I presume this account is their source for the debugging stuff, wherein an ex-member of the rationalist Leverage institute described their experiences. They described the institute as having “debugging culture”, described as follows:
In the larger rationalist and adjacent community, I think it’s just a catch-all term for mental or cognitive practices aimed at deliberate self-improvement.
At Leverage, it was both more specific and more broad. In a debugging session, you’d be led through a series of questions or attentional instructions with goals like working through introspective blocks, processing traumatic memories, discovering the roots of internal conflict, “back-chaining” through your impulses to the deeper motivations at play, figuring out the roots of particular powerlessness-inducing beliefs, mapping out the structure of your beliefs, or explicating irrationalities.
and:
1. 2–6hr long group debugging sessions in which we as a sub-faction (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a “demon” which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging tools.
The podcast statements seem to be an embellished retelling of the contents of that blog post (and maybe the allegations made by scott alexander in the comments of this post). I don’t think describing them as “completely made up” is accurate.
Leverage was an EA-aligned organization, that was also part of the rationality community (or at least ‘rationalist-adjacent’), about a decade ago or more. For Leverage to be affiliated with the mantles of either EA or the rationality community was always contentious. From the side of EA, the CEA, and the side of the rationality community, largely CFAR, Leverage faced efforts to be shoved out of both within a short order of a couple of years. Both EA and CFAR thus couldn’t have then, and couldn’t now, say or do more to disown and disavow Leverage’s practices from the time Leverage existed under the umbrella of either network/ecosystem/whatever. They have. To be clear, so has Leverage in its own way.
At the time of the events as presented by Zoe Curzi in those posts, Leverage was basically shoved out the door of both the rationality and EA communities with—to put it bluntly—the door hitting Leverage on ass on the on the way out, and the door back in firmly locked behind them from the inside. In time, Leverage came to take that in stride, as the break-up between Leverage, and the rest of the institutional polycule that is EA/rationality, was extremely mutual.
Ien short, the course of events, and practices at Leverage that led to them, as presented by Zoe Curzi and others as a few years ago from that time circa 2018 to 2022, can scarcely be attributed to either the rationality or EA communities. That’s a consensus between EA, Leverage, and the rationality community agree on—one of few things left that they still agree on at all.
From the side of EA, the CEA, and the side of the rationality community, largely CFAR, Leverage faced efforts to be shoved out of both within a short order of a couple of years. Both EA and CFAR thus couldn’t have then, and couldn’t now, say or do more to disown and disavow Leverage’s practices from the time Leverage existed under the umbrella of either network/ecosystem/whatever…
At the time of the events as presented by Zoe Curzi in those posts, Leverage was basically shoved out the door of both the rationality and EA communities with—to put it bluntly—the door hitting Leverage on ass on the on the way out, and the door back in firmly locked behind them from the inside.
While I’m not claiming that “practices at Leverage” should be “attributed to either the rationality or EA communities”, or to CEA, the take above is demonstrably false. CEA definitely could have done more to “disown and disavow Leverage’s practices” and also reneged on commitments that would have helped other EAs learn about problems with Leverage.
Circa 2018 CEA was literally supporting Leverage/Paradigm on an EA community building strategy event. In August 2018 (right in the middle of the 2017-2019 period at Leverage that Zoe Curzi described in her post), CEA supported and participated in an “EA Summit” that was incubated by Paradigm Academy (intimately associated with Leverage). “Three CEA staff members attended the conference” and the keynote was delivered by a senior CEA staff member (Kerry Vaughan). Tara MacAulay, who was CEO of CEA until stepping down less than a year before the summit to co-found Alameda Research, personally helped fund the summit.
At the time, “the fact that Paradigm incubated the Summit and Paradigm is connected to Leverage led some members of the community to express concern or confusion about the relationship between Leverage and the EA community.” To address those concerns, Kerry committed to “address this in a separate post in the near future.” This commitment was subsequently dropped with no explanation other than “We decided not to work on this post at this time.”
This whole affair was reminiscent of CEA’s actions around the 2016 Pareto Fellowship, a CEA program where ~20 fellows lived in the Leverage house (which they weren’t told about beforehand), “training was mostly based on Leverage ideas”, and “some of the content was taught by Leverage staff and some by CEA staff who were very ‘in Leverage’s orbit’.” When CEA was fundraising at the end of that year, a community member mentioned that they’d heard rumors about a lack of professionalism at Pareto. CEA staff replied, on multiple occasions, that “a detailed review of the Pareto Fellowship is forthcoming.” This review was never produced.
Several years later, details emerged about Pareto’s interview process (which nearly 500 applicants went through) that confirmed the rumors about unprofessional behavior. One participant described it as “one of the strangest, most uncomfortable experiences I’ve had over several years of being involved in EA… It seemed like unscientific, crackpot psychology… it felt extremely cultish… The experience left me feeling humiliated and manipulated.”
I’ll also note that CEA eventually added a section to its mistakes page about Leverage, but not until 2022, and only after Zoe had published her posts and a commenter on Less Wrong explicitly asked why the mistakes page didn’t mention Leverage’s involvement in the Pareto Fellowship. The mistakes page now acknowledges other aspects of the Leverage/CEA relationship, including that Leverage had “a table at the careers fair at EA Global several times.” Notably, CEA has never publicly stated that working with Leverage was a mistake or that Leverage is problematic in any way.
The problems at Leverage were Leverage’s fault, not CEA’s. But CEA could have, and should have, done more to distance EA from Leverage.
Quick point—I think the relationship between CEA and Leverage was pretty complicated during a lot of this period.
There was typically a large segment of EAs who were suspicious of Leverage, ever since their founding. But Leverage did collaborate with EAs on some specific things early on (like the first EA Summit). It felt like an uncomfortable alliance type situation. If you go back on the forum / Lesswrong, you can read artifacts.
I think the period of 2018 or so was unusual. This was a period where a few powerful people at CEA (Kerry, Larissa) were unusually pro-Leverage and got to power fairly quickly (Tara left, somewhat suddenly). I think there was a lot of tension around this decision, and when they left (I think this period lasted around 1 year), I think CEA became much less collaborative with Leverage.
One way to square this a bit is that CEA was just not very powerful for a long time (arguably, its periods of “having real ability/agency to do new things” have been very limited). There were periods where Leverage had more employees (I’m pretty sure). The fact that CEA went through so many different leaders, each with different stances and strategies, makes it more confusing to look back on.
I would really love for a decent journalist to do a long story on this history, I think it’s pretty interesting.
Huh, yeah, that sure refers to those as “debugging”. I’ve never really heard Leverage people use those words, but Leverage 1.0 was a quite insular and weird place towards the end of its existence, so I must have missed it.
I think it’s kind of reasonable to use Leverage as evidence that people in the EA and Rationality community are kind of crazy and have indeed updated on the quotes being more grounded (though I also feel frustration with people equivocating between EA, Rationality and Leverage).
(Relatedly, I don’t particularly love you calling Leverage “rationalist” especially in a context where I kind of get the sense you are trying to contrast it with “EA”. Leverage has historically been much more connected to the EA community, and indeed had almost successfully taken over CEA leadership in ~2019, though IDK, I also don’t want to be too policing with language here)
I presume this account is their source for the debugging stuff, wherein an ex-member of the rationalist Leverage institute described their experiences. They described the institute as having “debugging culture”, described as follows:
and:
The podcast statements seem to be an embellished retelling of the contents of that blog post (and maybe the allegations made by scott alexander in the comments of this post). I don’t think describing them as “completely made up” is accurate.
Leverage was an EA-aligned organization, that was also part of the rationality community (or at least ‘rationalist-adjacent’), about a decade ago or more. For Leverage to be affiliated with the mantles of either EA or the rationality community was always contentious. From the side of EA, the CEA, and the side of the rationality community, largely CFAR, Leverage faced efforts to be shoved out of both within a short order of a couple of years. Both EA and CFAR thus couldn’t have then, and couldn’t now, say or do more to disown and disavow Leverage’s practices from the time Leverage existed under the umbrella of either network/ecosystem/whatever. They have. To be clear, so has Leverage in its own way.
At the time of the events as presented by Zoe Curzi in those posts, Leverage was basically shoved out the door of both the rationality and EA communities with—to put it bluntly—the door hitting Leverage on ass on the on the way out, and the door back in firmly locked behind them from the inside. In time, Leverage came to take that in stride, as the break-up between Leverage, and the rest of the institutional polycule that is EA/rationality, was extremely mutual.
Ien short, the course of events, and practices at Leverage that led to them, as presented by Zoe Curzi and others as a few years ago from that time circa 2018 to 2022, can scarcely be attributed to either the rationality or EA communities. That’s a consensus between EA, Leverage, and the rationality community agree on—one of few things left that they still agree on at all.
While I’m not claiming that “practices at Leverage” should be “attributed to either the rationality or EA communities”, or to CEA, the take above is demonstrably false. CEA definitely could have done more to “disown and disavow Leverage’s practices” and also reneged on commitments that would have helped other EAs learn about problems with Leverage.
Circa 2018 CEA was literally supporting Leverage/Paradigm on an EA community building strategy event. In August 2018 (right in the middle of the 2017-2019 period at Leverage that Zoe Curzi described in her post), CEA supported and participated in an “EA Summit” that was incubated by Paradigm Academy (intimately associated with Leverage). “Three CEA staff members attended the conference” and the keynote was delivered by a senior CEA staff member (Kerry Vaughan). Tara MacAulay, who was CEO of CEA until stepping down less than a year before the summit to co-found Alameda Research, personally helped fund the summit.
At the time, “the fact that Paradigm incubated the Summit and Paradigm is connected to Leverage led some members of the community to express concern or confusion about the relationship between Leverage and the EA community.” To address those concerns, Kerry committed to “address this in a separate post in the near future.” This commitment was subsequently dropped with no explanation other than “We decided not to work on this post at this time.”
This whole affair was reminiscent of CEA’s actions around the 2016 Pareto Fellowship, a CEA program where ~20 fellows lived in the Leverage house (which they weren’t told about beforehand), “training was mostly based on Leverage ideas”, and “some of the content was taught by Leverage staff and some by CEA staff who were very ‘in Leverage’s orbit’.” When CEA was fundraising at the end of that year, a community member mentioned that they’d heard rumors about a lack of professionalism at Pareto. CEA staff replied, on multiple occasions, that “a detailed review of the Pareto Fellowship is forthcoming.” This review was never produced.
Several years later, details emerged about Pareto’s interview process (which nearly 500 applicants went through) that confirmed the rumors about unprofessional behavior. One participant described it as “one of the strangest, most uncomfortable experiences I’ve had over several years of being involved in EA… It seemed like unscientific, crackpot psychology… it felt extremely cultish… The experience left me feeling humiliated and manipulated.”
I’ll also note that CEA eventually added a section to its mistakes page about Leverage, but not until 2022, and only after Zoe had published her posts and a commenter on Less Wrong explicitly asked why the mistakes page didn’t mention Leverage’s involvement in the Pareto Fellowship. The mistakes page now acknowledges other aspects of the Leverage/CEA relationship, including that Leverage had “a table at the careers fair at EA Global several times.” Notably, CEA has never publicly stated that working with Leverage was a mistake or that Leverage is problematic in any way.
The problems at Leverage were Leverage’s fault, not CEA’s. But CEA could have, and should have, done more to distance EA from Leverage.
Quick point—I think the relationship between CEA and Leverage was pretty complicated during a lot of this period.
There was typically a large segment of EAs who were suspicious of Leverage, ever since their founding. But Leverage did collaborate with EAs on some specific things early on (like the first EA Summit). It felt like an uncomfortable alliance type situation. If you go back on the forum / Lesswrong, you can read artifacts.
I think the period of 2018 or so was unusual. This was a period where a few powerful people at CEA (Kerry, Larissa) were unusually pro-Leverage and got to power fairly quickly (Tara left, somewhat suddenly). I think there was a lot of tension around this decision, and when they left (I think this period lasted around 1 year), I think CEA became much less collaborative with Leverage.
One way to square this a bit is that CEA was just not very powerful for a long time (arguably, its periods of “having real ability/agency to do new things” have been very limited). There were periods where Leverage had more employees (I’m pretty sure). The fact that CEA went through so many different leaders, each with different stances and strategies, makes it more confusing to look back on.
I would really love for a decent journalist to do a long story on this history, I think it’s pretty interesting.
Huh, yeah, that sure refers to those as “debugging”. I’ve never really heard Leverage people use those words, but Leverage 1.0 was a quite insular and weird place towards the end of its existence, so I must have missed it.
I think it’s kind of reasonable to use Leverage as evidence that people in the EA and Rationality community are kind of crazy and have indeed updated on the quotes being more grounded (though I also feel frustration with people equivocating between EA, Rationality and Leverage).
(Relatedly, I don’t particularly love you calling Leverage “rationalist” especially in a context where I kind of get the sense you are trying to contrast it with “EA”. Leverage has historically been much more connected to the EA community, and indeed had almost successfully taken over CEA leadership in ~2019, though IDK, I also don’t want to be too policing with language here)