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…”
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.
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.
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.
dear me. doesn’t he know that the actual art requires hate-skimming at most?
lmaou bruv, great to know these clowns are both coping & seething
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.
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.
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
This thread has taken me from not knowing who David Gerard is (or the tracing woodgrains person, for that matter), to realizing this is his instance.
Lmao, what a wild ride. This community is awesome.
Took me like five minutes of reading to realize this was neant to be a hit piece and not praise.
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
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
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.
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.
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
Neoreaction: A Basilisk really is great, you definitely should tackle it soon!
Do it, it’s great, v edifying!
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.
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.’
That’s a lot of words about what is or isn’t a reliable source from one who doesn’t seem to know what a reliable source is. For a person of these beliefs, it is not surprising at all that their criteria seem to be:
- anything that agrees with them is reliable
- anything David Gerard considers unreliable is reliable because David Gerard is a big meanie and won’t include citations to HBD articles, uwu
- anything that David Gerard or any friendly associate of David Gerard publishes is UNreliable, again because he is a meanie; see above, uwu
Dawg, maybe you need to step back from this all. As Voltaire once said, reality has a well-known liberal bias. Your beliefs are probably just counter to reality, and the corpus of data is not in your favour.
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
also he lifted that line from me lol
lmao. Literally the only thing that had any truth or wit to it was plagiarised
he could have just said “as he calls himself”, but nooo
now it’s
He calls himself the Forrest Gump of the internet, and honestly, I can’t particularly disagree.
we’ll get there, comment by comment! Or not.
Only one problem with this, he will not mention he edited days after publishing it, so then people go ‘sneer club is whining about X, but the article clearly says Y they are lying again!’ so hope somebody made an archive of the initial post. Wait, I can just check that. People did so interested parties could diff it.
There’s also the Julian Assange connection, so we can probably blame him for Trump being president as well.
shakes fist at gerard that David is a real scallywag!
Sorry never heard of the Assange -> Trump gets elected connection, care to explain? (E: turns out I had, I had just forgotten how crazy everything was back then, and how hypocritical they all are compared to now)
I heard the bs thing that GG caused Trump (def not big enough, also international) or that the media mocking him and daring to run helped, etc. (It prob was a combination of everything).
Gerard -> Assange -> creates Wikileaks -> Wikileaks receives and publishes hacked or leaked DNC emails -> DNC emails shows Clinton cheating Sanders in the primary -> depresses turnout among potential democratic voters in the general election -> Trump wins.
On can question each step on how influential it’s for the next, but if one doesn’t Trump was all his fault.
Assange becomes a Russian asset because him being a low key sex pest somehow gives some European authorities cause to want to send him packing to the US where he is wanted for espionage should probably be one of the steps but in general yes.
Ow right, forgot about those whole damn emails. Amazing that after that shit Trump just takes the boxes home and puts them inside his shower. But wait I hear you think. Shower, that was in the toilet. No, look again at the image behind the first row of boxes is a shower curtain (you can see on the left side the marble gets higher, as you should tile a shower (it is mandatory like that in .nl at least)) and what do we see behind that curtain on the right? More boxes! Sindriiiii!
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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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.
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
What an ass
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.
Holy fuck David, you really are living rent free in this SOB’s head.
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.
