The post explicitly calls for thinking about how this situation is similar to what is happening/happened at Leverage, and I think that’s a good thing to do. I do think that I do have specific evidence that makes me think that what happened at Leverage seemed pretty different from my experiences with CFAR/MIRI.
Like, 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, and I feel like the post is trying to draw some parallel here that fails to land for me (though it’s also plausible it is pointing out a higher level of information control than I thought was present at MIRI/CFAR).
I have also had my disagreements with MIRI being more secretive, and think it comes with a high cost that I think has been underestimated by at least some of the leadership, but I haven’t heard of people being “quarantined from their friends” because they attracted some “set of demons/bad objects that might infect others when they come into contact with them”, which feels to me like a different level of social isolation, and is part of the thing that happened in Leverage near the end. Whereas I’ve never heard of anything even remotely like this happening at MIRI or CFAR.
To be clear, I think this kind of purity dynamic is also present in other contexts, like high-class/low-class dynamics, and various other problematic common social dynamics, but I haven’t seen anything that seems to result in as much social isolation and alienation, in a way that seemed straightforwardly very harmful to me, and more harmful than anything comparable I’ve seen in the rest of the community (though not more harmful than what I have heard from some people about e.g. working at Apple or the U.S. military, which seem to have very similarly strict procedures and also a number of quite bad associated pathologies).
The other biggest thing that feels important to distinguish between what happened at Leverage and the rest of the community is the actual institutional and conscious optimization that has gone into PR control.
Like, I think Ben Hoffman’s point about “Blatant lies are the best kind!” is pretty valid, and I do think that other parts of the community (including organizations like CEA and to some degree CFAR) have engaged in PR control in various harmful but less legible ways, but I do think there is something additionally mindkilly and gaslighty about straightforwardly lying, or directly threatening adversarial action to prevent people from speaking ill of someone, in the way Leverage has. I always felt that the rest of the rationality community had a very large and substantial dedication to being very clear about when they denotatively vs. connotatively disagree with something, and to have a very deep and almost religious respect for the literal truth (see e.g. a lot of Eliezer’s stuff around the wizard’s code and meta honesty), and I think the lack of that has made a lot of the dynamics around Leverage quite a bit worse.
I also think it makes understanding the extent of the harm and ways to improve it a lot more difficult. 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. As a concrete example, I have a large number of negative Leverage experiences between 2015-2017 that I never wrote up due to various complicated adversarial dynamics surrounding Leverage and CEA (as well as various NDAs and legal threats, made by both Leverage and CEA, not leveled at me, but leveled at enough people around me that I thought I might cause someone serious legal trouble if I repeat a thing I heard somewhere in a more public setting), and I feel pretty confident that I would feel very different if I had similarly bad experiences with CFAR or MIRI, based on my interactions with both of these organizations.
I think this kind of information control feels like what ultimately flips things into the negative for me, in this situation with Leverage. Like, I think I am overall pretty in favor of people gathering together and working on a really intense project, investing really hard into some hypothesis that they have some special sauce that allows them to do something really hard and important that nobody else can do. I am also quite in favor of people doing a lot of introspection and weird psychology experiments on themselves, and to try their best to handle the vulnerability that comes with doing that near other people, even though there is a chance things will go badly and people will get hurt.
But the thing that feels really crucial in all of this is that people can stay well-informed and can get the space they need to disengage, can get an external perspective when necessary, and somehow stay grounded all throughout this process. Which feels much harder to do in an environment where people are directly lying to you, or where people are making quite explicit plots to discredit you, or harm you in some other way, if you do leave the group, or leak information.
I do notice that in the above I make various accusations of lying or deception by Leverage without really backing it up with specific evidence, which I apologize for, and I think people reading this should overall not take comments like mine at face value before having heard something pretty specific that backs up the accusations in them. I have various concrete examples I could give, but do notice that doing so would violate various implicit and explicit confidentiality agreements I made, that I wish I had not made, and I am still figuring out whether I can somehow extract and share the relevant details, without violating those agreements in any substantial way, or whether it might be better for me to break the implicit ones of those agreements (which seem less costly to break, given that I felt like I didn’t really fully consent to them), given the ongoing pretty high cost.
When it comes to agreements preventing disclosure of information often there’s no agreement to keep the existence of the agreement itself secret. If you don’t think you can ethically (and given other risks) share the content that’s protected by certain agreements it would be worthwhile to share more about the agreements and with whom you have them. This might also be accompied by a request to those parties to agree to lift the agreement. It’s worthwhile to know who thinks they need to be protected by secrecy agreements.
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).
The post explicitly calls for thinking about how this situation is similar to what is happening/happened at Leverage, and I think that’s a good thing to do. I do think that I do have specific evidence that makes me think that what happened at Leverage seemed pretty different from my experiences with CFAR/MIRI.
Like, 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, and I feel like the post is trying to draw some parallel here that fails to land for me (though it’s also plausible it is pointing out a higher level of information control than I thought was present at MIRI/CFAR).
I have also had my disagreements with MIRI being more secretive, and think it comes with a high cost that I think has been underestimated by at least some of the leadership, but I haven’t heard of people being “quarantined from their friends” because they attracted some “set of demons/bad objects that might infect others when they come into contact with them”, which feels to me like a different level of social isolation, and is part of the thing that happened in Leverage near the end. Whereas I’ve never heard of anything even remotely like this happening at MIRI or CFAR.
To be clear, I think this kind of purity dynamic is also present in other contexts, like high-class/low-class dynamics, and various other problematic common social dynamics, but I haven’t seen anything that seems to result in as much social isolation and alienation, in a way that seemed straightforwardly very harmful to me, and more harmful than anything comparable I’ve seen in the rest of the community (though not more harmful than what I have heard from some people about e.g. working at Apple or the U.S. military, which seem to have very similarly strict procedures and also a number of quite bad associated pathologies).
The other biggest thing that feels important to distinguish between what happened at Leverage and the rest of the community is the actual institutional and conscious optimization that has gone into PR control.
Like, I think Ben Hoffman’s point about “Blatant lies are the best kind!” is pretty valid, and I do think that other parts of the community (including organizations like CEA and to some degree CFAR) have engaged in PR control in various harmful but less legible ways, but I do think there is something additionally mindkilly and gaslighty about straightforwardly lying, or directly threatening adversarial action to prevent people from speaking ill of someone, in the way Leverage has. I always felt that the rest of the rationality community had a very large and substantial dedication to being very clear about when they denotatively vs. connotatively disagree with something, and to have a very deep and almost religious respect for the literal truth (see e.g. a lot of Eliezer’s stuff around the wizard’s code and meta honesty), and I think the lack of that has made a lot of the dynamics around Leverage quite a bit worse.
I also think it makes understanding the extent of the harm and ways to improve it a lot more difficult. 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. As a concrete example, I have a large number of negative Leverage experiences between 2015-2017 that I never wrote up due to various complicated adversarial dynamics surrounding Leverage and CEA (as well as various NDAs and legal threats, made by both Leverage and CEA, not leveled at me, but leveled at enough people around me that I thought I might cause someone serious legal trouble if I repeat a thing I heard somewhere in a more public setting), and I feel pretty confident that I would feel very different if I had similarly bad experiences with CFAR or MIRI, based on my interactions with both of these organizations.
I think this kind of information control feels like what ultimately flips things into the negative for me, in this situation with Leverage. Like, I think I am overall pretty in favor of people gathering together and working on a really intense project, investing really hard into some hypothesis that they have some special sauce that allows them to do something really hard and important that nobody else can do. I am also quite in favor of people doing a lot of introspection and weird psychology experiments on themselves, and to try their best to handle the vulnerability that comes with doing that near other people, even though there is a chance things will go badly and people will get hurt.
But the thing that feels really crucial in all of this is that people can stay well-informed and can get the space they need to disengage, can get an external perspective when necessary, and somehow stay grounded all throughout this process. Which feels much harder to do in an environment where people are directly lying to you, or where people are making quite explicit plots to discredit you, or harm you in some other way, if you do leave the group, or leak information.
I do notice that in the above I make various accusations of lying or deception by Leverage without really backing it up with specific evidence, which I apologize for, and I think people reading this should overall not take comments like mine at face value before having heard something pretty specific that backs up the accusations in them. I have various concrete examples I could give, but do notice that doing so would violate various implicit and explicit confidentiality agreements I made, that I wish I had not made, and I am still figuring out whether I can somehow extract and share the relevant details, without violating those agreements in any substantial way, or whether it might be better for me to break the implicit ones of those agreements (which seem less costly to break, given that I felt like I didn’t really fully consent to them), given the ongoing pretty high cost.
When it comes to agreements preventing disclosure of information often there’s no agreement to keep the existence of the agreement itself secret. If you don’t think you can ethically (and given other risks) share the content that’s protected by certain agreements it would be worthwhile to share more about the agreements and with whom you have them. This might also be accompied by a request to those parties to agree to lift the agreement. It’s worthwhile to know who thinks they need to be protected by secrecy agreements.
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).