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Before anything else, I mean this gently. I do admire you; you're one of the luminaries of the whole SSC-sphere. Which is, I think, why this is important:
It was indeed a misstep - maybe a strategic mistake for your career - to be that kind of deceptive. If for no further reason than this: your final line in this article says that you're "not a Reliable Source." Of course I get it - meaning from the perspective of Wikipedia's Gerard-inculcated sclerosis, it's because you're a "nobody blogger" rather than a "legitimate media outlet." But much worse it is to be able to be accurately described as an "admitted hoaxer." Your work deserves much better than to have that card in your adversaries' hands.
Of course, there's no changing the past, so I'd say the only thing to do is Be Good going forward. You have my faith that you can and will, as with this article.
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.
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Strictly speaking, there is a way to escape this trap, which is to fully admit to the past errors and stop using the tainted persona, adopt a new Internet pseudonym, and with it a new identity set unassociated with past errors. If found and pressed, (re)acknowledge the past errors, and make the point that the new persona is on the diferent path. It's hard, it doesn't assauge the worst opponents, but it is a clear and credible break with the past practices.
It also means, however, dropping the reputation of being one of the luminaries of the whole SSC-sphere, and for people who have devoted large parts of their identity and emotional sense of self into that sort of persona, that's unacceptable.
I don't think abandoning his old persona and pretending to be someone else is good advice. He will inevitably be doxxed/discovered and then it will just add another layer of accusations of bad faith and deceptiveness.
It's bad faith and deceptive if done to avoid responsibility and guilt, as opposed to a process to acknowledge and overcome. Again, culturally-resonate examples abound: faking a conversion is contemptable, conversion as a new start is respectable. Or we could raise the more progressive-secular example of transition, or the chance to reset/reframe when marrying into another family, or so on.
Separately, there is a bit of amusement given that encouraging people to abandon old personas and pretend to be someone else, but in compliance with the rules, has been a Mission Accomplished success of The Motte's modding philosophy when dealing with sockpuppets who stay more within the rules. I realize Motte modding is non-generalizable, but it is applicable as a (sub)cultural example.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Well, I judged against that. That would mean covering up one lie with another, just waiting for the "Richard Hoste" trap to be sprung upon one's new "Richard Hanania" persona.
Maybe one could get away with it for long enough, but I'm looking for the high road here.
Alternatively, treat / approach it as one does someone who does a late-in-life baptism/conversion and adopts a new name. Spiritual rebirth is a common cultural context, and part of that is to do away with both the sins and the gains of the past as part of the break in identity. This isn't 'lie for the sake of a new false identity' this is 'recreate the identity,' which has common cross-cultural analogs and context for understanding if demonstrated as sincere and approached from a position of humility.
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