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In between blogging about fursuit collections, former motte moderator TracingWoodgrains has started to blow up on twitter after wading into an ongoing feud between Steve Sailer and propagandist Will Stancil.
Something in the replies must have really upset him (possibly interactions with a number of replyguys making not-so-veiled threats about what happens to people who associate with bigots or question "lying for the pursuit of good aims"), because he suddenly got really invested in proving that the recent FAA-DEI scandal is real.
After giving up on conservative journalists and deciding to do the legwork himself, he's now posting PACER documents from the recent FAA lawsuit, proving that the FAA HR department sent black applicants a list of resume buzzwords that would get their applications fast-tracked, via the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
A few hours ago this got the attention of Elon Musk, and Tracing is promising a follow-up, somehow trying to juggle 1L coursework with doing more investigative journalism than the entire conservative media put together. Obviously one of these things takes more time than the other, but I'm sure he'll have a coffee break free for the journalism bit.
One reason I think this could be important is that it's going to paint a huge target on Tracing's back. Propagandists have been claiming that the FAA DEI story was fake, the test designed to favor black applicants never existed, etc. They're going to get very angry at this evidence becoming widely known, and tracing is in a unique position to spread it outside the right wing news ghetto that prevents most liberals from ever encountering facts like these.
I'm not saying it's certain they're going to go after his law school, but he's in a uniquely vulnerable position right now, with very few allies in a position to help him (and probably a number who will suddenly decide he's on the enemy side of the fiend-enemy distinction.) So if anyone is in the position to help if he needs it, maybe start reaching out early.
Unfortunately all of this is getting difficult to follow without a twitter account (I even have one, but they're not letting me log in right now for no apparent reason). It's going to get even harder as Nitter instances die off. If anyone has a reliable account and would be willing to make screenshots, I'd love if you could take over covering the story as it develops.
Edit: his effortpost is now out on twitter and at his blog. I'll copy it into a reply below in case the nitter instance goes down again.
Just a note, this has obvious parallels to colleges letting DEI departments screen out the 80% of applicants before any objective hiring process begins:
It's a very effective method of manipulating procedural outcomes, isn't it?
When NY Times starts investigating this page and wants to interview me as the one sympathetic-to-their-audience 'progressive' venturing into the lions den, I promise to tell them y'all are just misguided victims of radicalizing social media algorithms. Probably the best I can do.
A transexual antifa paedophile arranged a hit piece on bronies with The Atlantic, and similarly David Gerard organized one with the New York Times. I can see it happening. It always seemed like your end game.
Okay, that was definitely antagonistic. If you got the impression from my exchange with @guesswho below that it's open season on him just because a lot of people have old grudges, you are wrong.
And blowing flames on old grudges seems to be your thing.
You are obviously an alt who's here to stir shit, and so far you've contributed nothing but trolling and knife-throwing. Banned for a week, and I'm going to recommend we just burn this alt next time you pop off.
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It's ok, I still get jokes, and this was a good one. I don't understand how anyone could read it in any way other than obvious sarcasm. Just another tick in the "dead internet theory" column.
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What's with the concept 'radicalizing social media algorithms'? This is like that idea that 'Putin hacked the elections'... by putting ads on facebook or something? How can people simultaneously defend democracy and believe that the average person is the cognitive equivalent of a fast food public wifi network?
If democracy is so great, why do we need to ban doctors from posting their opinions online? Why do we need to prevent people from taking horse deworming medication but make sure they get to vote?
If AI is racist, if Silicon Valley companies, the most powerful, data-driven, progressive companies ever, still can't seem to make DEI quotas, then perhaps they have a point?
I've made a few effortposts on this topic, ussually around the question of 'shouldn't we just let only the smart people vote?'
The basic idea is that if you have a true and powerful signal and a large enough amount of data collection, you can be ok even in a system with humongous amounts of noise.
It's ok if the average voter is so dumb that their voting behavior is near-random. So long as it's not completely random and they're probabilisticly influenced by the true signal of 'good candidate' at least a little, then if we average over tens of millions of voters we can recover that signal with high likelihood.
(whereas choosing any nonrandom subsample of the population to do the choosing, like 'the smart/informed people', is more likely to produce an artifact since their homogeneity makes them more likely to be biased in the same direction by the same factors)
This sounds rather like the "wisdom of crowds" argument — or at least adjacent to it. But, AIUI, that only really applies when the "noise" is unbiased; like in the classic "guess how many items in the jar," the average of people's "noisy" estimates converges toward the true value because people are equally likely to overestimate as underestimate. Does that still apply in voting? I think a case can be made that for various reasons — ranging from human cognitive biases to media institutions — the "noise" is not unbiased; the average "dumb voter" will tend to deviate from the "true signal" in particular directions, ensuring the aggregate "wisdom of the crowd" will be similarly biased away from the "true signal" in those same directions.
That is probably the largest falsifiable assumption underlying the rationale, that the noise is not normally distributed around the true signal.
The truest answer is 'that is possible and is a major weakness of the theory,' but, 3 mitigating arguments:
We have a 2-party system, in which each side has arguments and narratives trying to push people towards their direction. Voting simulations tend to suggest that in this situation, or even situations with 3 or 4 parties, it is natural for those opposing parties to center around the true center of public preference, and pull in either direction away from it. Since both parties have roughly similar number of devotees (which is not coincidental, they will change their positions until that equilibrium is reached in the long-run, which is part of why it centers that way in real life), we can expect/hope that the noise produced by those things roughly cancels out. (of course this conflates 'central voter preference' and 'the best government', but that gets into deeper philosophical discussions of what a 'good government' even is, which we're eliding atm)
Even if the population has net biases where everyone/the large majority are off in the same direction, these should be for specific issues or domains. Government is hugely complex and multi-faceted; it's possible for the government to be bad on 5 axes, ok on 10 axes, and good on 20 axes, or w/e. Even if there's some big universal bias that drives people away from the true signal on on axis or another, hopefully any axis without a singular such factor will still have pretty randomly distributed noise, and we'll do well on a lot of other metrics anyway.
In particular, I was comparing universal voting to some type of restricted voting where (for example) only people with a certain IQ or passing a certain competence test or etc. are allowed to vote. While it may be true that the general population of all voters could be systematically biased in some way, it's still much more likely that a smaller group selected on a specific metric, which therefore has less cognitive and experiential diversity, would have a similar or stronger bias of some kind. If you are trying to avoid systematic biases, it's really hard to do better than huge random samples in a situation like this, even if huge random samples aren't guaranteed to be perfect either. (and ofc I personally don't think you're going to do better hoping to get lucky with a benevolent monarch or any other system humans have tried, but maybe better non-voting systems are theoretically possible)
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Isn't the point of democracy that all candidates are 'good' candidates?
The alarming headlines about 'Russian bots' and 'radicalizing algorithms' are especially jarring. If 10 years of government work can be undone by a few hours of exposure to a Russian bot or an algorithm, perhaps your 'true signal' is not that true.
'Our glorious democratic education' vs their 'abhorrent authoritarian brainwashing'.
I suppose these media products are not to be taken at face value. Just an nth reinforcement 'you are a good person for not falling for the Eastasia propaganda'.
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Replying to myself to copy/paste one of those long posts, in case anyone is interested. Huge wall of text warning, with a lot of stuff that's probably too basic for the audience here:
This was in response to someone basically asking 'Wouldn't elections work better if only people who are educated on the issues and know enough to make good decisions were allowed to vote? Isn't it crazy that we let stupid and ignorant people make these decisions when they can't possibly know enough to decide well?'
My response:
So this is a really basic research methods question that scientists often have to deal with, mainly concerned with how to find a weak signal in a noisy data set.
Lets say that there's some 'correct' result for everyone election, the result that will lead to the best outcomes for the most number of people based on each of their individual preferences and needs, or whatever. The question is, what is the best way to arrive at that outcome as often as possible, or to arrive as closes as possible to it every time?
There are two main reasons this is a difficult problem. The first is that no one can see the future and it's impossible for anyone to truly know what the long-term consequences of any particular electoral outcome will be. The second is that it's impossible for anyone to truly know and understand the needs and preferences of all 350 million citizens and determine what the best outcome for all of them would be, even if they could predict it.
This creates a ton of uncertainty and disagreement about what the best electoral outcome is (who people should vote for), as we can see clearly at every election cycle.
In terms of statistical analysis, we would call this disagreement and uncertainty 'noise' - lots of disparate, high-variance, semi-random data about how people think everyone should vote. And we would call the 'correct' electoral outcome the 'signal' - the true result that we're trying to discover.
In this framing, an election is just a measurement, designed to try to capture the signal, and filter out the noise. Our elections tend to have a low signal-to-noise ratio, because it's so hard for anyone to know what the actual best outcome would be, and there's so much disagreement about what we should do.
As it turns out, scientists have been dealing with this problem in all kinds of domains since the invention of statistics, and they have a good handle on what works and what doesn't.
What you're suggesting is, basically, take a smaller number of data points from a restricted domain (people who pass the test), which you believe to have much less noise (less misinformation) and a much stronger signal (better understanding).
This is a good method in many domains - physicists, for instance, will go to great lengths to reduce noise in their experiments by shielding equipment or working far underground, even if this is expensive and limits the amount of data they can gather. If they can eliminate enough noise, they only need a very little data to confirm their hypotheses, because those hypotheses are very precise, and the systems they deal with are well-understood.
But the danger with restricting your domain and excluding subjects based on a specific criterion is that it can introduce bias into your measurements, leading you to very accurately measure the wrong signal. Physicists don't have to worry about this much, because physics works the same underground and behind shielding as it doe anywhere else. But any science that has to deal with people has to worry about this a lot, because people are very easily biased, and different groups of people can vary from each other in all kinds of ways.
In your example, it may be that people who pass your test know more about the world overall, but have some specific set of strong, incorrect beliefs that is currently in fashion among the educated classes, or was introduced to the curriculum they tend to study by the agencies that make that curriculum, or that concerns areas of study or ways of life (like plumbing or farm work) that the educated tend to have little contact with. And even if they have no systematically mistaken beliefs, their priorities and needs may still be systematically divergent from the rest of the general population - they may not appreciate the true needs of the poor, they may prioritize art and science over industry and safety, they may fall preferentially along one political or religious alignment, etc. Basically, as long as they have any systematic biases that make them different from the rest of the population, you cannot get the 'correct' signal from any type of measurement of them, because their 'signal' is something different that aligns with their biases. Their 'signal' may still be pretty good, but it can't ever be 'correct'.
How do scientists who deal with these types of problems try to measure the real signal amidst tons of noise, then? The answer is random sampling of lots and lots and lots of data points, averaged out with each other to converge on the correct signal.
See, when you have enough data points, it doesn't really hurt you much to add a 'noisy' data point (ie someone who knows nothing and acts randomly). Because that noise will tend to be randomly distributed, and cancel out with someone else who was randomly noisy in the other direction when you average everything together. So letting people with 'zero knowledge' vote is not a problem. The only type of voter that's a problem is one with 'negative information' - beliefs and preferences that actively drive them away from the correct signal. And even those people will tend to cancel out with people who have negative knowledge going the other direction... if you sample from every walk of life and every group, instead of limiting yourself to a single specific group with a tendency towards one specific flavor of negative knowledge.
Because the thing about a true signal is, that we expect it to have some impact on most data points, even if those points themselves have huge variance. Like if you give all the kids in one school platform shoes with 2" heels and measure their heights, there will still be lots of variance in height and there will be tons of kids in that school who are shorter than tons of kids in another school even with their shoes on, but if you take the average height it will still come out 2 inches taller, because the shoes still increased everyone's random noisy heights at once.
With elections, it's a bit more complicated, but it's the same idea. Maybe one person is an idiot about everything except farm policies, but they can tell a good farm policy from a bad one and that true information affects their vote. Maybe another person knows nothing about policy, but is a really good judge of character and will tend to vote for more honest and benevolent candidates. Maybe a third person has been through civil forfeiture and understands the reality of that situation much better than the average person, and lets that influence their vote when politicians make a proposal about it. etc.
Each of those people may have a lot of 'noise' in their heads about every topic other than the one they're good at, but that noise will be mostly random across individuals and will cancel out. As long as they have some knowledge or understanding that gives them good, 'correct' beliefs about the way to vote, and those beliefs influence their actual vote in some way, then that means they're being influenced by the 'signal' and will be adding true information about the signal to our data set when we measure them.
This is how psychologists, social scientists, and other scientists that deal with people and other complex and unpredictable phenomena, almost always design their studies: random sampling of as much data as possible, with statistical analysis to find the signal among the noise. It's simply the most practical and reliable way to go about things with situations this complex. And in the case of elections, that translates to allowing everyone to vote, and encouraging as many people to vote as possible.
It sounds counter-intuitive when you think about a single idiot voting. But when you think about that idiot as someone who only has one tiny spark of good information, and then think about the electoral process as adding the tiny sparks of tens of millions of people together to illuminate the truth, it makes a lot more sense.
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By redefining the word "democracy" to mean something much more disconnected from the views of "the average person"?
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Attributing to stupidity that which is usually attributed to malice is helpful when you're not allowed to outright call your outgroup evil.
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A number of users have reported this as "antagonistic" and I rather see their point. We've talked about your trolling before, and while I can appreciate its artfulness, even gentle sneering constitutes objectionable disdain.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. Or, if you prefer--you're not venturing into the lion's den, you're just another lion. I don't know if you and I have had this particular discussion before, but I've had it with many others: I will always enforce the rules more strictly when the target of criticism is this space and the people in it. That doesn't mean we can't be self-effacing and self-critical, but it does mean that such posts require maximum charity and effort. This post doesn't really cut it.
Are you really serious about this?
Set aside whether I can state my actual opinions or beliefs safely, now good-natured, ironic, self-deprecating jokes are going to be taken as sneering and antagonistic by the mods as well?
I just got a day ban for I have no idea what, ignored it, now a warning for a joke that's obviously aimed at the foibles of my own tribe (The signifigance of choosing NY Times for the bit cannot be lost on anyone here, surely?), and which others are engaging with in that spirit.
If certain mods have made up their mind or are going to be swayed by number of downvotes and reports, then there's no behavior I can take that protects me. Sure, 'don't link to meme images' is an easy arbitrary rule to follow, I can remember that. But these last 2 times have been complete surprises that I cannot understand the motivation behind, and could not have predicted in any way.
We've transitioned from 'I expect to be held to a different standard, but if I keep my head down enough and don't make my points with the same tone that others use against me and my side, I'll probably be ok' to 'I literally cannot predict what the mods will interpret as antagonistic anymore, I may as well just post honestly and see what happens'.
So, yeah.
"Humor" is often a tough moderation call. I don't know if you have many interactions with children, but "just joking!" is not an uncommon protest from kids who want to say something they know (or suspect) they shouldn't say, because it is actually unkind, or otherwise objectionable, but they understand that humor can sometimes help one speak more plainly than is normally permitted. Well, most of your joke was basically fine. This is the specific part that I found troublesome:
This is something people actually claim in earnest about their outgroup, particularly when their outgroup is the alt-right or something similar. So "come on, I'm just joking" becomes a convenient cover for reinforcing a weak man stereotype. If you didn't mean it that way, like... great! Now that I've pointed out the problem with letting "I'm just joking around guys" tempt you to make reductive claims about this community, maybe you can avoid the mistake in the future.
And, I suppose, to take the meta up a notch--there is at least one moderator who has already raised an objection to my moderation here, so don't imagine yourself to be on the wrong side of the mod team or anything. Apparently a lot of people here think you are reddit user darwin2500, in part because you appear to have claimed to be darwin2500, even though on reddit darwin2500 implied (though admittedly did not outright say) that he had left this space and found it amusing that people still imagined him to be here. I do not know whether you are darwin2500; I am actually skeptical because you have yet to post anything approaching the quality and insight that darwin2500 brought to the old subreddit when he wasn't eating bans for various rule violations. But whoever you are, one way to get charity weighing more heavily in your favor in moderation cases is to post good stuff. It would also help if you developed a reputation for posting honestly, instead of a reputation for posting dishonestly. One reason your posts get so heavily reported is that you have taken on darwin2500's burden, whether you are actually him or not: darwin2500 was a notorious troll who repeatedly refused to engage honestly when it became clear that he was wrong about something. Whether you're him or not, that is a behavior you also appear to exhibit here.
In other words--the kind of self-critical humor that you were exercising was not, in fact self critical, as far as I could tell. If you'd been poking fun at yourself instead of everyone else, well, it would have been easier to let that slide.
ETA:
This is bullshit. No one on the mod team has it out for you; if anything, I think you have a couple mods acting somewhat protectively of you for "affirmative action" reasons. The behavior you can take that protects you is to follow the rules. In particular, I actually have very little time for moderation these days, so unless I see you trashing the community I'm very unlikely to moderate you. Stop imagining yourself to be separate from (much less above) the group, here, and you'll be fine.
To kill the frog: yes, it's the type of claim that people who read the NYTimes believe, and the joke is that I can trick them into being nicer to you with this obviously dumb narrative because they only operate on pre-approved narratives and this is one they're programmed to accept.
When it became clear to the people who already disagreed with me, sure.
But don't expect me to be persuaded by the one argument you find persuasive, any more than you are persuaded when I make the one argument I find persuasive.
Obviously you think you are presenting arguments and evidentiary claims sufficient to justify your belief, that's why you hold that belief. But the people who don't hold that belief didn't just tragically fail to be exposed to those arguments and claims, they're generally aware of them and still find the balance of evidence to go the other way. I know that about you, you should know that about me.
I acknowledge when someone here convinces me of something I didn't believe before, but it doesn't happen all that often because the disagreements are much deeper than that.
Yes, this has always been the central problem between you and me.
Others seem to have gotten the joke, you take it as a directed sleight instead, and at this point I don't have much hope of convincing you otherwise. We've danced this dance a lot and it's tiring.
I will, however, keep saying what is true about my meaning and intention, whether or not it convinces you.
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I was radicalized by interacting with the kind of progressive who calls people racist for not believing Jussie Smollet and then refuses to acknowledge the case ever again once it becomes apparent that they've made a booboo.
Good thing the mods don't consider this type of post antagonistic in any way...
It probably helps that this was an actual thing that actually happened here by a rather infamous, and since moved on, member of the "community". In fact, the person who called the blatant hoax a blatant hoax earned a warning or temp ban, I can't remember which.
It was very radicalizing.
You might see whining about a hypothetical strawman, but it's actually "Oh yeah, I remember that..."
It helps even more that the member of the community in question did not move on, and you are, in fact, talking to him.
Hahahahah. Oh boy did I ever walk into that one. Had no idea. Definitely adds a pretty amazing color to the whole back and forth.
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You know, it's just possible that had you waited to see whether or not we would mod that comment, after you reported it, one of us might have agreed with you that it was in fact antagonistic. But no, you reported it and then immediately posted a passive-aggressive whine about what the mods do or don't consider antagonistic.
FWIW, my personal metric is the "Shoe on the other foot" test. If a leftie said something equally snide about why he's been "radicalized" by righties, would I mod it? Eh, maybe, but probably not. Now if you feel that the comment was a personal dig directed at you, well... sometimes a jerk's got a point, you know?
I wouldn't normally report a comment like that (if I did, your queue would get pretty clogged up). I decided to do it after posting because I realized it was unfair to accuse the mods of a double standard when they could just be unaware of that comment.
I don't actually want you to mod people who are mean to me, but I do want you to hold me to the same standards you hold them.
The way you instead agree with them pretty much confirms my expectations, but w/e.
Well, yes, I think the point he was making was accurate (you did that), and I also think it was antagonistic. And if you hadn't been whining about how the mods are unfair at the same time you reported the comment, I might have made a comment about not being a jerk and grinding old axes, but now I'm just rolling my eyes since you have to push buttons as hard as you can, especially after you claim you "wouldn't normally report a comment like that." (The heck you don't.)
I of course didn't, but since that's a meme started on here by my #1 long-term stalker who also happens to be a mod, I don't expect people to be much interested in being careful about the facts of the matter.
(as per any slander, it's a bunch of lies and mischaracterization built around a true seed of a real event. You'd think 8 years of seeing the left lie about Trump and Trump lie about the left would make the pattern clear to people discussing those events every day, but w/e)
@gattsuru is not a mod. He's not a stalker either, just unusually well-organized.
In any case, what's the response you're looking for with this comment? I'd like to provide it, if possible. I can't speak for anyone else, but I would like to be as careful of the facts as possible. I certainly am not interested in perpetrating lies or mischaracterizations. What's your understanding of events, and how does it differ from the description above? The original thread and subsequent threads aren't hard to find, and if there's a misunderstanding or a mischaracterization it shouldn't be too hard to demonstrate. Even if trawling the old threads is too much trouble, I'd at least be interested in hearing a more detailed description of events from your perspective.
It seems to me that this post, like many of your posts, is essentially a lament that people are treating you unfairly despite considerable forbearance on your part. I would like to treat you fairly; normally I would do that by responding directly to your statements, but given past experience I have some doubts that would be productive. So instead, I'll ask you directly: what sort of response would you like to the above? This is a discussion space, which means if you're posting here, we can presume you're looking for discussion. What should that discussion look like, in your view? What would be the proper way to proceed constructively? I can't promise that you'll get it from anyone else in this thread, but I can at least try to provide it myself, and maybe it can set an example.
To lay my cards on the table, I don't think you post in good faith, and believe that your general strategy is to push the edge of the rules as hard and as skillfully as possible, and then concern troll and play the victim when people push back. I think this has been your pattern for pretty much as long as I've been interacting with you, and believe I wasted a lot of time trying to have productive discussions with you before I got a handle on how your schtick works. If that model is correct, the next logical play would be for you to ignore this message and focus on the lowest-quality and most angry responses in the thread.
On the other hand, it seems to me that even if that is your schtick, the best response is to exert a bit of effort offering you what you appear to be asking for, and then make it clear that you probably won't take it. And if I'm wrong and you will take it, and we can actually have a high-quality dialogue, well, mission accomplished, as they say.
So, again, we have a clear disagreement here. You think you've been slandered, I think you are objecting to people pointing out your very real bad behavior. It doesn't seem to me that this disagreement should be unsolvable; people have criticized me for posts I've made in the past, and I've always been happy to discuss the issue with them at their pleasure, and will remain so in the future. So what's the proper way to proceed?
When do you personally think the left has ever lied about Trump?
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Hey, I'm not a moderator.
Source.
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Who do you actually think you're gaslighting here? The list of people eager to call you out after the hoax became obvious was practically endless, and the way you shamelessly feigned blindness to all of it was an instant meme with no moderator help required.
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We can't help ourselves, we are victims of systemic racism unearned privilege and white supremacist thinking 😔
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If the NYTs does do this at least someone should point them to https://www.vault.themotte.org/ it wouldn't take a journalist that long to get a feel for what the community values outside of picking some nuts in a community oriented around allowing nuts to cook.
That is a mistake theory recommendation, and the Times isn't running on mistake theory.
It'd depend on the reporter a think and what kind of story they can get out of it. "There are obscure forums where people are discussing wrong think" is a dog bites man story.
I doubt reporters are going to do that much leg work.
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Eh, not terribly true for me, unless "sort by new in reddit style threads on themotte," "read newest substack articles of people I run across" or occasionally, "look at the newest (not algorithmically generated) tweets for someone on nitter" count.
I don't know that his post will prompt lefty investigations here; it's not like he's acted terribly right-wing besides merely investigating the matter, and it's pretty egregious.
I assume he can flee to conservatives, even if he's not really one, for defense for this kind of thing, if needed.
That said, can you imagine the articles they'd write about themotte? (I suppose that would solve any evaporative cooling problems for the short term, but lead to large quality and moderation problems.)
Edit: Actually, maybe the anon (I believe?) account with enough biographical information to make doxxing not hard might be pretty attractive to some journalists. (How many gay-married ex-mormons in law school are there?)
It's kind of amazing to me that we've stayed under the radar for so long.
Really? This is a forum comprised of ~100 nobodies and maybe 3 D-list Twitter celebrities (Sorry, TracingWoodgrains and Kulak).
This is one of the least-important corners of the internet. A fun distraction at best.
I am highly disgruntled at being linked with those in the company of a Twitter celebrity, even a D-list one. You take that back!
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Who knows. I’ve always been a fan of a Scott Summer quote that the top 10% read the NYT and the top 1% spend their time on some obscure blog/message board. The DEI and critical theory types were all obscure before they took over everything.
The rationalist were obscure before they took over AI and Bitcoin. New ideas come from people who skim the NYT but develop their mental models elsewhere. Mass adoption of ideas won’t flow thru here but the laboratories upstream of say a Hannania weren’t developed on big twitter followings.
I would say in past generations ideas like neoliberalism were developed in academia by a Friedman toiling in anonymity but my guess is that’s not where the big cultural ideas will come from in the future.
I’ve long wandered if anyone I know in real life posts here and there’s a few who seem to fit the mold.
Neoliberalism (horribly vague word but the meaning here is clear from context) wasn't developed by (either) Friedman toiling in obscurity. There was an organised movement of classically liberal economists, founded by Hayek just after WW2, which recruited people like Milton Friedman and encouraged them to get involved in advocacy.
The Mont Pelerin Society is attacked by lefties as a vast right-wing conspiracy, but it was no more conspiratorial than any other professional network - it was just a professional association of like-minded politically-engaged economists that conducted its affairs in public. Arguably it is the prototype for the modern ecosystem of right-wing think tanks.
But to some degree neoliberalism was invented by a bunch of economists toiling away in academic semi-obscurity - the MPS was treated like a bunch of kooks (Friedman wasn't, but he was a serious economist because of his macro work, not his libertarian work) until the 1970's when suddenly there was a political need for what they were selling, and Reagan and Thatcher found a ready-made intellectual edifice to tell them both how and why to do the things they wanted to do anyway.
Nah, I'm going to side with the lefties here. "No more conspiratorial" doesn't mean much, when these sort of organizations are plenty conspiratorial. I don't even know if there can be "just a professional network" of economists. Economists aren't plumbers, there isn't a neutral way to judge their practices, and any way they will associate themselves will have more to do with ideology than professional practices.
Oh come on, this is literally "it's not a conspiracy, it's just a group of people acting together toward's a common goal!".
How is it a prototype? This whole model of influence goes way back to how the Catholic Church gained it's influence over Europe, if not to ancient philosophers whispering into the ears of emperors.
Not necessarily what they wanted to do anyway. I think someone (possibly Friedman) remarked how it was weird, and basically dumb luck, how someone like Pinochet would go for a market system, rather than more fashy ideas associated with military dictators. From what I understand he just wanted to be notAllende, and the Chicago Boys happened to be at the right place at the right time.
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We've stayed under the radar because we are very small. Even Scott is only recently on the radar and he's orders of magnitude larger.
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The mainstream media tends to avoid signal-boosting intelligent dissident voices. They want controlled opposition and/or clownish opposition. Much easier to write about Alex Jones or @420MAGAPepe1488 on X.
Similarly you don't see LibsOfTikTok engaging with Noah Smith. Much easier to dunk on the squad
The last time I saw Noah Smith get into a twitter argument it involved him giving an extremely common word (Growth) a novel and unintuitive definition and then "dunking" on people who didn't use it. I'd rather get into an argument with him than the squad to be honest.
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This is actually a debate space to make progressives better at debunking alt-right trolls. TheMotte plays a critical part in deprogramming radicals.
(this isn't even necessarily untrue)
This is true. Shakesneer used to be a leftist if I remember correctly, and judging by the recent podcast he's joined the many people deprogrammed by participating here.
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It is untrue because there are no progressives here…
There are plenty of true-to-the-name progressives here, but few "progressives" who buy into the definition of progress as whatever it is currently most socially beneficial to clamor for. The latter seek validation rather than progress, and can get it far more easily on other platforms.
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I used to be a token progressive on here but then I left because I took shrooms and decided hiking was a better use of my time than arguing on the internet.
Probably true, but heterogeneity of opinion keeps things interesting.
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Well, not many. Would you consider yourself a progressive, @guesswho?
No category label is ever fully accurate when applied to a person. But of the handful of major political labels we currently acknowledge in the US, it's the group I'm most likely to try to support, sure.
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I'm a progressive! (circa 2014)
Me too! (circa 300 A.D.)
You actually support Diocletian's reforms? umm, yikes.
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Much obliged, but please tell them I'm one of the radicalising algorithms instead, I'm embracing aspirational identity.
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