Who is Moloch and What is the MetaCrisis?

Post Reply New Topic

Steven Pinker got blasted a few years back for bringing up that there are certain science-blocking dogmas / prohibitions left of center that make certain 'true' topics unapproachable by anyone else but the far right, which then makes the far right the only potential expositors - and to that end I'm aware of a lot of conservative channels like Aporia who'd handle those with a proper adult level of locution AND without singing the praises of Jared Taylor. It's unfortunate but at some level it's been decided that this is how it should be - much like giving in-depth discussion of 'maleness' to Andrew Tate and the 'manosphere' (Richard Reeves is, thankfully, starting to break that).

Maybe we need a 'cognitive adults only' sticker to put on threads, or an adult content folder, if we're considering that there's a high likelihood of people reading who are looking for political ideologies to be parasitized by.

I know . . . it's a stretch of logic, and subtlety is not my strongest suit, but there is (to me) something about a long talk concerning demons and idolatry capped with a mention of cryptocurrency that makes me consider the possibility of a subtle sales pitch targeted at the fundie crowd.

Again, I admit I could be wrong, but that's the nature of suspicion.

The last sentence or two of the video didn't just say "blockchain exists." It was specifically claimed (albeit without any explanation) that blockchain was allegedly the solution to the "Moloch" problem. I got the impression that this video was intended primarily as a teaser, to get people interested in watching their other videos that discuss blockchain in more detail.


Not saying you can't post it. Posting it would not be against WP rules as far as I am aware.

But don't be surprised if someone comments on the Scientology connection -- especially if the video ends with something like, "Oh, and by the way, you'll be able to get this job done a lot faster if you've been making your brain run more efficiently by doing _________ [some Scientology-based exercise] every day!"


You have the right to feel that way. But I think it's disingenuous of you to be indignantly surprised by other people pointing out the crypto connection, especially if you don't beat them to the punch as I suggested earlier.

With what I explained earlier they're not necessarily wrong, the ingredients are there with smart contracts and zero-knowledge proofs. I don't think blockchain would solve all Moloch problems but it would yield such a jump in transparency that fraud gets a lot harder.

This is part of why I'm not inclined to see crypto as Nazis wearing white hats and passing out candy to kids. We can maybe discuss the sociology of why people would think of it that way, the lack of regulation has allowed all kinds of scams to proliferate and I'll try not to start on Gary Gensler but that situation's been an absolute joke. The fraud vectors for crypto tend to revolve around either 'pump and dump' me-too (replica of an existing project) coins or exchanges doing dodgy things. The place where I think ideas for the technology can indeed fail is where people want to try doing algorithmic stable coins which means stable coins not collateralized 1:1 with currency or even any currency, to which Terra Luna blew up back in April of 2022 when their stable coin depegged and went to zero.


I won't say there's absolutely nothing to people checking sources, I just get irritated when I get the sense that it's people using anything they can to waive off discussion of topics that they find uncomfortable or unfamiliar (or even when it's something like 'If I learned something new from Ed I'd be taking marbles out of my status bucket and putting them in Ed's status bucket, or I'd be acknowledging that Ed has rights to any status at all - screw Ed'). I've been places where I tried to share Michael Levin's research on bioelectric templates, xenobots, and implications regarding consciousness - to people who wouldn't have been aligned with the philosophic implications of his conclusions (which come from rigorous experimental work) and their answer was to shoot it down immediately by calling him a moral monster for experimenting on frogs and rodents - with such beautiful opacity that I could tell that this was his corrective for needing to encounter information he didn't like.

I can meet you maybe half way on this, there are enough times where I don't share something because I already know the channel is going to eviscerate the content and either the point isn't important enough or someone less controversial has said it better, but it's never going to be far from my mind that these kinds of switch-ups are exactly what people do when concepts are being presented that they're uncomfortable with, which clash with current beliefs, or just seem foundationally foreign which seems to turn the frontal lobe off and bring people to grade school antics even without controversial sourcing. It happens so often as an easy go-to point scoring tactic that it gets difficult to take seriously.

Found the Aporia YouTube channel just now. Appears to be libertarian. The featured video argued that conservatives can't beat the left because conservatives too are too "statist." But it was a bit odd to see a fervent anti-"statist" speaker wearing a NASA shirt, of all "statist" things.


Richard Reeves appears to be pretty mainstream, as far as I can tell from the Wikipedia article about him.

But if you post videos by white nationalists or "manosphere" influencers, don't be surprised if someone reports them to the mods. These ideologies are actually against the rules here (as also is the type of feminism that demonizes men), unlike cryptocurrency or Scientology.

There too it depends.

For MGTOW I've found ThinkingApe's content very helpful, mostly in the context of existentialism and common experiences that don't really get discussed openly among men. Guys like Aaron Clarey and Better Bachelor have a lot of useful content as well albeit Clarey can lose me when the Dennis Leary-ism gets too thick (his economic chops are good, his ability to see places where the math just doesn't add also is pretty good) and Better Bachelor does sometimes jump the gun on news stories although he's gotten better with that over time. A lot of them are pounding more explicitly on things that are making society intolerable enough to deal with that men shutting themselves in seems like a reasonable reaction to the kinds of neurological insult that dealing with... for tidiness I'll borrow the phrase 'clown world' because it does seem to wrap up something like a system that seems to be for and by people with cluster B personality disorders, that loves artifice and manipulation, hates truth, and I'd add that Thinking Ape, Aaron Clarey, and Better Bachelor aren't in any conventional way misogynistic.

I think the types of femcels you're talking about are the types who Shoe0nHead was reading posts from in 'The Male Loneliness Epidemic' where when she's reading those Twitter / X comments my instinctual reaction wasn't 'Wow - women and male feminists are horrible!', it was so far out of line with what I'm used to hearing women say even in their darkest times that I got the sense that these are just a long-tail distribution of really sick, miserable people - and that's roughly how I think most women see actual 'incel' incels (to separate from the definition 2 superorganism of 'person I disagree with politically' which seems to hijack almost any negative word under the sun).

The funny thing - kidology actually self-identifies as a femcel (I'd maybe call her my favorite 'staceycell' because I think she's being a bit brutal on herself to say that - although what she's said about dating apps, ie. being lesbian and mostly dating guys because she has no luck with women in online dating - that's fascinating) and I enjoy a lot of her content because she's always prying open these really unusual, under-researched, corners of sociology and she had a whole series on ethnocels, -cels in the LGBTQ community, other sociology topics, and to date she hasn't said anything even remotely comparable to Shoe0nHead's Twitter readings.

To me she's the type of 'femcel' that I'd compare to the kind of MGTOW that ThinkingApe, Aaron Clarey, and Better Bachelor are which is people just trying to call balls and strikes and noticing that as they do that some crazy imbalances are coming in.

The key distinction perhaps among all of them is that they don't hate the opposite sex, but they do see a system that's either constantly lying to, trying to manipulate, or trying to low-ball their value in the extreme (that pocket of pressures people are often referring to when they use words or phrases like 'the world' or 'society') and I can relate strongly to resisting that - especially since as a kid I was given a choice of either being a human foot stool or going my own way and socially not existing, to which I chose the later.

Well...the vid makers distort the topic to shoehorn it into their plug for crypto.

Moloch does NOT mean "pursuit of narrow goals as opposed to broad goals". The modern usage of Moloch means "any force that demands sacrifices". Not exactly the same thing.

So watching the video sets us all on the wrong course to discuss the topic in first place.


Its okay for Mutual of Omaha to sponsor "Wild Kingdom" on TV. And its okay for Merlin Perkins to make a cute segue to a commercial by making some kind of comparison between ...the leopard that killed the gazelle we just saw...to Mutual Omaha insurance (his frequent MO). But its not okay for Merlin Perkins to distort the whole topic of vertebrate zoology in order to sell Mutual of Omaha (which he didnt do).

And crypto isnt even a legit thing to be sponsored by (like an insurance company). Its not as black as pushing crystal meth ...but its kind of gray area thing of dubious social acceptability IMHO.

But if you want to course correct for the video's misteps to continue to discuss this "meta crises" then go right ahead.

Have I got this right?

Moloch is a concept (rather than an actual existing entity) which illustrates that we can't solve human-caused problems that most people agree should be solved.

The metacrisis is the crisis that crises exist and that we seem unable to make significant progress on many of them.

According to Dante and Allen Ginsberg Molloch is a metaphor for any force that demands that you burn children alive ... figuratively speaking...demands sacrifices.

According to the video Molloch is...going for narrow goals and ignoring the big picture.

And at the tail end is the part the OP wants us to ignore which is...that you can save the world (big picture and all) somehow...by sinking your lifesavings into crypto.

So...we will ignore that part.

Doesn't seem that way to me, but that's a detailed discussion for another time.


I don't see crypto as "Nazi" either. I see crypto as libertarian wackiness, not neo-Nazi wackiness.

Supposedly, one of the big advantages of crypto is that it is decentralized, rather than being under the control of a central bank. I don't see that as an advantage in a monetary system. On the contrary, it makes the system more unstable, it seems to me.

And it's only a matter of time before at least a few governments, and eventually more governments, decide to ban crypto on grounds of its environmental impact, due to the huge amounts of electric power it consumes in data centers. It wouldn't surprise me if there's eventually a worldwide (or nearly so) international treaty outlawing it.


It seems to me that most people are genuinely more likely to be willing to engage with "uncomfortable or unfamiliar" topics when there isn't the extra baggage of a disreputable or controversial source or context. Of course there's no guarantee that they will listen even to a perfectly respectable source, but they will at least be more likely to listen.


In the case of Michael Levin, I wonder if perhaps some people might be confusing Michael Levin the biologist with Michael Levin the philosopher? These are two distinct people with the same name, as I found out when googling "Michael Levin" just now. Michael Levin the philosopher is a supporter of white nationalism and has spoken at some of Jared Taylor's "American Renaissance" conferences. No doubt he has thereby caused some reputational difficulties for Michael Levin the biologist.


Yes, unfortunately a lot of people today seem to have much less tolerance for disagreement than was common ten to twenty years ago.

The more important thing to understand about the metacrisis is that any situation that both allows for first-defector advantage (like if there were a global nuclear disarmament deal and we could never prove 100% that everyone was disarming - such as only introducing UN monitors to certain facilities and still making them in covert ones) means that whoever defects on a regulation either gains asymmetric power by defecting or, alternately, makes a ton of money by defecting (such as Scott Alexander's example of the fish farms).

Daniel Schmachtenberger gave an example as well of Nordic whaling villages that are at war with one another. They know there's only a few of a certain kind of whale left, it will go extinct if hunted more, but with no regulation or no enforceable regulation it means that they're guaranteed to go extinct - so do I pull one or both of the last whales up so that the meat, blubber, oil, etc. goes to my village or do I let the enemy village fish it out? Daniels also talked about this in the context of poaching in Africa where once they made it impossible to go after animals in one area the poachers would just move on and alternate strategy - where the common denominator is the poverty of the poachers (you could probably say this about central American drug-runners as well) keeps them doing what they're doing.

Juicing in baseball is another example - ie. whoever takes steroids, disregards the ban in the American league, and doesn't get caught starts moving ahead a lot. We don't allow this because we don't want to have baseball leagues where to get in and be competitive you have to juice. This example shows as well that the rule is only as good as it's enforcement or it's enforceability as - again - it gives asymmetric advantage to defectors.

It's not that these problems are 'unsolvable' as much as there are a particular kind of setup that's very common with defection. I think this is why it can be it's own 'thing' that people focus on to figure out how many different ways we can jam or dissolve multipolar traps and weigh the pros and cons of any approach to see which ones are the most effective for the least cost on things like liberty or bureaucratic explosion.

If the video author believed crypto could help I'm a bit surprised that he wasn't over-the-moon about AI, to which I'd think the combination of AI monitoring and evolving both it's theories of multipolar traps / tragedies of the commons in the real world could observe them, better find them through - this is what crypto offers - extended ledgers that can quantify all kinds of costs that could be accounted before (without exorbitant $$$ that no one would be willing to pay based on the human effort such a thing would take), even anticipate them ahead of time and take actions to both alert regulators and offer solutions. The only inescapable downside with that of course - it's at least a partial panopticon, maybe not as bad as government CBDC's in that these would be decentralized currencies and the government couldn't just empty your bank account because the three-letter agencies don't like something about your politics (or worse - we could revert to third world politics of incumbents freezing the funds of their opponents).

Proof of work is almost explicitly a Bitcoin thing. Ethereum moved from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake which is the other big model. Proof of Stake does not take up the same energy bandwidth because you're not trying to leverage it against a real-world natural resource (hacks on the network limited by energy spent) but rather users staking their coins and delegating. Either one can start centralizing or become hackable if either the diversity of crypto miners (PoW) or validators (PoS).



TBH - I haven't been in a position, for a long time, where I felt like someone to the far right was saying something so important, and saying it in such solitude, that I had to push their voice out there even with the baggage. The conversations that only the right and some libertarians were having maybe in 2018 or 2019 have moved leftward. A couple great examples, particularly on the men's stuff, is seeing Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway come forward. There's also GameB to talk about a lot of the headier governance concepts that before the most notable dissidents who could give a deep counter-thesis that you could mull over were guys like Curtis Yarvin.

Pretty much if the system's going to run long-term with things as powerful as AI, synthetic biology, etc. and for all of that to NOT terminate life on earth based on defector advantage that system actually needs to somehow account for all of it.

Capitalism 'sort of' gets that we're not saints and that it's setting people up to run against each other for resources that can in some cases drive innovation that can be harnessed - at the price of a lot of human misery and condemnation of anyone, regardless of their integrity or moral values, and obviously a perpetual march of 3% growth either puts us into space to solve the problem later or it runs us head first into reality.

I think a lot of people who see that coming are trying to figure out of there's really much of anything we can do that won't have far worse consequences than doing nothing, this is what ultimately pushes me toward GameB or having a lot of interest in Nate Hagan's work as well as hoping that the kinds of things Daniel Schmachtenberger talks about on a regular basis could become every day common concepts. I'm not saying even that people should absolutely agree on what should be done about it, just that - like people who think that we'll be given a new earth by God at the end of time are really dangerous lunatics I can't help but feel a bit the same when I see people who don't even try to process the metacrisis and in particular have the intelligence to but would rather keep playing as if the earth can sustain 3% growth in consumption forever. The real goal with 'bend not brake' is to not have that whole thing turn into the worst of human history and human self-centeredness in scarcity. The whole point is that as many people who have different motivations who can actually process the issue might be able to add their own unique piece to solving it. They don't need to join a group, a government, or anything - they just have to be able to sort out the math, decide who the credible optimists and pessimists are, and steer themselves with that. The down side for everyone involved - there's no guaranteed reward and for anyone looking for a honeypot of status about all their going to find is, if they're lucky enough to be in the right place, maybe Nobel prizes for solving certain problems?

It's a case though where the more people are actually aware of it and can wrap their heads around it the less likely it is that we'll be fighting for our lives because of it. I can't remember who I've heard say it but there's an expression along the lines that what we see coming at us is much less likely to get us than what we can't. I also don't know how many people's minds can handle it so it's sort of that as well - ie. that if it's both true and nothing but a drain on your mental health it becomes an open-ended question as to whether you yourself at least should pursue it. If you think about how many people enlist in the military, enlist as fire-fighters, etc. it's sort of like that kind of calling or vocation.

You'll also find a lot of people who are big systems thinkers tend to like to analogize certain patterns of behaviors as describing certain deities of antiquity and they'll use those as short-hand (case in point - Moloch). Reductionism for solving certain kinds of problems is great, to take it as a totalizing lens though, particularly ignoring the power of network effects. Again - I think you'd have to worry about any given person who said they had the solution but, like recycling or like any other daily micro-decision you make it's better if you make those decisions with these things in mind.

That's good to know. So you think Bitcoin might get banned on energy consumption grounds, but not Ethereum?


Did you mean to end the above sentence at that point? Looks incomplete.


What specific "headier governance concepts" are you referring to here?

I looked at the GameB Wiki just now. Although the terminology of "Game A" vs. "Game B" is new to me, nearly all the ideas expressed here are already very familiar to me. They've been around for decades (if not longer), e.g. in the hippie movement and its various remnants and successors, in the ecology movement, and in the Occupy Wall Street movement if I remember correctly.

Which of GameB's ideas, if any, do you feel are actually new, besides the name?

I don't think banning would work like that. China banned it momentarily to then roll out their own CBDC. For Bitcoin you have a line of the largest hedge funds (Blackrock, Fidelity, maybe another twenty-five or thirty including Grayscale and their own SEC lawsuit) waiting to get approved for spot Bitcoin ETF's. Ethereum and the PoS altcoins (some are 'piece of ' but overall meaning proof-of-stake) had contests with the Howey Test of whether or not they were digital securities, to which Ripple's recent victory with with the SEC suggested that the only unregistered security exchanges were Ripple selling directly to VC's but suggesting that secondary sales to exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, Kracken, etc. would be considered commodity and this is where right-sizing crypto regulation gets tricky, it doesn't hold still but seems to move across categories.


It's not a huge change but to complete that - if proof-of-stake ends up having too few validators or almost all validators farmed in the same location that becomes prone for attack. Similarly for proof-of-work if miners aren't profitable enough anymore and stop doing what they're doing it's an opportunity for a state actor to start carrying out a significant part of the mining and maybe even stage a successful 51% attack, and people have had that concern about Bitcoin since the rewards per block cut in half every four years and if the value of bit coin doesn't commensurately move up with that it could drive the miners out and yield that outcome.


Examining the pros and cons of different models currently in place, rating those against latest data on network effects. A lot of it is further iterations of technocracy like the idea of quadratic voting which is set up to incentivize against rather than favor (as the current system does) extremes. They're mostly asking which risk exposures to democracy aren't being considered. Jim Rutt (founder of GameB) has a lot of interviews with different policy wonks, even current and former cabinet members, so it gets interesting. You also have Daniel Schmachtenberger, Samo Burja, Zak Stein, etc. who founded The Consilience Project to talk about all kinds of information commons issues - it's a good place to get an idea of what kinds of things they're discussing and concerned about.


So at worst they're maybe digging up a lot of ideas that could have been lost in the annals of academia and bringing them forward in a synthetic / synthesizing way. They're something like an open-air think tank with heavy environmentalist leanings but also trying to consider how we go through societal step changes (like taking a 33 to to even 50% global energy haircut) without WW3. With the network effects you'd probably see a lot of Marshall McLuhan. So it is taking a lot of hippy, ecology, and OWS epiphanies and carrying them up to an academic level of analysis.