What I meant was precisely the opposite: that moldbugged cladistics is overtly finalistic (the whys) at the expense of the mechanics (the hows). The very structure of cladistics induces that to an end — it _is_ a directed acyclic graph –but moldbugged cladistics have a distinct linnaean flavor to them as well. I could be wrong. UR is one of the blogs I stopped reading in the wake of the financial meltdown of late 2008 — i.e. prior to the Cathedral and such.

Present Moldbug is still too much of a system for me to take, I guess. I was taught from much too young to “make rhizome, not trees, never plant!”. But there are _fangs_ in the Dark Enlightenment that are worth following. (I think we can conclude that Radish is not a werewolf!)

I think there’s something to cheer about some notion of omnicomputationalism to the tune of “teach dumb matter”. I’m thinking, for example, of Manuel de Landa’s homilies on how rivers are sorting machines on pebbles and how soap bubbles are conditional energy minimizers. And I’m trying to stay this side of Gozer, not appealing to ideas of digital physics and mathematical realism and such; Stephenson’s “right pinky of God” that types fundamental constants into a command line and instantiates an universe is fundamentally Gozerian, but the notion that local structure-formation implies morphogenesis-computation requires only some simple monism, some kind of omnia-ex-machina.

Cladistics à la Moldbug misses this. Not only race, but the space race, the grand historical curve of China; all of this is thought of as distinctly finalistic, missing the hows for the whys. Do whys even exist? (Isn’t the lesswrongian basilisk a pathological outcome of a post-historical speculative idealism of the whys?)

“The biggest challenge is, of course, getting the money and engineering/science expertise together to solve those problems. On that front we’re in a race between civilizational disintegration and some nation or other powerful group recognizing that for a paltry few trillion in investment they can own the future Solar Empire.”

Score one more for Monarchy or facsimile thereof.

You first.

Right behind you. Honest Injun.

There is a faction of AI etc that is right out of Gozer Worshippers. Even the actual Alistair Crowley was benevolent by comparison. Gozer worship in Ghostbusters was in fact auto-biographical.

http://takimag.com/article/comedy_for_the_devil_kathy_shaidle/#axzz2nq23JsBM