I don’t assign high confidence to my ability to summarize it accurately because I didn’t really get it—I was frequently confused about the meaning. What little I did get out of it doesn’t match the praise it gets, and history/political science are not areas that I currently consider myself well informed about, so there is a high chance I’m missing something. Also, keep in mind I’m summarizing someone whose opinions are, superficially speaking, aligned with a group I generally tend to disagree with, so I might have un-adjusted for biases. Also, The Complete Works of Moldbug is frickin’ long, and I’ve only read a minuscule fraction of the work.
I just felt like trying Moldbug because it fit this exercise really well. Moldbug is the writer I’ve read the most recently who I think could really use some brevity.
I did get one useful meme out of it which I actually agree with … I generally felt this before reading reactionary literature, but I agreed with it more after:
Progressives should try their best to work within an existing imperfect system rather than against it—because structures are expensive and complicated, and if you’re gonna tear one down you’d better be prepared to build another one. In other words—rather than attacking bad things, create good things and let bad things wither away naturally.
Are those the best 15 words that the guy has? If so, that provides me significant information and potentially saves me time.
I don’t assign high confidence to my ability to summarize it accurately because I didn’t really get it—I was frequently confused about the meaning. What little I did get out of it doesn’t match the praise it gets, and history/political science are not areas that I currently consider myself well informed about, so there is a high chance I’m missing something. Also, keep in mind I’m summarizing someone whose opinions are, superficially speaking, aligned with a group I generally tend to disagree with, so I might have un-adjusted for biases. Also, The Complete Works of Moldbug is frickin’ long, and I’ve only read a minuscule fraction of the work.
I just felt like trying Moldbug because it fit this exercise really well. Moldbug is the writer I’ve read the most recently who I think could really use some brevity.
I did get one useful meme out of it which I actually agree with … I generally felt this before reading reactionary literature, but I agreed with it more after:
Progressives should try their best to work within an existing imperfect system rather than against it—because structures are expensive and complicated, and if you’re gonna tear one down you’d better be prepared to build another one. In other words—rather than attacking bad things, create good things and let bad things wither away naturally.