Democratic
Article
Democratic is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 08, 2022 and May 23, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “the traditional Democratic way of doing things—launching new federal programs, catering to interest groups, and accepting some waste and inefficiency as a cost of doing business—is on its way out”; “Sean McElwee , a recently-cancelled Democratic pollster”. It most often appears alongside Congress, 1968 convention, 1976 Democratic.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 08, 2022
- Last seen: May 23, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Congress (2 shared issues)
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- 1968 convention (1 shared issues)
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- 1976 Democratic (1 shared issues)
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- 1976 Democratic primary (1 shared issues)
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- 1976 primary (1 shared issues)
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- 1979 oil crisis (1 shared issues)
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- 1980 (1 shared issues)
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- Air Force One (1 shared issues)
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- Al Gore (1 shared issues)
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- American embassy (1 shared issues)
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- Anwar Sadat (1 shared issues)
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- Arkansas (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
When he first enters the 1976 Democratic primary, Carter is a complete unknown, and the general consensus is that he’s the longest of long shots. (“Jimmy who?” one opponent asks.) But two things go very, very right for him. First, he’s one of the few people who fully understands the changes to the Democratic primary process that were implemented after the chaos of the 1968 convention [1]. He stakes his campaign on the now-familiar strategy of winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, which is groundbreaking at the time. More importantly, the fact that no one has ever heard of him turns out to be a huge advantage in the wake of Watergate, when voters are hungry for an outsider.
The electoral map of the 1976 campaign. The Democratic coalition was pretty different back then!
Somehow, he does all of this while having one of the worst relationships with Congress of any modern president. Some of the conflict is personal: Carter is the anti-LBJ in that he hates dealmaking and is perpetually unwilling to compromise [2]. Deep down, he sees the dirty business of politics as inherently sinful, and he doesn’t understand why everyone can’t just do the right thing, especially when he’s explained to them at great length why it’s the right thing to do. He has huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but they relate to each other with barely veiled contempt. (It doesn’t help that Carter is the complete personal antithesis of Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a classic old-school Irish Democrat who loves back-slapping, cutting deals, and being a part of the Establishment Carter ran against.) Carter repeatedly vetoes bills passed by his own party because he has minor issues with them. At one point, he petulantly vetoes a $37bn defense bill because he thinks one specific item in it, representing less than 2% of the total, is a waste of money.
Take various actions to incentivize markets that predict world events, and disincentivize “will this market do X?” style gambling. For example, mana won in gambling markets will no longer count towards the leaderboard, and they’ll no longer show as “trending” on the front page. Manifold is in an awkward place. Like many early-stage websites, they have an enthusiastic community, a great product, and not much plan for making money. Their stopgap strategy was to let people buy extra mana with real money. They don’t want to remove this option, because it’s their whole business plan. But it’s a weird thing to do. Some fraction of the people who do it will do it for the wrong reasons. Manifold made the right choice refunding most of the money and taking steps to prevent this from happening in the future. But it was still a challenge the idea that it’s possible to run any kind of gambling-adjacent institution ethically, no matter how careful you try to be. I recently read an article on Sean McElwee, a recently-cancelled Democratic pollster. McElwee got in trouble for lots of reasons, but one was a gambling addiction, and one of the places he gambled was prediction markets (the article doesn’t say which one, but I assume it was PredictIt, the only America-accessible political prediction market that takes real money). PredictIt limits users to a few hundred dollars per wager, this clearly wasn’t the bulk of his gambling problem, and he seemed to do pretty well (his problem wasn’t he lost money, his problem was that he got in trouble for betting on elections that his polls influenced). And I don’t want to exaggerate how worried to be about this. People lose way more money on sports betting and poker every hour. A site that produces lots of great information, raises the sanity waterline, and once a year or so causes someone to lose $29,000 which management immediately gives back because they feel bad - is hardly the face of problem gambling in America. But still, now this is a thing that sometimes happens. Debt Brinksmanship Speaking of people ruining lives with bad financial choices - Congress is debating raising the debt ceiling. If they can’t compromise, the US will default on its debt, with potentially severe economic repercussions. But usually both parties do some brinksmanship but then compromise at the last moment. Will that happen this time too? All three sites think the most likely outcome is that the US successfully raises the debt ceiling (Metaculus is lower than the other two, maybe because it asks about a shorter time period). But when? From Kalshi and Polymarket: What happens if they don’t? The White House report says a “protracted” default (ie for more than three months) could sink the stock market by 45%. Is this an exaggeration? Given that this is about any default, and not just a “protracted” one, I think this backs up the White House claim that this would be pretty catastrophic. EPJ Probes The Long Run Superforecasters are pretty good at telling you who will win next month’s sports game, next month’s election, or next year’s geopolitical clash. What about the longer-term? Can they predict broader political trends? The distant future of AI? Until now, we didn’t know, for a simple reason: superforecasting was only a few decades old. Philip Tetlock did the original Expert Political Judgment experiments in the 80s and 90s. In a predictive success of his own, Tetlock realized this would be a problem early on. In 1998, he got experts to make predictions for the next 25 years. Specifically, he asked his forecasters to predict the course of nuclear proliferation and various border conflicts. Some were geopolitics scholars were were experts in these fields; others weren’t. It’s been 25 years since 1998, so we’re ready to open the time capsule and see how they did. Before answering: how do we judge the results? That is, the subjects made some guesses about the world in 2023. Let’s say a third of them were right. Is that good or bad? Does it mean people can predict the future 25 years out, or they can’t? Tetlock proposes several specific questions, of which I’ll focus on the three I find most interesting: Will forecasters do better than some hacked-together algorithmic guess based on base rates? For example, if we ask “will countries X and Y go to war in the next 25 years?”, will experts outperform just guessing the base rate of war between those two countries (or two similar countries) over a 25-year-period?