This misses the fact that people’s ability to negatively influence others might vary very widely, making it so that it is silly to worry about, say, 99.99% of people strongly negatively influencing you, but reasonable to worry about the other 0.01%. If Michael is one of those 0.01%, then Scott’s worldview is not inconsistent.
If it’s reasonable to worry about the .01%, it’s reasonable to ask how the ability varies. There’s some reason, some mechanism. This is worth discussing even if it’s hard to give more than partial, metaphorical hypotheses. And if there are these .01% of very strong influencers, that is still an exception to strong liberal individualism.
That would still admit some people at Leverage having significant mental influence, especially if they got into weird mental tech that almost no one gets into. A lot of the weirdness is downstream of them encountering “body workers” who are extremely good at e.g. causing mental effects by touching people’s back a little; these people could easily be extremal, and Leverage people learned from them. I’ve had sessions with some post-Leverage people where it seemed like really weird mental effects are happening in some implicit channel (like, I feel a thing poking at the left side of my consciousness and the person says, “oh, I just did an implicit channel thing, maybe you felt that”), I’ve never experienced effects like that (without drugs, and not obviously on drugs either though the comparison is harder) with others including with Michael, Anna, or normal therapists. This could be “placebo” in a way that makes it ultimately not that important but still, if we’re admitting that 0.01% of people have these mental effects then it seems somewhat likely that this includes some Leverage people.
Also, if the 0.01% is disproportionately influential (which, duh), then getting more detailed models than “charisma” is still quite important.
This misses the fact that people’s ability to negatively influence others might vary very widely, making it so that it is silly to worry about, say, 99.99% of people strongly negatively influencing you, but reasonable to worry about the other 0.01%. If Michael is one of those 0.01%, then Scott’s worldview is not inconsistent.
If it’s reasonable to worry about the .01%, it’s reasonable to ask how the ability varies. There’s some reason, some mechanism. This is worth discussing even if it’s hard to give more than partial, metaphorical hypotheses. And if there are these .01% of very strong influencers, that is still an exception to strong liberal individualism.
That would still admit some people at Leverage having significant mental influence, especially if they got into weird mental tech that almost no one gets into. A lot of the weirdness is downstream of them encountering “body workers” who are extremely good at e.g. causing mental effects by touching people’s back a little; these people could easily be extremal, and Leverage people learned from them. I’ve had sessions with some post-Leverage people where it seemed like really weird mental effects are happening in some implicit channel (like, I feel a thing poking at the left side of my consciousness and the person says, “oh, I just did an implicit channel thing, maybe you felt that”), I’ve never experienced effects like that (without drugs, and not obviously on drugs either though the comparison is harder) with others including with Michael, Anna, or normal therapists. This could be “placebo” in a way that makes it ultimately not that important but still, if we’re admitting that 0.01% of people have these mental effects then it seems somewhat likely that this includes some Leverage people.
Also, if the 0.01% is disproportionately influential (which, duh), then getting more detailed models than “charisma” is still quite important.