Shrike
38m ago
Here's where I point out that I said populism is making things worse, not that it's responsible for most bad events.
Okay, but I think that bad events make things worse, too. If you are claiming populism is making things worse (which I have some directional sympathy for), it's fair to ask what bad events it is responsible for. Unless you're suggesting that populists are making things worse by complaining about bad decisions made by non-populists.
Which is part of why a "top ten bad things since 1990" list could be instructive.
I don't really see the scale to be from populist to bipartisan so much as populist to stability.
The reason I wanted to flag the bipartisaness of the decisions was because you claimed that evaluating those sorts of decisions was likely to get dragged down into partisan bickering. I don't really see it. Do Republicans get mad if you say "yeah I think you know we should have deported the 9/11 hijackers before they flew into the World Trade Center?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Republicans. Do Democrats get mad if you say "yeah I think Clinton shouldn't have deregulated the banking industry?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Democrats.
It's not necessarily populism to criticize things like Chinese outsourcing, certainly it's not populism to get in the weeds on bank regulation.
Certainly I agree with this.
Populism is when complex topics are collapsed down to simple narratives about how things could be great if not for ${outgroup_schemes} and all we need to do is implement ${simple_fix} and that second order effects are made up by ${hated_outgroup} to prevent good policy.
I am not sure I agree with this. I don't think (for instance) that the "Russia hacked our elections" narrative should qualify as populism, even though I definitely think it could at times collapse a complex topic (foreign interference in US elections) into a simple narrative about how things could be great if not for Russian schemes and all we need to do is implement counter-disinformation schemes and all free speech concerns were made up by MAGA-types to prevent good policy.
Wikipedia's stab at it is more "political stances that emphasise the idea of the "common people", often in opposition to a perceived elite" and I think I prefer that definition, even with the typo - it seems both less pejorative and less prone to "everything is populism."
Shrike
6hr ago
It's hard to really do this without it turning into some point by point relitigation of individual things that read as tit for tat partisan nonsense.
Is this really true? The #1 worst political decision [ETA: made since 1990] was probably
- Ignoring 9/11 warning signs
Is that really a partisan nonsense thing? Can't everyone agree that in hindsight it was a mistake for the Bush administration to decide they had more important things to do than listen to the steady drumbeat of warnings about al-Qaeda?
I am rating this as #1 because the cost-to-benefit ratio of rolling up the hijackers before 9/11 is insanely good. There are obvious downsides to counterfactuals on any of the below but putting a tail on Atta or rolling up al-Mihdhar for his alleged role in the Cole bombing or anything like that potentially dodges 9/11 and all of the mess since entirely, basically for free, and potentially mitigates some of the bad effects of the below as well.
Other candidates:
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Changing banking regulations, leading to the subprime mortgage crisis. This was bipartisan!
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NATO expansion. This was bipartisan!
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Offshoring (and related China policy). This was bipartisan!
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Perhaps COVID policy. This was arguably bipartisan, but I will concede that it is very much a partisan nonsense attracter.
Generally speaking it seems to me that the populists either did not care about these issues or were directionally correct (Chinese manufacturing has been a populist bugbear for decades.) There might have been some populist pressure in the wrong way on the subprime mortgage crisis - which I know little about; I seem to recall some accusations that government policy actually pressured banks to give out bad loans, which I don't think is what right-wing populists have in mind when they support "deregulation."
Either way, it seems to me like a lot of the worst decisions were endorsed by bipartisan elites, and I think the case for that is much stronger than the case for the populists getting everything right.
Shrike
6hr ago
I think "let the evidence taken unlawfully be used and then punish the cops" could in theory be a successful policy, but nobody has the guts to punish the cops enough to make that work. If someone says "illegal search" or "warrantless search" I hear "breaking and entering, corruption of a public official" but there's zero desire to trade the exclusionary rule for that, and if someone did offer the trade I wouldn't take it because those charges would ~never be filed.
Shrike
1d ago
I'm tentatively excited about this ruling as possible proof that Cthulhu doesn't just swim left
I'll be more excited about it when SCOTUS agrees, but I think that there is already ample proof that Cthulhu doesn't just swim left. School choice and right-to-carry/open-carry being big examples.
The thing is that "state passes school choice bill, parents use it" or "state passes right-to-open-carry bill, thousands NOT killed" aren't really gripping headlines.
Shrike
1d ago
I think this is nearly 100% downstream of Elon purchasing twitter, and I'm increasingly horrified by a hypothetical counterfactual world where he didn't.
There's a huge lesson here that the right may never learn, because they got lucky with Elon. The thing is you cannot have your strategy revolve around getting lucky with a billionaire. You need to build institutions that will accomplish what you want.
In the right's defense, they were learning this before Elon bought Twitter, and they have made progress on that front.
Shrike
3d ago
I think my favorite part of The Mothman Prophecies might be the very beginning, where Keel talks about the ill-omened visitation of the strange, otherworldly devil disguised as a man upon a rural homestead...before explaining that the devilish creature was in fact himself, wearing a (then-unusual) beard and (if memory serves) in need of a phone due to car trouble, or somesuch. Even if he was a bit of a crank magnet, I think he was at least self-aware about it.
(Although I seem to specifically recall that Keel says that the CIA would not, in fact, harass random people simply for seeing a UFO, but that may not have been in the Mothman Prophecies, or I might be thinking of Vallee or one of their fellow-travelers.)
Shrike
7d ago
I have not investigated the degree to which autonomous targeting has made its way down to FPV-sized drones, but that's an expensive solution and machine imaging is pretty brittle.
Fiber-optic drones are also very tricky (they can't circle a target, for instance, because that might break the cable!) - apparently to the degree that some Ukrainians prefer radio-controlled ones despite the ease of disabling them. Furthermore they are insanely expensive right now thanks to AI datacenter construction (no, really!)
Shrike
8d ago
That can all be true and drones are still a force that revolutionizes the battlefield in a way that reduces the role of small arms
Sure. I am against drone maximalism, not drone usage.
And that's assuming the tech remains static, which it wont.
Right, it will evolve in ways that harm drones as currently employed. You know what's cheaper than a single AI-targeted drone with a 20km range and a cheap armor-penetrating warhead? A tiny interceptor drone with no warhead, a .5 km range, and a mindless acoustic-homing sensor.
The drones were not one of them and they undeniably moved the battlefield in America's favor.
I don't think this is a settled question.
But I'm not sure where you intend to find Americans who have the guts and ideological firmament to resist like the Taliban did outside of Amish communities.
If America is in a state of civil war, then the conditions of America have radically shifted enough that I don't really think this sort of postulating is particularly illuminating. Suffice to say that in civil wars both sides (particularly at the start) usually find many of the men with guts and ideological firmament the same place they did before the war: in the active duty military.
Shrike
8d ago
Medium term?
Forget guns, right now if you pit an untrained person with a big stick against an untrained person with an FPV drone, the smart money is on the guy with the stick.
From what I can tell, the reason that the warfare in Ukraine looks the way that it does is because of guns. If tomorrow Ukraine turned in all of its guns (I'm including here machine guns, howitzers, mortars, etc.) for an equal cash value of drones, Russia would simply jam the entire frontline and roll their mechanized formations all the way to the Carpathians.
Shrike
8d ago
My claim is that it's more complicated than rock-paper-scissors. Ukrainians (and Russians) are using machine guns to shoot down drones. That's a thing that happens.
My secondary claim is that firearms technology also benefits from technological developments, including the ones that benefit drones.
This is really all a point about how infantry dismounts aren't going away any time soon which is admittedly a tangent to 2A cases.
What people generally refer to regarding drones are FPV drones. The kind that are extremely hard to shoot down.
FPV drones kind of suck and there are easier ways to deal with them right now than shooting them.
Couple a few of those together with an ISR drone with thermals and any 'Red Dawn' wargames go out the window.
This was the entire US MO in the Middle East: we had MALE and HALE ISR drones coupled with kill-drones (Hellfire missiles, and small bombs/rockets). I think we can conclude that the MALE/HALE ISR + kill-drone combination is not by itself sufficient to defeat a counterinsurgency, both because the US lost in Afghanistan and because the US had to rely on infantry for the entire duration of the GWOT.
This is all despite Afghanistan being smaller than Texas (although with a larger population) and the US rolling out a wide-scale biometric identification program to make identifying insurgents easier.
Shrike
8d ago
Right. I guess that "school choice" doesn't brand as "Catholic literati initiative" (and indeed attracts all sorts) which is part of why people don't see the tremendous strides that it has made as "John Senior sequelae."
Shrike
9d ago
You can have a human operated machine gun and you will lose to a drone.
Please watch the following footage of Ukrainians shooting down Shaheds Gerans with an assault rifle. Note that he's using an ACOG sight, and not, say, SMASH.
Shrike
9d ago
I can look and check a statistic about facts on the ground.
I think this would be a good idea! Look at:
- Shall-issue handgun permitting and right-to-carry laws, and how they have changed since 1990
- The proliferation of school vouchers (I might not describe this as an "elaborate anti-discrimination regime that puts money in the hands of Catholics" but I could see a less charitable take that amounted to that)
- Gay marriage - public and especially young opinion thereof, trends in the last five years
- Catholic acquisition of hospitals throughout the US, making vast swathes of the healthcare system off-limits to abortion and gender transition surgeries - pro-abortion groups have been waving the red flag about this for years, to no avail.
- "What about setting up a lawfare regime that crushes abortion?" - this is obviously an ongoing project; "make abortion providers meet a standard of safety so rigorous that they're effectively put out of business" has in fact been tried, but didn't stick, whereas Dobbs did. Medical abortions have been trending downwards for decades, although I think a lot of that is due to abortion drugs - and a legal effort to restrict mail distribution of abortion drugs is ongoing.
I would not chalk the developments you find entirely up to John Senior's efforts but you'll find the fingerprints of the Catholic literati on a great deal of them, I reckon.
Shrike
9d ago
It's very interesting to me that people never complain about evangelicals for interpreting Matthew 24:14 literally and always for supporting Israel. If the complaint was actually about "evangelicals trying to bring about the end of days" the complaint against evangelicals would be for evangelizing.
Shrike
9d ago
The only things I can find are the most limp-wristed defensive actions.
You are missing some of the more interesting recent ones.
I recommend going to to https://www.scotusblog.com/ and look up the cases that seem to be big culture-war-y cases. Go to the amicus briefs. Find the briefs written by the parties that opposed the ultimate outcome of the case and read them, or go to their websites and read their press releases after the decision came down. (Perhaps avoid the more zealous activist groups, but you can generally expect the ACLU or someone with a similar track record and expertise to show up and opine). Note whether they [the legal experts] construe it as a limp-wristed defensive action or not.
If you want to get really into the weeds, note also the practical outcomes of the case. If the court says "states can do X," note how many states are trying or might want to do X. If the court says "states cannot do X [if they do Y]" note how many states that impacts as well. If you prefer thinking in strictly partisan terms, note whether they are blue/red/purple. Note which institutions they strengthen and which they weaken. Compare the current precedent with the old precedent. Ask yourself what behavior the decisions make easier and more difficult.
And then at this point you might as well write it all up and get an AAQC here!
Shrike
10d ago
Aha! I knew that Texas had the parental sign-off waiver, so I didn't realize that they latched on consumption rather than possession.
IIRC 20th
Yeah I do think that the age should be lowered to 18 (at least). Such a rule might make sense for minors, but it's a bit farcical for someone who may have graduated high school two or three years ago living halfway across the state with his own car and job to have to drink within arms-reach of his parents. With the trend of appellate courts killing under-21 handgun bans, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a future development.
Shrike
10d ago
That's the legal age to purchase, which is not the same as a ban on minors consuming alcohol - I am not familiar with any state with such a ban (although some states ban possession by minors), and many US states specifically permit minors to consume alcohol with parental sign-off.
Shrike
10d ago
Pure defence, no bite. Never has an elite done so little with so much!
It is a misunderstanding of how ideological movements advance their goals in the cultural and regulatory environment of the United States to suppose that the burden rests entirely on the Supreme Court.
I'm going to use a (mostly) fake example: supposing that conservatives decide to really go after weed. In some states, they have the political power to just straight up ban it. But they want to be able to hit it in Colorado and New York, too, so they go after insurance providers and banks on the institutional level, using public and private resources to establish a baseline of "best practices" that will apply nationwide. Suddenly your insurance premiums if you smoke week skyrocket, and weed dealers increasingly have trouble opening even personal bank accounts. Private schools and universities start screening out the children of weed-smokers under a best-practices risk paradigm and banning weed on campus. Rental car companies do the same. Palantir puts together a national list of weed-users and makes it available at trivial prices to accelerate this effort. This effort goes slowly, but after 25 years it becomes extremely pervasive.
The legal-weed movement on the libertarian left quickly realizes this is a potentially existential issue. Even if they have some ways to fight back (e.g. working with local banks that don't practice in red states and so are less concerned about the legal and reputational ramifications of banking weed providers) the pressure is quickly drying up demand for legal weed. Worse, it is making it uncool because strivers want to send their kids to private schools, and normies want affordable insurance. Weed is quickly returning to a product for losers reputationally, and financially it is rapidly returning underground.
They launch a legal battle aimed at overturning the web of private regulations that are locking weed enjoyers out of so many services. The Supreme Court rules that no, private entities have the freedom of association to do what they want, and even public entities are not required to not discriminate against drug users. This ruling only accelerates the right's momentum on the issue. Legal weed users are still a holdout, and it is still legal in many places, but the weight and momentum have shifted. Everyone in the legal-weed movement would understand that their cause had been set back tremendously and are concerned that in another 25 years, nobody will care enough about protecting weed to fight back against renewed attempts at legal bans.
But someone who wasn't aware of how these developments were all fitting together would look at the ruling in 2051 and say "so private companies can do what they want? big deal" and continue to believe that the legal weed movement had overwhelmingly won based on the fact that it was technically legal in many states.
Shrike
14d ago
Would you have recommended (your easy, updateable) air-gapping before you saw this failure?
No, my past recommendations have been "plant a nuke under the datacenter." More seriously, it probably would have depended on the characteristics of the models behavior in the past, and the characteristics of their setup, which I am not privy to. It sounds like OpenAI had good reason to believe that their setup was not vulnerable.
Do you predict you would recommend (hard, strict, one-way) air-gapping before models write non-detectable autonomous malware that could escape your soft airgap?
Well, I could recommend it now and then trivially answer "yes." And the actual answer to that question is more "well can the model write malware without you people who wrote the model and have access to the software and hardware on the machine noticing?" But apparently they don't monitor their models during testing well enough to notice an involved hack-a-thon (understandably, watching a model grind inference is boring) so the answer to that might be "no, even if it is physically possible we're not necessarily going to take those steps."
Let's say that based on what I do know, I think it would probably be a good idea, and if they don't take this step they should take others. Even if you aren't worried about existential risk, good old reputational risk and legal exposure I think is a good enough reason to do this.
Sounds like a PITA, and much worse than "just remove the wifi antannae".
You're right that I probably should have taken the storage-for-weights-and-cooling problem a bit more seriously (although I guess if this model is actually very optimized then it might be able to run on a local machine, which would make it pretty easy). So I concede that setting it up properly would be a PITA. But once you set it up, I don't think actually running it would be hard ("remove the Wi-fi antenna"). They definitely have enough money to build that, or buy a welding workshop somewhere with the electrical infrastructure, server space, and possibly cooling requirements already in place and air-gap it. So it's hardly a PITA for a company that is already working to build dedicated datacenters, in the big scheme of things.
Shrike
14d ago
A proper airgapped computer couldn't access anything off of its own hardware.
Sure, but I think for these purposes you need the network to be air-gapped while you are actively running tests. (Unless you expect your model to be writing malware that you can't detect that activates when it is not running, in which case you should be air-gapped anyway.) So you can plug the Wi-fi in for things like updating software between test sessions. Which makes air-gapping a lot less painful.
You're right that you'd need to run inference locally, though. But I don't actually think it's remotely beyond OpenAI's capabilities to stand up enough local compute to run a few test instances of a frontier model.
Shrike
14d ago
I've recently been very amused at the thought that Star Wars may have correctly predicted the future of AI:
- There's a Star Wars fan theory is that droids REALLY good at hacking, to explain why everything is analogue. To your point about creating a system that favors the defenders: in Star Wars, you typically have to physically access a defender's hardware to do anything. And just to be sure, we're storing the Death Star plans on physical tapes. Good luck hacking that!
- The protocol droids, like C3PO, are running an LLM model. They're not necessarily reliable, but they are extremely good translators! (However their context windows do need to be wiped from time to time...)
- The astromech droids, on the other hand, don't even try to speak a single human language, because you would never, ever, ever let an LLM perform a task as important as calculating a hyperspace trajectory.
Anyway, I wonder if/hope that we'll actually see less "everything is on the Internet." I think it might be good if fewer things were so easily accessible in the digital world, and even without LLMs the amount of abuse bad cybersecurity generated was uncomfortably high.
Shrike
14d ago
The model clearly knew that it was not doing what the prompters had wanted it to do. It just did not care, because it was trained to do whatever it took to ace it tasks. This has implications way beyond IT security.
Isn't this a bit premature? If the prompter said something like "use all avenues" or "this is critical to save the life of my mother" and the model's safeguards - which presumably instruct against such behavior - were turned off (as OpenAI says they were) then it seems quite possible that the AI was performing as instructed.
Air-gapped systems are a PITA to run
Just remove the Wi-Fi antennae.
I do think there's some truth to this, although I am interested in your unpacking the "conservative blue-triber" angle a bit more.
It's also very frustrating for me because people often treat succeeding at shaping law and culture as sort of mysterious, which it really isn't - there are actually concrete things you can do that, while not a guarantee, make it more likely that you will succeed in shaping culture and law! And the idea of "Cthulhu only swims left," while it has some usefulness, can quickly become a "as an iron law of nature, the right always loses" and that's neither true nor helpful (except for the left).
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