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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2453 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 25, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Is community drama Friday Fun?

Rationalist-adjacent blogger Dinomight is accusing rationalist-adjacent Twitter poaster Cremieux of plaigerizing his post on aspertame into a popular Twitter thread. This has now escalated to wall-of-text denounciations, involving characters such as LessWrong admins and our old friend TracingWoodgrains.

IMO

  • small writers, researchers, and information-aggregators need to be credited with specificity. This promotes good sources to the top and incentivizes independent efforts. It’s also intuitively good manners. It is what we owe to someone who spent his free time aiding the Common Good.

  • if you’re copying an original independent researcher’s small blog, just dropping it in “links” 20 subtweets down is insufficient. The reader will think that the author merely consulted the information but synthesized it themselves in digestible language. But Crem took someone’s synthesized and digestible language and simply reposted it. This would be like if I took an old themotte post and reposted it, just linking it at the bottom, or if I reposted someone’s humorous post for more views and only linked him as a reference. The small guy is owed recognition for his unique effort, or a direct mention; not a footnote.

  • Twitter and blogosphere generally = zero-sum status game; there cannot be infinite “interesting people you consult”. Crem siphoned most of the status gains from the “little guy” who may have spent a dozen hours writing an effortpost after reading about aspartame.

  • Crem, being the most popular twitter account in his niche, has a duty to promote good manners, ie cooperative prosocial norms. If he doesn’t give sufficient cred, then he is setting a standard where insufficient cred is the rule; suddenly, no one is ever going to do anything new or effortful, because someone like Crem will take most of the status.

  • It’s trivially easy to sufficiently share the status. Just say, “x wrote a good summary at y”, or “over at z’s blog”, or “summary is from h”. Best manners would be to find his account and link it. But just “links” isn’t enough.

  • Crem’s reply tells us that he is an antisocial status-obsessant like so many others, and people instinctively find this character type repulsive because it’s incredibly dangerous to the Common Good. World of Warcraft saw a similar moral quandary regarding PirateSoftware which essentially led to his plummeting in status. It’s not a “small error” if it indicates a deeper ethical violation, even though this specific error is super super tiny.

I'd be willing to cut Creamy some slack because he did link the post at the end, but the cope and seethe flameout makes me much less charitable.

Btw, has anyone heard the rumors that he is actually our very own TPO from the old country?

FWIW, I also vote +1 for Cremieux being TPO. Not 100%, but he is at the very least extremely reminiscent of him. The combination of being not only interested but strongly pro-HBD AND regularly using the concept of measurement invariance in particular to argue certain points. TPO also did that all the time. I should have noticed earlier, the connection just didn't come to mind.

Hmm, I’m not sure, and I say that as someone who perhaps along with @Rov_Scam interacted with him more than most back then. I searched Crem’s Twitter for 8 or 9 of the most common niche references TPO used to use, most had no results and the ones that did were vague at best. It would be remarkably disciplined. On the other hand, his career under that name did take off at about the same time he stopped posting here. The HBD stuff isn’t telling, many very online posters have that obsession.

The more telling thing would be posting style, but I don’t remember him having any particular quirks. I’d like to think I could recognize a Hlynka or an Ilforte, but not him.

I haven't heard of the guy, thus I haven't heard of the rumors, but having skimmed the Substack he almost certainly is the same person.

That is an insane guess. What are the million-to-one idiosyncrasies that you recognize in both?

It's not so much the idiosyncrasies but the whole picture. I don't know if you were around when he was still posting on the old SSC sub, but he had a single-minded focus on race science and would argue citing knowledge of highly specialized scientific theories and throw out citations as though they were punctuation. He exhibited the kind of knowledge that would suggest that he studies the sort of thing for a living, yet posted with a frequency that would seem to preclude any kind of employment at all. At the very least, I don't recall him ever mentioning any kind of credentials that would qualify him as an expert on genetics, or biology, or anything, really. So when someone starts a substack flogging the same horses in the same little corner of the internet, I'm bound to be suspicious. When that substack's about section is similarly devoid of reference to any qualifications, education, or training, it's raising some definite alarm bells.

What in your circles is denounced as fringe ‘race science’ we call HBD, and it was always very popular here, culminating when mods tried to ban it against the majority. This focus does not distinguish him. Everyone and their mom flogs the genetics horse to own the progs.

Most of what you read is written by people who seem to have a lot of time on their hands, and, if you curate wisely, requires a lot of specific knowledge the man on the street does not possess. The internet is full of these idle autists.

Besides, I seem to remember TPO living in liechtenstein, which would be hard to conceal as cremieux.

It's not that he posted about HBD insofar as he posted about little but HBD, shoehorning it into every discussion, no matter how irrelevant. 'm not sure what his alleged location has to do with anything.

Who was TPO, again? The penitent one?

TrannyPorno, prolific poster of yore, bete noire of the sneer club

Now that would be a twist.

Themotte has a sizeable presence on twitter.

Yeah, that’s shady. At least the kind of thing where permission should have been sought in advance.

Cremieux really went downhill in the last 9 months or so, he used to be a top tier stats guy but then got poisoned by politics. Still decent and definitely not mindkilled but the magic touch has been lost.

It's the content game. You want to be popular you're going to be a little political. Soon, you belong to the algorithm. If you don't fight it, you end up as Ian Miles Cheong eventually.

I saw this unfold "live" and was mostly annoyed the meta-level "controversy" kept popping up in my For You. Some of the "best" Twitter threads are just a dozen tweets and screencaps of random books/papers tied together to make some coherent point that you can nonetheless swipe through in 5 minutes. Is such content plagiarism? I find the notion itself absurd; this isn't academic writing. If the content is primarily sourced from one particular author they should obviously be linked to (which he was), but even this is a selfish desire: if their writing is interesting, I'll want to follow them! I read Cremiuex's thread, and I skimmed the blog post he allegedly "plagiarized", and I prefer Cremieux's rendition, but it doesn't matter, because if Cremiuex hadn't tweeted it, I wouldn't have ever found the source blog, or author.

Trawling the web and packaging up good ideas other people have had into a format that is easily digestible (and visible!) is a public service in my book. Cremiuex's thread was around 1000 words, the first blog post linked was around 3000 (maybe 2700 if we exclude some of the tables/formatting?) Even if Cremiuex didn't verify any of the figures or include anything from the other sources he linked (I am not invested enough in this saga to check) this degree of editorializing is sufficient to evade the label of "low effort content theft" in my opinion.

"This guy on Twitter plagiarized 1/3 of my blogpost then linked to my site, woe is me." Come on.

Some of the "best" Twitter threads are just a dozen tweets and screencaps of random books/papers tied together to make some coherent point that you can nonetheless swipe through in 5 minutes. Is such content plagiarism? I find the notion itself absurd; this isn't academic writing.

I think it's poor form to not give a 'H/t to @meduka for giving me the idea for this thread' or similar. It takes 2 seconds and gains you status, rather than loses it.

Edit: Saw that he linked Dinomight. Lessens the 'wrong'

I sort of agree with you. Fundamentally, this is inconsequential internet bullshit. I probably wouldn’t have made the post if I hadn’t seen Cremieux bragging about how much money he makes from these threads during the controversy.

Not a good look for Cremieux. That's a shame.

Edit: Not as bad as I first thought, as he included the source in a series of links at the end, labeled, "Links:"

Still not great.

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