Thread by @Aella_Girl

After Zoes article, I see lots of confusion over how Leverage Research related to rationalists, and some people describing them as in the same bucket. Here's a thread explaining!

Leverage drew a lot of people from the rationalist and EA communities, but also drew from others; Zoe was unaffiliated with rationalists before joining leverage, for example.
Geoff apparently worked with some standard rat institutions like CFAR early on.

Rationalists outside of Leverage had no idea what was going on inside of Leverage, it was very secretive. One of my other friends who I knew before she joined Leverage (she was also not a rat), would tell me almost nothing about what was going on in her life now.

Leverage was very different from CFAR or MIRI from the outside; it pulled people in and you sort of lost them; there was a clear "group" feeling they had that I didn't get out of the other orgs. It was also not focused on the practice of rationality, its core felt farther.

I've found established rationalist communities to have excellent norms that prevent stuff like what happened at Leverage. The times where it gets weird is typically when you mix in a strong leader + splintered, isolated subgroup + new norms. (this is not the first time)

Rationalist communities *do* tend to give rise to more splintered subgroups, I suspect. This is a side effect of having a big network of young, extremely open minded and curious people who are willing to doubt what they think they know, all gathered in one place.

But that's another topic; my point is that Leverage developed issues for reasons that are not present in the established rationalist community and its organizations, as far as I can tell. I'm happy criticizing Leverage and supporting the rats.

For content, I've been in the rat community since 2015, have attended regular rat meetups in 5 diff cities, lived in a core rat group house in the bay area (during the time of Leverage) and am currently dating a deeprat.