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]
I wish he could say things using less then million words, or at least provide a short summary afterwards. My attempt at a short summary would be this:
People are more likely to prefer solutions that provide more power to them personally. Even if they are trying to choose the best solution for everyone, they still have this bias; they honestly think that a solution which gives them more power is the best for society.
In democracy, everyone has the power, in theory. But when we ask how their opinions are formed, there are two important sources: schools and media.
Therefore we should expect politics to move in a direction where schools and media have more power. (Or perhaps a direction where the average former student, media consumer, has more power? The same thing.) This direction is called "the Left".
Every other direction, e.g. trying to give more power to church, or entrepreneurs, or medieval nobility, or armed forces, or extraterrastrial lizards, or genetically superior mutants, or whatever... faces the same problem: the schools and media have no selfish reason to support them. These directions are collectively called "the Right".
There is no way to fix this, to remove the power from the schools and media, unless we remove democracy.
.