this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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"Tracing Woodgrains" starts a eugenics-oriented education policy "think-tank" (www.educationprogress.org)
submitted 1 year ago by TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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Sneerclubbers may recall a recent encounter with "Tracing Woodgrains", née Jack Despain Zhou, the rationalist-infatuated former producer and researcher for "Blocked and Reported", a podcast featuring prominent transphobes Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog.

It turns out he's started a new venture: a "think-tank" called the "Center for Educational Progress." What's this think-tank's focus? Introducing eugenics into educational policy. Of couse they don't put it in those exact words, but that's the goal. The co-founder of the venture is Lillian Tara, former executive director of Pronatalist.org, the outfit run by creepy Harry Potter look-a-likes (and moderately frequent topic in this forum) Simone and Malcolm Collins. According to the anti-racist activist group Hope Not Hate:

The Collinses enlisted Lillian Tara, a pronatalist graduate student at Harvard University. During a call with our undercover reporter, Tara referred three times to her work with the Collinses as eugenics. “I don’t care if you call me a eugenicist,” she said.

Naturally, the CEP is concerned about IQ and want to ensure that mentally superior (read white) individuals don't have their hereditarily-deserved resources unfairly allocated to the poors and the stupids. They have a reading list on the substack, which includes people like Arthur Jensen and LessWrong IQ-fetishist Gwern.

So why are Trace and Lillian doing this now? I suppose they're striking while the iron is hot, probably hoping to get some sweet sweet Thiel-bucks as Elon and his goon-squad do their very best to gut public education.

And more proof for the aphorism: "Scratch a rationalist, find a racist".

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[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm surprised at how they've practically erased her from the site. Do you have any idea what the back-story is? I assume there must have been some sort of falling out. Perhaps her proximity to Curtis Yarvin was more than Trace could take (see: pictures of her at Yarvin's wedding).

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 1 points 15 hours ago

Tara spoke on Razib Khan's podcast in June 2023. He is one of the people who apparently sued RationalWiki to stop them saying true things about him. A snippet describes Tara as "A recent graduate of the University of Virginia in politics and policy, set to matriculate at Harvard University in the fall of 2023 for her master's, Tara believes that humans are a vital resource and that a future with ever-dwindling populations is a future of ever-dwindling possibilities."

In spring 2024 The New Atlantis called her "a master’s student at Harvard University who offers fertility education to young women. More specifically, many people want children with Ivy League genetics, and they’ll pay tens of thousands of dollars for eggs from a woman who has the credentials."

Tara was unmasked by Hope not Hate in October 2024. Trace announced CEP in February 2025 so I think he knew her views and associations. I don't know anything about the internal workings of CEP but white supremacists and eugenicists are rarely glorious examples of human achievement.