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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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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).

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