I bet a good way to improve your rationality is to attempt to learn from the writings of smart, highly articulate people, whom you consider morally evil, and who often use emotional language to mock people like yourself. So, for example, feminists could read Roissy and liberals could read Ann Coulter.
I’ve done exactly this. Read Roissy, read far-right sites (though not Coulter specifically.) Basically sought out the experience of having my feelings hurt, in the interest of curiosity.
I learned a few things from the experience. First, they have a few good points (my politics have changed over time). Second, they are not right about everything just because they are mean and nasty and make me feel bad, and in fact sometimes right-wingers and anti-feminists display flaws in reasoning. And, third, I learned how to deal better with emotional antagonism itself: I don’t bother seeking out excuses to be offended any more, but I do protect myself by avoiding people who directly insult me.
You’ll have to expand on this before I could agree. My inclination is to think quite the opposite. That is, when I read people who more or less articulately use highly emotion-button-pushing language to mock people like me, it puts my defenses up and makes me try to justify my beliefs, rationality be damned. Was this not pretty much the thrust of Politics is the Mind-Killer? If I were, to adopt a wild hypothetical, a conservative, I would probably say nearly anything to defend myself—whether publicly or in my own mind—against the kind of mockery I’d get on a daily basis from Paul Krugman’s blog (Krugman chosen as example per mattnewport). Rationality-wise, that is not the position I want to be trying to put myself in. Rather, I want to seek out reasoned, relatively “cool” (as opposed to emotionally “hot”) expressions of opposing viewpoints and try to approach them open-mindedly, trying to modify my positions if warranted.
“If I were, to adopt a wild hypothetical, a conservative, I would probably say nearly anything to defend myself—whether publicly or in my own mind—against the kind of mockery I’d get on a daily basis from Paul Krugman’s blog”
Yes, most people would do this, so the rationality challenge would be to fight against it. Think of it as special-forces-intensity rationality training.
Not everything that is difficult is thereby good training. It’s easier to withstand getting punched in the gut if you’re in good physical shape, but I wouldn’t suggest trying to get in shape by having someone punch you repeatedly in the gut.
(Indeed, at some point of martial arts training it’s useful to learn how to take a punch, but this training has to be done carefully and sparingly. You don’t become stronger by rupturing your spleen.)
I think this norm would do poorly in practice, because people would seek out antagonists they unconsciously knew would be flawed, rather than those who actually scare them.
A much better idea, I think, is the following:
Find someone who appears intelligent to you but is very ideologically different.
Offer to read a book of their choice if they read a book of your choice.
Give them a book you think will challenge them.
I’d suggest, however, that you not give the other person someone who will constantly mock their position, because usually this will only further polarize them away from you. Exposing oneself to good contrary arguments, not ridicule, is the way for human beings to update.
It’s probably good to have a mix. I get something distinct from reading people like Roissy or Sailer, whose basic values are totally divorced from my own. I get something else from Eliezer or Will Wilkinson, who derive different policy preferences from values that are similar to mine.
There’s something liberating about evil analysis, and I think it’s that it’s audaciousness allows you to put down mental blinders that would be on guard againstmore plausible threats to your ideological integrity. And a nice thing about values changing over time is that the classics are full of this stuff. Reading, say, Schmidt is like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that’s something you should experience regularly. Any similar recommendations?
Upvoted. From my reply you’ll see that I agree it’s probably good to seek out, as you say, those “whose basic values are totally divorced from [one’s’] own.” But can you say more about James Miller’s original contention that you should specifically be seeking out that which is designed to piss you off? That’s where it seems to me that his idea goes just totally wrong. How is this going to do anything except encourage you to retreat into tribalism?
If you know that doing X will ” encourage you to retreat into tribalism” then doing X gives you a great opportunity to fight against your irrational instincts.
Well, there is the aesthetic appreciation of polemic for its own sake, but that’s not going to make you more rational.
I think the most obvious answer, though, is that it can inure you a bit to connotative sneers. Aversion to this kind of insult is likely one of the major things keeping you from absorbing novel information!
One way to do this very quickly—you shouldn’t, of course, select your politics for such trivial advantages, but if you do, take advantage of it—is to become evil yourself, relative to the majority’s values. There are certain groups an attack upon which constitutes an applause line in the mainstream. If you identify as a communist or fascist or Islamist or other Designated Antagonist Group, you can either take the (obviously epistemically disastrous) route of only reading your comrades, or you can keep relying on mainstream institutional sources of information that insult you, and thereby thicken your skin. (Empirical prediction: hard {left|right}ists are more likely to read mainstream {conservatives|liberals} than are mainstream {liberals|conservatives}.)
(An alternate strategy this suggests, if your beliefs are, alas, pedestrian, is to “identify” with some completely ridiculous normative outlook, like negative utilitarianism or something. Let everyone’s viewpoint offend you until “this viewpoint offends!” no longer functions as a curiosity stopper.)
Well, I understand your reasoning: you suggest that it’s likely (or at least possible) that one’s reaction in the face of rhetorically “hot” disagreement will be a built-up tolerance (immunity) for mockery, making one more able to extract substance and ignore affect. My belief is that that particular strength of character (which I admire when I see it, which is rarely) is infrequent relative to, as I keep calling it, a retreat into tribalism in the face of mockery of one’s dearly-held beliefs. Hence my feeling that the upper-left quadrant of the graph I describe is not good breeding grounds for rationality. That isn’t to suggest that we shouldn’t do our best to self-modify such that that would no longer be the case, but it is hard to do and our efforts might be best spent elsewhere.
Also worth considering is the hypothesis that the two axes of my graph aren’t fully independent, but instead that “hot” expressions are correlated with substantively less rich and worthwhile viewpoints, because the richest and most worthwhile viewpoints wouldn’t have much need to rely on affect. If this is true (and I think it is at least somewhat true), it would be another reason for avoiding rhetorically “hot” political viewpoints in general.
As my political beliefs have become more evil I’ve become much better at ignoring insults to my politics. I remain pretty thin-skinned individually, though, so it seems that whatever’s moving me in this way is politics-specific.
The healthiest reading space is probably all over the axis. Passion is not the opposite of reason, and there are pleasures to take in reading beyond the conveyance of mere information.
Further to this. Let’s plot political discourse along two axes: substantive (x axis: -disagree to +agree) and rhetorical (y axis: -”cool”/reasoned to +”hot”/emotional). Oligopsony states that it is valuable to engage with those on the left-hand side of the graph (people who disagree with you), without any particular sense that special dangers are posed by the upper left-hand quadrant. (Oligopsony says reading so-and-so is “like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that’s something you should experience regularly”—regardless of the particular emotional relationship you are going to have with that Martian political philosophy as a function of the way in which it’s presented.) My view (following on, I think, PitM-K—and in sharp disagreement with James Miller’s original post in this thread) is that the upper half of the graph, and particularly the upper left-hand quadrant, is danger territory, because of the likelihood you are going to retreat into tribalism as your views are mocked.
Reading, say, Schmidt is like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that’s something you should experience regularly.
I like many aspects of Schmitt and he never produced any shock in me, unlike e.g. many bloggers who can be found 1-2 links away from Moldbug. In fact, many leftists have talked favourably about his reasoning if not his values.
Yes, I’ve heard of Schmitt. Paul Gottfried, who is one of my favorite contemporary political theorists, wrote a book about him. I plan to read at least some of Schmitt’s original work before reading what Gottfried has to say about him, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. Do you have any particular recommendations?
If you want to read some political philosophy that’s really out there by modern standards, try Joseph de Maistre. His staunch Catholicism will probably be off-putting to many people here, but a truly unbiased reader should understand that modern political writers are smuggling just as many unwarranted metaphysical assumptions into their work, except in much more devious ways. Also, although some of his arguments have been objectively falsified in the meantime, others have struck me as spot-on from the modern perspective of Darwinian insight into human nature and the humanity’s practical political experiences from the last two centuries. (His brother Xavier is a minor classic of French literature, whom I warmly recommend for some fun reading.)
I would accept that bet. In my experience exposure to such writings mostly serves to produce contempt. Contempt is one emotion that seems to have a purely deleterious effect on thinking. Anger, fear, sadness, anxiety and depression all provide at least some positive effects on thinking in the right circumstances but contempt… nothing.
I’ve been trying to do roughly that, though focusing more on the “smart and highly articulate” aspect and dropping “emotional mockery”. When I read someone taking cheap shots at a position I might hold, I mostly find the writer childish and annoying, I don’t see how reading more of that would improve my rationality. It doesn’t really hurt my feelings, unlike some commenters here, so I guess different people need to be prodded in different ways.
For smart and articulate writers with a rationalist vibe, I would recommend Mencius Moldbug (posts are articulate but unfortunately quite long; advocates monarchy, colonialism and slavery) and Noam Chomsky. Any recommendations of smart, articulate and “extreme” writers whose views are far from those two?
When I read someone taking cheap shots at a position I might hold, I mostly find the writer childish and annoying, I don’t see how reading more of that would improve my rationality.
I have the same reaction to someone taking cheap shots, period. It doesn’t matter whether they’re arguing something I agree with, disagree with, or don’t care about. It just lowers my opinion of the writer.
(I part ways with Rothbard here. While hereditary slavery is more debatable, I don’t have a problem at all with selling yourself into slavery. For me, a contract is an enforceable promise; removing my option to make enforceable promises cannot benefit me. If you don’t want to make the promise, don’t sign the contract. And promising to be your faithful servant so long as you and I shall live is a perfectly normal, legitimate, and (in a sane world) common sort of promise.)
I admit it: I am a pronomian. I endorse the nomos without condition. Fortunately, I do not have to endorse hereditary slavery, because any restoration of the nomos begins with the present state of possession, and at present there are no hereditary slaves. However, if you want to sell yourself and your children into slavery, I don’t believe it is my business to object. Try and strike a hard bargain, at least. (A slightly weakened form of pronomianism, perhaps more palatable in this day and age, might include mandatory emancipation at twenty-one.)
Hrmmmm… haven’t read the second link yet, but that first excerpt is.… well.… yeah. The selling yourself into slavery part is basically unobjectionable (to a libertarian), but selling your children into slavery....…
I think Moldbug’s positions seem to be derived not so much from reversed stupidity as reversed PC.
For smart and articulate writers with a rationalist vibe, I would recommend Mencius Moldbug (posts are articulate …
I’ll have to disagree, at least to the extent that this is taken as a positive attribute. I find his posts to be rambling and cutesy, which may correspond to articulate. But most people here have the kind of mind that prefers “get to the point” writing, which he fails at.
I think Moldbug is far away from any living thinker you could name. And he’d probably tell you so himself.
(FWIW, I think Moldbug is usually wrong, through a combination of confirmation bias and reversed stupidity, although I’m still open on Austrian economics in general.)
I have a very hard time evaluating Moldbug’s claims, due to my lack of background in the relevant history, but holy shit, do I ever enjoy reading his posts.
The crowd here may be very interested in watching him debate Robin Hanson about futarchy before an audience at the 2010 Foresight conference. Moldbug seems to be a bit quicker with the pen than in person.
Moldbug’s initial post that spurred the argument is here; it’s very moldbuggy, so the summary, as far as my understanding goes, is like this: Futarchy is exposed to corrupt manipulators, decision markets can’t correctly express comparisons between multiple competing policies, many potential participants are incapable of making rational actions on the market, and it’s impossible to test whether it’s doing a good job.
I enjoy reading his posts too (when I have the time—not much, lately), but I wasn’t very impressed by his debate with Robin Hanson—his arguments seemed to be mostly rehashing typical arguments against prediction markets that I’d heard before.
Yeah, that response didn’t have much content, but I think that’s pretty understandable considering that by that point in their debate, Moldbug had already revealed himself to be motivated by something other than rational objections to Hanson’s ideas, and basically immune to evidence. In their video debate it became very clear that Moldbug’s strategy was simply to hold Hanson’s ideas to an impossibly high standard of evidence, hold his own ideas to an incredibly low standard of evidence, and then declare victory.
So I can understand why Hanson might not have thought it was worth investing a lot more time in responding point by point.
I’m kinda torn about Moldbug. His political arguments look shaky, but whenever he hits a topic I happen to know really well, he’s completely right. (1, 2) Then again, he has credentials in CS but not history/economy/poli-sci, so the halo effect may be unjustified. Many smart people say dumb things when they go outside their field.
That just shows he got two easy questions right. When he spells out his general philosophy, which I had criticized before, you see just how anti-rational his epistemology is. You’re just seeing a broken clock at noon.
By the way, anyone know if “Mencius Moldbug” is his real name? It sounds so fake.
Funny, I like CS too but his writings put me off in part; I particularly disliked his Nock language. It looks like a seriously crappy Lisp to me (and I like Haskell better).
Nock was followed by Urbit, “functional programming from
scratch”, but that project doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere, and it’s not clear to me where there would be for it to go. His vision of “Martian code”, “tiny and diamond-perfect” is still a castle in the air, the job of putting a foundation under it still undone.
A criticism that I think applies to his politics as well. He does a fine destructive critique of the current state of things and how we got here, but is weak on what he would replace it by.
Probably, as lon as you restrict yourself to sane, articulate thinkers in the West. There are probably even more outlandish ideas in Japan, India, or the Islamic world.
Come to think of it, it would probably be more instructive to read “non-westernized” intellectuals from India, Korean, Japan, China or the Islamic world, talking about the west. I think Moldbug recommended a medieval Japanese writer talking about his experience in America, but I can’t find it right now.
I would defend an (eviscerated) monarchy such as Canadians like me and other Commonwealthers have as being a social good, insofar as it’s a rich & elegant tradition that’s not very pernicious.
Actual “off with his head” monarchy… nah.
And if Prince Charles decides to flap his unelected gums too much when he accedes, you may see me change my tune. But at the moment I’m happy to be a subject of HM Queen Elizabeth.
Paul Krugman’s a good example, because he goes on the offensive, but he’s not quite offensive enough. For good, juicy ad hominems, read SLOG (the blog of the Seattle Stranger) or Feministe.
How to offend a conservative is an interesting question. I think it should be easy to offend (or upset or disgust) a traditional social conservative, with simple sexual shock value. It’s harder for me to think of ways to offend an economic conservative. The closest thing I can think of is stereotyping libertarians as weirdo losers.
So here’s the bottom line: yes, northern Virginia, there is a housing bubble. (Northern Virginia, not Virginia as a whole. Only the Washington suburbs are in the Zoned Zone.) Part of the rise in housing values since 2000 was justified given the fall in interest rates, but at this point the overall market value of housing has lost touch with economic reality. And there’s a nasty correction ahead.
The fact that he (partially) acknowledged the existence of the problem, once it was well underway, doesn’t change the fact that he actively advocated the policies that caused the problem.
This is a special case of a well known process in social science circles since at least the 1950′s: role playing. It became popular after the work of Fritz Perls (a psychotherapist who started out in drama), who would have the patient do things such as play their mother or father (or tyrannical trauma family character of choice) to try and broaden their understanding of their life story and memory. It can be a very powerful technique. I have been in group psychotherapy sessions where people scream, bawl, and many other visceral responses get displayed.
In 1983 Robert Anton Wilson published a book, Prometheus Unbound which was ostensibly a self-help book for making your thinking more rational, specifically for destroying dogmas. This book is little more than one recipe after another for exercises of this type; for example, be a neo-Nazi for a week.
The mechanics is to learn by exposing yourself to that great universe of unknown-unknowns. My personal experience is sometimes they can be helpful, but it is really hard to know beforehand if they will be worth the time. I have benefited from some of these things; I have wasted time doing some.
I bet a good way to improve your rationality is to attempt to learn from the writings of smart, highly articulate people, whom you consider morally evil, and who often use emotional language to mock people like yourself. So, for example, feminists could read Roissy and liberals could read Ann Coulter.
http://roissy.wordpress.com/ http://www.anncoulter.com/
I’ve done exactly this. Read Roissy, read far-right sites (though not Coulter specifically.) Basically sought out the experience of having my feelings hurt, in the interest of curiosity.
I learned a few things from the experience. First, they have a few good points (my politics have changed over time). Second, they are not right about everything just because they are mean and nasty and make me feel bad, and in fact sometimes right-wingers and anti-feminists display flaws in reasoning. And, third, I learned how to deal better with emotional antagonism itself: I don’t bother seeking out excuses to be offended any more, but I do protect myself by avoiding people who directly insult me.
You’ll have to expand on this before I could agree. My inclination is to think quite the opposite. That is, when I read people who more or less articulately use highly emotion-button-pushing language to mock people like me, it puts my defenses up and makes me try to justify my beliefs, rationality be damned. Was this not pretty much the thrust of Politics is the Mind-Killer? If I were, to adopt a wild hypothetical, a conservative, I would probably say nearly anything to defend myself—whether publicly or in my own mind—against the kind of mockery I’d get on a daily basis from Paul Krugman’s blog (Krugman chosen as example per mattnewport). Rationality-wise, that is not the position I want to be trying to put myself in. Rather, I want to seek out reasoned, relatively “cool” (as opposed to emotionally “hot”) expressions of opposing viewpoints and try to approach them open-mindedly, trying to modify my positions if warranted.
I mean, am I missing something?
“If I were, to adopt a wild hypothetical, a conservative, I would probably say nearly anything to defend myself—whether publicly or in my own mind—against the kind of mockery I’d get on a daily basis from Paul Krugman’s blog”
Yes, most people would do this, so the rationality challenge would be to fight against it. Think of it as special-forces-intensity rationality training.
Not everything that is difficult is thereby good training. It’s easier to withstand getting punched in the gut if you’re in good physical shape, but I wouldn’t suggest trying to get in shape by having someone punch you repeatedly in the gut.
(Indeed, at some point of martial arts training it’s useful to learn how to take a punch, but this training has to be done carefully and sparingly. You don’t become stronger by rupturing your spleen.)
I think this norm would do poorly in practice, because people would seek out antagonists they unconsciously knew would be flawed, rather than those who actually scare them.
A much better idea, I think, is the following:
Find someone who appears intelligent to you but is very ideologically different.
Offer to read a book of their choice if they read a book of your choice.
Give them a book you think will challenge them.
I’d suggest, however, that you not give the other person someone who will constantly mock their position, because usually this will only further polarize them away from you. Exposing oneself to good contrary arguments, not ridicule, is the way for human beings to update.
It’s probably good to have a mix. I get something distinct from reading people like Roissy or Sailer, whose basic values are totally divorced from my own. I get something else from Eliezer or Will Wilkinson, who derive different policy preferences from values that are similar to mine.
There’s something liberating about evil analysis, and I think it’s that it’s audaciousness allows you to put down mental blinders that would be on guard againstmore plausible threats to your ideological integrity. And a nice thing about values changing over time is that the classics are full of this stuff. Reading, say, Schmidt is like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that’s something you should experience regularly. Any similar recommendations?
Upvoted. From my reply you’ll see that I agree it’s probably good to seek out, as you say, those “whose basic values are totally divorced from [one’s’] own.” But can you say more about James Miller’s original contention that you should specifically be seeking out that which is designed to piss you off? That’s where it seems to me that his idea goes just totally wrong. How is this going to do anything except encourage you to retreat into tribalism?
If you know that doing X will ” encourage you to retreat into tribalism” then doing X gives you a great opportunity to fight against your irrational instincts.
Well, there is the aesthetic appreciation of polemic for its own sake, but that’s not going to make you more rational.
I think the most obvious answer, though, is that it can inure you a bit to connotative sneers. Aversion to this kind of insult is likely one of the major things keeping you from absorbing novel information!
One way to do this very quickly—you shouldn’t, of course, select your politics for such trivial advantages, but if you do, take advantage of it—is to become evil yourself, relative to the majority’s values. There are certain groups an attack upon which constitutes an applause line in the mainstream. If you identify as a communist or fascist or Islamist or other Designated Antagonist Group, you can either take the (obviously epistemically disastrous) route of only reading your comrades, or you can keep relying on mainstream institutional sources of information that insult you, and thereby thicken your skin. (Empirical prediction: hard {left|right}ists are more likely to read mainstream {conservatives|liberals} than are mainstream {liberals|conservatives}.)
(An alternate strategy this suggests, if your beliefs are, alas, pedestrian, is to “identify” with some completely ridiculous normative outlook, like negative utilitarianism or something. Let everyone’s viewpoint offend you until “this viewpoint offends!” no longer functions as a curiosity stopper.)
Well, I understand your reasoning: you suggest that it’s likely (or at least possible) that one’s reaction in the face of rhetorically “hot” disagreement will be a built-up tolerance (immunity) for mockery, making one more able to extract substance and ignore affect. My belief is that that particular strength of character (which I admire when I see it, which is rarely) is infrequent relative to, as I keep calling it, a retreat into tribalism in the face of mockery of one’s dearly-held beliefs. Hence my feeling that the upper-left quadrant of the graph I describe is not good breeding grounds for rationality. That isn’t to suggest that we shouldn’t do our best to self-modify such that that would no longer be the case, but it is hard to do and our efforts might be best spent elsewhere.
Also worth considering is the hypothesis that the two axes of my graph aren’t fully independent, but instead that “hot” expressions are correlated with substantively less rich and worthwhile viewpoints, because the richest and most worthwhile viewpoints wouldn’t have much need to rely on affect. If this is true (and I think it is at least somewhat true), it would be another reason for avoiding rhetorically “hot” political viewpoints in general.
As my political beliefs have become more evil I’ve become much better at ignoring insults to my politics. I remain pretty thin-skinned individually, though, so it seems that whatever’s moving me in this way is politics-specific.
The healthiest reading space is probably all over the axis. Passion is not the opposite of reason, and there are pleasures to take in reading beyond the conveyance of mere information.
Further to this. Let’s plot political discourse along two axes: substantive (x axis: -disagree to +agree) and rhetorical (y axis: -”cool”/reasoned to +”hot”/emotional). Oligopsony states that it is valuable to engage with those on the left-hand side of the graph (people who disagree with you), without any particular sense that special dangers are posed by the upper left-hand quadrant. (Oligopsony says reading so-and-so is “like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that’s something you should experience regularly”—regardless of the particular emotional relationship you are going to have with that Martian political philosophy as a function of the way in which it’s presented.) My view (following on, I think, PitM-K—and in sharp disagreement with James Miller’s original post in this thread) is that the upper half of the graph, and particularly the upper left-hand quadrant, is danger territory, because of the likelihood you are going to retreat into tribalism as your views are mocked.
I like many aspects of Schmitt and he never produced any shock in me, unlike e.g. many bloggers who can be found 1-2 links away from Moldbug. In fact, many leftists have talked favourably about his reasoning if not his values.
Oligopsony:
Please pardon my evident lack of erudition, but which Schmidt do you have in mind?
Carl, and upon looking it up it’s Schmitt. So the lack of erudition is all mine.
Yes, I’ve heard of Schmitt. Paul Gottfried, who is one of my favorite contemporary political theorists, wrote a book about him. I plan to read at least some of Schmitt’s original work before reading what Gottfried has to say about him, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. Do you have any particular recommendations?
If you want to read some political philosophy that’s really out there by modern standards, try Joseph de Maistre. His staunch Catholicism will probably be off-putting to many people here, but a truly unbiased reader should understand that modern political writers are smuggling just as many unwarranted metaphysical assumptions into their work, except in much more devious ways. Also, although some of his arguments have been objectively falsified in the meantime, others have struck me as spot-on from the modern perspective of Darwinian insight into human nature and the humanity’s practical political experiences from the last two centuries. (His brother Xavier is a minor classic of French literature, whom I warmly recommend for some fun reading.)
I would accept that bet. In my experience exposure to such writings mostly serves to produce contempt. Contempt is one emotion that seems to have a purely deleterious effect on thinking. Anger, fear, sadness, anxiety and depression all provide at least some positive effects on thinking in the right circumstances but contempt… nothing.
I’ve been trying to do roughly that, though focusing more on the “smart and highly articulate” aspect and dropping “emotional mockery”. When I read someone taking cheap shots at a position I might hold, I mostly find the writer childish and annoying, I don’t see how reading more of that would improve my rationality. It doesn’t really hurt my feelings, unlike some commenters here, so I guess different people need to be prodded in different ways.
For smart and articulate writers with a rationalist vibe, I would recommend Mencius Moldbug (posts are articulate but unfortunately quite long; advocates monarchy, colonialism and slavery) and Noam Chomsky. Any recommendations of smart, articulate and “extreme” writers whose views are far from those two?
I have the same reaction to someone taking cheap shots, period. It doesn’t matter whether they’re arguing something I agree with, disagree with, or don’t care about. It just lowers my opinion of the writer.
Slavery? I’m certainly not defending Moldbug, but if he advocated slavery, I must have missed that post. Do you have a link?
See http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=slavery%20site%3Aunqualified-reservations.blogspot.com%2F
And there is, of course, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html which cannot be excerpted and done proper justice.
Hrmmmm… haven’t read the second link yet, but that first excerpt is.… well.… yeah. The selling yourself into slavery part is basically unobjectionable (to a libertarian), but selling your children into slavery....…
I think Moldbug’s positions seem to be derived not so much from reversed stupidity as reversed PC.
I’ll have to disagree, at least to the extent that this is taken as a positive attribute. I find his posts to be rambling and cutesy, which may correspond to articulate. But most people here have the kind of mind that prefers “get to the point” writing, which he fails at.
I think Moldbug is far away from any living thinker you could name. And he’d probably tell you so himself.
(FWIW, I think Moldbug is usually wrong, through a combination of confirmation bias and reversed stupidity, although I’m still open on Austrian economics in general.)
I have a very hard time evaluating Moldbug’s claims, due to my lack of background in the relevant history, but holy shit, do I ever enjoy reading his posts.
The crowd here may be very interested in watching him debate Robin Hanson about futarchy before an audience at the 2010 Foresight conference. Moldbug seems to be a bit quicker with the pen than in person.
Moldbug’s initial post that spurred the argument is here; it’s very moldbuggy, so the summary, as far as my understanding goes, is like this: Futarchy is exposed to corrupt manipulators, decision markets can’t correctly express comparisons between multiple competing policies, many potential participants are incapable of making rational actions on the market, and it’s impossible to test whether it’s doing a good job.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/05/futarchy-considered-retarded.html
Video of the debate is here: http://vimeo.com/9262193
Moldbug’s followup: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/01/hanson-moldbug-debate.html
Hanson’s followup: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/my-moldbug-debate.html
I enjoy reading his posts too (when I have the time—not much, lately), but I wasn’t very impressed by his debate with Robin Hanson—his arguments seemed to be mostly rehashing typical arguments against prediction markets that I’d heard before.
I was less than impressed by Hanson’s response (in a comment) to http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/pipe-shorting-and-professor-hansons.html
Yeah, that response didn’t have much content, but I think that’s pretty understandable considering that by that point in their debate, Moldbug had already revealed himself to be motivated by something other than rational objections to Hanson’s ideas, and basically immune to evidence. In their video debate it became very clear that Moldbug’s strategy was simply to hold Hanson’s ideas to an impossibly high standard of evidence, hold his own ideas to an incredibly low standard of evidence, and then declare victory.
So I can understand why Hanson might not have thought it was worth investing a lot more time in responding point by point.
I’m kinda torn about Moldbug. His political arguments look shaky, but whenever he hits a topic I happen to know really well, he’s completely right. (1, 2) Then again, he has credentials in CS but not history/economy/poli-sci, so the halo effect may be unjustified. Many smart people say dumb things when they go outside their field.
That just shows he got two easy questions right. When he spells out his general philosophy, which I had criticized before, you see just how anti-rational his epistemology is. You’re just seeing a broken clock at noon.
By the way, anyone know if “Mencius Moldbug” is his real name? It sounds so fake.
He states that it’s a pseudonym. (It’s actually quite a clever one—unique, and conveys a lot about him.)
MM’s name combines the pseudonyms he previously used as a commenter in two separate blogging realms (HBD and finance).
It’s a pseudonym; he’s said that himself, but I don’t remember where.
I am about 80% confident that his real name is [redacted]
Publically revealing people trying to stay anonymous (though admittedly in his case, not very hard) is not very nice :P
Funny, I like CS too but his writings put me off in part; I particularly disliked his Nock language. It looks like a seriously crappy Lisp to me (and I like Haskell better).
Agreed, Nock was a neat puzzle, but not much more. I have no idea why he tried to oversell it so.
Nock was followed by Urbit, “functional programming from scratch”, but that project doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere, and it’s not clear to me where there would be for it to go. His vision of “Martian code”, “tiny and diamond-perfect” is still a castle in the air, the job of putting a foundation under it still undone.
A criticism that I think applies to his politics as well. He does a fine destructive critique of the current state of things and how we got here, but is weak on what he would replace it by.
Probably, as lon as you restrict yourself to sane, articulate thinkers in the West. There are probably even more outlandish ideas in Japan, India, or the Islamic world.
Come to think of it, it would probably be more instructive to read “non-westernized” intellectuals from India, Korean, Japan, China or the Islamic world, talking about the west. I think Moldbug recommended a medieval Japanese writer talking about his experience in America, but I can’t find it right now.
Yukichi Fukuzawa. Only limited parts of his works are online (eg. in Google Books, very limited previews).
Why do you think MM has a rationalist vibe?. He doesn’t talk about probability or heuristics/biases etc.
I would defend an (eviscerated) monarchy such as Canadians like me and other Commonwealthers have as being a social good, insofar as it’s a rich & elegant tradition that’s not very pernicious.
Actual “off with his head” monarchy… nah.
And if Prince Charles decides to flap his unelected gums too much when he accedes, you may see me change my tune. But at the moment I’m happy to be a subject of HM Queen Elizabeth.
Who should conservatives read?
Glenn Greenwald!
Paul Krugman’s a good example, because he goes on the offensive, but he’s not quite offensive enough. For good, juicy ad hominems, read SLOG (the blog of the Seattle Stranger) or Feministe.
How to offend a conservative is an interesting question. I think it should be easy to offend (or upset or disgust) a traditional social conservative, with simple sexual shock value. It’s harder for me to think of ways to offend an economic conservative. The closest thing I can think of is stereotyping libertarians as weirdo losers.
Advocate Marxism?
Paul Krugman?
My experience is that Paul Krugman is one of those people with whom you disagree at your peril.
If by “peril” you mean being censored from the comments section of his blog....
If you disagreed with him about long-term interest rates on T-bills, and you bet on that belief, you lost a lot of money.
And if you agreed with him about the housing market and bought any real estate a few years back, then you’re probably underwater right now.
Even if you sold in 2006?
I don’t know if that link is gated or not.
The fact that he (partially) acknowledged the existence of the problem, once it was well underway, doesn’t change the fact that he actively advocated the policies that caused the problem.
Should the Federal Reserve have refrained from lowering interest rates in 2001?
This is a special case of a well known process in social science circles since at least the 1950′s: role playing. It became popular after the work of Fritz Perls (a psychotherapist who started out in drama), who would have the patient do things such as play their mother or father (or tyrannical trauma family character of choice) to try and broaden their understanding of their life story and memory. It can be a very powerful technique. I have been in group psychotherapy sessions where people scream, bawl, and many other visceral responses get displayed.
In 1983 Robert Anton Wilson published a book, Prometheus Unbound which was ostensibly a self-help book for making your thinking more rational, specifically for destroying dogmas. This book is little more than one recipe after another for exercises of this type; for example, be a neo-Nazi for a week.
The mechanics is to learn by exposing yourself to that great universe of unknown-unknowns. My personal experience is sometimes they can be helpful, but it is really hard to know beforehand if they will be worth the time. I have benefited from some of these things; I have wasted time doing some.
Ann Coulter’s blog seems fixed-width and very narrow :-(