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Im a bit surprised noone talked about it last week, but a big post came out about the history of Leverage Research. It was a major organisation in the same social circles as early Rationalism, but fell into disgrace shortly before covid after thoroughly driving themselves insane with woo/cult adjacent stuff. I was somewhat familiar with the case from back then, but reading this some things really came together for me, and I feel I now understand much better why the in-person rats are like that.
Reading this, there where many times where people seemed to me stupidly impressed by something. What little Ive seen of Anders (the founder/leader) psychological theory, that convinced so many he was worth working with, was the same. Why did they fall for this?
I think its because many of the people who got into Rationalism/EA/etc, did it because they Fucking Love Science. There really arent many places now where people believe in the power of science to transform the world in a big way, beyond what you need to rattle off to secure grants/investments, and it makes total sense that these people would be enamoured with it. There was of course also methodological thinking going on in rationalism, but these people would variously: adopt something from it as their shiny new tool, learn others as a shibboleth only, or saw the issue in self-improvment rather than understanding. They didnt do a systematic evaluation of methods generally, and keep it as a going concern in the back of their head, the way someone else might have done, and might have expected more people to do, if they didnt have in-person contact.
I dont want to blame them for this too much; I didnt get deep into methodology because I saw it as necessary for my journey to science utopia, either. I like science and all, but I got into methodology because I find it interesting for its own sake; from the rationalist perspective, Im drastically lacking in agency/urgency, its just that this is less personally harmful and more socially normal than what happened to them.
Measuring from the other end, the only case I clearly know of who really did develop significant methodological understanding because he thought it was neccessary for his project, is Yud. What did it take to make him do that? He thought he had previously been on course to destroy the world. The defense rests its case.
The "scene" is also bigger than just Rationalism, and the people who got into Leverage very deep may not have had as much contact with it as we might think someone moving to SF for this would. Still, a lot of social pathologies in the ratsphere make far more sense to me with a weaker version of this mechanism in mind.
I’m a junkie for the right kind of community drama, but I couldn’t get into this. All this woo stuff is incredibly lame and boring. The text is functionally indistinguishable from a narrative of one’s experiences with hallucinogens at Burning Man. I didn’t take the drugs, and I have no intention of taking those drugs. SBF tried to rootkit the United States Government and almost succeeded. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are building god as we speak. What did Leverage Research ever do?
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