wedrifid comments on The best 15 words - Less Wrong

12 Post author: apophenia 03 October 2013 09:08AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (383)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 October 2013 01:18:56PM 2 points [-]

Are those the best 15 words that the guy has? If so, that provides me significant information and potentially saves me time.

Comment author: Ishaan 05 October 2013 05:53:57PM *  1 point [-]

I don't assign high confidence to my ability to summarize it accurately because I didn't really get it - I was frequently confused about the meaning. What little I did get out of it doesn't match the praise it gets, and history/political science are not areas that I currently consider myself well informed about, so there is a high chance I'm missing something. Also, keep in mind I'm summarizing someone whose opinions are, superficially speaking, aligned with a group I generally tend to disagree with, so I might have un-adjusted for biases. Also, The Complete Works of Moldbug is frickin' long, and I've only read a minuscule fraction of the work.

I just felt like trying Moldbug because it fit this exercise really well. Moldbug is the writer I've read the most recently who I think could really use some brevity.

I did get one useful meme out of it which I actually agree with ... I generally felt this before reading reactionary literature, but I agreed with it more after:

Progressives should try their best to work within an existing imperfect system rather than against it - because structures are expensive and complicated, and if you're gonna tear one down you'd better be prepared to build another one. In other words - rather than attacking bad things, create good things and let bad things wither away naturally.