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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I want to whine about weakly upvoted comment https://www.themotte.org/post/109/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/15573?context=8#context

In a strictly genetic sense, the Mongols may be one of the most successful people groups in history; in terms of their culture, society, and way of life, they are largely extinct

The Mongol culture didn't spread because the premise (genetic success) is BS. Mongol conquests were due to better generals, discipline and ability to recruit non-Mongols into their war machine. They routinely beat numerically superior armies.

p.s:

So it's a very bad example of thesis 'genetic success doesn't imply cultural success', rather it's evidence in another direction.

Another thing I have with this that it looks poster is Western supermacist and imagines Mongols aka dumb zerg being strong only with their number.

At the top level? Can't you say something more substantial about it?

Oh. How much HBD debate spoils us xD

His premise was that Mongols were successful in darwinian sense (more copies of their genes) not that their genes conferred some advantage.

Wouldn't mongol genetic success be determined by their original number, reproductive success, and direct descendants alive today?

Perhaps even normalised to total globe population at the relevant time, or even to comparable tech and econ development levels, etc?

Culture and supremacist thinking being irrelvant in determining IF they were genetically successful?

Maybe I am misunderstanding though.

If your descendants married out of your ethnicity for 32 generations and so there is about 1/(2^32) of "your" genes in them, have you really been all that genetically successful?

The Y Chromosome doesn't get diluted, and neither do mitochondrial DNA. The Mongols would be found in the former, not the latter, like every other conquering army in history.

If it doesn't get diluted and doesn't mutate, then how did it come to be different from another ethnicity's Y chromosome? If it does mutate, then it looks like there's the same implication as if it diluted.

I might as well skip to the logical conclusion of my view on genetic legacy: it's a scam. Its purpose is to preserve individual beneficial alleles, not anything as coherent as an ethnicity, let alone anything from one person.

Think of it like blockchain: we can trace the lineage of a specific modern Y chromosome to historical forms with fewer novel mutations. Thus, haplogroups can be represented as a branching tree.

There are many millions of living male descendants of Genghis, vastly more than for any other male of his era. Seeing the geographic distribution, they must have substantial percentages of his autosomal DNA too. Statistically, there should be plenty enough data to reconstruct his genome from theirs with >99.9% coverage. This is entirely explained by the fact that he was very sexually prolific and that his family, clan and society have been dominant for a long time.

I don’t think there was a claim that Y chromosomes don’t have mutations. They just don’t undergo reassortment.

You would likely have substantially more than 1/2^32 of your genes coming from any specific 32nd-order ancestor - after all, 2^32 is over four billion, which would be eight times greater than world population in the 13th century, and many of those people would not have reproduced or have descendants alive today, no thanks to the Mongols.

Sure, drop a few orders of magnitude... or even a few dozen, I'd be making the same argument. 2^8 is 256. I would struggle hard to name 256 distinct traits of my body.

Depends.

If they didn't breed out of ethnicity how many of them and how many of your genes would there be?

Also if each generation has say 4 children, then there are ( 4/2)^32 copies of your genes out there.....?

I would understand the sentiment if they interbred closely enough to produce near-clones (aside from the sex, of course).

If applied to the first common ancestor of terrestrial life then it never had genetic success because its descendants (all life on earth) billions of years later are not clones of it.

I think your reasoning is wrong. Genetic success can only be sensibly measured against reasonable outcomes. To define success as essentially clones, which embeds implictly the truth that the adaptations previously selected for are still present, also implies that the environment has not changed lest some new adaptations be selected for or another set of non clone family organisms come to prominence and outcompete them.

Given that it is extremely improbable that the environment the prospective clone tribe lives in will not change, thanks to entropy, thermodynamics as applied to that system, etc then for them to have succeded by your standards they must also at some point be expected to be maladapted and fail to successfully clone themselves as they have up to this point.

Your very definition of genetic success embeds an inevitable failure. It is a contradiction in likely outcomes.

Your very definition of genetic success embeds an inevitable failure.

Correct. For an organism, at least.

Why do they need to be clones? Genetic fitness applies to individual genes, which don't especially care about each other except in-so-far as there are synergies in ability, so can be measured by just adding up the number of descendants weighted by their relatedness to you. 1,000,000 descendants each with 1/1,000 of your genetic material (above the average human baseline) is equivalent to 1,000 clones of yourself or 2,000 direct children (who have 1/2).

Correct, but why would I care about genetic fitness in terms of individual genes?

I don't know. Why would you care about genetic fitness at all?

Some people care about their descendants because they actually know them and form emotional connections with them as "family" which are stronger than those formed with friends or neighbors. Such connections can also be formed by adopted children who have no genetic relation at all. From this perspective, there's no reason to care about distant descendants of any type, closely or distantly related, because you will be dead and form no connection at all.

Some people care about their descendants out of an instinctive or cultural care about bloodlines and legacy. They care about making an impact on the world even after they're gone, and part of that impact is in the actual people who will be living there. This would imply a slight preference for descendants staying in the same ethnic and culture because they can carry on the cultural traditions as well as the genetic, but again there are some summation effects. 1,000,000 descendants each with 1/1,000 of your genetic material and 1/1,000 of your cultural traditions might be equivalent to 1,000 genetic/cultural clones. I suppose it depends on whether you care about cultural traditions individually (be kind to people instead of stealing from them) or as an entire package (you must obey every single one of these religious traditions in order to get into heaven, which is pass/fail such that obeying half is pointless).

Some people don't care at all.

More importantly, this thread began as a discussion of the Mongol's evolutionary success. On the level of evolution and selection effects, genes/cultures which in practice increase their probability of spreading will be more likely to exist. The Mongols did in fact end up with an extremely high number of very distant descendants. The genes that the Mongols had did in fact replicate themselves diffused throughout those descendants rather than staying clumped together. And to this day there are many more genes which are copies of Mongol genes than there are of most other groups of people who lived at that time period. From an evolutionary perspective those genes were in fact successful: they are more likely to exist today than other genes at that time period. In so far as those genes cause certain traits and behaviors, those traits and behaviors were selected for and exist more in the current population as a result. They did not successfully spread the "Mongol archetype" as a cohesive culture and distinct people, but they did spread their genetic heritage and make it more prevalent. You don't need to "care" about genetic fitness on an individual level such that you personally seek to maximize it to care about it from a scholarly perspective as an explanatory and predictive force of nature. Genes which "win" from this perspective don't need to be desirable or good, but from an evolutionary perspective they still tend to win and increase their prevalence and it's important to understand that and adapt to their presence and natural advantage in competition.

I was just thinking today that at least if Genghis Khan could somehow see into the present day (well, the last few decades), he would undoubtedly be pleased that he is still rememebered as one of the greatest conquerors ever, so much so that even almost 800 years after his passing bards still sing about his manly prowess.

after his passing bards still sing about his manly prowess.

I expected to see some mongol heavy metal here. Instead, HUH! HAH!

Thank you for your contribution to the preservation of this piece of our German cultural legacy.

There is a locally very-well-known Finnish cover of this song, too.

The quoted comment says the Mongols' genes were successful in the appears to say that their genes prevailed, not that their genes caused their success.

Yes, I understand that correctly. However this their genes prevailed is totally made up. Which is what i'm concerned about (and maybe due to reasons why author made it up totally false premise).

I’m pretty sure this is about allele frequency.

Seconding @2rafa, but for other reasons – what are you even disagreeing with?

It's commonly accepted that Mongols qua Mongols have been culturally infertile and left no posterity, certainly none commensurate with their success – sans, tellingly, the ancestral cult of Genghis and the story of pilfered riches. No catchy songs, no great monuments, no political treatises. Their military doctrine also didn't become some dominant paradigm. Peoples who suffered under their yoke have more to say of Mongols than Mongols themselves have! Modern scholars try to learn of Mongol institutions through Crimean Khanate!

I doubt they were all that genetically successful, though. Genghis was. The footprint of the whole tribe is not exceptional in proportion to their numbers prior the expansion.

Peoples who suffered under their yoke have more to say of Mongols than Mongols themselves have!

This is mainly because "mongol genetic success" is blatantly false thing. This is what i'm disagreeing with.

I guess there’s the Yuan dynasty. I don’t know nearly enough about their legacy on Chinese culture.

It’s difficult to assess without defining the question more precisely because many of the people administering the Yuan were, well, not Mongol, and many of the changes under the Yuan were not done under Mongol direction. There are lasting imprints of Yuan rule in Chinese history:

  • Beijing as a lasting capital city likely owes itself to the Yuan

  • Modern Mandarin has much to owe the Yuan adoption and standardization of a simplified Middle Chinese language

  • Various innovations in dress, like buttons

  • Various food imports

  • Being a pivotal part of the Song-Yuan-Ming economic transition (not necessarily a good thing)

  • Popularisation of plays and operas, and I think novels

  • Increased identification of modern Han identity in opposition to non-Han, though this had started earlier and does have ancient roots

  • Etc.

Notably, though, many of these aren‘t really Mongol impositions on native Chinese that were then carried forth, and some were Chinese reactions to Mongol rule.

It’s not surprising their direct high-cultural legacy isn’t commensurate with their success, since the economic system that partially underlay their success tends to produce small, illiterate populations. But their political-military system did in fact become dominant in Central Asia, with Timur’s and Babur’s empires (and so-called Turco-Mongol states in general) being self-consciously in that tradition. I don’t think the Timurid empire was culturally infertile, let alone the Mughals.

Eh, it was an innovation, but I think the whole thing was another wave of Steppe expansion in a long series, just in a more historically aware period, making them a popular reference point. Maybe I'm unfair to Mongols.

Are you not counting the Tatars as true Mongols? Surely a Russian like yourself would know about the legacy they left culturally and even genetically to the Russian people. Modern Russia is as much a creation of the Golden Horde as it is the Rus.

I want to think critically about who gets attention on the non-mainstream political internet.

There's a few models we can imagine for how this works. One is a perfect meritocracy. The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like. This is the naive view and it's what I imagined for a long time. I'm betting most people imagine that it works like this.

I don't think it works like this. When you try to compare the merit of big attention getters vs. smaller attention getters, you get weird, even creepy results. It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you. They are allowed to recieve attention by people with more traditional forms of power and lower forms of attention, the kind that isn't paid by consumers but rather is of a nature such that they are willing to buy it. This means their takes aren't really real. They're kind of fake, permitted, virtual, simulated; what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say? Most obviously, they can't criticize their allowers. More than that, they can't disagree with their allowers fundamentally. On a deep level, they just can't be honest. They're not honest. Honesty is not allowed. Keep this in mind -- I think if people were more critical about how establishment their favorite commentors are, the equation would tilt a little bit more toward a pure meritocracy.

Say more. I think there's some influence from higher powers, but the internet is much more meritocratic than any mainstream outlet. Do you think Moldbug, Scott, BAP, etc. would get any play whatsoever if it weren't for the internet? I don't. That means that, if establishment players are pushing particular outsider commentators, they're doing so while holding their noses, at least a little bit.

I do think the internet increased the extent of meritocracy, we're just far from a pure one still. In fact there might be a case that it was purer 10-15 years ago and now it's saturated, corporatized, censored, and centralized much more than before.

I don't think that "establishment players" necessarily resent the internet. Some seem to love it. It's cheaper to buy attention now.

I'll echo what some others have said and say that, while I think you have a bit of a point in that sometimes the best in a field are not the most well-known and instead the most well-connected get the spotlight, I think Scott and Yud are not great examples here. Status451 is probably mostly known for the Days of Rage book review; while an important work in our Internet Contrarian Nerd Canon that also includes many of Scott's works, that's mostly kind of it?

Meanwhile, I doubt that the Shadowy Cabals Running The World have ever heard of The Sequences or read Meditations on Moloch or Unsong, as your post seems to imply--the kinds of people who could probably nudge the course of history with a single phone call don't seem to act like they have, at least (with the infamous Sam Bankman-Fried being a possible, possible exception--and that's stretching it, since I think you could argue his history-changing power has been severely curtailed now).

David Hines who did that review (along with three articles on reading radical lefty organizing books) isn’t a main author on status451 anyways more of a guest writer. He’s more a regular contributor to The American Conservative and his Twitter feed has echoes of this place with his focus on civility while his politics are just mostly lukewarm conservatism and then there’s the typical dad posting. Which is to say he’s not exactly the modal status451 author back when they were still writing at all.

That probably makes it even worse! Probably the most well-known thing from that site, and it's a guest contribution!

It's the same everywhere. Look at this Graphtreon ranking. Pay attention to the following creators:

  • DarkCookie ($60k per month)

  • Sad Crab ($25k per month)

  • Dream Now ($6k per month)

DarkCookie has made a good game that has been stuck in development hell for months. He's hemorrhaging patrons (I remember him getting $100k per month), but he's still one of the top earners.

Sad Crab have a stellar artist, but their game has been stuck in development hell for months as well. Yes, their game is worse than DarkCookie's Summertime Saga, so earning 2x-4x less sounds fair, doesn't it?

Dream Now is making a game that is suffering from every known fault known to adult games (an episodic fiction in general): weird pacing, plot that goes nowhere, but so does every other game. Unlike the previous two, the creator actually manages to squeeze out a release every few months. Is his game 10x worse than Summertime Saga? Is it 4x worse than Innocent Witches? Hell no.

No adult game maker has been favored by the rich and by other entertainers. They do cross-promotions, but some of them are on this chart, and some of them are not at all, despite making games that easily rival the three I've covered.

The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like.

This right here can be bent to suit the situation: they key metrics is attracting other influencers who in turn attract other people. This is standard metric in marketing as well and it is a reason why companies go for endorsements from popular athletes, celebrities or social media stars. I vaguely remember some taste tests between Pepsi and Coke with Pepsi being preferred in blind tests but Coke being preferred if brand was on display. One explanation that saves "meritocratic" concept is that the relevant product is not just the soda, but rather it is the whole experience that is influenced also by things like brand value and recognition. That is the relevant metric here.

Another similar dynamics is when it comes to inventions. You have many stories where some groundbreaking innovation was simultaneously invented by multiple people. And the story always goes that if one inventor was from some Bumfuck, Nowhere and another one was well networked guy from New York, everybody knows which one was successful. Again, one can argue also on merit that networking skills and connections are type of earned advantage - even if not by the person themselves, but maybe the advantage was created by their parents and ancestors.

This right here can be bent to suit the situation: they key metrics is attracting other influencers who in turn attract other people.

This doesn't save the meritocracy concept because what I mean is democratic meritocracy. If a few people get 10,000 votes each, that's the nepotism model.

Then you have a very strange concept of meritocracy as it is all about people of merit having more say. If I am about to give a grant for physics research, of course it will be scientists sitting on grant committee as opposed to random people from the street. Can you explain how this "democratic meritocracy" is supposed to work? Even if the goal is to improve the lot of the masses, it will mean that people with merit will get more resources and status to work on behalf of people. So if let's say influencer is going to convince his flock about the importance of supposedly "good" Effective Altruism, it is supposed to still be in line with merit, right?

This goes for all entertainment sources, though. Who actually ends up capturing lightning in a bottle/the zeitgeist is pretty random, especially in the jump between 'known by enthusiasts of X' and 'known by the broader public'

You should read Influence by Robert Cialdini. Both yud and Scott have. There's also a lot of stuff that can only be described as memetic fitness - being from the same culture and having the same language as your readers, presenting the right image, getting and making the right references that they will recognise, talent expressing yourself, etc.

Also keep in mind that the closer you are to the centre the more you will appeal to both sides of the fight. Scott and yud are both closer than 451.

You know who else claimed to know better sources than the mainstream? Hipsters.

Consider a few alternative explanations:

  • it isn’t a meritocracy, just emergent patterns from the signaling and countersignaling of eight billion status games

  • it isn’t a meritocracy, just the human brain imagining trends where there are none

  • it is a meritocracy, but it is noisy and slow to act, so some chaff remains in with the wheat

  • it is a “meritocracy,” but truth doesn’t play any part in its metric of memetic fitness

  • it is a meritocracy, and the rich and influential actually have better taste than you

It’d be rather hard to tell these apart based on two data points.

Worse, it could be a combination: the public eye is fickle, and optimizes for dumb things like “outrage” and “tits.” Meanwhile, a million elites push two million competing causes, and billions of proles struggle to read those tea leaves for personal status. Out of the multitudes asserting their love for the Truth, few agree on what should qualify. Hipsters claim to know of a quality blog; counter-hipsters descend to explain how it is Problematic or perhaps a mouthpiece for the Cathedral. God forbid that someone wade in with less-than-pure motives!

If you’ve untangled this knot, then tell me: what is good, Phaedrus?

it isn’t a meritocracy, just emergent patterns from the signaling and countersignaling of eight billion status games

This is what I mean by meritocracy.

it isn’t a meritocracy, just the human brain imagining trends where there are none

Status 451 and John Nerst get as many viewers/comments/likes as SA/EY?

it is a meritocracy, but it is noisy and slow to act, so some chaff remains in with the wheat

10 years is too slow?

it is a “meritocracy,” but truth doesn’t play any part in its metric of memetic fitness

Still a meritocracy.

it is a meritocracy, and the rich and influential actually have better taste than you

The rich have a more democratic taste? I wouldn't call that better, and do you think their tastes are identical down to the point where themselves being criticized is A-OK, and how do you account for the lack of such criticism?

Meanwhile, a million elites push two million competing causes, and billions of proles struggle to read those tea leaves for personal status.

Divide by 1000 and I'd say you're onto something.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst.

That reminds me, whatever happened to ClarkHat? I remember Popehat eventually had to break up with him publicly on his blog. Presumably because Popehat was getting respectable mainstream attention and no longer needed the cover of "Look, I can cohort with diverse views I disagree with!"

Then Clarkhat got banned from Twitter for reasons I don't even remember. Looks like he quit posting on Status 451 in 2016. I was slightly hopeful he'd have gotten his twitter back in that amnesty Musk declared, but alas, still suspended. Not that I think he'd come back. I'm more just curious what exactly it was he was writing back then that was so completely bonkers his colleagues broke up with him and he got banned.

He wrote that immigration parable about Nazi aliens seeking asylum on Earth that led to a lot of handwringing in the comments and was apparently too much for Ken White.

I'd like to know if he's still around, too. He was pretty entertaining.

I kind of like it; it's fairly plausible.

Also, damn, I'm pretty sure I've seen a similar parable that ended up with the guy advocating in for letting in Hitlerite refugees getting kicked to death by some. (I believe Alexander Kruel wrote that one)

There was also the small matter of the Vox Day affair. As you may recall, Ken White was one of VD's bête noires, while Clark was a friend of both of them. The way I remember it, some of Ken's followers started calling Clark out on his association with VD, and Clark defended VD as an honorable and unfairly villified man, while also insisting that he and Ken were bffs and if VD ever dared to go low (such as mocking Ken's mental illness) in his spats with Ken, Clark would "rain hellfire" on VD.

VD promptly went low and wrote a series of vitriolic, mocking posts poking at every one of White's exposed weaknesses. (Ken had, probably unwisely when in the middle of a public fight with one of the most proudly cruel, no-holds-barred partisans on the Internet, written openly about his depression and mental illness.) VD even took shots at Ken's adopted Korean-born child.

Response from Clark: crickets.

That's about the time when you stopped seeing him around. To all appearances, when called upon to back up his claims of loyalty, he quietly picked up his hat and slipped out of the room.

That's about the time when you stopped seeing him around. To all appearances, when called upon to back up his claims of loyalty, he quietly picked up his hat and slipped out of the room.

I don't get it.

I respect Vox Day, he's intelligent, a solid writer and a good editor.

He can also be charitably described as an egomaniacal crank who's overly credulous and always sure of himself.

I also prefer not having him around, certainly online. (he's probably one of those guys who's raving lunatic online and a mostly normal bloke offline)

Denouncing him should be a rather easy moral choice.

Denouncing him should be a rather easy moral choice.

Bluntly, I think Clark was a coward who was hoping his buddy Vox wouldn't call his bluff. That he thought Vox wouldn't indicates he also wasn't very smart.

Certainly, if he had "rained hellfire" on Vox for attacking Ken White, Vox would have turned his saber wit on Clark as well (as he's done on many other former allies), and Clark didn't fancy being at the receiving end of Vox's vitriol and his followers' scorn himself.

An interpretation that's likely to be true.

The one that got him booted from Popehat was his weird scifi “Hitlerite” allegory about Muslim immigrants to Europe that hasn’t been scrubbed. Weirdly the silence caused by his ban on Twitter seems better for his brand than whatever broke in Kens brain with Trump and his Twitter posting. Even back before the boot Clark’s long form writing wasn’t very interesting to me but his Twitter was amusing at least.

I'm a little unclear on what your argument is stating, so I will respond to what I think you're saying and try to specify anywhere I think there is ambiguity.

The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. *

I'm reading your evidentiary claim/question as something like: Why do some writers/creators blow up, while others who are just as talented get nothing? Why is it that (made up number incoming) if there are 10,000 people who want to read grey-tribe CW analysis, and ten writers who are all about as talented as SA at writing blog posts, that SA gets 9,500 readers and the other nine split the remaining 500? Or, hell, let's even give SA that his content is 5% better, why does that translate to 95% of the spoils? The answer is, as ever, the network effects created by tribal and status signaling.

The value of the Western Canon historically is that references to one work in another work form layered meanings that help us create and decipher the meanings of other works. Knowing the mythological corpus of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Hesiod's Theogony allows you to understand Homer's Iliad, allows you to understand Plato's dialogues, the Bible sneaks in about here, allows you to understand Augustine, allows you to understand Shakespeare, and so on to Nietszche and Joyce and, hell, all the authors after Joyce** just wish their work could be as important as Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, real genre killers those. When you've read the Canon you can reference Dante and other educated men will get the references, and beyond the inherent enjoyment of the reference, and the enhancement of understanding and meaning produced by the metaphor, you get the benefit of signaling that you too are an educated man.***

The LW canon isn't that cool, but it works roughly the same way. Anywhere in the SSC-verse of subreddits and forums, you can reference SA, and other people will get it, and not only will it enhance the meaning of what you're saying by in a single phrase ("Moloch" or "Barber Pole"), you signal your in-group status. I'm one of you. This enhances your credibility. So I have no interest in reading another blogger who is "just as good" a writer when I get the additional value from being able to understand and make references to a better known work.

  • As an aside, this crabs-in-a-barrel grasping criticism lobbed at obscure figures (SA and Big Yud) in favor of even more obscure figures reminds me of what pissed me off so much about this TheAmericanConservative hit piece on Rogue Fitness. TLDR: Rogue is bad because it is using its market dominance in niche fitness spaces to trademark products and so prevents smaller innovative American companies from growing. The myopia and ignorance of that take is obvious: the market for strength and fitness equipment isn't limited to Rogue and American upstarts, it isn't even dominated by Rogue, it is dominated by cheap Chinese junk churned out to no-name brands off Amazon like Yes4All, Titan, and whoever owns the CAP name these days. Rogue is the upstart, because they market extremely high quality niche strength stuff that is at least occasionally made in USA. That as soon as they get a little bit of a business going their own team turns against them as sell-outs is maddening, the real war is out there, man. Emo Phillips' joke about the Narcissism of Small Differences strikes again.

** If you read Joyce or Nietzsche without having read, or at least familiarized yourself with, the majority of the Western canon you are missing out on the vast majority of it. Given the amount of references I pick up on, and my own sore lack of having read it all, I can only imagine how many I'm missing. And I can't imagine how pointless reading a work so dense in references is if you don't get the fraction that I'm getting. I guess that's why they make those annotated reading books that go along line by line and tell you Joyce's meanings; but the experience must be so completely different for someone who really gets it all. I find the gap in my, and my contemporaries, knowledge tends to be the music, opera and musical theater, that were part of culture. So few of the neo Western Traditionalists know their Gilbert and Sullivan.

*** The difference between Status as socioeconomic etc. status and Status as just being a member of one group among many coequals is just one of context. There isn't any mechanical difference between signaling you are a Victorian gentleman and signaling you are a Goth middle schooler, it is all in the eye of the beholder.

In fairness, Rogue's tactic very much does sound like the no-fun-allowed type of IP shenanigans that already plague other industries and fields. There's probably no reason they couldn't continue their made-in-America strategy and build a good reputation without trying to center themselves as "official"--plenty of other companies in other industries build good reputations without having to rest on popular trademarks or official partnerships, a la Coke.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst.

Okay, I had to look up the latter two, and while their sites are okay, there's nothing there that would really interest me. I don't follow Yudkowsky or hang out on Less Wrong. I certainly didn't come to Scott via "the rich and other entertainers", but via following various Catholic blogs.

You seem to be attributing success on their part to "nepotism", i.e. they know rich, influential people who boost them, while the meritorious artists who are starving in garrets get no attention.

My take on that? Starve away, if I don't want to read you, I won't - even if you are recommended by Taylor Swift and other nefarious string-pullers.

They are allowed to receive attention by people with more traditional forms of power and lower forms of attention, the kind that isn't paid by consumers but rather is of a nature such that they are willing to buy it.

Thanks, not in the market for conspiracy theories right now and I'm all out of tin foil, so I have to pass on this.

I think the implication is that other Catholic blogs were the “entertainers,” aka existing successful content-producers. This is, naturally, a fully general theory, one vague enough to avoid falsification...

It's not unfalsifiable, I've just left quantifying it as an exercise for the reader.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Wrong level of zoom.

Why are Ben Shapiro and Nathan Robinson "better" than Scott Alexander?

Your model should account for;

  1. Network effects and the resulting power-law distribution in attention density.

  2. Different variables that make up merit (in the context of the media landscape). Yarvin might have more "correct"/meritocratic takes than Scott, but Scott is infinitely more pleasing to read (to me).

  3. Audience. Scotts writing probably is incomprehensible to someone below 100 IQ. They might be able to parrot what Scott said. They can memorize the teacher's password. But they won't "get" it. Try explaining the idea of Moloch to everyone you meet and see how that goes. There is a marginal area where people do consume content they don't get, but parrot ("I fucking love science"). But most good political commentators don't pander to that audience.

  4. What do they want? Does everyone want {your favorite political commentator's unbiased insight}? Or do they want to shit on the outgroup with the justification as window dressing?

  5. Don't confuse good for {I like this commentator}.

  6. Weirdness points. Imagine two software engineers. Both are excellent programmers, but one looks like a homeless person. All else being equal, who will get hired over the other? Apply this exact mechanism to commentators and on the margins in an extremely competitive market. Even marginal amounts of weirdness will fuck you over. This is different from being pleasing, it's not being displeasing. This is the "Rule 2" of writing.

  7. Randomness. Luck.

extremely competitive market, power law

I don't see it as very competitive since it's trivial for someone to press subscribe. SA must really be way better than John Nerst in some way, but we can't see it as readers, because I believe that way is his friends who also have attention and who have money. This is the openish secret that is kept from us -- hey, it's only fair that someone who gets to tell everyone what to think, or think about at least, gets his privacy!

Randomness. Luck.

How do you square this with the law of large numbers?

I don't see it as very competitive since it's trivial for someone to press subscribe

This presupposes you see things you subscribed to and things you could potentially subscribe to on even footing, which is no longer the case the moment you subscribe to anything. You see more of what you subscribe to, that's what subscription is.

How do you square this with the law of large numbers?

Path dependency.

SA must really be way better than John Nerst in some way, but we can't see it as readers, because I believe that way is his friends who also have attention and who have money.

Wow, who are these rich friends and how can I get money off them, because they certainly never paid me to go read Scott! I demand my share of the swag!

You are sounding like "It's so unfair those guys got to be big name rich famous rockstars and my band didn't, we're every bit as good as they are!" Well, yeah, that's how it goes.

Meritocracy doesn't mean "flawless and perfect meritocracy", it means 'merit' is a very important factor. Random chance, idiosyncratic contingency, structural flaws, etc can explain why genius_1 gets lots of blog views and genius_2 doesn't. Human society is incredibly complicated. Many factors matter - for one, everythingstudies and status451 post less than once per month, while scott posts a few times per week. Some people who have more insight than scott just don't post, so we can't hear them at all! So the existence of smart people who are less popular than slightly less smart people, even in an honest meritocracy, isn't surprising at all! That said, quickly skimming Status 451, he's a significantly less skilled writer than scott and yud.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

maybe they're favored by 'the rich and other entertainers' for the same reason they're favored by large groups of people - because they're smart and write well?

The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you

"put in front of you" in the sense that they're downstream of very complex and shaped processes, and "put in front of you" in the sense that the elite are intentionally putting controlled opposition intellectuals in front of you to hide the dark truth, are different!

what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say

scott clearly and reasonably believes in a somewhat-strong form of HBD, and often hints at it. another person popular among the 'rich' and 'other entertainers' is moldbug (apparently glenn greenwald was introduced to moldbug by an unnamed billionaire) , who says a number of not-allowed things. Yet another person popular among 'other entertainers' (he's sometimes retweeted by people like jack posobiec and cernovich, relatively-mainstream right wing media figures) is BAP, whose regularly retweets literal nazi propaganda (not using this to condemn, just illustrate evidence against your point)! So I'm not sure this theory works.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

huh? I cannot recall any entertainers endorsing either of those individuals.

It seems like this post is more about having a bone to pick with Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky being undeservedly popular.

So you think it's a pure meritocracy then? What would I gain from "picking a bone" with Scott Alexander on The Motte?

Why would thinking that it's a meritocracy imply you were picking a bone?

few things in life are strictly a meritocracy . anything that is subjective , like writing, by definition cannot be a pure meritocracy.

By meritocracy I just mean selected for some trait of the work, so popularity can be both "subjective" and a "meritocracy."

Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?

I think there is some

Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?

What do you mean by "nepotism" in this context?

Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?

Nope. Now let's turn the question back on you: why are you recommending these two guys? What's in it for you? What do you get out of it, what favours do you owe them or hope to have them owing you?

Because that's how it works, by your own words: "The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you". Why are you trying to put Status 451 and John Nerst in front of me?

"Oh, I just think they're really really good and deserve to be better-known and more popular"? Well, maybe, but if I agree with your contention that it's all nepotism, then I have to consider that nepotism is at work here with your recommendations.

This is just another version of the complaint about bands: "They're not as good as they used to be, before they became popular. They sold out." Scott's fame, for what it's worth, got a target painted on his back by a jealous guy who funnelled rumours to Cade Metz at the NYT and resulted in that hit piece on rationalists (to tie-in with Metz' book on A.I. research but the article is not about Silicon Valley AI) and more explicitly, on Scott. And that it talks about Scott and Slate Star Codex is down to the guy who later bragged about having slipped Metz anonymous rumours to aim him at Scott.

So that's why people are wondering if you, too, have a bone to pick with Scott or why you're using him as an example of someone who is a manufactured 'celebrity' put out there by mysterious "allowers".

Grabbing eyeballs is not a meritocracy. It doesn't matter how worthy your prose; if it's turgid and boring to wade through, people are not going to bother and they'll go for the more entertaining, more enjoyable blog or Substack. Darkly hinting that it's all a sham and Scott is a puppet of "allowers" whom he can't criticise or disagree with, while people like [two names I don't know and don't care to know] are not Big Superstars - well, by your own theory, if they were Big Superstars it would be because they sold out and are in the thrall of "allowers".

I didn't get that either - maybe he means 'other bloggers'? SA is well read by some rich SV people though, as well as 'mainstream' people more generally. matty reads scott! But many people here were SA readers relatively much earlier, so

When I don't have energy for cooking and go to eat out, 9 out of 10 times it's a cafeteria with a small fixed menu. They serve a soup, a few bread buns, a fresh salad, and a dish with decent amount of chicken (12 options, realistically 5), all for something like $4,8. Right now I'm feeling cheeky so I'm in a mid-tier Iranian restaurant where Fesenjan and other delicious things can be had – for about 300% more. It leaves a better sensation after the fact, more giddy lightness than stuffed stomach; might just be saffron. Maybe I'll come here once more in my life.

Admittedly, this is unsolicited blogging and the moral of the story could as well be conveyed with McDonalds vs. fancy burgers, or with Scott's own musings on Coca-Cola in How The West HWas Won. I much prefer Wyclif's commentary. But there's no mystery in why Scott is a star of greater magnitude than Wyclif.

I've also wondered about prominence of rationalist thought leaders. But after all is said and done – this is cope, sorry. We know Scott's history and we know Eliezer's, it's all in the open, and many of us have been there for much, or all, of the way, long before they received any establishment attention. What makes those guys special is that they are, indeed, that good. Or rather – they're good at this niche public nerd-intellectual schtick. Good enough to have reasonably long shelf lives.

The first virtue of a public intellectual is productivity. The output must be consistent, voluminous, topical, wide-ranging, and ideally give the impression of effortlessness. A proper PI must be able to write about anything and, perhaps, write anything – from poetry to meta-analysis to an alchemical treatise; all in the same recognizable but immensely varied voice, a one-man magazine. It's a bit of a sports performance – namely, verbal gymnastics. Like Andrey Plakhov says:

…As those who download the pdf [of SSC blog] may notice, there are 9,500 pages. These are high-quality, well-written, thoughtful texts. To have prepared much of it, the author had to read dozens of articles, comprehend and conduct meaningful meta-analysis. Scott Alexander accomplished all of this in about seven years, while also managing to become and remain a practicing medical specialist (and this in the States, where the second task itself is often described as «the race of a lifetime»). Purely quantitatively, this is more than I thought possible for a human being. Personally, I'm not able to write at that rate even for days at a time, and even while on vacation (for clarity, let's drop the quality issue). But this is not something superhuman and does not make me suspect a «collective of authors». Rather, my feelings are similar to those of an amateur athlete who has watched how training of an Olympic champion looks like. Great motivation. [...]

Why am I all about numbers. Because we are faced with a case where it doesn't even translate into quality, but is quality in and of itself. On any topic, from the highly specialized to the generally important, Scott Alexander is able to fit a text of a couple of dozen pages long, stimulating further reflection simply by the mass of associations and unexpected angles that arise. Where I disagree with him, the disagreement is closer to «Wait, there might be another explanation,» or to «This line should have been thought through rather than brushed off,» rather than to «God, why am I reading this at all.»

Adding to that, Scott had his Annus Mirabilis of 2014, writing an entire book's worth of important articles! And they are all very accessible. That's the second virtue: clarity. Or put another way, being able to distinguish the job of a public intellectual and an academic performer. There is a niche for obscurantism, as Moldbug has demonstrated, but it is not large. People who'll read you are mostly not geniuses, but neither are they fools who can be intimidated and amazed by big words. Many of them just want an entertaining, clear narration and commentary of ideas they could as well write about themselves, had they more time.

Plakhov then proceeds to criticize Eliezer. I won't touch Eliezer beyond saying that he has essentially cultivated the community and intellectual culture where Scott got promoted, wrote an entire mini-Talmud of rationality and a very voluminous, popular work of fiction with the intention to peddle his ideas to the masses – an accomplishment that's harder than it might look. And this is the third virtue of a public intellectual – working in the context of a public-facing intellectual tradition, and molding it, and contributing to its growth. You can't get far on your own; nobody will care about a loquacious manifesto-shitting crank, even if by some miracle your manifestos are actually great so long as one looks past the inevitable lack of polish. So you've got to live in a society. It's not different from what aspiring artists (or sex workers) do, reposting and boosting each other. But these two have done more than others.

The fourth virtue is letting your personality shine through your texts - and better if it's a likeable personality for a wide enough audience. Author-clientele relationships are parasocial. Many very smart people would rather keep their identity small; so it takes reading 20x as much to get a good feeling for who Gwern is. It's perhaps a more authentic impression than one you get with a single note by Scott – but people like the latter more, and they like that it happens so naturally. But you mustn't be larger than life – that's the turf of life coaches, and it's nauseating for the target audience of intellectual commentary.

And only the fifth virtue, I'd say, is sticking to the confines of the Overton window, and thus preventing the loss of people who feel uncomfortable outside.

By the way, why do I know what Plakhov says? Because sometimes I get engrossed, perhaps infatuated, studying a hitherto ignored smartass, amazed that something so good, so obviously beyond my ken, was so readily available; and in a few days I skim his entire output, and in a few days+1 I am disappointed and see what should have been done and said better. But I did not. Because I'm not that productive and not that good.

There may be some factors loosely along the lines you hint at. Bluntly, they both are cult leader figures («rightful caliph» jokes are not just jokes), or perhaps intuitively exploiting the Learned Rabbi archetype of their ancestral culture. When I saw people debating Sequences IRL, it was hard to distinguish from a chavruta following a Shiur; or from an underground Marxist circle, acolytes diligently inspecting the complex wisdom in teacher's words. That's funny to see. That could contribute to the resiliency of their fame. That can be at most a part of it.

It may not be a perfect meritocracy. But it does select for the fittest.

The first virtue of a public intellectual is productivity.

Speaking of - when are you posting something on your substack, you lazy bum? I wanted to sponsor my favorite Russkie-in-exile, but you just won't let me.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

As someone who has lurked and been around since 2011, this is so out of touch as to be hilarious. Scott / Eliezer are reasonably well read and well known now because they have produced a prodigious amount of writing that is both intelligent and enjoyable to read. They have done so consistently for years.

I assure you in the early 2010s they were neither popular nor well-known, they got there because of the quality of their work.

Everything in there that is useful was written by someone else in a more succinct and engaging way elsewhere.

Why should someone refuse to enjoy anything but the absolute most succinct and engaging presentation of every idea they encounter?

I refuse to believe people actually enjoyed reading the sequences

there sure are an awful lot of people who claim otherwise

Everything in there that is useful was written by someone else in a more succinct and engaging way elsewhere

examples? yud being a 'top 1000 writer' instead of a 'top 1 writer' isn't surprising, nobody said he's the best writer, but he's still better than a ton of other people.

Also, consider HPMOR, which took off as harry potter fanfiction mostly independently, just because random people thought it was great writing.

Terrible argument! One can write great books and make retarded tweets. Whatever you think of King, I learned a new phrase today: going goblin. I intend to use it at every opportunity. is a few tiers below his books.

Also, how did HPMOR become top 3 HP fanfictions on fanfiction.net if he's a terrible writer? Admittedly, 95% of the competition there was teenage girls.

This is highly dishonest view of him. While I did not read all of the sequences, his Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for beginners is one of the best written pieces of "popular" philosophy out there. Even if you disagree, he introduces a lot of interesting concepts in very approachable way - although I'd argue that this does not apply to Mathematics and Logic" part, which requires a lot more knowledge. One thing I'd argue is that this sequence is misplaced as it also touched on nature of reality (ontology) as well as on moral facts and other moral concepts (axiology).

Now one thing I will give you is that Yud started the annoying practice of inventing convoluted parables involving aliens and 3,000 words to explain a concept that could be tackled in one paragraph worth of analogy. On the other hand it is a form of entertainment for many people (sadly not me), I'd rather have whole fanfiction like HPMOR or Unsong for that.

This morning, I started thinking about the ethics of AI-generated porn. One of the arguments I've heard against AI-generated porn is that it could be used to generate child porn. That got me thinking: is AI-generated child porn unethical? There are no children involved, so no one is being directly harmed. So the question seems to be how consumption of generated child porn by paedophiles would affect their likelihood to commit paedophilic acts.

One possibility is that consuming the stuff would increase the urge of paedophiles to commit paedophilic acts. Another possibility is it sates some inner urge and makes them less likely to harm children.

Anyone have opinions on this?

There’s also the fact it makes it dramatically more difficult to identify actual child porn.

Before the reports come in - we already disallowed this as a top-level post. Yes, we (multiple mods) suspect trolling (if you're not trolling, @ShockJock, then sorry, but picking a username like that and dropping in with this as your introductory post sure looks and smells like a troll). But we told him he could post it in the CW thread.

December 13, 2022

My friend and I recently got into a lengthy discussion over the topic of interracial dating while having coffee one morning. What made it specifically interesting was the perspective from which we both were perceiving it. I am a white Christian reactionary, and he is a mixed-race homosexual man. We were at a bar the previous night and i had politely declined a black woman's advances, and when asked why in the morning i explained to him that i have a strong preference for white women. I explained that i do find other races of women attractive, including black women, but that i simply cannot picture myself married with a woman of a different race and desired children who resembled myself. I don't usually explain this to people, but he seemed fairly interested.

It is here where he interjected and told me that the way i view interracial relationships were wrong, and that sooner rather than later the west will be a homogenization of all different races. He explained to me of a recent study he had read that said that interracial marriages already encompassed 30% of all marriages and is at upwards of 93% acceptance rate among the population, and both are projected to climb. This shocked me, as I explained to him that within my main communities that are predominately white I still found interracial marriages to be relatively rare through simple observation. I told him there is absolutely no way that is correct, as there is no way 30% of white people are in interracial relationships.

That night I did some more research and found out the realities of it. Now the biggest hurdle is that i can only really make claims based on marriages, there is no data on interracial dating. The data may be far higher when we take that into consideration but i could find nothing to substantiate any definite claims. The claim of 30% is not true. As of 2017 17% of the overall population is in an interracial relationship. There is also a 94% acceptance rate of interracial marriages in aggregate.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/

https://www.asanet.org/wp-content/uploads/attach/journals/apr20srefeature.pdf

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023118814610

It gets more interesting the more you delve into the makeup of the interracial relationships themselves. While definitely seeing an increase, White people have had the lowest growth of interracial marriages in the last forty years. Only about 11% of the white population will intermarry. And the gender disparity between white men and white women who intermarry are exactly the same as they were in 1980.

Among white newlyweds, there is no notable gender gap in intermarriage – 12% of men and 10% of women had married someone of a different race or ethnicity in 2015. The same was true in 1980, when 4% of recently married men and 4% of recently married women had intermarried.

Unlike many other ethnicity's, the intermarriage rates among whites are also constant regardless of education levels.

Among white newlyweds, the likelihood of intermarrying is fairly similar regardless of education level. One-in-ten of those with a high school diploma or less have a spouse of another race or ethnicity, as do 11% of those with some college experience and 12% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree. Rates don’t vary substantially among white newlywed men or women with some college or less, though men with a bachelor’s degree are somewhat more likely to intermarry than comparable women (14% vs. 10%).

For comparison, Black intermarriage rates have tripled since 1980, from 5% to 18%. The most dramatic gap in all the data exists between college educated black men and women.

Black men are twice as likely as black women to have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity (24% vs. 12%).

Also, just as a sidenote that shocked me, 54%! Of US born Asian women marry outside their race.

Overall, while whites have the largest amount of people intermarrying simply due to sheer logistical numbers, they are statistically the least likely to date outside of their race, and relatively equal rates for both men and women. I brought this up to him the next time I saw him, and he was quite shocked at this. He brought up an interesting question.

Considering that the general acceptance of interracial marriage is so high, why is it so relatively rare? We came up with a couple conclusions

  1. There is simply not enough intersection or engagement between different ethnic communities. If you are a certain race, you most often will associate with others of the same ethnicity simply due to family connections/religious affiliations etc.

  2. Most are outwardly accepting of it, but secretly discourage it. This is what I personally think it is, just simply based on my actual experiences. My parents could go on and on about however noble their intentions are, but if I brought home a black woman or a native woman, they would be supportive but be incredibly disappointed. I also see many white women disparaged in friend groups if they date inter-racially as well. I even found studies that suggest this has been measured (Could be misrepresented however)

https://www.psypost.org/2021/01/study-uncovers-a-gendered-double-standard-for-interracial-relationships-59477

  1. Religion. Most ethnic groups have different religious beliefs that would be difficult to compromise on if starting a family. It would be difficult if I were to date a Hindu woman for example, because then quickly come into contact with irreconcilable differences. She wants to have a Hindu wedding; I want to make Christian vows. She wishes to raise our child Hindu; I was to raise him Christian. I don’t see any way how these could be reconciled. Most of the successful interracial relationships I’ve ever seen have always had a shared religious belief between them. It just makes everything way easier.

It is also interesting that both my friend and I came into the conversation of interracial marriages with the context that that means some sort of mixture of whites. We never considered that the majority would be between different ethnic groups. It actually came into my head reading this article from refinery.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-ca/2021/12/10794659/interracial-relationships-black-women-whiteness\

While I resent much of the post-modern perspectives about race this is not the place for that, but I couldn’t help but notice that I ended up agreeing on many of her points. We do look at interracial relationships much like the perspectives that she presents. But the fact still remains, even in a period of time that is most likely the most accepting of interracial marriages throughout any point in history, almost to the point of encouragement, Interracial relationships still remain relatively rare.

I would suggest reposting this in the newer culture war roundup thread. Virtually no one will visit this older thread anymore.

Long time motteizen, new pseudonym for extra privacy.

Some friends and I are launching a new anonymous group blog: https://www.theprotocols.net/ Many of us have interesting culture-war related takes that we post on forums like these, or on our group chats, but we felt like we needed a place to more permanently publish things that deserved a wider audience. Subscribe via ye olde email or RSS to see posts as they come out.

Our first post is "Regulated Banks Are Just Stealing Your Money Slowly". Here is the TLDR:

In the wake of yet another crypto scam blowing up, smug commenters are shaking their heads and saying: “This disaster is the consequence of jettisoning 100-years of regulatory progress. Traditional FDIC insured banks have never lost customer funds this way, not even in the 2008 crash.”

...Newsflash: FDIC insured banks are stealing your money. They do it very slowly, but the total amount is very significant.

Well, to be more accurate, it is the government stealing your money, not the banks. Actually, to be more accurate, it is impossible to pin down who exactly is stealing your money, because banks should be seen as arms of the state, and the state is the arm of an ecosystem of elites and elite clients, and the entire thing has grown fiendishly complex because it is in everyones interest to allow it to be complex. In fact, the real bandit may be your neighbor who bought a million dollar home with a 30-year, 2% interest rate loan. Or maybe the thief is your friend who cashed out on Apple stock after Apple funded a stock buyback with a loan at 1% interest. (Don’t go screaming at your friend – hate the game not the player).

Complaints about the “banks” or “guvmint” stealing money via inflation are very old and are often seen as the ravings of cranks – but I don’t think many people appreciate how bad the problem has become in the last two decades. Let us go through the numbers, courtesy of the St. Louis Fed. Well, to be more accurate, it is the government stealing your money, not the banks. Actually, to be more accurate, it is impossible to pin down who exactly is stealing your money, because banks should be seen as arms of the state, and the state is the arm of an ecosystem of elites and elite clients, and the entire thing has grown fiendishly complex because it is in everyones interest to allow it to be complex. In fact, the real bandit may be your neighbor who bought a million dollar home with a 30-year, 2% interest rate loan. Or maybe the thief is your friend who cashed out on Apple stock after Apple funded a stock buyback with a loan at 1% interest. (Don’t go screaming at your friend – hate the game not the player).

...We start with a simple yeoman saver who wants to exchange present labor for some sort of medium-of-saving...So he does the simplest thing: he puts his money in a 3-month certificate of deposit at his local regulated, FDIC insured, plain vanilla bank and continually rolls it over. No default risk, no interest rate risk.

If our yeoman made a deposit in 2002, according to Fed data, his account would have gained a total of 36% over the last twenty years thanks to the the interest paid out. But during that time the Consumer Price Index rose 68%! In 20 years, our yeoman would have lost 19% of his purchasing power! Actually it’s worse than that. The amount his money was diluted is actually more than CPI inflation, but since economic productivity increased, his effective purchasing power was not decreased by the full amount of the dilution....

The distinction between monetary dilution and CPI inflation is ignored in most college economic courses, but it is very important. Think of it this way: Imagine I buy a stock in a boring, stable company. A share of the stock happens to have the same price as ten 50” TVs. Over 20 years, the CEO and the board fraudulently and secretly dilute the stock by 50%, making my shares 50% less valuable. So if productivity had stayed constant, my shares would lose half their purchasing power, only being tradable for 5 TVs instead of 10. However, productivity did not stay constant, Chinese factory workers have made it 40% more efficient to buy TVs. Thus one share can now buy seven 50” TVs. My ability to turn my shares into the real good of a TV only decreased by 30%. Now given all this is it fair for the CEO to say, “hey, I only diluted you by 30%, not 50%!” Or, consider if TV factory productivity had doubled, and thus my purchasing power held constant, would it be fair for the CEO to say, “I didn’t steal from you at all, since you can still buy the same number of TVs with your share of stock.” No and no. The dilution is a completely separate issue from the price of tea (or TV’s) in China.

When we look at National Income change over the last 20 years, we see that our simple account owner lost 40% of his money. That’s not quite an FTX-level scam, but that is pretty serious theft.

We could also look at the performance of our yeoman saver’s bank deposits versus holding assets that are much harder to dilute – such as gold or silver. This shows us our depositor lost 50% to 60% of his savings. We could also compare against alternative investments, such as the S&P 500 ETF or real estate. Here is the full chart:

Purchasing-power-lost.png

No matter how you look at it, our yeoman saver has been jobbed. Even if he chooses a modestly longer duration for his store of value, such as a 3-year U.S. Treasury, our saver loses 12% relative to CPI and 35% relative to monetary dilution.

In order to simply stay in place, he must make a risky investment. Our saver could get a higher interest rate by purchasing a long-term bond. But that introduces large interest rate risks. Our depositor who bought a 30-year bond last year when interest rates were historically low would have just lost 30% of his money.

Now hopefully you see why we live in the golden age of asset bubbles. By default, if you put your money in the stodgy, regulated bank, you will lose your money via dilution. So everyone is looking for a place simply to stash their money that won’t get diluted. All the savings in the world sloshes around chasing some asset that can hold value. As any given asset becomes popular it shoots up in bubble, with the greedy and the scammers piling on too. Even the prudent investor cannot discern what asset is in a bubble, and what asset is properly priced. Is Silicon Valley real estate currently in a bubble? Or is it properly priced based on expectations in the next 20 years of lower interest rates and more monetary dilution? Is the stock market over-valued based on a long-term analysis of P/E ratio? Or is this the new normal based on a government that will inflate and lower interest rates in order to “make number go up”?

So here is our plea to any political influencer who thinks the answer to banking crises and crypto crises is just moar regulation: the number one priority should be ensuring the average person has a place where they can simply deposit their money and not have it diluted or inflated away. As long as the default state is to lose much of your money, people will be seeking a riskier, higher-yielding outlet – whether that be the type of money market accounts that crashed in 2008 or a “Nyan Cat” NFT....

To any reader who just wants to save for retirement – well, we don’t want to give financial advice because we would feel bad if we reverse our view next month and forget to tell you. And are you really going to trust a brand-new anonymous zine for investing tips? We can tell you that we here at Protocol have our own internal debates between bitcoin maximalists and those who believe in more diversification. Generally, we have our own net worth spread out among: short-term U.S. treasuries, dividend paying stocks, American and international equity index funds, gold, bitcoin, Urbit stars, our own startups, and our own homes. “Crypto” is bad, bitcoin is great, but do learn how to self-custody.

Myself (and the author of the post through this account) will be happy to answer any questions or respond to comments about this post.

Also, we are open to publishing guest blog posts if you have something you need to get off your chest and want to publish anonymously to the web. You can DM me here or email the contact address on the web site. Cheers!

EDIT: Looks like I did a really poor job of making a TLDR for the original post. I've added a bit more context, but I advise clicking through and reading the whole thing before leaving a comment.

Whenever interest rates are lower than the rate of inflation or monetary dilution, the incentive will always be to load up on debt and purchase assets that can appreciate – whether that be Brooklyn brownstones or Dogecoin.

Yes, but even if the value of the brownstone decreases, you still have a brownstone. Where as crypto markets are speculation absent any underlying asset. And it’s even a bit unfair to call it currency speculation at present, given how few transactions are conducted with it.

What U.S. currency and the regulated banking system has behind it is the U.S. state. Whereas crypto has hopes, dreams, and Bahamian bucket shops.

Do some of you work at banks? I can't imagine a world where writing this post would be seen as dangerous. Maybe this is just the initial offering meant to be as inoffensive as possible?

As for the content, I agree and don't have much to say about it.

Maybe this is just the initial offering meant to be as inoffensive as possible?

This.

I work at a bank and the post really doesn't strike me as a well thought out critique of the banking system. I'm quite a fan of moving to crypto for other reasons so I definitely think there are good critiques of the banking system, but that they don't pay much interest on zero risk deposits is not one of them.

Maybe this is just the initial offering meant to be as inoffensive as possible?

Based on the domain name? Buckle up for a wild ride.

Which is a shame, really. I'd love to see some serious examination of what the net effects of modern seigniorage are. Is it effectively a progressive wealth tax, because it only directly hits people with accumulated cash? Is it regressive overall (above what level of wealth?) because anybody with real wealth has most of it properly invested, or at least can afford longer term bonds, because there's only so much cash you need to have safe and liquid for emergencies? Is it also effectively a fee the US charges the rest of the world, either legitimately (a reserve currency with a nice stable slow inflation being better than most other "safe" stores of wealth) or illegitimately (insert petrowarfare conspiracy theory here)? Is it a systemic risk, because of the vicious cycle of inflation we'd expect if the dollar ever ceases being the obvious world reserve currency?

But I'm going to be sadly unsurprised if this just turns out to be "In my country there is problem", only aimed at a different target audience and not ironic.

See our explanation of the domain name here: https://www.themotte.org/post/221/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/39692?context=8#context

Based on the domain name?

TIL that withheldforprivacy.com (used along with namecheap to register that site back in July) has a listed business address at Kalkofnsvegur 2, 101 Reykjavík, Ísland, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

All I could find with a casual search was this cease and desist related to a crypto scam run from such a withheld address. How curious.

Edit: I clicked your last link and now I understand the strategy much better.

Most likely the scam site before the domain was seized was registered using the same privacy service. It's a standard add-in offered by namecheap and every website registered with that service will list that address on the domain rather that whoever purchased it.

Money printing is a complicated topic but if we just take inflation aspect I'd argue it's best for the class of people for whom mortgages are a significant portion of their wealth and have a stable job that gives inflation adjusted raises. The very rich are pretty insulated as their wealth is invested and the poor don't have the money in the first places but may not have their pay as regularly raised to keep up with inflation. The benefit of the extra incentive to invest probably dominates and makes everyone better off.

Maybe you can invite this woman to write a guest post.

When we look at National Income change over the last 20 years, we see that our simple account owner lost 40% of his money. That’s not quite an FTX-level scam, but that is pretty serious theft.

Big difference between losing all your $ overnight vs. gradual loss of purchasing power.

...We start with a simple yeoman saver who wants to exchange present labor for some sort of medium-of-saving...So he does the simplest thing: he puts his money in a 3-month certificate of deposit at his local regulated, FDIC insured, plain vanilla bank and continually rolls it over. No default risk, no interest rate risk.

Or he could buy real estate, stocks, etc. which tend to not lose value to inflation. Or consumer goods. few people just park their discretionary income in savings accounts and do nothing else with it forever.

I’m not sure what your point here is. Interest rates are determined by the market. Monetary policy doesn’t effect real interest rates in the long run and fiscal policy has been extremely expansionary and that increases real interest rates. This isn’t a failure of the banking system it’s just the fact there is a glut of capital. Lots of savings chasing few investments.

Interest rates are determined by the market. Monetary policy doesn’t effect real interest rates in the long run

Nonsense.

fiscal policy has been extremely expansionary

True, this matters too.

and that increases real interest rates

Expansionary fiscal policy causes CPI inflation which lowers CPI-adjusted interest rates.

Cash, properly invested, is not guaranteed to lose to inflation. https://portfoliocharts.com/2017/05/12/understanding-cash-will-make-you-a-better-and-happier-investor/

Additionally, cash as a position in a portfolio has done better than risk assets for this calendar year.

Cash can be fine in times and places where government has handled currency dilution and interest rates responsibly. The United States since 2002 has not been such a place, which is the point of the post.

The United States since 1933 has not been such a place.

Congrats on founding your blog, I wish you and your companions well.

The problem with the theory that there is anywhere better to put your money than a bank is that you have to spend money to secure it. A significant lump of gold doesn't hold its value for you over time. The gold itself holds its value, but not for you. You have to guard it, you might lose it. If you lose it, you lose it all.

If you don't guard it, you risk theft and total loss. Your hypothetical yeoman saver is going to have, what, let's say $10,000.00. So he buys 5 ounces of gold. He can choose to keep it on him, like a pimp, but if he gets mugged there goes his life savings. Ditto keeping it at home, he better not get burgled when he isn't at home, better make sure no one ever finds out you're a goldbug. So while any single hypothetical yeoman farmer might get lucky and hang onto his retirement savings throughout his life, we should discount the value of physical savings like gold and silver by the odds of theft of that gold in the course of that 20 years. Of course, your level of personal security varies with who you are as a person. You might be big, tough, and live in a town where everybody knows you and either likes you well enough to protect you or knows that too many others like you too much to risk messing with you. But the unbanked small, weak, the stranger, the unloved, those who the police aren't interested in protecting, they can't carry their wealth with them; without banking they pretty much just never accumulate much mobile wealth at all in a modern and disconnected world.

The alternative in non-financial/banking investments in something concrete and productive like land. But land must be worked to give produce. Either by the owner or by a tenant. Any landlord will tell you, good tenant's are hard to find. Worth their weight in gold. The tenant who does his own repairs, pays his own costs, pays his rent on time, is rare. So if you want to invest in land, you're paying the costs (either by labor or by percentage) every year you own it. In cultures that are built around those kinds of leases, the costs are lower. But we don't live in those cultures.

I won't even countenance the idea of investing directly in a small business in this day and age. The risk of total loss without an owner putting blood, sweat, and tears into the business is basically 100%; even with that it's pretty high over 20 years.

So we probably need to start with eliminating the cash economy, the lack of connection and community among atomized individuals. But failing that, you're gonna need a bank.

Bitcoin does not cost anything to store, though you do have to spend some time learning how to self-custody securely. It's a lot easier than it was ten years ago, very low risk of losing your keys or having them stolen if you do it well.

Storage costs of gold are overblown. You can fit a million dollars of gold in a standard $70 a year safe deposit box. GoldMoney.com or BullionVault.com will store it for you with high security for 0.1% a year -- so that is a 2% loss over 20 years. That is far less than the numbers cited in the article for the monetary dilution losses from holding cash in a bank.

very low risk of losing your keys or having them stolen if you do it well.

Unless someone knows that in your brain is the key to $100,000 of untraceable, irrecoverable currency, in which case a 9mm held to your knee is sort of a universal key. With crypto transactions being, ideally, irreversible and untraceable, it's much riskier than gold coins because you can't even catch the guy with the gold. Alternatively, if crypto transactions are traceable and reversible, you are at the mercy of the government system, they can confiscate your money without even sending out the goon squad.

You have me on the safe deposit box, but I'm not sure I'd really trust a storage company with a significant fraction of my net worth. My bank can't fiddle with the numbers, I can show my math and my records. What do you do if your gold comes out lighter. Probably paranoia, I'm not sure that any of that is accurate, just vibes.

Unless someone knows that in your brain is the key to $100,000 of untraceable, irrecoverable currency, in which case a 9mm held to your knee is sort of a universal key.

Do not tell anyone who much crypto you have. For a wrench attack, the thief would have to know how much you have, otherwise you just open up a side wallet and only give them a small portion of your funds. Also, you can use multisig or split up your seed so that you literally could not give an attacker your keys on the spot even if you wanted to.

But yeah, given a high enough rate of crime, nothing is safe, kidnapping loved ones is always a risk, no matter what form of wealth you hold.

You have me on the safe deposit box, but I'm not sure I'd really trust a storage company with a significant fraction of my net worth.

Safe deposit boxes aren't perfect as bank customer service has declined. There are horror stories about banks shutting down a branch and not properly notifying customers and the deposit boxes ending up in limbo somewhere.

Do not tell anyone who much crypto you have.

Which is practical, as long as Crypto is an extremely marginal aspect of both the world economy and your personal net worth, or you live as a kind of digital nomad cyberpunk gray man. But it rather precludes it as a primary store of value for settled individuals and communities as a whole. If we ever reached a point where most wealth was stored through crypto, you would just have to target random rich people.

Unfortunately safe deposit boxes are steadily disappearing as a bank service across the US. And they're not exactly safe from Government intervention either.

Even if you assume there's no risk, though, the loss to inflation is still there. Even if I don't secure my cash an no one steals it, it's still going to lose value even compared to the modest return a savings account or CD would offer me. Investing in gold is just another commodity subject to the normal swings of commodity markets—it may prove to be a good investment, it may not be.

Gold doesn't inflate, it fluctuates. At least until we can rip atoms apart and rearrange them.

Mining increases the global gold supply by 2% every year.

I wonder how much is lost per year from accidents, caching/hoarding, wear, etc. The best figure I can get for wear is silver coins losing 5% weight over a lifetime.

Probably much less of an issue these days: nobody's sunk any spanish treasure ships lately, and fewer people are burying valuables to hide them from raiders. Plus more gold gets kept in bar form rather than being periodically switched between plates/ornaments and coinage, with whatever losses are involved.

I feel like a key issue in the "theft" metaphor is a distinction between the literal property (some number of dollars) and what that property can be exchanged for (its purchasing power). The "theft" that happens due to inflation does not actually entail taking any of my literal property, just a decrease in what that property can be exchanged for. The "theft" accomplished by FTX and other crypto exchanges involves the taking of actual property. The same logic that says inflation is "theft" to people who save currency would suggest it is "theft" from homeowners when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates and causes home prices to fall or that Elon Musk "steals" from $TSLA owners when his own sales decrease the price of the stock.

That aside, I also don't see how the conclusion follows from the premises or arguments. "We shouldn't put more regulations on cryptocurrency or banks because consumers don't have a risk-free way to preserve their purchasing power over some time horizon" is how I would summarize that final paragraph in the quote (and penultimate paragraph in the article). I just don't see how the argument connects to the conclusion.

Dilution is a form of theft. If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be theft, even if the price of shares actually rose during that period due to other factors. Tesla shares rising or falling is not theft.

"We shouldn't put more regulations on cryptocurrency or banks because consumers don't have a risk-free way to preserve their purchasing power over some time horizon"

Some amount of well-thought out regulation is fine. My point is that demand for scams and get-rich-quick schemes will exceed state capacity to police them as long as people must find an alternative to simple savings deposits in order to simply preserve purchasing power for retirement.

Dilution is a form of theft. If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be theft, even if the price of shares actually rose during that period due to other factors. Tesla shares rising or falling is not theft.

I continue to be confused. So the theft is not the loss of purchasing power of the dollars, but the literal printing of dollars? Is the takeaway supposed to be the government should stop printing new currency so as to stop the dilution? Given that economic output generally increases year over year this would almost certainly be a strongly deflationary position. Maybe that's good for currency hoarders with no debt, but it's pretty bad for everyone else.

Some amount of well-thought out regulation is fine. My point is that demand for scams and get-rich-quick schemes will exceed state capacity to police them as long as people must find an alternative to simple savings deposits in order to simply preserve purchasing power for retirement.

I wish this position was in the article! I can find nothing in the article that discusses state capacity to police get-rich-quick schemes or their relative frequency with regards to inflation.

Dilution is a form of theft. If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be theft,

Not if that was legal for him to do it is not. If so, then anyone buying shares should have priced in the chance of further shares being issued in to how much they valued the shares at when they purchased them. In that case they have implicitly consented to Musk creating more shares in buying the shares in the first place.

The dilution itself then is not theft, only if done illegally or in breach of a contract. At which point that is the issue not the dilution in and of itself. Better to rephrase it to say that Dilution can in some cases be similar to theft, if carried out illegally.

Taking something from someone isn't in and of itself theft either. It entirely depends on the circumstances.

Not if that was legal for him to do it is not.

That's... a bit like saying "primae noctis" wouldn't be rape. Technically correct, I suppose.

The best kind of correct. If we want to argue that it is morally wrong, that is absolutely fine, and arguably correct in both cases, but then we should take care to use terms appropriately.

We could say:" If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be morally wrong and comparable in outcome to theft."

or "If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, in breach of the law, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be theft"

then those are both plausibly correct.

It could be considered theft of wages.

I work, and rather than immediately spend my money, I save it in a bank account hoping to spend it later. However, due to negative real interest rates, the value of my savings goes down 40%. And what's more, it is reckless government spending that is responsible for much of the devaluation.

Sure I could gamble on stocks, or hoard gold in my basement, but one of the advantages of living in a society is the ability to save my wages for later when I need them. Losing this ability is a strong negative. Just ask people in Argentina or Venezuela.