TracingWoodgrains
No bio...
User ID: 103
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There’s a meme that successful break-off communities are impossible, but it’s hopelessly out of date.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.
TracingWoodgrains
2mo ago
Thanks! I’ll see what I wind up doing—I don’t think taking time off school is necessary, but I was definitely more than a little distracted in class today. I figure I’ll see who reaches out to me about what, if anything.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
They never promised $75k/year in compensation, $10k of which would be cash-based. This was the compensation package listed in their written, mutually agreed upon employment contract:
As compensation for the services provided, the Employee shall be paid $1,000 per month as well as accommodation, food, and travel expenses, subject to Employer's discretion.
They included another text in evidence where they restated part of it:
stipend and salary mean the same thing. in this instance, it's just $1000 a month in addition to covering travel, food, housing etc
The only apparent mention of $70000 as a number happened during a recorded interview (edited for clarity, meaning retained):
We're trying to think about what makes sense for compensation, because you're gonna be living with us, you're gonna be eating with us. How do you take into account the room and the board and stuff and the travel that's already covered? What we're thinking is a package where it's about the equivalent of being paid $70k a year in terms of the housing and the food, and you'll eat out every day and travel and do random fun stuff. And then on top of that, for the stuff that's not covered by room and board and travel is $1000 a month for basically anything else.
I would not personally take a job offering this compensation structure, but they were fully upfront about what the comp package was and it came pre-agreed as part of the deal. I see no grounds for complaints about dishonesty around it.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
there are certain subjects where I fear that if I deviate too much from the party line, I will be cast out into the outer depths before I even begin.
Richard Hanania is a good counterexample here. I don’t particularly like the guy (not least for his one-time soft plagiarism of me, but that’s a tangent) and I’m not a central member of his audience, but he spends a great deal of time and effort writing essays that castigate and rebuff people who do particularly like him and who want to be central members of his audience. He is a Problematic writer who constantly and openly decries the pathologies of the Problematic, spending more effort than plenty of leftists chronicling all the ways conservatives go wrong, and pulling no punches when doing so. Not just that. He doesn’t touch third rails, he bear-hugs them, and his audience only grows as a result.
And that makes him Interesting, and so I read what he has to say, and sometimes I learn things.
The primary thing a public-facing writer needs is to be Interesting. Forget tribes, forget cancelation, forget whatever: deviations make someone Interesting, and the Freddie deBoers of the world flourish while a thousand cut-and-paste Breadtubers with impeccable production value and assembly-line opinions drown in the kiddie pool before anyone cares who they are.
Oh, and the fiercest partisans? They won’t forget a single thing you say against them, and they’ll bring it up as part of the chattering Discourse around you if you get big enough, but that won’t stop them from loudly amplifying everything you say that expresses their worldview eloquently enough. Most people don’t pay attention to most things most of the time; they notice people when convenient and forget about them otherwise.
In particular, for all its faults the online right ecosystem is higher-variance than the online left, defined more by shared opposition than shared values. They’re used to envisioning themselves as a cloud of heretics, and while they can and will scream bloody murder at you for committing heresy against their particular orthodoxies, they cannot precisely kick you out and will not stop listening unless you are Dull.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
For what it's worth, native image uploading would be pretty great in the context of some effortposts. I don't know whether the gains are worth the risk of the low-effort stuff that would come along with it, but there are lots of times I write something for TheMotte+elsewhere where my motteversions cut out a lot of the graphs, illustrations, etc I otherwise scatter throughout. Would "image uploads as part of submissions, but not comments" be difficult to implement or worth exploring?
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
I think his comment on sexual ethics provides a hint as to what his rationalization of having affairs would be: people get so caught up on sexual ethics when what really makes a difference in the world are things like donating to overseas charities and advocating for animal rights. Yes, his affairs were selfish, but they were a small selfishness as he was pushing large groups towards immense utilitarian good, so to focus on it is a mere distraction. Particularly if nobody finds out—as you say, what’s the harm?
Even in utilitarian terms, this is a rationalization. He knows the second-order effects of affairs and knows what society’s actual feelings on sexual ethics are. He knows, surely, that it is the stuff of scandals and cratered reputations, that it could bring immense harm not just to him but to the ideas he champions, to his philosophy as a whole.
And you can argue that in a utilitarian frame, but we are all at war with our own minds to one extent or another, and the possibility of rationalization depends on the strength of one’s safeguards. Singer’s brand of utilitarianism is unusually bad, I would argue (and I think his quote on sexual ethics supports my argument), at providing defenses against rationalizing sexual misconduct to oneself.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
I don't think this will convince you, but when Brigham Young started that policy he explicitly stated that at some point it would end.
He did. Specifically, he stated this:
You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind. The first man that committed the odious crime of killing one of his brethren will be cursed the longest of anyone of the children of Adam. Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race—that they should be the “servant of servants;” and they will be, until that curse is removed; and the Abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree. How long is that race to endure the dreadful curse that is upon them? That curse will remain upon them, and they never can hold the Priesthood or share in it until all the other descendants of Adam have received the promises and enjoyed the blessings of the Priesthood and the keys thereof. Until the last ones of the residue of Adam's children are brought up to that favorable position, the children of Cain cannot receive the first ordinances of the Priesthood. They were the first that were cursed, and they will be the last from whom the curse will be removed. When the residue of the family of Adam come up and receive their blessings, then the curse will be removed from the seed of Cain, and they will receive blessings in like proportion.
Young and subsequent prophets treated it as if the doctrine had been established by Joseph Smith. From George Q. Cannon:
I had a conversation very early in life with President John Taylor, who told me what the Prophet Joseph had said upon this subject.
I related it to-day to the Council. He told him that the seed of Cain could not hold the priesthood, and that they would be debarred from the priesthood until Abel should have seed who could come forward and receive the priesthood. Cain had killed Abel, and he had died childless.
And from Joseph Fielding Smith:
Ham, through Egyptus, continued the curse which was placed upon the seed of Cain. Because of that curse this dark race was separated and isolated from all the rest of Adam's posterity before the flood, and since that time the same condition has continued, and they have been 'despised among all people.' This doctrine did not originate with President Brigham Young but was taught by the Prophet Joseph Smith .... we all know it is due to his teachings that the negro today is barred from the Priesthood. -The Way to Perfection, pages 110-111
This is not to claim that Smith was the actual originator of the doctrine—he made a few statements that could be interpreted that way, but the best-supported historical view indicates a shift from neutrality on slavery to an anti-abolitionist stance around 1836, followed by a firm commitment against slavery from 1842 to his death in 1844, with a few ordinations of black people to the Priesthood during that time. Rather, the point is that the question was treated by 19th and 20th century LDS leaders as settled doctrine, established by Joseph Smith and not to be undone until perhaps the Millennium.
Church leaders after Young treated it as settled and unambiguous doctrine well into the 20th century, most memorably during this 1947 exchange with Dr. Lowry Nelson, signed by the entire First Presidency of the church:
From the days of the Prophet Joseph even until now, it has been the doctrine of the Church, never questioned by any of the Church leaders, that the Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel. Furthermore, your ideas, as we understand them, appear to contemplate the intermarriage of the Negro and White races, a concept which has heretofore been most repugnant to most normal-minded people from the ancient patriarchs till now. God's rule for Israel, His Chosen People, has been endogenous. Modern Israel has been similarly directed. We are not unmindful of the fact that there is a growing tendency, particularly among some educators, as it manifests itself in this area, toward the breaking down of race barriers in the matter of intermarriage between whites and blacks, but it does not have the sanction of the Church and is contrary to Church doctrine .
While I don't disagree that an about-face on homosexuality would be a more difficult change to fit within LDS theology, my impression is that active members tend to understate the apparent permanence and seriousness of the doctrine banning black people from temple ordinances and the Priesthood and the significance of the 1978 reversal. It was much more than a simple, expected policy shift.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
I see your reason for concern, but I don't think it's accurate to stick this one in quite the same bucket. Specifically, I don't know that "instigating trouble" is an accurate framing here.
That my question contributed to him shutting the whole thing down was welcome, but unexpected. The role I expected to play was "onlooker investigating the veracity of suspicious-looking story." Increasingly, I reach out to the people involved as part of that sort of process. Is that instigating trouble? If it is, then no media outlet in the country would have cause to post here: getting commentary from the people involved in events is core to reporting.
I believe my behavior here was in line with the standard for anyone curious about a story and motivated to get to the bottom of it. That my digging led to more of a story than there would otherwise have been shouldn't preclude me, I believe, from writing that story or sharing it here.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
There’s no evidence either way about an arrangement except the accuser’s claim that he lied about having one.
If you do not consider breaking monogamous relationships up and giving career benefits to affair partners in a domain where he holds immense power to be evidence of wrongdoing, I will not be able to convince you otherwise, but my impression is that most people (correctly, in my estimation) disapprove of both.
When:
- someone is in a monogamous relationship, 2. Singer propositions her, 3. They have an affair, and 4. He publishes alongside her through the course and in the immediate aftermath of the affair…
I see very little left to demonstrate.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo ago
Oh, of course they're lying. To my eye, it's mostly kayfabe: they pretend to believe those things and other informed observers pretend to trust them. That's part of what makes holistic admissions so insidious to me, though: for uninformed observers, the kayfabe becomes real, and people start to accept that there must be sound, justifiable reasons for highly capable applicants to be rejected in favor of candidates with lower objective scores across the board.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo ago
I don't have a deep-felt opinion on whether Harvard should be egalitarian. I prefer egalitarian entry criteria for elite institutions both for self-interested reasons and because I prioritize academic excellence over things like wealth, but there's something honest about an unabashedly elitist finishing school for the rich and powerful that I have to respect. I do think it's trying to awkwardly staple a facade of egalitarianism over a core of elitism, though, and that leaves it in a precarious and self-contradictory position.
You could be right about the amount of leverage it gives, but I think the way the ruling explicitly set California schools as a good example gives a lot of reason to be skeptical that the leverage will amount to a great deal in practice. I'll be watching with interest, and I expect mountains of litigation to come out of the ruling, but I have trouble anticipating serious changes as a result.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
It's a bit petty and I haven't talked about it here to my recollection, but basically: when he ran a survey of his fanbase, he copied the format and many of the questions I used to survey r/themotte, repeating a number of items verbatim and copying much of my presentation of the results down to specific color choices. That's totally fine in my book—I'm glad he was impressed enough to use it, and it's a fun format that I think should spread—but when sharing the results of the survey, he first requested someone make an imitation of my results table, then removed all mention of my initial table after someone had copied it. You can see the archive here, where it links my work, with no mention of it in the live version.
Technically he did attribute my original when he was asking the questions, but it left a bit of a bitter taste for me when he edited any attribution out of the results page itself, and when I reached out asking about it, he first replied by saying that he didn't know what I was talking about, then went radio silent. It's not the sort of thing I'm interested in making a huge fuss over, but it did leave the lingering impression that his disagreeable approach is more than just an affect and that he can be a genuinely unpleasant person on an interpersonal level.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
I feel like you’re eliding the point in arguing against my case that his behavior follows from his ethics by referring to the drowning child argument rather than the argument I linked, in which he states explicitly that sexual ethics is unimportant and sex raises no unique moral issues at all.
I’m not the one who tied them together—he is! “Why are you focusing on petty things like sex when there are kids starving in Africa?” is only the slightest rephrasing of his argument. I absolutely would expect someone who takes Singer’s explicitly stated attitude towards sexual ethics to have looser sexual ethics than someone who takes the mainstream societal view, and while it would be unfair to pre-judge him based on that, it is eminently reasonable to take it into account after the fact.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths remains the classic diagnosis of this.
TracingWoodgrains
8mo ago
Per the core definitions used, ethnic cleansing is explicitly "get them to leave" as distinct from "destroy them" entailed by genocide. This is common across most sources. See eg:
That's one of the major reasons to have separate terms for the two! They're often paired in history, but it's not weasel-wording to use the actual definition of the phrase as it's actually and deliberately used in practice.
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
3mo ago
It’s not priced in, though, except perhaps to the extremely aware. Not a single article has been written about it, it gets not a single mention in his biographies, virtually nobody in the public knows any details of it. If it was an open secret, it certainly never escaped the circles closest to him, and while it’s possible and natural to assume he’d be the sort of person not to take serious issue with it, that doesn’t reveal much if anything about him actually doing it.
It makes sense, yes. But many things make sense without actually being part of people’s stories. He has been meticulous at keeping it out of the public eye.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Thanks for letting me know (in both cases)! Looks like they decreased its weighting pretty heavily/quickly—which, fair. Always happy when I show up there at all.
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.
TracingWoodgrains
8mo ago
I'm prepared to bite whatever bullet is here and say "those who read it and interpret it differently are wrong." It's a useful phrase with a clearly defined meaning. I use it as appropriate and if someone overinterprets it I'll correct them. I'm looking to describe a set of events that happen sometimes, not encourage overreaction.
I would say "You're welcome to suggest another phrase for the process of deliberate removal of a group of people from an area by any means necessary," but that feels silly. We have a phrase for that. It's ethnic cleansing. We don't need another. If people are overstating it or overinterpreting it, they should knock it off, since the word "genocide" already exists for that purpose.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Does he have any interest in building, or only in ruling what others have built?
I'm pretty far from a Moldbug apologist, but this particular criticism uniquely does not land for him. We're talking about a man who built a full-fledged alternative to the internet from the ground up, hand-crafting every stage of its unique and bizarre infrastructure. Now that he's stepped away to let it grow on its own, from what I understand of his current projects, he's become rather enamored with New York's Dimes Square art scene. It seems like a bit of a dead end at best to me, but it's certainly an attempt to build something.
There are many people at whom you can credibly level the "no interest in building" accusation. Whatever else Yarvin's flaws are, this is emphatically not one of them.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Suggestion: Make finding new comments easier.
I believe this is by far the biggest potential quality-of-life improvement over reddit while maintaining the single-thread structure. Specific suggestions, without any real degree of certainty about what would be simple/practical:
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Add a "collapse all old comments" button that lets you see new comments only.
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Add buttons and/or keyboard shortcuts to jump down the page to the next new comment.
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Highlight "More comments" buttons if there are new comments deep in a subthread. I can't count the number of times on reddit I either go hunting deep in comment chains for new comments that don't exist, or just miss new comments entirely b/c I don't want to check every deep chain.
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Bring over the reddit gold feature of a dropdown "Show comments since visit" menu that lets you select any one of your last few visits to the page to show new comments from. iirc this one was suggested down below, so I'm just seconding/consolidating.
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
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.
Than virtue ethics, deontology, or contractualism? Yes. I am not claiming they are more likely than people who do not actively aim towards upholding high, clearly articulated ethical standards, but yes, I assert that moral systems have measurable impacts on people’s behavior in important ways, and the safeguards against cheating within utilitarianism—and particularly, by Singer’s own explicit admission, in his brand of it—are straightforwardly less than those in other ethical systems.
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