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FiftyTwo comments on [Link] Noam Chomsky Killed Aaron Schwartz - Less Wrong
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Comments (116)
Can we add ignoring Moldbug to our general "don't feed the trolls" policy? He's deliberately provocative.
I don't think he is properly described as a "troll", though I'm puzzled by the high opinion that some folks here appear to have of Moldbug. This is someone who is manifestly not seeking truth honestly, doesn't write very clearly, often engages in mind-killer disputes, seldom makes claims that can be directly tested or even falsified in principle, and hasn't made any substantive contributions to any branch of science, philosophy, or mathematics.
The title is quite definitely just trolling. Edit: On Moldbug's part, not Athrelon's for quoting it.
I would have changed the title to something else if I had decided to share this only sharing the original title in the article itself.
I mean on Moldbug's part, I'm not blaming the poster for Moldbug's title :-)
Yes, I agree with that.
I think the reason why Moldbug is so often quoted around here is the following: There is a great diversity of political opinion on LW, and occasionally there are discussions touching on political issues. When these arise, a LWer whose general political outlook is leftist, liberal, centrist or libertarian will find it easy to find support and elaboration for their positions in links and references to many other writers sharing the same outlook and explaining it at the high intellectual level that LWers expect. There being many such writers, there is none who is disproportionately cited and referenced in LW. However, a LWer with a conservative/reactionary outlook has much fewer expositions of these ideas to link to (that other LWers would find plausible/intellectually congenial; Fox News pundits or Catholic theologians would not do.) Moldbug is one of the very few writers expounding this ideology in a way broadly compatible with the LW outlook, and hence it is not surprising that he is referenced more often that other political writers.
Perhaps memetic hazard is more accurate. The effect he has on LW commenters is somewhere between nerd sniping and the self congratulatory rage 'blue' commentators get into when a green says something obviously bad.
I disagree with Moldbug on many things, but I disagree with this even more.
While I have decided that many topics I like talking about probably should be written about on a different community blog, I don't intend to leave this site as an active commenter.
However if this norm is accepted it would much reduce my opinion of the rationality of the group passing it.
I therefore second CharlieSheen.
No dude. Just no. If that becomes policy I'm out of here.
I second this.
I strongly disagree with this.
Not all of his content is relevant to refining human rationality, interesting to this community or productive to discuss here. I wouldn't have posted this particular article. But many are, to give examples:
Also much of the writing of bloggers such as Federico that write very relevant material can only be understood if you have a good grounding in Moldbuggery.
As far as I can tell, there is more discussion of Moldbug on this site than there is of any other contemporary non-scientific non-LW figure. Do you believe this relative quantity is commensurate with the quality and significance of his thought?
I predict that if I started making multiple Discussion posts focused solely on the social criticism of Althusser or Deleuze or Zizek, I would face a very negative reaction from this community, even if I gussied it up with talk of "map vs. territory" and "Bayesian evidence". Yet for some reason the community seems far more tolerant of rampant Moldbuggery. I suspect this is primarily due to historical reasons dating back to the Overcoming Bias days, as well as the fact that Moldbug's writing style is more "nerd-friendly" than that of many other idiosyncratic political theorists.
For reasons such as these, some Moldbug enthusiasts here seem to operate on the assumption that anything written by Moldbug is by default a good topic of conversation on this site. I suspect that if the points made in the OP were written by someone other than Moldbug, they would not have been posted here. The filters used to determine which of Moldbug's ideas are good topics of discussion here are far too permissive. I don't think a ban is the correct response, but I do think that Moldbug fans need to be more reflective about what these discussions are contributing to this site.
I've recently noticed that Althusser's ISA vs. RSA distinction makes many of the same observations and arguments Moldbug has.
Except there's a perfectly reasonable way to take the ideas of these people and strengthen them from the perspective of epistemic rationality. Some ideas still pass through, while others need to be modified. And this is a process that desperately needs to happen, for all the criticisms the center LW group will give against philosophy in general.
I'm not sure, although comparing him with the examples you site in your next paragraph certainly makes him seem much more worthy. Seriously, could you have found someone whose philosophy does not contradict basic economics?
Could you site another example of a discussion post that's a link to Moldbug?
I think the comparison is fair. Both the Austrian and the Marxist economic traditions are pretty fringe and severely flawed. Moldbug has interesting and occasionally accurate things to say about politics despite his bad economics, but so do Althusser et al.
There are two of them linked in the comment by Konkvistador to which I was responding.
I'm skeptical that what was interesting was unique to Moldbug, or that what was unique to Moldbug was interesting.
Does he even claim much in the way of originality? The only obviously new thing that comes to mind is Patchwork, which is indeed stupid. But it certainly seems like he's mostly a convert to an intellectual tradition that is at best marginal but was once much more popular. Carlyle, Froude, de Maistre, Schmitt, he's mostly not claiming to be the source of his big ideas. He's a pretty decent sociologist or political scientist at times but mostly he's just a man out of his time, which appears to be somewhere in the 1800s.
He's such a terrible historian, so I can't really see his sociology or political theory as worthwhile.
Regarding originality, I think he suffers the same problem as early Eliezer - failure to acknowledge sources. It's not that big a problem for Eliezer because most of his sources (logical positivist philosophers, Dennett, etc.) would agree with, or at least respect, the new conclusions that are being drawn in the sequences.
Moldbug's citation problem is much bigger because many of his interesting ideas are straight from thinkers who would disagree with his conclusions. Further, Moldbug's core audience is very hostile to those thinkers.
Konkvistador cites previous discussion of Moldbug's view that religion deserves to be treated like an ideology. I don't disagree, but Marx's "Religion is the Opium of the People" can plausibly be read as asserting a very similar point. And the Chomskist Po-Mos take this idea even further, asserting that just about everything is an ideology. Likewise, "everything is an ideology" is the basic justification / explanation for Paul Graham's "Keep Your Identity Small." or the local Politics is the MindKiller norm.
Of these examples I see nothing that I would characterize myself as being hostile too. Except some of the more silly aspects of pomo.
What counts as silly post-modernism is exactly what is under dispute.
And weren't you asserting a few months ago that one should aim to be apolitical? Both Moldbug and post-modernism say that's essentially impossible for an active member of society.
I kind of failed at that pretty badly, though while it lasted it was a great exercise. I'll trying getting into it again. That it is impossible really isn't under dispute at all, what is under dispute is if it is useful to strive for such a state of mind.
Same can be said of human rationalism.
I don't think that answer to our human flaws is to retreat from trying to implement our terminal values. In other words, Politics is the MindKiller is not a certainty, simply a failure mode that society and its members have spent essentially no effort trying to avoid. If one can develop a sufficient level of self-criticism, one can do far better than the statistical norm.
That's been my strategy, anyway. Reject all false arguments, whether or not they lead to conclusions I like. If you think I've failed at that goal, I'd welcome your feedback. Crocker's Rules - for you, on this topic.
Generally I have had a high opinion of your output despite our disagreements on some value issues (which may or may not be actually incompatible), I recall some very neat rationalist debates.
It is more or less only the recent difference on our interpretation of Moldbug and some other minor things that lead me to believe you may not be open to good arguments associated with that cluster. I think you can avoid most of the risk of that by steel manning reactionary positions more when debating.
Have you even read the two articles? I found them interesting and they very much are his intellectual products. I'm sorry but I think you are being consistently less charitable to Moldbug than some other sources I won't list right now because I want to avoid political mindkilling. I don't see a good reason for this.
Does this comment about the first article you linked respond to your concern?
Regarding the second article, I just don't find it that interesting. Yes, it is worthwhile to notice how the ideas of the Protestant Reformation impacted later social justice movements up to the present day (i.e. morphological analysis). But there are lots of Reformation ideas, and not all of them transferred over to modern liberal thought (either the classical liberalism of Locke or the Fabian socialist liberalism of the community organizer).
And there's lots of ideas in modern social justice movements that doesn't descend from the Protestant side of the Reformation. Some Reformation ideas oppose later social justice ideas. That's my biggest problem with Moldbug - he constantly describes conflicts as two-sided when a more useful analysis would describe them as multi-sided. And, as shown by his whole Cold War = State Dept. v. Pentagon theory, Moldbug isn't particularly accurate at correctly labeling even if we grant a conflict only has two sides (I don't grant that about the Cold War, but that's probably a discussion for another day).
To pick another example, Moldbug's discussion about taking the political middle ground. His first observation - what currently is middle ground was quite radical for most of history - is true. And obvious to any serious student of history. The conclusions that Moldbug draws from that accurate and insightful point just don't follow at all.
put some links where your mouth is