While I’m not hugely involved, I’ve been reading OB/LW since the very beginning. I’ve likely read 75% of everything that’s ever been posted here.
So, I’m way more clued-in to this and related communities than your average human being and...I don’t recall having heard of Leverage until a couple of weeks ago.
I’m not exactly sure what that means with regard to PR-esque type considerations.
However. Fair or not, I find having read the recent stuff I’ve got an ugh field that extended to slightly include LW. (I’m not sure what it means to “include LW”...it’s just a website. My first stab at an explanation is it’s more like “people engaged in community type stuff who know IRL lots of other people who communicate on LW”, but that’s not exactly right either.)
I think it’d be good to have some context on why any of this is relevant to LessWrong. The whole thing is generating a ton of activity and it feels like it just came out of nowhere.
Personally I think this story is an important warning about how people with a LW-adjacent mindset can death spiral off the deep end. This is something that happened around this community multiple times, not just in Leverage (I know of at least one other prominent example and suspect there are more), so we should definitely watch out for this and/or think how to prevent this kind of thing.
I am referring the cause of this incident. This seems like a possibly good source for more information, but I only skimmed it so don’t vouch for the content.
Leverage has always been at least socially adjacent to LW and EA (the earliest discussion I find is in 2012), and they hosted the earliest EA summits in 2013-2014 (before CEA started running EA Global).
Having seen it, I have a very vague recollection of maybe having read that at the time. Still, the amount of activity on the recent posts about Leverage seems to me all out of proportion with previous mentions/discussions.
Also, for the extended Leverage diaspora and people who are somehow connected, LessWrong is probably the most obvious place to have this discussion, even if people familiar with Leverage make up only a small proportion of people who normally contribute here.
There are other conversations happening on Facebook and Twitter but they are all way more fragmented than the ones here.
I originally chose LessWrong, instead of some other venue, to host the Common Knowledge post primarily because (1) I wanted to create a publicly-linkable document pseudonymously, and (2) I expected high-quality continuation of information-sharing and collaborative sense-making in the comments.
As someone part of the social communities, I can confirm that Leverage was definitely a topic of discussion for a long time around Rationalists and Effective Altruists. That said, often the discussion went something like, “What’s up with Leverage? They seem so confident, and take in a bunch of employees, but we have very little visibility.” I think I experienced basically the same exact conversation about them around 10 times, along these lines.
As people from Leverage have said, several Rationalists/EAs were very hostile around the topic of Leverage, particularly in the last ~4 years or so. (I’ve heard stories of people getting shouted at just for saying they worked at Leverage at a conference). On the other hand, they definitely had support by a few rationalists/EA orgs and several higher-ups of different kinds.
They’ve always been secretive, and some of the few public threads didn’t go well for them, so it’s not too surprising to me that they’ve had a small LessWrong/EA Forum presence.
I’ve personally very much enjoyed staying mostly staying away from the controversy, though very arguably I made a mistake there.
(I should also note that I had friends who worked at or worked close to Leverage, I attended like 2 events there early on, and I applied to work from there around 6 years ago)
Sorry, edited. I meant that it was a mistake for me to keep away before, not now.
(That said, this post is still quite safe. It’s not like I have scandalous information, more that, technically I (or others) could do more investigation to figure out things better.)
Yeah, at this point, everyone coming together to sort this out together as a way of building a virtuous spiral of making speaking up feel safe enough that it doesn’t even need to be a courageous thing to do or whatever is the kind of thing I think your comment also represents and what I was getting at.
A 2012 CFAR workshop included “Guest speaker Geoff Anders presents techniques his organization has used to overcome procrastination and maintain 75 hours/week of productive work time per person.” He was clearly connected to the LW-sphere if not central to it.
While I’m not hugely involved, I’ve been reading OB/LW since the very beginning. I’ve likely read 75% of everything that’s ever been posted here.
So, I’m way more clued-in to this and related communities than your average human being and...I don’t recall having heard of Leverage until a couple of weeks ago.
I’m not exactly sure what that means with regard to PR-esque type considerations.
However. Fair or not, I find having read the recent stuff I’ve got an ugh field that extended to slightly include LW. (I’m not sure what it means to “include LW”...it’s just a website. My first stab at an explanation is it’s more like “people engaged in community type stuff who know IRL lots of other people who communicate on LW”, but that’s not exactly right either.)
I think it’d be good to have some context on why any of this is relevant to LessWrong. The whole thing is generating a ton of activity and it feels like it just came out of nowhere.
Personally I think this story is an important warning about how people with a LW-adjacent mindset can death spiral off the deep end. This is something that happened around this community multiple times, not just in Leverage (I know of at least one other prominent example and suspect there are more), so we should definitely watch out for this and/or think how to prevent this kind of thing.
What’s the other prominent example you have in mind?
I am referring the cause of this incident. This seems like a possibly good source for more information, but I only skimmed it so don’t vouch for the content.
Thanks.
Leverage has always been at least socially adjacent to LW and EA (the earliest discussion I find is in 2012), and they hosted the earliest EA summits in 2013-2014 (before CEA started running EA Global).
Having seen it, I have a very vague recollection of maybe having read that at the time. Still, the amount of activity on the recent posts about Leverage seems to me all out of proportion with previous mentions/discussions.
Also, for the extended Leverage diaspora and people who are somehow connected, LessWrong is probably the most obvious place to have this discussion, even if people familiar with Leverage make up only a small proportion of people who normally contribute here.
There are other conversations happening on Facebook and Twitter but they are all way more fragmented than the ones here.
I originally chose LessWrong, instead of some other venue, to host the Common Knowledge post primarily because (1) I wanted to create a publicly-linkable document pseudonymously, and (2) I expected high-quality continuation of information-sharing and collaborative sense-making in the comments.
As someone part of the social communities, I can confirm that Leverage was definitely a topic of discussion for a long time around Rationalists and Effective Altruists. That said, often the discussion went something like, “What’s up with Leverage? They seem so confident, and take in a bunch of employees, but we have very little visibility.” I think I experienced basically the same exact conversation about them around 10 times, along these lines.
As people from Leverage have said, several Rationalists/EAs were very hostile around the topic of Leverage, particularly in the last ~4 years or so. (I’ve heard stories of people getting shouted at just for saying they worked at Leverage at a conference). On the other hand, they definitely had support by a few rationalists/EA orgs and several higher-ups of different kinds.
They’ve always been secretive, and some of the few public threads didn’t go well for them, so it’s not too surprising to me that they’ve had a small LessWrong/EA Forum presence.
I’ve personally very much enjoyed staying mostly staying away from the controversy, though very arguably I made a mistake there.
(I should also note that I had friends who worked at or worked close to Leverage, I attended like 2 events there early on, and I applied to work from there around 6 years ago)
For what it’s worth, my opinion is that you sharing your perspective is the opposite of making a mistake.
Sorry, edited. I meant that it was a mistake for me to keep away before, not now.
(That said, this post is still quite safe. It’s not like I have scandalous information, more that, technically I (or others) could do more investigation to figure out things better.)
Yeah, at this point, everyone coming together to sort this out together as a way of building a virtuous spiral of making speaking up feel safe enough that it doesn’t even need to be a courageous thing to do or whatever is the kind of thing I think your comment also represents and what I was getting at.
A 2012 CFAR workshop included “Guest speaker Geoff Anders presents techniques his organization has used to overcome procrastination and maintain 75 hours/week of productive work time per person.” He was clearly connected to the LW-sphere if not central to it.