This saves me the effort of doing a deeper dive on Meditations on Moloch, since it keeps coming up as Scott Alexander’s one good piece of writing, and is frankly better than I could’ve done. I’m not immersed enough in “Rationalism” as a philosophy to pick it apart or follow its implications the way you have.

But I still find it germane that Alexander begins one section like this: >So let’s run through – let’s say ten – real world examples of similar multipolar traps to really hammer in how important this is.

… and doesn’t get to an actual real-world instance until example number 6.

1 (The Prisoner’s Dilemma) is a game theory experiment that almost never works out in real life the way the RAND Corporation insists it would. 2 is a thought experiment occasionally performed in an Econ 101 class to make students feel dumb. 3 (the Tragedy of the Commons) describes a phenomenon that happens occasionally, but isn’t a universal failure trigger; see Elinor Ostrom’s work. 4 is a thought experiment. 5 is a description of capitalism that might pass on a leftist meme account but wouldn’t even pass muster in a socialist reading group - and, again, Alexander talks about it purely as a theoretical trap, and not a “real world example”, of which he could find a a few if he tried.

And I harp on this not just to make Alexander look foolish, but because it illustrates a rigid guardrail on his thinking. He genuinely thinks game theory thought experiments involving human simulacra are “real world examples”.

And he has to because - as OP put it in the linked essay - he’s incapable of understanding agency or power. He thinks the failures of capitalism are failures of theory, or structure, or due to innate biological tendencies in the human genome, and not the result of choices made by British Parliament in the 18th century.

Haven’t read it yet, just commenting to say: Drooker is a beast. One of the great joys of my life was getting to meet Ginsberg (at the very end of his), and he was absolutely enamored with Drooker’s illustrations at the time. I had a dozen or so conversations with the man, and half of them were about those illustrations. :)

(These conversations were all in the span of 2 months or so, and he had probably just received the galley proofs of Illuminated Poems – I don’t mean to suggest that he was inordinately obsessed. Nor am I sure what “inordinately” would even mean for a man like Ginsberg.)

Yeah, this really brings into focus something really weird about how he and other rationalists think. That they for some reason don’t like to recognize the existence of conflict and agents actively trying to undermine others goals. Like, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that the reason why we have things like for-profit prisons or bloated military spending is because people actively wanted those things and worked to bring them about. Everything is just the natural outgrowth of just how the world works that no one chose.

It’s a very convenient worldview if you’re someone who thinks that the solution to everything is everyone becoming cleverer and technological development leading to some big singularity or whatever and political struggles are just tribalism? But it’s… like, obviously fucking wrong? Like, we know that many of the fucked up things in society are the product of intentional action because in many cases we have fucking documents and records proving it.

Like, even if rationalists weren’t reactionaries and were interested in politics it’s a mindset that will make them sitting ducks politically because while they’re acting like their political opponents are just too dumb to look past their selfish desires and work towards their obvious greater good a bunch of fucking Republican party insiders are grumbling about how their anti-poverty program will undermine the supply of desperate wage workers and hiring political consultants to find a way to destroy them.

A genius person who thinks everyone else is stupid will be beaten by just a moderately clever person who recognizes the threat of their opponents and acts accordingly every single time.

I keep mixing up Ginsberg with Ginzburg of the Chees and the Worms fame.

pretty good essay. i appreciate the attempt to bring it back to Ginsberg’s ideas, nice job. however, there are a few things you’re wrong about:

• scott alexander siskind is not smart, he only seems so to people who have never read a history book not written by a white supremacist. like your point that the mid-20th century generation didn’t just give up in despair and actually got to work trying to promote justice and peace is completely alien to these people because they don’t value things like black people’s civil rights or the liberation of women. in fact they oppose those things - and when you let them take the mask off, as on the_motte and culturewarroundup, they support the use of violence to destroy those things.

• scott alexander siskind is not a good writer, he only seems so to people who only read trash tier sf and internet posts. Howl is a lot of things, but it isn’t obscurantist or trafficking in deeply hidden metaphor and meaning. yet not a single one of the people praising this absolute dunderhead’s “but now we have COMPUTERS, surely this changes everything” essay seems to have even glanced at the original, or if they did, they didn’t understand it any more than siskind did.

this guy is a grade A moron and a fourth tier writer and his only importance is that the most powerful people on earth, those more directly in charge of our avenues of communication than anyone else, absolutely love every garbage word he writes and tell him and each other he’s a genius. we should never say “well, he writes well” as a means of politely cushioning our sneering. he doesn’t. he couldn’t if he wanted to.

Can’t they talk about building Elua, the Great Gardener and Its coming rule in public? Kinda like Xenu?