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".
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.
Reposting from Reddit!sneerclub: Back in the heyday of science blogging, Razib Khan called me a racist. The comment thread has apparently been lost to site rot, but as I recall, I shared a story about a young woman in India committing suicide out of fear that the LHC would destroy the world. My attitude was that this was a senseless tragedy that put a sharp point on the human cost of misinformation. The title of my blog post was "Doomsday fears claim a life". Razib Khan accused me of being racist against Indian people.
Sorry, I meant the backstory on her removal from CEP. As far as I can tell, she's sort of disappeared from the Internet since her removal.
To find that backstory, I looked up the history of CEP in general, but the above is all I could find. Maybe she went home to rethink her life? There is a better timeline where Ziz Lasota realized Yudkowsky was a charlatan surrounded by fools and went back to Alaska to write C# for a utility company and start a vegan recipe share.