Meditations on Moloch is a long 2014 article by Slate Star Codex (Scott Alexander). It introduces the concept of Moloch as a metaphor for collective action problems.
This post is noteworthy as it seems to be a source on [[Collective action problems]] for many people in “the space”, even if not particularly novel. It is also source for other pieces of terminology e.g.
Overall the piece is an very readable – albeit quite long – introduction to collective action problems and ways you can address them (eg. having a government!).
This is a classic [[prisoner’s dilemma]] with many participants.
Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.
So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill ‘‘them’’, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.
And okay, this example is kind of contrived. So let’s run through – let’s say ten – real world examples of similar multipolar traps to really hammer in how important this is.
Aa I shared elsewhere, the solution may be SIMPOL, simultaneous policy. Something similar happens when putting together the team for a movie. The producer gathers a set of possible actors, artists, writers etc and tries to get them to provisionally agree to the film.
Say you get a good writer and script and Julia Roberts agent agrees provisionally, then you build from there, if Julia Roberts does this will you, Brad Pitt/Ralph Fiennes, join, also as potentials? You build more on the strength of that, until the project is extremely attractive, even foolish to ignore, despite the fact nothing has been done apart from a script. Even if some pull out you may be able to slot others in because you have built a momentum and a team of note to push the project forward. https://uk.simpol.org/
“Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person.” - as soon as you mention it to another person, there’s a good chance they’ll snitch on you and get you murdered, otherwise they risk getting killed themselves.
Indeed this is a problem, in the abstracted thought experiment that is not real. In reality people look, see mutual suffering, whisper, grumble, conspire in secret, until revolution breaks forth. The greater the suffering of the population the greater the potential for rebellion of the many. So to expand here SIMPOL will be carried out in secret, at each individual risk and hope for a better world. All risk their lives.
Secret has always been difficult - never more than now. Talking about the “secret group” principle in public forums like this will do little to obscure your intentions.
Ah ok, although I’m fine to dialogue on that, I think it was because you mentioned secrets, and it was me that spoke of things happening in secret, not Rufus.
Yep, I responded to your post about secret - Multi polar trap deals with secrets - every time you tell your secret to someone else - it loads them with complicity and triggers the response - which is betraying you to the others.
That’s really not a great strategy, hoping and being prepared to risk your life.
Yet that is exactly the strategy that allows us as beings in relationships of care and community to rebel against the tyranny and suffering. The number of bees that sacrifice themselves so the hive may thrive. The paradox is that the more bees that offer sacrifice, the less the danger to each individual bee.
I’d love it if SIMPOL were as simple as that! What SIMPOL is doing certainly will not hurt, but I have a few geopolitical quibbles about the all nations adopting similar policies idea.
First all of, self-sacrifice against tyranny is as old as civilization - even older. The warrior ethos - found all over the planet prior to modernity - saw clinging to one’s personal life as cowardly and disgraceful. Only problem was, in all those many rebellions against some tyranny or another, the victors generally then set up their own tyrannies. No large scale civilization (that I am aware of) tried to set up flat egalitarianism across the board.
So … political theory writ large … but not our topic here. Assuming humans stay wired in the future the way humans have generally been wired up till now, I imagine the contest for power will be ongoing and some will do better at that than others. The best we can hope for, AFAIK, will be a relatively stable oligarchy in which some constellation of great powers a) collaborate to keep themselves in regional power and b) agreed to keep conflicts between themselves within some tolerable limits to allow persistence of both the biosphere and civilization itself. The post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe is a prototype of that model.
Where I think SIMPOL can help is in combating myopic xenophobia that will make any sort of global compromise or collaboration unworkable. For a world order to be - orderly - it will need legitimacy up and down the line. SIMPOL can contribute to that.