Many of these things seem broadly congruent with my experiences at Pareto, although significantly more extreme. Especially: ideas about psychology being arbitrarily changeable, Leverage having the most powerful psychology/self-improvement tools, Leverage being approximately the only place you could make real progress, extreme focus on introspection and other techniques to ‘resolve issues in your psyche’, (one participant’s ‘research project’ involved introspecting about how they changed their mind for 2 months) and general weird dynamics (e.g. instructors sleeping with fellows; Geoff doing lectures or meeting individually with participants in a way that felt very loaded with attempts to persuade and rhetorical tricks), and paranoia (for example: participants being concerned that the things they said during charting/debugging would be used to blackmail or manipulate them; or suspecting that the private slack channels for each participant involved discussion of how useful the participants were in various ways and how to ‘make use of them’ in future). On the other hand, I didn’t see any of the demons/objects/occult stuff, although I think people were excited about ‘energy healers’/‘body work’, not actually believing that there was any ‘energy’ going on, but thinking that something interesting in the realm of psychology/sociology was going on there. Also, I benefitted from the program in many ways, many of the techniques/attitudes were very useful, and the instructors generally seemed genuinely altruistic and interested in helping fellows learn.
Many of these things seem broadly congruent with my experiences at Pareto, although significantly more extreme. Especially: ideas about psychology being arbitrarily changeable, Leverage having the most powerful psychology/self-improvement tools, Leverage being approximately the only place you could make real progress, extreme focus on introspection and other techniques to ‘resolve issues in your psyche’, (one participant’s ‘research project’ involved introspecting about how they changed their mind for 2 months) and general weird dynamics (e.g. instructors sleeping with fellows; Geoff doing lectures or meeting individually with participants in a way that felt very loaded with attempts to persuade and rhetorical tricks), and paranoia (for example: participants being concerned that the things they said during charting/debugging would be used to blackmail or manipulate them; or suspecting that the private slack channels for each participant involved discussion of how useful the participants were in various ways and how to ‘make use of them’ in future). On the other hand, I didn’t see any of the demons/objects/occult stuff, although I think people were excited about ‘energy healers’/‘body work’, not actually believing that there was any ‘energy’ going on, but thinking that something interesting in the realm of psychology/sociology was going on there. Also, I benefitted from the program in many ways, many of the techniques/attitudes were very useful, and the instructors generally seemed genuinely altruistic and interested in helping fellows learn.