Astral Codex Ten

Michael Tracey

4 min read

Michael Tracey

Article

Michael Tracey is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 18, 2021 and March 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Michael Tracey is the only person I’ve seen do anything that could almost sort of be described as supporting Cuomo”; “I also give credit to … Michael Tracey for publicly acknowledging mistakes”; “Michael Tracey: D Tracey at least wrote a thoughtful reflection on his failed prediction”. It most often appears alongside China, Matt Yglesias, Aalto.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 18, 2021
  • Last seen: March 01, 2022

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.

Links For August
August 18, 2021 · Original source
16: Michael Tracey is the only person I’ve seen do anything that could almost sort of be described as supporting Cuomo in all this, so I guess give him a read.
Inline links: supporting Cuomo
Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
I’m proud of my record forecasting the invasion, given that it went against most of the predictions of those who generally share my foreign policy views. Anyone can occasionally be correct by following the same heuristic they always use, but I showed intellectual flexibility here by determining that American intelligence was likely correct. Karlin is the only other prominent US foreign policy skeptic I know of who thought war was even more likely than the conventional wisdom suggested, and he deserves credit for that (if you know of others, mention them in the comments). Part of the reason I came to the right conclusion was that I was even more pessimistic than most anti-interventionists were about the degree of rationality present in American foreign policy. For example, my friend Max Abrahms was saying until very recently that Putin was hoping for some concessions that would allow him to avoid war (to be fair, Max has been more correct than me on the invasion running into difficulties). I thought that was possible too, but I had little hope that American politics would allow Biden to strike a deal. When it became clear that negotiating over the NATO open door policy wasn’t even on the table, I increased my estimate of the probability for war. To his credit, Max has admitted I was right, as have others I’ve been texting with over the last few months. I also give credit to Saagar, Philippe, and Michael Tracey for publicly acknowledging mistakes.
Inline links: would allow him to avoid war, as have others, Saagar, Philippe, Michael Tracey
The only reason this isn’t an F is that I assume LindyMan plagiarized it from someone else, and I don’t want to blame him for their mistake. Michael Tracey: D Tracey at least wrote a thoughtful reflection on his failed prediction, which you can find here:
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!l4tH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f513dcb-a8c7-4762-98b2-b59c44f57a18_585x900.jpeg, here
I did try to qualify much of what I said on this topic to allow for the possibility that an invasion could in fact take place. In a February 10 article here on Substack, I wrote that a Russian escalation was “ominously plausible.” And I still think the formulation in this tweet from January 23 is very much legitimate: Still, I can understand why people who only caught snippets of certain tweets thought I was a 100% incorrigible “invasion denier.” I never denied the possibility of an invasion — again, I always made a point to explicitly allow for that very possibility. But the reality of online “content production” is that observers will impressionistically pick up on broad themes you seem to be projecting, and if real-world events appear to contradict the impression of you they’ve developed, they will conclude you’ve been proven disastrously wrong. Especially if they already don’t like you anyway. It's not an entirely unreasonable instinct — I’ve probably been guilty of it myself at times. They also weren’t crazy to develop the impression that I was highly skeptical of what was being claimed about the imminence of an invasion, notwithstanding the many caveats I tried to append.
Inline links: article