Many of the problems with systems and institutions we encounter in daily life can be traced to breakdowns in the system not attributable to any particular person or any single mistake. Rather, the true problem can only be understood at a systems level. We refer to this class of problems as Molochian, in reference to Scott Alexander's classic Meditations on Moloch.
Note. Reading Meditations on Moloch is not required for this workshop, but recommended.
Instructional Material
Moloch's Toolbox (Ch. 3 of Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky), concerns the types of situations that give rise to Molochian traps. In summary, Yudkowsky separates Molochian outcomes into three broad categories:
- "Cases where the decision lies in the hands of people who would gain little personally, or lose out personally, if they did what was necessary to help someone else."
- "Cases where decision-makers can’t reliably learn the information they need to make decisions, even though someone else has that information."
- "Systems that are broken in multiple places so that no one actor can make them better, even though, in principle, some magically coordinated action could move to a new stable state."
Cohort Activity
Moloch Is Everywhere [45 minutes]
Identifying Traps [10 minutes]
Go around the cohort and take turns identifying Molochian traps in your own life, at work, school, or in institutions that you interact with.
Categorizing Traps [10 minutes]
Go around the group again and decide which of three types of trap best describes each person's situation.
Identify Fixes [10 minutes]
Identify where the specific breakdown is happening in each situation, and what you would do to remedy it if you had power. Are there any generalized principles your cohort discovers in addressing these categories of traps?
Identify Sanctuaries [15 minutes]
Go around the cohort and discuss examples of systems succeeding in avoiding Molochian traps through some clever mechanism.
Moloch on Station Seven [45 minutes]
You, the Commander of Station Seven, are stunned to find that operating expenses on the station have increased by 15% since this time last year. You head out to talk to your various subordinates to figure out what's happening.
Objectives:
- Figure out how to reduce the expenses
- Prevent expenses from ballooning again
Hover over a block to talk to that person.
Orbital Positioning Director
The director of orbital positioning has been perplexed by an inexplicable 4% increase in fuel costs over the last six months. She looked into the issue and discovered that Station Seven has slowly, over the last year, gained a few percent of extra mass. This extra mass results in more fuel required to control the station's position, as well as causing the orbital position of the station to drift more seriously than it should.
Nutritional Supervisor
Station Seven requires regular shipments of organic FoodCubes to continue functioning. The supervisor of Station Seven's nutrition center has been struggling with several problems. The FoodCube shipments are often late. This has led to the supervisor habitually ordering FoodCube shipments 20% larger than the baseline requirements, so that the station doesn't run out of food entirely. Sometimes the food does arrive on time, leading the nutrition supervisor to simply throw all of the remaining food surplus from the previous shipment into the disposal hatch.
Waste Disposal Superintendent
The superintendent who oversees waste treatment and disposal on Station Seven has been dealing with intermittent issues with excess waste accumulation in the disposal plant. Sometimes the backup in the waste disposal plant is so severe that dangerous fungal growths begin to form in the waste stream.
Shipping Supervisor
The shipping supervisor has recently become aware that Station Seven has been drifting more than usual. As a precaution, he has been deferring all shipments to and from the station until the position of Station Seven is firmly within the designated orbital coordinates. After all, if payloads are launched to the station and it isn't in exactly the right place, there could be accidents. Better for some food shipments to be late, than to suffer a severe collision!
Game Solution
n
First of all, the biggest problem is that the department heads are not talking to each other about their problems, and not reporting issues to you. They are not learning important information about other parts of the system that impact their own functions.
To resolve the Molochian trap, you should use your authority to order the nutritional supervisor to stop ordering excessively large food shipments, so that the waste supervisor can clear out their backed up system, and the station's mass will decrease. Then the station can maintain its position more efficiently, and the shipping supervisor will no longer be forced to delay shipments of food, solving the nutritional supervisor's original problem, as well as several other inefficiencies.
