He is a successful pulp writer and pop nonfiction writer and fundraiser, and women like him, but he does not seem like a riveting speaker. In some ways his withdrawal to Twitter and Washington State makes it easier for fans to imagine that he is whatever they need.
He cites Samo Burja and Nicholas Decker? And Cremieux is the twitter account he cites second most often, with Richard Hanania in 4th place?
Samo Burja (“How Roman Emperors Handled the Succession Problem”), SlateScott, and POTUS have all expressed interest in Herbert Hoover. Is this part of a broader online right thing in the USA?
I think Yud does not want the responsibility. LessWrong and Effective Altruism attracted so many people, and he discovered that trying to manage the communities was too much work, so he just tweets and publishes fanfic. This is convenient for his fans because they can pick and chose which of his ideas are the Real Yud Thought.
In a quick DuckDuckGo I can’t find any site that claims Samo Burja has a degree.
His concept of live player is just another way of saying that most people are NPCs. The manuscript appears to call Elon Musk an engineer which is like calling Cheops an architect (alternatively, Musk must “fundamentally understand engineering”).
Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability https://samoburja.com/ He also has a Substack blog. People call him a sociologist and a political scirentist but he seems (echo me) entirely self-published except for a few opinion pieces and his highest educational credential is “studied at the University of Ljubljana.” The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.
Everything from the eugenics to the Social Darwinism to the ritual magick to the Jung to the goldbug economics is reviving ideas from the 1880s-1920s. If academics gave them up 50 or 100 years ago, that just proves that mainstream wisdom can’t be trusted!
I love this bit on “did they use goat’s blood in a silver chalice? Rookie mistake, my teacher used a brazen chalice and he was only carried off by demons once.”
Because Leveragers believed in the great potential of psychological change, naturally it became important to access seemingly cordoned-off areas of the psyche, to explore or to reprogram them. A student of other psychological and spiritual models might call mental space Leveragers now sought to understand “the unconscious,” or “the Abyss.” If more Leveragers had been following certain spiritual teachers or methods, they might have learned ideas about containment, such as “perimeters” — or “protection” practices, ranging from prayers to ritual cleansings. But, as many a serious practitioner could tell you, it’s hard to say whether any of that would have been truly protective, in the end.
Also, the Leverage Staffer who appeared on LessWrong to defend Geoff Anders’ practice of taking his disciples to bed was at one time CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism in the UK. https://old.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/1tyr0y0/request_can_someone_please_write_a_deep_dive_on/
The author characterizes EA as being more “businesslike and professional” than LW, then spends the article talking about how their plans all hinge on getting a rich patron.
The image of the beautiful gardens floored with Astroturf is sad.
Leverage published The “Post-Experiences” Inquiry Report: Factors and Mistakes that Contributed to a Range of Negative Experiences on Our 2011-2019 Research Collaboration. It does not mention demons, Buddhists, neoreactionaries, or bodywork.
The emphasis on how Geoff Anders is very sorry (but not how he claimed he had solved philosophy and was about to solve psychology and by the way he could help his disciples better if they stripped and assumed the position) reminds me of Anna Salamon not-talking talking about what went wrong at CFAR 1.0.
An official statement by a Leverage staffer back in 2021 defended the organization like this:
our Executive Director (Geoff Anders) had three long-term consensual relationships with women employed by Leverage Research or affiliated organizations during their history. Managing the potential for abuses by those in positions of power is very important to us. If anyone is aware of harms or abuses that have taken place involving staff at Leverage Research, please email me, in confidence, at (email deleted)
Laurenson’s story that “at the beginning of April 2018, one person Geoff was involved with, who was also his employee, found out that he’d gotten into a secret romance with another colleague he practiced bodywork with.” does not sound like great consent.
Many Leveragers believed Geoff’s decisions about who received organizational resources were affected by his romantic choices, for example.
Yuh think?
More fool you, Yud had three or four decoy trilbys at LessOnline 2026, and he got them from a dedicated costume supplier!
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain today instead of him.
Is “a non-traditional Buddhist order” a way of not naming OAK? OAK is the California branch of the MAPLE Buddhist Ratiionalist Cult whose gurus have also been accused of rape. I don’t know if OAK was connected to Leverage.
Edit / I Escaped a Cult - Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth Review
(Picks up the golden crown fedora splattered with blood and brains) I really didn’t think they’d just do this, I thought they wanted to abolish woo not embrace it. They seemed like Internet blowhards not a California cult.
I don’t know if the prosecution will say the accused talked her friends into this, or her friends talked her into it. Some people think Ziz talked someone else into taking their own life. Either story will be horrid.
The killings of outsiders remind me of the Symbionese Liberation Army because they don’t even follow from the ideology, just young people talking themselves into attacking their parents, their landlord, and the cops. I think the only reason Ziz and friends did not try armed robbery was that it does not pay any more.
Ms. Elmore has another post that begins “Psychedelics are increasingly a social activity in the rationalist community and a prescription for what ails ye, so I wrote this post on facebook earlier this year expressing my reservations about using psychedelics with the intent or pretense of learning truth.”
On Old! SneerClub, the Zizian whose parents were murdered in their home has been charged with the killing. The story is horrid so I will not link. I just wanted to make fun of cranks not stare at horrors.
RationalWiki says that Kelsey Piper helped Cotra launch her Substack blog https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kelsey_Piper There are not many Indian-American rationalists, Dwarkesh Patel and his GF come to mind and Venkatesh Rao is adjacent.