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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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It's so bad because she's so bad.

Body language is a pseudo-science, but tells do exist. Harris looks to the side when she's try to fetch and retrieve talking points. That's a novice move. The really good politicians can maintain eye contact even when they're doing the memory recall of talking points. The really good ones can smile, emote, gesture non-robotically when they do it. Harris is just overmatched.

Trump doesn't face these challenges because he will not be constrained by your plebe confines of sentence structure and grammar. His words are impressionistic-abstract devices that can be deployed and rearranged dynamically. If you're too dumb to follow his 9th order logic, that's on you pal.

Serious: Trump's tell is that he just starts a new sentence. It's obvious and horrible. More recently, he's been getting stuck in doom-loop repeats of the same anecdotes and basic sentence themes. They aren't even fully fleshed out talking points. He'll get stuck on individual words. Listen to him talk about his alcoholic brother on the Theo Von podcast. This is, funnily enough to @NewCharlesInCharge point, this is a failure mode of less sophisticated LLMs - they can get into latent spaces that are impossible to exit, so they just end up repeating the same output again and again even if you try to coach them away from it.