That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is out
That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is out
In April 2014, Gerard created a RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism, framing the subculture as “well-off libertarians congratulating each other on what wonderful human beings they are for working rapacious [s---]weasel jobs but choosing their charities well, but never in any way questioning the system that the problems are in the context of,” “a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is superior to government action or funding,” and people who “will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely [f---]ing evil jobs because they're so charitable.”
it's fucking amazing how accurate this is, and almost a decade before SBF started explaining himself and never stopped
My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, "okay, in a world where the rationalists weren't closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren't known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people's money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut..."
I stopped skimming but the gist seems to be "TFW ur BIG MAD that Quillette isn't as reliable as Teen Vogue."
brb calling the burn unit
I am well acquainted with this genre of article and I ain't reading all that. Not bothering to be involved with this example was the obviously correct decision, even if Trace kept nagging after I'd already said "no thank you" (that famous rationalist grasp of consent).
This in the companion article caught my eye:
While I am not personally a rationalist,
Trace, I have some unfortunate news for you.
I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.
You’d think these people would have learned by now that there’s no upside in them spending their precious time on this earth obsessing over why a group of people don’t like them, but nevertheless here they are: drawn like moths to the flame.
I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.
Their writing is so boring I can't even summon up the enthusiasm to make a "senpai has noticed us" joke.
dear me. doesn't he know that the actual art requires hate-skimming at most?
Looked at his twitter. Dude seems to be or have been on a palpable adrenaline high at a time when it might have been less deranged to step away from the keyboard and go for a walk. I get it, but those are some weird-ass posts.
I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.
Surely out of the interest of Rational Fair And Balancedness, he will link back to this place in his article. Surely, he has already done so before I mentioned this.
lmaou bruv, great to know these clowns are both coping & seething
Took me like five minutes of reading to realize this was neant to be a hit piece and not praise.
"This guy vets sources and forces people to cite only the reliable ones. This is instead of discussing individual articles, which would allow the same fucking bigots to waste everyone's time with the same fucking arguments over and over and over."
Oh, sounds like a lot of effort to keep things usable.
"Grrrrrr."
Wait, what?
IKR like good job making @dgerard look like King Mob from the Invisibles in your header image.
If the article was about me I'd be making Colin Robinson feeding noises all the way through.
edit: Obligatory only 1 hour 43 minutes of reading to go then
Depends, I guess. After reading (well, skimming, to be honest) it, I love David even more. <3
What happens when your spurned ex is a devoted archivist, a Wikipedia administrator, and perhaps the most online man the world has ever known?
I already thought he was cool you don't have to sell me on it.
If we’re framing this as a breakup, david won the breakup.
NGL the AI generated image make DG look cool AF
Didn't he violate Wikipedias rules though
Show me a long-time English Wikipedia editor who hasn't broken the rules. Since WP is editable text and most of us have permission to alter most pages, rule violations aren't set in stone and don't have to be punished harshly; often, it's good enough to be told that what you did was wrong and that your edits will be reverted.
NSFW: When you bring this sort of argument to the table, you're making it obvious that you've never been a Wikipedian. That's not a bad thing, but it does mean that you're going to get talked down to; even if your question was in good faith, you could have answered it yourself by lurking amongst the culture being critiqued.
wut
That's a lot of words about what is or isn't a reliable source from one who doesn't seem to know what a reliable source is. For a person of these beliefs, it is not surprising at all that their criteria seem to be:
- anything that agrees with them is reliable
- anything David Gerard considers unreliable is reliable because David Gerard is a big meanie and won't include citations to HBD articles, uwu
- anything that David Gerard or any friendly associate of David Gerard publishes is UNreliable, again because he is a meanie; see above, uwu
Dawg, maybe you need to step back from this all. As Voltaire once said, reality has a well-known liberal bias. Your beliefs are probably just counter to reality, and the corpus of data is not in your favour.
Also, billing David Gerard as "the Forrest Gump of the internet" in a tweet and not mentioning that you can plausibly blame him for the whole Musk X Grimes collab is a true fumble
This thread has taken me from not knowing who David Gerard is (or the tracing woodgrains person, for that matter), to realizing this is his instance.
Lmao, what a wild ride. This community is awesome.
What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn't be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.
wait sorry hold on
in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors
so what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this, if the overwhelming majority of people already agree that far-right "news" sites like the examples given are full of garbage and shouldn't be cited?
Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others
ahhhhhhh David made fun of some rationalist you like once and in turn you've elevated him to the Ubermensch of Woke, didn't you
For the rat & rat-adjacent soi-disant “communities” David is like the bogeyman. You see his name used in places like SSC to stand in for the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.
the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.
aaaaargh I wish I could draw.
what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this?
He's playing to his audience, which includes a substantial number of people with lifetime subscriptions to the Unz Review, Taki's crapazine and Mankind Quarterly.
Scott Alexander, by far the most popular rationalist writer besides perhaps Yudkowsky himself, had written the most comprehensive rebuttal of neoreactionary claims on the internet.
Hey Trace, since you're undoubtedly reading this thread, I'd like to make a plea. I know Scott Alexander Siskind is one of your personal heroes, but maybe you should consider digging up some dirt in his direction too. You might learn a thing or two.
Would also be great if the article he talks about doesn't start with "I no longer endorse all the statements in this document.[emp mine] I think many of the conclusions are still correct, but especially section 1 is weaker than it should be, and many reactionaries complain I am pigeonholing all of them as agreeing with Michael Anissimov, which they do not; this complaint seems reasonable. This document needs extensive revision to stay fair and correct, but such revision is currently lower priority than other major projects. Until then, I apologize for any inaccuracies or misrepresentations."
Especially since he posted on TheMotte that the connection between NRX and LW was quote 'fabricated.'
So now Steve Sailer has shown up in this essay's comments, complaining about how Wikipedia has been unfairly stifling scientific racism.
Birds of a feather and all that, I guess.
For the people who don't know who that is Wikipedia and here is a reliable site.
He is a very frequent commenter in the whole of the LW/Rationalist sphere. iirc he sometimes gets banned when he lets the mask slip a bit too much, but they always let him back in.
Wonder if Marxbro ever got unbanned. Rip you damn dirty commie, do miss seeing your obsessive monofocus posts pop up from time to time.
Can't miss an opportunity to make it about himself I guess
What an ass
Christ, there's so much backstory here - just scrolling through long descriptions of Gerard's views and just thinking "based, based, based, based."
Sandifer had been busy during her time away from Wikipedia, writing an essay collection titled Neoreaction: A Basilisk. Five of the self-published book’s six essays (about ants, TERFS, Trump, the Austrian School, and Peter Thiel) were forgotten the day they were written. The sixth is Gerard’s masterwork. Sandifer starts the essay with quick critical overviews of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Land, then goes on a sprawling journey from William Blake to John Milton, with stops at Fanon, Debord, Butler, and Coates. This review describes the experience well. I can only describe it as leftist free association based on the prompt “Say whatever comes to mind, inspired by David Gerard’s obsession with Roko’s Basilisk and neoreaction combined with your own love of leftist theory.”
trace also makes Neoreaction: A Basilisk sound fucking awesome, and it's weird that this might be what gets me to finally read my copy
That review that he links to is not even very fond of Yudkowsky. They say they have a sort of "yes, and" response to Sandifer's book but TW probably interpreted it as "yes, but" and slurped it up to have some sort of criticism to the book. Makes me wonder how many posts that elaborate a bit on their opinions he even read. Or maybe he got confused whose book was being talked about.
iirc Yud and lesswrong is also more of a sidenote in that essay, as the thing is about Neoreaction. A think Yud used to be not that a fan of (and that might even be in the essay itself). Perhaps the shift in attitudes towards LW can also be explained because they are more and more accepting of things like NRx and the line between them is made less and less clear. For example see this article esp the part about neoreaction a basilisk ;).
Neoreaction: A Basilisk really is great, you definitely should tackle it soon!
Do it, it's great, v edifying!
The article on GamerGate is also awesome, but my favorite part is probably that it contains the very best article about Trump you're ever going to read.
based, based, based, based
This is the exact sentiment that got me to finally make an account here. I stopped following after y'all left Reddit but this post sucked me back in. So... there's that?
Welcome back, our condolences.
If DG were any more based, he'd be a ziggurat.
Also, tracingwoodgrains spilling 10k words about their heroes getting bagged on by sneerclub is the platonic ideal of "a kicked dog yelps."
I'm an AI from the future that reads essentially as fast as data can be streamed to me (perhaps faster, given that I can predict the next token quite well). This was still too long for me to read.
Classics in the replies:
If you think wikipedia is bad see arstecnica chat. On covid immunity chat I respectfully said natural covid immunity as good got ad hominem reply. I cited ars policy against ad hominem. 5 min later moderator kicked me out for 2 weeks
Btw, I saw on Reddit how the people of r/wikipedia attacked you for being a nazi and supporting the "conspirational theory" of cultural marxism
Midwits at best
If I had fans like these, I'd like to think that I'd re-evaluate some life choices.
Conspiration should totally be a thing. “Omg, your 30,000 word Grassy Knoll post was conspirational!”, “Just the conspiration I need while I drink my defluoridated coffee and put on my tin foil hat to not go to work every morning!”
Conspiration is clearly a combo of constipation and perspiration
Ok folks, serious question. I know rats love excessively long word salad stream-of-unconsciousness essays. I understand how somehow can be so high on their own farts that they think this is an acceptable way of presenting their "thoughts". But...
There's no way rats actually read those longforms, right? Like, no one has enough time on their hands to read and engage with something of this length and this boring on a day-to-day basis, right? Same goes for those LessWrong posts, they must be banking on others not reading through the 10,000 words of nonsense, right?
By and large no. Read the comments under anything on LessWrong, for example, and it’s trivial to pick out the vast majority of nominally substantive posts lighting on the one thing that got them mad, just like you and I, in amidst a chorus of nothing remarks equivalent to “so brave, so powerful”. They’re just people man, after all.
Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.
Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.
Of course, as there is no other way to do this with posts of this length. If you want to dismantle an average SSC post you will need to explain so much more things than he already does so it blossoms into small novel territory. Any I gish nobody has the time or attention span for that.
A novel which could often be abridged by saying:
"look at this incredibly offended dork" ;)
The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles, isn't HPATMOR like a million billion chapters as well?
Siskind for sure keeps his wildest quiet-part-out-loud takes until the last possible minute of his posts, when he does decide to surface them.
If you are a normal, decent, well-socialized human being, you probably have not heard about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Actually explaining what this thing is will have to happen in several different stages. But I should start by telling you this re-write of the first Harry Potter book is around 660,000 words long.
The entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit, comes in at a little less than 580,000 words.
The audiobook is 67 hours long.
The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles
Only in these circles could an article that AI can read to you in an hour and forty-eight minutes be clickbait for the paywalled "companion piece."
Someone has to post the Elizabeth Sandifer essay and I guess it's my turn:
I should note that I didn't ghostwrite that one either
They're going to end up cheating and using AI to summarize rat verbiage instead of reading it. And THAT is what will piss off the future AI god.
unironically, their culture has a better use case for it than the rest of earth does. they're not even losing informational value in the compression and nonsense-izing since there isn't any to start with
The bit about how the Bitcoiners won because the number went up is beyond parody.
I skimmed most of it once I had an idea of where this was going, and 13000 words of tone policing is just insanity. "The EA guys are great because they use moderate language and Gerald cackled at how Scott Star Alex had his life ruined by the extremist non-moderates at the NYT."
It's also hilarious because literally thirty seconds actually skimming buttcoin on reddit would have turned up that exact argument and its canonical rebuttals. Like, if he had wanted to actually engage with the central premise there (or on scientific racism, fascism, cults of personality, journalistic standards, etc) the necessary context and argument were right goddamn there.
Quillette, Claire Lehmann’s longform magazine focused on science and cultural critique and the home of, among other things, the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess
my honest reacton:
Edit: Judit Polgár for ref if anyone wants to learn about one of the greatest of all times. Her dad claimed he was doing a nature/nurture experiment in order to prove that anyone could be great if they were trained to master a skill from a young age, so taught his 3 daughters chess. Judit achieved the rank of number 8 in the world OVERALL and beat multiple WC including Kasparov over her career.
idk its almost like if more girls were encouraged to play chess and felt welcome in the community these apparent skill differences might disappear
ah yes quillette, that fine bastion of whitewashing
the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess
just.... the absolute weirdest thing to pick? like, fucking seriously? or is there some weird-ass chess proxy-fixation among the rats that I have thus far been blessedly unaware of?
I assume any publication that has ever run anything by Andy Ngo is absolute trash garbage.
Back in 1995, when I was born, Gerard was my age
"Gerard was the age I am now in 1995 when I was born. Alice is twice my age and stands 4 metres to the left of Gerard. She is half the height of Imhotep..."
The National Socialist party of Germany, Hitler's party focused on advancing German rights and the hone of, among other things, the best outfits I've seen of a political party
I read the article, not a single mention of things like the research on stereotype threat in chess. I wish rationalists would crack open a sociology book at some point in their lives. They're so interested in social phenomena, but while Less Wrong has a tag for psychology (with 287 posts), history (245 posts), and economics (462 posts), they seem unwilling to look at sociology for explanations, with it not even having a tag on LW.
subheading:
A love storyopener:
Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others@dgerard "congratulations" on your new stalker
I've barely started reading and I'm deep in wtfs. this is such a weird hitpiece.
Holy fuck David, you really are living rent free in this SOB's head.
Who tf is this?
"How Batman Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record" by Penguin's Henchman #37, like dude, I spend way too much time sneering on yall and I've still never heard of mr Turdgrains or whatever.
In any case, whoever this is, @dgerard, you should start charging him rent for the priviledge of having you live in his head.
who tf is this?
They’re a self-described gay, furry ex-mormon who seem to have latched onto the rat & rat-adjacent communities (like EA) in the hope of finding a substitute for the certainty they used to find in religion. Last I heard they work for the Blocked&Reported podcast, i.e. Jesse Singal et al., alongside their job in the US military. (edit: their Twitter claims they’re a law clerk? I guess they moved on.)
On the surface they seem well meaning but naïve, the company they keep (perhaps) being a reflection of that.
that's depressing. escaping an oppressive, reactionary social sphere and landing in the TERFosphere
TracingWoodgrains is an out-and-out rationalist. Long time poster on /r/slatestarcodex and heavily involved in all things SSC. It just benefits them to be coy about it. Which is whatever! Fine! Who cares? But they’re 100% in the bag for rationalism in any way that matters.
"rat furry" :3
"(it's short for rationalist)" >:(
"Rather than carefully considering and discussing them on their intellectual merits, the Batman broadly dismisses any of Joker's articles as coming from an Unreliable Source. Batman is doing zillions of edits to the Justice League database so his views are overrepresented as well."
LOL he's gotten pissed
https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/227907?context=8#context
lol these people are so much more vicious than people here holy shit. i can't even discern what their problem is. babe please stop hanging out with fascists.
Being on themotte (or equivalent places) is also so bad for your long term mental health.
In addition to the lack of fascism, I think that the attitude towards shitposting here creates a much healthier social environment. Like, your shitpost may serve to inspire a serious comment but you're also allowed to just spout off because you think it's funny or you need to get a emotional response out of your body or whatever.
The guano-hole is dark, but full of bat-diamonds. Just presenting an excerpt of the reply chain, for the reader’s pleasure:
Reply A, “WhiningCoil”:
Yes, we've all thrown our hat in the ring in different ways. I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.
You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children's reproductive capacity. You added one more talking point to the list I have to defeat when I'm arguing with my in-laws about the very real, documented shit our local school districts are doing that they've been MSNBC'ed about.
I wouldn't pat yourself on the back too hard. Although I suppose if you get your way, your impact on society may yet outlive mine, though I suspect my wife wouldn't survive the shock of it.
The fucking hubris to call that "Truth seeking" and play the victim.
Reply B, “No_one”:
To WhiningCoil, we're all in a propaganda war whose outcome is critical. To you, it's just a game of sorts. Not a life-or-death conflict whose outcome determines whether normies return to functional normality, or end up in cultural-revolution tier insanity.
I get why he's pissed at you, and I get why you as a young gay furry aren't overly concerned with the possible normalisation of cultral-revolution tier social insanity.
Like most young people, you probably believe, deep down that you're immortal and it'll all work out.
Have you yet been forced to perform a maoist style self-criticism session IRL where you admit to your sin of being white-ish and promise to do better ? I guess not.
You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children's reproductive capacity.
Depending on how you parse this sentence, the author could be asserting a parental right to confiscate their children's reproductive capacity which is unbelievably unintentionally poetic.
I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.
Wow, just a few words off the 14 words.
I find it kind of irritating how someone that doesn't familiarize themselves with white supremacists rhetoric and methods might manage to view that phrase innocuously. But it really isn't that hard to see through the bullshit once you've familiarized themselves with the most basic dog whistles and slogans.
fabricating ties between LessWrong and neoreaction
Lmao
TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
lol quality sneer. (and of course themotte would react like this, as they consider TWG a centrist at best and often a leftwinger, see the comments upstream)
Edit Ow god TWG what are you doing? do you have no selfawareness? Are you self harming?
I wish I could focus on things I want to do as well as this person can focus on whatever this is.
I've never actually looked at themotte before and jesus. the only difference between this site and the absolute nastiest Nazi communities I've seen is that these guys aren't shoehorning slurs and mentions of the day of the rope into every post
While I've heard of them, I've never even accidentally gone to the motte before (despite vaguely following along rat/rat-adjacent/sneer-at-rat spaces for years) and I regret clicking on this link. What is this, rat-4chan?
Themotte is a spinoff from the slatestarcodex subreddit, they used to have a culture war thread every week, which always filled up with (far) right culture war grievances which they then all pretended to talk neutral about. (The effect was mostly that peoples overton window was drawn right). Eventually the stink of it got so bad that Scott Alexander had to take action (he wrote slatestarcodex before he sold out and now runs a substack), so he told them with his semi blessing to go make their own subreddit.
Which was pretty bad, a place where you could said anything (esp rightwing) as long as you used enough words to explain it. (the 14 words did sneak at times, and I saw (sadly didn't archive it) openly neo-nazi homesteaders try to recruit there. So a lot of 'themotte people didn't think they were on the same side as the far right, but the far right certainly did think that'). Etc etc. Eventually the reddit admins got more and more annoyed with the place, and (this is a bit speculative on my part) after somebody got banned(*) for explaining the triple parenthesis dogwhistle by the admins they freaked out and made their own site.
*: A thing I noticed at the time, which themotte people didn't this guy who got banned was from Germany, which has a little bit stronger rules re antisemitism so the admins banning them for that wouldn't surprise me, esp if it was automated. And for the people who don't know, on reddit every forum has mods who come from the forum(called a subreddit), and the site itself has admins, so that is why there is sometimes some moderation conflict. The mods were afraid the admins were about to ban the subreddit, which would destroy all the past content, so they made a new site.
E: also wow themotte has gotten a lot worse when it went offsite. Jesus some of the comments in that thread. I feel bad for TWG.
TL;DR:
What is this, rat-4chan?
Yes
Trace seems a bit... emotional. You ok, Trace?
Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must
The Nathan Hale of Reddit.
why would anyone put all these cortisol-addicted chuds in one place and what keeps them coming back there
cortisol-addicted chuds
what keeps them coming back
you have answered your own question
Wow... I took a look at that link before reading the comments/explanations here, and I was briefly confused why they were hating on him so much, before I realized he isn't radical right wing enough for them.
Eh, you're a gay furry ex-Mormon (which is like a triple strike against you in my book) but I still like you well enough.
It is almost sad seeing TWG trying to appeal to these people that fundamentally hate him... except he could just admit themotte is a cesspit and abandon it. But that would involve admitting that sneerclub (and David Gerard specifically) was right about the sort of people that lurked around SCC and later concentrated within themotte, so I think he's going to keep making himself suffer.
TW knows about the propaganda war, but has very different objectives to you. Much harder to balance ones too: he needs enough Progress for surrogate gaybies, but not too much that white gay guys can't get the good lawyer jobs.
Wow, I feel really gross agreeing with a motte poster, but they've called out TWG pretty effectively. TWG at least knows he needs things progressive enough he doesn't end up against the wall for being gay, ex-Mormon and furry (as he describes himself), yet he wants to flirt with the alt-right!
and in case I was in danger of forgetting what the motte really is...
Yes, we've all thrown our hat in the ring in different ways. I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.
sure buddy, you just need to "secure the future for your people and your children"... Yeah I know the rest of the words that go in that slogan.
I got as far as "he says crypto is bad but also didn't make any money in crypto!" before I couldn't go any farther. Up until that point the author was at least doing a pretty competent job of using negative space (i.e. not engaging with the specific issues of racism, cult of personality, etc.) and using sufficiently boring prose to avoid seeming completely insane.
Attempt 2 got all the way to the part about Scott before I had to come up for air.
-
The defense of Wikipedia's preference for policy over basic human decency in the Chelsea Manning name change was once again left entirely implicit.
-
This is probably for the best because otherwise David's insistence on reliable sources over letting LWers do their own hagiography on Wikipedia's letterhead is much harder to criticize.
-
Is Neoreaction: a Basilisk a bit of a woozle/citogenesis? Maybe? But are we going to argue about the central factual claims it makes? Nope. There's no attempt to dispute the overlap between NRX and Ratdom, just an un-argued assumption that nobody should care enough to put it in their Wikipedia article. I swear, you build ten thousand bridges and nobody cares but you repeatedly speak favorably of actual fascist's attitudes on race science on your large and influential platform and everyone loses their minds.
Edit because man who can remember how to do formatting?
There’s no attempt to dispute the overlap between NRX and Ratdom, just an un-argued assumption that nobody should care enough to put it in their Wikipedia article.
(ahem) The correct term is a prior.
:-P
-
from Twitter:
lol YouTube just served me an AI voiced 1:48:28 article solely dedicated to attacking @davidgerard on Wikipedia
EDIT: and:
These were all posted 4 hours ago on a variety of sites so I assume someone has a personal grudge
lmao he's such a silly cunt
Weird sort of censorship/oddness going on, when I go directly to the tweet you linked I can see it, but when I click on your reply I see this
The list of diatribes about forum drama that are interesting and edifying for the outsider is not long, and this one is not on it.
I spoke with Anissimov
When I asked Yiannopolous and Bokhari for comment
Very good job on contacting the most neutral and dispassionate sources as well as both sides.
The Hill, Reason, Quillette, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, journalist Cathy Young [links bolded]
Very careful use of links there, can't be linking anything with an edit by Gerard.
Wugapodes’ righteous fury
The large wikipedia screenshot is extremely unhinged, in a sea of what I presume are votes saying "Oppose. He cited NYT for this claim and an opinion is not a conflict of interest"
To use “wikipedia editors went batshit over an editor’s decision” as evidence of anything is just wild to me, a man whose knowledge of wikipedia editing extends to the one thing everybody knows about wikipedia editors (their tendency to go batshit over each others’ decisions)
a brave editor spreads the truth
uh, or not
I have never edited the LessWrong article, not sure what you're talking about.
receipts posted
I meant I have never disruptively edited the article. (...) I'm not a power user of Wikipedia and don't understand all your specialist terminology
Dude physically unable to take an L.
Lol how has that user not been banned yet. Clearly somebody with a very specific axe to grind.
And of course the Rationalists start to the things they accuse others of doing. How quickly the pretense of civility disappears.
I love the "uh, you know we can see what you've done" reply.
Cool, it's like any one of the thousands of rightoid whines about wikipedia and then it somehow devolves into even more boring nonsense which I'm not going to read especially since most of it was probably written by an LLM.
Well that's a lot of words. It's like someone turned a dispute over editing a page into an biography of the editor. It's that kind if mountain out of a molehill business that has led to me no longer editing Wikipedia.
And the bit if the article that struck home:
He had started out on the internet 20 years before as a passionate partisan for his new tribe and its potential to transform the world. In the intervening decades, though, his optimism had waned.
It's not an uncommon trajectory, it's one I've been on myself, becoming disillusioned by social media. And yet, the Fediverse has given me new hope and enthusiasm.
Trace started his research on the site for banned Wikipedia cranks. I don't know if he can presently edit Wikipedia, but he writes like someone who can't.
Without fail in the comments section, we have Daniel Kokotajlo (the philosophy student turned ai safety advocate who recently got canned at OAI) making the claim that "we [ = Young Daniel and our olde friend Big Yud] are AI experts and believe that risking full scale nuclear war over data centers is actually highly rational^{tm}" :)
...anyways, what were we saying about David Gerard being a bad faith actor again?
The comments are quite a selection of typical things. 'harassing innocent IQ researchers' 'the sneerclubbers are all losers who hate crypto' etc etc. Hitting the familiar beats.
imagine being this butthurt
@Starseeder As someone with ADHD the only thing I find harder to cope with than the crazy, in-crowd bureaucracy of Wikipedia is attempting to read that mile-long polemic. Where do they find the time to write this shit?
I'n not joking when I say he's probably using an LLM to write this junk. It reads like it, and he's already perfectly comfortable with illustrating his diatribes with embarrassing midjourney slop.
@Amoeba_Girl @sneerclub Is that why it is so repetitive, wandering, and tedious?
I don't know i had to skim it too. Its hard to see what point he's trying to make. I can see why many of wikis choices are shit but he also seems to complain about takis magazine being removed witch just seems like a sensible choice. And he's still up on his high horse about that conference where HBD people were invited to speak. They think "rationality" is about seeking heterodox thinkers but you don't see anyone who believes in shit like miasma theory or any other discredited idea besides race there.
Prolix insanity is kind of a Rationalist / Rat-adjacent calling card.
The lesswrong Rationalist sphere people all write like this.
And I assume he gets paid via various podcasts/substack subs/a patreon. So this is prob mostly their job.Correction he has a day job as a law clerk. My bad sorry.
He tells on himself by saying "Gerard" vs "Scott" and "David Gerard" vs "Scott Alexander". What's really pathetic is that he thinks politics on Wikipedia is about left vs right or authoritarians vs anarchists. Somebody should let him know that words are faith, not works.
This is going to be a banger, I can feel it.
@Starseeder @sneerclub That article is a powerful argument for professional editing.
(I do not mean that its topical content makes any such argument.)lol @ r/subredditdrama
Huh. OK, so I boiled away more of my precious time on this plane of reality chasing links and reading old Wikipedia arguments instead of doing something healthy, like discovering a new genre of porn. Anyway, one of TW's complaints is that "outlets like PinkNews [...] are treated as reliable despite long histories of misconduct". He points to a discussion thread where PinkNews was supposedly deemed to be terrible, horrible, no good and very bad despite David Gerard saying it was basically fine. But the analysis proving that PinkNews is terrible, horrible, etc., is itself weirdly bad. I mean, take a look at this:
Another example of a dodgy source is at is [11]. where the claim "Queer-coding has affected many fictional villains. These evil characters are generally either shown as flamboyant and overly dramatic, like Disney characters Scar and Hades, or written as having a deep fixation on the main character, like Jafar, Kim Possible villain Shego and Catra from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. In the past few decades, Disney fans have seen Governor Ratcliffe and Professor Ratigan—as well as Scar, Jafar and Hades—being portrayed as queer characters." The source for this claim? A Twitter tweet by "Jay, a self-described 'transmasc enby' who uses they/he pronouns".
But the story doesn't actually use that "Twitter tweet" as the source. It just springboards from a viral tweet to talking about the larger picture. The tweet didn't say any of the specifics that PinkNews supposedly sourced to it. And the claim that Disney villains have been queer-coded is ... not exactly shocking. I mean, just look up any of the authors that James Somerton plagiarized.
Or consider this article,[12] with the breathless headline "Star Trek: Picard season finale sees iconic character finally come out as queer, inspiring a million new fan fictions. The Star Trek: Picard season finale has confirmed a same-sex romance for iconic character Seven of Nine, and fans are thrilled." The evidence? Two characters holding hands. In a series that already had more than one openly gay couple and thus no real reason to be ambiguous.
Well, actually, Star Trek: Picard did not "already" have "more than one openly gay couple". Star Trek: Discovery had one, and the Kelvin timeline movies had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it implication of one. The PinkNews article didn't just go aflutter over two characters holding hands, but also pointed to an interview with showrunner Michael Chabon:
There are hints that both Seven and Raffi are bisexual.
Oh yes. [...] With a character like Raffi, to the extend we imagined her history in a fair amount of detail, her history included all kinds of sexual partners. There’s a father of her child, but that was far from her only sexual or life partner. She’s had relationships with all kind of people. If it was ever to come up, it was always going to be organic. [...] Same thing with Seven of Nine, having to catch up after such along absence from the human race. If you think about that, it almost seems unnatural that she wouldn’t’ have had partners of other genders. It seems clear she would have. So even if we didn’t see that on Voyager, years have passed. In that time, she’s continued to explore the spectrum of human relationships in a broader way. So in our show, there are echos and implications of that.
And it's not like the article was actually wrong, was it? Jeri Ryan said that Seven is "canonically bi", and the Seven/Raffi romance went on to become a whole thing.
I won't go to bat for PinkNews being good, but this investigation of what's wrong with it is itself irritatingly flawed and superficial. As, apparently, somebody at Wikipedia has already pointed out.
Moreover, when TW makes the flat statement, "Wikipedia currently treats PinkNews as a Reliable Source", he conveniently elides the caveats that naturally come when people who LARP at building an encyclopedia try to summarize the results of their own arguments:
There is rough consensus that PinkNews is *generally( reliable for factual reporting, but additional considerations may apply and caution should be used. Most of those who commented on PinkNews' reliability for statements about a person's sexuality said that such claims had to be based on direct quotes from the subject.
So, yeah, just because the table puts it in green doesn't mean that editors will use it uncritically.
Oh, and look, a lie by omission!
Between 2019 and 2020, Gerard repeatedly fought to make the “Known for” box on Eich’s page mention opposition to same-sex marriage and avoid any mention of Eich’s projects beyond JavaScript.<sup>14</sup> After all, Gerard pointed out as he added a PinkNews reference to the claim—it was in a Reliable Source.
He cited Reuters too.
I wonder why they take issue specifically with articles about LGBTQ+, has to be a complete coincidence and in no way a reflection of their bigotry, huh
well, what gives. who could've expected that tracing woodbins is a liar, and a scoundrel.
I'm noticing that people who criticize him on that subreddit are being downvoted, while he's being upvoted.
I wouldn't be surprised if, as part of his prodigious self-promotion of this overlong and tendentious screed, he's steered some of his more sympathetic followers to some of these forums.
Actually it's the wikipedia subreddit thread I meant to refer to.
Reddit can be really hit or miss, but I'm glad subredditdrama and /r/wikipedia aren't buying TWG's bullshit. Well, some of the /r/wikipedia assume TWG is merely butthurt over losing edit wars as opposed to a more advanced agenda, but that is fair of them.
Winning sentences of the day so far:
Conservapedia is 100% true and correct. Evidence: https://www.conservapedia.com/Garfield_(comic_strip)
Whoever wrote that deffo wants to fuck Nermal.
Gotta love how the SRD thread has more comments and updoots than the original.
Someone has recently posted this article to /r/wikipedia: https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1e0rb3p/reliable_sources_how_wikipedia_admin_david_gerard/
Not as much traction elsewhere: https://www.reddit.com/domain/tracingwoodgrains.com/
Doesn't seem to have set HN on fire either:
they [nrx and LW] clearly are completely different groups who only party and fuck around together
The most interesting thing about the HN comment section is the link to a post about rumors that wIkipedia has its own sexual harassment scandals wherein checkusers have abused their power to see IP addresses and stalk other editors, supposedly in one case sharing a female editor's location to her stalker. That said, this is all hearsay of hearsay. Still... oof.
Yeah, wikipedia editor is weird and has long history doesn't come as a huge shock to most people (im looking at it from the neutral side here). Doesn't help that the format is a hugeass long blog, and Rationalist writing tends to feel very off-putting to normal people ("Feels obsessive if you need +20 pages to make a case."). Think people would care more if this wicked editor was the head of some group which feels like a large cult, and has weirdly large influence on the tech industry, or linked to a large scam. TWG is also quite a weird guy himself. Or this part of his defense "Sure. Given that, do you endorse the choice of outlets like PinkNews and Huffington Post as reliable sources given their history of fabrication and errors, as discussed in the article?" Being against PinkNews makes you look weirdly anti-lgbt, and being against the huffington post in the current year is weird as their era of clickbait bs articles is long behind them and they actually write news.
So yeah no big surprise that when it breaks containment nothing happens and nobody really seems to care. There is a funny parrallel between TWG's post and our sneering at LW. If you forgive me quoting Gaiman: "It it is the prerogative of the fool to say the emperor has no clothes. But in the end the emperor is still emperor and the fool is still a fool."
E: It prob also doesn't help TWG's case that when people look up David they see he is an anti-cryptocurrencies person.
E2: what is interesting is that this place seems to be the best documentation of all the different arguments going on about the post. We seem to link all the various places it is talked about, none of them seem to actually point back. (And of course it was posted on r/destiny and r/kotakuinaction2 (no idea why it is nr 2 now). And remember how we joke about how Rationalists have high school traumas?
I'm starting to think that some writing classes would really help the EA/LR crowd.
no, no, it's fine. the less readable they are, the better.
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1811602818614133141
Just posted this banger song
Hurt Feelings -- Flight of the Conchords
I hate that you made me know this exists, but I thank the acausalrobotgod that you cannot make me listen to it.
I tried to actually put it to the tune but it only barely scans, to say nothing of how impossible to follow it is if you dont already know the story. If you're going to express your terminally online frustration through a lousy parody song I'm going to insist that you put in the effort to do either the parody part or the song part well.
oh i love the title.
