TracingWoodgrains
No bio...
User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
5mo 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
5mo 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
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
9mo 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
Honestly, talk to @KulakRevolt. You can aspire to be a scene player fitting into one of the silos, or you can just do interesting enough things that you catch the attention of a lot of silos and build your own specific audience, cross-promoting and jumping between scenes as you see fit. Kulak twittermaxxed and grabbed the attention of everyone from Scott Alexander and Tyler Cowen to Scott Adams and Jordan Peterson in short order. By the time you're at the stage where people tweet about you being a homosexual crypto-Jew, you've already won. If they care enough to slot you into a role in their mind, they care enough to pay attention when the people they like notice something you say. Let them tweet. The people they read will still link you whenever you say interesting enough things about the things they care about.
I dunno. I think basically anyone honest will alienate large swathes of people in their natural circles at times, but that's when you find out which ones are interesting and which are simply tiresome. Heaven knows I've done and said enough to alienate plenty, and as my profile grows I can't imagine that pace of alienation will slow down, but you don't want to be an ideological foot soldier, and interesting people don't want to hear only from ideological foot soldiers.
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.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Not only is this fourthhand (Joseph => John Taylor => George Q Cannon => us and the council), but it directly contradicts some of Smith's other actions and contemporary church doctrine.
Like I said, my point in mentioning it was not to present it as evidence for Smith's actual actions and beliefs, but to indicate how church leaders thought about the doctrine at the time.
It's easy in retrospect to conclude that the doctrines weren't actually as serious as they appeared, but the argument proves too much. While the ordinance/priesthood ban was in place, everyone understood the scriptural basis—including McKay:
“I know of no scriptural basis for denying the Priesthood to Negroes other than one verse in the Book of Abraham (1:26); however, I believe, as you suggest, that the real reason dates back to our pre-existent life” (The Church and the Negro, 91)
It was referenced regularly by LDS apostles and seventies in that context. From the 1948 Pearl of Great Price commentary:
“But the greatest curse of all that came upon Cain and his descendants was that they were “cursed as pertaining to the Priesthood,” that is, the entire lineage “could not have the right of Priesthood” (verses 26-27). From the foregoing scripture we learn that Ham, the son of Noah, preserved the curses of Cain in the land. Since Ham was a son of Noah, it is quite definite that he did not have a black skin and was not a descendant of Cain. But the scripture seems to indicate that the wife of Ham was a descendant of Cain and through her the curses were preserved (verses 21-25).
It was serious enough as doctrine that church leaders at the highest level were unified in reprimanding members like Nelson for considering interracial marriage or the notion of racial equality ("We should like to say this to you in all kindness and in all sincerity that you are too fine a man to permit yourself to be led off from the principles of the Gospel by worldly learning. You have too much of a potentiality for doing good and we therefore prayerfully hope that you can reorient your thinking and bring it in line with the revealed word of God.")
As social and political pressures mounted, as with polygamy, the leaders saw increasing reason to reexamine their views and shift doctrine. But it was a shift: it wasn't a sudden discovery that the view had no scriptural basis and that it was simple policy, but a gradual change of rhetoric and emphasis that culminated in the reversal of what had been seen as firm doctrine "never questioned by any of the Church leaders [...] from the days of the Prophet Joseph." The task was not to educate church leaders on their own doctrine but to build a new doctrinal framework that allowed something that had been overwhelmingly seen as repugnant, but which society's views were rapidly shifting on, to be overturned. The 1954 committee, 1965 shift in Brazil, and 1969 statement were all part of this gradual process of framework-building.
It's not my business anymore what the LDS church does with homosexuality. I recognized no personal interest in men at any point while I believed, and during that time I supported its stance on the matter and saw an unambiguous difference between the overturn of the temple/priesthood ban + intermarriage revulsion for black people and a theoretical reversal of doctrine on gay marriage. Now, from an outside view, I find the difference less persuasive. I wouldn't say it's probable, exactly, but it seems wholly plausible to me that as the views of members change and as social pressure mounts, a gradual work of framework-building will begin that culminates in a situation where something like... was it Tom Christofferson who tried to theorize that gay people might enter the second degree of glory in the Celestial kingdom? Where something like that becomes consensus.
This will only be intensified by the growth of new technologies like IVG, with potential to allow gay couples to have natal offspring. LDS theology as it stands is poorly equipped to handle the prospect of a child who genetically has two fathers or two mothers. In the past, as social views have shifted and new technology has entered the arena, the faith has gradually shifted. Changes in the rhetoric and understood etiology around homosexuality have shifted from the unambiguous and harsh language of Kimball and Packer in the 70s and 80s to more cautious and conciliatory words from modern leaders. I have no idea where it will end, and like I said, it's not my business. But the priesthood/temple/intermarriage change was a serious doctrinal shift that had cautious groundwork laid for it over the course of more than thirty years, and the church has taken that approach enough that I don't discount the possibility that it will happen again.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
I am, but when I was on the dating market I was still trying to figure out whether I should try to make it work with women, so I was dating both men and women pretty actively.
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
1yr ago
Yeah. His description was a bit odd ("I found an image online of a survey in which SlateStarCodex fans rated various things"), so it's hard to tell just what sort of proximity we're looking at, but definitely some sort of Motte-adjacency.
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
I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do take issue with that article being labeled as sneering. I presented an ongoing story while taking pains to avoid unnecessary potshots at the guy at the center of it. His behavior was bad in a way enabled by current culture, but by no means a pathology unique to progressive culture.
I emphasize this because I think it's worth distinguishing between sneering (overt mockery of opponents) and other sorts of criticism or negative coverage.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo 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
4mo 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.
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
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
10mo ago
It’s mostly my fault, alas—she’s a private person who was understandably a bit overwhelmed by the flood of attention the post drew. I’m hoping she’ll be comfortable republishing the info in yet more anonymized fashion somewhere later, since it was a fantastic and useful post, but for now it’s down.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
The author deleted the page, unfortunately.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
Yeah, one of my friends with absolute pitch reports the same thing—but relative pitch really is an incredibly useful skill for music, and the former entails the latter. I think those who have it and dismiss it often do so in comparison to “a generally good musical ear” and not something like my own near-tone-deafness and total inability to carry a tune when singing without accompaniment (this despite training early-ish on piano and becoming quite competent at it).
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Well, of course everybody wants that.
I feel like you're reading my comment as saying "I, uniquely, want a values-driven society, and cruel people like you prevent that."
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the rubber meets the road with values differences at some points, and that's where the culture war becomes most complex and most serious. It goes without saying that I believe my values are correct. They are, after all, my values. Others disagree with them, and the truce of liberalism is the most stable way I've seen to deal with those clashes up to this point, but the culture war stops being an abstract chat when your decisions cross someone else's line in the sand or vice versa. I condemn or criticize some choices. Some condemn or criticize my own. I have strong feelings about who is right and who is wrong in most culture war conflicts, but the stakes are high for everybody. At some point, conflicts or no, people decide what sort of life they want to live and find allies where they can. The value I have chosen to make my own stand on here is that bringing people into the world, becoming a parent, and working to raise children well is a good that should be pursued even as circumstances fall short of the most ideal.
The resentment you describe is understandable but a bit peculiar. There was no slippery slope from gay marriage to surrogacy. Gestational surrogacy has been legal in (most of) the United States since long before gay marriage was allowed. There was no carve-out in the push for legal marriage saying "we want to have all the legal rights straight married couples do, except for the option to pursue already legal surrogacy options". Marriage and surrogacy aren't even directly connected, except for questions like who the parents listed on birth certificates are: single men can pursue surrogacy, just like single women can find sperm donors.
Not to lean too much into the villain role in your story, but... what did you think was going to happen? Did you think all gay men who wanted to get married simply saw marriage in the shallower modern "if two people love each other very much..." light and not as the best option for stable, happy family formation and child-rearing? Did you see the collection of legal rights attached to marriage, routes to adoption and surrogacy that straight couples were already using, and assume gay people were simply uninterested; were you treating the idea as primarily symbolic rather than a specific legal change that would open up specific doors for people?
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Disagree on magic words. The magic words are “Anyway, you seem chill. Want to grab a coffee?” or something very similar, within the first three or four texts. No point beating around the bush until a text conversation dies, and I think a lot of people are looking for the few magical connections via text rather than treating it as the minimal filter it should be. Just provide a safe, low-commitment date option and most people who responded to your first couple of messages will shrug and go with it.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
For what it’s worth, I expect you and I can or could still have plenty of good conversations—but when people tell me they don’t want to share a society with me, I take seriously the need to build alternate spaces alongside those who do.
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
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.
Why would I? That tension between his present and his past, and my conflicted thoughts about it, is core to the reason we thought it would be interesting to do a podcast in the first place. We chatted in advance as well and covered some of the same ground; he came in fully aware that it could get combative and was not just amenable to that approach but actively interested in it. Masking my own sentiment towards the alt-right would be a disservice both to him and to listeners. When we moved past that part, I went back to engaging in a milder, more deliberate way, but both have their place.
Walt doesn't praise Hitler, but analogies are just that: analogies. I absolutely would push soft democratic socialists who had histories full of guillotine memes and so forth on those topics in very much the same tone I was pushing Walt. In his own writing, he makes the explicit comparison between himself and liberals who had communist phases, so it's worth exploring that comparison on its own terms.
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