Lots of people who disagree with Moldbug’s politics were capable of making useful predictions about the Arab Spring (or other political movements). Comparing any smart person’s predictions to “pundit” predictions is useful only for teaching you that pundits aren’t trying to be smart.
The Arab Spring was not a particularly grand or impressive prediction that I made with his models, it was just one of many, but it was one of the few that I could simply invoke and be confident will be properly understood, without having to digress into a long explanation of who got it wrong and that they indeed did get it wrong.
Note that I did compare reading Moldbug as a superior alternative to reading the pundits at the New York Times. A prediction market or a particularly sane domain expert would obviously outperform on most predictions.
The predictions I remember Moldbug making regarding the Arab Spring were that:
There’d be no civil war in Syria
The Westerners would let the Libyans die and perform no airstrikes
Both are failed ones. Mind you, they aren’t explicitly stated in the link above, but I think they’re correct interpretation of his statements there. Certainly they’d be seen as good predictions if they’d been successful ones.
So may I ask what part of his model allowed you to make what predictions regarding the Arab Spring?
actually strongly disliked his verbose and provocative writing style at first but was drawn in by the content. I don’t agree with on everything but steel manning his missteps as much as I steel man the missteps of authors in Academia or pundits of the New York Times have found his models much better and superior at giving good predictions about political outcomes (for example the Arab Spring).
I was talking about using Moldbug’s model to make predictions, not using his predictions! Though the latter will often correlate with the former.
So may I ask what part of his model allowed you to make what predictions regarding the Arab Spring?
The hopes of the chattering classes for Democracy in the Middle East bringing secularism and Western Liberal values to Middle Eastern countries as mostly empty self-delusion. Obviously other people got this right with different models, see Steve Sailer.
How the Western powers would disturb the process heading towards a stable order (Gaddafi and Syria crushing the rebels) create an unstable one that will be a headache (and thus jobs for the metaphorical Foggy Bottom) for years to come because they are unwilling to do what would be needed to clean it up (having a viable coalition of rebels crush all opposition) because that would violate progressive beliefs about how the world works.
Lots of people who disagree with Moldbug’s politics were capable of making useful predictions about the Arab Spring (or other political movements). Comparing any smart person’s predictions to “pundit” predictions is useful only for teaching you that pundits aren’t trying to be smart.
The Arab Spring was not a particularly grand or impressive prediction that I made with his models, it was just one of many, but it was one of the few that I could simply invoke and be confident will be properly understood, without having to digress into a long explanation of who got it wrong and that they indeed did get it wrong.
Note that I did compare reading Moldbug as a superior alternative to reading the pundits at the New York Times. A prediction market or a particularly sane domain expert would obviously outperform on most predictions.
The predictions I remember Moldbug making regarding the Arab Spring were that:
There’d be no civil war in Syria
The Westerners would let the Libyans die and perform no airstrikes
Both are failed ones. Mind you, they aren’t explicitly stated in the link above, but I think they’re correct interpretation of his statements there. Certainly they’d be seen as good predictions if they’d been successful ones.
So may I ask what part of his model allowed you to make what predictions regarding the Arab Spring?
Sigh, another misreading of my post:
I was talking about using Moldbug’s model to make predictions, not using his predictions! Though the latter will often correlate with the former.
The hopes of the chattering classes for Democracy in the Middle East bringing secularism and Western Liberal values to Middle Eastern countries as mostly empty self-delusion. Obviously other people got this right with different models, see Steve Sailer.
How the Western powers would disturb the process heading towards a stable order (Gaddafi and Syria crushing the rebels) create an unstable one that will be a headache (and thus jobs for the metaphorical Foggy Bottom) for years to come because they are unwilling to do what would be needed to clean it up (having a viable coalition of rebels crush all opposition) because that would violate progressive beliefs about how the world works.