TracingWoodgrains
Article
TracingWoodgrains is a recurring Instagram account in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 24, 2024 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “(h/t TracingWoodgrains)”; “thanks to TracingWoodgrains and his lawyer friends”; “Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains”. It most often appears alongside Australia, Charles Lehman, Dan Elton.
Metadata
- Category: Instagram Accounts
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: July 24, 2024
- Last seen: October 13, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Australia (2 shared issues)
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- Charles Lehman (2 shared issues)
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- Dan Elton (2 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- Google (2 shared issues)
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- Harris (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- Jack Despain Zhou (2 shared issues)
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- John Schilling (2 shared issues)
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- OpenAI (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
15: Adragon De Mello was an apparent child prodigy who became famous for graduating college at age 11. After his parents divorced, it came out that his father was an abusive jerk obsessed with raising a child prodigy, that De Mello was only moderately smart, and that his accomplishments probably owed more to fear and driven-ness than actual intelligence. He is now “an estimator for a commercial painting company”. (h/t TracingWoodgrains)
Inline links: Adragon De Mello, TracingWoodgrains
8: Law students, like most academic elites, are mostly liberal. But part of US legal training is apprenticing with a judge. And the more prestigious the judge, the more prestigious the clerkship, and the more career capital it provides. Judges and Supreme Court Justices are appointed through partisan politics, so they're about 50-50 liberal/conservative. And conservative judges prefer clerks who share their values. So the few Republicans who go into law have an easier time getting good clerkships and ending up on a prestigious career path, leading to a sort of unintentional "affirmative action" for right-wingers. TracingWoodgrains on X gives the details and the stats.
Inline links: TracingWoodgrains on X gives the details and the stats
40: This month in prediction markets: a court reverses the CFTC’s ruling that Kalshi can’t have prediction markets on Congressional elections. I have to say - before I found a few subfields of politics where I was interested enough to follow the nuts and bolts, I never really understood how much of the law-making process was government agencies setting policies, the people who dislike those policies going to court, and the court cancelling the policies. Also, thanks to TracingWoodgrains and his lawyer friends for their related work trying to protect US prediction markets.
[Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose review of The Educated Mind won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at The Lost Tools of Learning and will be at LessOnline this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains will be doing a live conversation about education.]
Thomas Briggs, $5K, for the Center for Educational Progress. CEP was founded by Jack Despain Zhou, who you may know better by his blogging pseudonym TracingWoodgrains; he is currently on leave as he pursues his legal training, but will return next year. The Center advocates effective pedagogy, especially ability tracking, ie letting faster and slower students each move at their own pace. In practice, this seems to mean a lot of legal briefs telling San Francisco why they shouldn’t ban algebra in middle schools. We support their work and are happy to fill their suspiciously-low funding request.
Inline links: CEP, TracingWoodgrains