Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary?

Hadn't seen that one (as previously stated). That is indeed a funny troll. However, my friend found the reporting in the geeks for monarchy article so outlandish that he was sure someone was putting a credulous writer on.

when the Neoreactionaries aren't busy reviving obscure archaic words for their own jargon, they're using Lesswrong-style jargon

I believe the fact that neoreactionaries make frequent use of LW jargon is down to more than a founder effect.

There are multiple aspects to the LW memeplex that perform significant legwork in laying an epistemological foundation to mug intelligent social liberals with reality, which is close to the defining trait of neoreaction. To wit,

• Physicalism, determinism, a universe Beyond the Reach of God; the universe is capable of arbitrarily deviating from wishful standards of fairness and equality, there are no cosmic attractors towards justice, humans can be effectively damned beyond redemption by biological variables outside the loci of moral agency.
• Generalised optimisation systems; once you understand these, the leap to criticism of democracy as a massive cybernetic failure mode is almost trivial.
• Game theory, for the public choice extension to the above.
• A deep epistemology of taboos, which form the Dark Matter of democracy, around which our governing narratives swirl otherwise inexplicably.
• Beliefs as constraints on expectations, versus belief as attire; this in itself is sufficient to generate enough conflict with official truth to put one far beyond the Overton window.

That being said, there's ample discussion already on Slate Star Codex, and I wouldn't want to see it crowding out other topics here.

I keep hearing people say this. This is a rationalist site; why hasn't anyone gone out and generated some statistics?

a) it's a relatively new memeplex, so if it's bad, someone has to do the work of swatting it down,

Really? Because most ideas are bad, and that by default includes most new ideas, so I don't see why a new "memeplex" shouldn't justify itself rather than having a right to be taken seriously.

I'd prefer the association be "Lesswrong is a place where neoreactionary ideas are discussed and sometimes criticized" than "Lesswrong is that place that sounds very similar to Neoreaction minus the explicit politics".

Out in the world, LessWrong is more closely associated with Peter Thiel's brand of libertarianism, and gets all the flak and critiquing usually given to techno-libertarianism.

which is why people downvote attempts to rehash it as a waste of everyone's time.

People have posted about creationism on LessWrong?

"Lesswrong is that place that sounds very similar to Neoreaction minus the explicit politics".

That's only an observation that could be made by someone who knows what neoreaction sounds like. On the other hand by having LW posts about neoreactionary ideas anybody reading LW comes into contact with them.

As for "bad ethics", I you define "bad ethics" as ethics that go against the current Progressive possition then yes NRx has "bad ethics".

Right and wrong are not defined by factional allegiance.

similarly someone who has 2014!"good ethics" like will turn out to have 2034!"bad ethics"

Dear God, I hope so! 2014 is barbaric! Have you even seen how many people are hungry, thirsty, sick, ignorant, enslaved, or debt-peons? Have you even bothered checking how much raw misery there is?

Something like 95% of LWers self-classify as social liberals.

Regrettable! I'd hope more would have the good sense to be Communists ;-).

Why would such a phenomenally non-socially-conservative group fixate on neoreaction unless it had some surface plausibility?

Because people are often attracted to things which offend them, like Republican Senators and homosexual prostitution ;-). This is pretty obvious if you model LWers as human beings rather than Bayesian utility maximizers.

That neoreaction uses bits of LW argot is probably more relevant, but it's hard for me to imagine it being the whole explanation. Would a serious creationist last long here just because they larded their comments with our jargon?

That depends. Was he once a spokesman for the Singularity Institute?

I've been advised to come here and defend myself.

If you haven't been watching closely, David Gerard has been spreading these same smears about me on RationalWiki, on Twitter, and now here. His tweets accuse me of treating the Left in general and the social justice movement in particular with "frothing" and as "ordure". And now he comes here and adds Tumblr to the list of victims, and "actual disgust" to the list of adjectives.

I resent this because it is a complete fabrication.

I resent it because, far from a frothing hatred of Tumblr, I myself have a Tumblr account which I use almost every day and which I've made three hundred posts on. Sure, I've gently mocked Tumblr (as has every Tumblr user) but I've also very publicly praised it for hosting some very interesting and enlightening conversations.

I resent it because I've posted a bunch of long defenses and steelmannings of social justice ideas like Social Justice For The Highly Demanding Of Rigor and The Wonderful Thing About Triggers, some of which have gone mildly viral in the social justice blogosphere, and some of which have led to people emailing me or commenting saying they've changed their minds and become less hostile to social justice as a result.

I resent it because, far from failing to intellectually engage with the Left, in the past couple of months I've read, reviewed, and enjoyed left-leaning books on Marx, the Soviet economy, and market socialism

I resent it because the time I most remember someone trying to engage me about social justice, Apophemi, I wrote a seven thousand word response which I consider excruciatingly polite, which started with a careful justification for why writing it would be more productive and respectful than not writing it, and which ended with a heartfelt apology for the couple of things I had gotten wrong on my last post on the subject.

(Disgust! Frothing! Ordure!)

I resent it because I happily hosted Ozy's social justice blogging for several months, giving them an audience for posts like their takedown of Heartiste, which was also very well-received and got social justice ideas to people who otherwise wouldn't have seen them.

I resent it because about a fifth of my blogroll is social justice or social justice-aligned blogs, each of which get a couple dozen hits from me a day.

I resent it because even in my most impassioned posts about social justice, I try to make it very clear that there are parts of the movement which make excellent points, and figures in the movement I highly respect. Even in what I think everyone here will agree is my meanest post on the subject, Radicalizing the Romanceless, I stop to say the following about the social justice blogger I am arguing against:

[He] is a neat guy. He draws amazing comics and he runs one of the most popular, most intellectual, and longest-standing feminist blogs on the Internet. I have debated him several times, and although he can be enragingly persistent he has always been reasonable...He cares deeply about a lot of things, works hard for those things, and has supported my friends when they have most needed support.

(DISGUST! FROTHING! ORDURE!)

I resent it because it trivializes all of my sick burns against neoreactionaries, like the time I accused them of worshipping Kim Jong-un as a god, and the time I said they were obsessed with "precious, precious, white people", and the time I mocked Jim for thinking Eugene V. Debs was a Supreme Court case.

I resent this because anyone who looks at my posts tagged with social justice can see that almost as many are in favor as against.

And I resent this because I'm being taken to task about charity by somebody whose own concept of a balanced and reasonable debate is retweeting stuff like this -- and again and again calling the people he disagrees with "shitlords"

(which puts his faux-horror that I treat people I disagree with 'like ordure' in a pretty interesting new light)

No matter how many pro-social-justice posts I write, how fair and nice I am, or what I do, David Gerard is going to keep spreading these smears about me until I refuse to ever engage with anyone who disagrees with him about anything at all. As long as I'm saying anything other than "every view held by David Gerard is perfect and flawless and everyone who disagrees with David Gerard is a shitlord who deserve to die", he is going to keep concern-trolling you guys that I am "biased" or "unfair".

Please give his continued campaigning along these lines the total lack of attention it richly deserves.

whereas it reacts with actual disgust and lack of philosophical charity to feminism, social justice, Tumblr, etc

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/

Yvain admits that he had negative personal experiences with feminists that may have left him prejudiced. It's a bias, but at least he is aware of it.

Biases aside, I think that many people, including Yvain, are concerned by the large political influence that SJWs can exert.
NRx, as wrong as they might be, hold virtually zero political influence at the moment, hence debating them is just an intellectual exercise.
SJWs can influence mainstream media, college policies and even legislation. They are perceived as hostile towards straight white men, and especially towards geeks (nerds, sci-fi fans, gamers, etc.). For people belonging to these groups, political opposition to SJWs is a matter of self-preservation.

Tumblr!social_justice and Tumblr!feminism (note the Tumblr! part) are not political ideas, though; they're more closely described as echo chambers (whoops, sorry, I meant to say "safe spaces", of course.) where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated - so reacting with disgust and ridicule to them is arguably appropriate given LW's and - plausibly - SSC's goals. Neoreaction at least makes the grade as something that's (marginally) politically relevant. Which is still not saying much, of course.

It's about the difference in quality of debate. Their manifold flaws notwithstanding, at least most neoreactionaries are articulate (Moldbug almost esoterically so). SJWs on the other hand feel entitled to go apeshit on you -- to hell with convincing and productive debates.

The steelmanning is due to the fact that neoreaction is a strange composite of a few very good things (originality, aesthetics, appreciation for virtue) dispersed in an extremely toxic medium of hatred, drive for dominance, and undue confidence in the rightfulness of their own ideas. (Most of neoreaction only makes sense from a sociopathic perspective). A mind that is wise and cautious in judgment sees the good along with the bad and figures out these guys can't quite be total sociopaths if you listen to them talking about what they like and strive for (and besides some of them can put up a strong case for their position), and so proceeds to attempt to filter the good ideas from the hateful drivel. A productive discussion may sometimes ensue; NRs may be quite hateful, but their natural habitat is the ivory tower rather than the sewage system that is the comments section. If you want far right low level trolling, there are better places for that.

By contrast -- I don't know what your experience was with SJWs, but this is how it was for me -- SJWs do nothing but low level trolling. They aren't going to give you anything you can conceivably desire out of the discussion (not even timely exit); they just want to fight. It's a great stretch of imagination to connect their verbal abuses to that one trait that psychologically distinguishes left from right, tenderness of heart. It's not difficult to see how they can be even worse than NRs at endearing themselves to one. The fact that they managed to exasperate Scott, who comes off as a supernaturally patient person in general, is a fact that should bear some consideration.

Having only a passing familiarity with Slate Star Codex, I can't claim to have much knowledge of the context here. However, using information gleaned from this comment alone, I would say that polite steelmanning is probably the default reaction to a lot of things as far as LW readers are concerned (this is obviously and sadly untrue outside of these circles), and that if feminism, social justice, and Tumblr were reacted to with genuine disgust, something probably happened to justify that disgust. If I'm wrong about this, feel free to inform me.

Where did Yvain state this? I didn't think he had any neoreactionary friends.

These things are disgusting. Slate Star is increasing in reasonableness.

Indeed. Archaeological study of the grounds surrounding Stonehenge shows evidence of what appears to be a prolonged conflict between two neighbouring settlements, which lasted several hundred years- during which time there were no new religious monuments made in the area (suggesting that most energies were devoted to this conflict). There's evidence of several major battles.

(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04hc5v7)

An attack at night can allow an evenly matched tribe to kill the other one. That puts some pressure on a tribe that fears getting ambushed to ambush first.

Yes. In communities where the strength of the family is irrelevant and the only focus is on the self, such behaviors are common. These communities are slowly being replaced by others due to their failure to reproduce.

Yes, not appropriate for being a reactionary leader in a far right group. Neoreaction is a social conservative movement. This is similar to how you wouldn't put an NRA member in charge of the local Democratic Party headquarters.

Apology accepted. Your second-hand sources were wrong, tell them that. It's so difficult to have legitimate discussions about NRx when 90% of the opinion the Less Wrong community has about us is based on stuff that is completely made up.

I'm guessing the mentality behind this comment is, "oh my god, this guy dares to question transsexualism? that's eviiiilll".

The hilarious thing about this is that Eliezer isn't even very hardcore about libertarianism

Are you joking, or do you really think that total open borders doesn't count as hardcore libertarianism?

Weird, I thought that link would lead to Straw Nihilist.

Are you arguing against this?

Most emphatically not. I'm very glad to have discovered that, and I'm grateful for EY's impassioned preaching, that made it seem immediately, crucially, urgently relevant. By comparison, when I read books like Think Fast and Slow, or watch shows like Crash Course Psychology or Earthlings 101. I feel like I'm just collecting a bunch of interesting, quaint. and curious trivia that aren't much of a factor in how I think of myself, the world, and my place in it. (And don't get me started on new Cosmos. NDG doesn't preach, he lectures. Carl Sagan at least used to wonder )

Well, we've never caught Nature glitching or bugging or even simplifying its calculations, and absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That we're living in a simulation is about as plausible as the Abrahamic narrative, about as falsifiable, and about as proven.

While I can't assign a reliable probability to the hypothesis "you're living in a simulation", I attach roughly zero decision-theoretic significance to the possibility. Meaning: since there's nothing I can do to affect this, I can safely go on with my life without giving it much thought beyond the usual philosophical ponderings I do whenever I'm in a contemplative mood.

Can I leave society If I don't like it? Can I free myself from it's constraints and take advantage of it as an outsider?

If not, why not?

IMHO the issue is that this kind of individualism in Western society, for wealthy white males, was created really long ago. Roughly late 18th century. So anyone without an explicit interest in history, esp. from the angle of questioning the whole modern epoch, will see this individualism already as an old, established, traditional stuff, i.e. pretty much conservative stuff. In the West, pretty much every step of progressivism, leftism or liberalism since that was largely about expanding it to other people, poor white males, non whites, women etc.

So you have the problem here that once one group of individuals got it, it is hard to defend why others should not. The issue is with having the first group have it, but that is a really old story, and so old that it looks downright conservative.

The compromise approach, the best liberal morality, is a nice theoretical solution, but that him does it work in practice? In practice, people have a right, or they don't.

I am under the impression that, proportional to the relevant populations, there are more American expats in Singapore than Singaporean expats in American.

The important point would be whether they are there for so many years, or whether they have torn up their passports.

By the way, that sentence is not an attack on NRx, but a proof of one of its principles - that homogeneity is useful.

Well, yes, I've been saying this from the beginning -- the word "neoreaction" fucked everything up. If you don't have a word for the whole cluster, each point can be argued; if you do, pro- and anti- become two factions, and you get the usual factional conflicts.

In particular, the strategy I suspect Nick Land was playing by was a mistake. Trying to create a faction and make it as loud as possible works in academia; not so much anywhere else.

After the NRx came in we've had useless arguments, downvote stalkers, and so on really hurting the signal to noise ratio.

As it was foretold of old.

Perhaps LW is vulnerable to getting sidetracked into futile discussions of NRx in particular because a lot of the LW memeset is shared with a lot of the NRxrz. Indeed, the NRxrz pride themselves on their clear-sighted rationality. From within, the participants think they're having a rational discussion, while from without it resembles no such thing, it's just politics as usual.

useless arguments, downvote stalkers, and so on really hurting the signal to noise ratio

You are actually wrong on the timeline, the genderwars and the Social Justice movement, came here and produced these symptoms first.

One can plausibly credit the formation of Neoreaction as a direct result of a feeling of persecution and tightening of the acceptable domain of rational investigation on this site, it caused many to leave and seed a whole new blogosphere where once there was just Moldbug.

1) People who think a lot and generally care about logical consistency, trending towards high IQ

2) who also have sufficiently understanding of parsimony that God, etc, is just totally out of the question

3) and who generally adapt well to technological advance, often being the people whose intellects are drive it forward

4) who don't base moral judgements off of strong emotional response to things that are "weird", like odd sexualities or profanity, or "threatening", like enemy combatants or opposing ideologies.

5) who have a degree of detachment from their particular situations, and wouldn't vastly put the importance of themselves, their family, or their nation above others. It's okay if they do so in small ways in personal life, but they should be cognizant of the whole universal brotherhood of mankind thing and generally see morality and kindness as something that should be applied to people relatively equally.

So a NRx-Lefty of this tribe believes these things, but also thinks an authoritarian, heirarchical society is the best way to achieve these values. So, people who fall into the tribe and are members of the cognitive elite will sort of rule over everyone else, using military force and propaganda and all that other stuff to achieve these values. They still care about outsiders, but they care in a very paternalistic sense and won't hesitate to override people's stated preferences in favor of what the NRx-Lefty extrapolates their preferences to actually be, since savages don't really know what they want or understand anything.

The bulk of the actual NRx movement would be considered enemies, savages, or subversives within this empire, because they tend to fail steps 4 and 5. Within the empire, it's "okay" to be a human-biodiversity-advocate in the same sense that it's okay to think that people with myopia are smarter and consider that a largely irrelevant fact because we have actual IQ tests that we can use to separate people with with much greater accuracy, but it's not okay in a moral sense to be a particularist who thinks your race should be defended. (Ideological particularism, is, of course, encouraged if it's generally in the Cathedral's favor.)

(Once again, describing, not condoning, an idea.)

Oh, that was directed at nydwracu, I misread the comment nesting loops.

The plurality of American blood comes from Germany, and the descendents of that immigrant wave tend to be Evangelicals, Lutherans, Catholics...I don't know whether this bloodline is actually more likely to follow Guns and God style conservatism, but that seems to be the notion here.

I think if I was going to label nydwracu's comment in one word I'd call it Völkisch.

I don't mean this as critisism, but 'NRx Left' sounds like an excellent opportunity for meta-meta-meta-contrarianism.

NRx-Lefties government had no qualms about imperialism and goes ahead and conquers the savages and converts them as described above whenever it's militarily viable and economically expedient, and because NRx-leftie isn't as mean as Leopold it won't take long before the conquered people consider themselves better off and don't even want independence.

What, like the British Empire? How did that work out?

Despite being American myself, I don't see the frontier between the Enlightenment and reaction as being an American military front.

The situation in Europe — including the resurgence of fascism in Greece, the emergence of Putin-Stalinism, and the various national conflicts over Muslim immigration and the status of immigrant communities with violent anti-woman, anti-dissident, or anti-free-speech practices — looks much more like a "clash of civilizations" to me than the current generation of American overseas adventurism does.

What is delivered by tank is not civilization; it is resource extraction.

The idea of bringing civilization, that is "Enlightenment-progressive-libertarian-feminist-liberal-universalism", into the midst of savages, that is "tribalist-reactionary-patriarchal-tyranny", on M-1A Abrams main battle tanks is called neoconservatism, funnily enough, and it didn't fare too well in reality.

In all fairness, what neo-cons brought to "tribalist-reactionary-tyrannies" was nothing more than a cargo-cult imitation of democracy. No effort at all was made to introduce even the classical-liberal institutions that modern Western polities are fundamentally based on, let alone anything close to libertarianism or Enlightenment values.

Hmm. Well, the monarchists think they are going to get some Vetinari style ruler who lets business faire, although that hasn't been common historically.

It looks like I further need to distinguish between We Want Exit, and Everyone has a Right to Exit. The latter fads up to World Government, the former falls apart over biological sustainability.

Since you LinkedIn stalked me and we do look to be associated with common organizations now and in the future, I'm going to restrain my emotions and try to discuss this issue. Instead of, you know, just strangling you through my monitor.

"For the next election!" is obviously a problem with current forms of democratic government. But I do think that if you were honestly trying to address that issue for the good of all, you would at least mention such proposals as commons trusts, if only to argue against them -- but they would be in your hypothesis space in the first place. Instead, "we have a problem in current-day democracy, especially American democracy" is taken as justification for, "It's time for a radical leap back to 1788 France" and other such neoreactionary positions.

To me, this stinks of motivated cognition. What you want is the absolute monarchy, or the seasteading, or the corporatized city-states, or Lord of the Rings, or something; the flaws in democracy are but a justification, not a reason. If you want to have honest discussions about these sorts of things, you can ask that the usual "Holy crap that guy is evil!" reactions be turned-off temporarily (I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum from you, so I know exactly what it's like to get that reaction upon mentioning my politics in polite conversation, especially in the damn-dirty-liberal-capitalist USA), and then come out and explain your real motivations. Until you admit what your real goal is, nobody can do anything but try to clear away the rhetorical smoke your faction is somewhat rudely throwing into the air.

Maybe you have fundamentally decent and honest intentions. Maybe you have fundamentally malevolent intentions but simply aren't configured to perceive right and wrong like the rest of us. But if you keep stinking everything up with obscurantist ranting about how everyone else besides you is both malevolent and insane, others will continue treating your ideological faction as logically rude.

A common, but shallow point. Thefallacy is equating democratic government with elected officials. Most democracies have second chambers , civil services and other added to lengthen time preference. Yes Minister is all about an elected pol being unable to budge the long term plans of his ministry.

The Master Slave impulse is a problem on both sides.

I don't think so... I think it is more like the ego-driven feeling of "why is he better than me?" the issue not directly being power, but rather giving someone power being a strong signal they are "better".

The problem of the ego is something I have been trying to figure out for about 15-17 years now. This can mean two things, either I am knowledgeable about it, or I developed a strong bias seeing the problem of the ego everywhere, even where it does not apply. So it is a topic I can be very right or very wrong about but little in-between. By the problem of the ego I mean I had some exposure in the Buddhist approaches of how the human psyche works, and quickly realized that the problem of modern people is not as much desire or anger, but more like vanity/pride. For example, a huge reason why we are atheists is not simply because it is irrational, but because theism demands a sense of knee-bending humility and submission that goes right against todays culture and mores.

Take this example. Scratch the gay-marriage debates and what you find is that the primary motivation is not securing pragmatic advantages for gays but rather not making them feel like second-class citizens. A grand social approval / validation. So there is this huge motive today that people absolutely loath feeling second-class or less worthy than others. This is some sort of a pride and I think this lurks behind a lot of political stuff today. One is that elected politicians are servants (ministers) of the public hence cannot feel superior to it. The idea being being uncomfortable with having rulers who could be said in some sense superior or more worthy. This is not so much envy as hurt pride.

This is difficult to discuss on LW because the whole process of Rationalism means setting aside this kind of pride, and probably most of you did it unconsciously long ago. Because with this kind of pride self-improvement through the outside view would not be possibble.

Is it clear what I am driving at? This is such a well-know problem to me that I don't really find the best words to express them, I belly-feel the problem of the ego since I realized at about 20 that me being rebellious against my parents at 16 was not about the limitations they set to me being too stringent, but more like the hurt-pride feeling how the eff they have the nerve to set me limits and give me orders, do they think they are better than me, that kind of think (around 20 I realized this issue through Buddhist meditation techniques and now am 37)

I don't see Moldbug as interested in demotic dictatorship. The lack of support in the "demos" is the problem.

The issue is still what is the difference. Some dude says now I rule and you shut up. How to tell if it is proper monarchy or yet another dictator?

The issue is, I don't see NRx providing a clear difference between monarchy and modern demotic dictatorship, and clear ways of preventing the first from sliding into the second.

For starters a monarch doesn't have to spend most of his effort manufacturing democratic support, thus he can actually focus his effort into governing the country.

That doesn't explain the difference between a monarch and a dictator, as requested. Once a dictator has suspended elections, they don't need democratic support either.

Under a demotic dictatorship, all people are required to participate in politics and form their own political opinions, and those opinions had better mach the dictator's/today's cathedral consensus.

That means that means that they have less time, not that the dictator does. The dictator doesn't need to manufacture assent, they rather need to quash dissent...as would a monarch, as many did. NRxs just assume that Monarchy will work effortlessly, because that's their desired conclusion.

But all these features were also true for the dictatorships toppled say in the Arab Spring. Or Franco. People were not expected to be engaging in politics, support was not manufactured etc. Still there was unrest and instability.

Putting it differently, from the Aristotelean stability-first angle the question is why and how would people accept it, when there is empirical fact they don't accept it in dictatorships.

As far as I can tell these kinds of demonstrations and unrest have two factors. One, students, intellectuals who care about things like freedom of speech: basically, with some cynicism you could see it they want a piece from the power cake. Perhaps a system that would offer them clear paths to power could defuse it, but being rebellious still feels more virtuous and empowering than repeating official propaganda for a chance of promotion and a sinecure so the only system I can imagine that could secure their support would be itself pretending to be perpetual rebels: welcome to the "Cathedral". Lacking that, you could shower honor and money on young intellectuals and still they would find rebellion more virtuous and empowering. A second factor is the basic simple hunger-revolt urges of the masses when and if the rulers manage to screw up the economy. You could see both factors in the Arab Spring, the mass-hunger-revolt being the muscle doing the pedaling behind it and the rebellious students and young intellectuals the steering brain.

It would be fascinating to do an in-depth study of student and young-intellectual rebelliousness. It looks like something invented in the 1960's, but Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday mentioned it existed in Vienna as far back as his youth1900, but weirdly enough, it was a proto-Nazi type of student movement, basically nationalist students getting drunk and starting fights in the name of some pan-German union. One of the weirdest and most scary facts of early 20th century Europe is that students were above-average likely to participate in proto-fascist movements. From these two data points one could speculate that it may be an ancestral urge, basically young males not wanting to be ruled by the silverbacks, and ape or caveman level status competition. Around the world, youth radicalism was visible in 1908, visible in 1848 and so on. Any monarchy should need a surefire way of dealing with that (i.e. give them power and prestige but also make it as romantic, virtuous and empowering as a revolution) to be seriously considerable.

Buying votes is illegal.

Come on. Spending money on making a candidate or party attractive and advertised buys votes. Not literally but in the sense of increases the chance of people voting for them.

You are just repeating the same evidence free point.

I was looking for a summary of the summary, not the opposite.

Moldbug is notorious for a jargon-heavy and hard-to-read writing style, which your comment is being compared to in a request for a clarified version.

My impression is that Land decided a long time ago to side with 'intelligence' in the abstract, in a sense that inevitably led him to antihumanism, and that he supports neoreaction insofar as he sees potential in its proposals to unchain institutional intelligences that he thinks are more worthy of support than anything human.

(I think he should look into the Italian Futurists, try to grok the aesthetic of them and the things around them and see what sorts of things they'd come up with. It's not that far from capitalism to war, for one. But I don't think it's too likely that he will; even if Moldbug hadn't reinforced the belief that nothing interesting ever came out of anything that had anything to do with the losing side of that particular war, the taboo there is still strong.)

Second thought-- that rant is from a Left point of view. It's "people are being hurt for no reason, this is intolerable", not civilization is falling apart from lack of virtue."

I didn't downvote, but linking to a rationalwiki attack post about neoreactionaries isn't a good way to inform people.

I think people downvoting you may not have realized that you were the original poster, and thus may have thought you should not reply at all if you didn't know more. (Since you are the OP I think your reply is justified in answering "as best you know, what exactly is it you're asking us about?")

Linking to a rationalwiki attack post on a subject isn't really a good way to give people an understanding of that subject.

I'd guess that the OP is too vaguely formulated and additionally loosely political. It is not trolling but standards are high here you know.

Monotonic as a percentage of GDP? Meaning the government will be 100% of GDP in finite time?

I wouldn't even go that far. I think it's reasonable to set aside the oscillations in the 1950-1980 period and call that bit basically monotonic, but WWI & WWII still wreck any underlying monotonicity (and arguably the Great Depression and Great Recession do too). Moreover, since 1975, the overall trend looks basically flat to me except for the Great Recession bump at the end.

Moving to my own country, I find an even stronger negative result: over the last 60 years the overall trend in public spending's share of GDP has been flat. (That, I must admit, surprised me a bit; I would've expected the government's share of spending to swell a bit over time because of aging populations and state provision of education & healthcare, which suffer from Baumol's cost disease. But apparently not.)

Um, if you have the ability to arbitrary rearrange your cells, they're likely more loosely attached to each other than those in animals. In any case you should be able to process raw environmental material to grow.

I have thought about possible future societies that aren't based on biological reproduction. Most of the examples in scifi fall apart after a little MoR-style pocking (their main flaw is keeping certain aspects of the setting the same as ours even if those aspects no longer make sense). The two that seem stable are the following:

1) Sentients become pure infomorphs (or ems as Hanson calls them). This abolishes the distinction between memetic and genetic inheritance. Thus "sex" in the sense of recombining "genetic" material is separate from reproduction and resembles having conversations. Reproduction consists of creating a copy of your mind/source code. This resembles the life cycle of bacteria, who exchange information via conjugation but reproduce via binary fission.

2) Sentients are produced in centralized factories, e.g., most children are grown in artificial wombs, or robots produced in more conventional factories. This effectively makes them eusocial with all that implies about their sense of individuality, or rather lack thereof.

The other possibility is old-fashioned sexual reproduction. I have no idea which of those possibilities will come to dominate.

One possibility is that body composition becomes less important because it's so easily changed. At that tech level, it probably doesn't have any health implications.

Height might be less significant.

Instead of more mass to be a larger male, how about less density?

Tentatively-- try living in a bunch of different cultures.

That sounds like premature optimization to me.

Few women say they would like to live in Gor. But some would. Some live in Gor-inspired relationships now. And maybe people would adapt.

I'm puzzled by your focus on women. Many men probably don't want to live in a patriarchal society either. I certainly don't.

That's aside from the fact that this really has very little to do with the subject at hand. There's a distinct question of what you expect will happen and what one should try to make happen.

I wouldn't be too surprised by the possibility of a future society returning to traditional social structures. I would be somewhat surprised by every future society returning to traditional social structures. Either way, I don't see why this means feminists shouldn't sign up for cryonics.

Where does Taleb argue that patriarchy is anti-fragile?

We have more people living better than ever before in history, and this is because of the Enlightenment.