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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35696 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Has anyone been checking out the reddit and hacker news reaction to TW's FAA scandal follow-up?

He's downvoted to -44 on /r/atc, which applauded his essay last year. Highlights from the comments:

Trace, the truth of the matter is you think you deserve a ton of credit for bringing this story to light. But this story has already been brought to light, been analyzed, and it’s nowhere close to the actual scandal of FAA hiring.

The choice you’ve made, is to cast your lot with the fascists currently ransacking our government. To pretend as though the Trump EO on DEI is in any way a reasonable response to a genuine policy concern, rather than the pure expression of bigotry that it actually is, is inexcusable.

There are only two sides right now. There are the neoconfederate fascists intent on dragging us back to the antebellum era, of which Trump, Vance, and Sailer are definitely a part. And there’s the rest of us.

You don’t have to be on their side if you don’t want to be. But if you choose to be, at least be honest with yourself about what you’re doing.

The top-voted comment on hackernews is accusing it of being a rehashed non-scandal laundered by authoritarian fascists. But the actual comments are mostly in favor, or pointing out that there's suddenly a lot of brand new accounts defending the FAA & claiming "this wasn't real DEI."

Grendel-khan describes the reaction:

The left outside the institution at fault swears up and down that something like this would never happen, and it's just right-wing disinformation, and you're probably a closet right-winger if you believe it.

The left inside the institution at fault swears up and down that this is a good thing and it's obvious that it's happening and why are you making such a big deal of it?

Taking it for granted for a moment that a lot of this stuff is totally astroturfed by blueanon orgs with AI-assisted spamming, it looks like doubling-down and tripling-down on full spectrum information manipulation is still the only strategy on the menu, even as it's increasingly failing and backfiring outside of totally controlled environments like reddit and bluesky.

So, what are the next four years going to look like? Is there going to be any evolution in strategy? Are they correct that just repeating a party line hard enough will bring people back into the fold?

I think that right now it's easy to point at this sort of frantic concern-trolling and laugh, but in a few years the average voter won't remember anything about some FAA hiring scandal except that "Trump used a tragedy for a culture war attack on minorities." Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.

So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.
Moldbug and especially Thiel may absolutely despise the press, but they see the manipulation of public opinion as a quirk of "demotic" regimes, and have no time for it themselves. Moldbug in particular dismisses color revolutions with the over-simplistic "why does the dictator not simply shoot the revolutionaries with crypto-controlled weapons?" Thiel is quieter but clearly sees controlling the murder drones and spying rings as more important than propaganda. Musk is the only one of Trump's big backers who thinks control of social media is important, and I'm convinced that's because of his showman's instincts and desire for attention rather than some strategic policy.

People here have been talking as if the left will shift to violence and hard power in response to their usual methods failing last year (more assassinations of Musk & Trump, etc.). I'm a lot more worried about them doing the same thing they always do and getting away with it, because people don't have lasting immunity to propaganda.

Part of me sympathizes with TWG but only part.

Back in the twenty-teens he was a vocal advocate of the sort of "full spectrum information manipulation" that has become the standard. Where he once bragged about fabricacating evidence to pwn LibsOfTikTok he now wonders why nobody trusts him.

I think TWG's actions were nakedly partisan, but aren't they arguably in the same camp as things like the Sokal Affair or John Bohannon's fake chocolate diet and anti-cancer drug hoaxes? I think it is worth testing the standards of outfits that people are relying on for information, if only to make sure the pipeline isn't broken and flawed in some way.

Ideally, every side should be testing their own information pipelines, and creating robust fact checking operations. But one of the good things about agonistic pluralism is that you can be assured that even if a side isn't testing their pipeline, the other side will try to do so at some point. The end result is that all of us observers watching from the side can get accurate damning information on both sides, if we're willing to wade through the words of partisans of either side.

That is all assuming such stress tests are well conducted, of course, which is no guarantee from partisan hacks.

I think it is worth testing the standards of outfits that people are relying on for information, if only to make sure the pipeline isn't broken and flawed in some way.

Part of the difference in judgement and the reaction around these parts, or at the blocked and reported subreddit, is how the observer weighs the target.

We all Many of us have extremely low opinions of LoTT's reliability, I'm pretty sure even some "locals" that are mostly sympathetic to her have a low opinion of her, so it's not that interesting to pull one over on her. She's a partisan hack and everyone knew it. Tricking a stooge isn't that fun and tends to backfire (like the infamous "it's okay to be white" and OK sign things from 4chan made the world worse rather than simply revealing how gullible and bigoted a certain kind of progressive is).

Pulling a hoax on the Ivory Tower, that's supposed to be our high-quality repository of knowledge, is different.

Edited in response to fair critique of consensus building language.

Consensus building. LoTT is the third of three female humans I have respect for.

Fair point, edited

The crux of Sokal's hoax was that it was inherently obvious to anyone who had a passing knowledge of the subject matter, and that Sokal made no attempt to hide it but that no one bothered to ask about it. Tracing made claims that were very much withing the spectrum of sillyness that has occurred, and that when the target bothered to asked about it, Tracing took actions to further hide it.

In short- the Sokal hoax rests on the point that no one bothered to try and check claims that were inconsistent with the subject matter because they were politically flattering. Tracing's hoax rested on the point that he fabricated evidence that was compatible with examples of the subject matter, and then blamed the person who tried to check.

Also, the circumstances of Trace's hoax made it easier for him to hoax compared to a right-winger sending in a hoax about his left-wing enemies. An actual hoax by a right-winger that smeared a left-winger would have to remain undetected over time; the right-winger would have to be able to send it in, get it posted, and not have people all over the Internet say "that's a hoax". If people did say that, the hoax would be counterproductive.

Trace was going to expose the hoax pretty soon, so he didn't have this limitation and could make cruder hoaxes than an actual right-wing hoaxter could get away with.

That still sounds similar to John Bohannon's hoaxes, where he fabricated fake studies with serious issues that got through peer review. But the problem with those studies was not as obvious as the Sokal hoaxes (where a cursory reading of them is enough to show they're nonsense), the problem is the peer reviewers were obviously doing a shoddy job and not actually engaging with the studies or numbers they were asked to review.

The problem with the idea of "within the spectrum of sillyness" thinking, is that there's always the possibility that a lot of the evidence is bad or misrepresented in the first place. You see a similar phenomenon in the way some online grifters present lawsuits against themselves to their audiences. To hear the grifters tell it, they're always persecuted martyrs, but often if you actually dig up trial transcripts they're being reasonably charged with a crime they actually committed. (I am not suggesting that no one is ever targeted politically, or unfairly charged with things that someone on the other side of the political aisle wouldn't be. I'm just saying that the pattern I observed occurs a lot as well.)

I'm not that committed to defending TWG here in any case. If the consensus is that he acted as a partisan hack, and that his stress test was badly conducted, I'm happy to accept that judgment. I just think that there are ways he could have done something similar to what he did that would have been defensible, and for the epistemic good of everyone involved.

Sure. He could have done better. He could also have admitted error, in the 'I acknowledge what I did was wrong' rather than the 'I wouldn't do it again because of the reaction I received' manner that he did. It certainly didn't help that he approached his hoax in a tenor of triumphalist jeering at his target for being gullible, rather than Sokal's matter-of-fact 'this is what I did, this is how I did it, and these are the stages where a reasonable reviewer should and could have asked questions.'

That TWG is a partisan is the least of the issues that led to the response. There are plenty of partisans in the Motte community, for various factions and interests. The issue was that he expected to be applauded for it, and then blamed anyone but himself for the response with poorly disguised contempt. There was a reason his depture-flounce was with a 'I've hated this entire community for so long now' spiel despite having re-entered to post a dunk-piece while claiming solidarity with the community, and that reason was that his claimed solidarity was insincere and had been for some time.

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