TracingWoodgrains
Article
TracingWoodgrains is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between August 23, 2021 and March 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Contact: TracingWoodgrains, tracingwoodgrains[at]gmail[dot]com”; “Contact: TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains@gmail.com)”; “TracingWoodgrains quits Blocked and Reported , reveals his name and face”. It most often appears alongside ACX, Bentham’s Bulldog, Daniel.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 7
- Issue count: 7
- First seen: August 23, 2021
- Last seen: March 21, 2025
Appears In
- Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
- Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
- Links for May 2024
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
- Links For September 2024
- Open Thread 369
- More Drowning Children
Related Pages
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- ACX (5 shared issues)
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- Bentham’s Bulldog (3 shared issues)
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- Daniel (3 shared issues)
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- DUBLIN (3 shared issues)
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- EA (3 shared issues)
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- Europe (3 shared issues)
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- Israel (3 shared issues)
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- London (3 shared issues)
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- Russia (3 shared issues)
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- Sam Kriss (3 shared issues)
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- Scott (3 shared issues)
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- US (3 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.
OMAHA, NE (RSVP) Contact: TracingWoodgrains, tracingwoodgrains[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, August 28 Location: Memorial Park - We will be near the white stone monument at the center of the park. I'll be wearing jeans and a black polo, carrying a sign with ACX meetup on it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/ashes.salt.green Notes: I've arranged a meetup before, but never in Omaha, and to be frank I don't know if there are more than one or two other ACX readers there, so this meetup is an experimental roll of the dice to see if anyone will show. I encourage interested parties to email me so I can get a sense of how many people to expect.
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/ashes.salt.green
OMAHA, NE Contact: TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains@gmail.com) Date: April 30 Time: 11:00 AM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86H6724Q+HF Location: Spielbound Board Game Cafe Notes: I am happy to run meetups but will not be here long-term, so would prefer the area to have a more stable host.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86H6724Q+HF
16: TracingWoodgrains quits Blocked and Reported, reveals his name and face. No word on his next steps, but I look forward to meeting him at Manifest and to seeing what he’ll do next.
Inline links: TracingWoodgrains quits Blocked and Reported
Wesley Fenza writes
Inline links: writes
My nomination for the Ubermesch is TracingWoodgrains, the notable gay furry formerly of the Blocked & Reported podcast and currently notorious on Twitter for his provocative essays. When I read Scott’s essay, he was the first person I thought of. One of his highest values is excellence. It informs everything he does. He is constantly advocating for the metaphorical poppies to get taller, and rages against our education system that encourages equality by holding back the more talented kids. He makes no apologies for it and doesn’t begrudge anyone pride in their achievements. But he also maintains an ethic of civic duty, and feels an affinity with his former Mormon community over their mutual desire to improve the world, create thriving communities, and engage in mutual aid. A true Nietschean master concerns himself only with his own excellence, but Trace is constantly encouraging and supporting others to become more excellent. This is on clear display in his essay on why he is voting for Kamala Harris despite the fact that she represents a political machine that is an anathema to his values.
Inline links: TracingWoodgrains, essay on why he is voting for Kamala Harris
While Yglesias manages to balance a desire for greatness with humility and egalitarianism, Trace balances the bronze age values of excellence, honesty, and individual merit with the liberal values of pragmatism, fairness, and broadly distributed prosperity.
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.
1: You might remember TracingWoodgrains winning the 2019 SSC adversarial collaboration contest with his piece on whether schools adequately served advanced students. Six years later, Trace (real name Jack Despain Zhou) and Lillian Tara are starting the Center For Educational Progress, a think tank to promote their agenda (mostly ability tracking). Read the manifesto here. If you’re interested in volunteering, following along, or helping with funding, check out their Discord server.
TracingWoodgrains draws off a now-deleted essay by Jaibot which talks about the “Copenhagen interpretation of ethics”. It argues that by “touching” a situation - a vague term having something to do with causal entanglement - you gain moral obligation for it. If you can simply avoid touching it, your moral obligation goes away.
Inline links: draws off