A Twitter thread weaving a story about racism in science got 44,000 likes. After people noticed incongruencies in the story, the author acknowledged to me he had copied from reddit. Then he deleted his reply, hid mine, then locked and deleted his account in short order. ...Huh. https://t.co/hbTDhGXSlj
— TracingWoodgrains (@tracewoodgrains) September 18, 2022
Thread first reported on rdrama:
https://rdrama.net/post/105564/phdcel-discovers-one-simple-trick-to
Stuart Ritchie and others noticed his wording was suspiciously similar to a prior reddit thread:
https://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie/status/1571595824672706561
Other details didn't quite seem to add up:
https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1571626850757009408
So I asked him about it all:
https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1571627271470940162
He confirmed he copied the thread, so I said thanks and he liked it. Then I guess he realized what he'd just confirmed, because he unliked, deleted his reply, hid my reply, locked replies to his thread, locked his account, and deleted his whole twitter account renamed himself to firstname-bunchofnumbers and removed his Twitter bio. In that order.
](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/587003826213617859/1021207809901215814/unknown.png)
I'll probably do a proper write-up about it or something, idk. it escalated quickly
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The depressing thing is, the original lie got 45,000 likes and will be yet more "evidence" that whites are evil and we need more books like Antiracist Baby and thought control.
Meanwhile, the truth gets 50 likes and will be ignored by everyone.
Excuse me while I go and be sick.
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Yeah, sensationalism always wins out. On the bright side: since he nuked the whole thread from orbit, it has no more chance of making it into bottom-feeding news articles, spreading around in direct form, etc. Nothing to be done about the past impressions, so a bunch of people will wander around with loose impressions leading to a vaguely worse model of the world, but straight-up deletion is one of the best possible outcomes in a case like this (and pretty rare too, honestly).
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Antiracist baby is literary kino. It encourages whites to confess all of their racist thoughts to combat racism. If publicly announcing all my racist thoughts will help to combat racism, I'm all for it
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Me as the robot and screaming something entirely different 😏
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That's because Trace made the mistake of being a reasonable polite person instead of an unreasonable butthole like the person he was talking to. If he had been more flamboyant and sensational in how he slapped this person down, he'd get better results.
I bet you that if his response to this Twittard's deception was to accuse them of pedophilia and call for their execution, he'd get a ton more views. Why be honest when interacting with dishonest people? You're not obligated to treat them with any more empathy or compassion than they show you.
That's why I like to lowkey dogwhistle for the execution of "social scientists" whose work doesn't replicate. The sensationalism gets me a lot more page-clicks, and the worst outcome that will happen is that the shitty scientists actually do get executed, which is a net win for humanity.
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I quite like your blog. Have you done an updated superforcasting article? I'm curious if the technique held up.
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I'm actually working on it now. The superforecasting worked quite well for Covid (I tripled my money), but I lost quite a bit of money on the Ukraine war. Ironically enough I was actually able to predict the Ukraine war in advance also, but since I'm not a financecel I wasn't able to predict how it would influence global markets. So I would say the superforecasting worked for two major geopolitical events, but I was only well-positioned to make money off of one of them.
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You too also read
Nassim Taleb?
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Of course: I consider myself a rationalist. I've read Taleb, Scott Siskind, Eliezar's Sequences, the whole reading list. The main thing that makes me different from other rationalists is that I'm much more aggressive and I believe in causing lots of pain to any person, group, or institution that disrespects me. I guess you could say that instead of an "effective altruist" I'm an "effective nihilist." Not all rationalists are harmless nerds: some of us are quite dangerous nerds.
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See the silver lining buddy, in your era you are part of the actual cool crowd, the ones who rightfully laugh at the sheep, it's like being galileo
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You can have a very fake Twitter thread about a KKK Vietnam vet doing super villian shit get well over 100k likes without any Snopes articles or Vox explainers but if one boomer forwards an email it's a heckin conspiracy theory
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