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As far as I know, the author's ultimate goal was libertarianism, but believed democracy was sub-optimal for achieving it. I suspect be saw in Urbit a non-politi

As far as I know, the author's ultimate goal was libertarianism, but believed democracy was sub-optimal for achieving it. I suspect be saw in Urbit a non-political technological means of realizing his ultimate end, which was libertarianism, and not dictatorship. On the subject of his views, my opinion is that the only way to really secure liberty is to inform the whole public of its value, and have those ideas of liberty receive a democratic sanction. That leads to a genuinely libertarian society, that if fragmented, would lead to the emergence of new libertarian micro-states, instead of collections of serfs, who without their master, immediately revert to tyranny.

jolux 5y ago
> As far as I know, the author's ultimate goal was libertarianism, but believed democracy was sub-optimal for achieving it. That's a euphemistic way to say he thought his views should be forced upon other people rather than having to convince them of their correctness in the public sphere. > I suspect be saw in Urbit a non-political technological means of realizing his ultimate end, which was libertarianism, and not dictatorship. You should read more about his views. I can't in good conscience recommend his writing because it's riddled with factual errors, but he definitely went far beyond libertarianism. He sees democracy as a failure and believes that absolute rule is more stable and prosperous and even more free than liberal democracy, and he's also unquestionably a racist.
- dcow 5y ago
  Citation needed on “unquestionably a racist”. As far as I’ve gleaned, the assertions that he’s a racist are heavily based on an encyclopedic (surface-level) interpretation that essentially boils down to: evolutionary biology is inevitably racist and therefore anybody who entertains the study is associatively a racist, James Damore, Bret Weinstein, style. The assertion is based on postmodern axioms describing what a racist ideology makes, not a western rationalist position that allows complex topics to be, well, complex.
  - dwb 5y ago
    > evolutionary biology is inevitably racist In the current historical context, yes, it is. If you could somehow neutrally float outside context (you can't), or we lived in a different world, then maybe it wouldn't be.
    - dcow 5y ago
      That's not even close to wholesale truth at any meaningful or useful level. To a very specific subset of loud people the idea that biology may play some role in expressed traits is problematic only because those traits have been deemed by some other portion of society to be a proxy for either the capacity or quality of some human or possibly also because the notion violates some axiomatic belief that heredity can't possibly play any role in any difference you can measure when there also exists a "racial" or "gender" associated partitioning of the data set. The problem is not that studies and results themselves are racist (data can't be racist). The problem is that parts of society (across the board) want to find racism in the data and draw problematic conclusions, even when the practitioners who just want to explore the data avoid any such narrative conclusion, so they will. They'll even brand the practitioners as racist for engaging in the pursuit of a scientific understanding of the world and generating the data in the first place. Rather than throw out an entire field of study that's relevant and important in medicine, psychology, biology, real sociology, education, politics, etc. a much more honest/level approach would be to attack the meta-level discussion around how we apply the results even when they might be problematic instead of branding anybody who references the data a racist. For example, if studies show that IQ can be associated at least at some level with gene expression (the reality is it's a complex mix of both biological lottery and social nurturing) then perhaps question the validity of applying IQ tests as gating functions in areas where they may be miss applied. Question whether the traits that IQ tests end up fuzzily measuring are in fact necessary, important, relevant, whatever. Perform your own studies to shed more light on the topic and evolve our understanding. And if the answer is still, "there seems to be a measurable, relevant, practical genetic difference" the fix your fucked up society (if that requires active political patches, so be it) and figure out how to incorporate the reality into your narrative, don't brand the data and anybody adjacent to it as deplorable. The idea that you can dismiss an entire field of rational study because it yields uncomfortable data or even just asks uncomfortable questions is immensely reductive and frankly harmful to a healthy society. Traditional religious institutions learned how to incorporate science but not before bloody fights and unhealthy/illiberal attempts to brand and silence practitioners, heretics. Regardless, the cults lost and rationalism prevailed. Historical context is dynamic, not static, and attempts to apply anecdotal interpretations based on a first order derivative of the current context really miss a lot of the picture.

jolux 5y ago

> As far as I know, the author's ultimate goal was libertarianism, but believed democracy was sub-optimal for achieving it. That's a euphemistic way to say he thought his views should be forced upon other people rather than having to convince them of their correctness in the public sphere. > I suspect be saw in Urbit a non-political technological means of realizing his ultimate end, which was libertarianism, and not dictatorship. You should read more about his views. I can't in good conscience recommend his writing because it's riddled with factual errors, but he definitely went far beyond libertarianism. He sees democracy as a failure and believes that absolute rule is more stable and prosperous and even more free than liberal democracy, and he's also unquestionably a racist.

dcow 5y ago
Citation needed on “unquestionably a racist”. As far as I’ve gleaned, the assertions that he’s a racist are heavily based on an encyclopedic (surface-level) interpretation that essentially boils down to: evolutionary biology is inevitably racist and therefore anybody who entertains the study is associatively a racist, James Damore, Bret Weinstein, style. The assertion is based on postmodern axioms describing what a racist ideology makes, not a western rationalist position that allows complex topics to be, well, complex.
- dwb 5y ago
  > evolutionary biology is inevitably racist In the current historical context, yes, it is. If you could somehow neutrally float outside context (you can't), or we lived in a different world, then maybe it wouldn't be.
  - dcow 5y ago
    That's not even close to wholesale truth at any meaningful or useful level. To a very specific subset of loud people the idea that biology may play some role in expressed traits is problematic only because those traits have been deemed by some other portion of society to be a proxy for either the capacity or quality of some human or possibly also because the notion violates some axiomatic belief that heredity can't possibly play any role in any difference you can measure when there also exists a "racial" or "gender" associated partitioning of the data set. The problem is not that studies and results themselves are racist (data can't be racist). The problem is that parts of society (across the board) want to find racism in the data and draw problematic conclusions, even when the practitioners who just want to explore the data avoid any such narrative conclusion, so they will. They'll even brand the practitioners as racist for engaging in the pursuit of a scientific understanding of the world and generating the data in the first place. Rather than throw out an entire field of study that's relevant and important in medicine, psychology, biology, real sociology, education, politics, etc. a much more honest/level approach would be to attack the meta-level discussion around how we apply the results even when they might be problematic instead of branding anybody who references the data a racist. For example, if studies show that IQ can be associated at least at some level with gene expression (the reality is it's a complex mix of both biological lottery and social nurturing) then perhaps question the validity of applying IQ tests as gating functions in areas where they may be miss applied. Question whether the traits that IQ tests end up fuzzily measuring are in fact necessary, important, relevant, whatever. Perform your own studies to shed more light on the topic and evolve our understanding. And if the answer is still, "there seems to be a measurable, relevant, practical genetic difference" the fix your fucked up society (if that requires active political patches, so be it) and figure out how to incorporate the reality into your narrative, don't brand the data and anybody adjacent to it as deplorable. The idea that you can dismiss an entire field of rational study because it yields uncomfortable data or even just asks uncomfortable questions is immensely reductive and frankly harmful to a healthy society. Traditional religious institutions learned how to incorporate science but not before bloody fights and unhealthy/illiberal attempts to brand and silence practitioners, heretics. Regardless, the cults lost and rationalism prevailed. Historical context is dynamic, not static, and attempts to apply anecdotal interpretations based on a first order derivative of the current context really miss a lot of the picture.