The Vietcong never existed. They were an arm of Hanoi. And Hanoi was never an enemy in the sense that the US wanted it to be overthrown or lose territory - nor in the sense that US derecognized Hanoi's authority over large parts of North Vietnam. The US seriously undermines the very existence of Israel. It never undermined the communist regime in the North. The squabble between the US and North Vietnam was like a quarrel within a marriage, like the frequent disputes between the Pentagon and the State Department. Indeed, Mencius argues that it was a dispute between the Pentagon and the State Department. In contrast, the dispute between the US and Rhodesia was existential.

The world that we think we are familiar with may be quite different from the way we think it is. We know less than we think. As you write the words above, you are (typically) in a room somewhere, looking at a monitor, surrounded by walls. You see very little of the world, just a few cubic meters of your immediate surroundings. So how do you know about the world that exists outside those four walls? Could it be that you remember that world, that you remember having been outside these walls before entering the room and writing your forum comment? So you have an eyewitness's memory of the world outside. Eyewitnesses, however, are notoriously unreliable (just google eyewitness reliable, you'll find discussion about this phenomenon). So your own personal memory of the world is unreliable. We know furthermore that your consciousness of what is in front of your eyes right now has enormous gaps. There has been a lot of interesting activity in this area. Google change blindness for example. Google invisible gorilla. So, we know very little about what is happening right now immediately around us. We have unreliable memory of what happened to us in the past. And now we move from our most direct sources of knowledge to indirect sources of knowledge, mostly what other people say. The unreliability of our senses, of our mind, and of our memory, must now be combined with the added unreliability of what other people tell us. This forum called "lesswrong" and its parent blog called "overcoming bias" are built in large part on the assumption that people are unreliable, often wildly unreliable. A little humility is in order. This is not to say that Mencius Moldbug is uniquely clear-sighted. That's not my point. My purpose is to dent, at least a little, the confidence that he must be wrong because he contradicts what we know quite well the world is like. You write: [...] That can be taken two ways. If you have great self-confidence in your knowledge of the world and in the absen