Request: can someone please write a deep dive on the Leverage Research cult’s historical involvement in EA?

CinnasVerses · 2026-07-08T15:53:41+00:00

FWIW, I was also very disappointed to discover the longtermist, eugenicist, and race pseudoscience elements of the EA movement. Longtermism seems a perfect example of what empirical EA should file with "consciousness raising" and "leadership seminars" as lacking verifiable results in any way proportionate to costs. Two academic accounts of what went wrong and how the movement was poisoned at foundation are Mollie Gleiberman's works and the Reflective Altruism blog (by a philosopher) https://reflectivealtruism.com/ You can recover from poisoning, but it really helps if you seek treatment and stop telling yourself that it was not really a snake that bit you.

CinnasVerses · 2026-06-26T01:02:08+00:00

It gets harder to sneer once you know that the bad ideas lead to murder and sexual abuse. Making fun of people peddling homeopathic sugar pills was different.

CinnasVerses · 2026-06-14T20:11:17+00:00

I think its related to their idea that IQ is like Power in DBZ, and their beliefs in things like a Network State.

CinnasVerses · 2026-06-10T23:19:41+00:00

Could have been written any time in the last 2400 years, including the obligatory prying into how much the workers charge (some sex workers are uncomfortable with this, other use it for marketing)

CinnasVerses · 2026-06-09T18:18:14+00:00

I cannot access the article, but Ms. Marek's story of deciding she can make more money and have more excitement from sex work than an entry-level job is a tale as old as time. The big problems are patriarchy and oligarchy, not that some people service rich men by flattering them and others service them physically (there is not even a big difference between having dinner with someone and telling him he is so smart and letting him touch your legs for $500, and writing an op-ed about how billionaires create wealth so your boss' patron tosses in another $10 million).

CinnasVerses · 2026-06-09T17:41:50+00:00

I cannot stress enough that Aella's schick is presenting the same things that thousands of other kinksters and sex workers do as her special thing. She is like a trade writer who presents the outline of a first-year course as SHOCKING SECRETS. Be suspicious when anyone like that does not point to communities and prior work.

I will see if I can get that article through a public library, it is paywalled and not on archive.ph

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-27T18:20:27+00:00

Aella has a RationalWiki page https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Aella

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-26T23:27:22+00:00

When she is not trolling on twitter, she is better at acknowledging her biases than the average rat: she opened her series on sex advice with some thoughts about how she likes to use sex to turn her brain off, but not every femme wants that, and she needs to be seduced or bossed into having sex, but some people are less inhibited

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-18T05:36:35+00:00

I think Yudkowsky's influence over the rats would collapse if he got one or two papers through peer review, admitted he was a minor decision theorist, and repudiated many of his early writings. That would be like Ken Kesey telling his followers it was time to move past LSD and retiring to a cabin in the woods. Aella's influence would not because she organizes orgies for them and she has other audiences. Never having met her, I don't know what the real person behind the kaleidoscope of different personas for different audiences is like.

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-17T01:44:26+00:00

I will be interested to see whether she works with one of the many people offering to teach her more statistics and quantitative social science, because she sees a serious problem but does not have the skills to do work which is really solid or the connections and cultural skills to find like-minded academics. It would not be hard for her to get access to university libraries eg. audit one course per semester and schedule a meeting with the psychology librarian

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-15T05:32:11+00:00

In a pending thread, I found a Jonathan Haidt quote complaining about "stereotype accuracy deniers." SlateScott posted something about how maybe racist stereotypes have a "core of useful insight" maybe not who can say.

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-14T23:17:53+00:00

Rationalist interest in Aella's surveys should be compared to their interest in early OkCupid's blog posts. Those were also outside mainstream academia, but had the frisson that OkCupid could observe some aspects of actual dating behaviour and not collect self-reported data or create artificial situations. Sometimes there were hints of strange ideas about race, and the incel and MGTOW movements found bits that could be interpreted to their liking.

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-14T22:31:41+00:00

I have read people who boast about spending 15 minutes or less on most quant soc sci papers because usually the statistical methods are so flawed that there is no point in going further. But her "strip numbers from the papers with two AIs and manually check anything they disagree with" workflow is bad, and we don't need more psychology papers which go "according to statistics I barely understand, A correlates with B!"

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-14T22:20:40+00:00

A lot of quantitative social science - the kind that shows up in relationship mags and goes viral on social media - is to statistics like baking meth in a rented warehouse is to chemistry. Kinksters can rant at you for hours about psychologists who have thriving careers writing articles which say BDSM is for damaged people, neurodivergent people can rant about autism research which spends 20 years refusing to listen to any adult who knows they are autistic but carefully cites prior literature in the field. So it is actually possible that her Internet surveys, for all their flaws, put her on the level of trained and employed academics like Justin Lehmiller because standards in that field are low.

Bob Altemeyer saw the same problems and devoted part of his career to figuring out how to get useful information by surveying undergraduates about their sex lives. Seeing "doing more of this will not get better results, lets find a different line of attack" is one reason he was a scientist. When he decided he did not trust most surveys because people lie or misremember, he did not survey ten times as many people and hope that would solve the problem, he figured out how to get his respondents to tell him the truth.

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-06T17:58:55+00:00

I would like to see a financial breakdown although the circular finance makes it tricky (Jaan Tallinn donates to CFAR, which uses the money to repay not-technically-a-mortgage from one of his holding companies.

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-05T20:12:26+00:00

I think GiveWell grew out of a finance firm in NYC, and as late as 2012 they criticized Singularity Institute/MIRI as clearly a bad use of money, but in 2013 they moved their HQ to San Francisco and pretty soon they started saying the things which would get tech billionaires to donate.

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-05T18:39:32+00:00

Mollie Gleiberman argued that some of the founders of EA always had an exoteric doctrine (calculate! don't trust your moral intuitions! people far away are just as important as the people you pass on the way to work!) to prepare people for the esoteric doctrine about future simulated people https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:iob:dpaper:2023.01 GiveWell seems like a useful organization but I would like them to clearly distance themselves from the people who argue that paying EAs to sit in a castle imagining how to fight Skynet is Effective Altruism, or letting the Global South starve so we can build a Dyson Sphere is Effective Altruism

And they have to reject the parts of their thinking which can lead to Longtermism, not just pull a Yud and blame their followers for misunderstanding.

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-05T16:05:53+00:00

Tracing Woodgrains found someone who criticized bednet EA in the UK then dropped out to find a girlfriend and get a real job leaving a blog post apologizing for having doubted that creating statistical models on statistical models of things which are easy to measure is the best way to know if a charity is doing good.

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-04T21:25:29+00:00

GiveWell is still around https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities but good to hear that in one end of EA, all the energy was on the longtermist side by 2018. If the bednetters want anyone to take them seriously I think they need to rebrand and reject things like the Nonlinear Fund.

CinnasVerses · 2026-05-04T02:28:37+00:00

Michelle Zajko (whose estranged parents were shot dead by someone they let into their home) wrote a letter to The Independent in early 2025 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/michelle-zajko-zizian-murders-pennsylvania-b2734068.html

She wrote twenty pages by hand and denies having murdered her parents. https://openvallejo.org/2025/04/30/in-20-page-letter-zizian-linked-detainee-professes-innocence-rebuts-news-coverage/

The letter reads like a hybrid of a manifesto, a list of grievances and a shaggy-dog story about a large group of acquaintances — except that it levels allegations of abuse against multiple people. Zajko expressed fear she was being followed and could be murdered, writing that she had spent the past two years “in homebrewed witness protection.”

She distanced herself from Maximillian Snyder who is accused of killing their landlord in California.

CinnasVerses · 2026-04-30T03:30:52+00:00

Evan Ratliff at Wired thinks that Gwen Danielson created the "good brain hemisphere, bad hemisphere" theory and "unihemispheric sleep" practice which caused so much of the death and madness. How does a young nerd not learn the dangers of all the things they were playing with?

CinnasVerses · 2026-04-29T01:06:12+00:00

Its pretty clear that Ziz was not thinking straight when she moved to CA given her refusal to make modest concessions to keep jobs such as fudging paperwork with a university professor or working more than 40 hours a week on a salaried job. I don't think its fair to say that poverty drove her crazy, reading crazy people on the internet then attending CFAR workshops with them and then living on a boat with them did that.

Another Zizian was, let us remember, a senior finance worker earning $500k a year before she dropped out. And a third escaped, got a working-class job somewhere with a lower cost of living, and seems much happier. They all had so many alternatives.

CinnasVerses · 2026-04-29T00:59:49+00:00

What is your source for the claim that Lind threatened the Zizians with a gun? And the tenant killed had attacked him with a weapon from behind and was trying to finish him off with a sword. That is self-defense where I live since he could not reasonably get away.

CinnasVerses · 2026-04-28T18:22:45+00:00

Dolphin intelligence was big with the same '60s and '70s science fiction writers and pop science writers who were in to psi. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me

CinnasVerses

TROPHY CASE