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If you want the world to become Tlon, don't you need an Orbis Tertius? As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit a
by vzcx 5y ago
If you want the world to become Tlon, don't you need an Orbis Tertius?
As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit and the cult of lisp, I've sometimes wondered how familiar he was the works of the latter, as you can often see some familiar things when you squint, but it's covered up with strange materials, quite possibly of alien origins.
- lisper 5y agoCurtis definitely was aware of Lisp. I pointed out to him that he seemed to be reinventing Lisp, but very badly. He actually acknowledged this, or at least acknowledged that this was a possibility. He specifically said that this was part of the Grand Plan (my description, not his): making Urbit radically different from anything that had gone before was an explicit design goal. That is one of the reasons I came to the conclusion that I did.
- dwb 5y agoHe strikes me as enough of a self-important dork to say (and mean) something like this, and what I’ve seen of his politics are extremely bad to me, but let’s not lose perspective: we’re talking about an open-source VM here. There’s no lock-in. If I got into it and then found out that it was worse than I’m seeing right now then I would shrug my shoulders and move on.
- lisper 5y ago> There’s no lock-in. There is very rarely any externally visible lock-in. That's not how cults work. Cults work by building a community of people who perceive non-members as the enemy. Urbit builds that community by enticing geeks with the promise of something new and interesting and then keeps them in by leveraging the sunk-cost fallacy (people don't like to admit that all the effort they put into learning Hoon was a waste of time) and all the derision that comes from the outside from people who "don't get it".
- dwb 5y agoI still think this "cult" characterisation is a bit much. Even if Urbit does inspire something like what you're worried about, we're talking about, what, some people being annoying in the comments section? The "followers" spending their time on doomed technology that isn't ideal for their needs? An alleged racist accumulating a bit more cryptocurrency (itself possibly a doomed technology) than we'd like? Compare this with religious cults that ruin people's lives, separate them from their families, and so on.
- lisper 5y agoScientology started off as a fairly innocuous-looking self-help book and look where it is now. These things take time. By the time it is obvious that a nascent cult is fully fledged it is generally too late to sound the alarm.
- dwb 5y agoSure, and I'm not saying it's impossible. But cults based on some deep self-improvement and/or transcendence plus charismatic leadership, I can broadly understand why they developed. Based on an open-source software project, seems much less likely – imho certainly not enough to start openly worrying about it at this stage.
- lisper 5y agoAre you aware that Curtis Yarvin is also Mencius Moldbug?
- dwb 5y agoYes, I even tried to read some of his blog posts under that name before I came across urbit. Didn’t bother finishing any because they were interminable and objectionable in about equal measure. I’m aware of the posited connection between his views (including the whole feudal thing) and urbit; I guess I just don’t see the need to be afraid of a shadowy presence behind the project, given what it is.
- vzcx 5y agoThere's being aware of Lisp and then there's having learned Lisp's lessons. Urbit is interesting to me but it is also interesting for me to imagine what it would be like if, perhaps, Curtis had attended MIT instead of Berkeley. Where you see nefarious intentions I see someone pursuing their own aesthetics, something that is very admirable and that I think more systems engineers should do. It's obviously not your aesthetic. It's not even really my aesthetic. It's Curtis's. But isn't "radically different from anything that has gone before" just a roundabout way of saying "cool?" As far as the "cult" goes, I am reminded of that part in Jodorowsky's Dune where he's all "I am looking for my holy warriors!" For any system, whether technological, religious or philosophical to remain living and breathing, it needs its adherents and believers, and I see neither bad intentions nor bad outcomes here. Maybe that's just what happens when you are deep enough in the cult. But the cult is... calm. Cozy, even. Is that so bad?
- lisper 5y agoIf Urbit were only a bad reinvention of whatever it's a bad reinvention of I would be totally unconcerned. The world is full of bad reinventions of all kinds of things. I've built a few myself. But Curtis is more than just a bad reinventor of things. He is also Mencius Moldbug, a prolific pseudo-intellectual influencer of the alt-right. His politics worry me much more than his coding style. And because of my personal dealings with him, I am not sanguine about his ability or that of his followers to separate the two.