this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
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The Oblivious Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0 (lydialaurenson.substack.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by Architeuthis@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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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:

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[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Even habryka has misgivings about the Laurenson writeup:

I do think almost all of what it says is literally true and I would recommend reading it to learn things about Leverage if someone is doing their own study and looking for facts, though wouldn’t recommend it for someone who is looking for a reasonable high level summary.

It somehow completely fails to cover Leverage deploying spies into other organizations and trying to take over CEA. It fails to cover the enormous number of straightforward lies told by Leverage staff in that and other contexts.

There is something that feels really weird about the article. As if the central story it is trying to tell is that Leverage fell apart due to no fault of any of its members because they encountered ancient magic or something. Which is a fun story to tell but really doesn’t map what actually happened IMO.

Also multiple people clearly had what I would describe as a psychotic break at Leverage and the casual disparagement of Zoe’s article really doesn’t feel good to me.

Laurenson herself replies and double downs on her no psychotic breaks at Leverage assessment. Her stance on psychotic break diagnosis comes off about as self-serving as SlateScott's it's not real autism if I can plausibly be described as having it musings from back in the day.