One aspect of neoreactionary thought is that it relies on historical narratives instead of focusing on specific claims that could be true or false in a way that can be determined by evidence.
Classifying traditions by their cladistic ancestry is a fine example. The statement that Universalism exists, that it is a descendant of Christianity, and that it is not a descendant of Confucianism, can only be interpreted intuitively. It is not a logical proposition in any sense. It has no objective truth-value. It is a pattern that strikes me as, given certain facts, self-evident. In order to convince you of this proposition, I repeat these facts and arrange them in the pattern I see in my head. Either you see the same pattern, or another pattern, or no pattern at all.
Given such an idea of how reasoning works, it’s not clear that there an easy solution that allows for agreeing on a social norm to discuss politics.
It isn’t clear to me that this sort of thought should be called “reasoning”, a term which is commonly used for dealing with propositions that do have truth-values, at all.
It seems to me to be more in the vein of “poetry” or “poetry appreciation”.
It seems to me to be more in the vein of “poetry” or “poetry appreciation”.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair to Moldbug. Illustrating patterns and using the human ability for pattern matching does have it’s place in knowledge generation. It’s more than just poetry appreciation.
After reading the quote I thought that he was trying to make an analogy between finding a historical narrative from historical facts and drawing a curve that has the best fit to a given series of data points. Indeed, saying that such curve is “true” or “false” does not make a lot sense, since just because a point lies outside the graph of a function does not mean that this function cannot be a curve of best fit—one cannot decide that from a small number of data points, one needs to measure (in)accuracy of the model over the whole domain. Such analogy would lead to interesting follow-up questions, e.g. how exactly does one measure inaccuracy of a historical narrative?
However, after reading Moldbug’s post I see that he does not try to make such analogy, instead he tries to appeal to intuitive thinking. I think this is not a good argument, since intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason, therefore saying that you used your intuition to arrive at a certain conclusion is basically saying that you used “something else” (similarly to how you cannot build stuff out of nonwood) - this category does not seem specific enough to be a good explanation. Humans are able to find a lot of patterns, some of which are not meaningful. It is an interesting problem how to recognize which patterns are meaningful and which aren’t. But this applies to the whole field of history, not just Moldbug’s ideas.
One aspect of neoreactionary thought is that it relies on historical narratives instead of focusing on specific claims that could be true or false in a way that can be determined by evidence.
I don’t see how it does this any more than any other political philosophy.
It’s not true for someone who does get his beliefs by thinking about issues individually. Whether or not you call such a person having a political philosophy is another matter.
One aspect of neoreactionary thought is that it relies on historical narratives instead of focusing on specific claims that could be true or false in a way that can be determined by evidence.
To quote Moldbug:
Given such an idea of how reasoning works, it’s not clear that there an easy solution that allows for agreeing on a social norm to discuss politics.
It isn’t clear to me that this sort of thought should be called “reasoning”, a term which is commonly used for dealing with propositions that do have truth-values, at all.
It seems to me to be more in the vein of “poetry” or “poetry appreciation”.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair to Moldbug. Illustrating patterns and using the human ability for pattern matching does have it’s place in knowledge generation. It’s more than just poetry appreciation.
After reading the quote I thought that he was trying to make an analogy between finding a historical narrative from historical facts and drawing a curve that has the best fit to a given series of data points. Indeed, saying that such curve is “true” or “false” does not make a lot sense, since just because a point lies outside the graph of a function does not mean that this function cannot be a curve of best fit—one cannot decide that from a small number of data points, one needs to measure (in)accuracy of the model over the whole domain. Such analogy would lead to interesting follow-up questions, e.g. how exactly does one measure inaccuracy of a historical narrative?
However, after reading Moldbug’s post I see that he does not try to make such analogy, instead he tries to appeal to intuitive thinking. I think this is not a good argument, since intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason, therefore saying that you used your intuition to arrive at a certain conclusion is basically saying that you used “something else” (similarly to how you cannot build stuff out of nonwood) - this category does not seem specific enough to be a good explanation. Humans are able to find a lot of patterns, some of which are not meaningful. It is an interesting problem how to recognize which patterns are meaningful and which aren’t. But this applies to the whole field of history, not just Moldbug’s ideas.
I don’t see how it does this any more than any other political philosophy.
It’s not true for someone who does get his beliefs by thinking about issues individually. Whether or not you call such a person having a political philosophy is another matter.