Thank you for writing this. Leverage was an enormous project, and the more we all can learn from it the better.
I think the biggest place where my perspective is different is that you are coming from a place where you have a really strong belief in the value of the things that Leverage was doing. Something like, it was a group of people who in an unorthodox way made a lot of deep and important discoveries about how people think and relate to each other. Outsiders, however, haven’t seen evidence of these discoveries, and so we pretty much have to take your word for it. In particular, I don’t accept the argument that we should trust that Leverage’s funders were carefully evaluating its output: many funders have a “hits based” approach, and even if they were looking closely, from what I know about them they didn’t have the background to know what was and wasn’t groundbreaking psychology research.
I understand that it’s hard to translate results from a high context environment like Leverage into something that can be shared externally, that the people involved were and remain very busy, and that there are questions about the advisability of sharing specific information. But I also think that in the absence of such sharing us outsiders should remain skeptical.
Thank you for writing this. Leverage was an enormous project, and the more we all can learn from it the better.
I think the biggest place where my perspective is different is that you are coming from a place where you have a really strong belief in the value of the things that Leverage was doing. Something like, it was a group of people who in an unorthodox way made a lot of deep and important discoveries about how people think and relate to each other. Outsiders, however, haven’t seen evidence of these discoveries, and so we pretty much have to take your word for it. In particular, I don’t accept the argument that we should trust that Leverage’s funders were carefully evaluating its output: many funders have a “hits based” approach, and even if they were looking closely, from what I know about them they didn’t have the background to know what was and wasn’t groundbreaking psychology research.
I understand that it’s hard to translate results from a high context environment like Leverage into something that can be shared externally, that the people involved were and remain very busy, and that there are questions about the advisability of sharing specific information. But I also think that in the absence of such sharing us outsiders should remain skeptical.
This comment inspired me to finally write this short piece that I’ve been hoping to write for a few years now.