I find something in me really revolts at this post, so epistemic status… not-fully-thought-through-emotions-are-in-charge?
Full disclosure: I am good friends with Zoe; I lived with her for the four months leading up to her post, and was present to witness a lot of her processing and pain. I’m also currently dating someone named in this post, but my reaction to this was formed before talking with him.
First, I’m annoyed at the timing of this. The community still seems in the middle of sensemaking around Leverage, and figuring out what to do about it, and this post feels like it pulls the spotlight away. If the points in the post felt more compelling, then I’d probably be more down for an argument of “we should bin these together and look at this as a whole”, but as it stands the stuff listed in here feels like it’s describing something significantly less damaging, and of a different kind of damage. I’m also annoyed that this post relies so heavily on Zoe’s, and the comparison feels like it cheapens what Zoe went through. I keep having a recurring thought that the author must have utterly failed to understand the intensity of the very direct impact from Leverage’s operations on Zoe. Most of my emotions here come from a perception that this post is actively hurting a thing I value.
Second, I suspect this post makes a crucial mistake in mistaking symptoms for the cause. Or, rather, I think there’s a core inside of what made Leverage damaging, and it’s really really hard to name it. Zoe’s post seemed like a good effort to triangulate it, but this above post feels like it focuses on the wrong things, or a different brand of analogous things, without understanding the core of what Zoe was trying to get at. Missing the core of the post is an easy mistake to make, given how it’s really hard to name directly, but in this case I’m particularly sensitive to the analogy seeming superficial, given how much this post seems to be relying on Zoe’s post for validation.
One example for this is comparing Zoe’s mention of someone at Leverage having a psychotic break to the author having a psychotic break. But Zoe’s point was that Leverage treated the psychotic break as an achievement, not that the psychotic break happened.
Third, and I think this has been touched on by other comments, is that this post feels… sort of dishonest to me? I feel like something is trying to get slipped into my brain without me noticing. Lots of parts the post sort of implicitly presents things as important, or asks you to draw conclusions without explicitly pointing out those conclusions. I might be… overfitting or tryin to see a thing because I’m emotionally charged, but I’m gonna attempt to articulate the thing anyway:
For example, the author summarizes Zoe as saying that Leverage considered Geoff Anders to be extremely special, e.g. Geoff being possibly a better philosopher than Kant.
In Zoe’s post, her actual quote is of a Leverage person saying “I think there’s good reason to believe Geoff is the best philosopher who’s ever lived, better than Kant. I think his existence on earth right now is an historical event.”
This is small but an actually important difference, and has the effect of slightly downplaying Leverage.
The author here then goes on to say that she doesn’t remember anyone saying Eliezer was a better philosopher than Kant, but that she guesses people would say this, and then points out probably nobody at MIRI read Kant.
The effect of this is it asks the reader to associate perception of Eliezer’s status with Geoff’s (both elevated) by drawing the comparison of Kant to Eliezer (that hadn’t actually been drawn before), and then implies rationalists being misinformed (not reading Kant).
This is arguably a really uncharitable read, and I’m not very convinced it’s ‘true’, but I think the ‘effect’ is true; as in, this is the impression I got when reading quickly the first time. And the impression isn’t supported in the rest of the words, of course—the author says they don’t have reason to believe MIRI people would view Eliezer as more relevant than philosophers they respected, and that nobody there really respected Kant. But the general sense I get from the overall post is this type of pattern, repeated over and over—a sensation of being asked to believe something terrible, and then when I squint the words themselves are quite reasonable. This makes it feel slippery to me, or I feel like I’ve been struck from behind and when I turn around there’s someone smiling as they’re reaching out to shake my hand.
And to be clear, I don’t think all the comparisons are wrong, or that there’s nothing of value here. It can be super hard to sensemake with confusing narrative stuff, and there’s inevitably going to be some clumsiness in attempting to do it. I think it’s worthwhile and important to be paying close attention to the ways organizations might be having adverse effects on their members, particularly in our type of communities, and I support pointing out even small things and don’t want people to feel like they’re making too big a deal out of something not. But the way this deal is made bothers me, and I feel defensive and have stories in me about this doing more harm than good.
I want to note that this post (top-level) now has more than 3x the number of comments that Zoe’s does (or nearly 50% more comments than the Zoe+BayAreaHuman posts combined, if you think that’s a more fair comparison), and that no one has commented on Zoe’s post in 24 hours. [ETA: This changed while I was writing this comment. The point about lowered activity still stands.]
This seems really bad to me — I think that there was a lot more that needed to be figured out wrt Leverage, and this post has successfully sucked all the attention away from a conversation that I perceive to be much more important.
I keep deleting sentences because I don’t think it’s productive to discuss how upset this makes me, but I am 100% with Aella here. I was wary of this post to begin with and I feel something akin to anger at what it did to the Leverage conversation.
I had some contact with Leverage 1.0 — had some friends there, interviewed for an ops job there, and was charted a few times by a few different people. I have also worked for both CFAR and MIRI, though never as a core staff member at either organization; and more importantly, I was close friends with maybe 50% of the people who worked at CFAR from mid-2017 to mid-2020. Someone very close to me previously worked for both CFAR and Leverage. With all that backing me up: I am really very confident that the psychological harm inflicted by Leverage was both more widespread and qualitatively different than anything that happened atCFAR or MIRI (at least since mid-2017; I don’t know what things might have been like back in, like, 2012).
The comments section of this post is full of CFAR and MIRI employees attempting to do collaborative truth-seeking. The only comments made by Leverage employees in comparable threads were attempts at reputation management. That alone tells you a lot!
CFAR and MIRI have their flaws, and several people clearly have legitimate grievances with them. I personally did not have a super great experience working for either organization (though that has nothing to do with anything Jessica mentioned in this post; just run-of-the-mill workplace stuff). Those flaws are worth looking at, not only for the edification of the people who had bad experiences with MIRI and CFAR, but also because we care about being good people building effective organizations to make the world a better place. They do not, however, belong in a conversation about the harm done by Leverage.
(Just writing a sentence saying that Leverage was harmful makes me feel uncomfortable, feels a little dangerous, but fuck it, what are they going to do, murder me?)
Again, I keep deleting sentences, because all I want to talk about is the depth of my agreement with Aella, and my uncharitable feelings towards this post. So I guess I’ll just end here.
It seems like it’s relatively easy for people to share information in the CFAR+MIRI conversation. On the other hand, for those people who have actually the most central information to share in the Leverage conversation it’s not as easy to share them.
In many cases I would expect that private in person conversation are needed to progress the Leverage debate and that just takes time. Those people at leverage who want to write up their own experience likely benefit from time to do that.
Practically, helping Anna get an overview over timeline of members and funders and getting people to share stories with Aella seems to be the way going forward that’s largely not about leaving LW comments.
I agree with the intent of your comment mingyuan, but perhaps the reason for the asymmetry in activity on this post is simply due to the fact that there are an order of magnitude (or several orders of magnitude?) more people with some/any experience and interaction with CFAR/MIRI (especially CFAR) compared to Leverage?
I think some of it has got to be that it’s somehow easier to talk about CFAR/MIRI, rather than a sheer number of people thing. I think Leverage is somehow unusually hard to talk about, such that maybe we should figure out how to be extraordinarily kind/compassionate/gentle to anyone attempting it, or something.
I agree that Leverage has been unusually hard to talk about bluntly or honestly, and I think this has been true for most of its existence.
I also think the people at the periphery of Leverage, are starting to absorb the fact that they systematically had things hidden from them. That may be giving them new pause, before engaging with Leverage as a topic.
(I think that seems potentially fair, and considerate. To me, it doesn’t feel like the same concern applies in engaging about CFAR. I also agree that there were probably fewer total people exposed to Leverage, at all.)
...actually, let me give you a personal taste of what we’re dealing with?
The last time I choose to talk straightforwardly and honestly about Leverage, with somebody outside of it? I had to hard-override an explicit but non-legal privacy agreement*, to get a sanity check. When I was honest about having done so shortly thereafter, I completely and permanently lost one of my friendships as a result.
Lost-friend says they were traumatized as a result of me doing this. That having “made the mistake of trusting me” hurt their relationships with other Leveragers. That at the time, they wished they’d lied to me, which stung.
I talked with the person I used as a sanity-check recently, and I get the sense that I still only managed to squeeze out ~3-5 sentences of detail at the time.
(I get the sense that I still did manage to convey a pretty balanced account of what was going through my head at the time. Somehow.)
It is probably safer to talk now, than it was then. At least, that’s my current view. 2 year’s distance, community support, a community that is willing to be more sympathetic to people who get swept up in movements, and a taste of what other people were going through (and that you weren’t the only person going through this), does tend to help matters.
(Edit: They’ve also shared the Ecosystem Dissolution Information
Arrangement, which I find a heartening move. They mention that it was intended to be more socially-enforced than legally-binding. I don’t like all of their framing around it, but I’ll pick that fight later.)
It wouldn’t surprise me at all, if most of this gets sorted out privately for now. Depending a bit on how this ends—largely on whether I think this kind of harm is likely to recur or not—I might not even have an objection to that.
But when it comes to Leverage? These are some of the kinds of thoughts and feelings, that I worry we may later see played a role in keeping this quiet.
I’m finally out about my story here! But I think I want to explain a bit of why I wasn’t being very clear, for a while.
I’ve been “hinting darkly” in public rather than “telling my full story” due to a couple of concerns:
I don’t want to “throw ex-friend under the bus,” to use their own words! Even friend’s Leverager partner (who they weren’t allowed to visit, if they were “infected with objects”) seemed more “swept-up in the stupidity” than “malicious.” I don’t know how to tell my truth, without them feeling drowned out. I do still care about that. Eurgh.
Via models that come out of my experience with Brent: I think this level of silence, makes the most sense if some ex-Leveragers did get a substantial amount of good out of the experience (sometimes with none of the bad, sometimes alongside it), and/or if there’s a lot of regrettable actions taken by people who were swept up in this at the time, by people who would ordinarily be harmless under normal circumstances. I recognize that bodywork was very helpful to my friend, in working through some of their (unrelated) trauma. I am more than a little reluctant to put people through the sort of mob-driven invalidation I felt, in the face of the early intensely-negative community response to the Brent expose?
Surprisingly irrelevant for me: I am personally not very afraid of Geoff! Back when I was still a nobody, I brute-forced my way out of an agonizing amount of social-anxiety through sheer persistence. My social supports range both wide and deep. I have pretty strong honesty policies. I am not currently employed, so even attacking my workplace is a no-go. I’m planning to marry someone cool this January. Truth be told? I pity any fool who tries to character-assassinate me.
...but I know that others are scared of Geoff. I have heard the phrase “Geoff will do anything to win” bandied about so often, that I view it as something of a stereotyped phrase among Leveragers. I am honestly not sure how concerned I actually should be about it! But it feels like evidence of a narrative that I find pretty concerning, although I don’t know how this narrative emerged.
The last time I choose to talk straightforwardly and honestly about Leverage, with somebody outside of it? I had to hard-override a privacy concern*, to get a sanity check. When I was honest about having done so shortly thereafter, I completely lost one of my friendships as a result.
Lost-friend says they were traumatized as a result of me doing this. That having “made the mistake of trusting me” hurt their relationships with other Leveragers. That at the time, they wished they’d lied to me which stung.
Any thoughts on why this was coming about in the culture?
If anyone feels that way (like the lost friend) and wants to talk to me about it, I’d be interested in learning more about it.
* I could tell that this had some concerning toxic elements, and I needed an outside sanity-check. I think under the circumstances, this was the correct call for me. I do not regret picking the particular person I chose as a sanity-check. I am also very sympathetic to other people not feeling able to pull this, given the enormous cost to doing it at the time.
This is not a strong systematic assessment of how I usually treat privacy agreements. My harm-assessment process is usually structured a bit like this, with some additional pressure from an “agreement-to-secrecy,” and also factors in the meta-secrecy-agreements around “being able to be held to secrecy agreements” and “being honest about how well you can be held to secrecy agreements.”
No, I don’t feel like having a long discussion about privacy policies right now. But if you care? My thoughts on information-sharing policy were valuable enough to get me into the 2019 Review.
The fact that the people involved apparently find it uniquely difficult to talk about is a pretty good indication that Leverage != CFAR/MIRI in terms of cultishness/harms etc.
Yes; I want to acknowledge that there was a large cost here. (I wasn’t sure, from just the comment threads; but I just talked to a couple people who said they’d been thinking of writing up some observations about Leverage but had been distracted by this.)
I am personally really grateful for a bunch of the stuff in this post and its comment thread. But I hope the Leverage discussion really does get returned to, and I’ll try to lend some momentum that way. Hope some others do too, insofar as some can find ways to actually help people put things together or talk.
Seems to me that, given the current situation, it would probably be good to wait maybe two more days until this debate naturally reaches the end. And then restart the debate about Leverage.
Otherwise, we risk having two debates running in parallel, interfering with each other.
The comments section of this post is full of CFAR and MIRI employees attempting to do collaborative truth-seeking. The only comments made by Leverage employees in comparable threads were attempts at reputation management. That alone tells you a lot!
Then it is good that this debate happened. (Despite my shock when I saw it first.) It’s just the timing with regards to the debate about Leverage that is unfortunate.
When everyone knows everyone else it’s more like Facebook than say Reddit. I don’t know why so many real life organizations are basing their discussions on these open forums online. Maybe they want to attract more people to think about certain problems. Maybe they want to spread their jeans. Either way, normal academic research don’t involving knocking on people’s doors and ask them if they are interested in doing such and such research. To a less extreme degree, they don’t even ask their family and friends to join their research circle. When you befriend your coworkers in the corporate world, things can get real messy real quick, depending on to what extent they are involved/interfering with your life outside of work. Maybe that’s why they are distinguishing themselves from your typical workplace.
MIRI and CFAR are non-profits, they need to approach fundraising and talent-seeking differently than universities or for-profit corporations.
In addition, neither of them is pure research institution. MIRI’s mission includes making people who work on AI, or make important decisions about AI, aware of the risks involved. CFAR’s mission includes teaching of rationality techniques. Both of them require communication with public.
This doesn’t explain all the differences, but at least some of them.
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.
Uhh. Sadly, this attitude is quite common, so I will try to explain. Some people are in general more gullible or easier to impress, yes. But that is just a part of equation. The remaining parts are:
everyone is more vulnerable to manipulation that is compatible with their already existing opinions and desires;
people are differently vulnerable at different moment of their lives, so it’s a question of luck whether you encounter the manipulation at your strongest or weakest moment;
the environment can increase or decrease your resistance: how much free time you have, how many people make a coordinated effort to convince you, whether you have enough opportunity to meet other people or stay alone and reflect on what is happening, whether something keeps you worried and exhausted, etc.
So, some people might easily believe in Mother Gaia, but never in Artificial Intelligence, for other people it is the other way round. You can manipulate some people by appealing to their selfish desires, other people by appealing to their feelings of compassion.
Many people are just lucky that they never met a manipulative group targetting specifically their weaknesses, exactly at a vulnerable moment of their lives. It is easy to laugh at people whose weaknesses are different from yours, when they fail in a situation that exploits their weaknesses.
By way of narrowing down this sense, which I think I share, if it’s the same sense: leaving out the information from Scott’s comment about a MIRI-opposed person who is advocating psychedelic use and causing psychotic breaks in people, and particularly this person talks about MIRI’s attempts to have any internal info compartments as a terrible dark symptom of greater social control that you need to jailbreak away from using psychedelics, and then those people have psychotic breaks—leaving out this info seems to be not something you’d do in a neutrally intended post written from a place of grave concern about community dynamics. It’s taking the Leverage affair and trying to use it to make a point, and only including the info that would make that point, and leaving out info that would distract from that point. And I’m not going to posture like that’s terribly bad inhuman behavior, but we can see it and it’s okay to admit to ourselves that we see it.
And it’s also okay for somebody to think that the original Leverage affair needed to be discussed on its own terms, and not be carefully reframed in exactly the right way to make a point about a higher-profile group the author wanted to discuss instead; or to think that Leverage did a clearly bad thing, and we need to have norms against that clearly bad thing and finish up on making those norms before it’s proper for anyone to reframe the issue as really being about a less clear bad thing somewhere higher-profile; and then this post is going against that and it’s okay for them to be unhappy about that part.
not something you’d do in a neutrally intended post written from a place of grave concern about community dynamics
I’m not going to posture like that’s terribly bad inhuman behavior, but we can see it and it’s okay to admit to ourselves that we see it
These have the tone of allusions to some sort of accusation, but as far as I can tell you’re not actually accusing Jessica of any transgression here, just saying that her post was not “neutrally intended,” which—what would that mean? A post where Gricean implicature was not relevant?
Can you clarify whether you meant to suggest Jessica was doing some specific harmful thing here or whether this tone is unendorsed?
Okay, sure. If what Scott says is true, and it matches my recollections of things I heard earlier—though I can attest to very little of it of my direct observation—then it seems like this post was written with knowledge of things that would make the overall story arc it showed, look very different, and those things were deliberately omitted. This is more manipulation than I myself would personally consider okay to use in a situation like this one, though I am ever mindful of Automatic Norms and the privilege of being more verbally facile than others in which facts I can include but still make my own points.
First, I’m annoyed at the timing of this. The community still seems in the middle of sensemaking around Leverage, and figuring out what to do about it, and this post feels like it pulls the spotlight away...
I want to second this reaction (basically your entire second paragraph). I have been feeling the same but hadn’t worked up the courage to say it.
I am also mad at what I see to be piggybacking on Zoe’s post, downplaying of the harms described in her post, and a subtle redirection of collective attention away from potentially new, timid accounts of things that happened to a specific group of people within Leverage and seem to have a lot of difficulty talking about it.
I hope that the sustained collective attention required to witness, make sense of and address the accounts of harm coming out of the psychology division of Leverage doesn’t get lost as a result of this post being published when it was.
For a moment I actually wondered whether this was a genius-level move by Leverage, but then I decided that I am just being paranoid. But it did derail the previous debate successfully.
On the positive side, I learned some new things. Never heard about Ziz before, for example.
EDIT:
Okay, this is probably silly, but… there is no connection between the Vassarites and Leverage, right? I just realized that my level of ignorance does not justify me dismissing a hypothesis so quickly. And of course, everyone knows everyone, but there are different levels of “knowing people”, and… you know what I mean, hopefully. I will defer to judgment of people from Bay Area about this topic.
Outside of “these people probably talked to each other like once every few months” I think there is no major connection between Leverage and the Vassarites that I am aware of.
I mostly assumed this; I suppose in the opposite case someone probably would have already mentioned that. But I prefer to have it confirmed explicitly.
The community still seems in the middle of sensemaking around Leverage, and figuring out what to do about it, and this post feels like it pulls the spotlight away.
I’m assuming that sensemaking is easier, rather than harder, with more relevant information and stories shared. I guess if it’s pulling the spotlight away, it’s partially because it’s showing relevant facts about things other than Leverage, and partially because people will be more afraid of scapegoating Leverage if the similarities to MIRI/CFAR are obvious. I don’t like scapegoating, so I don’t really care if it’s pulling the spotlight away for the second reason.
If the points in the post felt more compelling, then I’d probably be more down for an argument of “we should bin these together and look at this as a whole”, but as it stands the stuff listed in here feels like it’s describing something significantly less damaging, and of a different kind of damage.
I don’t really understand what Zoe went through, just reading her post (although I have talked with other ex-Leverage people about the events). You don’t understand what I went through, either. It was really, really psychologically disturbing. I sound paranoid writing what I wrote, but this paranoia affected so many people. What I thought was a discourse community broke down into low-trust behavior and gaslighting and I feared violence. Someone outside the central Berkeley community just messaged me saying it’s really understandable that I’d fear retribution given how important the relevant people thought the project was, it was a real risk.
Or, rather, I think there’s a core inside of what made Leverage damaging, and it’s really really hard to name it.
I’m really interested in the core being described better in the Leverage case. It would be unlikely that large parts of such a core wouldn’t apply to other cases even if not to MIRI/CFAR specifically. I know I haven’t done the best job I could have nailing down what was fucky about the MIRI/CFAR environment at 2017, but I’ve tried harder to (in the online space) more than anyone but Ziz, AFAICT.
This is small but an actually important difference, and has the effect of slightly downplaying Leverage.
I agree, will edit the post accordingly. I do think the fact that people were saying we wouldn’t have a chance to save the world without Eliezer shows that they consider him extremely historically special.
But the general sense I get from the overall post is this type of pattern, repeated over and over—a sensation of being asked to believe something terrible, and then when I squint the words themselves are quite reasonable.
Sorry, it’s possible that I’m writing not nearly as clearly as I could, and the stress of what happened might contribute some to that. But it’s hard for me to identify how I’m communicating unclearly from your or Logan’s description, which are both pretty vague.
But the way this deal is made bothers me, and I feel defensive and have stories in me about this doing more harm than good.
I appreciate that you’re communicating about your defensiveness and not just being defensive without signalling that.
I don’t really understand what Zoe went through, just reading her post (although I have talked with other ex-Leverage people about the events). You don’t understand what I went through, either. It was really, really psychologically disturbing. I sound paranoid writing what I wrote, but this paranoia affected so many people.
It would have probably better if you would have focused on your experience and drop all of the talk about Zoe from this post. That would make it easier for the reader to just take the information value from your experience.
I think that your post is still valuable information but that added narrative layer makes it harder to interact with then it would have been if it would have been focused more on your experience.
One example for this is comparing Zoe’s mention of someone at Leverage having a psychotic break to the author having a psychotic break. But Zoe’s point was that Leverage treated the psychotic break as an achievement, not that the psychotic break happened.
From the quotes in Scott’s comment, it seems to me also the case that Michael Vassar also treated Jessica’s and Ziz’s psychoses as an achievement.
Up for coming by? I’d like to understand just how similar your situation was to Jessica’s, including the details of her breakdown. We really don’t want this happening so frequently.
(Also, just, whatever you think of Michael’s many faults, very few people are cartoon villains that want their friends to have mental breakdowns.)
First, I’m annoyed at the timing of this. The community still seems in the middle of sensemaking around Leverage, and figuring out what to do about it, and this post feels like it pulls the spotlight away.
If we’re trying to solve problems rather than attack the bad people, then the boundaries of the discussion should be determined by the scope of the problem, not by which people we’re saying are bad. If you’re trying to attack the bad people without standards or a theory of what’s going on, that’s just mob violence.
I… think I am trying to attack the bad people? I’m definitely conflict-oriented around Leverage; I believe that on some important level treating that organization or certain people in it as good-intentioned-but-misguided is a mistake, and a dangerous one. I don’t think this is true for MIRI/CFAR; as is summed up pretty well in the last section of Orthonormal’s post here. I’m down for the boundaries of the discussion being determined by the scope of the problem, but I perceive the original post here to be outside the scope of the problem.
I’m also not sure how to engage with your last sentence. I do have theories for what is going on (but regardless I’m not sure if you give a mob a theory that makes it not a mob).
We want to reveal problems so that people can try to understand and solve those problems. Transforming an attempt to discussion of abuse into a scapegoating movement silences victims, preventing others from trying to interpret and independently evaluate the content of what they are saying, simplifying it to a bid to make someone the enemy.
Historically, the idea that instead of trying to figure out which behaviors are bad and police them, we need to try to quickly attack the bad people, is how we get Holocausts and Stalinist purges. In this case I don’t see any upside.
I perceive you as doing a conversational thing here that I don’t like, where you like… imply things about my position without explicitly stating them? Or talk from a heavy frame that isn’t explicit?
Which stated intentions? Where she asks people ‘not to bother those who were there’? What thing do you think I want to do that Zoe doesn’t want me to do?
Are you claiming I am advocating violence? Or simply implying it?
Are you trying to argue that I shouldn’t be conflict oriented because Zoe doesn’t want me to be? The last part feels a little weird for someone to tell me, as I’m good friends with Zoe and have talked with her extensively about this.
I support revealing problems so people can understand and solve them. I also don’t like whatever is happening in this original article due to reasons you haven’t engaged with.
You’re saying transforming an attempt to discuss abuse into scapegoating silences victims, keeps other ppl from evaluating the content, and simplifies it a bid to make someone the enemy. But in the comment you were responding to, I was talking about Leverage, not the author of this post. I view Leverage and co. as bad actors, but you sort of… reframe it to make it sound like I’m using a conflict mindset towards Jessica?
You’re also not engaging with the points I made, and you’re responding to arguments I don’t condone.
I don’t really view you as engaging in good faith at this point, so I’m precommitting not to respond to you after this.
Flagging that… I somehow want to simultaneously upvote and downvote Benquo’s comment here.
Upvote because I think he’s standing for good things. (I’m pretty anti-scapegoating, especially of the ‘quickly’ kind that I think he’s concerned about.)
Downvote because it seems weirdly in the wrong context, like he’s trying to punch at some kind of invisible enemy. His response seems incongruous with Aella’s actual deal.
I have some probability on miscommunication / misunderstanding.
But also … why ? are you ? why are your statements so ‘contracting’ ? Like they seem ‘narrowizing’ of the discussion in a way that seems like it philosophically tenses with your stated desire for ‘revealing problems’. And they also seem weirdly ‘escalate-y’ like somehow I’m more tense in my body as I read your comments, like there’s about to be a fight? Not that I sense any anger in you, but I sense a ‘standing your ground’ move that seems like it could lead to someone trying to punch you because you aren’t budging.
This is all metaphorical language for what I feel like your communication style is doing here.
Thanks for separating evaluation of content from evaluation of form. That makes it easy for me to respond to your criticism of my form without worrying so much that it’s a move to suppress imperfectly expressed criticism.
The true causal answer is that when I perceive someone as appealing to a moralistic framework, I have a tendency to criticize their perspective from inside a moralistic frame, even though I don’t independently endorse moralizing. While this probably isn’t the best thing I could do if I were perfectly poised, I don’t think this is totally pointless either. Attempts to scapegoat someone via moralizing rely on the impression that symmetric moral reasoning is being done, so they can be disrupted by insistent opposition from inside that frame.
You might think of it as standing in territory I think someone else has unjustly claimed, and drawing attention to that fact. One might get punched sometimes in such circumstances, but that’s not so terrible; definitely not as bad as being controlled by fear, and it helps establish where recourse/justice is available and where it isn’t, which is important information to have! Occasionally bright young people with a moral compass get in touch with me because they can see that I’m conspicuously behaving in a not-ethically-backwards way in proximity to something interesting but sketchy that they were considering getting involved with. Having clear examples to point to is helpful, and confrontation produces clear examples.
A contributing factor is that I (and I think Jessica too) felt time pressure here because it seems to me like there is an attempt to build social momentum against a specific target, which transforms complaints from complementary contributions to a shared map, into competing calls for action. I was seriously worried that if I didn’t interrupt that process, some important discourse opportunities would be permanently destroyed. I endorse that concern.
The true causal answer is that when I perceive someone as appealing to a moralistic framework, I have a tendency to criticize their perspective from inside a moralistic frame, even though I don’t independently endorse moralizing.
o
hmmm, well i gotta chew on that more but
Aella seems like a counter-productive person to stand your ground against. I sense her as mainly being an ‘advocate’ for Zoe. She claims wanting to attack the bad people, but compared with other commenters, I sense less ‘mob violence’ energy from her and … maybe more fear that an important issue will be dropped / ignored. (I am not particularly afraid of this; the evidence against Leverage is striking and damning enough that it doesn’t seem like it will readily be dropped, even if the internet stops talking about it. In fact I hope to see the internet talking about it a bit less, as more real convos happen in private.)
I’m a bit worried about the way Scott’s original take may have pulled us towards a shared map too quickly. There’s also a general anti-jessicata vibe I’m getting from ‘the room’ but it’s non-specific and has a lot to do with karma vote patterns. Naming these here for the sake of group awareness and to note I am with you in spirit, not an attempt to add more politics or fighting.
I was seriously worried that if I didn’t interrupt that process, some important discourse opportunities would be permanently destroyed. I endorse that concern.
Hmmmm I feel like advocating for a slightly different mental stance. Instead of taking it upon yourself to interrupt a process in order to gain a particular outcome, what if you did a thing in a way that inspires people to follow because you’re being a good role model? If you’re standing for what’s right, it can inspire people into also doing the right thing. And if no one follows you, you accept that as the outcome; rather than trying to ‘make sure’ something happens?
Attachment to an outcome (like urgently trying to avoid ‘opportunities being permanently destroyed’) seems like it subtly disempowers people and perpetuates more of the pattern that I think we both want less of in the world? Checking to see where a disagreement might be found…
I think it seems hard to find a disagreement because we don’t disagree about much here.
Aella seems like a counter-productive person to stand your ground against. I sense her as mainly being an ‘advocate’ for Zoe. She claims wanting to attack the bad people, but compared with other commenters, I sense less ‘mob violence’ energy from her
Aella was being basically cooperative in revealing some details about her motives, as was Logan. But that behavior is only effectively cooperative if people can use that information to build shared maps. I tried to do that in my replies, albeit imperfectly & in a way that picked a bit more of a fight than I ideally would have.
I feel like advocating for a slightly different mental stance. Instead of taking it upon yourself to interrupt a process in order to gain a particular outcome, what if you did a thing in a way that inspires people to follow because you’re being a good role model?
At leisure, I do this. I’m working on a blog post trying to explain some of the structural factors that cause orgs like Leverage to go wrong in the way Zoe described. I’ve written extensively about both scapegoating and mind control outside the context of particular local conflicts, and when people seem like they’re in a helpable state of confusion I try to help them. I spent half an hour today using a massage gun on my belly muscles, which improved my reading comprehension of your comment and let me respond to it more intelligently.
But I’m in an adversarial situation. There are optimizing processes trying to destroy what I’m trying to build, trying to threaten people into abandoning their perspectives and capitulating to violence.
It seems like you’re recommending that I build new capacities instead of defending old ones. If I’m deciding between those, I shouldn’t always get either answer. Instead, for any process damaging me, I should compare these two quantities:
(A) The cost of replacement—how much would it cost me to repair the damage or build an equivalent amount of capacity elsewhere?
(B) The cost of preventing the damage.
I should work on prevention when B<A, and building when A>B.
Since I expect my adversaries to make use of resources they seize to destroy more of what I care about, I need to count that towards the total expected damage caused (and therefore the cost of replacement).
If I’d been able to costlessly pause the world for several hours to relax and think about the problem, I would almost certainly have been able to write a better reply to Aella, one that would score better on the metric you’re proposing, while perhaps still accomplishing my “defense” goals.
I’m taking Tai Chi lessons in large part because I think ability to respond to fights without getting triggered is a core bottleneck for me, so I’m putting many hours of my time into being able to perform better on that metric. But I’m not better yet, and I’ve got to respond to the situations I’m in now with the abilities I’ve got now.
Well I feel somewhat more relaxed now, seeing that you’re engaging in a pretty open and upfront manner. I like Tai Chi :)
The main disagreement I see is that you are thinking strategically and in a results-oriented fashion about actions you should take; you’re thinking about things in terms of resource management and cost-benefit analysis. I do not advocate for that. Although I get that my position is maybe weird?
I claim that kind of thinking turns a lot of situations into finite games. Which I believe then contributes to life-ending / world-ending patterns.
…
But maybe a more salient thing: I don’t think this situation is quite as adversarial as you’re maybe making it out to be? Or like, you seem to be adding a lot to an adversarial atmosphere, which might be doing a fair amount of driving towards more adversarial dynamics in the group in general.
I think you and I are not far apart in terms of values, and so … I kind of want to help you? But also … if you’re attached to certain outcomes being guaranteed, that’s gonna make it hard…
I don’t understand where guarantees came into this. I don’t understand how I could answer a question of the form “why did you do X rather than Y” without making some kind of comparison of the likely outcomes of X and Y.
I do know that in many cases people falsely claim to be comparing costs and benefits honestly, or falsely claim that some resource is scarce, as part of a strategy of coercion. I have no reason to do this to myself but I see many people doing it and maybe that’s part of what turned you off from the idea.
On the other hand, there’s a common political strategy where a dominant coalition establishes a narrative that something should be provided universally without rationing, or that something should be absolutely prevented without acknowledging taboo tradeoffs. Since this policy can’t be implemented as stated, it empowers people in the position to decide which exceptions to make, and benefits the kinds of people who can get exceptions made, at the expense of less centrally connected people.
It seems to me like thinking about tradeoffs is the low-conflict alternative to insisting on guaranteed outcomes.
Generalizing from your objection to thinking about things in terms of resource management and cost-benefit analysis and your reaction to Eli’s summary of Michael and Spencer’s podcast, it seems like you’re experiencing a strong aversion (though not an infinitely strong one, since you said you might try listening to the podcast) to assimilating information about conflict or resource constraints, which will make it hard for you to understand behaviors determined by conflicts or resource constraints, which is a LOT of behavior.*
If you can point out specific mistakes I’m making, or at least try to narrow down your sense that I’m falsely assuming adversariality, we can try to discuss it.
But not all. Sexual selection seems like a third thing, though it might only common because it helps evolution find solutions to the other two—it would be surprising to see a lot of sexual selection across many species on a mature planet if it didn’t pay rent somehow.
Uhhh sorry, the thing about ‘guarantees’ was probably a mis-speak.
For reference, I used to be a competitive gamer. This meant I used to use resource management and cost-benefit analysis a lot in my thinking. I also ported those framings into broader life, including how to win social games. I am comfortable thinking in terms of resource constraints, and lived many years of my life in that mode. (I was very skilled at games like MTG, board games, and Werewolf/Mafia.)
I have since updated to realize how that way of thinking was flawed and dissociated from reality.
I don’t understand how I could answer a question of the form “why did you do X rather than Y” without making some kind of comparison of the likely outcomes of X and Y.
I wrote a whole response to this part, but … maybe I’m missing you.
Thinking strategically seems fine to the extent that one is aligned with love / ethics / integrity and not acting out of fear, hate, or selfishness. The way you put your predicament caused me to feel like you were endorsing a fear-aligned POV.
“Since I expect my adversaries to make use of resources they seize to destroy more of what I care about,” “But I’m in an adversarial situation. There are optimizing processes trying to destroy what I’m trying to build, trying to threaten people into abandoning their perspectives and capitulating to violence.”
The thing I should have said… was not about the strategy subplot, sorry, … rather, I have an objection to the seeming endorsement of acting from a fear-aligned place. Maybe I was acting out of fear myself… and failed to name the true objection.
…
Those above quotes are the strongest evidence I have that you’re assuming adversarial-ness in the situation, and I do not currently know why you believe those quoted statements. Like the phrase about ‘adversaries’ sounds like you’re talking about theoretical ghosts to me. But maybe you have real people in mind.
the phrase about ‘adversaries’ sounds like you’re talking about theoretical ghosts to me. But maybe you have real people in mind.
I’m talking about optimizing processes coordinating with copies of themselves, distributed over many people. My blog post Civil Law and Political Drama is a technically precise description of this, though Towards optimal play as Villager in a mixed game adds some color that might be helpful. I don’t think my interests are opposed to the autonomous agency of almost anyone. I do think that some common trigger/trauma behavior patterns are coordinating against autonomous human agency.
The gaming detail helps me understand where you’re coming from here. I don’t think the right way to manage my resource constraints looks very much like playing a game of MtG. I am in a much higher-dimensional environment where most of my time should be spent playing/exploring, or resolving tension patterns that impede me from playing/exploring. My endorsed behavior pattern looks a little more like the process of becoming a good MtG player, or discovering that MtG is the sort of thing I want to get good at. (Though empirically that’s not a game it made sense to me to invest in becoming good at—I chose Tai Chi instead for reasons!)
rather, I have an objection to the seeming endorsement of acting from a fear-aligned place.
I endorse using the capacities I already have, even when those capacities are imperfect.
When responding to social conflict, it would almost always be more efficient and effective for me to try to clarify things out of a sense of open opportunity, than from a fear-based motive. This can be true even when a proper decision-theoretic model the situation would describe it as an adversarial one with time pressure; I might still protect my interests better by thinking in a free and relaxed way about the problem, than tensing up like a monkey facing a physical threat.
But a relaxed attitude is not always immediately available to me, and I don’t think I want to endorse always taking the time to detrigger before responding to something in the social domain.
Part of loving and accepting human beings as they are, without giving up on intention to make things better, is appreciating and working with the benefits people produce out of mixed motives. There’s probably some irrational fear-based motivation in Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’s work ethic, and maybe they’d have found more efficient and effective ways to help the world if their mental health were better, but I’m really, really glad I get to use Amazon, and that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink exist, and it’s not clear to me that I’d want to advise younger versions of them to spend a lot of time working on themselves first. That seems like making purity the enemy of the good.
optimizing processes coordinating with copies of themselves, distributed over many people
Question about balance: how do you not end up reifying these in your mind, creating a paranoid sense of ‘there be ghosts lurking in shadows’ ?
This question seems central to me because the poison I detect in Vassar-esque-speak is
a) Memetically more contagious stories seem to include lurking ghosts / demons / shadows because adding a sense of danger or creating paranoia is sticky and salient. Vassar seems to like inserting a sense of ‘hidden danger’ or ‘large demonic forces’ into his theories and way of speaking about things. I’m worried this is done for memetic intrigue, viability, and stickiness, not necessarily because it’s more true. It makes people want to listen to him for long periods of time, but I don’t sense it being an openly curious kind of listening but a more addicted / hungry type of listening. (I can detect this in myself.)
I guess I’m claiming Vassar has an imbalance between the wisdom/truth of his words and the power/memetic viability of his words. With too much on the side of power.
b) Reifying these “optimizing processes coordinating” together, maybe “against autonomous human agency” or whatever… seems toxic and harmful for a human mind that takes these very seriously. Unless it comes with ample antidote in the form of (in my world anyway) a deep spiritual compassion / faith and a wisdom-oriented understanding of everyone’s true nature, among other things in this vein. But I don’t detect Vassar is offering this antidote, so it just feels like poison to me. One might call this poison a deep cynicism, lack of faith / trust, a flavor of nihilism, or “giving into the dark side.”
I do believe Vassar might, in an important sense, have a lot of faith in humanity… but nonetheless, his way of expressing gives off a big stench of everything being somehow tainted and bad. And the faith is not immediately detectable from listening to him, nor do I sense his love.
I kind of suspect that there’s some kind of (adversarial) optimization process operating through his expression, and he seems to have submitted to this willingly? And I am curious about what’s up with that / whether I’m wrong about this.
Question about balance: how do you not end up reifying these in your mind, creating a paranoid sense of ‘there be ghosts lurking in shadows’ ?
Mostly just by trying to think about this stuff carefully, and check whether my responses to it add up & seem constructive. I seem to have been brought up somehow with a deep implicit faith that any internal problem I have, I can solve by thinking about—i.e. that I don’t have any internal infohazards. So, once I consciously notice the opportunity, it feels safe to be curious about my own fear, aggression, etc. It seems like many other people don’t have this faith, which would make it harder for them to solve this class of problem; they seem to think that knowing about conflicts they’re engaged in would get them hurt by making them blameworthy; that looking the thing in the face would mark them for destruction.
My impression is that insofar as I’m paranoid, this is part of the adversarial process I described, which seems to believe in something like ontologically fundamental threats that can’t be reduced to specific mechanisms by which I might be harmed, and have to be submitted to absolutely. This model doesn’t stand up to a serious examination, so examining it honestly tends to dissolve it.
I’ve found psychedelics helpful here. Psilocybin seems to increase the conscious salience of fear responses, which allows me to analyze them. In one of my most productive shrooms trips, I noticed that I was spending most of my time pretending to be a reasonable person, under the impression that an abstract dominator wouldn’t allow me to connect with other people unless I passed as a simulacrum of a rational agent. I noticed that it didn’t feel available to just go to the other room and ask my friends for cuddles because I wanted to, and I considered maybe just huddling under the blankets scared in my bedroom until the trip ended and I became a simulacrum again. Then I decided I had no real incentive do to this, and plenty of incentive to go try to interact with my friends without pretending to be a person, so I did that and it worked.
THC seems to make paranoid thoughts more conscious, which allows me to consciously work through their implications and decide whether I believe them.
I agree that stories with a dramatic villain seem more memetically fit and less helpful, and I avoid them when I notice the option to.
Thanks for your level-headed responses. At this point, I have nothing further to talk about on the object-level conversation (but open to anything else you want to discuss).
For information value, I do want to flag that…
I’m noticing an odd effect from talking with you. It feels like being under a weighted blanket or a ‘numbing’ effect. It’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
My sketchpad sense of it is: Leaning on the support of Reason. Something wants me to be soothed, to be reassured, that there is Reasonableness and Order, and it can handle things. That most things can be Solved with … correct thinking or conceptualization or model-building or something.
So, it’s a projection and all, but I don’t trust this “thing” whatever it is, much. It also seems to have many advantages. And it may make it pretty hard for me to have a fully alive and embodied conversation with you.
Curious if any of this resonates with you or with anyone else’s sense of you, or if I’m off the mark. But um also this can be ignored or taken offline as well, since it’s not adding to the overall conversation and is just an interpersonal thing.
I did feel inhibited from having as much fun as I’d have liked to in this exchange because it seemed like while you were on the whole trying to make a good thing happen, you were somewhat scared in a triggered and triggerable way. This might have caused the distortion you’re describing. Helpful and encouraging to hear that you picked up on that and it bothered you enough to mention.
Your response here is really perplexing to me and didn’t go in the direction I expected at all. I am guessing there’s some weird communication breakdown happening. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess all I have left is: I care about you, I like you, and I wish well for you. <3
It seems like you’re having difficulty imagining that I’m responding to my situation as I understand it, and I don’t know what else you might think I’m doing.
I read the comment you’re responding to as suggesting something like “your impression of Unreal’s internal state was so different from her own experience of her internal state that she’s very confused”.
I empathise with the feeling of slipperyness in the OP, I feel comfortable attributing that to the subject matter rather than malice.
If I had an experience that matched zoe’s to the degree jessicata’s did (superficially or otherwise) I’d feel compelled to post it. I found it helpful in the question of whether “insular rationalist group gets weird and experiences rash of psychotic breaks” is a community problem, or just a problem with stray dude.
Scott’s comment does seem to verify the “insular rationalist group gets weird and experiences rash of psychotic breaks” trend, but it seems to be a different group than the one named in the original post.
One of the things that can feel like gaslighting in a community that attracts highly scrupulous people is when posting about your interpretation of your experience is treated as a contractual obligation to defend the claims and discuss any possible misinterpretations or consequences of what is a challenging thing to write in the first place.
I feel like here and in so many other comments in this discussion that there’s important and subtle distinctions that are being missed. I don’t have any intention to conditionlessly accept and support all accusations made (I have seen false accusations cause incredible harm and suicidality in people close to me). I do expect people who make serious claims about organizations to be careful about how they do it. I think Zoe’s Leverage post easily met my standard, but that this post here triggered a lot of warning flags for me, and I find it important to pay attention to those.
I think that the phrases “treated as a contractual obligation” and “any possible misinterpretations or consequences” are both hyperbole, if they are (as they seem) intended as fair summaries or descriptions of what Aella wrote above.
I think there’s a skipped step here, where you’re trying to say that what Aella wrote above might imply those things, or might result in those things, or might be tantamount to those things, but I think it’s quite important to not miss that step.
Before objecting to Aella’s [A] by saying “[B] is bad!” I think one should justify or at least explicitly assert [A—>B]
Yes, and to clarify I am not attempting to imply that there is something wrong with Aella’s comment. It’s more like this is a pattern I have observed and talked about with others. I don’t think people playing a part in a pattern that has some negative side effects should necessarily have a responsibility frame around that, especially given that one literally can’t track all various possible side effects of actions. I see epistemic statuses as partially attempting to give people more affordance for thinking about possible side effects of the multi context nature of online comms and that was used to good effect here, I likely would have had a more negative reaction to Aella’s post if it hadn’t included the epistemic status.
The community still seems in the middle of sensemaking around Leverage
Understanding how other parts of the community were similar/dissimilar to Leverage seems valuable from a sensemaking point of view.
Lots of parts the post sort of implicitly presents things as important, or asks you to draw conclusions without explicitly pointing out those conclusions.
I think you may be asking your reader to draw the conclusion that this is a dishonest way to write, without explicitly pointing out that conclusion :-) Personally, I see nothing wrong with presenting only observations.
First, I’m annoyed at the timing of this. The community still seems in the middle of sensemaking around Leverage, and figuring out what to do about it, and this post feels like it pulls the spotlight away.
Yeesh. I don’t think we should police victims’ timing. That seems really evil to me. We should be super skeptical of any attempts to tell people to shut up about their allegations, and “your timing is very insensitive to the real victims” really does not pass the smell test for me.
Some context, please. Imagine the following scenario:
Victim A: “I was hurt by X.”
Victim B: “I was hurt by Y.”
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, whether it happens the same day, the next day, or week later. Maybe victim B was encouraged by (reactions to) victim A’s message, maybe it was just a coincidence. Nothing wrong with that either.
Another scenario:
Victim A: “I was hurt by X.”
Victim B: “I was also hurt by X (in a different way, on another day etc.).”
This is a good thing to happen; more evidence, encouragement for further victims to come out.
But this post is different in a few important ways. First, Jessicata piggybacks on Zoe’s story a lot, insinuating analogies, but providing very little actual data. (If you rewrote the article to avoid referring to Zoe, it would be 10 times shorter.) Second, Jessicata repeatedly makes comparison between Zoe’s experience at Leverage and her experience at MIRI/CFAR, and usually concludes that Leverage was less bad (for reasons that are weird to me, such as because their abuse was legible, or because they provided space for people to talk about demons and exorcise them). Here are some quotes:
I want to disagree with a frame that says that the main thing that’s bad was that Leverage (or MIRI/CFAR) was a “cult”. This makes it seem like what happened at Leverage is much worse than what could happen at a normal company. But, having read Moral Mazes and talked to people with normal corporate experience (especially in management), I find that “normal” corporations are often quite harmful to the psychological health of their employees, e.g. causing them to have complex PTSD symptoms, to see the world in zero-sum terms more often, and to have more preferences for things to be incoherent.
Leverage was an especially legible organization, with a relatively clear interior/exterior distinction, while CFAR was less legible, having a set of events that different people were invited to, and many conversations including people not part of the organization. Hence, it is easier to attribute organizational responsibility at Leverage than around MIRI/CFAR.
Unless there were psychiatric institutionalizations or jail time resulting from the Leverage psychosis, I infer that Leverage overall handled their metaphysical weirdness better than the MIRI/CFAR adjacent community. While in Leverage the possibility of subtle psychological influence between people was discussed relatively openly, around MIRI/CFAR it was discussed covertly, with people being told they were crazy for believing it might be possible.
Leverage definitely had large problems with these discussions, and perhaps tried to reach more intersubjective agreement about them than was plausible (leading to over-reification, as Zoe points out), but they seem less severe than the problems resulting from refusing to have them, such as psychiatric hospitalization and jail time.
Despite the witch hunts and so on, the Leverage environment seems more supportive than what I had access to. The people at Leverage I talk to, who have had some of these unusual experiences, often have a highly exploratory attitude to the subtle mental realm, having gained access to a new cognitive domain through the experience, even if it was traumatizing.
An ex-Leverage person I know comments that “one of the things I give Geoff the most credit for is actually ending the group when he realized he had gotten in over his head. That still left people hurt and shocked, but did actually stop a lot of the compounding harm.” (While Geoff is still working on a project called “Leverage”, the initial “Leverage 1.0” ended with most of the people leaving.) This is to some degree happening with MIRI and CFAR, with a change in the narrative about the organizations and their plans, although the details are currently less legible than with Leverage.
I hope that those that think this is “not that bad” (perhaps due to knowing object-level specifics around MIRI/CFAR justifying these decisions) consider how they would find out whether the situation with Leverage was “not that bad”, in comparison, given the similarity of the phenomena observed in both cases; such an investigation may involve learning object-level specifics about what happened at Leverage. I hope that people don’t scapegoat; in an environment where certain actions are knowingly being taken by multiple parties, singling out certain parties has negative effects on people’s willingness to speak without actually producing any justice.
...uhm, does this sound a bit like a defense of Leverage, or at least saying “Zoe, your experience in Leverage was not as bad as my experience in MIRI/CFAR”? That is poor taste, especially when the debate about Zoe’s experience hasn’t finished yet.
Third, this comparison and downplaying is made even worse by the fact that many supposed analogies are not that much analogical:
Zoe had mental trauma after her experience in Leverage. Jessicata had mental trauma after her experience in MIRI/CFAR, and after she started experimenting with drugs, inspired by critics of MIRI/CFAR.
Zoe had to sign an NDA, covering lot of what was happening in Leverage, and now she worries about possible legal consequences of her talking about her abuse. Jessicata didn’t have to sign anything… but hey, she was once discouraged from writing a blog on AI timeline… which is just as bad, except much worse because MIRI/CFAR is less transparent about being evil. (Sorry, I am too sarcastic here, I find it difficult to say these things with a straight face.)
Zoe was convinced by Leverage that everything that happened to her was her own fault. Jessicata joined a group of MIRI/CFAR haters who believed that everything was evil but especially MIRI/CFAR, and then she ended up believing that she was evil… yeah, again, fair analogy! Leverage at least tells you openly that you are a loser, but the insidious MIRI/CFAR uses some super complicated plot, manipulating their haters to convince you about the same thing.
etc. (I am out of time, and also being sarcastic is against the norms of LW, so I better end here.)
In summary, it is the combination of: piggybacking on another victim’s story, making analogies that are not really analogies, and then downplaying the first victim’s experience… plus the timing right in the middle of debating the first victim’s experience… that makes it so bad.
I don’t think “don’t police victims’ timing” is an absolute rule; not policing the timing is a pretty good idea in most cases. I think this is an exception.
And if I wasn’t clear, I’ll explicitly state my position here: I think it’s good to pay close attention to negative effects communities have on its members, and I am very pro people talking about this, and if people feel hurt by an organization it seems really good to have this publicly discussed.
But I believe the above post did not simply do that. It also did other things, which is frame things I perceive in misleading ways, leave out key information relevant to a discussion (as per Eliezer’s comment here), and also rely very heavily directly on Zoe’s account at Leverage to bring validity to their own claims when I perceive Leverage as have been being both significantly worse and worse in a different category of way. If the above post hadn’t done these things, I don’t think I would have any issue with the timing.
I hope that other people, when considering whether to come forward with allegations, do not worry about timing or pulling the spotlight away from other victims. Even if they think their allegations might be stupid or low quality (which is in fact a very common fear among victims).
Strong downvote for choosing to entirely ignore the points/claims/arguments that Aella laid out, in favor of reiterating your frame with no new detail, as if that were a rebuttal.
Seems like a cheap rhetorical trick designed to say “I’m on the side of the good, and if you disagree with me, well …”
(Or, more precisely, I predict that if we polled one hundred humans on their takeaway from reading the thread, more than sixty of them would tick “yes” next to “to the best of your ability to judge, was this person being snide/passive-aggressive/trying to imply that Aella doesn’t largely agree?” Which seems pretty lacking in reasonable good faith, coming on the heels of her explicitly stating that not policing timing is a pretty good idea in most cases.)
I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here—call on Zoe as an authority to disapprove of me? Would it update you at all if the answer was what you doubted?
I am making an obvious point that how we treat people who make allegations in one case will affect people’s comfort in another case.
I am not sure what I would conclude if in fact Zoe was glad that Jessica was recieving a negative response, but it would be surprising and interesting, and counter-evidence towards ^
I find something in me really revolts at this post, so epistemic status… not-fully-thought-through-emotions-are-in-charge?
Full disclosure: I am good friends with Zoe; I lived with her for the four months leading up to her post, and was present to witness a lot of her processing and pain. I’m also currently dating someone named in this post, but my reaction to this was formed before talking with him.
First, I’m annoyed at the timing of this. The community still seems in the middle of sensemaking around Leverage, and figuring out what to do about it, and this post feels like it pulls the spotlight away. If the points in the post felt more compelling, then I’d probably be more down for an argument of “we should bin these together and look at this as a whole”, but as it stands the stuff listed in here feels like it’s describing something significantly less damaging, and of a different kind of damage. I’m also annoyed that this post relies so heavily on Zoe’s, and the comparison feels like it cheapens what Zoe went through. I keep having a recurring thought that the author must have utterly failed to understand the intensity of the very direct impact from Leverage’s operations on Zoe. Most of my emotions here come from a perception that this post is actively hurting a thing I value.
Second, I suspect this post makes a crucial mistake in mistaking symptoms for the cause. Or, rather, I think there’s a core inside of what made Leverage damaging, and it’s really really hard to name it. Zoe’s post seemed like a good effort to triangulate it, but this above post feels like it focuses on the wrong things, or a different brand of analogous things, without understanding the core of what Zoe was trying to get at. Missing the core of the post is an easy mistake to make, given how it’s really hard to name directly, but in this case I’m particularly sensitive to the analogy seeming superficial, given how much this post seems to be relying on Zoe’s post for validation.
One example for this is comparing Zoe’s mention of someone at Leverage having a psychotic break to the author having a psychotic break. But Zoe’s point was that Leverage treated the psychotic break as an achievement, not that the psychotic break happened.
Third, and I think this has been touched on by other comments, is that this post feels… sort of dishonest to me? I feel like something is trying to get slipped into my brain without me noticing. Lots of parts the post sort of implicitly presents things as important, or asks you to draw conclusions without explicitly pointing out those conclusions. I might be… overfitting or tryin to see a thing because I’m emotionally charged, but I’m gonna attempt to articulate the thing anyway:
For example, the author summarizes Zoe as saying that Leverage considered Geoff Anders to be extremely special, e.g. Geoff being possibly a better philosopher than Kant.
In Zoe’s post, her actual quote is of a Leverage person saying “I think there’s good reason to believe Geoff is the best philosopher who’s ever lived, better than Kant. I think his existence on earth right now is an historical event.”
This is small but an actually important difference, and has the effect of slightly downplaying Leverage.
The author here then goes on to say that she doesn’t remember anyone saying Eliezer was a better philosopher than Kant, but that she guesses people would say this, and then points out probably nobody at MIRI read Kant.
The effect of this is it asks the reader to associate perception of Eliezer’s status with Geoff’s (both elevated) by drawing the comparison of Kant to Eliezer (that hadn’t actually been drawn before), and then implies rationalists being misinformed (not reading Kant).
This is arguably a really uncharitable read, and I’m not very convinced it’s ‘true’, but I think the ‘effect’ is true; as in, this is the impression I got when reading quickly the first time. And the impression isn’t supported in the rest of the words, of course—the author says they don’t have reason to believe MIRI people would view Eliezer as more relevant than philosophers they respected, and that nobody there really respected Kant. But the general sense I get from the overall post is this type of pattern, repeated over and over—a sensation of being asked to believe something terrible, and then when I squint the words themselves are quite reasonable. This makes it feel slippery to me, or I feel like I’ve been struck from behind and when I turn around there’s someone smiling as they’re reaching out to shake my hand.
And to be clear, I don’t think all the comparisons are wrong, or that there’s nothing of value here. It can be super hard to sensemake with confusing narrative stuff, and there’s inevitably going to be some clumsiness in attempting to do it. I think it’s worthwhile and important to be paying close attention to the ways organizations might be having adverse effects on their members, particularly in our type of communities, and I support pointing out even small things and don’t want people to feel like they’re making too big a deal out of something not. But the way this deal is made bothers me, and I feel defensive and have stories in me about this doing more harm than good.
I want to note that this post (top-level) now has more than 3x the number of comments that Zoe’s does (or nearly 50% more comments than the Zoe+BayAreaHuman posts combined, if you think that’s a more fair comparison), and that no one has commented on Zoe’s post in 24 hours. [ETA: This changed while I was writing this comment. The point about lowered activity still stands.]
This seems really bad to me — I think that there was a lot more that needed to be figured out wrt Leverage, and this post has successfully sucked all the attention away from a conversation that I perceive to be much more important.
I keep deleting sentences because I don’t think it’s productive to discuss how upset this makes me, but I am 100% with Aella here. I was wary of this post to begin with and I feel something akin to anger at what it did to the Leverage conversation.
I had some contact with Leverage 1.0 — had some friends there, interviewed for an ops job there, and was charted a few times by a few different people. I have also worked for both CFAR and MIRI, though never as a core staff member at either organization; and more importantly, I was close friends with maybe 50% of the people who worked at CFAR from mid-2017 to mid-2020. Someone very close to me previously worked for both CFAR and Leverage. With all that backing me up: I am really very confident that the psychological harm inflicted by Leverage was both more widespread and qualitatively different than anything that happened at CFAR or MIRI (at least since mid-2017; I don’t know what things might have been like back in, like, 2012).
The comments section of this post is full of CFAR and MIRI employees attempting to do collaborative truth-seeking. The only comments made by Leverage employees in comparable threads were attempts at reputation management. That alone tells you a lot!
CFAR and MIRI have their flaws, and several people clearly have legitimate grievances with them. I personally did not have a super great experience working for either organization (though that has nothing to do with anything Jessica mentioned in this post; just run-of-the-mill workplace stuff). Those flaws are worth looking at, not only for the edification of the people who had bad experiences with MIRI and CFAR, but also because we care about being good people building effective organizations to make the world a better place. They do not, however, belong in a conversation about the harm done by Leverage.
(Just writing a sentence saying that Leverage was harmful makes me feel uncomfortable, feels a little dangerous, but fuck it, what are they going to do, murder me?)
Again, I keep deleting sentences, because all I want to talk about is the depth of my agreement with Aella, and my uncharitable feelings towards this post. So I guess I’ll just end here.
It seems like it’s relatively easy for people to share information in the CFAR+MIRI conversation. On the other hand, for those people who have actually the most central information to share in the Leverage conversation it’s not as easy to share them.
In many cases I would expect that private in person conversation are needed to progress the Leverage debate and that just takes time. Those people at leverage who want to write up their own experience likely benefit from time to do that.
Practically, helping Anna get an overview over timeline of members and funders and getting people to share stories with Aella seems to be the way going forward that’s largely not about leaving LW comments.
I agree with the intent of your comment mingyuan, but perhaps the reason for the asymmetry in activity on this post is simply due to the fact that there are an order of magnitude (or several orders of magnitude?) more people with some/any experience and interaction with CFAR/MIRI (especially CFAR) compared to Leverage?
I think some of it has got to be that it’s somehow easier to talk about CFAR/MIRI, rather than a sheer number of people thing. I think Leverage is somehow unusually hard to talk about, such that maybe we should figure out how to be extraordinarily kind/compassionate/gentle to anyone attempting it, or something.
I agree that Leverage has been unusually hard to talk about bluntly or honestly, and I think this has been true for most of its existence.
I also think the people at the periphery of Leverage, are starting to absorb the fact that they systematically had things hidden from them. That may be giving them new pause, before engaging with Leverage as a topic.
(I think that seems potentially fair, and considerate. To me, it doesn’t feel like the same concern applies in engaging about CFAR. I also agree that there were probably fewer total people exposed to Leverage, at all.)
...actually, let me give you a personal taste of what we’re dealing with?
The last time I choose to talk straightforwardly and honestly about Leverage, with somebody outside of it? I had to hard-override an explicit but non-legal privacy agreement*, to get a sanity check. When I was honest about having done so shortly thereafter, I completely and permanently lost one of my friendships as a result.
Lost-friend says they were traumatized as a result of me doing this. That having “made the mistake of trusting me” hurt their relationships with other Leveragers. That at the time, they wished they’d lied to me, which stung.
I talked with the person I used as a sanity-check recently, and I get the sense that I still only managed to squeeze out ~3-5 sentences of detail at the time.
(I get the sense that I still did manage to convey a pretty balanced account of what was going through my head at the time. Somehow.)
It is probably safer to talk now, than it was then. At least, that’s my current view. 2 year’s distance, community support, a community that is willing to be more sympathetic to people who get swept up in movements, and a taste of what other people were going through (and that you weren’t the only person going through this), does tend to help matters.
(Edit: They’ve also shared the Ecosystem Dissolution Information Arrangement, which I find a heartening move. They mention that it was intended to be more socially-enforced than legally-binding. I don’t like all of their framing around it, but I’ll pick that fight later.)
It wouldn’t surprise me at all, if most of this gets sorted out privately for now. Depending a bit on how this ends—largely on whether I think this kind of harm is likely to recur or not—I might not even have an objection to that.
But when it comes to Leverage? These are some of the kinds of thoughts and feelings, that I worry we may later see played a role in keeping this quiet.
I’m finally out about my story here! But I think I want to explain a bit of why I wasn’t being very clear, for a while.
I’ve been “hinting darkly” in public rather than “telling my full story” due to a couple of concerns:
I don’t want to “throw ex-friend under the bus,” to use their own words! Even friend’s Leverager partner (who they weren’t allowed to visit, if they were “infected with objects”) seemed more “swept-up in the stupidity” than “malicious.” I don’t know how to tell my truth, without them feeling drowned out. I do still care about that. Eurgh.
Via models that come out of my experience with Brent: I think this level of silence, makes the most sense if some ex-Leveragers did get a substantial amount of good out of the experience (sometimes with none of the bad, sometimes alongside it), and/or if there’s a lot of regrettable actions taken by people who were swept up in this at the time, by people who would ordinarily be harmless under normal circumstances. I recognize that bodywork was very helpful to my friend, in working through some of their (unrelated) trauma. I am more than a little reluctant to put people through the sort of mob-driven invalidation I felt, in the face of the early intensely-negative community response to the Brent expose?
Surprisingly irrelevant for me: I am personally not very afraid of Geoff! Back when I was still a nobody, I brute-forced my way out of an agonizing amount of social-anxiety through sheer persistence. My social supports range both wide and deep. I have pretty strong honesty policies. I am not currently employed, so even attacking my workplace is a no-go. I’m planning to marry someone cool this January. Truth be told? I pity any fool who tries to character-assassinate me.
...but I know that others are scared of Geoff. I have heard the phrase “Geoff will do anything to win” bandied about so often, that I view it as something of a stereotyped phrase among Leveragers. I am honestly not sure how concerned I actually should be about it! But it feels like evidence of a narrative that I find pretty concerning, although I don’t know how this narrative emerged.
Any thoughts on why this was coming about in the culture?
If anyone feels that way (like the lost friend) and wants to talk to me about it, I’d be interested in learning more about it.
* I could tell that this had some concerning toxic elements, and I needed an outside sanity-check. I think under the circumstances, this was the correct call for me. I do not regret picking the particular person I chose as a sanity-check. I am also very sympathetic to other people not feeling able to pull this, given the enormous cost to doing it at the time.
This is not a strong systematic assessment of how I usually treat privacy agreements. My harm-assessment process is usually structured a bit like this, with some additional pressure from an “agreement-to-secrecy,” and also factors in the meta-secrecy-agreements around “being able to be held to secrecy agreements” and “being honest about how well you can be held to secrecy agreements.”
No, I don’t feel like having a long discussion about privacy policies right now. But if you care? My thoughts on information-sharing policy were valuable enough to get me into the 2019 Review.
If you start on this here, I will ignore you.
The fact that the people involved apparently find it uniquely difficult to talk about is a pretty good indication that Leverage != CFAR/MIRI in terms of cultishness/harms etc.
Yes; I want to acknowledge that there was a large cost here. (I wasn’t sure, from just the comment threads; but I just talked to a couple people who said they’d been thinking of writing up some observations about Leverage but had been distracted by this.)
I am personally really grateful for a bunch of the stuff in this post and its comment thread. But I hope the Leverage discussion really does get returned to, and I’ll try to lend some momentum that way. Hope some others do too, insofar as some can find ways to actually help people put things together or talk.
Seems to me that, given the current situation, it would probably be good to wait maybe two more days until this debate naturally reaches the end. And then restart the debate about Leverage.
Otherwise, we risk having two debates running in parallel, interfering with each other.
Then it is good that this debate happened. (Despite my shock when I saw it first.) It’s just the timing with regards to the debate about Leverage that is unfortunate.
When everyone knows everyone else it’s more like Facebook than say Reddit. I don’t know why so many real life organizations are basing their discussions on these open forums online. Maybe they want to attract more people to think about certain problems. Maybe they want to spread their jeans. Either way, normal academic research don’t involving knocking on people’s doors and ask them if they are interested in doing such and such research. To a less extreme degree, they don’t even ask their family and friends to join their research circle. When you befriend your coworkers in the corporate world, things can get real messy real quick, depending on to what extent they are involved/interfering with your life outside of work. Maybe that’s why they are distinguishing themselves from your typical workplace.
MIRI and CFAR are non-profits, they need to approach fundraising and talent-seeking differently than universities or for-profit corporations.
In addition, neither of them is pure research institution. MIRI’s mission includes making people who work on AI, or make important decisions about AI, aware of the risks involved. CFAR’s mission includes teaching of rationality techniques. Both of them require communication with public.
This doesn’t explain all the differences, but at least some of them.
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.
Uhh. Sadly, this attitude is quite common, so I will try to explain. Some people are in general more gullible or easier to impress, yes. But that is just a part of equation. The remaining parts are:
everyone is more vulnerable to manipulation that is compatible with their already existing opinions and desires;
people are differently vulnerable at different moment of their lives, so it’s a question of luck whether you encounter the manipulation at your strongest or weakest moment;
the environment can increase or decrease your resistance: how much free time you have, how many people make a coordinated effort to convince you, whether you have enough opportunity to meet other people or stay alone and reflect on what is happening, whether something keeps you worried and exhausted, etc.
So, some people might easily believe in Mother Gaia, but never in Artificial Intelligence, for other people it is the other way round. You can manipulate some people by appealing to their selfish desires, other people by appealing to their feelings of compassion.
Many people are just lucky that they never met a manipulative group targetting specifically their weaknesses, exactly at a vulnerable moment of their lives. It is easy to laugh at people whose weaknesses are different from yours, when they fail in a situation that exploits their weaknesses.
By way of narrowing down this sense, which I think I share, if it’s the same sense: leaving out the information from Scott’s comment about a MIRI-opposed person who is advocating psychedelic use and causing psychotic breaks in people, and particularly this person talks about MIRI’s attempts to have any internal info compartments as a terrible dark symptom of greater social control that you need to jailbreak away from using psychedelics, and then those people have psychotic breaks—leaving out this info seems to be not something you’d do in a neutrally intended post written from a place of grave concern about community dynamics. It’s taking the Leverage affair and trying to use it to make a point, and only including the info that would make that point, and leaving out info that would distract from that point. And I’m not going to posture like that’s terribly bad inhuman behavior, but we can see it and it’s okay to admit to ourselves that we see it.
And it’s also okay for somebody to think that the original Leverage affair needed to be discussed on its own terms, and not be carefully reframed in exactly the right way to make a point about a higher-profile group the author wanted to discuss instead; or to think that Leverage did a clearly bad thing, and we need to have norms against that clearly bad thing and finish up on making those norms before it’s proper for anyone to reframe the issue as really being about a less clear bad thing somewhere higher-profile; and then this post is going against that and it’s okay for them to be unhappy about that part.
These have the tone of allusions to some sort of accusation, but as far as I can tell you’re not actually accusing Jessica of any transgression here, just saying that her post was not “neutrally intended,” which—what would that mean? A post where Gricean implicature was not relevant?
Can you clarify whether you meant to suggest Jessica was doing some specific harmful thing here or whether this tone is unendorsed?
Okay, sure. If what Scott says is true, and it matches my recollections of things I heard earlier—though I can attest to very little of it of my direct observation—then it seems like this post was written with knowledge of things that would make the overall story arc it showed, look very different, and those things were deliberately omitted. This is more manipulation than I myself would personally consider okay to use in a situation like this one, though I am ever mindful of Automatic Norms and the privilege of being more verbally facile than others in which facts I can include but still make my own points.
See Zack’s reply here and mine here. Overall I didn’t think the amount of responsibility was high enough for this to be worth mentioning.
I want to second this reaction (basically your entire second paragraph). I have been feeling the same but hadn’t worked up the courage to say it.
I am also mad at what I see to be piggybacking on Zoe’s post, downplaying of the harms described in her post, and a subtle redirection of collective attention away from potentially new, timid accounts of things that happened to a specific group of people within Leverage and seem to have a lot of difficulty talking about it.
I hope that the sustained collective attention required to witness, make sense of and address the accounts of harm coming out of the psychology division of Leverage doesn’t get lost as a result of this post being published when it was.
For a moment I actually wondered whether this was a genius-level move by Leverage, but then I decided that I am just being paranoid. But it did derail the previous debate successfully.
On the positive side, I learned some new things. Never heard about Ziz before, for example.
EDIT:
Okay, this is probably silly, but… there is no connection between the Vassarites and Leverage, right? I just realized that my level of ignorance does not justify me dismissing a hypothesis so quickly. And of course, everyone knows everyone, but there are different levels of “knowing people”, and… you know what I mean, hopefully. I will defer to judgment of people from Bay Area about this topic.
Outside of “these people probably talked to each other like once every few months” I think there is no major connection between Leverage and the Vassarites that I am aware of.
Thanks.
I mostly assumed this; I suppose in the opposite case someone probably would have already mentioned that. But I prefer to have it confirmed explicitly.
+2.
I’m assuming that sensemaking is easier, rather than harder, with more relevant information and stories shared. I guess if it’s pulling the spotlight away, it’s partially because it’s showing relevant facts about things other than Leverage, and partially because people will be more afraid of scapegoating Leverage if the similarities to MIRI/CFAR are obvious. I don’t like scapegoating, so I don’t really care if it’s pulling the spotlight away for the second reason.
I don’t really understand what Zoe went through, just reading her post (although I have talked with other ex-Leverage people about the events). You don’t understand what I went through, either. It was really, really psychologically disturbing. I sound paranoid writing what I wrote, but this paranoia affected so many people. What I thought was a discourse community broke down into low-trust behavior and gaslighting and I feared violence. Someone outside the central Berkeley community just messaged me saying it’s really understandable that I’d fear retribution given how important the relevant people thought the project was, it was a real risk.
I’m really interested in the core being described better in the Leverage case. It would be unlikely that large parts of such a core wouldn’t apply to other cases even if not to MIRI/CFAR specifically. I know I haven’t done the best job I could have nailing down what was fucky about the MIRI/CFAR environment at 2017, but I’ve tried harder to (in the online space) more than anyone but Ziz, AFAICT.
I agree, will edit the post accordingly. I do think the fact that people were saying we wouldn’t have a chance to save the world without Eliezer shows that they consider him extremely historically special.
Sorry, it’s possible that I’m writing not nearly as clearly as I could, and the stress of what happened might contribute some to that. But it’s hard for me to identify how I’m communicating unclearly from your or Logan’s description, which are both pretty vague.
I appreciate that you’re communicating about your defensiveness and not just being defensive without signalling that.
It would have probably better if you would have focused on your experience and drop all of the talk about Zoe from this post. That would make it easier for the reader to just take the information value from your experience.
I think that your post is still valuable information but that added narrative layer makes it harder to interact with then it would have been if it would have been focused more on your experience.
From the quotes in Scott’s comment, it seems to me also the case that Michael Vassar also treated Jessica’s and Ziz’s psychoses as an achievement.
Objection: hearsay. How would Scott know this? (I wrote a separate reply about the ways in which I think Scott’s comment is being unfair.) As some closer-to-the-source counterevidence against the “treating as an achievement” charge, I quote a 9 October 2017 2:13 p.m. Signal message in which Michael wrote to me:
(Also, just, whatever you think of Michael’s many faults, very few people are cartoon villains that want their friends to have mental breakdowns.)
Thanks for the counter-evidence.
If we’re trying to solve problems rather than attack the bad people, then the boundaries of the discussion should be determined by the scope of the problem, not by which people we’re saying are bad. If you’re trying to attack the bad people without standards or a theory of what’s going on, that’s just mob violence.
I… think I am trying to attack the bad people? I’m definitely conflict-oriented around Leverage; I believe that on some important level treating that organization or certain people in it as good-intentioned-but-misguided is a mistake, and a dangerous one. I don’t think this is true for MIRI/CFAR; as is summed up pretty well in the last section of Orthonormal’s post here. I’m down for the boundaries of the discussion being determined by the scope of the problem, but I perceive the original post here to be outside the scope of the problem.
I’m also not sure how to engage with your last sentence. I do have theories for what is going on (but regardless I’m not sure if you give a mob a theory that makes it not a mob).
This is explicitly opposed to Zoe’s stated intentions.
Other people, including me and Jessica, also want to reveal and discuss bad behavior, but don’t consent to violence in the name of our grievances.
Agnes Callard’s article is relevant here: I Don’t Want You to ‘Believe’ Me. I Want You to Listen.
We want to reveal problems so that people can try to understand and solve those problems. Transforming an attempt to discussion of abuse into a scapegoating movement silences victims, preventing others from trying to interpret and independently evaluate the content of what they are saying, simplifying it to a bid to make someone the enemy.
Historically, the idea that instead of trying to figure out which behaviors are bad and police them, we need to try to quickly attack the bad people, is how we get Holocausts and Stalinist purges. In this case I don’t see any upside.
I perceive you as doing a conversational thing here that I don’t like, where you like… imply things about my position without explicitly stating them? Or talk from a heavy frame that isn’t explicit?
Which stated intentions? Where she asks people ‘not to bother those who were there’? What thing do you think I want to do that Zoe doesn’t want me to do?
Are you claiming I am advocating violence? Or simply implying it?
Are you trying to argue that I shouldn’t be conflict oriented because Zoe doesn’t want me to be? The last part feels a little weird for someone to tell me, as I’m good friends with Zoe and have talked with her extensively about this.
I support revealing problems so people can understand and solve them. I also don’t like whatever is happening in this original article due to reasons you haven’t engaged with.
You’re saying transforming an attempt to discuss abuse into scapegoating silences victims, keeps other ppl from evaluating the content, and simplifies it a bid to make someone the enemy. But in the comment you were responding to, I was talking about Leverage, not the author of this post. I view Leverage and co. as bad actors, but you sort of… reframe it to make it sound like I’m using a conflict mindset towards Jessica?
You’re also not engaging with the points I made, and you’re responding to arguments I don’t condone.
I don’t really view you as engaging in good faith at this point, so I’m precommitting not to respond to you after this.
Flagging that… I somehow want to simultaneously upvote and downvote Benquo’s comment here.
Upvote because I think he’s standing for good things. (I’m pretty anti-scapegoating, especially of the ‘quickly’ kind that I think he’s concerned about.)
Downvote because it seems weirdly in the wrong context, like he’s trying to punch at some kind of invisible enemy. His response seems incongruous with Aella’s actual deal.
I have some probability on miscommunication / misunderstanding.
But also … why ? are you ? why are your statements so ‘contracting’ ? Like they seem ‘narrowizing’ of the discussion in a way that seems like it philosophically tenses with your stated desire for ‘revealing problems’. And they also seem weirdly ‘escalate-y’ like somehow I’m more tense in my body as I read your comments, like there’s about to be a fight? Not that I sense any anger in you, but I sense a ‘standing your ground’ move that seems like it could lead to someone trying to punch you because you aren’t budging.
This is all metaphorical language for what I feel like your communication style is doing here.
Thanks for separating evaluation of content from evaluation of form. That makes it easy for me to respond to your criticism of my form without worrying so much that it’s a move to suppress imperfectly expressed criticism.
The true causal answer is that when I perceive someone as appealing to a moralistic framework, I have a tendency to criticize their perspective from inside a moralistic frame, even though I don’t independently endorse moralizing. While this probably isn’t the best thing I could do if I were perfectly poised, I don’t think this is totally pointless either. Attempts to scapegoat someone via moralizing rely on the impression that symmetric moral reasoning is being done, so they can be disrupted by insistent opposition from inside that frame.
You might think of it as standing in territory I think someone else has unjustly claimed, and drawing attention to that fact. One might get punched sometimes in such circumstances, but that’s not so terrible; definitely not as bad as being controlled by fear, and it helps establish where recourse/justice is available and where it isn’t, which is important information to have! Occasionally bright young people with a moral compass get in touch with me because they can see that I’m conspicuously behaving in a not-ethically-backwards way in proximity to something interesting but sketchy that they were considering getting involved with. Having clear examples to point to is helpful, and confrontation produces clear examples.
A contributing factor is that I (and I think Jessica too) felt time pressure here because it seems to me like there is an attempt to build social momentum against a specific target, which transforms complaints from complementary contributions to a shared map, into competing calls for action. I was seriously worried that if I didn’t interrupt that process, some important discourse opportunities would be permanently destroyed. I endorse that concern.
o
hmmm, well i gotta chew on that more but
Aella seems like a counter-productive person to stand your ground against. I sense her as mainly being an ‘advocate’ for Zoe. She claims wanting to attack the bad people, but compared with other commenters, I sense less ‘mob violence’ energy from her and … maybe more fear that an important issue will be dropped / ignored. (I am not particularly afraid of this; the evidence against Leverage is striking and damning enough that it doesn’t seem like it will readily be dropped, even if the internet stops talking about it. In fact I hope to see the internet talking about it a bit less, as more real convos happen in private.)
I’m a bit worried about the way Scott’s original take may have pulled us towards a shared map too quickly. There’s also a general anti-jessicata vibe I’m getting from ‘the room’ but it’s non-specific and has a lot to do with karma vote patterns. Naming these here for the sake of group awareness and to note I am with you in spirit, not an attempt to add more politics or fighting.
Hmmmm I feel like advocating for a slightly different mental stance. Instead of taking it upon yourself to interrupt a process in order to gain a particular outcome, what if you did a thing in a way that inspires people to follow because you’re being a good role model? If you’re standing for what’s right, it can inspire people into also doing the right thing. And if no one follows you, you accept that as the outcome; rather than trying to ‘make sure’ something happens?
Attachment to an outcome (like urgently trying to avoid ‘opportunities being permanently destroyed’) seems like it subtly disempowers people and perpetuates more of the pattern that I think we both want less of in the world? Checking to see where a disagreement might be found…
I think it seems hard to find a disagreement because we don’t disagree about much here.
Aella was being basically cooperative in revealing some details about her motives, as was Logan. But that behavior is only effectively cooperative if people can use that information to build shared maps. I tried to do that in my replies, albeit imperfectly & in a way that picked a bit more of a fight than I ideally would have.
At leisure, I do this. I’m working on a blog post trying to explain some of the structural factors that cause orgs like Leverage to go wrong in the way Zoe described. I’ve written extensively about both scapegoating and mind control outside the context of particular local conflicts, and when people seem like they’re in a helpable state of confusion I try to help them. I spent half an hour today using a massage gun on my belly muscles, which improved my reading comprehension of your comment and let me respond to it more intelligently.
But I’m in an adversarial situation. There are optimizing processes trying to destroy what I’m trying to build, trying to threaten people into abandoning their perspectives and capitulating to violence.
It seems like you’re recommending that I build new capacities instead of defending old ones. If I’m deciding between those, I shouldn’t always get either answer. Instead, for any process damaging me, I should compare these two quantities:
(A) The cost of replacement—how much would it cost me to repair the damage or build an equivalent amount of capacity elsewhere?
(B) The cost of preventing the damage.
I should work on prevention when B<A, and building when A>B.
Since I expect my adversaries to make use of resources they seize to destroy more of what I care about, I need to count that towards the total expected damage caused (and therefore the cost of replacement).
If I’d been able to costlessly pause the world for several hours to relax and think about the problem, I would almost certainly have been able to write a better reply to Aella, one that would score better on the metric you’re proposing, while perhaps still accomplishing my “defense” goals.
I’m taking Tai Chi lessons in large part because I think ability to respond to fights without getting triggered is a core bottleneck for me, so I’m putting many hours of my time into being able to perform better on that metric. But I’m not better yet, and I’ve got to respond to the situations I’m in now with the abilities I’ve got now.
Well I feel somewhat more relaxed now, seeing that you’re engaging in a pretty open and upfront manner. I like Tai Chi :)
The main disagreement I see is that you are thinking strategically and in a results-oriented fashion about actions you should take; you’re thinking about things in terms of resource management and cost-benefit analysis. I do not advocate for that. Although I get that my position is maybe weird?
I claim that kind of thinking turns a lot of situations into finite games. Which I believe then contributes to life-ending / world-ending patterns.
…
But maybe a more salient thing: I don’t think this situation is quite as adversarial as you’re maybe making it out to be? Or like, you seem to be adding a lot to an adversarial atmosphere, which might be doing a fair amount of driving towards more adversarial dynamics in the group in general.
I think you and I are not far apart in terms of values, and so … I kind of want to help you? But also … if you’re attached to certain outcomes being guaranteed, that’s gonna make it hard…
I don’t understand where guarantees came into this. I don’t understand how I could answer a question of the form “why did you do X rather than Y” without making some kind of comparison of the likely outcomes of X and Y.
I do know that in many cases people falsely claim to be comparing costs and benefits honestly, or falsely claim that some resource is scarce, as part of a strategy of coercion. I have no reason to do this to myself but I see many people doing it and maybe that’s part of what turned you off from the idea.
On the other hand, there’s a common political strategy where a dominant coalition establishes a narrative that something should be provided universally without rationing, or that something should be absolutely prevented without acknowledging taboo tradeoffs. Since this policy can’t be implemented as stated, it empowers people in the position to decide which exceptions to make, and benefits the kinds of people who can get exceptions made, at the expense of less centrally connected people.
It seems to me like thinking about tradeoffs is the low-conflict alternative to insisting on guaranteed outcomes.
Generalizing from your objection to thinking about things in terms of resource management and cost-benefit analysis and your reaction to Eli’s summary of Michael and Spencer’s podcast, it seems like you’re experiencing a strong aversion (though not an infinitely strong one, since you said you might try listening to the podcast) to assimilating information about conflict or resource constraints, which will make it hard for you to understand behaviors determined by conflicts or resource constraints, which is a LOT of behavior.*
If you can point out specific mistakes I’m making, or at least try to narrow down your sense that I’m falsely assuming adversariality, we can try to discuss it.
But not all. Sexual selection seems like a third thing, though it might only common because it helps evolution find solutions to the other two—it would be surprising to see a lot of sexual selection across many species on a mature planet if it didn’t pay rent somehow.
Uhhh sorry, the thing about ‘guarantees’ was probably a mis-speak.
For reference, I used to be a competitive gamer. This meant I used to use resource management and cost-benefit analysis a lot in my thinking. I also ported those framings into broader life, including how to win social games. I am comfortable thinking in terms of resource constraints, and lived many years of my life in that mode. (I was very skilled at games like MTG, board games, and Werewolf/Mafia.)
I have since updated to realize how that way of thinking was flawed and dissociated from reality.
I wrote a whole response to this part, but … maybe I’m missing you.
Thinking strategically seems fine to the extent that one is aligned with love / ethics / integrity and not acting out of fear, hate, or selfishness. The way you put your predicament caused me to feel like you were endorsing a fear-aligned POV.
The thing I should have said… was not about the strategy subplot, sorry, … rather, I have an objection to the seeming endorsement of acting from a fear-aligned place. Maybe I was acting out of fear myself… and failed to name the true objection.
…
Those above quotes are the strongest evidence I have that you’re assuming adversarial-ness in the situation, and I do not currently know why you believe those quoted statements. Like the phrase about ‘adversaries’ sounds like you’re talking about theoretical ghosts to me. But maybe you have real people in mind.
I’m curious if you want to elaborate.
I’m talking about optimizing processes coordinating with copies of themselves, distributed over many people. My blog post Civil Law and Political Drama is a technically precise description of this, though Towards optimal play as Villager in a mixed game adds some color that might be helpful. I don’t think my interests are opposed to the autonomous agency of almost anyone. I do think that some common trigger/trauma behavior patterns are coordinating against autonomous human agency.
The gaming detail helps me understand where you’re coming from here. I don’t think the right way to manage my resource constraints looks very much like playing a game of MtG. I am in a much higher-dimensional environment where most of my time should be spent playing/exploring, or resolving tension patterns that impede me from playing/exploring. My endorsed behavior pattern looks a little more like the process of becoming a good MtG player, or discovering that MtG is the sort of thing I want to get good at. (Though empirically that’s not a game it made sense to me to invest in becoming good at—I chose Tai Chi instead for reasons!)
I endorse using the capacities I already have, even when those capacities are imperfect.
When responding to social conflict, it would almost always be more efficient and effective for me to try to clarify things out of a sense of open opportunity, than from a fear-based motive. This can be true even when a proper decision-theoretic model the situation would describe it as an adversarial one with time pressure; I might still protect my interests better by thinking in a free and relaxed way about the problem, than tensing up like a monkey facing a physical threat.
But a relaxed attitude is not always immediately available to me, and I don’t think I want to endorse always taking the time to detrigger before responding to something in the social domain.
Part of loving and accepting human beings as they are, without giving up on intention to make things better, is appreciating and working with the benefits people produce out of mixed motives. There’s probably some irrational fear-based motivation in Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’s work ethic, and maybe they’d have found more efficient and effective ways to help the world if their mental health were better, but I’m really, really glad I get to use Amazon, and that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink exist, and it’s not clear to me that I’d want to advise younger versions of them to spend a lot of time working on themselves first. That seems like making purity the enemy of the good.
Question about balance: how do you not end up reifying these in your mind, creating a paranoid sense of ‘there be ghosts lurking in shadows’ ?
This question seems central to me because the poison I detect in Vassar-esque-speak is
a) Memetically more contagious stories seem to include lurking ghosts / demons / shadows because adding a sense of danger or creating paranoia is sticky and salient. Vassar seems to like inserting a sense of ‘hidden danger’ or ‘large demonic forces’ into his theories and way of speaking about things. I’m worried this is done for memetic intrigue, viability, and stickiness, not necessarily because it’s more true. It makes people want to listen to him for long periods of time, but I don’t sense it being an openly curious kind of listening but a more addicted / hungry type of listening. (I can detect this in myself.)
I guess I’m claiming Vassar has an imbalance between the wisdom/truth of his words and the power/memetic viability of his words. With too much on the side of power.
b) Reifying these “optimizing processes coordinating” together, maybe “against autonomous human agency” or whatever… seems toxic and harmful for a human mind that takes these very seriously. Unless it comes with ample antidote in the form of (in my world anyway) a deep spiritual compassion / faith and a wisdom-oriented understanding of everyone’s true nature, among other things in this vein. But I don’t detect Vassar is offering this antidote, so it just feels like poison to me. One might call this poison a deep cynicism, lack of faith / trust, a flavor of nihilism, or “giving into the dark side.”
I do believe Vassar might, in an important sense, have a lot of faith in humanity… but nonetheless, his way of expressing gives off a big stench of everything being somehow tainted and bad. And the faith is not immediately detectable from listening to him, nor do I sense his love.
I kind of suspect that there’s some kind of (adversarial) optimization process operating through his expression, and he seems to have submitted to this willingly? And I am curious about what’s up with that / whether I’m wrong about this.
Mostly just by trying to think about this stuff carefully, and check whether my responses to it add up & seem constructive. I seem to have been brought up somehow with a deep implicit faith that any internal problem I have, I can solve by thinking about—i.e. that I don’t have any internal infohazards. So, once I consciously notice the opportunity, it feels safe to be curious about my own fear, aggression, etc. It seems like many other people don’t have this faith, which would make it harder for them to solve this class of problem; they seem to think that knowing about conflicts they’re engaged in would get them hurt by making them blameworthy; that looking the thing in the face would mark them for destruction.
My impression is that insofar as I’m paranoid, this is part of the adversarial process I described, which seems to believe in something like ontologically fundamental threats that can’t be reduced to specific mechanisms by which I might be harmed, and have to be submitted to absolutely. This model doesn’t stand up to a serious examination, so examining it honestly tends to dissolve it.
I’ve found psychedelics helpful here. Psilocybin seems to increase the conscious salience of fear responses, which allows me to analyze them. In one of my most productive shrooms trips, I noticed that I was spending most of my time pretending to be a reasonable person, under the impression that an abstract dominator wouldn’t allow me to connect with other people unless I passed as a simulacrum of a rational agent. I noticed that it didn’t feel available to just go to the other room and ask my friends for cuddles because I wanted to, and I considered maybe just huddling under the blankets scared in my bedroom until the trip ended and I became a simulacrum again. Then I decided I had no real incentive do to this, and plenty of incentive to go try to interact with my friends without pretending to be a person, so I did that and it worked.
THC seems to make paranoid thoughts more conscious, which allows me to consciously work through their implications and decide whether I believe them.
I agree that stories with a dramatic villain seem more memetically fit and less helpful, and I avoid them when I notice the option to.
Thanks for your level-headed responses. At this point, I have nothing further to talk about on the object-level conversation (but open to anything else you want to discuss).
For information value, I do want to flag that…
I’m noticing an odd effect from talking with you. It feels like being under a weighted blanket or a ‘numbing’ effect. It’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
My sketchpad sense of it is: Leaning on the support of Reason. Something wants me to be soothed, to be reassured, that there is Reasonableness and Order, and it can handle things. That most things can be Solved with … correct thinking or conceptualization or model-building or something.
So, it’s a projection and all, but I don’t trust this “thing” whatever it is, much. It also seems to have many advantages. And it may make it pretty hard for me to have a fully alive and embodied conversation with you.
Curious if any of this resonates with you or with anyone else’s sense of you, or if I’m off the mark. But um also this can be ignored or taken offline as well, since it’s not adding to the overall conversation and is just an interpersonal thing.
I did feel inhibited from having as much fun as I’d have liked to in this exchange because it seemed like while you were on the whole trying to make a good thing happen, you were somewhat scared in a triggered and triggerable way. This might have caused the distortion you’re describing. Helpful and encouraging to hear that you picked up on that and it bothered you enough to mention.
Your response here is really perplexing to me and didn’t go in the direction I expected at all. I am guessing there’s some weird communication breakdown happening. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess all I have left is: I care about you, I like you, and I wish well for you. <3
It seems like you’re having difficulty imagining that I’m responding to my situation as I understand it, and I don’t know what else you might think I’m doing.
I read the comment you’re responding to as suggesting something like “your impression of Unreal’s internal state was so different from her own experience of her internal state that she’s very confused”.
I was relying on her self-reports, like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe#g9vLjj7rpGDH99adj
What do you think the problem is that Jessica is trying to solve? (I’m also interested in what problem you think Zoe is trying to solve.)
I empathise with the feeling of slipperyness in the OP, I feel comfortable attributing that to the subject matter rather than malice.
If I had an experience that matched zoe’s to the degree jessicata’s did (superficially or otherwise) I’d feel compelled to post it. I found it helpful in the question of whether “insular rationalist group gets weird and experiences rash of psychotic breaks” is a community problem, or just a problem with stray dude.
Scott’s comment does seem to verify the “insular rationalist group gets weird and experiences rash of psychotic breaks” trend, but it seems to be a different group than the one named in the original post.
One of the things that can feel like gaslighting in a community that attracts highly scrupulous people is when posting about your interpretation of your experience is treated as a contractual obligation to defend the claims and discuss any possible misinterpretations or consequences of what is a challenging thing to write in the first place.
I feel like here and in so many other comments in this discussion that there’s important and subtle distinctions that are being missed. I don’t have any intention to conditionlessly accept and support all accusations made (I have seen false accusations cause incredible harm and suicidality in people close to me). I do expect people who make serious claims about organizations to be careful about how they do it. I think Zoe’s Leverage post easily met my standard, but that this post here triggered a lot of warning flags for me, and I find it important to pay attention to those.
Speaking of highly scrupulous...
I think that the phrases “treated as a contractual obligation” and “any possible misinterpretations or consequences” are both hyperbole, if they are (as they seem) intended as fair summaries or descriptions of what Aella wrote above.
I think there’s a skipped step here, where you’re trying to say that what Aella wrote above might imply those things, or might result in those things, or might be tantamount to those things, but I think it’s quite important to not miss that step.
Before objecting to Aella’s [A] by saying “[B] is bad!” I think one should justify or at least explicitly assert [A—>B]
Yes, and to clarify I am not attempting to imply that there is something wrong with Aella’s comment. It’s more like this is a pattern I have observed and talked about with others. I don’t think people playing a part in a pattern that has some negative side effects should necessarily have a responsibility frame around that, especially given that one literally can’t track all various possible side effects of actions. I see epistemic statuses as partially attempting to give people more affordance for thinking about possible side effects of the multi context nature of online comms and that was used to good effect here, I likely would have had a more negative reaction to Aella’s post if it hadn’t included the epistemic status.
Understanding how other parts of the community were similar/dissimilar to Leverage seems valuable from a sensemaking point of view.
I think you may be asking your reader to draw the conclusion that this is a dishonest way to write, without explicitly pointing out that conclusion :-) Personally, I see nothing wrong with presenting only observations.
Yeesh. I don’t think we should police victims’ timing. That seems really evil to me. We should be super skeptical of any attempts to tell people to shut up about their allegations, and “your timing is very insensitive to the real victims” really does not pass the smell test for me.
Some context, please. Imagine the following scenario:
Victim A: “I was hurt by X.”
Victim B: “I was hurt by Y.”
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, whether it happens the same day, the next day, or week later. Maybe victim B was encouraged by (reactions to) victim A’s message, maybe it was just a coincidence. Nothing wrong with that either.
Another scenario:
Victim A: “I was hurt by X.”
Victim B: “I was also hurt by X (in a different way, on another day etc.).”
This is a good thing to happen; more evidence, encouragement for further victims to come out.
But this post is different in a few important ways. First, Jessicata piggybacks on Zoe’s story a lot, insinuating analogies, but providing very little actual data. (If you rewrote the article to avoid referring to Zoe, it would be 10 times shorter.) Second, Jessicata repeatedly makes comparison between Zoe’s experience at Leverage and her experience at MIRI/CFAR, and usually concludes that Leverage was less bad (for reasons that are weird to me, such as because their abuse was legible, or because they provided space for people to talk about demons and exorcise them). Here are some quotes:
...uhm, does this sound a bit like a defense of Leverage, or at least saying “Zoe, your experience in Leverage was not as bad as my experience in MIRI/CFAR”? That is poor taste, especially when the debate about Zoe’s experience hasn’t finished yet.
Third, this comparison and downplaying is made even worse by the fact that many supposed analogies are not that much analogical:
Zoe had mental trauma after her experience in Leverage. Jessicata had mental trauma after her experience in MIRI/CFAR, and after she started experimenting with drugs, inspired by critics of MIRI/CFAR.
Zoe had to sign an NDA, covering lot of what was happening in Leverage, and now she worries about possible legal consequences of her talking about her abuse. Jessicata didn’t have to sign anything… but hey, she was once discouraged from writing a blog on AI timeline… which is just as bad, except much worse because MIRI/CFAR is less transparent about being evil. (Sorry, I am too sarcastic here, I find it difficult to say these things with a straight face.)
Zoe was convinced by Leverage that everything that happened to her was her own fault. Jessicata joined a group of MIRI/CFAR haters who believed that everything was evil but especially MIRI/CFAR, and then she ended up believing that she was evil… yeah, again, fair analogy! Leverage at least tells you openly that you are a loser, but the insidious MIRI/CFAR uses some super complicated plot, manipulating their haters to convince you about the same thing.
etc. (I am out of time, and also being sarcastic is against the norms of LW, so I better end here.)
In summary, it is the combination of: piggybacking on another victim’s story, making analogies that are not really analogies, and then downplaying the first victim’s experience… plus the timing right in the middle of debating the first victim’s experience… that makes it so bad.
I don’t think “don’t police victims’ timing” is an absolute rule; not policing the timing is a pretty good idea in most cases. I think this is an exception.
And if I wasn’t clear, I’ll explicitly state my position here: I think it’s good to pay close attention to negative effects communities have on its members, and I am very pro people talking about this, and if people feel hurt by an organization it seems really good to have this publicly discussed.
But I believe the above post did not simply do that. It also did other things, which is frame things I perceive in misleading ways, leave out key information relevant to a discussion (as per Eliezer’s comment here), and also rely very heavily directly on Zoe’s account at Leverage to bring validity to their own claims when I perceive Leverage as have been being both significantly worse and worse in a different category of way. If the above post hadn’t done these things, I don’t think I would have any issue with the timing.
I hope that other people, when considering whether to come forward with allegations, do not worry about timing or pulling the spotlight away from other victims. Even if they think their allegations might be stupid or low quality (which is in fact a very common fear among victims).
Strong downvote for choosing to entirely ignore the points/claims/arguments that Aella laid out, in favor of reiterating your frame with no new detail, as if that were a rebuttal.
Seems like a cheap rhetorical trick designed to say “I’m on the side of the good, and if you disagree with me, well …”
(Or, more precisely, I predict that if we polled one hundred humans on their takeaway from reading the thread, more than sixty of them would tick “yes” next to “to the best of your ability to judge, was this person being snide/passive-aggressive/trying to imply that Aella doesn’t largely agree?” Which seems pretty lacking in reasonable good faith, coming on the heels of her explicitly stating that not policing timing is a pretty good idea in most cases.)
I really doubt that Zoe takes great comfort in seeing other people getting strung up after making allegations.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here—call on Zoe as an authority to disapprove of me? Would it update you at all if the answer was what you doubted?
I am making an obvious point that how we treat people who make allegations in one case will affect people’s comfort in another case.
I am not sure what I would conclude if in fact Zoe was glad that Jessica was recieving a negative response, but it would be surprising and interesting, and counter-evidence towards ^
As I mentioned in my post, I am good friends with Zoe and I sent her my comment here right after I posted it. She approved.