Personally, I don’t follow Moldbug’s writings. Sometimes, when excerpts are posted here, I upvote them, and sometimes I downvote them. In this case, it seems to me that his argument fails to account for the influence of context in confrontations between entities. His formulation implies a transitivity of power, where A beats B, and B beats C, so A should also beat C. In practice though, you can easily end up with situations where A beats B because A’s interests in the confrontation are more in line with public opinion than B’s, or take less work to implement, etc., but loses to C without the same situational advantages.
Trying to define “whoever wins” as the overdog isn’t an improvement over the more standard formulation where the overdog is the entity which will win in most contexts if those entities come into conflict, or will win against more other entities which themselves have a record of being powerful.
I would have been unimpressed whether or not I thought Moldbug was using this as part of a narrative about who is and isn’t “powerful” in our society that I’d take issue with.
Personally, I don’t follow Moldbug’s writings. Sometimes, when excerpts are posted here, I upvote them, and sometimes I downvote them. In this case, it seems to me that his argument fails to account for the influence of context in confrontations between entities. His formulation implies a transitivity of power, where A beats B, and B beats C, so A should also beat C. In practice though, you can easily end up with situations where A beats B because A’s interests in the confrontation are more in line with public opinion than B’s, or take less work to implement, etc., but loses to C without the same situational advantages.
Trying to define “whoever wins” as the overdog isn’t an improvement over the more standard formulation where the overdog is the entity which will win in most contexts if those entities come into conflict, or will win against more other entities which themselves have a record of being powerful.
I would have been unimpressed whether or not I thought Moldbug was using this as part of a narrative about who is and isn’t “powerful” in our society that I’d take issue with.