Zoe Curzi's Experience with Leverage Research

What's frustrating about still hearing noisy debate on this topic, so many years later, is that Leverage being a really bad org seems overdetermined at this point. On the one hand, if I ranked MIRI, CFAR, CEA, FHI, and several startups I've visited, in terms of how reality-distorting they can be, Leverage would score ~9, while no other would surpass ~7. (It manages to be nontransparent and cultlike in other ways too!).  While on the other hand, their productive output was... also like a 2/10? It's indefensible. But still only a fraction of the relevant information is in the open.

One thing to note is that if you "read the room" instead of only looking at the explicit arguments, it's noticeable that a lot of people left Leverage and the new org ("Leverage 2.0") completely switched research directions, which to me seems like tacit acknowledgement that their old methods etc aren't as good.

Hi! In the past few months I've been participating in Leverage Research/EA discourse on Twitter. Now there is one Twitter thread discussing your involvement as throwaway/anonymoose: https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1585319237018681344 (with a subthread starting at https://twitter.com/ohabryka/status/1586084766020820992 discussing anti-doxxing norms and linking back to EA Forum comments).

One piece of information that's missing is why you used two throwaway accounts instead of one (and in particular, why you used one to reply to the other one, as alleged by Kerry Vaughan in https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1585319243985424384 ). Can you tell me about your reasoning behind that decision?

(If that matters, I am not affiliated with any Leverage-adjacent org and I am not a throwaway account for a different EA Forum user.)

I dipped my toe into openly commenting last week [LW(p) · GW(p)], and immediately received an email that made it more difficult to maintain anonymity - I was told "Geoff has previously speculated to me that you are 'throwaway', the author of the 2018 basic facts post".

Leverage Research hosted a virtual open house and AMA a couple weeks ago for their relaunch as a new kind of organization that has been percolating for the last couple years. I attended. One subject Geoff and I talked about was the debacle that was the article in The New York Times (NYT) on Scott Alexander from several months ago. I expressed my opinion that:

1.  Scott Alexander could have managed his online presence much better than he did on and off for a number of years.
2. Scott Alexander and the rationality community in general could have handled the situation much better than they did.
3. Those are parts of this whole affair that too few in the rationality community have been willing to face, acknowledge or discuss about what can be learned from mistakes made.
4. Nonetheless, NYT was the instigating party in whatever of the situation constituted a conflict between NYT, and Scott Alexander and his supporters, and NYT is the party that should be held more accountable and is more blameworthy if anyone wants to make it about blame.

Geoff nodded, mostly in agreement, and shared his own perspective on the matter that I won't share. Yet if Geoff considers NYT to have done one or more things wrong in that case, 

You yourself, Ryan, never made any mistake of posting your comments online in a way that might make it easier for someone else to de-anonymize you. If you made any mistake, it's that you didn't anticipate how adeptly Geoff would apparently infer or discern your identity. I expect why it wouldn't be so hard for Geoff to have figured it out it was you because you would have shared information about the internal activities at Leverage Research you are one of only a small number of people would have had access to. 

Yet that's not something you should not have had to anticipate. A presumption of good faith in a community or organization entails a common assumption that nobody would do that to their other peers. Whatever Geoff himself has been thinking about you as the author of those posts, he understands exactly the way in which to de-anonymize you or whoever would also be considered a serious violation of a commonly respected norm.

Based on how you wrote your comment, it seems that the email you received may have come across as intimidating. Obviously I don't expect you to disclose anything else about it, and would respect and understand if you don't, but it seems the email may have been meant to provide you with a well-intended warning. If so, there is also a chance Geoff had discerned that you were the account-holder for 'throwaway' (at least at the time of the posts in question) but hasn't even considered the possibility of de-anonymizing you, at least in more than a private setting. Yet either way, Geoff has begun responding in a way that if he were to act upon enough would only have become more disrespectful to you, your privacy and your anonymity. 

Of course, if it's not already obvious to anyone, neither am I someone who has an impersonal relationship with Leverage Research as an organization. I'm writing this comment with the anticipation that Geoff may read it himself or may not be comfortable with what I've disclosed above. Yet what I've shared was not from a particularly private conversation. It was during an AMA Leverage Research hosted that was open to the public. I've already explained above as well that in this comment I could have disclosed more, like what Geoff himself personally said, but I haven't. I mention that to also show that I am trying to come at this with good faith toward Geoff as well. 

During the Leverage AMA, I also asked a question that Geoff called the kind of 'hard-hitting journalistic' question he wanted more people to have asked. If that's something he respected during the AMA, I expect this comment is one he would be willing to accept being in public as well. 

Threads Roundup

• Several things under the LW Leverage Tag [? · GW]
• Leverage Basic Facts EA Post [EA · GW] & comment thread
  • I discovered this one a little late? Still flipping through it.
• BayAreaHuman LW Post [LW · GW]
  • By now, I have been able to confirm every single concrete point made in that post seems true or reasonable, to myself or at least one of my contacts (not always two). The tone is slightly-aggressive, but seems generally truth-seeking, to me.
  • I think it leans more towards characterizing dysfunctional late-L1, than early-L1? But not strictly.
  • Someone, probably Geoff (it's apparently the kind of thing he does, confirmed by 2+ people), sent out emails to friends of Leverage framing it as an unwarranted attack and encouraging flooding the comment thread with people's positive experiences.
    • I do not like that he did this! I know someone else, who intends to write up something more thorough about this. But if they don't, I am likely to comment on it myself, after saving evidence and articulating my thoughts.
    • EDIT: I do think a lot of the positive accounts are honest! I am not accusing any commenter of lying. My concern here is selective reporting, and something of a concentration of force [LW · GW] dynamic that I believe may have been invoked deliberately in a way that I do not trust as truth-seeking.
  • Matt Falshaw's recent email [LW(p) · GW(p)] mentioned non-Zoe people writing "disingenuous and deliberately misleading" posts in the past? If that was meant to implicate BAH, then I think it was being a bit "disingenuous and deliberately misleading."
• Zoe's Medium Post
  • I buy it! I was willing to chime-in in its favor, from early on
  • Late-Leveragers seem to have conceded that it is a valid personal recounting
  • In case this changes location: LW comment thread on it [LW · GW]
• Geoff Anders Twitch Streams
  • Stream 1
    • Included some relevant backstory on the rift with EA, which probably also belongs in a timeline.
    • Audio was recovered, and there's a transcript here [LW · GW] of the second half for the less audio-inclined.
    • Geoff's initial twitch-stream (with Anna Salamon) included commentary about how Leverage used to be pretty friendly with EA, and ran the first EAG. Several EA founders felt pretty close after that, and then there was some pretty intense drifting apart (partially over philosophical differences?). There was also some sort of kerfuffle where a lot of people ended up with the frame that "Leverage was poaching donors," which may have been unfair to Leverage. As time went on, Geoff and other Leveragers were largely blocked from collaborations, and felt pretty shunned.
      • Some decent higher-detail text summaries here [LW(p) · GW(p)] and here [LW(p) · GW(p)].
      • TekhneMakre started a thread with some good additional thoughts, here [LW(p) · GW(p)]
• Some Press Releases from Leverage
  • A letter from the Executive Director on Negative Past Experiences: Sympathy, Transparency, and Support
    • Commits to:
      • "reimburse any employee of any organization in the Leverage research collaboration for expenditures they made on therapy" (w/ details)
      • "we will share information about intention research in the form of essays, talks, podcasts, etc., so as to give the public greater context on this area of our past research"
      • Sets up 4 intermediaries (to ease coming forward with accounts, in cases of distrust)
        • EDIT: Names Anna Salamon, Eli Tyre, Matthew Graves, and Matt Falshaw as several somewhat-intermediary people who can be contacted.
      • "Leverage Research will thus seek to resolve the current conflict as definitively as possible, publicly dissociate from the Rationalist community, and take actions to prevent future conflict"
    • Overall, I found this one pretty heartening
  • Ecosystem Dissolution Agreement
    • The socially-enforced NDA-like from the end of Leverage 1.0
    • EDIT: For a sense of Leverage's information-suppression policy in prior years, here is the Basic Information Management Checklist from 2017
  • Leverage 1.0 Ecosystem information sharing and initial inquiry
    • Email from Matt Falshaw on Oct 19
  • ETA: Essay On Intention Research
    • This essay seemed really well done, overall.
      • Outlined the history of the research clearly. Seemed pretty good at sticking to fairly grounded descriptions, especially given the slipperyness of the subject matter. Tried to provide multiple hypotheses of what could be happening, and remained open to explanations nobody has come up with yet. This has been a tricky topic for people to describe, and I suspect he handled it well.
    • Mostly gives a history of Intention Research, a line of inquiry that started out poking at energywork and bodywork (directing attention with light touch), got increasingly into espousing detailed reads of each other's nonverbals, and which eventually fed into some really awful interpersonal dynamics that got so bad that Leverage 1.0 was dissolved to diffuse it.
    • Warnings are at the end. My sole complaint with the writing is that I wish they were outlined earlier.
  • ETA: Public Report on Inquiry Findings: Factors and Mistakes that Contributed to a Range of Negative Experiences on Our 2011-2019 Research Collaboration
    • I thought this was quite good. Reading this raised my esteem for Matt Falshaw.
    • I do think this accurately characterized a lot of the structural problems, and leaves me more optimistic that Leverage 2.0 will avoid those. If you are interested in the details of that, I recommend reading it.
      • I don't think all of the problems were structural? But a lot of them were, and the ones that weren't were often exacerbated by structural things. Putting the focus on fixing things at that layer looks like a reasonable choice.
    • 3-5 people with extremely negative experiences and perspectives, out of something like 45 people, does sound plausible to me.
    • Something I felt wasn't handled perfectly: The refusal of people with largely-negative experiences, to talk with investigators, reads to me as some indicator of a feeling of past loss-of-trust or breach-of-trust. And while their absence is gestured at, I did feel like the significance of this tended to get downplayed more than I would have liked.

I have some difficulty understanding the descriptions by former Leverage members. Inferential distance, but even if you tell me what the words refer to, I am not sure I am painting my near-mode picture correctly. Like, when you say "bodywork", now I imagine something like one person giving the other person a massage, where both participants believe that this action not only relaxes the body, but also helps to remove some harmful memes from the mind. -- Is this a strawman? Or is it a reasonable first approximation (which of course misses some important nuance)?

For me, getting these things right feels like I have an insight into how the organization actually works, on social level. Approximate descriptions are okay. If massaging someone's left shoulder helps them overcome political mindkilling, and massaging someone's right shoulder protects them from Roko's Basilisk, don't tell me! You have the NDA, and I don't actually care about this level of detail. Keep your secret tech! I just want to understand the dynamic, like if someone talks to a stranger and later feels like the person may have cast some curse on them, the reasonable response is to schedule a massage.

From all descriptions I have read so far, yours felt the most helpful in this direction. Thank you!

("object" is basically their confusing term for a psychologically-unhealthy memetic thing)

Cult symptom! Invented terminology for invented, fictitious entities.

Note that my goal isn't to evaluate harms caused by Leverage and try to offset such harms. Instead, it's trying to offset any incentives against sharing risky honest accounts like Zoe's.

I like the careful disambiguation here.

FWIW, I independently proposed something similar to a friend in the Lightcone office last week, with an intention that was related to offsetting harm.  My reasoning:

There's often a problem in difficult "justice" situations, where people have only a single bucket for "make the sufferer feel better" and "address the wrong that was done."

This is quite bad—it often causes people to either do too little for victims, or too much to offenders, because they're trying to achieve two goals at once and one goal dominates the calculation.  Not helping someone materially because the harm proved unintentional, or punishing the active party way in excess of what they "deserve" because that's what it takes to make the injured party feel better, that sort of thing.

Separating it out into "we're still figuring out the Leverage situation but in the meantime, let's try to make this person's life a little better" is excellent.

Reiterating that I understand that's not what you are doing, here.  But I think that would separately have also been a good thing.

A few quick thoughts:

1) This seems great, and I'm impressed by the agency and speed.

2) From reading the comments, it seems like several people were actively afraid of how Leverage could retaliate. I imagine similar for accusations/whistleblowing for other organizations. I think this is both very, very bad, and unnecessary; as a whole, the community is much more powerful than individual groups, so it seems poorly managed when the community is scared of a specific group. Resources should be spent to cancel this out.

In light of this, if more money were available, it seems easy to justify a fair bit more. Or even better could be something like, "We'll help fund lawyers in case you're attacked legally, or anti-harassing teams if you're harassed or trolled". This is similar to how the EFF helps with cases from small people/groups being attacked by big companies.

I don't mean to complain; I think any steps here, especially so quickly are fantastic.

3) I'm afraid this will get lost in this comment section. I'd be excited about a list of "things to keep in mind" like this to be repeatedly made prominent somehow. For example, I could imagine that at community events or similar, there could be necessary papers like, "Know your rights, as a Rationalist/EA", which flags how individuals can report bad actors and behavior.

4) Obviously a cash prize can encourage lying, but I think this can be decently managed. (It's a small community, so if there's good moderation, $15K would be very little compared to the social stigma that would come and you've found out to have destructively lied for $15k)

The most directly 'damning' thing, as far as I can tell, is Geoff pressuring people to sign NDAs.

I received an email from a Paradigm board member on behalf of Paradigm and Leverage that aims to provide some additional clarity on the information-sharing situation here. Since the email specifies that it can be shared, I've uploaded it to my Google Drive (with some names and email addresses redacted). You can view it here.

The email also links to the text of the information-sharing agreement in question with some additional annotations.

[Disclosure: I work at Leverage, but did not work at Leverage during Leverage 1.0. I'm sharing this email in a personal rather than a professional capacity.]

Another thing I want to mentally watch out for: 

It might be tempting for some ex-Leverage people to use Geoff as the primary scapegoat rather than implicating themselves fully. So as more stories come out, I plan to be somewhat delicate with the evidence. The temptation to scapegoat a leader is pretty high and may even seem justifiable in a "ends justifies the means" kind of thinking. 

I don't seem to personally be OK with using misleading information or lies to bolster a case against a person, even if this ends up "saving" a lot of people. (I don't think it actually saves them... people should come to grips with their own errors, not hide behind a fallback person.) 

So... Leverage, I'm looking at you as a whole community! You're not helpless peons of Geoff Anders. 

When spiritual gurus go out of control, it's not a one-man operation; there are corroborators, enablers, people who hid information, yes-men and sycophants, those too afraid to do the right thing or speak out against wrongdoing, those too protective of personal benefits they may be receiving (status, friends, food, housing), etc. 

There's stages of 'coming to terms' with something difficult. And a very basic model would be like 

1. Defensive / protective stage. I am still blended and identified with a problematic pattern or culture, so I defend it. It feels like my own being is at stake or on the line. It's hard to see what's true, and I am partially in denial or in dissociation—although I myself may not realize it. 
2. Mitosis stage. I am in the process of a painful identity-level separation from the pattern or culture. I start feeling anger towards it, some grief, horror, etc. It's likely I feel victimized. For the sake of gaining clarity, a victim narrative is more helpful than the previous narrative of "the thing is actually good though" or whatever fog of denial I was in. 
3. Grief stage. Even more open and full realization of what happened and its problematic nature. Realizing my own personal part in it and the extent to which my actions were my own and also contributed to harm. This can be a very difficult stage, and may come with shame, guilt, remorse, and immense sadness. 
4. Letting go and integration stage. Happy relief comes when all the disparate parts are integrated and all is forgiven. I hold myself to a new, higher standard, and I hold others also to a higher standard. I feel good about where I stand now, with more clarity and compassion. I see clearly what the mistakes were and how to avoid them. I can guide or warn others from making similar mistakes. There's no emotional or trauma residue left in me. My capacity has expanded to hold more complexity and diversity. I am more accepting of the past, can see from many perspectives, and ready to live fully present. 

Stage 2 is a dangerous stage, and it is one I have been in, and where I was most volatile, angry, and likely to cause damage. Kind of wanting more common knowledge about this as a Thing so that we are collectively aware that damage is best minimized. Although I imagine disagreements with this. 

Thanks, Anna!

As a LessWrong mod, I've been sitting and thinking about how to make the conversation go well for days now and have been stuck on what exactly to say.  This intention setting is a good start.

I think to your list I would add judging each argument and piece of data on its merits, .i.e., updating on evidence even if it pushes against the position we currently hold.

Phrased alternatively, I'm hoping we don't: treating arguments as soldiers: accepting bad arguments because they favor our preferred conclusion, rejecting good arguments because they don't support our preferred conclusion. I think there's a risk in this cases of knowing which side you're on and then accepting and rejecting all evidence accordingly.

Refraining from sharing true relevant facts, out of fear that others will take them in a politicized way, or will use them as an excuse for false judgments.

Are you somehow guaranteeing or confidently predicting that others will not take them in a politicized way, use them as an excuse for false judgments, or otherwise cause harm to those sharing the true relevant facts? If not, why are you asking people not to refrain from sharing such facts?

(My impression is that it is sheer optimism, bordering on wishful thinking, to expect such a thing, that those who have such a fear are correct to have such a fear, and so I am confused that you are requesting it anyway.)

I hesitated a bit before saying this? I thought it might add a little bit of clarity, so I figured I'd bring it up.

(Sorry it got long; I'm still not sure what to cut.)

There are definitely some needs-conflicts. Between (often distant) people who, in the face of this, feel the need to cling to the strong reassurance that "this could not possibly happen to them"/"they will definitely be protected from this," and would feel reassured at seeing Strong Condemning Action as soon as possible...

...and "the people who had this happen." Who might be best-served, if they absorbed that there is always some risk of this sort of shit happening to people. For them, it would probably be best if they felt their truth was genuinely heard, and took away some actionable lessons about what to avoid, without updating their personal identity to "victim" TOO much. And in the future, embraced connections that made them more robust against attaching to this sort of thing in the future.

("Victim" is just not a healthy personal identity in the long-term, for most people.)

Sometimes, these needs are so different, that it warrants having different forums of discussion. But there is some overlap in these needs (working out what happened, improving reporting, protecting people from cultish reprisals), and I'm not sure that separation is always necessary.

My read of the direction Anna seems to be trying to steer this is "do everything she can to clearly hear out people's stories carefully First." Only later, after people have really really listened, use that to formulate carefully considered harm-reducing actions.

Understanding the issue, in all its complexity, before working on coming up with solutions? I feel pretty on-board with that.

...I admit, I initially chaffed a bit? I have some memories of times Anna has leaned a bit more into the former-group's needs. Some of her attempts to aim differently this time, have felt a little awkward.

I did also get an "ordering other people to ignore politics and be vulnerable" vibe off this, which put my armor up to around my ears. (Something with more of a feel of... "showing own vulnerability to elicit other's vulnerability," would have generally felt more natural to me? I think her later responses cycled to this, a little).

...but I'm starting to think that even the awkwardness, is its own sort of evidence? Of someone who is used to wielding frame control, trying to put it aside to listen. And I feel a lot of affection, in seeing it show that she's working on this.

I would like it if we showed the world how accountability is done, and given your position, I find it disturbing that you have omitted this objective. That is, if I wanted to deflect the conversation away from accountability, I think I would write a post similar to yours. 

I would be happy to contribute my part of this, with the memory I have. I think I could cover a decent amount of the questions above, though would also likely get some things wrong, so wouldn't be a totally dependent observer.

Edit: I got a request to cut the chaff and boil this down to discrete actionables. Let me do that.

1. Will you release everyone from any NDAs

2. Will you step down from any management roles (e.g. Leverage and Paradigm)

3. Will you state for the record, that you commit to not threaten* anyone who comes forward with reports that you do not like, in the course of this process

I get the sense that you have made people afraid to stand against you, historically. Engaging in any further threats, seems likely to impede all of our ability to make sense of, and come to terms with, whatever happened. It could also be quite incriminating on its own.

* For full points, commit to also not make any strong stealthy attempts to socially discredit people.

I recognize it took some courage to talk about this in the first place, and I don't want to discount that. I am glad that you said something.

...but I also don't want to lose track of this thread [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Edit: I got a request to boil this down, so I separated it to that thread.

And reading the room? I think there is, broadly speaking, a lot of fear of you. And I think part of why that is true, is because you cultivated that.

You have noticed that you made some errors which blinded you to the consequences of some of your actions, and I think that's a good start? I hope you might be able to agree with me that this attitude of fear, is probably blinding you to the reporting of any further harms.

I recognize processing takes time, and there hasn't been a lot of time yet. But also, I think somebody needed to say this to your face, and it might as well be me.

How do you want to help wind down this aura of fear, which I think is still blinding not just most of us, but also YOU, to a lot of the full reality of what happened?

(And it might well be, that you will help with this by saying almost nothing and going after no-one. But if so? I think it would help, if you briefly committed to that outright.)

I appreciate hearing from you about some of what you probably got wrong.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of this started out relatively benignly, and spiraled?

I agree with your impression that arrogance was at least one of several pressures that made it hard to see that things were going in a bad direction. A lot of invisible guard-rails were dropped or traded away over time, and the absence of a certain amount of reality-checking made it very hard to fix after things had veered off the rails.

I hope your account contributes to making people less likely to make similar errors in the future.

(I would also be very unhappy, if I ever saw you having a substantial amount of power over people again though, fwiw.)

Piggybacking with additional accurate (albeit somewhat-tangential) positive statements, with a hope of making it seem more possible to say true positive and negative things about Leverage (since I've written mostly negative things, and am writing another negative thing as we speak):

The 2014 EA Retreat, run by Leverage, is still by far the best multi-org EA or rationalist event I've ever been to, and I think it had lots of important positive effects on EA.

I interacted with Leverage some over the years. I felt like they had useful theory and techniques, and was disappointed that it was difficult to get access to their knowledge. I enjoyed their parties. I did a Paradigm workshop. I knew people in Leverage to a casual degree.

What's live for me now is that when the other recent post about Leverage was published, I was subjected to strong, repeated pressure by someone close to Geoff to have the post marked as flawed, and asked to lean on BayAreaHuman to approximately retract the post or acknowledge its flaws. (This request was made of me in my new capacity as head of LessWrong.) "I will make a fuss" is what I was told. I agreed that the post has flaws (I commented to that effect in the thread) and this made me feel the pressure wasn't illegitimate despite being unpleasant. Now it seems to be part of a larger concerning pattern.

Further details seem pertinent, but I find myself reluctant to share them (and already apprehensive that this more muted description will have the feared effect) because I just don't want to damage the relationship I have with the person who was pressuring me. I'm unhappy about it, but I still value that relationship. Heck, I haven't named them. I should note that this person updated (or began reconsidering their position) after Zoe's post and has since stopped applying any pressure on me/LessWrong. 

With Geoff himself (with whom I personally have had a casual positive relationship) I feel more actual fear of being critical or in anyway taking the side against Leverage. I predict that if I do so, I'll be placed on the list of adversaries. And something like, just based on the reaction to the Common knowledge post, Leverage is very agenty when it comes to their reputation. Or I don't know, I don't fear any particularly terrible retribution myself, but I loathe to make "enemies".

I'd like to think that I've got lots of integrity and will say true things despite pressures and incentives otherwise, but I'm definitely not immune to them. 

My contact with Leverage over the years was fairly insignificant, which is part of why I don’t feel like it’s right for me to participate in this discussion. But there are some things that have come to mind, and since Anna’s made space for that, I’ll note them now. I still think it’s not really my place to say anything, but here’s my piece anyway. I’m speaking only for myself and my own experience.

I interviewed for an ops position at Leverage/Paradigm in early 2017, when I was still in college. The process took maybe a couple months, and the in-person interview happened the same week as my CFAR workshop; together these were my first contact with the Bay community. Some of the other rationalists I met that week warned me against Leverage in vague terms; I discussed their allegations with the ops team at my interview and came away feeling satisfied that both sides had a point.

I had a positive experience at the interview and with the ops and their team hiring process in general. The ops lead seemed to really believe in me and recommended me to other EA orgs after I didn’t get hired at Paradigm, and that was great. My (short-term) college boyfriend had a good relationship with Leverage and later worked at Paradigm. In mid-2017 I met a Leverage employee in a non-Leverage context and we went on a couple dates; that ended amicably. All that’s just to say that at that point, I thought I had a fairly positive relationship with them.

Then, Leverage/Paradigm put on EA Summit in the summer of 2018. I applied to attend and was rejected. My boyfriend, who I think attended a Paradigm workshop around that time, managed to get that decision reversed, but told me that I was rejected because I was on a list of people who might speak ill of Leverage. That really rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t think I had ever acted in a way to deserve that, and it seemed bad to me that they were so paranoid about their reputation that they would reject large swaths of people from a conference that’s supposed to bring together EAs from around the world, just because of vague suspicion. Ironically that’s the personal experience that led me to distrust Leverage the most. 

The bottom line being that discussions around Leverage’s reputation have always been really fraught and murky, and it’s totally understandable to me that people would fear unknown repercussions for discussing Leverage in public. Many other people in these threads have said that in various ways, but there’s my concrete example.

My current feelings are a mixture of the following: 

• I disagree with a lot of the details of what many people have said (both people who had bad experiences and people defending their Leverage experiences and giving positive testimonials), and feel like expressing my take has some chance of making those people feel like their experiences are invalidated, or at least spark some conflict of some type
• I know that Geoff and Leverage more broadly in the past have said pretty straightforwardly that they will take pretty adversarial action if someone threatens their reputation or brand, and that makes me both feel like I can trust many fewer things in the discussion, and makes me personally more hesitant to share some things (while also feeling like that's kind of cowardly, but I haven't yet had the time to really work through my feelings here, which in itself has some chilling effects that I feel uncomfortable with, etc.)
• On the other side, there have been a lot of really vicious and aggressive attacks to anyone saying anything pro-leverage for many years, with a strength that I think is overall even greater and harder to predict than what Geoff and Leverage have been doing. It's also been more of a crowd-driven phenomenon, which makes it less predictable and more scary.
• I feel like it's going to be really hard to say anything without people pigeonholing me into belonging to some group that is trying to rewrite the rationality social and political landscape some way, and that makes me feel like I have to actively think about how to phrase what I am saying in a way that avoids that pigeonholing effect (as a concrete example, one person approached me who read Ben's initial comment on the "BayAreaHuman" post that said "I confirm that this is a real person in good standing" as an endorsement of the post, when the comment was really just intended as confirming some facts about the identity of the poster, with basically complete independence from the content of the post)
• I myself have access to some sensitive and somewhat confidential information, and am struggling with navigating exactly which parts are OK to share and which ones are not. 

I appreciate this invitation. I'll re-link to some things I already said on my own stance: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-about-leverage-research-1-0?commentId=2QKKnepsMoZmmhGSe [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Beyond what I laid out there:

• It was challenging being aware of multiple stories of harm, and feeling compelled to warn people interacting with Geoff, but not wanting to go public with surprising new claims of harm. (I did mention awareness of severe harm very understatedly in the post. I chose instead to focus on "already known" properties that I feel substantially raise the prior on the actually-observed type of harm, and to disclose in the post that my motivation in cherry-picking those statements was to support pattern-matching to a specific template of harm).

• After posting, it was emotionally a bit of a drag to receive comments that complained that the information-sharing attempt was not done well enough, and comparatively few comments grateful for attempting to share what I could, as best I could, to the best of my ability at the time, although the upvote patterns felt encouraging. I was pretty much aware that that was what was going to happen. In general, "flinching in anticipation of a high criticism-to-gratitude ratio" is an overall feeling I have when I imagine posting anything on LessWrong.

• I was told by friends before posting that I ought to consider the risk to myself and to my contacts of tangible real-world retribution. I don't have any experience with credible risk of real-world retribution. It feels mind-numbing.

• Meta: I haven't felt fully comfortable describing retribution concerns, including in the post, because I haven't been able to rule out that revealing the tactical landscape of why I'm sharing or avoiding certain details is simply more information that can be used by Geoff and associates to make life harder for people pursuing clarity. This is easier now that Zoe has written firsthand about specific retribution concerns.

• Meta-meta: It doesn't feel great to talk about all this paranoid adversarial retribution thinking, because I don't want to contribute to the spread of paranoia and adversarial thinking. It feels contagious. Zoe describes a very paranoid atmosphere within Leverage and among those who left, and I feel that attesting to a strategically-aware disclosure pattern carries that toxic vibe into new contexts.

I will talk about my own bit with Leverage later, but I don't feel like it's the right time to share it yet.

(But fwiw: I do have some scars, here. I have a little bit of skin in this one. But most of what I'm going to talk about, comes from analogizing this with a different incident.)

A lot of the position I naturally slide into around this, which I have... kind of just embraced, is of trying to relate hard to the people who:

• WERE THERE
• May have received a lot of good along with the bad
• May have developed a very complicated and narratively-unsatisfying opinion because of that, which feels hard to defend
• Are very sensitized to condemning mob-speak. Because they've been told, again and again, that anything good they got out of the above, will be swept out with the bathwater if the bad comes to light.
  • This sort of thing only stays covered up for this long, if there was a lot of pressure and plausible-sounding arguments pointing in the direction of "say nothing." The particular forms of that, will vary.
  • Core Leverage seems pretty willing to resort to manipulation and threats? And despite me generally trying so hard to avoid this vibe: I want to condemn that outright.
  • Also, in any other circumstance: Most people are very happy to condemn people who break strong secrecy agreements that they've made. If you feel like you've made one, I recognize that this is not easy to defy.
    • (My own part in this story is small. The only reason I'm semi-comfortable with sharing it, is because I got all of my own "vaguely owning the fact that I broke a very substantial secrecy agreement, publicly, to all my friends" out of the way EARLY. It would be bogging me down like crazy, otherwise. I respect Zoe, and others, for defying comparable pulls, or even worse ones.)
      • If you're stuck on this bit, I would like to say: This is an exceptional circumstance. You should maybe talk to somebody, eventually. Maybe only once your own processing has settled down. Publicly might not be the right call for you, and I won't push for it. Please take care for yourself, and try to be careful to pick someone who is not especially prone to demonizing things.
• People can feel their truth drowned out by mobs of uninvested people, condemning it from afar.
  • The people who know what happened here, are in the minority. They have the most knowledge of what actually happened, and the most skin in this. They are also the people with the most to fear, and the most to lose.

People often don't appreciate, how much the sheer numbers game can weigh on you. It can come to feel like the chorus is looming over you, in this sort of circumstance; poised, always ready to condemn you and yours from afar. Each individual member is only "speaking-their-truth" once, but in aggregate, they can feel like an army.

It's hard to keep appropriate sight of the fact that the weight of the people who were there, and their story, are probably worth 1000x as much as even the most coherent but distant and un-invested condemning statement. They will not get as many shares. It might not even qualify as a story! But their contributions are worth a lot more, at least in my mind. Because they were THERE.

And I... want to stick up for them where relevant? Because this one wasn't my incident, but I know how hard it might be for them to do it for themselves. I can't swear I will do a good job of it? But the desire is there.

I do think a more-private forum, that is enriched for people who were closer to the event, might be a more comfortable place for some people to recount. It's part of why I tried to talk up that possibility, in another thread.

...it is unfortunately not my place to make this, though. For various reasons, which feel quite solid, to me.

(And after Ryan's account? I honestly have some concerns about it getting infiltrated by one of the more manipulative people around Leverage. I don't want to discount that fear! I still think it might be a good idea?)

I do think we could stand to have a clearer route for things to be shared anonymously, because I suspect at least some people would be more comfortable that way.

(Since "attempts at deanonymization" appears to be a known issue, it may be worth having a flag for "only share as numeric aggregations of >1, using my recounting as a data-point.")

EDITEDIT: This press release names Anna Salamon, Eli Tyre, Matthew Graves, and Matt Falshaw as several somewhat-intermediary people who can be contacted. I feel fewer misgivings around contacting them, than I did around the proposal of contacting Geoff and Larissa to handle this internally.

In the past, I've been someone who has found it difficult and costly to talk about Leverage and the dynamics around it, or organizations that are or have been affiliated with effective altruism, though the times I've spoken up I've done more than others. I would have done it more but the costs were that some of my friends in effective altruism interacted with me less, seemed to take me less seriously in general and discouraged me from speaking up more often again with what sometimes amounted to nothing more than peer pressure. 

That was a few years ago. For lots of reasons, it's easier, less costly, less risky and easier to not feel fear for me now. I don't know yet what I'll say regarding any or all of this related to Leverage because I don't have any sense of how I might be prompted or provoked to respond. Yet I expect I'll have more to say and towards what I might share as relevant I don't have any particular feelings about yet. I'm sensitive to how my statements might impact others but for myself personally I feel almost indifferent. 

My general feeling about this is that the information I know is either well-known or otherwise "not my story to tell." 

I've had very few direct interactions with Leverage except applying to Pareto, a party or two, and some interactions with Leverage employees (not Geoff) and volunteers.  As is common with human interactions, I appreciated many but not all of my interactions.

Like many people in the extended community, I've been exposed to a non-overlapping subset of accounts/secondhand rumors of varying degrees of veracity. For some things it's been long enough that I can't track the degree of confidences I'm supposed to keep, and under which conditions, so it seems better to err on the side of silence. 

At any rate, it's ultimately not my story/tragedy. My own interactions with Leverage has not been personally noticeably harmful or beneficial.

Yep. I hope this isn’t bad to do, but I am doing it.

Unfortunately for me, there is apparently no video recording available on Twitch for this stream? (There are two short clips, but not the full broadcast.) 

If anyone has a link to it, if you could include it here, that'd be great. ! 

Given what the post said about the NDA that people signed when leaving, it seems to me like explictely releasing people from that NDA (maybe with a provision to anonymize names of other people) would be very helpful for having a productive discussion that can integrate the experiences of many people into public knowledge and create a shared understanding of what happened. 

Hi Geoff—have you posted the brief response comment anywhere yet?

Separately, I’m going to write a letter in my role as Executive Director of Leverage Research on the topic of harms from our previous psychology research and the structure of the organization.

Geoff, has this letter been published yet? And if not, when will it be published?

• For Geoff or Reserve: What is the relationship between Leverage and Reserve, and related individuals and entities?
• For everyone: Under what conditions does restitution to ex-Leveragers make sense? Under what conditions does it make sense for leadership to divest themselves of resources?
• For everyone: In arguendo, what could restitution or divestment concretely look like?

Edit: I was going to leave the original comment, to provide context to Vaniver’s reply. But it started receiving upvotes that brought it above “-1", making it a more prominent bad example of community norms. I think the upvotes indicate importance in the essence of the questions, but their form were ill-considered and rushed to judgement. In compromise, I've tried to rewrite them more neutrally and respectfully to all involved. I may revisit them a few more times.

I can confirm that this document is legitimate as I've seen a more recent version of the same checklist.

Leverage Research is planning to review and revise its information management policy, as soon as we have time.

Relatedly, a LessWrong user recently reached out to us directly for information about our information management policies and agreements. During the conversation, it became clear that it was difficult for them, as someone seeking information, to formulate which questions to ask and difficult for us as an organization to determine what answers they might find useful, given the differences in information and context. As a result of this conversation, we concluded it might be useful to figure out how to help people request the information that they are looking for, while at the same time protecting the institute’s time, ownership of research, and ability to carry out its mission. 

As part of this, we have now set up a request form on our website where it is possible to make information requests of the organization. We expect to respond to genuine inquiries with answers, updates to our FAQ (forthcoming), the release of documents, and more, as our other responsibilities permit.

Would you happen to have/be willing to share those emails?

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Thanks! I would love follow-up on LW to the twitch stream, if anyone wants to. There were a lot of really interesting things being said in the text chat that we didn’t manage to engage with, for example. Although unfortunately the recording was lost, which is unfortunate because IMO it was a great conversation.

TekhneMakre writes:

This suggests, to me, a (totally conjectural!) story where [Geoff] got into an escalating narrative cold war with the rationality community: first he perceives (possibly correctly) that the community rejects him…

This seems right to me

Anna says there were in the early 2010s rumors that Leverage was trying to fundraise from "other people's donors". And that Leverage/Geoff was trying to recruit, whether ideologically or employfully, employees of other EA/rationality orgs.

Yes. My present view is that Geoff’s reaching out to donors here was legit, and my and others’ complaints were not; donors should be able to hear all the pitches, and it’s messed up to think of “person reached out to donor X to describe a thingy X might want to donate to” as a territorial infringement.

This seems to me like an example of me and others escalating the “narrative cold war” that you mention.

[Geoff] seemed to talk in long, apparently low content sentences with lots of hemming and hawing and attention to appearance…

I noticed some of this, though less than I might’ve predicted from the background context in which Geoff was, as you note, talking to 50 people, believing himself to be recorded, and in an overall social context in which a community he has long been in a “narrative cold war” with (under your hypothesis, and mine) was in the midst of trying to decide whether to something-like scapegoat him.

I appreciate both that you mentioned your perception (brought it into text rather than subtext, where we can reason about it, and can try to be conscious of all the things together), and that you’re trying to figure out how to incentivize and not disincentivize Geoff’s choice to do the video (which IMO shared a bunch of good info).

I’d like to zoom in on an example that IMO demonstrates that the causes of the “hemming and hawing” are sometimes (probably experience-backed) mistrust of the rationalist community as a [context that is willing to hear and fairly evaluate his actual evidence], rather than, say, desire for the truth to be hidden:

At one point toward the end of the twitch, Geoff was responding to a question about how we got from a pretty cooperative state in ~2013, and said something kinda like “… I’m trying to figure out how to say this without sounding like I’m being unfair your side of things,” or something, and I was like “maybe just don’t, and I or others can disagree if we think you’re wrong,” and then he sort of went “okay, if you’re asking for it” and stopped hemming and hawing and told a simple and direct story about how in the early days of 2011-2014, Leverage did a bunch of things to try to cause specific collaborations that would benefit particular other groups (THINK, the original EA leaders gathering in the Leverage house in 2013, the 2014 retreat + summit, a book launch party for ‘Our Final Invention’ co-run with SingInst, some general queries about what kind of collaborations folks might want, early attempts to merge with SingInst and with 80k), and how he would’ve been interested in and receptive to other bids for common projects if I or others had brought him some. And I was like “yes, that matches my memory and perception; I remember you and Leverage seeming unusually interested in getting specific collaborations or common projects that might support your goals + other groups’ goals at once, going, and more than other groups, and trying to support cooperation in this way” and he seemed surprised that I would acknowledge this.

So, I think part of the trouble is that Geoff didn’t have positive expectations of us as a context in which to truth-seek together.

One partial contributor to this expectation of Geoff’s, I would guess, is the pattern via which (in my perception) the rationalist community sometimes decides peoples’ epistemics/etc. are “different and bad” and then distances from them, punishes those who don’t act as though we need to distance from them, etc., often in a manner that can seem kinda drastic and all-or-nothing, rather than docking points proportional to what it indicates about a person’s likely future ability to share useful thoughts in a milder-mannered fashion. For example, during a panel discussion at the (Leverage-run) 2014 EA Summit, in front of 200 people, I asked Geoff aloud whether he in fact thought that sticking a pole though someone’s head (a la Phineas Gage) would have no effect on their cognition except via their sense-perception. Geoff answered “yes”, as I expected since he’d previously mentioned this view. And… there was a whole bunch of reaction. E.g., Habryka, in the twitch chat, mentioned having been interning with Leverage at the time of that panel conversation, and said “[that bit of panel conversation] caused me nightmares… because I was interning at Leverage at the time, and it made me feel very alienated from my environment. And felt like some kind of common ground was pulled out from under me.”

I for many years often refrained from sharing some of positive views/data/etc. I had about Leverage, for fear of being [judged or something] for it. (TBC, I had both positive and negative views, and some error bars. But Leverage looked to me like well-meaning people who were trying a hard-core something that might turn out cool, and that was developing interesting techniques and models via psychological research, and I mostly refrained from saying this because I was cowardly about it in response to social pressure. … in addition to my usual practice of sometimes refraining from sharing some of my hesitations about the place, as about most places, in a flinchy attempt to avoid conflict.)

I didn't hear anything that strongly confirms or denies adversarial hypotheses like "Geoff was fairly actively doing something pretty distortiony in Leverage that caused harm, and is sort of hiding this by downplaying / redirecting attention / etc.".

My guess is that he was and is at least partially some of doing this, in addition to making an earnest (and better than I’d expected on generic-across-people priors) effort to share true things. Re: the past dynamics, I and IMO others were also doing actively distortionary stuff, and I think the Geoff’s choices, and mine and others’, need to be understood together, as similar responses to a common landscape.

As I mentioned in the twitch that alas didn’t get recorded, in ~2008-2014, ish, somehow a lot of different EA and rationality and AI risk groups felt like allies and members of a common substantive community, at least in my perception (including my perception of the social context that I imagined lots of other peopl were in. And later on, most seemed to me to kinda give up on most of the others, opting still for a social surface of cooperation/harmony, but without any deep hope in anyone else of the sort that might support building common infrastructure, really working out any substantive disagreements (with tools of truth-seeking rather than only truce-seeking/surface-harmony-preservation, etc.). (With some of the together-ness getting larger over time in the early years, and then with things drifting apart again.) I’m really interested in whether that transition matches others’ perceptions, and, if so, what y’all think the causes were. IMO it was partly about what I’ve been calling “narrative addiction” and “narrative pyramid schemes,” which needs elaboration rather than a set of phrases (I tried this a bit in the lost twitch video) but I need to go now so may try it later.

Geoff describes being harmed by some sort of initial rejection by the rationality/EA community (around 2011? 2010?).

One of the interesting things about that timeframe is that a lot of the stuff is online; here's the 2012 discussion (Jan 9th [LW(p) · GW(p)], Jan 10th [? · GW], Sep 19th [LW · GW]), for example. (I tried to find his earliest comment that I remembered, but I don't think it was with the Geoff_Anders [LW · GW] account or it wasn't on LessWrong; I think it was before Leverage got started, and people responded pretty skeptically then also?)

Well, the video is lost. But my friend Ben Pace (do you know him? he is great) was kind enough to take notes on what he said specifically in response to my question. 

My question was something like: "Why do you think some people are afraid of retaliation from you? Have you made any threats? Have you ever retaliated against a Leverage associate?" This is not the exact wording but close enough. I used the words "spiteful, retaliatory, or punishing" so he repeats that in his answer. 

I also explicitly told him he didn't have to answer any of these questions, like I wasn't demanding him to answer them. 

I am pasting Geoff's response below. 

• Great questions.
• Um.
• Off the top of my head I don’t recall spiteful retaliatory or punishing actions. Um. I do think that I… There’s gotta be some other category of actions taken in anger where… I can think of angry remarks that I’ve made, absolutely. I can think of some actions that don’t pertain to Leverage associates that after thinking about for a while I realized there was something I was pretty angry about. In general I try to be really constructive, there’s definitely, let’s see, so… There’s definitely a mode that, it’s like, I like to think of all sorts of different possibilities of things to do, for example this was for EAG a while back, we were going to go and table at EAG and see if there’s anyone who is good to hire, we received word from CEA that we weren’t allowed to table there, super mad about that because we created the EA Summit series and handed it to CEA, being disinvited from the thing we started, I was really mad “let’s go picket and set up in front of EAG and tell people about htis”, y’know a number of people responded to that suggestion really negatively, and… Maybe the thing I want to say is I think there’s something like appropriate levels of response, and the thing I really want to do is to have appropriate levels of response. It’s super hard to never get mad or never be insulted but the thing I try super hard to do is to get to the point where there’s calibrated response. So maybe y’know there’s something in there… I have been in fact rly surprised when people talked about extreme retaliation, I’m like “What.” (!).
• There’s definitely a line of thought I’ve seen around projects where they deal with important things, where people are like “The project is so important we must do anything to protect it” which I don’t agree with, y’know, I shut down Leverage because I talked to someone who was suffering too much and I was like “No” and then that was that.

• [ETA: sorry for all the caveats... specifically, I do use judgy language, but don't endorse the judgements, but don't want to change the language.] [The following if taken as a judgement is very harsh and basically unfair, and it would suck to punish Geoff for having conversations like this. So please don't take it as a judgement. I want to get a handle on what's up with Geoff, so I want to describe his behavior. Maybe this is bad, LMK if you think so.] It was often hard to listen to Geoff. He seemed to talk in long, apparently low content sentences with lots of hemming and hawing and attention to appearance, and lots of very general statements that seemed to not address precisely the topic. (Again this is unfairly harsh if taken as a judgement, and also he was talking in front of 50 people, sort of.)

I don't think it's bad of you. It seemed to me that he was deflecting or redirecting many of the points Anna was trying to get at.

Personally I think this story is an important warning about how people with a LW-adjacent mindset can death spiral [? · GW] off the deep end. This is something that happened around this community multiple times, not just in Leverage (I know of at least one other prominent example and suspect there are more), so we should definitely watch out for this and/or think how to prevent this kind of thing.

Leverage has always been at least socially adjacent to LW and EA (the earliest discussion I find is in 2012 [LW · GW]), and they hosted the earliest EA summits in 2013-2014 (before CEA started running EA Global).

As someone part of the social communities, I can confirm that Leverage was definitely a topic of discussion for a long time around Rationalists and Effective Altruists. That said, often the discussion went something like, "What's up with Leverage? They seem so confident, and take in a bunch of employees, but we have very little visibility." I think I experienced basically the same exact conversation about them around 10 times, along these lines.

As people from Leverage have said, several Rationalists/EAs were very hostile around the topic of Leverage, particularly in the last ~4 years or so. (I've heard stories of people getting shouted at just for saying they worked at Leverage at a conference). On the other hand, they definitely had support by a few rationalists/EA orgs and several higher-ups of different kinds.

They've always been secretive, and some of the few public threads didn't go well for them, so it's not too surprising to me that they've had a small LessWrong/EA Forum presence.

I've personally very much enjoyed staying mostly staying away from the controversy, though very arguably I made a mistake there.

(I should also note that I had friends who worked at or worked close to Leverage, I attended like 2 events there early on, and I applied to work from there around 6 years ago)

A 2012 CFAR workshop [LW · GW] included "Guest speaker Geoff Anders presents techniques his organization has used to overcome procrastination and maintain 75 hours/week of productive work time per person." He was clearly connected to the LW-sphere if not central to it.

IMO, is that we should tolerate some impropriety for the greater good.

I agree!

I am just pointing out that trust is asked of us.

I agree!

Leverage really seems like a cult. It seems like an unsafe institution doing harmful things.

Reminder that Leverage 1.0 is defunct and it seems very unlikely that the same things are going on with Leverage 2.0 (remote team, focus on science history rather than psychology, 4 people).

I am not sure how much this stuff about Leverage is really news to people involved in our other "world saving" orgs.

The information in Zoe's Medium post was significant news to me and others I've spoken to. 

(saying the below for general clarity, not just in response to you)

I think everyone (?) in this thread is deeply concerned, but we're hoping to figure out what exactly happened, what went wrong and why (and what maybe to do about it). To do that investigation and postmortem, we can't skip to sentencing (forgive me if that's not your intention, but it reads a bit to me that that's what you want to be happening), nor would it be epistemically virtuous or just to do so. 

Some major new information came to light, people need time to process it, surface other relevant information, and make statements. The matter is complicated by forces inhibiting people from speaking both in favor and against Leverage. If there's any reluctance to "sell out" Leverage, it's because people want to have the full conversation first, not because of any sense of solidarity that we're all "world saving" orgs.

That's my context. However I agree that my contributions haven't been very high EV in that I'm very far on the outside of a delicate situation and throwing my weight around. So I won't keep trying to intervene / subtextually post.

we should tolerate some impropriety for the greater good

On one level I think this is correct, but...I also think it's possibly a little naïve.  

In the potential world which consists of only "us", the people who think this world saving needs done, and who think like "we" do, your statement becomes more true. 

In the world we live in wherein the vast majority of people think the world saving we're talking about is unimportant, or bad, or evil, your statement requires closer and closer to perfect secrecy and insularity to remain true.