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]
Isn't doing politics here kind of dull? If you want to discuss this start an open thread politics discussion. If you want I can produce random quotes from respectable and influential leftist authors about various demographics that they believe will need to be physically removed for their utopia.
This seems like an ad hominen since you know many readers dislike Sam0345. They do sounds similar in that they are right wing.
I can point to many neurologically produced leanings that universalism requires us to suppress as well. Also I can make the argument that most people have sufficent non-Universalist memes in their mind that a logical extrapolation of where universalism might evolve in the next century or so will terrify them.
So what does that leave us with? Try to preserve the balance between Universalist and non-Universalist human values we are most comfortable with? Heh, say hello to a strategy that we have empirical evidence is a losing one: Conservatism.
Many people who go "yuck conservatism" today will be going "yay conservatism" in 2030, especially if we really are living in a period of rapid evolution for the Universalist memeplex where many people can't abandon their old values and opinions fast enough to keep pace. This still won't make conservatism a winning strategy.
I'm pretty sure that principled or even pragmatic libertarians are already considered extreme. Indeed they have been called "far right" and possibly scary to non-libertarians on this very forum. How extreme might they be considered in 10 or 20 years when their few remaining status raising talking points are largely accepted as common wisdom among educated people?
Three Worlds Collide, dude. Three Worlds Collide that doesn't require non-humans. Total war of cultural annihilation might be the only logical, coherent and moral option for all three. As you can already see, I pick Normal Ending in such an eventuality.
(Might writing it have been EY's Dumbledore-like plan to give us a reference point for when we discover this very kind of situation in ordinary human history? I'm asking you to ponder this last one seriously, paranoid as it might sound.)
In particular:
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