Rufus rough notes / comments
PD / Moloch is credible as a description of many situations that have happened or could happen.
BTW on the piece in the wiki: Meditations on Moloch
Then the question is how do we get out of it …
- Iterated PD (Axelrod etc) give us folk theorem where we can get cooperation with enough care for the future. We can get even more with evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma etc. cf nice animation in The Evolution of Trust
- Multi-level group selection gives other strong reasons to think this can happen (cf e.g. Ultrasocity by Turchin, D.S. Wilson etc). Of course, i think you want to add culture to this point rather than pure genetic version.
Asides
Why was Moloch a success?
[Interesting sociological question]
Seems many people who don’t have a classic academic background or know about political economy etc are engaging with these kind of ideas via moloch. so why was it successful? (Especially in Engineer / Rationalist / EA community).
- Moloch is a great name, almost onomatopoeic.
- Simple label for a concept (or concepts) which don’t always have a single name (tragedy of commons, prisoner’s dilemma, collective action problems etc).
- Also has the advantage of a little bit of vagueness of what is included
- Agentic aspect (also a defect)