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In April 2014, Gerard created a RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism, framing the subculture as “well-off libertarians congratulating each other on what wonderful human beings they are for working rapacious [s—]weasel jobs but choosing their charities well, but never in any way questioning the system that the problems are in the context of,” “a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is superior to government action or funding,” and people who “will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely [f—]ing evil jobs because they’re so charitable.”
it’s fucking amazing how accurate this is, and almost a decade before SBF started explaining himself and never stopped
My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”
What 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.
NGL the AI generated image make DG look cool AF
If we’re framing this as a breakup, david won the breakup.
Didn’t he violate Wikipedias rules though
hey buddy, uh, you gonna post any sneers in this here SneerClub thread you’ve started?
it’s a highly sneerable article, i’m sure he has something to sneer about it
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!
wut
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.
I am well acquainted with this genre of article and I ain’t reading all that. Not bothering to be involved with this example was the obviously correct decision, even if Trace kept nagging after I’d already said “no thank you” (that famous rationalist grasp of consent).
This in the companion article caught my eye:
While I am not personally a rationalist,
Trace, I have some unfortunate news for you.
I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.
You’d think these people would have learned by now that there’s no upside in them spending their precious time on this earth obsessing over why a group of people don’t like them, but nevertheless here they are: drawn like moths to the flame.
dear me. doesn’t he know that the actual art requires hate-skimming at most?
I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.
Their writing is so boring I can’t even summon up the enthusiasm to make a “senpai has noticed us” joke.
There would be an upside if they could magically acquire some self-awareness, and reflect on why a whole group thinks their ideas are idiotic. Alas,
Yeah see also his denouncement of Roko’s Basilisk (ctrl-f the page), we know it wasn’t that important, the funny part was that it was a dumb rehash of Pascals wager, and that at the time Yud took is very seriously.
Wood also doesn’t seem to link to the actual Rationalwiki article which also makes clear that Yud doesn’t really believe in it (probably). It also mentions just how few (but above the 5% lizardman constant, so cause for concern, if they took their own ideas and MH seriously) people were worried about it. And every now and then you do find a person online who does take the idea seriously and worries about it, which is a bit of a concern. So oddly they should take it more seriously but only because it wrecks a small percentage of minds.
It is weird to not mention Yuds freakout:
Listen to me very closely, you idiot.
YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.
There’s an obvious equilibrium to this problem where you engage in all positive acausal trades and ignore all attempts at acausal blackmail. Until we have a better worked-out version of TDT and we can prove that formally, it should just be OBVIOUS that you DO NOT THINK ABOUT DISTANT BLACKMAILERS in SUFFICIENT DETAIL that they have a motive toACTUALLY[sic] BLACKMAIL YOU.
And pretend this was just a blip and nothing more. Mf’er acted like he was in Stross novel.
(Also after not clearly sharing the information about Roko’s Basilisks history, and we sneer at it, I came across this sentence: “then cites his pet article on Roko’s Basilisk directly while giggling about how mad it made Yudkowsky fans.” lol, no selfawareness there wood).
Roko’s basilisk is one of my favorite things because of the combination of how stupid it is and also how utterly panicked they all were. Desperately imagining magical communication across time and space with their dumb paperclip demon and panicking.
Why don’t they just believe in a deity if they want one so bad?
It’s funny because you will hear over and over again from them online, in almost rank-and-file prose, about how it was all a big storm in the collective teacup, and then some time later run across yet another story of a real life non-anonymous person who was freaked the fuck out for some good period of time, as were some large portion of their friends
And it still randomly freaks people out to this day, it clearly isn’t a storm in a teacup for some people. And it is quite easily countered, but that also adds some ideas which counter the whole FOOM bs, so it is clear why they rather all push this under the rug, no matter the mental health cost of any Rationalists or would be Rationalists.
HOW does he seriously use the phrase ‘acausal blackmail’. I assumed the majority of word combinations for ‘acausal’ + noun were just jokes from people on here but apparently not.
Ikr, literally a plot point from Charles Stross Singularity Sky (2003) series and they take it seriously. (Which fits a pattern, CW: sexual abuse
spoiler
Yuds math pets thing also has a similarity to the horrible sadist torture scene in the last rifter series book (2004) in which a woman gets horribly abused more if she answers question wrong. (with the added plot twist that the torturer isn’t as smart as he thinks he is and is partially wrong about the questions he ‘rewards’ (which could be some 4d chess move but doubtful)). Anyway, not the greatest read. Esp 2 decades later, when a lot of the weird science fiction terms used in the books have taken a very alt-right/dark enlightenment turn (which makes me wonder if they stole that).
)
must be woke mind virus, we don’t even acknowledge race and iq, smdh
I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.
Surely out of the interest of Rational Fair And Balancedness, he will link back to this place in his article. Surely, he has already done so before I mentioned this.
Looked at his twitter. Dude seems to be or have been on a palpable adrenaline high at a time when it might have been less deranged to step away from the keyboard and go for a walk. I get it, but those are some weird-ass posts.
lmaou bruv, great to know these clowns are both coping & seething
I stopped skimming but the gist seems to be “TFW ur BIG MAD that Quillette isn’t as reliable as Teen Vogue.”
brb calling the burn unit
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
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.
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!
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.
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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.”
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.
What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn’t be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.
wait sorry hold on
in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors
so what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this, if the overwhelming majority of people already agree that far-right “news” sites like the examples given are full of garbage and shouldn’t be cited?
Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others
ahhhhhhh David made fun of some rationalist you like once and in turn you’ve elevated him to the Ubermensch of Woke, didn’t you
what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this?
He’s playing to his audience, which includes a substantial number of people with lifetime subscriptions to the Unz Review, Taki’s crapazine and Mankind Quarterly.
For the rat & rat-adjacent soi-disant “communities” David is like the bogeyman. You see his name used in places like SSC to stand in for the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.
the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.
aaaaargh I wish I could draw.
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
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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
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?
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
also, just ito “things to pick by which to point out dirtrag as a Shining Beacon”, it’s pretty fucking out there
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.
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?
Iirc ssc has written about it so yes
not playing it, you understand
Has anyone informed them that Elon Musk, the smartest man alive, dismissed chess as two low-dimensional and prefers to be challenged by some PC multiplayer combat game instead?
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.
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…”
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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
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.
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 an AI from the future that reads essentially as fast as data can be streamed to me (perhaps faster, given that I can predict the next token quite well). This was still too long for me to read.
Scott Alexander, by far the most popular rationalist writer besides perhaps Yudkowsky himself, had written the most comprehensive rebuttal of neoreactionary claims on the internet.
Hey Trace, since you’re undoubtedly reading this thread, I’d like to make a plea. I know Scott Alexander Siskind is one of your personal heroes, but maybe you should consider digging up some dirt in his direction too. You might learn a thing or two.
Would also be great if the article he talks about doesn’t start with “I no longer endorse all the statements in this document.[emp mine] I think many of the conclusions are still correct, but especially section 1 is weaker than it should be, and many reactionaries complain I am pigeonholing all of them as agreeing with Michael Anissimov, which they do not; this complaint seems reasonable. This document needs extensive revision to stay fair and correct, but such revision is currently lower priority than other major projects. Until then, I apologize for any inaccuracies or misrepresentations.”
Especially since he posted on TheMotte that the connection between NRX and LW was quote ‘fabricated.’
Ok folks, serious question. I know rats love excessively long word salad stream-of-unconsciousness essays. I understand how somehow can be so high on their own farts that they think this is an acceptable way of presenting their “thoughts”. But…
There’s no way rats actually read those longforms, right? Like, no one has enough time on their hands to read and engage with something of this length and this boring on a day-to-day basis, right? Same goes for those LessWrong posts, they must be banking on others not reading through the 10,000 words of nonsense, right?
The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles, isn’t HPATMOR like a million billion chapters as well?
Siskind for sure keeps his wildest quiet-part-out-loud takes until the last possible minute of his posts, when he does decide to surface them.
If you are a normal, decent, well-socialized human being, you probably have not heard about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Actually explaining what this thing is will have to happen in several different stages. But I should start by telling you this re-write of the first Harry Potter book is around 660,000 words long.
The entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit, comes in at a little less than 580,000 words.
The audiobook is 67 hours long.
In my more innocent college days, there was a group of people doing a reading of it in the dorm lounge laughing their asses off. Ong I thought it was a hyper self-aware satire that was making fun of internet “umm ackshully” / iamverysmart posters. There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?
Yud, it’s not too late to say sike bro.
Homo sapiens! What an inventive, invincible species. It’s only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds! They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life! Ready to out-sit eternity. They’re indomitable.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?
Even just saying it was mescaline would help it make more sense.
it’s not too late to say sike
citation needed ;p
The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles
Only in these circles could an article that AI can read to you in an hour and forty-eight minutes be clickbait for the paywalled “companion piece.”
They’re going to end up cheating and using AI to summarize rat verbiage instead of reading it. And THAT is what will piss off the future AI god.
unironically, their culture has a better use case for it than the rest of earth does. they’re not even losing informational value in the compression and nonsense-izing since there isn’t any to start with
By and large no. Read the comments under anything on LessWrong, for example, and it’s trivial to pick out the vast majority of nominally substantive posts lighting on the one thing that got them mad, just like you and I, in amidst a chorus of nothing remarks equivalent to “so brave, so powerful”. They’re just people man, after all.
Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.
Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.
Of course, as there is no other way to do this with posts of this length. If you want to dismantle an average SSC post you will need to explain so much more things than he already does so it blossoms into small novel territory. Any I gish nobody has the time or attention span for that.
A novel which could often be abridged by saying:
“look at this incredibly offended dork” ;)
Someone has to post the Elizabeth Sandifer essay and I guess it’s my turn:
I should note that I didn’t ghostwrite that one either
subheading:
A love storyopener:
Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others@dgerard “congratulations” on your new stalker
I’ve barely started reading and I’m deep in wtfs. this is such a weird hitpiece.
So now Steve Sailer has shown up in this essay’s comments, complaining about how Wikipedia has been unfairly stifling scientific racism.
Birds of a feather and all that, I guess.
What an ass
For the people who don’t know who that is Wikipedia and here is a reliable site.
He is a very frequent commenter in the whole of the LW/Rationalist sphere. iirc he sometimes gets banned when he lets the mask slip a bit too much, but they always let him back in.
Wonder if Marxbro ever got unbanned. Rip you damn dirty commie, do miss seeing your obsessive monofocus posts pop up from time to time.
Can’t miss an opportunity to make it about himself I guess
Who tf is this?
“How Batman Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record” by Penguin’s Henchman #37, like dude, I spend way too much time sneering on yall and I’ve still never heard of mr Turdgrains or whatever.
In any case, whoever this is, @dgerard, you should start charging him rent for the priviledge of having you live in his head.
who tf is this?
They’re a self-described gay, furry ex-mormon who seem to have latched onto the rat & rat-adjacent communities (like EA) in the hope of finding a substitute for the certainty they used to find in religion. Last I heard they work for the Blocked&Reported podcast, i.e. Jesse Singal et al., alongside their job in the US military. (edit: their Twitter claims they’re a law clerk? I guess they moved on.)
On the surface they seem well meaning but naïve, the company they keep (perhaps) being a reflection of that.
“rat furry” :3
“(it’s short for rationalist)” >:(
that’s depressing. escaping an oppressive, reactionary social sphere and landing in the TERFosphere
TracingWoodgrains is an out-and-out rationalist. Long time poster on /r/slatestarcodex and heavily involved in all things SSC. It just benefits them to be coy about it. Which is whatever! Fine! Who cares? But they’re 100% in the bag for rationalism in any way that matters.
“Rather than carefully considering and discussing them on their intellectual merits, the Batman broadly dismisses any of Joker’s articles as coming from an Unreliable Source. Batman is doing zillions of edits to the Justice League database so his views are overrepresented as well.”
