Moloch
- Context:
- (a source that's not yet available, but will be on youtube soon)
- In Converting Moloch from Sith to Jedi by Daniel Schmachtenberger, he talks about how Moloch is effectively races to the bottom, where in order to compete you have to do something that undermines your personal values or destroys common goods.
- However, he notes, there can also be races to the top! A race to the top occurs when there's a situation where companies or individuals are unable to compete without adopting some new approach that benefits the whole. Tesla making electric cars affordable is a great example of this on the technology level—since the consumer demand is there, it's forcing the entire auto industry to start shifting away from internal combustion engines.
- In general, Game A dynamics within a given business will make it less competitive within its industry, so as Game B dynamics start to stabilize within some organizations, other organizations will either have to find a way to operate at a similar level of effectiveness, or will go bankrupt.
- To illustrate these, read these this excerpt from the Intro to An Everyone Culture:
- > In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and nonprofits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.
> We regard this as the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. Is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their energies? The total cost of this waste is simple to state and staggering to contemplate: It prevents organizations, and the people who work in them, from reaching their full potential.
- Clearly, any organization that can find a different way to organize itself that puts an end to the hiding and taps peoples' deep appetite to do good work and to learn new things... will have a huge advantage.
- I was reading The Box by Marc Levinson May 29th, 2020 & May 30th, 2020 which is a book about the story of how container shipping came to dominate (and generate) global commerce
- and found myself thinking about the role that unions have played in fighting Moloch. A union creates a larger unit of people able to coordinate to make a shared demand, so that Moloch (in this case, in the form of the employer) can't divide & conquer.
- However, reading the many many case studies in The Box by Marc Levinson, it seems pretty clear to me that unions are only able to fight against Moloch—they can't actually create races to the top.
- This means they eventually tend to lose, because the largest pressures still come from the downward spiral. Moreover, conflicts between and within unions illustrate that Molochian dynamics can still show up there.
- In the case of container shipping, the longshoreman's unions were opposed to it altogether, but once it was demonstrated how much cheaper it was, it created a clear race where the old shipping methods couldn't compete.
- Interestingly, it's not obvious to me right now whether to characterize such a race as a race to the top or to the bottom!
- The longshoremen did backbreaking labour, but they were paid quite well for it (when they were paid at all) and they had a lot of loyalty and derived a lot of meaning from their work. From their perspective, the various organizations that were shifting to container shipping were selling out to Moloch.
- However, what was actually being lost here? In the short-term, surely lots of longshoremen became unemployed, but this was in part because the unions fought container-shipping tooth & nail right up until they were defeated, leaving the members suddenly with nothing. If the unions had been able to see the change coming and consciously & strategically adapt what they were doing & retrain their people, then something else might have been possible.
- I'm not suggesting this was within the realm of possibility at the time even if the unions had accepted the imminent change to container shipping; the reality was that these low-skill jobs were simply moving out of New York City, whose downtown ports were already becoming unworkable for various other reasons—in addition to the deteriorating physical condition, it was hard to get the goods from inland to the ports. Trucking them through Manhattan traffic was costly, as was the rail lines sending their boxcars on small boats briefly across the bay just so they could be unloaded and loaded onto oceangoing ships. Plus the factories next to the ports were struggling with NYC's real estate and electrical costs increasing.
- Meanwhile in parallel with the Tesla analogy, part of why shipping became way cheaper with the containers is that it actually took way less energy to do! In this case though, the energy saved wasn't fossil fuels but human labor energy, which is a challenging topic—humans, despite what some propaganda would tell you, value working, and moreover need to generate some sort of livelihood. They also need to eat anyway, so it's harder to point at wasted fuel.
- (related: Studies on Slack (on slatestarcodex))
3 linked references
October 15th, 2025
- thinking about Moloch & The Creature that Eats Moloch and re-reading Meditations on Moloch and the bit towards the end about Elua (which is kind of the supercooperation cluster)
- and I'm like "hmm yeah some gods want to evolve into Elua (I think the judeochristian one very much does) and others might want to get included as part of the overall flow, but others' very nature (eg Moloch's) is essentially opposed
April 21st, 2023
- I've seen a creature that eats Moloch. The creature is hard to describe, and currently asleep
- Malcolm's 100× vision talks about this at the end:
- > This collective brain and collective body are themselves part of a larger network of other similar superorganisms, which sometimes overlap somewhat. This network also includes more self-contained companies that are operating using a similar self-energizing collective-intelligence-oriented culture and probably some of those companies were initially incubated in the “collective body” level.
- > These superorganisms form a kind of virtual economy, in the same sense that a country or city has an economy. Part of what makes there be an economy is that economic activity is WAY cheaper within the clusters that mutually recognize each other as part of this new Game-B-esque attractor, due to increased capacity to do trust-building and coordination. This economy is able to be remarkably creative and productive compared to the rest of the world even though we’re operating in ways that aren’t built on the false accounting of externalizing costs, and thus has huge net exports (to the old economy) of an increasing number of goods & services, and is well on its way to outcompeting or converting Game-A businesses until finally Moloch eats itself.
- > creature is hard to describe (and currently asleep) but...
the basic gist is that moloch occurs fractally due to failing to be able to find/design/recognize win-wins that both/all parties can verify are better for all. iow, a failure to scale consciousness. - > but then trust-building capacity among/between systems that can do this successfully is so great that they outcompete systems that CAN'T do it, which means forces everybody to become a supercooperator
in some sense Moloch eats itself