Trying to do a cooperative, substantive reply. Seems like openness and straightforwardness are the best way here.
I found the above to be a mix of surprising and believable. I was at CFAR full-time from Oct 2015 to Oct 2018, and in charge of the mainline workshops specifically for about the last two of those three years.
At least four people
This surprises me. I don’t know what the bar for “worked in some capacity with the CFAR/MIRI team” is. For instance, while at CFAR, I had very little attention on the comings-and-goings at MIRI, a much larger organization, and also CFAR had a habit of using five or ten volunteers at a time for workshops, month in and month out. So this could be intended to convey something like “out of the 500 people closest to both orgs.” If it’s meant to imply “four people who would have worked for more than 20 hours directly with Duncan during his three years at CFAR,” then I am completely at a loss; I can’t think of any such person who I am aware had a psychotic break.
Psychedelic use was common among the leadership
This also surprises me. I do not recall ever either directly encountering or hearing open discussions of psychedelic use while at CFAR. It was mentioned nonzero times in the abstract, as were any of dozens of other things (CFAR’s colloquia wandered far and wide). But while I can think of a time when a CFAR staff member spoke quietly and reservedly while not at work about an experience with psychedelics, I was not in touch with any such common institutional casualness, or “this is cool and people should do it” vibe, between 10⁄15 and 10⁄18. I am not sure if this means it happened at a different time, or happened out of my sight, or what; I’m just reporting that I myself did not pick up on the described vibe at all. In fact, I can think of several times that psychedelic use was mentioned by participants or volunteers at workshops, and was immediately discouraged by staff members along the lines of “look, that’s the sort of thing people might have personal experiences with, but it’s very much not at all in line with what we’re trying to do or convey here.”
Debugging sessions
This … did not surprise me. It is more extreme than I would have described and more extreme than I experienced or believe I participated in/perpetuated, but it is not to the point where I feel a “pshhhh, come on.” I will state for the record that I recall very very few debugging sessions between me and any less-senior staff member in my three years (<5), and absolutely none where I was the one pushing for debugging to happen (as opposed to someone like Eli Tyre (who I believe would not mind being named) asking for help working through something or other).
Relatedly, the organization uses a technique called goal factoring
This one misses the mark entirely, as far as I can see. Goal factoring, at least in the 2015-2018 window, bears no resemblance whatsoever EDIT: little resemblance to things like Connection Theory or Charting. It’s a pretty straightforward process of “think about what you want, think about its individual properties, and do a brainstorming session on how you might get each individual property on its own before returning to the birds’-eye view and making a new plan.” There’s nothing psych-oriented about it except in the very general sense of “what kinds of good things were you hoping to get, when you applied to med school?”
No one at CFAR was required to use the double-crux conversational technique
This one feels within the realm of the believable. The poster describes a more blatant adversarial atmosphere than I experienced, but I did sometimes have the feeling, myself, that people would double crux when that was useful to their goals and not when it wasn’t, and I can well imagine someone else having a worse experience than I did. I had some frustrating arguments in which it took more than an hour to establish the relevance of e.g. someone having agreed in writing to show up to a thing and then not doing so. However, in my own personal experience, this didn’t seem any worse than what most non-Hufflepuff humans do most of the time; it was more “depressingly failing to be better than normal” than “notably bad.” If someone had asked me to make a list of the top ten things I did not like at CFAR, or thought were toxic, this would not have made the list from my own personal point of view.
There were required sessions of a social/relational practice called circling
This is close to my experience. Notably, there was a moment in CFAR’s history when it felt like the staff had developed a deep and justified rapport, and was able to safely have conversations on extremely tricky and intimate topics. Then a number of new hires were just—dropped in, sans orientation, and there was an explicit expectation that I/we go on being just as vulnerable and trusting as we had been the day before. I boycotted those circles for several months before tolerance-for-boycott ran out and I was told I had to start coming again because it was a part of the job. I disagree with “The whole point of circling is to create a state of emotional vulnerability and openness in the person who is being circled,” but I don’t disagree that this is often the effect, and I don’t disagree with “This often required rank-and-file members to be emotionally vulnerable to the leadership who perhaps didn’t actually have their best interests at heart.”
The overall effect of all this debugging and circling was that it was hard to maintain the privacy and integrity of your mind if you were a rank-and-file employee at CFAR.
This also has the ring of truth, though I’m actually somewhat confused by the rank-and-file comment. Without trying to pin down or out this person, there were various periods at CFAR in which the organization was more (or less) flat and egalitarian, so there were many times (including much of my own time there) when it wouldn’t make sense to say that “rank-and-file employees” was a category that existed. However, if I think about the times when egalitarianism was at its lowest, and people had the widest diversity of power and responsibility, those times did roughly correspond with high degrees of circling and one-on-one potentially head-melty conversations.
Pressure to debug at work
This bullet did not resonate with me at all, but I want to be clear that that’s not me saying “no way.” Just that I did not experience this, and do not recall hearing this complaint, and do not recall participating in the kind of close debugging that I would expect to create this feeling. I had my own complaints about work/life boundaries, but for me personally they didn’t lie in “I can’t get away from the circles and the debugging.” (I reiterate that there wasn’t much debugging at all in my own experience, and all of that solicited by people wanting specific, limited help with specific, limited problems (as opposed to people virtuously producing desire-to-be-debugged in response to perceived incentives to do so, as claimed in some of the Leverage stuff).)
The longer you stayed with the organization, the more it felt like your family and friends on the outside could not understand the problems facing the world, because they lacked access to the reasoning tools and intellectual leaders you had access to. This led to a deep sense of alienation from the rest of society. Team members ended up spending most of their time around other members and looking down on outsiders as “normies”.
This zero percent matches my experience, enough that I consider this the strongest piece of evidence that this person and I did not overlap, or had significant disoverlap. The other alternative being that I just swam in a different subcultural stream. But my relationships with friends and family utterly disconnected from the Bay Area and the EA movement and the rationalist community only broadened and strengthened during my time at CFAR.
There was a rarity narrative around being part of the only organization trying to “actually figure things out”, ignoring other organizations in the ecosystem working on AI safety and rationality and other communities with epistemic merit. CFAR/MIRI perpetuated the sense that there was nowhere worthwhile to go if you left the organization.
Comments like this make me go “ick” at the conflation between CFAR and MIRI, which are extremely different institutions with extremely different internal cultures (I have worked at each). But if I limit this comment to just my experience at CFAR—yes, this existed, and bothered me, and I can recall several instances of frustratedly trying to push back on exactly this sort of mentality. e.g. I had a disagreement with a staff member who claimed that the Bay Area rationalist community had some surprising-to-me percentage of the world’s agentic power (it might have been 1%, it might have been 10%; either way, it struck me as way too high). That being said, that staff member and I had a cordial and relatively productive disagreement. It’s possible that I was placed highly enough in the hierarchy that I wasn’t subject to the kind of pressure that this person’s account seems to imply.
There was a rarity narrative around the sharpness of Anna’s critical thinking skills, which made it so that if Anna knew everything you knew about a concern and disagreed with you, there was a lot of social pressure to defer to her judgment.
I did not have this experience. I did, however, have the experience of something like “if Anna thinks your new idea for a class (or whatever) is interesting, it will somehow flourish and there will be lots of discussion, and if Anna thinks it’s boring or trivial, then you’ll be perfectly able to carry on tinkering with it by yourself, or if you can convince anyone else that it’s interesting.” I felt personally grumpy about the different amount of water I felt different ideas got; some I thought were unpromising got much more excitement than some I thought were really important.
However, in my own personal experience/my personal story, this is neither a) Anna’s fault, nor b) anything other than business as usual? Like, I did not experience, at all, any attempt from Anna to cultivate some kind of mystique, or to try to swing other people around behind her. Quite the contrary—I multiple times saw Anna try pretty damn hard to get people to unanchor from her own impressions or reactions, and I certainly don’t blame her for being honest about what she found promising, even where I disagreed. My sense was that the stuff I was grumpy about was just the result of individuals freely deferring to Anna’s judgment, or just the way that vibes and enthusiasm spread in monkey social groups. I never felt like, for instance, Anna (or anyone on Anna’s behalf) was trying to suffocate one of my ideas. It just felt like my ideas had a steeper hill in front of them, due to no individual’s conscious choices. Moloch, not malice.
This made it so that Anna’s update towards short timelines caused a herd of employees and volunteers to defer to her judgment almost overnight...however, Anna also put substantial pressure on members of the team to act as if shorter timelines were the case.
Did not experience. Do not rule out, but did not experience. Can neither confirm nor deny.
The later iterations of the team idolized the founders...no new techniques have been developed in quite a few years
Yes. This bothered me no end, and I both sparked and joined several attempts to get new curriculum development initiatives off the ground. None of these were particularly successful, and I consider it really really bad that no substantially new CFAR content was published in my last year (or, to the best of my knowledge, in the three years since). However, to be clear, I also did not experience any institutional resistance to the idea of new development. It just simply wasn’t prioritized on a mission level and therefore didn’t cohere.
There was rampant use of narrative warfare (called “narrativemancy” within the organization) by leadership to cast aspersions and blame on employees and each other. There was frequent non-ironic use of magical and narrative schemas which involved comparing situations to fairy-tales or myths and then drawing conclusions about those situations with high confidence. The narrativemancer would operate by casting various members of the group into roles and then using the narrative arc of the story to make predictions about how the relationship dynamics of the people involved would play out. There were usually obvious controlling motives behind the narrative framings being employed, but the framings were hard to escape for most employees.
This reads as outright false to me, like the kind of story you’d read about in a clickbait tabloid that overheard enough words to fabricate something but didn’t actually speak to anyone on the ground.
The closest I can think of to what might have sparked the above description is Val’s theorizing on narrativemancy and the social web? But this mainly played out in scattered colloquium talks that left me, at least, mostly nonplussed. To the extent that there was occasional push toward non-ironic use of magical schemas, I explicitly and vigorously pushed back (I had deep misgivings about even tiny, nascent signs of woo within the org). But I saw nothing that resembles “people acting as narrativemancers” or telling stories based on clichés or genre tropes. I definitely never told such stories myself, and I never heard one told about me or around me.
That being said, the same caveats apply: this could have been at a different time, or in a different subculture within the org, or something I just missed. I am not saying “this anecdote is impossible.” I’m just saying ????
I will say this, though: to the extent that the above description is accurate, that’s deeply fucked. Like, I want to agree wholeheartedly with the poster’s distaste for the described situation, separate from my ability to evaluate whether it took place. That’s exactly the sort of thing you go to a “center for applied rationality” to escape, in my book.
Generally there was a lack of clarity around which set of rules were at play at CFAR events and gatherings: those of a private gathering or those of the workplace. It seemed that the decision of which rules were at play were made ad hoc depending on the person’s aesthetic / presentation, their social standing, and the offense being considered. In the absence of clear standards people ultimately fell back on blame-games and coalitional negotiation to resolve issues instead of using more reasonable approaches.
I do not recognize the vibe of this anecdote, either (can’t think of “offenses” committed or people sitting in judgment; sometimes people didn’t show up on time for meetings? Or there would be personal disagreements between e.g. romantic exes?). However, I will note that CFAR absolutely blurred the line between formal workshop settings, after-workshop parties, and various tiers of alumni events that became more or less intimate depending on who was invited. While I didn’t witness any “I can’t tell what rules apply; am I at work or not?” confusion, it does seem to me that CFAR in particular would be 10x more likely to create that confusion in someone than your standard startup. So: credible?
At such social gatherings you felt uncertain at times if you were enjoying yourself at a party, advocating for yourself in an interview, or defending yourself on trial for a crime. This confusing mixture of possible social expectations disoriented attendees and caught them off-guard giving team members deeper insight into their psyches. No party was just a party.
Again, confusing and not at all in synch with my personal experience. But again: plausible/credible, especially if you add in the fact that I had a relatively secure role and am relatively socially oblivious. I do not find it hard to imagine being a more junior staff member and feeling the anxiety and insecurity described.
I don’t know. I can’t tell how helpful any of my commentary here is. I will state that while CFAR and I have both tried to be relatively polite and hands-off with each other since parting ways, no one ever tried to get me to sign an NDA, or implied that I couldn’t or shouldn’t speak freely about my experiences or opinions. I’ve been operating under the more standard-in-our-society just-don’t-badmouth-your-former-workplace-and-they-won’t-badmouth-you peace treaty, which seems good for all sorts of reasons and didn’t seem unusually strong for CFAR in particular.
Which is to say: I believe myself to be free to speak freely, and I believe myself to be being candid here. I am certainly holding many thoughts and opinions in reserve, but I’m doing so by personal choice and golden-rule policy, and not because of a sense that Bad Things Would (immediately, directly) Happen If I Didn’t.
Like, I want to agree wholeheartedly with the poster’s distaste for the described situation, separate from my ability to evaluate whether it took place.
As a general dynamic, no idea if it was happening here but just to have as a hypothesis, sometimes people selectively follow rules of behavior around people that they expect will seriously disapprove of the behavior. This can be well-intentioned, e.g. simply coming from not wanting to harm people by doing things around them that they don’t like, but could have the unfortunate effect of producing selected reporting: you don’t complain about something if you’re fine with it or if you don’t see it, so the only reports we get are from people who changed their mind (or have some reason to complain about something they don’t actually think is bad). (Also flagging that this is a sort of paranoid hypothesis; IDK how the world is on this dimension, but the Litany of Gendlin seems appropriate. Also it’s by nature harder to test, and therefore prone to the problems that untestable hypotheses have.)
This literally happened with Brent; my current model is that I was (EDIT: quite possibly unconsciously/reflexively/non-deliberately) cultivated as a shield by Brent, in that he much-more-consistently-than-one-would-expect-by-random-chance happened to never grossly misbehave in my sight, and other people, assuming I knew lots of things I didn’t, never just told me about gross misbehaviors that they had witnessed firsthand.
there was a lot of social pressure to defer to her judgment.
Moloch, not malice.
The two stories here fit consistently in a world where Duncan feels less social pressure than others including Phoenix, so that Duncan observes people seeming to act freely but Molochianly, and they experience network-effect social pressure (which looks Molochian, but is maybe best thought of as a separate sort of thing).
Trying to do a cooperative, substantive reply. Seems like openness and straightforwardness are the best way here.
I found the above to be a mix of surprising and believable. I was at CFAR full-time from Oct 2015 to Oct 2018, and in charge of the mainline workshops specifically for about the last two of those three years.
This surprises me. I don’t know what the bar for “worked in some capacity with the CFAR/MIRI team” is. For instance, while at CFAR, I had very little attention on the comings-and-goings at MIRI, a much larger organization, and also CFAR had a habit of using five or ten volunteers at a time for workshops, month in and month out. So this could be intended to convey something like “out of the 500 people closest to both orgs.” If it’s meant to imply “four people who would have worked for more than 20 hours directly with Duncan during his three years at CFAR,” then I am completely at a loss; I can’t think of any such person who I am aware had a psychotic break.
This also surprises me. I do not recall ever either directly encountering or hearing open discussions of psychedelic use while at CFAR. It was mentioned nonzero times in the abstract, as were any of dozens of other things (CFAR’s colloquia wandered far and wide). But while I can think of a time when a CFAR staff member spoke quietly and reservedly while not at work about an experience with psychedelics, I was not in touch with any such common institutional casualness, or “this is cool and people should do it” vibe, between 10⁄15 and 10⁄18. I am not sure if this means it happened at a different time, or happened out of my sight, or what; I’m just reporting that I myself did not pick up on the described vibe at all. In fact, I can think of several times that psychedelic use was mentioned by participants or volunteers at workshops, and was immediately discouraged by staff members along the lines of “look, that’s the sort of thing people might have personal experiences with, but it’s very much not at all in line with what we’re trying to do or convey here.”
This … did not surprise me. It is more extreme than I would have described and more extreme than I experienced or believe I participated in/perpetuated, but it is not to the point where I feel a “pshhhh, come on.” I will state for the record that I recall very very few debugging sessions between me and any less-senior staff member in my three years (<5), and absolutely none where I was the one pushing for debugging to happen (as opposed to someone like Eli Tyre (who I believe would not mind being named) asking for help working through something or other).
This one misses the mark entirely, as far as I can see. Goal factoring, at least in the 2015-2018 window, bears
no resemblance whatsoeverEDIT: little resemblance to things like Connection Theory or Charting. It’s a pretty straightforward process of “think about what you want, think about its individual properties, and do a brainstorming session on how you might get each individual property on its own before returning to the birds’-eye view and making a new plan.” There’s nothing psych-oriented about it except in the very general sense of “what kinds of good things were you hoping to get, when you applied to med school?”This one feels within the realm of the believable. The poster describes a more blatant adversarial atmosphere than I experienced, but I did sometimes have the feeling, myself, that people would double crux when that was useful to their goals and not when it wasn’t, and I can well imagine someone else having a worse experience than I did. I had some frustrating arguments in which it took more than an hour to establish the relevance of e.g. someone having agreed in writing to show up to a thing and then not doing so. However, in my own personal experience, this didn’t seem any worse than what most non-Hufflepuff humans do most of the time; it was more “depressingly failing to be better than normal” than “notably bad.” If someone had asked me to make a list of the top ten things I did not like at CFAR, or thought were toxic, this would not have made the list from my own personal point of view.
This is close to my experience. Notably, there was a moment in CFAR’s history when it felt like the staff had developed a deep and justified rapport, and was able to safely have conversations on extremely tricky and intimate topics. Then a number of new hires were just—dropped in, sans orientation, and there was an explicit expectation that I/we go on being just as vulnerable and trusting as we had been the day before. I boycotted those circles for several months before tolerance-for-boycott ran out and I was told I had to start coming again because it was a part of the job. I disagree with “The whole point of circling is to create a state of emotional vulnerability and openness in the person who is being circled,” but I don’t disagree that this is often the effect, and I don’t disagree with “This often required rank-and-file members to be emotionally vulnerable to the leadership who perhaps didn’t actually have their best interests at heart.”
This also has the ring of truth, though I’m actually somewhat confused by the rank-and-file comment. Without trying to pin down or out this person, there were various periods at CFAR in which the organization was more (or less) flat and egalitarian, so there were many times (including much of my own time there) when it wouldn’t make sense to say that “rank-and-file employees” was a category that existed. However, if I think about the times when egalitarianism was at its lowest, and people had the widest diversity of power and responsibility, those times did roughly correspond with high degrees of circling and one-on-one potentially head-melty conversations.
This bullet did not resonate with me at all, but I want to be clear that that’s not me saying “no way.” Just that I did not experience this, and do not recall hearing this complaint, and do not recall participating in the kind of close debugging that I would expect to create this feeling. I had my own complaints about work/life boundaries, but for me personally they didn’t lie in “I can’t get away from the circles and the debugging.” (I reiterate that there wasn’t much debugging at all in my own experience, and all of that solicited by people wanting specific, limited help with specific, limited problems (as opposed to people virtuously producing desire-to-be-debugged in response to perceived incentives to do so, as claimed in some of the Leverage stuff).)
This zero percent matches my experience, enough that I consider this the strongest piece of evidence that this person and I did not overlap, or had significant disoverlap. The other alternative being that I just swam in a different subcultural stream. But my relationships with friends and family utterly disconnected from the Bay Area and the EA movement and the rationalist community only broadened and strengthened during my time at CFAR.
Comments like this make me go “ick” at the conflation between CFAR and MIRI, which are extremely different institutions with extremely different internal cultures (I have worked at each). But if I limit this comment to just my experience at CFAR—yes, this existed, and bothered me, and I can recall several instances of frustratedly trying to push back on exactly this sort of mentality. e.g. I had a disagreement with a staff member who claimed that the Bay Area rationalist community had some surprising-to-me percentage of the world’s agentic power (it might have been 1%, it might have been 10%; either way, it struck me as way too high). That being said, that staff member and I had a cordial and relatively productive disagreement. It’s possible that I was placed highly enough in the hierarchy that I wasn’t subject to the kind of pressure that this person’s account seems to imply.
I did not have this experience. I did, however, have the experience of something like “if Anna thinks your new idea for a class (or whatever) is interesting, it will somehow flourish and there will be lots of discussion, and if Anna thinks it’s boring or trivial, then you’ll be perfectly able to carry on tinkering with it by yourself, or if you can convince anyone else that it’s interesting.” I felt personally grumpy about the different amount of water I felt different ideas got; some I thought were unpromising got much more excitement than some I thought were really important.
However, in my own personal experience/my personal story, this is neither a) Anna’s fault, nor b) anything other than business as usual? Like, I did not experience, at all, any attempt from Anna to cultivate some kind of mystique, or to try to swing other people around behind her. Quite the contrary—I multiple times saw Anna try pretty damn hard to get people to unanchor from her own impressions or reactions, and I certainly don’t blame her for being honest about what she found promising, even where I disagreed. My sense was that the stuff I was grumpy about was just the result of individuals freely deferring to Anna’s judgment, or just the way that vibes and enthusiasm spread in monkey social groups. I never felt like, for instance, Anna (or anyone on Anna’s behalf) was trying to suffocate one of my ideas. It just felt like my ideas had a steeper hill in front of them, due to no individual’s conscious choices. Moloch, not malice.
Did not experience. Do not rule out, but did not experience. Can neither confirm nor deny.
Yes. This bothered me no end, and I both sparked and joined several attempts to get new curriculum development initiatives off the ground. None of these were particularly successful, and I consider it really really bad that no substantially new CFAR content was published in my last year (or, to the best of my knowledge, in the three years since). However, to be clear, I also did not experience any institutional resistance to the idea of new development. It just simply wasn’t prioritized on a mission level and therefore didn’t cohere.
This reads as outright false to me, like the kind of story you’d read about in a clickbait tabloid that overheard enough words to fabricate something but didn’t actually speak to anyone on the ground.
The closest I can think of to what might have sparked the above description is Val’s theorizing on narrativemancy and the social web? But this mainly played out in scattered colloquium talks that left me, at least, mostly nonplussed. To the extent that there was occasional push toward non-ironic use of magical schemas, I explicitly and vigorously pushed back (I had deep misgivings about even tiny, nascent signs of woo within the org). But I saw nothing that resembles “people acting as narrativemancers” or telling stories based on clichés or genre tropes. I definitely never told such stories myself, and I never heard one told about me or around me.
That being said, the same caveats apply: this could have been at a different time, or in a different subculture within the org, or something I just missed. I am not saying “this anecdote is impossible.” I’m just saying ????
I will say this, though: to the extent that the above description is accurate, that’s deeply fucked. Like, I want to agree wholeheartedly with the poster’s distaste for the described situation, separate from my ability to evaluate whether it took place. That’s exactly the sort of thing you go to a “center for applied rationality” to escape, in my book.
I do not recognize the vibe of this anecdote, either (can’t think of “offenses” committed or people sitting in judgment; sometimes people didn’t show up on time for meetings? Or there would be personal disagreements between e.g. romantic exes?). However, I will note that CFAR absolutely blurred the line between formal workshop settings, after-workshop parties, and various tiers of alumni events that became more or less intimate depending on who was invited. While I didn’t witness any “I can’t tell what rules apply; am I at work or not?” confusion, it does seem to me that CFAR in particular would be 10x more likely to create that confusion in someone than your standard startup. So: credible?
Again, confusing and not at all in synch with my personal experience. But again: plausible/credible, especially if you add in the fact that I had a relatively secure role and am relatively socially oblivious. I do not find it hard to imagine being a more junior staff member and feeling the anxiety and insecurity described.
I don’t know. I can’t tell how helpful any of my commentary here is. I will state that while CFAR and I have both tried to be relatively polite and hands-off with each other since parting ways, no one ever tried to get me to sign an NDA, or implied that I couldn’t or shouldn’t speak freely about my experiences or opinions. I’ve been operating under the more standard-in-our-society just-don’t-badmouth-your-former-workplace-and-they-won’t-badmouth-you peace treaty, which seems good for all sorts of reasons and didn’t seem unusually strong for CFAR in particular.
Which is to say: I believe myself to be free to speak freely, and I believe myself to be being candid here. I am certainly holding many thoughts and opinions in reserve, but I’m doing so by personal choice and golden-rule policy, and not because of a sense that Bad Things Would (immediately, directly) Happen If I Didn’t.
Shrug emoji?
As a general dynamic, no idea if it was happening here but just to have as a hypothesis, sometimes people selectively follow rules of behavior around people that they expect will seriously disapprove of the behavior. This can be well-intentioned, e.g. simply coming from not wanting to harm people by doing things around them that they don’t like, but could have the unfortunate effect of producing selected reporting: you don’t complain about something if you’re fine with it or if you don’t see it, so the only reports we get are from people who changed their mind (or have some reason to complain about something they don’t actually think is bad). (Also flagging that this is a sort of paranoid hypothesis; IDK how the world is on this dimension, but the Litany of Gendlin seems appropriate. Also it’s by nature harder to test, and therefore prone to the problems that untestable hypotheses have.)
This literally happened with Brent; my current model is that I was (EDIT: quite possibly unconsciously/reflexively/non-deliberately) cultivated as a shield by Brent, in that he much-more-consistently-than-one-would-expect-by-random-chance happened to never grossly misbehave in my sight, and other people, assuming I knew lots of things I didn’t, never just told me about gross misbehaviors that they had witnessed firsthand.
Damn.
The two stories here fit consistently in a world where Duncan feels less social pressure than others including Phoenix, so that Duncan observes people seeming to act freely but Molochianly, and they experience network-effect social pressure (which looks Molochian, but is maybe best thought of as a separate sort of thing).