Strangeloop II¶
The Hacker News discussion thread on The Moldbug Affair is not to be missed. To call it ‘historic’ wouldn’t be (much of) and exaggeration. It’s well-worth a look just for the Urbit insights alone. In addition (and quite separately from the last point) ‘yarvin9’ pops up to make an impressive demonstration of not groveling to the mob. That, hopefully, could provide a model for the many others who will find themselves in analogous witch-trial hot-seats over the months and years to come.
A few highlights.
devalier , on Urbit:
It wasn’t the code itself that I learned from. I have more been
enriched and stimulated by reading the blog posts, documentation,
hacker news threads, and mailing list. A couple of the more
interesting ideas are:
* He created Nock, which in a way is bytecode language, like
compiled java bytecode or the .NET CIL. But his idea was that this
bytecode should be the simplest possible thing, far, far simpler
than the CLR. In fact, it should be versioned in Kelvin
versioning, starting at 5,000 and counting down, until it is
finally perfected and will never need to change. Going forward,
all consumer apps will always compile down to this bytecode. All
new hardware platforms can build interpreters for this bytecode. I
think that is a pretty novel and neat approach. If it caught on,
it would ensure that any program we wrote now could be run for the
next thousand years.
* His view is that to beat spam, you simply need to have a finite
number of cryptographically secured identities. This number can be
large. But if it is finite, that means accounts will not be
costless, which means the market over time will be able to solve
the problems of trust and filtering out spam in a way far superior
to how it works today.
It’s hard to do the ideas justice by trying to repeat them myself.
In reading through the material it was just lots of little things,
where I said to myself, “Ah, that is a neat solution to that
problem, I wonder if he’ll be able to make it work.”
Quality sarcasm from 13thLetter:
What a crazy coincidence. This talk was accepted when nobody knew
who Yarvin was, but now that you and your friends want to cast him
out into the wilderness for disagreeing with your political
opinions, all of a sudden you realize that the talk was
technically uninteresting anyway. What are the odds, huh?
yarvin9 on racism:
I shouldn’t post as urbit. Quite a few other people, few of whom
agree with me on anything, have worked on the project.
The word “racist” and its conjugations does not appear in the
English language until the 1920s – see Peter Frost’s cultural
history
*. If you
asked Shakespeare if he was a “racist,” he would not know what you
meant.
“Racist” is essentially a term of abuse which no group or party
has ever applied to itself. Like most such epithets, it has two
meanings – a clear objective one, describing a person who fails to
believe in the anthropological theories of human equality which
became first popular, then universal in the mid-20th century; and
a caricature of the vices, personal or political, typically
engaged in by such a foul unbeliever.
[This non-apology under pressure is truly glorious]
topynate on the realistic micro-sociology of
crimethink definition:
Kicking people from your tech conference because they were racist
outside of it hands veto power to whoever determines what racism
is and when something is ‘too racist’. The same goes for the other
beyond-the-pale isms like sexism, fascism, etc.
paxdickinson on precedent:
It’ll be [Alex Miller’s] decision next time too. And now that the
Red Guards know he’ll succumb to even the slightest bit of
pressure, there will certainly be a next time.
convexfunction on prophecy:
It’s funny because he definitely
saw
this coming.
djur on “this is so … I can’t even …”
This is a core tenet of Moldbuggian neoreaction, that American
and European politics are run by a “Cathedral” that adheres to
communist beliefs. Claiming that mainstream political positions
are communism is absolutely insane.
corporealist on perspective:
This guy is a rightwinger (outside of his industry) and somebody
didn’t like it. What an embarrassment. They’re proving the right’s
points.
ShardPhoenix on more perspective:
… socialism is much worse than racism. Socialism (actual
socialism, not “social democracy” aka capitalist welfare state)
destroys countries (eg North Korea), while racism is merely a
moderate problem (eg South Korea is very racist but doing
fine).
ADDED: So I guess the Streisand Effect really is a thing.
