Monotonic as a percentage of GDP? Meaning the government will be 100% of GDP in finite time?
MichaelAnissimov
Karma: 775
I’m guessing the mentality behind this comment is, “oh my god, this guy dares to question transsexualism? that’s eviiiilll”.
It is my quote. It is meaningfully distinct, in the sense that we can participate in a progressive society where it’s normalized, but recognize how it emphatically does not fit into a conservative framework.
In general, this position is similar to that of many conservative Republicans. It may be shocking to many of the people on this site to be exposed to view held by a majority of Americans, but that’s just too bad. In any progressive “struggle session”, I will fail. This is because I reject the entire progressive worldview.
Yes, not appropriate for being a reactionary leader in a far right group. Neoreaction is a social conservative movement. This is similar to how you wouldn’t put an NRA member in charge of the local Democratic Party headquarters.
Sort of. Traditionalism is great, though. You have the tone right.
When people see the headline “monarchy!” they’re missing the 2-3 years of thinking and 2,000+ pages of reading that go between step 1 (let’s reset social progress and then very carefully consider positive proposals) and step 2 (maybe, in some specific contexts, something like a certain class of monarchies would be useful for certain small-to-medium states).
Monarchy is just a tentative positive proposal (with limited potential application) I came to after several years of searching after the Cathedral mind virus had been dispelled. Moldbug seems to have come to something closer to anarchocapitalist seasteading-type city state proposals. Land leans even more anarchocapitalist than Moldbug. So, the positive recommendations vary widely. We are definitely not utopians, and admit our proposals are flawed just like any other.
First and foremost, neoreaction is about a critique. Positive proposals are less frequently discussed and there is great disagreement about them within neoreaction. So, many people involved in neoreaction are involved primarily for the negative critique, and make no commitment to any specific positive proposals.
In the case of human enhancement, we depend even more greatly on (some subset of) traditional values to maintain societal stability, since the possible dimensions of failure are so much larger.
There’s no divide, since for the time being, baseline humans is all we have. “Whatever gets things done effectively” is presently defined as “whatever gets things done effectively for baseline humans”.
As long as it’s clear that the term isn’t doing any semantic heavy-lifting here, it’s safe in this context. No flattering claims are being made about non-Enlightenment principles in general, just that they correspond to a vast space.
You specifically said he was “hanging around neoreactionaries”. It sounds like a quibble, but it’s actually worth knowing the real result. The entire weight of your original statement implied his ideological change came from the people he was actually spending time with IRL. But now in this latest post you admit you were wrong about that, and that’s important.
Imagine how intolerable NRx would be if it were to acquire one of these.
Of course we have one, but it’s secret.
Yes, because there are fundamentally high time preference incentives in democracy.
Viewing reactionaries as wishing to return to a time in the linear past, which evolved organically based on local conditions, and which may not be appropriate to present technological conditions, is mistaken. The goal is not to simply revive a past arrangement but to apply certain traditional principles and spirit to a newer expression of organic principles that is suited to its context. So, when you say “go back to”, it’s not that simple. Which is why “pre-Enlightenment” seems like an oversimplifying label, to me.
In fact, you could call it post-Enlightenment, since it would be the emergence of structure from an Enlightenment society that may retain some Enlightenment principles while discarding others. Calling any system based on principles aside from Enlightenment ones “pre-Enlightenment” seems like assuming a kind of a priori obsolescence, in effect dismissing it before it’s even considered.
In any case, “pre-Enlightenment” does not refer to any specific structure (like kangaroos), but a wide variety of arrangements. Therefore, I see it as more similar to “non-elephant” than “kangaroo”.
Exhaustively speaking, societal organizational principles in the abstract tend to be Enlightenment-oriented or not. So, yes, any given transhuman future will have principles of some kind, which will be inspired by the Enlightenment or not. Non-Enlightenment principles (used here to describe every possible set of societal principles besides those based around the Enlightenment) are a rather huge space of possibilities, which cover not only many societies which have already existed, but many millions which may have yet to come to pass. Many “pre-Enlightenment” situations were organic hierarchies, similar to the way nature itself has operated for literally billions of years. “Pre-Enlightenment” does not refer to a specific thing, but a huge space of configurations which do not closely adhere to Enlightenment principles.
Why would they resemble the pre-democratic outcomes that advancedatheist says “wouldn’t surprise me”?
Because some of those, like hierarchy, are game theoretic equilibria that are likely to emerge across a wide range of possible configurations, especially where there are great asymmetries between agents.
What should even draw “premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies” to anyone’s attention, out of the vast and unknown possibilities of a transhuman estate that removes the reasons that those societies evolved in those ways?
Are you saying that you think that a vast majority of the possible transhuman futures rest entirely on Enlightenment principles?
Why couldn’t post-democratic outcomes exist even if human nature is deliberately reengineered?
Apology accepted. Your second-hand sources were wrong, tell them that. It’s so difficult to have legitimate discussions about NRx when 90% of the opinion the Less Wrong community has about us is based on stuff that is completely made up.
This is one of the funnier things I’ve read this year.
Where did Yvain state this? I didn’t think he had any neoreactionary friends.
Straightforwardly equating NRx with monarchy is a very surface-level (mis)understanding.
Yes. In communities where the strength of the family is irrelevant and the only focus is on the self, such behaviors are common. These communities are slowly being replaced by others due to their failure to reproduce.