The only comments made by Leverage employees in comparable threads were attempts at reputation management. That alone tells you a lot!

So much of this on this site, it's incredible. Makes me wonder if people are consciously doing it. If they are, then why would they even join this cult in the first place? Personally I've observed that the people who easily join cults are rather very impressionable. Even my wife got duped by a couple of middle aged men. It's a different type of intelligence and skill set than the stuff they employ at colleges and research institutions.

Depression has always been an interesting excuse that people like to pull out of their sleeves. It's quite a general overarching term that gets thrown around easily while on a case by case basis, things are much more complicated. Labeling everything that's not positive as depressive is a bit disingenuous, borderline gaslighting if you will. Such dismissive attitude seems more like a means to an end rather than trying to constructively explain anything in-depth.

How is this not a cult?

Goal: increase the number of people who read EA research

Sure you want people to read about climate change, but those things have extensive peer-reviewed research and have gone through a lot of vetting of information and their reliability. What makes the stuff on this site worthwhile? I truly want to understand why these stuff are worthwhile if people haven't put in the work to verify and vet the content. A lot of fictions and a lot of hypothetical scenarios don't usually lead to legitimacy by themselves. Does this make sense to you?

Established intuitions don't accept these works but I do accept them. That means those institutions must suck and I don't. If you've actually dropped out of those established institutions, then I can definitely see why it might be the case.

Is this not negative?

That's one big question I still haven't been able to answer. Just how meaningful is personal happiness? My guess is that it's very subjective. If that's the case then wouldn't existential meaning be completely subjective? How much objectivity, if any, can we derived out of examining existential meaning in different individuals?

Not every number pulled out of the ass is annotated with that. You are arguing semantics with me while I'm just pointing out a general observation on this website. It's not that hard to verify my observations though. Seems like you are just trying to be defensive rather than providing anything of substance to this discussion. There is definitely not a lack of fictional content on here though, just saying.

I often see people pulling random numbers out of their asses on here. No wonder there are so many college dropouts on here if that's how they go about doing research (i.e. The people who introduced me to this website are college dropouts themselves). Does the general public and established institutions take these works seriously? These articles and "research" seem to be rather self-contained in their own niche communities, much less of a public acceptance of their work at large. Makes me wonder just how much of these things are taken seriously outside of these communities themselves.

'My April Fools Day Confession', where he claimed that he actually came from that world and none of his ideas were original.

The god of EA community claiming he's a god that came from a different world. I'm not sure why I have this feeling that the EA community is full of people who are full of themselves, a lot like other echo chambers we see on the web these days. At the end of the day, how is the EA community any different from other online discussion forums with their own communities? Even academia is known for quite a bit of people who are also full of themselves. I guess human conditions are very deeply ingrained in the subconscious.