Copied from the stubsack:
The Inside story of Leverage Research
This should be interesting, it’s about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don’t know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.
edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.
Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:
I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.
edit edit: Why can’t these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020
edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she’s Curtis Yarvin’s baby momma.
edit x 4: Index of the read along posts, part titles are from the original:
Cool short read, I’d recommend it too.
One notable additional piece of information pointed out here is that after the NYMag thing fell apart she got a $35K grant from what turns out to be a sort of rationalist slush fund to finish the piece. The original contract was for $9500 so it’s possible she came out quite ahead on the deal.
Supposedly a bunch of it went to things that would normally be handled on the publisher’s end, like professional fact checking, but having now read the piece I don’t really know what that would look like. She has Dear Leader Geoff Anders on the record like 16 times (k5 rusty counted) and is consistently pretty uncritical of his claims, AND she’s best friends with most of the “ex”-levs named in the article, like did it take thirty thousand dollars to find out that guru David’s origin story is unsubstantiable bollocks and to triple-double check Zoe’s claim of psychotic breaks? (verdict: when rationalists in a high-control environment get PTSD from seeing and hearing things that aren’t there it’s not a psychotic break but some secret other thing).
Also there’s a bunch of most-important-philosopher-in-history Geoff’s original writings and they are predictably bad and ridiculous: