Biden
Article
Biden is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 48 times across 48 issues between January 29, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “now-President Biden’s response”; “they would pressure Biden to fire him”; “we can count him as a correct prediction for its theory”. It most often appears alongside Trump, China, Twitter.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 48
- Issue count: 48
- First seen: January 29, 2021
- Last seen: January 16, 2026
Appears In
- Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy
- WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise
- Book Review: Why We’re Polarized
- Statement on New York Times Article
- Highlights From The Comments On March Links
- Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y
- 2020 Predictions: Calibration Results
- Links For April
- Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
- Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021
- Instead Of Pledging To Change The World, Pledge To Change Prediction Markets
- Contra Hanania On Partisanship
- Highlights From The Comments On Orban
- 15
- Links For November
- Grading My 2021 Predictions
- Predictions For 2022
- Ukraine Warcasting
- 22
- Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster?
- Universe-Hopping Through Substack
- Links For October
- 22
- Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
- Most Technologies Aren’t Races
- Links For May 2023
- Bride Of Bay Area House Party
- 23
- Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
- 23
- Links For January 2024
- 24
- 24
- 24
- My 2024 Presidential Debate
- Prediction Markets Suggest Replacing Biden
- Open Thread 337
- Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
- Links for July 2024
- Your Book Review: Real Raw News
- Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were Mispriced
- Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument
- Subscrive Drive ‘25 + Free Unlocked Posts
- Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
- Links For April 2025
- Links For October 2025
- Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
- The Dilbert Afterlife
Related Pages
-
- Trump (31 shared issues)
-
- China (15 shared issues)
-
- Twitter (15 shared issues)
-
- Joe Biden (14 shared issues)
-
- Metaculus (14 shared issues)
-
- PredictIt (13 shared issues)
-
- Polymarket (12 shared issues)
-
- Ukraine (12 shared issues)
-
- US (12 shared issues)
-
- COVID (11 shared issues)
-
- Manifold (11 shared issues)
-
- Israel (10 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.
4. Furthermore, the positive examples of technocracy @slatestarcodex refers to are...surprising. Two examples. To call school desegregation a technocratic invention papers over decades of community activism for desegregation. Perhaps even more dramatically looking at the coronavirus as an example of the success of technocracy runs against pretty much any reasonable reading of the international data. Danielle Allen and I have a piece coming out on this (we were both deeply involved in developing a response plan here https://ethics.harvard.edu/Covid-Roadmap that significantly influenced now-President Biden's response), but perhaps the sharpest point here is that the country, Taiwan, which performed best in the virus was led in part by Audrey Tang who moved back to Taiwan after being immersed in and repulsed by the rationalist movement in Silicon Valley - see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/how-taiwans-unlikely-digital-minister-hacked-the-pandemic/) and dedicated herself to doing things differently in Taiwan (see her amazing poetic job description here:
There are all sorts of places you could go with this. Maybe expertise is a sham, and a smart guy thinking for five minutes can outdo a decade of working on a PhD. Maybe Joe Biden is an idiot for not appointing Zvi the Secretary of Health. Maybe the whole system is a plot to keep good people down, and we need to burn it down and start over again. Or maybe I'm dumb and biased, and actually the experts are doing much better than Zvi but I'm selectively misinterpreting evidence until I think they aren't.
Joe Biden can't appoint Zvi as CDC Director, at least not usefully. If Biden appointed Zvi as Director one of three things would happen. One, Zvi would learn to play politics as adroitly as the current Director, and lose his advantage over her. Two, Zvi would offend enough people that they would pressure Biden to fire him. Or three, Zvi would offend people, Biden would offend people by not firing Zvi, and eventually Biden would fall beneath some necessary threshold of support and not be able to be an effective President. I'm not saying that just appointing Zvi would inevitably get Biden impeached. I'm saying Biden has a certain amount of slack, given how many people he needs to keep happy in order to govern effectively, and appointing Zvi as CDC Director would use up so much of that slack that he couldn't do other equally useful things later without becoming ineffective and likely to lose reelection.
This is called negative partisanship, and apparently it's the driver of our entire political system. This is especially true among independents - if you ask them why they voted for an R or D in a certain election, they're more likely to talk about hating and fearing the other party than about supporting their choice. But it seems to be true among partisans as well. One explanation for why Trump did so well among Republicans, despite his apparent forsaking of many Republican sacred cows on the campaign trail, was that he credibly promised to accomplish the one thing most Republicans want from their political leaders - not being a Democrat. Likewise, Joe Biden seems to be doing pretty well for himself right now based on a bold platform of not being Donald Trump. Klein believes this is pretty typical. He cites studies among Republicans showing that increasing some measure of liking Republicans one unit only makes them 3% more likely to donate to a campaign; increasing the same measure of hating Democrats the same amount makes them 11% more likely (there are similar numbers for the other side).
But after a bit of this he regains his footing and segues into a stronger argument that might give even conservatives some food for thought. Klein notes that although both Democrats and Republicans have some extremists in their coalition, the institutional Democrats seem to be doing a better job preventing them from gaining power. In a purely structural sense, without getting into whether you believe they're morally equivalent or whatever, the democratic socialists/Bernie Sanders seem to be an "insurrection" comparable to the Tea Party/Trump on the Republican side. But the mainstream neoliberal Republicans surrendered to the Tea Party and to Trump in rapid succession, and the mainstream neoliberal Democrats are still resisting. The Democrats' Tea Party equivalent is probably AOC, but she and her allies are still a small minority in the Democratic caucus. And the Dem presidential nomination went to Joe Biden, a moderate who wouldn't look out of place running for president in 1988 (in fact...). Why We're Polarized was published too early to mention Biden in this context, but we can count him as a correct prediction for its theory.
4. They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel. This is true – I can think of a friend of mine who also knows Peter Thiel. In fact, I met Peter Thiel once, kind of unexpectedly, at a party, long before Trump was in the news, and exchanged about two sentences of conversation with him (I don’t think he had the slightest idea who I was, nor was there any reason he should have). I have never personally met the other right-wing figures named in the article. I wrote a 30,000 word condemnation of one of them on my blog a few years ago, and we have since had some email exchanges about to what degree this was unfair. I received a sympathetic email from another of them about the Times article. Others I have had literally no contact with. Again, it would not surprise me if I was a few degrees of social separation from some of these people. I don’t feel like this means I have done anything wrong, and I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away from a Republican or Trump supporter. I myself am a Democrat, voted Warren (IIRC) in the primary, and Biden in the general.
Inline links: a 30,000 word condemnation, would not surprise me if
As someone who followed his primary campaigns closely in 2016 and 2020 and supported him in both, I can't buy into this thesis. My view is much simpler: Bernie never had a majority of the primary electorate. In 2016 his numbers were puffed up by non-ideological anti-Hillary votes and in 2020 Democratic candidates simply coordinated to stop Bernie in exactly the way Republican candidates failed to do with Trump. The article skewers a straw man by contrapositing its arguments from "if the Democratic party was so desperate to rally around Biden...." They were not, any more than Republicans were eager to rally around Ted Cruz! The difference is they sucked up and did it when the circumstances left it as the only option. This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system.
1. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races 2. The same party wins both Senate races in Georgia 3. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating 4. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% 5. US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century 6. The year-end unemployment rate is below 5 percent 7. The year-end unemployment rate is above 4 percent 8. Lakers win the NBA championship 9. Joe Biden ends the year as president 10. Nancy Pelosi sets a definitive retirement schedule 11. A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court 12. The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US 13. Substack will still be around 14. People will still be writing takes asking if Substack is really sustainable 15. Apple releases new iMacs powered by Apple silicon 16. Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon 17. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent 18. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent 19. Lloyd Austin not confirmed as Defense Secretary 20. No federal tax increases are enacted 21. Biden administration unilaterally relieves some but not all student debt 22. United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance 23. Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations 24. US and China reach agreement to lift Trump-era tariffs 25. Slow Boring will exceed 10,000 paid members
1. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races (60%) 2. The same party wins both Senate races in Georgia (95%) 3. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating (70%) [83%] 4. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% (60%) [60%] 5. US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century (80%) [84%] 6. The year-end unemployment rate is below 5 percent (80%) 7. The year-end unemployment rate is above 4 percent (80%) 8. Lakers win the NBA championship (25%) [25%] 9. Joe Biden ends the year as president (95%) [96%] 10. Nancy Pelosi sets a definitive retirement schedule (60%) 11. A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court (70%) [50%] 12. The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US (60%) [80%] 13. Substack will still be around (95%) 14. People will still be writing takes asking if Substack is really sustainable (80%) 15. Apple releases new iMacs powered by Apple silicon (90%) [84%] 16. Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon (70%) [53%] 17. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent (70%) 18. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent (90%) 19. Lloyd Austin not confirmed as Defense Secretary (60%) 20. No federal tax increases are enacted (95%) 21. Biden administration unilaterally relieves some but not all student debt (80%) 22. United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance (80%) 23. Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations (70%) [38%] 24. US and China reach agreement to lift Trump-era tariffs (70%) 25. Slow Boring will exceed 10,000 paid members (70%) [75%]
...until recently! As far as I know, the first official journalists to do something like this were Dylan Matthews, Kelsey Piper and Sigal Samuel at Vox. They're trying again this year, but now they're joined by a pretty big name in traditional punditry - Matt Yglesias, formerly of Vox, now here at Substack. In theory you can read the relevant post here, but it’s paywalled. We'll start with the predictions themselves, then talk about what this means for journalism. Here are the questions to be predicted:
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%
23: Pew feature on political mutual understanding - just 2% of Biden/Trump voters feel like Trump/Biden voters understand their point of view “very well”. What would they say if they had the chance to explain themselves? Pew collects several dozen people’s (very short) answers. Seem to be divided 50/50 between “we wish you understood how we’re all on the same team trying to build a better world” and “we wish you understood how much you suck”. Semi-related: QAnon-ers try to explain who they are and what they want people to understand about them.
1. Donald Trump remains President: 90% 2. Donald Trump is impeached by the House: 40% ***3. Kamala Harris leads the Democratic field: 20% ***4. Bernie Sanders leads the Democratic field: 20% 5. Joe Biden leads the Democratic field: 20% ***6. Beto O’Rourke leads the Democratic field: 20% 7. Trump is still leading in prediction markets to be Republican nominee: 70% 8. Polls show more people support the leading Democrat than the leading Republican: 80% 9. Trump’s approval rating below 50: 90% ***10. Trump’s approval rating below 40: 50%</s> ***11. Current government shutdown ends before Feb 1: 40% 12. Current government shutdown ends before Mar 1: 80% 13. Current government shutdown ends before Apr 1: 95% ***14. Trump gets at least half the wall funding he wants from current shutdown: 20% 15. Ginsberg still alive: 50%
In the 2020 election, it became standard consensus that "people of color", though still heavily majority-Democrat, were surprisingly willing to vote Trump. But everyone acted like this was some unpredictable freak occurrence of the 2020 election; in fact the change started in 2016 or even earlier, as these graphs show. Everyone was just too stuck in their Trump = whiteness narrative to notice it.
Inline links: standard consensus, as these graphs show
The second comment that people read as Trump endorsing neo-Nazis was his supposed refusal to condemn white supremacy during his debate with Biden. Here's the transcript:
US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than 50%: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%
In April, Joe Biden pledged to halve US emissions (from their 2005 max) by 2030.
Inline links: pledged to halve US emissions
All of these pledges have one thing in common - they expire long after the relevant officials are out of power (and in Biden's case, probably dead). As hard as it is to hold politicians accountable in normal situations, it's even worse here. Sure enough, prediction aggregator Metaculus shows that forecasters only give a 15% chance that we reach Biden's emissions target by 2030.
Inline links: only give a 15% chance
What if instead of pledging anything about emissions, Biden pledged to shift the prediction aggregator?
Richard Hanania of the Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology asks "why is everything liberal?" Given that there are approximately equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden voters in elections, how come we have "woke capital" celebrating Pride Month, instead of unwoke capital celebrating some conservative cause (as might have happened fifty years ago)? How come conservatives worry about censorship by liberal tech companies instead of vice versa? How come conservatives worry about college turning their kids liberal instead of vice versa?
There were a lot of conservatives in the comment who made basically this point, or who compared various things Viktor Orban did to various things Joe Biden (actually or imaginarily) did.
I think one simple signal that Orban has garnered more power than Biden is that Orban got a major controversial law passed in two hours, whereas it took Biden six months to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill that as far as I can tell nobody actually disagreed with.
Yeah, I didn’t get into Orban’s crusade against George Soros. I think all the “no worse than Biden” people would have been extra angry about that one; is this different from the US crusade against the Koch Brothers?
I’m fascinated by how many people expect someone who is neither Biden nor Harris to win the Democratic nomination in 2024. Biden is down five cents since this summer without any new health problems (that I know about), and sitting presidents rarely get refused a renomination just because they’re unpopular. Maybe people think Biden’s age wouldn’t have mattered if he was popular, but as it is it’ll make a graceful excuse to convince him to sit out? I still think he’s undervalued.
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
1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%
US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40% 2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10% 3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80% 4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60% 5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99% 6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50% 7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5% 10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30%
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
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
I’m not sure what the solution is. It can’t be to declare that Joe Biden is Nostradamus, or that everyone should now get together and sing kumbaya with anonymous US intelligence officials. And it can’t be that the over-eager war provocations rampant in US media are suddenly just swell. Whatever else happens with Ukraine, a presumption of incredulity toward these government/media factions still has to remain broadly in place — albeit with new Russia-specific adjustments given the crazed actions of Putin. I’ll have more to say soon on a substantive level about the nightmare that’s unfolding, including the culpability of US policy and political culture in setting the stage for this insane attack. Because it’s more vital than ever to not be cowed into ignoring the typically disastrous role of US intervention. But first I thought I owed at least a partial accounting of my own record. Consider it a work in progress.
I’m proud of my record forecasting the invasion, given that it went against most of the predictions of those who generally share my foreign policy views. Anyone can occasionally be correct by following the same heuristic they always use, but I showed intellectual flexibility here by determining that American intelligence was likely correct. Karlin is the only other prominent US foreign policy skeptic I know of who thought war was even more likely than the conventional wisdom suggested, and he deserves credit for that (if you know of others, mention them in the comments). Part of the reason I came to the right conclusion was that I was even more pessimistic than most anti-interventionists were about the degree of rationality present in American foreign policy. For example, my friend Max Abrahms was saying until very recently that Putin was hoping for some concessions that would allow him to avoid war (to be fair, Max has been more correct than me on the invasion running into difficulties). I thought that was possible too, but I had little hope that American politics would allow Biden to strike a deal. When it became clear that negotiating over the NATO open door policy wasn’t even on the table, I increased my estimate of the probability for war. To his credit, Max has admitted I was right, as have others I’ve been texting with over the last few months. I also give credit to Saagar, Philippe, and Michael Tracey for publicly acknowledging mistakes.
You can find a good list of other pundits who did poorly here, eg: #Ukraine invasion the Biden administration has been pounding the drums on never came???? ","username":"peterdaou","name":"Peter Daou","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Feb 15 14:27:56 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{"full_text":"BREAKING: Russian President Vladimir Putin says Russia is ready to discuss security measures with the U.S. and NATO as immediate fear of war appears to lessen. https://t.co/iPiEeFUVSD","username":"AP","name":"The Associated Press"},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":31,"like_count":228,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> There’s a discussion of who in China was right vs. wrong here; I haven’t focused on it since I don’t recognize any of the Chinese people involved, but my takeaway is that the government seemed genuinely wrong. They weren’t just covering for Putin; they were actually taken by surprise.
And yet “trust the US government” has so far failed to solve all of our epistemic problems. Partly this is because the US government constantly disagrees with itself (the FDA got in a fight with Biden over vaccine readiness; Trump’s EPA and Biden’s EPA made very different statements on climate change). Partly it’s because for internal political reasons or military/geopolitical reasons, the US government has lots of incentives to lie or stretch the truth. Partly it’s because other organizations with the same advantages as the US government make counterclaims (eg the Ukrainian government said their intelligence told them Russia wouldn’t invade, and they also seemed pretty trustworthy).
Probably it’s not worth worrying about the tiny differences between this and 538; I assume it’s within the margin of error, or pretty close. But if we insisted on doing that, we could note that the incumbent party always has a disadvantage, voters are angry at high inflation, and so they’re leaning a bit Republican to punish Biden even though the Democratic platform is slightly closer to the median voter.
A typical article is “THE TRUMP OFFENSIVE BEGINS!!” I kind of have trouble following it, but it looks like everything that has happened since at least 2015 has been Trump’s plan to redeem America!! Everything is going exactly according to plan, and by raiding Mar-a-Lago, Biden and the FBI have played right into Trump’s hands!! We know this is true because Trump has filed some lawsuits!!
Inline links: “THE TRUMP OFFENSIVE BEGINS!!”
I guess this is the QAnon thing (though he has some kind of complicated objection to that terminology). And QAnon is among the most over-covered phenomena of our time, so much so that it’s hard to have a novel or interesting take on it. But I’ll try: I think the right genre for Trump is “outlaw prince” - like Robin Hood, or Song Jiang, or your better class of pirate captain. Realistically he’s just out to enrich himself. But he defeats and embarrasses so many people along the way that he becomes a legend, inextricably tied to the very idea that the establishment can be beaten. He develops a cult following, his relatively meager real accomplishments get exaggerated in song and legend, and everyone assumes that he was only stealing from the rich in order to give to the poor or something. He can’t be caught, he can’t be defeated; like Elvis, he won’t even be able to die. He has ascended to the realm of archetypes. I guess that is a kind of winning a #SoulWAR.
Inline links: complicated objection
40: When Trump passed his tax cut, I complained that you could do a lot better things with the $100 billion/year price tag. So I guess it’s only fair for me to link that same post again now that the cost of Biden’s college loan forgiveness has been estimated at ~$500 billion (equivalent to something like ~$25 billion/year, I guess?) But looking over that post from 2017 again I find I am now much more skeptical of all the people who say that homelessness could be solved for $23 billion/year or whatever.
Inline links: I complained that, estimated at ~$500 billion
But polls did pretty badly last election. ”Least accurate in 40 years”, said Politico. On average they overestimated Biden’s support by four points, maybe because Republicans distrust pollsters and refuse to answer their questions. Might the same thing be happening this year? If so, does it give Republicans reason for optimism?
Inline links: said Politico
. . . a few key vote updates in competitive states were unusually large in size and had an unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratio. We demonstrate the results differ enough from expected results to be cause for concern.
For example, here’s the voting count record in Wisconsin, where Biden eventually won by a smidgen:
You notice a sudden and suspicious spike in Biden votes around 11-04 04; Vote Pattern Analysis suggests this demonstrates fraud.
Even in the unlikely scenario where AI causes a singularity and remains aligned, I have trouble worrying too much about races. The whole point of a singularity is that it’s hard to imagine what happens on the other side of it. I care a lot how much relative power Xi Jinping, Mark Zuckerberg, and Joe Biden have today, but I don’t know how much I care about them after a singularity.
“Wouldn’t Joe Biden overregulate small business?” There won’t be small business! If you want to build a customized personal utopian megastructure, you won’t hire a small business, you’ll just say “AI, build me a customized personal utopian megastructure” and it will materialize in front of you. Probably you should avoid doing this in a star system someone else owns, but there will be enough star systems to go around. If people insist on having an economy for old time’s sake, you can just build a Matrioshka brain the size of Jupiter, ask it which policies are good for the economy, then do those ones.
And yeah, that “they’re not actively a sadist” clause is doing a lot of work. I want whoever rules the post-singularity future to have enough decency to avoid ruining it, and to take the Jupiter-sized brain’s advice when it has some. I think any of Xi, Biden, or Zuckerberg meet this low bar. There are some ideologues and terrible people who don’t, but they seem far away from the cutting edge of AI.
It’s fascinating that even after a year of very bad publicity, Musk remains most respected (although maybe this is just because he’s on a list of “political figures” without being a politician, and people hate politicians?). But it’s equally interesting that Trump and DeSantis both do better than any liberal. Did this poll just oversample conservatives? I don’t think so - its relative ratings line up pretty well with RCP, except for Trump, who RCP has about as low as Biden. I think more likely conservatives actually like Trump and DeSantis, whereas liberals merely tolerate Biden and Clinton, and this gives them a bigger favorability advantage than election results would suggest.
Inline links: line up pretty well with RCP
“Everyone says that negative polarization is a stronger force than positive. People might like Biden a little, but they really really hate Trump. It’s the same with writers. You might have some online pundits who you like, but you probably have more who you hate, and the hate is stronger. Until now, Substack was only able to profit off the liking - a certain cut of every paid subscription. Well, that’s why we’re introducing the antisubscription. You pay Substack the same amount as a subscription, and it neutralizes the subscription of one supporter. The blogger ends out with zero. If 10,000 people subscribe to Bari Weiss, and 4,000 people antisubscribe to her, then on net Bari gets paid for 6,000 subscriptions.”
Pratik Chougule leads the Coalition for Political Forecasting, a pro-prediction-market lobbying group. He discussed the CFTC’s recent decision, which was less about the normal factors and more about CFTC bureaucrats’ concern that they would be put in a situation where they had to determine election results. Suppose that Biden beats Trump in 2024, and Trump claims there was election fraud. Normally this is a problem for Congress, election regulators, the courts, the media, and the American people. But if there are election prediction markets, then election fraud would indirectly become a type of financial fraud, and now it is also a problem for the CFTC. I think this is a stretch - one could easily frame the question as “will such-and-such a source certify Biden as the winner of the 2024 election?” and then any fraud is already priced in - but I guess this isn’t how CFTC thinks.
Inline links: Coalition for Political Forecasting
I sometimes describe myself as “quasi-libertarian”. On most political issues, I try to err on the side of more freedom, and I think markets are pretty great. But I really don’t care about taxes, I have only the faintest idea how guns work, I voted for Obama, Hillary, and Biden, and I find the sort of people who go to Libertarian Party meetings to be weird aliens. Am I a libertarian or not? This is why I just say “quasi-libertarian”.
Related: in case you’re wondering how much Biden’s latest Venezuela deal is worth:
15: Ancient Germanic kingdoms used to devise mythical genealogies linking their royal families to Odin. And lots of ethnically-Northern-European people are descended from ancient Germanic kings. Combine these facts, and you can chart the 55-generation line of descent from Odin to Joe Biden. I think this has actually made me 0.0001% prouder to be an American. The bottom of the chart is Joe Biden’s real relatives, and the top is the real mythological line of Anglo-Saxon kings, but is the middle accurate? I notice it traces Biden’s ancestry much further than most credible articles on the subject, which go up to the Taylors at best. But it seems to be drawing off of this genealogy database. If there’s a fake step in there somewhere, I can’t tell where it is [UPDATE: in the comments, The Genealogian identifies the fake steps]
Inline links: the 55-generation line of descent from Odin to Joe Biden, this genealogy database, The Genealogian identifies the fake steps
20: In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t.
Inline links: is now a crime
Would it be trivial to rewrite this joke for an American audience? Certainly the basic structure would carry over nicely (it would end with Biden nuking Missouri). But I don’t know how to capture the ambiguity of “any city in the west”.
And Johnson chronicles other problems with them. For example, long after the media called the 2020 election for Biden, PredictIt held on to a ~9% chance of a Trump landslide so massive it could not possibly have occurred even if he won all of his voting fraud challenges. Betting sites favored Biden to win all swing states, but Trump to win overall. The whole thing was a mess.
The latest round of polls shows voters preferring Trump to Biden in 2024:
Biden’s popularity has been going down since the beginning of 2023:
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
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
Let’s start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the biggest political story of the past four years was Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade and gave final decision-making power on abortion back to the states. How would a second Biden administration treat this issue? Do you think states should be setting policy on abortion?
Alexander: President Biden, your position?
Alexander: Wow, I’m having a hard time finding any real points of disagreement tonight. Let’s stay on cultural issues, where I know the two of you have clashed before. President Biden, a lot of conservatives are worried that your administration promotes “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. What do you have to say to them?
In normal times, I wouldn’t blame him for this. Every early-stage dementia patient (and their family and friends) always tells themselves (and everyone else) that they’re fine. It’s an easy thing to think, there’s never a clear bright-line where things obviously stop being fine, and the charade saves them from having to confront horrifying questions about their own mortality. When I start getting demented, I plan to also insist I’m fine, and you guys will just have to cope with whatever incomprehensible garbage ends up on this blog. But Joe Biden and his family have the future of the country in the balance. They need to step up and do the hard thing.
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.
2: Related: some Democrat friends have asked me to signal-boost this post they wrote about why and how to help get Biden to step down (basically: other candidates do better in adjusted head-to-head polls; calling your representative will help).
Inline links: signal-boost this post they wrote
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.
31: Well, Harris has finally replaced Biden. Let this be a lesson to all the commenters who told me that the Democratic Party was rudderless and didn’t have enough shadowy elites to enforce obviously-correct actions. What bothers me most about this whole thing was how good some of the reporting right after the debate was - suddenly we had detailed profiles of how many times Biden had slipped up when, who was hiding it from us, which aides were more interested in continuing to deny it vs. coming clean, what their motives were, et cetera. So why didn’t we have it a few months earlier, when it could have done more good? Either the sources refused to talk until it was officially popular to talk about, or the reporters refused to listen until same. Either way, it’s a good reminder that although the media very rarely lies, the impression it gives about any topic depends at least as much on its current popularity as on the ground-level facts.
Following widespread and blatant fraud in the 2020 election, endorsed as legitimate by the media, Donald Trump pretended to surrender power to Joe Biden. In reality, though, he retained the support of the U.S. military, and continues to exercise presidential power from a secret bunker at Mar-a-Lago.
Inline links: retained the support
Joe Biden, who is not really president and perhaps not really Joe Biden either, is somehow still exerting dictatorial powers over much of America, assisted by Deep State-aligned government agencies like the IRS, the FBI, and of course, FEMA. Any time there is a natural disaster, Trump-loyal military forces do battle with FEMA operatives. These battles have killed hundreds.
Inline links: do battle
But I don’t just need to guess based on comments and donation messages. In this realm, I can appeal to personal experience. I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers constantly. We get emails from people who confidently insist the public-facing news of the day is fake, and the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed. At public Q&A events, we’ve fielded questions from genuinely nervous and worried people, who complain about their friends losing hope and being blackpilled by the news, and want to know why there hasn’t been more effort to share what’s “really” going on. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on. Somehow and someway, a lot of people believe or half-believe or badly want to believe this stuff. And where a lot of people do anything, there are takeaways to be found! In my three-plus years of reading all news that is both real and raw, here is what I’ve found. Conspiracies Evolve Like Comic Book Lore In his review of the Alexander Romance, Scott remarked that figures like Alexander the Great or Hercules were, essentially, the pre-modern versions of Batman: Stories about them are a genre, with countless different variations and stylistic choices that evolve over time, with just a few set principles guiding all of them. The Real Raw Newsiverse, and other modern conspiracy theories, also function like comic book lore. Just like Batman, and just like Hercules, “Donald Trump” has become a genre. Fake news stories about him and his Deep State enemies have a few core premises (adrenochrome, pedophile cabals, there is a Plan and we should Trust It) but endless room for variation past that point. Fans of comic books, soap operas, or The Simpsons might be familiar with something TVTropes calls “comic book time.” Certain facets of a fictional reality are locked in place, and with the passage of time everything else is gradually retconned to maintain the status quo. In season 2 of the Simpsons, Homer and Marge started dating in 1974, in Season 3 Marge becomes pregnant with Bart in 1980 (after a date watching The Empire Strikes Back), and in season 4 it’s revealed that Homer missed the Moon Landing to listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Tragically, though, The Simpsons kept going past season 10, and if Homer was 18 in 1974 that would make him eligible for a full Social Security benefit today. So in 2008, the continuity changed so that Homer was in a Nineties grunge band just before marrying Marge8. The Simpsons writers have avoided rejiggering the canon since, but if they do, they’ll have to confront the fact that 30-something Homer and Marge are now millennials, and in a decade they’ll be members of Gen Z. You may live to see a Simpsons flashback episode about Homer and Marge living as hipsters in Brooklyn during the 2010s (truly, we live in cursed times.) But the same phenomenon exists in the world of conspiracies. Instead of a consistent, elaborate canon, what we have is a few story beats with a lot of customization and the occasional retcon. When Baxter first began posting his stories, a core part of the narrative was that Donald Trump still secretly had all the powers of the presidency and was still in command of the entire U.S. military command. Early articles promised that Trump’s apparent loss of office was only a temporary ruse, necessary to expose the worst elements of the Deep State, but that Trump’s triumphal return to power would take place by July 4, 2021. The national media might have put on a song and dance suggesting otherwise, but behind the scenes, loyal military forces were the real ones in control. This control even extended to the military helpfully house-sitting the White House and not letting Biden use it. Despite his illegitimate victory, Biden met an unwelcome surprise when he arrived at the White House on January 20. Instead of getting a ceremonial greeting, he and Kamala Harris were stopped by National Guard and U.S. Marines at the barbwire fence encircling the White House. The Marines informed them that the military had assumed control of the Executive Branch and instructed them to vacate the area. When Harris belligerently said, “Move aside, we’re president now,” the Marines locked the gate. […] To avoid shame and maintain an illusion of power, Biden’s people concocted a ruse, supported by his media allies, to deceive the American public into believing he had won a fair election and had moved into the White House on schedule. Inside Actor/Producer Tyler Perry’s 300-acre Atlanta estate sits a three-story stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, which he originally built as a set piece for a television show. […] Although the replicant White House is built to 80% scale, on television and in images it’s indistinguishable from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and Harris have been using the facsimile to feign leadership and impose despotic rule on the nation. Of course, July 4 came and went, with Trump’s return nowhere to be seen, so the canon simply updated: In the new narrative, the military had been conducting a year-long election fraud audit on Trump’s behalf, the results were nearly ready for public release, and Trump’s return would simply be “swift.” But no swift return has transpired, and so as the 2024 election has approached, the lore has evolved in the direction of Trump authentically running in this election and simply reclaiming power by winning it. As time has passed, more subtle changes have had to pile up. Early on, RRN reported that Joe Biden was a brain dead semi-corpse being held at Walter Reed, and any public appearances by “Biden” were one of several actors. But after four years of Let’s Go Brandon, Biden himself has become a more popular villain, and so quietly references to his brain-dead status have disappeared. In the early days of RRN, the military was firmly behind Trump and any implication that Biden held the powers of commander-in-chief was a media-fueled sham. But as time has passed, Trump being the “real” commander-in-chief over a loyal military has evolved into a reality where there are two American militaries, a “White Hat” faction loyal to Trump and “Black Hats” loyal to Biden. Early stories implied the White Hats were more numerous, but recent stories have implied the opposite, with the White Hats an elite force that often wins battles decisively while badly outnumbered. A secret purge has gradually become a secret civil war, specifically one with frequent war crimes: White Hat forces in Maui have eradicated or repelled all but a handful of the felonious FEMA agents who began terrorizing the tropical paradise in the aftermath of the inexplicable blaze that razed Lahaina and surrounding towns in early August, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News. Since mid-August, United States Marines have fought with FEMA patrols in Lahaina, Kaanapali, Wailuku, Maalaea, and Pukalani, and the skirmishes resulted in the deaths of approximately 475 federal goons and, alas, 34 valiant Marines. The Marines died upholding the Constitution of the United States; the feds died trying to defend the criminal Biden regime. […] “The Marines died valorously,” our source said. “We ain’t taking FEMA prisoners from the rank and file, only the key players. General Smith made it clear it’s weapons-free. Those bastards know damn well they’re following unlawful orders, and they’ll pay the price.” I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal). What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people. Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile. Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero. I actually think the reverse side of this explains things like the durability of Russiagate: If you’re a normal American liberal, everything Trump says is offensive and piggish, but to justify their level of disdain for them, many needed to elevate his evil to the level of treason, even if that never really made any sense. It can't just be that Trump is an egotistical jerk or a narcissist or whatever. He's got to be a traitor who's going to end American democracy. People Crave Extreme, Over-the-Top, and Underhanded Solutions. At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial. The law simplified the procedures of the country’s Revolutionary Tribunal by: Defining a whole heap of activities as criminal treason, including “creating scarcity,” disparaging the National Convention, “inspiring discouragement,” and spreading fake news.
Polymarket (and prediction markets in general) had an amazing Election Night. They called states impressively early and accurately, kept the site stable through what must have been incredible strain, and have successfully gotten prediction markets in front of the world (including the Trump campaign). From here it’s a flywheel; victory building on victory. Enough people heard of them this election that they’ll never lack for customers. And maybe Trump’s CFTC will be kinder than Biden’s and relax some of the constraints they’re operating under. They’ve realized the long-time rationalist dream of a widely-used prediction market with high volume, deserve more praise than I can give them here, and I couldn’t be happier with their progress.
Inline links: Polymarket, called states impressively early and accurately, including the Trump campaign
As we speak, PredictIt says there’s a 7% chance that Kamala Harris will be the next President. Commenters are debating whether maybe Biden will resign in her favor so she can get to be “first woman president” for a few months. But long after Biden won the last election, PredictIt said there was a 9% chance Trump would be the next President; some commenters suggested that maybe he would #StopTheSteal and win a fair recount (aside from the inherent implausibility of this, some of the specific scenarios bettors placed money on required him to win California, where his campaign hadn’t even asked for a recount).
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
Eventually at some age, Biden is likely to get dementia, and the chance gets higher the older he gets.
Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims. If Muslims hate Biden for being too pro-Israel, but Trump is even more pro-Israel, should they vote Trump instead of Biden to prove that Biden needs them?
Inline links: Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims
Homeowners want to preserve or increase the value of their houses. Of these, I think 6 is one of the less important ones - if this were the dominating factor, people would support upzoning, since it usually raises the value of properties in the upzone (if developers can build skyscrapers on your land, then your land value goes up relative to the profitability of skyscrapers). But part of the problem is that people don’t support upzoning. So 6 can’t be the dominating factor. Without POSIWID, people could think about all of these possibilities and come to their own conclusions. POSIWID tries to ban thinking about 1-5 by fiat, insisting that 6 is the only possible explanation and anyone considering the others is naive. I think this makes it a bad heuristic. But there are two more concerning things about how Negating is using POSIWID. First, he’s picking out one particularly salient thing the system does (raise house prices) and claim that’s “the” purpose. He could equally well pick any of the other results - preserve neighborhood character, protect the environment, help Chinese people escape currency controls. Like I said in the original post, in practice POSIWID serves as justification for paranoia - whatever effect you like least, whatever possibility would be most sinister - that’s the one that the system is intentionally aiming for. Second, he’s saying it’s the purpose of “the” system. Which system? I bet whatever government he’s talking about has some organization called the Affordable Housing Bureau, or whatever. And I bet that the Affordable Housing Bureau really does make housing slightly more affordable, relative to the counterfactual where it doesn’t exist. It’s just that lots of other government, market, and social forces conspire to make it much less affordable. If Negating were to claim “The purpose of the Affordable Housing Bureau is to make housing less affordable”, this would be false even if the overall picture (the government is deliberately raising real estate prices) were true. Brad writes: I have to toss in Pournelle's Iron Law. The purpose of a system - when it is first established - may be dramatically different from the purpose it assumes after a few years. Consider: You establish a system to solve a problem. That could be homelessness, or asylum, or drug abuse, or any of a number of other things. This system employs people, who then have an automatic interest - not in solving the problem - but in prolonging it, even in making it worse. After all, without the problem, the organization would not need to exist. And hwold writes: I see it used as "if you have a complex system/bureaucracy to solve X, then the incentives inside it is for X to get worse, and incentives will not have 0 influence on outcomes" For example : https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1906042672499864034 I think this sounds profound on first glance, and it’s probably true in some cases. But it’s not nearly true enough to be an Iron Law. Try to think about it in specific Near Mode cases: If you eliminated police, would crime go down, because the police have an incentive to preserve crime? If you eliminated the fire department, would fires go down, because the fire department has an incentive to preserve fire? If you eliminated doctors, would cancer deaths go down, because doctors have an incentive to preserve cancer deaths? If you eliminated the FDA, would dangerous drug side effects go down, because the FDA has an incentive to preserve dangerous drug side effects? If you eliminated the Federal Reserve, would bank runs go down, because the Federal Reserve has an incentive to preserve bank runs? Brad’s original comment mentions homelessness and drug abuse, but I know some drug abuse doctors, and they’re (mostly) good people who do their best in a tough situation. Drug abuse doesn’t continue because drug abuse doctors are secretly ensuring it continues to help their bottom line. Drug abuse continues because fentanyl is really, really addictive. Even good conspiracy theories don’t work like this. Was there a conspiracy among pain pill manufacturers to addict people? Yeah, kinda, although I think the degree to which this caused the opioid crisis is pretty overblown. But the pain pill manufacturers weren’t a system dedicated to preventing addiction. They did their job (reduce pain) fine, then ran an unrelated evil conspiracy on the side! Breb writes: This way of thinking may result from taking a strategy for predicting the motives of individuals, and using it to predict the motives of organisations. "Cui bono?" works when you're considering a single action carried out by a single person at a single moment in time, but it doesn't really work when you're considering the behaviour of hundreds of people who are incentivised to somewhat-but-not-perfectly cooperate over a long period to somewhat-but-not-perfectly implement a goal that was established by someone who somewhat-but-not-perfectly understands that that goal is just an instrument to attain a larger, more complex goal set by somebody else. I’m against this for individuals too! There are a million self-help gurus who try to convince you that that if you procrastinate - let’s say you always do term papers the night before and get terrible grades and it’s threatening your ability to complete college - then it must be because this secretly benefits you in some way. Maybe your overly-strict father wants you to complete college, and you’re deliberately trying to fail as a secret act of rebellion against him hidden even from yourself. Although something like this might sometimes be true, more often a clearer understanding of the circuitry involved (in this case, hyperbolic discounting) saves you from these labyrinths and lets you think about things straightforwardly again. Tom J writes: In the original Stafford Beer sense, the slogan POSIWID means that you can't tell from outside the system whether any given behaviour was *intended* or not. For the purposes of objective analysis, you have to treat your system as a black box that *does* whatever it's observed to do, as opposed to what people *claim* the point of the system is. This may be true in cybernetics. Or it may be an interesting methodological commitment, in the same way that the behaviorists’ “assume there is no such thing as human interiority” was an interesting methodological commitment. But I don’t think it’s common or valuable in normal-life analysis of social systems. When Biden bans NVIDIA from sending advanced chips to China, black box analysis would have to be ambivalent between explanations like: Biden personally hates Jensen Huang and wants his company to suffer
Inline links: writes, writes, https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1906042672499864034, writes, hyperbolic discounting, writes
Biden personally hates Jensen Huang and wants his company to suffer
Biden thinks NVIDIA produces bad chips and wants to save China from buying inferior products.
11: Update on Ozempocalypse: some pharmacies have stopped selling compounded GLP-1 drugs, others continue, with various flimsy legal excuses. Cremieux has a guide (partly subscriber-only) on how to order and use cheap “research chemical” GLP-1 from from peptide companies. And the Trump administration cancelled a Biden initiative to make GLP-1 drugs available via insurance.
19: T Greer on Trump’s flip-flopping Ukraine-Russia policy (X): “Every administration since Clinton comes in determined to reset US-Russian relations, to clear away old legacies and bad blood. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump I, even Biden. It is the swampiest of all swampy ideas, resetting relations with the Russians. It never works.”
Obviously, if you know economics, you know the cost of things going down would be bad, and that your own salary going up is due as much to economic forces as anything, but you can’t fix sentiment errors like this by sitting the whole country down and having an economics lesson (indeed, I’d argue biden tried that).
And some of his commentary was good. He was one of the first people to point out the classic Trump overreach, where he would say something like “Sleepy Joe Biden let in twenty trillion illegal immigrants!” The liberal media would take the bait and say “FACT CHECK: False! - Joe Biden only let in five million illegal immigrants!”, and thousands of people who had never previously been exposed to any narrative-threatening information would think “Wait, Joe Biden let in five million illegal immigrants?!” Once you notice it, it’s hard to unsee.
There are two ways to make historically good predictions. The first way is to be some kind of brilliant superforecaster. Adams wasn’t this. Every big prediction he made after this one failed. Wikipedia notes that he dominated a Politico feature called “The Absolute Worst Political Prediction of 20XX”, with the authors even remarking that he “has managed to appear on this annual roundup of the worst predictions in politics more than any other person on the planet”. His most famous howler was that if Biden won in 2020, Republicans “would be hunted” and his Republican readers would “most likely be dead within a year”. But other highlights include “a major presidential candidate will die of COVID”, “the Supreme Court will overturn the 2024 election”, and “Hillary Clinton will start a race war”.
Inline links: The Absolute Worst Political Prediction of 20XX
Backlinks
- 2020 Predictions: Calibration Results
- 2024 election
- 538
- 538
- @slatestarcodex
- Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument
- Alex Tabarrok
- Alexander the Great
- Anatoly Karlin
- Anthony Fauci
- Antonin Scalia
- AstraZeneca
- atheists
- Audrey Tang
- Bari Weiss
- Bayes’ Theorem
- Bernie
- Betfair
- Bibi
- Biden administration
- Bill Gates
- black Americans
- BLM
- Book Review: Why We’re Polarized
- Books: C
- Books: D
- Books: H
- Books: R
- Books: S
- Books: T
- Books: U
- Books: Y
- Brands
- Bride Of Bay Area House Party
- BTC
- Byrne Hobart
- cancel culture
- Castro
- CFTC
- Charles Lehman
- Chicago Principles
- Taiwan conflict
- Chinese people
- Civil War
- Clinton
- CNN
- Coinbase
- Concepts: 0-9
- Concepts: A
- Concepts: B
- Concepts: C
- Concepts: D
- Concepts: E
- Concepts: H
- Concepts: I
- Concepts: J
- Concepts: L
- Concepts: M
- Concepts: N
- Concepts: O
- Concepts: P
- Concepts: R
- Concepts: S
- Concepts: T
- Concepts: V
- Concepts: W
- Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were Mispriced
- Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
- Contra Hanania On Partisanship
- Court packing
- COVID vaccine
- CPI
- crypto
- CSPI
- Dan Schwarz
- Daniel Reeves
- Dave Barry
- David Shor
- Democrat
- Democrat
- Democratic Party
- Democrats
- Democrats
- Dow
- Dustin Moskovitz
- EA Forum
- Edward Luttwak
- Elizabeth Warren
- Emmanuel Macron
- EPA
- Ethereum
- Ethereum
- Events: 0-9
- Events: A
- Events: C
- Events: N
- Events: O
- Events: R
- Events: S
- Events: T
- Events: W
- FBI
- Federal Reserve
- Films
- First Sigma
- fluvoxamine
- Fox
- FOX
- Frederick Douglass
- FutureSearch
- Gamestop
- George W. Bush
- GK Chesterton
- Glen Weyl
- Glenn Greenwald
- Good Judgment
- Grading My 2021 Predictions
- Guam
- Gurdjieff
- Hanania
- Hans Rosling
- Hari Seldon
- Highlights From The Comments On March Links
- Highlights From The Comments On Orban
- Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
- Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
- Hillary
- Hillary Clinton
- House
- Illuminati
- Industrial Revolution
- INFER
- Infinite Jest
- Instagram Accounts
- Instead Of Pledging To Change The World, Pledge To Change Prediction Markets
- Palestine conflict
- Jair Bolsonaro
- James Grugett
- January 6th
- Javier Milei
- Joe Biden
- Kamala Harris
- Karger
- Koch Brothers
- Larry Summers
- Links For April
- Links For April 2025
- Links For January 2024
- Links for July 2024
- Links For May 2023
- Links For November
- Links For October
- Links For October 2025
- Lorien
- LSD
- Lula
- Luria
- Lyman Stone
- MAGA
- Manifold.love
- 24
- 22
- 23
- 15
- 23
- 24
- 24
- 22
- Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
- Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y
- Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021
- Mar-a-Lago
- Marvel
- Marx
- Matt Bruenig
- Matt Taibbi
- Matt Yglesias
- Maxim Lott
- mechanism design
- media
- Metamask
- Milei
- Mississippi
- Moloch
- Montreal Night Of Terror
- moonshadow
- Most Technologies Aren’t Races
- MR
- Music
- Musk
- Muslims
- My 2024 Presidential Debate
- Nancy
- Nancy Pelosi
- NBC
- Netanyahu
- Newsom
- Nixonland
- Noahpinion
- NOW
- NYT
- Obama
- Ohlone
- Oklahoma
- Open Thread
- Open Thread 337
- Organizations: 0-9
- Organizations: A
- Organizations: C
- Organizations: D
- Organizations: E
- Organizations: F
- Organizations: G
- Organizations: H
- Organizations: I
- Organizations: L
- Organizations: M
- Organizations: N
- Organizations: O
- Organizations: P
- Organizations: Q
- Organizations: R
- Organizations: S
- Organizations: T
- Organizations: U
- Organizations: W
- OWID
- Ozy Brennan
- Ozzie Gooen
- Palestine
- People: A
- People: B
- People: C
- People: D
- People: E
- People: G
- People: H
- People: I
- People: J
- People: K
- People: L
- People: M
- People: N
- People: O
- People: P
- People: R
- People: S
- People: T
- People: V
- People: W
- People: X
- People: Y
- People: Z
- Pew
- Philip Tetlock
- Piketty
- Places: B
- Places: C
- Places: G
- Places: H
- Places: P
- Places: Q
- Places: S
- Places: T
- Places: U
- Places: V
- Places: W
- Politico
- Polymarket
- Prediction Markets Suggest Replacing Biden
- Predictions For 2022
- PredictIt
- President of the United States
- Publications: 0-9
- Publications: A
- Publications: B
- Publications: C
- Publications: E
- Publications: H
- Publications: L
- Publications: N
- Publications: P
- Publications: R
- Publications: S
- Publications: T
- Publications: U
- Publications: W
- QAnon
- QRI
- Quebec
- slatestarcodex
- RBG
- RCP8.5
- Republicans
- Republicans
- Reuters
- Richard Ngo
- Richard Reeves
- Roe v. Wade
- Roe v. Wade
- Ukraine war
- Russiagate
- Salvador
- San Francisco Bay Area
- Sanders
- Scientific American
- Scott Adams
- Scott Sumner
- Scout Mindset
- Senate
- Shingles vaccine
- Simone Collins
- slatestarcodex
- Slow Boring
- social media
- Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
- Sonia Sotomayor
- Sora
- Soros
- Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
- South Carolina
- SSC
- Star Wars
- Starlink
- Starship
- State of the Union
- Statement on New York Times Article
- Stephen Grugett
- Steve Jobs
- Stormy Daniels
- Subscrive Drive ‘25 + Free Unlocked Posts
- Substack
- Substack
- Swift Centre
- technocracy
- Ted Cruz
- The Dilbert Afterlife
- Tokyo Olympics
- Trevor Klee
- Trump
- Trump campaign
- Tucker Carlson
- Tumblr
- Ukraine Warcasting
- Universe-Hopping Through Substack
- University of Austin
- Unsong
- US government
- US Naval Institute
- Venues: A
- Venues: M
- Venues: S
- Vitamin D
- Vox
- warfarin
- Warren
- WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise
- West Bank
- Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy
- Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster?
- White House
- White House
- Xi Jinping
- Yang
- Yglesias
- YouGov
- Your Book Review: Real Raw News
- Your Name Was Changed At Ellis Island
- Zvi Mowshowitz