Effective Altruism is a cognitive hazard that exists somewhere on a spectrum between prolonged lead exposure and a career in the National Football League. The loose nexus between E.A., the “rationalist” community, and the neo-reactionary movement has already given us the Zizian murder cult, the FTX fraud and bankruptcy, Curtis Yarvin’s whole deal, and the worst fanfic that can exist under currently understood laws of nature. Last week, Yarvin‘s ex-fiancée Lydia Laurenson published a 14,000 word abortive New York magazine story to her Substack about yet another Peter Thiel-funded nest of these dimwits so now, possibly due to severe crimes we committed in a past life, you and I have to learn about them. Let’s meet Leverage Research.
Leverage Research was founded in 2011 by an absolute muppet named Geoff Anders. Anders spoke to Laurenson on the record sixteen times and she’s clearly both a friend and a fan of his, but in what will reveal itself as the signature experience of this piece, I couldn’t possibly roast him any harder than Laurenson herself unintentionally does:
At age thirteen, Geoff says, he woke up one day and realized he was a Christian. By age sixteen, he was reading Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. He read Spinoza, whose philosophical axioms include clauses like: “All things which exist, exist either in themselves or in something else,” and who tries to use that sort of argument to prove the existence of God. To this day, Geoff feels that Spinoza is “awesome,” displaying an almost childlike joy when discussing the 1600s philosopher. Yet Geoff also felt that Spinoza didn’t do a good enough job, so, during free periods in high school, Geoff liked to sit in the middle of a public study area, surrounded by books and paper, “coming up with better proofs for the existence of God.” Soon he read Kant, who became his favorite philosopher. Eventually, Geoff came to feel that he was not a Christian. Still, he wanted to do something really good for the world.
Anders wowed the E.A. money goobers with a homebrew theory of psychology he calls Connection Theory, “a near-total theory of the mind,” (though it explicitly excludes emotions, lol) which he summarizes in the following four points:
That’s right: “Everything a mind is aware of is… an awareness of something.” Suck on that Spinoza, you amateur. You absolute dickhead. Anders never really explains what “elegant” means in point two either, or if he does it comes after he wrote “To define [‘elegantly’], we will first need to introduce the concept of explanation,” which is where I threw my laptop into the sea. Connection Theory is basically “what if brain is just like computer?” drawn out to punishing length and tedium by an extremely bad writer.
But not only is Connection Theory an exercise in protracted Weed Thinking, it’s also the source of a self-improvement technology which Anders called “charting,” and which everyone else has known as concept mapping for the last fifty years or so. This technique allegedly cured both anxiety and headaches, and “revealed buried cosmological ideas,” but was also so powerful and dangerous it led multiple Leverage Research employees to experience “bouts of shaking that could last hours; hysterical screaming and crying, with no identifiable cause.” It’s a technique so risky that we often don’t teach it in schools until the third or even the fourth grade. Thanks to a charting instruction manual written by Brian Burns and James Dama we can evaluate the danger of this explosive discovery for ourselves:
Screaming, crying, throwing up.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a blank check from the Paypal Mafia must be in want of a coterie of sycophants. And so Anders and Leverage started gulping down well-meaning do-gooders from the narrow end of the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality funnel with the promise that they didn’t have to study anything in particular, just be as heterodox as possible. “If a new recruit operated under very different mental frameworks compared to other Leveragers, this was a plus, not a problem,” explains Laurenson.
Inside [Leverage], people were always ending projects, starting new ones, and collaborating freely. Geoff designed Leverage to pursue multiple avenues in parallel. He didn’t want to impose structure; he wanted to see how people self-organized.
Of course what everyone ended up self-organizing to spend most of their time working on were Anders’ personal hobbyhorses: Connection Theory and charting. It just happened that way! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ A healthy marketplace of ideas in action. And the first thing Anders did to facilitate this alleged “work” was throw out the scientific method:
…Geoff posed a thought experiment: What if [Leverage employee Tyler Alterman] took a pill, then started floating off the ground, and touched down five minutes later — then would Tyler feel that he needed to use a scientific tool in order to trust his own observations? What if Tyler took another pill from the same jar, and the second time he took the pill he floated off the ground, then touched down five minutes later? How long would it take for Tyler to conclude that each pill made him float for five minutes?
If I started listing ways that this thought experiment could be correlation rather than causation, I would not run out before the heat death of the universe. But in his hangers-on, Anders selected for bright and highly educated people who somehow never learned to actually think, so Tyler, who had previously “worked on cognitive science and social psychology, at labs ranging from Yale to the University of Chicago” was flummoxed by this basic hypothetical. In the midst of a personal crisis of faith about psychology’s replication crisis, Tyler ultimately agreed that the best path forward was to jettison science completely.
In Tyler’s words, he and other Leveragers came to believe that “if you adopt this scientific mindset of looking for large effects, then you can just go around and find a lot of things that scientific people won’t be paying attention to, and possibly mine some of the important secrets of the world.”
Baby, we got a stew going now. A bunch of young people living and working in one building, many of them in complex romantic relationships with each other, with no mandate to produce anything of value, but who have been told by their charismatic leader that they are the smartest and goodest of the smart and good. Of course they carefully guarded against becoming a cult by watching the Youtube video “How to Start A Cult.”
If you’re clever and self-aware, the obvious cult building techniques your live-in boss/shared boyfriend is practicing won’t work on you. That’s just science large effects!
With science and its pesky “randomized controlled experiments” done away with, Leverage promptly added new practices like “bodywork” and “energy healing” which offered much better opportunities to sexually exploit employees than Geoff Anders’ regrettably spreadsheet-based psychological exploration techniques ever could.
Those who held the title “master” were widely gossiped about, and sometimes ran into interpersonal problems. In the case of [neo-ractionary and “Great Founder Theory” inventor Samo Burja], some colleagues thought him a harmless flirt, but others were discomfited by his sexual behavior. A male ex-Leverager says he recalls a moment when Samo unexpectedly showed him a naked photo of one of Samo’s girlfriends, which he found uncomfortable (Samo denies this). One woman went so far as to file an official complaint against Samo alleging sexual abuse and misconduct. When asked about the complaint in 2024, Geoff says there was an internal investigation, which concluded that Samo “acted with bad judgment.” (The author of the complaint declined to comment for this story. Samo responded to my request for comment in writing: “The complaint was filed by an ex-girlfriend, not a coworker. It was an unfortunate and messy interpersonal conflict. I deny any wrongdoing.”)
Oh yeah, also by this point four men had been given the title “master.” Very normal style think-tank stuff. In 2017 Anders promised Peter Thiel that within three years his boxes and arrows based mind mapping technique would discover or create ten so-called masters, “who excelled at a discipline,” whatever that means. And then presumably Thiel could, I don’t know, designate them his Dreadlords to battle the anti-Christ or something. It’s frightening to realize, because they have all the money and basically control our society right now, but these people are complete fucking lunatics. Just absolutely potty. Speaking of which:
Emily [Crotteau] recalls sitting in her office… one day, in August 2018, when another employee showed up unexpectedly, with no meeting on the calendar. According to Emily, the person said they’d discovered something “extremely powerful” and was afraid that “things” would “attack” as a result. They asked Emily to teach them “occlumency,” a Harry Potter term, which is defined on the Harry Potter website as “the act of magically closing the mind against intrusion.” Emily says she wanted to help, but she wasn’t sure how, so she asked what the person had been researching lately. The person did not touch her or physically interact with her, but Emily found their verbal response “extremely nauseating… it super-duper freaked me out.” She told the person she “didn’t understand” and suggested that they proceed more slowly. She did not, however, teach them occlumency, “because I don’t know how to do that.”
This is one of many moments in this arduous story when the reader might wish to ask between three and seventy follow-up questions, but Laurenson breezes right by the “occlumency” anecdote in order to give us way too much detail about the group’s other pseudo-scientific theories, such as “introjection” and “intention research,” which are absolutely nothing. This passage also gives you a good taste of the sort of writing our anonymous long-suffering New York editor was dealing with. If that editor was you, or you know anything about this piece from the magazine side, please get in touch! I am dying to know what this two year long edit was like.
Oddly, after all the drama, the whole thing ended on June 30th, 2019 when Anders called everyone into a meeting room, told them it was over, and took away their gym keys. Nobody died, thank goodness, and no one seems to have been permanently harmed, at least according to Laurenson, for whatever that’s worth. The end-of-Q2 wind-down date leads me to suspect that Leverage 1.0 ended due to funding pressure more than anything else. The organization had made some efforts to fund itself by developing a stablecoin called Reserve (this was in the heady days of the crypto boom, after all) but they couldn’t even make that pay off. Otherwise, they discovered nothing of value despite more than a decade of driving each other crazy with endless white papers about energy demons.
What do we learn from all this? Mostly the same thing we learned when the crypto bros repeatedly rediscovered financial fraud, or when effective altruists decided the most effective altruism was to buy themselves a castle, or when ride share companies kept accidentally reïnventing the bus. If you start by ignoring everything that we already know, the best you can ever hope for is to accidentally rediscover the already-known. Geoff Anders was so smart and original that he threw out all the best practices of organizational design and workplace safety, all the methods of science, and the whole history of psychological research, and as a result his organization was chaotic, abusive, and discovered nothing.
Leverage still exists, and Geoff Anders still runs it. The organization’s website now says that it “conducts foundational research and works with external teams to cause revolutions in science and greater progress in both science and technology.” Elsewhere it calls this focus “metascience.” Under social science research it lists numerous papers in “Introspection” as well as “A Summary of Samo Burja Thought” in case you were looking for that.
In a slightly shorter but even less readable companion post, Lydia Laurenson explains that she originally pitched this Leverage story to New York magazine, which offered her $9,500 and worked with her through numerous drafts of it over two years before she decided to pull it due to “vibes.” She then solicited and received a $35,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund to finish it, and if you were thinking “wow that sounds like a mean-spirited parody of what rationalists would call a slush fund” you would be right. Laurenson’s clearest statement of what happened with New York is:
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.
Just like rationalists in other fields, Laurenson ignored the basics, like the fusty journalistic principle that her primary responsibility is to the reader and not her subjects and friends in Leverage. As a result she found herself unable to accept that her story makes Leverage look like a malicious and unethical human experiment run by a self-aggrandizing crackpot. The irony is that even after taking much more money from related parties and fellow travelers to publish a sanitized version that’s as nice as possible to all her nice, good friends, what still shines through is the story of a malicious and unethical human experiment run by a self-aggrandizing crackpot.
“Hell Is Other People” by Cory Doctorow in Locus is a different view on much the same kind of thing.
If you’re really interested in Leverage Research, Zoe Curzi wrote a Medium post about her experiences there in 2021, and a mononymous former employee named Cathleen also wrote at length about hers. Both are very long and annoying, which is a hallmark of rationalist and E.A. writing, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Speaking of people Peter Thiel owns, The Atlantic republished a J.D. Vance essay from 2016 where the now-Vice President called Donald Trump “cultural heroin.” Despite being anti-Trump instead of pro-Trump it’s still extremely bad, as you’d expect from Vance, and The Atlantic should be embarrassed that they published it in the first place.
“Millie Bobby Brown believes she was a closeted gay soldier who was killed with a sword in a past life.” Naturally.
Today in Crabs: (content warning: crabs)
No song because this post is far too long already! Thanks everyone who got a paid subscription in Paywall June, and if you were waiting until Paywall-Free July to get one just to show me you’re no sheep, now’s your chance.
