Everything from the eugenics to the Social Darwinism to the ritual magick to the Jung to the goldbug economics is reviving ideas from the 1880s-1920s. If academics gave them up 50 or 100 years ago, that just proves that mainstream wisdom can’t be trusted!

I love this bit on “did they use goat’s blood in a silver chalice? Rookie mistake, my teacher used a brazen chalice and he was only carried off by demons once.”

Because Leveragers believed in the great potential of psychological change, naturally it became important to access seemingly cordoned-off areas of the psyche, to explore or to reprogram them. A student of other psychological and spiritual models might call mental space Leveragers now sought to understand “the unconscious,” or “the Abyss.” If more Leveragers had been following certain spiritual teachers or methods, they might have learned ideas about containment, such as “perimeters” — or “protection” practices, ranging from prayers to ritual cleansings. But, as many a serious practitioner could tell you, it’s hard to say whether any of that would have been truly protective, in the end.

Also, the Leverage Staffer who appeared on LessWrong to defend Geoff Anders’ practice of taking his disciples to bed was at one time CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism in the UK. https://old.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/1tyr0y0/request_can_someone_please_write_a_deep_dive_on/

The author characterizes EA as being more “businesslike and professional” than LW, then spends the article talking about how their plans all hinge on getting a rich patron.

The image of the beautiful gardens floored with Astroturf is sad.

Leverage published The “Post-Experiences” Inquiry Report: Factors and Mistakes that Contributed to a Range of Negative Experiences on Our 2011-2019 Research Collaboration. It does not mention demons, Buddhists, neoreactionaries, or bodywork.

The emphasis on how Geoff Anders is very sorry (but not how he claimed he had solved philosophy and was about to solve psychology and by the way he could help his disciples better if they stripped and assumed the position) reminds me of Anna Salamon not-talking talking about what went wrong at CFAR 1.0.

An official statement by a Leverage staffer back in 2021 defended the organization like this:

our Executive Director (Geoff Anders) 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 (email deleted)

Laurenson’s story that “at the beginning of April 2018, one person Geoff was involved with, who was also his employee, found out that he’d gotten into a secret romance with another colleague he practiced bodywork with.” does not sound like great consent.

Many Leveragers believed Geoff’s decisions about who received organizational resources were affected by his romantic choices, for example.

Yuh think?

More fool you, Yud had three or four decoy trilbys at LessOnline 2026, and he got them from a dedicated costume supplier!

Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain today instead of him.

Is “a non-traditional Buddhist order” a way of not naming OAK? OAK is the California branch of the MAPLE Buddhist Ratiionalist Cult whose gurus have also been accused of rape. I don’t know if OAK was connected to Leverage.

Edit / I Escaped a Cult - Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth Review

(Picks up the golden crown fedora splattered with blood and brains) I really didn’t think they’d just do this, I thought they wanted to abolish woo not embrace it. They seemed like Internet blowhards not a California cult.

I don’t know if the prosecution will say the accused talked her friends into this, or her friends talked her into it. Some people think Ziz talked someone else into taking their own life. Either story will be horrid.

The killings of outsiders remind me of the Symbionese Liberation Army because they don’t even follow from the ideology, just young people talking themselves into attacking their parents, their landlord, and the cops. I think the only reason Ziz and friends did not try armed robbery was that it does not pay any more.

Ms. Elmore has another post that begins “Psychedelics are increasingly a social activity in the rationalist community and a prescription for what ails ye, so I wrote this post on facebook earlier this year expressing my reservations about using psychedelics with the intent or pretense of learning truth.”

On Old! SneerClub, the Zizian whose parents were murdered in their home has been charged with the killing. The story is horrid so I will not link. I just wanted to make fun of cranks not stare at horrors.

And these people know that crypto and GameStop and their friends’ startups did not keep growing rapidly forever. They know that just because donations to EA had been rapidly growing they did not continue to accelerate. They have friends who covered the logistic function / sigmoid at Stanford. Another Californian had a witticism about the trouble getting someone to understand something when he is paid to misunderstand.

She also has a post about meditation and mindfulness. I did not expect the thick Western Buddhist strand in this movement.

Scott Alexander funded a prediction-market startup which uses points not dollars. I think many of our friends lack the ovaries to bet significant numbers of real dollars on Kalshi or Polymarket.

I think that backwards (like 1950s and earlier) views of autism are common in American psychiatry, but would love to hear more about his ideas from someone with relevant training. AFAIK no peer has ever commented on his biomedical blogging, like experts have commented on his eugenics promotion and cozy relationship with white supremacists and neoreactionaries. He never seems to have written for any professional venue either.

I think magazines like Liberal Currents, for a generally politically and culturally engaged white-collar audience, have been like this since they were printed on rag paper. The only difference between it and fandom drama is that the participants can rationalize it in fancier language.

The alleged victims from that time don’t seem to want to go public except one who is still on twitter and one who took her own life (and the Mittenscautious blog posts and the mainstream media articles on sexism in EA and LessWrong). I would not recommend putting anyone who was prominent at MIRI or CFAR or the related parties and group homes in the 2010s in a position of responsibility.

Edit / CFAR’s take after they were forced to expel Brent was that “we believe that Brent routinely manipulated those around him, and that he physically, sexually, and emotionally abused at least two of his partners.” Their updates and the blog posts by ‘Mittenscautious’ seem as close as we can get to what he was accused of by insiders without a lot of archive-diving.

I don’t understand the American social media and Old Media practice of everyone talking about some representative or candidate for the legislature. The only people who should be talking about a candidate for a district in New York State live in New York State.