Paraphrasing Curtis Yarvin’s “Why you should come to LambdaConf anyway”

I found this Medium post extremely hard to parse in some sections (much like his blog posts). I decided to go through it line by line and note more clearly what was happening. After I’d gone through all that trouble, it seemed worth posting up for other people to read.

This isn’t designed to be read on its own. I’ll be keeping the section titles and paragraph counts the same, so you can easily compare the two. Yarvin will be referred to as “he”, and I’ll be “I”.

Why you should come to LambdaConf anyway

Appeal to the reader’s intelligence. They are an active member of a valuable and cutting edge field.

Appeal to the reader’s morality. They are a good person who responds strongly to immoral acts (He will return to this at the end, that the moral reader does not need to respond strongly to acts that are not “evil”).

The scandal

Appeal to the reader with humor and act as if the whole matter is ridiculous. Do not clearly explain or link to what most complainants are actually concerned about. Link to a very vague and centrist response to “the scandal”.

Re-appeal again to the reader’s morality and intelligence. End with humor.

Why you should come to LambdaConf anyway

He is the guy with the silly pseudonym, but he has read liberal publications and attended an Ivy League school.

Here’s why you should come to LambdaConf anyway:

• He is not his pseudonym. He can compartmentalize but also has tunnel vision if you try to talk about something he is not interested in.
• Mention of (I assume) a tool or library he will be discussing at LambdaConf with buzz-words.
• Mention of (I assume) a tool or library he will be discussing at LambdaConf. Claim that it can “only debut at LambdaConf” (I’m not sure what means? Is it a product launch? If so, why do I seem to be expected to already know what it is?). Weird reference to drugs and old poetry (appeal to outsiders).

Why you have nothing to be afraid of (TLDR)

He is a polite and professional man. He is used to be being able to ignore his public writings that people find offensive.

Claim that everyone who has read suggestions of bigotry into his written works are mistaken. Claims that writing about historical writing and scientific ideas are incapable of “affecting anyone’s personal or professional life”. (what is the purpose of that writing, if not affecting someone’s personal or professional life?)

He is not various things that (I assume) people have called him. There are no references to anyone calling him these things. Appeal to people’s visceral reaction against 4chan and anti-semitism (Logical fallacy: 4chan doesn’t like him, so he must be on your side) Claim to not be leading any organizations with lofty political goals (probably true, but most people who might claim this don’t have years of diatribes about political issues). Claim to not have answered email account for pseudonym in “years” (unprovable).

Appeal to own lack of importance and common ground with reader (see first 2 paragraphs). Lay the ground-work for claim of intellectual innocence (to be returned to later).

Defines racism extremely badly (will be repeated later). Claim to not have beliefs matching this specific definition (unprovable, but most people who might claim this don’t have years of writing that most people interpret as leaning towards racist beliefs). Appeal again to the boogey-man of 4chan.

Straw-man of one way to “not be a racist”. Rejects that idea based on unspecified scientific grounds (Appeal to outsiders, contrarians, & pseudo-intellectuals who have already taken offense at the simplistic straw-man he propped up).

He’s not a “racist” (what he means is “bad guy”, as explained in the next sentence). He doesn’t equate (weird racist-seeming generalizations) with “moral superiority”. (This does not really make sense in this context, but is clarified a bit once he talks about “IQism” later)

Have you agreed with him yet? If not, it might be your fault. Please read more of his writing.

What this is all about anyway (longform)

For 6 years, he wrote a blog (link to blog). It is a very intellectual blog, which “revisited old views” about apparently all fields of human endeavor with the goal of “reconsidering intellectual perspectives from an absolute position not relative to present-day fashions”. (I have not read much of his blog, but from what I have seen — the posts are very long, reference lots of old written material, and few have clearly defined theses and conclusions)

Reference to “right” and “left” in comparison to the more centrist “Common Wisdom”, which changes over time.

So we should abandon “common wisdom” and reach our own conclusions (Appeal to outsiders, contrarians, & pseudo-intellectuals)(Logical Fallacy: no true scotsman. “common wisdom” is certainly more true in some historical contexts than others)

Since we are too familiar with our modern context to properly ignore our own biases, we should ignore everything after the civil rights movement. We can trust that we won’t be misled by any of their ideas, because of a “wide culture gap”. (Link to 500 page book about the American Revolution published before the Ford Motor Company existed, claiming that it will “change your mind” about “something unimportant”. Change my mind about what? was the American Revolution “unimportant”?)

He thought this would be harmless and fun, but it was not.

He read the wrong books (link to book published before England legally abolished slavery), ones not assigned at Brown, and the ideas those gave him did not match those espoused by a fictional character from the 1700s.

One way to summarize the results he did get is this famous quote from political scientist Eric Voegelin: (this quote is “famous”?)

Bizarre quote about the “Gnostic dream world” that reads like a deleted scene from Donnie Darko. Basically it says that if cause is disassociated from effect, then immoral actions might be seen as moral. (I assume there’s context around this in the original text that makes it match what he claims in the next paragraph).

He says “No need to try to parse that.” (then why quote it?). He then says that if you “think from scratch” you can reach conclusions that cause you to disagree with what other people see as reality. (I’m not sure how this is related to the quote referenced, which seems to be more of a thought experiment about how morality is not an absolutely defined concept but is dependent upon the reality moral concepts exist in. I’m also not sure how this is different from any other difference of opinion, except that it’s based on texts from the 1700s instead of lived experience.)

Uses humor to defuse previous block of philosophical bunk. Claims we agree on morality, but disagree on facts. Extreme example of murder to make other claims seem less severe.

Enough with the philosophy

Forget the example he just laid out (then why lay it out?) Is he a racist?

No, but he might walk and talk like one.

So now he needs to defend that behavior. But he’s not trying to convince you. He just needs you to “suspend your fear” (Appeal to the reader’s bravery and open-mindedness).

In real life, DNA doesn’t matter

He not only knows about old books, he also knows about biology! Science asks us re-adjust our accepted truths frequently. “Human population genetics” is apparently the one most likely to ask this of us in 2016.

Claims that DNA “is not relevant at an individual level” (wat?), it matters to “history and politics” but not “personal or professional lives” (notice that this is the same thing he said about written ideas at the beginning. I’m curious what he thinks CAN affect our ‘personal or professional lives’).

DNA provides less information than talking to a human about themselves. (duh?) Starts talking about IQ (when did IQ become a question here?)

We can’t measure IQ from DNA (Who asked you to? Oh, this is an attempt to explain his non-racist beliefs about how some people just have lower IQs. I get it) or their “racial appearance” (that will surely help your case). It would be morally ok to measure IQ from DNA if it produced accurate results, but it doesn’t, so it’s useless. (Who claimed IQ was a useful measure of anything? There’s no citations for any of this).

The real problem is IQism

Asks us to agree on a simplistic definition of racism, as described in the beginning of the article. Admits it’s simplistic, does not address that it is also incorrect.

No one is racist unless they think “white people are better than black people”. Non-racists are not-racist in different ways (so far that means nothing).

He is now explaining to me how I think about race, intelligence, and what I value in human beings. This is the definition of a straw-man. (at least he’s not wrong about the second part — I do think it’s better to be smart than stupid. In fact, I think close to 100% of people would choose to be “smarter”, if they could do it effortlessly)

He now defines the straw-man of beliefs in opposition to his as “No race is better than any other race, because all races are equally smart”. (There is so much nonsense loaded into this, and it came so out of left field, I don’t think I can even unpack it.)

He’s not racist because he does not agree with his straw-man. Okay, now I’ve got to go back and find the straw-man whose beliefs he does not share. “Intelligence is homogenously distributed across the human species” and “It’s better to be smart than stupid”. Alright.

He doesn’t agree with the theory of “human neurological uniformity”. He uses an acronym “HNU”, which I assume is just for saving him time later, as it doesn’t show up on Google at all. Interestingly, “human neurological uniformity” doesn’t really show up on Google either. It’s got 604 results, which all seem to be related to his own blog. Anyway, he doesn’t agree with it because reasons.

HNU can’t exist without proof, he claims “statistically, its presence is expected and its absence would be remarkable”, which I assume he just views as common sense, since there’s no references. There is a link to a study which claims to have found statistically significant differences in brain mass between races in a sample size of 69 individuals. (It is not my understanding that brain mass has a direct correlation with functioning or intelligence, but I’m not a neuroscientist)

Claims that “few” people believed in his HNU straw-man a century ago. Link to show that “racist” is not recorded in Google Books until the 1940s, and claim that its lack of existence correlates with extreme racism in the general populace (ok, that’s a gimme). Gets sarcastic, says acceptance of HNU must have been driven by tons of evidence and studies (we know he’s being sarcastic, since if those studies existed, he would agree with the concept, as the intellectual paragon he sets himself up as).

Says that this is not the place to argue about HNU (then why bring it up?). Links to a book and article by Nicholas Wade, who is apparently a science write for the New York Times. Impugns the journalistic integrity of the New York Times unless the content is written by this scientist who agrees with his views.

Now he wants us to ignore his straw-man of HNU to focus on the second claim from above — “being intelligent doesn’t make you a better person”. The words he used earlier were “It’s better to be smart than stupid”, which I believe has a large semantic difference with how he’s phrasing it now, but whatever.

Calls racism “creepy” unless it’s insincere, like Dave Chappelle (I’m going to ignore unpacking that one). Implies strongly that most racists think “people who score higher on IQ tests are in some sense superior human beings” (in my experience, not at all what most racists are about. IQ is just the most “scientific” element in the racist arsenal).

Where IQism comes from

Appeal to humor and our moral nature again.

Claims that IQ “correlates across a wide variety of problem-solving skills”. However, our children’s brains will be made obsolete by machine learning.

Returns to the straw-man propped before this section that smarter people are more moral people. He does not cite any source for this being a common opinion. (Note multiple references to a “smarter person” being gendered as male. I’m sure this was unintentional on his part and my even mentioning it will be jumped on by someone who thinks I’m trying to drag sexism in where it doesn’t exist, but it’s interesting).

Claims that most people who think smart = moral learned this in high school.

Claims that for the “average American New Yorker reader”, high school was a time of friendlessness, mockery, and under-appreciation of intellectual gifts.

Anecdote about “IQism”. He did anti-social acts in 3rd grade, so he was moved to 4th grade. (Oh god, I just checked and there’s still like 2 pages to get through. Goddamn it). He moved to a foreign country, then came back and got through a bachelor’s degree quickly, then dropped out of another school later.

Compares his history’s propensity for “IQism” as similar to a “heroin-addicted sex worker”’s for blood-borne diseases.

He rejects IQism, and equates it as morally similar to racism. Strongly implies that racism does not bother him.

Categorizes “cheerleaders and jocks” as now “housewives and plumbers”, and unsuccessful ones at that.

IQism in historical perspective

The Nazis were defeated and now Germans are “super sweet”.

“IQism” destroyed Detroit, apparently? (I don’t know the history of Detroit, but I have read some recent news stories of pretty heinous political corruption, which I assume are relevant to the recent problems. And I don’t know how the auto industry’s problems are the fault of “IQism”.)

Claims that “50 years ago” (was he alive then?), there were “thriving African-American business districts” that are no longer safe. (There’s no citation here either, but I wonder what larger social and economic issues might be contributing to this if true?)

Says that colleges and NPR have stolen black America’s votes for nothing in return.

Refers to Trump voters as “shit-tier” (how is that not IQism???), who are tired of having a third of their income used by the elite for wars in the middle east (really? Trump voters are losing 33% of their income to taxes?)

Describes a system for our “whole society” that funnels the best test-takers through hazing and into incompetently performed government bureaucrat jobs. (This seems so generic as to be ridiculous on its face and, anecdotally, is not the experience of me or anyone I know. Maybe attending an Ivy League school provides a different experience.)

Claims that people automatically sift to an appropriately prestigious institution by IQ, and are arrogant about their IQ. (Still no sources for this part, and I’ve completely forgot what the original point was supposed to be. That IQ does not make one person more moral than another?)

IQ will make you better at your job, but not as much as a “clue” will.

A “clue” is apparently being able and willing to say that except for finance, tech, and the “university-media-government complex” (what in the hell is that?), “everything else in America is rotting”.

Claims that “everyone who is smart feels the right to rule”.

Refers to the “Twitter mob” that bullies individuals by tricking their conscience into not realizing they’re just getting high off their power.

Says nerds can’t make an effective government because “high-IQ people are not inherently better than low-IQ people”, but might be able to try if they read enough old books (kind of contradicting himself, isn’t he? Confusing.)

Why you should come to LambdaConf (again)

Acts like he has clearly explained Moldbug’s beliefs (I would have had an extremely hard time summarizing them without doing this), and re-iterates that Moldbug is a separate persona from himself.

Seems to think ideas can only be wrong, not evil. (Perhaps this is a result of his experience with functional programming? If you think of the world as a shared state in a pure functional language? No side effects, no evil? I don’t know, but I think this claim is absurd on the face of it, even if his ideas might not necessarily be able to be called “evil”.)

Mentions some programming concepts to show he also has programming opinions, I guess?