SneerClub

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.