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