Harnessing an understanding of science and people to advance knowledge in commonly overlooked or misunderstood areas. Our research takes us into undefined areas, utilizes neglected approaches, and includes long-term research programs, (re)building fields from the ground up where necessary.

Towards a science of science; learning how discoveries are made.

In response to growing concern about scientific stagnation, some have suggested that studying science itself could be part of the solution. Leverage proposes that it may be possible to learn about science by examining the history of successful sciences.

We study the major breakthroughs in the early histories of successful fields to understand how people make discoveries in the early stages of science and help researchers make new breakthroughs today.

We estimate that there are between 200–400 critical discoveries in the early histories of today’s successful sciences. We are currently producing in-depth case studies covering the history of electricity from William Gilbert in 1600 to James Clerk Maxwell in 1845. The end goal of the program is to render the early history of science accessible by making it possible to examine the data set of discoveries and draw conclusions about the early scientific process.

Towards a science of people; studying the mind through introspection.

Over the past decade, Leverage studied psychology, a field mired in a replication crisis. Our hypothesis has been, and continues to be, that introspection is a promising research method and can provide the foundation for fruitful efforts to better understand people.

Our Exploratory Psychology program is an attempt to use an introspection-centric approach to understanding people. 

We believe that the creation and distribution of useful tools for introspection have the potential to advance our understanding of people and to help individuals generate beneficial self-knowledge. We provide introspective tools such as belief reporting and charting, collaborate with other practitioners and developers of introspective tools, and provide training to researchers on how to use introspection to study the mind effectively and safely. Our goal is to develop and distribute introspective methods that could serve as the foundation for developing a new subfield of introspection research.

Towards a science of progress; understanding blindspots and breaking bottlenecks

Science and technology have the potential to empower humanity with new knowledge and new tools with which to improve the world around us. Yet, scientific institutions are frequently not as functional as society needs them to be. Even as the number of researchers and amount of money spent on research increases, in many places, fields simply aren’t making fast enough progress.

By combining our understanding of science and people, we aim to discern and address the social and institutional, not just technical, obstacles to progress across a variety of fields—such as geothermal, supersonic flight, and psychology—and coordinate efforts to overcome them.

Our Bottlenecks program consists of both events and research. The events provide a venue for bringing together researchers, funders, and project leaders to think and talk about where the real bottlenecks are, and our publications communicate the conclusions we reach.

Leverage cares about helping to ensure that science and technology have a positive impact. When new technologies appear, it is important to consider their effect. Large language models (LLMs) have recently been in the news, typified by OpenAI’s text generators (like GPT-4) and Midjourney’s and Stable Diffusion’s image generators.

Our AI initiative focuses on understanding the real present and future dangers and helping society positively grapple with the topic. If you are interested in contributing, get in touch.