Well, I’m not convinced there is a single concept involved. What Yvain talks about is complex and multilayered. There are externalities and information asymmetries and attractor basins, etc. If I was forced to pick one expression I’d say something like emergent system behaviour, but that’s not quite it either.
Am I the only one who didn’t feel like the central Moloch concept was hard to reach? As I understand it, “Moloch” just refers to a specific kind of coordination failure, in which participants in a competitive market-like environment “defect” by throwing their own values under the bus, to no ultimate gain besides a temporary positional advantage over those who do not do so. Obviously this phenomenon can create/contribute to various eschatological attractor basins, of the paperclip-tiles/disneyland-with-no-children sort; without the “Moloch” concept it might be non-obvious that/why a marketplace of agents with human values could end up in such a situation.
Am I the only one who didn’t feel like the central Moloch concept was hard to reach? As I understand it, “Moloch” just refers to a specific kind of coordination failure, in which participants in a competitive market-like environment “defect” by throwing their own values under the bus, to no ultimate gain besides a temporary positional advantage over those who do not do so. Obviously this phenomenon can create/contribute to various eschatological attractor basins, of the paperclip-tiles/disneyland-with-no-children sort; without the “Moloch” concept it might be non-obvious that/why a marketplace of agents with human values could end up in such a situation.