I am not really recanting that? I still think something “off” happened there.
But I could stand up and give a more balanced deposition.
To be clear? I do think BAH’s tone was a tad aggressive. And I think there were other people in the thread, who were more aggressive than that. I think Leverage Basic Facts EA had an even more aggressive comment thread.
I also think each of the concrete factual claims BAH made, did appear to check out with at least one corner of Leverage, according to my own account-collecting (although not always at the same time).
(I also think a few of the LBFEA’s wildest claims, were probably true. Exclusion of the Leverage website from Wayback Machine is definitely true*. The Slack channels characterizing each Pareto attendee as a potential recruit, seems… probably true?)
There were a lot of corners of Leverage, though. Several of them were walled off from the corners BAH talked about, or were not very near to it.
For what it’s worth, I think the positive accounts in the BAH comment thread were also basically honest? I up-voted several of them.
Side-note: As much as I don’t entirely trust Larissa? I do think some of her is at least trying to hold the fact that both good and bad things happened here. I trust her thoughts, more than Geoff’s.
* Delisted from Wayback: The explanation I’ve heard, is that Geoff was sick of people dragging old things up to make fun of the initial planning document, and critiquing the old Connection Theory posts.
I am also dead-certain that nobody was going into the full story, and some of that was systematic. “BAH + commentary” put together, still doesn’t sum to enough of the whole truth, to really make sense of things.
Anna & Geoff’s initial twitch-stream 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. That all was an important missing piece of the puzzle.
((Meta: Noticing I should add this to Timeline and Threads somewhere? Doing that now-ish.))
(I also personally just really liked Anna’s thoughts on “narrative addiction” being something to watch out for? Maybe that’s just me.)
The dissolution & information agreement was another important part. Thank you, Matt Falshaw, for putting some of that in a form that could be viewed by people outside of the ecosystem.
I also haven’t met anybody except Zoe (and now me, I guess?) who seems to have felt able to even breathe a word about the “objects & demons” memetics thing. I think that was another important missing piece.
Some people do report feeling incapable of speaking positively about Leverage in EA circles? I personally didn’t experience a lot of this, but I saw enough surprise when I said good things about Reserve, that it doesn’t surprise me particularly. Leverage’s social network and some of its techniques were clearly quite meaningful to some people, so I can imagine how rough ‘needing to write that out of your personal narrative’ could have been.
Hm… I notice I’m maybe feeling some particular pressure to personally address this one?
Because I called out the deliberate concentration of force in the other direction that happened on an earlier copy of the BayAreaHuman thread.
I am not really recanting that? I still think something “off” happened there.
But I could stand up and give a more balanced deposition.
To be clear? I do think BAH’s tone was a tad aggressive. And I think there were other people in the thread, who were more aggressive than that. I think Leverage Basic Facts EA had an even more aggressive comment thread.
I also think each of the concrete factual claims BAH made, did appear to check out with at least one corner of Leverage, according to my own account-collecting (although not always at the same time).
(I also think a few of the LBFEA’s wildest claims, were probably true. Exclusion of the Leverage website from Wayback Machine is definitely true*. The Slack channels characterizing each Pareto attendee as a potential recruit, seems… probably true?)
There were a lot of corners of Leverage, though. Several of them were walled off from the corners BAH talked about, or were not very near to it.
For what it’s worth, I think the positive accounts in the BAH comment thread were also basically honest? I up-voted several of them.
Side-note: As much as I don’t entirely trust Larissa? I do think some of her is at least trying to hold the fact that both good and bad things happened here. I trust her thoughts, more than Geoff’s.
* Delisted from Wayback: The explanation I’ve heard, is that Geoff was sick of people dragging old things up to make fun of the initial planning document, and critiquing the old Connection Theory posts.
I am also dead-certain that nobody was going into the full story, and some of that was systematic. “BAH + commentary” put together, still doesn’t sum to enough of the whole truth, to really make sense of things.
Anna & Geoff’s initial twitch-stream 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. That all was an important missing piece of the puzzle.
((Meta: Noticing I should add this to Timeline and Threads somewhere? Doing that now-ish.))
(I also personally just really liked Anna’s thoughts on “narrative addiction” being something to watch out for? Maybe that’s just me.)
The dissolution & information agreement was another important part. Thank you, Matt Falshaw, for putting some of that in a form that could be viewed by people outside of the ecosystem.
I also haven’t met anybody except Zoe (and now me, I guess?) who seems to have felt able to even breathe a word about the “objects & demons” memetics thing. I think that was another important missing piece.
Some people do report feeling incapable of speaking positively about Leverage in EA circles? I personally didn’t experience a lot of this, but I saw enough surprise when I said good things about Reserve, that it doesn’t surprise me particularly. Leverage’s social network and some of its techniques were clearly quite meaningful to some people, so I can imagine how rough ‘needing to write that out of your personal narrative’ could have been.