Nobody is in charge and everybody is trapped

Hook

Companies that don’t maximise profit lose. Countries that don’t arm get invaded. Everybody hates it, and everybody plays.

Claim

Good people produce bad outcomes because each is rational inside the game, and fixing it means redesigning the game, not finding a villain. When every actor is rewarded for a race, a decent person who stops loses and the race goes on. Use simple words: an arms race with a scoring rule, not “Moloch”.

Story

Petar’s tweet drafts from Meditations on Moloch (called a dictatorless dystopia). Scott Alexander’s essay is from 2014, on Slate Star Codex. Facebook is the concrete case: nobody at the platform had to want outrage, a scoring rule produced it. The Dictator’s Handbook reads the same logic in politics: leaders do what keeps their coalition happy. The Citrini 2028 memo, a fictional scenario, has the same shape: each firm’s rational AI response, collectively catastrophic.

Sources

• Petar’s unpublished tweet draft; Meditations on Moloch via his drafts
• Petar’s unpublished tweet draft
• Petar’s notes on a fictional scenario, not a forecast
• Meditations on Moloch, Slate Star Codex
• Boston.com reprint of Washington Post: Facebook formula
• The Dictator’s Handbook, Wikipedia

Check before posting

• Petar’s own reading note of the original essay was not found, only tweet drafts. The essay link above was not opened.
• Never describe the Citrini scenario as fact. It is fiction.
• Needs a person-level story. The Facebook note has the closest one.

Counterargument

It can excuse people who chose badly. Facebook could have set the weight to zero earlier.

Post angles

Facebook (Croatian)

• Nema zle zavjere. Gore je: nitko ne vlada, a svi su zarobljeni. Svatko igra racionalno, a ishod je lud.
• Ne moram vjerovati da su novinari zli da shvatim zašto su naslovi takvi. Ako vas svi konkurenti nagrađuju za bijes, oni koji ne rade isto nestaju. Pitanje nije tko je kriv, nego kako promijeniti pravila igre.

LinkedIn (English)

• There is no evil plot. The truth is stranger: nobody is in charge and everybody is trapped. Everyone plays rationally and the outcome is mad.
• The question is not who is to blame, but how to change the game. Incentives explain, they do not excuse.

Links

• Facebook weighted the angry reaction five times a like and then found angry posts carried more misinformation
• AI just put an engine on the race to the bottom
• The same game with a different name makes people cooperate, and most people cooperate if the game lets them
• Rulers answer to whoever keeps them in power so changing who that is changes behaviour
• Companies captured states long before AI and United Fruit is the model