taelor comments on Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.] - Less Wrong

9 Post author: arborealhominid 16 November 2012 06:37PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (259)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: taelor 18 November 2012 11:32:22AM *  5 points [-]

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".