Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell
Read the original on Slate Star Codex →
Follow-up reading
↳ Addendum To “Enormous Nutshell”: Competing Selectors — a six-years-later addendum · Jun 2019
↳ The Anti-Reactionary FAQ — the rebuttal FAQ · Oct 2013
Summary
Scott's charitable steelman of neoreaction (Moldbug et al.), now read in full: the leftward ratchet and "progressive immune system"; culturalist rather than oppression-based explanations of group difference; colonialism and the "uncanny valley of dictatorship"; corporal punishment vs. prison; the gender/happiness data; the Mormons-vs-Unitarians case for cultural unity (with Putnam's diversity-distrust finding); and - most notably - the "Reach For The Tsars" section, which frames society as actors trapped by incentives needing an "Unincentivized Incentivizer", an early seed of the coordination-failure idea later developed into Meditations on Moloch. Explicitly a summary he intends to rebut.
Why this score
Quality 81 · Excellent. Excellent craft and charity, the definitive accessible exposition of neoreaction, and - read in full - it carries more of Scott's own thinking than its framing suggests (the proto-Moloch "Unincentivized Incentivizer"). Held below the top tier because the bulk is deliberately derivative and the subject has dated. Solid Excellent.
Claude’s paradigm shift 52 · Moderate. Mostly repackages Moldbug for a wide audience (low novelty there), but it popularised the ideological-Turing-test norm and contains a genuinely fresh framing (the Unincentivized Incentivizer) that seeded later work. Notable, edging up from moderate.
Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. The definitive accessible steelman-exposition of neoreaction (and a proto-Moloch seed in 'Reach For The Tsars'); influential within the online ideological discourse of its moment. Niche, now-dated, and purely discursive with no material change — modest RWI.