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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.
I have a chip on my shoulder about a few guys who regularly make subtly fallacious arguments in favor of a position they support but who will never actually defend those arguments when pressed by someone with subject-area knowledge. As in, I've had to watch time and time again when somebody points out the error in the logic or brings in their own, seemingly superior data and these people will ignore it entirely and/or shift to a slightly different position.
Intellectual cowardice is an ongoing pet peeve of mine. All the moreso by parties who make their living on their analysis of reality. They seem to fill a niche that's a step above "blowhard cable news pundit" where people who want their priors confirmed but also want to think they're not being fed a line of biased tripe like the proles.
Again, this became blatant with Noah suddenly coming to the realization back in October that YES, the Left houses a LARGE amount of antisemitism whilst Conservatives/righties have been pointing this out for a really long time. He's happy to believe that the right tolerates antisemites and condemn them for it, because that fits his preferred conclusions. Simple.
I went back to his feed again and now I had to read the gem "Nuclear is a niche product." Which is 'true' in the broad sense (it is niche because nobody is allowed to build it!) but then he declares solar the superior product and when somebody reasonably calls him out on this he wouldn't even deign to respond.
"Nuclear is a niche product! Solar is our best bet!"
"Wait, by any fair definition Solar is in fact very niche and will remain that way for years to come, what are you basing that on?"
Clearly he's just engagement baiting at this point, but again, this is all decreasing the quality of discourse, and somehow this guy makes his living by the quality of his input to discussions. Compare that to Zeihan's take on the same issue, which means we can actually compare their accuracy down the road.
On the other hand, I've yet to hear the good counterargument that demographic collapse won't inevitably lead to certain nations experiencing massive internal chaos.
China currently depends on imports for its basic energy and food needs, and the primary value they have to trade is a massive labor pool and, more recently, massive pool of consumers. And they admit that this pool is about to shrink sharply because the country's TFR has been well below replacement for decades now.
The cascade of effects seems straightforward:
Which of these steps is wrong, or where can the CCP intervene to avert the end state?
He's been pointing out that the U.S. efforts to secure the seas for private vessels are likely to decrease, and with the Houthis continuing to interfere with shipping in the Red Sea there's already plenty of signs that this is accurate.
I see the Reddit comment and yeah, he definitely blew the 'two year' prediction and I'd not expect anything like that to occur even in the next two years, but I actually agree that we're in 'witching hour' times, where fat tailed impacts can occur on short time scales.
Indeed, the main reason I'm not a full doomer myself is that I'm seeing two possible futures, one where AI and automation lives up to the hype and manages to usher in a new industrial revolution, and one where things spiral out of control before we get true benefits from AI and we end up in a deep global recession. I honestly couldn't tell you which is more likely, but I don't see a likely future where we kind of just muddle along on the current path without something giving way.
Noah seems to try to put the optimist spin on things but doesn't seem to actually want to engage with the doomer's case in earnest. He mostly seems to say "line has been going up in the past, I believe line will go up in future." Which is fine... but not useful.
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