Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard

TracingWoodgrains

Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard

TracingWoodgrains

52 min read · Jul 10, 2024

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Larks

Thanks for writing up this super diligent post and shedding some light for what must to outsiders seem like a very opaque subculture. It definitely fits with my limited experience of David Gerard as an editor, in both cases where I agreed with his edits and those I didn't.

Gerard seems like an especially egregious case - and particularly galling to us as the targets of his vendetta - but I'm also interested in the broader lessons.

Having been an avid user of wikipedia early on, in some senses it has been successfully far beyond Jimbo's expectations, especially in terms of its scale and influence. But on the other hand its hard to imagine he would have wanted - or tolerated - this, and my impression is that the reliability of wikipedia on politically-salient topics has fallen over time. To what extent was this inevitable? It seems wikipedia, despite having a lot of policies and procedures, failed to have a sufficient immune response to deal with such a transparent bad actor. Is this because other senior editors are similar or sympathize with him, or just that their para-legal infrastructure was deficient?

This sort of Robert Conquest-style decay seems like it has happened to a lot of organisations. One protective factor seems to be for-profit status, because competition and customer preferences act to keep you focused on the mission. But even that is not guaranteed, and many organisations we care about would be difficult to structure as for-profits.

One alternative seems to be to have a charismatic leader with whom the buck stops. Outsiders cannot easily evaluate the morass of internal wikipedia discussions, but they could evaluate Jimbo, and if everyone in power was accountable to (someone who was accountable to ...) Jimmy that seems like a significantly better check. This is basically the approach taken by a lot of Democracies - you have a leader, whose character and achievements can be evaluated by voters, and then in turn they have a broad mandate with the power to achieve it.

At this point we're far from the original topic, but it does occur to me that EA collectively doesn't really have either of these, since the most plausible candidates have declined to take up the mantle.

Ebenezer Dukakis

I do think governance is very important, as EA's recent history has illustrated, and deserves way more discussion.

Outsiders cannot easily evaluate the morass of internal wikipedia discussions, but they could evaluate Jimbo

I'm skeptical of this argument, but I'm trying to steelman. Is the idea that I can form an opinion of Jimbo's character based on e.g. his tweets, and once I trust his character, I can trust him to adjudicate internal Wikipedia disputes?

Because if I'm forming my opinion of Jimbo by reading internal Wikipedia disputes -- which honestly seems like the best method -- we might be back where we started.

Wikipedia does run ArbCom elections, but you need a certain number of edits to vote. Presumably that additional context helps voters evaluate candidates. (EDIT: It could also worsen self-selection/organizational drift issues. I'm tempted to say self-selection is the main problem with controversial online discussion.)

EDIT: I suppose Larks' argument could also work if you simply empower the existing ArbCom with a broad mandate.

Larks

I'm sure there are a bunch of leaders you have some opinions of - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jamie Dimon, Peter Thiel, Kim Jong Un, Joe Biden etc. You made those evaluations based on some mixture of different factors - reading their tweets, seeing them interviewed, observing whether their plans work out, reading other people's views on them. If they were a big wikipedia editor, you could even read internal wikipedia disputes they participated in, just as reading their EAF/LW comments can help you judge people here.

The key step is that you make this evaluation for the one single leader, and then if they seem intelligent and ethical and motivated and organised and so on, infer that the organisation they lead is good also. You don't have to read all the wikipedia disputes to judge the collective decision making of the editors, or even a representative sample - just read some controversial ones Jimmy got stuck into, and see if the King ruled wisely.

The reason this is not 'right back where we started' is I think most people find it much easier to evaluate a single human (a task we practice all our lives at, and did in the ancestral environment) than to evaluate large organisations (a much more difficult skill, with worse feedback mechanisms, that did not exist in the ancestral environment).

Ebenezer Dukakis

The reason this is not 'right back where we started' is I think most people find it much easier to evaluate a single human (a task we practice all our lives at, and did in the ancestral environment) than to evaluate large organisations (a much more difficult skill, with worse feedback mechanisms, that did not exist in the ancestral environment).

Sure, that seems reasonable. Another point is that large groups may have competing internal factions, which could create a source of variability in their decision-making which makes their decisions harder to understand and predict.

Lower variability with the CEO approach should mean a smaller sample size is required to get a bead on their decision-making style.

BTW, did you get the private message I sent you regarding a typo in your original comment? Wondering if private messages are working properly.

Karthik Tadepalli

One of the most interesting posts I've seen on the forum, ever. Thanks for writing this up!

AltForHonesty

I appreciate the work that went into this post, but I do think you understate the link between LW and neoreaction. You say:

Gerard’s second project, to create an association in people’s minds between rationalism and neoreaction, was much more ambitious than the first. [...] Rationalists and neoreactionaries, on the other hand, were distinct and well-defined groups, neither of which particularly liked each other.[...] But Gerard had two cards to play: first, a glancing, single-sentence note in an article from the Reliable Source known as TechCrunch that neoreactionaries occasionally “crop-up on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong, having cryptic conversations about ‘Moldbug’ and ‘the Cathedral,’”

Assuming this was true at one point, it seems to no longer be the case (and it's also not a purely online thing anymore) as we could see recently with e.g. Manifest and Yarvin's afterparty.

Comments

Larks

Gerard seems like an especially egregious case - and particularly galling to us as the targets of his vendetta - but I'm also interested in the broader lessons.

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Gerard almost always abbreviates this as “an RS.” For clarity and to avoid an excess of Wikipedia acronyms throughout the article, I use the full phrase each time.

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Note that when judging reliability of sources, Wikipedia editors select from “Option 1” (reliable), “Option 2” (unclear), “Option 3” (unreliable), and “Option 4” (publishes falsehoods and should be banned as a source).

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"Why do a seven-meg Web site critical of Scientology?”

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Gerard and Sandifer battled alongside each other in the Wikipedia trenches for years starting in the early 2000s, and remain close friends to this day. Examples follow: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

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Gerard was proud enough of this article that he linked it from RationalWiki half a decade later.

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An anti-Wikipedia gossip site mentions Gerard once called Metz a “sociopathic a---hole.” This would make sense given their opposed interests at the time, but link rot has claimed the original source, so this one just gets a footnote.

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A set of admins elected as a sort of “supreme court” for Wikipedia who act as the final word in on-site dispute resolution.

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This yearning, along with a time Gerard described his experience in school as frustrating and lamented the plight of “the brilliant kid unchallenged by school” who falls to pieces on hitting real challenges, is the most sympathetic I have found Gerard. I have written at some length about my own feelings on interacting with smart people, and the plight of smart kids unchallenged by school was the focus of my first piece of serious public writing and remains a fixation of mine.

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Here, I once again find myself more sympathetic to Gerard than I expected. It was difficult, at times, for people in LessWrong’s serious, almost robotically logical frame to make room for things like teasing, and during the years Gerard was friendly to LessWrong, the site’s RationalWiki article really was laudatory and affectionate in many places.

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Crowley’s efforts to get his friend interested in cryonics did not stick, as Gerard’s later Wikipedia commentary attests.

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The user in question had given media interviews under his real name some years before, and per Sandifer had twice mentioned his workplace on Wikipedia, but at the time of Sandifer’s leak he was actively seeking to keep his Wikipedia editing separate from his work.

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There may come a time when I talk about reproductively viable worker ants, but this is not that time. I’ll give you one guess as to whether Gerard was active in that particular controversy, but so far as I can tell, it was not pivotal to his own narrative. I was a Mormon missionary in Australia at the time, offline and blissfully unaware of All Of That, and I have maintained an intense distaste for it since. If this paragraph reads as nonsense to you, congratulations. Do yourself a favor and keep it that way.

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When a detail involves a long sequence of Wikipedia edits, I will often simply link the page’s revision history for simplicity. To find specific edits, search “Gerard.”

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(1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6) — you get the point. He added it, then sourced it to a PinkNews article. “[T]here we go, cites - and this had been international news since 2012.” “[A]nd another, in the headline, internationally. It's literally what he's most famous for.” “Brave is covered in the wider world primarily as "Eich's next project" and not for its own sake.” “Need to bring RSes showing that he is actually mainstream famous for those other things.”

^{^}

Writing an article like this inevitably leads to Pepe Silvia moments as you see the same names pop up again and again and wonder about the connections. Because many Wikipedia editors use pseudonyms divorced from their identities elsewhere online or in the world, information about who they are is scarce and it’s easy to imagine coordination anywhere from “these two people have similar interests and values” to “these people talk every day.” I had one such moment with Sandstein, who (as discussed in the article) later pushed hard to get another prolific editor with his own twenty years of history banned from Wikipedia for criticizing Gerard’s deletionist approach to Reliable Sources. Coordination and tangled webs of relationships are inevitable when people spend years in common space, and there’s nothing sinister about that, but threads like that are idle reminders that as much happens online in private spaces as in public ones, and even benign coordination often leaves nothing but shadows on the open web.

Sandstein, Sandstein, I look in the mail, this whole box is Sandstein!

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In a Wikipedia edit war two editors wrestle directly over the content of a page, reverting each other’s choices and arguing. Here, Gerard wanted to include a 2015 statement in order to imply that a taboo on discussing the topic lasted a long while, while others wanted to remove it to reflect that the topic was discussed normally before that date. If you love petty arguments, feel free to read the edit reasoning, bottom to top.

“Quit it with the blind reverts.”

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of Gerard and his friends.

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Full comment: “Thank you for your mail and for your interest! Generally spoken, the process of writing and researching an article is very different depending on the subject and the special perspective of the author, mixing reading, talking and thinking. Before publication, two editors and one corrector proofread the text. But I am sorry that it is not possible for us to reconstruct the writing process of an article which is seven years old. All the notes which have been used for it don‘t exist anymore. We hope for your understanding.”

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Gerard and his friends

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Gerard appears to have been quite fed up with Émile back in the day. He was personally responsible for deleting Torres’ Wikipedia page once upon a time, then making it so only admins could recreate the page. In one terse Wikipedia edit, he comments that he’s removing “spam promotion of [Émile] Torres, whose article was just deleted for the fourth time.”

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I consider myself a friendly critic of EA. My wrestling with them is mostly out-of-scope for this essay, but for the curious, I recommend Erik Hoel, Zvi Mowshowitz, and Nuño Sempere.

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Wikipedia’s term for article edits, used to substantiate specific claims about editors.

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I have never considered myself a rationalist, as I explained to a couple of rationalists who kindly brought me on for a podcast interview, but that’s as much out of respect towards them as anything else and many of the communities I actually spend my time in spawned in their shadow. While I’ve never been drawn to AI, quantum physics, and Bayes the same way they have, they are some of the smartest people I know and I consider it a compliment to be conflated with them. I have long read, appreciated, and commented on Scott Alexander’s work, count many rationalists and effective altruists as friends, and get on better with them than I do with most.

^{^}

He was complaining about a notorious serial downvote troll on LessWrong, someone who caused him no end of frustration during his time on the site by going through a long backlog of his posts and downvoting them.

Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard

Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard

Introduction: Reliable Sources

Gerard’s Standards for Reliable Sources

Who Is David Gerard?

The Early Romantic Years

Gerard’s fling with LessWrong in the twilight of the old internet

The bitter end

The Vindictive Ex

LessWrong

Effective Altruism

Scott Alexander

Conclusion

Companion article: A Young Mormon Discovers Online Rationality