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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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The rot runs deep.

Take a look at this paper. Here's the abstract:

It is incorrect to consider tidal power as renewable energy. Harnessing tidal energy will pose more severe problems than using fossil fuels. This study provides quantitative estimates to show how using tidal energy can destroy the environment in a short amount of time. Tides are induced by the rotation of the Earth with respect to the gravity of the Moon and Sun. The rotational energy of the Earth is naturally dissipated by tides slowly. Consuming tidal energy further reduces the rotational energy, accelerates the energy loss rate, and decelerates the rotation of the Earth. Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years. As a consequence, one side of the Earth would be exposed to the Sun for a much longer period of time than it is today. The temperature would rise extremely high on that side and drop extremely low on the other side. The environment would become intolerable, and most life on Earth could be wiped out.

Do read the paper. It's not long and it's a good test of one's bullshit detector1. For the impatient: the author assumes a 2% growth rate for humanity's energy use and projects that forward a thousand years.

The paper's isn't that interesting once you spot the trick. But it does bring up two interesting thoughts:

  • If the NYT picked up this story, do you think they'd have the nuance to highlight the shall we say questionable assumptions in this paper? Or would they just blare a giant headline stating "TIDAL POWER WILL KILL US ALL!" (Sub-heading: solar and wind the only way forward...)? Would they even link to the original paper? I think the world's complexity has surpassed the abilities of the average MSM reporter/editor/reader. Even if journalists are perfectly honest and impartial, they are too susceptible to manipulation to be trusted. Barring a drastic change in our media, the information content of the typical news article is now capped at zero.
  • How far can we extrapolate from this example? This guy's apparently a professor at Stanford and apparently he's been teaching there for some time (the paper refers to a grad-level class in 1993). And it's... pretty easy to find garbage papers. Here's another one. For a broader perspective, consider the replication crisis, accounts like this one, and digging back to the ancient year of 2009, Climategate. This is why for example I think Global Warming/Climate Change/etc... is nonsense. That we have the tools to model the Earth's climate at all is (imo) an outlandish claim (it's a complex dynamical system the size of the planet with billions of poorly understood interactions!). That we can project this model forward a hundred years (with all of its many intrinsic dependencies on other complex systems like human civilization) is another outlandish claim. And that we should restructure all of society based on these projections is yet another outlandish claim (with a side-helping of massive conflicts of interests). And at the bottom of it all are people like our dear Dr. Jerry.

1 I suppose this is technically consensus building. If you think the paper's arguments are reasonable, I'd be happy to discuss that as well...

I'm going with Poe's law here. From the abstract, I assumed that paper was a joke, but I can't find any clear evidence either way.

This is not a good paper.

I don’t think you understand the relationship of such a not-good paper to the dreaded Scientific Consensus. Anyone can be wrong on the Internet, even if they typeset their theory in LaTeX instead of raw HTML. If they engage in the normal publication, review, and replication process, and their colleagues talk about their paper around the water cooler—well, they’re still allowed to be wrong. Even a bad paper can trigger good responses.

Note, also, that the NYT has not picked up this story. You are borrowing trouble. Actually, I guess you’re borrowing the Hackernews line on this topic.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Dr. Liu is a Stanford professor. He’s not on the faculty lists, and doesn’t come up from a casual google. You also misread the bit about 1993–all the paper says is that he presented to a graduate class in 1990, and that he later left the school which hosted his sites. So I don’t think you need to worry about canceling this guy.

I am confused.

I'm hesitant about how much doxing of an individual we should do here, but when I investigate it, it looks like this person is a student at Stanford (in the computational engineering department, which I think means computer models of things), and that this 'paper' is just published on his personal page, not in any journal.

Is that wrong? If that's not right, could you link to what else you're seeing?

Assuming I'm right: every student has to write dozens or hundreds of random papers while they're at school. The fact that one of them contains an error is not especially alarming; I've graded many of them, they all contain errors. This in particular is sort of a funny error but it seem indecorous to pick out this one student on all the internet to point and laugh at, let alone to hold up as evidence against all climate scientists or w/e (not even the same department!).

One swallow doesn't make a summer. One paper (by a non expert) doesn't invalidate an entire field of experts.

we should restructure all of society based on these projections is yet another outlandish claim (with a side-helping of massive conflicts of interests)

I think looking at proposed answers to climate change is what turns evaluating the climate change hypothesis form a reasoning exercise into an emotional/political endeavour - and it cuts both ways. This is the only way I can explain all the special pleading for climate change as uniquely suspect for decades, despite being a bland, intuitive hypothesis. I think it's helpful set aside looking at proposed answers before thinking about the hypothesis.

I think Global Warming/Climate Change/etc... is nonsense

We should expect some kind of climate change a-priori. Anything else is nonsense. We've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1859. Very basic. We've known the atmosphere:earth is roughly proportional to apple:apple-skin for a fair bit too. I'd be shocked if adding ~1 quintillion Kg's of CO2 to the atmosphere had precisely no effects. Measuring CO2 in ppm is trivial. Measuring temperature is trivial. Even if climate change isn't human caused, it'd still be worth investigating so we can engineer around it.

That we have the tools to model the Earth's climate at all is (imo) an outlandish claim

This is also a dubious line of thinking (its something like the appeal to ridicule). Chess computers, controlled flight, weather prediction, gene editing, nuclear fission, were all once claimed to be too outlandish to be possible. They still feel outlandish, but all can be done by hobbyists.

Most of those things are much easier to model than the climate because there are thousands and thousands of inputs into the climate. GIGO

This still seems like special pleading. Perhaps you can argue/explain to me how its not. As I see it, we can figure out chess, engineer billions of transistors per sq in, manipulate genomes, program LLMs with billions of tokens, perform a million-trillion operations every second. Therefore its not unreasonable to suspect that we can make good climate models.

So, I don't know how pleasing you'll find this answer, but the burden of proof is on the models to show their efficacy. A lot of the things you mentioned were very difficult things to do, but we know they work because we see that they work. You don't have to argue about whether Stockfish's chess model captures Truth with a capital T; you can just play 20 games with it, lose all 20, and see. (And of course plenty of things look difficult and ARE still difficult - we don't have cities on the moon yet!)

So, if we had a climate model that everyone could just rely on because its outputs were detailed and verifiably, reliably true, then sure, "this looks like it's a hard thing to do" wouldn't hold much weight. A property of good models is that it should be trivial for them to distinguish themselves from something making lucky guesses. But as far as I know, we don't have this. Instead, we use models to make 50-year predictions for a single hard-to-measure variable (global mean surface temperature) and then 5 years down the line we observe that we're still mostly within predicted error bars. This is not proof that the model represents anything close to Truth.

Now, I don't follow this too closely any more, and maybe there really is some great model that has many different and detailed outputs, with mean temperature predictions that are fairly accurate for different regions of the Earth and parts of the atmosphere and sea, and that properly predicts changes in cloud cover and albedo and humidity and ocean currents and etc. etc. If somebody had formally published accurate predictions for many of these things (NOT just backfitting to already-known data), then I'd believe we feeble humans actually had a good handle on the beast that is climate science. But I suspect this hasn't happened, since climate activists would be shouting it from the rooftops if it had.

Thanks. I am trying to ignore specifics and make an inductive argument about science in general to shed light on why climate science appears special (ie: most biologist claim that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, physicists say the universe has a speed limit, meteorologists say 80% chance it'll rain in 3 days etc). Normally, people just go "oh okay". AFAIKT, some 95% of climate scientists are saying "yep, the climate is projected to warm for x and y reasons" and yet many people are have been uniquely skeptical for ~50 years despite increasing consensus among people who have studied the science thousands of hours. I curious what the reason for this is.

Personally, I think the hypothesis is the expected one. Humans have added a trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere in 200 years, and its trivial to prove CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I'd expect something to happen, probably warming, although this need not be the case, and I don't really care either way. All I want to know is what makes climate science uniquely dubious from the highest vantage point, without specifics (mostly for practical reasons).

I haven't followed this much at all. I don't disagree with the points you made, but at a 5 minute glance it seems that the climate models are useful. Even if they weren't, skepticism in the face of an increasing consensus in a quantitative field over decades begs for an explanation.

Biology and physics are old sciences compared to climate science. And the list of amazing things we've done with biology and physics over the last 200 years is insanely long. I guess you're saying that we should give climate science the same level of veneration, even without actual results and useful predictions, because it (ostensibly) uses the same processes. But even if you pretend that climate science is conducted with the same level of impartial truth-seeking - despite the incredible political pressure behind it - that's still missing the point that science is messy and often gets things wrong. Even in biology (e.g. Lamarckism) or physics (e.g. the aether). It takes hundreds of repeated experiments and validated predictions before a true "consensus" emerges (if even then). Gathering together a consensus and skipping that first step is missing the point.

And remember, skepticism is the default position of science. It's not abnormal. Heck, we had people excitedly testing the EmDrive a few years back, which would violate conservation of momentum! We didn't collectively say "excommunicate the Conservation of Momentum Deniers!"

Regardless, I'm not saying that climate science or the models are entirely useless. Like you said, the greenhouse effect itself is pretty simple and well-understood (though it only accounts for a small portion of the warming that models predict). There's good reason to believe warming will happen. Much less reason to believe it'll be catastrophic, but that's a different topic!

We should give climate science whatever veneration it earns. AFAIKT, it has produced results and useful predictions, but this is largely immaterial to what I'm talking about.

If there was Blah Science, researched for decades by tens of thousands of smart people who overwhelmingly agree that X is true, I'd bet on X being true.

My point: most people would bet on X being true in normal circumstances. People seem to make an exception for climate science. I'm curious why people make this exception.

I'm also curious if there are any other broad fields where this pattern holds. Things surrounding nutrition come to mind. Perhaps there are many, and what I'm calling special pleading is quite common.

Climate science has made predictions that are laughably wrong, and this doesn't seem to bother the researchers. The IPCC reports have often contained an enormous range of predictions based on various conditions, and even then on at least one occassion they all missed high. Climate science is no longer an unproven science with a curious number of believers; it's a field full of failures and missed predictions excused by "oh but we know better now".

I'm curious why people make this exception.

About as curious as our friend Secure Signals is when he claims some discrepancy in concentration camp numbers, I imagine.

If there was Blah Science, researched for decades by tens of thousands of smart people who overwhelmingly agree that X is true, I'd bet on X being true.

Psychology, sociology, criminology, economics... That's four fields with zero credibility off the top of my head. I'm sure others can add more. [EDIT] - Add whatever pedagogy or whatever they call the study of education methods itself. That one's toast too.

You should not assume science is correct because of a consensus. When that consensus starts shipping engineered solutions based off that consensus, then you can start taking them at their word. This attitude should expand to cover anything from physics to hard math if they engage with a live political issue.

Can we predict the weather tomorrow? Yes and no. There are just too many variables and randomness in the system to be exact but have a decent approximation.

Climate is more complex. We don’t know how to measure every variable. We don’t know what variables should be included. We don’t know how much each variable should matter.

Chess is simple. There are 9 kinds of pieces and 64 squares. Climate is a lot more complex.

Right, but this line of reasoning could be used to dismiss as inaccurate anything sufficiently complex and niche. The human body, the universe, and AI are complex, but people don't dismiss medicine, astrophysics, and LLM's because of complexity. What is special or unique about decades of climate science that gives people pause?

I don't want to put words in peoples mouths. If people think decades of climate science is uniquely dubious because they reckon its just too complex, that's fine. Special pleading is an informal fallacy anyhow. OP found climate science to be nonsense, and the idea of climate modeling to be outlandish, and didn't elaborate. But saying this isn't special pleading by pointing out complexity is a non-starter. It's rare that, for decades, 90+% of trained scientists agree on some domain specific thing in a heavily quantitative field, yet popular sentiment demurs without easily explaining why.

  1. Astrophysics is interesting but doesn’t really make any demand upon me. Whether they are right or not is by and large irrelevant.

  2. The complexity of AI is part of the argument against AI. That is, we don’t understand exactly how it works and therefore the alignment problem is a concern.

  3. Medicine — well the answer is it depends. The older a practice the more I trust it. I like lindy things.

  4. But it isn’t just climate. I think when it generally comes to predicting complex phenomena we overstate our ability to predict things.

chess, engineer billions of transistors per sq in, manipulate genomes, program LLMs with billions of tokens, perform a million-trillion operations every second.

All of those are discrete (except manipulation of genomes), chess has an finite number of movements and we are barely understanding the genome; grouping it with something simple as chess is disingenuous. By contrast the climate has a number of inputs that can't even be comprehended, are analogue in nature and affect it in variable ways, from mayor ocean currents and wind fronts to cow farts and the movement of people. We can't even predict the weather from one day to another, just forecast it with probabilities.

As an aside, I still think chess fits. I don't even think we know how many games of chess are possible. Humans recently approximated a Go engine - something people long claimed was too complex to ever be done, much like chess. Models + compute can beat humans at games of unimaginable complexity.

Regardless, even if chess is a bad analogy, admitting that doesn't gets me out special pleading that climate science is not only special in its complexity, but also special in that thousands of people with PhD's, from Montana to Mongolia, overwhelmingly agree that its possible to model climate usefully.

What reason do I have to disbelieve climate science that doesn't also apply to designing bleeding edge microchips, or medicine, or applied physics, or the improvements seen in weather forecasting? I'm trying to argue myself into climate science skepticism inductively and/or by way of inferences. A strong quantitative scientific consensus about cause and effect is usually a good bet. What makes climate science different?

The only thing I can come up with is that climate science is more akin to a year-long weather forecast (ie cannot be computed in P time because well understood chaotic conditions). But then why do such a large amount knowledgeable keep spending money on the practical applicability of climate models? I'm back at special pleading that science is a liar in this case in particular.

but also special in that thousands of people with PhD's, from Montana to Mongolia, overwhelmingly agree that its possible to model climate usefully.

Well, they have a vested interest in it, no?

What reason do I have to disbelieve climate science that doesn't also apply to designing bleeding edge microchips, or medicine, or applied physics

that they at least produce the predicted results, be it a bleeding edge chip or a failed attempt at one, weather forecasting as I see it isn't much better than an old man and bad knees.

What makes climate science different?

That is trying to understand a really complex system, that a myriad of special interest have their hands in all kinds of places, and that the system as such began a long long time ago and we don't know much about that period.

I'm back at special pleading that science is a liar in this case in particular.

not this case in particular, you can add Psychology with its replication crisis to the pile and whatever the COVID clusterfuck was.

weather forecasting as I see it isn't much better than an old man and bad knees.

This was a common sentiment back when I was growing up in the 90s. Even back then, it was a silly sentiment and wrong, though it wasn't completely wrong, but it's certainly completely wrong today. Even since the 90s to today, weather forecasting has improved substantially. This makes sense, because there's a ton of money to be made by forecasting weather slightly better than the competition. Weather drives energy usage patterns to a significant extent - think air conditioning and heating - and being able to predict those patterns more accurately than someone else allows one to make bets on the energy markets (things like electricity, nat gas, coal, oil) to make more money. An old man with bad knees and a team of professional meteorologists both get things wrong from time to time, but how often they get things wrong and how severely they get things wrong are very very different these days.

we don't know much about that period.

Actually, we do! Antarctic ice-cores let us get a surprising amount of information about the climate of the earth in the past. Similarly, other fields can tell us really interesting things as well - if you encounter lots of fossils of creatures that only lived in tropical rainforests in a place that is now a desert, that is useful information. Similarly, noticing lots of aquatic/fish fossils on ground that's above the waterlevel can tell you things as well. There's a vast wealth of information about the past available to modern scientific inquiry.

I personally believe in global warming - I can't see any other reasonable conclusion when you look over the data we have available to us. Historical changes in temperature and the association with atmospheric carbon dioxide seem fairly undeniable at this point. I don't think that climate change is going to cause Venus Earth or the end of the world, it is going to have a significant impact on human society due to how dependent we are upon the climate as it stands. There will be winners and losers, but at the same time I highly doubt anything is going to actually fix it - there are too many economic, political and military incentives to burn fossil fuels, and most of the current proposals from the left to deal with the problem essentially boil down to letting Goldman Sachs make more money while limousine liberals pay large sums of money to try and avoid facing up to their own massive contributions to the issue.

That is trying to understand a really complex system

This is practically a definition for 'science'.

Well, they have a vested interest in it, no?

This is largely true for most fields of science.

the system as such began a long long time ago and we don't know much about that period.

Similarly, this is also true for most of science.

I can't find anything that makes these arguments apply to climate science, but not biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, etc.

Eg. Do we really know bacteria cause disease? Researches have a vested interest in continued research, but the proposed mechanisms are beyond complex, based on biology that began over a billion years ago.

that they at least produce the predicted results

Apparently climate models have been, on average, predictive. But this is not the kind of inductive claim I'm searching for.

weather forecasting as I see it isn't much better than an old man and bad knees.

Apparently, these are accurate 75% of the time inside of 5 days. This would be easy to disprove. Again, not an inductive claim. As an aside, if interested I'd be willing to bet money that weather forecasts are about as accurate as 30 sec. of googling led me to believe they are.

that a myriad of special interest have their hands in all kinds of places

I'm extremely mindful of this regarding climate policy.

This is practically a definition for 'science'.

The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not. Climate is plausibly across the line to intractably complex.

More comments

we should restructure all of society based on these projections is yet another outlandish claim (with a side-helping of massive conflicts of interests)

These are two distinct propositions unrelated to each other.

"Leeches, bloodletting and self flagellation do nothing to stop plague."

"There is no plague. Fever, black spots all over the body and vomiting blood are completely normal. Everything is fine."

We should expect some kind of climate change a-priori. Anything else is nonsense. We've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1859. Very basic.

Exactly. Climate change does not rest on Al Gore and Greta, it rests on basic 19th century science.

If you do not trust these free masons, you can replicate their experiments at home, you do not have to take their words on faith.

If your political tribe requires you to deny simple laws of physics, find better one.

If your political tribe requires you to deny simple laws of physics, find better one.

Okay, look, imagine that you wake up in an alternate reality where there's a flourishing scientific field studying beneficial effects of smoking tobacco (it was real for a while, a guy who invented like a third of modern statistics after retiring picked up a fight with all the people saying that smoking causes lung cancer, pointing out that they use bad statistics, correlation doesn't equal causation, what if people with lung cancer pick up smoking to soothe their lungs; also nicotine might help with schizophrenia, nicotine can be a safer and better stimulant than caffeine, etc etc).

Then you discover that the 99.7% consensus of the pro-smoking scientists corresponds to the 98% of their research being funded by tobacco companies. Stop for a second, why does that raise your hackles regardless of the subject matter, whether they study smoking or AGW?

When a scientist who studies the beneficial effects of smoking on a grant from a tobacco company publishes a paper saying that tobacco causes cancer, we should all stop promoting that and cancel our entire field, a few things happen:

  1. His paper is not mentioned in his benefactor's speech to the company telling them how they should funnel more money into the study of the beneficial effects of smoking.
  2. He never receives any grants from the company ever more.
  3. He quits the field.
  4. His peers in the field universally condemn his research as flawed because they don't want to lose funding or quit the field.
  5. His peers in the field believe themselves to be right and their job to be producing research convincing to the public, not research discovering truth.
  6. If the field is politicized, his peers also believe that all opponents also want to eat fetuses or make rape legal.

This same effect of course applies to the field of climate research as the scientists working in it apply for grants to the USA Department of Energy or other state-level entities that are naturally interested in the evidence for global warming as a clear and present threat.

So unfortunately with the way the funding is set up, the entire field produces no knowledge (justified true belief). It might be true that AGW is dangerous to humanity, we know that the entire climate research community would claim that it is true regardless of whether it is true, so them claiming that it's true gives us 0 information. Simple as.

For a bit more of an expanded argument read the AGW section of https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/

If you do not trust these free masons,

Side note: Freemasons are some of the most trustworthy people I have ever met, on average they stick to a stricter moral code than your average man on the street. If I had to choose between trusting a freemason I knew nothing about or John Doe, I would trust the freemason without hesitation.

The author assumption is ... reasonable about trends. What he fails to consider is that by that time we are way above type 1 Kardashev civilization (and probably type 3 or 4 Kardashian civilization) - so we will be harvesting the energy of the sun. Or we would have gone extinct anyway.

If the NYT picked up this story, do you think they'd have the nuance to highlight the shall we say questionable assumptions in this paper? Or would they just blare a giant headline stating "TIDAL POWER WILL KILL US ALL!" (Sub-heading: solar and wind the only way forward...)? Would they even link to the original paper? I think the world's complexity has surpassed the abilities of the average MSM reporter/editor/reader. Even if journalists are perfectly honest and impartial, they are too susceptible to manipulation to be trusted. Barring a drastic change in our media, the information content of the typical news article is now capped at zero.

If you want to criticise the press, you would do well to choose a real example rather than make one up and declare that if it occurred it would be a damning indictment of our media. In fact, the original initial version was first published in 2019. Not a single outlet, no matter how obscure, that I can find has covered this at all. In addition, from what I can tell this has never been published in any journal or been peer-reviewed at all. It's hard, therefore, to see this as anything other than lame culture warring. 'If this paper was picked up by the news or academic community, which it totally would, apart from the fact that it hasn't, but I know they definitely would if they hadn't, what rubes that would show them to be'. If anyone responds to this the inevitable reply will be 'the media is bad on science, look at X, Y and Z' or whatever, but then consider using one those real examples as the basis for a post rather than making up a non-existent story to get mad at.

This is so idiotic I don't even know where to start. I genuinely wouldn't be against seeing this dude get shot on live television pour discourager les autres.

Just like how there is an upper limit to how much solar energy we can generate in a day on earth (surface area of planet *maximum amount of energy falling on each unit area per hour*24 hrs), there is an upper limit to how much tidal energy we can generate because we don't have any way to make the tides stronger (and thus pull energy from the earth's rotation into the movement of seawater). This upper limit doesn't give a shit about us needing to grow energy consumption at 2% per year. It is a physical fact, nothing to do with humanity or its needs. When we reach this limit we're straight up not going to be able to generate more energy via tidal methods and will have to switch to something else. What will it be? I don't know but so far humanity has a very good track record in finding alternatives when they become necessary. And this upper limit is so low that it will be many millions of years before there is even a slight impact on the length of a sidereal day.

As a result of this limit we can spend eons harvesting tidal energy and it won't make any significant difference to the earth's rotation. In fact, it's going to slow the earth's rotation just as much as if we harvested literally 0 tidal energy. This is because the earth loses rotational energy when it gets converted into the movement of water (as the tide goes up, water needs to move to that area), not when we harnass that water movement to create electricity. At the moment all this energy is being converted into heat and sound as the water of the tide comes in and rubs against the land/the aligned directional movement of the water molecules gets replaced with random movement though entropy, thereby increasing water temperature. Diverting a portion (any portion, up to 100%) of this energy into electricity is going to do literally nothing to how much the tides are slowing down the earth.

Tides are already slowing down the earth's rotation, harvesting tidal energy won't speed up or slow down this rate at all.

Got it, tides come in, tides go out, never a miscommunication.

Let's not casually talk of violence when a writer hasn't thought as deeply about an issue as you.

It's the duty of a scientist to think deeply about the things he writes about. People will assume that, because he is a scientist, he has in fact thought deeply about the subjects of the papers he publishes. Scientists who don't think deeply about their areas of study need to be discouraged from being scientists, lest they use their institution's prestige to convince people of things that aren't true.

There are probably more humane and effective ways of discouraging someone from being a scientist other than a live televised broadcast of their firing squad.

Humane, sure. Effective? Hard to beat a bullet.

digging back to the ancient year of 2009, Climategate

Am I the only one who finds Moldbug's writing style completely incomprehensible? He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say. The only thing I'm confident of is that, whatever it is he believes (which is something I am wholly unable to glean from the actual content of what he's written), he thinks it's so self-evident that you'd have to be an utter cretin not to already believe it.

It's an experience not unlike reading TLP/Edward Teach, but at least in that case the incomprehensibility does seem to be deliberate (for whatever reason).

He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say.

As in you read the whole linked article and have no idea, or gave up after the first ten or so paragraphs? Because while undeniably excessively verbose, containing frequent tangents, and actually being less about the Climategate and more about how the Climategate is yet another example of how power corrupts, it presents clear points with solid justifications.

If you're interested in something much more concise and aimed at someone who is not already on the same wavelength you might want to read the AGW section of this: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/ . It is not, strictly speaking, about the Climategate, because it predates it by a few months I think, but it predicts it presciently.

Am I the only one who finds Moldbug's writing style completely incomprehensible?

the earlier stuff is more readable. he is leaning into the verbosity in part because that is what is expected of him. no one subs to moldbug for hot takes. they want to work for it

Moldbug's writing is good actually.

It is unfortunate that A Gentile Introduction and the Open Letter are the essays most frequently cited to new readers. Moldbug's stuff is best read in chronological order. The writing style is fundamentally stream-of-consciousness. In order to follow the argument, you must be primed with the same thoughts as the narrator. Nested clauses -- far from being unwieldly -- serve as clues and invite the reader to ponder the deeper implications of the content in front of them.

it's good in the sense that it's not something that the average person can ever aspire to. it is demonstrative of a sort of rarefied skill on his part to compose it. is his writing the best in my opinion in terms of style or readability ? no. there are other writers whose writings I find more enjoyable.

Moldbug's stuff is best read in chronological order.

This sounds suspiciously similar to "yeah dude season 1 is a bit of a drag but it gets soo good after that, it's worth it."

I'd say it's much more like how if you try to read later works by a philosopher they are frequently a brick wall of incomprehensible terminology and seemingly nonsensical reasoning, but only because they spent the earlier works defining terms and explaining ideas, some of which are compacted from essay-length down to a single word, and they aren't going to go back over the basics every time they mention a concept.

To use an example closer to this community, if I were to say "The Molochian tendencies of the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are a result of the toxoplasmosic interplay between competing egregores" it requires reading like 4 of Scott's essays to understand.

Fair. The difference being, once you actually read the essays from which "Moloch" and "toxoplasma" originate, the terms are easy to understand because Scott explains what they mean in plain simple language. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Moldbug ever explained what he means by e.g. "the Cathedral" in plain, simple language, even though from my understanding it's a much less complex concept than "toxoplasma".

My entire post--maybe even my entire blog--reduced to three words. If you want to know how you are governed, this is it: you are governed by Manipulating Procedural Outcomes. It's perfect. It belongs on someone's tomb.

That's about as succinct as you could get I think. The woman who invented the phrase had a longer blogpost about it.

Also fair, though I'd just say that I read a lot of his works in chronological order, and I don't remember ever being confused on what was meant by the Cathedral. I think he did a good job of gradually introducing facets of a very large term, though I understand why some may find the style obnoxious (personally I enjoy it).

I think you've identified two keys flaws in Moldbug's writing. I'm not deeply familiar with everything he wrote but from what I've read, he strikes me as afflicted with Smart Person Syndrome. Because he's smart, he assumes everyone else is an idiot, especially anyone who disagrees with his viewpoints.

He writes like he was partially graded on word count, rather than solely substance, in college and never quite kicked the habit. I've noticed a lot of so-called "thought leaders" (I hate that term but I don't have a better one) have the same issue. 10 words when 5 will do, most of which are only tangentially related to the subject at hand. It's a sort of anti-Twitter where an idea is expanded on way past the point of coherency.

because he’s smart

Or because it’s a competitive strategy.

Insisting that your enemies are idiots usually plays pretty well. Especially when you’re already preaching about sheeple normies bureaucrats. Moldbug isn’t writing to convince.

I think he is. One strategy that quite often works with people is to use a lot of big words and long sentences filled with stuff that’s interesting but largely irrelevant to the point at hand. It looks impressive to outsiders to write 3x more words than necessary especially if you can drop big words and jargon that most people have vaguely heard of. I don’t think he’s actually smarter than the average college graduate, but his game of using words words words to make prosaic ideas sound impressive does work on some people.

What is he writing for, then?

At his best? He’s writing to galvanize people who already agree with him. Putting words to that nebulous fear of the outsider which lives in all our hearts, while presenting it as a special insight. Providing a framework to justify what his audience would like to do anyway: complain about the government, pine for days gone, and above all, oppose woke politics.

Most of the time, at least since he started making money off it? Entertainment.

he strikes me as afflicted with Smart Person Syndrome. Because he's smart, he assumes everyone else is an idiot, especially anyone who disagrees with his viewpoints.

I think there's a problem that affects a lot of writers wherein they get so close to their ideas that they lose the distance and objectivity that would allow them to assess how these ideas would be met by someone encountering them fresh. "Because I understand it, it must be comprehensible to anyone of approximately my intelligence." But there's a world of difference between coming up with a smart idea and actually explaining it effectively, which is why you need beta readers to ensure that your ideas are coming off in the manner you intend. I'm sure if this was suggested to him, Moldbug would of course insist that he doesn't want his ideas to become diluted or "dumbed-down" by making them more accessible to the "lay person", but this defense smacks of insecurity to me. If you live in a democracy and you want to influence policy you have to meet the voters where they are, which means explaining your ideas in a way that makes sense to the biggest possible audience. Maybe Moldbug would claim he's not trying to influence a big audience, but rather a curated intelligentsia who are themselves powerful enough to influence public policy. Not to blow my (our) own trumpet, but this website is full of high-IQ autistic nerds with thousands of postgrad degrees between us who are not shy about giving controversial or even taboo topics/positions a fair hearing - if even we have trouble understanding what he's trying to say half the time, that suggests it's a deficiency with the writing style, not with the intelligence of the readers.

I've noticed a lot of so-called "thought leaders" (I hate that term but I don't have a better one) have the same issue. 10 words when 5 will do, most of which are only tangentially related to the subject at hand. It's a sort of anti-Twitter where an idea is expanded on way past the point of coherency.

Richard Hanania wrote a good article arguing that it's rarely worthwhile reading non-fiction books about ideas (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, pop philosophy, pop psychology etc., as distinct from history books, biographies and so on). He argued that the core idea of such a book can usually be succinctly expressed in essay form (<10k words) with no loss of fidelity - but book publishers have no way to make money from essays, so they get the writer to pad out the essay with numerous examples of the phenomenon they're describing, personal anecdote, and filler passages to bring it up to book length. He gave the specific example of The Righteous Mind, a book which I enjoyed and agreed with the core premises of - but 400 pages, really? Scott has covered more ground than that book in a single blog post of a few thousand words.

Probably a lot of writers who get into the habit of doing this find that the habit starts to infect even their non-book writing, resulting in even the articles published on their own blogs becoming needlessly bloated.

I acknowledge that this comment itself may come off as an example of precisely the negative phenomenon I'm describing.

completely incomprehensible

I assume it's some sort of Straussian/obscurantist thing; intentionally hiding your points to prevent normies from being able to read it.

Much less charitably it's because his points are weak & often vibes-based, and any reasoning he makes would evaporate if stated explicitly and with any sort of rigour beyond Darkly Hinting to what you mean and letting the reader fill in the blanks. The few times he has written about things I am familiar with, the content really has been rather poor – take this article, for example, where he argues that a software that is only able to perform HTTP GET requests is safe, as such requests don't affect the server content. Anyone that has worked in web security know this is blatantly wrong, as there is probably hundreds of easily performed exploits and escapes for that weak of a sandbox.

Yes, Moldbug is a vibes-based writer who has been saying the same thing (moderated or exaggerated as necessary) since 2008. That said, there are some all-time classics on UR and his focus on the 'long arc of history' (whatever one calls it) is important. Also, his impact on Thiel is single handedly responsible for a lot of the modern weird right in the US and for subsequently 'converting' a lot of high-status and wealthy people to reactionary ideas about democracy and the state.

Am I the only one who finds Moldbug's writing style completely incomprehensible? He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say. The only thing I'm confident of is that, whatever it is he believes (which is something I am wholly unable to glean from the actual content of what he's written), he thinks it's so self-evident that you'd have to be an utter cretin not to already believe it.

No, you are not the only one. I can usually understand what he is getting at, but Moldbug is ridiculously long-winded and meandering. I have found that it is best to just skip the introduction and skim his articles until he starts actually talking about whatever he is talking about, which tends to be several paragraphs in; in the climategate article, I would start reading at "In reality, there’s no way...", then start skimming again whenever he goes on a tangent. Even then I don't often think it's worth the effort; I prefer the dark enlightenment thinkers who write clearly, like Jim and Spandrell.

It's an experience not unlike reading TLP/Edward Teach, but at least in that case the incomprehensibility does seem to be deliberate (for whatever reason).

I've heard it theorized that Moldbug is also being obscurantist on purpose, in order to keep away the riff-raff, but I have no idea if it's true or not.

Have you seen the programming languages Hoon and Nock he designed for his Urbit computing platform? It is the most obscurant thing I’ve ever seen outside of esoteric programming languages like Brainfuck.

I enjoyed that Bioleninism post.

There's that, and it also appears that he's assuming the energy extracted comes directly and exclusively from the Earth's rotation, rather than from that as well as the Moon's orbit. But the quoted point is probably the more important one - it seems intuitively implausible even before I read the article that the amount of energy the human race uses is anywhere near the same order of magnitude as what is associated with the Earth's rotation.

Either way, I also have no confidence that any mainstream media source is capable of evaluating the claim with appropriate skepticism and performing, or even getting someone more qualified to perform, basic checking for major holes in the idea rather than jumping on what would be an attention-getting headline.

This is an old trick. Exponential consumption growth is a killer.

Let's say someone invents the holy grail, a Total Conversion Engine. At a rate of E=MC^2, pour in 10 litres of water, get out about 900 Exajoules of energy (50% more than current yearly global energy consumption). There's about a sextillion (E+21) litres of water in the ocean. So we'd naively expect this TCE to power the earth for about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Factor in consumption growth, with a current usage of 600 Exajoules, and 2% growth per year - and we use up all the water on the planet in about 2350 years. I haven't double checked my maths, some of those numbers might be off by a few orders of magnitude- but increasing eg. the mass of water in the ocean by x1000 adds only 350 years. Decrease growth to 1% and we get 4700 years. The numbers barely matter, exponential growth dwarfs all.

This may seem like something insane to consider, but it does matter when it comes to super long term thinking. Consumption growth is real. The invention of a miraculous new energy source that makes energy incredibly cheap may make a growth rate of only 2% optimistic.

On a long enough timescale, Solar is the only form of energy that matters, and the only way to get more is to colonise the galaxy/universe.

Consuming tidal energy further reduces the rotational energy, accelerates the energy loss rate, and decelerates the rotation of the Earth.

I hate how people are ridiculously long-termist when it comes to trivial nonsense like this. If we found that tidal power was slowing the rotation of the Earth, we could simply stop using it and switch to fusion. The very idea is sillier than the urban planners who despaired about cities drowning in horse shit (then we invented the car). At least horse manure was a pressing problem in the 19th century! We do not need to care about extremely long-term issues since our circumstances change. There was litigation in the US about storing waste for a million years:

The court ruled that EPA's 10,000-year compliance period for isolation of radioactive waste was not consistent with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations and was too short.

From 10,000 to one million years, EPA established a dose limit of 100 millirem per year. EPA's rule requires DOE to show that Yucca Mountain can safely contain wastes, considering the effects of earthquakes, volcanic activity, climate change, and container corrosion, over one million years.

Who cares? These people do apparently... but what does it matter what the radioactive waste will be in 10,000 years or more when the US isn't even competent enough to create a centralized nuclear waste storage site? The whole, farcically administrated Yucca waste dump was cancelled anyway. Right now it's sitting in containers next to power plants! That's obviously not secure for 100 years, 10,000 or a million. Does the government just assume that civilization is going to collapse and so nuclear waste must be secured for the benefits of Mad Max style looters and gangsters?

And at the same time, when there's actually a good reason to be longtermist (on important matters like population growth, or colonizing the universe), nobody cares. The cretins who spent serious time and money on this nonsense should be forced to copy out Bostrom's 'Astronomical Waste' by hand so they can begin to understand the scale of their folly and perverseness.

If we found that tidal power was slowing the rotation of the Earth, we could simply stop using it and switch to fusion.

The same way we've found coal power is causing problems and we can "simply" stop using it and switch to fission?

We did have a good run of switching away from coal, then the greenies got upset about realistic alternatives so we switched back. Also a war broke out.

Well we're switching away from it aren't we? If not to fission, at least other renewables.

He’s not wrong he’s just using his conclusion for the wrong thing.

At a 2% growth rate we are fusing 390 million times the amount of energy we are using today. Which is actually an interesting thought experiment. It shows how drastically different the world would be or society plateaus somewhere. At 390 million current energy usage it wouldn’t matter if the world quits spinning. That energy usage would be high enough to do outside air conditioning etc. it’s a completely alien world and at a point of development of like Dyson Spheres.

The NYT (and fellow travelers) likely would view the article as bunk, because it's clearly a physics/energy/environment paper written by a CS professor. This is one of the few checks that journalists are able to perform, and from what I've seen they generally do perform that check.

They might also note that it hasn't been peer reviewed, and that it isn't formatted according to the accepted standard for scientific papers. (As QuantumFreakonomics says below, it's more blog than paper.)

Whether they would note what, concretely, is wrong with the paper, I think depends on who else they managed to interview, and how persuasive those would be.

This looks like some random professor’s thought experiment blog. Was this paper published anywhere? It certainly doesn’t look like it passed peer-review (as bad as the peer-review system is, I don’t think they’d green-light such a misleading abstract).

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