I definitely agree that (1) “what society wants” is a useful notion and that it is different from (2) “situations in which what society wants deviates from what would be good for its individuals”. I would just argue that given both the historical and SSC-inspired connotations of “Moloch”, this term should be associated with (2) rather than with (1) :-).
Maybe. I actually don’t think the term “Moloch” is very important. What I think is important is getting a good conceptual understanding of the behavioural notion of “what society wants”, behavioural in the sense that it is independent of idealized notions of what would be good or what individuals imagine society wants but depends on how the collection of agents behaves/is incentivized to behave. I view the fact that this ends up deviating from what would be good for the sum of utilities, as essentially the motivation for this topic, but not the core conceptual problem. So I’d want to nudge people who want to clarify “Molochs” to focus mostly on conceptually clarifying (1) and only secondarily on clarifying (2).
Secondarily, just to push back against your point that “Moloch” is historically more connotated with (2). This is sort of true, but on the other hand, what does the concept of “Moloch” add to our conceptual toolbox, above and beyond the bag of more standard concepts like “collective action problem” and “externalities” and so forth? I’d say that it is already well-understood that collections of individuals can end up interacting in ways that is globally pareto-suboptimal. I think the additions to this analysis made in SSC are something like: conceptualizing various processes as optimizing in a certain direction/looking at the system-level for optimization processes. The core point to get clarity on here is I think (1), and then (2) should fall out of that.
I definitely agree that (1) “what society wants” is a useful notion and that it is different from (2) “situations in which what society wants deviates from what would be good for its individuals”. I would just argue that given both the historical and SSC-inspired connotations of “Moloch”, this term should be associated with (2) rather than with (1) :-).
Maybe. I actually don’t think the term “Moloch” is very important. What I think is important is getting a good conceptual understanding of the behavioural notion of “what society wants”, behavioural in the sense that it is independent of idealized notions of what would be good or what individuals imagine society wants but depends on how the collection of agents behaves/is incentivized to behave. I view the fact that this ends up deviating from what would be good for the sum of utilities, as essentially the motivation for this topic, but not the core conceptual problem. So I’d want to nudge people who want to clarify “Molochs” to focus mostly on conceptually clarifying (1) and only secondarily on clarifying (2).
Secondarily, just to push back against your point that “Moloch” is historically more connotated with (2). This is sort of true, but on the other hand, what does the concept of “Moloch” add to our conceptual toolbox, above and beyond the bag of more standard concepts like “collective action problem” and “externalities” and so forth? I’d say that it is already well-understood that collections of individuals can end up interacting in ways that is globally pareto-suboptimal. I think the additions to this analysis made in SSC are something like: conceptualizing various processes as optimizing in a certain direction/looking at the system-level for optimization processes. The core point to get clarity on here is I think (1), and then (2) should fall out of that.