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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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SMBC gets this close.

I've been thinking about the Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox recently. From the Wiki, it

argues perfectly informationally efficient markets are an impossibility since, if prices perfectly reflected available information, there is no profit to gathering information, in which case there would be little reason to trade and markets would eventually collapse.

That is, if everyone is already essentially omniscient, then there's no real payoff to investing in information. I was even already thinking about AI and warfare. The classical theory is that, in order to have war, one must have both a substantive disagreement and a bargaining friction. SMBC invokes two such bargaining frictions, both in terms of limited information - uncertainty involved in a power rising and the intentional concealment of strength.

Of course, SMBC does not seem to properly embrace the widely-held prediction that AI is going to become essentially omniscient. This is somewhat of a side prediction of the main prediction that it will be a nearly perfectly efficient executor. The typical analogy given for how perfectly efficient it will be as an executor, especially in comparison to humans, is to think about chess engines playing against Magnus Carlsen. The former is just so unthinkably better than the latter that it is effectively hopeless; the AI is effectively a perfect executor compared to us.

As such, there can be no such thing as a "rising power" that the AI does not understand. There can be no such thing as a human country concealing its strength from the AI. Even if we tried to implement a system that created fog of war chess, the perfect AI will simply hack the program and steal the information, if it is so valuable. Certainly, there is nothing we can do to prevent it from getting the valuable information it desires.

So maybe, some people might think, it will be omniscient AIs vs omniscient AIs. But, uh, we can just look at the Top Chess Engine Competition. They intentionally choose only starting positions that are biased enough toward one side or the other in order to get some decisive results, rather than having essentially all draws. Humans aren't going to be able to do that. The omniscient AIs will be able to plan everything out so far, so perfectly, that they will simply know what the result will be. Not necessarily all draws, but they'll know the expected outcome of war. And they'll know the costs. And they'll have no bargaining frictions in terms of uncertainties. After watching enough William Spaniel, this implies bargains and settlements everywhere.

Isn't the inevitable conclusion that we've got ourselves a good ol' fashioned paradox? Omniscient AI sure seems like it will, indeed, end war.

AI doesn't change the problem of computational tractability. There are a lot of problems now where we know how to find the exact solution (to any arbitrary, finite precision) but where the solution is many orders of magnitude beyond what computers would be able to achieve in any reasonable timeframe, even assuming Moore's law. Like the exact energy spectrum of any medium sized atom in a reasonable basis set (yes, there are various approximations that can be computed which work well enough) because the problem scales factorially with the number of electrons and basis functions. There’s so much handwaving in "omniscient" where people are glossing over any serious thought about what it would actually take to achieve omniscience, and at least some of Yudkowski's arguments about the way a superintelligence could infer physics from between 1 and 3 frames of video are provably wrong if you know anything about math and physics (I wrote something about this on an SSC thread perhaps 8ish years ago).

EY's three frames scenario was excellently debunked in this Less Wrong post:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ALsuxpdqeTXwgEJeZ/could-a-superintelligence-deduce-general-relativity-from-a

Someone also pithily asked what physical theories the AI would arrive at if the three frames involved a helium balloon.

Like the exact energy spectrum of any medium sized atom in a reasonable basis set

This problem is actually definitely computable. Any medium-sized atom does this "calculation" all the time just fine. We may need to employ quantum computers, but problems that the nature solves are not difficult.

There are a lot of problems that are not solvable, though, but this is not a good example.

As someone who has worked with quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry, that's. . . really silly, and kind of not turning out to be a practical or useful way of approaching problems, despite what Richard Feynman might have thought before quantum computers were really a thing. Addirionally, any claims that quantum computers have a low enough noise floor or long enough coherence times to do any useful calculations are currently overhyped, misleading BS, and it's not clear that there's a clear path out of that.

I think the response would be that you don't need arbitrary precision. You just need enough to get within a pretty wide range of bargaining solutions. That may be doable at a higher level of abstraction, and a perfect executing AI can find that proper level of abstraction.

Of course, this process might not even look like finding the right level of abstraction to our eyes. In chess, grandmasters sometimes look at computer moves, and they struggle to contextualize it within a level of abstraction that makes sense to them. Sometimes, they're able to, and they have an, "OHHHHHHHH, now I see what it's saying," even though it's not "saying".

My response to that would be tongo back to something like chemistry, which is computationally more complex than chess, less complicated than modeling a lot of other real world things, but also obeys known equations.

There are some surprisingly simple systems for which all our normal computational chemistry approximations fail and they require much more sophisticated solutions. And you can't always handwave it away to "AI will find a simpler approximation that works". How do you know? Is there a good enough approximation that "works" for factoring any large number? Why should computational scaling laws cease to apply in theory? Would, for example AI be able to solve any arbitrary NP hard problem even if we could prove P != NP?

How do you know?

I don't know! I'm just temporarily importing my understanding of the tenets held by the singulatarian doomerists. They seem convinced that there's nothing we can do, not militarily, not intelligence community, not nothing, to even hold a candle in comparison to how good it's going to be at executing. Presumably, a part of its ability to be so good is going to be understanding the world around it with significantly smaller error bars than we currently have. I don't think they even need it to be completely zero error bars; just that it's wayyyy better than ours. What I think is related is that we don't need to have perfectly zero error bars in order to avert war; we just need small enough error bars to overcome the bargaining frictions. Given the high costs of war, that seems pretty feasible.

the widely-held prediction that AI is going to become essentially omniscient.

Held by whom?

As someone directly involved in the design and development of ML algorithms, Yudkowsky's blind faith in the inevitability of omniscient/super-intelligent AI has always felt like the rationalist equivalent of "and then a miracle occurs". Sure, if A through E then possibly F, but that's all in theory, and even if we get to E, F is by no means a given.

Nah, the assumption here is "and then no miracle occurs".

If we're really improbably lucky, then we do get a miracle: the level of intelligence required for an ape to create civilization (i.e. the point we're basically still at, because the millennia of memetic evolution afterward has grossly outraced the eon of genetic evolution beforehand) turns out to be essentially the same as the maximum level of intelligence achievable by any technology. AI could pass the C3PO "somewhat annoying but helpful" level, but it couldn't possibly pass the Data "better at math but wouldn't clearly be better in command" level. All those log(N) curves turn out to actually be logistic(N) in the limit, and human thinking remains relevant indefinitely after all.

Even if we develop proper reasoning engines within the next 5-10 years, there is still a big leap to be made between basic reason and a truly general intelligence, much less general intelligence to super intelligence, and an even bigger jump from "super intelligence" to "omniscience".

And that's without considering Yudowsky and Altman's wider body of quasi-religious pronouncements.

There's a difference between this and "it becomes omniscient somehow" and other rationalist religious exclamations.

Could you cite "it becomes omniscient somehow" from a rationalist?

Does the OP count?

The one opposing "everyone in the Big Yud singularity doomerist community"? The opposition itself isn't a deal-breaker (though it's clearly at least a non-central example), but the word choices to maximize emotional reaction at the expense of clarity are.

I was hoping someone would at least point out an interesting source being paraphrased. You see ML papers that talk about the infinite-width limit of neural networks, and sometimes that's just for a proof by contradiction (as OP appears to be attempting, to be fair), and sometimes it leads to math that applies asymptotically in finite-width networks ... but you can see how after a couple rounds of playing Telephone it might be read as "stupid ML cult thinks they're gonna have infinitely powerful computers!"

I quoted Scott below, but yes, everyone in the Big Yud singularity doomerist community. My post is taking one of their tenets seriously and seeing the implications. My sense is that they won't be particularly happy with such implications. Of course, part of the bit is exposing that many many people don't believe their tenets, surfacing that disagreement, with a clear application of how it contrasts with their other claims.

And they'll have no bargaining frictions in terms of uncertainties. After watching enough William Spaniel, this implies bargains and settlements everywhere.

Fortunately SMBC made a comic about this too.

Not AI, of course, but if you are able to reliably predict the outcome of a conflict, you can just skip the conflict itself and go straight to the settlement.

Nice find!

Even an omniscient AI would still fight a war. War is about using force to achieve a political goal. If you have force and a goal, you can have a war. Rationality has nothing to do with it. Even if a party knows that it will lose a war, they will often continue fighting out of internal political considerations and spiteful hatred.

Hatred is rational. You would rather face a conciliatory pushover than a hateful, spiteful opponent.

Anyway, some AIs will be smarter than others and so they'll be stronger.

War is about using force to achieve a political goal.

That would be the substantive disagreement part. Classical theory says that that's not enough for war. You also need a bargaining friction, otherwise, you'll get a negotiated settlement.

Well yeah, omniscient AI will end war by taking over the world, leaving no possible adversaries.

Again I have to quote Boaz Barak (currently OpenAI): AI will change the world, but won’t take it over by playing “3-dimensional chess”.

Consider the task of predicting the consequences of a particular action in the future. In any sufficiently complex real-life scenario, the further away we attempt to predict, the more there is inherent uncertainty. For example, we can use advanced methods to predict the weather over a short time frame, but the further away the prediction, the more the system “regresses to the mean”, and the less advantage that highly complex models have over simpler ones (see Figure 4). As in meteorology, this story seems to play out similarly in macroeconomic forecasting. In general, we expect prediction success to behave like Figure 1 below—the error increases with the horizon until it plateaus to a baseline level of some simple heuristic(s). Hence while initially highly sophisticated models can beat simpler ones by a wide margin, this advantage eventually diminishes with the time horizon.

Tetlock’s first commandment to potential superforecasters is to triage: “Don’t waste time either on “clocklike” questions (where simple rules of thumb can get you close to the right answer) or on impenetrable “cloud-like” questions (where even fancy statistical models can’t beat the dart-throwing chimp). Concentrate on questions in the Goldilocks zone of difficulty, where effort pays off the most.” Another way to say it is that outside of the Goldilocks zone, more effort or cognitive power does not give much returns.

Rather, based on what we know, it is likely that AI systems will have a “sweet spot” of a not-too-long horizon in which they can provide significant benefits. For strategic and long-term decisions that are far beyond this sweet spot, the superior information processing skills of AIs will give diminishing returns. (Although AIs will likely supply valuable input and analysis to the decision makers.). An AI engineer may well dominate a human engineer (or at least one that is not aided by AI tools), but an AI CEO’s advantage will be much more muted, if any, over its human counterpart. Like our world, such a world will still involve much conflict and competition, with all sides aided by advanced technology, but without one system that dominates all others.

In essence, irreducible error and chaotic events blunt the edge of any superintelligent predictor in a sufficiently high-dimensional environment.

What remains to be answered for me:

  1. Can AI planners interfere in the events with enough frequency and precision to proactively suppress chaos and reduce the world to a game of chess they can model to the draw?
  2. Is a decently superhuman prediction and execution not enough to eliminate warm, simply because humans are already close to this level and only initiate wars they won't win (instead of pragmatically retreating to some defensible compromise) in feats of retardation (see: Russia)?

This is definitely where I start to quibble with the concept of "superintelligence" as synonymous with "omniscient."

Irreducible error because your sensors aren't precise enough to resolve every single detail you need to make 'perfect' decisions and chaotic events that can't be predicted without spending WAY too much effort.

ALL THAT SAID, I do think that an AI that is able to formulate a long term goal will be RIDICULOUSLY effective at achieving it, even amidst chaos.

One thing I can imagine is if the superintelligence wants a particular person dead it could do something 'basic' like a genetically targeted bioweapon, or something more creative like getting the person to consume two separate substances each of which is individually innocuous or even beneficial, but have a fatal interaction effect if they are both introduced to the human body in a short period of time.

So in the morning, the AI ensures that the target consumes a dose of substance A, then later in the day gets them to consume substance B, and they die in a way that looks very accidental, or maybe even natural, and thus it would be hard to detect how it was achieved.

Maybe the AI is even able to design novel substances that will achieve this goal so there'd be no real way for the individual to defend against this approach.

Now, the next step that is harder for me to buy is that they could use this sort of precisely targeted, nigh-undetectable interventions to guide all events towards their preferred state, avoiding wars but never overtly showing their hand, even if people suspect some given event was due to its meddling.

Not sure what you suggest here is really new to AI, humans are pretty good at killing human beings (a state agency such as the KGB or CIA can kill anyone who wishes to remain relevant with around 100% certainty if they really want to, although making it ~undetectable is slightly less efficient and slower, and more likely to fail) and they are kinda iffy at using those sorts of interventions to guide events towards their preferred state.

I mean, I ignored that the AI would have a plethora of ways to kill a person directly.

Fly a drone in through a window and spray any given toxin in their face, then fly it out.

Hijack their car's software, disable the brakes at an opportune time.

I'm sort of gesturing at the fact that a superintelligent AI can probably carry out Rube-Goldberg-esque plans with enough precision to hit multiple targets at once, with the aim of achieving multiple goals at once, all without immediately tipping any observers off as to their ultimate plans.

So assuming their ultimate plan isn't to just kill humanity as a whole, there is an 'interesting' world that emerges that ultimately bends towards the AI's preferences but doesn't necessarily require omniscience and 'solving' the game. The AI still has to adjust the plan in progress, might miss some of its targets, and unforeseen events can still surprise it, but nonetheless, the state of the world ticks inexorably towards the outcome it wants.

And its moves can occur on such a high dimension that no single human, even given access to all the necessary information, could see what its doing or even hope to outsmart it.

Yes, it's an interesting theory. I guess my point is that due to information friction I think humans can carry out plans - perhaps ones that might not be as good as those of a theoretical superintelligence, but still plans that confound observers. I mean shoot there's still (good faith?) arguments about whether COVID-19 was a lab leak or not despite all the evidence there.

Now, and I apologize for the tangent, but if the scenario you describe came about (or even became plausible) it would be unfalsifiable, leading to a world where Superintelligence replaces the Illuminati as the hidden hand behind world events.

Yes, exactly.

And then we're living in a world where even our own motivations for taking a given action could be the result of an upstream manipulation.

I think the best illustration of this principle lies in the downfall of Kodak. Their bankruptcy is often cited as a cautionary tale of what happens when you obstinately stick to old technology in the midst of a changing landscape. But that it were true! Yes, Kodak was synonymous with film in the early 2000s, but, while digital cameras existed, they were expensive and people were still buying a ton of film. So they weren't going to just stop producing it (and they still haven't). But the idea that they didn't see the writing on the wall and failed to embrace digital photography is a myth. They wholeheartedly threw most of their effort into what they perceived the transition to digital would look like. They manufactured inexpensive digital cameras and supplies for making prints at home, and they put kiosks in stores and malls for people without the equipment to make prints. What they failed to anticipate was a world where the market for cheap cameras would move to smartphones, and where social media would replace the need to get prints of everything.

And the reason they didn't anticipate it was because they couldn't anticipate it. No one could. Digital cameras started gaining market share before the rise of social media and phones with acceptable cameras. If you told someone in 2003 what the low end of the photographic world would look like 5 years later, they'd tell you you were nuts.

Point and shoot digital cameras killed mass market film well before the iphone age. If Kodak made inexpensive digital cameras, then where are all of them today?

Maybe they got their arse handed to them by the Japanese, but that would be a failure to compete, not a failure to anticipate.

They did pretty well through the point and shoot era, and their cameras were everywhere if you cared to look; in 2005 they led the market in camera sales. They just weren't involved in the pro market the way their competitors were, so when that market died they had nothing to fall back on.

then where are all of them today?

In the recycling bin, or at the back of a drawer unused. Displaced in everyday use by phone cameras, just as physical prints have largley been replaced by Facebook and instagram.

The only people who use a seperate (non-phone) camera these day are professional photographers and high-end hobbiests who are looking for quality over price. This (not the ultimate shift to digital) is the shift that kodak failed to anticipate.

I've never held my hobby of photography highly enough to splurge for a DSLR.

My brother did his, and now it collects dust with the bulk of his photography done with his iPhone 15 Pro Max.

My family splurged for a DSLR a decade or more ago, but now it basically only gets pulled out when we need the 50-300mm lens for distant shots, or maybe once or twice a year when a few shots are so important that they're worth the extra hassle. We used to pull it out for low-light photography too, but at some point phone image sensors got so sensitive that it makes up for not having half a pound of glass in front of them.

Oh - I do still use the DSLR body with a telescope adapter. I tried an eyepiece-to-phone adapter for that, but the quality wasn't nearly as high. Maybe I just need to find a better one.

At this point, I'm not sure what utility a DSLR offers over a newer mirrorless camera. If you already own one, great, but they're a dying breed.

Frankly speaking, the computational photography that phone cameras pull of is nigh magical (though some of it is plain hallucinations of non-existent details), and I wish dedicated camera manufacturers took more inspiration from them rather than vice versa.

IMHO the mechanical mirrors are pointless; large lenses are really the only things phones lack. My DSLR is just old enough that mirrorless options were still kind of new. We also got a Nikon 1 around the same time, for portability, but unlike the DSLR that one's been completely obsoleted by our phones.

I'm not a fan of the current state of computational "photography", though. Detecting motion between multiple frames and trying to stack and deconvolve to get a sharp still image, that's fantastic, but when we reached the point where there's a "upsample moon photos using a neural net trained on moon photos" step, we'd lost the plot. If I wanted data from existing photos rather than my own photos then I'd be using the web browser, not the camera.

My Kodak DC220 sits unused on my bookcase, only barely hidden by my untidiness :-)

chess

If you pit two top engines against each other, you won't have any idea who will win. You know it'll be a coin toss but you won't know who will win.

There can be no such thing as a human country concealing its strength from the AI.

Time to read the three body problem again. It's fiction but it conceptualizes the idea of wallfacers who will deceive the enemy AI which can be everywhere in the world all at once.

Even if an AI can simulate the world with such accuracy that it becomes essentially a game, the opponent's moves are still unknown. Playing a game well is one thing, but solving a game (determining if a player can force a win) is entirely harder. Checkers, tic-tac-toe, and connect four are solved, while chess is not.

With current technology, nobody knows the outcome of a very lopsided chess game. The underdog AI still has a chance, and that's why people are still interested in watching.

If you pit two top engines against each other, you won't have any idea who will win. You know it'll be a coin toss but you won't know who will win.

Emphasis added. I don't need to know in order for the AI to tell me that the best outcome is a negotiated settlement within certain parameters.

the opponent's moves are still unknown.

Agreed, but sort of irrelevant. The chess engine is still executing perfectly, even though it doesn't actually know what moves the opponent will ultimately make.

Playing a game well is one thing, but solving a game (determining if a player can force a win) is entirely harder. Checkers, tic-tac-toe, and connect four are solved, while chess is not.

I think the answer here is again that it is ultimately irrelevant. We didn't need to solve chess or diplomacy to have an engine become a nearly perfect executor or to narrow the range of outcomes significantly (>90% draws unless you extremely bias the starting positions, for example).

You are being nonsensical in your handwaving of complexity. Chess has 32 total pieces each with an extremely contrained potential action across only 64 positions. You can't just handwave knowability there into the real world. There's no reason to believe enough computational power exists to be able to have 'omniscient level' understanding of the world. You are just speaking pure, unfounded fiction.

For the record, you don't have a problem with me. You have a problem with the people who hold the position that we are approaching an AI singularity and that doom is inevitable because the AI will have all these incredible characteristics. I don't actually hold that position; I'm just investigating it.

In any event, I again don't think it needs to be actually omniscient. It just needs to be able to reduce error bounds enough to eliminate the bargaining friction. Since war is very costly, it certainly doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to get the error bars down enough. Think of it as a continuum. As the ability to gather information, model, and predict accurately goes up, the likelihood of war goes down, since the bargaining frictions due to uncertainty are reduced. Yes yes, it may be only when we take the limit that the likelihood of war goes down to precisely zero. I'm not even quite sure of that, because since war is so costly, we can probably still tolerate a fair amount of uncertainty and still remain in a region where settlements can be negotiated.

The AI singularity/doom people think that, for all intents and purposes, we're headed for that limit. They may be wrong. But if one believes their premise, then I think the conclusion would be that war goes to zero.

wallfacers

This is the absolute pinnacle concept of that series. I’m not exactly an AI skeptic, I truly think it will revolutionize the entire world in my lifetime.

But rationalists constantly underestimate the power and grace of intuition in service of subversion. Humans absolutely excel at it, and I can’t envisage a world where they are overtaken by machines in this particular task. It’s too messy, too inexact, too chaotic.

Under constant total surveillance and crushing power imbalances, prisoners develop their own occult economy, rituals, alliances, symbology, etc etc etc. the prison which is not in fact run by the prisoners is the unstable exception only bought by extreme and unwavering competence & creativity, not the rule.

People regularly deceive themselves in a richly woven pattern that only they themselves can unlock.

Deceiving a rationalistic / probabilistic super intelligence?

Child’s play. GG EZ.

I mean, even in the book almost every Wallfacer fails. Not just that, but most of the Wallfacers' plans are unraveled by their opposite "wallbreaker."

The one plan that worked out was due to the guy acting incredibly erratically for like a couple decades (because he had no intention of actually doing anything) then getting blackmailed into actually trying to succeed at his task, then managing to obtain an insight that would allow him to win but was also achievable without making any moves that would make his plan obvious. AND THEN, he was only able to beat the trisolarans because he was suicidally committed to said plan when the moment came.

Oh, and he almost got killed by the Trisolarans several times but happened to have a supremely competent and aware bodyguard around at the right time.

the widely-held prediction that AI is going to become essentially omniscient.

Can you name three people who would agree that they make this "widely" held prediction? I know a lot who predict "much better than humans at making predictions", and quite a few who predict something like "that which cannot be predicted will be controlled", and a handful who predict galaxy-brained strange-loop reflective cooperation, but all of these fall quite a bit short of "essentially omniscient".

The typical analogy given for how perfectly efficient it will be as an executor, especially in comparison to humans, is to think about chess engines playing against Magnus Carlsen. The former is just so unthinkably better than the latter that it is effectively hopeless; the AI is effectively a perfect executor compared to us.

The important question is whether they are effectively perfect executors compared to each other. Humans are effectively perfect executors in social conflict when compared to chimpanzees, but we still fight against each other.

Can you name three people who would agree that they make this "widely" held prediction?

Probably not. I don't keep track of names of people. Obviously, there's Big Yud. I quoted Scott below. I'd have to wade further into those doomerist circles to get a third name, and meh.

The important question is whether they are effectively perfect executors compared to each other.

This is where I'm appealing to things like the >90% draw rate in computer chess (when the starting positions are not specifically biased). We also see something similar in the main anti-inductive system that I'm making comparison to - financial markets. At one point, I had heard that an offhand estimate of how long a good trading idea lasts before it's discovered and proliferated is like 18 months. The models just keep getting better.

I don't think Yudkowsky would agree that he expects AI to be effectively omniscient in an absolute sense - relative to humans, sure, but that's a very different question. I do understand how it's possible to read him as saying that - a lot of the things he's written make more sense if his mental model is "an omniscient, reflexively consistent agent". However, I think that's because that represents the mental model he uses to think about AGI, rather than because that's something he expects to literally happen. In an interview a couple years ago he said

Planning is one way to succeed at search. I think for purposes of understanding alignment difficulty, you want to be thinking on the level of abstraction where you see that in some sense it is the search itself that is dangerous when it’s a strong enough search, rather than the danger seeming to come from details of the planning process.

One of my early experiences in successfully generalizing my notion of intelligence, what I’d later verbalize as “computationally efficient finding of actions that produce outcomes high in a preference ordering”, was in writing an (unpublished) story about time-travel in which the universe was globally consistent.

The requirement of global consistency, the way in which all events between Paradox start and Paradox finish had to map the Paradox’s initial conditions onto the endpoint that would go back and produce those exact initial conditions, ended up imposing strong complicated constraints on reality that the Paradox in effect had to navigate using its initial conditions. The time-traveler needed to end up going through certain particular experiences that would produce the state of mind in which he’d take the actions that would end up prodding his future self elsewhere into having those experiences.

The Paradox ended up killing the people who built the time machine, for example, because they would not otherwise have allowed that person to go back in time, or kept the temporal loop open that long for any other reason if they were still alive.

Just having two examples of strongly consequentialist general optimization in front of me – human intelligence, and evolutionary biology – hadn’t been enough for me to properly generalize over a notion of optimization. Having three examples of homework problems I’d worked – human intelligence, evolutionary biology, and the fictional Paradox – caused it to finally click for me.

which, when I read, it, was an "aha" moment where I understood why the stuff he wrote was Like That™ despite his insistence that people were misinterpreting his old writing.

This is where I'm appealing to things like the >90% draw rate in computer chess (when the starting positions are not specifically biased).

I think that's a fact particular to chess - I don't expect the same result in computer Go / othello / some other game that is less structurally prone to having draws.

We also see something similar in the main anti-inductive system that I'm making comparison to - financial markets. At one point, I had heard that an offhand estimate of how long a good trading idea lasts before it's discovered and proliferated is like 18 months. The models just keep getting better.

The models do keep getting better, but I don't see how improvement in those models means that there is a reachable point where winning strategies switch from being based on deception and trickery to being based on cooperation stemming from mutual knowledge of each others' strategies (here though I do expect Yud would take your side).

I mean, I kinda get your point that it's the way that he thinks about it, but he also says that it gives us straightforward bounds:

A paperclip-maximizing superintelligence is nowhere near as powerful as a paperclip-maximizing time machine. The time machine can do the equivalent of buying winning lottery tickets from lottery machines that have been thermodynamically randomized; a superintelligence can’t, at least not directly without rigging the lottery or whatever.

But a paperclip-maximizing strong general superintelligence is epistemically and instrumentally efficient, relative to you, or to me. Any time we see it can get at least X paperclips by doing Y, we should expect that it gets X or more paperclips by doing Y or something that leads to even more paperclips than that, because it’s not going to miss the strategy we see.

So in that sense, searching our own brains for how a time machine would get paperclips, asking ourselves how many paperclips are in principle possible and how they could be obtained, is a way of getting our own brains to consider lower bounds on the problem without the implicit stupidity assertions that our brains unwittingly use to constrain story characters. Part of the point of telling people to think about time machines instead of superintelligences was to get past the ways they imagine superintelligences being stupid. Of course that didn’t work either, but it was worth a try.

So, I guess, like, think about the best possible plans you could come up with to put some error bars on the expected value of war. Perhaps notice that political scientists don't just ask the question, "Why is there war at all?" (...coming up with the answer involving bargaining frictions...) but also the question of why war is actually still somewhat rare, especially if we think about all of the substantive disagreements there are out there. They point out that the vast majority of wars that are started actually end surprisingly quickly, often as some information is learned in the process, a settlement is quickly reached. Superintelligences are going to be wayyyyyyyyy better at driving down those error bars and finding acceptable settlements.

This is where I'm appealing to things like the >90% draw rate in computer chess (when the starting positions are not specifically biased).

I think that's a fact particular to chess - I don't expect the same result in computer Go / othello / some other game that is less structurally prone to having draws.

I guess it's not the draws, themselves, that are "the thing". Let me try to put it another way. One of the top GMs in the world made a comment not too long ago about their experience working with very powerful computers. He said something along the lines of, "With the computer, it's always either zeros or winning." That is, he basically viewed it as that once you have enough computanium, for many many many positions, either the computer sees a way to essentially just straight equalize or it can see out to a win. Now, obviously, this is not strictly true, and it's obviously not true in all positions, as you get closer to the start of the game. But they can see the expected outcome sooo vastly better than we can. In the same way that people want to blow up that ability to things like "can engage in warfare sooo vastly better than we can", it should also blow up their ability to see expected outcomes and come to negotiated settlements sooo vastly better than we can.

I don't see how improvement in those models means that there is a reachable point where winning strategies switch from being based on deception and trickery to being based on cooperation stemming from mutual knowledge of each others' strategies

The attempted resolution in the financial markets paradox is that people just stop investing in more information. Could they double down on deception and trickery? Perhaps. But that seems like an unlikely result, game-theoretically. "Babbling equilibrium" or "cheap talk" are sometimes invoked, depending on the specific formalization. There are others that aren't in that wiki article. I could walk through a bunch of different models for how humans try to deal with deception and trickery in different domains. Presumably a superintelligence will know all of them and more... and execute even better in implementing them. It took me a long time to realize this, but when you think of deception and trickery as part of the strategy set, then the correct game-theoretic notion of equilibrium is not necessarily "cooperation stemming from mutual knowledge of each others' strategy", but "the appropriate equilibrium stemming from mutual knowledge of each others' strategy, which may contain deception and trickery, and you are each reasoning about the other's ability to engage in deception and trickery, the value the other may obtain from such, etc." Of course I know that my opponent may try deception and trickery, so I need to reason about it. A superintelligence will reason about it even better. Probably the easiest thing to think about here is again the game Diplomacy.

Where the mere game of Diplomacy differs from actual war in the real world is that we have good reason to believe that the costs of engaging in war are much much much higher, so we have a very big bargaining range, and we need quite significant bargaining frictions to get in the way. I still don't see how a superintelligence doesn't reduce the bargaining friction.

Superintelligences are going to be wayyyyyyyyy better at driving down those error bars and finding acceptable settlements. [...] I still don't see how a superintelligence doesn't reduce the bargaining friction.

I hope you're right about that. I worry that a lot of the dynamics around retaliation and precommitment are anti-inductive, and as such the difficulty of determining where the bright lines actually are scales with the sophistication of the actors. This would happen because a hostile actor will go right up to the line of "most aggressive behavior that will not result in retaliation" but not cross said line, so it becomes advantageous to be a little unclear about where that line is, and that lack of clarity will be calibrated to your adversaries not to some absolute baseline. And this is the sense in which I don't see a reachable point where honesty and bargaining come to strictly dominate.

As a note I do expect that bargaining frictions will be reduced, but the existential question is whether they will be reduced by a factor large enough to compensate for the increased destructiveness of a conflict that escalates out of control. Signs look hopeful so far but our sample size is still small. Certainly not a large enough sample size that I would conclude

The omniscient AIs will be able to plan everything out so far, so perfectly, that they will simply know what the result will be. Not necessarily all draws, but they'll know the expected outcome of war. And they'll know the costs. And they'll have no bargaining frictions in terms of uncertainties.

Only a couple minor responses, as I think we're mostly understanding each other.

this is the sense in which I don't see a reachable point where honesty and bargaining come to strictly dominate.

My only quibble is that I don't think we really need the "honesty and" part. The question really is whether, even with dishonesty, bargaining can be achieved.

As a note I do expect that bargaining frictions will be reduced, but the existential question is whether they will be reduced by a factor large enough to compensate for the increased destructiveness of a conflict that escalates out of control.

The weirdly good thing about the increase in destructiveness ("good" only in the narrow sense of bargaining and likelihood of war, not necessarily in general) is that this increases costs to both sides in the event of war. As such, it increases the range of possible bargaining solutions that keep the peace. Both factors (this and the reduced bargaining frictions) should decrease the likelihood of war.

Thanks for the read, i think Omniscient AI is a long way of. Almost all current ai models "simply" condence known knowledge. Most new discoveries made is finding patterns that we didnt seen before, but where already present. The current AI models have no capacity to think and rationalize. They are just very complex and high dimensional information vectors (that is what the N-amount of parameters mostly are).

Simply said: Just because a LLM knows the relation between certain human words does not mean it it sentient. The models can only repeat what the humans trained them on.

It won’t end war because the omniscient Chinese AI will be able to omnisciently bullshit the omniscient American AI to the point that there is uncertainty again.

If there is value in weeding out the bullshit, the omniscient AI will weed out the bullshit. AI already plays diplomacy, trying to weed out bullshit. Just increase the scale. The best bullshitting Diplomacy players will be mere Magnus Carlsens against it. The Chinese AI and the American AI will both compute all the way out to the draw, just like the TCEC.

Arguably the Diplomacy players will do better than the AI. "A curious game, the only winning move is not to play." But humans have been able to create uncertainty about their willingness to play an unwinnable game nevertheless for decades.

Isn't the inevitable conclusion that we've got ourselves a good ol' fashioned paradox? Omniscient AI sure seems like it will, indeed, end war.

Omniscience, though, is a really high bar. The SMBC was positing only a rational AI, not an omniscient one.

I don't expect AI to become omniscient. The inherent problem in actually modeling the real world well enough to predict it perfectly, faster than events play out, particularly when said real world contains other equally-powerful modelers, seems likely to be unsolvable. Further, even if you could do that, you'd need perfect information on the initial conditions, which there's no way to get.

I think you're doing the thing where you haven't internalized "the thing". From Scott:

Consider weight-lifting. Your success in weight-lifting seems like a pretty straightforward combination of your biology and your training. Weight-lifting retains its excitement because we don’t fully understand either. There’s still a chance that any random guy could turn out to have a hidden weight-lifting talent. Or that you could discover the perfect regimen that lets you make gains beyond what the rest of the world thinks possible.

Suppose we truly understood both of these factors. You could send your genes to 23andMe and receive a perfectly-accurate estimate of your weightlifting potential. And scientists had long since discovered the perfect training regimen (including the perfect training regimen for people with your exact genes/lifestyle/limitations). Then you could plug your genotype and training regimen into a computer and get the exact amount you’d be able to lift after one year, two years, etc. The computer is never wrong. Would weightlifting really be a sport anymore? A few people whose genes put them in the 99.999th percentile for potential would compete to see who could follow the training regimen most perfectly. One of them would miss a session for their mother’s funeral and drop out of the running; the other guy would win gold at whatever passed for this society’s Olympics. Doesn’t sound too exciting.

A team sport like baseball or soccer would be harder to solve. Maybe you’d have to resort to probabilistic estimates; given these two teams at this stadium, the chance of the Red Sox winning is 78.6%, because the model can’t predict which direction some random air gusts will go. I guess this is no worse than having Nate Silver making a betting model. But on the individual level, it’s still a combination of your (well understood) genes and (well understood) training regimen.

Hedge funds already have some of the best weather models in the world. There's alpha there right now. Or at least there was; I don't know how much has been anti-inducted away. The god AI will certainly be able to do at least as well. It will probably make our current best models look like a mere Magnus Carlsen. And if there's alpha in taking a more minute view, scoping the model in to a particular stadium, why can't it do that? Where there is alpha in the AI getting information, the AI will go there and get the information. It will be able to massively reduce the error bars. And all you need to get rid of war is reduce the error bars enough to get to a negotiated agreement. There's tons of alpha there, so there they will go. Until that alpha has been anti-inducted away, and we're right back in the paradox.

All this is at the "suppose" level. Yes, the god AI will be able to do this. IF it exists. I say the god AI will not exist.

And if there's alpha in taking a more minute view, scoping the model in to a particular stadium, why can't it do that? Where there is alpha in the AI getting information, the AI will go there and get the information.

It's an AI, a brain in a box. Even if it's really fucking smart, it has no advantage over us meat-brains in going places and getting information.

I say the god AI will not exist.

This is sort of the crux. I happen to agree with you. The point of my comment was to investigate the tenets of a group of folks and see what the implications are. I think that if one adopts a position like in that Scott quote, then the implication is something like the end of war.

Agreed, at least until the prices of solar panels and drones drop by a factor of 10-100.

Yes.

While I'm here, I'd suggest that so far in real life people index so hard on the intelligence that they overlook how little data the available AI can process at one time, which is a big limitation on IRL usefulness, or at least a speedbump. I have some professional experience with this (albeit mostly secondhand) and from what I can tell it's kinda like if you're dealing with a very smart intern with the memory of a goldfish. It can process data blazingly fast but you have to spoonfeed it one bite at a time. Which makes the blazing speed a bit underwhelming.

Now, this gives it definite advantages relative to all-human employment but you also have to hold its hand everywhere.

Note that I'm not making any predictions or claims, just noting my IRL understanding, and I know that context windows continue to be able to be expanded regularly - but AI ain't gonna be able to take over the world or even my job if it can't watch the entire Star Wars trilogy in one sitting.

I know that context windows continue to be able to be expanded regularly - but AI ain't gonna be able to take over the world or even my job if it can't watch the entire Star Wars trilogy in one sitting.

I just checked, and the current leader has 100 million tokens ("equivalent to 750 novels"), while non-specialized models are in the 100k-1M range. You're going to have to update your arguments (then update them again in a few months when AIs meet your new standards, then update them again...).

When we use them in practice we have to cut up the content that we feed them because we have much more content (gigabytes worth) than they can handle.

As I said, I think this is a solvable problem. But a lot of AI enthusiasts are, in my impression, just using them as personal assistants and not necessary engaging with them in more strenuous real-world use cases.

In my experience ‘real’ context is 5k to 15k max, even for the big models.

The large context windows are based on ‘can it retrieve very specific information from 1M tokens ago’ not ‘will it naturally remember that this information exists and how it might be relevant to whatever it’s doing at the moment’.

How is the alleged 100M model on RULER / NiaH? I find myself skeptical based on their blog post, the lack of concrete info therein, their choice to build a custom benchmark instead of using the industry standard ones (like RULER), their claims of having 100x'd context over publicly available SOTA, and their choice to name themselves "magic ai".

Your point does stand with gemini's 1M context window though - that one is the real deal, although the real killer will be a large-context reasoning model (without the ability to meaningfully process the things they retrieve from their context window, long-context LLMs don’t have much of an advantage over RAG).

I'm not familiar with that model (I just found it by searching), but I wouldn't doubt if they were simply Goodhearting their way into some flashy claims.

One thing to keep in mind is that these models are the worst they'll ever be. Give it a year or so and someone (either one of the big companies or someone building off their work) will release a model with both early-2025 level quality and >=100M context.

Agreed. Though I suspect progress on any concrete performance metric you care to predict will advance about as fast as you expect, and real-world practical uptake will be much slower than you expect (at least of you're Situational-Awareness-pilled, which is the vibe I get), because going from 5% to 95% on one of the benchmark tasks has limited practical value.

Isn't that basically the premise of Laplace's Demon?

Richard Hanania continues his criticism of Musk, as a guest author for UnHerd. (Sidenote: On his own website, he wrote "I never thought I would write an article for Sohrab Ahmari, as we disagree on a lot and I’ve regrettably insulted him a few times, but he reached out after my recent piece on Musk and asked if I would like to write something for UnHerd.") It's a combination of criticism of Musk as an intellectual, criticism of DOGE, and contrasting the intellectual traits adaptive for business and non-business success. The closing paragraphs are interesting:

To be sure, this analysis doesn’t explain everything about Musk’s recent behaviour. There may be other dimensions. I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022, whether it was from drug use, social-media addiction, a combination of both, or something else. It’s possible that all his business ventures begin to fail from now, which would indicate a more general decline in his cognition and ability to regulate his emotions. Much reporting has been done on Musk’s drug use, which has been serious enough to worry many around him.

Yet if Musk continues to succeed as a businessman while being this dumb about everything related to public policy, he will end up having given us what was by far history’s greatest demonstration of the non-transferability of insight and skill across domains where wise leadership is necessary for human flourishing.

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years. The news has been doing this forever. Everything else Hanania writes is not a full representation of facts, but a partisan slant to make you dislike Elon (eg, no proof that cutting Department of Ed employees will reduce the longterm collection of debt in any way that it deserves a moment’s thought; no entertaining the notion that he did not cut those specific employees; no entertaining the notion that “build fast and break things” may be the overall utilitarian strategy which simply looks worse when you write a slanted list of all the bad things; etc)

The thing is, when you post provably false s*** like the 4% approval rating thing we discussed in the other thread, and then when called out on it you double down, that alienates smart people who care about the truth. For instance, here's what Steve Sailer said today:

It would be great if DOGE could distinguish who is doing useful boutique research on education and who is wasting taxpayer money. But it appears that DOGE doesn’t have time for that, much like DOGE doesn’t seem to have time for much else in the way of useful analysis.

On the other hand, every time the NYT dubiously asserts that Trump is about to do something stupid, Trump cultists dreams up all sorts of ideas why, actually, that would be a genius 4-D chess thing to do.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/will-doge-cancel-naep

Seems like DOGE is burning its bridges with the very demographic it was supposed to appeal to, while maintaining the support of people who have never said a critical thing about Trump in their entire lives.

One canceled contract was weighing how effectively Oregon schools spent taxpayer dollars that were set aside to improve reading instruction, by emphasizing phonics, vocabulary and other building blocks of early literacy.

Sailer’s entire post hinges on this.

The lab for which funding was cut spends a lot of resources on addressing “inequitable disciplinary actions” ie wasting money on trying to “address” why blacks are disciplined more, etc. So it’s good that their funding was cut. On WestEd, who was granted money to work on REL West —

Take research consultancy WestEd, which runs REL West and is a supporting partner for several other RELs. With $260 million in revenue and more than 1,400 employees across 13 offices, the consultancy receives substantial public funding. Financial statements show that a third of WestEd’s revenue comes from federal sources, and almost half from state and local sources. The consultancy’s products include a report promoting the replacement of standardized tests with controversial lottery admissions to ensure “equitable” access to competitive magnet high schools, and a teacher’s guide on “culturally responsive” math education. WestEd even trained teachers on “Critical Race English Education.” Participants learned, for instance, how they could lead lessons which examine the role of the “white savior complex” in Atticus Finch’s character development in To Kill a Mockingbird.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-department-of-education-contracts-left-activism

If the media cared about the truth, an iota, they would tell you this. They don’t. They omit and lie. I hope conservatives become the best omitters and liars in the entire world, and then we win. As of now, because it’s such a waste of time to actively determine how the media is lying, I am in a kind of default “the media is always lying” hibernation. Just cut everything at this point, I really don’t care — the Oregonians get what they deserve

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years.

Punching a specific person that has been punching you for years is fair game.

Punching people more generally because you were punched for a while isn't remotely the same, and is usually rather frowned upon.

All is fair in existential infowar.

This is one of the big classical problems with democracy.

I’m not sure what you mean. In a democracy filled with uninformed and incompetent voters, if one side lies all the time, the other side must lie in turn in order to compete, let alone win. This is actually the very basis of newspapers in the American democratic tradition. X is not a newspaper, no, but it has taken on the same role. If the American voter wishes to learn about the facts and only the facts, they have to read papers and bills and data, and not Reddit or X or Bluesky. And yet they continue to use these services, at once proving that they are incompetent judges of the most obvious fact that the media lies. To quote Thomas Jefferson,

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them

It's not irrational to delegate some amount of legal or political understanding to a trusted intermediate. One should still be open to whether they lied/erred and check their work from time to time, but expecting everyone everywhere to be deep subject-matter experts in this stuff is foolish.

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years.

Hard disagree. If your opponent burns down the epistemic commons, and you respond in kind, you have just ceded the moral high ground. See Scott Alexander's Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons:

Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) – the kind of conditions where everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise – the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles.

If you abandon Simulacrum Level 1, you might win or lose, but to a proponent of the truth it will not matter more than it would matter to an atheist which religion won the memetic competition and established a theocracy.

Also, Hanania argues that Musk is worse than the liberals:

The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.

The woke left has obviously not been a steadfast ally of the Truth. They certainly pick the studies they cite as cannon fodder for their side, and this has skewed all of the social 'sciences'. The embrace blank-slatism to a degree that they are unable to even engage with HBD on its merits. But to their credit, they at least believe that their world view is correct. This opens up the -- theoretical -- possibility to engage with them over the factual state of the world and convert them.

By contrast, Trump (the guy who Musk is backing and sucking up to) has had a total disregard for Level 1 through his entire political career: birtherism, qanon, election denial to the migrants eating cats and dogs. He is not so much lying (which would mean knowing the object level truth, than subverting it) as much as bullshitting and presumably, the median Trump voter knows this.

The "epistemic commons" have not been "burned down" because they never existed in the first place as a "commons" that excludes a plurality or more of the population is nothing of the sort.

What has been badly damaged is the Blue/Grey tribe's ability to dictate the rules of engagement and maintain the structural integrity of thier information bubbles.

There is no "sense making crisis" there is only a subset of people who are the intellectual equivalent of flightless birds on an isolated island who hadn't had to worry about predatory rodents until a bunch of jerks showed up in a boat and now its the fucking apocalypse.

If you abandon Simulacrum Level 1, you might win or lose, but to a proponent of the truth it will not matter more than it would matter to an atheist which religion won the memetic competition and established a theocracy.

In other words a whole lot, depending on how each religion feels about burning atheists at the stake.

He is not so much lying (which would mean knowing the object level truth, than subverting it) as much as bullshitting and presumably, the median Trump voter knows this.

I'm not sure the median Trump voter knows that so much as does not pay attention to politics?

The median voter does not necessarily engage in this kind of theorising. I suspect the median voter just votes straight R or straight D because that is what they have always done. I suspect that what the median Trump voter knows is more along the lines of - Trump's opponents constantly accuse him of lying, they are liars themselves, sure Trump can be a bit hyperbolic sometimes, but he's correct on the big picture. And then they probably don't think too much about specific details.

The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.

That’s quite a leap. The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X.

When people leave the app they aren’t consuming your ads and might not resume using your app for many hours or days.

Elon found himself with an unprofitable company and took a lot of drastic steps to get to profitability.

This is also parsimonious with Elon’s own recommendation for putting links in a reply. They don’t want people bouncing directly from feed to another surface.

It's funny how so many people I read who are made at Musk are writers who don't have the ability to promote their Non-X writing platforms on X anymore. They find this to be a huge injustice and immoral, I find it mostly annoying because I have to read them complaining about it all the time.

Platform X doesn't let me promote other platform Y doesn't seem like a shocking situation to me. Nothing is preventing them from writing an X-article or wtf X calls their longer form platform if it bothers them so much. They're not being censored, they're being encouraged to produce on the same site they're promoting on.

The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X

Fine, but wasn't Elon's whole motivation for buying X to improve or level in some way the social media information space? With which the link de-boosting works at total cross-purposes.

I guess the first priority is making the site self-sustaining.

This opens up the -- theoretical -- possibility to engage with them over the factual state of the world and convert them.

Many of them explicitly say "do not even try to understand what racists are thinking -- or you might yourself turn into a racist".

Yes, but I would rather deal with hypocrites who claim to be on the side of truth and logic than with honest conflict theorists, because with the former there is an opening, however small, to engage intellectually, while with the latter there can be only war. Obviously both sorts exist on either side and we may disagree on their proportions, but to me it seems clear that the median woke progressive is more of a hypocrite (based on revealed preferences when it comes to lifestyle, the neighborhoods they move to, etc.) while the median dissident rightist is more of a conflict theorist.

I specualte that often two conflict theorists often ally against third conflict theorist, and that conflict vs mistake is false dichotomy.

I dunno, I would rather my side wins battles rather than constantly loses them while “fighting fair” against an opponent who refuses to even entertain the idea.

Truth matters in pragmatic affairs science, or from purely philosophical perspective - but it has never mattered in politics. Nope, not ever. This is perhaps the one area postmodernists get it right, in the struggle for power in the political arena, the winners get to tell you what the truth is.

The way I would put it is that there is a correct way to do things, but the people who believe in it were lulled into a false understanding of the world and exploited by the unscrupulous. By the time enough of them woke up to do anything about it the game had already been thoroughly rigged against them, so they were forced to turn to the unscrupulous to fend them off.

I would then go on to say that that through something like deus ex machina, they somehow managed to get Trump. And that his deceptions are red tribe styled not blue tribe and that's essentially what this disagreement is about.

But I left that off the first bit because then the first bit is easier to agree with. Because that's how little effort it takes to influence people if you know what you are doing, and for all their faults the media does know how to influence people.

If your opponent burns down the epistemic commons, and you respond in kind, you have just ceded the moral high ground.

It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.

The woke left has obviously not been a steadfast ally of the Truth. They certainly pick the studies they cite as cannon fodder for their side, and this has skewed all of the social 'sciences'.

And they've got something better than objective truth. They define the accepted truth. If you try to contradict them, they'll print a thousand authoritative studies that back up their work and prove you're not only an evil racist but an ignorant science denier too. THAT is useful. That means that whatever "objective criteria" you try to institute, they can define the truth so those criteria support whatever they want. You can't beat this with words; you can only beat this with an "objective truth" they can't mess with. Not one "so obvious" they can't mess with it, because there's nothing so obvious. One that is as futile to deny as an oncoming train.

It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.

I, as a person who hates and argues against the act of doxxing--regardless of who is involved, have just met an argument I can't defeat.

"Moral High Ground?" Fuggedabout it.

If that's a veiled threat, don't bother; I've already been doxxed.

If not, the point of the term "moral high ground" is that "high ground" is in some way a superior tactical position. If it is not, the term is misleading. Without that implication, complaining that someone should not respond because they will lose the "moral high ground" is basically saying they should follow your (not their!) principles and lose rather than violate them and stand a chance. If you want to say that, say that; using the analogy of a "moral high ground" implies otherwise.

I was absolutely sincere, very confused why you thought it was threat. I think Doxxing is about the most evil and dishonorable thing you can do with the Internet. I consider Swatting a form of doxxing.

What other argument--aside from "moral high ground" is there to not dox people?

It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.

And they've got something better than objective truth. They define the accepted truth. If you try to contradict them, they'll print a thousand authoritative studies that back up their work and prove you're not only an evil racist but an ignorant science denier too. THAT is useful. That means that whatever "objective criteria" you try to institute, they can define the truth so those criteria support whatever they want. You can't beat this with words; you can only beat this with an "objective truth" they can't mess with. Not one "so obvious" they can't mess with it, because there's nothing so obvious. One that is as futile to deny as an oncoming train.

they they they

The claim was that team Musk+Trump have left the level 1 reality + destroying regular people's opportunity to seriously discuss level 1 reality on social media. Instead of employing " "objective truth" " in quotes, they employ bullshit. As far as I understand, you argue it is good and necessary because you will lose to "they" (Team Blue) otherwise?

Consider the downside of this policy: There are several examples modern and past what happens to a country when its governance is based on bullshit. Requiring your underlings and associates to repeat your bullshit back to you leads to success of people who are good at bullshitting or stupid enough not to know the difference. When ideological vibes and feels become more important than material reality, being knowledgeable about material reality becomes a hindrance in a smart person's career. Venezuela and South Africa are prime examples of such countries. If you try to build a dystopia of lies out of Ayn Rand novel except nominal political valence switched, more likely you are going to get more of Trumpzuela where big corp CEOs continue to get fat government contracts to build things that don't work as long they fat flatter Trump's ego. It is unlikely to be a cathartic step in a heroic journey where you win the fight and get to start building country you like after you win. The bullshit apparatus will say that fight is still going on no matter what it achieves. It was built for having power and repeating bullshit and after it has been built, its prime objective is to perpetuate itself.

This dovetails to a more important complaint. If the politician supposedly representing my tribe is running on vibes and bullshit, I can't trust them to do anything long-term useful. Musk claims that DOGE has achieved an amount-you-can't-keep-track-of in saving government expenses and exposing fraud but it has not. Instead, the claim is that Musk does his best to foster an information environment where it is difficult to find out what they really achieved and how they could achieve what they set out to do.

Let me extrapolate: Team Red says they will do something about gender ideology in schools, do something about the border and the illegals, do something about China, do something about economy and trade. Do I really want to hear about Team Red's performance concerning these issues by the way of DOGEfied information environment? Truth-seeker is always in danger of learning something new, followers of philosophical system of abandon-reality get to bullshit everyone, including their voters.

The claim was that team Musk+Trump have left the level 1 reality + destroying regular people's opportunity to seriously discuss level 1 reality on social media. Instead of employing " "objective truth" " in quotes, they employ bullshit. As far as I understand, you argue it is good and necessary because you will lose to "they" (Team Blue) otherwise?

I am saying that most of social media was never really discussing "objective truth". Instead, they were discussing accepted truth, as defined by the institutions. Trying to hew to THAT means you lose, because the institutions are controlled by Team Blue.

Bullshit, of course, has been a staple of political discourse forever. It's just that Team Blue has been able to pass their bullshit off as objective truth for a long time.

Consider the downside of this policy: There are several examples modern and past what happens to a country when its governance is based on bullshit. Requiring your underlings and associates to repeat your bullshit back to you leads to success of people who are good at bullshitting or stupid enough not to know the difference.

This is where Team Blue was taking us.

Musk claims that DOGE has achieved an amount-you-can't-keep-track-of in saving government expenses and exposing fraud but it has not. Instead, the claim is that Musk does his best to foster an information environment where it is difficult to find out what they really achieved and how they could achieve what they set out to do.

One cannot expect Musk, as a principal of DOGE, to give objectively true facts about it. He will boost it and should be expected to do so.

An inherent problem with populism that skepticism goes out the window. People are placed in power based on what they say, and the electorate is hesitant to criticize what they do. Sure, populists don't talk or govern like effete Borgpeople, but their competence, effectiveness, and leadership should receive no less scrutiny. Musk has been positioned like a Soros fever dream: way more money, more involved in government, less oversight, more in control of media.

Its probably too early to tell if Musk's signature DOGE program will be a success like Tesla, or a total failure like Hyperloop or The Boring Company. I'm guessing it will be somewhere in between. He's overpromising and underdelivering with wild claims. This is a pattern. Second human crew to Mars by 2024, self driving LA to NY parking lots with no supervision by 2016. For DOGE he set the mark at 2T in cuts, revised down to 1T, apparently by July 2026. They've already published a bunch of erroneous stats and stories, and people are swallowing the narratives wholesale. USAID is suddenly and obviously bad, and everybody knows it. We shouldn't infer anything from the fact that every other developed nation has an analogous agency - who usually spend more as a % of national income - just ax the whole program, its 100% waste, fraud, and abuse.

I can be optimistic, but that needn't lessen my skepticism. Politics is a game of promising the world and delivering an atlas. Usually there is pushback. Granted, most major political media is now decidedly right leaning (at least podcasts, cable, and youtube), but for a group that rightly (if hyperbolically) showed interest in Bidens Ukraine dealings, The Twitter Files, Bidens mental decline, there seems to be no appetite for investigating the worlds richest man plugged in to the backdoor of government by an agency that tried to permanently dodge FOIA requests, run by what Vance insinuated were "kids".

Musk has more overt power than Soros because he's playing a strongman on social media. Soros, in contrast, was a part of a giant emergent international blob. Financed via other 'billionaire philanthropists' along with tax dollars from all over the world. Working around the clock to skew peoples perception of reality to a preferred political end. There's no comparison.

Maybe when Musk and friends start fermenting their own global blob we can start asking questions. But so far there's not even a coherent idea of what that blob should be or why.

My whole point is people hesitance to even ask questions. Maybe Soros did everything you claim. None of that is my point.

As you stated, Musk has overt power. He bought a SM site, which he uses spread narratives and skew peoples perception of reality to a preferred political end, and has been appointed to directly audit the government, after being the by far the largest donor. Why on Earth should we be allergic to asking questions now?

As I noted, its probably too early to tell, but I'm mystified by the lack questioning given the power. Musk is one of the largest individual beneficiaries of government money. Thats notable. A $400M contract to buy armored Teslas appeared out of nowhere, only to be canceled. The Biden admin authorized a 450k plan to look into a similar EV scheme. Weird. DOGE has made some errors publicly, always overstating their findings. Okay, mistakes happen. They tried to make DOGE un-FOIA-able for 10 years. Whats that about? Practically overnight the media narrative became that USAID is some sort of scam that needs to be shuttered immediately. This came on faster than COVID-19 in Google Trends. How very odd.

Your point, as it could be read from your post, was tethered to the idea that populism was some kind of related problem. I don't see how that can be relevant when so many of the questions you assert to not being asked of Musk can be very similarly leveraged towards the ruling class that sat prior to Musk.

I mean, Musk has seen plenty of open criticism recently. The H1B/Vivek stuff, along with him pretending to be good at video games. Alongside that you have a budding media industry centered around hating Musk 24/7. His companies being subsidized by the government is certainly not an uncriticized element.

I'm not sure to what extent dislike for USAID needs to be astroturfed or to what extent you want to question the media narrative surrounding it. I think there's a sizable population that doesn't like their taxes wasted on trans operas in Ireland or whatever. I find the whole ordeal more similar to something like the 'twitter files'. Just with more meat on the bone. But yes, Musk sure can press his finger on the scale considering his reach on X. And between the reach of him, Trump and Joe Rogan I'm not sure what oddity you are looking to question.

Populism is related in that I think it inherently contains a lack of skepticism. Everybody is just following the narrative with this admin, whereas the prior media trajectory was skepticism often to the point of conspiracy. Its early, but I promote skepticism always. Given that there was comparatively no interest in USAID prior, an about face inside of a few days speaks to mob mentality and blind allegiance to the party line. The media narrative is so far ahead of the details that $50M for condoms in Gaza hallucination was repeated ad nauseum by the admin itself. Of course the vast majority of Americans don't want 50 grand wasted on some trans Irish play, but that's $1 in every $100,000 of an agency that people are acting like needs to obviously be shuttered overnight. I'm not opposed to shutting it down, but relevant and true details matter. The oddities I want to question are manifold. The worlds richest man is personally auditing the entire government with apparent carte balance. Perhaps its for the best, but its worth questioning. The Epstein list was heavily redacted. Whats that about. Why are top lawyers at the DOJ from the Federalist Society resigning en masse claiming they're being asked to do illegal things. Why are Trumps personal lawyers, got appointed to government position, saying they're going to "protect Trump leadership" - which is not their job - vowing to "chase DOGE's critics to the end of the Earth". Seems odds.

Given that there was comparatively no interest in USAID prior, an about face inside of a few days speaks to mob mentality and blind allegiance to the party line.

How is this a problem particular to populism? Are we supposed to forget the constant swapping of profile pics to show your alignment to the Current Thing? The about face from "Covid is no worse than the flu" to "Covid is the biggest disaster since WW2"? Or from "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" to "Covid did most likely leak from a lab, and we knew about it from the start"?

To USAID in particular, is it really an about-face, or did people react to previously unknown information about it being used for Blue-aligned causes, from spreading transgenderism in the third world to sponsoring the majority of Ukraine's "independent" media?

I think that the truth is perhaps much simpler. Musk has not "deteriorated" intellectually so much as he has transitioned from being a darling of progressives and blue/grey-tribe technocrats due to his elecric cars, to being an enemy due to his politics.

Elon has always been erratic and eccentric, (just look at his kids' names) but nobody really cared until he aligned himself with the Tea-Party/Maga right.

It was published in 2019, and it's been a few years since I read it, but I'm trying to think back to examples from Ed Niedermeyer's "Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors," to see if they indicate a trend. Musk's MO was very much fake-it-till-you-make-it, even when that included commiting outright fraud (so much fraud...), but he cared enough about reality to admit (eventually) that certain decisions had been wrong (e.g., the Model X was overly complex and achieving mass-production for the Model 3 by reinventing the assembly line in an unclear way that required "building the machine that builds the machine"). On the other hand, Tesla has removed RADAR from its sensor suite, for pure monocular computer vision (they have multiple forward-facing cameras, but they're different fields of view, not stereoscopic).

I was recently listening to something on the early days of the airline industry and was struck by how much their description of Donald Douglas was giving me Elon Musk vibes.

A sort of "you need to be at least this mad to truly revolutionize an industry", reasonable men need not apply.

Now read about Howard Hughes.

While his kid's names are weird, they're not erratic.

L X Æ A-Xii, 4 Exa Dark Sideræl, Techno Mechanicus aren’t erratic sounding names?

They all sound science fictional. He doesn’t jump from sci-fi name to ghetto name to fundy name- he stays in the same land of strange names.

My guess is that he just mostly lets the mothers name the children. The ones with the weirdest names are the ones with Grimes.

This is not remotely tenable. His achievements at SpaceX were, in every sense of the word, extraordinary.

Meanwhile DOGE is going to end up being simply ineffective at achieving even its most basic goals.

DOGE is a suicide mission (unless a meaningless blue ribbon commission, which is what I expected) and it's a serious demerit against Musk's intelligence/perceptiveness that he actually took it seriously. The executive has relatively limited means to actually do anything about the budget. That has to come from Congress, and the GOP has been anywhere from useless (W. Bush administration oversaw the biggest increase in healthcare spending since LBJ; Obamacare just locked it in and socialized some of it) to merely OK (second-term Obama GOP House did see some deficit reduction) on the budget since Gingrich, who was frankly playing on easy mode (post cold war peace dividend plus the peak earning years of the Boomers coinciding with a small generation retiring and good economic growth) compared to what any House is dealing with now.

Last I checked, the GOP House since taking over in '23 has done nothing but pass continuations of Biden/Pelosi's budgets.

Last I checked, the GOP House since taking over in '23 has done nothing but pass continuations of Biden/Pelosi's budgets.

Because the GOP majority is not a monolith, they have to find something that bridges the freedom caucus folks and the blue state folks and the western-GOP folks.

It's a serious demerit against Musk's intelligence/perceptiveness that he actually took it seriously

It's a demerit against the theory of infinite-transferability of ability, and against him that he didn't realize that.

Will it? What exactly do you think those goals are?

DOGE is arguably being fairly effective in its core goal of providing propaganda to justify tax cuts while convincing the base forward rather than backward progress is being made on government spending.

I agree that this is the most parsimonious explanation. Even someone as public as Musk spends a majority of his time outside the spotlight, so few people, if any, have enough contact with him to make a call like his mind breaking. Sometimes it's obvious, as in the case of people like Kanye or Biden, but in those cases, generally even the people who support them can't deny it, not without massive help from powerful media companies, anyway. This criticism of Musk appears to come almost entirely from people who already disliked Musk and Trump, and the people who currently like Musk don't seem to have noticed this, so my conclusion is that people claiming that evidence points to Musk's mind breaking are characterizing his apparent shift in politics away from them as that, and then honestly believing it (well, I wonder if Hanania believes it, if he's as smart as I think he is; from my following his Twitter account, he seems to optimize around heat and not light, in a way that presents himself as a wise right-wing contrarian, so I'm not sure if he believes in anything these days). If there were some significant population of people who are cheering on what Musk is doing these days who think his mind is broken, that would lend credence to the theory, but outside of that, it's hard to conclude anything other than partisan bias. Which is the correct explanation for roughly 99.9% of all questions in the realm of politics, by my estimation.

I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022

Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth. Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever? No. If anything he shot himself in the foot switching from 'I'm a smart tech-right policy guy' to 'let me sneer at all the right-wing retards who are now running the country and are in a position to implement policies'. He's the contrarian rat that jumps on board the sinking ship. What a fool!

Elon may indeed have lost some of his faculties, idk, I've never met the man. I doubt Hanania has either. Armchair psychoanalysis of extremely unusual people is basically just glorified name-calling.

Whatever Elon has lost, if anything, he still makes the rest of the world look like drooling retards. What did I get done in the last 3 years, since 2022? I certainly didn't start an AI company that's outperforming Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I didn't build the biggest datacentre on the planet at record speed.

It's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree with Elon's choices or think he should do something else. I disagree with Elon about many things, including his whole concept of what a state is for. But if people want to go around calling him dumb or saying that his brain 'broke', then we'd better have some serious achievements to prove that we know what 'smart' or 'successful' is! Certainly something better than 'I wrote a book rehashing Mearsheimer (nobody cares about it) and blew up my political career' like Hanania.

Why should anyone care what Hanania thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it? He was pivoting away from Trump while Elon pivoted towards Trump... I think it's clear who has better political skills and like everything else between them, it's an orders of magnitude difference.

If anything he shot himself in the foot switching from 'I'm a smart tech-right policy guy' to 'let me sneer at all the right-wing retards who are now running the country and are in a position to implement policies'. He's the contrarian rat that jumps on board the sinking ship. What a fool!

As I said in the last thread, when you change add stuff to your platform that didn't used to be there, some people who liked the old platform will decide they don't like the new platform and depart. Others will support ANYTHING the party does, because loyalty to their tribe is all that matters. What's the next thing the Tucker Carlson fans are going to embrace? Are they going to take issue with chlorinated swimming pools? Whatever it is, I'm sure a large proportion of people here will embrace, ignore, or sanewash it. Other people will decide they don't feel like being Republicans anymore and get accused of "jumping ship" for not changing their minds.

So your heuristic is that we should just ignore less successful people when they criticize their more successful peers? So when some Republicans claim that Biden has dementia, we can safely ignore that because the ones making the claim are not a sitting president of the United States, but some congressmen at best?

He was pivoting away from Trump while Elon pivoted towards Trump... I think it's clear who has better political skills and like everything else between them, it's an orders of magnitude difference.

For the career of Hanania, a political endorsement of Trump would have been a no-brainer: Trump might have offer him a job in his administration, while there is no way in hell Harris would have offered him a job. So either he was deluded into thinking that there was no way Trump could win (unlikely) or we must consider the possibility that he is driven by something other than opportunism. I think it is likely that he considered a Trump policy so bad that it would be net negative even if Trump implemented a few of his policy proposals.

Personally, I do not think that Musk turned into an idiot, and more that he turned evil or that he was always evil, but used to mask that fact through backing pro-social causes like electric cars -- that he faked being aligned to the thriving of humanity when it served his interests, and now he fakes being aligned to Trump's interests instead.

Granted, Musk backed Trump before the election (while the other tech billionaires mostly waited until Trump had won to kiss his ring), but this still does not seem an unreasonable gamble. Trump is very willing to use the federal government to harass companies which have offended him personally. The Democrats have certainly also leaned on tech companies in the past, but they might force SpaceX to hire a few more DEI, not blacklist them for government contracts because they hate Musk.

Biden was never smart or capable, his first presidential campaign crashed because he lied about being first in his class and plagiarizing. Pretty poor on 'not sounding like a fool in speeches' and 'avoiding scandals' too. Elon can sometimes sound like a fool in speeches and he is scandal-prone but there are other redeeming qualities that are lacking with Biden.

I don't know what selection mechanisms exist in the Democratic Party for leadership material but the people that gave us Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are clearly not prioritizing skills and ability.

You can be successful without being smart. Clearly I erred in tying 'smart' and 'successful' together when I was primarily talking about the allegations that Elon broke his brain. Most of the time you need to be smart to be successful.

It's particularly jarring because the GOP is now the party whose voters have lower average income.

https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0

Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth.

This is only relevant if we think that Twitter followers or personal wealth are proportional to intelligence.

There is no doubt some correlation between intelligence and success at one's endeavours. Some. But it is not total, and so if we consider why Hanania isn't fabulously wealthy and followed by a lot of people on the internet, we might consider the very many relevant factors other than intelligence. For instance, Hanania is younger than Musk, Hanania has different personal goals and priorities to Musk, Hanania has a different personality profile to Musk, Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was, and that's all well before we even get to considering luck or arbitrary fortune.

Maybe you think Hanania is dumb anyway, and sure, maybe he is.

But I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people with fewer than Musk's 219 million Twitter followers who you and I would agree are smarter or more reliable guides than Musk. I'm also willing to bet there are lots of people with less net wealth than Musk's 225 billion that you and I would agree are smarter than Musk.

Likewise for other celebrities. Justin Bieber has 109 million Twitter followers and a net worth of around 300 million. That's a lot more than most people. Are you prepared to become a Belieber?

Be serious. Hanania may well be dumb and wrong, but this kind of sneering "he doesn't have as much money as Musk" is worthless.

But I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people with fewer than Musk's 219 million Twitter followers who you and I would agree are smarter or more reliable guides

There are absolutely people I agree with more often than Musk. There are some people online who I think are very wise and I agree with basically everything they say. Whereas I disagree with many things that Musk says, we clearly have different goals and understanding of the world. So there are people wiser than Musk.

But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path? Musk wants to settle Mars, so he simply takes over the entire spaceflight market with SpaceX. The Democratic Party/decel culture gets in his way, so he moves to smash them with Twitter and Trump. AI coming up sooner than expected, looks like that's important? Why not simply start a frontier lab? Electric cars and robots as well!

These are impressive achievements! It is hard to create things, rather than merely performing a role for someone else like so many. Try starting your own business. It's hard on a wholly different level.

When Bieber demonstrates general-purpose creative ability (at maybe 10 or 100 times his net worth), as opposed to just being a one-trick pony in music/infatuating young women, then I'll defend his general ability. Taylor Swift does the same thing better than Bieber and has basically no political influence (her endorsement had minimal effect), Musk is on a totally different level.

But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path?

The post you are replying to explained this. Intelligence does not straightforwardly equate to success like that - it is one of many correlates. Musk's wealth has multiple causes; a person of equal or greater intelligence might easily not be as successful.

Musk is rich and powerful, but that in itself does not show that Hanania is wrong, nor does it absolve Musk of any of his obvious faults.

Musk is not some baron or duke. His inheritance was by no means significant in him becoming wealthy.

'Personality type' is just a different way of saying intelligence in this context. 'I am smart but lazy' is an excuse, not an explanation. It doesn't matter at all if you're smart in some esoteric way that has no relevance in the real world. Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken.

Criticizing faults is fine but it is bizarre and question-begging for people who are in virtually every way less competent to criticize the ability of far more capable people.

I would say that one's personality may shape one's goals and priorities?

For example: I would say that Thomas Aquinas was devastatingly intelligent by any fair standard. He chose a path of life that committed him to both celibacy and poverty. By the standard you've given, though, he cannot be intelligent. He did not achieve worldly power, office, or glory.

I conclude therefore that your standard is a bad standard. It does not measure intelligence. There are extremely intelligent people who do not achieve "great effects on the world", at least in the sense that you've given. In Aquinas' case this seems to be a result of his choice not to seek that type of success. He sought something else.

Likewise "Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken" is a non sequitur. It is entirely conceivable that a person might have great effects on the world while having a brain that is, in some sense, broken. You just cannot get from "Musk has influenced the world" to "Musk has no significant faults". The claim is fallacious.

Thomas Aquinas was definitely intelligent, we are still talking about his books centuries after his death. He absolutely had impact and significance. Most of what he writes is basically nonsense but that's the nature of theology.

Maybe you can be intelligent and not do anything significant. But doing something significant requires intelligence. Given that we can't read minds and analyse them perfectly, we should assume that those who do great things have greater faculties than those who merely claim to be intelligent.

So I find it disgusting for a nobody like Hanania to go 'oh I listened to him on a podcast and read some tweets of this guy, so I can look down on his intelligence, his basic mental faculties'. That's what I'm upset with.

I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022

Furthermore, how is Hanania in a position to judge? Does he know anything of significance? What operations has he overseen? What high-performance organization has he built?

If you're down-rating Elon Musk's intelligence in favour of 'luck or arbitrary fortune', where is your reasoning that it's actually straightforward to build a rocket company or start a leading AI lab (which he did while Hanania thinks his brain was broken)? Is NASA too busy huffing airhorn gas to make cheap rockets? Is Meta AI full of dribbling retards? Did Jeff Bezos just roll bad dice with his space company? Obviously not! It's the special competence of this one man, with secrets that we don't understand regarding management, motivation and so on.

How is Musk broken if he achieves massive successes in science, engineering, business and politics?

I think it would make your argument vastly more succinct if you just said "Musk is more powerful", rather than arguing back and forth on the relative value of wisdom, smarts and factual accuracy, as well as whether Musk possesses all of those. Musk has power, Hanania doesn't, therefore Hanania's criticism is groundless and impotent. That appears to be the real gist of what you're saying.

But suppose Hanania really doesn't have the right to speak on Musk. In that case, why do you care enough to correct the public mottizen opinion on Hanania and urge people to not listen to him? Shouldn't his lack of influence be self-evident?

Maybe you can be intelligent and not do anything significant. But doing something significant requires intelligence. Given that we can't read minds and analyse them perfectly, we should assume that those who do great things have greater faculties than those who merely claim to be intelligent.

I did say that I believe intelligence correlates with success. It just doesn't do so absolutely or reliably - there are successful idiots, and unsuccessful geniuses. I think Musk's business success is a data point in favour of his being clever, but it's not the only consideration, nor is it decisive in itself.

As it happens I do think Musk is reasonably clever. I don't go quite as far as Noah Smith, but I think Smith is directionally correct, and people who sneer and declare Musk a moron are being foolish.

Is Musk smarter than Hanania? I don't know. I think Hanania is evidently a reasonably smart person as well - his high standard of written expression and analytical ability show that, even if I do often think he's wrong - but I wouldn't make a general comparison. I don't know either of them in person in the kind of detail that I think I would need to in order to make a credible comparison. Fortunately "is Musk smarter than Hanania?" is the kind of question that never needs to be answered. It's a silly question - in practice, in any disagreement between Musk and Hanania, I have ample ways of resolving it without going down that rather pointless tangent.

What I find bizarre in your comments, though, is this:

So I find it disgusting for a nobody like Hanania to go 'oh I listened to him on a podcast and read some tweets of this guy, so I can look down on his intelligence, his basic mental faculties'. That's what I'm upset with. [...] Furthermore, how is Hanania in a position to judge? Does he know anything of significance? What operations has he overseen? What high-performance organization has he built?

I find this strangely defensive? You almost sound offended! Suppose for the sake of argument that Musk is in some objective sense smarter than Hanania. So what? Hanania is not a peasant bowing and scraping before his lord. People are allowed to criticise people smarter than them. If Person A has an IQ of 140 and Person B has an IQ of 150, it is still permissible for Person A to criticise Person B. Indeed, it is wholly conceivable that Person A might criticise Person B and be entirely correct in those criticisms, because IQ is not a measure of correctness, either factual or moral.

So even if for the sake of argument Musk is objectively more intelligent than Hanania, that would not make Hanania's argument incorrect. It would be a red herring.

This seems like an obvious case of proving too much to me. "People can never criticise their intellectual superiors" is a fake rule we never apply to anything else. Maybe Musk is much better at starting tech companies than Hanania. Bully for him. So what?

And I suppose as far as disgust or moral offense goes, for what it's worth I'm morally disgusted at the idea that the plebs should never criticise their supposed betters. There is nothing that Musk has done that confers on him a right to not be a target of criticism by others. Maybe Hanania's criticism of Musk is mistaken, but if so it's mistaken because of its actual merits, not because Hanania dared to lift his eyes to look upon the god-like mien of the shining Musk.

If you're down-rating Elon Musk's intelligence in favour of 'luck or arbitrary fortune', where is your reasoning that it's actually straightforward to build a rocket company or start a leading AI lab (which he did while Hanania thinks his brain was broken)? Is NASA too busy huffing airhorn gas to make cheap rockets? Is Meta AI full of dribbling retards? Did Jeff Bezos just roll bad dice with his space company? Obviously not! It's the special competence of this one man, with secrets that we don't understand regarding management, motivation and so on.

I'd assert that Musk's various achievements are in no way incompatible with him being pathological in some other respect.

Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was

I understand that this line was not core to your point, but to correct the record - Musk’s family was middle class, turbulent, and abusive. His father’s financial success was very up and down, and he is now completely broke (Musk used to support him, but cut him off after he repeated slept with and attempted to sleep with younger family members.)

Musk arrived in Canada at 17 with $2000 to his name and never received substantial financial support from his family after that. His mom would sometimes send him $100 for groceries. There is no evidence that he ever received a large cash infusion from his parents. Of all the excuses for why Musk is more successful than you, “rich parents” has to be the worst.

Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth.

Following this logic, who are you to contradict Hanania?

Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever?

What's your actual argument here? Elon is a super successful businessman so he can't be wrong about Zelenskyy being a dictator with a 4% approval rating who started the Russian-Ukraine War?

Elon may indeed have lost some of his faculties, idk, I've never met the man. I doubt Hanania has either. Armchair psychoanalysis of extremely unusual people is basically just glorified name-calling.

Is wondering if Elon has gone a little nuts "glorified name-calling" or is it... wondering if Elon has gone a little nuts? I guess it could be the former, but it seems like the OP is being earnest and I'm pretty sure the rules here say something about arguing with people in good faith.

It's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree with Elon's choices or think he should do something else.

Uh, is it? According to your logic, I feel like it's not:

Whatever Elon has lost, if anything, he still makes the rest of the world look like drooling retards. What did I get done in the last 3 years, since 2022? I certainly didn't start an AI company that's outperforming Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I didn't build the biggest datacentre on the planet at record speed.

But whatever.

Why should anyone care what Hanania thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it?

What if I asked, "Why should I care what Elon Musk thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it?" In fact, I am asking that. How is Elon Musk good at politics? He genuinely seems terrible at it. He's more unpopular than ever. DOGE is a mess. What has he achieved? He publicly supported Donald Trump? That's not good politics, that's just expressing preferences. Having actual moral objections to someone isn't the same thing as not having "political skills."

How is Elon Musk good at politics?

How much political influence does Elon Musk have in the US? Politics isn't about popularity. Taylor Swift is pretty popular. Is she good at politics? No.

Elon is a super successful businessman so he can't be wrong about Zelenskyy being a dictator with a 4% approval rating who started the Russian-Ukraine War?

Tweet accuracy does not determine whether someone's brain is broken. Advancing a message in accordance with one's goals is more important than factual accuracy. Trump does this all the time, he blows up every number 2-5x. Doing that has no relation to his political ability, it is beyond doubt that his political ability is immense.

If your brain is broken, then you'd be saying things like Biden did: "And now I want to hand it over to the President of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination, ladies and gentlemen, President Putin". That is what having a broken brain looks like, when you're not on-message, when you're so far off-message that you're supporting the other side.

Elon knows more about the war in Ukraine than the entire Pentagon. Not because he knows the ins and outs of every calibre of artillery, not because he pores over every inch of satellite intel and reads every single powerpoint slide... but because he appreciates the basic strategic dynamics of the situation and adjusts his stance accordingly: 'if military victory is not cost-efficient, use diplomacy to minimize losses'. And if getting rid of Zelensky helps this, then he'll move in that direction with 'get rid of Zelensky' rather than getting bogged down in juvenile narratives like 'Putin is a bully' like our prestigious, military expert class who work day and night bungling everything they touch. Note that Elon started off super-pro Ukraine, donating them hundreds of millions worth of military aid in Starlink. He changed his stance to match the situation. Appreciating the key facets is better than racking up debating point trivia.

Do you really believe that someone leading a for-now successful business precludes them undergoing mental decline? If anything, why not take a look at recent developments in contrast to past performance as more relevant evidence than the simple fact of a successful business existing? Tesla stock not doing so hot these days.

Should we assign truth value to people's opinions based on their wealth and following? I don't see how your comments about Hanania's global strategic positioning have anything to do with the veracity of his opinion.

You also seem to think...people are dumb for not following Trump even if they don't believe in his goals or execution? It seems extremely plausible that Hanania simply did not want to be a sycophant for Trump, which says nothing about how 'bad' he is at politics. You seem to be invoking some assumption that Hanania was clearly angling for some political gain that he fumbled by not supporting Trump, and that doesn't seem much more plausible than other explanations.

Hanania said he was anti-woke, he made all these posts about it. He was seemingly angling to be a public intellectual and influence US policy in various respects before flip-flopping and burning his bridges.

In that scenario, it makes sense to not come out and sneer at Trump. It's called tact, diplomacy, political skill. Or is Hanania just an internet troll with a substack?

Furthermore, I am highly confident that Elon Musk has demonstrated a high level of business ability and 'making things happen' in the last 3 years. Tesla is just one of his businesses. Tesla is exactly where it was in July 2024 or November 2024 in stock price. It's a 700 billion dollar company manufacturing goods in competition with China, which is extremely difficult. Maybe Elon can't be expected to run Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and GrokAI at a world-class level simultaneously, while also rearranging US politics? Maybe he can only keep 3 or 4 balls in the air at once, he's still pretty good at juggling. People who have never juggled aren't qualified to sneer at the abilities of the best jugglers, that's my point.

Again, you seem to be squashing a lot of plausible complexity into a very simple categorization of Hanania being 'antiwoke'. Does being antiwoke preclude one from disagreeing heavily with other antiwoke people to the point you publically break from them? I don't see why it would. It COULD be the case that he thought this was best for his career and this is some massive error on his part in sensing what his audience wants, but it's just as convenient an explanation that he disagrees with Trump on policy to such a degree that simply being on the antiwoke team is not enough to garner a blind eye.

I think there's a country mile between cynically falling in line behind 'your guy' and being an internet troll. Was Sanders trolling when he ran against Clinton? Or is it more likely that people on ostensibly the same wing of politics sometimes do things that hurt others in the same wing because they have different beliefs?

If you don't accept that people who don't run successful businesses can't provide insight on those who do, then I struggle to see how you manage to derive value from any comments on this forum, where anonymous internet randos constantly comment on the goings-on of high profile business and government leaders who are usually, by every public metric, very successful. A sneer (or criticism, or observation) is just as good as the argument it presents, no more no less. People who are successful may have on average better insights into others that are as well, but you can still always judge the critique on its merits no matter who submits it. In this case, to refute Hanania's comments a good response would be to cite Musk's recent successes, as you've done. The comments on Hanania' lack of business success don't really address anything directly. (And in fact, I find it likely that he is, by this metric you've chosen, more successful than most commenters here, the forum you elect to participate in.)

Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth. Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever?

No one shall care about Hanania, but you should care, if you care about world's affairs at all, if man who does all these things, destroys his brain with drugs and gets all his information from xitter and 4chan shitposters.

If he's doing those things, then is he destroying his brain with drugs? What about Meta, what have they been doing? Has Zuckerberg been destroying his brain with drugs throwing $20 billion into VR with zero returns and with Meta AI getting defenestrated by Grok 3 and Deepseek, not to mention kowtowing to Trump after he won the election rather than supporting him before, like Elon? Running these huge organizations is difficult. There are ups and downs.

The elite, prestigious sources of information have discredited themselves. They go on and on about climate change (nothingburger) and demand extremely costly and ineffective fixes. They came up with DEI and globalized the whole US race obsession. They swept Rotherham under the carpet and brought us the summer of Floyd. They've damaged relations between the sexes considerably. They cheered for the retard wars in the middle east. They spurred political division by blundering obsessively and then screeching misinformation when anyone tried to point out their inadequacy.

The damage caused by the narratives they put out far exceeds anything Musk and far-right anime profile pics have done.

This is sneering.

Or rather, it's the kind of sneering that people like Hanania indulge to salve their egos.

I am not ashamed to say that I am of origin a 4chan shitposter. I, of course, cannot speak for an amorphous group of internet trolls. But I'd like to think that people like me and people who think like me have no pretensions of gatekeeping the culture or its discourse. But despite this, our little internet sect - if it can even be called that - is upstream of so much of the current political moment that we are either incredibly prescient of the degeneration of propriety or we masterminded its fall and decline. The American president is a living, breathing meme. He trolls the world! And in some insignificant yet important way, we are a part of it.

Or it could be all a big coincidence. It would be just as funny.

No one outside of Hanania's little circle cares about his opinions. He's no thought leader. Not even a secret king. Trump may be master of the media cycle, but he is a boomer and ultimately of their generation. Elon is one of us. At times he may be based and other times he will be a lolcow, but the Extremely Online Right Wing Weirdos have broken into government and there is nothing the bow-tied Buckleyites can do about it.

nothing the bow-tied Buckleyites can do about it.

Hanania is a former white nationalist who wrote for Counter-Currents.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything?

Analysing the tribe that Hanania belongs to may be great sport, but it is, surely, completely inconsequential to the points he makes, which the top-level post presumably wanted to discuss?

In short: he's coping and seething because he is not the court philosopher of the people in power.

In the long: it's no longer 2012. You don't get points for Noticing, no more than you get credit for being a geocentrist in this day and age. Whether Hanania likes it or not, Elon Musk has actually accomplished things. What has he done? Suffered in the desert of barely acceptable discourse for a decade, and when he emerges he isn't treated as a prophet, with respect. He's a nobody, a has-been. Elon brute-forced his way into the president's cabinet to dictate policy, while Hanania snipes at him on a substack. Who is he to say about competence, about anything? Sure, it's not debate club rules, but writing furious tracts on how Elon is a drug addict that is crashing out isn't exactly gentlemanly, either.

Even if Elon is a tenth of the man he was when he started up SpaceX, he's still vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania was on his best day. In the real world, this matters. There is a long history of intellectuals waging personal grudges in the public discourse against their enemies. Nearly all of it is uninteresting.

I'm just going to repeat myself - what does that, even if true, have to do with anything?

I haven't speculated on Hanania's private motivations, in the depth of his soul, because I don't care about them. He's a guy who commentates on politics, and he's provided commentary here. Either that commentary is true and useful, or it isn't, and in neither case does it matter what you think his private dreams and aspirations might be.

Hanania has commented negatively on Musk's character and behaviour. As far as I can tell those comments are well-grounded in observable evidence. What more do you need?

Yes, Musk is "vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania". This is true. This is, in fact, the whole reason why it is appropriate to write articles in Unherd about Musk's character, addictions, changing behaviours, etc., and would not be appropriate to publish similar analyses of Hanania. Musk's character, behaviour, choices, etc., affect vastly more people in the real world, and therefore it is both fair and necessary to subject Musk to closer scrutiny.

The question is why discuss anything Hanania has to say at all? If it's not inherently interesting (and I don't think it is), it would have to be because Hanania is someone to pay attention to. And IMO (and I said this some months ago), he's not.

I don't think he necessarily believes everything he retweets. I think it's more likely that he using 'arguments tweets as weapons'. As someone said in the article's comments (worth a skim btw), the guy is autistic and likely copying a rhetorical strategy he's seen used by others.

I do agree that he is thin skinned (See cave diving submarine suggestion > 'pedo guy' incident, Asmongold Blue Check removal after calling out his fake World #1 Gamer LARP incident) and cracks are appearing at the seams under the current withering pressure. Could also be on enough drugs to affect his behaviour.

All that being said the answer to a flawed Elon isn't 'disband DOGE and make no attempts against cutting spending or the government bureaucracy'.

One last thing, I found the below paragraph from the article interesting:

It might be reasonable to suspect that someone as successful as he is must just be playing dumb online, while displaying a hidden command when it comes to policy. Yet even if you are sympathetic to his goal of reducing the size and scope of government — as I am — focusing on firing federal employees is just about the worst possible way to achieve that end. Fewer people working at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, doesn’t mean regulators getting off the backs of pharmaceutical companies trying to bring drugs to market. Instead, it makes drug-approval processes longer and more arduous. Or consider: Republicans have tended to oppose student-loan forgiveness, but now cuts at the Department of Education may lead to there not being enough workers to collect debt. Put another way: Muskian methods may be enacting a de facto version of former President Joe Biden’s policies.

Isn't this kind of assuming a malicious compliance that's been talked about on here recently? As in 'if you make budget cuts, we will deliberately take them out of areas that will most enrage voters'?

I'm absolutely convinced the thai submarine diver pedoguy incident was directionally correct. You've got a middle aged British dude in Thailand, that's a huge red flag.

If that's all the evidence there is, then how about a solid "I don't know at all"?

Have we considered how destructive having the political left be angry at you is to the sanity of people who aren't cut out for it? That is, people who aren't politicians?

As a prior example, I'm thinking of Jordan Peterson, who seems to have followed a similar trajectory of brilliant man becoming increasingly unhinged as political attacks step up.

Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.

His fallout with Sam Harris over losing a bet re: the number of total COVID cases there would be in the US seem like early hallmarks of Musk's decline.

Since then it seems like the left's hatred of him has only intensified, not that he didn't help himself by indulging in trolling them back. Basically, having an irresistible urge to troll and being a target of the left can drive some men to ruin.

Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.

I believe it was specifically the factory closures that did it, because Musk would have seen it as a potential death sentence for his businesses if it carried on. Before this, blue tribe tended to act in ways that were either neutral or positive for his business. That suddenly flipped to extremely negative.

But this is always going to be the elephant in the room for any Trump/Musk is doing a wrecking ball argument. Progressives just drove a wrecking ball that was at least an order of magnitude worse through society, which can justify a pretty big wrecking ball in response if that prevents it from happening again. Or halts it, even. The US avoided some of the worst of it but parts of Europe were still doing severe restrictions in late 2021, after the vaccine rollout, and thus long past any logical stopping point. Worst case scenario for the minimally Trumpy world that Hanania wants is that we're still doing them in 2025.

And to reiterate the below comment, the result is that I’m also okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out whatever political faction we should call this thing.

I think you have a very good point here. I suffered through a set of proto-Woke struggle sessions in the mid-2010s and it does leave certain scars.

The result is that I’m okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out the woke and the people/ideas that produce wokeness. I’m not proud of it but it’s true.

I think the crucial question in this respect is what does it mean to be cut out for it. After all, the trajectories of Musk and Peterson are by no means universal.

Musk and JP could have avoided so much self-inflicted misery if the bottom 99% of their tweets were deleted instead of posted, with hardly any loss in upside.

Being cut out for it means being cool in the face of ugly attacks. It means "acting Presidential". Refusing to be trolled. Refusing to engage in trolling. Have principles, but if you don't, at least pretend to instead of pitching them to own the libs.

A publicist could have saved them each boatloads of treasure, their reputation and their sanity.

To some extent I'd argue that that's the crux of the entire culture war. The left, via their march through institutions as well as their early control over new media, gained access to a super weapon; the ability to point the whole of society against any individual. Western democracies, influenced by Hobbes, had gone to great lengths to make sure this could not be done without considerable hurdles. But suddenly this super weapon was not only available, but at the beck and call of anyone on the left with a good enough narrative. The only constraint was that it could only be pointed rightward.

So for a decade, we had ever increasing use of this weapon against a large number of people. But more often than not, those who were targeted were the "powerful", that is to say, successful people with something to loose . Anyone caught in the crosshairs was ruined; their career, social life, in some cases even freedom suddenly forfeit. But at the end of the day, those people were still alive. Still part of society. And as you said, I think the experience of having your world ripped away for seemingly no reason is enough to genuinely drive someone mad.

And that's what we're now seeing. A horde of these people, crazed to the point of mayhem, ripping apart the core foundations of society. And the left, like a child who shot their parent in a fit of anger, suddenly waking up to the fact that they destroyed their primary means of protection, and that there is no way to wind back the clock.

And while I think quite a few of us might take some grim satisfaction in that last statement, it doesn't change the fact that we're all on this ship as well. If it goes down, every one of us is going to suffer.

I actually have a different issue to raise than my earlier remark: very little of this is new. American business elites have been trying to roll back regulatory oversight, labor laws, and the welfare state since the minute they were created. Certainly the proposition that Musk et al are reacting to being 'ruined' is laughable. Even before he managed to make himself un-elected shadow president, he was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Sorry bud, libs hating billionaires isn't new either. All you have to do to get away from them is uninstall twitter.

The only thing new is that the conservative movement has become more reactionary and overtly illiberal.

The only thing new is that the conservative movement has become more reactionary and overtly illiberal.

fitting it would be in reaction to the lib covid hysterics' extreme illiberalism turning the state into a weapon against all of society with its fingers permeating every part of life and causing enormous harm to them

conservatives are the last liberals and it's why they've been losing for many decades

standing atop history yelling "stop!" to the rightwing who were desperately trying to roll-back what the leftists had managed to scheme their way into accomplishing a mere 10 years ago

the ability to point the whole of society against any individual. Western democracies, influenced by Hobbes, had gone to great lengths to make sure this could not be done without considerable hurdles.

This wasn't some ambient power that the Left decided to wield one day. It's a newly developed power, enabled by technology and the virtualization of society. Before ~2000, there was no way the whole of society could be pointed at anyone. Everything was too fragmented for any group (even the elite!) to act coherently, and information was collected, integrated, and acted upon in a much looser cycle. "What should the world do if a random person does a Nazi salute in her car?" wasn't a question anyone considered, because it was entirely unactionable. Now, though, a picture gets taken and shared online, millions of people can see it within an hour, her employer can be easily identified and be communicated to, public relations can carefully track negative sentiments, and she can be fired by lunchtime.

Why was it initially wielded by the Left? Good timing and proximity to the tools of symbolic production.

The left, via their march through institutions as well as their early control over new media, gained access to a super weapon; the ability to point the whole of society against any individual.

This isn't really true*, but it gestures towards something true: the fairly novel experience for social conservatives of not being in the normative driver's seat. For a very long time, social conservatives defined collective norms while social liberals rebelled against them. Every so often the liberals would win a fight and move consensus, but the center of gravity remained with conservatives. Even institutions that tended to be dominated by liberals in composition (e.g. Hollywood) still had to submit to a broader conservative consensus.

In the Obama era, this was upended and for the first time conservatives were in the uncomfortable and bewildering position of being censured for failing to adhere to liberal values rather than vice versa. The cultural center of gravity shifted away from conservatives. Liberals were defining standards of public behavior, and generally not in ways conservatives found agreeable. The entertainment industry shrugged off the aforementioned conservative consensus and started pushing overtly progressive themes (e.g. LGBT/minority representation) in a way that challenged conservatives' sense of rightful cultural hegemony.

This is part of why we get the peculiar phenomenon where conservatives seem to care far more about what liberals say about them than vice versa. The former were accustomed to being able to demand respect and unaccustomed to finding themselves on the outside;the latter were already acculturated to a certain amount of social opprobrium and often took pride in it.

*social media cancellation overwhelmingly affected people in liberal-dominated spaced and was an emergent behavior rather than a directed one. Rupert Murdoch was in no danger of being canceled even though left-wingers absolutely despised him; we can argue about why Musk shifted right

I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s. Liberals, up until Obama were just much more careful about showing their power level until the long March was over so they could consolidate power. Hollywood had always been liberal, and even if the movies made in 1970 would be conservative by modern standards, they were absolutely liberal by the conservative standards of the day. Soylent Green was an overpopulation/environmental piece, blaxploitation was an entire genre of film, anti war themes showed up in movies, tv shows, music, and so on. Liberal protests on college campuses have likewise been a thing since Kent State.

I think there are two catalysts for the change. First, social media vastly extended the reach of social opinion, such that private opinions could be easily disseminated online and thus weaponized. You ended up saturating the culture in political opinion, and liberals realized that there were lots of them in cultural power. And it also indexed people’s views for easy reading, thus allowing a purge of crime-thinkers from political and cultural power. The second was the retirement of the old guard who came of age in tge 1950s. They were 60 in 2010, and so a lot of these early boomers retired. They might have headed up a department at a college, ran a music label or tv/movie studio, but they’d imbibed the notion that politics shouldn’t overwhelm the purpose of the institution itself. Entertainment existed to entertain, not preach, colleges were about education. Once those old guys retired, the new leadership felt little compunction about turning the entire thing into a propaganda machine.

I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s.

I disagree. The fact that American conservatives don't make very much art isn't especially material*, both because popular art still tended to defer to conservative sensibilities and, more importantly, because I am not just talking about art. Piecemeal challenges to conservative cultural hegemony didn't change the underlying fact that you had to convince conservatives to let you succeed and conservatives were still ultimately setting the baseline. ∃ liberals who have substantial breaks from conservative orthodoxy is not the same thing as liberals driving culture. It took 45 years to go from Stonewall to Obergfell, and that issue still isn't exactly settled. Hell, you had Prop 8 in California in 2008. The 80s were full of conservative backlash to the cultural turmoil of the 70s and the 90s were marked by Clinton's 'triangulation' strategy (i.e. pivoting right on a lot of issues) and a general sense that everything was fine, don't rock the boat.

*Although perhaps a better metaphor then would be that conservatives were in the back of the cultural limousine, being chauffeured around by liberals.

I think art and education are the critical components of gaining control of the culture. Culture is the water you swim in without thinking about it. So if I want to normalize an idea, I would absolutely want to push it into every bi5 of culture I can get away with. If I want to normalize gays then I slowly inject that idea in every story told and song would be written about gay life. If I wanted to normalize Buddhism, you’d see a lot of the heroes of your favorite tv series and movies and references the dharma and meditation and quotes from the sutras in your music. Eventually you’ll not notice it so much, but it will affect you.

I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s

And what of the other 5 thousand years of human history?

I believe the Flintstones comic proposes that it was Clod the Destroyer, who punches the liberals in the beef.

I think like everything else it goes in cycles. The modern age (basically since the 1860s has been a time of Cthulhu swimming left, but there are other periods in which Cthulhu was swimming rightward. The rightward swings tend to happen in times of cris, but they do happen.

I am fairly sure American conservatives were not in the cultural driver seat for the other 5 thousand years of human history either.

this was upended and for the first time conservatives were in the uncomfortable and bewildering position of being censured for failing to adhere to liberal values rather than vice versa

Or rather, what "conservatism" was started to cut over at that time. This is a consequence of the Boomers taking over as the primary political power bloc in the US from the generations before them (enough of them had died off at that time to make this possible).

Progressives (which you both do and don't call liberals, and hints at part of the problem for the real liberals and one they've been grappling with for some time) are conservatives, because they act like everything they complain about conservatives for doing. They attempt to enshrine a self-enriching lie that makes them feel better. There is no difference between a Moral Majoritarian of the 1980s and a Moral Majoritarian of the 2020s outside of the fact that the 2020s one no longer feels the need to pretend to be Christian (the '80s Moral Majority wasn't either, of course)- they're both majority-female-led movements, too.

the latter were already acculturated to a certain amount of social opprobrium and often took pride in it.

This is what the modern liberal movement, typified by Musk/Trump and those who voted for them, is starting to rediscover. It's going to be really destructive for a while because the only lever any liberal-minded individual knows how to pull is the one that flushes conservatives (and any good they did) right down the toilet, and so you're going to get people who are more hardened than usual against conservative caterwauling to the point they enjoy it, at the expense of more stable reforms.

This description gives me Wheel of Time vibes, and that is terrifying. Granted, in WoT, it wasn't the women driving the men mad, but it was their failure to work together that tainted Saidin, drove male channelers mad, and led to the Breaking of the World. And if there's a single madman who could break the world ... it'd be the Dragon Elon Musk. ... Wait, what was Ishamael's true name, again? 😱

The ship was heading for an iceberg anyway and they were running articles called "Why Hitting Icebergs is Actually a Good Thing".

JBP was fine until he started using twitter regularly. So were lots of people. I genuinely think that the human mind isn't built for high stakes conversations with thousands of people at once. Let alone doing those every hour of every day.

It takes some character to tell a roomful of people that they're wrong to their face, but imagine if you were brought back to a new roomful of angry people every day for the rest of your life.

I do notice that Elon's zaniness has increased in proportion to his shitposting. But who knows which direction the causality goes there, if any.

Peterson has been a particularly sad one to watch - in some of his early appearances he seems relatively articulate, but watch anything from him later on and it's like watching a man destroy himself in slow motion. My first reaction to Peterson was that he was uninteresting but basically reasonable. Now my reaction to Peterson is a kind of tragic pity.

He used to be a lot more interesting, Maps of Meaning, which is what put him on the map remains a genuinely interesting work if you are into comparative religion from a Jungian perspective.

I want to be fair here, it does seem like he lost some of his wits, but his recent Bible stuff isn't that bad. It just doesn't hit as hard as his old lectures for some reason.

Maybe we've all just moved past such ideas in some sense.

I haven't read that book yet, actually, but I remember Rowan Williams' review of it. Williams is certainly a theologian and biblical scholar of some depth, and one whose judgement I have a good deal of respect for, so that warned me away. It sounded more like Peterson reading the Bible and then using it, no matter what it says, as an excuse to get on one of his regular hobby-horses. This much harsher (and more entertaining) review made it sound quite self-indulgent to me.

You're onto something there for sure. If you ever draw the ire of a Twitter hate mob, the first hundred people that are angry at you make you feel bad. But by the time you've seen the thousandth you have fully dehumanized them and wonder how you can use this power.

It wasn’t a Twitter hate mob. The thing is that in the case of Peterson, they basically got him turned out of university, forced him into choosing between “training in woke” and not being able to practice psychology. And this wasn’t Twitter, a lot of the hate came from news media, political pundits, the students at his university. Basically he was fortunate to have popularity with young men and thus could still earn a living.

I stand corrected.

I don't disagree with anything Hanania wrote, and I do think there's value in publicly stating true things, even if some people in the audience already know them. The general thesis here - that Elon Musk has gotten a lot worse over the last few years, and that lately he seems far too dependent on social media and gullible to conspiracy theories - is, I think, undoubtedly true, and the more people who are aware of it, the better.

However, that said, for a piece titled "How Elon Musk lost the plot", I would have liked more of an attempted explanation as to why this happened. Hanania offers basically three theories:

  1. Musk has optimised his thought process for business, not politics. Certain traits are advantageous in business, like tunnel-vision, innovation, drive, and disregard for limitations imposed by others, but are disadvantageous in politics, or in a serious attempt to comprehend the world. Musk's prior cleverness was non-transferable.

  2. Musk has gotten addicted to social media, trapped himself in a bubble, and this is shaping all his thoughts.

  3. Musk is on drugs.

It is, of course, perfectly plausible that it's a combination of all three - Musk's cleverness didn't transfer, he got himself into an echo chamber of conspiracist lunatics, and drug abuse made everything worse. That seems plausible to me, at least, and a reminder that a combination of factors are likely to exacerbate each other. Brilliance is not a single stable trait, but rather a confluence of factors.

Hanania only discusses the second and third theories offhandedly at the end, though, despite their obvious relevance to the rest of us. I would have been interested to see them integrated a bit more with the central thesis.

Hanania only discusses the second and third theories offhandedly at the end, though, despite their obvious relevance to the rest of us. I would have been interested to see them integrated a bit more with the central thesis.

I think the problem with this is that they mostly (other than observing his social media posts) require private knowledge of him. Also, the transferability of advantageous business traits to other domains may be under-discussed, so it makes editorial sense to give it more attention.

Worse at what? Faking normality? What is the correct level of social media engagement beyond which one appears dependent? Which conspiracy theories does he gullibly believe? You have no doubt these things are true, so I assume you have conclusive evidence.

'Faking normality' is a pejorative way to put it, but yes, he is demonstrably not very good at being socially aware in public. The correct level of social media engagement might be debated between people, but I suggest that it is less than Musk's use. This is too much. As for his gullibility, Hanania covered this perfectly well in the article. He linked this piece which notes, for instance, Musk's belief that Twitter had fake employees, and Musk's belief in the Paul Pelosi false claims. There's Musk's belief that Community Notes were being gamed because they correctly pointed out that Zelensky didn't have an approval rate of 4%, or election nonsense around Dominion voting machines. I do not think it should be very controversial to say that Elon Musk recklessly believes false things. Now not all false things are conspiracy theories, but insofar as a number of Musk's beliefs entail the claim that a clandestine group of people are manipulating events, in secret, for their own agenda, it's reasonable to call them conspiracy theories.

Yeah I didn't read past the first paragraph of Hanania and I really thought you had something significantly better than a rolling stones article called 11 WTF Moments From ‘Character Limit,’ the Book About How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

That's fucking gossip. Gossip based on a ridiculous premise no less. Musk is obviously not neurotypical, he has been accused of weird behaviour all his life and yes that includes ridiculous leaps of logic that don't always pan out. A large part of his success is because of his willingness to say and do things others believe you shouldn't. That practically demands society will call you unhinged.

Nothing in that list looks more unhinged than when he was calling that diver a pedo for making him look bad, and that was well before he bought twitter, so is he just a slow motion train wreck that also makes successful rockets and ai and doge and fakes playing diablo? There's a whole lot of ruin in that man! The last item in the list is about Jack Dorsey also believing some 'conspiracy theories', because gossip doesn't care about truth, it is a social tool used to enforce normality.

Musk doesn't operate like normal people because Musk is not like normal people. And thank God for that.

I linked the Rolling Stone piece because that was the piece Hanania linked in his article, if you were paying attention, and as much as we look down on Rolling Stone (which is absolutely reasonable, it's a rag), the claims that I took from it are true. It links Musk's own tweets. He really did believe that Twitter had fake employees and that Paul Pelosi was attacked by his gay lover. I then gave two additional examples of my own, so I was not relying wholly on one article - Musk's belief that Community Notes were being gamed, and that Dominion voting machines were influencing the election. These are all directly sourced to thinks that Musk said himself, in public.

Nothing in that list looks more unhinged than when he was calling that diver a pedo for making him look bad, and that was well before he bought twitter, so is he just a slow motion train wreck that also makes successful rockets and ai and doge and fakes playing diablo? There's a whole lot of ruin in that man!

Um, yes? Musk is clearly an erratic man with a bizarre relationship with the truth. He said unhinged things well before 2022, and he continues to do nonsensical things today, like buy high level Path of Exile 2 accounts and unconvincingly pretend to be an uber gamer. None of that makes it implausible that he has gotten worse over time.

I am aware the rolling stone article was in the article, my point was that you were unequivocal, so when you said he has gotten a lot worse over the past few years I was expecting a sharp obvious decline, not 'he did the exact same shit half the men on the planet have done at one time or another'. The Paul Pelosi thing was hilarious! I want it to be true too! So, much like I do with serial murderer Ted Cruz, I pretend it is true. This is common behaviour. It's not good, but it's not something you should be using to judge someone incompetent, particularly when they continue knocking it out of the park in other areas.

Similarly common is thinking your employees are lying to you and stealing from you. The voting machines thing I'll just say that I don't see how it's more outlandish than all cops are racist or republicans want all women in chains - the only difference is those conspiracies have social approval.

But yeah everybody does shit like that, the only difference here is that Musk is a public figure so his bad behaviour is isolated and blown up into a big deal. The justification for this is society needs to show people how not to behave, and if you want to say he's being a stupid prick I am right there with you, but the media became the west's new priests without the discipline of the old order and are no longer policing bad behaviour, they are instead weaponising mental illness against their enemies. That's all I see happening here.

If this is what you think everybody does, then... well, I question how many people you've been interacting with. Most people, I notice, seem to be able to not spend hours every day tweeting nonsense. Most people did not respond to the Paul Pelosi story with "LOL, I wish that were true, it'd be hilarious!", even if you hold that Musk was joking, which he does not appear to have been doing anyway.

No, most people are not like Elon Musk in this regard, and I find this an odd defense considering that you just said that Musk "doesn't operate like normal people". Which is it? Even in this post you accuse the media of "weaponising mental illness" - is Musk mentally ill? Is that your position? Is his behaviour normal or not?

But yeah everybody does shit like that, the only difference here is that Musk is a public figure so his bad behaviour is isolated and blown up into a big deal.

If this were the case I would expect there to be similar stories about every public figure, or at least, about every public figure that the mainstream media blob does not like. But that is not the case.

If this were the case I would expect there to be similar stories about every public figure, or at least, about every public figure that the mainstream media blob does not like. But that is not the case.

Lmao ok.

I will clarify some misunderstandings.

I said half of the men on the planet, which was hyperbole, you got me. It is common to want embarrassing stories about people you dislike to be true was my point. if you think it isn't I question how honest you allow the people in your life to be with you. Also most people do indeed say stupid shit on xitter all day every day. That's why everyone hates it? It is also common, when you have a conspiracy theory, to follow it as far as you can for fun. It is also a useful mental exercise, because it allows you to think in ways you hadn't previously.

Secondly, yes Musk is similar to other people in some ways and different in others. He is, in my opinion, more different than similar, but like most people he has two arms, two legs, a heart, and cognitive faculties regulated by hormones. Therefore he is susceptible to influence, he gossips and loves and hates and admires just like normal people, but he isn't normal.

Thirdly the media weaponises mental illness by using it to smear people who are merely badly behaved by isolating their bad behaviour and finding a pattern they can claim shows this behaviour is part of a trend that justifies taking from them. Musk might be mentally ill, I don't know, I'm not his doctor. I do know that he doesn't seem to be 'much worse' than he was 7 years ago, so I guess I remain unconvinced.

More comments

Is there something about this post you wanted to discuss? or are you only posting it so you could quote autistic people making awkward digs at other autistic people? boo outgroup via proxy.

I don’t see how posting a (imo substantive) criticism of one particular person constitutes “boo outgroup.”

substantive criticism = cheesecake_llama is a drug addict that broke their brain with drugs because I disagree with their political opinions?

That’s an obvious strawman of Hanania’s argument

I think I found some potential timestamp fraud in government we should be looking at.

"DOGE is working 120 hours a week," Musk said Sunday on X. "Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast."

No one is working 120 hours a week.

That leaves 7 hours a day (yes including weekends) for anything else that isn't working so they wouldn't be getting good enough sleep, they're not showering, they're not messaging their families, and all the fun Doomscrolling on social media Musk seems to have time for. And if they are spending lots of time not doing work while working (like other office jobs) then they should be revising down to reflect that they're counting their shower times and twitter scroll times. I don't get to claim I did 50 hours of work because every morning I get up, poop, brush my teeth and shower and commute taking up roughly an hour and the time I spend driving back and getting gas and other parts of life. (Edit: Also for musk specifically, what about all the other jobs he's supposed to be doing? Are we supposed to believe this man never sleeps?)

80 hours? Definitely possible.

100? Really pushing it.

120 for a sustained period? That's a lie. They're either lying or are doing other things while claiming they work which is also a lie. And either they're actually clocking in 120 (in which case that's a really strong sign of timestamp fraud) or he's lying about their hours worked to everyone else.

Why bring this up? Well Musk keeps lying, about a lot of things. They famously lied about the amount of money they cut forcing them to delete it.

He lied about social security by implying that all the people on numident were falsely receiving benefits

BBC verify did a debunking of the Gaza condom claims, he mislead people about FEMA spending being spent on migrant housing (they administered over funding from a separate program and none was using from normal FEMA funds), etc etc.

And in general the way I think about liars is these two points

1: We need to ask "why are they lying?". Why claim you're working 120 hours a day when it's obviously not true? Why mislead people on social security fraud or FEMA spending? Why lie?

It could be that they were trying to do something properly, could not find actual good evidence but wanted to save face. It could be that they have an ulterior motive. It could be that they're genuinely incompetent with what they are doing. But there is a reason and understanding that is important.

2: Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. When a known liar keeps making misleading or false claims, it's on us to stop taking the things they say at face value. Fool us again, shame on us. Whenever Musk makes a claim about fraud or waste or hours spent working, we should discard him as a tainted source. It's not to say he can't be telling the truth about something, but this water spout is corrupted and we should draw from the clean river of truth somewhere else. He can bring the receipts if he wants to be believed.

Edit: To be clear here the possibility here is.

  1. He's just straight up lying in general

  2. They do work a whole lot but they're including things like showering and brushing teeth and other morning/night activities in their time which is not normal and highly misleading.

  3. They're seriously truthful and they're working off less than 7 hours of sleep every day of the week for months not doing basic human things like showering, brushing their teeth, cleaning up their trash, or taking breaks ever. Or maybe they fit that in by only doing 6 and a half hours of sleep perpetually instead. Either way they are superhumans but disgusting ones.

Most likely it's just the first

Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.
  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
  • Recruiting for a cause.
  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!'

Using statements by Musk and his team to draw a line is good. Extrapolating that line to a general “them” is less good. You could fix that by more narrowly tailoring your claims about just who is losing credibility.

The biggest issue is framing your conclusions as our conclusions. We need to investigate. We should discard him. No. This is a discussion, not a petition. Please don’t speak for everyone.

Also, the CW threads roll over on Mondays. Should you revise this, it’ll probably get more traction in this week’s thread.

Them is a pronoun used to refer to a prior named person and/or group. I know people are used to conspiracy "Them" usage as some vague Illuminati Jewish Conspiracy, but it's also just normal English.

The biggest issue is framing your conclusions as our conclusions. We need to investigate. We should discard him. No. This is a discussion, not a petition. Please don’t speak for everyone.

My thoughts on what people should do when seeing misinformation doesn't mean others have to follow it. I think we should call the police about a break-in but that doesn't mean a person has to if they got robbed.

Why is modern architecture so bad, and more importantly why is it so common in spite of this?

The utter vacuity of modern architecture (and art) is probably not lost on many users around here. My distaste for modern architecture has been around for a while, but I never felt very strongly about it up until I visited Toronto and saw just what kind of effect that sort of construction had on the urban landscape - I found a city filled to the brim with ugly water-stained concrete-and-glass skyscrapers, some constructed by the likes of Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei; a city where traditional vernacular architectural styles were typically absent, found only in select areas like the Distillery District and St. Lawrence Market. It was an utterly depressing cityscape, and after I contrasted it with the very many examples of cosy and inviting vernacular architecture in South Korea - some of which were actually new traditional hanok neighbourhoods funded and supported by the South Korean government - I found myself deeply wanting to know why an entire society would willingly subject themselves to the pernicious and subtle form of psychological torture we call "modern architecture".

The gulf between what I perceive most people like and what architectural theorists like is truly incredible, and that shows up in many enthusiast forums. In true gatekeeping fashion, /r/Architecture seems to consider talking about the broad concept of "modern architecture" in a critical way as showcasing one's plebian-ness and disqualifying one from offering opinions on the topic. The general take seems to be that modern architecture is clearly too complex to broad-brush, after all post-war architectural styles span the range of heroic modernism, post-modernism, 60s space age, 70s modern, 80s neo-brutalism, 90s cookie cutter, contemporary, and so on. The blanket claim that one doesn't like all of it seems to be perceived as such a ridiculous and broad statement that no credence should be given to it whatsoever, then as a counterpoint people will recommend a piece of purportedly groundbreaking, humanistic modern architecture that... doesn't look substantially more pleasing to your average person than the concrete blocks people recall when they think of modern architecture.

This is because there is a broad common thread spanning most of these architectural trends, and among these are a "clean slate" philosophy, a conscious refusal to adopt local, pre-modern styles, focus on clean shapes and simplification and minimalism, and design and expressions meant to be adapted for the "age of machine". It's a trend that persists when you look everywhere from early pioneers like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to contemporary starchitects like Zaha Hadid, and even if certain architects weave in vernacular sensibilities every now and then, it will often be expressed within the larger context of this new post-war mode of architecture, for example in an ironic and highly simplified manner like is done in postmodernism. To engage in such obfuscatory pedantry so as to not properly engage with the critical opinions of laymen who aren't as well-versed in architecture-speak (whose opinions on what constitutes good architecture significantly differ from that of the academic world, and who often feel deprived of any say over the urban environments they live in) rubs me the wrong way. So for ease I'll refer to the phenomenon in question as "modern architecture", instead of listing out every single style it encapsulates.

I've seen a number of explanations posited to explain why "modern architecture" is so common, and I've attempted to look into them in order to investigate if they have any credence whatsoever.

1: The general public actually enjoys "modern architecture", and demands architecture in that style.

It is not uncommon for architects to suggest to detractors that the style of building is the client's fault, and not to blame the architect. So is this true, do clients actually ask for modern architecture? This is probably the explanation that is easiest to address - the literature is actually shockingly consistent on this: People hugely prefer traditional vernacular styles over post-war styles of architecture, and this preference is consistently found across groups regardless of political identification or race or sex.

This is practically a formality, but here goes. A 2007 poll of 2,200 random Americans conducted by the AIA found a strong preference for traditional styles after presenting them with a list of 248 buildings deemed important by AIA members, with participants strongly preferring buildings that evoked Gothic, Greek and Roman traditions. It is necessary to note that tastemakers did retort to this, with the rebuttal of urban design critic John King including the assertion that architecture cannot just be evaluated via a photo, as well as the assertion that the list did not reflect the ideas of architectural experts but the opinions of the general populace (this one I find somewhat funny, considering it's a tacit acknowledgement that the preferences of architects are out of line with the general populace). In a similar vein, yet another study of 2,000 US adults who were shown seven pairs of images of existing U.S. courthouses and federal office buildings (consisting of one traditional and one modern building) showed that 72% preferred a traditional look, and this was the case regardless of whether one was Republican or Democrat or Independent, female or male, white or black (so no, liking traditional architecture isn't a "right-wing thing", as it is sometimes portrayed). The preference for traditional architecture was also consistent regardless of what socioeconomic status the respondent belonged to, suggesting the disparity in prevalence of traditional architecture and general-populace preference for it isn't an issue of class divide where the richest people can specifically commission buildings and decide what gets built. Neoclassical buildings were most favoured, and brutalist buildings were most disfavoured. A British replication of this result can be found in a YouGov survey, which polled 1042 respondents asking them which building out of four they would prefer to be built in their neighbourhood - the result came out 77% in favour of traditional and 23% in favour of modern. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Ruth Reed, responded to this with the assertion that traditional buildings are expensive and unsustainable (a point I will examine later).

But perhaps John King is correct that a photo doesn't properly capture how a piece of architecture actually feels - this is actually a critique I think holds water, there are many places I like far more in person than I imagined I would from a photo alone. Lucky for us, there's a study in Norway which used VR technology to partially circumvent that problem, capturing 360 degree videos of streets in Oslo then presenting them to participants by means of a VR headset. "It emerged that the places characterised by traditional architecture were appreciated considerably more than contemporary urban spaces. The traditional square Bankplassen got the best score, while the contemporary part of Toftes street in the generally popular district, Grünerløkka, came last." But if that, too, isn't a good enough facsimile of the actual experience of visiting a place, here is a Swedish thesis that details the results of a poll in the town of Karlshamn about what parts of their town residents like best, finding that that "the inhabitants make very unanimous aesthetic valuations of the buildings and that the wooden buildings, the small scale and the square are the most appreciated features. Studies in the field of environmental psychology find a general aesthetic preference for features that can be related to the traditional small town".

There are also other more informal polls which one can rely on, such as this bracket assessing readers' favourite buildings in Chicago - the bracket in question was populated via popular nomination, then whittled down to a final four. All of the final four are in traditional style, featuring the Tribune Tower, Carbide and Carbon Building, Wrigley Building, and The Rookery Building. It seems clear that the majority of the public, regardless of demography, prefers traditional architecture, and these results are robust and replicable across many different methodologies. And, well, water is wet. Sometimes it seems that architects are unpleasantly surprised with these results and are in disbelief/denial about the fact that the majority of the public might truly have these views, which brings me to my next possibility:

2: Architects like "modern architecture", the public does not; the excess of modern architecture represents the tastes of architects and not the general populace.

There is a somewhat convincing corpus of evidence showing that architects simply appreciate architecture in a different way from the general populace - as a starting point this study summarises some results from previous work on the topic. One study from 1973 suggests architects respond more to "representational meaning" in a building while the general layman prioritises "responsive meaning", with representational meaning having more to do with the percepts, concepts and ideas that a building conveys and responsive meaning being more of a judgemental view of whether the building is nice in a more immediate affective and evaluative way. Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography". The study in question reaffirms these findings, finding from an admittedly small sample that "non-architects gave more affective responses and descriptive responses to the physical features of the building in question, whereas architects commented more on ideas and concepts used to arrive at the physical forms".

This 2001 study showed a large discrepancy between architects' predictions of laypersons' preferences and their actual preferences. They presented a sample of 27 individuals without architectural training with colour slides of 42 large contemporary urban structures constructed in the 1980s and 1990s, and asked them to rate it from 1 to 10. 25 architects were then brought in to "predict or try to mimic a typical nonarchitect's global impression of each building". Low correlations were found between lay ratings of architecture and architects' predictions of lay ratings, and a slight trend towards less experienced architects making better estimations of lay ratings was found. Experience as an architect, if anything, seems to distance one further from the public's idea of "good architecture". While that study showed people contemporary buildings and doesn't directly touch on the traditional/modern dichotomy, it is notable that architects cannot predict lay preferences even within that narrow subset of architecture.

In addition, there are a number of studies which deal directly with that, though sample sizes are typically small. Devlin and Nasar (1989) report on the results of a study where 20 non-architects and 20 architects were shown a series of pictures of buildings which were categorised into general types: "High", which was characterised by fewer materials, more concrete, simpler forms, more white, and off-center entrances, and "Popular", which was characterised by use of more building materials, horizontal orientation, hip roofs, framed windows, centred entrances, and warm colours. Non-architects were more likely to evaluate "high" architecture as unpleasant, distressing and meaningless, while for architects the relationship between architectural style and evaluation was inverted. Small sample sizes, I know, there's not that much research on this, but the research that does exist tends to point in the same direction.

I consider it very likely that some architects (starchitects in particular) do build structures meant for their own self-edification, at the expense of the public and even the client - Peter Eisenman's House VI is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms. But most architects are normal working people constrained by clients' preferences and requirements, so the assertion that architects' preferences are responsible for the proliferation of modern architecture feels a bit impoverished to me as an explanation. They may have come up with the style, but it's not clear how much decisive influence their preferences have on most building projects. Perhaps it is just a dictatorship of taste - maybe architects do utilise their monopoly on skill and expertise to push their preferences through, as this comment by an architect on Scott's post "Whither Tartaria" notes, or maybe another driving factor is responsible here.

3: Traditional architecture just costs more to build, and when asked to make a tradeoff between their design preferences and low costs clients would prefer the latter.

This is an often-forwarded explanation for the prevalence of modern architecture, and it was initially the explanation I found the most convincing and intuitive. However, the urban planner and author Ettore Maria Mazzola has put some work into trying to estimate the prices of traditional vs modern architecture, and he does so by using ISTAT (Italian Bureau of Statistics) data, illustrating a large number of buildings and their costs from the 1920s and 1930s and updating them to today's dollars. His findings are presented in his 2010 book on the topic, but that is hard to access so they are also outlined in this paper. According to him "[t]raditional buildings of the first decades of the 20th Century were built in average times ranging from 6 to 12 months, they cost up to 67% less than the current building, and, after all these years, they still have never required maintenance works". Of course, there are problems when you're comparing across different time periods since there are factors that differ between the 1920s/30s and now, such as differing labour costs and building regulations, and so this cannot be considered the last word on the issue.

For a far more illustrative modern-day comparison, there's this paper: "The Economics of Style: Measuring the Price Effect of Neo-Traditional Architecture in Housing" which attempts to study the price premium on neotraditional houses in the Netherlands. They investigate if the higher prices placed on neotraditional houses are due to the higher costs of construction, and from a preliminary investigation into that topic they find: "On our request they provided information on construction costs of houses that vary in style but are otherwise the same. The information provided by Bouwfonds shows that houses in different styles developed by Bouwfonds do not vary in costs. Terraced homes in the style of the 1930s have similar construction costs as houses designed in “contemporary” styles." In an analysis of 86 Vinex housing estates they find significant price premiums for neotraditional houses and houses that refer to neotraditional architecture (as compared to non-traditional houses), with a 15% premium for the former and 5% premium for the latter. They also investigate if differences in interior quality or construction costs could explain the price premium and find that the price premium barely reduces even in more homogenous samples with less room for differences in construction costs. Rather, what they find is that supply is the main factor influencing traditional architecture's prices - in the highly regulated Dutch environment there has been a lack of supply capable of meeting demand, and the price premium has been slowly eroded as more traditional housing has been manufactured overtime. As a result, cost doesn't seem to be the driver for the lack of traditional architecture, nor does it seem to be the case that the style of residential housing perfectly reflects consumer preference - there seems to be an undersupply of neotraditional housing, which then gets reflected in higher prices.

Such an analysis seems to be supported when looking at individual case studies - traditional architecture is not inherently more expensive than modern architecture. An interesting example of this is the Carhart Mansion in New York City, a traditional building which was constructed at "substantially the same unit cost as new Modernist luxury apartment buildings", according to Zivkovic Associates, the organisation that was responsible for the plans and elevations for the building. While it is true that this building was constructed as a luxury apartment building at a higher price point than many other housing markets, the fact that it features a similar unit cost as luxury modernist buildings still raises the question as to why there aren't more traditional buildings at this price point. Furthermore, it's hard to explain away the findings of the earlier Netherlands paper with the claim that traditional stylings are only cost-effective when building higher-end properties, since the similarity in cost seems to persist there too. However, there's an interesting aspect to the case of the Carhart Mansion which might explain the proliferation of modern architecture:

4: City planning boards and other approval committees strongly prefer modern architecture, and are more likely to approve modern-style constructions regardless of the wishes of end-users or architects.

The Carhart Mansion's design was opposed by many members of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), with the LPC initially being skeptical about the proposed Classical design, and with many members making statements such as "You can’t do that – the façade has to be plain and simple." According to the source linked earlier, "[t]he LPC’s concerns seemed to focus on the question of how well the design would be executed – whether the quality of the craftsmanship in the new construction would do justice to the historic buildings around it. (Oddly, this did not seem to be an issue with the earlier Modernist design!)"

This quote from the very same source is also illustrative: "If you speak with architects and consultants who appear frequently before the LPC, they characterize their perceptions of the LPC’s decisions as follows: Designs for additions to landmarks or infill buildings in historic districts that do not violate the cornice lines and overall massing of neighboring protected buildings will likely win approval, even if aggressively Modernist in style, materials and details; but new traditional designs would have a harder time being approved on the basis of style alone. Accordingly, a number of prominent New York architects specializing in projects involving landmarks have advised their clients that new traditional designs employing actual historic architectural language, such as fully realized Classicism, would likely cost them a lot more in time and money in the review process. This perception has had a chilling effect on new traditional design in historic districts in New York City and in other cities where similar views prevail."

I'm not aware of any source that properly studies this, but it's probably not implausible that planning committees' preferences and tendencies surrounding architecture differ from the public. It's not necessarily the case that architecture granted planning permission reflects what the public wants - planners are a selected group of people with certain training, and this obviously skews the preferences of the people involved in planning.

Finally, a bonus:

5: People don't like modern architecture less than traditional architecture, it's just that the traditional architecture has been subjected to a selection process which filters out all the bad buildings.

Easily falsified - see above in part 1; even modern architecture selected for their importance doesn't fare as well against the traditional stuff.

Furthermore, here is the modern day Toronto City Hall. Here is the Royal Ontario Museum, with a large contemporary "crystal" built into the original neo-romanesque façade. Here are some old photos of Toronto. I suppose I can't speak for anyone else and maybe some users of this forum will find the current Toronto architecture to be scintillating pieces of art, but I can say it's quite clear to me - a plebeian - which of those looks more appealing, and the examples of modern architecture I've offered up are serious landmarks of the city, whereas the old photos in question are just normal streets in Old Toronto.

Anyway, it's a bit bizarre to me why architecture today seems to skew overwhelmingly modern, despite the public seeming to find these buildings worse than traditional styles. So far I think a combination of point 2 and point 4 is probably what's skewing the ratio, but I've not drawn any firm conclusions.

Modern style architecture is due to the shift in where cost falls. Notice something about modern construction? It tries to maximize big flat sheets put together and flat concrete and minimizes having lots of individual bricks. This is because semiskilled labor has gotten dramatically more expensive, so options which minimize it become more appealing.

Isn't this a circular argument? Semiskilled labor has gotten more expensive because nobody wants to train to be a bricklayer when nobody needs bricks laid. Or do explain the cost of semiskilled labor another way?

Semiskilled labor in general is much more expensive in the modern west than it ever has been- warehouse workers and painters and the like are just harder to replace.

You're failing to represent the full case for argument #5.

  1. People are emotionally primed to associate particular styles with particular positive or negative things. If you see something in a tudor style you probably think of a wealthy old neighborhood or a european tourist trap-- both of which would be pleasant places to exist in regardless of what architectural style they were built in. If we built all our prisons, hospitals, and corporate offices in the same style it would take a bit of the shine off of it.
  2. Old styles haven't stayed static-- they've been constantly improved on. The apartment complex I live in probably would have looked like a set of hideous industrial buildings when they were built in the first half of the 20th century. But since then, they've been decorated and improved in a variety of little ways-- decorative green window shutters, trees that have grown to maturity, tasteful black railings on staircases, etc. All of those things were technically possible to do when the property was first built, but it took time for people to understand how best to work with that style and incorporate the most effective decorative elements. We're not just seeing the prettiest old buildings, we're seeing the prettiest versions of old buildings.

People are emotionally primed to associate particular styles with particular positive or negative things. If you see something in a tudor style you probably think of a wealthy old neighborhood or a european tourist trap-- both of which would be pleasant places to exist in regardless of what architectural style they were built in. If we built all our prisons, hospitals, and corporate offices in the same style it would take a bit of the shine off of it.

I don't know about that, one of the building considered most beautiful in my city was built for the purpose of holding water tanks.

I agree that the novelty might wear off a bit, but Paris is chock full of beautiful buildings, and people all over the world seem to like it all the same.

People are emotionally primed to associate particular styles with particular positive or negative things. If you see something in a tudor style you probably think of a wealthy old neighborhood or a european tourist trap-- both of which would be pleasant places to exist in regardless of what architectural style they were built in. If we built all our prisons, hospitals, and corporate offices in the same style it would take a bit of the shine off of it.

I think you've got the causality here entirely backwards - the reason why traditional architecture is associated with wealthy old neighbourhoods or European tourist traps is because traditional-style properties are capable of commanding high prices and/or an influx of tourist money, resulting in them being high-SES neighbourhoods. That association can only exist, however, because people like these buildings in the first place.

Furthermore in Sweden many towns are built in traditional style, and there have been a few studies evaluating architectural preferences in such places, and the overwhelming majority still prefers older buildings. The study I linked in Part 1 of my post on the preferences of Karlshamn residents is one such example; it evaluates the residents of a town that is primarily traditional in style - you can look up photos of the town - and finds that they also prefer traditional small-town architecture. There is also the fact that scenes that deviate far from the rule of nature are literally harder for the visual cortex to process and cause more discomfort as a result, and modern buildings are less naturalistic and more unpleasant (as noted by that very same study).

On a personal note I can say I very much enjoy all traditional vernacular architectural styles, even those I've only recently stumbled upon - for example I like Korea's hanok and temple architecture, Vietnam's Nguyen Dynasty palaces and tombs, and India's Himalayan kath-kuni buildings, they are not represented very widely and you don't come across them often, but even on first glance they were hugely pleasing to me in a way modern architecture has never been. I suppose you can add an epicycle and say they recall other forms of architecture I have positive associations with, but taken alongside the above reasons for skepticism I think this fails as an explanation.

Old styles haven't stayed static-- they've been constantly improved on. The apartment complex I live in probably would have looked like a set of hideous industrial buildings when they were built in the first half of the 20th century. But since then, they've been decorated and improved in a variety of little ways-- decorative green window shutters, trees that have grown to maturity, tasteful black railings on staircases, etc. All of those things were technically possible to do when the property was first built, but it took time for people to understand how best to work with that style and incorporate the most effective decorative elements. We're not just seeing the prettiest old buildings, we're seeing the prettiest versions of old buildings.

I don't really understand how this is relevant to an argument regarding aesthetic merit though. Yes, old styles of architecture have been constantly iterated on and improved overtime, and modernist styles could in theory be prettier if we changed all kinds of things about it. But as they currently stand, these buildings are evaluated as less pleasing by the public compared to traditional architecture. How long these respective styles took to develop is not what's in question here. I mean, if you turn the clock forward 200 years perhaps modernism will have mutated into something people really enjoy, but that timeframe isn't necessarily relevant to your average urban-dweller today who will live and die in one of these blocks. All it means is “hey, maybe we shouldn’t have thrown out literal thousands of years of accumulated wisdom in a poor attempt to implement the design equivalent of Year Zero”.

I'm on team "it depends."

There are a lot of problems in Chicago, but the city looks pretty goody, actually. I like their Trump Tower! It has human centric walking paths around it, gardens, and places to sit. It looks pretty good from across the river! It's probably comfortable inside. The Wrigley building may be more aesthetic, but not enough to be worth passing up all those windows. I love the aesthetics of the Lurie Gardens, with a little bit of prairie, surrounded by city towers. But Chicago has always wanted to be a big American city.

I'm less of a fan of California design, especially since it's been encroaching on the Southwest, with grey houses with sharp angles taking over from the tan houses and soft edges. The Southwest should have tan houses and rounded edges! It should look like it's covered in local clay! I'm not certain what's prompting the grey and white angular houses, the owners probably think it looks "fresh" or some such thing, even if I think it's tired just five years on. Like the Catholic churches in the 70s, they age quickly.

Phoenix is odd, and not very aesthetic, but each individual person gets some nice desert landscaping, an air conditioned house, and access to a bunch of goods at one of the hundreds of identical strip malls. It isn't a city built for the past or the future, but for the present, and it will be fine if it keeps getting rebuilt until they run our of water or air conditioning units are outlawed. Tucson has more history, and therefore better architecture. Here's a church from about a decade ago. It's completely fine. Most of their newer apartment and condo developments are also just fine, in a way that pictures don't capture super well. They're safe, clean, have nice little patios full of potted succulents, and a couple of swimming pools. Nothing grand or awe inspiring, but just fine. Very livable.

I'm not sure what's happening with Toronto, perhaps like Phoenix they don't have enough history as a city? Quebec City sounds reasonably aesthetic. South Korea is more aesthetic than Phoenix, but may be a worse place to live, going by everyone's unwillingness to raise children there.

I think like a lot of other parts of western culture, it’s just a matter of thinking of the culture as disposable. You just don’t design a building with the assumption that the building will outlive you, so the order of the day is to make the thing as cheaply as possible and not worry about future users of the building.

This seems to be contradicted by point 3.

I can't speak for Toronto. Maybe the demands of harsh winters, or the lack of natural beauty limit what can be done with modern styles which often draw much of their appeal from space and the surrounding environment, so architects instead try pure weirdness and that puts people off.

I can say, though, in Vancouver, modernism works very well.

Meanwhile, I find the nearby Vancouver Art Gallery to be a dated relic of an ancient time, and neither inviting, nor pleasant to be around, or inside.

But that's just my opinion

The Law Courts

That’s a cool-looking building, but I can’t take it seriously as a courthouse

I've often wondered if that's the point, much like being given a death sentence for twitter posts by a man in a dress and silly wig. Making the justice process deliberately absurd demonstrates power because the message is "you don't dare laugh at this"

Why is modern architecture so bad, and so common?

This is more like one person's opinion than a matter of fact

the WTC facade, composed of tridents situated above the square aqueduct-like arches of the foyer, was an example of visually pleasing modern architecture. it does not always have to be bad.

This is more like one person's opinion than a matter of fact

More like an (admittedly exaggerated for effect) statement of general public evaluation, supported by multiple studies of preference linked within the post itself.

the WTC facade, composed of tridents situated above the square aqueduct-like arches of the foyer, was an example of visually pleasing modern architecture. it does not always have to be bad.

I don't like the WTC. That being said I realise it does not always have to be bad, and there's even a piece of modern architecture I actually do like in my own city - the Sydney Opera House. Unfortunately I also understand that most of what people have constructed does not live up to this standard in the slightest, most of it falls far short of even the most pedestrian traditional buildings, and even with the Opera House I find it works better as an isolated structure rather than an overarching aesthetic for most of the city.

Why is modern architecture so bad, and so common?

I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant! Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example, but I find them to be comforting and nostalgic. Where other people see a dystopian late-capitalist hellscape, I see the familiar sights of the family road trips of my youth. YMMV.

Admittedly I'm a complete plebian and philistine when it comes to architecture. I've never made any attempt to study architecture qua architecture at all.

Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography".

This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):

Our topic proper is the beauty of art as the one reality adequate to the Idea of beauty. Up to this point the beauty of nature has counted as the primary existence of beauty, and now therefore the question is how it differs from the beauty of art.

We could talk abstractly and say that the Ideal is beauty perfect in itself, while nature is beauty imperfect. But such bare adjectives are no use, because the problem is to define precisely what constitutes this perfection of artistic beauty and the imperfection of merely natural beauty. We must therefore pose our question thus: why is nature necessarily imperfect in its beauty, and what is the origin of this imperfection? Only when this is answered will the necessity and the essence of the Ideal be revealed to us in more detail.

[...] spirit cannot, in the finitude of existence and its restrictedness and external necessity, find over again the immediate vision and enjoyment of its true freedom, and it is compelled to satisfy the need for this freedom, therefore, on other and higher ground. This ground is art, and art's actuality is the Ideal.

Focusing in on some specific examples:

Peter Eisenman's House IV is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms.

I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.

I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.

But why does man-made beauty need to be something normies hate? As a strong example, consider traditional bonsai, which is primarily about making things more natural than nature. Theres also a strand of modern industrial design which isnt forcefully minimalist;the things it makes are not usually beautiful, but they are cool, and in certain product categories very popular. The architecture version is the glassbox skyscraper, which is not super popular but propably some of the best of modernism.

But why does man-made beauty need to be something normies hate?

Well, there was that one study where architects actually are psychologically incapable of seeing beauty like a normal person. (I know it was linked on here, but I can't find it).

But really, it's all about how the general public perceives the designer's intentions. Dropping an intentionally-ugly structure in the middle of the city is basically a giant fuck you to its residents, whether the designers meant it that way or not (and given the demeanor and... political persuasion of the average artist, I think this happens more than anyone wants to admit).

We already know government buildings are designed with brutalist architecture in mind simply to make them seem more imposing, powerful, and official, so it's not exactly far-fetched that rich patrons (or groups of patrons) commission [modern] art for that purpose as well.

I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant!

I grouped modern architecture together in part because no studies I know of are conducted with the objective of quantifying architects and laypersons' preference evaluations for specific architectural trends, in general they just present their preferences for broad categories such as "traditional architecture" and "modern architecture". I also think that it's perfectly acceptable to use these broad categories to simplify analysis - despite the different modern architectural trends possessing some differing philosophies they also share a lot and the variance in the end result isn't super significant for someone not well versed in the history of architectural trends.

Perhaps that is not obvious to a person who's read about architecture for three thousand hours and can see all the tiny differences, but two different pieces of modern architecture will both still be perceived as generally minimal and stolid, and there will generally be a high level of correlation between your average layman's evaluations of the two buildings. It's not that an individual layman will have the same opinions on all modern architecture, in fact I think most don't, but a person who dislikes one modern architectural trend will also probably dislike others (again, this is as a general tendency, not saying this always holds true on a person-to-person basis). You will probably find high correlations between what people think of Walter Gropius' Fagus Factory (early modernist) and Robert Venturi's Guild House/Gordon Wu Hall (postmodern). In any case, doing large-scale analyses of broad groupings based on proximity in concept-space is kind of necessary to some extent unless you only ever want discussion to remain on the level of the individual house.

This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):

Hegel and the modernists (as well as the architectural tradition they spawned) are exceptional in this regard though. People in general far prefer natural environments to man-made ones, studies on the topic have tended to show that people find landscapes that depart far from the rule of nature more uncomfortable than those that don't. They literally take more effort to process and increases the amount of oxygen used by the brain. That same source notes "We then analysed images of apartment buildings, and found that over the last 100 years, the design of buildings has been departing further and further from the rule of nature; more and more stripes appear decade by decade, making the buildings less and less comfortable to look at."

I would be fine with architects building these things if they were just making art for display in a dedicated space. When you walk into a gallery, you tacitly accept the fact that you are going to be seeing an individual artist's expression. The same is not true for public art, which has to be endured by people regardless of whether they want to see it - they have to work and play and travel in these spaces. I remember going into Union Station in Toronto and seeing a horrendous piece of art, Zones of Immersion, plastered all over the walls, it made me feel like I was boarding a train to Auschwitz. It sucked. It was terrible. It made me hate the artist for inflicting that travesty upon commuters that have to use the station day in, day out. In similar fashion every building an architect makes inherently has the ability to elevate or pollute the commons, and it makes me extremely annoyed when the government spends 250 million dollars worth of public money to erect monstrosities their citizens hate.

Personally, I like very weird, discordant music. I would not expect it to be played in a public square and especially not as a permanent fixture.

I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.

I'm glad you enjoy the look (given the studies linked in my post and in my comment to you here, I think that opinion might be a fringe one). But architecture is inherently part art, part design, and what makes it unique is that it doubles both as an aesthetic product and a tool which people want to use for its functionality as a living space. House VI indisputably fails at the latter, and in my opinion, the former as well.

I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.

I'm almost deliriously exhausted so I may be retarded right now, but the way the post is structured, it's a bit unclear where the defence of Eisenman starts; could you cite the sections which you consider as defending his philosophy?

People in general far prefer natural environments to man-made ones, studies on the topic have tended to show that people find landscapes that depart far from the rule of nature more uncomfortable than those that don't.

Right, but there's a high correlation between the types of people who tend to prefer man-made beauty to natural beauty, and the types of people who tend to become artists. So their own aesthetic preferences get amplified and displayed to the public.

I would be fine with architects building these things if they were just making art for display in a dedicated space.

There have to be limits of some kind, of course. But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.

it's a bit unclear where the defence of Eisenman starts

The most relevant section is everything between "McGowan and Engley" and "the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean".

But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.

I'm not sure that this is coherent. If the artist has the freedom to put a sculpture of a gory corpse outside my house against my will, because that fits his conception of beauty, then do I not have the freedom to melt down his sculpture with a blowtorch against his will, because that fits my conception of beauty? Am I not also an artist, for making the world around me more beautiful as I see it?

You might say "well, he got approval from the government and you didn't", but since we're presupposing that the public agrees with me, and since this is presumably a democratic government that is supposed to follow the public will, for the government to give him and not me approval is an obvious bug, not intended behaviour.

Right, but there's a high correlation between the types of people who tend to prefer man-made beauty to natural beauty, and the types of people who tend to become artists. So their own aesthetic preferences get amplified and displayed to the public.

To what extent is this itself a modern phenomenon? Plenty of historical artists were obsessed with natural, including human, forms (e.g. da Vinci, Michelangelo, Durer). I could believe that the obsession with man made beauty is a "preversion" of the modern artistic class, but I don't see a reason why it should be so, or even why the members of the academy should have been replaced by those who don't care about natural beauty in the first place.

You could argue that the mere act of creating art at all is already an admission that there is something deficient or lacking in nature such that it needs to be supplemented by human creation.

And artificial/non-natural subject matter has always existed in art, see for example Hieronymus Bosch or the three headed Jesus paintings.

It's a highly modern phenomenon, and it was driven by many things - the arrival of decent photography in part drove the visual arts into increasing abstraction, for example, since withdrawing from realism was a way to distinguish themselves and find something photography couldn't do. Of course, they didn't have to make the new style so ugly - Islamic art has long tackled non-representational visual style with incredible results which I think most of the public would enjoy, which leads me to my second point:

Artists previously conceptualised themselves as inevitably having to interact with the commercial world - many modern design schools were an attempt to distance themselves from this, to bring taste into the halls of academia, and this also meant they removed all sanity-checks on their vision of artistry. This is how you get things like Eisenman depriving his client of a master bedroom where the couple could sleep together, and depriving them of a staircase with a proper railing, and initially attempting to deprive them of bathrooms in-house. Mies van der Rohe made a building with only three positions for the blinds inside of them; allowing people to only open them fully, halfway, or have them completely closed, because the demands of life should not impose upon their artistic vision. In Tom Wolfe's book From Bauhaus to Our House, a sneering quote can be found from the director of the Museum of Modern Art "We are asked to take seriously the architectural taste of real-estate speculators, renting agents, and mortgage brokers!"

In many European art compounds it was not uncommon to announce something akin to "We have just removed the divinity of art and architecture from the hands of the official art establishment [the Academy, the National Institute, the Künstlergenossenschaft, whatever], and it now resides with us, inside our compound. We no longer depend on the patronage of the nobility, the merchant class, the state, or any other outside parties for our divine eminence. Henceforth, anyone who wishes to bathe in art’s divine glow must come here, inside our compound, and accept the forms we have created. No alterations, special orders, or loud talk from the client permitted. We know best. We have exclusive possession of the true vision of the future of architecture."

In contrast much art back then was "commercial" art understood to be made primarily for the benefit of wealthy patrons, and the first image that comes to mind whenever I think of a tremendous artist is Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, contorted in an uncomfortable position, paint dripping down onto his face, reading scripture intently so he could draw inspiration from the words of the Bible itself, and yet feeling so inadequate about his ability to rise to the task he literally believed it would destroy his reputation, as detailed in his poem about the painting of the chapel. He did not consider himself a painter and only acquiesced to the pope's pressure for him to take on the commission. But he singlehandedly made one of the most beloved pieces of Western art in existence.

Now consider this absolute hubris from Jan Tschichold's book The New Typography: "More than all pre­vious art, the art of today demands creative will and strength. Its aim is utmost clarity and purity. ... Is it then surprising that its representations at first baffle the unsophisticated viewer, who is used to something completely different, or even actually repel him? Lazy and hostile people are still trying to make it appear contemptible in the eyes of others. and describe it as nonsense. These are the same people from whose physical attacks Manet's "Olympia" had to be protected by the police, a picture that is today one of the most precious treasures of the Louvre. Their prattling is too empty and unimportant to be taken seriously."

Yes, artists being indulgent has always existed, and there's some continuity between the attitudes of artists then and today, but in general the difference in humility is incredible. It's been a trend of modern artists and designers to view themselves as beholden to nothing, with the public being seen as an irrelevant triviality. And that would also be my response to @Primaprimaprima above - dictatorships of taste have never sat right with me, and the purpose of public art is for, well, the public. For artists not to consider the effects of their work on the intended stakeholders is basically a dereliction of their intended function, IMO. The complete separation of art from commerciality or the actual people it's being made for, where they will fail to consider the public's preferences and instead opt for narcissistic works of self-edification, is one of the very many defects of modern artistic thought.

the arrival of decent photography in part drove the visual arts into increasing abstraction

Like modern art's relation to photography I feel your discussion of modern architecture is missing some mention of the development of novel materials. A great big part of why so much of it is steel beams, sheet glass and reinforced concrete or finished in synthetic colours and assembled with adhesives and rivets or such is because they were newly available and made what was previously impossible possible. Tie that in with the "truth to materials" attitude from the Arts & Crafts movement and you arrive at a distinctly industrial era aesthetic, both in the sense that the materials are made in a factory and the resulting buildings are often vaguely reminiscent of the factories where the materials were made.

Your first point is good and sounds reasonable.

Your second point is not clear to me. What is it that caused artists in the modern era to rebel against the tastes of their patrons? Why is it that these rebellious artists, rather than toiling in obscurity, actually became commercial successes with ample patronage?

It seems to me that the only explanation must be that they are not, in fact, rebelling against the tastes of their patrons, and it is actually the taste of the patrons that has changed. This is kind of kicking the can down the road, because we can ask why the taste of patrons changed in the first place - but I'm comfortable saying that peoples' tastes change over time for some exogenous reasons, and sometimes they change for the worse.

It seems to me that the only explanation must be that they are not, in fact, rebelling against the tastes of their patrons, and it is actually the taste of the patrons that has changed.

This would have been my hypothesis too if not for two things:

1: There are modern architects and artists, particularly very popular and in-demand ones with the most power to set taste, who actually seem to fail to give the client what they want. See Eisenman's House VI again as an example - he certainly felt comfortable depriving the client of much of what they found important. Again, there's also this comment from an architect under Scott's post on the traditional/modern divide in aesthetics, stating that architects do have some power to impose taste due to the fact that they possess skills the client needs, and that the client does not dictate everything. In Tom Wolfe's book on modern architecture, he notes "I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out."

2: Most people, including the upper class who have the power and financial wherewithal to commission these buildings, seem to prefer the style of traditional buildings as opposed to modern ones. See the studies linked in Part 1 of my original post, as well as the price premiums that traditional housing commands despite apparently similar construction costs (in part 3 of my original post); it doesn't seem to be the case that this proliferation of modern architecture is primarily a bottom-up, demand-driven phenomenon.

It's a copout, but I don't have a definitive answer for you as to why the public and the art world shifted so heavily out of phase, and how this situation continues to propagate itself. The bulk of my post tries to answer the question of what's happened, why there is such a persistent bifurcation between what is actually being produced and people's stated preferences, and I can't really come to a firm conclusion. I can only guess it's partly down to the maintenance of a strict academic/architectural hegemony and partly down to the influence of city-planning councils which are a nonrepresentative and generally trained group of people that have the power to approve or veto developments. Perhaps there's also some fashionability in there - academic opinion is high status and has the ability to dictate the choices of the public, not just the other way around, and once academic consensus regarding modern art was established it caused some segment of the elite to be willing to forfeit designs they personally enjoy for an attempt at signalling status. For some people, getting a house built by Frank Gehry in what is perceived as forward-thinking styling is more important than actually living somewhere they would most enjoy, and there are also many patrons like governmental institutions who don't actually live in the buildings they commission and may not actually like them but want to project an air of modernity, which isn't inherent to the style but is rather an aesthetic signal academics created once they deemed it the New Style, fit for the Age of Machine. In other words, academics dictate demand just as much as they respond to it.

It's a copout, but I don't have a definitive answer for you as to why the public and the art world shifted so heavily out of phase, and how this situation continues to propagate itself.

There's a very simple solution that I'm honestly surprised no one has voiced. I confess I have neither the knowledge nor rhetoric to conclusively prove this theorem beyond my passionate and amateur interest in house design and architecture, but it basically boils down thusly;

Architecture is heavily invested in Academics. Academics are very political. Therefor, it's reasonable to assume that Architecture is also heavily political and driven by politics.

When you trace 'Modern'(I use capital M for a reason) Architecture back to the Bauhaus movement and the entire reasoning behind it, I feel it becomes very obvious.

Then again, I am clearly biased, as I absolutely loathe Bauhaus and nearly everything it's influenced.

Two possibilities come to mind for a shift in power towards artists:

  1. Better coordination of artists through the academy, unifying artistic taste and coordinating the shunning of defectors.
  2. Most patronage is now distributed by committees not individuals. Individuals seem to have stronger personal sensibilities and more confidence asserting them.

Artistic defectors have been shunned for hundreds of years. Off the top of my head, the Vienna Secession and the Exhibit of Rejects both consisted of artists with heterodox styles that couldn't find a place in the academy and had to strike out on their own.

More comments

Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example

Nobody uses that term but fans of Strongtowns. Hating "stroads" for their appearance, though, is like complaining about the interior architecture of a factory. Their priority isn't visual appeal, it's function. Quaint medieval (or in the US, imitations of same) town centers with narrow twisting alleys and hipster shops are very picturesque, but if you want to get some serious shopping done, not very practical. Bringing your SUV to your nearest commercial area, bisected by a "stroad", and hitting the Home Depot, Target, and then the grocery store... now that's more like it.

Hating "stroads" for their appearance, though, is like complaining about the interior architecture of a factory.

I also would not enjoy spending a significant fraction of my life staring at the ugly bowels of a factory and would be willing to pay a premium to avoid it. The problem is there is nowhere in this country where I could get that even if I wanted to (and the thought of moving to Europe disgusts me).

I also would not enjoy spending a significant fraction of my life staring at the ugly bowels of a factory and would be willing to pay a premium to avoid it.

As long as you don't work in one, you don't have to. As for commercial areas... there's usually not that much housing there and what housing there is, is on the lower end of the market, so you can pay your premium and not look at them all the time. Here is a pretty good example. Ugly, yes. But this is the suburb it's in. Don't want to stare at a "stroad"? Don't live on Route 10. There's lots of other space.

tfw your fellow forum-dweller posts a road that you have walked down multiple times as a "pretty good example" of an "ugly" "'stroad'"

On a serious note, I think you mixed up your links, as the first one and the second one are not in the same area.

Sorry, I have no idea why that link goes to Lexington Avenue now. I checked before I posted and it went to the right spot. In fact, when I cut and paste the link from the source it still goes to the right spot. I've replaced it with a Google Maps link to the same place.

The original version of the first link pointed to an unintended location (which apparently varied depending on who clicked on it) because it included multiple tildes, which were misinterpreted as strikethrough formatting by this website's broken formatter.

Yeah, when I hover over the "ugly" link the url says it's in New Jersey, but when I click it takes me to my own neighborhood. Which is several states away from the Garden State.

I figured it out. The first link points to an unintended location because it includes multiple tildes, which are misinterpreted as strikethrough formatting by this website's broken formatter.

I, who have never had a driver's license, find stroads a real pain in the ass. I don't want to think about how many hours of my life have been wasted just walking through 20-acre parking lots. God forbid anyone actually put the parking lot in the back, with the store right on the sidewalk like in a real city, and have the main entrance on the sidewalk, and a separate entrance in the rear (supermarkets used to be built like this in the thirties and forties).

Putting parking lot in the back makes little difference. It only matters if you’re already on the street with the front entrance. If you’re a block away, you need to cross the parking lot anyway.

More generally, without a car you are effectively disabled, in the literal sense: not fully able to participate in society in the same way the majority is. Most societies make some accommodations to the disabled, but there are real limits and trade offs involved. For example, people who have trouble walking (which in US is I suspect a bigger group than people without access to a car) typically appreciate a lot being able to drive right to their destination, and park right at the entry.

Point is, it is not clear to me why we should cater to your disability, to the detriment of the majority.

People don't use that term, but that doesn't mean that people like them. The problem is when people have to spend significant amounts of time looking at the visual equivalent of, as you say, a factory interior, whenever they need to commute or go to the store.

Why do you even need an SUV to buy things? You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need. The SUV solves the problem the stroad created. The issue is that people live in suburbs that have the greenery and freedom of a city while having the services of a rural area forcing people to drive places.

The car based city layout makes people obese, is ugly as sin, and isn't functional as it is incredibly demanding to maintain.

Because all of that is expensive. Expensive in your own time because you have to go to the store every day instead of once a week; expensive because the shops can't be megastores on relatively cheap land, and instead have to be studio apartments that sell bread or parsnips; expensive because the stores have to get their food delivered somehow, and if there is no road, that has to be done with some alternative, slower, more expensive implement than a truck.

You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need.

Let me see you pick up two bags of 25 kg each rice and flour on foot. Or fill a bottle of propane.

No issue on a cargo bike. Also I prefer fresher food that buying tens of kg of food that is meant to be stored for years.

"Sensible cities and walkable environments" is code for "we want to force people to use public transportation because cars give you too much freedom". And you really do not want to be forced to use public transportation in America.

It's not that way in Scandinavia, or wasn't when I visited. It's just too bad the US doesn't have the demographics of Denmark.

(deleted and reposted because I posted one level too deep)

There isn't an inherent reason that public transportation has to be a mobile insane asylum. If we're fantasizing about tearing out stroads, we can throw that into the bargain too.

Cars don't give freedom. They are the most regulated form of transport. They require licenses, insurance following strict rules on the road and high costs. Most of the time a driver is stuck in traffic. Police spend more time controlling drivers than any other mode of transport.

The issue in the US is a black crime issue. Instead of solving that issue the US has revamped its cities to socially isolate people by wasting vast sums of money on cars. The result is urban sprawl with low social cohesion with fat people driving around in cars with cops controlling them.

The cars came before the crime. Crime on public transit is a deal-breaker in many cases, but public transit has plenty of disadvantages before that. It's not door-to-door or even garage-to-parking lot, so there's a longer walk at each end. You have to wait for it. It has to stop all the time to pick up passengers. Passengers who aren't criminals are still often annoying, talking loudly or playing music or (usually children) crying and screaming. To make bus routes efficient, they tend to be circuitous so they take not only more time but more distance than driving. The target in transit is a "3-seat ride", which means changing vehicles twice with an additional wait each time; lesser destinations either are not served or require even more changes. When ridership is low they cut routes or limit hours; when it's high you end up standing for a long time or waiting for the next bus/train or both.

I occasionally visit my parents for brunch.

How would you recommend I exercise my supposedly-increased freedom to travel without a car if I wanted to make a 100 km trip to a rural location that isn't on the route between two cities?

Cars give convenience , which is close enough. Public transportation is slow and a waste of time even if it saves a small amount of fuel. Time wasted waiting for the bus, bus stops, and then walking too and from the stops.

In many cities it is as fast if not faster. Also for most things people don't need public transit, a short walk is faster than being stuck in a car. The mindset of a car being convient because it allows people to travel far comes from people living in a dead suburb.

In many cities it is as fast if not faster.

Which cities?

I just checked my daily commute, and I'd have to leave an hour earlier and get home 45 minutes later if I had to take the bus. I could cut that down to half an hour each if my boss let me change my shift to match the busses, but that's still an hour a day on top of getting that accommodation.

Also for most things people don't need public transit, a short walk is faster than being stuck in a car.

A short drive is faster than a short walk. I've driven to the store literally 400 meters away (280 m as the crow flies) because I was in a rush and driving is faster than running.

You can criticize me for my poor planning, but I confirmed that it was faster by timing my next few trips. It wasn't a lazy misconception or a naive assumption.

The mindset of a car being convient because it allows people to travel far comes from people living in a dead suburb.

That's literally the majority of Americans, so I'm not sure where you're going with that. Are you saying they have a distorted mindset and are factually incorrect? That it's true for them (due to their bad circumstances), but the idea has spread to people it doesn't apply to? Is it a moral judgment?

In many cities it is as fast if not faster.

Not in any Canadian city, unless you happen to live right next to the trunk. A commute that would take 15 minutes by car ultimately ballooned to an hour by a combination of bus, train, and being on foot.

I would rather commute an hour by car. I can buy a car that is nice (I could even get one where the roof comes off), I don't have to worry about belligerent drunk people, schedules being offset so that the bus departs right before the train arrives for whatever reason, or worry about being stuck out late once the transit system has shut down for the night.

Cars don't give freedom. They are the most regulated form of transport. They require licenses, insurance following strict rules on the road and high costs.

Cars are both more regulated than other forms of transport, and still give more freedom than they do. The ability to go directly where you want, at the time you want, with the cargo you want, is that significant that it far outweighs everything else.

Most of the time a driver is stuck in traffic.

This is just plain false.

being stuck in traffic is offset by time waiting for the bus/train to come, stops, and so on. Except for maybe BART during heavy congestion, it is not faster.

it is not faster

I'm skeptical of this, and even if true, it doesn't matter. Economists have been wrestling with this issue for a long time, and the conclusion they always find is that people would rather be stuck in traffic in their own personal conveyance than stuck in public transport, as they value the privacy and control personal conveyance gives.

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That’s an entirely circular issue. “We chose to cede our cities and public spaces to the underclass and mentally ill drug addicts, so now public transport is scary and unsafe” is a political choice, not an inevitability. There are many countries in which public transport is clean, safe, well-policed and used by all classes except the super rich, even where those very same people have cars or can afford to drive. Long road trips are tiring, and on public transport you can read, work, or relax instead of performing the labor of driving.

That assumes that crime and vagrancy are the reason Americans don't embrace public transport. But these aren't problems everywhere. Pittsburgh transit doesn't have these problems, at least not to the degree that anyone has expressed concern about them. I used to rely on bus lines, including some that served bad neighborhoods, when I lived in the city, and the worst thing I had to deal with was poor people listening to shitty rap music with cheap headphones that didn't contain the sound well. While this may be one of the reasons that some people say it's relatively easy to live here car-free, most people still use their cars to get around, despite the fact that narrow streets and a dearth of easy parking doesn't make driving particularly easy, either.

If all of the policies that would reverse this state of affair are firmly outside the Overton window, then unfortunately it is an inevitability rather than a choice. The choice was made a long time ago.

What Overton window? If DOGE can dismantle executive agencies at will and we're discussing undoing birthright citizenship and annexing Greenland and Canada, then surely "let's put mentally ill drug addicts in rehab programs against their will so they don't piss or stab people on the subway" is back on the table?

Mainly because crime is a local issue, not a federal one, and nearly every metro area is firmly under local single-party rule.

then surely "let's put mentally ill drug addicts in rehab programs against their will so they don't piss or stab people on the subway" is back on the table?

That would be logical, but logic doesn't have much power in the culture wars. Have you seen any evidence that's actually the case?

If DOGE can dismantle executive agencies at will and we're discussing undoing birthright citizenship and annexing Greenland and Canada...

We are doing at most one of those things. It may yet turn out to be zero of those things, once the courts have their say. So there's not much reason to believe "let's lock up mentally ill drug addicts" is back on the table.

And they also are denser or in other ways optimized for public transport. America , except for some cities, has never been optimized in this way.

Additionally, if most people could walk to their local pub, drunk driving injuries/deaths would be almost nonexistent.

Only if all your friends also live within walking distance, which is unlikely in any case.

For what it’s worth, Japan did not have the issues with vagrants and crazy people on their trains - instead, we were packed in like sardines with people so close that I couldn’t hold my arms flat against my sides without touching someone (and I was noticeably a foreigner and a man - my sister had it far worse). I’d take time spent in traffic over the subway any day of the week.

It is a circular issue. But the ceding of America’s public spaces to the Visigoth marauders is something no municipal administration will ever, ever fix. So when sensible Americans hear “we should abolish cars for walkable cities and public transportation” they correctly hear “please step inside the rape tube”

No, this is a code for: "we want traditional European urbanism without traditional European rule of law"

Close. The issue is that they think they can have European urbanism without a European population.

It’s not the population. Public transport in Addis Ababa is literally cleaner and safer than in LA. It’s solely the rule of law and harsh (or not so harsh) treatment of the vagrant, violent underclass.

Why do you even need an SUV to buy things? You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need. The SUV solves the problem the stroad created.

Do you have children? How many people do you need to buy groceries for? Have you ever needed to buy one (or multiple!) sheets of plywood? Do you own your own home, or do you rent an apartment?

Car/stroad haters seem to overwhelmingly be young, childless, apartment-renting city-dwellers. If you somehow aren't, then your critiques make no sense.

I lived in Europe as a missionary for two years. Carried all my shopping by hand either walking or on public transit. It sucked then, and I was 19 to 21 at the time and extremely physically active and only shopping for myself (my companion was carrying his own groceries). It would suck far more now.

Car/stroad haters seem to overwhelmingly be young, childless, apartment-renting city-dwellers. If you somehow aren't, then your critiques make no sense.

lol, on Reddit there is a nearly 1-1 overlap between childfree/fuckcars subs

I have three sons, do practically all the shopping and I have been doing just fine without a car for the past 4 years. If I lived in a suburb it would probably not be fun but I live in an urban area with a medium sized shop between me and the subway station. An alternative is of course having your groceries delivered, which is still far cheaper than owning a car.

On the rare occasion we actually need a car we just borrow or rent one. We found owning one was excessive for our current needs.

An alternative is of course having your groceries delivered, which is still far cheaper than owning a car.

Not always. in the long-run a car is cheaper. You pay a huge premium for delivery.

Not that big a premium. I'd have to buy groceries in excess of $5000 a month for car to just break even with home delivery.

You need other frequent or important uses of the car for it to be remotely economical.

That probably depends on location? Where I live grocery stores will deliver to you for free if you order more than €40 of food.

Yes, but how much do they charge for smaller orders, and how much do you pay each year to own a car? In the UK we pay £2–4 for delivery of a £40+ order every few weeks (buying the rest of what we need on foot, typically once a day on the way home from the station). Let's say we spend £150/y on delivery (certainly an overestimation). No car can be owned for so little, even if you could get insurance and fuel for free.

In my big city (indeed the biggest) in Europe, what most people in the middle class and above do is order groceries 1x per week online. Because the city is so dense, the truck makes like 20 stops over a couple of hours and delivery fees are therefore very cheap. I pay $5 a month for unlimited deliveries, and all the groceries are the exact same price as in the store with no additional service charges or fees.

This accounts for all heavy items like detergent and bottled water, bulky bags of potatoes etc. Then for the rest of the week I either walk to the grocery store, deli/butcher or farmer’s market on Sunday (all a maximum of ten minutes’ walk) and get fresh meat/bread/pastries if I want them. This works pretty well and I never feel overburdened.

I could buy all my groceries every day in person with little additional nuisance, because there are multiple grocery stores in the five minute walk between my subway station and home and in the four minute walk between my destination subway station and my office. In that case, like many people, I’d just buy items in smaller purchases instead of once for the week or fortnight. But I prefer planning my meals.

I have family who live out in the suburbs in New Jersey and Connecticut. Walking from the parking space to the store, around the huge and not very dense grocery store (since space in big warehouse stroad strip malls is cheap), and then back to the car likely covers a greater distance than many trips to and from (and around) the grocery store in dense cities on foot.

Walking from the parking space to the store, around the huge and not very dense grocery store (since space in big warehouse stroad strip malls is cheap), and then back to the car likely covers a greater distance than many trips to and from (and around) the grocery store in dense cities on foot.

LOL, no. The distance to the furthest spot to the store entrance in my suburban NJ grocery store shopping center is 600 feet. Nobody ever has to park that far away; those particular spots are only used by employees and other far spots are used by people going to other stores that are closer. More typically it's less than half that. Most places in Manhattan are more than 600 feet, never mind the typical lesser distances, from the grocery store. 600 feet is just over two short blocks in Manhattan, and less than a long block.

But I prefer planning my meals.

I thought i did too, because that was how my mother taught me, but when i stopped it was as if a massive weight came off my shoulders. Now i just shop every other day, buy what's on sale and make something from that. If me or the family happen to crave something specific I can adjust on the day. I plan like 1 meal a week and I love it.

72% preferred a traditional look, and this was the case regardless of whether one was Republican or Democrat or Independent, female or male, white or black (so no, liking traditional architecture isn't a "right-wing thing", as it is sometimes portrayed).

My intuition here is the leftists enjoy the construction of experimental transgressive architecture, and while they may prefer traditional architecture in isolated comparisons, they would not enjoy a city that maximizes this preference.

In general I consider aesthetics-based zoning rules to be a left-leaning preference, and many of those are varying degrees of "traditional": I've heard Europeans in touristy cities complain that installing a heat pump is difficult because they can't visibly change the facade. Or San Francisco requiring expensive custom woodwork for similar reasons. Santa Fe codified "traditional" adobe as an architectural requirement, and I've suspected some "cute" small American towns I've visited do similarly to manage their aesthetics.

If anything, architectural free-for-all seems a bit of a libertarian aesthetic, and it's popularity in the US strikes me as a remaining vestage of the nation's cultural focus on "liberty".

If anything, architectural free-for-all seems a bit of a libertarian aesthetic, and it's popularity in the US strikes me as a remaining vestage of the nation's cultural focus on "liberty".

I wouldn't say that the US's focus on liberty is at all in a state of remaining vestiges -- both the mainstream US left and right define themselves explicitly in terms of liberty ("my body my choice," "live free, no mandates", "trans rights are human rights", "no tax on tips" -- even "all cops are bastards" is rather an interesting corruption of libertarian critiques of the police), they just disagree on precisely where the limits of liberty should be and what constitutes an unacceptable attack on the liberty of another. That's why the left went all-in on the paradox of tolerance, after all, and why they began defining hate speech in terms of 'violence', because 'violence' was long considered the limit of liberty.

Americans eat, drink, sleep, and breathe liberty, so much that it's very hard for Americans to understand how profoundly liberty-focused they are even in comparison to the rest of the Western world.

I generally disagree with the notion that modern architecture is bad but there is definitely quite a lot of bad architecture made. But good modern buildings can be visually very pleasing. For example, I find the Rietveld Schröder House extremely captivating. Even more impressive is that it was built in 1924.

If you don't find it better than an ordinary brick house from that time, the next explanation is

6: If you are longer exposed to something (including an architectural style), it makes you feel better about it

This is a well-know phenomenon in music. A song feels better the more you listen to it. An architectural example is the Eiffel Tower that was extremely controversial and hated by many when it was built. Now, it is perceived as an iconic and inseparable part of Paris. It will also explain why architects are more fond of modern architecture: they are much more exposed to it.

For what it's worth, the more time I spend looking at the Eiffel Tower the more I agree with the original critics and wish it had been torn down.

I've lived near and in buildings that look almost exactly like that, and it still looks absolutely hideous to me. The building in the background mogs it by a mile.

If you are longer exposed to something (including an architectural style), it makes you feel better about it

That might be a true factor, but if it were the entire reason, it would predict that people make no distinction between buildings that were built before they were born - after all, can't be exposed longer than your life.

That would surprise me and doesn't appear to be in evidence.

An architectural example is the Eiffel Tower that was extremely controversial and hated by many when it was built. Now, it is perceived as an iconic and inseparable part of Paris.

The Eiffel Tower might an icon of Paris - but do Parisians actually consider it beautiful? Compared to, say, the towers of Notre Dame? Or may its impressive and skyline-dominating size, the imposing construction, and the utility as a vantage point more relevant to its popularity?

Angular things are always inferior to curves. Buildings that look more natural are more beautiful and modernism leans into artificial looks

To provide a contrary data point, I find that building you linked utterly repulsive.

I find the Rietveld Schröder House extremely captivating. Even more impressive is that it was built in 1924. If you don't find it better than an ordinary brick house from that time, the next explanation is 6: If you are longer exposed to something (including an architectural style), it makes you feel better about it

Personally I don't like it, and I've been exposed primarily to modern architecture in my urban environments. I would think this is true for most people who express preferences against modern architecture - they live in cities primarily filled with concrete-and-glass blocks. Perhaps exposure plays a bit of a role here, but I doubt it's the only reason for the disparity between architects' and laypersons' preferences.

I suppose the initial framing is a bit besides the actual question, which was not "why do people like modern architecture", it was "why is the style associated with modern architecture so common, despite the fact that people in my experience dislike it?" I've updated the title of the post to reflect this.

Does your distaste to modern style extend to other aspects of modern design? Modernist architecture was just one pillar of the modernist movement. Modernist ideas for exteriors also allowed for completely new interior designs. The interiors with large windows and open spaces are impossible in traditional architecture. The modernist style of furniture or just simply design of tools is also different.

Looking around me in my European landscape, I can definitely say that modern interior design is pretty widely accepted, way more than the exteriors that are indeed not fully accepted. There are very few people that design their bedrooms in old style, similarly for bathrooms or living rooms.

I definitely think there is some merit to modern interior design principles - I enjoy bright open spaces as much as the next guy - but I find it most visually pleasing when these principles are integrated with older, more rustic styles of design. For example, here's Eunpyeong Hanok Village in South Korea, built in 2014. The interiors clearly crib from modern design with how open and airy they are, but they incorporate traditional stylings into the buildings' interiors seamlessly to make a space that looks inviting. Of course this is adapted for the Korean environment and can't be generalised - localised approaches involving the vernacular style of any given area are always needed, much of this wouldn't necessarily work in the European context.

Currently, I live in a gleaming white block of an apartment building, and frankly I have to say the interiors feel a bit alienating sometimes. It's hard to hate it because it's been my home for years, but it sometimes comes off as quite sterile and bland, and while it's technically designed in a way that's meant to let in light, in spite of this I almost always keep the blinds closed. The sunlight can get harsh. Many traditional East Asian buildings tried to solve this problem by softening the sunbeams through panes of paper, creating a warm diffuse glow, but modernist buildings do nothing of the sort - the light that filters in through the massive glass windows in the midday is brain-boiling, and I dislike having to pull down the blinds every single time noon rolls around.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not strictly in favour of retvrning completely and building everything in perfectly authentically old-style ways, I think there's something to be learned from some modern ideas of design, but as a standalone aesthetic package it just doesn't work for me. I primarily wish we had hybridised these traditional vernacular forms with up-to-date concepts in a more seamless and natural manner - more like a natural progression of the style, instead of simply disposing of all the architectural forms that had developed locally for thousands of years. To see these rich and varied traditions quickly disappear in mere decades feels like a travesty.

Isn’t it akin to modern art (I think few people actually enjoy modern art compared to masters of the past): liking something beautiful is blasé and therefore the midwits prefer ugly over beautiful to signal taste?

I think that's almost certainly the reason why the midwits in academia prefer modern architecture - it is a signal that you have had the time to develop this type of inaccessible preference. Of course, that still doesn't explain why modern architecture is everywhere despite the general populace seeming to dislike it - they are the clients that developers and by extension architects are marketing to, after all, and one would expect market forces to assert themselves at some point and populate the urban landscape with architecture the public actually likes. That's the very question my post is attempting to answer.

The general populace aren't the clients. Rich people (and corporations) building buildings are. And they hire people to decide on the architecture, and those people are likely close cousins to those midwits in academia.

If you want to know what the general populace likes, look at tract houses including McMansions (but keep in mind that architectural design is not the only thing people are looking for). If you want to know what rich people like, look at custom-built homes.


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