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New from me: Reliable Sources, investigating how longtime malicious critic of this community, RationalWiki sysadmin, and Wikipedia administrator David Gerard launders his grudges into the public record. The article is a bit of a labor of love: I'd been loosely familiar with him from his time in spaces critical of this forum, but I had no clue just how deep the rabbit hole went. For the past five years, he's been on a mission to slash-and-burn "unreliable sources" from Wikipedia, advocating for sites like PinkNews and HuffPost as reliable while pushing to make heterodox and right-wing sources impossible to cite.
Back in the day, Gerard was a surprisingly big fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky and a reasonably good-faith contributor on LessWrong who was alternately friendly and critical. At some point, though, coinciding with the 2012-2014 cultural schism that destroyed old internet culture, he turned more and more against it. After his longtime friend [Elizabeth] Sandifer got banned from Wikipedia for doxxing someone in the wake of Gerard's abusing mod tools to lock Chelsea Manning's article under her new name back in 2013, Gerard seems to have elected to abandon all pretense of good faith on Wikipedia, instead spending years shaping the LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, and other rationalist-adjacent pages to reflect any negative information he could.
In particular, he was directly responsible for more-or-less fabricating ties between LessWrong and neoreaction, going so far as to have his friend self-publish a book (Neoreaction: A Basilisk) that used him as a source for all claimed ties, finding a review of the book from another friend of hers, and sliding that review in as a citation to claim a tie between the two communities. He also fed as much negative info about Scott to the NYT's Cade Metz (an old rival of his) during that whole affair a few years back while repeatedly trying to doxx Scott on his Wikipedia page and editing the page to put the focus on the NYT affair and remove articles critical of the NYT. That behavior, in the end, got him banned from directly editing things related to Scott Alexander, but to this day he remains the primary contributor to e.g. the LessWrong Wikipedia article.
There's much more in the article. The man has thirty years of online history, from running an anti-scientology page on Julian Assange's server back in the day to hosting LemonParty to a whole lot more, and I was caught up by a mad impulse to document All Of It. It's almost impossible to explain this sort of context to uninvolved parties without, well, sitting down, trawling through hundreds of obscure pages, interviewing a bunch of people close to the events, and pulling three decades of online Lore into legible form, so that's what I did.
All the best.
Hey, quick question, do you still believe we should lie down and take a beating from your side, hoping that we don't die from it?
It's who whom the whole way down. Unless my memory fails me entirely, which it may, I can barely tell half of you semi-anonymous handles apart, TracingWoodgrains fed LibsOfTiktok false info once upon a time to in an effort to delegitimize her as well.
He did, and went to consider it justified, since the fake furry school worksheets included reference to My Little Pony, which, according to TW, LoTT should have spotted and should have tipped her off they are fake. To me a weak argument, since MLP isn't something people outside the very online niche are familiar with, and even if it is referenced it doesn't mean the worksheet is fake, since a teacher referencing some media for children, to make it more relatable, isn't outside the realm of possibility.
But since he has established a pattern of pointing of dishonesty, even by people who politically 90% agree with him, I see him as force for Truth.
Maybe. Maybe not. You either wage information war to humiliate, alienate and discredit your political opponents, or you don't. TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
This viewpoint is basically your version of the social-justice activist's "police is racist for arresting a Black shoplifter", is it not? It doesn't matter that the arrested person was a shoplifter and police's core function includes arresting shoplifters, but only that they were black; it doesn't matter that the hoaxed person was a purveyor of bad epistemics and a rationalist blogger's core function includes obstructing purveyors of bad epistemics, but only that she was conservative.
There is a view that it is proper to enact violence upon and confine criminals and doing so doesn't make you qualitatively the same as those who would do so against any political opponent. It's not too much of a stretch to draw the same distinction regarding sneer celebrities and similar antisocial elements of the epistemic domain, and say that they ought to be humiliated, alienated and discredited regardless of political colour.
No, and I don't understand how you can make that comparison.
It's: arresting shoplifters does not justify an elaborate sting operation, and an arrest made by a SWAT team. By the way, the sting operation involved a "free samples" sign left next to the shoplifted items, which may or may not have been obviously fake enough for a normal person to tell apart from a legitimate one.
Feel free to use the "well, technically they did shoplift" defense just don't whine about the townsfolk suddenly becoming rather uncooperative with officer Leroy Jenkins, who led the operation.
I can't find a good way to respond to your objection because it is not clear to me what part of the comparison you think fails. Just to be clear, you do understand that I think that LoTT's normal conduct of nutpicking the outgroup is the bad thing, rather than just the circumstance that LoTT reposted a hoax, right? I doubt any of our right-wing members think that the left-wing version of that behaviour (which is basically sneerclub and rationalwiki) is good; to assert that it's good when your tribe does it is just the same sort of trite who/whom that otherwise takes the form of "black people shoplifting is just".
It's the part where you're implying people agree with you on the nature and the level of badness of the transgression, and only object to the reaction for tribal affiliation reasons, rather than because they think the reaction is completely disproportionate to the alleged crime.
The problem here is that the very structure of hoax, and all the commentary around it, did not attack that part of LoTT's conduct. The hoax could only criticize her lack of vetting of her source material.
They all have a function in a balanced ecosystem, and are all completely fine, as long as they aren't taken to excess.
Check your premises before forming your conclusions, I guess.
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