This article is intended as a companion piece to “Reliable Sources”, in which I detail the story of Wikipedia admin David Gerard. I highly recommend reading that article before this one; this may not make much sense absent that context.
Introduction
“Oh, it’s David Gerard again.”
“…how could I possibly explain David Gerard?”
Such was my reaction when I saw a charming Guardian article focused on digging up dirt against Manifest, a prediction market conference I had the great honor of presenting at. As the New York Times documented last year, Manifest is an environment like no other, “equal parts Math Olympiad and Burning Man” that attracts, among others, “a movement of cerebral data obsessives”: the Bay Area Rationalists. For me, as I wrote on Twitter, it represented an opportunity to spend a weekend chatting with and learning from many of my role models, people like Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten, Substack CEO Chris Best, and Kelsey Piper, who writes about effective altruism for Vox; meeting old online friends in person; and telling a packed crowd how the long-dismissed “cute kids’ game” of Neopets evolved the most involved, cutthroat game economy this side of EVE online. It was a spectacular weekend, one of the best of my life.
The Guardian article is a peculiar piece of work: written not by someone who had attended the conference, but by one seemingly doing nothing beyond going through the list of invited guests looking for any who had past controversies. It takes a sinister tone throughout, describing the inn-turned-conference-center in which the conference took place as a “walled, surveilled compound,” casting broad aspersions at attendees, and making basic factual errors its editors scrambled to correct post-publication. Through a lens of journalism as truth-seeking, the article is incoherent. In Gerard’s frame, though, it makes perfect sense: the article creates a record in a Reliable Source allowing him and others so inclined to encourage people to dismiss the conference and its attendees sight unseen.
I had long known, vaguely, about Gerard. While I am not personally a rationalist, I enjoy their company and their writing and have spent much of my time online chatting amiably within their diaspora. Spend much time in a place like that and you inevitably become idly aware of the crowd of jackals on the outskirts waiting to scavenge quotes to share with their friends. As a part-time jackal myself, I get the impulse, but it’s a peculiar thing, to know people are watching you in that way.
While Gerard’s grudge never extended to me in particular (upon finding out I was preparing my article, he mentioned he “had previously considered [me] on the saner end of the rationalists1 from [my] reasonably coherent twitter”), I made peace long ago with the knowledge that if someone were to try to ruin my online reputation, it would probably be one from Gerard’s circle.
What I hadn’t always realized is just how far back my history with him went—that he was one of the men who built the online world I discovered when I first logged on.
Those Who Built My World
Back in the early 2000s, a certain culture—leftish-libertarianish, "hacker culture," New Atheist, anti-Bush, pro-gay, "information wants to be free"—containing both Gerard and LessWrong founder Yudkowsky was broadly united as “the internet” against a consistent set of external threats: Fundies, Bigots, the Anti-Science, Censors, and Moralists.
This is the world I discovered as a cocky Mormon teenager who fancied myself a budding skeptic: one built by men like Gerard and Yudkowsky, one I was equal parts entranced and disturbed by, one I could not look away from.
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