TracingWoodgrains
No bio...
User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
IIRC Tracing has "I am a furry, here is my favorite gay furry porn I made with the gay furry porn AI generator" in all his bios.
Hm?
It's pretty much limited to profile pictures, to be honest, and I don't really talk about porn at all. I do AI generate pleasant SFW furry pictures on a quiet Twitter alt from time to time, but that's about it. It's only really a major part of my persona in BARPod Lore, and that's mostly just because that's what's appropriate for the show's vibe.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
I don’t think it works to treat that passage as not specifically about sex when he emphasizes it is why he will not bother to address sexual ethics. What does Singer think about sexual ethics? That. That is the core of it.
I don’t precisely disagree that utilitarians, in their daily lives, are conscious of duty to the near. I disagree that they have a philosophical justification for it that amounts to more than just stapling the same instinct all people feel onto their framework. More, I disagree that their advocacy for increased duty-to-the-far can or claims to come without tradeoffs. Attention is limited, and utilitarian arguments—Singer’s in particular—constantly focus on the need to assign less of it to the near and more of it to the distant.
So—yes, in their daily lives, they have friends and family members, and yes, when pressed, they come up with utilitarian-sounding justifications for it. But that, I argue, is a second- or third-order kludge to reconcile human instinct with a moral system that does not inherently account for it or treat it as relevant.
I expect people to have insightful comments on every domain of behavior they claim authority over. Singer claims authority over all of ethics and should be held to that standard.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
“I don't see how that is shown by the email in question.”
“If you were thinking you were the only one, and if that was crucial to what you felt about our relationship, I’m sorry, that isn’t true.”
That is: he lied by omission by not mentioning multiple simultaneous affairs. I don’t find your “emotional cheating” reading plausible; in context, it seems strained to read it in any way other than “actively pursuing the same sort of relationship he has with her, as the opportunity arises based on distance.”
TracingWoodgrains
10mo 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.
I won't claim it's entirely discontinuous from the past, but I think it's notable that eg Ben expressed fury at the lack of changes since FTX and the EA community as a whole has recent memories of being dragged through scandal after not being suspicious enough.
EDIT: Oliver, too, mentions being intimidated by FTX and not sharing his concerns as one of the worst mistakes of his career.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo 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
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
5mo ago
There are absolutely competent people within it, inasmuch as there are people within it at all. The issue I'm pointing to is one of raw numbers, not one of competence.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
This move from DeSantis/Rufo is an example of conflict theory in action, one that my article explicitly defends.
I do not mean only classical liberals, and what I am talking about is orthogonal to the free and robust exchange of ideas. A group can support their exchange all they want, but if nobody within it is willing to devote their study and their careers to the ideas themselves, that support only goes so far. To better explain what I mean, I'll use the example of police: if progressives want an institution that aligns with their values, at some point some of them actually have to bite the bullet and become police officers. If conservatives want a serious foothold in the humanities and social sciences, some have to bite the bullet, study, and make arguments within those disciplines.
Obviously, this cannot happen in environments where progressives take over and shut them out. But assume an academic institution that genuinely holds, as one of its values, the free and robust exchange of ideas, is hiring. What will be the proportion of progressives to conservatives among highly qualified people who apply for a humanities post? Conservative intellectuals talk a great deal about preserving and valuing intellectual heritage, but for all of that, it is (broadly speaking) liberals and progressives who take serious interest in these topics day to day.
I strictly oppose the freezing-out of conservatives in these institutions. Whether that happens or not, though, conservatives themselves have a great deal of building to do if they value the humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts more broadly. The most open-minded opponent is still not going to push your ideas for you. You need to bend down, get your hands dirty, and do some gardening for yourself.
That, more or less, is what I'm getting at. It applies to me no less than to conservatives; many of the ideas I would like to see flourish are currently struggling, and that's not going to change unless people like me make it change. So it goes.
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
I very frankly do not care who someone is "adjacent to"; I care who they are and what they say. Your favored public thinkers, whoever they are, are extremely unlikely to talk about things as in the link above. Know why I can say that? Because I follow just about everyone who talks visibly about that stuff. People should talk about it more. That he does so is a credit to him and a strike against those who complain that I would so much as mention him.
Your line about "Jews" betrays your own ignorance about him, incidentally. He's anything but antisemitic, and inasmuch as I have disputes with him on that broad topic, it is that he sees Israel's hands as rather cleaner than I personally do. Your opponents do not all fit into a single bucket that you can label "fascist" and have done with it, and I have little patience for dark insinuations of this sort.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Mormons, quite frankly, are used to it. That doesn’t mean they’re fond of it or that it’s okay, but they have functionally no true allies in the sociocultural landscape (with other Christians considering them a heretical near-cult and progressives considering them self-evidently bigoted), and there are no real social penalties for even the harshest of criticism towards them.
When I was Mormon, I was used to mostly keeping my head down to avoid trouble in the public sphere, and I doubt I was uncommon in that. Criticizing Mormons is playing the social game on easy mode.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo 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
Well, yes. I think so.
If you look at the specific people who do this sort of thing, they tend to be older loners with few close friends on- or offline who spend much of their time shouting mostly into the void on social media. Inasmuch as they have influence, it's usually mediated via a few more predictable figures who amplify everything that might advance their causes, or overly credulous/careless institutions that don't look closely at people who ostensibly align with causes they want to be seen supporting. It's real influence, mind. There are spheres where people will absolutely trust their word over mine. The broader leftist culture they take advantage of is dominant on social media and in several influential domains.
But the other thing I get for being associated with them is a general circle of Sanity around me, with people who have more reach and influence than any of those watching, already very familiar with this song and dance. If I examine the set of people who share and believe that sort of thing, they're all people with politics far from mine in domains far from mine who would have no interest in what I have to say in the best of circumstances. I'd rather they not take notice of me, but they just don't have enough proximity to me to really matter, y'know?
I'm not interested in being defined by a struggle with a few fringe lunatics, but to be blunt, I'm confident in my odds in an Optics Battle in the eye of the broader popcorn gallery if it ever comes to something like that. They're the sort of people even their allies tend to tolerate at best, and you can only cry wolf so many times before most people start tuning you out. Like—Jesse can still have pitches accepted at the New York Times. Blocked & Reported can cover things in peace most of the time, with only occasional storms when people bother to notice. Materially, it's unlikely that these guys could close doors to me without raising my profile enough to open more and better doors. They're annoying, but at least in my position, that's about all they are.
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
4mo ago
Sure. Of the things I listed, I think lying to your affair partner is rather less significant than most other parts of the story—I just wanted to establish that it was one of the points demonstrated by the email.
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
10mo ago
I disagree. This chart is nothing if not ranking people from best to worst along every relevant domain Harvard can muster. Axes of diversity go into their rankings within some of those metrics, but while their numbers may not match up to what you or I would rank as "best" or "worst", they are very much trying to select, and justify their selection as, the best.
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
4mo ago
I think the two are inherently connected in important ways—that a world where people share more of Singer’s ideals is one where they share more of his behavior as well. For an ethicist, their life is and must be their message. We all know about the sexual misadventures of Mohammed and Joseph Smith. Secular ethicists, too, must be judged by more than simply their abstract ideas.
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
10mo ago
My impression is that there's little reason to contain culture war in specific. Other similar spaces I participate in (eg /r/blockedandreported) do just fine with a discussion thread for most topics and independent posts for particularly effortful or relevant commentary. I think it would make sense to preserve the culture war thread as it stands while allowing effortful posts touching on culture war topics to stand independently if the author wants to post them at the top level.
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
1yr ago
Okay, Hlynka, please tell us explicitly in what sense Steve Sailer believes in Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics.
He cannot and he will not; this is less charitable than I typically am, but from his treatises on this topic I get the sense that he hopes by force of repetition alone to cement a tendentious and sweeping thesis of why everyone who disagrees with him is aligned, no matter the level and incontrovertibility of evidence provided to the contrary. You are not wrong to correct him, but you will get nowhere in doing so.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
You posted somewhere else in the thread that the obvious core drive of a human is to escape death. I assure you, I find that statement as repugnant as you appear to find its opposite.
You're Christian, yes?
I find the Christian objection to transhumanist anti-death pushes fascinating, because "death" means such different things to Christians and atheists. To a Christian, there is no need to escape death on Earth, because Christ already overcame the bonds of death for us with the Resurrection, and we too will be resurrected and raised to a state of perfection if we hold firm. To seek to overcome death on Earth looks like pursuing a shallow, partial, impossible form of what is already granted free of cost to all of us. Christians have fulfilled this drive already in their minds. The rest of us, lacking such a perceptual safety net, do what we must.
This fundamental disconnect over what death is makes it complex to have a meaningful conversation about the nobility of pursuit of immortality between Christians and non-Christians, as the rest of us seek to build what you believe you already have.
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.
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