I see zero evidence that, among a million patches, the worst cases would never ever arise once.
Looking at the real world spending of people with power and wealth and the traits these people have it seems to me that you would see many many more Dubai's and Singapore's than summer camps for sadists.
Why is one in a million that terrible? Its a far better track record than democracy or monarchy have... Indeed why would one in a hundred or one in ten be that horrible? Your opinion if this is an acceptable utilitarian trade and even desirable compared to modern third world misery, depend strongly on where you stand on torture vs. dust specks.
Looking at the real world spending of people with power and wealth and the traits these people have it seems to me that you would see many many more Dubai's and Singapore's than summer camps for sadists.
In the 20th century, in a world where democracy and human rights are actively promoted, all factors that would be missing from Moldburgia. Look at the real world behaviour of autocrats in the past.
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]