[HN Gopher] Meditations on Moloch (2014)
___________________________________________________________________
Meditations on Moloch (2014)
Author : abhaynayar
Score : 147 points
Date : 2023-03-19 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slatestarcodex.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slatestarcodex.com)
| fwlr wrote:
| Scott Alexander's opus magnum, and one incredibly important piece
| of writing. I remember when it first came out, I used to attend a
| little social gathering once a month. One of the many things we
| did was function as an informal reading group of SlateStarCodex
| posts. That month, the gathering happened to fall just a few
| hours after Meditations on Moloch was published. We all turned up
| looking like stunned mullets, just staring at each other and
| saying "Moloch, right?" before lapsing back into thought.
|
| Every few years I think about putting together a compendium of
| "Required Reading to Save the World" and this piece is always on
| the list.
|
| So many beautiful, chilling, inescapable lines:
|
| " _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._ "
|
| " _...Maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would endorse
| the existence of Las Vegas. ... 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. ... 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._ "
|
| " _The ocean depths are a horrible place with little light, few
| resources, and various horrible organisms dedicated to eating or
| parasitizing one another. But every so often, a whale carcass
| falls to the bottom of the sea. More food than the organisms that
| find it could ever possibly want. There's a brief period of
| miraculous plenty, while the couple of creatures that first
| encounter the whale feed like kings. Eventually more animals
| discover the carcass, the faster-breeding animals in the carcass
| multiply, the whale is gradually consumed, and everyone sighs and
| goes back to living in a Malthusian death-trap. ... This is an
| age of whalefall, an age of excess carrying capacity, an age when
| we suddenly find ourselves with a thousand-mile head start on
| Malthus. As Hanson puts it, this is the dream time._ "
|
| ""If you don't work, you die." _Gotcha! If you do work, you also
| die! Everyone dies, unpredictably, at a time not of their own
| choosing, and all the virtue in the world does not save you._
| "The wages of sin is Death." _Gotcha! The wages of everything is
| Death! This is a Communist universe, the amount you work makes no
| difference to your eventual reward. From each according to his
| ability, to each Death._ "
|
| " _Suppose you make your walled garden. You keep out all of the
| dangerous memes, you subordinate capitalism to human interests,
| you ban stupid bioweapons research, you definitely don't research
| nanotechnology or strong AI. Everyone outside doesn't do those
| things. And so the only question is whether you'll be destroyed
| by foreign diseases, foreign memes, foreign armies, foreign
| economic competition, or foreign existential catastrophes._ "
|
| " _But the current ruler of the universe - Moloch - wants us
| dead, and with us everything we value. Art, science, love,
| philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. ... The only
| way to avoid having all human values gradually ground down by
| optimization-competition is to install [a different God to rule]
| over the entire universe who optimizes for human values. ... Once
| humans can design machines that are smarter than we are, by
| definition they'll be able to design machines which are smarter
| than they are, which can design machines smarter than they are,
| and so on in a feedback loop so tiny that it will smash up
| against the physical limitations for intelligence in a
| comparatively lightning-short amount of time. ... In the very
| near future, we are going to lift something to Heaven. It might
| be Moloch. But it might be something on our side. If it's on our
| side, it can kill Moloch dead._ "
|
| " _Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the
| god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss
| your babies in exchange for victory in war. He always and
| everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into
| the flames, and I can grant you power. As long as the offer's
| open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer.
| Only another god can kill Moloch_."
|
| " _There are many gods, but this one is ours._ "
| rednalexa wrote:
| Did you ever put together the reading list? Id be curious to
| check them out.
| fwlr wrote:
| No, I haven't, though I will eventually. In the meantime,
| some other pieces that always come to mind as being
| definitely on that list are Weaponised Sacredness by Sarah
| Perry, specifically the section on egregores
| (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/
| ctrl-f "The Egregore"), Rene Girard's Scapegoat, and as
| antagonistic reading (threatening ideas you must engage with)
| Spandrell's IQ Shredder, and Nick Land's Hell-Baked. In
| general the list is about coming to understand little-
| recognized forces that control the world.
| rednalexa wrote:
| Thanks I'll start with those! Moloch was a great one so
| I'll be happy to dive into more.
| citelao wrote:
| Same; I come back to this article every few years, and I'd
| love to discover other pieces like it.
| [deleted]
| mxkopy wrote:
| I don't like how the writer absolves the individual of any
| responsibility in perpetuating 'Moloch'. It's not the case that
| we live in
|
| > a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen
| including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures
| unconquered
|
| - there are people who _want_ the status quo to continue and
| unilaterally _benefit_ from it.
|
| IMO a better discussion of this sort of thing lies in the _Anti-
| Oedipus_. Its answer to "What does it?" is fascism. And not in a
| strict political sense, but in a more abstract psychological sort
| of sense.
|
| Take for example an elderly person going to their grocery store,
| who sees one of the workers with their shirt unbuttoned. The
| elderly person promptly goes to the manager, who apologizes
| profusely and fires the worker on the spot. This is a sort of
| fascism that we are all capable of doing, and some make a living
| out of doing it. It's morality on a post-industrial scale. It's
| our tendency to think about "the way things are supposed to be",
| enforced by iron-clad rules.
|
| Everyone _should_ have a family. Everyone _should_ have a job.
| Everyone _should_ wear a uniform.
|
| The penalties for not doing these things result in much of the
| strife Scott references (no uniform => no job, no job =>
| homeless). And it's _not_ because we live in a system TM, but
| because some people actively perpetuate their own beliefs about
| how the world _should_ work and dole out punishment accordingly.
| We all have a little fascist in us that tells us what should
| happen. Some people end up nurturing it more than others, and no
| one in a position of great power isn 't listening to it. Moloch
| will be defeated when that stops being the case IMO
|
| EDIT
|
| This is from Foucault's intro to the Anti-Oedipus:
|
| "Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is
| fascism (whereas Anti-Oedipus' opposition to the others is more
| of a tactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the
| fascism of Hitler and Mussolini--which was able to mobilize and
| use the desire of the masses so effectively--but also the fascism
| in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism
| that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that
| dominates and exploits us."
| aeternum wrote:
| [flagged]
| mxkopy wrote:
| That's kind of a contrived example. Having a uniform doesn't
| help you load groceries or stock shelves, but wearing a
| tinkerbell costume does in fact help you act like tinkerbell.
|
| It'd be more like if Disney required the actress to make
| certain movements or say certain phrases just because "that's
| how we remember the movies doing it".
|
| Fascism in the Anti-Oedipus has a very specific meaning so I
| implore you to read some of it before you criticize my use of
| the term.
| whythre wrote:
| If the term you are using deviates significantly from the
| common understanding, you might want to refrain from using
| it. Also that last bit amounts to 'you can't criticize me
| until you educate yourself on my idiosyncratic
| definitions,' which seems both silly and unreasonable.
|
| You might just want to use a different word than fascism,
| anti-Oedipal or otherwise.
| jamilton wrote:
| They said upfront that they were using it in a non-
| standard way, I think it's fine.
| mxkopy wrote:
| It's not that different though. 'Fasces' means 'a bundle
| of sticks bound tightly together', which signifies how
| the uniformity of a people can be made into a powerful
| instrument put into the hand of a single person. In the
| case I gave the customer demands uniformity from the
| workers. It's a sort of fascism but on the level of an
| individual's psyche rather than an entire nation.
| IX-103 wrote:
| So call it micro-fascism?
| skybrian wrote:
| Getting fired from a job is bad and that seems like an
| unforgiving place to work. But equating it to becoming homeless
| and calling it fascist seems a bit much? There are other jobs
| out there.
|
| A similar argument is used by men who blame women for them
| being single. Getting dumped is no fun, but...
| mxkopy wrote:
| You can get fired for stealing from the company. You can get
| fired for attacking a customer. I'm not talking about those
| things, I'm talking specifically about getting fired because
| of someone's _psychology_ , even - especially - if that
| psychology is of the customer. And again, fascism here means
| something close to but not the same as fascism in a political
| context.
|
| And from what I know, correct me if I'm wrong; usually if you
| don't have a job for some time you end up being homeless
| unless you have some support. Again I might be off the mark
| here.
| yterdy wrote:
| I was just remarking the other day of the danger one
| particularly self-righteous man can present to many. There was
| the guy who advocated zealously against separating bike and car
| traffic, for years, resulting in untold numbers of dead
| cyclists. There was the guy who advocated zealously for work
| search reqs as a condition of receiving unemployment, robbing
| millions of the opportunity to reskill after being fired or
| laid off. There was the guy who flipped dozens of state houses
| by planting lies about his party's opponents. There was Richard
| Nixon and his _waves hands vaguely_.
|
| This kind of person doesn't even necessarily lead a movement or
| anything of that sort. He is simply loud, and single-minded,
| and shrewd about couching his disastrous visions in terms that
| the go-along-to-get-along majority find agreeable enough to
| outweigh the discomfort of confronting him.
| Joeboy wrote:
| Reminds of Margaret Mead's "Never doubt that a small group of
| thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed
| it's the only thing that ever has". Not sure that was
| _exactly_ the sort of thing she meant but...
| antiquark wrote:
| > Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!
|
| This strikes me as someone following an ideology. The ideology
| becomes a substitute for thought: an algorithm that's relied upon
| (obeyed?) when making decisions. Algorithm == machinery.
| User23 wrote:
| This makes me think of this wonderful articlep[1] about
| Tolkien's concept of "the Machine."
|
| [1]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/fall-...
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Treating "the algorithm" as a kind of divine power
| misunderstands where algorithmic power comes from
|
| From "Magic Numbers" https://reallifemag.com/magic-numbers/
| richeyrw wrote:
| For those who prefer listening to reading, here's the audio
| version:
|
| https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/meditations-on-moloch
| sva_ wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion, great listening to this during
| cooking.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| (2014)
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| My favorite thing he's ever wrote. I think the Moloch metaphor is
| really powerful for thinking about accelerationism and is in fact
| the metaphor of our age.
|
| Look at climate change, student debt, housing, or basically any
| other issue on which we're kicking the can down the road and you
| can see a certain Molochian bargain: we sacrifice our children
| for sake of the status quo.
| cma wrote:
| The stuff that didn't make it to the blog is disturbing too
| (like the weird conclusion to the Moloch essay):
|
| https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/ArsonAtDennys/status/13621531...
|
| Apparently lots of the blog and his neoreactionary FAQ was set
| up to get people into some of the ideas if neoreactionaries
| like eugenics stuff.
|
| There was a whole trove of stuff that released a bit after the
| NYT article on Slate Star Codex that kind of proved its
| suspicions right.
| woooooo wrote:
| I'd love some reasoning for why this guy in particular comes
| in for such an amount of character assassination.
|
| Is it the fact that he's academically adjacent yet doesn't
| toe the line?
|
| There are thousands of people with middlebrow blogs out
| there, why the focus on slatestarcodex?
| strken wrote:
| I think it's because he's basically correct, or convincing
| enough to seem so, about a set of facts that we've all
| decided to politely ignore for the good of society.
|
| As the rationalists might say, scientific racism is (seen
| as) an infohazard that will destroy many useful cultural
| institutions if it spreads beyond the small community of
| researchers with sufficient context to understand it, and
| he's spreading it. The thing about infohazards is that
| _even true information_ can be hazardous.
|
| Other middlebrow blogs either talk about different things,
| have less reach, or aren't as vulnerable.
| yterdy wrote:
| I think we should be clear that scientific racism is a
| case of an infohazard that is not, in fact, true (even if
| one can make a convincing, though ultimately fallacy-
| dependent, argument for it, usually by ignoring the
| falsification of the "sets of facts" which underpin it).
| The trouble is that admitting _that_ is also a sort of
| infohazard, for certain people.
| strken wrote:
| I have absolutely no idea whether it's actually correct
| or not, make no claims about it, and don't think the
| object level question matters compared to whether it's
| harmful. Discussing its validity in any way is falling
| into the trap of publicising it.
| yterdy wrote:
| It matters because the topic refuses to stay buried (say,
| when brought up as an example of a controversial figure's
| purported views), and the prospect of it not being a
| closed question invites bad actors to rationalize social
| inequity, and their own tainted views and actions,
| through its lens.
|
| This is a topic where a conscientious person should have
| an idea of its correctness and should stake that claim
| firmly. Best of all, doing so eliminates one's part in
| the harm of its nature as an infohazard.
| [deleted]
| cma wrote:
| It's mainly the stealth pushing of eugenics.
| woooooo wrote:
| That's what I'm talking about, you can accuse anyone of
| "stealth pushing eugenics" with enough text to comb
| through and a willingness to quote out of context. Heck,
| plenty of "woke" authors would qualify.
|
| Why him? This went on for years and years before
| culminating in that NYT article.
| cma wrote:
| He was pretty open here that he uses this as plausible
| deniability. On some other uncovered stuff that came out
| after the NYT article I believe he was paying homeless in
| exchange for getting sterilized, or making plans to. I'll
| have to dig it up.
|
| edit: I think it was for homeless with partially
| heritable mental illness, not all homeless
| woooooo wrote:
| Now there's a claim I'd love to see some evidence for.
| throwoooo wrote:
| Imperfect evidence but claim was made with screenshot
| accompanying in above linked Twitter, see that one: https
| ://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/ArsonAtDennys/status/13621874..
| .
| woooooo wrote:
| I'm honored by the nickname, thanks :)
| [deleted]
| skybrian wrote:
| Seems like the background behind that is that Scott Alexander
| has sometimes entertained weird ideas. He's been open about
| at one time believing a conspiracy theory himself, for a
| little while.
|
| That screenshot doesn't actually say what about neo-
| reactonary stuff he thought was interesting, just that there
| is some. The rest is left to your imagination, and Scott
| Alexander's enemies want you to imagine the worst.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| > He's been open about at one time believing a conspiracy
| theory himself, for a little while.
|
| Absolutely disgusting. How could he?? But which one?
| MKULTRA*? Operation Northwoods*? Flat earth? Illegal
| domestic surveillance by the NSA*? Operation Gladio*? Tell
| us which one, so that we may denounce him!
|
| * Oops, this one's real lol
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > My favorite thing he's ever wrote.
|
| Exactly the same for me.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| the parable of talents is also way way up there.
| johnfn wrote:
| I would go one step further - Meditations on Moloch is my
| favorite post on the internet, bar none. I first read it in
| 2014, and now I go back to it every now and then and I'm still
| awe-struck. Back when I first read it I felt he was saying
| something true and new. These days I've read a bit more and I
| know he's not the first to frame up this exact idea, but I've
| never read anyone frame it up quite so well.
| User23 wrote:
| > It's powerful not because it's correct - nobody literally
| thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything
|
| However an absolute majority of human beings do believe evil is
| literally spiritually personified. This is of course part of the
| appeal of strict materialism: once you accept that there are
| purely spiritual beings that can have an effect on the visible
| world, it's pretty much an inescapable conclusion that at least
| some of the evil we see is their work. One can't deny their
| possibility or even probability without denying anything non-
| material. Of course at that point you pretty much lose the
| ability to talk about evil in any meaningful way. Morality
| becomes nothing more than an expressed personal preference and
| like any other personal preference you have no grounds for
| denying others' right to disagree. You can appeal to some vague
| concept of "harm" or "rights," but others can just disagree that
| harm is wrong or that rights must be respected.
| jancsika wrote:
| > it's pretty much an inescapable conclusion that at least some
| of the evil we see is their work.
|
| It's not inescapable, but it's certainly the first conclusion
| to jump to. :)
|
| But even then, it's been in a kind of god-of-the-gaps scramble
| for some time. Even for the families who go around talking
| about how "blessed" everyone is, there's usually a mom or
| somebody in there who read and understood one of a thousand
| child-rearing psychology books. "We're so blessed to have had
| great pre-K instructors in this community which we researched
| while looking for communities with decent schools" is a far cry
| from attributing most of the human condition to spiritual
| hijinks.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| > Morality becomes nothing more than an expressed personal
| preference and like any other personal preference you have no
| grounds for denying others' right to disagree.
|
| Religious faith makes no difference here. When a radical
| islamic meets a protestant, all they can do is assert their
| preferences against each other, until they finally resort to
| "denying others' right to disagree" - aka coercion.
| pfortuny wrote:
| I do not agree on the personification of evil (especially among
| Christians, who are whom I know). They believe there are
| persons who chose evil (the devil and his demons) but they are
| not the personification of evil.
|
| As persons, their existence is somehow "sacred" and in some
| sense "good". This is Aquinas' explanation which I deem
| satisfactory for the time being.
|
| One can commit oneself to evil but one cannot become "evil".
|
| As a consequence, even the devil deserves the benefit of the
| doubt, as Thomas More said. A human being, so much more.
| dustingetz wrote:
| gently disagree and propose that in the same way that they
| don't hear you, you aren't hearing them
| atemerev wrote:
| Thankfully, in these cases other people who are not into Moloch's
| worship unite, forget their differences, and purge him out of
| existence. The history is full with examples.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Quoting _Meditations on Moloch_ , part VIII:
|
| > Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had
| many names. In the Kushiel books, his name was Elua. He is the
| god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things.
| Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness,
| community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.
|
| > The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think "Ha ha, a
| god who doesn't even control any hell-monsters or command his
| worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This
| is going to be so easy!"
|
| > But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And
| the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a
| surprising number of unfortunate accidents.
|
| > There are many gods, but this one is ours.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| _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!_
|
| 1954
| blatant303 wrote:
| Allen Ginsberg
|
| "Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit,
| humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance ... I'm a member of
| NAMBLA because I love boys too -- everybody does, who has a
| little humanity."
|
| Source: https://www.nambla.org/ginsberg.html
|
| > Children screaming under the stairways!
| [deleted]
| tomaskafka wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
|
| "Egregore (also spelled egregor; from French egregore, from
| Ancient Greek egregoros, egregoros 'wakeful') is an occult
| concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the
| collective thoughts of a distinct group of people."
|
| For example, a state or AI - something that consistsnof people,
| but has a distict goals of its own.
| rolisz wrote:
| I've been running into egregores (or at least the concept of
| egregores) a lot lately!
| seneca wrote:
| Scott used to write some fantastic content. The classic SSC
| posts, this amongst them, were so thought provoking and original.
| Even when I strongly disagreed with it, I was always glad to have
| read it. He has lost his spark in recent years, it seems.
| Something about being de-anonymized, or maybe getting married,
| has peeled away the mad genius of his content and replaced it
| with prediction markets.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Scott agrees: 'Why Do I Suck?'
| (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck)
| meowface wrote:
| This recent post has been considered by some a return to form:
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geogra...
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Meditations on Moloch (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26129062 - Feb 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _Meditations on Moloch (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23734235 - July 2020 (43
| comments)
|
| _Meditations on Moloch (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756487 - April 2019 (54
| comments)
|
| _Meditations on Moloch (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17577913 - July 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _Meditations on Moloch_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10532551 - Nov 2015 (2
| comments)
| dirtyid wrote:
| Wonder if slate/astra will ever become required reading for
| schools. Shorter than shakespeare.
| [deleted]
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