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cousin_it comments on Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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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.