Lydia Laurenson: "The Inside Story of Leverage Research"

By Davis_Kingsley @ 2026-07-02T23:02 (+14)

This is a linkpost to https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-leverage-research

Lydia Laurenson recently posted an article called "The Inside Story of Leverage Research" that gets into substantially more detail on what went on in that organization and I thought made quite an interesting read. However, note also relevant Twitter comments from Oliver Habryka:

Having been around the ecosystem, having interned there, and having arguably worked there during my work at CEA it’s… a mediocre article.

It IMO puts the emphasis on largely the wrong things and the wrong dynamics, occasionally is dramatically wrong, and has some huge enormous missing moods. 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.