Setup instructions for Dataview, Marp Slides, and Web Clipper — the three plugins that complete the Karpathy-style LLM wiki pattern.
Links: INDEX, Working With Claude
What it does: Queries your vault like a database. Filters by status, date, folder, tags, links.
Install: Settings > Community Plugins > Browse > search “Dataview” > Install > Enable.
Recommended settings (Settings > Dataview):
= this.status in pages)Example queries for this vault:
All active research, sorted by date:
```dataview
TABLE status, created
FROM "research"
WHERE status = "active"
SORT created DESC
```
Everything linking to a specific tag file (put this inside a tag index page):
```dataview
LIST
FROM [[tags/philosophy]]
SORT file.name ASC
```
Recently modified pages across the vault:
```dataview
TABLE file.folder AS "Location", status
SORT file.mtime DESC
LIMIT 20
```
Pages grouped by status:
```dataview
TABLE rows.file.link AS "Pages"
WHERE status
GROUP BY status
```
Page counts per folder (DataviewJS):
```dataviewjs
for (let folder of ["projects", "research", "notes", "tasks", "logs"]) {
let count = dv.pages('"' + folder + '"').length;
dv.paragraph(`**${folder}:** ${count} pages`);
}
```
Key detail: Our ## Tags section uses markdown links like [philosophy](/Vault/tags/philosophy/). Dataview’s FROM [[tags/philosophy]] finds all pages containing a link to that tag file — so our existing tag system works with Dataview out of the box. No need for #hashtag syntax.
What it does: Renders markdown files with marp: true frontmatter as slide decks. Preview in Obsidian, export to PDF/PPTX/HTML.
Install: Settings > Community Plugins > Browse > search “Marp Slides” (by Samuele Cozzi) > Install > Enable.
Configuration (Settings > Marp Slides):
CLI also installed: marp is available in terminal for batch export:
marp slides.md --pdf
marp slides.md --pptx
marp slides.md --html
Quick start: Any research page can become a rough slide deck by adding this frontmatter and using --- between slides:
---
marp: true
theme: gaia
paginate: true
headingDivider: 2
---
With headingDivider: 2, every ## heading starts a new slide automatically.
What it does: Clips web articles to markdown, drops them in your vault’s raw/ folder for ingestion.
Install: Browser extension — search “Obsidian Web Clipper” in Chrome/Edge/Firefox extension store. Official extension by the Obsidian team.
Configure the template (click extension icon > settings gear):
rawsource: `` (text)author: `` (text)title: `` (text)clipped: `` (text)published: `` (text)Two pro-capitalism camps fight over foundations — and the libertarian defends his case by conceding subjectivism and grounding it on performative contradiction, the exact move that would have bought him the objectivity he’s disclaiming.
Date: 2025-02-13 Source: YouTube — The Rational Egoist — Transcript Participants: Michael Leibowitz (Objectivism) vs. Jack V. Lloyd (libertarian voluntarism, author of Philosophical Voluntarism) Format: ~77 min, two halves — each defends “my system best defends capitalism,” then open exchange. No panel/Q&A. Result: No resolution; collapses (by both debaters’ agreement) into a pure epistemology dispute — objective vs. subjective knowledge. Vault relevance: Relational Objectivity, The Constitutive/Elective Distinction, The Regress Problem, Is-Ought and Performative Grounding, Stance-Independence Retreat, Wilson vs Objectivism
Leibowitz posted “objectivism offers the best defense of capitalism”; Lloyd objected; this is the debate. The standard frame is Rand’s old charge that libertarians lift the politics (NAP, property) without earning it from metaphysics + ethics. That charge is present — but the unusual part is Lloyd’s defense, which doesn’t reach for natural law at all.
Both explicitly agree near the end that the whole thing reduces to epistemology. Leibowitz cites Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: the postmodernist undercuts his own argument by retreating to “it’s all opinion.” Lloyd insists he’s not contradicting himself — he grants observed facts/cause-effect (“a bridge between both”) while denying ultimate truth.
The twist, precisely stated (Chris). The novelty isn’t libertarian-vs-objectivist per se — it’s that Lloyd defends libertarianism through a moral anti-realist framework and rejects the objectivist framework outright.
“Most Mises-libertarians have no trouble accepting objectivism.” — Chris
So Lloyd is an outlier: the usual fusionist libertarian is happy to bolt Randian ethics onto the politics. Lloyd refuses that and refuses Rothbard’s natural law (he says so explicitly in his opening), grounding instead on performative contradiction + adopted psychology + anti-realism about ultimate truth.
Chris’s verdict on the anti-realism: heavily lacking. When Leibowitz pressed, Lloyd squirmed each time. The pin-down move Chris flagged as decisive:
“How can you make statements without accepting those statements are true?”
That’s the self-refutation horn, and it landed. Lloyd makes a five-minute string of truth claims (history is violent, kings got away with it, cause-and-effect is real, performance proves existence) while maintaining we can’t know truth. Leibowitz’s “on one hand you say we can’t know, on the other you make truth claims, and any assertion I make you dissolve into ‘it’s all subjective’” is the correct read of the structure — Lloyd is trapped in the subjectivist web he spun.
The deeper kill shot (Chris): the anti-realism arc is itself a performative contradiction. As a libertarian, Lloyd knows performative contradiction — it’s the libertarian’s own grounding tool (Hoppe’s argumentation ethics). He uses it to ground self-ownership and consent. But then his whole moral anti-realism is performatively self-defeating on the same logic:
“Why believe in the NAP?” — Chris
If morality is subjective and non-self-executing, the NAP is just Lloyd’s preference — yet he spends the debate arguing people should adopt it, that it’s the best defense of capitalism. Advocacy of a norm performatively presupposes the norm is correct to adopt, not merely preferred. You cannot argue “you ought to accept the NAP” while holding “there are no objective oughts.” This is a level deeper than Leibowitz’s epistemic catch (truth-claims-while-denying-truth): it’s a normative performative contradiction — denying moral realism in the act of prescribing a moral norm. And it’s the move Lloyd of all people should have seen, because performative contradiction is exactly how Hoppe’s libertarianism grounds the NAP in the first place — as something the arguer cannot coherently deny.
Closing synthesis (Chris): both camps pre-decide the structural/elective split; the vault lets time decide it. The two positions reduce to mirror over-commitments:
- Objectivist: “since we can prove one moral truth, everything is objective.”
- Libertarian: “everyone should do what they want — but we all believe in the NAP.” — Chris
Each picks the split in advance and then forces every norm to one side. The Objectivist generalizes from a single proven case to total objectivity; the libertarian declares everything elective and then smuggles one mandatory exception (the NAP) it can’t justify on its own terms. The vault’s answer is that there are both structural and elective choices — and time tells us which is which. Which norms are constitutive/agent-relative (real, non-arbitrary) versus genuinely elective isn’t settled by armchair fiat from either side; it’s revealed empirically by convergence under reality-pressure over long timescales (Trunk 2 sorting Trunk 1). The error common to Leibowitz and Lloyd is wanting the structural/elective boundary fixed by their epistemology up front, when it’s an output of accumulated reality-testing, not an input.
The root of the divide: the subjective theory of value (Chris). Why do Objectivists and (Austrian) libertarians clash at all when they agree on so much? Because the libertarian side inherits the Austrian subjective theory of value (Mises) — Rand fought Mises over exactly this. Hoppe is the instructive case: he keeps subjective value in economics but tries to make property ethics objective via argumentation; Lloyd kept the subjectivity and dropped the ethical-objectivity half (which is why he reads as more consistently Misesian than the fusionists who bolt on Objectivism).
The Objectivists’ reverse error — and the grenade test (Chris). Objectivism over-shoots in the opposite direction: “everything is objective,” yet it is a person’s actions that reveal what he prefers at any given choice. Chris’s standing illustration:
“Does a dad throw himself on a grenade to save his family?” — Chris
There is no third-person objective right answer here — and even Objectivists concede it’s only “right” for the person making it (Rand’s own move: dying for those you love can be selfish, because life without them isn’t worth living to you). That concession is agent-relativity — Category 3. So the Objectivist who says “everything is objective” already lives in the agent-relative middle at the margins, just as the libertarian who says “everything is elective” already smuggles in one mandatory norm. Both tacitly occupy the constitutive middle they verbally deny — from opposite ends.
So they agree more than they disagree (Chris). Strip the meta-layer and Objectivist, libertarian, and vault all reach the same practical structure — respect property, don’t initiate force, the grenade is the dad’s call. The disagreement is in how they get to the answer, not the answer. Which is the Agrippa-page lesson restated: the errors don’t live at the foundation, and attacking each other’s route misses that the structure they build is nearly identical.
Why the argument is immortal (Chris’s capstone). All of this reinforces the vault theory: we can see morality emerge out of realism because of structure — but the extent of that emergence is not fully known, and it changes when the structure changes.
“This is probably why this argument has gone on for most if not all of mankind.” — Chris
The boundary between structural (constitutive) and elective is a moving, incompletely-revealed target: still being discovered by convergence over time (Trunk 2), and itself shifting when conditions shift — contraception, abundance, AI (Trunk 4 dynamics). So the Objectivist-vs-libertarian fight isn’t perennial because it’s unanswerable; it’s perennial because the answer is a structure-dependent, time-revealed quantity that no armchair epistemology can fix once and for all. That’s the vault’s diagnosis of the whole 2,000-year argument in one line.
The vault is the unseen third party here, and it splits the decision:
debates, philosophy, epistemology, morality
`
Optional: URL-based triggers — auto-select templates by site:
Workflow: Clip article > it lands in raw/ > tell Claude “ingest the new raw file” > Claude processes it into vault pages.
Keyboard shortcut: Alt+Shift+O (Windows) for quick clip without opening the UI.
By default, Web Clipper links to remote image URLs (which can break). To save images locally:
raw/assets/Ctrl+Shift+DCtrl+Shift+D to pull images locally.