END BOsses
Just as it’s hard to have good story without a compelling bad guy, it’s hard to design a good game without an end-boss. And humanity’s game is certainly not short on them! Here are some of the biggest, baddest bosses we need to defeat—or at least keep at bay—until we can figure out how to turn them into allies.
MOloch
Humanity likely has no deadlier enemy than Moloch. Moloch was the name of a particularly nasty biblical demon who, in return for money and power, demanded the ultimate sacrifice: your children. Horrible stuff.
In modern times, Moloch has become synonymous with the wider concept of excessive sacrifice in the name of winning. A sports person who sacrifices their integrity by cheating to win. A CEO who cuts corners on environmental protections to boost their quarterly earnings. A politician who spreads lies about their opponents to get ahead.
These are all instances of Molochian behaviour — it’s a mindset that can infect any one of us. But there are also Molochian games too, which push their players into these dark bargains through bad incentives.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Consider the 1950’s nuclear arms race: it’s not like the US or the Soviet Union especially wanted to empty their coffers into the military; but the game theory of the situation demanded it. If they didn’t, they’d be left vulnerable to attack from their opponent who did. And so, both sides got trapped into a race to the bottom where both sides built up arsenals large enough to wipe out everyone on Earth many times over.
That’s Moloch’s trap: a negative-sum game that locks otherwise rational actors into harmful competitive spirals where no single can individually escape from. It does this by trapping players in the following dilemma:
“I don’t want to do [X], but my competitors will probably do [X] anyway, so I have to do it too, else I’ll get left behind”.
This is the mechanism that underlies so many of our biggest issues: environmental pollution, addictive technologies, intensive factory farming, over-deforestation, nuclear weapon proliferation, climate change, reckless AI development…
For example: imagine a social media company trying to satisfy their investors by maximizing advertiser revenue. They notice that some of their competitor platforms start using a new addictive tool that keeps users scrolling for hours. Even if they’d rather not use this tool on their own users, they know that if they don’t, eventually they’ll lose business to all the other platforms, which will upset their investors. So unless they want to get raked over the coals at the next shareholder meeting, they end up adopting it too. (which btw is why all the big platforms now have tiktok style infinite scroll shortform videos coz they’re digital super-heroin aimed straight at the reward systems of your lizard brain). And once such a powerful technology gets popped, it’s very hard for humanity to stop.
So Moloch is the main bad guy of our story right now, because it is what is stopping humanity from coordinating to solve many of our trickiest issues. But tricky does not equal impossible, and there have been many examples where we DID manage to break out of its trap. For more on that, check out Win-Wins of history.
For a deeper dive on Moloch, check out the resources page. Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch is especially recommended.
Moloch sucks. It creates games that reward bad guys. And it can turn otherwise good people into bad guys. It’s the god of lose-lose games.
Which raises the question: what is the God of the opposite? What is the God of Win-Win games? You already know the answer ;)
NORM
Who is Norm? Norm is the patron saint of Bureaucracy. He sucks. More on him later, I have other more urgent things to write.