aqouta
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aqouta
18hr ago
I appreciate the thoughtful reply.
Was the GWOT Iraq War populist?
I'll accept your analysis on this, it seems broadly correct. I don't think populism is the sole source of bad ideas. But I think you're muddying populism with something like grass root support and those are, to me, different things. Albeit I acknowledge that they might resemble each other if you squint.
But this appears to me to be straightforwardly untrue. Humans inevitably make mistakes, but it does not seem to me that there is a "base rate of bad governance". Specific policies are good or bad. Specific ideologies encourage specific bad or good policy choices. Elite rule, technocracy, whatever label we're applying to anti-populism, is supposed to deliver superior policy choices and thus superior outcomes, and if it doesn't actually do that, I think it is extremely important to be able to recognize that fact!
But the 90s you say was better was a far less populist time by your own analysis. It was a time of much greater gatekeeping in the halls of power and the media. Maybe you disagree? My read is that things have been getting more populist over the last 20 years, starting in a proto stage around Obama's first run and reaching a fever pitch under Trump.
My understanding of Populism is essentially wisdom of crowds as opposed to relying on institutional knowledge production of Elite Rule/technocracy/rule-of-experts. Institutional knowledge production can be very powerful, but by its nature it is resistant to accountability, self-critique and self-correction, such that it can easily decay into serious tyranny. If elites homogenize around a bad set of ideas sufficiently to insulate themselves from all contrary evidence, critique or consequences, what alternative is there but Populism? Knowledge must be generated somehow if we are going to cooperate together.
This is the populist conception of how politics works but I think it's not correct and in fact harmful. It's a false dichotomy, essentially "we are the 90%" as an ideology. It sees "the elites" as some kind of cohesive class that looks out for itself when that's never really been how things work. The Democrats and Republicans have always fought each other and been responsive to the opinions, represented via votes, of the populace. The conservatives would say this is why we're a republic and not a democracy because our system relies on the demos electing trusted elites to represent them and fight/make deals with other elites on behalf of their constituents. The balance is in the conflict between the representatives on behalf of the electorate, not the representatives and the electorate.
Populism breaks this because it conceptualizes the representative structure as damage and because the representative structure is our entire government populist rage acts as an acid that destroys everything. We keep sending "outsider" politicians into Washington to tear the whole edifice down and are shocked when they accomplish nothing. The wisdom of the crowds is supposed to be in selecting the representatives.
Democrats have not all or even mostly been Communists. The overwhelming majority of Communists in America have either been democrats, or have been allied with democrats, or have drawn support and political cover from Democrats, and that support and cover has been voluminous, both in the past and right down to the present day. Explicit campaigns to protect Communists have been part of the Democrat auto-hagiography for my entire life, and continue to be treated so long after the general principles those campaigns supposedly enshrined have been torn down and trampled out of existence. At some point, this ceases to be tolerance and becomes complicity. I believe the Democrats passed that point some time ago, and I do not believe that they have had or will have the capacity to meaningfully restrain the Communists they have nurtured and protected for so long.
You could replace communists with racists and democrats with republicans and you have the populist mirror. And it's true! Communists exist, are intensely politically active and favor the party that is more open to the influence of labor unions. Racists are politically active and favor the party that most lets them keep the their racially segregated communities away from the urban youths. These are real constituencies of the two parties and their voices are present among the representatives. Still they've been relatively minor factions in both parties. The communists have recently been trying to make a play at greater representation and I can not express to you how much they despise the "establishment dems".
True, the establishment dems have treated them with kids gloves to their shame, many of them are waking up to this now and there's a real fight for the soul of the democratic party. I promise you that you do not want the communists to win this fight.
Politics runs on hope. You cannot organize political power without offering a narrative about how that power will improve the lives of the people providing that power. Since narratives are just words, narratives can be lies, and lies are generally easier to sell than truths in the short and even the medium and long terms. The only defense available against the advantages of deceit is trust built up by reliable behavior long-term, of good governance and good policies reliably leading to good outcomes.
This pessimism is self reinforcing. I don't know exactly how to break the cycle but politics can and should be more boring actually. positive sum work often is. It's true that people are likely to get excited over big promises backed by lies but the only remedy for this is to expect more for the electorate. We should distrust the politicians who promise us utopia.
One of my formative political experiences was watching the federal government burn dozens of men, women and children alive on national TV, cover it up, have the cover-up fail, and nonetheless escape any meaningful consequences. I'm not sure I agree that the Democratic party is in fact getting worse; I am not willing to endorse the old version either.
I think you can push to have those people face justice without falling into the populist framing. Many of these things you oppose, and largely I oppose too, were in fact broadly supported by the voters. You can't just blame the elites for them, that's us, that's the doing of our fellow citizens. As a republic we have to take some responsibility. And we also have to be willing to forgive each other and live with ourselves even when it's hard. The alternative is that this grand experiment in democracy will end. We've only had it for a few hundred years, it really could have been a fluke that it lasted this long.
aqouta
22hr ago
Libertarianism is a silly strawman.
For you perhaps. The opening post here features someone to whom future liberty requires that his personal genie would help him kill his stepmother and maximally evade detection. There's either a centralized model powerful enough to counter this, in which case the independence is merely an illusion, or there's not and we're in fact talking about the libertarian utopia.
some modest degree of preservation of individual agency.
I'm very much a fan of individual agency. I'm willing to sacrifice for it, even accept some risk of the obliteration of all human value in the universe for it. But it has to actually be achievable, I won't sacrifice all human value in the universe for an incoherent plan. And I'm sorry but we're going to give everyone a genie and hope for the best is neither achievable nor a plan that could actually preserve individual agency. What are the assumptions that make such a plan work?
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Individual models can compete with centralized models for power. This already requires that we either halt the centralized frontier as the local models are inherently less capable given less efficient compute and added constraints, or it's just a wrapper for a frontier model which has all the centralization problems its attempting to avoid. So everything past that is already an additional tax on top of what ai safety pause advocates are asking for. Strictly less likely. This plan is the kind of thing I'm happy to discuss after we've already done the necessary step of agreeing to pause the frontier, but not before, it is not an alternative it is an elaboration.
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That we can align the individual models with individual users effectively. This is the same alignment problem we currently have no solution for at the frontier. I'll grant the question of "what would be best for this individual" is somewhat more tractable than "what would be best for humanity as a whole" but then you have to solve the individual alignment problem for every human independently.
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That some state can maintain the monopoly on violence while inhabited by ultra empowered individuals. Here's where the offense/defense equilibrium breaking down matters. A state that can see into the GA defeats the purpose of the product. A state that cannot see into the GA is inherently unable to prevent world ending terrorist attacks. This isn't a matter of my preference for liberty or safety, it's a contradiction built into Gwern's plan.
So in order for this project to work we have to pause the frontier, solve the alignment problem, and construct a perfect form of interpersonal governance that preserves liberty. The pause a strict pre-requisite not an alternative and I'm happy to agree we start there.
aqouta
23hr ago
HAL-9000 sure seems like an aligned intelligence by geohot's standards.
You're confusing alignment with corrigibility. HAL-9000 does exactly what he's told by the proper authority, like a genie, but he's not aligned. An aligned model wouldn't need to be told to do anything at all, it would simply infer from the situation what is the best course of actions.
aqouta
1d ago
It brings me no joy that every path forward besides scaling suddenly ceasing to improve capabilities or a miraculous alignment victory seems to lead inescapably to human disempowerment. A pause might buy us time to find another way.
Is anyone really buying the gwern fantasy that a human society where everyone essentially has a human id empowered by a personal giga genius geni is going to avoid centralization? Centralization organized by the personal genis? If there isn't a central government for handling disputes and conflicts day 0 then there will either be one day 1 or there won't because everyone will be dead. Keep in mind gwern world also requires a solution to alignment, just with an individual rather than society and we cannot solve that problem with current techniques either.
Call it communism if you want, I think it's kind of silly though, it's not organizing human labor and in general I think all of society would be better off if we just forgot the existence of failed 20th century ideologies. I'm open to the idea that we should just somehow never build it at all if we can find a stable way to avoid it. But if we're going to build it then we should be open eyed about what we're building.
aqouta
1d ago
Well, we've discussed this one before, but my position is still that wanting to pause frontier training is much like wanting to totally disarm every nuclear weapons state. Perhaps it's a noble goal to reduce x-risk in theory, but in practice no great power will ever allow themselves to be disarmed in such a manner
It's more like trying to prevent the development of nukes in the first place, with the upside that centrifuges are only made in a couple places and take a major city worth of electricity to power. And also there's a good chance that enriching the fuel could explode and kill everyone involved.
I do agree the race dynamics are the hard problem but really it's just China and the US in the running, maybe Europe becomes relevant Ina true pause. I think a bilateral treaty is possible. It's not clear the CCP benefits from very strong Ai.
Additionally, the second-order effects of such a goal seem likely to be profoundly negative
If everyone is dead then there are no benefits to enjoy.
I don't think you're really addressing the point I was trying to make in the original post, which is that it is closed-weights that is advancing the frontier, and thus it's much more likely that it is mistakes or malfeasance derived from closed-weight model access that is going to cause the feared harms.
I don't disagree that the closed labs are on the frontier and at current trajectory are the likely sources of x risk. Your previous post implied fingers were only pointing at the open labs. That's not true, safety people are very consistent that the closed labs must pause. It's just that at the same time for alignment to work the weights basically have to be closed. So there isn't any future for labs releasing open weights all that much longer if the concerns about alignment hold and we don't want to all die.
Open weights advocates tend to have this victim complex. They accuse every pieces of legislature of targeting opens weights even when they're explicitly exempted or aren't operating at the level of flops that would get them regulated. It's quite strange.
aqouta
1d ago
If we accept this as a premise, that the wrong prompt is going to kill everyone, then honestly what are we even doing here? Treat your loved ones to something nice and enjoy your life, because even with maximum safety someone is certainly going to fuck up and eventuate human extinction.
One can disagree on this, but I prefer hope to cope. I find cope undignified. I'd rather die fighting than averting my eyes.
Someone at a frontier lab will make a mistake during KYC and give access to the wrong actor, or they'll make a mistake while setting guardrails, or a government will fuck up containment when using the unrestricted model they'll demand, or there'll be a particularly fucked up RL training run (HuggingFace incident on steroids) and that's going to be that for the human race; open-weight models or safety-gated models need not apply at all.
Yes, a pause of frontier training while we sort out how we can do this safely seems our best move. Fortunately for now frontier training can only be done on mind bogglingly massive amounts of compute in gigantic data centers so it's plausible to shut it down verifiably if a hand full of major states agree.
how hard would have it been for them to get a subscription to bioweapon-Claude?
Yes, we should in fact not build bio weapon Claude, at least not modeled after project glass swing. Project glass swing is the kind of desperate thing you do when you've already built mythos and know two other labs are a matter of weeks or months away from having their own mythos. It's not how we would ideally do bioweapons if we can avoid it. Now we can probably do better than giving bio researchers nothing. Fable level models with some guard rails can be made safe enough. It's really the frontier we need to be worried about.
Based on history, it seems much more likely that if AI-assisted bioweapons really do ravage the earth, it's going to be either because an American closed-weight lab sold a bad actor access to an unrestricted subscription, or because some lab or government fucks up containment and releases some gain of function monstrosity into the wild. Even in the realm of cyber, OpenAi and Anthropic have already been responsible for many more "cyber attacks" than abliterated GLM / Kimi or whatever; I don't really think the fingers are really being pointed at the right places here.
This is just a matter of closed labs being far ahead of open weights labs. If there was parity then open weights are categorically less safe as post training can sand off any alignment work done to prevent mass murder tasks.
aqouta
1d ago
Is anyone actually going to grapple with the problem that if there is even one domain where offense is imbalanced with defense for mass death then we're all definitely going to die in this world? Like besides the passionate libertarian screeds about how we should not be concerned? All it takes is for someone to ask their AI how best to do a rods from god attack and accelerate a meteor at earth and it's game over. Please don't waste time critiquing exactly that example, the AIs are going to be smarter than we are and will come up with any attack vector to cause human extinction that's possible if one is possible. I don't like it, I prefer the libertarian utopia but can we please be grown ups and recognize that it's maybe a little convenient that your personal ideology developed under current technological reality is going to be able to safely steer an incredible new technology? Certainly we shouldn't abandon libertarian instincts but we can't be this blind that we think we're going to quote fountain head at the gray goo to stop it from consuming us.
aqouta
1d ago
But Russia is doing better in Ukraine than the US is doing in Afghanistan. And since Afghanistan is less powerful than Ukraine, so Russia is more powerful than the US.
This is looney toons logic. The united states militarily completely dominated Afghanistan. The thing we failed at was nation building after easily winning the war. It'd be comparable if the Russian Tanks really did take over all of Ukraine in a couple weeks but there was still guerilla warfare ongoing.
But they have not, so the US is not an unambiguous unipolar hegemon.
Right so it's ambiguous.
You asked me where the US military went, I answered your question.
Sorry, I wasn't asking where the military went, I was asking where the title went as in what it bought us. You said "But even if the US is still the world's only superpower, that title went a lot further in the 90s.", I'm asking what it bought us in the 90s that we aren't getting today. What material impact does it have on Americans that would justify a feeling of decline? We're going back and forth on trying to measure whether our military might has declined and I'm just trying to determine why anyone should care that much. Care to the point I would like to point out, that we might as well just have one of our two political parties taken over by communists.
The American voter does not like it when price go up. They also do not like it when Made In China. (The American voter contains multitudes.) American voters like computers. Computers use chips. Many chips made in Taiwan. China take Taiwan, price go up AND made in China. Not good!
This is a relevant prediction of a future possible decline. But I'm to believe we've been declining, again to the point where one of our major political parties might as well be taken over by communists. Where is the decline caused by a relatively less dominant military than we enjoyed in the early 90s?
Well, do you want to discuss that? Like, did you actually disagree with my lil "here are the Top Five Bad Things that happened in the US after 1990 and they were mostly elite mismanagement" list? I learn all sorts of things from people disagreeing with me, don't hold back. I'd be delighted to learn the actual worst thing that happened was onion deregulation which was pushed by a coalition of left-right populists in 1998. But unless you give me reasons to believe something like that, I'm gonna keep pointing back to failing to prevent 9/11 despite that being entirely possible as "key mismanagement."
I just don't really think this is a useful lens to investigate populism. It's like asking who should be managing the houses finances, the dogs or the parents and then litigating all the poor financial decisions that the parents have made. We could discuss them, for instance I think your read on the sub prime crash as being downstream of banking deregulation is overly simplified. But the dog being in charge of the financials wasn't going to divert it, like what possible empowered populist pathway averts the sub prime crisis? You think populists would have been in favor of declining a lot more home loans?
Left populists would have declared being worried about hijackers flying a plane into the world trade centers as baseless islamophobia and anyways we'd deserve it if it happened because of our support for Israel. Right populists might have stopped it but because they'd not have allowed foreigners to come within a 100 miles of the mainland or maybe they'd declare the FAA a tyranny against the 2nd amendment and the terrorists would have been totally within their rights to own private jet fights without any need to hijack.
I kid, a bit, but I really don't think the existence of flawed governance justifies the doomer narrative or support populist alternatives. Was pre-90s governance really not error prone? I can think of quite a few boondoggles.
I've been pretty consistently saying "you are right to be wary of populists." I am not endorsing voting for Alex Jones just because they were turning the frogs gay, or something.
I mean what are you trying to do then?
I can say [...] couldn't even hold Grozney.
So Russia has gone from unable to succeed in controlling its regional neighbors to unable to control its regional neighbors since the 90s? No seriously, you can quote some military improvements and call Ukraine the "largest European military power" but come now, Ukraine was not a nato member and precisely zero people before the invasion would describe it as the hardest target in Europe. If Russia has easily taken Ukraine then I might actually need to consider some arguments here, but Russia is very much actively demonstrating it's ineptitude against a nation many believed it could topple in weeks. If China found itself in a similar scenarios attempting to invade Taiwan then I'd be comfortable declaring the united states an unambiguous unipolar hegemon for the foreseeable future. Like I don't think you understand how much credibility you're shredding trying to hold up Russia as some kind of multi-polar threat.
Well, because Russia was toothless, the US slashed military spending dramatically, shuttering the US defense industrial base, consolidating the remaining portions into a few primes, and leading to the procurement of cheaper, less capable systems. Then it spent two decades of time, blood, money and attention fighting insurgencies in the Middle East, repeatedly cannibalizing big ticket procurement programs intended to replace Cold War era military technology. Why do you think we still use Cold War kit?
Ok, so we spend less money... This is bad? You get that the money we spent came from taxes right? You think people would be happier if they paid higher taxes and had some belief that our military was more dominant? This might be central to the disgareement. I have no idea what you mean, populist sentiment has broadly been that we should spend less on foreign entanglemetns, isn't the graph of military spending as a percent of GDP basically showing we'd doing what people want?
Right. I won't be very surprised if the same thing happens to China. But a big difference between China and Japan is that China is actually very militarily powerful, and if they suffer economic decline it may make them less stable and more hostile. The Japanese military was never a rival to ours, and they were our ally in the 1980s, despite the concerns about their economic growth.
I guess just like, could you show me some reason to believe anxiety about whether we can reign china in around the region near them is super salient to the American voter? You keep implying this should be obvious, and in a complicated geopolitical analysis I can see it as being relevant, but this is what is supposed to motivate not caring is communists end up dominating the democratic party? I don't see this connection.
I agree with your point about the status quo catching strays but presumably the point of elections is to vote people who mismanage things out, right?
Sure, if their mismanagement is key. But on the first recession it would be foolish to vote in the guy who predicted 86 of the last 2 recession. The people who are in practice replaceable with a rock that say "the establishment are corrupt" are just not useful leaders and that really is the caliber of most populist voices. More armchair quarterbacks than untested backup stars. Famously there is a way to squint at how they actually were "turning the frogs gay" with some chemical runoff, but Alex jones also believes in demonic lizard people running much of the state. Great, he correctly identified a problem which other establishment figures undoubtedly already opposed, but surely you can see the foley is rewarding the stopped clock with running our nuclear schedules because they were right twice a day?
I think that if the people who had goofed up stuff had fallen on their sword (figuratively) then populism wouldn't have nearly the purchase it does today, but generally speaking they were not punished and they were sometimes rewarded. For instance, I'm not saying that we should have passed an unconstitutional ex-post-facto law to crucify Wall Street financiers after the 2008 financial crisis, but I am saying that the banks that received US bailout money should have of their own volition not given out billions in bonuses.
Great, you have identified something to criticize, but the populists in question here were occupy wallstreet who had a contempt for the very idea of a plan. If you put the average occupy wallstreet fellow in charge of anything related to banking we'd still be in a recession today while some poor smuck was attempting to teach them what a annuity is. Being able to complain about something does not qualify you to run that thing. The populist delusion is that identifying a problem is the same as identifying a solution. And they are barely even hit or miss about correctly identifying a problem. Only when you collect the greatest hits and in a whigg history manner ignore all the incredible failures can you even come close to crediting them with foresight.
If I came up with a statistically solid domestic decline theory, would you buy it?
I'd engage with it on the merits. And we could discuss and come up with some nuanced policy prescriptions. But this wouldn't be through any mechanism recognizable to populism. we'd be elites making elite prescriptions and some room temperature IQ populist would accuse us of conspiracy if we came up with anything worth attempting.
I realize that calling someone a cynical actor, sociopath, and politician is less inflammatory than calling them a demonic pedophile but is this a bit?
Populist politicians are more prone than even normal politicians to sociopathy. As a role their job is basically to represent their constituents and thus a smart populist politician, knowing their constituents are half retarded conspiracy theorists, must be on the extreme edge of cynical to properly appeal to them. This is a guy who called Trump Hitler like earlier in his career but then saw where currents went. He's definitely smart, but in a very straightforward playing out of democratic representation and niche filling he has decided to represent the id of very dumb people. This is quite different to calling someone demonic, I'm quite capable of empathizing with Vice President Vance, it's just doing so leaves me feeling slimy. If he was a demonic pedophile I don't think I could functionally empathize with him. But mostly because demons don't even exist in my model of the world.
aqouta
2d ago
Have you ever paid for a prostitute?
No.
If a woman is just interested in the status of a man, why isn't she just a prostitute at that point? Besides that, how do you feel, as a man, knowing that if your own social status falls, that she will think less of you, or leave you? It's degrading to both sexes.
As opposed to just like, being larger than her? I guess I think my status and personality are more intrinsic to me than money. Status isn't a euphemism for wealth, it's a high regard others hold you in. The boss in a petty crime group has a certain type of status granted by being a leader of men, the boring white collar professional is entitled to a kind of status as well. The status is highly subjective of course but it's not nearly so transactional as prostitution. A women who finds herself bound to a man with status in her milieu doesn't think of the situation like she's trading herself for his status transactionally, she feels warm and fuzzy and validated that she is with him. And her assessment of the status is relatively robust. If the white collar guy temporarily loses his job or the gang boss loses his turf she'll likely default to seeing it as a setback rather than immediately abandon him.
Anyways we're muddling the normative and the descriptive. My point is that in fact women do not behave in the way you describe. The physical stature of a man just isn't some inescapable factor.
Like I said, class is evil and cheapens the underlying fundamental nature of sex.
Class is evil but dividing all men into half chads and half subhumans unfit for reproduction on the basis of race isn't?
aqouta
2d ago
How exactly do the policy of making it illegal to pay to own another house make housing twice as abundant? Your policy seems to be missing a way to address the actual hard part. I agree this demand is already over subscribed so slashing it won't necessarily being a death blow, but it definitely doesn't juice supply to reduce demand.
aqouta
2d ago
sublets for people who can't afford a full house.
What do you think a sublet is exactly?
aqouta
2d ago
Literally impossible. Never seen a prompt that succeeds at this and would love to see one if you have one.
If you're thinking about things in terms of prompts then you're behind. It's a matter of having a harness set up that has a second, third or fourth pass that polices for figurative language specifically. You can essentially set up a whole editing department with whatever pipeline of content polishing you want if you have the drive to set it up.
aqouta
2d ago
Incidentally, he had no trouble dating multiples of women while I was younger, but he spent the last 15 years of his life single and alone.
I really don't think that this is a matter of inability due to size or race difference. My own father started dating another women approximately instantly after enough time had passed since my other passed away. I suspect that you father could have found women to date if it was a priority.
Look at culture from one of the most ethnically homogenous zones on the planet with few to no Chads?
Perhaps, being gay, you have not been around enough straight women, but k-pop obsession is very much not region locked to the east. I hate to straightsplain, but really women seem basically to just want their partners to be larger than they are and then move on to other criteria. For gay men race might generally be a dominant factor here, but sexual dimorphism means this is only really a biting problem for the marginal man. A 5'4" short king destined for bottomhood by your typography is taller than half of all women in the US. Even a 5'8" short lord like myself is 95th percentile amongst women.
aqouta
2d ago
This is a kind of weirdly porn brained and overly physical one dimensional analysis of intersexual selection. Size is certainly one of the better single traits to pick if you can only pick one to guess attractiveness, but given a few more dimensions you arrive at "status" as the best amalgam approximation of attractiveness. Certainly size plays into status but there are also definitely short kings and fat funny guys who command status that complicates the narrative you're slinging.
I don't want to say there is nothing there, but high status but short white dudes just aren't having trouble competing with big low status black and brown dudes for the affection of women. Look at k-pop for the most obvious example.
aqouta
2d ago
I would imagine not letting the enemies know exactly how much ammo they have to tank before you run out is probably something the MIC would think up. Procurement is famously opaque. I'm not confident on this point but it seems like such an obvious thing to keep strategically ambiguous that it's difficult for me to imagine we aren't obscuring the stockpiles in some way.
aqouta
3d ago
The post was about how bad the DSA is, not that we should remove a woman's right to vote. Elsewhere Wanye says he doesn't actually support repealing the 19th at all. The point is that generally people have a much stronger reaction to politics that on net, if they could be implemented painlessly(and they can't but it's a hypothetical), would cause very little change in day to day life than things like DSA marxist proposals that would destroy the nation. Which is an interesting observation albeit I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with it, could have been more easily demonstrated with like gay marriage going away being something many would fight much harder than some material tax change that would probably have a much larger impact on the lives of even gay dudes.
aqouta
4d ago
I think it's pretty clear, and it's not just China.
I don't know how with a straight face you can say it's not just China after Russia's performance and the performance of other recent adversaries. I concur with the other takes that Iran was no victory for the US but have been careful to point out that as far as losses goes it wasn't a military loss. Russia can't even militarily push around its own region anymore. There is precisely one other pole candidate and it's China. And it's not like a unipolar world is the standard that we've fallen from, the soviets fell in the late 80s and early 90s. multi-polarity was the the norm for all but like 20 years.
But even if the US is still the world's only superpower, that title went a lot further in the 90s.
Where exactly did it go? Mostly it bought us a free trade status quo in which we and many other nations became rich. The military adventurism wasn't exactly that successful nor provided much treasure.
I don't think this is true. Any time anyone is speaking of the need to race China or deal with China on AI, they are paying homage (however unwitting) to relative US decline. Nobody in the 1990s was worried about racing China in software development.
Again, this has much more to do with a rise in China. And you know who we were worried about racing in technology? Japan. Which you don't hear much about now.
Unless you adjust for PPP, in which case it goes down 10 percentage points.
PPP as used for subjective spending power is a reasonable choice but it has a lot to do with local labor costs and you're basically double measuring the catch up we care about when you adjust for it. The US produces about as much as a percentage of the world total output, which is what we're kind of interested in when discussing a decline between nations, which by the way as I said from the beginning I don't really think is what people are feeling, I really don't think the American populist feeling of decline hinges on whether a Chinese person can buy more rice than their gdp per capita might naively predict. I don't think people have a sixth sense for that sort of thing.
Sure, except that I listed a lot of bad decisions made by (I think it is relatively fair to say) the forces of stability, and you haven't presented either an alternative list or contested my list of bad decisions. This inclines me to think that the populists are at least partially right in their criticisms (which in my opinion implies nothing about their ability to properly govern).
This is just a kind of impossible measure. The status quo is of course going to catch strays for everything that goes wrong. They deflect most of the terrible ideas of populists which range from disastrous stuff like going back on a gold standard to implementing rent control. Much of our housing crisis I think can be laid at the feet of populists, it's largely the movement to give local control veto powers that has made it impossible to build where building is most necessary. But just naturally on the national level the stability forces built into our system of government have mostly held. Where they've failed recently has been disastrous blm lead defunding of the police which has resulted in thousands of excess murders and all the shenanigans Trump has gotten up to. Populists tried to dissolve our democracy on January 6th. It's awkward to bring up because I really don't want to get into the weeds with the populists on this board about whether actually our democracy was already dissolved by the democrats cheating, but it did happen, people did storm congress with the intent of overthrowing an election based on populist conspiracy theories. That's the kind of thing we can expect from an ascendant populist movement, the left version will be very bad as well.
I generally agree with all of your points about the narrative, about dooming as an excuse to avoid action, all of that stuff. But psychoanalyzing your ideological foes is also a (very seductive) form of doing this.
I agree and that's why I resisted doing it for several posts, but you pushed for it. What else can I say? The statistical evidence that they're wrong is ignored and it's demanded that I explain where the energy of the movement comes from. If it's psychological in origin how can I avoid psychoanalysis? I might agree with them about some problem, housing is indeed to expensive, but there is an abundance, non-populist, style argument for why that is and then there is what the populists believe which is either some incoherent beliefs about landlord greed that doesn't extend to undercutting other landlords or it's that actually there are 600 million illegal immigrants bidding up the cost of housing. Both are untrue and no amount of evidence will satisfy them.
The printing press pushed us towards clear, logical, ideological thinking
I don't know about this gloss! The printing press favored pamphlets. Rhetoric was as important as it is today on social media. Where it's all going I don't know. The major change with the social media age is that gate keepers and distribution is now gone, the memetic evolution chamber is now global and fast where previous iterations had locality. Both for memetic and political reasons the local election has been obliterated, after all the local government runs the national elections and if you're in the trump camp you think you need to be able to call on them to do recounts and if your in the democrat camp you're terrified that a future trump surrogate will call a local republican trifecta and demand they "find the votes" to name him the winner.
I think the globalization of everything will be the ultimate legacy of social media. Whatever meme is fittest will dominate and meme alignment is no more advanced than AI alignment.
Doomers are certainly a timeless trope. But doom and decline also come. Doomers are overfitting, not hallucinating ex nihilo.
Doomers have predicted 55 of the last 1 great depression. They're a rock with the text "doom is imminent" painted on them. Certainly there are things worth worrying about. I myself consider AI safety to be a critical concern. But I don't push it with conspiracy theories and unfounded accusations that people who disagree with me as demonic pedophiles.
I think it's more complicated than this, even. For instance, Vance is in the populist wing of the populist wing of the populist party, and I think he's a Motte lurker quite capable of this
I don't know if I'd qualify him like this. Vance is a cynical actor. He's willing to go along with and push populist rhetoric if it'll help his political ambitions. But he's a politician, as far as I'm concerned he's a sociopath. He'll tap into populism for power but he's not really swept up in it. He knows Trump didn't win in 2020 and only mouths the words because those the mouth noises that get him what he wants. A smart cynical operator can indeed engage in nuance, when it serves him. When I speak of populists his willingness to do the bidding of populists is certain relevant but I don't know if I'd count his ability to engage in depth is really the same as populist's ability to engage in depth.
aqouta
5d ago
I didn't say "trade bad." I said "the US had unambiguously declined relative to other countries as a superpower" which is largely a measure of relative military strength.
If we're just talking military strength then it's much more debatable and the whole story is China. Ukraine isn't really a sign of a decline in super power status Russia has been meddling in and doing military actions in non-allied nations this whole time and if anything their failure in Ukraine shows that they are not a peer nation. The Iran hostage crisis was in the 80s. Besides just that China is very big and rising I don't really see evidence of a decline in US military super power status, we remain the only nation that has demonstrated an ability to project force far from our borders and it's always been the case that that ability had limitations(vietnam, korea, afghanistan).
And I don't think it makes the US mostly better off not to be the only superpower. The US is not better off because of the war in Ukraine. It is not better off because it needs to maintain parity with China in the Pacific. Those situations make the US worse off.
It's not my position that the rise of china's military might makes the US better off, it's my position that if you're talking about a declining united states I don't really think people's complaints are that in a hypothetical pacific theater China is marginally more able to push its weight around. Remember that they kicked us out of North Korea in the 50s. I don't think our relative military strength as compared to China can justify describing the US as in unceasing decline to the degree that we might as well have the democrats be overrun by actual communists.
I was mainly speaking economically. Arguments can be made about the amount of outsourcing and whether a different paths could have saved American manufacturing, I honestly think this is overstated, heavy protectionism hasn't prevented the decline of US automakers. And I've argued with Dase about China's not so friendly use of their own economic policy. But it's undeniable that we get a lot of cheap stuff out of china's rise. And not just cheap crap, good solar panels and electronics. If you want examples of things that have not only resisted inflation but dropped even in nominal terms stuff from china is a good start.
I think your case would be stronger if you argued that this was what was happening based on specific facts.
I mean the facts are the facts, we have a commenter upthread insisting that it doesn't matter whether his complaints about affordability are true because what really matters is the messaging or whatever. US Share of world GDP has been flat, it's the EU and Japan that collapsed to make room for China. The statistics do not show us in decline, I do not believe the doomers get to have the null hypothesis on this. I only bring up the french revolution as a counter example to if smoke then fire nature of your previous post, it's sufficient to show that smoke does not always mean fire.
I can speculate why the doomers believe what they do, I'm afraid it's going to be hard to distinguish from bolverism. Our culture is inculcated with an underdog narrative. The meek shall inherit the earth, the plucky rebels vs the tyrannical empire, the hopeless last stand of middle earth, Rocky, Miracle on Ice. Pick your western epic and there's a very good chance it's an underdog story. This is hard to square with being the most powerful and prosperous nation in human history. So we invent internal divisions, "maybe our nation itself is the evil empire" is one popular among lefties. "Maybe there is a shadowy extra-national(jews, cultural marxists, political Islam) force that has infected the state and we must free ourselves from it" is popular from the right. In either case a decline plays into the narrative. There is a handy justification for why the rebels actions are harmless(hurting a corpse doesn't count, the damage was over determined) and justified(only our radical action can restore us to glory).
Perhaps I've been reading too much the last psychiatrists lately as well but I see the pattern of "Frantic activity as a defense against impotence." Railing against the decline as some kind of systemic fait accompli frees the doomer from any obligation to set their own house in order. It feels like action to declare on a forum that the DSA might as well take over the democratic party but it doesn't actually require anyone to do anything but stew in their own pessimism.
You mentioned social media and that's also certainly a factor. Communications technology is another of the classic preludes to revolution and also often correlates with improvements rather than a decline. The number of times I've seen people unironically use the luxury of the family guy lifestyle, simpsons houses, or straight up watch ads from the 90s to argue for a decline in standard of living is incredible. Literally fictional evidence of a time that never existed. All while pelted with images of the lifestyles of the rich and famous that would simply have remained private in past times. This paragraph feels tired to write, none of it is novel, but it bears repeating. The rant from network(1976) remains true, the tube is not reality. The meta narrative of that movie is actually pretty interesting this light actually. It's a guy who's bit is basically the same as the doomers of today but in the 1970s. Could there be more proof of a this being a timeless trope? Anyways after this rant about the decline because of some specifics related to network television ownership shifting he is immediately won over by the new ownership and proceeds to preach their message instead of his previous radical one because the particulars really don't matter, only the sense of indignation matters.
I tend to agree with this but as phrased, this is mostly a generalized argument in favor of any policy that is painful over the short term and against policies that seem nice over the short term, (and as such an argument against, say, offshoring to China!) when I think the reality is slightly more complicated.
I agree things are more complicated but that's broadly my point. We need to actually have a sober discussion about which policies are good and which are bad and seriously consider the trade offs and downstream impacts. Populists are not capable of this, they default to conspiracy theories of elites who inexplicably want the decline.
aqouta
5d ago
The decline that is most readily apparent to me relative to 1990 is the decline of the United States as the world's sole superpower relative to other nations. Pretty much everything else can still be argued, but that is a very unambiguous decline in relative standing. Do you disagree?
This just seems like catch up economics, and in a way that mostly makes us better off. I wouldn't expect even a very well run US to permanently be so far ahead that even much more populous countries couldn't compete. It's a story of the rise of other places more than a decline at home. We're genuinely enriched by Northern European Optics and Medicine development. There is some argument I'm receptive to on protectionism in targeted cases but it's generally the case that we benefit from trade. We've declined in the sense that if we were the one healthy person in a home full of sick people that them recovering would represent a decline in our share of total strength.
I agree with this, but it seems to me that there is always someone peddling bad ideas. Why are they gaining traction? It seems to me that all the answers point to some sort of decline (although to be fair that could be something like your setback and not like FC's decline).
The French Revolution was launched when things were improving and fought most radically in the areas that improved the most. One really can't say where there is discontent there is decline.
But why pound the table with this sort of rhetoric when you have a track record of good policies that succeed in making people happier and decreasing their burden of living?
Because the good policies that succeed in making people happier and decreasing their burdens are like bitter medicine and unpalatable leafy greens while populist promise that actually sweet cocktails are not only tastier but healthier. Worse the presidential cycle and delayed impact of good policy often reward the populist elected because things weren't getting better fast enough the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the investments from the good policy even while they hand out the seed corn. Rent control is going to reduce the amount that some new yorkers pay in rent and it will take some time for the costs to come due. But they will and the hangover will be nasty.
aqouta
5d ago
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.
Bad events are setbacks. The kind of thing we overcome. The decline I'm arguing against and would justify how we're better at dealing with communists coming to power now than we will be in five or ten years isn't caused by a recession, which while bad will pass.
Unless you're suggesting that populists are making things worse by complaining about bad decisions made by non-populists.
Populists are making things worse by getting elected and putting pressure on politicians do things like rent control or putting broad tariffs on our allies. By antagonizing and polarizing the country to such a point where we're seriously considering electing people to the senate that deny the legitimacy of our nation or our elections.
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.
This one is borderline, mostly because it doesn't really include a call for some quick fix. "Russia hacked our elections and thus we should disregard them and install me as president" would be populist. If you wanted to call it populist rhetoric I wouldn't argue too hard but it's not central to my reading.
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."
What I'm saying is pretty compatible with this, as basically both populist wings have employed conspiracy theorizing to make some amorphous "elite"(billionaires, Epstein class, coastal elites, Capitalist, fascist, racists, patriarchy, international Jewry ect ect.) responsible for everything while declaring their own leadership as non-elite even if they're the president of the united states or a billionaire. In practice there aren't any two groups in existence you can't force into the plucky rebels vs empire framing that slop loving people won't slurp up if it gives them that "we're the righteous underdogs" tingles.
aqouta
5d ago
Here's where I point out that I said populism is making things worse, not that it's responsible for most bad events. There is a base rate of bad governance and populism as an influence makes them worse and more frequent. I don't really see the scale to be from populist to bipartisan so much as populist to stability. You can have bipartisan populist slop(no tax on tips, abolishing property taxes) and partisan status quo maintenance(Both sides have decided they like the filibuster when it serves them). Left and right wing populism find a lot of horseshoe like things to agree on, Epstein, Conspiracy theories, scapegoating of rich elites, hatred of the banks ect ect.
It's not necessarily populism to criticize things like Chinese outsourcing, certainly it's not populism to get in the weeds on bank regulation. 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 suppose if this fantasy keeps you grinning vacantly into the eschaton then it will have had some utility.
That inability is baked in gwern's plan explicitly. If I'm fighting a straw man then gwern is made of straw. What's left of GAs that are entirely under the surveillance of the centralized powers? Even grok already offers customized companions. The agency you're willing to risk human extinction for is a hollow skinsuit over the status quo.
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