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shminux comments on Open thread, 11-17 August 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I am not aware of an existing one, although it is related to Moloch, as described in SSC when applied to the state:
What Munger describes as The State, SSC calls Moloch. What your link calls the Munger test, may as well be called the Moloch test:
I don't know about that. I understand Moloch as a considerably wider and larger system than just a State.
Probably. I think Moloch is a metaphor for the actual, uncaring and often hostile universe, as contrasted with an imagined should-universe (the unicorn).
No, that's Gnon (Nature Or Nature's God). Moloch is the choice between sacrificing a value to remain competitive against others who have also sacrificed that value, or else to stop existing because you are not competitive. The name comes an ancient god people would sacrifice their children to.
Right, thanks.
Well, not THAT wide :-)
My thinking about Moloch is still too fuzzy for good definitions, but I'm inclined to to treat is as emergent system behavior which, according to Finagle's Law, is usually not what you want. Often enough it's not what you expect, too, even if you designed (or tinkered with) the system.
The unicorn is also narrower than the whole should-universe -- specifically it's some agent or entity with highly unlikely benevolent properties and the proposal under discussion is entirely reliant on these properties in order to work.
Moloch is based on the neo-reactionaries' Gnon. Notice how Nyan deals with the fuzziness by dividing Gnon into four components, each of which can be analyzed individually. Apparently Yvain's brain went into "basilisk shock" up on exposure to the content, which is why his description is so fuzzy.
Maybe genealogically, but Moloch and Gnon are two completely different concepts.
Gnon is a personalization of the dictates of reality, as stated in the post defining it. Every city in the world has the death penalty for stepping in front of a bus -- who set that penalty? Gnon did. Civilizations thrive when they adhere to the dictates of Gnon, and collapse when they cease to adhere to them. And so on. The structure is mechanistic/horroristic (same thing, in this case): "Satan is evil, but he still cares about each human soul; while Cthulhu can destroy humanity and never even notice." (in the comments here) Gnon is Cthulhu. Gnon doesn't care what you think about Gnon. Gnon doesn't care about you at all. But if you don't care about Gnon, you can't escape the cost.
There's nothing dualistic about Gnon: there's only the spectrum from adherence to rebellion. Moloch vs. Elua, on the other hand, is totally Manichaean: the 'survive-mode' dictates of Gnon are identified with Moloch, the evil god of multipolar traps and survival-necessitated sacrifices, and Moloch must be defeated by creating a new god to take over the world and enforce one specific morality and one specific set of dictates everywhere.
(Land, Meltdown: "Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously.")
"Platonic-fascist top-down solutions" that didn't screw up viciously: universal education, the hospital system, unified monetary systems, unified weights and measures, sewers, enforcement of a common code of laws, traffic signals, municipal street cleaning...
A lot of people would argue that this is in fact in the process of screwing up right now.
This really didn't develop top-down.
Strictly speaking I don't think an answer to Moloch has to be in the form of a totalizing ethic, although it sure makes it easier if it is.
That's not self-evident to me. At the levels of abstraction we're talking about, the idea of opaque, uncaring, often perverse, and sometimes malevolent system/universe/reality is really a very old and widespread meme.
Personalizing it in quite this way was based on Gnon. Also the level of abstraction we (i.e., Yvain) are talking about it's impossible to say much of anything meaningful as you yourself noted in the grandparent.
Or it's based on the poem "Howl," which uses the term Moloch and is quoted in full in the post.
I've been thinking of Moloch as the God of the Perverse Incentives, which doesn't quite cover it (it has the right shape, but strictly speaking a perverse incentive needs to be perverse relative to some incentive-setting agent, which the universe lacks) but has the advantage of fitting the meter of a certain Kipling poem.
This is pretty close to my definition, but I'd simplify it to "Moloch is incentives". Perverse or not, Moloch is the god that gives you near-mode benefits unrelated to your far-mode values.