Earth is at “starting to adopt the wheel” stage in the coordination domain.
tech is abundant coordination is not
I’m not sure this is actually right, and I think coordination is in fact abundant compared to other animals. Indeed, the ability for humans to be super-cooperative and imitative of each other is argued by Heinrich to be one of the major factors, if not the major factor for human dominance.
This is definitely subjective. Animals are certainly worse off in most respects and I disagree with using them as a baseline.
Imitation is not coordination, it’s just efficient learning and animals do it. They also have simple coordination in the sense of generalized tit for tat (we call it friendship). You scratch my back I scratch yours.
Cooperation technologies allow similar things to scale beyond the number of people you can know personally. They bring us closer to the multi agent optimal equilibrium or at least the Core(Game Theory).
Examples of cooperation technologies:
Governments that provide public goods (roads, policing etc.)
Money/(Financial system)/(stock market)
game theory equivalent of “transferable utility”.
Unions
So yes we have some well deployed coordination technologies (money/finance are the big successes here)
It’s definitely subjective as to whether tech or cooperation is the less well deployed thing.
There are a lot of unsolved collective action problems though. Why are oligopolies and predatory businesses still a thing? Because coordinating to get rid of them is hard. If people pre-commited to going the distance with respect to avoiding lock in and monopolies, would-be monopolists would just not do that in the first place.
While normal technology is mostly stuff and can usually be dumbed down so even the stupidest get some benefit, cooperation technologies may require people to actively participate/think. So deploying them is not so easy and may even be counterproductive. People also need to have enough slack to make them work.
TLDR: Moloch is more compelling for two reasons:
Earth is at “starting to adopt the wheel” stage in the coordination domain.
tech is abundant coordination is not
Abstractly, inasmuch as science and coordination are attractors
A society that has fallen mostly into the coordination attractor might be more likely to be deep in the science attractor too (medium confidence)
coordination solves chicken/egg barriers like needing both roads and wheels for benefit
but possible to conceive of high coordination low tech societies
Romans didn’t pursue sci/tech attractor as hard due to lack of demand
With respect to the attractor thing (post linked below)
I’m not sure this is actually right, and I think coordination is in fact abundant compared to other animals. Indeed, the ability for humans to be super-cooperative and imitative of each other is argued by Heinrich to be one of the major factors, if not the major factor for human dominance.
This is definitely subjective. Animals are certainly worse off in most respects and I disagree with using them as a baseline.
Imitation is not coordination, it’s just efficient learning and animals do it. They also have simple coordination in the sense of generalized tit for tat (we call it friendship). You scratch my back I scratch yours.
Cooperation technologies allow similar things to scale beyond the number of people you can know personally. They bring us closer to the multi agent optimal equilibrium or at least the Core(Game Theory).
Examples of cooperation technologies:
Governments that provide public goods (roads, policing etc.)
Money/(Financial system)/(stock market)
game theory equivalent of “transferable utility”.
Unions
So yes we have some well deployed coordination technologies (money/finance are the big successes here)
It’s definitely subjective as to whether tech or cooperation is the less well deployed thing.
There are a lot of unsolved collective action problems though. Why are oligopolies and predatory businesses still a thing? Because coordinating to get rid of them is hard. If people pre-commited to going the distance with respect to avoiding lock in and monopolies, would-be monopolists would just not do that in the first place.
While normal technology is mostly stuff and can usually be dumbed down so even the stupidest get some benefit, cooperation technologies may require people to actively participate/think. So deploying them is not so easy and may even be counterproductive. People also need to have enough slack to make them work.