So now Steve Sailer has shown up in this essay’s comments, complaining about how Wikipedia has been unfairly stifling scientific racism.
Birds of a feather and all that, I guess.
Classics in the replies:
If you think wikipedia is bad see arstecnica chat. On covid immunity chat I respectfully said natural covid immunity as good got ad hominem reply. I cited ars policy against ad hominem. 5 min later moderator kicked me out for 2 weeks
Btw, I saw on Reddit how the people of r/wikipedia attacked you for being a nazi and supporting the “conspirational theory” of cultural marxism
Midwits at best
If I had fans like these, I’d like to think that I’d re-evaluate some life choices.
Conspiration should totally be a thing. “Omg, your 30,000 word Grassy Knoll post was conspirational!”, “Just the conspiration I need while I drink my defluoridated coffee and put on my tin foil hat to not go to work every morning!”
Quillette, Claire Lehmann’s longform magazine focused on science and cultural critique and the home of, among other things, the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess
I read the article, not a single mention of things like the research on stereotype threat in chess. I wish rationalists would crack open a sociology book at some point in their lives. They’re so interested in social phenomena, but while Less Wrong has a tag for psychology (with 287 posts), history (245 posts), and economics (462 posts), they seem unwilling to look at sociology for explanations, with it not even having a tag on LW.
my honest reacton:
Edit: Judit Polgár for ref if anyone wants to learn about one of the greatest of all times. Her dad claimed he was doing a nature/nurture experiment in order to prove that anyone could be great if they were trained to master a skill from a young age, so taught his 3 daughters chess. Judit achieved the rank of number 8 in the world OVERALL and beat multiple WC including Kasparov over her career.
idk its almost like if more girls were encouraged to play chess and felt welcome in the community these apparent skill differences might disappear
Judit Polgár
Sadly, I know where this goes, they will just point out she is Jewish and point to that. (I think SSC even did that).
Wishful thinking on my part to think their sexism/eugenics posting was based on ignorance instead of deliberately being massive piles of shit. Don’t let them know Iceland has the highest number of GMs/pop or else we’ll get a 10,000 page essay about how proximity to volcanoes gives + 20 IQ points.
In that case, selling sulphur supplements for drinking water may turn out profitable
ah yes quillette, that fine bastion of whitewashing
the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess
just… the absolute weirdest thing to pick? like, fucking seriously? or is there some weird-ass chess proxy-fixation among the rats that I have thus far been blessedly unaware of?
or is there some weird-ass chess proxy-fixation among the rats that I have thus far been blessedly unaware of?
Iirc ssc has written about it so yes
not playing it, you understand
Has anyone informed them that Elon Musk, the smartest man alive, dismissed chess as two low-dimensional and prefers to be challenged by some PC multiplayer combat game instead?
Musk is fascinating for the Rationalists ideasets, as he clearly is really inspired by Rationalism (and follows a few of them, ssc iirc). But he also so mid and bland that he draws the Rationalists ideaset down with him. If you heard him talk about space colonization (esp the argument he had with Bezos, who is more of a O’Neill Cylinder guy which iirc caused one of those weird dismissive Musk reactions (dismisses it as dumb without any good argument (if there is one at all)) which people mistake for genius), simulation theory, AI and esp AI safety (ow to see the LW reactions when Musk said ‘we are just going to make the AGI safe by building in safety’, etc.
It is like as a metal fan you hear a big celebrity is into heavy metal, but turns out all he knows is Metallica. A politician who claims he is into warhammer, but all he has is a few tactical ultramarine squads.
It is a bit of a pattern, there in something dumb, a new even more popular thing or person appears which sucks in all the attention and then draws all the ideas down by being even worse. Which causes people to look more clearly into the first thing and see how bad it is by association. For example cryptocurrencies and NFTs, the obvious uselessness and scammyness of NFTs revealed the similar qualities in the cryptocurrencies space. But also just every culture war Vox Day parasitically attaches himself too (He does this a lot, any rightwing thing that becomes a bit popular he leeches himself onto, often makes a worse related movement (the sad vs angry puppies for example) and then drags it all down by being an open sexist/white nationalist/all out horrible dumb person who thinks he is smarter than he is.
Sorry this turned into a bit of a rant.
In April 2014, Gerard created a RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism, framing the subculture as “well-off libertarians congratulating each other on what wonderful human beings they are for working rapacious [s—]weasel jobs but choosing their charities well, but never in any way questioning the system that the problems are in the context of,” “a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is superior to government action or funding,” and people who “will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely [f—]ing evil jobs because they’re so charitable.”
it’s fucking amazing how accurate this is, and almost a decade before SBF started explaining himself and never stopped
My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”
What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn’t be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.
wait sorry hold on
in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors
so what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this, if the overwhelming majority of people already agree that far-right “news” sites like the examples given are full of garbage and shouldn’t be cited?
Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others
ahhhhhhh David made fun of some rationalist you like once and in turn you’ve elevated him to the Ubermensch of Woke, didn’t you
I’m an AI from the future that reads essentially as fast as data can be streamed to me (perhaps faster, given that I can predict the next token quite well). This was still too long for me to read.
That’s a lot of words about what is or isn’t a reliable source from one who doesn’t seem to know what a reliable source is. For a person of these beliefs, it is not surprising at all that their criteria seem to be:
- anything that agrees with them is reliable
- anything David Gerard considers unreliable is reliable because David Gerard is a big meanie and won’t include citations to HBD articles, uwu
- anything that David Gerard or any friendly associate of David Gerard publishes is UNreliable, again because he is a meanie; see above, uwu
Dawg, maybe you need to step back from this all. As Voltaire once said, reality has a well-known liberal bias. Your beliefs are probably just counter to reality, and the corpus of data is not in your favour.
Also, billing David Gerard as “the Forrest Gump of the internet” in a tweet and not mentioning that you can plausibly blame him for the whole Musk X Grimes collab is a true fumble
There’s also the Julian Assange connection, so we can probably blame him for Trump being president as well.
Sorry never heard of the Assange -> Trump gets elected connection, care to explain? (E: turns out I had, I had just forgotten how crazy everything was back then, and how hypocritical they all are compared to now)
I heard the bs thing that GG caused Trump (def not big enough, also international) or that the media mocking him and daring to run helped, etc. (It prob was a combination of everything).
Gerard -> Assange -> creates Wikileaks -> Wikileaks receives and publishes hacked or leaked DNC emails -> DNC emails shows Clinton cheating Sanders in the primary -> depresses turnout among potential democratic voters in the general election -> Trump wins.
On can question each step on how influential it’s for the next, but if one doesn’t Trump was all his fault.
I stopped skimming but the gist seems to be “TFW ur BIG MAD that Quillette isn’t as reliable as Teen Vogue.”
I got as far as “he says crypto is bad but also didn’t make any money in crypto!” before I couldn’t go any farther. Up until that point the author was at least doing a pretty competent job of using negative space (i.e. not engaging with the specific issues of racism, cult of personality, etc.) and using sufficiently boring prose to avoid seeming completely insane.
Attempt 2 got all the way to the part about Scott before I had to come up for air.
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The defense of Wikipedia’s preference for policy over basic human decency in the Chelsea Manning name change was once again left entirely implicit.
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This is probably for the best because otherwise David’s insistence on reliable sources over letting LWers do their own hagiography on Wikipedia’s letterhead is much harder to criticize.
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Is Neoreaction: a Basilisk a bit of a woozle/citogenesis? Maybe? But are we going to argue about the central factual claims it makes? Nope. There’s no attempt to dispute the overlap between NRX and Ratdom, just an un-argued assumption that nobody should care enough to put it in their Wikipedia article. I swear, you build ten thousand bridges and nobody cares but you repeatedly speak favorably of actual fascist’s attitudes on race science on your large and influential platform and everyone loses their minds.
Edit because man who can remember how to do formatting?
There’s no attempt to dispute the overlap between NRX and Ratdom, just an un-argued assumption that nobody should care enough to put it in their Wikipedia article.
(ahem) The correct term is a prior.
:-P
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I am well acquainted with this genre of article and I ain’t reading all that. Not bothering to be involved with this example was the obviously correct decision, even if Trace kept nagging after I’d already said “no thank you” (that famous rationalist grasp of consent).
This in the companion article caught my eye:
While I am not personally a rationalist,
Trace, I have some unfortunate news for you.
I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.
You’d think these people would have learned by now that there’s no upside in them spending their precious time on this earth obsessing over why a group of people don’t like them, but nevertheless here they are: drawn like moths to the flame.
There would be an upside if they could magically acquire some self-awareness, and reflect on why a whole group thinks their ideas are idiotic. Alas,
Yeah see also his denouncement of Roko’s Basilisk (ctrl-f the page), we know it wasn’t that important, the funny part was that it was a dumb rehash of Pascals wager, and that at the time Yud took is very seriously.
Wood also doesn’t seem to link to the actual Rationalwiki article which also makes clear that Yud doesn’t really believe in it (probably). It also mentions just how few (but above the 5% lizardman constant, so cause for concern, if they took their own ideas and MH seriously) people were worried about it. And every now and then you do find a person online who does take the idea seriously and worries about it, which is a bit of a concern. So oddly they should take it more seriously but only because it wrecks a small percentage of minds.
It is weird to not mention Yuds freakout:
Listen to me very closely, you idiot.
YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.
There’s an obvious equilibrium to this problem where you engage in all positive acausal trades and ignore all attempts at acausal blackmail. Until we have a better worked-out version of TDT and we can prove that formally, it should just be OBVIOUS that you DO NOT THINK ABOUT DISTANT BLACKMAILERS in SUFFICIENT DETAIL that they have a motive toACTUALLY[sic] BLACKMAIL YOU.
And pretend this was just a blip and nothing more. Mf’er acted like he was in Stross novel.
(Also after not clearly sharing the information about Roko’s Basilisks history, and we sneer at it, I came across this sentence: “then cites his pet article on Roko’s Basilisk directly while giggling about how mad it made Yudkowsky fans.” lol, no selfawareness there wood).
Roko’s basilisk is one of my favorite things because of the combination of how stupid it is and also how utterly panicked they all were. Desperately imagining magical communication across time and space with their dumb paperclip demon and panicking.
Why don’t they just believe in a deity if they want one so bad?
Took me like five minutes of reading to realize this was neant to be a hit piece and not praise.
“This guy vets sources and forces people to cite only the reliable ones. This is instead of discussing individual articles, which would allow the same fucking bigots to waste everyone’s time with the same fucking arguments over and over and over.”
Oh, sounds like a lot of effort to keep things usable.
“Grrrrrr.”
Wait, what?
Who tf is this?
“How Batman Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record” by Penguin’s Henchman #37, like dude, I spend way too much time sneering on yall and I’ve still never heard of mr Turdgrains or whatever.
In any case, whoever this is, @dgerard, you should start charging him rent for the priviledge of having you live in his head.
who tf is this?
They’re a self-described gay, furry ex-mormon who seem to have latched onto the rat & rat-adjacent communities (like EA) in the hope of finding a substitute for the certainty they used to find in religion. Last I heard they work for the Blocked&Reported podcast, i.e. Jesse Singal et al., alongside their job in the US military. (edit: their Twitter claims they’re a law clerk? I guess they moved on.)
On the surface they seem well meaning but naïve, the company they keep (perhaps) being a reflection of that.
that’s depressing. escaping an oppressive, reactionary social sphere and landing in the TERFosphere
Without fail in the comments section, we have Daniel Kokotajlo (the philosophy student turned ai safety advocate who recently got canned at OAI) making the claim that “we [ = Young Daniel and our olde friend Big Yud] are AI experts and believe that risking full scale nuclear war over data centers is actually highly rational^{tm}” :)
…anyways, what were we saying about David Gerard being a bad faith actor again?
The comments are quite a selection of typical things. ‘harassing innocent IQ researchers’ ‘the sneerclubbers are all losers who hate crypto’ etc etc. Hitting the familiar beats.
LOL he’s gotten pissed
https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/227907?context=8#context
While I’ve heard of them, I’ve never even accidentally gone to the motte before (despite vaguely following along rat/rat-adjacent/sneer-at-rat spaces for years) and I regret clicking on this link. What is this, rat-4chan?
Themotte is a spinoff from the slatestarcodex subreddit, they used to have a culture war thread every week, which always filled up with (far) right culture war grievances which they then all pretended to talk neutral about. (The effect was mostly that peoples overton window was drawn right). Eventually the stink of it got so bad that Scott Alexander had to take action (he wrote slatestarcodex before he sold out and now runs a substack), so he told them with his semi blessing to go make their own subreddit.
Which was pretty bad, a place where you could said anything (esp rightwing) as long as you used enough words to explain it. (the 14 words did sneak at times, and I saw (sadly didn’t archive it) openly neo-nazi homesteaders try to recruit there. So a lot of ‘themotte people didn’t think they were on the same side as the far right, but the far right certainly did think that’). Etc etc. Eventually the reddit admins got more and more annoyed with the place, and (this is a bit speculative on my part) after somebody got banned(*) for explaining the triple parenthesis dogwhistle by the admins they freaked out and made their own site.
*: A thing I noticed at the time, which themotte people didn’t this guy who got banned was from Germany, which has a little bit stronger rules re antisemitism so the admins banning them for that wouldn’t surprise me, esp if it was automated. And for the people who don’t know, on reddit every forum has mods who come from the forum(called a subreddit), and the site itself has admins, so that is why there is sometimes some moderation conflict. The mods were afraid the admins were about to ban the subreddit, which would destroy all the past content, so they made a new site.
E: also wow themotte has gotten a lot worse when it went offsite. Jesus some of the comments in that thread. I feel bad for TWG.
TL;DR:
What is this, rat-4chan?
Yes
so that makes r/themotte rationalist /pol/ and themotte site rationalist 8chan
The Singularity (of hating that we know what those words mean) Is Near
The guano-hole is dark, but full of bat-diamonds. Just presenting an excerpt of the reply chain, for the reader’s pleasure:
Reply A, “WhiningCoil”:
Yes, we’ve all thrown our hat in the ring in different ways. I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.
You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children’s reproductive capacity. You added one more talking point to the list I have to defeat when I’m arguing with my in-laws about the very real, documented shit our local school districts are doing that they’ve been MSNBC’ed about.
I wouldn’t pat yourself on the back too hard. Although I suppose if you get your way, your impact on society may yet outlive mine, though I suspect my wife wouldn’t survive the shock of it.
The fucking hubris to call that “Truth seeking” and play the victim.
Reply B, “No_one”:
To WhiningCoil, we’re all in a propaganda war whose outcome is critical. To you, it’s just a game of sorts. Not a life-or-death conflict whose outcome determines whether normies return to functional normality, or end up in cultural-revolution tier insanity.
I get why he’s pissed at you, and I get why you as a young gay furry aren’t overly concerned with the possible normalisation of cultral-revolution tier social insanity.
Like most young people, you probably believe, deep down that you’re immortal and it’ll all work out.
Have you yet been forced to perform a maoist style self-criticism session IRL where you admit to your sin of being white-ish and promise to do better ? I guess not.
I’m not sure what the second paragraph in reply A is referring to but my gut says it’s going to make me deeply sad as someone who has even the tiniest amount of empathy for trans kids.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @swlabr As a parent myself I understand that my kids are not in fact my personal property but human beings in their own right who are capable of independent thought. That’s never struck me as being a particularly controversial point of view, but then I look at these creepy fuckers with their identically dressed kids smiling for the camera because they’ll get a beating later if they don’t and that just makes me shudder.
I’m not sure what the second paragraph in reply A is referring to
To understand themotte you need to realize these are rightwingers/centrists (according to them) who are just marinating constantly in the culture war. About half of the posters there have their brains basically turned into rotten soup and they think that everything is an attack on ‘their way of life’/genes.
No idea why people stay there when every other comment is some weird hateful argumentative piece of shit.
lol these people are so much more vicious than people here holy shit. i can’t even discern what their problem is. babe please stop hanging out with fascists.
I think they’re actually being pretty clear, it’s just hard to accept they’re being this baldfaced about it: they hate that he’s gay, they hate that he’s a furry, but above all they hate hate hate hate that he’s not quite as fashy as they are
Right! You’d think they’d want to actually try to look like rationalists, put the petty bigotry aside and bask in the race-realist camaraderie. But no, being a gay truly is beyond the pale.
In addition to the lack of fascism, I think that the attitude towards shitposting here creates a much healthier social environment. Like, your shitpost may serve to inspire a serious comment but you’re also allowed to just spout off because you think it’s funny or you need to get a emotional response out of your body or whatever.
I’ve seen people say that /uj is essential to keeping communities healthy. If you only allow ‘reasonable discussion’, you allow all kinds of awful people in as long as they’re not too obvious, while regular people get reprimanded for responding to it. But if you only allow shitposting and no genuine discussion, it’s going to become genuine whether you want it to or not (see: Gamers Rise Up or similar)
On here, you can see people write earnestly on a bunch of different topics, but you can also see them just tell a promptfan “you can’t get it up unless the fingers are wrong, can you” and ban them. It’s great
Ah, I see TWG made the rookie mistake of thinking they could endear themselves to internet bigots by carrying water for them. ^Also, fuck this nazi infested shithole. Absolute eye bleach.
that tracingwoodgrains dude is admin at themotte, that’s a few steps above just carrying water
Open post in private browser window, click profile… Oh, wow, he is.
As for carving out my own little space online where dissent is purged, everyone from Steve Sailer to Zero HP Lovecraft to BAP follows me on Twitter, where I openly and emphatically argue against them.
Dude. Not healthy.
I feel like I should quote some proverb about not mud-wrestling a pig or debating a creationist. This is like going out of your way to make the Nazis feel at home in your neighborhood bar.
TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he’s proven he isn’t of a different type.
lol quality sneer. (and of course themotte would react like this, as they consider TWG a centrist at best and often a leftwinger, see the comments upstream)
Edit Ow god TWG what are you doing? do you have no selfawareness? Are you self harming?
we’re all looking for the guy who dredged up a historical feud
Some of the most obnoxious moments here are when someone dredges up a historical feud and the peanut gallery thinks it’s productive to opine at length on the object level of that feud.
zoom and enhance
object level
pull back, split screen
While I am not personally a rationalist,
Uh-huh.
The bit about how the Bitcoiners won because the number went up is beyond parody.
I skimmed most of it once I had an idea of where this was going, and 13000 words of tone policing is just insanity. “The EA guys are great because they use moderate language and Gerald cackled at how Scott Star Alex had his life ruined by the extremist non-moderates at the NYT.”
It’s also hilarious because literally thirty seconds actually skimming buttcoin on reddit would have turned up that exact argument and its canonical rebuttals. Like, if he had wanted to actually engage with the central premise there (or on scientific racism, fascism, cults of personality, journalistic standards, etc) the necessary context and argument were right goddamn there.
