I recently read Terry Bouricious’ book about Sortition and I highly recommend it (It’s completely free on his substack)
Yoav Ravid
Karma: 3,525
Typo: It’s Prediction Markets “Fail” To *Mooch (not Moloch)
Reducing the amount of voters can be good because it increases the remaining voters’ motive to become well informed instead of remaining rationally ignorant, but it won’t work if people just self refrain, because the people who refrain will probably me exactly those that should remain.
Using sortition to pick a representative subset of the population to vote solves this problem.
Technically it makes sense for the nuked side to lose everything and for the nuking side to gain little. But you want to model a scenario where the sides might actually want to nuke the other side, which you have naturally between enemies, but don’t have between LessWrongers unless you incentivize them somehow. So giving rewards for nuking makes sense, because people want to increase their own Karma but don’t want to decrease the Karma of others.
And I think the incentives are deliberately designed such that no nukes aren’t the obvious optimal equilibrium. That’s what makes it an exercise in not destroying the world. If it were easy it wouldn’t be much of an exercise.
This is extremely cool! good job! Looking forward to seeing how this unfolds, which will unfortunately happen mostly as I sleep (and as a citizen I hope to come out at the end of this with no change to my Karma)
Thanks. If it’s indeed framed as a game then I would like to participate as well. So I pressed the button and opted in.
That sounds like a terrible strategy. Your threat won’t be credible because your goal is to make the world better, not destroy it. And anything you do to make the threat credible (like some sort of precomitment mechanism) will risk the world actually getting destroyed.
Did anything happen after you pressed it?
How would you leverage a button that destroys the world to make the world better?
So the responsible thing to do is to refrain, right? Cause if everybody did nobody would have the ability to destroy the site, and what would you do with such an ability anyway except not use it?
The problem is it feels like a game/exercise, and a game/exercise is something I want to opt in to, even if just to challenge myself.
That said, I think twice before pressing any big red button, and as of yet I haven’t pressed this one.
Edit: Following Dagon’s comment (published 8 hours after this post), which confirmed it’s framed as a game, I decided to press the button and opt in.
a method to induce male stem cells to lose their Y chromosome and duplicate the X chromosome, thus becoming female.
If you had twin fertilised eggs, could you use this method to create almost-genetically-identical opposite-sex twins? Which would supposedly let you isolate the effects of sex on the individual?
Yeah, I think I agree with this. Do you have an idea for a name that captures this dynamic? Do you think one of the names I or Legionnaire suggested captures it?
Hmm.. I think our understanding what “Moloch” stands for is quite different, cause none of what you suggested seems close to me. Which I guess also illustrates why I wanted a different name. “Moloch” is very good at entering your head and creating a visceral feeling of the dynamic, but it can also make it ambiguous and difficult to understand. Also, I find when I introduce people to the concept, it really throws them off if I start to talking about some mythical deity from the Bible :)
Ouuu nice! there’s some good ones here. I think my favourite from these is “Sacrificial Spiral”. “Sacrificial Contest” is also good. Deadlock is also a good term, though not as part of “Competition Deadlock”. Perhaps “Mutual Sacrifice Deadlock”, or something of the sort. “Feedback” can also be a good term.
Thanks!
I tried to think of different names for the Moloch Dynamic[1] and came up with
Mutual Sacrifice Trap
Mutual Sacrifice Equilibrium
Mutual Sacrifice Equilibrium Trap
Sacrifice Race
Sacrifice Competition
“Collective” can also replace or be added before “Mutual”, to signify that it tends to refer to dynamics of many actors, where coordinating to get out of the equilibrium trap is difficult.
What do you think of these options?
- ^
A reminder of what the Moloch Dynamic is:
“In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.”—Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch
From Protection or Free Trade by Henry George:
The Robber that Takes All that is Left
Labor may be likened to a man who as he carries home his earnings is waylaid by a series of robbers. One demands this much, and another that much, but last of all stands one who demands all that is left, save just enough to enable the victim to maintain life and come forth next day to work. So long as this last robber remains, what will it benefit such a man to drive off any or all of the other robbers?
Such is the situation of labor today throughout the civilized world. And the robber that takes all that is left, is private property in land. Improvement, no matter how great, and reform, no matter how beneficial in itself, cannot help that class who deprived of all right to the use of the material elements have only the power to labor—a power as useless in itself as a sail without wind, a pump without water, or a saddle without a horse.
I recommend the full chapter, and book.
One extreme solution, which I think is good regardless of this issue, is using sortition with high alternance, like they did in ancient Athens. I recommend Terry Bouricius’ book on sortition.
The difference between leaders in dictatorships and in democracies isn’t so much in the average time they rule, but in the variability in the time they rule. Yes, not ageing wouldn’t help someone like Bachir Gemayel who was assassinated after two weeks in office, but it would probably have helped a leader like Stalin. So I care more about the variability of how much no-ageing would help dictators than the average. But still, I agree ageing isn’t the main bottleneck on dictatorship.
The comment option sorting is amazing! Thanks!
The new reacts are also cool, though I also liked the “I checked” reacts and would have liked to have both.
Would Moloch qualify as an Egregores?