It has taken me about three days to mentally update more fully on this point. It seems worth highlighting now, using quotes from Oli’s post:
I’ve talked to a lot of people about stuff that happened at Leverage in the last few days, and I do think that overall, the level of secrecy and paranoia about information leaks at Leverage seemed drastically higher than anywhere else in the community that I’ve seen
I think the number of people who have been hurt by various things Leverage has done is really vastly larger than the number of people who have spoken out so far, in a ratio that I think is very different from what I believe is true about the rest of the community.
I am beginning to suspect that, even in the total privacy of their own minds, there are people who went through something at Leverage who can’t have certain thoughts, out of fear.
I believe it is not my place (or anyone’s?) to force open a locked door, especially locked mental doors.
Zoe’s post may have initially given me the wrong impression—that other ex-Leverage people would also be able to articulate their experiences clearly and express their fears in a reasonable and open way. I guess I’m updating away from that initial impression.
//
I suspect ‘combining forces’ with existing heavy-handed legal systems can sometimes be used in such a dominant manner that it damages people’s epistemics and health. And this is why a lot of ‘small-time’ orgs and communities try to avoid attention of heavy-handed bureaucracies like the IRS, psych wards, police depts, etc., which are often only called upon in serious emergencies.
I have a wonder about whether a small-time org willing to use (way above weight class) heavy-handed legal structures (like, beyond due diligence, such as actual threats of litigation) is evidence of that org acting in bad faith or doing something bad to its members.
I’ve signed an NDA at MAPLE to protect donor information, but it’s pretty basic stuff, and I have zero actual fear of litigation from MAPLE, and the NDA itself is not covering things I expect I’ll want to do (such as leak info about funders). I’ve signed NDAs in the past for keeping certain intellectual property safe from theft (e.g. someone’s inventing a new game and don’t want others to get their idea). These seem like reasonable uses of NDAs.
When I went to my first charting session at Leverage, they … also asked me to sign some kind of NDA? As a client. It was a little weird? I think they wanted to protect intellectual property of their … I kind of don’t really remember honestly. Maybe if I’d tried to publish a paper on Connection Theory or Charting or Belief Reporting, they would have asked me to take it down. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
maybe an unnecessary or heavy-handed integration between an org and legal power structures is a wtf kind of sign and seems good to try to avoid?
I really don’t know about the experience of a lot of the other ex-Leveragers, but the time it took her to post it, the number and kind of allies she felt she needed before posting it, and the hedging qualifications within the post itself detailing her fears of retribution, plus just how many peoples’ initial responses to the post were to applaud her courage, might give you a sense that Zoe’s post was unusually, extremely difficult to make public, and that others might not have that same willingness yet (she even mentions it at the bottom, and presumably she knows more about how other ex-Leveragers feel than we do).
It has taken me about three days to mentally update more fully on this point. It seems worth highlighting now, using quotes from Oli’s post:
I am beginning to suspect that, even in the total privacy of their own minds, there are people who went through something at Leverage who can’t have certain thoughts, out of fear.
I believe it is not my place (or anyone’s?) to force open a locked door, especially locked mental doors.
Zoe’s post may have initially given me the wrong impression—that other ex-Leverage people would also be able to articulate their experiences clearly and express their fears in a reasonable and open way. I guess I’m updating away from that initial impression.
//
I suspect ‘combining forces’ with existing heavy-handed legal systems can sometimes be used in such a dominant manner that it damages people’s epistemics and health. And this is why a lot of ‘small-time’ orgs and communities try to avoid attention of heavy-handed bureaucracies like the IRS, psych wards, police depts, etc., which are often only called upon in serious emergencies.
I have a wonder about whether a small-time org willing to use (way above weight class) heavy-handed legal structures (like, beyond due diligence, such as actual threats of litigation) is evidence of that org acting in bad faith or doing something bad to its members.
I’ve signed an NDA at MAPLE to protect donor information, but it’s pretty basic stuff, and I have zero actual fear of litigation from MAPLE, and the NDA itself is not covering things I expect I’ll want to do (such as leak info about funders). I’ve signed NDAs in the past for keeping certain intellectual property safe from theft (e.g. someone’s inventing a new game and don’t want others to get their idea). These seem like reasonable uses of NDAs.
When I went to my first charting session at Leverage, they … also asked me to sign some kind of NDA? As a client. It was a little weird? I think they wanted to protect intellectual property of their … I kind of don’t really remember honestly. Maybe if I’d tried to publish a paper on Connection Theory or Charting or Belief Reporting, they would have asked me to take it down. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
maybe an unnecessary or heavy-handed integration between an org and legal power structures is a wtf kind of sign and seems good to try to avoid?
I really don’t know about the experience of a lot of the other ex-Leveragers, but the time it took her to post it, the number and kind of allies she felt she needed before posting it, and the hedging qualifications within the post itself detailing her fears of retribution, plus just how many peoples’ initial responses to the post were to applaud her courage, might give you a sense that Zoe’s post was unusually, extremely difficult to make public, and that others might not have that same willingness yet (she even mentions it at the bottom, and presumably she knows more about how other ex-Leveragers feel than we do).