The gist of it is that he had interesting ideas on political systems in the past, but that his current ideas are nonsense, and in fact his old work explains exactly why his new work is nonsense.
A sci-fi variant of autocracy is not an interesting idea though. Why is a CEO king and a royal board of directors interesting? Its not even novel: his proposal is identical to that laid out by the "technocracy" movement a century ago.
Tangential: I'm reminded of the sadly stillborn Final Fantasy Versus XIII, and its apparent ambition to present a "modern" monarchy, styled visually with elements of both contemporary business and the mafia. You're right, there's nothing inherently noble or benevolent in autocracy; the king brought forward to the present isn't a statesman or innovator, he's a robber baron or a crime boss. I kind of lament that that sort of explicit idea didn't enter the cultural discourse.
That is a shame - sounds like a fun idea for a JRPG.
Bioshock sort of touches on technocracy, but its more post-apocalyptic. A game that spans the rise and fall of a "board of great geniuses" would be great.
Having had a stint in my youthful life where I studied Technocracy a great deal, I still see some powerful concepts that I can't let go of. The emphasis on standardization and elimination of the price system, even if nothing more than a though experiment on human nature, seemed like worthwhile concepts to consider. Rather than demonize the technocracy movement, I would recommend some investigation into the ideas that underpinned it, especially as we now witness a transition from a limitless growth world to steady state.
My basic issue with technocrats is that they conflate aesthetic rationality with effective rationality. The perfect city is not a symmetric grid, for example. Yarvin’s writing is Brasilia in Substack-form. A lot of tech “geniuses” are like this (e.g. Thiel, Andreesen)
imagine being this fucking stupid and still opening your mouth. read a book about the era instead of getting your views from wikipedia and marvel movies retard
but for you, my dear retard, i'll make an exception:
Progressiveness is like waves of wind. It comes and it goes, and it goes more often then it comes. We have extremely brief sections of time where a lot of progressiveness is achieved, and then we have longer periods of darkness where we stagnate or regress.
Reconstruction, followed by Jim Crow. The late 70s had a period of progressiveness, of openness, especially towards homosexuals. Then AIDS came, and that was all forgotten. The 80s were another dark age.
In the 90s we had another brief opening, but that too ended sooner than it started. We didn't pick up until the 2010s. By 2014/2015 progressiveness was on the way out, just in time for marriage equality to push through. And now, we are in another dark period and have been for a while.
Technocracy just follow wherever the wind blows. Progressiveness will come back, and hopefully we can push enough through that we'll be set for the next decade to come. That's really what it's all about - get as much done as fast as possible, so that it cannot all be reverted, no matter how hard conservatives try.
A fascist technocracy is not interesting in the slightest. It’s what basement dwelling teens who idolize John Galt dream about before they are exposed to the complexity of the real world.
Understatement of the millenium, but Yarvin has written a lot more than "let's do fascist technocracy!"
I find his writing style wastes a lot of one's time and I disagree with him on nearly everything, but there's no denying that there are many interesting ideas in there.
I absolutely deny that there are any interesting ideas in there.
We've done this, it was called the dark ages and it sucked and we moved past it. Engaging with this pablum in any way is granting it attention and vigor it obviously doesn't deserve.
I agree with the other replies that I've never been able to find any interesting ideas amidst his schlock, but I'm wondering what "many interesting ideas" you see, from your prospective? Just a couple examples would be useful. It's totally possible I've missed them because I haven't ever been able to engage with his writing.
He's pretty thoughtful about how power is actually leveraged and has interesting insights around these ideas, particularly areas of democratic failure that I think are worth thinking about. I think his solutions are more questionable, but his writing is at least worth engaging with.
I think people just dismiss him out of hand because he's a political enemy.
I'm worried I'm sealioning, but could you possibly point me to one of these thoughtful pieces? It's a lot to wade through for me to try to figure out what you're talking about without any pointers...
I did read a decent amount of his "mencius moldbug" stuff back in the day, and I just wouldn't describe it the way you do in this comment, so I'm wondering what I'm missing.
Hmmm, ok, I read this. Are there any parts of it that you find particularly thoughtful about power or areas of democratic failure that are worth thinking about?
I think we probably just fundamentally disagree here, because to me, this whole thing seems like drivel. Are there gems in there that I'm just not recognizing?
The idea that stuck out to me is even if you repeal chevron deference and argue congress should be making laws like it’s supposed to, the outcome will be vague laws which then get interpreted by the courts, pushing the real legislation from administration technocrats that might at least be subject matter experts in the best case to unelected judges that probably don’t know anything.
The symbolic idea of who holds power and who actually holds power in practice are not the same.
There’s also the bit that doge is constrained in ways that make success unlikely (which has now been proved out).
Thanks, that's helpful. I agree that first point is interesting, but it's maybe the most mainstream view he expresses in the article. (The issue of judicial power is pretty commonly discussed by normie liberals as well!) But that's not really a knock against it. So fair enough, thanks for calling that one out!
I think the doge thing is silly though. It didn't fail because it was "constrained in ways that make success unlikely", it failed because: 1. There was obviously just arithmetically not enough money in discretionary spending to make more than a tiny dent in spending, and 2. They never made even the most cursory effort to improve efficiency, and just went with this ideological chainsaw approach. Maybe there's some version of the idea that was (and is) a good one, but it was always doomed to fail as conceived and led.
I never found any of his ideas interesting. Unusual, maybe, but unusual does not mean interesting. I come from a country with a history of autocracy, and it has been an absolute dogma for me to not touch anything autocratic with a six-mile pole.
Well, I hope the rest of the world now will get the memo too, before we'll need a world war to crystallize the lesson.
Fascism and Ayn Rand's political philosophy are pretty different from each other, however you may feel about either one. Not everything you dislike is the same bad thing.
I would think someone intent on calling Moldbug's ideas interesting would at least try to patch up the big holes. Like the city-states that have free flowing capital and populations, but somehow avoid an analogue to international law.
Or the dictator that isn't subject to approval, except by the required committee that can fire him. There's 4 points and 2 of them are contradictory!
> Like the city-states that have free flowing capital and populations, but somehow avoid an analogue to international law.
This is what kills me about attempts like this (e.g. like Scott Alexander's) to make Yarvin's ideas seem "interesting" or "thought-provoking".
Well-read as Yarvin might be, only someone who is mentally a teenager can have his kind of beliefs. "Society would be great if it weren't for all these monstruous things I don't like, artificially imposed on us by... aliens?"
It reminds me of teenagers who go online and make arguments like "well, ackshually, the US is not a democracy but a republic...". Yeah, yeah, you're very smart for pointing this out, now go sit in a corner and let the grownups talk.
Does anyone have a link to the tool some hn person made of a tool that catalogs all Yavin's old writing? It was a really slick project and I misplaced it.
I mean, "interesting" but still autocratic. His old ideas were nonsense too; unworkable teenage thought experiments dressed up as serious proposals. His new work just happens to be internally inconsistent as well as bad in all the other ways it always was.
Because he says rich people should rule the world, ergo rich people like him and attempt to encode his very stupid ideas into our politics, ergo we all have to care what he says
It’s really a testament to how astonishingly stupid some of those rich folks are that they find any of Yarvin’s work compelling.
And, to put this in perspective, there's 1 degree of separation between our current Vice president and Yarvin. I can guarantee that the two of them have had conversations about politics as Vance is quite close to Thiel who loves Yarvin.
That's what I've been wondering. How is this much different from Nixon's trickle down economics? An idea the wealthy are happy to promote because it protects their influence.
More to the point, how is this any different than serfdom? The inevitable result of "optimize for the wealthy" seems to be that. And, well, we did that. And it sucked.
I don't understand why we're reinventing feudalism over and over again and acting like it's novel. Giving all the tools to the wealthy doesn't make society a better place, and we've proved that. It decidedly stagnates everything, which, ironically, leads to very poor living conditions, including for the wealthy. So it's not even good for them, it's just self-destructive.
pretending that there's a legitimate, good faith, reasonable-people-can-disagree debate about "race & IQ" is one of the most obvious giveaways.
from January 2025 [0]:
> Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country.
a bit of additional context from Wikipedia [1]:
> Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal.
he claims that Lynn's work is still "hotly debated" and links to an article in "Aporia Magazine" which is published by the "Human Diversity Foundation" [2]:
> The Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) is a far-right company founded in 2022 to publish "race science" through the Aporia Magazine and Mankind Quarterly. It also publishes Edward Dutton's The Jolly Heretic podcast. Key persons of the HDF including its founder support remigration and white nationalism.
the role that Alexander plays reminds me of the attempts in the early 2000s to "teach the controversy" [3] about evolution vs. creationism. there is no actual scientific debate, but people with a political axe to grind want to shift the Overton window and give the impression that there is one.
That person is way too far down the rabbit hole themselves to give a decent criticism of Alexander.
When someone's #1, heavy-hitting, come-out-swinging criticism amounts to "his group is not as smart as they think they are" then they're already done. They've cooked themselves. I read that paragraph and heard it in the mean girl voice they thought they were hiding.
#2 is that his wrong ideas are immoral. #3 is that #2 draws the wrong crowd.
It's not like I don't get the point. It's just written for an audience that already deep in that corner of the blogosphere.
I'm sure they pump their fists at such a clean summing-up of why they hate him. But my eyes are glazing over.
This is just a preaching-to-the-choir description of the fact that Siskind does not hold 100% to egalitarian leftism. Unless you're already a doctrinaire egalitarian leftist, I don't see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter
> Unless you're already a doctrinaire egalitarian leftist, I don't see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter
It seems possible that if someone wasn’t familiar with Scott’s position on race science, they could read about his position on race science and then have that influence their opinion of him.
Out of curiosity, are you lumping everybody into two groups? The way your sentence was worded it sounds like there are on one hand people that believe in race science, and on the other hand “doctrinaire egalitarian leftists”. If the only qualification required to be a “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” is “not believing in race science”, then you’ve kind of just said “Unless [you don’t believe in race science], I don’t see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter”, which might actually kind of underscore some people’s issue with him.
Thank you for clarifying that you are using the term “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” to refer to any individual that does not believe in race science, or more specifically any individual that doesn’t agree with Scott Siskind’s position on race science.
I’m personally not super familiar with that label and assumed because of the definitions of those words that it would have some sort of philosophical or ideological connotation — but since a person needn’t be doctrinaire, a philosophical egalitarian, or a leftist to not be a fan of Scott’s blog, when you say “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” here you mean it like when a Juggalo says somebody isn’t “down with the clowns”
I’d pick another word for non-Codexers or Scott Thots (I’m guessing, I don’t know what label your fandom self-applies here), as someone could mistakenly think that you are trying to make some sort of point. (Which we know that you are not, since your original post was essentially just “Bringing up Scott’s positions on race science won’t change the opinions of the fans of Scott’s positions on race science” just phrased in a maximally-confusing and belabored way)
I've read only perhaps 1% of Siskind's work and don't have a particularly close familiarity with him or opinion on his work, and from that position I'm pointing out that the blog post is not particularly persuasive. It just states that Siskind does not hold to the same presuppositions as the author without making an argument for those presuppositions
> I've read only perhaps 1% of Siskind's work and don't have a particularly close familiarity with him
I see the point you’re trying to make here and I’m sorry I’m just not interested in becoming part of your fandom. I don’t really care how little you feel someone needs to read of Scott’s blog to find race science to be so compelling
Yeah, I guess it's true that people who (1) like eugenics and "human biodiversity" (i.e., race science), and (2) think neoreactionism is "edgy and cool" are not egalitarian or leftist.
This seems to boil down to that Elizabeth Sandifer, a self described "middle-aged trans anarchist", believes https://www.astralcodexten.com is "fertile grounds for white nationalist recruitment".
This is just wrong and anyone can visit the blog to see for themselves.
Well, for one thing, that comment is in response to a link to a blog post that Scott wrote about how The Feudalism Blogger’s old posts about how feudalism is good were better than The Feudalism Blogger’s new posts about how feudalism is good.
He sort of panders to an audience that fancies themselves much smarter than the average person, and as such categorically demand opinions that average people do not hold — no matter how sensible they might be. To accommodate that requirement he repackages existing (more usually conservative/libertarian) cultural gripes by pairing them with some light criticism and branding it as some sort of enlightened centrist/Third Way perspective. This sort of practice in general has lost some of its illusory appeal in recent years since so many previously “politically inscrutable” rich and influential folks dropped their centrist/apolitical trappings and came out as staunchly right-wing.
That being said there are quite a few readers that still want to play the “Are they right wing? Are they left wing? Are they something magical and ascendant?” game, and audience capture is a real phenomenon, so the entrenched players have no reason for introspection or change.
I have noticed this too. I've only ever read him off and on, and I get the feeling that he must have written something during one of the periods I wasn't reading his still at all that got him "canceled", but I have no idea what it was.
When the American Left split into progressive and liberal camps in the mid 2010s, the rationalist and adjacent communities underwent a huge internal conflict. Scott and a lot of his orbit tend to stay on the liberal side which these days is called and often calls itself "centrist". The aftermath of the split has had pretty huge effects in most Western spaces. A lot of the progressive left is really angry at the centrist left wing and many centrists think the progressive left is misguided and hate on them. The hate that Scott gets is largely a fallout from this schism.
He seems to get more hate than more mainstream people on the more centrist side of that split... Granted, they do all get hate, and your description does resonate. But he still seems to be an outlier.
He was considered a core, visible member of the rationalist community from well before the split. For better or for worse he is considered a figurehead of the movement. With the acrimony of the split there was no way he was going to escape unscathed no matter which side he ended up on just by sheer visibility of his writing.
But it's not rationalists mad about this split who seem to have outsized vitriol for him. It seems to me that it's people who were not involved in that community to begin with.
My read has always been that the angry folks were always rationalist adjacent even if they weren't rationalists themselves. There's a lot of people in my IRL network, for example, who are 1-3 degrees of separation from Scott or Yud but have never posted about them or in the rationalist blogspace at all.
In the schism the other person replying to you is talking about, Scott didn’t go fully into the far left progressive ideology when it happened so therefore he’s a traitor since he should “know better”.
One tenant of the progressive thinking is if you know their argument then you must agree with them because they’re “right”. So you’re either ignorant or evil - there’s no room for smart people that just think they’re wrong. They know Scott isn’t ignorant so therefore he must be evil.
My other comment got flag killed because I mentioned the core group I think is responsible for this kind of thinking within that community.
I’ve read LessWrong on and off since 2014. Read SSC and ACX semi-regularly. Scott’s a crank. He writes convincingly, he understands charisma and style, but he just can’t hold his own in an intellectual exchange.
Just last week he and Tyler Cowen of Marginial Revolution got into a dispute over USAID and DOGE and the degree to which Scott fails over and over again to read otherwise simple sentences is staggering.
He got associated with the "intellectual dark web" for occasionally having opinions outside of the mainstream. The NYTimes was even planning on writing a hit piece on him back in the day that scared him so bad he shut down his original site. I think his writing today lacks the sort of honesty or novelty it once had because he's very sensitive to being called out.
The gist of it is that he had interesting ideas on political systems in the past, but that his current ideas are nonsense, and in fact his old work explains exactly why his new work is nonsense.