“Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out… In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.” —Paul Graham
mingyuan
Guide to rationalist interior decorating
Takeaways from one year of lockdown
The impossible problem of due process
I want to note that this post (top-level) now has more than 3x the number of comments that Zoe’s does (or nearly 50% more comments than the Zoe+BayAreaHuman posts combined, if you think that’s a more fair comparison), and that no one has commented on Zoe’s post in 24 hours. [ETA: This changed while I was writing this comment. The point about lowered activity still stands.]
This seems really bad to me — I think that there was a lot more that needed to be figured out wrt Leverage, and this post has successfully sucked all the attention away from a conversation that I perceive to be much more important.
I keep deleting sentences because I don’t think it’s productive to discuss how upset this makes me, but I am 100% with Aella here. I was wary of this post to begin with and I feel something akin to anger at what it did to the Leverage conversation.
I had some contact with Leverage 1.0 — had some friends there, interviewed for an ops job there, and was charted a few times by a few different people. I have also worked for both CFAR and MIRI, though never as a core staff member at either organization; and more importantly, I was close friends with maybe 50% of the people who worked at CFAR from mid-2017 to mid-2020. Someone very close to me previously worked for both CFAR and Leverage. With all that backing me up: I am really very confident that the psychological harm inflicted by Leverage was both more widespread and qualitatively different than anything that happened at CFAR or MIRI (at least since mid-2017; I don’t know what things might have been like back in, like, 2012).
The comments section of this post is full of CFAR and MIRI employees attempting to do collaborative truth-seeking. The only comments made by Leverage employees in comparable threads were attempts at reputation management. That alone tells you a lot!
CFAR and MIRI have their flaws, and several people clearly have legitimate grievances with them. I personally did not have a super great experience working for either organization (though that has nothing to do with anything Jessica mentioned in this post; just run-of-the-mill workplace stuff). Those flaws are worth looking at, not only for the edification of the people who had bad experiences with MIRI and CFAR, but also because we care about being good people building effective organizations to make the world a better place. They do not, however, belong in a conversation about the harm done by Leverage.
(Just writing a sentence saying that Leverage was harmful makes me feel uncomfortable, feels a little dangerous, but fuck it, what are they going to do, murder me?)
Again, I keep deleting sentences, because all I want to talk about is the depth of my agreement with Aella, and my uncharitable feelings towards this post. So I guess I’ll just end here.
The rationalist community’s location problem
Cryonics signup guide #1: Overview
Self-sacrifice is a scarce resource
Reflections on the cryonics sequence
#3: Choosing a cryonics provider
Meetups as Institutions for Intellectual Progress
reflections on lockdown, two years out
How to have a happy quarantine
Location Discussion Takeaways
Some end-of-year media recommendations
What Are Meetups Actually Trying to Accomplish?
You missed one! Thanks to Zvi for keeping us all informed every single week for months :)
Bay Solstice 2019 Retrospective
The question for me is how much these observations apply to peasant life in other places and at other times.
Most of this sounds a lot like my dad’s life in China in the 1970s. I don’t know about infanticide or some of the other things, but the impression I get from my dad’s stories is of a dirty, lawless village dominated by horrible people. The following is mostly based on my memories of stories my dad told me when I was younger, so I will definitely get some details wrong, but the basics are true.
Poverty
Food: Many days out of the year, my dad’s family ate nothing but rice. They raised livestock (my dad had to share his room with a pig for a while), but as far as I know they only ate meat at spring festival (and much of this was left out for the ancestors). They also ate eels and frogs that they caught in the river — where they also bathed, washed their vegetables, and dumped their chamber pots — and presumably ate vegetables when they were in season. One time my dad cooked me and my sister the ‘soup’ he used to eat when he was a kid, which was just boiled water with a bit of soy sauce.
Illness: One time when he was very young my father got a horrible fever, and people thought he might die… but his grandmother scooped water from a muddy puddle into a bowl, and showed him a bubble resting atop the water. She told him that the bubble contained his spirit, and had him drink the muddy water to heal him. (Obviously he survived.) Also, my grandfather had bronchitis for about sixty years, and one of their neighbors had a persistent cough for years on end that would drive everyone crazy.
My dad has an anecdote:
One day when I was 4 years old (1971), I fell and cut my forehead on the stone door step of my house and needed to be stitched up. My grandmother wrestled and carried me, with the help of a neighbor, to the village “clinic”, which was staffed by the one and only “barefoot doctor” in my area. A barefoot doctor was a hygiene worker sent down from an urban city to rural areas during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976). The entire medical supply in the village (of more than 1,200 people) fit in a wooden box the size of a small countertop microwave. The supply did not include numbing gel or anesthesia of any kind. It took four adults to pin me down on a wooden board over two workbenches to sew up my wound.
Jealousy: This is maybe a bit different, but ever since my dad moved to the US (even when he and my mom were on foodstamps and raising a kid with no income), ~100% of his interactions with his family back in China include them asking him for money, often in the $10,000+ range. And not even for necessities, but for things like funding a new (doomed) business venture, or buying an apartment for his nephew so that his girlfriend would marry him.
Morals / cruelty / women
Cruelty to animals: At least my dad definitely didn’t see animals as worthy of compassion — they were either wild or livestock. Dogs were generally wild (I don’t know of people keeping them as pets), and it was normal to throw rocks at them to shoo them away. My dad hated his family’s pig (which smelled terrible, was loud, and ate so much that sometimes there wasn’t any left over for the humans), and even today he has no interest in pets whatsoever.
Cruelty among kids: My dad has a memorable story about chasing a rival gang of boys from a neighboring village into the village’s waste pit (i.e. a giant pile of shit). I get the sense that at least in my dad’s experience, kids were cruel to each other in general — he had maybe one friend, and he has no warm feelings towards either his older or younger brother, and most of his childhood stories involve rivalries or fights.
Cruelty among adults: Physical fights among adult men also weren’t uncommon. When the village’s harvests were pooled by the government and each family was allowed to take a share, people would fight each other for the best melons. Sometimes people fought in the street for other reasons as well.
My dad’s dad was an embezzler, and was verbally and physically abusive to both his wife and his children — he beat my dad for things such as using his writing paper to fold boats, accidentally cracking one of the chamber pots, and not going to school, at least as young as the age of five. He beat his wife all the time, and I think she often took beatings for her children, and he raped her with their children in the room.
My dad writes:
On days my mother didn’t cook enough for everyone, my father would yell at my mother for being a stingy bitch. On days my mother prepared too much food, my father would accuse my mother for being a wasteful idiot incapable of planning ahead. Sometimes my mother found her life too hard to bear and wanted / threatened to end it. She would reach for one of bottles full of pesticides on the living room floor. When fights broke out between my parents, I usually wanted to run away but almost always ended up sticking around to watch for dangerous moves. Quite a few times I had to wrestle that pesticide bottle out of my mother’s hands.
The women of my grandmother’s generation were tasked with spraying the fields with pesticides, and most of them (including my grandmother herself) consequently died young due to ovarian cancer. Also my great-grandmother had bound feet; not sure how that factors in but it’s horrifying.
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Re:
If this kind of cruelty is common, is it inherent to poverty, including the lower levels of education that necessarily accompany poverty? And if so, does increased wealth and education alone lead to a more humane society, or did the transition to more equal rights and status also require a change in morals and other ideas that is not a natural or inherent consequence of material progress?
I’m much less sure about anything here. But my dad’s family seems to have stayed pretty terrible despite the changes of the last fifty years (they now have plumbing, electricity, and plenty to wear and eat). His father never stopped being cruel, his brothers never stopped trying to guilt him into giving them money, and his younger brother’s wife divorced him for being his terrible self. Then again I guess despite their rise in material wealth, they probably still never got anything beyond a middle school education, so maybe just not a relevant example at all.
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Hope this was helpful! Clara had already showed me some of the Semyonova stuff so I had already been thinking about this a fair amount and I’m glad to have a reason to write it up.
Okay, meta: This post has over 500 comments now and it’s really hard to keep a handle on all of the threads. So I spent the last 2 hours trying to outline the main topics that keep coming up. Most top-level comments are linked to but some didn’t really fit into any category, so a couple are missing; also apologies that the structure is imperfect.
Topic headers are bolded and are organized very roughly in order of how important they seem (both to me personally and in terms of the amount of air time they’ve gotten).
Discussion of MIRI/CFAR vs Leverage comparison
Extent to which this post pulls attention away from (and cheapens) the important discussion that was being had about Leverage
Aella’s thread
Discussion of extent to which the comparison is misleading, and concrete places where the comparison breaks down
Eli’s thread
Viliam’s subsubthread
Habryka’s subthread
Vanessa’s thread
Different drivers of mental health problems (rationalistthrowaway’s thread)
Different norms wrt criticsim (Viliam’s subthread)
We don’t actually know how bad Leverage was (Freyja’s subthread)
Accounts from other MIRI and CFAR employees (current or former)
Addressing factual statements
orthonormal’s thread
Anna’s thread
Unreal’s thread
Allegations of problems at CFAR (PhoenixFriend’s thread)
Several responses from current or recent CFAR employees
It’s misleading to say CFAR and Leverage had the same plans (Anna’s subthread)
Addressing the interaction between CFAR and MAPLE/Monastic Academy (Duncan’s subthread)
Addressing the general vibe of the OP
Logan’s subthread
Extent of Michael Vassar’s involvement in psychosis cases, and discussion of how misleading it was to leave this out of the original post
Scott’s thread
Habryka’s subthread
Problems need scapegoats (Vaniver’s subthread)
Is the situation described here worse than the average?
Discussion of how rates of mental health problems in the rationality community and various subcommunities compare to base rates in comparable communities
Rob’s thread
Anecdotal experience in CS academia
Gunnar and Habryka’s subthread
Discussion of whether MIRI and Leverage are worse for employees’ mental health than the average tech workplace
Jessica’s subthread
Discussion of secrecy
Zack’s thread
Claim that secrecy of this level is totally normal in some fields (Aryeh’s comment)
Discussion of whether writing about timelines influences timelines (AlexMennen’s thread)
Is cult-like psychological harm a recurring pattern in the rationalist community, and what can we do to mitigate it?
nostalgebraist’s thread
Comparison to academia (temporarity_visitor_account’s thread)
Three factors and potential ways of addressing them (James_Miller’s thread)
Short comment by 4thWayWastrel basically just stating the question
Discussion of potentially harmful memes around ‘psycho-spiritual development’, including postrationality, psychedelics, and ‘woo’/supernaturalism
CronoDAS and Eliezer’s thread
Woo: Discussion of Buddhism, meditation, tarot
Can meditation be harmful in much the same way as psychedelics
Connections between psychedelic use and ‘woo’
Psychedelics: Discussion of therapeutic uses, anecdotes about good and bad effects, anecdotes about irresponsible usage
Sub-discussion about drugs in general and illegality
Viliam’s subthread
Around Kegan levels and the Monastic Academy
Claim that psychedelics don’t have much impact on most people (Kenny’s thread)
Discussion of drugs and drug legal status (James_Miller’s thread)
The mission is inherently stressful
Chris_Leong’s comment
adamzerner’s comment
Vanessa’s thread
Discussion of idolization of rationalist community ‘thought leaders’
Deference to Eliezer (Ben’s thread)
Deference to Anna Salamon (PhoenixFriend’s thread, perhaps elsewhere as well)
How important is Eliezer’s contribution to AI safety, actually? (Chris_Leong’s thread)
People might have very different experiences in the same organization
Unreal’s thread
Also discussed a lot in the comments of the preceding Leverage-focused posts
Addressing other aspects of the OP
Discussion of what OP says about hiring practices (Vanessa’s thread)
Discussion of OP’s allegations that other EA orgs do ‘fake research’ (philip_b’s thread)
Unconvinced by the argumentation in the post (bn22’s comment)