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buybuydandavis comments on Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.] - Less Wrong
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Back maybe 15 years ago, the libertarian techno smarty pants were often anarcho capitalists. I think someone expressed that Moldbug has roots in anarcho capitalism. Neocameralism seems a natural evolution of that. "To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country." So, defense agencies are now tied to dirt (which I find a bow to the reality of defense economics and the practicalities of markets in force), but otherwise the intellectual assumptions (and mistake, IMO), are about the same.
Also, Moldbug's description of the progressive attitude toward conservatives largely matches the Moldbug attitude toward progressives - "They believe in a brain dead orthodoxy that props up an oppressive evil empire". Moldbuggers are the daring new tip of the spear.
One of the benefits of being way out on the fringe is that no one has bothered to make arguments against you yet, so you get to be right. You get to be a critic without being critiqued in turn. Good times.
UPDATE: For the influence of Anarcho Capitalism on Moldbug, and how he is basically an anarcho capitalist focused on the ownership of dirt, see his Formalist Manifesto:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.html
Particularly on his apparent anarcho capitalist roots:
I like this and I think I'm prone to forgetting this for a few months, then asking questions then realizing plenty of important bits haven't been thought through.
I'm proud to be working on correcting that, as Konkvistador and a few others can testify. I haven't written much so far, and it's scattered all over my comments and stuff, but still... it's another meta-level to the contrarianism pyramid.
Wait, are you "working on correcting that" on an object-level or the meta-level? (and don't answer yes).
Object-level mostly, I'm afraid. I have neither the knowledge nor the experience nor the reputation nor, probably, the gray matter that I'd need to organize a challenge to a powerhouse like Unqualified Reservations on a meta level. :) Seriously, Moldbug is just plain smarter than me; I can only argue against things where he appears deluded.
I would have thought that Moldbug's theory that the Cold War was an expression of bureaucratic conflict between the US State Department and the US military was sufficiently nonsensical that refutation was unnecessary.
Any point Moldbug might make about the liberal attitude towards conservatives seems more simply explained by "Politics is the mind-killer."
This doesn't explain the asymmetries we observe. His model does.
Which asymmetries do you mean? Regardless of merit, conservatives think liberals are wrong and liberals think conservatives are wrong. That's the mindkiller - no further explanation appears to be necessary. The word each side uses to label "wrong" is an expression of local applause lights - basically no substantive content at all.
To give an example. Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn't that interesting?
I wish he could say things using less then million words, or at least provide a short summary afterwards. My attempt at a short summary would be this:
People are more likely to prefer solutions that provide more power to them personally. Even if they are trying to choose the best solution for everyone, they still have this bias; they honestly think that a solution which gives them more power is the best for society.
In democracy, everyone has the power, in theory. But when we ask how their opinions are formed, there are two important sources: schools and media.
Therefore we should expect politics to move in a direction where schools and media have more power. (Or perhaps a direction where the average former student, media consumer, has more power? The same thing.) This direction is called "the Left".
Every other direction, e.g. trying to give more power to church, or entrepreneurs, or medieval nobility, or armed forces, or extraterrastrial lizards, or genetically superior mutants, or whatever... faces the same problem: the schools and media have no selfish reason to support them. These directions are collectively called "the Right".
There is no way to fix this, to remove the power from the schools and media, unless we remove democracy.
What is this an argument for? I can't figure it out. Is he saying that it's bad that people want more power?
Whether something is real or not, is independent on whether it is "good" or "bad". So in the first place, MM says that this is what happens: that people in democracies on average vote for more political power for the average Joe, which consequently means more power to those who form Joe's opinions -- the schools and the media.
True or false?
To me it seems essentially correct, with the addition that we should go further and examine who owns the schools and who owns the media, how much those owners influence the content of the message, and what are the incentives for the owners. As I understand MM, he says that successful journalists get their ideas from the schools, the whole school system gets their opinions from university professors, and the university professors are almost independent... except for their dependence on money from government. Which motivates them to descibe the world in a manner that calls for more money from the government to university professors.
Then, as a specific consequence, the university professors have an incentive to promote central planning over free market, because in central planning the government will pay them for research about how to plan things better. This is almost like paying them for saying: "central planning is the correct answer". On the other hand, promoting free market or other forms of citizens deciding independently of government (and professors) is almost like saying: "my job is superfluous, please fire me". Professors will have bias against that.
Only after we decide whether something is true or false, we should look at the consequences. MM says that the consequence of biased government decisions is ineffectivity in general, and specifically higher crime rates. (I did not check his numbers.)
I would say that the "more power" which people get, is mostly illusory for most people. It can make you feel good to have a right to vote for Republicans or Democrats or Libertarians or Greens, but so what? Either way Libertarians and Greens will lose, and both Republicans and Democrats will continue doing the things you hate, such as war, taxes and spying on citizens. On the other hand, the higher crime has more impact on you. So maybe... having more of this "power" is actually a net loss for the average Joe.
Does it seem correct to you because it is the way you would expect the world to be, or because you have good observational data to back it up? I ask mainly because to me it seems a question whose answer is hard to establish; it's true that in all democratic countries the average Joe gained some additional power in the course of the last century, but 1) it was mainly a result of suffrage extension; after establishing universal suffrage over 18 I don't see any systematic increase of average Joe's power, 2) when trying to conclude the direction of a very slow power shift, we need precise ways to define and measure power, unless we want to risk our conclusions being infested by bias and random errors; when asked whether the average José in Spain has more power now than he had fifteen years ago, not only I am unable to answer, but I also lack a clear idea what information to check if I seriously intended to do some research and find it out.
Not only I am not sure whether the average Joe has, on average, more power now than he had ten or twenty years ago (not speaking about countries which went through an abrupt regime change), but I also doubt whether the average Joe actually votes for more (political) power. I see election campaigns putting much emphasis on social security, taxes, crime, healthcare, corruption, even morality and religion in some countries, but comparably few parties promise more power to the citizens. If getting more power was one of the more important goals of the average Joe, why do the parties so rarely include it in their programs?
Another question is whether the average Joe thinks he's an average Joe -- given how self-serving biases work, I doubt it -- and if not, why would he vote for more power for someone else?
The average Joe knows that he is not a millionaire, he is not a movie star, and he did not get Nobel price. His biases will probably make him believe that he is between 60th and 70th percentile. He can still vote for less power for the top 10%, or more popularly 1%.
The rest of your questions... I don't really know. Right at this moment it occurred to me that perhaps the feeling of power is more important that the power itself; most people don't notice the difference. Saying "senator Sam will reduce crime and give you free healthcare if you vote for him, Joe" makes Joe feel powerful. Saying "milionaire Mark made his money legally, you can't take his money away and use it as you want, Joe" does not make Joe feel powerful. Even if in reality senator Sam has more money than millionaire Mark, and senator Sam makes some rules that reduce Joe's freedom, while Mark only provides cheap shiny toys for everyone. Generally, if Joe feels that he can influence the state (even if that influence is mostly illusory), a more powerful state will make Joe feel more powerful. But I don't know how to measure this feeling precisely.
I know Moldbug thinks it's true -- as much as anyone can know what that guy really thinks. I just think it's a facile argument in fancy clothes.
What's preferable to letting people feel powerful, even if it's illusory? How opposed to the free market are professors, really? If your summary is faithful, it seems like he's overstating the entrenchment of bad ideas in academia, or at the very least understating the feedback between disciplines where bad ideas are stickier and disciplines where bad ideas are quickly revealed as such. And are there many reasons to believe that application of central planning isn't getting more and more precise over time?
MM does not oppose central planning. His idea of a good state is to hire Steve Jobs and make him a dictator (or dictator's minister). Supposedly Steve Jobs is smart enough to prescribe central planning where central planning works better, and prescribe free market where free market works better, and measure the efficiency of both.
On the other hand, a democratic government decides between central planning and free market based on the popular opinion, which is based on professors' advice, which is driven by their desire to get more grant money. This leads to a choosing a policy not because it gives the best results, but because it is the best topic for writing papers about. For example: nobody really understands Keynesian economics, probably because it does not really work, which allows professors to publish many papers about it, which makes it popular among professors, and journalists (with some hyperbole here).
Essentially: Central planning as done in democracy is imprecise because academia introduces systematic biases into central planning. A non-democratic ruler could avoid this bias.
Your description omits the most important question: why are the schools and media for things other than democracy that we know to be "Left" ideologically - e.g. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or feminism, or other such stuff? Where have they got those memes originally? Me, I'm saying Robert Nisbet and Zizek are right: Progressivism derives directly from 1st Century Christianity (although its road was long and twisted).
Moldbug has made similar claims.
His "Calvinism" thing looks completely baseless and arbitrary to me, though, especially in the face of Nisbet's argument. Could it be more of an attempt to sweeten the pill for the "conservative" part of the audience by avoiding blaming "mainline" Christianity?
Or maybe Moldbug is just bad at processing/modelling religious feeling due to him being... neurodiverse... in a way that inhibits religion-connected parts of the psyche? I bet that's so.
I think this is precisely and amazingly correct. And Nisbet's argument has been around in "approved", non-contrarian science long before Moldbug!
You are plain wrong on this. I find this suspicious and strange since you didn't used to be.
He explicitly states that American progressivism is the descendant of mainline protestantism. As to his audience if anything most of his "conservative" non-atheist readers are probably protestant and nearly everyone reads him as blaming at the very least mainline protestantism too if not Christanity as a whole. Moldbug does rant less on Catholicism but I think that is because he sees the same thing Muflax speculated on:
I wanted to link to his profile too but he seems to have delete his LW account. :(
I'm not sure how it looks to you, but looking from an outside perspective, I can certainly see the similarities between Calvinism and Progressivism (specifically the form you seem to belong to).
In a number of places you expressed utter horror at the notion that people should face what they deserve. This reminds me of the Calvinist idea that everyone deserves to get thrown into hell.
Specifically, both strike me as possessing an alief, if not a belief, that being virtuous requires that one constantly feel guilty. What one should be feeling guilty about differs.
In the case of the Calvinist one should feel guilty about original sin, of which one is reminded whenever one experiences sexual attraction, or enjoys one's food, or has fun when one could be doing work. In the case of the Progressive one should be guilty about one's white/male/upper class/straight/righty/etc. (select all that apply) privilege, of which one is reminded whenever one perceives one is receiving the benefits of said privilege.
The article is interesting for how badly it misrepresents American history. Intellectual elitist dominance of US policy is a frequently debated topic throughout the history of the United States. Moldbug is right that certain views flowed from academia to public consciousness. But he ignores a lot of other causal factors.
Regarding US race relations, Moldbug ignores that (1) the trend towards pro-civil rights court rulings predates California's Proposition 14 by at least 40 years in cases like Buchanan v. Warley (1917) and Missouri exrel. Gaines (1938) and (2) the prime mover of US political opinion was probably public unwillingness to support the methods of Bull Connor.
Regarding the political tilt of academia, Moldbug ignores the conservative movement's recent success in creating an academic movement that lead to the appointment of conservative judges who have dramatically rolled back US constitutional and statutory interpretation from the more liberal positions of the Warren Court.
Finally, the disparate treatment of unjust tyrants like Castro and Pinochet in academia (1) ignores the different treatment of those regimes by the US government, and (2) partially reflects a feeling of guilt that the US was involved in establishing conservative regimes by taking actions like supporting the coup against Allende or the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and creation of the Mobutu regime. By contrast, there was relatively little US support for the creation of the Castro regime, and thus less culpability for the injustices that followed.
In short, Moldbug's history is incredibly selective - making it impossible to take seriously any of the conclusions he draws from his historical analysis.
That you tout this as a grand example of right wing victory is somewhat surprising, it in my eyes weakens your case considerably for it is a feeble thing compared to the vast cultural shift leftward in the past decades and centuries.
As far as I can tell, Moldbug's thesis is:
My points were (paragraph by paragraph):
- academic pressure doesn't explain the civil rights movement in the US
- academia is not immune to right-wing ideas
- the evidence that academia is leftist is explainable by other factors beyond ideological bias (with a side helping of policy-makers don't seem as leftist as their professors)
In short, that makes the second sentence of Moldbug's thesis not likely enough for further consideration. I leave it to you to judge whether the first sentence stands without the second. But Moldbug doesn't seem to think so - otherwise, why waste all that energy citing that particular historical evidence at all?
As an aside, if one's political theory really can't distinguish between the victorious community organizer and the defeated business executive, then my evidence is entitled to substantially less weight. But that isn't the consensus usage in the doctrines of history or political science dating back to before the rise of PC concerns (but after the Glorious Revolution - so Moldbug may not care). Further, I assert political theories that can't tell the difference (e.g. political Marxism as practiced) are insufficiently nuanced to be capable of making useful predictions.
This is a fully general argument against historical analysis. I can't think of a single historian who isn't incredibly selective.
Regardless I didn't mean to invoke the entire article, merely the statement which seems obviously correct in general. The w-force is there and we're not sure what it is. It might be caused by humans moving in a forager direction because of wealth, "moral progress", the same kind of memetic selection that gave us religions... Even if I agree with everything it has done so far and is likely to do in the near future, I probably wouldn't like what it does in a few decades or centuries. As I have no reason to suspect it has conveniently weakened at the time my values are in vogue this scares me.
I fear Cthulhu as I fear Azathot for much the same reasons.
No, it really isn't. Our confidence in empirical propositions from the history / social sciences disciplines is structurally lower than our confidence in empirical propositions from hard science. But that doesn't mean that we can't point to some empirical propositions and say "Not likely enough for further consideration."
We were having a discussion elsewhere about whether "moral progress" and "moral regress" were meaningful labels. Establishing our disagreement on those points seems to be a prerequisite for figuring out what we can and can't learn from history. At the very least, agreement on terminology is necessary to shorten inferential distance enough for us to even have a conversation.
I'd say he might be using hyperbole to aim his readers at what he perceives as the truth in this regard. Imitating Carlyle and so on :).
I'm still laughing at his model of the USSR though (grim grimy monotonous slum); my parents and grandparents have given me much better and more nuanced information about how it worked. Not to say that it wasn't grim, grimy or monotonous, but...