/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

Remember when /ratanon/ was good?


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> Political units should have total, and unquestioned sovereignty on their territory, because contrary situation leads to multipolar traps
> Yet at the same time they should be subordinated to market mechanism
Am I missing something, or are Moldbug's ideas somewhat inconsistent? Why is violence, or other rivalry through political means undesirable, but capitalism is not?
It's been a while since I read Moldbug, but I don't remember very much talk of market mechanisms? Certainly no advocacy for neoliberal stuff like competitive bidding for government functions, etc. He talked about countries being owned by shareholders who get dividends, but that in itself is not a market, any more than say the internal governance of IBM is market-based…

Moldbug wants to engineer a reduction in violence because violence is wasteful. He is not against all competition or conflict. He considers them inevitable. To him violence is wasteful pretty much by definition because it happens due to uncertainly about who would win in an armed conflict. People generally don't fight hopeless fights, so reducing uncertainly reduces armed conflict.

A market in state shares would allow for liquidation of failed states without the usual violence. At the same time it would align the quality of the services provided by states with the self-interest of their owners, making such states less likely to fail in the first place. It's the Mandate of Heaven with(out) a human face (being stamped on).

I don't remember Moldbug saying this outright, but he does not seem to believe that war is eugenic, at least in the present. It would be better if people competed through other means, like, again, capitalism.


I brought up Urbit at work a couple days ago. Kind of worried that bringing it up will activate some coworker's purity monitors, associate me with Moldbug, and target me for destruction. Not clear to me whether that's something I actually should worry about, when I previously was in a group of social-justicey programmers, they certainly associated anyone talking about Urbit with NRX and disdained them, but maybe they were just hyper-active in their purity-enforcement.


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