New ideas are often hard to explain. In some cases, the difficulty can persist for what seems like a supernaturally long time. An example is Urbit, which we think is a new centralized internet, but it’s hard to know for sure.
We ourselves had this problem for years. We explained to people what Leverage did literally dozens of different ways, and it usually didn’t stick. We now have a great explanation, which is that we study science and people, and use our understanding of both to advance scientific fields.
This has worked in discussions so far, and people now seem to understand what we do — which by the way is a completely amazing thing and we’re really happy about it. But there’s still a lingering piece, which is why it was so difficult to explain in the first place, and how we can help more people get on board.
Our answer here is that when someone has a really new idea, they also frequently have a really different picture of the world than other people. The idea makes sense in the context of the picture, but without the whole picture the idea can be very hard to understand.
If that’s the problem, the solution is to figure out how to communicate the different picture of the world. That’s much easier said than done because a new picture of the world may be composed of twenty different assumptions, most of which need to be included for the idea to end up making sense.
In our case, Leverage didn’t have a complete picture of the world. It was much more like fragments which made sense together but didn’t yield a unified whole. That’s why there was never a “Leverage worldview” for people to sign onto. We were engaged in building towards that, but we weren’t close to done, and any attempt any of us made to communicate it was fragmentary. This made it very hard to communicate, even when we really wanted to.
Now though, I personally have gotten far enough in building a picture of the world that I can explain it. It’s not the same as the “Leverage worldview,” in part because it’s more general and pertains to things outside of the institute’s work. It does, however, impact the institute’s work, since I’m the founder, and it’s part of my worldview, and a lot of what Leverage does makes more sense in that context.
I’ll be publishing pieces of my personal world on my own substack soon. The first part is entitled The Nuclear Lockdown, Part 1 — the link is to a review draft.
This seemed like a good topic for a Leverage Weekly, because I spent a bunch of time working on it this week, and we’ve been talking for a while about how to give greater context for our work. In the background of what I’m calling the “nuclear lockdown,” I think it’s much easier to understand what Leverage is and does.
Enjoy,
Geoff
P.S. Feel free to join our Discord if you’re interested in discussing any of the topics here or related topics.