If the only thing the Moldbug posts did was link to that material, that would be a service in itself.
To give Yarvin his due though, he does a good job synthesizing it all into a general theory of power being a necessary and sufficient explanation of motivations in most cases.
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.
If you want to read a book about the struggle of Romanticism and Humanism, read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.[3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
For those interested in a direct response by a scholar to another, perhaps less extreme and more sophisticated, charlatan of Yarvin's general milieu, see: https://thebaffler.com/latest/peterson-ganz-klein
All simplified models are wrong. Some are useful. (And it's very hard to avoid 'appeal' being a critical factor in the popularity of any model or narrative. It acts as a single point of failure in any truth-seeking mechanism, including academia and the like. This of course explains much about the popularity of some contemporary ideas.)
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.
While the so-called European Miracle of the past 500 years is a fascinating and complex area of research that will undoubtedly be studied for generations and centuries to come, I wasn't aware that anyone considers modern (18th c. and beyond) romanticist ideology to be the major driving force of science and technology.
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.
- Julian S. Huxley (co-founder of UNESCO), 1936
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.
I'm not so sure. There is a core problem here, and that is that intelligence is not all that it's made up to be. It takes no more than a glance at the current American president to see that. That intelligence (by which I mean relative intelligence) is some ultimate power is, itself, a myth perpetuated by people who consider themselves particularly intelligent. You'd hear similar things about beauty from beautiful people. Clearly, many great works were done by people who were not amazingly intelligent, and people who were amazingly intelligent have done some amazingly stupid things. Personally, I think charisma is far more important. I see no inherent reason why any discoveries regarding intelligence would have bigger consequences than discoveries about charisma.
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.
Yeah, but I don't think intelligent people are better at predicting things (weighted by impact). Again, look at the current US president; or at stock traders.
> It was not charisma that cracked Enigma and built the A-bomb.
No, but arguably neither would have been done when they were done if it weren't for a war that started largely due to charisma.
> But united tribes of many hunter-gatherers can be slaughtered by a handful of machine guns produced by boring industrialized societies.
But it's not high relative intelligence that brought us industrialization. Those same people who were later industrialized had had hundreds of thousands of years of hunting-gathering.
How would you know if that's a dollar better-spent? All humans are pretty bad at flying, yet airplanes are pretty useful. All of technology is spending on the respective meaning of "educating morons." Military R&D is a great example. A weakling with a gun can easily beat a strong sword-wielding knight. In fact, the difference between a strong fighter with a sword and a weakling with a sword is pretty much erased by guns.
> Do you mean Napoleon? Or von Bismarck?
I meant Hitler. Napoleon was a different story, but WWI was also very much a product of Romanticism.
> you outed yourself as a non-European
Well, I'm Jewish.
> You're implying that a hunter-gatherer society, an agricultural society and an industrialized society select for the same traits.
Traits? Have we already established that natural selection in the past ~10000 years since the agricultural revolution has had any significant impact in shaping human society? (To be clear, that was a rhetorical question; no, we have not established that).
By the way, my great grandparents weren't elites so much as they were poor tradesmen, except maybe in the addled minds of the followers of ignorant "great men," armed with a romantic ideology of an imagined past and pseudo-science -- and, of course, guns -- who brutally murdered them. Apparently, my great-grandparent's "superior Ashkenazi cognition" wasn't enough to ensure their survival -- maybe because of some other "weaknesses associated with their race," but I think that the more plausible explanation is that it was because of racism, a force that seems to trump intelligence time and again.
They read like a text by a Reiki guru about quantum physics. It, too, can be surprising by pointing out that the Newtonian mechanics you learned in high-school is far from the whole story, except that the story they give is just... wrong. I'm not saying one couldn't come to the same position as him while actually knowing history, but he specifically certainly doesn't.