Here's a long, detailed account of a Leverage experience which, to me, reads as significantly more damning than the above post: https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b
 

I vouch that this person is both a LW user who has written IMO some good posts and a member of in-person rationalist/longtermist/EA communities who is in good standing.

Edit: This comment is not meant as an endorsement (nor is this a disendorsement) of the content of the post. I generally support LWers and rationalists being able to post pseudonymously and have their identity as longstanding members of the various communities verified.

Using psychological techniques to experiment on one another, and on the "sociology" of the group itself, was a main purpose of the group. It was understood among members that they were signing up to be guinea pigs for experiments in introspection, altering one's belief structure, and experimental group dynamics.

The Pareto program felt like it had substantial components of this type of social/psychological experimentation, but participants were not aware of this in advance and did not give informed consent. Some (maybe most?) Pareto fellows, including me, were not even aware that Leverage was involved in any way in running the program until they arrived, and found out they were going to be staying in the Leverage house.

Hi all, former Leverage 1.0 employee here. 

The original post and some of the comments seem epistemically low quality to me compared to the typical LessWrong standard. In particular, on top of a lot of insinuations, there are some false facts. This seems especially problematic given that the post is billed as common knowledge. 

There’s a lot of dispute and hate directed towards Leverage, which frankly, has made me hesitant to defend it online. However, a friend of mine in the community recently said something to the effect of, “Well, no former Leverage employee has ever defended it on the attack posts, which I take as an indication of silent agreement.” 

That rattled me and so I’ve decided to weigh in. I typically stay quiet about Leverage online because I don’t know how to say nuanced or positive things without fear of that blowing back on me personally. For now, I’d ask to remain anonymous, but if it ever seems like people are willing to approach the Leverage topic differently, I intend to put my name on this post. I don’t expect my opinion alone (especially anonymously) to substantially change anything, but I hope it will be considered and incorporated into a coherent and more complete picture. 

At a macro level, I had a really positive experience at Leverage. I didn’t feel pressured to do self-improvement or use experimental psychology techniques, and I appreciated the freedom to do independent research. I felt I could (and did on several occasions) opt out of the group-dynamics experiments and training, and was largely free to do my own thing. I learned a lot, became much more curious about the world and willing to form and defend my own views, and met some really amazing people. If I ever have kids and tell them about my bold younger years, I fully expect wholesome Leverage stories to be on the list (with no cult-undertones). I found the people to be kind and thoughtful, and the organization as a whole to be broadly supportive and respectful of my wishes and boundaries. The intellectual environment was incredible and the best of my life. The worst part of my Leverage experience was the negativity I experienced from the EA and rationality communities (for example, receipt of hate mail), and the distance that put between me and people I respect.

Overall, I think my experience really mismatched the picture of Leverage described by OP. 

That said, I want to second Freyja’s comment that Leverage was large and pretty decentralized and people’s experiences really differed. I know of at least two former employees who I believe had importantly negative experiences, and that speaks to mistakes made by the organization and its participants. Nonetheless, I think claiming that the OP’s picture above represents common knowledge is importantly wrong and a real disservice to future efforts of rationalists to try to understand Leverage. 

On the object level, here are some comments on aspects of the original bullets that didn’t match my experience: 

• I didn’t feel encouraged or pressured to live at the office as a new hire. I lived there initially because it made it easier to relocate from the East Coast. I moved out shortly after and no one seemed bothered. 

• I didn’t find the information policy I signed overly stringent. I’ve signed confidentiality agreements with multiple normal for-profit companies (that aren’t affiliated with Leverage, EA, or rationality), and this policy was less restrictive than those. It allowed for personal blogs as well as sharing Leverage training techniques and research piecemeal (without approval required). It required permission before publishing the organization’s research online or starting an extended training / coaching relationship with anyone. It also prohibited sharing personal information about hires or information a trainer learned about a client during training / coaching. These rules seemed sensible to me. I had two different outside-of-Leverage romantic partners while I worked at Leverage, and I saw an external counselor. I discussed my experiences at Leverage (and Leverage’s research) with both and didn’t feel I was in violation of the information policy. 

• Charting was not the only self-improvement or psychology technique that Leverage researched or used in training. Focusing, IFS, coherence therapy, CBT tools, deliberate practice, TAPs, meditation, and more were also used and incorporated. Individual researchers and trainers also developed and used a number of their own techniques that were not based on charting. The charting technique Geoff initially developed also underwent a number of changes over the years primarily driven by researchers other than Geoff. Leverage’s training and psychology research was not primarily driven by Geoff or predominantly composed of charting. 

• I had a good experience with all the training I did and did not experience any form of mental fragmentation. I had one very positive experience in particular, where my social anxiety was significantly and stably lessened afterward. Otherwise I found the training beneficial and better than various other self-improvement tools I’ve tried, but unflashy. I was initially hopeful about larger or faster training successes, but I mostly didn’t experience these; good tools for thinking about how to solve my problems, improving my models, and relating to my feelings reliably helped me, but there was no magic self-improvement sauce. 

• It is not true that people were expected to undergo training by their manager. My understanding and experience of the policy and norms were that (1) training / debugging / coaching wasn’t required, (2) if you chose to do training you could choose your trainer (or choose to avoid a particular trainer or set of trainers), (3) “trainer” was a particular job role that did not include being a manager (did not include evaluating performance or determining payroll status), and (4) not all members of the org were trainers or expected to train anyone. Over several years, I switched between trainers several times with no problem and chose to avoid working with certain trainers entirely. (Hedge: there were two smaller training groups where I believe it was a norm for members of the group to train each other. I wasn’t part of those groups and can’t speak to them.)

• 6 types of bodywork were researched (that I know of): a bodywork style from NYU’s acting school, energy work done by Luminous Awareness, body work styles used by two different independent body work practitioners that people recommended, embodiment and movement techniques (for example, the alexander technique, feldenkrais), body-focused introspection (Focusing), and massage (one researcher looked into and pursued massage certification). Touching in all forms I encountered or heard about was minimal and consensual (like a hand on the back), and not all body work involved touch. Several researchers thought body work was ineffective and overblown, and several thought it was effective and useful (among those, some thought the change was obvious and legible and some felt the impacts were confusing or hard to pin down). This was a big source of internal disagreement. While I tend to prefer interventions that are on my priors more credible than body work and energy healing, there are a lot of anecdotal reports of large positive effects from body work and energy healing (like curing chronic pain) and I was glad that some people chose to look into it.

• I did not join Leverage to be a guinea pig for psychological experimentation. I joined because I wanted to research self-improvement techniques and I liked the vision of starting a university for people who wanted to run high impact projects. I was disappointed with how little I learned in college, and I was (and still am) excited about research into different versions of higher education. I thought the training techniques Leverage had were interesting and helpful, but “being experimented on” was not my primary purpose in joining nor would I now describe it as a main focus of my time at Leverage. 

• I did not find the group to be overly focused on “its own sociology.” Most people I interacted with were mostly doing research (including research in the field of history and sociology), ops (accounting, facility maintenance), or training (see tools above), rather than focusing on the group itself. Near the end, there was lots of internal conflict between different teams / subgroups of the organization, which did feel self-indulgent and unhealthy to me. My understanding is that this contributed to the organization being shut down. 

• The stated purpose of Leverage 1.0 was not to literally take over the US and/or global governance or “take over the world,” nor did I believe or feel pressured to believe that the organization would do so. I’ve been told that the original mission was fairly classic EA (improve the world via the most effective interventions), but Leverage took a more abstract reasoning oriented and less data driven approach. I am glad they did this, largely for diversification (though I can see why people object to Leverage taking talent that might otherwise have gone to other EA orgs) and because it led to them running the initial EA Summits. By the time I joined, the stated mission was to improve the world through social science, specifically via research and delivery of useful training and effectiveness techniques, and research into history / sociology, and coordination. This matched my experience of what the org did day-to-day. For most of the years I was there, there was a training team, a sociology team, etc. Within that broad umbrella there was a lot of diversity in what people worked on and what impact they believed their research and Leverage overall would have; I can’t speak to what other individuals privately believed, but OPs claim is false.

• I did not believe or feel pressured to believe that Leverage was “the only organization with a plan that could possibly work.” I continued to be involved in and supportive of EA while working at Leverage, including donating to SENS (pre-recent disputes), GFI, and other orgs. I respected Eliezer, loved HPMOR, was optimistic about MIRI, and thought the raising-the-sanity-waterline goal of the rationality community was great. I also think many hospitals, animal shelters, advocacy groups, and other extremely common interventions and institutions succeed at their missions and contribute to improving the world in many straightforward ways. 

• I didn’t believe or feel like I was supposed to believe that Geoff “was among the best and most powerful ‘theorists’ in the world.” 

• I did not find “Geoff’s power and prowess as a leader [to be] a central theme.” For most of my years at Leverage 1.0, I interacted primarily with my research, my team, and my team leader; Geoff / Geoff’s leadership was not a major focus for us. In the year before Geoff shut Leverage 1.0 down, Geoff’s leadership was a central theme insofar as he came under criticism internally for not resolving conflict in the group. I think this was hard for all parties involved, and is not best characterized as “his power being a central theme.” 

• The comment on Geoff’s dating life (even after OPs edits) still strikes me as misleading. For example, one of the women mentioned was in a long-term relationship with Geoff prior to her joining Leverage. She subsequently applied to work at Leverage and was accepted by a hiring committee in accordance with the recruitment policy at the time; the hiring committee knew she was in a relationship with Geoff which she expected to continue, and considered that in the hiring process. (I communicated with her to make sure she was okay with me posting this bullet, and she also added that she did not consider herself to be a subordinate to Geoff while they were dating.) I believe there’s similar clarifying context in the other cases, though I’m not willing to discuss the details without permission from the others involved. I also want to go on record and apologize for participating in the discussion of someone’s romantic life online, and I’m sorry it’s come to this. 

Three final comments: 

- I believe that Leverage was great in many ways and I personally benefited a lot from working there, but I also believe it had real problems and made mistakes. I think the discussion in the comments speaks for itself re: that there were negatives associated with Leverage. I view experimenting with self-improvement tools and non-standard organizational structures to generally be risky (but worth having at least some organizations do) and Leverage didn’t handle it delicately in all cases; when I hear of former Leveragers reporting harms, I tend to believe them and find fault with the organization. However, I also think there are generally fewer reports (in the grapevine or formally reported) of harms than are widely believed to exist and less of a picture of the positives. 

- Sometimes I have heard members of the rationalist community hear positive reports about Leverage from ex-Leveragers, insinuate that the ex-Leveragers are basically “still brainwashed,” and then ignore the information. This seems epistemically problematic, because it is very hard to respond to. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do about that here, other than try to convey some nuance, and caution that if all Leveragers’ positive experiences are dismissed as brainwashing or cult-member-positivity, it will be very hard to find out any time Leverage-centered gossip is wrong. I’d desperately like the in-person Bay area community to form a more coherent view on Leverage that unifies the positives and negatives, and extracts lessons about self-experimentation, psychology and training research, non-standard company structures, and weird ambitious organizations in general. I don’t see how that will happen if the current discourse around Leverage doesn’t improve substantially, including making the environment more palatable for Leveragers to talk about the positives and negatives of their experience. 

- Finally, I expect to respond to comments that seem to me like they’re posted in the spirit of genuine inquiry – please avoid vitriol and insinuations. Sorry for the length of this comment, thanks for bearing with me. 

This is subjective and all, but I met Geoff Anders at our 2012 CFAR workshop, I absolutely had the "this person wants to be a cult leader" vibe from him then, and I've been telling people as much for the entire time since. (To the extent of hurting my previously good friendships with two increasingly-Leverage-enmeshed people, in the mid-2010s.)

I don't know why other people's cult-leader-wannabe-detectors are set so differently from mine, but it's a similar (though less deadly) version of how I quickly felt about a certain person [don't name him, don't summon him] who's been booted from the Berkeley community for good reason.

> some of the people who don’t like us
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1?commentId=jSCFY2ypMpvAZr8sy [LW(p) · GW(p)]

> However, I would also like to note that Leverage 1.0 has historically been on the receiving end of substantial levels of bullying, harassment, needless cruelty, public ridicule, and more by people who were not engaged in any legitimate epistemic activity. I do not think this is OK. I intend to call out this behavior directly when I see it. I would ask that others do so as well.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1?commentId=hqDXAtk6cnqDStkGC [LW(p) · GW(p)]

It would be sad if people came away with the idea that the OP was motivated by hate, jealousy, or tribalism. I think the OP is motivated out of deep compassion for the wider community.

Leverage keeps coming up because Geoff Anders (and associates) emit something epistemically and morally corrosive and are gaslighting the commons about it. And Geoff keeps trying to disingenuously hit the reset button and hide it, to exploit new groups of people. That’s what people are responding to and trying to counteract in posts like the OP.

-

Edit: Removed a paragraph.

You know, I'm not necessarily a great backer of Leverage Research, especially some of its past projects, but I feel the level of criticism that it has faced relative to other organizations in the space is a bit bizarre. Many of the things that Leverage is criticized for (such as being secretive, seeing themselves at least in part as saving the world, investing in projects that look crazy to intelligent outsiders, etc.) in my view apply to many rationalist/EA organizations. This is not to say that those other organizations are wrong to do these things necessarily, just that it's weird to me that people go after Leverage-in-particular for reasons that often don't seem to be consistently applied to other projects in the space.

(I have never been an employee of Leverage Research, though at one point they were potentially interested in recruiting me and I was not interested; at another point I checked in re: potentially working there but didn't like the sound of the projects they seemed to be recruiting for at the time.)


EDIT 10/13: My original comment was written before the Medium post from Zoe Curzi. The contents of that Medium post are very concerning to me and seem very unlike what I've encountered in other rationalist or EA organizations.

Wanna +1 all these things are points I've heard from people who were at Leverage, also. I also have a more negative opinion of Leverage than might be implied by the points alone, for the record.

Speaking personally, based on various friendships with people within Leverage, attending a Leverage-hosted neuroscience reading group for a few months, and having attended a Paradigm Academy weekend workshop.

I think Leverage 1.0 was a genuine good-faith attempt at solving various difficult coordination problems. I can’t say they succeeded or failed; Leverage didn’t obviously hit it out of the park, but I feel they were at least wrong in interesting, generative ways that were uncorrelated with the standard and more ‘boring’ ways most institutions are wrong. Lots of stories I heard sounded weird to me, but most interesting organizations are weird and have fairly strict IP protocols so I mostly withhold judgment.

The stories my friends shared did show a large focus on methodological experimentation, which has benefits and drawbacks. Echoing some of the points, I do think when experiments are done on people, and they fail, there can be a real human cost. I suspect some people did have substantially negative experiences from this. There’s probably also a very large set of experiments where the result was something like, “I don’t know if it was good, or if was bad, but something feels different.”

There’s quite a lot about Leverage that I don’t know and can’t speak to, for example the internal social dynamics.

One item that my Leverage friends were proud to share is that Leverage organized the [edit: precursor to the] first EA Global conference. I was overall favorably impressed by the content in the weekend workshop I did, and I had the sense that to some degree Leverage 1.0 gets a bad rap simply because they didn’t figure out how to hang onto credit for the good things they did do for the community (organizing EAG, inventing and spreading various rationality techniques, making key introductions). That said I didn’t like the lack of public output.

I’ve been glad to see Leverage 2.0 pivot to progress studies, as it seems to align more closely with Leverage 1.0’s core strength of methodological experimentation, while avoiding the pitfalls of radical self-experimentation.

Would the world have been better if Leverage 1.0 hadn’t existed? My personal answer is a strong no. I’m glad it existed and was unapologetically weird and ambitious in the way it was and I give its leadership serious points for trying to build something new. 

facts that are more-or-less "common knowledge" among people who spent time socially adjacent to Leverage

Yup, sounds right. As someone who visited the rationality community in the bay a bunch in 2013-2018, almost nothing listed in the bullet points was a surprise to me, and off-hand I can think of dozens of other people who I would assume also know almost everything written above. (I'm sure there are more such people, that I haven't met or wouldn't remember.)

I don't have anything in particular to say about the implications of these facts, just seemed worth mentioning this thing re common knowledge.

(The main thing I hadn't heard about was the sexual relationships bullet point.)

Hi, I'm Olli Payne. I first encountered Leverage in person during the summer of 2018 and worked at Paradigm from August 2019 through April 2020.

I moved to the Bay from NYC in April 2018, after hearing about communities there (EA, Rationality, Leverage, Futurism, etc) that are focused on thinking long-term and having a large positive impact, something that resonated with me and my goals. After attending several EA meetups, I went to a few EA Global afterparties, including one at Leverage's Lake Merritt apartment.

I'd already started to hang out with Leverage employees who I'd met at the afterparty when I requested to be invited to a Paradigm workshop. I attended the workshop in June of 2018 and after finding the tools incredibly useful, I began to pursue a job at Leverage.

During the year before I was hired at Paradigm, I made many friends with employees of both Paradigm and Leverage. We went bouldering, saw movies, played video games, tried to perfect the baking of pies... I'm very happy to say that I'm still close with many of these friends.

This was my take-away from being around Leverage 1.0:

The organization and its members did have the stated goal of "world-saving," but that phrase was used within the group's culture as an intentionally-campy blanket term for world improvement, since it was known and accepted within the ecosystem of projects that no two people completely agreed on how that should be done, and everyone was there to figure it out together. It was a complex group effort, NOT a one-minded initiative, and I enjoyed being around people who were very intellectually diverse but had the same big-picture desire to see a much better world than exists today. This is an ambitious and tough environment to exist in, and it's challenging to avoid personal conflict that can lead to interpersonal misconduct when as much diversity is present in a group with such high-stakes goals. I understand that people were negatively affected by this. But call it what it is.

In 2019, I was (finally) hired at Paradigm as a trainer. This was at the beginning of the Leverage 2.0 era. Paradigm's main focus was to make the tools more accessible to a wider audience. Because I thought the tools were great, and after becoming familiar with the issues that adjacent communities had with the level of transparency around them, I was excited to help with that goal. While I was employed at Paradigm, I was never told that I had to participate in training. I also streamed on Twitch with 1.5k followers my first few months employed there. My content included gaming as well as talking about self-improvement and mental exercises like Focusing. Co-workers watched my stream and no one asked or told me to stop.

I see great potential in the tools, and I'm confident that they will be more than useful in the self-improvement journeys of those looking to fix critical problems in the world.

I'll also add that I don't normally share personal information online, especially in public forums like this, but I'm making an exception here because it adds some perspective:

Today, I live in Louisville, KY with my boyfriend who had never even heard of LessWrong before I showed him this post. I occasionally do bodywork with him, and he'd actually already experienced it at a workshop during his Undergrad program for Opera & Voice at WKU before we even met. We have 2 cats, our own condo, and too many jalapenos growing in our garden to know what to do with. I run a Branding and Design studio focused on helping impactful projects succeed in the memetic space - feel free to reach out, I'm excited to work with anyone whose goals are aligned with my studio's.

Lastly, I'd like to mention that I'm grateful to Leverage. After my time at Paradigm ended they supplied me with the work and contacts that got my studio off the ground. I apply much of what I learned from Leverage 1.0 and Paradigm to develop the frameworks and theories that I use on a daily basis to help cool people and projects succeed.

Participation in the project involved secrecy / privacy / information-management agreements. 

How strong were those agreements? How much were the participants allowed to share privately with friends, family or outside therapists?

Yup. I have known all of these things since 2018-2019, and know or know of maybe a few dozen people who also know these things. I’m glad this bare minimum is being discussed openly, publicly.

Secondhand, I have a very negative view of at least some parts of what happened in Leverage 1.0. My best guess is that the relationships and events that some people have (mostly privately) described as controlling or abusive were not evenly distributed across the whole organisation. So it would have been straightforward for someone to be working at Leverage and never see or get deeply involved with situations that a handful of people have, in private or in semi-public conversations, described clearly as cultic abuse. It seems like there are on the order of dozens of people who probably had a roughly fine time being involved in Leverage for many years, and at least a handful of people who report much more negative experiences.

(I’m @utotranslucence on Twitter; never officially had a LessWrong account before but been around the Bay Area community since 2017. I attended one Paradigm training weekend in early 2018 and some parties at the Lake Merritt building but most of my knowledge comes from conversations with friends who did work there, and there are plenty of things I still don’t know with great clarity.)

It seems plausible that in the future, if there aren't already, there will be many groups that use the language and terminology of rationality to serve more self-interested and orthogonal objectives.

I do worry about "ends justify the means" reasoning when evaluating whether a person or project was or wasn't "good for the world" or "worth supporting". This seems especially likely when using an effective-altruism-flavored lens that only a few people/organizations/interventions will matter orders of magnitude more than others. If one believes that a project is one of very few projects that could possibly matter, and the future of humanity is at stake - and also believes the project is doing something new/experimental that current civilization is inadequate for - there is a risk of using that belief to extend unwarranted tolerance of structurally-unsound organizational decisions, including those typical of "high-demand groups" (such as use of psychological techniques to increase member loyalty, living and working in the same place, non-platonic relationships with subordinates, secrecy, and so on) without proportionate concern for the risks of structuring an organization in that way.

There is (roughly) a sequences post [LW · GW] for that. :P

My name is Joe Corabi. I am a philosophy professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and a longtime friend of Geoff Anders.  I have known Geoff since we were grad students together at Rutgers.  We have also collaborated over the years on a number of philosophical projects, both related to and separate from Leverage Research. 

I have been a volunteer off and on at Leverage since its founding and I wanted to share my experience of Leverage in the hopes that it provides some unique evidence about the organization and its history.  I was troubled by the recent Less Wrong post and I spoke to Geoff about the possibility of writing something that can hopefully provide some additional context for those looking to evaluate the situation. 

I was initially drawn to Leverage by the enthusiasm of its members and Geoff’s vision for the organization.  In my view, which is from someone who has spent over 20 years studying philosophy in an intensive way, Geoff is a highly skilled philosopher who has both an expert knowledge of the field and a sensitivity to methodological concerns, the combination of which is quite rare.  In my view, professional analytic philosophers nowadays often tend to substitute questions that are readily answerable for questions that have deep significance, and they also use methods that encourage small, clever moves in argumentation over insights that will integrate well with a bigger picture of human knowledge and understanding.  I found Geoff to be unique among philosophers I had met in several ways.  Most notably, he was very well steeped in the history of philosophy without, as far as I could tell, succumbing to any tendency to fetishize that history.  He had a broad appreciation for the way that historical philosophers had different methodological approaches for addressing philosophical problems than most current philosophers, and he had a keen awareness of ways that the methods those philosophers employed could lead to improvements in philosophical understanding. I was someone trained in philosophy in a very ahistorical way and Geoff did a fantastic job of answering objections I had to emphasizing the study of historical figures.  He provided me with new approaches for reading historical figures that helped me to get much more out of them.  (I should also mention that I have never found him to be anything but a highly respectful interlocutor who addresses disagreement with charity and a spirit of rational dialogue.  I have never seen him treat anyone else who disagreed in any way different from this. The view of him insinuated in the post—that he was an authoritarian or master manipulator—just does not fit the picture of him I have assembled over the years.)

Based on my conversations with Geoff about philosophy and seeing his own philosophical work, I judged that he was someone who had unusual insights and potentially the ability to lead an organization that would make dramatic improvements to the world.   I started volunteering time with Leverage in whatever ways I could, occasionally visiting their original headquarters in New York City to make presentations and collaborate with Leverage employees.  I continued this practice after the organization moved to California. 

The projects I have volunteered for with Leverage have been diverse.  My involvement with the organization has waxed and waned over the years depending on my other commitments and on my sense of where my efforts would be most valuable.  I have had many positive experiences with Leverage—times when I felt that I was learning about theories and even whole fields that I knew little about and which seemed to promise significant insights.  At other times, I had the sense that there were aspects of Leverage that reproduced things that I did not like about academia.  For example, in one case, I spent significant time on a research project on intelligence amplification, submitted it, then felt that it got filed away without ever having much impact or even getting read by hardly anyone.  (It turns out that I may have been wrong about this, but it was my impression at the time.  This is a fear that I and many other academics also have about our published academic work.)  In another case, I pledged to help a Google engineer (who I believe was connected with the rationalist community) with developing an online intelligence testing platform that a number of people at Leverage had an interest in testing and using. The original plan as I understood it was that I would provide significant theoretical consultation, but in the end he had a more or less complete vision for the project (an impressive one honestly) and my role wound up being much more that of a grunt worker. I judged this to be a less valuable use of my time than other potential things I could be doing, so I did not continue with the project beyond the first few months.

In my debriefs with Geoff, I never felt any pressure to volunteer at the organization more than was comfortable for me, and I never felt any pressure to engage in charting or other more cutting-edge experimental techniques that were popular there.  I knew about at least some of these practices (probably most), and Geoff always good-naturedly invited me to try them out if I thought they would be helpful or I was interested in providing feedback on them. I did try some of these things out, particularly charting.  I found the results fairly impressive in my own case.  I was not fully convinced of all the underlying theoretical claims because I felt that there was not yet comprehensive enough evidence and I held some background philosophical positions that were in tension with the approach, but I was certainly impressed and wanted to learn more. 

Although I never felt pressure from Geoff, I also never felt that I was being “shut out” because I did not live in California or dedicate myself full-time to Leverage’s projects.  I found that Geoff was more available for casual conversations and informal brainstorming sessions early in the organization’s history than he was later (where our conversations tended to be shorter and more efficiently focused on official business), but I judged that to be a virtually inevitable consequence of the fact that the organization had ambitious goals and he had many demands on his time.  I always found him to be the same friendly and reasonable person, and I never saw any indication of increasing demand for agreement with him or any official organizational platform.  He was always welcoming to me without being pushy.  Interestingly, I did sometimes have the impression that I was being treated as an underling or subordinate by a couple of early employees (or perhaps volunteers) of Leverage, perhaps because I was not a member of the rationalist community or because I worked only part-time on Leverage-related projects. But those individuals have to the best of my knowledge not been associated with Leverage in any way since at least 2013.  All my other interactions with Leverage employees, while typically brief, have been very positive.

I have not been physically present at Leverage for several years, so I can’t comment on any interpersonal conflicts at the organization or how (or whether) the culture of Leverage 1.0 changed late in its history.  There does seem to be evidence of conflict and dysfunction there towards the end.  I can only reiterate that my own visits over the years were intellectually invigorating. While some of the projects at times seemed a bit hokey to me, much of what happened seemed exciting and was done as far as I could tell in a spirit of open inquiry and sensitivity to evidence. I was always struck by the decentralized feel of the organization when I visited—the fact that there were many different projects going on simultaneously that seemed to be controlled largely by individuals other than Geoff, with visions somewhat different from his.  So it seems especially ironic to me that Geoff has been accused of having an authoritarian presence or of leading some sort of personality cult.  All I can say is that this does not fit at all with my experiences of Leverage.

For those who think the above description reads like one of a typical cult, it's worse reading how a description of an actual cult reads.

There's currently a cult trying to take over a place that hosts personal development seminars (and I know people personally who went there for seminars unrelated to the cult.

https://metamoderna.org/how-a-psychedelic-sex-cult-infiltrated-a-german-ecovillage/

Am I crazy or was something really similar to this, with the same thing of asking for a LW moderator to vouch, posted like a year ago? I didn't immediately find it by searching.

I can verify that I saw some version of their document The Plan[1] (linked in the EA Forum post below) in either 2018 or 2019 while discussing Leverage IRL with someone rationalist adjacent that I don't want to doxx. While I don't have first hand knowledge (so you might want to treat this as hearsay), my interlocutor did and told me that they believed they were the only one with a workable plan, along with the veneration of Geoff.

[1]: I don't remember all of the exact details, but I do remember the shape of the flowchart and that looks like it. It's possible that my interlocutor also got it from Gregory Lewis, but I don't think so.

Figured I'd chime in too—I'm Jordan Alexander and I was one of the Pareto Fellows back in 2016. I've been involved with the EA and rationality community to various degrees since then (Stanford EA, internship at CHAI, active GWWC pledge) so I thought I'd give my account of the program. I recognize that other people may have had different experiences during the program and that there may have been issues that I was not personally aware of as a participant in the program.  

As for my relationship with Leverage: I have a few friends at Leverage, though we're not in close contact. I participated in Paradigm Coaching (essentially a combination of personal and professional one-on-one coaching) for a few months at the end of 2019 and found it incredibly helpful while working on the mundane problem known as "job-hunting". Finally, one of my friends at Leverage reached out and asked me if I was interested in sharing my experience at the Pareto Fellowship after this post popped up. Frankly I'm annoyed that I have to do this but it seems unfair that these sorts of posts reappear every year. I work as a software engineer and have no professional or financial ties to Leverage. 

Here's an overall account of the program structure, going off of the archived Pareto Fellowship website:

• The program was indeed split into training and project phases. The trainings were given by folks at Leverage or CEA, though the CEA folks had very close ties to Leverage and similar ways of thinking (some of the CEA folks also worked at Leverage following the program). This program was incubated at CEA but I'd personally judge it as accurate if one were to say that this was basically a Leverage-run and CEA-funded program.
• The training topics were as-described on the Pareto website. I thought the training was great, though there were definitely a few fellows that were familiar with the content beforehand and if I were in their place I would've wanted it to be compressed further.
• The project phase lacked strong mentorship and wasn't quite able to satisfy every Fellow's interests. I'd say that the Pareto Fellowship—in terms of material goods—mainly provided food, housing and a fancy title that made it easier for fellows to find their own mentors.

With all this said, then, in terms of immediate professional growth the Pareto Fellowship wasn't that great. What the Pareto Fellowship was great for, in my eyes, was personal growth. This was echoed among a few fellows, usually along the lines of "I didn't do anything incredibly useful in the near-term but I experienced the most personal growth ever during that summer." This was true for myself as well and I still consider it a good investment that I'd make again. Again, though, this is not meant to be a universal judgement of the program. 

Still, it's odd to see these posts popping up again and again because what went best for me in the Pareto Fellowship was the content that came from Leverage. In my eyes it worked incredibly well as an environment for young professionals to come together and spend a couple months deeply and rigorously examining their beliefs and what they'd focus on throughout their career. 

Now, the EA/rationalist community has produced a few other programs like this (SPARC, CFAR) that are generally subjected to far less scrutiny and name-calling than Leverage has been. As such, here's a defensive account of the program that addresses some of the concerns in the above post: 

• The day-to-day classes of the Pareto Fellowship were hosted at the Leverage building on Lake Merritt. Most of the Fellows lived there, though there was alternative housing provided in a Berkeley apartment. I lived in the Berkeley housing for a month or so during the program but later moved to the Leverage house because there were more amenities at the Leverage House. To my knowledge, everyone that wanted to live off-site was able to do so.
• I kept a public personal blog at the time and briefly mentioned the Pareto Fellowship in it. I mentioned it once and someone suggested I run it by the program managers, who said it was fine. This was a completely unremarkable exchange. I am aware of information-management agreements with regards to content that's originally designed by Leverage. They do not seem meaningfully different from an NDA or a confidentiality agreement that one might sign in similar contexts (trade secrets, distribution rights, etc.).
• Leverage has indeed developed unique introspective techniques. I requested to participate in a charting session during the program and found it helpful. At no point did I feel pressured to do so. I also find Leverage's frameworks generally helpful for thinking and continue to use them occasionally. I think these introspective techniques can be compared reasonably well to therapeutic techniques, though Leverage doesn't claim to do the same work licensed therapists do. Still, I've used professional therapy services (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and psychoanalysis in particular, with two different certified mental health professionals completely disconnected from Leverage) and found them to be complementary to the techniques taught at Leverage.
• Leverage did not try to actively recruit me nor do I recall any explicit opportunities to apply for a job at Leverage (perhaps this was unique to my situation, I was 18 and a rising college freshman with no inclinations to drop out).
• I read "the Leverage plan" around that summer. Emphatically, the plan did not state Leverage would "literally take over US and or/global governance," but would train skilled and value-aligned individuals to occupy positions of power. Importantly: there was no explicit coordination with Leverage or top-down hierarchy. The idea was to equip individuals with skills and have them do their own thing in various important roles. This is pretty much what any skill-building or movement-building organization does, the folks at Leverage just happen to have had a very detailed plan.
• The "vibe" within Leverage was overall pessimistic about existential risk. This was the case for most Berkeley rationalist-adjacent orgs I encountered at the time. There was not an explicit "narrative" or stated Leverage position.

Now, here's a positive account of the program that addresses the impact it had on me personally:

• As a newcomer to the Bay Area EA community I was able to live in a house of thoughtful people and foster deep connections with other Pareto Fellows that I'm still in touch with. In purely professional terms, I made between 5 to 10 strong contacts that I'd be happy to work with on future projects (and have done so already on a few occasions). This is an insanely high hit-rate for a program of roughly 20 people and I doubt it would have been possible without the co-living setup. In non-professional terms, I made lots of friends that I still care about today.
• As a rising college freshman I was given time for intellectual exploration with a group of smart, independent thinkers that I respected. The program was relatively unstructured, which was probably less helpful for some of the older fellows but gave me ample time to explore my own interests. By the end of summer and after an amazing fireside chat with Nate Soares I'd decided to take a stab at doing AI Safety Research. It's not what I work on these days for reasons entirely disconnected from Leverage but, again, especially in 2016 "AI Safety" was a far less established field and it would've been difficult to find a group of people that took it seriously in the way Leverage and Leverage-adjacent folks did (even while Leverage itself was focused on global coordination problems).
• Again, as a rising college freshman I found it incredibly valuable to have a set of structured introspective practices that I could rely on during college. I'm glad that the folks at Leverage created a space where it was ok to have deep conversations about the structure of one's beliefs and their values. I never felt "directed" towards any train of thought in particular (though perhaps this was purely coincidental). Having these conversations is certainly something that's hard to do and it can be quite off-putting to have conversations about something that one has held on to for a while (e.g. at the time I was questioning my belief in Catholicism) but the Pareto/Leverage staff handled all of these conversations with me with a great deal of care. It's difficult to market for these kinds of things in advance, and frankly I also expected the Pareto Fellowship to be more directly career-oriented than it ended up being but I'd be disappointed if we threw out this kind of space entirely under the misguided idea that emotional depth and introspection equate to "cultishness" and ought to be avoided in any kind of "official" CEA-sponsored summer program.

Finally, I'm generally annoyed that one of these posts surfaces every year in what seems like an attempt to unearth some deep secret at the heart of Leverage. I genuinely think that these are well-intentioned people working on an ambitious and unique project. Building these projects is hard and I wish this community had more respect for that. 

I'm not sure what the meaning, if any, of the following fact is, but: I notice that I would feel very positively about Leverage as it's portrayed here if there weren't relationships with multiple younger subordinates (e.g. if the leader had been monogamously married), and as it is I feel mildly negative about it on net.

I should clarify upfront that I am not a rationalist, and am not a fan of LessWrong. 

That said, I have some experience when it comes to... this sort of thing.

So when I was a little younger, I was the figurehead and leader of a sex cult. (Oddly enough, I did this without ever really understanding that it was, in fact, a sex cult. One of my best friends described this as a "Jerry Smith plot", which I found hilarious.) This cult was, in practice, a discord server focused around my erotic hypnosis work. I copied the model from another server that was definitely a sex cult, and tried to strip out all of the culty elements and just leave the aesthetics (because a lot of us liked the aesthetics). But you really can't reconstitute the structure of a high-control group without, in various ways, reconstituting the behavior of a high-control group. It doesn't work - the culty shit works its way back in if you're not extremely careful. And I was not careful, for reasons that may be obvious if you think about the perks one gets as the figurehead of a sex cult. A lot of people got hurt.

Why bring that up? Because hoo boy does this tick a lot of similar boxes. 

A lot of things scream "high control environment", which... okay, not necessarily all red flags. And he's dating subordinates. Again, not always bad. Like, in the traditional business world, a boss sleeping with one of their subordinates at all is considered a red flag - not illegal, but certainly a really bad idea due to the power dynamics in play. 

But given what this post says, it sounds like he's essentially using his star power to specifically attract young women, then grooming them, isolating them within the group, using various forms of psychological manipulation to make them more invested, and connecting their housing to their employment. My brain takes these facts, and then quickly and easily maps them onto my experience as a member of one sex cult and the leader of another. I find the result very concerning.

But even if all of that isn't enough of a red flag, consider that the OP of this post has made it anonymously and seems to find it important that this organization not think ill of them. 

Hi BayAreaHuman, 

I just posted an update [LW · GW] on behalf of Leverage Research to LessWrong along with an invite to an AMA with Leverage Research next weekend, as it seems from the comments that there isn’t a lot of common knowledge about our current work or other aspects of our history. I encourage people to read this [LW · GW]for additional context, and I hope the OP will be able to update this post to incorporate some of that.

I also want to briefly address some of the items raised here.

Information management policies

Leverage Research has for a long time been concerned about the potential negative consequences of the potential misuse of knowledge garnered from research. These concerns are widely shared for research in the hard sciences (e.g., nuclear physics), but are valid as well for the social sciences. 

Starting in 2012, Leverage Research had an information management policy designed to prevent negative intended consequences from the premature dissemination of information. Our information policy from 2012-2016 required permission for the release of longform information on the internet. We had an information approval team, with most information release requests being approved. In 2016, the policy was revised, in part to give blanket permission for the sharing of longform information on the internet unrelated to their work at Leverage. Based on our ED’s recollection, in no case was permission withheld for the online publication of regular personal information.

Our information management policy aimed to balance simplicity and usability with effect and certainly did not get everything right. One of the negative consequences of our information policy, as we have learned, is the way it made some regular interactions with people outside of the relevant information circles more difficult than intended. We intend to learn from this experience and do better with information management in the future.
 

Dangers and harms from psychological practices

As mentioned in my update post, [LW · GW] we are very concerned about potential harms to individuals from experimenting with psychological tools and so--when we begin to distribute some of these tools to the public--we will include in the release descriptions of the wide variety of potential near-term and long-term dangers from psychological experimentation that we are aware of.

The post mentions “hearing people who did lots of charting within Leverage report that it led to dissociation and fragmentation, that they have found difficult to reverse.” We believe that the tools we will release to the public, including Belief Reporting and basic charting, are generally safe, and will do our best to alert people to the potential dangers.

If anyone has experienced negative effects from psychological experimentation, including with rationality training, meditation, circling, Focusing, IFS, Leverage’s charting or Belief Reporting tools (or word-of-mouth copies of these tools), or similar techniques please do reach out to us at contact@leverageresearch.org. We are keen to gain as much information as possible on the harms and dangers as we prepare to release our psychology research.
 

Dating policies

From 2011–2019, Leverage did not focus on the development of standard professional norms or policies. We had an employee handbook covering equal employment opportunity, sexual and other forms of harassment, company conduct, and complaints procedures, but had no policy (and still have no policy) on who should date whom. It is true that our Executive Director had three long-term consensual relationships with women employed by Leverage Research or affiliated organizations during their history. Managing the potential for abuses by those in positions of power is very important to us. If anyone is aware of harms or abuses that have taken place involving staff at Leverage Research, please email me, in confidence, at larissa@leverageresearch.org or larissa.e.rowe@gmail.com. 

Following 2019, Leverage began to prioritize the development of professional standards. We expect to develop policies on dating in the workplace and other topics as part of this effort. As the HR representative at Leverage Research, developing these standards further is my responsibility.

Charting/debugging was always optional

The post claims that “Members who were on payroll were expected to undergo charting/debugging sessions with a supervisory "trainer", and to "train" other members.” This is inaccurate, and I’m not sure how this misunderstanding could have occurred.

Neither charting nor debugging was ever required of any person at any time at Leverage, either as part of their work or prior to being hired as part of the hiring process. Many individuals chose to be charted because of their interest in it, either for work or self-improvement-related reasons. But charting — as well as other psychological interventions—were and should remain strictly voluntary. Individuals who were uninterested in charting could have (and did) study other topics.

I hope this, along with my LessWrong forum post [LW · GW], helps to answer some of the questions and concerns raised here. If you have any questions not answered by this comment, my post, or other materials online please feel free to email me (larissa@leverageresearch.org) or join us at our virtual office next weekend.

When I hear that a few people within Leverage ended up with serious negative consequences because of charting, it's unclear for me from the outside what that means.

It's my understanding that Leverage did a lot of experiments. It could be that some experiments ended messing up some of the participants. It could also be that "normal charting" without doing any experiments messed the people up. 

Hi all,

During my years in the Bay I spent some of my time as an employee of Paradigm, a Leverage 1.0 affiliate. I also spent a good amount of time living and hanging out at the Leverage house/offices.

I'm writing here from a coffeeshop in Berlin because...why? I think because I get frustrated by the balance of coverage that Leverage gets. When I consider what sorts of things produce value, they tend to start off being very high-variance. They tend to have very weird-seeming history. 

For instance: Whispers have it that – before AI X-Risk was a respectable, well-known cause backed by people like Elon Musk – that a high school drop-out named "Eliezer Yudkowsky" wrote a Harry Potter fan-fiction to bring hundreds of people into a rationalist movement that might someday save the world from runaway algorithms. Did you know Trump-supporter Peter Thiel was an early funder of one of its main organizations?! Did you know that many rationalists have become affiliated with Neoreaction, an alt-right group with members that support authoritarianism?!! Don't get me started on a different now-respectable org – one staffed by many rationalists – that bootstrapped itself in part through astroturfing and which maintains strict information management policies (what are they hiding???).

I speak above of causes and orgs (ones that I like by the way) that have since done a decent job of PR...to the point where most people don't know about their strange early history. Leverage 1.0, on the other hand did a crap job of PR, and so clearly biased "Facts" posts I've seen on here do more damage. They do damage to reputations of organizations that were – on net in my opinion – worthwhile endeavors and to people who continue to be generative (like Geoff, who, full disclaimer, is my friend).

That all said, I don't dispute most of what BayAreaHuman has mentioned above. I'm reacting more to "Facts" posts that read like gossip magazine content but with the stylistic manner of rationalist objectivity. I.e., posts that seem intent on curating bullet-points about Leverage that appear to me to be hand-selected to be off-putting, despite an overall tone and structural properties of objectivity. (My straw-man imitation: "Look, I'm not saying LessWrong is a cult. I'm just stating several facts showing a similarity to 'high-demand groups.' Wink wink.")

For my part, Leverage 1.0 harmed me in some ways. It helped me in some ways. The result was, upon reflection, quite net positive. I'd be happy to say more after eating some dinner.

Update from Leverage Research: a reminder about our AMA & other ways to get updates
For anyone in this thread who still has questions about Leverage Research, I just wanted to remind you about the AMA we are running at our virtual office tomorrow (Saturday, October 2, at 12 PM PT). 

The event is open to anyone interested in our work and is designed to allow people to ask questions about our history, current work, and future plans. See this comment for further details. [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Beyond that, we're currently exploring different ways to ensure we hear from people who were part of the Leverage 1.0 ecosystem about their experiences, especially before we release some of our psychology tools and as we write our FAQ on our history (see this post for more details on these two initiatives [LW · GW]). This includes looking into neutral third-party moderators and ways of gathering anonymous feedback. If you want to stay up to date on the steps we're taking, or our current work in general, subscribe to our quarterly newsletter or follow us on Twitter.

How do you say "this a cult" without literally saying the words "this is a cult"? (In the common colloquial sense of the word "cult", as opposed the historical academic sense of the word.)

I've never heard of this organization until now and I'd be happy never to hear about them in the future. (This isn't a criticism of OP.)

It's been helpful for me to think of three signs of a cult:

1. Transformational experiences that can only be gotten through The Way.

2. Leader has Ring of Power that gives access to The Way.

3. Clear In-Group vs. Out-Group dynamics to achieve The Way.

Leverage 1.0 seems to have all three:

1. Transformational experiences through charting and bodywork.

2. Geoff as Powerful Theorist.

3. In-group with Leverage as "only powerful group".

Given this, I'm most curious about what Geoff has done to reflect/improve and what the ~rationalist community would want to see from him in order to "trust" him again.

Fwiw, I know very little about Leverage. I've never met Geoff but I have heard a few negative stories about emotional ~trauma from some folks there.

Cult Checklist taken from here: https://rebelwisdom.co.uk/18-film-content/general/605-how-to-spot-a-cult-jamie-wheal

I think the way the term cult (or euphemisms like “high-demand group”) has been used by the OP and by many commenters in this thread is extremely unhelpful and, I suspect, not in keeping with the epistemic standards of this community.

At its core, labeling a group as a cult is an out-grouping power move used to distance the audience from that group’s perspective. You don’t need to understand their thoughts, explain their behavior, form a judgment on their merits. They’re a cult. 

This might be easier to see when you consider how, from an outside perspective, many behaviors of the Rationality community that are, in fact, fine might seem cultish. Consider, for example, the numerous group houses, hero-worship of Eliezer, the tendency among Rationalists to hang out only with other Rationalists, the literal take over the world plan (AI), the prevalence of unusual psychological techniques (e.g., rationality training, circling), and the large number of other unusual cultural practices that are common in this community. To the outside world, these are cult-like behaviors. They do not seem cultish to Rationalists because the Rationality community is a well-liked ingroup and not a distrusted outgroup.  

My understanding is that historically the Rationality community has had some difficulty in protecting itself from parasitic bad actors who have used their affiliation with this community to cause serious harm to others. Given that context, I understand why revisiting the topic of early Leverage might be compelling. I would suggest that the cult/no cult question will not be helpful here because the answer depends so largely on whether people liked or didn’t like Leverage. I think past events should demonstrate that this is not a reliable indicator of parasitic bad actors.

Some questions I would ask instead include: Did this group represent that they were affiliated with Rationality in order to achieve their ends? If so, did they engage in activities that are contrary to the norms of the Rationality community? Were people harmed by this group? If so, was that harm abnormal given the social context? Was that harm individual or institutional? Did those involved act responsibly given the circumstances? Etc. 

Given my knowledge of Leverage 1.0 and my knowledge of the Rationality community, I am quite confident that Leverage was not the parasitic bad actor that you are looking for, but I think this is something the Rationality community should determine for itself and this seems like a fine time to do so.

However, I would also like to note that Leverage 1.0 has historically been on the receiving end of substantial levels of bullying, harassment, needless cruelty, public ridicule, and more by people who were not engaged in any legitimate epistemic activity. I do not think this is OK. I intend to call out this behavior directly when I see it. I would ask that others do so as well.

(I currently work at Leverage research but did not work at Leverage during Leverage 1.0 (although I interacted with Leverage 1.0 and know many of the people involved). Before working at Leverage I did EA community building at CEA between Summer 2014 and early 2019.)