I want to throw out that while I am usually SUPER on team “explicit communication norms”, the rule-nuances of the hardest cases might sometimes work best if they are a little chaotic & idiosyncratic.
I personally think there might be something mildly-beneficial and protective, about having “adversarial case detected” escape-clauses that vary considerably from person-to-person.
(Otherwise, a smart lawful adversary can reliably manipulate the shit out of things.)
I also have a deep appreciation, for Zoe calling out that different corners of Leverage had very different experiences with it. Because they did! Not all time-slices or sub-groups within it experienced the same problems.
This is probably part of why it was so easy, to systematically play people’s personal experiences against each other: Since he knew the context through which Leverage was experienced, Geoff or others could systematically bias whose reports were heard.
(Although I think it will be harder in the future to engage in this kind of bullshit, now that a lot of people are aware of the pattern.)
To those who had one of the better firsthand experiences of Leverage:
I am still interested in hearing your bit! But if you are only engaging with this due to an inducement that probably includes a sampling-bias, I appreciate you including that detail.
(And I am glad to see people in this broader thread, being generally open about that detail.)
Since it sounds like just-upvotes might not be as strong a signal of endorsement as positive engagement...
I want to say that I really appreciate and respect that you were willing to come forward, with facts that were broadly-known in your social graph, but had been systematically excluded from most people’s models.
And you were willing to do this, in a pretty adversarial environment! You had to deal with a small invisible intellectual cold-war that ensured, almost alone, without backing down. This counts for even more.
I do have a little bit of sensitive insider information, and on the basis of that: Both your posts and Zoe’s have looked very good-faith to me.
In a lot of places, they accord with or expand on what I know. There are a few parts I was not close enough to confirm, but they have broadly looked right to me.
I was very up-front about the role I am attempting to embody in this: Relating to, and trying to serve, people with complicated opinions who are finding it hard to talk about this.
I feel we needed someone to take this role. I wish someone had done it for me, when my stuff happened.
You seem to not understand that I am making this statement, from that place and in that capacity.
Try seeing it through through the lens of that, rather than thinking that I’m making confident statements about your epistemic creepiness.
Hopefully this helps to resolve your confusion.
I get VERY creepy vibes from this proposal, and want to push back hard on it.
Although, hm… I think “lying” and “enemy action” are different?
Enemy action occasionally warrants breaking contracts back, after they didn’t respect yours.
Whereas if there is ZERO lying-through-negligence in accounts of PERSONAL EXPERIENCES, we can be certain we set the bar-of-entry far too high.
On mediators and advocates: I think order-of-operations MATTERS.
You can start seeking truth, and pivot to advocate, as UOC says.
What people often can’t do easily is start with advocate, and pivot to truth.
And with something like this? What you advocated early can do a lot to color both what and who you listen to, and who you hear from.
I hesitated a bit before saying this? I thought it might add a little bit of clarity, so I figured I’d bring it up.
(Sorry it got long; I’m still not sure what to cut.)
There are definitely some needs-conflicts. Between (often distant) people who, in the face of this, feel the need to cling to the strong reassurance that “this could not possibly happen to them”/”they will definitely be protected from this,” and would feel reassured at seeing Strong Condemning Action as soon as possible...
...and “the people who had this happen.” Who might be best-served, if they absorbed that there is always some risk of this sort of shit happening to people. For them, it would probably be best if they felt their truth was genuinely heard, and took away some actionable lessons about what to avoid, without updating their personal identity to “victim” TOO much. And in the future, embraced connections that made them more robust against attaching to this sort of thing in the future.
(“Victim” is just not a healthy personal identity in the long-term, for most people.)
Sometimes, these needs are so different, that it warrants having different forums of discussion. But there is some overlap in these needs (working out what happened, improving reporting, protecting people from cultish reprisals), and I’m not sure that separation is always necessary.
My read of the direction Anna seems to be trying to steer this is “do everything she can to clearly hear out people’s stories carefully First.” Only later, after people have really really listened, use that to formulate carefully considered harm-reducing actions.
Understanding the issue, in all its complexity, before working on coming up with solutions? I feel pretty on-board with that.
...I admit, I initially chaffed a bit? I have some memories of times Anna has leaned a bit more into the former-group’s needs. Some of her attempts to aim differently this time, have felt a little awkward.
I did also get an “ordering other people to ignore politics and be vulnerable” vibe off this, which put my armor up to around my ears. (Something with more of a feel of… “showing own vulnerability to elicit other’s vulnerability,” would have generally felt more natural to me? I think her later responses cycled to this, a little).
...but I’m starting to think that even the awkwardness, is its own sort of evidence? Of someone who is used to wielding frame control, trying to put it aside to listen. And I feel a lot of affection, in seeing it show that she’s working on this.
I was once in a similar position, due to my proximity to a past (different) thing. I kinda ended up excruciatingly sensitive, to how some things might read or feel to someone who was close, got a lot of good out of it (with or without the bad), and mostly felt like there was no way their account wouldn’t be twisted into something unrecognizable. And who may be struggling, with processing an abrupt shift in their own personal narrative—although I sincerely hope the 2 years of processing helped to make this less of a thing? But if you are going through it anyway, I am sorry.
And… I want this to go right. It didn’t go right then; not entirely. I think I got yelled at by someone I respect, the first time I opened up about it. I’m not quite sure how to make this less scary for them? But I want it to be.
The people I know who got swept up in this includes some exceptionally nice people. There is at least one of them, who I would ordinarily call exceptionally sane. Please don’t feel like you’re obligated to identify as a bad person, or as a victim, because you were swept up in this. Just because some people might say it about you, doesn’t make it who you are.
I will talk about my own bit with Leverage later, but I don’t feel like it’s the right time to share it yet.
(But fwiw: I do have some scars, here. I have a little bit of skin in this one. But most of what I’m going to talk about, comes from analogizing this with a different incident.)
A lot of the position I naturally slide into around this, which I have… kind of just embraced, is of trying to relate hard to the people who:
WERE THERE
May have received a lot of good along with the bad
May have developed a very complicated and narratively-unsatisfying opinion because of that, which feels hard to defend
Are very sensitized to condemning mob-speak. Because they’ve been told, again and again, that anything good they got out of the above, will be swept out with the bathwater if the bad comes to light.
This sort of thing only stays covered up for this long, if there was a lot of pressure and plausible-sounding arguments pointing in the direction of “say nothing.” The particular forms of that, will vary.
Core Leverage seems pretty willing to resort to manipulation and threats? And despite me generally trying so hard to avoid this vibe: I want to condemn that outright.
Also, in any other circumstance: Most people are very happy to condemn people who break strong secrecy agreements that they’ve made. If you feel like you’ve made one, I recognize that this is not easy to defy.
(My own part in this story is small. The only reason I’m semi-comfortable with sharing it, is because I got all of my own “vaguely owning the fact that I broke a very substantial secrecy agreement, publicly, to all my friends” out of the way EARLY. It would be bogging me down like crazy, otherwise. I respect Zoe, and others, for defying comparable pulls, or even worse ones.)
If you’re stuck on this bit, I would like to say: This is an exceptional circumstance. You should maybe talk to somebody, eventually. Maybe only once your own processing has settled down. Publicly might not be the right call for you, and I won’t push for it. Please take care for yourself, and try to be careful to pick someone who is not especially prone to demonizing things.
People can feel their truth drowned out by mobs of uninvested people, condemning it from afar.
The people who know what happened here, are in the minority. They have the most knowledge of what actually happened, and the most skin in this. They are also the people with the most to fear, and the most to lose.
People often don’t appreciate, how much the sheer numbers game can weigh on you. It can come to feel like the chorus is looming over you, in this sort of circumstance; poised, always ready to condemn you and yours from afar. Each individual member is only “speaking-their-truth” once, but in aggregate, they can feel like an army.
It’s hard to keep appropriate sight of the fact that the weight of the people who were there, and their story, are probably worth 1000x as much as even the most coherent but distant and un-invested condemning statement. They will not get as many shares. It might not even qualify as a story! But their contributions are worth a lot more, at least in my mind. Because they were THERE.
And I… want to stick up for them where relevant? Because this one wasn’t my incident, but I know how hard it might be for them to do it for themselves. I can’t swear I will do a good job of it? But the desire is there.
I do think a more-private forum, that is enriched for people who were closer to the event, might be a more comfortable place for some people to recount. It’s part of why I tried to talk up that possibility, in another thread.
...it is unfortunately not my place to make this, though. For various reasons, which feel quite solid, to me.
(And after Ryan’s account? I honestly have some concerns about it getting infiltrated by one of the more manipulative people around Leverage. I don’t want to discount that fear! I still think it might be a good idea?)
I do think we could stand to have a clearer route for things to be shared anonymously, because I suspect at least some people would be more comfortable that way.
(Since “attempts at deanonymization” appears to be a known issue, it may be worth having a flag for “only share as numeric aggregations of >1, using my recounting as a data-point.”)
EDITEDIT: This press release names Anna Salamon, Eli Tyre, Matthew Graves, and Matt Falshaw as several somewhat-intermediary people who can be contacted. I feel fewer misgivings around contacting them, than I did around the proposal of contacting Geoff and Larissa to handle this internally.
I had to read this a few times before I pieced it together, so I wanted to make sure to clarify this publicly.
You are NOT saying this public forum is the place for that. Correct?
You are proposing that it might be nice, if someone else pulled this together?
Perhaps as something like a carefully-moderated facebook group, or an event.
(I think this would require a good moderator, or it will generate more drama than it solves. It would have to be someone who does NOT have “Leverage PR firm vibes,” and needs a lot of early clarity about who will not be invited. Also? Work out early what your privacy policy is! And be clear about how much it intends to be reports-oriented or action-oriented, and do not change that status later. People sometimes make these mistakes, and it’s awful.)
Because on the off-chance that you didn’t mean that...
I did have some contact with the Leverage strangeness here. But despite that, I have remarkably few social ties that would keep me from “saying what I think about it.” I still feel seriously reluctant to get into it, on a public forum like this. I imagine that some others would have an even harder time.
Bits of koan that dropped into my head.
The sort-of-mathematical phrasing I might use to describe the copy-machine copy is “a slice of a flat diagonal hyperplane, with both time and space components.”
The second question is a sort of “oh, I guess this gesture has a few useful-to-think-about analogs in real life.”
A copy machine copies a 5 minute video over time, going line by line, one line per second. Every pixel it sees, it copies perfectly. Is it an accurate copy?
A teacher teaches a student every thing the teacher knows, building up from basic to advanced knowledge over the course of years. At each weekly lesson, the student learns the planned material perfectly. That exact topic is never revisited again.
By the end of the last class, does the student know and understand everything the teacher knows?
It has been about a year, so here’s an update.
The initial things that drew me to TiddlyWiki are still covered in this post, and still basically true.
I still love using TW, and it’s still my main personal notetaking software. Since this post, I have gone through at least 3 cycles of feeling further charmed by it, after discovering it had some additional functionality that I didn’t know it surfaced (ex: the ctrl-E “Excise & Transclude” shortcut, easy palette-swapping, changing the journal datetime format, Github saving, easy export to JSON). I’ve only run into 1 new point of disappointment: its multi-person editing inadequacies.
It has a really good hackability philosophy. TW seems to surface everything it possibly can to deliberate modification, and then tries to make modifying it easy. The software is hackable, old, and a decent number of programmers like it, so the add-on ecosystem is pretty informal but really great.
(Unfortunately, I can’t compare it with Roam’s current ecosystem, because I haven’t tried Roam recently. My fuzzy and weakly-held impression is that TW leans harder towards amazing self-contained functionalities, personalization, and a culture of casual hacking & sharing. While Roam seems better with chrome extensions, the external-facing APIs of other software, and being intuitive to use for non-programmers. I am curious what other people’s impressions are.)
Between satisfaction with TW’s basic offerings, and a good add-on environment, I have basically gone from “trying new notetaking software all the time,” to “notetaking-monogamous for 2+ years.”
Notably, my typical response to finding something else that I want my notes to do has changed from “finding a new software suite,” to “sketching what I want as a spec, then hunting for an TW add-on or function that does that thing.” In some rare cases, I’ve even written basic implementations myself. The software has done a fabulous job of rising to my growing demands of it.
(To give some idea of the diversity of things out there: There’s a TW GTD implementation, Roam-inspired TW variant, TW slide shows, calendar things, timers, several varieties of TW as a code-highlighter (ex: codemirror), some flashcard things, graphs… this list is long. A few TW environments or add-ons barely resemble their starting point in anything but philosophy, and might qualify as full-blown web-apps.)
So, a new thing I recognize as very valuable, if you want a system to grow with you: A good add-on ecosystem!
This thing wasn’t in my old list of desirables, but I wish it was: I feel horrified in retrospect that I ever put up with a knowledge-base software that didn’t have transclude or lists-from-tag-filters baked in. It saves me a lot of time and frustration to have large chunks of my overview notes use pointers to update themselves.
Something TW isn’t good at: With TW, it doesn’t look like I can set it up so that 2 people can modify the same file at once. I ended up settling for Github merges. It looks like a few people have gotten part of the way to making this dream work, but there is a lot of set-up required to run it, and it doesn’t seem to be able to do this yet anyway. (This difficulty is a serious drawback of the self-contained single-file philosophy TW has.)
As someone who has helped run events, I do assume that “loud noises, firearms, and occupying streets without a permit are illegal” probably accounts for a lot of it. Maybe also “people have other means of advertising available,” if military, political, or store advertising did a lot to prop up the industries surrounding this.
But here’s another one I thought of: Taking weekends off wasn’t really standardized in the US until about 1940. When were vacation days standardized? Is it possible that in the absence of a strictly standardized set of days you have off, this becomes a great excuse to take a day off, and that this partially accounted for their size and grandeur?
Maybe people had big celebrations, in part to give a sufficiently strong informal mark of social validation to something being a “holiday?” Only nowadays, that doesn’t get you anything much.
(Fortunately, I think this one is easy to test: If these parades were usually on Sundays, I think this doesn’t hold up as an explanation.)
This could be the flip-side of the flashcard-set you’re selling, and I enjoyed learning that Wikipedia included lists like these:
The relevant list of lists probably covers several more, although most don’t seem to be following the “Named” naming convention. At a glance I’m seeing...
It’s sorta non-obvious. I kinda poked at this for hours, at some point? It took a while for me to settle on a model I liked for this.
Here’s the full notes for what I came up with.
Physics: Feels close. Hm… biological life as a self-compiler on a physics substrate?
DNA or gametes seem really close to a “quine” for this: plug it into the right part of an active compiler, and it outputs many instances of its own code + a customized compiler. Although it crashes/gets rejected if the compiler is too different (ex: plant & animal have different regulatory markers & different sugar-related protein modifications).
I don’t have a fixed word for the “custom compiler” thing yet (“optimized compiler”? “coopted compiler”? “spawner”? “Q-spawner”?). I have seen analogous stuff in other places, and I’m tempted to call it a somewhat common pattern, though. (ex: vertically-transmitted CS compiler corruption, or viruses producing tumor micro-environments that are more favorable to replicating the virus)
An unusual mathematical-leaning definition of a living thing.
(Or, to be more precise… a potential living immortal? A replicon? Whatever.)
A self-replicating physical entity with...
Quine: Contains the code to produce itself
Parser: A parser for that code
Code includes instructions for the parser; ideally, compressed instructions
Power: Actively running (probably on some substrate)
Not actively running is death, although for some the death is temporary.
Access to resources may be a subcomponent of this?
Substrate: A material that can be converted into more self
Possibly a multi-step process
Access to resources is probably a component of this
Translator: Converts quine into power, or vice-versa
Not always necessary; sometimes a quine is held as power, not substrate
Parser and Code: the information can actually be stored on either; you can extract the correct complex signal from complete randomness using an arbitrarily-complex parser chosen for that purpose. There are analogies that can be drawn in the other direction, too: a fairly dumb parser can make fairly complicated things, given enough instructions. (Something something Turing Machines)
Ideally, though, they’re well-paired and the compression method is something sensible, to reduce complexity.
A quine by itself has only a partial life; it is just its own code, it requires a parser to replicate.
(If you allow for arbitrarily complex parsers, any code could be a quine, if you were willing to search for the right parser.)
Compilers are… parsers? (Or translators?)
It is possible for what was “code” information to be embedded into the parser. I think this is part of what happens when you completely integrate parts in IFS.
I’m less clear on what’s important about power? Things to poke: Power, Electicity, Energy (& time-as-the-entropy-direction?). Animating. Continuity, Boltzmann brains, and “Is it frozen/discontinuous relative to this frame of time/reference?” (Permutation City). What is Death? (vs Life, or vs a frozen/cryonic quine)
Example replicons: A bacterium, a cell, a clonal organism, a pair of opposite-sexed humans (but not a single), self-contained repeating Game of Life automata, the eventual goal of RepRap (a 3D printer fully producing a copy of itself)
Viruses: Sometimes quines, sometimes pre-quine and translator
A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
-- Daniel Dennett
The distinctive thing about Lisp is that its core is a language defined by writing an interpreter in itself. It wasn’t originally intended as a programming language in the ordinary sense. It was meant to be a formal model of computation, an alternative to the Turing machine. If you want to write an interpreter for a language in itself, what’s the minimum set of predefined operators you need? The Lisp that John McCarthy invented, or more accurately discovered, is an answer to that question.
-- What I Worked On, Paul Graham
Related: Self-Reference, Post-Irony, Hofstadter’s Strange Loop, Turing Machine, Automata (less-so), deconstruction (less-so)
Is a cryonics’d human a quine? (wrt future technology)
The definition of parasite used in Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of parasites is literally quines.
(Complex multi-step life-cycle in the T5 case, though?. The quine produced a bare-bones quine-compiling “spawner” when it interacts with the wild-type, and then replicates on that. Almost analogous to CS viruses that infect the compiler, and any future compiler compiled by that compiler.)
Process is Art: Is art that demonstrates how to craft the art, a quine on a human compiler?
Some connection to: Compartmentalization (Black Box Testing, unit tests, separation of software components) and the “swappability” of keeping things general and non-embedded, with clearly-marked and limited interface-surfaces (APIs). Generates pressure against having “arbitrary compilers” in practice.
DNA is a quine, when processed by DNA Replicase.
Although with a sufficiently complex (or specific) compiler or processor, any arbitrary stream of information can be made into a quine.
You can embed information in either of instructions/substrate, or compiler/processor. Quines usually seem limited to describing instructions/substrate, but that’s not the only place information can be drawn from. I’ve kinda come to think of it as 2-term operation (ex: “this bit of quine code is a quine wrt python”).
(More physical quines: Ink scribbles on a sheet of paper are a quine wrt a copy-machine. At about the far-end of “replicative complexity gets stored in the processor,” you have the “activated button” of a button-making machine (which activates with a button, and outputs buttons in an active state). I think the “activated button” here is either a quine, or almost a quine.)
The cool thing about life is that it it is both a quine, and its own processor. (And also, sorta its own power source.)
I find it simpler to call systems like this “living” (at least while active/functional), since they’re meaningfully more than just quines.
Viruses are definitely quines, though. Viruses and plasmids are non-living quines that compile and run on living biological systems.
One little drawback of ThoughtSaver (although I generally like the idea!)...
The fact that I reclustered these right away, means I had better retention for the leaf-related questions but got annoyed whenever the cluster-branch questions came up. Memorizing how you had phrased it was sometimes in conflict with remembering a more useful clustering, for me.
I don’t know how to build things that are resilient to this, but I wanted at least some awareness of this problem.
I appreciate hearing from you about some of what you probably got wrong.
I’m pretty sure that a lot of this started out relatively benignly, and spiraled?
I agree with your impression that arrogance was at least one of several pressures that made it hard to see that things were going in a bad direction. A lot of invisible guard-rails were dropped or traded away over time, and the absence of a certain amount of reality-checking made it very hard to fix after things had veered off the rails.
I hope your account contributes to making people less likely to make similar errors in the future.
(I would also be very unhappy, if I ever saw you having a substantial amount of power over people again though, fwiw.)