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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.
That's not why she should have figured out that it was fake. She could, and should, have noticed that she was talking to a person who did not exist about something he would not cite to a specific location, making excuses when she asked for info about the space it was initially shared. That the worksheet was silly and full of inside jokes added to it, but "this anonymous person sent me this document; therefore, this happened" is bad epistemics.
I'm not certain which of the people in the link 90% agree with me and continue to feel this forum has a bizarrely distorted view of my own politics, but that's a fight I'm pretty worn out on fighting. Regardless, glad I've made a good impression otherwise.
Give me a break.
A normie would think "if that's a hoax, that would require a huge, huge, amount of effort. Nobody would go through that much effort to pull a hoax on a random person". That's why she didn't figure out that it was fake.
You can fool anyone by being a weird person from the Internet, if you spend enough time tricking someone who isn't familiar with weird people on the Internet.
Verification is the difference between journalism and gossip. I think once you play at the former, you should be held to a higher standard than a random stranger. Once her attempt at verification failed, a journalist would have had a duty not to publish. The fact that LoTT did, regardless, is a tidy rebuttal to anyone treating it as hard-hitting investigative journalism.
LoTT is literally a Twitter shitpost account -- whoever said that she was (is?) doing hardhitting investigative journalism? It's like those people posting "IT'S HAPPENING" on /pol -- way to go dude, you hoaxed a bunch of shitposters.
Look, I’d be happier with an equilibrium where Twitter shitposters aren’t given any more credence than a tabloid.
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