jollityfarm:

nostalgebraist:

[snip]

If you’d like, I can send you a really good deconstruction of a bunch of ‘traditionalist’/neoreactionary arguments, but 

a) you’ve probably already read it, and
b) it’s made by one of those big yud fans iirc (slate star codex or something)(which doesn’t make the arguments presented any less true, but I’m more likely to take something with a grain or two of salt if it stinks of lesswrong dot com on the internet)

Basically these dudes remind me of Porfiry from The Golovlyov Family, who throws words at you until you’re like “oh my god FINE WHATEVER YOU’RE NOT SAYING ANYTHING BUT IF YOU SHUT UP I’LL DO WHAT YOU WANT.”

Oh yeah I’ve read that one, it’s great!

This may also be of interest to jonomancer.

I don’t like every post on Slate Star Codex, but as a whole it is one of the most (unironically) good things I’ve seen come out of Less Wrong.

(via jollityfarm)

See, the thing about hatereading someone like Moldbug is that while he’s wrong, the ways is which he’s wrong are just boring and tiresome and depressing, which is not what I’m looking for.

From what I can tell, most of his writing goes like this:

1. Moldbug starts with a pretty broad conclusion in mind, usually one that would feel right at home in a generic far-right Op-Ed
2. Moldbug puts on special glasses with lenses tinted the color of this conclusion, and pretty soon everything starts seeming consistent with it, and he spews what seems like hundreds of historical anecdotes or quotations at you and explains why they “make sense” given the conclusion.  Since history is full of many heterogenous things, it is pretty easy to do this
3. Any broad area of historical fact that does not seem consistent with the conclusion gets either ignored or shoed in by making up new categories (e.g. “demotist country”).  Anything that has any kind of connection whatsoever is casually assumed to be essentially identical if this jibes with the conclusion.
4. The conclusion is proven. Q.E.D.

So, for instance, one recent post is a long ramble spiraling around the statement – which he italicizes, sets off on its own line, and refers to as “the Red Pill” – that “America is a communist country.”

Of course, this statement is either obviously false or very misleading.  But rather than rephrasing it to be less misleading, which would seem to be the natural thing to do here, Moldbug spends a lot of time explaining how “the Cathedral” has supplied your mind with “antibodies” that prevent you from glimpsing such a radical truth.  These “antibodies” roughly amount to the notion that “when someone says ‘America is a communist country,’ they actually mean what you think they’d mean.”

Moldbug doesn’t mean what you think he’d mean.  What does he mean?  It’s hard to tell, but it seems to be something like “there is a leftist tradition in America, and people in power in America do things that fit in with this tradition, and we might as well call this tradition 'communist,’ because all leftists are basically communists, since they aren’t usually in the practice of explicitly disavowing communism the way that, say, conservatives explicitly disavow fascism.”

Of course, examples that seem to “fit” this view abound, because people have done and said many things in American history for a variety of political reasons.  Sometimes those reasons are leftist ones!  Sometimes leftists are even in a position of power!  So now we enter Moldbug Phase 2 and there’s a very long, very uninteresting catalogue of historical examples of Americans doing leftist things that required some amount of political power.  As though we should be shocked that any such examples exist.

The reason this isn’t even fun to hateread, for me, is the grinding joyless predictability of it all.  It’s impossible to imagine Moldbug ever being surprised by one of his own conclusions, because his writing always starts with the conclusion and then goes on an epic personal quest trying to find some sense in which the conclusion might be true (which is usually very difficult, hence the length and convolutedness).

It’s very clear from reading the post I described that Moldbug could never have actually looked at the evidence and decided spontaneously that “America is a communist country” was a good way to describe it.  Instead, he began with the phrase "America is a communist country" – not even an idea, but a string of words – because this was the sort of thing he wanted to be seen as saying.  Because he felt a kinship with the sort of person he pictures as writing “America is a communist country”; because part of his schtick is that the things that far-right Op-Ed columnists write are subtly ingenious rather than obviously false; because he has warm fuzzy associations with phrases like “America is a communist country” as markers of his side, his people, his tribe.

Lost in any of this is any kind of discovery or novelity.  Moldbug is never going to have an idea so zany you’ll say “oh my god, only Moldbug could have come up with this.”  What he’s going to do is select ideas that already exist in the far-right tradition and then tie himself into knots trying to think up ways they might be true.

Compare this to the experience of (hate)reading the weirder rationalists.  It takes real creativity to come up with something like Roko’s Basilisk.  What’s more, it takes a real dedication to following your premises wherever they lead, which is a respectable and beautiful thing – which means that when it goes horribly wrong, that’s interesting.  Roko didn’t start out with the Basilisk and reason backward; he started with a set of premises and, to his utter surprise, derived the Basilisk, and what he derived freaked him the fuck out.  That’s interesting; that’s funny; that’s poignant; that’s a story.  The rationalists are usually like that, which is what makes them so great, even when they’re wrong.  Moldbug, by constrast, is just kind of wearying and sad.

Someone reblogged my post with the dril/Yudkowsky screenshots and then made an ill-informed and monumentally smug text post dissing “internet rationalists” and for some reason that follow-up post is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me

I’m not going to argue, dammit, I’m not getting into this, I can’t expect other people to hew to my exact specific convoluted patterns of seriousness and unseriousness, censure and praise, and besides that level of smug is not something I think a stranger is capable of piercing

I have shit to do today, I do not have time to explain that I do not wear a fedora

Weird how sometimes even when I agree with someone their writing can make me feel a useless shuddering unease that makes me want to never trying to do or say things because nothing I do will ever achieve any productive effect, besides maybe someone will someday point out what was wrong with it in words that make them seem clever and cool and give me retroactive utility as a foil for their personal brand

I hope I do not have that effect on anyone though sometimes I worry with all the Yudmocking and stuff

Roko’s Modern Life

mercurialmalcontent replied to your post: For a change of pace, here’s Big Yud w…

He’s right, MoR isn’t a mediocre HP fanfic. It’s an INCREDIBLY AWFUL one.

turboshitnerd replied to your post: Incidentally, you know someone who — i…

I’ve never read beyond like the first chapter, and no way. No way that’s anything close to an accurate assessment.

pluspluspangolin replied to your post: Incidentally, you know someone who — i…

I’m so baffled by this

Yeah, I don’t get it either.  I think I finally managed to get to Chapter … 17? before quitting, but it wasn’t even a “guilty pleasure” thing or a “this passes the time” thing, it was an “it takes effort to push myself through each and every paragraph of this” thing

sir-argues-a-lot replied to your post: I think there’s a recurring feature in…

Honestly though, I think that you fall within the “controversial, but really quite interesting” category yourself. Like Hideaki Anno or colwag.

Thank you!

I take the comparison to colwag better than some people would – he’s always struck me as a very reasonable guy despite his bizarre opinions

Man I totally put in the wrong comparison screenshot for one of those tweets by mistake, and it still worked pretty well

A testament to the solidity of the Dril Or Yudkowsky Comedy Conceit

chronicpnin:

curly is the most bullshit stooge. his antics are the least believable. moe and larry would have kicked him out of the stooges in real life

“dril or yudkowsky?”: the game

Incidentally, you know someone who – it might surprise you to learn – loved HPMoR?  Aaron Swartz:

41. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky

This is a book whose title still makes me laugh and yet it may just turn out to be one of the greatest books ever written. The writing is shockingly good, the plotting is some of the best in all of literature, and the stories are simply pure genius.