Consider the nuclear arms race of the 1950s: it’s not like the USA or the Soviet Union especially wanted to empty their coffers into their militaries; after all, that is taxpayer money that could be spent on keeping taxpayers happy. But they didn’t have much of a choice, because the game theory of the situation demanded it — anyone who didn’t would be left vulnerable to attack from the other side. And so, both nations got trapped in a race to the bottom, reactively building up bigger and bigger arsenals than the other guy until there were enough nukes 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. It does this by trapping players in the following dilemma:

“I don’t want to do crappy thing [X], but my competitors will probably do [X] anyway, so I have to do it too, else I’m at a disadvantage”.

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… annoying!

So Moloch is the main bad guy of our story right now, because it is what is stopping us humans from coordinating to solve many of our trickiest issues.

But tricky does not equal impossible! There have been many examples where we DID manage to break out of Moloch’s 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. Either way, just remember that Moloch sucks. It’s the demon-god of lose-lose games that turn even good guys into bad guys.

Which raises the question: what is its opposite? Is there a God of Win-Win? Why yes there is… and if you would like to get to know it, keep reading.