Do you work at a megacorp or "prestige field" (big law, banking, consulting) where inside the walls everything is politics? Are you interested in rational critiques of capitalism's Molochian failure modes? Then go read @TheZvi's sequence on "Moral Mazes": thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/mol…
The Mazes sequence is deeply related to @slatestarcodex's "Meditations on Moloch", @vgr's "Gervais Principle", @ESYudkowsky's Inadequate Equilibria, and #NickBostrom's "Paperclip Maximizer". It's about environments where high optimization pressure creates toxic competitiveness.
The sequence was inspired by the 1988 book "Moral Mazes", a groundbreaking fieldwork on the internal status-game dysfunction of middle managers in large corporations, due to competitive pressures.
amzn.to/31WdB16
I found it gripping because I consider one of the great philosophical questions of our time to be the tension between efficiency and humanity. Competition is an incredible mechanism - we can get SOOOOO many paperclips SOOOO cheaply these days (and food, clothes, shelter...)
Yet we also have clear theory & examples to show that extreme competition will, if left unchecked, squeeze all that is good out of our lives. Sadly, 99.9% of people who point this out, and 99.99% of proposed solutions, strike me as EVEN WORSE than the problem (f**king commies).
But that doesn't mean that I don't believe in the problem. I do. I'm scared for the end of Dreamtime. I'm worried that @Outsideness is right and that what's inevitable is the emancipation of capital, not people. I desperately want to keep some "slack" (thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/sla…)
And so I thrill to see a brilliant, thoughtful analyst like @TheZvi go deep into these topics in an empirical way (ie not just the systems theory of the problem, but how to spot and avoid it in your own life).
The whole sequence is 40,000 words, so I won't even try to summarize it, just go read it if you're at all interested in Molochian dynamics. The one post I'll call out is the last one, which outlines needed essays that you (yes, YOU) could write.
thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/maz…
Tagging people who should definitely read the series if they haven't: @eriktorenberg @VitalikButerin @RafeFurst @jim_rutt @jgreenhall @WilliamAEden @diviacaroline @brijpatel @s_r_constantin
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