I had thought about saying this earlier, for fairness/completeness, but didn’t get around to it. I’ve heard some people feeling wary of speaking positively of Leverage out of vague worry of reprisal.
So… I do want to note
a) I got a lot of personal value from interacting with Geoff personally. In some sense I’m an agent who tries to do ambitious things because of him. He looked at my early projects (Solstice in particular), he understood them, and told me he thought they were valuable. This was an experience that would later feed into my thoughts in this post.
b) I also have gotten some good techniques from the Leverage ecosystem. I’m not 100% sure which ideas came from where, but Belief Reporting in particular has been a valuable tool in my toolkit.
(none of this is meant to be evidence about a bunch of other claims in this thread. Just wanted to somewhat offset the arguments-are-soldiers default)
Piggybacking with additional accurate (albeit somewhat-tangential) positive statements, with a hope of making it seem more possible to say true positive and negative things about Leverage (since I’ve written mostly negative things, and am writing another negative thing as we speak):
The 2014 EA Retreat, run by Leverage, is still by far the best multi-org EA or rationalist event I’ve ever been to, and I think it had lots of important positive effects on EA.
I had thought about saying this earlier, for fairness/completeness, but didn’t get around to it. I’ve heard some people feeling wary of speaking positively of Leverage out of vague worry of reprisal.
So… I do want to note
a) I got a lot of personal value from interacting with Geoff personally. In some sense I’m an agent who tries to do ambitious things because of him. He looked at my early projects (Solstice in particular), he understood them, and told me he thought they were valuable. This was an experience that would later feed into my thoughts in this post.
b) I also have gotten some good techniques from the Leverage ecosystem. I’m not 100% sure which ideas came from where, but Belief Reporting in particular has been a valuable tool in my toolkit.
(none of this is meant to be evidence about a bunch of other claims in this thread. Just wanted to somewhat offset the arguments-are-soldiers default)
Piggybacking with additional accurate (albeit somewhat-tangential) positive statements, with a hope of making it seem more possible to say true positive and negative things about Leverage (since I’ve written mostly negative things, and am writing another negative thing as we speak):
The 2014 EA Retreat, run by Leverage, is still by far the best multi-org EA or rationalist event I’ve ever been to, and I think it had lots of important positive effects on EA.