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]

On recommendation from several LessWrongers I've been over the past year or so occasionally digging into the many long posts to be found in the archives of Unqualified Reservations (archive links best accessed from here). It is written by Mencius Moldbug, who is probably familiar to many of us here as well as to readers of Overcoming Bias. He is an erudite, controversial and most of all contrarian social critic and writer.

He sometimes repeats and often refines his key ideas. He uses his writing style as a barrier to entry (it is debatable if this does more harm than good for his quality of thought and communication, but it is an interesting way to aim for the correct contrarian cluster), thus he is an acquired taste, posters have recommended the gentle introduction series as good place to start reading him. This series is similar, while this one and The Formalist Manifesto focus more on summarizing his political thought, which may also be useful in itself.

Link to topical entry is here. Link to discussion on previous entry I read is here.

Five ways to classify belief systems

I use the word kernel to mean "belief system." Kernels, like Gaul, are divided into three parts: assertions about the real world (Hume's "is"), moral judgments about the real world (Hume's "ought"), and paranormal or other metaphysical propositions (such as David Stove's wonderful ruminations on the number 3).

Everyone, no matter how smart or stupid, has exactly one kernel. However, kernels are not assigned randomly, as if in some weird Buddhist boot process. For example, your kernel is likely to show similarities to that of your parents, friends, teachers, karate masters, favorite anchormen, etc, etc.

Let's call a kernel pattern which many people share a prototype. Methodism, environmentalism, firearms practice, snake handling and Burning Man attendance are all prototypes. While there are few Methodist environmentalists who are also snake-handling marksmen and never miss a burn, various subcombinations are not uncommon.

In general we are most interested in complete prototypes, that is, kernel patterns that are broad enough to serve as identities. It is common to describe someone as "a Methodist," or (not quite in the same way) as "an environmentalist." People who match the other prototypes above may use nouns for themselves, but they're must less likely to be described or introduced as such. An incomplete prototype simply says less about you. For example, many snake handlers are also committed peace activists who drive Range Rovers and shop at Pottery Barn.

Two common examples of a complete prototype are religions, which involve convictions about one or more anthropomorphic paranormal entities, and idealisms, which involve convictions about one or more undefined universals, or ideals.

Many people consider the distinction between religion and idealism important and/or interesting, but here at UR we don't much care for it, since only metaphysical propositions can distinguish the two. You can go from religion to idealism and back simply by adding and subtracting gods, angels, demons, saints, ghosts, etc. I personally have slain many ghosts and quite a few demons, and I once kidnapped an angel and forced her at swordpoint to lead me to the altar of Thoth, where I sacrificed her for 20,000 experience points, permanent immunity to fire, and an alignment change to chaotic evil. However, this was not in real life. And even in D&D, I've never had the misfortune to encounter a god.

On LessWrong already discussed a more extensive form of this argument in "Belief in religion considered harmful?".  

Therefore, we'll just use the word prototype to mean either religion or idealism. Of course one can study either forever. In fact, most scholars in history have spent most of their time investigating the twisty little passages, all alike, of one single prototype. However, since here at UR we are generalists, not Irish monks, Talmudic scribes or Koranic talibs, we will try and work a little more broadly.

Before you can really think about prototypes, you have to be able to name and classify them. One obvious analogy is the study of languages, which are transmitted from person to person in a vaguely similar way. Prototype transmission really has nothing in common with language transmission, but the metaproblems are the same: what does it mean to say, "X descends from Y?" Is a classification tree a tree, or a directed acyclic graph? Is variation continuous, or discrete? Etc, etc, etc.

Probably readers can add a few, but I can think of five ways to classify prototypes: nominalist, typological, morphological, cladistic, and adaptive.

As our example for each, let's use the movement generally known as the Enlightenment. There is no noun for people whose kernels match the Enlightenment prototype, but there should be, because this noun arguably applies to almost everyone on earth. Let's call these suspicious characters Luminists. Their sinister views can be described as Luminism.

A nominalist classification simply accepts the prototype's classification of itself. Luminists, for example, believe there is no such thing as Luminism. (This is very common.) Rather, they are simply people who have seen the light of reason. It just so happened that they all saw more or less the same light at more or less the same time. But since by definition there's only one such thing as reason, this explanation is not inherently implausible.

A typological classification distinguishes prototypes according to specific features. For example, when you distinguish between religions and idealisms - as between Christianity and Luminism - you are performing an act of typology. The flaws in this approach can be seen by the fact that a typological classification of languages tells us Old Saxon is a dialect of Early Apache, since they both have arbitrary word order and long, incomprehensible sentences. Meanwhile, a vampire bat is a grinning, hairy owl, IHOP and Domino's both serve round food, Congress is considering a new O visa for ostriches, Burmese tribeswomen and other long-necked bipeds, and Luminism is a kind of Confucian Sufi-Buddhism.

A morphological classification is like a typological classification with a clue. It attempts to construct a historical descent tree by looking at multiple points of similarity. Morphological classification tells us that Luminism is actually a sect of Christianity, because Luminists share a wide range of kernel features with many Christians, and there are even intermediate forms which can reasonably be described as Christian Luminists or Luminist Christians.

A cladistic classification also produces a historical descent tree, but it uses a completely different method. Cladistic classification ignores actual beliefs and looks only at patterns of conversion. It asks: if you are a Luminist and your parents were not Luminists, what were they? Since the answer is usually (if not always) "Christian," in this case cladistics produces the same result as morphology For obvious reasons, this is often so.

Besides the usual trees, both morphological and cladistic methods can also produce graph structure, that is, patterns of combination or syncretism. For example, both methods identify Hellenistic and Jewish roots for Christianity, with the cladistic method adding various Roman cults such as those of Augustus, Sol Invictus, and Mithra.

An adaptive classification is not interested at all in descent. Rather, it focuses on how and why the prototype succeeds. For example, Luminism, Christianity, Sol Invictus and Islam are all prototypes that succeeded (at one time or another) by virtue of being an official prototype, that is, by explaining the legitimacy of a government - helping to organize its supporters, strike fear into the hearts of its enemies, brainwash its dutiful taxpaying serfs, etc, etc, etc. But with the exception of the third, all the above have also done just fine in an unofficial capacity, so this official selection is not a complete explanation of their success.

Of course, I personally find the last three classification methods the most compelling, with my favorites being the morphological and adaptive methods. But words are just words, and anyone can look at these phenomena any way they like. And if you can suggest any additions to the list, the comments section is, as usual, open.

Upon introspection I generally seem to implicitly use adaptive frames for "kernels" in ancient societies I don't know very well (or which don't have a well preserved written history - say like an explanation for widespread human sacrifice in Mesoamerica) and when I just read something by Dawkins. Morphological when thinking about religion in ancient literate societies I know quite a bit about like say the Roman Empire and nominalist when deciding how I classify modern religions like Mormonism.

There are other examples, but overall Moldbug's division seems to me to capture most of my differing approaches to thinking about "kernels" and indeed they do seem to be running on different algorithms. The obvious question which I hope to discuss in the comment section is which of these approaches is most useful under different sets of circumstances and goals.

Doing some thought on it his take on the concept and his division of the categories. In itself it seems a somewhat useful framework for thinking about intellectual fashion and ideological or religious transformation.

I've recently run across this 2007 post on the blog Unqualified Reservations (archive best read here). It is written by Mencious Moldbug, who is probably familiar to some Overcoming Bias and Lesswrong readers. He is a erudite, controversial and most of all contrarian social critic and writer. In 2010 he debated Robin Hanson on the subject of Futarchy.

Why do atheists believe in religion?

Not everyone these days believes in God. But pretty much everyone believes in religion.

By "believing in religion," I mean recognizing a significant categorical distinction between "religious" phenomena, and those that are "nonreligious" or "secular."

For example, the concepts of "freedom of religion" and "separation of church and state" are dependent on the concept of "religion." If "religion" is a noninformative, unimportant, or confusing category, these concepts must also be noninformative, unimportant, or confusing.

Since most atheists, agnostics, etc, consider the First Amendment pretty important, we can assume they "believe in religion."

My question is: why? Is this a useful belief? Does it help us understand the world? Or does it confuse or misinform us? Once again, our team of crack philosophers is on the case.

Let's rule out the possibility that "religion" is noninformative. We can define "religion" as the attribution of existence to anthropomorphic paranormal entities. This definition has its fuzzy corner cases, notably some kinds of Buddhism, but it's short and it'll do for the moment.

We are left with the question: is "religion" an important or clarifying category? Or is it unimportant and confusing?

If you believe in God, obviously you have to believe in religion. Religion is an important category because your religion is true, and all other religions are false. (As Sam Harris puts it, "everyone's an atheist with respect to Zeus.")

For atheists of the all-around variety - including me - the question remains. Why do we believe in "religion?"

One obvious answer is that we have to share the planet with a lot of religious people. If you are an atheist, there is no getting around it: religion, as per Dawkins, is a delusion. Deluded people do crazy things and are often dangerous. We need to have a category for these people, just as we have a category for "large, man-eating carnivores." Certainly, religious violence has killed a lot more people lately than lions, tigers, or bears.

This argument sounds convincing, but it hides a fallacy.

The fallacy is that the distinction between "religion" and other classes of delusion must be clarifying or important. If there is a case for this proposition, we haven't met it yet.

Peoples' actions matter. And peoples' beliefs matter, because they motivate actions.

But actions in the real world must be motivated by beliefs about the real world. Delusions about the paranormal world are only relevant - at least to us atheists - in the special case that they motivate delusions about the real world.

So, as atheists, why should we care about the former? Why not forget about the details of metaphysical doctrine, which pertain to an ethereal plane that doesn't even exist, and concentrate our attention on beliefs about reality?

If you believe that nine Jewish virgins need to be thrown into Mt. Fuji, you are, in my opinion, deluded. Whether you believe this because you are receiving secret messages from Amaterasu Omikami, or because it's just payback for the dirty deeds of the Elders of Zion, affects neither me nor the virgins.

If you believe "partial-birth abortion" is wrong because it's "against God's law," or if you think it's just "unethical," your vote will be the same.

If you are tolerant and respectful of others because you think Allah wants you to be tolerant and respectful of others, how can I possibly have a problem with this? If you stab people in the street because you've misinterpreted Nietzsche and decided that morality is not for you, is that less of a problem?

Lots of people have delusions about the real world. People believe all kinds of crazy things for all kinds of crazy reasons. Some even believe sensible things for crazy reasons. Why should we establish a special category for delusions that are motivated by anthropomorphic paranormal forces?

A reasonable answer is: why not?

Certainly, religion is an important force in the world today. Certainly at least some forms of religion - "fundamentalist," one might say - are actively dangerous. No one is actually stabbing people in the street because of Nietzsche. The same cannot be said for Allah.

How can it possibly confuse or distract us to recognize and protect ourselves against this important class of delusion?

To see the answer, we need to break Godwin's Law.

Which I think may indeed be appropriate. 

Suppose Hitler had declared that, rather than being just some guy from Linz, he was Thor's prophet on earth. (Some people would have been positively delighted by this.) Suppose that everything the Nazis did was done in the name of Thor. Suppose, in other words, that Nazism was in the category "religion."

This is by no means a new idea.

Violating Godwin's law to breach the fence between religion and ideology to see what cognitive dissonances we can dredge up is old hat for us LWers (A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies 2009 by Yvain).

Many writers, including Eric Voegelin, Eric Hoffer, Victor Klemperer, Michael Burleigh, etc, etc, have described the similarities between Nazism and religions. But Nazism does not fit our definition of religion above - no paranormal entities. This is the definition most people use, so most people don't think of Nazism as a religion.

The Allies invaded Nazi Germany and completely suppressed Nazism. To this day in Germany it is illegal to teach National Socialism. I think most Americans, and most Germans, would agree that this is a good thing.

But if we make this one trivial change, turning Nazism into Thorism and making it a "religion," which as we've seen need not change the magnitude or details of Nazi crimes at all, the acts of the Allies are a blatant act of religious intolerance.

Aren't we supposed to respect other faiths? Shouldn't we at least have restricted our unfriendly attentions to "fundamentalist Nazism," and promoted a more "moderate" version of the creed? Suppose we gave the Taliban the same treatment? What, exactly, is the difference between Eisenhower's policy and Ann Coulter's?

It gets worse. Another one of Voegelin's "political religions," which by our definition are not religions at all (no anthropomorphic paranormal entities) is Marxism. Let's tweak Marxism slightly and assert that the writings of Marx were divinely inspired, leaving everything else in the history of Communism unchanged.

Marxism, unlike Nazism, is still very popular in the world today. A substantial fraction of the professors in Western universities are either Marxists, or strongly influenced by Marxist thought. Nor are these beliefs passive - many fields that are actively taught and quite popular, such as postcolonial studies, seem largely or entirely Marxist in content.

This is certainly not true of Nazism. It is also not true of Christianity or any other "religion" proper. Many professors are Christians, true, and some are even fundamentalists. But the US educational system is quite sensitive to the possibility that it might be indoctrinating youth with Christian fundamentalism. "Creation science," for example, is not taught in any mainstream university and seems unlikely to achieve that status.

If Marxism was a religion, Marxist economics would come pretty close to being the exact equivalent of "intelligent design." But, again, Marxism as religion and Marxism as non-religion involve exactly the same set of delusions about the real world. (Of course, to a Marxist, they are not delusions.)

Should non-Marxist atheists, such as myself, be as concerned about separating Marxism from state-supported education as we are with Christianity? If Marxism is a religion, or if the difference between Marxism as it is in the real world and the version in which Marx was a prophet is insignificant, our "wall of separation" is a torn-up chainlink fence.

But there was a period in which Americans tried to eradicate Marxism the way they fight against "intelligent design" today. It was called McCarthyism. And believers in civil liberties were on exactly the opposite side of the barricades.

As non-Marxist atheists, do we want McCarthy 2.0? Should loyalty oaths be hip this year? Should we schedule new hearings?

This is why the concept of "religion" is harmful. If trivial changes to hypothetical history convert reasonable policies into monstrous injustices, or vice versa, your perception of reality cannot be correct. You have been infected by a toxic meme.

If memes are analogous to parasitic organisms, believing in "religion" is like taking a narrow-spectrum antibiotic on an irregular schedule. The Dawkins treatment - our latest version of what used to be called anticlericalism - wipes out a colony of susceptible bacteria which have spent a long time learning to coexist reasonably, if imperfectly, with the host. And clears the field for an entirely different phylum of bugs which are unaffected by antireligious therapy. Whose growth, in fact, it may even stimulate.

In the last two centuries, "political religions" have caused far, far more morbidity than "religious religions." But here we are with Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett - still popping the penicillin. Hm. Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?

I hope you can now see reason I've picked a partially misleading title, since I think Moldbug makes a pretty convincing argument that belief in "religion" may be considered harmful even for atheists, let alone those of us who aspire to refine rationality.

In such a model questions like "is the Church of Scientology a religion?" dissolve rapidly. Whether something should be tax exempt because it is "really" a "religion" or "a church" is a legal question of importance only to activists trying to challenge law and lawyers, that shouldn't change our ethical intuitions or cause us to try to imagine a sea or play up rather minor geographical features, to separate the continents of Religion and Ideology in our maps of reality.

Every single proposed mechanism for the retention and spread of religion from convenient curiosity stoppers, indoctrination of youth, to tribal identity markers hold for ideology just as strongly as for religion. Even seemingly very specific memetic adaptations like "God of the gaps", seem to arise in various non-theistic ideologies. Maybe similar adaptations arise because it is the same niche?

Thinking about the implications of such a hypothesis, atheism for one additional god is a rather easy step of rationality to take. Very few people believe in the great Juju or Zeus. Adding YHWH to the list isn't that much of a stretch, for those fortunate enough to be educated and living in most of the West.

But how hard is it for someone to question, in a unbiased fashion, such gods and holy words such as say Democracy?