Sorry, I must WRECK Your Post on Moldbug, Julius Branson
nothing personnel
It started with this tweet.
Julius Branson (pls follow), Internet Scholar High voltage sign
@JuliusBranson
Aug 17
It's suspicious indeed. Google analytics indicate it may be inorganic. Powerful parasites are pushing it for reasons I've explained.
I thought ‘what were the reasons’? There’s only one post on your substack with ‘Moldbug’ in the title.
I didn’t find the reasons. Could you be so charitable to provide more details?
Here is a quick rundown of accusations against Moldbug / NRx in general. I’ll answer them all. And you’ll complain my answers are not empirical. LOL
‘Therefore fallacy’ - discussion from unproven assumptions, ‘painting’, ‘smalltalk’
Noncentral fallacy
redefinition of a loaded word -
that liberal societies are Orwellian Mind Control States - ‘practically unverifiable’
on totalitarian states and brainworms
‘Harvard as church’ as anticoncept
Disregard of empirical evidence, rhetorical tactics
Skimming Wikipedia and bad citations, errors in quotes - ‘irritating errors’, ‘knowledge level comes off as embarrassingly undetailed and underdeveloped’
Ideas as real objects without justification
Thiel funding - Hoan Ton That - author of Clearview AI, as NRxer
Advocating for disengagement
1 Aruging from unproven assumptions
But what is the null hypothesis? The very idea of narrating the ‘liberal democracies of the West’ as a ‘Orwellian Mind Control States’ makes you think. Question your assumptions. Then you’re free to accept or reject the alternative categorization. Parallel to investigating phlogiston...
2 Noncentral fallacy
A term introduced here in a lesswrong post , defined:
I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."
Call it the Noncentral Fallacy.
But your definition is different
This essentially involves the redefinition of a connotatively loaded word, like Orwellian, church, or leftist, into another definition that allows something else to be labeled with the word. This therefore transfers the previous connotation to the newly labeled thing undeservingly. One example highlights all of these issues. In the beginning of his “Gentle Introduction,” Moldbug asserts that liberal societies are “Orwellian Mind Control States.”
Too bad for you, it’s harder to disprove similarity than hint at it. In feature space objects can be similar in many many ways. The original definition assumes the construct of the category is shared between the discourse parties, and it is the emotional reaction that’s contentious, as it’s not a central category member. Moldbug’s argument deconstructs our notions of the category in question, almost as if he was asking for EMPIRICAL JUSTIFICATION for that belief.
3 Anticoncept and epistemology question
Why is your method correct? ‘He has bad epistemology, and you have good’
You have empirical Randist paradigm, he has intuitive - parallelistic ‘as above so below’ 17th Century science mindset. He’s doing memetics, approach that works for the field. Yours doesn’t.
If you’re so scientific, you need predictions as well, don’t you? You didn’t refer to them.
4 Rhetorical tactics and empirical evidence
Then it should have been empirically examined as to whether or not they do this, and if so, what instrumental purpose it has. Depending on the results, which are to be based on detailed historical fact and perhaps some contemporary data collection, the question can be answered
‘Historical fact’, lmao.
“In the pursuit of truth, the rhetorical tactics” - respect the grift, man
Why would there be a need? If it fits your puzzle, so be it
Doesn’t science rely on speculative theory, wild guesses, that are invested money and effort into, before being empirically ‘proven’?
5 Skim reading and wrong citations
Well that’s the high - level view that he’s attempting to construct a broad narrative. You’d find Hegel’s Philosophy of History deficient in detail too. There is a need to write in broad strokes that doesn’t capture every single detail. Wrong citations - happens, respect the grift, man.
6 Ideas as real objects
Oh man, you absolutely hate Hegel and Richard Dawkins, don’t you? ‘Talking about ideas as real objects’ isn’t obviously wrong in the current global discourse, you didn’t provide a source from which angle are you attacking this strain of thought.
7 Thiel funding
You describe the facial recognition tool as ‘dystopian software’. You either didn’t do your research or purposefully misrepresented Mr Ton-That. Or your enemies just cover their tracks really well changing multiple articles, because also the application of said tool was to be explicitly right wing! Specifically to detect illegal immigrants.
And what is the funding supposed to prove? Either the power is decentralized, then why Peter Thiel would be necessarily in there cabal? OTOH, given the JQ centralization hypothesis, then Thiel is not in that network explicitly. He’d need to be swayed to their side. What then happens? From the argument from the stronger case, if he wouldn’t be sincere RW-ger at the top, who else could be? If you go with centralized model of power, you need to get rid of the notion of ‘our guys at the top’ as well. Now THAT would be a blackpill.
The whole idea ‘reee, it’s not organic!!!’, the fear of astroturfing, and glowies.
It’s a RW cope and downfall - just organic things allowed, only the ‘free market of ideas organic changes are allowed’, no restorative acceleration by Will of (new) cultural Heroes. It’s a fundamentally conservative, i.e. losing approach.
Yes, there are various attempts at infilitration of RW communities
It’s reality that needs to be accepted and every person / institution needs to be judged on an ongoing basis. Support specific actions, be vary of brands for themselves.
[...]by their fruits ye shall know them. (Matt. 7:15–20.)
But Yarvin isn’t that bad,
At least according to the guy who declared holy jihad on Nrx from a TradCath perspective the day before…
As a final nail in the coffin of the funding argument, this thread:
8 Degree of action concerning the immediate political strategy
Well, one perspective is Yarvin’s own justification in the Clear Pill series.
On my end, I’ll write about the action question’ extensively in an upcoming series of blog posts about NRx. Subscribe for free to stay tuned.