TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
It’s going great! Here’s the most recent quality contributions roundup:
https://old.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/1dsozbw/quality_contributions_up_to_30_june_2024/
Culturally, it has become exactly what I envisioned it being, and I am proud to have helped lay the foundation for one of the healthiest discussion spaces online, even as my own attention has moved mostly to Twitter.
Thanks for asking, and take care.
That's fine. Participating someplace where a significant minority of the community care about nothing but digging through old grievances every time I post gets old very, very fast, and there's not really a point to beating around the bush on that. Once, this forum meant a great deal to me, and many of the individuals on it still mean a lot to me, but the space as a whole lost the mandate of heaven long ago despite your own good work and the good work of the other mods.
In the past couple of months, I've met more than a dozen motte users I read avidly, respect, and have fond memories of in real life, at several events tied to this broader community. Almost none of them post here anymore. The Motte had a good run and contains a lot of good memories, but for all practical purposes, I think its run is over. Here’s to a glorious diaspora.
I encourage those of you who enjoy what I have to say to join me on Twitter or elsewhere. At this point, the conversations there are richer, the community there healthier, and participation there is more meaningful than it is here, and I have very little to gain from kicking around someplace where some 1/4 of the userbase want it to be crystal clear that they loathe me every time I post. There was a time this was the best discussion space online, but that time has passed and it's time for relics like me to move on.
All the best.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
I deleted my LoTT stuff because, in one of the worst moments of my time online, it was too much for me to engage with the community I had come up within as they reacted less charitably and more harshly to me than everywhere else on the internet. As for this one, don't worry. I meant every word of it and have no intention of deleting it. I reiterate the same to you. Go screw yourself.
People build the communities they deserve.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
That's not why she should have figured out that it was fake. She could, and should, have noticed that she was talking to a person who did not exist about something he would not cite to a specific location, making excuses when she asked for info about the space it was initially shared. That the worksheet was silly and full of inside jokes added to it, but "this anonymous person sent me this document; therefore, this happened" is bad epistemics.
I'm not certain which of the people in the link 90% agree with me and continue to feel this forum has a bizarrely distorted view of my own politics, but that's a fight I'm pretty worn out on fighting. Regardless, glad I've made a good impression otherwise.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
Checking the timing on everything, his malicious edits started in earnest well before the ant farming really kicked off. He participated in the Gamergate nonsense, certainly, but I will firmly maintain my reading that his shift came before that point and Gamergate just solidified things.
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.
"Hosted LemonParty" comes straight from the horse's mouth:
(I find myself in the position of being the only guy who has root and cares to do site admin on the server hosting Lemonparty (Wikipedia explanation). I found a few other shock sites hosted there too when I did a cleanout of dead accounts. It’s slightly disquieting to find myself responsible for maintaining this species of cultural icon.)
In fact, him talking about that is where I got the Forrest Gump of the internet line.
I don't personally see that as a smear at all, and he doesn't treat it as one when talking about it. It's just one peculiar, flavorful side point in a long history.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
If an editor approached me, I would do so, but in all honesty I'm quite lazy about reaching out to outlets. Writing on one's own platform is better for most self-interested reasons, and the whole process of working with editors and connecting with outlets and so forth mostly feels like more of a pain than it's worth.
A lot of journalists follow me these days, though, so you never know.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo 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.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
4mo ago
Yeah, for me this is very much an "I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" situation. I have my differences with the Lightcone guys, but the article was atrocious, and Oliver and I chatted a bit about it after its release.
Mind, I have a personal stake in this, since I was invited to present at Manifest and loved every second of it. I met a startling amount of old-school Motte users there as well. While the conference was ostensibly about prediction markets, in many ways it felt like keeping that spirit alive and bringing it into in-person spaces. Lighthaven is beautiful, Manifest rocked, and the Guardian can shove off.
One author is the same person who fruitlessly doxxed dissident right figure L0m3z the other week, while perennial anti-rationalist obsessive David Gerard bragged about giving background info. It's the sort of article that's much less interested in any real journalism and much more interested in creating a paper trail to establish the spookiness of everyone involved.
The EA forum has a couple of posts on the matter that I've been commenting in. It's an interesting environment, torn between social justice progressivism and rationalist instincts, but I usually get a more-or-less fair hearing over there. The posts in question:
Anyway, the most serious implication is a potential closing of Lighthaven, which would be a major blow for the Bay Area rationalists and for adjacent spheres, since it really is an incredible venue. That would happen with or without the article, though, and depends on a lot of funding questions. Manifest itself is unlikely to be moved by the article—the organizers and attendees know what they want, and the Guardian's irritation is only so much noise. Time will tell, though.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
5mo ago
Beautiful essay. I don’t quite agree, nor do I quite disagree, but it makes me think.
My own perspective on body modification is that the body is worth handling with deep seriousness and forethought. Our culture lacks much of the framework to make modification like tattoos meaningful, but more dramatic changes are inherently more meaningful (for better or worse) — people should approach them with seriousness and we should build proper frameworks around them if they intend to pursue them. Such frameworks are buildable but effortful, and are mostly not individual efforts. They can’t be divorced from societal context. A meaningless tattoo is no more or less a tragedy than the rest of a meaningless life.
Is the context you outline sufficient justification? That’s not really up to me, and it certainly isn’t my style, but it seems like people are having a good time. You make a compelling defense.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
5mo ago
All the best.
As a postscript, two final notes on the reaction at the time that I was looking for and finally found -- this is the full set of reactions to my original comment, and this is rdrama's reaction to the motte's reaction. Note in particular this comment and the replies below it from people who frequent both forums.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
5mo ago
one person mentioned that Zorba should talk with you about whether you want to remain part of the community.
Reread this and think about the words you wrote, please.
that one guy
You're linking one heavily downvoted jerk, but also--that's the point. Yes, being a somewhat public figure means more people have more opinions about you more aggressively. Having hundreds of people pile on you at once, many of them people you've had longstanding friendly relationships with, feels very very different than a single contentious conversation.
Anyway, since you're mentioning the reaction to the banned books list, look at it. He got some light criticism, a few people questioning his premise, quite a bit of interest. That's it. Nothing particularly notable, nothing dramatic.
The bad reception was because we're highly committed to honesty, not because we're highly committed to the Right.
There are high motives and low motives for every decision. I wouldn't flatter yourself too much here (though I also wouldn't imply that no critics had good points.) I didn't walk away thinking "these guys are highly committed right-wing partisans," I thought, "Huh, these people are willing to make and nod along to false, conspiratorial claims about me and hop in on a massive dogpile in which my character, my motives, and my membership in this space all become topics of heated controversy, thinking the worst of me and extending no grace whatsoever in a time when I could really use it." Unless you've been on the other end of something like that, I suggest not acting too much as if you know what it's like.
Similarly, you can choose to believe that it's just partisanship making people react in silly ways, but I've been around here a very long time and watched many of the best people here move on due to one or another comparable frustration. Explanations of why this forum zeitgeist was acting reasonably and nobly every time only go so far. At some point, it becomes simpler to leave than to explain, and poster after poster has made that calculation.
Anyway, that's enough talk of the bad blood. I usually don't bring it up because at this point I'm in a very lucky position on the whole and I prefer to remember the good memories here. There's plenty of good here, now as ever; I'm just some guy who's been around far too long and seen far too much.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
5mo ago
I do relate, honestly, to being a believer in a space full of nonbelievers and the sense of isolation it can provide as people attack your deeply held beliefs. The particular reply you link is obnoxious, low-quality, certainly unpleasant to receive—and downvoted, with no meaningful support from others. And it’s true—you were staking out a minority viewpoint difficult to defend in a forum like this, and receiving harsh responses for doing so.
You very badly misunderstand the situation and the comparison at hand, though. I’ve been in heated conversations before. I’ve had slapfights, I’ve had controversial posts that get a lot of pushback. That’s all well within the norm.
What is extremely far from the norm is having people en masse accuse you of being a shill, tell you your reputation has been destroyed, tell you you don’t belong in the forum, and receive mass support (see eg upvote totals) for doing so. You’re fixating on one person who respects me—and was still calling me a shill—and a handful of supportive replies, in the middle of a flood of vitriol. I didn’t link the worst ones—I linked some of the ones with the most support and one drive-by potshot in the middle of the flood. At the end of your conversation, nobody was threatening any longstanding impact or indicating that they would treat you differently moving forward. There were no spiraling ramifications, no deep-felt expressions of hatred. It’s apples and oranges.
Dismissal isn’t comparable, either. People weren’t coming around en masse to tell Kulak he didn’t belong in the community after the article. They just disagreed with it!
Like, you can see in the links—note particularly the one mentioning it was clearly costing me a lot of goodwill. People there were extremely well aware at the time that it was an extraordinary reaction in an extraordinary situation; to treat it otherwise is to badly misread it. I’m not going to act like nobody on this forum has ever faced worse—particularly around flameout posts—but I can emphatically tell you that the reaction here was uniquely ugly, of all the places that took note of the event.
Sorry, I don't buy it, and I'm pretty frustrated that's what you jumped to in response. Give one example you faced of "worse treat[ment]" anywhere near comparable in vehemence, scale, and forum support (keeping in mind that these were only some of many) or I simply do not believe you.
I deleted the OP, which makes the thread a bit hard to follow, but example replies can be found eg here, here, here, here, or here. There were many more.
I can handle complaints. I think I handled the process carelessly on the whole and appreciated much of the respectful feedback I got. But when people I've spent years speaking amiably with accuse me of being an agent of The Machine and tell me I should be banished from our shared community, piling on more than anywhere else at the single lowest point of my time online—well, that's the sort of thing that leads to long-term fraying of relations. I'm not going to place it on the whole community, and appreciate in particular those who apologized for their role in that sequence, but years later I remain disgusted with the whole affair. How the people around you act when your back is against the wall matters, and the way the zeitgeist of this forum reacted to me then was to call me a dishonest shill for The Enemy and tell me to get out.
Things had already been fraying for a while before that point, but that day has remained in the back of my mind whenever I've participated here since. It doesn't stop me from getting along with many of the mods and users here, it doesn't stop me from being grateful that my writing is usually so well-received here, and it doesn't stop me from appreciating this forum as having been key to my development as a writer, but it makes it very hard for me to see the forum as a whole as anything but just another place to argue with people on the internet.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
5mo ago
The reaction to the LoTT mess in particular was extraordinarily far from even-handed debate.
On my FAA article: It was absolutely a deliberate framing focused on being persuasive towards the people who could actually do something about the problem, and subsequent conversations I've had indicate that it was at least moderately successful in that regard. As a bonus, it was much more agreeable to many of the specific individuals impacted than a more partisan framing would have been. Eventually I hope I can go into that in more depth, but the short answer is that I think you're mistaken to see it as difficulty in criticizing them.
Note also that the Democrats aren't my ingroup and never have been, and government agencies as a whole certainly are not.
"Share a country" and "be ruled by" are very different sentiments as well. The first is saying something very close to "I don't want you anywhere in any community I could conceivably be physically present in." It's a huge deal to say to someone and mean, particularly over a single hastily dashed out political stance, and it's not like he was saying it about specifically what I was trying to articulate about that scenario. He was saying it about me as a whole, and I think people absolutely should take it seriously if others say it to them. Be ruled by? Sure, nobody wants to be ruled by those they have deep-running disagreements with. That's not the same as sharing a country.
Crucially to the point here: a discussion space like this is much smaller and more personal than a country. If people in a small discussion space can't abide the idea of so much as sharing a country with you, it would be madness to put effort into sharing anything smaller than that with them. If someone both doesn't want to share a country with me and wants to write aiming to persuade others that they shouldn't, either, there's no turning around with a "but we're still cool, right?"
No. Words have meaning. That's about as emphatic a denunciation as someone can provide. If you do not want to share so much as a country with me, then you will at most be someone I occasionally argue with on the internet--nothing more--and my commentary about you will reflect that.
I want to live in a culture where I can build alongside people who share my values. That certainly does not preclude sharing that broader culture with others who have radically different values; I have not told my political opponents I don't wish to share a country with them, nor would I. I'm perfectly happy to share countries and forums alike with people I have wide-ranging disagreements with. Yes, it's horrifying when your tribe demonstrates adherence to values you didn't anticipate and that feel like a repudiation of your expectations! That doesn't entail wanting them to leave your country! The very comment you link emphasizes not writing them off and being happy to bury the hatchet.
It's risible to compare a sentiment of wanting to build alongside people who want to build alongside you to one of telling people you don't want them in your country. Nobody should struggle to tell the difference.
As for your participation in my spheres, I appreciate many of your contributions and am happy for people to participate where they'd like. Participate if you want, don't if you don't want. The whole point of planting a flag and letting people find it or not as they will is allowing people like you to decide whether what's under that flag is worthwhile enough to spend time around.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
5mo ago
I post attribution to the things I link. In that specific case, what I linked was a Substack post that someone else had linked here, and I attributed it to the original post and told people where I found it as it was relevant. Inasmuch as you have a grievance against those who have left here with bitter feelings, turn inwards and accept that this place could have been the incubator you envision, and you and yours fumbled that. It will not be what it could have been, your own choices and efforts at culture-building contributed to that, and you can resent those who left if you'd like but you can't rebuild lost goodwill by wishing it were otherwise.
That's all I have remaining to say to you on any of this. I wish you the best of luck finding more people who want to spend time around you.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
5mo ago
In theory, yeah, and every time I've stopped by to read it it remains quite good, but in practice I don't actually exert that much conscious control over where I go online. I got out of the habit of reading the forum regularly and never got into the habit of reading the QC report in lieu of it. There's a lot of good when I see it, I just don't usually see it organically these days.
It is a reflection of that sense of betrayal. I'm not sure what's odd about feeling betrayed by a large chunk of your online community rallying behind the idea that they don't want to share a country with you. That you would struggle to understand it is a bit baffling.
Like, c'mon: "I don't even want to live in a group of hundreds of millions of people that includes both me and you. Your ideals disgust me on a fundamental level. But hey, now that you've broken out, where's the promotion for us hometown lads?" Surely you can see why I'd find that a bit rich. You cannot at once reject someone as unworthy to share a polis with you and expect them to treat your companionship as meaningful.
The friend-enemy distinction matters. Put bluntly, I see you personally as wanting to put me on the enemy side of the friend-enemy distinction, repeatedly defend that choice, and then post in resentment about a lack of friendship resulting from that. Choose one.
I don't at all think I'm reading too much into a single word, no. It's obnoxious for people to treat me as a representative of a coalition that rejects me and that I reject, and it is a specific coalition, not simply a relative term. Using it suggests neither understanding nor a wish to understand, and I find it much easier to simply build elsewhere than to bridge a determinedly unbridgeable gap.
Re: the FC thing—that was mostly relevant as a reminder that if that sentiment was broadly shared here, then I should not put my energy into building this space. If the zeitgeist of a space is “we don’t even want to live in a country with you,” it sure isn’t the sort of space I want to put my creative energy into.
As for the map—the map is that I spend the overwhelming majority of my politically relevant time online pushing against prog excesses, I have never self-identified as one and continue not to, and at this point I literally work for a law firm that is overtly anti-prog, but due to a few high-level traits, a loud subset of people cannot help but map me into that category regardless. The map is that after years of watching you and yours form overtly and obviously incorrect models of who I am and what I do, then cling to them after you should very well know better, I prefer to spend my time engaging with people who don’t do that. The broader map is that some form of this sentiment, spread over a hundred excellent former regulars here, is why there are a hundred excellent former regulars here, and the problem is not with them.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
5mo ago
“In your digital hometown” is the key phrase you excluded. I have large crowds yell at me every time I post anything vaguely controversial. Heck, half a dozen people called me a fascist for this. But “cancellation” and online mob dynamics mostly have any impact when it’s people you care about and have longstanding positive relationships with. They’re the ones who have some degree of power over you. The lesson from it was screamingly obvious: build elsewhere.
It’s not the fundamental differences, either, or not just that. It’s that this place takes them so dreadfully seriously. The same dynamic proceeds in a much more lighthearted way at rdrama, where those fundamental differences obviously exist but everyone just yells at each other until they basically get along regardless.
But yeah, that even here you label me as a “prog” is the sort of thing that makes me inclined to say goodbye and good riddance to all of this. I’m being direct because I do think you’re a good representative of the zeitgeist view that was embraced here; you’re pleasant to chat with and you also remind me regularly of what I began to find insufferable here.
You’ve built your culture, now enjoy it. People who have come from here don’t trumpet their associations with you? Not a lot of people you really disagree with stop by to argue quite so much these days?
Whoopsie.
So it goes.
You should read my article! I cover these sources and these individuals in some detail, indicating why I think the term is wholly appropriate.
For example, it seems almost certain that the Breitbart guys (who had no real ties to either neoreaction or LessWrong) just cribbed from Wikipedia, and they didn’t remember their reasoning when I reached out.
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