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

arborealhominid

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]

Moldbug is actively hostile to libertarian thought - he's more royalist / authoritarian.

If he's become actively hostile to libertarianism, then this is a reverse from his originial position put forth here:

That leaves libertarians. Now, I love libertarians to death. My CPU practically has a permanent open socket to the Mises Institute. In my opinion, anyone who has intentionally chosen to remain ignorant of libertarian (and, in particular, Misesian-Rothbardian) thought, in an era when a couple of mouse clicks will feed you enough high-test libertarianism to drown a moose, is not an intellectually serious person. Furthermore, I am a computer

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5benelliott14y

Yes and no, he's mentioned that he 'loves libertarians to bits', and in general seems to think they have a better idea of the problem than most but don't go far enough with their solution.

33Viliam_Bur14y

Sometimes I think that Moldbug is an extrapolated libertarian. The world he describes seems to me as something that would naturally happen after a few iterations of the libertarian paradise. The "unextrapolated" libertarians imagine a balanced market of power, forever. But in real life, local monopolies sometimes happen. Each such monopoly would create what Moldbug calls "sovereign" -- an entity with unlimited power over their resources (including people), but still acting as a participant in the outside market. For the outside market, cooperating with the sovereign, or even just ignoring them, could be a more profitable option than fighting them. (Evidence: What does an ordinary western citizen think about freedom in China? And what about buying cheap products from China?) Moldbug is a few steps ahead; he thinks about what makes sovereigns internally weak or strong.