Republicans

Article

Republicans is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 29 times across 29 issues between January 21, 2021 and March 31, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “including 38% of Republicans”; “Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to support abortion restrictions”; ""Republicans suck” and references to their political stance”. It most often appears alongside Democrats, Trump, Twitter.

Metadata

Category: Concepts
Mention count: 29
Issue count: 29
First seen: January 21, 2021
Last seen: March 31, 2026

Appears In

- Democrats (20 shared issues)
- Trump (17 shared issues)
- Twitter (12 shared issues)
- Biden (9 shared issues)
- China (8 shared issues)
- Ukraine (8 shared issues)
- US (8 shared issues)
- California (7 shared issues)
- Manifold (7 shared issues)
- Metaculus (7 shared issues)
- NYT (7 shared issues)
- Polymarket (7 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.

Still Alive

January 21, 2021 · Original source

And: a recent poll found that 62% of people feel afraid to express their political beliefs. This isn't just conservatives - it's also moderates (64%), liberals (52%) and even many strong liberals (42%). This is true even among minority groups, with more Latinos (65%) feeling afraid to speak out than whites (64%), and blacks (49%) close behind. 32% of people worry they would be fired if their political views became generally known, including 28% of Democrats and 38% of Republicans. Poor people and Hispanics were more likely to express this concern than rich people and whites, but people with post-graduate degrees have it worse than any other demographic group.

Inline links: recent poll

Book Review: Why We're Polarized

February 09, 2021 · Original source

In 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to support abortion restrictions. That same year, a poll found that "only 54% of the electorate believed that the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party"; 30% thought there was no difference. As late as 2004, about equal numbers (within 5 pp) of Democrats and Republicans agreed with statements like "government is almost always wasteful and inefficient" and "immigrants are a burden on our country". Between the late 60s and early 90s, Democratic presidents deregulated the airlines and passed welfare reform; Republican presidents pushed immigration amnesties and founded the EPA.

Inline links: As late as 2004

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act threatened the Dixiecrats' key issue. It wasn't quite as simple as "Democrats were for it, Republicans were against it" - in fact, 80% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats supported it. But that year's presidential election pitted heavily pro-CRA Democrat Lyndon Johnson against anti-CRA Republican Barry Goldwater, beginning Southerners' defection to the Republican Party.

Stop for a second before reacting here. I get the impression that Klein understands he is taking a risk (not an actual risk of decreased popularity, given the givens, but some kind of metaphysical risk to his soul) by abandoning his previous attempt at a neutral stance and coming out like this. I think he feels bad about it, and that he considered not writing this chapter on that basis. I think it's very important to him that we consider the possibility that he wants to be neutral, is trying as hard as he can to be neutral, but that even from an attempted-neutral point of view he thinks the decline of the Republican Party is a threat to the stability of the country. And I think it's very important that we maintain a stance where we recognize this is a potentially true state of affairs - it really is possible that one party is much worse than the other! - and don't automatically condemn Klein for raising the possibility.

Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y

March 15, 2021 · Original source

In fact, I think a lot of commentators would admit they're not really in the prediction business and probably couldn't do it any better than anyone else. I think that getting commentators to admit this would be a fine outcome for this multi-decade line of research - as long as they stuck to it. If I claim that nothing I say has predictable real-world consequences, I shouldn't be in the business of assessing the risks/benefits of Vitamin D, or which theories of antidepressant action make sense, or telling Republicans they could win if they focused on class more. If I learned I was wrong (or at least no righter than average) about all those things, I guess I could continue to write - this post I'm writing now has no predictable real-world consequences - but it would have to be a much humbler and pared-down blog.

Things I Learned Writing The Lockdown Post

July 21, 2021 · Original source

Writing the post made me think a lot of Robin Hanson's idea of "pulling policy ropes sideways". The idea is, the Democrats and Republicans (or whoever) are in a giant tug-of-war over some issue, like looser or stricter lockdowns. There are so many people pulling, on both sides, that you adding your efforts to one side or the other will barely matter. Meanwhile, if you pull the ropes sideways - try to make a difference in some previously unexplored direction that nobody is fighting - you can often have much more effect, plus there's no reason to think that the direction everyone is fighting over is the most interesting direction anyway.

Inline links: pulling policy ropes sideways

Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts

September 06, 2021 · Original source

In case you find this hard to follow: ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that looked promising against COVID in early studies. Later it started looking less promising, and investigators found that a major supporting study was fraudulent. But by this point it had gotten popular among conspiracy theorists as a suppressed coronavirus cure that They Don’t Want You To Know. The media has tried to spread the word that the scientific consensus remains skeptical. In the process, they may have gone a little overboard and portrayed it as the world’s deadliest toxin that will definitely kill you and it will all somehow be Donald Trump’s fault. It turned into the latest culture war issue, and now there’s a whole discourse on (for example) how supposedly-sober fact-checkers keep calling it "a horse dewormer” (it is used to deworm horses, but it’s also FDA-approved for humans, but lots of the people using it are buying the horse version), and probably this is hypocritical in some way. Enter the article above. A doctor named Jason McElyea apparently told local broadcaster KFOR that Oklahoma hospitals are “overwhelmed” with ivermectin poisoning cases, so much so that “gunshot victims” are “left waiting”. Some of the world’s biggest news outlets heard the story and ran with it. The tweet mentions the Rolling Stone version, but the same story, with the same doctor’s testimony, got picked up by The Guardian, the BBC, Yahoo News, etc. Which brings us to the Sequoyah Hospital letter on the right. They released a statement saying that Dr. McElyea hasn’t worked there in two months, they haven’t had any ivermectin overdose cases, and they don’t know what he’s talking about. In the comments, author Virginia Hume sums up the situation nicely: I’ve recently been reading Scout Mindset (expect a review soon), which is kind of the rationalist movement in book form. It focuses on the difference between how we treat ideas that conform to our biases versus those that contradict them. If they conform, we ask “Are we allowed to accept this?” and wave them through, like a small town police chief dealing with a case involving the mayor’s son. If they contradict, we subject them to the harshest inquisition possible, like a small town police chief dealing with a guy named “Abdullah” with a sinister-looking beard. The media was already looking to discredit ivermectin. So the report of one doctor - without even a phone call to confirm - was good enough for Rolling Stone, The Guardian, BBC, etc. It was “too good to check”. II. Did you believe that? I did, briefly. Then I remembered the Law Of Rationalist Irony: the smugger you feel about having caught a bias in someone else, the more likely you are falling victim to that bias right now, in whatever way would be most embarrassing. So, quick check: am I doing this? I notice this story is exactly tailored to appeal to me and people like me. It discredits the media establishment, who I don’t like. It’s a great argument for why we need more rationality, something I’ve been trying to push. It lets me feel superior to everyone: I am properly skeptical of ivermectin, but also I haven’t become a contemptible propagandist who joins in mass media smear campaigns. And I didn’t even take a second to check if it was true! I’m relying entirely on the word of a Twitter bluecheck I’ve never heard of before, whose profile picture is some kind of dog (an Australian sheepdog? maybe some kind of weird collie?) Forget making a phone call to a hospital, I didn’t even read the original article! The story was “too good to check”! So I tried checking, and noticed that the third reply to the original tweet was this: In case you’re as confused as I am, NHS here = “Northeastern Health System”, an Oklahoma health care group. Britain is not involved. This…turns out to be completely true. The story never mentions Sequoyah Hospital! Dr. McElyea has worked at Sequoyah in the past, but he’s a traveling doctor and works lots of places. Plausibly Sequoyah just wanted to clarify that they weren’t like the hospitals in the story, they’re not turning away gunshot victims, and if you happen to be a gunshot victim you’re still welcome to go to Sequoyah and can expect timely care. Apparently I’m not the only person who doesn’t scroll down to the third tweet. The right-wing Washington Examiner has an article on how Rolling Stone’s Ivermectin Fiction Shows Why Republicans Don’t Trust Media. Fox has an article on Rolling Stone Forced To Issue Update After Viral Ivermectin Story Turns Out To Be False. One Redditor puts it more bluntly: “Dr. Jason McElyea, who has been claiming that emergency rooms have been turning away gunshot victims because of Ivermectin overdoses, is a liar.” None of these sources mentioned that the original article had never claimed Sequoyah Hospital was involved. Their story was - I guess - too good to check. III. Did you believe that? I mean, that’s also a pretty cool story, isn’t it? Right-wing news outlets accuse the so-called “liberal media” of bias, then get hoist on their own petard? Seems a bit too cute. Have you clicked through to any of the links yet? No? Not even after I admitted I’m probably biased here? Sequoyah Hospital might not be the particular hospital that the doctor in the story was thinking of. But isn’t it suspicious that other hospitals are so packed with ivermectin cases that they have to delay care to gunshot victims, yet Sequoyah says that it “has not treated any patients due to complications of treating ivermectin”? Seems weird for there to be that much difference. Okay, this time I promise I’m not trying to psych you out. Here’s what I’ve actually been able to figure out about this situation: Rolling Stone seems to think that the Sequoyah Hospital statement casts doubt on their account. They changed the title of their article to “One Hospital Denies Oklahoma Doctor’s Story…” and edited in a long prologue about the hospital’s statement in a way that suggests they feel bad about their reporting. They say that they have reached out to various relevant doctors and hospitals for comments but have not heard back from them - which I guess is good, because if your hospital is so busy that you don’t have time to treat gunshot victims, you really shouldn’t have time to give interviews to Rolling Stone.

Inline links: the, The Guardian, the BBC, Yahoo News, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!50Ju!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6a65950a-1232-4977-ace5-71b13c4ab83f_726x156.png, Scout Mindset, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cSE3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe530cd25-fde9-4b98-b7d8-a1143ee0e026_722x187.png, Rolling Stone’s Ivermectin Fiction Shows Why Republicans Don’t Trust Media, Rolling Stone Forced To Issue Update After Viral Ivermectin Story Turns Out To Be False, puts it more bluntly

A Democrat reads some fraction of this story, and sees a bunch of idiot conspiracy theorists taking deadly horse medication to cure COVID. A doctor warns people that his hospital is overcrowded with poisoning cases, and the media dutifully reports on this. Then an unrelated hospital puts out a press release saying they’re not involved and - even though this changes nothing - Republicans seize on this to declare the entire media is “fake news” and nobody should trust anything they read and the horse dewormer conspiracists were right all along.

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

September 17, 2021 · Original source

And also - consider universal health care. Lots of countries have universal health care. It's not an impossible High Modernist pipe dream that can never be accomplished. Or stopping illegal immigration - many countries manage this just fine, America could do it if it wanted to. Democrats hold protests and get angry demanding things like universal health care, Republicans hold protests and get angry demanding things like an end to illegal immigration, and both sides lose some faith in government when they don't get what they want. But these aren't insane demands which inevitably bleed into nihilist temper tantrums after predestined failures. They're just normal political requests for achievable goals, which various interest groups will fight over and then the government will either do them or not. Yeah, Occupy Wall Street was kind of silly, but most of politics continues to be the struggle for normal potentially achievable stuff. If we admit that, what's left of Gurri's thesis?

Gurri talks a lot about Center and Border, but barely even mentions Left and Right. Once you reintroduce these, you have a solution to nihilism. The Left can come up with a laundry list of High Modernist plans that they think would solve all their problems, and the Right can do the same. Then one or the other takes control of government, gets thwarted by checks/balances/Mitch McConnell, and nothing happens. No American Democrat was forced to conclude that just because Obama couldn't solve all their problems, the promise of High Modernism was a lie. They just concluded that Obama could have solved all their problems, but the damn Republicans filibustered the bill. Likewise, the Republicans can imagine that Donald Trump would have made America great again if the media and elites and Deep State hadn't been blocking him at every turn. Donald Trump himself tells them this is true!

Links For November

November 25, 2021 · Original source

24: Sort of related: I console myself with the idea that the Democrats have some kind of grand strategy to both make everyone hate them as much as possible, and also push policies that will accomplish exactly the opposite of all their goals. Then Republicans will capture all branches of government with large majorities, and build lots of solar panels in order to own the libs. Also promote race-blind hiring, build lots of housing to fight homelessness, repeal SALT deductions, regulate Big Business, pull out of foreign wars, heck, why not legalize marijuana? Viewed this way, maybe Biden and Pelosi are the greatest political geniuses of their generation!

Inline links: legalize marijuana

I console myself with the idea that the Democrats have some kind of grand strategy to both make everyone hate them as much as possible, and also push policies that will accomplish exactly the opposite of all their goals. Then Republicans will capture all branches of government with large majorities, and build lots of solar panels in order to own the libs. Also promote race-blind hiring, build lots of housing to fight homelessness, repeal SALT deductions, regulate Big Business, pull out of foreign wars, heck, why not legalize marijuana? Viewed this way, maybe Biden and Pelosi are the greatest political geniuses of their generation!

Inline links: legalize marijuana

May 10, 2022 · Original source

Here’s PredictIt on Republicans’ chances of taking the Senate in November: The red line marks the Supreme Court leak. After a month of near-stability, Democrats’ chances went from 22% to 29%, before stabilizing around 26%. Markets on the Senate and on other sites like Polymarket tell a similar story. This is as far as we can go without using Manifold. Manifold questions have much less volume than PredictIt or Metaculus, and I have much less confidence in them, but for the record, here are a few: Disclaimer: I moved that one a bit myself, it was around 77% and I thought that was too high. Despite the fearmongering, this one looks about right to me. Disclaimer that Manifold probably can’t handle probabilities this small correctly and there’s no reason to think 0.2% is more realistic than 2%. It’s not 10% though. I couldn’t find some markets I wanted, so I’ve created them on Manifold for you to bet on: Will the Supreme Court leaker’s identity be known by 2023?

Inline links: PredictIt, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x1aF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c12404d-769c-4c3b-b863-ca7084ede93c_675x467.png, Polymarket, https://manifold.markets/fortenforge/did-the-dobbs-v-jackson-leak-come-f, https://manifold.markets/BrianAhuja/will-interracial-marriage-be-banned, Will the Supreme Court leaker’s identity be known by 2023?

Links For June

July 01, 2022 · Original source

18: Related - Go Republican, Young EA. It argues that although there’s brutal competition for spots at liberal think tanks / journals / policy wonk positions, the crop of conservative intellectuals is so much sparser that there’s much less competition at the conservative end. But the Democrats and Republicans both hold power about equally often. So somebody trying to get power (sorry, I mean “make a difference”) should try to get into the conservative ecosystem instead of the liberal one, since they’ll rise much higher in an equally lucrative field. I agree with all of this. I don’t think liberals should fake being conservative (it wouldn’t work, plus you’d have to be conservative which might not be the difference you want to make). But I would encourage anyone who’s on the border to polish their conservative credentials, and anyone who happens to be a conservative interested in EA ideas to be aware of their value.

Inline links: Go Republican, Young EA

July 12, 2022 · Original source

Related: Liz Cheney says the Republican Party “can’t survive” nominating Trump in 2024. This is exactly the kind of prediction I anticipate people walking back if they were asked to make it formally. Let’s say “conditional on Trump as 2024 nominee, Republicans won’t get >40% of the vote in either of the 2028 or 2032 presidential elections”. Would Liz Cheney - or anyone else - really take that bet, at any odds? Is there any formulation matching a commonsense notion of “not surviving” they would accept?

Inline links: Liz Cheney says the Republican Party “can’t survive”

The immediate cause of the July 1 spike could have been this New York Times article, saying Trump was getting close to announcing his candidacy. So you could make an argument that the decline from 6/19 to 6/29 was a genuine effect of damaging insurrection revelations, and then the spike around 7/1 was an unrelated boost from people increasing their probability that he would run. If true, that suggests that P(Trump wins|Trump runs) is pretty high, since even small revelations about his intentions move the market a lot.

Inline links: this New York Times article

Democrats are angry about the overturning of Roe. Republicans are happy, but angry people vote and happy people mostly don’t. So plausibly the decision increases Democrats’ chance of keeping the Senate later this year:

Universe-Hopping Through Substack

September 29, 2022 · Original source

Political Substacks tend to have names that suggest stability - “The Bulwark”, “North Star”, “Steady” - or reasonableness - “Common Sense”, “Civil Discourse”, “Lucid”. They all have taglines like “Just the news, the way it should be, without the craziness and partisan bias”. Their articles are all things like “WATCH how the FASCIST ultra-MAGA Republicans ABUSE women and CHILDREN because THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT!!!”

Inline links: The Bulwark, North Star, Common Sense, Civil Discourse, Lucid

Atop this motley crew sits Heather Cox Richardson, one of the few Substackers to have a New York Times article about her - in fact, part of the even more select group of Substackers who got NYT articles about them consensually. The Times describes her as a mild-mannered history professor who rose to superstardom “by accident” after an essay she posted took off. Her day job is studying the Civil War, and part of her shtick is comparing modern Republicans to Civil War era slaveowners, something there is certainly not zero demand for.

Inline links: a

Still, all of her posts are like this. A daily discussion of one timely issue, a lot of useful context and explanation, and a paragraph or two about why it proves that the Republicans are the party of hatred and bigotry.

Prediction Market FAQ

December 20, 2022 · Original source

when you’re not sure which of many competing experts to trust, you should trust a prediction market instead of any of them Going through these claims one by one: 3.1: Why expect all prediction markets to agree with each other? Either all prediction markets agree with each other, or you can get rich quick: Suppose prediction markets disagreed. For example, suppose the RNC ran an Official Republican Prediction Market that said there was only a 10% chance Democrats would win the next election, and a 90% chance Republicans would. And suppose the DNC ran an Official Democrat Prediction Market that made the opposite prediction: 90% chance Democrats, 10% chance Republicans. Then you could buy a share of “Democrats will win” from the Republican market for 10 cents, plus a share of “Republicans will win” from the Democrat market for 10 cents, and be guaranteed to make $1 when one party or the other wins. You have turned 20 cents into a guaranteed $1. Repeat until you are rich or the mispricing has been corrected. This is just what financial experts call “arbitrage”. You may notice that in finance, people always give specific prices for things like shares of stock, barrels of oil, or Bitcoins. People say things like “Google stock is up to $300”, but never “Google stock is up to $300 on the NYSE, but down to $200 on NASDAQ”. If that was true, people would buy it on NASDAQ, sell it on NYSE, make $100 in free money, and get rich quick. In ideal situations, arbitrage forces everybody everywhere to agree on the same price for a financial instrument. Prediction markets turn claims about truth into financial instruments in a way which forces everybody everywhere to agree on how likely the claim is to be true. 3.2: Why expect prediction markets to be hard for special interests to manipulate? Either a prediction market is not currently mispriced because of a manipulation attempt, or you can get rich quick. Argument: Suppose a prediction market was currently mispriced because of a manipulation attempt. For example, suppose there is a prediction market for whether the sun will rise tomorrow. The true probability is obviously 100%, corresponding to a cost of $1.00. But suppose some special interest who wanted to trick people into believing the sun would not rise successfully spent money to bid the market down to only 10%. This means that you can buy, for $0.10, a share which pays $1 if the sun rises tomorrow. In other words, you can dectuple your money for free. Repeat until you are rich or the mispricing has been corrected. This may sound complicated in theory, but it plays out straightforwardly in real life. As a test, I tried to manipulate the market on whether Austin Chen, founder of Manifold Markets, would be charged with a felony. There’s no reason to think he should be, so the price started at 5%. I spent $200 in Manifold’s play money bidding it up to 95%. Within an hour, other investors noticed the mispricing and corrected it back down to 5% again. 3.3: Why expect prediction markets to be free from bias? Either a prediction market is not currently mispriced because of bias, or you can get rich quick. The argument: Suppose all smart people, including you, know that there is an 80% chance that the Democrats’ economic plan will create new jobs. But suppose that Republicans, because of their partisan biases, refuse to believe it, and say there is only a 40% chance. And suppose the Republicans set up their own prediction market where they bid the price of a share down to $0.40. You can, of course, go on this prediction market, buy shares for $0.40, and double your money in expectation. Repeat until you are rich or the mispricing has been corrected. I already described how something like this happens on PredictIt (a non-ideal prediction market that you can only make a few hundred dollars in expectation by correcting), and that I do in fact make a few hundred dollars every election season. 3.4: Why should I believe a prediction market’s consensus over my own opinion? This is the same argument as “the prediction market will always be at least as accurate as the top expert” only with you in the place of the top expert. Either prediction markets are at least as smart as you are, or you can get rich quick. The argument here is the same as “at least as smart as the smartest expert” argument in 2, except replacing “the smartest expert” with “you”. But just to lay it out explicitly: Suppose you were smarter than some prediction market. Then if you disagreed with the market, usually you would be right and it would be wrong. So look for cases where you disagree with the market, buy those shares, and you will make money in expectation. Repeat until you are rich or the mispricing has been corrected. I like this because it’s a good empirical test, and one that many people have tried. If you think you’re smarter than the prediction markets, bet on them and see what happens! I think most people will find that (over the long run) they lose money, and eventually this will cure them of their delusion that they can beat the markets. A few people might find that (over the long run) they do win money, just as a few people (eg Warren Buffett) can consistently win money on the stock market. Hopefully those people will quit their day jobs and become full-time prediction market traders. They’ll become multimillionaires, and their hard work will ensure that prediction markets stay more accurate than the rest of us. 3.5: Why should I believe that a prediction market makes good decisions about which of many competing experts to trust? Suppose you accept that a prediction market will always be at least as accurate as some well-known expert (eg Nate Silver). But what if you’re not sure who the real experts are? Or what if there are many experts, all saying different things, and nobody knows who to trust? In this case, a prediction market will always be at least as good as any other source (including you) at telling good experts from bad, or at figuring out which of many good experts is the best. By this point you should be able to predict the argument, but for completeness’ sake: Suppose you were better than the prediction market at determining which of many competing experts to trust, or how to aggregate the pronouncements of many experts into a single authoritative opinion. Then if you disagreed with the market, usually you would be right and it would be wrong. So look for cases where you disagree with the market, buy those shares, and you will make money in expectation. Repeat until you are rich or the mispricing has been corrected. To ground this in a real example, suppose there is some new virus which might or might not spread to the United States. A Harvard professor of epidemiology says there’s a 70% chance it will spread, a Yale professor of epidemiology says there’s an 90% chance it will spread, and a guy in a tinfoil hat on Infowars says there’s a 0% chance it will spread because it’s all a fake government plot. If I knew nothing else about this situation, I would probably think there’s about an 80% chance the virus will spread. I trust the Harvard and Yale professors equally much, and the tinfoil hat guy not at all. Suppose I saw a prediction market that was only at 10%, because most people trusted the tinfoil hat guy. I would want to buy YES shares until the price got up to 80%, because in expectation I would octuple my money. Suppose I saw a prediction market that was only at 70%. Now I wouldn’t be sure whether the prediction market was dumber than me (believed tinfoil hat guy) or smarter than me (they know a lot about epidemiology - or about the credibility of specific experts - and have decided to trust the Harvard professor over the Yale professor). Maybe I could improve on this. If I knew things about epidemiology, I could read over both professors’ arguments and try to figure out if one was better than the other. If I knew things about academia, I could pick over both professors’ resumes and see whether the Harvard professor seemed more distinguished or had more respect in her own field than the Yale professor. In the end, I might decide the prediction market was right to price it at 70% (in which case I wouldn’t do anything), or that actually both experts seemed equally expert (in which case I might bid it up to 80%), or that actually the Yale epidemiologist was better (in which case I might bid it up to 90%). 3.5.1: Isn’t it weird to give non-experts (like prediction market investors) the final judgment in which of two experts is right? Yes, but I don’t think this is avoidable. If there were no such thing as prediction markets, and the Harvard epidemiologist said 70%, and the Yale epidemiologist said 90%, and the tinfoil hat guy said 0%, and for some reason it mattered a lot to you which of these was true - then you would still have to make that decision. If there’s some extremely authoritative source who can make the decision for you - let’s say the World Health Organization says “after reviewing all experts’ arguments, we believe that the final probability is 75%” - then great! Either: The WHO is clearly the most trustworthy source - in which case we go back to the Nate Silver situation where the prediction market should be just as accurate as it is.

Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al. Top-1 accuracy is distinguished, as in the paper, from top-k accuracy in which k outputs from the model are generated, and the best output is selected. By "unified" we mean that the system is integrated enough that it can, for example, explain its reasoning on a Q&A task, or verbally report its progress and identify objects during model assembly. (This is not really meant to be an additional capability of "introspection" so much as a provision that the system not simply be cobbled together as a set of sub-systems specialized to tasks like the above, but rather a single system applicable to many problems.) Resolution will come from any of three forms, whichever comes first: (1) direct demonstration of such a system achieving ALL of the above criteria, (2) confident credible statement by its developers that an existing system is able to satisfy these criteria, or (3) judgement by a majority vote in a special committee composed of the question author and two AI experts chosen in good faith by him, for the sole purpose of resolving this question. Resolution date will be the first date at which the system (subsequently judged to satisfy the criteria) and its capabilities are publicly described in a talk, press release, paper, or other report available to the general public. Even this isn’t perfect (which models are “the equivalent of” a 1:8 scale Ferrari 312?), but in practice once you get to this level of details people mostly stop worrying about this. Another method (mostly associated with Manifold) is to just leave it up to human judgment - specifically, the judgment of the person who made the market. For example, I could make a market in “By 2050, will there be an AI which Scott Alexander thinks qualifies as ‘human-level’?” This will force market participants to price in the risk that I have bad judgment or act dishonestly. But perhaps these risks are small. For example, I might say elsewhere what I think qualifies as “human-level” AI, or you might think human-level AI will be so obvious when it comes that I will definitely agree with you about it. As for honesty, this could be enforced either legally or by reputation. Someone who has resolved their past 100 prediction markets honestly will probably resolve this one honestly too, especially if they get paid to do so and will never get customers again if they lie. When we invest on the normal stock market, we trust that our brokers / the NYSE / etc won’t run off with our money, and this trust is usually well-deserved. Even when we make an online purchase, we trust that the store we’re sending our money to won’t steal it and refuse to send us the product. It would be an exaggeration to say that trust is a solved problem, but evidence from Manifold suggests that most people price in a <1% chance that well-known market makers with good reputation resolve dishonestly. If prediction markets got big enough, they could spawn trusted “resolution companies” who individual markets and market-makers could outsource their resolution to, for a fee. If these companies were ever dishonest, they would lose all their business from then on, so they would probably be as honest as other businesses like your broker / the NYSE / various online stores / etc. 4.7.1: Isn’t a lot of the “crisis of trust” around questions that might never have clear future answers? For example, consider the debate around whether Donald Trump is a Russian agent. Maybe no proof will ever come out either way. Or maybe some evidence will appear that seems to prove one side or the other, but people will continue to deny it for political reasons, and the problem of resolving the prediction market will be just as hard as the problem of answering the original question. Indeed, prediction markets aren’t very good at this, and are only fully trustworthy on questions where the true answer will eventually become apparent. Still, they might not be completely useless. For example, if you’re worried about Trump being a Russian agent because you expect him to pursue pro-Russia policies, you can start markets in whether he pursues those policies. Or you can start a conditional market (see 5.1) on whether, if Russia ever releases its past intelligence data many years from now, the data confirm/disconfirm that Trump was an agent. See Part 5 for other clever ways you might try to address this problem. 4.8: “Meme stocks” like Gamestop and AMC sometimes remain mispriced indefinitely. How do we know this won’t happen with prediction markets? Meme stocks are a type of Ponzi. It’s “reasonable” to buy Gamestop at some inflated price, because - who knows? - someone else might buy it at an even more inflated price tomorrow. And this can keep going arbitrarily long, or at least long enough for you to get out with a profit. Unlike meme stocks, prediction markets have a clear resolution date. If you’re predicting who will win the next election, the market will go to 100% or 0% after the election finishes. No matter how many memes there were, you wouldn’t buy a share in “the Democrats will win the election” for 99% the day before Election Day if you knew they would definitely lose. But that means prediction markets should be accurately priced the day before Election Day, which means you shouldn’t buy at an inaccurate price two days before Election Day, and so on. I can’t say for sure that no prediction market will ever get mispriced for meme reasons, but they should be much more robust against meme mispricings than the stock market. And even the stock market doesn’t have too many meme stocks. 4.9: How do prediction markets deal with outcomes in the far future? Suppose there is a question “who will win the 2100 election?” Currently it says 25% Democrats, 75% Republicans, and I believe it should be 50-50 (we’ll ignore third parties, or the possibility of America not existing in 2100, for now). So if I bet on the market, I can (in expectation) double my money. But there are many better ways to double your money by 2100. For example, if the stock market grows 4% per year, I should expect any money invested in the stock market to multiply by 20x in 2100. So just doubling it in a prediction market is a bad option. Realistically, this means prediction markets won’t work well for far-future events. These might be a better match for forecaster tournaments or some other structure, where we get the forecaster track records through present events, then use those track records weighting their far-future predictions (see also 5.5). There are already good forecasting tournaments on some far future events. But if you really wanted to use a prediction market, you could theoretically solve this by putting investors’ money in index funds while they waited. Then the winner would get their (and the losers’) original deposits and investment profits, and it would go back to being a better option than investing in index funds directly. In practice this seems complicated and I wouldn’t expect it to work. 4.9.1: What about predicting things that would make it impossible or pointless to win money, like human extinction? Again, these questions probably aren’t great matches for prediction markets, and you should use forecasting tournaments or some other method (see also 5.5). If you really wanted, you might be able to make it work in theory through a mechanism sort of like this one. 5. What are some clever uses for prediction markets? Here’s a non-exhaustive list: 5.1: Conditional prediction markets / decision markets Suppose the government is trying to decide whether to throw its weight behind Vaccine A or Vaccine B for some deadly disease. There are some experts behind both, both sets of experts accuse the other of being in the pay of pharmaceutical companies, and decision-makers don’t know who to trust. They might make two prediction markets, like: If we decide to go with Vaccine A, will at least X people die from the disease?

Inline links: Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al, already good forecasting tournaments on some far future events, this one

If you have no special expertise or skills, I expect you would mostly lose money on prediction markets, and I would rather this be play money than real money. 7.1: …if I’m an expert in some unrelated field, like biology or physics You can still try playing on Manifold, but I would also recommend you get an account on Metaculus and try out questions in your area of expertise. Metaculus aims to be policy-relevant, and the more experts it has forecasting scientific questions, the more likely it is to get them right. You should also feel free to try Metaculus even if you’re not an expert - their algorithm will see how often you’re right, and upweight or downweight your guesses accordingly. 7.2: …if I’m a hotshot financial trader? Consider betting on real money prediction markets. If you’re outside the US, your best bet is probably Polymarket (some Americans have found ways to use VPNs and crypto to trade on Polymarket despite the ban on US citizens; I don’t know how safe or recommended this is). If you’re inside the US, your best bet is probably Kalshi. I think the sort of person who can make money day trading stocks or crypto can also make some money playing prediction markets, probably with more social utility. As with any investment, please be sure you’re actually a hotshot financial trader, and don’t bet more than you can afford to lose. 7.3: …if I’m a blogger or journalist? You should consider including or citing prediction markets in your articles. Instead of saying “two polls say that the Democrats have a slight lead in the election, versus one poll that says the Republicans have a big lead”, you can say “Prediction markets say the Democrats have a 64% chance of winning the election”. Instead of saying “given their new logistical problems, experts are increasingly skeptical that Ukraine can retake Donetsk by winter,” you could say “Prediction markets say there is only a 12% chance Ukraine will take Donetsk by winter, which is down by 9% since the logistical problems started”. I recently had to read many articles on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which all repeated that “rumors said” Twitter was about to go down because of his mass firing. Meanwhile, there were several prediction markets on whether this would happen, and they were all around 40%. If some journalist had thought to check the prediction markets and cite them in their article, they could have not only provided more value (a clear percent chance instead of just “there are some rumors saying this”), but also been right when everyone else was wrong. Here are some examples of journalists talking about prediction markets: Bloomberg: Election Prediction Markets Show Kenosha Is Helping Trump

Inline links: get an account on Metaculus, Polymarket, Kalshi, Election Prediction Markets Show Kenosha Is Helping Trump

Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023

February 20, 2023 · Original source

The crisis of the Republican Party will turn out to have been overblown. Trump’s policies have been so standard-Republican that there will be no problem integrating him into the standard Republican pantheon, plus or minus some concerns about his personality which will disappear once he personally leaves the stage. Some competent demagogue (maybe Ted Cruz or Mike Pence) will use some phrase equivalent to “compassionate Trumpism”, everyone will agree it is a good idea, and in practice it will be exactly the same as what Republicans have been doing forever. The party might move slightly to the right on immigration, but this will be made easy by a fall in corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor, and might be trivial if there’s a border wall and they can declare mission accomplished. If the post-Trump standard-bearer has the slightest amount of personal continence, he should end up with a more-or-less united party who view Trump as a flawed but ultimately positive figure, like how they view GW Bush. Also, I predict we see a lot more of Ted Cruz than people are expecting.

The Republican Party hasn’t moved on from Trump in any direction. They have stayed exactly at Trump. Ron DeSantis seems personally successful and good at inciting culture war panics, but I don’t think there is a “DeSantis-ism” that offers a particular vision of 21st century conservatism. Ted Cruz remains irrelevant.

It will become more and more apparent that there are three separate groups: progressives, conservatives, and neoliberals. How exactly they sort themselves into two parties is going to be interesting. The easiest continuation-of-current-trends option is neoliberals+progressives vs. conservatives, with neoliberals+progressives winning easily. But progressives are starting to wonder if neoliberals’ support is worth the watering-down of their program, and neoliberals are starting to wonder if progressives’ support is worth constantly feeding more power to people they increasingly consider crazy. The Republicans used some weird demonic magic to hold together conservatives and neoliberals for a long time; I suspect the Democrats will be less good at this. A weak and fractious Democratic coalition plus a rock-hard conservative Republican non-coalition might be stable under Median Voter Theorem considerations. For like ten years. Until there are enough minorities that the Democrats are just overwhelmingly powerful (no, minorities are not going to start identifying as white and voting Republican en masse). I have no idea what will happen then. Maybe the Democrats will go extra socialist, the neoliberals and market minorities will switch back to the Republicans, and we can finally have normal reasonable class warfare again instead of whatever weird ethno-cultural thing is happening now?

Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality

May 11, 2023 · Original source

I checked to see if people who identified with other vague categories had more Long COVID. This was mostly true for left-leaning or weird categories, and mostly false for right-leaning or normal categories. For example, Christians and Republicans had no more Long COVID than people who said no religion or no political party, but polyamorous people and rationalists did. The strongest effect was for ambidextrous people, but ambidextrous people also have more mental illness.

There was no such effect among Democrats, Republicans, Christians, or vegetarians. I would expect someone who goes to church occasionally and thinks God might exist to have the same dilemma about whether to identify as Christian as someone with a few homosexual thoughts would have about whether to identify as bisexual. But we don’t see the same effect there.

This isn’t exactly the same as Peter’s comment. Peter’s comment was about likelihood of choosing any identity (which is rebutted by the data on Christians, Republicans, etc). This one is about choosing a “weird” identity.

Links For August 2023

August 09, 2023 · Original source

24: The Republicans are considering weakening PEPFAR, a program which saved millions of lives by providing cheap anti-AIDS medication to Africa, based on concerns that some of the money might be going to abortions (this doesn’t seem to be happening in a meaningful way).

Inline links: considering weakening PEPFAR,

In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences

August 16, 2023 · Original source

Only about 4% of marriages are between Democrats and Republicans

Inline links: about 4%

Husbands and wives’ social classes correlate at about 0.8 If 96% of Democrats are marrying non-Republicans, it seems like Democrats must have a strong preference against marrying Republicans, and ought to value having information about someone’s politics before they date them. Realistically, this underestimates the level of political sorting; I don’t think I’d be a good match for an extremely woke person, even if we were both technically “Democrats”. You could argue that this says nothing about preferences, and that it’s just coincidental sorting; Democrats only meet other Democrats, and so only end up dating them, but they’d be just as happy to date a Republican if only they knew one. I think this fails in several ways: first, many Democrats know plenty of Republicans. Second, many people use dating apps, where it’s easy to date people you don’t know. Third, common-sensically, I still don’t want to date that woke person, or a fundamentalist Christian, or many other types of people with different political views from myself. I won’t deny that there are probably people in those categories I would like if I got to know them. I just think it fails common sense that these have zero predictive power in assessing compatibility. …because empirically, dating sites can sort people very well The only dating app I ever seriously used was OKCupid, back when it was good. It asked users questions like “Do you like going to big parties?”. They would answer both for themselves, and how an ideal partner would answer (eg if you don’t like parties, but you want to date someone who does). Then it would calculate your match percent with everyone else on the site. This was a simple, low-tech system. Nobody had done scientific work to establish that the questions it asked were important; many of them obviously weren’t. They were just random questions some people had thought up. Still, it worked uncannily well. For a while, the person in the entire US with the highest match percent with me was my actual girlfriend (who I had met separately, not using the site). She told me I was her second-highest match percent; her ex was #1. Reading the profiles with high match percents on OKCupid, I usually found them funny, intelligent, interesting, and people I’d be excited to get to know even if I couldn’t date them. Reading the ones with low match percents, I found them alienating, bizarre, and sometimes opening a window into entirely new types of defective people who I didn’t know existed and who I wish I could have stayed in blissful ignorance of. …because most people have lots of strict preferences that are paradoxically easy to satisfy Back when I was on the dating market, I was only considering women who met all of the following (estimated percent of people who satisfied each in parentheses): Between ~22 and ~40 (33%)

Inline links: about 0.8

Some of these should matter a lot. For example, “interest in long-term relationships” sounds like whether someone is looking for a casual fling vs. marriage, a frequent dealbreaker on dating sites. And “values eg traditionalism and conservatism” sounds like politics - and again, we know only about 4% of Democrats marry Republicans and vice versa2.

Inline links: 2

Links For January 2024

January 18, 2024 · Original source

37: TracingWoodgrains: The Republican Party Is Doomed. Not electorally; it can still win elections as much as ever. But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively (especially in the modern world where you need to cross your bureaucratic Ts or your policy will be overturned by the Supreme Court). All of this is a pretty common take (albeit well-presented). But I was intrigued by a conclusion hinted at in the article and developed more in comments sections, which is that Republicans will be dragged kicking and screaming towards something like small-government libertarianism, by the brute fact that government power will always work against them no matter how many elections they win. That is, Republicans will never be able to teach conservative principles (or even stop the teaching of woke principles) in the education system, because even if a future President Trump appoints a conservative Secretary of Education, all the teachers’ unions / principals / education degree-granting institutions will be left-wing. But Republicans might be able to create a robust charter school / home school / private school system that circumvents the power of all these groups and gives it back to parents. And ~50% of parents are conservative, which is a better deal than they’d get anywhere else. I dunno, could work.

Inline links: The Republican Party Is Doomed

Links For February 2024

February 29, 2024 · Original source

…I said it was pretty obvious, like it’s a law of nature, but maybe that’s not true? Republicans thought they were winning as recently as 2020; Democrats were very close to thinking it in 2016. So you could also make an argument that whichever side doesn’t have the President thinks they’re losing, up until the Biden administration, when Democrats decided they were losing even though they had Biden. But Republicans thought they were losing until halfway into the Trump administration, then changed their minds, even though the Dems won the House that year. Why?

Book Review: The Origins Of Woke

May 01, 2024 · Original source

Therefore, every business owner needs to monitor their employees for jokes, political comments, flirtatiousness, and take action against any offenses. Hanania has several complaints here. First and most legibly, it (say it with me) gets taken too far. Volokh lists a large number of [examples of things that have been found to be] evidence of a hostile work environment: signs with the phrase “men working”; “draftsman” and “foreman” as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and a burning American flag in a cubicle; an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki, and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition; jokes of a sexual nature not targeted at any particular person; misogynistic rap music […] even terms like “great view” and “walk-up” have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs. And In a 2015 and 2016, a black father and son named Owen Diaz and Demetric Di-az2 [sic] worked at a Tesla plant. They sued the company for racial discrimination, with the father’s claims alone making it to trial….racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz, and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the workers allegedly responsible were mostly or all minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished. Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz […] a jury disagreed, and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African-American employees, and without hostile intent. (fact check: this article says the racism also included demands to “go back to Africa” people leaving drawings of caricatured black cavemen at the employee’s desk, threats, and claims that black employees were "given the most menial and physically demanding work" - and that these claims were backed up by testimony from two dozen former workers and a cellphone video showing people telling a black employee that they are going to “cut you up, n—-r”. This seems like a sufficiently different story that I’d like to know whether Hanania still stands by his version) Other parts of harassment law lead to more unfair double-binds. For example, you can’t be seen to “retaliate” against someone who accuses another worker of harassment. So suppose that a minority employee is bullying a white employee, the white employee resists, and the minority accuses them as “harassment”. Maybe there’s even a full trial, everyone agrees this is what happened, and the white employee is found totally innocent. Still, you can’t fire the bully, because that would be retaliation for a harassment complaint. And since you probably don’t want the bully and their victim in the same department, you need to move one of them. And you can’t move the bully, because that would be viewed as “retaliation” for the harassment complaint and they could sue you for millions of dollars. So you have to punish the victim. But Hanania doesn’t just say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like Office Space. Is this true? People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law? Or because neoliberalism replaced the work-for-thirty-years-and-get-a-golden-watch corporation with the work-for-three-years-and-then-seek-a-better-job-elsewhere corporation? Still, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation - he calls the current regime, “a sexless, androgynous, and sanitized workplace” which is “contrary to human nature [and] miserable”. Without civil rights law, we could have “organizations that combined the aspects of a church, a social club, a matchmaking service, and a traditional business.” In such a world: Some corporations start encouraging dating and forming close personal bonds among their employees. This can take many forms, from Christian matchmaking to promoting a party-like atmosphere. These pro-relationship corporations will come in conservative or liberal forms. Other firms explicitly market themselves as providing a more “professional” or “classic” work experience . . . we will see a period of wild experimentation, with some forms of corporate organization drawing a great deal of media coverage. People will criticize many of these experiments, and they will become the subject of public outrage. After civil rights law has been defanged, however, government no longer has the ability to easily shut such efforts down. Eventually, public anger subsides, and the idea of the media attacking a firm because it dislikes its internal culture will seem as intolerant as attacking a religious community for its doctrines, or homosexuals for what they do together as consenting adults. I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here. …And More Richard Hanania hates all this stuff. Partly he hates it because he thinks it’s unfair and anti-business and anti-merit. But also, Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren’t allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to act enthusiastic about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation - at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn’t just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves. This is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can’t just give blacks ten extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting to everyone that they don’t do this and it’s perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity so nobody can notice all the favoritism they’re doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is “fairer”. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators - not because they’re required to hire diversity coordinators, it’s not a requirement - but because they love equality so so much (and if they don’t do this, they’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons). Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you are being forced to comply with. Like in communism, you have to become your own mini-police state. You have to make employees snitch on each other if they tell the wrong joke. You have to turn your company into a tyranny of HR ladies. If you do any of this even a little less than other companies, you’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons, with penalties running potentially into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Because there’s no legible law except “be the same as everyone else so you don’t stand out as sue-able”, every corporation homogenizes into the same bland HR-ocracy. Everyone agrees on the same hiring process, which is to prioritize college degree, resume, and interview, and definitely not any test or measure of ability. This leads inevitably to our current society, where everyone has to waste their childhood doing meaningless extracurriculars so they can get into the best college so they can take the best internships so they get the best jobs. (unless they do something stupid like let themselves get the dreaded “resume gap”). But also: During the early 1800s, government positions were given out by the “spoils system”, basically “does the party in power like you personally?” In the 1880s, after President Garfield was assassinated by a guy who didn’t get a good enough position, they switched to a formal civil service, based on test performance and merit. The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare. Still, this gradually (and somewhat deniably) ended in the 1970s, because the merit-based hiring system seemed like disparate impact. Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result. Hanania doesn’t mention this, but I’ve heard an additional argument elsewhere. It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit. Still, if you have great lawyers and are willing to pay a lot to settle lawsuits, you can get away with legally dangerous things. This is only worth it if you really really want high-merit employees, ie if the best employee is much more financially valuable to you than the second-best. This is mostly true in Wall Street (where you want your trader to outsmart the other guy’s trader by half a millisecond or whatever) and Silicon Valley (where ten employees can write a program used by millions of people). So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities. Meantime, Wall Street and Silicon Valley would love to have you. So all the smart people got concentrated in a few industries that might not have been their most economically productive use, and the old American tradition where elite families would send some of their kids into public service died out. What To Do? Hanania stresses that most Americans hate affirmative action (and probably by extension most other civil rights law, though they’ve probably never heard of disparate impact). Affirmative action has been on the ballot nine times, and failed eight of those. Most recently, it failed in California, a deep-blue, 66% minority state where the pro-AA side outspent opponents 17-to-1. Also, Republicans have controlled all the branches of government many times in the past fifty years, and now they control the Supreme Court. Most civil rights law is based on executive orders and judicial decisions, so you wouldn’t even need a Congressional vote to overturn it. Just an executive order, from any president who felt like it. Reagan could have overturned half of this with the stroke of a pen, if he’d wanted. So how has it survived this long? His answer: because until about 2010, Republicans were too scared of getting called racist. Reagan wanted to overturn affirmative action, but other Republicans (like Bob Dole) begged him not to, because racism, and eventually he caved. But since 2010, everyone has already been calling Republicans racist all the time, to the point where probably this threat has lost its power. And the sort of moderate Republicans who reined in Reagan are gone. So why haven’t Republicans (eg Trump) acted? Hanania thinks everyone is so obsessed with “woke” culture war stuff that the low-hanging fruit of actual woke laws that presidents can change has slipped under the radar. And so, this book. I would have summarized the case as “Hey, Republicans! Do you hate wokeness? Well, too bad, it’s a vast cultural movement with bastions in a bunch of places where we have no power. But some of this civil rights law stuff seems pretty related to wokeness, and we do potentially have power there. So instead of fighting the unwinnable cultural battle, how about we fight the very winnable policy one?” But maybe this didn’t seem optimistic enough for Hanania, so he framed it as “the legal wokeness is the source of the cultural wokeness” instead. More on this later. The Origins Of . . . Inequality A progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?” Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground. “Cool theoretical result,” objects the hypothetical opponent. “But white households earn an average of $80K and black households an average of $50K, and so on with other minority groups. So it sure seems like something inequality-related is going on.” My tongue-in-cheek reframing of Hanania’s summary of civil rights law went: We notice your workforce is less black than the applicant pool.

Inline links: 2, this article

Prediction Markets Suggest Replacing Biden

July 02, 2024 · Original source

I assume they chose these three because they’re the only ones discussed enough to have enough data. I am following their lead. I appreciate John and Maxim’s work, but I’m not completely comfortable trusting it. Their model is based on results from Betfair, Smarkets, PredictIt, and Polymarket. But I don’t know much about the first two (as an American, I’m banned from even reading Betfair), and the latter two are notoriously bad at partisan political questions. They usually overestimate Republicans’ chances, partly because Democrats’ opposition to online political betting has turned the pool of online political bettors disproportionately red. While a fluid and easily-accessible prediction market should be able to avoid biases like these, neither PredictIt nor Polymarket really qualifies. The CFTC, which regulates prediction markets, has crippled both - PredictIt has very low maximum investments per market, and Polymarket is crypto-only and banned for US citizens. These have prevented their biases from being corrected and made both of them perform relatively weakly in head-to-head contests. And Stossel/Lott’s focus on betting sites automatically excludes two of the biggest and most historically accurate forecasting engines from their calculation - Metaculus and Manifold. In order to get numbers I trusted more than theirs, I looked at Metaculus, Manifold, PredictIt, and Polymarket, weighting each by how much I trusted it. Here’s what I found: The Biden number is about 4% higher than Nate Silver’s model over the same time period; see below for why that might be. [EDIT 7/2/24: Original version had a miscalculation which decreased everyone’s odds by about 10%. Above version should be correct.] You can find my sources at the bottom of the post. “Explicit” odds are based on questions like “What are the chances of Biden winning if he is the nominee?” “Implied” odds were generated by combining the questions “What is the chance of Biden being the nominee?” and “What is the chance of Biden winning?”; this is safe enough with Biden, but with unlikely nominees like Newsom, some of the percentages can get small enough that they start running into small-number-biases and become less trustworthy. I’ve weighted each market’s explicit calculation higher than their implicit one to compensate. A possible objection to these results: conditional probabilities don’t exactly reflect the intuitive concept of decision-making. That is, we’re not asking “We want to know whether or not to keep Biden, so what are the chances that he’ll win if we do?”, we’re asking the market for the chance that he’ll win, in the set of worlds where people decide to keep him for other reasons. We should expect this to overestimate his performance. That is, imagine that tomorrow, Biden has completely recovered, he easily wins his next debate with Trump, and everyone agrees the most recent debate was just a fluke - in that world, he is both more likely to be nominated and more likely to win. Alternatively, if tomorrow he gets much worse and can’t even speak in full sentences, he’s much less likely to be nominated and much more likely to lose. Since the real world includes both those possibilities, restricting ourselves to the set of worlds where he gets nominated means we’re overestimating the chance that he wins. There are similar-albeit-less-severe problems with other candidates - if we choose Newsom, that might be because he won some kind of debate or process versus Harris and all the other potential replacements. Overall I expect this to be mostly correct, but probably overestimate Biden’s chances by a percent or two relative to others. Along with these three candidates, Metaculus had an explicit “should the Democrats replace Biden?” question: Manifold also asks how Democrats will do if they replace Biden (without specifying a particular replacement): We can compare this to their Biden market… …and find that once again, they expect replacing Biden to go better (though I think 51% is just cope). At the Manifest prediction market conference in early June, I interviewed Nate Silver: …and asked him for his probability that the Democrats would win this election, versus his probability that the Democrats would win conditional on Biden not being the nominee (specifically “drops dead tomorrow of natural causes”). He said 40-45% chance normally, 50% chance without Biden. This was before the debate, but I think it matches the markets’ opinion that switching candidates would help the Democrats’ chances - and this has only become more true since the debate. On the other hand, polls asking people how they would vote in possible matchups don’t show any advantage of alternate candidates over Biden. Here’s the only post-debate poll I could find: And if Biden does need to be replaced, Democrats mostly support Harris, who the prediction markets find least promising: Maybe Democrats are the wrong people to ask - they’re already going to vote Biden, so you want someone who’s more attractive to independents. Of course, in a normal primary it would be Democrats making the decision. But if elites are going to do something behind closed doors, maybe they should take advantage and choose the candidate most likely to win, for once. I think these polls are the strongest objection to the prediction markets’ verdict. You could make an argument where prediction market users are mostly educated liberal white males, and even though they’re incentivized to honestly determine what ordinary people think, they’re too out-of-touch with ordinary people to do so effectively. Or they might be over-fixating on “voters don’t like Biden’s senility” without considering that, even if voters didn’t know Biden was currently senile before Thursday, they probably guessed that he would become senile sometime in his four-year term, and had basically accepted that his aides would do the hard work. Maybe they prefer a well-known likeable incumbent over an unknown quantity (and the unknown quantity’s potential new/weird aides), even if the well-known likeable incumbent is senile. Maybe elites know more than we do about how hard it is to inject a new candidate at the last moment, how dangerous it is to have someone who hasn’t been thoroughly vetted for scandals, et cetera. Still, for now I trust the prediction markets. I think replacing Biden would add ~10 prcentage points to the Democrats’ chance of victory. At the end of this post, I’ll list the prediction markets I’m using as sources. But before then, a brief interlude of: Fuzzy Subjective Human Factors I Am Not Really Qualified To Talk About Many people on Twitter are asking “how could anyone possibly have been stupid enough to not realize that Biden was senile?” I was that stupid. I didn’t say it openly, because I’m at least smart enough to have a high threshold for giving my opinion on political things I don’t know much about. But I thought it in my heart. So in case the people asking “how could anyone have been that stupid?” actually want an explanation, here’s my former reasoning. Republicans have been accusing Biden of being senile (and the Democrats of hiding it) for at least five years now. Before the 2020 debates, they were excited that this was when they could finally prove once and for all that Biden was senile. Then Biden did fine, and they retreated to “well he’s senile but they have some secret drug they’re giving him, just during debates, that makes him look fine”. Notice this is from 2020; according to polls, he did win the debate that year (source) I think a lot about experimental cognitive enhancement drugs, and I can say with confidence that nothing like that exists. Stimulants can help people with mild dementia be more active and motivated, but they don’t really improve cognition directly, and they can’t make a demented person temporarily lucid. Still, for the past four years, every time Biden was going to do something - a press conference, a State of the Union, whatever - the Republicans would say “ha, this time is going to be the proof that he’s senile!” And then he would always do fine, and they would retreat back to “I guess he used the secret drug this time too”. The satire site Babylon Bee had some funny articles about this: Babylon Bee, after Biden gave a good State of the Union speech earlier this year. Meanwhile, the Democrats were spreading the alternate narrative that Trump was senile. This one has gotten less press, because I don’t know how many people really believed it. But it came up occasionally, along with out-of-context video snippets where Trump said or did something dumb or meandering. Of course, anybody with a presidential candidate’s level of public exposure will have a few gaffes. Even if they don’t, you can always deceptively crop something so it looks like they did. Wait, why is a psychoanalyst getting quoted as a top expert in dementia? (source) I didn’t know you could diagnose someone via Change.org petition, but 2544 people who claim to be licensed professionals can’t be wrong! So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, and the constant retreat into conspiracy theories of “I guess he used the magic drug again but we’ll get him next time!”, I just tuned out this entire category of thing. And I guess I kept it tuned out longer than I should have, whoops. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Even if liars are saying something for their usual liar reasons, it can still be true. For twenty years, people spread false rumors that Castro was on his deathbed, but this didn’t make Castro immortal. In the same way, I should have figured out that even if I couldn’t trust any particular claim that Biden was senile, the prior for an 81 year old becoming senile was still high. But I guess I assumed that if he was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years. I’m still confused what those elites were thinking. Reading the news coverage for the past few days (including some video clips from a post-debate rally where he seemed noticeably better) it seems like some combination of: He has good days and bad days, and they were hoping this would be a good day.

Maybe Democrats are the wrong people to ask - they’re already going to vote Biden, so you want someone who’s more attractive to independents. Of course, in a normal primary it would be Democrats making the decision. But if elites are going to do something behind closed doors, maybe they should take advantage and choose the candidate most likely to win, for once. I think these polls are the strongest objection to the prediction markets’ verdict. You could make an argument where prediction market users are mostly educated liberal white males, and even though they’re incentivized to honestly determine what ordinary people think, they’re too out-of-touch with ordinary people to do so effectively. Or they might be over-fixating on “voters don’t like Biden’s senility” without considering that, even if voters didn’t know Biden was currently senile before Thursday, they probably guessed that he would become senile sometime in his four-year term, and had basically accepted that his aides would do the hard work. Maybe they prefer a well-known likeable incumbent over an unknown quantity (and the unknown quantity’s potential new/weird aides), even if the well-known likeable incumbent is senile. Maybe elites know more than we do about how hard it is to inject a new candidate at the last moment, how dangerous it is to have someone who hasn’t been thoroughly vetted for scandals, et cetera. Still, for now I trust the prediction markets. I think replacing Biden would add ~10 prcentage points to the Democrats’ chance of victory. At the end of this post, I’ll list the prediction markets I’m using as sources. But before then, a brief interlude of: Fuzzy Subjective Human Factors I Am Not Really Qualified To Talk About Many people on Twitter are asking “how could anyone possibly have been stupid enough to not realize that Biden was senile?” I was that stupid. I didn’t say it openly, because I’m at least smart enough to have a high threshold for giving my opinion on political things I don’t know much about. But I thought it in my heart. So in case the people asking “how could anyone have been that stupid?” actually want an explanation, here’s my former reasoning. Republicans have been accusing Biden of being senile (and the Democrats of hiding it) for at least five years now. Before the 2020 debates, they were excited that this was when they could finally prove once and for all that Biden was senile. Then Biden did fine, and they retreated to “well he’s senile but they have some secret drug they’re giving him, just during debates, that makes him look fine”. Notice this is from 2020; according to polls, he did win the debate that year (source) I think a lot about experimental cognitive enhancement drugs, and I can say with confidence that nothing like that exists. Stimulants can help people with mild dementia be more active and motivated, but they don’t really improve cognition directly, and they can’t make a demented person temporarily lucid. Still, for the past four years, every time Biden was going to do something - a press conference, a State of the Union, whatever - the Republicans would say “ha, this time is going to be the proof that he’s senile!” And then he would always do fine, and they would retreat back to “I guess he used the secret drug this time too”. The satire site Babylon Bee had some funny articles about this: Babylon Bee, after Biden gave a good State of the Union speech earlier this year. Meanwhile, the Democrats were spreading the alternate narrative that Trump was senile. This one has gotten less press, because I don’t know how many people really believed it. But it came up occasionally, along with out-of-context video snippets where Trump said or did something dumb or meandering. Of course, anybody with a presidential candidate’s level of public exposure will have a few gaffes. Even if they don’t, you can always deceptively crop something so it looks like they did. Wait, why is a psychoanalyst getting quoted as a top expert in dementia? (source) I didn’t know you could diagnose someone via Change.org petition, but 2544 people who claim to be licensed professionals can’t be wrong! So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, and the constant retreat into conspiracy theories of “I guess he used the magic drug again but we’ll get him next time!”, I just tuned out this entire category of thing. And I guess I kept it tuned out longer than I should have, whoops. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Even if liars are saying something for their usual liar reasons, it can still be true. For twenty years, people spread false rumors that Castro was on his deathbed, but this didn’t make Castro immortal. In the same way, I should have figured out that even if I couldn’t trust any particular claim that Biden was senile, the prior for an 81 year old becoming senile was still high. But I guess I assumed that if he was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years. I’m still confused what those elites were thinking. Reading the news coverage for the past few days (including some video clips from a post-debate rally where he seemed noticeably better) it seems like some combination of: He has good days and bad days, and they were hoping this would be a good day.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qt9P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa11d1a27-cfc2-4708-9db1-e344b391ac9a_1288x758.png, source, think a lot about experimental cognitive enhancement drugs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!shq2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92d67bb2-5940-44ba-ad21-df822276280a_781x829.png, Babylon Bee, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2y5u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa986c7ac-16c2-4987-b520-8f6ddf9ad13d_757x690.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SN0G!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6068601f-0eef-4a1c-b885-19f5712decf1_751x668.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vL01!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb26c689-1e81-422b-9493-ae44cac59125_858x814.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6ssu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F760276bb-2f91-4545-bbf5-d3f9fe911de7_975x654.png, Change.org petition, Reversed stupidity is not intelligence

Notice this is from 2020; according to polls, he did win the debate that year (source) I think a lot about experimental cognitive enhancement drugs, and I can say with confidence that nothing like that exists. Stimulants can help people with mild dementia be more active and motivated, but they don’t really improve cognition directly, and they can’t make a demented person temporarily lucid. Still, for the past four years, every time Biden was going to do something - a press conference, a State of the Union, whatever - the Republicans would say “ha, this time is going to be the proof that he’s senile!” And then he would always do fine, and they would retreat back to “I guess he used the secret drug this time too”. The satire site Babylon Bee had some funny articles about this: Babylon Bee, after Biden gave a good State of the Union speech earlier this year. Meanwhile, the Democrats were spreading the alternate narrative that Trump was senile. This one has gotten less press, because I don’t know how many people really believed it. But it came up occasionally, along with out-of-context video snippets where Trump said or did something dumb or meandering. Of course, anybody with a presidential candidate’s level of public exposure will have a few gaffes. Even if they don’t, you can always deceptively crop something so it looks like they did. Wait, why is a psychoanalyst getting quoted as a top expert in dementia? (source) I didn’t know you could diagnose someone via Change.org petition, but 2544 people who claim to be licensed professionals can’t be wrong! So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, and the constant retreat into conspiracy theories of “I guess he used the magic drug again but we’ll get him next time!”, I just tuned out this entire category of thing. And I guess I kept it tuned out longer than I should have, whoops. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Even if liars are saying something for their usual liar reasons, it can still be true. For twenty years, people spread false rumors that Castro was on his deathbed, but this didn’t make Castro immortal. In the same way, I should have figured out that even if I couldn’t trust any particular claim that Biden was senile, the prior for an 81 year old becoming senile was still high. But I guess I assumed that if he was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years. I’m still confused what those elites were thinking. Reading the news coverage for the past few days (including some video clips from a post-debate rally where he seemed noticeably better) it seems like some combination of: He has good days and bad days, and they were hoping this would be a good day.

Inline links: source, think a lot about experimental cognitive enhancement drugs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!shq2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92d67bb2-5940-44ba-ad21-df822276280a_781x829.png, Babylon Bee, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2y5u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa986c7ac-16c2-4987-b520-8f6ddf9ad13d_757x690.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SN0G!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6068601f-0eef-4a1c-b885-19f5712decf1_751x668.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vL01!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb26c689-1e81-422b-9493-ae44cac59125_858x814.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6ssu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F760276bb-2f91-4545-bbf5-d3f9fe911de7_975x654.png, Change.org petition, Reversed stupidity is not intelligence

Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance

July 23, 2024 · Original source

Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it! (the above poll probably overestimates support for cancel culture, because it talks about saying “things widely considered hateful” instead of, like, one tweet expressing a widely-shared opinion at the wrong time) Liberals invent a fictional entity called “The Right”, which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Right” because it’s an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo. Likewise, conservatives invent a fictional entity called “The Left”, which is full of all the most horrible woke things that FOX was ever able to find one Gender Studies professor saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Left” because it’s coming for our children, then rile up a mob against a Home Depot woman who makes a bad tweet. 4. Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough I hate this because I’ve fought with these people on the Left, and they sound exactly the same. “If you feel like compromising with the Right, it’s important to remember what they’ve done. They separated families and locked children in cages. They forced 10-year-old rape victims to carry their rapists’ babies. They murdered our grandparents by refusing to mask in the middle of a pandemic. They killed thousands of American soldiers in a war over fake WMDs, then cut VA funding so the soldiers they wounded would die on the street. At this very moment, they’re boiling our planet alive to protect fossil fuel barons’ profits. How dare you suggest it could possibly be wrong to cancel someone like that!” This isn’t a knock-down argument. Sometimes you’re right when you think your enemies are bad, and they’re wrong when they think you’re bad. I can’t say for sure this isn’t one of those times. But: The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HKLM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc536a7a3-0a21-4978-8024-221253c4dddd_601x450.png

Any rule of the form “Don’t do X, unless you can think up a big pile of negative adjectives to describe why the people you’re doing X to deserve it” will simply never prevent anyone from doing X, not even once. 5. Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire Postcards From Barsoom helpfully includes a list of the cancellations he finds most enraging. I agree most of them are enraging. But they’re not stories about Trump, Tucker Carlson, or Nick Fuentes. The median victim of cancel culture is some center-left college professor who sent out an email saying that he supports BLM but questions some of their tactics. (I would add David Shor to the list as an especially revealing case, and Al Franken as an especially clear own-goal) This is because you mostly get the critical mass necessary for cancellation in very leftist institutions, and most people in very leftist institutions are leftists. There’s a deeper problem here where pre-emptive fear of cancellation blocked rightists from joining these institutions in the first place. But in terms of actual cancellations, they’re usually some poor shmuck who put too few exclamation points after “BLM!!!!” Likewise, if there are right-wing cancellation squads, they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!” 6. Cancellation Is The Enemy Of Competence Cancellation isn’t just morally bad. It also screws over society. And it screws over your own institutions worst of all. By society I mean: you want scientists to be producing good science, not producing the science least likely to get them cancelled. You want the Federal Reserve filled with the best economists, not the most politically pure economists. No matter how righteous your cause, if you cancel people who don’t agree with it, you end up with the kind of low-quality science and corrupt institutions we’ve grown used to recently. This is bad insofar as you care about things like truth, trust, or national flourishing. But even if you don’t care about those things, remember that cancellation is mostly friendly fire. Cancellers can’t 100% control broader society, but they do control their own party and its organs. I think this is part of why the Democratic Party is floundering right now. At the risk of getting cancelled myself, it kind of seems like Democrats now wish they’d put a little more of thought into picking a popular/electable VP in 2020 instead of the most diversity-box-ticking person they could find on short notice. Why didn’t they? Well, would you, as a Democratic Party insider, want to speak out against Kamala Harris, in f**king 2020 of all years? Obviously anyone who tried that would have been cancelled. So nobody spoke out against the decision, they went ahead with it, and now they’ve boxed themselves into a corner. You, too, can one day have a party this self-sabotaging and incapable of winning elections! All you need to do is adopt cancel culture! (“But we would only apply it to actually bad things, not to people on our own side just trying to warn us”. I’m pretty sure the Democrats didn’t go into this expecting to punish people on their own side trying to warn them, yet here we are.) 7. No, Seriously, This Is A Terrible Decision I think the Democrats as a political party are massively underperforming their fundamentals. They have most of the elites (elites, by definition, are powerful), most of the donor money, and their two main bases (college graduates and minorities) have both ballooned as a share of the population, while the Republicans’ (white people, rural people) are in decline. They control all the prestige media. Trump has no self-control and dozens of skeletons in his closet. How could they lose? There are many factors - inflation, Afghanistan, the Electoral College - but part of the story has to be that wokeness and cancel culture are historically unpopular. They produced short-term gains (as people became afraid to speak out against them) but long-term disaster (as their extremism alienated friends and fired up enemies). This is still just my optimistic prediction. But if conservatives ever in fact take enough power that they can wield cancellation more effectively than the Democrats, then it will have been borne out. In which case, you, too, will have the opportunity for short-term gains at the expense of alienating everybody with a backbone and/or conscience. What could possibly go wrong? 8. Don’t Go Mad With Power Until You Actually Get The Power I can’t remember if this is on the Evil Overlord List, but it should be. The right is still out of power. For one thing, Biden is still President. There’s even (according to betting markets) a 40% chance that the Dems win the next election. (The argument in this paragraph isn’t original, but I lost the link to it): Consider an undecided voter in a swing state. As an independent, they’re probably on the right on some issues and on the left on others. Many of them are probably former liberals who left the fold because of wokeness and cancel culture. Now they check out what right-wingers have to offer, and it’s “We also love cancel culture, we plan to drop all of our principles as soon as we win, anyone with lefty opinions should be terrified.” Doesn’t sound like a great advertisement. But also: even if Trump wins in a landslide, conservatives still won’t control the levers of cancel culture. Did the Republicans taking the White House, House, and Senate in 2016 end cancel culture? Did it even slow it down? Plus or minus a few civil rights laws, cancel culture isn’t implemented at the government level. It’s implemented at the level of media, institutions, and popular taste-making, which Democrats hold more firmly than federal government. Even if Trump wins, the median outcome of conservatives endorsing cancellation is that the few liberals in these institutions trying to restrain their worst tendencies get dismissed as useful idiots for conservatives who wouldn’t hesitate to cancel them if they were on the other side. Why mention this? Because the people talking about cancellation insist they’re “just being strategic” and “just laser-focused on winning” when in fact writing the blog posts at all reveals they couldn’t care less about any of these considerations. It’s psychological re-enactment, plain and simple. 9. There’s Probably Other Options “But we can’t just do nothing!” Unfreedom of conscience, like famine and plague, has haunted us throughout history and will probably continue to do so. Still, I think the very-long-range trend for all three problems is down, and that hard work by good people can push that forward. This will look like boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked. Here are some possible subtasks: Politicians should dismantle the government apparatus propping up cancel culture. Certainly the sorts of things mentioned in the Twitter Files count here, but so do some of the civil rights stuff Richard Hanania talks about in Origins of Woke.

Inline links: Postcards From Barsoom, David Shor, Al Franken, Evil Overlord List, psychological re-enactment, Twitter Files, Origins of Woke

Mantic Monday: Judgment Day

November 05, 2024 · Original source

The market defines “major” as five hundred participants causing either $1 million in damage or 10 hospitalizations/deaths. This market is priced higher than Manifold’s chance that Trump loses, suggesting a ~5% chance that the Democrats riot (or that Republicans win but riot anyway).

Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument

November 22, 2024 · Original source

Suppose something important will happen at a certain unknown point. As someone approaches that point, you might be tempted to warn that the thing will happen. If you’re being appropriately cautious, you’ll warn about it before it happens. Then your warning will be wrong. As things continue to progress, you may continue your warnings, and you’ll be wrong each time. Then people will laugh at you and dismiss your predictions, since you were always wrong before. Then the thing will happen and they’ll be unprepared. Toy example: suppose you’re a doctor. Your patient wants to try a new experimental drug, 100 mg. You say “Don’t do it, we don’t know if it’s safe”. They do it anyway and it’s fine. You say “I guess 100 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 250 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 250 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 500 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 500 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They say “Haha, as if I would listen to you! First you said it might not be safe at all, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 250 mg, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 500 mg, but you were wrong. At this point I know you’re a fraud! Stop lecturing me!” Then they try 1000 mg and they die. The lesson is: “maybe this thing that will happen eventually will happen now” doesn’t count as a failed prediction. I’ve noticed this in a few places recently. First, in discussion of the Ukraine War, some people have worried that Putin will escalate (to tactical nukes? to WWIII?) if the US gives Ukraine too many new weapons. Lately there’s a genre of commentary (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) that says “Well, Putin didn’t start WWIII when we gave Ukraine HIMARS. They didn’t start WWIII when we gave Ukraine ATACMS. He didn’t start WWIII when we gave Ukraine F-16s. So the people who believe Putin might start WWIII have been proven wrong, and we should escalate as much as possible.” There’s obviously some level of escalation that would start WWIII (example: nuking Moscow). So we’re just debating where the line is. Since nobody (except Putin?) knows where the line is, it’s always reasonable to be cautious. I don’t actually know anything about Ukraine, but a warning about HIMARS causing WWIII seems less like “this will definitely be what does it” and more like “there’s a 2% chance this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back”. Suppose we have two theories, Escalatory-Putin and Non-Escalatory-Putin. EP says that for each new weapon we give, there’s a 2% chance Putin launches a tactical nuke. NEP says there’s a 0% chance. If we start out with even odds on both theories, after three new weapons with no nukes, our odds should only go down to 48.5% - 51.5%. (yes, this is another version of the generalized argument against updating on dramatic events) Second, I talked before about getting Biden’s dementia wrong. My internal argument against him being demented was something like “They said he was demented in 2020, but he had a good debate and proved them wrong. They said he was demented in 2022, but he gave a good State Of The Union and proved them wrong. Now they’re saying he’s demented in 2024, but they’ve already discredited themselves, so who cares?” I think this was broadly right about the Republican political machine, who was just throwing the same allegation out every election and seeing if it would stick. But regardless of the Republicans’ personal virtue, the odds of an old guy becoming newly demented each year is about 4% per year. If it had been two years since I last paid attention to this question, there was an 8% chance it had happened while I wasn’t looking. Like the other examples, dementia is something that happens eventually (this isn’t strictly true - some people reach their 100s without dementia - but I think it’s a fair idealized assumption that if someone survives long enough, then eventually their risk of cognitive decline becomes very high). It is reasonable to be worried about the President of the United States being demented - so reasonable that people will start raising the alarm about it being a possibility long before it happens. Even if some Republicans had ulterior motives for harping on it, plenty of smart, well-meaning people were also raising the alarm. Here I failed by letting the multiple false alarms lull me into a false sense of security, where I figured the non-demented side had “won” the “argument”, rather than it being a constant problem we needed to stay vigilant for. Third, this is obviously what’s going on with AI right now. The SB1047 AI safety bill tried to monitor that any AI bigger than 10^25 FLOPs (ie a little bigger than the biggest existing AIs) had to be exhaustively tested for safety. Some people argued - the AI safety folks freaked out about how AIs of 10^23 FLOPs might be unsafe, but they turned out to be safe. Then they freaked out about how AIs of 10^24 FLOPs might be unsafe, but they turned out to be safe. Now they’re freaking out about AIs of 10^25 FLOPs! Haven’t we already figured out that they’re dumb and oversensitive? No. I think of this as equivalent to the doctor who says “We haven’t confirmed that 100 mg of the experimental drug is safe”, then “I guess your foolhardy decision to ingest it anyway confirms 100 mg is safe, but we haven’t confirmed that 250 mg is safe, so don’t take that dose,” and so on up to the dose that kills the patient. It would be surprising if AI never became dangerous - if, in 2500 AD, AI still can’t hack important systems, or help terrorists commit attacks or anything like that. So we’re arguing about when we reach that threshold. It’s true and important to say “well, we don’t know, so it might be worth checking whether the answer is right now.” It probably won’t be right now the first few times we check! But that doesn’t make caution retroactively stupid and unjustified, or mean it’s not worth checking the tenth time. Can we take this insight too far? Suppose Penny Panic says “If you elect the Republicans, they’ll cancel elections and rule as dictators!” Then they elect Republicans and it doesn’t happen. The next election cycle: “If you elect the Republicans, they’ll cancel elections and rule as dictators!” Then they elect Republicans again and it still doesn’t happen. After her saying this every election cycle, and being wrong every election cycle, shouldn’t we stop treating her words as meaningful? I think we have to be careful to distinguish this from the useful cases above. It’s not true that, each election, the chance of Republicans becoming dictators increases, until eventually it’s certain. This is different from our examples above: Eventually at some age, Castro has to die, and the chance gets higher the older he gets.

Inline links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, generalized argument against updating on dramatic events, I talked before about getting Biden’s dementia wrong, about 4% per year

But it’s not true that at some point the Republicans have to overthrow democracy, and the chance gets higher each election.

You should start with some fixed chance that the Republicans overthrow democracy per term (even if it’s 0.00001%). Then you shouldn’t change that number unless you get some new evidence. If Penny claims to have some special knowledge that the chance was higher than you thought, and you trust her, you might want to update to some higher number. Then, if she discredits herself by claiming very high chances of things that don’t happen, you might want to stop trusting her and downdate back to your original number.

Lives Of The Rationalist Saints

February 20, 2025 · Original source

St. John of Daly City left his hometown at age sixteen to join the Centrist Order, who tried to free themselves of political bias by meditating on moderate positions. Unsatisfied with their limited piety, he and several other members of the order split to found the Ultra-Both-Sidesists, known for extreme pronouncements like “If you favor either of Democrats or Republicans over the other by even one percent, you are no better than a mindkilled MAGA/woke fanatic.” He (or according to some scholars, one of his disciples) invented a new Implicit Association Test that could be used to ferret out even tiny amounts of political favoritism, then took it every day, scourging himself when he deviated from perfect neutrality by even a single question. When he died, nobody in his order could form an opinion on who should replace him; finally, the whole sect was dissolved by Pope Anna III and its assets donated to shrimp welfare.

Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target

October 10, 2025 · Original source

But all of these are their own sorts of slippery slopes. Suppress the speech of their opponents? Should the Republicans have started a civil war when Democrats got social media to do woke content moderation? Ignore the will of Congress? Should Democrats have started a civil war when Trump refused to fund PEPFAR even after Congress allocated the money? Prosecute political opponents? Should the Republicans have started a civil war when New York prosecuted Trump for Stormy Daniels? Should the Democrats start one now that Trump is prosecuting James Comey for perjury? No particular form of any of these things ever feels like the cosmically significant version of these things where assassinations and armed uprisings become acceptable. But would-be dictators are masters of boundary-pushing and frog-boiling; there’s almost never one moment when they say outright “Today I will be cancelling democracy for no reason, sorry”.

Open Thread 414

December 29, 2025 · Original source

3: Ozy has a post arguing that EAs should be more willing to donate to political campaigns, and that donations before January 1 are most effective. Includes his specific candidate recommendations for Democrats; thoughts for Republicans/independents/non-Americans to follow.

Inline links: has a post arguing

Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls

January 13, 2026 · Original source

If the Republican gets elected, will the economy be good four years later? …and if one market is higher than the other, then you’ve successfully forced everyone to settle on a canonical probability of which candidate will be better for the economy. The fatal flaw is confounding by noncausal pathways. For example, bettors might reason: suppose for some extrinsic reason (let’s say someone struck oil) the economy is very good from 2026 - 2028. Then in 2028, people will feel better about Trump, and are more likely to elect Vance. And if the economy is very good from 2026 - 2028, then it’s more likely to be very good from 2028 - 2032 (the oil is still there). Therefore, we should bet up the Republicans → good market, and bet down the Democrats → good market, before we even think about whether Republicans or Democrats will do a better job with the economy. Therefore, this can’t be a good way to determine whether Republicans or Democrats will do a better job with the economy. Here’s a potential workaround I’ve never seen before: suppose you create a set of conditional prediction markets as above. Then you create a set of secondary markets, asking bettors to predict the price of the first set of markets on the day before Election Day. On the day before Election Day, either they’ll have struck oil, or they won’t have. So regardless of the oil situation, people will be factoring in only the true effect of the parties’ policies. If you ask people today to predict those markets, they’ll be predicting the true effect of the policies. Giving an example with numbers on everything (thanks to AI for gaming this out with me): - 25% chance of striking oil - NO OIL WORLD (75% chance): ------ D increases GDP 5%, R increases GDP 2% ------ D wins 50%, R wins 50% - YES OIL WORLD (25% chance): ------ D increases GDP 10%, R increases GDP 7% ------ D wins 10%, R wins 90% Total P(R wins) = 0.75×0.5 + 0.25×0.9 = 0.375 + 0.225 = 0.6 Total P(D wins) = 0.75×0.5 + 0.25×0.1 = 0.375 + 0.025 = 0.4 Naive conditional market calculation E[GDP | R wins] = (0.225×7% + 0.375×2%) / 0.6 = (1.575% + 0.75%) / 0.6 = 3.875% E[GDP | D wins] = (0.025×10% + 0.375×5%) / 0.4 = (0.25% + 1.875%) / 0.4 = 5.3125% Naive difference: 5.3125% - 3.875% = 1.4375% (understates the true 3% causal effect of D policies) Secondary market calculation On Election Eve, conditional on oil found: R market = 7%, D market = 10% On Election Eve, conditional on no oil: R market = 2%, D market = 5% E[Today's market on the Election Eve R market price] = 0.25×7% + 0.75×2% = 1.75% + 1.5% = 3.25% E[Today's market on the Election Eve D market price] = 0.25×10% + 0.75×5% = 2.5% + 3.75% = 6.25% Secondary market difference: 6.25% - 3.25% = 3% (exactly the true causal effect)This doesn’t completely solve the conditional problem. There could be residual correlations based on hidden variables that affect the outcome of interest (in this case the election) without being known to bettors even on Election Day Eve. A trivial example is some extraordinary event which happens at 12:01 AM on Election Day. A more subtle example goes something like: suppose the economy is subtly good, nobody has managed to aggregate the statistics and figure this out in a legible way yet, and each individual person still only has private knowledge that the economy is good for him- or her-self. They might still be more likely to vote Republican based on their own private economic optimism, and then the hidden goodness of the economy might become manifest and improve GDP during the next term. Yes, this example is a stretch; maybe I’m missing better ones, or maybe this is a silly edge case failure mode that shouldn’t bother us in real life. What about interaction effects - for example, if Democrats were better at milking a good economy and making it even better, but Republicans were better at correcting a distressed economy and bringing it back to average, would that break the link between the primary and secondary markets? This is beyond my poor mathematical ability, but the AIs claim it’s not a problem - the secondary market workaround still ensures the correct difference. Bonus question: Is there a way to simplify this so that we don’t have to run all four markets? The End Of The Beginning When I started this column in 2021, I dreamed of a time when there would be big legal prediction markets on important topics. That’s come true. There have been some small benefits, but not the epistemic wonderland I hoped for. So what now? Do we pat Shayne Coplan and Tarek Mansour on the back, let them enjoy their superyachts, and otherwise forget about this space? I see two ways forward. The first is to continue praying for the original Manifold vision - a prediction market site which offers: Real money markets

Last Rights

March 11, 2026 · Original source

So for example, in Republican-dominated North Carolina, 50.9% of people voted Trump, 60% of state senate seats are held by Republicans, and 71.4% of their House seats belong to Republicans. The state senate (50 seats) is only half as gerrymandered as the House delegation (14 seats).

Republicans: You’re about to take a beating in the midterms. The aggressive gerrymandering in Texas could easily backfire in a blue year, and California just passed the “I Hate Republicans” act to gerrymander that state as well. Ratifying the CAA is a way to blunt the effect, and let your colleagues in Illinois and California and New England have their voices heard. But there’s a bigger reason for you to want to support this. If you’re a Republican in 2026, you exist to serve Donald Trump and his vision for America. You want to help Donald Trump recreate America in his image. The image of America will be the image of the new Capitol Building, and Donald Trump will lead this design. You saw how excited he was about the east wing of the White House; imagine how ecstatic he would be to get to design the Donald J. Trump Capitol Building. Imagine how owned all those Washington libs will be when they walk by the giant golden statue of Donald Trump that hosts Congress.

Inline links: beating

A constitutional amendment must be ratified by 3/4 of states; that’s 38/50. Eleven have ratified it already, so we need 27 more. Of the 39 states that have not ratified the CAA, 13 have legislatures run by Democrats and 25 have legislatures run by Republicans. This has to be a bipartisan effort.

Against The Concept Of Telescopic Altruism

March 31, 2026 · Original source

Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking demanding that the government send food to people starving in Ethiopia. But would they support government programs to help Americans starving near their own home? Yes - most Democrats support programs like free school lunches (used as a way to ensure poor kids get at least one good meal a day), and most Republicans oppose them. This is probably just downstream around general beliefs in government intervention, but at least these beliefs are consistent.

Inline links: and

Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking you to donate bednets and medications to fight pandemics in Africa. But would they care about a pandemic that affected ordinary Americans? Yes - the COVID pandemic was only five years ago, and most Democrats supported stronger anti-pandemic measures than most Republicans.

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Astral Codex Ten

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Republicans

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