I don’t feel like digging up the whole sordid backstory (though this would be a good starting point), but I get the impression he’s upset that we’re not a vector for his politics.
More specifically, he’s upset that we’re willing to tolerate people who point out that many of his ideology’s claims are in fact falsifiable and false.
You are atypical in this respect.
Ideologies rarely make easily falsifiable statements.
Agreed, my point is that it is still meaningful to speak about ideologies being right or wrong.
I know nothing about Australian politics.
Yes, you do. I assume you’re at least aware that it’s a parliamentary constitutional monarchy with norms resembling those on other advanced western democracies.
Am I allowed to refer to myself as non-ideological when it comes to Australian politics?
You have an ideology about how governments ought to work, you may not know enough about Australia to know what its doing wrong or which party is closest to pushing things in the wright direction, but if you did the research you’d either find yourself sympathizing with one of them or conclude that all of them are insane and advocate some radical (from the point of view of internal Australian politics) position that hardly anyone there is advocating.
Let’s replace Australia with something like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Belarus, or Kazakhstan. I’m guessing you probably know about as little about at least one of those countries as you know about Australia and yet you probably have opinions about what’s wrong with those countries.
To take my point even further: do I have an ideology regarding the best way to use a bucket full of Legos?
You have priors and preconceptions about it.
What is it about politics that causes everyone to have an ideology a priori?
Because the word “ideology” is generally used to refer specifically to politics.
Ideologies frequently make falsifiable statements. They tend to say X is true so one should do Y to produce good outcome Z. The statements “X is true”, and “doing Y produces outcome Z” are both falsifiable. Granted the statement “outcome Z is good” is harder to analyze given the current state of metaethics, but in practice one can get remarkably far just looking at the first two statements.
The difference is I believe that some ideologies are truer, i.e., better correspond to reality, than others.
So what you’re talking about is susceptibility to peer pressure?
I consider myself to be someone who’s politically non-ideological,
I think the problem is that being “politically non-ideological” is a meaningless phrase. Rather, if someone describes himself as “non-ideological” that generally means he’s bought into his ideology so strongly that he no longer perceives it as an ideology.
As Taleb points out here it’s not even clear that socialism promotes less inequality.
In the U.S., when I look at a room with hotshot businessmen in 2014, I know that the 2024 one will be different (except for businessess subject to bailouts). The same cannot be said in Europe or in places where the state is powerful. And if I look at the bureaucratic and academic establishments, the only people who would drop out of the 2014 cohort are the retired/deceased ones.
Static measurements of inequality are defective (in addition to their traditional lack of mathematical rigor). True equality in income is probabilistic: it requires downward mobility. This should map to opportunity. I quickly wrote down the sketch of what such a true measurement of equality would be like.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIX3AzcHFkaGtORkU/edit
Re: Capitalism.
Even if we accept the premise that socialism reduces inequality, your argument boils down to that we should make the poor a little worse of (relative to where they’d be otherwise) in order to make the rich significantly worse of in the name of “fighting inequality”.
Universities have been progressing from providing scholarship for a small fee into selling degrees at a large cost.
This is the natural evolution of every enterprise under the curse of success: from making a good into selling the good, into progressively selling what looks like the good, then going bust after they run out of suckers and the story repeats itself … (The cheapest to deliver effect: “successful” cheese artisans end up hiring managers and progress into making rubber that looks like cheese, replaced by artisans who in turn become “successful”…).
I assume this is similarly true in most politically “stable” countries.
Well, during the 19th century the US had a system whereby the entire civil service was replaced whenever the party in power changed.
To come back to Moldbug, the interesting thing about the post that you linked is that his prediction about bitcoin turned out to be wrong. Bitcoin trades higher than when I wrote the post and is very far away from 0.
Well, his prediction about what the central banks and governments would do was wrong. His prediction about what effect such actions would have may very well have been correct.
Also, could you taboo “ideological”. I suspect in practice it tends to mean some combination of “disagrees with me” and “contrarian”.
Pure socialism and pure free markets have rarely existed at any sort of scale or for any substantial length of time.
Um, Soviet Union, Cuba.
You could designate a group of people to set your vote for you
I believe they’re called “political parties”.
Reality exists. It includes certain facts, such as the way men and women are attracted to each other, which some people find hard to accept. These facts are part of human nature. If these facts cannot be accepted, and are opposed, the people who oppose them become enemies of humanity. They cannot accept humanity for what it is, so they hate it.
Every person who has skin in the game knows sort of what is bullshit and what is not, since our capacities to rationalize —and those of bureaucrats and economists —are way too narrow for the complexity of the world we face, with its complex interactions. And survival is a stamp of statistical validity, while rationalization and narratives are the road to the cemetery.
Financial inequalities are ephemeral, one crash away from reallocation; inequalities of status & academobureaucrat “elite” are there to stay
The problem is that wikipedia isn’t that good at finding the truth about controversial topics.