Comments on: Quote note (#129)

By: Why Cultural Evolution Is Real (And What It Is) | Carcinisation

Why Cultural Evolution Is Real (And What It Is) | Carcinisation — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 11:09:20 +0000

[…] mutate and survive. John Gray, Why capitalism hasn’t triumphed, November 8, 2014. Thanks to xenosystems for highlighting this […]

By: Why Cultural Evolution Is Real (And What It Is) | The View from Hell

Why Cultural Evolution Is Real (And What It Is) | The View from Hell — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 09:55:02 +0000

[…] mutate and survive. John Gray, Why capitalism hasn’t triumphed, November 8, 2014. Thanks to xenosystems for highlighting this […]

By: Scharlach

Scharlach — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 01:59:49 +0000

I look forward to giving you a black eye some day.

By: admin

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 01:38:09 +0000

My derision is restricted entirely to the passage cited (which is among the most ludicrous pieces of self-annihilating ‘reason’ I have ever seen). I don’t know Gray’s work well enough to have any more general opinion about it.

By: SanguineEmpiricist

SanguineEmpiricist — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:05:17 +0000

He probably is. He’s greater than every “neoreactionary’ save maybe two/three. Give it another shot.

By: Hanfeizi

Hanfeizi — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:37:38 +0000

If an idea keeps hanging around, it’s probably adaptable in one way or another. The common cold is annoying, but highly robust. That doesn’t mean we need to “like” getting the cold… but the fact that it persists in existing does nothing to disprove Darwin.

My head hurts trying to follow his reasoning.

By: wenshuang

wenshuang — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 22:12:11 +0000

@E Antony Gray

You are mistaken re: culture as a set of semantic information (and rituals are not necessarily semantic), though that was a prevailing theory among ethnoscientists through the 60’s and symbolic interactionists. Semantics do play a significant role, but not all culture is semantic. we agree that biology predisposes, my claim was in reference to the structure of processing, mediation, and the mechanism of selection. You might enjoy reading Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, Michael Tomasello, and Maurice Bloch on this. Admittedly “just biology” over simplifies, the point should be obvious that ideas are inextricable from the process that creates them.

Lastly, can you clarify what you mean by real magic?

By: SanguineEmpiricist

SanguineEmpiricist — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 19:28:41 +0000

You’re right, they’re just not well read. Taleb respects him the most out of any thinker and his post-liberalism/book on Isiah Berlin is relatively good. He is aware of Haidt’s moral methodology as well.

By: E. Antony Gray (@RiverC)

E. Antony Gray (@RiverC) — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 16:44:34 +0000

this is wishful thinking, re: culture. Culture is a set of semantic contents, though they involve also tacit semantics (rituals.) Biology predisposes, but does not determine. If culture is real magic, you will not find proofs for it in natural philosophy.

By: Rasputin

Rasputin — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 14:29:16 +0000

Perhaps I read it when I was younger and more impressionable. But I still think that the attack on humanism in Straw Dogs could be seen as a much less fully realised precursor to aspects of the DE attack on progressivism, particuarly the sections in which he attacks contemporary notions of moral progress. Grey was one of Dawkins better mainstream critics around the time of the God Delusion, even if he failed to systemise his objections into anything like Moldbugs brilliance. I agree that his understanding of evolution focuses far to heavily on the adaptive and misses out on the generative implications almost entirely. His conception of history as a cycle of gain and loss, rather than something with the potential for a telos, probably makes him resistant to such lines of thought.