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We've likely reached the peak of unrest sometime in the last few years. The woke movements are still bubbling, but the first derivative of their energy has turned negative.
Man if Noah Smith says something I'm reflexively going to believe it is the actual inverse of the truth.
It'd be 'easy' to "call the top" after the intense violence that marked the summer of 2020, but I don't for a second buy that the factors that enabled that sort of violence have changed much, or that there's not sufficient energy simmering under the surface for it to happen again.
Typical sort linear thinking, draw the line on the graph, circle the high point, and assert that things couldn't possibly go higher than that!
You could make the same argument about inflation, actually, claiming that because it peaked under Covid conditions it is unlikely to ever get so high again because those conditions have passed.
This is uncharitable, bordering on a strawman of what he said. He didn't claim it with strong certainty, just that there was a good chance that unrest had peaked. Given the retreat of woke (e.g. Harris' campaign platform) this is seeming more and more prescient now. Quoting directly from the article:
On the other hand, there have now been two separate attempts on Trump's life. Clearly a sign of lowering temperatures!
Globally, unrest seems to be ticking up regularly!
We just had riots in Ireland and England over their migrant situation. Also in Venezuela over an election. And in the U.S. Pro-palestine protestors are still kicking around. There was an actual shooting involving one recently.. We've had multiple (three that I know of, as another one occurred this past weekend) individuals who have literally burned themselves to death as a political statement.
I'd wager the main reason things are holding a bit steady is the pending election, where both sides think they have a shot a victory. I will happily bet against anyone who thinks unrest won't immediately spike up inside of six months if Trump manages to win the election.
Like, the whole argument seems to hinge on the idea that people are becoming more satisfied with the status quo, less prone to lash out. Which seems blatantly untrue to me?
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Anything he’s obviously gotten wrong in the past?
Just curious so I can update my mental model.
And here he goes doing it in just the past couple days:
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1836065799406280838
Claiming that China somehow possesses capacity to detonate electronic devices at will... in the U.S.
Without a single suggestion as to the means they could do it. Like, there's almost zero reason to believe this is true.
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1835718296047653161
Here he is giving Kamala credit for increases in U.S. energy production that By the very graphs he posted obviously and clearly began during Trump's term.
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1835388262464286853
Here he references data that cuts off in 2022 to dismiss claims about the number of migrants in Springfield in 2024. Then later admits that the number could still be higher and indeed plenty of people post various sources to back up the claim of 20k. Note that you can easily check and see that there was dramatic devolution of the situation in Haiti that might have caused a large uptick in refugees since then!
This is the guy who writes a column claiming to analyze facts and give reasonable conclusions based on those facts.
I don't use the term hack as a trivial thing, but I genuinely believe Noah Smith is a hack.
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The one that really, really got me to reject him as a source of useful insight was this INTENSE insistence, during Covid times, that every state, every country absolutely HAD to implement a "Test and Trace" protocol before lockdowns could be lifted.
He actually changed his twitter handle to include "Test and Trace." He wrote articles about it. Its not that he was suggesting the idea itself, per se, that bugged me it was more the complete conviction he decided to take on the position which seemed extremely unwarranted by the actual information on hand at the time.
And of course I think he abruptly stopped mentioning it at all sometime in 2021, and so hasn't grappled at all with whether it actually proved effective vs. other methods (or simply doing nothing) and re-evaluated his once strongly-held beliefs.
Granted, he's just one of many people and institutions who torched credibility in my eyes during that period of time.
Another example, he (a Jewish man) was apparently quite blind to antisemitism on the Left until October 2023, and he OF COURSE insists this wasn't due to his own ideological leanings. He's not the only one, but my lord does his obliviousness seem particularly terminal.
Finding a blind spot THAT massive should inspire some epistemic humility, but he earns his keep by writing pieces about how people should understand and act in the world so that would mean he'd have to find some other line of work, too.
Here he is 2022 calling for a troop buildup in Poland and in other NATO countries. not sure where he thinks those troops are coming from, or what his actual expertise on military matters is. Or whether he's gone back and checked if this was a good idea in light of the past two years of fighting.
The main reason I haven't really lost even an ounce of respect for Scott Alexander, by comparison, is Scott's willingness to actively re-examine his past beliefs (which he often posts in form of odds-based predictions anyway!) to see if he did anything particularly wrong. Noah simply does not do this, and as mentioned probably can't afford to if he wants to keep his job.
Test and trace certainly seemed like it could be good early on, before it became clear that COVID was too easily spread and would never be effective. He dropped the push for test and trace after a few months.
Reinforcing east-flank NATO countries is a good idea given Russia's aggression. Previously, NATO had mostly only kept tripwire forces near Russia to avoid "provoking" them. Rescinding that policy to at least some degree was a good choice.
None of these seem like horrible miscalculations by any stretch unless I'm missing other context.
Again, with what troops? What second-order effects are there from doing so? Why does it assume U.S. troops rather than Europeans stepping into the gap?
Can't just magick up these solutions because you think they sound good. Perfect example with the test and trace. He didn't bother to think about feasibility (or, as he might put it "state capacity") given the actual situation on the ground, and just pushed for an idea because in theory it might be a great solution! But what does that count for?
He seems to be incompetent on geopolitical matters, and I've had a few Gell-Mann moments where he talks about topics I'm actually familiar with and he gets things badly wrong, or misses some important extra variable.
Like, it is unclear why you'd choose him for your analysis over any other random pundit, other than he's pretty good at couching his observations as if they're detached and 'objective' in some ways. But as with the leftist antisemitism issue, he appears to be so heavily detached that he's not really engaged with base reality enough to pontificate!
The guy I've been currently listening to for insights is Peter Zeihan, and he seems to be MUCH, MUCH better at the "levelheaded examination of objective facts on the ground and delving into implications" game.
So the value that Noah contributes to the discourse, even if it isn't negative (I think it is, he clouds issues more than he clarifies!) is probably not enough to justify listening to him over someone like, say, Nate Silver or even Eliezer Yudkowsky with Demonstrated expertise and a track record for honesty and accuracy. And again, Scott Alexander is great on the meta level for figuring out why we make certain errors in thinking.
With troops from NATO member states? There's been a steady drumbeat of articles over the past few years of countries doing exactly this. By the way you're framing this you're seeming to imply there's some huge problem here, but you're not really saying what that is. I also don't recall this being a topic that Noah has returned to much. Did he write an article about it? You posted a single tweet he made as your evidence that he has no idea what he's talking about, on a thing that did end up happening and was (I would argue) a good idea. Is there more to this that I'm missing? This just seems extremely thin to me.
Zeihan triggers the same "bullshit artist" alarm to me that you're getting from Noah, although for me it's probably somewhat lesser here. I've only read a few of his takes and I haven't been particularly impressed, as he has the age-old pundit problem of overconfidence. His book is a good example, where it's stated as a prediction rather than a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. Funnily enough, Noah had the same critique as I did.
I also read Nate Silver and Scott Alexander and think they're great overall. They run into issues sometimes, nobody is perfect after all. But they're better than the pack which is the important part. I'm less enthused about Yud, as he's sounded more and more like a detached luddite lunatic.
Went over Noah's recent twitter posts and he's as bad as I remember. Recounted here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/250998?context=8#context
He's just all over the place. He wants to comment on cyberwarfare capabilities in China, but I doubt he has knowledge in that area.
Then on U.S. energy production policy.
Then on Haitian migrants in Ohio.
But makes glaring errors in each comment, and that's just the ones I semi-randomly picked as examples.
This is the stuff you GENERALLY don't get from Zeihan, Silver, or Scott, they wouldn't make STRONG claims well outside their area of expertise and then fail to back up any of it.
Yud, well, his whole thing is that AGI is likely to kill off humanity and he's seeing more and more signs he feared might arise and yet few people seeming to care, it must be a bit of a living nightmare for the guy.
I also read Zeihan's book and skimming that review I'm not even sure Noah understand the arguments. He makes the following statement:
But he earlier grants that "The first of these [demographic collapse] is probably unavoidable." So he's accepting the premise that Zeihan uses there!
And Zeihan's whole point is that China is in such rapid, terminal demographic decline that they will collapse entirely on their own, with or without U.S. keeping the sea lanes open, so unless you can explain why a Chinese collapse WON'T happen, then 'U.S.-Chinese Cooperation' is not a viable solution because there won't be any China to cooperate with.
I don't know how a guy can miss or ignore points this badly without it being intentional. the reason countries will collectively make decisions that are disastrous for themselves is that they won't have much choice once the demographics collapse forces their hand!
It seems to me that you just have a chip on your shoulder about the guy. None of the examples you posted here or on the other post seem wrong beyond a "reasonable people could disagree" level. Certainly not to the extent that an unbiased person would call the person making them a "hack".
I have two priors here: The first is that he uses Twitter as a sounding board for rapid ideas-testing, so I'm more willing to excuse things he says there than I would be if he made the same argument on Substack or a published article. The second is that his interests cover a few different disciplines, primarily geopolitics, economics, and the things that branch out from them, but he has a few specific topics within those fields that he's become more of an expert on. As such, I don't think the notion that he bounces between topics is particularly troubling -- he has a core set of things he covers on rotation, and most topics beyond them are covered through a similar lens. Failing that, he tends to bring data. Sometimes his conclusions are overbroad and the data can be a bit iffy (e.g. he's a big solar booster but I've heard there are issues with LCOE as a measure of their ultimate economic feasibility, yet he frequently cites it in his charts) but overall he does a good job.
For the object-level concerns:
Probably the worst (for him) example you brought is this one... but he's not saying that they'd just make peoples' phones explode through a hack or something, but by their supply chain dominance, a topic he's talked about at length before in other contexts. I still think it's directionally wrong that this would happen, although I don't really hold it against him much since, again, it's Twitter.
You're arguing against a strawman here. He's not saying that Trump was bad for energy or anything like that, just that Biden continued being good.
In the article he linked, there was another chart that had employment numbers to 2024 which showed basically no change in the 2 years. Furthermore, somebody in the replies posted another thread showing there was no huge surge.
As a final point, the fact that you'd put Zeihan in with the likes of Nate Silver and Scott Alexander is wild, and that you'd use him as a foil to Noah is even wilder. I've been going through some of Zeihan's predictions and he's a typical doomer, with all the bad predictions that come along with that. E.g. he made a very strong prediction that China would collapse in 10 years, and I don't think we need to wait another 6 years to see if this comes true. It's way too overconfident. China could certainly experience turmoil, and if we're being generous then there's maybe a 10% chance this spills over catastrophically in the next few years, but he's saying it like it's guaranteed.
He's also claimed Alberta and Saskatchewan would have imminently held independence referendums, and then joined the US.
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