Copied from the stubsack:
The Inside story of Leverage Research
This should be interesting, it's about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don't know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.
edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.
Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:
I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.
edit edit: Why can't these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020
edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she's Curtis Yarvin's baby momma.
Indexing the read along posts, part titles are from the original:
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 while, 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:
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:
The final paragraph is basically a restatement of the pitch for Geoff's connection theory:
All the comments are her ex-lev friends congratulating her.
That's it.
I'd like to echo YNIH, this has been a wild ride. Thanks for history and the analysis! Reinventing the wheel but worse (i.e. rizzless Scientology) is certainly a trope with our subjects, isnt it?
On a side note, as someone who has enjoyed the occasional temporal lobe seizure, I wonder if Lydia ought to have a quiet word with a neurologist. The déjà vu might be a portent, but not the one you feel that it is.
Thank you for your service in writing up this sneer-a-long and in unearthing this maddening artifact from the unseen cyclopean depths of substack. Zoe Cursi's account seems like a far more sober examination of the dynamic and at least has the decency to treat the extreme distress that this whole thing caused as a problem rather than a sign that there was something powerful at work (that something obviously being the cult dynamic itself). But it's rare to be able to see the inside of a cult from the perspective of a believer like this, and the way that manifests here is fascinating.