lol @ r/subredditdrama
Reddit can be really hit or miss, but I’m glad subredditdrama and /r/wikipedia aren’t buying TWG’s bullshit. Well, some of the /r/wikipedia assume TWG is merely butthurt over losing edit wars as opposed to a more advanced agenda, but that is fair of them.
Huh. OK, so I boiled away more of my precious time on this plane of reality chasing links and reading old Wikipedia arguments instead of doing something healthy, like discovering a new genre of porn. Anyway, one of TW’s complaints is that “outlets like PinkNews […] are treated as reliable despite long histories of misconduct”. He points to a discussion thread where PinkNews was supposedly deemed to be terrible, horrible, no good and very bad despite David Gerard saying it was basically fine. But the analysis proving that PinkNews is terrible, horrible, etc., is itself weirdly bad. I mean, take a look at this:
Another example of a dodgy source is at is [11]. where the claim “Queer-coding has affected many fictional villains. These evil characters are generally either shown as flamboyant and overly dramatic, like Disney characters Scar and Hades, or written as having a deep fixation on the main character, like Jafar, Kim Possible villain Shego and Catra from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. In the past few decades, Disney fans have seen Governor Ratcliffe and Professor Ratigan—as well as Scar, Jafar and Hades—being portrayed as queer characters.” The source for this claim? A Twitter tweet by “Jay, a self-described ‘transmasc enby’ who uses they/he pronouns”.
But the story doesn’t actually use that “Twitter tweet” as the source. It just springboards from a viral tweet to talking about the larger picture. The tweet didn’t say any of the specifics that PinkNews supposedly sourced to it. And the claim that Disney villains have been queer-coded is … not exactly shocking. I mean, just look up any of the authors that James Somerton plagiarized.
Or consider this article,[12] with the breathless headline “Star Trek: Picard season finale sees iconic character finally come out as queer, inspiring a million new fan fictions. The Star Trek: Picard season finale has confirmed a same-sex romance for iconic character Seven of Nine, and fans are thrilled.” The evidence? Two characters holding hands. In a series that already had more than one openly gay couple and thus no real reason to be ambiguous.
Well, actually, Star Trek: Picard did not “already” have “more than one openly gay couple”. Star Trek: Discovery had one, and the Kelvin timeline movies had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it implication of one. The PinkNews article didn’t just go aflutter over two characters holding hands, but also pointed to an interview with showrunner Michael Chabon:
There are hints that both Seven and Raffi are bisexual.
Oh yes. […] With a character like Raffi, to the extend we imagined her history in a fair amount of detail, her history included all kinds of sexual partners. There’s a father of her child, but that was far from her only sexual or life partner. She’s had relationships with all kind of people. If it was ever to come up, it was always going to be organic. […] Same thing with Seven of Nine, having to catch up after such along absence from the human race. If you think about that, it almost seems unnatural that she wouldn’t’ have had partners of other genders. It seems clear she would have. So even if we didn’t see that on Voyager, years have passed. In that time, she’s continued to explore the spectrum of human relationships in a broader way. So in our show, there are echos and implications of that.
And it’s not like the article was actually wrong, was it? Jeri Ryan said that Seven is “canonically bi”, and the Seven/Raffi romance went on to become a whole thing.
I won’t go to bat for PinkNews being good, but this investigation of what’s wrong with it is itself irritatingly flawed and superficial. As, apparently, somebody at Wikipedia has already pointed out.
Moreover, when TW makes the flat statement, “Wikipedia currently treats PinkNews as a Reliable Source”, he conveniently elides the caveats that naturally come when people who LARP at building an encyclopedia try to summarize the results of their own arguments:
There is rough consensus that PinkNews is *generally( reliable for factual reporting, but additional considerations may apply and caution should be used. Most of those who commented on PinkNews’ reliability for statements about a person’s sexuality said that such claims had to be based on direct quotes from the subject.
So, yeah, just because the table puts it in green doesn’t mean that editors will use it uncritically.
Oh, and look, a lie by omission!
Between 2019 and 2020, Gerard repeatedly fought to make the “Known for” box on Eich’s page mention opposition to same-sex marriage and avoid any mention of Eich’s projects beyond JavaScript.<sup>14</sup> After all, Gerard pointed out as he added a PinkNews reference to the claim—it was in a Reliable Source.
He cited Reuters too.
I wonder why they take issue specifically with articles about LGBTQ+, has to be a complete coincidence and in no way a reflection of their bigotry, huh
well, what gives. who could’ve expected that tracing woodbins is a liar, and a scoundrel.
I’m noticing that people who criticize him on that subreddit are being downvoted, while he’s being upvoted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, as part of his prodigious self-promotion of this overlong and tendentious screed, he’s steered some of his more sympathetic followers to some of these forums.
Actually it’s the wikipedia subreddit thread I meant to refer to.
It occurs to me that, intentionally or not, he’s probably steering TESCREAL types to Wikipedia itself as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if accounts were coming out of the woodwork to post multi-kiloword screeds about Wikipedia being soooo unfairrrr…
as, indeed, has started to happen https://xcancel.com/thezahima/status/1811495742894408065
literal brigading
hopefully this gets shut down hard at all the places they try to fuck with. we’ve already had 2 cases too many of jonringer this year
Trace RTs someone hoping aloud that his nonsense gets laundered by an RS, then breathlessly reports on his literal transparent brigade getting unbanned using a very strained appeal to WP:AGF, so I am starting to get a picture of his end-goal.
(looks up meaning of WP:AGF)
… Yeah, that site is probably not the right hobby for me.
(looks up the LessWrong discussion page)
My God, it’s full of smeg
it’s good the rats can’t help themselves but to brag about what they’re doing – in at least three different public places.
Annoying that TWG is also doing the slimy thing which is so common in internet trolling nowadays. The text says ‘im not a reliable source’ the subtext (or well with this retweet, text) says ‘make my post a reliable source and attack David’.
(What makes this even worse is that the weird far rightwingers from themotte see all leftwingers as behaving like this, and the, to them, super leftwing TWG is feeding into their stereotypes. Well done on feeding the far right propaganda machine).
His replies have gone up in upvotes substantially since yesterday, so it looks like a bit of light brigading is going on.
He is transparently trying very very hard to start a gamergate and it’s pathetic.
It’s like these people are enforcing a facade of polite tone and measuredness as a way to launder literal intellectual terrorism! Dang!
Saw somebody on r/ssc go ‘why do they always focus on roko’s basilisk and never any of the more important things like Yuds lack of qualifications or academic rigor’ and saw them also lol that we here apparently didn’t want to spend the 2hs to read it (and well that woulds also require 4h+ to then respond about all the various weird inaccuracies). Which is was an amusing few posts. Yeah, we don’t have the energy/desire to read all those posts, but neither do you as Yuds lack of qualifications etc comes up quite often.
They want sneers about Yud’s lack of qualifications? Fine:
Noncy prig who never went to high school founded a cult for people who can’t leave it behind! How’s about that, eh?
Yeah mentioned it does come up quite often, but rokos basilisk just is funnier.
E: flannyo (used to post in sneerclub) is in that thread and actually arguing with people and pushing back on the post a bit. Which isn’t going super badly compared to if you tried something like that on themotte vs r/ssc.
Remember Oswald Mosley
(specifically the bit where he and his kept getting facepunched, along with their little gatherings disrupted and made extremely unpopular for establishments to host)
they are
My condolences.
every accusation is a confession
Gotta love how the SRD thread has more comments and updoots than the original.
Winning sentences of the day so far:
Conservapedia is 100% true and correct. Evidence: https://www.conservapedia.com/Garfield_(comic_strip)
Whoever wrote that deffo wants to fuck Nermal.
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!”
Conspiration is clearly a combo of constipation and perspiration
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.
I’m starting to think that some writing classes would really help the EA/LR crowd.
no, no, it’s fine. the less readable they are, the better.
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
Back in 1995, when I was born, Gerard was my age
“Gerard was the age I am now in 1995 when I was born. Alice is twice my age and stands 4 metres to the left of Gerard. She is half the height of Imhotep…”
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
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?
Not even – it’s a simplified Civilization clone for mobile. (It actually sounds like a pretty neat little game, but, uh, chess it is not!)
There are no hidden layers to Elon Musk’s thinking. He likes the gratification of impulsively pushing a button and seeing the numbers go up. He likes games that are straightforward and easy to beat. He’d rather reset every 45 minutes than execute meticulous plans that extend far into an uncertain future. He does not think ten moves ahead. He just responds with maximal aggression to the latest change of conditions. (The stock is down again. Announce robotaxis!) When this works, he gets the satisfaction of dominance. When it doesn’t, he can always just reset and try again. Elon Musk’s suit of armor is that he is extremely rich.
So it’s the gamer equivalent of one of those big-game hunting safaris where the game has been corralled and pre-tranquilised for the client’s convenience?
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.
not playing it, you understand
I assume any publication that has ever run anything by Andy Ngo is absolute trash garbage.
or is there some weird-ass chess proxy-fixation among the rats that I have thus far been blessedly unaware of?
Gonna take a shot in the dark and say the fixation’s from viewing chess more as an IQ showcase than as a game.
probably but it isn’t one I’ve come across (in this form), thus my surprise
They’re all in for Chess as a sine qua non metric for intelligence if you spend enough time staring into the pit. Better to call it g than IQ tbh. Not only does it (chess) have the lick of rigour, it has the nerd cultural cachet and the ludicrous white masculinity complex.
also, just ito “things to pick by which to point out dirtrag as a Shining Beacon”, it’s pretty fucking out there
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.
Careful, that might cause the humanbiodiversity posters to react and draw lines on maps! (Is that still a thing? I can’t recall seeing much HBD posters anymore, likely my own bubble of course).
In that case, selling sulphur supplements for drinking water may turn out profitable
Indeed. He did a post entirely about the family being Ashkenazi Jews. You’re never going to guess the premise of the post!
Was it about how feminism is bad.
No wait sorry, I’m misrepresenting his position.
Was it about how only 30% of feminists are sane and the rest are insane?
Or at least not provably not insane.
Yes thanks, didn’t want to dreg up the full quote.
The National Socialist party of Germany, Hitler’s party focused on advancing German rights and the hone of, among other things, the best outfits I’ve seen of a political party
Christ, there’s so much backstory here - just scrolling through long descriptions of Gerard’s views and just thinking “based, based, based, based.”
Sandifer had been busy during her time away from Wikipedia, writing an essay collection titled Neoreaction: A Basilisk. Five of the self-published book’s six essays (about ants, TERFS, Trump, the Austrian School, and Peter Thiel) were forgotten the day they were written. The sixth is Gerard’s masterwork. Sandifer starts the essay with quick critical overviews of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Land, then goes on a sprawling journey from William Blake to John Milton, with stops at Fanon, Debord, Butler, and Coates. This review describes the experience well. I can only describe it as leftist free association based on the prompt “Say whatever comes to mind, inspired by David Gerard’s obsession with Roko’s Basilisk and neoreaction combined with your own love of leftist theory.”
trace also makes Neoreaction: A Basilisk sound fucking awesome, and it’s weird that this might be what gets me to finally read my copy
The article on GamerGate is also awesome, but my favorite part is probably that it contains the very best article about Trump you’re ever going to read.
iirc Yud and lesswrong is also more of a sidenote in that essay, as the thing is about Neoreaction. A think Yud used to be not that a fan of (and that might even be in the essay itself). Perhaps the shift in attitudes towards LW can also be explained because they are more and more accepting of things like NRx and the line between them is made less and less clear. For example see this article esp the part about neoreaction a basilisk ;).
Honestly, anyone who read the essay can see that the question of whether Yud approves is totally irrelevant to its thesis, but these people are incapable of reading styles of argument that don’t proceed by declarative statements about binary choices, except of course in those situations where something precious to them (such as their good standing at the “not a racist” club) might by at stake
Do it, it’s great, v edifying!
Neoreaction: A Basilisk really is great, you definitely should tackle it soon!
That review that he links to is not even very fond of Yudkowsky. They say they have a sort of “yes, and” response to Sandifer’s book but TW probably interpreted it as “yes, but” and slurped it up to have some sort of criticism to the book. Makes me wonder how many posts that elaborate a bit on their opinions he even read. Or maybe he got confused whose book was being talked about.
deleted by creator
based, based, based, based
This is the exact sentiment that got me to finally make an account here. I stopped following after y’all left Reddit but this post sucked me back in. So… there’s that?
Welcome back, our condolences.
If DG were any more based, he’d be a ziggurat.
Also, tracingwoodgrains spilling 10k words about their heroes getting bagged on by sneerclub is the platonic ideal of “a kicked dog yelps.”
LOL he’s gotten pissed
https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/227907?context=8#context
Wow… I took a look at that link before reading the comments/explanations here, and I was briefly confused why they were hating on him so much, before I realized he isn’t radical right wing enough for them.
Eh, you’re a gay furry ex-Mormon (which is like a triple strike against you in my book) but I still like you well enough.
It is almost sad seeing TWG trying to appeal to these people that fundamentally hate him… except he could just admit themotte is a cesspit and abandon it. But that would involve admitting that sneerclub (and David Gerard specifically) was right about the sort of people that lurked around SCC and later concentrated within themotte, so I think he’s going to keep making himself suffer.
TW knows about the propaganda war, but has very different objectives to you. Much harder to balance ones too: he needs enough Progress for surrogate gaybies, but not too much that white gay guys can’t get the good lawyer jobs.
Wow, I feel really gross agreeing with a motte poster, but they’ve called out TWG pretty effectively. TWG at least knows he needs things progressive enough he doesn’t end up against the wall for being gay, ex-Mormon and furry (as he describes himself), yet he wants to flirt with the alt-right!
and in case I was in danger of forgetting what the motte really is…
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.
sure buddy, you just need to “secure the future for your people and your children”… Yeah I know the rest of the words that go in that slogan.
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
Being on themotte (or equivalent places) is also so bad for your long term mental health.
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.
themotte assigns user ID, which i suspect are just sequential integers. TW is 103, some other users have their user IDs in low 1000s (3000-5000). he’s there for a long time
I had noticed the user ID and figured that they were sequentially-assigned integers, but I hadn’t bothered to check what the numbers had gotten up to. I’m seeing a 930, an 1175, a 2327… So, yeah.
why would anyone put all these cortisol-addicted chuds in one place and what keeps them coming back there
cortisol-addicted chuds
what keeps them coming back
you have answered your own question
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 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.
Wow, just a few words off the 14 words.
I find it kind of irritating how someone that doesn’t familiarize themselves with white supremacists rhetoric and methods might manage to view that phrase innocuously. But it really isn’t that hard to see through the bullshit once you’ve familiarized themselves with the most basic dog whistles and slogans.
You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children’s reproductive capacity.
Depending on how you parse this sentence, the author could be asserting a parental right to confiscate their children’s reproductive capacity which is unbelievably unintentionally poetic.
Ok so this comment made me realise I had incorrectly parsed these comments. They are far, far worse than what I thought they were saying originally. Thanks!
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.
I’d say your instincts are correct and I too will dare not venture down that path.
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.
@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.
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.
fabricating ties between LessWrong and neoreaction
Lmao
I’ve never actually looked at themotte before and jesus. the only difference between this site and the absolute nastiest Nazi communities I’ve seen is that these guys aren’t shoehorning slurs and mentions of the day of the rope into every post
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
On one hand, being here means that I’ve had to learn to parse this description in order to understand what we’re talking about. On the other hand now that I have this cursed knowledge I’m pretty sure my presence here is necessary for my continued mental health, such as it is.
This must be how people end up in one of those outer-god-summoning cults.
I wish I could focus on things I want to do as well as this person can focus on whatever this is.
Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must
The Nathan Hale of Reddit.
Trace seems a bit… emotional. You ok, Trace?
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…”
@Starseeder @sneerclub That article is a powerful argument for professional editing.
(I do not mean that its topical content makes any such argument.)a brave editor spreads the truth
uh, or not
I love the “uh, you know we can see what you’ve done” reply.
I have never edited the LessWrong article, not sure what you’re talking about.
receipts posted
I meant I have never disruptively edited the article. (…) I’m not a power user of Wikipedia and don’t understand all your specialist terminology
Dude physically unable to take an L.
“Specialist terminology” like… the word edit?
Not sure writing an encyclopedia is a good hobby for you, bro.
OK, I just spent 10 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back clicking around Wikipedia edit histories, and it seems that LessWrongers are really unhappy about the LessWrong article saying anything about neoreactionaries. And they’re willing to say why at typical length.
aww, poor babies. if only they didn’t literally have the leading nrx thinkers as figures of note in their own community makeup! alas, difficulty: impossible
I think that might have been bad faith, but im not sure.
christ that second reply is some pure-grade uwu smolbean pretension bullshit
Apologies, I meant I have never disruptively edited the article
“what do you mean keep the music down? it’s not that loud”
I was simply trying to improve its quality
“I merely wish you to be on my level? what’s that, what level is it? it’s mine of course, what a ridiculous question”
I’m not a power user of Wikipedia and don’t understand all your specialist terminology so forgive me if I make the odd mistake or faux pas
don’t even have a sneer for this. this “oh, oops, totes didn’t mean to offend!” shit that these fuckers pull when they get caught out is so goddamn tired. facepunch material.
(it’s not even particularly “good” darvo)
Please don’t doxx me.
“goooootta make the other people responsible for my own actions! that’s the ticket!”
Lol how has that user not been banned yet. Clearly somebody with a very specific axe to grind.
And of course the Rationalists start to the things they accuse others of doing. How quickly the pretense of civility disappears.
This is going to be a banger, I can feel it.
Well that’s a lot of words. It’s like someone turned a dispute over editing a page into an biography of the editor. It’s that kind if mountain out of a molehill business that has led to me no longer editing Wikipedia.
And the bit if the article that struck home:
He had started out on the internet 20 years before as a passionate partisan for his new tribe and its potential to transform the world. In the intervening decades, though, his optimism had waned.
It’s not an uncommon trajectory, it’s one I’ve been on myself, becoming disillusioned by social media. And yet, the Fediverse has given me new hope and enthusiasm.
Trace started his research on the site for banned Wikipedia cranks. I don’t know if he can presently edit Wikipedia, but he writes like someone who can’t.
It definitely reads like a frustrated editor dramatising petty disputes for a wider audience, who I very much doubt is interested in Wikipedia minutiae. It doesn’t explain why it has to be quite that long - I managed to finish reading it but it took a few goes to slog my way to the finish.
why it has to be quite that long
Welcome to the rationalist-sphere.
What happens when your spurned ex is a devoted archivist, a Wikipedia administrator, and perhaps the most online man the world has ever known?
I already thought he was cool you don’t have to sell me on it.
If we’re framing this as a breakup, david won the breakup.
NGL the AI generated image make DG look cool AF
Didn’t he violate Wikipedias rules though
Show me a long-time English Wikipedia editor who hasn’t broken the rules. Since WP is editable text and most of us have permission to alter most pages, rule violations aren’t set in stone and don’t have to be punished harshly; often, it’s good enough to be told that what you did was wrong and that your edits will be reverted.
NSFW: When you bring this sort of argument to the table, you’re making it obvious that you’ve never been a Wikipedian. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that you’re going to get talked down to; even if your question was in good faith, you could have answered it yourself by lurking amongst the culture being critiqued.
wut
hey buddy, uh, you gonna post any sneers in this here SneerClub thread you’ve started?
previously, presently (this thread). also:
I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems
I lack any concrete evidence, but wouldn’t it just be fucking hilarious
still hasn’t really posted any sneers :<
although they seem to be really on the ball with posted TWG updates!
it’s a highly sneerable article, i’m sure he has something to sneer about it
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.
Honestly I’ve made it my life’s purpose to be a loser by the standards these people set, and succeeded beyond either of our wildest dreams
I’m just an even bigger loser than they already think irl. They can’t properly imagine the depth of my loserdom.
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?
IKR like good job making @dgerard look like King Mob from the Invisibles in your header image.
If the article was about me I’d be making Colin Robinson feeding noises all the way through.
edit: Obligatory only 1 hour 43 minutes of reading to go then
Depends, I guess. After reading (well, skimming, to be honest) it, I love David even more. <3
