TracingWoodgrains
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User ID: 103
Yes—the email I screenshot in my Twitter thread on the matter. Unless it’s fake, which I place low likelihood on given that she submitted it as evidence in a court filing, it’s strongly indicative that they had an affair and that she was not the only affair partner at the time.
EDIT: The court filings also include an email from him rebuking her about an interaction they had at a fundraiser meeting for her charity, which he was on the board of. The contents of that interaction and email, as described in the court filing, are not nearly as clear of evidence but are still worth mentioning.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Talking about getting and spending, we lay waste the world.
Rarely is the chasm between my own thought and mainstream thought so apparent as when conversation turns to advertisers. I loathe these faceless entities working to wrest my thought into the shape of their own designs, prodding and pulling for whichever levers they can pull to make me consume ever more of their products. I block all ads I can block, recoil when one prods through my defenses and demands my attention.
Yes, this latest campaign is miserable, but not because of what’s in it. It’s because I must watch people broadcast their allegiance to consumption, because they pull ads into my consciousness and reveal their passion for the norm of advertising by crying out against deviations from that norm. Yes, Bud Light ads are grotesque, as are Nike and all culture war ads of the day—but when were they not grotesque, these machines spending untold millions to entangle people’s identities and values with the mass-market products they consume?
I do not care about Dylan Mulvaney, do not care about Bud Light. This lack of caring is not apathy, but a deep-felt antipathy towards the machine that pulls them into my sphere of awareness. Every time someone tells me with heated emotion about the latest symbol of consumption for this or that, the Enemy has won. Every time culture warriors line up for and against Product, the centrality of Product to Culture is sacralized.
Yes, you might say: you may not care about these things, but they care about you. That is, in short, the problem: they care about me when I do not wish to care about them, they spend millions hunting me while I work to evade them, and then they tap into the passions of vectors like you and in so doing find me once more, force themselves into my consciousness once more.
Ad culture is grotesque. It has been so long before Mulvaney and will be so long after they are replaced by the next in a flood of spokespeople sacrificing their lives to the Machine. Drink what beer you will, treat it as an expression of your deep-felt values if you must, but in my book this ad campaign should receive just as much attention as every other hostile, shrieking intrusion into our minds: none at all beyond a muted channel and averted eyes.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
He posts astute and data-driven threads on a wide cariety of topics worth talking about, including a number that are of obvious direct personal interest to me. Why on earth wouldn’t I recommend him?
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
New from me: Viral "Racism in Academia" Story Deleted When I Started Asking Questions
I noticed a suspicious-looking viral Twitter thread yesterday, so I started poking around a bit and, to my surprise, watched its author first reply to my question, then delete his reply and hide my question, then lock the thread, then delete the thread and nuke his whole account.
In this article, I tell that story and examine my takeaways from it. Highlights below:
“So I did an experiment, I am looking for a postdoctoral position and decided to check to what extent racism in science could be. I took my CV and changed the name to a more western one. I'd send it out with my real name, then a few days later (or before) with the western name.”
So began a viral Twitter thread from Mohamad, a PhD student with a small online presence and a remarkable and troubling story of racial bias in academia. When he applied to a postdoc using his real name, he got seventeen responses to a hundred applications, all negative. Changing nothing but his name, he experienced a remarkable transformation of fortunes: eighty-seven replies, including fifty-four scientists willing to apply for a fellowship with him. Not only that, but he reported harrowing harassment from the universities, with messages like “If we can keep lowering the barrier for entry, science will become a joke.”
The thread exploded in popularity, reaching well over 40000 likes and 10000 retweets. Millions of people saw it. Commenters rushed to extend their sympathies. Professors and researchers encouraged him to publish the experience, called for more implicit bias training in the field, and shared the story as an example of the grim reality academics must deal with. It began to spread around the internet, rising quickly to the front page of Hacker News and elsewhere.
Now the thread is gone, his account is renamed and private, and it looks increasingly likely the whole story was a fabrication.
In the replies to the original thread, there were a good handful of confused or uneasy responses, but none of them got much traction. One person pointed out that institutions should notice two copies of a CV with different names. Another asked how he could change his name on the scientific papers that would be included in the application. A third commented that most institutions would require letters of recommendation with others vouching for the individual under their real name.
There were other incongruities. Who would put in the work to send out two hundred applications under two different names, then provide no visible evidence? Who would design a precise experiment like that, with a hundred applications at once, in the middle of a high-pressure academic job search? What’s the likelihood that he could even find a hundred institutions with open postdoc positions exactly matching his niche academic field?
How could the results flip so dramatically, from nothing but rejections to half of the responders eagerly looking to apply with him? And what of the rude remarks? Any academic who harassed him as he described would be committing career suicide and opening themself up for lawsuits as soon as the harassment was publicized. (Link)
Look: none of this guarantees something fishy. There could be good answers to any or every one of these questions. But they’re odd, aren’t they? They demand explanations, they demand answers. At the very least, they demand curiosity.
None of these were the smoking gun that made him nuke his whole account, mind. That smoking gun came from a reddit thread shared on /r/MensRights a few days beforehand, pointed out most prominently by Stuart Ritchie.
In the end, this sort of self-nuke is about the best outcome I could really hope for. Someone with more sinister intent could have dodged my question, ignored people pointing out incongruities, and left the story up to let it keep spreading. Now, no news stories will be written to amplify it further. Nobody will keep the thread in their back pocket to add to a list of stories about racism in academia. No stubborn contrarians need to chase it around the internet begging people to remember that it probably didn’t happen.
All that’s left? A million people nodding vaguely and saying “Oh, yeah, I read something about that once. People with western names get like ten times as many callbacks as others. Hm, can’t find it now. You know how it goes.”
Just the vibes.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
note: this post, reluctantly, collapses liberals and leftists under the label 'liberal' to follow the conventions of the paper I'm whining about. I'll try not to twitch too much.
Heaven save me from misleading social science papers. I tweeted about this, but hopefully I can whine a bit more coherently in longform. Bear with me; this might get heavy on diving through numbers.
As part of a larger effort to explore DeSantis's claimed New College coup, in which he picked conservatives for the board of a progressive school, I returned to the evergreen question of political background of university professors, which led me to this study. The study is the most recent overall view cited by the Wikipedia page examining the question. Its conclusions are summed up as such:
In 2007, Gross and Simmons concluded in The Social and Political Views of American Professors that the professors were 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative.
If you're the sort to do "pause and play along" exercises in the middle of reading, take a shot at guessing what the underlying data leading to that conclusion looks like.
Here's the underlying spread. 9.4% self-identify as "Extremely liberal", 34.7% as "liberal", 18.1% as "slightly liberal", 18% as "middle of the road", 10.5% as "slightly conservative", 8% as "conservative", and 1.2% as "very conservative. Or, in other words, 62% identify as some form of liberal, 20% as some form of conservative.
So how do they get to the three reported buckets? Not with a direct survey. Prior analyses, notably including Rothman et al 2005, referenced repeatedly throughout this paper, lump "leaners" who express weak preferences in a direction in with others who identify with that direction. This paper elects to lump all "leaners" together as moderates, while noting that "we would not be justified in doing so if it turned out that the “slightlys” were, in terms of their substantive attitudes, no different than their more liberal or conservative counterparts." They use answers to twelve Pew survey questions, where 1 is "most liberal", 5 is "most conservative", and 3 is "moderate" to examine whether substantive attitudes are different enough to justify lumping the groups together.
Here's what their results look like, in full MSPaint glory. Again, if you're playing along at home, consider the most natural groupings, based on these results. The answers of "extremely/liberal" respondents average out to 1.4 on the 5-point scale, close to the furthest left possible. "Slightly liberal" respondents are not far behind, at 1.7 on the scale. Both "middle of the road" and "slightly conservative" respondents remain to the left of center, as measured by the Pew scale, averaging 2.2 and 2.8, respectively. It's only when you look at the "very/conservative" group that you see anyone at all to the right side of the Pew survey, with average scores of 3.7, far from the maximum possible.
From this data, the authors decide the most logical grouping is to lump "slightly liberal" respondents in with middle and slight conservatives as "moderates". That is to say: even though their scores are closest to the other liberals, almost a point closer to other liberals than to the slight conservatives, and more than a full point towards the "liberal" side of Pew's scale—significantly further left by that metric than even the most conservative grouping lands to the right—the authors label them "moderates".
Their justification? "[T]hat there are differences at all provides further reason to think that the slightlys should not be treated as belonging to the extremes." That is: any difference at all between their answers and the answers of those who identify as further left is sufficient justification to categorize them alongside people who they disagree with much more visibly. There is no sense in which this is the most natural or coherent grouping.
If the study went by pure self-identification, it could reasonably label 62% as liberals and 20% as conservatives, then move on. It would lead to a much broader spread for apparent conservatives than for others, but it would work. If it went by placement on their survey answers, it could reasonably label 62% as emphatically liberal, 28% as moderate or center-left, and 10% as conservative, with simple, natural-looking groups. Instead, it took the worst of both worlds, creating a strained and incoherent group of "moderates" who range from emphatically liberal to mildly liberal, in order to reach a tidy headline conclusion that "moderates" in academia outnumber "liberals".
Perhaps I shouldn't be so upset about this. But the study is everywhere, and nobody reads or cares about the underlying data. Wikipedia, as I've mentioned, tosses the headline conclusion in and moves on. Inside Higher Ed reports professors are more likely to categorize themselves as moderate than liberal, based on the study. Headlines like "Study: Moderate professors dominate campuses" abound. The study authors write articles in the New York Times, mentioning that about half of professors identify as liberal. Even conservative sources like AEI take the headline at face value, saying it "yielded interesting data" but "was fielded right before the extreme liberal lurch took off in the mid-2000s".
Look, I'm not breaking new ground here. People know the biases inherent in social science at this point. Expectations have mostly been set accordingly. There's not even a real dispute that professors are overwhelmingly liberal. All that as it may, it drives me mad every time I find a paper like this, dive into the data, and realize the summary everyone takes from it is either negligently or deliberately wholly different from the conclusions a plain reading of the data would provide.
It's not lying! The paper presents the underlying data in full, explains its rationale in full. The headline conclusion is technically supportable from the data they collected. The authors are respectable academics at respectable institutions, performing serious, careful, peer-reviewed work. So far as I have knowledge to ascertain, it contains no overt errors and no overt untruths.
And yet.
TracingWoodgrains
29d ago
What are you talking about here? Last time I recall mentioning systems on Twitter it was to marvel at the way some people take the whole thing seriously.
I freely admit association with the Motte as appropriate. This place was a big part of my own intellectual journey and I have nothing to hide about it. In this case, Twitter throttles Substack links as if they're ads, so I couldn't link the Vitalist's blog without my posts getting throttled into oblivion. I even mention my connection in the replies to that post.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence.
This is healthy for me to hear. He and I had a falling out some time back, and I admit it's colored my impression of things; I'm glad to have such a clear reminder of what he could bring to the table at his best to balance against my own sentiment.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
In what sense am I not being skeptical enough? My strongest conclusion by far is based on the email from Singer she entered into evidence and the evidence of their collaboration during the time frame of the alleged affair. Did you read the email? Unless it is inauthentic, it makes it hard for me to see a world where they were not having an affair, he did not initially lie to her in at least one way about it, or he was not having at least one other affair at approximately the same time.
It’s worth being skeptical of her claims, and I am, visibly so and stated every time I post about it. I agree that the “made advances on every female coauthor” claim in particular strains credulity. But there is enough that does not rely solely on her word to make it noteworthy and tough for me to dismiss in full.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
I agree with the rest of your post, but it's myopic to say that these institutions are overwhelmingly progressive "because progressives showed up." It is absolutely not a stretch of the word "elite" to wonder why all the twenty-somethings going to law school all share these same ideological premises. They all grew up with a similar curriculum, a similar Grand Narrative of history, watching the same movies, receiving the same cultural signals. And you've already explained how the institution is self-reinforcing, so there's just not a lot of room in your own framing for conservatives to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and capture institutions by attending law school.
That's another layer up from the question of who's showing up. Yes, there's a reason all young, educated professionals share the same ideological premises, and yes, that reason is worth exploring. A lot of my answer basically looks like "progressives showed up" another layer up—that curriculum, those cultural signals, that Grand Narrative is what the people who prioritized making curricula and sending cultural signals and forming a Grand Narrative believe. Culture isn't infinitely malleable, but it doesn't just happen. The project of framework-building falls to those who take it seriously, and there's no law decreeing that good ideas will win out over bad ones. It's a power game many layers deep that every movement in history has played, and conservatives are on the outside of culture looking in at the moment because they lost the cultural power game at least a generation ago, and in some regards much longer, without realizing it.
People often defend surrogacy with the idea that people have the right to do what they want with their bodies. I appreciate and respect those willing to stand in a libertarian defense of something I value, but for my part, I strongly prefer a more affirmative case.
For context, my husband and I are currently talking with a potential surrogate and working out some of the many, many logistical challenges on the road to parenthood. We're in early stages, and there is a great deal to be worked out, but we fully intend on becoming parents as soon as realistically possible. Given that, none of this debate is abstract for me, and I am as far from a neutral party as one can get.
While there are cases in which I respect the value of libertarian frameworks legally and I lean far towards "live and let live" from a metacultural standpoint, there is nothing libertarian about my moral approach to life. I do not believe all choices are equally valid or that there is nothing wrong with hedonism. I do not see things like parenthood as neutral choices that people can take or leave. Rather, what is perhaps my most fundamental philosophical conviction is this: life is Good, human life especially so. The most natural things in the universe are death, decay, and emptiness. Growth, life, and creation are fragile anomalies. We belong to an eons-long heritage of those who have committed to building and maintaining life in the face of inevitable decay. Our duty is to do the same.
Becoming a parent and raising children well is, put simply, the most good almost anyone in the world can do. It is a force multiplier: the good an individual can do is necessarily constrained compared to what their descendants can accomplish. People try to dodge around this, and even longtermists like Will MacAskill who intellectually understand the value of parenthood make excuses for it in their own lives. But it seems incontrovertibly true to me. People, particularly if they are in a position to provide well for children, should become parents. It is not a neutral action among many neutral actions. It is a moral ideal that people should pursue.
All of this takes us to adoption and surrogacy. I accept as a given that the ideal situation for a child is to be raised by their biological parents in a stable home. Inasmuch as social science is worthwhile to note, it has mostly backed this idea up. But for the most part, when people pursue other outcomes, the choice is not between "have biological parents raise a given child in a stable home" and "pursue other family structures for that child". For adoption, the value is obvious and non-controversial given the choice: "bring a child into a loving, stable home without its biological parents" or "send the child to an orphanage, toss it to the wolves, or pursue one of many other tragic outcomes for unwanted children". For most cases of surrogacy, the choice is a bit different: "create a child that will be raised by one or both biological parents in a stable home, but whose birth mother is not their genetic mother or caretaker" or "create no child".
Some people's moral intuitions are that nonexistence is preferable to, or not obviously worse than, existence in a less-than-ideal setting. I wholly reject this intuition, and looking at the record of the persistence of life in the face of adversity, belong to a heritage of those who have, time and time again, rejected it. Life is Good.
As for surrogate mothers? There is nobility, dignity, and grace in parenthood. Bringing a child into the world is an act of hope. To do so on behalf of another, even when provided financial compensation, is not a neutral or profit-focused choice. It's certainly not something that could or should ever be demanded of someone. It's a selfless choice both on behalf of the child who would otherwise not be born and the prospective parents who would otherwise have no children. The woman I've been talking a bit about it with is a young mother who feels she is not in a spot to responsibly raise more children of her own, but strongly wants to keep having children on behalf of others. That's a standard profile for a surrogate, and it's one I see as deeply admirable.
On my own behalf, I claim no fundamental right to have children, because I claim no rights that require others to act. But I absolutely claim that a society in which those who are equipped to raise children, and want to do so, can work alongside those who want to give birth to others' children is in a better spot than one that keeps children with potential to lead meaningful lives from being born. For my own part, while I won't claim to any extraordinary personal ability in terms of parenting, I have no doubt whatsoever that my husband is someone who should be a father, and I am grateful to live in a world where that's a possibility.
There are margins at which some of these arguments shift. There are absolutely exploitative and tragic environments that should be understood and called out. There are settings into which it's not appropriate to bring a child, and edge cases to analyze and discuss. My aim here is not to address all edge cases, but to examine the central case, and in particular, the case for an educated, well-off prospective parent in a society with lower-than-replacement fertility and increasing dismissiveness towards the value of parenthood. Life is worth pursuing and preserving to such a degree that you can get very far from the true ideal case before nonexistence is better than existence, or choosing not to become a parent is better than choosing to become one.
Is this all a foot in the door for transhumanism? I won't speak for others, but on my own behalf I eagerly answer: yes. In a universe where the most natural things are death, decay, and emptiness and all of life is in rebellion against that natural state, it is not just acceptable to prioritize what is Good over what is natural, it is correct. While we all must come to peace with limitations we cannot change, the high points of human history have been our collective work to push back against that creeping entropy and the arbitrary, often cruel limits it imposes. We have already become much more than we once were, and we can and should become much more than we are now.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
Ah—I have no idea whether he explicitly said such a thing and would be quite startled if he did. From my angle, the fact of an affair and concurrent/subsequent collaborative work are already sufficient to establish a degree of fairly serious misconduct, where the spectres of professional reward and punishment inevitably loom given the power dynamics in play.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
New from me: In Defense of the New College Takeover, also published with my bosses' permission over at Blocked & Reported. In light of the recent news that Ron DeSantis appointed Chris Rufo and a number of other conservatives to the board of hyper-progressive New College of Florida, I felt compelled to write a response to criticisms of the move from a number of people in the "heterodox" sphere, including my own bosses. The full piece is quite long, so I'll quote the third section below (with some edits for brevity), in which I make the case for serious diversity of thought not only within institutions, but between them:
Many people I respect worry about the idea of one institutional bias being replaced by another sort of institutional bias in universities, and embrace the idea that every university should be a joyous hodgepodge of intellectual curiosity with no loyalty, implicit or explicit, to any one creed. This stance, more or less, is held by all those I cite in my intro as critics of this move: my employers, Young, Pinker, Haidt, and other principled and careful thinkers whose stances I take seriously.
I like and respect their position. Is it too impertinent, though, to say they might be wrong?
Before you crucify me, allow me to introduce another set of thinkers I respect: [Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, and Robin Hanson].
Those of you who have heard of these men before already likely know what they have in common: they are all professors of economics at George Mason University. This is not a coincidence. Rather, it is the direct result of a conscious choice by George Mason, more than 50 years ago, to zig where other universities zagged, snapping up brilliant free-market economists while their ideas were unpopular in the broader academic market. Fittingly for an economics department, they found and exploited an niche that was undervalued by academia writ large, and were rewarded with a string of brilliant economists, including Nobel Prize winners, and a culture of contrarianism and intellectual curiosity that persists to the present.
The existence of the GMU economics department is a boon to academic and intellectual culture, and has provided serious benefits to me personally, even though I have never attended and most likely will never attend George Mason University, even though I stubbornly and resolutely reject many tenets of the libertarianism of so many of its finest thinkers. It did not spring up by chance. It sprang up out of a conscious, ideologically influenced decision to provide an alternative to the culture embraced by the great majority of universities around it.
In short, universities do not exist in isolation. Jonathan Haidt is absolutely correct about the value of viewpoint diversity in academia. Nobody, sincere or not, well-meaning or not, is free of bias. Nor should people be free of bias—or, in other words, they ought to have clear values. Much more important is to be aware of and explicit about their biases, and to open their work to examination by those with contrary biases. I’ve written before about the value of wrong opinions. If you more-or-less agree with something, it’s easy to brush over shared assumptions and nod along without close examination. Only those motivated to disagree are likely to put in the time and effort to give any intellectual work the serious critique it deserves.
What applies to individuals applies to institutions. Every institution has values: some implicit, some explicit. Every university department, and every university, evolves an overarching culture. When I dream of diversity in academia, I do not dream of a diversity that sees every university aiming to achieve a perfect 50/50 balance of people who fall on the left or the right of the American political spectrum. I do not dream of a diversity in which every economics department offers the same mix of Keynsian, Chicago, and Austrian economics. I dream of diversity between institutions: one in which George Mason economists argue with Harvard critical race theorists, where Chicago Law and Berkeley Law hash out serious disagreements, where to attend one university means to be immersed in its particular culture, with a range of cultures on offer between different universities that is as wide as productively possible.
This feels obvious and pressing in education, the domain I feel strongest about. It’s not as simple as progressive versus conservative in that domain—it rarely is. But schools of education are subject to a range of fads, struggling to adopt the lessons of cognitive science. The most well-publicized example recently has been the question of “The Reading Wars,” a fierce dispute between phonics and whole-language approaches. Other debates and forgotten episodes include “discovery learning” versus direct instruction, the spread of “learning styles” even as its evidence base crumbled, and the school district that threw unimaginable money at education problems with minimal effect. To dive into all of these properly would deserve an article of its own, but each question interacts with ideology in sometimes subtle ways, and our best instincts can lead us astray in a domain where what works is often, maddeningly, what feels worst. The field has been dominated like few others by progressives with progressive instincts, and many of its missteps are in precisely the places where those instincts lead intuition astray.
Right now, the most serious shortage I see in the broader culture of academia is that of serious traditionalist conservative intellectuals and universities. Liberals are well-represented. Libertarians make their showing, and not a half-bad one at that. Heaven knows there are plenty of Marxists. But conservatives have fled the Academy and the Academy has fled conservatives. In the social sciences and humanities—the domains I find most compelling—serious conservative thought is almost wholly absent, and with that absence comes real loss, especially for those who disagree with conservatism. Hiring conservative professors in overwhelmingly liberal humanities departments is part of the solution, but another serious part—and a responsibility that can only fall on conservatives themselves—is the cultivation of more intellectually serious humanities and social sciences departments, alongside liberal arts colleges, with sincere commitments to presenting conservative thought. [...]
Bluntly, I cannot picture a world where New College shifts to being dominated by conservatives. What I can picture, and what I hope for, is a world where it shifts to being open to conservatives, where young people eager to study the great works of history and to embrace a liberal arts education can do so in an environment that does not demand rigid adherence to progressive tenets. Perhaps that 12 to one ratio among faculty can shrink to, say, four to one. Stranger things have happened.
The answer to bias isn’t only a different kind of bias. But in an ecosystem where virtually every liberal arts college is overwhelmingly biased in much the same way, having a few to sing the counter-melody can help.
Yeah, so that's neat.
It's hard to be frank on this topic without sounding conspiratorial. The reality is that there is a small but obsessive cadre of 'activists', mostly a distinct subset of Extremely Online trans women, who hate my bosses with every fiber of their being. I knew that coming into the B&R job, of course. It was priced in, and the question was not "will they hate me once they notice me?" but "when will they notice me?".
The answer seems to be approximately when the podcast decided to cover the recent Keffals/Kiwifarms kerfuffle with care and in detail rather than jumping on the "Kiwifarms must go" train (link). They don't care at all about me qua me. I'm a nobody still, some random with a tiny platform who mostly just bloviates on obscure forums. But they do care about my bosses, very much, and in the recent scuffle it seems they've finally identified me as another angle of attack.
This can mostly be attributed to everyone's favorite AgainstHateSubreddits moderator, who has a personal and longstanding feud with rdrama. She spammed Jesse's replies and her own Twitter account with six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon links between rdrama and Kiwifarms, using my prank as an excuse to link Jesse to Kiwifarms to try to discredit his reporting. See: Exhibit A and Exhibit B as the most relevant—per her, I carried out "fascist terrorism" in league with Kiwifarms and Libs of TikTok, working with them to terrorize trans people and push teachers out of their jobs. This is now Established Fact on a certain corner of the internet. One obsessive in particular who has a long history of spreading particularly unhinged malicious rumors about my bosses (eg baselessly accusing Jesse of assaulting trans women) has tried to amplify it further (see here), having cracked the code that I am a "right wing monster" who is "laughing at the thought of his contributions to queer people and school teachers facing armed violence", indicated in part by my dogwhistling username reference to Known Bigot Orson Scott Card.
Any amount of engagement with this set encourages them, of course. Responding to out-of-the-blue false accusations from people I've never met gets morphed into "screenshotting the posts of trans people who have them blocked to try and rile mobs up" (see here) and becomes more evidence that I am a "creep" connected to a "dangerous stalker".
Andrea James is part and parcel with this group, and has a long history of genuinely unhinged harassment in this domain. She was discussed in Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger (1, 2, 3): in 1998, for recommending Blanchard's book and commenting on her own autogynephilia; in 2003, for posting images of J. Michael Bailey's children with lewd captions parodying his book, and later in her own interactions when James referred to her kids as her "precious womb turds", among other things. My bosses have been stalked by her for a while on this front—see here.
Inasmuch as I have an official statement on the matter, it can be found on my Twitter over here. I knew this sort of thing was inevitable, and while it's definitely an irritation, it's just chatter from people who were going to hate me no matter what I did, looking to wield me to undermine reporting they'd rather my bosses not do. Quite frankly, in the circles I travel in and care to travel in, having that sort of enemy is more likely to help than it is to hurt. In candor, it felt much worse to be called a Weapon Of The Cathedral in league with Taylor Lorenz by people I'd been chatting with on good terms for years (eg here). This, in contrast, is just Business As Usual. It's frankly not even worth correcting the explicit factual errors on the page, since nobody who is likely to like or respect me in any capacity is particularly likely to trust James, Oaken, or the rest. I'll just take note and move on.
My only disappointment is that she didn't commission a caricature of my character like she did for my bosses (here).
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
While I don't endorse "come on, you should totally draw art for my product"–type behavior, I do think the position would have been appealing and appropriate for a certain type of person I am not far from. My monthly salary on top of room and board was significantly larger as a military enlistee, but I also wasn't traveling the world. I think they were realistically underpaying for what they wanted but also think "don't take the job" is an adequate remedy to that.
I take your point about the writing style, but for me it's secondary to the core impression that the investigation was very badly mishandled in a way that makes examining things now feel unfair. The initial report should not have been released as-is and it reflects poorly on the whole EA/LW-rationalist community that it was. Given the poor choices around its release, I don't feel inclined to focus too much on what really looks like mundane and predictable workplace/roommate drama.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
The best advice I can give for Twitter is basically “follow eigenrobot and work outward from there.” tszzl (roon) and growing_daniel are also good “hub accounts” for the tech side of things. If you prefer to start with motte-adjacency, go with ymeskhout, AnechoicMedia_, sonyasupposedly, CremieuxRecueil, and Kulak.
There are a lot more accounts I could mention (I follow around 900 people) but the clear entry point to Twitter for people from here is the ACX-adjacent section (TPOT), which maintains a high standard of amiability/sanity norms while talking about much the same stuff as here.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo ago
I wouldn't call them all amazing scholars. As I mention in the post, Harvard hasn't selected primarily on intelligence for a long while. I would call the ones I met noticeably capable, well-adjusted, balanced people when compared to the median individual: smart, knowledgeable, conscientious, well-connected, well-off, and ambitious, the sort of people who stand out in any group they're in as being the ones who get things done. Not better than anyone else in the world, but noticeably highly selected in those domains.
This is a generalization, of course, not a rule, and reality is always less shiny than generalizations of this sort allow for, but I've been sincerely impressed by the Harvard (and Yale, and similar-school) graduates in my life.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter lately, particularly since I can mottepost there now. What I formerly read as fundamental constraints in the directions you point turn out to be mediated pretty heavily by the part of it a person spends time in and who they choose to interact with. There’s a self-selecting group in and around the ACX-adjacent parts of Twitter that is pleasant and full of smart, well-mannered, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people, with two clear advantages in my view:
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The decentralized nature means that incompatible personalities can self-select into slightly different subcommunities where people who get on with both can still interact with both in what feels like the same space, meaning in particular that the ideological range is much broader than here.
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The public nature means that when you chat with people in your quiet corner, your posts will occasionally leave the bubble and contact a much wider audience, sometimes including the public figures you talk about. In the recent OpenAI drama, for example, the interim CEO was a well-known regular in Twitter’s ACX-adjacent sphere.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
Oh, I see a lot of open questions and a lot of room for my judgment to shift in a number of directions—but few beyond complete falsehood that are highly exculpatory for Singer. Your hypothetical is not impossible but even in a scenario like that the mixing of career benefits and an affair is morally fraught.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
These - look, I don't want to be insulting about Mormons, but good Lord is it very, very hard to resist dropping one of the "m"s there - blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal.
...yeah, I'm going to have to second @RaiderOfALostTusken here. There are many things Mormons can be accused of, but having no sci-fi/fantasy chops just isn't one of them. Orson Scott Card is one of the sci-fi greats; Brandon Sanderson is one of the most successful and imaginative fantasy writers around. Twilight has a bad reputation, but I'll cop to thoroughly enjoying Stephanie Meyer's The Host. I've never paid much attention to Battlestar Galactica, but it seems close to the core of space-faring sci-fi classics. The list of successful, popular LDS sci-fi/fantasy writers drags on: Tracy Hickman, Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, James Dashner, so forth. None of these rely on tired American political slogans to define their work.
I have no interest in or particular knowledge of Rings of Power, but I see very little to suggest Mormonism is the cause of its triteness. You'll have to look elsewhere for that.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Aye, that's the trouble with culture war spats, isn't it? None of them are abstract for everyone, and the culture war has real stakes. I want to live in a culture where my family and I can live according to our values and build alongside people who share those values. Emphasizing where surrogacy fits within that frame, and carving out space where people won't look at my family with the sort of suspicion and hissing condemnation @Catsnakes_ below illustrates is a real, important part of that.
To opponents of surrogacy, "literally purchasing another human being" and "providing compensation for the complex and demanding circumstances needed to create a human being" are a distinction without a difference; all I can say is that I see a crucial distinction, and see surrogacy as no more purchasing a human being than IVF or, more disputably, paying a hospital for childbirth. We live in a world where money is inextricably tied up in even intimate human interactions, but that doesn't strip them of their humanity or their worth.
As for changing my mind—look, obviously people stake a lot on major life decisions, and I can't pretend I expect my mind to change on this one. If it were to change, though, it would happen the same way it always does: either by convincing me that some of my values are poorly conceived, or working within the frame of my own values to convince me that my plans don't live up to them. That's why I don't really expect a change, of course—I've spent a long while considering my values and finding the right landing spot, and I suspect I'm mostly past the stage of serious, rather than marginal, adjustments. But the pathway to change is straightforward.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
Yeah. And honestly, there are worse things than being paid in exposure. I'd describe that as the primary compensation for my podcast job (my bosses pay me a perfectly fair hourly wage, but I'm certainly not doing it for the money). It's just worth being clear-eyed about precisely what that entails and when it's appropriate.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
Also: gendercritical -> Ovarit, ConsumeProduct under the auspices of the .win network, OpieAndAnthony -> onaforums. Probably others, too.
There’s a meme that successful break-off communities are impossible, but it’s hopelessly out of date. General-purpose break-offs fail, but if people are in a habit of visiting specifically the community instead of just seeing it pop up occasionally on their front page, they will follow it to a new location. Honestly, fully unsuccessful community break-offs are rarer than successful ones at this point. The reddit diaspora is large and growing.
Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths remains the classic diagnosis of this.
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