and if the one long post of his I read is representative
Huh. That's an interesting post. There's a core idea that might be valid but it is lost in claims like:
Its core beliefs are claims about the spirit world, which no Catholic (except of course the Pope) has experienced firsthand.
Which is such a confused claim about Catholic doctrine that I'm not sure where to begin.
There's a core idea that might be valid but it is lost in claims like:
Its core beliefs are claims about the spirit world, which no Catholic (except of course the Pope) has experienced firsthand.
Which is such a confused claim about Catholic doctrine that I'm not sure where to begin.
I think an accurate summary of Catholic doctrine is this: all Catholics, the Pope not excepted, have only one channel of communication to God, namely prayer. However, when speaking in his role as Universal Pastor, the Holy Spirit prevents him from teaching error. Lay Cat...
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]