TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
11mo ago
It’s going great! Here’s the most recent quality contributions roundup:
https://old.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/1dsozbw/quality_contributions_up_to_30_june_2024/
Culturally, it has become exactly what I envisioned it being, and I am proud to have helped lay the foundation for one of the healthiest discussion spaces online, even as my own attention has moved mostly to Twitter.
Thanks for asking, and take care.
That's fine. Participating someplace where a significant minority of the community care about nothing but digging through old grievances every time I post gets old very, very fast, and there's not really a point to beating around the bush on that. Once, this forum meant a great deal to me, and many of the individuals on it still mean a lot to me, but the space as a whole lost the mandate of heaven long ago despite your own good work and the good work of the other mods.
In the past couple of months, I've met more than a dozen motte users I read avidly, respect, and have fond memories of in real life, at several events tied to this broader community. Almost none of them post here anymore. The Motte had a good run and contains a lot of good memories, but for all practical purposes, I think its run is over. Here’s to a glorious diaspora.
I encourage those of you who enjoy what I have to say to join me on Twitter or elsewhere. At this point, the conversations there are richer, the community there healthier, and participation there is more meaningful than it is here, and I have very little to gain from kicking around someplace where some 1/4 of the userbase want it to be crystal clear that they loathe me every time I post. There was a time this was the best discussion space online, but that time has passed and it's time for relics like me to move on.
All the best.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
11mo ago
I deleted my LoTT stuff because, in one of the worst moments of my time online, it was too much for me to engage with the community I had come up within as they reacted less charitably and more harshly to me than everywhere else on the internet. As for this one, don't worry. I meant every word of it and have no intention of deleting it. I reiterate the same to you. Go screw yourself.
People build the communities they deserve.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
11mo ago
That's not why she should have figured out that it was fake. She could, and should, have noticed that she was talking to a person who did not exist about something he would not cite to a specific location, making excuses when she asked for info about the space it was initially shared. That the worksheet was silly and full of inside jokes added to it, but "this anonymous person sent me this document; therefore, this happened" is bad epistemics.
I'm not certain which of the people in the link 90% agree with me and continue to feel this forum has a bizarrely distorted view of my own politics, but that's a fight I'm pretty worn out on fighting. Regardless, glad I've made a good impression otherwise.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
11mo ago
Checking the timing on everything, his malicious edits started in earnest well before the ant farming really kicked off. He participated in the Gamergate nonsense, certainly, but I will firmly maintain my reading that his shift came before that point and Gamergate just solidified things.
TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
From the very bottom of my heart, go screw yourself.
Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must; I believe this will mark my first violation of this sort. But I stand by it, and sometimes, things like this need to be said.
To you, to everyone like you who thinks that about me here: go screw yourself.
I have always been perfectly upfront about who I am, what I do, and why. I have aimed to remain earnest, consistent, open, and push constantly against falsehood and towards painting clear pictures of the truth, including in controversial and sensitive situations. I stake my reputation and my name on my work. The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.
Have I made missteps? I don't know anyone in the arena who has not. But I am immensely proud of my work as a whole, and every time I return here and find miserable scolds like you grousing about bitterness you've never let go, it disgusts me.
Screw you, screw everyone like you here, and if I didn't know perfectly well that plenty of people here do not think like you, I would delete my posts here and never spend another moment on this site, because you and yours have dragged it into the gutter and I don't need to spend my time around people determined to see nothing but the worst in me. Imagine writing something like this after I spend a month exhaustively documenting the malicious history of one who has been spreading propaganda against communities like this before either you or I had anything to do with it. Imagine having nothing better to do than dig this rubbish up, than look to start a stupid fight over nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you won't.
You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.
"Hosted LemonParty" comes straight from the horse's mouth:
(I find myself in the position of being the only guy who has root and cares to do site admin on the server hosting Lemonparty (Wikipedia explanation). I found a few other shock sites hosted there too when I did a cleanout of dead accounts. It’s slightly disquieting to find myself responsible for maintaining this species of cultural icon.)
In fact, him talking about that is where I got the Forrest Gump of the internet line.
I don't personally see that as a smear at all, and he doesn't treat it as one when talking about it. It's just one peculiar, flavorful side point in a long history.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
11mo ago
If an editor approached me, I would do so, but in all honesty I'm quite lazy about reaching out to outlets. Writing on one's own platform is better for most self-interested reasons, and the whole process of working with editors and connecting with outlets and so forth mostly feels like more of a pain than it's worth.
A lot of journalists follow me these days, though, so you never know.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
11mo ago
New from me: Reliable Sources, investigating how longtime malicious critic of this community, RationalWiki sysadmin, and Wikipedia administrator David Gerard launders his grudges into the public record. The article is a bit of a labor of love: I'd been loosely familiar with him from his time in spaces critical of this forum, but I had no clue just how deep the rabbit hole went. For the past five years, he's been on a mission to slash-and-burn "unreliable sources" from Wikipedia, advocating for sites like PinkNews and HuffPost as reliable while pushing to make heterodox and right-wing sources impossible to cite.
Back in the day, Gerard was a surprisingly big fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky and a reasonably good-faith contributor on LessWrong who was alternately friendly and critical. At some point, though, coinciding with the 2012-2014 cultural schism that destroyed old internet culture, he turned more and more against it. After his longtime friend [Elizabeth] Sandifer got banned from Wikipedia for doxxing someone in the wake of Gerard's abusing mod tools to lock Chelsea Manning's article under her new name back in 2013, Gerard seems to have elected to abandon all pretense of good faith on Wikipedia, instead spending years shaping the LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, and other rationalist-adjacent pages to reflect any negative information he could.
In particular, he was directly responsible for more-or-less fabricating ties between LessWrong and neoreaction, going so far as to have his friend self-publish a book (Neoreaction: A Basilisk) that used him as a source for all claimed ties, finding a review of the book from another friend of hers, and sliding that review in as a citation to claim a tie between the two communities. He also fed as much negative info about Scott to the NYT's Cade Metz (an old rival of his) during that whole affair a few years back while repeatedly trying to doxx Scott on his Wikipedia page and editing the page to put the focus on the NYT affair and remove articles critical of the NYT. That behavior, in the end, got him banned from directly editing things related to Scott Alexander, but to this day he remains the primary contributor to e.g. the LessWrong Wikipedia article.
There's much more in the article. The man has thirty years of online history, from running an anti-scientology page on Julian Assange's server back in the day to hosting LemonParty to a whole lot more, and I was caught up by a mad impulse to document All Of It. It's almost impossible to explain this sort of context to uninvolved parties without, well, sitting down, trawling through hundreds of obscure pages, interviewing a bunch of people close to the events, and pulling three decades of online Lore into legible form, so that's what I did.
All the best.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
11mo ago
Yeah, for me this is very much an "I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" situation. I have my differences with the Lightcone guys, but the article was atrocious, and Oliver and I chatted a bit about it after its release.
Mind, I have a personal stake in this, since I was invited to present at Manifest and loved every second of it. I met a startling amount of old-school Motte users there as well. While the conference was ostensibly about prediction markets, in many ways it felt like keeping that spirit alive and bringing it into in-person spaces. Lighthaven is beautiful, Manifest rocked, and the Guardian can shove off.
One author is the same person who fruitlessly doxxed dissident right figure L0m3z the other week, while perennial anti-rationalist obsessive David Gerard bragged about giving background info. It's the sort of article that's much less interested in any real journalism and much more interested in creating a paper trail to establish the spookiness of everyone involved.
The EA forum has a couple of posts on the matter that I've been commenting in. It's an interesting environment, torn between social justice progressivism and rationalist instincts, but I usually get a more-or-less fair hearing over there. The posts in question:
Anyway, the most serious implication is a potential closing of Lighthaven, which would be a major blow for the Bay Area rationalists and for adjacent spheres, since it really is an incredible venue. That would happen with or without the article, though, and depends on a lot of funding questions. Manifest itself is unlikely to be moved by the article—the organizers and attendees know what they want, and the Guardian's irritation is only so much noise. Time will tell, though.
You should read my article! I cover these sources and these individuals in some detail, indicating why I think the term is wholly appropriate.
For example, it seems almost certain that the Breitbart guys (who had no real ties to either neoreaction or LessWrong) just cribbed from Wikipedia, and they didn’t remember their reasoning when I reached out.
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