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Comment by mikeklaas | Hacker News Reader

For a much grimmer and soul-wrenching take on this, read Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...

Meditations on Moloch made such an impact on me, that I routinely say aloud "Moloch" when I spot circumstances of competition leading to otherwise irrationally bad outcomes. Sort of in a religious way. :)

I went to comments exactly to see if anyone mentioned it already.

BTW. The efficiency (specialization) vs redundancy (genericity) is a kind of jing-jang, fractal thing and is part of how the universe ... dances... I'd say (inspired by Alan Watts lectures). Systems have cycles where they build specilization up until it becomes so fragile and unstable that it blows up and genericity takes over again. I don't know if that's like some law of cybernetics or something.

Similar to how stability on one level of analysis leads to instability in the one above it (well described in Taleb's book).

And the yin to that yang: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/moloch-hasnt-won/

Longer series, but the first post does a good job of summarizing Meditations on Moloch.

Somewhat offtopic, try listenig to the original poem on youtube. It's a treat.

>an ancient Carthaginian demon

This shouldn't bother me but it really does. For a community striving to be less wrong, how does someone write a 47-minute long post about Moloch but not know Moloch?

It doesn't really matter since it's about the metaphor not the actual Moloch, but I guess it's because of where it's posted. Not sure if there's a name for it but there's a phenomena where if you say you care about something, you'll get a lot of flak for it compared to if you never mention it. Kind of like how Google always gets a lot of bad press since they claim to care about X when VCs for example have a much worse record but don't really get mentioned. With lesswrong's reputation, I can't help but be really put off by the inaccuracy.

I guess a big part of it is that Scott just took the name from the Ginsberg poem and probably only did a quick lookup on who Moloch actually was (as he was more interested in Ginsberg's Moloch than in the Canaanite Moloch)?

Considering Scott's interest in things kabbalistic (e.g. Unsong), and his general erudition, I suspect he knows more about the origins of Moloch than you give him credit for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch#Carthaginian_Cronus

At this point I'm just being pedantic, but that does not explain why he called Moloch a demon.

Horned deity which eats children? Sounds exactly like a demon to me.

I think that's a stretch. I don't think the ancient Canaanites viewed Moloch as evil. Even Milton and Flaubert consider him a god. I think such definitions only make sense within the context of the religion. I could argue that Yaweh is a demon because he is evil (has also asked for child sacrifice among other things), but that is an absurd claim within the religion where by definition he is good and the source of morality.

So by calling Moloch a demon, you are participating in perpetuating a potentially false history of Moloch that is heavily biased and Judeocentric. Sure you can call him an evil pagan god, but to call him a demon requires fitting that into a prior belief system of evil supernatural entities which is inconsistent with the very belief system he came from.

Oh, I'm sure of that. But the point I was trying to make is that he wasn't going for accuracy to ancient myth, just as Ginsberg wasn't.

What is the correct definition then?

Molok is the name used in the Bible for a Canaanite deity that the Israelites were forbidden to "suffer their seed to pass through the fire to". Details are scarce, but this is usually taken to refer to human sacrifice. It later became syncretized with reports of child sacrifice at Carthage, where the popular imagery associated with Molok (the idol with outstretched hands, the drums) is taken from.

Carthage and Canaan did share many cultural traits, and the Carthaginians also called themselves Canaanites. It's quite plausible that the Carthaginians would indeed worship Moloch and make sacrifices to that god, and that the mentions of child sacrifice in classical sources about Carthage are based on such.

I think it's still inaccurate to refer to Moloch as Carthaginian rather than Canaanite. The latter is obviously correct, though a bit vague. The former is contested and not as clear.

Wikipedia probably has a better answer, but basically the name Moloch is from the Bible. One of the ways genocide of the inhabitants of Canaan (the promised land) is justified is by describing Canaanites as immoral people who sacrifice their own children to idols. Moloch is supposed to be one of the idols, but the actual history of Moloch is very sparse. Probably was one of the main local gods way back in the day like Baal. Probably not even an "evil" god at all (like Baal) since the Bible is heavily biased against the competing local gods in the region.

So basically, a god of Canaanites we only know about from the people that wanted to wipe them out and wrote very influential texts.

We should ask a German, they put a noun to everything.

I was thinking the same thing recently, reading a New York Times review panel on Hamilton. Someone said they didn't focus enough on slavery, and that the casual mentioning of Sally Hemings was tasteless. I posed the same thought: If Sally hadn't been mentioned at all, they wouldn't have commented on the lack of focus on her. If they didn't make a point of being a multiracial cast, or had lyrics condemning slavery, would there have been so much criticism for the magnitude of their condemnation?

This phenomenon of "talking about something, then being attacked for not caring/knowing enough" seems to be happening more and more online.

Seems related to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics:

"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster."

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

Slightly - and that's an interesting article to be sure. The difference between that article and the Hamilton or "you don't know enough about Moloch" examples is that the article shows conditional assistance to a problem, where the two above examples have no quid pro quo. Hamilton sheds some light on something, and someone was inaccurate in a literary analysis.

I think people like to see the poor helped unconditionally, or with conditions that help them. In the PETA example, it seems to outsiders that a political agenda is being forced on them. PETA may counter they are improving lives by showing the benefits of veganism.

In the wifi example, it looks like exploitation of the desperate, though it isn't any more debasing than swinging a sign around for a furniture store.

And in the Uber example, that just looks shitty because they're a hugely wealthy company... though I don't know how much of the surge pricing goes to the driver.

"I think people like to see the poor helped unconditionally..."

Yes, people like to see the poor helped...they do not particularly like helping the poor themselves.

I think that's what I had seen before. Thanks for scratching my itch.

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