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Transcript for Geoff Anders and Anna Salamon's Oct. 23 conversation
AnonymousCoward02120

<3

Sorry. I was in a really shitty mood. That wasn't nice of me.

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8Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
<3  I will note that I think it's completely valid to hold each of the following views: * My recent stuff is badly written * My recent stuff is on a topic we should spend less time on * My recent stuff made things worse ... I, like, hope those things aren't true, but they are worthwhile hypotheses.
Transcript for Geoff Anders and Anna Salamon's Oct. 23 conversation
AnonymousCoward0290

It seems to me that Leverage had a large and broad effect on the Effective Altruism and Rationality communities worldwide, with having organized the 2013-2014 EA Summits, and having provided a substantial fraction of the strategic direction for EAG 2015 and EAG 2016, and then shared multiple staff with the Centre For Effective Altruism until 2019. 

For me personally this still rounds off to "not very important." Especially in the sense that there is nothing I, or the vast majority of people on this site, could possibly do with this information. I was a... (read more)

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Transcript for Geoff Anders and Anna Salamon's Oct. 23 conversation
AnonymousCoward02420

A few things.

  1. I'm a high-karma LW member and I created an anonymous account to say this for reasons given below. Trust me on that or don't, my arguments should stand on their own.
  2. Way too much of this kind of self-obsessed community gossip has dominated LW in recent weeks. This stuff demands highly disproportionate attention and has turned LW into a net negative place for me to spend time on.
  3. This Leverage drama is not important to anyone except a small group of people and does not belong on LW. Perhaps the relatively small group of Bay Area rationalists who
... (read more)
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8Rob Bensinger
What do you think of Anna's https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SWxnP5LZeJzuT3ccd/pr-is-corrosive-reputation-is-not ? (I don't know that I fully understand her view in that post, but it seems like a fruitful place to look for cruxes, given how much you talk about "PR" ad "optics" here.)
Grant Demaree331

I don’t agree with the characterization of this topic as self-obsessed community gossip. For context, I’m quite new and don’t have a dog in the fight. But I drew memorable conclusions from this that I couldn’t have gotten from more traditional posts

First, experimenting with our own psychology is tempting and really dangerous. Next time, I’d turn up the caution dial way higher than Leverage did

Second, a lot of us (probably including me) have an exploitable weakness brought on high scrupulously combined with openness to crazy-sounding ideas. Next time, I’d b... (read more)

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6Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
=P
Ben Pace120

I appreciate you sharing your perspective. A lot of this is uninteresting and irrelevant to perhaps the majority of readers (though I think that as you weight users by karma you’d start to find for more and more of them this is directly about the social dynamics around them).

I’m pretty pro this discussion happening somehow for the communities involved, and think it’s been pretty helpful in some important ways for it to happen as it has in public.

I wonder if there’s a natural way for it to be less emphasized for the majority for whom it is uninteresting. Pe... (read more)

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9habryka
I think some of these are pretty reasonable points, but I am kind of confused by the following:  It seems to me that Leverage had a large and broad effect on the Effective Altruism and Rationality communities worldwide, with having organized the 2013-2014 EA Summits, and having provided a substantial fraction of the strategic direction for EAG 2015 and EAG 2016, and then shared multiple staff with the Centre For Effective Altruism until 2019.  This suggests to me that what happened at Leverage clearly had effects that are much broader reaching than "some relatively small group of Bay Area rationalists". Indeed, I think the Bay Area rationality community wasn't that affected by all the stuff happening at Leverage, and the effects seemed much more distributed.  Maybe you also think all the EA Summit and EA Global conferences didn't matter? Which seems like a fine take. Or maybe you think how CEA leadership worked also didn't matter, which also seems fine. But I do think these both aren't obvious takes, and I think I disagree with both of them.