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.’
from Twitter:
lol YouTube just served me an AI voiced 1:48:28 article solely dedicated to attacking @davidgerard on Wikipedia
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
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.
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
lol @ r/subredditdrama
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.
every accusation is a confession
It occurs to me that, intentionally or not, he’s probably steering TESCREAL types to Wikipedia itself as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if accounts were coming out of the woodwork to post multi-kiloword screeds about Wikipedia being soooo unfairrrr…
His replies have gone up in upvotes substantially since yesterday, so it looks like a bit of light brigading is going on.
they are
My condolences.
He is transparently trying very very hard to start a gamergate and it’s pathetic.
It’s like these people are enforcing a facade of polite tone and measuredness as a way to launder literal intellectual terrorism! Dang!
Remember Oswald Mosley
(specifically the bit where he and his kept getting facepunched, along with their little gatherings disrupted and made extremely unpopular for establishments to host)
Saw somebody on r/ssc go ‘why do they always focus on roko’s basilisk and never any of the more important things like Yuds lack of qualifications or academic rigor’ and saw them also lol that we here apparently didn’t want to spend the 2hs to read it (and well that woulds also require 4h+ to then respond about all the various weird inaccuracies). Which is was an amusing few posts. Yeah, we don’t have the energy/desire to read all those posts, but neither do you as Yuds lack of qualifications etc comes up quite often.
They want sneers about Yud’s lack of qualifications? Fine:
Noncy prig who never went to high school founded a cult for people who can’t leave it behind! How’s about that, eh?
Yeah mentioned it does come up quite often, but rokos basilisk just is funnier.
E: flannyo (used to post in sneerclub) is in that thread and actually arguing with people and pushing back on the post a bit. Which isn’t going super badly compared to if you tried something like that on themotte vs r/ssc.
as, indeed, has started to happen https://xcancel.com/thezahima/status/1811495742894408065
literal brigading
hopefully this gets shut down hard at all the places they try to fuck with. we’ve already had 2 cases too many of jonringer this year
Annoying that TWG is also doing the slimy thing which is so common in internet trolling nowadays. The text says ‘im not a reliable source’ the subtext (or well with this retweet, text) says ‘make my post a reliable source and attack David’.
(What makes this even worse is that the weird far rightwingers from themotte see all leftwingers as behaving like this, and the to them super leftwing TWG is feeding into their stereotypes. Well done on feeding the far right propaganda machine).
Trace RTs someone hoping aloud that his nonsense gets laundered by an RS, then breathlessly reports on his literal transparent brigade getting unbanned using a very strained appeal to WP:AGF, so I am starting to get a picture of his end-goal.
it’s good the rats can’t help themselves but to brag about what they’re doing – in at least three different public places.
(looks up meaning of WP:AGF)
… Yeah, that site is probably not the right hobby for me.
(looks up the LessWrong discussion page)
My God, it’s full of smeg
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.
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.
well, what gives. who could’ve expected that tracing woodbins is a liar, and a scoundrel.
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
Gotta love how the SRD thread has more comments and updoots than the original.
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.
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 his 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
also he lifted that line from me lol
lmao. Literally the only thing that had any truth or wit to it was plagiarised
he could have just said “as he calls himself”, but nooo
now it’s
He calls himself the Forrest Gump of the internet, and honestly, I can’t particularly disagree.
we’ll get there, comment by comment! Or not.
Only one problem with this, he will not mention he edited days after publishing it, so then people go ‘sneer club is whining about X, but the article clearly says Y they are lying again!’ so hope somebody made an archive of the initial post. Wait, I can just check that. People did so interested parties could diff it.
There’s also the Julian Assange connection, so we can probably blame him for Trump being president as well.
Sorry never heard of the Assange -> Trump gets elected connection, care to explain?
I heard the bs thing that GG caused Trump (def not big enough, also international) or that the media mocking him and daring to run helped, etc. (It prob was a combination of everything).
Gerard -> Assange -> creates Wikileaks -> Wikileaks receives and publishes hacked or leaked DNC emails -> DNC emails shows Clinton cheating Sanders in the primary -> depresses turnout among potential democratic voters in the general election -> Trump wins.
On can question each step on how influential it’s for the next, but if one doesn’t Trump was all his fault.
Ow right, forgot about those whole damn emails. Amazing that after that shit Trump just takes the boxes home and puts them inside his shower. But wait I hear you think. Shower, that was in the toilet. No, look again at the image behind the first row of boxes is a shower curtain (you can see on the left side the marble gets higher, as you should tile a shower (it is mandatory like that in .nl at least)) and what do we see behind that curtain on the right? More boxes! Sindriiiii!
Assange becomes a Russian asset because him being a low key sex pest somehow gives some European authorities cause to want to send him packing to the US where he is wanted for espionage should probably be one of the steps but in general yes.
shakes fist at gerard that David is a real scallywag!
Holy fuck David, you really are living rent free in this SOB’s head.
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.
Honestly I’ve made it my life’s purpose to be a loser by the standards these people set, and succeeded beyond either of our wildest dreams
I’m just an even bigger loser than they already think irl. They can’t properly imagine the depth of my loserdom.
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.
Can’t miss an opportunity to make it about himself 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.
What an ass
@Starseeder @sneerclub That article is a powerful argument for professional editing.
(I do not mean that its topical content makes any such argument.)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.
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
“rat furry” :3
“(it’s short for rationalist)” >:(
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.
“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.”
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.
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:
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.
It’s rdrama, they’re in another league of weird. Fun fact: TheMotte is using a fork of rdrama’s code.
“setting HN on fire” is an unfortunate phrase that one might otherwise wholly be able to get behind
damn english and its imprecision!
🎶 we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn 🎶
The site does tend to fall over if there are more than 300 comments on a post…
they [nrx and LW] clearly are completely different groups who only party and fuck around together
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.
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.
