culture war roundup
I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.
I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that address the proliferation of ways one can completely wreck their life in short order. Just like drugs are more potent than they were 50 years ago, marketing companies are much, much better at their jobs and barely-legal scams are more efficiently predatory than ever before. And meanwhile, humans are, if anything, a little dumber on average.
Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.
Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.
ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.
Even my deepest belief in personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.
But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.
It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.
And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.
Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.
The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...
Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.
Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or have a bank account at all? Or have kids?
How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)
Not Just Bikes has a new video out: How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it). I have a love/hate relationship with urbanist essayists like this. On the one hand, they often raise issues that most of the time are not explicitly considered by most people. On the other hand, they tend to have a very leftist perspective, and ignore important costs, benefits, and solutions.
The video makes roughly the following arguments:
- If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can do other things while in transit. This lowers the effective cost of traveling a given distance. As a consequence, there will be more demand for road space, increasing congestion.
- Because autonomous cars are so technology-laden, the market will favor a few large companies that offer a subscription model. There are several consequences of this, which can be summarized as: laws will favor the companies rather than the public.
- Getting into doomer territory, car makers might succeed in banning human drivers and pedestrians from most roadways, and increase speed limits to ridiculous levels, causing noise pollution and other problems. They might also get public transit banned (I'm not sure how this would happen but that's the argument).
Externalities
1 and 3 are similar problems. There are externalities that current laws don't address because they weren't huge problems given historical technology. Namely noise, tire pollution, and congestion. But new technology, autonomous cars, changes the costs and benefits of driving and will make these externalities much worse.
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers: highways, roads, parking spaces, parking garages. Bans are the same blunt tool that current laws use to force too much parking and not enough housing and bikes lanes to be built, just in the opposite direction. But he redeems himself by proposing putting a price on driving.
If you've ever heard of Arthur Pigou, a price on driving as the solution to 1 and 3 is pretty obvious. If someone really wants to drive at 4:30pm on a Friday when everyone else in the city wants to drive too, let them pay extra to be one of the people who can actually get places. There's a limit to how many people can actually get anywhere at that time, and we might as well offer the slots to the people who get the most value from it, and get some money back for public use in return. Charging a congestion fee completely solves the problem of autonomous vehicles circling the city hoping to be closest to the next customer. They have to pay the same fee as anyone else, so they'll only be on the road if they're the highest-value use of road space.
Not Just Bikes proposes investing in "functional and viable public transit", especially in forms that are difficult to remove, presumably to be able to resist transient political pressure. Of course, any publicly-run agency is going to have a very hard time running "functional and viable" transit when compared to a selfish private organization. And there's no reason a company that makes autonomous vehicles can't make and run buses as well.
A better solution is to price road space appropriately, and be agnostic to who's using the space. This allows the highest-value uses without artificially restricting to "public" or "autonomous" uses. Offer express lanes that guarantee certain speeds by limiting the number of vehicles that can enter. The entry fee is set high enough that there aren't any queues to enter. Crucial here is that any vehicle, private or public, should be able to use the lane as long as the driver pays the fee. This allows many more solutions to transit problems, without the dysfunction of publicly-run bus agencies. For example, corporate shuttles, church buses, and private rideshares should be allowed to use the same express lanes as public buses. And if Jay Leno wants to drive his personal car in the express lane, as long as he pays the fee, let him! Same goes for autonomous vehicle makers. If they want to reserve some space on freeways for their cars, make them compete on price the same as anyone else.
Putting a market-based fee on express lanes has a side benefit of making the opportunity cost of formerly transit-only lanes more legible. A few such market-based lanes can illustrate how expensive existing transit-only lanes really are.
Public Choice
Point 2, that laws will tend to favor autonomous car makers over the public, is just a specific example of public choice being a hard problem. There are analogous situations with Big Tech and the public commons, John Deere and right-to-repair, and Big Oil and climate regulations. I don't have a lot to say here, except that this has always been a problem, in other times and places has been much worse, and is likely to be manageable. People are smart.
An Aside on Congestion and Induced Demand
This video mentions the old chestnut that (paraphrasing) induced demand means it's pointless to increase road capacity. I'll quote one of our own:
Likewise a new freeway lane immediately filling up tells us there are still more people who want to be using this freeway.
If autonomous vehicles lead to people traveling more, that's good! It means more trips are now worth taking. People are visiting friends and relatives more often, working at jobs that are farther away but are a better fit for them, and in general doing more valuable things.
Conclusion
I'd like to see more discussion of the economics of transit, and economic solutions, especially without a leftist slant. But this is the first time I've seen a popular urbanist talk about the fact that self-driving cars will increase road use and congestion. This is great! This fact should be obvious to anyone who's spent five seconds thinking about the consequences of making driving cheaper, but I haven't seen it mentioned much outside rationalist circles. This point alone makes up for any other failings in this video.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10d ago
But back to NIMBYism, building more affordable housing would actually make living here worse and it can be argued mathematically: median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer.
Municipal budgets don't work like that. The vast majority of cities are funded nearly entirely by property taxes. More density nearly always results in higher property valuations and therefore higher tax revenue; density dominates building quality: a very nice single family home will still be significantly less valuable than however many mediocre townhouses you can squeeze onto the same plot of land. I guess the non-obvious part is how the cost of infrastructure like roads (cheaper per household with higher density) compares to the cost of services like schools (which should approximately scale proportional to the number of students), which you get into elsewhere in this thread talking about the cost of public school per student.
Hmmm...
I think that there's a group of 'public intellectuals' that includes Hanania, Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, Jesse Singal, and a few others, who have crammed themselves into a microniche of the influencer ecosystem where they play the same ragebait game as everyone else, but have the wherewithal to couch it in enough rhetorical flourish and data that they can maintain reputation as 'serious' intellectuals who are worth listening to even among the more respectable circles of discourse. They're basically squeezed in right beneath The Atlantic but above, say, Vice covering angles that are a bit too speculative for real news but never so lowbrow that they can't be discussed in polite company.
Their persona is basically "haha I agree with 95% of what [ideology] says, but on these specific issues I vehemently disagree and will vigorously bang the drum of dissent, bet you never expected that!" (Being FAIR, Ben Shapiro was also like this, but he's made the big time so he doesn't have to rely on this any more)
Hanania is very much a right-leaning mirror of Yglesias. He has high verbal IQ and is versed in the esoteric and counterintuitive arguments that were born from the neoreactionary movement, but makes himself out to be the moderate and rational alternative to said neoreactionaries.
I also think he doesn't have much interesting to say. His shtick seems to be "here's some piece of data or a study result that seems to contradict a particular right wing narrative, I hereby declare that narrative debunked!" Here's an example. "Haha, I found some data that vaguely disagrees with your point! How's it feel to be WRONG?" Then he gets dunked on but he achieved his goal of gaining attention.
And he isolates that data from almost any and all surrounding context so that the interlocutor is forced to introduce the necessary informational context which he can either ignore, or attack narrowly "that doesn't refute MY data!" even though the whole issue is HIS data, in context, doesn't really refute anything. Or, if he wishes, put on a layer of irony and claim he wasn't making his claim seriously anyway, you rube.
In short, they all like to pull 'micro' motte-baileys where they never make any serious claim that can be pinned down and destroyed, they stick their toe in the Bailey enough to garner some outrage but no so far that they can't defend the claim with some artful rhetoric.
I think their grift mode is to state some superficially fallacious contrarian argument, then claim that they'll address all critiques and counterarguments in their longer substack essay, which once you pay to access it and read it, you realize it is just a wordier version of the same arguments but then they have your money.
So they're just selling newsletters via particularly skilled trolling, if you will.
Side note, just to add to my earlier gripes about Noah Smith, here's him botching another prediction/analysis about topics he really doesn't grasp.
I'm fascinated by these young women -- where are they? Why aren't we hearing more from them?
I touched upon this earlier, but annecdotally, the mothers of young children, and women in stable relationships hoping to become mothers broke overwhelmingly for Trump, and again annecdotally a good part of that break seems to have come from the perception that the Democrats are the party of queer Tumblr bullshit.
The Trump add about Kamala being "the candidate of they and them not you" that was running in my neck of the woods for about a month prior to the election appears to have struck a cord. Afterall, would you trust this person with your kids? what about this person?
TequilaMockingbird
12d ago
Me from a couple months ago...
Speaking from inside the industry OpenAI hasn't been pushing the bar forward so much as they have been expanding access. To be fair this can be a lucrative buisiness model, Apple became the powerhouse that it is today by making "tech" accessible to non-techies. But Apple was also pretty open about this being thier model. Nobody expected thier Mac to represent the bleeding edge of computing, they expected it to "just work". Contrast this with openAI where they and thier boosters are promising
the moonimminent fully agentic super-intelligence but when you start peeling back the skin you find that the whole thing is a kludgy mess of nested regression engines with serious structural limitations.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
13d ago
I feel like you are confusing several separate issues. Nothing I've done in this thread is aimed at "protecting a user from criticism." Coffee_enjoyer was breaking the rules and obnoxiously axe-grinding
I can't discern him breaking any rules, or you explicitly accusing of breaking him of any rules, apart from the subjective "wildcard rule" about obnoxiousness. It's fine to have a wildcard rule that essentially says "don't do things we don't like", but to then try to pin the "breaking the rules" label on someone who only ran afoul of that rule is somewhere between a case of the noncentral fallacy and plain self-aggrandizement, where you expect other people to treat your taste with the same reverence as a written rule.
Your complaints are not at that level, but your candor over your distaste for Dean suggests to me that you are making a similar mistake: allowing animus toward a user to blind you to the fact that this is not ultimately about the user, but about the rules.
I think hounding other posters for evidence and forcing them to produce more evidence in a more legible way is an unalloyed good, actually. I'd love for you to prove me wrong, and show me an instance where someone is doing the same thing for a position that I agree with or user that I like where I think that it would be appropriate to moderate the pursuers. The closest example I can remember is where back in the Reddit era, people were piling up on darwin2000 (might have gotten the number part wrong) over not taking responsibility for boldly wrong predictions (in contexts such as the Smollett case). I was rather fond of him as a user and thought that he was an asset by virtue of putting out some overly welcoming hearths by merely existing, but was absolutely in favour of him being held accountable in the way he was.
I initially didn't want to make an argument based on accusations of bias, but looking through your posting history it seems plainly evident that you are deeply aligned with Dean on the Israel/Palestine question, and back the Israeli side in a way that can't be described as dispassionate. Are you sure that you are not letting your animus towards a side blind you to the fact that you are just using the rule that basically says "excuse to be deployed in edge cases" as an excuse in a case that is not particularly on edge? It's not like not being candid about this, or mostly avoiding engagement on substance (easy when an "excellent poster" is around to make your case for you anyway), magically makes you neutral. The least you could have done to not make this look as bad would have been to recuse yourself and let this be handled by another moderator who can express his views of the object-level issue with fewer expletives than this.
Separately, everything I said about Dean being a good poster was in direct response to coffee-enjoyer's obnoxious, overwrought, and rhetorical "is this the kind of posting you want!?" The answer was "yes, that's the point of the AAQCs, these are the kinds of posts we want." I was trying to find a way to help coffee_enjoyer understand why he was being moderated. Ultimately, I seem to have failed to find such a way; coffee_enjoyer seems to me far more interested in being angry about the disagreement between him and Dean (and, by extension, my moderating him over his approach), than in understanding that the problem is not the substance, but in the uncharitable and antagonistic nature of his engagement.
Well, forget about him. Can you explain to me, or anyone else, why he was being moderated? My current understanding is that you like Dean's posts in general and are moreover extremely unsympathetic to the anti-Israel position, and therefore perceive any persistent attempt to impose a tax on Dean's pro-Israel posting in its present shape as something that needs to be suppressed using the wildcard rule. Is this accurate?
You've left out my quite explicit point that AAQCs are not a bar to banning. Users cannot get away with "more extreme posts" indefinitely.
The clause doesn't have to be parsed as "(more extreme) posts" for the cycle to hold; it is absolutely sufficient for it to be "more (extreme posts)". Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago - and the way in which they are bad was originally trailblazed by "quality posters" who evidently were so favoured that unless someone took one for the team and raised a stink out in the open, you wouldn't even know that reports were just being redirected into the trash due to their standing, as opposed to nobody seeing a problem at all to begin with. Once the prolific and beloved posters all do it, the nobodies are free to follow suit.
In the end, we can't maintain this space at all if we worry too much about what might or might not "drive users away."
Is this a belief that's based on a concrete observation of bad things that happened when you "worried too much", or just rationalising the easy option of going with your gut?
One person's final straw is someone else's welcoming hearth.
One does not make up for the other. People can still make good posts and interesting conversation away from a welcoming hearth, but by definition they won't after they had to bear their final straw. You can run a good version of this forum while being a welcoming hearth to nobody, but you can't run one while putting the final straw on too many, especially if you selectively do so on just about everyone except those having a particular gamut of opinion.
Do you imagine there is any argument or evidence at all that could persuade you to change your current approach to moderation, or is it a matter of either having to take your ride to wherever it leads or getting off?
naraburns
nihil supernum
14d ago
Does your Trump theory have any predictive power?
Sort of? I'm trying to anticipate their strategy for undermining Trump, on the assumption that they will indeed have (at least!) one.
Specifically, I'm wondering about a possible echo of something like this. Only instead of (or perhaps in addition to) race, a relentless stream of dubious abortion tragedies and sex and sexuality discussions. Many commentators here and elsewhere have observed a recent "cooling" of Wokeness in public discourse; was that just a rush to centrism in an effort to get Kamala elected? Does Trump's victory raise the culture war temperature?
The local site with the similar spin is not surprising; the spin is largely self-executing in this case. The decision to elevate any particular assault to national news, however, requires some conscious decision-making.
Yes, California's ruling class has been quite vocal in their repudiation of the low-key barstool populism of men like Nixon and Reagan. How has that been working out for them? You want to see what the "third-worlding" of America looks like in practical terms? California is your patient zero.
The 'browning of America' counts everyone who is not white.
Yes I know. It's also a rather stupid and Unamerican way to frame things, which is why I made the point to say the "Asiaing" or "South Americaing" of America. Because you see, the problem is not white people brown people or blue people. (that's the woke mind-virus talking) The problem is the importation of parasites and social dysfunction from Asia and South America.
You see, the specific corner of the US I am in has a sizeable black/brown population that's been here since the 18th century. In short, my America isn't "browning" so much as it is brown and has been for longer than anyone can remember. It is also obvious at a glance that it's not these people who are the problem. You want to see the problem? look to California, look to the Northeast. There is your problem.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
14d ago
If 1.5ppm reduces IQ's by 2-5 points, what is the reduction in IQ's from the recommended level of 0.7? Keep in mind that the recommended level was 1.2 until recently.
The number is between zero and 2-5, assuming no hormesis. Based on Cremieux's arguments here, I lean towards closer to zero.
Markets of ideas can't work if everyone just buys an index fund. Aren't you at all curious about this?
Far be it from me to compel people to buy index funds. Let a thousand flowers bloom. For my part, I'm not convinced that there is a there there at all, and I don't see anyone making any argument that would suggest that the scale of the problem is anywhere near spewing lead from every tailpipe.
There also has to be someone buying puts for the market to function, after all.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14d ago
It is worth pointing out that the Kingdom of Canada is still technically a vassal of the British Empire, so pressing the claim would mean with war with the top liege and all his vassals, which probably include nuclear Gandhi.
(1) It is somewhat interesting to note that Victoria 3 has introduced a new tier above empire, called "hegemony". (It reminds me of my abortive attempt to make a Crusader Kings 2 mod with all the titles shifted down by a step, so that "mega-empires" like India and Rome could be on their own tier separate from regular empires like Bengal and Italy.) In-game, India is a hegemony, Britain is an empire, and Canada is a kingdom. Personally, though, I think it makes more sense to call Canada an empire, with each province afforded the dignity of kingdom status in the federation. (The USA's states, with their tradition of "dual sovereignty", definitely should count as kingdoms.)
(2) Canada is not a vassal of Britain. Rather, the title is still personally held by Charles himself, though he has delegated the administrative minutiae to local steward Trudeau. Call it a personal union. (India does count as a vassal.)
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
14d ago
That I could wake up in the morning with enough states undeclared (by two of the three organizations used to resolve Polymarket) to plausibly swing the result is horrific optics.
Completely agree with you. This was my greatest fear, should not be possible at all. With more resources and organisation it should not be possible. I wish at the very least that the FEC sent 'flying squads' to the swing states to act as a QRF for any of these bullshit anomalies. As soon as any of this shit pops up on a radar, that counting office gets 20 Feds dropping in to stand over them. There needs to be consequences for even looking like you're trying something funky.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
14d ago
The fundamental disconnect is that you don't see what Nietzsche interprets as a continuity between the ancient barbarian conquerors and noble classes of civilization. You play the game of "oh I love the United States but I disavow the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Indians, sorry we were sooo barbaric for doing that!" Nietzsche related the future aristocracy with barbarian conquerors. The Pirates were not a "future aristocracy" they were a bitter underclass! The Romans, the Greeks, the Anglo-Saxons, they were Noble and the pirates were not Noble. Simple as.
The word "Aryan" denoted and was synonymous with "Noble", pointing towards an ethnic self-conception of these barbarian conquerors as Noble. The point being, the "barbarian conquerors" should be viewed as proto-Aristocrats, because they were across everything we regard as Civilization: the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Aryans, etc. They actually became the upper and ruling classes of the civilization you hold in high regard.
The armies of illiterate savages who sacked Rome were actually a civilizing force
Not so much a civilizing force as a cleansing force of a civilization that decayed under dysgenic forces. And yes, those barbarians warlords did become the future aristocracy, particularly in Northern Italy.
The entire idea of a Pirate is as an inversion or ressentiment towards The Aristocract. The Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Greek, Roman, etc. is the aspirational aristocrat. Their genealogy actually composed the forces of civilization.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
15d ago
What's Tulsi going to head, DHS?
I'm more interested in Musk's promised cost-cutting measures. His whole mode of operation is "guardrails and red tape are for stupid people", while federal bureaucracy is 90% guardrails and red tape. How much carte blanche is he going to get to overhaul the departments before the Congress realizes what's going on?
I once posted a hypothetical here about Trump trying to hollow out one of the noncompliant departments. I can now actually imagine this happening: Trump might be all about vibes, but Musk can easily post a department-wide email that goes, "Just to let everyone know, I've just made myself the sole AD domain administrator, everyone's access has been terminated. Attached is the list of people the new Secretary and I will interview today. If they pass, they will start interviewing more people and so on, so your access will be gradually restored in the next few days. However, I'm going to remain the only one who can approve anything in SAP until the new spending policy is in place. Oh, and let the guys who have come to fix the hinges on the server room door in"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Three reasons.
First, DIY tech is constantly improving, and it's already well past the point where guns can in fact be controlled. Gun control is a dead letter simply from a practical perspective. Crime is a major political concern and likely will be for some time, and in that time the Gun Culture will continue killing it on outreach to the youth.
Second, the Gun Culture will not accept new legislation, will not comply with it if passed, and is actively and aggressively eroding the existing laws. The AR15 has been thoroughly normalized. SBRs are completely normalized. Automatic weapons are effectively normalized, both in legal and illegal versions; I'm given to understand that you can 3d-print glock switches for example. What you're going to see is the legal full auto giving cover to the illegal, until outright defiance is completely normalized and any enforcement effort becomes a moot point. I'm hopeful similar things will happen with more significant weapons as well.
Third, technological developments are almost certainly going to moot the whole question within the decade. What people will be worrying about won't be guns.
TequilaMockingbird
15d ago
Ill admit that I was one of those people and am finding myself pleasantly surprised to be (at first pass at least) eating crow.
Too soon to tell re: my alternate lower confidence prediction/conspiracy theory.
What sort of "accountability" did you have in mind?
TequilaMockingbird
15d ago
I have germ of a post thats been percolating since this exchange here about how it's dumb to indulge in doomerism that I ought to flesh out along these lines.
But to answer your question about "what happened", the answer is that the fight isnt over until everyone agrees on who won. Reaganism was supposed to have been done-in by the end of the Cold War and the rise of "Progress" and Globalization but, to all appearances, its back baby.
It's Better to be Lucky than Good
I’m not a practiced Bayesian, and to be honest this is as much as a victory lap as it is a reflection on my priors. Oh lets, be honest. This is mostly a victory lap.
My major election posts in the lead up:
-
I noted Joe Rogan had solidified his status as a Kingmaker after the Trump interview. This seems to have been born out by Trump’s quick acknowledgment of Rogan’s endorsement and the large shout out by Dana White in Trump’s Victory speech. Even before the interview, I noted Trump going on Rogan was a Big Deal. I realized I was right about the impact when NBC of all things made multiple references to the ‘Joe Rogan Army’ during their election coverage when noting the young male turnout.
-
After going on Rogan, the McDonalds photo op, and Kamala’s failure to resonate in her campaign, I made a Trump win prediction at 55-60% certainty 10 days before the election.
-
I quickly noted the Selzer poll was likely bullshit.
Things I got wrong:
-
I underestimated the impact of the Garbage fiasco. I thought it was just more random flotsam in the election and would probably be quickly forgotten. To be fair I didn’t know Trump’s team would use meme magic to force the MSM to cover Trump speaking from a garbage truck. The nail in the coffin was when he honked the horn (rare footage)
-
I didn’t post about this, but I did upvote Blackpill posts about Democrat election fraud. I really did expect 3am mystery trucks, election officials putting up paper over the windows and keeping monitors outside, gas/water leaks and restarting the count after monitors had gone home etc etc at about 65-70% certainty. That didn’t eventuate thankfully.
Takeaways:
I’m not an American citizen/resident so I’m not immersed in the election. I am ‘very online’. I rate my election prediction performance as ‘not bad’ for this one, but I put that down to my information diet curation. My major aggregator was actually here at the Motte (with some other centrist non-MSM sources) and I would then go down rabbit holes myself for further research. I leveraged the screening and arguments of this forum to better inform myself, so I consider myself pretty lucky to be here.
One last point is that I’m upgrading my view of betting markets to consider them a credible source. They won’t be my only source, but I’m now taking them seriously. Polymarket got this one right.
Honestly, I was nonplussed at how convinced The Motte was about a Kamala victory in the predictions subthread. Most picked Harris, and even those who picked Trump expressed less confidence than the prediction markets, which were about 65% Trump at the time.
My guess? I don't think you guys are susceptible to propaganda so much as addicted to the black pill. This is a very dour message board. So I agree with the second half of your post more than the headline.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
Like I said the fully Trump captured GOP invested heavily in proactively preventing what they believed were the avenues of voter fraud Trump has never given up on from 2020. I can't exactly take a victory lap because even I said I thought an outcome like this was weak circumstantial evidence. But maybe the GOP's heavy investment in fraud prevention carried the day. We may never know since the election only happens once, and we'll never see the counterfactual.
naraburns
nihil supernum
16d ago
I Am Not Immune to Propaganda
I'm bad with numbers, but it feels pretty likely to me. Is that 70%-80%? I don't think I'd say 90%, the electoral college situation does give me some hesitation. By "inevitable" I mean "I don't see anything short of a black swan event shifting the outcome from where it's currently headed," not "I'm 100% sure of this specific outcome."
I furthermore said:
Insofar as Harris has not (yet?) done anything blatantly unconstitutional, I also think it is a little more likely than not (55%? 60%?) that a true electoral win from Trump could still see his inauguration prevented by his opponents, hook or crook. This could potentially be done by preventing an apparent electoral victory simply by thumbing the scales in a few key states.
I rarely "put a number on it." If I had a head for numbers, I would probably have gone into tech instead of becoming a professional wordcel. I don't know what "80%" feels like, the way so many people seem to. But lately I have been trying to, if not quantify my predictions, at least hold myself more accountable for them. I would like to be better at predicting things, partly because I want to become a bit less risk-averse. That means hedging less, and stating more, and looking back at why I was right or wrong.
There is of course still time for Trump's opponents to prevent his inauguration, or try. The fact that the major news networks refused to certify his clear and overwhelming victory for many hours after it was obvious even to them, definitely made me worry that we were in for a repeat of 2020. Instead, we got a repeat of 2016. We do still have to make it two months without lawfare or rioting hindering the process, but the way things are looking this morning, I'm much less confident about this. (Probably my next substantive question is, "what will Jack Smith try next?")
So, what led me to these errors? I don't know! But I have some working theories.
Pessimism: I did not want Kamala Harris to become the President. Politically, my adult life has been a string of disappointments. So my priors on "the candidate I like least will win the election" are high, even though I know rationally that whether or not I like a candidate has very little to do with their electability. I also know many people who are in the habit of predicting that things will happen and, when pressed, will explain that they want those things to happen.
Insufficient Skepticism: Probably anyone who has spent more than five minutes on the Motte knows that I mistrust corporate news media a lot. I am even aware that polls are politically slanted. And yet, somehow, every time I went looking into the polls behind the media's unapologetic shilling for Harris, I came away thinking, "even if that result is wrong, surely it's not so wrong that Trump could actually pull this off." And maybe this just goes back to my difficulty with numbers. But I am such a skeptical person by nature that it feels too convenient to conclude that, no, I need to be even more skeptical.
Superstition: Early yesterday evening, when it became apparent that the "blue wall" was nowhere to be seen, a family member said to me, "he might actually do this!" And I found myself reluctant to agree because I didn't want to jinx it. This is stupid, and I have a hard time seeing how it could have fed into my actual predictions, but combined with the pessimism (above) I apparently have a reflexive resistance to agreeing that something could actually come out the way I want it to.
But maybe you have some different theories? I'm open to suggestions!
Now--all of that said, I do have to congratulate myself on one (possibly ego-protective) thing:
I never did put any money on Harris.
Part of my process this time was telling myself: "you know she's going to win, so you can make some money on it. Plus, if she loses, you'll be happy, so you won't mind the pecuniary loss. Now is the perfect time to finally get into those prediction markets Scott Alexander is always talking about!"
But I couldn't do it. I had initially thought to make myself a killing by betting $10,000, but I found myself feeling too risk-averse. What about $1,000? Or $100? Every time I opened up the necessary apps to start the process, I talked myself out of it.
So did I really think Kamala was going to win? If I wasn't willing to put any skin in the game, did I really believe what I said I believed? I think I did! It feels like I did. But I can't dismiss the possibility that my instincts are better at math than my conscious thoughts. I saved myself thousands of dollars by being pessimistic, skeptical, maybe even a little superstitious. And I'm not entirely sure what to make of that.
Yes - Harris' grand strategy was to build the largest possible anti-Trump coalition, rather than to present a positive vision of her centre-left (or left) plans for America. If you thought (as I did) that the biggest groups of persuadable voters were NeverTrump conservatives and double-haters then this would have have been the right approach. But it appears that it wasn't. I say appears because of the strong possibility based on polls and betting markets that essentially nothing has affected this election since the Dems nominated Harris, and that it has always been 51-49 for Trump with us just not being able to read the runes with the polling technology we have.
they are pretty close to it, last time I checked
Check again, they get nominated for AAQCs, and deservedly so (https://www.themotte.org/post/983/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/208068?context=8#context, https://www.themotte.org/post/987/quality-contributions-report-for-april-2024).
If you want a joke forum maybe you should consider reddit yourself?
I don't want a joke forum, but I do want a serious discussion forum in which cracking jokes and good-natured ribbing are permitted and even encouraged. Which is why I'm here.
low-effort punching-down
An anonymous rando cracking a joke about two fabulously wealthy and powerful women who each came within a hair's breadth of becoming the literal leaders of the free world (and one of whom is currently literally next in line to become the leader of the free world) now constitutes "punching down". Lol. But thank you for providing such an illustrative example of a point I made months ago regarding how the "punching up/down" concept is so prone to abuse:
In practice, all you need to do is find one axis on which Alice is considered to be worse off than Bob, and then claim that her position on this axis negates whatever positions she might occupy on any other axes which might be relevant to the debate over who has more power in an interpersonal or political debate. (Hillary Clinton may be white, cis, straight, fabulously wealthy, well-educated and extremely powerful in the literal sense of having held numerous high-ranking government positions in a career spanning decades - but she is a WOMAN, therefore all criticism and jokes directed at her are unacceptable punching down.)
Moving on.
But to me, it's not even a funny-mean joke, nor particularly inventive; it's just mean.
Fair enough. Doesn't mean it's against the rules. I never claimed it was "inventive" (and now the goalposts are moving again: "your joke did not reach @EverythingIsFine's minimum threshold for creativity, three-day ban"): it was just playful teasing, which this thread and forum are full of.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
I had my thesis. Was I right? Yet to see. Those 3 am vote dumps are still possible.
Copyright is obviously a license.
Yes, that's one way to add a license to a photo. However, as I mentioned, nobody actually did this.
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