Also, that comment was only able to provide mention of a handful of people describing Leverage like a cult, admitting they could not recall any specific details.
I could list a number of specific details, but not without violating the preferences of the people who shared their experiences with me, and not without causing even more unnecessary drama.
These details wouldn’t make for a watertight case that they’re a “cult”. I deliberately didn’t claim that Leverage is a cult. (See also this.) But the details are quite alarming for anyone who strives to have well-calibrated beliefs and an open-minded and welcoming EA community. I do think their cultishness led to unnecessary harm to well-meaning, young people who wanted to do good in the world.
There’s a big difference between feeling cultlike, as in “weird”, “disorienting”, “bizarre” etc, and exhibiting the epistemic flaws of a cult, as in having people be afraid to disagree with the thought leader, a disproportionate reverence for a single idea or corpus, the excommunication of dissenters, the application of one idea or corpus to explain everything in the world, instinctively explaining away all possible counterarguments, refusal to look seriously at outside ideas, and so on.
If you could provide any sanitized, abstracted details to indicate that the latter is going on rather than merely the former, then it would go a long way towards indicating that LR is contrary to the goal of well-calibrated beliefs and open-mindedness.
I could list a number of specific details, but not without violating the preferences of the people who shared their experiences with me, and not without causing even more unnecessary drama.
These details wouldn’t make for a watertight case that they’re a “cult”. I deliberately didn’t claim that Leverage is a cult. (See also this.) But the details are quite alarming for anyone who strives to have well-calibrated beliefs and an open-minded and welcoming EA community. I do think their cultishness led to unnecessary harm to well-meaning, young people who wanted to do good in the world.
There’s a big difference between feeling cultlike, as in “weird”, “disorienting”, “bizarre” etc, and exhibiting the epistemic flaws of a cult, as in having people be afraid to disagree with the thought leader, a disproportionate reverence for a single idea or corpus, the excommunication of dissenters, the application of one idea or corpus to explain everything in the world, instinctively explaining away all possible counterarguments, refusal to look seriously at outside ideas, and so on.
If you could provide any sanitized, abstracted details to indicate that the latter is going on rather than merely the former, then it would go a long way towards indicating that LR is contrary to the goal of well-calibrated beliefs and open-mindedness.