the great potential of psychological change

Which is a euphemism for success in brainwashing.

Also, having dismissed the entirety of psychology and psychiatry as unscientific, they naturally landed ass first on Jung and Dion Fortune as major points of reference.

If your property is outside the solar system, you will need to either go into cryosleep or upload yourself to a computer to survive the journey.

Reminder that rationalists have developed a completely mysticalised conception of brain uploading that’s very functionally similar with old timey souls, mostly so they don’t need to deal with the SOMA problem of every instance of uploaded consciousness being a completely separate self-actualised entity.

Like how exactly is a digital impression of my personality being shipped to alpha centauri to inspect my holdings affect my personal experience? How is it supposed to be interchangeable with using some other made up technology that takes me there in person?

See, it works like this, no one knows what consciousness is, but it’s probably a mathematical object, and if your current conscious self is the same as the conscious self that will be inhabiting your body next friday, and also if a supreme being wants to torture you after you are dead…

Another OpenAI attempt at monetization has died an ignoble death.

OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it. Atlas was announced in October.

Nothing in my interactions with humanities types indicates they would be in a better position to handle either the educational slopnami or a slopped out job market.

As far as educational systems go, “human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning” were always left to natural selection instead of being actively pursued. Taking a philosophy course on the history of logic and ethics isn’t the same as having any.

The part about tasteless AI enthusiasts needing to be housetrained to not post slop on the forums because that’s borderline antisocial was also cool.

I like how Yud’s rogue data center air raid task force is gradually becoming another weird rationalist accepted truth.

There’s a corresponding siskind post also called something something plan A, I skimmed until the part where the US and China take de facto control of chip infrasrtucture and distribution (saying “nationalise” is haram for free market types), basically imagine having to write a letter to the government to formally justify upgrading your computer, and that’s all the AI fanfiction I can tolerate without ruining my breakfast.

Also clanker crankers appropriating the term ‘Golden Path’ from Dune is just distasteful.

Being each other’s therapists

That’s probably a euphemism for levs subjecting each other to hours long so-called debugging sessions, i.e. rationalist flavored scientology auditing.

More mundane cult stuff was also taking place, like keeping everyone constantly exhausted from continuous busywork, while also guilt-tripping them out of having free time and non-cult related interests in general. This seems to be a refrain in other witness testimonies that’s absent in Laurenson’s telling, unless she threw a passing mention somewhere that I didn’t catch.

What it boils down is that it was an actual honest to god cult that was getting tons of EA money to develop a self help system that would turn people into Elon Musks (their go-to example for an apex human). They also came up with a stablecoin and a cryptofash magazine that are both still around, and did a lot of behind the scenes work for EA at large, like getting the ball rolling with organising EA conferences around the world.

I think the reason all these exposés are so tiresome to read is because they tend to focus on the boring cult stuff instead of the bonkers rationalist lore (like how Leverage people were trying to cast HPMOR spells on each other), or the long shadow it casts on our current cultural moment due to its deep influence in the EA/rat subculture, like how Amodei though not a member seemed to be a regular there, Grimes is a contributor to Palladium, ex-levs have launched elite coaching companies that presumably implement lev-tech and so on.

Additionally, in true rationalist fashion nobody was punished and nothing was learned, so the people responsible are still around, still getting Thiel money to do much of the same stuff with probably the same issues, just keeping a lower profile this time.

edit: this is much shorter https://www.todayintabs.com/p/over-leveraged thanks @nfultz@awful.systems

Cool short read, I’d recommend it too.

One notable additional piece of information pointed out here is that after the NYMag thing fell apart she got a $35K grant from what turns out to be a sort of rationalist slush fund to finish the piece. The original contract was for $9500 so it’s possible she came out quite ahead on the deal.

Supposedly a bunch of it went to things that would normally be handled on the publisher’s end, like professional fact checking, but having now read the piece I don’t really know what that would look like. She has Dear Leader Geoff Anders on the record like 16 times (k5 rusty counted) and is consistently pretty uncritical of his claims, AND she’s best friends with most of the “ex”-levs named in the article, like did it take thirty thousand dollars to find out that guru David’s origin story is unsubstantiable bollocks and to triple-double check Zoe’s claim of psychotic breaks? (verdict: when rationalists in a high-control environment get PTSD from seeing and hearing things that aren’t there it’s not a psychotic break but some secret other thing).

Also there’s a bunch of most-important-philosopher-in-history Geoff’s original writings and they are predictably bad and ridiculous:

(article has link to the entire word doc)

Zoe Cursi’s account seems like a far more sober examination of the dynamic

I’ve been reading Zoe’s account and she gives a radically different picture of especially Geoff, just by mentioning stuff he was saying and doing while Leverage was active, instead of focusing on his later heartfelt regrets.

Geoff estimated that there were roughly 10 “super weapons” or “super theories.” He said we already had 1–2, one being we had solved philosophy (but not completely, he admitted — all he had left to do was prove that time exists and maybe a few other details, was what I remember him saying). The second super weapon/theory was that we had the One True Theory of Psychology (this phrase was used regularly by many Leverage members).

Uhhhhhhhhhhh

Within a few months of joining, a supervisor I trusted who had recruited me confided in me privately, “I think there’s good reason to believe Geoff is the best philosopher who’s ever lived, better than Kant. I think his existence on earth right now is an historical event.”

Hell yeah.

yeah we never find out what Geoff was doing during the Intention Wars.

I’ve been reading Zoe’s account and apparently he was giving talks and presentations about said Intention Objects:

They were considered to be sort of like autonomous psychological bits that you could accidentally or purposefully leave in another person’s mind to affect or control them. If intentional, it might cause them to subtly view you a different way, make more real or less real certain concepts, change their experience of the passage of time, say, or make them more susceptible to mind-reading attempts in the future, etc.

Hard to tell if he was purposely fanning the flames or himself lost in the sauce. Also I called intention objects tulpa knock-offs earlier, but Zoe’s additional details make me think of them more as thetans.

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 rationalists 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.

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 time, 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.

Palladium

According to the article the whole thing was a Leverage project:

Politically, Leverage has punched above its weight, though liberal Leveragers may wince to think of it. While at Leverage, two neoreactionary employees named Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett co-founded a magazine called Palladium. Their parties have drawn Peter Thiel, the musician Grimes, and other luminaries from the “tech right” or “New Right.” Samo is now Editor-in-Chief of Palladium; he also runs a research and analysis firm called Bismarck, and published “Great Founder Theory” on his website in 2020.

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.

Seriously. Like the pitch is literally, you’re hired, now leave your old life behind to permanently move in with us. Our founder is a great genius who created this incredible philosophy on how to shape reality and influence people, and your job is to practice it 24/7 and take notes. You will also be giving up huge chunks of your income to our charities, and don’t forget that sexual boundaries in the compound group home office will be really really muddled.

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

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.