longer.blue

# Moldbug's Gray Mirror I recently subscribed (10 dollars is quite the price for the de facto DOGE manual! if anyone's got an email they're feeling dangerous about, I got some gift subscriptions with it) and found this paywalled content on Barbarians and mandarins quite insightful as well (italics mine for technical points, bolding for semantics): >***The first way to replace this accountability system is by eliminating it.*** All currently funded scientists are permanently funded to work on whatever they want to work on. Overhead payments are paid directly to the PI—Harvard can try to squeeze the money back if it wants, but the scientist is now in the position of power. Bad scientists will waste the money and good scientists will use it wisely—as they already do. >*You can destroy all of NIH and NSF if you do this.* Don’t block the scientists. Free the scientists. It’s not your money, is it? Don’t randomly decimate the agency’s staff. Just obviate the whole agency. >A way of generating science that will generate much more science than NIH and NSF today, at the same cost, is to just continue every PI’s grant indefinitely and let them work on whatever they want. When they want to retire, they can hand the grant over to their best student. >**Separately, with all deliberate speed, the Administration will independently review all fields, department and programs of American science for their scientific efficiency.** ***A new investigation board will be formed for this purpose.*** >The grant system is especially terrible because it locks in science itself—the actual pursuit of knowledge. Grants lock the research into a program and direction. **End this bogus system of false accountability in science**, and just let the scientists work on whatever they want. Some of them may waste the money. Most of them will probably choose something different—and, not incidentally, love you for the rest of their lives. ***Be a king, king.*** >Yes, new researchers are constantly graduating and seeking money like baby birds. *Your objective is to build a new system of credentials that awards the same distinction of “permanently funded scientist,”* but through a totally different, better mechanism that will cause the new crop of scientists to look down on the old crop—incidentally, pouring another layer of cement on top of the nails in the coffin of the old regime. ***This new mechanism will issue new lifetime grants to the best new researchers.*** >In order to do this, you have to judge the scientific integrity of every scientific field. *You have to do your own survey of science, starting with scientific advisors you trust, and verify that everything funded by 20th-century science bureaucrats is actual science.* Some of it is. Some of it isn’t. You can give it a score from 1 (astrology) to 5 (physical chemistry). Every research program within every field must be independently and externally checked for systematic bureaucratic error. Yes, scientists can cross fields. Start with the right chemists, biologists and physicists, and work outward. >Should low-quality fields or programs or individual scientists be defunded? Maybe. But not necessarily. **Once we go down the rathole of whether people the old regime was paying deserve to be paid, we are back to spending money to buy enemies.** “And some who die deserve life,” as Gandalf said. Their crime was—they did bad work for a bad government. **One response is to leave the money, but strip the credential. It is often ideal to punish by humiliation rather than injury**. It is enough that bad science ceases to exist—next to the purification of the truth, clawing back money seems small. >Once a field has been rated, *a group of experts within it can be selected to restore the field, prune its research programs, and suggest areas of work that were being missed.* **Once these new leadership structures have been established, they can start selecting new grantees, establishing new journals and credentialing systems, etc, etc.** >***The entire reputation system needs to be rebooted. Nothing connected to the old regime is allowed to live—not Science, Nature, etc.*** They have all stained themselves. Covid was the last straw. *The editors should have to stand outside in Times Square for 48 hours, wearing no pants and a sign saying “Proximal Origins,” for tourists to film*. ***Then they can change their names and get new jobs in different fields.*** >***It is okay to really single out a small number of enemies—so long as you really, truly destroy them, or at least the evil pride that animates them. The Chinese, always a wise people, used emasculation for this purpose—like most such historical techniques, a little heavy for the modern public. But you get it.*** >**Every existing institution of science, outside the scientists and the labs themselves, must be fully cremated in a nuclear autoclave**. Its people will of course survive and may even be reused in different capacities, in different organizations. *But everything administrative that could preserve so much as a particle of DNA, certainly including buildings, has to turn into dust. Any legal method should be used to accomplish this.* >Destroying science is a chump trick. Anyone could destroy science. The Mongols could destroy science. Also, getting paid in science is a chump trick. There are a lot of jobs, especially once you shoot a few of your enemies. If the world-historic crisis of global retardation continues, there is plenty of blacktop along this chump road. But in the end, it is the road toward winding up in the foam yourself—probably with me, for all my troubles. (This is what usually happens to right-wing intellectuals, actually.) >The real trick is—saving science. I think it’s actually well within your power. And if I’m wrong and you don’t have the power—get it. Fast. Otherwise, you’ll die. Maybe even literally. Real power is no joke. >*Once you stand up a new scientific establishment (not to mention a new educational and media establishment), it will still report to the chief executive. In fact, it will take on the character of that President.* >If he cannot create a new science which is palpably, self-evidently superior to the old science—not just by leaving out all the weird race communism—maybe he is not the right king for the job after all. **The true king is tested not just in the energy of his actions, but in the fineness of his discernment. His sword cuts every thread, in exactly the right place.** It will seem entirely logical that he is the center of all prestige—like Elizabeth I in Elizabethan England. Not at all like Elizabeth II in the Britpopper UK. >Ultimately, this scheme succeeds if and only if the new science can look down with nothing but contempt at the old science—and the new scientists look back without regret at the old science. Trust me, no one is going to regret working on their grants. >**If the king can capture even this highest fortress of prestige, nothing else of the old regime can possibly remain.** There was a reason the US and USSR poured rivers of cash into the sciences, and even the arts, in the Cold War. *What we call “soft power” is essentially the battle for the loyalty of the nobility—and the West won the Cold War largely by undermining the loyalty of young Eastern elites.* >While the state’s need for consent is universal, **the lower classes—the bourgeoisie, peasantry and underclass—can be coerced into consent.** With nobles this is less easy. Russia had a prestige fork between its old nobility and its new intelligentsia for 50 years before the Revolution. Putin’s regime suffers greatly from this condition today. >***To capture an elite, you have to demolish its institutions, filter its personnel (for both loyalty and talent), and rehouse them in new and better institutions. Once these new institutions are firmly established and clearly superior, the regime change is complete. It’s an understatement to say that the administration is far away from any such dream.*** # Outro *"The first basic principle of anti-coup defense is therefore to deny legitimacy to the putschists." --THE ANTI-COUP MANUAL*