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TracingWoodgrains


				

				

				
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User ID: 103

TracingWoodgrains


				
				
				

				
16 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:22:43 UTC

					

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User ID: 103

I appreciate the apology. I have always been upfront about precisely who I am.

Now featuring a semi-interactive version of the quiz itself.

Thanks for posting this here, by the way! I've, uh, had my hands full with a few things.

This is a dead thread months later, but here. Incident reports and shoplifting records from retail firms paint a clear picture.

The Republican Party is doomed.

I don't mean they'll lose every election moving forward. My case, rather, is this: they know exactly what they want someone to do, but in an increasing number of institutions, there is no one left to do it. Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation. The near-term future is already written.

The demands of a two-party system mean each party will typically adjust over time to capture, if not 50% of the electorate, at least enough to remain meaningfully competitive. There is no reason to expect that to change. Republicans are electorally competitive and will likely remain so, particularly given their advantage in rural areas with greater Senate representation. People zero in on that, but electoral politics is a small part of governance writ large.

I am one of the most conservative students at my law school. More specifically: I, a gay, centrist Biden voter, am one of the most conservative students at my law school. The Federalist Society here is anemic and widely derided, while there's a dizzying array of progressive organizations. The professors and administrators are, if anything, even more progressive. My school is in no sense an outlier in this regard, nor is this specific to law. The same patterns are overwhelmingly visible in every group of educated, young professionals. Bloomberg documents how donations skew progressive in virtually every field.

People want to say young and educated people have always leaned left, but that simply is not true. Not like this. The leftward skew is a recent, and accelerating, phenomenon. Democrats have gained more and more ground among young and educated people alike, and the rightward shift people are used to seeing just isn't happening as it did before. Among young, educated professionals, the salient political divide is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, but between liberals and various stripes of socialists. The New York Times and Financial Times document the way long-standing patterns have shifted.

What's the conservative coalition? Truckers, farmers, business owners, construction workers. Don't get me wrong: these are useful, socially valuable, necessary professions. But they have nothing to do with the day-to-day of governance on the ground. About the only governance-related profession they remain influential in is the police force, which tells you all you need to know about the current reputation of the police force among educated, young professionals.

This means that, for the medium-term future, Republicans are dealing with a coalition of the high and low against the middle when it comes to politics. They authentically represent, to one degree or another, somewhere near half of the country. They have representation at the highest levels of government, controlling the Supreme Court, maintaining razor-thin margins in the House and Senate, and remaining competitive within Presidential races. But because their voters are increasingly old, rural, and less educated, they lack all but the slightest foothold in the great majority of institutions run by and filled with young, educated professionals: that is to say, the great bulk of institutions involved in the day to day of governance.

The field of education provides a good case study as to how this plays out. Educators are overwhelmingly progressive in their inclinations. Left to their own devices, they will take a policy and curricular stance broadly in line with progressive sensibilities. Teacher's unions are unambiguously and emphatically against the Republican Party. Conservatives like to emphasize school choice, pointing to charter and private schools as potential alternatives, but even there, the great bulk of educators are politically liberal. Eva Moskowitz, founder of high-achieving charter school system Success Academy, champion of school choice advocacy, and a model of what conservatives point to as an ideal in education, is a registered Democrat.

The most successful recent conservative education advocacy movement, Moms for Liberty, tells you all you need to know in its name: it is a movement not of educators or of students, but of parents looking from the outside at a system that broadly opposes their values. Florida politicians have spent enormous political capital to pull a single, tiny liberal arts college towards a conservative ethos.

Here's the problem: by the time you're trying to legislate every one of your preferences, resisted at every level by the people put in place to enact those preferences, you've already lost. Republicans want people who want to enact their values. What they've got is equal representation in the part of the government that can swing a big stick around trying desperately to corral a group where even the educators supported by their policies are likely to want nothing to do with them.

What of the rising stars in each political party? For the Democrats, you have Pete Buttigieg: working within the institutions at every step, from Ivy League to consulting to military to local governance and smoothly into high-level tasks within his own party, focused on technocratic proposals dependent on high state capacity. For the Republicans, there's Vivek Ramaswamy: downplaying his past within those same institutions, rising to incredible wealth via private enterprise, smashing into the scene of his own party as an outsider obviously loathed by those who have spent their lifetimes within it, focused on a libertarian "burn it down" ethos. To be a popular Republican in the Trump era, you almost need to be an outsider promising to tear the government to pieces. Image

Conservatives right now are desperate for public intellectuals who reflect their values. As soon as a conservative-coded intellectual shows a modicum of talent or originality, they skyrocket into prominence. Jordan Peterson spent a career in obscurity in academia before a fight over pronouns launched him into an enormous platform with millions of followers. Chris Rufo became one of the leaders of the conservative movement in moments after speaking cogently about critical race theory. Richard Hanania, despite constantly telling conservatives how stupid and ineffectual he thinks they are, has gained a massive conservative fanbase by virtue of being able to argue coherently for some of their values.

Perhaps most telling is the example of Aaron Sibarium, recently profiled for Politico: perhaps the most prominent conservative investigative reporter today, a secular Jew who voted for Clinton and Biden but, because he opposes social justice progressivism, has sauntered into the wide-open niche of investigative journalism from a conservative point of view. Why is he filling that role so effectively? Simple: there was nobody else to do so.

On a smaller scale, even a few tweets that capture the conservative zeitgeist can shoot someone into the public eye overnight, as Darryl Cooper (MartyrMade) discovered when an articulate defense of the 'stolen election' feeling took him from 7000 Twitter followers one day to 55000 three days later, or our own @KulakRevolt found as he went from no public presence to being the rising voice of the burn-it-down ethos in a matter of a few months of well-written diatribes. Costin Alamariu launched an obscure work of academic philosophy to the top of the Amazon charts off the strength of an absurdist right-wing pseudonymous persona. Ask any of them what they think of the institutional Republican Party sometime.

Conservatives are so desperate for a shred of cultural influence that they turn people like Oliver Anthony (“Rich Men North of Richmond”) into overnight sensations, only to learn that they, too, have nothing but scorn for the Republican Party.

Put simply: right now, at the nuts and bolts of governance, the Republican Party has a much shorter bench of talent than the Democratic Party. Even conservative intellectuals are trained in overwhelmingly progressive institutions. This affects every level of politics, but since it doesn't necessarily harm them electorally, there's no incentive to course-correct at the level of electoral politics. Quite the opposite, in fact: every single Republican politician, and every single conservative influencer, benefits individually from their coalition’s weakness among young, educated professionals. In many ways, they’re living the dream: massive audiences hungry for competence with little competition fighting to provide that competence in any given field.

Some want to frame it as institutional capture, a battle against the ruling elite, that could be corrected if the right people are in charge. Is there some of that? Sure. But at most institutions, it's a simple function of the politics of the people seeking those institutions out. My law school is not overwhelmingly progressive because the Powers That Be want it to be progressive. It's overwhelmingly progressive because progressives showed up. You can only stretch the word "elite" so far, and by the time you get down to schoolteachers, you've stretched it past the breaking point.

Conservatives, to be clear, aren't going anywhere, nor is the growing dissident right movement. But even when Republicans win electoral power, they lack the human capital at all levels of governance to accomplish what they really want with it. Under Republican rule, half of top government officials work to enact the approximate will of slightly less than half of Americans while virtually every educated, young professional anywhere near politics resists any way they can. Only a few have even the vision of changing this by re-entering those institutions, with most seeing no recourse beyond slowly fading or burning every institution to the ground.

The Republican Party will remain visible. It may even continue to win elections. But at the basic tasks of governance and defining culture at all levels, its death warrant has already been signed. The Republican Party is doomed.

(Also posted to Substack)


While I prepared this post for a general audience, I have a few more Motte-specific thoughts. At this point, I think the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that, whatever else this space is and has been, it is one of vanishingly few incubators for intellectually rigorous thinkers with sympathy towards one shade or another of conservatism. Kulak is one of the most prominent examples, but far from the only one who has an impact far beyond these quiet circles.

After I Tweeted out an initial version of this post, a high-level Republican official contacted me about it, broadly agreeing with the thesis while pointing out that parties are composed, broadly speaking, of those who show up. In his words, a political party is an entity that exists solely to conduct elections, and things can change in a hurry depending on who shows up. Speaking in general terms, he's part of the Thiel-adjacent set. He made the case that there is a lot of room, given the short bench, for people outside the traditional, highly polished, consultant-safe pathways to have a real impact on things, which in some ways can be turned to the good.

I don't have any sort of call to action here, for myself or others, but I think it's worth having a clear-eyed view of the political dynamics in play.

In the Google Drive folder, I shout at people to install RECAP. I went with the first guy who had PACER access, a stranger to me, trying to get into the story as quickly as possible.

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.

In news that went mostly unnoticed at the time but has since picked up some steam, Peter Singer was sued pro se by a woman who alleged they had an affair twenty years ago and that he's had affairs with many other women, including many co-authors, over his career. Her lawsuit was pretty transparently weak due to statute of limitations issues and the affair being consensual--the "damages" she claimed were the loss of the house her ex-fiance bought as he was breaking up with her due to the affair--but the claims in it are nothing short of a terrible look for Singer: propositioning and sleeping with married and unmarried women in his field over a long period of time, giving career benefits (eg coauthorship) to affair partners, misrepresenting himself as having a "Don't ask, don't tell" arrangement with his wife and lying to affair partners about having multiple simultaneous affairs, and more. It was dismissed after a demurrer claiming no actionable claims was granted: that is, no facts were actually discovered or litigated.

In terms of hard evidence, she included several emails between Singer and her in the filing, one of which included him confessing to her that he had multiple other apparent affair partners. They collaborated on at least four op-eds during the affair or its immediate aftermath, and she contributed a chapter to a book he wrote, so it does appear that her portrayal of career benefits for affair partners has some substance.

I read the court filings and have contacted the parties involved; I'm working on a more detailed article about the whole thing. If you'd like to see the court files yourself, the relevant court is here. Search for case number 22CV01792. The accuser also wrote a shorter essay about it on her website.

While she should not be viewed as a fully reliable narrator, the evidence suggests the truth of her claims that they had an affair, that he admitted to her he was having other affairs, and that she got career benefits from the affair. It's a bit mysterious to me that nobody has touched the story, but at least until a somewhat obscure December YouTube video, about the only place I can find the allegations having been discussed is a quiet EA forum thread.

It caught my attention because of that lack of attention despite its clear newsworthiness. It's the sort of thing I think is easy, but incorrect, to dismiss as mere gossip: Peter Singer is one of the leading ethicists of our time, and I believe his behavior follows from his ethics in visible, important ways. More specifically, I think classical utilitarianism as a whole suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near in ways that this sort of misconduct highlights.

I don't think it's the sort of thing that should, or will, define Singer. I do, however, think that it's the sort of thing that should be part of his life story and so far has conspicuously not been.

Three months ago, LessWrong admin Ben Pace wrote a long thread on the EA forums: Sharing Info About Nonlinear, in which he shared the stories of two former employees in an EA startup who had bad experiences and left determined to warn others about the company. The startup is an "AI x-risk incubator," which in practice seems to look like a few people traveling around exotic locations, connecting with other effective altruists, and brainstorming new ways to save the world from AI. Very EA. The post contains wide-ranging allegations of misconduct mostly centering around their treatment of two employees they hired who started traveling with them, ultimately concluding that "if Nonlinear does more hiring in the EA ecosystem it is more-likely-than-not to chew up and spit out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world."

He, and it seems to some extent fellow admin Oliver Habryka, mentioned they spent hundreds of hours interviewing dozens of people over the course of six months to pull the article together, ultimately paying the two main sources $5000 each for their trouble. It made huge waves in the EA community, torching Nonlinear's reputation.

A few days ago, Nonlinear responded with a wide-ranging tome of a post, 15000 words in the main post with a 134-page appendix. I had never heard of either Lightcone (the organization behind the callout post) or Nonlinear before a few days ago, since I don't pay incredibly close attention to the EA sphere, but the response bubbled up into my sphere of awareness.

The response provides concrete evidence in the form of contemporary screenshots against some of the most damning-sounding claims in the original article:

  • accusations that when one employee, "Alice", was sick with COVID in a foreign country and nobody would get her vegan food so she barely ate for two days turned into "There was vegan food in the house and they picked food up for her, but on one of the days they wanted to go to a Mexican place instead of getting a vegan burger from Burger King."

  • accusations that they promised another, "Chloe", compensation around $75,000 and stiffed her on it in various ways turned into "She had a written contract to be paid $1000/monthly with all expenses covered, which we estimated would add up to around $70,000."

  • accusations that they asked Alice to "bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border" turned into "They asked Alice, who regularly traveled with LSD and marijuana of her own accord, to pick up ADHD medicine and antibiotics at a pharmacy. When she told them the meds still required a prescription in Mexico, they said not to worry about it."

The narrative the Nonlinear team presents is of one employee with mental health issues and a long history of making accusations against the people around her came on board, lost trust in them due to a series of broadly imagined slights, and ultimately left and spread provable lies against them, while another who was hired to be an assistant was never quite satisfied with being an assistant and left frustrated as a result.

As amusing a collective picture as these events paint about what daily life at the startup actually looked like, they also made it pretty clear that the original article had multiple demonstrable falsehoods in it, in and around unrebutted claims. More, they emphasized that they'd been given only a few days to respond to claims before publication, and when they asked for a week to compile hard evidence against falsehoods, the writers told them it would come out on schedule no matter what. Spencer Greenberg, the day before publication, warned them of a number of misrepresentations in the article and sent them screenshots correcting the vegan portion; they corrected some misrepresentations but by the time he sent the screenshots said it was too late to change anything.

That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?

From a long conversation with Habryka, my impression is that a lot of EA community members were left scarred and paranoid after the FTX implosion, correcting towards "We must identify and share any early warning signs possible to prevent another FTX." More directly, he told me that he wasn't too concerned with whether they shared falsehoods originally so long as they were airing out the claims of their sources and making their level of epistemic confidence clear. In particular, the organization threatened a libel suit shortly before publication, which they took as a threat of retaliation that meant they should and must hold to their original release schedule.

My own impression is that this is a case of rationalist first-principles thinking gone awry and applied to a domain where it can do real damage. Journalism doesn't have the greatest reputation these days and for good reason, but his approach contrasts starkly with its aspiration to heavily prioritize accuracy and verify information before releasing it. I mention this not to claim that they do so successfully, but because his approach is a conscious deviation from that, an assertion that if something is important enough it's worth airing allegations without closely examining contrary information other sources are asking you to pause and examine.

I'd like to write more about the situation at some point, because I have a lot to say about it even beyond the flood of comments I left on the LessWrong and EA mirrors of the article and think it presses at some important tension points. It's a bit discouraging to watch communities who try so hard to be good from first principles speedrun so many of the pitfalls broader society built guardrails around.

New from me - Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong, a deep dive into the sequence of events I summarized here last week. It's much longer than my typical article and difficult to properly condense. Normally I would summarize things, but since I summarized events last time, I'll simply excerpt the beginning:

Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek's Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they'd heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase "HBD" is muttered, but it's nobody's birthday.

A few days before publication, they present key claims to the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), who furiously tell them that many of the claims are provably false and ask for a brief delay to demonstrate the falsehood of those claims, though their principles compel them to avoid threatening any form of legal action. The Times unconditionally refuses, claiming it must meet a hard deadline. The day before publication, Scott Alexander gets his hands on a copy of the article and informs the Times that it's full of provable falsehoods. They correct one of his claims, but tell him it's too late to fix another.

The final article comes out. It states openly that it's not aiming to be a balanced view, but to provide a deep dive into the worst of EA so people can judge for themselves. It contains lurid and alarming claims about Effective Altruists, paired with a section of responses based on its conversation with EA that it says provides a view of the EA perspective that CEA agreed was a good summary. In the end, it warns people that EA is a destructive movement likely to chew up and spit out young people hoping to do good.

In the comments, the overwhelming majority of readers thank it for providing such thorough journalism. Readers broadly agree that waiting to review CEA's further claims was clearly unnecessary. David Gerard pops in to provide more harrowing stories. Scott gets a polite but skeptical hearing out as he shares his story of what happened, and one enterprising EA shares hard evidence of one error in the article to a mixed and mostly hostile audience. A few weeks later, the article writer pens a triumphant follow-up about how well the whole process went and offers to do similar work for a high price in the future.

This is not an essay about the New York Times.

The rationalist and EA communities tend to feel a certain way about the New York Times. Adamantly a certain way. Emphatically a certain way, even. I can't say my sentiment is terribly different—in fact, even when I have positive things to say about the New York Times, Scott has a way of saying them more elegantly, as in The Media Very Rarely Lies.

That essay segues neatly into my next statement, one I never imagined I would make:

You are very very lucky the New York Times does not cover you the way you cover you.

[...]

I follow drama and blow-ups in a lot of different subcultures. It's my job. The response I saw from the EA and LessWrong communities to [the] article was thoroughly ordinary as far as subculture pile-ons go, even commendable in ways. Here's the trouble: the ways it was ordinary are the ways it aspires to be extraordinary, and as the community walked headlong into every pitfall of rumormongering and dogpiles, it did so while explaining at every step how reasonable, charitable, and prudent it was in doing so.

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.

At least the callout post came with testimony from people who had actually worked at Nonlinear. It had quotes and screenshots and other forms of evidence of the kind that convince us of many things every day. It turns out these statements did not reflect reality and the screenshots were carefully curated to present a particular narrative. This is a risk we run any time we trust someone's testimony about a situation we don't have first hand experience with. This is an ordinary, and probably unavoidable, epistemic failure mode.

Not good enough.

Yes, the callout post came with all of those things. Here's what else it came with:

  • An emphatic warning from a trusted community member that he had reviewed the draft the day before publication and warned of major inaccuracies, only one of which got corrected.

  • The subjects of the post claiming hard evidence that many of the claims in the post were outright false and begging for a week to compile and send that evidence while emphasizing that they'd had only three hours to respond to claims that took hundreds of hours to compile.

  • A notice at the top, treated as exculpatory rather than damning, that it would be a one-sided post brought about by a search for negative information.

Any one of those things, by itself, was a glaring red flag. All three of them put together leave absolutely no excuse for the post to have been released in the state it was in, or for an entire community that prides itself on healthy epistemics to treat it as damning evidence of wrongdoing. If it had been published in the New York Times rather than the effective altruism community, every single rationalist would—rightly—be cursing the name of the news outlet that decided to post such a piece.

This is ordinary in Tumblr fandoms. It's ordinary in tabloids. It's jarring and inexcusable to see the same behavior dressed up in Reasonable, Rational, Sensible language and cheered by a community that prides itself on having better discourse and a more truth-seeking standard than others.

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.

I have no idea who Walter Block is without looking him up. Singer is one of a small handful of living philosophers to make it into standard intro to philosophy courses. He is the only living person in the lede of Wikipedia’s article on utilitarianism and is, I would guess, virtually universally considered the greatest living utilitarian. He’s made Time top 100 lists and received a long list of public honors.

By any measure, he is one of the most influential ethicists of all time, certainly one of the most influential living ones. Few people’s ideas have shaped and shifted the public idea of morality as his have. He is almost singularly influential in his field.

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:

  1. 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.

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.

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.

New from me: When "Punch a Nazi" Goes Wrong, a deep dive into a recent viral altercation between furries on a beach where one hit another over the head with a megaphone. In the immediate aftermath, the bulk of reactions were people celebrating it as a justified case of punching Nazis. The event first drew my attention due to my distaste to people celebrating political violence, no matter the target, then continued drawing me in as I realized how warped the initial story had been and how unlikely it was that anyone else would see a reason to get a clearer picture. I spent a couple of weeks interviewing everyone I could get in touch with who had some connection to the conflict, poking around and trying to construct a full picture of what happened.

Normally I would excerpt a chunk of my post here, but this one is long and not particularly well suited to excerpting, so I'll summarize instead.

I went in assuming that the victim was some variety of conservative, warped by the standard methods to "Nazi", but the closer I looked into it, the more I realized that not even that was true. When I spoke with the victim, he described himself as a "Bernie Sanders democratic socialist," and he had the social media presence to back it up, not to mention the shirt he was wearing at the time of the assault (covered in the full array of wine-mom-liberal slogans: "Science is real", "Black lives matter", so forth).

The full story is tragicomic, an initially petty dispute given meaning over the years by the participants working to frame it as a grand political struggle. The original cause of the "Nazi" allegations was the behavior of the victim's boyfriend, who, while having similar political leanings to the victim himself, had roleplayed as a Nazi furry in the video game Garry's mod half a decade ago. This, and a couple of other vague allegations, were enough to turn a personal disagreement into a half-decade-long mission to smear his name in public and private wherever he tried to go within his community. The dispute intensified after a disagreement about responsible Covid precautions at meetups (to wit: would a voluntary, masked, outdoor meetup in 2021 kill people?), ultimately escalating to threats of lawsuits, deep mutual acrimony, and eventually this assault.

Ironically, if the victim and his boyfriend had been the far-right figures they stood accused of being, they'd be in a much better position to weather the whole controversy, with sympathetic allies to spread a counter-narrative, presenting them as martyrs and providing a community to retreat back into. Part of the tragedy of the whole sequence is that the ostracization was so effective only because the two of them were inches away culturally and politically from the leftists celebrating the assault (different primarily, as one mentioned sardonically in a message to me, in not believing random people should be assaulted for political reasons).

There's a certain futility to writing something like this. It's unlikely to reach the core audience who would need to accept it to make a meaningful difference in the ingroup reputation of the victim. Narratives have a way of reinforcing themselves, and when I reached out to writers spreading the Nazi allegations with some authority, they found excuses for every piece of evidence that suggested something more complex was in play. I can only address a crowd of uninvolved onlookers predisposed to agree with me on the material issues at hand. I felt compelled to write about it, though—both because the event is a microcosm of a lot of current cultural trends, a reminder of how destructive personal disputes become when they become charged with the sense of righteous political struggle, and because it was the sort of story big enough to permanently ruin the victim's reputation in his own community and small enough that nobody else would bother to tell his story. If someone's going to become an outcast from a community of outcasts, they deserve that much.

Full article here.

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.

Very well put, and neatly in line (down to mentioning Jane Street) with a recent thought of mine:

smart, rational, capable, serious people shuffle into Jane Street and Silicon Valley and rationally, sensibly make millions of dollars. But they abdicate the role of culture-shaping to teenagers on Tumblr and TikTok. Many sane individuals exist in an insane culture, but deep-lying incentives point them away from building culture—and then they find themselves tossed about by the cultural and political forces they neglect.

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.

I wrote a rather long post on my reflections in the wake of affirmative action, detailing why I'm mostly ambivalent about its end and what I see as the core problem with college admissions. One section is mirrored/excerpted below:


[...] hearing some prestige university arguments for affirmative action in non-technical positions, I find myself almost persuaded.

Almost. And then I see the chart that gives the game away, the chart that should be seared into the mind of every observer to the affirmative action debate: the Asian Discrimination Chart.

Why, if the goal was to ensure representation of vulnerable or historically discriminated against populations—why precisely did Harvard and other top universities use "holistic" factors to ensure Asian Americans had to climb a steeper objective hill not just than under-represented minority students, but than all others?

Well, just what sort of business do you think Harvard is in?

Harvard's Business

You don't get to be in the position Harvard is without understanding certain games on a deep institutional level, without playing them better than all others. Harvard is no mere technical school, seeking to train domain experts in rigorous ways. No. It's an Ivy League School, and more than that, it's Harvard. Its mission is not to find the best, but to define the best. And with all due respect to Yale and new upstart Stanford, it's been the best in that business since before the founding of the United States.

Harvard students, put simply, are better than you. This isn't me saying this, mind: it's the whole holistic edifice of university admissions and university rankings, the Supreme Court and the halls of Congress, really every prestige institution in the country. Ask McKinsey or Deloitte if you need convincing. Check where your professors went to school. Run up to a random passerby on the street and see what they think of a Harvard degree. Like it or not, it's a near-universal symbol of competence.

Some are better than you because of their heritage, some because of their wealth, some because of their connections. Some, in part, because of their race: you cannot maintain credible elite institutions with few black people sixty years after the civil rights movement. And, yes, some because of their academics, their intelligence and their work ethic. What sort of elite would it be, after all, if it did not pay lip service to the ideal of meritocracy that inspires so many of the hoi polloi, did not reassure them that academic skill, too, would be counted among its holistic ranking? Most, to be clear, have a combination of the above, a mix precisely in line with Harvard's dreams. Admit just the right set to render your institution legitimate as the elite.

I've met many Harvard students by now, and to be frank, it was almost always clear quite rapidly why they were attending Harvard while I was not. I'll give their admissions team this: they're good at their jobs. It's comforting to imagine some sort of cosmic balancing, where aptitude in one domain is balanced by struggle in another, but Nature is crueller than that. I won't claim every Harvard student is peerless. But they are, by and large, an extraordinarily impressive group of young people, by any measure. That's what happens when you spend several centuries building a reputation as the best of the best. It is a true signal of excellence, one that any individual, rational, ambitious actor should pursue.

For twelve years, every student in the country toils away in a system shouting egalitarianism at every turn. Look at policy priorities and school budgets and you'll see it: an earmark for the disadvantaged here, a special program there, an outpouring of funding for special education in this district, and of course classroom after classroom where teachers patiently work with the students who just need a bit of extra help.

Then comes admissions season, and with a wink and a nod, the system strips away the whole veneer and asks, "So, just how well did you play the game? ...you were aware you were playing the game, yes?"

Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst. Not just the most capable academics, mind: are you telling me you want a campus full of nerds? Please. Leave that to MIT and Caltech.

I don't want to be reduced to just a number, you say. Very well, Harvard responds, we will judge the whole of you and find you wanting. Is that better?

Let us return to the question, then: why does Harvard discriminate against Asians?

Set aside every bit of high-minded rhetoric, even understanding that most who give noble justifications have convinced themselves of those justifications. Set aside every bit of idealism, even understanding that most at every level of education are indeed idealists. Harvard discriminates against Asians because it is not just an elite school, but the elite school, and Asians are simply not elite enough.

I try to be cautious in using the phrase "systemic racism"—I find it often abused past the breaking point. But as I've said in terser form before, if you want a pure example of the term, and a pure demonstration of just what game Harvard is playing, look no further than its treatment of Asian Americans. Elite values—the true values underlying an institution like Harvard—are never fully legible and never fully set. In easy cases, they align with the values trumpeted on the surface: we value intelligence, we value hard work, we want to give everyone an equal shot.

One problem: Asian Americans came along and took those values a bit too seriously. They started gaming the system by taking it earnestly at face value and working to align with explicit institutional values. But admit too many, and the delicate balance is upset, the beating heart of elite culture animating the whole project disrupted. Academics-focused students, after all, lack social development and, as Harvard infamously argued in the case, simply have bad personalities.

Harvard's been around long enough to have played this game a few times before. When a new group gets too good at understanding and pursuing the explicit values it uses to grant its project the veneer of legitimacy, it smiles, thanks them for their applications, and then changes its process.

As sociologist Jerome Karabel documents, this is in fact the original inspiration for holistic admissions. From The New Yorker:

The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.” [...] Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit.

As public values change, the conception of "elite" changes with them. Harvard and its co-luminaries do not quarrel with each change in turn. They simply adopt them, embrace them, and embody them. In the '50s and '60s, this meant (again per the above New Yorker article) Yale accepting a mediocre academic who seemed like "more of a guy" than his competitors, proudly noting the proportion of six-footers, and watching out for troubling homosexual tendencies. In the 1980s, it meant disapproving notes from Harvard admissions about "shyness," a student seeming "a tad frothy," and one poor soul who was "short with big ears."

In 2023, it means hyperfocusing on one particular, often self-contradictory, frame of Diversity, on preaching ideals of egalitarianism, social justice, and inclusivity quite at odds with its pedigree. And yes, it means that Asians have stellar academics and extracurriculars but, alas, inviting too many would wreck the vibe.

What galls about this all—and look, how could it not?—what galls is the hypocrisy. What galls is watching some of the most elitist and exclusive institutions in the country preach inclusiveness while closing their doors to all but a minute fraction of those who apply, preach egalitarianism while serving as the finishing schools of the most privileged.

If the leaders of Harvard and Yale truly believed in the values they espouse, they would tear their schools to the ground, stone by stone, brick by brick. If the administrators and student body truly, in their heart of hearts, believed in a philosophy of egalitarian inclusiveness rather than the image of themselves as the deserving elite, nothing would be left of either by tomorrow morning.


In the other sections, I focus on a comparison to the Navy Seals (flat admission standards & high-attrition pipeline vs opaque standards where admission itself is the prize and graduating is trivial), examine my personal experience with the whole thing, and cover why I'm skeptical the AA ban will change much in a practical sense.

Yeah, I'm working on an article about it, but this is the most thorough account I think I've given so far. Copied for convenience:

Different people have different reactions to strict religious environments. I was a serious, religiously scrupulous kid who took my faith's commandments very seriously. I was also always a bit odd. Mormons have a strict prohibition against pornography, unmarried sex, or dating before 16 years old, something that extends to generally strict modesty standards and instructions not to look on women with lust more broadly.

I internalized those standards and, so far as I can tell, developed an instinctive disgust/irritation reaction to seeing women in any sort of immodest or 'sexy' settings: bikinis, billboard models, sex scenes or kissing in movies—everything intended to arouse, even tame stuff, was something to grimace and look away from. No dating, no relationships, no sex? Fine by me. I'd shove all that stuff into a corner and deal with it when I was an adult or something. This extended for me even to things like crude sex jokes from other guys, which bothered me in particular when they came from other Mormons—didn't they care? I valued modesty and chastity and was scrupulous in those values. Sexual things were threats and temptations. Noticing them with anything other than disgust was a personal failing.

But, well, I was still an adolescent boy, and hormones don't simply disappear when ignored. I took my faith's prohibitions seriously and rarely dug where I wasn't supposed to, but seem to have sublimated my romantic feelings into an interest in something safely outside the realm of the real. At some point, I wandered onto deviantArt, where I found a few extraordinary artists who portrayed the world of anthro animals in compelling, beautiful ways—see here or here for (safe) examples—and without being able to articulate why I was so fascinated by that world or was paying so close of attention to it, began to follow their work with interest. I've always loved nature and the sense of wildness; the artists I found excelled at capturing emotions close to my heart. Art (and I do mean art here, not as a euphemism) became a non-threatening, meaningful outlet for me to explore the idea of romance disconnected from the baggage, cruft, and uncertainty around a real world where I had internalized that I should clamp down on all feelings in that domain.

I'm not convinced that people are born with immutable romantic interests, but I am convinced that past adolescence, some stay more-or-less fixed. In my case, a strict upbringing that I took seriously, combined with the need for some sort of outlet and an insistence on staying glued to the computer when possible, meant that my own oddness was channeled and focused during a sensitive development period towards a deep-running interest in and appreciation for anthropomorphism, along with a conviction that I was asexual. I'm quite sure at this point that the interest is immutable, and I wouldn't change it—I remain mostly detached from the furry fandom for many obvious reasons, but I continue to love the impossible world I was so drawn to in adolescence, for all the same reasons.

I kept telling myself that romance would come later, that crushes and noticing interest in people and all the rest would be right around the corner, but as I got older and it kept not happening I started to seriously ask myself whether I was capable of being in love. In my early twenties, after I stepped away from Mormonism and let myself examine questions of romance in any way connected to the real without flinching away, I finally noticed a sense of romantic interest in people—men, that is—and was thoroughly relieved to learn I was normal enough to be able to fall in love. So then I started dating, met my now-husband, and lived happily ever after. The end.

In short, I see my interest as a sublimation of religious scrupulosity towards all things sexual, the result of being an odd person who took a strict environment seriously while having open access to outlets that eventually swept my pre-existing tendencies into a specific, peculiar cultural niche. I like to tell people, because I think it's true, that five hundred years ago I would have been a monk. But I grew up in the early 2000s, so I became a gay furry instead.

So it goes.

Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths remains the classic diagnosis of this.

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.