TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
People are welcome to pull pistols on me. If someone wants to write an in-depth expose on all of my online activity, be my guest. I leave it open for the world to see. I encourage it, in fact: write your hit piece on me. Write a magnum opus detailing my crimes to the world. I throw plenty of punches and am prepared to receive them in return. But dragging it into unrelated conversations, such that every conversation becomes a referendum on those topics, deserves no respect and serves to do nothing but degrade this forum as a place for conversation.
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. If I'm trying to dodge the online right, I'm doing a terrible job of it.
Anyway, you seem charming. I'll leave you to it.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
They were pressured! Objectively, straightforwardly, unambiguously, they were pressured! It was the result of a multi-year lobbying effort from the NBCFAE, going all the way up to the Congressional Black Caucus! I spend four paragraphs detailing the contours of that pressure in excruciating detail.
You say they were under much more pressure than other directions--really? Why would you think that? Race is a uniquely hot-button issue in America, and left-leaning people in particular are very, very bad at facing down race-based pressure. That doesn't make it a willful pursuit of exactly what they want to do at every step. Massively changing a hiring process is an incredibly obnoxious thing to have to do. It's not the sort of thing that happens without pressure. Yes, they're more ideologically amenable to that pressure than you would be, but no, that doesn't make it not pressure.
The FAA is not at all clearly, not at all obviously, subject to more pressure from the voters and the pilot schools than a random black activist group. Did voters and pilot schools stage meetings with Congress? Did voters and pilot schools pursue a multi-year campaign to change things?
(The answer is: Yes, after the scandal. And they changed things! That pressure worked too!)
Look, dude, I get that you sincerely think this is a major blind spot of mine and I'm trying to obfuscate responsibility for the figures involved, but that is simply not the case. I presented the full truth in a way designed to leave not past administrators--who were already fired, demoted, and otherwise disgraced over it--but present ones, who had a mess dumped in their lap, a way to save face by acknowledging and correcting the harm.
Nothing in my presentation stopped millions of conservatives from concluding that the whole of it was a horribly corrupt mess. A great deal in my presentation convinced both people directly involved in the fight for justice in the wake of the scandal and other well-meaning liberals that I wasn't just another far-right figure with an axe to grind, and as a result the people involved were grateful and willing to go on record with further details (which I hope to get into a mainstream publication), and those liberals learned about a scandal that had previously been kicking around only places like Steve Sailer's blog.
It's fine to be irritated that I bend over to be charitable and to make people comfortable and to appeal to their better nature, but you don't have an accurate model of the people involved or of me, and it's leading you astray.
I respect and appreciate that.
The reality is that their needling has been effective. Not on my life, my career, or my writing as a whole, all of which are on a trajectory I could never have imagined or hoped for. But they have caused serious long-term damage to a place I loved over many years, made things unbearable for people I respect, and made this forum increasingly one-note and lifeless. Letting them know that they get to me personally does nothing to impact any of that, it just makes this a place I no longer want to spend my time.
At the same time, having watched it for years, I did want to share my sentiments with them directly before I left. I don't know whether they're bad people in some abstract sense, but they damaged something I loved and are now jealously guarding its corpse. So be it.
It doesn't matter whether they know they got to me or not. If they want to follow me elsewhere, I don't have to dance around the way I do here, and the chorus of malcontents on Twitter is large enough that another voice or two makes little difference. One way or another, I'm leaving this site, though, and it did matter to me whether I said how I felt before then.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
skillfully crafting the narrative such that if you're not paying attention you'll be led to the exact opposite of the correct conclusion, even with all of the relevant facts in hand. In the FAA case, one might conclude that the whole mess was just a bunch of innocent nonpartisan officials struggling to fulfill the law
I don't think this is fair to me at all. This is the final paragraph of my article.
I am confident that Buttigieg can see that just as well as the rest of us, that for many, it is simply the same neglect everybody else has shown towards the case that has led it to linger awkwardly unresolved for a decade. There is nothing to be gained from fighting the suit further. It is a black eye on the FAA, a black eye on the DOT, and a black eye on our public institutions as a whole. People have paid shockingly little attention to it as it's rolled through the courts, in part, no doubt, because anything touching on diversity is a hot topic that becomes a culture war football in a moment. My instinct, looking at the whole mess, is that the DOT and FAA should publicly apologize, settle, and do their best to begin making right what was so badly broken.
That's not a claim of struggling to fulfill the law--it's a claim that people did terrible things, got exposed as being terrible things, and have left a black eye on institutions that people have failed to pay attention to for partisan reasons.
I said, and will continue to say, that it is not fundamentally partisan. When I speak with partisans involved in it about the specific details, including ones with ties to the institutions in question, people are outraged. People certainly respond to it in partisan ways, but inflaming it as an issue where the people whose laps it got dumped in have no way to save face, where they're either conquered or they stick to their guns and win, does not actually help the issue get solved.
I will absolutely own up to framing my articles in ways that make people more likely to listen to them, but I think it's a grave misreading to take it as me absolving anyone of responsibility or treating it anything as other than a blatantly corrupt institutional failure on all levels.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo 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.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
Thanks--it means a lot. Reactions like this, and knowing how many of us had The Gerard Experience, are why I wrote the article. He needs to be seen to be understood.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
Enjoy your feud, Jiro. You, like Nybbler, have mostly damaged this website, and you remain the same as ever. Take care.
It's cope and seethe, but it's beautiful cope and seethe that comes from a place of love, and that's noble in its own right. Forums like this are the same as Discord servers. Ones that build healthy local cultures retain people, ones that build unhealthy local cultures slowly drive people away. So it has ever been. Hugboxes are fine and good. People should be coordinating with others who share their interests and their goals. You can build beautiful things alongside your friends, and people should. Spaces with disagreement are great, too, when they can manage it in constructive ways (rdrama, oddly enough, does a healthy job at that), but everyone should have a couple of nice fenced-off hugboxes alongside their PvP zones. I just met up with a dozen people from one of my hugboxes and spent the better part of a week hanging out with a handful of motte lads from another. That is well and good. People should pursue that sort of community.
As for bile and rabble, I spend most of my public online time these days on places famous for bile-filled rabble. I was attracted to Twitter in specific because I noticed that the rationalist-adjacent culture there is healthy. They have leftists, they have right-wing dadposters who would be at home in themotte. People interact with the slice of the community they can handle, and the whole community remains cohesive enough to have meetups and build alongside each other and do beautiful things. By posting there, I increase my incidental exposure to people who really, truly disagree with me from all angles, because each post there might break containment and reveal me to people who share none of my background and none of my ideals. Every day, I engage with more people who truly disagree with me than I ever could here, and watch some of them call me a fascist, others a degen furfag, and still others listen. All of that is well and good.
The above post is an example! I penned a harsh criticism of one of my local sphere's longest-standing malicious critics. He and his friends are discussing it and digging up dirt on me, people in my Twitter circles are discussing it, I'm bantering and bickering back-and-forth with Eliezer Yudkowsky about it. People stay in places that fulfill needs for them and leave places that don't. For people who lack a crowd who want to turn every conversation into a referendum with their past grievances that I've acquired, and who broadly align with the local ideological frame, the Motte remains a pleasant enough place, and they're welcome to keep enjoying it. But I have a whole internet to engage with people who disagree with me, and no reason to share a community with those who live for dredging up historic grievances and others who shrug and make their excuses for others who do so, when I can't give that course of action the response it deserves.
You're right, though. Leaving is part of the problem, and that's why I've clung on for years here after falling out of love with this space. But the pastures really are greener elsewhere these days, in a way they were not in the past, and parts of that "elsewhere" remain very much part of the same meta-community as this.
I've given my advice on finding decent communities in this culture. The Twitter postrat scene is a dozen times healthier than the Motte at this point, and much more rewarding for high-quality posters. Substack as well. People can and do participate both here and there. Quality rises over there, and the upside there is tremendous. It's a place where you talk to public figures and not just about them, a place where you wind up chatting with and following as many people who disagree with you as you and they can handle, a place where usually you chat peacefully with your friends and occasionally the world gazes on. It's not for everyone, but they succeeded at culture-building in a way that matters. And it's more the commons than this place! It's a commons that is actually common.
I appreciate your thoughts and your passion here, and those who don't have my idiosyncratic reasons to leave have plenty of cause to stay and try to build in this place. Your sense of duty towards community speaks well of you.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
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.
The people still beating this drum hated me before that moment and see it as simply the most convenient attack vector. You’re welcome to play along, but I’m not going to validate it. Enjoy your site.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
Yes, that’s how every social group works, and there are consequences for every “not.”
Anyway, you’re one of the highest-volume, lowest-effort partisans here and you’ve been that way the entire time I’ve known you. If this forum hated Darwin for the reasons they said they did, you’d get at least as much criticism. I hope you enjoy the forum you’ve helped build. Take care.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
It’s tongue in cheek with a hint of seriousness. There were always better and worse discussion spots, interesting people will always gravitate towards some or others of them, and it’s worth noting where things are happening when. Other places are just a lot more exciting than here these days.
You’re right that there are many worth reading and interacting with here, but to be frank, there is precisely one place online where I have to play nice with people as unpleasant as the worst people here. Rdrama creates a more functional environment around this stuff, for heaven’s sake. Twitter creates a more functional environment around it.
These days, I have more reasonable and good people to interact with than I know what to do with. The ones here mean more to me than most places, because I’ve been around here a long while, but many of my favorite people have moved on, many driven off by the same malcontents who now try to enforce twisted purity tests here, and there is nowhere else among my regular haunts online that feels as dysfunctional and unfun as here. It’s very simply not worth it to put up with them any more, and this forum is no longer the only place I can fill the need that caused me to post here.
See you on the other side.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
Mostly Twitter, some into EA circles or away from online commentary and into irl stuff, some Discord, a few rdrama, some more than one of them. Twitter is the only one that fulfills a truly similar role.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
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 ?
There is precisely one place where people have tried to force me to do something like that. It’s here, by posters like Coil but unfortunately also posters who are otherwise good, and I find that sadder than anything else about this place.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
To clarify, it definitely wasn't mostly just him writing it! RationalWiki has a lot of prolific editors; he's just the Twitter frontman, the sysadmin, and in many ways the one who sets the cultural tone.
I've always enjoyed your company as well, but I have gotten almost nothing out of this place since it moved to the new site and my experiences elsewhere are becoming better and better. The one thing I am missing out on by leaving this place is the presence of the people I respect here who have not yet built presences elsewhere, and at this point, the only thing keeping me coming back around here has been nostalgia for what once was.
I'm a fossil around here these days. It's time to pull the plug.
See you on the other side, someday.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
I really do. Substack comment sections, Twitter with the character limit removed, starting a Substack and having Substack post to Substack post conversations like the guys around Walt Right have been doing, Discord, theschism.
I know Twitter has a bad reputation here but the rationalist-adjacent subculture there is massively healthier than the local one, and even though longposters are a bit of an invasive species, half a dozen high-quality motteposters with large accounts at least are keeping the longform spirit alive there. Happy to show the ropes to anyone who wants to dip their toes in over there.
I don't think any of them have consistently higher-quality + higher-output conversations than the Motte at its peak, but it has not been at its peak for a very, very long time. These days, those are the spaces in which I have my longform conversations, and Twitter in specific is where the mandate of heaven has landed.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
Hey, you've known me for a long time—long enough that you can know I am wholly capable of maintaining equanimity and responding with grace when I want to do so. Tonight, I did not want to do so. I wanted to react from the heart, without my usual filters, to the small group of people who have made it their mission to damage this space for years—and who have succeeded in doing so. I'm responding to everyone who made this place unappealing for CanIHaveASong, for paanther, for heterodox_jedi, for Gemma, for Yassine, for countless other posters a thousand times better than the miserable ankle-biters who drove them away in a quest for a twisted sort of purity. The miserable scolds are here, and the rules here are incapable of seeing the miserable scolds and chasing them away before they chase everyone else away, so it's time to let them have it and continue to build elsewhere.
My foot was already mostly out the door. Now it's out, and I want everyone I like here, and everyone who likes me here, to understand exactly why.
See you on the other side.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
There are places I will litigate the events of that time. This is not one of those places, and while you seem like a good chap, I'd encourage you to think about what it's like to have people looking, with every post you make, for excuses to bring up their old grudges rather than trying to litigate and rationalize the specifics of those grudges. See you on the other side someday, perhaps.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
I've already been gone except to cross-post my articles here, more or less. I miss our conversations, but I don't miss them enough to have them in front of the loud, bitter minority here. Yassine and everyone before him had the right idea; on the scale of things, I've been hanging on much longer than most. It's time to amputate the limb.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
There is every reason to burn this bridge. I'm not interested in politely ignoring the angry drunk ranting on the edges of my conversation every time I go to the local pub to chat with my friends. There are plenty of good people here, but at this point, most have either built accompanying presences elsewhere or can do so, and I think they should. I'm sure there is still magic here for others, but others don't have the angry drunk ranting on the edges of every conversation they have in the pub, and I have enough places without that that I no longer need to cling to what I once had here.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
I'm making some harsh comments here tonight, and I stand by every word in them, but given our history I want to mention that I'm not making them about you and, despite our continued tension and disagreements, I appreciate that you're coming from a place of principle and seriousness.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
It's more personal here, because this place used to mean a lot to me and it's tough to come to terms with it now being the only place on the internet I interact regularly with people who hold long-standing, deep grudges against me and want me to remember that every time I post. I'm not interested in shaking it off or in displaying a thick skin here. Anyone who nods along with their behavior here is not someone I want to share a community with, and I am more interested in loudly signalling that than in presenting in a stoic way.
As far as insecurity and things following me—look, I participate in a lot of online communities, and only one has a large sub-population of bitter grudge-holders who want to drag their conflicts with me into every interaction. Yes, that group has successfully ruined my perception of this community, but that has happened while I've been in the most successful part of my online career by far. You're not seeing insecurity here, you're seeing frustration at what's become of a place I once loved.
From behind a screen, I have plenty of time to consider my words and my self-presentation. When I want to be calm, I am, and my online history backs that up. What I wanted there was, for once in my time on the Motte, to tell the people who have delighted in making it a petty, vindictive space that clings to grudges to go screw themselves for contributing to the destruction of something beautiful.
The Motte that I loved is dead, and although good people still continue to interact atop its corpse, I would like those good people to know in no uncertain terms that the people who killed that Motte remain, while the posters they loved have mostly moved on to greener pastures. I've been returning here to maintain a point of contact with those who have not yet joined the motte diaspora, but now I want those people to understand that as far as I'm concerned, this community is no longer worth coming to and they should work alongside me to build elsewhere.
TracingWoodgrains
the leaves that are green turn to brown
3mo ago
Yeah, fair enough on that.
I understand and have understood what you’re saying, but I just don’t think “suspiciously little pressure” is a good descriptor here. The schools weren’t influential after the change! They were shoved to the side altogether and granted only the slightest bit of attention. Pressure had to come from outside the org, because that’s where the injured parties were.
I extended, and extend, little charity to those who made the mess. As for extending charity to people who inherited it, since nothing happened about it in the Trump admin, I’m disinclined to blame the Biden admin for nothing continuing to happen.
I do think the circumstances were not particularly unusual; I don’t think we have an alternative that would properly right the ship.
I don’t think it was a fluke and didn’t convey that it was a fluke—I just highlighted and emphasized the incident.
Anyway, all of this is stemming from you coming one step away from calling me a liar for a framing you would have presented differently. I am not persuaded, and given the amount of time I spend criticizing progressives and trying to build alternatives, it takes an incredibly strained reading of my position to treat me as fundamentally aligned with them.
Thanks for the chat, at any rate. This will be my last response on this topic, since I’m headed away from the forum now-ish. All the best.
More options
Context Copy link