Social preferences have worked before. But I think you are assuming that people are rational agents who choose optimal actions? My take on this is that cultures of the past taught people not to be rational to this degree, and that it was partly this lack of rationality which prevented moloch. This may be why darwinism didn’t select for logical and unbiased beings to begin with (personal theory of mine).
Aren’t these all partial solutions to Moloch?
Bottom-up control rather than top-down, irrational agents or individality (anything which increases the amount of optimal choices), illegibility (you can’t get trapped in a meta which isn’t discoverable/well-known), decentralization (molochian problems appear at asymptotic limits, which means that they emerge at size. By avoiding large systems, you avoid moloch)
I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while myself. I have not thought much about The Goddess of Everything Else, so I cannot tell if my current insights account for that or not.
On the contrary, the advantage of evolutionary game theory is that you do not need to assume that individuals in the model are rational agents. As I said in the previous post, evolutionary game theory stems from biology, where you’re dealing with animals that are of course not acting rationally—instead, the payoffs are what is selected for. In EPD individuals don’t really make choices at all, they just have strategies (C or D).
My focus here was on solutions that work for generic collective action problems (usual concept of Moloch), but don’t work for evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma (my concept of Moloch). It’s true I didn’t go through all possible solutions to collective action problems—instead I focused on those that don’t involve making structural changes (as opposed to changing parameters) of the model.
I don’t think your examples work as direct solutions to EPD:
Bottom-up control: any form of ‘control’ seems like ‘changing the payoffs’ - doesn’t matter whether it’s top-down or bottom-up.
Irrational agents: we’ve already covered this—the model assumes non-rational agents.
Illegibility: only helps if you assume rational agents who want legibility.
Decentralisation: you actually get basically the same overall results as EPD in a fairly small, finite population—this is called a ‘Moran process’.
Though to be clear, I do think that bottom-up control, decentralisation and social preferences are partial solutions to Moloch, just not directly—they require a switch to a different model, e.g. the Goddess model.
That makes sense, but something feels off about it.
It seems to assume that all agents have the same payoff matrix, that the metrics are objective rather than subjective, that objective outcomes are the same as subjective outcomes, that the agent is not deceived about the payoff, that agents optimize for the same thing, that all agents have access to the same strategies.
It’s also a mistake to compare biological behaviour to rational optimization. If I’m hungry, I gather food, and once I have enough food, I stop gathering food. The value of food depends on its scarcity, and any needs I have can be sated, limiting the destruction on my environment. Animals don’t generally engage in unbounded behaviour. The seven deadly sins are a pathological failure in which one seeks X when they can only be satisfied by Y. X gives a reward which feels like Y, but only as a short-lived substanceless imitation. What religious people conceptionalize as evil is behaviour which aligns with this pathology. Evil seems to be insatiability itself, thought it’s often described in terms of its consequences.
The story of “Goddess of Cancer vs the Goddess of Everything Else” seems wrong to me. I don’t think there was any molochian behaviour before human beings. Ants do not destroy themselves. and I think it was limited up until the modern world because we weren’t intelligent, materialistic, and pathological enough for it to become a bigger issue than culture could protect against. Also, some cultures succeeded more than others. Socities successful in this manner are now called “high trust socities”.
There’s a book called “The future of the commons” which deal with social dilemmas. One quote goes “Even relatively large-scale collective-action problems are more likely to be solved when the necessary institutions are developed from below”. Taleb seems to have written Skin in the Game with a similar intuition for the conflict between emergent self-regulation and external regulation. Finally, Seeing like a state outlines a similar point, as does Ribbonfarms article on Legibility. What do all these have in common? they criticize modern aspects of the world, which appeared around the same time that Molochian problems started to get the upper hand.
Of course Moran processes are molochian—all pure replicators are. Just like grey goo, and cancer. The only non-molochian life is biological, sentient and conscious. This is exactly the set of life which can experience qualia, and the set of life which can be subjective, illogical, moral, and resist taking optimal actions.
Social preferences have worked before. But I think you are assuming that people are rational agents who choose optimal actions? My take on this is that cultures of the past taught people not to be rational to this degree, and that it was partly this lack of rationality which prevented moloch. This may be why darwinism didn’t select for logical and unbiased beings to begin with (personal theory of mine).
Aren’t these all partial solutions to Moloch?
Bottom-up control rather than top-down, irrational agents or individality (anything which increases the amount of optimal choices), illegibility (you can’t get trapped in a meta which isn’t discoverable/well-known), decentralization (molochian problems appear at asymptotic limits, which means that they emerge at size. By avoiding large systems, you avoid moloch)
I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while myself. I have not thought much about The Goddess of Everything Else, so I cannot tell if my current insights account for that or not.
On the contrary, the advantage of evolutionary game theory is that you do not need to assume that individuals in the model are rational agents. As I said in the previous post, evolutionary game theory stems from biology, where you’re dealing with animals that are of course not acting rationally—instead, the payoffs are what is selected for. In EPD individuals don’t really make choices at all, they just have strategies (C or D).
My focus here was on solutions that work for generic collective action problems (usual concept of Moloch), but don’t work for evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma (my concept of Moloch). It’s true I didn’t go through all possible solutions to collective action problems—instead I focused on those that don’t involve making structural changes (as opposed to changing parameters) of the model.
I don’t think your examples work as direct solutions to EPD:
Bottom-up control: any form of ‘control’ seems like ‘changing the payoffs’ - doesn’t matter whether it’s top-down or bottom-up.
Irrational agents: we’ve already covered this—the model assumes non-rational agents.
Illegibility: only helps if you assume rational agents who want legibility.
Decentralisation: you actually get basically the same overall results as EPD in a fairly small, finite population—this is called a ‘Moran process’.
Though to be clear, I do think that bottom-up control, decentralisation and social preferences are partial solutions to Moloch, just not directly—they require a switch to a different model, e.g. the Goddess model.
That makes sense, but something feels off about it.
It seems to assume that all agents have the same payoff matrix, that the metrics are objective rather than subjective, that objective outcomes are the same as subjective outcomes, that the agent is not deceived about the payoff, that agents optimize for the same thing, that all agents have access to the same strategies.
It’s also a mistake to compare biological behaviour to rational optimization. If I’m hungry, I gather food, and once I have enough food, I stop gathering food. The value of food depends on its scarcity, and any needs I have can be sated, limiting the destruction on my environment. Animals don’t generally engage in unbounded behaviour. The seven deadly sins are a pathological failure in which one seeks X when they can only be satisfied by Y. X gives a reward which feels like Y, but only as a short-lived substanceless imitation. What religious people conceptionalize as evil is behaviour which aligns with this pathology. Evil seems to be insatiability itself, thought it’s often described in terms of its consequences.
The story of “Goddess of Cancer vs the Goddess of Everything Else” seems wrong to me. I don’t think there was any molochian behaviour before human beings. Ants do not destroy themselves. and I think it was limited up until the modern world because we weren’t intelligent, materialistic, and pathological enough for it to become a bigger issue than culture could protect against. Also, some cultures succeeded more than others. Socities successful in this manner are now called “high trust socities”.
There’s a book called “The future of the commons” which deal with social dilemmas. One quote goes “Even relatively large-scale collective-action problems are more likely to be solved when the necessary institutions are developed from below”. Taleb seems to have written Skin in the Game with a similar intuition for the conflict between emergent self-regulation and external regulation. Finally, Seeing like a state outlines a similar point, as does Ribbonfarms article on Legibility. What do all these have in common? they criticize modern aspects of the world, which appeared around the same time that Molochian problems started to get the upper hand.
Of course Moran processes are molochian—all pure replicators are. Just like grey goo, and cancer. The only non-molochian life is biological, sentient and conscious. This is exactly the set of life which can experience qualia, and the set of life which can be subjective, illogical, moral, and resist taking optimal actions.
Thoughts?