I also note that "debugging" was mentioned only once, briefly. It seemed fairly important from Zoe's piece: that at least some people felt significant pressure to engage repeatedly in a practice whose uncharitable description might be "High-ranking member tells low-ranking member, 'Why do you not agree with me? Let's spend hours digging into what is wrong with you that you would think that, until you decide you agree with me after all.'"
The article does say "But almost all Leveragers devoted hours to studying self-examination using techniques forged by its founder". I'm not sure that a lot of that went under the term debugging.
Both charting and belief reporting are key terms that leverage uses.
While you could do an uncharitable description where a person with imposter syndrome who believes that they are not good enough to drop that believe by a higher ranking member as "High-ranking member tells low-ranking member, 'Why do you not agree with me? Let's spend hours digging into what is wrong with you that you would think that, until you decide you agree with me after all.'", you are losing quite a lot of understanding when doing so.
Belief reporting happens to be much more effective than a framework like Bryon Katie's The Work for that purpose.
The moods are so missing that it almost reads as a literary piece with an unreliable narrator.
We were really determined not to start a cult, which is why we repeatedly watched the YouTube video how to start a cult.
We were not an intellectual monoculture: for diversity we had a bunch of neo reactionaries. The allegations of us being a Peter Thiel cult are unfounded.
We didn’t have any psychotic breaks. None. But if we did, that would be perfectly normal for our type of groundbreaking organization, and an understood danger of the process. But we didn’t have any.
As if the central story it is trying to tell is that Leverage fell apart due to no fault of any of its members because they encountered ancient magic or something.
It doesn't read to me that way. They tried to learn the "ancient magic" for someone who according to "multiple former Leveragers" thought they were a force for evil.
Why might he believed that? The article says "Masters often found themselves at loggerheads. Geoff and David each bragged to their colleagues about how they psychologically manipulated the other, or complained about issues for which they blamed the other. "
An environment where the leader brag about psychologically manipulating each other is quite obviously an environment if you run into a lot of problems if you experiment with nonverbal techniques that can be used to manipulate each other.
They also engaged in practices to increase their sensitivity to the relevant phenomena in an act of hubris. Then when one person, tried to implement at least some safety protocols they report that Geoff said they did something bad because it discourages investigation.
If someone would want to learn these things in most spiritual traditions both the hubris and the low morals involved in the consent problems around using nonverbal techniques to manipulate each other are recipes for disaster. Both of these things are faults of the members.
I do find it quite plausible that this is the key dynamic that lead them to shut down their group house when they did it.
It somehow completely fails to cover Leverage deploying spies into other organizations and trying to take over CEA. It fails to cover the enormous number of straightforward lies told by Leverage staff in that and other contexts.
That's probably an interesting story to tell there but the CEA people don't seem to want to talk about it and Goeff says he doesn't want to talk about it because he doesn't want more conflict with CEA. It's might be harder to get the ground truth there.
Lydia Laurenson recently posted an article called "The Inside Story of Leverage Research" that gets into substantially more detail on what went on in that organization and I thought made quite an interesting read. However, note also relevant Twitter comments from Oliver Habryka: