I’m not sure I take a throwaway comment by someone closely socially tied to the author of the comment as evidence that it isn’t equivalent.
Also it doesn’t need to be literally equivalent to them. The criticism, if there is one, would be that Scott’s concept doesn’t add anything to the work done by academics—although that criticism would be false if it unified hitherto un-unified fields in a useful way.
The criticism, if there is one, would be that Scott’s concept doesn’t add anything to the work done by academics
Stuart Armstrong (author of the OP in the link above) seems to think it was academically inspiring, cf. the passage starting with
Academic Moloch
Ok, now to the point. The “Moloch” idea is very interesting, and, at the FHI, we may try to do some research in this area (naming it something more respectable/boring, of course, something like “how to avoid stable value-losing civilization attractors”).
The project hasn’t started yet, but a few caveats to the Moloch idea have already occurred to me. …
Not sure if that counts for you.
(I’m not socially tied to Luke in any way. I had the same misconception as you a long time ago, remember reading that comment as clarifying, and thought you would appreciate the share.)
Do you have a citation for coordination traps specifically? Coordination games seem pretty closely related, but Googling for the former I find only casual/informal references to it being a game (possibly a coordination game specifically) with multiple equilibria, some worse than others, such that players might get trapped in a suboptimal equilibrium.
Not really; rationalist jargon is often more memetically fit than academic jargon so it’s often hard for me to remember the original language even when I first learned something from non-rationalist sources. But there’s a sense in which the core idea (Nash equilibria may not be Pareto efficient) is ~trivial, even if meditating on it gets you something deep/surprising eventually.
I don’t really think of presenting this as Moloch as “reinventing the wheel,” more like seeing the same problem from a different angle, and hopefully a pedagogically better one.
I agree with Linch that the idea that “a game can have multiple equilibria that are Pareto-rankable” is trivial. Then the existence of multiple equilibria automatically means players can get trapped in a suboptimal equilibrium – after all, that’s what an equilibrium is.
What specific element of “coordination traps” goes beyond that core idea?
Moloch
Tragedy of the Commons
Not really, “coordination failure due to positional arms race” is better.
I’m not sure I take a throwaway comment by someone closely socially tied to the author of the comment as evidence that it isn’t equivalent.
Also it doesn’t need to be literally equivalent to them. The criticism, if there is one, would be that Scott’s concept doesn’t add anything to the work done by academics—although that criticism would be false if it unified hitherto un-unified fields in a useful way.
That’s fair, no need to take it.
Stuart Armstrong (author of the OP in the link above) seems to think it was academically inspiring, cf. the passage starting with
Not sure if that counts for you.
(I’m not socially tied to Luke in any way. I had the same misconception as you a long time ago, remember reading that comment as clarifying, and thought you would appreciate the share.)
Moloch is just a fanciful term for coordination traps right?
Do you have a citation for coordination traps specifically? Coordination games seem pretty closely related, but Googling for the former I find only casual/informal references to it being a game (possibly a coordination game specifically) with multiple equilibria, some worse than others, such that players might get trapped in a suboptimal equilibrium.
Not really; rationalist jargon is often more memetically fit than academic jargon so it’s often hard for me to remember the original language even when I first learned something from non-rationalist sources. But there’s a sense in which the core idea (Nash equilibria may not be Pareto efficient) is ~trivial, even if meditating on it gets you something deep/surprising eventually.
I don’t really think of presenting this as Moloch as “reinventing the wheel,” more like seeing the same problem from a different angle, and hopefully a pedagogically better one.
I agree with Linch that the idea that “a game can have multiple equilibria that are Pareto-rankable” is trivial. Then the existence of multiple equilibria automatically means players can get trapped in a suboptimal equilibrium – after all, that’s what an equilibrium is.
What specific element of “coordination traps” goes beyond that core idea?