Unqualified Reservations

If you loved this you'd love http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ The older stuff is pretty stellar, I wrote an post on Metafilter about it a few years ago: http://www.metafilter.com/66006/The-Unqualified-Reservations-of-Menciu…

I should mention that so far i've found The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) and this blog (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com) have built up an idea of classic economics and hinted at Austrian economics. I'm still having trouble understanding some of the macro stuff like foreign currency reserves, printing money, inflation + employment etc.

I hit the same wall the library. If you want a new injection of novel intellectual thought, I highly recommend the blog Unqualified Reservations ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ ). Read the entire archive, plus all the books he recommends. That should keep you intellectually stimulated for two to three years at least.

If you're wondering whether there is something of value hiding underneath all of the obscurity and if it might be worth your time to do a deep dive, IMHO the answer is a resounding no. There is nothing hiding in Urbit other than a deliberately obfuscated computing model, of the same stripe as brainfuck, but with (again IMHO) very different motives. Brainfuck is obscure purely for the sake of being obscure, in the spirit of a puzzle or other intellectual challenge. Urbit has more sinister motives, not least of which is to separate fools from their money by selling them "real estate" in the Urbit cyberworld. The obscurity is there to conceal the fact that there is no there there, to entice people into investing time and effort into it, and then keep them sucked in by leveraging the sunk cost fallacy. It is a tactic taken directly from the playbook of con men and cult leaders through the ages. What is worthwhile (IMHO) is to read some of Curtis Yarvin's (the founder and designer of Urbit) writings and compare them to the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, particularly bootlegged copies of the "secret" teachings of the "church" of Scientology, not for content, but for structure. To my eye, there are deeply disturbing similarities. [1] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/ [2] https://www.xenu.net/archive/ot/

You are onto something here. If this topic interests you, there are worse places than https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/. The writing style can be challenging at times, but it will answer some of your questions.

These are all inevitable consequences of artificially cheap debt due to USD "printing". The Cantillon Effect has weird consequences. Bullshit companies can be worth billions, and people will rationally flee the dollar (into e.g. BTC). Bitcoin has a much more plausible value proposition than most of these bullshit companies. Conflating the anomalously high value of BTC with the anomalously high value of companies is a category error. http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2018/10/bitcoin-and-bubble-theory-of-mone… https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-bitc…

Great post, I think you’d get a lot out of reading this old blog post on Unqualified Reservations — Is journalism official? https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/is-journalism-officia…

That's a great observation. There was a _very long_ but funny and insightful article expanding on this issue, calling such interfaces "hubristic": http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.de/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-…

It would surprise me if the government doesn't already attempt to use such techniques to manipulate the public. I just suspect they do it badly, because while Trump/Obama/Hillary can fire people who perform badly and hire the best people for the role, the civil service cannot. They certainly engage in propaganda in general, however, mainly by going directly through the media. The thing here which is actually interesting is not the use of propaganda. What's interesting is people outside the cathedral using it effectively. https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduct… (Or a shorter description: http://home.earthlink.net/~peter.a.taylor/moldbug.htm )

This is the blog in question: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ Honestly, I can't make heads or tails of it. There's some racist lingo, but more than anything this guy seems unhinged, like the kind of person I wouldn't want to be in a room with, let alone have a conversation with.

The two blog posts that seem to have been most cited as evidence are the following: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/why-carlyle-mat… http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/understanding-r…

Except "Mencius Moldbug" stopped posting altogether a couple of years ago, and for a year prior to that only some random poetry: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ From everything I've heard Moldbug is now purely a historical figure in the "Dark Enlightenment", although I suppose more real than Emmanuel Goldstein.

I think our progressive politics IS to blame: for deluding San Franciscans into believing such a thing is possible. Actually it is possible. But the irony is that the person who came up with best idea that would have fixed/prevented this problem, has now been ostracized as a "fascist" by the left-wing tech community: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formalist-manifes… If circa 2007, San Francisco itself had been turned into a join-stock corporation, with all the existing residents given shares, then all residents would have grown wealthy as the city grew rich. Furthermore, the government would have had an incentive to allow new housing, since that would increase total tax revenues, and thus increased dividends for all residents. Right now, the politically powerful have no incentive to improve new building, since they do not directly benefit.

Lovely. I have a problem with "communists in tech". Perhaps I should organize with my buddies on twitter and write angry emails to corporations that employ them, 'cos, durr hurr, it offends me! And btw, this "legitimizes slavery" is bullshit. This is the article in question. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/why-carlyle-mat…

This post, which definitely resonates with me and my experience in Silicon Valley and in Seattle, surrounded by very leftist politics, reminds me a lot of Mencius Moldbug's brilliant piece "Technology, communism and the Brown Scare": http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technology-commun…

"Apparently there once was a kind of obsolete proto-blog that was called a 'book.'" [1] But even real books, the internet has made them very accessible. You can find PDFs for all sorts of new books if you know where to look -- not everything, yet, but a lot. Amazon has as good a search interface as any library's DOS terminal I've ever used (I'd argue much better). All the fascinating facts, stories, and amazing information are on the web, too, along with a bunch of other stuff. I'd say the author just needs to refine his webcrawling. [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/universalism-post…

"Comedy writer" isn't quite how I'd describe it, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Urbit is run by the guy who writes/wrote under Mencius Moldbug, who is perhaps one of the more controversial people to achieve internet fandom. If you read through all the archives on his site and have no opinion (probably somewhere in the "I hate him" or "I find this reasonably convincing" statistical clusters), then your sense of outrage has been diminished, I would say. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ Note: I myself am unconvinced by his writings, and find him to be just another ironic instance of the ironic nature of American culture, eager to avoid the appearance of naivete by abandoning all hopes that are fragile. Do with that what you will.

In this context, I hope at some point sama has a chance (if he hasn't already) to read the post "Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot" by Mencius Moldbug: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not… The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We actually have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are operating in consensus reality rather than actual reality. Their joysticks are not plugged in. When the consensus is nonsense, sober good sense is nonsense. Nonsense is no use to anyone. It's a long post, but if you're interested in examining the problems we face from a fresh and unusual perspective it's worth reading the whole thing.

The best model I've found that explains Bitcoin is Moldbug's Monetary theory. If you had to read just one article I'd recommend http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.in/2011/04/on-monetary-restan… But if you have the time you could read all his articles on economics conveniently collected at moldbuggery.blogspot.com (under economics)

Tianming. If some other system governs better than democracy, then we should use it. As Moldbug points out, the current US Govcorp is structured as an employee collective[1][2], which no competitive corporation chooses as a system of organization in the free market. As Mancur Olson points out, bureaucracies tend to get more inefficient over time[3]. I know we've all been raised to believe that democracy is love and rainbows, but maybe it's time to rethink that. [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/why-when-and-how-… [2] http://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/on-government-employment/ [3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation/dp/03000307…

It is a speculation bubble. People are betting that Bitcoin will become world money and be worth millions of products in many countries. Anything can become money only when it has value and acceptance which are created by speculators. Such bubble can pop only if some other, more promising thing may become money, or if there's a flaw in the currently hyped thing. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2013/04/bitcoin-is-money-b…

There's a big difference between a prediction market and a decision market, which is what futarchy is. Mencius Moldbug expounded on this quite a while back in this post: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/pipe-shorting-and… I won't go into much detail (the post is worth reading), but his basic point (which I agree with) is that the reason a prediction market works (when it works) is that the only incentive governing people's bets is their beliefs about the expected probabilities of outcomes. But this can only work if the bets people make are themselves statistically independent of the outcomes, and in a decision market they obviously can't be, since people's bets determine the outcome. (In the post Moldbug gives an actual real-world example of a market which gets manipulated in exactly this way.)

Someone earlier in this thread mentioned his apparent disdain for PL research. If you want some background on his experiences, as well as some great musings on the current state of CS grad programs, I recommend these two articles: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navrozov-momen… http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-…

You've obviously never read any Mencius Moldbug [1]. [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com

By "right-thinking minds", I mean "correct-thinking minds". It is a fireable offense to say non-feminist or anti-feminist things, even in a dry academic way (look at Larry Summers) - it is politically incorrect. Non-feminist and anti-feminist thought is no longer an acceptable part of the mainstream conversation. The range of permissible mainstream thought is determined by the left. Essentially, the mainstream follows Harvard with a ~30 year lag. The infrastructure which propagates what Harvard believes to everybody else and determines the constraints of acceptable thought is what Moldbug calls "the Modern Structure"[1] or "the Cathedral"[2]. [1] http://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-modern-structure.html [2] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introducti…

I disagree with this article. Apathy didn't kill anything; the unstoppable juggernaut of technology can, is and will replace all pseudo factory robots with actual factory robots. What we do about that is the question of the ages indeed. If you're interested in a much more insightful discussion of this issue, this is very much worth your time: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/sam-altman-is-…

Unqualified Reservations, by our very own Moldbug: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/

Schmidt compares China to a business but then shies away and says he doesn't mean it literally. This analogy/truth is far more important than he admits. Anyone interested might enjoy: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/rotary-management… (what a corporation would be like if run like the U.S. government) http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/landscape-of-bewi… (follow-up)

Your users actually showed great foresight, I think. There are good reasons to avoid "intelligent" or hubristic interfaces: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and… Summary: "intelligent" interfaces will always fail for trying to solve a problem (the Chinese room) which is un-decidable even for a human mind, and so the future will use dumb, reliable interfaces (until we can figure out telepathy). Corollary: users shouldn't be blamed for not wanting to trade reliability for "awesomeness". Read the article, it's worth it.

Money, honors, influence - anything contingent on impressing an audience. An externally motivated person is capable of doing good science, given the right incentives. However, the way science is funded in most of the world today provides incentives for showmanship, rather than results. This trend has already destroyed physics (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465092756) and computer science (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-… as respectable, intellectually honest fields. Internally motivated people, driven purely by a love of their field's conceptual beauty, are invulnerable to having their goal system perverted by such systemic rot.