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StartAtTheEnd

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Status: No less important than the problem with AGI. I promise.

Here's the solution to the problem of Moloch:

Less information. Seriously. Hear me out.
Before we discovered clickbait, it could not dominate.
Now that it's well-know, it's a nash's equilibrium, we have no choice but to tend towards clickbait.
Why is make-up popular? Because it exists. It's now a nash's equilibrium, we can't get rid of it again, for girls want to look pretty. They feel pressured towards this strategy.

Why are cities all about efficiency and competition, while some rural areas still value health and well-being over productivity? It's because some people haven't fallen into the trap/dilemma yet. They're not sufficiently connected/exposed yet.

Now, lets consider two systems less complex than the real world: What ruined the magic of old MMORPG games? What ruined the internet? Answer: It was information. Strategy guides, statistics, metrics which could be gamed, efficient searching, and datamining.
It ruined communities by removing organic social aspects from the equation.
It allowed us to wrap our heads around essential metrics so that they could be gamed.
It allowed us to look for, or at least calculate, the most efficient strategies.

My favorite beach used to be clean, now it's not. Why? It became well-known.
There used to be beautiful, untouched areas of nature, most are now gone, why? They were revealed.
Now we look for "red flags" in others. Indeed, real life has become "meta".
Humanity regarded as a resource (something exploitable) is closer to a waste product than ever before. "Waste" is the last transformation that a resource goes through, the state in which no further exploitation is possible.
Naivety is a resource. Innocence is a resource. Attention is a resource. "Caring", "Reactivity" are resources. These are all finite.

Things lose their magic once you understand them. Things can be systematized once an overview of them is possible.
I used to like people more because I understood them less. I used to view people as individuals because I hadn't yet built a mental model in which I could categorize them.
This is a warning: Stop exposing information recklessly. Prometheus wasn't punished without reason.
There exists far worse nash's equilibriums than we have discovered until now. It's likely we will ever recover if we expose too many of them.
I don't know enough about information theory to explain what causes this, but this article (now mine, but a great read) feels related: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-legibility/
It has become clear to me that my well-being literally requires "warrens", and that censorship and tyrannism requires control which requires capturing information. "Moloch" result from openness of information. Your privacy in your own house is a direct consequence of the information being isolated from the outside world. (It will die with IoT). If you can ever be your true self, it's likely because you're in an environment in which your true self won't be displayed to anyone you worry about judging you.
Knowledge is inversely proportional to self-esteem and happiness (in general. Not all forms of knowledge are unhealthy)

Conclusion: Moloch is a result of open information. Most mental illness in the modern world, too, is because of information and the psychological changes which meta-knowledge brings. Humanity, regarded as a complex system, is better off with far less connectivity of information. The world itself is tending towards "premature exploitation". Originality, individuality and variety are decreasing, destructive interference is accelerating.

I'm using mathematical concepts, but I'm not very familiar with game theory or entropy. This is all pure intuition - but regarded as a hypothesis, it explains a great deal of things, and yet, false positives are hard to find.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong, and that the set of Moloch-ized areas of life does not tend towards 100% as access to information about the world approaches infinity. But I'm quite certain that transparency of information is accelerating a lot of undesirable things - global surveillance is merely one outcome. Human interactions turning into optimization games (social media likes) and algorithms (dating checklists) is merely another.

1StartAtTheEnd3y

It's indeed an interesting conversation! But possibly too broad. You can continue to engage if it interests you, but don't feel pressured to reply further if it's too much. The "solved" aspect is indeed my primary concern. On a related note, there's a few other things about our way of advancing the modern world which seems to oppose The Fun Theory Sequence, including modern values. The modern society is awful at psychology because an understanding of it would conflict with our moral values (and conflict with many ideologies). What I think is a great argument for this is the Blank Slate theory and the controversy of things like IQ tests and other controversial things that most intellectuals are aware of but avoid getting into. "Reducing information" is not what I want to do exactly. I want to reduce the access to information, not the information inherent in the system. The latter would make the problem worse (simpler things are solved faster). I think most of the world is locked down by molochian restrictions, and that the rest is to follow. Look at this process for instance: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ It did not happen just 15 years ago. But every year, the process seems to go faster, and the initial stage seems to increase. The rule-breakers vs regulation race is never included, rules and regulations are rarely reversed, and we never achieve the safety with which the law is argued. The main way we avoid decay is that, when things start sucking too much, people jump ship and find an alternative. Like this, we cycle through different platforms over time and leave once they suck enough (MSN, Skype, Discord). But recently the decay is at the upper levels, which form top-down restrictions. On LW, we're restricted by international law, then the national laws of the countries in which the servers are hosted, then probably by local laws? then the laws of the hosting company, then by t

1quetzal_rainbow3y

You have really weird beliefs about the past. The general mechanism for dating 200 yers ago was arranged marriage. It not always was forced, you could refuse in really uncomfortable cases, but social pressure was immensive and if you was, like, peasant, you considered your comfortable survival much before your personal feelings. Yep, it probably didn't feel like optimization number-crunching, but this was because all optimization was from outside - people who didn't follow the custom simply died. And I don't even talk about nice family optimization task "You are peasant in Russia in 19th century, and it's famine outside, you should choose what child you are going to stop feeding, because it's less condemnable practice than abortion". Or "You are peasant in Russia in 19th century, and it's famine outside, so you need to choose which child to kick out of the house for them to become factory workers (if they are lucky) or beggars or thieves or prostitutes (child prostitution in Russian Empire was not uncommon)". [...] You enemies could be less tactically skilled, but your mistakes killed you in the same amount. [...] If you were medieval peasant, you basically didn't have money to have weapon and armor and you mostly didn't have any choice other than suffer the consequences of war. If you were somewhat richer and lived somewhat later, you could go to be mercenary, because war was rare profitable enterprise before capitalism. And if you lived in era of nation states, you usually was drafted in army and had choice between prison/katorga/execution on spot and going to war because your government told you so. I picture here too dark image of the past, and I need to say that even in this conditions people could find multiple cracks in social order and widen them if they were lucky and creative, and modern times have much more space for such cracks. Yes, I agree that we lost some freedoms - we have closed borders between nation states and inscrutable bureaucracy

Am I correct that you consider the past worse because people suffered more in the past? That's not the metric I focus on. I'm not speaking against either suffering nor your dislike of it, both of these are human things. My problem with mathematical optimization is that it seems to overwrite what's human with something inhuman. The modern world primarily seems moral because it's profitable to pretend to be moral. A charity is more likely to donate 10% of its profits and re-invest 90% into marketing itself than it is to donate 90% of its profits to those who... (read more)