Was Moldbug Right about the Cathedral?

No reason to think so

Moldbug coined the term “Cathedral” in 2007 to denote academia and the media, which he claimed is sovereign over the elected government and society. This concept builds on Moldbug’s idealism, his theory that leftism is fundamentally an idea and not rooted in genetics or some other cause.

In 2021, Moldbug wrote an unusually concise updated treatise on Cathedral theory. In this article, I will critique this article, and through it the theory of the Cathedral.

The Ideological Homogeneity of the Cathedral

Moldbug begins by discussing the ideological homogeneity of the Cathedral:

[T]he cathedral is many institutions. Yet the label is singular. This transformation from many to one … is the heart of the mystery at the heart of the modern world. … The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

…

Most notably, … it has one clear doctrine or perspective. It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together.

For instance: in 2021, Harvard, Yale, the Times and the Post are on the same page. … In 1951, Harvard, Yale, the Times and the Post were on the same page. But Yale in 1951 was on nowhere near the same page as Yale in 2021.

I must point out that Moldbug supplies no evidence for this claim. What if Cathedral institutions are not as homogenous as they appear? In journalism and the media, the Cathedral is not at all homogenous.

Source [1], [2]

It is reductive and tautological to just define everything but the NY Times out of the Cathedral. We’re not playing wordgames here — if the Cathedral is “journalism + academia”, and the above chart shows journalism, how is the Cathedral homogenous?

These kinds of social analyses must absolutely be based on math, data, and evidence. It’s not acceptable to just make up claims from your armchair. How can anyone but the ignorant ever be convinced by such a method? My main problem with Moldbug’s writings has always been that he is “not a big fan of empirical evidence”. What value does your work have then? I cannot speak for his fans, but I certainly don’t need another man to do my thinking for me. I can come up with my own half-baked shower thoughts.

As for HYPSM — assuming, without evidence, that the median position at HYPSM is always the same at one time, this can be explained by the law of large numbers (read this thread!). The change over time is always coordinated because when there is evolution in the sampled population, the institution medians will change in tandem as sampling continues.

So it’s not just that everyone … is on the same page. It’s more like: everyone is reading the same book—at the same speed. …

We would never concede this level of axiomatic infallibility to a single organization, like the Catholic Church—that would be putting all our brains in one basket. No egghead would make that mistake. …

While we are aware that individuals—even very smart individuals—can go extremely awry in their perception and analysis of reality, and while we have seen even groups do the same thing (hence “groupthink”), we are sure they cannot all go wrong together. To err is human—but eliminating error is just a function of sufficient statistical power.

But statistics only works if your samples are independent. If some mysterious force is coordinating them—you are not measuring reality, you are just measuring that force.

Here Moldbug asks how all parts of the Cathedral could “go wrong” all at once. This is based one two false premises. The first was discussed above; there is no real uniformity in the Cathedral. The other false premise is that Moldbug seems to think, in line with his previously explored idealism, that Progressivism is an “error.” But no one is mistaken, what we have is exactly what people want, more or less. Leftism is primarily genetic.

Bad ideas?

Harvard is not a black box. We know how these organizations work.

The institutions of the cathedral are not relevant as hierarchical command structures … like the Church. …

Rather, the cathedral operates as a discourse—not an army of ideas, a market of ideas. The institutions are just brands—marks of prestige. Ideas in this market evolve; they reproduce by being taught, they mutate by being thought, and they are selected by— …

In math, the only selective advantage an idea can have is that it is good math. Good math beats bad math. …

The hard sciences are supposed to work like math. In certain places, certain fields, and certain ways, they do. …

But in science already we sense that here are other forces; that the selective advantage of an idea may not be solely driven by the quality of that idea; that while some shared sense of quality does remain intact, it is starting to feel like an eroding legacy. …

[A]ny problem is with the ideas—that bad ideas in the humanities have in some way flourished at Yale (and everywhere else)—like toxic green algae in a once-blue mountain lake. Now why would that happen?

It must be related to the pattern of selective advantage in this marketplace of ecology. …

There is no reason why leftism at HYPSM must be due to what I call reality bias in my Quantitative Sociobiology Manuscript. Here, reality bias is a misnomer; really, it just means any feature of an idea what could cause ideas like it to become more common in the next generation of ideas, with no external pressure. I don’t think there’s currently any evidence that anything but scientific ideas that are verified have reality bias. With no change to the gene pool or other environmental factors, we expect ideas to get more scientific with time. This is the process of research discovery.

But they should not get more leftist with time unless leftism is true. If they have been getting more leftist, it’s probably because more leftist people produce more leftist ideas. And the people have genetically become more leftist.

Moldbug really has no case that leftism comes from reality bias. As usually, he just makes it up as he goes along. There is more evidence that leftism comes from dysgenics and mutational load, which can produce an apparent increase in leftist ideas.

Is the Cathedral Sovereign?

The sewage that is polluting the lake is sovereignty. The dissidents have better ideas than the professors because the professors have sovereignty and the dissidents don’t.

The professors and journalists have sovereignty because final decisions are entrusted to them and there is no power above them. Only professors can formulate policy—that is, set government strategy; only journalists can hold government accountable—that is, manage government tactics. Strategy plus tactics equals control.

…

[We have] a form of government that leaks power—that inherently wants to outsource responsibility to outside actors. Whenever the government relies on university research for a strategy or policy decision, or makes a decision which is influenced by media reporting, or selectively releases information to the media, this trust is leaking sovereignty into the cathedral. Which, being outside the government, is about as “democratic” as Genghis Khan.

…

Why does the government—or more precisely, the civil service—leak power? Because it is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies leak power.

…

The form of government currently used by [us] also has a name. It is a bureaucracy, which is one kind of oligarchy. (“Deep State,” if you absolutely must.)

What is sovereign? I always like Burnham’s definition: “A social group which makes and enforces its own rules for itself, and does not recognize rules made for it by an agency outside the group, is called autonomous or sovereign — such as the capitalist nations all claimed to be and the chief of them in fact were.”

Do professors and journalists make their own rules? This only makes sense if you think they have complete mind control over elites, politicians, and the masses. But the evidence of complete mind control is very weak. Propaganda hardly works. Moldbug doesn’t know this because he’s a radical idealist. Cathedral sovereignty follows from idealism, and falls with hereditarianism.

I have written of an alternative model and given a procedure for verifying it. While there exists no hard verification of the sovereignty of any specific group or institution, my hypothesis is probably better than Moldbug’s.

It goes like this: we live in a state where the masses are overly organized, having several levels of democratic government each with large violence forces that use guns to exert force while obese and overweight. This state says it’s a democracy controlled by the people. If we are honest with ourselves, the median person is fine with this state, indicating no radical divergence of policy from the median. The state basically revolves around guaranteeing the rights and equality of this median person — I think we live in a democracy. At least, for the most part.

As shown above, the Cathedral is mostly representative of the variance in the people, and different section of the people reject parts of the Cathedral they don’t like — Fox News fans don’t trust the “fake news” much, and urban liberals despise right-wing media. We also know these political differences are mostly driven by genetics, not random media exposure.

But yes, some high IQ, hard working people do have extra power and assert deviance at the margins. However, these people are related to the masses, so they don’t have radically divergent views, limiting the importance of whatever power they do have.

I think a good way to see who has extra power is to see who has the money. If you can get concessions from the masses they don’t already want, you can get money from them. Who has the money? The masses have about 70% of the wealth spread between them, and the economic elite (1%) have the remaining 30%. The education industry, which partially serves the masses, gets 6% of the GDP, so their power is definitely less than the economic 1%, if we accept the money heuristic.

And this makes sense given a sanity check. Elon Musk is more powerful than some nerdy college professors or broke journalists. The guy can hire an army of these people to do what he says. And no, they can’t just reprogram his mind — he’s smarter than them and the memetic world is a big place, and he’s been all over it anyway. Iterate this for all the other billionaires, and go on down the latter to the multi-millionaires, people who actually build stuff, etc. The modern aristocracy basically. Some professors make their way into this — you see it when they accumulate 8+ figure net worths. But not all. And most people in this group are not professors. It’s a similar dynamic to that between the nobility, warriors, and Church in the middle ages. Lowly friars are not more powerful than the local lord, but the Pope is a king worth fearing, just not the only one.

But today, this powerful class only has a minority of the power. Maybe 30%.

This is a perfectly reasonable alternative view to Yarvin’s, which I would say is more likely to be true. Even if we don’t yet have all the data needed to pick between models, Yarvin’s fans tend to be very dogmatic about their leader. They see him as uniquely brilliant and “insightful.” But other models that are no less “brilliant” or “insightful” can be built (and have been), and Yarvin has no evidence in favor of privileging his view. If anything, the evidence puts him near the bottom in the grand competition of political models.

Despite this, the masses don’t judge based on evidence. I think there’s a bias against hereditarianism and towards idealism, and Moldbug benefits from that. He also has the advantage of being very early in the scene, owing to his age. In addition, most people have an IQ of 100. Math and data are more complex than words and stories and select for people with rare right-tail IQs, so words and stories tend to get more raw attention than math and data.

Because of this, Moldbug’s type of thing will probably stick around until the science is very mature. I think I’ve laid the groundwork for the science that will replace Yarvin’s type of blogging, but the data and my ability to get more is limited by funding and resources and active researchers. One man with four figures can’t do much more than I have done over reasonable time spans. Gregory Clark and Peter Turchin are two other people really chasing beyond-group-and-IQ sociobiology, and both have spent literal decades building data sets just to test a couple questions they came up with ages ago. It’s clear we need more people and therefore more funding — this is the way forward.