Perhaps it is something the people a few circles out say? That is, someone who is just inside the group, justifying themselves to someone who is just outside the group?
Or what outsiders think when they look at the project and something feels fishy—but then they decide to ignore that feeling because there is a tiny chance that...
“Perhaps” as in “maybe some people say this, but I haven’t seen it”? Like is this just speculation that maybe people said stuff like this, or do you have particular reason to think that?
It’s pretty counter to how everyone at leverage, who I talked to, talked to me. Mostly they though that Leverage was clearly massively more promising than any other project (and sometimes had an air of being kind of...smug about the things that they knew and understood?).
I can think of exceptions of people who I would guess might have had a different attitude, but even those people would not have been like “but there’s a small chance it will have a huge impact” And I don’t see why they would justify themselves to outsiders that way, since that’s a super lame defense of your work.
I have a model where the followers of an ideology with a charismatic leader often say different or less coherent things than the founder, partly because the founder had to somehow be more impressive than everyone else in order to get their power over people (e.g. most Marxists relative to Marx; most Christians relative to the Pope). So in this case it wouldn’t surprise me if they sometimes used Pascalian arguments while they were not used by the founder of the group.
But yes, I was barely acquainted with Leverage when it existed, and didn’t know what Black Lotus was until after it exploded, I am not reporting from experience.
Perhaps it is something the people a few circles out say? That is, someone who is just inside the group, justifying themselves to someone who is just outside the group?
Or what outsiders think when they look at the project and something feels fishy—but then they decide to ignore that feeling because there is a tiny chance that...
“Perhaps” as in “maybe some people say this, but I haven’t seen it”? Like is this just speculation that maybe people said stuff like this, or do you have particular reason to think that?
It’s pretty counter to how everyone at leverage, who I talked to, talked to me. Mostly they though that Leverage was clearly massively more promising than any other project (and sometimes had an air of being kind of...smug about the things that they knew and understood?).
I can think of exceptions of people who I would guess might have had a different attitude, but even those people would not have been like “but there’s a small chance it will have a huge impact” And I don’t see why they would justify themselves to outsiders that way, since that’s a super lame defense of your work.
I have a model where the followers of an ideology with a charismatic leader often say different or less coherent things than the founder, partly because the founder had to somehow be more impressive than everyone else in order to get their power over people (e.g. most Marxists relative to Marx; most Christians relative to the Pope). So in this case it wouldn’t surprise me if they sometimes used Pascalian arguments while they were not used by the founder of the group.
But yes, I was barely acquainted with Leverage when it existed, and didn’t know what Black Lotus was until after it exploded, I am not reporting from experience.