Copied from the stubsack:
The Inside story of Leverage Research
This should be interesting, it's about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don't know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.
edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.
Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:
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.
edit edit: Why can't these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020
edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she's Curtis Yarvin's baby momma.
edit x 4: Index of the read along posts, part titles are from the original:
Thank you for your service in writing up this sneer-a-long and in unearthing this maddening artifact from the unseen cyclopean depths of substack. Zoe Cursi's account seems like a far more sober examination of the dynamic and at least has the decency to treat the extreme distress that this whole thing caused as a problem rather than a sign that there was something powerful at work (that something obviously being the cult dynamic itself). But it's rare to be able to see the inside of a cult from the perspective of a believer like this, and the way that manifests here is fascinating.
I've been reading Zoe's account and she gives a radically different picture of especially Geoff, just by mentioning stuff he was saying and doing while Leverage was active, instead of focusing on his later heartfelt regrets.
Uhhhhhhhhhhh
Hell yeah.