.

Didn’t he violate Wikipedias rules though

NGL the AI generated image make DG look cool AF

If we’re framing this as a breakup, david won the breakup.

Prolix insanity is kind of a Rationalist / Rat-adjacent calling card.

I don’t know i had to skim it too. Its hard to see what point he’s trying to make. I can see why many of wikis choices are shit but he also seems to complain about takis magazine being removed witch just seems like a sensible choice. And he’s still up on his high horse about that conference where HBD people were invited to speak. They think “rationality” is about seeking heterodox thinkers but you don’t see anyone who believes in shit like miasma theory or any other discredited idea besides race there.

I’n not joking when I say he’s probably using an LLM to write this junk. It reads like it, and he’s already perfectly comfortable with illustrating his diatribes with embarrassing midjourney slop.

The lesswrong Rationalist sphere people all write like this. And I assume he gets paid via various podcasts/substack subs/a patreon. So this is prob mostly their job. Correction he has a day job as a law clerk. My bad sorry.

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 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.

.

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?

<img alt="a photo of calipers" src="https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/615a1805-2390-4490-9ba9-51505db26e1f.jpeg">

my honest reacton:

<img alt="" src="https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/02c2478c-e615-4b75-8e19-f46c874e22c5.png">

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

Back in 1995, when I was born, Gerard was my age

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

<img alt="" src="https://www.awful.systems/pictrs/image/255c7409-baef-4e00-9895-819d330b6b94.jpeg">

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.

I’ve barely started reading and I’m deep in wtfs. this is such a weird hitpiece.

<img alt="" src="https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/2848193d-f24e-4ba0-a895-adef4e696f64.png">

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…”

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.

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.

lmao he’s such a silly cunt

Weird sort of censorship/oddness going on, when I go directly to the tweet you linked I can see it, but when I click on your reply I see this

brb calling the burn unit

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.

“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.”

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.

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

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?

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.’

To use “wikipedia editors went batshit over an editor’s decision” as evidence of anything is just wild to me, a man whose knowledge of wikipedia editing extends to the one thing everybody knows about wikipedia editors (their tendency to go batshit over each others’ decisions)

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.

Someone has to post the Elizabeth Sandifer essay and I guess it’s my turn:

eruditorumpress.com/…/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kil…

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.

@V0ldek

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.

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.

What an ass

Can’t miss an opportunity to make it about himself I guess

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.

Trace seems a bit… emotional. You ok, Trace?

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.

why would anyone put all these cortisol-addicted chuds in one place and what keeps them coming back there

I wish I could focus on things I want to do as well as this person can focus on whatever this is.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

fabricating ties between LessWrong and neoreaction

Lmao

I knew the yarvin afterparty fact would come in handy later

Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must

The Nathan Hale of Reddit.

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.

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

“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?

Also, billing David Gerard as “the Forrest Gump of the internet” in a tweet and not mentioning that you can plausibly blame him for the whole Musk X Grimes collab is a true fumble

Attempt 2 got all the way to the part about Scott before I had to come up for air.

• The defense of Wikipedia’s preference for policy over basic human decency in the Chelsea Manning name change was once again left entirely implicit.

• This is probably for the best because otherwise David’s insistence on reliable sources over letting LWers do their own hagiography on Wikipedia’s letterhead is much harder to criticize.

• Is Neoreaction: a Basilisk a bit of a woozle/citogenesis? Maybe? But are we going to argue about the central factual claims it makes? Nope. There’s no attempt to dispute the overlap between NRX and Ratdom, just an un-argued assumption that nobody should care enough to put it in their Wikipedia article. I swear, you build ten thousand bridges and nobody cares but you repeatedly speak favorably of actual fascist’s attitudes on race science on your large and influential platform and everyone loses their minds.

Edit because man who can remember how to do formatting?

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.

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.

Doesn’t seem to have set HN on fire either:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40928248

<img alt="" src="https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/4576ca1c-8a07-4ff4-9e7d-955c48d1f10f.png">

I hate that you made me know this exists, but I thank the acausalrobotgod that you cannot make me listen to it.

.

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!”

Winning sentences of the day so far:

Conservapedia is 100% true and correct. Evidence: www.conservapedia.com/Garfield_(comic_strip)

Whoever wrote that deffo wants to fuck Nermal.

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

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.

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.

Gotta love how the SRD thread has more comments and updoots than the original.

no, no, it’s fine. the less readable they are, the better.