Conversation

After Zoes article, I see lots of confusion over how Leverage Research related to rationalists, and some people describing them as in the same bucket. Here's a thread explaining!
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Leverage drew a lot of people from the rationalist and EA communities, but also drew from others; Zoe was unaffiliated with rationalists before joining leverage, for example. Geoff apparently worked with some standard rat institutions like CFAR early on.
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Rationalists outside of Leverage had no idea what was going on inside of Leverage, it was very secretive. One of my other friends who I knew before she joined Leverage (she was also not a rat), would tell me almost nothing about what was going on in her life now.
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Leverage was very different from CFAR or MIRI from the outside; it pulled people in and you sort of lost them; there was a clear "group" feeling they had that I didn't get out of the other orgs. It was also not focused on the practice of rationality, its core felt farther.
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I've found established rationalist communities to have excellent norms that prevent stuff like what happened at Leverage. The times where it gets weird is typically when you mix in a strong leader + splintered, isolated subgroup + new norms. (this is not the first time)
Rationalist communities *do* tend to give rise to more splintered subgroups, I suspect. This is a side effect of having a big network of young, extremely open minded and curious people who are willing to doubt what they think they know, all gathered in one place.
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But that's another topic; my point is that Leverage developed issues for reasons that are not present in the established rationalist community and its organizations, as far as I can tell. I'm happy criticizing Leverage and supporting the rats.
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For content, I've been in the rat community since 2015, have attended regular rat meetups in 5 diff cities, lived in a core rat group house in the bay area (during the time of Leverage) and am currently dating a deeprat.
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