First, note the spelling: confusingly, it's Swartz, not Schwartz.
While it's as hard as ever to make sense of Moldbug's stream of consciousness, it seems like he is stuck in a circular redefinition of "underdog". The regular definition involves comparing priors, while his is comparing posteriors:
In the real world in which we live, the weak had better know their own weakness. If they would gather their strength, do it! But without fighting, even "civil disobedience." To break a law is to fight. Those who fight had better be strong. Those who are not strong, had better not fight.
How do you actually figure out who is stronger? The only definitive test is to let them fight it out. No one expected a minor act of civil disobedience in Tunisia to topple multiple governments across the globe.
As for the typically sensationalist title "Noam Chomsky Killed Aaron Swartz", while Chomsky's writings may have inspired Swartz to act, like they inspired other people to act, the decision to fight and the choice of weapons was Swartz's alone. How close he was to his next victory (he won against the establishment several times before), we will never know, because the trial will not happen now. He could have been one depression pill away from pulling through. His cause may yet prevail if the paywall customs will change in the wake of his suicide.
What do people see in Moldbug, anyway, beyond his provocative writing style?
What do people see in Moldbug, anyway, beyond his provocative writing style?
I actually strongly disliked his verbose and provocative writing style at first but was drawn in by the content. I don't agree with on everything but steel manning his missteps as much as I steel man the missteps of authors in Academia or pundits of the New York Times have found his models much better and superior at giving good predictions about political outcomes (for example the Arab Spring).
So yeah he is quite clever and relatively good at modelling the world.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html
Summary: Moldbug on the Aaron Schwartz affair. Power is a very real thing with real consequences for activists, yet many people don't understand the nature of power in modern times. People like Noam Chomsky get great fame doing bad epistomology about who has power, and as a result do great harm to idealistic nerds who don't read between the lines to selectively target their attacks at weak institutions (Exxon, Pentagon) instead of strong ones (State, academica incl. MIT).
Here he returns to a theme that is one of his real contributions to blogospheric political thought: that victory in political competitions provides Bayesian information about who has power and who doesn't. If your worldview has the underdog somehow systematically beating the overdog, your epistemology is simply wrong - in the same way, and to the same extent, as a geocentrist who has to keep adding epicycles to account for anomalous observations.
This means that activists like King, Schwartz, and Assange are only effective in bullying the weak, not standing up to the strong (despite conventional narratives that misassign strengths to institutions). When such activists stop following the script, and naively use the same tactics to attack strong institutions, reality reasserts itself quite forcefully: