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.
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.