
Meditations on Moloch (2014) - dhh2106
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
======
ex3xu
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.

~~~
rumcajz
I've done a write-up on the book here:
[http://250bpm.com/blog:128](http://250bpm.com/blog:128)

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lkbm
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.

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richeyrw
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...](http://traffic.libsyn.com/sscpodcast/Meditations_on_Moloch.mp3)

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posterboy
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.

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Matumio
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nonab6djMAA)

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

~~~
mrec
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...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/)

~~~
m_fayer
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.

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

~~~
strainer
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).

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oli5679
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.

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

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NateEag
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.

~~~
gjm11
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.)

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

------
SonOfLilit
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.

------
hamilyon2
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.

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pete23
“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.

------
mbrock
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.

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obviuosly
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".

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

~~~
obviuosly
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.

~~~
mikeash
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.

~~~
obviuosly
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.

------
paol
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.

~~~
flancian
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.

~~~
wool_gather
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.

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posterboy
Can I get a quick summary?

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

~~~
repsilat
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.

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ErotemeObelus
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.

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

~~~
ErotemeObelus
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.

