Ten years late to the thread, but I wanted to make a clarification for people who might see this.
Yudkowsky’s characterisation comes from a good faith misunderstanding of what Yarvin (Moldbug) is doing. Yarvin is perfectly capable of separating the normative from the descriptive, but this is much less relevant to his project than to Yudkowsky’s. Yudkowsky is trying to solve AI alignment, and therefore ideally needs a very pure conception of the terminal values of humanity, or the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity. But this is purely theoretical axiology, and in the context of political philosophy, it is rather ephemeral.
Political philosophy is more concerned with the distinction between long term goals and short term goals. This is related to terminal values versus instrumental values, but there is no clear dividing line, since the long term goals are also constrained by material reality and therefore contingent, which contingency separates them from true terminal values. Since a sharp dividing line between long term goals and short term goals would be arbitrary and fail to properly capture the nuances of the spectrum, Yarvin does not draw such a line. He does not however conflate goals belonging to different time horizons, so he is also not committing the “fallacy of grey”.
Ten years late to the thread, but I wanted to make a clarification for people who might see this.
Yudkowsky’s characterisation comes from a good faith misunderstanding of what Yarvin (Moldbug) is doing. Yarvin is perfectly capable of separating the normative from the descriptive, but this is much less relevant to his project than to Yudkowsky’s. Yudkowsky is trying to solve AI alignment, and therefore ideally needs a very pure conception of the terminal values of humanity, or the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity. But this is purely theoretical axiology, and in the context of political philosophy, it is rather ephemeral.
Political philosophy is more concerned with the distinction between long term goals and short term goals. This is related to terminal values versus instrumental values, but there is no clear dividing line, since the long term goals are also constrained by material reality and therefore contingent, which contingency separates them from true terminal values. Since a sharp dividing line between long term goals and short term goals would be arbitrary and fail to properly capture the nuances of the spectrum, Yarvin does not draw such a line. He does not however conflate goals belonging to different time horizons, so he is also not committing the “fallacy of grey”.