Meditations On Moloch

The essay treats Moloch as a name for systems in which competition rewards sacrificing one value to gain another. Over time, those who make the sacrifice win, and the shared value disappears. It uses examples from prisoner’s dilemmas, markets, war, science, education, and politics to show how coordination failures and proxy goals create perverse equilibria.

It then asks what technology will do to these traps. New tools can weaken physical limits, expand population pressure, intensify competition, and loosen the link between institutions and human values. The essay argues that civilization needs coordination, and ultimately a gardener strong enough to stop the race to the bottom instead of merely surviving inside it.

Reading notes

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• Moloch names the force that turns competition into a process that strips away human values.
• The same structure appears in prisoners’ dilemmas, dollar auctions, pollution races, arms races, cancer, and institutional incentives.
• In these traps, each actor follows local incentives correctly while the whole system gets worse.
• Coordination can prevent some traps, but coordinating institutions are themselves vulnerable to the same pressures.
• Technology creates new opportunities to intensify competition and reopen old traps.
• Capitalism, democracy, and memetic competition can still drift away from the values they are supposed to serve.
• The essay contrasts captured systems with a proposed garden governed by a stronger, value-aligned power.
• It ends by framing transhumanism as a project to defeat Moloch rather than submit to it.