Mencious Moldbug, who is probably familiar to some Overcoming Bias and Lesswrong readers. He is a erudite, controversial and most of all contrarian social critic and writer.
I’ve read mentions of Moldbug here before. I tried reading some of his essays once or twice, but from what i remember, i thought he was too long-winded, i thought he made broad unsupported assumptions and shakey generalizations and never seemed to get to a point. Actually, i remember thinking that, like you mention, he struck me as “most of all contrarian”, trying to be controversial for its own sake.
But i’ve seen a few recommendations of his writing here. Maybe i should reconsider my judgment of him. I know you linked to a debate with him and Robin Hanson… but that’s a 72 minute long video. What’s a good jumping-off point to get into his writings?
I actually watched the debate video, and Moldbug came across as ridiculous. He has these broad theoretical criticisms of futarchy, and when Hanson tried to offer empirical evidence against the assumptions underlying those criticisms, he rejected the value of empirical evidence. Then he basically revealed that he thinks science is a very bad tool for acquiring knowledge about anything other than the specific system being studied, and that a priori argumentation is a much better tool. On the basis of a priori philosophy (and, I guess, some amount of inspiration from European history and Steve Jobs) he has decided that some form of monarchy (on the model of corporate governance, I take it) is the best way to do things.
Nothing I saw in the video makes him seem like someone whose ideas I want to spend time exploring. (The essay quoted above is better, but still not all that impressive.) Is the debate with Hanson representative of Moldbug’s style of argumentation, or is it somewhat of an aberration?
Monarchy is clearly the best form of government for appropriate value of variable monarch. What else is FAI rearranging matter in the light cone after all?
Monarchy is clearly the best form of government for appropriate value of variable monarch. What else is FAI rearranging matter in the light cone after all?
An entirely different form of singleton. Even presidents and dictators don’t qualify as “Monarchs” and they are a whole lot more similar to a King than an FAI is.
Where does it say your absolute ruler needs to be human? :P
Jest aside, you are right, the kind of AI’s people normally talk about when discussing FAI are sufficiently different from any human mind or even what we may intuitively imagine a mind to be, for the comparison to be grossly misleading. Talking about a ruler or supreme judge is a much worse comparison than say the old theological comparisons of YHWH to this, since ironically he was likley to be much more anthropomorphic in many respects than a FAI would be.
The statement was a bit tongue in cheek, I just wanted to point out that monarchy gets various ick feelings from us because we are mostly anti-authoritarian, but a supreme AI is the ultimate authoritarian form of government since anything it sets to do, it will do.
The reason I wanted to point to this bias was that I’ve been considering that there may be other (local) maxima on the graph of the function good (concentration of power, trustworthiness) for lesser values of concentrated power and trustworthiness.
Moldbug has his own idea for best possible government ever (TM) and is biased in its favour, he tries to find what he can to criticizes futarchy because I think he’s spooked on some level it could do as well as his own proposal and may be easier to implement. Being a big fan of the formal power structure matching the actual power structure in a country (something that probably appeals to the non-neurotpyical especially strongly), the common human bias of someone manipulating the market to gain informal power probably seems a unusually disturbing possibility, to the point of him wanting to avoid it on aesthetic grounds and seeking rationalizations to justify it.
I think Robin Hanson clearly won that debate, though lets remember that Robin Hanson is pretty good at winning debates (according to audience polls he generally beats EY too). Moldbug is a bit out of his league, his writing is in my opinion much better.
He is good at diagnosing the state of modern democracies and is probably also reliable on the history of ideas, his proposed treatments, or in other words, what to do about it, are much less impressive. For example he puts hope in the internet being a game changers wanting to build a better truth seeking mechanism than academia (something like a super reliable wikipedia with original research allowed). When people see how much better its predictions are it is supposed to start to replace academia. Consider just how naive such an attitude is in light of his otherwise cheerily cynical attitude—people do not value truth that much, even when its very useful they won’t like it if bad signalling accompanies it, and who has the biggest influence on signaling game among the educated? The very same class he calls the iron polygon of power or “The Cathedral”. The multi-headed beast that unites and is a cross-section of the Ivy Leagues, the Media, the State and those now fashionably called the 1%, will eat up anything as quaint as a unusually good description of reality up as an appetizer on the way to real problems that might threaten it.
If not earlier academia will direct its legitimacy granting or damaging attention to his revipedia project when it will be trusted and starts doing what Moldbug really hopes it will do. It is supposed to simply one day announce what the best form of government according to the information available is, and all other forms will lose legitimacy. Naturally the best form of government will turn out to be neocamerialism.
I think it probably would outperform modern democracies in quality of life, but something as radical as an actually reliable reality mapping institution or process, that directly affects public opinion and policy, would probably come up with something different. Moldbug has an above average map of reality for someone who’s interested in politics, he’s just bad at navigating it and won’t accept that there may be a no win scenario here.
I heard LW people talking about him, went to see what all the fuss was about and like you I just gave up after a while. I suspect his essays are long to keep people from thinking about them too clearly.
Don’t underestimate the inferential differences involved. Consider how much text the sequences amount to. Even individual entries are sometimes monstrous in length.
If you where to travel back in time and ask the people living in the Roman Empire what their system of government is, the surprising answer is that most would say “Republic”. Rome was formally still a republic for a very very long time. Not only that it also presented itself in both propaganda and action as a Republican government and most preserved sources even point to it being considered a republic by many living in it except those defeated in its power struggles.
What the Roman state considered itself to be, and whether it considered itself a republic, and what the people thought is something that is easily confirmed or falsified, as much as any historical fact or interpretation can be, by a moderate amount of scholarship.
But that’s because the meaning of res publica most foundational for them would have been “the system of government we live under,” and it wouldn’t have been ridiculous for them to consider it continuous with the system of government in place in Rome before the Principate. When Gibbons uses the idiomatic translation of the term, “commonwealth,” to refer to what he and we call the Empire, or James Madison and the bunch talk about how republics like Rome are the best sort of government because they combine monarchy with aristocracy and democracy, we shouldn’t be surprised; words change. Things changed with the Principate but they also changed with the Aventine Succession, Marsic War, rise of the Praetorian Guard, and so on.
Likewise for quite some time before the Principate Rome together with its holdings constituted an “empire” in the modern sense, but if you traveled back 21 centuries and inquired Roma rem publicam uel imperium habit? they’d consider the question confused.
But that’s because the meaning of res publica most foundational for them would have been “the system of government we live under,” and it wouldn’t have been ridiculous for them to consider it continuous with the system of government in place in Rome before the Principate.
The foundational event of the Roman state, on which its institutions based their claim to legitimacy, was the 509BC revolution that threw out the king and established the Republic. (Not at all unlike the U.S., in fact.) Even well into the imperial period, monarchy was seen by the Romans as characteristic of barbarians and Oriental aliens, and it would have been extremely offensive to suggest that the reigning imperatores were in fact monarchs, and the whole system utterly and irreconcilably different from the old Republic. It took three centuries of this charade until Diocletian finally ended the pretense and openly proclaimed himself a monarch and demanded to be approached and addressed as such.
That’s my strong impression at least, though admittedly I’m not an expert in classical history. So I think the analogy with the modern U.S. government is quite pertinent if, indeed, its de facto system of government is very different from what it is supposed to be according to its formal constitution and the political formulas that are piously declared in public.
Likewise for quite some time before the Principate Rome together with its holdings constituted an “empire” in the modern sense, but if you traveled back 21 centuries and inquired Roma rem publicam uel imperium habit? they’d consider the question confused.
My high-school Latin has rusted almost to the point of nonexistence, but shouldn’t this be vel and habet?
In any case, if you travelled back 21 centuries, the imperium would have been understood as an office given to certain military commanders within the republican institutions (sometimes only honorific, and sometimes conveying actual authority). It had nothing resembling the modern meaning of “empire.” And if you asked back then whether Rome was a republic or a monarchy (using any commonly recognized word for the latter), to a Roman it would have sounded as laughable as if you gave the same question to a modern-day American.
[EDIT: Due to sheer carelessness, I interpreted “back 21 centuries” as the early first century AD, i.e. the time of Augustus. Looking back, I’m now not sure what exact period it was supposed to refer to.]
My high-school Latin has rusted almost to the point of nonexistence, but shouldn’t this be vel and habet?
Habet yes, but “u” is actually a better transcription than “v”, and is in fact preferred by some modern scholars. (Latin did not have the sound represented by “v”, and Roman writing did not have the character “U”; instead, the character “V” was used to represent the phonemes /u/ and /w/.)
(ETA: Also, though my Latin is rusty as well, the word we want here is probably aut [roughly “xor”] rather than uel.)
Interesting—I know that the original Latin alphabet didn’t have the letter “U,” but I’ve never seen a modern transcription that uses “u” for both /u/ and /w/. How recent is this trend?
Fairly recent, as far as I know; probably no earlier than the 1980s. (This is just a guess based on vague memory.) I’m not even sure it has spread much beyond people whose interest in Latin is specifically linguistic. (For instance I don’t know that there are any pedagogical materials—as opposed to linguistic treatises—that use this spelling, though there might be.)
Spelling Latin with u has always been there (but as a tiny minority of texts). Here are some occurrences of omnia uincit amor over the years: 1603, 1743, 1894, 1974.
If you compare the frequencies of vincit and uincit on Google Ngram viewer, you’ll see that the u spelling has always been present at a low frequency. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable recent trend (other than the general decline of Latin as a proportion of printed material). I tried a few other Latin words and got similar results.
And if you asked back then whether Rome was a republic or a monarchy (using any commonly recognized word for the latter), to a Roman it would have sounded as laughable as if you gave the same question to a modern-day American.
I’m not sure about this. Caesar was murdered because of fears that he would become a king, and surely well-informed later Romans would have realized that the concentration of power under the emperors matched or surpassed the one under Caesar (plus hereditary succession, of course). And in fact Tacitus’ ‘Annals’ begin with a contrast between the “freedom and consulships” that started with Lucius Brutus and the “despotism” of Augustus and his successors. Perhaps a patriotic double standard (“we Romans are not slaves to a king like those Eastern barbarians”) would have prevented them from calling the Empire a monarchy, but if asked whether the actual organization of their government resembled more closely that of Rome in 200 BC or that of the Kingdom of the Parthians, they might have admitted to the latter.
Sure, with years the pretense became increasingly transparent—and of course, already in the time of Caesar, it was clear to any informed observer that things were very different from the heyday of the republican institutions. Still, I’m sure a second-century Roman would have been offended if one were to suggest that the proud republican “SPQR” inscriptions on public buildings and military standards were just a hypocritical sham, even if that claim would have been more or less correct.
Moreover, the imperial succession is one issue where it seems like the need to maintain the pretense had serious practical implications, since it was impossible to legislate clear succession rules that would recognize the imperial office as hereditary. In this regard, as much as the republican institutions had become increasingly irrelevant from Augustus on, there was still a deep and fundamental difference from explicit hereditary monarchies such as the Parthian Empire.
But i’ve seen a few recommendations of his writing here. Maybe i should reconsider my judgment of him. I know you linked to a debate with him and Robin Hanson… but that’s a 72 minute long video.
I wouldn’t recommend that debate, it’s not exactly Moldbug’s most shining moment.
A decent jumping-off point may be his formalist manifesto. There are probably some other good starting points (Maybe this, this, or this )
Mencius tends to be very long-winded, but is a decent enough writer. Some of his sarcastic contrarian trolling can get a bit tiring, and he does repeat himself in different posts, but he at least has some unusual non-stupid ideas, I just wish he organized them better and dropped the sarcasm.
I’ve read mentions of Moldbug here before. I tried reading some of his essays once or twice, but from what i remember, i thought he was too long-winded, i thought he made broad unsupported assumptions and shakey generalizations and never seemed to get to a point. Actually, i remember thinking that, like you mention, he struck me as “most of all contrarian”, trying to be controversial for its own sake.
But i’ve seen a few recommendations of his writing here. Maybe i should reconsider my judgment of him. I know you linked to a debate with him and Robin Hanson… but that’s a 72 minute long video. What’s a good jumping-off point to get into his writings?
I actually watched the debate video, and Moldbug came across as ridiculous. He has these broad theoretical criticisms of futarchy, and when Hanson tried to offer empirical evidence against the assumptions underlying those criticisms, he rejected the value of empirical evidence. Then he basically revealed that he thinks science is a very bad tool for acquiring knowledge about anything other than the specific system being studied, and that a priori argumentation is a much better tool. On the basis of a priori philosophy (and, I guess, some amount of inspiration from European history and Steve Jobs) he has decided that some form of monarchy (on the model of corporate governance, I take it) is the best way to do things.
Nothing I saw in the video makes him seem like someone whose ideas I want to spend time exploring. (The essay quoted above is better, but still not all that impressive.) Is the debate with Hanson representative of Moldbug’s style of argumentation, or is it somewhat of an aberration?
Here’s how the discussion between Moldbug and Hanson went:
M: Decision markets won’t work well if P, and we don’t know that ~P.
H: We have data from lab and field experiments, and we always find ~P.
M: Well, induction is useless. Why should I believe ~P for a system you haven’t experimented on?
H: Well, here are some theoretical arguments suggesting ~P.
M: Oh, I don’t deny that often ~P. But how do you know that always ~P?
H: Is there any kind of evidence I could present that would convince you that ~P in the relevant cases?
M: Nope. The problem is, you’re thinking like a social scientist. You need to think like a philosopher.
H: Okay.… so what does thinking like a philosopher reveal?
M: We need a monarch.
Monarchy is clearly the best form of government for appropriate value of variable monarch. What else is FAI rearranging matter in the light cone after all?
An entirely different form of singleton. Even presidents and dictators don’t qualify as “Monarchs” and they are a whole lot more similar to a King than an FAI is.
Where does it say your absolute ruler needs to be human? :P
Jest aside, you are right, the kind of AI’s people normally talk about when discussing FAI are sufficiently different from any human mind or even what we may intuitively imagine a mind to be, for the comparison to be grossly misleading. Talking about a ruler or supreme judge is a much worse comparison than say the old theological comparisons of YHWH to this, since ironically he was likley to be much more anthropomorphic in many respects than a FAI would be.
The statement was a bit tongue in cheek, I just wanted to point out that monarchy gets various ick feelings from us because we are mostly anti-authoritarian, but a supreme AI is the ultimate authoritarian form of government since anything it sets to do, it will do.
The reason I wanted to point to this bias was that I’ve been considering that there may be other (local) maxima on the graph of the function good (concentration of power, trustworthiness) for lesser values of concentrated power and trustworthiness.
That is an amusing and not too inaccurate summary. Up voted!
Moldbug has his own idea for best possible government ever (TM) and is biased in its favour, he tries to find what he can to criticizes futarchy because I think he’s spooked on some level it could do as well as his own proposal and may be easier to implement. Being a big fan of the formal power structure matching the actual power structure in a country (something that probably appeals to the non-neurotpyical especially strongly), the common human bias of someone manipulating the market to gain informal power probably seems a unusually disturbing possibility, to the point of him wanting to avoid it on aesthetic grounds and seeking rationalizations to justify it.
I think Robin Hanson clearly won that debate, though lets remember that Robin Hanson is pretty good at winning debates (according to audience polls he generally beats EY too). Moldbug is a bit out of his league, his writing is in my opinion much better.
He is good at diagnosing the state of modern democracies and is probably also reliable on the history of ideas, his proposed treatments, or in other words, what to do about it, are much less impressive. For example he puts hope in the internet being a game changers wanting to build a better truth seeking mechanism than academia (something like a super reliable wikipedia with original research allowed). When people see how much better its predictions are it is supposed to start to replace academia. Consider just how naive such an attitude is in light of his otherwise cheerily cynical attitude—people do not value truth that much, even when its very useful they won’t like it if bad signalling accompanies it, and who has the biggest influence on signaling game among the educated? The very same class he calls the iron polygon of power or “The Cathedral”. The multi-headed beast that unites and is a cross-section of the Ivy Leagues, the Media, the State and those now fashionably called the 1%, will eat up anything as quaint as a unusually good description of reality up as an appetizer on the way to real problems that might threaten it.
If not earlier academia will direct its legitimacy granting or damaging attention to his revipedia project when it will be trusted and starts doing what Moldbug really hopes it will do. It is supposed to simply one day announce what the best form of government according to the information available is, and all other forms will lose legitimacy. Naturally the best form of government will turn out to be neocamerialism.
I think it probably would outperform modern democracies in quality of life, but something as radical as an actually reliable reality mapping institution or process, that directly affects public opinion and policy, would probably come up with something different. Moldbug has an above average map of reality for someone who’s interested in politics, he’s just bad at navigating it and won’t accept that there may be a no win scenario here.
Meh, from everything I’ve seen your first few impressions were accurate.
Most of his early political thinking is summarized here.
Edit: He also apparently wrote a sequence of posts titled “A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations”.
Thank you. That looks a bit more manageable to start with.
I heard LW people talking about him, went to see what all the fuss was about and like you I just gave up after a while. I suspect his essays are long to keep people from thinking about them too clearly.
Don’t underestimate the inferential differences involved. Consider how much text the sequences amount to. Even individual entries are sometimes monstrous in length.
Here’s most of my problems with Moldbug condensed into one sentence: a bold assertion with no literal meaning that I can easily confirm or falsify.
The literal meaning is the plain meaning.
If you where to travel back in time and ask the people living in the Roman Empire what their system of government is, the surprising answer is that most would say “Republic”. Rome was formally still a republic for a very very long time. Not only that it also presented itself in both propaganda and action as a Republican government and most preserved sources even point to it being considered a republic by many living in it except those defeated in its power struggles.
What the Roman state considered itself to be, and whether it considered itself a republic, and what the people thought is something that is easily confirmed or falsified, as much as any historical fact or interpretation can be, by a moderate amount of scholarship.
But that’s because the meaning of res publica most foundational for them would have been “the system of government we live under,” and it wouldn’t have been ridiculous for them to consider it continuous with the system of government in place in Rome before the Principate. When Gibbons uses the idiomatic translation of the term, “commonwealth,” to refer to what he and we call the Empire, or James Madison and the bunch talk about how republics like Rome are the best sort of government because they combine monarchy with aristocracy and democracy, we shouldn’t be surprised; words change. Things changed with the Principate but they also changed with the Aventine Succession, Marsic War, rise of the Praetorian Guard, and so on.
Likewise for quite some time before the Principate Rome together with its holdings constituted an “empire” in the modern sense, but if you traveled back 21 centuries and inquired Roma rem publicam uel imperium habit? they’d consider the question confused.
The foundational event of the Roman state, on which its institutions based their claim to legitimacy, was the 509BC revolution that threw out the king and established the Republic. (Not at all unlike the U.S., in fact.) Even well into the imperial period, monarchy was seen by the Romans as characteristic of barbarians and Oriental aliens, and it would have been extremely offensive to suggest that the reigning imperatores were in fact monarchs, and the whole system utterly and irreconcilably different from the old Republic. It took three centuries of this charade until Diocletian finally ended the pretense and openly proclaimed himself a monarch and demanded to be approached and addressed as such.
That’s my strong impression at least, though admittedly I’m not an expert in classical history. So I think the analogy with the modern U.S. government is quite pertinent if, indeed, its de facto system of government is very different from what it is supposed to be according to its formal constitution and the political formulas that are piously declared in public.
My high-school Latin has rusted almost to the point of nonexistence, but shouldn’t this be vel and habet?
In any case, if you travelled back 21 centuries, the imperium would have been understood as an office given to certain military commanders within the republican institutions (sometimes only honorific, and sometimes conveying actual authority). It had nothing resembling the modern meaning of “empire.” And if you asked back then whether Rome was a republic or a monarchy (using any commonly recognized word for the latter), to a Roman it would have sounded as laughable as if you gave the same question to a modern-day American.
[EDIT: Due to sheer carelessness, I interpreted “back 21 centuries” as the early first century AD, i.e. the time of Augustus. Looking back, I’m now not sure what exact period it was supposed to refer to.]
Habet yes, but “u” is actually a better transcription than “v”, and is in fact preferred by some modern scholars. (Latin did not have the sound represented by “v”, and Roman writing did not have the character “U”; instead, the character “V” was used to represent the phonemes /u/ and /w/.)
(ETA: Also, though my Latin is rusty as well, the word we want here is probably aut [roughly “xor”] rather than uel.)
Interesting—I know that the original Latin alphabet didn’t have the letter “U,” but I’ve never seen a modern transcription that uses “u” for both /u/ and /w/. How recent is this trend?
Fairly recent, as far as I know; probably no earlier than the 1980s. (This is just a guess based on vague memory.) I’m not even sure it has spread much beyond people whose interest in Latin is specifically linguistic. (For instance I don’t know that there are any pedagogical materials—as opposed to linguistic treatises—that use this spelling, though there might be.)
Spelling Latin with u has always been there (but as a tiny minority of texts). Here are some occurrences of omnia uincit amor over the years: 1603, 1743, 1894, 1974.
If you compare the frequencies of vincit and uincit on Google Ngram viewer, you’ll see that the u spelling has always been present at a low frequency. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable recent trend (other than the general decline of Latin as a proportion of printed material). I tried a few other Latin words and got similar results.
I’m not sure about this. Caesar was murdered because of fears that he would become a king, and surely well-informed later Romans would have realized that the concentration of power under the emperors matched or surpassed the one under Caesar (plus hereditary succession, of course). And in fact Tacitus’ ‘Annals’ begin with a contrast between the “freedom and consulships” that started with Lucius Brutus and the “despotism” of Augustus and his successors. Perhaps a patriotic double standard (“we Romans are not slaves to a king like those Eastern barbarians”) would have prevented them from calling the Empire a monarchy, but if asked whether the actual organization of their government resembled more closely that of Rome in 200 BC or that of the Kingdom of the Parthians, they might have admitted to the latter.
Sure, with years the pretense became increasingly transparent—and of course, already in the time of Caesar, it was clear to any informed observer that things were very different from the heyday of the republican institutions. Still, I’m sure a second-century Roman would have been offended if one were to suggest that the proud republican “SPQR” inscriptions on public buildings and military standards were just a hypocritical sham, even if that claim would have been more or less correct.
Moreover, the imperial succession is one issue where it seems like the need to maintain the pretense had serious practical implications, since it was impossible to legislate clear succession rules that would recognize the imperial office as hereditary. In this regard, as much as the republican institutions had become increasingly irrelevant from Augustus on, there was still a deep and fundamental difference from explicit hereditary monarchies such as the Parthian Empire.
I wouldn’t recommend that debate, it’s not exactly Moldbug’s most shining moment.
A decent jumping-off point may be his formalist manifesto. There are probably some other good starting points (Maybe this, this, or this )
Mencius tends to be very long-winded, but is a decent enough writer. Some of his sarcastic contrarian trolling can get a bit tiring, and he does repeat himself in different posts, but he at least has some unusual non-stupid ideas, I just wish he organized them better and dropped the sarcasm.