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.
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.