The gist of it is that he had interesting ideas on political systems in the past, but that his current ideas are nonsense, and in fact his old work explains exactly why his new work is nonsense.
Bioshock sort of touches on technocracy, but its more post-apocalyptic. A game that spans the rise and fall of a "board of great geniuses" would be great.
but for you, my dear retard, i'll make an exception:
Reconstruction, followed by Jim Crow. The late 70s had a period of progressiveness, of openness, especially towards homosexuals. Then AIDS came, and that was all forgotten. The 80s were another dark age.
In the 90s we had another brief opening, but that too ended sooner than it started. We didn't pick up until the 2010s. By 2014/2015 progressiveness was on the way out, just in time for marriage equality to push through. And now, we are in another dark period and have been for a while.
Technocracy just follow wherever the wind blows. Progressiveness will come back, and hopefully we can push enough through that we'll be set for the next decade to come. That's really what it's all about - get as much done as fast as possible, so that it cannot all be reverted, no matter how hard conservatives try.
I find his writing style wastes a lot of one's time and I disagree with him on nearly everything, but there's no denying that there are many interesting ideas in there.
Well, I hope the rest of the world now will get the memo too, before we'll need a world war to crystallize the lesson.
We've done this, it was called the dark ages and it sucked and we moved past it. Engaging with this pablum in any way is granting it attention and vigor it obviously doesn't deserve.
Well, the "dark ages" is now widely considered a misnomer, and that time is seen as an important era development-wise.
Whereas now many argue it's decline and regression in many areas compared to recent past.
I think people just dismiss him out of hand because he's a political enemy.
I did read a decent amount of his "mencius moldbug" stuff back in the day, and I just wouldn't describe it the way you do in this comment, so I'm wondering what I'm missing.
I think we probably just fundamentally disagree here, because to me, this whole thing seems like drivel. Are there gems in there that I'm just not recognizing?
The symbolic idea of who holds power and who actually holds power in practice are not the same.
There’s also the bit that doge is constrained in ways that make success unlikely (which has now been proved out).
I think the doge thing is silly though. It didn't fail because it was "constrained in ways that make success unlikely", it failed because: 1. There was obviously just arithmetically not enough money in discretionary spending to make more than a tiny dent in spending, and 2. They never made even the most cursory effort to improve efficiency, and just went with this ideological chainsaw approach. Maybe there's some version of the idea that was (and is) a good one, but it was always doomed to fail as conceived and led.
I would think someone intent on calling Moldbug's ideas interesting would at least try to patch up the big holes. Like the city-states that have free flowing capital and populations, but somehow avoid an analogue to international law.
Or the dictator that isn't subject to approval, except by the required committee that can fire him. There's 4 points and 2 of them are contradictory!
This is what kills me about attempts like this (e.g. like Scott Alexander's) to make Yarvin's ideas seem "interesting" or "thought-provoking".
Well-read as Yarvin might be, only someone who is mentally a teenager can have his kind of beliefs. "Society would be great if it weren't for all these monstruous things I don't like, artificially imposed on us by... aliens?"
It reminds me of teenagers who go online and make arguments like "well, ackshually, the US is not a democracy but a republic...". Yeah, yeah, you're very smart for pointing this out, now go sit in a corner and let the grownups talk.
It’s really a testament to how astonishingly stupid some of those rich folks are that they find any of Yarvin’s work compelling.
These rich people have very powerful connections.
I don't understand why we're reinventing feudalism over and over again and acting like it's novel. Giving all the tools to the wealthy doesn't make society a better place, and we've proved that. It decidedly stagnates everything, which, ironically, leads to very poor living conditions, including for the wealthy. So it's not even good for them, it's just self-destructive.
When someone's #1, heavy-hitting, come-out-swinging criticism amounts to "his group is not as smart as they think they are" then they're already done. They've cooked themselves. I read that paragraph and heard it in the mean girl voice they thought they were hiding.
#2 is that his wrong ideas are immoral. #3 is that #2 draws the wrong crowd.
It's not like I don't get the point. It's just written for an audience that already deep in that corner of the blogosphere.
I'm sure they pump their fists at such a clean summing-up of why they hate him. But my eyes are glazing over.
This is just wrong and anyone can visit the blog to see for themselves.
Read Scott’s glowing review of _Albion’s Seed_.
It seems possible that if someone wasn’t familiar with Scott’s position on race science, they could read about his position on race science and then have that influence their opinion of him.
Out of curiosity, are you lumping everybody into two groups? The way your sentence was worded it sounds like there are on one hand people that believe in race science, and on the other hand “doctrinaire egalitarian leftists”. If the only qualification required to be a “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” is “not believing in race science”, then you’ve kind of just said “Unless [you don’t believe in race science], I don’t see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter”, which might actually kind of underscore some people’s issue with him.
He sort of panders to an audience that fancies themselves much smarter than the average person, and as such categorically demand opinions that average people do not hold — no matter how sensible they might be. To accommodate that requirement he repackages existing (more usually conservative/libertarian) cultural gripes by pairing them with some light criticism and branding it as some sort of enlightened centrist/Third Way perspective. This sort of practice in general has lost some of its illusory appeal in recent years since so many previously “politically inscrutable” rich and influential folks dropped their centrist/apolitical trappings and came out as staunchly right-wing.
That being said there are quite a few readers that still want to play the “Are they right wing? Are they left wing? Are they something magical and ascendant?” game, and audience capture is a real phenomenon, so the entrenched players have no reason for introspection or change.
from January 2025 [0]:
> Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country.
a bit of additional context from Wikipedia [1]:
> Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal.
he claims that Lynn's work is still "hotly debated" and links to an article in "Aporia Magazine" which is published by the "Human Diversity Foundation" [2]:
> The Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) is a far-right company founded in 2022 to publish "race science" through the Aporia Magazine and Mankind Quarterly. It also publishes Edward Dutton's The Jolly Heretic podcast. Key persons of the HDF including its founder support remigration and white nationalism.
the role that Alexander plays reminds me of the attempts in the early 2000s to "teach the controversy" [3] about evolution vs. creationism. there is no actual scientific debate, but people with a political axe to grind want to shift the Overton window and give the impression that there is one.
0: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-le...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn