3 ms·

Oh, I have no doubt Yarvin's writings could unleash something, if only because they already did. They're a rehashing of what became mainstream opinions followin

by pron 7y ago

Oh, I have no doubt Yarvin's writings could unleash something, if only because they already did. They're a rehashing of what became mainstream opinions following Romanticism [1]. Eugenics [2] was taught in numerous universities at the beginning of the 20th century. Clearly, some people can find Romanticism appealing today for the same reason they found it appealing in the 19th c., and they will find it appealing, yet again in the 23rd. The only defense is knowing how and why it arose the first time around, and why it was ultimately rejected. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain

NaggingGranpa 7y ago
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.
- pron 7y ago
  > In the end, the unleashing of energy will be due to people researching the genetic basis of intelligence and IVF. 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.
  - NaggingGranpa 7y ago
    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.
    - pron 7y ago
      > A little predictive power can go very far. 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.
      - NaggingGranpa 7y ago
        > I don't think intelligent people are better at predicting things I never claimed such a thing. I meant predictive power when it comes to allocating resources, especially from the budget devoted to education. A dollar wasted on trying to educate a moron could be invested in military R&D. > a war that started largely due to charisma. Charisma? Do you mean Napoleon? Or von Bismarck? You don't need much charisma to make the French and the Germans kill each other. Who was the charismatic leader that made the Danes go to war with the Prussians? With such a strange statement, you outed yourself as a non-European. No matter how many history books you read, some things you will never understand. In that regard, you are exactly like Moldbug. Just do not claim that Rousseau invented nationalism, please. My aged heart cannot take that much. > Those same people who were later industrialized were just as intelligent during the hundreds of thousands of years of hunting-gathering. You're implying that a hunter-gatherer society, an agricultural society and an industrialized society select for the same traits. And that the initial distributions were the same. Think Fokker-Planck. How likely is that? Zero probability, I would say.
zozbot234 7y ago
Eugenics emerged in modern times as a Progressive-era policy. It seems kind of vague and perhaps misleading to link it to Romanticism, when actually it follows along the exact same lines as the secular, "scientific" Humanism that you evidently find so appealing.
- NaggingGranpa 7y ago
  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
- pron 7y ago
  It emerged as a result of both. Reactionary/romantic ideals have always co-opted what they viewed as scientific knowledge or technology in the service of their imagined past. That progressive ideals may have also ultimately employed horrific tools goes without saying, and that some conservative forces have sometimes opposed them is also true. But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative leading to a conclusion is wrong, regardless of whether it's done intentionally by a scholar wishing to push an agenda, or unintentionally by name-dropping, bloviating ignoramuses like Yarvin.
  - NaggingGranpa 7y ago
    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.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      That seems unlikely, since 'pron has repeatedly identified himself as a (former?) history grad student / PhD candidate, and, in various threads on the site, has gone into enough depth on the topic that I'd be disinclined to doubt them.
pron 7y ago
P.S. 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 https://thebaffler.com/latest/peterson-ganz-klein

by pron 7y ago

NaggingGranpa 7y ago

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.

pron 7y ago
> In the end, the unleashing of energy will be due to people researching the genetic basis of intelligence and IVF. 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.
- NaggingGranpa 7y ago
  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.
  - pron 7y ago
    > A little predictive power can go very far. 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.
    - NaggingGranpa 7y ago
      > I don't think intelligent people are better at predicting things I never claimed such a thing. I meant predictive power when it comes to allocating resources, especially from the budget devoted to education. A dollar wasted on trying to educate a moron could be invested in military R&D. > a war that started largely due to charisma. Charisma? Do you mean Napoleon? Or von Bismarck? You don't need much charisma to make the French and the Germans kill each other. Who was the charismatic leader that made the Danes go to war with the Prussians? With such a strange statement, you outed yourself as a non-European. No matter how many history books you read, some things you will never understand. In that regard, you are exactly like Moldbug. Just do not claim that Rousseau invented nationalism, please. My aged heart cannot take that much. > Those same people who were later industrialized were just as intelligent during the hundreds of thousands of years of hunting-gathering. You're implying that a hunter-gatherer society, an agricultural society and an industrialized society select for the same traits. And that the initial distributions were the same. Think Fokker-Planck. How likely is that? Zero probability, I would say.

zozbot234 7y ago

Eugenics emerged in modern times as a Progressive-era policy. It seems kind of vague and perhaps misleading to link it to Romanticism, when actually it follows along the exact same lines as the secular, "scientific" Humanism that you evidently find so appealing.

NaggingGranpa 7y ago
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
pron 7y ago
It emerged as a result of both. Reactionary/romantic ideals have always co-opted what they viewed as scientific knowledge or technology in the service of their imagined past. That progressive ideals may have also ultimately employed horrific tools goes without saying, and that some conservative forces have sometimes opposed them is also true. But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative leading to a conclusion is wrong, regardless of whether it's done intentionally by a scholar wishing to push an agenda, or unintentionally by name-dropping, bloviating ignoramuses like Yarvin.
- NaggingGranpa 7y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    That seems unlikely, since 'pron has repeatedly identified himself as a (former?) history grad student / PhD candidate, and, in various threads on the site, has gone into enough depth on the topic that I'd be disinclined to doubt them.

pron 7y ago

P.S. 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 https://thebaffler.com/latest/peterson-ganz-klein