Last month there was a discussion of Moldbug in the Open Thread, and I posted this comment regarding my primary theory of where Moldbug went wrong. I'm not really sure what the ettiquete on reposting posts that you've already made is, but the executive summery is that Moldbug allowed his identity to get so entangled in the fight against Whig history that he fell into the trap of thinking that all you have to do is say the exact opposite of what the Whig historians say and you're guaranteed to be right, a trap which Herbert Butterfield, the original critic of whiggish naratives, warned of. In fact, I think there's an essay somewhere where Moldbug explicitly positions himself as a defender of "Tory history".
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]