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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.
From the very bottom of my heart, go screw yourself.
Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must; I believe this will mark my first violation of this sort. But I stand by it, and sometimes, things like this need to be said.
To you, to everyone like you who thinks that about me here: go screw yourself.
I have always been perfectly upfront about who I am, what I do, and why. I have aimed to remain earnest, consistent, open, and push constantly against falsehood and towards painting clear pictures of the truth, including in controversial and sensitive situations. I stake my reputation and my name on my work. The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.
Have I made missteps? I don't know anyone in the arena who has not. But I am immensely proud of my work as a whole, and every time I return here and find miserable scolds like you grousing about bitterness you've never let go, it disgusts me.
Screw you, screw everyone like you here, and if I didn't know perfectly well that plenty of people here do not think like you, I would delete my posts here and never spend another moment on this site, because you and yours have dragged it into the gutter and I don't need to spend my time around people determined to see nothing but the worst in me. Imagine writing something like this after I spend a month exhaustively documenting the malicious history of one who has been spreading propaganda against communities like this before either you or I had anything to do with it. Imagine having nothing better to do than dig this rubbish up, than look to start a stupid fight over nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you won't.
You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.
As the joke goes, you can build the pub, you can build the pier, but ya go and fuck one goat...
Your sin was goring the wrong ox, not trolling in the first place. If you had gotten the NYT to publish a positive story about furries insisting on eating out of dog bowls in school cafeterias, the majority of these people would be singing your praises. I don't recall the Texas abortion bounty hunter trolls provoking any real outrage.
At the end of the day, no matter how much investigating reporting you do to embarrass activists on the left, you'll still be the goat fucker my friend. IMO, stop apologizing and double down.
This ain't it at all. Hoaxing the NYT would be notable for the same reasons The Rape On Campus story out of Rolling Stone was notable. There are supposed to be fact checkers, multiple sources, teams of lawyers, etc vetting a story. There is supposed to be a rigorous institution in play here, with the pretense that it can course correct for any particular individuals biases or short comings.
Convincing a twitter anon, even a popular one, of a hoax is Kiwifarms material. It's giving your uncle a facebook chain letter. Doing it to score cheap political points is especially gross. It's like if I was engaged in a heated debate here, and to win it, I registered a new twitter account and said some bullshit, and then came back here pointing to it going "See, people on twitter are saying the bullshit I said they were saying!" And maybe some poor schmuck here believed it, and then I used that as further evidence of how gullible they are.
And this whole, "How dare you" attitude, and this pretense of "truth seeking". I mean... maybe. But like I said, it puts an asterisk. I know this is a guy who wages information war. I need to be weary of that.
And in a world where millions of people don't treat a twitter anon as a source for reinforcing/building their beliefs then that may hold some weight. But that is not this world.
Once we are at that point then any influencer is as fair game as the paper of record. They have to be. Whether it is a "fitness" guru getting exposed as using steroids or a culture warrior being exposed as only posting material which hurts their outgroup true or not.
If someone is treated seriously by people as an information source then they must be able to be exposed if their information is bad or suspect.
You're stuck in a pre-social media mindset here. The world has changed and the sources of information people take seriously has changed with it.
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