Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways!
Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch
whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten
armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like
endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and
antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is
the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove
and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who
frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of
the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which
exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten
years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off
the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

What’s always impressed me about this poem is its conception of civilization as an individual entity. You can almost see him,
with his fingers of armies and his skyscraper-window eyes.

A lot of the commentators say Moloch represents capitalism. This is definitely a piece of it, even a big piece. But it doesn’t
quite fit. Capitalism, whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen? Capitalism in whom I am a consciousness without a body?
Capitalism, therefore granite cocks?

Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth
could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and
aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?
And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.
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.
And okay, this example is kind of contrived. So let’s run through – let’s say ten – real world examples of similar multipolar
traps to really hammer in how important this is.

1. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, as played by two very dumb libertarians who keep ending up on defect-defect. There’s a much
better outcome available if they could figure out the coordination, but 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. I wrote about this and even more convoluted versions of the same principle in Game Theory As A Dark
Art. 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. From within the system, each individual step taken
might be rational.
(Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!)
3. The fish farming story from my Non-Libertarian FAQ 2.0:
As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand
identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month.
For a while, all is well.

But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough
pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish
farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes
waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the
fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.

But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm
worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns
$699 profit.

Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance
costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.

Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and
everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes
around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s
productivity goes down.”

Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him
Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns
$699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their
filter for $300 extra profit…

A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign
a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign
such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like this is the core of my objection to libertarianism, and that Non-Libertarian FAQ
3.0 will just be this one example copy-pasted two hundred times. From a god’s-eye-view, we can say that polluting the lake
leads to bad consequences. From within the system, no individual can prevent the lake from being polluted, and buying a
filter might not be such a good idea.

4. The Malthusian trap, at least at its extremely pure theoretical limits. Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto
a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art
(you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH).
You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations,
the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around,
and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.

A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit
less of this sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all, and any sect of rats
who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few generations.

In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take
over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that
sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism,
and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.

If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be
exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be
outcompeted by their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle
will begin again. Any sect of rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom
advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.
For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can
apply to other things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should maintain a
comfortably low population. From within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic imperative and the island will
end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.

5. Capitalism. Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he
sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t,
because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt.
Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of
ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.
Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment
of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by
companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.
(I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as
those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies –
defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is
red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)
From a god’s-eye-view, we can contrive a friendly industry where every company pays its workers a living wage. From within
the system, there’s no way to enact it.

(Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose blood is running money!)
6. The Two-Income Trap, as recently discussed on this blog. It theorized that sufficiently intense competition for suburban
houses in good school districts meant that people had to throw away lots of other values – time at home with their children,
financial security – to optimize for house-buying-ability or else be consigned to the ghetto.
From a god’s-eye-view, if everyone agrees not to take on a second job to help win their competition for nice houses, then
everyone will get exactly as nice a house as they did before, but only have to work one job. From within the system, absent a
government literally willing to ban second jobs, everyone who doesn’t get one will be left behind.

(Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs!)

7. Agriculture. Jared Diamond calls it the worst mistake in human history. Whether or not it was a mistake, it wasn’t
an accident – agricultural civilizations simply outcompeted nomadic ones, inevitable and irresistably. Classic Malthusian trap.
Maybe hunting-gathering was more enjoyable, higher life expectancy, and more conducive to human flourishing – but in a
state of sufficiently intense competition between peoples, in which agriculture with all its disease and oppression and
pestilence was the more competitive option, everyone will end up agriculturalists or go the way of the Comanche Indians.
From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to see everyone should keep the more enjoyable option and stay hunter-gatherers. From
within the system, each individual tribe only faces the choice of going agricultural or inevitably dying.

8. Arms races. Large countries can spend anywhere from 5% to 30% of their budget on defense. In the absence of war – a
condition which has mostly held for the past fifty years – all this does is sap money away from infrastructure, health,
education, or economic growth. But any country that fails to spend enough money on defense risks being invaded by a
neighboring country that did. Therefore, almost all countries try to spend some money on defense.
From a god’s-eye-view, the best solution is world peace and no country having an army at all. From within the system, no
country can unilaterally enforce that, so their best option is to keep on throwing their money into missiles that lie in silos
unused.

(Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!)
9. Cancer. The human body is supposed to be made up of cells living harmoniously and pooling their resources for the
greater good of the organism. If a cell defects from this equilibrium by investing its resources into copying itself, it and its
descendants will flourish, eventually outcompeting all the other cells and taking over the body – at which point it dies. Or the
situation may repeat, with certain cancer cells defecting against the rest of the tumor, thus slowing down its growth and
causing the tumor to stagnate.
From a god’s-eye-view, the best solution is all cells cooperating so that they don’t all die. From within the system, cancerous
cells will proliferate and outcompete the other – so that only the existence of the immune system keeps the natural
incentive to turn cancerous in check.

10. The “race to the bottom” describes a political situation where some jurisdictions lure businesses by promising lower
taxes and fewer regulations. The end result is that either everyone optimizes for competitiveness – by having minimal tax
rates and regulations – or they lose all of their business, revenue, and jobs to people who did (at which point they are
pushed out and replaced by a government who will be more compliant).
But even though the last one has stolen the name, all these scenarios are in fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns
how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be
outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again
equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be
worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.

Before we go on, there’s a slightly different form of multi-agent trap worth investigating. In this one, the competition is kept
at bay by some outside force – usually social stigma. As a result, there’s not actually a race to the bottom – the system can
continue functioning at a relatively high level – but it’s impossible to optimize and resources are consistently thrown away
for no reason. Lest you get exhausted before we even begin, I’ll limit myself to four examples here.

11. Education. In my essay on reactionary philosophy, I talk about my frustration with education reform:
People ask why we can’t reform the education system. But right now students’ incentive is to go to the most
prestigious college they can get into so employers will hire them – whether or not they learn anything.
Employers’ incentive is to get students from the most prestigious college they can so that they can defend their
decision to their boss if it goes wrong – whether or not the college provides value added. And colleges’ incentive
is to do whatever it takes to get more prestige, as measured in US News and World Report rankings – whether or
not it helps students. Does this lead to huge waste and poor education? Yes. Could the Education God notice this
and make some Education Decrees that lead to a vastly more efficient system? Easily! But since there’s no
Education God everybody is just going to follow their own incentives, which are only partly correlated with
education or efficiency.
From a god’s eye view, it’s easy to say things like “Students should only go to college if they think they will get something out
of it, and employers should hire applicants based on their competence and not on what college they went to”. From within
the system, everyone’s already following their own incentives correctly, so unless the incentives change the system won’t
either.

12. Science. Same essay:

The modern research community knows they aren’t producing the best science they could be. There’s lots of
publication bias, statistics are done in a confusing and misleading way out of sheer inertia, and replications often
happen very late or not at all. And sometimes someone will say something like “I can’t believe people are too
dumb to fix Science. All we would have to do is require early registration of studies to avoid publication bias, turn
this new and powerful statistical technique into the new standard, and accord higher status to scientists who do
replication experiments. It would be really simple and it would vastly increase scientific progress. I must just be
smarter than all existing scientists, since I’m able to think of this and they aren’t.”
And yeah. That would work for the Science God. He could just make a Science Decree that everyone has to use
the right statistics, and make another Science Decree that everyone must accord replications higher status.

But things that work from a god’s-eye view don’t work from within the system. No individual scientist has an
incentive to unilaterally switch to the new statistical technique for her own research, since it would make her
research less likely to produce earth-shattering results and since it would just confuse all the other scientists.
They just have an incentive to want everybody else to do it, at which point they would follow along. And no
individual journal has an incentive to unilaterally switch to early registration and publishing negative results,
since it would just mean their results are less interesting than that other journal who only publishes ground-
breaking discoveries. From within the system, everyone is following their own incentives and will continue to do
so.

13. Government corruption. I don’t know of anyone who really thinks, in a principled way, that corporate welfare is a good
idea. But the government still manages to spend somewhere around (depending on how you calculate it) $100 billion dollars
a year on it – which for example is three times the amount they spend on health care for the needy. Everyone familiar with
the problem has come up with the same easy solution: stop giving so much corporate welfare. Why doesn’t it happen?
Government are competing against one another to get elected or promoted. And suppose part of optimizing for electability
is optimizing campaign donations from corporations – or maybe it isn’t, but officials think it is. Officials who try to mess with
corporate welfare may lose the support of corporations and be outcompeted by officials who promise to keep it intact.
So although from a god’s-eye-view everyone knows that eliminating corporate welfare is the best solution, each individual
official’s personal incentives push her to maintain it.

14. Congress. Only 9% of Americans like it, suggesting a lower approval rating than cockroaches, head lice, or traffic jams.
However, 62% of people who know who their own Congressional representative is approve of them. In theory, it should
be really hard to have a democratically elected body that maintains a 9% approval rating for more than one election cycle. In
practice, every representative’s incentive is to appeal to his or her constituency while throwing the rest of the country under
the bus – something at which they apparently succeed.
From a god’s-eye-view, every Congressperson ought to think only of the good of the nation. From within the system, you do
what gets you elected.

II.
A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. 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.

In a sufficiently intense competition (1-10), everyone who doesn’t throw all their values under the bus dies out – think of the
poor rats who wouldn’t stop making art. This is the infamous Malthusian trap, where everyone is reduced to “subsistence”.

In an insufficiently intense competition (11-14), all we see is a perverse failure to optimize – consider the journals which
can’t switch to more reliable science, or the legislators who can’t get their act together and eliminate corporate welfare. It
may not reduce people to subsistence, but there is a weird sense in which it takes away their free will.

Every two-bit author and philosopher has to write their own utopia. Most of them are legitimately pretty nice. In fact, it’s a
pretty good bet that two utopias that are polar opposites both sound better than our own world.
It’s kind of embarrassing that random nobodies can think up states of affairs better than the one we actually live in. And in
fact most of them can’t. A lot of utopias sweep the hard problems under the rug, or would fall apart in ten minutes if actually
implemented.

But let me suggest a couple of “utopias” that don’t have this problem.

– The utopia where instead of the government paying lots of corporate welfare, the government doesn’t pay lots of
corporate welfare.
– The utopia where every country’s military is 50% smaller than it is today, and the savings go into infrastructure spending.

– The utopia where all hospitals use the same electronic medical record system, or at least medical record systems that can
talk to each other, so that doctors can look up what the doctor you saw last week in a different hospital decided instead of
running all the same tests over again for $5000.

I don’t think there are too many people who oppose any of these utopias. If they’re not happening, it’s not because people
don’t support them. It certainly isn’t because nobody’s thought of them, since I just thought of them right now and I don’t
expect my “discovery” to be hailed as particularly novel or change the world.
Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia. The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it
wasn’t designed by humans. Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by
assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take
by assuming people will obey incentives.
But that means that just as the shapes of rivers are not designed for beauty or navigation, but rather an artifact of randomly
determined terrain, so institutions will not be designed for prosperity or justice, but rather an artifact of randomly
determined initial conditions.

Just as people can level terrain and build canals, so people can alter the incentive landscape in order to build better
institutions. But they can only do so when they are incentivized to do so, which is not always. As a result, some pretty wild
tributaries and rapids form in some very strange places.

I will now jump from boring game theory stuff to what might be the closest thing to a mystical experience I’ve ever had.

Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking
down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in
every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:
It is glorious that we can create something like this.

It is shameful that we did.

Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-
by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our
civilization’s limited resources?

And it occurred to me that maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would endorse the existence of Las Vegas. Even
Objectivism, which is usually my go-to philosophy for justifying the excesses of capitalism, at least grounds it in the belief
that capitalism improves people’s lives. Henry Ford was virtuous because he allowed lots of otherwise car-less people to
obtain cars and so made them better off. What does Vegas do? Promise a bunch of shmucks free money and not give it to
them.

Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk
in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A
rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward
circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with
slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following
the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers
in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!”
Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was
latent in neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur who built it was just
filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete.
So we have all this amazing technological and cognitive energy, the brilliance of the human species, wasted on reciting the
lines written by poorly evolved cellular receptors and blind economics, like gods being ordered around by a moron.

Some people have mystical experiences and see God. There in Las Vegas, I saw Moloch.
(Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch, whose blood is running money!
Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch, whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! Skeleton treasuries! Blind capitals! Demonic industries! Spectral
nations!)