I worked for CFAR from 2016 to 2020, and am still somewhat involved.
This description does not reflect my personal experience at all.
And speaking from my view of the organization more generally (not just my direct personal experience): Several bullet points seem flatly false to me. Many of the bullet points have some grain of truth to them, in the sense that they refer to or touch on real things that happened at the org, but then depart wildly from my understanding of events, or (according to me) mischaracterize / distort things severely.
I could go through and respond in more detail, point by point, if that is really necessary, but I would prefer not to do that, since it seems like a lot of exhausting work.
As a sort of free sample / downpayment:
At least four people who did not listen to Michael’s pitch about societal corruption and worked in some capacity with the CFAR/MIRI team had psychotic episodes.
I don’t know who this is referring to. To my knowledge 0 people who are or have been staff at CFAR had a psychotic episode either during or after working at CFAR.
Psychedelic use was common among the leadership of CFAR and spread through imitation, if not actual institutional encouragement, to the rank-and-file. This makes it highly distressing that Michael is being singled out for his drug advocacy by people defending CFAR.
First of all, I think the use of “rank-and-file” throughout the use of this comment is misleading to the point of being dishonest. CFAR has always been a small organization of no more than 10 or 11 people, often flexibly doing multiple roles. The explicit organizational structure involved people having different “hierarchical” relationships depending on context.
In general, different people lead different projects, and the rest of the staff would take “subordinate” roles, in those projects. That is, if Elizabeth is leading a workshop, she would delegate specific responsibilities to me as one of her workshop staff. But in a different context, where I’m leading a project, I might delegate to her, and I might have the final say. (At one point this was an official, structural, policy, with a hierarchy of reporting mapped out on a spreadsheet, but for most of the time I’ve been there it has been much more organic than that.)
But these hierarchical arrangements are both transient and do not at all dominate the experience of working for CFAR. Mostly we are and have been a group of pretty independent contributors, with different views about x-risk and rationality and what-CFAR-is-about, who collaborate on specific workshops and (in a somewhat more diffuse way) in maintaining the organization. There is not anything like the hierarchy you typically see in larger organizations, which makes the frequent use of the term “rank and file” seem out of place and disingenuous, to me.
Certainly, Anna was always in a leadership role, in the sense that the staff respected her greatly, and were often willing to defer to her, and at most times there was an Executive Director (ED) in addition to Anna.
That said, I don’t think that Anna, or either of the EDs ever confided to me that they had ever taken psychedelics, even in private. I certainly didn’t feel pressured to do psychedelics, and I don’t see how that practice could have spread by imitation, given that it was never discussed, much less modeled. And there was not anything like “institutional encouragement”.
The only conversations I remember having about psychedelic drugs are the conversations in which we were told that it was one of the topics that we were not to discuss with workshop participants, and a conversation in which Anna strongly stated that psychedelics were destabilizing and implied that they were...generally bad, or at least that being reckless with them was really bad.
Personally, I have never taken any psychoactive drugs aside from nicotine (and some experimentation with caffeine and modafinil, once). This stance was generally respected by CFAR staff. Occasionally, some people (not Anna or either ED) expressed curiosity about or gently ribbed me about my hard-line stance of not drinking alcohol, but in a way that was friendly and respectful of my boundaries. My impression is that Anna more-or-less approves of stance on drugs, without endorsing it as the only or obvious stance.
Debugging sessions with Anna and with other members of the leadership was nigh unavoidable and asymmetric, meaning that while the leadership could avoid getting debugged it was almost impossible to do so as a rank-and-file member. Sometimes Anna described her process as “implanting an engine of desperation” within the people she was debugging deeply. This obviously had lots of ill psychological effects on the people involved, but some of them did seem to find a deeper kind of motivation.
This is false, or at minimum is overly general, in that it does not resemble my experience at all.
My experience:
I could and can easily avoid debugging sessions with Anna. Every interaction that I’ve had with her has been consensual, and she has, to my memory, always respected my boundaries, when I had had enough, or was too tired, or the topic was too sensitive, or whatever. In general, if I say that I don’t want to talk about something, people at CFAR respect that. They might offer care, or help, for if I decided I wanted it, but then they would leave me alone. (Most of the debugging, etc., conversations that I had at CFAR, I explicitly sought out.)
This also didn’t happen that frequently. While I’ve had lots of conversations with Anna, I estimate I’ve had deep “soulful” conversations, or conversations in which she was explicitly teaching me a mental technique...around once every 4 months, on average?
Also, though it has happened somewhat more rarely, I have participated in debugging style conversations with Anna where I was in the “debugger” role.
(By the way, is in CFAR’s context, the “debugger” role is explicitly a role of assistance / midwifery, of helping a person get traction and understanding on some problem, rather than an active role of doing something to or intervening on the person being debugged.
Though I admit that this can still be a role with a lot of power and influence, especially in cases where there is an existing power or status differential. I do think that early in my experience with CFAR, I was to willing to defer to Anna about stuff in general, and might make big changes in my personal direction at her suggestion, despite not really having and inside view of why I should prefer that direction. She and I would both agree, today, that this is bad, though I don’t consider myself to have been majorly harmed by it. I also think it is not that unusual. Young people are often quite influenced by role models that they are impressed by, often without clear-to-them reasons.)
I have never heard the phrase “engine of desperation” before today, though it is true that there was a period in which Anna was interested in a kind of “quiet desperation” that she thought was a effective place to think and act from.
I am aware of some cases of Anna debugging with CFAR staff that seem somewhat more fraught than my own situation, but from what I know of those, they are badly characterized by the above bullet point.
I could go on, and I will if that’s helpful. I think my reaction to these first few bullet points is a broadly representative sample.
[Edit: I want to note that this is represents only a fraction of my overall feelings and views on this whole thing.]
I feel some annoyance at this sentence. I appreciate the stated goal of just trying to understand what happened in the different situations, without blaming or trying to evaluate which is worse.
But then the post repeatedly (in every section!) makes reference to Zoe’s post, comparing her experience at Leverage to your (and others’) experience at MIRI/CFAR, taking specific elements from her account and drawing parallels to your own. This is the main structure of the post!
Some more or less randomly chosen examples (ctrl-f “Leverage” or “Zoe” for lots more):
If the goal is just to clarify what happened and not at all to blame or compare, then why not...just state what happened at MIRI/CFAR without comparing to the Leverage case, at all?
You (Jessica) say, “I will be noting parts of Zoe’s post and comparing them to my own experience, which I hope helps to illuminate common patterns; it really helps to have an existing different account to prompt my memory of what happened.” But in that case, why not use her post as a starting point for organizing your own thoughts, but then write something about MIRI/CFAR that stands on its own terms?
. . .
To answer my own question...
My guess is that you adopted this essay structure because you want to argue that the things that happened at Leverage were not a one-off random thing, they were structurally (not just superficially) similar to dynamics at MIRI / CFAR. That is, there is a common cause in of similar symptoms, between those two cases.
If so, my impression is that this essay is going too fast, by introducing a bunch of new interpretation-laden data, and fitting that data into a grand theory of similarity between Leverage and MIRI all at once. Just clarifying the facts about what happened is a different (hard) goal than describing the general dynamics underlying those events. I think we’ll make more progress if we do the first, well, before moving on to the second.
In effect, because the data is presented as part of some larger theory, I have to do extra cognitive work to evaluate the data on its own terms, instead of slipping into the frame of evaluating whether the larger theory is true or false, or whether my affect towards MIRI should be the same as my affect toward Leverage, or something. It made it harder instead of easier for me to step out of the frame of blame and “who was most bad?”.