You know I really do feel like I am clinging bitterly to my priors and my meta at this point as I joked on twitter recnetly. I knew this was inevitable should our presence ever be noticed by anyone actually important like a journalist. What I didn’t know was it would still hurt.
You shouldn’t be upset by the initial media coverage, and I say this as someone who doesn’t identify with neo-reactionary thought. Attacking new social movements is NOT inevitable. It is a sign of growth and a source of new adherents. Many social movements never pick up enough steam to receive negative coverage, and those movements are ineffective. Lots of people who have never heard of neo-reactionaries will read this article, note that parts of it are pretty obvious bullshit (even the parts that are intended to be most negative; lots of people privately believe that IQ and race are connected even if they are publicly unwilling to say anything of the sort), and follow the links out of interest. There are many very smart people that read TechCrunch, and don’t automatically agree with a journalist just because they read an article. Obviously this is bad for Peter Thiel, who is basically just collateral damage, but it’s most definitely good for neo-reactionaries.
Gandhi’s famous quote (“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”) is accurate as to the stages that a movement needs to pass through, although obviously one can be stopped at any given stage. I think we are already seeing these stages play out in the Men’s Rights movement, which is further along the curve than neo-reaction.
Clinging bitterly to your priors and your metta sounds like a sign you should update, and that’s more important than deleting or not deleting a blog comment.
As for your comment, first two paragraphs are fine, perhaps even providing helpful clarification. The sarcasm in the second paragraph is probably unhelpful, though, maybe just edit the comment.
I don’t think you should. But maybe this is because I feel the same way (;_;) despite being just someone who endorses HBD and dislikes Progressivism but thinks Moldbug wrong. I like this comment you made elsewhere much better than the one you linked to though:
Progressive takeover of a community is strongly empowered by a journalists noticing nonprogressive ideas floating there.
We’ve been noticing this process for a long time now. I now think I was wrong on this in the past. This should be a sign for what you call the “outer right” that we will only inflame the now inevitable escalation of status warfare, as social justice debates hijack attention away from human rationality to value and demographic warfare and people like us are systematically excluded from the intended audience. An explanation of some related costs for those who can’t think of them. I think your and Anissimov’s site More Right makes a nice Schelling point to regroup and continue our exploration of human rationality applied to controversial topics.
HBD = Human BioDiversity, a line of thought which asserts that humans are significantly different genetically. Often called “racism” by people who don’t like it.
To be more clear, HBDers claim that not just that humans differ significantly at a genetic level (that’s pretty uncontroversial: I don’t think anyone is going to argue that genetically inherited disease aren’t a thing for example). As far as I can tell, the HBDers believe that most or almost all of mental traits are genetically determined. Moreover, HBDers seem to generally believe that these genetic traits are distributed in the population in ways that closely match with what are normally seen as ethnic and racial groups, and that that explains most of racial differences in IQ scores, life success, and rates of criminal activity.
The anti-reaction FAQ describes it as “Neoreaction is a political ideology supporting a return to traditional ideas of government and society, especially traditional monarchy and an ethno-nationalist state. It sees itself opposed to modern ideas like democracy, human rights, multiculturalism, and secularism. ” As far as I’m aware, neoreactioaries do not object to that description.
I feel this is a stupid question, but I’d rather ask it than not knowing: Why would anyone want that? I can understand opposing things like: democracy, secularism and multiculturalism, but replacing them with a traditional monarchy just doesn’t seem right. And I don’t mean morally, I just don’t see how it could create a working society.
I can fully understand opposing certain ideas, but if you’re against democracy because it doesn’t work, why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
If you accept the criticism it makes of democracy you are already basically Neoreactionary. Only about half of them advocate monarchy as what should replace our current order, remember no one said the journalist did an excellent job reporting about us. While I can’t even speak for those who do advocate Monarchy, only for myself, here some of my reasons for finding it well worth investigating and advocating:
Good enough—You need not think it an ideal form of government, but if you look at it and conclude it is better than democracy and nearly anything else tried from time to time so far, why not advocate for it? We know it can be done with humans and can be stable. This is not the case with some of the proposed theoretical forms of government. Social engineering is dangerous, you want fail safes. If you want to be careful and small c-conservative it is hard to do better than monarchy, it is as old as civilization, an institution that can create bronze age empires or transform a feudal society into an industrial one.
Simplicity—Of the proposed other proposed alternative forms of governments it is the one most easily accurately explained to nearly anyone. Simplicity and emotional resonance are important features with many consequences. For example when Moldbuggians say society would benefit from formalization they should aim for a bare bones OS for this to be feasible. Formalization is the process where the gap between the actual and claimed functioning of a social institution is closed as much as possible in order to reduce disinformation. This is considered good because uncertainty results in politics/war. There are also costs for keeping people in positions of responsibility sane and not accidentally ending up believing in disinformation if such is common around them. Not bothering to keep them sane at all seems bad.
Agile experimentation—Social experimentation is however useful, especially since the same solutions won’t work for all kinds of societies in all situations. It is a system that can be easily adjusted for either robustness or flexibility as needed. A monarch has simple logistics to set up or allow social experiments. Futarchy, Neocameralism… why risk running a society on this OS rather than set up a more robust one and then test it within its confines? East India Companies, Free Cities, religious orders are common in the history of Western monarchy. Indeed you can look at Constitutional Monarchy in modern democratic countries as experiments that where either judged successful or an experiment that breached containment. Even in this case of breach the form of monarchy was still preserved however and might possibly be revived at a future point in time.
Responsible ideology crafting—Many Neoreactionaries think the relative political stability of the Western world of the past 70 years will not last. Historically transition from some kind of republic to military dictatorship is common. Rule by leader of victorious conquering army, has historically show successful transition to monarchy, as all dynasties where basically founded by them. Even if in itself such a change isn’t likely in the West, the unlikely situations where neoreactionary criticism of democracy would be taken seriously and guide policy, is one where the most likely victor of the social instability is not an ideal representation of a Neoreactionary CEO philosopher but a military dictator. We should try and plan social reform constrained by logistics of the likeliest outcome of our ideas becoming important, otherwise we are irresponsible. Indeed this might have been the grand crime of Communist theorists.
Low Hanging Fruit—It has been understudied by modern intellectuals who furthermore are biased against it. Compare how much modern theoretical work has been done on Democracy vs. Monarchy. See number wikipedia articles for a quick proxy. This is perhaps practical given the situation we find ourselves in but also somewhat absurd. For example as far as I’m aware no one outside reaction has in depth considered the ridiculously obvious idea of King as Schelling Point! Modern game theory, cognitive science and even sociology unleashed on studying monarchy would reveal treasures, even if we eventually decide we don’t want to implement it.
I was trying to say Neoreactionaries basically only strongly agree on these criticisms, not the particular solutions how to ameliorate such problems. I hope that is apparent from the paragraph?
Neoreactionaries basically only strongly agree on these criticisms, not the particular solutions
How are you going to distinguish them from conservo-libertatians, then? I would imagine they would also agree with much of those criticisms and will disagree as to the proposed solutions.
They don’t use the particular concepts of Neoreaction, things like the Cathedral or the idea Progressivism is the child of Protestant Christianity or why it drifts leftwards. There will be no clear line as both conservo-libertarians and anarcho capitalists are big inspirations to the neoreactionary world view and form a big part of its bedrock. It is observed many reactionaries tend to be ex-libertarians.
I was under the impression that they also tend to agree about certain social issues such as traditional gender roles (though after posting that comment I found out that Moldbug agrees with progressive views about homophobia); am I wrong?
Neoreaction is basically defined as “these particular criticism of Progressivism & Democracy”! I’m not sure you will find common agreement among neoreactionaries on anything else.
Then you either throw up your hands and go meta with secession/seasteading/etc. or try to find existing systems that neither of those systems would apply to… how about Switzerland?
I am curious why Switzerland isn’t more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The cynical explanation is that promoting a system someone else invented and tested is not so good for signalling.
I am curious why Switzerland isn’t more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The correct question is whether Switzerland’s success is caused by its political system. If not, emulating it won’t help.
We can at least be sure that Switzerland’s success hasn’t been prevented by its political system. This isn’t a proof that the system should be copied, but it’s at least a hint that it should be studied.
Switzerland is pretty small, and it’s not obvious to me that its political system would scale well to larger countries. But then again, it’s not obvious to me that it wouldn’t, either.
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws. These differences allow people to do some lower-scale experiments, and probably allow an individual to feel like a more important part of the whole (one in a few thousands feels better than one in a few millions). I would guess this division to regions is very important.
So a question is, if we wanted to “Switzerland-ize” a larger country, should we aim for the same size (population) or the same number of regions? Greater region size may reduce the effect of an individual feeling important, but greater number of regions could make the interactions among them more complicated. Or maybe the solution would be to have regions and sub-regions, but then it is not obvious (i.e. cannot be copied straightforwardly) what should be the power relationship between the regions and their sub-regions.
It would be safer to try this experiment first in a country of a similar size. Just in case some Illuminati are reading this discussion, I volunteer Slovakia for this experiment, although my countrymen might disagree. Please feel free to ignore them. :D
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws.
Reminds me of some large countries… in North America, I think? :-)
Then again, population-wise it’s bigger than reactionary poster children such as Singapore or Monaco and comparable to progressivist poster children such as Sweden or Denmark.
I want to emphasize again monarchy only recently gained popularity among neoreactionaries, its possible the majority of them still dream of Moldbug’s SovCorps. Anarcho-Papist for example basically believes anarcho-capitalism is best but thinks the Neoreactionary analysis of why society is so leftist is correct.
The popularity of aristocratic and monarchist stories in popular culture—Star Wars, LOTR, The Tudors, Game of Thrones, possibly Reign if its rating improve, etc. - says something about the human mind’s “comfort” with this kind of social organization. David Brin and similar nervous apologists for democracy have that working against them.
I can fully understand opposing certain ideas, but if you’re against democracy because it doesn’t work, why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
The obvious question here is, why do you think monarchy has been “shown not to work”? Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies? Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
That question is kinda obvious. Thanks for pointing it out.
From what I remember from my History classes, monarchies worked pretty okay with an enlightened autocrat who made benefiting the state and the populace as his or her prime goal. But the problem there was that they didn’t stay in power and they had no real way of making absolutely sure their children had the same values. All it takes to mess things up is one oldest son (or daughter if you do away with the Salic law) who cares more about their own lives than those of the population.
So I don’t think technology level plays a decisive factor. It probably will improve things for the monarchy, since famines are a good way to start a revolution, but giving absolute power to people without a good fail-safe when you’ve got a bad ruler seems like a good way to rot a system from the inside.
I was in a Chinese university around Geoge W. Bush’s second election and afterwards, which didn’t make it easy to convince Chinese students that Democracy was a particularly good system for picking competent leaders (Chinese leaders are often graduates from prestigious universities like Tsinghua (where I was), which is more like MIT than like Yale, and they are generally very serious and competent, though not particularly telegenic). On the other hand, the Chinese system gets you people like Mao.
I don’t think Mao could exactly be said to be a product of the Chinese system, seeing as unless you construe the “Chinese system” to include revolutions, it necessarily postdates him.
I’m not necessarily saying that democracy is the best thing ever. I just have issues jumping from “democracies aren’t really as good as you’re supposed to believe” to “and therefore a monarchy is better.”
I feel I should point out the Chinese system was not what got Mao into power. Instituting the Chinese system is what got him into power. And this system saw massive reform since then.
Bullets 5 and 6 of this MoreRight article point out some reactionary ideas to assuage your concerns. Like Mr. Anissimov notes, it is necessary not only to consider the harm such a failure mode might cause, but also to compare it to failure modes that are likely to arise in demotist systems. Reactionary thought also includes the idea that good systems of government align their incentives such that the well-being of their ruler coincides with that of their people, so a perfectly selfish son should not be nearly as much of a concern as an stupid or evil one.
Picture an alternative Earth Prime where monarchies dominated the political landscape and democracies were seen as inconsequential political curiosities. In this Earth Prime, can you not imagine that textbooks and teachers might instead point out equally plausible-sounding problems with democracy, such as the fact that politicians face selection pressures to cut off their time horizons around the time of their next election? Can you not imagine pointing to small democracies in their world with failures analogous to failures of democracies in our world, and declaring “Q.E.D.”? How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
I don’t think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
The tendency to see society as being in a constant state of decline, descending from some golden age, is positively ancient, and seems to be capable of arising even in cases where there is no real golden age to look back on, unless society really started going downhill with the invention of writing. There is no shortage of compelling biases to motivate individuals to adopt a Reactionary viewpoint, so for someone attempting to judge how likely the narrative is to be correct, they need to look, not for whether there are arguments for Reaction at all, but whether those arguments are significantly stronger than they would have predicted given a knowledge of how well people tend to support other ideologies outside the mainstream.
I don’t think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
Of course not; even if you reject the current conventional narrative, it still takes a lot of evidence to pinpoint Reaction as a plausible alternative (nevermind a substantially correct one). But Mathias was basically saying that the models and case studies of monarchy he studied in his history classes provided him with such a high prior probability that monarchy “doesn’t work” that he couldn’t imagine why anybody could possibly be a monarchist in this day and age. I was arguing that the evidence he received therein might not have been quite as strong as he felt it to be.
Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
The argument could be constructed that for different levels of technology, different form of government is optimal. Which sound plausible. For a very low technology level, living in a tribe was the best way of life. For higher level, it was a theocracy or monarchy. For yet higher level, it was a democracy (and this is why the old monarchies are gone). And for even higher level (today in the first world), it is monarchy again.
It’s a bit suspicious that the monarchy is the optimal form of government twice, but not impossible. (Although it is better to have opinions because most evidence points towards them, not merely because they are not completely impossible.)
Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
That response is nonsense, an unfair reading. Jaime already offered your hypothesis immediately preceding:
Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies?
He explicitly says that means something completely different.
I imagine that he means, quite correctly, that many comparisons between democracies and monarchies fail to compare examples at the same technology level.
As to the other point, I doubt Jaime thinks that monarchies turning into democracies is a very good argument in favor of democracies, just that it is a common implicit argument. I doubt that there are many people who think that monarchy is a good form of government at two technological levels, separated by democracy. Generally people who condemn democracy think that it was a mistake, perhaps historically contingent, or perhaps a natural tendency of technology, but one to be fought. Some reactionaries hold that this is a good time to pursue non-democracies, but usually because democracy is finally self-destructing, not because technological pressures have reversed course.
But monarchies turning into democracies is evidence against the stability of monarchies, and some reactionaries do implicitly make the argument that technology favors monarchy in two different periods.
why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
Because you are so incredibly smart that today you will get everything right, and those old mistakes done by lesser minds are completely irrelevant...?
Maybe it’s not about people really wanting to live under some majesty’s rule, but about an irresistable opportunity to say that you are smarter than everyone else, and you have already found a solution for all humanity’s problems.
(This was originally my observation of Communists of the smarter type, but it seems to apply to Neoreactionaries as well.)
Even before reading it, I already agree that democracy does not work the way people originally thought it would, and some pretend it works even today. (People voting to get money from their neighbors’ pockets. Idiots who know nothing and want to learn nothing, but their vote is just as important as Einstein’s. Media ownership being the critical factor in elections.)
That just doesn’t give me enough confidence that my solution would be better. Let’s say it would avoid some specific problems of democracy successfully. How about new problems? (Or merely repetition of the old ones, enhanced by the modern technology.)
Einstein was a physicist. He probably had more sense about politics than random inattentive person who votes on the basis of emotion, but I’m going to hope that people who actually know something about politics get influence by writing and/or politicking. Their influence isn’t limited to their vote.
To quote myself on what I consider is plausibly better than democracy:
Futarchy for starters. Neocameralism proposed by Mencius Moldbug might work better but is risky. City state oligarchies. Anarchy-Capitalism if you can get it. A Republic with limited franchise if you can keep it. A properly set up monarchy. Even democratic technocracy, where democratic element would have about as much role in governance as the Monarchy part does in the Constitutional Monarchy of the United Kingdom. Arguably we are nearly there anyway.
Neocameralism in paritcular is something that is possibly still more popular among Neoreactionaries than democracy. Here I briefly explain it:
Neocameralism by Moldbug which is basically to have the state be guided by the profit motive and have such overwhelming military force that uses crypto lock technology to enforce it has no reason to brainwash its citizens since they don’t have the military force to matter politically. They can’t seize the government/companies assets. The profit motive together with the corporate structure keeps most of them from being hijacked by its CEO as well as keeps most of them nice to its customers (citizens). You can make sure it will be nice by give stock options to specialized efficient charities. Basically divide the state between the rent extracting part and the goodness generating part people expect, min-max both, pair them up in a single adventuring party and enjoy your munchkinized society. Obviously it kind of sucks if you discover things people really really like spending money on but hurt them, but hey democracy would collapse at that too.
Well, the neoreactionaries claim that strong monarchies will be more stable, and less subject to needing to satisfy the fickle whims of the population. There is some validity to at least part of the argument: long-term projects may do better in dictatorships. Look for example at the US space program: there’s an argument that part of why it has stalled is that each President, desiring to have a long-lasting legacy, makes major changes to the program’s long-term goals, so every few years a lot of work in progress is scrapped. Certainly that’s happened with the last three Presidents. And the only President whose project really stayed beyond his office was JFK, who had the convenience of being a martyr and having a VP who then cared a lot about the space program’s goals.
However, the more general notion that monarchies are more stable as a whole is empirically false, as discussed in the anti-reaction FAQ.
What I suspect may be happening here is a general love for what is seen as old, from when things were better. Neoreaction may have as its core motivation a combination of cynicism for the modern with romanticism about the past.
If you do read any of the pro-reaction stuff linked to by K (or the steelman of reaction by Yvain) I suggest you then read Yvain’s anti-reaction FAQ which provides a large amount of actual data.
Thank you. I’ll read the FAQ, it seems exhaustive and informative.
And as I hope I made clear, I can certainly understand the notion that “democracy isn’t awesome”. But I don’t get the jump from there to “a monarchy will be better.”
Yvain’s anti-reaction FAQ shows nothing of the sort. It cherry-picks a few examples. To compare the stability of democracies and monarchies, a much broader historical comparison is needed. I’m working on one now, but people should really read their history. Few of those who confidently claim monarchies are unstable have more than a smidgen of serious reading on Renaissance Europe under their belts.
Considering that your response relies heavily on deciding who is or isn’t “demotist”, it might help to address Yvain’s criticism that the idea isn’t a well-defined one. The issue of monarchs who claim to speak for the people is a serious one. Simply labeling dictators one doesn’t like a demotist doesn’t really do much. Similarly, your response also apparently ignores Yvain’s discussion of the British monarchy.
Napoleon was a populist Revolutionary leader. That should be well-understood.
I’m not convinced that this is a meaningful category. It is similarly connected to how you blame assassins and other issues on the populist revolutions: if historically monarchies lead to these repeatedly, then there’s a definite problem in saying that that’s the fault of the demotist tendencies, when the same things have not by and large happens in democracies once they’ve been around for a few years.
Also, while Napoleon styled himself as a populist revolutionary leader, he came to power from the coup of 18 Brumaire, through military strength, not reliance on the common people. In fact, many historians see that event as the end of the French Revolution.
While I understand that responding to everything Yvain has to say is difficult, I’d rather read a complete and persuasive response three months from now than an unpersuasive one right now. By all means, feel free to take your time if you need it.
All of these have issues, I like Nick Land’s one best, Moldbug is probably easier to read if you are used to the writing style here, Scott’s is the best writer of the three, but deficient and makes subtle mistakes since he isn’t reactionary.
My own summary of some points that are often made would be:
If you build a society based on consent, don’t be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society. What reactionaries call the Cathedral is machinery that naturally arises when the best way to power is hacking opinions of masses of people to consent to whatever you have in store for them. We claim the beliefs this machine produces has no consistent relation to reality and is just stuck in a feedback loop of giving itself more and more power over society. Power in society thus truly lies with the civil service, academia and journalists not elected officials, who have very little to do with actual governing. This can be shown by interesting examples like the EU repeating referendums until they achieve the desired results or Belgium’s 589 days without elected government. Their nongovernment managed to have little difficulty doing things with important political implications like nationalizing a major bank.
Moral Progress hasn’t happened. Moral change has, we rationalize the latter as progress. Whig history is bunk.
The modern world allows only a very small window of allowed policy experimentation. Things like seasteading, charter cities are ideas we like but think will not be allowed to blossom if they should breach the narrow window of experimentation allowed among current Western nations.
Democracy is overvalued, monarchy is undervalued. This translates to some advocating monarchy and others dreaming up new systems of government that take this into account.
McCarthy was basically right about the extent of Communist influence in the United States of America after the 1940s. We have weird things like the Harvard Crimson magazine endorsing the Khmer Rouge in the 70s! or FDR’s main negotiator at Yalta being a Soviet spy cropping up constantly when we examine the strange and alien 20th century. McCarthy used some ethically questionable methods against Communists (and yes most of his targets where actual Communists), but if you check them out in detail you will see they are no more extreme or questionable than the ones we have for nearly 80 years now routinely used against Fascists. Why do we live in a Brown scare society while the short second Red scare is by many treated like one of the gravest threats against liberal democracy ever? Why where western intellectuals consistently deluded on Communism from at least the 1920s to as late as the 1980s if they are as trustworthy as they claim?
Psychological differences exist between ethnic groups and between the sexes and these should have implications for into issues like women in combat, affirmative action or immigration.
The horror show of the aftermath of decolonization in some Third World countries was a preventable disaster on the scale of Communist atrocities.
The first three are meta arguments, that contribute to the last four which are object level assessments, that you can make without resorting to the meta arguments.
The claim that the morality of a society doesn’t steadily, generally, and inexorably increase over time is not the same as the claim that there will be no examples of things that can be reasonably explained as increases in societal morality. If morality is an aggregate of bounded random walks, you’d still expect some of those walks to go up.
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.
Do you think there’s a causal connection between the decline of lynching and the various ills you’ve listed?
How is causality relevant? The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase—unless we add to the hypothesis the possibility of ‘counterrevolutionary’ periods where immoral, anti-Whig groups take power and immorality increases, but expressing concern over things like illegitimacy rates, knockout games, and inner-city dysfunction is an outgroup marker for Whigs.
Demonstrating causality would be doing more work than is necessary. To argue against the hypothesis that the values of A, B, C, … are all increasing, you don’t need to show that an increase in the value of A leads to decreases in any of B, C, …; you just need to demonstrate that the value of at least one of A, B, C, … is not increasing.
(To avert the negative connotations the above paragraph would likely otherwise have: no, I don’t think the decline of lynching caused those various ills.)
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching (A) may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment (B) and illegitimacy rates (C), the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population (D), drug abuse (E), knockout games (???), and so on.
(parentheticals added).
You were originally arguing that some weighted sum of A, B, C… was increasing. NancyLebovitz was pointing out that A has clearly decreased, and so for the sum to increase on average, there has to be a correlation between A decreasing and B, C, … increasing. Then she asked if you thought this correlation was causal.
In response, you punted and changed the argument to:
The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase
which was a really nice tautological argument.
So while showing causality is “more work than is necessary” for disproving the straw-Whiggery of your previous comment, it doesn’t mean anything for the point NancyLebovitz was raising.
I think people not being assaulted and killed by an angry crowd is good. Vigilantism is a sign of a deficient justice system and insufficient pacification of the population, thus poor governance. I’m happy at the reduction of lynching, but I’m unhappy at the increase of other indicators of depacification and deficient justice systems that seem to have grown worse in Western society.
As a side note this is still a disturbingly common phenomena of mob violence from Nigeria to Madagascar, not to mention Southern Asia and some Latin American countries. I’m also sadly quite unconvinced no lynchings occur in Western states for that matter.
If you build a society based on consent, don’t be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society.
That isn’t an argument amounting to right is right, since the left has its own version...see Chomskys manufactured consent.
What’s more,manufactured consent existed in societies that didn’t run on consent., in the form of actual sermons preached in actual churches and actual cathdrals.
My own attempt at a limited view of moral progress has the following features:
Economic growth, largely driven by secular trends in technology, has resulted in greater surpluses that may be directed towards non-survival goals (c/f Yvain’s “Strive/survive” theorising), some of which form the prerequisites of higher forms of civilisation, and some of which are effectively moral window-dressing.
As per the Cathedral hypothesis, with officially sanctioned knowledge only being related to reality through the likely perverse incentives of the consent factory, this surplus has also been directed towards orthogonal or outright maladaptive goals (in cyclical views of history, Decadence itself).
We no longer have to rationalise the privations of older, poorer societies. This is the sense in which linear moral progress is the most genuine (c/f CEV).
The interaction between the dynamics of holier-than-thou moralising and the anticipatory experience of no longer having to rationalise poverty is complicated. Examination of history reveals the drive for levelling and equalisation to be omnipresent, if not consistently exploitable.
No. Well, maybe the third paragraph, except that it’s part of history now and for that reason should be left alone. But otherwise, both your distancing of MoreRight from LessWrong and Eliezer’s distancing of LessWrong from the reactosphere are appropriate and relevant statements of true things.
Maybe I can. It seems Elezier was hurriedly trying to make the point that he’s not affiliated with neoreactionaries, out of fear of the name of LessWrong being besmirched.
It’s definitely true, I think, that Elezier is not a neoreactionary and that LessWrong is not a neoreactionary place. Perhaps the source of confusion is that the discussions we have on this website are highly unusual compared to the internet at large and would be extremely unfamiliar and confusing to people with a more politically-oriented mind-killed mindset.
For example, I could see how someone could read a comment like “What is the utility of killing ten sad people vs one happy person” (that perhaps has a lot of upvotes) - which is a perfectly valid and serious question when talking about FAI—and erroneously interpret that as this community supporting, say, eugenics. Even though we both know that the person who asked that question on this site probably didn’t even have eugenics cross their mind.
(I’m just giving this as an example. You could also point to comments about democracy, intersexual relationships, human psychology, etc.)
The problem is that the inferential distance between these sorts of discussions and political discussions is just too large.
Instead of just being reactionary and saying “LessWrong doesn’t support blabla”, it would have been better if Elezier just recommended the author of that post to read the rationality materials on this site.
LessWrong is about the only public forum outside their own blog network that gives neoreaction any airtime at all. It’s certainly the only place I’ve tripped over them.
On the other hand, I at least found the conversation about neoreaction on LW to be vague and confusing and had basically no idea of what the movement was about until I read Yvain’s pieces.
it would have been better if Elezier just recommended the author of that post to read the rationality materials on this site.
I find it unlikely that the author would do that, or have the right mindset even if he did. So do you mean this would have been more optimal signaling somehow?
Perhaps signaling, and also to get people who are reading the article and comment section to read more about LessWrong instead of coming to possibly the wrong conclusion.
The best move for Eliezer to disassociate LessWrong from reactionaries would be to not mention them at all. Do you see anyone defending the honor of Hacker News in the comment section? Think about what your first instinct is when you say heard someone from some organization, that you know nothing about, explaining they are not actually right wing or Communist or even better, racist?
Eliezer’s comment hurt my feelings and I’m not sure why it was really necessary. Responding to something just reinforces the original idea. If rationalists want to reject the Enlightenment, we should have every right to do so, without Eliezer proclaiming that it’s not canon for this community.
If I had still been working for MIRI now, would I be fired because of my political beliefs? That’s the question bothering me. Are brilliant mathematicians going to be excluded from MIRI for having reactionary views?
Part of the comment is basically like, “Scott Alexander good boy. We have paid him recently. Anissimov bad. Bad Anissimov no work for us no more.”
Eliezer’s comment hurt my feelings and I’m not sure why it was really necessary. Responding to something just reinforces the original idea. If rationalists want to reject the Enlightenment, we should have every right to do so, without Eliezer proclaiming that it’s not canon for this community.
You claim a right not to have your feelings hurt that overrules Eliezer’s right to speak on the matter? That concept of offense-based rights and freedom to say only nice things is one that I am more used to seeing neoreactionaries find in their hated enemies, the progressives. Are you sure you know where you are actually standing?
Eliezer has made a true statement: that neoreaction is not canon for LessWrong or MIRI, in response to an article strongly suggesting the opposite.
Elsethread you write:
The fact that Eliezer felt the need to respond explicitly to these two points with an official-sounding disavowal shows hypersensitivity
So Eliezer shouldn’t say anything, because:
He’s hurting your feelings.
He’s being hypersensitive. Thank you for making this so clear.
Apparently the supposed Streisand effect applies to him responding to Klint but not to you responding to him. How does that one go?
“Responding to something just reinforces the original idea” touts timidity as a virtue—again, not a sentiment I would ever expect to see penned by any of the neoreactionaries I have read. These are the words of a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
And btw, it looks to me like Eliezer’s wasn’t an official-sounding disavowal, it was an official disavowal.
Your response to Eliezer, both here and in the other thread, comes across as a completely unjustified refusal to take his comment at face-value: Eliezer explaining that he concluded your views were not worth spending time on for quite rational reasons, and is saying so because he doesn’t want people thinking he or the majority of the community he leads hold views which they don’t in fact hold.
This seems to be part of a pattern with you: you refuse to accept that people (especially smart people) really disagree with you, and aren’t just lying about their views for fear or reputational consequences. It’s reminiscent of creationists who insist there’s a big conspiracy among scienitsts to suppress their revolutionary ideas. And it contributes to me being glad that you are no longer working for MIRI, for much the same reasons that I am glad MIRI does not employ any outspoken creationists.
I find this comment a bit mean (and meaner than most of what I saw in this thread or the linked one, tho I haven’t read that one in much detail).
Maybe it’s because other people feel more strongly about this topic than I do; to me “democracy vs. monarchy” is both a confused and fuzzy question and an irrelevant one. Maybe with a lot of effort one can clarify the question and with even more effort, come up with an answer, but then it has no practical consequences.
Not mean-spirited. Just honest. If this were a private conversation, I’d keep my thoughts to myself and leave in search of more rational company, but when someone starts publicly saying things like...
“Eliezer [is] proclaiming that it’s not canon for this community.”
“The comment is basically like, ‘Scott Alexander good boy. We have paid him recently. Anissimov bad. Bad Anissimov no work for us no more.’”
Accusing Eliezer of dismissing an idea out of hand due to fear of public unpopularity.
(all of which are grossly unfair readings of Eliezer’s coment)
Not that much more unfair than proclaiming something thoroughly refuted and uninteresting based on a single post rebutting the least interesting claims of only two authors, especially given that what appears to have gotten picked up as the central point of the post (NK/SK) is wrong on many different levels.
Hm, I didn’t feel that Eliezer was being particularly dismissive (and am somewhat surprised by the level of the reactions in this thread here). The original post sort-of insinuated that MIRI was linked to neoreaction, so Eliezer correctly pointed out that MIRI was even more closely linked to criticism of Neoreaction, which seems like what anybody would do if he found himself associated with an ideology he disagreed with—regardless of the public relations fallout of that ideology.
Reminder that the article just said neoreactionaries “crop up” at Less Wrong. Then the author referred to a “conspiracy,” which he admits is just a joke and explicitly says he doesn’t actually believe in it. The fact that Eliezer felt the need to respond explicitly to these two points with an official-sounding disavowal shows hypersensitivity, just like he displayed hypersensitivity in his tone when he reacted to the “Why is Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong?” thread. The tone is one of “Get it off me! Get it off me! Aiyeee!” If he actually wanted to achieve the “get it off me” goal, indifference would be a more effective response.
Does no official response from Hacker News, which also received the damning accusation that neoreactionaries “crop up” there, imply consent and agreement from Y Combinator?
There’s a difference between “neoreactionary” and “expresses skepticism against Progressive Orthodoxy”. Paul Graham might be guilty of the latter, but there’s certainly little evidence to judge him guilty of the former.
Paul Graham might be guilty of the latter, but there’s certainly little evidence to judge him guilty of the former.
I wasn’t aware we were a courtroom and we were holding our opinions to a level of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. I was pointing out that silence is often consent & agreement (which it certainly is), that PG has expressed quite a few opinions a neoreactionary might also hold (consistent with holding neoreactionary views, albeit weak evidence), and he has been silent on the article (weak evidence, to be sure, but again, consistent).
that PG has expressed quite a few opinions a neoreactionary might also hold
IAWYC but the relevant standard is “which a neoreactionary is more likely to hold than a non-reactionary”. I’d guess both Ozy Frantz and Eugine_Nier would agree about the colour of the sky, but...
You should know perfectly well that as long as MIRI needs to coexist and cooperate with the Cathedral (as colleges are the main source of mathematicians) they can’t afford to be thought of as right wing. Take comfort at least in knowing that whatever Eliezer says publicly is not very strong evidence of any actual feelings he may or may not have about you.
I can’t figure out whether the critics believe the Cathedral is right-wing paranoia or a real thing.
MIRI is seen as apolitical. I doubt an offhand mention in a TechCrunch hatchet job is going to change that, but a firm public disavowal might, per the Streisand effect.
From reading HPMOR and some of the sequences (I’m very slowly working my way through them) I get the impression that Eliezer is very pro-enlightenment. I can’t imagine that he’d often explicitly claim to be pro-enlightenment if he weren’t, rather than simply avoiding the whole issue.
being pro-enlightment from the perspective of a science fanboy and poly amorous atheist is different than being pro-enlightment as a direct counterargument to reactionary thought. Certainly before I read NR stuff I never thought a reasonable person could claim the enlightenment was a bad thing.
Special case. This site is based around his work so he has every right to decide what it is officially linked to, but the tone of his remarks seemed to go much further than merely disavowing an official connection. Eliezer also states, “More Right” is not any kind of acknowledged offspring of Less Wrong nor is it so much as linked to by the Less Wrong site.”, but More Right is indeed linked to in the blogs section of the Wiki, last time I checked. Also, More Right was founded by LessWrong rationalists applying rationality to reactionary ideas. More Right is indeed an indirect offspring of the LessWrong community, whether community leaders like it or not.
But you’re not a brilliant mathematician – you shouldn’t (even rhetorically) evaluate the consequences of your political actions as they would relate to a hypothetical highly-atypical person. Of course, a genius ( being of immense value) has lots of wiggle room. But you’re not one.
If you still worked at MIRI, you would have negative value. That is, the risk of someone using your writings to tar and feather MIRI would be higher than the expected value of employing you. It’s likely you would be fired, as it would be a rational move. I have no idea how good you were at whatever it was you did for MIRI, but it’s likely there are plenty of candidates of equal abilities who are not publishing blogs that pattern-match with fascist literature.
As being thought of in a political light (especially a political light that the vast majority of prospective contributors and donors find distasteful) would certainly harm MIRI, how could you possibly be offended by something so predictable?
You know I really do feel like I am clinging bitterly to my priors and my meta at this point as I joked on twitter recnetly. I knew this was inevitable should our presence ever be noticed by anyone actually important like a journalist. What I didn’t know was it would still hurt.
This emotion shows in my reply. Should delete it?
You shouldn’t be upset by the initial media coverage, and I say this as someone who doesn’t identify with neo-reactionary thought. Attacking new social movements is NOT inevitable. It is a sign of growth and a source of new adherents. Many social movements never pick up enough steam to receive negative coverage, and those movements are ineffective. Lots of people who have never heard of neo-reactionaries will read this article, note that parts of it are pretty obvious bullshit (even the parts that are intended to be most negative; lots of people privately believe that IQ and race are connected even if they are publicly unwilling to say anything of the sort), and follow the links out of interest. There are many very smart people that read TechCrunch, and don’t automatically agree with a journalist just because they read an article. Obviously this is bad for Peter Thiel, who is basically just collateral damage, but it’s most definitely good for neo-reactionaries.
Gandhi’s famous quote (“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”) is accurate as to the stages that a movement needs to pass through, although obviously one can be stopped at any given stage. I think we are already seeing these stages play out in the Men’s Rights movement, which is further along the curve than neo-reaction.
Clinging bitterly to your priors and your metta sounds like a sign you should update, and that’s more important than deleting or not deleting a blog comment.
As for your comment, first two paragraphs are fine, perhaps even providing helpful clarification. The sarcasm in the second paragraph is probably unhelpful, though, maybe just edit the comment.
I don’t think you should. But maybe this is because I feel the same way (;_;) despite being just someone who endorses HBD and dislikes Progressivism but thinks Moldbug wrong. I like this comment you made elsewhere much better than the one you linked to though:
We’ve been noticing this process for a long time now. I now think I was wrong on this in the past. This should be a sign for what you call the “outer right” that we will only inflame the now inevitable escalation of status warfare, as social justice debates hijack attention away from human rationality to value and demographic warfare and people like us are systematically excluded from the intended audience. An explanation of some related costs for those who can’t think of them. I think your and Anissimov’s site More Right makes a nice Schelling point to regroup and continue our exploration of human rationality applied to controversial topics.
What’s HBD?
HBD = Human BioDiversity, a line of thought which asserts that humans are significantly different genetically. Often called “racism” by people who don’t like it.
To be more clear, HBDers claim that not just that humans differ significantly at a genetic level (that’s pretty uncontroversial: I don’t think anyone is going to argue that genetically inherited disease aren’t a thing for example). As far as I can tell, the HBDers believe that most or almost all of mental traits are genetically determined. Moreover, HBDers seem to generally believe that these genetic traits are distributed in the population in ways that closely match with what are normally seen as ethnic and racial groups, and that that explains most of racial differences in IQ scores, life success, and rates of criminal activity.
Are you bitter about the journalist or about Eliezer?
Would you have written a response just to the journalist?
What is neoreactionaryism?
The anti-reaction FAQ describes it as “Neoreaction is a political ideology supporting a return to traditional ideas of government and society, especially traditional monarchy and an ethno-nationalist state. It sees itself opposed to modern ideas like democracy, human rights, multiculturalism, and secularism. ” As far as I’m aware, neoreactioaries do not object to that description.
I feel this is a stupid question, but I’d rather ask it than not knowing: Why would anyone want that? I can understand opposing things like: democracy, secularism and multiculturalism, but replacing them with a traditional monarchy just doesn’t seem right. And I don’t mean morally, I just don’t see how it could create a working society.
I can fully understand opposing certain ideas, but if you’re against democracy because it doesn’t work, why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
If you accept the criticism it makes of democracy you are already basically Neoreactionary. Only about half of them advocate monarchy as what should replace our current order, remember no one said the journalist did an excellent job reporting about us. While I can’t even speak for those who do advocate Monarchy, only for myself, here some of my reasons for finding it well worth investigating and advocating:
Good enough—You need not think it an ideal form of government, but if you look at it and conclude it is better than democracy and nearly anything else tried from time to time so far, why not advocate for it? We know it can be done with humans and can be stable. This is not the case with some of the proposed theoretical forms of government. Social engineering is dangerous, you want fail safes. If you want to be careful and small c-conservative it is hard to do better than monarchy, it is as old as civilization, an institution that can create bronze age empires or transform a feudal society into an industrial one.
Simplicity—Of the proposed other proposed alternative forms of governments it is the one most easily accurately explained to nearly anyone. Simplicity and emotional resonance are important features with many consequences. For example when Moldbuggians say society would benefit from formalization they should aim for a bare bones OS for this to be feasible. Formalization is the process where the gap between the actual and claimed functioning of a social institution is closed as much as possible in order to reduce disinformation. This is considered good because uncertainty results in politics/war. There are also costs for keeping people in positions of responsibility sane and not accidentally ending up believing in disinformation if such is common around them. Not bothering to keep them sane at all seems bad.
Agile experimentation—Social experimentation is however useful, especially since the same solutions won’t work for all kinds of societies in all situations. It is a system that can be easily adjusted for either robustness or flexibility as needed. A monarch has simple logistics to set up or allow social experiments. Futarchy, Neocameralism… why risk running a society on this OS rather than set up a more robust one and then test it within its confines? East India Companies, Free Cities, religious orders are common in the history of Western monarchy. Indeed you can look at Constitutional Monarchy in modern democratic countries as experiments that where either judged successful or an experiment that breached containment. Even in this case of breach the form of monarchy was still preserved however and might possibly be revived at a future point in time.
Responsible ideology crafting—Many Neoreactionaries think the relative political stability of the Western world of the past 70 years will not last. Historically transition from some kind of republic to military dictatorship is common. Rule by leader of victorious conquering army, has historically show successful transition to monarchy, as all dynasties where basically founded by them. Even if in itself such a change isn’t likely in the West, the unlikely situations where neoreactionary criticism of democracy would be taken seriously and guide policy, is one where the most likely victor of the social instability is not an ideal representation of a Neoreactionary CEO philosopher but a military dictator. We should try and plan social reform constrained by logistics of the likeliest outcome of our ideas becoming important, otherwise we are irresponsible. Indeed this might have been the grand crime of Communist theorists.
Low Hanging Fruit—It has been understudied by modern intellectuals who furthermore are biased against it. Compare how much modern theoretical work has been done on Democracy vs. Monarchy. See number wikipedia articles for a quick proxy. This is perhaps practical given the situation we find ourselves in but also somewhat absurd. For example as far as I’m aware no one outside reaction has in depth considered the ridiculously obvious idea of King as Schelling Point! Modern game theory, cognitive science and even sociology unleashed on studying monarchy would reveal treasures, even if we eventually decide we don’t want to implement it.
That sounds like a hell of a package deal fallacy to me.
I was trying to say Neoreactionaries basically only strongly agree on these criticisms, not the particular solutions how to ameliorate such problems. I hope that is apparent from the paragraph?
How are you going to distinguish them from conservo-libertatians, then? I would imagine they would also agree with much of those criticisms and will disagree as to the proposed solutions.
They don’t use the particular concepts of Neoreaction, things like the Cathedral or the idea Progressivism is the child of Protestant Christianity or why it drifts leftwards. There will be no clear line as both conservo-libertarians and anarcho capitalists are big inspirations to the neoreactionary world view and form a big part of its bedrock. It is observed many reactionaries tend to be ex-libertarians.
I was under the impression that they also tend to agree about certain social issues such as traditional gender roles (though after posting that comment I found out that Moldbug agrees with progressive views about homophobia); am I wrong?
What is the package?
Isn’t “oppose democracy for a specific set of reasons” a natural category?
Added, based on your other comment: “skepticism against Progressive Orthodoxy” is a lot weaker than opposing democracy.
Neoreaction is basically defined as “these particular criticism of Progressivism & Democracy”! I’m not sure you will find common agreement among neoreactionaries on anything else.
And if we accept the Reactionary criticisms of democracy and the Progressive criticisms of aristocracy and monarchy? What then?
Then you get to happily look down on everyone’s naive worldviews until you realize that world is fucked and go cry in a corner.
Been there, done that, realized that crying won’t make the world any less fucked, come back from the corner.
Psychosocial development of puberty in a nutshell?
Doesn’t reactionary or progressive criticism in itself if taken seriously already do this?
Then you either throw up your hands and go meta with secession/seasteading/etc. or try to find existing systems that neither of those systems would apply to… how about Switzerland?
I am curious why Switzerland isn’t more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The cynical explanation is that promoting a system someone else invented and tested is not so good for signalling.
The correct question is whether Switzerland’s success is caused by its political system. If not, emulating it won’t help.
We can at least be sure that Switzerland’s success hasn’t been prevented by its political system. This isn’t a proof that the system should be copied, but it’s at least a hint that it should be studied.
Switzerland is pretty small, and it’s not obvious to me that its political system would scale well to larger countries. But then again, it’s not obvious to me that it wouldn’t, either.
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws. These differences allow people to do some lower-scale experiments, and probably allow an individual to feel like a more important part of the whole (one in a few thousands feels better than one in a few millions). I would guess this division to regions is very important.
So a question is, if we wanted to “Switzerland-ize” a larger country, should we aim for the same size (population) or the same number of regions? Greater region size may reduce the effect of an individual feeling important, but greater number of regions could make the interactions among them more complicated. Or maybe the solution would be to have regions and sub-regions, but then it is not obvious (i.e. cannot be copied straightforwardly) what should be the power relationship between the regions and their sub-regions.
It would be safer to try this experiment first in a country of a similar size. Just in case some Illuminati are reading this discussion, I volunteer Slovakia for this experiment, although my countrymen might disagree. Please feel free to ignore them. :D
Reminds me of some large countries… in North America, I think? :-)
For various levels of superficiality, yeah.
Then again, population-wise it’s bigger than reactionary poster children such as Singapore or Monaco and comparable to progressivist poster children such as Sweden or Denmark.
Always go meta. I feel like an addict saying that.
I want to emphasize again monarchy only recently gained popularity among neoreactionaries, its possible the majority of them still dream of Moldbug’s SovCorps. Anarcho-Papist for example basically believes anarcho-capitalism is best but thinks the Neoreactionary analysis of why society is so leftist is correct.
You make incremental patches and innovations in the existing setup, and keep a very close eye on the results.
Somebody’s mind explodes :-D
The popularity of aristocratic and monarchist stories in popular culture—Star Wars, LOTR, The Tudors, Game of Thrones, possibly Reign if its rating improve, etc. - says something about the human mind’s “comfort” with this kind of social organization. David Brin and similar nervous apologists for democracy have that working against them.
The obvious question here is, why do you think monarchy has been “shown not to work”? Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies? Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
That question is kinda obvious. Thanks for pointing it out.
From what I remember from my History classes, monarchies worked pretty okay with an enlightened autocrat who made benefiting the state and the populace as his or her prime goal. But the problem there was that they didn’t stay in power and they had no real way of making absolutely sure their children had the same values. All it takes to mess things up is one oldest son (or daughter if you do away with the Salic law) who cares more about their own lives than those of the population.
So I don’t think technology level plays a decisive factor. It probably will improve things for the monarchy, since famines are a good way to start a revolution, but giving absolute power to people without a good fail-safe when you’ve got a bad ruler seems like a good way to rot a system from the inside.
I was in a Chinese university around Geoge W. Bush’s second election and afterwards, which didn’t make it easy to convince Chinese students that Democracy was a particularly good system for picking competent leaders (Chinese leaders are often graduates from prestigious universities like Tsinghua (where I was), which is more like MIT than like Yale, and they are generally very serious and competent, though not particularly telegenic). On the other hand, the Chinese system gets you people like Mao.
I don’t think Mao could exactly be said to be a product of the Chinese system, seeing as unless you construe the “Chinese system” to include revolutions, it necessarily postdates him.
I totally agree, and in addition, Mao is the kind of leader that could get elected in a democracy.
However, a democracy may be getting rid of someone like Mao than China was (provided the democracy stats).
I’m not necessarily saying that democracy is the best thing ever. I just have issues jumping from “democracies aren’t really as good as you’re supposed to believe” to “and therefore a monarchy is better.”
I feel I should point out the Chinese system was not what got Mao into power. Instituting the Chinese system is what got him into power. And this system saw massive reform since then.
Bullets 5 and 6 of this MoreRight article point out some reactionary ideas to assuage your concerns. Like Mr. Anissimov notes, it is necessary not only to consider the harm such a failure mode might cause, but also to compare it to failure modes that are likely to arise in demotist systems. Reactionary thought also includes the idea that good systems of government align their incentives such that the well-being of their ruler coincides with that of their people, so a perfectly selfish son should not be nearly as much of a concern as an stupid or evil one.
Picture an alternative Earth Prime where monarchies dominated the political landscape and democracies were seen as inconsequential political curiosities. In this Earth Prime, can you not imagine that textbooks and teachers might instead point out equally plausible-sounding problems with democracy, such as the fact that politicians face selection pressures to cut off their time horizons around the time of their next election? Can you not imagine pointing to small democracies in their world with failures analogous to failures of democracies in our world, and declaring “Q.E.D.”? How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
I don’t think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
The tendency to see society as being in a constant state of decline, descending from some golden age, is positively ancient, and seems to be capable of arising even in cases where there is no real golden age to look back on, unless society really started going downhill with the invention of writing. There is no shortage of compelling biases to motivate individuals to adopt a Reactionary viewpoint, so for someone attempting to judge how likely the narrative is to be correct, they need to look, not for whether there are arguments for Reaction at all, but whether those arguments are significantly stronger than they would have predicted given a knowledge of how well people tend to support other ideologies outside the mainstream.
Of course not; even if you reject the current conventional narrative, it still takes a lot of evidence to pinpoint Reaction as a plausible alternative (nevermind a substantially correct one). But Mathias was basically saying that the models and case studies of monarchy he studied in his history classes provided him with such a high prior probability that monarchy “doesn’t work” that he couldn’t imagine why anybody could possibly be a monarchist in this day and age. I was arguing that the evidence he received therein might not have been quite as strong as he felt it to be.
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
The argument could be constructed that for different levels of technology, different form of government is optimal. Which sound plausible. For a very low technology level, living in a tribe was the best way of life. For higher level, it was a theocracy or monarchy. For yet higher level, it was a democracy (and this is why the old monarchies are gone). And for even higher level (today in the first world), it is monarchy again.
It’s a bit suspicious that the monarchy is the optimal form of government twice, but not impossible. (Although it is better to have opinions because most evidence points towards them, not merely because they are not completely impossible.)
That response is nonsense, an unfair reading. Jaime already offered your hypothesis immediately preceding:
He explicitly says that means something completely different.
I imagine that he means, quite correctly, that many comparisons between democracies and monarchies fail to compare examples at the same technology level.
As to the other point, I doubt Jaime thinks that monarchies turning into democracies is a very good argument in favor of democracies, just that it is a common implicit argument. I doubt that there are many people who think that monarchy is a good form of government at two technological levels, separated by democracy. Generally people who condemn democracy think that it was a mistake, perhaps historically contingent, or perhaps a natural tendency of technology, but one to be fought. Some reactionaries hold that this is a good time to pursue non-democracies, but usually because democracy is finally self-destructing, not because technological pressures have reversed course.
But monarchies turning into democracies is evidence against the stability of monarchies, and some reactionaries do implicitly make the argument that technology favors monarchy in two different periods.
Because you are so incredibly smart that today you will get everything right, and those old mistakes done by lesser minds are completely irrelevant...?
Maybe it’s not about people really wanting to live under some majesty’s rule, but about an irresistable opportunity to say that you are smarter than everyone else, and you have already found a solution for all humanity’s problems.
(This was originally my observation of Communists of the smarter type, but it seems to apply to Neoreactionaries as well.)
Read ten pages of “Democracy: the God That Failed” and see if you still feel that there’s so little substance to what we believe.
Even before reading it, I already agree that democracy does not work the way people originally thought it would, and some pretend it works even today. (People voting to get money from their neighbors’ pockets. Idiots who know nothing and want to learn nothing, but their vote is just as important as Einstein’s. Media ownership being the critical factor in elections.)
That just doesn’t give me enough confidence that my solution would be better. Let’s say it would avoid some specific problems of democracy successfully. How about new problems? (Or merely repetition of the old ones, enhanced by the modern technology.)
Einstein was a physicist. He probably had more sense about politics than random inattentive person who votes on the basis of emotion, but I’m going to hope that people who actually know something about politics get influence by writing and/or politicking. Their influence isn’t limited to their vote.
In fact, Einstein was pretty politically active and influential, largely as a socialist, pacifist, and mild Zionist.
To quote myself on what I consider is plausibly better than democracy:
Neocameralism in paritcular is something that is possibly still more popular among Neoreactionaries than democracy. Here I briefly explain it:
Well, the neoreactionaries claim that strong monarchies will be more stable, and less subject to needing to satisfy the fickle whims of the population. There is some validity to at least part of the argument: long-term projects may do better in dictatorships. Look for example at the US space program: there’s an argument that part of why it has stalled is that each President, desiring to have a long-lasting legacy, makes major changes to the program’s long-term goals, so every few years a lot of work in progress is scrapped. Certainly that’s happened with the last three Presidents. And the only President whose project really stayed beyond his office was JFK, who had the convenience of being a martyr and having a VP who then cared a lot about the space program’s goals.
However, the more general notion that monarchies are more stable as a whole is empirically false, as discussed in the anti-reaction FAQ.
What I suspect may be happening here is a general love for what is seen as old, from when things were better. Neoreaction may have as its core motivation a combination of cynicism for the modern with romanticism about the past.
If you do read any of the pro-reaction stuff linked to by K (or the steelman of reaction by Yvain) I suggest you then read Yvain’s anti-reaction FAQ which provides a large amount of actual data.
Thank you. I’ll read the FAQ, it seems exhaustive and informative.
And as I hope I made clear, I can certainly understand the notion that “democracy isn’t awesome”. But I don’t get the jump from there to “a monarchy will be better.”
Read “Democracy: The God That Failed” and “Liberty or Equality” for some basic arguments.
I object to that piece being called a “Steelman of reaction” despite Yvain’s claims in his later piece.
Do you mean that the piece does not do the best case possible, or do you mean that was it is steelmanning is not neoreaction?
Until some certified reactionary can do better....
Yvain’s anti-reaction FAQ shows nothing of the sort. It cherry-picks a few examples. To compare the stability of democracies and monarchies, a much broader historical comparison is needed. I’m working on one now, but people should really read their history. Few of those who confidently claim monarchies are unstable have more than a smidgen of serious reading on Renaissance Europe under their belts.
I look forward to you response when it is published. As of right now, that’s an assertion without data.
Here: Response to Yvain on “Anti-Reactionary FAQ”: Lightning Round, Part 2 — Austrian Edition.
Considering that your response relies heavily on deciding who is or isn’t “demotist”, it might help to address Yvain’s criticism that the idea isn’t a well-defined one. The issue of monarchs who claim to speak for the people is a serious one. Simply labeling dictators one doesn’t like a demotist doesn’t really do much. Similarly, your response also apparently ignores Yvain’s discussion of the British monarchy.
It’s just a small slice of a response, I can’t respond to everything at once...
Napoleon was a populist Revolutionary leader. That should be well-understood.
For something more substantial, try “Democracy: the God That Failed” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
I’m not convinced that this is a meaningful category. It is similarly connected to how you blame assassins and other issues on the populist revolutions: if historically monarchies lead to these repeatedly, then there’s a definite problem in saying that that’s the fault of the demotist tendencies, when the same things have not by and large happens in democracies once they’ve been around for a few years.
Also, while Napoleon styled himself as a populist revolutionary leader, he came to power from the coup of 18 Brumaire, through military strength, not reliance on the common people. In fact, many historians see that event as the end of the French Revolution.
While I understand that responding to everything Yvain has to say is difficult, I’d rather read a complete and persuasive response three months from now than an unpersuasive one right now. By all means, feel free to take your time if you need it.
There are three decent starting points:
The Dark Enlightenment (The Complete Series) by the British philosopher Land, 28k word count
The open letter to open minded Progressives series by Mencius Moldbug, 120k word count
Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell by Scott Alexander aka Yvain, 16k word count
All of these have issues, I like Nick Land’s one best, Moldbug is probably easier to read if you are used to the writing style here, Scott’s is the best writer of the three, but deficient and makes subtle mistakes since he isn’t reactionary.
My own summary of some points that are often made would be:
If you build a society based on consent, don’t be surprised if consent factories come to dominate your society. What reactionaries call the Cathedral is machinery that naturally arises when the best way to power is hacking opinions of masses of people to consent to whatever you have in store for them. We claim the beliefs this machine produces has no consistent relation to reality and is just stuck in a feedback loop of giving itself more and more power over society. Power in society thus truly lies with the civil service, academia and journalists not elected officials, who have very little to do with actual governing. This can be shown by interesting examples like the EU repeating referendums until they achieve the desired results or Belgium’s 589 days without elected government. Their nongovernment managed to have little difficulty doing things with important political implications like nationalizing a major bank.
Moral Progress hasn’t happened. Moral change has, we rationalize the latter as progress. Whig history is bunk.
The modern world allows only a very small window of allowed policy experimentation. Things like seasteading, charter cities are ideas we like but think will not be allowed to blossom if they should breach the narrow window of experimentation allowed among current Western nations.
Democracy is overvalued, monarchy is undervalued. This translates to some advocating monarchy and others dreaming up new systems of government that take this into account.
McCarthy was basically right about the extent of Communist influence in the United States of America after the 1940s. We have weird things like the Harvard Crimson magazine endorsing the Khmer Rouge in the 70s! or FDR’s main negotiator at Yalta being a Soviet spy cropping up constantly when we examine the strange and alien 20th century. McCarthy used some ethically questionable methods against Communists (and yes most of his targets where actual Communists), but if you check them out in detail you will see they are no more extreme or questionable than the ones we have for nearly 80 years now routinely used against Fascists. Why do we live in a Brown scare society while the short second Red scare is by many treated like one of the gravest threats against liberal democracy ever? Why where western intellectuals consistently deluded on Communism from at least the 1920s to as late as the 1980s if they are as trustworthy as they claim?
Psychological differences exist between ethnic groups and between the sexes and these should have implications for into issues like women in combat, affirmative action or immigration.
The horror show of the aftermath of decolonization in some Third World countries was a preventable disaster on the scale of Communist atrocities.
The first three are meta arguments, that contribute to the last four which are object level assessments, that you can make without resorting to the meta arguments.
Do you think the decline of lynching is mere change rather than progress?
The claim that the morality of a society doesn’t steadily, generally, and inexorably increase over time is not the same as the claim that there will be no examples of things that can be reasonably explained as increases in societal morality. If morality is an aggregate of bounded random walks, you’d still expect some of those walks to go up.
To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment and illegitimacy rates, the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population, drug abuse, knockout games, and so on.
Do you think there’s a causal connection between the decline of lynching and the various ills you’ve listed?
How is causality relevant? The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase—unless we add to the hypothesis the possibility of ‘counterrevolutionary’ periods where immoral, anti-Whig groups take power and immorality increases, but expressing concern over things like illegitimacy rates, knockout games, and inner-city dysfunction is an outgroup marker for Whigs.
You need evidence actual decline to justify reaction. Othewise, why reverse random drift?
This is always a bad sign in an argument. If causality doesn’t matter, what does?
Demonstrating causality would be doing more work than is necessary. To argue against the hypothesis that the values of A, B, C, … are all increasing, you don’t need to show that an increase in the value of A leads to decreases in any of B, C, …; you just need to demonstrate that the value of at least one of A, B, C, … is not increasing.
(To avert the negative connotations the above paragraph would likely otherwise have: no, I don’t think the decline of lynching caused those various ills.)
(parentheticals added).
You were originally arguing that some weighted sum of A, B, C… was increasing. NancyLebovitz was pointing out that A has clearly decreased, and so for the sum to increase on average, there has to be a correlation between A decreasing and B, C, … increasing. Then she asked if you thought this correlation was causal.
In response, you punted and changed the argument to:
which was a really nice tautological argument.
So while showing causality is “more work than is necessary” for disproving the straw-Whiggery of your previous comment, it doesn’t mean anything for the point NancyLebovitz was raising.
I think people not being assaulted and killed by an angry crowd is good. Vigilantism is a sign of a deficient justice system and insufficient pacification of the population, thus poor governance. I’m happy at the reduction of lynching, but I’m unhappy at the increase of other indicators of depacification and deficient justice systems that seem to have grown worse in Western society.
As a side note this is still a disturbingly common phenomena of mob violence from Nigeria to Madagascar, not to mention Southern Asia and some Latin American countries. I’m also sadly quite unconvinced no lynchings occur in Western states for that matter.
Here is a recent example.
That isn’t an argument amounting to right is right, since the left has its own version...see Chomskys manufactured consent.
What’s more,manufactured consent existed in societies that didn’t run on consent., in the form of actual sermons preached in actual churches and actual cathdrals.
My own attempt at a limited view of moral progress has the following features:
Economic growth, largely driven by secular trends in technology, has resulted in greater surpluses that may be directed towards non-survival goals (c/f Yvain’s “Strive/survive” theorising), some of which form the prerequisites of higher forms of civilisation, and some of which are effectively moral window-dressing.
As per the Cathedral hypothesis, with officially sanctioned knowledge only being related to reality through the likely perverse incentives of the consent factory, this surplus has also been directed towards orthogonal or outright maladaptive goals (in cyclical views of history, Decadence itself).
We no longer have to rationalise the privations of older, poorer societies. This is the sense in which linear moral progress is the most genuine (c/f CEV).
The interaction between the dynamics of holier-than-thou moralising and the anticipatory experience of no longer having to rationalise poverty is complicated. Examination of history reveals the drive for levelling and equalisation to be omnipresent, if not consistently exploitable.
Word counts: Yvain 16k; Land 28k; Moldbug 120k.
I counted Moldbug from this complete copy.
Useful info, thank you! This reinforces my primary recommendation of Land.
No. Well, maybe the third paragraph, except that it’s part of history now and for that reason should be left alone. But otherwise, both your distancing of MoreRight from LessWrong and Eliezer’s distancing of LessWrong from the reactosphere are appropriate and relevant statements of true things.
Yes, you should delete it. Eliezer shouldn’t have written his comment, either.
Could you explain why (for both comments)?
Maybe I can. It seems Elezier was hurriedly trying to make the point that he’s not affiliated with neoreactionaries, out of fear of the name of LessWrong being besmirched.
It’s definitely true, I think, that Elezier is not a neoreactionary and that LessWrong is not a neoreactionary place. Perhaps the source of confusion is that the discussions we have on this website are highly unusual compared to the internet at large and would be extremely unfamiliar and confusing to people with a more politically-oriented mind-killed mindset.
For example, I could see how someone could read a comment like “What is the utility of killing ten sad people vs one happy person” (that perhaps has a lot of upvotes) - which is a perfectly valid and serious question when talking about FAI—and erroneously interpret that as this community supporting, say, eugenics. Even though we both know that the person who asked that question on this site probably didn’t even have eugenics cross their mind.
(I’m just giving this as an example. You could also point to comments about democracy, intersexual relationships, human psychology, etc.)
The problem is that the inferential distance between these sorts of discussions and political discussions is just too large.
Instead of just being reactionary and saying “LessWrong doesn’t support blabla”, it would have been better if Elezier just recommended the author of that post to read the rationality materials on this site.
LessWrong is about the only public forum outside their own blog network that gives neoreaction any airtime at all. It’s certainly the only place I’ve tripped over them.
On the other hand, I at least found the conversation about neoreaction on LW to be vague and confusing and had basically no idea of what the movement was about until I read Yvain’s pieces.
What little I understood of it was having people on LW say how great Moldbug was and why I should read him.
I find it unlikely that the author would do that, or have the right mindset even if he did. So do you mean this would have been more optimal signaling somehow?
Perhaps signaling, and also to get people who are reading the article and comment section to read more about LessWrong instead of coming to possibly the wrong conclusion.
The best move for Eliezer to disassociate LessWrong from reactionaries would be to not mention them at all. Do you see anyone defending the honor of Hacker News in the comment section? Think about what your first instinct is when you say heard someone from some organization, that you know nothing about, explaining they are not actually right wing or Communist or even better, racist?
I agree and that’s why I mentioned he should have just recommended reading the website.
Eliezer’s comment hurt my feelings and I’m not sure why it was really necessary. Responding to something just reinforces the original idea. If rationalists want to reject the Enlightenment, we should have every right to do so, without Eliezer proclaiming that it’s not canon for this community.
If I had still been working for MIRI now, would I be fired because of my political beliefs? That’s the question bothering me. Are brilliant mathematicians going to be excluded from MIRI for having reactionary views?
Part of the comment is basically like, “Scott Alexander good boy. We have paid him recently. Anissimov bad. Bad Anissimov no work for us no more.”
You claim a right not to have your feelings hurt that overrules Eliezer’s right to speak on the matter? That concept of offense-based rights and freedom to say only nice things is one that I am more used to seeing neoreactionaries find in their hated enemies, the progressives. Are you sure you know where you are actually standing?
Eliezer has made a true statement: that neoreaction is not canon for LessWrong or MIRI, in response to an article strongly suggesting the opposite.
Elsethread you write:
So Eliezer shouldn’t say anything, because:
He’s hurting your feelings.
He’s being hypersensitive.
Thank you for making this so clear.
Apparently the supposed Streisand effect applies to him responding to Klint but not to you responding to him. How does that one go?
“Responding to something just reinforces the original idea” touts timidity as a virtue—again, not a sentiment I would ever expect to see penned by any of the neoreactionaries I have read. These are the words of a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
And btw, it looks to me like Eliezer’s wasn’t an official-sounding disavowal, it was an official disavowal.
Your response to Eliezer, both here and in the other thread, comes across as a completely unjustified refusal to take his comment at face-value: Eliezer explaining that he concluded your views were not worth spending time on for quite rational reasons, and is saying so because he doesn’t want people thinking he or the majority of the community he leads hold views which they don’t in fact hold.
This seems to be part of a pattern with you: you refuse to accept that people (especially smart people) really disagree with you, and aren’t just lying about their views for fear or reputational consequences. It’s reminiscent of creationists who insist there’s a big conspiracy among scienitsts to suppress their revolutionary ideas. And it contributes to me being glad that you are no longer working for MIRI, for much the same reasons that I am glad MIRI does not employ any outspoken creationists.
I find this comment a bit mean (and meaner than most of what I saw in this thread or the linked one, tho I haven’t read that one in much detail).
Maybe it’s because other people feel more strongly about this topic than I do; to me “democracy vs. monarchy” is both a confused and fuzzy question and an irrelevant one. Maybe with a lot of effort one can clarify the question and with even more effort, come up with an answer, but then it has no practical consequences.
Chris is obviously being mean-spirited here, and a direct response would only escalate, so I won’t make one.
Not mean-spirited. Just honest. If this were a private conversation, I’d keep my thoughts to myself and leave in search of more rational company, but when someone starts publicly saying things like...
“Eliezer [is] proclaiming that it’s not canon for this community.”
“The comment is basically like, ‘Scott Alexander good boy. We have paid him recently. Anissimov bad. Bad Anissimov no work for us no more.’”
Accusing Eliezer of dismissing an idea out of hand due to fear of public unpopularity.
(all of which are grossly unfair readings of Eliezer’s coment)
...then I think some bluntness is called for.
Not that much more unfair than proclaiming something thoroughly refuted and uninteresting based on a single post rebutting the least interesting claims of only two authors, especially given that what appears to have gotten picked up as the central point of the post (NK/SK) is wrong on many different levels.
Hm, I didn’t feel that Eliezer was being particularly dismissive (and am somewhat surprised by the level of the reactions in this thread here). The original post sort-of insinuated that MIRI was linked to neoreaction, so Eliezer correctly pointed out that MIRI was even more closely linked to criticism of Neoreaction, which seems like what anybody would do if he found himself associated with an ideology he disagreed with—regardless of the public relations fallout of that ideology.
Reminder that the article just said neoreactionaries “crop up” at Less Wrong. Then the author referred to a “conspiracy,” which he admits is just a joke and explicitly says he doesn’t actually believe in it. The fact that Eliezer felt the need to respond explicitly to these two points with an official-sounding disavowal shows hypersensitivity, just like he displayed hypersensitivity in his tone when he reacted to the “Why is Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong?” thread. The tone is one of “Get it off me! Get it off me! Aiyeee!” If he actually wanted to achieve the “get it off me” goal, indifference would be a more effective response.
I routinely read “I was only joking” as “I meant every word but need plausible deniability.”
Silence is often consent & agreement.
Does no official response from Hacker News, which also received the damning accusation that neoreactionaries “crop up” there, imply consent and agreement from Y Combinator?
Given the things PG has said at times, I’m not sure that is a wrong interpretation of matters. Modus ponens, tollens...
There’s a difference between “neoreactionary” and “expresses skepticism against Progressive Orthodoxy”. Paul Graham might be guilty of the latter, but there’s certainly little evidence to judge him guilty of the former.
Are you and Konkvistador using the word with different meanings, the former narrower and the latter broader? or am I missing something? or...
I wasn’t aware we were a courtroom and we were holding our opinions to a level of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. I was pointing out that silence is often consent & agreement (which it certainly is), that PG has expressed quite a few opinions a neoreactionary might also hold (consistent with holding neoreactionary views, albeit weak evidence), and he has been silent on the article (weak evidence, to be sure, but again, consistent).
Paul Graham is also a cultural liberal and has the resulting biases. Look at the last section of this essay for a dramatic example.
You should know perfectly well that as long as MIRI needs to coexist and cooperate with the Cathedral (as colleges are the main source of mathematicians) they can’t afford to be thought of as right wing. Take comfort at least in knowing that whatever Eliezer says publicly is not very strong evidence of any actual feelings he may or may not have about you.
I can’t figure out whether the critics believe the Cathedral is right-wing paranoia or a real thing.
MIRI is seen as apolitical. I doubt an offhand mention in a TechCrunch hatchet job is going to change that, but a firm public disavowal might, per the Streisand effect.
From reading HPMOR and some of the sequences (I’m very slowly working my way through them) I get the impression that Eliezer is very pro-enlightenment. I can’t imagine that he’d often explicitly claim to be pro-enlightenment if he weren’t, rather than simply avoiding the whole issue.
The Enlightenment predates democratic orthodoxy. Monarchs like Louis XVI, Catherine II, and Frederick the Great were explicitly pro-Enlightenment.
I had thought that reactionaries were anti-enlightenment though?
It’s complicated. We reject some parts of the Enlightenment but not all. Jayson just listed three of my favorite monarchs, actually.
being pro-enlightment from the perspective of a science fanboy and poly amorous atheist is different than being pro-enlightment as a direct counterargument to reactionary thought. Certainly before I read NR stuff I never thought a reasonable person could claim the enlightenment was a bad thing.
That’s a very interesting phrase.
It may well be true in which case it reflects a very interesting feature of the territory.
Absolutely true.
Eh? Is that because of a more general principle that Eliezer ought not make statements about what is and isn’t LW canon, or is it a special case?
Special case. This site is based around his work so he has every right to decide what it is officially linked to, but the tone of his remarks seemed to go much further than merely disavowing an official connection. Eliezer also states, “More Right” is not any kind of acknowledged offspring of Less Wrong nor is it so much as linked to by the Less Wrong site.”, but More Right is indeed linked to in the blogs section of the Wiki, last time I checked. Also, More Right was founded by LessWrong rationalists applying rationality to reactionary ideas. More Right is indeed an indirect offspring of the LessWrong community, whether community leaders like it or not.
But you’re not a brilliant mathematician – you shouldn’t (even rhetorically) evaluate the consequences of your political actions as they would relate to a hypothetical highly-atypical person. Of course, a genius ( being of immense value) has lots of wiggle room. But you’re not one.
If you still worked at MIRI, you would have negative value. That is, the risk of someone using your writings to tar and feather MIRI would be higher than the expected value of employing you. It’s likely you would be fired, as it would be a rational move. I have no idea how good you were at whatever it was you did for MIRI, but it’s likely there are plenty of candidates of equal abilities who are not publishing blogs that pattern-match with fascist literature.
As being thought of in a political light (especially a political light that the vast majority of prospective contributors and donors find distasteful) would certainly harm MIRI, how could you possibly be offended by something so predictable?