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”.
They have deleted Tara from their blog, and Trace is listed as “on temporary leave” since October 2025. I don’t think anyone who wants policy reform rather than institutional destruction will have work in the USA until 2029.
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).
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.
Ah yes the more leftwing themotte user tracingwoodgrains. They place their windows in really strange places over there.
(For people not up to date on The Lore, he is one of the people who is behind TheSchism, an attempt to create TheMotte (sorry not going to explain that one today) with less rightwing assholes, the result)
Oh, but they’re just very concerned that American schools are forcing all the children into the same mold, don’t you see
gag me with a fucking spoon
That’s an interesting palette choice on your generated illustrations my guys
The shit’s so ass I can’t even.
There’s something I like to call “AI tint” which almost all AI images have. It’s when there’s something so fundamentally wrong with the picture but you can’t tell what. You suspect it’s AI, so you go looking for obvious flaws to confirm it.
I don’t know why AI bros don’t see it. Maybe they do but think it’s ok?
At this point it’s a cultural signifier. In other words, they know it looks like shit but they are virtue signaling.
Fascism is all about vibes with no underlying structure. AI slop satisfies that specification perfectly.
Vice signalling. https://awful.systems/post/3520479
In a completely unexpected turn of events this new experiment in mainstreaming eugenics is being currently boosted by siskind.
Wait, you are saying the ‘we should create incentives for less people to sterilize themselves’ guy is for this? Damn. That is fucked up.
That is not how you trace woodgrains. That is not how you trace woodgrains at all!
creepy Harry Potter look-a-likes (and moderately frequent topic in this forum)
Not by choice!
Everything I have read about this guy creeps me out or pisses me off.
From the US department of not beating those allegations.
Eugenics? A guy going bald that early?
Lesbionest, there is no better proxy for polygenic fitness than your total word count at lesswrong and acx.
Baldness just makes you more aerodynamic, and in our eugenics enabled charter city/network state/seastead you’ll be getting assigned a state sponsored waifu anyway (terms and conditions may apply, like being not unprovably not related to persons of dubious genetic heritage).
Woodgrains and fans are taking a victory lap now for getting Vox to take up one of their anti-diversity memes, claiming that FAA endangered lives by adding a biographical assessment to their application process: https://www.vox.com/politics/399804/trump-dei-democrats-faa
Vox happens to be downstream of EA money, coincidentally.
Incidentally, the only time I’ve seen Tracing Woodgrains pop up in my timeline is retweets from one of the Decoding the Gurus podcast hosts, who had also previously palled around with EA-adjacent ‘intelligence researchers’ like Stuart Ritchie. Something to keep in mind for people who perhaps hold up that podcast with its long-form episodes as a benchmark for debunking IDW crankery.
