I think it's very, very difficult to get a good picture of politics, both due to human psychology and the intrinsic complexity and non-repeatability of the domain. It's almost certainly not worth my time to get a good picture of politics, because that would require my entire life. But if I wanted a good picture of politics, Mencius is very far down on the list of places I would look, given all the red flags his writing raises for me. If I wanted a good picture of politics I would start by hitting up Carl Shulman, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and lots of other sources. I would probably never even make it down to Mencius Moldbug.
very far down on the list of places I would look, given all the red flags his writing raises for me
Although as Steven Kaas suggested in 2007, some thinkers might be crazy and inaccurate overall (and thus rightfully raise lots of red flags), and yet also have a few genuine insights not easily found elsewhere: if the most all-around-reliable thinkers also make some systematic mistakes (perhaps ideologically- or culturally-motivated), then we would expect some fringe thinkers to have some good ideas simply because they're exploring regions of ideaspace tha...
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]