I thought the other “side” was supposed to have its case presented in the original? I saw an entirely political attack that relied on skewed facts and opportunistic grandstanding over a recent death. I retorted with some ways in which it’s dishonest, fallacious and doesn’t constitute anything like a proper rational argument.
So you responded with a political attack on a similar level? Surely you see the problem with that kind of reasoning.
My retort was also quite political in substance, true. And yet, if Moldbug or some of his fans were really interested in making the whole thing more truth-tracking, they would listen to my counter-examples and either refute them or make their case incorporate it somehow. The same goes for other people’s objections in this thread.
I didn’t write nor share this article by Moldbug. And I have always tried my best to make proper rational arguments by the highest LW standards when introducing such material.
Yet due to the climate in this thread a rational argument wouldn’t be judged fairly. By the voting patterns and shifts I can tell users have gotten tribal.
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.
So you responded with a political attack on a similar level? Surely you see the problem with that kind of reasoning.
I didn’t write nor share this article by Moldbug. And I have always tried my best to make proper rational arguments by the highest LW standards when introducing such material.
Yet due to the climate in this thread a rational argument wouldn’t be judged fairly. By the voting patterns and shifts I can tell users have gotten tribal.
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.