Because Gerard was on LessWrong when the internet splintered and polarized, he saw the whole story through the lens of LessWrong, and on an instinctive level the site became his go-to scapegoat for all that was going wrong for his vision of the internet.
And I want to make a comment before continuing to read.
I’m uncomfortable with the psychologizing here. I feel like your style is inviting me to suspend disbelief for the sake of a clean and entertaining narrative. Not that you should never do such a thing, but I think it maybe warrants some kind of disclaimer or something. If you had written this specifically for LW, instead of as a linkpost to your blog, I would be suggesting major rewrites in order meet the standards I’m used to around here.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the true psychological story was significantly different than the picture you paint here. Especially if it involved real life events, e.g. some tragedy in his family, or problems with his friends or job. Would those things have even been visible in your research?
I’ll keep reading, but I’m now going to spend extra effort to maintain the right level of skepticism. None of what I’ve read so far contradicts my priors, but I’m going to avoid updating too hard on your interpretations (as opposed to the citations & other hard facts).
I am bothered that no other commenters have brought this up yet.
That part is in a paragraph that starts with “My impression is...”.
In and around presentation of the facts, I believe it is useful to provide best-fit narrative explanations for how and why those things were going on, while making it clear that those are only my personal opinions. I source my facts thoroughly and separate my opinions out explicitly. I respect that some may prefer me to keep opinions out of it altogether, but that is simply not how I write.
That part is in a paragraph that starts with “My impression is...”.
Fair.
And yet I felt the discomfort before reading that particular paragraph, and I still feel it now. For me personally, the separators you included were not enough: I did indeed have to apply extra effort throughout the post to avoid over-updating on the interpretations as opposed to the hard facts.
Maybe I’m unusual and few other readers have this problem. I suspect that’s not the case, but given that I don’t know, I’ll just say that I find this writing style to be a little too Dark Artsy and symmetrical for my comfort.
I still think this post was net good to publish, and I might end up linking it to someone if I think they’re being too credulous toward Gerard. But if I do, it might be with some disclaimer along the lines of, “I think the author got a little carried away with a particular psychological story. I recommend putting in the effort to mentally separate the facts from the fun narrative.”
Also, to give credit where it’s due, the narrative style really was entertaining.
I appreciate the feedback, but I do want to push back a bit on an idea I see creeping around the edges here at times—that to use effective rhetoric to present the truth is a sin of some sort. Inasmuch as that is your meaning, I respectfully disagree. Guided By the Beauty of Our Weapons is a beautiful essay and one I aim to take to heart. In fact, I think much of the reason this essay has resonated so much with people is because it tells an exhaustively documented, true story about malfeasance that the subject has attempted to hide for a very long time. It is, in short, a fundamentally asymmetric weapon. But to use asymmetric weapons without symmetric ones is to tie one hand behind your back.
To tell the story in an effective way, I needed to write in an entertaining, compelling fashion that told readers why they should care about the decades of niche internet history I was about to throw at them. It wasn’t going to be enough to simply recite a list of facts in bland, understated fashion. The story had to contain the animating heart of what made it mean so much—to Gerard, to the participants here, to onlookers. Now—it’s true, in one sense, that effective rhetoric and effective storytelling are symmetric weapons. People can use rhetoric effectively independent of truth! That does not, however, make effective rhetoric and storytelling bad weapons.
Gerard has an extensive writing history here and elsewhere, and I reviewed thousands of his LessWrong comments, hundreds of thousands of Wiki edits, and a wide range of his posts elsewhere as I worked to piece his story together. Throughout the article, I share sources and peeks at the moments that spoke most to the narrative I saw emerging in his editing and writing history; in the instances where there are gaps, I make that clear as well.
You mention that my writing would not meet local standards. That’s fine for what it is, but from my angle, it feels like what you’re wincing at is precisely the reason people cared enough to understand an obscure feud between a long-time bugbear of this community and his many rivals: because I told the story as a story, not just as an encyclopedia entry.
Your standards are not mine, and to be frank, mine are not yours. I write in the style I do deliberately and with careful consideration. I work exhaustively to ensure every factual claim I make is backed up, I focus the story on important truths while making my own perspective clear, and I supplement all of that with serious consideration for the sort of artistry that makes an hour-long story about Wikipedia edits worth reading. I respect that you feel uncomfortable about my writing but I stand by my approach in full.
I want to echo RobertM’s reply to this. I had a similar reaction to the ones that he, mike_hawke and Raemon have related in this thread.
I interacted with Gerard a bit on tumblr in ~2016-18, and I remember him as one of the most confusing and frustrating characters I’ve ever encountered online. (I have been using the internet to socialize since the early 2000s, so the competition for this slot is steep.) His views and (especially) his interpersonal conduct were often memorably baffling to me.
So when I saw your article, and read the beginning of it, I thought: “oh, neat, maybe this will finally explain what the hell that guy’s deal was.”
But after reading the whole thing, I still feel as mystified as ever on that question. The experience of reading the article was like:
I read a long string of paragraphs about some specific pattern of behavior, e.g. aggressively editing a specific Wikipedia article. This material is carefully written, meticulously annotated with citations, and interesting in its own way, but it doesn’t explain Gerard—rather, it is simply more of the sort of thing that is in need of explanation. I nod along, thinking “yeah, that definitely sounds like the kind of weird shit that David Gerard does online.”
Suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, I am confronted with something very different—something like the bit that mike_hawke quoted in his original comment. This material imputes psychological states to Gerard, and purports to provide the “whys” behind the behavior documented elsewhere in the post. But it doesn’t seem related to what comes before or after it in the text; it’s just there, suddenly, out of nowhere.
Whereas the rest of the post is granular, precise, narrowly scoped, and extensively cited, these “psychological/narrative beats” are broad, sweeping, brief, and not clearly tied to any supporting evidence or argumentation. They just get stated, abruptly and unceremoniously, and then the post immediately moves on to more of the granular documentary stuff.
I reach a moment like this, and I do a double take. I think “wait, did I accidentally skip half a page?” The flow of my reading experience is broken; I scroll up and spend a little while confirming that I didn’t miss some key section, before moving on.
Repeat until done.
I am not against “effective rhetoric and storytelling,” as you put it, but I don’t think the rhetoric and storytelling here were effective. I don’t object in principle to journalism that presents a narrative alongside the reported facts, but the narrative and the facts need to cohere with one another.
Narrative beats like “he saw the whole story through the lens of LessWrong, and on an instinctive level [...]” should feel like natural summations of the more granular details reported by the text before and after them; if they feel like they’re abruptly appearing out of nowhere, something is wrong.
This is not about some eccentric lesswrong-dot-com standard of austere argumentative purity—it’s about the more ordinary standards I have come to expect when I read long-form narrative journalism, in any venue.
(Or the relatively loose standards which, say, I would apply if I were hearing a narrative-with-accompanying-facts related to me by a friend whom I broadly trusted. Even in that context, the story has to fit, it has to be a story about the related facts, and a story to which the facts are germane and which they could at least plausibly support—even if the nuts and bolts of that evidentiary relation are not filled in as thoroughly as a more exacting audience might require, even if the presentation would not be deemed sufficient in court or on lesswrong or whatever.)
I appreciate that you’ve read a huge amount of Gerard’s online writing (much more than I have read, or would ever want to read). I appreciate that you believe in the story you told, and believe that it’s substantiated by the evidence you’ve reviewed. I just don’t think your post communicated that understanding to the reader.
It’s a great, thorough account of Gerard’s weird spin-doctoring crusades on Wikipedia and elsewhere—and since this comment has had a negative tone throughout, I do want to thank you for providing that! -- I’m just not a fan of the narrativizing and psychologizing in it. Perhaps the narrative is true, and perhaps you know that it is true. But your post does not actually tell that story to the reader—it merely asserts that it is telling that story, here and there, and then moves on.
As far as I can tell, this isn’t the complaint. The complaint is that the psychologizing just isn’t sufficiently substantiated in the text. Good prose and compelling narrative structure don’t require that. (You might occupy an epistemic state where you’re confident that your interpretation is correct, but that’s a separate question from how much readers should update based on the evidence presented.)
I found the post overall quite good but noticed some of the same things that mike_hawke pointed out.
ETA: I do sort of expect this response to feel like I’m missing the point, or something, but I think your response was misunderstanding the original complaint. The discomfort was not with using “effective rhetoric to present the truth”, but with using rhetoric to present something that readers had no justified reason to believe was the truth.
Maybe I’m unusual and few other readers don’t have this problem. I suspect that’s not the case, but given that I don’t know, I’ll just say that I find this writing style to be a little too Dark Artsy and symmetrical for my comfort.
fyi I also felt this. (Don’t have much more to add. I just wanted to note it).
I read as far as this part:
And I want to make a comment before continuing to read.
I’m uncomfortable with the psychologizing here. I feel like your style is inviting me to suspend disbelief for the sake of a clean and entertaining narrative. Not that you should never do such a thing, but I think it maybe warrants some kind of disclaimer or something. If you had written this specifically for LW, instead of as a linkpost to your blog, I would be suggesting major rewrites in order meet the standards I’m used to around here.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the true psychological story was significantly different than the picture you paint here. Especially if it involved real life events, e.g. some tragedy in his family, or problems with his friends or job. Would those things have even been visible in your research?
I’ll keep reading, but I’m now going to spend extra effort to maintain the right level of skepticism. None of what I’ve read so far contradicts my priors, but I’m going to avoid updating too hard on your interpretations (as opposed to the citations & other hard facts).
I am bothered that no other commenters have brought this up yet.
That part is in a paragraph that starts with “My impression is...”.
In and around presentation of the facts, I believe it is useful to provide best-fit narrative explanations for how and why those things were going on, while making it clear that those are only my personal opinions. I source my facts thoroughly and separate my opinions out explicitly. I respect that some may prefer me to keep opinions out of it altogether, but that is simply not how I write.
Fair.
And yet I felt the discomfort before reading that particular paragraph, and I still feel it now. For me personally, the separators you included were not enough: I did indeed have to apply extra effort throughout the post to avoid over-updating on the interpretations as opposed to the hard facts.
Maybe I’m unusual and few other readers have this problem. I suspect that’s not the case, but given that I don’t know, I’ll just say that I find this writing style to be a little too Dark Artsy and symmetrical for my comfort.
I still think this post was net good to publish, and I might end up linking it to someone if I think they’re being too credulous toward Gerard. But if I do, it might be with some disclaimer along the lines of, “I think the author got a little carried away with a particular psychological story. I recommend putting in the effort to mentally separate the facts from the fun narrative.”
Also, to give credit where it’s due, the narrative style really was entertaining.
(EDIT: typos)
I appreciate the feedback, but I do want to push back a bit on an idea I see creeping around the edges here at times—that to use effective rhetoric to present the truth is a sin of some sort. Inasmuch as that is your meaning, I respectfully disagree. Guided By the Beauty of Our Weapons is a beautiful essay and one I aim to take to heart. In fact, I think much of the reason this essay has resonated so much with people is because it tells an exhaustively documented, true story about malfeasance that the subject has attempted to hide for a very long time. It is, in short, a fundamentally asymmetric weapon. But to use asymmetric weapons without symmetric ones is to tie one hand behind your back.
To tell the story in an effective way, I needed to write in an entertaining, compelling fashion that told readers why they should care about the decades of niche internet history I was about to throw at them. It wasn’t going to be enough to simply recite a list of facts in bland, understated fashion. The story had to contain the animating heart of what made it mean so much—to Gerard, to the participants here, to onlookers. Now—it’s true, in one sense, that effective rhetoric and effective storytelling are symmetric weapons. People can use rhetoric effectively independent of truth! That does not, however, make effective rhetoric and storytelling bad weapons.
Gerard has an extensive writing history here and elsewhere, and I reviewed thousands of his LessWrong comments, hundreds of thousands of Wiki edits, and a wide range of his posts elsewhere as I worked to piece his story together. Throughout the article, I share sources and peeks at the moments that spoke most to the narrative I saw emerging in his editing and writing history; in the instances where there are gaps, I make that clear as well.
You mention that my writing would not meet local standards. That’s fine for what it is, but from my angle, it feels like what you’re wincing at is precisely the reason people cared enough to understand an obscure feud between a long-time bugbear of this community and his many rivals: because I told the story as a story, not just as an encyclopedia entry.
Your standards are not mine, and to be frank, mine are not yours. I write in the style I do deliberately and with careful consideration. I work exhaustively to ensure every factual claim I make is backed up, I focus the story on important truths while making my own perspective clear, and I supplement all of that with serious consideration for the sort of artistry that makes an hour-long story about Wikipedia edits worth reading. I respect that you feel uncomfortable about my writing but I stand by my approach in full.
I want to echo RobertM’s reply to this. I had a similar reaction to the ones that he, mike_hawke and Raemon have related in this thread.
I interacted with Gerard a bit on tumblr in ~2016-18, and I remember him as one of the most confusing and frustrating characters I’ve ever encountered online. (I have been using the internet to socialize since the early 2000s, so the competition for this slot is steep.) His views and (especially) his interpersonal conduct were often memorably baffling to me.
So when I saw your article, and read the beginning of it, I thought: “oh, neat, maybe this will finally explain what the hell that guy’s deal was.”
But after reading the whole thing, I still feel as mystified as ever on that question. The experience of reading the article was like:
I read a long string of paragraphs about some specific pattern of behavior, e.g. aggressively editing a specific Wikipedia article. This material is carefully written, meticulously annotated with citations, and interesting in its own way, but it doesn’t explain Gerard—rather, it is simply more of the sort of thing that is in need of explanation. I nod along, thinking “yeah, that definitely sounds like the kind of weird shit that David Gerard does online.”
Suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, I am confronted with something very different—something like the bit that mike_hawke quoted in his original comment. This material imputes psychological states to Gerard, and purports to provide the “whys” behind the behavior documented elsewhere in the post. But it doesn’t seem related to what comes before or after it in the text; it’s just there, suddenly, out of nowhere.
Whereas the rest of the post is granular, precise, narrowly scoped, and extensively cited, these “psychological/narrative beats” are broad, sweeping, brief, and not clearly tied to any supporting evidence or argumentation. They just get stated, abruptly and unceremoniously, and then the post immediately moves on to more of the granular documentary stuff.
I reach a moment like this, and I do a double take. I think “wait, did I accidentally skip half a page?” The flow of my reading experience is broken; I scroll up and spend a little while confirming that I didn’t miss some key section, before moving on.
Repeat until done.
I am not against “effective rhetoric and storytelling,” as you put it, but I don’t think the rhetoric and storytelling here were effective. I don’t object in principle to journalism that presents a narrative alongside the reported facts, but the narrative and the facts need to cohere with one another.
Narrative beats like “he saw the whole story through the lens of LessWrong, and on an instinctive level [...]” should feel like natural summations of the more granular details reported by the text before and after them; if they feel like they’re abruptly appearing out of nowhere, something is wrong.
This is not about some eccentric lesswrong-dot-com standard of austere argumentative purity—it’s about the more ordinary standards I have come to expect when I read long-form narrative journalism, in any venue.
(Or the relatively loose standards which, say, I would apply if I were hearing a narrative-with-accompanying-facts related to me by a friend whom I broadly trusted. Even in that context, the story has to fit, it has to be a story about the related facts, and a story to which the facts are germane and which they could at least plausibly support—even if the nuts and bolts of that evidentiary relation are not filled in as thoroughly as a more exacting audience might require, even if the presentation would not be deemed sufficient in court or on lesswrong or whatever.)
I appreciate that you’ve read a huge amount of Gerard’s online writing (much more than I have read, or would ever want to read). I appreciate that you believe in the story you told, and believe that it’s substantiated by the evidence you’ve reviewed. I just don’t think your post communicated that understanding to the reader.
It’s a great, thorough account of Gerard’s weird spin-doctoring crusades on Wikipedia and elsewhere—and since this comment has had a negative tone throughout, I do want to thank you for providing that! -- I’m just not a fan of the narrativizing and psychologizing in it. Perhaps the narrative is true, and perhaps you know that it is true. But your post does not actually tell that story to the reader—it merely asserts that it is telling that story, here and there, and then moves on.
Hm, ok. This is good feedback. I appreciate it and will chew on it—hopefully I can make that sort of thing land better moving forward.
As far as I can tell, this isn’t the complaint. The complaint is that the psychologizing just isn’t sufficiently substantiated in the text. Good prose and compelling narrative structure don’t require that. (You might occupy an epistemic state where you’re confident that your interpretation is correct, but that’s a separate question from how much readers should update based on the evidence presented.)
I found the post overall quite good but noticed some of the same things that mike_hawke pointed out.
ETA: I do sort of expect this response to feel like I’m missing the point, or something, but I think your response was misunderstanding the original complaint. The discomfort was not with using “effective rhetoric to present the truth”, but with using rhetoric to present something that readers had no justified reason to believe was the truth.
fyi I also felt this. (Don’t have much more to add. I just wanted to note it).