Well, if all this is true, yes, but Yarvin espouses the idea that the European classical model of interstate conflict, which does not seem to be true.
Yarvin also says he believes that his model of total power with accountability only to boards of directors results in less death. This seems to be proved wrong with the current slaughter in Gaza.
Being seriously wrong about important things is not in any way incompatible with being extremely smart. Even about the things you are famous for defending.
I basically don't know anything about Yarvin, only seen a couple memes and his debate with Hanson, but seems silly to imply he's stupid even if I personally haven't found anything of value in his work. I also know almost nothing about Chomsky but from the handful of clips I've seen he seems like a complete hack eg. making stuff up about Herbert Spencer and James M. Buchanan, things that are fairly trivial to fact check, but he's obviously pretty smart. Funnily the kind of mistakes he made re Spencer expose how normie leftist his information channels must be, it's like those ppl who just read Wikipedia all day.
I'm unfamiliar with the "clips" you've cited, (videos?) but I would say Chomsky's best book is "Current Issues in Linguistic Theory." His best politics focused work is "Radical Action." For something great you can read for free online, I will follow Bentham and recommend his short essay on Derrida and other postmodernist philosophers, and alternatively his email debate with Sam Harris about the Iraq War.
I am basing my opinion on three Yarvin books: "An open letter to open-minded progressives", "a general introduction to unqualified reservations", and "Patchwork". All are available online for free.
Of course, that's just three books. I don't know the man. He might be smarter than me. But he makes several really obvious errors in thinking in these books, and in the last decade, it doesn't seem to me like he's altered his thinking to correct for these errors at all. Instead, he has doubled down.
If someone can recommend something good Chomsky wrote I would be happy to read it, but like I didn't actively go out to find mistakes in his work, just that the bits and pieces I came across from his supporters were just obvious slop.
As Sam Kriss wrote, "Yarvin’s account—that Israel wants to give every Gazan equity in their own displacement, but it can’t because the global ruling class is made of adjunct professors and freelance journalists—does not. It doesn’t even touch reality. It wibbles away on an entirely separate plane."
He might be smart, to come up with this alternative vision of reality, backed up by numerous sources. But that kind of comes into conflict with what the definition of smartness usually refers to, in colloquial speech.
Philip Tetlock is required reading re the failings of talking heads appearing on the air or in print as experts. He has found ways to quantify their predictions and found that 'superforecasters' - often lay people with the right combination of humility, curiosity and constant (Bayesian? or quasi-Bayesian?) updating - routinely outperform them. His focus is on the prediction of events in international politics, but I suppose his findings would have pretty strong implications for other fields as well.
Making accurate predictions is importantly different from having useful and interesting thoughts! Tetlock emphasizes the accuracy of his foxes over his hedgehogs - but doesn't emphasize the fact that foxes make use of multiple theories built by conflicting hedgehogs in making their predictions, but make no theories of their own that anyone else could use to improve future predictions.
Another appeal is the way some public intellectuals speak instead of what they say. Most of what Jordan Peterson and Curtis Yarvin say is really thin. But Peterson has fluffy rhetoric (e.g. phrases like "biblical corpus" and "pyramidcal structure") and Yarvin excessively name drops, so a lot of people think they're brilliant.
Yarvin almost fooled me with this, for a while- he so extensively name drops and quotes primary sources (honestly, the linking is over-dramatic at times) that I had to stop and think and be like "actually, doesn't interstate anarchy in the classical model produce way more war than the internationalist paradigm?"
"The German Federation but full of old people and each member state has a nuke" doesn't exactly strike me as a method of secure peace, but it's never been tried, so maybe! Quick question: how much progress has Yarvin made on the cryptologically secure weapons he's been working on? How many dossiers does the Antiversity have?
As a Moldbuggian, it makes sense that you believe that the internationalist rules-based order is really just American hegemony or "demotism" under another name. Quibbling over definitions is rarely useful, nor is feeding the trolls, so I won't. The relative lack of moderate power wars doesn't seem to be explainable by nukes alone, unless you go full simplistic moldbuggery and call every state that is not a superpower a vassal state.
But the aging population explanation doesn't make sense. The percentage of population that is fighting age, particularly 16-30, has grown rather than shrunk, both in the US and the world, since WWII. There are far more people, and there's plenty of conscripts available.
I'm not beholden to Moldbug's worldview. He has some good points, created several useful concepts, and is wrong about several things.
" The relative lack of moderate power wars doesn't seem to be explainable by nukes alone, unless you go full simplistic moldbuggery and call every state that is not a superpower a vassal state."
Yes, every state is either a superpower or a vassal. And who's vassal is being fought over in Ukraine right now. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part it's true. And in the Cold War it was even more blatantly true.
"But the aging population explanation doesn't make sense. The percentage of population that is fighting age, particularly 16-30, has grown rather than shrunk, both in the US and the world, since WWII. There are far more people, and there's plenty of conscripts available."
The aging population has several other effects. It makes society much more risk averse, as we saw during the Covid years. Also, we need millions of people to keep the elderly population alive, so there's an entire sector of the labor force that barely existed before that now can't build armaments or fight. And beyond the age distribution, it's not clear that young men in the US will accept being conscripted to fight a war thousands of miles away. I'd rather go to jail that be sent to fight to make sure Taiwan can remain in the US sphere of influence, or even over some retarded Eastern European nation who would rather commit suicide than get along with Russia.
An EXPERT is somebody who knows enough about their subject to be able to present both sides on any topic. He has no strong opinions and can bore you at length.
A KNOW-ALL knows enough to form an opinion which they can justify when challenged.
When you’re reading an account of X, a topic that’s of interest to you, you want to it to reach a conclusion, you want to come away with a feeling that you’ve learnt something. An expert will write a long account of who said what and when. But you wanted to read about X, not about the history of X. A know-all will give you a single view; it may not be 100% correct but there will be enough evidence to defend it.
The good old BBC, in its ongoing mission to provide balance, sees balance as two equal but opposing opinions. No use talking to an expert as he will give a single balanced view and the only opposing view would be an ignoramus. Although there’s no shortage of these, they tend not to sound good on TV. So, they go for two opposing know-alls.
It is the know-alls who advance science. You have to assume a theory is true to test it or to build on it. Experts have too much invested in the uncertainty of the status quo.
George Will is a public intellectual who probably does not fit neatly into your categories. He had a tremendous knowledge of history, deploys it often in his columns, and writes really well. The Doonesbury spoof of his is great (starting here and in subsequent days):
And the most compelling of public intellectuals are often popularizers of important ideas (of whatever persuasion) presented in a way that a reasonably intelligent non-specialist can understand. Voltaire comes to mind as among history’s best known popularizers. Some academic specialists who are at the top of their own field can also have a knack for popular translation. Steven Pinker is one such today.
It helps to see public intellectuals as playing a social function, not engaging in intellectual inquiry. They're not there to investigate all the reasons for or against legalized abortion. In a social setting, reason-giving is better understood as a social practice, not a search for truth. You make a claim and justify it—if people find it acceptable, that's it. Public intellectuals are there to give voice to claims and justifications that work well enough. They're "smart" enough. Someone like Pruss on the other hand prefers to dig deeper, drawing ever finer distinctions that just aren't necessary in the social world. It all comes down to two very different goals.
Good points. In any case, if you have important ideas (whether novel or not doesn’t really matter, because a lot of old good ideas lay dormant because they haven’t been presented successfully to masses) you better damn well pay attention to how the more successful “dumb person’s smart person” is doing well enough that average people are interested in hearing somewhat nuanced ideas. i would say somewhat like Tucker is a dumb person’s smart person, Shapiro is a regular person’s smart person. JP, too. Sam Harris is a smart person’s smarter person. And then the unknowns who split hairs even more, are the smarter person’s smartest person.
Most of the ideas in that last category will never get noticed. And a lot of talented thinkers are lured into serving in that capacity. Makes some sense to go after the top ideas and appeal to the top thinkers.
Seems like this should matter. But because we live in a marketplace it often doesn’t. The ideas that matter (about how people should think and act if they want personal and societal well-being) are the ones that can be conveyed to the people who matter, and that’s ultimately average people. And while this can be annoying, would we want it any other way?
The real enterprise in conveying complex ideas for the people that matter is to make sure they “get it.” If the stuff you’re thinking about is too deep, it might never get seen. Even if it’s a valuable idea that would work and inspire change if understood, if it’s not understood, what the fuck is one actually doing?
Anyway, I like your topic and I understood it, so I’ll read more of your stuff. Congrats. I know that ain’t easy to pull off. This piece was an example of ideas that average people will get and think is smart. Okay maybe you’re a “sort of smart persons smarter person.”
...and maybe the missing component is "to be a smart person's smart person, you need to be smart AND appeal to *their* tastes or surprise them," which is going to be a smaller subset of people because (a) academic turbo-nerds are often interested in, and surprised by, different things than the average person, and also (b) it's just hard to be extremely extremely good at two things at the same time, even if they are mostly similar. "Tails coming apart" and all that.
In graduate school I took a class taught by a brilliant scholar who had written an extraordinarily influential book (that was successful both academically and among the public). They were an absolute bore in the classroom, though. Television or the debate stage would be absolutely out of the question. So there's that aspect too.
This essay is both really good and somewhat confused. You argue that public intellectuals succeed by producing novel ideas or maybe by generating clever arguments, unless they succeed by being a total hack; they succeed because their arguments are accessible, except that people who read Scott Alexander have an average IQ of 128, etc. Overall, this is an excellent piece though, especially the insight that some public intellectuals (e.g., Einstein) are/were genuinely brilliant, and the fact that midwits share that opinion doesn't undermine it at all.
I don't see what's confused. Most of the time, they succeed by being an average person's smart person, but sometimes they fill a niche and are a smart person's smart person.
Tucker Carlson seems pretty intelligent when talking about random subjects off the cuff, but one can tell he speaks 'like a journalist' when on the subject of politics.
As someone who’s neither educated nor particularly bright, my advice is that if you’re smart and have a good idea that you believe should be widely shared, either 1) directly demonstrate its effects to such an overwhelming extent that average people can comfortably put aside their inability to understand it or 2) apply more of your enviable cognitive resources to the idea’s most rudimentary explanation.
The reach of an idea is a significant component of its effectiveness. Speak slowly, use small words.
Moldbug is my idea of a stupid person's idea of a smart person.
Wasn’t he part of SMPY, might be a stupid person’s idea of a smart guy, but he does seem objectively pretty bright https://sebjensen.substack.com/p/estimating-the-iq-of-curtis-yarvin
Well, if all this is true, yes, but Yarvin espouses the idea that the European classical model of interstate conflict, which does not seem to be true.
Yarvin also says he believes that his model of total power with accountability only to boards of directors results in less death. This seems to be proved wrong with the current slaughter in Gaza.
Being seriously wrong about important things is not in any way incompatible with being extremely smart. Even about the things you are famous for defending.
I basically don't know anything about Yarvin, only seen a couple memes and his debate with Hanson, but seems silly to imply he's stupid even if I personally haven't found anything of value in his work. I also know almost nothing about Chomsky but from the handful of clips I've seen he seems like a complete hack eg. making stuff up about Herbert Spencer and James M. Buchanan, things that are fairly trivial to fact check, but he's obviously pretty smart. Funnily the kind of mistakes he made re Spencer expose how normie leftist his information channels must be, it's like those ppl who just read Wikipedia all day.
I'm unfamiliar with the "clips" you've cited, (videos?) but I would say Chomsky's best book is "Current Issues in Linguistic Theory." His best politics focused work is "Radical Action." For something great you can read for free online, I will follow Bentham and recommend his short essay on Derrida and other postmodernist philosophers, and alternatively his email debate with Sam Harris about the Iraq War.
I am basing my opinion on three Yarvin books: "An open letter to open-minded progressives", "a general introduction to unqualified reservations", and "Patchwork". All are available online for free.
Of course, that's just three books. I don't know the man. He might be smarter than me. But he makes several really obvious errors in thinking in these books, and in the last decade, it doesn't seem to me like he's altered his thinking to correct for these errors at all. Instead, he has doubled down.
If someone can recommend something good Chomsky wrote I would be happy to read it, but like I didn't actively go out to find mistakes in his work, just that the bits and pieces I came across from his supporters were just obvious slop.
As Sam Kriss wrote, "Yarvin’s account—that Israel wants to give every Gazan equity in their own displacement, but it can’t because the global ruling class is made of adjunct professors and freelance journalists—does not. It doesn’t even touch reality. It wibbles away on an entirely separate plane."
He might be smart, to come up with this alternative vision of reality, backed up by numerous sources. But that kind of comes into conflict with what the definition of smartness usually refers to, in colloquial speech.
Philip Tetlock is required reading re the failings of talking heads appearing on the air or in print as experts. He has found ways to quantify their predictions and found that 'superforecasters' - often lay people with the right combination of humility, curiosity and constant (Bayesian? or quasi-Bayesian?) updating - routinely outperform them. His focus is on the prediction of events in international politics, but I suppose his findings would have pretty strong implications for other fields as well.
Making accurate predictions is importantly different from having useful and interesting thoughts! Tetlock emphasizes the accuracy of his foxes over his hedgehogs - but doesn't emphasize the fact that foxes make use of multiple theories built by conflicting hedgehogs in making their predictions, but make no theories of their own that anyone else could use to improve future predictions.
Another appeal is the way some public intellectuals speak instead of what they say. Most of what Jordan Peterson and Curtis Yarvin say is really thin. But Peterson has fluffy rhetoric (e.g. phrases like "biblical corpus" and "pyramidcal structure") and Yarvin excessively name drops, so a lot of people think they're brilliant.
Yarvin almost fooled me with this, for a while- he so extensively name drops and quotes primary sources (honestly, the linking is over-dramatic at times) that I had to stop and think and be like "actually, doesn't interstate anarchy in the classical model produce way more war than the internationalist paradigm?"
Nuclear weapons and an aging population are the primary reason for the lack of major power wars after WW2. Go back to sucking Bill Kristol's dick.
"The German Federation but full of old people and each member state has a nuke" doesn't exactly strike me as a method of secure peace, but it's never been tried, so maybe! Quick question: how much progress has Yarvin made on the cryptologically secure weapons he's been working on? How many dossiers does the Antiversity have?
I was addressing your contention that American hegemony is the reason for relatively little major power war.
As a Moldbuggian, it makes sense that you believe that the internationalist rules-based order is really just American hegemony or "demotism" under another name. Quibbling over definitions is rarely useful, nor is feeding the trolls, so I won't. The relative lack of moderate power wars doesn't seem to be explainable by nukes alone, unless you go full simplistic moldbuggery and call every state that is not a superpower a vassal state.
But the aging population explanation doesn't make sense. The percentage of population that is fighting age, particularly 16-30, has grown rather than shrunk, both in the US and the world, since WWII. There are far more people, and there's plenty of conscripts available.
I'm not beholden to Moldbug's worldview. He has some good points, created several useful concepts, and is wrong about several things.
" The relative lack of moderate power wars doesn't seem to be explainable by nukes alone, unless you go full simplistic moldbuggery and call every state that is not a superpower a vassal state."
Yes, every state is either a superpower or a vassal. And who's vassal is being fought over in Ukraine right now. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part it's true. And in the Cold War it was even more blatantly true.
"But the aging population explanation doesn't make sense. The percentage of population that is fighting age, particularly 16-30, has grown rather than shrunk, both in the US and the world, since WWII. There are far more people, and there's plenty of conscripts available."
The aging population has several other effects. It makes society much more risk averse, as we saw during the Covid years. Also, we need millions of people to keep the elderly population alive, so there's an entire sector of the labor force that barely existed before that now can't build armaments or fight. And beyond the age distribution, it's not clear that young men in the US will accept being conscripted to fight a war thousands of miles away. I'd rather go to jail that be sent to fight to make sure Taiwan can remain in the US sphere of influence, or even over some retarded Eastern European nation who would rather commit suicide than get along with Russia.
Reminds me of something I wrote recently:
An EXPERT is somebody who knows enough about their subject to be able to present both sides on any topic. He has no strong opinions and can bore you at length.
A KNOW-ALL knows enough to form an opinion which they can justify when challenged.
When you’re reading an account of X, a topic that’s of interest to you, you want to it to reach a conclusion, you want to come away with a feeling that you’ve learnt something. An expert will write a long account of who said what and when. But you wanted to read about X, not about the history of X. A know-all will give you a single view; it may not be 100% correct but there will be enough evidence to defend it.
The good old BBC, in its ongoing mission to provide balance, sees balance as two equal but opposing opinions. No use talking to an expert as he will give a single balanced view and the only opposing view would be an ignoramus. Although there’s no shortage of these, they tend not to sound good on TV. So, they go for two opposing know-alls.
It is the know-alls who advance science. You have to assume a theory is true to test it or to build on it. Experts have too much invested in the uncertainty of the status quo.
George Will is a public intellectual who probably does not fit neatly into your categories. He had a tremendous knowledge of history, deploys it often in his columns, and writes really well. The Doonesbury spoof of his is great (starting here and in subsequent days):
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1986/07/08
And the most compelling of public intellectuals are often popularizers of important ideas (of whatever persuasion) presented in a way that a reasonably intelligent non-specialist can understand. Voltaire comes to mind as among history’s best known popularizers. Some academic specialists who are at the top of their own field can also have a knack for popular translation. Steven Pinker is one such today.
It helps to see public intellectuals as playing a social function, not engaging in intellectual inquiry. They're not there to investigate all the reasons for or against legalized abortion. In a social setting, reason-giving is better understood as a social practice, not a search for truth. You make a claim and justify it—if people find it acceptable, that's it. Public intellectuals are there to give voice to claims and justifications that work well enough. They're "smart" enough. Someone like Pruss on the other hand prefers to dig deeper, drawing ever finer distinctions that just aren't necessary in the social world. It all comes down to two very different goals.
Good points. In any case, if you have important ideas (whether novel or not doesn’t really matter, because a lot of old good ideas lay dormant because they haven’t been presented successfully to masses) you better damn well pay attention to how the more successful “dumb person’s smart person” is doing well enough that average people are interested in hearing somewhat nuanced ideas. i would say somewhat like Tucker is a dumb person’s smart person, Shapiro is a regular person’s smart person. JP, too. Sam Harris is a smart person’s smarter person. And then the unknowns who split hairs even more, are the smarter person’s smartest person.
Most of the ideas in that last category will never get noticed. And a lot of talented thinkers are lured into serving in that capacity. Makes some sense to go after the top ideas and appeal to the top thinkers.
Seems like this should matter. But because we live in a marketplace it often doesn’t. The ideas that matter (about how people should think and act if they want personal and societal well-being) are the ones that can be conveyed to the people who matter, and that’s ultimately average people. And while this can be annoying, would we want it any other way?
The real enterprise in conveying complex ideas for the people that matter is to make sure they “get it.” If the stuff you’re thinking about is too deep, it might never get seen. Even if it’s a valuable idea that would work and inspire change if understood, if it’s not understood, what the fuck is one actually doing?
Anyway, I like your topic and I understood it, so I’ll read more of your stuff. Congrats. I know that ain’t easy to pull off. This piece was an example of ideas that average people will get and think is smart. Okay maybe you’re a “sort of smart persons smarter person.”
Who are all the smart person's intellectuals?
Richard Feynman had an IQ of 125.
I just figured out what kind of public intellectual I am. I am a smart person's stupid person!
...and maybe the missing component is "to be a smart person's smart person, you need to be smart AND appeal to *their* tastes or surprise them," which is going to be a smaller subset of people because (a) academic turbo-nerds are often interested in, and surprised by, different things than the average person, and also (b) it's just hard to be extremely extremely good at two things at the same time, even if they are mostly similar. "Tails coming apart" and all that.
In graduate school I took a class taught by a brilliant scholar who had written an extraordinarily influential book (that was successful both academically and among the public). They were an absolute bore in the classroom, though. Television or the debate stage would be absolutely out of the question. So there's that aspect too.
This essay is both really good and somewhat confused. You argue that public intellectuals succeed by producing novel ideas or maybe by generating clever arguments, unless they succeed by being a total hack; they succeed because their arguments are accessible, except that people who read Scott Alexander have an average IQ of 128, etc. Overall, this is an excellent piece though, especially the insight that some public intellectuals (e.g., Einstein) are/were genuinely brilliant, and the fact that midwits share that opinion doesn't undermine it at all.
I don't see what's confused. Most of the time, they succeed by being an average person's smart person, but sometimes they fill a niche and are a smart person's smart person.
Tucker Carlson seems pretty intelligent when talking about random subjects off the cuff, but one can tell he speaks 'like a journalist' when on the subject of politics.
The last time I listened to one of his monologues, he was talking about how skyscrapers are scary, because they're big.
They are big enough to induce vertigo in a subset of people.
As someone who’s neither educated nor particularly bright, my advice is that if you’re smart and have a good idea that you believe should be widely shared, either 1) directly demonstrate its effects to such an overwhelming extent that average people can comfortably put aside their inability to understand it or 2) apply more of your enviable cognitive resources to the idea’s most rudimentary explanation.
The reach of an idea is a significant component of its effectiveness. Speak slowly, use small words.