I have read Moldbug recently (this Friday + Saturday), so the ideas are not very much processed in my head yet. Obviously I am shifting from what MM said, through how it makes sense to me, to my explanations which are not really based on MM's texts. I guess I should stop doing this, because I am basicly defending someone else's bottom line.
Your anecdote suggests that you missed an opportunity to become a chairman! :D
I also had some small experience with politics, and it also suggests that if a person has a desire for power, they can get it surprisingly easily. A few years ago I was a candidate in a municipal election. I did almost nothing to increase my chances (procrastination, lack of experience, lack of social skills, lack of desire for power...), and yet I received 50% of necessary votes. So I guess if I were just a little more agenty, I could have been a member of the municipal government. It was interesting to see that when the idea of being elected switched from far mode to near mode ("so, can we put your name on the official list of our candidates?"), many previously enthusiastic people became nervous and step back. This suggests there is some juicy low-hanging fruit here. I wonder what happens on the higher levels -- whether the competition suddenly becomes tough after the people with no desire for power are removed, or whether it is also surprisingly easy to become e.g. a member of parliament.
I was actually elected a chairman of a local organisation (the lowest level) this spring and that is about as much as I have time for. The district chairman has to invest more time (organising events and kicking procrastinating collaborators' asses) and money (phone calls, probably also bribes); needless to say, he gets his money back through processes I am not actually willing to participate in. And probability to assume that function for myself would be negligible even if I tried; I wasn't even elected as a delegate for the regional conference.
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]