For what it's worth his writing is very thought provoking and novel. I'd recommend anyone bored of mainstream groupthink take a look at it.
Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
191–200 of 453 posts
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Musk is on the outs. And what if there is no grand conspiracy? We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
> Musk is on the outs. Musk "left" government the day before his government employment would reach a length threshold requiring a lot more paperwork and transparency. Trump presented Musk with a ceremonial key to the White House. Musk has made some recent statements about the "big beautiful bill" that could be seen as an actual policy break with Trump. With that, he's aligned to GOP politicians who feel the bill does…
this is one of the most depressing things about recent turns. this directly manufactured outrage. these petty dramas, this US govt a tv show. Oh no, did you see what trump did to that foreign leader? we've been explicitly given a sham, playacting government whose primary mission to be replace honest debate with this sham soap opera. i expect soon to found out that the Elon that we see is really his secret twin.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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I’m responding to
> For what it's worth, I don't think anyone familiar with Scott Alexander's writings would characterize him as a crank.
with a counter-example. I don’t particularly care about the meta-point they are attempting to make.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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.
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Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are welcome to defend rising fascism if you want. People will justly criticize you, of course. What happened to intellectual seriousness? Why should you be so frightened of people criticizing you? This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull.
I don't like Yarvin's ideas that I've heard, but GP has a point. There's almost no point to posting something that will just get downvoted quickly (which any defense of Yarvin certainly would), regardless of whether it makes any interesting points. Once it's dead it won't get much if any interaction. It's not about being afraid of people criticizing, it's about expending the effort to write a quality comment that won…
It probably has a lot to do with Yarvin's influence at least partially leading the tech CEOs and the current administration down a similar authoritarian path as the USSR, North Korea, China. Or maybe better comparison, Putin's Russian and Orban's Hungary.
Why should we take those ideas seriously in liberal democratic societies? We don't take Mein Kampf's ideas seriously.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief... that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. I mean, living in 2025 America that's not a bad default assumption to make, is it? By default when the solar salesman (or pest control salesman) comes to the door I consider it a scam because it generally is (same for phone sales, and most internet ads). Is everything a scam? No. B…
I have no empirical evidence of this to present, but if you view every transaction as existing on some scale of scam-iness, where one side is you lose your house and wife and kids and the other is an amazing deal for you, the average position on that scale has shifted toward the backside pretty much the entirety of my life. Anything that comes to me first, I pretty much always write off as a scam. Email from someone…
> Did things always feel like this?
I wonder about this, too. What were things like in, say, the 1960s? When you went to buy a new appliance, did you feel like the appliance was designed to intentionally screw you as much as possible via planned obsolescence, anti-consumer-repair measures, purchased "warranties" that had tons of fine print so you could never actually benefit, etc?
Even as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, I learned that everything was a scam. How many times did child-me watch a TV commercial (on the childrens' channels) that showed a remote-controlled toy car doing extremely cool stunts and riding on rocks and dirt, only to get it for a birthday present and have it not able to move at all unless it was on a totally flat, level, surface? Or, have you ever seen a commercial for a toy like the "Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots"? I'm sure they're on YouTube. Then once you see the toy in person it's pathetic.
I've truly been taught my whole life that everything is a scam.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#197[flagged]
How exactly would you suggest standing up for Yarvin?
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#198Scott Alexander also recently had a take on Curtis Yarvin’s recent actions: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-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.
Ironically, the quality of Scott's work has taken a markedly sharper nosedive in the last decade than the quality of Yarvin's work.
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.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#199Scott Alexander also recently had a take on Curtis Yarvin’s recent actions: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-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.
The style of this post reminds me a lot of Matt Levine's money stuff.
Matt Levine is coherent though.
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!
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yarvin stated in an interview that he barely knows Vance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcSil8NeQq8&ab_channel=TheIn...
To contextualize that claim, I'd quote the article: > "'How dangerous is it that we are being linked?' Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—'wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know i…
In this context, three years ago, Vance was describing Yarvin as his "good friend" (when he was campaigning for a seat in the US Senate, which he won), while four months ago, Yarvin is saying he barely knows Vance. If you're suggesting that the apparent discrepancy is a result of strategic dishonesty for reputation preservation, that would mean that either:
1. Yarvin wants to distance himself from Vance because he fears reputational damage from being associated with the US Vice President. (But from other evidence, cited in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out, this seems implausible.)
2. Vance wanted to exaggerate his closeness to Moldbug in order to enhance his own reputation. This doesn't seem plausible either; it's implausible that more than 0.1% of the Ohio electorate had any idea who Moldbug was, and at the point that you're a plausible candidate for a US Senate seat, your reputation will no longer be enhanced by being associated with a little-known blogger.
A much more likely explanation is that Vance admires Moldbug and wants to encourage his followers to read him.