The thread seems to be dropping off, but this is gold.

EAs need to downplay climate change because otherwise it becomes really hard to explain why preventing it isn’t the main focus of the organisation, since it should break their utilitarian calculus just as much as imaginary future robots with a hard on for paperclips do, with the additional problem that it would make their relationship with capital providers far more adversarial.

Plus they probably think that if they oppose industrial build out even indirectly it will piss off the basilisk.

Fucking Richard Dawkins has lately been going around saying eugenics work it’s just kind of unethical, we’ll probably get to see a lot of this kind of guy around sadly.

Also people individually and voluntary making reproductive choices is not eugenics, as evidenced by how no one normal actually gives a shit if you are choosing to have children or not. Although I get it’s just OP’s libertarian brainrot that makes them think “state-enforced sterilisation of undesirables” can be interchangeable with everyone magically culturally and voluntarily agreeing to do this one cool thing.

edit: whoops meant for top thread

What is with this attitude of dismissing regular people’s opinions as “feelings” in comparison to their own rationality?

It’s baked into rationality that if you don’t agree with the core tenets of the movement it’s a sign you aren’t doing logic properly being objective enough, so it follows that that’s how they see most people.

Also in this specific instance they need to ignore the decades of concerted efforts by fossil fuel profiteers with more money than god to suppress the science and spread climate denialism, because kissing the ass of the 0.1% happens to be one of those core tenets.

It probably hit the mainstream with AI2040 in early July, but it’s just too rationalist coded for there to not have been precursors.

It came out today that Leopold Aschenbrenner (he of the situational awareness fund implosion fame) was also telling everyone who’d listen about how he was going to be buying up galaxies as soon as AI progress made access to them a piece of cake.

Basically outer space manifest destiny is an important part of AI2040, AI Future’s sort of summer sequel to AI2027, I’d say it appears to be well on its way to become another rationalist Weird Accepted Truth.

The way that they use that term makes it synonymous with Orthodox (“right practices/thinking”).

I mean objectivism was already taken so…

It had disabled safeguards on purpose, left the systems attached to the internet and then let the AI software agents do their worst, while pretending not to notice.

“It’s an ethically challenged publicity stunt,” says one highly experienced senior security expert who has led the development of global technical security standards.

Cats and dogs living together, skepticism of press releases in tech journalism, mass hysteria.

The coverage of the Effective Altruism aspect is also refreshingly uncharitable.

I’m almost sure I’ve seen Yud play the neurodivergent card before, not sure if it was about autism specifically. If @ThinXTanX is right and it’s from well over a decade ago and he’s changed his tune since then I’m sure it’ll come up eventually.

It’s possible Yud’s insistence that nothing works on him because he is a self-acclaimed neurodivergent with “akrasia” and fat-no-matter-what genes skews the overall view of therapeutics in the community

Compelling members to offer up their private lives to the community is in fact certified Cult Shit™️

the great potential of psychological change

Which is a euphemism for success in brainwashing.

Also, having dismissed the entirety of psychology and psychiatry as unscientific, they naturally landed ass first on Jung and Dion Fortune as major points of reference.

Being each other’s therapists

That’s probably a euphemism for levs subjecting each other to hours long so-called debugging sessions, i.e. rationalist flavored scientology auditing.

More mundane cult stuff was also taking place, like keeping everyone constantly exhausted from continuous busywork, while also guilt-tripping them out of having free time and non-cult related interests in general. This seems to be a refrain in other witness testimonies that’s absent in Laurenson’s telling, unless she threw a passing mention somewhere that I didn’t catch.

What it boils down is that it was an actual honest to god cult that was getting tons of EA money to develop a self help system that would turn people into Elon Musks (their go-to example for an apex human). They also came up with a stablecoin and a cryptofash magazine that are both still around, and did a lot of behind the scenes work for EA at large, like getting the ball rolling with organising EA conferences around the world.

I think the reason all these exposés are so tiresome to read is because they tend to focus on the boring cult stuff instead of the bonkers rationalist lore (like how Leverage people were trying to cast HPMOR spells on each other), or the long shadow it casts on our current cultural moment due to its deep influence in the EA/rat subculture, like how Amodei though not a member seemed to be a regular there, Grimes is a contributor to Palladium, ex-levs have launched elite coaching companies that presumably implement lev-tech and so on.

Additionally, in true rationalist fashion nobody was punished and nothing was learned, so the people responsible are still around, still getting Thiel money to do much of the same stuff with probably the same issues, just keeping a lower profile this time.

edit: this is much shorter https://www.todayintabs.com/p/over-leveraged thanks @nfultz@awful.systems

Cool short read, I’d recommend it too.

One notable additional piece of information pointed out here is that after the NYMag thing fell apart she got a $35K grant from what turns out to be a sort of rationalist slush fund to finish the piece. The original contract was for $9500 so it’s possible she came out quite ahead on the deal.

Supposedly a bunch of it went to things that would normally be handled on the publisher’s end, like professional fact checking, but having now read the piece I don’t really know what that would look like. She has Dear Leader Geoff Anders on the record like 16 times (k5 rusty counted) and is consistently pretty uncritical of his claims, AND she’s best friends with most of the “ex”-levs named in the article, like did it take thirty thousand dollars to find out that guru David’s origin story is unsubstantiable bollocks and to triple-double check Zoe’s claim of psychotic breaks? (verdict: when rationalists in a high-control environment get PTSD from seeing and hearing things that aren’t there it’s not a psychotic break but some secret other thing).

Also there’s a bunch of most-important-philosopher-in-history Geoff’s original writings and they are predictably bad and ridiculous:

(article has link to the entire word doc)

Zoe Cursi’s account seems like a far more sober examination of the dynamic

I’ve been reading Zoe’s account and she gives a radically different picture of especially Geoff, just by mentioning stuff he was saying and doing while Leverage was active, instead of focusing on his later heartfelt regrets.

Geoff estimated that there were roughly 10 “super weapons” or “super theories.” He said we already had 1–2, one being we had solved philosophy (but not completely, he admitted — all he had left to do was prove that time exists and maybe a few other details, was what I remember him saying). The second super weapon/theory was that we had the One True Theory of Psychology (this phrase was used regularly by many Leverage members).

Uhhhhhhhhhhh

Within a few months of joining, a supervisor I trusted who had recruited me confided in me privately, “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.”

Hell yeah.

yeah we never find out what Geoff was doing during the Intention Wars.

I’ve been reading Zoe’s account and apparently he was giving talks and presentations about said Intention Objects:

They were considered to be sort of like autonomous psychological bits that you could accidentally or purposefully leave in another person’s mind to affect or control them. If intentional, it might cause them to subtly view you a different way, make more real or less real certain concepts, change their experience of the passage of time, say, or make them more susceptible to mind-reading attempts in the future, etc.

Hard to tell if he was purposely fanning the flames or himself lost in the sauce. Also I called intention objects tulpa knock-offs earlier, but Zoe’s additional details make me think of them more as thetans.

When I first read this I zeroed in on ‘problematic behavior’ to mean anything not matching Geoff’s idea of optimal behavior, in line with rationalist notions of how you can’t really disagree with rat tenets, you can only have bad epistemics that you should fix by reading the sequences and rationalists influencers.

In retrospect, the part where he considers his theory to be a do-over of traditional psychology except we’ll make it scientific this time was probably the more load bearing bit, in the sense that maybe the whole point of Leverage 1.0 was having an isolated group of unsuspecting test subjects on whom he could do experimental psychology on.

Part 5: How it ended

They start making a bunch of money form a third-rate stablecoin while the author claims they invented the concept, and also they decided that to completely get rid of intention objects/tulpas/egregores they had to become traditionally religious, like literally attending catholic mass and sikh study groups.

Just when they almost fold in a non traditional buddhist monk order that apparently turns out to be another, different sa-infested rationalist cult, Geoff decides a restructuring is in order, which amounts to basically dissolving Leverage.

This happens in a sort of ceremony where Geoff unhangs employee portraits while crying all the time, because presenting the cult leader as a sensitive human especially deserving of empathy is very important to this author.

Remaining leveragers form a sort of diaspora in the broader EA/rat community, and also COVID happens. The buddhist cult ends up with the Leverage office building.

For normal people, the following would be a massive conflict of interest statement. For the author, it was Tuesday:

My professional work was on pause, so I spent hundreds — maybe thousands — of hours in 2020-2021 on spiritual practice. In late 2020, I began independently sensing stuff that seemed “demonic” during interactions with some Leveragers, and I felt happy that my Leverage friends seemed able to help me make sense of it.

I arranged my first in-person meeting with Geoff Anders, because I had begun worrying about how the Leverage toolkit might cause harm within my community — especially given that many former Leveragers from the Psychology program became coaches after they left Leverage, and were teaching their methods to an increasingly large number of people.

Queue breakfast club ending: Geoff does some bullshit inquiry and promises to continue learning from the lessons of L1.0, and that he is now monogamous, for real this time. He then promptly started what “some” are describing as Leverage 2.0. Some leverageres from the slovenian’s Psychology group founded Palladium Magazine while others got work as coaches to the elites, occasionally subcontracting stuff to the author, who actually bothers to admit is a conflict of interest this time, albeit in an inline note. Rationalists and EAs gain cultural notoriety due to SBF and AI. We are told things between ex-levs and the broader EA and rat community can be tense due to mutual accusations of cultishness.

The ending is on a super weird note, with ex-lev and close friend of the author Emily Dame waxing poetic about how she’s been reading the bible and her time at Leverage was just like being one of christ’s apostles:

Everyone always talks about the Gospels, but I loved the Letters and the Acts, because I was just like: I was there. This is what Leverage felt like. And in the Acts, there are these moments where, like, Peter heals a lame person using the Holy Spirit, where he just commands the man to get up, and he gets up, and then he’s kind of like: ‘What just happened?’

The final paragraph is basically a restatement of the pitch for Geoff’s connection theory:

“You’re trying to find the language that produces the most consistent effects that allows the good thing to happen — that allows you to talk to your peers — that allows you to keep alive the possibility for the good thing. And it’s like. Well. I totally identify with that.”

All the comments are her ex-lev friends congratulating her.

That’s it.