Bankless 152 - Why Can't We Have Nice Things | Liv Boeree
Primer: Why is the story of an old Canaanite god relevant to us today? In this episode of Bankless, Liv Boeree, a legendary poker player, ties in Scott Alexander’s famous piece, Meditations on Moloch, with the ills we see in society today. Do we have some way to defeat its nefarious influence in our lives? Read on.
Background
Game theory expert
Legendary poker player
What Brought Her To Moloch
Is a pathologically competitive person. Had to win at everything
Fell in love with poker as it’s a ruthless game. Saw the full gamut of human behaviour through it
“Their friends might bluff them out of a huge amount of money, or they screw up or they get unlucky. And some people will be able to just sort of dust it off and then go down the pub with their friends afterwards and talk about it and learn from it. And others would fall out with their friends.”
- Liv Boeree
Learned about a branch of philosophy known as Effective Altruism — science, in its truest form, is trying to understand how the world works and to predict it better
A consistent theme with all the problems that keep arising in the world (e.g. environmental degradation, nuclear warhead proliferation)
These problems are game-theoretic. People are optimizing for the short-term against the long-term health of the commons
Led her to read Slate Star Codex’s Meditations of Moloch
Slate Star Codex’s Meditations On Moloch
Was a borderline spiritual read
It’s a 1.5 hours read
Scott Alexander, the author, takes the reader by the hand and provides lots of examples
Centered around a poem written by Allen Ginsberg called Howl, which talks about Moloch
Scott uses each line of the poem to assemble a picture of this thing that seems to cause problems within our society
How Does She Define Moloch?
Defines it as a force of game theoretic incentives that can lead agents within a competitive system to sacrifice more and more of their other values in order to win
“So it's kind of like winning for winning sake, if you would encapsulate it in a mindset. But it's also like the outcomes of it tends to be destruction of the wider ecosystem that is containing that game.”
- Liv Boeree
It’s the god of unhealthy competition. Not the god of competition since competition is a neutral thing
The Term “Moloch As The God Of Coordination Failure”
Example of a crowd of people in a football stadium
A few people from the first row gets too excited and stands up, preventing subsequent rows of people from seeing
The subsequent rows are forced to stand up, forcing everyone behind them to stand up
Everyone is worse off as they have to stand for the rest of the game
In the Instagram space a few years ago, beauty filters started to emerge
Females who are trying to become influencers had a strong pressure to use these filters
As the filters got better, it became an arms race to get even better filters
History Of Moloch
Came from an old Canaanite Bible story
There was a cult that was so obsessed with winning and wanted a stronger army
They had this god, Moloch, that they worshipped
They believed that if they could sacrifice what they cared about the most, they would be rewarded with military power
They would literally sacrifice their babies into a burning effigy
“It's like throwing more and more and more of your other values under the bus in order to win this one narrow prize.”
- Liv Boeree
The Moloch mindset needs 2 things to thrive:
A poorly designed competitive system with bad incentives
A minimum threshold/number of people within the system who wants to win the game
A Centralized Coordinator As A Solution To Moloch?
The centralized coordinator can become corrupt as well
People thought that the poem was about Capitalism, but it’s more than that
In Communism, competition is reduced to nothing, but still people would end up trying to optimize for something else
In Nick Bostrom’s Vulnerable World Hypothesis, our world is going in 2 directions:
Top-down control
Anarchy and mass decentralization
Both has its cons. Need to find a third attractor on a different dimension that is not just a trade-off between these 2 options
The Prisoner’s Dilemma And Moloch
People usually think of it as single player
The clear dominant strategy is to defect
The realistic version is to cooperate, at least in the beginning
Recommends Evolution of Trust, a website that talks you through these iterated prisoner’s dilemma
Moloch is the thing that makes you always defect
When Is Moloch Most Dangerous?
When it incentivizes people to come up with newer ways to get a competitive advantage
Unfortunately, it ties in with tech since tech is on an exponential curve
Companies are trying to be the first to build superintelligence
Solving Moloch
No clear process of what that looks like
A win-win solution would want to maximize choice for people and empower them
It comes laden with wisdom
Practical Examples Of Moloch’s Aesthetics In Our Lives
Moloch gets into many of our Capitalist systems
Moloch reduces complex things down into single metrics
E.g. The rainforest is biodiverse and rich. People are just cutting down trees into lumber
“You know, money is great, but it is a very perverse, bastardized way of encapsulating value in a single dimension.”
- Liv Boeree
Is Moloch A Landscape?
Doesn’t want to broaden the definition of Moloch is everything that’s bad
Prefers to break it down to:
Molochi-systematic issues
Moloch mindset
These are the 2 directions where we can try to fix things:
Designing better systems
Spreading memes to increase awareness that one is acting in a Molochi way
What Systems Are Ripe For Change?
Social media algorithms are optimized to reduce the human experience down to a single metric of likes and retweets
Realized that people have been getting increasingly angry on social media
Social media is optimized for clickbaits and the most triggering thing of the day
Fear and rage are most effective at driving engagement
“There's this force that wants drama, because drama is what pays. And so it's a really fucked incentive model, whereby the more crazy, shady things that happen in the world, the richer the media gets.”
- Liv Boeree
Have to get enough people aware just how bad the media is incentivized to stir polarization and for people to be less inclined to share and click on it
Identifying Our Wins Against Moloch
There’s a Wikipedia page detailing all the near-misses of nuclear war or potential flashpoints
However, it’s unclear what the percentage of what these near-misses are
Seems that we are in a lucky universe where no nuclear war has actually happened
Scott Alexander wrote a piece called The Goddess of Everything Else, who is very win-win
The fact that we have been winning is not evidence that we will make it
Designing Social Networks
Adaptability is key because you need to amend rules
Burning Man is an example of a good system
Have to be based on a set of core principles or cleverly designed starting conditions
Giving without expecting something in return
The Crypto Community
A new community/tech is vulnerable to scammers
Like every other new community, it is naive and did not consider edge cases/psychopaths coming in to corrupt it
The community need to be honest with themselves and design a system where psychopaths’ behaviours are constrained
Takeaways From This Episode
You cannot design a good system if you are not living the win-win mindset
Was Moloch Part Of Her Competitive Poker Journey?
When she screwed up in a poker tournament, she felt jealous of someone else’s success
Have pathological optimism to see the positive side of it
Viewing it positively got easier as she got older
Her YouTube Channel
Moloch: The Media Wars will be out soon
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