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 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?