What Cummings is proposing is formalism with a thin veneer of silicon valley jargon, like “startups” or whatever, designed to be palatable to people like the ones who frequent this website.
He couldn’t be clearer, re: where his influences are coming from, he cites them at the end. It’s Moldbug, and Siskind (Siskind’s email leaks show what his real opinions are, he’s just being a bit coy).
The proposed system is not going to be more democratic, it is going to be more formalist.
(I wonder why you say “Moldbug” rather than “Yarvin” but “Siskind” rather than “Alexander” or “Scott”.)
If your reading of anything Scott’s written is that he favours anything like neoreaction, then it’s a very different reading from mine. My reading is that he thinks neoreaction is mostly garbage but with occasional valuable insights. His actual words in what I suspect is the same leaked email as you’re talking about: “Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them.” My mental model of Scott is not excited by the prospect of Dominic-Cummings-alikes finding a way to get a populist president installed who will bulldozer all the bureaucratic obstacles between himself and absolute power.
I’m not familiar enough with the details of Yarvin’s ideas to know how closely aligned Cummings’s proposal is to Yarvin’s “formalism”. (It doesn’t looks super-close to me, though.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I do agree that Cummings is generally Up To No Good (though I don’t hate him as intensely as the UK media fairly clearly wants me to), I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw him, and I don’t think his proposals here are likely to end well if anyone tries to put them into action.
Downvoted for ad hominem. Having drawn inspiration from an author you don’t like is not an argument against anything. Saying you don’t like some authors without making reference to any specific positions those authors have is an invitation to contentless flamewar.
Many of the specific points in the post do seem to be copied from Moldbug/Yarvin’s recent work, more so than you might guess if you’re not familiar with it, and only saw Yarvin listed along with Alexander/Hanania/Sullivan/Shor at the end—not just the idea of the executive shutting down entrenched bureaucracies, but the framing of the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations as once-in-70-years de facto regime changes, and the specific citation of Roosevelt’s inaugural address as a primary source.
I think it does make sense to read it in that context. A casual reader might come away with the impression that (as ChristianKI puts it) Cummings is proposing “making the system more demoractic (as in, increasing the power of democratically legitimized people)”. Whereas if you know that Cummings is reading off of Yarvin’s playbook, it’s a lot clearer that being more democratic probably isn’t the point. (In Yarvin’s worldview, it’s about temporarily using the forces of democracy to install a king who will govern more competently than a distributed bureaucratic oligrachy.)
Analogously, if some article talked about alignment of present-day machine-learning systems and cited Yudkowsky as one of several inspirations, but the specific points in the essay look like they were ripped from Arbital (rather than proportionately from the other four authors listed as inspirations), you’d probably be correct to infer that the author has given some thought to superintelligent-singleton-ruling-over-our-entire-future-lightcone-forever scenarios, even if the article itself can’t cross that much inferential distance.
Yarvin advocates installing a king who not just controls the government but also institutions outside of the government.
Cummings proposes installing someone with a role like FDR. I do consider FDR to be democratically legitimated and his frequent reelection a sign that the population liked him governing the way he did.
I am not going to waste my time arguing against formalism. When it comes to things like formalism I am going to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps, if it comes time to “have an argument” about it.
I’m happy to disengage, then. But for the record, I don’t actually know what you mean by formalism in this context; you seem to think that it’s a dreadful thing to accuse someone of, but the OP doesn’t use the word at all, you never define it, and the Wikipedia page is irrelevant enough to the post that I’m pretty sure you must mean something else.
Formalism is Moldbug’s name for his own politicaal theory. It isn’t prominent enough to have a WP article. I would guess that Ilya associates it with another political system beginning with the letter F.
What Cummings is proposing is formalism with a thin veneer of silicon valley jargon, like “startups” or whatever, designed to be palatable to people like the ones who frequent this website.
He couldn’t be clearer, re: where his influences are coming from, he cites them at the end. It’s Moldbug, and Siskind (Siskind’s email leaks show what his real opinions are, he’s just being a bit coy).
The proposed system is not going to be more democratic, it is going to be more formalist.
(I wonder why you say “Moldbug” rather than “Yarvin” but “Siskind” rather than “Alexander” or “Scott”.)
If your reading of anything Scott’s written is that he favours anything like neoreaction, then it’s a very different reading from mine. My reading is that he thinks neoreaction is mostly garbage but with occasional valuable insights. His actual words in what I suspect is the same leaked email as you’re talking about: “Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them.” My mental model of Scott is not excited by the prospect of Dominic-Cummings-alikes finding a way to get a populist president installed who will bulldozer all the bureaucratic obstacles between himself and absolute power.
I’m not familiar enough with the details of Yarvin’s ideas to know how closely aligned Cummings’s proposal is to Yarvin’s “formalism”. (It doesn’t looks super-close to me, though.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I do agree that Cummings is generally Up To No Good (though I don’t hate him as intensely as the UK media fairly clearly wants me to), I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw him, and I don’t think his proposals here are likely to end well if anyone tries to put them into action.
Downvoted for ad hominem. Having drawn inspiration from an author you don’t like is not an argument against anything. Saying you don’t like some authors without making reference to any specific positions those authors have is an invitation to contentless flamewar.
Many of the specific points in the post do seem to be copied from Moldbug/Yarvin’s recent work, more so than you might guess if you’re not familiar with it, and only saw Yarvin listed along with Alexander/Hanania/Sullivan/Shor at the end—not just the idea of the executive shutting down entrenched bureaucracies, but the framing of the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations as once-in-70-years de facto regime changes, and the specific citation of Roosevelt’s inaugural address as a primary source.
I think it does make sense to read it in that context. A casual reader might come away with the impression that (as ChristianKI puts it) Cummings is proposing “making the system more demoractic (as in, increasing the power of democratically legitimized people)”. Whereas if you know that Cummings is reading off of Yarvin’s playbook, it’s a lot clearer that being more democratic probably isn’t the point. (In Yarvin’s worldview, it’s about temporarily using the forces of democracy to install a king who will govern more competently than a distributed bureaucratic oligrachy.)
Analogously, if some article talked about alignment of present-day machine-learning systems and cited Yudkowsky as one of several inspirations, but the specific points in the essay look like they were ripped from Arbital (rather than proportionately from the other four authors listed as inspirations), you’d probably be correct to infer that the author has given some thought to superintelligent-singleton-ruling-over-our-entire-future-lightcone-forever scenarios, even if the article itself can’t cross that much inferential distance.
Yarvin advocates installing a king who not just controls the government but also institutions outside of the government.
Cummings proposes installing someone with a role like FDR. I do consider FDR to be democratically legitimated and his frequent reelection a sign that the population liked him governing the way he did.
That’s a fair standard so long as it’s applied fairly. But applying it fairly means you can’t complain about Aumann being a theist, and so on.
Having specific theistic beliefs seems very different than “having drawn inspiration” from someone.
I am not going to waste my time arguing against formalism. When it comes to things like formalism I am going to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps, if it comes time to “have an argument” about it.
I’m happy to disengage, then. But for the record, I don’t actually know what you mean by formalism in this context; you seem to think that it’s a dreadful thing to accuse someone of, but the OP doesn’t use the word at all, you never define it, and the Wikipedia page is irrelevant enough to the post that I’m pretty sure you must mean something else.
Formalism is Moldbug’s name for his own politicaal theory. It isn’t prominent enough to have a WP article. I would guess that Ilya associates it with another political system beginning with the letter F.