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)
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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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Replying to
Is the rationalist community a cult? — Nah, we just spawn cults like some sort of eldritch brood mother, why do you ask?
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A community of people with a high propensity to form/join cults, that over years has *not* formed a cult (except when they join adjacent groups that spring up to take advantage of that propensity), is to me an incredible mark in favor of that community.
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As in; if you form a community of ppl with a strong tendency to get violent when they get angry, and they consistently *don't* get violent when angry (tho ppl on the edges of the community join splinter groups and do get violent), this means something is going right in the core