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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Moldbug's writing is good actually.

It is unfortunate that A Gentile Introduction and the Open Letter are the essays most frequently cited to new readers. Moldbug's stuff is best read in chronological order. The writing style is fundamentally stream-of-consciousness. In order to follow the argument, you must be primed with the same thoughts as the narrator. Nested clauses -- far from being unwieldly -- serve as clues and invite the reader to ponder the deeper implications of the content in front of them.

it's good in the sense that it's not something that the average person can ever aspire to. it is demonstrative of a sort of rarefied skill on his part to compose it. is his writing the best in my opinion in terms of style or readability ? no. there are other writers whose writings I find more enjoyable.

Moldbug's stuff is best read in chronological order.

This sounds suspiciously similar to "yeah dude season 1 is a bit of a drag but it gets soo good after that, it's worth it."

I'd say it's much more like how if you try to read later works by a philosopher they are frequently a brick wall of incomprehensible terminology and seemingly nonsensical reasoning, but only because they spent the earlier works defining terms and explaining ideas, some of which are compacted from essay-length down to a single word, and they aren't going to go back over the basics every time they mention a concept.

To use an example closer to this community, if I were to say "The Molochian tendencies of the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are a result of the toxoplasmosic interplay between competing egregores" it requires reading like 4 of Scott's essays to understand.

Fair. The difference being, once you actually read the essays from which "Moloch" and "toxoplasma" originate, the terms are easy to understand because Scott explains what they mean in plain simple language. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Moldbug ever explained what he means by e.g. "the Cathedral" in plain, simple language, even though from my understanding it's a much less complex concept than "toxoplasma".

My entire post--maybe even my entire blog--reduced to three words. If you want to know how you are governed, this is it: you are governed by Manipulating Procedural Outcomes. It's perfect. It belongs on someone's tomb.

That's about as succinct as you could get I think. The woman who invented the phrase had a longer blogpost about it.

Also fair, though I'd just say that I read a lot of his works in chronological order, and I don't remember ever being confused on what was meant by the Cathedral. I think he did a good job of gradually introducing facets of a very large term, though I understand why some may find the style obnoxious (personally I enjoy it).

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