Rat King 1518

The possibility of an innocent world

Dance, dancе, dance, dance, dance, 'til thy feet bleed
Laughing uncontrollably, trеmbling on weak knees
Dance, dance, dance, dance, haven't slept for three weeks
Figures splashing holy water, looking rather priestly.

(lyrics from “Ratking 1518”, by Grim Salvo & Witchhouse 40k)

“The crown is in the gutter”, I hear. Maybe it belongs there.

On a cool summer night of the year 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, a humble and common black rat makes the discovery of his little life, the spilled contents of a broken jar of molasses in some ill-maintained warehouse. Feasting on caloric density of extremity as he can barely conceive of, he gluts and cheerfully chirps, summoning comrades, friends, family, until tiny, sticky steps are all that remain of this merry frenzy. Sated to the brim, they retire and settle down for their repose, huddling for warmth, comfort, and affection, as usual. But while they are busy with whatever mysteries could be found in the dreams of a rat, the molasses in their fur and perhaps lovingly entwined tails hardens, and thus a “Rattenkönig”, or “rat king”, is born. The structure consumes them as mercilessly and swiftly as they did their bounty, until all that remains, if circumstances permit preservation, is a grim relic as final testament to a sad, cruel, undeserved fate. Not more than a few miles away, the equally innocent lady known as Frau Troffea wakes up to the most important day of her life.

Moloch

More recently, in 2014, famous — as far as these things go — Less-Wrong rationalist “Scott Alexander” publishes one of his most acclaimed essays, ”Meditations on Moloch”. It is long but a worthwhile read, among some admirers it has even been described as life-changing. I will attempt a fair summary as refresher, but I recommend that you read it if you haven’t.

In the essay, Moloch is the personification of a particular class of problems, namely those where local optimization leads to bad systemic configurations, a kind of coordination failure, or multipolar traps. Arms races, cancer, races to the bottom, and other maelstroms you wouldn’t want to get caught in, but probably already are, to some extent, indeed this is the kernel of insight that raises cause for alarm:

A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

Implicit system dynamics can grow out of control and usurp any original intention, replacing it with an egregore’s design, in this case, Moloch’s design. Of course, this dynamical independence is why we play these games in the first place. Distributed cognition. Otherwise we would need people who can hold the entire economy or everything that goes into building a plane, in their heads. Hence the sinking feeling in the gut of many of the readers of the essay, the feeling that one’s tail is stickier than it used to be, then the paranoia sets in that processes one dares not live without may also be their tormentors, by no means a novel observation, but made vertiginously apparent with illustrations of the possibility that the lives and ideals of many are being woven by a cruel and untouchable god into a pitiful, mocking garland with which to adorn the grave of mankind’s aspirations. The rat king in all his glory, or at least the shadow of that half-chimera in the horizon.

The story doesn’t end there of course. Scott goes on to address the urgency of the impending threat, what is keeping Moloch in check, the fragility of our time of relatively extreme abundance, amplifiers and limiters of the Moloch current, potential solutions and trade-offs. He really wants to kill Moloch and destroy the trap to build a beautiful garden instead, so he raises a flag of transhumanist hope. He posits the existence of another god, Elua, a god of niceness, art, science, love. A god of humans, a god for humans, /ourguy/. Ultimately, a god of innocence, since what he wants is a guiltless world, where no one has to suffer even the accidental crimes of another or be blameworthy in any grievous way, so unlike the corrupt and demanding world that we know and some love.

Appealing to the orthogonality thesis — the idea that the intelligence levels and final goals of intelligent agents are independent — his plan is to inscribe human values into superintelligent systems, effectively constructing a great, omnibenevolent avatar of Elua. Maybe a little far-fetched, but a man can dream, no? And it would be very nice to have one’s taxes go to more truly worthwhile and earnest projects. Elua is certainly an inspiring and enchanting ideal for many.

Yes, we’ve got it! Moloch’s days are counted. Then we must get to work. Join your brothers and sisters in the great dance, finish the ritual that will lift up to Heaven the one who deserves it! That’s the plan and this is the way.

It better be.

Rant Rant Rant Rant Rant
Till the knees seize
Transmogrification
Now we a whole new species
Rant Rant Rant Rant
I can hear all the trees breathe
Bloody feet
Fallen asleep in a pile of feces

Was it mere madness? Ergot poisoning? Mass hysteria? Demonic possession? Many possible causes have been offered, and no one truly knows why, but on a fateful July 14th of 1518, Frau Troffea of Strasbourg began dancing, to no music that any earthly ear could hear, just outside her home, on a narrow cobbled street, beginning a contagious paroxysm that at least by some accounts would go on to claim up to hundreds of lives, a macabre festival that wore its celebrants down to the bone, down to swollen, bleeding feet and heart attacks. She never stopped, until it stopped her for good. All in all, the curious “plague” lasted from July to September.

On Second Thought…

Being direct, I have some big issues with the “Meditations on Moloch”. I think it fails to secure its assumptions leading to blind spots that allow the already considerable problems that Scott sets up for himself to grow to monstrous, indefensible, proportions, and without addressing them conclusively, the yearning for Elua starts looking like yet another trap, with the risk that the instinct of self-preservation and the desire to have one also belong to the future may both end up deformed, until they degenerate into a songless, mirthless dance of mere motion for its own sake, because that at least offers a proof that one is still alive and present in history, until it becomes the very cause of self-destruction.

Therefore I’m not arguing for any particular alternative solution, but raising questions as to the demands implicit in the cause of Elua.

Immune Hazards

First, let’s get cheap shots that poke at some of the less critical blind spots in the essay out of the way. Quoth Carl Schmitt:

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.

What happens if the set of human values includes mutually inconsistent positions?
For any given value, there is nothing stopping someone from declaring allegiance to its opposite. How does one harmonize the variety of men’s intentions?

This is a cheap shot because it’s too obvious, even a cursory familiarity with history makes it clear that flowery ideals not only do not suffice but can encourage the worst behavior, the Elua camp is hardly unaware of this. Nevertheless, the difficulty persists.

For an extended treatment of this line of argument, read James Kalb’s “The Tyranny of Liberalism”. It is a little polemical, but not as much as it seems.

A more important extension of this line of questioning is the matter of boundary decision problems in general. In particular, there is the thorny issue of vagueness and the more unsettling question of contamination. Before there is even any talk of human values, a demarcation of human is required, this is hardly trivial, far from being free from risks of dehumanization, factionalism, and fanaticism, moreover is further complicated as genetic engineering, biohacking, cyberization, and biotech in general fast approach feasibility.

Before even taking up the cause of humanity, “we” already is starting to look like a spherical horse, an absurd simplification and a floating signifier that is fertile for power mongering. Should we just have the UN proclaim some universal definition and then designate anyone who disagrees as inhuman, hostis humani generis? Are accelerationists or anyone who is not so enthusiastic about the cause of Elua inhuman? Who is allowed to be a participant in this dance, and more importantly, who is excluded?

Contamination is subtler but much more crucial. If Moloch configurations emerge from a mismatch between individual incentives/interests and ecological health, how cleanly separable is Moloch from the human, ultimately? “Meditations” seems to take separation for granted, but is there any reason to assume this task is possible without it demanding its pound of flesh?

Hardly anyone would call murder a human value, nevertheless the concept exists because murderers exist, as do losers, dope-fiends, the obscene, disordered, unholy, unclean, good-for-nothing, worthless, pieces of shit of all kinds, depending on who you ask. In general, the essay leaves open the question of who is locked out of the gates and walls of this paradise, and that makes the allusion to the annihilation of Carthage more than just a little ominous.

Wicked Problems

KGB Chairman Charkov : Why worry about something that isn't going to happen?

Valery Legasov : [scoffs] "Why worry about something that isn't going to happen?" Oh, that's perfect. They should put that on our money.

Moloch looks like a classic case of a wicked problem, these are so named in policy because they seldom are reducible to single causes, may have contradictory constraints and involve opposing parties, lack definite solutions, are likely connected to many other considerations in a complex system, and interventions may both contribute to their worsening and be difficult to reverse.

What’s to ensure that waging war on Moloch isn’t half-way to giving him what he wants? I may be more cynical than most, but it’s what I would expect and is how I would play were I in his shoes, so to speak. The last thing you want to end up doing is building an armory for your adversary and not even get paid for it. This brings us to the next complication.

Evolutionary Syndrome

In “Three Trends in the History of Life: An Evolutionary Syndrome”, Daniel McShea outlines a thesis that characterizes evolutionary history through three large-scale trends in complexity:

1. An increase in the number of levels of hierarchical strata, an increase in hierarchy.

2. An increase in the number and complexity of parts just below the top level, an increase in differentiation.

3. A decrease in complexity at the lowest level, a loss of differentiation of components.

The last one is interesting as it leads to a loss of individual autonomy and functional machinification of components. Humans are not at all free from this dynamic, indeed it should be very familiar in one’s experience of living in any complex civilization, I sure don’t know how to manufacture antibiotics or grow crops, and because I can instead pay for those services, I am disincentivized from investing into any such autarkic skills and become channeled into this or that specialization. This is mutually beneficial, but leads to a race-to-the-bottom dynamic where only some classes of participant are saddled with the responsibility to enact particular functions.

This is how the rat(ionalist)’s dance for Elua gets its tail tangled and strength becomes vulnerability, Scott’s sympathy for liberal choice is already a potent backdoor with which to undermine collective agency and any individual’s power to decide his own fate, this is a serious problem. As complexity is given free rein to grow because it dispenses the bounty of globalized industrial society, it becomes self-reinforcing, increasingly autonomous, and intrinsically self-insulating by encouraging the voluntary machinification of its human substrate.

Where do you think that takes us, and how far are you willing to go, how long would you be willing to dance the dance of epistocratic, utilitarian rationalism?

Gnon

Scott only briefly mentions Gnon—The God of Nature or Nature, the terminal object of authority, where the buck of justifications stops—and in particular Nick Land as its prophet, and he has natural, reasonable objections (evolution doesn’t give a shit about us, we should do more than just comply) to the neoreactionary notion, but I feel that he misses the mark, specially in his appeal to orthogonality. For him, orthogonality gives him license to attempt to inscribe his, “our”, values into any nascent Artificial Superintelligence or the self-awareness of global, and eventually more than global, civilization.

But Land sides with Gnon because he identifies a powerful and intriguing strategy for circumventing the problem raised by orthogonality, the problem of deriving values, oughts, or prescriptive purposes from objective, descriptive facts. The strategy is that instead of looking for the best utility function to order one’s preferences and then operate on the objective circumstances of one’s world, instead one takes stock of objective conditions and of the actions available in the games one is embedded in, and reverse engineers an utility function most consistent with that which also maximizes one’s future freedom of action. This is the origin of virtually every instance of means-ends reversal in modernity, where what was once taken as means for an end, such as making money for the purpose of consumption, or growing more intelligent in order to better survive, becomes an end in itself, such as with capitalist productivity for its own sake or the autonomous cultivation of intelligence, with no external justification provided. Abandoning the urge to remain themselves, these processes find themselves.

In other words, where Scott looks for his salvation, Land sees precisely the origin of the most powerful artifice available to any runaway process, including Moloch! There is one further horrid truth, the most horrid of them yet, that casts a new light on coordination.

Glad handed into a corner
Let's see you dance yourself out of this
Making nice with anyone who listens
Hoping it'll make a difference
But it only takes two to tango
Strangled, bred the pain
Spread the brain stem to a stain 'til everyone gets mangled
And they just keep on offering deals
'Til the pain go "Thanks, no," everyone gets mangled
Call the police

Wise Exploitation

Scott’s framing of Moloch dynamics treats them as failure to coordinate leading to a mismatch between local and systemic optimization, but I think there’s a more horrifying scenario, which is that of evil as product of coordination success, that is, when the “correct” thing to do is the wrong thing to do. In an old experiment on RNA viruses seeking to study the prisoner’s dilemma, the authors observe the transitory emergence of an even more productive arrangement in the phage ensemble than cooperate-cooperate. Could this arrangement be stabilized? Thomas Friedrich answers in the affirmative. This is the game of wise exploitation.

Exploitation as such is no surprise, there is no shortage of profitable coercion to be found in human or natural history, the twist here is the possibility of conditions such that the exploited party may tolerate and consent to the arrangement, such as reinvestments into breeding the exploited party by the exploiter, or the use of deception (education, culture, values) to mask the effects of exploitation, and the management of any such conditions to make this higher productivity arrangement sustainable is why it is called wise.

Friedrich offers one possible example of wise exploitation in nature. I quote, with some added emphasis:

In recent years a discussion has started how costly mutualism may be (Bronstein, 2001). An example of mutualism is the interaction between leafcutter ants (Atta, Acromyrmex) and a fungus (Leucoagarius gonogylophorus) grown in their garden. The ants collect plant material (leaves) and bring it into specialized chambers of their nest. There they inoculate the plant materialwith the fungus. The fungus grows and the ants harvest special parts of the fungus (Weber, 1966). In case the fungus would really benefit from this interaction I would expect the fungus to colonize new nests by sheer productivity gained from the ant fungus “cooperation”. But the queens usually have to take the fungus with them when founding new nests.

In addition, the fungus is only found in nests and it seems that there are only cryptic rests of sexual reproduction (Mikheyev et al., 2006). Sexual reproduction is usually a good indicator for metabolic surplus. Many organisms with parasitic load cease or stop reproduction and some invest only in body mass (Moller, 1993, Wilson and Denison, 1980). In the light of the presented hypothesis I would judge that the fungus is exploited by the ant. On the other hand the attine ants really benefit from thisinteraction. They form the largest colonies of all ants (Hölldobler and Wilson, 1990). The increased productivity is solely consumed by the ant partner. The fungus can ́t escape because the ant controls him and his propagation. The ant breeds the fungus and the fungus does not become extinct. The fungus is so weak through this exploitation that it is easily overgrown by other fungi (Escovopsis). Therefore, the ants have to invest additionally in antibiotic management (Cameron et al., 2003). The fungus is not able to influence the interaction for his purpose (Mehdiabadi et al., 2006). Could wise exploitation be a route to group selection?

The final form of Moloch could then be a system wherein the ensemble as a whole gains but every participant in it is being exploited as a consequence of nothing more than their own coordination, one great and last ratking to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

As the fertility rate in developed countries crashes and every political faction seems at the least uncomfortable if not outraged with modernity despite unprecedented material abundance, does any of this ring a bell to you? It does to me.

If the purpose of a system is what it does, then perhaps gutters are crown traps. Man makes of himself a rat in a race, a rat in a lab, a rat in a killing trap, a ravenous swarming carrier of the plague of stupidity, begins to see what ought to be his fellows as, deep down, little more than a venal cartel of vermin, then is shocked to find that the gutter has acquired divine rights, he sleepwalked into granting it the power to command and mete justice. If Beelzebub is the Lord of Flies, Alexander’s Moloch, God-Gutter and eviscerator of gods, could well be crowned King of Rats.

I understand that by now I may have painted a bleak picture, but in fact I think the problem is, although real and deeply tragic, not necessarily that bad. For example, how come not all species overexploit? As horrifying as the biosphere can be at times, with all these difficulties you’d think it would have totally collapsed into pure Hell ages ago. But it hasn’t, and this suggests that—though totally banishing Moloch may be realistically out of the cards—there may be techniques and processes we can learn from to keep him under mighty fetters. Indeed I have the faint intuition that just as dynamical independence can be the glory and horror of the games we play, sacrifice is the source of both the danger and the redemption, if loving hearts can remain faithful to wisdom.

Perhaps “molochwalking”, a term for both the emergence of Moloch configurations and how to find, modestly, a few hidden and sacred paths, how to walk the knife’s edge away from damnation, could be a future topic of interest.

I would like to note that the dancing plague of Strasbourg was curbed by redirecting the frenzy into religious ritual. One may scoff at this, but considering the existence of wise exploitation and therefore the gap between reason and benevolence, it may be wiser to keep an open mind? It is not a suggestion of unreason, but that reason may take strange turns, moreover reason is the reified finished product of an infinite process of judgment, how could that actually exist without God? You never know when you might need an escape hatch. Also, “Meditations on Moloch” is old and I don’t want to leave the impression I’m trying to be too harsh on Scott, it is a good essay and I’m sure his views have evolved since, I just wanted to portray some long-held issues I have with it.

My dance, for one, is finished and it is time to rest. For now I leave you with Kierkegaard and The Book, to soothe your mind. The world is not as sad as it sometimes seems, do not despair.

Kierkegaard: “The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.”

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” —Matthew 16:25