Take the Iron Dome Pill

[Anonymous No.18254759]

Here is one way to check out any idea you don’t want to believe: assume it’s true, then build a new reality around that axiom.

Once you fail, you get to say: I can’t see how this could be true.

I don’t want to believe the CIA did 9/11. I try to build a reality in which it did. I fail spectacularly. I go back to believing it was an al-Qaeda conspiracy. I don’t want to believe OJ is guilty. I assume he’s innocent, then look for the real killers. But I can’t even imagine them.

This integrity check is literally failsafe. It can’t brainwash you into random Internet nonsense. If you don’t see a hole in the dome, you stay in your present reality. Your failure is a contrapositive proof that either you were right, or your imagination was weak. Either way, time for another steak.

And your success—remains yours. No one needs you to believe anything else. This pill is neutral, tasteless unbelief. It is just a broad-spectrum treatment for common political formulas. It contains no beliefs of its own, true or false.

The clear pill does say you’re in a dome. It says nothing about the real world outside that dome, only that you know nothing about that world—just some facts. It does not even challenge any of those facts. It is made from pure philosophy and contains no jet fuel or steel beams.

Try it! It’ll be fun! All the cool kids are taking it!

[Anonymous No.18254771]

Face it /lit/ Moldbug can't be refuted. There's nothing outside the Iron Dome.

[Anonymous No.18254775]

>>18254759
I wonder if he ever applied this clear pill thought process to a certain World War 2 event.

[Anonymous No.18254804]

>>18254775
Pretty easy. There's no line of thought that would conclude that the holocaust didn't happen. You will always find evidence showing how bad things were.

[Anonymous No.18254822]

>>18254759
>think about something before you believe it
How is this a new or revolutionary method?
Let's try it. You've got a man who says that he's a woman. Now me myself? I cannot imagine a reality in which that man is a woman. But me not believing that Butterfly is a woman doesn't prevent him from snarkily larping as one on /lit/.
Is the "clearpill" just thinking about how plausible a narrative is? Maybe I'm missing something.

[Anonymous No.18254839]

>>18254804
It's pretty easy to construct a version that doesn't have death camps. Still qualifies as genocidal/ethnic cleansing of course.

[Anonymous No.18254881]

>>18254822
Filtered. Try reading the essay it's genius and fun.

[Anonymous No.18254914]

>>18254881
>part 1/5 released 9/27/2019
>part 2/5 released 11/25/2019
>part 3/5 released....?????
When does the great genius Yarvin, inventor of thinking about whether something is plausible, plan on releasing the rest of his essays? Surely he didn't give up on them prematurely?

[Anonymous No.18255080]

>>18254759

[Anonymous No.18256068]

>>18254759
>Obama birtherism is true
>and by that I don't mean he was born in Kenya, that's obvious bull, I mean that his real father was American
>the election was stolen
>and by that I don't mean that it was fraudulent, I mean that uhhhh elections are a proxy for civil war and mail ballots don't count as combatants
Why does he keep doing this? I get that it's a bit, but what's the point?

[Anonymous No.18256786]

Holy shit it's over for the undomed.

[Anonymous No.18256897]

>>18255080
based. Where is this from?

[Anonymous No.18257975]

Holy based.

[Anonymous No.18257993]

>>18254759
I hate all these psedo-traditionalist kikes who sow confusion and obfuscate the true counter-revolution.

[Anonymous No.18258001]

>>18254759
Mossad did 9/11, but Moldbug the jw won't admit it.

[Anonymous No.18258020]

>>18257993
>the true counter-revolution
Which is?

[Anonymous No.18258097]

>>18254759
sounds like Occam's Razor with extra steps

[Anonymous No.18258290]

>>18256068
I honestly can't take most critiques when they rely so heavily on deconstructing a writer's style and aesthetic rather than his arguments. This basically culminates into "there's nothing new under the sun" by the end.

[Anonymous No.18258335]

>>18258290
>>18258290
Yes, this argument here in that picture is just the genetic fallacy. (Claiming a conclusion is wrong due to the origin of the argument.)

It's pretty clear from Moldbug's writing of "America is a communist country" that he means America is and has almost always been a leftist country, from it's founding on until today. (Especially culturally and politically, if not economically.)

And that seems to be true in most cases. Think back to history class, when we learned how great the US was, how it was a shining beacon, far ahead of its time on democracy, human rights, liberalism etc. Of course, there were a few instances of countries jumping forward, like the French briefly, and some tiny countries in Europe, but the US has largely led the way... And guess what: each of these (democracy, liberalism, etc.) was a leftist proposal at the time it was made. And then the US has helped spread those leftist reforms to other countries, just like the USSR spreading literal communism to others.

The original idea of "US is a communist country" came from the fact that almost every single one of the 1932 communist party agenda items exist and are normal today, but very few of the policy proposals from the traditionalist / reactionary parties at the time were ever implemented. Today's "right wingers" are Trump supporters, AKA, people who roughly support the 1980s Democrat policy platform.

I'm pretty sure that's what he means by "USA is a communist country": that the leftists, especially the cultural ones, somehow win again and again and again, almost invariably.

He doesn't literally mean the proleteriat owns the means of production, lol. That post sounds like it was written by some autistic Scott Alexander reader.

[Anonymous No.18258387]

>>18258335
Imagine taking moldbug seriously

[Anonymous No.18258398]

>The clear pill does say you’re in a dome. It says nothing about the real world outside that dome, only that you know nothing about that world—just some facts. It does not even challenge any of those facts.

[Anonymous No.18259572]

Now this is based.

[Anonymous No.18259616]

>>18254759
These are Jewish wordgames and Israel did 9/11

[Anonymous No.18259630]

>>18254759
ur mum gives iron dome

[Anonymous No.18259642]

Moldbug is too based for /lit/

His newest article basically dabs all over the cretins who are constantly screeching about how AI will inevitably kill us all as raving lunatics.

[Anonymous No.18259896]

>>18258290
I am asking about style more than substance, yeah.

>>18258335
But why phrase it as "America is a communist country"? Is that the best way to get the point across?
There are people who do earnestly believe that America is under explicitly communist control, or that Obama was born in Kenya, or that Biden stole the election through fraud. Moldbug likes to use those conspiracy theories (I use the label non-judgmentally) to label his own takes even when he means something different. He's somewhat forthright about that. But why does he do that?
Does he start out with his thing about mail ballots and then label it as "Biden stole the election", or does he start with the label and look for a sense in which it's true?
Does he want to give his reader the thrill of believing something forbidden by handing them a completely different belief that's superficially similar?
Or does he want to associate himself with people who do believe the conspiracy theories?
Or is it that he actually believes the conventional conspiracy theories but doesn't think he can get that past the reflexive denial of his readers?
Maybe I am too autistic. Help me out here.

[Anonymous No.18260058]

>>18254804
>There's no line of thought that would conclude that the holocaust didn't happen.
lol

[Anonymous No.18260079]

>>18260058
Some pseuds being pseuds. At best they could prove that something in the holocaust proof is questionable. But what does that change?

[Anonymous No.18260146]

>>18254839
>It's pretty easy to construct a version that doesn't have death camps.
i can't really imagine that without going full schizo where a sizable part of the population of wartime poland would have to be crisis actors or mass-hallucinating.

[Anonymous No.18261131]

>>18259642
>His newest article
Wow tell me more

[Anonymous No.18261157]

>Instead of evaluating the plausibility of competing hypotheses, just check if they're internally inconsistent!
>Yeah don't compare whether my worldview is more realistic given the evidence bro. Just assume it's true and see if you can explain away any possible contradictions.

t. conspiracy theorist

[Anonymous No.18261165]

This board has gotten much worse since curtis started spamming his idiot blog on it

[Anonymous No.18261974]

>>18259896

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I agree that his non-analytic style can be unhelpful at times. Sometimes I enjoy his wildman writing style, other times I think it holds him back.

I think the most charitable interpretation is he (1) wants to direct actual conspiracy people away from false conspiracies. If he associates with them, they can and will read his stuff and perhaps be directed away from false beliefs. Many conspiracy theorists, at root, appear to believe in conspiracies because their moral views/goals aren't represented in sane ways, and they're unable to do so themselves, so they go into lala land due to cognitive dissonance. Alex Jones and Noam Chomsky are good examples. They both have wildly outsider moral takes and since those views are almost completely unrepresented in legacy media / popular culture they both appear to go a bit crazy. (Chomsky, recently though, appears to be going senile and has just become "democrats good, repubs bad" unfortunately.)

I think a good piece of evidence to support this is his articles that have the essence "It's not the Jews, but here's why it might look that way" in which he, in essence, argues that it is the entire system and Jews just happen to be elites at a higher rate and since elites hold X views his readers find repugnant (supporting the system), Jews overwhelmingly end up having those X views. This contrasts with the Jews hold X views and they cause the system to X, which a lot of other far right people believe. (Yarvin seems to think it is IQ or culture that puts Jews in such a situation that they are disproportionately elites, though it might also have been the Chinese or someone else had Jews not existed. He believes the system would support itself regardless of who is in the system. You could read James Burnham's The Machiavellians for a defense of this view, though Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is also fun if slightly less clear.)

The second reason I think (2) is that Yarvin wants to show why people fall into believing those conspiracies / crazy theories in the first place. There's often a grain of truth in most whacky views and if there aren't philosophers and other thinkers there to justify the sane sides of those views, they get completely insane.

Take the 2020 USA election, for example. Most Trump people feel it was stolen or unfair. The evidence doesn't obviously support Trump's claims of voter fraud, but even if every single vote was counted 100% accurately and there was literally 0 fraud anywhere, Trump people would still have reason to complain. (1) The mainstream cultural institutions that in large part determine what people believe have not at all been fair to Trump in the slightest. They've taken almost everything he's said out of context and done everything in their power to smear him for 5 years while most also praise his opponents endlessly.

[Anonymous No.18261997]

>>18261165
Filtered. He's the greatest thinker alive and truly a delight.

[Anonymous No.18262029]

>>18261974
Part II: if Democracy is supposed to allow people to be governed the way they want to be governed, it seems very illegitimate to have unelected people (news, universities, school board curriculum, etc.) shaping people's views throughout their entire life in one way or another.

Not so sure about this second point but here goes:

(2) It's become increasingly clear that the different parts of the USA want fundamentally different things from government. California wants to become Mexico, Oregon wants to become Norway and middle USA and the South pretty much want to remain the same but with lower immigration, etc. Whoever wins, it is going to feel to the losers that the winner is illegitimate simply because the winner will (almost necessarily due to polarization) have such different views from themselves. (Texas' 'care for yourself' attitude vs. California's 'government will care for you', for example). Hillary people spent 4 years going down conspiracy rabbit holes and now it's Trump's turn.

I think he wants to direct them away from conspiracies and towards philosophy. Moldbug is against democracy (see Hoppe: Democracy the God that Failed, Brennan, Against Democracy, Caplan, Myth of Rational Voter, Burnham, the Machiavellians) and I think he's trying to push on how absurd democracy is by pointing out things people FEEL are illegitimate (changing election laws the year of the election in a way absolutely everyone knew was going to benefit one part, for example) are not "bugs" of the system but features.

He frequently talks about "starting from principles" (and usually vaguely references Kant, though arguably incorrectly). That's what I took him as doing with some of those posts at least: trying to (1) argue that democracy itself is absurd, (2) show the counter-narrative as opposed to the media propaganda in such a way that you realize that if the media showed the counter-narrative, instead of the narrative, that the unwashed masses would probably believe it just as much, (3) just generally show you that one view (or collection of views) almost completely dominates the mainstream views, whether it be university, media, etc.

[Anonymous No.18262105]

>>18262029
Sorry, it's getting a bit rambly at this point.

I think there's another thing he's doing in some of these posts that discuss conspiracies. I think he's (3) trying to show how "narrative driven" what most people believe are. He's a huge Chomsky fan (and Pareto, Mosca, Machiavelli, etc.) and he agrees that (a) the views of most people are shaped by what is on the news and (b) what is on the news is often a single perspective that has notable omissions or skew.

I can read / understand Mandarin and if you watch news from China on western or middle eastern affairs, it is an entirely different narrative, one of American imperialism, rampant cold hearted capitalists and bullying. My French is awful but from what I can understand (and translate helps me to understand) they have a quite different narrative on world events as well (though not as different). They tend to see Americans as barbaric, self-centered, materialistic, shallow and ignorant, though also somewhat imperialistic. (Likewise, obviously, conservatives and progressives have a different narrative.)

I think it's plausible that he's also trying to get readers (mostly normies who find his blog) to be "jarred" from their usual perspective. He has a book called "An Open Letter to an Open Minded Progressive" in which he specifically addresses normies, trying to get them to step out of their usual mindset and heuristics of world history. (Most of his readers are tech people, overwhelmingly progressive young people.) He also has another book that starts with the phrase "take the red pill" (I think he invented the phrase, as far as politics goes).

Perhaps he's trying to jar people as hard from their normal standpoint as possible? Like the philosophers dragging the people chained in the cave up into the sun?

I was a typical 2016 Trump conservative until I read some of his stuff. Since then I think my views have gotten a bit more extreme, he he. I guess it worked for me, though perhaps not for others.

I completely agree it's not the most effective style for everyone.

[Anonymous No.18262166]

>>18254759
Invents a shittier version of the categorical imperative. Why does anyone take him seriously?

[Anonymous No.18262407]

>>18261974
>>18262029
>>18262105
Informative, thank you. I'll have to mull this over.

[Anonymous No.18262414]

>>18262105
>>18262029
>>18261974
Cringe

[Anonymous No.18262509]

>>18254759
aint nobody got time for that

[Anonymous No.18262712]

Moldbug is the only writer today who will be remembered centuries from now

[Anonymous No.18262746]

>OP discovers "Steelmanning"

[Anonymous No.18262757]

>>18254759

>I don’t want to believe the CIA did 9/11. I try to build a reality in which it did. I fail spectacularly. I go back to believing it was an al-Qaeda conspiracy.

Imagine being this cucked

[Anonymous No.18263686]

>>18262712
This. Monuments will be made honoring the Caesar of Sovcorp.

[Anonymous No.18264041]

>>18262746
Best part is that "steelmanning" is most popular with reddit bugmen like Sam Harris. Yurvin is regurgitating Sam Harris tier methods and championing them as divine revelation.

[Anonymous No.18264059]

>>18264041
The bugmen are right about steelmanning though, that is exactly what you should do.

[Anonymous No.18265285]

Holy I didn't know moldy was this based.

[Anonymous No.18265399]

>>18258335
>from it's founding
A thoroughly New England Puritan Yankee account from a Silicon Valley scion of Cold War Stage Department subverters— Neocameralism swaps the gentile kibbutz Socialist International with transnational techno-stetls, which is why he’s not cancelled for alt-neocohen adjacency: it’s all compatible with UN Smart Cities and Schwab types’ free range bug pod Truman show Bakunin-lite

[Anonymous No.18266369]

Anyone read his latest? I think it's his best yet.
Literally one of the greats now.

[Anonymous No.18266382]

>>18254759
>iron dome analogy
so all present beliefs are just larping lies and that the dome protects from reality?

[Anonymous No.18266412]

>>18254759
>I don’t want to believe the CIA did 9/11. I try to build a reality in which it did. I fail spectacularly.

How can you fail at this? This is a very easily constructed reality.

[Anonymous No.18266424]

I don't believe the CIA did 9/11.
But I completely understand how someone would think so.
I feel the exact same way with them creating crack or AIDS. You didn't try enough.

[Anonymous No.18266436]

>>18264041
>Best part is that "steelmanning" is most popular with reddit bugmen like Sam Harris
Why are you people like this

[Anonymous No.18266594]

>>18266369
Entertaining, worth my time, ultimately really unconvincing.
It did help me pin down his implicit belief that culture, specifically the media, is all that matters. America is leftist because being a Democrat is prestigious, and there's no need to look further than that. The obvious way for Jeff Bezos to exert power is through the Washington Post, and because that in particular is hard to steer, money in general is useless.
That seems at odds with the quasi-libertarian/Austrian economist approach he takes at other times.
Is there a post where he justifies it? Without accepting that much of what he says falls flat for me.

[Anonymous No.18266600]

>>18260079
That the entire narrative needs to be re-examined

[Anonymous No.18266605]

>>18254759
This guys entire life work is an attempt at shifting the wrath of the far right away from jews

[Anonymous No.18266878]

>>18258020
my revolution desu

[Anonymous No.18267213]

>>18254759
This is a shill thread and you are obviously a shill. Shame on every one include me, for responding to this trash.