And are there many reasons to believe that application of central planning isn't getting more and more precise over time?
MM does not oppose central planning. His idea of a good state is to hire Steve Jobs and make him a dictator (or dictator's minister). Supposedly Steve Jobs is smart enough to prescribe central planning where central planning works better, and prescribe free market where free market works better, and measure the efficiency of both.
On the other hand, a democratic government decides between central planning and free market based on the popular opinion, which is based on professors' advice, which is driven by their desire to get more grant money. This leads to a choosing a policy not because it gives the best results, but because it is the best topic for writing papers about. For example: nobody really understands Keynesian economics, probably because it does not really work, which allows professors to publish many papers about it, which makes it popular among professors, and journalists (with some hyperbole here).
Essentially: Central planning as done in democracy is imprecise because academia introduces systematic biases into central planning. A non-democratic ruler could avoid this bias.
A non-democratic ruler could avoid this bias.
Whilst imposing plenty of their own, eg Grab The Money and Run, Impose My Religion on Everyone, Trees Are More Interesting to Talk to than People, etc, etc.
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]