16/ We are a car based society for dozens of reasons - each of them with a different coefficient. We have rape for dozens of reasons, each with a different coefficient. We have copyright law for dozens of reasons. And, in turn, each of these "things" is not one thing but
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17/ a cluster of things. Cars are tools to commute, and to transport kids, and to shop, AND status symbols, AND mating tools, and and and Democracy is a tool for selecting rulers, AND a tool of mythmaking, AND an outlet for sociopaths, AND a historic accident, AND ...
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18/ And so any attempt to say that democracy IS X, or MEANS X,or is INCOMPATIBLE with Y, is wrong, because "democracy" is really a cluster of different / overlapping things. This is bad news for the rationalist enterprise (both the modern one in 2020 and the earlier wave >
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19/ ...that day dreamed of formal languages for debating propositions using Boolean logic, etc. Moldbug is pretty formalist and High Theory, and this is to be expected, because he's autistic & we autists love high theory I like reading Molds bc his theories and writing are fun
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20/ ...but Molds really only does a tiny bit of high theory. A LOT of what he writes is really more the footnotes, and footnotes are inherently anti-high theory. High theory is about principles divorced from details, and footnotes are details. High theory can't survive >
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21/ impact with footnotes. Footnotes complicate, diffuse, and render the monocausal multi-causal.
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22/ I think that High Theory is oversupplied relative to ideal market clearing quantities bc it's fun to do, easy to do, and it looks high status. Confidence is attractive, and so flatly asserting "All governments derive from <X>" sounds both smart and confident.
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23/ High theory is basically bumper sticker campaigning, but at a meta level, not an object level. Bumper sticker: No farms no food (e.g. "I'm virtuous and important for farming") High theory: "All power flows from the control of resources" or whatever
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24/ and... I dunno where I'm going with this. Basically, this, I guess: almost everything in the real world is messy. Code has more parts than you might thing. Rivers have no one "head water". Every machine has hundreds of parts. ...and High Theory ignores all of this.
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you know, honestly, Dadaism makes more sense than High Theory
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