I think the way the term cult (or euphemisms like “high-demand group”) has been used by the OP and by many commenters in this thread is extremely unhelpful and, I suspect, not in keeping with the epistemic standards of this community.
No. As demonstrated by this comment by Viliam, the word “cult” refers is a well-defined set of practices used to break people’s ability to think rationally. Leverage does not deny using these practices. To the contrary, it appears flagrantly indifferent to the abuse potential. Cult techniques of brainwashing an attractor of human social behavior. Eliezer Yudkowsky warned about this attractor. Your attempt to redefine cult more broadly is a signal you’re bullshitting us.
Your mind belongs to the group : In the description above there’s no mention of people needing to confess sins.
They call it “Belief Reporting”, it’s described in one of the documents that were removed from Internet Archive. The members are (were?) supposed to do it regularly with their manager. That is like “auditing” in Scientology, except instead of using an e-meter they rely on nerds being pathologically honest.
There’s no inherent need to confess having violated any rules and comitted sins in belief reporting.
It’s a debugging technique and while you can use any debugging technique to debug someone having comitted sins no one here who has closer information about leverage charged that they do that.
Scientology actually does force people to confess sins when they commit what they consider ethics violations (scientology calls their code of conduct ethics).
Anyone involved in scientology would easily classify what scientology does as including a need to confess sins. On the other hand, that’s far how the participants of belief reporting sessions at Leverage likely thought about it. At the moment there’s no source that anybody in Leverage got an impression that this is what happened to them.
It’s quite toxic for rational discussion to make those accusations instead of focus on the facts that are actually out in the open.
I learned belief reporting from a person who attended a Leverage workshop and haven’t had any direct face-to-face exposure to Leverage.
Belief reporting is a debugging technique. You have a personal issue you want to address. Then you look at related beliefs.
Leverage found that if someone sets an intention of “I will tell the truth” and then speaks out of a belief like “I’m a capable person” and they don’t believe that (at a deep level), they will have a physical sensation of resistance.
Afterwards, there’s an attempt to trace the belief to it’s roots. The person can then speak out various forms of “I’m not a capable person because X” and “I’m not a capable person because Y”. Then recursively the process gets applied to seek for the root. Often that allows uncovering that there’s some confusion at the base of the belief and then after having uncovered the confusion it’s possible to work the tree up again to get rid of the “I’m not a capable person” belief and switch it into “I’m a capable person”.
This often leads to discovering that one holds beliefs at a deep level that one’s system II considers silly but that still are the base of other beliefs and that affect our actions.
In my opinion, this sounds interesting as a confidential voluntary therapy, but Orwellian when:
Members who were on payroll were expected to undergo charting/debugging sessions with a supervisory “trainer”, and to “train” other members. The role of trainer is something like “manager + therapist”: that is, both “is evaluating your job performance” and “is doing therapy on you”.
So, your supervisor is debugging your beliefs, possibly related to your job performance, and you are supposed to not only tell the truth, but also “seek for the root”… and yet, in your opinion, this does not imply “having to confess violation of the rules or committed sins”?
What exactly happens when you start having doubts about the organization or the leader, and as a result your job performance drops, and then you are having the session with your manager? Would you admit, truthfully, “you know, recently I started having some doubts about whether we are really doing our best to improve the world, or just using the effective altruist community as a finshing pond for people who are idealistic and willing to sacrifice… and I guess these thoughts distract me from my tasks”, and then your therapist/manager is going to say… what?
Nothing written above suggests that doubt about central strategy would have been seen as sin, especially when it isn’t necessarily system II endorsed. It’s my understanding that talking about the theories of change through which Leverage is going to have an effect on the world was one of the main activities Leverage engaged in.
Besides the word sin is generally about taking actions that are in violation of norms of an organization. In the Scientology context it’s for example a sin to watch a documentary about Scientology on normal TV. In Christianity masturbation would be a sin.
Leverage doesn’t have a similar behavior codex that declares certain actions as sins that have to be confessed.
Role conflicts between being a manager and a therapist can easily produce problems but analysing them through a frame as it being about “confessing sins” is not an useful lense to think coherently about the involved problems.
You missed the part where this person was pointing out that there is Deliberately Vague Language used by the OP. Imo, this language doesn’t create enough of a structure for commenters to construct an adequate dialogue about several sub-topics in this thread.
Also, what’s “flagrantly indifferent” about Larissa wanting to hear out people who feel wronged?
You seem to be quite upset by all of this, why not reach out and let her know?
Nah, he’s alright. If someone calls a cult a cult, that’s not a reason to call them upset. Plus, he writes about plenty of other things; you’re the one with the new account made only to defend Leverage.
you’re the one with the new account made only to defend Leverage
The social pressure against defending Leverage is in the air, so anonymity shouldn’t be held against someone who does that, it’s already bad enough that there is a reason for anonymity.
If questioning the “rationality” of the discourse is defending them, then what do you suppose you’re doing?
I just don’t see the goals or values of this community reflected here and it confuses me. That’s why I made this account—to get clarity on what seems to me to be a total anomaly case in how the rationalist community members (at least as far as signaling goes, I guess) conduct themselves.
Because I’ve only seen what is classifiable as a hysteric response to this topic, the Leverage topic.
No. As demonstrated by this comment by Viliam, the word “cult” refers is a well-defined set of practices used to break people’s ability to think rationally. Leverage does not deny using these practices. To the contrary, it appears flagrantly indifferent to the abuse potential. Cult techniques of brainwashing an attractor of human social behavior. Eliezer Yudkowsky warned about this attractor. Your attempt to redefine cult more broadly is a signal you’re bullshitting us.
It’s useful to be able to conceptualise something that is 50% or 90% of the way to becoming a cult, because then you can jump off.
Leverage is not doing everything that Viliam described in his post.
Your mind belongs to the group : In the description above there’s no mention of people needing to confess sins.
A sacred science : Leverage did not have an intellectual environment that didn’t allow for doubts.
Map over the territory : There’s no assertion of that in the common knowledge facts and I doubt it’s true for Leverage.
They call it “Belief Reporting”, it’s described in one of the documents that were removed from Internet Archive. The members are (were?) supposed to do it regularly with their manager. That is like “auditing” in Scientology, except instead of using an e-meter they rely on nerds being pathologically honest.
There’s no inherent need to confess having violated any rules and comitted sins in belief reporting.
It’s a debugging technique and while you can use any debugging technique to debug someone having comitted sins no one here who has closer information about leverage charged that they do that.
Scientology actually does force people to confess sins when they commit what they consider ethics violations (scientology calls their code of conduct ethics).
Anyone involved in scientology would easily classify what scientology does as including a need to confess sins. On the other hand, that’s far how the participants of belief reporting sessions at Leverage likely thought about it. At the moment there’s no source that anybody in Leverage got an impression that this is what happened to them.
It’s quite toxic for rational discussion to make those accusations instead of focus on the facts that are actually out in the open.
What’s the content of belief reporting?
I learned belief reporting from a person who attended a Leverage workshop and haven’t had any direct face-to-face exposure to Leverage.
Belief reporting is a debugging technique. You have a personal issue you want to address. Then you look at related beliefs.
Leverage found that if someone sets an intention of “I will tell the truth” and then speaks out of a belief like “I’m a capable person” and they don’t believe that (at a deep level), they will have a physical sensation of resistance.
Afterwards, there’s an attempt to trace the belief to it’s roots. The person can then speak out various forms of “I’m not a capable person because X” and “I’m not a capable person because Y”. Then recursively the process gets applied to seek for the root. Often that allows uncovering that there’s some confusion at the base of the belief and then after having uncovered the confusion it’s possible to work the tree up again to get rid of the “I’m not a capable person” belief and switch it into “I’m a capable person”.
This often leads to discovering that one holds beliefs at a deep level that one’s system II considers silly but that still are the base of other beliefs and that affect our actions.
Thanks for the description!
In my opinion, this sounds interesting as a confidential voluntary therapy, but Orwellian when:
So, your supervisor is debugging your beliefs, possibly related to your job performance, and you are supposed to not only tell the truth, but also “seek for the root”… and yet, in your opinion, this does not imply “having to confess violation of the rules or committed sins”?
What exactly happens when you start having doubts about the organization or the leader, and as a result your job performance drops, and then you are having the session with your manager? Would you admit, truthfully, “you know, recently I started having some doubts about whether we are really doing our best to improve the world, or just using the effective altruist community as a finshing pond for people who are idealistic and willing to sacrifice… and I guess these thoughts distract me from my tasks”, and then your therapist/manager is going to say… what?
Nothing written above suggests that doubt about central strategy would have been seen as sin, especially when it isn’t necessarily system II endorsed. It’s my understanding that talking about the theories of change through which Leverage is going to have an effect on the world was one of the main activities Leverage engaged in.
Besides the word sin is generally about taking actions that are in violation of norms of an organization. In the Scientology context it’s for example a sin to watch a documentary about Scientology on normal TV. In Christianity masturbation would be a sin.
Leverage doesn’t have a similar behavior codex that declares certain actions as sins that have to be confessed.
Role conflicts between being a manager and a therapist can easily produce problems but analysing them through a frame as it being about “confessing sins” is not an useful lense to think coherently about the involved problems.
Interesting, thanks!
You missed the part where this person was pointing out that there is Deliberately Vague Language used by the OP. Imo, this language doesn’t create enough of a structure for commenters to construct an adequate dialogue about several sub-topics in this thread.
Also, what’s “flagrantly indifferent” about Larissa wanting to hear out people who feel wronged?
You seem to be quite upset by all of this, why not reach out and let her know?
Nah, he’s alright. If someone calls a cult a cult, that’s not a reason to call them upset. Plus, he writes about plenty of other things; you’re the one with the new account made only to defend Leverage.
The social pressure against defending Leverage is in the air, so anonymity shouldn’t be held against someone who does that, it’s already bad enough that there is a reason for anonymity.
If questioning the “rationality” of the discourse is defending them, then what do you suppose you’re doing?
I just don’t see the goals or values of this community reflected here and it confuses me. That’s why I made this account—to get clarity on what seems to me to be a total anomaly case in how the rationalist community members (at least as far as signaling goes, I guess) conduct themselves.
Because I’ve only seen what is classifiable as a hysteric response to this topic, the Leverage topic.