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Starseeder @awful.systems

That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is out

246 comments

  • 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 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

  • 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!”

  • 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.

  • 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)

  • 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.

  • Cool, it's like any one of the thousands of rightoid whines about wikipedia and then it somehow devolves into even more boring nonsense which I'm not going to read especially since most of it was probably written by an LLM.

  • lol @ r/subredditdrama

    • 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....

      • every accusation is a confession

    • 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.

    • 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.

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

246 comments