Upvoted because Anna articulated a lot of what I wanted to say but didn’t have the energy or clarity to say with such nuance.
Freyja
Karma: 378
Thank you for keeping that promise; I imagine it wasn’t easy to write.
I wouldn’t, but I also wouldn’t consider that to be the case for many of the speculative startups I’ve worked at, in hindsight.
I consider ‘wasting millions of dollars’ to be a shitty thing to do, but also unfortunately common. I think focusing on whether the money was wasted is distracting (and perhaps dismissive) away from the stories being told.
This may be a crux; Walter may just value personal suffering versus use of economic resources differently to me.
I feel like if you read Zoe’s medium post, read the parts where she described enduring cPTSD symptoms like panic attacks, flashbacks and paranoia consistently for two years after leaving Leverage, and then rounded that off to ‘she felt useless and bailed’ then, idk dude, we live in two different worlds.
I would also be very interested in a timeline for this.
I really don’t know about the experience of a lot of the other ex-Leveragers, but the time it took her to post it, the number and kind of allies she felt she needed before posting it, and the hedging qualifications within the post itself detailing her fears of retribution, plus just how many peoples’ initial responses to the post were to applaud her courage, might give you a sense that Zoe’s post was unusually, extremely difficult to make public, and that others might not have that same willingness yet (she even mentions it at the bottom, and presumably she knows more about how other ex-Leveragers feel than we do).
I’m someone with a family history of psychosis and I spend quite a lot of time researching it—treatments, crisis response, cultural responses to it. There are roughly the same number of incidences of psychosis in my immediate to extended family than are described in this post in the extended rationalist community. Major predictive factors include stress, family history and use of marijuana (and, to a lesser extent, other psychedelics). I don’t have studies to back this up but I have an instinct based on my own experience that openness-to-experience and risk-of-psychosis are correlated in family risk factors. So given the drugs, stress and genetic openness, I’d expect generic Bay Area smart people to have a fairly high risk of psychosis compared to, say, people in more conservative areas already.
You might not be able to say this, but I’m wondering whether it’s one of the NDAs Zoe references Geoff pressuring people to sign at the end of Leverage 1.0 in 2019,
It seems like one of the problems with ‘the Leverage situation’ is that collectively, we don’t know how bad it was for people involved. There are many key Leverage figures who don’t seem to have gotten involved in these conversations (anonymously or not) or ever spoken publicly or in groups connected to this community about their experience. And, we have evidence that some of them have been hiding their post-Leverage experiences from each other.
So I think making the claim that the MIRI/CFAR related experiences were ‘worse’ because there exists evidence of psychiatric hospitalisation etc is wrong and premature.
And also? I’m sort of frustrated that you’re repeatedly saying that -right now-, when people are trying to encourage stories from a group of people who we might expect to have felt insecure, paranoid, and gaslit about whether anything bad ‘actually happened’ to them.
I am also mad at what I see to be piggybacking on Zoe’s post, downplaying of the harms described in her post, and a subtle redirection of collective attention away from potentially new, timid accounts of things that happened to a specific group of people within Leverage and seem to have a lot of difficulty talking about it.
I hope that the sustained collective attention required to witness, make sense of and address the accounts of harm coming out of the psychology division of Leverage doesn’t get lost as a result of this post being published when it was.
Hi Geoff—have you posted the brief response comment anywhere yet?
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.
This is great, and straightforward, and I’m glad you joined the conversation. Thank you.
I think the fact that it is now a four person remote organization doing mostly research on science as opposed to an often-live-in organization with dozens of employees doing intimate psychological experiments as well as following various research paths tells me that you are essentially a different organization and the only commonalities are the name and the fact that Geoff is still the leader.
I have a sincere question for you, Kerry, because you seem to be upset by the approach commenters here are taking to talking about this issue and the people involved, and people here are openly discussing the character of your employer, which I can imagine to be really painful.
If your sister or brother or your significant other had become enmeshed in a controlling group and you believed the group and in particular its leader had done them serious psychological harm, how would you want people to talk about the group and its leader in public, after the fact? What sorts of discussions, comments or questions would you consider reasonable or necessary under such circumstances, and what would you consider off the table?
(Specifically, I’m not focused on whether you believe Leverage 1.0 had those characteristics, but how you would respond towards a group and its leader that you personally believed -did- have these characteristics)
Yup. I have known all of these things since 2018-2019, and know or know of maybe a few dozen people who also know these things. I’m glad this bare minimum is being discussed openly, publicly.
Secondhand, I have a very negative view of at least some parts of what happened in Leverage 1.0. My best guess is that the relationships and events that some people have (mostly privately) described as controlling or abusive were not evenly distributed across the whole organisation. So it would have been straightforward for someone to be working at Leverage and never see or get deeply involved with situations that a handful of people have, in private or in semi-public conversations, described clearly as cultic abuse. It seems like there are on the order of dozens of people who probably had a roughly fine time being involved in Leverage for many years, and at least a handful of people who report much more negative experiences.
(I’m @utotranslucence on Twitter; never officially had a LessWrong account before but been around the Bay Area community since 2017. I attended one Paradigm training weekend in early 2018 and some parties at the Lake Merritt building but most of my knowledge comes from conversations with friends who did work there, and there are plenty of things I still don’t know with great clarity.)
Hi Cathleen. As someone inadvertently but meaningfully once tangled up in this story who you probably don’t know, I have a deep admiration, gratitude and respect for this post and your decision to write it and post it publicly. I read all of it, and might yet read it again. It helped to make sense of the story and the parts relevant to me in a way that is, in real time, updating and improving my understanding of how different people with different personalities can participate in the same situation and come out of it with different struggles and different earned wisdom. Yours is a perspective I’ve been missing, so thank you for having the courage and grace to share it.