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.

I’d say it’s all of that, plus the fact that a lot of the cult stuff are also present in how organised rationalism works in general so you need to believe that such a tradeoff can be mostly worth it, otherwise it’s time to really get packing.

Although a more charitable read could be that the intended audience are people still under cult influence who need to be communicated to (in the most non-judgemental way possible so as to not trip any cult induced outgroup-o-phobia) that it’s entirely possible to feel you are in a situation with positive and productive elements that is also a fucking cult that is eating you alive.

The extended framing of how ‘high-control literature’ applies to the MAPLE situation probably also caters to those sensibilities, most other readers probably already got that it’s a cult as soon as stuff like dear leader halting his daily two-hour speech when someone almost nodded off to make everyone stand up and stare at them in silence for ninety minutes started being mentioned. Or the constant surveillance and brainwashing. Or keeping everyone within a hair’s width from collapse from exhaustion at all times. Or the isolation retreats where your only human contact is a few minutes per week of getting told off by dear leader. Or <gestures at everything>.

Having said all that, the positive aspects of MAPLE the author manages to come up with seem to amount to providing life structure and long term goals, which really doesn’t seem like much:

Again I’ll say: there was a great deal of good at MAPLE. While many people were being impacted in the ways above, many were also becoming less anxious, more grounded, more relationally attuned, less distracted and more focused, more capable of doing chores and taking on responsibility without internal resistance, physically healthier, deepening in their spiritual practice, and more. Most people experienced some amount of the positive and the negative, which is a large part of why many former residents say their relationship to MAPLE is “complicated.”

Guys guys guys hear me out guys what if I say what if uh the market can’t be irrational? Because of all the money? That would be really cool right?

But using like 2000 words.

no wonder the staff voted with their feet

Rather than rebelling against google, it seems like they where just poached by anthropic a short while before the project shut down:

[Alphahold VP and nobel winner] Jumper announced in June that he was leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic. A couple of his colleagues jumped ship to Anthropic, as well. DeepMind has confirmed to the Times that it also moved staff members internally to Gemini-focused projects. Other former staff members were reassigned to Alphabet’s drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs, which is a DeepMind spin-off.

I’m almost sure I’ve seen Yud play the neurodivergent card before, not sure if it was about autism specifically. If @ThinXTanX is right and it’s from well over a decade ago and he’s changed his tune since then I’m sure it’ll come up eventually.

Like a lot of the rationalist world view and the way it readily aligns with enabling cult dynamics and providing justification for rule-by-epstein-class, this is probably just another happy accident brought on by people who like to role play as geniuses but can’t see past the tip of their nose.

It’s possible Yud’s insistence that nothing works on him because he is a self-acclaimed neurodivergent with “akrasia” and fat-no-matter-what genes skews the overall view of therapeutics in the community

There should be a case study on how OneNote started out ok and just keeps getting worse and less usable every update. Maybe ms is using it as training ground for new project managers and it’s been just a series of half-baked first attempts as updates since forever.

The AI bros are worried about the precedent that someone, anywhere, can tell them “no,” and make it stick. And others who hate vibe code might realise they too can say no. You can just ban the slop bros.

I both love and hate that vibe coders are developing a perpetual victim mentality.

Their “Dev team of none” justification (one of many) is really solid and not something I’ve seen spotlighted before, here it is in full:

The development team of none

Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.

It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.

To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.

Wow what cutting insight, what incisive vision, what an original thinker!

Oh wait no that was just the plot of the Animatrix from two decades ago.

the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it

If you don’t mind reading comics online you could check Fairmeadow.

kayfabe vcs

Yes exactly how can you write an entire thing treating rationalism like something you can do an apostasy out of and never mention Yud once.

I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of “leaving rationalism” is framed more as him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone, specifically James Damore, the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women don’t belong in tech.

I don’t know the author so I don’t know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.

The Guardian published a William McAskill editorial in the what-if-the-stateless-text-generators-had-moral-agency genre of fiction, and Emily Bender did a thread

From the article:

But the sheer pace of growth in AI means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enormous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant AI systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.

Get fucked, Will.

But also, if we grant the untenable sci-fi premise, this would be like a star trek episode where the federation cedes unconditionally to the expansionist alien fascists of the week if they have a much greater population because that’s all it takes to outweigh the other side’s moral concerns.

Earth-Trisolaris Organisation-ass moral framework.

Compelling members to offer up their private lives to the community is in fact certified Cult Shit™️

The Leverage article kept referring to him as “the slovenian” and that’s at least honorary eastern europe, but I’ve no idea if he actually grew up there.

If the argument is that too much rationaltruism fried his brain then fine I guess.

Otherwise I don’t think United Healthcare doing AI assisted fraud falls into any rationalist framework of doom, and also those people are allergic to direct action.

Also the article is already setting the bar very high by using the Zizians, a sect that’s almost completely predicated on semi-obsure rationalist lore, as their first point of reference for rationalism gone wild.

Sounds like he went for the low hanging fruit to showcase his business and ate shit, good to know.

His great founder theory certainly seems amenable to going all in on dictators.

Attempting to credit Luigi’s actions to AI millenarianism putting him in a weird headspace almost feels like stolen valor.

Still, if that’s where his mental health defence is going to hinge on then I guess it’s relevant.

[Tim Urban] goes on to claim that ASI, with an IQ of 12,000, will eventually replace humankind as the dominant species on the planet:

That IQ works like mana points is both a widespread misconception and a red flag that you’re far more ignorant than you let on.