you read the famous Allen Gensberg’s poem on Moloch
[link] {https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/}
There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society.
“Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people,
mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”
Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”
The implicit question is; if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it?
### . And Ginsberg answers:
Moloch.
It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything but because
thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent. Bostrom makes an offhanded
reference of the possibility of a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which
nevertheless endures unconquered.
It’s easy enough to imagine such a state- 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.
Real world examples of similar multipolar traps to really hammer in how important this is
1. The Prisoner’s Dilemma
coordination is hard. From a god’s-eye-view, we can agree that cooperate-cooperate is a better outcome than defect-defect, but neither prisoner within the system can make it happen.
2. Dollar auctions
Using some weird auction rules, you can take advantage of poor coordination to make someone pay $10 for a one dollar bill. From a god’s-eye-view, clearly people should not pay $10 for a on-er.
3. The fish farming story
4. The Malthusian trap
5. Arms races