I thought the other "side" was supposed to have its case presented in the original? I saw an entirely political attack that relied on skewed facts and opportunistic grandstanding over a recent death. I retorted with some ways in which it's dishonest, fallacious and doesn't constitute anything like a proper rational argument.
So you responded with a political attack on a similar level? Surely you see the problem with that kind of reasoning.
My retort was also quite political in substance, true. And yet, if Moldbug or some of his fans were really interested in making the whole thing more truth-tracking, they would listen to my counter-examples and either refute them or make their case incorporate it somehow. The same goes for other people's objections in this thread.
I didn't write nor share this article by Moldbug. And I have always tried my best to make proper rational arguments by the highest LW standards when introducing such material.
Yet due to the climate in this thread a rational argument wouldn't be judged fairly. By the voting patterns and shifts I can tell users have gotten tribal.
Personally, I don't follow Moldbug's writings. Sometimes, when excerpts are posted here, I upvote them, and sometimes I downvote them. In this case, it seems to me that his argument fails to account for the influence of context in confrontations between entities. His formulation implies a transitivity of power, where A beats B, and B beats C, so A should also beat C. In practice though, you can easily end up with situations where A beats B because A's interests in the confrontation are more in line with public opinion than B's, or take less work to impleme...
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: