Democrats

Article

Democrats is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 34 times across 34 issues between February 09, 2021 and March 31, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “In a purely structural sense … the institutional Democrats seem to be doing a better job”; “Aren’t I just describing Democrats? No. The Democrats are a coalition of the upper class”; “The Democrats hate this; they prefer a system where powerful insiders get to play favorites”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Republicans, US.

Metadata

Category: Organizations
Mention count: 34
Issue count: 34
First seen: February 09, 2021
Last seen: March 31, 2026

Appears In

- Trump (22 shared issues)
- Republicans (19 shared issues)
- US (12 shared issues)
- Donald Trump (10 shared issues)
- Joe Biden (10 shared issues)
- Twitter (10 shared issues)
- Biden (9 shared issues)
- Democrats (9 shared issues)
- Elon Musk (9 shared issues)
- Russia (9 shared issues)
- Ukraine (9 shared issues)
- United States (9 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.

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

But since the Democratic party contained both northern Democrats (relatively liberal) and Dixiecrats (relatively conservative), it didn't want to take a coherent party-wide stance on liberalism vs. conservatism. And by the median voter theorem, that meant the Republicans also didn't want to take a coherent stance on liberalism vs. conservatism. So both parties ended out centrist and identical.

But also, maybe polarization changes identities? Maybe farmers became more religious, and non-farmers became less religious? I mean, something like this definitely seems to have happened: both parties were about equally religious until the 1980s, when Democrats abandoned religion en masse partly because it seemed like kind of a Republican thing. And sometimes polarization attracts based on identities - for example, gay people moving to the Democratic Party once homosexuality becomes a topic of debate.

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"

February 25, 2021 · Original source

I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything. All else being equal, I'd rather you have a coherent interesting message, and make Democrats shape up to compete with you.

Aren't I just describing Democrats? No. The Democrats are a coalition of the upper class, various poor minorities, union labor, and lots of other groups. It's an easy mistake to make, because you Republicans absolutely loathe the upper class, and whenever you're talking about Democrats you focus on this group and how much you hate them. But you make the mistake of saying you hate Democrats, and then it looks like boring old partisanship. Or saying you hate the elites, and then it looks like boring old populism. Or saying you hate rootless cosmopolitans, and then it looks like boring old anti-Semitism. Or saying you hate the government, and then it looks like boring old libertarianism.

It's the 21st century; having principles is out of style. Politics is motivated by tribal hatred. You tell your people that the other side hates them and wants to kill them; they need to fight back. The Democrats are great at this - cis white men hate you, they deny your right to exist, the cruelty is the point, resist or be destroyed. You Republicans have been caught flat-footed. You can’t openly defend cis white men; that would be transphobic racist sexist. And you can’t openly attack trans black women - that would be super transphobic racist sexist. Plus it wouldn’t work; there aren’t that many of them, and they’re not powerful enough to be scary.

Highlights From The Comments On Class

March 05, 2021 · Original source

Are you going to do a similar post for the Democrats? Would be cool to read them side-by-side.

I have less good advice for the Democrats because they seem less confused. I am against wokeness on moral/epistemic grounds, but it does seem to be a winning strategy (I think 25% less wokeness would be an even more winning strategy, but I think the general direction is working).

The most famous example of doing this well was the Reagan coalition, where powerful business interests got to stay rich and powerful, and Moral Majority Christians got to have prayer in school or whatever. But the modern Democratic coalition works too - powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better.

Inline links: anti-racist math

Book Review: The New Sultan

March 18, 2021 · Original source

This has made me a lot less optimistic about the kind of dictator-prevention strategy where everyone has lots of guns and then if a dictator comes to power you rush out into the streets shouting FREEEEEDOM!, William-Wallace-style, shooting everything in sight. If there's a military coup or something, this might work. But if every day your institutions are just a tiny bit less legitimate than the day before, when do you rush out into the street? One of the most important steps on the way to Erdogan's total control was his court-packing, accomplished under the guise of EU-bid modernization. But if the Democrats manage to pack the Supreme Court at some point, are the people with guns going to rush out into the street shouting FREEEEEDOM? No - realistically even the people who really hate the Democrats and think they're bad and wrong are going to stop short of armed revolution, because that alone isn't quite Stalin-level obvious evil. Erdogan demonstrates that you can become a dictator through a few dozen things like that chained together, without any obvious single point where everyone wakes up and notices. There is no fire alarm for dictatorship.

Inline links: There is no fire alarm for dictatorship

Second, if there was a single moment went things obviously took a turn for the worse in Turkey, it was the Ergenekon trials - Erdogan's attempt to forge evidence of an anti-Turkey conspiracy involving all of his enemies. This makes me a little more concerned about things like QAnon than I had been previously - if Trump had arrested various prominent Democrats for their role in a Deep State pedophile ring, that would be pretty similar to the tactic Erdogan used to seize ultimate power. On the other hand, the thing where Democrats talk about how Trump supporters entering the Capitol was an “attempted coup” and we need lots of “domestic terror laws” and a grand attempt to uncover the complicity of the mainstream Republican establishment and bring them to justice - that also feels a little too Erdoganesqe for comfort. Having ideas about the Deep State and attempted coups floating around, sounding vaguely credible, was a major factor in Erdogan's success. The more skeptical we can be of that sort of thing, the better.

2020 Predictions: Calibration Results

April 05, 2021 · Original source

POLITICS: 21. Democrats nominate Biden, and he remains nominee on Election Day: 90% 22. Balance of evidence available on Election Day supports (as per my opinion) Tara Reade accusation: 90% 23. Conditional on me asking about Reade on SSC survey, average survey-taker’s credence in her accusation is greater than 50%: 70% 24. …greater than 75%: 10% 25. …greater than credence in Kavanaugh accusation asked in the same format: 40% 26. Trump is re-elected President: 50% 27. Democrats keep the House: 70% 28. Republicans keep the Senate: 50% 29. Trump approval rating higher than 43% on June 1: 30% 30. Biden polling higher than Trump on June 1: 70% 31. At least one new Supreme Court Justice: 20% 32. I vote Democrat for President: 80% 33. Boris still UK PM: 90% 34. No new state leaves EU: 90% 35. UK, EU extend “transition” trade deal: 80% 36. Kim Jong-Un alive and in power: 60%

Inline links: 26. Trump is re-elected President: 50%

Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions

April 19, 2021 · Original source

1. Donald Trump remains president at end of year: 95% 2. Democrats take control of the House in midterms: 80% ***3. Democrats take control of the Senate in midterms: 50% ***4. Mueller’s investigation gets cancelled (eg Trump fires him): 50% 5. Mueller does not indict Trump: 70% ***6. PredictIt shows Bernie Sanders having highest chance to be Dem nominee at end of year: 60% 7. PredictIt shows Donald Trump having highest chance to be GOP nominee at end of year: 95% 8. [This was missing in original] ***9. Some sort of major immigration reform legislation gets passed: 70% 10. No major health-care reform legislation gets passed: 95% 11. No large-scale deportation of Dreamers: 90% 12. US government shuts down again sometime in 2018: 50% 13. Trump’s approval rating lower than 50% at end of year: 90% ***14. …lower than 40%: 50% ***15. GLAAD poll suggesting that LGBQ acceptance is down will mostly not be borne out by further research: 80%

My argument was something like: QAnon are, for real, the sort of people that Democrats like to imagine all Republicans are. They're crazy and have no valid concerns. So Democrats had a very strong incentive to exaggerate their role within the Republican party and convince people that QAnon was the driving force behind Trump support. Nobody ever gave an estimate for how many people were in QAnon, and every report on it was consistent with "a tiny handful". There was also a big attempt to make QAnon look violent by everyone giving long lists of "Violent Acts Caused By QAnon", when you examined them closer, literally did not include a single violent act caused by QAnon (it was all either nonviolent acts, plots that never materialized, or criminals who were incidentally QAnon supporters).

Inline links: long lists

In ~November 2020, I did a survey of Twitter in which I searched the keyword "QAnon", and the most recent 100 results were all Democrats attacking QAnon; no matter how far I scrolled I could not find any actual QAnon supporters. But I don't know if this was because vocal QAnon opponents actually outnumbered QAnoners by that much, or because Twitter is doing a really good job censoring them (is it even possible to censor supporters using a keyword this successfully without opponents getting caught in the crossfire?) Either way, this added to my evidence that this was a pointless moral panic.

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism

May 04, 2021 · Original source

Traditional worker-based movements are by no means dead even in the advanced capitalist countries where they have been much weakened by the neoliberal onslaught on their power. In South Korea and South Africa vigorous labour movements arose during the 1980s and in much of Latin America working-class parties are flourishing if not in power. In Indonesia a fledgling labour movement of great potential importance is struggling to be heard. The potential for labour unrest in China is immense though unpredictable. And it is not clear either that the mass of the working people in the US, who have over this last generation often willingly voted against their own material interests for reasons of cultural nationalism, religion, and moral values, will for ever stay locked into such a politics by the machinations of Republicans and Democrats alike. Given the volatility, there is no reason to rule out the resurgence of popular social democratic or even populist anti-neoliberal politics within the US in future years.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Governor Of California?

August 25, 2021 · Original source

Maybe you should actually be scared of the California Democratic Party and its demand that no Democrat stand as a replacement for Governor Newsom? I think this makes sense if you want a future career in California state politics; probably they can blacklist you forever if you cross them. But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath. That’s why we would have been able to take this weird opportunity that all the real politicians turned down. Also, given the level of competence they’ve shown here, having the California state Democratic Party out for your head is probably the surest path to a long and healthy life.

Several top California Republicans signed up as replacement candidates. But top California Democrats didn't. The state party officially recommends voters say no to recalling Newsom (obviously), but also that they leave the question about his replacement blank. In keeping with this policy, no important Democrat has signed up as a potential replacement candidate. A few randos with (D)s next to their name signed up for vanity campaigns, but that's it.

Inline links: officially recommends

Maybe at some point this seemed like a defensible position? California is a deep blue state, so maybe Democrats thought they could just...not dignify the recall with a response? [EDIT: Commenters bring up that in the 2003 recall election, Democrats fielded a great replacement candidate, lots of Democrats who disliked the governor voted yes on recall because it was costless with such a good replacement, and then the governor got recalled and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger won the replacement election. Now they want to try the opposite strategy of forcing Democratic voters to oppose the recall entirely.] But the mask mandates are lasting longer than expected, the wildfires are pretty bad this year, and Newsom supporters lack all conviction while his opponents are full of passionate intensity. For whatever reason, polls show the recall-Newsom question is 50-50 to pass right now.

Inline links: in the 2003 recall election, polls show

Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography

September 14, 2021 · Original source

Modi accuses the Congress Party of being the descendants of those Indians who did well under British colonialism, liked British colonialism a little too much, and basically Europeanized - including a European-style semi-racist contempt for ordinary Indians. They're the kind of people who would happily force-sterilize eight milion of their countrymen because Western powers called India "backwards" for having too high population growth. The sort of people who would declare an Emergency dictatorship, happily kill or imprison hundreds of thousands of Indians without moral compunction, then immediately back down when Western media said they looked bad. They dominate the media, academia, and NGOs (all of which Modi accuses of being sycophantic and complicit in Emergency atrocities and everything else bad that Congress has ever done, while coming up with ways to make the most neutral actions by Congress' opponents look like dastardly acts of villainy). Their policies, insofar as they have any, involve whatever forms of socialism don't really help the poor but do ensure that anything that anyone wants to do requires permission from elites first, eg the "License Raj". According to Modi, the Congress Party hates the average Indian and the average Indian hates them right back. They survived as a democratic party by preventing any real opposition from forming, plus using their media connections to spread fear and division among people, plus occasionally just declaring martial law and imprisoning anyone they didn't like.

I was struck by Modi's view of Indian politics: educated elites cynically fanning racial discord so they could force minority groups to flee to them as "protectors". This is probably how Trump would describe the Democrats if he was smart enough to think of it. Of course, Modi's enemies turned it around and called Modi a populist-nationalist leader keeping a veneer of plausible deniability while inciting anger/suspicion/violence against minority groups, which is of course how the Democrats think of the Trump-era Republicans. All the most recent trends in American politics happened in India too, only ten years earlier.

Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change

October 13, 2021 · Original source

The argument about future elections seems flawed. It is not an accident that elections are very close: the parties are strongly incentivised to position themselves in a way that appeals to approximately the number of people they need to win elections. If you removed 1% of the electorate's left wing, the Democrats wouldn't sit there losing elections for ever, they'd just move slightly to the right until they picked up enough centrists to restore the equilibrium. So there is an effect on policy outcomes, but it's roughly proportional to the population change rather than being hugely amplified by elections as claimed.

Second, often elections aren’t close. As a commenter brings up in that thread, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives nonstop for 38 years from 1955 - 1993. Reagan won the 1984 election by 525 to 13 (and AFAICT MVT should be aiming at the median electoral vote in an electoral system). I think some of this has to do with irrational emotions - ie the South hated Republicans so much after Lincoln and the Civil War that Democrats could do whatever they wanted and still win there. But there sure are a lot of irrational emotions in politics today and I wouldn’t want to count this factor out.

This also reminded me of the recent Ezra Klein piece on David Shor. Shor is telling Democrats that if they took more popular positions they could get more votes; Democrats’ response has been mixed:

Inline links: Ezra Klein piece on David Shor

Dictator Book Club: Orban

November 04, 2021 · Original source

So Viktor Orban got everyone from his liberal democratic party together and asked - what if, instead of being liberal democrats, we were all far-right nationalists?

Our story begins on March 30 1988, when young Viktor Orban founded an extra-curricular society at his college called The Alliance Of Young Democrats (Hungarian abbreviation: FiDeSz). Thirty-seven students met in a college common room and agreed to start a youth organization. Orban's two roommates were there, along with a couple of other guys they knew. Orban gave the pitch: the Soviet Union was crumbling. A potential post-Soviet Hungary would need fresh blood, new politicians who could navigate the democratic environment. They could get in on the ground floor.

Separated from his pomp and platform, he was just a 27 year old kid without a lot of political experience. There was a glut of liberal democrats in Hungary - the country had just had a successful liberal democratic revolution - and Orban and Fidesz couldn't differentiate themselves from the rest of the market. Most liberal democrats wanted cosmopolitan intellectual types; Orban - despite his herculean efforts to lose the accent and develop some class - was still just a hick from Hicksville. During the next election, Fidesz did embarrassingly badly.

Predictions For 2022

February 01, 2022 · Original source

VOX PREDICTIONS 1. Democrats will lose their majorities in the House and Senate (95%): SELL TO 90% 2. Inflation in the US will average under three percent (80%): HOLD 3. Unemployment in the US will fall below four percent by November (80%): SELL to 60% if they mean in November, otherwise hold 4. Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade (65%): SELL to 60% 5. Stephen Breyer will retire from the Supreme Court (55%): N/A 6. Emmanuel Macron will be reelected president of France (65%): HOLD 7. Jair Bolsonaro will be reelected president of Brazil (55%): SELL to 50% 8. Bongbong Marcos will be elected president of the Philippines (55%): BUY to 60% 9. Rebels will not capture Addis Ababa (55%): N/A 10. China will not reopen its borders in the first half of 2022 (80%): BUY to 90% 11. Chinese GDP will continue to grow for the first 3/4 of the year (95%): SELL to 90% 12. 20% of US kids between 0.5 and 5 years old will get at least one COVID vaccine by year's end (65%): HOLD 13. WHO will designate another Variant Of Concern by year's end (75%): HOLD 14. 12 billion COVID shots will be given out globally by 11/2022 (80%): HOLD 15. At least one country will have less than 10% of people vaccinated with two shots by 11/2022 (70%): BUY to 95% 16. A psychedelic drug will be decriminalized/legalized in at least one more US state (75%): HOLD 17. AI will discover a new drug promising enough for clinical trials (85%): HOLD 18. US govt will not renew the ban on funding gain-of-function research (60%): HOLD 19. The Biden administration will set the social cost of carbon at $100/ton or more (70%): HOLD 20. 2022 will be warmer than 2021 (80%): HOLD 21. Kenneth Branagh's Belfast will win Best Picture (55%): SELL to 30% 22. Norway will win the most medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics (60%): HOLD

While I agree things don’t look good for the Democrats, 95% chance they lose both houses of Congress implies 97.5% chance of losing each house, which seems too high. I’m smashing the BUY button as hard as I can on “at least one country will fail to get to 10% vaccination rate” - there are a lot of countries, and as far as I know North Korea is refusing all vaccines out of general evilness. Although I’m not supposed to check betting markets, Dylan writes that he checked the betting markets for the Academy Awards, saw a 30% chance that Belfast would win, but he thinks the number is more like 55%. I know nothing about movies, but where markets and a puny mortal disagree I’ll go with the market. I’ve rated a few options N/A because they’ve already resolved or had big updates since Vox made their predictions.

YGLESIAS PREDICTIONS 1. Democrats lose both houses of Congress (90%) HOLD 2. Democrats lose at least two Senate seats (80%) HOLD 3. Democrats lose fewer than six Senate seats (80%) HOLD 4. Nancy Pelosi announces retirement plans (70%) HOLD 5. Stephen Breyer does not retire (60%) N/A 6. Some version of Build Back Better passes (60%) HOLD 7. Joe Biden is still president (90%) HOLD 8. At least one Biden cabinet-rank official resigns (70%) HOLD 9. No military conflict between the PRC and Taiwan (a worryingly low 90%) HOLD 10. New U.S. sanctions on Russia (70%) HOLD 11. Saudi Arabia and Israel establish diplomatic relations (60%) SELL to 50% 12. Fewer U.S. Covid deaths in 2022 than in 2021 (80%) BUY to 90% 13. Emmanuel Macron re-elected (60%) HOLD 14. Traffic light coalition exploits loopholes to get around the constitutional debt brake (70%) HOLD 15. No recession in 2021 (90%) SELL to 80% 16. Liz Cheney loses primary (80%) HOLD 17. Some version of USICA passes Congress (70%) HOLD 18. Lula elected president of Brazil (60%) SELL to 50% 19. China officially abandons Covid Zero (70%) HOLD 20. Fewer U.S. Covid-19 deaths in 2022 than in 2020 (80%) BUY to 90% 21. Additional booster shots of mRNA vaccines authorized for seniors (80%) HOLD 22. November 2022 year-on-year CPI growth is below 6% (70%) BUY to 80% 23. November 2022 year-on-year CPI growth is above 4% (70%) SELL to 50% 24. The Fed ends up doing more than its currently forecast three interest rate hikes (60%) HOLD 25. Russia does not invade Ukraine (60%) HOLD 26. Viktor Orbán loses power in Hungary (60%) HOLD 27. Sinn Fein becomes the largest party in the Northern Ireland assembly (60%) HOLD 28. The U.S. and Canada reach an agreement on softwood lumber (70%) HOLD 29. Democrats go down at least one governor on net (60%) HOLD 30. The unemployment rate stays between 4 and 5% (70%) SELL to 60% if you mean 12/22, to 40% if you mean it never gets outside that range at all

Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster?

June 08, 2022 · Original source

I am skeptical. Taking the top graph at face value, the Democratic Party in 2020 (median ideology score: - 0.37) is further right than the Democratic Party in 1880 (-0.41).

The Democratic Party of 1880 didn’t have opinions on most modern issues. But they explicitly supported racial segregation and a ban on Chinese immigrants. Implicitly, they opposed all modern welfare programs, all income taxes, any minimum wage, gay marriage, and transgender people. And DW-NOMINATE wants us to believe they were further left than modern Democrats?

He concludes that, contra the image where the Right stays in the same place and the Left moves, both Republicans and Democrats have “changed a lot” since 2008. He wisely avoids speculating on whether one party has moved further or faster than the other. I’m less wise, so I’ve been trying to look into this question. My conclusion is: man, people really have strong emotions on this. I think a lot of the disagreement happens because this is more than one question. You can operationalize it a couple different ways: Which party’s policy positions have changed more in their preferred direction (ie gotten further left for the Democrats, or further right for the Republicans) since 2008 - or 1990, or 1950, or some other year when people feel like things weren’t so partisan?

Against "There Are Two X-Wing Parties"

June 09, 2022 · Original source

One of my least favorite political tropes is the claim that "America has two left-wing parties" or "America has two right-wing parties" or "both major parties are socialist" or however else you want frame this. The argument goes that even the Democrats aren't truly left (or even the Republicans aren't truly right), and so one side of the political spectrum completely controls discourse.

My California Ballot 2022

November 04, 2022 · Original source

This is California, so the Democrats always win. When I vote, I mean to send a signal somewhere in between “you are the candidate I really prefer for this office” and “I will vote for the Democrat if I approve of her and want her to have a mandate; otherwise I will vote for the Republican as a protest”.

In fact, that day will be tomorrow, when I announce my new sport, Predictelectionresultsball. The rules are: there are two teams, one predicts the Republicans will win, the other predicts that the Democrats will win, and whoever is right gets one point and wins the game. Bets on the outcome can be placed at my new sports betting site, Shmanifold, any resemblance to any other site is entirely coincidental.

This got me thinking: I make fun of Gavin Newsom a lot. I say he has no characteristics except good hair and the ability to pander to every interest group the exact right amount. But Newsom is favored as the Democratic nominee in 2024 if Biden chooses not to run again. Why? Usually people who become a major party candidate for President have some positive quality that has helped them get that far. Donald Trump is a master showman and figured out how to tap a vein of populist anger no one else could. Joe Biden has folksy charm and 75,000 years of experience in the Senate. Hillary Clinton had stratospheric name recognition and the support of the Democrats’ best political machine. If Gavin Newsom becomes President, or even a nominee, to what will we attribute this? I have lived in his state for four years now and I am baffled. He is a mystery, a gaping void where a candidate statement and photo should be, certain of victory with no explanation.

Inline links: make fun of Gavin Newsom

Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency

December 08, 2022 · Original source

Do Vietnamese people love trading monkey gifs? Are Ukrainians especially susceptible to Ponzi schemes? Is Venezuela laden with techbros? Vietnam uses crypto because it’s terrible at banks. 69% of Vietnamese have no bank access, the second highest in the world. I’m not sure why; articles play up rural poverty, but many nations have more rural poor than Vietnam. There’s a history of the government forcing banks to make terrible loans, and then those banks collapsing; maybe this destroyed public trust? In any case, between banklessness and remittances (eg from Vietnamese-Americans), Vietnam leads the world in crypto use. Ukraine has always been among the top crypto countries: in 2021, NYT called it “the crypto capital of the world”. Again, this owes a lot to its terrible banking system. NYT describes its banks as “so sclerotic that sending or receiving even small amounts of money from another country requires an exasperating obstacle course of paperwork”, and this guy says that if you deposit more than $100,000 in a Ukrainian bank, “the chance that you get it back is very slim”. When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian government doubled down on crypto as a way for friendly Westerners to donate to the war effort - $70 million as of March. It proved so helpful that during the first month of the war, in between dodging Russian artillery shells President Zelenskyy found time to pass a law legalizing crypto and strengthening its regulatory framework. Venezuela’s economy has been in slow motion collapse for the past decade. Inflation is currently in the triple digits (remember, people worried the Democrats would lose the midterms because of a US inflation rate of 8%). If your country has a triple-digit inflation rate, you might prefer to use an alternative currency, which Venezuela’s authoritarian government tries to prevent people from doing. Cryptocurrency provides a hard-to-ban alternative which has caught on among Venezuelan hustlers and small businessmen. I personally contributed in a small way to Russia’s cryptocurrency use. I’ve been trying to help Russian ACX readers escape to other countries to avoid conscription or arrest. Of my two successes so far, both involved sending cryptocurrency to help them afford a ticket out and living expenses while they searched for a job in their new country. I’m pretty proud of this and I don’t think it would have been possible without crypto. I think a lot of Westerners want to think of developing-world uses as a boring sideshow, and highlight Westerners trading monkey gifs as the only part of crypto worth talking about. But about 66% of crypto users live in the developing world. More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America. Of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most governance and banking failures! Big Crypto Projects Are Very Rarely Scams I realize this is a bold sentence to use as a section header in 2022. But I recently tried to figure out the exact scam rate, and it seemed low. I searched for articles called things like The Top Crypto Projects Of 20XX, and then I checked how many of those projects, years later, had turned out to be scams.I tried my best not to cherry-pick, and to focus on the first article that Google fed me for each of various relevant search terms. I ended up using four articles for this experiment: Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015

Inline links: 69% of Vietnamese, a history, remittances, “the crypto capital of the world”, this guy, $70 million as of March, pass a law, More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America, Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015

“Oh, so you’re one of those annoying libertarians?” Maybe! But I’ve donated to enough Democrats to get spam texts from Nancy Pelosi. And a lot of them say things like “our democracy is in danger” or “this could be our last free election ever” . If you really think January 6 was a close call, where do you think we’d be if Trump had succeeded? Would he have just passed a few more tax cuts and built a few more miles of border wall? Or would he have actually done the fascism thing? And if he actually did the fascism thing, do you think he would have shown more restraint than the Canadians, and backed down from freezing bank deposits as a weapon against protesters?

If Nancy Pelosi’s text messages are any guide, Democrats have joined libertarians in the “actually pretty worried about the government becoming an oppressive dictatorship” club. I don’t think they can say with a straight face that there’s no chance that we ever get fascists who use financial repression as a tool of control. So they better have a plan. Crypto is the best-developed one I know. Or if you’re still not concerned about the US, at least be concerned about Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Russia or Iran, where there are already authoritarian governments and people are already using crypto to try to get around them.

Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise

December 09, 2022 · Original source

This has been done by keeping wealth out of the hands of people who didn't go to the right colleges, and reshaping the Democratic party in a way that made it both rich and controllable. That was done by re-creating the Democratic party as the anti-white-male party. This has no effect on white males who attend an Ivy or equivalent; they're still guaranteed a high-paying, high-prestige job. So the reforming of Ivy admissions policy, in cooperation with re-orienting the Democratic party using identity politics, has created a situation which lets the ruling wealthy elites shut out middle-class white and Asian males (including Jews) from wealth and power, and all but guarantee that those non-whites and females admitted to the Ivies will follow the party line. And it does all this in a way which focuses attention on racial and sexual discrimination, both shielding itself from charges of racial or sexual discrimination, and distracting attention from the actual, class-based discrimination.

Also in the 1970s, the political parties were disrupted, with the Democrats losing the South, and starting to lose the working class. They flipped positions between then and now. The Democrats are now the party of the rich. Witness the fact that they're outspending the Republicans right now in the critical Georgia Senate race by 2 to 1. Check political-spending statistics, and it appears that roughly a third of the disposable wealth in America was transferred to Republicans to Democrats between 1980 and the present.

Prediction Market FAQ

December 20, 2022 · Original source

After the event happens, use the outcome to update everyone’s reputation and refine the algorithm. Superforecasting uses some of the same ideas as prediction markets - probabilistic forecasts, incentives to get the right answer, aggregation methods that favor people with good track records. In studies comparing superforecasting tournaments to small prediction markets, the superforecasting tournaments have done equally well or even slightly better. My goal with this FAQ is not to claim that prediction markets are always better than superforecasting. I think of both as part of the same revolution in forecasting technology, and would be happy with policy-makers or other important people using either. Still, I do think that each has situations where they might be a better fit than the other. Superforecasting tournaments shine on questions so far in the future that financial incentives start to lose force (for example, people are unlikely to place bets on questions about 2100, when most of them will be dead anyway). They’re also good in situations where you can’t get a big prediction market together - superforecasting scales down more gracefully, since you can identify individuals as superforecasters and consult them even in situations where you can’t get a full tournament together. Prediction markets shine in avoiding advanced manipulation attempts, in providing a single canonical answer when someone might worry that any given tournament was biased, and in aggregating the results of superforecaster tournaments with each other and with other sources. Remember that a superforecasting tournament can be considered an “expert”, like Nate Silver. So by the argument in Part 2, we should expect that a big prediction market won’t consistently be worse than any given superforecasting tournament, as long as the tournament’s answers are public knowledge. If there were ever a superforecasting tournament that consistently outperformed prediction markets, that would be a simple mispricing, people would correct it, and the market would eventually agree with the tournament. 4.5: Aren’t prediction markets gambling? Isn’t gambling bad and addictive? Yes, sort of. But most countries allow forms of gambling that aren’t too addictive and have some social value. For example, investing in stocks, or investing in commodities futures. I think prediction markets are more like this than like traditional gambling in casinos. People who want to gamble can already buy cryptocurrencies, or trade stocks on Robin Hood, or (in 20 states) place online sports bets on sites like DraftKings. All these things seem more addictive than, and have less social utility than, prediction markets. I don’t think promoting or legalizing prediction markets is going to make the gambling situation much worse than it is already - so given how useful I think they are, I think they would be net positive. People who are more concerned about the gambling aspect might want to stick to play money prediction markets, which wouldn’t have this problem. 4.6: Where does the money in prediction markets come from? That is, if "you get a dollar when the Democrats win”, who provides the dollar? In the abstract, prediction markets pair up people who want to bet on different sides of a proposition. For example, if a market says that there’s a 75% chance that the Democrats win, then they pair up someone willing to buy a share in “The Democrats win” for $0.75 with someone willing to buy a share in “The Democrats lose” for $0.25, for a total of $1 spent on these two shares. Then, when the Democrats either win or lose, the person with the correct share gets the $1. In practice it’s annoying to have to wait for someone to take the opposite side of the trade, so some people (or bots!) play “market maker” and are willing to take your bet on the assumption that someone else will come along soon to take the other side. But it’s usually safe to abstract this step away and just imagine people betting with each other, using the market as an intermediary. 4.6.1: Then why should anyone play prediction markets, when on average they’ll only break even? It seems like this is a worse deal than stocks, which tend to go up over time. Every dollar someone wins on a prediction market corresponds to someone else’s loss; in expectation; across all participants, the average gain is 0. But the stock market tends to go up over time, as businesses expand to new areas and invent new products; across all participants, the average gain is about 4% per year. So why ever invest in prediction markets instead of stocks? Whatever the theoretical answer to this question, lots of people do invest in prediction markets instead of stocks sometimes; several existing prediction markets have questions with hundreds of thousands of dollars in trading volume. You would have to ask those people why they do it. Maybe it’s because it’s fun. Or maybe it’s because they think (rightly or wrongly) that they’re above average and can make a profit. This is no different than other zero-sum games like sports betting, which attracts billions of dollars each year. The futures and commodities markets are also zero-sum, but attract billions of dollars by giving companies an opportunity to hedge risk. For example, a nickel mine might get rich if the price of nickel goes up, but go bankrupt if the price of nickel goes down. And they might prefer a predictable world where they get a small but guaranteed profit no matter what happens to nickel prices. So they bet some amount of money on commodity markets that the price of nickel will go down, and then their income is the sum of what they make from their nickel mining and from their bets - which, if they handled their hedging correctly, should be a small but guaranteed profit. Prediction markets would allow hedging of other types of risk - for example, import-export businesses might want to hedge against the risk that a protectionist politician gets elected, or tourism companies might want to hedge against a pandemic that closes international borders. These people would inject enough money into the market to subsidize sophisticated speculators. Finally, I envision that someday people who want to know the answer to specific questions can subsidize prediction markets on them. For example, the Democratic Party might subsidize a conditional market (see 5.1) about which Democratic primary candidate is most likely to win the general election. Their money would go to giving the average investor a 4% (or some other number) rate of return - although of course winners would gain more than that and losers would still lose on net. I think this is the most likely way for prediction markets to become very big. 4.6.1.1: If people use prediction markets to hedge risk, won’t that distort them? That is, suppose that an import-export business spends millions of dollars betting that Trump will win in order to hedge against his protectionist policies. Since their bets aren’t based on the real chance of Trump winning, won’t that distort the market? No. Suppose that everyone knows Trump has a 50-50 chance of winning. And suppose the import-export business, in the process of hedging risk, bids it up to 90-10. Since you know Trump has a 50-50 chance of winning, you can get rich quick by bidding it back down to 50-50. From your point of view, the import-export business is (in expectation) giving you free money. But they’re still happy to do it, because they’re hedging their risk successfully. 4.7: Aren’t a lot of the questions we care about inherently subjective or hard to measure? This is a frequent problem for prediction markets. For example, we might want to know something like “will we get human-level AI before 2050?” But how do we define “human-level AI”? If there’s an AI that’s much better than humans at most tasks, but much worse at a few, is that “human-level”? If there’s an AI that seems human-level in demos, but the team that makes it won’t let it be independently tested, should that count? If it works through some kind of Frankenstein chip that combines vat-grown brain tissue with computing machinery, is that still an “AI”? Prediction markets have found a few ways around this problem. First, many groups (for example, Metaculus) try to define their resolution criteria very carefully. A typical Metaculus question on AI sounds like this: We will thus define "an AI system" as a single unified software system that can satisfy the following criteria, all completable by at least some humans. Able to reliably pass a 2-hour, adversarial Turing test during which the participants can send text, images, and audio files (as is done in ordinary text messaging applications) during the course of their conversation. An 'adversarial' Turing test is one in which the human judges are instructed to ask interesting and difficult questions, designed to advantage human participants, and to successfully unmask the computer as an impostor. A single demonstration of an AI passing such a Turing test, or one that is sufficiently similar, will be sufficient for this condition, so long as the test is well-designed to the estimation of Metaculus Admins.

Prediction markets are like stock markets, but for beliefs about future events. For example, you can buy or sell shares in events like “The Democrats will win the next election” or “A Category 5 hurricane will hit Florida this year”.

Typically, a share pays out $1 if the event occurs, and nothing if it doesn’t. In this scenario, the price of the share will naturally represent the market’s belief about the likelihood of the event. For example, if a share in “The Democrats will win the next election” trades for $0.20, then the market believes there’s a 20% chance the Democrats will win the next election.

Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying

December 29, 2022 · Original source

I Googled “Trump fraudulent election”, and the first story that came up supporting the idea that the Democrats stole the 2020 election was Fox News’ Senator Rand Paul Claims Statistical Fraud In States Where Trump Lost.

Inline links: Senator Rand Paul Claims Statistical Fraud In States Where Trump Lost

Who Predicted 2022?

January 24, 2023 · Original source

Last year saw surging inflation, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a surprise victory for Democrats in the US Senate. Pundits, politicians, and economists were caught flat-footed by these developments. Did anyone get them right?

Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023

February 20, 2023 · Original source

On the other hand, everyone will have underestimated the extent of crisis in the Democratic Party. The worst-case scenario is Kamala Harris rising to the main contender against Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. Bernie attacks her and her followers as against true progressive values, bringing up her work defending overcrowded California prisons as a useful source of unpaid labor. Harris supporters attack Bernie as a sexist white man trying to keep a woman of color down (wait until the prison thing gets described as “slavery”). Everything that happened in 2016 between Clinton and Sanders looks like mild teasing between friends in comparison. If non-Sanderites rally around Booker or Warren instead, the result will be slightly less apocalyptic but still much worse than anyone expects. The only plausible way I can see for the Dems to avoid this is if Sanders dies or becomes too sick to run before 2020. This could tear apart the Democratic Party in the long-term, but in the short term it doesn’t even mean they won’t win the election – it will just mean a bunch of people who loathe each other temporarily hold their nose and vote against Trump.

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?

1. Trump wins 2020: 20% 2. Republicans win Presidency in 2020: 40% 3. Sanders wins 2020: 10% 4. Democrats win Presidency in 2020: 60% 5. At least one US state has approved single-payer health-care by 2023: 70% 6. At least one US state has de facto decriminalized hallucinogens: 20% 7. At least one US state has seceded (de jure or de facto): 1% 8. At least 10 members of 2022 Congress from neither Dems or GOP: 1% 9. US in at least new one major war (death toll of 1000+ US soldiers): 40% 10. Roe v. Wade substantially overturned: 1% 11. At least one major (Obamacare-level) federal health care reform bill passed: 20% 12. At least one major (Brady Act level) federal gun control bill passed: 20% 13. Marijuana legal on the federal level (states can still ban): 40% 14. Neoliberals will be mostly Democrat/evenly split/Republican in 2023: 60%/20%/20% 15. Political polarization will be worse/the same/better in 2023: 50%/30%/20%

Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco

March 20, 2023 · Original source

Everyone here thinks the world will end soon. Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro. Everyone here is complicit in their chosen ending - plane flights, porn, $20/month GPT-4 subscriptions. “We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”

Highlights From The Comments On Putin

August 11, 2023 · Original source

Schumer actually did say on the news that he expected the security services to sabotage Trump with a kind of "ha ha" tone. The reason American security services can't do this kind of thing isn't the virtue of left wing leaders or norms. It's that they cannot expect the kind of deference the KGB required. When Democrats have tried to weaponize such institutions they have faced backlash. (And Republicans have generally not been able to for the reasons you say.) The reason the security services can't suppress the Republicans is that the Republicans have real power and will strike back. And the same for the Democrats.

You said: "As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. I’m not being some misty-eyed optimist here".

I stick to my distinction between the mainstream Democrats and FALN, just as I would make a similar distinction between mainstream Republicans and right-wing terrorist militias.

February 20, 2024 · Original source

5: Swift Centre has a forecasting piece on the US elections; spiciest claim is that “replacing Biden won’t help the Democrats”. I notice that this isn’t exactly what the question says - it says the Democrats’ chances are better if Biden is the candidate on Election Day than if he isn’t. But this could be because the Democrats are more likely to replace Biden in a world where things aren’t going their way. I don’t know if this is because they simplified the question in their article, or if this is actually a (slight) mistake.

Inline links: has a forecasting piece on the US elections

May 13, 2024 · Original source

There are already hundreds of groups that care deeply about the outcome of elections. Some have billions of dollars on the line, like defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, real estate developers, and investment banks. Others care for non-financial reasons: transgender people, Christians, gun owners, the population of Ukraine, people who think we’ll all die from climate change, people who think the country will become a dictatorship, all Democrats, all Republicans, etc. The idea that adding one more group - “people who have a few thousand dollars staked on Kalshi” - will be the difference between a safe and secure election, and one that’s hacked by motivated parties, is pretty crazy.

Nate Silver, Josh Barro, and others have been banging this drum recently: the most important thing Democrats can do this year is get Sonia Sotomayor to retire. Sotomayor is an older liberal-leaning Supreme Court justice. She might get sick or die in the next four years, and if Republicans win the 2024 election, then they get to choose her replacement and the Court shifts even further right. If she retired today, Biden and the Democratic Senate would choose her replacement and the Court wouldn’t shift. She doesn’t want to resign, but Silver (remembering the similar case of RBG) thinks Democrats should pressure her as best they can. The markets have been shifting between 20% and 40%, but don’t seem to expect this to happen.

Inline links: Nate Silver, Josh Barro

Prediction Markets Suggest Replacing Biden

July 02, 2024 · Original source

The last week hasn’t been great for the Democratic Party. First Biden bombed the debate. But the subsequent decision about whether/how to replace Biden has also been embarrassing. Biden has refused to step aside gracefully, and party elites don’t seem to have any contingency plan. Worse, they don’t even seem united on the need to figure anything out, with many deflecting the conversation to irrelevant points like “Trump is also bad” or pretending that nothing is really wrong.

Some of the party’s problems are hard and have no shortcuts. But the big one - figuring out whether replacing Biden would even help the Democrats’ electoral chances - is a good match for prediction markets. Set up markets to find the probability of Democrats winning they nominate Biden, vs. the probability of Democrats winning if they replace him with someone else.

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.

ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein

October 30, 2024 · Original source

Full disclosure: this isn’t a crux for me and I probably would have still opposed Trump even if the Supreme Court was mostly liberal and the Democratic Party was more cohesive.

I might criticize their strategy in more depth in another post, but I won’t deny it makes a certain kind of perverse sense. More than that though, something here resonates with me psychologically. I keep having to shake myself out of viewing this election as a psychodrama with two characters: myself and the Democratic Party.

One worry is that Trump tries to pack election boards with his supporters and give them a mandate to fiddle with election law in ways that make him more likely to win (I don’t claim Democrats never do this, just that Trump has openly endorsed doing it orders of magnitude more). This probably can’t swing 60-40 elections, but it might swing 51-49 elections, and nowadays almost every election is 51-49.

Inline links: I don’t claim Democrats never do this, nowadays almost every election is 51-49

Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims

November 08, 2024 · Original source

The more I think about this, the more I think it’s also the right move in the real world. Kamala might not know the word “pre-committment”, but I think she’s smart enough to know that if she gives one interest group special treatment for conspicuously betraying her, then every interest group will conspicuously betray her the very next moment. So if she’s smart, she’ll do nothing (or even punish them by veering further anti-Israel?) and they’ll be stuck both having no voice in the Democratic Party and having a higher chance of Republicans taking power.

In fact, we could think of this not as the Muslims defecting against Kamala, but as them defecting against the Democratic coalition. Every part of the Democratic coalition would like to defect in a way that prioritizes their pet issue and screws over every other part of the coalition. The Democrats succeed as a party (and beat the Republicans) insofar as the coalition members stay strong and don’t do this. Maybe Kamala’s actual response should be something like “here are the usual levers for influencing Democratic Party policy, like voting in the primary, you lost, and you are trying to re-litigate a completed political process because you don’t like the result, in the same way we condemn Donald Trump for doing.”

Mentioned before: a group of Muslims in Michigan are backing Trump because they’re mad at the Biden/Harris administration for supporting Israel. They understand that Trump supports Israel even more. They just worry that if they always vote straight Democrat like every other minority group, the Democrats have no incentive to listen to them. They hope that if they elect Trump, even if he doesn’t listen to them, then the Democrats will work harder to woo them next time around.

Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist

February 26, 2025 · Original source

In 2020, the Democrats - party of coastal elites! - came back in power. They considered undoing Trump’s SALT cap. But they thought it would look bad to cut taxes on themselves at the same time they were expanding government, so they decided against.

I know about this mostly because I noticed my taxes going up. I’ve seen a few articles about it here and there. But it’s not a big national issue. People don’t hold protest marches about it. The Republicans couldn’t bother getting enough of a coherent opinion on it not to let their own cap expire, and the Democrats didn’t care enough to change the Republicans’ cap during their four years in power.

Because biases can put their finger on the evidentiary scale, but sufficiently strong evidence can still break through. It would be flattering to Democrats if they had won by a landslide in 2024, but this was obviously false, and there was no way to spin it to be true, so they just accepted the humiliating defeat.

The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs

April 30, 2025 · Original source

If one day Joe Biden had conceived a personal hatred for the nation of Ecuador and tried to sacrifice America’s interests on the altar of some anti-Ecuador crusade, his handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing. And maybe that particular metaphor owes more to Biden’s age than the inexorable logic of liberal institutionalism. But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever. Congressional Democrats would push back. State Department bureaucrats and White House staffers would water down the orders. DNC operatives would say it doesn’t play well with [list of one million different activist groups who must be kept satisfied at all times]. Democrat-controlled media would attack the policy, and the base would rebel against it. In the end, Clinton/Obama/Harris would relent: partly to preserve political capital, partly because only the sort of person who would relent in these situations would have gotten the job in the first place. I think both liberals and conservatives agree that this story is directionally correct - otherwise you wouldn’t need the “unitary executive” doctrine or 3,000,000 pages of Moldbug prose. But why is it correct?

Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.

Links For July 2025

July 01, 2025 · Original source

16: Related from Decker: suppose that Democrats promise that, once they regain control of the government, they’ll pay universities all the counterfactual funding they would have gotten if Trump hadn’t cut their budget. Then universities borrow money now against that future windfall. What goes wrong?

Inline links: from Decker

Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams

January 21, 2026 · Original source

I have seen people try to walk this back by saying Adams only meant they would be persecuted in some way that was metaphorically equivalent to hunting, but I feel like “good chance you will be dead within the year” is saying he means the kind of hunting which literally kills you, and “police will stand down” means that it will be the sort of extremely illegal thing that police would normally react to. I have seen other people try to link this to examples of Republicans actually getting killed, such as Charlie Kirk. But Adams was telling his readers there was “a good chance” that “they” would be dead within a year, which I think implies this fate happening to a significant proportion of ordinary Republicans, not just one prominent person. Also, Kirk was five years after the comment was posted. Can we dismiss this as a joke? I think Adams has used the manipulation technique of saying things that might or might not be jokes and then strategically sticking to them or saying “What? Me? I was only joking! Haha! You can’t take a joke!” depending on which was more convenient to him at that exact second, enough times that I’m not comfortable letting him have that escape. Also, when I was replying to Joel Pollak about this, I happened to glance at his Twitter account, and one of the top tweets was a repost of someone saying that “The Democrat playbook is to arrest every single person who disagrees with them”. I think if I forced Pollak into some kind of extremely literal frame of mind - maybe asked him to bet money on whether I could tweet the words “the Democrats are wrong about immigration” in my Democrat-controlled state without getting arrested - he would admit that, okay, they don’t want to arrest literally every single person who disagrees with them. He was exaggerating for effect, probably in much the way he’s going to say that Scott Adams was exaggerating for effect. You say stuff like “The Democrats are going to HUNT YOU DOWN and LITERALLY MURDER YOU. They will TORTURE YOUR FAMILY and RAPE YOUR DAUGHTER and EAT YOUR PETS and TURN YOUR HOUSE INTO A CHURCH OF SATAN”, and what you mean is “I disagree with the Democrats and sometimes they go overboard cancelling people”. I have a post called If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It. My thesis is that tolerating claims of “directional correctness” - the thing where someone asks to get a pass because even if they said wasn’t literally true, it “points to” an “emotionally correct” thing - is eventually totally corrosive. It means everyone ratchets up their claims to the highest level they think they can get away with (ie walk back later if challenged, as a motte and bailey). And then you end up with this miasma where maybe 5% of people totally believe you, and 50% of people sort of absorb the connotation and think something like that is true, and then people get terrified of the Democrats and think of them as monsters and treat politics as an existential struggle where they will genuinely get arrested or murdered unless they do it to the Democrats first, and then you get a civil war or something. I think Adams and Pollak’s milieu has in fact reached this point, and their love for these kinds of exaggerations is a big part of the cause. Adams was one of the funniest people in the world. If he was actually telling a joke, you could tell by the fact that you were laughing hysterically. “Democrats will hunt and kill you” isn’t funny. I’ll refrain from judgment about whether it was Adams’ sincerely held belief, some kind of annoying manipulation attempt, or whether Adams even recognized a difference between the two. But I think judging him on the fact that it didn’t happen is completely within bounds. … 3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece … Zanzibar BuckBuck McFate writes: This business where boomers are tolerant of contradictions and find them amusing whereas millennials are horrified is a dynamic I've noticed as well, it seems to be true in politics also, I myself feel this hunger to be authentic all the time. I think it has something to do with the difficulty children have in putting negativity in context. They can't distinguish between a parent having a bad day and venting, or having an existential crisis. So the 50s guy was half right - you don't have to love your boss in your heart of hearts but careful what you say to your kids. Feral Finster writes: » “This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.” Compare with the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers. Yeah, it’s interesting to compare Rao and Adams. Rao formulated his Gervais Principle as a specific response to Adams’ Dilbert Principle, which I guess means Rao thought Adams got it wrong. Did he? The Pointy Haired Boss seems to go back and forth between Clueless and Sociopath, which is probably why Rao thought Adams’ work fell short. Dogbert is clearly Sociopath, but has no permanent role in the corporation, and doesn’t really represent a real thing you can be - his character was a ridiculous scammer who succeeded at near-impossible endeavours (like convincing people he was a Nostradamus-style mystical prophet) because the logic of the strip demanded it. Later, Adams foregrounded the CEO character more, maybe to create a purer Sociopath, letting the Boss go closer to Clueless. This is making me somewhat regret accusing Adams of wanting to be the Pointy-Haired Boss. It would have been fairer (and less of an accusation/surprise) to accuse him of wanting to be Dogbert. But again, Dogbert doesn’t represent a real thing you could be, which might have been why the PHB made a better metaphor. (contra my claim, the cover of Win Bigly shows a mashup of Dogbert and Trump. Fine, Dogbert is a thing one person can be.) You can read my full review of The Gervais Principle here. cincilator writes: Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you. Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it. To spell it out more explicitly: All nerds must eventually realize they’re not going to immediately dominate everything by intellect alone. This isn’t because intellect isn’t great, it’s because 1) it’s only one of many skills, and 2) you probably aren’t even the person with the most intellect. Again, every mildly-talented person has to face this realization, whether it’s a nerd realizing he won’t be the next Einstein or a jock realizing he won’t be the next LeBron. If someone deals with this using denial (one of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the nerd who says no, I really am the next Einstein, ie a crackpot, aka the sort of person who gets featured on Sneerclub. If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub4. If they just deal with it maturely instead of spinning up maladaptive defenses against it, they’re a nerd who is hopefully good-natured and accepting of their nerdiness, and hopefully does some good work in some specific small area, and changes the world in some specific small way (or some very large way, if they can work together with other people and get lucky). Bugmaster writes: I think Adams is basically correct. Yes, facts and evidence do exist and are real; but they have virtually no impact on anything socially important -- i.e., on anything important whatsoever. Memes and charisma and persuasion are what matters if you want to achieve life goals that extend beyound yourself and your immediate family. I worry that Adams (and you) are doing something where unless the average person can solve every problem by facts and intelligence alone, then facts+intelligence lose and memes and persuasion win. But the average person also can’t solve every problem by memes+persuasion alone! If Dilbert is an 80th percentile nerd, the 80th percentile persuader is - I don’t know, a used-car salesman? Dilbert’s probably earning more money, especially nowadays when he could make L5 at Google. And if Donald Trump is a 99.9999th percentile persuader, the 99.9999th percentile nerd is Ilya Sutskever. Probably most people would slightly prefer being Trump to Sutskever, but Sutksever does have a couple billion dollars, plus the more ethereal rewards of genius; it still seems like a pretty good deal. I also think you’re doing a sort of black-and-white thinking here. Every day, great persuaders like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes end up in jail, because in fact the things that they said were true were not true. Every day, smooth-talking charismatic manipulators successfully seduce the girl into bed with them, then totally fail to turn it into a happy stable marriage, because after a few years even the dumbest woman catches on and figures out whether her mate provides real value or not. Even Donald Trump has only a 37% approval rating, because he can’t make “we should alienate our allies over Greenland” sound plausible to most of the American people. When someone’s very good at it, persuasion sometimes helps them blur facts around the edges. But that’s it. Nobody except Scott Adams and a few psychotherapists ever go to hypnotist school. Most don’t even go to any formal persuasion classes. That’s because hypnotism/persuasion isn’t really a lifehack that helps you win all the time at everything. If the world’s best hypnotist asked a room of VCs for money with a stupid business plan, he would probably fail. This isn’t to say persuasion is useless, and in certain fields it can be very powerful indeed. But let’s not go crazy and start worshipping it. The grass is always greener on the other side. The nerd sits in his cubicle and thinks “If only I were more charismatic.” But the salesman with the bright teeth and the firm handshake thinks “Man, I bet I could get out of this dead-end job if only I were smarter.”5 … 4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST) … Ilya Lozovsky writes: Ninety percent of this essay is brilliant — smarter and realer than anything anyone else has written about Adams — but the end lost me. It's too generous, to the point of being a whitewash. Adams was vicious and hateful and played a material role in convincing Americans to vote for actual fascism. I don't think it's right to "hand it to him." JJ McCullough (JJM’s Shortstack) writes: Good essay, but I think you kinda yadda-yadda'd away his racist rant, which was extremely explicit and extended. I think it was the opposite of a "bog-standard cancellation," which we think of as being a slightly unfair, overzealous policing of an at least slightly subjectively offensive comment, often from years ago. But Scott went on quite a long diatribe about why black people, as a group, are dangerous and undesirable to be around, and why he, personally, goes out of his way to avoid them. Some conservatives have tried to use "bog-standard" anti-woke logic in defending him, but no, his comments really are quite explicitly and undeniably racist, if that term has any useful definition at all. Alex Wotbot writes: Now, you quoted Adams saying: “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away” If this was the intended point, does it really make sense that only the far-left freaked out? It’s kind of important to mention this was within a hypothetical. Suppose a survey reported that 26% of a population believes “The phrase ‘It’s OK to be blonde’ is hate speech” and another 21% weren’t sure if they agree with the statement or not. Now suppose you were blonde, would you hang around that population? Now go read the February 2022 Rasmussen Reports survey. Please do better than this, I don’t want to have to Gell-Mann memoryhole this. Many people had strong opinions on this, so I have to respond to it. But first, I want to make it extra clear in capital letters: I AM DOING THIS IN THE COMMENTS POST, TO RESPOND TO YOUR COMMENTS, AND NOT BECAUSE I THINK IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. Certain people screenshotted the one paragraph of my ten thousand word essay that discussed this and posted it on Twitter, in order to make it look like I was joining in some kind of chorus of liberals reducing Adams to his worst moment. I posted what I thought was a no-nonsense, factual description of what happened, in order not to be accused of hiding it or covering it up. It was the least important part of my essay, I’m aware that writing about it at all opens me to attack from both sides, and I discuss it here only to respond to all of you who wanted to know my opinion on it. Just don’t screenshot it on Twitter and say “LOOK SCOTT IS STILL HARPING ON THE RACE THING”, that’s all I’m asking. That having been said… To make sure we’re all on the same page - Adams’ comments were prompted by this poll, conducted February 2023. The question was: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘It’s OK to be white’” Among blacks, 53% agreed, 26% disagreed, and 21% were “not sure”. Among whites, the numbers were 81/7/13. Here’s the video of Adams’ comments: Transcript: If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people - according to this poll, not according to me - that’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the f**k away. Wherever you have to go. Just get away. Cause there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. You just have to escape. That’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood with a very low black population. Because unfortunately, there’s a high correlation between the density - this is according to Don Lemon, here I’m just quoting Don Lemon, who said when he lived in a mostly black neighborhood, there were a bunch of problems he didn’t see in white neighborhoods. So even Don Lemon sees a big difference, for your quality of living, based on where you live and who’s there. So I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. Because there’s no longer a rational impulse. And so I’m… I’m gonna, uh, I’m gonna back off from being helpful to black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. Like I’ve been doing it all my life, and I’ve been… the only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. [cackles] It makes no sense to help black Americans if you’re white… it’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying. Totally not trying. Is this racist? I have a piece called Against Murderism, where I talk about why it’s so hard for people to agree on questions about “racism”. The summary: although it would be possible to have someone be purely, axiomatically racist - having it be a premise of their reasoning that they hate black people - in practice few people are like this. More typically, people have some argument more like: I don’t like [specific bad thing]

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KA_U!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2cb6162-0262-4c4c-8048-e8355f38967a_900x280.gif, If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It, writes, writes, the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers, The Gervais Principle, writes, 4, writes, 5, writes, JJM’s Shortstack, writes, writes, this poll, Against Murderism

Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day

March 03, 2026 · Original source

America will hold midterm elections on November 3. Incumbents always have a hard time during midterms, and Trump’s approval rating is low, so it’s expected to be a good year for Democrats. Prediction markets expect them to win at least the House (80% chance) and maybe even the Senate (20 - 40% chance).

Republicans generally believe there is significant fraud in elections, especially immigrants voting illegally, and propose strict ID requirements to prevent this. Most Democrats believe fraud is rare, and that strict ID requirements are more likely to disenfranchise normal voters who don’t have the right forms of ID available. The latest flashpoint in this battle is the SAVE Act, a Republican-sponsored bill which would require voters to show a passport, birth certificate, or Real ID when registering to vote for the first time or changing their registration. It recently passed the House, but is on track to be filibustered by Democrats in the Senate:

A blue wave. This would be a somewhat surprising result of Republican policies, but it makes sense. All of these restrictions select for high-information, high-motivation voters - people who hear about the new rules and get fired up enough to hunt down their birth certificate, march down to the DMV, wait on line for one million hours, and re-register. Due to their education advantage and the structural features of midterms, that probably favors Democrats. Democrats are more likely to own passports (one of the easiest forms of valid ID), and less likely to trigger increased scrutiny by having changed their name recently (because liberal women are less likely to marry and take their husband’s surname). First-order, a blue wave like this is good for the left. But second-order, if the above factors lead to some completely implausible blue wave that makes no sense by normal election standards, then Republicans could decide the elections were illegitimate and we’re back at chaos again.

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.

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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.

Astral Codex Ten

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Astral Codex Ten

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Atlas

Democrats

Democrats

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