In Chris Mooney's book "The Republican Brain" he makes a good case based on recent studies for why we should think of the totalitarianism of the former USSR as a right wing phenomenon. [...] Conservative personalities then acclimate themselves to the resulting bureaucracy and seek to freeze it in place. Then, being authoritarians, they accumulate power and use it as authoritarians always do.

It'd be hard for me to overstate my skepticism for the genre of popular political science books charging that their authors' enemies are innately evil. I haven't read Mooney's book, though I have read quite a few articles with a similar thesis; if you're presenting his analysis accurately, though, it seems pretty tortured.

Mao was central to his revolution from its inception, and if you've read anything of his it's obvious that he was a true believer. The democides he's been charged with may have worked as consolidations of power, but they certainly weren't attempts to minimize social or political change; indeed, most of the deaths during the Great Leap Forward can be laid at the feet of novel but poorly implemented agricultural organization. (This may also be true for the Holodomor and other instances of mass famine in the Soviet Union.) Stalin's a more ambiguous case; many of his worst excesses do seem to have served a personal power grab, and he was a relatively minor figure within Lenin's initial party organization, but if anything he seems too ambitious to be branded a Marxist conservative. His purges don't fit well with a desire to safeguard the Leninist bureaucracy; on the contrary, they pretty much destroyed it. He was of course an authoritarian in the sense of seeking to maximize personal and state power, but the "Marxist conservative" label seems to fit Khrushchev and others of his generation much better.

In any case, if we're using "liberal" and "conservative" strictly to gauge desire for social change, then by the same token we have to decouple it from authoritarianism or adherence to positions generally thought of as right-wing. Indeed, in this narrow sense Hitler, Mussolini, and others (though perhaps not Franco) might be considered liberals: fascist (in the grandparent's sense) ideology is quite big on cultural traditionalism, but even more central is its concept of social transformation based on extreme nationalism, shared political goals, and economic corporatism. The nostalgia in its rhetoric has to be understood in that context (and, in Hitler's case, in the context of a sense of national humiliation following WWI).

Liberal means "novelty seeking". So what you have in human personalities are those who seek to minimize change and those who seek to maximize it.

You might be interested in these two articles. Note that Moldbug's writing is cited as an example of insight porn in the comments.

The "Dark Enlightenment" crowd differs from the Conservative crowd in that the former are more likely to be maladapted people wanting radical change in society and novelty in their ideas while the latter are well adjusted people who dislike change since it is cognitively expensive to deal with. Here is a left wing take on the difference. I think this is a key problem of his readers since it biases them towards such ideas (this includes me naturally). Arguably Marxism had a boosted appeal in the middle of the 20th century among Western intellectual elites because of similar reasons.

Moldbug himself probably only enjoys demolishing Universalism as much as he does because his grandparents where Communists, parents where Liberals and he moved in the university crowd in California, so the ideas he comes up with and the material he seeks out differ radically from what he was immersed in as a child, teenager and probably even now.

By the way, you can quote on less wrong by putting a ">" at the beginning of a paragraph. So if I write "> this" I get:

this

Moving on:

"The fact is that humans can be highly rational in one area while extremely irrational in another."

Really? How do you know that? Why shouldn't it be true that someone who is deeply wrong about one thing would not also be wrong about another? Your counter argument is a common fallacy. I am referring to studies in which a population is tested for whatever it is the study is looking for. You, like so many others these days, counter by saying: "I knew this one guy, he wasn't like that so your study must be wrong

No. That's not the argument being made here. The argument being made is twofold: 1) Exceptions exist (which doesn't contradict the statistical claim) and 2) The statistics are actually weak effects. But if you prefer, consider the following situation: In many parliamentary systems one has a wide variety of different political parties. Israel for example has 14 parties with representation in the Knesset. Almost any two parties agree on at least one issue, and disagree on a variety of issues. That means that if a party is correct about all issues, then there have to be a large number (or even a majority) of people who are correct about that issue but wrong on many other issues. Even in a system like the US, people have a variety of different views and don't fall into two strict camps in many ways (here again is somewhere where the GSS data is worth looking at), so the claim that people are across the board irrational or rational just doesn't make sense.

There is in fact what is called the "smart idiot" effect. Conservatives who are better educated tend to be MORE wrong than their less educated base because they have more resources to bring to bear in rationalizing their fears.

Sure, this is likely the cause of some of what is going on here, especially in regards to global warming. Moreover, more educated people are more likely to know what their own tribe is generally expected to believe and adjust their views accordingly.

"Moreover, by other metrics, conservatives have more science knowledge than liberals on average."

So in responding to scientific studies that show differences between how authoritarians and liberals process data you cite... what? a blog? I am guessing that the blog you consider most relevant is that of Razib Kahn.

I'm citing GSS data which happens to be discussed in more detail at a certain set of blogs. Note that the GSS data is freely availalble so you can easily verify the claims yourself. Note also that phrasing this question as "authoritarian" v. "liberal" is even more misleading than your earlier statement about authoritaianism. The data in question is explicitly about self-identification as liberal or conservative, not about any metric of authoritarianism. Indeed, many viewpoints that are classically seen as "conservative" or "right-wing" are anti-authoritarian. For example, free market economics is a right-wing viewpoint.

"In fact, the GSS data strongly suggests that in general the most stupid, ignorant people are actually the political moderates."

As Razib himself says "The Audacious Epigone did not control for background variables."

Yes, and there are actually fascinating things that occur when you try to. If you control in the GSS for income and education for example then self-identified liberals outperform self-identified conservatives. But that's not terribly relevant: the question here is given someone's political orientation, what should you expect about their knowledge level and accuracy of world view across politics and other issues? The underlying causal issues are an interesting side-issue but don't touch on the basic question.

"You seem to be asserting that "Person X who says A will be extremely unlikely to have anything useful to say." And asserting that "If Person Y thinks that Person X has interesting things to say about B despite X's declaration of A, that makes the person Y even less likely to have useful things to say?""

Because the acolyte is always less than the master.

That doesn't make any sense. You are essentially claiming that someone who says "That guy over there may be wrong about a lot of things but he may have a handful of valid points" is more wrong than the person believes all the wrong points. Essentially, this claim amounts to saying that being open to a possibility of a diamond in the coal is more irrational than thinking the coals are all diamonds. Do you see the problem?

I have to have a filter.

Sure, I think reading Moldbug is generally a waste of time and wouldn't recommend people to read him. But that's not the issue that we're discussing. Scroll back up a bit. The issue that started this subthread was the claim that some people on LW thinking that Moldbug might be worth paying attention to meant that there was something deeply wrong with Less Wrong as a whole. That's the context that's relevant here (and in that context most of the rest of your comment isn't germane).

My other reply got very long and this matter was essentially tangential so I've broken this off into a separate comment.

Furthermore the questions in his database search do not test for scientific literacy. They test for conformity. Which I am more than willing to admit conservatives would perform better at. If I repeat the social norm that astrology is unscientific do I have "more science knowledge" than someone who does not?

This seems to be more about word games than anything else. If someone believes that the Earth is round but they don't know why that's commonly accepted, they have a fact about the universe, and one that if they think hard enough about it, one that probably pays rent. That they got to that result by "conformity" is both not obviously testable, and isn't relevant in this context. Understanding that astrology doesn't work is a perfect example of scientific knowledge. Moreover, I'm not completely sure what you mean by conformity. For example, I've never personally tested whether astrology works or not. Is it conformity to accept the broad set of scientific papers showing that it doesn't work?

Really? How do you know that? Why shouldn't it be true that someone who is deeply wrong about one thing would not also be wrong about another? Your counter argument is a common fallacy.

You should read the material linked to from this LW wiki article on Compartmentalization.