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The Oblivious Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0 (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) by Architeuthis@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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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.

edit x 4: Index of the read along posts, part titles are from the original:

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[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Actually, taking a closer look at this line:

Connection Theory, which he describes as “a theory of belief and behavior that postulates that people have basic goals, and act for the sake of achieving those basic goals.” 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.

So unless we're already getting into some very culty language where words like "Basic Goals" or "logic" are cult jargon that only loosely resemble their more general use this sounds less like an overview of a theory and more like an incredibly obvious statement that would have to fit into basically any psychological paradigm other than maybe hard behaviorism.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

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 rationalist 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.