Meditations on Moloch (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Meditations on Moloch (2014)

slatestarcodex.com

226 pointsdhh210654 comments

This was a mostly entertaining read, if a bit all over the place. I do have one point to offer -- I noticed this article quotes liberally from Bostrom, Nick, but misses another thinker who has relevant ideas about avoiding what this author refers to as "multipolar traps" -- Ostrom, Elinor. I recommend those who are interested in resources for the fight against Moloch to look into her book Governing the Commons, as she devised a set of principles for managing common-pool resources to avoid these types of traps, at least in specific concrete scenarios.

I've done a write-up on the book here: http://250bpm.com/blog:128

The fact that Ostrom's work isn't better known is one of the tragedies of our times. It's as though people heard of tragedy of the commons, decided it excused bad behavior or apathy, and refused to hear how the tragedy of the commons is to be avoided.

I will also add Le Guin's "A non-Euclidean view of California as a cold place to be" as the spiritual complement of Ostrom's mathematics and science.

Thanks for the pointer, I am unfamiliar with the work of Ostrom. Based on the nobel lecture of her's it seems pretty damn interesting.

This, and Inadequate Equilibria have been a useful way of viewing societies problems. They've also raised red flags on things that I think are definitely Good.

Notably, both of these talk about problems in science, and how it's "easy" to solve...if you have a Science God to issue the Science Decree.

And then we start overthrowing the evil Science God Elsevier in favor of a more decentralized science publishing. This is a huge victory for good over evil, but it takes the form of replacing the evil Science God with Moloch.

Centralization enables despotism. Decentralization enables Moloch. Coordination problems are a real issue we need to address; preferably without abusive consolidation of power.

For those who prefer audio (podcast) here's an audio version of it (read by yours truly, though I did clips of Ginsburg whenever he quotes from the poem.)

http://traffic.libsyn.com/sscpodcast/Meditations_on_Moloch.m...

The monarch isn't free of moloch, if he has become moloch. He isn't free of himself. He is not selfless. He can't embody selflessness, because that would paradoxically require freedome from selflessness. It's an unachievable ideal. He can however try to destruct everything and everyone. That would be another form of selflessness. Thus, selfishness is a necessary property of being.

Instead of looking at rulers, the picture has to start at the root. I think they kinda skip over that fact, taking it for granted, though the first principia discordia quote that's noted does imply it.

Here is an animation of part of the poem (3min), for those who are too busy lifting Moloch to the sky to read a whole essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nonab6djMAA

A very good essay, also a deeply depressing one if you do not get to the end and consider his solution viable.

If you found that depressing, steer clear of Scott's Who By Very Slow Decay [1].

It's an extraordinarily powerful piece though, and an interesting stylistic counterpoint to Moloch's oneiric ramblings.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...

I agree, insightful and powerful, thanks for the link. The medical system in general is a perfect case study of the contradictions and cruelties that have emerged from our present technological and institutional status quo. Maybe a barometer too, telling of how well or how badly a given society is dealing with the current moment.

Is this American culture where people mostly die in hospitals, with “palliative care” prolonging their suffering? In Europe and elsewhere, people mostly die at home. It is unpleasant and traumatic, like everything there is about death, but still, I believe, infinitely better than what he describes in this post.

I think the fish farm parable fails when one considers few number of farms and more realistic conditions https://greyenlightenment.com/fish-farm-economies/

That it is such a cursory and flawed note posted under the brand of "Enlightenment Through Understanding".

Their argument declares an inevitable consolidation in amount of farms - so briefly explained it amounts to an article of faith. And a plain error encoded in two simple tables, where larger farms magically produce less waste products (pollution).

I once thought a TL;DR of this excellent essay is impossible, but then Eliezer Yudkowsky more or less managed it in Chapter 3 of Inadequate Equilibria:

Inspired by Allan Ginsberg’s poem Moloch, Scott Alexander once wrote of coordination failures:

> Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question—C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers—what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

> And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

>There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

> The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

> Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

> Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”

> The implicit question is—if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch.” It’s powerful not because it’s correct—nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything—but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.

Scott Alexander saw the face of the Enemy, and he gave it a name—thinking that perhaps that would help.

The whole essay is interesting, but I was particularly impressed by how vividly he articulated a lot of dry economic concepts in the first section.

This is the article that made me really pay attention to Slate Star Codex.

This is a great essay. It's lengthy but it uses its bulk to great effect.

It may be the best articulation I have seen of the Christian idea that the world is fallen.

And yes, when we say that, this is what we mean.

This notion that the world, or humanity at large, might be fallen from some earlier "perfect" state is of course found all over the place in the history of thought. By way of example, a description of the Golden Age, or the age of Truth, from the Mahabharata:

> Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.

(There might even be something to it, given how long human history from the emergence of behaviorally-modern humans (10,000 BC?) to the beginning of the historical record actually was. Who's to say that human societies in that time period did not gradually evolve to a sort of cultural- and value- "modernity", that was subsequently forgotten in some sort of great, worldwide social crisis? That might have been the true "Fall from Eden" perhaps, scattering human societies far and wide.)

I call shenanigans.

Yes, Scott's essay and the Christian idea of fallen-ness both fit the following high-level description: "The world is in a mess because of the way people are."

No, they are not the same idea, and claiming that they are (1) is unfair to Scott, since it suggests that all he did was to take an idea that "we" (i.e., Christians) already had and express it well; and (2) promotes Christianity in a way it doesn't deserve, since it suggests that Scott's specific and ingenious account of just how human nature leads to the world being a mess is one that "we" already had.

For all I know, perhaps some individual Christian thinkers had the same specific insights as Scott -- e.g., I think C S Lewis had some smart things to say about how the essence of hell is competition, or something like that -- but it certainly isn't accurate to say that "we" mean what Scott describes.

[Disclaimer: I am not a Christian. But I was one for multiple decades. When I say "we" above I am echoing NateEag's language.]

1. Christian ideas of "fallenness" do not generally involve Scott's insights about game theory and coordination problems.

2. Christian ideas of "fallenness" generally emphasize other aspects of human sinfulness besides the ones relevant to Scott's analysis (selfishness, greed, competitiveness).

3. Christian ideas of "fallenness" generally incorporate (as important features) elements that are conspicuously absent from Scott's analysis. "Cursed is the ground because of you": following Genesis, Christians commonly reckon that the world's "fallenness" explains its imperfect hospitability to human flourishing: just as some people look forward to a "post-scarcity" society, the Garden of Eden (whether regarded as historical or mythical or both) is a "pre-scarcity" society: one that provides everyone with what they need and want. "Since death came by a man, so the resurrection of the dead also comes by a man.": following 1 Corinthians, Christians commonly reckon that the very existence of death is the result of human "fallenness". None of this stuff is in Scott's discussion of Moloch; none of it needs to be.

(To keep myself honest, I just did a little experiment: I looked up Genesis 3 and 1 Corinthians 15 in a few books I had on my shelf: the "New Jerome Biblical Commentary" (one volume, liberal-ish RC), "The theology of the book of Genesis" by R W L Moberly (Anglican), the "Cambridge Bible Commentary" on 1,2 Corinthians (liberal Anglican-ish). I also looked up "fall" in the Oxford Companion to the Bible (liberal-ish Anglican-ish) and the "Concise Dictionary of Theology" of O'Collins and Farrugia (middle-of-the-road RC), which are the only two encyclopaedia-like things I have handy. There's no hint in any of them of anything like Scott's analysis. Of course that's a small sample, from a narrow-ish range of theological perspectives -- no evangelicals, traditionalist RCs, Eastern Orthodox, death-of-God ultraliberals, etc. -- but I think it's enough to make it clear that it's not true that Scott's analysis is what "we" (= Christians) mean by the idea that the world is fallen.)

THANKS for this. I wanted to write it but could not have done nearly as good a job.

Terrible sure, but why "fallen"? Fallen from what exactly?

Then surely you understand that the world cannot be non-fallen. Where is your deity in all this?

You're misunderstanding the entire point of Christianity, in the interest, perhaps, of a snarky quote? In Christianity, the world will always be fallen, sure. The whole point is that it is. The non-fallen place is heaven- that's where "our diety" is: bringing those who'd actually want to be there to Heaven. What we do in the meantime is try to make the world as less-bad as possible.

Ah. Could you show me where in your holy texts this is explained?

Among a great many other passages:

For the world being fallen: "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned." (Romans 5:12) "Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground..." (Genesis 3:17b-19a)

Our mission on Earth: https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Charity Note that most of these quotes are very often used (and quotes here) in such a way that it wouldn't even be sustainable to survive and continue giving. You have to use your brain, even with Biblical commands, in order to carry them out it seems.

Take note here that I don't even think any of this is necessarily moral or a good idea. But it's easy to find!

I was rather hoping for evidence of your heaven. All you have are old people writing down the words of other old people.

I'm sticking with Pastafarianism, thanks. Good luck with your evangelism.

We ban accounts that bully other users like this. Could you please review the guidelines?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have reviewed the guidelines. Could you ban this account? Thanks!

Well, armed forces and defence/offense complex predates everything else in his examples.

And actually demand army creates in sosiety may be very very useful since it drives innovation.

I always get a justification of the elitist exploitation vibe from these kinds of writings. "We can't do anything about it, it's just prisoner's dilemmas all the way down. Move along, nothing to see here".

It seems to me that the ultimate point of this essay is the exact opposite of that.

Uhm, no: The piece claims we are subjected to inhumane incentives set by competition for resources (rather than by corrupted individuals and groups who have become too cozy in their armchairs). It claims that only centralized control by an “unincentivized incentivizer” can prevent Molochian systems from sliding into degenerate chaos, without really specifying what that is.

I think the idea that a centralized solution will bring us Eden is not only naive, but it is also exactly playing into the hands of the centralized elite because it does not question them. Distracting from the blame of the elites is a convenient sleight of hand. The notion that efforts must be strengthened to establish a centralized control deprives us of means of getting rid of corruption by threats of forced replacement.

It specifies exactly what the solution is: bringing about the singularity in a deliberate fashion that ensures the resulting superhuman AI is on our side. I’m short, we need to create a loving god.

I don’t know if I find this to be a sane suggestion, but it doesn’t seem to resemble what you’re saying.

Yeah, it is some kind of god, which is a completely far fetched, utopist, naive and futurist idea. We already know how to deal with the problem of corrupt leadership: Burn it down and replace it. It is suspicious that this is not considered here.

I agree in part, it seems more apparent however that this cursory and throw away philosophy is the trend in modern intellectualism; the idea that in two lines one can convey a sense of authority, provide an accurate and irrefuteable conclusion, and then solve for x.

It is unfairly simplistic, to give people their own soundbites and bolster their already established opinions, when carefully approaching any one of the things listed would properly require an entire volume and much study.

“I am a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris not to try to kill God.”

This essay is excellent - gets a little bogged down in rubbing your nose in enough examples, but has enough depth of concept to compensate.

The mythological framing of this essay and its theme of good and evil as they appear in economics and war remind me of a great book, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain.

This book is an exploration of making and unmaking, where making is civilization as materialized care for pain and discomfort and unmaking is the opposite demonstrated by the document tendency of torturers in war to use benign household items as weapons, thus inverting the structure of civilization.

Here a simple quote to show Scarry's way of appreciating made objects:

> It is almost universally the case in everyday life that the most cherished object is one that has been hand-made by a friend: there is no mystery about this, for the object's material attributes themselves record and memorialize the intensely personal, extraordinary because exclusive, interior feelings of the maker for just this person: This is for you. But anonymous, mass-produced objects contain a collective and equally extraordinary message: Whoever you are, and whether or not I personally like or even know you, in at least this small way, be well.

And here a more in-depth quote from the book's introduction to show the deeper purpose of the book which is to hold up the imagining and construction of material civilization as a primary ethical concern, being the positive inverse of torture and war:

> The vocabulary of "creating," "inventing," "making," "imagining," is not in the twentieth century a morally resonant one: "imagining," for example, is usually described as an ethically neutral or amoral phenomenon; the phrase "material making" is similarly flat in its connotations, and is even (because of its conflation with "materialism") sometimes pronounced with a derisive inflection. But an unspoken question begins to arise in Part One which might be formulated in the following way: given that the deconstruction of creation is present in the structure of one event which is widely recognized as being close to an absolute of immorality (torture), and given that the deconstruction of creation is again present in the structure of a second event regarded as morally problematic by everyone and as radically immoral by some (war), is it not peculiar that the very thing being deconstructed—creation—does not in its intact form have a moral claim on us that is as high as the others' is low, that the action of creating is not, for example, held to be bound up with justice in the way those other events are bound up with injustice, that it (the mental, verbal, or material process of making the world) is not held to be centrally entailed in the elimination of pain as the unmaking of the world is held to be entailed in pain's infliction? The morality of creating cannot, of course, be inferred from the immorality of uncreating, and will instead be shown on its own terms. That we ordinarily perceive it as empty of ethical content is, it will be argued, itself a signal to us of how faulty and fragmentary our understanding of creation is, not only in this respect but in many others. It is not the valorization of making but its accurate description that is crucial, for if it is in fact laden with ethical consequence, then it may be that a firm understanding of what it is will in turn enable us to recognize more quickly what is happening not only in large-scale emergencies like torture or war but in other long-standing dilemmas, such as the inequity of material distribution.

This is one of the best essays I've ever read.

I was surprised to find it was never discussed on HN (plenty of submissions, no traction). So go read it HNers.

It resonated with me deeply too, which I guess is what often happens when you are at the just the right time in some intellectual development -- you've read the right things, and you already think or believe (is there a difference?) some or even most of the things that the essay will be telling you.

Then the essay comes, builds some new connections, and drives home one or more new points that you were building up to unknowingly. The whole structure is strengthened, and some parts of it even get something resembling a final shape.

We sometimes then just call it an enjoyable read and move on, until the next time. But regardless of the outcome the process itself is one of the best things in the human experience.

Yes. There were also several link-outs that are now on my to-read list, which is, to me, always a positive outcome. I think this essay itself is probably worth revisiting in a couple of months, too.

Seconded. This essay made me re-think what our problems are and what kind of dynamics those problems exhibit.

I feel the same way about the Inadequate Equilibria book https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ (free-to-read). In many ways, it's a different look into the very same problems, with more depth and less egregore/meme engineering.

Yep, Inadequate Equilibria is also a gem. I'd say that compared to MoM, it is more down-to-earth and about how to navigate the problem field and how to find the cases where one can make a difference.

I also feel that as an engineer it is really easy to forget to see the context of a problem. Often technical solutions can be really shitty, but still work because of the context. And installing better solutions won't work if the context does not allow it (or makes it too pricey). Often the shittiest solutions are cemented in use by difficult webs of dependencies that are hard to change. Examples of this kind of systems would be social media platforms (cemented by network effects) and payment systems (technically PITA, but hard to compete with).

Why do people keep recommending this book? It's someone trying to reason by metaphor with thermodynamics instead of just doing the basic game theory.

Mind you, I have never found Yudkowsky's thought anything but imprecise and wandering.

it's a really good essay. A similar example can be given with the current student loan situation. if employers all together agreed to not req. degrees, the problem would be attenuated , but defection means that such cooperation won't happen. An employer who defects will have an advantage. Competition makes things better and worse at the same time .

Can I get a quick summary?

By the way, does anyone know and use automatic summary plug-ins?

If you're interested at all, it's well worth finding some time to read the thing in its entirety. Yes, it's a long build-up that could be compressed, but the punchline wouldn't be nearly as effective without it.

I might have misunderstood it when I read it (and it has been a while), but I thought the general idea was about shitty Nash equilibria.

So far capitalism has driven moral progress and increased standards of living, but maybe we'd be wrong to trust it forever. If the logical end result of following progress is us innovating ourselves out of existence (AI, nuclear weapons, whatever) then we might need to take drastic measures to avoid the default outcome, get off the path we're on and onto a different one.

I can't stand slatestarcodex or lesswrong. They're not INTP but try really hard to be.

And MBPI--because it's based on field observations in the 1910's--is the least politically correct typology.

Can you explain why you brought MBTI into this (it has nothing to do directly with the linked essay)?

1. My original comment was that the linked website is trying too hard to be INTP. I mentioned INTP because it has a very specific stereotype and no other word in the English language covers.

2. But because this is HN, SOMEONE is going to say that MB is pseudoscience.

3. So I needed to premptively respond to the would-be smart alec.

What's "INTP"?

Meyers-Briggs personality type:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTP

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