Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
21d ago
Scott has a new post on AI and money in politics. I'd like to take a step back and talk about how we got here.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda. But in the years after the decision, the feared corporate catastrophe failed to materialize. Trump didn't win in 2016 because of corporate support. In the primary, he bragged that he was self-funding his campaign and so wasn't beholden to special interests. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders got a lot of milage out of constantly reminding people that he didn't have a SuperPac.
In 2019, Scott wrote the prophetic Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, in which he pointed out that wealthy actors are probably underspending on politics and then brainstormed ways to turn money into political influence. By 2022, we started to see serious attempts at using previously-unheard-of amounts of money to systematically affect the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was too-clever-by-half donating money he didn't technically own, but Elon Musk's aquisition of Twitter ended wokeness overnight and likely won Trump the 2024 election. If Scott is to be believed, the cryptocurrency and AI industries are well on their way to fulfilling SBF's dream of rooting the state.
Why did it take 10+ years for this to happen? My hypothesis: cultural inertia (and shame).
Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.
Quantumfreakonomics
22d ago
Here is the text of the 15th Amendment:
Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude–
Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Nothing in the text gives specific races any special representation. It gives citizens of all races the right to vote. A black person in any given electoral district has exactly the same voting power as a white person in the same district.
The issue is that Congress and the courts have used section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (text here) to enforce a collective right on the part of black people as a cohesive race to get their own majority-minority electoral districts. There are a lot of reasons why this sort of makes sense, but it’s weird and not a direct consequence of the right enumerated in the 15th Amendment.
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
Once you fully accept divine providence, you're sort of forced into rationalizing events in this way. There are still a bunch of biblical prophesies that God has to fulfil eventially. It is very convenient for the fulfilment of these prophesies to have the Jewish people concentrated in the holy land. It is reasonable to assume given these premises that God will prevent the United States from turning against Israel.
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
10 am on a Monday
I swear they do this on purpose. It's like they want people to ignore traditional eucharistic discipline.
Quantumfreakonomics
26d ago
The current buildout is about to run into the wall that is the electrical grid. AI will become unpopular overnight as soon as people realize that the brand new data center down the road is causing their electric bill to go up.
Quantumfreakonomics
29d ago
They might if America itself turns against Israel
Quantumfreakonomics
29d ago
Why do you exclude South Africa-style reintegration? Eventually someone is going to realize that grotesque jihadi violence is counterproductive and that they would get way more stuff if they kept the Jews around to milk welfare out of.
Quantumfreakonomics
30d ago
It doesn't nessesarily imply big-O Eastern Orthodoxy, but it does imply adherence to small-o Nicene orthodoxy, which nessesitates an organized church under a valid bishop.
Quantumfreakonomics
30d ago
Okay, who is his bishop?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
That whole section of Leviathan can be boiled down to honor as deference to and respect for power. There are some old Moldbug essays that try to flesh this out concretely.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
What is this supposed to prove exactly? The Italian locations look pretty, but the Californian infrastructure is more useful.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Let me just tell you from learning the hard way: These women are doing you a favor by making it clear this is a dealbreaker up front.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though.
I guess my question is, why are they resisting this? The hardest part of making a successful social media site is building the userbase. The current Bluesky userbase consists almost entirely of people who left Twitter because it wasn’t an ideological monoculture. Owning a site with an annoying userbase is better than owning a site with no userbase.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
The specific prohibition is against “hot drinks”. Coffee and tea are brewed hot. Monster (as far as I know) isn’t.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I didn't know we had Mauritanian slavers on this forum. Truly nothing is beyond our reach.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Maybe you’re just in a bad spot. I was pleasantly surprised by the Hinge algorithm. It seemed to figure out what I like pretty quick.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
there’s not much the rank and file can do to stop them.
All they have to do is check the box labeled “Ocasio-Cortez”. That’s it. Nothing can stop them if they decide to check the box.
This is the problem, right?
Maybe? Democrat messaging is really, really, really, abysamally, unfathomably bad. It is so bad that getting back at the people responsible for terrible Democrat messaging is a substantive policy position of the Republicans.
I mean, just look at this shit. Marginal improvements won't fix this, but a complete paragidm shift might.
The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”
It’s easy to get bogged-down in policy minutia here. Normies don’t care about that stuff, even if they say they do. Democrats lose because they are lame. Voting for Trump is fun. It’s thrilling. It feels like raiding a WOW dungeon with 77 million of your best buds. Voting Democrat feels like going to church, except you know that God isn’t real.
There is no reason to think that this is a permanent or even semipermanent phenomenon. All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
We don’t have the context. We don’t know why Jay Jones thinks Todd and Jennifer Gilbert are “evil” and “breeding little fascists”. Going on priors, it’s probably not a very good reason, but we don’t actually know that.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This could conceivably work, but the more-likely result is the same thing that always happens with affirmative-action, where there is a clique of “real” researchers doing “real” science, and then a bunch of affirmative-action hires producing slop that no one actually cares about.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I am aware that they are well-regarded. I stated (correctly) that they are bad.
I have no logical or rational defense of this whatsoever, and yet I can't stop smiling every time I watch it.
The age of text is over. The time of the reel has come.
More options
Context Copy link