@ValueOfType The people who refuse to join the non-joiners club.
— Slope of Function (@SlopeOfFunction) March 29, 2015
The most ridiculous (yet also somehow endearing) thing about rationalists is the combined belief that (a) we are just on the verge of creating an agency far more powerful than our own and (b) if we just math hard enough, we can contain it.
I was also an early "sparring partner" of Moldbug. Fortunately most of that stuff is gone from the net but I just dug some out of the Internet Archive. Eventually I gave up on it as a waste of time, but I remember the horrified feeling I got when I realized that what I thought was just a weird little corner of the internet was actually a growing influence on real politics and a significant ideological contributer to Trumpism – I think it when I learned that he was watching election returns with Peter Thiel is what did it for me. That some of the jargon has made it to Fox News doesn't surprise me in the least, and shouldn't surprise Scott. There is no daylight at all between NRX and the Republican Party in 2021.
Siskind's whole "conflict theory" machinery is part of an elaborate effort to deny not just class conflict but conflict in general. It very often leads to weird blind spots; I wrote about it here. It's a very weird mode of thought. I mean, it's one thing to dislike conflict, it's another thing to try to write about political and economic matters as if conflict didn't exist.
Yeah there is an amazing narrowness of vision thing going on there, verging on solipsism. One of his conflict theory pieces had the absurd line "nobody has any real policy disagreements", which I took to mean, "anybody who disagrees with me doesn't really exist for me (until they become a threat in which case I'll write 100K word screeds against them)".