LOL he's gotten pissed
https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/227907?context=8#context
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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He tells on himself by saying "Gerard" vs "Scott" and "David Gerard" vs "Scott Alexander". What's really pathetic is that he thinks politics on Wikipedia is about left vs right or authoritarians vs anarchists. Somebody should let him know that words are faith, not works.
The list of diatribes about forum drama that are interesting and edifying for the outsider is not long, and this one is not on it.
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.
Can't miss an opportunity to make it about himself I guess
What an ass
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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.
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?
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.
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I spoke with Anissimov
When I asked Yiannopolous and Bokhari for comment
Very good job on contacting the most neutral and dispassionate sources as well as both sides.
The Hill, Reason, Quillette, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, journalist Cathy Young [links bolded]
Very careful use of links there, can't be linking anything with an edit by Gerard.
Wugapodes’ righteous fury
The large wikipedia screenshot is extremely unhinged, in a sea of what I presume are votes saying "Oppose. He cited NYT for this claim and an opinion is not a conflict of interest"
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)
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."
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Christ, there's so much backstory here - just scrolling through long descriptions of Gerard's views and just thinking "based, based, based, based."
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."
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
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.
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
Do it, it's great, v edifying!
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