NaggingGranpa's comments

I blame Oedipus.

Moldbug allegedly acquired enough loot during the dot-com bubble to afford spending 7 years at home reading something like 1 book per day. That could be 2500 books in total.

History grad students have to TA. They have to produce research. It's hard to consume as much as Moldbug when one has such demands on one's time.

More importantly, Moldbug almost certainly has more brainpower than the vast majority of history grad students. Whether he used such brainpower wisely is highly debatable.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

Yet, it was the horrible, horrible Europe that Moldbug mythologizes and romanticizes that made virtually all advances in science and technology until a few decades ago.

Ancient Greece produced mechanical computers. Only recently did the great civilizations of China and India overcome Hellenic science & technology. Having Mandarins cataloging the Emperor's property is not a great use of human capital.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

Harmful to whom?

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

You don't need to understand intelligence that well to change the world. A little predictive power can go very far.

In the end, it's a bit like playing roulette. A small edge and many bets will make you rich.

> I see no inherent reason why any discoveries regarding intelligence would have bigger consequences than discoveries about charisma.

It was not charisma that cracked Enigma and built the A-bomb. Better brains means better weapons, which means conquering and annihilating stupider tribes. It's the history of Mankind.

Charisma helps uniting tribes. But united tribes of many hunter-gatherers can be slaughtered by a handful of machine guns produced by boring industrialized societies.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

Ignorant? He probably read more old books than you -- which does not mean he understood much. He spent 7 years of early retirement burning his dot-com loot on Amazon.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

You give the CIA too much credit.

Much of the armed forces and the civilian populace hated Allende and his policies. Pinochet was an opportunist who jumped on the bandwagon when it was already in motion. The CIA had it easy. In South Vietnam, under more adverse conditions, the CIA failed miserably.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

Once the full implications of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics will inevitably become part of the religion of the future, or of whatever complex of sentiments may in the future take the place of organized religion. It is not merely a sane outlet for human altruism, but is of all outlets for altruism that which is most comprehensive and of longest range.

- Julian S. Huxley (co-founder of UNESCO), 1936

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

It's well-known that the Nazis imported eugenics from Yale and Oxbridge. And eugenics was publicly defended by people all over the political spectrum until 1939. After 1945, it went underground. It never went away.

Moldbug can preach his Carlyleism all he wants. In the end, the unleashing of energy will be due to people researching the genetic basis of intelligence and IVF. The pathological bloviators preach, the unsung soldiers and scientists make things happen.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

Mythmaking and mythbusting do not have to be mutually exclusive. If one can recognize the former, the whole can be edifying.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

> his understanding of the material is well below that of a first-year history student

Met plenty of history grad students in grad school. Well-read but intellectually very limited, and very herd-minded. But, then, I did not go to an Ivy with a tradition of excellence in the humanities.

> Second, there is nothing new about his positions

Of course there is, it's just the nutty cypherpunk stuff like crypto-locked nukes.

> As someone who studied both physics and history in grad school

You're a member of an extremely small class. He does not write for people like you. It makes no sense to write for people like you if power is the goal.

Marx's writing was childish beyond belief. He did not even know calculus. Yet, look at how much has been unleashed on his behalf.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

The cold leftovers can still be highly nutritious to those raised on processed, mythologized, state-endorsed pseudo-history.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Urbit

Patrilineally, Yarvin is Jewish.

NaggingGranpa | 6 years ago | on: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

Don't be thick. A handful of oligarchs seizing all the wealth created by Soviet "slave" labor and sharing very little did destroy Ukraine long before the loonies in Lviv decided to overthrow the shameless crook from the Donbas.