I got as far as "he says crypto is bad but also didn't make any money in crypto!" before I couldn't go any farther. Up until that point the author was at least doing a pretty competent job of using negative space (i.e. not engaging with the specific issues of racism, cult of personality, etc.) and using sufficiently boring prose to avoid seeming completely insane.
SneerClub
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.]
Without fail in the comments section, we have Daniel Kokotajlo (the philosophy student turned ai safety advocate who recently got canned at OAI) making the claim that "we [ = Young Daniel and our olde friend Big Yud] are AI experts and believe that risking full scale nuclear war over data centers is actually highly rational^{tm}" :)
...anyways, what were we saying about David Gerard being a bad faith actor again?
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.
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.
a brave editor spreads the truth
uh, or not
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.
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.
imagine being this butthurt
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)
@Starseeder As someone with ADHD the only thing I find harder to cope with than the crazy, in-crowd bureaucracy of Wikipedia is attempting to read that mile-long polemic. Where do they find the time to write this shit?