Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.]

This is in part a strategy to keep out the wrong contrarian cluster. But yes reading say Vladimir_M is a better use of time. Moldbug does have some very good essays though.

I too think I agree but I think there is a spectrum when it comes to the separation of normative claims. Example: Both Marx and Kaczynski failed in distinguishing the normative from the descriptive, but Kaczynski less so.

I do agree with this.

I think Moldbug's main point is that even if cynical people acknowledge that the media often uses its powers in biased ways, there's still an ideal that the media should be this fair and balanced impartial observer that just provides information and then lets the people decide. Moldbug beleives such an ideal to be naive and unworkable: the media will allways be biased, and will always use its powers to influence the secular political enviroment, and expecting it not to grossly misunderstands what the media actually is, how it operates and what its incentives are.

There's also the fact that when people think of "biased" media, their minds tend to jump immediately to media that is biased against their own political views, while being blind to the biases of their own favorite media source (witness all the liberals, who rightly decry Fox News while putting NPR on a pedastal).

You must hang out with smarter people than me.

What communities do you have in mind?

I did not mean to imply existence of such communities.

So under anarcho-capitalist principles, a division of the world into state-like bodies, defining whatever laws they like within their territories, is perfectly legitimate and acceptable. Since that is the world as it stands, I don't see what the anarcho-capitalists are complaining about.

I think you know that they are complaining about not getting their adolescent utopia of doing what they like, and not being beholden to The Man.

Moldbug somehow argues that external pressure would keep sovereigns from making their patches into slave labor camps

In my opinion this is very similar to the standard libertarian argument, except that instead of companies on the free market, MM speaks about sovereigns. And it didn't convince me, too.

I am not defending MM here, I am just trying to understand him and pick the parts of his theory that seem correct to me. This is not one of them.

But to be fair, and fight the status quo, imagine that we are both subjects of the Moldbuggian Kingdom in the alternative universe, and we are discussing pros and cons of democracy, as a hypothesis. In that case, Hitler and Pinochet would be actually arguments against democracy. Like: "Let's imagine that we try this democracy thing here. What makes you believe that people would not vote for an evil charismatic leader like Hitler? Also, even a democratic country needs a strong army, somehow isolated from the election process (otherwise a foreign attack during the election day would defeat the unprepared country). So what makes you believe that an army leader could not take over the power, like Pinochet?" And it would be your turn to convince me that it cannot happen, which would be rather difficult, because in reality, it happened.

To be clear, my point is that horrible evil things can happen in any political regime. Including democracy; including libertarian utopia; including MM's utopia. Therefore "it could happen in a regime X" is not a sufficient argument for democracy. At best, it could be made to a statistic argument about how likely do different horrible things happen in different regimes to an average person.

And we should include all the horrible things that happen, not just those caused by the government directly. To take everything that happens in a country as a result of the government action or inaction. If the tyrant executes one hundred people, that's one hundred people dead. If the small criminals independently murder one hundred people, that's also one hundred people dead. The government is equally responsible for both. Just like the tyrant could decide to not execute those hundred people, so could the government decide to spend a bit more money on police instead of something else. Sovereign government has total power over their territory; therefore also it has total responsibility. All crimes that happen in a democratic country are the crimes of the democratic government. And that is a lot of crimes. Again, no government can bring that crime to zero, but we can still discuss whether government X can bring the total crimes in the country to a lower level than government Y. According to MM, the democratic governments are pretty bad at this.

I proclaim the case on Patchwork closed.

The American patchwork resulted in civil war. The Italian patchwork was eventually invaded.

Both were still extremely productive and raised living standards dramatically and furthermore made innovations that changed the world for the better. I consider the evidence that patchworks are bad insufficient.

Recall that in Neocameralism/Patchwork CEOs are under plausibly tight control to ensure profit maximization. You are using loaded terminology. Your argument is much better if you talk about profit maximizations not necessarily being as benign as imagined in a transhuman world rather than importing connotations of alpha apes doing anything they want and this ending badly.

+Tyrants are known to enjoy domination and torture of subjects even at cost to themselves (e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, the Kims, Pinochet or the various post-soviet dictators).

Disappointed you would do this. Down voted.

Note that Moldbug spins some long, unlikely, hyper-Functionalist story somewhere on UR - as an attempt to juggle the Holocaust into a different reference class, maybe?

Oh come on. Pot calling kettle black. You kind of do stuff like that all the time my friend. Without linking to the actual article related to this (which I don't recall) is from a consequentalist view of communication nothing but a boo light.

I strongly disrecommend all variants of "I told you so".

Isn't doing politics here kind of dull? If you want to discuss this start an open thread politics discussion. If you want I can produce random quotes from respectable and influential leftist authors about various demographics that they believe will need to be physically removed for their utopia.

Does that sound like a certain Sam0345? You bet it does!

This seems like an ad hominen since you know many readers dislike Sam0345. They do sounds similar in that they are right wing.

I hesitate to say - as it might sound rather extremist - but I'm trying to hint that 1) "right-wing" leanings might be incompartible in their essense with both neurologically egalitarian leanings and the acquired memeplex of Universalist morality, 2) that most readers of this are likely to share - on a fundamental psychological level - a sufficient part of the Universalist memeplex, and 3) that it follows that right-wing philosophy might be in its core objectively hostile to your extrapolated volition.

I can point to many neurologically produced leanings that universalism requires us to suppress as well. Also I can make the argument that most people have sufficent non-Universalist memes in their mind that a logical extrapolation of where universalism might evolve in the next century or so will terrify them.

So what does that leave us with? Try to preserve the balance between Universalist and non-Universalist human values we are most comfortable with? Heh, say hello to a strategy that we have empirical evidence is a losing one: Conservatism.

Many people who go "yuck conservatism" today will be going "yay conservatism" in 2030, especially if we really are living in a period of rapid evolution for the Universalist memeplex where many people can't abandon their old values and opinions fast enough to keep pace. This still won't make conservatism a winning strategy.

I'm pretty sure that principled or even pragmatic libertarians are already considered extreme. Indeed they have been called "far right" and possibly scary to non-libertarians on this very forum. How extreme might they be considered in 10 or 20 years when their few remaining status raising talking points are largely accepted as common wisdom among educated people?

If you're curious about this Preston character, here's a long and detailed analysis of how his ideas fit into the broader context of American right-wing decentralized anti-progressivism. (By some leftist I've never heard of.)

Based on my impression, Moldbug is more or less a monarchist

One of the many elephants in the room is that monarchy is a system where it was completely normal for the monarch to impose their religion on their subjects. Moldbug makes a big thing about this tenuous, almost invisible Cathedral thingy, but if he gets his utopia he may well find hismelf dealing with the real thing.

Mencius' conception of useful hierarchical authority models puts CEO and Monarch in a similar space.

In the sense that there is a single guy at the top, I suppose. But then by that logic you can argue Moldbug ought to have no problems with a parlamentary democracy with a prime minister. The point is not that there is a single guy in charge at the top, but the system of incentives that girds the society and gives it shape. There is a big difference between the British monarchy in the Stuart period ("bring back the Stuarts!"), and what Moldbug is actually advocating.

To give an example. Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn't that interesting?

I thought R.A.G.E. was a gedankenexperiment meant to demonstrate the actual extent of power of the cathedral. If he really believes it is a plausible path he is farther down the crackpot path than I thought.

That's a good point, though there are still lots of "fringe" thinkers (not including fringe thinkers already in contact with my community, like Robin Hanson and Patri Friedman) that I would turn to before Moldbug, e.g. Michael Albert, David Benatar, and Noam Chomsky.

Since Catholic theology is massively specious to begin with, I think you should have a higher threshold for what kinds of simplifications count as oversimplifications. Anyway I do.

Having been exposed to a little bit of actual history, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if the feudal societies in fiction are gross oversimplifications of real world feudalism.

There is a sizable minority of academic historians that deny there ever was such a thing as real world feudalism (as it is popularly conceived of). See for example, the work of historian Elizabeth A. R. Brown.

Offhand, I can't think of any sf which has explained why a return of a feudal system is plausible

In the Vorkosigan series, the main events surround a planet with a feudal system. This is explained because the planet lost contact with the larger galactic civilization and regressed in tech level massively. Meanwhile certain powerful bandits and raiders became strong enough in the chaos and passed down their roles on to their children. Then when they ended up being reconnected with the advanced technology societies they became very quickly a feudal culture with advanced technology. One major aspects of the stories is how this is an inherently unstable situation. (I have to wonder if this is in deliberate contrast to something like Dune where society stagnates in a feudal system with advanced tech for hundreds of years.)

Wil McCarthy's Queendom of Sol novels, as I recall, provide some backstory for the feudal government in a very advanced civilization with a lot of transhuman tech. The upper class in this society even went out of its way to find the remaining plausible pretenders to royal status, so it made an heir of Tonga's royal family as the queen, and married her to the survivor of some obscure noble family in Catalonia. McCarthy argues that this arrangement would provide stability and reduce the waste of resources on politics because the queen and her consort, like everyone else, would live for really long times and exploit the human tendency to form dominance hierarchies.

Links? Tempt me with mind killing.

It's been a while since I read his blog, but I think he's mentioned that he no longer stands by his whole BDH-OV class analysis, though I don't think he ever really explained why. That's the only thing that comes readily to mind.

the running 11 year average of global temperature has not flattened since 1990, but continued upward at almost the same pace with only a moderate decrease in slope since the outlier 1998 year. The 11 years 2000-2010 global mean temperature is significantly higher than the 10 years 1990-2000.

That is not "flat since the 90s". The only way to get "flat since the 90s" is to compare 1998 to various more recent years noting that it was nearly as hot as 2005 and 2010 etc. and slightly hotter than other years in the 2000s, as if 1 year matters as much as 10 in a noisy data set.

If he had said "flat since 1998" that might be technically true in a way, but it's a little like saying the stock market has been flat since 2007.

That doesn't even consider using climate knowledge to adjust for some of the variance, for instance that El Niño years are hotter, and that 1998 was the biggest El Niño year on record.

The leap from "controlled experiments are not possible" to "one has to deduce from first principles" is huge and unsupported. The results of controlled experiments do not exhaust the available empirical evidence by a long shot. We have a lot of data about the effects of monetary policy from around the world. True, inferring causality from this data is not nearly as straightforward as inferring causality from a randomized controlled trial, but it's still a lot more reliable than deduction from first principles, I would think.

Think about how your argument sounds when applied to cosmological theories about the very early universe. We have a number of different theories that cannot be simultaneously right, and we cannot conduct controlled experiments. Would you endorse deduction from first principles in this instance as well?

So, who does one follow: The Nobel Laureate or the man the Federal Reserve seems to be following? Perhaps neither? We certainly cannot follow both

If you didn't accept the wisdom of the Federal Reserve before in its policies and theoretical choices, why would you accept the wisdom of the Federal Reserve after they have supposedly begun listening to Sumner? Why, indeed, does their choice matter at all to someone considering whether to believe Krugman, Sumner, or neither?

Vacuums exist. Nearly frictionless planes and more or less perfectly rigid bodies actually exist. There is nothing wrong with abstraction based on objective reality. Claiming that one is about to declare how economies ought to work is not a abstraction based on a preexisting reality. It is attempting to impose one's own subjective needs wants and desires on reality.

That is not science, that is pseudoscience.

Spherical cow is not "how science is done". It is a joke. Jokes rely on reversing expectations, going counter to reality, for the surprise element. How science is actually done is you begin with the intent to describe the real world and from there you use whatever tools, intellectual or actual, at your disposal in order to accomplish your goal.

If one's goal is not to describe how economies actually work you are not doing science. Declaring what one's ideal economy ought to be is not the same as describing how a real economy would behave under ideal conditions. If I declare how photosynthesis ought to work I am not doing the same thing as describing how photosynthesis actually works under ideal conditions. It seems like a subtle distinction but it is not and failing to understand this difference has lead to a lot of bad science by lesser minds.

Suppose a man goes to the supermarket with a shopping list given him by his wife on which are written the words "beans, butter, bacon and bread". Suppose as he goes around with his shopping cart selecting these items, he is followed by a detective who writes down everything he takes. As they emerge from the store both the shopper and the detective will have identical lists. But the function of the lists is quite different. In the case of the shopper's list the purpose of the list is, so to speak, to get the world to match the words; the man is supposed to make his actions fit the list. In the case of the detective, the purpose of the list is to make the words match the world; the man is supposed to make the list fit the actions of the shopper. This can be further demonstrated by observing the role of "mistake" in the two cases. If the detective gets home and suddenly realizes that the man bought pork chops instead of bacon, he can simply erase the word "bacon" and write "pork chops". But if the shopper gets home and his wife points out that he has bought pork chops when he should have bought bacon he cannot correct the mistake by erasing "bacon" from the list and writing "pork chops".

Scientists are detectives attempting to describe how the world behaves. If the world behaves differently than we expect we erase bacon and write down pork chops even if we really would prefer bacon. Idealists, fantasists and Austrian school economists want bacon on the detective's list so they write down bacon and blame reality for not living up to their desires.

That's religion, not science.

"That's a reasonable description of the word's use as a slur"

There are 13 million voices crying from the grave that justify it's use as a slur.

In Chris Mooney's book "The Republican Brain" he makes a good case based on recent studies for why we should think of the totalitarianism of the former USSR as a right wing phenomenon. The reason why hinges on how "conservative" is defined in the social sciences. Conservative for the purposes of these studies means "resistant to change". Liberal means "novelty seeking". So what you have in human personalities are those who seek to minimize change and those who seek to maximize it.

Thus in the former USSR or Maoist China or the French Revolution you have the initial radical change to society. Conservative personalities then acclimate themselves to the resulting bureaucracy and seek to freeze it in place. Then, being authoritarians, they accumulate power and use it as authoritarians always do. To exterminate their opposition. In the past debates on this issue were based in political philosophy. I, along with Chris, am claiming to give it a more solid footing in cognitive science.

So... the totalitarianism of the USSR was a right wing phenomenon despite the socialist economic model it followed. Stalin was a wing nut. Generalissimo Franco was cut from the same mold and also guilty of his own mass murder and genocide.

I don't believe in extending tolerance to such people or those who emulate them or in seeing them as "interesting" because they have come up with some variation of their authoritarian ideology. They should be called out and forced to give account for themselves. Liberal personalities seeing a novel twist on authoritarianism might find that attractive. "Oh look! Here is something different. How interesting." That's fine as far as it goes but just as the authoritarian personality should never be allowed free rein so also the liberal personality should not allow his/her self to be distracted by bright shiny objects. Perhaps it is true that Moldbug was able to polish the bright shiny turd that is Franco's fascism. Whoopie.

"The fact is that humans can be highly rational in one area while extremely irrational in another."

Really? How do you know that? Why shouldn't it be true that someone who is deeply wrong about one thing would not also be wrong about another? Your counter argument is a common fallacy. I am referring to studies in which a population is tested for whatever it is the study is looking for. You, like so many others these days, counter by saying: "I knew this one guy, he wasn't like that so your study must be wrong." You are correct that global warming is true regardless of the politics of the person. However the reverse is not true. The politics one has are strong indicators of how likely it is one holds beliefs that are not true.

There is in fact what is called the "smart idiot" effect. Conservatives who are better educated tend to be MORE wrong than their less educated base because they have more resources to bring to bear in rationalizing their fears. This is all about fear you know. Certain people react very fearfully to change. Like changing ideas about marriage for example. They then marshal their intellectual abilities to defend their emotional priors. The fact they can do so eloquently changes nothing.

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"Moreover, by other metrics, conservatives have more science knowledge than liberals on average."

So in responding to scientific studies that show differences between how authoritarians and liberals process data you cite... what? a blog? I am guessing that the blog you consider most relevant is that of Razib Kahn.

Razib poses the question "are conservatives more scientifically literate than liberals?" Well that is a different question isn't it? Furthermore the questions in his database search do not test for scientific literacy. They test for conformity. Which I am more than willing to admit conservatives would perform better at. If I repeat the social norm that astrology is unscientific do I have "more science knowledge" than someone who does not? Or am I simply aping the values of my tribe and signaling I am a beta male in good standing?

Liberals would predictably adopt scientific ideas outside the norm because they are interested in them and it is exciting to explore the new or odd for it's own rewards. Just as for a conservative it is comforting to reaffirm consensus beliefs. Both personalities are rewarded for their behavior. One for seeking out the new, the other for conformity to authority. Both are necessary for any healthy society. However, conservative personalities have a greater need for epistemic closure and are therefore more susceptible to a self validating reality bubble.

Which is what we see today on the right in the US.

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"In fact, the GSS data strongly suggests that in general the most stupid, ignorant people are actually the political moderates."

As Razib himself says "The Audacious Epigone did not control for background variables."

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"You seem to be asserting that "Person X who says A will be extremely unlikely to have anything useful to say." And asserting that "If Person Y thinks that Person X has interesting things to say about B despite X's declaration of A, that makes the person Y even less likely to have useful things to say?""

Because the acolyte is always less than the master.

I prefer to cut Gordian knots rather than spend my days trying to untie them. So if it is true that Moldbug is a royalist and admires the fascist dictator Generalissimo Franco (who is still dead) then he is low on my stack of "people I should give a shit about". Any followers even less so because they can't even be original about who's boots they should lick.

Ezra Pound was a great poet and likewise a fascist and admirer of Spain's Franco. But poetry is art and while I might be able to set aside my political opinions to make room for Pound I would not consider anything he said outside of that to be of great value. There have been many artists who held political views I find repugnant and there have been many of history's monsters who created artifacts of great beauty. The Samurai lords of feudal Japan created works of great beauty by night and literally hacked their peasants into bits by day. But art is one thing about which it is impossible to have "wrong" opinions about.

I have to have a filter. If I do not have one I will spend all my time pursuing false trails and diving into rabbit holes that go nowhere. So... in my first reply in this thread I clicked on the first link to Molbug's pretentious twaddle on how he was going to teach people "true" economic theory. It was very kind of him in my view to make it clear from the beginning that he had no interest at all in economics as a science. So... someone who makes a thought error that bad, who thinks you can dictate what is true about economics, how likely is it that such a person would make the same thinking error in other disciplines? I think the odds are quite good. I did read a bit more before I closed the tab and he does seem to have a way with words. So.... there's that... I guess.

If one wishes to understand a topic my advice is to go to any University bookstore and get an undergraduate textbook and read it. The odds are it is likely to be... wait for it... less wrong than some crank on the internet who thinks the academic world is conspiring against him. PLOP! Into the dustbin of history they go.

In economics that book will be Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw. It WON'T be some crackpot libertarian theory or the latest dribblings from the Austrian school. Why? Because Utopian systems are not about describing what is (and therefore they cannot be about what could be). They are about creating a bubble to insulate oneself from the big bad world. Yes yes it is harsh, reality is truly frightening. It may well be that we have set into motion events that will lead to our extinction. When I was young it was the threat of nuclear war. Today it is the possibility of a global extinction event due to climate change. Perhaps tomorrow it will be a killer asteroid. But denial and retreat are not solutions.