Not all of his content is relevant to refining human rationality, interesting to this community or productive to discuss here. I wouldn’t have posted this particular article. But many are, to give examples:
Also much of the writing of bloggers such as Federico that write very relevant material can only be understood if you have a good grounding in Moldbuggery.
As far as I can tell, there is more discussion of Moldbug on this site than there is of any other contemporary non-scientific non-LW figure. Do you believe this relative quantity is commensurate with the quality and significance of his thought?
I predict that if I started making multiple Discussion posts focused solely on the social criticism of Althusser or Deleuze or Zizek, I would face a very negative reaction from this community, even if I gussied it up with talk of “map vs. territory” and “Bayesian evidence”. Yet for some reason the community seems far more tolerant of rampant Moldbuggery. I suspect this is primarily due to historical reasons dating back to the Overcoming Bias days, as well as the fact that Moldbug’s writing style is more “nerd-friendly” than that of many other idiosyncratic political theorists.
For reasons such as these, some Moldbug enthusiasts here seem to operate on the assumption that anything written by Moldbug is by default a good topic of conversation on this site. I suspect that if the points made in the OP were written by someone other than Moldbug, they would not have been posted here. The filters used to determine which of Moldbug’s ideas are good topics of discussion here are far too permissive. I don’t think a ban is the correct response, but I do think that Moldbug fans need to be more reflective about what these discussions are contributing to this site.
I predict that if I started making multiple Discussion posts focused solely on the social criticism of Althusser or Deleuze or Zizek, I would face a very negative reaction from this community, even if I gussied it up with talk of “map vs. territory” and “Bayesian evidence”.
Except there’s a perfectly reasonable way to take the ideas of these people and strengthen them from the perspective of epistemic rationality. Some ideas still pass through, while others need to be modified. And this is a process that desperately needs to happen, for all the criticisms the center LW group will give against philosophy in general.
Do you believe this relative quantity is commensurate with the quality and significance of his thought?
I’m not sure, although comparing him with the examples you site in your next paragraph certainly makes him seem much more worthy. Seriously, could you have found someone whose philosophy does not contradict basic economics?
I predict that if I started making multiple Discussion posts focused solely on the social criticism of Althusser or Deleuze or Zizek, I would face a very negative reaction from this community, even if I gussied it up with talk of “map vs. territory” and “Bayesian evidence”. Yet for some reason the community seems far more tolerant of rampant Moldbuggery.
Could you site another example of a discussion post that’s a link to Moldbug?
Seriously, could you have found someone whose philosophy does not contradict basic economics?
I think the comparison is fair. Both the Austrian and the Marxist economic traditions are pretty fringe and severely flawed. Moldbug has interesting and occasionally accurate things to say about politics despite his bad economics, but so do Althusser et al.
Could you site another example of a discussion post that’s a link to Moldbug?
Does he even claim much in the way of originality? The only obviously new thing that comes to mind is Patchwork, which is indeed stupid. But it certainly seems like he’s mostly a convert to an intellectual tradition that is at best marginal but was once much more popular. Carlyle, Froude, de Maistre, Schmitt, he’s mostly not claiming to be the source of his big ideas. He’s a pretty decent sociologist or political scientist at times but mostly he’s just a man out of his time, which appears to be somewhere in the 1800s.
He’s such a terrible historian, so I can’t really see his sociology or political theory as worthwhile.
Regarding originality, I think he suffers the same problem as early Eliezer—failure to acknowledge sources. It’s not that big a problem for Eliezer because most of his sources (logical positivist philosophers, Dennett, etc.) would agree with, or at least respect, the new conclusions that are being drawn in the sequences.
Moldbug’s citation problem is much bigger because many of his interesting ideas are straight from thinkers who would disagree with his conclusions. Further, Moldbug’s core audience is very hostile to those thinkers.
Konkvistador cites previous discussion of Moldbug’s view that religion deserves to be treated like an ideology. I don’t disagree, but Marx’s “Religion is the Opium of the People” can plausibly be read as asserting a very similar point. And the Chomskist Po-Mos take this idea even further, asserting that just about everything is an ideology. Likewise, “everything is an ideology” is the basic justification / explanation for Paul Graham’s “Keep Your Identity Small.” or the local Politics is the MindKiller norm.
Konkvistador cites previous discussion of Moldbug’s view that religion deserves to be treated like an ideology. I don’t disagree, but Marx’s “Religion is the Opium of the People” can plausibly be read as asserting a very similar point. And the Chomskist Po-Mos take this idea even further, asserting that just about everything is an ideology. Likewise, “everything is an ideology” is the basic justification / explanation for Paul Graham’s “Keep Your Identity Small.” or the local Politics is the MindKiller norm.
Of these examples I see nothing that I would characterize myself as being hostile too. Except some of the more silly aspects of pomo.
What counts as silly post-modernism is exactly what is under dispute.
And weren’t you asserting a few months ago that one should aim to be apolitical? Both Moldbug and post-modernism say that’s essentially impossible for an active member of society.
I kind of failed at that pretty badly, though while it lasted it was a great exercise. I’ll trying getting into it again. That it is impossible really isn’t under dispute at all, what is under dispute is if it is useful to strive for such a state of mind.
I don’t think that answer to our human flaws is to retreat from trying to implement our terminal values. In other words, Politics is the MindKiller is not a certainty, simply a failure mode that society and its members have spent essentially no effort trying to avoid. If one can develop a sufficient level of self-criticism, one can do far better than the statistical norm.
That’s been my strategy, anyway. Reject all false arguments, whether or not they lead to conclusions I like. If you think I’ve failed at that goal, I’d welcome your feedback. Crocker’s Rules—for you, on this topic.
Generally I have had a high opinion of your output despite our disagreements on some value issues (which may or may not be actually incompatible), I recall some very neat rationalist debates.
It is more or less only the recent difference on our interpretation of Moldbug and some other minor things that lead me to believe you may not be open to good arguments associated with that cluster. I think you can avoid most of the risk of that by steel manning reactionary positions more when debating.
This is the sort of conversation where being specific would be particularly helpful.
Regarding steelmanning, I generally decline to change someone’s position to the point where that someone would no longer endorse the argument. Given what I’ve read of Moldbug’s, I’m particularly uncertain of what changes I could make that I thought were improvements and that Moldbug would likely endorse.
Aside from my concerns with Moldbug’s grasp of historical or economic analysis, my basic understanding of his position is that he thinks governments should have the same ownership rights in property that private landowners have in property—which everyone with a brain should agree is not how any country is organized currently. My objections to that are two-fold:
(1) I’m unaware of that ever happening in a stable way anywhere in the last 2000 years, so I have essentially no useful evidence to figure out how it would work in practice.
(2) It’s hard for me to come to grips with what problems this solution is intended to solve. Specifically, there are many problems that “government” is understood to exist in order to solve. And increasing government power in the way Moldbug describes solves essentially none—except as the extreme “solution” of denying that they are problems.
More generally, it’s hard for me to see Moldbug as more than an advocate for far less social unrest. I’m not sure he has a good plan for getting to that goal, but even so, the core argument to be made is about the optimal level of social unrest. Moldbug’s provocative writing just assumes one agrees with his understanding on that point, and so those who don’t agree have very little to grapple with in any productive fashion.
Have you even read the two articles? I found them interesting and they very much are his intellectual products. I’m sorry but I think you are being consistently less charitable to Moldbug than some other sources I won’t list right now because I want to avoid political mindkilling. I don’t see a good reason for this.
Does this comment about the first article you linked respond to your concern?
Regarding the second article, I just don’t find it that interesting. Yes, it is worthwhile to notice how the ideas of the Protestant Reformation impacted later social justice movements up to the present day (i.e. morphological analysis). But there are lots of Reformation ideas, and not all of them transferred over to modern liberal thought (either the classical liberalism of Locke or the Fabian socialist liberalism of the community organizer).
And there’s lots of ideas in modern social justice movements that doesn’t descend from the Protestant side of the Reformation. Some Reformation ideas oppose later social justice ideas. That’s my biggest problem with Moldbug—he constantly describes conflicts as two-sided when a more useful analysis would describe them as multi-sided. And, as shown by his whole Cold War = State Dept. v. Pentagon theory, Moldbug isn’t particularly accurate at correctly labeling even if we grant a conflict only has two sides (I don’t grant that about the Cold War, but that’s probably a discussion for another day).
To pick another example, Moldbug’s discussion about taking the political middle ground. His first observation—what currently is middle ground was quite radical for most of history—is true. And obvious to any serious student of history. The conclusions that Moldbug draws from that accurate and insightful point just don’t follow at all.
I strongly disagree with this.
Not all of his content is relevant to refining human rationality, interesting to this community or productive to discuss here. I wouldn’t have posted this particular article. But many are, to give examples:
Belief in Religion Considered Harmful
Five Ways To Classify Belief Systems
Also much of the writing of bloggers such as Federico that write very relevant material can only be understood if you have a good grounding in Moldbuggery.
As far as I can tell, there is more discussion of Moldbug on this site than there is of any other contemporary non-scientific non-LW figure. Do you believe this relative quantity is commensurate with the quality and significance of his thought?
I predict that if I started making multiple Discussion posts focused solely on the social criticism of Althusser or Deleuze or Zizek, I would face a very negative reaction from this community, even if I gussied it up with talk of “map vs. territory” and “Bayesian evidence”. Yet for some reason the community seems far more tolerant of rampant Moldbuggery. I suspect this is primarily due to historical reasons dating back to the Overcoming Bias days, as well as the fact that Moldbug’s writing style is more “nerd-friendly” than that of many other idiosyncratic political theorists.
For reasons such as these, some Moldbug enthusiasts here seem to operate on the assumption that anything written by Moldbug is by default a good topic of conversation on this site. I suspect that if the points made in the OP were written by someone other than Moldbug, they would not have been posted here. The filters used to determine which of Moldbug’s ideas are good topics of discussion here are far too permissive. I don’t think a ban is the correct response, but I do think that Moldbug fans need to be more reflective about what these discussions are contributing to this site.
Except there’s a perfectly reasonable way to take the ideas of these people and strengthen them from the perspective of epistemic rationality. Some ideas still pass through, while others need to be modified. And this is a process that desperately needs to happen, for all the criticisms the center LW group will give against philosophy in general.
I’ve recently noticed that Althusser’s ISA vs. RSA distinction makes many of the same observations and arguments Moldbug has.
I’m not sure, although comparing him with the examples you site in your next paragraph certainly makes him seem much more worthy. Seriously, could you have found someone whose philosophy does not contradict basic economics?
Could you site another example of a discussion post that’s a link to Moldbug?
I think the comparison is fair. Both the Austrian and the Marxist economic traditions are pretty fringe and severely flawed. Moldbug has interesting and occasionally accurate things to say about politics despite his bad economics, but so do Althusser et al.
There are two of them linked in the comment by Konkvistador to which I was responding.
I’m skeptical that what was interesting was unique to Moldbug, or that what was unique to Moldbug was interesting.
Does he even claim much in the way of originality? The only obviously new thing that comes to mind is Patchwork, which is indeed stupid. But it certainly seems like he’s mostly a convert to an intellectual tradition that is at best marginal but was once much more popular. Carlyle, Froude, de Maistre, Schmitt, he’s mostly not claiming to be the source of his big ideas. He’s a pretty decent sociologist or political scientist at times but mostly he’s just a man out of his time, which appears to be somewhere in the 1800s.
He’s such a terrible historian, so I can’t really see his sociology or political theory as worthwhile.
Regarding originality, I think he suffers the same problem as early Eliezer—failure to acknowledge sources. It’s not that big a problem for Eliezer because most of his sources (logical positivist philosophers, Dennett, etc.) would agree with, or at least respect, the new conclusions that are being drawn in the sequences.
Moldbug’s citation problem is much bigger because many of his interesting ideas are straight from thinkers who would disagree with his conclusions. Further, Moldbug’s core audience is very hostile to those thinkers.
Konkvistador cites previous discussion of Moldbug’s view that religion deserves to be treated like an ideology. I don’t disagree, but Marx’s “Religion is the Opium of the People” can plausibly be read as asserting a very similar point. And the Chomskist Po-Mos take this idea even further, asserting that just about everything is an ideology. Likewise, “everything is an ideology” is the basic justification / explanation for Paul Graham’s “Keep Your Identity Small.” or the local Politics is the MindKiller norm.
Of these examples I see nothing that I would characterize myself as being hostile too. Except some of the more silly aspects of pomo.
What counts as silly post-modernism is exactly what is under dispute.
And weren’t you asserting a few months ago that one should aim to be apolitical? Both Moldbug and post-modernism say that’s essentially impossible for an active member of society.
I kind of failed at that pretty badly, though while it lasted it was a great exercise. I’ll trying getting into it again. That it is impossible really isn’t under dispute at all, what is under dispute is if it is useful to strive for such a state of mind.
Same can be said of human rationalism.
I don’t think that answer to our human flaws is to retreat from trying to implement our terminal values. In other words, Politics is the MindKiller is not a certainty, simply a failure mode that society and its members have spent essentially no effort trying to avoid. If one can develop a sufficient level of self-criticism, one can do far better than the statistical norm.
That’s been my strategy, anyway. Reject all false arguments, whether or not they lead to conclusions I like. If you think I’ve failed at that goal, I’d welcome your feedback. Crocker’s Rules—for you, on this topic.
Generally I have had a high opinion of your output despite our disagreements on some value issues (which may or may not be actually incompatible), I recall some very neat rationalist debates.
It is more or less only the recent difference on our interpretation of Moldbug and some other minor things that lead me to believe you may not be open to good arguments associated with that cluster. I think you can avoid most of the risk of that by steel manning reactionary positions more when debating.
This is the sort of conversation where being specific would be particularly helpful.
Regarding steelmanning, I generally decline to change someone’s position to the point where that someone would no longer endorse the argument. Given what I’ve read of Moldbug’s, I’m particularly uncertain of what changes I could make that I thought were improvements and that Moldbug would likely endorse.
Aside from my concerns with Moldbug’s grasp of historical or economic analysis, my basic understanding of his position is that he thinks governments should have the same ownership rights in property that private landowners have in property—which everyone with a brain should agree is not how any country is organized currently. My objections to that are two-fold:
(1) I’m unaware of that ever happening in a stable way anywhere in the last 2000 years, so I have essentially no useful evidence to figure out how it would work in practice.
(2) It’s hard for me to come to grips with what problems this solution is intended to solve. Specifically, there are many problems that “government” is understood to exist in order to solve. And increasing government power in the way Moldbug describes solves essentially none—except as the extreme “solution” of denying that they are problems.
More generally, it’s hard for me to see Moldbug as more than an advocate for far less social unrest. I’m not sure he has a good plan for getting to that goal, but even so, the core argument to be made is about the optimal level of social unrest. Moldbug’s provocative writing just assumes one agrees with his understanding on that point, and so those who don’t agree have very little to grapple with in any productive fashion.
Have you even read the two articles? I found them interesting and they very much are his intellectual products. I’m sorry but I think you are being consistently less charitable to Moldbug than some other sources I won’t list right now because I want to avoid political mindkilling. I don’t see a good reason for this.
Does this comment about the first article you linked respond to your concern?
Regarding the second article, I just don’t find it that interesting. Yes, it is worthwhile to notice how the ideas of the Protestant Reformation impacted later social justice movements up to the present day (i.e. morphological analysis). But there are lots of Reformation ideas, and not all of them transferred over to modern liberal thought (either the classical liberalism of Locke or the Fabian socialist liberalism of the community organizer).
And there’s lots of ideas in modern social justice movements that doesn’t descend from the Protestant side of the Reformation. Some Reformation ideas oppose later social justice ideas. That’s my biggest problem with Moldbug—he constantly describes conflicts as two-sided when a more useful analysis would describe them as multi-sided. And, as shown by his whole Cold War = State Dept. v. Pentagon theory, Moldbug isn’t particularly accurate at correctly labeling even if we grant a conflict only has two sides (I don’t grant that about the Cold War, but that’s probably a discussion for another day).
To pick another example, Moldbug’s discussion about taking the political middle ground. His first observation—what currently is middle ground was quite radical for most of history—is true. And obvious to any serious student of history. The conclusions that Moldbug draws from that accurate and insightful point just don’t follow at all.
put some links where your mouth is