Ron Maimon, Luboš Motl and other Internet things I hear of today for the very first time

Sunday, 19 January, Year 6 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

So, apparently there's this thing called Quora. On the face of it this would be yet another failed social platform, like those two or three hundred things that boldly went nowherei before, wis.dm and what have you. This superficial view would of course be wrong (says Quora) :

Quora is your best source for knowledge.

So now that's clarified, obviously Quora - being the best source of knowledge - would also know who the best source of knowledge is. As Mr. Dunning would put it, Metacognition for the win!

Moving on :

    Ron Maimon: What does Ron Maimon think on Luboš Motl's conservative political beliefs?

    Wikipedia states, that Luboš Motl is politically conservative. A quote from Wikipedia:

    His political comments include comparing Islam to Nazism and expressing sympathy for Anders Breivik's idea of a necessary war to prevent Europe from "becoming a part of the Islamic civilization", though he disagreed with Breivik's methods and his respect for Al-Qaeda.

    What does Ron Maimon think about this? Does he agree or disagree with these views, how would he comment on them?

Nice pasta dish I got going there, huh. Anyway, as best anyone can discern the Maimon dude is some twentysomething douche whose entire existence consists of and is reducible to social media profiles. Sort of a professionalii consumate redditor, if you will. So you know, he does a lot of useful stuff that principally consists of nothing at all.

On the other hand the Luboš Motl dude is some thirtysomething douche whose entire existence consists of. Shit. Well, he doesn't have a job, he has a blog, upon which he writes. So... ostensibly... there isn't really any difference to speak of.

Gaze upon it, dear aging generation, this is the brave new world. Food is plentiful, so kids don't need to worry about where and how they'll ensure their next meal, like prior to 1800. Mating has had all barriers lifted, and moreover it just isn't something they're much interested in anyway. There's nothing left for them to do all day other than play WoW and dork about on blogspot, twitter and stumbleupon. And imgur and popurls and tumblr. And wikipedia, uncyclopedia, theotheropedia, conservawiki, liberalowiki, starwarspedia, dorkopedia, dirkbogardepedia and so on. And so forth. And soforth.com. And soforth.moc. And sofor.th. Isn't that clever.net ?

Anyway, let's see the response :

Ron Maimon, trutheriii
Votes by Soubhik Bhattacharya, Mirzhan Irkegulov, Anonymous,iv Hadayat Seddiqi, and 3 more.
I disagree with him completely, but I think I understand where the position is coming from. Lubos grew up under totalitarian communism, as did my mother, and only someone exposed to that kind of leftist tyranny can understand the right-wing ideas that come. You rebel and rebel against communism, and since communism, like theocracy, sounds kind of nice on paper, it makes you want to be a devil-worshipping illuminati. This is common in Eastern Europe and in Russia, you just have to wait for these people to come to their senses.

While the sentiment is certainly mutual, I do appreciate the funny that is some lazy kid with poor school results and no social life waiting for his parents to "come to their senses". Why don't these guys see that this is the real world ? Learning ? What, in school ?! What nonsense! And who needs learnin' when you got truthin' ? Who needs a girlfriend when you got Anonymous ?

Marxism wasn't a purposeful plot to enslave the world, it was an attempt to prevent the accumulation of market power and to shine a ray of light through the horrific boredom and drudgery and consumer-fetishism that defines bourgeoise life. It is an attempt to free people from money, which enslaves people and steals their souls under the threat of joblessness and homelessness. Marxism-Leninism failed only because it gave shitty small minded bureaucrats complete control over an entire economy. It is not clear that there isn't a more enlightened path.

Most rapists claim their abuse wasn't aimed at hurting the victim, it merely was intended to help her see the world with better eyes. After all fucking is great, what strange defect in her head is preventing her from appreciating it ? Definitely have to wait for her to come to her senses. Preferably in a basement somewhere, let's call it Go Lag for more unintentional comedy.

"The horrific boredom and drudgery and consumer-fetishism that defines bourgeoise life". Hear the thing go, will you! Apparently being a pointless, useless, uneducated and boring kid is somehow the fault of the "bourgeoisie", whatever that'd be. Likely it'd be his mom and pop, that eschewed beating the shit out of him every chance they got. The reason truther Joe can't entertain himself is, in his own estimation, neither that he's stupid nor that he's illiterate, nor that it's lazy. It's just insufficient marxism in the world. Here's a hint, junior : your soul being stolen'd be the best thing that could possibly happen to it. Certainly couldn't be worse than what you're doing to it as it is, ya know ?

And marxism didn't fail because it gave shitty small minded bureaucrats complete control of the economy. Marxism failed because the only people that think marxism is a thing are shitty, small minded fuckwits, such as for instance Anon Raimon. By the time marxism takes over a group, society or state it no longer matters if you do or don't give shitty, small minded fuckwits anything whatsoever : as they're the only thing you've got, they'll take control of everything by default. And you'll fail, but not because "they took control" of things. You'll fail because all the cool people left long, long ago. You'll fail because when I point and laugh at you, Anon Raimon, it's not the sound of one man's voice and laughter that you hear. It's everything good and beautiful and true and worthwhile in this world that's laughing, pointing and laughing, filling the heavens and the four winds with peals of snicker and tornadoes of lol. All of it directed at you - and miracle of miracles, all of it inaudible by you. Funny how that works.

But people living in communist states just didn't see bourgeoise life as a soul-crushing horror, they didn't live it. They wanted the blue jeans, rock and roll, the easy life of the manager. They didn't want a drab boring world of cookie-cutter government housing and government jobs. They couldn't understand the desperation of westerners, because they had their own worse problems.

Go take a stroll through the drab of Westerners today, that marxism has finally taken over. Admire the drab of London, the drab of Paris, the drab of Washington, Boston or New York. The boring cookie-cutter world of government housing and government jobs. And you want out of it ? Ha. Good luck getting out of it by even more marxism, it'll be fun to watch from afar.

There is also the issue that Motl is probably financially supported by right-wing interests now, as he has to make a living after having been booted out of Harvard.

Some people are independently wealthy. I have no idea of this guy, but anyway the observation begs the question : do social media nobodies also have to make a living ? Or does living on the welfarist dole not count as "being financially supported by left wing interests" ? How's the truther-o-meter going on this, dear Anon Maimon ? Are you on welfare ?

When he was there, he was making enemies left and right, by criticizing a certain powerful loop quantum gravity supporter correctly and bitingly, and also by criticizing what he perceived as the left-wing political correctness at Harvard.

This would happen to be not only the job of the scientist, and of the thinking man generally, but moreover the point of the marxist's lifev. Unfortunately shitty, small minded "truther"-fuckwits have no representation of anything, and actually are simpleminded enough to display their conformity- and uniformity-mindedness just like that, out of sheer boredom. As they say, all you need to do to extract a confession from the stupid is to give them enough ink and paper.

This cost him, and no matter what he did, research wise (and he had a killer classic publication the year he left), he was on his way out.

If this is true then Harvard left with him, leaving behind some empty warehouses and other irrelevant buildings. This is obvious, isn't it ? Why'd someone able to write a killer classic publication care whether he does it here or there or anywhere else ?

He's also a complete dick, and I admire that, but it doesn't make friends.

Depends. So far, your idiocy is the best recomendation he could have hoped for, in my eyes. And unlike what you are or ever will be, and unlike anyone you know or ever will know, I'm very very rich, and very very powerful.

Harvard, despite the pretense, is not a particularly left-wing institution. Harvard professors tend to be a bunch of right-wing folks who pay lip-service in a condescending way to sterile versions of left-wing ideas. Harvard humanities is Herrstein and Murray, and kicks out Cornel West. It's full of that condescending type of liberalism that thinks it knows better.

Cornel West was an illiterate fuckwit, to the degree a barn would have kicked him out. This is scarcely any sort of argument, it simply reads "the militant marxists have betrayed the revolution because while they're very good at pushing it, nevertheless they're acting according to what works and that makes them stinky elitists - why even last week they wouldn't promote some fuckwit who delivered no results at all!"

I think Lubos needs to grow up a little regarding this right wing crap. He is objectively wrong regarding certain things. Global warming is not made up,

By now there's little difference between claiming "global warming is not made up" and claiming the earth is round. It's not even ignorance anymore, it's a certain brand of quite willing suspension of thought coupled with a particular livresque approach to reality. Yes, if the world we live in were in fact a play someone wrote, and if that play was predicated on the notion that some dorks taking twenty years of data, extrapolating it into two hundred years worth of history and then taking that result and extrapolating it into the future is perfectly fine, valid science because that's just how that particular fictitious universe works then you could perhaps say - in character! - that it's not made up. Seems a little contrived.

religious people are not stupid and delusional for the most part

This sounds like a fine candidate for the "least convincing strawman of the year" award.

Religious belief does require stupidity, at least of the thought-suspension type discussed above, and it does require delusion. While it's true that many religious people, and even more people with religious beliefsvi manage to isolate this insanity from the rest of their social, economical, political and intellectual life and in so doing manage to live reasonably fulfilled, normal lives does not mean that it's not stupidity and delusion. It just means some people are better at encapsulation than others.

That aside, it is generally amusing to notice that your average libertard takes nutty Islamist religious beliefs a lot more in stride than equally nutty Christian religious beliefs. Apparently there is such a thing as a right-wing, white supremacist, religious nutjob yet there is no such thing as a right-wing, olive supremacist, religious nutjob. Now how could this be ?

They have a fragile insight regarding human collectives and history.

Derp. Nobody understands collectives nao. It's a holy word!

Marxism contains a lot of valuable lessons, although you need to pick and choose.

So does my toilet bowl.

The capitalist world is not dominated by deserving people who acquired wealth through innovation, although there are a few.

This is nonsense. Capitalism is always and everywhere dominated by deserving people. The proof they're deserving is that they're dominating it. If they're undeserving, they'll go away. If you're more deserving than them, kick them out or push them away. The one thing you don't get to do is create some imaginary (and thus "better") system of measuring deservingness, and then whine and bitch that the actual system measuring actual deservingness in actual reality couldn't care less. By that token you might as well dream one night that all the houses on your street were floating, and then spend the rest of the day complaining to people that houses aren't floating irl. Such undeserving houses, seriously nao.

Capitalism as it is understood in the west today is a system that rips off innovation to concentrate wealth among innovation-destroyers.

This nonsense could perhaps use some fleshing out, for great amusement.

Capitalism only functions when it is close to its theoretical equilibirum, which today means a massive amount of redistribution and anti-trust action, but perhaps people can get together to make it work better with new ideas.

No, capitalism actually always functions just fine. Government intervention in the market can only be borne by very stable markets, that happen to be very close to equilibrium, in the sense that it will take longer for such intervention to wreck the entire thing in that particular circumstance. But otherwise, in all situations markets work just fine. It is incumbent upon Anon Maimon and all his friends to adjust their expectations to whatever is coming out of the market, because the market sure as hell isn't going to adjust itself to whatever is coming out of Anon whoever. Things just don't work that way.

But these are political things, economic things, and it is hard to do experiments to test, so you can't be 100% certain. I think of Lubos as a modern day Pacqual Jordan, somewhat misguided politically, although nowhere near as terribly as Jordan, but a technical powerhouse, and it's a shame he doesn't get a chance to do as much original work in the company of peers, as he could.

Maybe he's just not found any peers yet. With jerkoffs like you everywhere, it's not particularly surprising.

———
  1. The theory that there's value in user generated content is not much unlike the theory that there's cooked food in the air. To some concentrations this holds true, especially if you're around a restaurant with a good cook. The problems only start when you try to feed anyone by some sort of food-from-the-air extraction process. []
  2. There's nothing professional about it. []
  3. I guess saying fucker'd have been too much of a stretch. []
  4. "Appreciated by X, Y, some dork and Z.", a characterisation trick invented by Moliere. Used here unintentionally, of course. []
  5. As defined by... you know, Marx. []
  6. "People with religious beliefs", said as if you said "people with bunions". Obviously people get bunions, and obviously most manage to still walk. Nevertheless, bunions are still pathological, even if very mildly so in most cases, and even if generally unworthy of clinical attention. []
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15 Responses

  1. Anonimosław`s avatar
    1
    Anonimosław 
    Sunday, 19 January 2014

    Motl is not a fan of bitcoin, it looks like he has some misconceptions about economics.
    http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/11/bitcoin-will-probably-keep-on.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LuboMotlsReferenceFrame+%28Lubos+Motl%27s+reference+frame%29

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 19 January 2014

    The funny thing is that since we're all older than Bitcoin, any person alive has, at some point in their life, had some misconceptions about Bitcoin. Some manage to get over it, some don't. It's perhaps easier for some and more amusing for others, but still, on the overall... we're all in the same boat on that nude fact.

    Course this isn't really intended to mean that wilful ignorance a la Yarvin, Krugman et al or simple disinterested salescrap a la Keiser or the lolzbrothers is to be excused as "the same thing".

  3. There's no reason to expect any stability of prices (or wages) expressed in the bitcoins. No one is targeting the inflation rate. No one is doing anything else that would keep the value of the bitcoins nearly constant (relatively to products and services or at least relatively to well-known currencies which are quasi-constant). So if there's nothing that would remove the volatility, the volatility will exist.

    "There's no such thing as a duck."

  4. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    4
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 19 January 2014

    Lolz.

  5. Ron Maimon`s avatar
    5
    Ron Maimon 
    Monday, 3 February 2014

    I am 40, the exact same age as Lubos Motl, he entered Harvard a little after I left, and was the internet screamer there right after me. My mother is dead, and I am not wealthy. I stand by my answer, the respose is economically illiterate. Cornel West was a terrible loss to Harvard and a great gain to Princeton, even if you count by the only metric you would appreciate--- money coming in.

  6. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    6
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 3 February 2014

    Money coming in is not the only metric I would appreciate. In fact, it is one of the metrics I most often discount, much to the exasperation of the cohorts of illiterate dorks a legacy (of which Cornel West is a negligible example) has created all over the Western world.

    The problem with money coming in is this : it is very easy for it to mask the reality of the matter, giving you the false impression you're giving something useful when in fact you're not, and giving you the extremely dangerous conviction that you have something there. This is particularly visible with start-ups, and any actually competent VA will tell you as much : there are bad and good revenue streams and more promising start-ups have been ruined by the former than by any other reason (including unresolved sexual tensions among the founders).

    Yahoo for that matter is a fine example in this line, in that as Graham explains back before his brain turned to mush, pretty much all the dotcom boom consisted of ignar twentysomething faggots doing the practical equivalent of lapdances for a bunch of clueless old lemons, who responded by throwing money around (a process called, for absolutely no good reason, "investment"). The faggots took this money, dumped it on yahoo in exchange for headdress extensions, because like all faggot groups ever they had these weird epeen contests going (the exact psychology of this is too lengthy a topic to bother with here and already well described other places anyway). This generated surging financial results for yahoo, supporting to the supperficial eye the shockingly stupid notion that headdress competitions are an actual economical activity. They are not, nor is Cornel West "bringing money in" an economical activity. Consequently, the money brought in, by either, and by their ilk, will be simply discounted on the balancesheets by any sane reader (here you have a fine practical example of this concept, the last item on the revenue list).

    The problem with illiterate yet certificated idiots (of which Cornel West is an unremarkable example) is detailed in this footnote and commemorated here. Broadly speaking, they command no interest whatsoever, of any kind or type, except such limited attention as any chimp in a zoo : when you're young enough you may think their stupidity is somewhat entertaining.

    So there you go : you call others that which you yourself are, and you have this proven to you (inasmuch as you're not wealthy, and I am, and yet you dare speak in my presence of "economic illiteracy", as if this is allowed now). Which problem you readily resolve (in your own head and there only) as "the world is broken". No, the world is not broken. Your head is. Very, very broken.

    If you are at all interested in attempting to fix it, and perhaps start now - so very, very late in one's life, deep, deep in that selva selvaggia - on a path you should have in fact started about thirty years ago, were you not unfortunate enough to be born and educated by the stupid, you may perhaps be best served by the lateral example of my slaves trying to come to terms with my actions. You will need to acquire fluency in Romanian somehow before you can do that, however. I guess you may pay for it. Good luck.

  7. This is the most stupid article in the whole internet. You are only jealous because you know only an infinitesimal small amout of things Lubos and Ron know. And Ron is in his thirthys you moron.

  8. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    8
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 23 February 2014

    Well at least you misspelled thirties rather than moron. If given a choice I'd have preferred it that way.

  9. It Is all About freedom,fame,wealth,stardom,affluence,riches and living the Good life,if You Are tired of borrowing,poverty and living a frustrated life,Here Is a chance to change all that to get $250000 every 3 days and $1000000 membership blessing by joining illuminati,if you are interested Then contact: illuminatistars or call +14425, to Be on top today and make your dreams come true.

  10. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    10
    Mircea Popescu 
    Thursday, 13 November 2014

    No shit, marky.

  11. Eduardo GV`s avatar
    11
    Eduardo GV 
    Sunday, 2 August 2015

    Ron Maimon has two degrees, from Cornell and Harvard. And Luboš Motl is a former Harvard University professor. Both are followed and appreciated by thousands readers worldwide. Dude, you really should use Google at least a bit before writing about other people.

    Quoting Huxley's novel does not automatically turn any written nonsense into something worth reading. If I were you at this point I would do myself a favour and erase this post. Unless you don't mind making a fool of yourself.

  12. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    12
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 2 August 2015

    Instead of "deleting this post" I'll point out a few things for your benefit.

    I. The man who expects to post on the Internet and ~not~ therefore make a fool of himself is certainly very special, intellectually speaking. In the retarded sense of "special".

    II. The "thousands of people" argument carries about as much water as you'd expect. Consider that Trilema is idem followed and appreciated by thousands of people worldwide. Consider that tu ipse failed to google etc.

    III. No deletion ever fixed anything. I'd much rather be me, - which is, someone read and appreciated by thousands of people yet still ready to make a fool of myself and learn something in the process - than, for instance, you - which is, too insignificant to have a name and too petrified of wholly imagined consequences to ever be anything but insignificant.

    See how this works ?

    Now, if you have something substantial to add to the conversation, preferably something other than a reflection of your childhood trauma and assorted maleducation, I'm sure the Internet's all ears.

  1. [...] yesterday I linked to an article by a Czech fellow named Luboš Motl, as part of a larger discussion of nonsense to which he is no part whatsoever.i Today I actually got around to reading what the man [...]

  2. [...] quote an earlier description, Yahoo for that matter is a fine example in this line, in that as Graham explains back before his [...]

  3. [...] You would be excused for having no idea who Lubos Motl is, except of course... [...]

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