SneerClub

I guess I'll just do a read along write up:

Part 1:

In the Effective Altruist community, Leverage held “mystique,” according to a former employee. It didn’t help that some employees lost touch with their previous friends and families. One community member observes that “a lot of people dropped off the face of the Earth when they started working at Leverage.” Rumors swirled. Since Peter Thiel was an early funder, a local wit dubbed Leverage “Peter Thiel’s MKUltra”

Zoe [ex-Leverage with PTSD who went public] also wrote: “I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid myself of specific ‘demons’ I felt I’d picked up from other members of Leverage. If this sounds insane, it’s because it was… In addition, I’ll be honest — I experienced real effects of these ‘demons.’ ”

This is the author by the way:

By the time I heard about Leverage, I was fascinated by mysticism, meditation, and witchcraft. By 2020, my spiritual practice yielded disorienting results: vivid dreams, weirder-than-usual hunches, intense visualizations, trance-like states, and more. I sought balance by discussing these with an accredited therapist, who said I was fine, and by getting advice from friends, including friends from Leverage. This was when I began to understand what might be meant by the word “demon.” And those discussions with former Leveragers formed a basis of shared experience, which eventually led sources at Leverage, including Geoff Anders, to trust me with this story.

A lot of this unintentionally reads like what here's what the cultic milieu looks like from the point of view of those especially vulnerable to cult influence:

Nevin Freeman, who was employee #5, says that Leverage “self-selected for people who didn’t place their faith in existing institutions,” who wanted to build something better. [...] This in turn led Nevin to a visiting fellowship at Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI, formerly known as the Singularity Institute), then to a startup job. He began donating half his salary to fund people working on AI issues; after he met Geoff, Nevin redirected his money to fund Geoff, then joined Leverage.

On definitely not cult building:

Oliver discovered Leverage after he decided to work on “collective intelligence” and became interested in the business concept of “learning organizations,” organizations that prioritize continuous transformation of employees as well as the organization itself.

Most sanitized description of nrx ever, and also diversity is great when it comes to letting the fascists in:

One clear example of this pluralism arrived in the form of a charismatic, self-assured Slovenian man in his twenties [...] When he joined Leverage in 2015, Samo was already involved with the burgeoning neoreactionary movement, an online right-wing subculture with tech overtones, which was somewhat interconnected with the rationality community [... ...] more neoreactionaries were hired over time, which formed an odd synthesis.

But for the rationalists it was Tuesday:

Eventually, in 2018, a neoreactionary group that had multiple members at Leverage made monogamy a requirement for members in good standing, which some thought odd given that more than one neoreactionary, including Samo, were in open relationships, as was most Leverage leadership, including Geoff.

You don't say:

Emily recalls that the group was alert for cult warning signs.

There's also a lot of subtext that the people at Leverage never seem to actually do anything besides talk about stuff and cultic self care, that doesn't rise to the surface because the writer is overly sympathetic to them. She tries to counterbalance this with reminders about how there was a semi-constant rotation of ultra rich casual guests and that some Leverage adjacent people went to do Important Things, like Dario and the wealthy longevity guy.

This experience [of meeting a random billionaire one night in the group house kitchen] “moved me along the spectrum from Leverage being completely delusional to, like, maybe Leverage being onto something, if they were able to convince someone like that,” says Tyler. “I think the truth was that Leverage was onto a bunch of things, and it was delusional, and it was closely intertwined.”

Gradually, a cult of personality with the stated purpose of self-replicating in other organisations emerged:

Gradually, themes emerged. [...] Several people studied meditation and other woo-woo stuff (sometimes abbreviated woo); some hoped to achieve spiritual enlightenment and share the process afterwards. Meanwhile, before he arrived at Leverage, Samo had already started researching a subject that he called “Great Founder Theory,” delineating the process by which exceptional people scale their impact through organizations; once at Leverage he created a research group that became the department of Sociology.

Cultic self-care:

In groups, in pairs, or alone in their rooms, the researchers sat with notebooks and whiteboards, diagramming every corner of their mental landscapes, seeking ways to “debug” behaviors they deemed undesirable. For most, the Holy Grail was a way to work harder, work smarter, accomplish bigger goals, or otherwise transcend the limitations they felt held them back from changing the world.

Then there's some stuff about how our benevolent leader Geoff decided that academic psychology isn't a real science and should instead be replaced with his own Connection Theory, which as far as I can tell is basically a brainwashing framework:

What follows, then, is that any person’s problematic behavior can be changed, because “if you actually get the logic of what’s producing the problematic set of beliefs or actions,” then you can intervene in that logic.

He also cured some guys caffeine addiction by laying hands at the start of the article, which I didn't think much of at the time because I thought the author just threw it in for flavour, and that her overall approach would be uh different. Later CT also cured his nagging worries about being a creep, good for him I guess:

He introspected on his discomfort, discussed his observations with a colleague, and traced the discomfiting sensation to his underlying beliefs about how society designates some people as creepy. The pair concluded that he had “irrational” beliefs about society and creepiness, and discussed the subject in detail, until Nevin felt that his irrational beliefs had changed.

ConTheory apparently also cured some guys cluster headaches, others not so much:

Simultaneously, Leveragers observed undesirable effects during charting sessions: bouts of shaking that could last hours; hysterical screaming and crying, with no identifiable cause.

Eventually the slovenian nrxer reinvents founders' mythos from first principles and they decide to monetize it by creating a become-a-founder self-help seminars thing with a shared profits arrangement with the wanna-be founders:

In 2017, during a fundraising meeting for Paradigm Academy, Geoff promised Peter Thiel an appealing use case for the Leverage introspection tools. Geoff and his colleagues would either find and recruit ten “masters” who excelled at a discipline, or create ten masters using their cognitive toolkit, within three years.

Part 2 soon, or eventually.