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TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
TracingWoodgrains
@tracewoodgrains
Storyteller. Pragmatist. Pursue excellence. Cofounder @CenterforEdProg. Eng/中文
5 subscribers
Jun 1 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
male sexuality is the most destructive and perverse force known to man and has to be policed, constrained, and controlled perhaps to win young men back we should figure out how to rebuild the social technologies held within traditional faiths, centered around policing, constraining, and controlling the sexuality of men towards positive ends, in a way suited to the needs of the day
May 15 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
One informative experience moving between reading academic research and legal cases is watching the same names pop up as authors in research disputes and experts in court cases.

As one example, James Kulik performed some of the most influential meta-analyses lending support for ability grouping, notably arguing against Robert Slavin, who would release competing meta-analyses slicing the same data slightly differently to question it. Here, he's mentioned in Georgia State Conference of Branches of NAACP v. Georgia, 775 F.2d 1403 (11th Cir. 1985), which remains one of the most influential precedential cases on the question and found that ability grouping tended to be a legitimate educational practice. He did good work; it makes sense to see him called to testify in support of the practice, and it makes sense that the court found his arguments persuasive!

But it feels odd, you know, knowing that so much legal precedent depends on who found the right academic to make the right case in the right courtroom before the researchers wander back to their own field's journals and keep firing arguments back and forth. How many quiet battles take place first in the academic literature, then on the witness stand? How much of our law rests on the lightly examined testimony of whichever academic sold their story the best?Image As another example: In the famous case Larry P. v. Riles, the court found that IQ tests were biased against black students and therefore could not be used to place students in remedial courses.

But...Image
May 14 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I’ve been torn on the extent to which the Afrikaner refugee claim is legitimate vs a political stunt, and they’re obviously receiving favored treatment compared to most refugees, but this statement has enough ominous lines that it persuades me towards the refugee case. If a country is upset people left because it had plans to “transform” their position and hold them “accountable,” I think they’re at the very least not insane to want to leave!
Apr 20 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
one reason I react so strongly to calls for violence is that I get the sense that for a lot of people, violence is how you show true seriousness—and they want to skip all the steps of living humbly for a cause and jump straight to dying nobly for it, no matter the cost to others you feel strongly enough about this to call for violence? cool! do you feel strongly enough to do a thousand more useful and less glamorous substantive things, things that don’t threaten to throw everyone else into chaos?

no? then sit down.
Mar 26 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This podcast is a great listen, and it demonstrates the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Abundance.

At every step, Newsom nods along and says how much he loves it. And at every step, Newsom nods along and explains why he's already "done" it or why he won't do it. What does Abundance need? More specific demands and a more pugilistic attitude.

It's simply too agreeable right now. It doesn't need endless hypothetical allies, it needs to provide specifics about who's blocking what and why, then to get them out of the way.
Mar 18 • 25 tweets • 8 min read
Good book so far! Image My banner art is set in (alt-history) 1905. Why? I couldn't have given a better reason than this. Image
Image
Mar 16 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
This is the paradox of the dissident right: For all the time they spend calling others degenerates, much of their behavior is almost uniquely repulsive to those whose traditions they make idols of.

People like Captive Dreamer bring shame to their families and their traditions. More on this:

Mar 13 • 5 tweets • 4 min read
Just watched a 4-hour argument between an archaeologist and a pseud (Flint Dibble and Graham Hancock) so I'd know what a random tweet was talking about. Now I can't find the tweet so instead I'll blast my thoughts to the public, bc it Says A Lot About Society.

The argument was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and probably everyone else has already heard of it, but I sure hadn't.

First: the pseud has a much, much larger platform than the archaeologist. He's had Netflix shows, been on Joe Rogan, and plays a large role in shaping the public conversation around the topic. The archaeologist has the heft of institutional credibility, but has much less personal influence than the pseud.

Second: the pseud sucks. He sucks. His m.o. is to play at god-of-the-gaps, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively at anything he can assert is underexplained while dismissing sound evidence as inconsequential and demanding to be taken seriously the whole time. He frames a narrative of himself vs Orthodox Academics, and rather than treating academia as a perpetual argument, treats every Orthodox Academic as an attorney defending the Client of Orthodoxy. This, in his eyes, justifies any tactic necessary to make his case: selective evidence, innuendo, anything and everything to persuade people towards his pre-determined conclusion, like the worst and most dishonest sort of online arguers. He openly states this.

Third: the intersection with politics and culture is fascinating and predictable. The archeologist accepts the progressive culture that dominates academia as the air he breathes, which is why eg he is now primarily active on Bluesky. In the entire conversation, the one strong point the pseud has is when he points out how he's been framed as Perpetuating White Supremacy. And there's actually a really interesting conversation that could be had there: academia has drifted towards a moral consensus alongside its focus on truth claims, and when criticizing opponents, academics often mix moral and truth claims while asserting the same authority from both.

Inevitably, this means that people wary of their moral uniformity will trust them less; this gave the pseud an opening to claim he was a victim of Cancel Culture and of vicious smears. One of the core challenge for people who take truth seriously today is that most of the people with actual legitimate expertise in hard fields pair that expertise with confidence in a moral consensus not at all shared by many of the people they need trust from, and interpretations in line with that moral consensus. Many, unimpressed by the moral claims, will turn instead to those who align more with their moral frames even if what those people say on factual matters is nonsense.

Fourth: it's been a while since I saw this sort of good, old-fashioned beatdown of a pseud. The highlight was probably the numerology section, where - in response to claims about how extraordinary numerical coincidences connected the Great Pyramid to the radius of the earth - the archeologist showed how the same coincidences could be applied to the weed number. Good, clean fun.

The coda of this is that the pseud went back to Joe Rogan and together they found the one time in a four-hour conversation the archeologist misstated the evidence and mocked him behind his back. They lamented how the archeologist "played fast and loose with the truth", how he was arrogant, just wanted to win, didn't want to get to the truth, and how this proved there was an arrogant establishment in archeology that would use dirty tricks to cling to a narrative while the pseud was just curiously exploring questions. No matter that the pseud had been embarrassed on topic after topic. No matter that all he had was furtive gesturing and innuendo in the face of serious research. All he had to do was note one error after-the-fact (something the archeologist agreed was in error), then come back and trumpet it to "show" that the archeologist was a mendacious liar trying to keep him down the whole time.

Quite the microcosm.Image
Image
Image anyway, here's the argument

Mar 10 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The way Darryl Cooper broke into mass consciousness is rather awkward for everyone whose introduction to him was “God’s Socialist” or “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem”

He is a much more complex and sympathetic figure than the standard range of grifters and ne’er-do-wells The trouble is that in a certain light, he is exactly who everyone thinks he is

and in another equally important light, he is very much not who everyone thinks he is

his podcast contains some of the most humanizing examinations of thorny history anywhere. and yet
Jan 30 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Look, Pete. I like you, but you had your chance to settle Brigida v. US Department of Transportation, and you didn't. Now is not the time for you to try to spin it into a political victory. You failed. Take accountability.
Jan 30 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
Not to pick too much of a feud with an institution I quite like, but to pick a feud with an institution I quite like, young liberals need to snap out of reflexive revulsion and mockery every time someone raises a conservative-coded problem.

Look. I get it. "DEI this" and "DEI that" are annoying. And anything that becomes an Approved Conservative Explanation will be embraced by some of the most obnoxious and unpleasant people in the world. One time an unambiguous white supremacist called it DEI when I pointed out he was lying about Asian IQ graphs. That stuff's real. It happens.

But you know what else is real? The 2014 air traffic control hiring scandal as one of the clearest and most pressing causes for the ATC shortage @CNLiberalism dismisses here. With explicitly racial motivation, people actually substantially weakened the test used to hire air traffic controllers. Then, with explicitly racial motivation, they actually replaced it with a blatantly rigged "biographical questionnaire." Then, with explicitly racial motivation, one person leaked the answers to this questionnaire to people in a race-based organization.

All of this actually, unambiguously happened. As a direct result of it, the air traffic control hiring pipeline was shattered. People who had spent years in school planning to become ATCs—fully qualified, ready to go, having already passed relevant tests—were dismissed with no chance of appeal. Those same people have been fighting for justice for a decade now.

I've spoken with several of these people fighting for justice. They're not fringe firebrands. Their politics are all over the spectrum; their backgrounds are everything from a woman working passionately to get more women involved in aviation to a moderate Latino man who spent years fighting through courts to get his FOIA requests approved so he could piece together the story to instructors who watched the government trample and dismiss their livelihood, then cover it up, lest it interfere with Diversity Goals.

You know who's stood in their way? Look, I hate it as much as you do, but it wasn't the crank conservatives. It was the Reasonable, Centrist, Smug Liberals who, every time they heard a conservative-coded criticism, refused to air it in their media, turned their brains off, and mocked it.

I was glad to have some small role in bringing their story back to prominence during the Biden administration, when Buttigieg--one of the politicians I respect most--was in charge of the FAA and had his name on the lawsuit that's been trying to settle this for years. He could have repaired it. He could have been honest, could have fixed what Trump 1 failed to do. He did not.

So now--guess what? The conservatives get a dunk. They get to score a point. They win a round in this game of politics, and liberals lose. They have the opportunity to fix something that everyone who understands the story knows is a massive scandal, something that makes liberals look terrible, and you know what? If they actually settle this lawsuit, patch things up with the CTI schools that the FAA screwed over all those years ago, bring justice to the individuals harmed, and repair a broken pipeline? Good. Let them rub that in our faces. Let them drink liberal tears, because in this case, the libs deserve it.

@SeanDuffyWI is the new US Secretary of Transportation. As one of his first acts, he should settle the class action lawsuit formerly known as Brigida v. Buttigieg, soon--presumably--to be known as Brigida v. Duffy, issue an official apology to the victims of years of knowing incompetence on the part of the FAA, and repair a broken pipeline. No more excuses. No more waiting. It's been a decade. The time is now.

And if all liberals can do while that's going on is call it "tiresome"? Look: the Obama admin made that bed, the Biden admin failed to fix it, and I don't really care how "tired" people are of hearing the phrase DEI, there is a problem that needs fixing and someone had better fix it. If the New Liberals can't help with that, can't even face it down honestly, then they need to step aside so others can.Image For those just tuning into the story now:

Jan 23 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I’m not clued-in enough to AI to understand why R1 is a big deal, but a lot of the bright sorts on my timeline are incredibly excited about it

like, I understand the “comparable to o1” part but after that I get a bit lost in the weeds

has anyone legibilized it yet? hm this is helpful

Jan 18 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I confess with some shame that I'm growing to accept the term "Woke Right" as basically reasonable

populist identitarian right-wing-ism with Social Media Mob characteristics: group-focused, power-aware, and looking to cast heretics out and control the politics of the country now obviously this is basically just another term for the dissident right, but the way they have begun to organize themselves and aggressively purity-test people for compliance is, if not wholly new, at least growing more notable

see eg replies here

Jan 12 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
When I analogized the barrier between childhood and adult language learners to other skills, some people pushed back on the premise: do children learn languages better than adults?

What do researchers say? Yes, but It's Complicated. Highlights below. Image First: children do not learn straightforwardly faster than adults. Many people rightly point out that an adult with one or two years of experience can outpace a child. Over time, though, they keep improving in areas adult learners falter in. Image
Jan 10 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
that barrier between people who learn languages as children and those who learn it as adults? realistically, it exists in many more fields. we're not culturally equipped to understand what native-level proficiency even looks like on most topics. these are all research-backed. but we have no systematic understanding of critical and sensitive periods, only glimpses in some of the most obvious fields and observational lessons from intensive training programs. minds do not remain open forever.

Nov 21, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
thinking I should probably read an Ayn Rand book at some point to figure out what all the fuss is about

will I become (more) insufferable upon doing so which one should I read?
Nov 16, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I could very easily believe something like this is happening, but this is an atrocious test of it and should be wholly disregarded. You can’t compare politicians to commentators without a ton of confounding factors entering in, and the only difference they found was for views. Image This is either dishonest or a simple misreading of the paper. The paper found comparable increases in retweets and favorite counts for the Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats are starting from a much lower baseline because, again, they’re not comparing like with like. Image
Nov 6, 2024 • 6 tweets • 5 min read
It may be too early for an election retrospective. It's still election night, and technically things haven't been called. It's a good time to speak candidly, though:

There is not a single moment this election that I felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris. Not one.

But—people, and especially leftists, will say—you're a centrist! she ran to the center, did she not? spoke of unity, focused on fundamentals, stayed disciplined? And I confess: she did. But let's consider the nature of that "running to the center": well-oiled, precisely tuned gears of the Machine, turning and calculating that to win the vote, they needed to present as Normal.

Not that they were ever wrong. Not that any of their priorities were mistaken, that they had ever seriously overstepped, that they needed any serious re-examination. Just that they needed to slow-walk things, to be calm, to rely on running against Trump and repeating platitudes to waltz into the presidency.

"What will you do differently from Joe Biden?" A bold answer from Kamala: I'm not him, and I'm not Trump. Great. "What are we to make of your positions during the 2020 primary?" Well, it's not 2019 anymore, is it? "Did you ever, even once, go too far?" A laugh and a charming slice-of-life quip.

The Democrats tried to run an election on vibes alone. Kamala is brat. Kamala is normal. Kamala is all things to all people. Kamala is with the good guys and against the bad guys, with the good things and against the bad things, and shouldn't that be enough?

Look, I've been adamantly against Trump from the day he entered the national scene. I have never wavered on that. But I spend my time and my energy writing, shouting, begging someone to listen that people do not trust the Machine, and they do not trust it for good reason. Young, educated professionals are far to the left of the average American, and they are the ones in control of every institution. Institutions systematically represent their views, treating them as natural and everyone else as aberrant.

I'm on the fringes of that group, right-wing by young, educated professional standards, dead center by the standards of the country. And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.

Kamala Harris never represented me. The Democrats never signaled to me that they heard and understood my voice and voices like mine, only that they wanted to pull the right levers and press the right buttons and twist the right knobs to convince that mystical creature, the Centrist, that they were on their side.

I don't know what will happen under what looks to be four more years of Trump. I don't think it will be as dire as the worst predictions, and hope it won't be, but I remain now as ever wholly convinced that he is temperamentally unfit to be President and the country is a more volatile and uncertain place with him in charge.

But what I hope is this: the Democrats don't take this moment to lament to themselves how everyone fell victim to misinformation and imagined grievances, that they were fine and good and the people were the problem, that their problem is they were simply not pure-Left enough. Now is the time for recognition that they fundamentally, wholly failed to understand and reach the frustrated center. They have four years to get serious about doing so.Image and yes this essay is an extended form of this but dangit I stayed in the coalition of a candidate I never wanted and never trusted from day one, and now she lost and I actually would like my priorities to be understood, thank you very much

Nov 4, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
as a reminder, this is what people fought to put and keep on her Wikipedia page, suppressing every hint of accurate info for ideological reasons

I have no stake in women’s boxing and prefer a live-and-let-live approach but I really, really hate being lied to Image my prior thread on the matter

Oct 29, 2024 • 4 tweets • 5 min read
I'm getting a lot of understandable pushback on this, including from people I respect, which means it's worth expanding on at length. What was I sloppily gesturing towards with this throwaway line? In short: the fundamentally foreign nature of the "MAGA chud" archetype to me.

I grew up in Utah. Everyone knows Utah is sort of its own thing, but liberals still often clumsily lump its culture in with conservative culture more broadly. It's worth outlining my impression of white Southerners as a suburban Mormon schoolchild:
- These are the people who tell me I'm not a Christian, spread lies about my religion, and picket outside my religius events.
- These are the people whose ancestors drove my ancestors out of Missouri, in part because they worried my people would be anti-slavery.
- These are the people whose ancestors fought against my country in defense of slavery, then fought the government in defense of segregation.
- ...but these are also my allies in a sense against the godless, hedonistic Democrats and Hollywood, who misunderstand, misrepresent, and slander my morality, try to foist gay marriage on me, etc

Of course real history, and real culture, are always more complex than the self-interested stories one absorbs as a child. But the cultural tension points were real and strongly felt. Inasmuch as I recognized my heritage and culture, it was distinctly Northern, emphatically Mormon, and quintessentially American suburban middle class.

None of this has anything to do with Appalachian culture in specific, arguably the one most specifically gestured to in the quoted post. That's because I didn't think or learn about Appalachian culture at all, outside of, say, vaguely positive sentiments about Daniel Boone and frontiersmen.

The book Albion's Seed argues for the presence of four distinct settler groups in America that make this clearer: the northern Puritans (New England) and Quakers (Pennsylvania), the southern Cavaliers (Virginia) and Borderers (Appalachia). Mormons are best seen in that light as a peculiar Puritan offshoot, and the natural narrative for me can be parsed in that light.

Alongside that, I was drawn to the aesthetics and culture of (particularly Victorian) England. Many of the best childhood books I read were British classics. Lewis and Tolkien seemed obviously right about everything important (except their regrettable lack of opportunity to convert to Mormonism). E. Nesbit and Roald Dahl spun charming worlds; Arthur Rackham's illustrations defined how the fae ought to be and set me up to be frustrated with Disney forevermore. I was caught up by and inspired by the beauty and the history of institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, and more broadly the notion that there were plenty of stuffy, learned, Cultured people around who would tell me everything I was doing was wrong for esoteric reasons.

When Trump took over the Republican Party, he ushered in a period of dominance for an aesthetic and a frame that combined my natural enemies of southern culture and the hedonism, sin, and excess I associated with Hollywood and Vegas. Suddenly it really sank in just how many of the people I had vaguely assumed were my co-tribals were fundamentally foreign to me, how little my culture, my experiences, and my hopes seemed to have in common with theirs.

This was compounded by my growing sense of unease with Mormonism - not on moral grounds, as I clung to my faith's doctrine on gay marriage all the way through Obergefell, but on intellectual ones. Suddenly, awkwardly, I found myself increasingly alienated not just from the friendlier-seeming political tribe, but from my own ethnic/religious one. All around the same time, I started realizing the extent to which my imagined vision of an academic culture of stuffy old Tasteful professors in tweed jackets arguing about Matters of Consequence had become a modern-progressive monoculture, with its own off-putting and alienating mores.

I paint in broad strokes here. But I hope you understand the gestures. I was hungry to see a refined moralist conservatism somewhere—one that, even if I rejected it and it me, could credibly claim a certain moral authority in the frame I recognized—and all I saw was what Freia colorfully called "feral hillbilly amerikaners" yelling vulgarities about guns and deportations.

I have complicated feelings about this. Obviously I don't precisely relate with that tribe as a tribe, and I'm conscious at once of not wanting to judge them harshly and Noticing the harsh judgment, and misjudgment, many of them toss at me (particularly now that I'm a Gay Godless Lib and all). I'm wary of those who seek to lionize dysfunction of any sort, and in posts like Freia's I see a certain "noble savage" mythologizing. But I've also been impressed by e.g. Darryl Cooper's dives into Amerikaner culture/history, and have slowly gotten a sense of the side of the picture I was missing, and what all of that feels like from the inside.

All of this to say: I have no particular quarrel with "low-class feral hillbilly amerikaner" culture, except inasmuch as they pick fights with me and mine over things I value. I recognize why two flippant lines are nowhere near enough to convey the sort of sentiment I vaguely aimed to outline. But it is not my culture, it never has been, and it rose to prominence seemingly in place of a culture I had seen here and there, in books and hints of conversations, and hoped to find as part of the world I grew up into.Image
Image this is an important note from a frank exchange that touches on part of my sentiment. the trope-character Freia references defends Your right against Them. that sounds great until you realize you're Them, and the "defense" includes "no family for you."

Oct 28, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
every once in a while I catch something intelligent from Vance or see Elon do something cool and think “…could I support MAGA?” and then I remember that I like immigrants and hate conspiracists and can’t stand tariffs and want nothing to do with Trump’s inner circle ever inspired by the below