I've seen several people on Less Wrong recommend Mencius Moldbug's writings, and I've been curious about how he became so popular here. He's certainly an interesting thinker, but he's rather obscure and doesn't have any obvious connection to Less Wrong, so I'm wondering where this overlap in readership came from.
[EDIT by E.Y.: The answer is that he's not popular here. The 2012 LW annual survey showed 2.5% (30 of 1195 responses) identified as 'reactionary' or 'Moldbuggian'. To the extent this is greater than population average, it seems sufficiently explained by Moldbug having commented on the early Overcoming Bias econblog before LW forked from it, bringing with some of his own pre-existing audience. I cannot remember running across anyone talking about Moldbug on LW, at all, besides this post, in the last year or so. Since this page has now risen to the first page of Google results for Mencius Moldbug due to LW's high pagerank, and on at least one occasion sloppy / agenda-promoting journalists such as Klint Finley have found it convenient to pretend to an alternate reality (where Moldbug is popular on LW and Hacker News due to speaking out for angry entitled Silicon Valley elites, or something), a correction in the post seems deserved. See also the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain, LW's second-highest-karma user). --EY]
I'm a Moldbug fan, and I agree with most of what he says about AGW, assuming I have read him correctly. His writings are dense and can be difficult to parse.
As he says, we do not have the scientific tools to make sensible climate predictions for the next, say, 50 years, because there are far too many free parameters, and you cannot do an experiment (i.e. perturb the climate and observe the response in order to establish the parameters). The fact that he mentions macroeconomics next in the article is amusing because there you have the exact same modelling procedures, but the difference is that macro economists freely admit this problem. Moldbug freely concedes the sign of the effect (i.e. CO2 increases temperature) but this is meaningless if you don't know the magnitude. I also agree with him that the assumption that warmer temperatures are purely bad is absurd - of course there will be benefits too.
I think that on climate science, he is saying that there is no conspiracy as such, but that, like in every other scientific field, there is little interest in funding any dis-confirmatory studies. Therefore the only research or modelling that gets carried out is that which is expected to support the consensus, and the only stuff that gets published is that which beats the margin of statistical significance. This is hardly unique to climatology, but the problem is worse there because the field is so politicised; climatologists see their work as part of a public policy debate in a way that (say) biochemists don't, and the effect of government funding is so pernicious. At least that's what I think Moldbug is saying, if he is saying there is a grand conspiracy I disagree. I wholeheartedly agree that Science is often not science, and that Science is an arm of the state, but you don't need Moldbug for that, Hayek wrote extensively and brilliantly on the subject.
Where I disagree with Moldbug is on the precautionary principle. I do think there is a difference between a 3 degree temperature rise caused by humans, and one caused by "natural effects," in that we are more likely to be able to remedy the former than the latter.
None of this is to say that global warming isn't "real," btw.
This neither raises nor lowers my confidence in the rest of his writings.
Really? There has been masses of funding from groups environmental policy would adversely affect (fossil fuel companies mainly) to find discomfirmatory evidence or muddy the waters, and they leap on any evidence that appears to be on their side (see the 'climategate' emails).