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Vladimir_Golovin comments on This Failing Earth - Less Wrong
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Sounds scary. Michael, if writing up the full post will take too long, could you post a short summary / key facts here in the comments?
after the civil war a pipeline was built from the heart of academia into the sewage of politics, hoping that the crystal pure waters of science would wash out the muck. no one remembered to install a backflow valve and the sewage of politics simply backed up into academia.
90% of grants come from the same place. You don't need conspiracy theories to explain coordination when everyone is getting checks with the same signature.
edit: before i get down modded to oblivion I'd just like to point out that standard history suffers from severe crippling hindsight bias. history properly interpreted is the search for decisions that had disproportionate impact on the future light cone. Because we dont have access to alternate presents this is extremely difficult and the standard methods strike me as guilty of the same curve fitting that evolution was in its infancy (lamarckianism, social darwinism, other sillyness).
You ought to cite the text you are quoting.
i'm genuinely curious about how other less wrong readers feel about UR. The robin/moldbug thread on OB was on a thoroughly boring subject.
Huge fan here. Not sure that Moldbug is necessarily the most reliable thinker of good thoughts, but his good thoughts have almost no overlap with other people's good thoughts, which makes them especially informative.
Yes, exactly. If more people were writing on Moldbug's topics (structural improvements to government, differences between past and present that we completely miss because we are surrounded only by present, shittiness of many modern institutions, especially politics and academia) I doubt I would read him. He tends to exaggerate his theses and make overly sweeping claims (the comments often have good rebuttals), and I try to avoid people who say false things, especially interesting false things. His numerous mistaken comments on prediction markets are a good example.
But in the current intellectual climate, I think he adds a lot of valuable signal. I'm not the most objective b/c his areas of interest strongly overlap with mine, but for me he's a must-read.
I am in tentative agreement with Moldbug's main points. But like patrissimo says, some of his claims are overly sweeping. Unlike patrissimo, I have no significant personal stake in Moldbug's being right aside from the stake we all have in the health of the state and the society in which we live.
I see him as an eloquent crank. He's so far out from the mainstream that I can't really endorse anything he says, but he serves as a kind of sanity check, because he makes well crafted (and, sometimes, well-cited) arguments against things people usually take for granted.
(One complaint that I do have, however, is his focus on rising crime rates. The general historical trend in homicide rates has been a steady decrease.)
I agree with this. I think his writings reek of "dark side epistemology". He uses a lot of florid, non-precise, language filled with obscure references that seemed designed to instill reverence rather than educate.
The irony is that I agree with him about many things, but I can't stand him because he seems far too overconfident about the accuracy of his shocking claims.
Says the guy who posts on Less Wrong...
historical data of such a nature is worthless. if the ratio of recorded crime:crime changes how can you extract a meaningful trend? can you take into account the cost of living in areas vs the level of crime? (does it cost more or less today to buy yourself out of crime heavy areas?). trying to do induction over social data is one of the main things I'm in agreement with MM about. It's a waste of time. You can't isolate variables well enough to do proper regressions.
MM using crime as justification for widespread changes to society is one of the weird things about his position, taking into account his position on scientism in the social sciences.
If you'd like a second source, you could read Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment; he dates decline in excellence to roughly the same time period, although he has no strong explanation of the statistics.
seconded
Seconded.