Donald Trump

Article

Donald Trump is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 57 times across 57 issues between February 05, 2021 and March 11, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “ended up choosing Donald Trump as the best person”; “Donald Trump president”; “we elected Donald Trump president”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Twitter, United States.

Metadata

Category: People
Mention count: 57
Issue count: 57
First seen: February 05, 2021
Last seen: March 11, 2026

Appears In

- Trump (30 shared issues)
- Twitter (25 shared issues)
- United States (14 shared issues)
- Elon Musk (13 shared issues)
- US (13 shared issues)
- Google (12 shared issues)
- Israel (12 shared issues)
- New York Times (12 shared issues)
- America (11 shared issues)
- Joe Biden (11 shared issues)
- California (10 shared issues)
- COVID (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.

WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise

February 05, 2021 · Original source

Obviously the best case scenario would be that Zvi or whoever was the expert, and could have done what they did, only earlier. But this is assuming away the entire problem. What's the best form of government? Benevolent dictatorship, obviously, just get the best person in the country and let her fix everything. But everyone realizes this is easier said than done; the procedure to pick the best person is corruptible. At one point we tried a very simple best-person-picking procedure that really should have worked and ended up choosing Donald Trump as the best person. I'm still not really sure what went wrong there, but apparently this is really hard.

What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top. Wrong. People who most brutally and nakedly optimized for power would gain power; that's what "optimize" means. The interesting thing about the current system is that, after millions of very smart and altruistic people have contributed to it over generations, sometimes gaining and keeping power within it is modestly correlated with being good and right. The Director of the CDC isn't a COVID denialist. She's probably not even going to endorse Lysenkoism, at least not literally. That's because our system isn't as crappy as the Stalinist one, which failed so badly that endorsing Lysenkoism became a route to career success. In fact, the last Director of the CDC disagreed with his boss (Donald Trump) in a lot of cases where his boss was wrong; that never would have happened under Stalinism, and probably wouldn't happen in whatever system you'd get after burning ours to the ground. Our system of expert-having is actually much better than we deserve, given that we elected Donald Trump president. Making it better should still be our top priority, but we shouldn't lose sight of how much we've already got.

February 08, 2021 · Original source

Polymarket is another cryptocurrency-based prediction market. It's got about two dozen contracts open, and some of them are pretty big - $5 million plus! With that kind of money, we ought to be seeing some really good predicting! We're...not. Either there's a 6% chance that Donald Trump will be president again by March 31, or something's gone wrong.

Inline links: Polymarket

Probably it's the second one. I tried to bet against Trump, but getting money into the market was pretty hard. You need USDCoins, a stablecoin related to Ethereum. Polymarket tries to let you buy them directly, but their app wanted me to give them a security code which never showed up, so I gave up on this. Instead I bought some USDC at Coinbase and tried to send them over. But along with the usual Ethereum gas fees, they have something called a relayer, which is supposed to collect my money and put it in my account. And it's apparently heavily backed up, and after two days my money is nowhere to be seen (though I believe them when they say that they're trying their hardest and it will probably percolate through the Ethereum network someday). Maybe everyone's having these kinds of issues and this is why the Trump contract hasn't adjusted? I'm not sure. I will keep you updated if my money ever materializes.

Inline links: when they say

Book Review: Fussell On Class

February 24, 2021 · Original source

It’s impossible to tell when Fussell is serious vs. joking. The section on the physiognomy of different classes has to be a joke, right? But then how did he come up with the Virgin vs. Chad meme in 1983? Also, why does my brain keep telling me these are John McCain and Donald Trump? A friend urges me to think of these not as "rich/successful people" vs. "poor/unsuccessful people", but as three different ladders on which one can rise or fall. The most successful proles are lumber barons or pro athletes or reality TV stars. These people are much richer and more powerful than, say, a schoolteacher, but they’re still proles, and the schoolteacher is still middle class. Likewise, a very successful middle class person might become a professor or a Senator or Jeff Bezos, but this doesn't make them even a bit upper class.

Baseball caps - artificial, convenient, homegrown - are apparently the prole-est thing there is. More evidence for a Trump connection? 4. Foreign things are high class, especially British things. Paul Fussell is very insistent on this point; in his "What Class Is Your Living Room?" quiz, he offers you one point for everything you have referencing the United Kingdom. He was apparently employed as a class consultant for someone designing an upper-class neighborhood, and gave everything British names with apparently good results:

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

February 25, 2021 · Original source

Aren't I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, grad students, and starving artists may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class. The upper class is a cultural phenomenon.

I hear you're having a post-Trump identity crisis. Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people. Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won; absent his personal magic it seems like a losing combination. You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you're not sure why, and you don't know how to build on this success.

Inline links: having a post-Trump identity crisis

Trump didn't win on a platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever. He won on a platform of being anti-establishment. But which establishment? Not rich people. Trump is rich, lots of his Cabinet picks were rich, practically the first thing he did was cut taxes on the rich. Some people thought that contradicted his anti-establishment message, but those people were wrong. Powerful people? Getting warmer, but Mike Pence is a powerful person and Trump wasn't against Mike Pence. Smart people? Now you're burning hot.

Highlights From The Comments On Class

March 05, 2021 · Original source

This also sparked a discussion about whether Donald Trump was “upper class”, with one person arguing in support that he owns gold toilets, and someone else responding that gold toilets are the least classy thing imaginable. Good summation of the difference between economic vs. cultural models of class!

Old money types like me will always have an honorary place in the upper classes but the other reason that the upper classes have opened up for the billionaires is that the traditional old money is in the process of drying up. Old money used to be defined as 19th century or earlier in origin, and was eventually opened to make way for the descendants of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. But with relatively few exceptions, it stopped opening up after that, and fortunes made in the latter half of the twentieth century really don't get you much status (look no further than Trump). Meanwhile those proper old money fortunes continue to get divided generation after generation so I guess it was inevitable that the billionaires with some decent taste would have to refresh the ranks.

Ambidexterity And Cognitive Closure

April 01, 2021 · Original source

First, a question asking respondents to rank their support for Donald Trump on a 1 - 5 scale. Previous studies have linked support for Trump to "right-wing authoritarianism", and although I have concerns about that exact construct, I thought it was in the spirit of the original research.

On the Trump item, the consistently-handed gave Trump a 1.63 star rating; the ambidextrous gave him 1.85. So ambidextrous people were more likely to support Donald Trump, p = 0.049 (I realize how bad that p-value looks, but check the publicly available data yourself if you don't believe me - though you may get slightly different results since a few people asked that they be excluded from the public data).

Inline links: check the publicly available data yourself

The second possibility is that I ran into a Lizardman Effect. Ambidexterity, supporting Donald Trump, and being Marxist were all uncommon positions in my survey. The sort of uncommon answers that trolls might endorse to confuse people, or that somebody who wasn’t taking the survey seriously might put down randomly in a rush to finish. We should expect a very small level of correlation between all uncommon positions just because of this effect. I’m eyeballing this as bigger than the Lizardman Effect alone usually gets us, but I don’t know how to prove that.

Inline links: Lizardman Effect

Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions

April 19, 2021 · Original source

I had many opinions on Donald Trump. I tried to back some of those opinions up with predictions about what would happen during his administration. Now that the dust has cleared, it's time to see how I did.

21. Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination: 60%

There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars

May 10, 2021 · Original source

I'm not sure when racial issues completely eclipsed gender-related ones, but it must have happened by 2016. Consider: Hillary Clinton, a historic first woman candidate. Her opponent, Donald Trump, a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct by "at least 23 women since the 1980s", and who was caught on tape saying he liked to "grab [women] by the pussy". While this angle wasn't exactly ignored, it took obvious back burner to a massive and coverage-dominating debate over the possibility that Trump might be racist, based mostly on his position about immigration plus a few ambiguous remarks that he later denied meaning.

The term rose to prominence on August 26, 2016, when Hillary Clinton gave a major speech declaring the online alt-right to be a growing threat. This was obviously a ploy to link her opponent, Donald Trump, to a growing threat, but the ploy worked, and everyone agreed they were threatening.

Eight years earlier, John McCain was running for President. He had previously told reporters "I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live," and never apologized or backed down. And he was running against the first black major-party presidential candidate. And the media still couldn't really muster up the effort to accuse him of racism in any kind of meaningful way. Meanwhile, Trump could have gone on stage wearing an "ASK ME ABOUT MY SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS" t-shirt, and every single question would have been about race.

Your Book Review: Humankind

May 28, 2021 · Original source

Hold on, hold on," I hear you say, "why are we comparing adult apes to human toddlers? Our success is down to the capabilities of our adults - we're not led by toddlers, at least not since Donald Trump was voted out." (I'm allowed to be snide about your previous choice of president without actually understanding the issues at stake, just like you're allowed to be snide about Brexit without actually understanding the issues at stake.)

August 02, 2021 · Original source

There is a lot to dislike about Nigerian megachurches. The pastor of the Redemption organization, Enoch Adeboye, owns somewhat more private jets than you would expect from a humble man of God. And another Nigerian megapastor, Chris Oyakhilome, is known for spreading such Scripturally-inspired truths as “5G causes COVID”. The whole movement is inextricably linked to the Prosperity Gospel, which (although I am not a theologian) does not seem very Biblically accurate. They’re not subtle about it either - one of the top megachurches is called Winners Chapel (surprisingly, Donald Trump has yet to join).

Inline links: known for spreading, Winners Chapel

Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story

August 08, 2021 · Original source

I know anger looks bad, and I try hard not to sound angry, and I think I succeed really amazingly well. You have no idea how non-angry I can sound about malaria killing millions of people, or climate change killing millions of people, or Donald Trump, or Xi Jinping, or all sorts of other terrible things and people. Overall given how enraging the world is, I think I’m doing a really commendable job of not sounding angry all the time. But everyone fails on something and for me it’s this.

There is also an anti-police blogosphere, an anti-Trump blogosphere, and an anti-North-Korea blogosphere. Sometimes people form a blogosphere against a thing because it is bad. One of the people in the anti-FDA blogosphere is that guy who lost his intestine because the FDA delayed his drug for five months arguing about a warning label. People get angry when the FDA almost kills them. Then they write pieces about their anger. I’ve never had the FDA almost kill me personally, but I have had it hobble my efforts to help some really desperate patients who I’ve grown kind of attached to over the years, and yeah, that also makes me angry. If your response is “this comes from an angry person so I can ignore it”, I think you will miss a lot of important stories, not just FDA-related ones.

Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts

September 06, 2021 · Original source

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

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

Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography

September 14, 2021 · Original source

In my review of Art Of The Deal, I quoted Donald Trump's advice on dealing with reporters:

Inline links: my review

I have a friend who studied the history of fascism. She gets angry when people call Trump (or some other villain du jour) fascist. "Words have meanings! Fascism isn't just any right-winger you dislike!" Maybe she takes this a little too far; by a strict definition, she's not even sure Franco qualifies.

Both are much more similar to each other than either to Trump. Nobody thought Trump was honestly religious, and nobody thought he was a beacon of ascetism and non-corruption. I was going to add that Trump never had any history as a competent regional administrator, but I guess people who believed his reality show persona believed he was an unusually skilled businessman, which maybe ticks that box. He didn't shed a far-right image to appeal to center-right capitalists - he kind of did the reverse - but maybe the fundamental nature of the Republican Party did that balancing act for him.

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

September 17, 2021 · Original source

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

Or is this ignoring fundamental asymmetries? The Right can (sometimes) muster up trust in Donald Trump and Fox News, but they still seem pretty Border. Meanwhile, the center-left is celebrating mainstream journalists and universities and experts with a vigor that seems perhaps more desperate, but no less intense, than in the 20th century. Perhaps this will change; the Right could swing back to being Romneycrats, and Bernie and AOC could still take over the left. But so far it doesn't look that way. Maybe the occasional tendency of the US to switch party systems has captured the center-vs-border conflict and subsumed it into the broader left-right one.

Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions, scientific progress was slowing down, poverty remained as troubling as ever, and 50% of public school students stubbornly stayed below average. But the media trusted the government, the people trusted the media, and failures got swept under the rug by genteel agreement among friendly elites, while the occasional successes were trumpeted from the rooftops.

Links For September

September 20, 2021 · Original source

10: A while ago I linked Glenn Greenwald’s claim that (contra most media sources), the bungled clearing of Lafayette Park in Washington DC wasn’t President Trump’s fault. Many commenters argued that it was, or at least that Greenwald’s argument was overly simplistic. I was finally able to find a good article making the anti-Trump case in full, which I link here in penance: Trump’s False Lafayette Square Exoneration. At this point I’m at the “sounds really complicated, don’t care enough to sort this one out” phase.

Inline links: Trump’s False Lafayette Square Exoneration

29: Study shows Donald Trump is grumpy when he does not get enough sleep. Being an important enough figure that scientists study you personally sounds exhausting.

Inline links: Donald Trump is grumpy when he does not get enough sleep

Highlights From The Comments On Orban

November 11, 2021 · Original source

Another is to be Donald Trump. Go against elite opinion, have all of the elites hate you, and - realistically - don’t accomplish very much. When you try to accomplish something, the courts will declare it unconstitutional, the media will attack it, and academic experts will say the evidence is against it. You can ram the government really hard against all these other institutions and try to break past by sheer inertia, but it’s a tough battle.

Several people pointed out reasons why Orban’s wall worked but Trump’s wouldn’t. E Dincer writes:

Inline links: E Dincer

1) Unlawful entry only accounts for a small portion of illegal immigration in the US, with most immigrants entering legally and overstaying their visas. [This article](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/real-immigration-crisis-people-overstaying-their-visas/587485/) was the first Trump-era hit on the subject I found on Google. As far as I can tell, the current numbers are similar, with there being about double the number of visa overstays annually as unlawful entries. Obviously a wall would only affect unlawful entry.

Inline links: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/real-immigration-crisis-people-overstaying-their-visas/587485/

Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

November 17, 2021 · Original source

Source. Real data would follow something like a bell curve. This is going to require a social norm of always sharing data. Even better, journals should require the raw data before they publish anything, and should make it available on their website. People are going to fight hard against this, partly because it’s annoying and partly because of (imho exaggerated) patient privacy related concerns. Somebody’s going to try make some kind of gated thing where you have to prove you have a PhD and a “legitimate cause” before you can access the data, and that person should be fought tooth and nail (some of the “data detectives” who figured out the ivermectin study didn’t have advanced degrees). I want a world where “I did a study, but I can’t show you the data” should be taken as seriously as “I determined P = NP, but I can’t show you the proof.” The second reason I think this, aside from checking for fraud, is checking for mistakes. I have no proof this was involved in ivermectin in particular. But I’ve been surprised how often it comes up when I talk to scientists. Someone in their field got a shocking result, everyone looked over the study really hard and couldn’t find any methodological problems, there’s no evidence of fraud, so do you accept it? A lot of times instead I hear people say “I assume they made a coding error”. I believe them, because I have made a bunch of stupid errors. Sometimes you make the errors for me - an early draft of this post of mine stated that there was an strong positive effect of assortative mating on autism, but when I double-checked it was entirely due to some idiot who filled out the survey and claimed to have 99999 autistic children. In this very essay, I almost said that a set of ivermectin studies showed a positive result because I was reading the number for whether two lists were correlated rather than whether a paired-samples t-test on the lists was significant. I think lots of studies make these kinds of errors. But even if it’s only 1%, these will make up much more than 1% of published studies, and much more than 1% of important ground-breaking published studies, because correct studies can only prove true things, but false studies can prove arbitrarily interesting hypotheses (did you know there was an increase in the suicide rate on days that Donald Trump tweeted?!?) and those are the ones that will get published and become famous. So if the lesson of the original replication crisis was “read the methodology” and “read the preregistration document”, this year’s lesson is “read the raw data”. Which is a bit more of an ask. Especially since most studies don’t make it available. The Sociological Takeaway I’ve been thinking about this one a lot too. Ivermectin supporters were really wrong. I enjoy the idea of a cosmic joke where ivermectin sort of works in some senses in some areas. But the things people were claiming - that ivermectin has a 100% success rate, that you don’t need to take the vaccine because you can just take ivermectin instead, etc - have been untenable not just since the big negative trials came out this summer, but even by the standards of the early positive trials. Mahmud et al was big and positive and exciting, but it showed that ivermectin patients recovered in about 7 days on average instead of 9. I think the conventional wisdom - that the most extreme ivermectin supporters were mostly gullible rubes who were bamboozled by pseudoscience - was basically accurate. Mainstream medicine has reacted with slogans like “believe Science”. I don’t know if those kinds of slogans ever help, but they’re especially unhelpful here. A quick look at ivermectin supporters shows their problem is they believed Science too much. @jonno_bosch I work in hospitality so I need things to return to normal ASAP. I am using Ivermectin as a prophylactic. Hugely influenced by Carvallo trail and Chala trail which showed huge protection","username":"Bannisterious","name":"Andrew Bannister","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Feb 12 16:21:14 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":0,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @mtskullcrusher @HereComeTheJud @therealjosexy @joeycadre @PeegeRiley @dcwickedestcity @blaireerskine Read Raad. Or Mahmud. Or ICON study from Florida. Or Mexico City hospitalizations study. Or Niaee. Or...\n\nOr just type \"ivermectin covid\" in Google Scholar and read.","username":"fatlas6","name":"fatlas","profile_image_url":"","date":"Thu Sep 02 21:34:59 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":1,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> They have a very reasonable-sounding belief, which is that if dozens of studies all say a drug works really well, then it probably works really well. When they see dozens of studies saying a drug works really well, and the elites saying “no don’t take it!”, their extremely natural conclusion is that it works really well but the elites are covering it up. Sometimes these people even have a specific theory for why elites are covering up ivermectin, like that pharma companies want you to use more expensive patented drugs instead. This theory is extremely plausible. Pharma companies are always trying to convince people to use expensive patented drugs instead of equally good generic alternatives. Ivermectin believers probably heard about this from the many, many good articles by responsible news outlets, discussing the many, many times pharma companies have tried to trick people into using more expensive patented medications. Like this ACSH article about Nexium. Or my article on esketamine. Given that dozens of studies said a drug worked, and elites continued to deny it worked, and there are well-known times where elites lie about drugs in order to make money, it was an incredibly reasonable inference that this was one of those times. If you have a lot of experience with pharma, you know who lies and who doesn’t, and you know what lies they’re willing to tell and which ones they shrink back from. As far as I know, no reputable scientist has ever come out and said ‘esketamine definitely works better than regular ketamine’. The regulatory system just heavily implied it. I claim that with ivermectin, even the people who don’t usually lie were saying it was ineffective, and they were saying it more directly and decisively than liars usually do. But most people can’t translate Pharma → English fluently enough to know where the space of “things people routinely lie about and nobody worries about it too much” ends. So they incredibly reasonably assume anything could be a lie. And if you don’t know which statements about pharmaceuticals are lies, “the one that has dozens of studies contradicting it” is a pretty good heuristic! If you tell these people to “believe Science”, you will just worsen the problem where they trust dozens of scientific studies done by scientists using the scientific method over the pronouncements of the CDC or whoever. So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government campaigns focusing entirely on hand-washing (HEPA filters? What are those?) Not only would a recommendation to trust experts be misleading, I don’t even think you could make it work. People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught. But also: one of the data detectives who exposed some fraudulent ivermectin papers was a medical student, which puts him somewhere between pond scum and hookworms on the Medical Establishment Totem Pole. Some of the people whose studies he helped sink were distinguished Professors of Medicine and heads of Health Institutes. If anyone interprets “trust experts” as “mere medical students must not publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes”, then we’ve accidentally thrown the fundamental principle of science out with the bathwater. But Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad, is a distinguished critical care doctor. What heuristic tells us “Medical students should be allowed to publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes” but not “Distinguished critical care doctors should be allowed to publicly challenge the CDC”? Then what about “believe statisticians”? I’ve never heard anyone propose this before, but re-centering the mystique of scientific-expertise in study-analyzers and study-aggregators rather than object-level scientists is…one way you could go, I guess. Statisticians admittedly sort of failed us here: the first several meta-analyses said ivermectin worked. But the statistical process - the idea that studies are raw materials, but it takes skill to turn them into the finished good of scientific knowledge - sort of comes out looking good. If we need to summarize our takeaway in a slogan of exactly two words, one of which is “trust”, you could do worse than this one. (am I secretly suggesting that we make rationality higher status? Maybe, although rationalists did no better here during the early phase of “looks promising so far” than anyone else, and it was researchers digging into the nitty-gritty of the data who really solved this.) Or maybe this is the wrong level on which to think about this. Maybe there isn’t and can’t be a simple heuristic you can teach everyone in school or via a PR campaign which will lead to them having making good health decisions in an adversarial information environment, without having any negative effects anywhere else. But you also don’t want people to make bad health decisions. So what do you do? The Political Takeaway All of this is complicated by the impression many people (including me) have, that ivermectin boosterism and vaccine denialism are closely linked. The ivermectin evidence is complicated. There’s room for doubt. I can maybe see room for doubt on some marginal vaccine-related issues like how seriously to take the occasional reports of myocarditis in teens. But the basic issue - that the vaccine works really well and is incredibly safe for adults - seems beyond question. Yet people keep questioning it. I think it’s important to address ivermectin support on its own terms - as a potentially plausible scientific theory in a debris field of confusing evidence, which should be debated to the usual standards of scientific debate. I’ve tried to do that above. But this picture wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging the overlap with vaccine denial - a segment of people who are completely crazy and wrong and who happen to have fixated on this mildly interesting question as opposed to some other one with even less evidence. I’ve been trying to figure out a model where ivermectin support and vaccine denialism both make visceral sense to me, and here’s what I’ve got: Imagine that in 2025, an alien invasion fleet reaches Earth. But it got hit by a supernova on the way, the spaceships are partly disabled, and they’re only able to conquer some out-of-the-way place - let’s say Australia. There’s a few cycles of conflict and cease-fire, a few cities get nuked, and finally we settle into an uneasy peace. Over the next few years, humanity grudgingly admits the invaders into the world community. They get a seat in the United Nations. We sort of cooperate with them on projects that are important to both sides, like stopping climate change. We still hate them, but only at the level of ordinary international rivalries, like USA/USSR. In 2035, the aliens announce that a quantum memetic plague from the Andromeda Sector has reached Earth. Billions of people will die unless we let them put an immunity-granting cybernetic implant in all humans’ brain. The aliens admit we haven’t always been friends, and honestly they would still like to conquer us someday. But this plague is an ancient enemy of all sentient beings, they dealt with it on their homeworld eons ago, and they want to help us out here. Humans apparently don’t have the ability to detect quantum memetic plagues, but mortality rates for over-65s do seem weirdly high this year, something like 10x worse than a normal flu season. Do you let the aliens put an implant in your brain, or not? If it helps, the aliens look like this. Surely anyone with a brain that size must know what they’re talking about, right? (source) Fine, you don’t have to decide immediately. The brain implants aren’t even ready yet. Some human scientists suggest wearing face masks in the interim. The aliens say no, that will never work, that’s not how you deal with quantum memetic plagues, if you do anything other than wait for the brain implants you’re anti-science idiots who are wasting precious time and will kill millions of people. Human nations try face masks anyway…and they clearly and conspicuously work. The aliens say whatever, we’re still the advanced spacefaring civilization here, maybe it works for humans but that’s not the point, the point is you’ve got to let us put implants in your brains. Some human scientists suggest reopening vital services. The aliens say no, millions will die, this is “mass human sacrifice”, humans apparently must care nothing about their families’ lives. The humans try reopening anyway, and…it goes kind of okay? Maybe the death rate goes up 10% to 20% or so, hard to say? The aliens say whatever, maybe their calculations were off by a few orders of magnitude, the point is, you have to let us put implants in your brain or you’ll all die. Then some human scientists suggest vaccinating against the plague. The aliens say this is idiotic, vaccines originally come from cowpox, even the word “vaccine” comes from Latin vaccus meaning “cow”, are you saying you want cow medicine instead of actual brain implants which alien Science has proven will work? They make lots of cartoons displaying humans who want vaccines as having cow heads, or rolling around in cow poop. Meanwhile, the first few dozen studies show vaccines work great. Many top human leaders, including war heroes from the struggle against the aliens, get vaccines and are seen going out in public, looking healthy and happy. The aliens say that human science is hopelessly flawed because of complicated statistical concepts that inferior life forms like us don’t even have words for. You need to ignore all the studies and meta-analyses showing that vaccines definitely work, and let the aliens give you brain implants instead. So do you let the aliens put an implant in your brain, or not? Obviously you think long and hard before doing this. And obviously this is an extended metaphor for vaccine denialism. So what’s the difference between the metaphor (where you’re presumably anti-implant) and the real world (where you’re presumably pro-vaccine?) For me, it’s a combination of: The aliens are hostile, so I don’t trust them no matter how smart they are

Inline links: Source, this post, this ACSH article about Nexium, my article on esketamine, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1UIV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F598d7d6c-de95-4b94-b13a-3c8a452b0409.jp2, source

Movie Review: Don't Look Up

January 04, 2022 · Original source

But first, the plot in a nutshell: Male Scientist and Female Scientist discover a comet will hit Earth in six months. They contact the relevant authorities, Black Scientist and Asian Scientist, and go to meet the President (who, despite being a woman, is Donald Trump). The President says scientists are always doomsaying, if people get too panicked she’ll lose the midterm election, and she’ll get around to dealing with this later.

Predictions For 2022

February 01, 2022 · Original source

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%

The Passage Of Polymarket

February 07, 2022 · Original source

Easy to create your own subsidized markets “Real money” should be self-explanatory. Metaculus and Manifold are both very nice, but so far they’re limited to a small group of enthusiasts playing in their spare time. I value them both, but neither is the killer app that makes prediction markets as central to everyday life as stock markets or polls or whatever. “Easy to use” is kind of self-explanatory, but with some caveats. A big part of ease-of-use is liquidity; you can get that from a big user base or from clever deployment of automated market makers. A market that requires crypto knowledge is harder to use than one that doesn’t; one that’s inaccessible from the US is harder to use than one that isn’t. Also all the normal things like UI and search. “Easy to create your own markets” is where we’ve gotten stuck so far. Prediction markets are absolutely on top of questions about whether Donald Trump will win various elections. This is a solved problem. What I really wanted last year (and would have subsidized!) was a market about whether Alameda County, California, would permit indoor gatherings of 50 people on January 8th 2022 (ie would I be forced to cancel my wedding). But I also would have appreciated the ability to put a few questions to prediction markets before starting my psychiatry practice, or my grants program, or any of a dozen other things I did. A friend has gone further, and half-jokingly said they want to create conditional prediction markets about whether they’re compatible with various women in our friend group, to be paid out six months after the first date. Some of these applications are attempts to route around the principal-agent problem. Maybe I have some question about whether a certain grant would succeed, I’m not sure who to ask, and even if someone gives me a “Bob Smith, Grant Evaluator” business card, I don’t know if he’s any good. A prediction market takes all the pain out of searching for information - if I subsidize it enough, it’ll attract people with the relevant skill set who will solve my problem for me. Probably some of these ideas wouldn’t work, but probably other ideas I can’t even think of now would. I don’t know what the killer app for prediction markets will be. But we’re not going to find out unless people can create their own subsidized markets and play around. Polymarket took some baby steps towards this before the settlement: they had a Discord server where anyone could propose questions, and a lot of those questions became markets. But they still had to be general interest, not “let Alice’s five friends predict her dating life”. And there’s a big difference between “talk it over with company representatives on a Discord server” and “press a button”. Imagine if you could only tweet by emailing Jack Dorsey and convincing him that your comment was a good thing to have on Twitter. Even if Jack had good judgment and approved most requests, this would be a long way from the limbic system < — > Send Tweet loop that real Twitter users know and love. I asked some people in the business why they won’t do this. They said most people are bad at writing good resolution criteria. They don’t want their employees to get stuck resolving incredibly dumb questions about people’s dating lives, hunting down inaccessible or conflicting information, and making a bunch of people mad whichever way they decide. As far as I can tell, Manifold Markets solved that problem with their “proposer decides the resolution, caveat emptor” strategy. But Manifold is US-based and can’t use real money, so there’s still no way to subsidize a market effectively. (This is why I’m pessimistic about Kalshi. They could potentially do a lot of good in the “will Afghanistan collapse?” types of markets the Nobel laureates want, though even there I think some of their betting limits will give them trouble - $25,000 is good money, but not quite good enough to incentivize founding the prediction market equivalent of a Wall Street trading firm. But even if they solve this, I can’t imagine the regulators giving them permission to host “will this grant work out?” or “how will my dating life go?” markets; it’s just too weird, and the CFTC is too conservative. I don’t know, maybe their connections will come through and pull it off, but I don’t even know if they’re ambitious enough to want this, and I hate having to rely on one organization.) Right now my hopes are, in ascending order of likelihood: Manifold figures out some kind of weird crypto thing that isn’t real money from a legal perspective, but is real money from a “people really want it and will put a lot of effort into getting it” perspective.

Inline links: Metaculus, Manifold

Links For April

April 14, 2022 · Original source

9: Scholars in Early 21st Century Studies: “Donald Trump is not a historical figure, but is actually a compilation of four distinct sources”.

Inline links: “Donald Trump is not a historical figure, but is actually a compilation of four distinct sources”

July 12, 2022 · Original source

The original case for formal forecasting grew out of pundits often being confident and wrong. And nowhere have pundits been wrong more often than when they predict that the newest scandal will end Donald Trump’s career once and for all.

I thought of this last week while reading Is Conservative Media Breaking Up With Trump? The Daily Beast argues that the revelations from the 1/6 Committee are so damaging that even previously-loyal GOP elites are starting to turn on their former master. And with DeSantis as such a tempting alternative 2024 nominee, maybe Trump is more of a liability than an asset. Is this finally the jam ol Donny Trump can’t wriggle his way out of?

Inline links: Is Conservative Media Breaking Up With Trump?

Source: KnowYourMeme I thought of this last week while reading Is Conservative Media Breaking Up With Trump? The Daily Beast argues that the revelations from the 1/6 Committee are so damaging that even previously-loyal GOP elites are starting to turn on their former master. And with DeSantis as such a tempting alternative 2024 nominee, maybe Trump is more of a liability than an asset. Is this finally the jam ol Donny Trump can’t wriggle his way out of?

Inline links: KnowYourMeme, Is Conservative Media Breaking Up With Trump?

August 16, 2022 · Original source

You know a prediction market has really made it when its insane questions about Donald Trump start getting close to zero. Insight has almost made it.

From Insight: You know a prediction market has really made it when its insane questions about Donald Trump start getting close to zero. Insight has almost made it.

Inline links: https://insightprediction.com/m/95/will-donald-trump-become-president-by-the-end-of-2022

This is pretty bizarre: Polymarket says Trump is much more likely to get the GOP nomination than DeSantis, but PredictIt said the opposite. Polymarket’s been at this level for a while, so it’s not just a week ago vs. now.

Links For September 2022

September 06, 2022 · Original source

12: Donald Trump endorsed “Eric” for a Republican primary election where three candidates were named Eric; chaos ensues.

Inline links: chaos ensues

My California Ballot 2022

November 04, 2022 · Original source

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

Nathan Hochman is a prosecutor whose message is to cut the politics and get tough on crime. He is a moderate Republican and says he opposes Donald Trump. His plans tend to sound like “you know, be tough on crime, do tough-on-crime kind of stuff”, and his most specific proposal is a massive campaign against human trafficking. I don’t want to call human trafficking “fake” in general, which would be false and offensive, but I think it is correct to round it off to fake for the specific purpose of a Californian Attorney General election, and I feel like he is insulting my intelligence by making it a central plank of his campaign.

Inline links: a massive campaign against human trafficking

Lanhee Chen has a PhD and JD from Harvard and does public policy at the Hoover Foundation at Stanford. He was apparently Mitt Romney’s economic policy advisor and served on some board of important experts that decided things about Social Security. He is against Trump and apparently wrote in Mitt Romney’s name on his 2016 ballot, which, mood.

Prediction Market FAQ

December 20, 2022 · Original source

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

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

The WHO is completely untrustworthy. I worry some people will be offended by me even considering this possibility, but sometimes things like this are clearly true. For example, the EPA seems like it should be an authoritative-seeming source on the environment. But during the Trump administration it got captured by some pretty awful people and made some official-sounding statements about how the evidence showed global warming was fake. So we do need to be prepared for authoritative-sounding sources being completely untrustworthy. And if this happens, I hope prediction markets will figure this out and discount their opinion the same as they would the tinfoil hat guy. Or, if they don’t, at least you can get rich quick by betting against them.

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.

Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying

January 11, 2023 · Original source

Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right

Your Book Review: Lying for Money

May 26, 2023 · Original source

The 2021 US version also adds a few other examples that weren't part of the 2018 UK edition, including Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos, and Donald Trump's Hotels & Resorts – I am unsure if these were added because they might be more relevant to the interest of US readers, or if the UK version of the book was completed and sent off to the editor too soon for "examples ripped from 2016 headlines" to make the cut.

Attempts To Put Statistics In Context, Put Into Context

June 08, 2023 · Original source

IQ affects grades more than political affiliation (liberal vs. conservative) affects whether or not you like Donald Trump (on the ACX survey).

Political conservatism vs. support for Trump (on ACX survey): 0.5

Inline links: 0.5

Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

August 04, 2023 · Original source

(If you ever wondered why Donald Trump was less revolutionary (for good or for ill) than many people expected him to be, this is why. He didn’t have an organized movement ready to take the tiller of state and strike out in a bold new direction, and so he wound up doing a lot of things in surprisingly business-as-usual ways. To radically overthrow institutions from within, you need to do better.)

Hitler wasn’t the Emperor from Star Wars—he didn’t pretend to be a nice democracy-loving guy until he had all the power in his hands. Hitler was the guy who went to a discussion club and yelled at everyone else for not being anti-Semitic enough. He wasn’t blowing a dog whistle—more like a fanfare trumpet.

(This, by the way, is why it is so dangerous for well-meaning people who support not-Hitlerian causes to use Hitlerian tactics. I’m going to give some specific examples, so apologize in advance for offending everyone’s political sensibilities. But even if you’re sympathetic to Trumpism, you should still be horrified by the January 6th incident, because it pushes our politics towards the use of physical terror. Likewise, if you’re on the left, you should be suspicious of the Black Lives Matter protests for the same reason. This doesn’t mean that Trump is Hitler or that BLM is the SA. But it does mean that, if you actually want to stop Hitler II, you have to be willing to call out your own side when they set precedents that a future Hitler could use to his advantage.)

Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World

August 11, 2023 · Original source

If monogamous marriage changes testosterone levels, what does the rise of serial monogamy do to that relationship? How does the WEIRD complex function when work disappears, if there’s a shortage of marriageable men and a mother might do better raising a kid herself – in the 90s in US cities, and today maybe in Ohio? If Jimmy Carter was an example of Protestant guilt culture when he said “I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times,” what does that culture look like in the age of Donald Trump? How will modern institutions react back on the WEIRD complex? There’s a famous answer that capitalism eats its own roots.

Inline links: when work disappears, capitalism eats its own roots

August 28, 2023 · Original source

1: Not a prediction market per se, but British bookies were offering bets on how much Donald Trump will weigh at his arraignment.

Inline links: how much Donald Trump will weigh at his arraignment

My Presidential Platform

September 05, 2023 · Original source

When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR. Appoint Donald Trump Constitutional Monarch This would require a constitutional amendment, but I’m sure I could convince enough people.

The British experience suggests that the role of a constitutional monarch is to flaunt how rich they are, get 24-7 news coverage regardless of whether or not they do anything interesting, and have scandals. Donald Trump is the best person in the world at all three of these things.

Trump wants to be on top, but is not that interested in governing. Meanwhile, American liberals (by revealed preference) want to continue thinking about him every hour of every day forever, but also don’t want him to govern. Constitutional monarchy would satisfy everyone’s preferences. If Trump is destined to destroy democracy - and everyone agrees that he is - let’s make it happen as gently and non-destructively as possible.

Book Review: Elon Musk

September 13, 2023 · Original source

I don’t know how 4D-chess this is. Donald Trump is famously unpolished, but the media follows every crazy thing he says and he ends up with 10x more coverage than some other candidate who does everything “right”, plus ordinary people will listen to him out of morbid curiosity over what he’ll say next. Elon is certainly very famous, even more famous than you would expect “just” from him being the richest man in the world and making impressive products.

Hardball Questions For The Next Debate

November 07, 2023 · Original source

Our candidates who have qualified today are Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump. And our first question is: what issue do you think is most important in this election? Chris Christie, let’s start with you.. Your Forbidden Letter is “V”.

MODERATOR: Sorry Ron, there were “S”s in the words this, is, and impossible. Donald Trump, you’re up next. The question is still what issue you think is most important during this campaign. Your Forbidden Letters are “A”, “E”, and “I”, which I realize might seem a bit -

CHRISTIE: Um. Hmmm. What’s going on in Ukraine is a . . . global Chrisis. [long pause] Like all Americans, I’m horrified by the news about Russian forces’ massaChris of innocent people. Ukraine should get not just our continuing support, but an inChris in military aid. [upbeat, finding his stride]. And I want to call out the hypoChrisy of Donald Trump on this issue. He says he wants to keep America strong, but he proChristinates on helping one of our most important allies.

The Psychopolitics Of Trauma

January 25, 2024 · Original source

Politics can become something between an addiction and an obsession. People can spend hours every day watching cable TV or scrolling through their Twitter feeds, trying to stay abreast of the latest outrage the other side is perpetrating. To be clear, they hate this. Each time they hear another outrage they’re somewhere between dejected and enraged. But they keep doing it. For hours a day. They will justify this with claims like “I need to stay informed so I can make a difference”. Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day. In any other situation, a condition with impaired cognition, psychotic symptoms, emotional instability that impaired normal functioning, and associated addictions/obsessions would qualify as a mental disorder. So again, which mental disorder is it? This post is about the possibility that it might be trauma. II. When Donald Trump was elected, some people described themselves as “traumatized”. Someone asked me for comment on the record, hoping I would say something like “as a real psychiatrist, trauma is a real disorder with strict criteria, and all you people are dumb”. I did not, in fact, make this comment. “Trauma” isn’t technically a mental disorder. The DSM contains seven “trauma and stressor related disorders”, of which the best-known is PTSD. An eighth disorder, “complex PTSD”, didn’t quite make it into the DSM but has been accepted by other classification systems, including the ICD-10 and WHO; other proposed trauma disorders are even less well-established. “Trauma” itself is a vague word encompassing all of these plus many less-well-defined situations. Although the vague concept “trauma” goes well beyond the DSM’s formal definition of PTSD, I think the latter makes a good reference point. Let’s look at the diagnostic criteria: [A trauma victim is someone who has] exposure to “actual or threatened death, injury, or sexual violence in one or more of the following ways: Directly experiencing the traumatic event(s).

A Google search brought up this lovely t-shirt. I think eBay’s policy of promoting inclusiveness by displaying shirts on ethnically diverse models may have failed them in this case. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Donald Trump Jr has a book called Triggered, and a biweekly TV show of the same name. Sheila Jeffreys’ biography is called Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life. Jeffreys and Trump Jr may not have much else in common, but they are united by a shared appreciation for applying this technical psychiatric term to politics. I think this makes the most sense if political triggering and psychiatric triggering are literally the same thing because political toxicity is a subspecies of PTSD. D2: Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world. Do I even need to explain this one? D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others. As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics. But I claim this is an overly restrictive description of the true problem, which is a general distortion of cognition around traumatic stimuli. See for example Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction. Here the researchers make people solve math/logic puzzles with five apples and eight oranges or whatever; as usual, most people do fine. Then they change the content to traumatic stimuli, like five rapists and eight abusers. Nobody is particularly happy about this change, but traumatized people seem to do worse when the stimuli relate to their own trauma. This is an exact analog to the “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” task discussed above; I don’t know if one line of research inspired the others, but they show some similar results. Other people have even more general findings. You may remember the Stroop Effect, where people have to say the color of words without getting distracted by their content. One variant is the Emotional Stroop Effect, where instead of giving color words (“yellow”, “red”, etc), you use emotional words and traumatic stimuli. Traumatized people tend to do worse at Emotional Stroop tasks relating to their specific trauma. See Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda. See also The Precision Of Sensory Evidence for a discussion of how this effect might happen. E1: Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people and objects. As seen at your family Thanksgiving table. Politics makes otherwise kind people into angry jerks. E3: Hypervigilance This is defined as a heightened awareness of surroundings, constantly scanning for danger, and misinterpreting innocuous stimuli as threatening. Wikipedia describes it as “there is a perpetual scanning of the environment to search for sights, sounds, people, behaviors, smells, or anything else that is reminiscent of activity, threat or trauma”. Dog whistles. Microaggressions. The hallmark of the advanced political partisan is the ability to describe everything the other side (or neutral third parties) do as secretly a political offense, and to reduce every possible situation to their issue of choice. For the past ten years, I’ve been involved in the anti-AI-existential risk movement, and have gotten to know other people in this movement pretty well. I can say with high certainty that the number one motive of these people is that they do not want to be killed by robots. Still, over the years people have ascribed every possible motive to us except that one, for example: It’s a plot by Big Tech to distract from other harms they are committing.

Inline links: Triggered, Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life, Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction, Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda., The Precision Of Sensory Evidence, Dog whistles

Paranoia and conspiracy theories, considered psychotic symptoms in individuals, are almost the norm in politics. Forget the people who believe that Biden/Trump/FEMA/whoever literally want to put them in camps. The coastal elites/the patriarchy/the rich/the liberal media may all be real groups with agendas different from yours, but the way some people think about them actively plotting to dismantle everything good in the world shades into paranoia (if you don’t believe this about your side, at least consider it on the other!) I’m not just making fun of other people, I find myself making this mistake constantly.

Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll

June 14, 2024 · Original source

Here “family” was defined on the question page as including “brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”. This is broader than Pollfish’s “member of your household” but narrower than Rasmussen’s “person you know”. Kirsch and I got similar results for knowing someone who died of COVID - 6.5% vs. 7.5%. But we got very different results for knowing someone who died from the vaccine: Kirsch’s 8.5% vs. my 0.6%. Why? As people love to point out, my survey is a nonrepresentative sample. But as I point out, it’s important to keep track of when that should vs. shouldn’t matter. No matter how weird my readers are, they’re not biologically invincible - they should have side effects at similar rates to anyone else. One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way. I didn’t have a question about vaccine-related views, but it’s no secret that vaccine opponents are more often right-wing, so I looked at questions about politics. Conservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%). But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%). I couldn’t find much of an effect by gender, education level, or any of the other traditional demographic categories. This doesn’t quite explain the difference between my survey and the others, since my moderates had 1.3% side effect rate, and the Rasmussen moderates had 22%. But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths. II. All of this would be much clearer if we could get in there and ask the people who said their relatives died from vaccines what they meant. Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission to email them. So I emailed the people who answered “yes” to that question and asked for their story. Some details: 5,981 people took the survey

Inline links: as

Maybe there’s some very big population of people who got the vaccine, then died eventually (where “eventually” could be anything from the same day to years later) of some condition (where “some condition” ranges from things plausibly connected to vaccines like allergic reactions, to things not plausibly connected to vaccines like lightning strikes). Depending on people’s previous assumptions about the risks of the vaccine, they’ll either report these as vaccine-related deaths, or think of them as unrelated coincidences. This would explain why my data found that Trump supporters were 20x more likely than Trump opponents to know a vaccine-related death.

Inline links: lightning strikes

But this can’t be the whole explanation: ACX readers are only a little further left than the general population, and even the most pro-Trump ACXers reported lower death rates than the median Kirsch poll respondent. My guess is that this is a blog about statistics and reasoning, so people here are very cautious about the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

My 2024 Presidential Debate

June 27, 2024 · Original source

Alexander: Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated (2016, 2020, 2023), I’ve been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald J. Trump. This debate will be broadcast live to select viewers, and I’ll also post a transcript on my blog.

Inline links: 2016, 2020, 2023

The COVID vaccine might not literally contain a microchip that lets Bill Gates control your mind. But we really do grant unaccountable tech billionaires root access to our culture - and seemingly pro-social requests really can be a vector for establishing control. I, Donald Trump, might not literally lead a euconspiracy of patriotic Americans who are about to blow the lid off the corrupt Biden administration and liberal establishment. But it really is true that even in the darkest night, when all seems lost, there are seeds of hope visible to those who search for them, and that even the most invincible-seeming tyranny can fall in an instant if enough people push at it.

Alexander: Donald Trump, your closing?

Your Book Review: Real Raw News

July 26, 2024 · Original source

If you’re a follower of U.S. news outlets, you’ve seen some big stories unfolding over the past year: The unprecedented four criminal indictments lodged against former President Trump. The ongoing AI explosion. The backlash against “DEI,” “woke,” and “cancel culture” as exemplified by Elon Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter to “X.”

Some people write fanfics about Harry Potter. Some people write fanfics about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then, well, some people write fanfics about Donald Trump.

At Real Raw News, Donald Trump is still president – just a temporarily embarrassed one, who has had to abandon the public-facing side of his job in order to lure the “Deep State” out of hiding into its own annihilation.

Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman

July 30, 2024 · Original source

Human nature is not so bad that collectivist and egalitarian ideologies are always going to be prevalent among the masses. They simply need to be protected from cancerous ideas that make them a threat to progress, which come from both the right and left. Somewhat paradoxically, democracy does a pretty good job of this relative to other systems. Okay, so right-wing guy claims to be Nietzschean, why am I saying this disproves something about partisan politics? Hanania is terrible at being right-wing. He’s pro-choice, pro-immigration, pro-euthanasia, pro-vaccine, pro-globalism, pro-Ukraine, atheist, and supports the recent guilty verdict on Trump. As with Donald Trump, he’s living proof that right-wingers will welcome anyone sufficiently offensive without caring about their policy positions. My impression of Hanania is that his Nietzscheanism is incredibly deep, principled, and heartfelt, while his right-wing-ness is at best an alliance of convenience. This adequately explains most of his positions: He’s pro-immigration because he’s obsessed with excellent/talented people and wants them to come to the US and use their talents more effectively.

Inline links: pro-choice, pro-immigration, pro-euthanasia, pro-vaccine, pro-globalism, pro-Ukraine, atheist, supports the recent guilty verdict on Trump, https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1803558199867724014

Also, what about Donald Trump? It’s remarkable how closely he fits the master morality archetype - amoral, power-hungry, uniquely himself, unselfconsciously rich, fond of boasting about his own greatness. Nietzsche didn’t expect masters to be well-liked; the whole point of a master is not caring what other people think. But something about Trump’s style makes him wildly popular. I wonder if his masterliness comes off as leadership, in a way that earns the respect of people who distrust every other politician. Or whether conservatives, sick of weaponized altruism, are ready for someone who rewound two thousand years of pro-morality propaganda and ended up back at pagan warrior-kingship.

Interview Day At Thiel Capital

September 03, 2024 · Original source

“Ah, yes. Dan. Thank you for coming to Thiel Capital today. I see you’re interviewing for Vice-President Of Undermining Democracy. Your resume looks stellar - I didn’t know anyone had served in the Trump, Putin, and Jong-un administrations. We just have one question: What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”

“No, I mean, like, literally still the President. If you watch media reports carefully, you see pictures of Biden in the White House, Biden on Air Force One, Biden with Secret Service agents. And yes, I know former Presidents get some protection, get to visit the White House often, and so on. But if you compare stories about Trump or Obama doing these things to stories about Biden, it’s almost an order of magnitude difference. He’s still President.”

ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein

October 30, 2024 · Original source

Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke in telling you what the woke Washington Post and failing LA Times don’t want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.

Inline links: Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, David Duke, the woke Washington Post, LA Times

The other tailwind is intra-party cohesion. Donald Trump spent the past eight years purging the Republican Party of people willing to stand up to him. The current head of the RNC is Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, the Democrats are delightfully unorganized, such that there are constant rumors that Joe Biden is trying to sink Kamala Harris, that Nancy Pelosi made some kind of horrendous blackmail threat to Joe Biden, and that possibly all of these people are part of a shadow war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I don’t believe any of it, but it’s pretty funny and less worrying from an ability-to-consolidate-power standpoint than what’s happening with the GOP.

A long time ago, I wrote about the difference between ingroup, outgroup, and fargroup. Ingroup and outgroup you know. But how come people have stronger emotions about Ibram X. Kendi (or Chris Rufo) than about Kim Jong-un or whoever's committing the latest genocide in Sudan? It's not because you're American and naturally care about American affairs - how about that Brazilian judge who banned Elon Musk's X? It's because all those guys are part of your psychodrama and some Sudanese psychopath isn't. Well, Kamala Harris' price controls are my outgroup; Donald Trump setting tariffs is my fargroup.

Inline links: the difference between ingroup, outgroup, and fargroup

Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims

November 08, 2024 · Original source

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.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem great to actually elect someone who you hate and who will work as hard as he can to thwart your policy priorities. Imagine if every group tried this, and we ended up with gun owners and evangelicals voting Harris and Muslims and trans people voting Trump. It would be ridiculous. Is there some sort of middle ground?

On Priesthoods

January 08, 2025 · Original source

Society-wide: The marketplace of ideas! This is where everyone gets to have their say. New hypotheses get stress-tested, bounced off against each other, and only the strongest survive. This level also produces true learning - if only one idea survives the marketplace, then average spectators can easily pick it out (although of course it can still be wrong). Its disadvantage is that it’s impossible for several billion people to hold a true “discussion” among themselves. Also, many of these people are extremely stupid, their ideas are bad, and they fill the conversation with noise. Is there a useful group size in between these two? What about discussing ideas in a group made of only the most intelligent and knowledgeable people? This gives you the debate and collaboration functions that you only get in group conversation. But it’ll have a better signal-to-noise ratio than all of society, and it might be small enough to manage. Also, you can make people sign on to good discussion norms before they enter, and you can expel them if they screw up. The Boundary Against The Public From this formulation, it becomes clear that such a priesthood is only useful insofar as it has some kind of barrier between itself and the general public. The priesthoods don’t exactly hate the public. But they hate the idea of letting the public’s ideas mix with their own. It’s not just that they discount the public’s ideas insofar as the public is less sophisticated than themselves. Their whole identity comes from their separation from the public. Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized, the same way it would be hard to convince Democrats to accept a plan that Donald Trump proposed first, even if it otherwise fit with Democratic ideals. I recently reviewed Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus To Our House, on the architectural priesthood. It discusses the response when renegade architects would build things in styles favored by the public - for example, Edward Stone and the Kennedy Center: Stone and Saarinen, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Goff and Greene, were too American, which meant both too parochial (not part of the International Style) and too bourgeois. Somehow they actually catered to the hog-stomping Baroque exuberance of American civilization. When Stone designed the Kennedy Center in Washington with a lobby six stories high and six hundred and thirty feet long – so big, as one journalist pointed out, that Mickey Mantle’s mightiest home run would have been just another long fly ball – it was regarded as an obscenity. Stone was actually playing upto American megolomania. He was encouraging the barbaric yawps. He was glorifying The Client’s own grandiose sentiments. More generally: In a way, the very productivity of a man like Wright, Portman, or Stone counted against him, given the new mental atmosphere at the universities. Oh, it was easy enough, one supposed, to go out into the marketplace and wheedle and vamp and dance for clients and get buildings to do. But the brave soul was he who remained within the compound, stayed within the university orbit. Or, from the comments, this quote by architect Peter Eisenman: What I’m suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right. I used to wonder why so many econ-bloggers I liked were at GMU. GMU only is only the 74th best economics department in the country, but more than half of the econbloggers I like are affiliated with it in some way (Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, Scott Sumner, Mark Koyama, sorry if I’m forgetting anyone!). Granted that some of this is because I lean libertarian and so do they - but I don’t think there’s a mountain of amazing and popular left-wing econbloggers who I’m ignoring. Part of this must be that Mercatus head Tyler Cowen is better at spotting and cultivating talent than others - but you’d still think the #73 ranked department would try to poach some of his hard work. When I asked academics about this, they didn’t find it mysterious at all. The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters. This is my experience too. I once got rejected from a psychiatry residency I wanted, partly because they saw I had a blog and thought it might cause trouble (though the less prestigious hospital that eventually accepted me did consider it a plus, for which I remain grateful). I wish I could say that the program which rejected me is kicking themselves right now - I’m probably one of the most-read psychiatrists in the world, and most of what I write is relatively orthodox and (I hope) reflects well on the field. But outside of my fantasies, they are doing nothing of the sort. At best, my blog has gone from a liability to being neutral or a very slight positive. Certainly it doesn’t make me as impressive as someone who went to a medical school one tier above mine. Consider how impressive a boundary this is - someone can have literally tens of thousands of fans for doing popular writing in a field, and the amount of extra status it gives them in the field is within a rounding error of zero. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters. Still, at least I’m a member in good standing. At least I’m higher than pond scum. The lowest-status doctor in the world - the guy who, if doctors were Maoist revolutionaries, would get his face on the “Criticize X, Criticize Y” posters - is Dr. Oz. This isn’t because Dr. Oz lacks medical skill. Back in the day, he was a professor of surgery at Columbia, and by all accounts quite good at it. But then he went on TV and started catering to the public. He told them their stupid miracle cures and $19.99 supplements were Real Medicine. Imagine a Catholic bishop declaring ex cathedra that The Da Vinci Code is 100% real. Authority bestowed to fight the heresies of a fallen world, instead used to prop up those heresies. Columbia recently “cut ties” with Oz in some vague way, but as far as the medical profession is concerned, it’s too little, too late. I think the profession’s hatred for Oz is justified - his claims are false and probably cause a lot of harm. But other doctors who say false harmful things get only a fraction of the hatred that Dr. Oz does. He’s not just defrauding and maybe killing the people who take his supplements. He’s sullying Medicine itself. This hard boundary - this contempt for two-way traffic with the public - might seem harsh to outsiders. But it’s an adaptive artifact produced by cultural evolution as it tries to breed priesthoods that can perform their epistemic function. The outside world is so much bigger than the priesthoods, so much richer, so full of delicious deposits of status waiting to be consumed - that any weaker border would soon be overrun, with all priesthood members trying to garner status with the public directly. Only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations. The Boundary Against Capitalism Dr. Oz illustrates another point: power corrupts, and the priests (as people known to be more knowledgeable than the public) have the power to bless or damn interventions in their field. Without some boundary against capitalism, they would abuse that power to make money. Again, cultural evolution has produced such a boundary. A doctor who seems too mercenary loses status in the priesthood. My father - a much more orthodox (and hence higher-status) member of the medical priesthood than I will ever be - used to even get suspicious of concierge doctors. Was it really in keeping with the principles of medicine to care about the amount of money you got for your service? Shouldn’t the usual insurance payments (calculated behind the scenes, without you ever having to think about it) be enough for anybody? If you let doctors charge extra for their services, they might do bad medicine in order to increase profits. In the worst case scenario, they might flatter members of the public who wanted all-natural $19.99 supplements. This taboo has faded as insurance squeezes doctors harder; even my father eventually relented. But there’s still the sense that doctor is a calling in a way that used-car salesman isn’t. If you pursue money too aggressively, can we really be sure you’ve heard the call? Why doesn’t every doctor pursue their own $19.99 supplement business? Some of this is professional regulation - there’s a sense that probably the Medical Board will come down on you if you do something wrong (though most doctors are proudly ignorant of the exact limits of the Medical Board’s power - why should the pious worry about the exact boundaries of excommunicable offenses?) But most of the barrier comes from self-regulation based on social status. By the time you’re done with medical school and residency, all of your non-doctor friends have long since abandoned you, and all the old sources of status and approval that you used to crave have been excised and replaced with the all-seeing eye of the medical priesthood. If you sell out and start the supplement line, you might get a new Ferrari, but everyone whose opinion you respect will hold you in contempt. The public might think it’s cool that you have a Ferrari, but doctors know better: nobody with a supplement line has ever been cool. This doesn’t mean doctors are incorruptible. Plenty of them become pharma company shills. But that’s because being a pharma company shill doesn’t burn intra-priesthood respect the same way. For better or worse, pharma companies straddle the priesthood boundary. They may not be fellow priests, but they’re at least nuns or deacons or something. They won this by sacrificing certain capitalist parts of themselves (for example, becoming heavily regulated) and by agreeing to follow the norms of the medical priesthood (for example, communicating through papers published in medical journals with high-status doctors as lead authors). Through their sacrifice, they achieve ritual purity; now priests can interact with them guilt-free. Is ritual purity really the same as moral acceptability? Sounds like the kind of question a member of the public might ask! Communication Norms Within The Priesthoods Although priests talk normally when when they meet one another at the water cooler, ex cathedra communication must be performed in a ritually pure way. For the medical priesthood, that means papers published in a medical journal. Consider ritually impure communication - for example, Twitter. Someone may try to make a medical claim (“SSRIs are a great depression treatment!”). But one can’t even predict the genre the reply will take. It could be any of: Insult (“You’re just another a big pharma shill trying to poison us!”)

Inline links: recently reviewed, is only the 74th best, recently “cut ties” with Oz, too little, too late

Links For February 2025

February 27, 2025 · Original source

8: Twitter user @fae_dreams asked the new generation of AI reasoning models to replicate Donald Trump’s challenge from my fictional 2024 debate: describe his policy in heroic hexameter while avoiding letters A, E, and I. Here’s my favorite:

Inline links: my fictional 2024 debate

11: Intrinsic Perspective wants a law saying AI-generated text must be watermarked. I was most interested the article’s claim that there is now “semantic watermarking” - watermarking which operates on the level of ideas, and can’t be defeated by rephrasing an AI-generated text in your own words. I have skimmed the paper explaining this and think I vaguely understand what’s going on, but it still boggles me that this is possible. 12: Aella: How OnlyFans Took Over The World. There have been camgirl sites since forever. How did OnlyFans leap over all of its predecessors and achieve an unprecedented level of success? Aella discusses many factors, but one stands out: traditional camsites advertised the site as a whole, and then once you got to the site you chose which model you wanted to see. OnlyFans encourages models to advertise themselves - often on their own social media accounts, sometimes via scams - which “unlocks human creativity” on the problem of bringing new eyeballs to a porn site. 13: Nate Silver has 113 predictions for Trump’s second term. I’d be interested to see whether making each of these predictions 10% less confident (to account for possible gameboard-overturning AI) ends up beating Nate. 14: Sarah Constantin: What’s Behind The SynBio Bust? Three of the most promising synthetic biology companies - Gingko, Zymergen, and Amyris - all crashed between 2021 and 2023. Why? Producing chemicals in traditional factories is orders of magnitude more efficient than synthesizing them via microbes (except for the sort of large biomolecules that can’t be produced in factories). These companies had brilliant employees and cool tech, but no clear plan to get around this handicap, and used up their runway before they could figure one out. They also focused too hard on designing the microbes, and were too willing to outsource the actual manufacturing to other people without being sufficiently paranoid that those other people were doing quality control. 15: One of the more exciting psychiatric results (which I blogged about a long time ago) was the apparent finding that omega-3 supplementation could prevent high-risk people from having first break schizophrenia. A new RCT says this doesn’t replicate and cites two other recent trials showing it didn’t replicate. There’s also a new meta-analysis which says actually it does replicate, but usually failing a big RCT is a bad sign and I’m pretty skeptical. Thanks to Isaak F for the links. {ETA: Thomas Reilly says: “Although I don't believe omega-3 supplementation has any benefit in psychosis, I also don't think this new trial should shift your opinion much, given the total sample size was n=135 and the total number of transitions to psychosis was n=8.”] 16: Claim that predictions of global warming magnitude are gradually going down thanks to successful pledges/action: Source is CipherNews (h/t Stefan Schubert) apparently citing Climate Action Tracker, but I get the impression that this is just some people eyeballing the size of pledges and not any more sophisticated forecasting. I don’t know how to square this with the claims that such and such a thing (summer temperature, sea ice, etc) is much worse than anyone expected. 17: I don’t know anything about the Lucy Letby case, but all of my smart friends who have been right about this kind of thing before say she’s innocent. 18: A reader asks House of Strauss (edgy sports Substack) whether the vibe shift away from political correctness threatens the edgy Substack business model - as the power of orthodoxy declines, can you still get rich and famous as a brave anti-orthodoxy critic? His answer: nothing that can happen from here is as bad as the Twitter/X link deboost (which made attracting attention harder for everyone). I mostly agree: I think discoverability has suffered, people who are already famous will be able to stay famous without too much extra effort, and everyone else will have to explore new options. 19: Spectator: Could AI Lead To A Revival Of Decorative Beauty? Profiles Not Quite Past, a startup using AI and fancy printing to make customized Delft tiles. It’s a good idea and the tiles are very pretty, but the tiles are sort of a best possible case (a pretty, traditional object that can have a customized 2D image and be mass-printed). I think most forms of lost decorative beauty aren’t bottlenecked by ability to generate 2D images of the type image models are good at, and so will have to wait. 20: Some friends including Kelsey Piper wrote an emergency PEPFAR Report, collecting evidence for why PEPFAR is good/effective/important and deserves to be kept. Some key points: PEPFAR has saved between 7.5 and 30 million lives, at a cost between $1,500 and $10,000 per life saved. The US government is willing to spend at least a thousand times this much to save an American life.

Inline links: wants a law saying AI-generated text must be watermarked, skimmed the paper explaining this, How OnlyFans Took Over The World, 113 predictions for Trump’s second term, What’s Behind The SynBio Bust?, this doesn’t replicate, actually it does replicate, says, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S0yA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb75ee3e3-3c0d-48b7-aa98-88f5e33dbf55_748x447.png, CipherNews, Stefan Schubert, Climate Action Tracker, the Lucy Letby case, His answer, Could AI Lead To A Revival Of Decorative Beauty?, Not Quite Past, PEPFAR Report

The current status of PEPFAR is still unclear - people are theorizing that maybe Trump/Rubio ordered it restarted, but Musk/DOGE are refusing to comply?! Whatever is happening, it’s “too little, too late” and many clinics are already closed.

Inline links: are theorizing, “too little, too late”

Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity

March 19, 2025 · Original source

Maybe this isn’t surprising? Maybe it’s straight out of Pavlov - pair a neutral stimulus (like a flashing light) together with a negative stimulus (like an electric shock) often enough, and rats will learn to hate the flashing light. But usually Pavlov doesn’t work quite this well. People who hate school will happily walk past the schoolhouse; people who burn themselves on hot stoves will happily touch a cold stove; people who hate Donald Trump will laugh along with a lookalike Trump impersonator. In Pavlov’s experiments, the conditioned response fades to extinction after the conditioned stimulus stops correlating with the unconditioned stimulus. But deaf misophoniacs will still hate the sight of chewing the millionth time they see it.

Links For April 2025

April 22, 2025 · Original source

16: Trump Tower is a BDSM erotic novel published in 2011. It was originally credited to Donald Trump as author (with Jeffrey Robinson as ghostwriter), but at the last moment Trump changed his mind, and Robinson was listed as the author. I appreciated Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, and nominate them to cover this one too. 17: Wikipedia on the beginning of the Horslips, one of Ireland’s most famous rock bands: Barry Devlin, Eamon Carr and Charles O'Connor met when they worked at Arks Advertising Agency in Dublin. They were cajoled into pretending to be a band for a Harp Lager commercial but needed a keyboard player. Devlin said he knew a Jim Lockhart who would fit the bill. The four enjoyed the act so much that they decided to try being proper rock performers. 18: I complained that Elon Musk’s idea of “truth-seeking AI” was bad for alignment, and I still think this is true in the very long run. But I can’t deny it’s an inspired / providential choice for the current moment, already paying dividends (X): 19: Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb, The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone, and Against Lyman Stone are some of this month’s top anti-Lyman-Stone content. 20: New polling on the Middle Ages: 21: More new-ish AI policy substacks potentially worth your time: You may remember Helen Toner from the OpenAI board drama, but she’s also an experienced and thoughtful scholar on AI policy and now has a Substack, Rising Tide. I especially appreciated Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse.

Inline links: Trump Tower, Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, the beginning of the Horslips, bad for alignment, already paying dividends (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nPJW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad66b2c0-0180-4fc1-afc1-25de0f0ce40f_533x518.png, Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb, The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone, Against Lyman Stone, New polling on the Middle Ages, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9b_4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe3163eca-eaf4-492a-ac68-eadefa169be2_632x419.png, Rising Tide, Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse

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.

Inline links: Ozempocalypse, others continue, has a guide (partly subscriber-only), cancelled a Biden initiative

Their source, humanphenotypes.net, divides humanity into a hundred or so ethnic groups. Although they cite sources, I don’t understand the philosophical basis of the classification. Also, 100 images is so few that you start memorizing them after a while. I hope they move on to real pictures of real people in naturalistic situations. Remember, asking where someone is from ‘originally’ is a microaggression, but inferring it yourself based on their “mildly platyrrhine, high-rooted nose” is A-OK! 32: Farmkind has a new version of their calculator to determine meat offsets, eg how much do you have to donate to animal welfare charities to compensate for the animals you harm by eating meat. Does the average person really eat chicken 9x a week? 33: Not going to waste your time listing every bad thing Trump has done this month, but among the worst is sending innocent people to horrible Salvadorean prisons (including one person picked up because he had an autism awareness tattoo in honor of his brother, which they mistook for a gang tattoo), then refusing to bring them back. I have seen a couple of people defend denying immigrants due process; I assume they will not be moved by humanitarian arguments, but I think there are some more practical considerations: Zaid Jilani points out that if immigrants don’t get a right to due process, citizens also don’t get a right to due process, because the government can kidnap citizens, claim they’re immigrants, and the citizens can’t prove otherwise since they don’t get due process.

Inline links: humanphenotypes.net, a new version of their calculator, including, Zaid Jilani

Moldbug Sold Out

May 07, 2025 · Original source

A patchwork of city-states, unbound by modern “international law”, with few barriers to the free flow of capital and population. I’ll then describe how carefully Moldbug explained that you had to have these things, or else the dictatorship would fail in more or less the ways normies expect dictatorships to fail - leaving himself no room for the kind of pivot he’s trying now. 1: Classic Moldbug Believed Populist Dictatorship Would End In Disaster Classic Moldbug admitted that fascism and communism were extremely bad. He just drew different borders around political systems: fascism, communism, third world banana republic dictatorship, and democracy all cluster together as systems where coalitions rule because they can seize temporary power in a semi-lawless society. In the various totalitarianisms, it’s literal seizing of power through armed troops or secret police; in democracy, it’s electoral seizing of power through distributing the most goodies to coalition members. From here, my bolding. Clearly, the worst forms of demotism, the really bad apes, were the totalitarian systems—fascism and communism. The main difference between fascism and communism was not in mechanism, but in origin—fascist elites tended to be militarist, communist elites intellectual. But the one-party state is a clear case of convergent evolution. To a neocameralist, totalitarianism is democracy in its full-blown, most malignant form. Democracy doesn’t always deteriorate into totalitarianism, and lighting up at the gas pump doesn’t always engulf you in a ball of fire. Many people with cancer live a long time or die of something else instead. This doesn’t mean you should smoke half of Virginia before lunch. A political party is a political party. It is a large group of people allied for the purpose of seizing and wielding power. If it does not choose to arm its followers, this is only because it finds unarmed followers more useful than armed ones. If it chooses less effective strategies out of moral compunction, it will be outcompeted by some less-principled party. When one party gains full control over the state, it gains a massive revenue stream that it can divert entirely to its supporters. The result is a classic informal management structure, whose workings should be clear to anyone who watched a few episodes of The Sopranos. Without a formal ownership structure, in which the entire profit of the whole enterprise is collected and distributed centrally, money and other goodies leak from every pore. Totalitarian states are gangster states, in other words, and they tend to corruption and mismanagement. The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading—a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch. The difference is the management structure. The CEO and the monarch owe their positions to a law which all can obey, and those who choose to obey the law are naturally a winning coalition against those who choose to break it. The dictator’s position is the result of his primacy in a pyramid of criminals. This structure is naturally unstable. There is always some other gangster who wants your job. Dictators, like Mafia chiefs, are not good at dying in bed. The internal and external violence typical of totalitarian states is best explained, I think, by this built-in mismanagement. Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle. The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup. European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare. Note that the financial logic which keeps the neocameralist state lawful does not apply in any way to the totalitarian state, because the latter does not have a stable management structure which is controlled by its shareholders. Lawlessness is not profitable for the state as a whole, but it may be quite profitable for the part that chooses lawlessness, and in the totalitarian state no one is counting as a whole. Similarly, only shareholder control gives the neocameralist state an incentive to remain small and efficient. The totalitarian state has an incentive to become large and inefficient, because every functionary has an incentive to expand his or her own department, and no bean-counter who demands that the department do more with less. In a totalitarian state, since no gangster is permanently safe from any other gangster, there is a strong incentive for anyone with power to take what he can, while he can. And there is no disincentive for him to avoid abusing a resource which neither he nor his allies benefit from. Under gangster management, the totalitarian states often engaged not only in mass murder, but mass murder of their most economically productive citizens. I’m trying to avoid subjecting you to too many Moldbug walls of text, but this is a constant hobbyhorse of his. Unless you implement his neocameralist ideology of shareholder control, your attempted autocracy will become a totalitarian state, which will be even worse than regular democracy. 2: The Dictator Must Not Be Elected The original sin of democratic/totalitarian governments is permitting power struggles. When you permit power struggles, the most power-hungry person wins. This person is probably a bad guy. But even if he isn’t, he has to optimize for gaining and maintaining power, instead of for the national interest. This usually means paying off the people who raised him to and keep him in power, i.e. corruption. Sometimes the corruption is straightforward, like giving friendly colonels vast sums from the public treasury. Other times it’s more insidious; if someone rose to power because organized labor joined their coalition, they have to overpay public unions, pass stifling pro-labor regulations, and ban whatever productive economic activity the labor unions don’t like. Therefore, we need a dictator who came to power without a struggle and doesn’t owe anyone anything. This is Moldbug’s read on “the divine right of kings”: Divine-right monarchy is very easy to understand, even for an atheist like me. We have already derived it. To an atheist, the King’s authority must be absolute, not because he is appointed by God, but because he is appointed by no one. If someone appoints him, that man is King. If their roles are divided—the famous “balance of powers” or “checks and balances”—they will struggle, and one or the other prevail. Probably the many over the few. How do you come to power without a fight? This is a tough ask, but Classic Moldbug bit the bullet: anybody who wants power is unworthy of it. You have to just sit there being worthy. When people get tired of sucking, they’ll give you power. The Procedure [for installing a virtuous government] comes in Three Steps: 1: Become worthy. 2: Accept power. 3: Rule!!1! You think I’m kidding. But I’m not. How do you become worthy? You must absolutely, 100%, avoid any kind of candidacy in elections, protesting the government, criticizing the government, thinking you could do government better than the current government, or (god forbid) deliberately trying to take power: As a reactionary, you don’t believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal. They must submit to the New; you must submit to the Old. The reactionary’s opinion of USG is that it is what it is. It is run by the people who run it. And at present, the present management may well be the best people in the world to run USG, and even if they’re not he can’t imagine what might be done about it—short of replacing the whole thing. This simple and final judgment, like the death penalty, admits no possible compromise. In particular, passivism is to Gandhi as Gandhi is to Hitler. Hitler, before 1933, was a violent democratic activist; Gandhi was a nonviolent democratic activist. Passivism is not any sort of activism. Passivism is passivism. In plain English, you may not even begin to consider the rest of the Procedure until you have freed yourself entirely from the desire, built-in burden though it be of the two-legged ape, for power. Break the steel rule, change your name to “Darth,” don’t expect to keep your internship at the Jedi Council. As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy. He would rather drink his own piss, than shift public opinion. He finds elections—national, state or local—grimly hilarious. And if he needs to get from Richmond to Baltimore, he drives through West Virginia. The passivist has a term for democratic activism directed by the right against the left. That term is counter-activism. Passivism does not dispute the fact that counter-activism sometimes works. For instance, it worked for Hitler. (We’ll say more about Hitler.) However, it only works in very unusual circumstances (such as those of Hitler), and is extremely dangerous when it does work (e.g., the result may be Hitler). In case this isn’t crystal-clear, the steel rule precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, “tea parties,” journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable […] In the First Step, passivism is a no-brainer. Why should you be interested in influencing OUSG? You’re trying to replace the Structure, not join it. One clear sign that you’re doing this right and haven’t been corrupted by power is that people won’t write hit pieces about your blog. I swear I’m not making this up: [A] passivist blog will appear, at worst, harmless and extremely strange. There’s something going on here, Mr. Jones. But you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Jones? As an existential enemy of USG, the reactionary may well deserve some immune attention. But he won’t get it, and he is quite happy with that. True fact: the author of UR has received over 7 zillion very interesting emails, all of which deserve responses, often long, that most have not received (but will). Number of hostile communications received, in over two years of blogging: zero. One can ascribe this result to many hypotheses, not all flattering, but I put it down to passivism. If you break this rule and seek electoral power, you are punished with something terrible: right-wing populism, which is basically the same as Hitler and must be prevented at all costs. [The] third tactical benefit [of passivism is] Hitler prevention. To an orthodox reactionary, Hitler is basically the poster child for what happens if you break the steel rule. Fascism is reaction, but laced with cancerous tumors of democracy—“right-wing populism,” as people say these days. If it loses it loses; if it wins, the tumors grow. An improvement on Communism, but not much of one. Just about all of Hitler’s shtick, right down to the name of his party, was ripped off from the Left. Who introduced nationalism to the Continent of Europe? The Hapsburgs, or Garibaldi? Under this camouflage, which never convinced anyone with a college education, Nazism was never in any way leftist. Rather, it was a demotic corruption of the old Prussian tradition […] Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design. The reactionary’s basic answer to the Hitler Question is the Law of Sewage. (This is not my invention, but I don’t know where I got it. Heinlein, perhaps?) The Law is: if you put a drop of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage. You’ll find that this rule applies perfectly to many fields of human endeavor. Thus, Nazism contains a great deal of reactionary wisdom, because those who created it were quite familiar with the old Continental tradition of government. However, the Nazi movement originated as a democratic political party. Thus Nazism combined the venom of democracy with the experience and efficiency of Prussia, an understandably dangerous combination […] This is where passivism, by abjuring democracy, vaccinates itself against Hitler. True: at a higher level, the reactionary seeks to cause a transition in power, and thus in a sense seeks power itself. But he is not an activist, because he is not working for power. His actions do not excite the human political instinct, the love for forming coalitions and tearing hell out of the apes across the river. For one thing, said actions bear no resemblance to normal politics. For another, they cannot bring any actual power to the actors, even if they succeed. Which, however likely, must remain intuitively implausible—if not laughable. And thus the project of reaction does not attract those with a real taste for power, which if nothing else is very un-Nazi-like. In other words - the failure mode of neoreaction (good) is right-wing populism eg Nazism (bad). You’ll know you’ve fallen into the failure mode if your reactionary movement starts with a democratic political party, or if its members are feeling normal human political emotions. If you can’t have a normal democratic party, how do you complete steps two and three - accepting power and ruling? Moldbug’s answer is complicated and not very related to our topic, but he thinks you first create the Antiversity, a shadow university system laser-focused on always telling the truth. Then you bootstrap it into a shadow government, which doesn’t engage in violent revolution or political campaigning, but just sits there being right about things (I’m imagining for example a shadow FDA that produces better drug information than the real FDA, so people gradually come to trust the shadow FDA more even though its rulings have no legal effect). Then people gradually switch their allegiance from the real government to the shadow government, until finally the shadow government proposes a pseudo-candidate in an election whose sole platform is “switch power from the real government to the shadow government”. Once he wins, he revokes the Constitution, implements the shadow government charter, and resigns. Why do you have to use this weird process instead of taking power the normal way? Because if you take power the normal way, you will fall into the trap of right-wing populism and become like Hitler: You start to see the difference between this and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the equivalent of the Antiversity was… Hitler. Have you read Hitler? I have. (The Table Talk is the Hitler to read.) Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from drinking lead soda, and also had a nasty case of tertiary syphilis. I may have some of Hitler’s talents—I will be the first to admit it. But I have no intention of applying for his job. I would never be able to do it, anyway. I don’t think anyone could. 2.5: The Dictator Must Not Need Anyone’s Approval This is a trivial extension of the previous point - “If someone appoints [the King], that man is King”. If the people appoint the King, the people are King, and then you’re a demotic totalitarianism. How do you avoid dependence on other people’s approval? In a democracy, you need the approval of 51% of people to win the next election; in a traditional dictatorship, you need the approval of the secret police or military to keep crushing your opponents. The reason [an unquestioned autocracy with no dissent] is peaceful and free is that we’ve defined [the autocrat’s] primary right so that it works just like a secondary right, [ie his legal rights are completely enforced by real power/control.] Hitler, Stalin and Mao, on the other hand, had enemies. Stalin and Mao, especially, basically operated under the assumption that everyone in the world wanted to kill them and take their jobs. After a while this was quite the self-fulfilling prophecy. Terrorist government—as in the Reign of Terror, a usage that’s unfortunately lapsed—is a consequence not of absolute primary title, but of insecure primary title. It is best understood as a form of civil war. So a dictator who still has enemies risks being crazy and genocidal. We’ll never get a dictator with nobody who dislikes him, but can we get a dictator with effectively no enemies - ie one whose enemies have zero chance of seizing power and so who might as well not exist? Yarvin admits this is a tough problem, but suggests cryptographically-locked weapons: In a full CDCC government, the sovereign decision and command chain is secured from end to end by military-grade cryptography. All government weapons—not just nukes, but everything right down to small arms—are inoperable without code authorization. In any civil conflict, loyal units will find that their weapons work. Disloyal units will have to improvise. The result is predictable, as results should be. That is, all weapons need a key to fire (or have a key that can prevent them from firing). The dictator owns the key. He can selectively disable weapons of rebel forces, allowing even the tiniest remnant of loyalists to easily overpower them. There are probably some implementation difficulties here; the point is that it’s definitely not democracy, nor even some kind of two-bit dictatorship where the dictator depends on the continued goodwill of the army. Why go to these lengths? Because without them, the dictator needs to curry favor through various corrupt strategies that undermine the national interest. Of these, the most malignant - the one Moldbug holds his deepest vituperation for - is fake news. Democratic parties necessarily lie, because they are not infinitely correct about everything, but they need the public to think they are. In order to maintain the support of the masses, they will lie about the nature of their policies, the details of their policies, and especially the success of their policies. There are two kinds of government: those whose formula of legitimacy depends on popular consent, and those whose doesn’t. Following contemporary usage, we can classify these as authoritarian and democratic. An authoritarian state has no need to tell its subjects what to think, because it has no reason to care what they think. In a truly authoritarian government, the ruling authority relies on force, not popularity. It cares what its subjects do, not what they think. It may encourage a healthy, optimistic attitude and temperate lifestyle proclivities, but only because this is good for business. Therefore, any authoritarian state that needs an official religion must have something wrong with it. (Perhaps, for example, its military authority is not as absolute as it thinks.) A democratic state which tells its citizens what to think is a political solecism. Think about the motivation for democracy: it consigns the state to the collective responsibility of its citizens, because it feels this is an independent and well-anchored hook on which to hang the common good. Once the republic has an established church, this hook is no longer independent, and the (postulated) value-add of democracy is nullified. Without separation of church and state, it is easy for a democracy to indulge itself in arbitrarily irresponsible misgovernment, simply by telling its bishops to inform their congregations that black is white and white is black. Thus misdirected, they are easily persuaded to support counterproductive policies which they wrongly consider productive. Moldbug warns that this is especially characteristic of right-wing populism, which is why he [Moldbug] is relieved when right-wing populism loses: The entire political structure of the American populist tradition is set up to select for ignorance and stupidity, and select against organization and cohesion. Thus it is simultaneously undesirable and ineffective, and even those of us who like myself sympathize with it to a considerable degree are often slightly relieved to see it lose, as it always does. 3: The Dictator Must Be Limited By A Board Of Directors How do we know that the dictator won’t have terrible policies, or be sadistic, or rename every state to “Statey McStateFace” just for fun? Moldbug proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation. This helps in two ways. First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy. Second, the board of directors (or the investors who elect them?) will be aligned because they have stock. The stock goes up if the nation does better. If the dictator tries to kill the Jews and the market thinks that’s bad for business, then the directors will fire and replace the CEO. What happens if the controllers disagree on what “responsible” government means? We are back to politics. Factions and interest groups form. Each has a different idea of how Steve should run California. A coalition of a majority can organize and threaten him: do this, do that, or it’s out with Steve and in with Marc. Logrolling allows the coalition to micromanage: more funding for the threatened Mojave alligator mouse! And so on. That classic failure mode, parliamentary government, reappears [...] Actually, there’s one way to do it. We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative...We have, of course, reinvented the joint-stock company. There is no need to argue over whether this design works. It does. How would the board of directors remove a dictator who didn’t want to be removed? If the country is running on the cryptographically-locked weapon system discussed earlier, the directors will have a higher-level key that can overrule the dictator’s key and make sure that factions loyal to the board have working weapons while those loyal to the dictator don’t. How would the system guard against the dictator arresting the directors and torturing the key out of them? Maybe the directors could live in foreign countries (remember, they aren’t motivated by patriotism - they just want their stock to go up). Or maybe some of this process can be done cryptographically, so that nobody knows how many shares people have, how they voted, or even who the directors are at any given time. If the dictator started poking around to try to figure this out, the directors could remove him. I bring this up partly because 2025-Yarvin has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently. Corporations, he argues, are nimbler and better-run than democracies. A big part of their advantage is that the buck stops with an autocratic CEO instead of a limited President. Therefore, to improve upon democracy, give President Trump the limitless powers of a corporate CEO. [When people ask me why I think monarchies are better than democracies] I ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that we call companies are actually like monarchies. And then you’re looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it […] I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad. But the overall quality, just pick one at random, and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there […] One of the things about monarchy that’s been known for quite some time—and again, even in very, very anti-monarchial regimes and periods, an exception is made for this—is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment … you should have someone in charge. But even granting that corporations are better-governed than democracies, this comparison doesn’t work. Corporate and national governance are trying to solve different problems. Corporate governance asks “Given pre-existing rule of law and the certainty that all of our bylaws will be enforced by a greater power, how do we ensure competent administration?” National government asks “How do we generate rule of law out of nothing in a way that can prop itself up and defend against attacks?” What prevents Tim Apple from refusing to pay dividends to Apple investors and keeping all the profit for himself? Easy question, it’s the United States government, no problem here. What prevents Donald Trump from murdering America’s five richest billionaires and taking their stuff? The police? What about the thing where Trump is the police chief’s boss’s boss’s boss’? Awkward, but that’s why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, government-of-law-and-not-of-men, all that stuff. What prevents Donald Trump from calling in the military to arrest all the other separate powers that are supposed to check and balance him? Uh, more separation of power, different checks and balances, some sort of loyalty to the Constitution. When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve. Classic Moldbug understood this well, which was why he proposed a separate power capable of checking his dictator - the board of directors1 - and a mechanism for keeping the system stable against power grabs - the cryptographic weapons. But the regime he boosts today has nothing like this, so it’s facile to use the corporate comparison argument. 4: The Dictator Must Be Embedded Within A Patchwork Of Similar Corporate City-States. Architectonics already did a great job covering this one. Read his Part 1 and Part 2, then meet me back here for the Conclusion section. At Long Last, I’ve Created The Populist Strongman From My Classic Series Of 11,000 Blog Posts “Don’t Create The Populist Strongman” I enjoyed reading Unqualified Reservations, way back in 2013. I didn’t agree with it, but I thought some parts of it were good, and even the bad parts helped me think clearly about the nature of power. I hoped the neoreactionaries would take the good parts, ditch the rest, and build something useful out of it. I think some people, mostly outside the organized neoreactionary movement, did exactly that (subscribers-only post, sorry). Unfortunately, Yarvin went the opposite direction, jettisoning the good stuff in favor of the bad. All the warnings against populism, party politics, corrupt power-seeking officials, misinformation, and mobocracy have been filed away in favor of a Flanderized “maybe dictatorship is good”. One reason I respect Sam Altman is that back in 2016, when he founded an AI charity to bring a positive singularity to the world, he realized that it would later be extraordinarily tempting to turn it into a normal profit-focused company and get rich. So he tied himself to the mast by designing a nonprofit structure capable of thwarting all the machinations his future self could throw at it. A few years later, he gave into temptation, tried to turn it into a normal profit-focused company, and failed, because the structure he designed was really good. This was the best possible outcome, and one of many reasons I number him among the all-time greats. Moldbug deserves a similar level of respect. He clearly saw that the failure mode of his philosophy was that power-seeking people would use it to support right-wing populism. He included a fantastic number of tests to determine whether any given self-professed reactionary was the real deal or a false prophet, begging his readers to apply them carefully to anyone claiming the mantle of reaction. Then he got corrupted by power and tried to use his philosophy to endorse right-wing populism. But the tests are still there! Anyone who reads through 11,000 blog posts can see all the red flags where Moldbug says “…and if I ever do X, then I’ve sold out and you should stop listening to me.” Another all-time great! Just the few posts I’ve highlighted in this essay have listed over a dozen tests - by tests I mean something where Moldbug says something is an absolutely vital feature of the new regime, or that without it things would descend into kleptocracy, or that this is the only safeguard against Hitler, or something along those lines. These include: The reactionary party always tells the truth

Inline links: here, The Sopranos, Divine-right monarchy, through West Virginia, Mr. Jones, Moldbug’s answer, Reign of Terror, suggests cryptographically-locked weapons, they will lie, is relieved when right-wing populism loses, proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation, has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently, 1, Part 1, Part 2, did exactly that, and failed

Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out. In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely interesting speculations on novel sci-fi variants of autocracy. Admitting that the dictatorships of the 20th century were horrifying, he proposed creative ways to patch their vulnerabilities by combining 18th century monarchy with 22nd century cyberpunk to create something better than either. These ideas might not have been realistic. But they were cool, edgy, and had a certain intellectual appeal. Then in the late 2010s, as soon as his ideas started getting close to power he dropped it all like a hot potato. The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s Moldbug feared most - a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit - giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos. So, for example, Yarvin urges Trump to become more of a dictator, and Young accuses him of ignoring that fact that dictators can go crazy and do terrible things. The (anonymized) Twitter user above counters that Classic Moldbug includes a cleverly-designed procedure for an unremovable board of directors with well-aligned incentives who can remove a dictator if he screws up. That’s all true! Classic Moldbug does have that part! It’s great, at least as speculative fiction! But Trump hasn’t implemented it and never will, so who cares? The whole point of post-2015 Yarvin is to say “I, a cool person who has thought a lot about autocracy, conjecture that autocracies might go great if you do certain things, so don’t worry about Trump”, and hope you don’t notice that Trump isn’t doing any of the things. Props to the Architectonics blog for writing Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug (Part 2 here), which does a good job pointing this out in one limited domain: countries under international law vs. sovereign corporations under patchwork. But I think the problem is much broader. I’ll divide my argument into four parts: Classic Moldbug thought the default outcome of a modern populist dictatorship was disaster. To avert this, he proposed three mechanisms.

Inline links: Architectonics, Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug, Part 2 here

We’re told not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But Moldbug seems pretty fixed on perfection, constantly warning that you have to follow these rules or else you’ll get Hitler and it will be even worse than normal democracy. By my count, the Trump administration is zero out of sixteen.

Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID

May 29, 2025 · Original source

I want to make it clear: I am not recommending that people kill Donald Trump or Marco Rubio. I am recommending that God consider sending them to Hell. I think this is a moderate compromise proposal, endorsed by leading Hell experts2.

Inline links: endorsed by leading Hell experts, 2

I reject the claim that criticism is tantamount to violence - a claim which anyway I usually hear applied to transgender sex workers rather than, say, Donald Trump. Partly this is because I think a writer’s first responsibility is to to truth, second to goodness, and only very far down the list to manage the emotions of some hypothetical psychopath who may or may not be reading their work.

Even if Tyler disagrees with this, I think there are enough other people calling Donald Trump a bad person that it’s not worth his time to respond to me in particular; he should present some kind of more general explanation of his views.

In Search Of AI Psychosis

August 26, 2025 · Original source

I’m not making fun of Kelsey or her daughter here. Something about this rings true to me. When I was eight years old, I wouldn’t have cared much what my parents thought either. But if the computer believed it, that would be a different story! II. In Search Of . . . Social Media Psychosis? In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past ten years: QAnon is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The most common version claims that liberal elites, especially Hillary Clinton, molest young children to extract an immortality serum from their blood. Donald Trump figured this out and is trying to stop them, but for some reason he can’t play his hand openly, so he has to pursue a roundabout strategy involving winning the Presidency and dismantling the liberal order from above. Everything that has happened in politics over the past ten years has been part of the shadow war between Trump and the immortal pedophile conspiracy. This is pretty crazy. But is it psychotic? And since it spread through sites like 4chan and Facebook, should we invent a new diagnostic entity, “social media psychosis”, to cover it? These are tough questions, but in the end we didn’t do this. I think this was partly because there was a pre-existing category, “conspiracy theory”, that seemed like a better fit. We concluded that “sometimes social media facilitates the spread of conspiracy theories”, but stepped back from saying “social media can induce psychosis”. And by “in the end we didn’t do this”, I mean “we absolutely did it, but forgot about it later.” I think now there might be several dozen subreddit moderators who could accurately describe their job as “witch webmaster who runs an online service giving advice to new witches”. And partly it was because there are so many crazy beliefs in the world - spirits, crystal healing, moon landing denial, esoteric Hitlerism, whichever religions you don’t believe in - that psychiatrists have instituted a blanket exemption for any widely held idea. If you think you’re being attacked by demons, you’re delusional, unless you’re from some culture where lots of people get attacked by demons, in which case it’s a religion and you’re fine. This is partly political self-protection - no psychiatrist wants to be the guy who commits an Afro-Caribbean person for believing in voodoo. But it also seems to track something useful about reality. Nietzsche wrote “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Most people don’t have world-models - they believe what their friends believe, or what has good epistemic vibes. In a large group, weird ideas can ricochet from person to person and get established even in healthy brains. In an Afro-Caribbean culture where all your friends get attacked by demons at voodoo church every Sunday, a belief in demon attacks can co-exist with otherwise being a totally functional individual. So is QAnon a religion? Awkward question, but it’s non-psychotic by definition. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If social media makes a thousand people believe the same crazy thing, it’s not psychotic. If LLMs make a thousand people each believe a different crazy thing, that is psychotic. Is this a meaningful difference, or an accounting convention? Also, what if a thousand people believe something, but it’s you and your 999 ChatGPT instances? III. A Hidden Army Of Crackpots I have a family member who believes that the theory of evolution, as usually understood, cannot possibly work. He has developed an alternative theory called “noctogenesis” which patches Darwinism using ideas from the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and he works on-and-off on various related books and papers. I have told him I suspect he might be a crackpot; he stands by his claims. It’s fine; when I got into the technological singularity and AI safety, lots of people suspected I was a crackpot, and I stood by my claims too. You’ve got to stand by your family members even when they’re slightly crackpottish. This family member is happily married, retired after running a successful business, and generally a normal likeable person. He has no signs of mental illness, and doesn’t talk about quantum evolution unless someone else brings it up first. There must be millions of people like him. Used car dealers with proofs of P = NP, dentists who think they’ve discovered something important about Mary Magdalene, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon. I’m working on evaluating ACX Grants, and these people are out in force. A few propose literal perpetual motion machines. Others have vaguer plans, like some kind of social media app (it’s always a social media app) that will cause world peace. Many of them have decent jobs and seem like upstanding members of society. Their secrets are known only to themselves, their family members, and their would-be grantmaker. …and, increasingly, their chatbots. After years of hiatus (or at least not talking to me about his work) my family member is back on the quantum evolution beat, and LLMs appear to be involved. If I knew him less well, I would think the LLM had caused the quantum evolution theory - but no, it just made it much easier to research and write about. Is this psychosis? The answer has to be no, but it’s once again hard to draw the line. A very small number of crackpots will be vindicated by history. A larger number will be erroneous but sympathetic - the official account of the Kennedy assassination is pretty weird, and reasonable minds can disagree. From there, we get to ones that are maybe not so sympathetic: flat earth, QAnon, the thing where the Queen was an alien lizard. If only one person thought the Queen was an alien lizard, and they never managed to convince anyone else, would that be sufficient evidence for a delusional disorder? I’m not sure. (psychiatry has a diagnosis, schizotypal personality, which sort of involves being a normal person with a few odd ideas, but it’s not a great match for many of these people, and interesting mainly as a genetic curiosity - it travels in the same families as schizophrenia itself) Maybe this is another place where we are forced to admit a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders - there is an unbroken continuum from mildly sad to suicidally depressed, from social drinking to raging alcoholism, and from eccentric to floridly psychotic. People who are eccentric can remain so their whole lives, with the level of expression depending on their social connections and the ease of pursuing their rabbit holes. LLMs, by making it easier to pursue odd theories and serving as a surrogate social connection who always agrees with you, can bring latent crackpottery into the open. IV. Cause And Effect Bipolar disorder has an interesting relationship with sleep. Most manic people sleep very little, or not at all - maybe an hour or two a night. But also, poor sleep can cause bipolar episodes in people prone to them. In a typical case, a bipolar who’s been well-controlled for years will get assigned a big report at work and get poor sleep for a few nights until they finish. At first, this will be just as bad as it sounds, and they’ll be working through a fog of tiredness. Then the tiredness will lift. They’ll feel normal, then better-than-normal, until finally they can’t sleep even if they want to. Then they’ll email the report to their boss and it will be written entirely in Assyrian cuneiform. I increasingly think this isn’t just an incidental feature of bipolar, but part of the reason it exists as a diagnostic category at all. Most people have a compensatory reaction to insomnia - missing one night of sleep makes you more tired the next. A small number of people have the reverse, a spiralling reaction where missing one night of sleep makes you less tired the next. Solve for the equilibrium and you reach a stable attractor point where you never sleep at all. But this does other bad things to your brain - hence the cuneiform. I’m not claiming that bipolar is “just” sleep loss. As Borsboom et al will tell you, psychiatric disorders can be viewed as complex networks of symptoms, each reinforcing the others. In a few pure cases, you can get a ratchet going with sleep alone, and the sleeplessness will spark everything else. More likely, there will be lots of interactions between poor sleep and everything else, and the “everything else” can sink or hypercharge an impending manic episode. Still, I find this a fruitful way to think about bipolar. Sleeplessness is both the cause and the effect. Can delusions also be like this? That is, suppose there’s some personality trait where having one delusion makes you even more delusional. Maybe the delusion makes you excited (who wouldn’t be excited to learn they’re the Messiah?), and you’re more delusional when you’re in an excited state and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it’s a three-symptom cycle - the delusion causes excitement, which makes you unable to sleep, which scrambles your thinking, which makes you more delusional (which makes you even less able to sleep, etc). The point is: delusions are certainly an effect of bipolar disorder. And in the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, we should expect that effects are often also causes; that’s how the vicious cycle gets going. This is the best I can do at modeling true LLM psychosis. Someone with a trait where delusions lead inevitably to more delusions starts using an LLM. The LLM accentuates whatever usual tendency towards crackpottery they have and makes them believe something a little crazier than whatever they believed before. Then that crazy belief feeds upon itself and causes other things like excitement and sleep loss, which (if the person is predisposed) precipitates a true psychotic episode. V. Folie A Deux Ex Machina If one person believes a crazy thing, it’s a delusion; if a thousand people believe it, it’s a religion. What if exactly two people believe it? In psychiatry, this is called folie a deux. It fits awkwardly into our nosology and is rarely seen. Still, it happens enough to generate a few case studies. In a typical case, one person has psychosis for some normal reason, like schizophrenia or bipolar, and the second person is a shut-in who lives with them and rarely talks to anyone else. The psychotic person gets some normal psychotic delusion - they’re God, the Feds are after them, etc - and sort of psychically steamrolls over the second person until they believe it too. Usually removing the second person from the first is sufficient for a cure. This slightly challenges the view of psychosis as a biological disorder - but only slightly. Again, think of most people as lacking world-models, but being moored to reality by some vague sense of social consensus. If your social life is limited to one person, and that person themselves becomes unmoored, then sometimes you will follow along. I would expect second-sufferers to believe delusions in a sort of cognitively normal way, the same way people believe true facts, honest mistakes, and conspiracy theories. I would expect them to be less likely (though not zero likely) to have other psychotic features like sleep disturbances, hallucinations, disorganized speech, or a tendency to autonomously generate delusional ideas aside from the one they absorbed from the index case. An introverted person using an LLM has some similarities to folie a deux. If they use the chatbot very often, it might be a large majority of their social interactions. Here the primary vs. secondary distinction breaks down - the most likely scenario is that the human first suggested the crazy idea, the machine reflected it back slightly stronger, and it kept ricocheting back and forth, gaining confidence with each iteration, until both were totally convinced. Compare this to normal social interactions, where if someone expresses a crazy idea that isn’t common in their culture, other people will shoot them down or at the very least nod politely and stop the conversation. So my working theory of LLM psychosis is: Some patients were already psychotic, and LLMs just help them be psychotic more effectively.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HDQb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fece0561a-a62c-4eb6-8e23-7c0db5cb8a0b_749x479.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mYKR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03938197-ae2c-4dde-88d4-c22f66e34c09_767x681.png, the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon, ACX Grants, a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders, As Borsboom et al will tell you, the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, folie a deux

Open Thread 399

September 15, 2025 · Original source

Donald Trump was chosen by God. You can tell because he's invincible. He can wriggle out of scandals that would sink Tricky Dick Nixon ten times over. He can run on a platform of punishing illegal immigrants, and the illegal immigrants themselves will rally to his banner. He can support Israel harder than anyone has ever supported it before, and Arab-Americans will break fifty years of Voting Blue No Matter Who to march behind him. He can get 100% evangelical backing while oozing contempt for Christianity, 100% libertarian support while trampling the Constitution, and 100% allegiance from Wall Street while dismantling global trade. KKK wizards and celebrity rappers compete to compliment him loudest; Nazis and the ADL jostle past each other to sing his praises. Shooting him in the head only makes him stronger.

To posit Trump's divine election is not to imply he has any positive qualities. When the Israelites stopped obeying the commandments, God punished them by raising an incompetent idolator named Jeroboam to the throne. Jeroboam started a disastrous war that killed 500,000 of his own men, after which his dynasty collapsed and his entire family was slain. Jeroboam was chosen by God to crush and humiliate Israel. But he was chosen by God. Has America been obeying the commandments lately?

Defining Defending Democracy: Contra The Election Winner Argument

September 18, 2025 · Original source

Someone argues that Donald Trump threatens democracy, maybe because he’s asserting authority against the judiciary or the media or the NGOs. Someone else counterargues that it hardly seems undemocratic for someone to favor someone who won an election (the President) over other people who did not (the judiciary, the media). If anything, it seems undemocratic to allow the unelected people to continue to obstruct and harass elected leaders.

Sources: Babylon Bee (yes I know it’s satire; notice the direction), Spiked, WSJ, MacIver Institute The most common response is to say that fine, democracy is about who wins votes, but we also like liberalism, liberalism is under threat, it’s too hard to talk about “liberalism” because in the US it sometimes means being left-wing, and so we use the related concept “democracy” as a stand-in. This is reasonable, and some accused-democracy-destroyers like Viktor Orban even accept it for themselves, calling their brand of government “illiberal democracy”. But I think there’s an even stronger response that doesn’t require admitting to a bait-and-switch: democracy isn’t just about having an election. It’s about having more than one election. Imagine a system where the winner of a fair election gets unlimited authority during his term. What forces this person to ever hold another fair election? Why can’t he ban the media from reporting on his missteps? Or confiscate opposition parties’ treasuries? Or order the police to murder any candidate who runs against him? The preparations for the next election, and the election itself, occur while it is still his term; if he can do whatever he wants during his term, there is nothing guaranteeing a fair election besides his personal goodwill. When we adjust for this - when we consider how to accord a leader enough power to do anything except rig the next election in his favor - we find that this is such a hard problem that it already requires most of the checks, balances, and civil society that we call liberalism. For example, the simplest way to win an election is to murder opposing candidates. We cannot merely constitutionally ban the leader from murdering people; if the leader controls the judiciary, he can pack it with sympathetic judges who will find him innocent of murder even when he does it in broad daylight (for some reason, no Russian judge has ever convicted Vladmir Putin of any of the assassinations that so many Western sources are sure he committed). So in order to give teeth to even the most basic ban on murdering rival candidates, you need an independent judiciary. (and although having “unelected bureaucrats” sounds bad, it’s important that these people not be directly elected at exactly the same time as the leader, because if the same electorate that puts the leader in power puts the checks on the leader in power, they’re likely to come from the same party. In the US, we solve this in a variety of ways, especially by staggering appointments - some officials are appointed by the previous leader, or the one before that.) But an independent judiciary is useless if the leader can ignore it without penalty. And the penalty cannot be purely legal, because legal penalties are levied by a judiciary, ie the organ that such a leader is ignoring. So this penalty must bottom out in extra-legal consequences: either the public relations consequences of the populace realizing that their leader has become a dictator, or - in the worst-case scenario - the military realizing this and taking direct action. But these extra-legal consequences require a well-informed populace (or at least a well-informed military). Now we also need freedom of the press. And a token freedom of the press, only sufficient to print the single line “the leader has defied the judiciary”, won’t be enough. People need context: is there an emergency? Was the judiciary actually trying to overstep? Is this part of a pattern? Is the leader generally a bad enough actor that this should tip people over the edge to vote against him, or to protest him? Many people will be reluctant to protest if the economy is strong and the borders are peaceful; is the economy actually strong, and the border actually peaceful, or is this just state propaganda? Answering these questions requires a flourishing journalistic ecosystem, including investigative reporters. A well-informed populace is useless without the ability to act on its information. Consider what might happen in a flourishing democracy if a leader tried to fire all the election monitors and replace them with toadies who would stuff the ballot boxes in his favor. Someone at the election office notices and informs the media (this step goes better if you have whistleblower protections enshrined in law, which may require an independent legislature).

Inline links: Babylon Bee, Spiked, WSJ, MacIver Institute, “illiberal democracy”

Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds

October 21, 2025 · Original source

Everyone else The partisan groups have lots of money but little distortionary effect. Democratic machines try to elect Democrats, Republican machines try to elect Republicans, but they don't push their chosen candidates towards any specific position besides the ones that play well with voters. They are, so to speak, priced in. AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel. They are orders of magnitude more effective than any comparable political organization. Their advantage stems from the nature of political donations, which come in two types. "Hard money" is money given directly to candidates; strict campaign finance limits it to $7000 per donor. "Soft money" comes from SuperPACs and can evade most campaign finance laws; it can pay for ads but can't fund candidates directly. Candidates prefer hard money to soft money, but it's harder to get; a single billionaire can provide unlimited soft money, but you need a wide donor base to acquire hard money. But not too wide! When millions of waitresses and bartenders gave Bernie Sanders $25 each, that was impressive grassroots support - but each of those $25 checks only went 1/280th as far as one person giving the $7000 max, and all of these waitresses are hard to corral and coordinate for downballot causes. AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))), are at the exact sweet spot of moderately numerous, moderately well-off, and very committed. This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money, compared to other groups that are more reliant on single billionaires or masses of poor people. But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep most politicians in line. Everyone else includes other industry groups, labor groups, and activist cadres. Probably on aggregate these people are destroying America, but as individual organizations they're miniscule compared to the first two categories. The biggest of these is a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC that nobody's ever heard of. The average PAC strategy is this: when the incumbent will obviously win, donate money to the incumbent. When there's a tight race, donate money to both sides. Why does the first prong of this strategy work? If the incumbent will definitely win, why are they selling out for more cash? Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money for a pretty good reason: they can transfer it to other politicians or the party apparatus in exchange for goodwill that can be cashed in later for leadership positions. Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here. One ventured that he had seen Democrats in D + 30 states with 0.000% chance of losing run themselves ragged raising more and more money. Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will never truly accept that their safe seat is safe. These people aren't corrupt. They're not spending the money on campaign Lamborghinis. They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising. And why does the second prong work? Why does donating to a Congressman buy their goodwill if you also donated an equal amount to their opponent? Part of the answer is the same as above: it can buy leadership positions, it can satisfy an irrational addiction to money. But another part is that politicians don’t like thinking of donations as a corrupt quid pro quo. The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want, is something of an exception. Usually it's just - you have a random bill on toilet regulation or something in front of you. A bunch of randos want to call you and give their advice. But you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign (and maybe also gave something to your opponent, but whatever, everyone does it). This catches your attention. So you make sure to take their call first, and listen the longest. This still doesn't entirely make sense to me. But it's how all PACs (except AIPAC and the machines) operated until 2024. III. In 2024, the crypto industry raised the stakes. Let's put numbers on all of this. In that year, AIPAC raised $87 million. The real estate group that usually plays runner-up raised $20 million. Marc Andreessen’s new crypto PAC, Fairshake, raised $260 million. Just a totally unheard-of amount of money for a single industry. How did they do it? In some sense, this isn't surprising. In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin did very well. Many people in the industry got rich. A16Z, Marc Andreessen's crypto-heavy venture capital firm, says they invested $8 billion into crypto. Coinbase, the biggest US crypto company, is valued at $85 billion. The richest crypto billionaires have 10-to-11 digit net worths. And government regulation is potentially an existential threat to crypto. So in some sense, it's the least surprising thing in the world that they could scrounge up $260 million to save their multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. The only reason it's remarkable is that, for some reason which I still haven't figured out, nobody else - not the oil industry, not the firearms industry, not the defense industry - ever tried this before. How exactly did the industry pull this together? Andreessen personally donated $40 - $50 million (remember, the second-biggest industry PAC, real estate, raised only $20 million total from all donors, personal and business). Again, this isn't a crazy proportion of his net worth: he has $2 billion, so a $50 million expense hardly forces him back to ramen. It's just that no other billionaire of his stature is even in the game. Then his cofounder Ben Horowitz donated another $40 million. Then two big crypto companies (Coinbase and Ripple, both with A16Z links) donated another $40 - 50 million each. As the saying goes, sooner or later it all adds up to real money. Anyway, they won overwhelmingly. They combined the business-as-usual strategy of donating to safe incumbents and both sides of close races, with the AIPAC strategy of picking a few big opponents of their cause and airdropping massive sums on their rivals. For example, Representative Katie Porter (D-California) was an Elizabeth Warren ally and cryptocurrency critic. When she ran for Senate, Fairshake dropped $10 million into attack ads against her in the primaries - more than most candidates' total spending. The attack ads didn't say she was bad on crypto - something that approximately no voters care about. They were just normal attack ads on whatever aspect of her policy and personality focus groups said she was most vulnerable on (in practice, an accusation that she mistreated her Congressional staff). She lost badly, coming in third place. Although nobody can prove she wouldn't have lost anyway, conventional wisdom was that crypto had successfully made its point. According to SFGate: An unnamed political operative told the magazine: “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your f—king family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” The scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of cases, the New Yorker wrote. Now, neither presidential candidate wants to run astray of the industry: Donald Trump spoke at a crypto conference, and Kamala Harris signaled her support. And Porter is forced out of Congress. These are all important signs that crypto’s bet is paying off, but I think I know what metric the crypto barons themselves are watching, and if anything it’s even more bullish: Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.

Inline links: According to SFGate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bWaN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13d918d0-5918-4bf6-9dee-0a798c76ae82_706x499.png, strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks

Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.

Inline links: strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks

Highlights From The Comments On Fatima

October 24, 2025 · Original source

Speaking of “nothing could be simpler”, I tried staring at the moon the night after I read this article. I was completely, absolutely unable to make myself think it looked anything like Ayatollah Khomeini. I worried that I didn’t have a clear enough memory of what Khomeini looked like, so I tried Donald Trump. Still no luck. I worried that it might be relevant that I didn’t like Donald Trump, so I tried Eliezer Yudkowsky. Still nothing.

But if He does try to trick people, He should succeed. I can’t say either of these two things with confidence. Doesn’t the Biblical God sort of try to trick Abraham into thinking he’s going to have to sacrifice his son? And what is God, anyway? Isn’t the whole world a product of God? Does the existence of mirages in the desert count as “God trying to trick people”? Does that fact that we know there are mirages imply that God failed? Still, Ethan’s take on the “sun” miracle of Fatima seems like an unusually clear-cut case of God trying to trick people and failing, and I’m uncomfortable with it. You can always add more overfitting. God’s goal was for the crowds at Fatima to be fooled, but then for Dalleur (2021) to figure it out, and so He achieved His goal perfectly. Okay. But speaking of overfitting… If I understand Ethan right, Fatima was an objective omnidirectional light show, plus a unidirectional heat ray. Ghiaie was a spotlight-shaped unidirectional lightshow. Benin City was a subjective omnidirectional light show limited to a single field, plus an objective unidirectional heat ray. God implemented all of these miracles in completely different ways. Why? Inscrutable God reasons. This isn’t a terrible answer. People often do things for reasons I can’t explain - if I could predict Trump’s behavior, my stock market returns would be much higher. And surely God, as a being with motives and knowledge far beyond my ken, should be even more incomprehensible. But there was an interesting recent Notes debate about a Bentham Bulldog’s post. BB said that atheists had many problems - how was the world created? how do you overcome skepticism? what happened at Fatima? - whereas theism only has one problem - the problem of evil. Evil is a big problem, but it’s at least nice to only have one. Some of the commenters - and I can no longer find the comment I liked anymore, but don’t take this as an original insight from me - pointed out that this is cheap. If you are an atheist, you need to answer many how questions. How did the miracle at Fatima happen? If you try to explain it with natural laws - for example, gravity - it’s fair for an interlocutor to point out that gravity can’t do that; it can only make things fall. If you’re a theist, you have a free option to convert any how question to a why question. How? Because God did it! Your interlocutor can’t object, because we know God can do anything. But in exchange, you now have a why question - why did God do that, and not something else? The sum of all why question - the fact that the real world doesn’t look like it was optimized for some specific plausible motive like goodness - is the problem of evil. Thus, it is exactly equivalent to all the inconvenient “how” questions you hoped you’d avoided. The commenter sarcastically compared this to an attempt to sweep all scientific anomalies under the rug as “the problem of uncharacteristicness”. How did Fatima happen? “Well, it must have been produced by laws of physics, so there!” But the sun spinning and dancing through the sky is hardly what you would expect from the laws of physics. “Yeah, whatever, that’s just the ‘problem of uncharacteristicness’, we’ve already priced that one in, at least we only have one problem!” This made me more attuned to questions of God’s motives. Yeah, it is kind of weird that God would create the same miracle three different ways, and we don’t know why. Yeah, it is kind of weird that God would try to trick people into thinking a non-sun-object was the sun, then let a few smart people working years later see through the deception. Are these problems of motive exactly as problematic for the theist as 70,000 people seeing the sun do impossible things is for the atheist? My gut answer is no. Should I trust my gut? Dylan: In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy Evan wrote the original response to Ethan, before I got involved in the debate. I was a bit harsh on him, saying that his part about the child-seers was fine, but calling his investigation of the sun miracle superficial and unfairly dismissive. Dylan of Chaotic Neutral writes In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy, and Evan additionally defends himself here. Before getting to Dylan’s post - yeah, I was unfair to Evan (partly this is because my brain has trouble remembering that Ethan Muse and Evan Murphy are two different people). In particular, I described his hypothesis on the child-seers as being that they “confabulated” their visions, a term that Evan took great pains to disclaim in his actual post. I was thinking of a broader definition of “confabulation” that includes hallucination-like phenomena - but Evan was right that if I had read his post carefully, I wouldn’t have used the specific word he said he was against. I mostly just skimmed it to see if he had a really good explanation for the sun miracle thing, then got annoyed when he didn’t. But Dylan has additional complaints. He writes: Evan DID give this miracle the attention it deserved. He spent 18 hours researching and writing his article, presenting much of the same evidence and coming to many of the same conclusions that Scott did, and he did it as an ordinary citizen with a “day job” and in a household that “does not possess a dishwashing machine.” What more could you ask of a skeptical individual!? Unlike myself and the other lazy skeptics, he actually did respect this miracle claim enough to do a proper investigation. And towards the end, yes, he decided to wrap up early […] To criticize Evan’s conduct here in this miracle debate is to set an extremely high bar that cannot possibly be met by the overwhelming majority of the skeptical community. Such exacting standards will ultimately only serve to discourage diligent skepticism like Evan’s and incentivize lazy skepticism like mine. I have two partial defenses of my own actions. First, I think the majority of those 18 hours were spent on the child-seer section, which I acknowledged was good. I didn’t care about that part. To me, the trouble of explaining how three children can say in a convincing and honest-sounding and semiconsistent way that they saw the Virgin Mary is a rounding error compared to the trouble of explaining how 70,000 people can say in a convincing and honest-sounding and semiconsistent way that they saw the sun fall from the sky. But second, I think Dylan is arguing that Evan should get an A for effort. I agree. He put in a lot of work, he adhered to good scholarly principles, and he hit all of the beats that a skeptical explanation is supposed to hit. The only thing he didn’t do, from my perspective, is defuse the fact that the Fatima miracle is extremely creepy, and I have no idea what to do with it, and I can’t fit it into my ontology. Evan’s only attempt to defuse the miracle was that it was a hallucination or illusion or something. This is a reasonable conjecture, but for me it was already priced in - as soon as you hear about a miracle, the obvious next step is “well, maybe it was a hallucination or illusion or something”. I didn’t feel like his piece added anything extra. Generously, some of his tangential points - like that Garrett and Almeida weren’t the perfect skeptics they are sometimes portrayed as - might have defused 1% of my discomfort. I think a reasonable conclusion for this would have been “I’ve rehearsed the obvious arguments for why it is possible to be skeptical of anything, I’ve found some tangential facts that maybe remove 1% of the mystery, but man, I don’t know, this really needs lots more investigation”. My research hardly provided any kind of brilliant omni-solution, but I think that learning about the Ghiaie/Benin/Lubbock/Medjugorge followup miracles and the Redditor testimonies each defused about 15% of my reluctance to accept Fatima as natural, and the fire kasina + Khomeini stuff defused another 10%, to the point where I’m only about 60% as confused and unhappy as when I started. I hope I correctly signposted this level of success/failure to the reader. On Miracles Other responses tried to assert a general point that we should always disbelieve miracles. I. Eugene Earnshaw writes that We Do Not Need To Care About Miracles. If I understand his argument right: there are many examples of anomalous phenomena (eg crop circles) and stage magic (eg sawing a woman in half). When we don’t know how these are done, they seem impossible, and (almost) no amount of armchair reasoning can produce a plausible explanation. But in many cases, we have eventually figured them out - some “white hat” crop circlers explain how they make their seemingly-impossible patterns, and some magicians publish explanations of their tricks. After the fact, we can see how these seemingly-impossible things followed natural law after all. So we shouldn’t worry too much each time we encounter a new miracle that hasn’t yet been explained. Okay, but - suppose that the Pope said “I’m tired of convincing you people the normal ways, I’m going to start blowing up mountains”, and pointed his papal staff at Mt. Everest, and it exploded. And then we asked him to repeat the performance, and he did so as many times as we asked him, again and again. Would we shrug and say “Nothing to see here, I’m sure there’s some reasonable explanation”? If the miracle were sufficiently convincing, we would either believe it, or at least think it pointed at something interesting (maybe the Vatican obtained super-nukes and is hiding them under mountains and choreographing their detonations - but this would be pretty important and very different from “nothing to see here”). Ben Landau-Taylor gives a related answer, reminding us that meteorites used to be dismissed on exactly these grounds. The science of the day didn’t allow for non-planet objects to be in space, so rocks falling from the sky was every bit as weird as the sun dancing and changing colors. “When President Jefferson was told that Professors Silliman and Kingsley had described a fall of stones from the sky at Weston, in Connecticut, he remarked: ‘It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors will lie than to believe that stones will fall from heaven.’” In the end, I think we just get back to regular Bayesianism. We have two hypotheses: First, that the world acts entirely according to natural law. Second, that sometimes it includes divine intervention (or very surprising natural laws that we wouldn’t have predicted beforehand). We start with a high prior on the first hypothesis based on our long history of seeing only natural events. When we see evidence that is more likely on the second hypothesis than the first, we update in favor of it. We should remember that “more likely on the second hypothesis than the first” is full of pitfalls - on the first hypothesis, it’s likely that there will be many skilled fraudsters and stage magicians, so even very strange-seeming anomalies might not be very unlikely under it. Still, at the point where the Pope starts blowing up mountains, maybe you think it’s pretty unlikely that stage magic could accomplish this, and you update a little. II. Omne Bonum makes a different point: there are many possible miracles. Most do not occur. Yes, a few of them do. But can we be sure it’s above the background rate? Even if there are no true miracles, you’ll get one-in-a-million coincidences one-millionth of the time. If you’re not good at accounting for the 999,999 failures - and people aren’t - this will look impressive. Against this, what is the base rate for the sun changing color and dropping out of the sky, at the precise time that child-seers prophecied a miracle would occur? Seems lower than one in a million. Impossible things should never happen. Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on - or that I’m crazy, or dreaming, or something other than just “well it was a coincidence”. III. FLWAB takes on Hume’s argument against miracles (see also Kenny Easwaran here), which - sorry, I realize it’s suspicious to say this about a famous philosopher - is extremely bad. Hume argues that a miracle is a violation of natural law. And a natural law is something that is always true. But since it’s always true, it can’t be violated. And if we eventually confirmed that it was violated, then we were wrong about it being a natural law. Which means its violation wasn’t even a real miracle anyway. This seems to be a purely semantic argument. We know that the Red Sea usually stays in one place. But suppose Moses lifts his staff and parts the Red Sea, and that all of this is very convincing (we witness it personally, we measure the sea with various instruments, etc). I think Hume would have to say that we have disproven the natural law “the Red Sea usually stays in one place” - but only in favor of a new natural law “the Red Sea stays in one place except when Moses raises his staff”. And since we have never observed a violation of this new natural law, no miracle has occurred! Against this, we can call the way things work 99.999% of the time, when God isn’t acting directly, and when everything is proceeding via predictable material patterns “natural law”, and the very rare deviations that only occur in the presence of God or other extremely holy figures “miracles”. If for some reason you hate that terminology, come up with a new word, “shmiracle”, for the abnormal phenomena that only occur secondary to God’s direct intervention, and then we can argue whether shmiracles exist. IV. Why am I insisting on this so hard? This question of miracles is no different from every other question, where confirmation bias is a part of normal Bayesian reasoning. If you believe that vaccines don’t cause autism, then any given study showing that they do is likely to be a fraud or a mistake - especially given the history of such frauds, and the political pressures for producing them. But you gained your belief that vaccines don’t cause autism through some normal amount of evidence, and if the evidence that they did cause it ever become truly overwhelming, you would switch sides. The key skill of rationality is to know when to update your beliefs how much. These arguments feel like sleights-of-hand arguing that you can avoid ever updating on this question. I don’t think Bayesian reasoning provides an excuse for this. I think some of these arguments attempt to make an objection that the prior probability of miracles is zero, and so no matter how much evidence you get, you can never update towards them. But the prior probability of miracles isn’t zero unless either the prior probability of God’s existence is zero, or the probability that God intervenes in the universe is zero. I don’t know any infinitely-convincing argument for either of these points, so I think miracles have a prior probability above zero, which means we have to treat them the same as any other hypothesis. Yes, we will need many extra guardrails and cautions and good heuristics to prevent ourselves from getting bamboozled by the pitfalls that lurk in this area in particular. But that’s true of everything! You also need extra guardrails and cautions and heuristics to prevent yourself from getting bamboozled by scientific studies! There’s no substitute for doing the work. Actual Highlights From The Actual Comments Josh (blog) writes: I’d add that we have at least one verified case where a sun miracle was occuring, and an actual group of fedora wearing atheists were present with a modified telescope, and did not see anything interesting. >> “At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics group set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual (Long 1992, 3; see figure 1).” https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/11/22164423/p14.pdf Funny, but they don’t provide information like whether people were seeing sun miracles at the exact moment the telescope was being used, or whether anyone who could see a sun miracle without the telescope switched to using the telescope and then it stopped. They just say they brought a telescope to a Marian site where some people had seen sun miracles at some point. Even if they clarified that some people had used the telescope while seeing a sun miracle and had it immediately stop miracle-ing, I don’t think this would update me very much. We know it’s not the real sun (Ethan says fake sun, I say subjective phenomenon), and we know the non-Fatima miracles aren’t objective (Ethan says only Fatima was objective, I say none of them were objective). John Schilling writes: Twenty-nine *thousand* words on this subject, and none of them are “unidentified”, “flying”, or “object”. Well, OK, there are a few uses of that last, but in the strained phrasing of “UFO-like object”, as if we are preemptively discounting the possibility that sun miracles are actually UFOs. Sun miracles are actually UFOs, full stop. Not “flying saucers”, not “alien spaceships”, maybe “divine miracles”, but definitely “unidentified flying objects”. We invented that last phrase for a reason, and this is exactly that reason. Which means, the thing I learned from this is that the younglings have completely forgotten all that was learned in the Before Times about UFOs. And that, in this context, Scott is a youngling - UFOs seem to have faded from pop culture in the 1990s. Thanks for making me feel old, Scott :-) With the benefit of age and experience, I read the first few paragraphs, made the tentative conclusion that this was almost certainly [see section 6], but figured Scott wouldn’t be doing this deep a dive if it was that simple. And here we are. It probably is just that simple, and now we can back that up with a fairly exhaustive look at the alternatives. For which, unironically, thank you Scott. It’s good to sometimes double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the obvious conclusion. But for those of us who grew up in the 1980s, who were “rationalists” when rationalism hadn’t been invented and we had to call ourselves “skeptics”, UFOs were as important a subject of rationalist/skeptical inquiry as is AI risk today (and for about the same reason). People learned an awful lot in those days. One of those things is that most people don’t spend much time really looking at the sky and will consistently fail to recognize even slightly-unusual phenomena, like the sun partially veiled by clouds. And the other, more important thing is that when presented with an image they don’t recognize, people will very predictably see what their culture has taught them to expect to see. In 1880s-1890s America, any weird thing in the sky was clearly a fantastic airship, built by some mad scientist out of a Jules Verne novel, and was perceived with a wealth of surrounding detail all aligned with that model. 1950s-1980s America, the same things were clearly “flying saucers”, fantastic alien spaceships piloted by little green or grey men, with the same level of impossible detail. And anywhere you’ve got ten thousand devout Catholics fervently hoping to see a Miracle involving the Sun, and the weather makes the sun look a bit wonky... For an old-school skeptical experiment at understanding this effect, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1980/04/22165441/p34.pdf TL, DR, a gathering of UFO enthusiasts expecting to see a flying saucer in the night sky, are presented with thirty seconds of a monochromatic point source of light at ground level, stationary and unchanging except for one brief interruption. What is perceived, is an object high in the sky with finite angular size and geometric shape, of multiple colors, and conspicuously moving, all consistent with the pop-culture concept of a flying saucer and not some prankster with a spotlight. I considered discussing the UFO angle (the section heading would have been “Virgin Galactic”), but in the end I couldn’t justify it. Yes, the phenomenon is trivially a UFO (in the sense of a thing in the sky we don’t understand). But does this help us? When I think of UFOs, I think of people arguing about whether something was the planet Venus, or a weather balloon, or aliens. But Fatima obviously wasn’t Venus or a balloon (though, uh, see here for a dissenting take). And if it was aliens, you’d have to explain why they pretended to be the Virgin Mary and discussed a bunch of Catholic inside-baseball with a trio of child-seers for several months. So what’s left? When I asked John, he answered: UFOs, are just people seeing something they don’t understand and trying to interpret it by an overweighted, culturally-transmitted prior. Which differs from culture to culture. And that’s something we know a lot about. Which you seem to have independently rediscovered, but I can’t help thinking you’d have got there a lot faster if you’d had a proper map of the territory. A map which includes no aliens outside of the imaginary sort. Maybe one way to rescue the UFO connection is to say that there’s so much weirdness that we should be less willing to take any given example of weirdness on its own terms. I asked in the comments for other examples of miracles as compelling as Fatima. People suggested some of the better-verified reincarnation accounts, some of the better-verified UFO sightings, and some of the more spectacular psi phenomena. I don’t know if these are all exactly as strong as Fatima, but I think many of them are closer to Fatima than to the traditional skeptical conception of an alcoholic liar asserting with zero evidence that he dun saw dem aliens one night. When viewing all of these anomalies as a gestalt, we can go four different directions: Individualized natural explanations. The UFOs were swamp gas and weather balloons. The reincarnation stories are toddlers who are naturally gifted at cold reading. Fatima was entoptic phenomena. Sea serpents are really big oarfish.

Inline links: an interesting recent Notes debate, In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy, defends himself here, We Do Not Need To Care About Miracles, explain, gives, Omne Bonum, takes on Hume’s argument against miracles, here, confirmation bias is a part of normal Bayesian reasoning, blog, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/11/22164423/p14.pdf, writes, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1980/04/22165441/p34.pdf, see here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H6Qh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6087bbd3-2496-46b1-87e0-f96ce73c19d2_522x223.png

Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls

January 13, 2026 · Original source

2: Donald Trump’s company Truth Social said in October that it’s becoming the world’s first social media platform offering prediction markets via a partnership with crypto.com. This isn’t quite what I want - I don’t think users can create their own prediction markets - but it’s a step forward. Also, think about how much money someone’s going to make by taking the pro-left-wing side of all those trades!

Inline links: the world’s first social media platform offering prediction markets

Will Trump turn America into a dictatorship? Make it great again? Somewhere in between?

If America nation-builds Venezuela, for whatever definition of nation-build, will that work well, or backfire? Some of these are long-horizon, some are conditional, and some are hard to resolve. There are potential solutions to all these problems. But why worry about them when you can go to the moon on sports bets? Annals of The Rulescucks The new era of prediction markets has provided charming additions to the language, including “rulescuck” - someone who loses an otherwise-prescient bet based on technicalities of the resolution criteria. Resolution criteria are the small print explaining what counts as the prediction market topic “happening'“. For example, in the Khameini example above, Khameini qualifies as being “out of power” if: …he resigns, is detained, or otherwise loses his position or is prevented from fulfilling his duties as Supreme Leader of Iran within this market's timeframe. The primary resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible reporting. You can imagine ways this definition departs from an exact common-sensical concept of “out of power” - for example, if Khameini gets stuck in an elevator for half an hour and misses a key meeting, does this count as him being “prevented from fulfilling his duties”? With thousands of markets getting resolved per month, chances are high that at least one will hinge upon one of these edge cases. Kalshi resolves markets by having a staff member with good judgment decide whether or not the situation satisfies the resolution criteria. Polymarket resolves markets by . . . oh man, how long do you have? There’s a cryptocurrency called UMA. UMA owners can stake it to vote on Polymarket resolutions in an associated contract called the UMA Oracle. Voters on the losing side get their cryptocurrency confiscated and given to the winners. This creates a Keynesian beauty contest, ie a situation where everyone tries to vote for the winning side. The most natural Schelling point is the side which is actually correct. If someone tries to attack the oracle by buying lots of UMA and voting for the wrong side, this incentivizes bystanders to come in and defend the oracle by voting for the right side, since (conditional on there being common knowledge that everyone will do this) that means they get free money at the attackers’ expense. But also, the UMA currency goes up in value if people trust the oracle and plan to use it more often, and it goes down if people think the oracle is useless and may soon get replaced by other systems. So regardless of their other incentives, everyone who owns the currency has an incentive to vote for the true answer so that people keep trusting the oracle. This system works most of the time, but tends towards so-called “oracle drama” where seemingly prosaic resolutions might lie at the end of a thrilling story of attacks, counterattacks, and escalations. Here are some of the most interesting alleged rulescuckings of 2026: Mr Ozi: Will Zelensky wear a suit? Ivan Cryptoslav calls this “the most infamous example in Polymarket history”. Ukraine’s president dresses mostly in military fatigues, vowing never to wear a suit until the war is over. As his sartorial notoriety spread, Polymarket traders bet over $100 million on the question of whether he would crack in any given month. At the Pope’s funeral, Zelensky showed up in a respectful-looking jacket which might or might not count. Most media organizations refused to describe it as a “suit”, so the decentralized oracle ruled against. But over the next few months, Zelensky continued to straddle the border of suithood, and the media eventually started using the word “suit” in their articles. This presented a quandary for the oracle, which was supposed to respect both the precedent of its past rulings, and the consensus of media organizations. Voters switched sides several times until finally settling on NO; true suit believers were unsatisfied with this decision. For what it’s worth, the Twitter menswear guy told Wired that “It meets the technical definition, [but] I would also recognize that most people would not think of that as a suit.” Domer: Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal? AFAICT, this is the only case where the oracle genuinely broke down (as opposed to a legitimate disagreement). In February, it looked like both America and Ukraine had agreed to a mineral deal, but the oracle considered the question and decided this didn’t count as a full agreement (and indeed, the apparent agreement then fell apart). In March, a cabal of YES holders tried again. They waited for a time when all Polymarket employees would be out of the office, and when not too many people would be voting on the decentralized resolution oracle, then spammed it with calls to resolve to YES based on an argument that the February agreement had qualified after all. The YES holders and not-particularly-plugged-in oracle voters pushed the vote towards YES. Then, with two minutes to spare, a Polymarket employee showed up and said that Polymarket’s opinion was that it should be NO. This was technically framed as a recommendation to oracle voters, but it is so effective in establishing the Schelling point that it’s practically always followed. However, in this case, there were only two minutes left, which wasn’t enough time for the voters to change their mind. Seeing that the resolution was trending towards yes, the Polymarket representatives, not wanting to break their streak of always establishing the Schelling point, changed their own opinion to YES, and the final vote was YES 99%. Domer: How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?: Kalshi’s resolution criteria for this market said they would resolve it when a major news source published Oscar viewership numbers. A few minutes after the Oscars, NYT published preliminary viewership numbers, without any caveats saying they were preliminary. The next day, they published another article saying that actually, the real viewership numbers were higher. Kalshi decided that the letter of the resolution criteria was met when NYT published its first article, and that NYT changing its opinion didn’t imply that Kalshi should change the resolution. Traders who bet on the later (ie correct) numbers were unsatisfied with this decision. NYPost: Will America invade Venezuela? On January 3, the US bombed Venezuela, sent in a Special Forces team that successfully captured President Maduro, and announced that they would thenceforward “run the country” (a claim they later walked back). Does this qualify as an “invasion”? Polymarket’s resolution criteria defined “invasion” as “a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela”. It didn’t seem like the US was trying to establish control over Venezuelan territory, exactly, so they resolved NO. Traders who bet on YES were unsatisfied with this decision. With one exception, these aren’t outright oracle failures. They’re honest cases of ambiguous rules. Most of the links end with pleas for Polymarket to get better at clarifying rules. My perspective is that the few times I’ve talked to Polymarket people, I’ve begged them to implement various cool features, and they’ve always said “Nope, sorry, too busy figuring out ways to make rules clearer”. Prediction market people obsess over maximally finicky resolution criteria, but somehow it’s never enough - you just can’t specify every possible state of the world beforehand. The most interesting proposal I’ve seen in this space is to make LLMs do it; you can train them on good rulesets, and they’re tolerant enough of tedium to print out pages and pages of every possible edge case without going crazy. It’ll be fun the first time one of them hallucinates, though. …And Miscellaneous N’er-Do-Wells I include this section under protest. The media likes engaging with prediction markets through dramatic stories about insider trading and market manipulation. This is as useful as engaging with Waymo through stories about cats being run over. It doesn’t matter whether you can find one lurid example of something going wrong. What matters is the base rates, the consequences, and the alternatives. Polymarket resolves about a thousand markets a month, and Kalshi closer to five thousand. It’s no surprise that a few go wrong; it’s even less surprise that there are false accusations of a few going wrong. Still, I would be remiss to not mention this at all, so here are some of the more interesting stories: Fhantombets: Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Twelve hours before the announcement, someone placed a large Polymarket bet on Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, bringing her probability from 4% to 73%. When Machado later won, observers suspected insider trading. But an account named fhantombets claims to have interviewed the winning trader; although he did not reveal his exact strategy, the interview better matches a story where he was good at navigating WordPress directories, and found that the Nobel team put a draft of the announcement up early in a nonpublic part of their WordPress site. He won about $70,000. LuishXYZ: Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad? This is a small town in Ukraine that the Russians obviously were not going to capture; the Polymarket price trended toward zero. The resolution criteria named maps by the well-regarded Institute For The Study of War as canon. A few hours before resolution, ISW updated their maps to show the the town captured by Russia, which was definitely false. Polymarket resolved to YES, and the fictional Russian advance disappeared. The Institute then issued a statement saying the map update was “unapproved”, and fired one of its staffers who had presumably been involved. The cheater’s exact winnings are unknown, but based on the size of the market are probably mid-6-digits. TechCrunch: What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call? Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong delivered the company’s “earnings call”, ie a speech to investors about its recent progress. At the end, he said “I've been tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call”. Armstrong is worth $10 billion and doesn’t need to manipulate a $50,000 market for the money - he later described his comments as “trolling”. Other crypto executives condemned the move, with one saying that “you need your head examined if you think it’s cute or clever or savvy that the CEO of the biggest company in this industry openly manipulated a market.” I might need my head examined, because I think it’s at least kind of funny. Forbes: Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year? A trader called AlphaRaccoon got 22/23 of these Polymarket questions right, and has a history of implausibly good performance on Google-related questions. They basically have to be a Google insider, but (since all of this is done through crypto) nobody has a good way to figure out who. They made $1 million. NPR: Will Maduro be captured? Just before the secret operation that captured Maduro, someone placed a mysterious $32,000 wager on YES. Was this insider trading by someone in the administration or military? Nobody knows, since the profits go to an anonymous crypto wallet. But the article mentions that the crypto wallet appears to be cashing out through regulated KYC-compliant US exchanges, which suggests they’re not very worried about their identity getting discovered. Maybe they just got lucky after all. AlanMCole: How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing? Karoline Leavitt is Trump’s press secretary. On January 7, she held an ordinary press briefing. Kalshi had its usual market about how long the briefing would last, divided into bins of greater than vs. less than 65 minutes. At the 64:24 mark, Leavitt ended the conference in what appeared to be a sudden manner, and the “less than 65 minutes” bin shot from 2% to 100%. A viral tweet convinced many people that Leavitt must have been insider trading, but Cole counterargued that Leavitt could only have won about $4,000 from the market, which probably isn’t enough to risk one’s job as White House Press Secretary. Sometimes people just end press conferences at weird times. Cole concluded: Now, some opinions and generalizations, as someone who looks at prediction markets plenty (I’ll probably write something about my own experience with them at some point.) 1. This market, like many of them, is pretty stupid. I like substantive markets; this isn’t substantive. 2. The major prediction markets have a wildly undisciplined comms strategy where any attention is good attention, and they love implying all sorts of crazy wild west stuff is going on to get attention. 3. People do bet on things potentially subject to manipulation or insider trading. But usually the markets like that (such as duration of press conference, or stupid “what will be mentioned” markets) are small, especially relative to the wealth of key decisionmakers. 4. Losers in markets are huge whiners, and the more frivolous and tiny their bets, the more likely they are to whine. Sometimes in sports it’s pretty egregious. They’ll get mad at a team for running out the clock when ahead but under some spread they bet on. 5. Lower-quality financial news often doesn’t pay much attention to quantity. (For example, dumb stories about how a decisionmaker has a conflict of interest because they’re invested in an index fund which is 3 percent comprised of some company.) 6. Given the platforms’ undisciplined social media strategy of “promote prediction market chatter no matter what kind of chatter it is,” I don’t think this tweet rises even to the status of “lower-quality financial news.” Kalshi’s team, whatever their faults, are extraordinarily efficient at getting batched approvals of many near-identical markets with slight parameter variation; I’ve seen Tarek speak about this on Odd Lots. The result is they’ve got TONS of them, for better or worse. You’re gonna see 1-in-100 upsets on tiny Kalshi markets for as long as this regulatory equilibrium holds, even if nothing unusual is going on, simply because they’re publishing hundreds (thousands?) of markets per day. There’s a saying that you can’t con an honest man. This isn’t exactly true. But it’s easier to con people who are playing in a “what words will Brian Armstrong say today” market than people who are trying to do something useful, and I have trouble feeling sorry for these people when Brian Armstrong says silly words. Conditional Markets: A Modest Proposal Conditional markets (“decision markets”) are the strongest case for prediction markets potentially being revolutionary. The idea is - you may want to base a decision (like which candidate to elect) on an outcome (like how they’ll affect the economy). So you make two markets: If the Democrat gets elected, will the economy be good four years later?

Inline links: UMA Oracle, Keynesian beauty contest, Will Zelensky wear a suit?, calls this, told Wired, Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal?, How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?, another article, Will America invade Venezuela?, stories about cats, Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize?, claims, Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad?, a statement, What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call?, described, Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year?, Will Maduro be captured?, How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing?

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

“systems are better than goals” The main idea, that by changing my thoughts I can change my reality, is simple but went a long way for me. It opened up my imagination to what’s possible and made my thinking more positive. Cinna the Poet writes: To share a different perspective on Adams, my uncle was an avid follower. He went from being a principled libertarian whose ideas I respected very much to (I’m sad to say) an alt right bigot. Under the influence of Adams, he had no interest anymore in objective truth or the actual scientific method. Reality was all a matter of spin and “persuasion.” The phrase “post truth” gets thrown around too much, but Adams fit that description perfectly. Alex Poterack writes: I just need to note you’re not the only one who read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. I’m the other one. Dozens of people chimed in, here and on social media, to say they did this too. Alyssa Briggs writes: This is a great article, but you left out that he handed out king-sized candy bars on Halloween. He will be very missed by the local kiddos. … 6: Summary/Updates … This was a tough post to write, and I think many people will continue to find it unfair. For example, I claimed that Adams said he joined Team Trump because he didn’t want to pay Hillary’s proposed estate tax - and that he said he didn’t care whether the estate tax was unfair or not, he just personally hated the idea of losing money. But an Adams backer could justly point out that a few sentences later, he does talk about how it’s unfair to make him pay an estate tax when he worked hard his whole life. And then a few paragraphs later, he gives a different, more sympathetic story about how he thought Hillary supporters were bullies and it was important to stand up to them (although he then says maybe Trump supporters were exactly equal bullies, but he selfishly was more against the bullies who were bullying him - but then elsewhere he says no, the Hillary supporters’ bullying was worse.) Adams keeps trying to eat his cake and have it too. He gives one prosocial altruistic explanation (so that if someone accuses him of being selfish, he can show they’re wrong), and then one amoral selfish explanation (so that if someone argues with him about whether it’s really altruistic to oppose estate taxes for millionaires, he can say “Ha, you can’t get me, I already admitted I’m a cold hard realist who doesn’t worry about that kind of fuzzy stuff.”) This is much like how he first said Donald Trump was amazing (but didn’t endorse him), then said he was endorsing Hillary Clinton (but only for his own safety), then endorsed libertarian Gary Johnson (???), then when it looked like Trump would win again walked it back and said obviously he had really been for Trump the whole time. If someone else had won, he would have spun a story where his endorsement of them had been real. He admits all of this! So someone who is charitably inclined to Adams can tell a story where he’s a great predictor, has always done everything for good patriotic altruistic reasons, and only teaches persuasion so that people can better understand themselves and their world. Someone who is uncharitably inclined can tell a different story where his predictions are mostly wrong, he does everything for selfish reasons, and uses persuasion to manipulate others and enrich himself. I usually try to err on the side of charity. But Adams is wearing a metaphorical “I AM GOING TO USE YOUR CHARITABLE INSTINCTS TO MANIPULATE YOU” t-shirt. So I’m happy to suspend charity in this case and judge him on some kind of average of his conflicting statements, or even to default to the less-advantageous one to make sure he can’t get away with it. So here are the updates I made based on your comments: Adams wasn’t an ivermectin true believer, and although my piece very narrowly avoided saying that he was, I should have been clearer about this and avoided implying it.

Inline links: writes, writes, writes

This is my second time having this argument - the first was my Elegy For John McCain, which failed much worse - basically everyone thought it was unfairly negative to him and inappropriate just after his death. That was eight years ago, I don’t think I’ve done any more posts, positive or negative, on people’s deaths since then, and I felt ready to try again. For what it’s worth, I still like the elegy, and am glad I memorialized McCain in some way. This became more awkward after I found out that Adams had said several nice things about me. Sandeep writes: Among the numerous intellectual gifts I have received from reading Scott Adams is that I started reading slatestarcodex on his recommendation (which then had a huge influence on me). I had known about slatestarcodex even before, but it was Adams’ recommendation that gave me the energy to overcome my reading-inertia and start poring through long articles of Alexander. I think I’d heard that Adams recommended me at one point, but forgotten by the time I wrote this post. Here’s one of his articles saying nice things about me; someone else dug up a kind tweet, though it was in response to someone else’s deleted message and I couldn’t see exactly what he was praising. I don’t want to have a blanket policy of never criticizing anyone who’s nice to me; it seems corrupt in the sense of “replacing my journalistic judgment with a policy of praising anyone who gives me favors”. On the other hand, the deepest circle of hell is supposedly reserved for people who betray their benefactors, and this makes game theoretic sense. Without having a general solution to this problem. In this situation, I mainly considered the point above - I don’t think this was a fully hostile article, and so I didn’t run my full “is it appropriate to write a hostile article about this person?” check. But secondarily, I think Adams linked my blog post as part of the usual blogosphere activity of recommending interesting links, not as a specific attempt to kindle a friendship with mutual obligations. If I were his friend, then I hope I would understand him well enough to know whether he would want a mixed memorial like this (and if not, I wouldn’t do it). @Eigengender on Twitter ran a poll, and found that: …which makes me more confident that I landed on the tone I wanted. And several people commented that the essay seemed pro-Adams, or made them like Adams more: Joel McKinnon writes: As a chronic sufferer of TDS I've fallen into the "the friend of my enemy is my enemy," and long stopped having any respect for this other Scott A. The post did a great job of contextualizing a complicated and intelligent man's life and ideas. Jonathan Lipschutz writes: I loved Dilbert! He had a remarkable ability to identify the absurdity of life/reality. I was not aware of so much other material/information/‘wisdom’?!/ideas. It seems to me he was a true, great contributor to America and Americans and Western intellectual discourse in the vain of other greats like Mark Twain. What I learned from your piece, which was absolutely amazing in its own right and shined throughout as a tribute and labor of love, was [Adams’] humanity. He was labeled as a racist, which i believe to be bunk and a lack of honesty/courage with addressing the point/argument he was making. He was an eminently flawed human being, like all humans, but he was also acutely aware of this and tried to help others with humor and honesty. Pointing out ways humans fall short, including himself. But he used his special powers in the service of intellectual honesty/inquisitiveness/love for his fellow human beings. Banjo Kildeer writes: This is a wonderful piece. Your love for Scott Adams shines through. @disgruntledcho1 writes: [This] made me actually feel warmly for Scott Adams, a thus-far unparalleled feat. The most important question is whether Scott Adams himself would have appreciated the post, and this convinces me that he would have. One of Adams’ favorite persuasion topics was what he called “Two Movies On One Screen”, where people would come away from the same event with totally different narratives - for example, a Democrat might watch a Trump speech and conclude that Trump had openly and clearly announced his racism, while a Republican watching the same speech might think that Trump had just said something patriotic and hadn’t mentioned race at all. Whatever his opinion on what I said, I’m sure he would have found your reactions hilarious. … 2: Was I Unfair To Adams? … Leo Abstract writes: [The problem with your eulogy] isn’t that it was harsh--he was harsher to himself, frequently. (i.e. when he said he realized at age 8, sadly looking at his nerdy little face in the mirror, he was gonna have to ‘get rich’). [The] problem is it was just wrong, and seemed badly(or un-)researched. His interest in persuasion was teaching people when others were doing it to them, not teaching them to do it to others. His interest in Trump was Trump doing it BACK at the media, not on his poor voters. Disagree. Adams’ book Win Bigly includes Persuasion Tips, persuasion checklists, and a Persuasion Resource Reading List, all of which take it as a given that he is teaching you to persuade others: I haven’t watched his videos, but they have names like You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook (“Learn practical techniques to harness the power of persuasion”), and Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life. Adams absolutely did not limit his interest in Trump’s persuasion to the media, and praised Trump (for example) using persuasion techniques to take down other Republican candidates. You can find his discussion of how Adams “publicly predicted Ben Carson’s demise” after Trump acted out a mocking version of Carson’s description of getting stabbed in the belt buckle (according to Adams, a masterful example of “visual persuasion”). Leo continues: A good example would be spinning a whole tale about him as an ‘ivermectin true believer’, when he was open about his skepticism. if you knew his history with medically-assisted suicide, you’d know he didn’t plan on fighting the cancer and only did IVM because his fans begged him. I half-apologize for this one. I didn’t try to “spin a whole tale” about Adams as “an ivermectin true believer”. What I said was: » “In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer.” I stand by that paragraph. I don’t think someone who was milking right-wingers as a cynical grift would have gone so far as to trust their recommendations on what to take for his cancer. I think Adams became a sincere right-winger, and so was willing to listen to right-wing medical advice. But I agree that it was written sloppily and sort of suggests he was an ivermectin true believer. He wasn’t, and I apologize for that. I later realized I didn’t need to read tea leaves about this - he says, very explicitly, in one of his books, that yes, after getting attacked by too many left-wing trolls, he decided to commit to fully joining the right wing: » “If you want to see the world more clearly, avoid joining a tribe. But if you are going to war, leave your clear thinking behind and join a tribe. Trumped joined the Republican tribe to win the presidency. Now I was joining the Trump tribe. For a war against Hillbullies [ie pro-Hillary Clinton bullies]. I was all in.” After I made some of these arguments to Leo, he said: I do think that people who listened to thousands of hours of him speaking off-the-cuff might have a better understanding than someone attempting to gain the same by reading a few of his old blog posts. This is a fair criticism. I tried listening to a couple of his shows, and they had a different, friendlier tone than his books / interviews / tweets. Arguably Adams thought of formal written communication as a place to do manipulation, and verbal communication as a cozier spot where he could relate to people normally and explain all the manipulation he was doing. @Ashwin V writes: If you knew anything about Scott, you would know that he never considered anyone a "lesser human" as you've so confidently asserted. He was streaming and trying to pass on his wisdom on his death bed. This was a response to my claim that Adams “longed to be a manipulator of lesser humans”. Several people including Ashwin objected that Adams didn’t see anyone as lesser, nor think of manipulation as demeaning. For example, nutter_just: “Your error is in thinking you must be a lesser human to be manipulable. My impression was Scott believed everyone was like this even himself which is why he believed self affirmations worked. It’s you manipulating your dumb self.” Again, I’ll half-apologize. I regret my exact framing (“lesser humans”), which I think was unnecessarily inflammatory since it implies he was sort of thinking in those terms. But I think he was doing a bad thing which requires that on some philosophical level he has to be treating other people as his lessers in an unacceptable way, even if he wasn’t consciously thinking that they were. I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind. Nor is it exonerating to say “I also manipulate myself” (even if this is true). For analogy, suppose that Adams was a literal telepathic mind controller. If he used his powers on himself (mind controlling himself to work harder), that sounds like a good lifehack. But if he used his powers to turn everyone else into his zombie slaves, he would be offending the dignity of humankind, and “I also use my powers on myself!” would be no excuse. There are a thousand edge cases, complications, things that are sort of manipulation but not quite, and ways that some of those things might be permissible for the greater good. But none of them change the fact that in the simplest and most typical of cases, like the telepathic mind controller with his zombie slaves, manipulation is wrong. One might object that there are simple, typical cases on the other side too. When a job candidate shaves, dresses nicely, and gives a firm handshake, this is in some sense “manipulating” the interviewer, since it’s an attempt to influence his decision through some channel other than facts. I can’t draw a perfect bright line here between the good and the bad cases, but I would apply tests like “is this an attempt to more effectively convey true information?” (eg when I shave, it conveys that I’m capable of remembering to shave and care a lot about the interview), “is this something where failing to do the thing would also convey even more information?” (eg if I didn’t shave, it would falsely suggest I really didn’t want the job), and “is this something where the target has basically given implied consent to this level of manipulation” (eg the interviewer wants and even hopes that people will dress nicely for the interview). I think some of Adams’ manipulations seem closer to the bad cases than the good ones. He wrote about the moment he decided to use his persuasion powers to convince America to elect Trump. One day when he was doing his dispassionate observer act, he heard about Hillary’s estate tax plan and realized it would cost his estate lots of money. He had no particular principled stance against it (“You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children”) but concluded that: This was personal. This was also the day I decided to move from observer to persuader. Until then I was happy to simply observe and predict. But once Clinton announced her plans to use government force to rob me on my deathbed, it was war. Persuasion war.” Accepting for the sake of argument that Adams’ persuasive powers are as impressive as he thinks, he manipulated thousands of people who might have stood to benefit from an estate tax, or who sincerely believed in fairness-based arguments for an estate tax, to vote against their own interests/beliefs, in order to enrich him personally1. I think this requires some sort of standpoint where you consider their agency and interests less important than your own, and that’s why I described him as wanting to manipulate “lesser humans”. This coexists with him often being very nice, with many people saying his podcast helped them become better people, etc. @janiesaysyay writes: This essay is a great demonstration of the kind of leftist, myopic thinking Scott [Adams] was fighting. This is how [Alexander] describes [Coffee With Scott Adams], one of the most influential online shows: » "I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show. I couldn’t entirely follow..." “Some community"?! CWSA was one of the first long running, online, interactive, alternative news shows. Scott was a trailblazer host with his reasonable, thoughtful take on current events, often describing the "2 screens” views of both the left and right political opinions on current events. Scott [Adams]' question and answer discussions with his audience brought varied insights, and gave Americans a nuanced view of news. At the end of his life, Scott was highly influential in American thought, culture and politics. CWSA made it acceptable to be an American, someone who was proud of the country, unashamed of their race; proud of the culture, and proud of the heritage which built the country. This made me wonder whether I was underestimating the reach of Adams’ podcast, so I tried to find statistics. CWSA ranks 50th on Apple’s top 100 news/politics podcasts2. It’s very close to the rankings of Jen Psaki (Biden’s ex-press-secretary) and Al Franken (ex-Senator), but also to very many people I have never heard of. I’m not sure how to interpret this. Comparing YouTube subscribers of Adams and various other podcasts I’ve heard of, all numbers in thousands: Joe Rogan: 21,000

Inline links: Elegy For John McCain, writes, Here’s one of his articles saying nice things about me, ran a poll, writes, writes, writes, writes, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8Dya!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6aea0e56-b1a1-48ca-84ab-406017ae27a1_1618x462.png, You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook, Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life, writes, nutter_just, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r4fL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d643c5f-b24c-4f01-baad-963686d680da_560x174.jpeg, 1, writes, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wOcC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F141d78d7-8756-4ed6-bc53-081bac795a0a_728x250.png

Last Rights

March 11, 2026 · Original source

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

Inline links: beating

I’m more skeptical of this claim, mainly because it seems that all politics is national politics now. There’s one newspaper and three websites and all they care about is national politics. My Congressional representative ran for office touting her background in energy conservation and water management, arguing that in a drying state and a warming climate we really need somebody in Congress who knows water problems inside and out. Now that she’s actually in Congress, it seems that her main job is calling Donald Trump a pedophile5. The incentives here are to get noticed by the press and to go viral talking about how evil the other side is, so that people who are angry at the evil other side will give you money and you can win your next election.

Inline links: 5

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

Astral Codex Ten

Table of Contents

Atlas

Donald Trump

Donald Trump

Article

Metadata

Appears In

External Links

Source Context

Backlinks

Astral Codex Ten

Table of Contents

Atlas

Donald Trump

Donald Trump

Article

Metadata

Appears In

Related Pages

External Links

Source Context

Backlinks