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IlyaShpitser comments on Lesswrong, Effective Altruism Forum and Slate Star Codex: Harm Reduction - Less Wrong
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Comments (150)
I think I learned what I needed to learn about Moldbug and neoreaction based on his reaction to Scott's post. "Intellectual progress" is when you engage with your critics.
Scott focused heavily on engaging Michael Anissimov's positions, and he did reply to them.
I think many people would have loved to see a response by Moldbug, and found his response disappointing. My guess is that Moldbug felt that his writings already answered a lot of Scott's objections, or that Scott's approach wasn't fair. And Moldbug isn't the same thing as neoreaction; there were other responses by neoreactionaries to Scott's FAQ.
The FAQ nails neoreaction on a lot of object-related issues, and it has some good philosophical objections. But it doesn't do a good job of showing the object-related issues that neoreaction got right, and it doesn't quite do justice to some ideas, like The Cathedral and demotism. And the North Korea stuff has really easy to anticipate objections from neoreactionaries (like the fact that it was lead by communists).
The FAQ answers the question "what are a bunch of objections to neoreaction?", but it doesn't answer the question "how good a philosophy is neoreaction?" because it only makes a small dent. If you consider the FAQ in conjunction with Neoreactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-sized Nutshell, then you would get a better sense of the big picture of neoreaction, but he doesn't really integrate his arguments across the two essays, which causes an unfortunately misleading impression.
The FAQ put me off getting into neoreaction for a while, but when I did, I was much more impressed than I expected. The only way to get a good sense of what it actually is would be spending a lot of time with it.
Things that need to happen before I take NRx any sort of seriously:
Currently I have no idea if Moldbugs writings really answered Scott's objections and finding it out looks simply harder than what being a generic reader is supposed to be.
Well Michael Anissimov has just published an ebook.
Disclaimer: I have not read it and thus cannot make any statements about it's contents.
And gets a bunch of the object level issues wrong, as Michael Anissimov has pointed out.
Without getting into NRx issues, this sentence is very wrong.
Arguing and pursuing truth is indeed not the same, but when virtually every empirical, numerical claim is falsified by an opponent, that is a situation where arguing or changing the mind is really called for.
To be fair, when they were making them I already smelled something. I have some familiarity with the history of conservative thought back to Oakeshott, Chesterton, Burke or Cicero and never just pointed to a crime stat or something and saying see, that is what is wrong here. It was never their strengths and I was half-expecting that engaging in chart duels is something they are not going to win.
Agreed. It would have been interesting to see a back and forth between those two. Scott's open-mindedness would have made him an ideal interlocutor for Moldbug; he missed a great opportunity there.