I will read the Moldbug article, although I have to say I'm not optimistic, given my past experience with his writing. But I do want to disagree on this:
Inferring causality from a time-series of various economic variables is incoherent... Data about effects of economic policy tells us nothing if one has not already pre-supposed causal relationships between certain variables (ie, which variable is affecting which). If one had not done so, how does one know which variables to link with which other one?
I think you are either underestimating the tools at our disposal for causal discovery, or you have an evidential standard for causality that is way too high. Are you familiar with Judea Pearl's work on inferring causation from probabilities? Check out this sweet post by Eliezer if you're not.
ETA: I'm only a few paragraphs into the Moldbug piece and my hackles are already rising. He has already declared that a conscious being must be rational "by definition" and that other peoples' desires are unknowable, also "by definition". I don't think either of these claims are true (assuming the words have their usual meanings), let alone true by definition. This doesn't bode well, but I'll keep reading.
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]