Leverage Research

The Rationalist-adjacent cult space fascinates me. While I'm sure most of it is abusive crap, Scientology for STEM nerds, it also seems like a scene with a lot of creative ferment, and god knows tech could use some of that. https://t.co/VMDX1RNdTZ

— mtraven (@mtraven) September 26, 2021

(Disclosure: I was briefly engaged to the famous neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin in 2022. Notwithstanding the Leverage neoreactionary contingent, Curtis was not part of Leverage, and he is not part of this story.)

Geoff believed that academic psychology was not a real science like physics, but that it could be. He had studied the philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s ideas about paradigm shifts, and did not believe there was a coherent psychological paradigm to be shifted; instead, he believed there was a field to be founded. While getting his philosophy PhD, he drafted a first attempt that he called Connection Theory, which he describes as “a theory of belief and behavior that postulates that people have basic goals, and act for the sake of achieving those basic goals.”

According to Emily, the person said they’d discovered something “extremely powerful” and was afraid that “things” would “attack” as a result. They asked Emily to teach them “occlumency,” a Harry Potter term, which is defined on the Harry Potter website as “the act of magically closing the mind against intrusion.” Emily says she wanted to help, but she wasn’t sure how,

Among Leveragers who worked there towards the end of 2018, many speak of a multi-month period called “The Intention War.” Said “war” was objectively brief, but subjectively long for those who experienced it, and most of those involved became acutely paranoid. As Tee’s subgroup began to fear malign intention objects more and more, it became hard for him to maintain relationships with people outside the subgroup. Tee says that colleagues told him that “I was unintentionally passing intention objects, sort of like a germ.”

Nevin’s team was early to market, founding a financial technology company in 2018 that is now called Reserve (they originally tossed around other names with very different vibes, like “Fathom” and “Flamingo”)

While at Leverage, two neoreactionary employees named Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett co-founded a magazine called Palladium. Their parties have drawn Peter Thiel, the musician Grimes, and other luminaries from the “tech right