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]
Three Worlds Collide, dude. Three Worlds Collide that doesn't require non-humans. Total war of cultural annihilation might be the only logical, coherent and moral option for all three. As you can already see, I pick Normal Ending in such an eventuality.
(Might writing it have been EY's Dumbledore-like plan to give us a reference point for when we discover this very kind of situation in ordinary human history? I'm asking you to ponder this last one seriously, paranoid as it might sound.)
In particular:
Duh.
Duh. There's no Alderson line to blow up!
Maybe.
The real logical end point "superhappies" won't care about the things they agree to care about in the story. The logical end point of universalism isn't even superhappies, the logical endpoint is a singularity of holier than thou signalling inspired behaviour.
In its most memetically virulent form possible. I see a bunch of puritans lecturing and torturing each other over how evil they are, forever. I rather take a good boot stomp on my face forever than that. Humans are better at dealing with that kind of pain.
But obviously I could be wrong, I'v... (read more)