TracingWoodgrains
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
10mo ago
Hold on, let's be clear.
I'm not blowing up on a bait post by an obvious drive-by troll. I ignored that. I'm responding to people like WhiningCoil and Dean who have been in this community for years, have hated me for years, and who actively want to push me out of this space. I am responding publicly, and clearly, in a way that emphasizes that they are in this space and people I like are leaving it, and that I, too, am leaving it.
The amount of people surprised at my thin skin should give those same people pause about its thinness. I went my whole time here without a single warning; I spend my time online hanging out on Twitter and rdrama and poking the bears of tech centimillionaires and rationalist grantmakers and government agencies and Wikipedia obsessives who spend decades etching their grudges into the public record. When I don't want to react harshly, I don't. In this case, I am, after some thought, telling people who have antagonized me for years precisely what I think of them in a public enough way that uninvolved people can understand exactly what's going on and why.
I don't care about the community's longevity at this point. People who do are welcome to it, but I think it had a great run for many years and stopped being what I loved in it years ago. I've had one foot out the door here for years, and it's time to step out properly. My burning of bridges is not performative--I have too many spaces full of good people for me to possibly keep up with, and dropping one that has many good people and a few miserable ones with altogether too much local-cultural sway is sad only because of history.
You're absolutely right: my leaving is a conscious choice I am making. I was not forced out. Every top-level post I make here, it's clear that plenty of people here appreciate what I have to say. I appreciate their interest, and I appreciate what this community was to me in the past, but I don't think this is a space where I personally should contribute time, energy, or passion any more.
It's possible that well down the line I'll pop back for a bit--never count anything out--but I wouldn't count on it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
"What is wrong with you?" disingenuously adds a moral and emotional valence to my statement that was absolutely not there. My position is more or less what @ControlsFreak stated, and what I said very plainly: your objections to what TracingWoodgrains did to LoTT (and lack of objection to what he did to David Gerard) are 100% conflict theory and 0% principled objection.
@Jiro is, of course, wrong and misses the point. No one here has objected to Trace doing a piece on David Gerard because pretty much no one here likes David Gerard and if anyone but Trace had done the piece, they'd be blowing it up with AAQCs. But, like you, they hate Trace (for being a gay furry who started the Schism and once pranked LoTT) more than they hate David Gerard (who's a more remote figure to most people here).
WhiningCoil
10mo ago
By this reasoning, we should see everyone saying "well, this time TracingWoodgrains collected information about our enemies, so that's fine". This was not the reaction.
I've seen ample people (including mods) going "You seem to hate TracingWoodgrains more than you hate David Gerard, what is wrong with you?" which is at least adjacent to that reaction.
Jiro
10mo ago
"...but there are good reasons why a regular person would want to use Ashley Madison,"
Ashley Madison's advertising was clearly aimed towards people for whom using it would be unethical, and the vast majority of users were such people. Ethical edge cases like some openly poly person who wanted to use it are a rounding error.
It's like claiming that it's okay for someone to be in the hitman business because if you're trapped in a building with a killer on the loose, you can call up a hitman and get him to kill the killer. Maybe, but that's a very noncentral hitman job.
Whenever there was a new hack, a new release, a new doxx, it seemed like no one was asking, "Is this type of hacking/releasing/doxxing okay or bad in general?"
By this reasoning, we should see everyone saying "well, this time TracingWoodgrains collected information about our enemies, so that's fine". This was not the reaction.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
10mo ago
TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
That's your takeaway from the whole saga? It's far more reasonable to conclude that LibsofTikTok is the equivalent of David Gerard. She's a culture warrior to whom truthfulness matters not one whit through and through but unlike Hanania doesn't have the intelligence and social grace to present as respectable. I support her name being dragged through the mud for the same reason I support Gerard's name being dragged through it.
Dean
Flairless
10mo ago
People who convert generally don't pretend to be someone else and abandon their previous identity.
Yes they do. I will disagree with you here, particularly since I'm referring to the more variable forms of conversion and not simply religious.
People who do major lifetime conversions frequently cut ties and connections with their previous identities, including in some cases the formal identities themselves, in their efforts to distance themselves from these past personas and habbits. This can go from religious/cult conversion, gender transition, nationalization, marriage, even very banal things like going to college and dropping old nicknames to adopt new monikers. The very act of creating and internet pseudonum is an act of obscuring a previous identity, and we don't consider that a falsification, even though the research on how people's behavior and prowess over the internet change vis-a-vis in person is well established.
We could endlessly go into how in depth as to how relevant twitter-handles and Rationalist-sphere psuedonums are to these, but I suspect it would be missing the point regardless.
Even if Trace apologized for pranking LoTT (which, by the way, I agree was a low point, but seriously y'all need to get over it, it's not like LoTT has ever been doing any kind of quality or good faith "journalism") and disappeared, if he reappeared as Earnest McGee, brand new social media account talking about culture war topics, and then was discovered to be TracingWoodgrains, I think you and his other detractors would be the first to gleefully drag him. You would not grant him absolution and forgiveness.
I am as always impressed by your long-distance over-internet mindreading powers of my views and approaches to absolution and forgiveness. I can only hope that you are as capable in person.
In return, I am reminded of the opening paragraph of the classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.
In Chesterton’s The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.
Dean
Flairless
10mo ago
Why do you believe Woodgrains pushback is based on things completely unrelated to the current post?
Tracingwoodgrains condemnations of Gerard include both explicit and implicit themes that Gerard is malicious, deceptive, dishonest, and taking exceptional effort in order to negatively shape others perceptions of his political opponents. The evidence of this goes back years, more than a decade ago. This is presented as to be contemptable, especially as he is unrepentant, a critic of this community, and doing this in obvious self-interest (in this case, ideological).
Tracingwoodgrain's LibsOfTikTok hoax was also malicious, deceptive, dishonest, and took exceptional effort in order to negatively shape others perceptions of his political opponent. The evidence of this goes back years, not even half a decade ago. Tracingwoodgrains is also unrepentent, a critic of this community, and doing this in obvious self-interest (in this case, self-publicity).
There is the surface-level subject of a post, and the meta-level subject of what a poster likes to talk about or return to. Woodgrain's thesis lacks sting or sincerity when its themes are things he is likewise guilty of (of kind if not degree), and noting this when he attempts to assert a moral high ground is not merely a matter of grudges, but of topling the meta-positioning of the argument.
And that pushback in turn revealed relevant context via the response- Tracing went from pejoratively opening his characterization with 'longtime malicious critic of this community' to a blistering 'screw you' burnout rant and posts about how bad this community had been for a long time. This is relevant information for the current post. It reveals not only information about the viewpoint biases of the author (by reminding otherwise-ignorant readers of narrator similarities with the subject of condemnation), but it revealed previously hidden information (the private views the writer has of his audience).
This is silliness. Maybe you'd have a point if @TracingWoodgrains used his credibility to push the story but he didn't. LOTT ate bait posted by an anonymous source with zero attempt at verification. He did not pimp out his name. There is no reason to believe anything he writes is a hoax. The only lesson one can reasonably draw from the whole thing is that you shouldn't take the word of random anonymous people or those who do.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
People who convert generally don't pretend to be someone else and abandon their previous identity. Even if Trace apologized for pranking LoTT (which, by the way, I agree was a low point, but seriously y'all need to get over it, it's not like LoTT has ever been doing any kind of quality or good faith "journalism") and disappeared, if he reappeared as Earnest McGee, brand new social media account talking about culture war topics, and then was discovered to be TracingWoodgrains, I think you and his other detractors would be the first to gleefully drag him. You would not grant him absolution and forgiveness.
WhiningCoil
10mo ago
I mean, there is also apologizing to the party you wronged and swearing you'll never do that again. But that's clearly off the table since he seems to think the problem is that his hoax wasn't received well, and maybe he could have done something on the margins to address that, but it was otherwise absolutely justified. Which is largely why I regard TracingWoodgrains and the target of this piece as not all that dissimilar in the first place.
WhiningCoil
10mo ago
I do believe in good faith truth seeking. I just think that when an interlocutor has waged an information war in the past, that puts a permanent asterisk on their "truth seeking".
I've noticed this a lot. There is this strain of internet user that believes if you can create fake websites, fake images, fake users, etc to convince your political opponents of falsehoods to embarrass them, that's just good old fashioned internet fun. And yeah, I laughed too when local news reporters beclowned themselves reporting on Jenkem. But it takes a far darker turn when you muddy the waters of real, salient, political issues as TracingWoodgrains has done, and bragged about, here even.
But I donno. Maybe I have him wrong, and at some point he publicly apologized to LibsOfTiktok for hoaxing her, and has publicly expressed that he regrets waging an information war on her.
TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
From the very bottom of my heart, go screw yourself.
Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must; I believe this will mark my first violation of this sort. But I stand by it, and sometimes, things like this need to be said.
To you, to everyone like you who thinks that about me here: go screw yourself.
I have always been perfectly upfront about who I am, what I do, and why. I have aimed to remain earnest, consistent, open, and push constantly against falsehood and towards painting clear pictures of the truth, including in controversial and sensitive situations. I stake my reputation and my name on my work. The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.
Have I made missteps? I don't know anyone in the arena who has not. But I am immensely proud of my work as a whole, and every time I return here and find miserable scolds like you grousing about bitterness you've never let go, it disgusts me.
Screw you, screw everyone like you here, and if I didn't know perfectly well that plenty of people here do not think like you, I would delete my posts here and never spend another moment on this site, because you and yours have dragged it into the gutter and I don't need to spend my time around people determined to see nothing but the worst in me. Imagine writing something like this after I spend a month exhaustively documenting the malicious history of one who has been spreading propaganda against communities like this before either you or I had anything to do with it. Imagine having nothing better to do than dig this rubbish up, than look to start a stupid fight over nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you won't.
You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.
WhiningCoil
10mo ago
Maybe. Maybe not. You either wage information war to humiliate, alienate and discredit your political opponents, or you don't. TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
WhiningCoil
10mo ago
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.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
10mo ago
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.
Another day, another Guardian hit job.
The title reads "Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back"
Take a moment to form a hypothesis about what kind of group this could be. The KKK? Some fringe right-wingers? An Israeli lobby group?
Turns out their target of the day is Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone is running lesswrong, which is a grandparent of themotte.
I personally have only heard of lightcone in context of TracingWoodgrains' writings on the Nonlinear investigation conducted by Ben Pace and Oliver Habryka. (TIL that this is a name different from the handle of a former motte mod. In my defense, I did not read a lot from either of them. Blame my racist brain.)
Of course Trace's critique could not be more different from what the Guardian writes about lightcone.
They start off by linking the NYT article on Scott Alexander. I think it is the one where they tried to doxx him. Apparently the NYT does not like my adblocker or something, the only think I get (besides a picture which indicates that the NYT designers have way too much time on their hand) is the text "Silicon Valley’s Safe Space -- Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared." -- I guess that is one way to phrase it. Of course, the Guardian gleefully doxxes Scott again, not that anyone cares (but it's the thought that counts).
Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic. From the linked article, I would say it is either being tone-deaf or intentionally courting controversy. He even has sympathy for incels. The nerve of that man!
Apparently they found no dirt on Eliezer, which to me seems like a failure of investigative journalism. EY has written a lot more than the six lines Cardinal Richelieu would have required.
Then they come to the "extreme figures" present at Manifest 2024.
Jonathan Anomaly is apparently pro eugenics. Never heard of him. However, given that anything from "select embryos which do not have a genetic disease" to "encourage smart and successful people to have kids" can be called eugenics, and given that the article would cite the most damning quotation, I will assume that he is not a Nazi.
Razib Khan is a journalist scientist and writer who got kicked out of the NYT because he wrote for some "paleoconservative" magazine. This matters only if you think that failing the NYT ideological purity test is some kind of fatal character flaw.
I vaguely recall Stephen Hsu being discussed on slatestarcodex and from what I remember my conclusion was that he got cancelled for a lack of ideological purity -- calling for research into increasing human intelligence is not acceptable, and talking about race differences is even less acceptable.
Brian Chau is apparently an e/acc and thus probably the most controversial person from my personal point of view. But then, engaging in honest discussion with advocates of other positions is generally a good thing, so if Lighthaven is more inclusive than Aella's birthday party, I am kinda fine with it.
Of course, the narrative would not be complete without the specter of antisemitism, here in the form of a quote "[Hsu is] often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people [...]". I think the rationalist community is a bad place for antisemites for the same reason why the marathon Olympics are a bad place for white supremacists.
In the end, the plug for this story -- lightcone having received money from SBF -- has no bearing on the bulk of the article, which is about how icky these ratsphere nerds are. It does not matter if SBF donated to the Save Drowning Puppies Foundation or to the Feed Puppies to Alligators Alliance -- either the donations can be kept or not.
Edit: fixed Khan's profession.
gattsuru
11mo ago
This discussion only partly overlaps, and @TracingWoodgrains’s real world experience is more relevant than mine, but it may still be worth reading.
I generally don’t recommend pushing yourself into casual sex you don’t want. Yes, you’ll get swamped with ‘dtf’ comments on most dating sites, and there’s a more emphasis on sex early in relations with online dating, but it is absolutely possible to focus on people looking for real relationships and get some genuine interest. You’ll have to handle some rejection, but so do the dtf-spammers.
In the US, I’d point to interest organizations (both explicitly gay, like various Pride orgs, or where there’s just a bunch of people who happen to be gay and out), but I don’t know enough about Kiwi culture to say whether norms are the same there.
Getting more comfortable about sex, both in terms of shyness and in terms of physical comfort, can be valuable. Most people will have some patience for shy folk, and some love the idea of bedding a blushing ‘virgin’, but there’s a lot of ways discomfort with or with talking about stuff can backfire, even with partners who want to take things slow. Nothing’s going to swap for the frisson with a partner, but if you’re used to never ever mentioning anything about your sexuality or interests, there are a lot of spheres where it’s ’normal enough’ that it’ll at least get past the feeling that mentioning top, switch, or bottom is going to have the earth open up under you.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
If I may briefly interject: there is a reason we tone police here, and it's because words (and their resonance) matter. You are expressing bafflement that @TracingWoodgrains took offense to you calling him a "prog." "What?" you say. "I don't take offense to being called a trad!"
Assuming you're being sincere (probably you are), I will just tell you: the two terms are not equivalent. Some leftists may call trads "trads" in a derogatory fashion, but I have seen it used much more frequently by trads themselves (or if it's being used in a condescending fashion, it's usually by traditional conservatives or DRs). (Leftists are more likely to call you "fascist.") Meanwhile, I almost never see progressives/leftists/wokes call themselves "progs." Everyone knows that's meant as an insult.
Generally speaking, we wouldn't mod someone for calling another poster a "prog," but depending on the tone and the context, it could very easily be read as intended to insult. Whereas while I suppose someone could take offense at being called a "trad," you'd have to be going out of your way to boo the outgroup to make "trad" into an insult.
While you may think this is a semantic argument, it gets to the root of your exchange with @TracingWoodgrains. You casually call him a "prog," which you and he both understand to mean that he is in the enemy camp, a member of your outgroup, one of Those People. He, not even considering himself a proper progressive, finds it indicative of what he's talking about - being put in a mislabeled box by people who don't bother to understand what he actually believes - and you blink in astonishment that he took your label as an act of belligerence.
If someone called me a "prog" I wouldn't take offense, exactly, but I would conclude two things: (1) This person is an idiot who doesn't care what I actually believe and just throws everyone with slightly left-leaning views into the same box; (2) This person meant to offend me (and will probably pretend they didn't and say "What's wrong with being called a prog?" if I call them on it).
VinoVeritas
11mo ago
Some of our best people like TracingWoodgrains (who is apparently a furry) and Kulak (who is apparently a very attractive woman? wtf) are now posting on twitter for Muskbucks and some like Hlynka have just been banned by overzealous overlords seeking to 'guide' the community
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
11mo ago
I recall a year or two ago there was some shout outs from @ymeskhout and @TracingWoodgrains. They both have larger audiences and could do the same. Maybe they didn't see much effect.
I reference the motte, its role in my development, and my continued participation here as appropriate and will always have a soft spot for it, but my experience here has long been a complicated one and promotion is similarly complicated. In some ways, it often threatens to stir up drama best left in the past.
Yassine has similarly complex feelings about it all, but I won't speak for him.
I don't have the opportunity to read it as regularly as I did in the past, but I think the best, most honest, and most natural way for me to shout it out is "Here's something cool I read; here's the source." Since I'm unlikely to see every post or comment here these days, I'm always happy to be tagged into things that seem particularly worth seeing.
wemptronics
11mo ago
My impression is that Zorba et. al would rather the project die than have its mission compromised. The move was a full commitment to make it work or death. A concern beginning back at reddit where the lowest common denominator wandering in and ruining everything was a genuine one that required active management. The project is always in some precarious, delicate state of balance that requires a velvet glove.
I recall a year or two ago there was some shout outs from @ymeskhout and @TracingWoodgrains. They both have larger audiences and could do the same. Maybe they didn't see much effect. Mods are likely older and busier now which makes the idea of managing problems that come with a boom from widescale advertising unappealing.
Putting the vault on substack and having people blast that out seems like a good (safer) idea to filter out some of the troublemakers and attract more wordcels. Entropy, a bitch, etc. Before death, Kulak should put the site on blast to his Twitter followers for maximum going-out-with-a-bang witch gathering.
If you had read the article, you would have noticed that he addresses the very Breitbart article you linked.
Given David Gerard's history of constructing his own reality and then force-fitting Reliable Sources into that narrative, it does not seem bad faith at all to assume that fabrication is precisely what he's doing here. He's clearly not a man who spends a lot of time on Breitbart.com looking to uncover the Truth. Something motivated a man who likely despises Breitbart in general and Milo Yiannopolous in specific to cite their website as a source. You can quibble about the semantics of the word "fabricate" in this context, but to be clear, he is deciding that This Thing must be true without reliable evidence, and then going out to find that evidence, even when it does not exist or is worthless by his own standards.
Whether or not you think the word "fabricating" is sufficiently accurate in this context, it's a huge leap to then claim that an obsessively sourced document in excess of 12,000 words is "bad faith." The article bends over backwards to be charitable to a man whose every action makes him look like, at best, a vandal of history with outsized influence on a website that constitutes the only source of information many people will ever consume on a given subject. In fact, I think a good faith reading of the article would reveal that Tracingwoodgrains was abundantly charitable and writing entirely in good faith, even if you disagreed with his interpretation of the facts. There is a massive canyon between "disagreeing with the precise word chosen to describe David Gerard's behavior in a comment summarizing a 12,000 word article" and "bad faith."
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