NAB notes: anti-subversiveness, miscellany

This is the last of these “note” posts I’ll write about this book.  It’s not going to be some sort of grand synthesis of the other ones, just a presentation of a final angle on the book, and then notes on some miscellaneous bits I noticed while reading but couldn’t fit in anything else.  Not building to anything; there’s no monster at the end of this post.

Index for these notes:

Part 1 (Yudkowsky as analytic philosopher)

Part 2 (The AI Box)

Part 3 (Moldbug, the counter-revolutionary tradition, and violence/friction)

Part 4 (Takedown vs. conceptual riff)

Part 5 (Empathy)

Part 6 (You are here)

Anti-subversiveness

I can’t pretend to “review” this book without substantial bias.  In part, that’s because of the emotional baggage I bring to the table, as discussed last time.  It’s also because the evaluative standards being used, both in the book itself and in Sandifer’s writing about it elsewhere online, seem so far from mine that I don’t know how to bridge the gap besides saying “this just isn’t how we do things here inside my skull.”

As discussed last time, I don’t want to close off “empathic bridges” with unfamiliar ways of thought and self-expression.  In fact, I actively want to build them.  However, at this point, my bridge with Phil is shoddy enough that I’m still juggling a bunch of contradictory hypotheses about how he might he thinking and feeling.

Here’s one.  This is going to be kind of mean, but I hope it’s taken in the spirit of “let’s talk about the structural flaws in the bridge” rather than “let’s bomb the bridge into oblivion.”

What makes Phil Sandifer see a text as interesting, as worthy of serious engagement, seems to be very different from what determines these things for me.  One can see this in our differing responses to the trio, but also – much more clearly – in Sandifer’s online responses to reviews of his book.

He has praised mine effusively: “they’re amazingly smart, incisive responses, and I’m quietly thrilled to have written a book that can provoke takes like this.”  This is, obviously, very flattering, and I feel kind of gross about the very idea of using this comment as evidence in some case against Sandifer, but I think the case here ought to be made, so here we go.

There have been a number of other reviews and review-like-things popping up on tumblr.  One thing I can definitely say about this book (and I really mean this, as a serious, positive thing) is that it’s sparked a lot of people’s minds.  My tumblr dash is so much more interesting than it was a few weeks ago (which is not to say that it was uninteresting before, just that there’s this new topic now and it’s an unusually fecund one).  People are writing ten-part reviews, reviews that apply Sandifer’s own methods to his book while disclaiming those methods, reviews like whatever the hell it is I’ve been doing.  Sandifer’s concepts and his approach, whether or not any given commentator likes them at all, definitely are the sort of things that get people talking, and in new, strange ways.

Sandifer, however, does not see this situation quite as I do.  While praising my reactions, he’s responded to the other stuff I mentioned with brief, withering dismissals, as if swatting flies: “I’m not actually sure there’s a single sentence of this that makes a true assertion.”  “Not even wrong.”  “… gruesomely facile reading of Moore … “  “This is a genuinely astonishing document - a middling effort at deconstruction (and let’s face it, middling’s a good result for your first effort at deconstruction) that eventually runs into Thomas Ligotti and absolutely freaks, morphing into a gloriously over-emphatic self-Basilisking.”

These are all responses to takes that struck me as interesting – not always ones I agreed with, but often ones taking cool angles I hadn’t thought of, or using rhetorical techniques I wouldn’t have used but which are fun to see play out on the page.  Maybe it is somehow the case that my posts are just, like, better than all these other ones.  But not that much better, not in that qualitative way, such that mine are worthy of attention and the others aren’t, full stop.

So what makes the distinction?  First, I’d like to ask Phil this, as a non-rhetorical question.  I actually don’t know.  But the thing that keeps occurring to me is that my posts are written in a style/tone/etc. that I think is much more familiar to him.  I’ve put on a certain hat, self-consciously, while writing these.  I’ve spent some time in what I think is Phil’s milieu.  I’ve binge-read numerous SF/F blogs, mostly those with an academic-critical bent (I love Adam Roberts, but bless his heart, the man can’t go two seconds without mentioning he’s a professor of English lit), and mostly those who’d eventually come down on the anti-Puppy side of the Hugo kerfuffle.  (Although I’ve also binge-read Vox Day and John C. Wright, but that probably helps here too.)  In college I was assigned some of the sorts of critics who operate by looking for holes in a text (which was when my Roman Love Elegy class went from fascinating to inane real quick, IMO, but maybe I should have worked harder on that bridge).  Etc.

The reactions Phil didn’t like, whatever their merits, were not written with this hat on.  They were written in @psybersecurity‘s idiosyncratic sort of philosophy-bro register (which I love), or in @socialjusticemunchkin‘s own idiosyncratic register which I’m not even sure how to describe (this is not a criticism).  So one possible interpretation is that Phil’s criteria for engagement largely have to do with how much a text looks like the kind of thing he’s used to taking seriously.

This would fit, too, with his levels of engagement in NAB.  He’s most willing to take Land seriously, and of the trio Land writes most like Phil, and wears a hat least out of place in circles Phil frequents.

But this is a whitelist, not a blacklist.  It’s not “I cannot engage with people wearing certain hats,” it’s “I cannot engage, unless you’re wearing certain hats.”  So this attitude would be a very restrictive straitjacket (which is one reason I’m just mentioning it as a hypothesis, because it’s the worst of a number of possibilities, and I don’t want to just assume the worst).  After all, the past is a different country; if you think @socialjusticemunchkin is weird, try reading any big-name thinker pre-20th-C.  Or, not to put too fine a point on it, try reading someone who’s never been to college.  I don’t think Yudkowsky skipped college for financial reasons, but many people are facing the prospect of really staggering levels of high-interest debt in order to get their hats these days.

And this, in the end, rather than any specific disagreement, is why I feel like I fundamentally just cannot truly engage with NAB.  I can quibble over facts, I can riff on concepts, but I cannot shake the sense that NAB is basically about policing boundaries I don’t respect.  That its most basic goal is an anti-subversive one.  (@psybersecurity used the term “anti-iconoclastic,” which is probably better.)

This is not because Moldbug or whoever is “subversive,” at least not in any positive sense of the term, but that NAB’s technique for opposing him is an anti-subversive technique.  Moldbug’s an autodidact.  He doesn’t write in a certain way that has come to signify “serious thinker” in certain circles in a certain recent span of time.  He’s (checks) not on the whitelist.  Next, please.  We have (voice takes on a certain hauteur) standards in this establishment.

I think Moldbug is deeply, hilariously wrong.  But he’s not wrong for this reason.  No one is wrong for this reason.

I would love to conclude that all of this is a completely misreading and Sandifer is actually doing something I can get behind.  I am not, currently, able to conclude that.  Here, then, we must stop.

Miscellany

Just some other stuff I noted.

Sandifer’s version of the Roko’s Basilisk story.  Look, I know you’re groaning, but if I’ve done all this other stuff I might as well have a crack at this.  Early on, before his longer treatment of the story, Sandifer writes:

The result was a frankly hilarious community meltdown in which people lost their shit as ideas they’d studiously internalized threatened to torture them for all eternity if they didn’t hand all of their money over to MIRI, culminating in Yudkowsky himself stepping in to ban all further discussion of the dread beast.

Unless I’ve been very confused about this for years, this is getting events backwards.  Yudkowsky’s freakout and banning was one of the first things to happen, quickly after the post appeared; only one other person in the original thread (PeerInfinity) could be described as “losing their shit.”  Instead, what happened is closer to “the community lost its shit over Yudkowsky losing his shit”: Yudkowsky’s use (abuse?) of mod powers to shut down a new idea in AI ethics seemed deeply troubling given the supposed ethos of the site.  And as for the other person who freaked out in the original thread, well, I’m not sure “hilarious” is the word I’d reach for:

it triggers a really strong negative emotional reaction. and I suspect that it would trigger similar reactions in others […] 

I thought I was finally rid of the nightmares where I end up in some sort of post-singularity hell… but now Roko had to go and create a vaguely plausible argument for why that might still happen… […]

Hmm… perhaps I should be more clear about what I’m getting so angry about. Most of it is that I’m getting angry at the idea that humanity’s CEV might choose to punish people, after the Singularity, to the point of making their life “a living hell”… That thought triggers all sorts of negative reactions… rage, fear, disgust, hopelessness, pity, panic, disbelief, suicidal thoughts, frustration, guilt, anxiety, sadness, depression, the urge to scream and run away, the urge to break down and cry, fear that thinking about this will break my mind even worse than it’s already broken… fear of the nightmares that I’m likely to have… fear about this actually happening…

Triggered?  Kek.

Moldbug and profit.  Sandifer quotes a post, from the “Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” series, in which Moldbug proposes an ideal system of government on the basis of a few criteria, one of which is “responsibility.”  He observes that people don’t tend to agree about what “responsibility” is, and proposes a jaw-dropping solution:

How, with an impossibly fuzzy word like “responsibility,” can we round up a large number of intelligent individuals who share a common definition? […] Actually, there’s one way to do it. We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative.

The reader is obviously meant to WTF at this passage, and Sandifer indeed WTFs:

But to my mind the most compellingly fucked up thing here is the basic idea that turning a profit is an inherently desirable act. […]

Actually, this underlies a lot of what’s wrong with Moldbug. It’s not that I doubt that he has answers to the obvious question of why turning a profit is a good thing; I’m sure he does. Rather, it is that he does not consider this question obvious enough to bring up and answer alongside his assertion. And this really is stunningly weird in the context of all his red pill rhetoric about the corrupt horrors of liberal democracy. Because while there are a great many obvious critiques of liberal democracy, “there’s just not enough respect for profit” really doesn’t feel like one of them. 

If true, this would indeed be bizarre and revealing.  But remember, this is part of Moldbug’s outreach effort to progressives.  Does he think they’re just going to nod along to the claim about profit?  Of course not.  Indeed, he immediately notes that his “definition” of responsibility doesn’t look anything like the ordinary sense of the word, and that it is likely to horrify progressives, and spends much of the rest of the post explaining himself!

As a progressive, you consider undivided government (“dictatorship”) the root of all evil. […]  When we add the abominable and astonishing suggestion that said government should actually turn a profit, we reach maximum horror. But if we are not willing to question even our deepest beliefs, our minds are hardly open. […]

Clearly, good works are not compatible with turning a profit. […]  It is hard to see how it improves its bottom line by feeding the poor, healing the lame, and teaching the blind to see. And indeed, it doesn’t.

So we can separate California’s expenses into two classes […Moldbug goes on, describing a way of organizing profitable vs. charitable activities in a way that he thinks will maximally benefit the poor and needy, never once invoking the notion that Profit Is Just Good, although perhaps in some deeper sense he still relies on that notion, there might be an interesting argument to that effect, but if there is it does not appear in NAB]

I was going to say something about my disagreements with the points about “parasitic memeplexes” and the Cathedral on pp. 71-3 but it is becoming clear that I need to kick my NAB-noting habit before I start to need professional help so I’ll omit that.

One last thing (really).  Whiteness and anti-semitism.  Starting on p. 118, there’s an interesting set of ideas about perceived threats to whiteness from the outside vs. from within.  Sandifer identifies anti-semitism among white nationalists as the latter:

This is always the charge: you can tell the Jews are dangerous because of their disproportionate representation in the corridors of power. 

What’s important about this is not that there’s a goddamn bit of sense to it, but rather that it’s a fundamentally different paranoia than, say, cuckolding. This isn’t the outside coming in and destroying the last refuge of whiteness. This is the suggestion that the most crucial institutions of power have already fallen into the hands of the Other. And indeed, the choice of the Jews to represent this fear highlights just how deep the horror goes, because it’s not like the Jewish diaspora was a “just a couple generations ago” thing like the end of American slavery. If it’s the Jews that did it, it got done millennia ago.

Anti-semitism, Sandifer goes on to say, “redirect[s] the paranoia to a deep-seated element of white culture.”

I must be misunderstanding this.  Yes, in the present anti-semitism often involves the claim that Jews are too powerful, and it often has in the past too (e.g. in the “Protocols”).  But this really perceived as a threat from white culture, and from something that’s been white culture for millennia, when the Jews of Europe have historically been set apart by their necessary-yet-despised economic role as usurers, when the original audience of the Merchant of Venice would have known immediately Shylock was a Jew thanks to the actor’s bright red wig and prosthetic hooked nose, when in the real historical Venice Jews were literally required by law to wear special identifying badges or hats, when this was a thing that could be written in 1914, when … 

Look, I don’t presume to educate Sandifer on anti-semitism.  I’m sure he knows this stuff.  I’m sure he also knows about how whiteness, that social construct, has had porous boundaries.  I’m sure he’s seen the 19th-century caricatures of Irish immigrants as subhuman.  (Those were my ancestors; it’s a relief for me that we became Just More White People at some point before my birth.)  But in light of this all, I just can’t make sense of his notion that anti-semitism identifies the problem within white culture.  The very fact that “they hate these guys who are also white, that’s interesting” is a natural thought in 2016 is the result of a long, messy, incomplete process of integration, which was in an earlier and far uglier stage “just a couple generations ago.”

Not that Sandifer doesn’t know all this.  Not that I’m not being condescending.  Not that … but then again, not that … I’m sorry, I simply must go, it’s time for my NABaholics Anonymous meeting now.

I’m done, thank God, thank the Basilisk, I’m done.  No bang, no whimper, no monster.  Keep the bridge open.

marcusseldon replied to your post: NAB notes: empathy This note gets into more…

I feel like I take Sandifer differently in the quoted bits than you (though I have not read the book to see the context). Implicitly, I think there is a point to be made that reading Yudkowsky cannot merely be done by code switching to his terms. Words have connotations that cannot be pulled away from them, and using words in weird or non-standard ways, even if you say so in advance, is about more than mere semantics. It’s fighting over how we configure our concepts.

I see what you’re saying, but my point wasn’t that Yudkowsky was just saying “normal” things in unfamiliar language.  The distinction is blurred throughout that whole post, but I meant to support empathy (if not agreement) with people who really are saying different (”alien”) things, not just people who use alien words.

My point is more that people’s reason for speaking the way they do is often opaque and determined by details of their history, and if you actually care then you need to carefully/tentatively explore why they’re doing what they’re doing, not just notice the first impression it makes and declare, “this makes this first impression!”  (That’s sorta what I was saying with the neighbor and his haircut.)

NAB notes: empathy

This note gets into more personal territory for me.  Which is thematically appropriate!  But it means I have to say a bit about myself, first.  Buckle up for a dive straight into my own navel.  (None of this is new if you’ve read some of my personal tumblr posts.  In fact many of you have probably heard this repeated ad nauseam.)

I’ve always found that my default modes of expression – the ones that come most naturally, that are easiest for me – are modes conventionally associated with formality, artifice, and lack of emotion.  In other words: I write and talk like a detached academic (or like someone trying to sound detached and academic) unless I make a conscious effort not to.

This extends to body language and vocal tone.  If I’m having a really bad time mentally, I’m not likely to cry or cringe, and in fact what I’ll probably do is give some abstract theoretical description of the exact way I feel like absolute shit and how it differs from other ways of feeling like absolute shit.

People who knew me IRL used to say I reminded them of a robot – which they often did not mean as an insult, but it was still a thing.  (I was frequently likened to Data from Star Trek in particular.)  My control over my affect has grown over time, plus I just know nicer people, so I don’t get this much these days.  But I still have the trait.

The giant irony here is that I am most able to seem non-robotic and non-detached when I feel calm and in control, because then I have the resources to craft a performance.  If I’m emotionally perturbed, these resources dwindle and I find it harder to carefully consider every word and motion – and as a result, the robot comes back out.  This is not to say I produce totally coherent stuff when I’m feeling fucked up, just that I produce stuff that is less and less tailored to avoid overly stuffy constructions, fancy (often math-related) words, and pointless overly elaborate multi-layered theories of what’s going on.

The conventional wisdom is that emotion = immediacy = concreteness, that abstract theories and fancy words are for observers at a comfortable remove, and that when the situation is hitting you on an emotional level you tend to express yourself in simpler, more immediate, situation-specific terms.  I do the opposite.

This presents an interesting challenge for the empathy of people who interact with me, particularly those who don’t know me well.  Ideally, they’ll be able to get beyond my unusual way of expressing emotions and resonate with my actual emotions.  There are definitely people who can do this, and even do it right after meeting me for the first time.  There are also some who can’t.

This can manifest itself in several ways.  The most benign is that the people doesn’t grok me, and realizes they don’t grok me, and tells me.  They may ascribe the failure to me, or to themselves, or somewhere in between, but in any case they recognize that the usual empathic process has not in fact occurred.

The other way – and this is a lot more common, I think – is that people will think they know how I’m feeling, while being wrong.  Usually this is in the obvious way: I seem cold and detached, so I must in fact not be feeling much and must be seeing the world largely as an abstract puzzle with no real effects on me.  This can move quite swiftly from “Rob is not feeling much on this occasion” to “Rob doesn’t feel much at all.”  (Way back in early 2009 I made a LiveJournal post starting with “Why do people think I have no emotions, or unusually few emotions?”, because at the time this was actually a common perception – which people made clear to me! – and I was curious as to why.)

And, because empathy involves feeling what someone else is feeling, “Rob doesn’t feel much at all” can easily turn into “Rob can’t empathize.”  Which would, if true, provide a nice explanation for the odd and difficult-to-parse affect which started all this: if I’m blind to the whole emotional layer of the human world, then of course I’ll never have learned to speak its language.

Something interesting has happened here.  At this point, there is no possibility of an “empathic bridge” forming between me and the other person.  They aren’t going to see anything I try to send their way, and they’ve decided I’m not able to pick up anything they might send out, to me or in general.  But this wasn’t inevitable from the outset.  This person and I both, let’s suppose, have some empathetic resources.  We’re very different on the surface, and maybe deep down, too.  But we might have approached that difference more slowly, tentatively, sensitively, and finally end up kinda-grokking one another.  (I realize my own culpability in this kind of thing – are people really this dismissive, or am I too quick to see that when it’s not there?)

But instead, the empathic bridge fizzles because, in some sense, the other person was too empathetic.  More precisely, they were too secure in their identity as empathetic beings.  They didn’t problematize empathy, think of it as a messy through-a-glass-darky thing which depends on mutual effort and can have unexpected twists.

Empathy can fail in one way, by simple blindness.  But it can fail in another way, by simple sight: one “sees” the other person so “clearly” at the outset that the possibilities for communication are drastically truncated.  If I look at you and think I know who you are, how you feel, what you value, what you worry about, if I can read you like an open book, then how can I encounter you as a complex human being?  How can you surprise me?

I probably ought to mention the actual book at some point.

Not yet, though.  Let’s talk about my feelings some more.

I’ve been writing all of these posts in a detached critical style, as is my default.  But I’m not just someone talking about a book.  The author is reading my posts, sometimes replying to them.  And I don’t at all come to this book as a neutral observer.  It’s a book that takes a definite side in an odd little culture war that I’ve been involved in – from both ends – for years.

I first discovered Overcoming Bias back in 2008, in college, in the days when “Rob is a robot” was basically a meme in my social circles.  I found the posts by this guy “Eliezer Yudkowsky” deeply comforting, not really for his ideas but because he sounded like me.  He was a “robot,” too, in a great many of the same ways.  And the things he said about the false dichotomy between reason and emotion felt like they were written to me, back in those days when my every quirk and tic (literally; I have Tourette’s) felt like they were being ruthlessly scanned to determine whether I was one of the Rational People or one of the Emotional People.  (This binary was basically identical to the STEM vs. Humanities binary, which was talked about constantly at my college, in big bold nuance-free Physics Majors Are From Mars, English Majors Are From Venus terms)

So anyway I get bored of the blog for a while and come back later and it turns out they’ve turned into some sort of “personality cult” (?) worried about “Roko’s Basilisk,” and by this point I know enough about math and philosophy to know how much more there is in heaven and earth than Bayes’ Theorem, and it looks like a goldmine of fascinating nonsense

and on a RationalWiki talk page I find “The Ballad of Big Yud,” and then later I get a tumblr and start Yudmocking under the tag “#big yud,” and the rationalists find me and want to hear all about my opinions, and they seem weirdly sharp and curious and self-aware for ostensible cult members, and actually a lot of them seem to find the Yudkowskian canon as wrongheaded as I do, and they sound like me, and anyway now Scott Alexander’s novel contains a new religious group that uses “a big Hebrew letter yud” as an identifying symbol

and I met my girlfriend on “rationalist tumblr” and she’s flown across the Atlantic Ocean twice to be with me and in six days I’m going to do the same to be with her.

All of which is to say that when Neoreaction A Basilisk starts talking about the concept of empathy, my response is going to have a lot of emotional baggage involved.

And some of that baggage, honestly (though obviously), is reflexive wariness of Phil.  He seems like an interesting guy.  He’s been very generous and civil to me in our few interactions so far (while I haven’t really repaid the favor).  But my psychological immune system looks at him and gets worried about the Robot/Non-Robot sorting factory from my college days.  He’s taken me seriously, but he’s responding to some takes that at least struck me as interesting with curt dismissals.  And when I see this kind of gap I don’t understand, I worry about whether I’m on thin ice, merely enjoying the fruit of a temporary sorting error.  Have I merely bluffed my way through the Voight-Kampff test?  And what would Phil have made of the me from 2008, who hadn’t yet learned that (say) removing the word “rational” from your vocabulary makes people suddenly treat you more like a human being?

But of course to believe this would be to make the empathy error I described earlier.  I have no idea if this is how Phil feels about anything.  I’m just lazily matching him to stereotypes I picked up in college.  And because the human brain just works that way, this nonetheless feels real, as though I really am grokking him.  I’m not.

Empathy is tricky business.  Let’s try to tread carefully.

NAB’s discussion of empathy begins with an interesting bit on the Turing Test, specifically on Turing’s original formulation, which, if you haven’t looked it up, may surprise you.  Sandifer then says:

[…] Alan Turing suggests that the fundamental nature of thought and, by implication, of humanity is the capacity for empathy in much the same way that enlightenment liberalism suggests that it is free will and Ligotti suggests that it is consciousness.

Well, that’s an interesting idea, in the abstract.  Wouldn’t it be nice to lark about it with Sandifer over beers some evening, with not a care or worry in mind?

Unfortunately, there are occasions on which someone would like to have a reasonable academic discussion about an idea, and he’s not wrong to want it, and yet – that idea sets off alarm bells ringing in your head.  Whether or not it’s just an idea to him, it isn’t to you.  I trust this will be a familiar experience.

Sandifer goes on to say, drawing on Land, that empathy contains the potential for horror.  Because empathy is about (Sandifer says) opening yourself up to invasion, for letting something different from you, something alien, get into your head.  Sandifer writes a really gorgeous sentence about this:

Empathy is what distinguishes invasion from destruction; the means by which a relationship between the inside and outside is forged and maintained.

Where is he going with this?  Given who he’s talking about, it’s not surprising: “All three of our main thinkers fail in key ways to grapple with empathy.”  Land, he says, consciously rejects it.  Moldbug “has an almost pathological disinterest in the notion.”  And Yudkowsky?  He considers empathy, but “badly”; he “overlooks the ways in which empathy is a powerful mode of understanding”; and ultimately:

Yudkowsky thinks of empathy in terms of peering into black boxes, and as a thing that is done. The result of this approach is that Yudkowsky, without really meaning to, tends to look at everyone else in the world as inefficient Eliezer Yudkowskys instead of people as such.

Sandifer’s objecting here to Yudkowsky’s characterization of empathy as merely a sort of tool once can control, an “empathy mode” one can put one’s brain into – “as though,” Sandifer writes, “it’s some sort of conscious act of will to be invaded.”

But here’s the thing.  Empathy, as an actual process that occurs inside our heads, is merely a tool, in that it is merely one aspect of the complicated give-and-take we use to understand and get along with our fellow humans – who, notably, are outside out of our heads.  More pointedly, no literal “invasion” ever takes place, because we’re not science-fictional telepaths or empaths.  When I feel like your emotions are invading my mind, what’s really going on is that my mind is inventing emotions which may or may not have anything to do with what’s actually going on in the separate cosmos inside that other skull a few feet away from me.

We’re all prisoners of our skulls.  Naive realism is false.  Visual illusions exist.  Duh.  Phil knows this; we all do.

But then we must, we have a responsibility to, use our faculty of inventing-others’-emotions actively.  Consciously.  What we want is to “empathize” in the deepest sense, to really build that empathic bridge with the cosmos in another skull.  We must realize that this is tricky, that there are no cheat codes, that we cannot just reach out and “invade” the other skull.  In other words, we must realize, with Yudkowsky, that we really do have some conscious control over a sort of “empathy mode,” that this tool has its uses, and that it is also not a cheat code.

There is a part of my brain which is telling me all sorts of nasty things about Phil’s internal cosmos, about how he sorts the Robots from the Real People and how he’s about to see through my fleshy disguise any moment now.  This is not, in fact, Phil “invading” my brain.  This is what happens when I press a button on a certain black box.  The black box is fallible.  I can choose to ignore it.

Sandifer quotes a passage from this post, about precisely the distinction I just noted:

[ “Empathic inference” is] configuring your own brain in a similar state to the brain that you want to predict (in a controlled sort of way that doesn’t lead you to actually hit anyone).  This may yield good predictions, but that’s not the same as understanding.  You can predict angry people by using your own brain in empathy mode.  But could you write an angry computer program?  You don’t know how your brain is making the successful predictions.  You can’t print out a diagram of the neural circuitry involved.  You can’t formalize the hypothesis; you can’t make a well-understood physical system that predicts without human intervention; you can’t derive the exact predictions of the model; you can’t say what you know.

Here’s Sandifer’s response:

It is difficult to know where to begin. What is perhaps most perplexing is how clinical the description is. Recall that we got to empathy through imagery of infection, invasion, and trauma. It is not a tame or easy subject. But more significant than the problems of tone are the problems of content. In particular, Yudkowsky’s decision to equate “understanding” with the capacity to “make a well-understood physical system that predicts without human intervention” is a move that accuses the overwhelming majority of the human population of not understanding anything whatsoever.

I have thoughts about this passage, but first, it conjured up an emotion, and an associated mental image.  The mental image was of me, trying more and more desperately to communicate some state of distress I am in, and Sandifer standing back and remarking on how clinical my language is.  I try harder, and in my frustration my language gets more and more clinical (as it does), and Sandifer gets if anything less uneasy, because no one discussing emotions would ever speak this way.

I’m sorry.  That’s merely my emotional reaction (ha ha).  Please don’t think I trust this vision to tell me actual things about Sandifer’s skull-cosmos.  My intellectual reaction?  Well, this passage has been confusingly excerpted from a post about attempts to make psychology scientific.  When Yudkowsky writes “understanding,” here, he means “the sort of understanding one wants in a field calling itself a science.”  It isn’t his definition of the word “understanding.”  (Sometimes, in fact, people do not spell out exactly what they mean.)

Does Sandifer mean that while this passage appears unremarkable in context, it in fact reveals deep flaws in Yudkowsky’s view of empathy?  Perhaps.  But one thing he has not done is tried to meet Yudkowsky on anything like his own terms – “terms” in the linguistic sense, in particular.  He’s looking at a kind of verbal self-expression that is quite alien to his sensibilities, and instead of working towards an empathic bridge, he just picks at bits of the unfamiliar style that suggest things inside his own skull.  He doesn’t say “a person is saying these strange words, and maybe I can slowly work my way toward understanding why someone might find that natural.”  He just uses a cheat code and conjures up an immediate picture of the psychology behind such a statement.  But there are no cheat codes.  Empathy isn’t tame or easy.

A moment later Sanidfer writes, of another Yudkowsky quote:

It’s tempting to describe this as an attempt to characterize emotion by someone who has never actually had one, although that’s unfair.

Unfair, surely.  But tempting?  I mean, here Sandifer is, waxing lyrical about how empathy means contact with the mind of something alien, and here he is, confronted with something unfamiliar, and he’s tempted to just say “there is nothing here”?

Remember that idea that made me uneasy earlier?  “The fundamental nature of thought and, by implication, of humanity is the capacity for empathy.”  In my personal experience, questioning people’s empathy – whether their capacity for it, or their understanding of that capacity – tends to be a step on the road to the conclusion that their skulls are barren of feeling, that there’s not much to empathize with up there.  From there, it’s not difficult to say they’re not quite human.  But “people who talk funny are not human” is not an attitude with a great historical track record.

OK, OK.  I’m not saying Sandifer actually thinks anyone is subhuman, or that he thinks we should all be xenophobes, or something.  I’m saying that his language here sets off a lot of alarms for me, and may do it too for other people, in individual-backstory-conditioned ways he may not realize.  Which is fine – everything is like this.  And I suspect that for Sandifer, Yudkowsky and co. set off an analogous set of alarms.

But the story of bridging one skull to another doesn’t just end when the alarms go off.  (If it did, then – among other things – the world would be an even worse place for trauma survivors that it actually is.)  It’s tough, but we can keep going.  If we manage to avoid the trap of thinking that anyone just can’t empathize.  That road leads right to isolation, to retreat from all other beings.  My brain tells me that any minute now Phil is going to classify me as a Rationalist Robot and all of a sudden his empathy will switch off just like that.  Phil thinks that rationalists are going to classify him as a Marxist Postmodernist (or whatever) and their empathy will switch off just as quickly.  This is how we lose the game before we’ve even started.

Sandifer concludes this discussion by saying that the trio are part of a larger, rising ideology that actively opposes empathy, an ideology threading through other things like MRAs and 4chan and white nationalism:

Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land don’t just “do poorly” with empathy - they represent the most visible and explicit edge of a Cathedral-scaled system of values that casts the desire to listen and try to understand people who are different from you as anathema to reason itself.

More alarms are going off for me, obviously.  (We know alarms are not infallible.)  I’m not a channer or a WN or any of that stuff.  But Sandifer is not taking aim at any particular little group.  He’s drawing a giant lasso around a large range of groups, some clearly despicable, and claiming that it’s all part of one big thing which manifests, on the edges, even in the odd ways certain people talk about emotions.  And he’s saying that this gigantic group, this them, is opposed to empathic bridges, and hence it’s a lost cause to try to empathically bridge with them ourselves.

I’m not a channer or a WN, but I’m not confident I’m not one of them.  I do talk funny, after all, if you catch me off-guard.  And thems have a habit of growing and growing.

Finally, the crux:

At last, then, we have a credible answer to the most stubbornly worrisome of neoreactionary arguments - that Malthusian limits will eventually reassert themselves and tribal affiliations will reign supreme anyway, so you may as well give up on diversity before it’s too late. Perhaps they will, and a historical period of war is inevitable given current conditions. But if so, “values empathy” is just as effective a tribal delineation as any, and probably a fair bit more effective than DNA haplogroups. Put another way, maybe the neoreactionaries are right and we’re going to have to shoot some people; if so, let’s shoot them first.

The alarms in my head say say: this is beyond parody.  Empathy, which has dissolved innumerable tribal distinctions, which lets us live alongside those who seem different, and even those who are different, without constantly bashing each other over the heads, will become the final tribal distinction.  Total war against the xenophobe class!  I say to anyone who has ever felt an unexpected kindling of sympathy for the alien: this is what separates you from the alien!  Destroy the infidel whose scripture has no room for other scriptures!

Excuse me.  I’ve got that out of my system now.  I think, clearly, that this kind of idea just cannot work, that it goes against the very concept of empathy.  Which is probably the joke – after all, Sandifer specifically mentions that he’s nabbing the neoreactionaries’ idea and just reversing it.

And hell, it’s not like I haven’t felt exactly the same way sometimes.  I, too, have my thems.  The “people who think I have no feelings” who’ve popped up throughout this essay are, after all, not a well-defined identity group with a name.  If I can identify them before they strike, it’s only by a grab bag of correlates, by signifiers of social class and values, by … how they talk.  Oh dear.

Just don’t slip into thinking this is the truth.  Rage against the bastards, sure, but say hi to your new neighbor even though he has That Haircut The Bastards Have, or else you’ll never know the glories of his internal cosmos.  (You’ll never guess why he got that haircut.  It’s a long story, and contains about 5 distinct ironies.)

Keep the bridge open.  Say hi to the rationalist next door.

This essay should be over.  I meant to finish all that up quickly and get to the “other part,” but then I got way to into my ironies-about-empathy gimmick and wrote 2 trillion words.  But what the other part was going to be about was how there’s a lot of good stuff about what I’ve been calling the “empathic bridge” in the work of Scott Alexander.

This is thematically fitting, because AFAIK Phil just thinks Scott kind of sucks.  That he’s not fascinating-bad the way the trio are, but just plain bad.  And writers one is already inclined to view this way can indeed disappoint reliably, without fail.  But then, if you start building a bridge, what comes across may surprise you.

Scott has a certain infamy among some people for being the guy partially responsible for the rationalism-neoreaction bridge, and for having a bee in his bonnet about social justice.  (We all have our alarms.  Scott has clinical OCD, so his alarms are worse than mine, I think.)

But if you twist the kaleidoscope a little, Scott looks like the world’s biggest progressive.  Not in the sense that he takes especially “progressive” stances, but in the sense that he writes mythological parables about how the history of life, from single cells to you and me, is a steady march of cooperation and coalition-building and setting aside tribal differences.  Moldbug has his “W-force,” the thing that makes Cthulhu always swim left.  Scott sees it too, and he loves it.

He is worried, though – in Meditations on Moloch – that the conjunction of capitalism and technological advances (yes, really) will halt this march of progress before we can join our arms together yet again, fight the beast at the end of the universe, and immantentize the eschaton.  Which we will do, of course, by building Yudkowsky’s Friendly AI.  It’s the only thing that can save us from techno-libertarian progress.

I’m not entirely representing Scott fairly here.  But how could I?  Wonders come to us across the trade routes between skulls, and we can only speculate about the civilizations that produce them.  And yet there are those who are ever so sure what’s going on over there, thanks to their handy cheat code.  Let’s take a moment, in the spirit of sneer culture, to laugh at them.

I’m nearly done with another NAB post and it’s extremely long.  This will be the second-to-last one, with the last one an index/conclusion.  This thing would go under a cut in any other circumstances, but I want to preserve the no-cuts rule I’ve used so far.  So heads up.

Speaking of which, I was of course thinking about “Red Pills” recently, and also TNC, and then I was reading over some bits of TNC, and noticed this phrase, from a chapter about its most central big-scary-concept:

it presents itself in a complete bolus of absolute responsibility

“Bolus” is not a word I see every day.  I couldn’t quite remember what it meant.  (Had I known when writing the passage?)  So I looked it up:

argumate:

I’m waiting for @nostalgebraist to start writing Neoreaction a Basilisk Prime.

I mean, I did do a creative project about many of same themes treated in NAB, and it was literally “a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment.”

It’d be simultaneously dickish, tacky, and incredibly simplistic to claim that The Northern Caves is some sort of substitute for or alternative to Sandifer’s book.  It clearly isn’t, and I’m having trouble writing this post because I’m worried about even the hint of that implication.  But it’s definitely a creative flight of fancy involving many of the same ideas.  I’ve recommended it to Sandifer and I’m excited to hear what he thinks.

NAB notes: Sandifer’s negative evaluations as wards against horror

This is turning into a series, so for reference: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

While reading Neoreaction A Basilisk, I kept wondering how much it was meant as a takedown of the trio, and how much it was meant as a creative, conceptual riff which simply used the trio for some raw material.

Of course, the answer is “it’s both.”  But that isn’t quite right, either.  As a takedown, it’s scattered and not especially useful for someone who just wants to know what’s wrong with the trio.  I’ve seen a few posts from people saying they wanted it to be some sort of primer for fighting neoreaction, and it clearly isn’t that – saying “Moldbug’s use of Satanic negation reveals his unacknowledged sympathy for Satan as represented in Paradise Lost” is not the kind of idea that will help you out in direct political scuffles with Moldbug fans.

As a conceptual riff, though, it’s continually limited by the invasion of takedown-related material.  The book presents itself as an examination of strange internet (psuedo-)philosophers who – like classic horror story protagonists – are confronted with the unintended, disturbing, mind-searing implications of their own work.  This sounds like a good story, and it seems as though Sandifer wants to tell it.  But whenever the story starts to get interesting, whenever a bit of real narrative develops, whenever Sandifer starts tying the literary resonances here to his own literary interests like Milton or Blake … it all quickly runs aground, usually within a page, because Sandifer switches back to an evaluative mode.

Any attempt to build a mood, to dim the lights and get the audience spooked, is quickly interrupted as the lights flip back on and the storyteller starts haranguing you about how our mad philosopher protagonist made a totally shit point in this one blog post, oh my god, how are people so wrong on the internet.

It’s clear that Sandifer does not see Yudkowsky or Moldbug as intellectuals worth taking seriously (Land is a bit more complicated).  So it would be easy for him to just say at the outset: “look, I don’t think these people’s actual ideas are worth the virtual paper they’re printed on.  I do find them interesting as characters, and I’m going to tell a story about their journeys that I find potent in itself, like so many other good stories about awful or risible people.”

Indeed, this is sort of what he does, in the early parts of the book.  As @psybersecurity​ writes:

One problem is that Sandifer can’t help but continue to use Moldbug and Yudkowsky as punching bags. It’s a bit of an issue - after presenting legitimately good, concise criticisms of the two in the book’s introductory segment, he seemingly feels justified in adopting a smug attitude towards them as easily ignorable figures that no respectable intellectual would take seriously. And yet he can’t help but bring up qualms with them again and again, as if he’s not quite as secure in his dismissal as he wishes he was. 

This is not just some little infelicity, I think.  It’s a major problem which holds the book back a great deal in its ambitions to do something creative and legitimately chilling.  The “story” is so stop-and-go that it’s barely there: the book is so wedded to the takedown format that any flights of fancy Sandifer wants to attempt must be weighed down with great ponderous loads of potshots.

Why is the book like this?

My bet is that the conceptual/narrative riff, not the takedown, was Sandifer’s driving motivation.  His descriptions of the book are heavily slanted in that direction, after all.  Take this paragraph from the Kickstarter:

Neoreaction a Basilisk is a work of theoretical philosophy about the tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe. It is a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment. A savage journey to the heart of the present eschaton. A Dear John letter to western civilization written from the garden of madman philosophers. A textual labyrinth winding towards a monster that I promise will not turn out to be ourselves all along or any crap like that.

IMO, this is a great pitch.  It also sounds far more interesting and fun than the actual book.  The description suggests literary game-playing, genuine induction of unease in the reader, a work of creative writing by someone who, incidentally, doesn’t think much of the people who served as its inspirations.

Why couldn’t Sandifer have just written that book?  I suspect – and I could be wrong – that Sandifer has realized that his intended audience won’t look kindly at any book about neoreaction and Less Wrong unless it’s a takedown.  Sandifer is not aiming this book at fans of these ideas, and his target audience is either already hostile to the ideas or likely to become hostile when made aware of them.

He’s clearly interested in writing something that takes concepts like “Red Pills” and “democracy will destroy itself” seriously, and doing creative work within that framework.  But that framework comes from people whose other views he abhors.  Writing a book of riffs on the aesthetic potential of “the Red Pill” runs you the risk of looking like you’re sympathetic to “the Red Pill” as conceived of by Moldbug and PUAs.  “Roko’s Basilisk” makes Less Wrong a readily dismissable laughingstock to various parts of the internet; it’s also “a really spectacular story,” as Sandifer puts it, but if you push that angle to the point of admitting the idea really is chilling, you risk looking like you’re no savvier than the folks who freaked out about it in the first place.

So Sandifer must continually reassure his readers: “it’s OK, I think these people are ludicrous, I’m not taking them seriously.”  This explains why he keeps on taking potshots against Yudkowsky and Moldbug long after he’s fully dismissed them as serious thinkers.  He knows that a book that treats these people even as serious literary characters is going to strike a lot of people as conceding too much to them.  So he tries to treat them as serious literary characters, because that’s his fundamental project, but he still keeps worrying that he might be taking them too seriously for his audience’s tastes, and so he keeps interrupting the story with more disses, until the cancerous tissue of the disses occupies so much space that the story is a mere shadow of what it might have been.

This also explains why his disses are so half-hearted.  That’s not to say he’s too nice: he’s perfectly willing to call these people idiots.  If anything, though, he still pulls his punches.  He’s willing to call the trio some nasty names – because that’s a cheap, easy way to convey antipathy – but he doesn’t delve into their work far enough to identify its true (and vast and deep) flaws, sometimes ignoring obvious and damning critiques in favor of much weaker ones.  You can get a far more damning primer on Moldbug’s failings from the Anti-Reactionary FAQ (published Oct. 2013), and as sweet Yudkowsky dunks go, he has nothing on someone like @argumate​.

I don’t think this is because Sandifer can’t write a takedown.  I think it’s because his heart isn’t it in.  He’d never countenance this kind of laziness when it comes to Milton and Blake, because he actually cares about Milton and Blake.

But nonetheless, the half-hearted dunks interrupt the action again and again, insistently, compulsively.  Because if he went too long without them, he’d be writing an actual treatise on the serious literary potential, the horror and beauty, of “Red Pills” and “basilisks,” of silly and possibly evil internet ephemera.

I don’t want to go too far here, but I hope this way of going-too-far is in the spirit of all of this: it seems like his decision to send review copies to neoreactionaries and Less Wrong rationalists would fit naturally into this defense.  Presumably these people will get bees in their bonnets and write some infuriated words, which will reinforce the impression that Sandifer’s book is a takedown, which will neutralize any remaining sense that he’s fraternizing with the enemy.

I should be clear.  I’m not saying that Sandifer agrees with the trio’s substantial claims, any more than one has to endorse Humbert Humbert’s self-presentation to enjoy Lolita.  But there are some people who, understandably, can’t enjoy Lolita anyway, because they simply and for good reason want nothing to do with people like H.H., and are emphatically opposed to exploring his emotional complexities, his pathos, what can be done with him from a playful ironic literary remove.  They don’t want to explore his possibilities; they just want to say “fuck that guy” and be done with it.  So, too, with some people and neoreaction.  But Sandifer is not one of these.  He’s interested in the pathos and the playful possibilities.  He wants to write Lolita, not a manual on the prevention of child abuse.

And so, in the book itself, like one of the horror protagonists he discusses, Sandifer continually, compulsively – and less and less convincingly – says no, asserts that nothing is wrong, that he’s in control, that he’s not unhealthily interested in his subjects, that he knows they’re wrong and evil (did you know he thinks they’re wrong and evil?  let’s say it again to make sure), that he may be gazing into the abyss but – rest easy – it’s not gazing into him, that nothing is off here, dear reader, oh no, that the trio is just as dismissible as you thought when you began reading, let me just reiterate that once again for clarity, no there is not anything going on over there in the shadows –

He’s of the Devil’s party, but he doesn’t know it.

Man, I definitely have to give Phil Sandifer props for getting my creative juices flowing.  I just have so much shit I want to write about his book, even though most of it is negative.  There’s more to come soon.

NAB notes: Moldbug and counter-revolution

(This is really long, and I apologize if people dislike these dash-stretching posts.  I prefer not to use cuts for this kind of thing because that way people skimming the dash may notice a particular bit of interest.)

One of the central themes of Neoreaction A Basilisk is that philosophies can have implications – “monsters” – that horrify their creators, or which go against their creators’ most cherished values.  So there are a number of sections where Sandifer looks for these sorts of contradictions in the output of the trio.  (See the discussion of “pwnage” in @psybersecurity‘s review)

Let’s look at one such contradiction Sandifer identifies in Moldbug.  There’s a lot of stuff going on in the passage about this – Johnson’s quip that “the first Whig was the Devil,” Satan as a character in Paradise Lost, Sandifer’s distinction between “Satanic negations” and “Antichristal negations,” etc.

But the basic idea is that Moldbug rhetorically identifies “the devil” or “Satan” with chaos, which he hates, order being (ostensibly) his highest value.  Yet (Sandifer says) Moldbug himself imitates the Satan of Paradise Lost in several ways, both because he relies constantly on a “yes, but” rhetorical strategy and, more simply, because Moldbug is (or wants to be) a chaotic, edgy, rebellious figure, handing out Red Pills to people who just want the vertiginous thrill of seeing their old ordered reality for the bullshit it is(, man).

Certainly this tension is there in Moldbug.  He’s a raving firebrand for the cause of order and stability, and despite valuing those things he keeps turning on the reader with a wink, saying “yes, but no” and pulling away the solid ground you thought you were on.   His says that reading his writing is like taking a psychedelic drug, and psychedelic trips are not noted for their stability or for their tendency to induce faith in firm hierarchies.

But how weird is this, really?  Should we be surprised?  Sandifer thinks it’s weird, that Moldbug is in fact the kind of chaotic force he loathes most.  But I think that in saying so, he’s missing what a reactionary actually is.

I’m relying here on Corey Robin’s interesting essay collection The Reactionary Mind, particularly the first two essays, which handily enough are both available in full online – one on the nature of conservatism and one on Hobbes.  I recommend reading both, which may even make my words here superfluous, since I’m mostly just going to regurgitate Robin.  (Of course, you might think Robin is full of shit, although to me he’s pretty convincing.)

Robin’s basic theme is of modern conservatism descends less from the complacent voices of any given “old order” than from the voices of reaction – that is, the firey new voices that rise up in defense of the old order when it is challenged, who often see things quite differently than the old order did before the challenge arose.

Robin’s second theme is that these reactionary voices tend to concede that things really are different after the challenge – that we can’t just pretend the revolution never happened – and in fact adopt (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) the tactics of the revolutionary forces, even making a pitch for the old order in the same terms used by its overthrowers.  (”Aristocracy is the real revolution, man.”  Or: “you want to really blow your mind?  Read Moldbug.”)

The reactionary isn’t the muddy-headed aristocrat who wants nothing more than to hunt game on his spacious estate – he’s restless and roiling, a political animal, a firebrand, just one who happens to argue for the aristocratic system.

Robin writes:

Ever since Edmund Burke invented conservatism as an idea, the conservative has styled himself a man of prudence and moderation, his cause a sober—and sobering—recognition of limits. “To be conservative,” writes Michael Oakeshott, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown … the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant.” Yet the political efforts that have roused the conservative to his most profound reflections – the reactions against the French and Bolshevik revolutions, the defense of slavery and Jim Crow, the attack on social democracy and the welfare state, the serial backlashes against the New Deal, the Great Society, civil rights, feminism, and gay rights – have been anything but that. Whether in Europe or the United States, in this century or previous ones, conservatism has been a forward movement of restless and relentless change, partial to risk taking and ideological adventurism, militant in its posture and populist in its bearings.

In other words: being a whirlwind force of chaos in the name of the old order isn’t an aberration, it’s the norm.

Robin finds this tendency in a number of places.  The one that’s most interesting in re: Moldbug is the case of Joseph de Maistre, one of the classic reactionaries, a vigorous defender of monarchism in the wake of the French Revolution.  But Maistre said a lot of things that may surprise you.  Robin again:

[Burke and Maistre share] an antipathy, bordering on contempt, for the old regime they claim as their cause. The opening chapters of Maistre’s Considerations on France are an unrelenting assault on the three pillars of the ancien régime: the aristocracy, the church, and the monarchy. Maistre divides the nobility into two categories: the treasonous and the clueless. The clergy is corrupt, weakened by its wealth and lax morals. The monarchy is soft and lacks the will to punish. […]

The second element we find in these early voices of reaction is a surprising admiration for the very revolution they are writing against. Maistre’s most rapturous comments are reserved for the Jacobins, whose brutal will and penchant for violence – their “black magic” – he plainly envies. The revolutionaries have faith, in their cause and themselves, which transforms a movement of mediocrities into the most implacable force Europe has ever seen. Thanks to their efforts, France has been purified and restored to its rightful pride of place among the family of nations. “The revolutionary government,” Maistre concludes, “hardened the soul of France by tempering it in blood.” […]

Archmonarchist that he was, Maistre understood that the king could never return to power if he did not have a touch of the plebeian about him. So when Maistre imagines the triumph of the counterrevolution, he takes care to emphasize the populist credentials of the returning monarch. The people should identify with this new king, says Maistre, because like them he has attended the “terrible school of misfortune” and suffered in the “hard school of adversity.” He is “human,” with humanness here connoting an almost pedestrian, and reassuring, capacity for error. He will be like them. Unlike his predecessors, he will know it, which “is a great deal.

My point isn’t that Maistre is especially like Moldbug, but that he clearly thinks a little chaos and bloodshed can sometimes really hit the spot, that Satan (in Sandifer’s sense) is not the enemy.  And that he’s willing to adapt his case to revolutionary times, much as Moldbug does.  And this from a guy who’s basically the prototypical reactionary!

Robin’s essay on Hobbes, who he (while aware of the obvious objections) calls “the first counterrevolutionary,” is more in the same vein.  But it’s worth reading too because Hobbes, in Robin’s portrait, just sounds so much like the kind of guy who’d call his ideas “the Red Pill”:

It’s no accident that Hobbes fled his enemies and then his friends, for he was fashioning a political theory that shredded longstanding alliances. Rather than reject the revolutionary argument, he absorbed and transformed it. From its deepest categories and idioms he derived an uncompromising defense of the most hidebound form of rule. He sensed the centrifugal pulses of early modern Europe – the priesthood of all believers, the democratic armies massing under the banner of ancient republican ideals, science and skepticis – and sought to convert them into a single centripetal force: a sovereign so terrible and benign as to make any challenge to such authority seem not only immoral but also irrational. Not unlike the Italian Futurists, Hobbes put dissolution in the service of resolution. He was the first and, along with Nietzsche, the greatest philosopher of counterrevolution, a blender avant la lettre of cultural modernism and political reaction who understood that to defeat a revolution you first must become the revolution.

As a certain movie protagonist once said: “whoa.”

OK, I’ve more than made my point there.  And I’ve only claimed that Moldbug shares these tensions with his most famous antecedents, not that the tensions are (therefore?) not a problem.  Maybe this is just a problem for all these guys, for Hobbes and Maistre et. al. as well as for Moldbug.

But in that case, it’s just a problem with reaction, not with Moldbug.  (Robin would say it’s a problem with the entirety of conservatism.)  Sandifer’s frame is about mad philosophers and horror protagonists delving too deep into the dark; for this to work, Moldbug has to be struggling with something newly and idiosyncratically awful and self-opposing.  If Moldbug’s descent into the dark happens just because he’s a reactionary, then it’s pretty commonplace and well-established, as encounters with horror go.  The basilisk there isn’t neoreaction, it’s just reaction, and Moldbug’s venturing into anything but the unknown.

Is there a better way to play Sandifer’s game with Moldbug?  I think so.

I’m admittedly much less sure of myself with Moldbug than I am with Yudkowsky.  I’ve read some Moldbug posts here and there, but Sandifer seems to have read a lot more Moldbug than I have.  Anyway, let’s see how well I do.

Sandifer more-or-less identifies Moldbug’s core value as “order,” as opposed to “chaos,” hence the Satan thing:

Over and over again, Moldbug insists that order, law, and the concept of goodness are interchangeable synonyms, whereas chaos is inherently a force for evil and indeed the very definition of evil.

He specifically quotes at one point from Part 3 of Moldbug’s Open Letter series, which defines reaction as favoring order.  Here’s another quote from that post:

A reactionary - ie, a right-winger - is someone who believes in order, stability, and security. All of which he treats as synonyms.

This sounds like Sandifer’s line about synonyms.  But the triad, at least in this particular line, isn’t the same one.  In particular, “order” is arguably the least progressive-friendly term here.  “I value order” calls up, for me, a lot of scary, dystopian scenarios.  But “stability” and “security”?  Hey, I like those too.  I may want to attend a wild party now and then, but I also want to be able to walk home safely.

“Being able to walk home safely,” I think, is really the more fundamental concept for Moldbug here, which is getting referred to as “order” a lot because, hey, synonyms.  My sense is that what motivates Moldbug is not “order” as a pure abstract concept – which would a pretty weird and alien preference even before he even starts devising governments to ensure it – but a revulsion towards violence.

He puts things this way in his very first post, “A Formalist Manifesto”:

The basic idea of formalism is just that the main problem in human affairs is violence. The goal is to design a way for humans to interact, on a planet of remarkably limited size, without violence.

Especially organized violence. Next to organized human-on-human violence, a good formalist believes, all other problems - Poverty, Global Warming, Moral Decay, etc, etc, etc - are basically insignificant. Perhaps once we get rid of violence we can worry a little about Moral Decay, but given that organized violence killed a couple of hundred million people in the last century, whereas Moral Decay gave us “American Idol,” I think the priorities are pretty clear.

Compared to Protect Order At All Costs, Chaos Is The Tool Of Satan, this is pretty friendly and recognizable stuff.  He states it pretty starkly, but I do think reducing violence is pretty good as basic goals go, if you have to choose just one.  (See also his fears that someone will physically harm his daughter.  EDIT 5/14/16: if you’re interested, I wrote about the racism in that post here)

A bit later he replaces the word “violence” with “friction,” which is broader.  It covers any sort of uncertainty over the result of a conflict that might cause both sides to judge the conflict worth a go.  (This is what animal dominance hierarches are trying to avoid – they figure out who can beat up whom and trust the results, so no one actually has to fight.)  Avoiding this is, again, pretty good as basic goals go.

So how do Moldbug’s ideas come back to horrify him?  Simple.  Scott Alexander covered it long ago in great and delicious detail.  The problem for Moldbug is that the political systems he thinks might be nice and nonviolent and frictionless are in fact the exact opposite.

Monarchy is frictionless?  What the fuck?  Practically every famous story about kings is about friction, and there are a lot of these stories, and they happen in quite compressed sequence.  Rebellions against the monarch happen constantly.  Monarchs tend to lose their position by getting killed by people who then take their place, and this recycling occurs at quite a fast clip.  The Hundred Years’ War involved a dizzying network of larger and smaller friction that honestly – speaking as a pampered democratic modern – makes my head spin, with a dispute over succession to the throne of France interlocking with various smaller succession disputes.  It’s not that everyone knew who was sovereign over what; it feels more like no one knew who was sovereign over anything.  Popes, who were absolute rulers of their own domains, excommunicated each other, squabbled over succession, and sometimes decided they had sovereignty over the stuff kings were supposed to have sovereignty over.  It was Moldbug’s nightmare.  And with all this friction came, yes, a massive amount of pointless violence, moving in vast and unpredictable waves.

Moldbug must know all this.  I mean, it’s there in the record.  Trying to write it off as one big Cathedral lie would be impossible.  But still he persists in his bizarre vision of stability under monarchy.

What is Moldbug’s basilisk?  “Here, the House of Stuart is back.  Really.  You are the subject of a king, now.  Enjoy your order, stability and security.  It’s what you wanted.”