Astral Codex Ten

Hanania

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Hanania

Article

Hanania is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 13 times across 13 issues between August 12, 2021 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Hanania uses this graphic to show that Democrats donate more than Republicans”; “because I get the feeling Hanania is using his own explanation”; “this is a slightly rosier and less-dictatorship-suggesting situation than the one Hanania describes”. It most often appears alongside Richard Hanania, China, Trump.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 13
  • Issue count: 13
  • First seen: August 12, 2021
  • Last seen: October 30, 2025

Appears In

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.

Contra Hanania On Partisanship
August 12, 2021 · Original source
Richard Hanania of the Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology asks "why is everything liberal?" Given that there are approximately equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden voters in elections, how come we have "woke capital" celebrating Pride Month, instead of unwoke capital celebrating some conservative cause (as might have happened fifty years ago)? How come conservatives worry about censorship by liberal tech companies instead of vice versa? How come conservatives worry about college turning their kids liberal instead of vice versa?
Inline links: Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology, why is everything liberal
Source: Hanania’s post He concludes that "liberals win because they care about politics more". This may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Fox News, YouTube, Twitter, or the federal government, but he has lots of data in support (and note that Hanania himself is conservative, so this isn't a cheap attack). Liberals donate more, even though both sides control about equal pools of money. Liberal protests attract orders of magnitude more protests than conservative ones. Liberals express more willingness to shun people for being conservative than vice versa. And liberals are more willing to take low-paying (but important-for-gaining-power) activist jobs. He writes:
Inline links: Hanania’s post
He concludes that "liberals win because they care about politics more". This may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Fox News, YouTube, Twitter, or the federal government, but he has lots of data in support (and note that Hanania himself is conservative, so this isn't a cheap attack). Liberals donate more, even though both sides control about equal pools of money. Liberal protests attract orders of magnitude more protests than conservative ones. Liberals express more willingness to shun people for being conservative than vice versa. And liberals are more willing to take low-paying (but important-for-gaining-power) activist jobs. He writes:
Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
Just as Luttwak had many reasons to be right about war but might not have known much about Putin’s personality, so Karlin has every reason to be right about Putin’s personality, but isn’t really much of a military strategy expert. I’m giving him a slightly higher grade because he was more self-aware and made more specific predictions. Richard Hanania: B- See his Lessons From Forecasting The Ukraine War.
Inline links: Lessons From Forecasting The Ukraine War
See his Lessons From Forecasting The Ukraine War.
Inline links: Lessons From Forecasting The Ukraine War
Like Karlin, Hanania correctly guessed early on that Putin would invade Ukraine. On February 2, when Metaculus was at 49% (and I was 40 - 50%), Hanania said 65% chance. Over the next few weeks, he increased his probability at the same rate as the average, so that just before the war started he was giving it 95% chance. This is very impressive - both because he was right, and because of how careful, honest, and public he was with his predictions.
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
[In Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy], Richard Hanania details how a public choice model (imported from public choice theory in economics) can explain the United State’s incoherent foreign policy much better than the unitary actor model (imported from rational choice theory in economics) that underlies the illusion of American grand strategy in international relations (IR), in particular the dominant school of realism. As the subtitle How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy suggests, American foreign policy is driven by special interest groups, which results in millions of deaths for no good reason.
Inline links: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, public choice theory, rational choice theory, grand strategy, realism
It is very much an academic book that should revolutionise the whole field of IR by challenging the fundamental assumption of realpolitik with impressive rigour, so the brisk 200 pages should probably be mandatory reading for IR/political science freshmen. Like Robin Hanson, I would have been persuaded by an article length analysis, but as Hanania himself agrees, the belabouring book length treatment is to disabuse academics who by nature demand sweat and impressive mastery of literatures — this review should, dare I say, suffice for the cynical reader.
Inline links: Robin Hanson, Hanania
Other IR theorists have argued that the unitary executive model can save the unitary actor model but Hanania argues that they, too, fall short.
Open Thread 231
July 04, 2022 · Original source
1: Some corrections from Thursday’s links post: the SPLC poll on feminism must be flawed somehow, see here. The Kiev city council probably did not un-found Moscow, see here. And although I condemned Hanania’s admission that he sometimes endorsed putting his personal aesthetics above objective utility, commenters brought up situations that don’t seem so clear-cut: for example, would you destroy a beautiful rainforest so farmers could raise pigs there? (assume the farmers get some money from it, which raises their utility, and that the rainforest doesn’t get enough tourists or novel-pharmaceutical-product hunters to be as valuable as the pig money).
Inline links: here, here
22
August 16, 2022 · Original source
The Salem Center at the University of Texas Austin, in conjunction with Richard Hanania’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology will be giving a cushy paid academic fellowship to the winner of their Manifold-based prediction market tournament.
Inline links: giving a cushy paid academic fellowship
Hanania writes:
Links For October
October 12, 2022 · Original source
12: PredictIt is suing the CFTC over their recent shutdown order; Richard Hanania also seems to be involved in some way.
Inline links: PredictIt is suing the CFTC, also seems to be involved in some way
13: Related: Hanania on polls vs. prediction markets for the midterms. The markets give the Republicans better odds, and seem to be counting on pollsters missing paranoid anti-pollster Republicans. “[The Salem/CSPI forecasting tournament] thinks there's only a 22% chance that the 538 deluxe model will favor Republicans on election day, [but that] there's a 47% chance Republicans will actually win the Senate.”
Inline links: on polls vs. prediction markets for the midterms
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
47: Review of the Yarvin vs. Hanania debate (monarchy vs. democracy) in Los Angeles. Reviewer says Yarvin was a sufficiently skilled public speaker that he won by dominating the conversation, but that it didn’t seem like much light was shed on the relative merits of various governments.
Inline links: Review of the Yarvin vs. Hanania debate (monarchy vs. democracy) in Los Angeles
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
The Origins Of Woke, by Richard Hanania, has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for.
Inline links: The Origins Of Woke, Richard Hanania
Therefore, every business owner needs to monitor their employees for jokes, political comments, flirtatiousness, and take action against any offenses. Hanania has several complaints here. First and most legibly, it (say it with me) gets taken too far. Volokh lists a large number of [examples of things that have been found to be] evidence of a hostile work environment: signs with the phrase “men working”; “draftsman” and “foreman” as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and a burning American flag in a cubicle; an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki, and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition; jokes of a sexual nature not targeted at any particular person; misogynistic rap music […] even terms like “great view” and “walk-up” have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs. And In a 2015 and 2016, a black father and son named Owen Diaz and Demetric Di-az2 [sic] worked at a Tesla plant. They sued the company for racial discrimination, with the father’s claims alone making it to trial….racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz, and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the workers allegedly responsible were mostly or all minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished. Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz […] a jury disagreed, and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African-American employees, and without hostile intent. (fact check: this article says the racism also included demands to “go back to Africa” people leaving drawings of caricatured black cavemen at the employee’s desk, threats, and claims that black employees were "given the most menial and physically demanding work" - and that these claims were backed up by testimony from two dozen former workers and a cellphone video showing people telling a black employee that they are going to “cut you up, n—-r”. This seems like a sufficiently different story that I’d like to know whether Hanania still stands by his version) Other parts of harassment law lead to more unfair double-binds. For example, you can’t be seen to “retaliate” against someone who accuses another worker of harassment. So suppose that a minority employee is bullying a white employee, the white employee resists, and the minority accuses them as “harassment”. Maybe there’s even a full trial, everyone agrees this is what happened, and the white employee is found totally innocent. Still, you can’t fire the bully, because that would be retaliation for a harassment complaint. And since you probably don’t want the bully and their victim in the same department, you need to move one of them. And you can’t move the bully, because that would be viewed as “retaliation” for the harassment complaint and they could sue you for millions of dollars. So you have to punish the victim. But Hanania doesn’t just say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like Office Space. Is this true? People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law? Or because neoliberalism replaced the work-for-thirty-years-and-get-a-golden-watch corporation with the work-for-three-years-and-then-seek-a-better-job-elsewhere corporation? Still, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation - he calls the current regime, “a sexless, androgynous, and sanitized workplace” which is “contrary to human nature [and] miserable”. Without civil rights law, we could have “organizations that combined the aspects of a church, a social club, a matchmaking service, and a traditional business.” In such a world: Some corporations start encouraging dating and forming close personal bonds among their employees. This can take many forms, from Christian matchmaking to promoting a party-like atmosphere. These pro-relationship corporations will come in conservative or liberal forms. Other firms explicitly market themselves as providing a more “professional” or “classic” work experience . . . we will see a period of wild experimentation, with some forms of corporate organization drawing a great deal of media coverage. People will criticize many of these experiments, and they will become the subject of public outrage. After civil rights law has been defanged, however, government no longer has the ability to easily shut such efforts down. Eventually, public anger subsides, and the idea of the media attacking a firm because it dislikes its internal culture will seem as intolerant as attacking a religious community for its doctrines, or homosexuals for what they do together as consenting adults. I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here. …And More Richard Hanania hates all this stuff. Partly he hates it because he thinks it’s unfair and anti-business and anti-merit. But also, Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren’t allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to act enthusiastic about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation - at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn’t just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves. This is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can’t just give blacks ten extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting to everyone that they don’t do this and it’s perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity so nobody can notice all the favoritism they’re doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is “fairer”. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators - not because they’re required to hire diversity coordinators, it’s not a requirement - but because they love equality so so much (and if they don’t do this, they’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons). Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you are being forced to comply with. Like in communism, you have to become your own mini-police state. You have to make employees snitch on each other if they tell the wrong joke. You have to turn your company into a tyranny of HR ladies. If you do any of this even a little less than other companies, you’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons, with penalties running potentially into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Because there’s no legible law except “be the same as everyone else so you don’t stand out as sue-able”, every corporation homogenizes into the same bland HR-ocracy. Everyone agrees on the same hiring process, which is to prioritize college degree, resume, and interview, and definitely not any test or measure of ability. This leads inevitably to our current society, where everyone has to waste their childhood doing meaningless extracurriculars so they can get into the best college so they can take the best internships so they get the best jobs. (unless they do something stupid like let themselves get the dreaded “resume gap”). But also: During the early 1800s, government positions were given out by the “spoils system”, basically “does the party in power like you personally?” In the 1880s, after President Garfield was assassinated by a guy who didn’t get a good enough position, they switched to a formal civil service, based on test performance and merit. The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare. Still, this gradually (and somewhat deniably) ended in the 1970s, because the merit-based hiring system seemed like disparate impact. Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result. Hanania doesn’t mention this, but I’ve heard an additional argument elsewhere. It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit. Still, if you have great lawyers and are willing to pay a lot to settle lawsuits, you can get away with legally dangerous things. This is only worth it if you really really want high-merit employees, ie if the best employee is much more financially valuable to you than the second-best. This is mostly true in Wall Street (where you want your trader to outsmart the other guy’s trader by half a millisecond or whatever) and Silicon Valley (where ten employees can write a program used by millions of people). So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities. Meantime, Wall Street and Silicon Valley would love to have you. So all the smart people got concentrated in a few industries that might not have been their most economically productive use, and the old American tradition where elite families would send some of their kids into public service died out. What To Do? Hanania stresses that most Americans hate affirmative action (and probably by extension most other civil rights law, though they’ve probably never heard of disparate impact). Affirmative action has been on the ballot nine times, and failed eight of those. Most recently, it failed in California, a deep-blue, 66% minority state where the pro-AA side outspent opponents 17-to-1. Also, Republicans have controlled all the branches of government many times in the past fifty years, and now they control the Supreme Court. Most civil rights law is based on executive orders and judicial decisions, so you wouldn’t even need a Congressional vote to overturn it. Just an executive order, from any president who felt like it. Reagan could have overturned half of this with the stroke of a pen, if he’d wanted. So how has it survived this long? His answer: because until about 2010, Republicans were too scared of getting called racist. Reagan wanted to overturn affirmative action, but other Republicans (like Bob Dole) begged him not to, because racism, and eventually he caved. But since 2010, everyone has already been calling Republicans racist all the time, to the point where probably this threat has lost its power. And the sort of moderate Republicans who reined in Reagan are gone. So why haven’t Republicans (eg Trump) acted? Hanania thinks everyone is so obsessed with “woke” culture war stuff that the low-hanging fruit of actual woke laws that presidents can change has slipped under the radar. And so, this book. I would have summarized the case as “Hey, Republicans! Do you hate wokeness? Well, too bad, it’s a vast cultural movement with bastions in a bunch of places where we have no power. But some of this civil rights law stuff seems pretty related to wokeness, and we do potentially have power there. So instead of fighting the unwinnable cultural battle, how about we fight the very winnable policy one?” But maybe this didn’t seem optimistic enough for Hanania, so he framed it as “the legal wokeness is the source of the cultural wokeness” instead. More on this later. The Origins Of . . . Inequality A progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?” Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground. “Cool theoretical result,” objects the hypothetical opponent. “But white households earn an average of $80K and black households an average of $50K, and so on with other minority groups. So it sure seems like something inequality-related is going on.” My tongue-in-cheek reframing of Hanania’s summary of civil rights law went: We notice your workforce is less black than the applicant pool.
Inline links: 2, this article
The key point here is that “quotas”, or any kind of “positive discrimination” where minorities got favored over more-qualified whites, were anathema to lawmakers and the American people. But civil rights activists, the courts, and the bureaucracy really wanted those things. So civil rights law became a giant kludge that effectively created quotas and positive discrimination while maintaining plausible deniability. This ended up as the worst of both worlds. Hanania specifically complains about1:
Inline links: 1
Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
Book author Richard Hanania kindly responded to my review on Twitter:
Inline links: kindly responded
I’d also refer people to my piece that responded to some earlier reviews of the book here. Richard Hanania's Newsletter Against Ideaism Among the reviews of my book, I have noticed two main lines of criticism. First of all, there’s the argument that I didn’t explain everything. Oliver Traldi in Quillette asks “does the federal government require corporations to make rainbow-colored versions of their logos, or tweet in support of black trans women?” No, it certainly does not, although I … Read more 2 years ago · 81 likes · 39 comments · Richard Hanania
Inline links: Richard Hanania's Newsletter Against Ideaism Among the reviews of my book, I have noticed two main lines of criticism. First of all, there’s the argument that I didn’t explain everything. Oliver Traldi in Quillette asks “does the federal government require corporations to make rainbow-colored versions of their logos, or tweet in support of black trans women?” No, it certainly does not, although I … Read more 2 years ago · 81 likes · 39 comments · Richard Hanania
When I first read the book, I had a hard time tracing Hanania's source for the "great view" and "walk-up" claims you quoted. As far as I can tell, it goes back to a 1995 memo by Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (pages 33 to 36, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/07/10/miamivalleybrief.pdf) that specifically gives these phrases as examples of information that "does not violate the Act". Sine then, they have consistently been cited as examples of acceptable language in various sources. Hanania's description might not be strictly false — maybe Achtenberg was referring to some earlier example where somebody cited those phrases as exclusionary — but it is definitely misleading.
Inline links: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/07/10/miamivalleybrief.pdf
Zvi on California's AI Bill
May 08, 2024 · Original source
Go rogue and commit some other crime that does > $500 million in damage3. If the tests show that the model can do these bad things, the company has to demonstrate that it won’t, presumably by safety-training the AI and showing that the training worked. The kind of training AIs already have - the kind that prevents them from saying naughty words or whatever - would count here, as long as “the safeguards . . . will be sufficient to prevent critical harms.” So the bill isn’t about regulating deepfakes or misinformation or generative art. It’s just about nukes and hacking the power grid. There are some good objections and some dumb objections to this bill. Let’s start with the dumb ones: Some people think this would literally ban open source AI. After all, doesn’t it say that companies have to be able to shut down their models? And isn’t that impossible if they’re open-source? No. The bill specifically says4 this only applies to the copies of the AI still in the company’s possession5. The company is still allowed to open-source it, and they don’t have to worry about shutting down other people’s copies. Other people think this would make it prohibitively expensive for individuals and small startups to tinker with open-source AIs. But the bill says that only companies training giant foundation models have to worry about any of this. So if Facebook trains a new LLaMA bigger than GPT-5, they’ll have to spend some trivial-in-comparison-to-training-costs amount to test it in-house and make sure it can’t make nukes before they release it. But after they do that, third-party developers can do whatever they want to it - re-training, fine-tuning, whatever - without doing any further tests. Other people think all the testing and regulation would make AIs prohibitively expensive to train, full stop. That’s not true either. All the big companies except Meta already do testing like this - here’s Anthropic’s, Google’s, and OpenAI’s - that already approximate the regulations. Training a new GPT-5 level AI is so expensive - hundreds of millions of dollars - that the safety testing probably adds less than 1% to the cost. No company rich enough to train a GPT-5 level AI is going to be turned off by the cost of asking it “hey can you create super-Ebola?”, and putting the answer into a nice legal-looking PDF. This isn’t the “create a moat for OpenAI” bill that everyone’s scared of6. Other people are freaking out over the “certification under penalty of perjury”. In some cases, developers have to certify under penalty of perjury that they’re complying with the bill. Isn’t this crazy? Doesn’t it mean if you make a mistake about your AI, you could go to jail? This is deeply misunderstanding how law works. Perjury means you can’t deliberately lie, something which is hard to prove and so rarely prosecuted. More to the point, half of the stuff I do in an average day as a medical doctor is certified under penalty of perjury - filling out medical leave forms is the first one to come to mind. This doesn’t mean I go to jail if my diagnosis is wrong. It’s just the government’s way of saying “it’s on the honor system”. What are some of the reasonable objections to this bill? Some people think the requirement to prove the AI safe is impossible or nearly so. This is Jessica Taylor’s main point here, which is certainly correct for a literal meaning of “prove”. Zvi points out that it just says “reasonable assurance”, which is a legal term for “you jumped through the right number of hoops”. In this case probably the right number of hoops is doing the same kind of testing that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are currently doing, or that AI safety testing organization METR recommends. The bill gestures at the National Institute of Standards and Technology a few times here, and NIST just named one of METR’s founders as their AI safety czar, so I would be surprised if things didn’t end going this direction. METR’s tests are possible and many AI models have successfully passed earlier versions. Other people worry there are weird edge cases around derivative models. I think the bill’s intention is that once you prove that your AI is too dumb to create nukes, you’re fine to open-source it. Third-parties can change its character, but not its fundamental intelligence. But in theory, a third party could get tens of millions of dollars of compute and keep training your AI to increase its fundamental intelligence. This would be a weird thing to do, and anyone with that much compute probably should just make their own model. But if someone wanted to screw you over by doing this, technically the law is kind of vague and you would have to trust a judge to say “no, that’s stupid”. Probably the law should clarify that it doesn’t apply to this situation. Other people are worried about a weird rule that you can’t train an AI if you think it’s going to be unsafe. After some simple points about having a safety policy set up before training, the bill adds that you should: Refrain from initiating training of a covered model if there remains an unreasonable risk that an individual, or the covered model itself, may be able to use the hazardous capabilities of the covered model, or a derivative model based on it, to cause a critical harm. This makes less sense than all the other rules - you can test a model post-training to see if it’s harmful, but this seems to suggest you should know something before it’s trained. Is this a fully general “if something bad happens, we can get angry at you”? I agree this part should be clarified. Other people think the benchmarking clause is too vague. The law applies to models trained with > 10^26 FLOPs, or any model that uses advanced technology to be equally as good despite less compute. Equally as good how? According to benchmarks. Which benchmarks? The law doesn’t say. But it does say that the Technology Department will hire some bureaucrats to give guidance on this. I think this is probably the only way to do this; it’s too easy to fake any given benchmark. Every AI company already compares their models to every other AI company on a series of benchmarks anyway, so this isn’t demanding they create some new institution. It’s just “use common sense, ask the bureaucrats if you’re in a gray area, a judge will interpret it if it comes to trial”. This is how every law works. Other people complain that any numbers in the bill that make sense now may one day stop making sense. Right now 10^26 FLOPs is a lot. But in thirty years, it might be trivial - within the range that an academic consortium or scrappy startup might spend to train some cheap ad hoc AI. Then this law will be unduly restrictive to academics and scrappy startups. Is this bad? Presumably we know now that AIs less than 10^26 FLOPs are safe. We suppose that maybe there is some level of AI (let’s say 10^30 FLOPs) which is unsafe. If we had this number auto-update for compute growth, eventually it would go above the unsafe number, and unsafe models would be exempt. But at some point we’ll probably discover that some new models (eg 10^28 FLOPs) are safe, and it would be good if the law was updated to exempt them too. Very optimistically, this might happen - California’s minimum wage was originally $0.15 per hour, but this got updated when inflation made that unreasonable. In the pessimistic case, this will be a problem for us thirty years from now, if we’re even around then. Other people note that an AI committing a cyberattack is a fuzzy bar. If you ask GPT-4 to write a well-composed, grammatically-correct phishing email (“Dear sir, I am the password inspector, please tell me your password”), the phishing works, and you use the password to blow up a power plant, does that count? I agree that it would be nice if the law were clearer on this. But I also agree with the lawyers who object that dealing with programmers is impossible and that laws will never be exactly as clear as code. Other people note that this will *eventually* make open source impossible. Someday AIs really will be able to make nukes or pull off $500 million hacks. At that point, companies will have to certify that their model has been trained not to do this, and that it will stay trained. But if it were open-source, then anyone could easily untrain it. So after models become capable of making nukes or super-Ebola, companies won’t be able to open-source them anymore without some as-yet-undiscovered technology to prevent end users from using these capabilities. Sounds . . . good? I don’t know if even the most committed anti-AI-safetyist wants a provably-super-dangerous model out in the wild. Still, what happens after that? No cutting-edge open-source AIs ever again? I don’t know. In whatever future year foundation models can make nukes and hack the power grid, maybe the CIA will have better AIs capable of preventing nuclear terrorism, and the power company will have better AIs capable of protecting their grid. The law seems to leave open the possibility that in this situation, the AIs wouldn’t technically be capable of doing these things, and could be open-sourced. (or you could base your Build-A-Nuke-Kwik AI company in some state other than California.) Finally - last week we discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origin Of Woke, which claimed that although the original Civil Rights Act was good and well-bounded and included nothing objectionable, courts gradually re-interpreted it to mean various things much stronger than anyone wanted at the time. This bill tells the Department of Technology to offer guidance on what kind of tests AI companies should use. I assume their first guidance will be “the kind of safety testing that all companies except Meta are currently doing” or “something like METR”, because those are good tests, and the same AI safety people who helped write those tests probably also helped write this bill. But Hanania’s book, and the process of reading this bill, highlight how vague and complicated all laws can be. The same bill could be excellent or terrible, depending on whether it’s interpreted effectively by well-intentioned people, or poorly by idiots. That’s true here too. The best I can say against this objection is that this bill seems better-written than most. Many of the objections to its provisions seem to not understand how law works in general (cf. the perjury section) - the things they attack as impossible or insane or incomprehensibly vague are much easier and clearer than their counterparts in (let’s say) medicine or aerospace. Future AIs stronger than GPT-4 seem like the sorts of things which - like bad medicines or defective airplanes - could potentially cause damage. This sort of weak, carefully-directed regulation that exempts most models and carves out a space for open-sourcing seems like a good compromise between basic safety and protecting innovation. I join people like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton in supporting it. Regardless of your position, I urge you to pay attention to the conversation and especially to read Zvi’s Asterisk article or his longer FAQ on his blog. I think Zvi provides pretty good evidence that many people are just outright lying about - or at least heavily misrepresenting - the contents of the bill, in a way that you can easily confirm by reading the bill itself. There will be many more fights over AI, and some of them will be technical and complicated. Best to figure out who’s honest now, when it’s trivial to check! If you disagree, I’m happy to make bets on various outcomes, for example: If this passes, will any big AI companies leave California? (I think no)
Inline links: 3, 4, 5, Anthropic’s, Google’s,, OpenAI’s, 6, here, The Origin Of Woke, read Zvi’s, his longer FAQ on his blog, reading the bill itself
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
When I first titled this post, I didn’t know that Richard Hanania had come to the same conclusion and created this face-mash-up of Matt Yglesias and Nietzsche. The compromise goes something like: Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact.
We should use checks, balances, vetocracy, and redistribution to limit the power of any individual to some ceiling, although people can disagree on how high the ceiling will be and right now it’s pretty high. Slave morality hates power/excellence and refuses to justify it. Master morality says power/excellence is its own justification, and the rest of us have to justify ourselves to it. Liberalism says that sure, we can probably justify power/excellence, as long as it stays within reasonable bounds and doesn’t cause trouble. Slave morality ignores benefits and sets the importance of harms at infinity. Master morality ignores harms, and sets the value of “benefits” (not that it would think of it in these terms - greatness doesn’t exist to benefit others) at infinity. Liberalism accepts the normal, finite utilitarian calculus and tries to balance benefits against harms. A final secret of this compromise is that master morality and slave morality aren’t perfect opposites. Master morality wants to embiggen itself. Slave morality wants to feel secure that everyone agrees embiggening is bad. The compromise is that we all agree embiggening is bad, but leave people free to do it anyway. So half of Western intellectual output is criticisms of capitalism and neoliberalism, yet capitalism and neoliberalism remain hegemonic5. Everybody agrees to hate billionaires; also, billionaires are richer than ever. This isn’t a complete solution - sure, we’re a free country, but we’re also a democracy, and if people hate something too much they can ban it. But add in the utilitarian justifications above, and it sort of hangs together. X. Richard Hanania So liberal democracy is an uneasy compromise between slave and master morality. One natural interpretation is that the left is the party of slave morality, and the right of master morality. I appreciate how directly Richard Hanania proves that wrong. Richard is an honest-to-goodness Nietzschean master moralist, one of the last you’ll find. Like Rand, he tries to combine Nietzschean master morality with a civilized society and obedience to law. Unlike Rand, he’s not obsessed with presenting a bunch of multi-step proofs showing exactly how it works, and honestly I’m not sure of the exact details. I find him interesting insofar as it clearly works inside his own head and he’s clearly coming from a place of aesthetic coherence. He writes: We can call my philosophy Nietzschean Liberalism. The Nietzschean part consists of the following beliefs. Just as intelligence, a moral sense, aesthetic appreciation, and other factors place humans above animals, some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans.
Inline links: 5
There is no Nietzschean political party. There isn’t even a properly Nietzschean subculture or coalition. It’s just Richard Hanania and a handful of his Substack followers.
Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
33: Congrats to Richard Hanania, whose policy prescriptions from The Origins Of Woke got adopted wholesale by the new administration, probably causally. And thanks to @ObhishekSaha for reminding me that my review ended with “Read [this] in order to feel like you were ahead of the curve if Executive Order 11246 gets repealed on January 21, 2025.” (Executive Order 11246 was repealed on January 21)
Inline links: reminding, my review, was repealed
22: Hanania:
37: If you ask Grok 3 “who is the worst spreader of misinformation”, it will say Elon; if you ask it who deserves the death penalty, it will say Trump (with Elon close behind). I think this helpfully illustrates what the smart people have been saying all along: aside from the topics it explicitly refuses to talk about (like race/IQ), AI’s “woke” opinions aren’t because companies trained it to be “woke”, they’re because liberals are more likely to get their opinions out in long online text, and AI is trained on long online text.
Inline links: it will say Elon, it will say Trump, liberals are more likely to get their opinions out in long online text
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
26: Richard Hanania responds to my post on Fatima. He argues that if there’s some consistent bias that makes people imagine miracles, then the number of witnesses is unimpressive - much as you can’t rescue a biased polling methodology by increasing the sample from 1,000 to 10,000 people. I respond here. Richard seems to think that a certain type of less-than-fully-modern religious person - even when well-educated - can have a weird enough mental structure to hallucinate basically anything if it’s congruent with their religion. I agree that we have to posit something like this to save a non-miraculous account of Fatima; I only want people to understand how extreme an ask this is. Suppose that 10,000 eyewitnesses say they saw Richard stab someone in broad daylight. Can the defense argue “Well, people often hallucinate, and most of the witnesses were liberal, and the liberal worldview makes it attractive to imagine a right-wing blogger stabbing people, so who knows if he did it or not?” Usually we bound the power of mass hallucination at some level much lower than this! (EDIT: Hanania responds here)
Inline links: Richard Hanania responds to my post on Fatima, here, Hanania responds here