An important note, that I couldn’t manage to fold into the essay proper:
I have direct knowledge of at least three people who would like to say positive things about their experience at Leverage Research, but feel they cannot. People who are fully on board with the fact that their experiences do not erase Zoe’s, but whose own very different stories are relevant to understanding what actually went wrong, so that it can be fixed for those who suffered, and prevented in the future.
And at least these three people are not speaking up, because the current state of affairs is such that they feel they can’t do so without committing social suicide.
This is a fact about them, not a fact about LessWrong or what would actually happen.
But it sure is damning that they feel that way, and that I can’t exactly tell them that they’re wrong.
Personally, I think it’s clear that there was some kind of disease here, and I’d like to properly diagnose it, and that means making it possible to collect all of the relevant info, not an impoverished subset.
We were missing Zoe’s subset. It’s good that we have it now.
It’s bad that we’re still dealing with an incomplete dataset, though, and it’s really bad that a lot of people seem to think that the dataset isn’t meaningfully incomplete.
But it sure is damning that they feel that way, and that I can’t exactly tell them that they’re wrong.
You could have, though. You could have shown them the many highly-upvoted personal accounts from former Leverage staff and other Leverage-adjacent people. You could have pointed out that there aren’t any positive personal Leverage accounts, any at all, that were downvoted on net. 0 and 1 are not probabilities, but the evidence here is extremely one-sided: the LW zeitgeist approves of positive personal accounts about Leverage. It won’t ostracize you for posting them.
But my guess is that this fear isn’t about Less Wrong the forum at all, it’s about their and your real-world social scene. If that’s true then it makes a lot more sense for them to be worried (or so I infer, I don’t live in California). But it makes a lot less to bring to bring it up here, in a discussion about changing LW culture: getting rid of the posts and posters you disapprove of won’t make them go away in real life. Talking about it here, as though it were an argument in any direction at all about LW standards, is just a non sequitur.
Thanks for gathering these. They are genuinely helpful (several of them I missed).
But yes, as you inferred, the people I’ve talked to are scared about real-life consequences such as losing funding or having trouble finding employment, which are problems they don’t currently have but suspect they will if they speak up.
I reiterate that this is a fact about them, as oppose to a fact about reality, but they’re not crazy to have some weight on it.
When it comes to the real-life consequences I think we’re on the same page: I think it’s plausible that they’d face consequences for speaking up and I don’t think they’re crazy to weigh it in their decision-making (I do note, for example, that none of the people who put their names on their positive Leverage accounts seem to live in California, except for the ones who still work there). I am not that attached to any of these beliefs since all my data is second- and third-hand, but within those limitations I agree.
But again, the things they’re worried about are not happening on Less Wrong. Bringing up their plight here, in the context of curating Less Wrong, is not Lawful: it cannot help anybody think about Less Wrong, only hurt and distract. If they need help, we can’t help them by changing Less Wrong; we have to change the people who are giving out party invites and job interviews.
I expect that many of the people who are giving out party invites and job interviews are strongly influenced by LW. If that’s the case, then we can prevent some of the things Duncan mentions by changing LW in the direction of being more supportive of good epistemics (regardless of which “side” that comes down on), with the hope of flow-through effects.
I expect that many of the people who are giving out party invites and job interviews are strongly influenced by LW.
The influence can’t be too strong, or they’d be influenced by the zeitgeist’s willingness to welcome pro-Leverage perspectives, right? Or maybe you disagree with that characterization of LW-the-site?
Things get complicated in situations where e.g. 70% of the group is welcoming and 30% of the group is silently judging and will enact their disapproval later. And the zeitgeist that is willing to welcome pro-Leverage perspectives might not be willing to actively pressure people to not discriminate against pro-Leverage folk. Like, they might be fine with somebody being gay, but not motivated enough to step in if someone else is being homophobic in a grocery store parking lot, metaphorically speaking.
(This may not describe the actual situation here, of course. But again it’s a fear I feel like I can’t dismiss or rule out.)
“three people… would like to say positive things about their experience at Leverage Research, but feel they cannot”:
Oof. I appreciate you mentioning that.
(And a special note of thanks, for being willing to put down a concrete number? It helps me try to weigh it appropriately, while not compromising anonymity.)
Navigating the fact that people seem to be scared of coming forward on every side of this, is hard. I would love advice on how to shape this thread better.
If you think of something I can do to make talking about all of {the good, the bad, the neutral, the ugly, and the complicated}, easier? I can’t guarantee I’ll agree to it, but I really do want to hear it.
Please feel free to reach out to me on LW, anytime in the next 2 months. Not just Duncan, anyone.
Offer does expire at start of January, though.
I am especially interested in concrete suggestions that improve the Pareto Frontier of reporting, here. But I’m also pretty geared up to try to steelman any private rants that get sent my way, too.
(In this context? I have already been called all of “possessed, angry, jealous, and bad with secrets.” I was willing to steelman the lot, because there is a hint of truth in each, although I really don’t think any of them are the clearest lens available. If you can be kinder than that, then you’re already doing better than the worst baseline that I have had to steelman here.)
P.S. I recognize it is easy to cast me as being on “the other side?” It’s an oversimplification, and I’d love to have a more balanced sense of what the hell happened. But I also don’t want my other comments to come as a late surprise, to anyone who is already a bit spooked.
Also, to people who really only want to talk about their story privately, with whoever it is that you trust? That’s valid, and I hope you’re doing okay.
I am not really recanting that? I still think something “off” happened there.
But I could stand up and give a more balanced deposition.
To be clear? I do think BAH’s tone was a tad aggressive. And I think there were other people in the thread, who were more aggressive than that. I think Leverage Basic Facts EA had an even more aggressive comment thread.
I also think each of the concrete factual claims BAH made, did appear to check out with at least one corner of Leverage, according to my own account-collecting (although not always at the same time).
(I also think a few of the LBFEA’s wildest claims, were probably true. Exclusion of the Leverage website from Wayback Machine is definitely true*. The Slack channels characterizing each Pareto attendee as a potential recruit, seems… probably true?)
There were a lot of corners of Leverage, though. Several of them were walled off from the corners BAH talked about, or were not very near to it.
For what it’s worth, I think the positive accounts in the BAH comment thread were also basically honest? I up-voted several of them.
Side-note: As much as I don’t entirely trust Larissa? I do think some of her is at least trying to hold the fact that both good and bad things happened here. I trust her thoughts, more than Geoff’s.
* Delisted from Wayback: The explanation I’ve heard, is that Geoff was sick of people dragging old things up to make fun of the initial planning document, and critiquing the old Connection Theory posts.
I am also dead-certain that nobody was going into the full story, and some of that was systematic. “BAH + commentary” put together, still doesn’t sum to enough of the whole truth, to really make sense of things.
Anna & Geoff’s initial twitch-stream included commentary about how Leverage used to be pretty friendly with EA, and ran the first EAG. Several EA founders felt pretty close after that, and then there was some pretty intense drifting apart (partially over philosophical differences?). There was also some sort of kerfuffle where a lot of people ended up with the frame that “Leverage was poaching donors,” which may have been unfair to Leverage. As time went on, Geoff and other Leveragers were largely blocked from collaborations, and felt pretty shunned. That all was an important missing piece of the puzzle.
((Meta: Noticing I should add this to Timeline and Threads somewhere? Doing that now-ish.))
(I also personally just really liked Anna’s thoughts on “narrative addiction” being something to watch out for? Maybe that’s just me.)
The dissolution & information agreement was another important part. Thank you, Matt Falshaw, for putting some of that in a form that could be viewed by people outside of the ecosystem.
I also haven’t met anybody except Zoe (and now me, I guess?) who seems to have felt able to even breathe a word about the “objects & demons” memetics thing. I think that was another important missing piece.
Some people do report feeling incapable of speaking positively about Leverage in EA circles? I personally didn’t experience a lot of this, but I saw enough surprise when I said good things about Reserve, that it doesn’t surprise me particularly. Leverage’s social network and some of its techniques were clearly quite meaningful to some people, so I can imagine how rough ‘needing to write that out of your personal narrative’ could have been.
Have people considered just making a survey and sending it out to former Leverage staff? This really isn’t my scene but it seems like while surveys have major issues, it’s hard for me to imagine that surveys are worse at being statistically representative than qualitative accounts that went through many selection filters,
And at least these three people are not speaking up, because the current state of affairs is such that they feel they can’t do so without committing social suicide.
An important note, that I couldn’t manage to fold into the essay proper:
I have direct knowledge of at least three people who would like to say positive things about their experience at Leverage Research, but feel they cannot. People who are fully on board with the fact that their experiences do not erase Zoe’s, but whose own very different stories are relevant to understanding what actually went wrong, so that it can be fixed for those who suffered, and prevented in the future.
And at least these three people are not speaking up, because the current state of affairs is such that they feel they can’t do so without committing social suicide.
This is a fact about them, not a fact about LessWrong or what would actually happen.
But it sure is damning that they feel that way, and that I can’t exactly tell them that they’re wrong.
Personally, I think it’s clear that there was some kind of disease here, and I’d like to properly diagnose it, and that means making it possible to collect all of the relevant info, not an impoverished subset.
We were missing Zoe’s subset. It’s good that we have it now.
It’s bad that we’re still dealing with an incomplete dataset, though, and it’s really bad that a lot of people seem to think that the dataset isn’t meaningfully incomplete.
You could have, though. You could have shown them the many highly-upvoted personal accounts from former Leverage staff and other Leverage-adjacent people. You could have pointed out that there aren’t any positive personal Leverage accounts, any at all, that were downvoted on net. 0 and 1 are not probabilities, but the evidence here is extremely one-sided: the LW zeitgeist approves of positive personal accounts about Leverage. It won’t ostracize you for posting them.
But my guess is that this fear isn’t about Less Wrong the forum at all, it’s about their and your real-world social scene. If that’s true then it makes a lot more sense for them to be worried (or so I infer, I don’t live in California). But it makes a lot less to bring to bring it up here, in a discussion about changing LW culture: getting rid of the posts and posters you disapprove of won’t make them go away in real life. Talking about it here, as though it were an argument in any direction at all about LW standards, is just a non sequitur.
Thanks for gathering these. They are genuinely helpful (several of them I missed).
But yes, as you inferred, the people I’ve talked to are scared about real-life consequences such as losing funding or having trouble finding employment, which are problems they don’t currently have but suspect they will if they speak up.
I reiterate that this is a fact about them, as oppose to a fact about reality, but they’re not crazy to have some weight on it.
When it comes to the real-life consequences I think we’re on the same page: I think it’s plausible that they’d face consequences for speaking up and I don’t think they’re crazy to weigh it in their decision-making (I do note, for example, that none of the people who put their names on their positive Leverage accounts seem to live in California, except for the ones who still work there). I am not that attached to any of these beliefs since all my data is second- and third-hand, but within those limitations I agree.
But again, the things they’re worried about are not happening on Less Wrong. Bringing up their plight here, in the context of curating Less Wrong, is not Lawful: it cannot help anybody think about Less Wrong, only hurt and distract. If they need help, we can’t help them by changing Less Wrong; we have to change the people who are giving out party invites and job interviews.
I expect that many of the people who are giving out party invites and job interviews are strongly influenced by LW. If that’s the case, then we can prevent some of the things Duncan mentions by changing LW in the direction of being more supportive of good epistemics (regardless of which “side” that comes down on), with the hope of flow-through effects.
The influence can’t be too strong, or they’d be influenced by the zeitgeist’s willingness to welcome pro-Leverage perspectives, right? Or maybe you disagree with that characterization of LW-the-site?
Things get complicated in situations where e.g. 70% of the group is welcoming and 30% of the group is silently judging and will enact their disapproval later. And the zeitgeist that is willing to welcome pro-Leverage perspectives might not be willing to actively pressure people to not discriminate against pro-Leverage folk. Like, they might be fine with somebody being gay, but not motivated enough to step in if someone else is being homophobic in a grocery store parking lot, metaphorically speaking.
(This may not describe the actual situation here, of course. But again it’s a fear I feel like I can’t dismiss or rule out.)
“three people… would like to say positive things about their experience at Leverage Research, but feel they cannot”:
Oof. I appreciate you mentioning that.
(And a special note of thanks, for being willing to put down a concrete number? It helps me try to weigh it appropriately, while not compromising anonymity.)
Navigating the fact that people seem to be scared of coming forward on every side of this, is hard. I would love advice on how to shape this thread better.
If you think of something I can do to make talking about all of {the good, the bad, the neutral, the ugly, and the complicated}, easier? I can’t guarantee I’ll agree to it, but I really do want to hear it.
Please feel free to reach out to me on LW, anytime in the next 2 months. Not just Duncan, anyone. Offer does expire at start of January, though.
I am especially interested in concrete suggestions that improve the Pareto Frontier of reporting, here. But I’m also pretty geared up to try to steelman any private rants that get sent my way, too.
(In this context? I have already been called all of “possessed, angry, jealous, and bad with secrets.” I was willing to steelman the lot, because there is a hint of truth in each, although I really don’t think any of them are the clearest lens available. If you can be kinder than that, then you’re already doing better than the worst baseline that I have had to steelman here.)
P.S. I recognize it is easy to cast me as being on “the other side?” It’s an oversimplification, and I’d love to have a more balanced sense of what the hell happened. But I also don’t want my other comments to come as a late surprise, to anyone who is already a bit spooked.
So, my personal story is in here, along with some of my current sense-making.
Also, to people who really only want to talk about their story privately, with whoever it is that you trust? That’s valid, and I hope you’re doing okay.
Hm… I notice I’m maybe feeling some particular pressure to personally address this one?
Because I called out the deliberate concentration of force in the other direction that happened on an earlier copy of the BayAreaHuman thread.
I am not really recanting that? I still think something “off” happened there.
But I could stand up and give a more balanced deposition.
To be clear? I do think BAH’s tone was a tad aggressive. And I think there were other people in the thread, who were more aggressive than that. I think Leverage Basic Facts EA had an even more aggressive comment thread.
I also think each of the concrete factual claims BAH made, did appear to check out with at least one corner of Leverage, according to my own account-collecting (although not always at the same time).
(I also think a few of the LBFEA’s wildest claims, were probably true. Exclusion of the Leverage website from Wayback Machine is definitely true*. The Slack channels characterizing each Pareto attendee as a potential recruit, seems… probably true?)
There were a lot of corners of Leverage, though. Several of them were walled off from the corners BAH talked about, or were not very near to it.
For what it’s worth, I think the positive accounts in the BAH comment thread were also basically honest? I up-voted several of them.
Side-note: As much as I don’t entirely trust Larissa? I do think some of her is at least trying to hold the fact that both good and bad things happened here. I trust her thoughts, more than Geoff’s.
* Delisted from Wayback: The explanation I’ve heard, is that Geoff was sick of people dragging old things up to make fun of the initial planning document, and critiquing the old Connection Theory posts.
I am also dead-certain that nobody was going into the full story, and some of that was systematic. “BAH + commentary” put together, still doesn’t sum to enough of the whole truth, to really make sense of things.
Anna & Geoff’s initial twitch-stream included commentary about how Leverage used to be pretty friendly with EA, and ran the first EAG. Several EA founders felt pretty close after that, and then there was some pretty intense drifting apart (partially over philosophical differences?). There was also some sort of kerfuffle where a lot of people ended up with the frame that “Leverage was poaching donors,” which may have been unfair to Leverage. As time went on, Geoff and other Leveragers were largely blocked from collaborations, and felt pretty shunned. That all was an important missing piece of the puzzle.
((Meta: Noticing I should add this to Timeline and Threads somewhere? Doing that now-ish.))
(I also personally just really liked Anna’s thoughts on “narrative addiction” being something to watch out for? Maybe that’s just me.)
The dissolution & information agreement was another important part. Thank you, Matt Falshaw, for putting some of that in a form that could be viewed by people outside of the ecosystem.
I also haven’t met anybody except Zoe (and now me, I guess?) who seems to have felt able to even breathe a word about the “objects & demons” memetics thing. I think that was another important missing piece.
Some people do report feeling incapable of speaking positively about Leverage in EA circles? I personally didn’t experience a lot of this, but I saw enough surprise when I said good things about Reserve, that it doesn’t surprise me particularly. Leverage’s social network and some of its techniques were clearly quite meaningful to some people, so I can imagine how rough ‘needing to write that out of your personal narrative’ could have been.
Have people considered just making a survey and sending it out to former Leverage staff? This really isn’t my scene but it seems like while surveys have major issues, it’s hard for me to imagine that surveys are worse at being statistically representative than qualitative accounts that went through many selection filters,
Not even pseudonymously?
Their stories are specific enough that pseudonymity isn’t viable.