When you refuse to treat humans as rational agents, it's easy to forget the most important aspect of human behavior: that it responds to incentives (even perverse ones). How hard-working or intelligent a human is depends on whether society rewards hard work and intelligence. If the products of someone's hard work are redistributed to those who are lazy on that grounds that being lazy is not the person's fault, there will suddenly be a lot fewer hard workers and a lot more lazy people.
Except that there is no such sudden change, and the numbers of unemployed people increase and decrease with the health of the economy, indicating that people are willing to take jobs when they are available, and that status is important as well as income, and that people can acquire money through luck and inheritance as well as hard work...
I could go on.
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]