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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Where is the American Dream?

There has always been a dream of wealth and fortune in America. Drawing immigrants and inspiring the population. A sense that you can start from nothing or very little and pull yourself up through hard work, a bit of smarts, and a bit of luck. But I find myself a little unsure of how do this lately.

Learn to code

A decade ago there was a refrain among the elite "learn to code". That was how the coal miners in West Virginia would replace their dirty global warming causing jobs with something less harmful for the environment.

I know how to code. I've been coding for more than a decade. I'm out of a job and unlike in previous years I'm not being assaulted by job offers on LinkedIn every day.

The talk I'm hearing (and believing) around twitter and silicon valley is that AI is replacing coders. Or at least that is enough of a perception that hiring is down.

I'm at least a senior web developer, but for the new kids coming out of college... I don't know. I used to know guys a few years younger than me asking for help finding a job out of college and I'd do a resume tune-up and send it back to them and they'd tell me thanks but they managed to get a job already.

Nowadays I don't even think telling people to go into coding is a good idea.

Heal the sick

There does seem to be a consistent growth industry in medicine. I'm certain this is true. However I feel this is a bad omen.

Medicine has this feel to me like it is a consumption industry. The typically unhealthy are often old people that aren't really producing lots of goods and services anymore. It's savings that they are using to prolong their life.

Maybe if all the medical spending was on life extension I'd feel this was a good use of money.

But forget about how I feel about the industry. Is this any place to get rich as part of the American dream? If you enjoy terrible hours, lots of bureaucratic red tape, and years of mandatory training then it's all for you. It's certainly not available as a quick career pivot.

Become a social media star

Another avenue of wealth open to seemingly everyone is to go on social media and become an internet sensation. Sell advertising and related products.

Im honestly not sure if this is a realistic avenue these days or not. I do enjoy quite a few niche media things. They seemingly make a living even if they aren't wealthy.

The downsides seem numerous.

  1. Your business is beholden to the social media sites you live on.
  2. You may end up with fame, but without the traditional trappings of fame that would protect you.
  3. You are very connected with customers and consumers who are very accustomed to getting exactly what they want. It's a brutal set of obligations.

Where do I go make money?

Some of this really just boils down to my personal job security. Where do I go to start making money?

But the the rest boils down to where do my kids go to start making money?

My mom was able to give me good advice a decade and a half ago to go into coding. It worked out well for a while.

Now I'm in a bind of figuring out what to do next, and what paths to lead my kids down for good career paths.

*The AI-lephant in the room

LLMs certainly change things. I'm sorta operating on an assumption that language based things will be solved and done for. If it involves typing up or reading and comprehending a thing that seems like something current AIs can generally do better than 95% of people.

I'm assuming other distinct areas will not be solved for. Not because I think they are unsolvable, but just planning becomes meaningless at a certain point. But they also don't seem currently solved.

The American dream is still alive and quite strong, and we can see this by the large number of immigrants risking life and limb still trying to get into the country to this day. But for the average American it's a bit more faded and one big reason is pretty simple.

What is it? Life is simply better to begin with. Even the poorer end of rural Americans still tend to have somewhat reliable food, clean water, safe shelter, entertainment that even the kings of old could only dream of (who needs a royal jester when there's millions of them on your TV and computer), good looking comfortable clothing, and medical treatment among many many other things. That's not to say there aren't still problems but the lives of most citizens are substantially better than even many upper class of the 1800s.

You don't have to go to the big city living next to horse manure filled streets with one arm from a factory accident anymore because the alternative is somehow even worse. Despite the gap in wealth increasing substantially the actual life experience has narrowed. Even the average home is getting larger, putting them closer and closer to mansions despite smaller household sizes. There's simply less to aspire towards, and the American dream has always been one of aspiration.

Some of this really just boils down to my personal job security. Where do I go to start making money?

But the the rest boils down to where do my kids go to start making money?

It takes a somewhat adaptive and entrepreneurial mindset to really make major money from nowhere. Any simple answer is liable to go the same way they've always gone, a flood of new workers over time chasing the simple money.

But the good news is, if things go well, we might even need to worry about it too much. Perhaps AI and automation are so incredible that even the poorest of rurals will now benefit from the personal maids and private chefs with very little work done in exchange. The American Dream may dry up completely for citizens because we'll have reached the peak of the mountain and find ourselves nowhere else to climb. (And hopefully not some sort of great war over resources wiping out most humans or some other doomsday scenario).

Philosophically that scares me, how will we find meaning in this life where no jobs are even needed anymore? Can humans handle Paradise? But if we disregard that sort of concern for a second, then the life is better and you will have no need for an American dream any longer because that dream will be the default.

"Adolescence" isn't like that.

After watching it, I can give my thoughts, and it really isn't.

First let's look at what "incel" means in the world of the show (which may not reflect reality). "Incel" is portrayed as a zoomer concept that all the kids know about and the boring old adults don't get it. The kids know about it because all kids know about it, and boring old adults don't because it's a kid thing and it's just not part of their generation. It's also shown to be a generic insult, kind of like how calling someone a fag may have been used 10 years ago. Calling someone an incel doesn't make them an incel, just like calling someone a fag doesn't make him a homosexual. And in fact the protagonist explicitly rejects the label. His friends are also not suggested to be incels, though they are pushed together as common victims of bullying. One is bullied for being poor and the other is bullied for being dumb.

In the show there is no idea that there's a looming incel threat that is coming for your kids and schools. The attack is portrayed as being motivated by bullying and a personal grudge against the victim, not by ideology or misogyny. Of course being called ugly and an incel was a big part of this bullying, but no more than any other kind of relentless torment that kids put each other through.

Now let's analyze the episodes individually.

Episode 1 mostly lacks social commentary, but if anything, is anti-police by showcasing quality police brutality and abuse. The show starts off with the detectives nonchalantly executing a hardcore no-knock raid with dozens of heavily armed officers in order to pick up a kid. Even though the kid is an accused murderer, they have no reason to believe he will resist or that the family will impede the investigation. Then there's the interrogation, where the police don't have enough evidence, so they gaslight in order to fish for a confession. Fortunately the kid has a lawyer and is able to avoid most of the traps. It's true that being anti-police is somewhat blue-coded but I don't otherwise see anything too major happening in this episode.

Episode 2 is more of a commentary on school and society. The administration is shown as uncaring and incompetent. Bullying runs rampant. The detective's son is even bullied every day nobody things anything of it. The drama and storytelling is nice, because we see in the beginning that the victim's best friend is hiding something, and we find out gradually that it's because the victim was doing the bullying too. Of course murder isn't justified in this situation, but it establishes the main character as a sort of antihero that we can almost relate to. Which is the perfect time because when the detective breaks the friend he says that's the last thing he needs to close the case and throw our antihero in prison.

Episode 3 is a battle of wits between the two characters. The killer wrongly assumes that the psychologist is in cahoots with the police and fishing for a confession, but rightly understands that she is not on his side. The psychologist alternates between trying to build a rapport and asserting her authority, while the killer remains on the defensive. At the end we find out that the killer gained a liking for his nemesis, in sort of a messed up Stockholm syndrome kind of way. It is shown that the killer's mind is melted by being exposed to too much oversexualized content on Instagram. This sounds correct as whenever I make the mistake of opening FB, I get reels by creators who also do OF.

Episode 4 is hard to analyze, but it's hard to argue that there's any sort of partisan propaganda wrapped up in it.

Overall, the show is overhyped but also interesting enough, and really isn't pushing some sort of woke angle. 50% of murders are committed by a certain kind of person, yet true crime shows usually feature karens and highly intelligent men as the killers. This is because their crimes are shocking and unexpected, not because of a woke bias in reporting.

I'll take an L on my various "they ran out of mana" takes, clearly if they can make a goofy propaganda flic, and get so much buzz going around it, they still got something left in the tank.

Why anyone here would want to give even more energy to it is beyond me, though.

When government is talking big game about showing a propaganda piece to children, there's no real way to counter it without giving it more oxygen.

It's natural to see people move to subversion. The battle to keep this particular piece of Netflix slop hidden away is already lost.

One thing that seems preposterous to me throughout this entire thing is how a 13 year old boy is being treated like an adult. Everybody involved, even the psychologist just acts as if this kid is and ought to be a man who has control over his emotions, a sex life and full control over his actions.

It's bizarre.

really isn't pushing some sort of woke angle

You can interpret anything as non-woke if you want. I could interpret the Sequel trilogy of Star Wars as an aristocratic anti-woke vitalist saga if I wanted. The First Order displays massive superiority in engineering and warfare, the decadent new Republic clearly has no clue what they're doing. Democracy simply doesn't work and needs ridiculous feats of luck to prevail over disciplined, efficient authoritarianism. There's a treacherous black guy who displays zero positive qualities and even gets his attempt at a heroic sacrifice cucked away from him. All politics is decided by great men/women of esteemed bloodlines...

But that's not the message from the writers, that's not what they were aiming for and that's not what most people are getting from the story. Adolescence is a Netflix original, not a Little Dark Age edit.

A story framed around a young teen middle-class/non-gang white boy being a murderer is innately woke since this basically never happens. There are vast numbers of shocking and unexpected things they could do in the entire field of fiction, that they choose this particular theme is question-begging.

The first episode is pro police brutality. The protagonist of the first two episodes is a police officer, and the daughter corrects her parents when they ask about a complaint. The response is considered justifiable by the police and the child’s own counsel didn’t consider police brutality worthy of attention. The audience takeaway is that this action is justified — all the cool protagonists were involved, and it’s only an angry low class Dad who temporarily wants to file a complaint. Episode two is where we learn about incels and the “red pill” from the detective’s son, and that this is what caused the murder. The accomplice is also clearly depicted as being incel adherent, hence his obsession with looks and asking the detective about whether he got girls.

I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op. The series is designed to (1) make children afraid of ever coming across something online about incels or the red pill by introducing a strong terror response, for instance (a) imagining themself as the boy and having your father watch as the police inspect your penis [this is the director’s intent, hence the focus on the father’s face], (b) making the boy utterly humiliated and demeaned, for instance his peeing himself and crying and then being thrown in jail after being humiliated by a woman, (c) making you think you can be an accomplice also thrown in jail, hence the plot line of the body who was beaten by the black girl [the only time the “authority-coded” characters cry and sympathize is for the black girl]; (2) make women afraid of boys who look or behave like the boy protagonist, by associating the boy with all sorts of evils and shock and humiliation; [3] artificially raise the status of minorities, for instance the black police officer and the south Asian teachers, whereas there’s an ugly white police officer who is intentionally depicted as an ugly older incel

It’s really not about “bullying is bad” at all. That’s what episode three was about. Episode three is about raising the possibility that this is the case, and then the director shooting down the notion psychologically via (1) depicting the boy as aggressive and manipulative and violent, (2) making us unsympathetic to the boy and instead sympathetic to the dominant detective, (3) showing the detective denying any sympathy to the boy at the end and then breaking down, signaling to the viewer to sympathize with the woman and not the boy.

What I just can’t wrap my head around is —

  • is it a foreign country somehow spending, like, billions of dollars in espionage and subterfuge to get this show made and shown to the youth? Why would anyone show this to their own children?

  • is it a domestically made psy-op in order to, like, “subjugate” white people in the UK further? Did the government think they were getting too uppity because of the grooming gangs?

Like there is nothing organic about the directorial decisions at all.

"Adolescence" isn't like that.

Like what? What is "Adolescence" and what is it supposed to (not) be like?

It's a short, four episode UK TV series about a teenager who murders a classmate. It's being interpreted as a penetrating look at the radicalisation of young boys by social media.

So, I can often be found posting on here complaining about bias in medicine (although I disagree about some of the kinds of bias with quite a few posters here).

We do have something of an update to a long running story that’s worth sharing.

Meddit link for more discussion and detail: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1jotpzz/follow_up_on_the_study_showing_discrepancies_in/

Basically, awhile back there was a headline about how black babies received worse outcomes when care for by white doctors. Apparently, this went so far as to get cited in the supreme court.

Sometime later someone on Meddit (which is still quite pro-woke) noticed that they forgot to control for birth weight, which would likely completely kill the effect size (explanation: white physicians have more training and take care of sicker babies who have worse outcomes). At the time there was a significant amount of speculation essentially going “how do you miss this? That would be the first you would control for.”

Well, it turns out that someone filed a FOIA request and well, to quote Reddit:

“A reporter filed a FOIA request for correspondence between authors and reviewers of the article and found that the study did see a survival benefit with racial concordance between physician and patient, however it was only with white infants and physicians. They removed lines in the paper *stating that it does not fit the narrative that they sought to publish with the study.” *

While I often criticize medicine for being political, I’m often found here telling people to trust the experts when it comes to (certain aspects) of COVID or whatever, and well this kinda stuff makes it very very hard.

The initial findings were passed around very uncritically and sent up all the way to the supreme court.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.

I don't know how to fix it either and I have been losing sleep about it for a while, but I am glad to know you can see it now too. In the broadest scope @faceh nails it with consequences, but enacting consequences is going to be a real challenge. It does seem like we're going to need a significant numbers of lives lost in an actual disaster to occur before we can snap enough people out of the fog of complacency, because until lives are lost the buck is too easy to pass, it's too easy to downplay and dismiss it as 'misinformation'.

I think the best 'consequences' are those that follow naturally/intrinsically from failure to be honest. Lying must have a cost, one that cannot be avoided if you lie/defect consistently.

If you're flying a passenger plane, you probably shouldn't have an ejection seat or parachute if your passengers don't have such an escape option. That way you will be extra sensitive to possible danger. The norm that The Captain is the last to leave a sinking ship operates similarly. And you can also surmise that the more responsibility inherent to your position, the more severe the consequences should be for misuse or screwup.

Sometimes you can't make the consequences that immediate but you can still align incentives. Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence. Boeing should probably take this idea.

For politicians, I'd suggest that they must be forced to endure the direct consequences of rules they impose. If you are supporting criminal justice reform, you should probably be required to live at least part-time in the most crime-ridden districts in your jurisdiction. If you want to drastically increase police authority or make penalties for crimes harsher, you should be subject to 'random' investigations where you will be arrested and tried for ANY crimes discovered. "If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide," right?

The penalty for publishing bad science or bad statistics, especially if you intentionally hide the stuff that would destroy your conclusions... well that's tricky. We discussed this a while back and I admitted to not having a solution. Prediction markets are a decent mechanism, require scientists to put their money at risk on a market betting on whether their results will replicate or not.

Many institutions seem to have failed or been corrupted by introducing 'false' consequences, where a member who is caught screwing up is 'publicly' reprimanded but privately, they're not punished, or maybe they're even rewarded, and rather than removed from power, they get shuffled off somewhere else in the system and hope that nobody notices.

Partially this is due to a 'circling the wagon' effect, if someone is part of your ingroup you don't want to let the outgroup hurt them so that you, too, can be protected if they come for you. Even a 'good' person would want to insulate their fellows from consequences since they are insulated in return.

But I suspect a lot of it comes from malicious actors FIRST convincing members of a group to remove the factor that actually punishes malfeasance, and then grabbing up as much power as they can for their own purposes... and other bad actors see that there's power to be grabbed and minimal consequences, so it becomes attractive to bad actors.

So the REALLY important factor is that the consequences actually have to filter out bad actors or incompetents from the system entirely, which allows the system to improve via iteration. You can't have consequences that ONLY inflict pecuniary loss, for example, if the person can afford to pay the 'fines' and yet continue to maintain their position of influence and authority.

A friend works on high-danger vehicles (let's say helicopters) as a software engineer. The first thing that happens when they push a software update is that as many engineers as possible get rounded up to take a flight on the helicopter.

Similarly Kawasaki Heavy Industries used to show off their confidence in the precision and reliability of their industrial robots by having the CEO and various others sit on a sofa while their biggest robot moved it around, although that's obviously more staged.

My favorite example of this is the weird enthusiasm with which Richard Davis loves to shoot himself to promote body armor.

It has to be quite exhilarating. All your instincts telling you you're done for, only to escape death without a scratch. I could see myself getting addicted to it.

but I am glad to know you can see it now too

Nah this problem is why I first started posting way back in the days where some of our most reasonable contributors didn't see that the news and "science" was biased. I think pretty much everyone still here gets that at this point, so I've spent more time arguing about overreaction lately, but my views haven't changed.

This is a particularly good example for everyone to toss into their brain for later though.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.

I see you’re starting to understand how me and mine felt during/after the scamdemic overreaction.

Fucked if I know how you get the trust back. It’s gone. We’re just going to have to, as a society, deal with a permanently lower vaccination rate. I don’t have a solution, except to say that defenestrating the people pushing the medical… narratives, not just the Covid one but lots of other blatantly political stuff, would start a slow process of rebuilding trust. Not regaining, rebuilding. The uncritical trust in doctors is dead, and the medical establishment killed it.

I’ve been harping a lot recently on the need to build new, functional, things to replace the old ones going haywire in entirely predictable ways. I don’t really have a ‘solution’ solution in the case of the medical establishment but I’m pretty sure the medical price transparency crowd will be the ones best positioned to come up with one.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back?

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, a powerful immortal trickster being ("Q") who has tangled with the Enterprise many times appears on the bridge of the Enterprise. He tells a story of having his powers stripped for his sins and begs the crew's help. The crew are, understandably, skeptical. He plaintively claims to be mortal and asks what he can do to convince the crew that he is indeed mortal. The Enterprise's Klingon security officer has the answer:

Die.

Die

Very funny Worf, eat any good books lately?

If you check the raw emails you can also see someone warned them about controlling for birth weight but they ignored the warning.

https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/U-MN-FOIA-concordance.pdf

I was talking with a health economist about it & he asked 2 questions.

...

[2] When discussing possible mechanisms, he asked whether there is an effect on birth weight (and I would add gestational age). I said that this is conditional on the hospital stay when giving birth, so there's not much scope for affecting these at that point. He suspected that the patient-physician relationships might pre-date birth and we might see a legitimate good effect on it. Alternatively, seeing nothing could be interpreted as evidence against selection, a placebo. These competing interpretations make it a bit dicey.

[2] We do have controls for low weight and early term in the estimations. Do you want me to split based on these?

[2] No. The idea would be to use them as outcomes, rather than controls. But I'm not sure we want to go down that road. It could be a mechanism but it requires that the baby's doctor (not the mom's) exert some influence during the pregnancy. Given that we think the mother's doctor is more important prenatally than the baby's, it would be more informative if we could see the effect of mother's doctor race on child birth weight and gestation. But this is not possible, I think.

Yeah the Meddit thread goes into some of this and that's a very sympathetic audience going.....oh my.

How do we get the trust back?

You don't? I'm pretty sure the correct answer is "make like the police and get defunded." Or get subject to a constant background level of social opprobrium for the rest of your life. Same difference.

Everybody knew what they were getting into when they kicked this off. They just thought it was worth the risk.

They just thought it was worth the risk.

No, most people were fooled just as much as anyone else was. Everyone in medicine is in the academia basically, and most of the academy are true believers.

No, most people were fooled just as much as anyone else was.

They were warned. Repeatedly. Not quietly. Not by conservatives.

I really don't think that is true. People in medicine are there because they are willing to suffer to help people. They are getting it wrong because of propaganda efforts by the university administrations and journalist classes.

They are just as fooled as everyone else, even the bad actors in this case think they are helping and doing the right thing because "these things are true, if the data doesn't match we must have done something wrong!" after years of being brainwashed.

I really don't think that is true.

You really don't think it's true that people were warned? That's really not a question of mental state.

I'm not sure what you mean.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back?

The same way you get trust back in a normal human relationship: you apologize unreservedly, make concrete steps to prevent the issue happening again, and accept that it will be a long time (if ever!) before the trust is rebuilt to what it used to be.

In this case, that means that first, everyone who repeated this false evidence needs to retract it, and apologize for their error in repeating it. No holding back because they think that fighting racism is a noble goal, no minimizing to try to avoid reputation damage, nothing. Full on admit the fault and apologize. Second, this man himself needs to be banned from ever doing research again without supervision from someone more trustworthy. Third, publications which repeated this falsified research need to brainstorm a plan for how they will catch future problems like this, and that should include a good honest look at how their own biases helped it to happen (because I have very little doubt they didn't check too closely because this research confirmed some editors' biases).

The medical profession needs to do that not only for this case, but for any other cases that come to light. And then wait. They will no doubt be beaten up in the short term by people who are angry at having been betrayed. They will get this thrown back in their faces from time to time. But eventually, if they are patient and keep acting with integrity, the wound will (probably) heal and the trust will be back. It's not an easy or fast process though.

This is the professional website of the study's lead author

This is me reading tea-leaves a little bit, but some things stand out to me.

The majority of his academic background is in business (MBA) and a fanci-fied version of IT. His professional experience was with CACI which is laughably described as a "mid-size" consulting firm. CACI is a notorious "body shop" Beltway Bandit that makes billions of dollars off of staff augmentation for Federal Contracts. Their own website states they employ about 25,000 people.

This provides a mental model, at least, of how this study - and its accompanying malfeasance - came into being. This is a consultant in a classroom. "What does the client want as an outcome? Racism. Okay, great! We can work the numbers to make it say that."

In the Daily Caller piece that the reddit post links to, they have a screenshot of this guy's Microsoft Word comments - one of them literally says, "this is not the story we're trying to tell." This is straight out of a consulting 101 MBA class.

At some point in the 2000s, Academia became a kind of side option career for people who aren't actually serious academics or researchers. You could pickup up a PhD from somewhere in something and then get associate or adjunct status. Sure, this salary wasn't great, but it gave you that credential to pass around as a digital hustler - you could go on podcasts, do paid speaking engagements, consult on the side for $300 an hour. It was a weird kind of self-reputation-maxxing. And that's part of the real long term rot of the academy. If you got a PhD in the 1950s or before, it's because you were almost monkish in your devotion to serious study in a field.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.

TAPS

THE

SIGN

Although admittedly this is not about 'elites' doing things on behalf of a whole society. A lot of blame can probably be ascribed to people who spread this information without checking it or by uncritically accepting it and parroting it as if it is true.

Which, it turns out, includes a SCOTUS Justice. Its in an actual, published SCOTUS opinion now (albeit a dissent, so it probably won't be used as precedent).

Should she formally retract that, somehow?

To be fair, she did tell us that she was not a biologist.

The study that was a big part of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was later revealed to be complete bullshit and nobody cared about that, so I think she is probably safe.

There's probably a pretty solid essay or law review article to be written (probably already has) pointing out that empirically, it is better for the courts to stick to textualism/legislative intent when interpreting the law, as they have an extremely dubious track record when it comes to interpreting science and statistics while reasoning about what laws mean or 'ought' to mean.

Recent decisions the go into the form and function of various firearms/ parts of firearms when ruling on gun control laws suffer from similar issues.

You should never trust a single study. Scott said it well “beware the man of a single study”

However there is a fair bit of research on racial concordance and how this improves healthcare outcomes. Apparently black people feel better about having black doctors and are more likely to adhere to their meds if a black doc prescribes them. Makes sense given how extreme the ingroup bias is among black people, so I don’t doubt the results. On the other hand, does this mean I as a white pefson can legitimately demand I have a white physician because that would make me feel more comfortable? No?

On the other hand, does this mean I as a white pefson can legitimately demand I have a white physician because that would make me feel more comfortable? No?

Tons of people pick a doctor on the basis of ‘bedside manner’ or otherwise feeling comfortable with the doctor. It’s everywhere.

Pick a doctor? Sir I don’t speak American, can you rephrase?

Where I’m from, you’re sometimes lucky to even have one at all. Mine is Filipino and I’m white. Which is fine, he seems pretty competent although truth be told I’d still rather a white doctor.

I believe that's usually attributed to Aquinas:

"Cave ab homine unius libri."

And, as I understand it, he meant it admiringly, in the Bruce Lee "I fear the man who has practiced one kick a thousand times, not the man who has practiced a thousand kicks one time" sort of way.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.

I say this of any institution public or private. The answer to restoring trust is a simple but apparently too difficult to actually do — be trustworthy. It’s kind of a crazy question. When doctors lie and misrepresent the truth, when they openly try to manipulate the public into believing things that are not supported by research in order to get them to obey, or when they push unneeded drugs and treatments on people, it’s easy to lose trust. And I find the loss of trust in medical professionals and institutions to be actually dangerous because honestly most people are horrible at understanding health information without a doctor to help them.

More directly:

Being untrustworthy should come with fairly immediate consequences upon revelation.

And you should DEFINITELY be kicked from any position of trust and banned from future ones.

That sort of mentality would probably do a lot for police reform, too.

Yep. I think it was Yudkowsky who had a list of possible police reforms in the wake of the Death of George Floyd that included immediate and permanent removal of any police officer who is involved in the death of an unarmed person during an interaction. They just cannot work in law enforcement thereafter.

Drastic, but if there's an extremely low rate of deaths in police interactions (that's a claim the pro-police side usually makes) then it restores trust to know that no cop will ever be put back on the streets after killing someone without justification. And of course, prison time can still result if there wasn't justification. Minimal cost overall.

It would be really handy to remove the massive 'benefit of the doubt' that goes in favor of on-duty cops that allows the actual nasty/predatory ones to act with impunity for far longer than they would if they were held to the standard of a normal citizen. And it aligns incentives so that cops are really motivated to avoid doing anything life-threatening to unarmed persons.

At its core, that is what feels like is the major problem. Incentives aren't aligned in a way that points towards outcome everyone wants. We'd all like to be able to take scientific research seriously and NOT have to be immediately skeptical. Scientists would like to believe they're pushing boundaries of knowledge forward and have some prestige from that. We want policies to be informed by good, accurate, reliable information, while accounting for uncertainties.

But that requires screwups to be uncovered and corrected quickly and bad actors to be removed before they cause too much damage. It ain't what we have currently.

Yudkowsky who had a list of possible police reforms in the wake of the Death of George Floyd that included immediate and permanent removal of any police officer who is involved in the death of an unarmed person during an interaction

I remember seeing this from Yudkowsky and thinking it was ridiculous and yet another example of how unserious a person he is. Many ""unarmed"" people killed by the police attack a cop and try to take their gun. You cannot "unarmed" fight a cop. That's a fight with a gun involved.

Perhaps, but look at the exact context of the incident that led to this.

George Floyd died while he was in handcuffs, face to the floor, with a grown man kneeling on top of him. He was 'unarmed' by any fair definition of the word.

A lot of people believe the cop's actions killed him, a lot of people believe it didn't, and say it was probably the drugs. Indeed, the mainstream conservative position is turning into Derek Chauvin deserves a pardon.

The rule proposed by Yudkowsky cuts the knot and just removes any 'bad' cops from the job even if we don't know for sure they're bad cops, so as to restore trust to the police as a whole, where the people who believe ACAB at least see that there's a consequence for the death of 'innocent' (yeah, I know I know) people in police encounters, and the "law and order" people can see that its the simple application of a facially neutral rule that holds the police to a 'high' but not unfair standard.

George Floyd was murdered and his murderer is currently in prison. The system worked, to the degree it does for handling murderers after the fact.

I would rather point to Michael Brown of "hands up, don't shoot" fame. He severely beat a cop with his bare hands. Fractured skull while in a car wearing a seat belt level beating. But Mr. Brown failed to take the cop's gun despite trying. Many cops have retention holsters and merely grabbing the grip of their gun and pulling won't get it out. Michael Brown then briefly ran away, but stopped, turned and charged the cop. It was then this cop defensively and justifiably shot an unarmed man to death.

Despite attempted railroading by the Obama administration, this cop escaped criminal punishment for his entirely justified defensive shooting of an unarmed man. Good thing Yudkowsky doesn't have some special veto power to punish this cop regardless. There's a reason we don't just cut knots. We need unruined un-carved-apart basic government institutions.

How do we get the trust back?

I think one thing that American liberals / institutionalists desperately need to recover is an understanding that most people don't see themselves in some universal, internally sympathetic class with our well-credentialed elites, and thus that the claim of such elites earning and maintaining trust is itself nothing like a default. And "But I did well on the test administered by elites like me" isn't enough. I think that's a really hard pill to swallow for people who have put all their chips on the current meritocracy, though, and it's understandable, because we were all born into a world that once had more default institutional trust.

It's interesting, because I don't think these ideas are hard to get across in the abstract.

I've asked before, as an example, some well-credentialed liberals I knew if they would accept universal health care funded and run by the government, with the constraint that it would be entirely run and maintained by experts from the Communist party of China, with their own internal methods for determining who was an expert. And (it should go without saying), I have not got any takers - and honestly, it's a bit interesting to try to tease out why exactly. And yet, realistically, for many Americans, administration by the current system internally gatekept and administered by American liberals is obviously not that dissimilar to that thought experiment for large swathes of Americans who are entirely alienated from those liberal gatekeepers too. They could well be forgiven for suspecting that the American liberal gatekeepers, as a class, despise them much more, and are much keener to socially engineer away their communities, than a similar program administered by the Chinese might be. At the very least, they can go read what the American version are actually saying in English about them on social media.

I get why it's a tough spot, emotionally, to be in for the winners of the meritocracy I'm gesturing at. It's really nice to get free institutional legitimacy, and it totally sucks to lose that if you were accustomed to having it, especially if you are the tail end of a long process of drawing down that legitimacy that had been built up by your forbearers who understand power and public trust in deep ways that they apparently didn't pass on (which I personally think is an accurate description of the institution builders of the progressive era compared to their "progressive" great-grandchildren). But from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations is a thing. And I think American liberals simply no longer have the luxury of being oblivious to the realities of where power and legitimacy come from, and thus how they absolutely HAVE to rigorously publicly police themselves and their institutions to regain that trust. This stuff isn't magic. But I see a whole lot of behavior that looks like magical thinking, with a complete obliviousness to cause-and-effect when it comes to public trust.

Even if "Racism is a public health emergency" made any sense at all, people who want public power have to be smart enough to understand that you can't announce that stuff and then be surprised and huffy when large amounts of white people ignore your authority when you announce you intend to squirt novel fluid in their kids arms via flu vaccine. There's a total misunderstanding about the role of "consent of the governed", and how it means something much bigger in the way Americans organize themselves culturally than just questions about law and the Federal government...

They could well be forgiven for suspecting that the American liberal gatekeepers, as a class, despise them much more, and are much keener to socially engineer away their communities, than a similar program administered by the Chinese might be

The core red tribe does not believe this. The Chinese are dirty uncivilized commie barbarians, they’re even worse than democrats.

But many of these institutions are suffering self inflicted wounds. It’s been obvious since I’ve been paying attention to news (starting in junior high) that the news “of record” was liberal to a fault, was generally secular, and that it was pro-LGBT (this was in mid 1990s so well before Woke). And once you understand such a thing, and understand that “the news of record” has no interest in telling unbiased news, and will happily distort, misreport, play up or down different stories in order to create the impression that they want you to have. Learning that basically killed my trust in mainstream news.

University was much the same way. Outside of extremely skill or maths heavy courses, you could just simply expect that ideas like social libertarianism if not outright celebration of degenerate if not destructive lifestyles, government control, generous welfare states, free college, free healthcare, and basically socialism. And so you eventually understand that these scholars are not disinterested Confucian scholars simply looking for knowledge. If that were the case, it seems that at least some of them would come out t9 be socially conservative, or economically libertarian.

And once you understand such a thing, and understand that “the news of record” has no interest in telling unbiased news, and will happily distort, misreport, play up or down different stories in order to create the impression that they want you to have. Learning that basically killed my trust in mainstream news.

Agreed. The mainstream media is a joke - even "reputable" institutions like the NYT have very little interest in providing balanced coverage of things. What interest exists is generally from an older generation of journalists, who are aging out and being replaced by young zealous partisans. And by and large, people not only have no interest in fixing it, they don't even have interest in seeing the problem! See smug slogans like "reality has a liberal bias" - that sort of attitude is just not indicative of genuine intellectual honesty and willingness to see things from other points of view.

If that were the case, it seems that at least some of them would come out t9 be socially conservative, or economically libertarian.

In fairness there were libertarians in the economics department where I went to college, so that does happen some of the time. I don't know how often, but it does at least seem that some academics do come out the way you describe.

I think one thing that American liberals / institutionalists desperately need to recover is an understanding that most people don't see themselves in some universal, internally sympathetic class with our well-credentialed elites, and thus that the claim of such elites earning and maintaining trust is itself nothing like a default. And "But I did well on the test administered by elites like me" isn't enough. I think that's a really hard pill to swallow for people who have put all their chips on the current meritocracy, though, and it's understandable, because we were all born into a world that once had more default institutional trust.

The problem is that studies like this make this harder. It's a cycle.

They do think they're smarter, but that's not all of their claim. Or they wouldn't find it so hard to grant that someone like Elon is smart.

It's that they are necessary, precisely because the bigotry and ignorance of the unsympathetic part of the populace can't be left unchecked. It's not only harmful to them, it disproportionately harms those America owes a blood debt. It hurts the marginalized the worst and, to steal a line, that's too serious a matter to be left up to the voters to decide themselves.

They know they are disliked by some, they expect it. But a) people always resist progress and b)those people are people who don't know about things like this.

It's much harder to climb down this sort of moral position than it is to admit you're not as certain about a purely technical matter. It's much harder to see the necessity.

I've asked before, as an example, some well-credentialed liberals I knew if they would accept universal health care funded and run by the government, with the constraint that it would be entirely run and maintained by experts from the Communist party of China, with their own internal methods for determining who was an expert. And (it should go without saying), I have not got any takers

That's a wonderful hypothetical.

They seem to be coming around though!

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1906727995307381025

Summary: TracingWoodgrains ran a poll for both left and right respondents, asking if they'd rather have their opposite running the world vs. China.

For left respondents, China won handily, opposite for right-responders. Obvious selection bias and all, but troubling. The days of substantial fifth-columnism may be returning.

Is there one offering Russia and Iran as possible alternatives instead? I suspect Putin is slightly more popular than democrats among right wingers, the ayatollah in between democrats and xi, and and the CCP last of all.

This might just be a measure of partisanship, though. Two years ago, would the results be different?

  1. This is an online poll.

  2. The alternative was Trump, so it became a fargroup vs. outgroup question.

I really don’t see the left having much admiration for China, they’re too involved in religious repression of Muslim minorities and too ethnically-chauvinist for the social-and-not-economic left to find them appealing. There’s also the one-child policy legacy, widely understood as a policy that led to mass-murder of female infants and thus is seen as horrifically misogynist (it’s literally an example of the government controlling women’s reproductive rights!). I’m sure there’s some tankies somewhere who admire Mr. Xi, but they’re not mainstream.

If anything, “China is not trustworthy and can’t be allowed to grow in power” is the one foreign policy matter where there’s broad agreement across the political spectrum in the US. See strong support for the Hong Kong protesters, spy balloon fiasco, scandals about Chinese students being spies, fear of a war over Taiwan, the CHIPs Act (that failed). There’s bipartisan support for a firm position against China and the progressive left has no interest in allying with them. I suspect if tensions over Taiwan ever went hot, left-wingers would be more likely than right-wingers to support war; it would be another Ukraine.

I know some grassroots right-wingers who’ve bought into the propaganda that Russia is some great haven for social conservatism, but I don’t know any left-wingers who believe China is anything but a repressive authoritarian regime. Unlike the Soviet Union, they don’t have the cover of limited information — when an elderly official was dragged out of a party meeting it was all over Twitter — and people on the ground who speak English like the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan can speak to how China’s actions threaten their freedom.

Plus, their regional dominance threatens Japan, and everyone in America seems to agree the Japanese are cool.

Conspicuous China hatred is a racially tinged deep red thing to me; it might have religious overtones(persecution of Chinese Christians) and almost certainly has fifties level anti communist paranoia.

Maybe conspicuous Chinese hatred is like that, but my point is that low-level suspicion and dislike is so ubiquitous that it's not conspicuous. Particularly when it's focused on the CCP and not Chinese people, as it almost always is.

I'm not really talking about "The Chinese eat dogs!!!" stuff, which I agree has a racial component. Though I do believe there's growing suspicion more broadly about Chinese attitudes towards animals after the China-sympathetic view of COVID's origins was that people in Wuhan were eating bats, and especially after reports that the Chinese government was mass-killing family pets of infected people.

(If you want to find the few tankies who like the Chinese government, find the people who would get mad at me using the acronym "CCP" and loudly insist it's actually the "CPC". It's the lowest tier of language policing, which is why you'll only find it among internet communists.)

I found the old /r/Medicine thread when this study first came out, and I saw that even the, the majority of opinions were skeptical. I'd upvoted all of them.

It's a shame that there isn't much legal penalty for such knowing academic fraud, but if any of the authors are doctors, the AMA should throw their license in a bin and light it on fire. Knowing what I do about the AMA, that is unfortunately rather unlikely.

but if any of the authors are doctors, the AMA should throw their license in a bin and light it on fire.

-They weren't doctors IIRC.

-Lol don't listen to the anti-AMA nonsense, they aren't that influential.

Yup. I forgot the AMA is analogous to the BMA, and that you guys don't have a central regulator like we do in the form of the GMC.

Yeah we have a bunch of national and state level regulators and things. It. Is. A. Nightmare.

Also great! (but often for bad actors)

I felt like this fell within the realm of social science (especially since authors weren't doctors) rather than medicine even when it came out and as such should have been treated with extreme skepticism just the same as other social "science". No need to really update beyond the already existing heuristic of social scientists are lying charlatans who shouldn't be trusted.

That is not to say that there isn't problems within medicine but this felt a bit orthogonal to that.

The problem is that I saw plenty of doctors uncritically citing this, using it to mentally update, and using it define future research and goals.

Much of medicine is social science or even just art (they call it the art and science of healthcare for a reason!) often this is because patient interaction and buy in and convincing is most of the job and ethics impairs how much hard science we actually have.

I've mentioned several times here, I've been reading Gibbon's Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire. By Volume 3 and 4 (where I currently am), the citizens of the Western Roman Empire, crushed by taxes and "illiberal edicts" whatever that means to Gibbon or the Romans, were in some proportion somewhere between indifferent and cautiously optimistic for Gothic, Vandal or Frankish rule. Of the Gothic rule in Italy in particular, in some ways and for some time Theodoric was perceived as protecting the glory and the ways of the Italians.

From an intellectual perspective, you read the sequence of events, and it makes a certain neocon "We'll be welcomed as liberators" sort of sense. But as often as that hasn't played out in our age, we know it's not that simple. It's profoundly rare for a peoples to willingly accept a foreign tyranny over a native tyranny. There are usually at least some vague feelings of tribal unity lying around in mothballs to man the lines against the invaders. They won't make slaves out of us! We're already slaves of one of our own god damnit! How completely detached from your ruling class, how utterly neglected is their noblesse oblige before the peoples are willing to trade one slave master for another?

Now I can only speak for myself, but this is the kind of shit that makes me go "Oh, I get it now." The relentless naked blood libel from my "betters" directed towards me is insufferable. If any other country attacked the US with intentions to conquer it, I'd at least be willing to hear them out.

The relentless naked blood libel from my "betters" directed towards me is insufferable. If any other country attacked the US with intentions to conquer it, I'd at least be willing to hear them out.

Yeah, I get what you mean. We've had some posters talk about how they wish China would take over the country, and on the one hand that's an obviously bad idea. The Chinese government really is a repressive, authoritarian government with a culture very foreign to ours. It would be rather miserable to have them rule us. But on the other hand, I get why people say it. There's only so much naked hatred and contempt you can see your countrymen show for your values and your way of life before you go "fuck it, maybe at least those other guys would consider letting me live the way I want. I know this group never will".

Does China even want to rule us directly? Like Russia straightforwardly would, yeah, but does China want more than trade and foreign policy concessions?

No idea. It's just something I've seen kicked around on the motte in the past; I'm way too ignorant of Chinese goals to say if that's something they'd want even if offered it.

Kudos to you for updating after seeing a particularly bad case of massaging the science for political outcomes. I also genuinely don't know how you reform academia and medicine when they are willing to be this blatantly political in their "science."

It's a shame because I love the Academy as an institution and an ideal, but it has become so corrupted it's shocking to me even on the 100th example. I hope for all our sakes we can find a way to save science without burning down too much.

I wouldn't call this an update/change haha. Because of how far people go in the other direction here I'm often defending the academy but not always, and out in the real world I'm almost always complaining about it. I do however this example is particularly egregious and because it's a multi-year follow-up too many people will miss it.

Priors here slanted opinions against the academy regardless of the legal outcome, because the only presentation the academy cares to display is sanctimonious moralizing. The only change would be whether the judiciary is viewed as equally captured.

In a breaking news story, apparently Trump has privately said Musk will step back from his role in the admin.

Of course, this has been claimed multiple times before somewhat falsely, so take it with a grain of salt! However, over the last couple of months it does seem that Elon has been wearing out his welcome in the admin, as many posters here predicted might happen.

I'm curious what exactly the problems have been internally - do you think it's just that Elon hasn't been able to defer to Trump enough? Or to put it more bluntly, to flatter Trump's ego?

Or is it more of an issue of a lack of cuts? I haven't been able to get good numbers, but I do think that the general 'vibe' is that Elon's cutting has been disappointing so far. Perhaps this is because of the coordinated media attack against him, but it also could just be that cutting the federal government is a beastly task. Personally I'm of the opinion he should have more time, but sadly that may not be the case.

The ostensible reason Elon is giving is apparently to focus more on business interests. This could be the case, as I'd imagine running multiple giant companies while also trying to head a govt. department is... basically impossible. That being said, it goes against a lot of the messaging Elon and Trump put together when they first started DOGE.

Either way, this turn of events, if it bears out, seems bad for team Trump as a whole, given how many eggs were put in the cutting government spending basket. Without Elon cutting hardcore, I fail to see how their admin can get even close to balancing the budget.

Already denied by Trump administration

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/musk-not-leaving-yet-wrapping-up-work-schedule-once-incredible-work-doge-complete-white-house

"This ‘scoop’ is garbage," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted to X on Wednesday. "Elon Musk and President Trump have both publicly stated that Elon will depart from public service as a special government employee when his incredible work at DOGE is complete."

I fail to see how their admin can get even close to balancing the budget.

What makes you think Trump cares at all about this? Nothing he has ever done indicates any kind of concern for the deficit - even the DOGE spree ended up targeting 'woke' spending specifically rather than 'waste' writ large. And of course he's lining up for the usual Republican budget-busting tax cut.

I've been listening to a Tim Dillon (a standup comedian) for a lot of my political news. He called it a while back that Musk and Vivek were going to be fall guys.

The strategy that makes sense to me, and I think the one they've talked about before is to break down the government for the first part of the administration and then build it back up in the form they want for the second part. The building up will be easier if done by someone with a clean record. Someone seen as a voice of reason and stability.

Musk was always going to be there only for 130 days. This is all the media speculating that he's going to stay on forever and then being surprised when they stuck to their stated plan.

I think the answer is simpler: Elon is becoming a political liability. A Quinnipiac poll back on 3/13 found Elon and DOGE even less popular than Trump. Trump is under water by about 11 points (42-53) but Elon is under water by 21 points (36-57). Especially among independents, he's under-water 2:1 (31-63). A pretty solid majority also indicate they believe DOGE is hurting the country more than helping (40-54) and disapprove of the way Elon and DOGE have been treating federal workers (36-60). Heck, back in February an Economist/YouGov poll found that a plurality of respondents (46%) wanted Elon to have no influence in the administration. Compared to 25% who wanted him to have "a little" influence and 13% who want him to have "a lot."

This brings us to the Wisconsin Supreme Court election last night. Elon inserted himself pretty directly in the election, doing a $1 million dollar giveaway to promote the Republican candidate. In addition he spent upwards of $25m dollars to campaign for the Republican candidate. The democrat ended up winning anyway. I've also seen some analysis that Schimel (the Republican candidate for judge) did worse state-wide than other Republicans running, which some are attributing to Elon's prominence.

People have seen what Elon Musk has on offer and they mostly don't want it!

I think that elon has become too unhinged lately. Trump/JD Vance know that they have to deliver big on at least one of the two things they got elected on - culture war or economy. And Elon hasn't delivered big wins on the CW front - it seems that the authors of Project 2025 seems to be quieter but more effective on that front.

Is there conclusive evidence on how these cuts are actually going, and how much money is being saved? It’s nearly impossible to navigate the media landscape of propaganda, lies, and hit pieces to really know what the numbers are saying.

Just wait and see what the next budget reports say? See if debt to gdp actually starts falling?

Here is a projection from the CBO (congressional budget office) projecting DOGE to be a massive failure, and note this analysis is from a right wing/libertarian news org so I’d actually give it more credibility: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cbo-forecasts-doge-and-ai-will-be-massive-failures-sees-us-debt-exploding-productivity

Unfortunately, according to DOGE's own numbers, it's a lot of "on paper" savings.

From some previous contracting work, I know an unfortunate amount about how Federal procurement works. The DOGE tracker sites I've found have direct links to FPDS (Federal Procurement Data System) pages for very specific contracts. That's good! But the devil is always in the details.

For any given government contract, there is the total lifetime value of the contract and dollars already obligated to it. As a toy example, let's say the Department of Commerce wants to do some general IT upgrade. It does some market research (not really, lol, but, whatever) solicits some bids, reviews proposals, and awards a contract. The total award value may be $500m, $1bn, or even more. But that doesn't mean the contract gets a big up-front payment of $1bn. It means that the Department of Commerce has given itself permission to spend up to that limit on this one particular contract (technically, depending on the contract type and structure, it could be across a lot of smaller contracts and/or task orders, but let's keep things simple for now).

When DOGE lists its numbers, its listing that full $1bn ceiling as the "savings." A few different media outlets tried to Point And Laugh at this, but the reality is that they're wrong as well. For the Department of Commerce (or anyone) to award a contract, they don't necessarily have to already have the budget approved by congress. In the industry, the term "unfunded opportunity" or "unfunded contract" is used in this case. The Government customer has a true need for whatever it says it does and can go through the bid and proposal process - but they have no obligation to actually pay you only because you've won a contract. Now, if you do any work on that contract, that's a different story. The fact of the matter is, unfortunately, that you can have a government contract that is effectively worth nothing even though it says "eleventy billion dollars" on the piece of paper.

Returning to DOGE, that they are canceling contracts and counting the ceiling value of those contracts could or could not be significant. If the agency in question already had their budget approved (and for several of these larger, longer term contracts, it is highly likely that was the case) then this the cancelling of these contracts does in fact save money from a future budget perspective. But it's not necessarily as if DOGE "found" $1bn dollars sitting in a commerce account somewhere and has now repurposed it for the General Purpose America Fuck Yeah account. They've freed up budget room next year and in the years following.

OR, they've cancelled a contract that was unfunded to begin with and so the savings are quite imaginary. It's like if you get an unexpected car repair bill and then mentally "cancel" your beach vacation. Did something happen? Not exactly. And certainly not in a true fiscal sense.

But wait, there's more. Just because a single contract within the Department of Commerce (to stick to my previous example) got cancelled, doesn't mean the agency as a whole won't find a way to reshuffle the budget and retain those dollars. Again, Congress controls the budget and they approve it every year (or, as has been the case for about the past 20 years - I'm not joking - the pass a weird series of CRs or otherwise out of order budgetary actions to sustain the budget as is with some new starts - kind of).

So, when do DOGE cuts get real and sticky? When Congress passes a budget. That's when you'll be able to actually see meaningful money stop flowing to agency / department X,Y, or Z. Until then, it's an on paper "win" (or not, see above) and, because it's happening totally within the executive branch, nothing stops a potential Democrat President in 2028 (or whenever) from flipping the switch in the other direction and directing Department of Commerce (and everyone else) to go ahead and try to get those IT contracts rolling again.

And I think this is part, though not the largest no most important part, of Elon's likely downfall in the Trump 2.0 admin. What he is used to doing in the corporate world is not possible in the Federal Government. The entire reason the founders set the system up the way they did was to make things intentionally hard to coordinate. They split the budget passers from the budget users and the law makers from the law enforces from the law interpreters. They did this because they wanted the default option to be "nothing happens." In the 18th century, this meant Americans were mostly free, then, to run their own lives. But through gradual executive overreach, aided many times by a cowardly Congress, we now have a poor situation in which the Executive kind of gets to do whatever it wants unless Congress or the Courts calls it out.

and note this analysis is from a right wing/libertarian news org so I’d actually give it more credibility

The analysis is from the CBO, Zero Hedge's analysis (I would not put much stock in it, their analysis for years has been that the world is weeks/months away from economic collapse) is that CBO talks bullshit:

Well if only the previous administration hadn't listened to the CBO's cheerful forecasts years ago when the "nonpartisan" budget office said to do... precisely what was done and lo and behold, here we are. And now the CBO wakes up?

The bottom line, however, is that the CBO has openly declared war on Musk and is daring him to shutdown whole swaths of the government, and if there is anything Elon lives for, it's a dare. It sure would be ironic if the completely useless and thoroughly partisan CBO itself were to be the next to be eliminated.

Actually I’ve found that the zerohedge in house analysis is pretty accurate (and sensational, but they are in the selling-clicks business). A lot of their reposts and features from different figures like Peter Schiff (long time gold bug) is very doom and gloom.

But also, they’ve been shilling gold for years and now it’s up >50% YoY on one of its biggest pumps ever?

Secondly, doom and gloom doesn’t mean that stocks are going to zero, economy dead. Really we are in a slow motion crack up boom, where runaway government spending moons the currency supply and this pushes home prices, stock prices, and asset prices all to unfathomable highs.

"Well, I think he's … amazing. But I also think he's got a big company to run. And so, at some point he's going to be going back. He wants to." Trump said.

Is that it? The idea that blabber mouth extraordinaire Donald Trump saying this is some insight into future actions of the administration seems like audacious wishcasting.

Was there some actual disagreement or complaint, I'd understand trying to game what's going to happen. If that quote is the whole of it, all I see here is concern trolling by the press.

People have completely forgotten that Musk and Trump have worked together before, had disagreements, and parted amicably.

Has anyone mentioned the HHS firings? https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/trump-administration-begins-mass-layoffs-health-agencies-sources-say-2025-04-01/

Approximately 10,000 people will be fired.

Under normal circumstances, I might care about this very much. Valuable research and important advancements may be lost...but after COVID, I can't bring myself to care. These are the people who locked citizens up int their homes, closed churches, destroyed the development of children, the economy, freedom of assembly, lied about masks, fabricated social distancing, pushed a flawed and untested vaccine and threatened anyone who didn't take it.

It's not hard to see why these agencies need to be purged and rebuilt after the insanity that was COVID.

It's true. The HHS employees working on grants for brain cancer, or AIDs, or IVF, or whatever were responsible for why state governments decreed churches couldn't meet. I hope you understand why people like me hold people like you responsible for the economic devastation of Trump's tariffs.

The "experts" in health had a collective point in the era of COVID lockdowns. Very long lockdowns good, enormous riots better. It reached the point of comedy with "racism is the real epidemic".

I'm sure the great majority of cancer and HIV researchers didn't sign some pro-lockdown (but not for riots) statement. They kept quiet while the loud ideologically motivated few spoke collectively for them and advocated for the most ruinous policies of the modern era.

And now, who could have forseen there would be a backlash against all of them collectively? Having so thoroughly burned their credibility and made such bitter enemies out of mainstream Americans.

I think medical research in particular and scientific research in general is valuable and important. That's one reason why it is so horrible that they almost all kept quiet while the experts speaking for them called for schools to be closed for years. They choose a controversial partisan side. And now the other side holds a Federal trifecta.

I hope you understand why people like me hold people like you responsible for the economic devastation of Trump's tariffs.

I sincerely doubt your capacity to hold anyone responsible for anything. Too many essays about the merits of complicity and sitting quietly.

Proof or Bluff? Evaluating LLMs on 2025 USA Math Olympiad

Abstract: Recent math benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) such as MathArena indicate that state-of-the-art reasoning models achieve impressive performance on mathematical competitions like AIME, with the leading model, o3-mini, achieving scores comparable to top human competitors. However, these benchmarks evaluate models solely based on final numerical answers, neglecting rigorous reasoning and proof generation which are essential for real-world mathematical tasks. To address this, we introduce the first comprehensive evaluation of full-solution reasoning for challenging mathematical problems. Using expert human annotators, we evaluated several state-of-the-art reasoning models on the six problems from the 2025 USAMO within hours of their release. Our results reveal that all tested models struggled significantly, achieving less than 5% on average. Through detailed analysis of reasoning traces, we identify the most common failure modes and find several unwanted artifacts arising from the optimization strategies employed during model training. Overall, our results suggest that current LLMs are inadequate for rigorous mathematical reasoning tasks, highlighting the need for substantial improvements in reasoning and proof generation capabilities.

Background: The 'official' American competitive high school math circuit has several levels, progressing from AMC 10/12 (25 question, multiple choice, 75 minutes total) to AIME (15 questions, 3 hours, answers are in the form of positive 3 digit integers) to USAMO (2 days, 6 proof-based questions total, 3 questions with 4.5 hours per day), with difficulty increasing commensurate with the decrease in # of questions. While most AIME questions can be ground out using a standard set of high school/introductory college level math knowledge and tricks, the USAMO requires more depth of understanding and specialized techniques. For example, problem 1 (theoretically, the easiest) is as follows:

Let k and d be positive integers. Prove that there exists a positive integer N such that for every odd integer n > N , the digits in the base-2n representation of n^k are all greater than d.

This problem can be solved fairly simply using induction on k.

I've also noticed this when plugging grad-level QM questions into Gemini/ChatGPT. No matter how many times I tell it that it's wrong, it will repeatedly apologize and make the same mistake, usually copied from some online textbook or solution set without being able to adapt the previous solution to the new context.

Relevant update: the authors of the paper, which didn't include Gemini 2.5, just added its results to MathArena.

https://matharena.ai/

@self_made_human may be interested in this, since he was trying to evaluate 2.5 himself.

Tldr is the top line number is a step improvement over all existing models, but it's mostly from being able to complete the first problem. You can click on the first result cell to see its responses and the grader's scoring rubric. Some hypothetical higher risk of contamination since it's newer.

https://x.com/mbalunovic/status/1907436704790651166

Gemini 2.5 Pro was released on the same day as the benchmarks, so data contamination seems rather unlikely. You'd expect contamination on all the questions, and not just two.

Thanks for the ping. As I've always said, getting models to do any better than chance is the biggest hurdle, once they're measurably better than that, further climbs up the charts are nigh-inevitable.

Agreed. What's nice is that this benchmark is now in a sweet spot. If models consistently hover around the floor or ceiling, there's no signal for whether your model is improving. Once it gets into the middle area, though, model quality can be measured and compared easily, and progress proceeds quickly. I expect this benchmark to be saturated early 2026 at the latest.

It's not a proof, and in order to be "a bluff" there would've had to have been an intent to decieve.

Last week @2rafa asked "When will the AI penny drop? and the answer i would have liked to give at at the time was "when the footprint of a decent tokenizer gets small enough to run organically" or "when the equipment available to the hobbiest and semi-pro comunity catches up with the requirements of a decent tokenizer".

Until that happens specific questions will be doomed to be answered unspecifically.

The broad consensus (which i agree with) within the robotics and machine learning communities is that the existing generative models are ill-suited for any task requiring autonomy or rigor and that this is not a problem that can be fixed by throwing more FLOPs at it.

Why are you talking about the footprint of a tokenizer? Tokenization is cheap compared to actually evaluating the LLM.

Tokenization is cheap compared to actually evaluating the LLM.

Processing tokens is cheap. Generating tokens is expensive.

Evaluating a model can range from relatively cheap to cripplingly expensive depending on the metrics chosen and level of rigor required.

I agree with everything you wrote in this reply. But your reply seems to have nothing to do with your message I originally replied to. Why were you mentioning the cost of tokenization?

Gave it a shot with Claude with a proof that I think works. In this case it seems that Claude is quite bad at math. I wonder if other llms are better.

https://claude.ai/share/e1408d35-76b4-4157-9a7f-dbe59b13c027

Edit: Ooops I'm an idiot. I looked at the answer key here: https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/2025_USAMO_Problems/Problem_1

And they just go straight for the closed form of any digit in the base representation. Then from the closed form it's ezpz to prove the final answer. My proof probably still works but it's waaay convoluted compared to what is necessary.

I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking to solve it. It claimed to have a solution. I asked for the most concise summary it could provide'

Okay, here's a concise summary of the proof, avoiding technical jargon:

The Problem: Imagine you have a way of writing numbers that isn't based on powers of 10 (like our usual 1s, 10s, 100s), but on powers of $2n$, where $n$ is some odd number (like powers of 6, if $n=3$, or powers of 10, if $n=5$). We look at the number $n^k$ ($n$ multiplied by itself $k$ times). We want to show that if you pick $n$ to be a really large odd number, then when you write $n^k$ in this "base $2n$" system, all the "digits" you use will be bigger than some target value $d$.

How the Proof Works:

  1. Figuring out the Digits: The proof first finds a way to calculate the digits used to write $n^k$ in the base $2n$ system. Let's call the digits $c_0, c_1, c_2, \dots$.
  1. The Last Digit ($c_0$): It turns out the very last digit ($c_0$, the "ones" place in this system) is simply $n$ itself. So, to make this digit bigger than $d$, we just need $n$ to be bigger than $d$.
  1. The Other Digits: The proof finds a formula for the other digits ($c_1, c_2,$ etc.). It shows that each digit $c_i$ is calculated by taking $n$, multiplying it by some specific odd number (which depends on $k$ and which digit it is), dividing by a power of 2 (like 2, 4, 8, ...), and then rounding down.
  1. Making Digits Large: Since the odd number multiplier is at least 1, each digit $c_i$ is at least roughly $n$ divided by some power of 2 (like $n/1, n/2, n/4, \dots, n/2^{k-1}$).
  1. The Threshold: If we want all digits to be bigger than $d$, we need even the smallest of these estimates (which involves dividing $n$ by the largest power of 2, $2^{k-1}$) to be bigger than $d$. The proof calculates that if $n$ is larger than a specific value $N$ (which depends on $k$ and $d$, specifically $N = 2^{k-1}(d+1)$), then every digit is guaranteed to be greater than $d$.
  1. Conclusion: Therefore, such a threshold $N$ exists. Pick any odd number $n$ larger than this $N$, and all the digits of $n^k$ in base $2n$ will be larger than $d$.

Was it Induction?

The main argument of the proof is not primarily by induction. It's a direct proof that calculates the digits and then finds a condition on $n$ (making it large enough) to satisfy the requirement.

However, induction was used for one small intermediate step: proving that $n^k$ always leaves a remainder of $n$ when divided by $2n$ (which showed that the last digit $c_0$ is indeed $n$). But the overall structure connecting the size of $n$ to the size of all digits didn't rely on induction.

Here's the raw answer (minus reasoning trace):

https://rentry.org/5s6q6nxe

Hmm, it's maybe coming close to something that works, but seems to fuck up at the important junctures. After a couple of paragraphs where it doesn't find anything useful, in paragraph 7 it concludes that we can break down n^(k - i - 1) into q*2^(i+1) + r_i, where r_i = n^(k - i - 1) mod 2^(i+1). But then later it declares that r_i = n^(k - i - 1) and the proof follows from there. Unfortunately I don't think this would get any points, although maybe it could figure something out if you keep telling it where it fucks up.

/images/17435421010140572.webp

I copied your comment, and it insisted it was correct. I then shared the image, and it seems to think that the issue is imprecise terminology on its part rather than an actual error.

Here's the initial response:

https://rentry.org/yzvh9n47

After putting the image in:

https://rentry.org/c6nrs385

The important bit:

The proof never claims $r_i = n^{k-i-1}$. It uses $r_i = n^{k-i-1} \pmod{2^{i+1}}$ and the derived property $r_i \ge 1$.

Conclusion: The confusion likely arises from either the slightly ambiguous notation in the highlighted sentence (which should explicitly state "fractional part of ... is ...") or a misreading of the later step where the lower bound $r_i \ge 1$ is applied. The mathematical logic itself appears sound.

This happens because while the model has been programmed by some clever sod to apologize when told that it is wrong, it doesn't actually have a concept of "right" or "wrong". Just tokens with with different correlation scores.

Unless you explicitly tell/programm it to exclude the specific mistake/mistakes that it made from future itterations (a feature typically unavailable in current LLMs without a premium account) it will not only continue to make but "double down" on those mistakes because whatever most correlates with the training data must, by definition, be correct.

This happens because while the model has been programmed by some clever sod to apologize when told that it is wrong, it doesn't actually have a concept of "right" or "wrong". Just tokens with with different correlation scores

This is wrong! It would have been a reasonable claim to make a few years back, but we know for a fact this isn't true now:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model

It turns out that, in Claude, refusal to answer is the default behavior: we find a circuit that is "on" by default and that causes the model to state that it has insufficient information to answer any given question. However, when the model is asked about something it knows well—say, the basketball player Michael Jordan—a competing feature representing "known entities" activates and inhibits this default circuit (see also this recent paper for related findings). This allows Claude to answer the question when it knows the answer. In contrast, when asked about an unknown entity ("Michael Batkin"), it declines to answer.

There was other relevant work which shows that models, if asked if they're hallucinating, can usually find such errors. They very much have an idea of true versus false, to deny that would be to deny the same for humans, since we ourselves confabulate or can be plain old wrong.

Unless you explicitly tell/programm it to exclude the specific mistake/mistakes that it made from future itterations (a feature typically unavailable in current LLMs without a premium account) it will not only continue to make but "double down" on those mistakes because whatever most correlates with the training data must, by definition, be correct.

Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking in particular is far more amenable to reason. It doesn't normally double down and will accept correction. At least ChatGPT has the option to add memories about the user, so you can save preferences or tell it to act differently.

I'm slightly disappointed to catch it hallucinating, which is why I went to this much trouble instead of just accepting that as a fact the moment someone contested it. It's still well ahead of the rest.

This is wrong! It would have been a reasonable claim to make a few years back, but we know for a fact this isn't true now

Sorry I meant to reply to @yunyun333's comment about "doubling down" but I can assure you that we do not "know that for a fact" and feel the need to caution you against believing everything you read in the marketing materials.

The "hallucination problem" can not realistically be "solved" within the context of regression based generative models as the "hallucinations" are an emergant property of the mechanisms upon which those models function.

A model that doesn't hallucinate doesn't turn your vacation pictures into a Hayo Miyazaki frame either and the latter is where the money and publicity are.

Developers can adjust the degree of hallucination up or down and tack additional models, interfaces, and layers on top to smooth over the worst offenses as Altman and co continue to do, but the fundemental nature of this problem is why people seriously invested in machine learning/autonomy often dismiss models like GPT (of which Claude is a branch/derivative) as an evolutionary dead-end.

feel the need to caution you against believing everything you read in the marketing materials

Anthropic is a reputable company on the cutting edge of AI, so I'd ask you for concrete disagreements instead of an advice for generalized caution.

Here are other relevant studies on the topic:

https://openreview.net/forum?id=KRnsX5Em3W

https://openreview.net/forum?id=fMFwDJgoOB

https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.68/, an older paper from 2023.

This applies the same standard about the ability to differentiate truth from fiction that is used to justify that belief in humans.

Further, as models get larger, hallucination rates have consistently dropped. I recently discussed a study on LLM use for medical histories which found 0% and ~0.1% hallucination rates. As I've said before, humans are not immune to hallucinations or confabulations, I'd know since I'm a psych trainee. That's true even for normal people. The only barrier is getting hallucination rates to a point where they're generally trustworthy for important decisions, and in some fields, they're there. Where they're not, even humans usually have oversight or scrutiny.

A model that doesn't hallucinate doesn't turn your vacation pictures into a Hayo Miyazaki frame either and the latter is where the money and publicity are.

There is a difference between hallucination and imagination. That is just as true for LLMs as it is for humans. Decreasing hallucination rates do not cause a corresponding decrease in creativity, quite the opposite.

The "hallucination problem" can not realistically be "solved" within the context of regression based generative models as the "hallucinations" are an emergant property of the mechanisms upon which those models function.

What does "solving" the hallucination problem look like, though? Humans also hallucinate all the time - in fact, arguably, this is one of the core reasons for the existence of this website and specifically this CW roundup thread - and it is something we've "solved" through various mechanisms of checking and verifying and holding people accountable, with none of them getting anywhere near perfect. Now, human hallucinations are more well understood than LLM ones, making them easier to predict in some ways, but why couldn't we eventually get a handle on the types of hallucinations that LLMs tend to have, allowing us to create proper control mechanisms for them such that the rate of actual consequential errors becomes lower than those caused by human hallucinations? If we reach that point, then could we say that hallucinations have been "solved?" And if not, then what does it matter if it wasn't "solved?"

"What does solving the hallucination looks like?" is a very good question. A major component of the problem is defining the boundaries of what constitutes "an error" and then what constitutes an acceptable error rate. Only then can you begin to think about whether or not that standard has been met and the problem "solved".

Sumarily the answer to that question is going to look very different depending on the use case. The requirements of the average white-collar office-drone looking to translate a news article, are going to be very different from the requirements of a cyber-security professional at a financial institution, or an industrialist looking to automate portions of thier process.

When I'm giving my intake speach to interns and new hires I talk about "the 9 nines". That is that in order to have a minimally viable product we must meet or exceed the standards of "baseline human performance" with 99.9 999 999% reliability. Imagine a test with a billion questions where one additional incorrect answer means a failing grade.

In this context "Humans also hallucinate" is just not an excuse. Think about how many "visual operations" a person typically performs in the process of going about thier day. Ask yourself how many cars on your comute this afternoon, or words in this comment thread have you halucinated? A dozen? None? I you think you are sure, are you "9 nines" sure?

A lot of the current refinement and itteration work on generative machine learning models revolves around adding layers of checks to catch the most egregious errors (not unlike as with humans as you observed) and giving users the ability to "steer" them down one path or another. While this represents an improvement over the previous generation such solutions are difficult/expensive to scale and actively deleterious to autonomy. The thinking being that "a robot" that requires a full-time babysitter might as well be an employee. This is why you can't buy a self-driving car yet.

I kinda respect it doubling down, but it's scrambling to cover its ass. Also, I noticed it forgot the "mod 2n" part of c_i, which also throws a wrench into things.

Ah... I get it now. Thank you! I'm disappointed to see hallucination and confabulation here, but it you're inclined, do keep trying out Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking in particular. It's a good model.

This problem can be solved fairly simply using induction on k.

This does turn out straightforward once you get the idea to induct on k. But that wasn't my first though. Since I'm out of practice, I probably wouldn't have thought of that myself for a long time.

Ofc proof by indiction is the classic solution to this sort of problem so it's only my fault for failing. I wonder if slopgpt can solve it if you tell it to induct on k.

I've also noticed this when plugging grad-level QM questions into Gemini/ChatGPT. No matter how many times I tell it that it's wrong, it will repeatedly apologize and make the same mistake, usually copied from some online textbook or solution set without being able to adapt the previous solution to the new context.

Could you confirm the exact models used? Both Gemini and ChatGPT, through the standard consumer interface, offer a rather confusing list of options that's even broader if you're paying for them.

I just used the free public facing ones (Gemini 2.0 flash, GPT 4-o). You can try asking it for the decay time for the 3p-1s transition in hydrogen. It can do the 2p-1s transition since this question is answered in lots of places but struggles to extrapolate.

I will note that Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o are significantly behind the SOTA! The latter got a very recent update that made it the second best model on LM Arena, but they're both decidedly inferior in reasoning tasks compared to o1, o3 or Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking. (Many caveats apply, since o1 and o3 have different sub-models and reasoning levels)

I asked two instances of Gemini 2.5 Pro:

Number 1:

What is the decay time for the 3p-1s transition in hydrogen? Make sure you are certain about your answer, after doing the relevant calculations.

Final answer: 5.27 ns

Second iteration:

What is the decay time for the 3p-1s transition in hydrogen? Make sure you are certain about your answer, after doing the relevant calculations. I have enabled code execution, if you think that would help with the maths.

Final answer: 5.28 ns

I wasn't lying to it, I'd enabled its ability to generate and execute code. Neither instance had access to Google Search, which is an option I could toggle. I made sure it was off. If you read the traces closely, you see mention of "searching the NIST values", but on being challenged, the model says that it wasn't looking it up, but trying to jog its own memory. This is almost certainly true.

I've linked to dumps of the entire reasoning trace and "final" answer:

First instance- https://rentry.org/cqty47r2

Second instance- https://rentry.org/2oyx24sa

I certainly don't know the answer myself, so I used GPT-4o with search enabled to evaluate the correctness of the answer. It claimed that both were excellent, and the correct value is around 5.4 ns according to experimental results (the decay time for the hydrogen 3p state).

I also used plain old Google, but didn't find a clear answer. There might be one in: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12043-018-1648-4?

But it's pay walled. I don't know if ChatGPT GPT-4o was able to access it despite this impediment.

Edit:

DeepSeek R1 without search claimed 1.2e-10 seconds. o3-mini without search claims 21 ns.

The correct answer is about 5.98 ns when applying the spontaneous emission formula, so Gemini pro 2.5 got it correct, although it had to reference NIST when its original formula didn't work. It looks like it copies the correct formula so I'm not sure where the erroneous factor of 4 comes from.

Thank you.

What do you mean by "reference NIST"? I think I've already mentioned that despite its internal chain of thought claiming to reference NIST or "look up" sources, it's not actually doing that. It had no access to the internet. I bet that's an artifact of the way it was trained, and regardless, the COT, while useful, isn't a perfect rendition of inner cognition. When challenged, it apologizes for misleading the user, and says that it was a loose way of saying that it was wracking its brains and trying to find the answer in the enormous amount of latent knowledge it possesses.

I also find it very interesting that the model that couldn't use code to run its calculations got a very similar answer. It did an enormous amount of algebra and arithmetic, and there was every opportunity for hallucinations or errors to kick in.

For the first calculation dump at least, it comes up with a value 6.63 × 10⁸ s^-1, then compares it to the expected value from the NIST Atomic Spectra Database 1.6725 × 10⁸ s⁻¹, then spends half the page trying to reconcile the difference, before giving up and proceeding with the ASD value.

Hmm. I think that's likely because my prompt heavily encouraged it to reason and calculate from first principles. It's a good thing that it noted that those attempts didn't align with pre-existing knowledge, and accurately recalled the relevant values, which must be a nigh-negligible amount of the training data.

At the end of the day, what matters is whether the model outputs the correct answer. It doesn't particularly matter to the end user if it came up with everything de-novo, remembered the correct answer, or looked it up. I'm not saying this can't matter at all, but if you asked me or 99.999% of the population to start off trying to answer this problem from memory, we'd be rather screwed.

Thanks for the suggestion and looking through the answer, I've personally run up to the limits of my own competence, and there are few things I can ask an LLM to do that I can't, while still verifying the answer myself.

At the end of the day, that's not really what matters, because nobody is going to need to solve a problem in physics with a known solution. A good portion of tests that I had as an undergraduate and in graduate school were open book, because simply knowing a formula or being able to look up a particular value wasn't sufficient to be able to answer the problem. If I want a value from NIST, I can look it up. The important part is being able to correctly engage in the type of problem solving needed to answer questions that haven’t ever been answered before.

I've had some thoughts about what it actually means to be able to do "research level" physics, which I'm still convinced no LLM can actually do. I've thought about posing a question as a top level post, but I'm not really an active enough user of this forum to do that amd don't want to become one.

Finally, I want to say that for the past 18 months, I've continually been getting solicitations on LinkedIn to solve physics problems to teain LLM's. The rate they offer isn't close to enough to make it worth it for me, even if I had any interest, but it would probably seem great to a grad student. I wouldn't be surprised if these models have been trained on more specific problems than we realize.

The quote the full model names in appendix A.1, but it's really such a short paper that it's worth at least scrolling through before discussing.

  • O3-MINI (HIGH)
  • O1-PRO (HIGH)
  • DEEPSEEK R1
  • QWQ-32B
  • GEMINI-2.0-FLASH-THINKING-EXP
  • CLAUDE-3.7-SONNET-THINKING

While surprisingly poor performing, it's not entirely out of line with my own experience experimenting with this class of models. They do seem to hallucinate at a very high rate for problems requiring subtle but extremely tight reasoning.

Thank you for listing out the models in the paper, but I was more concerned with the ones you've personally used. If you say they're in the same tier, then I would assume that you mean o3-high, o1 pro but not Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking (since you didn't mention Anthropic). I will note that R1, QWQ and Flash 2.0 Thinking are worse than those two, even if they're still competent models.

The best that Gemini has to offer is Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking, which is the state of the art at present (in most domains). Is that the one you've tried? If you're not paying, youre not getting it on the app. I use it through AI Studio, where it's free. For ChatGPT, what was the best model you tried?

If you don't want to go to the trouble of signing up to AI Studio yourself (note that it's very easy), feel free to share a prompt and I'll try it myself and report back. I obviously can't judge the quality of the answer on its own merits, so I'll have to ask you.

Ah, I'm not OP. I've tried O3 High, O1 Pro, and QwQ. For the paper they have the prompts and grading scheme on the corresponding github. USAMO questions are hard enough you definitely need some expertise to grade them accurately. I'm far from being capable of judging them accurately.

Very qualitatively, the current crop of LLMs impresses me with the huge breadth of topics they can talk about. But "talking" to them does not give the impression they are better at reasoning than anyone I know who has scored >50% on USMAO, IMO, or the Putnam.

But "talking" to them does not give the impression they are better at reasoning than anyone I know who has scored >50% on USMAO, IMO, or the Putnam.

They are still improving very quickly, and I don't see the rate of improvement leveling off. Gemini 2.5 recently answered with ease a test question of mine that Gemini 2.0 (and, honestly, everything prior to Claude 3.5) had been utterly confused by. But I admit that they're definitely lacking in reasoning skills still; they're much better at retrieval and basic synthesis of knowledge than they are at extrapolating it to anything too greatly removed from standard problems that I'd expect were in their training data sets.

Still, can we take a step back and look at the big picture here? The USAMO is an invitation-only math competition where they pick the top few hundred students from a bigger invitation-only competition winnowed from an open math competition, and the median score on it is still sub-50%. The Putnam has thousands of competitors, but they're typically the most dedicated undergrad math majors and yet the median score on it is often zero! How far have we moved the goal posts, to get to this point? It's the "Can a robot write a symphony?" "Can you?" movie scene made manifest.

I don't think I know anyone who:

has scored >50% on USMAO, IMO, or the Putnam.

I think my younger cousin was an IMO competitor, but he didn't win AFAIK, even if he's now in a very reputable maths program.

I'm personally quite restricted myself in my ability to evaluate pure reasoning capabilitiy, since I'm not a programmer or mathematician. I know they're great at medicine, even tricky problems, but what makes medicine challenging is far more the ability to retain an enormous amount of information in your head rather than an unusually onerous demand on fluid intelligence. You can probably be a good doctor with an IQ of 120, if you have a very broad understanding of relevant medicine, but you're unlikely to be a good mathematician producing novel insights.

I did for all three, but it was many years ago, and I think I'd struggle with most IMO problems nowadays. Pretty sure I'm still better at proofs than the frontier CoT models, but for more mechanical applied computations (say, computing an annoying function's derivative) they're a lot better than me at churning through the work without making a dumb mistake. Which isn't that impressive, TBH, because Wolfram Alpha could do that too, a decade ago. But you have to consciously phrase things correctly for WA, whereas LLMs always correctly understand what you're asking (even if they get the answer wrong).

More news in immigration yesterday. There's an Atlantic article about it. The docket is Abrego Garcia v. Noem. The facts I'm recounting come from the declaration of Robert L. Cerna, Acting Field Office Director of the ICE Harlingen Field Office. This declaration is attached as Exhibit C to the government's response in opposition to the TRO (ECF #11).

6. On March 15, 2025, two planes carrying aliens being removed under the Alien Enemies Act (“AEA”) and one carrying aliens with Title 8 removal orders departed the United States for El Salvador. Abrego-Garcia, a native and citizen of El Salvador, was on the third flight and thus had his removal order to El Salvador executed. This removal was an error.

7. On March 29, 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) served Abrego- Garcia with a Notice to Appear, charging him as inadmissible pursuant to Section 1182(a)(6)(A)(i) of Title 8 of the United States Code, “as an alien present in the United States without being admitted or paroled, or who arrived in the United States at any time or place other than as designated by the [Secretary of Homeland Security].”

...

9. On October 10, 2019, an IJ ordered Abrego-Garcia’s removal from the United States but granted withholding of removal to El Salvador pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A). This grant of protection prohibited his removal to El Salvador.

10 . Following this grant of withholding of removal, Abrego-Garcia was released from ICE custody.

11. On March 12, 2025, ICE Homeland Security Investigations arrested Abrego- Garcia due to his prominent role in MS-13. Over the next two days, Abrego-Garcia was transferred to the staging area for the removal flights discussed in Paragraph 6.

12. The operation that led to Abrego-Garcia’s removal to El Salvador was designed to only include individuals with no impediments to removal. Generally, individuals were not placed on the manifest until they were cleared for removal.

13. ICE was aware of this grant of withholding of removal at the time Abrego- Garcia’s removal from the United States. Reference was made to this status on internal forms.

14. Abrego-Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the Title 8 flight to be removed to El Salvador. Rather, he was an alternate. As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight. The manifest did not indicate that Abrego-Garcia should not be removed.

15. Through administrative error, Abrego-Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador. This was an oversight, and the removal was carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Abrego-Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13.

That last line is, frankly, insane to me given the circumstances. "Yea we knew at the time we deported the guy to El Salvador that it was illegal for us to do it, but it was in good faith!" What is the government's response to having illegally deported someone? Too bad! The government makes a few arguments but here I want to zoom in on a particular one: redressability. Ordinarily in order for a U.S. Federal court to have jurisdiction to hear a case the Plaintiff (that would be Abrego-Garcia, his wife, and his 5 year old son in this case) bears the burden of establishing that an order of the court would redress their claimed injury. This cannot be met here, according to the government, in part because they no longer have custody of Abrego-Garcia and so there is no order the Court can issue as to the United States Government that will reddress their injury. The appropriate entity to be enjoined is the government of El Salvador, over which a U.S. federal court obviously has no jurisdiction.

As best I can tell nothing in the redressability argument turns on any facts about his legal status in the United States. The argument is strictly about who presently has custody of the defendant in question. I do not see any reason why the government could not make an identical argument if an "administrative error" meant they deported a United States citizen.

In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.

From my understanding, El Salvador is not planning on making the people Trump sends them into upstanding citizens of their society. Instead, they will simply lock them up indefinitely.

Given the harmfulness of being locked up indefinitely in a country with a spotty human rights record, I would argue that this demands due process on the scale of a capital crime trial. In consequence, it is closer to executing someone than to deporting a Canadian whose work visa expired back to Canada.

In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.

You may have noticed that the asylum system is broken in all of these countries, with millions of illegal immigrants cynically using it as a get out of jail free card that allows them to sneak into the first world and stay there indefinitely.

The only countries that don't have these issues (Australia, Denmark, Japan come to mind) grant approximately zero asylum claims.

In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.

Which is why the European continent of civilized nations have largely transitioned to a pre-arrival detention model, so that those who would make asylum claims receive lengthy prison sentences without a court trial before they can make an asylum claim.

The Europeans pay extensive sums of money to countries with spotty human rights records precisely for this service, as do many other countries that would rather not deal with economic migrants who have been coached to claim asylum.

It has largely been a win-win-win for the three main groups of states involved. Migrant-destination states don't have to deal with increasingly delegitimized asylum practices that have been used as a tool for illegal migration facilitations, Migrant-holding states get significant foreign aid and reprieve from state sanctions from the migrant-destination states, and bystander states that aren't facing socially-destabilizing numbers of migrants get to claim moral high ground posturing relative to the rest.

In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.

And the consequence of that is that we're letting pedophiles and repists stay, and that's not civilized in my book.

This centers the criminal, and his rights, and what is in his interest. What about my rights? And my interests? Why should my state put the interest of someone who has zero right to be here above mine?

He is not an American. He has zero right to be here. He broke the law to be here. He lied that he was in danger to abuse our asylum laws. He is not a good faith actor.

Given the harmfulness of being locked up indefinitely in a country with a spotty human rights record, I would argue that this demands due process on the scale of a capital crime trial.

Infinity Salvadorans, Infinity Afghans, Infinity Somalians

Why should my state put the interest of someone who has zero right to be here above mine?

The point is that the same logic which is being applied here could be used to deport and abandon citizens. Just ignore due process, do what you want and then, oops, looks like you're in a tinpot dictatorship now so nothing we can do because there's no way to redress your grievance.

'I don't care about due process because this guy was guilty anyway' is not a very coherent position.

This centers the criminal, and his rights, and what is in his interest. What about my rights? And my interests? Why should my state put the interest of someone who has zero right to be here above mine?

He is not an American. He has zero right to be here. He broke the law to be here. He lied that he was in danger to abuse our asylum laws. He is not a good faith actor.

Given that he was imprisoned without trial on his return to El Salvador, he wasn't wrong that he was in sufficient danger to trigger the asylum laws. His claim to be in danger from gangs (indeed, a specific gang that was a rival of MS-13) may also be correct, but in these parts I understand that the hip terminology is "directionally correct", which he certainly was.

Yes he was wrong. He fabricated a specific claim of danger to game our asylum laws. That some totally different thing happened to him has no bearing on his original claim.

What rights of yours were infringed? What evidence is there that he fabricated a specific claim of danger?

He lied that he was in danger to abuse our asylum laws. He is not a good faith actor.

Given that he was imprisoned without trial on his return to El Salvador, he wasn't wrong that he was in sufficient danger to trigger the asylum laws. His claim to be in danger from gangs (indeed, a specific gang that was a rival of MS-13) may also be correct, but in these parts I understand that the hip terminology is "directionally correct", which he certainly was.

Yes he was wrong. He fabricated a specific claim of danger to game our asylum laws. That some totally different thing happened to him has no bearing on his original claim.

Requesting clemency for patricide on grounds of being an orphan is certainly a strategy.

"I'm in danger from one gang because I'm a member of another gang" is a cheeky reason to demand asylum, but I don't think it's actually valid. And Garcia claims not to be a member of MS-13.

I had to read several articles about this to really understand

  • he illegally entered the US
  • he applied for asylum, citing danger if he returned to El Salvador
  • a judge denied his asylum request
  • but a judge did sympathize and say he can't be deported back to El Salvador
  • he's still an illegal alien!
  • presumably the US tried to find another place to send him, but couldn't
  • so he remained in the US
  • until they accidentally deported him to El Salvador for thinking he was part of a gang

I had to read several articles about this to really understand

I hate journalists so much. They deliberately lie by omission because of their ideologies (Right wing journos leave things out too).

It shouldn't take so much time to figure out what all these people are arguing about.

more than ever, reading the news is anti-informative

Wait, so he wasn't granted asylum, just a stay of deportation to El Salvador specifically?

If I'm understanding right:

  • He applied for asylum from El Salvador in 2019. The immigration judge denied his request for asylum, but granted him "withholding of removal," which specifically prohibited his deportation to El Salvador due to the risk of persecution there
  • ICE did not appeal this decision, and he was released.
  • The withholding of removal meant he was still removable from the US, just specifically not to El Salvador. The government could have legally deported him to any other country willing to accept him without violating the court order.
  • The "administrative error" was that ICE deported him specifically to El Salvador in March 2025 despite being aware of his protection from removal to that country, violating the exact limitation imposed by the court.
  • And now the Trump admin is saying "yeah we did the thing we were specifically ordered by the court not to do, but now it's done and even though we could fix it we won't and you can't make us".
  • And the Trump admin is probably correct on the "and you can't make us" part, because in the end a court order is a piece of paper and someone still has to enforce said court order.
  • This doesn't actually set any legal precedent that this method of deportation is ok though, it just adds to the growing pile of divergences between what the law says agencies must do and how government agencies actually operate in practice.

He applied for asylum from El Salvador in 2019. The immigration judge denied his request for asylum, but granted him "withholding of removal," which specifically prohibited his deportation to El Salvador due to the risk of persecution there

This seems like a pretty nonsensical status that I can't really explain. The guy is from El Salvador, which is then about the only country that could be reasonably expected to take him back for no reason (others would also expect dollars, most likely). I get that there are real concerns about it's criminal justice practices these days (which are maybe better than it's previous murder practices), but I can't really explain this ruling other than an activist judge recognizing that he doesn't actually qualify for asylum but granting him the closest functional equivalent: Surely asylum would apply if he was actually at risk of persecution (on the basis of protected statuses) and applied truthfully for it in the US. Or maybe I'm missing something?

To that I'll add my confusion about "we can't just send him back to a country with a 'shady' human rights record!" arguments. If his argument for being allowed to stay in the US was "I'm being threatened by gangs", isn't that problem largely taken care of by now?

That is an excellent point.

Though he's being held in prison in El Salvador? Because the US said so? And he has no rights as an El Salvsdor citizen himself to demand his release?

I think the redressability argument makes sense. At most, they can order DHS/CPB that, if the plaintiff presents himself at the border, they must admit him.

On October 10, 2019, an IJ ordered Abrego-Garcia’s removal from the United States but granted withholding of removal to El Salvador pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A). This grant of protection prohibited his removal to El Salvador.

So to actually read the operative statute it says

  • (A) In general Notwithstanding paragraphs (1) and (2), the Attorney General may not remove an alien to a country if the Attorney General decides that the alien's life or freedom would be threatened in that country because of the alien's race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.
  • (B) Exception Subparagraph (A) does not apply to an alien deportable under section 1227(a)(4)(D) of this title or if the Attorney General decides that-
    • (i) the alien ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the persecution of an individual because of the individual's race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion;
    • (ii) the alien, having been convicted by a final judgment of a particularly serious crime is a danger to the community of the United States;
    • (iii) there are serious reasons to believe that the alien committed a serious nonpolitical crime outside the United States before the alien arrived in the United States; or
    • (iv) there are reasonable grounds to believe that the alien is a danger to the security of the United States.

It doesn't seem clear to me that the AG couldn't invoke 1231(b)(3)(B)(iv), which essentially vest in her the plenary power to make an exception to (A).

Then specifically, look at the date of the order, October 10, 2019, who was AG on that date?

The whole thing is ridiculous kayfabe. Trump's AG, by the very terms of the statute, could have ordered him back to ES 5 years ago.

Actually I'm a bit confused so if anyone has the details please help.

It seems like these people are being deported, so once they land in another country any reason for their detention under US law has come to an end, unless there are some sort of parallel criminal proceedings.

So if they are imprisoned in the El Salvador prison, it seems like it would have to be under El Salvador law. Unfortunately I have no idea of what that might be.

The problem with this approach is that it establishes terrible incentives. If the argument "that was a mistake, but it is a done deal, and no court order in the world can change this" was sufficient, then there would not be wrongful death civil suits.

If individuals or governments fuck up in a way which is beyond repair, we don't shrug and say "well, luckily for you, the antique you recklessly destroyed was beyond price, so there is nothing you can do to make it right, off you go". We use money to approximate the damage. Sometimes we award punitive damages.

Of course, the prison in El Salvador is as likely to follow the whims of the US government as gitmo is. If Trump makes it a priority to right the wrong his administration did, that guy could be back on US soil in 24 hours. It only takes a court to set the correct incentive.

Perhaps award to him or his family 1000$ in federal funds for the first day he spends in El Salvador because Trump's goons ignored a court order, and double that every day afterwards, up to 1% of the defense budget per year. I am sure that the administration would rather get him back then pay him a billion in taxpayer money.

How about we fine him for entering the US illegally and make the fine double your proposed fine?

I see no reason why people who shouldn’t be here in the first place are getting benefits denied to US citizens given there’s no federal right to compensation for government mistakes/ errors / negligence.

Illegally entering the US is not a crime which warrants a lifetime of imprisonment, or what might be an adequate monetary equivalent to that.

If someone is trespassing on your property, and steps on a landmine you placed and gets his legs blown off, you can not simply tell the judge that since the trespasser was in the wrong, he does not have any cause for a complaint.

I see no reason why people who shouldn’t be here in the first place are getting benefits denied to US citizens given there’s no federal right to compensation for government mistakes/ errors / negligence.

While the US government claims sovereign immunity over a lot of things, there is still the FTCA.

WP gives an example:

In 2022, a navy sailor successfully sued under the act after being hit by a vehicle driven by an active-duty military member, and received a $493,000 settlement.

Perhaps award to him or his family 1000$ in federal funds for the first day he spends in El Salvador because Trump's goons ignored a court order, and double that every day afterwards, up to 1% of the defense budget per year. I am sure that the administration would rather get him back then pay him a billion in taxpayer money.

I think this would be considered a punitive rather than a coercive fine. Still, I don't think you even need to go exponential on the fines. There is existing precedent for the structure "$25,000 minimum initial fine, increased in $25,000 increments daily until the contempt is purged or the maximum penalty of $250,000 is reached after 10 days; amount of fine depends on timeliness of compliance", and I think that structure would probably suffice.

This actually makes me feel better than after reading the other fake news. This guy was supposed to be deported to somewhere besides El Salvador, but we couldn't find any other country in the world willing to take him. So he had no legal status and should be deported asap. I'm gonna call it a happy accident.

Meanwhile the other fake news says:

the man had protected immigration status in the U.S. ...

a judge granted him withholding from removal.

On Wednesday, March 12, Abrego Garcia learned his immigration status had changed

Also, it appears that "withholding of removal" is not in the statute but just agency regulation. So hopefully Trump can just EO nuke the entire section after a nice APA rulemaking, and then be done with it.

the government is still allowed to deport that person to a different country if the other country agrees to accept them.

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/asylum-withholding-of-removal

All Trump needs is a backup country to deport everyone to who can't be deported to El Salvador. Any ideas?

But you should have some damn sympathy for a fellow citizen's suffering.

Progressives, especially post-Hart-Celler, have diluted and deconstructed the meaning of citizenship to such an extent that there are tens of millions of individuals in this country with whom I share almost nothing in common except for a legal fiction. There’s a good chance that the people you’re talking about do not even speak the same language I do, nor have they even needed to learn to do so in order to be considered citizens. They and I have no common bonds of kinship, of culture, of social context. Nothing!

I extend to them the basic human empathy I’d extend to any non-American, and I wish the situation were not such that this sort of nothing needs to happen to them. But the fact that they have a piece of (digitized) paper saying they’re as American as I am means nothing to me.

Progressives, especially post-Hart-Celler, have diluted and deconstructed the meaning of citizenship to such an extent that there are tens of millions of individuals in this country with whom I share almost nothing in common except for a legal fiction.

Can you give some examples of "diluted and deconstructed the meaning of citizenship?"

There’s a good chance that the people you’re talking about do not even speak the same language I do, nor have they even needed to learn to do so in order to be considered citizens. They and I have no common bonds of kinship, of culture, of social context. Nothing!

I'd be open to making the naturalization test English-only, but why isn't having passed the naturalization test evidence of commonality?

What does being an American mean to you?

My great grandfather came here on accident- the royal navy blockaded his home country- and he assimilated into a shotgun wedding and becoming a self made millionaire before the war ended. Was he American? How about the intentional Ellis islanders? A third generation Mexican American who speaks English and Spanish equally poorly?

They are not American to you.

Your attitude makes you unworthy of being an American to me.

So goes our country.

I mean I think there are limits. A real, legitimate citizen, naturalized absolutely should have every right in America as a native citizen. But when this get brought up, basically anyone who gate crashes the border is now a de facto citizen in the eyes of much of the left and of course only those terrible people on the right think such gate crashes should leave. And I don’t think that’s unreasonable. We can’t do that because we don’t have room for billions of people to come here and simply squat. They need to go home.

This reads as if you are trying to paper over how Hoffmeister and others on your side do not care about actual citizens.

Deporting illegals. Fine, that's a total valid outcome for Trump winning an election.

Celebrating the cleaving of an American citizen from their spouse and parent? That's wrong, and I think you know it.

I’m not sure what you’re even talking about. The man who was deported is not an American citizen. His wife, who is, married an illegal immigrant — presumably aware that she was doing so — and bore him a son. Don’t you think she should have foreseen, as a reasonable outcome, that he would eventually be identified as an illegal immigrant?

We separate criminals from their spouses and children every day. Inmates don’t get to bring their wives and children to prison with them, and presumably you would not advocate for them to be permitted to do so. Similarly, we separate illegal immigrants from their citizen spouses and dependents when we deport them. This is a totally reasonable outcome. Don’t marry illegal immigrants!

People on the left fearmonger about the idea of American citizens being wrongly deported.

This is very unlikely for several reasons:

  1. Naturalized immigrants all have papers and are in the system

  2. US citizens born abroad have their births registered to obtain identity documents (to first travel to the US)

  3. 'Birthright citizens' almost always have parents who realize how valuable citizenship for their kids is, so are likely to have a birth certificate

  4. Legacy Americans with no birth certificates for whom obtaining proof of citizenship is otherwise impossible can be DNA tested and will show a big web of extended family in the US that will confirm US-born ancestors

The few people who would be wrongly deported given these safeguards would be a handful extremely stupid people with no family who care about them at all, which suggests an asocial streak that would likely be little missed in any case.

This is conflating risk and hazard (in addition to being yourself antisocially callous or glib about people "that would likely be little missed" ... by you): The risk may be low (if people are given due process, prior to deportation, which has unfortunately become an "if"...), but the hazard is very, very high.

I'm as opposed to "open borders with extra steps" as the next Motter, but saying concerns about extreme hazards are "fearmongering," because the hazards are low risk is itself a motte-and-bailey.

Something like 100 US citizens have been wrongfully deported the last two decades. I can't find any case law about it though. It seems the error is discovered (or a complaint is made) and they are eventually awarded damages. The government has apparently never argued that our courts have no jurisdiction over these deportees, but I'm not clear why the arguments being posed by Trump's lawyers would be any different?

Because US citizens have different rights than illegal aliens whose deportation proceedings have been stayed due to an executive order?

Okay so suppose a US citizen is wrongfully held in a foreign prison. What could a US court do to fix that? The executive has a lot of tools to fix that, but courts don't? If the executive is not interested in fixing it, aren't they just screwed?

I'm not sure you can effectively execute a detailed genetic testing plan from an El Savadorean gulag, but even if you could, and even if a US Court accepted it, it wouldn't matter much to your jailors.

Seems like a claim of actual citizenships should give the individual the right to some kind of summary hearing in front of a neutral party to make that case.

That stuff can just be gamed. If an individual has no US passport or birth certificate, they can be deported and then - if they win their case upon appeal or their family / some NGO appeals on their behalf - they can be paid $250k in compensation and flown back. Special procedures can easily be implemented for the Amish or Mennonites or whatever (who are obviously not just going to be picked up by ICE).

Most of the kind of Americans who would be accidentally deported under this policy would be overjoyed to make a quarter million dollars for spending 2 weeks in a Salvadoran gulag.

But all of this could be avoided by just ensuring due process before anyone is deported. Why would we intentionally give the federal government this kind of power that could easily be abused? It serves no purpose other than removing a miniscule number of illegal immigrants who have no real effect on anything.

It is, as you say, unlikely.

But I am still concerned when the US Department of Justice argues that if it did happen to me, I would have no redress.

I mean are dna tests acceptable evidence for that?

I agree that in practice US citizens are not going to be locked up in an El Salvadoran gulag.

I know this is whataboutism - and I’m not making this argument, just kind of stating how I feel - but, and this does suck, we killed a million Iraqi’s and Afghans and fucked our good will for decades … why do I care about this dude?

It’s an oopsie - it’s not a US citizen - it sucks but, man it just gets a big who gives a fuck from me.

Get him back eventually and give him a million bucks - I’m not saying it’s a non story but I bet minus the destination, we’ve made a few thousand similar mistakes over the last twenty years.

Or maybe it’s the opposite of TDS for me - maybe I just downplay every story because every story for 10 years has been amplified to 10.

Hard to tell.

In quality adjusted life years, this pales in comparison to the Iraq war.

Most civilians the US killed in Iraq were killed within the rules of engagement. While scholars of international law might have various ideas about the legality of invading Iraq, but from my recollection there was never a US court injunction against using bombs in Iraq.

The crimes which really enraged the public were not the median civilian killed by a bomb, but outliers like Abu Guraib. This is just a consequence of humans being scope insensitive, but also, you are who you are on your very worst day -- "but have you considered all the days of my life when I did not kill anyone" is not a very successful defense.

maybe I just downplay every story because every story for 10 years has been amplified to 10.

I feel this way whenever Trump says something truly 'out there' like wanting to make Canada the 51st state.

Okay, yeah, that's pretty crazy to outright say it. But meh, unless he started massing troops at the border you can't arse me to care when every second sentence out of his mouth for 4 years was turned into a national headline predicting immediate doom.

The dude blew up one of Iran's top generals INSIDE Iraq during his term, and we didn't actually see a war with Iran. There's no reason to keep declaring 4 alarm fires just because Trump is blowing smoke.

So yeah, I'm going to tend to assume that almost every crisis the media portrays is in fact exaggerated until proven otherwise.

It's not that you should care about this dude. It's that you (presumably, given your comment) live in a country with a legal system that primarily makes decisions based on precedent, and "this one weird trick lets the government sidestep due process requirements" is a terrifying precedent to set.

If the "administrative error" argument actually stands up in court, that is.

I agree with you, but I'll note that our entire legal system seems to be based on "one weird trick"s, all the way down. That's how they got a felony conviction against Trump for a misdemeanor whose statute of limitations had expired. Unfortunately if the system really wants to get you, they will. I don't know how to fix it, but at the very least let's keep calling it out wherever we see it.

Baby, bathwater.

Almost none of our legal system relies on that sort of chicanery. Rewarding any administration for doing more of it is a terrible idea.

terrifying precedent

I was terrified when the democrats stopped listening to the court system (ex: gun control), ignored violent protests (BLM) and engaged in unprecedented law fare against individual politicians and an entire voting block (ex: anti-BLM, J6).

This is just more of the same or better than all that.

Most of the stuff you mention is entirely orthogonal to ignoring the court system. Police getting deployed is a political decision, and the safeguard against politicians failing to stop violent protests is to vote them out of office. Law fare -- while problematic -- is explicitly using the court system.

If you have a story about someone who was imprisoned for a gun regulations charge, and the courts ordered their release and then the democrats said "haha" and kept them imprisoned indefinitely, please share it.

"Our protestors don't get charged with anything and your protestors are the recipients of an unprecedented manhunt" IS abuse of the court system. Who to charge and over charge is weaponization of the legal system.

The law fare against the NRA and Trump and so on is abuse of the court system.

The ignoring of SC rulings on gun control is abuse of the court system.

It is not the EXACT SAME abuse of the court system but demanding it be is missing the point.

Having no redress to those abuses - e.g., nobody has standing has to challenge or slow-rolling proceedings until the case is moot - is using the court system.

I'm definitely not saying that this is the first instance of the executive branch trying to circumvent due process requirements, or the worst instance. I don’t even think this is in the top 3 worst cases since the turn of the millenium (for those I'd say operation chokepoint, national security letters, and guantanamo bay, probably in that order of severity).

But each new bad precedent is in fact bad, and still the sort of thing I'd like to see less of rather than more of, and I'm sad when I see people on here who cared a lot about due process 2 years ago abandon that now.

Edit: On examination of the case, this the Trump admin defying the court, rather than the Trump admin finding a legal loophole that the court agrees with. So yeah, to your point, "executive branch does not listen to judicial branch" is obnoxious and worrying but I agree that this is less of a somethingburger than I originally thought on account of this AFAICT not actually setting any new legal precedents.

That last line is, frankly, insane to me given the circumstances. "Yea we knew at the time we deported the guy to El Salvador that it was illegal for us to do it, but it was in good faith!" What is the government's response to having illegally deported someone? Too bad! The government makes a few arguments but here I want to zoom in on a particular one: redressability. Ordinarily in order for a U.S. Federal court to have jurisdiction to hear a case the Plaintiff (that would be Abrego-Garcia, his wife, and his 5 year old son in this case) bears the burden of establishing that an order of the court would redress their claimed injury. This cannot be met here, according to the government, in part because they no longer have custody of Abrego-Garcia and so there is no order the Court can issue as to the United States Government that will reddress their injury. The appropriate entity to be enjoined is the government of El Salvador, over which a U.S. federal court obviously has no jurisdiction.

It's possible in a 2016-2020 Trump Admin, this is an argument I would have cared about. But I literally just lived through an administration that forced me to take an experimental vaccine. Luckily my only side effect (so far) is permanent tinnitus. But the manufacturer is shielded from liability, and so is the government which forced it on me. I mean I guess the supreme court struck down that mandate... but they did so after the deadline by which I would have immediately lost my job, so thanks for nothing. I wouldn't mind some redress. What's my inability to fall asleep because of the ringing in my ears worth?

We just lived through an illegal eviction moratorium. After the Supreme Court decided it was illegal, were any of the people harmed by that offered any compensation? Were the landlords compensated for being forced to house squaters? Or did Blackrock roll up their foreclosed homes?

What about all these federal programs to relocate, house and feed migrants of questionable immigration status, and all the crime and destruction of institutions it caused? Do any of the communities that had hoards of barbarians air dropped on them by the feds get any sort of redress? What about the victims of unquestionably illegal immigrants? People who lost family or were otherwise horribly victimized because the Biden administration just ignored immigration law? Where were all these arguments about "If congress passes a law funding blah blah blah the executive must enforce those laws"? Where were the nationwide injunctions, or the concerns about redress for the victims of illegal alien crime? How was it not a constitutional crisis that uncounted millions of illegal and questionably legal aliens were allowed to invade over 4 years?

This might be bad. But I just can't possibly be made to care. I don't want to hear about "redress" given the profound damage the last administration did completely scot-free. Until I see Fauci behind bars, I'm happy letting ICE run completely amok and plead "qualified immunity" to all of it. Let Trump give them all preemptive pardons. Have them show up at people's doors with those instead of warrants. I don't care anymore. I already saw from 2020-2024 that the law doesn't matter. I'm certainly not going to let arguments about principle matter to me now. This is power politics now baby.

Biden flew in hundreds of thousands of illegals and somehow the courts found that nobody had standing to challenge it.

What case was this?

Texas v. DHS (not the other Texas v. DHS)

https://aflegal.org/litigation/texas-et-al-v-dhs-et-al-chnv-parole-case/

How did the CHNV parole programs constitute the Biden administration flying in hundreds of thousands of illegals?

Not OP, but perhaps United States v. Texas

In 2021, after President Biden took office, the Department of Homeland Security issued new Guidelines for immigration enforcement. The Guidelines prioritize the arrest and removal from the United States of noncitizens who are suspected terrorists or dangerous criminals, or who have unlawfully entered the country only recently, for example. Texas and Louisiana sued the Department of Homeland Security. According to those States, the Department’s new Guidelines violate federal statutes that purportedly require the Department to arrest more criminal noncitizens pending their removal. The States essentially want the Federal Judiciary to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policy so as to make more arrests. But this Court has long held “that a citizen lacks standing to contest the policies of the prosecuting authority when he himself is neither prosecuted nor threatened with prosecution.” Linda R. S. v. Richard D., 410 U.S. 614, 619 (1973). Consistent with that fundamental Article III principle, we conclude that the States lack Article III standing to bring this suit.

Let’s say you’re walking down the street and a black guy steals your phone. Later that day, this same black guy is minding his own business when he is attacked, arrested, and beaten within an inch of his life by an unabashedly racist police officer who is an open member of the KKK. The police officer notices the cell phone, which he finds out later was reported missing by you, and returns it to you. Further investigation reveals that the police officer had no probable cause, and simply assaulted the man because he was black. Do you have to give him your cell phone back?

The answer is obviously no, right? Just because the black man has a clearly justified claim against the government, doesn’t mean that we have to recommit all of the crimes that the unlawful state action righted. Compensation should be made in a different way.

Okay, what is an adequate compensation for likely having to spend the rest of your life in some Latin America prison? At what monetary sum would you be indifferent between getting locked up and getting the compensation and being free and getting nothing?

Presumably, a million US$ will not buy you freedom, but 100M$ -- if invested wisely in campaign donations -- might see you getting freed within a year and living in a mansion for the rest of your life.

I actually think if there's a court order preventing the government from taking the black guy's phone, and the government knowingly grabbed it anyway, then the government should return it back to him. Yes, even if it seems counter-intuitive.

It's similar to the fruit from the poisonous tree doctrine; yes, the evidence is true and overwhelming that the criminal did it, but we let them go anyway because the government obtained the evidence illegally. Also very counter-intuitive. We KNOW the fucker did it, it's bad that the government illegally obtained the evidence but that's in the past, and we have the evidence now, why can't we use it to lock them up? I assert it's the same reason as in this case. It incentivizes the government to take the expedient "the-ends-justifies-the-means" approach which negatively impacts innocent people.

I actually think if there's a court order preventing the government from taking the black guy's phone, and the government knowingly grabbed it anyway, then the government should return it back to him. Yes, even if it seems counter-intuitive.

This sort of argument quickly leads to absurd places. Should the government return a kidnap victim to her kidnapper, if she was only found because a racist cop didn't like the look of some black guy who they later found out was hiding stolen children in his basement? Should the government refuse to act on the knowledge that a massive terrorist attack is being planned, if that knowledge was acquired by a racist cop roughing up a shifty-looking Arab?

The rule is not that the police have to literally undo all their previous actions or not act to address an imminent threat in the event of a procedural mishap, intentional or otherwise, it's just that evidence obtained in that way is not admissible in court, increasing the chances that the kidnapper and terrorists in your examples would walk free. In the most egregious cases, I imagine you could get a jury nullification-adjacent situation where the jurors, despite "not being allowed to consider" the tainted evidence, unanimously vote to convict.

Jury nullification is one-way only. If a jury convicts and the judge thinks it's bananas, the judge can generally set it aside. But the judge can't set aside a jury acquittal because that would violate the right to trial by jury.

I don't think the incidental discovery thing is quite as important as a court specifically prohibited the action to be taken. If a court ordered a kidnap victim to not be separated with her kidnapper, then my first inclination is that this is fake news and to dig into the court documents to see what really happened. Similarly in the hypothetical that a court is prohibiting the government from stopping a massive terrorist attack for whatever reason.

The fruit from the poisonous tree doctrine as applied in the US is pretty stupid. It is beyond retarded that good faith procedural errors can allow obviously guilty men go free. Most of the rest of the world does not have it, or does not have it to the same extent as US does.

A good faith error is literally a named exception to the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine.

The problem is that just about every error can be made to seem good faith.

Can you explain how it is a problem? It's not immediately clear to me, and it's apparently not immediately clear to most of the legal systems around the world, given that they do not subscribe to the extensive application of this doctrine.

Sure. I believe that the cops should not have near-infinite leeway to bend the rules and trod upon civil liberties to secure a conviction so long as they can convincingly make up a story about how they e.g. executed a warrantless wiretap in good faith.

Oh, we can continue applying the doctrine to illegal wiretaps just fine, that's not my problem with it. My problem is things like, if you fail to recite a specific magic incantation before your suspect confesses to the crime, you must disregard that confession.

So your objection is basically just to Miranda rights?

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Spontaneous confession is in fact an exception to the requirement to read the suspect their rights. The "magic incantation" is only required before custodial interrogation.

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They just put people in prison regardless of the cops beating a confession out of them or tossing their place without a warrant or whatever, and no one has a problem with that. (or at least they better not)

IMHO a better solution to the "fruit from the poisonous tree" rule would be "the criminal defendant can be in prison when the criminal cop is too". Two crimes get two sentences, not zero. Making one sentence contingent on the other would be sufficient to fix the bad incentives.

In this case, though ... do we even need to imprison the "defendant"? "A confidential informant said he was MS-13" got him held without bond after he was arrested for loitering, but never got a conviction. "The cops think this gang-member-turned-snitch is very trustworthy now" is a good place to start an investigation but surely it's not a good enough place to end one; police informants are sometimes themselves motivated more by base incentives than by a newly-acquired love of honesty and justice.

IMHO a better solution to the "fruit from the poisonous tree" rule would be "the criminal defendant can be in prison when the criminal cop is too". Two crimes get two sentences, not zero. Making one sentence contingent on the other would be sufficient to fix the bad incentives.

The outcome of that would be judges looking the other way to avoid putting cops in jail.

So then we're back to the status quo of zero sentences in N% of cases, but we get justice in 100-N%? Since N will be less than 100 that still sounds like an improvement.

I think N would be near enough to 100 not to matter. Putting cops in jail for misconduct is very unpopular. Any prosecutor who tries it ends up getting shunned by the cops and losing his career as a result. A few years ago a couple of NYPD cops even beat up a judge and got away with it.

A few years ago a couple of NYPD cops even beat up a judge and got away with it.

Source?

https://archive.ph/3miok

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I think N would be near enough to 100 not to matter. Putting cops in jail for misconduct is very unpopular. Any prosecutor who tries it ends up getting shunned by the cops and losing his career as a result. A few years ago a couple of NYPD cops even beat up a judge and got away with it.

If the primary problem is cops who beat citizens (or mishandle investigations, ignore procedures, etc) when they think they can get away it, that should be the problem directly to solve.

"Fruit of poisonous tree" is not working very well. Cases where it should be apply, may get parallel construction and other lies to "hide the poison" (hopefully rarely), yet criminals who face procedural errors walk free (quite often). Evidently criminals walking free is not enough of incentive for the rotten parts of the tree to become less rotten.

If the primary problem is cops who beat citizens (or mishandle investigations, ignore procedures, etc) when they think they can get away it, that should be the problem directly to solve.

Yes, and the way it is solved is by changing incentives so when cops mishandle investigations, ignore procedures, and beat citizens, the defendant is freed and the police have egg on their face. Punishing the cops for doing it would be great but is never going to happen.

Evidently criminals walking free is not enough of incentive for the rotten parts of the tree to become less rotten.

Not the remaining rotten parts, no.

A few years ago a couple of NYPD cops even beat up a judge and got away with it

Based

Aww, put a little more effort into it than this!

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I do not see any reason why the government could not make an identical argument if an "administrative error" meant they deported a United States citizen.

Here's a small hint, U.S. Citizens are 'owed' certain 'duties' by 'their' (key word) Government. Non-citizens (once they've been determined to be such) are not.

Here's the actual Federal Law on the matter:

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title22/chapter23&edition=prelim

And the quote:

§1731. Protection to naturalized citizens abroad

All naturalized citizens of the United States while in foreign countries are entitled to and shall receive from this Government the same protection of persons and property which is accorded to native-born citizens.

Bonus points:

§1732. Release of citizens imprisoned by foreign governments

Whenever it is made known to the President that any citizen of the United States has been unjustly deprived of his liberty by or under the authority of any foreign government, it shall be the duty of the President forthwith to demand of that government the reasons of such imprisonment; and if it appears to be wrongful and in violation of the rights of American citizenship, the President shall forthwith demand the release of such citizen...

Granted, what this looks like in practice is up for debate. What does "unjustly deprived" mean?

I'll reiterate the point I already made that I think the only way the Administration gets any heavy pushback on these actions is if they accidentally deport an actual U.S. citizen, who is then tangibly, physically harmed or killed while in custody, where-ever that is.

I actually agree that these measures are pretty draconian, but its hard to feel like "due process" is a major concern.

It'd be MUCH, MUCH easier to get Due Process if these folks, you know, followed the process and entered the country via the channels established to keep track of them and grant them permission to be here, so they can have a 'known' status.

"I intentionally skipped the procedural steps that would have established my right to stay in the country, but don't you DARE skip the procedural steps that would delay my inevitable removal from the country" is not a winning argument, I daresay.

I actually agree that these measures are pretty draconian, but its hard to feel like "due process" is a major concern.

It'd be MUCH, MUCH easier to get Due Process if these folks, you know, followed the process and entered the country via the channels established to keep track of them and grant them status to be here.

"I intentionally skipped the procedural steps that would have established my right to stay in the country, but don't you DARE skip the procedural steps that would delay my inevitable removal from the country" is not a winning argument, I daresay.

There's a lot of people in between US Citizen and illegal immigrants, like green card holders, legal immigrants and temporary (legal) visitors. Tens of millions, in fact. Where do they stand on the "Due Process" scale? Because even if you are right and US Citizens do have legal recourse, the non-Citizens legal immigrants sure don't.

I think they're at least entitled to get a hearing as to whether they were legally entitled to be in the U.S., and to contest any grounds the U.S. used to remove them, on that basis.

I'm NOT certain if it then follows that they can demand that the U.S. return them back to U.S. soil.

What would probably result in that case is that they get released from El Salvadoran custody and then can buy a plane ticket back on their own dime. Not certain though. The whole idea is that Green card status is a privilege that is granted by the U.S. government and exists only so long as the government chooses. Its not a strict entitlement.

Wouldn't that solve the issue? They got their due process (albeit not on U.S. soil) and are not barred from re-entering the U.S. if they want, since they still have the green card.

Again admitting that its Draconian to sweep up nonviolent, legal 'guests' and 'visitors' alongside verifiable criminals.

BUT I WOULD ONCE AGAIN SUGGEST THAT SUCH PEOPLE CAN PETITION THEIR HOME COUNTRY FOR REDRESS.

BUT I WOULD ONCE AGAIN SUGGEST THAT SUCH PEOPLE CAN PETITION THEIR HOME COUNTRY FOR REDRESS.

Isn't this guy actually Salvadoran? His home country is the one holding him in prison, which might complicate efforts to ask for him back even if the administration wanted to. Unless it's something they explicitly negotiated, it seems a bit odd to argue for jurisdiction. "Please send us this guy of yours you have in prison, we don't think he did anything wrong" doesn't work for political prisoners internationally most of the time.

I mean if the US said "we are no longer going to pay you to keep this guy in prison" and El Salvador said "ok cool but we're still keeping him" then I think the admin's "we don't have jurisdiction" argument would hold together a bit better. They should try it.

Only tangentially related: I wonder if the US is paying any other countries to keep their own citizens imprisoned. I wouldn't be surprised if there is foreign aid for "criminal justice" tied to anti-terrorism laws, for example.

I can agree with most of this and I believe you are internally consistent. My worry is that there's a negative incentive here. There's nothing to disincentivize the government to do the wrong thing in your framework. I believe the US government should be compelled to reverse its actions if it accidentally removes someone who has the authorization to be in the country and ships them off to a foreign prison (regardless of whether the government can be compelled to do so in the current legal framework). Otherwise, the government is not disincentivized to commit more "oopsies" in the future, and it becomes much more likely to incorrectly ship people to foreign prisons, causing tremendous individual harm to people who may not deserve it.

My worry is that there's a negative incentive here. There's nothing to disincentivize the government to do the wrong thing in your framework

Perhaps.

But under the previous setup, there was nothing to disincentivize people from coming in illegally, since they knew that even if they got 'caught' it could take a long time for 'due process' to occur before they get removed.

I strongly believe that's the goal of the current actions the admin is taking. Make it clear that you can't just hop the border and expect to stay here for years while your case is held up endlessly in court. You have a real chance of getting removed, and a real chance of ending up in a foreign prison if you have a criminal record.

I DO NOT think that the Trump admin wants to deport thousands upon thousands of criminals and pay for them to stay in an El Salvadoran prison. There's no strong benefit to having to pay for their imprisonment indefinitely, vs. kicking them out and not have to worry about them returning.

Now, your concern becomes very valid if it comes to intentionally targeting noncitizens for removal as a means to, e.g. punish dissent or scare citizens into taking or refraining from taking some action.

But I don't think there's any way around the fact that a national government claims the inherent authority to decide which foreign parties are and are not allowed to be in the country. And thus you can't expect them to accept a regime where ANY attempt to remove noncitizens, regardless of justification, has to be held up by the courts before it is executed.

Like, we agree that if there were an active war popping off, the U.S. would be justified in kicking out any citizens of the enemy nation that were residing in its borders, yes?

Trump is in fact trying to make the argument that there's an 'invasion' occurring, and so you can see how this might slide the situation into a bit of a grey area.

I believe the US government should be compelled to reverse its actions if it accidentally removes someone who has the authorization to be in the country and ships them off to a foreign prison (regardless of whether the government can be compelled to do so in the current legal framework)

I think if this becomes enough of an issue then yeah, perhaps there should be some actions taken by the home countries of the person in question.

Like I can't believe nobody seems to think that the countries that these people are nominally citizens of aren't interested in freeing them from a foreign prison? Why is everyone expecting U.S. COURTS to intervene on behalf of foreign nationals???

I also think the economic incentives are such that if the U.S. accidentally removes people who are doing very productive work for the U.S., then various parties have reason to intervene and pay large sums of money to both retrieve them and lobby to prevent it from happening again.

I’m in agreement on the incentives both for the protests on college campuses (in which at least two students lost visas) and the mass deportations. The point is to let both the public and potential immigrants that the days of crossing into the USA and just staying forever and doing whatever you want are over.

I think long term we need some sort of expedited hearing system to prevent mistakes and allow people to question the deportation. But that can’t happen until the numbers are low enough that you can have reasonable processes. As it stands now, the legal immigranttion process is extremely difficult and takes almost a decade unless you qualify for H1B. The process for asylum is overwhelmed because everyone who gets caught knows they get to stay if they claim asylum, and they know it will take years and suspect that Congress will eventually pass another amnesty before the hearing ever happens.

Until you get this into a position where the numbers are less than what can be reasonable to have our system handle with some speed — maybe clearing the median case within 3-4 months instead of a decade — I just don’t think the logistics work.

I'm NOT certain if it then follows that they can demand that the U.S. return them back to U.S. soil.

Why not? If they were allowed to be in the US, and the US expels them erroneously, surely it's not fair to them to ask them to front the cost of the trip back, which they wouldn't have needed if not for the government screw-up.

Suppose I'm at a neighbor's house party. The guy gets drunk, mistakes me for a personal enemy of his who snuck in uninvited, punches my lights out, then drives me to the next town over and drops me off at a bus stop before I come to. Once he sobers up and realizes, I think he owes me more than an apology over the phone and invitation to come back over if I want. I think he definitely owes me bus fare at least, and probably some extra compensation for my trouble. I've got no absolute right to be at his house whenever I want, but that's not the point!

surely it's not fair to them to ask them to front the cost of the trip back, which they wouldn't have needed if not for the government screw-up.

I mean, if he can meet the standard for a false arrest case he might have a shot.

But I think the entire point of the case is hinging on whether there was or was not probable cause to detain him.

And its not inherently required to return him to U.S. soil to hold that hearing either.

Like, if you get arrested (they falsely thought that you were a vagrant for sleeping at a bus stop with alcohol on your breath) and taken to jail, then it turns out there was no basis to actually arrest you, you get released. But the cops aren't obligated to drive you home. They might do so by way of apology/to avoid bad press.

Fundamentally I think its FAIR to fly him home. In fact I'd say that's the best way to smooth over the situation to mitigate bad press. But that's only IF there's an actual finding that the detention was unjustified/unlawful and there is in fact no other legal reason to keep him out.

Goes to my other point that every Nation State claims the authority to exclude foreign nationals if the need arises.

Remember Trump's Travel Bans from his first term?

The Supreme Court upheld most of THOSE travel bans when the administration bothered to defend them. This should add on to the point about what 'due process' foreign nationals are entitled to.

In this case, it's not so much "the next town over" as it is "home": the guy in question is a citizen of El Salvador. Although I think there are reasonable asylum claims about how one's own (legal) country will treat them, and maybe even those are sufficiently sympathetic here, but it does complicate the "sent to random country" narrative.

In this case, it's not so much "the next town over" as it is "home"

Okay, so let's say he dumped me back in my home town. But I left all my stuff at his place before he deported me and, since I intended to stay in town for the night, I had dinner reservations in the morning. No matter how you slice it, being unexpectedly moved across borders at short notice is a serious inconvenience at best, and the government ought to make it up to people if it forces it upon them by mistake.

Your analogy misses some key important points (e.g. the neighbor house party should be a strict invite only event, and you only got into it because you literally snuck through the window), but more importantly, the issue is not compensation for plane ticket. I'd be happy to give that guy $1000 for him to fuck off. He can buy plane ticket to US with it, but he will not be admitted into the country, because the US government is under no obligation whatsover to admit any noncitizens into the country.

(e.g. the neighbor house party should be a strict invite only event, and you only got into it because you literally snuck through the window)

This comment-thread is about how to treat non-citizens who were legally on US soil and are then mistakenly deported. Which may or may not describe this particular guy, but we'd moved beyond talking about him in particular.

I don't understand how either of those statutes defeat the redressability argument. What is the order a court could issue as to the government in the case of a citizen that it couldn't in the case of a non-citizen that would effect that individuals return? Quoting from the government's reply (citations omitted):

When “[t]he existence of one or more of the essential elements of standing 'depends on the unfettered choices made by independent actors not before the courts and whose exercise of broad and legitimate discretion the courts cannot presume either to control or to predict,’ . . . it becomes the burden of the plaintiff to adduce facts showing that those choices have been or will be made in such manner as to . . . permit redressability of injury.” Here, “Plaintiffs’ injury can only be redressed by [a] foreign nation[] not before the court.” Plaintiffs concede that Abrego Garcia is in the custody of El Salvador, a foreign sovereign over which this Court “has no jurisdiction.” Plaintiffs instead seek orders from this Court directing the United States to obtain Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody by financial pressure and diplomacy. But they have made no showing that such measures are likely, not merely speculative, to obtain the ultimate relief they seek—Abrego Garcia’s release. There is no showing that any payment made to El Salvador is yet to occur; no showing that El Salvador is likely to release CECOT detainees but for any such payment; no showing that El Salvador is even inclined to consider a request to release a detainee at the United States’ request.

...

Because this Court has no power over a foreign sovereign and because Plaintiffs have not clearly shown that enjoining Defendants as Plaintiffs ask will likely redress their injuries, Plaintiffs lack standing for the relief they seek.

What would be different about this analysis if Abrego Garcia were a citizen? Sure maybe the Plaintiffs could point to 1732, why would that matter? What is the order of the court that would redress the harm in the case of a citizen but not a non-citizen?

"I intentionally skipped the procedural steps that would have established my right to stay in the country, but don't you DARE skip the procedural steps that would delay my inevitable removal from the country" is not a winning argument, I daresay.

The procedural steps you denigrate are important, as here, to ensure that such a person is actually removeable!

The procedural steps you denigrate are important, as here, to ensure that such a person is actually removeable!

Correct! Except I'm not 'denigrating' them, I'm pointing out that by the migrants skipping procedure, they've made it that much harder to employ due process protections.

If they didn't skip the steps when entering the country, it would be MUCH easier to determine their rights and status under the law! Government would have some record of their entry, they'd presumably be able to present some tangible evidence of their status, and they might actually have a case file open to process their claims to stay here.

So I'm not all that surprised that the Admin is shortcutting the "remove them from the country" part by taking advantage of the fact that they lack strong proof of their entitlement to remain here.

What would be different about this analysis if Abrego Garcia were a citizen?

Because a U.S. Citizen would actually have a cognizable entitlement to make the government follow through on a 'duty' that they can implore the U.S. Government to actually act on, via the U.S. Court system.

To wit:

it shall be the duty of the President forthwith to demand of that government the reasons of such imprisonment; and if it appears to be wrongful and in violation of the rights of American citizenship, the President shall forthwith demand the release of such citizen...

"I am a U.S. Citizen held in a Foreign Prison, there is no justification for holding me, do your job and take the steps to get me out."

Vs. a foreign national trying to use a U.S. Court to force a foreign goverment to do something. When said foreign national should presumably be asking their HOME COUNTRY for help. Why are they demanding the U.S. take action rather than their home country?

No, a U.S. Court has no jurisdiction over a foreign sovereign government, but they can order the U.S. to comply with its own laws and do the thing where it retrieves a U.S. citizen from Foreign custody. Which should be pretty easy when the U.S. is the one that is paying to keep them there.

As we're finding out, though, that's a precarious thing for a Court to do when the Executive does not want to follow their instructions and has some legal basis for ignoring/bypassing them.

I just don't think there's an argument for bypassing procedures for U.S. Citizens.

If they didn't skip the steps when entering the country, it would be MUCH easier to determine their rights and status under the law! Government would have some record of their entry, they'd presumably be able to present some tangible evidence of their status, and they might actually have a case file open to process their claims to stay here.

And at what point is he supposed to actually present this evidence?

Well, once at the time he was originally arrested/detained. This is why if you're traveling through a foreign country you're supposed to keep your passport and/or visa on your person.

If he had documentation proving his right to be there with him and they still arrested him (sans evidence of another crime) then I agree that is a due process violation.

I don't think people would complain too harshly if an American citizen got arrested abroad b/c they lacked sufficient identification, and needed to call up the embassy to verify their identity and entitlement to presence in the country to get released, though.

And that would be his second chance to present evidence, when there's some hearing via either the U.S. or his home country to show proof of his status and/or disprove the basis for his detention so as to obtain release from custody.

And if he's an American citizen, then what? Is ICE just supposed to take his word for it?

And that would be his second chance to present evidence, when there's some hearing via either the U.S. or his home country to show proof of his status and/or disprove the basis for his detention so as to obtain release from custody.

Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? In the present case the government is arguing that he isn't entitled to any hearing, even though they admit that he shouldn't have been removed. The whole process is designed to be impossible to challenge.

At least in Abrego-Garcia's case, the proceedings leading up to the October 10, 2019 hearing.

At which hearing he was granted protection from removal. Presumably, had he gotten a hearing this time, he could have presented that as evidence. As it was, he didn't get one, and neither would an American citizen. The whole point of OP's argument is that only citizens should be entitled to due process, yet there's an inherent contradiction in that one who isn't afforded due process has no ability to prove his citizenship.

My point is that he did have an opportunity to prove his citizenship. Any parade of horribles predicated on not getting one kinda has to run by that point. If you're centered on the removal to El Salvador rather than any other country, which is all his protection from removal covers, that's certainly fair, and no small oopsie woopsies fucky wucky from the Trump admin, to absolutely no one's surprise. But it's a different class of problem.

((While I'd argue that mistake should count as a due process violation, I'm not sure it actually does under existing law; Baker and progeny have left the bounds of the due process clause very narrow even for actual citizens after actual hearings.))

If they didn't skip the steps when entering the country, it would be MUCH easier to determine their rights and status under the law! Government would have some record of their entry, they'd presumably be able to present some tangible evidence of their status, and they might actually have a case file open to process their claims to stay here.

So I'm not all that surprised that the Admin is shortcutting the "remove them from the country" part by taking advantage of the fact that they lack strong proof of their entitlement to remain here.

I don't understand how this applies to the instant case. It is the sworn testimony of the relevant ICE Field Director that they knew at the time they removed him that it was unlawful and they did it anyway. Due to an "administrative error." There is not any controversy about Abrego Garcia's status or whether the government could lawfully deport him to El Salvador.

No, a U.S. Court has no jurisdiction over a foreign sovereign government, but they can order the U.S. to comply with its own laws and do the thing where it retrieves a U.S. citizen from Foreign custody. Which should be pretty easy when the U.S. is the one that is paying to keep them there.

If a court order commanding the United States government to withhold payment to El Salvador pending release of some individual is likely to lead to El Salvador releasing said individual back into US custody that seems like it defeats the redressability argument for citizens and non-citizens alike. The whole question is "is there any order a court could issue that would cause El Salvador to return the relevant individual?" If the answer is "yes" then the government loses on redressability.

It is the sworn testimony of the relevant ICE Field Director that they knew at the time they removed him that it was unlawful and they did it anyway. Due to an "administrative error." There is not any controversy about Abrego Garcia's status or whether the government could lawfully deport him to El Salvador.

I quibble with that reading of it. It isn't clear that the 'administrative error' was discovered before the guy was actually removed. The implication that he was removed on a 'good faith' basis says to me that whomever actually removed him thought the order was valid, and somebody else later noticed the mistake. I'm not taking them at their word, though.

But either way, the guy isn't required to be kept on U.S. soil, and I don't KNOW of any law (it might exist, but a google search and ChatGPT query didn't find it) that would require that the U.S. bring him back to U.S. soil.

Maybe they stop paying for his detention, he's released into El Salvador, and he can pay for a flight back?

I will reiterate: why doesn't he request assistance from his home country where he actually has citizenship?

The whole question is "is there any order a court could issue that would cause El Salvador to return the relevant individual?" If the answer is "yes" then the government loses on redressability.

Uh, not quite.

The Court has to have some statutory or common law authority on which to base an Order. Judges sometimes just issue orders to do things without such basis, and parties sometimes comply with it, but if the Court says "you are hereby directed to stop paying for the detention of this person on the basis of my own personal authority/interpretation of the law" then he's really overstepped.

This gets to the idea that Courts have very, VERY little power to intervene in foreign affairs matters, which are virtually unreviewable since they involve Plenary powers of the executive branch. Even SCOTUS doesn't claim authority to mess around with treaties entered by the Executive. If the President enters an agreement with a foreign government, Courts are usually not going to step in and interfere with that, for separation of powers reasons. Directly ordering the Executive to stop payments to a foreign government probably violates separation of powers.

(This is also why the use of the Alien Enemies Act is pretty likely to pass muster, although that relies on his military authority)

Ordering the Executive to carry out his duties under CHAPTER 23 §1732 and thus "to demand of that [foreign] government the reasons of such imprisonment; and if it appears to be wrongful and in violation of the rights of American citizenship, the President shall forthwith demand the release of such citizen..." is just enforcing the legislature's intent and making the government follow its own rules.

So the order would have to be based on some legal entitlement to compel the U.S. government to do or stop doing something.

What statute exists that authorizes a non-citizen to compel the U.S. to take ANY steps whatsoever regarding their imprisonment in another country?

If we don't care about such basis, then the Judge might as well just unilaterally say "I declare that this person is a U.S. citizen for all pursuits and purposes and is thus entitled to be returned to the U.S. immediately."

But I suspect you'd agree that is beyond the pale?

I will reiterate: why doesn't he request assistance from his home country where he actually has citizenship?

Because it's the US who wronged him and have a responsibility to make it up to him.

Remember back when Trump issued a bunch of Travel Bans in his first term? Those were largely upheld by the Supreme Court, even though a LOT of immigrants/refugees/foreign nationals were 'wronged' by their implementation.

Because the interests of persons who are NOT citizens of the U.S. with respect to the U.S. Government are not nearly as sacrosanct.

He might or might not have a false arrest case.

If he thinks that the U.S. has wronged him, he should still probably go to his Home Country and ask them to represent his interests wrt the U.S.'s actions.

He doesn't really have the standing to compel the United States to do anything, and bringing suit against the Country would probably get his Green Card or refugee status revoked anyway.

The government has no responsibility to right wrongs in general. There are some specific laws that apply to some specific contexts, for example Federal Tort Claims Act (which would not apply here), but as a general matter, government enjoys sovereign immunity, which means that unless some specific law applies, it is under no obligation to compensate you if it wrongs you.

While I am always reluctant to grant the government any additional powers, I do have to agree with this due process take. Due process only exists if the parties involved sign on to the process. If you are not going to bother to legally arrive, the government should not have to legally bother to deport you, just pack you up and ship you home.

Due process only exists if the parties involved sign on to the process

The reason you have due process for this kind of thing is that there are a variety of potential issues, like "actually I do have legal residency" or "I don't have legal residency, but there are legal reasons not to deport me (like I'll be killed)" or "I'm not who they claim I am".

"Bad guys don't deserve due process" is misunderstanding the reason we have due process.

the government should not have to legally bother to deport you, just pack you up and ship you home.

The Trump administration is not simply shipping people back to their country of origin.

And verification of identification and immigration status is right and proper. That does not take very long, a couple of days at most. What we have now is "due process" that involves multiple hearings with overbooked judges, strung out over months or years, with the alien in question continuing to reside in the country with no restrictions, and if it looks like they arr going to lose they can simply stop showing up for hearings.

One mans due process is another mans gross abuse of the system. The scales of justice demand balance.

I've also been trying to ascertain why they need to remain on U.S. soil to receive "due process."

Can't find anything that states that they have to be present in the U.S. for it to 'count.'

The part where they're removed to a different country isn't going to inherently prevent them from getting a hearing as to their legal status in the U.S.

What it does presumably do is make it almost pointless to pursue a hearing they know they'd lose.

What about asylum seekers who go through the legal port of entry instead of sneaking in? Are they owed due process?

Yes, that is the proper process, and they are owed due process. The "credible fear" exception that has become the standard response in recent years is so transparently abused that it should be done away with entirely.

I asked that because apparently one such refugee got deported to El Salvador who was such a legal asylum seeker. He had a mom and dad tattoo that apparently made him get kicked out

That sounds like it was a mistake then, and should be addressed. But the presence of error is not justification to just give up.

Did he get kicked out after being admitted, or was his claim processed and rejected?

It was in the process of being approved or not

So, if his application got rejected for this reason, that's pretty dumb, but not quite the same thing as grabbing a dude who went in legally, was accepted, and then got deported.

More comments

So why was an ms13 gang member being legally shielded from deportation again? What system did that, and why is it legitimate?

an ms13 gang member

The alien claims that the govt. has presented no evidence that he's a member of any gang at all, let alone MS-13 in particular.

why was an [illegal alien] being legally shielded from deportation

The alien claims: in his hometown he was targeted by a gang; the persecution persisted even after his family moved three times (though only a 15-minute drive away each time); and sending the alien out of the country was the family's last resort. The immigration pseudo-judge believed that claim and granted withholding of removal. The govt. did not appeal that determination.

The alien claims that the govt. has presented no evidence that he's a member of any gang at all, let alone MS-13 in particular.

How about we check for ourselves?

Here is the specific claim from Abrego Garcia v. Noem linked by OP:

'19. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia is not a member of or has no affiliation with Tren de Aragua, MS-13, or any other criminal or street gang. Although he has been accused of general “gang affiliation,” the U.S. government has never produced an iota of evidence to support this unfounded accusation.

Here is what the government says in their DEFENDANTS’ MEMORANDUM linked by OP:

During a bond hearing, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) stated that a confidential informant had advised that Abrego Garcia was an active member of the criminal gang MS-13. Id. ¶ 31. Bond was denied. See id. ¶¶ 34, 39; see also IJ Order, infra Ex. A, at 2–3 (finding that Abrego Garcia was a danger to the community); BIA Opinion, infra Ex. B, at 1–2 (adopting and affirming IJ Order, specifically finding no clear error in its dangerousness finding).

...

Abrego Garcia is barred from disputing that, as a member of the criminal gang MS-13, he is a danger to the community. This factual finding was made in his bond proceedings before the agency, IJ Order 2–3, and he appealed that finding to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which affirmed it as not clearly erroneous, BIA Opinion 1–2. Because he did not seek further review of the Board’s decision, that decision is a final judgment precluding relitigation of the issues it resolved.

So the government has presented evidence that Garcia was in a gang (a confidential informant). And the court has found that he was in fact a gang member. And when Garcia appealed that finding, the finding was affirmed. Which he did not again appeal.

Seems... not ideal... that people can just make stuff up in the "FACTS" section of court documents. Why are people allowed to claim things as "FACTS" that clearly aren't facts? The government either has or has not presented evidence that Garcia is in a gang. Both can't be true, and both sides are claiming that they did/did not provide evidence. Someone's "FACTS" are not actually factual.

This clearly does not meet the standards of a criminal trial in any civilized country, including the US. He did not get to face and cross-examine his accuser.

Given that what is at stake here is El Salvador locking him up long-term, I feel it is reasonable to require similar standards of evidence to a criminal trial.

I would maybe agree with your feelings if Garcia made any effort to come here legally. But he did not. He chose to lie and cheat his way in. So I feel it is reasonable to deport him, regardless of the outcome.

The government presented evidence that he was in a gang and took advantage of an extremely lenient (towards the government) of review ("not clearly erroneous") to prevent him from challenging it. This actually makes me more disposed to believe he isn't a gang member, since he got procedurally screwed out of challenging the claim.

It makes sense when you watch the Twitter/Cable News discourse. The baseless accusation that the government presented no evidence is not in the documentation so that it can hold up in court. It's there so that talking heads on Twitter and CNN can quote those documents angrily and selectively. It's laundering talking points through legal filings.

I understand why it was done by Garcia's lawyer. But before I looked into it I would have assumed that its against the rules to lie to judges in the lawsuits (or whatever it was) you file. The claim is that:

the U.S. government has never produced an iota of evidence to support this unfounded accusation.

Which clearly is not true. They did have evidence. Maybe it was really weak evidence, I don't know, but it was evidence. I'm not a lawyer, but can you really just get away with blatantly lying like that?

Could be an exact-words thing. The informant is anonymous and his exact words haven't been made public. Therefore the U.S. government has not produced the evidence, though it claims to possess it.

though only a 15-minute drive

For context, based on a recent visit, 20mph is a good speed in El Salvador.

The IJ found that he faced a likelihood of being tortured if returned to El Salvador and so could not be deported there as part of the US agreement on the UN Convention Against Torture.


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