this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
0 points (NaN% liked)

SneerClub

1307 readers
1 users here now

Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

See our twin at Reddit

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
self@awful.systems
blakestacey@awful.systems
dgerard@awful.systems
0
The Oblivious Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0 (lydialaurenson.substack.com)
submitted 3 months ago by Architeuthis@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
50 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Copied from the stubsack:

The Inside story of Leverage Research

This should be interesting, it's about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don't know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.

edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.

Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:

I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.

edit edit: Why can't these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020

edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she's Curtis Yarvin's baby momma.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

After all, it was a workplace where many employees lived together, and had multiple overlapping romantic relationships with their colleagues, while also essentially acting as each other’s therapists

"After all, it was completely fucked"

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Being each other's therapists

That's probably a euphemism for levs subjecting each other to hours long so-called debugging sessions, i.e. rationalist flavored scientology auditing.

More mundane cult stuff was also taking place, like keeping everyone constantly exhausted from continuous busywork, while also guilt-tripping them out of having free time and non-cult related interests in general. This seems to be a refrain in other witness testimonies that's absent in Laurenson's telling, unless she threw a passing mention somewhere that I didn't catch.