Hi folks,
Recorded this interview with Trace at Manifest last month. We talked about evolving cultural dynamics online, reforming the Democratic Party, and how small groups of people can have disproportionate influence on public policy. Also discussed is the impact of places like TheMotte, both as a crucible for ideas and as a training ground for future writers and leaders.
Given Trace's prominence and contentiousness here, I hope it might be of interest. Look forward to hearing what people think, and perhaps sparking some discussion. I've highlighted one point of disagreement I have with his ideas [thusly] in the transcript.
The video, Spotify/Apple Podcast links, and a full 'Patio11-style' transcript are all available here: https://alethios.substack.com/p/with-tracingwoodgrains-journalism
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
[caveat: I'm not an unbiased interlocutor, here]
I think this is only true for a very specific set of things.
If this is supposed to be the reference to the Motte, it's worth exploring what, exactly that would mean. Are the original founding members from back when the CWR was on SSC's subreddit around? Does anyone remember their names, or even what they left over? Are we measuring by leadership and moderation, and Amadan tells us what the shape of this forum looks like? If we're measuring by volume, did Darwin tell you the shape of this community back on the subreddit? I'd love if it were true in some sense, where the community and outside impact was shaped by its most productive members -- a Motte that was Dean-shaped wouldn't be a bad thing! -- but no. Even for the absolute best writers, here, there's more to it than that, and looking through AAQCs and seeing many of the best have neither a high upvote score nor a lot of good follow-on conversation shows that pretty quick.
Or, for another example, one can readily look at the furry fandom. There are people in (or previously in) the fandom that have had massively outsized impact on the environment and the norms. Dragoneer (rip) shaped FurAffinity, Tourmal and three or four writers SoFurry, I'd assume there's something similar for IB and don't want to know; UncleKage runs Anthrocon with an iron mandible, so on. If you look at history, Fred Patton has a nice list of a few major creators of a handful of very specific pieces That Mattered.
And he also has a massive list, often of people (some much more active), that didn't. Anyone know who made and runs VCL without looking it up? What its ethos is or was? When the entire site died? Fandom culture knows the Burned Furs, even if they might not know the people who actually formed it, but does anyone want to pretend that these people actually drove the movement, rather than the drive-by SomethingAwful brigades? Weasyl? There is no FanLore on WerewolfDotCom, and no one cares what I could write about Chris, Lv246, and XZenGrim, even if it was once one of the more active forums of its age and focus; The WEREweb has almost entirely bitrot out.
I'm not going to throw away the Great Man Theory of subcultures, but I also think there are very dire limits to it.
The Burned Furs are the clearest-cut version: they were not the first 'clean up the fandom's image' group, and they weren't the last; there was nothing unusual in their presentation or their focus. But they were late enough that some of the conversations were web-indexed, early enough to not just get lumped into the SomethingAwful anti-furs, and tech enough to have forums of their own rather than YahooGroups, and either by effort or (mis)fortune received (comparatively) mainstream coverage. Associated Student Bodies is famous for popularizing the 'off to gay furry college' subgenre, but for all of its skill in writing or art, or consistency in output (which wasn't actually that great), more vital was its ability to get decent copy available for bulk publication (and a few fans with scanners willing to hoist the black flag). At the other extreme, there's a lot of ruin in an organization, but the final straw seldom has a name meaningful to anyone except the blocklists.
At best, this says something trivial about the importance of timing; at worst, this points to a far more serious limitation on the ability of a handful of loud and enthusiastic activists to actually make concrete progress in objectives. You need more than a compelling story, or a specific matter, or a really clear narrative. You need a fulcrum, or it's just chaff.
I don't think it's enough.
((While less confident, I'm not sure it's necessary, either. The flip side to the bad guys having an observable pattern, as much as they have alpha, here, they don't really have good stories. The argument against direct instruction isn't specific or cohesive, and it's won for literal decades.))
For example, Brigadia was an offhand comment here a week and a half before Trace published his expose (and a few days before Sailer and Stancil's and Musk's fight over the matter); genav and pilot news had covered the matter in an apolitical way in 2015 as Pearson and Rojas, and academic criticism had noticed the impact on CTI.
Props to Trace for finding the fulcrum he needed for it to get any recognition -- especially if that ended up everyone liking to see Stancil humiliated, but I'll also take just putting all these things and the cheating scandal together into a single piece and the right place at the right time and the right promotion. But it wasn't just a cohesive, compelling, clear narrative pointing out why this matters in a way they already agree with.
(I'd argue that the inclusion of the cheating scandal made it less cohesive, but a better work overall. But being a good work doesn't make it effective: it's only been six months into either bet, but I'm not exactly feeling worried. The best result we've actually gotten is Duffy trying to settle the case, something Buttigieg notably never did, and that's still far more than a day late and dollar short. Snow is still
workingemployed at the FAA.)Like Trace's claims about public institutions more generally, this depends on leaning so heavily on "in part" that it stops being meaningful. Yes, it's quite possible that small differences in openness to experience or willingness to do low-paid high-status work have a few percentages of impact on political breakdowns of different groups. But these differences or interest have existed for most of a century, and while there's also been a political discrepancy in academia predating the Eisenhower administration, Trace's thesis points to the evidence of a recent and far greater change.
And there's a much more obvious and more stronger cause for that change. The right-wing has abandoned by virtually every institution in the country because it has been abandoned -- or been ejected. There's staggeringly few 'institutions' where discrimination against conservatives is not endemic and overt; there's no space where law and regulation has not been turned against a wide variety of conservative behaviors. In academia, specifically, we're more than a decade downstream of the revelation that conservatives trying to build organizations in academia not only must accept members regardless of direct contradiction to a socially conservative belief central to the organization, but even accept officers; campuses have only broadened the breadth and scope of these policies since far beyond any focus against discrimination or for identity. In spheres that had external forces or pressures that maintained some level of parity in the past, like the military, after they didn't respond to more 'subtle' pressures progressives instead turned up the thumbscrews; in others, like police, it just became dogma to defund the institution for literally years. (And those, still, never became as progressive-dominated as academia has.)
Trace's response when pressed is to [insist that these pressures are "[...]not a function of institutional power[...]") because the same disparities show up in measures outside of preference falsification, when it's not to just say 'skill issue'. That's hilariously wrong given his specific examples -- we don't have the actually have the information to say anything about voting patterns, but there have in fact been massive censorship campaigns focused on donation patterns and the nearest proxies of voting affiliation we have in party affiliation -- but more than that it's not even wrong. The entire point of these campaigns are to prevent any remotely sane or risk-averse conservative from entering the field to start with. Finding that there are indeed few (poorly) hidden conservatives at the trail's end isn't even engaging with the question; it's just reframing it.
That doesn't just matter in the 'boo hoo conservatives' sense, or even the 'oh those dastardly leftists' sense, regarding why things are the way they are, or even in the descriptive sense of what would need be done to change things. Saying the left will be 'reliant' on these institutions is wrong; trying to use these behaviors to predict the shape of 'new leaders' coming up into progressive spheres is wrong. The left owns these institutions in the sense you or I would own a cheap Harbor Freight screw bit; there is nothing so trivial that they will not bring it to bear, and nothing so dishonest and credibility-destroying that they will resist the urge to break them into glitter for even a second.
And well before that, it doesn't even tell us what there will be to lead. Especially as the actual capabilities that 'elite human capital' claim that they're focused around shrivel up and blow away in the wind, the actual groups will be The Groups, in the sense of unions and minority affinity orgs and scammers rather than the education and enthusiastic and careful-about-the-truth, because whatever might have once tied the professional class to those things is gone, replaced with a dress code and a lawn sign.
This one I have a lot more sympathy about because I believed it once, too. I can't give the hard counterexamples without self-doxxing, but to give a publicly-known one: no, you can not compete with FIRST and VEX by providing a simpler, better, easier, and cheaper product. No, it doesn't matter how bad the color sensors work. A literal decade-plus of compute advances and some mindbogglingly bad decisions by these companies makes a better mousetrap easy; it does not make a path to your door.
If this is a descriptive position, it's true and disappointing; if it's a normative one, it's wrong and appalling.
The first rule of any systems reliability problem is to solve for 'who can't be hit by a bus'. We're just downstream of a massive scandal because too few people are willing to retire from politics; the Democratic party has had a narrow House loss become significantly less narrow because multiple members have just up and died post-election, and only missed it getting even worse because the Republicans haven't done a great job either. I don't mean to say that just as a memento mori. There's always more work to be done. Even if you're not getting up there in years -- though that makes it the discrepancy more overt today -- you should be passing on skills and getting new insights and, yes, recognizing when someone else is a better choice for a job than you are.
People have, in the history of the world, given up power. Even if you don't think it's out of the goodness of their hearts, it's simply because they couldn't use it as well directly. If the most powerful thousand people in the country can't come to this revelation, there's something more broken in the system than any mere issue of politics. If they did, and deny it, that's a moral failing on them. Stealing fire from the gods might not have worked out great for Prometheus when he got caught, but it doesn't make Zeus any less of a dick for holding it close to start with.
There's an argument against passivity in general. But knowing you're trying to take down absolute jerks matters; knowing you're taking down people who will break everything else matters. Actually saying it, explaining it, when it's still relevant and before they're trotted off the stage, matters.
But these are all lazy nitpicks!
I put good effort into those nitpicksWell, no. I actually do hope Trace's Centre for Educational Progress project is successful, even if I'm not optimistic. Education and upskilling and excellence is important, and the disinterest modern schools hold those topics in is one of the more critical civilization-threatening projects. And that, I expect, is what lead this entire conversation to exist. These points are all, yes, all just leading to what Trace wants to do with CEP.
Which means it's a problem if the way they're supposed to flow naturally toward Trace's theory of change, and they don't. That's why I'm not optimistic.
If excellence were enough to take down the teacher's unions, they'd have fallen out of favor decades ago to the first set of a half-dozen Karens decades ago, or a bucket scooped from the grease trap in the last decade. If all that you needed to do to get people talking was formally writing down mind-numbing details into a good cohesive story that tells people why they should care, the phonics people would have completely purged whole language people decades ago, and Orson Scott Card would have solved gay rights in 1980. If producing good solutions to long-standing problems is enough that's great, but one of Trace's CEP people points to Mike Rowe, and there's a punchline to that joke. I'll applaud Rowe for the extent he hasn't let politics (or getting maximum public attention) core out his brain (at least more than a Koch donation), but the man's 62, and MikeRoweWORKS has been around since 2008.
It's only skulls of travellers paving this road, but there's still skulls, here.
While your opening argument could be construed as just a quibble about the exact coefficient of the power-law distribution that Trace is alluding to, I generally agree with the thrust of your response as a whole.
As I note in the transcript:
Trace's approach can demonstrably work for situations like the banning of the American Bully XL that he cites. You can look at recordings of any local Council meeting to see dozens of these sorts of examples every year, where decision-makers have been motivated to pull a single policy lever at their disposal in order to satisfy the demands of some small group of people who were motivated enough to show up and communicate clearly. Where the approach is necessary, but substantially insufficient, is when you're trying to influence the most complex systems in the known universe - multi-functional institutions. There, a far more comprehensive strategy is required. After all, Gramsci's Long March that brought us here was the work of generations.
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