While I agree, I think that was his intent.
The first idea of "be a sheep" seems like John is actually engaged in wanting to have a serious discussion about politics. He lacks the knowledge that he's advocating liquid democracy but that's sort of okay.
The second paragraph of capitalists vs. socialist on the other hand is hard to address on a serious level. When Lenin got to power in Russia he didn't attempt to introduce socialism directly but tried to put state capitalism into motion because he didn't consider Russia to be advanced enough to introduce socialism directly.
Sticking with capitalism for a while till socialism can be introduced is what Lenin advocated. Moldbug knows his history. John doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that his compromise is basically what Lenin advocated 100 years ago.
Furthermore John probably means something different when he says socialism then Lenin did 100 years ago. The problem is that I honestly don't know what John means. The notion of John that "we" can stick with capitalism presupposes that we are capitalist. Does John means that Germany is capitalist and not socialist? Scandinavia? I have no idea. On the other end of the spectrum there are various libertarians who say that the US isn't pure capitalist.
But even if I would know what he means, framing the debate that way is problematic. I think it's much more useful to discuss whether markets are better than hierarchical structures to solve certain problems than to discuss government vs. private ownership.
The frame also ignores issues such as whether companies are lead by their owners or by hired MBA's who get payed on short term metrics and who have no real incentives to act in the long term interest of the company. The frame isn't helpful for discussing issues such as an unconditional basic income or single payer healthcare.
I can keep my sanity if I talk with someone who's a racist and spreads a lot of bad memes. I can also keep my sanity when I hear someone talk about capitalists vs. socialist. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't speak up when someone spreads harmful memes in any of those cases.
To come back to Moldbug, the interesting thing about the post that you linked is that his prediction about bitcoin turned out to be wrong. Bitcoin trades higher than when I wrote the post and is very far away from 0.
To come back to Moldbug, the interesting thing about the post that you linked is that his prediction about bitcoin turned out to be wrong. Bitcoin trades higher than when I wrote the post and is very far away from 0.
Well, his prediction about what the central banks and governments would do was wrong. His prediction about what effect such actions would have may very well have been correct.
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: