Bubbles are great, but if you lose the ability to live outside the bubble, you have a problem. For example, the bubble owner may start extracting rent from you. But even in a perfectly benevolent bubble, all the resources outside the bubble become inaccesible to you. Life in a bubble is great, if you have the capacity to leave.
I think there were growing pains for people who weren’t adept at what we’d ended up focusing on (but who wanted to continue being part of our group and our mission) but who also weren’t able or willing to contribute in other ways (e.g. fundraising or recruiting or day-to-day operations).
Allow me to rephrase it using my own words: You hired kids right out of university, provided for them accommodation and food, did their dishes and laundry, and paid them for doing “psychological research” which consisted of making up stuff and providing emotional support to each other. When you finally decided to stop paying some of them, they were really sad. (No shit, Sherlock!) But despite the sadness, they didn’t volunteer to e.g. help you with your job. Sad to be low-status, but unwilling to gain that status back by doing the dishes.
How much am I exaggerating here?
To me it seems that you hired kids with no experience of real life, absurdly spoiled them, and then… they didn’t provide enough value to your project (you considered them insufficiently psychologically insightful; they refused to do the mundane jobs), but also lacked the skills needed to survive outside of this protective bubble and they knew it. They would probably need a “normal life coach” just to be able to keep a job and survive living on their own. The three months of financial runway were generous, but they should have spent the time getting outside-of-bubble skills.
The problem was not the bubble. The problem was populating it with people incapable of surviving outside the bubble. I suspect that this created the stress, and also the potential for abuse. You can be friendly to each other, but if the boss can press a button that will end your life as you know it, that is a huge power differential. That is way more power than an average employer (even an average American employer) has over their employees.
A charitable reader will assume that this all happened by accident.
I agree with the content of your comment but the framing gives me a sense of bad faith, and makes me uncomfortable.
If I put a lot of time into a post-mortem detailing how an 8 year project I put a lot into went wrong, and then the top comment was someone summing up what I’d done in an uncharitable paragraph saying things like “making stuff up” and “no shit sherlock” I’d feel like I’d tried to do a good thing for the discourse at large and was defected against.
It feels worth pointing out that Universities seem to try to set up this sort of absurdly protective bubble, by design. Uni extracts sometimes-exorbitant rent, while doing so; Leverage was at least usually paying people salaries.
Meanwhile, a lot of US bureaucracy appears almost… tailor-made to make life more complicated, with a special exception to that reserved for “full-time employees of large corporations”? (I think that for historic reasons, some of their bureaucratic complications are consistently outsourced to their company to handle.)
Against this societal backdrop, I find it hard to fault Cathleen or Leverage for trying what they did. While also not being too surprised, that it led to some dependence issues.
(Maybe having a hard “2 years” limit, and accepting a little less “heroic responsibility,” would have downgraded a lot of issues to just “University dorm level.”)
Sad to be low-status, but unwilling to gain that status back by doing the dishes.
On interesting aspect here is that most actual cults have no problem giving people dish duties if they think those people should do it. Lack of getting them to do the dishes is an example of little pressure being put on them even when they didn’t add value.
Yeah, as far as I know (I am not yet in the middle of the article—and in the meanwhile I already did the dishes twice, hung up the laundry, and read a bedtime story to my kids, hehe), living in Leverage sounds like lots of fun… if you enjoy that type of thing, and if you are able to survive outside the bubble.
Generally, group houses are a controversial topic on Less Wrong. Whenever you mention them, someone says “awesome” and someone else screams in horror. I am on the “awesome” side… but that is because I am already capable of living the normal life, so if I joined such project and something went wrong, I could simply… leave. I am also able to keep my boundaries, so I would be like “the entire weekend is my personal free time” (and I am using it to meet people outside this group), and if the group is not okay with that, then I quit (it helps that I have the “fuck-you money”). Though I suspect that with this attitude, I wouldn’t get hired in the first place… which perhaps points towards the problem (that the group members were selected, perhaps unintentionally, for their potential to become dependent on Geoff/group).
Are group houses a controversial topic here? My impression is that overall LW is much more positively inclined toward them than the general public. With a view like, “group houses are something that works really well for the right people, though they aren’t for everyone.” I’ve seen reactions where people say that they personally wouldn’t want to live in one, but I don’t think I’ve seen people saying that they are harmful in general?
I think I remember some very negative comments on the “Dragon Army” post, but I can’t find them now.
There was a time in the past where people were a bit hysterical about whether LW is a cult or not, and talking about living together was one of the triggers. Recently, everyone seems to have calmed down.
Bubbles are great, but if you lose the ability to live outside the bubble, you have a problem. For example, the bubble owner may start extracting rent from you. But even in a perfectly benevolent bubble, all the resources outside the bubble become inaccesible to you. Life in a bubble is great, if you have the capacity to leave.
Allow me to rephrase it using my own words: You hired kids right out of university, provided for them accommodation and food, did their dishes and laundry, and paid them for doing “psychological research” which consisted of making up stuff and providing emotional support to each other. When you finally decided to stop paying some of them, they were really sad. (No shit, Sherlock!) But despite the sadness, they didn’t volunteer to e.g. help you with your job. Sad to be low-status, but unwilling to gain that status back by doing the dishes.
How much am I exaggerating here?
To me it seems that you hired kids with no experience of real life, absurdly spoiled them, and then… they didn’t provide enough value to your project (you considered them insufficiently psychologically insightful; they refused to do the mundane jobs), but also lacked the skills needed to survive outside of this protective bubble and they knew it. They would probably need a “normal life coach” just to be able to keep a job and survive living on their own. The three months of financial runway were generous, but they should have spent the time getting outside-of-bubble skills.
The problem was not the bubble. The problem was populating it with people incapable of surviving outside the bubble. I suspect that this created the stress, and also the potential for abuse. You can be friendly to each other, but if the boss can press a button that will end your life as you know it, that is a huge power differential. That is way more power than an average employer (even an average American employer) has over their employees.
A charitable reader will assume that this all happened by accident.
I agree with the content of your comment but the framing gives me a sense of bad faith, and makes me uncomfortable.
If I put a lot of time into a post-mortem detailing how an 8 year project I put a lot into went wrong, and then the top comment was someone summing up what I’d done in an uncharitable paragraph saying things like “making stuff up” and “no shit sherlock” I’d feel like I’d tried to do a good thing for the discourse at large and was defected against.
It feels worth pointing out that Universities seem to try to set up this sort of absurdly protective bubble, by design. Uni extracts sometimes-exorbitant rent, while doing so; Leverage was at least usually paying people salaries.
Meanwhile, a lot of US bureaucracy appears almost… tailor-made to make life more complicated, with a special exception to that reserved for “full-time employees of large corporations”? (I think that for historic reasons, some of their bureaucratic complications are consistently outsourced to their company to handle.)
Against this societal backdrop, I find it hard to fault Cathleen or Leverage for trying what they did. While also not being too surprised, that it led to some dependence issues.
(Maybe having a hard “2 years” limit, and accepting a little less “heroic responsibility,” would have downgraded a lot of issues to just “University dorm level.”)
The EA hotel has a two year limit (I think exceptions are possible though). After reading this article, I’m feeling like Greg made a good choice here.
On interesting aspect here is that most actual cults have no problem giving people dish duties if they think those people should do it. Lack of getting them to do the dishes is an example of little pressure being put on them even when they didn’t add value.
Yeah, as far as I know (I am not yet in the middle of the article—and in the meanwhile I already did the dishes twice, hung up the laundry, and read a bedtime story to my kids, hehe), living in Leverage sounds like lots of fun… if you enjoy that type of thing, and if you are able to survive outside the bubble.
Generally, group houses are a controversial topic on Less Wrong. Whenever you mention them, someone says “awesome” and someone else screams in horror. I am on the “awesome” side… but that is because I am already capable of living the normal life, so if I joined such project and something went wrong, I could simply… leave. I am also able to keep my boundaries, so I would be like “the entire weekend is my personal free time” (and I am using it to meet people outside this group), and if the group is not okay with that, then I quit (it helps that I have the “fuck-you money”). Though I suspect that with this attitude, I wouldn’t get hired in the first place… which perhaps points towards the problem (that the group members were selected, perhaps unintentionally, for their potential to become dependent on Geoff/group).
Are group houses a controversial topic here? My impression is that overall LW is much more positively inclined toward them than the general public. With a view like, “group houses are something that works really well for the right people, though they aren’t for everyone.” I’ve seen reactions where people say that they personally wouldn’t want to live in one, but I don’t think I’ve seen people saying that they are harmful in general?
(Disclosure: I live in a group house of sorts)
I think I remember some very negative comments on the “Dragon Army” post, but I can’t find them now.
There was a time in the past where people were a bit hysterical about whether LW is a cult or not, and talking about living together was one of the triggers. Recently, everyone seems to have calmed down.
Dragon Army was, in their own words, a “high-commitment, high-standards, high-investment group house model with centralized leadership”. Reading through the negative comments, they’re about ways in which people expect this complex project to go poorly, and not about group houses in general: https://web.archive.org/web/20180117095209/http://lesswrong.com/lw/p23/dragon_army_theory_charter_30min_read/
https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/dragon-army-retrospective-597faf182e50