Liv Boeree on Multipolar Traps

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It's Liv on Lex Fridman and they hit more topics but I really love how much she's raising 'Moloch' awareness.

For anyone not familiar with Liv - famous Australian poker player, got out of poker and got a degree in astrophysics and has gotten really interested/active in the complexity, x-risk, etc. communities as well as some of the rationalism groups like Less Wrong. What I'm really glad of is she's now adding something of a celebrity face to GameB and complexity ideas that have needed to get out but didn't have any great channels (closest proximate perhaps being Tristan Harris and his Center for Humane Technology).

In the second hour (a little before 1:15:00) they touch on Slate Star Codex's 'Meditations on Moloch' and get into the question of what multipolar traps are and how they're as much of an x-risk as claimed. I like the way Liv phrased it in a different interview, that multipolar traps are sort of the 'final boss' in terms of being the generator of negative and zero-sum games. She mentioned in that interview as well that there were people who claimed that it all came down to entropy but disagreed, as I would, that there are many different ways that you could deal with entropy. Multipolar traps, OTOH, really are a Darwinian thing and they feed on Darwinian self-interest in ways that feed wars for gene supremacy which, if every actor is self-interested, no one will voluntarily lose a game even if they objectively had bad genes thus letting that maximize is a recipe for the perfection of Machiavellianism and psychopathy.

Where I think some optimism can be had is that there's a good chance that a world where people were commonly self-aware about these things is a world where people would have instincts carving in a different direction because they'd see red flags and rather than reacting in the immediate moment they'd be more likely to tell friends and family about a problem and the result would, ideally, be to do things that diffuse rather than escalate it.

Anyway that was for the 'TL:DW: lets talk about it' crowd.

She's totally right, but I couldn't hear much of a solution apart from 'make people pay for twitter to change twitter's incentive'.

Basically what jaron lanier has been preaching for years.

If this is as long-range, network related, and persistent a problem as to be something like the foundational human problem and part of its definition is you can't solve it by direct action from within a given system because any law or rule set can be gamed if that's the intent, it's a much more abstract war - ie. to solve the intent in far more of the populace, and I'd add - actually empower that part of the populace as well in a way that they don't pay for their virtue by falling to the bottom by not giving cut-throat hierarchy climbing their every ounce.

Well.duh. But apart from basically removing abstract monetary gains from the entire system and relying on something like social recognition as reward for behaviour - which worked in small groups but there's a reason it hasn't scaled - I'm unsure what to do.

There's an approach by some German or Austrian guy that goes by 'social wealth economy', in which taxation is dependent on social aspects of how the enterprise is run. Some ideas are: a capitalist will have zero taxation on his profits, if his enterprise fulfills certain environmental and social standards. - everyone gets paid properly and the company doesn't do any damage - that's going to decrease profits, but then, there's no reason to tax the company because there's no damage to fix.

....it at least sounded like something worth thinking about in more detail

There's that or the radical opposite approach, via block chain, where you're logging every little noteworthy thing you do to various block chains for $$ - whether it's getting your steps in on Sweatcoin, or getting your stay-at-home-mom credit through some future MomCoin, or tracking your spiritual or philosophic development through JesusCoin, MasonCoin/EasternStarCoin, SocratesCoin, KierkegaardCoin, or your artwork gets minted as an NFT and bought for an immediate small sum but gets larger rewards on resale, that at least monetizes all kinds of things that weren't well monetized before - OTOH its closer to sticking a probe in every orifice for data collection and runs into the dystopic scenario Mary Harrington and Paul Kingsnorth were talking about a while back - where it's nakedly obvious that we're as much standing reserve as the trees in the woods behind us or the iron ore and coal veins in a local mountain. The other problem - if we'll try to hack/game any system we'll find ways to even make that more dystopic because, if we're here to shred each other over genes, it's what we do.

And jesuscoin would be something people trade? What would stay-at-home-mom-coin derive its value from? With NFTs and cryptocurrency SO FAR it's clear that it derives its value from people buying it for dollars and euros and ruble.
...
You think I should convert to christianity? Jesus-coin is trading higher than atomist-coin right now ....

Yeah, that's my Catholic upbringing coming forward. Guilty as charged.


Pawtocol looks like it would be a good example of that. It's ticker is UPI, ie. Universal Pet Income.

The pet generates a certain amount of UPI, the owner buying certain brands of product from the pet store yields UPI, or you can use UPI to buy certain things at the pet store.

I do walk a couple miles each evening and I do use sweatcoin which is worth probably $.05 but you get a sweat coin for every mile you walk with an available 2x 20 minute bonus (if you know you'll be walking for 20 min or longer) and three advertisements you can watch per day to score additional sweat coin.

My guess is a stay-at-home-mom-coin would be like that, ie. clocking certain activities, being paid directly in a coin to watch advertisements, bonuses for buying certain products, etc.

If they did that 'right' however they'd find some way to make it a larger store of value that would treat each holder's coins like shares and they'd be getting dividends on shares.

The thing I'd worry about though is that this would be like a passable living if someone is juggling activities with nine or ten coins, and yeah - volatility would make that important as well. That and yeah, we all become traders and words like 'long', 'short', 'margin', and 'margin call' become household terminology (so still a lot like gig economy, just without anyone dangling you by a string and holding a knife to it based on performance).


There's something going around right now with buying fractional shares in artwork (though I'm always disappointed when they're mentioning Banksy, I don't understand some people's tastes). The idea is that this is part of how the rich store value, that its higher yielding than stocks or real estate, and at the same time what is most art of the collecting variety other than canvas NFT's? Maybe the one thing canvas has is that someone could be painting the Adriatic from Italy and put some sea water in the paint for extra 'place' saturation but aside from a slight fishy-briny smell that's about all the difference you get.

So the big question is whether there will ever be a 'Mona Lisa' NFT.


That's a good question. I'm guessing no, you might trade jesus-coin but I'm guessing you'd have to be Christian in order to stake / yield farm it.