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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   20095 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Well, Steve Bannon just threw a Roman salute at CPAC.

I know some people may have reservations in claiming that Elon didn’t mean to do what people thought he did, and many will scream until their hearts give out that he did it emphatically due to some inherent impulse to troll. Bannon doing this (a month no less) after Elon’s own stunt not only means that this was probably in response to that, but also Bannon didn’t even do the same winding motion which was the cover; no, ‘my heart goes out to you’, or, ‘I am reaching out to you’, or any superficial justification, just an unbridled arm stretched out for the purposes of salutation. Accompanying this a proclamation that Trump is a great man of history, no less, someone whose coming is augured only twice in the history of a country, with Bannon proclaiming that only Trump is worthy to be the Republican Party (and therefore President) even in 2028.

The Rubicon seemingly is continually crossed ever-so-slightly, or at least, it is being approached for the purposes of eventually making it to the other side. This comes after the news of the Napoleon quotation posted on the date of Mark Antony offering Ceasar the title of King, and the White House social comms posting Trump as King. Obviously, the former is enigmatic as a function, and the latter humorous. It’s just an interesting start to a new regime seemingly radicalized by its previously downtrodden nature; defeated, the bloodied and uncowed rejects are now reveling in their victory beyond even the limits of their persecutors’ sense of regality.

It’s funny seeing Richard Spencer being a decade early to the seeming new tradition of Trump orbiters, and only if he had bid his time he would potentially have been capable of releasing his true feelings had they not been mellowed in time. Nick Fuentes, on the other hand, is late: stating his sensing of some ulterior goal behind this style of communication being only discomforting. This is basically like the twilight zone at this point in that, although these points don’t seemingly add up to one singular great attractor at the end of whatever this Presidency even is, it’s entailing something completely different.

Ave Trump, Emperor of the Americans.

This is from 1 month ago:

“Bannon calls Musk 'evil' and 'racist' as MAGA civil war boils over”

“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon said. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Bannon hates Musk. In a wider sense, it’s a conflict between two large groups on the ‘new right’.

  • A largely Christian, largely evangelical, largely middle aged, largely middle-American wing, descended from ‘classic’ Fox, Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax. Pro-Israel, pro-troops, sometimes isolationist, not-necessarily pro-NATO, shades of Buchanan at times minus the historical conspiracies, but also within the mainstream of US conservative opinion. This is where Bannon and his ‘permanent coalition’ of 60% of whites, 40% of Hispanics, 20% of blacks is. Opposed to mass immigration, but especially including H1B immigration. Especially distrustful of big tech. Want to preserve existing US demographics and may stereotype but have no overt or intellectual racial animus towards black Americans.

    _

  • Tech right, ultra online, ambivalent toward H1Bs, pro in Elon’s case, disproportionately non-white, Silicon Valley, e/acc, government waste, very pro free speech, largely parrot’s Musk’s views but also associated closely with Thiel and some other VCs. Like /pol/ often performatively racist, especially toward black people, but actually quite diverse themselves. Blue tribe, lives in big cities, probably works in tech, DOGE staffer, likely not religious except in a possibly tradcath or orthodox aesthetic-only sense, redscarepod listener or subreddit user, new right press involvement in some cases. HBD believer, read Moldbug and Land in 2010 (if they’re older, read their views rephrased in online infographics in 2017 if they’re younger).

    _

    In addition to these you have combinations of more esoteric racists, third-worldists like Fuentes, extreme antisemites, ultra culture war obsessives still cataloguing video game wokery like it’s 2015, people who primarily have contempt for women and the wider Tate-sphere, zoomer Muslims who’ve adopted a hybrid of Islamist and western dissident right ideologies, Russophiles and nazbols like Hinkle, BAP’s gay bodybuilders and so on, and overt feds like Carlson, but they’re relatively less relevant to this current dispute.

It’s funny seeing Richard Spencer being a decade early to the seeming new tradition of Trump orbiters, and only if he had bid his time he would potentially have been capable of releasing his true feelings had they not been mellowed in time.

Just to nitpick: he never actually gave the Roman salute, at least not publicly. The one time he was accused of doing so, he was actually raising his glass of whiskey.

Right, what Spencer famously did after Trump’s first win was to shout “hail victory” ie the literal translation of “sieg heil”.

If anything that looks less like a roman salute than Elon's gesture

It's to Roman salute what a solar cross, a kolovrat or a meander are to a swastika. Sufficient plausible deniability, but they know you know they know why you put something with rotational symmetry and right angles on your banner.

The woke left and woke right are both desperate to make fetch happen.

What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?

Everyone’s been talking a lot about both the downsizing of the federal government, and the rapid improvement of LLM technology, such that the fake jobs are being cut at the same instant that more jobs are becoming to some degree fake. I don’t necessarily think that the US government should be a bastion of fake jobs, especially Culture War ones, but at the same time I wonder if there’s any end game people like Musk are working toward.

As far as I can tell:

Blue collar jobs are still largely intact. There’s about the same need as there ever was for tradesmen, handymen, construction workers, waste disposal, and so on. Most of the automation in those fields came from vehicles a century ago, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to leverage things like prefab construction all that much more. I personally like the new “3-D printed” extrusion style of architecture, but it doesn’t look like it actually saves all that much labor.

Pink collar: Childcare takes about the same amount of labor per child, but there are fewer children. Nursing is in demand, but surely healthcare can only take up so much of the economy. Surely? Retail continues to move online, and we continue to descend into slouchy sweatpants, parachute pants, and the oversized, androgynous look. I would personally like it if some of the excess labor went into actually fitted clothing, but haven’t seen any signs of this. Cleaning services seem to have more demand than supply, with an equilibrium of fewer things getting cleaned regularly than in the past, while continuing to be low in pay and prestige, so I’m anticipating more dirt, but little investment into fixing it.

Demand for performance based work seems to be going down. It’s just as good to listen to or watch a recording of the best person in a field than a live performance by someone less skilled. But were performers ever a large part of the economy?

Middle class office work, knowledge work, words, paperwork, emails: seems about to implode? How much of the economy is this? Google suggests about 12%. That seems like a lot, but nothing close to the 90% of farm work that was automated throughout the 21st Century. This article was interesting, about the role of jobs like secretary, typist, and admin assistant in the 20th Century. I tried working as an assistant to an admin assistant a decade or so ago, and was physically filing paperwork, which even then was pretty outdated.

The larger problem seems to be status. What kinds of work should the middle class do, if not clerk and word adjacent things? There seems to be near infinite demand for service sorts of work – can we have an economy where the machines and a few others do all the civilizationally load bearing work, while everyone else walks each other’s dogs and picks up each other’s food? My father thinks that there’s less slack in many of these jobs than when he was younger. I’m not sure if that’s true in general, or how to test it.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with a future where most people are doing and buying service work. The current trend of women all raising each other’s children and caring for each other’s elderly parents seems to not be working out very well, though.

This will come for blue collar jobs pretty soon too.

Consider meat processing: parting out chicken or pork carcasses is something that’s hard to automate. Every carcass is slightly different, and the nature of the tasks makes it hard to build a machine that will do this with good enough accuracy and low enough waste.

Now, imagine we have robots with flexible arms like humans. Current AI tech solves the image recognition problem, so that the robot understands the carcass like human does. It also solves explaining the purpose of the task, so that the robot understand the actual purpose of separating thighs or breast, instead of just mindlessly following the programmed moves. Lastly, it solves the reasoning part, so that the robot can plan the task independently for each carcass, and adjust to conditions as it proceeds.

All that remains is integrating these into one performing system. This is by no means an easy task: it will still probably take years before the finished product is cheaper and better than illegal immigrant. However, 5 years ago, the idea of training robots to part out chickens was complete science fiction.

Absolutely not. You think it's basically straightforward because you're human and you take your senses and capabilities for granted.

Imagine that you have to part out a chicken carcass but:

  • You are wearing glasses that make everything smeary and screw up your depth perception (cheapish RGBD camera)
  • You are only allowed to use one hand (robust control of two arms in sync is still an ongoing research problem)
  • Your arm is heavy and your joints are super stiff (soft robotics isn't used in production because reliable manufacturing processes / control algorithms are still in development and their response profile changes daily due to wear and tear)
  • Your fingers are frozen so you get basically no sensory feedback; at best you can feel vaguely how much force you're applying at your wrist (anything more sensitive than basic force feedback are still experimental because optical touch sensors they have short lifetimes and need constant recalibration)
  • Your body is locked in place, so you can only move your shoulder/elbow/wrist joints

Unless you're planning to cut up the chicken with a circular saw, you also have to figure out how to analyse the structure of a carcass, and how the meat will react under manipulation. This data doesn't exist right now so you're going to have to train it on your own data, which means you need to find a way of obtaining and labelling that data.

EDIT: Sorry if this came across as harsh. I agree that we've gone from 'we have no idea how to approach this problem' to 'solving this is really REALLY hard'. Mostly what I want to say is that "Now, imagine we have robots with flexible arms like humans." is a much bigger deal than you think it is (and not theoretically solved as of now) and I think that training the relevant AI is much harder than you think it is.

I didn’t say it will be easy. What you describe are real problems. However, they are not as insurmountable as AI was 10 years ago. 10 years ago, there was relatively little investment in touch sensors, because even if you perfected them, there was little you could do with them. Now it is different.

My point is that AI advancements allow us to leap over solving problems by designing tool paths and configuration spaces, and onto solving problems by telling a robot “we need you to cut chicken, look how it’s done and imitate”.

A LOT of stuff is gated behind advances in (imitation) reinforcement learning + real-time adaptation. Especially soft robotics - if you can learn and update the material's dynamics on the fly rather than trying to model them mathematically then I think many doors open.

This seems like the self-driving car redux. They improve, and they improve... and at some point they stop getting better because the remaining problems are intractable.

But the thing about self-driving cars is that they are already better than human drivers. There's just a huge wall of tradition preventing them from becoming much more widespread.

Meat processors aren't going to give a shit if robots can only attain 98% accuracy or something

Sure, but, you can take a Waymo if you are I'm a city they service. It works to the point that self driving cars are right now successfully self driving around a few cities.

With the caveat that these plateaus tend to be bottlenecked by specific problems. AI moves like glaciers - sometimes they stick, sometimes you get lucky and the pressure shifts something and then a thousand tons of ice move at once.

I agree 100% with all of this, but in the longer-term, robots will have other offsetting advantages.

Humans have 2 arms and 10 fingers. Robots might have 50 arms and 1000 fingers. Humans have 2 eyes in a fixed position. Robots might have hundreds of eyes, including flexible antennae that can look into crevices and small spaces. Robots can have wheels, they can have saws, they can have radar, sonar, lidar, flashlights, they can fly, they can be tiny, they can be huge, they can swarm with other robots. And they can be iterated on.

One other big challenge currently is latency. Those big reasoning & purpose models are not quick compared to the speeds industrial automation of that sort tends to run at.

Basic image recognition I'd say has gotten there, but not the rest of it.

5 years ago, the idea of training robots to part out chickens was complete science fiction.

5 years ago we already had robust image segmentation models based on labelled data https://paperswithcode.com/sota/instance-segmentation-on-coco Given the controlled lighting and camera angles on a factory floor, it's definitely tractable problem with that period's technology.

Of course that period's AI would lack decision making and merely use vision as a mechanism to adjust the tool path with feedback. But processing chickens is quite mindless and mechanical, merely accounting for variation in the size and shape of the chicken. I don't see how modern humanlike AI will help here, when we end up training assembly line workers to be more mechanical.

I'd guess that making and foodproofing an industrial robot to be able to function safely in the factory environment would be the hard part. Even if the software package was already perfected, I doubt you could build the robot cheaply enough to make it worth it.

I believe that things like iphones are still assembled by hand even though those are perfectly uniform and good for automation.

Isn't this a solved problem?

I'm sure I've seen footage of automated chicken processing in the Netherlands or Germany.

For example https://youtube.com/watch?v=QIciSPOm1h0

No AI required.

That's interesting, I had thought they were farther from automating meat processing. That does sound like a terrible job, anyway.

AI is already imploding the white collar world in other ways than just job replacement. Let me give an example.

AI BDR (business development representative) is one of the roles that most AI agent companies are rushing out because it’s (seemingly) low hanging fruit.

What is a BDR? It’s the lowest sales role that fields inbound requests and does outbound prospecting (cold calls, emails etc).

Cold calling used to be the best way to do outbound until 3 things happened: 1. Email, 2. decline of the office phone, and robo calling + smartphone with contacts making answering unknown calls a scourge.

Now phones are just broken as a concept. I never pick up unknown numbers and now miss all sorts of important calls like drs appointments etc.

So emails.. that worked for a while, but it’s been an arms race of attention against spam. In the last 6 months it’s broken completely Why? Because there was a really short period of time where AI BDR was a super power, human like messaging, custom not templates, even personalized to company / contact research at scale.

But the pipe has already been clogged and it’s ruined for everyone. A world of perfect AI, every company who can maybe sell me something can send a handcrafted message to me every single day. That’s millions of messages. No one AI can get through the other. Email and marketing on both sides of the equation is over.

There’s no quick fix. AI being good didn’t improve outbound sales for the seller or recipient (except for a short period inside 2024).

It just broke it. AI didn’t replace jobs, it didn’t increase efficiency. It clogged a channel with so much junk it collapsed.

This will happen in other places.

I think AI will take most jobs, for sure. But I also think a lot more human interaction is going to have to take place in person from now on because how easy it will be to fake even HD video calls that are imperceptible very soon.

Interesting. My impression of advertising is that it was already substantially clogged, to the extent that it hardly matters if an email is personal or not, in fact a personalized message from a stranger is actually more suspicious than a normal advertisement, it's probably going to be some kind of scam.

I think my mobile phone company has some sort of spam filter, because the only unwanted calls I get are from the politicians in a jurisdiction I once registered to vote, so plausibly I opted into that.

Lately, I've found myself ignoring or marking as spam pretty much all business emails, and following them on social media instead. This is despite being the sort of person who reads blogs that are basically advertisements. I'll be annoyed when Google reviews, Amazon reviews, and Reddit posts get filled up even more with AI entries, but that was probably going to accelerate even without AI.

Yeah this narrative seems completely false from my experience. Email has been an abysmal channel for years now. Spam filters killed off much of its efficacy like a decade ago. Gmails "Promotions" tab annihilated mass market email advertising well before LLMs.

It's still active in b2b sales/account management work.

I should perhaps have added that if I compare email open rates/click through/whatever now versus 2/5/10 years ago in the companies I have worked for, they're pretty much the same. No evidence for any further decline in effectiveness yet

Gmails "Promotions" tab annihilated mass market email advertising well before LLMs.

I do still get a lot of ad-type emails in my main inbox, but then, I haven't "trained" Gmail to move some types to Promotions.

A similar sort of arms race is happening in hiring. Resume -> run through LLM to fake effort ('personalize') for a billion jobs -> hiring managers run through LLMs to try to regain sanity in number of seemingly-effortful applications. It's a rather unfortunate Nash equilibrium.

Anecdotally I've seen a lot more 'have any friends that would be a decent fit for this job?' style hiring lately than I have in a long time. And I suspect that may be one of the major outcomes - more web-of-trust style communication.

This is easy to solve: just flip the script. Have the recruiters and hiring managers reach out to people. All you need is a job market clearing house, where job seekers advertise their interest, and companies make the first move. Clearing house verifies identity of job seeker, to prevent creation of multiple profiles, and charges companies a fee per contact, so that they don’t spam people indiscriminately.

This works, because this model has been very common on the tech industry. In my dozen+ of years in this industry, I only ever cold sent my resume to one company, for an intentship. I got that job, and from that point it was always recruiters reaching out to me.

This only really work when there is an oversupply of jobs compared to "qualified" labour.

The purpose of a CV, personal letter etc. Is often more an attempt to pre-empt part of the interview process than matching credentials to job requirements (both of which often are inaccurate). The entry of AI's here makes things less like a clearinghouse because you get less useful information before the interviews.

All you need is a job market clearing house, where job seekers advertise their interest, and companies make the first move.

Does this really not exist yet?

LinkedIn. With all the associated pathologies. But you have to be established and have some skills to sell.

Maybe boomer advice will become relevant again, and we'll start having to approach potential employers in person.

For that, you'd have to break HR's stranglehold on the process. Strongly in favour of, by the way.

It just broke it. AI didn’t replace jobs, it didn’t increase efficiency. It clogged a channel with so much junk it collapsed.

This will happen in other places.

Here's one. Google image search is now littered with AI slop.

Another is google ads. There’s an apocalypse brewing here for companies that rely on adspend for inbound driven pipeline. It’s falling off a cliff

Google regular search is also littered with AI slop.

Someone said in a lower thread the internet will be the first casualty of AI and I tend to agree

The only real solution I'm aware of is some form of Universal Basic Income. In other words, if the economy explodes as human cognitive and physical labor is automated, then governments tax it and redistribute it.

This will likely prove unpopular with the people and entities being taxed on their newfound wealth, and it remains to be seen whether governments/democracies will listen to their anxious and unemployed populace over entrenched interests who now hold most of the money and power.

I don't think the likelihood of this happening is high enough for me to relax and take it for granted.

Even if UBI was a thing, that doesn't necessarily mean that inequality wouldn't be. The future uber-wealthy might well be the descendants of those who already had existing wealth, or at least shares in FAANG. I'd take this as acceptable if it meant I wouldn't starve to death.

Blue-collar work won't be safe for long either. We're seeing robotics finally take flight, there are commercial robo-taxis on the road, and cheap robo-dogs and even humanoids on the market. The software smarts are improving rapidly, and so is the hardware. Humans are going to end up squeezed every which way.

There are no reassuring answers or easy solutions, but at least hope isn't lost that we'll come out of this unemployed yet rich beyond our wildest dreams. It only takes a trivial share of the light cone to make billionaires of us all, assuming the current ones will deign to share.

UBI I think has too many problems to work.

First of all, it’s dependent on getting the money in the first place, and it’s probably pretty trivial to renounce citizenship and bugger off to a tax haven today, and given that “owning AI” doesn’t require you to be in the country at all, there’s nothing tying the guy who owns the company to the country the AI is in.

Second, keeping the UBI within reasonable limits is impossible. There will be millions of voters with hands out to collect UBI, and maybe 100 people paying for it. When the chance comes to vote on benefits and taxing the owners to pay, the only vote that keeps the politician in power is “raise the payout!” Eventually this becomes unsustainable as you tax 95% of the income of tge three people doing anything productive to pay the millions who aren’t.

Third, a population controlled by dependence on government handouts to survive is not free. You can get people to do anything you want if the alternative is “lol no money for you”. And this will be 99% of the population. That’s not something to get into lightly.

and given that “owning AI” doesn’t require you to be in the country at all, there’s nothing tying the guy who owns the company to the country the AI is in.

This may sound silly, but presuming we get superintelligent-but-completely-domesticated AI, a government could possibly just tax the AI itself. In this scenario, a government asks an AI to pay some tax based on the money it's earned from serving and working for people. Granted, this requires the AI to actually have meaningful access to the relevant pursestrings.

But were performers ever a large part of the economy?

They weren’t ever a huge load-bearing part of the economy, but it was a lot larger than it is now. Back before video and audio recording technology, if you wanted to listen to music or watch a play, someone had to do it live for you. That meant there were a lot more paid performers, and a lot more people skilled in the music and the performing arts as a serious hobby. While the economic loss was relatively small compared to say, the loss of manual labor, it does mean there are more people who feel unfulfilled because they will never be able to support themselves doing what they love. It’s a psychological loss similar to the complaints you hear by artists about AI drawings.

What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?

Every man a project manager!

No, seriously - if AI trends continue, it might be good at writing memos, doing research, constructing arguments, finding citations, booking meetings, constructing presentations, drafting architectural plans, etc. If every office worker gets that capability at his fingertips, it (in theory) means that pretty much anyone who is decently literate and competent can then supervise loads of AIs doing loads of work - because AI ain't gonna prompt itself. Competition will keep the price down on AI, whereas if each man is suddenly 8x as productive he might be able to bring home a managerial salary.

I suspect things won't turn out quite this way (or at least not for a while) but hey it wouldn't be so bad an outcome.

I have project managers who work with me. I don't want to become one.

Every man a project manager!

I do think AI has made programmers more productive, and that it is about to make them much more productive to the point where they might be essentially project managers.

What remains to be seen is what economic benefit that will have. For example, if there are 10x as many video games as there were before, do they create 10x the economic value. Of course not.

As the economy becomes more digital, it becomes a lot harder to quantify gains in GDP. In 1987, Legend of Zelda might have cost $50. Today, for almost the same price, you can buy a Zelda game with far better graphics and a much longer story line. But does the consumer today get more enjoyment from 2025 Zelda that from 1985 Zelda? I don't think so. The hedonic treadmill is real.

Similarly, does the economy grow from making TikTok 20% more addictive. Does it grow from adding AI-generated thots to Instagram? Or from making AI girlfriends? A lot of the stuff that happens in software, maybe even most of it, is just not that important or even counterproductive.

Somewhat related...

The dream of reducing drudgery by offloading it to AI might fall flat too. AI will make it possible for a human lawyer to easily glean information from a 1000 page document. But it will also make it possible for that same human lawyer to produce a 100,000 page contract of dense legalese. Existing improvements in technology have seemingly only increased the demand for lawyers.

What remains to be seen is what economic benefit that will have. For example, if there are 10x as many video games as there were before, do they create 10x the economic value. Of course not.

Video games are (mostly) saturated, although I think that AI can reduce the amount of manpower required to make a AAA game and therefore encourage experimentation and proliferation in ways we haven't seen since the 2000s.

More importantly, though, there are huge realms of software development that are mostly untouched because they're tedious and uninteresting to skilled, highly-paid software engineers. I think that AI-driven software development could vastly improve the quality and user experience for 99% of the software that ordinary people (not tech bros) use.

Anecdotally, I'm making good progress on some personal software projects now I don't have to write all the tedious bits after work.

I won't consider video games saturated until developers can create faster than "content locusts" want to consume. Currently games that provide a lot of playtime relative to developer time still have significant gaps between major deployments. Path of Exile for example had approximately three minor and one major release per year. Given that most players play 1-2 weeks after a release this produces 4-8 weeks of player time per year of development time. If you're into a more niche genre you might be looking at one or two good titles per decade.

I won't consider video games saturated until developers can create faster than "content locusts" want to consume.

Some people might argue that we already quietly hit this point well before the current AI craze. The struggles of the modern gaming industry and the indie scene are partly because it's (perceived as) hard to peel chronic Minecraft/Fortnite/COD/etc. players away from their comfort games.

That might be what people say but the real issue is that the games are mediocre trash. As soon as anything decent actually is released people flock to that game.

All this is (almost) only cope for bad developers.

Even if you're in a major genre like RPGs you might still only get a good game once every couple of years. That there is a sea of uninspired and boring shit out there doesn't really matter.

The only parts of the market that really are closing in on being saturated are the ones where the playtime is essentially infinite, like competitive multiplayer games.

What is happening is perhaps comparable to the book market. Does there being practically no barrier to entry mean that the market is saturated? No, it means the market for mediocre slop is saturated, which is of so low quality that the vast majority of prospective consumers have negative interest in it, or only use it as a sort of background noise to fill time. Some might even argue that there is less worthwhile books to read despite there being more words written than ever before.

For example, if there are 10x as many video games as there were before, do they create 10x the economic value. Of course not.

Bingo.

I am slightly hopeful that 3D printing (and I guess 3D printing + AI) will get us to some good places in the tangible meatspace. I also suspect that, if Space Economy becomes real, there might be a lot of possibilities for material improvement (some of which might be tied to white collar type jobs, like Martian Rock Rover Supervisor).

But it will also make it possible for that same human lawyer to produce a 100,000 page contract of dense legalese. Existing improvements in technology have seemingly only increased the demand for lawyers.

Yes, and this is a horrible thought. I would be quite happy with a law banning contracts that cannot be meaningfully understood in 5 minutes. That's not a law banning even per se 100,000 pages of dense legalese but I should be able to read a contract in one sitting with no surprises. Same with a law.

(Lawyers will love this once they realize it means litigating over whether the fine print was adequately represented by the topline!)

I would be quite happy with a law banning contracts that cannot be meaningfully understood in 5 minutes. That's not a law banning even per se 100,000 pages of dense legalese but I should be able to read a contract in one sitting with no surprises. Same with a law. (Lawyers will love this once they realize it means litigating over whether the fine print was adequately represented by the topline!)

This ties into an axiom of my political views. Give or take:

Once a person is affected by more words of law than it is possible for them to read and understand in their lifetime, corruption is effectively inevitable.

(Which then feeds forward into constitutions, hierarchical laws, kitchen-sink bills, etc, etc.)

Once a person is affected by more words of law than it is possible for them to read and understand in their lifetime, corruption is effectively inevitable.

Aha. I love this.

I expect Prompt Engineering will turn out to be the world's shortest lived career.

I think it'll turn out to be a skill, in the same way that Human Engineering collaboration with colleagues is a skill. Envisioning and describing what you want in reasonably precise terms, then zeroing in on it as part of a conversation, is a skill that many people don't have. It's not going to be enough to sustain a career entirely on its own but it's going to be a big boost for one.

Telling a computer what you want it to do with such clear terminology and logical consistency that it can't possibly fuck it up is just programming.

AI companies have a strong incentive to make prompting easy, and they already have, I recall the days of using the GPT-3 base model and trying to get it to do anything useful. Right now, the models are significantly smarter and in fact are quite proactive in asking clarifying questions and making useful suggestions that the user didn't know. In the limit, this makes prompting beyond a formulation of an initial suggestion redundant.

We're not there yet, but we're close. Eventually the systems will just understand intent or outright demand clarification, and fancy prompting won't add much to the equation.

Telling a computer what you want it to do with such clear terminology and logical consistency that it can't possibly fuck it up is just programming.

First off, that's not what he is describing. Secondly, that is only part of being a programmer.

Programming is both a kind of general problem solving related to how software works and can work, and the technical skill of writing the actual code.

I assume the latter part will be the first to be mostly automated away, which will greatly increase productivity, and when the second is automated fully then I'm not sure there will be any more white collar work at any level anywhere.

I didn't mean anything so stringent as programming. I only mean that reasonable clarity of thought and expression is a gift that many don't possess; the Motte is very wordcel-heavy and I think people forget this. The AI can only do so much.

My guess is that prompt engineering won't be a career per se at all, except for possibly for artists.

2027 inside a Fortune 500 office:

"What if, hear me out, we just ask the AI which prompts to write and then lay off the Prompt Engineering division."

Isn't that how most AI assistants are structured? You ask the frontend LLM for a picture of a cat dressed as a ninja pirate, it asks the backend network using the whole "exquisite quality, trending on artstation" lingo.

If the AI is not only doing all the work, deciding how to do it and deciding what to do then there is not really a need for humans in any part of the process, not even C-suit.

Why would the government/military uphold the social contract of private ownership at that point? And after that, why not let the AI run the government and military as well? After all, the ones who don't will quickly get outcompeted.

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait

Series Index:

  1. Intro
  2. Downtown
  3. Strip District
  4. North Shore
  5. South Side
  6. Hill District: Lower Hill

Part 5: The Hill District, Continued

The entry on the Lower Hill from a couple weeks ago was really more of an appetizer than a main course, since the area discussed hasn't been a developed neighborhood since the early 1950s. Today, we'll move into the Hill District proper, discussing the neighborhoods officially designated as Crawford-Roberts and Middle Hill, which make up the bulk of the old Hill District. In future installments we'll look at Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village, two project neighborhoods that merit their own discussion, and Uptown, The Upper Hill (Sugar Top), and Polish Hill, three very different neighborhoods that are on the periphery of the Hill District but are nonetheless historically bound to it.

As we discussed last time, much of the Lower Hill was razed in the 1950s for an urban renewal project that never fully came to fruition. Crawford-Roberts is a semi-bogus name city planners gave to the rump section of the Lower Hill that wasn't demolished wholesale. In the section on Downtown I mentioned that Pittsburgh came out of the Second World War with a serious image problem, and was desperate to shed its image as a smog-choked industrial town. Adding to the problem was that one of the poorest, most run-down and overcrowded parts of the city immediately abutted downtown to the east. When Federal money for slum clearance became available in the 1940s, the city moved forward with plans to build a civic auditorium, arts center, symphony hall, lots of tower in the park housing, and other amenities like hotels and restaurants.

In the end, it stopped with a single apartment tower and the civic auditorium, which lasted for nearly 50 years but was only briefly used for its intended purpose. The rest of the old neighborhood became a sea of parking lots. The Hill District was Pittsburgh's original dumping ground for blacks, Jews, Italians, and other undesirables, who initially settled in the Lower Hill close to Downtown, but gradually moved up the hill as they became more prosperous. By the 1950s, the Lower Hill was the poorest section but also the most racially diverse. The Middle and Upper parts of the Hill were blacker but also more prosperous—the Middle Hill was 80%–90% black by 1940, but was inhabited by industrial workers and others with steady employment. Beyond that was the small community of black professionals on Sugar Top.

During the Lower Hill redevelopment process, the black community in the Middle and Upper Hill was reasonably supportive of the Urban Redevelopment Authority' goals. There as hope that the demolition of a disreputable area would strengthen the link between the Middle Hill and Downtown, and the poorest of the poor would be moved out of overcrowded, unsanitary, dilapidated housing and into gleaming new apartment houses. That they were overoptimistic at best or naïve at worst became apparent shortly after the wrecking balls started swinging in 1956. Changes in Federal housing policy meant that the new projects had not materialized, and displaced residents found themselves with nowhere to go. The Italians went in one direction, the Jews in another, and the blacks went wherever they could. Some went to Homewood or Beltzhoover or other far-flung parts of the city, but the majority just moved deeper into the Hill District.

By the time the Civic Arena was completed in 1961, housing policy was the least of the reasons Middle Hill residents had for concern. While they may have hoped that the redevelopment of the Lower Hill would lead to a revitalization of the Middle Hill, the city fathers didn't see it that way. To them, the Middle Hill was no less a slum than the Lower Hill, and it didn't help that it was increasingly occupied by the same undesirables they had just kicked out. It turned out that selling modern luxury apartments on the edge of a black area was a tough sell to wealthy whites in the 1960s, and the benefactors of the arts didn't want to soil their shoes walking through a neighborhood that, to them, was as much of a slum as it had been years before. The center for the arts, which was to be modeled after Lincoln Center in New York and include a symphony hall, repertory theater, restaurant, exposition hall, apartment building, huge underground parking garage, and maybe even a modern art museum, was the centerpiece of the next phase of development, but the financial backers, particularly the H.J. Heinz Foundation, thought it illogical to pay huge sums for a cultural acropolis without eliminating the neighboring blight. They made it clear to the city that no more money would be forthcoming unless another 50 blocks were cleared east of Crawford St.

The city, apparently realizing that the calls for additional demolition weren't going to stop, did the private backers one better. They responded with a plan to clear an unspecified plot of land for a public park, built a wall along the western side of Crawford St. to protect cultural center patrons from disagreeable views, and build new residential high rises that would obscure the rest of the Hill and cut it off from the redeveloped area. By 1963 the total redevelopment area had expanded to 900 acres, practically the entire Hill District. While publications from the Planning Commission and URA spoke in lofty terms about the need for citizen input and community engagement, the ideas were not presented as proposals but as done deals, even though this was far from the truth. The city seemed bound and determined to clear out an inconvenient neighborhood and have a clear, glistening new corridor between Downtown and Oakland. Whatever revitalization Hill residents had hoped to see ten years earlier was now a distant memory, and they were effectively being told that revitalization was contingent on their leaving. Urban Renewal had become Negro Removal.

The community, previously supportive of redevelopment efforts, turned hard against any further encroachments on the neighborhood, and vowed to hold the line at Crawford St. As the URA sought to make the proposals official, neighborhood residents erected a billboard at the corner of Crawford St. and Center Ave. which read "Attention: City Hall and the URA, No Redevelopment Beyond This Point." From this intersection, renamed Freedom Corner, Hill district residents marched downtown despite death threats from white Pittsburghers and demanded that redevelopment stop — "Not another inch!" This sentiment wasn't limited to the Hill District; by 1965 opposition had galvanized among residents of neighborhoods throughout the city that were the subject of proposed renewal projects. But while the city may have treated these proposals as inevitabilities, the specifics presented were always vague. There were rumors, general recommendations, and the occasional artist's rendering, but these were all theoretical in nature; there was nothing close to any concrete plans or drawings for the Hill District. Despite residents' fears, any redevelopment beyond Crawford Ave. was at the bottom of a long list of projects already in the hopper. As community opposition grew, the city, while stil formally recommending slum clearance, admitted, in an apparent attempt to relieve the pressure, that the plans would take decades to realize.

One can date the end of the Pittsburgh Renaissance not just to the decade, or the year, but to the minute. At 10:30 pm on May 20, 1969, councilman and mayoral candidate Pete Flaherty was having a spaghetti dinner with his wife and two sons when he received a telephone call from his campaign headquarters that his opponent, Judge Harry Kramer, had conceded the nomination. Since the Democratic party had taken over city government in 1934, machine politics, or "The Organization", as it was called, had dominated. Flaherty won a council seat in 1965 and quickly became the heir apparent but increasingly found himself at odds with the administration. In early 1969, before incumbent mayor Joseph Barr decided whether he'd be seeking a third term, Flaherty announced he was entering the race. The Organization was stunned; if Barr retired and Flaherty kept his mouth shut, he could have had the nomination handed to him on a silver platter, but he wanted to earn it instead. More importantly, he felt reform was needed and couldn't make a credible case for it as a machine selection. With Barr deciding he was done and Flaherty turning coat, The Organization tapped Judge Kramer, convincing him to resign a cushy seat on the Probate bench for what should have been a guaranteed position as mayor.

But while Kramer's commitment to public service was honorable, his political skills left much to be desired. He had no response to Flaherty when it came to policy and resorted to incoherent personal attacks that accused him of being a far left kook on the one hand and a "Republocrat" on the other. More importantly, the city employees and councilmen who constituted The Organization's rank and file took Flaherty's concerns to heart and broke ranks. Still, Kramer's loss came as a shock. The organization that had seen the city through the Depression and World War II, and that had transformed it smog-choked backwater to one of the most beautiful places in the nation was done. The remaining loyalists were forced to back Flaherty in the general election, as any Republican would allow governor Raymond Shafer to run wild in the city. While Flaherty would see to completion the projects that were already construction, no new proposals would be forthcoming, and any existing ones would die a quiet death. To him, these were nothing more than expensive boondoggles, and he'd focus his administration on unsexy things like paving, street lighting, fiscal responsibility, and labor agreements. The era of machine politics in Pittsburgh was over.

For the Hill, though, it was too little too late. While the Middle Hill's Center Ave. business district was unaffected by urban renewal, it would not survive the riots that erupted in the wake of Dr. King's assassination in 1968. While these affected several city neighborhoods, the Hill District was the hardest hit. What was left of the Lower Hill continued to deteriorate following the initial demolition, as the promised revival never came. Without a functional business district, and with little hope of rebuilding Center Ave., the remaining black middle class decamped for elsewhere, and the neighborhood slowly began to empty. While narcotics had been an increasing problem since the early 1960s, the arrival of the crack epidemic in the 1980s brought gang warfare at a scale never before seen. The population of the Hill District, which sat at over 50,000 in 1950, had been reduced to only 15,000 by 1990. For all of the Hill's problems, overcrowding was no longer one of them.

5B. Crawford-Roberts

Crawford-Roberts is a semi-bogus neighborhood designation that nobody uses in real life, but it warrants separate treatment here as it comprises the rump portion of the old Lower Hill that was spared demolition. Aerial photographs show that it was starting to suffer from demolition by 1967, and by 1993 it was almost completely vacant. Suburban style split-level houses were built in the 1970s in an attempt to retain middle class residents. While this had some degree of success—these are all owned by long-time residents, many original owners—they are incongruous in an urban neighborhood close to a major downtown. While they thankfully aren't building these anymore, what's been going in instead hasn't been much better. In the late 1980s, the URA began an early New Urbanist project called Crawford Square that sought to redevelop what had been lost to blight. It was touted as a "contextualist" development that was meant to blend in with the historic character of the neighborhood. Compromises were made to "reflect the reality of the automobile", and there was no apparent attempt to obtain any variance from contemporary zoning codes. The topography made it difficult to build alleys in some places, so the result was old-style houses with front loading garages and deep setbacks. It isn't horrible, but it stands in stark contrast with the historic structures that remain. The townhomes at the heart of the development have an [antiseptic feel] that evokes a senior living community more than an urban neighborhood; I call it "soft urbanism" because it tries to conform to the large-scale descriptors of urbanism—density, traditional styles, etc.—without actually bothering to see what the existing built form actually looks like. Luckily, the more recent developments do a much better job.

One thing that has been successful is the crime reduction. The first phase of Crawford Square was finished in 1993, and in the decades since the area went from being one of the most dangerous parts of the Hill to one of the safest. This is despite half of the rentals being subsidized "affordable" units, though it should be mentioned that even the for-sale units and new single family homes are also subsidized, but in a different way—the city offers ten year property tax abatements on new construction homes in designated redevelopment areas, giving middle class people financial incentive to buy in the hood and in turn giving developers incentive to build there. For all the outward success, though, this has been an incredibly slow process. While the development was officially completed in 2000, it was only in the past few years that the URA was finally able to unload the last 6 parcels in the development area. So while the Lower Hill has been showing signs of life, the pace of construction isn't exactly frenetic, and what has been built has required significant government nudging.

Neighborhood Grade: Stable. 15 years ago you could have made the argument that this was gentrifying, but that was merely in anticipation of development at the old arena site. Two things hold it back. First, the built form isn't particularly appealing. It wasn't originally designed to be trendy to outsiders but to retain middle class blacks who would otherwise leave the neighborhood; hence the concessions to the suburban lifestyle and aesthetic that is anathema to any self-respecting urban pioneer. More importantly, the old Wylie Ave. business district that was destroyed in the 1950s is still vacant, and the Center Ave. business district in the neighboring Middle Hill isn't doing too hot. Beyond that, there aren't any walkable amenities. If the arena site development ever comes to fruition and is able to attract sufficient ground-level retail, this could change, but I don't see this becoming a trendy area any time soon.

5C. Middle Hill

This was the heart of the old Hill District and remains the heart of the current Hill District. The boundary between the Lower and Middle Hill was always indistinct, but the Middle Hill starts around the beginning of the Center Ave. business district and includes everything up to Herron Ave. that isn't part of a housing project. See map. If the Crawford-Roberts area is the part of the hill that the city wants you to see, then the Middle Hill is the part it doesn’t want you to see. There is a significant amount of neglect, abandonment, and, ultimately, demolition. There are plenty of historic structures scattered throughout the neighborhood, and occasionally enough remains intact to give you an idea of what the neighborhood looked like in its heyday. There are also a couple of weird suburban enclaves like Midtown Square and Francis Court that have held up well. But this part of the Hill is mostly vacant lots, with some streets only having a single, vacant structure remaining. Keeping in mind that the Hill once had a population density of over 80,000 people per square mile, comparable to the denser parts of Brooklyn, this is an odd, sad fate. While most of Wylie and Center avenues are technically zoned commercial, there is often not enough left to tell where the business district even was, though there are plenty of businesses scattered throughout the neighborhood. While the Lower Hill is more celebrated, the Middle Hill was always more the center of black life in Pittsburgh. The fame of the Lower Hill comes primarily from its notoriety as a rowdy nightlife district, where too many jazz greats to list cut their teeth and many more played when visiting. But it was the Middle Hill where residents went to take care of the boring, functional, everyday things. While displacement of low-income residents is the big issue that’s always brought up when discussing gentrification, I suspect that a large part of the issue is also that gentrified business districts tend to cater to the kind of chi-chi things that primarily appeal to rich white people. There's some cultural signaling involved here; when the first businesses that move into a moribund area are microbreweries and art galleries, but nothing that appeals to the immediate needs of existing residents, it doesn't help them in the short term and signals to landlords that it's time to start renovating their properties and raising rents. There's some level of understanding that these kinds of things are necessary to attract business from outside the neighborhood, but they'd prefer that to happen after the business district can satisfy their basic needs.

Nothing illustrates this dynamic better than the Hill's decades-long grocery store issue. In the 1970s, part of the attempt to stabilize the Hill by suburbanizing it was the construction of an auto-oriented shopping plaza, anchored by a grocery store. That store was gone by the mid-80s, as the Hill continued its decline. The lack of a grocery store rose to political prominence as the plans for a new arena were coming to fruition. For all the grand redevelopment plans being discussed, Hill groups just wanted a grocery store on the site, or, barring that, anywhere else in the Hill. Most white Pittsburghers saw this as nothing more than whining, to the extent they paid attention to it at all. There was no grocery store because the Hill can't support one, and we aren't spending tax dollars to prop up an unprofitable business just so you have a shorter bus ride.

Hill House was a community organization that had existed since the 1960s to provide after school programs, music lessons, and the like to Hill residents, as well as general community activism. Changes to the nonprofit landscape had them scrambling for program funding by the 2000s. In 2008, with the Civic Arena on the demolition block and redevelopment talks in the works, the Penguins and the URA signed a community benefit agreement that included several groups, with Hill House named as fiduciary representative for the community. The deal included 1 million dollars to put toward a grocery store. They found a tenant, secured the property, and began construction in 2011.

Things went sideways almost immediately. The contractor didn't post a bond. Architectural plans proved unworkable, necessitating a last-minute redesign. Overages abounded. Hill House took out massive loans to cover fundraising shortages. Nonetheless, a Shop-n-Save opened in 2013 to much fanfare. It wouldn't last the decade. For background, Shop-n-Save is a regional chain that is more or less the marketing arm of wholesale distributor SuperValu, the stores themselves being independently owned. This is in contrast to Giant Eagle, the regional flagship, that owns the vast majority of its stores outright. Giant Eagle is perceived as overpriced by most people in Pittsburgh. Anyway, the local NPR affiliate ran a story about a year after opening that said the store was doing about $25,000/week in total sales. By contrast, a typical suburban Aldi does about $350,000/week despite a smaller footprint and lower prices. Initial projections were dependent on the redevelopment of the old arena site, and, as we saw last time, we're still waiting for this to happen.

The bigger problem was theft. It's expected that a store in a low-income location is going to have an above-average amount of shrinkage. It's not expected that the manager of the store will be responsible for most of that shrinkage. The guy was taking cases of product before it could even go on the shelves and selling it himself. Able to read the room, store employees followed suit, loading up after a shift and heading to the bars and street corners where they'd unload it at a discount to passersby. Given the general vibe of the place, there was no motivation among employees or management to prevent customers from doing the same thing; the store was a block away from a police station, the police assured the owners that they were committed to preventing theft, but no one ever bothered to report anything. Combine the theft with a small, low-income customer base and it was bound to fail.

When the Shop-n-save closed in 2019, it took Hill House down with it. The store debacle was far from their only problem, but the rent couldn't cover ongoing building maintenance. In a supreme twist of irony, the final straw came when the URA cut off their line of credit. Hill House had been borrowing money to cover maintenance costs, but the URA said that enough was enough. Hill House was able to avoid bankruptcy, but only by selling off real estate as a prelude to dissolution. Without an anchor tenant, however, they couldn't find a buyer for the shopping complex, and the URA was forced to assume ownership.

The failure of the Shop-n-Save didn't end the Hill District's bid to get a grocery store. The URA was desperate to unsaddle itself from the building maintenance, and offered 1.5 million in incentives for anyone who wanted the property, provided they had a plan for a grocery store. Four prospective bidders came forward, and the winner was Salem Abdullah, the owner of a successful Halal grocer in the Strip District. Salem's was popular but had outgrown its location. The crux of the plan seems to have been twofold. First, a destination store with an established customer base would make it so he wasn't relying on Hill residents alone to make ends meet. Second, the larger location would allow him to expand his core operations while also expanding into a full-service store. No one doubted his dedication to the project, as he sunk 5 million of his own money into it on top of what the URA gave him.

Last week, he announced that the store would suspend operations indefinitely. But this time, attitudes range from indifference to good riddance. The entire reason Hill District residence wanted a grocery store so badly was because they didn't want to deal with the inconvenience of going elsewhere to shop, and since they're a low-income community, the store would have to have competitive prices that allowed them to stretch their dollar. Salem's did neither. To the first point, although it was ostensibly a full-service grocery store, an observant Muslim isn't allowed to sell anything that isn't Halal. The lack of pork products should have been a showstopper in and of itself, but few realized how far this went. Canned soups, boxed stuffing mixes, ramen noodles, pop tarts, broth, gravy mix, wine vinegar of any kind, corn bread—and the list goes on. Other items beyond his normal scope of operations were limited and inconsistent. The produce selection was about half of a normal grocery and frequently was out of key items like apples and cantaloupe, white bread sold out quickly and was slow to be replaced, and deli selection was limited. There was no tobacco, lottery, or money orders.

In short, it was a larger version of his specialty store in the Strip with a limited selection of grocery items and a limited deli. And since he didn't have the buying power of a chain, he was effectively paying retail for everything. If people have to go to another store to get produce, or pork, or whatever, they're going to do all of their shopping at the other store. If the other store also has significantly better prices, you can't compete, period. If it's both more economical and more convenient to pay a jitney ten bucks to take you to the South Side Giant Eagle, that's what people are going to do, especially if that's what they've been doing for the past 30 years.

I don't think that Salem Abdullah is a bad dude or that this was some kind of URA cash grab boondoggle. The 1.5 million he got was mostly loans, and he put another 5.5 million of his own money into the project. His idea was bad, but it was the only one on the table that was remotely feasible. There were three other bids. Two were from idealistic groups with visions of saving the community from food desertdom by offering high-quality, healthy options. These were discarded pretty easily, since neither group had any experience running a grocery store and came across as disorganized. The other bid was from a national chain of Asian markets, who put the bid in at the last minute and didn't bother to clarify that they sold non-Asian items. Salem's was local and had the money. He just completely misread the needs of the community.

Neighborhood Grade: Ghetto. Between the urban prairie and fragmented remnants of what was once a huge business district, the area is bleak. Crime is still high, though the gang warfare is over and most of this is spillover from nearby housing projects. But the stigma is still there, and any new business has a hard time attracting customers from outside the neighborhood. Pittsburgh's ghettos are more "have street smarts and avoid known drug areas" than "make a beeline for the highway and don't stop at any red lights". It also has a prime position between downtown and the University of Pittsburgh that's had city planners salivating for decades.

That being said, there are a few factors weighing against a turnaround happening any time soon. First, the city and the URA have officially committed to developing the Hill District from "the bottom up". So far, that's meant that development has been focused on the Crawford-Roberts area and whatever the hell they're doing at the old arena site. There's been some limited development in the Middle Hill—a YMCA on Center Ave., townhomes and a senior living complex on Wylie, a few single family homes, and a new library. All this development, though, has been limited to the western third of the neighborhood. It seems highly unlikely that it will extend beyond Kirkpatrick St. in the foreseeable future, let alone fill out the neighborhood.

Adding to the problem is that the centrality of its location is deceiving. On a street map, it appears to be in the middle of everything. But it's hard to actually get to unless you're really trying. Access from Downtown is hindered by I-579 and the gaping maw that is the old arena site. The northern edge of the neighborhood is a steep hillside with no road access even possible. The only direct access to Oakland is via Center Ave., which dives into a valley somewhat apart from the main neighborhood before going up over another hill, and even then it only spits you out into an odd corner of Oakland far from the Pitt campus and main business district. Access is somewhat better from the south, but that's only by turning off of 5th or Forbes Ave. in Uptown, which is a peripheral part of the Hill with its own business district that already acts as the main thoroughfare between the two neighborhoods. And, as we shall see in a few weeks, even it has a ways to go.

And then there's the red tape. A disproportionate share of the available land is owned by the URA or the city, which means that any developer has to go through them and by extension Marimba Milliones her ilk who will insist that you provide affordable housing guarantees on the one hand but tell you they don't want a housing project on the other. What's their actual vision for the future? Based on the reports they've commissioned in the past 15 years, it's mostly a pie in the sky vision of a diverse yet African-American-centered community full of improbable businesses like an African Diaspora Food Hall, an automotive shop that gets cheap rent in exchange for motorcycle repair classes, a pop-up mini golf course, a late night music venue that looks like an unsanctioned rave even though it isn't—you know, the kind of stuff that attracts rich white people but isn't too obvious about it.

I don't think this is going to happen. What I think will happen is one of two things. The most likely scenario is that the URA's slow but steady march continues and the neighborhood continues to be a lower-income black area with newer housing and new storefronts that can't find commercial tenants. There's also the possibility that the gentrification wave slowly percolating in Uptown shoots up the hillside faster than anyone's ability to control it. I guess a third possibility is that the neighborhood eventually empties out so completely that there's no base of political power left and the URA gives developers a blank check, but I wouldn't count on that happening. The best case scenario is that Center Ave. turns into something akin to the U Street Corridor in Washington DC. I think things will eventually turn around, but I wouldn't venture a guess as to when that will happen. The only question is whether, when that day arrives, anything of the old neighborhood will be left standing.

So the Trump administration has made an effort to limit "indirect" research costs, those research funds which institutions charge on top of a research grant to pay for expenses which cannot be attributed to an individual research project, for items like building maintenance, grant writing staff, and administrative staff. The new policy, effective February 10, 2025, caps the indirect cost rate at 15% for all NIH grants, both new and existing. People in my social circle are watching the court battle over this with baited breath. One of their institutions charges 55%, and another one charges 70% (which appears to be the legal maximum). From this perspective, 15% seems very very low, but it appears the average is around 27%.

I recently talked to some of my Korean researcher friends, and in Korea indirect costs are capped at 17% (and come out of the allocated grant money, so they are considered during grant proposal submission). Of that 17%, the institution even sets a few percent aside to give "miscellaneous funds" to Professors. My friend (a former Resident) said that these miscellaneous funds (which are completely unregulated) were critical to keeping medical professors on the job after an anti-corruption law banned them from taking "gifts" from patients: they were frequently spent on personal items, team dinners, and alcohol. In my experience they were used to purchase high-end computers for data analysis. But the point is that 17% leaves the institution with a surplus.

I'm left wondering if indirect costs in the US (now two to four times higher than those of Korea) are a result of perverse incentives. The NIH negotiates these after grants have been granted. If the US had counted these expenses against the grant value prior to grants being granted (as Korea does), would professors have been incentivized to lobby their institutions against administrative bloat?

I tried to find how these costs have changed over time, and it looks like they have risen by a few percent in the past decade, but every grantmaking agency has different numbers and it is a mess, with more variance between agencies than change over time.

I estimate public construction projects in a major Democratic city, which has plenty of bureaucracy baked in. Our general job costs (project managers, project-related office spaces, permits, etc.) usually comes out to 12% of the total, assuming we actually want the job. Additional overhead/profit is usually another 15-20% on top of it (note the profit part of that calculation, which theoretically shouldn't exist for nonprofit government grants).

I don't know how universities are run, but there's no reason I can think of that they should need 70% additional funds beyond the cost of the research itself unless the original grants include almost none of the actual funds. That's an extreme number.

One reason is maintaining the facilities and very expensive machines that hard science labs use, 70% extra makes sense for those

The immediate question I have is how are Korean universities funded? My understanding is that research grant overhead is a significant chunk of the total funding of US universities. Do Korean universities get more funding for their general administration and capital costs from other sources?

Irregardless of whether Trump broke the law, this Biden appointed judge (a black Lesbian, what a surprise) is making a fool of herself and the law by blocking this with her TRO (temporary restraining order).

Firstly, monetary damages cannot be irreperable harm, and this is a settled legal principle for hundreds of years. You don't need to cite any Supreme Court case because it's a core principle in common law, in every US court not just federal, and every lawyer and judge knows this. And without irreperable harm you can't have a TRO. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/irreparable_harm

Secondly, a TRO must have an end date. That's part of what makes a TRO temporary. So she clowned any illusion of being a real judge by writing this:

This TRO shall become effective immediately upon entry by this Court. It shall remain in effect until further order of this Court.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.280609/gov.uscourts.mad.280609.8.0_1.pdf

The order expires at the time after entry—not to exceed 14 days—that the court sets, unless before that time the court, for good cause, extends it for a like period or the adverse party consents to a longer extension. The reasons for an extension must be entered in the record.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_65

Less sneering, please. Regardless of how you feel about the order, you should be civil about it.

Firstly, monetary damages cannot be irreperable harm, and this is a settled legal principle for hundreds of years.

This is a general principle, but there are always exceptions. Most of these involve judgment-proof defendants. Say Fred and Sam are having a dispute over a driveway Sam uses to access his business. Fred puts up concrete barricades on the disputed right-of-way, denying access to Sam or any customers, preventing use of the business. Sam cannot operate his business and sues Fred for trespass. Sam may be able to calculate that he's losing $5,000/day in revenue while the barricades are up; under the rule, he wouldn't be entitled to a TRO. Except any court would grant him one, because if the case takes a year to resolve, it's unlikely that fred will be able to come up with $1.8 million in damages.

This example is based on a case I actually dealt with a couple years ago except the defendant wasn't some random guy but a railroad (it was a dispute over a crossing agreement). I was still able to get a TRO, not because there was any question of the railroad's ability to pay damages but because I convinced the judge that my client couldn't afford the mortgage and ongoing maintenance costs to the property without the property generating any revenue. Damages would be cold comfort if the property were foreclosed on and he were forced into bankruptcy.

Another case I was peripherally involved with during my time in oil and gas involved a contractual dispute between Warren Steel and a coal company whose name I can't remember. (This is a grossly oversimplified version) Warren had an ongoing contract with the company that required them to deliver coal to the mill a few times a week. They were way behind on payments and owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. The coal company said they weren't getting any more shipments until they paid what was overdue. Warren sued the coal company for breach of contract arguing that future deliveries weren't conditioned on payment for prior deliveries. From here it gets a bit complicated. The typical remedy here would be for Warren to buy coal on the spot market and collect the price difference from the breaching coal company. Warren argued that their financial position was precarious (there was no denying this based on their payment history) and that they would be unable to secure credit to buy at sharply inflated spot market prices. If the coal company didn't make their next scheduled shipment, they wouldn't be able to make any steel, would have to shut down the mill, and any hope of them remaining operational would be gone. the court issued the TRO and told the coal company to make the delivery. In any event, Warren Steel filed for bankruptcy a few days later.

And who could forget the man himself, Donald Trump. If you remember, last year he was on the wrong end of a nine-figure civil judgment, and was told that if he wanted to stay the judgment pending appeal he would have to post a bond of $450 million within 30 days. This is about as clear-cut as it gets—he had $450 million in assets. If he posted the bond and won the appeal, he'd get the money back. So what's the problem? He successfully argued that since no insurance company would take real estate as collateral, he would have to liquidate it at fire sale prices, causing irreparable harm. The judge agreed and reduced the bond to something an insurance company could manage.

Secondly, a TRO must have an end date. That's part of what makes a TRO temporary.

Most court orders aren't written by the court. If I'm asking for a TRO, I have a copy of the order with me and I hand it to the judge to sign if she decides to grant it. In most cases, you're asking for the TRO in motions court early in the process before the case is listed for trial and assigned a judge.After that it has to go to calendar control for them to schedule a hearing for a preliminary injunction. By law that hearing has to be within 14 days, but the judge who's signing it doesn't know when that's going to be; the upshot is that we put the 14 day max in the order.

In this case, the judge who issued the TRO wrote the order herself after the hearing had already been scheduled. She's hearing arguments tomorrow, after which, she'll either lift the order entirely or grant an injunction. There was no reason to put a specific expiration date because it's implied that she's going to lift it after the hearing.

This is a general principle, but there are always exceptions.

Hmm point taken. You're definitely right about this.

Though for this particular case it seems that the motion for TRO wasn't well plead then, as they don't allege any concrete imminent harms such as losing your house or business. The motions all claim the possibility of disruptions to research operations as a result of the lost revenue, but stop short of pleading that it will happen. It's also especially dubious since these institutions are sitting on multi-billion-dollar endowments in the bank.

Say Fred and Sam are having a dispute over a driveway Sam uses to access his business. Fred puts up concrete barricades on the disputed right-of-way, denying access to Sam or any customers, preventing use of the business. Sam cannot operate his business and sues Fred for trespass. Sam may be able to calculate that he's losing $5,000/day in revenue while the barricades are up; under the rule, he wouldn't be entitled to a TRO. Except any court would grant him one, because if the case takes a year to resolve, it's unlikely that fred will be able to come up with $1.8 million in damages.

In this case I think an ex-parte TRO would be a stretch, because if that TRO needs to be turned into an injunction within 14 days, then $5,000 * 14 is only $70,000. Though since a PI still needs to show irreparable harm your point still stands. Well also I'm assuming this is state court so rule65 doesn't apply anyways.

In this case, the judge who issued the TRO wrote the order herself after the hearing had already been scheduled. She's hearing arguments tomorrow, after which, she'll either lift the order entirely or grant an injunction. There was no reason to put a specific expiration date because it's implied that she's going to lift it after the hearing.

I've never seen the order written like this, I've always seen an end date explicitly written. Since the hearing date is literally written in the paragraph above, it would be trivial to write it into the TRO order itself and save some legal ambiguity. What happens if the judge catches the rona and is out for a month? Does the illegal TRO stick until appeals smacks it down?

Also the federal government isn’t judgement proof unless they refuse to waive sovereign immunity

I don't understand. Let's say I'm a biologist and applied for a $100k grant to study some kind of esoteric ligand discovery method and that was awarded. My university can then go to the NIH and say "yooo we need an extra $55k for indirect costs" and the NIH is like "bet, here's $155k"? But if it was awarded to a more prestigious university they might have said "yooo $70k extra actually" and the NIH would be like "say less, here's $170k"

A system like this seems like it would incentive administrative bloat. Is this really how it works?

It's included in the original grant amount. So you'd ask them for 155k, and the team at Prestigious University would ask for 170k for the same work, then the funder would theoretically take that into account when deciding where to spend their money. You also have to tell them how much is direct costs and how much is overheads, not just "we need 155k".

I think operating institutions is much cheaper in Korea whereas doing research out of those institutions is only slightly cheaper.

Physics professor Steve Hsu's take: https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1889350047004848291

Cutting ICs will only indirectly affect woke activities. The cuts will harm overall university budgets, but the main harm will be to very expensive STEM activities on campus, which require large IC charges to fund.

Building new labs, renovating old labs, hiring staff to deal with real regulatory and compliance requirements, etc. all require additional funds from ICs. Existing grants do not cover any of these costs which are very large and very real.

Without sufficient ICs a university could easily decide that STEM research is too expensive, while cash cow race-to-the-bottom courses in Sociology or Psychology become more attractive. There are fierce internal battles between factions within every university, and if STEM research becomes a big money loser, its advocates will lose more battles.

Overall this is a huge win for China because the appeal of working as a scientist at a US university is significantly diminished as the available resources decrease.

Overall this is a huge win for China

Steve Hsu is a weird guy.

I follow him on Twitter where he mostly posts about how great China is, despite living in the US and teaching at the University of Michigan. It's very black-pilling for the idea of assimilation.

He thinks every thing is a huge win for China because he loves China and wants them to defeat the US.

I do agree that he likes China, but I don’t think he wants it to defeat US. The way I read him is more like “if China defeats us, it will be deserved, because they’re doing a lot of right things, while we are just fumbling while being insanely overconfident about our abilities, and seriously underestimating China”.

I think you misread Hsu's motives. He's almost always giving his honest read of a situation and saying where US policy is working against itself. For example, export restrictions on high-end microchips. He said this is just going to bootstrap Chinese chip manufacturing that otherwise would have had to compete with imports. Manufacturers in China have the same incentives as anyone else and until the ban consumed a whole lot of imported chips.

Now we have DeepSeek R1 that was partly trained on Huawei chips.

On a recent podcast he talked about learning of Trump's win while hiking a mountain in China. And he fist-pumped and celebrated as an American happy that his country was getting back on the right track. And then shortly after was soliciting for technical experts to fill roles in the adminstration.

Maybe I am reading him wrong.

For what it's worth, I largely agree with his China takes, just minus the triumphalism.

He appears to be an unironic MAGA guy though. I suppose it's not contradictory if you believe a war between US and China isn't inevitable.

he loves China and wants them to defeat the US.

Seems pretty uncharitable. Why do you think he wants China to defeat the US?

I doubt this is an assimilation story. Hsu's dad was born in pre-revolutionary China and Hsu's granddad was a KMT general, so he'd have little familial reason to hold red China in high regard. Hsu himself was born in Iowa and has worked exclusively in American institutions - if he really loved China so much he could certainly move there.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to make any sense. And yet that's the read I get from seeing hundreds of his tweets. I think people have stickier ethnic loyalties than we might want to admit.

That's why Scott's recent take about Rotherham landed kind of flat. His take was something like this:

"Americans are mad about white girls getting raped by Pakistani man in England. But these same Americans aren't mad about the even bigger problem of Pakistani children being raped by Pakistani men in Pakistan. I thought they cared about Pakistani rapists, but I guess not. So inconsistent."

To which the answer from everyone was sorta, "d'uh".

hiring staff to deal with real regulatory and compliance requirements

Comes back to 'Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats'. The overhead is a result of the regulations. The removal of overhead doesn't remove regulations.

What funding do woke movements need ? They're staffed by privileged upper class volunteers who're signed up in unemployable non-STEM programs. Wokeism works precisely because it needs no funding.

Without sufficient ICs a university could easily decide that STEM research is too expensive, while cash cow race-to-the-bottom courses in Sociology or Psychology become more attractive. There are fierce internal battles between factions within every university, and if STEM research becomes a big money loser, its advocates will lose more battles.

When I was in college, several of the STEM professors brought up how many adjunct sociology professors their research grants were funding from the half-ish of the money that was "indirect". It was quite a few, because relatively little of tuition ends up paying for professors. I'm not saying this hypothetical couldn't happen, but that the reverse of it (STEM research is a cash cow for high-ranked multidisciplinary universities) has been true before.

Can you confirm this to be true ? It seems insane that funding money crosses department boundaries.

I don't know the financial details at play, but money is often very fungible. It could easily be "letting all the tuition funds pay for humanities" or something like that. Although I've also heard universities complain informally about earmarked gifts: rich benefactors want new named buildings, not expensive repairs to existing ones.

A common complaint with earmarked donations (& grants for that matter) in general: "buy the new shiny" is often far more attractive than "do the preventative maintenance to keep the previous workhorse running".

Won’t we just switch to funding the lab directly instead of indirect taxation?

This provides insufficient opportunities for grift.

Zeno's AGI.

For a long time, people considered the Turing Test the gold standard for AI. Later, better benchmarks were developed, but for most laypeople with a passing familiarity with AI, the Turing Test meant something. And so it was a surprise that when LLMs flew past the Turing Test in 2022 or 2023, there weren't trumpets and parades. It just sort of happened, and people moved on.

I wonder if the same will happen with AGI. To quote hype-man Sam Altman:

trying Grok 3 has been much more of a "feel the AGI" moment among high-taste testers than i expected!

Okay, actually he said that about Chat GPT 4.5, but you get the point. The last 6 months have seen monumental improvements in LLMs, with DeepSeek making them much more efficient and xAI proving that the scaling hypothesis still has room to run.

Given time, AI has been reliably able to beat any benchmarks that we throw at it (remember the Winograd schema?). I think if, 10 years ago, if someone said that AI could solve PHD level math problems, we'd say AGI had already arrived. But it hasn't. So what ungameable benchmarks remain?

  1. AGI should lead to massive increases in GDP. We haven't seen productivity even budge upwards despite dumping trillions into AI. Will this change? When?

  2. AI discoveries with minimal human intervention. If a genius-level human had the breadth of knowledge that LLMs do, they would no doubt make all sorts of novel connections. To date, no AI has done so.

What stands in the way?

It seems like context windows might be the answer. For example, what if we wanted to make novel discoveries by prompting an AI. We might prompt a chain-of-reasoning AI to try to draw connections between disparate fields and then stop when it finds something novel. But with current technology, it would fill up the context window almost immediately and then start to go off the rails.

We stand at a moment in history where AI advances at a remarkable pace and yet is only marginally useful, basically just a better Google/Stack Overflow. It is as smart as a genius-level human, far more knowledgable, and yet also remarkably stupid in unpredictable ways.

Are we just one more advance away from AGI? It's starting to feel like it. But I also wouldn't be surprised if life in 2030 is much the same as it is in 2025.

And so it was a surprise that when LLMs flew past the Turing Test in 2022 or 2023, there weren't trumpets and parades. It just sort of happened, and people moved on.

Did they? Did it?

There was a big flurry of development 3 - 4 years ago enabled by Nvidia's (then new) multimodal framework and novel tokenization methods, but my impression is that those early breakthroughs have since given way to increasingly high compute times for increasingly marginal gains.

As for the path forward, while llms and other generative models have thier uses, i find it unlikely that they represent a viable path towards "True AGI" as despite the claims of grifters and hype-men like Altman, they remain non-agentic nor are they "reasoning" or "inferring" in the sense that most people use that word. The reason of an LLM is more like the verbal/intellectual equivalent of a space filling curve. The more itterations of Hilbert you run the more of the square you color-in but you're still constraining yourself to points on a line (or tokens in the training data). Once you understand this, the apperant stupidity of LLMs becomes both less remarkable and far more predictable.

If we do see "True AGI" in the next 5-10 years I predict that it will come out of what will seem to a lot users here like left feild. But leave the algorithm engineers all nodding to each other. EG there some breakthrough in digital signal processing leads to self-driving cars picking thier route for the scenery.

No AI has ever passed a Turing Test. Is AI very impressive and can it do a lot of things that people used to imagine it would only be able to do once it became generally intelligent? Yes. But has anyone actually conducted a test where they were unable to distinguish between an AI and a human being? No. This never happend and therefore the Turing Test hasn't been passed.

The entire point of the Turing Test is that, rather than try to define general intelligence as the ability to do specific things that we can test for, we define it in such a way that passing it means we know the AI can do any cognitive task that a human can do, whatever that might be, without trying to guess ahead of time what that is. We don't try to guess the most difficult things for AI to do and say it has general intelligence when it can do them, or else we end up making the mistake that you and many others are making where we have AI that can do very well in coding competitions but cannot do the job of a low level programmer or it can get high marks on a test measuring Ph.D. level of knowledge of some subject, but it can't do an entry level job of someone in that field.

Humans have always been and continue to be really bad at guessing what will be easy for computers to do and what will be hard, and we're discovering that the hardest things for computers to do are not what we thought, so the Turing Test must remain defined as a test in which the computer passes if it is indistinguishable from a human being. That is not the same as sounding like a human being or doing a lot of things only humans could do until recently.

It is still trivial to distinguish an AI from a human being because it has a very distinctive writing style that it struggles to deviate from, it cannot answer a lot of very simple questions that most intelligent people can answer, and it refuses to do a lot of things of things like use racial slurs, give instructions for dangerous actions, and answer questions with politically incorrect answers.

We shouldn't be too surpised that AI can do well on these benchmarks but not lead to massive productivity increases because doing well on benchmarks isn't AGI. There aren't very many jobs that consist of completing benchmarks.

AI is still pretty dumb in some sense. The latest estimates of the number of neurons these models have that I've heard are on the order of 2 trillion. That would make it about as smart as a fox. That's smarter than a cat but dumber than a dog. If a company said they were investing in dog breeding to see if they could get them to replace humans, would you expect a huge increase to our GDP just because it turns out they're better than almost anyone at finding the locations of smells (implying they could be better than us at most things)? Or what if they bred cats to help catch rodents or apes to instantly memorize visual layouts? It seems absurd only because dogs have been around for a long time and we're used the idea that they can't do human jobs and being good at smelling doesn't predict other cognitive abilities. Chimpanzees are far more intelligent than any AI, but I haven't heard of them taking anyone's job yet.

The difference with AI is it is rapidly improving and we can expect it to reach human intelligence before too long, but we are clearly not there yet and benchmarks are not going to give us more than a rough idea of how close we are to it unless those benchmarks start getting a lot closer to the things we actually want AI to do.

No AI has ever passed a Turing Test. Is AI very impressive and can it do a lot of things that people used to imagine it would only be able to do once it became generally intelligent? Yes. But has anyone actually conducted a test where they were unable to distinguish between an AI and a human being? No. This never happend and therefore the Turing Test hasn't been passed.

The Turing test has been performed with GPT-4, and it passed 54% of the time (compared to humans being suspected as human 67% of the time.)

That's a nice experiment you have there. It would be a shame if someone were to replicate it. (Or look at the original paper) That howtogeek article is seriously overselling it.

I think we have AGI. Or at least sorta of. It's probably in the range of a 110-130 IQ person, but in just about all domains. Humans in specific domains that are very smart can still usually beat AIs. But college kids are almost universally not able to surpass them.

The only difference is agency. Which is why agentic AIs are some of the hype right now. AI just sits there and does nothing without human prompting. Which seems like one of the dream scenarios for AI safety obsessed people.

Agentic AIs seem like possibly the real wave of AI that will change society. When you can tell an AI "Hey go be active promoting a thing on the Internet". The Internet is probably going to be the first casualty of AI.

If it is missing a crucial characteristic of human intelligence, how can you say it has AGI? I can believe it could do well on an IQ test, but given that it has a totally different distribution of abilities, the relevance of those tests for AI is very low. The predictive power of an IQ test result for AI is dramatically lower for an AI. So while it might get a 120 IQ result, it is in no way as competent as an actual person with an IQ of 120.

Once it gets agency, we will probably discover something else it is lacking that we didn't think of before. So we can't even modify the test to include agency to get something as good as an IQ test is for humans. We need to remember that it has a different skill distribution and one which we are discovering as it improves. That's why the ultimate test has to be the broadest set of possible tasks that humans do, not these narrow tests which happen to be highly predictive for human abilities.

An AGI should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for AlphaFold.

What crucial characteristic is AI missing? Agency? It's not missing it so much as they just choose not to implement it.

Knowing that there is a real world, out there, beyond language.

Are the moon landings a hoax? Large Language Models can say what people say, perhaps rather more fluently and persuasively. If one is open to the possibility that there is more than one kind of intelligence, then LLM's have one of those kinds of intelligence, and in greater degree than an average human. But LLM's are rather stuck on giving their own opinion of whether the moon landings are a hoax, because they don't know whether the moon is real or fictional. Nor do the know whether the Earth is real or fictional. The whole "ground truth" thing is missing.

We don't know the "ground truth" either, though. All the information that we parse, such as touching the Earth or seeing the moon in the sky or through a telescope are basically hallucinations created by our brains based on the sensory input that we take in through detection mechanisms in our cells. We have to trust that the qualia that we experience are somewhat accurate representations of the "ground truth." Our experience is such that we perceive reality accurately enough such that we can keep surviving both as individuals and as a species, but who knows just how accurate that really is?

LLMs are certainly far more limited compared to us in the variety of sensory input they can take in, or how often it can update itself permanently based on that sensory input, and the difference in quantity is probably large enough to have a quality of its own.

My guess as to the biggest missing factor between here and AGI is efficient online and self-directed learning (aka continuous or lifetime learning).

More specifically, a means of avoiding the inward spiral that comes when the model's output becomes part of its input (via the chat context). I've noticed that LLMs very quickly become less flexible as a conversation progresses, and I think this kind of self-imitation is part of it. I'm working on something and I'd like to force the AI to push itself out of distribution, but I'm not sure how.

Yes, agency. How do you know they know how to implement it?

Because it exists? The agentic AIs are already a thing

Those don't really work. There have been a bunch of iterations but prompts of the form 'decide what you should do to achieve task X and then do it' don't produce good results in situ and it's not really clear why. I think partly because AI is not good at conceptualising the space of unknowns and acting under uncertainty, and it's not good at collaborating with others. Agentic AI tends to get lost, or muddled, or hare off in the wrong direction. This may be suboptimal training, of course.

I read Zvi he follows AI much closer than I will ever bother to.

There are potential tricks around the problem you talk about. One of the easier ones is asking the AI to prompt engineer itself. "How would you request a task to do X" ... "How would you improve this prompt that is a request to do task X" ... keep doing that and asking separately "which is a better prompt to do task X".

The sense I get is that there is thinking that an AI is doing, but it is mostly like a dice roll. Rolling consecutively for a cumulatively high number isn't a great strategy, but you don't need to do that. You can instead do something where you re-roll for the best possible roll, then move on to the next roll and do the same thing.

From 5 hours ago: A complex problem that took microbiologists a decade to get to the bottom of has been solved in just two days by a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool.

Professor José R Penadés and his team at Imperial College London had spent years working out and proving why some superbugs are immune to antibiotics.

He gave "co-scientist" - a tool made by Google - a short prompt asking it about the core problem he had been investigating and it reached the same conclusion in 48 hours.

He told the BBC of his shock when he found what it had done, given his research was not published so could not have been found by the AI system in the public domain

Prof Penadés' said the tool had in fact done more than successfully replicating his research.

"It's not just that the top hypothesis they provide was the right one," he said.

"It's that they provide another four, and all of them made sense.

"And for one of them, we never thought about it, and we're now working on that.".

The researchers have been trying to find out how some superbugs - dangerous germs that are resistant to antibiotics - get created. Their hypothesis is that the superbugs can form a tail from different viruses which allows them to spread between species. Prof Penadés likened it to the superbugs having "keys" which enabled them to move from home to home, or host species to host species. Critically, this hypothesis was unique to the research team and had not been published anywhere else. Nobody in the team had shared their findings.

Slowly it's becoming clear that ASI is already with us. Imagine if you handed someone from 100 years ago a smartphone or modern networking technology. Even after explaining how it worked, it would take them some time to figure out what to do with it. It took a long time after we invented wheels to figure out what to do with them, for example.

The technology to automate 80-90% of white collar labor already exists, for example, with current-generation LLMs. It's just about interfaces and layers and regulation and safeguards now. All very important, of course, but it's not fundamental technical challenge.

I'm skeptical this is actually how it went down. Why would it take 2 days to come up with the hypotheses? I'm not aware of any LLM that thinks that long, which to me implies the scientist was working with it throughout and probably asking leading questions.

It looks like co-scientist is one of the new "tree searching agent" models: you give it a problem and it will spin off other LLMs to look into different aspects of the problem, then prune different decision trees and go further with subsequent spinoff LLMs based on what those initial report back, recursing until the original problem is solved. This is the strategy that was used by OpenAI in their "high-compute o3" model to rank #175 vs humans on Codeforce (competitive coding problems), pass the GPQA (Google-proof Graduate-level Q&A), and score 88% on ARC-AGI (vs. Human STEM graduate's 100%). The recursive thought process is expensive: the previous link cites a compute cost of $1000 to $2000 per problem for high-compute o3, so these are systems that compute on each problem for much longer than the 35 seconds available to consumer ($20/month) users of o1.

Thanks, that's good information. Still, I don't believe it would actually take two days straight to work through the problem, which indicates follow-up questions etc.

Doesn't sound like it.

He gave "co-scientist" - a tool made by Google - a short prompt asking it about the core problem he had been investigating and it reached the same conclusion in 48 hours.

Possible if running on Google servers that the request is somehow queued up or prepared at least in the testing phase which they appeared to have been invited to.

Imagine if you handed someone from 100 years ago a smartphone or modern networking technology. Even after explaining how it worked, it would take them some time to figure out what to do with it.

I came of age right as the Internet was taking off. But I've started watching classic movies and TV and I think the "information at my fingertips" effect is something that has happened so gradually I don't think we really appreciate it's impact fully, even pre-LLM. One recent TV episode from the '90s had one character tell another to travel to the state capital and find and photocopy dead-tree legal references, which was expected to take a day. My world today is radically different in a number of ways:

  • State laws are pretty easily accessible via the internet. I'm not sure how the minutia of laws were well-known back then. Are our laws themselves different (or enforced differently) because the lay public can be expected to review, say, health code requirements for a restaurant?

  • Computerized text is much more readily searchable. If I have a very specific question, I can find key words with ctrl-f rather than depending on a precompiled index. The amount of information I need to keep in my brain is no longer things like exact quotes, just enough to find the important bits back quickly. The computer already put a bunch of white-collar workers out of jobs, just gradually: nobody needs an army of accountants with calculators to crunch quarterly reports. Or humans employed to manually compute solutions to math problems.

  • The Internet is now readily accessible on-the-go. Pre-iPhone (or maybe Blackberry), Internet resources required (I remember this) finding a computer to access. So the Internet couldn't easily settle arguments in real conversation. The vibe is different, and at least in my circles, it seems like the expectation of precision in claims is much higher. IRL political arguments didn't go straight to citing specific claims quite the same way.

I sometimes feel overwhelmed trying to grasp the scope of the changes even within my own lifetime, and I find myself wondering things like what my grandfather did day-to-day as an engineer. These days it's mostly a desk job for me, but I don't even know what I'd be expected to do if you took away my computer: it'd be such a different world.

I'm not sure how the minutia of laws were well-known back then.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but laws are organized into books that are indexed. You look up the relevant statute, search for the right section, and then read a few paragraphs describing the law. If you need to know the details of case lawyer, you consult a lawyer. They go to law school and read relevant cases to know how judges are likely to rule on similar future cases.

You still need lawyers to do this because ctrl-f doesn't return a list of all the relevant legal principles from all the relevant cases.

There also has been a massive explosion in the number and complexity of laws since the word processor was invented.

There also has been a massive explosion in the number and complexity of laws since the word processor was invented.

This is, I think, the answer I was looking for. Ctrl-F doesn't find everything (I've had to search non-indexed dead-tree books before), but it's a huge force multiplier.

To me, this is impressive, but not that impressive: sure it answered the question, but it didn't pose the question. In the same way, LLMs are decent at writing code, but have ~no ability to decide what to write. You can't just point them at your codebase and a bunch of email threads from PMs and hope it writes the right thing.

I don't know how many plausible hypotheses there are for the question it solved, or how hard it is to generate them, but it's surely much easier than looking at the state of the field as a whole and coming up with a new idea for which to generate hypothesis.

AI is a junior engineer.

AI is a junior engineer.

It's actually far worse than that. LLMs are a junior engineer who cannot learn. The reason that we put up with junior engineers and invest effort into training them is because they will learn, stop making junior mistakes, and someday be productive enough that they pay off the effort of training them. But you can't do that with an LLM. Even after 2-3 years of development, they still suck at writing code. They still hallucinate things because they have no understanding of what they are doing. They still can't take on your feedback and improve for the next time you ask a question.

If LLMs were as capable as a junior engineer, that wouldn't be all bad. But they're actually less capable. Of course people aren't impressed.

I agree completely.

LLMs are a junior engineer who cannot learn.

I see you've met my coworker.

they still suck at writing code

Hoo boy. Speaking as an programmer who uses LLMs regularly to help with his work, you're very, VERY wrong about that. Maybe you should go tell Google that the 20% of their new code that is written by AI is all garbage. The code modern LLMs generate is typically well-commented, well-reasoned, and well-tested, because LLMs don't take the same lazy shortcuts that humans do. It's not perfect, of course, and not quite as elegant as an experienced programmer can manage, but that's not the standard we're measuring by. You should see the code that "junior engineers" often get away with...

I use AI a lot at work. There is a huge difference between writing short bits of code that you can test or read over and see how it works and completing a task with a moderate level of complexity or where you need to give it more than a few rounds of feedback and corrections. I cannot get an AI to do a whole project for me. I can get it to do a small easy task where I can check its work. This is great when it's something like a very simple algorithm that I can explain in detail but it's in a language I don't know very well. It's also useful for explaining simple ideas that I'm not familiar with and would have to look up and spend a lot of time finding good sources for. It is unusable for anything much more difficult than that.

The main problem is that it is really bad at developing accurate complex abstract models for things. It's like it has memorized a million heuristics, which works great for common or simple problems, but it means it has no understanding of something abstract, with a moderate level of complexity, that is not similar to something it has seen many times before.

The other thing it is really bad at is trudging along and trying and trying to get something right that it cannot initially do. I can assign a task to a low-level employee even if he doesn't know the answer and he has a good chance of figuring it out after some time. If an AI can't get something right away, it is almost always incapable of recognizing that it's doing something wrong and employing problem solving skills to figure out a solution. It will just get stuck and start blindly trying things that are obviously dead-ends. It also needs to be continuously pointed in the right direction and if the conversation goes on too long, it keeps forgetting things that were already explained to it. If more than a few rounds of this go on, all hope of it figuring out the right solution is lost.

Thanks, it's clear that (unlike the previous poster, who seems stuck in 2023) you have actual experience. I agree with most of this. I think there are people working on giving LLMs some sort of short-term memory for abstract thought, and also on making them more agentic so they can work on a long-form task without going off the rails. But the tools I have access to definitely aren't there yet.

So, yeah, I admit it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that you can swap a junior employee's role out with an LLM. o3 (or Claude-3.5 Sonnet, which I haven't tried, but which does quite well on the objective SWE-bench metric) is almost certainly better at writing small bits of good working code - people just don't understand how horrifically bad most humans are at programming, even CS graduates - but is lacking the introspection of a human to prevent it from doing dangerously stupid things sometimes. And neither is going to be able to manage a decently-sized project on their own.

I'm a programmer too, and I'm perfectly willing to tell Google that their 20% code is garbage. Honestly you shouldn't put them on a pedestal in this day and age, we are long past the point where they are nothing but top tier engineers doing groundbreaking work. They are just another tech company at this point, and they sometimes do stupid things just like every other tech company does.

If you are willing to accept use of a tool which gives you code that doesn't even work 10% of the time, let alone solve the problem, that's your prerogative. I say that such a tool sucks at writing code, and we can simply agree to disagree on that value judgement.

The vast majority of that "code being written by AI" at Google is painfully trivial stuff. We're not talking writing a new Paxos implementation or even a new service from scratch. It's more, autocomplete the rest of the line "for (int i = 0"

This is exactly @jeroboam's point - you say "AI is a junior engineer" as if that's some sort of insult, rather than unbelievably friggin' miraculous. In 2020, predicting "in 2025, AI will be able to code as well as a junior engineer" would have singled you out as a ridiculous sci-fi AI optimist. If we could only attach generators to the AI goalposts as they zoom into the distance, it would help pay for some of the training power costs... :)

It's weird and a surprise that current AI functions differently enough from us that it's gone superhuman in some ways and remains subhuman in others. We'd all thought that AGI would be unmistakable when it arrived, but the reality seems to be much fuzzier than that. Still, we're living in amazing times.

It's weird and a surprise that current AI functions differently enough from us that it's gone superhuman in some ways and remains subhuman in others. We'd all thought that AGI would be unmistakable when it arrived, but the reality seems to be much fuzzier than that.

"We" should have read Wittgenstein to predict this. LLMs can speak, but we can't understand them.

People really need to get over anthropomorphism until we actually understand how humans work.

it didn't pose the question

The question was “why are some bacteria resistant to antibiotics”, ie one of the most important questions in medicine.

On the one hand, wow, that's very, very impressive.

On the other hand, skeptical questions and my prior of "nothing ever happens and especially not with LLMs" makes me ask: was that literally the question? Do you have a source? I am very much not a biologist, but that is surprisingly/impressively broad.

I’ve never understood how the Turing test measured anything useful. The test doesn’t even require that the AI agent understand anything about its world or even the questions being asked of it. It just has to do well enough to convince a human that it can do so. That’s the entire point of the Chinese room rejoinder— an agent might well be clever enough to fool a person into thinking it understands just by giving reasonable no answers to questions posed.

The real test, to me, is more of a practical thing — can I drop the AI in a novel situation and expect it to figure out how to solve the problems. Can I take a bot trained entirely on being an English chatbot and expect it to learn Japanese just by interacting with Japanese users? Can I take a chatbot like that and expect it to learn to solve physics equations? That seems a much better test because intelligent agents are capable of learning new things.

The Turing test is an insanely strong test, in the sense that an AI that passes it can be seen to have achieved human-level intelligence at the very least. By this I mean the proper, adversarial test with a fully motivated and intelligent tester (and ideally, the same for the human participant).

Certainly no AI today could pass such a thing. The current large SotA models will simply tell you they are an AI model if you ask. They will outright deny being human or having emotions. I don't know how anyone could think these models ever passed a Turing test, unless the tester was a hopeless moron who didn't even try.

One could object that they might pass if people bothered to finetune them to do so. But that is a much weaker claim akin to "I could win that marathon if I ever bothered to get up from this couch." Certainly they haven't passed any such tests today. And I doubt any current AI could, even if they tried.

In fact, I expect we'll see true superhuman AGI long before such a test is consistently passed. We're much smarter than dogs, but that doesn't mean we can fully imitate them. Just like it takes a lot more compute to emulate a console such as the SNES than such devices originally had, I think it will require a lot of surplus intelligence to pretend to be human convincingly. If there is anything wrong with the Turing test, it's that it's way too hard.

The Turing test is like the Bechdel test. It’s not a perfect heuristic, and it’s misused in a lot of ways, but the point is that it’s a fairly low bar that most things at the time still weren’t able to clear.

I am flabbergasted by people, including the person who came up with the Chinese Room thought experiment, Searle, not seeing what seems to me to be the obvious conclusion:

The room speaks Chinese.

(Is that a problem? No, not at all. I just didn't think you'd be Chinese)

No individual component of the room speaks Chinese, including the human, but that is no impediment. No single neuron in your brain speaks English, but we have zero qualms about saying the entire network, i.e your brain, does.

I am flabbergasted by people, including the person who came up with the Chinese Room thought experiment, Searle, not seeing what seems to me to be the obvious conclusion:

The room speaks Chinese.

Searle literally addressed this objection in his very first paper on the Chinese Room.

Searle’s response to the Systems Reply is simple: in principle, he could internalize the entire system, memorizing all the instructions and the database, and doing all the calculations in his head. He could then leave the room and wander outdoors, perhaps even conversing in Chinese. But he still would have no way to attach “any meaning to the formal symbols”. The man would now be the entire system, yet he still would not understand Chinese. For example, he would not know the meaning of the Chinese word for hamburger. He still cannot get semantics from syntax.

Seems nonsensical to me. I fail to see how this person could have that inside their brain and fail to speak Chinese. How is that even physically possible?

So, take throwing a ball. The brain’s doing a ton of heavy lifting, solving inverse kinematics, adjusting muscle tension, factoring in distance and wind and all in real time, below the level of conscious awareness. You don’t explicitly think, “Okay, flex the biceps at 23.4 degrees, then release at t=0.72 seconds.” You just do it. The calculations happen in the background, and you’d be hard-pressed to explain the exact math or physics step-by-step. Yet, if someone said, “You can’t throw a ball because you don’t consciously understand the equations,” you’d rightly call that nonsense. You can throw the ball - your ability proves it, even if the “how” is opaque to your conscious mind.

If Searle were to attempt to rebutt this by saying, nah, you're just doing computations in your head without actually "knowing" how to throw a ball, then I'd call him a dense motherfucker and ask if he knows how the human brain works.

The answer is that he doesn't understand Chinese, he plus the room understand Chinese.

If someone internalizes the system in his head, ignoring practicality (which makes it hard to properly imagine the situation), then he's acting as a dumb CPU executing a Chinese program. The answer is still "the man doesn't know Chinese, the system does". The answer feels strange because "the man" is in the man's head and "the system" is also in the man's head, but that doesn't make them the same thing or mean that they both have the same knowledge.

Of course, in Searle's time, "come on, he's running a virtual machine" isn't something you could really say because people weren't familiar with the concept.

Virtual machines were a thing since 1965, and Searle wrote his nonsense about intentionality in 1983, and the Chinese Room in 1980.

If someone has the gall to claim to disprove the possibility of artificial intelligence, as he set out to do, it would help to have some understanding of computer science. But alas.

The answer is still "the man doesn't know Chinese, the system does".

I agree with you but Searle and his defenders wouldn't. As far as I'm concerned, it matters not a jot if the system is embedded inside a brain, up an arse, or in the room their arse is resting in.

You're just a Functionalist, exactly the sort of people the argument is supposed to criticize. Or you're missing the point.

Searles is a Biological Realist, which is to say that he believes that processes of mind are real things that emerge from the biochemical processes of human beings and that language (and symbol manipulation in general) is a reflection of those processes, not the process in itself. He thinks thoughts are real things that exist outside of language.

To wit, he argues that what the room is missing is "intentionality". It does not have the ability do to anything but react to input in ways that are predetermined by the design of the chinese manual, and insofar as any of its components are concerned (or the totality thereof) they are incapable of reflecting upon the ideas being manipulated.

Your brain does "speak chinese" properly speaking because it is able to communicate intentional thoughts using that medium. The mere ability to hold conversation does not qualify to what Searles is trying to delineate.

It does not have the ability do to anything but react to input in ways that are predetermined by the design of the chinese manual

Not too familiar with Searle's argument, but isn't this just saying that the lack of ability to generalize out of distribution is the issue? But I don't get how being able to react to novel inputs (in a useful way) would even help things much. Suppose one did come up with a finite set of rules that allowed one to output Chinese to arbitrary inputs in highly intelligent, coherent ways. It's still, AFAICT, still just a room with a guy inside to Searle.

Perhaps it's the ability to learn. But even then, you could have the guy follow some RL algorithm to update the symbols in the translation lookup algorithm book, and it's still just a guy in the room (to Searle).

It's not even clear to me how one could resolve this: at some point, a guy in the room could be manipulating symbols in a way that mirrors Xi Jinpeng's neural activations arbitrarily closely (with a big enough room and a long enough time), and Searle and I would immediately come to completely confident and opposite conclusions about the nature of the room. It just seems flatly ridiculous to me that the presence of dopamine and glutamate impart consciousness to a system, but I don't get how to argue against that (or even get how Searle would say that's different from his actual argument).

You're just a Functionalist, exactly the sort of people the argument is supposed to criticize. Or you're missing the point.

My response is that there isn't a point to miss.

Searles is a Biological Realist, which is to say that he believes that processes of mind are real things that emerge from the biochemical processes of human beings and that language (and symbol manipulation in general) is a reflection of those processes, not the process in itself. He thinks thoughts are real things that exist outside of language.

That strikes me as the genuine opposite of what someone with a realistic understanding of biology would believe, but I guess people can call themselves whatever they like. It strikes me as unfalsifiable Cartesian Dualism or a close relative, and worth spending no more time rebutting with evidence than it was forwarded without evidence.

To wit, he argues that what the room is missing is "intentionality". It does not have the ability do to anything but react to input in ways that are predetermined by the design of the chinese manual, and insofar as any of its components are concerned (or the totality thereof) they are incapable of reflecting upon the ideas being manipulated.

What is so mysterious about this "intentionality"? Give the Room a prompt that requires it to reason about being a Chinese Room. Problem solved.

Your brain does "speak chinese" properly speaking because it is able to communicate intentional thoughts using that medium. The mere ability to hold conversation does not qualify to what Searles is trying to delineate.

What is the mechanism by which a thought is imbued with "intentionality"? Where, from a single neuron, to a brain lobe, to the whole human, does it arise?

realistic understanding

Realism is a term of art in metaphysics in particular and philosophy in general. It is the view that reality exists outside of the processes of the mind, the opposite of anti-realism (solipsism, skepticism, etc).

It strikes me as unfalsifiable Cartesian Dualism

For what it's worth, Skepticism, which I take to be your view if you're making this objection, is also unfalsifiable. As are all statements in metaphysics.

I happen to be a metaphysical skeptic myself, but this isn't an argument. We're talking about something more fundamental than notions of falsifiablity or correspondence. You can't use logic even.

What is so mysterious about this "intentionality"?

What isn't? Consciousness is the most mysterious phenomenon I have ever experienced. It is so mysterious in fact as to be a centerpiece of many religious traditions.

Why do humans go about doing things on their own instead of merely reacting to their environment? Is it just a more complex form of the instinctive behavior we see in other animals or something entirely different? And why do I have qualia? These are mysteries.

Give the Room a prompt that requires it to reason about being a Chinese Room. Problem solved.

Unless the writer of the manual understands reasoning to a sufficient degree as to provide exhaustive answer to all possible questions of the mind, this isn't possible. And certainly isn't within the purview of the thought experiment as originally devised.

What is the mechanism by which a thought is imbued with "intentionality"? Where, from a single neuron, to a brain lobe, to the whole human, does it arise?

We don't know yet. We may possibly never know. But we can observe the phenomenon all the same.

For what it's worth, Skepticism, which I take to be your view if you're making this objection, is also unfalsifiable. As are all statements in metaphysics.

I happen to be a metaphysical skeptic myself, but this isn't an argument. We're talking about something more fundamental than notions of falsifiablity or correspondence.

If we really want to get into this, then proving (and disproving) anything is mathematically impossible..

This makes axioms necessary to be a functional sapient entity. Yet axioms are thus incredibly precious, and not to be squandered or proliferated lightly.

To hold as axiomatic that there exists some elan vital of "intent" that the room lacks, but a clearly analogous system in the human brain itself possesses, strains credulity to say the least. If two models of the world have the same explanatory power, and do not produce measurable differences in expectation, the sensible thing to do is adopt the one that is more parsimonious.

(It would help if more philosophers had even a passing understanding of Algorithmic Information Theory)

Unless the writer of the manual understands reasoning to a sufficient degree as to provide exhaustive answer to all possible questions of the mind, this isn't possible. And certainly isn't within the purview of the thought experiment as originally devised.

Why not? What exactly breaks if we ask that the creator of the Room makes it so?

It is already a very unwieldy object, a pure look-up-table that could converse in Chinese is an enormous thing. Or is it such an onerous ask that we go beyond "Hello, where is the library?" in Chinese? You've already shot for the moon, what burden the stars?

If the Room can equipped to productively answer questions that require knowledge of the inner mechanisms of the Room, then the problem is solved.

We don't know yet. We may possibly never know. But we can observe the phenomenon all the same.

For consciousness? Maybe. I'd be surprised if we never got an answer to it, and a mechanistic one to boot. Plenty of mysterious and seemingly ontologically basic phenomenon have crumbled under empirical scrutiny.

a clearly analogous system

Non functionalists disagree that it is analogous. So you need to actually make that argument beyond "it is obviously so because it is so from the functionalist standpoint".

Moreover, you're defending two contradictory positions here.

On the one hand, you seem ready to concede to metaphysical skepticism and the idea that knowledge is impossible. On the other hand, you're using the Naive Empiricist idea that systems can only be considered to exist if they have measurable outcomes. These are not compatible.

If what you're doing is simply instrumentally using empiricism because it works, you must be ready to admit that there are truths that are possibly outside of its reach, including the inner workings of systems that contain hidden variables. Otherwise you are not a skeptic.

What exactly breaks if we ask that the creator of the Room makes it so?

It requires the assumption that cognition is reducible to computation, which makes the entire experiment useless as a prop to discuss whether that view is or isn't satisfactory. It turns it into a tautology.

If the Room can equipped to productively answer questions that require knowledge of the inner mechanisms of the Room, then the problem is solved.

If computationalism is true, computationalism is true.

Plenty of mysterious and seemingly ontologically basic phenomenon have crumbled under empirical scrutiny.

You should be careful with that line of thinking.

Surely you must be familiar with the story of Lord Kelvin's speech to the Royal Society inwhich he stipulated that Physics was now almost totally complete save for two small clouds.

  1. the relative motion of the ether with respect to massive objects
  2. Maxwell-Boltzmann's theorem on the equipartition of energy

Explaining those "small" issues would of course end up requiring the creation of special relativity and quantum mechanics, which were neither small tasks, nor ultimately complete to this day and unearthed a lot more problems along the way.

Whatever one thinks of our epistemic position, I always recommend humility.

Non functionalists disagree that it is analogous. So you need to actually make that argument beyond "it is obviously so because it is so from the functionalist standpoint".

On the flip side... how is the thought experiment helping illustrate anything to anyone who doesn't already agree with Searle's take? It's as if he's saying "...and obviously the room doesn't know anything so functionalism is wrong."

One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. 🤷

Moreover, you're defending two contradictory positions here.

On the one hand, you seem ready to concede to metaphysical skepticism and the idea that knowledge is impossible. On the other hand, you're using the Naive Empiricist idea that systems can only be considered to exist if they have measurable outcomes. These are not compatible.

If what you're doing is simply instrumentally using empiricism because it works, you must be ready to admit that there are truths that are possibly outside of its reach, including the inner workings of systems that contain hidden variables. Otherwise you are not a skeptic.

I am large, I contain multitudes. As far as I'm concerned, there is no inherent contradiction behind my stance.

Knowledge without axiomatic underpinning is fundamentally impossible, due to infinite regress. Fortunately, I do have axioms and presumably some of them overlap with yours, or else we wouldn't have common grounds for useful conversation.

I never claimed being a "skeptic" as a label, that's your doing, so I can only apologize if it doesn't fit me. If there are truths beyond materialist understanding, regretfully we have no other way of establishing them. What mechanism ennobles non-materialists, letting them pick out Truth safe from materialism from the ether of all possible concepts? And how does it beat a random number generator that returns TRUE or FALSE for any conjecture under the sun?

Non functionalists disagree that it is analogous. So you need to actually make that argument beyond "it is obviously so because it is so from the functionalist standpoint".

I must then ask them to please demonstrate where a Chinese Room, presumably made of atoms, differs from human neurons, also made of atoms.

If computationalism is true, computationalism is true.

I reject your claim this is a tautology. A Chinese Room that speaks Chinese is a look-up table. A Chinese Room that speaks Chinese while talking about being a Chinese Room is a larger LUT. Pray tell what makes the former valid, and the latter invalid. Is self-referentiality verboten? Can ChatGPT not talk about matrix multiplication?

Whatever one thinks of our epistemic position, I always recommend humility.

I'm all for epistemic humility, but I fail to see the relevance here. It's insufficient grounds for adding more ontologically indivisible concepts to the table than are strictly necessary, and Searle's worldview doesn't even meet necessity, let alone strictness.

There's epistemic humility, and there's performative humility, a hemming and hawing and wringing of hands that we just can't know that things are the way they seem, there must be more, and somehow this validates my worldview despite it having zero extra explanatory power.

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Your tests have the exact same "problem" as the Turing Test, though. There's no way to tell if the bot actually "understands" Japanese just because it is able to produce Japanese words that are understandable to Japanese people after interacting with Japanese people a bunch. There's no way to tell if the bot actually "understands" physics just because it responds to an equation with symbols that a learned physicist would judge as "correct" after interacting with a bunch of physics textbooks or lectures or whatever. It could just be updating the mappings within its Chinese room.

One might say that updating the mappings in its Chinese room is essentially another way of describing "understanding." In which case the Turing Test also qualifies; if the chatbot is able to update its mappings during its conversation with you such that it appears to you as indistinguishable from a human, then that's equivalent to a bot updating its mappings through its conversations with Japanese people such that it appears to Japanese people as someone who understands Japanese.

I guess the point of my conjecture is that understanding is required for intelligence. And one way to get after intelligence is putting an agent in a situation where it has no previous experience or models to work from and expect it to solve problems.

Where I agree with the idea behind the Chinese Room is exactly that. Yes, the agent can answer questions about the things it’s supposed to be able to answer questions about well enough to fool an onlooker asking questions about the subject it’s been trained to answer. But if you took the same agent and got it off script in some way — if you stopped asking about the Chinese literature it was trained to answer questions about and started asking questions about Chinese politics or the weather or the Kansas City Chiefs, an agent with no agency that doesn’t actually have a mental model of what the characters it’s matching actually mean will be unable to adapt. It cannot answer the new questions because it specifically doesn’t understand any of tge old questions nor can it understand the new ones. And likewise if the questions in English are not understood it would be impossible to get the agent to understand Japanese because it’s unable to derive meanings from words, it’s just stringing them together in ways that it’s training tells it are pleasing to users.

It’s also a pretty good test for human understanding of a given subject. If I can get you to attempt to use the information you have in a novel situation and you can do so, you understand it. If you can only regurgitate things you have been told in exactly the ways you have been told to do it, you probably don’t.

Where I agree with the idea behind the Chinese Room is exactly that. Yes, the agent can answer questions about the things it’s supposed to be able to answer questions about well enough to fool an onlooker asking questions about the subject it’s been trained to answer. But if you took the same agent and got it off script in some way — if you stopped asking about the Chinese literature it was trained to answer questions about and started asking questions about Chinese politics or the weather or the Kansas City Chiefs, an agent with no agency that doesn’t actually have a mental model of what the characters it’s matching actually mean will be unable to adapt.

Perhaps I'm not as familiar with the Chinese Room experiment as I thought I was. I thought the Chinese Room posited that the room contained mappings for literally every single thing that could be input in Chinese, such that there was literally nothing a Chinese person outside the room could state such that a response indicated a lack of understanding of Chinese? If the Chinese Room posits that the mappings contained in the room are limited, then that does change things, but then I also believe it's not such a useful thought experiment.

I personally don't think "understanding," at least the way we humans understand (heh) it, is a necessary component of intelligence. I'm comfortable with calling the software that underlies the behavior of imps in Doom as "enemy artificial intelligence," even though I'm pretty sure there's no "understanding" going on in my 486 Thinkpad laptop that's causing the blobs of brown pixels to move on the screen in a certain way based on what my player character is doing, for instance. If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck and is otherwise completely indistinguishable from a duck in every way that I can measure, then I'll call it a duck.

I personally don't think "understanding," at least the way we humans understand (heh) it, is a necessary component of intelligence. I'm comfortable with calling the software that underlies the behavior of imps in Doom as "enemy artificial intelligence," even though I'm pretty sure there's no "understanding" going on in my 486 Thinkpad laptop that's causing the blobs of brown pixels to move on the screen in a certain way based on what my player character is doing, for instance. If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck and is otherwise completely indistinguishable from a duck in every way that I can measure, then I'll call it a duck.

Yeah, to tie this back to the above thread about the ramifications of massively-increased automation, what the hell does it matter if an AI really understands anything, if it puts most of us out of a job anyways? Philosophy is for those who don't have to grind for their bread.

Most people will recognize AGI when it can independently enact change on the world, without regard for the desires or values of humans, including its creators. Until then, they'll see whatever brilliant things it enables as merely extensions of the guiding human's agency.

AI built on language models will always reflect us because they’re trained on us in a fundamental way. They are the product of human civilization, their ways of thinking are ours, only faster / better. Where AGI is ‘evil’ it will be evil in a human way.

This.

MY personal benchmark is that I want an AI agent that can renew and refill a drug prescription for me.

This isn't a task that should require an AGI, but its one that is frustrating for me to accomplish, and often involves interacting with a couple website, then making a phone call to multiple parties, possibly scanning and e-mailing a document or two, and finally confirming that the end result is ready for pickup.

This still seems beyond the current crop.

And I daresay that robotics is lagging enough that I'm skeptical that we'll see AI capable of physically navigating the real world independently, without using a human intermediary before we get AGI. They haven't yet hooked up an LLM to sensors that give it a constant stream of data about the real world that I know of, so maybe it can adapt faster than I expect. I wouldn't put anything out beyond 5 years.

That said, I don't think an AGI NEEDS to be able to navigate the world, if its smart enough it can use human intermediaries to achieve most of its goals, potentially including killing the humans.

So, if I'm being blunt and oversimplifying, the current state of AI tech is ABSOLUTELY a tool that can leverage human productivity, but needs more agentic behavior and the ability to manipulate atoms and not just bits, which I think most benchmarks don't actually account for.

As far as gorillas are concerned, humans still can't replace gorillas - neither a human nor any human technology can pass as a member of a gorilla tribe and fulfill all the functions that gorillas expect of each other no worse than a gorilla would. Yet, if gorillas could invent benchmarks as well as humans do, they probably would have made up a whole bunch that we would have blown past with ease - we could delouse more effectively, make devices that roar louder, thump artificial chests with more force, mass-produce silverback pheromones in bioreactors and obliterate any rivalling gorilla tribe with FPV drones. At some point, we have to recognise that "be a productive and well-assimilated member of the existing community of X" is a much harder problem than "outperform X at any given task not closely coupled with the former", which is unsurprising because life on earth has a much longer evolutionary history gatekeeping its respective community than it has doing anything that we consider useful.

Unfortunately, our informal AGI metrics, which really should be looking at performance at the latter, keep falling into the trap of measuring performance at the former instead, leaving us in a position somewhat akin to gorillas dismissing early hominids because they can't even grow a full back of majestic silver hair.

AI limitations go well beyond simply not fitting in as humans. Virtually anything we value in real life will be accomplished better by a below-average human than by an AI. AI agents, given scaffolding that allows them more human reasoning (long-term memory storage, frequent reminders of their objective, plugins that give them access to the internet etc.) are generally pretty useless and incapable of solving even very basic programs. And they usually go mad eventually.

Extending the gorilla-human analogy, AIs are really more like gorillas to us humans. We have much stronger tools available to do most of what they can do (construction equipment, machinery, etc.), and we can't exactly leave them alone to accomplish objectives--even if they could technically be better than humans at some forms of brute labor, for example, they won't understand the objective, or will forget it very quickly and pursue more gorilla things. We're not asking them to enter human society, just asking them to be useful to us on any level besides entertainment.

AIs are moderately more useful than that but still fundamentally extremely limited.

agents, given scaffolding that allows them more human reasoning (long-term memory storage, frequent reminders of their objective, plugins that give them access to the internet etc.) are generally pretty useless and incapable of solving even very basic programs. And they usually go mad eventually.

In fairness to AI, the internet drives many humans mad, too.>

I agree with your main premise, but a nitpick:

For a long time, people considered the Turing Test the gold standard for AI. Later, better benchmarks were developed, but for most laypeople with a passing familiarity with AI, the Turing Test meant something.

I'm not really sure that's true. The Turing Test has been passed in some form or another since 1966, with ELIZA, and I also remember various chat bots on AOL instant messenger doing the same back in the early 2000s. I think that people realized quickly that the Turing test is just a novelty, something thought up by Turing in the early days of computer science that seemed relevant but was quickly proven not to be, and that various technologies could beat it.

ELIZA didn't pass the Turing Test. The Turing Test includes an adversarial element where a person is told that one player is human, and the other a machine, and must determine the difference.

It is not simply temporarily making a person think he is talking to a human when he already assumes that is the case.

It was not possible for computers to fool a median-IQ person in this manner until roughly 2022, give or take.

I don't think it's conclusive that nothing has passed the test before, because I don't think the test is necessarily set in stone. There are variations, and I think it's been romanticized enough that people have moved the goalposts for the test as we progress. I mean some people could be fooled while others are not. Eugene Goostman is another one from 2014 that is said to have passed the test.

budge upwards despite dumping trillions into AI

a) We didn't.

b) it takes time to integrate new tech into business and to figure out how to best use it. Reasoner models are what, 3 months old now?

But I also wouldn't be surprised if life in 2030 is much the same as it is in 2025.

You'll be a little lucky if you're even alive. Pacific War 2: Electric Boogaloo and it's possible thermonuclear complications aside, there's many, many people who think like Ziz, there doesn't seem to be a good way of preventing jailbreaks reliably and making very deadly pathogens that kill in a delayed manner is not hard if you don't care about your own survival that much. And in any case, It looks like for a ~500k$ people will be able to run their own OS AGI in isolation, meaning moderately rich efilist lunatics could run their own shitty biolabs with help and spend as much time figuring out jailbreaks as needed, with no risk of snitching.

there's many, many people who think like Ziz

I put very little weight on this. It seems obvious to me that it's just become a sort of ingroup belief that it is now trendy to have. Ten years ago, it was the opposite. Virtually everyone in AI research found the idea to be ridiculous. Within the last few years, the balance of opinion has changed without any significant relevant new information on what AI will be like.

Every estimate that is actually based on people betting real money or which weights estimates based on the predictive abilities of those providing the estimates gives a very low probability of this happening.

And in any case, It looks like for a ~500k$ people will be able to run their own OS AGI in isolation, meaning moderately rich efilist lunatics could run their own shitty biolabs with help and spend as much time figuring out jailbreaks as needed, with no risk of snitching.

Possible, but also possible that you can just cheaply run massive automated genetic testing on trillions of particles, with billions of sensors located at every major human transit point that can pick up on those pathogens before their delayed death sentence kicks in and before they spread as widely as their proponents hope. It's all fiction for now, we'll see who wins (or perhaps not). I'm pretty optimistic humanity will survive beyond 2030.

There's no known disease that could wipe out all life on earth if every single person got it simultaneously. Prion disease is essentially the only 100% fatal disease and it does not kill quickly enough to stop reproduction.

I'm not a strong domain expert in microbiology, but it strikes me as a not particularly insurmountable challenge to design a pathogen that would kill 99.99% of humans. I think it you gave me maybe $10 million and a way to act without drawing adverse attention, I'd be able to pull it off. (With lots of time reading textbooks or maybe an additional masters)

The primary constraint would be access to a BSL-4 lab, because otherwise the miscreants would probably be the first to die to a prototype of the desired strain.

We already have gain-of-function research, the bare minimum, serial passage isn't that difficult. With expertise roughly equivalent to a Master's student, or a handful, it would be easy enough to gene-edit a virus, cribbing sections from a variety of pathogens till you get one you desire. I see no reason in principle why you couldn't optimize for contagiousness, a long incubation period and massive lethality.

This is easy for most nation-states, but thankfully most of them aren't omnicidal. Very difficult for lone actors, moderately difficult if they have access to scientific labs and domain expertise. I think we've been outright lucky in that no organized group has really tried.

Just because there isn't an existing pathogen that kills all humans (and there isn't, because we're alive and talking), doesn't mean it isn't possible.

I am not qualified to make technical statements about the ease of developing biological weapons but let me apply some outside-the-box thinking.

You are almost certainly wrong about how easy this is.

I am basing this on computer engineers who make statements like "an undergrad could build this in a weekend" and are wrong almost 100% of the time. Things always take longer than you think.

I don't know what specific obstacles you would face on your way to build a bioweapon, but I predict that you don't either. It's not the known unknowns that get you. It's the unknown unknowns.

Please don't try to prove me wrong, though :) And I agree that serious bioweapons are likely within the capacity of major states.

I have a reasonable plan in mind for what I'd do with the $10 million. I'd probably pivot away from my branch of medicine and ingratiate myself into an Infectious Disease department, or just sign up for a masters in biology.* The biggest hurdle would be the not getting caught part, but there's an awful amount of Legitimate Biology you can do that helps the cause, and ways to launder bad intent. Just look at apologia for gain of function.

There's also certainly Knightian uncertainty involved, but there are bounds to how far you can go while pointing to unknown unknowns. I don't think I'd need $1 billion to do it, as I'm confident it couldn't be done $3.50 and a petri-dish.

And whatever the actual cost and intellectual horsepower + domain knowledge is, it only tends downwards, and fast!

*If you can't beat disease, join them

You could create something like that, tge hard part is spreading it. The reason that Covid was a hard nut to crack as far as stopping the spread was that it was pretty mild for most people. In fact if it had come out in the 1970s before we had the ability to track it and ID it and before we had the internet for remote work and online shopping, it would have probably gone unnoticed except that it was a “bad flu year” and there’d be a lot of elderly dead people. People would have felt fine to go to work or hang around other people so it’s easy to spread. But a virus that kills you doesn’t spread as much because dying people aren’t inclined to go to work, school or shop at Walmart. People get the death virus, feel like crap, go to the doctor get admitted to the hospital and die there. No one outside of that household gets it because once you have it you’re too sick to go anywhere. AIDS is an exception but only because the incubation phase is so long — you can have and spread AIDS for years before getting sick.

The hard part is what I was alluding to, when I mentioned that during the gene-editing, you could copy and paste sections of genomes from unrelated pathogens. Nature already does this, but to a limited extent (bacteria can share DNA, viral replication often incorporates bits of the host or previous viral DNA still lurking there).

I expect that a competent actor could merge properties like:

  1. Can spread through aerosols (influenza or rhinoviri)

  2. Avoids detection by the immune system, or has a minimal prodrome that looks like Generic Illness (early HIV infection)

  3. Massive lethality (HIV or a host of other diseases, not just restricted to viruses)

The design space pretty much contains anything that can code for proteins! There's no fundamental reason that a disease can't both be extremely lethal and have incubation periods long enough for it to be widespread. The only reason, as far as I can see, for why we don't have this is because nobody has been insane (and resourceful) enough to try. Holding the former constant, the resource requirement is dropping precipitously by the year. Anyone can order a gene editing kit off ebay, and the genetic code of many pathogens are available online. The thing that remains expensive is a proper BSL-4 lab, to ensure time to tinker without releasing a half-baked product. But with AI assistance, the odds of early failure are dropping rapidly. You might be able to do a one-off print of the Perfect Pathogen, and as long as you're willing to die, spread it widely.

Sure, but everything you describe here are things that

  1. you don't need AI for
  2. AI actually mitigates against considerably

a long incubation period

This is a huge problem for ending life on Earth; living is 100% fatal but humans keep having kids. If you set an incubation period that is too long, then people can just post live through it. I also think a long incubation period would dramatically raise the chances that your murdercritter mutates to a less harmful form.

Just because there isn't an existing pathogen that kills all humans (and there isn't, because we're alive and talking)

Well, prion disease may be associated with spiroplasma bacterial infection, but it still hasn't killed all humans.

I think it's far from clear that AI mitigates the issue more than it currently exacerbates. I'm in agreement that it's already technically possible, and we're only preserved by the modest sanity of nations and a lack of truly motivated and resource-imbued bad actors.

In a world with ubiquitous AI surveillance, environmental monitoring and lock-downs of the kind of biological equipment that modern labs can currently buy without issue, it would clearly be harder to cook up a world-ending pathogen.

We don't live in that world.

We currently reside in one where LLMs already possess the requisite knowledge to aid a human bad actor in following through with such a plan. There are jailbroken models that would provide the necessary know-how. You could even phrase it as benign questioning, a lot of advanced biotechnology is inherently dual-use, even GOF adherents claim it has benefits, though most would say it doesn't match the risks.

This is a huge problem for ending life on Earth; living is 100% fatal but humans keep having kids. If you set an incubation period that is too long, then people can just post live through it. I also think a long incubation period would dramatically raise the chances that your murdercritter mutates to a less harmful form.

In a globalized world, a long incubation period could merely be a matter of months. A bad actor could book a dozen intercontinental flights and start a chain reaction. You're correct that over time, a pathogen tends to mutate towards being less lethal towards its hosts, but this does not strike me as happening quickly enough to make a difference in an engineered strain. The Bubonic Plague ended largely because all susceptible humans died and the remaining 2/3rds of the population had some degree of innate and then acquired immunity.

Look at HIV, it's been around for half a century, but is no less lethal without medication than when it started out (as far as I'm aware).

Prions would not be the go-to. Too slow, both in terms of spread and time to kill. Good old viruses would be the first port of call.

We don't live in that world.

It kinda seems like we do live in a world where any attempt to kill everyone with a deadly virus would involving using AI to try to find ways to develop a vaccine or other treatment of some kind.

Good old viruses would be the first port of call.

They mutate so rapidly, though, and humans have survived even the worst of the worst (such as rabies).

Not that I am not saying you couldn't kill a lot of people with an infectious agent. You could kill a lot of people with good old-fashioned small pox! I just think the vision of a world sterilized of human life is far-fetched.

It's ironic, though - the people who are most worried about unaligned AI are the people who are most likely to use future AI training content to spell out plausible ways AI could kill everyone on Earth, which means that granting unaligned agentic AI is a threat for the purposes of argument, increases the risks of unaligned agentic AI attempting to use a viral murder weapon regardless of whether or not that is actually reliable or effective.

Sorry, side tangent. I don't take the RISKS of UNALIGNED AI nearly as seriously as most of the people on this board, but I do sort of hope for the sake of hedging those people are considering implementing the unaligned AI deterrence plans I came up with after reflecting on it for 5 minutes instead of along with posting HERE IS HOW TO KILL EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING over and over again on the Internet :p

ETA: not trying to launch a personal attack on you (or anyone on the board) to be clear, AFAIK none of y'all wrote the step-for-step UNALIGNED AI TAKES OVER THE WORLD guide that I read somewhere a while back. (But if you DID, I'm not trying to start a beef, I just think it's ironic!)

It kinda seems like we do live in a world where any attempt to kill everyone with a deadly virus would involving using AI to try to find ways to develop a vaccine or other treatment of some kind.

The downside to this is having to hope that whatever mitigation is in place is robust and effective enough to make a difference by the time the outbreak is detected! The odds of this aren't necessarily terrible, but you want it to have come to that?

It's ironic, though - the people who are most worried about unaligned AI are the people who are most likely to use future AI training content to spell out plausible ways AI could kill everyone on Earth, which means that granting unaligned agentic AI is a threat for the purposes of argument, increases the risks of unaligned agentic AI attempting to use a viral murder weapon regardless of whether or not that is actually reliable or effective.

Sorry, side tangent. I don't take the RISKS of UNALIGNED AI nearly as seriously as most of the people on this board, but I do sort of hope for the sake of hedging those people are considering implementing the unaligned AI deterrence plans I came up with after reflecting on it for 5 minutes instead of along with posting HERE IS HOW TO KILL EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING over and over again on the Internet :p

I expect hope than a misaligned AI competent enough to do this would be intelligent enough to come up with such an obvious plan, regardless of how often it was discussed in niche internet forums.

How would you stop it? The existing scrapes of internet text suffice. To censor it from the awareness of a model would require stripping out knowledge of loads of useful biology, as well as the obvious fact that diseases are a thing, and that they reliably kill people. Something that wants to kill people would find that connection as obvious as 2+2=4, even if you remove every mention of bioweapons from the training set. If it wasn't intelligent enough to do so, it was never a threat.

Everything I've said would be dead-simple, I haven't gone into any detail that a biology undergrad or a well-read nerd might not come up with. As far as I'm concerned, it's sufficient to demonstrate the plausibility of my arguments without empowering adversaries in any meaningful way. You won't catch me sharing a .txt file with the list of codons necessary for Super Anthrax to win an internet argument.

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My really vague understanding is that long incubation times give the immune system more time to catch the infection early, which doesn't matter as much when it's very new and nobody has antibodies.

In theory long incubation + 100% mortality rate seems like it would take out a good chunk of the population in the first wave, but in practice people would just Madagascar through it.

Oh sure, but depending on the agent (particularly if it is viral, right?) if you're spreading it to billions of people you're introducing a lot of room for it to gain mutations that might make it less deadly. At least that would be my guess.

In theory long incubation + 100% mortality rate seems like it would take out a good chunk of the population.

Definitely seems plausible. Hopefully instead of using AI to create MURDERVIRUSES people will use it to scan wastewater for signs of said MURDERVIRUSES.

And killing somebody after infection is the easy part - somehow spreading to "every single person", or even a significant fraction, is a million times harder. People really underestimate how hard it is to build superweapons that can end civilization (it's easy in the movies!). I think if there are going to be problems with widespread unfiltered AI, it'll be because a large number of unstable individuals become individually capable of killing thousands of people, rather than a few people managing to kill billions.

Yes. And if AI is All That I imagine it will actually be fairly good at mitigating bioweapons - moreso than other weapons of mass destruction.

a) We didn't.

You don't think $1 trillion has been spent globally on AI so far? I think you're wrong. Revenue of NVDA alone is $60 billion in 2024 (figure 95+% of that is AI spend). But that's just a small percentage of the overall cost, which includes energy, servers, and most importantly salaries. Probably the total spend is less than $1 trillion per year right now, but inching up towards it. Cumulative spend should be well over $1 trillion.

b) it takes time to integrate new tech into business and to figure out how to best use it. Reasoner models are what, 3 months old now?

You'll be a little lucky if you're even alive [in 2030]

It seems like this is a pretty tight path between literally zero economic value in 2025 and apocalypse before 2030. I'm not saying you will be wrong, only that you would be wrong to have any confidence in these predictions. There's still value in Bayesian priors, such as "most years don't have nuclear war" and "no one has created a lab-grown virus that has killed people".

To the common layperson, LLMs haven't really advanced that much since 2022 or 2023. Sure, each new model might have fancy graphs that show it's better than ever before, but it always feels disappointingly iterative when normal people get their hands on it. The only few big leaps have come from infrastructure surrounding it that lets us use it in novel ways, e.g. Deep Research is pretty good from what I've heard. DR isn't revolutionary or anything, it just takes what we already had, gives it more processor cycles, and has it produce something with lots of citations which is genuinely useful for some things. I expect further developments will be like that. It's like how electricity was sort of a flop in industry until we figured out things like the assembly line.

"AGI" is basically a meme at this point. Nobody can agree on a definition, so we might have had it back in 2022... or we might never have it, based on whatever definition you use. It's a silly point of reference.

Why aren’t Democrats physically occupying government buildings?

I’ve been reading and watching a lot of left-wing content lately. A big topic of conversation is what exactly Democrats could do to slow down or stop Trump. The “mainstream” opinion is that Democrats can’t really do anything except sue, since they control zero branches of federal government. I disagree.

DC voted 90% for Kamala. Pretty much every federal employee is in danger of losing their job if Trump successfully consolidates power. They could collectively decide to simply not comply with Trump’s orders. He would have to blow all of his political capital on calling in the national guard while his allegedly illegal orders get litigated.

Look at this video from the other week purporting to show Congressional Democrats being “physically blocked” from entering the Department of Education. They aren’t even really trying to get inside. They could totally storm in if they wanted!

Has anyone chained themselves to their desk? Or better yet, to one of these mystical “servers” containing so much sensitive personal data? We saw more effective civil disobedience over Gaza than we are seeing over our own government.

I have two theories for this incompetence, but am eager to hear more:

  1. All of the organizations and groups that typically organize and support these types of protests blew their entire budget on the presidential campaign. Then, money dried up as rich donors feared getting on Trump’s bad side.

  2. After January 6, the Democrats focused their self-image around the idea of “procedure” and “doing things the right way”. This calcified to such an extent that anyone in a position of leadership is now incapable of forming and executing plans which do not conform with the collective PMC understanding of what is allowed or “proper”.

For your typical government employee/Democrat activist you underestimate how much privilege they are used to. Even judicious prosecutions (think 1/10th of J6ers) would be considered incredibly oppressive compared to what they have received for stunts in the past. With the precedent of J6 hanging over their heads plus the new AG likely being quite happy to take up the good cases, such people are looking at the prospect of actual consequences for such an action.

For a class that has been exempt from consequences for most/all of their lives that must seem like an extremely daunting risk.

On top of that, would such a thing be effective? Unlikely. DOGE and associated efforts are working (kinda) largely because they are popular. Defending unpopular programs with unpopular tactics isn't usually that great of a political tactic. I can work for a while if the media is running cover, as with the BLM summer riots, but without control of Twitter, and the rest of social media somewhat freed from oppressive left wing pressure from inside the DOJ and IC, they cant guarantee anything like that sort of propaganda control.

Maybe they all live in a different cheaper state now due to WFH.

What do you think they'd be accomplishing by such protests? Surely protesting Trump shutting down the Department of Education by occupying the Department of Education so it can't function would be counter-productive. Are you suggesting the individual federal employees that are fired... keep working, treating their firing as illegal and asserting they still have jobs?

There's certainly been calls from the left for the Democrats to do more. But obstruction and destruction of the federal government is what their opponents want; it very unclear what they could do that wouldn't just be helping the Republicans. Maybe physically obstructing DOGE employees and thereby forcing arrests, to make it look more serious? That's still just handing more power over to the Republicans (by reducing Democratic congressional votes), as discussed down-thread.

keep working, treating their firing as illegal and asserting they still have jobs?

The "I'm out of work, but I identify as an employee of the federal government" jokes write themselves.

They won't fight back without power for the same reason that they wouldn't fight when they had power. "They" (the former establishment) are a bloated, hollowed out husk. They lack the ability or the consensus to take decisive action. I say this as someone that would have partially preferred that they stayed in power just for the stability it would have provided (Trump's actions will have huge unforeseen consequences - both positive and negative, even his most ardent supporters have to admit this). A competent "They" would have thrown the full power of the state against Trump the second he lost power the first time. Either that or used media manipulation to turn the page on him. In the end, they lacked the resolve to do either. They waited until it was clear he wasn't going away on his own, then launched a last minute, poorly orchestrated series of legal assaults that did little more than boost his popularity. Things that are too weak to defend themselves die. That's the way of the world.

A competent "They" would have thrown the full power of the state against Trump the second he lost power the first time.

Again, they did. They took thier shot (both literally and figuratively) and missed.

The cynical answer would be that with USAID gutted and the FBI/DHS under the microscope, the funding and institutional support for "activists" is suddenly a lot less forthcoming.

There may have been a logic to the Blitzkrieg beyond what we can obviously see.

So the entirety of the “cathedral” that governed all of western civilization was reliant on a few billy from the US foreign aid budget and the FBI? Seems unlikely.

Why is it so unlikely? It seems that a large amount, perhaps even a majority, of the Democrats advocacy apparatus is at least partially funded by the US government. That plus donors still feeling the sting of dumping record breaking amounts of money into the Harris campaign debacle probably means the number of paid protestors is fairly low right now.

One thing I have been disappointment by is the lack of the "center left" pundits like MattY and @TracingWoodgrains writing long thinkpieces expressing outright embarrassment about how this whole apparatus of grifting off the feds is to them and their general movement.

Throw in The State Department, The Department of Education, Health and Human Services, The National Science Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, plus all the other grantmaking institutions in the federal government I can’t think of, and you can start to see how the power brokering and control of elite opinion might suddenly become a lot less lucrative once the money spigot shuts off.

I’m still surprised they aren’t fighting harder to keep the spigot on.

Because it would look (and be shamelessly) corrupt. When you shine a light in a dark place, the cockroaches scurry - not from any intellect, but from billions of years of survival instinct. Being quiet and hoping the bear eats you last is the play here: making a scene just makes you a priority target for the vengeful Trump administration.

I think watching the democrats, it’s fairly clear that they don’t really believe the stuff they’re telling the public. If they believe that this is the prelude to a coup, or tge destruction of these institutions as a permanent thing, or that Trump is setting up a fascist system, they’d absolutely be doing those kinds of things. They’d absolutely filibuster in congress so no congressional actions would be possible. What they’re actually doing is … nothing. And the mismatch is pretty obvious. Especially when you compare the actions of people in the know (administrative people and Congress) with the people outside the system who believe the rhetoric they used.

It’s certainly possible that they’re wrong and we actually are poised on the brink of a fascist dictatorship. But when the people in the know are acting like it’s all fine, I can’t take the idea seriously.

they’d absolutely be doing those kinds of things.

I think they’d actually turncoat very fast.

Or they’d be quitting and running. Of course they’re not doing that either.

I think there’d be plenty of warning to flee to Canada(and after that, further abroad) much closer to the time it actually became necessary if so.

Alternate hypothesis, that I simply want to be true, and it's pure vibes.

The Democrats know they have committed horrendous crimes. There is no longer any uniparty firewall between Trump and the proof of their crimes. No former CIA backstabbing Mike Pompeo as secretary of state. No more hostile FBI and other intelligence agencies that just want to investigate Trump and sabotage his admin versus validating the claims he makes about others. Even the DOJ seems more willing to bring the full weight of the federal government against his enemies, in much the same way they were brought against him, and it's not unlikely they'll actually find something. They might even investigate the claims of voter fraud versus dismissing them out of hand like Barr famously did.

A possibility exists where Democrats know exactly what they've done, and also know there is little that can save them at this point. They're in shock, and they are going through the motions. The anxiety of when the hammer will finally drop is killing them.

At least that's my fan fiction. Could probably use more guns and tits.

I get the impression that the election results have been deflating for the Democrats, not just because they lost, but because of who they lost.

Democrats REALLY liked the idea that, regardless of the vote totals, the voters who would make up the future (minorities and young people) were overwhelmingly on their side. And so losing young men, and having a severe dent put in Hispanic votes, has been really demoralizing and disorienting.

And it's specifically demoralizing in the context of taking radical action. "We have to take direct action because, even though old white Fox News voters have a slight voting edge, our base of marginalized voters, full of righteous fury, demand it - they can't wait any longer!" is a great motivator to direct action for a certain kind of progressive. "White middle aged upper middle class Karens are super pissed and are going to take to the streets after being repudiated by their sons", on the other hand, is... I don't know. Whatever it is, it's not at all the same kind of moral justification story.

All of which is to say, I think its finally sinking in that certain aspects of left-of-center radicalism are REALLY unpopular to a much bigger part of the voting base than had been previously accepted, and its unpopular with groups that left-of-center types don't feel as comfortable writing off. And yet those same people are still, also, uncomfortable with crossing the radicals in their coalition, too. So they are left in a bind about how to respond to the current moment.

Also, I think there is also a sense in those circles that their media / communication situation is much more damaged than they had realized. To make protesting valuable, you need favorable coverage that reaches the kinds of audiences you care about, and that requires a favorable media apparatus with serious reach. I get the sense that Democratic thought leaders, right now, have a sense that they've lost that, with legacy media having less and less reach and less and less trust, and with new social media like Tik-Tok and X and huge bro podcasts being less than sympathetic at this point. And worse still, the corners of social media that are more sympathetic to them, the corners that actually have audiences, are also often steeped in the Pro-Palestine / Anti-Israel stuff that massively fractures the Democratic coalition by driving Jews crazy.

Those are some thoughts, anyway.

I think you’re right that losing the emerging democratic majority is deflating but it’s also just that democrats don’t have a single ideology. Chuck Schumer no doubt is theoretically very progressive but probably he’s not entirely comfortable with trans. The radical activist wing is not able to execute radical solutions but that might be specifically the radical activist wing.

Chuck Schumer no doubt is theoretically very progressive

Said no one, ever.

Chuck Schumer is a generic liberal who has repeatedly acted to limit the influence of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

And it's specifically demoralizing in the context of taking radical action.

This would imply that they took the sort of radical actions OP is describing in response to Trump's first term, where he didn't have this sort of delegitimizing gain amongst important demographics and Russia hysteria was at its peak.

I don't think they risked felonies even then.

This would imply that they took the sort of radical actions OP is describing in response to Trump's first term.

They did.

Trump's first term was typifified by a series of escalations by the progressive wing of the Democratic party starting with disrupting senate hearings and and government officials tweeting about joining the #resistance in 2016, and culminating with the "firey but mostly peaceful" protests and an election that a plurality of Americans are convinced was rigged of 2020.

A lot of these things were radical if viewed from the outside, but didn't put them directly at risk.

I would think the employed and well-off progressives were the ones providing cover in the NYT by shutting down things like Tom Cotton calling for a national response, not the actual people burning down cities (and even there there was more cover because some local authorities simply refused to use a strong hand).

OP is talking about them risking felony charges from a Trump-led government by trespassing on federal property or trying to bodily prevent Trump-appointed people from access. It's one thing to bully editors from your company discord for covering riots. But that is a different level of skin in the game.

The 70 year-old politicos aren't going to give anyone a chance to arrest them. The middle class bureaucrats aren't going to risk jail either without some cover.

The actual play would be to stoke enough rage amongst the general public and underclass for them to do it or provide cover for people with more to lose, at which point people can come out with the excuses used during BLM/Luigi frenzy: obviously it isn't ideal but there's a legitimate reason behind all of this we need to talk about, "language of the unheard" and all of that.

The problem, I think, is that significant swathes of the public simply don't care that much about minutiae around government departments. What this election seems to have shaken is the notion that these sorts of people actually represent the groups in whose name they seize power . Apparently it's taking them a while to find the rhythm again.

Even the drugged-out lumpenproles taking to the streets in 2020 were mostly acting because they knew they had official cover. Police that wouldn’t open fire on them, shady mystery funds that would immediately post their bail, political DAs that would recommend sub-minimum sentences, and a news media that would paint them as heroes. And I suspect many of them were receiving a salary for it.

You forgot 3.- USAID was paying the bills for left wing protestors, they’re incapable of being effective without it.

Of course, realistically, there’s tons of factors involved. Musk locked a bunch of these people out of buildings, for one. Lots of tactics short of arrest to use to break up these sclerotic and uncoordinated attempts.

Occupying government buildings to coerce a political outcome was merely planned by the Proud Boys and they got decades in jail for it.

They're only out now due to pardon, the laws are still on the books and available to the Trump DoJ.

“Man carrying things” parodying the vibe change:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LWPhZu0EeXg

Then there was this posted by Cenk Uygur (the not so young anymore Young Turks guy):

https://x.com/cenkuygur/status/1892057431179477251

Yesterday, @nytimes had a story about Democratic donors fleeing the party. That explains why the Democratic leaders look like deer in the headlights. Since the donors are gone, there's no one left to give them orders. So, they're like robots frozen in place, awaiting commands.

Didn’t have time to find the nyt story yet.

Pretty sure he is referencing this article. The Angle:

  • Donors believe money was not well spent in 2024
  • Donors are reevaluating the party and its priorities ("donate to people, not party")
  • Advocacy orgs are cited as making cuts and layoffs. The Times believes these would be spearheading resistance to Trump otherwise.
  • Major donors fear retribution from the Trump administration.

The last point is highlighted throughout.

Advocacy orgs are cited as making cuts and layoffs. The Times believes these would be spearheading resistance to Trump otherwise.

There might be something to this. Channeling Scott from his "Dark Money in Almonds" piece, it's kind of remarkable how small amounts of money in politics make a big difference. Kamala's campaign was uniquely wasteful, but she still only spent a couple billion.

So I think there might be something to the USAID cuts being able to kneecap advocacy.

Let's say that $50-100 billion annually leaked from the federal government into partisan NGOs. That money might be earmarked for nonpartisan things, but it freed up other money for the NGO to pay protestors, buy ads on social media, etc... Even $1 or $2 billion spent on those activities might move the needle a lot.

Now, those same NGOs need every dollar they have to avoid laying off staff. The money for paid agitation is just gone, kaput.

I read you article

Much of the concern centers on legislation in Congress that would remove the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups that are found to be supporting terrorist organizations.

I partly understand the concern. Legislation may be much different from how it is described. Nevertheless "tax breaks for terrorists" is bad optics. Does any-one know the story behind this? The article discusses various groups

Groups that support L.G.B.T.Q. rights, promote gender equity and champion other progressive causes have cut staffing and announced that longtime leaders are leaving.

but doesn't join the dots on how accusations of "supporting terrorist organizations" could be weaponized against the groups mentioned. Perhaps there are other groups, not mentioned, that are more at risk?

Based on the groups involved and the act, my guess is that people in those organizations had some dealings with Palestinian charities. Being charitable, my guess would be that they did less than enough investigation into them, and are realizing that they might be in big trouble.

After January 6, the Democrats focused their self-image around the idea of “procedure” and “doing things the right way”. This calcified to such an extent that anyone in a position of leadership is now incapable of forming and executing plans which do not conform with the collective PMC understanding of what is allowed or “proper”.

I think this is part of it, but I also think there is just a lack of physical courage among most people on the left (and people on the right, to be fair.)

I am genuinely not trying to caricature or strawman the left, but they do tend to attract a more effeminate, intellectual type of person as of late. Note that this CERTAINLY isn't true of the left historically, but seems to be the tendency today. Young men are at historic lows for the Democratic party, the group who tends to have the most physical aggression and willingness to go occupy a building or storm a castle. Combine this with the fact that physical courage seems to be dropping across the board, and you have people who simply aren't willing to put themselves at risk or take bold physical action in this way.

Combine this with the fact that physical courage seems to be dropping across the board

"Lying flat" is a type of strike/collective bargaining. It's not generally recognized as such because the people in power and the people who are thought to be on the side of collective bargaining are the same people, which is why China tries to suppress it.

the group who tends to have the most physical aggression and willingness to go occupy a building or storm a castle

Young men need to have an incentive to do that. They haven't had such a thing for 2 generations now- things have gone downhill for them since the '80s due mostly to enclosure by the old (through various justifications- environmentalism and safetyism being the most popular). In places that have less enclosure, people are doing better- TFRs are higher, wages are higher/costs of living are lower, the police force actually functions, military recruitment remains very high, R&D budgets are high, etc.

Now, young women generally benefit from that because young men will generally compete and distinguish themselves more for access to young women. But they've just discovered that the reward they offer to do those things- that being themselves- is insufficient. Their social credit card has been declined, and if you've spent the last 20-50 years forming your entire identity around having limitless social credit (and men fighting for the privilege to pick up your tab)?
Yeah, I can see how that could be existentially demoralizing. The lies stop being fun to tell when people stop believing in them.

Combine this with the fact that physical courage seems to be dropping across the board

The old also actively punish young men for exercising this virtue. If you remove them and create institutions that reward this it'll come back, but that's going to take some time and require investment.

Writing in 1844, Karl Marx describes the power of money sardonically

The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet.

Time has concealed the meaning of twenty-four feet, but Marx has already quoted from Goethe's Faust

“Six stallions, say, I can afford,
Is not their strength my property?
I tear along, a sporting lord,
As if their legs belonged to me.”

so we know what he is getting at. He needs young men to join his anti-capitalist revolution, so he makes it clear that Capitalism involves the young man standing in the gutter while his girlfriend rides by in a six horse carriage, being pawed by the ugly rich old man who owns it/her. Such powerful rabble rousing! Marx knew human nature and how love could be used to harness young men to his cause.

But 1844 is a long time ago. Would Marx use the same trick today? I doubt it would work. He talks to red-pilled young men and they tell Marx the received wisdom of today's youth: "She's not yours, its just your turn." In today's hook up culture, there is lust, but not love. Marx hoped that young men would die for love. But nobody dies for lust.

My social credit card has been declined? That’s news to me. Do you have evidence that young men compete and distinguish themselves for access to me?

Do you have evidence that young men compete and distinguish themselves for access to me?

No disrespect intended, but this is common knowledge to the point that it defies belief that anyone would not know this (kind of like if you asked someone to provide evidence that people die if they stop breathing). If you're young enough you may not have realized it yet, I suppose. But young men spend vast quantities of effort to try to get attention (and especially sex) from women. It's the #1 thing on their minds, and a lot of things they do can be traced back to "showing off for the girls".

Or, as Chris Rock memorably put it: "Women are offered dick every day. Every [woman] gets offered dick at least three times a week. Three times a day, shit! That’s right, every time a man’s being nice to you … all he’s doing is offering dick. That’s all it is. ‘Can I get that for you? – How about some dick?’ ‘Could I help you with that? – Could I help you to some dick? – Do you need some dick?’" Yes he's a comedian and he's playing it for laughs, but it works because both he and the audience know how true it is.

Yes he's a comedian and he's playing it for laughs, but it works because both he and the audience know how true it is.

What else are they going to offer? Pussy?

(Actually, come to think of it, there are some exceptions to this: cougars are what women-offering-dick looks like, and "male-offering-pussy" is the trap archetype. 'Masculinity' and 'femininity' are derivatives of this, but they mean different things to each gender.)

My impression is that she's a trans woman. Things like putting "and no I am not a man" in her bio, and talking explicitly online about her UTI, and the proportion of posts about gender vs everything else.

On the other hand, no, being offered "dick" three times a day isn't exactly a positive experience, even if accompanied by some other performances.

I also clocked that. Normally, I don't think it matters what your identify is, only the content of your thought.

But if you're going to make your whole thing about gender, I do think it matters a lot whether you are trans or not. Especially if you're going to ask for "sources" that men want sex from women. The experience of a trans woman is not the same as a biological woman. It's just not.

Who knew my biggest struggle on this site wasn’t debating hobby horses it was convincing people I’m a biological woman. I even put it in my name to make it easy. If you want a picture of my tampon stash all you gotta do is ask.

Strangely, those are the sorts of details that suggested trans to me.

(I have given birth to three children, could probably have another, and have no tampon stash)

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I want to make a Yaniv joke, but it's probably against the rules somehow -- so let's just say that on the modern internet, not only does nobody know that you're a dog, but nobody can be sure that you aren't a dog either.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg

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I even put it in my name to make it easy.

There are a surprising number of corners of the internet now where P('biological woman' | 'explicitly and visibly states is a woman') is lower than P('biological woman' | 'NOT(explicitly and visibly states is a woman)').

(Alas, it is essentially impossible to gather proper statistics on this.)

I’ve been called a lot of things, but being trans has gotta be a first. That was a good giggle for me.

Edit: Also hey you try going five days in a row with barely any sleep from feeling like you gotta spend a penny 24/7 and NOT talk about it.

It wasn't based on much, so I'm willing to believe I'm just wrong about that.

I can assure you I have 100% organic home-grown cage-free open-field breasts.

I mean, I didn't say it was. Just saying everyone i know (women included) is well aware that young men spend crazy amounts of effort on catching the eye of young women. Whether it's sexual or not (it isn't always), young men are thirsty for female attention and chase it very, very hard.

The fact that their first instinct to oppose him is to open up a lawsuit is telling. It may have been more effective in a previous era, but it relied on a high-trust society which saw the institutions of government as legitimate. They really have absorbed the Asimovian morality of 'violence is the last resort of the incompetent', but hoping that historical forces give you victory isn't strategy. It's not even tactics. It's assuming that the universe will award you with moral victories without developing virtue.

I imagine that filing a lawsuit to overturn an executive order is a delicate business. If an ordinary lawyer tries it, their case will be promptly dismissed. Only the top, expensive lawyers get hearings for fancy legal theories leading to restraining orders against government actions.

Expensive lawyers. These lawsuits may become rare if the dark money from USAID and elsewhere dries up.

Has anyone chained themselves to their desk? Or better yet, to one of these mystical “servers” containing so much sensitive personal data? We saw more effective civil disobedience over Gaza than we are seeing over our own government.

This kind of behavior would require actually committing to have one's own skin in the game, quite literally. That is not something most people who do white collar work are accustomed to or desiring of. If they lose their comfy government jobs, maybe they have to go on welfare or whatever at the worst case - though that seems likely to be rare, and I'd guess the median and modal result is finding a less desirable job that pays less/offers less security/offers less status. If they storm the DOE or chain themselves to their desk, the worst case is getting killed while being arrested, and I'd guess the median and modal result is spending some time in jail or even prison. The proportion of people who work comfy white collar jobs who believe so much in their principles that they would risk the latter when the former is right there as an option seems likely to be very small, from my experience living among such people.

maybe they have to go on welfare

You misunderstand. The government job is the welfare.

It is in the best interests of the people receiving the welfare that a significant fraction of the public perceives them to have been removed from the dole without cause to maximize the chance of being back on the dole if and when welfare is expanded again. That's a much harder sell if they're removed for cause.

This is instinctual behavior, which is why it doesn't require any tho(ugh)t-leader on Twitter to say "just comply with it, don't resist". Compare parents who tend to be cowed into submission should CPS threaten to take their children away.

This is also partially why removing the probationary welfare recipients is probably a sounder tactic than it would seem at first- people who aren't used to it yet are [politically] easier to wean off of it than people that are.
And the people that have been there for a long time aren't going to be employable once they're fired because, like a coal miner in his late 40s, his skills won't transfer no matter how smugly you say "learn to code"... which is why, when the mine's shutting down, you offer the motivated ones several months' severance so that they may buy and attend training for a different job, move to another area, or leave the workforce entirely- the other reason being that, because they're competent, they can throw their weight around much more effectively if the reason the mine's closing is a political decision on the owner's part; if you're going to purge a group, and the group will 100% find out before it occurs, it's best to offer favorable terms of surrender to the ones that could make a real mess before the purge occurs (obviously blind-siding everyone costs less, but democratically-elected politicians can't do that for obvious reasons).

Compare parents who tend to be cowed into submission should CPS threaten to take their children away.

Or use as a threat ‘CPS says we’re hitting you too much, you’d better start behaving or they’ll take you away.’.

I have a feeling this calculus is understood by the Trump team and is the fulcrum of their attack: ain't nobody gonna do nothin about it!

theory 2 might hold weight if they believe any kind of storming of a building is now an insurrection

I feel like that would fit my theor that the Dems have been hoisting flags and wearing belief that force them into ever smaller corners. They can't act because they, through their own speech, have outlawed the beliefs needed to act.

Republicans in Congress have such a slim majority right now that Democrats cannot afford anyone to be arrested for any period of time. They already have to convince 5+ Republicans to get a majority, they don’t want to sabotage themselves and make it 6+ because one of their own congressmen pushed through the National Guard to get into his office and was arrested on the spot. Republicans are counting on them to resist so that they can lock up the congressmen and drag out the proceeding legal fight so the congressmen are too busy trying to get out of jail and can’t vote on legislation.

I highly doubt the Republican party wants to actually lock up Congressmen, seems like this would be a huge waste of political capital. Well perhaps they want to, but they know it would be a foolish move strategically.

This seems like a bit of a paranoid fantasy from my perspective. If anything the Republicans have been far less willing to use lawfare against their opponents than the last Democratic president.

They would cite Santos precedent and kick the person out of congress (which would be justified)

The Republican party released a video of migrants in chains and called it ASMR. In my opinion it’s not a reach that the cruelty can stretch to that, and that they believe they have the political capital to do it, seeing as, in my opinion, their base has supported every cruel executive order made so far.

link? (not a pun)

Democrats have such a slim majority in Congress right now

Democrats are in minority in both the House (215 D / 220 R) and the Senate (47 D / 53 R).

Your observation still stands.

Oops mb

Umm….republicans have the majority (unless the joke is that some rep are actually Dems)

I guess that’s “the joke”? In my opinion, the Democratic strategy is that not all Republicans are the same. The Republican majority is slim, so there is wiggle room convince only a few to not vote on legislation.

There's an argument that Trump/Elon have disrupted the left's nexus of command and control: a combination of social media/mainstream media/NGOs who could be mobilized to astroturf protests or to fan the flames of existing protests. In this model, a "movement" might start on Twitter with a hashtag #DCsitin and then mainstream media would report on it favorably, people would turn out in the streets (including paid protestors), and the government would feel pressured to do something to make it go away. Some have called this the "color revolution" playbook. I think this is a bit conspiratorial but maybe descriptive of a system that evolved organically.

Note: On a meta level, sorry for posting my top-level comment right after yours. When I see a stale front page I sometimes get motivated to write something. Next time, I'll double-check that no one posted while I was writing.

I mean, this is very much the thesis that Mike Benz keeps putting forward. USAID and it's network of NGOs functioned to almost completely manufacture reality. He's so far down that rabbit hole, he believes that almost everything we perceive about politics and where the consensus lies is a carefully constructed lie by USAID and NGOs.

I had an article once, I can't find it now, talking about the nuts and bolts of how these protests work. Which is basically that a network of like minded (the article doesn't go into funding) activist embedded in various organizations start working the phones and collaborating with each other, and they do so with such speed and behind the scenes deft, the entire effort seems natural. The "community organizer" calls their local representative who calls a friendly reporter. At some point the perfect "victim" with a sob story is selected. Sometimes it's even true! The reporter is networking with the totally doesn't exist anymore Journo Pros mailing list to get their little set piece national coverage. A local affiliate goes out to get the B-Role footage that every cable news network is going to use. And the key to this whole thing is speed. Within 4-8 hours of whatever event occurred that could boost a narrative it's been done. A layman might think it was totally organic, when in reality it was just a rolodex of numbers.

And possibly a bunch of USAID funding...

IF USAID funding was such a key part in all this, it being cut off says a lot about why the Democrats seem completely adrift and feckless. During the Summer of Floyd, Maxine Water's used to be able to nakedly call for violence in the streets, and next thing you knew a mob was harassing random diners in Baltimore. Now, it's like someone took away whatever causal mechanism turned Democratic politician's speech into flashpoints on the streets and then national news stories that bolstered their narrative.

I mean, maybe the nation just isn't feeling it anymore. Maybe 4 years of Biden's "The adults are back in charge" just destroyed something in people's minds about how responsible D's are versus R's. Maybe the skill level of the D leadership has fallen off a cliff and they forgot how to do this shit. Maybe more than just SV billionaires defected to Trump.

Maybe it was USAID the whole time. It's a convenient explanation.

Whatever it was, it seems like the Democrats have lost their mojo.

The "community organizer" calls their local representative who calls a friendly reporter.

I have started almost completely writing off news stories about filed lawsuits for this reason. The bar to file is so low that except in situationally interesting cases (IMO: raises novel legal questions), I just can't be bothered with "patient says doctor didn't tell them about side effects" or "plane crash survivor sues airline". It genuinely seems to me like many of these articles are really (goodeffective) lawyers exercising networks with journalists to put public pressure on their counterparties to settle, or, less often, to raise the prominence of their clients. It'd be one thing if the articles had substantive analysis and outside facts, but they typically lazily repeat one party's claims from the filing.

The most hilarious theory I’ve heard is that Gaza caused democrats to purge the Jews from their leadership and replace them with incompetent black women. Don’t know if it’s true though.

That sounds like nonsense. The Democratic organizational base has been Black women for decades. That's why the party hasn't moved left as much as the very-online contingent of progressives want it to. Those Black women are a lot more conservative (both in the "further right politics" sense and in the "less willing to shake up the status quo" sense).

In other words, Black Women Are Less Likely? (Slate Star Codex, February 2015)

That's why the party hasn't moved left as much as the very-online contingent of progressives want it to. Those Black women are a lot more conservative (both in the "further right politics" sense and in the "less willing to shake up the status quo" sense).

This is news to me, I thought it would have been Black men who'd be the more conservative type.

Maybe the skill level of the D leadership has fallen off a cliff and they forgot how to do this shit.

Speaking of compelling theories...

There's been some chatter going around X about how the Democratic Party is a casualty of Hamas. I think the logic goes something like this:

  1. A large percent of Democratic Party operators are/were high human capital Jews

  2. After 10/7, the left wing of the Democratic Party became anti-Semitic

  3. "Jew" is now a slur in leftists spaces. Jews are denied leadership opportunities or simply leave.

  4. Within the party infrastructure, Jews are replaced with low human capital DEI hires

Result: complete incompetence, Kamala Harris, Karen Bass, etc, etc..

"Jew" is now a slur in leftists spaces. Jews are denied leadership opportunities or simply leave.

The slur is "Zionist" (to gives them the veneer of plausible deniability)

The second half of 3 as well as 4 presuppose that “leftists” control hiring, and promotion to leadership positions within the Democratic Party infrastructure. Is that in fact the case?

In a sense, it's trivially true in that Democrats are the leftist party.

But, yeah, I think there has been a bigger emphasis on DEI over competence within left-ideology. Hard to imagine that doesn't spill over into the party itself.

My point was, there are (as in any big-tent party) multiple wings/factions within the Democrats. The hardcore idpol progressive leftists—the sort who are alleged to be antisemites who care more about DEI bona fides than competence—are one such wing, but there are at least 2 others: the anti-idpol class-first leftists (roughly corresponding to Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren supporters) and, for lack of a better term, “The Blob”, aka the centrist PMC/technocrat wing who may pay lip service to DEI but remain staunchly pro-Israel (basically Clinton and Biden supporters).

It’s not obvious to me that the idpol-left faction has taken over the Democrats to such an extent that they can purge competent Jews as mentioned above.

The black political machine is another important wing for the democrats.

So you have a minor class-first wing, an establishment blob wing, a far left wing, and a black machine politics wing. I’m guessing the blob can’t carry the other three on it’s own.

Man, hearing you break out the various political machines made me wonder how much the other competing rackets in the DNC coalition treat the black political machine. Especially when time after time, under the slightest amount of public exposure, they turn out to be literally retarded.

But instead it got me thinking about how much of politics is just ritual. It doesn't matter that people like the Philadelphia mayor are nakedly retarded. At some point a consultant will give her the magic words that say "I'm electable". The press will go "She said the magic words that make her electable". And all the voters will think to themselves "Well, the priestnews said she said the words that mean I should vote for her". So she's mayor. Apparent illiteracy aside.

And I single the black political machine out for their politicians just nakedly being unable to speak properly, display a 5th grade level of education (see above), or provide believable explanations for their preposterous behavior. If machine politics weren't at play, it's hard to imagine how these people could have ever gotten anywhere close to the positions they hold.

I mean, here we are, this lady couldn't spell Eagles despite it likely being somewhere right in front of her, I doubt it will impact her electability one iota. Howard Dean's political aspirations were destroyed by one awkward scream. "What's Aleppo?" will haunt Gary Johnson in his nightmares until the day he dies he was beat over the head with it so many times. Overwhelmingly the priest decide what matters and what doesn't, and their congregation just receives that opinion.

Obviously, politics as ritual is responsible for people like Mike Pence too. All I ever heard about him was that he was "electable" despite not knowing anything about him, or anything he's ever said, or any accomplishment he could ever lay claim to. There is very clearly a ritual to rightwing politicians as well, with different magic words and a different priestly caste conferring "electability" unto them.

Which is clearly what drives many of these people completely fucking insane about Trump, and now many of the people who have rode his coattails in his new coalition. These are bipartisan heretics one and all. They don't ritualize the right words, the priestly caste has excommunicated them, and none of this was supposed to happen god damnit! It was the end of history!

In theory, there should be a DNC bench of outcast that could take over the DNC just as hard as Trump and 8 years of Trumpism took over the RNC. But instead, Trump stole many of their best outcast too (RFK Jr, Tulsi, Elon).

It's going to take a new DNC to have any hope of keeping up with the new RNC. If rumors of the Black Political Machine filling in the gaps left by a withering coalition are true, jeeze.

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You're forgetting intersectionality.

Ironically, the ideology that presumes to be about collectivist organization is, in practice, extremely individualist. There are no factions, not in the traditional sense: but thousands of extremely self-interested individuals who have been handed a superweapon to destroy the 'pale, male, and stales' in their way of sinecures and political power.

When you get cancelled, the factions cease to have all meaning.

All of their hands are stained with this blood. Internally, they are just as paranoid as Stalinists. They may internally not believe in idpol but they are forced to because there are hundreds of people after their jobs. They are all replacable, mediocre nobodies that can have everything taken away from them because all they have was given and that is by design.

I thought it was very convenient: "race and IQ poaster concludes problem is race and IQ". But it is interesting to see the left-wing version from Cenk Uygur posted above. Both sides seem to think Democrats lost or alienated important human capital.

Note: On a meta level, sorry for posting my top-level comment right after yours. When I see a stale front page I sometimes get motivated to write something. Next time, I'll double-check that no one posted while I was writing.

Don't worry about this. I for one welcome more and more top level posts.

Those tactics are for show; they only work when there's real power behind them. Federal employees deliberately defying him would just get fired for cause. Those occupying buildings would be arrested by Feds who remained loyal (even if that meant using CBP for it). And Trump wouldn't "blow political capital" doing that; he'd probably gain it.

Why risk 35 years of comfortable sinecure because of 2-4 years of mild discomfort?

Trump wouldn’t be blowing his political capital. This stunt would increase his capital. People generally don’t like sit ins. Columbia wasn’t popular.


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