The Moldbug Variations(thebaffler.com)
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The Moldbug Variations
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein
13 comments
It's sad that the person who co-wrote Zero to One would fall into this orbit. It remains one of my favorite business books in spite of the fact that its co-author has gone off and hopped on the crazy train politically.
Of course many of the original Italian Futurists became Fascists too. There seems to be some tendency for unbridled futurist thinkers to fall for fascism and similar ideologies.
Some futurists also go for left-leaning forms of totalitarianism too. I know several really smart authoritarian Marxists.
I see it as a pathology of futurists who have gotten themselves too far from the coal face; of futurists who are not actually Doing The Work (or aren't anymore). There's a temptation to think that politics is the thing holding us back from progress and that progress can be accelerated politically. If we could just get rid of all that slow painful democratic consensus and replace it with some kind of dictatorship of know-it-all smart people all that magic futurist technology would just materialize out of thin air.
There's also this tendency to think regulation is holding us back. That can happen, but it typically happens after things are invented. Regulation is not preventing us from achieving immortality or true AI or free energy because we have no idea how to do those things regardless of whether or not there are laws against them.
Edit: Thiel's case is honestly more mysterious though. Here's a guy who's spent years ranting against the fact that our culture is controlled by know-nothing windbags who don't actually do anything and are hostile to progress and what does he do? He gets behind Donald Trump, a total know-nothing windbag who has absolutely no skills, abilities, or understanding beyond the ability to promote himself and manipulate people. Trump is the emptiest of empty suits. There is literally nothing there except primate dominance gestures. I have no idea what Thiel thought was going to happen, but it's not happening whatever it was.
Of course many of the original Italian Futurists became Fascists too. There seems to be some tendency for unbridled futurist thinkers to fall for fascism and similar ideologies.
Some futurists also go for left-leaning forms of totalitarianism too. I know several really smart authoritarian Marxists.
I see it as a pathology of futurists who have gotten themselves too far from the coal face; of futurists who are not actually Doing The Work (or aren't anymore). There's a temptation to think that politics is the thing holding us back from progress and that progress can be accelerated politically. If we could just get rid of all that slow painful democratic consensus and replace it with some kind of dictatorship of know-it-all smart people all that magic futurist technology would just materialize out of thin air.
There's also this tendency to think regulation is holding us back. That can happen, but it typically happens after things are invented. Regulation is not preventing us from achieving immortality or true AI or free energy because we have no idea how to do those things regardless of whether or not there are laws against them.
Edit: Thiel's case is honestly more mysterious though. Here's a guy who's spent years ranting against the fact that our culture is controlled by know-nothing windbags who don't actually do anything and are hostile to progress and what does he do? He gets behind Donald Trump, a total know-nothing windbag who has absolutely no skills, abilities, or understanding beyond the ability to promote himself and manipulate people. Trump is the emptiest of empty suits. There is literally nothing there except primate dominance gestures. I have no idea what Thiel thought was going to happen, but it's not happening whatever it was.
I'm not even so sure that it's Futurism with Thiel so much as just unbridled avarice.
If it looks like a greedy scumbag, and quacks like a greedy scumbag, well...
If it looks like a greedy scumbag, and quacks like a greedy scumbag, well...
Read Zero to One. Assuming that is in any way representative of what he thinks, he's a Futurist.
Then again it's also possible that he's massively inconsistent and full of contradictions. Humans are not perfectly philosophically consistent robots. Contradiction is more normal than not. Peoples' beliefs often come more from emotional affinities and cultural bias than reason.
Then again it's also possible that he's massively inconsistent and full of contradictions. Humans are not perfectly philosophically consistent robots. Contradiction is more normal than not. Peoples' beliefs often come more from emotional affinities and cultural bias than reason.
Or, you know, a utility-maximizing actor found it utility-increasing to place certain words into certain sequences in certain contexts due to the expected effect said arrangement would have upon the expected audience?
It's not terribly complicated.
It's not terribly complicated.
I get your point and I in fact agree. I just wanted to say that that is a sentence structure that only a programmer could find beautiful :)
The sentence flows perfectly well. Not sure anyone would find it beautiful but it is certainly succinct and expressive.
Seems like Peter Thiel just has a policy to keep a finger in a lot of pies. Reminds me of the time Yarvin wrote a criticism of Sam Altman:
> Sam Altman (whom I don't know, but SF is a small town and I probably know someone who knows him) ... [1]
It's amusing that the missing link between them would be Peter Thiel.
([1]: If you really want to read the full post you can easily find it using Google.)
> Sam Altman (whom I don't know, but SF is a small town and I probably know someone who knows him) ... [1]
It's amusing that the missing link between them would be Peter Thiel.
([1]: If you really want to read the full post you can easily find it using Google.)
I have a friend who's just spooky in his ability to predict the movement of culture and politics, often many years in advance. He's a genius about other matters too. He clearly possesses an off-the-charts IQ as well as a lot of varied worldly experience and background.
He also thinks the Apollo Moon landings were fake.
We've debated the subject. His reasons for thinking this are complex but they boil down not only to evidence (as he sees it) but the cultural narrative. Why did we step so far back from progress in the early 70s? Maybe it's because our greatest achievement was a ruse and everyone kind of realized it on some subconscious level. Maybe the psychological effect of that ruse was to derail us from the future. Oh, and the films of Stanley Kubrick are full of covert signals where he spills the beans about the whole thing. Just watch. It's all right there. Kubrick did the Moon landing fakes and later used the same technology to film 2001, which is in part a very "meta" allegory about the Moon hoax.
I think this is all completely and utterly nuts.
I've met Yarvin a.k.a. Moldbug. He's really brilliant. I'm sure he has an off-the-charts IQ and like many scary smart people his mind has habits of its own and often moves in mysterious and deeply creative directions. His software work transcends the realm of conventional development and into the realm of high conceptual art.
He thinks feudalism and autocracy are superior political systems, a notion about as nutty as the Moon Hoax theory. There is literally not a shred of evidence for it either contemporary or historical and it makes no rational sense. In all our many thousands of years of social experimentation there are no examples that can be cited to support the case and many that can be cited against it. If you want an easy one search for a picture of North and South Korea from space. There's your answer. Case closed.
We went to the Moon too. I've seen the pictures and heard the astronauts talk about what it was like to... uhh... walk on the Moon.
There are low superstitions only an idiot would believe. For those of greater intellect there are higher superstitions far too absurd for an idiot to grasp. It takes a genius to contort their mind like that. It takes a really profound intellect to convince themselves that the Moon landings were fake, that the Earth is flat, or that feudal autocracy is a superior system of government.
Look into the flat Earth. It's got some Mensa-grade IQ proponents. Only a genius could grasp the mathematics of the ether vortex that allows satellites to "orbit" above the plane. An idiot would conclude that they're just falling in circles around a big ball, which yields simple math an idiot could grasp but does not explain the subtile occult symbolism of US polar expeditions or why the UN won't allow us in Antarctica. It takes a really perceptive mind to notice those things and tie it all together. Here let me "red pill" you...
The right and conspiracy theorists have no monopoly here. I'd also count the postmodernist dialectical hermeneutics word salad spewed by critical studies professors in humanities departments. As near as I can tell it means nothing but maybe I'm too dense. Maybe the most profound insights into history and culture are buried in all those syllables.
I've seen enough of this to start thinking that bizarre transcendentally-irrational nonsense is one of the things holding back the evolution of human intelligence. I've wondered if our 100 average IQ might be an evolutionary local maximum surrounded by valleys on all sides. Lower IQs don't equip us with enough brains to survive, while high IQs too frequently lead to cognitive towers of babel that derail and confuse. Basically we get smarter until +/- one standard deviation of 100 and then start getting dumb again, but in a different way. We get complex-dumb not simple-dumb. Maybe there's another local maximum up there somewhere... like if you had an IQ of 300 you'd see through the nonsense easily... but we've never reached it. Super-smart humans seem smart enough to assemble elaborate state graphs but not smart enough to prune them, and they seem prone to letting the impressiveness of these structures overwhelm the simple evidence of the senses and straightforward reason.
It doesn't surprise me to see a lot of nutty stuff in Silicon Valley. With so many high-IQ people assembled in one place they're sure to drive each other to complete and utter insanity through competitive intellectual edifice building and hyper-meta-over-analysis. I'm not sure if legal marijuana will help or make this a lot worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT0zjorR68A
Edit: my Moon hoaxer friend predicted the rise of the alt-right as far back as 2008, calling Obama-era America "Weimar America" and even going to far as to cite geek culture as ground zero for its emergence. He predicted a new, hip fascist movement that would ascend with a mixture of futurism, conservatism, and quasi-occultism (Kek! Kek! Kek!) and that it would come from the Internet. He predicted all this eight years ago. Today he predicts a two-term Trump and a world war. Let's hope he's wrong.
Edit #2: You can also see the tower of babel effect in the design of software, where us geniuses can add complexity forever but can never prune it.
He also thinks the Apollo Moon landings were fake.
We've debated the subject. His reasons for thinking this are complex but they boil down not only to evidence (as he sees it) but the cultural narrative. Why did we step so far back from progress in the early 70s? Maybe it's because our greatest achievement was a ruse and everyone kind of realized it on some subconscious level. Maybe the psychological effect of that ruse was to derail us from the future. Oh, and the films of Stanley Kubrick are full of covert signals where he spills the beans about the whole thing. Just watch. It's all right there. Kubrick did the Moon landing fakes and later used the same technology to film 2001, which is in part a very "meta" allegory about the Moon hoax.
I think this is all completely and utterly nuts.
I've met Yarvin a.k.a. Moldbug. He's really brilliant. I'm sure he has an off-the-charts IQ and like many scary smart people his mind has habits of its own and often moves in mysterious and deeply creative directions. His software work transcends the realm of conventional development and into the realm of high conceptual art.
He thinks feudalism and autocracy are superior political systems, a notion about as nutty as the Moon Hoax theory. There is literally not a shred of evidence for it either contemporary or historical and it makes no rational sense. In all our many thousands of years of social experimentation there are no examples that can be cited to support the case and many that can be cited against it. If you want an easy one search for a picture of North and South Korea from space. There's your answer. Case closed.
We went to the Moon too. I've seen the pictures and heard the astronauts talk about what it was like to... uhh... walk on the Moon.
There are low superstitions only an idiot would believe. For those of greater intellect there are higher superstitions far too absurd for an idiot to grasp. It takes a genius to contort their mind like that. It takes a really profound intellect to convince themselves that the Moon landings were fake, that the Earth is flat, or that feudal autocracy is a superior system of government.
Look into the flat Earth. It's got some Mensa-grade IQ proponents. Only a genius could grasp the mathematics of the ether vortex that allows satellites to "orbit" above the plane. An idiot would conclude that they're just falling in circles around a big ball, which yields simple math an idiot could grasp but does not explain the subtile occult symbolism of US polar expeditions or why the UN won't allow us in Antarctica. It takes a really perceptive mind to notice those things and tie it all together. Here let me "red pill" you...
The right and conspiracy theorists have no monopoly here. I'd also count the postmodernist dialectical hermeneutics word salad spewed by critical studies professors in humanities departments. As near as I can tell it means nothing but maybe I'm too dense. Maybe the most profound insights into history and culture are buried in all those syllables.
I've seen enough of this to start thinking that bizarre transcendentally-irrational nonsense is one of the things holding back the evolution of human intelligence. I've wondered if our 100 average IQ might be an evolutionary local maximum surrounded by valleys on all sides. Lower IQs don't equip us with enough brains to survive, while high IQs too frequently lead to cognitive towers of babel that derail and confuse. Basically we get smarter until +/- one standard deviation of 100 and then start getting dumb again, but in a different way. We get complex-dumb not simple-dumb. Maybe there's another local maximum up there somewhere... like if you had an IQ of 300 you'd see through the nonsense easily... but we've never reached it. Super-smart humans seem smart enough to assemble elaborate state graphs but not smart enough to prune them, and they seem prone to letting the impressiveness of these structures overwhelm the simple evidence of the senses and straightforward reason.
It doesn't surprise me to see a lot of nutty stuff in Silicon Valley. With so many high-IQ people assembled in one place they're sure to drive each other to complete and utter insanity through competitive intellectual edifice building and hyper-meta-over-analysis. I'm not sure if legal marijuana will help or make this a lot worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT0zjorR68A
Edit: my Moon hoaxer friend predicted the rise of the alt-right as far back as 2008, calling Obama-era America "Weimar America" and even going to far as to cite geek culture as ground zero for its emergence. He predicted a new, hip fascist movement that would ascend with a mixture of futurism, conservatism, and quasi-occultism (Kek! Kek! Kek!) and that it would come from the Internet. He predicted all this eight years ago. Today he predicts a two-term Trump and a world war. Let's hope he's wrong.
Edit #2: You can also see the tower of babel effect in the design of software, where us geniuses can add complexity forever but can never prune it.
> or that feudal autocracy is a superior system of government.
The thing to ask is, as always, cui bono? Perhaps he sees it as superior because he believes that he would have a better place in it than he does in the current system.
The thing to ask is, as always, cui bono? Perhaps he sees it as superior because he believes that he would have a better place in it than he does in the current system.
Consider that the issue here may not what you're trying to measure (intelligence), but the metric you're using to measure it (IQ).
Frirst, IQ does not measure gross intelligence the way most people think it does. It measures the ability to succeed on an IQ test, which seems to correspond to several abilities possessed by generally intelligent people. Being high or low-IQ does not guarantee intellectual performance on a given task or in a given setting.
Second, intellect is an amplifier of but not a replacement for skills and hard work. You can't understand the physics of or rocket science required to perform a moon landing unless you've got the knowledge and skill to apply those principals. General knowledge doesn't imply specific knowledge almost ever. Even learning to reason logically is a skill you have to pick up before you can apply it. If Mozart had never seen a piano or any other instrument, he would never have become a musical prodigy on those instruments.
"Complex-dumb," in my opinion, is just a result of people with some degree of general intellect (or who believe they have that intellect and can convince others of it) assuming that their smarts give them the ability to understand things without putting in the work required to actually understand them. (If we accept this concept, there are also some interesting implications when we start asking 'what leads a person to make that assumption?', but that's another discussion.)
Frirst, IQ does not measure gross intelligence the way most people think it does. It measures the ability to succeed on an IQ test, which seems to correspond to several abilities possessed by generally intelligent people. Being high or low-IQ does not guarantee intellectual performance on a given task or in a given setting.
Second, intellect is an amplifier of but not a replacement for skills and hard work. You can't understand the physics of or rocket science required to perform a moon landing unless you've got the knowledge and skill to apply those principals. General knowledge doesn't imply specific knowledge almost ever. Even learning to reason logically is a skill you have to pick up before you can apply it. If Mozart had never seen a piano or any other instrument, he would never have become a musical prodigy on those instruments.
"Complex-dumb," in my opinion, is just a result of people with some degree of general intellect (or who believe they have that intellect and can convince others of it) assuming that their smarts give them the ability to understand things without putting in the work required to actually understand them. (If we accept this concept, there are also some interesting implications when we start asking 'what leads a person to make that assumption?', but that's another discussion.)
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```
Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel.”
“Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos responded.
“Less than you might think!” Yarvin wrote back. “I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”
```
It seems Thiel is very much in the pocket of the Valley's Neo-Fascist movement.