The Prisoner's Dilemma

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The one good way we've been able to avoid mollock swallowing usis is through co ordination. You don't need a mob boss to solve the prisoner's dilemma, he says. The fact that humans didn't consistently defect with each heand co operate andd the reason that little kids like playing with each other in the service of a common goal are just that we're built differently. And so the cordination problem comes easier to usye.

David and Tamler wind their way through the long-requested “Meditations on Moloch” by Scott Alexander, a comprehensive account of the coordination problems (personified by Allan Ginsberg’s demon-entity Moloch) that lead to human misery and values tossed out the window. Does Alexander’s rationalist conception of human nature ignore the work of VBW favorites like Joe Henrich and Robert Frank? Is he a little too friendly to the neo-social Darwinism view of some guy named Nick Land? And oh no, why does he have to go transhumanist at the end?! Plus, we talk about the unique comic vision of Norm Macdonald and why we loved him.