Mod note: this post violates our LLM Writing Policy for LessWrong and was incorrectly approved, so I have delisted the post to make it only accessible via link. I've not returned it to your drafts, because that would make the comments hard to access.
David, please don't post more direct LLM output, or we'll remove your posting permissions.
Escaping Molochian traps is difficult. Yet as you identified, the dynamic is fundamentally driven by competition, and there is little value in being right if you are left behind or simply cease to exist. As Alexander Scott argued in his Meditations on Moloch, the primary response lies in balancing competition with cooperation.
This is of course a general consideration, and I genuinely don't know how the Qing Empire could have navigated its way out. But what I do observe is that cooperation almost always begins with communication, with persuasive ideas that circulate and diffuse across boundaries, whatever form those boundaries take. Someone denounces practices that are abusive, dangerous, revolting, or immoral, armed with rhetoric and emotional or rational arguments, and slowly convinces more and more people until these ideas gather enough support among elites to produce real change: a social revolution, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, a treaty halting nuclear proliferation, an agreement to limit CO₂ emissions and perhaps, one day, meaningful AI regulation.
It doesn't always work, and the results can be delayed by decades or even centuries. But history offers countless examples where cooperation ultimately prevailed following this process (and sadly, countless examples where it failed). Competition dictates the terms of survival, cooperation renegotiates them.
I think this phenomenon has a pretty simple explanation. In a competitive world, survival is predicated on fitness. Fitness is determined on balance by many factors. Industrialization won because even though it made society worse in some regards, on balance it increased a society's fitness and ability to outcompete others.
You can resist negative externalities in a competitive environment only so long as you can maintain fitness while doing so.
For example: want to operate an ethical, repairable phone company? Better have a good plan for competitors who sell more phones at higher margins because they have less repairable designs and force customers to switch more often, in addition to removing their headphone jacks and charger in the box to sell more accessories and reduce costs. Maybe you would be forced to do some of these things yourself in order to stay competitive enough to avoid doing the others. The alternative is irrelevance or bankruptcy.
Note: I don't fully believe what I'm about to argue. But I think it's a useful thought experiment to stress-test our assumptions about "progress."
The Weird Claim
Most history books say the Qing Empire was backward. It refused trains. It refused factories. It lost wars. It collapsed.
But what if we read the story in another way?
What if the Qing wasn't failing to modernize — but was actually identifying problems that we only started talking about 150 years later?
The Train Story
When British engineers showed Qing officials steam locomotives, the officials added it to collection but said no in using it.
We usually tell this story like this: "Silly old men afraid of new things."
But here's another way to read it:
Imagine your neighbor wants to build a highway through your village. He says: "Trust me, it will be great! Everyone will get rich!"
You ask: "What happens when someone gets hit by a car? What about the noise? The smoke? Who pays when something breaks?"
He says: "We'll figure it out later."
You say: "No."
Were you being stupid? Or were you the only adult in the room?
Early steam trains were dangerous. They exploded. They killed workers. They disrupted farming villages along their routes. The Qing officials weren't imagining these problems — these were real, unsolved problems.
Today, we have a whole field called technology readiness levels — the idea that a technology isn't ready to deploy until you've solved the safety and integration problems. The Qing were basically asking: "Is this at production level yet?"
The answer, honestly, was: not really.
The Factory Story
The Qing also resisted industrial capitalism and large factories.
Again, we tell this as: "They didn't understand economics."
But what if they were actually thinking of something else?
They saw that factories:
Does this sound familiar?
This is basically the entire critique of modern city and society. These are the things we put in undergraduate economics textbooks as "market failures." These are the debates we're still having about tech companies, gig workers, and carbon emissions.
The Qing government looked at the factory system and said: "The machine is impressive, but the side effects don't have solutions yet, and the political power imbalance has no good answer."
That's not ignorance. That's a reasonable risk assessment.
Flip Side
Here's where things gets interesting — and I want to be honest about the limits.
The Qing Empire collapsed.
I'm not going to say this was entirely colonialism's fault, even though colonialism was real and brutal. I want to ask a harder question:
Even if their criticisms were correct, their approach didn't work.
This is actually a deep problem in rationalist thinking. Being right about the problems doesn't mean you've found a stable solution.
A critic who correctly identifies every flaw in a bridge design, but offers no alternative, still ends up at the bottom of the river when the bridge collapses under them.
The Qing's precautionary stance — however intellectually defensible — left them vulnerable to actors who had fewer scruples about externalities. It's like refusing to eat processed food while your neighbor who eats junk food is somehow out-competing you at work. Your health analysis might be correct. But the game isn't played on the terms you chose.
The Real Question This Thought Experiment Points To
So what's the actual puzzle here?
It's this: Where is the balance?
We know unconstrained industrialization causes real harm — climate change, inequality, political capture by corporations, urban dysfunction. The Qing critics were pointing at real things.
We also know that a society that refuses all technological deployment because "the safety problems aren't fully solved" will get left behind by one that doesn't — and then won't be around to implement its careful policies.
This maps onto debates we have right now:
The pattern is always the same. Someone says: "This technology has unsolved problems." Someone else says: "But if we wait, we lose." And history doesn't give us a clean answer about who was right, because the timelines are too long and the counterfactuals are invisible.
The One-Line Version
The Qing Empire made arguments about technology and capitalism that we now recognize as basically correct — and then collapsed anyway.
Maybe the lesson isn't "they were wrong." Maybe the lesson is: being right about the problems isn't enough. You also have to solve the political economy of how to implement your caution in a competitive world.
That's a problem we still haven't solved.
Curious what others think — especially whether there are historical cases where a "go slow, do it right" approach to industrialization actually worked at scale, or whether the competitive dynamics of international relations make this structurally impossible.