The Moldbug Variations
I have a friend who&#x27;s just spooky in his ability to predict the movement of culture and politics, often many years in advance. He&#x27;s a genius about other matters too. He clearly possesses an off-the-charts IQ as well as a lot of varied worldly experience and background.<p>He also thinks the Apollo Moon landings were fake.<p>We&#x27;ve debated the subject. His reasons for thinking this are complex but they boil down not only to evidence (as he sees it) but the cultural narrative. Why did we step so far back from progress in the early 70s? Maybe it&#x27;s because our greatest achievement was a ruse and everyone kind of realized it on some subconscious level. Maybe the psychological effect of that ruse was to derail us from the future. Oh, and the films of Stanley Kubrick are full of covert signals where he spills the beans about the whole thing. Just watch. It&#x27;s all right there. Kubrick did the Moon landing fakes and later used the same technology to film 2001, which is in part a very &quot;meta&quot; allegory about the Moon hoax.<p>I think this is all completely and utterly nuts.<p>I&#x27;ve met Yarvin a.k.a. Moldbug. He&#x27;s really brilliant. I&#x27;m sure he has an off-the-charts IQ and like many scary smart people his mind has habits of its own and often moves in mysterious and deeply creative directions. His software work transcends the realm of conventional development and into the realm of high conceptual art.<p>He thinks feudalism and autocracy are superior political systems, a notion about as nutty as the Moon Hoax theory. There is literally not a shred of evidence for it either contemporary or historical and it makes no rational sense. In all our many thousands of years of social experimentation there are no examples that can be cited to support the case and many that can be cited against it. If you want an easy one search for a picture of North and South Korea from space. There&#x27;s your answer. Case closed.<p>We went to the Moon too. I&#x27;ve seen the pictures and heard the astronauts talk about what it was like to... uhh... walk on the Moon.<p>There are low superstitions only an idiot would believe. For those of greater intellect there are higher superstitions far too absurd for an idiot to grasp. It takes a genius to contort their mind like that. It takes a really profound intellect to convince themselves that the Moon landings were fake, that the Earth is flat, or that feudal autocracy is a superior system of government.<p>Look into the flat Earth. It&#x27;s got some Mensa-grade IQ proponents. Only a genius could grasp the mathematics of the ether vortex that allows satellites to &quot;orbit&quot; above the plane. An idiot would conclude that they&#x27;re just falling in circles around a big ball, which yields simple math an idiot could grasp but does not explain the subtile occult symbolism of US polar expeditions or why the UN won&#x27;t allow us in Antarctica. It takes a really perceptive mind to notice those things and tie it all together. Here let me &quot;red pill&quot; you...<p>The right and conspiracy theorists have no monopoly here. I&#x27;d also count the postmodernist dialectical hermeneutics word salad spewed by critical studies professors in humanities departments. As near as I can tell it means nothing but maybe I&#x27;m too dense. Maybe the most profound insights into history and culture are buried in all those syllables.<p>I&#x27;ve seen enough of this to start thinking that bizarre transcendentally-irrational nonsense is one of the things holding back the evolution of human intelligence. I&#x27;ve wondered if our 100 average IQ might be an evolutionary local maximum surrounded by valleys on all sides. Lower IQs don&#x27;t equip us with enough brains to survive, while high IQs too frequently lead to cognitive towers of babel that derail and confuse. Basically we get smarter until +&#x2F;- one standard deviation of 100 and then start getting dumb again, but in a different way. We get complex-dumb not simple-dumb. Maybe there&#x27;s another local maximum up there somewhere... like if you had an IQ of 300 you&#x27;d see through the nonsense easily... but we&#x27;ve never reached it. Super-smart humans seem smart enough to assemble elaborate state graphs but not smart enough to prune them, and they seem prone to letting the impressiveness of these structures overwhelm the simple evidence of the senses and straightforward reason.<p>It doesn&#x27;t surprise me to see a lot of nutty stuff in Silicon Valley. With so many high-IQ people assembled in one place they&#x27;re sure to drive each other to complete and utter insanity through competitive intellectual edifice building and hyper-meta-over-analysis. I&#x27;m not sure if legal marijuana will help or make this a lot worse.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JT0zjorR68A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JT0zjorR68A</a><p>Edit: my Moon hoaxer friend predicted the rise of the alt-right as far back as 2008, calling Obama-era America &quot;Weimar America&quot; and even going to far as to cite geek culture as ground zero for its emergence. He predicted a new, hip fascist movement that would ascend with a mixture of futurism, conservatism, and quasi-occultism (Kek! Kek! Kek!) and that it would come from the Internet. He predicted all this eight years ago. Today he predicts a two-term Trump and a world war. Let&#x27;s hope he&#x27;s wrong.<p>Edit #2: You can also see the tower of babel effect in the design of software, where us geniuses can add complexity forever but can never prune it.