12 ms·

Meditations on Moloch (2014)

221 points by abhaynayar 4y ago

richeyrw 4y ago
For those who prefer listening to reading, here's the audio version: https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/meditations-on-moloch https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/meditations-on-moloch
- sva_ 4y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion, great listening to this during cooking.
ordinaryradical 4y ago
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.
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  > My favorite thing he’s ever wrote. Exactly the same for me.
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  the parable of talents is also way way up there.
- cma 4y ago
  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/1362153191102677001 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.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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
      - austhrow743 4y ago
        Lost underwater city. There are some suspiciously man made looking natural rock formations underwater that look like part of a pyramid. Scott even scuba dived there to check them out. I'm not sure how much conspiracy is involved.
    - kmmlng 4y ago
      I think people underestimate how hard it is to evaluate the validity of ideas. Most people think they are open to new ideas, but actually have a pre-configured bias system that automatically accepts or rejects any incoming ideas. If you are actually willing to entertain new ideas, you have to run with something for a while while you figure out if it makes sense or not. You have to suspend parts of your existing belief system and reexamine assumptions you have made before. You will probably change your conclusion a couple of times in the process. Dismissing conspiracy theories is the safe thing to do. It also does not require any effort, intelligence or insight on your part. I admire people who are willing to actually engage with ideas like that, even though it does not seem feasible everywhere all the time.
- johnfn 4y ago
  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.
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  I have to give it to Unsong, but that's a hell of a long favorite. My favorite bit in Unsong is the chapter where God gives an answer to the problem of evil, but there are so many other good bits in there too. Meditations on Moloch is fantastic for sure. I also really love Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person. Oh, and Idol Words, a more recent one that I really liked. I like Scott best when he's doing that particular weird brand of fiction he does, where he mixes sci-fi and philosophy and religion and kinda mashes them into a cool new thing. Unsong is the longest example of course but he's released lots of cool little one offs in that vein through the years. Some links: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th... https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-dee... https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ https://unsongbook.com https://unsongbook.com https://unsongbook.com/chapter-71-but-for-another-gives-its-ease/ https://unsongbook.com/chapter-71-but-for-another-gives-its-... If you can think of any other examples of this kind of thing from Scott that you like, post a link, I'm sure there's some I haven't found yet.
  - chimprich 4y ago
    There's this bit of fiction: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ I was blown away at the time, but I seem to remember didn't get much love when discussed on here. I thought about it a lot during the Covid information wars.
    - agentwiggles 4y ago
      Oh yeah, that is a good one for sure! Definitely hits a nerve when I look back at the last few years.
- globalreset 4y ago
  Moloch is not exactly about kicking the can down the road. It's about competitive forces forcing individual actions (sacrifices) to gain an advantage that seem rational when viewed in separation, but since everyone will be competing the same way, making same sacroficies, gain no one anything in aggregate.
seneca 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Scott agrees: 'Why Do I Suck?' (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck)
- meowface 4y ago
  This recent post has been considered by some a return to form: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geogra...
Sniffnoy 4y ago
(2014)
hprotagonist 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 https://www.nambla.org/ginsberg.html > Children screaming under the stairways!
  - rukuu001 4y ago
    He's repugnant and the art does not redeem him in any way. Reading the poem feels like picking up million dollars that's covered in shit. It's still a million dollars. But it's still covered in shit.
antiquark 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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-mortality-and-the-machine-tolkien-and-technology/260412/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/fall-...
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > Treating “the algorithm” as a kind of divine power misunderstands where algorithmic power comes from From "Magic Numbers" https://reallifemag.com/magic-numbers/ https://reallifemag.com/magic-numbers/
User23 4y ago
> 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.
- pfortuny 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  gently disagree and propose that in the same way that they don’t hear you, you aren’t hearing them
- jancsika 4y ago
  > 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.
deleted 4y ago
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fwlr 4y ago
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.”
tomaskafka 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore "Egregore (also spelled egregor; from French égrégore, from Ancient Greek ἐγρήγορος, egrēgoros '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 4y ago
  I've been running into egregores (or at least the concept of egregores) a lot lately!
  - 0xBABAD00C 4y ago
    Human beings are not the top-level cognitive agents, there are egregores at higher levels of organization (related to memeplexes, meta-organisms, etc). It's just hard to define and talk about them concretely, our language is not well-suited to reason about agency above the human level. One century-old example of identifying an egregore is the meme "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." It's nothing supernatural, just like a combination of neurons computing each their own thing gives rise to a new agent (human), a combination of humans computing each their own thing gives rise to a superhuman agent (spectre of communism).
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      My opinion is that the Earth is the top level cognition with a hierarchy of lesser intelligences going all the way to the single cell. We exist in between and that is why the human condition is so depressing.
      - deleted 4y ago
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- dbtc 4y ago
  Thank you, I hadn't heard of the word before and I think it'll stick with me. I think there may be some crossover or resonance with the ideas of: - Carl Jung's collective unconscious and archetypes - Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler's view of civilizations as (pseudo) organisms.
dang 4y ago
Related: Meditations on Moloch (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26129062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26129062 - Feb 2021 (2 comments) Meditations on Moloch (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23734235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23734235 - July 2020 (43 comments) Meditations on Moloch (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756487 - April 2019 (54 comments) Meditations on Moloch (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17577913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17577913 - July 2018 (1 comment) Meditations on Moloch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10532551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10532551 - Nov 2015 (2 comments)
atemerev 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
mxkopy 4y ago
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 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    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.
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dirtyid 4y ago
Wonder if slate/astra will ever become required reading for schools. Shorter than shakespeare.
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  Maybe in some Upper Div Philosophy class when he inevitably goes down as another cornerstone in the history of Philosophy.
alan-crowe 4y ago
Section IV says: The idea of biological or cultural evolution causing a mass population explosion is a philosophical toy at best. I think it likely that biological and cultural evolution get tangled together. Ponder the Darwinian pressures on the memetic immune system. It gets really complicated when things get Darwinian on two levels. People need a memetic immune system, to protect them against memes such as the Skoptsy[0] or Shakers[1] Memes themselves need to fit in the obvious sense of telling people to spread them. But in addition to this single level fitness, there is a cross-level concept: a meme is fertile if it encourages its hosts in their biological reproduction. The "be fruitful and multiply" meme has an edge, separate from its own reproductive success, in an increasing number of hosts. A meme is barren if it discourages its hosts in their biological reproduction. This complicates the Darwinian pressures on the memetic immune system. Assuming that the mechanisms in play are subtle enough to distinguish between fertile memes and barren memes, evolution shapes our memetic immune systems to block barren memes while leaving us vulnerable to fertile memes. Suppose that being smart correlates with having a subtle memetic immune system. Then we expect differences between smart and stupid people. We ponder barren memes and notice smart people being more resistant than stupid people. That seems natural; memes are basically selfish, being more resistant is good, right? Then we ponder fertile memes, and smart people are more vulnerable than stupid people. Wait! How are smart people getting infected by these memes, aren't they supposed to be smart? Whoops! Gaps in the memetic immune system to let the fertile memes through are favoured by natural selection. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skoptsy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skoptsy [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaker_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaker_communities
hawkjo 4y ago
Beautiful
- deleted 4y ago
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specproc 4y ago
I doubt an LLM will ever be able to write like that.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
TLDR
- tsukikage 4y ago
  "We do not give you server space / To ask such things; it’s not a perk, / So cease these idle questionings, / And please get back to work."

221 points by abhaynayar 4y ago

For those who prefer listening to reading, here's the audio version: https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/meditations-on-moloch https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/meditations-on-moloch

sva_ 4y ago
Thanks for the suggestion, great listening to this during cooking.

ordinaryradical 4y ago

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.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago
> My favorite thing he’s ever wrote. Exactly the same for me.
hprotagonist 4y ago
the parable of talents is also way way up there.
cma 4y ago
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/1362153191102677001 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.
- skybrian 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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
    - austhrow743 4y ago
      Lost underwater city. There are some suspiciously man made looking natural rock formations underwater that look like part of a pyramid. Scott even scuba dived there to check them out. I'm not sure how much conspiracy is involved.
  - kmmlng 4y ago
    I think people underestimate how hard it is to evaluate the validity of ideas. Most people think they are open to new ideas, but actually have a pre-configured bias system that automatically accepts or rejects any incoming ideas. If you are actually willing to entertain new ideas, you have to run with something for a while while you figure out if it makes sense or not. You have to suspend parts of your existing belief system and reexamine assumptions you have made before. You will probably change your conclusion a couple of times in the process. Dismissing conspiracy theories is the safe thing to do. It also does not require any effort, intelligence or insight on your part. I admire people who are willing to actually engage with ideas like that, even though it does not seem feasible everywhere all the time.
johnfn 4y ago
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.
agentwiggles 4y ago
I have to give it to Unsong, but that's a hell of a long favorite. My favorite bit in Unsong is the chapter where God gives an answer to the problem of evil, but there are so many other good bits in there too. Meditations on Moloch is fantastic for sure. I also really love Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person. Oh, and Idol Words, a more recent one that I really liked. I like Scott best when he's doing that particular weird brand of fiction he does, where he mixes sci-fi and philosophy and religion and kinda mashes them into a cool new thing. Unsong is the longest example of course but he's released lots of cool little one offs in that vein through the years. Some links: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th... https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-dee... https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ https://unsongbook.com https://unsongbook.com https://unsongbook.com/chapter-71-but-for-another-gives-its-ease/ https://unsongbook.com/chapter-71-but-for-another-gives-its-... If you can think of any other examples of this kind of thing from Scott that you like, post a link, I'm sure there's some I haven't found yet.
- chimprich 4y ago
  There's this bit of fiction: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ I was blown away at the time, but I seem to remember didn't get much love when discussed on here. I thought about it a lot during the Covid information wars.
  - agentwiggles 4y ago
    Oh yeah, that is a good one for sure! Definitely hits a nerve when I look back at the last few years.
globalreset 4y ago
Moloch is not exactly about kicking the can down the road. It's about competitive forces forcing individual actions (sacrifices) to gain an advantage that seem rational when viewed in separation, but since everyone will be competing the same way, making same sacroficies, gain no one anything in aggregate.

seneca 4y ago

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 4y ago
Scott agrees: 'Why Do I Suck?' (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck)
meowface 4y ago
This recent post has been considered by some a return to form: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geogra...

Sniffnoy 4y ago

(2014)

hprotagonist 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 https://www.nambla.org/ginsberg.html > Children screaming under the stairways!
- rukuu001 4y ago
  He's repugnant and the art does not redeem him in any way. Reading the poem feels like picking up million dollars that's covered in shit. It's still a million dollars. But it's still covered in shit.

antiquark 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
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-mortality-and-the-machine-tolkien-and-technology/260412/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/fall-...
cratermoon 4y ago
> Treating “the algorithm” as a kind of divine power misunderstands where algorithmic power comes from From "Magic Numbers" https://reallifemag.com/magic-numbers/ https://reallifemag.com/magic-numbers/

User23 4y ago

> 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.

pfortuny 4y ago
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 4y ago
gently disagree and propose that in the same way that they don’t hear you, you aren’t hearing them
jancsika 4y ago
> 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.

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fwlr 4y ago

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.”

tomaskafka 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore "Egregore (also spelled egregor; from French égrégore, from Ancient Greek ἐγρήγορος, egrēgoros '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 4y ago
I've been running into egregores (or at least the concept of egregores) a lot lately!
- 0xBABAD00C 4y ago
  Human beings are not the top-level cognitive agents, there are egregores at higher levels of organization (related to memeplexes, meta-organisms, etc). It's just hard to define and talk about them concretely, our language is not well-suited to reason about agency above the human level. One century-old example of identifying an egregore is the meme "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." It's nothing supernatural, just like a combination of neurons computing each their own thing gives rise to a new agent (human), a combination of humans computing each their own thing gives rise to a superhuman agent (spectre of communism).
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    My opinion is that the Earth is the top level cognition with a hierarchy of lesser intelligences going all the way to the single cell. We exist in between and that is why the human condition is so depressing.
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dbtc 4y ago
Thank you, I hadn't heard of the word before and I think it'll stick with me. I think there may be some crossover or resonance with the ideas of: - Carl Jung's collective unconscious and archetypes - Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler's view of civilizations as (pseudo) organisms.

dang 4y ago

Related: Meditations on Moloch (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26129062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26129062 - Feb 2021 (2 comments) Meditations on Moloch (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23734235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23734235 - July 2020 (43 comments) Meditations on Moloch (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756487 - April 2019 (54 comments) Meditations on Moloch (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17577913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17577913 - July 2018 (1 comment) Meditations on Moloch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10532551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10532551 - Nov 2015 (2 comments)

atemerev 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

mxkopy 4y ago

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 4y ago
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- mxkopy 4y ago
  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.

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dirtyid 4y ago

Wonder if slate/astra will ever become required reading for schools. Shorter than shakespeare.

reducesuffering 4y ago
Maybe in some Upper Div Philosophy class when he inevitably goes down as another cornerstone in the history of Philosophy.

alan-crowe 4y ago

Section IV says: The idea of biological or cultural evolution causing a mass population explosion is a philosophical toy at best. I think it likely that biological and cultural evolution get tangled together. Ponder the Darwinian pressures on the memetic immune system. It gets really complicated when things get Darwinian on two levels. People need a memetic immune system, to protect them against memes such as the Skoptsy[0] or Shakers[1] Memes themselves need to fit in the obvious sense of telling people to spread them. But in addition to this single level fitness, there is a cross-level concept: a meme is fertile if it encourages its hosts in their biological reproduction. The "be fruitful and multiply" meme has an edge, separate from its own reproductive success, in an increasing number of hosts. A meme is barren if it discourages its hosts in their biological reproduction. This complicates the Darwinian pressures on the memetic immune system. Assuming that the mechanisms in play are subtle enough to distinguish between fertile memes and barren memes, evolution shapes our memetic immune systems to block barren memes while leaving us vulnerable to fertile memes. Suppose that being smart correlates with having a subtle memetic immune system. Then we expect differences between smart and stupid people. We ponder barren memes and notice smart people being more resistant than stupid people. That seems natural; memes are basically selfish, being more resistant is good, right? Then we ponder fertile memes, and smart people are more vulnerable than stupid people. Wait! How are smart people getting infected by these memes, aren't they supposed to be smart? Whoops! Gaps in the memetic immune system to let the fertile memes through are favoured by natural selection. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skoptsy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skoptsy [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaker_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaker_communities

hawkjo 4y ago

Beautiful

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specproc 4y ago

I doubt an LLM will ever be able to write like that.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

TLDR

tsukikage 4y ago
"We do not give you server space / To ask such things; it’s not a perk, / So cease these idle questionings, / And please get back to work."