Here's a long, detailed account of a Leverage experience which, to me, reads as significantly more damning than the above post: https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b
 

Using psychological techniques to experiment on one another, and on the "sociology" of the group itself, was a main purpose of the group. It was understood among members that they were signing up to be guinea pigs for experiments in introspection, altering one's belief structure, and experimental group dynamics.

The Pareto program felt like it had substantial components of this type of social/psychological experimentation, but participants were not aware of this in advance and did not give informed consent. Some (maybe most?) Pareto fellows, including me, were not even aware that Leverage was involved in any way in running the program until they arrived, and found out they were going to be staying in the Leverage house.

Hi all, former Leverage 1.0 employee here. 

The original post and some of the comments seem epistemically low quality to me compared to the typical LessWrong standard. In particular, on top of a lot of insinuations, there are some false facts. This seems especially problematic given that the post is billed as common knowledge. 

There’s a lot of dispute and hate directed towards Leverage, which frankly, has made me hesitant to defend it online. However, a friend of mine in the community recently said something to the effect of, “Well, no former Leverage employee has ever defended it on the attack posts, which I take as an indication of silent agreement.” 

That rattled me and so I’ve decided to weigh in. I typically stay quiet about Leverage online because I don’t know how to say nuanced or positive things without fear of that blowing back on me personally. For now, I’d ask to remain anonymous, but if it ever seems like people are willing to approach the Leverage topic differently, I intend to put my name on this post. I don’t expect my opinion alone (especially anonymously) to substantially change anything, but I hope it will be considered and incorporated into a coheren... (read more)

This is subjective and all, but I met Geoff Anders at our 2012 CFAR workshop, I absolutely had the "this person wants to be a cult leader" vibe from him then, and I've been telling people as much for the entire time since. (To the extent of hurting my previously good friendships with two increasingly-Leverage-enmeshed people, in the mid-2010s.)

I don't know why other people's cult-leader-wannabe-detectors are set so differently from mine, but it's a similar (though less deadly) version of how I quickly felt about a certain person [don't name him, don't summon him] who's been booted from the Berkeley community for good reason.

> some of the people who don’t like us
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1?commentId=jSCFY2ypMpvAZr8sy

> However, I would also like to note that Leverage 1.0 has historically been on the receiving end of substantial levels of bullying, harassment, needless cruelty, public ridicule, and more by people who were not engaged in any legitimate epistemic activity. I do not think this is OK. I intend to call out this behavior directly when I see it. I would ask that others do so as well.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1?commentId=hqDXAtk6cnqDStkGC

It would be sad if people came away with the idea that the OP was motivated by hate, jealousy, or tribalism. I think the OP is motivated out of deep compassion for the wider community.

Leverage keeps coming up because Geoff Anders (and associates) emit something epistemically and morally corrosive and are gaslighting the commons about it. And Geoff keeps trying to disingenuously hit the reset button and hide it, to exploit new groups of people. That’s what people are responding to and trying to counterac... (read more)

You know, I'm not necessarily a great backer of Leverage Research, especially some of its past projects, but I feel the level of criticism that it has faced relative to other organizations in the space is a bit bizarre. Many of the things that Leverage is criticized for (such as being secretive, seeing themselves at least in part as saving the world, investing in projects that look crazy to intelligent outsiders, etc.) in my view apply to many rationalist/EA organizations. This is not to say that those other organizations are wrong to do these things necessarily, just that it's weird to me that people go after Leverage-in-particular for reasons that often don't seem to be consistently applied to other projects in the space.

(I have never been an employee of Leverage Research, though at one point they were potentially interested in recruiting me and I was not interested; at another point I checked in re: potentially working there but didn't like the sound of the projects they seemed to be recruiting for at the time.)


EDIT 10/13: My original comment was written before the Medium post from Zoe Curzi. The contents of that Medium post are very concerning to me and seem very unlike what I've encountered in other rationalist or EA organizations.

Speaking personally, based on various friendships with people within Leverage, attending a Leverage-hosted neuroscience reading group for a few months, and having attended a Paradigm Academy weekend workshop.

I think Leverage 1.0 was a genuine good-faith attempt at solving various difficult coordination problems. I can’t say they succeeded or failed; Leverage didn’t obviously hit it out of the park, but I feel they were at least wrong in interesting, generative ways that were uncorrelated with the standard and more ‘boring’ ways most institutions are wrong. Lots of stories I heard sounded weird to me, but most interesting organizations are weird and have fairly strict IP protocols so I mostly withhold judgment.

The stories my friends shared did show a large focus on methodological experimentation, which has benefits and drawbacks. Echoing some of the points, I do think when experiments are done on people, and they fail, there can be a real human cost. I suspect some people did have substantially negative experiences from this. There’s probably also a very large set of experiments where the result was something like, “I don’t know if it was good, or if was bad, but something feels dif... (read more)

facts that are more-or-less "common knowledge" among people who spent time socially adjacent to Leverage

Yup, sounds right. As someone who visited the rationality community in the bay a bunch in 2013-2018, almost nothing listed in the bullet points was a surprise to me, and off-hand I can think of dozens of other people who I would assume also know almost everything written above. (I'm sure there are more such people, that I haven't met or wouldn't remember.)

I don't have anything in particular to say about the implications of these facts, just seemed worth mentioning this thing re common knowledge.

(The main thing I hadn't heard about was the sexual relationships bullet point.)

Yup. I have known all of these things since 2018-2019, and know or know of maybe a few dozen people who also know these things. I’m glad this bare minimum is being discussed openly, publicly.

Secondhand, I have a very negative view of at least some parts of what happened in Leverage 1.0. My best guess is that the relationships and events that some people have (mostly privately) described as controlling or abusive were not evenly distributed across the whole organisation. So it would have been straightforward for someone to be working at Leverage and never see or get deeply involved with situations that a handful of people have, in private or in semi-public conversations, described clearly as cultic abuse. It seems like there are on the order of dozens of people who probably had a roughly fine time being involved in Leverage for many years, and at least a handful of people who report much more negative experiences.

(I’m @utotranslucence on Twitter; never officially had a LessWrong account before but been around the Bay Area community since 2017. I attended one Paradigm training weekend in early 2018 and some parties at the Lake Merritt building but most of my knowledge comes from conversations with friends who did work there, and there are plenty of things I still don’t know with great clarity.)

Am I crazy or was something really similar to this, with the same thing of asking for a LW moderator to vouch, posted like a year ago? I didn't immediately find it by searching.

Figured I'd chime in too—I'm Jordan Alexander and I was one of the Pareto Fellows back in 2016. I've been involved with the EA and rationality community to various degrees since then (Stanford EA, internship at CHAI, active GWWC pledge) so I thought I'd give my account of the program. I recognize that other people may have had different experiences during the program and that there may have been issues that I was not personally aware of as a participant in the program.  

As for my relationship with Leverage: I have a few friends at Leverage, though we're not in close contact. I participated in Paradigm Coaching (essentially a combination of personal and professional one-on-one coaching) for a few months at the end of 2019 and found it incredibly helpful while working on the mundane problem known as "job-hunting". Finally, one of my friends at Leverage reached out and asked me if I was interested in sharing my experience at the Pareto Fellowship after this post popped up. Frankly I'm annoyed that I have to do this but it seems unfair that these sorts of posts reappear every year. I work as a software engineer and have no professional or financial ties to Leverage. 

Here's an... (read more)

I'm not sure what the meaning, if any, of the following fact is, but: I notice that I would feel very positively about Leverage as it's portrayed here if there weren't relationships with multiple younger subordinates (e.g. if the leader had been monogamously married), and as it is I feel mildly negative about it on net.

I should clarify upfront that I am not a rationalist, and am not a fan of LessWrong. 

That said, I have some experience when it comes to... this sort of thing.

So when I was a little younger, I was the figurehead and leader of a sex cult. (Oddly enough, I did this without ever really understanding that it was, in fact, a sex cult. One of my best friends described this as a "Jerry Smith plot", which I found hilarious.) This cult was, in practice, a discord server focused around my erotic hypnosis work. I copied the model from another server that was definitely a sex cult, and tried to strip out all of the culty elements and just leave the aesthetics (because a lot of us liked the aesthetics). But you really can't reconstitute the structure of a high-control group without, in various ways, reconstituting the behavior of a high-control group. It doesn't work - the culty shit works its way back in if you're not extremely careful. And I was not careful, for reasons that may be obvious if you think about the perks one gets as the figurehead of a sex cult. A lot of people got hurt.

Why bring that up? Because hoo boy does this tick a lot of similar boxes. 

A lot of things scream "hig... (read more)

Hi BayAreaHuman, 

I just posted an update on behalf of Leverage Research to LessWrong along with an invite to an AMA with Leverage Research next weekend, as it seems from the comments that there isn’t a lot of common knowledge about our current work or other aspects of our history. I encourage people to read this for additional context, and I hope the OP will be able to update this post to incorporate some of that.

I also want to briefly address some of the items raised here.

Information management policies

Leverage Research has for a long time been concerned about the potential negative consequences of the potential misuse of knowledge garnered from research. These concerns are widely shared for research in the hard sciences (e.g., nuclear physics), but are valid as well for the social sciences. 

Starting in 2012, Leverage Research had an information management policy designed to prevent negative intended consequences from the premature dissemination of information. Our information policy from 2012-2016 required permission for the release of longform information on the internet. We had an information approval team, with most information release requests being approved. ... (read more)