I was going to leave a comment there when I read it this morning, but Moldbug doesn't read his comments, so...
To claim that the activists were strong is pretty absurd. The activists failed for approximately a century, in a regime that did a very good job of returning to the status quo ante bellum, died repeatedly while I don't recall hearing of very many KKKers ever dying, and a partial victory at some point in some small town shows that they're 'strong'?
Reminds me of the over-application of 'revealed preferences' and the dormitive fallacy: 'who are the strong? Those who win. How do you win? Be the strong.' Well, uh, OK, if you think that's anything but word games, I'll leave you to it then.
And then there's the selection biases here; how many activists do you ever hear of? How many movements? As all analyses of power acknowledge, there's a lot of chance & variation involved... I remember reading that in China right now, they average something like 6000 disturbances or movements a year, of which I can name maybe 2 or 3 categories - Tibetan and Falun Gong, and whatever the last strike or protest the New York Times covered was.
(So basically, classic Moldbug: provocative and interesting, but the more you think on it, the less convincing it gets. I subscribe for the former, but I wish there was less of the latter.)
To claim that the activists were strong is pretty absurd. The activists failed for approximately a century, in a regime that did a very good job of returning to the status quo ante bellum, died repeatedly while I don't recall hearing of very many KKKers ever dying, and a partial victory at some point in some small town shows that they're 'strong'?
This might be a radical suggestion, but who holds power does change over time. Especially over as long a period as a century. It can also hardly be disputed that gaining stronger allies or your allies being more interested in helping you makes you stronger.
Quite obviously Universalism was not completely done with tolerating racism in the 19th century. Note how Eugenics came into fashion among Progressives in the 1900s and how support Eugenics correlated with racialist ideas. And in the 19th century actual democracy (elected officials) on the state level had much more teeth than the 1960s according to Moldbugs model and my own study of US history. He notes in other writing that rule by the civil service which we have today is preferable to the mob politics and spolis system.
Desegregation in the United States was very much not the will ...
So you agree that the cause of civil rights started out as the underdog, and only gained power gradually with time until it had enough power to challenge the established law and change it. How does this differ from the standard Progressive narrative? (other than, perhaps, insisting pedantically that once the cause is strong enough to win, it shouldn't be called the underdog any more?)
Re your last paragraph, it is true that if a winner writing history says "we were the underdog, and despite that we won quickly and decisively", this should be suspect as unlikely and a self-flattering image. But if the winner's history goes "we were the underdog, had many defeats and setbacks but gradually rallied people to our cause until we started winning, and we hope to win more in the future as more and more people come to side with us" (which is closer to the standard Progressive narrative on civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, etc) why is this especially suspect? (You might suspect the cause to be less pure or the reasons why it gathered support less related to people seeing its justice, than the supporters believe, but this is different from questioning the underdog to overdog progression story).
Certainly flukes happen. But they are flukes. If activists were weak, their victories would be isolated and of short duration, quickly reverted.
Which is why the long hypothesized WWI did not happen after a fluke like a Serbian terrorist assassinating someone important, because all flukes are isolated and of short duration.
(Is that a simplified and facile claim? Yes. Is it more simplified and facile than your argument? No.)
But if I lose some rounds, win one spin, and keep on winning thereafter, then something funny is going on. Or maybe I own the casino.
What's winning in this context? Blacks becoming wealthy, respected, functional, equals of whites and not remaining the permanent lower-class? I see... Clearly those blacks and their white allies really succeeded in their missions and just kept on winning after putting that small-town sheriff in his place!
But oh right, I forgot, Moldbug is a complete conspiracy theorist that has an explanation for that too: the blacks are constitutionally inferior, yes, but the reason for the absence of their success despite their tremendous power is that it really serves the white elite's true purposes and the blacks are just their shock troop...
Moldbug's article is interesting where it speaks in generalities, but on the specifics of Aaron Swartz's story, it seems to misunderstand the power relations involved. Yes, MIT and the State are powerful; but Aaron never intended to cross them; he expected, incorrectly but not unreasonably, that they'd stay neutral. He did intend to go against JSTOR, but while JSTOR may have been powerful, it looked to casual observers like a fairly simple institution with only one trick, not like an actual political player that could recruit MIT and the state into a questionable cause.
weak institutions (Exxon, Pentagon) instead of strong ones (State, academica incl. MIT)
I guess it's a huge relief for Bradley Manning (whom M.M. has carefully avoided mentioning along with Assange and Greenwald, although all three tend to get media exposure in connection) that he tried to "bully" a weak, indecisive Pentagon, whose hands are tied by its mortal enemies in the civillian bureaucracy - and thus the military can't stand up to the treasonous filth and has to treat him with kid gloves on.
And of course, the dirty, brainwashed, cowardly commies who hung out at the Occupy "protests" are the Obama regime's wet dream, spewing abuse against the already powerless big business and financial institutions - a perfect opportunity for it to further rob the deserving and appearse the plebs! Which is why the regime is intimidating its police into accommodating the lawless rioting scum - and the cops slavishly obey. The forces of law and order wouldn't dare lay a finger on those good-for-nothing hippies, not with the propaganda media watching!
Oh wait, this isn't relevant! Moldbug's above such inconvenient commie-sympathizing "facts", he's using Schwartz' ...
In my opinion, your reply would be significantly more powerful if it didn't contain that much sarcasm and overall didn't resemble a typical comment in a random political discussion on the internet. I am not sure whether signalling own political bias helps in internet discussions in general, but strongly suspect that it doesn't help here.
(Written by someone who's too getting annoyed at this moldbuggish madness.)
You present a very one sided take on this.
I thought the other "side" was supposed to have its case presented in the original? I saw an entirely political attack that relied on skewed facts and opportunistic grandstanding over a recent death. I retorted with some ways in which it's dishonest, fallacious and doesn't constitute anything like a proper rational argument.
My retort was also quite political in substance, true. And yet, if Moldbug or some of his fans were really interested in making the whole thing more truth-tracking, they would listen to my counter-examples and either refute them or make their case incorporate it somehow. The same goes for other people's objections in this thread.
I was replying to the case as presently made (as e.g. summed up by Athrelon), and wasn't attempting to steel-man it - frankly, there's people who'd do so far better than me. My gratuitous use of sarcastic tribal language was entirely intentional, as MM and some of his fans seemingly can't get enough of it.
Personally, I don't follow Moldbug's writings. Sometimes, when excerpts are posted here, I upvote them, and sometimes I downvote them. In this case, it seems to me that his argument fails to account for the influence of context in confrontations between entities. His formulation implies a transitivity of power, where A beats B, and B beats C, so A should also beat C. In practice though, you can easily end up with situations where A beats B because A's interests in the confrontation are more in line with public opinion than B's, or take less work to implement, etc., but loses to C without the same situational advantages.
Trying to define "whoever wins" as the overdog isn't an improvement over the more standard formulation where the overdog is the entity which will win in most contexts if those entities come into conflict, or will win against more other entities which themselves have a record of being powerful.
I would have been unimpressed whether or not I thought Moldbug was using this as part of a narrative about who is and isn't "powerful" in our society that I'd take issue with.
First, note the spelling: confusingly, it's Swartz, not Schwartz.
While it's as hard as ever to make sense of Moldbug's stream of consciousness, it seems like he is stuck in a circular redefinition of "underdog". The regular definition involves comparing priors, while his is comparing posteriors:
In the real world in which we live, the weak had better know their own weakness. If they would gather their strength, do it! But without fighting, even "civil disobedience." To break a law is to fight. Those who fight had better be strong. Those who are not strong, had better not fight.
How do you actually figure out who is stronger? The only definitive test is to let them fight it out. No one expected a minor act of civil disobedience in Tunisia to topple multiple governments across the globe.
As for the typically sensationalist title "Noam Chomsky Killed Aaron Swartz", while Chomsky's writings may have inspired Swartz to act, like they inspired other people to act, the decision to fight and the choice of weapons was Swartz's alone. How close he was to his next victory (he won against the establishment several times before), we will never know, because the trial will not happen now. He could have been one depression pill away from pulling through. His cause may yet prevail if the paywall customs will change in the wake of his suicide.
What do people see in Moldbug, anyway, beyond his provocative writing style?
What do people see in Moldbug, anyway, beyond his provocative writing style?
For a certain subset of the population that's quite reactionary/conservative and yet quite intellectual, he provides validation they can't find easily elsewhere.
Yeah, that's the role he played for me at least. That said, I'd really like to see some "reactionary" bloggers who hold themselves to a higher intellectual standard than Moldbug. A good example is this post which made the rounds recently. Some of Yvain's LJ posts fit the bill as well, but I feel that a lot more such material is still waiting to be written.
What do you mean by 'reactionary'? On my definition of that term--roughly, 'extreme conservatism or authoritarianism'--Yvain is definitely not a reactionary blogger.
Lots of people who disagree with Moldbug's politics were capable of making useful predictions about the Arab Spring (or other political movements). Comparing any smart person's predictions to "pundit" predictions is useful only for teaching you that pundits aren't trying to be smart.
The predictions I remember Moldbug making regarding the Arab Spring were that:
Both are failed ones. Mind you, they aren't explicitly stated in the link above, but I think they're correct interpretation of his statements there. Certainly they'd be seen as good predictions if they'd been successful ones.
So may I ask what part of his model allowed you to make what predictions regarding the Arab Spring?
Moldbug is leaving out the possibility that the balance of power might be changing, so that behavior which was too dangerous in the past is now worth attempting. Also, people's behavior can occasionally change the balance-- the Federal government was on King's side because a great many people worked to put it there.
Does getting assassinated say anything about one's power level?
MESSAGE TO ADMINS: THIS POST HAS SOME FLASH CONTENT IN IT'S HTML (BOTTOM) THAT'S CAUSING BUGS ON THE MAIN DISCUSSION PAGE - PLEASE EDIT THE HTML AND DELETE IT.
(It means that this page and discussion are always asking for a flash plugin, which at least on my version of firefox isn't even needed, I'm not the only one with this problem)
(then delete this comment)
Thanks!
Wait, I thought Moldbug considered "actual power" to be aligned with liberal public opinion. But liberal public opinion seems to favor Chomskyite activists like Swartz over evil copyright institutions like JSTOR, or am I out of the loop?
His point is that such action would be much more favoured if done against Exxon Mobile than MIT.
This means that activists like King, Schwartz, and Assange are only effective in bullying the weak, not standing up to the strong
An institution might be very strong in some respects, but not strong enough to move the populace against a sufficiently popular cause backed by a sufficiently charismatic leader.
Some institutions have more power to move the will of the public than others. The US government can to a significant extent shape public opinion by passing laws, not just conform to public opinion. But it can't do so to an unlimited extent, and if another figure pushes for a position that's more in line with public opinion, they're going to have an advantage over the government, even if they have less ability to sway public opinion.
Here he returns to a theme that is one of his real contributions to blogospheric political thought: that victory in political competitions provides Bayesian information about who has power and who doesn't.
This differs from realpolitik how...?
While I don't agree with much of the linked post, the line portraying civil disobedience as an application of might makes right really hits hard for me. I need to do more thinking on this to see if there is justification for me to update my current beliefs.
If you thought physical power was the only kind of power, such that social power was not a kind of power, then yes, you need to update your beliefs.
Why is Firefox telling me that additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page? (And then not providing any when I click the "Install Missing Plugins" button?)
While I said elsewhere that I wouldn't have shared this article on the site, I find it telling that this article started at 6 when I first saw it and is now where it is. I wouldn't have ascribed this much meaning, but if comments like this get heavily down voted too, it fits into a pattern my cluster of users has been noting for several months now.
Perhaps I do need to start my own blog as suggested by some. But as I said I prefer communities to lonely things such as one man blogs, especially if the latter has long periods of inactivity.
Athrelon would you...
I find it telling that this article started at 6 when I first saw it and is now where it is
If it's telling, what does it "tell" whether it first received the upvotes and then the downvotes, or if it first received the downvotes and then the upvotes?
Something it might tell is e.g. that the downvoters are the people who actually took the time to read the article linked and founds themselves considering it inferior. While the upvoters just upvoted without reading.
But it seems you put more probabilty on a more negative conclusion from the sequence of first upvotes-then downvotes.
While the upvoters just upvoted without reading.
Or they could've already read it; perhaps because they subscribed to the RSS feed for new posts (as would only be sane for people who want to read new Moldbug posts, since he updates so sporadically).
My intent is a general warning against formulating hypotheses one way or another on as flimsy evidence as the times each vote occurred, I wasn't intending to commit same sin myself.
...Better to be a live dog than a dead hero. But had Aaron Swartz plugged his laptop into the Exxon internal network and downloaded everything Beelzebub knows about fracking, he would be a live hero to this day. Why? Because no ambitious Federal prosecutor in the 21st century would see a route to career success through hounding some activist at Exxon's behest. Your prosecutor would have to actually believe he was living in the Chomsky world. Which he can't, because that narrative is completely inconsistent with the real world he goes to work in every da
He has a much stronger case with the example of Julian Assange than with Aaron.
......may yet get its hands on a similar figure, Julian Assange. You know, when I read that Assange had his hands on a huge dump of DoD and State documents, I figured we would never see those cables. Sure enough, the first thing he released was some DoD material.
Why? Well, obviously, Assange knew the score. He knew that Arlington is weak and Georgetown is strong. He knew that he could tweak Arlington's nose all day long and party on it, making big friends in high society, a
Can we add ignoring Moldbug to our general "don't feed the trolls" policy? He's deliberately provocative.
I don't think he is properly described as a "troll", though I'm puzzled by the high opinion that some folks here appear to have of Moldbug. This is someone who is manifestly not seeking truth honestly, doesn't write very clearly, often engages in mind-killer disputes, seldom makes claims that can be directly tested or even falsified in principle, and hasn't made any substantive contributions to any branch of science, philosophy, or mathematics.
The title is quite definitely just trolling. Edit: On Moldbug's part, not Athrelon's for quoting it.
I think the reason why Moldbug is so often quoted around here is the following: There is a great diversity of political opinion on LW, and occasionally there are discussions touching on political issues. When these arise, a LWer whose general political outlook is leftist, liberal, centrist or libertarian will find it easy to find support and elaboration for their positions in links and references to many other writers sharing the same outlook and explaining it at the high intellectual level that LWers expect. There being many such writers, there is none who is disproportionately cited and referenced in LW. However, a LWer with a conservative/reactionary outlook has much fewer expositions of these ideas to link to (that other LWers would find plausible/intellectually congenial; Fox News pundits or Catholic theologians would not do.) Moldbug is one of the very few writers expounding this ideology in a way broadly compatible with the LW outlook, and hence it is not surprising that he is referenced more often that other political writers.
As far as I can tell, there is more discussion of Moldbug on this site than there is of any other contemporary non-scientific non-LW figure. Do you believe this relative quantity is commensurate with the quality and significance of his thought?
I predict that if I started making multiple Discussion posts focused solely on the social criticism of Althusser or Deleuze or Zizek, I would face a very negative reaction from this community, even if I gussied it up with talk of "map vs. territory" and "Bayesian evidence". Yet for some reason the community seems far more tolerant of rampant Moldbuggery. I suspect this is primarily due to historical reasons dating back to the Overcoming Bias days, as well as the fact that Moldbug's writing style is more "nerd-friendly" than that of many other idiosyncratic political theorists.
For reasons such as these, some Moldbug enthusiasts here seem to operate on the assumption that anything written by Moldbug is by default a good topic of conversation on this site. I suspect that if the points made in the OP were written by someone other than Moldbug, they would not have been posted here. The filters used to determine which of Moldbug's ideas are good topics of discussion here are far too permissive. I don't think a ban is the correct response, but I do think that Moldbug fans need to be more reflective about what these discussions are contributing to this site.
I'm skeptical that what was interesting was unique to Moldbug, or that what was unique to Moldbug was interesting.
Sometimes a decision that results in a clear chance of death is better; stop trying to not lose and maximize the chances of winning.
Or take a more moderate route, and maximize the definite integral of the value of outcomes with respect to their utility.
I strongly disagree with this.
Not all of his content is relevant to refining human rationality, interesting to this community or productive to discuss here. I wouldn't have posted this particular article. But many are, to give examples:
Also much of the writing of bloggers such as Federico that write very relevant material can only be understood if you have a good grounding in Moldbuggery.
As far as I can tell, there is more discussion of Moldbug on this site than there is of any other contemporary non-scientific non-LW figure. Do you believe this relative quantity is commensurate with the quality and significance of his thought?
I predict that if I started making multiple Discussion posts focused solely on the social criticism of Althusser or Deleuze or Zizek, I would face a very negative reaction from this community, even if I gussied it up with talk of "map vs. territory" and "Bayesian evidence". Yet for some reason the...
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html
Summary: Moldbug on the Aaron Schwartz affair. Power is a very real thing with real consequences for activists, yet many people don't understand the nature of power in modern times. People like Noam Chomsky get great fame doing bad epistomology about who has power, and as a result do great harm to idealistic nerds who don't read between the lines to selectively target their attacks at weak institutions (Exxon, Pentagon) instead of strong ones (State, academica incl. MIT).
Here he returns to a theme that is one of his real contributions to blogospheric political thought: that victory in political competitions provides Bayesian information about who has power and who doesn't. If your worldview has the underdog somehow systematically beating the overdog, your epistemology is simply wrong - in the same way, and to the same extent, as a geocentrist who has to keep adding epicycles to account for anomalous observations.
The truth is that the weapons of "activism" are not weapons which the weak can use against the strong. They are weapons the strong can use against the weak. When the weak try to use them against the strong, the outcome is... well... suicidal.
Who was stronger - Dr. King, or Bull Connor? Well, we have a pretty good test for who was stronger. Who won? In the real story, overdogs win. Who had the full force of the world's strongest government on his side? Who had a small-town police force staffed with backward hicks? In the real story, overdogs win.
"Civil disobedience" is no more than a way for the overdog to say to the underdog: I am so strong that you cannot enforce your "laws" upon me. I am strong and might makes right - I give you the law, not you me. Don't think the losing party in this conflict didn't try its own "civil disobedience." And even its own "active measures." Which availed them - what? Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.
This means that activists like King, Schwartz, and Assange are only effective in bullying the weak, not standing up to the strong (despite conventional narratives that misassign strengths to institutions). When such activists stop following the script, and naively use the same tactics to attack strong institutions, reality reasserts itself quite forcefully:
You know, when I read that Assange had his hands on a huge dump of DoD and State documents, I figured we would never see those cables. Sure enough, the first thing he released was some DoD material.
Why? Well, obviously, Assange knew the score. He knew that Arlington is weak and Georgetown is strong. He knew that he could tweak Arlington's nose all day long and party on it, making big friends in high society, and no one would even think about reaching out and touching him. Or so I thought.
In fact, my cynicism was unjustified. In fact, Assange turned out to be a true believer, not a canny schemer. He was not content to wield his sword against the usual devils of the Chomsky narrative. Oh no, the poor fscker believed that he was actually there to take on the actual powers that be. Who are actually, of course, unlike the cartoon villains... strong. If he didn't know that... he knows it now!
...But had Aaron Swartz plugged his laptop into the Exxon internal network and downloaded everything Beelzebub knows about fracking, he would be a live hero to this day. Why? Because no ambitious Federal prosecutor in the 21st century would see a route to career success through hounding some activist at Exxon's behest...
But when you take on a genuinely respected institution - whether State or MIT - your "civil disobedience" has all the prospects of George Wallace in the schoolhouse door.
Then he takes his beliefs seriously, and speaks actual truth to actual power. Well, ya know, power doesn't like that much.