SneerClub

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:

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.

Part 4: Intention War

Where a rationalist bubble of impressionable young pranayama (and possibly psychedelics) enthusiasts after having pinballed from one guru to the next for a while enter the yes-and phase and reinvent tulpas from first principles.

It's kind of interesting in that while they have noticed that these experiences occur only when being prompted by other Leveragers, instead of thinking that maybe the vibes in this place are completely fucked in the causing bad trips sort of way and maybe the main thing Connection Theory is good for is making you really vulnerable to outside influence, they interpreted it as a psychic contagion that they need to keep contained from the outside world and so double down on the isolation.

As Tee’s subgroup began to fear malign intention objects more and more, it became hard for him to maintain relationships with people outside the subgroup. Tee says that colleagues told him that “I was unintentionally passing intention objects, sort of like a germ.”

Things seem to be falling apart since an overabundance of caution of not catching a malevolent 'intention' makes communication and organisation difficult. Can't wait to find out what Geoff's been doing during all this time, since a big problem here seems to be how completely lost and lacking general direction everyone seems to be. Is this like his version of a stanford prison experiment type situation? edit: yeah we never find out what Geoff was doing during the Intention Wars.

After months of PTSD inducing anxiety they finally grow out of this phase by employing the dark magic of interorganizational meetings and actually talking things out:

We tried to create a clearinghouse and some shared language for it.” They “found that the contagions were generally working on specific emotional vulnerabilities, psychological vulnerabilities. If you looked at a particular case, and found out what the vulnerability was, you could basically proactively talk to people about those psychological vulnerabilities and have them do a little bit of trauma work or do a little bit of spiritual — whatever their favorite modality was, and basically get an immunity.”

In other words: Some Leveragers spent months, even subsequent years, interrogating their own and each other’s minds, convinced that finding and healing their own psychic vulnerabilities was the best way to prevent the spread of dangerous psychological material. Regardless of its accuracy, this mentality may have contributed to PTSD symptoms. As Zoe Curzi later wrote about her Leverage time: “I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded.”

Some yada yada about carl jung and mah taboo subjects of research, on to the next part.

Part 3 Part 2

L1.0 seems to slowly be turning into Hogwarts with everyone going all in on various occult practices they find in mythology and fairy tales. They are still hiring at this point, so it's entirely possible your first meeting as a new hire could be about carrying around iron nails to ground your spiritual energy.

As shocked newcomers tried to process what they were hearing, Emily cried.

The author makes sure we know that Nevin things that while the ultimate practicality of all this may have been dubious, “Had the research continued, they would have ultimately done, I think, a very good job of making sense of the area and coming up with theories and testing them.” So it's almost fine I guess.

Then she goes on to describe obvious cult shenanigans like the leader sexing whoever he wants in the most ~~oblivious~~ ~~whitewashy~~ ~~irresponsible~~ uncritical way possible:

Most of the dramatic events at Leverage can be framed as totally mundane — as resulting from humans doing human things in an unwise manner. After all, it was a workplace where many employees lived together, and had multiple overlapping romantic relationships with their colleagues, while also essentially acting as each other’s therapists. One especially intense incident occurred in early 2018.

[Dear Leader] Geoff had long had open relationships around Leverage. Generally, his relationships were fairly transparent both to their participants and to other Leveragers. But at the beginning of April 2018, one person Geoff was involved with, who was also his employee, found out that he’d gotten into a secret romance with another colleague he practiced bodywork with. The revelation left those around Geoff reeling — in some cases merely confused; in others, betrayed and devastated.

But don't worry, Geoff feels bad about it, whatever it was, I would think simply stepping out on the workplace polycule shouldn't merit such a special mention given everything else going on.

Geoff also acknowledges that his actions might be partially attributable to the cognitive changes he was attempting, and that perhaps as a result of psychological experimentation, “during this time, my own reasoning did not work nearly as well.”

We close part three with a somewhat odd epilogue that starts out with (paraphrasing) "many leveragers believed that maybe it's possible that there may have been a non-provably non-negligible chance" that Geoff was allocating funds with respect to who he was fucking at the time. This uncharacteristic throwing of dear leader under the bus helps draw attention away from the rest of the epilogue where in a very roundabout and muddled way it seems to be implied that the actual issue was everyone using L1.0 tech to gaslight the hell out of each other.

Specifically, I think the part about using leverage's homebrew brainwash toolkit to cure jealousy and broken hearts is as close as the author is willing to get to alluding that there was a lot of gaslighting and manipulation of people into sexual roles they wouldn't otherwise have consented to going on, like maybe being part of dear leaders harem until he grew bored of them and cast them aside and pulled their funding.

But it wasn’t just Geoff. In the close-knit ecosystem community, where all kinds of boundaries blurred, where many performed unofficial therapy for each other while yearning for deep personal change, such secrets were not just an internal currency for maneuvering within the group — they also affected what seemed psychologically possible.

Had they really seen what they thought they saw? What feelings, ideas, or mental frameworks could plausibly be managed with a bodywork or charting session? Could jealousy, or a broken heart, be “cured” with the Leverage toolkit? Was it reasonable for leaders to require specific psychological interventions of their subordinates? In this high-pressure context, where the researchers were themselves the subjects, did it make sense to set limits on what they were trying to be?

On to part 4

So many red flags to unpack that it could fill a suitcase.

Dissident RIght

An Oxymoron If There Ever Was One

Is "a non-traditional Buddhist order" a way of not naming OAK? OAK is the California branch of the MAPLE Buddhist Ratiionalist Cult whose gurus have also been accused of rape. I don't know if OAK was connected to Leverage.

Edit / I Escaped a Cult - Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth Review

The group felt hard to categorize. It seemed more Red Tribey than Blue Tribey (though it contained both), and I eventually learned that its membership contained many old-school NRx scenesters. But these guys violated my expectations about Red Tribe, because they were funny, brilliant media observers who never said anything racist or sexist (at least not in that Slack). Nowadays there is a ton of media coverage about NRx and the dissident right, but this coverage has largely failed to capture how the best parts of the movement felt non-denominational. Or at least, that’s how it felt when I started spending hours per day in this Slack group.

Liberalism is a disease of the mind where, due to an inability to distinguished aesthetics from substance, one ends up judging things on means rather than ends.

History's greatest monsters have been well dressed and genteel. Many of the most ardent fighters for humanity are coarse, flawed, and unpleasant. Mayhaps a lesson about books and covers? Let's see where this group ends up

I don’t spent as much time in the movement these days; it’s turned into an echo chamber; racism and sexism are front-and-center

Oh Apollo, free me from this curse.

Me, catching up with the edits: wow that escalated quickly

(Picks up the golden ~~crown~~ fedora splattered with blood and brains) I really didn't think they'd just do this, I thought they wanted to abolish woo not embrace it. They seemed like Internet blowhards not a California cult.

Part 3: Practical Magic is basically an x-files episode, what am I even reading

“The phrase being ‘taken out’ started getting used a lot,” Emily says, if a Leverager felt unable to follow through on normal duties because they were still recovering from a bodywork session. Worse, the word “emergency” was becoming common, as it was used when an employee was in an extremely bad state (screaming or convulsing, for example) and then required hours or days of help.

In a discussion outline, she listed negative effects she’d seen in bodywork subjects (bad headaches, fever, nausea, fear, “overwhelm,” and “inability to be around people”) as well as practitioners (bad headaches, exhaustion, nausea, and “metaphysical unease”). During the meeting, Emily learned that her list wasn’t long enough: Colleagues were seeing panic attacks, paralysis, tinnitus, rashes, allergic reactions like runny noses, “aversion to physical touch,” and “persistent unpleasant visual imaginations” after bodywork. She was horrified, and her immediate recommendation was to slow down the research. But soon after the meeting, Geoff rebuked her.

A lot of this feels like they overdid the breathwork and resistance breathing exercises and as a consequence are constantly slightly hypoxic. Recuperating an exhausted respiratory system can be a hell of a time because you can't exactly take a break from breathing to rest , just a lot of bad headeachey sleep.~source:~ ~freediving~ ~dabbler.~

Also there's a part where David does some bodywork that involves pushing the other guy on the heart which resulted in a long period of those aftereffects, and having a weight on your chest sounds a lot like doing resistance breathing without being aware of it. Someone in other place very justifiably worries if there were a carbon dioxide leak in the premises. Nausea is also constantly mentioned, which I think can be a symptom of low blood pressure, which could be a thing If you are constantly exhausted from your breathing being all messed up.

Nevermind, Geoff to the rescue:

According to Geoff, he believed that Emily and her friends — a tight-knit group that included James — were trying to “monopolize” bodywork. The elephant in the room was funding pressures. Bodywork was an excellent way to impress funders quickly, so slowing down research might mean slowing a promising funding pathway.

There's an extended tangent of overexamining the claims of Zoe (see start of pt1) about people having had psychotic breaks following these practises by asking Leveragers who are willing to talk about it, to conclude that while these things can be very common in such settings it is very doubtful that they took place in Levrage 1.0 .

This mostly stands out because of the pattern of going the extra mile with due diligence on a victim's claims (who notably didn't return the writers calls while Geoff more than happy to be quoted) versus the part about reproducing guru David's apprehensions for Leverage as if that lets him off the hook for being an obvious charlatan all too willing to take power and mess with people's heads.

Goddammit:

Emily recalls a time when one, then two, then three separate women came to her and said they’d had “very similar nightmares of being raped or sexually harmed by a persona, or being, or energy, that looked a lot like a person in the group.” The situation, Emily says, seemed bad “from a research perspective, but also from the community care perspective.”

“We did try to talk to the individual who was sort of implicated in the dreams. And that was weird, sort of unsatisfying,”

This is getting increasing hard to unpack in sneer form, like you have the story of James, both in a long term relationship and simultaneously getting it on with his PhD supervisor, as rationalists are want to. Is the supervisor taking advantage of him? Who knows, definitely not the writer who won't even comment on James' range of chronic symptoms being consistent with PTSD, even when L1.0 tech causes him to think he might have been repressing memories of being sexually abused at a young age. All's well that ends well, James decides he is unworthy of the primary girlfriend and breaks up with her for to be with his supervisor and continue The Work with Leverage 1.0 .

And all across Leverage were dozens of similar stories: Breakdowns, heartbreaks, commingled with occasional shining breakthroughs.

I'll take a break.

Part 2: Body and Energy

Using fake or cherry-picked results in your papers is totally just a matter of philosophical opinion:

Tyler is a charming young man with impish eyes. Before joining Leverage, he worked on cognitive science and social psychology, at labs ranging from Yale to the University of Chicago. He left amid escalating concerns around the “Replication Crisis,” a philosophical conflict within the academy

This is good epistemics:

What if Tyler took a pill, then started floating off the ground, and touched down five minutes later — then would Tyler feel that he needed to use a scientific tool in order to trust his own observations? What if Tyler took another pill from the same jar, and the second time he took the pill he floated off the ground, then touched down five minutes later? How long would it take for Tyler to conclude that each pill made him float for five minutes? [...] if Tyler found an unexpected but massively obvious effect, like a pill that made him levitate, then would he still need a randomized controlled trial to believe that this obvious effect actually existed?

"I too used to listen to satanic music before someone finally got me to read the bible":

I couldn’t believe what I saw. I had arrived with all these people I considered to be hyper-rational nerds who were emotionally inexpressive, to the point where many people who visited Leverage came away with the impression that it was full of ‘robots.’ But now all these people were cathartically weeping, shaking, etc. One guy I thought of as the paradigmatic Rational Person now had his shirt completely unbuttoned and seemed to be lamenting on the couch like a melancholic king. Afterwards, everyone was, of course, like: ‘WTF was that?’ ”

Then Tyler and a bunch of other Leveragers sign up to the Energy Healing School for a paltry $10K each.

Some friction follows between the hippie style meditation practices and CT, because apparently the former makes available for introspection mental space that isn't accessible by the latter. Also this is sure to end well:

Emily says that “emotion was taboo as a technical concept; it wasn’t included in Connection Theory.” According to some former Leveragers, this put the group in the position of trying to process shared emotions, including emotions from their relationships with each other, while lacking fundamental language for it — all while determinedly intending to access the deep unconscious.

This I assume is on top of dismissing psychology completely because dear leader didn't like it, so they have absolutely no external point of reference for what's going on mentally with them.

David the guru appears:

According to Geoff, David described having gone “to the East” and found old masters whose lineages were not being passed on; he claimed he’d convinced these aging spiritual masters to teach him. A former Leverager remembers David claiming he could heal or cause cancer with a touch, “cause bones to heal, like 6x to 10x speed,” or “induce seizures or hallucinations” with bodywork, as well as organ failure.

David joins the slovenian and Tyler becomes his apprentice. David becomes a Leverage 'master'.

The title “master” carried an unclear but powerful status within the ecosystem. An ex-Leverager says that “masters” had a perceived “halo” and there was a shared “blind spot around people’s character and ethics that led to empowering people with questionable morals.” This halo effect made it hard to give masters negative feedback.

David “was routinely missing entire days just to meditate on his kidneys and was claiming they were failing,” which David attributed to Geoff causing him bodily harm via deliberate psychological manipulation.

The slovenian nrxer acquires a reputation of being a sex pest:

When asked about the complaint in 2024, Geoff says there was an internal investigation, which concluded that Samo “acted with bad judgment.”

Just normal rationalist workplace things:

David also had tension with Samo, who was in an open marriage while also dating a woman who worked with him in the Sociology department.

There is some bruhaha and a cybersecurity related falling out and David and Samo's ex leave Leverage, but David's legacy remains:

Regardless of David’s intentions, adding bodywork to the Leverage toolkit had surprising consequences. From the beginning, non-monogamy was common and accepted within Leverage; but bodywork provided a new, confusing, and plausibly professional context for intimate physical contact. And Leveragers soon determined that they could combine bodywork with other techniques to bypass the partition — a move that arguably, finally, allowed them to dive into the uncharted waters of the deep unconscious.

Yeah, this is now cult cult.

Also the writer doesn't want all this unpleasantness to reflect badly on David, so she makes sure to add this preface, how thoughtful:

I was able to confirm that he did not feel Leveragers shared his moral values, and that he felt he couldn’t transfer his skills to people who did not share his values. He believed his mastery could be badly distorted if he tried to transmit it without transmitting the values that informed it.

Tune in for Part 3 I guess.

I guess I'll just do a read along write up:

Part 1:

In the Effective Altruist community, Leverage held “mystique,” according to a former employee. It didn’t help that some employees lost touch with their previous friends and families. One community member observes that “a lot of people dropped off the face of the Earth when they started working at Leverage.” Rumors swirled. Since Peter Thiel was an early funder, a local wit dubbed Leverage “Peter Thiel’s MKUltra”

Zoe [ex-Leverage with PTSD who went public] also wrote: “I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid myself of specific ‘demons’ I felt I’d picked up from other members of Leverage. If this sounds insane, it’s because it was… In addition, I’ll be honest — I experienced real effects of these ‘demons.’ ”

This is the author by the way:

By the time I heard about Leverage, I was fascinated by mysticism, meditation, and witchcraft. By 2020, my spiritual practice yielded disorienting results: vivid dreams, weirder-than-usual hunches, intense visualizations, trance-like states, and more. I sought balance by discussing these with an accredited therapist, who said I was fine, and by getting advice from friends, including friends from Leverage. This was when I began to understand what might be meant by the word “demon.” And those discussions with former Leveragers formed a basis of shared experience, which eventually led sources at Leverage, including Geoff Anders, to trust me with this story.

A lot of this unintentionally reads like what here's what the cultic milieu looks like from the point of view of those especially vulnerable to cult influence:

Nevin Freeman, who was employee #5, says that Leverage “self-selected for people who didn’t place their faith in existing institutions,” who wanted to build something better. [...] This in turn led Nevin to a visiting fellowship at Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI, formerly known as the Singularity Institute), then to a startup job. He began donating half his salary to fund people working on AI issues; after he met Geoff, Nevin redirected his money to fund Geoff, then joined Leverage.

On definitely not cult building:

Oliver discovered Leverage after he decided to work on “collective intelligence” and became interested in the business concept of “learning organizations,” organizations that prioritize continuous transformation of employees as well as the organization itself.

Most sanitized description of nrx ever, and also diversity is great when it comes to letting the fascists in:

One clear example of this pluralism arrived in the form of a charismatic, self-assured Slovenian man in his twenties [...] When he joined Leverage in 2015, Samo was already involved with the burgeoning neoreactionary movement, an online right-wing subculture with tech overtones, which was somewhat interconnected with the rationality community [... ...] more neoreactionaries were hired over time, which formed an odd synthesis.

But for the rationalists it was Tuesday:

Eventually, in 2018, a neoreactionary group that had multiple members at Leverage made monogamy a requirement for members in good standing, which some thought odd given that more than one neoreactionary, including Samo, were in open relationships, as was most Leverage leadership, including Geoff.

You don't say:

Emily recalls that the group was alert for cult warning signs.

There's also a lot of subtext that the people at Leverage never seem to actually do anything besides talk about stuff and cultic self care, that doesn't rise to the surface because the writer is overly sympathetic to them. She tries to counterbalance this with reminders about how there was a semi-constant rotation of ultra rich casual guests and that some Leverage adjacent people went to do Important Things, like Dario and the wealthy longevity guy.

This experience [of meeting a random billionaire one night in the group house kitchen] “moved me along the spectrum from Leverage being completely delusional to, like, maybe Leverage being onto something, if they were able to convince someone like that,” says Tyler. “I think the truth was that Leverage was onto a bunch of things, and it was delusional, and it was closely intertwined.”

Gradually, a cult of personality with the stated purpose of self-replicating in other organisations emerged:

Gradually, themes emerged. [...] Several people studied meditation and other woo-woo stuff (sometimes abbreviated woo); some hoped to achieve spiritual enlightenment and share the process afterwards. Meanwhile, before he arrived at Leverage, Samo had already started researching a subject that he called “Great Founder Theory,” delineating the process by which exceptional people scale their impact through organizations; once at Leverage he created a research group that became the department of Sociology.

Cultic self-care:

In groups, in pairs, or alone in their rooms, the researchers sat with notebooks and whiteboards, diagramming every corner of their mental landscapes, seeking ways to “debug” behaviors they deemed undesirable. For most, the Holy Grail was a way to work harder, work smarter, accomplish bigger goals, or otherwise transcend the limitations they felt held them back from changing the world.

Then there's some stuff about how our benevolent leader Geoff decided that academic psychology isn't a real science and should instead be replaced with his own Connection Theory, which as far as I can tell is basically a brainwashing framework:

What follows, then, is that any person’s problematic behavior can be changed, because “if you actually get the logic of what’s producing the problematic set of beliefs or actions,” then you can intervene in that logic.

He also cured some guys caffeine addiction by laying hands at the start of the article, which I didn't think much of at the time because I thought the author just threw it in for flavour, and that her overall approach would be uh different. Later CT also cured his nagging worries about being a creep, good for him I guess:

He introspected on his discomfort, discussed his observations with a colleague, and traced the discomfiting sensation to his underlying beliefs about how society designates some people as creepy. The pair concluded that he had “irrational” beliefs about society and creepiness, and discussed the subject in detail, until Nevin felt that his irrational beliefs had changed.

ConTheory apparently also cured some guys cluster headaches, others not so much:

Simultaneously, Leveragers observed undesirable effects during charting sessions: bouts of shaking that could last hours; hysterical screaming and crying, with no identifiable cause.

Eventually the slovenian nrxer reinvents founders' mythos from first principles and they decide to monetize it by creating a become-a-founder self-help seminars thing with a shared profits arrangement with the wanna-be founders:

In 2017, during a fundraising meeting for Paradigm Academy, Geoff promised Peter Thiel an appealing use case for the Leverage introspection tools. Geoff and his colleagues would either find and recruit ten “masters” who excelled at a discipline, or create ten masters using their cognitive toolkit, within three years.

Part 2 soon, or eventually.