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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
subheading:
A love storyopener:
Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others@dgerard "congratulations" on your new stalker
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.
LOL he's gotten pissed
https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/227907?context=8#context
Holy fuck David, you really are living rent free in this SOB's head.
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
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.
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.
imagine being this butthurt
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"
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.
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?
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.
a brave editor spreads the truth
uh, or not
@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?
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.
lol @ r/subredditdrama
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/
@Starseeder @sneerclub That article is a powerful argument for professional editing.
(I do not mean that its topical content makes any such argument.)https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1811602818614133141
Just posted this banger song
oh i love the title.