Author here.
I still believe this article is a important addition to the discussion of inadequate equilibria. While Scott Alexander’s Moloch post and Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book are great for introduction and discussion of the topic, both of them fail, in my opinion, to convey the sheer complexity of the problem as it occurs in the real world. That, I think, results in readers thinking about the issue in simple malthusian or naive game-theoretic terms and eventually despairing about inescapability of suboptimal Nash equilibria.
What I try to present is a world that is much more complex but also much less hopeless. Everything is an intricate mess of games played on different levels and interacting in complex and unpredictable ways. What, at the first glance, looks like a simple tragedy-of-the-commons problem is in fact a complex dynamic system with many inputs and many intertwined interests. To solve it, one may just have to step back a bit and consider other forces and mechanisms at play.
One idea that is expressed in the article and that I often come back to is (my wording, but the idea is very much implicitly present in Ostrom’s book):
All in all, it seems that organically grown institutions are a lot like Hayek’s free markets. They are information-processing machines. They aggregate countless details, too small and numerous for any central planner to take into account, and generate a set of efficient governance rules.
Another one that still feels important in the hindsight is the attaching of a price tag to a coordination failure (“this can be solved for $1M”) which turns the semi-mystical work of Moloch into a boring old infrastructure project, very much like building a dam. This may have implications for Effective Altruism. Solving a coordination failure may often be the most efficient way to spend money in a specific area.
Author here.
In the hindsight, I still feel that the phenomenon is interesting and potentially important topic to look into. I am not aware of any attempt to replicate or dive deeper though.
As for my attempt to explain the psychology underlying the phenomenon I am not entirely happy with it. It’s based only on introspection and lacks sound game-theoretic backing.
By the way, there’s one interesting explanation I’ve read somewhere in the meantime (unfortunately, I don’t remember the source):
Cooperation may incur different costs on different participants. If you are well-off, putting $100 into a common pool is not a terribly important matter. If others fail to cooperate all you can lose is $100. If you just barely getting along, putting $100 into a common pool may threaten you in a serious way. Therefore, rich will be more likely to cooperate than poor. Now, if the thing is framed in moral terms (those cooperating are “good”, those not cooperating are “bad”) the whole thing may feel like a scam providing the rich a way to buy moral superiority. As a poor person you may thus resort to anti-social punishment as a way to punish the scam.