Aella
As I mentioned in my post, I am good friends with Zoe and I sent her my comment here right after I posted it. She approved.
I feel like here and in so many other comments in this discussion that there’s important and subtle distinctions that are being missed. I don’t have any intention to conditionlessly accept and support all accusations made (I have seen false accusations cause incredible harm and suicidality in people close to me). I do expect people who make serious claims about organizations to be careful about how they do it. I think Zoe’s Leverage post easily met my standard, but that this post here triggered a lot of warning flags for me, and I find it important to pay attention to those.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here—call on Zoe as an authority to disapprove of me? Would it update you at all if the answer was what you doubted?
I don’t think “don’t police victims’ timing” is an absolute rule; not policing the timing is a pretty good idea in most cases. I think this is an exception.
And if I wasn’t clear, I’ll explicitly state my position here: I think it’s good to pay close attention to negative effects communities have on its members, and I am very pro people talking about this, and if people feel hurt by an organization it seems really good to have this publicly discussed.
But I believe the above post did not simply do that. It also did other things, which is frame things I perceive in misleading ways, leave out key information relevant to a discussion (as per Eliezer’s comment here), and also rely very heavily directly on Zoe’s account at Leverage to bring validity to their own claims when I perceive Leverage as have been being both significantly worse and worse in a different category of way. If the above post hadn’t done these things, I don’t think I would have any issue with the timing.
Scott’s comment does seem to verify the “insular rationalist group gets weird and experiences rash of psychotic breaks” trend, but it seems to be a different group than the one named in the original post.
I… think I am trying to attack the bad people? I’m definitely conflict-oriented around Leverage; I believe that on some important level treating that organization or certain people in it as good-intentioned-but-misguided is a mistake, and a dangerous one. I don’t think this is true for MIRI/CFAR; as is summed up pretty well in the last section of Orthonormal’s post here. I’m down for the boundaries of the discussion being determined by the scope of the problem, but I perceive the original post here to be outside the scope of the problem.
I’m also not sure how to engage with your last sentence. I do have theories for what is going on (but regardless I’m not sure if you give a mob a theory that makes it not a mob).
I find something in me really revolts at this post, so epistemic status… not-fully-thought-through-emotions-are-in-charge?
Full disclosure: I am good friends with Zoe; I lived with her for the four months leading up to her post, and was present to witness a lot of her processing and pain. I’m also currently dating someone named in this post, but my reaction to this was formed before talking with him.
First, I’m annoyed at the timing of this. The community still seems in the middle of sensemaking around Leverage, and figuring out what to do about it, and this post feels like it pulls the spotlight away. If the points in the post felt more compelling, then I’d probably be more down for an argument of “we should bin these together and look at this as a whole”, but as it stands the stuff listed in here feels like it’s describing something significantly less damaging, and of a different kind of damage. I’m also annoyed that this post relies so heavily on Zoe’s, and the comparison feels like it cheapens what Zoe went through. I keep having a recurring thought that the author must have utterly failed to understand the intensity of the very direct impact from Leverage’s operations on Zoe. Most of my emotions here come from a perception that this post is actively hurting a thing I value.
Second, I suspect this post makes a crucial mistake in mistaking symptoms for the cause. Or, rather, I think there’s a core inside of what made Leverage damaging, and it’s really really hard to name it. Zoe’s post seemed like a good effort to triangulate it, but this above post feels like it focuses on the wrong things, or a different brand of analogous things, without understanding the core of what Zoe was trying to get at. Missing the core of the post is an easy mistake to make, given how it’s really hard to name directly, but in this case I’m particularly sensitive to the analogy seeming superficial, given how much this post seems to be relying on Zoe’s post for validation.
One example for this is comparing Zoe’s mention of someone at Leverage having a psychotic break to the author having a psychotic break. But Zoe’s point was that Leverage treated the psychotic break as an achievement, not that the psychotic break happened.
Third, and I think this has been touched on by other comments, is that this post feels… sort of dishonest to me? I feel like something is trying to get slipped into my brain without me noticing. Lots of parts the post sort of implicitly presents things as important, or asks you to draw conclusions without explicitly pointing out those conclusions. I might be… overfitting or tryin to see a thing because I’m emotionally charged, but I’m gonna attempt to articulate the thing anyway:
For example, the author summarizes Zoe as saying that Leverage considered Geoff Anders to be extremely special, e.g. Geoff being possibly a better philosopher than Kant.
In Zoe’s post, her actual quote is of a Leverage person saying “I think there’s good reason to believe Geoff is the best philosopher who’s ever lived, better than Kant. I think his existence on earth right now is an historical event.”
This is small but an actually important difference, and has the effect of slightly downplaying Leverage.
The author here then goes on to say that she doesn’t remember anyone saying Eliezer was a better philosopher than Kant, but that she guesses people would say this, and then points out probably nobody at MIRI read Kant.
The effect of this is it asks the reader to associate perception of Eliezer’s status with Geoff’s (both elevated) by drawing the comparison of Kant to Eliezer (that hadn’t actually been drawn before), and then implies rationalists being misinformed (not reading Kant).
This is arguably a really uncharitable read, and I’m not very convinced it’s ‘true’, but I think the ‘effect’ is true; as in, this is the impression I got when reading quickly the first time. And the impression isn’t supported in the rest of the words, of course—the author says they don’t have reason to believe MIRI people would view Eliezer as more relevant than philosophers they respected, and that nobody there really respected Kant. But the general sense I get from the overall post is this type of pattern, repeated over and over—a sensation of being asked to believe something terrible, and then when I squint the words themselves are quite reasonable. This makes it feel slippery to me, or I feel like I’ve been struck from behind and when I turn around there’s someone smiling as they’re reaching out to shake my hand.
And to be clear, I don’t think all the comparisons are wrong, or that there’s nothing of value here. It can be super hard to sensemake with confusing narrative stuff, and there’s inevitably going to be some clumsiness in attempting to do it. I think it’s worthwhile and important to be paying close attention to the ways organizations might be having adverse effects on their members, particularly in our type of communities, and I support pointing out even small things and don’t want people to feel like they’re making too big a deal out of something not. But the way this deal is made bothers me, and I feel defensive and have stories in me about this doing more harm than good.
Would you happen to have/be willing to share those emails?
Saw it immediately after I posted, will draft this ty
Here’s a long, detailed account of a Leverage experience which, to me, reads as significantly more damning than the above post: https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b
Yeah, ‘cult’ is a vague term often overused. Yeah, a lot of rationality norms can be viewed as cultish.
How would you suggest referring to an ‘actual’ cult—or, if you prefer not to use that term at all, how would you suggest we describe something like scientology or nxivm? Obviously those are quite extreme, but I’m wondering if there is ‘any’ degree of group-controlling traits that you would be comfortable assigning the word cult to? Or if I refer to scientology as a cult, do you consider this an out-grouping power move used to distance people from scientology’s perspective?
Wanna +1 all these things are points I’ve heard from people who were at Leverage, also. I also have a more negative opinion of Leverage than might be implied by the points alone, for the record.
I’m not sure if you’ve tried psychedelics. Psychedelics have very different effects on people, but I was very lucky; on me they produced exactly the effect you described—reducing my mental processes to far more granular levels. I did psychedelics enough that now this type of ‘unfusing’ process feels somewhere between ‘default’ to ‘always present but sleeping’ to me. I feel rendered mute when trying to talk about this, because this topic triggers a strong inability in myself to remain fused with the thoughts I am trying to handle. It also makes me cry, which makes discussions awkward.
I’ve spent a lot of time in rationalist communities trying (and failing) to talk about this topic (cause of the crying). Reading stuff like this makes me feel a lot of emotions and gives me a desire to be around you and Valentine and the others who are saying similar things.
-edit: did not know about the pm feature
I perceive you as doing a conversational thing here that I don’t like, where you like… imply things about my position without explicitly stating them? Or talk from a heavy frame that isn’t explicit?
Which stated intentions? Where she asks people ‘not to bother those who were there’? What thing do you think I want to do that Zoe doesn’t want me to do?
Are you claiming I am advocating violence? Or simply implying it?
Are you trying to argue that I shouldn’t be conflict oriented because Zoe doesn’t want me to be? The last part feels a little weird for someone to tell me, as I’m good friends with Zoe and have talked with her extensively about this.
I support revealing problems so people can understand and solve them. I also don’t like whatever is happening in this original article due to reasons you haven’t engaged with.
You’re saying transforming an attempt to discuss abuse into scapegoating silences victims, keeps other ppl from evaluating the content, and simplifies it a bid to make someone the enemy. But in the comment you were responding to, I was talking about Leverage, not the author of this post. I view Leverage and co. as bad actors, but you sort of… reframe it to make it sound like I’m using a conflict mindset towards Jessica?
You’re also not engaging with the points I made, and you’re responding to arguments I don’t condone.
I don’t really view you as engaging in good faith at this point, so I’m precommitting not to respond to you after this.