I'm new to the LW community, and I've been reading the seminal works. After reading Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch and Zvi's Moloch Hasn't Won, I wanted to add a couple thoughts - mostly additional rebuttal of "Meditations...". To summarize Scott’s argument: * With a few exceptions, because of game...
Programmers are familiar with navigating interfaces and protocols. Whether it’s ASCII, a function signature, an OOP interface, HTTP, or gRPC, these kinds of interfaces are ubiquitous, exist at all levels of abstraction, and are necessary for connecting distinct modules to form a coherent system. I've been musing about the ways...
I'm new to the LW community, and I've been reading the seminal works. After reading Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch and Zvi's Moloch Hasn't Won, I wanted to add a couple thoughts - mostly additional rebuttal of "Meditations...".
To summarize Scott’s argument:
I think that Zvi covers most of the key issues with "Mediations..." in "Moloch Hasn’t Won”. To summarize Zvi’s rebuttals:
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Great summary. I think this is missing something:
We don't seem to have good social interfaces for large groups, perhaps because we cannot simulate large groups.
Not exactly what I was going for. Many actors + game theoretic concerns -> complex simulation. Eventually good simulation becomes intractable. However, when a common set of rules is enforced strongly enough, each individual's utility function aligns with that set of rules. This simplifies the situation and creates a higher level interface. This is why I thought to include enforcement as an important dimension.
In response to this:
Regarding mental prediction of group behavior as the definition of trust. I am not sure on this... (read more)
Hueristical decision-making is quick and practical. Experts tend to have better hueristics, and are usually in a better position to speculate about unfamiliar or uncertain treatments than laypeople. One good reason to be a fantasy-forbidding expert is that there are massive asymmetries in unvalidated medicine. The potential upside of taking vitamin X is probably small and bounded. The potential downside is unbounded.
That said, given the long history of traditional medicine, there are probably some effective treatments in the alternative medicine canon that just aren't yet well understood. Intellectual modesty is important.
Programmers are familiar with navigating interfaces and protocols. Whether it’s ASCII, a function signature, an OOP interface, HTTP, or gRPC, these kinds of interfaces are ubiquitous, exist at all levels of abstraction, and are necessary for connecting distinct modules to form a coherent system.
I've been musing about the ways that culture, laws, and authority act as dynamic social interfaces. These structures seem to emerge as solutions to social coordination problems. Different solutions have different advantages and disadvantages.
Many families, communes, and kibbutzes demonstrate a successful kind of anarcho-communism - there is a high degree of trust, and individuals get along through mutual aid and without formal codes. One explanation... (read 649 more words →)
Thanks for the link. Wish I'd read it earlier! That's a much better exposition of what I was trying to express here. :)
I do think that there's complication beyond even the two-layer model presented in "Studies on Slack". For example, maybe my company gives a lot of slack and looks at my value-add on a 5-year timeframe. At the same time, I have little personal slack around my annual bonus because I need to pay off loans. Perhaps the culture I live in has some different level of slack in its expectations for work. Although the two-layer model is a useful simplification, I'm not sure that the actual interactions are so neatly hierarchical.