👁️ "Crying Through the Walls": Inside Leverage Research

EA's second-most menacing subcult gets a friendly new history.

Welcome to Dark Markets, a weekly newsletter about Silicon Valley ideology, financial fraud, and the irrationality of money. I’m David Z. Morris - fraud investigator, PhD historian of technology, fintech analyst, and author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia. This week, we revisit the topics of that book.

On July 1, a writer named Lydia Laurenson published a novella-length report about the history of Leverage Research, a private institute founded by Geoff Anders and closely associated with Effective Altruism and Rationalism. Leverage was/is funded by the same billionaires who funded the broader Rationalist idea-space, including Peter Thiel and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn.

Very broadly, Leverage was researching “psychology,” in the much-reduced functionalist sense that Rationalists (and analytic philosophers like Anders) understand that concept. Noone in the organization was trained in psychology, and their improvisational methods and simplistic viewpoints seem to have led to nothing of genuine intellectual value. More to the point, their goal was less self-understanding than self-improvement, making the movement in substance less a “research” organization than a self-help group - and, according to many critics including former participants, a cult.

Leverage’s methods certainly had impacts - just not the ones anyone was hoping for. I wrote about Leverage, and the larger Rationalist sphere, in my book Stealing the Future. At the time, we had gotten Zoe Curzi’s report of what sure seemed a lot like cult conditioning and high-control techniques within Leverage, which led to a spate of psychological incidents among participants. Those revelations were serious and legitimate enough to have apparently led to Leverage losing credibility and status within its own mileu, but it was still a pretty limited viewpoint.

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So I was eager to dig in to Laurenson’s account, hoping that it would provide more insight into the wierdness of Anders and the rest of the crew.

Unfortunately, while it contains important new information that I highlight below, this is not a serious piece of writing that asks hard questions or digs into the ideology behind Leverage with any sort of critical eye. Instead, it reads largely like an internal history that acknowledges some problems but essentially takes Leverage’s claims of its own importance and accomplishments at face value.

But it doesn’t just read like an internal history. Though Laurenson foregrounds that the piece was initially commissioned by New York Magazine, she ultimately published it on her own Substack, after accepting a large grant from the very people she’s writing about, rather than working to meet the journalistic standards of a mainstream publication.

In short, Laurenson’s piece is paid propaganda, and should be regarded as such - even and perhaps especially when it seems shocking or revelatory.

This is representative of a much larger chronic blind spot among EAs and Rats, whose ethics, such as they are, don’t seem to include any grasp of the concept of a conflict of interest. As I’ve explored in depth, it’s an endlessly ironic original sin for a movement claiming to pursue the elimination of bias.

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Lydia Laurenson circa 2014, from a blog post about a coffee shop she ran.

Crying and Screaming

For all the propagandistic circumstances of her work, Laurenson does confirm a lot of the weirdness hinted at behind the scenes at Leverage - functionally, her report resembles a “limited hangout” that reveals a few embarrassments to defang deeper questions. Above all, Laurenson confirms Zoe Curzi’s allegations that a lot of the “psychological experimentation” going on at Leverage was deeply traumatic to participants.

Laurenson also reveals a lot of new information about how deeply far-right neoreactionaries were entrenched in Leverage, and in turn in the wider EA and Rationalist world. I’ve written at length about the fundamentally authoritarian nature of the underlying utilitiarian ethos common across these movements, but Laurenson closes that loop in a much more direct fashion.

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One strand of Laurenson’s story is a Leverage recruit named James Dama, who she follows from his arrival at Leverage to his unfortunate exit as a badly damaged person.

James sometimes heard screams and hysterical crying through the walls, only to be assured that these were standard outcomes of the Psychology program.

One of the strangest elements of the story, a detail new to Laurenson’s account, is that “bodywork” was a substantial part of the practice. Essentially, Reiki. Not only is this a remarkably strange thing for a “rational” group to be pursuing - it seems to for some reason have become a broadly damaging practice.

Emily [another of Laurenson’s subjects] increasingly found herself enduring bizarre side effects, like headaches or crippling anxiety, after bodywork experiments. She noticed that others had frequent aftereffects, too … the word “emergency” was becoming common, as it was used when an employee was in an extremely bad state (screaming or convulsing, for example) and then required hours or days of help.

This seems bad!

There’s also a lot more here about Geoff Anders, who Laurenson interviewed directly, on friendly terms. There are several moments where it’s clear Laurenson herself doesn’t perceive the deeply troubling and weird aspects of Anders’ character.

Geoff Anders tells me that he originally planned his life course in his teens … In the first box, which represents his initial goal, Geoff wrote: “Answer all philosophical questions.” This box is connected to later boxes that hold later goals, things like: “Understand the structure of our society,” “Determine the path to the best society,”

There’s something admirable about this kind of directness and ambition - and it’s also the kind of grand vision that attracts psychologically needy people to controlling leaders.

But obviously, these are the ambitions of a teenager, not an adult. The problem isn’t that Anders goals are overambitious or vague, but that they’re non-actionable and generic. There’s no indication in any of Laurenson’s piece that Anders actually has a unique, or even particularly structured, approach to using all of Leverage’s passionate young recruits to tackle these problems.

[Anders] was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic Foundation … a lone mathematician predicts the fall of this Galactic Empire … he therefore forms a secret society of scientists that shepherds humanity across centuries, hoping to reduce the predicted dark age to a single millennium.

There’s a lot here to unpack, but it’s gratifying to learn Anders was so unproblematically inspired by the predictionist mythology of Foundation - the childish idea that a group of very smart people could secretly manage society. It’s the stuff of science fiction, but as so often happens with rationalists, Anders took it literally.

Warning: No Journalism Ahead

For now, I’m picking out highlights from an incredibly long - 14,000 words - piece of work. There will be a lot more to dig into here, such as Laurenson’s account of Leverage’s Reserve stablecoin project. But the truth is that for all the length, as with other Rationalists like Yudkowsky, there’s not a lot of there here.

That leads back to the story of the piece’s creation, which I think itself reveals more profound truths about the Rationalist world than the contents of the article itself. Laurenson was originally commissioned to write the article by New York Magazine, an august home for feature reporting. But she has written at length about how that deal fell apart, a story I interpret essentially as her inability to actually be objective about a group to which she has deep and personal ties.

(Most notably, Laurenson was briefly engaged to and conceived a child with Curtis Yarvin, the Loser King of Witless Hatred. I find it hard to imagine any argument that would lead me to take someone who had ever made that decision entirely seriously.)

After failing to reach a working compromise with New York Magazine, Laurenson says she decided to publish the work on her own anyway, and this is where things get really problematic. She describes taking a $35,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing Foundation for her work on the piece. This is several times more, notably, than what she would have been paid by New York Magazine - and Survival and Flourishing is funded in part by none other than Jaan Tallinn, also a funder of Leverage Research.

So in direct fact, Laurenson’s account is literally paid propaganda for a movement of which she still essentially considers herself a part. She tried to write something that might convey to the broader world her own sense that the Leverage story is Important, rather than just being a sad and fairly squalid little object lesson in what the lack of a robust humanities education does to rudderless young adults. But she failed in that effort, and instead wrote what is essentially yet another overlong LessWrong post.

It is a re-enactment of the same misunderstanding of the motives and means of intellectual inquiry that has left Eliezer Yudkowsky in a Thiel-funded bubble writing endless reams of ungrounded nonsense and never publishing a single peer-reviewed paper. The entire Rationalist/EA memeplex is essentially made up of contract workers, totally dependent on billionaire funders, who act as if they’re performing intellectual inquiry, when in fact their entire existences are window dressing for capital and power. In the end, above all, it’s very sad.

This is quite palpable in the final product Laurenson delivers. Frankly, there’s no universe in which any version of this story would have made it into the pages of New York, because Laurenson isn’t engaged in any true reflection on what she learned or experienced - she largely tells a simple linear narrative of what happened, which doesn’t add up to a magazine feature.

Laurenson particularly doesn’t engage deeply with the cultish aspects of Leverage, including the patently bizarre fact that its founder explicitly positioned himself as a world-historic philosopher with world-changing insights. In other words, Geoff Anders sold himself as a cult leader, and the results as recounted by Zoe Curzi and others speak for themselves - breakdowns and mental anguish were seemingly more common at Leverage than personal breakthroughs.

There’s little evidence any participants reached the Elon Musk-like level of effectiveness that was their explicit (and of course, itself debatably worthy) goal. That includes Geoff Anders himself, who now presides over a much-reduced Leverage 2.0.

I consider Leverage the second-weirdest splinter group to derive from the Rationalist scene (and maybe the second most dangerous). The weirdest, of course, was the Ziz cult.

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Leverage and the Far Right

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.

Laurenson’s article, well beyond this line, is one of the most direct and detailed acknowledgments of very, very close connections between Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Neoreaction. Obviously the brilliant El Sandifer saw this from the outside early, describing the nexus in her 2016 book Neoreaction: A Basilisk, which I will never stop shilling.

But for most of the last decade, largely thanks to gestures of rejection from Eliezer Yudkowsky, EA and Rationalism have claimed distance from the far right. Laurenson blows that up substantially, showing that not only were neoreactionaries friends with Rationalists and EAs - Laurenson describes Leverage hiring several avowed and active neoreactionaries over the years, also including Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett.

Geoff pitched Jaan Tallinn, a software billionaire and early EA funder. In Jaan’s New York hotel room, Geoff described his thesis: The main bottleneck for solving the world’s most entrenched problems was not a lack of money, ambition, or technology. It was a lack of insight into human behavior.

I cite this only to say that “I have more insight, give me money” is a pitch that works on dumb guys. This story makes Jaan Tallinn, like Peter Thiel, seem fundamentally dumb.

When Emily joined in 2015, she spent her first month living with Tyler in a roomful of bunk beds they called “The Barracks.” They both went through the first iteration of “Basic Training,” a program Leverage began that year for incoming employees. Emily studied Leverage organizational history, as well as Geoff’s psychological theory, Connection Theory.

And indeed, it turns out Anders is doing Dumb Guy Theory. Specifically, Dumb Engineer Thinks Humans are Computers theory.

Geoff believed that academic psychology was not a real science like physics, but that it could be … Connection Theory, [is] “a theory of belief and behavior that postulates that people have basic goals, and act for the sake of achieving those basic goals.” 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.

On its face, this is nothing more than a restatement of the Plato’s Cave allegory of enlightenment, or the simple Marxian concept of false concsciousness - the idea that people act poorly simply because they don’t know any better. Consciously or unconsciously, they believe things that aren’t true, and “debugging” in Anders’ framework is the way to eliminate these flaws in thinking. But that’s a straightforwardly childish view of human nature - one based most of all, in this case, on an engineer’s presumption of the perfectibility of systems, including minds.

A more modern conception of the mind and behavior is not simply that people have bad ideas that influence their behavior, but that their material and social conditions influence their beliefs at a systematic level. Sometimes these are directed efforts for the benefit of specific groups with larger agendas.

For example, a group of rich technologists might choose to fund a worldview that absolves social and political systems entirely of responsibility for individual behavior, and instead places the locus of responsibility entirely on the individuals themselves. Such as, for instance, the way Peter Theil funded Anders’ further development of these shallow right-wing ideas, and the way Jaan Tallinn paid Lydia Laurenson to mythologize them.

So we see the self-perpetuating nature of these beliefs: Because they have been taught to look only at individual psychology, these people can’t even see their own use as tools by the people paying them to keep doing what they’re doing.

The stories of James Dama, and of the recruit named Emily, end badly. The methods touted by Leverage, including Scientology like “debugging” and whatever the hell was going on in those body work sessions, wind up harming them substantially.

James still has such severe panic attacks that he cannot drive and has trouble working. Emily has difficulty describing her troubles in standard English, and says her “energy body” was severely damaged at Leverage. Both feel deeply hurt and abandoned by their colleagues.

Despite this, Laurenson ends the piece with a shockingly approving “where are they now” update on other players in Leverage. It doesn’t feel like she’s seriously grappling with the consequences she is describing.

It seems likely that Laurenson, like so many in this world, is a little short on real human empathy.

I Don’t Like Lydia Laurenson.

I’ll close with this - I find this person distasteful in both general and specific ways.

Most directly, for the version of the piece now published, she accepted a $35,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing fund. This fund is backed by Jaan Tallinn, also a major funder of Leverage Research. This is just staggeringly stupid behavior, especially for someone who (see below) spends so much time hand-wringing about the state of journalism. Not only is the conflict brazen, $35k is an embarrassing amount of money to get for writing a substack post, one that nakedly reveals the way billionaire money insulates people in this world from reality, and distorts overall discourse - there’s no way a vocal critic of EA or Leverage would be able to get that kind of money to do equivalent work, from any source.

(For comparison, I make about $8k a year from this newsletter, which I write at least once every week. And I love every single one of my supporters from the bottom of my heart.)

Laurenson’s willingness to simply take a check, without apparent worry about her own conflict or the broader effects of the dynamic - while having supposedly devoted a lot of years to studying disinformation! - is intellectually and ethically risible. That she is simultaneously posing very very hard as an ethically concerned “journalist” is just the most direct reason I find her and her ilk, at best, unserious to the point of inconsequence.

Laurenson is also, again, a former fiancee of Curtis Yarvin - which frankly, puts her judgment even more definitively and fundamentally at question. These people are embarrassing jokes and their behavioral and intellectual norms are toxic to society.

Laurenson offers a paaaaaainfully extended explanation of why she “chose to pull” the story from New York Magazine. This includes an extended meditation on her rising critiques of the journalism industry - but this is a strange meditation from someone whose involvement in journalism proper has been rather superficial. She wrote a few pieces for the likes of TechCrunch and the Atlantic in the mid-2010s, but since then seems to have written only for her own substack and a false-start magazine called The New Modality.

She also seems to have taken around year longer than planned to write the thing, so I suspect this piece not getting published was a bit more complex, given the number of dings against her objectivity. She writes that “there are huge framing differences between the mainstream media and the communities from which Leverage emerged,” and that “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.” Which is basically an admission that her editors thought she wasn’t being objective. Perhaps the things someone steeped in this culture treats as normal (such as joining a cult after having a really good energy healing session) are things a New York Mag reader would expect to be acknowledged as pretty fucking weird.

Her side-post about the publication and writing of her piece makes this even more obvious with bits of mythologizing about how the history of Leverage is “a big deal,” despite Leverage never seemingly accomplishing anything measurable other than becoming an object lesson about the inherent authoritarianism of Effective Altruism and Rationalism.

More generally, I find Laurenson’s discussion of the writing process odd. She describes “selling” the story to NYMag as a way to “re-establish myself professionally,” and that “the flexible nature of the work would give me time and space to recover” from her poor choice of having a child with Curtis Yarvin. This is a bizarre tell, in the sense that a NYMag cover story probably pays about $4,000 - maybe ten grand max. So Laurenson hasn’t exactly felt huge pressure to be earning a full-time salary, for reasons that are to me mysterious.

She elsewhere mentions that her father is a Yale-educated lawyer and she grew up in Westchester, so draw your own conclusions. She also writes about getting radicalized by the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in 2020 - that is, radicalized to the right by property destruction she describes as “devastation.” She unselfconcsiously chronicles inhaling every bit of sensationalist news she could about protests and street violence. “I began to spend hours every day monitoring fragmented information sources.” That is, she was programming her own personal Fox News bubble.

In other words, she’s a right-wing snowflake who can barely keep her racial paranoia in check.

For my money, anyone who grew up rich and becomes a right-winger is inherently uninteresting and unimaginative - even if that rich household was superficially “liberal.” Laurenson, like so many of these people, is just vastly less of an iconoclast, and vastly more of a supplicant bootlicker, than she is able to see herself.

And this is, of course, was the goal of these billionaire funders of intellectual dead-ends like Leverage: to defang serious critical inquiry from some huge slice of smart young people.

The main takeaway from Laurenson’s writeup, for me, was simply that people handed Geoff Anders a ton of money to recruit people to “research” topics in which they had no training or expertise. This means Leverage functioned, much like Yudkowsky’s Rationalist movement, as a busy box - a distraction from more serious work that might have threatened the interests of the wealthy people funding them.

That was the real point. And it’s the one Laurenson most studiously avoids allowing herself to see.