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Emile comments on Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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I've been trying to do roughly that, though focusing more on the "smart and highly articulate" aspect and dropping "emotional mockery". When I read someone taking cheap shots at a position I might hold, I mostly find the writer childish and annoying, I don't see how reading more of that would improve my rationality. It doesn't really hurt my feelings, unlike some commenters here, so I guess different people need to be prodded in different ways.
For smart and articulate writers with a rationalist vibe, I would recommend Mencius Moldbug (posts are articulate but unfortunately quite long; advocates monarchy, colonialism and slavery) and Noam Chomsky. Any recommendations of smart, articulate and "extreme" writers whose views are far from those two?
I'll have to disagree, at least to the extent that this is taken as a positive attribute. I find his posts to be rambling and cutesy, which may correspond to articulate. But most people here have the kind of mind that prefers "get to the point" writing, which he fails at.
I have the same reaction to someone taking cheap shots, period. It doesn't matter whether they're arguing something I agree with, disagree with, or don't care about. It just lowers my opinion of the writer.
I think Moldbug is far away from any living thinker you could name. And he'd probably tell you so himself.
(FWIW, I think Moldbug is usually wrong, through a combination of confirmation bias and reversed stupidity, although I'm still open on Austrian economics in general.)
I have a very hard time evaluating Moldbug's claims, due to my lack of background in the relevant history, but holy shit, do I ever enjoy reading his posts.
The crowd here may be very interested in watching him debate Robin Hanson about futarchy before an audience at the 2010 Foresight conference. Moldbug seems to be a bit quicker with the pen than in person.
Moldbug's initial post that spurred the argument is here; it's very moldbuggy, so the summary, as far as my understanding goes, is like this: Futarchy is exposed to corrupt manipulators, decision markets can't correctly express comparisons between multiple competing policies, many potential participants are incapable of making rational actions on the market, and it's impossible to test whether it's doing a good job.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/05/futarchy-considered-retarded.html
Video of the debate is here: http://vimeo.com/9262193
Moldbug's followup: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/01/hanson-moldbug-debate.html
Hanson's followup: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/my-moldbug-debate.html
I enjoy reading his posts too (when I have the time - not much, lately), but I wasn't very impressed by his debate with Robin Hanson - his arguments seemed to be mostly rehashing typical arguments against prediction markets that I'd heard before.
I was less than impressed by Hanson's response (in a comment) to http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/pipe-shorting-and-professor-hansons.html
Yeah, that response didn't have much content, but I think that's pretty understandable considering that by that point in their debate, Moldbug had already revealed himself to be motivated by something other than rational objections to Hanson's ideas, and basically immune to evidence. In their video debate it became very clear that Moldbug's strategy was simply to hold Hanson's ideas to an impossibly high standard of evidence, hold his own ideas to an incredibly low standard of evidence, and then declare victory.
So I can understand why Hanson might not have thought it was worth investing a lot more time in responding point by point.
I'm kinda torn about Moldbug. His political arguments look shaky, but whenever he hits a topic I happen to know really well, he's completely right. (1, 2) Then again, he has credentials in CS but not history/economy/poli-sci, so the halo effect may be unjustified. Many smart people say dumb things when they go outside their field.
That just shows he got two easy questions right. When he spells out his general philosophy, which I had criticized before, you see just how anti-rational his epistemology is. You're just seeing a broken clock at noon.
By the way, anyone know if "Mencius Moldbug" is his real name? It sounds so fake.
He states that it's a pseudonym. (It's actually quite a clever one - unique, and conveys a lot about him.)
MM's name combines the pseudonyms he previously used as a commenter in two separate blogging realms (HBD and finance).
It's a pseudonym; he's said that himself, but I don't remember where.
I am about 80% confident that his real name is [redacted]
Publically revealing people trying to stay anonymous (though admittedly in his case, not very hard) is not very nice :P
Funny, I like CS too but his writings put me off in part; I particularly disliked his Nock language. It looks like a seriously crappy Lisp to me (and I like Haskell better).
Agreed, Nock was a neat puzzle, but not much more. I have no idea why he tried to oversell it so.
Nock was followed by Urbit, "functional programming from scratch", but that project doesn't seem to have gone anywhere, and it's not clear to me where there would be for it to go. His vision of "Martian code", "tiny and diamond-perfect" is still a castle in the air, the job of putting a foundation under it still undone.
A criticism that I think applies to his politics as well. He does a fine destructive critique of the current state of things and how we got here, but is weak on what he would replace it by.
Probably, as lon as you restrict yourself to sane, articulate thinkers in the West. There are probably even more outlandish ideas in Japan, India, or the Islamic world.
Come to think of it, it would probably be more instructive to read "non-westernized" intellectuals from India, Korean, Japan, China or the Islamic world, talking about the west. I think Moldbug recommended a medieval Japanese writer talking about his experience in America, but I can't find it right now.
Yukichi Fukuzawa. Only limited parts of his works are online (eg. in Google Books, very limited previews).
Slavery? I'm certainly not defending Moldbug, but if he advocated slavery, I must have missed that post. Do you have a link?
See http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=slavery%20site%3Aunqualified-reservations.blogspot.com%2F
And there is, of course, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html which cannot be excerpted and done proper justice.
Hrmmmm... haven't read the second link yet, but that first excerpt is.... well.... yeah. The selling yourself into slavery part is basically unobjectionable (to a libertarian), but selling your children into slavery.......
I think Moldbug's positions seem to be derived not so much from reversed stupidity as reversed PC.
Why do you think MM has a rationalist vibe?. He doesn't talk about probability or heuristics/biases etc.
I would defend an (eviscerated) monarchy such as Canadians like me and other Commonwealthers have as being a social good, insofar as it's a rich & elegant tradition that's not very pernicious.
Actual "off with his head" monarchy... nah.
And if Prince Charles decides to flap his unelected gums too much when he accedes, you may see me change my tune. But at the moment I'm happy to be a subject of HM Queen Elizabeth.