
The Moldbug Variations - s_kilk
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein
======
s_kilk
Key quote:

```

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.

~~~
api
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.

~~~
s_kilk
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...

~~~
api
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.

~~~
postramus
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.

~~~
elsurudo
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 :)

~~~
kwhitefoot
The sentence flows perfectly well. Not sure anyone would find it beautiful but
it is certainly succinct and expressive.

------
api
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](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.

~~~
ivraatiems
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.)

