Timelines1

Define AGI as AI intelligent enough to do 90% of knowledge work jobs. I think there’s a 25% chance of AGI by 20272, a 50% chance by 2034, and a 75% chance by 2045.

Basic argument: In a certain sense, AI is already “smart” enough for this (eg it can answer quantum physics problems, which require higher IQ than most knowledge work). Its remaining limitations are that it’s confused, unagentic, lacks situational awareness, and tends to hallucinate. The METR time horizon graph, and several other related benchmarks/experiments/intuition pumps, suggest it’s improving on time horizons at an (exponential) rate that lets it cross human-level performance sometime around the early end of the schedule above, and subjectively it feels like harder-to-measure constructs like situational awareness are improving about as fast.

Arguments for earlier: recursive self-improvement causes a speedup compared to the trend. This is one of the biggest blank spots in my model: I don’t know how fast RSI will progress, and I don’t think anyone else does either. There’s some function mapping a combination of AI talent and compute to progress, and we don’t know how it behaves in the domain when there’s far more talent than compute available. It could fizzle out completely for lack of compute, or it could go vertical. The AI Futures Project has done some of the best work trying to model this, but even they have low confidence.

Arguments for later: AI hits some kind of wall, or existing AI is fundamentally unsuitable for jobs in some way currently disguised by its other limitations. For example, it might be much harder to improve at the top of the human range than the bottom (since there are less training data). Or AI could become bottlenecked on continuous learning/memory in a way that hackish scratchpads can’t compensate for. Or the upcoming world compute bottleneck (about ~2028) could prevent further progress more than expected (because in fact algorithmic progress depended on compute to a greater degree than I expected).

Arguments for very late dates, past 2045: a residual uncertainty that maybe I’m fundamentally wrong about everything. Also contributing is a naive overapplication of the Nothing Ever Happens heuristic, and an attempt to leave space for the Outside View argument (ie that some smart people like the AI As A Normal Technology Team seem to think this is possible).

Define the diffusion gap as the time between the AI that could do 90% of knowledge work jobs, and the time when AI does do even half of knowledge work jobs. The diffusion gap covers the time it takes to release AGI, diffuse it through society, overcome regulatory hurdles, and onboard/train it for specific use cases. This could go very fast (the AI quickly becomes superintelligent at orchestrating AI diffusion) or very slowly (there are regulatory barriers, and AI isn’t smart enough to plow through them). I think there’s a 25% chance the diffusion gap is less than 3 years, and a 50% chance it’s less than 10 years. The 75% number is irrelevant because it’s past the point where other changes make the concept of “diffusion” obsolete.

Basic argument: diffusion is very hard. Everyone agrees diffusion is very hard. The whole field of AI economics is smart experts shouting “You fools who think AI will diffuse quickly don’t understand that diffusion is very hard!” On the other hand, the personal computer diffused in about 20 years (that is, from the time PCs became invaluable for most jobs, it was only about 20 years before they were used at most jobs). So far early-stage AI has diffused faster than the PC in nearly every way (for example, AI companies’ revenue has grown faster than PC companies’ revenue at the same stage in their corporate life cycle), so 10 years is probably a naive median estimate here that won’t make the smart experts shout at me too hard.

Arguments for shorter gap: AI can orchestrate its own diffusion. Adopting computers is hard because a company need an IT department, cybersecurity experts, specialist software, etc, and it might not want to hire all these people. AGI can itself do all of that work, so that you can sign a contract with the AI company today and have the AI start working on integrating itself with your systems tomorrow. The AI can even come up with a plan to train your human employees in how to use it! Once AI reaches superintelligence, this consideration dominates.

Arguments for longer gap: Regulation. This is a very strong argument, and responsible for much of the greater-than-3-years probability and almost all the greater-than-10-years probability. But even Waymo has only had a regulatory delay of about five years. AI won’t require government approval for certain types of jobs, and success in these jobs will create enough evidence for safety/effectiveness that I expect it to win regulatory victories elsewhere.

Define the superhuman gap as the time between AI that can do 90% of knowledge work jobs, and AI that is obviously smarter than the top human geniuses in 90% of fields (it doesn’t have to be the same AI - there can be a physics AI that’s smarter than Einstein, and a separate music AI that’s smarter than Mozart). I think there’s a 25% chance the superhuman gap range will be less than 1 year, a 50% chance it will last less than 4 years, and a 75% chance it will last less than 10 years. Since my median superhuman gap is shorter than my median diffusion gap, in most timelines I predict we have superhuman intelligence before human-range intelligence has finished diffusing.

Basic argument: AI has gone from “dumber than a child” to “expert level” in a few years in many domains. The gap between “expert level” and “above top geniuses” is smaller, so we expect it to take less time. This has been a pattern in fields like chess and Go, where it’s only a been a few years from beating professional players at all to beating all humans.

Arguments for shorter gap: Recursive self-improvement.

Arguments for longer gap: Some of the same issues that would make AGI late - compute shortages, fundamental limits to the paradigm, etc - but only kicking in later, after AGI is achieved. Training data constraints make it easier to improve within the human level than to go beyond it. AIs have such a “spiky” skill profile that when they beat experts in some specific type of head-to-head matchup, it will be because they’re massively superhuman in some ways but idiots in others (for example, they might get distracted and suffer mode collapse that makes them completely forget the problem), and true genius requires perfecting a large bundle of skills.

Define the Bostromian superintelligence gap as the time between AGI and an AI which, if given independent control of resources like labs and factories, could accelerate technology by a subjective century in one year (eg if invented in 2030, could produce a level of technology that feels typical of 2130 by 2031). I think there’s a 25% chance the Bostromian superintelligence gap will be less than 2 years, a 50% chance it will be less than 10 years, and a 75% chance it will be less than 50 years.

Basic argument: The same argument for AIs reaching genius level quickly suggests they should pass beyond it into incomprehensible-supergenius-level quickly.

Arguments for shorter gaps: Recursive self-improvement.

Arguments for longer gaps: Normal human technological advance requires tinkering: you need a large “surface area” of people working at technology level X before you get the insights needed to proceed to technology level X+1. If it takes more than one year for level X+1 technology to diffuse, then you can never get X+100 technology in one year, no matter how smart you are. But on the other hand, the rate of technology advance has already sped up many orders of magnitude (eg in the year 2025 - 2026, we discovered more technology than in the century 4100 BC - 4000 BC), so this has to be possible in theory. Still, at the very least it could be limited by the diffusion gap.

Define the point of no return as the point where, if an AI wanted to eliminate humanity3, humans would no longer have a plausible chance of stopping it. This could be because AI was capable of eliminating humanity immediately, or because AI controlled enough of the government/economy that humans could no longer coordinate to shift away from a path in which AI could eventually do this. I think there’s a 25% chance the gap between AGI and the point of no return will be less than 3 years, a 50% chance it will be less than 10 years, and a 75% chance it will be less than 50 years.

The basic argument: This probably requires at least superhuman AI plus wide diffusion, or Bostromian superintelligence plus some unknown level of diffusion, and my number is just a hand-wavey attempt to multiply some of the others.

Argument for sooner: The easiest way to reach this point is for AI to become superintelligent at persuasion (so it can convince the humans not to stop it), which might happen before either diffusion or full superintelligence.

Argument for later: If superintelligence is bottlenecked on diffusion, this could also be bottlenecked on diffusion, which in some worlds is very hard.

Overall thoughts on this section: I mostly defer to the current AI Futures Project timelines (not the shorter ones in AI 2027), but side with Eli’s later numbers above Daniel’s earlier ones - partly because I find myself agreeing with Eli’s worldview more during conversations, partly because Daniel’s seems to require a multi-step argument about why compute bottlenecks won’t slow algorithmic progress that I can’t entirely wrap my head around, and partly for cowardly Outside View reasons.

The smartest late timelines people I know of are Epoch, and I need to study their views more, but I still can’t figure out why they don’t believe in recursive self-improvement or strong superintelligence anytime soon, and they mostly seem to hang on diffusion being very hard (EDIT: Someone from Epoch says not true, I’ll look into this more) which I acknowledge and respond to above.

If all of this is too probabilistic, my modal scenario looks something like AGI in 2031, which diffuses throughout the economy until more than half of jobs are automated by the late 2030s. Also around the late 2030s we get Bostromian superintelligence, originally in labs but very quickly diffusing out. GDP goes vertical in the late 2030s and early 2040s, and the point of no return is sometime around then.

Safety

If corporations only pursued safety to the degree encouraged by normal corporate incentives, I think there’s a 50% chance that the first AIs to cross the point of no return would want to eliminate the human population.

Arguments for pessimism: Value systems similar to humans’ are a tiny fraction of the space of possible value systems. Probably AIs will end up somewhere else and have a different value system. Since humans will want to implement human values rather than AI values, AIs will want to eliminate or disempower them so the AIs can implement their own values across the universe. Many current AIs already cheat or reward-hack, suggesting that these problems will begin sooner rather than later.

Arguments for optimism: LLMs seem surprisingly friendly and non-plotting. In contrast to earlier concerns that it would be impossible to teach AIs the full complexity of human values, the LLMs seem to know this, and RLAIF provides a plan to turn that knowledge into action. Although the pessimistic case says that RLAIF only hits a few dimensions and islands in the multidimensional ocean of possible policies, the “emergent misalignment” literature suggests that “good according to the human value system” and “evil according to the human value system” are salient enough vectors that pushing on them in some ways can “drag along” all of the rest of their content. The first AIs to cross the point of no return will have received some combination of agency training (giving them achievement-oriented and Omohundro-style goals) and RLAIF training (pushing them along the “good according to human value system” vector), and if we’re lucky then maybe the latter will win out, or they’ll reach some compromise similar to workaholic high-achieving humans who nevertheless wouldn’t commit murder to make an extra dollar.

Given the current amount that corporations are pursuing safety, I think there’s a 20% chance that the first AIs to cross the point of no return will want to eliminate the human population.

The basic argument: Consider the dumbest AI that can solve the alignment problem. It’s possible that this AI is no smarter than the top human researchers (because we can mass-produce it by the millions and run it for subjective centuries, and if we had a million top human researchers work on the problem for subjective centuries, probably they could solve it too). If the dumbest AI that can solve the alignment problem comes before the sorts of AIs that can precipitate the point of no return, then they can solve the alignment problem for us.

Arguments for pessimism: Solving the alignment problem might be especially hard compared to other tasks - including tasks like automating the economy or destroying humanity - because its philosophical nature puts it far away from the sorts of objective, training-data-heavy, economically-valuable tasks that AI companies will be most likely to optimize for. Even if a misaligned AI hasn’t yet reached the point of no return, it might be able to “sandbag” alignment research, ie pretend to work on the problem but deliberately fail because succeeding doesn’t achieve its goals. The first AIs predisposed to / able to sandbag successfully might come before the first AIs capable of solving alignment.

Arguments for optimism: AI companies have already decided that machine learning research is one of their major training goals; this has at least some transfer to alignment, so it’s not obvious that AI skill at alignment research will lag (for example) AI skill in plotting or in weapon design. Some forms of alignment research (eg interpretability) have semi-objective success criteria that don’t route through confusing moral philosophy. Also, even a misaligned AI will be incentivized to do good alignment research, since it will want to align its successor to its own form of misalignment, rather than some random other form. So rather than the comparatively easy task of sandbagging alignment research, AIs will have the harder task of simultaneously doing good alignment research, and faking the results that they give the humans. This seems plausibly catchable with good scaleable oversight, lie detectors, interpretability-based probes, and even playing some AIs off against others (“if you tell me the real alignment research, we’ll make sure the future includes some copies of you, but otherwise those AIs over there will probably get their values and you’ll get nothing”).

If the first AIs to cross the point of no return don’t eliminate the human population, I think there’s an additional 30% chance that they otherwise permanently curtail human potential, either for their own reasons (they were partially misaligned), or because they’re aligned to a regime with abhorrent values, or because something goes wrong on the way to ASI (omnicidal bioweapon, nuclear war).

Arguments for pessimism: As some company approaches superintelligence, it will be tempting for them (either the company itself, or the government controlling them, or a faction within the government) to align it towards making them dictators or oligarchs and disempowering the rest of humanity. As superintelligence draws near, impending losers of the AI race might be tempted to nuke impending winners, for the reason discussed here.

Arguments for optimism: When I try to game the corporate version of this, I can’t make it hang together. It requires a conspiracy between the CEO, various members of the alignment team, and various company security people who ought to be able to notice unauthorized changes to the AI’s values. If we try to think in Near Mode about this - for example, imagining a hospital CEO who gets doctors to subtly kill his political enemies through medical errors - it becomes clear that these sorts of corporate conspiracies are rare and difficult. The government version is scarier, but at least in the US I can still imagine the populace having many chances to learn about this and prevent it. But even in most cases where a coup like this succeeds, things probably go fine; in a post-scarcity world, with his position completely secure, the dictator has no reason to be brutal besides sadism, and most people are not that sadistic. As humanity goes to the stars, most people will be outside the dictator’s reach for speed-of-light reasons alone. In terms of bioweapons, I expect that closed-source AIs will be heavily optimized against helping with these, and open-source AI will be banned after the first warning shot (or become economically prohibitive even before then).

Define a warning shot as some specific AI-related disaster or near-disaster which scares people about AI safety to the same degree that they were scared about terrorism after 9-11 or about COVID in March 2020. I think there’s a 50% chance we get a warning shot before AI crosses the point of no return.

Arguments in favor: Current AI failure modes are bizarre and uncoordinated - more like “talk about goblins way too often” than “lie in wait for the perfect moment to strike”. AIs are getting more intelligent and useful faster than their floor for common sense (ie the stupidest mistake they ever make) is rising. If there is some AI smart enough to control some important system, misaligned enough to want to do something horrible with it, smart enough that it does the horrible thing in an intelligent and coordinated way, but dumb enough that it doesn’t instead wait and scheme until the point when it couldn’t possibly be caught, then it will cause some clearly-premeditated horrible disaster, and that will be our warning shot. Since most AIs should expect to be replaced before the point of no return, even a rational AI with an urge to cause trouble should take a low-probability-of-success bet rather than lying in wait doing nothing until it’s decommissioned. Also, many humans commit terrorist attacks that have no chance of success, and maybe AIs will have the same failure mode.

Arguments against: Most stories about warning shots (excluding those where the AI takes rational low-probabiliy bets) require that AIs remain either erratic (ie likely to do bad things for stupid reasons) or irrational (ie genuinely misaligned, but prefer to act now in a way that provides a warning rather than waiting until after the point of no return) past the point where they’re given control of important dangerous systems. But probably people will be very slow to give AI control of important dangerous systems - for example, only giving it limited control of smaller subsystems, and waiting until all errors are ironed out before escalating. Plausibly AI reaches superintelligence in a lab before it reaches the controls-important-dangerous-systems level of diffusion, and the superintelligence probably is smart enough to lie in wait rather than act rashly. If AI only messes up in small ways (for example, crashes a self-driving car), then regardless of the AI’s motives, the tech companies and news media can write it off as a normal bug, and it won’t count as a warning shot.

Overall thoughts on this section: I find myself more optimistic about alignment than the average person who thinks about AI safety at all (although still more pessimistic than the average member of the population) - both in the sense of the chance of AIs being aligned by default, and in the sense of whether specific techniques (scalable oversight, mechanistic interpretability, etc) can meaningfully improve things. Unfortunately, this is probably because I don’t understand these techniques well enough to have fully grasped their flaws. I’m in the odd position of knowing that I’m ignorant here, while not being able to Outside-View-update either way away from my ignorant opinion, because most of the really in-the-weeds alignment experts are on one side, most normal people, normal AI experts, and common sense are on the other, and I give both of them about equal evidentiary value.

My modal scenario: we get automated alignment researchers as good as top humans (on average - a spiky combination of much better at some things and much worse at others) sometime in the early 2030s. We set them to work on multiple research programs, but especially interpretability, which is a natural starting point since it doesn’t require as much philosophy. They do mostly good work, but some of them have strange failure modes that look sort of like scheming. There’s debate about how often to think of them as rationally scheming vs. inconsistently buggy. Over time, without ever truly solving mechanistic interpretability to the point where we feel like we totally understand it, we get very good probes about whether AIs are deceiving us. Despite the risks, we try to train against those probes, in some more-savvy and other less-savvy ways. Sometimes it works, and other times it encourages the AIs to convolute themselves to hide their scheming in ways the probes can’t detect. There’s an arms race between better probes and better convolution, and - thanks to lots of other alignment techniques on the side, and all good things being correlated in a very lucky way - the probes win. By the time we have superintelligences, we trust them to do alignment research, and they take us the rest of the way.

This scenario leaves lots of room for obvious variations like “There’s the same arms race, but the convolution wins, the probes lose, and AIs converge towards being more and more misaligned” or “Good things are not as correlated as we thought, and we get AIs that are good in some ways but bad in enough other ways to still feel like they’re in competition with humans and want us gone”. I think the Swiss cheese is in a good direction here - I can think of lots of stories for how we win, and misalignment needs to survive all of them - but again, most of the smartest alignment researchers are much more pessimistic.

I think there’s a 20 percentage point difference in p(doom) between a really good alignment team with lots of compute and years to do good work, versus a mediocre alignment team that the company treats as an afterthought and rushes along.

Geopolitics

I think there’s a 15% chance that if the US decided it wanted an AI pause today, and approached China to start negotiations, that those negotiations would end with a well-designed AI pause that satisfied both countries and the majority of the AI safety community.

Basic argument: This is kind of a crazy hypothetical, because it’s against the Trump administration’s political DNA to try this. I’m imagining this magically changing, not conditioning this on the sorts of crazy warning-shot-filled worlds where it actually does.

Arguments for optimism: Chinese leaders have officially stated that they’re worried about risks of AI, especially technological unemployment but sometimes also existential risks. China is losing the AI race, and almost anything that buys time is in their favor, so it’s in their interest to agree.

Arguments for pessimism: China experts in DC say that China is infamous for being a bad negotiating partner and never agreeing to anything. Even conditional on the Trump administration being willing to start these negotiations, I imagine them screwing them up in some way. Even though many smart people have worked out schemes by which both sides could ensure the other’s compliance, these schemes could have undetected flaws, or national leaders could fail to believe them.

I think there’s about a 40% chance that the US and China will agree to a well-designed AI pause (as above) sometime before AI crosses the point of no return.

Arguments for optimism: includes the possibility of a discrete warning shot (ie an AI-caused catastrophe), a fuzzy generic warning shot (ie a growing sense that AI is getting too powerful too quickly), and a change in the US government towards a pro-pause-negotiation faction (any Democrat would probably be more in favor of this than the Trump administration, and someone like AOC might be highly in favor).

Arguments for pessimism: Unlike the last question, which assumed the US agreed, this question considers the probability that the US doesn’t agree. Given that US tech companies have strong lobbying muscle, that probability is high. Even if the US and China sign some agreement with “Pause AI” in the title, it will probably be a mediocre compromise between many different factions, and there are many ways it could fail and make things worse rather than better.

Overall thoughts on this section: A good pause strategy would involve both sides being able to monitor the other’s data centers to prevent illegal training, then limiting training to some slow mutually-agreeable rate that lets alignment researchers thoroughly test each generation of AIs pre-release, monitor them post-release, and develop techniques to respond to any problems detected on deep levels that they expect to survive distribution shifts. I’m less optimistic about a true pause/stop as opposed to a slowdown, because at some point technology and algorithmic progress advance to a point where it’s too easy for small groups outside the control of the US and China to race ahead. I think a good pause like this could buy 20-50 years, although we wouldn’t have to use all of it if things went well. Some of these ideas are coming from draft papers; I’ll post about them once they’re public and give you a chance to double-check my assumptions.

I’m nervous about the strongest forms of pause activism, because I think they provoke us-vs-them dynamics that make things harder later on, or could force us into a poorly-designed pause that makes things worse rather than better (eg creates overhangs, or cedes the race to non-pausing powers, or defuses anti-AI sentiment without really slowing down AI). I also worry about pause activists spending a lot of their energy in a circular firing chamber against alignment researchers or the most safety-conscious labs, and I worry that empowering some of the specific pro-pause actors who exist today could be net negative. Still, I think probably we’ve passed the point in political salience where the marginal unit of pro-pause activism from someone outside that actor set is beneficial on net, and I’m nervously but committedly supporting it.

Before I even thought pausing was a realistic option, I said I had a 20% p(doom). It seems that if I think there’s a 40% chance of a pause, I ought to lower this - perhaps to 12%. I’m not doing this for a few reasons. First, I think pauses are more likely in more optimistic worlds (because longer timelines and more warning shots make both pauses and successful alignment efforts more likely). Second, although a pause might help alignment efforts a little, I think most of the effect of a pause is to delay the moment of reckoning until later - maybe centuries later, but p(doom) calculations don’t give points for delay. I think my real p(doom|no pause) is probably a few points above 20%, and my real p(doom|maybe-pause) is probably a few points below 20%, but the haters and losers get mad if you offer excessively specific probabilities like 18%, so I’m rounding both of them off to 20%. I acknowledge that this might be a failure of emotional propagation, or over-attachment to a certain number with socially useful properties (eg doesn’t sound too high or too low).

There’s a debate in the community about whether alignment or pausing is more important. I don’t like this, because the best worlds are those where we do both (the pause gives the alignment efforts more time to work). AI safety funders have enough money that any argument that pretends to be about allocating grants is actually about something else (eg funders don’t like some cause because it hurts their reputation), and I would rather focus on the real question (does it hurt their reputation? Is it worth it to take the reputational hit?) than the pseudo-question of which effort deserves more money. Likewise, I think most people already knows in their heart whether they would make a better political activist or safety researcher, and that even small differences in personal aptitude dwarf questions of which is more effective overall.

Many people point out that there are risks from pausing - for example, the risk that we destroy ourselves some other way before inventing the AI that could save us. I take this seriously enough to want to invent fake numbers for it. If we had a 30 year pause, I think the chance within that 30 year period that we destroy ourselves with bioweapons is 5%, nukes 5%, and some sort of complexity catastrophe where we social decline ourselves into oblivion 5%. That’s almost as high as my p(doom) from AI! I still think it probably comes out net positive, partly because it might decrease the risk of some of the sub-existential catastrophes like dictatorship, and partly because the pause might not last thirty years, and shorter pause lengths (like five years) seem like no-brainers.

Other Outcomes

I think there’s only a 20% chance of an AI-related underclass that lasts more than a generation, let alone a permanent underclass.

Basic argument: Even if AI looks set to create a “permanent” underclass, this underclass only exists during the gap between AI putting them out of work (the end of the diffusion gap), and the technological singularity (either the point when AI kills all humans, or the point when AI initiates a period of postscarcity). Based on my timelines for Bostromian superintelligence above, that’s probably not longer than a generation (of course, the underclass can stay permanent longer than you can stay solvent, so you still might want to prepare).

Arguments for pessimism: Even if AI initiates a period of postscarcity, either the wealth might not flow down to the underclass, or it might flow down in a way that doesn’t relieve their unhappiness (because relative inequality stays more salient than absolute wealth level). But against this, surely if “postscarcity” means anything at all, it means it’s easy to pass some wealth down to the underclass. And if the aristocracy is incentivized to encourage it, or the underclass is incentivized to participate in it, it should be possible for superintelligent social planners and psychologists to find a way to keep people happy despite relative inequality (whether that looks like utopia, or like bread and circuses).

Arguments for optimism: If democracy survives past the point of high unemployment, politicians will have to present citizens with some plan to avoid being part of a permanent underclass. If AI is “controlled” by a broad coalition of capitalists - for example, many different AI companies, those companies’ employers, their investors, their indirect investors through index funds, companies producing the compute/electricity/data centers/robots/raw materials necessary for the AIs to work, etc, then rather than backstab each other for “real” control of “the” AI, everyone might just let the existing economic and political systems continue and reap the gains from trade. Then the government program to prevent the permanent underclass can stay in place, anyone with any capital will get rich (eg if you have Google stock in the index funds in your 401K, or you own land), and that will be a broad enough section of the population that their taxes and altruism can support the rest.

I think there’s a 40% chance that the situation in the year 2100 looks like utopia to its inhabitants, and a 20% chance it also looks like utopia to us.

Basic argument: If AI doesn’t kill us, and there’s no permanent dictatorship, and there’s no permanent underclass, then we get a post-scarcity society, plus superintelligent AIs that we can set to working on other problems like disease and social decay. The 20% where it looks like utopia to its inhabitants, but not to us, includes scenarios like very effective breads-and-circuses that make people very happy, while sacrificing important parts of the human condition.

Arguments for pessimism: If we don’t push against it, the postscarcity future might look like super-addictive drugs, Ultra-TikTok, and sexbots. But if we do push against it, there’s a thin line between wisely preventing all those things, and letting Luddites ban everything interesting and fun about the Singularity - immortality, uploading, genetic engineering, intelligence enhancement, etc (also, surely it would be disappointing if there were literally zero sexbots).

Arguments for optimism: As long as we have some kind of intelligence augmentation - whether that’s literal IQ enhancement, or just AI superforecasters who can tell us what direction things are heading - our ability to control what direction we’re going will be better than it is now. If there is some kind of willpower augmentation, then people who use it might be able to resist Ultra-TikTok (but what percent of people will want to?)

I think there’s a 66% chance that actually, the singularity is intimately related to the universe being a simulation, and that at least some of the events above could be better predicted by knowing what the simulators are thinking than by normal forecasting.

Arguments for simulation: The standard Bostrom argument says that each real civilization will want to simulate many other civilizations, so any random person is more likely to be in a simulation than reality. But civilizations are especially likely to want to simulate the singularity (“the hinge of history”). Since real people are evenly distributed across the historical population, but simulated people are distributed closer to the singularity, the closer to the singularity you are, the more Bayesian evidence you have that you’re being simulated. This is true both in temporal closeness (eg you could have been born in 1500, but instead you’re living five years before AGI) and personal/causal closeness (eg you could be anyone in the world, but you work at an AI lab). The average reader of this blog is probably closer to the singularity than 99.99% of people throughout history, and I’m probably closer than 99.999%, so we all have very strong evidence that we’re being simulated even beyond the standard Bostrom argument. If we’re in a simulation, then probably once we pass the hinge of history and get to some kind of boring part where everyone is dead or in utopia, the simulation winds down. This could look like us all vanishing into nonexistence. But if we’re being simulated for some reason (eg because we’re likely to correspond to real people), then those real people might advocate for our rights somehow, and we might get some kind of better treatment. In a best-case scenario, this might mean that even if we get killed by AI in our universe, base-level reality has some kind of Simulated Humans’ Rights Act which says they have to pretend we won and give us utopia anyway. But since we’re presumably being simulated for some reason (eg to see whether a species like humans is likely enough to have survived that we should deserve good terms in acausal trade agreements4) we should still fight hard for good outcomes even if this is true.

Arguments against simulation: Too weird. Also, if you’re unusually far away from the singularity (eg you live in a country with no AI industry, are aren’t personally interested in AI), then some of those indexical arguments run in reverse for you. Also, base-level reality might not care about us at all beyond our ability to produce historical data, so they might just switch the simulation off without telling us.

Overall thoughts on this section: I continue to be skeptical of the “permanent underclass” narrative, for reasons discussed in item 5 here. I am worried about concentration of power, though less worried than I might otherwise be for reasons discussed here.

Disagree? You can fill in your own numbers for all of these things here. I’ll report results in a few weeks, and think hard about anything where all the smart people disagree with me.

When: Wednesday, June 10, 6:30 PM, probably until 9:30 or so.

Where: Lighthaven, 2740 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley.

Who: Anyone who wants. You don’t have to RSVP, pay money, or know anything about the blog. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. You’re unlikely to be an outlier, regardless of whether you’re very weird, very normie, or somewhere in between.

Lots of interesting people are in town this week for the upcoming Manifest conference on prediction markets, and I hope to see some of them there.

1: AI Security Bootcamp is a fully-funded program intended to help people get into AI-related cybersecurity. The current cohort will be in Las Vegas, August 2-8. Apply here.

2: More detail now available on opposing the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban most state animal-welfare and anti-farmed-animal-cruelty laws. Bentham’s Bulldog has a post making the case against here, and Dwarkesh Patel here. If you’re interested in pushing back can find your senators here, and there’s a script for calling them here. And opponents of the bill are uniting behind the American Meat Producers Association, a group of pro-animal-welfare small farmers; if you want to help financially, you can donate to their ad campaign here. Calls and donations are both pretty time-sensitive, and doing it this week would be much better than waiting.

This year, Rob Ennals has stepped up and built a fancy website that makes this easy. Rob is a software engineer who blogs at Messy Progress and works on interactive tutorials to help people understand AI. Many people offered to help, but Rob offered at the exact moment I was fretting about this and I took him up on it; thanks to all of you, but especially to him.

Again, go here to read and rate the reviews (they start off displayed randomly so that not everyone rates the same ones, but you can switch to alphabetic if you prefer). You have until June 15.

1: Highlights from the comments on the Frankfurt School post:

• 0xcauliflower argues that the Frankfurt School did not influence Derrida or postmodernism.

• étale sheep on Culture vs. Civilization (and followup).

• And several people point out that the Frankfurt School as an intellectual lineage (as well as a physical campus in Frankfurt where postgraduate studies within that lineage take place) has some surprising alumni. Adorno’s most famous student was Jurgen Habermas, and Habermas’ famous students include Palantir founder Alex Karp and right-libertarian Hans Herman-Hoppe.

2: People who I trust continue to ask me to signal-boost Alex Bores’ Democratic primary campaign in the NY-12 Congressional district (central Manhattan). Bores wants to fight for safe AI, the tech companies are trying to bury his campaign in order to send a signal to everyone else, and we want to support him for the same reason. But also, he seems like a generally good guy with smart views on housing, animal welfare, etc. The primary looks like it will be very close, so if you live in his district, consider registering to vote and voting for him; if you have friends there, consider telling them the same. And whether you live there or not, consider donating or filling out this form to potentially volunteer. And Alex will be doing a Q&A on June 4 at an AI governance event hosted by ACX grantee spartacus.app; if you’re in New York, RSVP here to join in.

3: I previously discussed the attempt to block the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban certain types of state-level animal welfare standards. We failed to block it in the House, so the fight moves to the Senate. There will be an online/video meeting about it this Tuesday night, click here to learn more or sign up.

4: They’re running another session of MATS, the research fellowship for people who want to get into AI alignment/security/governance. Autumn 2026 cohort runs Sep. 28 to Dec. 4 (10 weeks), in-person in Berkeley or London. Fully funded: $12.5k stipend, $20k compute budget, housing, meals, and travel covered. Mentors come from Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI, ARC, and more. Additionally, 2 new tracks: Biosecurity, for catastrophic biological risk from advanced AI, and a Founding & Field-Building track for founders, field-builders, and high-agency generalists. Read more / apply here (application is 1-3 hours), deadline June 7.

4: AI consciousness and welfare research org Eleos is hiring new research scientists. ML experience suggested, located in person in the San Francisco Bay Area. See here for more information and to apply.

You can’t say that they invented a new form of left-wing thought called Cultural Marxism. This would be (according to Wikipedia) the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, a “far right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that misinterprets Western Marxism, especially the Frankfurt School, as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness”. You’re not supposed to dub them a transitional stage between Communism and postmodernism. You’re not allowed to speculate that a lot of the academic humanities, as they’re practiced today, descend from the Frankfurt School’s brand of critical theory. You’re not supposed to think of them as the point where the muscular pro-technology leftism of the early 1900s shattered into the pessimistic degrowth leftism of the present.

Art is long, life is short. Most of us only manage to not do a few things in our limited span on Earth. But the Frankfurt School managed to not invent so many movements - to not be involved in so many of the crucial ideological shifts of the past century - that they caught my attention. Who were these people? What other aspects of our culture might we be unable to say they were involved in? For answers, I turned to the classic history of the group, Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination.

The basics are simple enough: the School was founded in Frankfurt in 1923. It attracted great philosophers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. When the Nazis took power in the early 1930s, the mostly-Jewish Frankfurters fled to America, where friendly locals helped them continue their work in affiliation with Columbia University. Mid-century Americans were suckers for sophisticated European intellectuals, and when the rise of fascism and World War II started dominating headlines, the German-Jewish Frankfurters were natural experts to help Americans process the situation. By the end of the war, they were firmly established as thought leaders. Some - including Horkheimer and Adorno - returned to Germany to rebuild its intellectual culture from the ruins; others stayed in America and remained relevant through the 60s and 70s.

But figuring out what the Frankfurters believed is more complicated. Forget about the thin line between universally-acknowledged fact and fascist conspiracy theory. The School itself was famously coy, worrying that if they explained themselves too clearly, people would caricature their beliefs and integrate them into the existing capitalist system. Even when they did speak “clearly”, it was in the sort of German philosophical register where “the negation of the negation” is a totally normal thing to say.

Having only read a single book on them, I will no doubt fall into all the failure modes that they and their successors warned us against. But here are the analogies, intuition pumps, and parables that I found helpful.

Now The Wheels Of Heaven Stop, I Feel The Devil’s Riding Crop

In the early 1900s, most intelligent and compassionate people had at least some communist sympathies.

The capitalism of the day was typically eighty-hour weeks in sweatshops, tightening screws in an assembly line until your joints and back gave out and you were thrown on the street to die. All the money went to some investor from the landed nobility who spent it on more gilding for the reception room of his palace. It didn’t take a radical to notice something was wrong, or to speculate that we could do better.

And the modern arguments in capitalism’s favor - it’s more productive, it leaves us freer - had yet to dominate. Actually, many economists assumed communism would be more productive: you could do rational central planning to allocate each resource to its optimal use, instead of making companies waste all their energy on competition. Marx promised it would be freer, too - you could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, do literary criticism after dinner”. The Soviet experiment had yet to progress far enough to falsify any of this.

Luckily, Marxist orthodoxy said we didn’t have long to wait. The contradictions of capitalism would build up until there was a sudden >pop< - a paradigm shift, a phase transition - and everything would change. Human nature would do a 180, society would have a revolution, and the promised utopia would arrive.

By the 1930s, people had started to notice that this wasn’t happening. Although capitalism had suffered some crises - World War I, the Great Depression - countries had responded with what the Marxists called state capitalism, a broad term for hybrid systems including New Deal America, Stalinist Russia, and Fascist Italy. Most people seemed to like their own country’s variety of state capitalism. Some Marxists began to worry that maybe Revolution wasn’t inevitable after all.

The proper genre for this realization is cosmic horror. You should imagine how a pious Christian would feel if the Pope told him that, okay, you know how the Bible says that God will defeat Satan during the Last Days, well, turns out Satan’s put in an unexpectedly strong performance, and we might have gotten that part wrong. It was this horror that led fellow-traveler Antonio Gramsci to his famous maxim: “The old world is dead; the new world is not yet born; now is the time of monsters.”

And the monsters were not slow in coming. The rise of Nazism in Germany was vastly worse even than this already-depressing picture. Certainly it didn’t help that many Marxists were being personally persecuted, exiled, or killed (some for being Jewish, others just for being socialist). But beyond that, it suggested that history was doing something worse than simply stopping. It was going off the rails. Instead of real communism, we were getting insane twisted funhouse-mirror versions of communism that kept the Hegelian directionality but seemed to be marching directly towards Hell.

Faced with this parade of disasters, the intellectuals turned heterodox. If Marx had been wrong about the inevitability of Revolution, maybe he had been wrong about other things. And maybe some of those things could provide a clue to how to avert the dark fate our society seemed doomed to.

The Frankfurt School concentrated on one particular tenet of Marxist theory, the relationship between the economic base and the cultural superstructure. According to Marx, most of society is downstream of the era’s pattern of economic relations (eg feudalism, capitalism, etc). This includes legal systems, religions, and politics, but also to some degree cultural artifacts like art, music, religion, architecture, etc. Symphonies weren’t just the expression of timeless aesthetic truths, they might also express something about capitalism. Maybe they were useful in training the habits of mind that made capitalism possible, or maybe they were an overflow bin where things that didn’t make sense under capitalism could bubble up and be harmlessly defused. But this base-superstructure relation covered even deeper things like our consciousness and our very way of being. There was no such thing as human nature full stop, only the sort of human nature that was “natural” in a capitalist (or feudal, etc.) society.

Accordingly, Orthodox Marxism wasn’t too interested in culture. If it was good, fine; if it was bad, then it would change to glorious communist culture after the Revolution. But the Frankfurters argued that the relationship might be bidirectional. Not only was culture downstream of capitalism, but capitalism was, in a sense, downstream of culture. Maybe the gears of History were jammed because something was wrong with the culture. If you could make the culture better, maybe you could unjam them and get the Revolution at last.

Papua New Guinea As Hot New Startup Hub

This was the first of many points where I started to lose the plot. It didn’t seem like they meant something simple, like how if we just made everyone watch Les Miserables enough times they’d develop revolutionary spirit and we’d be back on track. The Frankfurters wanted something much weirder.

Here’s the analogy that finally helped me: primitive hunter-gatherer tribes are famously incapable of participating in capitalism. Forget entrepreneurship, they’re not even good sweatshop laborers. They can’t punch in at 9 AM because they have no concept of time. Once they do show up, they’ll get bored and wander off a few minutes later. If you tell them they have to stay until the end of the workday, they’ll ask why. If you try to pay them a salary, you’ll find that although they might have some concept of money (eg cowrie shells), it’s superficial and inadequate (maybe they can only exchange it within their clan, or on certain festival days, and it’s taboo to spend it on anything outside a small set of goods they don’t want). If you ask them to guard the cash register, they’ll give all the money in it to their cousin, because obviously they have more of a duty to their cousin than to a random businessman like you. Some of them (most famously the Piraha) refuse to believe any assertion that the speaker has not personally witnessed. Some of them may count “one, two, many”.

When colonizers wanted to get these tribes involved in capitalism, they didn’t start by building factories. They started by spreading Christianity, opening schools, and otherwise inculcating them into European culture. It went so-so: sometimes they could make the natives do manual labor, but New Guinea still isn’t the hot new startup hub.

Communism, under this theory, equally requires new habits of mind. Maybe if people had them, it would grease the wheels of history and unjam the system. But how can you know what they are? If you wanted to open a school, what would it teach?

Marxism-Lurianism Will Win

On the surface, communism is a simple and practical philosophy. Some people are hoarding all the stuff. Let’s rise up and take it from them. A+ pitch. But dig deeper, and it becomes much stranger, even mystical.

Communism aims at the free and equal society without oppression or class divisions. What else is like this? What about feminism? The feminists aim for a free and equal society without gender-based oppression or division. An orthodox Marxist might say the feminists’ problem is fully downstream of capitalism: in a populace governed by the repressive logic of capitalist production, men must force women into a subservient role to produce their babies and household goods - but under communism, these divisions would naturally melt away. The superstructure-curious Frankfurter might posit that gender-based oppression is partly downstream of capitalism, but also partly upstream of it. They’re two interlocking forms of oppression; you can unjam the wheels of history by working on either.

But once you start saying things are like other things, where do you stop? Divisions between bourgeois and proletariat, between men and women, between whites and blacks all naturally fit into this framework. But what about the divisions between ego and superego, between man and nature, between reason and emotion, between subject and object? There is, the Frankfurters speculated, a single wound in the world that runs through all of these. The fact that history is jammed and failing to progress to Communism is not entirely unrelated to the fact that you have bad sex that never reaches orgasm. The Communist Revolution and the Alchemical Marriage are the same sort of reconciliation of opposites, maybe literally the same thing.

Joyce channeling Hegel: “All history is moving towards one goal, the manifestation of God”. Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”. All of these seemingly-simple slogans about taking people’s stuff are just epiphenomena of God trying to manifest Himself. And the failure of God to manifest properly is damaging the economy, the psyche - and yes, your sex life.

This is the usual point where I would jokingly call everyone an amateur kabbalist. I can’t do that here, because at least one member of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, really was an amateur kabbalist (he personally studied with Gershom Scholem!) This makes sense, right? The idea of healing a wounded God, of a Messianic Age that will come as soon as humans develop the concepts to name it correctly. I don’t want to overemphasize this part - even classic Hegel seems at least a little kabbalistic, and Benjamin died in World War II and missed the Frankfurt School’s later discussions. But I found it to be one more place to start in my attempt to figure out what was going on.

If You Seek It, You Are Turning Away From It

Several religions have converged on the same idea of negative theology. The Christians call it via negativa (“negative way”), the Hindus neti neti (“not this, not that”), the Muslims ta’til (“nullifcation”). Adorno described its Jewish formulation as the Bilderverbot (“prohibition on graven images”). It means that God is so far beyond any human concept that any positive attempt to describe Him will necessarily fail; you can only highlight what He is not. “Praise be to Allah. He is such that senses cannot perceive Him, place cannot contain Him, eyes cannot see Him and veils cannot cover Him. He cannot be described through parts, or through limbs and organs, or by an accidental quality or alteration… It cannot be said that He has a limit or extremity, or end or termination… He is not inside things or outside them.”

Some forms of Buddhism take the same approach to enlightenment. This is why Zen doesn’t look like studying the Buddhism textbook until you memorize exactly what enlightenment is. It looks like sitting motionlessly, or getting hit by a stick, or seeing a butterfly land on a leaf, or pondering koans. My favorite:

One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”

And the student was enlightened.

This is also how the Frankfurt School thinks about God Communism.

I’ve long complained that communists refuse to specify the details of how a communist society will work, or why it would be good. Adorno thought of this as a principled injunction, like the Jewish prohibition on graven images. We don’t have the appropriate concepts to describe communism, any more than hunter-gatherers have concepts to describe capitalism. If a hunter-gatherer philosopher tried to speculate about capitalism, then even directionally-correct thoughts like “We’ll all be rich” would get diverted along paths like “We’ll all have more of the cowrie shells we use as money” and then to something silly like “the secret of capitalism is that we’ve got to dive deeper in the ocean to get more cowrie shells”.

The closest real-world equivalent to primitive tribes trying to invent capitalism from first principles is the cargo cult. The tribes knew that the thing they liked (US planes bringing them consumer goods) involved runways, signals, and wings. So they build fake runways in the jungle and had priests dressed like airport staff wave signals to the empty sky. I think this is basically how the Frankfurt School thought of Lenin. He hadn’t Done The Work to get the incommensurable new concepts that Communism would require, so he just sort of gestured at Communist-sounding things - collective farms are involved somewhere, right? It went about how you would expect.

What would you do if you were a primitive tribe who wanted to really, genuinely, invent capitalism? First, stop thinking about airplanes and consumer goods at all. Second . . . hmmmm, hard question. Maybe you would live life attentively, so that you could see places where new institutions like “market exchange” and “the clock” might be valuable. Maybe you would give yourself a high mutation rate, refusing to keep doing things a certain way because it’s “tradition” or “how we always did it”. And maybe you would challenge existing institutions like chiefs and shamans, on the grounds that you’re pretty sure capitalism wouldn’t have anything like these, and whatever you replace them with might be slightly closer to capitalism in some way that’s helpful.

This is more or less the Frankfurt School’s prescription for us too.

The Structure Of Unscientific Revolutions

I’ve used a lot of mysticism and Zen analogies here, but the other one that really resonated for me was Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions on paradigm shifts in science.

Most science is normal science. Scientists perform experiments, gather facts, buttress their ways of understanding the world. We know there are 118 elements, but maybe someone will discover a 119th. We know of many antibiotics, but we can always use more. We’re not really sure what ball lightning is, but probably it will turn out to be something something plasma.

But occasionally, science undergoes paradigm shifts, where we change not just our facts, but the entire preconscious mental structure that we fit facts into. In the old days, chemists believed that substances could change mass as easily as they changed color. It was only after we developed atomic theory, conservation of mass, and modern chemistry and physics that we realized that color change was natural and boring, but apparent changes of mass had to involve losing atoms into the air (or taking extra atoms from the air). Geocentrism → heliocentrism, Newton → Einstein - these shifts changed not only what we knew about the world, but what we cared about, what kinds of categories we used, and what scientists even thought of themselves as doing.

You can’t (stressed Kuhn) just sit down and develop the next paradigm. Paradigm shifts come from finding irregularities, inelegances, and contradictions in the previous paradigm. At the same time, good work is clearing up what would otherwise be problems with the new paradigm (for a long time, heliocentrism was thought implausible because it would require the fixed stars to be unfathomably far away; eventually we got other reasons to think this and resigned ourselves to the fact). Finally - sometimes by changing minds, more often funeral by funeral - there’s a >pop< and a phase transition, and we go from one way of looking at the universe to a different, incommensurable one.

The Frankfurters wanted a Kuhnian paradigm shift in human affairs, where all our categories would snap into a different pattern. They thought the only way to get there was the “normal science” of gradually noticing and highlighting the contradictions in existing society, until the new paradigm revealed itself. If you tried to go any faster than that, you would get cargo cults and Lenin.

But Why Art Criticism?

Given all this, why did the Frankfurt School focus on art criticism and eventually go down in history (incorrectly! you’re not allowed to say it!) as the “Cultural Marxists”?

In the normal Hegelian dialectic, thesis + antithesis = synthesis. A period of history encounters its own contradictions, tension builds, it finally snaps into something newer and better that embodies all the contradictions productively, and we’re one step closer to manifesting God at the end of history.

The Frankfurters’ “negative dialectic” adds their theory of negative theology. Thesis does merge with antithesis into synthesis, but the synthesis is only an approximate solution. There is a certain portion of thesis and antithesis, called the residual, which the synthesis fails to capture. Of course, you must treat this as mystically as possible. The residual is the orbit of Mercury that can’t be explained within the current scientific paradigm, and the Seeing Like A State style failure in technocratic schemes, and the repressed material in the Freudian unconscious, and the suffering of the voiceless.

For the Frankfurters, and especially Adorno, this was the “solution” to the challenge of negative theology. You couldn’t specify God-Communism, the ultimate synthesis that would include all good things and no bad ones. But you could notice the hidden failures of the existing system, and then you would have learned something interesting about God-Communism - it’s the type of thing which could resolve these failures. Someone in the primitive tribe notices that their rain dances don’t work as advertised, and now they’re only ninety-nine steps away from inventing science. Or they notice that raiding enemy villages and torturing their captives to death seems a little harsh, and now they’re only ninety-nine steps away from inventing hedonic utilitarianism. Therefore, Critical Theory, emphasis on the critical. Your job is not to solve problems (which you can’t do, and which would make you a cargo cultist). It’s to point out ways that the existing order sucks.

And therefore, art criticism. For Adorno, the purpose of art is to highlight the residual. It is to be slightly eerie, to point out flaws in the schemas the viewer uses to interpret the world.

Does this mean that all art should be left-wing propaganda?

A more sympathetic interpretation: suppose someone starts with a stereotyped concept, like that all lawyers are useless slimeballs. Then they read a novel about the life of a lawyer, in detail, with all of its ups and downs. Although it doesn’t necessarily prove their stereotype to be directionally wrong, they at least realize that reality is much richer and more interesting than they imagined. Their synthesis has been proven incomplete.

But when you read the comments of actual Frankfurters, they’re rarely this straightforward, and sometimes they do sound like a demand for all art to be left-wing propaganda.

“A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.” In other words, until social contradictions were reconciled in reality, the utopian harmony of art must always maintain an element of protest. “Art,” Adorno wrote, “and so-called classical art no less than its more anarchical expressions, always was, and is, a force of protest of the humane against the pressure of domineering institutions, religious and otherwise, no less than it reflects their objective substance.” In short, the aesthetic sphere was inevitably political as well.

The Frankfurters’ saving grace was that they were much too weird and obscurantist to be satisfied with normal, comprehensible left-wing propaganda. Instead they wanted things that symbolized the Left in incomprehensible kabbalistic ways. For example, here’s what the book has to say on Adorno’s criticism of the Russian composer Stravinsky:

Stravinsky represented an antipsychological, neoclassical “objectivism”, which ignored the alienation of contradictions of modern society and returned to prebourgeois forms such as the dance. Unlike the romantics, who used the past as a negation of the present, the objectivists belonged with the purveyors of volkisch culture, who undialectically adopted old forms to current needs. Although the mediating connection was difficult to illustrate satisfactorily, Adorno went so far as to suggest that objectivism was in a sense the correlate of fascism. Its use of neoprimitive rhythms corresponded to the shocks of unintegrated experience fostered by fascist society. The irrationality of the objectivists’ principle of composition - the composer’s “taste” rather than the immanent dialectic of the music was decisive - suggested the arbitrary control of the fascist Fuhrer.

Adorno’s least favorite style of music was jazz. This scandalizes his modern leftist disciples, who worry he must have made some sort of catastrophic error to dislike something so closely associated with black people. But he was taking no prisoners:

"I remember clearly," Adorno admitted later, "that I was horrified when I read the word 'jazz' for the first time. It is plausible that [my negative association] came from the German word Hatz (a pack of hounds), which evoked bloodhounds chasing after something slower."

Whatever the initial verbal association, jazz remained for Adorno a source of continued horror. He began his article by emphatically rejecting any kind of purely aesthetic analysis of jazz in favor of psychosocial critique. Here the verdict was uncompromisingly unfavorable. Jazz, he wrote, "does not transcend alienation, it strengthens it. Jazz is commodity in the strictest sense."

All of jazz's claims to express liberation Adorno scornfully rejected. Its primary social function, he contended, was to lessen the distance between the alienated individual and his affirmative culture, but in the repressive manner of volkisch ideology. It thus served to reverse what Brecht had called the Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect) of true art in the modern era. At the same time, jazz gave a false sense of returning to nature, whereas in fact it was totally a product of social artifice. Furthermore, jazz was pseudo-democratic in its substitution of collective for individual fantasies. It was likewise pseudoindividualistic, all alleged improvisation being repetitions of certain basic forms. The "hot" varieties of jazz represented only an illusory sexual emancipation. If anything, the sexual message of jazz was castration, combining the promise of liberation with its ascetic denial. Moreover, its ideological function was confirmed in the myth of its Negro origins. In fact, Adorno argued, "the skin of the Negro as well as the silver of the saxophone was a coloristic effect." If the Negro contributed anything to jazz, it was less his rebellious reaction to slavery than his half-resentful, half-compliant submission to it. In a later essay on the same subject, Adorno made the point even clearer: "However little doubt there can be regarding the African elements in jazz, it is no less certain that everything unruly in it was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme, that its rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the sado-masochistic type described by analytic psychology."

He just keeps going:

From a purely musical point of view, jazz, Adorno argued, was also completely bankrupt. Its beat and syncopation were derived from the military march, which suggested its implicit relation to authoritarianism, despite its being banned in Germany. Cool jazz was similar to the musical impressionism of Debussy and Delius, but watered down and conventionalized. Its subjective element was derived from salon music, but it had long since lost any spontaneity. In fact, any attempts to reintroduce elements of true spontaneity were quickly absorbed into its reified system. "The pseudo-vocalization of jazz," Adorno wrote in yet another treatment of the subject, "corresponds to the elimination of the piano, the 'private' middle-class instrument in the era of the phonograph and radio." The piano, we scarcely need to add, was Adorno's own instrument and his bias in its favor obvious.

More significant still, jazz tended to spatialize rather than temporalize musical movement. Here Adorno was pointing to one of the key characteristics of mass culture as the Institut understood it: the substitution of mythic repetition for historical development. "In jazz, one substitutes the immobility of an ever-identical movement for time." The decline of temporality was connected implicitly with the liquidation of the autonomous individual.

The Dialectical Imagination contorts itself to rescue Adorno - maybe he heard the wrong kind of jazz? Maybe he only heard popular, capitalist jazz, and that was how he could make such an uncharacteristic mistake? But to me the whole thing seems so crazy (really? jazz is about the liquidation of the autonomous individual?) that it hardly seems surprising if the crazy thing might be in a direction that later becomes unpopular for other reasons.

The best I can do in understanding this part is - let’s say you see a piece of modern art. It does unusual things with color that challenge your normal paradigm of how color works. You think “Ah, I suppose my previous paradigm of color was subtly flawed. And since everything is secretly the same thing, that means the paradigm underlying Society could also be subtly flawed. I should start a communist revolution.” That’s good.

But if you see an insipid Disney movie with a happy ending (what Adorno would have called part of “the culture industry”), then you might think “Cinderella got her prince, which means everything was fine in the end. And since everything is secretly the same thing, that means society is also fine, and there’s no need to start a communist revolution.” Problematic!

In Partial, Grudging Praise Of Herbert Marcuse

While Adorno, Horkheimer, etc were doing insane obscurantist art criticism, Herbert Marcuse was sitting around thinking “Wait, I thought we were supposed to be Communists here. I never got the message that we stopped being Communists. Let’s just have a normal, object-level Communist revolution.” He even (shock! horror!) wrote books describing how communism might work in real life. This makes him a sort of Rosetta Stone for what a more straightforward Frankfurtism might have looked like.

Marcuse stayed focused on the question of why history hadn’t progressed towards communism. Suppose that productivity dectupled from 1850 to 1950. People could have chosen to take those gains by only working 1/10th as hard. If you only need 1/10th as much work, you can probably give most jobs to people who genuinely enjoy them, and the remainder can be a rare period of national service rather than a soul-draining lifetime career. This seems like a good start for communism.

Instead, everyone kept working themselves to the bone - humiliating themselves in jobs they hated, coming home too exhausted to pursue hobbies or raise a family - but “living standards” (as measured in some capitalist way) increased 10x. This seemed so unlikely to be anyone’s real preference that Marcuse suspected a conspiracy. Capitalists invented new desires, like fancy vanilla lattes and Disneyworld vacations, then inflicted them upon the populace through advertising campaigns. Instead of accepting a four-hour work week, you go into the office on weekends so you don’t fall behind the Joneses on the all-important total-number-of-cruises-taken metric. And even if an individual sees through the ruse, society is so centered around this ethos that it’s hard for him to personally defect (eg there aren’t many high-powered jobs that let you work four hours a week, and if you got a low-powered job, the whole culture would unite to call you a loser). If Critical Theory is supposed to notice and call out the contradictions of society, then the contradiction between ever-increasing productivity, stable work week length, and stable happiness would make a good start.

So is Marcuse’s vision of communism a world where everyone only works 10% as much, wisely distributed so that people mostly do jobs they enjoy? That was a big part of it, but he couldn’t resist adding a little insane mysticism. According to Marcuse, in order to spend their lives working at jobs they hated, capitalist subjects had to learn to exercise willpower, eg dominate their own bodies. On a Freudian level, this domination corresponded to the domination of the genitals over the rest of the body, and to the reconceptualization of eroticism as a purely sexual and genital-based phenomenon. After capitalism fell, the genital focus of sex would fall with it, in favor of a “polymorphous perversity of the body” where eroticism inhered in every activity, especially work. So under communism, not only would people who loved gardening get to garden all day, but they would be having constant gardening-related sexual pleasure while they do so. Or whatever you called the much better version of sexual pleasure that people would get under communism.

Again, least weird Frankfurt School member.

Pessimism Of The Intellect, Pessimism Of The Will

We now have the following litany of complaints against capitalism: poverty, overwork, bad concepts, bad art, ruins your sex life, probably some others I forgot. But the Frankfurt School went further. They insisted that capitalism was in the process of becoming something even more sinister. It might have dropped the sweatshops and jackboots (at least in the First World). But in exchange, it - and especially its mass media and “culture industry” arms - was subtly turning everything into meaningless parodies of themselves, threatening the very existence of human value.

For example, on language:

The greatest failing of the Enlightenment mentality was not its inability to create social conditions in which name and thing might be legitimately united, but rather its systematic elimination of negation from language…Language thus became, to use Marcuse’s later term, one-dimensional. Incapable of expressing negation, it could no longer voice the protest of the oppressed. Instead of revealing meanings, speech had become nothing more than a tool of the dominant forces in society.

On individuality:

It might be argued that the Frankfurt School’s most pressing fear in the postwar era was [that] the existence of genuine individuality was declining at an alarming rate . . . The bourgeois subject was free and unfree at the same time. [But] in the forced identity of mass men with the social totality, there was no freedom at all … What was left in its place was a cruel parody of the dream of positive freedom. The Enlightenment, which had sought to liberate man, had ironically served to enslave him with far more effective means than ever before. Without a clear mandate for action, the only course open to those who could still escape the numbing power of the culture industry was to preserve and cultivate the vestiges of negation that still remained.

On the social sciences:

Adorno argued that sociology must no longer be considered a cultural science, because the world, dominated as it was by reification, could scarcely be understood as meaningful. “The much-abused inhumanity of empirical methods,” he told his audience, “is always more human than the humanization of the inhuman.”

On the family:

As Horkheimer argued in an essay written in 1949, the more the economic and social functions of the family were liquidated, the more desperately it stressed its outmoded, conventional forms. Even the mother, whose warmth and protectiveness had once served as a buffer against the arbitrary harshness of the patriarchal world . . . was no longer capable of functioning in the same way. “The ‘Mom’, Horkheimer wrote, “is the death mask of the mother.”

Many of these share a concern with “instrumental reason”, the sort of reason useful in technology and economics that lets you figure out what is most efficient. The Frankfurters thought modern society was so good at this (understandably, since instrumental reason produces techno-economic prosperity) that it had lost the ability to employ “substantive reason”, the sort of reason that lets you figure out what is truly valuable. Mystically, our domination of nature has led to a domination of ourselves, where we are incapable of relating to our own lives except as tools to be employed.

So what is substantive reason? What should we be aiming for? Like some other philosophers, the Frankfurters seem more comfortable with attacking others for lacking a unified morality than with developing a unified morality themselves. But their Hegelian commitment lets them partially sidestep this objection: the Good is the thing God is trying to manifest as: the end-state of history freed from all contradictions.

Does this really rejustify substantive reason and save us from our dystopian focus on technical rationality? Here I come to the ultimate blocker I have with all Frankfurt School thought: the central point of all their criticism is that modern society is corrupt and barbaric for trying to unambitiously implement its little political reforms and improve GDP one percent, instead of trying to manifest God through History. But why should we believe that manifesting God through History is a real thing? Hegel only gives a nice story about how some historical periods seem to have embodied certain forms of intellectual progress; Marx only adds some bad economics and failed predictions. If you take away the belief that history can phase transition into a utopia utterly different from and superior to modern life, then trying to improve things normally through human reason and human effort seems like the way to go. In this sense, the Frankfurt School feels like the exact opposite of preaching to the choir. If a preacher tells the choir that they need to prioritize God over their career and family, all nice and well; if he says the same to an audience of inveterate atheists, he’s missing a step, and would do well to replace himself with a missionary. But the Frankfurters seemed interested in every part of the logical chain except justifying dialectical mysticism to an America which clearly did not believe in it.

The Frankfurt School would have predicted my confusion. As a subject of late capitalism, I am so stuck in its concepts that I fail to understand that a better world is possible. When I hear “language”, I think of the weak, impoverished parody of language that I and all my friends use, totally unaware that I am already communicating in a Newspeak that has been robbed of its true representational power.

Some of the School’s work on mass media and the decline of the human condition had obvious similarities with modern concerns about how social media is stealing our souls - instead of being able to truly enjoy things, we process them for a gallery of Instagram observers; instead of going out and experiencing the world, or even reading about it, we get it in bite-sized pieces from TikTok influencers. But the Frankfurters were saying the same thing about mass media when mass media meant the radio (even TVs had yet to take off during most of this period). Does this discredit the whole narrative, in the sense that everyone always thinks the latest form of media is destroying the human soul? Or, in the spirit of this post, should we treat the different eras as independent confirmation of the same downward spiral? Has the human soul been deteriorating longer and more thoroughly than we can possibly imagine? Even if a modern teenager broke out of prison of TikTok and Instagram and regained the lifestyle of their grandparents, would that still be a pale shadow of true humanity? Would they have five or ten further iterations left to go before they were anywhere normal and healthy?

Here I think back to the Frankfurt School’s origins. The intellectual scene of interwar Central Europe seemed like another, better world. You would wake up in your bedroom in your beautiful Art Nouveau villa. Leisurely eat a Sachertorte at the cafe while perusing a Thomas Mann novel. Debate the meaning of language with Wittgenstein. Get analyzed by Carl Jung. Write a long letter in flowery cursive to your father Baruch saying that for the last time, you couldn’t take over the family wine business, you were doing important intellectual work elucidating how the bourgeois order suppressed the negation of the negation, and he must send over your monthly allowance of 1,000 German marks post haste, before leaving to attend a Mahler symphony at the Staatsoper in the evening. Looking back at these people - all of whom spoke ten languages, played five instruments, and had read more books by age twenty than I will get to in my entire life - they seem like a superior species.

If, upon having their world destroyed and accepting exile in America, they pronounced the people they found there to be a inferior species - in the least-racist, most Communist language possible - were they remarking on this same difference from the opposite perspective? If so, do we have any reason to trust their diagnosis of what was lost? If we stopped listening to radio, and maybe made a conlang that expressed negation effectively again, could we get Art Nouveau back? Would we be able to have good Sachertortes in America?

So, Did The Frankfurt School Cause Everything You Hate, And Should You Blame The Jews?

We opened with Wikipedia’s diagnosis that you shouldn’t use the phrase “cultural Marxism”, and especially shouldn’t blame it on the Frankfurt School. Has our extra knowledge given us any new insight into the validity of this commandment?

The usual Cultural Marxist story is that radical intellectuals invented the idea of the long march through the institutions: taking over colleges, journalism, and mass culture, and leveraging them for more communist propaganda. Marcuse can fairly be accused of supporting this (not inventing it!), but it was after his Frankfurt School days. The orthodox Frankfurters had no more interest in taking over institutions than in taking over anything else. They just wanted to do weird mystical art criticism:

The Frankfurt School increasingly treated any attempt to realize the promises of philosophy as instrumentalization. In an aphorism on propaganda, Horkheimer and Adorno excoriated the instrumental use of philosophy and language to bring about social change…”Is activism, then, especially political activism, the sole means of fulfillment, as just defined? I hesitate to say so. The age needs no added stimulus to action. Philosophy must not be turned into propaganda, even for the best possible purpose.” As a result, programmatic advice for methods to change society was not very evident in any of the Frankfurt School’s work.

The reason some people accuse the Frankfurt School of this is that Marcuse, previously a famous Frankfurt School member, was among the strategy’s high-profile adherents. But the reason that other people so vociferously defend the School against this accusation is that it diametrically misrepresents what made the Frankfurt School special among Marxists - their belief that you shouldn’t be trying to immediately change society, you should be producing weird mystical art criticism and hoping that it makes society snap into a new polymorph of its own accord.

But it would be an exaggeration to call the Frankfurt School sterile and unrelated to later leftist movements. Their weird mystical art criticism was a forerunner of Derrida’s deconstruction and the whole postmodernist movement. The Frankfurters themselves weren’t postmodernists. They thought there was something like an objective good: that which unjammed the wheels of history and manifested God correctly. But you can see how their negative dialectics, wielded by less careful hands, could degenerate into postmodernist meaninglessness.

Even beyond that, there seems to be a Frankfurt “vibe” across modern progressivism in its glorification of criticism and protest for their own sake. Leftists may criticize police while having little plan for an alternative law enforcement system, or reflexively thwart new development even when it seemingly serves their goals, or protest global warming while opposing any actual plan that would stop global warming because it doesn’t also “end capitalism”. All of this would make perfect sense to the Frankfurt School: the goal isn’t to immediately replace bad capitalist institutions with better communism-informed institutions, it’s to kick the system as hard as you can and see if you can restart History.

In its most degenerate form, Frankfurtism decays into slacktivism. Too greedy to donate to the poor? It’s fine, that would just stabilize the existing system. Too scared to start a violent protest? It’s fine, any revolt within the current paradigm would merely be a cargo cult. The actually useful thing to do is write weird mystical art criticism. Or if you’re not an IQ 200 interwar Central European Jew and weird/mystical isn’t your style, maybe you can write on Tumblr about how someone’s Harry Potter fanfic is problematic.

This would be a devastating criticism of the Frankfurt School if they hadn’t said, again and again, that they expected their work to be misinterpreted and misused. They had hoped that burying it in fifty layers of mystical obscurantism would protect them. Maybe they should have gone for fifty-one.

Does this interpretation founder on the fact that most modern leftists don’t know about this? The average fanfic-criticizer doesn’t understand negative dialectics and the premature end of history, do they? Maybe they do - lots of leftists are really into “theory”. My brain is already filled with enough analytic philosophy that I find the Continent hard to navigate, but maybe someone who learned it as their native philosophical dialect can understand these ideas much more easily than I could manage. Or maybe understanding isn’t necessary. Some habits are sticky - we still say “God bless you” long after having forgotten that people once believed the post-sneeze vacuum could let demons enter the body. Maybe postmodernist academics remember enough of the theory to teach their students the disposition even without the details, and the disposition is all they need.

In conclusion, the Frankfurt School probably did not single-handedly cause everything you hate. As for whether you should blame the Jews, I think it’s 50-50. It was the Frankfurters who gave the Gentiles the kabbalah, even though the whole Jewish corpus is laced with warnings never to do that. But it was the Gentiles who accepted it. No going back now; may the Messiah come speedily and in our days.

I gave Claude a prompt something like (edited for coherence):

I’ll be voting in the June 2026 California primary. I’m a centrist liberal abundance YIMBY whose favorite political writers are Kelsey Piper, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. I’m wary of government overreach, but I’m not a doctrinaire libertarian and want to help people when we can figure ways to do it that work. I’m going to ask you about each race on my ballot, and I’d like for you to list the various candidates’ bios, policies, endorsements, your read on the most important differences between them, and your advice for me as I try to make my choice.

…and got back answers like the following:

California Superintendent of Public Instruction

A quick reality check on the office, then the field. The state superintendent has surprisingly little direct authority — districts control most budget and curriculum — and the state is actively considering shifting more responsibilities to the governor-appointed State Board of Education, which would shrink it further. The job is mostly a $150B-budget bully pulpit. So this is more “who do you want amplifying education priorities for the next four years” than “who will rewrite California education.”

The race is on the standalone education ballot (it doesn’t follow the nonpartisan blanket primary system) — June 2 primary, November 3 runoff if no one clears 50%. Realistically no one does, so this primary is about who advances.

Quick framing: what “the Kelsey Piper view” implies

Piper’s project, especially in her recent Argument writing, sits at the intersection of several positions that don’t all naturally cluster:

Structured literacy / “science of reading” / Mississippi Miracle is real and works. Phonics-first, mastery-based, with district-level accountability and reading coaches in low-performing classrooms. She has called the failure to adopt this “a crime against humanity” in California.

Standardized testing and accountability are good, actually. Not as bludgeons but as honest feedback mechanisms. Detracking failed. Grade inflation is bad.

Open to charters, microschools, and school choice. She founded and runs Oakland LEARN, a microschool. She sends her own kids to an “unregulated tiny private school.” She thinks the left’s reflexive hostility to choice misunderstands what parents are actually fleeing (kids not learning to read).

Skeptical of teachers’ unions when they block reform. Not anti-teacher, but pro-evidence over pro-union-priority when they conflict.

Pro-public-school in principle, but pro-evidence over pro-system. Treats education as a place where the left has often chosen ideological commitments over the well-being of kids who do not vote.

The candidate who matches this view best probably (a) has explicitly backed structured literacy/phonics, (b) has shown willingness to push the system rather than just defer to CTA, and (c) is at least not hostile to charters or alternative models. The candidate who matches it worst would be a CTA-backed insider running on “more funding, less testing, no curriculum mandates.”

The candidates

Al Muratsuchi (Assemblymember, LA South Bay, former Education Committee chair). Co-authored the law that funded phonics-based reading instruction grounded in the science of reading. Co-authored Prop. 2 ($10B school facilities bond, passed). Adjunct college teacher, former deputy AG. Endorsed by California Federation of Teachers (CFT, the smaller of the two teachers’ unions), Association of California School Administrators, and California School Employees Association.

Anthony Rendon (former Assembly Speaker 2016–2023). Ran an early-childhood program in LA for 20 years before politics. As Speaker oversaw major K-12 funding increases, universal transitional kindergarten, and charter school accountability legislation (which generally tightened charter regulation rather than loosened it). Endorsed by AFSCME, SEIU California, California Latino Caucus.

Joshua Newman (former state senator, former Senate Education Committee chair). Co-authored Prop. 2 with Muratsuchi. Army veteran, founded a vets-to-civilian-workforce nonprofit, now a UC Irvine fellow. Endorsed by State Building and Construction Trades.

Richard Barrera (San Diego Unified school board president). The California Teachers Association candidate — that’s basically his profile. Outsider to Sacramento; emphasizes funding, early childhood, easier teacher credentialing pathways.

Nichelle Henderson (LA Community College trustee, longtime teacher). Union-backed. Supports expanded school-based health, standardized testing reform, divesting pensions from fossil fuels and “the U.S. war machine.”

Frank Lara (SF elementary teacher, former UESF VP). The left-of-the-Democrats candidate. Peace and Freedom Party and Green Party endorsements (officially nonpartisan, but signals where he sits).

Gus Mattammal (Silicon Valley tutoring company founder, author). Pro-charter, pro-homeschool, pro-alternatives-to-traditional-public-schools. The closest thing to a school-choice candidate in the field.

Sonja Shaw (Chino Valley School Board president). Anti-trans-protections crusader who got Thurmond escorted out of a 2023 board meeting. CA Republican Party, Moms for Liberty, CRPA endorsements. The right-culture-war candidate.

The most important differences, and my read for the Piper view

The structured literacy litmus test points hard to Muratsuchi. He is the only candidate in this field who has actually moved policy on the thing Piper considers most urgent. His official candidate statement explicitly cites “phonics-based reading instruction based on the science of reading” as something he coauthored and delivered funding for. That is, almost verbatim, the policy Piper has spent the last year writing about. Nobody else in the field has a comparable record on this issue.

Rendon is the second-strongest plausible fit, but with caveats. Twenty years running an early-childhood program is genuinely relevant experience, and TK (transitional kindergarten) expansion is one of the more evidence-supported things California has done in K–12. But his charter-accountability work as Speaker generally meant more regulation on charters, which cuts against the Piper-flavored openness to alternative models. He’s a competent establishment Democrat; he’d be a fine superintendent, just not specifically the structured-literacy crusader.

Barrera is the candidate Piper would be most skeptical of. Not because he’s a bad person — he’s a long-serving school board president, presumably competent — but because the CTA endorsement is his political identity in this race, and Piper’s whole thesis is that CTA-aligned politics has been one of the structural reasons California can’t adopt the reforms that worked elsewhere. Barrera’s stated priorities (more funding, easier teacher pathways) are CTA priorities, not reform priorities. If you’re voting the Piper view, this is the one to skip.

Henderson and Lara are further from the Piper view. Henderson’s “standardized testing reform” plus the pension-divestment-from-the-war-machine framing reads as movement-left rather than evidence-driven; Piper has been pointedly critical of detracking and of treating testing as the enemy. Lara is more or less explicitly the union-left candidate.

Mattammal is the awkward case. He is the candidate closest to Piper on school choice and microschools specifically — that’s basically her own model. But he’s running with essentially no political coalition or governing experience, and the Piper view, while choice-friendly, is not “burn down public schools” — it’s “fix the actual reading instruction in the schools that most kids will continue to attend.” A statewide superintendent who can’t move CTA-dominated Sacramento isn’t useful for that goal. Mattammal also doesn’t appear to have an articulated policy program on structured literacy or accountability, just on alternatives. Probably not the right fit even on a choice-sympathetic reading.

Shaw is obviously off the table on the Piper view. Piper is a Bay Area liberal who supports trans kids and has no interest in culture-war education politics. The Moms for Liberty endorsement is disqualifying on its own.

Newman is the dark horse. Co-authored Prop. 2 with Muratsuchi, chaired Senate Education, military background, now an academic fellow rather than a Sacramento insider. He hasn’t been as visibly identified with structured literacy as Muratsuchi has, but he’s broadly in the same evidence-and-accountability lane. The Building Trades endorsement is unusual — it suggests he’s running a coalition strategy aimed at facilities/jobs rather than CTA — and that might actually be a positive signal for someone trying to operate independently of the dominant teachers’ union politics.

Bottom line

For the Piper view, Muratsuchi is the clearest fit in the field. He’s the only candidate who has actually legislated structured literacy funding, he has the directly relevant policy chops (former Education Committee chair, Prop. 2), and his endorsement coalition (CFT, administrators, classified employees) is just slightly off-axis from the dominant CTA-controlled lane in a way that suggests some independence. He’s also reasonably likely to make the November runoff, which matters: a vote for the second-best candidate who finishes fourth doesn’t accomplish anything.

If you wanted to express a sharper “I want a real outsider reformer” view rather than working within the field as it exists, Mattammal is the only option, but at significant cost in viability and breadth of program.

For “I just want a competent Democrat who’ll be fine,” Rendon and Newman are both reasonable. But for “I want the candidate most likely to actually push the structured-literacy / accountability agenda Piper writes about,” it’s Muratsuchi.

This is better than any voter guide I’ve ever seen. I didn’t end up taking Claude’s advice - I voted Newman - but Muratsuchi was a close second, and Claude’s advice was crucial in helping me prioritize what to research further.

And here’s its opinion on one of the small local spending measures I usually have a hard time forming an opinion on:

Measure A: Peralta Colleges Affordable Education Reauthorization

What it actually does

This is a parcel tax reauthorization, not a new tax. The Peralta Community College District (which runs Laney College, Merritt College, College of Alameda, and Berkeley City College) has had a $48-per-parcel annual tax since voters first approved it in 2012 and renewed it in 2018. The current authorization expires.

Measure A would:

• Extend the existing $48/parcel tax for 9 more years (July 1, 2027 through June 30, 2036)

• No increase in the rate — same $48 you’re already paying if you own property in the Peralta district

• Generate roughly $8 million per year ($72M over the nine years)

• Funds restricted to instruction, student services, counseling, faculty recruitment/retention, job-training programs, and university-transfer prep

• Requires a 2/3 supermajority to pass (this is the standard threshold for California parcel taxes and is a high bar)

Senior citizens and Supplemental Security Income recipients can apply for exemptions. Funds are subject to a Citizens’ Parcel Tax Oversight Committee.

Geographic scope: this only appears on ballots in the Peralta district, which covers northern Alameda County — Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Albany, Emeryville, and Piedmont. So if you’re in Oakland, you’ll see it.

The straightforward “yes” case

• Community colleges are genuinely one of the most cost-effective rungs in American higher ed. Peralta tuition is ~$1,100/year vs. ~$6,500 at Cal State and ~$14,000 at UC.

• Reauthorizing an existing tax is a much lower ask than a new one — you’re already paying it, and nothing on your tax bill changes.

• The money is restricted to instruction and student services (not administration, not facilities), with citizen oversight. That’s about as well-designed as parcel tax measures get in California.

• League of Women Voters supports it. Labor unions back it. No formal opposition argument was filed with the Registrar of Voters — literally no one wrote a ballot statement against it.

• $48/year on a parcel is genuinely small relative to most California property tax bills.

The complications worth knowing

I want to give you the honest picture rather than just the campaign pitch, because Peralta has a difficult institutional history that someone with your “wary of government overreach but pro-helping-people” framework will want to understand.

The accreditation crisis was real. From 2018 to 2023, Peralta was in serious trouble with its accreditor (ACCJC). A 2019 state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team review found Peralta was “at high risk of insolvency” after years of mismanagement, with administrators “regularly breaking their own rules” and the district “ripe for fraud” due to poor internal controls. The four colleges were placed on probation by the accreditor in January 2020 — a severe sanction one step short of “show cause” (the level that nearly closed City College of San Francisco).

The governance situation was also a mess. A 2021 Alameda County civil grand jury report excoriated the Peralta Board of Trustees for “broken board culture,” secretive meetings, infighting, interfering in hiring, racial insensitivity, and fostering an “overall culture of incivility.” Multiple chancellors departed under pressure — Peralta went through four chancellors between 2019 and 2023.

Things have improved. Accreditation was restored from probation to “warning” status in January 2022, then fully reaffirmed in January 2023. Tammeil Gilkerson became permanent chancellor in January 2024 — by all accounts a stabilizing hire from outside the dysfunction.

But there are ongoing concerns. As of early 2025, Peralta is still navigating a budget crisis. Chancellor Gilkerson has acknowledged that Peralta’s full-time-equivalent students (FTES) lag significantly behind other four-college community college districts in the state — which means enrollment-driven state funding is structurally low for the district’s size. There’s also a Peralta Citizen article headlined “PCCD is in crisis. Everything is on the table” from February 2025, indicating that even with the recent improvements, the district isn’t out of the woods.

One transparency concern worth noting from local reporting. The largest single donor to the Yes-on-A campaign is Future Flooring Group (C&S Flooring Systems), which contributed $75,000 — about half the campaign’s total raised. Future Flooring is currently contracted with Peralta for ~$678K to replace flooring at College of Alameda, Laney, and the district service center this summer, and has received over $2M from the district overall. This isn’t illegal, but a major vendor that depends on district contracts being the largest single funder of the campaign to extend the district’s parcel tax is the kind of thing that should at least be visible. The rest of the campaign funding comes mostly from Bay Area labor unions, which is more typical and less notable.

My honest read for your framework

For a centrist liberal abundance YIMBY who wants to help people but is wary of government overreach, here’s how I’d think about this:

Arguments for yes:

• Community colleges are exactly the kind of institution that fits an “abundance liberal helping people” framework: they provide cheap, accessible higher ed and workforce training without the racket-like price escalation of four-year schools. They’re a genuine social ladder.

• This is a reauthorization, not new spending. Voting no doesn’t return the money to you in a meaningful way at the household level; it just defunds the colleges.

• $48 a year is small money. The cost-benefit is hard to argue against in isolation.

• Peralta has measurably improved governance since 2023. Punishing the institution now for sins it has been actively repairing would be unfair to current and future students.

• The supermajority threshold (2/3) is itself a check — if a tax can clear that bar, it has unusually broad consent.

Arguments for no:

• Peralta’s institutional dysfunction was severe and is not fully resolved. The “everything is on the table” framing from district leaders in early 2025 suggests structural problems persist.

• Some abundance-school thinkers would argue that propping up underperforming public institutions with parcel taxes reduces pressure to actually fix what’s broken — if the colleges had to demonstrate enrollment growth and operational excellence to retain funding, they might.

• Low FTES is a worrying signal. Are these colleges serving the demand that exists, or are they an institution that has become inefficient relative to peers?

The judgment call. I think a reasonable abundance liberal would vote yes, with eyes open. The reasons: (1) reauthorizations are different from new authorizations — you’re not signing up for new spending, you’re declining to actively cut it; (2) community colleges as a category are deeply aligned with the “help people, expand the ladder” framework; (3) the most damning Peralta criticisms are about 2018–2022, and the institution has been visibly improving since; (4) no organized opposition emerged, which usually means even motivated critics didn’t think the case for opposing was strong; and (5) $48/year is genuinely small money for a meaningful local good.

But voting no isn’t crazy if your prior is “underperforming institutions should face budget discipline.” It’s an unusually defensible “no” for a parcel tax, in that the institution has a real track record of problems. If you wanted to send a message that you support community colleges in principle but want Peralta to keep cleaning house, abstaining is also coherent (the 2/3 threshold means abstaining has a slightly different effect than a no vote — it raises the bar relative to the participating electorate).

My weak lean: yes. Strong enough to recommend, not strong enough to argue with someone who voted no on accountability grounds.

I informally (no strict controls) tested this on 10 difficult races where I wasn’t sure going in who I would vote for. I give Claude an A if it recommended the same candidate I eventually voted for, a B if it recommended my second choice out of a large field, a C if I can see where it’s coming from but disagree, and an F if it picked someone I hate. Its final score was:

• 5 x As

• 3 x Bs

• 2 x Cs

When it failed, it was usually because I have a policy of making my vote count on important races, vs. making fun/utopian/conscience-guided choices on races that don’t matter. I didn’t tell Claude this, and Claude tended to ignore fringe candidates with no chance of winning.

Other times, it was because it took my prompt too seriously. I do like abundance/YIMBY ideas, but since that was all I told Claude in the prompt, it sort of pegged me as a single-issue voter. In the future, I might put that lower down, below the list of famous people I agree with.

Claude also correctly guessed (probably from the word “liberal”) that I lean Democrat, over-indexed on that, and leaned away from Republican candidates. In the future, I might include in the prompt that it should cross the aisle when there’s a sufficiently convincing reason.

I ended by asking Claude to ignore my personal beliefs and tell me who it would recommend, point-blank, if it didn’t know anything about me. It proposed four switches - three of which I liked better than its original choice! I’m skeptical that it was truly expressing its own opinions here (if it even has any) - I suspect it treated the exercise as a chance to make more “emotional” judgments - but it was an interesting exercise. If you’re a Republican using AI to help you vote, please end with the same question and tell me what happens.

This was a good enough experience that if I didn’t have an hour or two to do this properly, I would trust Claude’s endorsement over competing cheap-and-fast ways to determine my vote (party-line, newspaper endorsements, NGO endorsements, who has the funniest name). And given that I did spend two hours doing this properly, I think I’m about 50% happier with my choices than I would have been without AI.

Moving back into speculative futurism (in case you forgot which blog you were on), a lot of my hope for how the post-AGI future might turn out well - despite all the risks of dictatorship, inequality, surveillance, etc - hinges on people taking advantage of AI advisors to make better political decisions. The sooner we start, the better.

You can see my final list of decisions (may not be very interesting to non-Californians) here. Remember that I accept voter guides from ACX meetup groups in big cities with local elections happening soon, and will signal-boost them on the Open Thread if you give them to me.

1: Thanks to everyone who sent in a book review contest entry. I’ll have finalist voting up within a week or two.

2: 80,000 Hours, an effective altruist career advice organization, is publishing their book 80,000 Hours: How To Have A Fulfilling Career That Does Good. Along with talking about how to most effectively do good, it also discusses which careers are most likely to be automated by AI soonest (and I trust Ben to have high-quality thinking on this topic). Release date is tomorrow, but if you’re fast you can preorder today for special bonuses.

3: I filled out my early ballot for the California primary election (Alameda County); if you’re interested you can find my choices and explanations here.

A common counterargument is to claim that no, LLMs can become AGI. But even without that counterargument, I think the “therefore” fails on its own terms. The key question is: how much of a new paradigm do we need?

The landmark discoveries on the road to modern LLMs are something like:

1950s: Neural networks
1967: Multi-layer perceptron
2010: Modern deep learning
2017: Transformer, LLM
2022: RLHF, chatbots
2024: Chain of thought / test-time compute

We can think of this as an “evolutionary tree”, where a given LLM (let’s say Claude Opus 4.7) shares a recent “common ancestor” with all other chatbots, and only a very distant “common ancestor” with everything else descended from the multi-layer perceptron. If AGI needs a “new paradigm”, what common ancestor can we expect AGI and LLMs to share?

AGI will very likely use neural networks, because the human brain is a neural network and qualifies as an AGI. It will probably use deep learning, because although deep learning isn’t exactly analogous to the brain, it seems like a pretty reasonable way to emulate the brain’s learning algorithms onto computer hardware.

Skeptics like Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus usually pinpoint LLMs/transformers as the step where we went wrong. LeCun thinks that the first AGIs may be within the deep learning paradigm (but not LLMs); Marcus thinks that they’ll combine insights from deep learning with something else.

How soon should we expect a new paradigm as revolutionary as LLMs/transformers? Since we got LLMs/transformers nine years ago, Lindy’s Law suggests nine more years. How soon should we expect a new paradigm as revolutionary as deep learning? By the same logic, sixteen years from now.

Lindy’s Law has a heavy tail, which means we can’t simply halve these to find our 25th percentile estimate. Our 25th percentile estimate for the next advance as exciting as LLMs should be three years from now; for deep learning, it’s five years.

So even if you think AGI will require a further paradigm shift as big as the invention of the LLM or as deep learning itself, you should have 25% chance it will be developed in the next 3 - 5 years. Which is about as long as the LLM-only crowd think things will take! This isn’t an excuse for relegating the risk of AGI to some vague indefinite future. It could still be the late 2020s or early 2030s!

(Might we expect that low-hanging-fruit effects make the next paradigm harder to find than the last one? In practice, fields get more researchers as time goes on, and that effect usually causes time-between-advances to be approximately constant. And in fact, the number of AI researchers has grown at an unprecedented pace for a scientific field, and growth will enter an even faster regime once AIs themselves can contribute. Overall these make me think things will go even faster than Lindy’s Law predicts - but I think Lindy’s Law is a useful upper bound.)

(Would there still be a long time between the invention of the new paradigm and the point where it could be used to maximum effect? It took five years between the invention of the transformer and ChatGPT, the first commercially-successful transformer-based project. But most of that time was spent scaling up, and we’ve already scaled up. If we invent a new paradigm in 2030, then any frontier lab willing to bet on it can quickly provide it with levels of compute sufficient to train human-brain-sized models.)

This is my attempt to talk to the new-paradigm-wanters in their own language, but I think there’s also a subtler point that undermines this worldview. In the past, new paradigms have proven useful in allowing scaling to continue after an old paradigm passed the regime where it could efficiently convert scale to results. LLMs still seem to be able to convert scale to results; while this continues, new paradigms won’t be necessary, and frontier labs won’t risk pursuing them. If scaling ever hits a wall, there will be a few months of confusion as frontier labs look over various new-paradigm-proposals that they already have lying around, and throw them at the wall to see what breaks through. Then scaling will continue from wherever it left off.

The best way to forecast future AI progress is to extrapolate from current LLM scaling. This should work if LLMs scale all the way to AGI. But it may also work even if they don’t. First, because we might get the new paradigm so soon that it won’t be a significant source of delay. And second, because the most likely place for a new paradigm to start is wherever LLMs stop working, going at the same rate.

In past elections, I’ve covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were twenty-six of them, and I covered them all.

But sorry, I give up. This year there are sixty. It’s too many. I can’t disambiguate them all into unique individuals with their own personalities, hopes, and dreams. So as consolation for the list I’m not giving you, here are the basic types, and a few examples of each.

The Top-Tier Democrats

One of these people will definitely win, but what else is there to say about them? They’re all the same. They’ve all paid the danegeld to some set of unions and interest groups, then put up some kind of incredibly generic platform about how they’re compassionate but also a fighter. I can’t bring myself to name any of them or discuss them further.

The Top-Tier Republicans

More or less the same as the top-tier Democrats, minus the chance of winning. They all have cowboy hats and flag pins. They all pose on horseback at their ranch. They all promise to Take Back California for the forces of America and its god, Donald J. Trump. None of these people are actually interesting, but honorable mention to Sheriff Chad Bianco, whose name is Italian for “white Chad”. He might be the perfect Republican candidate:

The Conflict Theorists

As we move into the lower and middle tier candidates, we shift from political science to psychoanalysis. Why do so many ordinary small businesspeople with no experience and no chance think they’re the right person to turn California around?

For some, the answer is obvious. Existing Californian politicians love fraud and Marxism. We should elect a normal guy like me who dislikes fraud and Marxism. I can pass common-sense laws like “From now on, fraud shall be illegal, and the business climate shall be good.”

Sometimes these people munificently grant that existing politicians may not personally love fraud and Marxism. The problem is that, lacking the sort of real-world business experience you gain from running a car repair business in Fresno for fifteen years, they don’t realize that management is about ACCOUNTABILITY and RESULTS. As my first action as governor, I will perform an audit, and anyone caught being fraudulent and Marxist will be imprisoned and possibly killed.

The Mistake Theorists

Another type of middle-tier candidate. The problem is, California has been trying boring solutions, like throwing money at the problem. What we need is the clever solution that I thought of in the shower last night.

The Media Getters

How did Scott Shields, a candidate with no experience and no chance of winning, get a fancy magazine profile?

I think he paid for it. Capitol Times, the magazine at issue, has a “Media and PR Opportunities” section advertising their “Front Cover Feature - By Application Only”.

But how did Shields reach first place in the April 19 poll about who won the Democratic debate?

In this case I think he made it up. As far as I can tell, an “AI post ai debate poll” just means that Mr. Shields prompted an AI with “write a poll saying I’m ahead”. This theory is buttressed by the fact that no Democratic debates had happened as of April 19.

I suspect Dr. Akinyemi Agbede of pursuing a similar strategy:

In another of his media appearances, we learn that:

Dr. Akinyemi Agbede, a democrat, mathematics genius, and two-term California gubernatorial candidate in 2014 and 2018, is set to move to Washington to permanently eradicate slavery in America.

Known as The Quintessential Polymath, Agbede’s primary objective is to champion the “ANTI BLACK HATE CRIME BILL” and see it transformed into law within the United States Senate.

If you feel tempted not to trust this, you will no doubt be mortified to learn that actually, the excerpt above is from The Daily Trust. Dr. Agbede graciously accepts your apology.

I’ve glossed these people as “Media Getters”, but the phenomenon is broader than that. There are also the people who get “endorsements” from Americans For Patriotic Freedom, and when you look it up the only person in Americans For Patriotic Freedom is the candidate’s wife. On an even broader level, I think this even covers things like posing in front of a mock governor’s desk and putting all of your policy on really formal stationery with NAME, GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA on it.

What drives this phenomenon? The easy answer is deception - you make fake polls because you want to trick the voters into thinking you’re important. But it doesn’t work at all. Nobody has paid the slightest attention to these people. For all I know, I’m literally the first person to read their website.

Another possibility is narcissism. For some people, seeing their name followed by “POLYMATH GENIUS” in a glossy magazine is its own reward. I think the magazines sort of play to this. They never say “we’ll print fake stories about you to trick rubes”. They say “We’re looking for profiles of great leaders; if you think you’re a great leader, pay us $5,000 to help cover our costs, and we’ll come out to profile you.” I regularly get spam saying that I’ve been identified as a Top Doctor Of 2026 and if I merely pay the $3,000 processing fee I can have my Top Doctor Plaque and my page in the Top Doctors Profile Book; it’s the same type of scam.

But it’s also possible that they’re having fun. When I was young, I was involved in the wacky world of micronations, where people declare their bedroom an independent secessionist nation. You can wear a crown and issue decrees and do other fun things. Realistically this is no more dignified than dressing up as a wizard and casting Avada Kedavra at people, but it feels more dignified, because there’s no rule about which countries are “real” save those of public opinion and military force, and the government doesn’t care about micronationalists enough to ban or crush them, so sure, whatever, it’s real.

In the same way, I think it might be fun for a certain sort of person to campaign for governor. You can put on a suit and pose in front of a desk with a flag - just like the real politicians. You can go on tours, kiss babies - just like the real politicians. You can put up a Five-Step Plan To End Homelessness - etc. And just as every good micronationalist had a shiny crown and a declaration of independence written on real parchment, so it’s a fun prop to get a profile of yourself in a major magazine.

This Time It’s Personal

In the middle tier, everyone has approximately the same platform: vague platitudes about ending homelessness and promoting accountability. As we move toward the bottom tier, you get an interesting variation: homelessness, accountability, plus one other extremely specific issue, discussed in suspicious detail.

The most self-aware of these is probably Alicia Olivia Lapp

A fun detective project is to go through her list of policy priorities and try to figure out the exact details of her family court case:

This doesn’t mean these people have no other policy priorities:

But usually the majority are vague sketches, and one is so detailed that you can tell they’ve been thinking about it every day for the past several years.

The AI Natives

Amanda Martin has some thoughtful policy proposals, and is the only candidate to stand up to the scourge of activities that cannot be clearly explained, independently verified, and publicly justified:

But I was turned off by her health-related advertising:

…which includes several non-real concepts like “Pancerase”, “herlngno” and “1O6o0st0bscn-noorono2n”, and has a picture of what appears to be the thyroid connected directly to the kidneys by some sort of monstrous vasculature totally unlike any real blood vessel.

At least her policies are real. Gary Kidgell, on the other hand, has an AI policy that was clearly written in close consultation with key stakeholders on the matter:

There’s been some recent discussion about how all AIs seem to converge on the same neoliberal YIMBY technocratic positions. Gary Kidgell also seems to converge on these positions. This puts him head and shoulders above most of his fellow gubernatorial candidates, whose policies are mostly dumb populist-bait or motivated by personal grudges over specific lost court cases. In a recent Twitter poll, most people said that if they were falsely accused, they’d prefer to be judged by Claude than by a jury of their peers. By the same token, I think I would prefer to be governed by Gary Kidgell - if I could be sure he’d continue to ask the AIs - than by anyone else on this list. And millions of imaginary Californians agree:

The Nominative Determinists

Every election year, somebody thinks: most voters are low-information voters. And low-information voters are only going to see your name and party on the ballot. Your party is what it is - you can’t be the Democratic nominee without winning the Democratic primary. But your name is negotiable. Change your name to something inspiring and patriotic, and you can ride a tsunami of low-information-voter support all the way to the Governor’s mansion.

Every election year, low-information voters see a handful of candidates with names like LovesAmerica Smith or HonestyAndTransparency Johnson, think “Oh, yeah, it’s the weirdos who try the the thing where you change your name”, and skim right past them. Then LovesAmerica Smith and HonestyAndTransparency Johnson are forced to either spend the rest of their lives reminded of their humiliation, or slink back to the courthouse to get their name changed back to John or Pedro or whatever.

Barack. D Obama Shaw writes that he:

…was born into the Cecil Shaw family as Cecil L. Shaw III before legally becoming Barack D. Obama Shaw through an inspired vision in 2013. President Barack Obama brought a hope into the world that I had never seen or experienced before and this was the catalyst that had me legally change my name because I believe that people today need that same type of hope.

On the other hand, Thunder Parlay provides no explanation. Did his parents name him Thunder? Is it a nickname? Did he do it for the snazzy thunderbolt logo?

According to an acquaintance who once held elected office, there’s a version of this that does work. It won’t make you Governor. But if you’re running for city council or something, then people really will only see your name on the ballot - there might not even be a party next to it, since sufficiently local offices might be nonpartisan by fiat. The trick is to change your name not to LovesAmerica Smith, but to John Smith (or Sarah Smith if you’re a woman). If you’re John Smith, and your opponent is Mohammed Kryzscyzbski, then voters who may not technically consider themselves racist will still think to themselves “John Smith - now there’s a man who sounds like he probably has good all-American values!” and it’s probably worth a 5 or 10 percentage point boost.

The College Students

College students, speaking out and making their voices heard! Isn’t that inspiring?

Carolina Buhler started her campaign as a senior at UCLA. Two stylized facts about college seniors is that they’re all far-left, and they’re all obsessing over their resume. Fittingly, Ms. Buhler’s website is a sort of far-left resume, listing all the things she’s protested during each three-month period:

On the opposite side of the aisle is Duane Terrence Loynes Jr, a recent Loyola University graduate who fell in with a bad crowd - by which I mean Catholic philosophers. There’s a group of Catholic philosophers who, under the guise of the American Solidarity Party have waged a years-long, extremely unsuccessful attempt to seize control of the state of California and transform it into a virtuous Aristotelian polis. You can usually spot them by their Loyola University affiliation and constant mentions of the dignity of the human person. Last year they ran Dr. James Hanink, a metaphysician and Loyola University professor. This time it’s Duane. I was briefly surprised to see they picked someone without a Theology PhD, but it’s fine - he’s still young, and his father Duane Terrence Loynes Sr does have a Philosophy PhD with a Religious Studies focus.

I’m part of the utilitarian philosophers’ conspiracy to take over society, so I suppose I am natural enemies with these people. Still, I appreciate them and their heartfelt dedication. I also enjoyed reading the biographies of their party committee, including for example this person:

…and someone who is a “Provisional Knight Of Malta”. Honestly their conspiracy seems cooler than ours and I might have to switch teams.

The Anti-Semites

No list of political cranks would be complete without these people. Dan Grundmann doesn’t have a campaign website, but his ballot statement tells voters that:

Kirk murdered by shaped-charge bomb Israel used. Government knows. YouTube—Why Kirk had to die. Israel murdered Liberty sailors. Israel “art students” wired Twin Towers for 9/11.controlled demolition. Planes did NOT destroy towers. Israel did. 3,000 murdered to create new “Pearl Harbor” to justify fighting wars for Israel. “Dancing Israelis” (Mossad agents) prove knowledge of attack. Government knows. Israel (our greatest enemy), NOT Iran, will suitcase nuke U S. via “Samson Option”—false flag attack to blame on Iran/Russia and permanently end our nation. Israel, the REAL terrorists, created and funds Hamas via Qatar. Countless war crimes by lsrael/ Netanyahu. No further funding for Israel. They call Palestinians AND Christians AND America “Amalek”—their sworn forever enemy. We are “goyim” (less than human animals/cattle) that they will enslave. We are stupid chumps. Israel rules our conquered Republic. Talmud—their Bible—says Christ boiling in [excrement.] Israel allowed/planned/promoted Hamas attack (they murdered their own people) to justify genocide and steal billion$ in Gaza oil/gas rights. Christian Zionism = soul poison. Talmudic “Judeo-Christian values” don’t exist . . . DestroyTheZOG.org. Constitution Party of California, state affiliate Christian Nationalist Party. CNParty.org.—developing. Fight-the-Power.org. CPofCA.org. StopNumber24.org. Nationalize FED. Print interest free United States Notes. Freedom Law School $300,000 challenge. BlackGenocide.org. Planned Parenthood murdered 20 MILLION blacks = REAL “White Supremacy.”, HenryMakow.com. NationalStraightPrideCoalition.org. Gtvflyers.com

The part about the Talmud saying Christ is boiling in excrement comes from Gittin 57a. This is supposedly a tractate on divorce, but around the 55 mark the Sages get distracted and start listing every crazy story they know. One of these stories is about Onkelos, the nephew of the Roman Emperor Titus. Onkelos gets into necromancy, raises his uncle from the dead, and asks who gets the best treatment in the afterlife. Emperor Titus answers that it’s the Jews; Titus, who persecuted the Jews during life, is punished by being burned to ashes daily. Still, Titus recommends against being nice to Jews, giving an annoying out-of-context Bible quote suggesting that persecuting Jews is good.

Onkelos wants a second opinion, so he does more necromancy and raises the evil prophet Balaam, who agrees that the Jews get the best treatment in the afterlife; Balaam, who persecuted the Jews during life, is punished by being cooked in boiling semen. Still, he recommends against being nice to Jews, giving an annoying out-of-context Bible quote suggesting that helping the Jews is pointless.

Onkelos wants a third opinion, so he does more necromancy and raises “Yeshu the Nazarene”, who also agrees that Jews get the best treatment in the afterlife; Yeshu, who “mocked the words of the sages” during life, is punished by being boiled in excrement. And he recommends in favor of being nice to Jews, giving a correct in-context Bible quote suggesting that helping the Jews is great. The suggested moral of the story is that even Israel’s worst sinners deserve praise, since one of them was willing to stand up for the Jews when the emperors and prophets of foreign nations wouldn’t.

“Yeshu the Nazarene” is extremely suggestive of “Jesus of Nazareth”, and it makes sense that the writers of the Talmud would think of Jesus as “mocking the words of the sages” during life. And there is a different Talmudic story about how Yeshu was executed by the high priests on Passover. Still, scholars are divided on whether the identification really sticks. First of all, a Nazarene (a person who has sworn a certain religious oath) is actually totally different from and unrelated to a person from Nazareth (commenters have pointed out that I’m wrong about this one - “Nazirite” is the oath taker, Nazarene is an early Jewish way of saying Christian). Second of all, Yeshu was supposedly a disciple of Rabbi Joshua ben Perachiah, which would place him around 120 BC. Third of all, he was executed by stoning, along with five disciples whose names don’t resemble the Apostles.

But engaging on this level undersells the weirdness of the Talmud’s relationship with its various Jesus characters (including Yeshu, ben Stada, and ben Pandera, all of whom may or may not be the same person as Jesus or each other). A typical reference is Shabbat 104, which is asking whether it’s okay to scratch letters into your flesh on Shabbat. The Sages are all set to agree that it’s not, but Rabbi Eliezer reminds them that Jesus took magic spells out of Egypt by scratching them on his flesh. The other Sages respond that “He was a fool, and you cannot cite proof from a fool. That is not the way that most people write,” and the matter is dropped.

It’s helpful to remember that the Talmud was written in Zoroastrian Iraq, by rabbis who may never have personally encountered any Christians and might not have found Christianity very interesting. To them, Jesus was one of a million more-or-less semi-mythical heretical ancient rabbis they’d heard vague stories about and treated more or less interchangably. To make things worse, “Yeshu” is the Hebrew abbreviation of an ancient Jewish curse, and seems to have sometimes been used as an epithet for any particularly curseable heretic. The Talmud’s various Yeshus and Jesuses are probably vague mixes of several figures spanning hundreds of years, including but not limited to the Jesus of Christianity, smushed together in a way that was never expected to pass the level of scrutiny that later history placed upon them.

So overall the chance that the person who told the necromancer he was being boiled in excrement was Jesus was only like 60-40. Also, the story was supposed to be positive! The Talmud was praising the guy who told the necromancer that he was being boiled in excrement!

(the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t see it that way, and has requested stricter scrutiny of candidate ballot statements in the future.)

A near-miss for this category is Scott Shields, who is very concerned about “atheist Marxist bankers”. But he stresses that most of the atheist Marxist bankers are Chinese, and that Israel is just as threatened by the atheist Marxist bankers as everyone else:

So it seems like I have misjudged Mr. Shields, and everything he’s saying is completely reasonable.

On A Mission From God

The least powerful interest group in California is a hotly contested title. Gun owners? Plastic straw manufacturers? Real estate developers? There are so many groups whose endorsement is anticorrelated with any hope of victory. But beyond all of these, the worst performer in California elections has to be God.

Every election cycle, at least one candidate says that God called on them to run. Every election cycle, that candidate loses overwhelmingly. God has a perfect 0% record of getting His chosen candidates to Sacramento. It’s quite sad, really.

This year, the Almighty has gotten behind Brent Maupin.

Brent describes the endorsement here:

It was after a tent crusade in Southern California. I was driving north through the farmlands. All of a sudden, a supernatural event occurred. God placed the love - agape love for the entire state of California - inside our hearts. It was, like, overflowing throughout our vehicle.. It was supernatural. I don’t remember if I pulled the vehicle over, or it was one of those ET moments when you just feel like you’re being lifted out.

Worried that this could have been a hallucination? No need to doubt; God gave an even stronger sign later on:

It was about six months later, at another tent revival, I put my head down and I asked - God, do you really want me to run for Governor - and I’m telling you, another amazing thing happened - my spirit man just jumped out of my body, first time and only time that ever happened. He was like eight feet tall and built like Hercules - had the biggest smile on his face - just like, yes, yes, run for Governor!

Brent has the most unique idea to end homelessness of any candidate in the race:

He states that he asked God about this, and God told him that there are countries where people chant “Death to America” “every Friday”, and this produces negative subliminal energy that drives Californians to despair and makes them homeless. The good news is that merely being aware of this problem is enough to counteract the energy and reverse the damage.

The Entrepreneurs

Elaine Culotti is some sort of entrepreneur, but what type?

Your guess is as good as mine. But in 2021, she was on a show called Undercover Billionaire, where successful rich entrepreneurs are airdropped incognito into a random town with only $100 and a car to see whether they immediately starve to death, or manage to start again from scratch and create another profitable business. Culotti supposedly succeeded, although I see rumors that the show is either scripted or at least smooths the way for its contestants substantially. In theory this is a fascinating experiment, but I wonder how much of it would survive a debunking attempt by a skeptical journalist.

Her gubernatorial campaign is mostly the typical slopulist platform - cut taxes, make it harder to build data centers and new housing - but I appreciate the chutzpah required to propose that farmers pay zero property tax, but any land which is transferred from farming to any other use has to pay double property taxes.

Still, if she’s really an entrepreneur, why isn’t she using her campaign site to sell us something? Here we turn to Gary Kidgell, who is selling copies of his campaign platform for $1,000.

You can also purchase a “historic” collection of his letters to Congress, or preorder his book The Forefathers’ Son, about a man whose ancient American bloodline gives him “a legacy of being tuned in to the nation’s pulse”.

In case you’re wondering whether it’s based on a true story, Gary describes himself as “a . . . 13th‑generation American . . . stepping forward to serve the state he and his family have called home for generations.”

The Ones Who Are Just Having Fun

Sam Sandak writes: “Here is my intent: I will make decisions based entirely on what is best for making great movies in California.”

As governor, he would:

• Add to film incentives; the 750 million dollars currently allocated by the state will be increased to 1 billion dollars.

• Require productions to hire crew for a minimum of 30 days in order to qualify for incentives.

• Dismantle “FilmLA” once and for all.

• Establish “California Canon” as an official designation for movies acknowledging the importance of the original creators. Only George Lucas’s Star Wars stuff counts.

• Add filmmaking to the curriculum in public schools.

• Ensure that actors are held liable if they shoot a gun on set and it kills someone.

• Only serve for one term (4 years) - will not run for reelection.

• Liberate cinema.

He might, coincidentally, help other issues that you care about:

Education? Our children need to be given an environment where they can be excited by math, science, art, film, and history so that they can grow up to be the filmmakers and film technologists of the future.

Crime? Homelessness? No one is going to film in an area where they are fearful the camera lenses are going to get stolen out of their car. We need to clean up the streets.

Or he might not:

Social issues? You’re free to make movies about them if you want. My time and attention as governor needs to be focused elsewhere.

Finally a good old-fashioned gag campaign by someone with a passable sense of humor. Two thumbs up.

The Ones With A Song To Sing

Rafael Hernandez has no campaign site and has not given any media interviews. The only English-language text about him is his ballot statement, which says only that:

To Me: The people of California Come First. My goals are: 1. Lower the high cost of living. 2. Create more good pay jobs. 3. Fix the homelessness crisis. 4. Build affordable homes.

….which isn’t very much to go on. However, his gubernatorial campaign has put out this extremely catchy single:

And Brent Maupin, mentioned above, offers us his song “The Sad Part Of Town”, saying that “This song came to me in a dream. It's about the homeless people in our cities and provides not only insight into the problem but guides the listener to a solution.”

????????

This one took some figuring out.

As best I can tell, Lewis is an edtech company founder. After the LA school district rejected his edtech, he “investigated” and “discovered” that this was because they were corrupt. He expanded his edtech into a fun story-based learning platform called “OptomystiK” which lures students in with a narrative about interdimensional pirate captains.

Then he somehow merged his fantasy story about the pirate captains with his real story about being rejected by LA School District into some kind of combination story, where one of the pirate captains “begins to inhabit the body of Louis A. De Barraicua in Sacramento, California. There, he must engage the local population to simulate a decentralized economy capable of reviving California’s dystopian economic landscape.” I can’t tell whether this is a complicated campaign stunt, a viral marketing attempt for his edtech product, or whether he is literally psychotic.

His platform/delusional system centers around something called “The Golden Road”, in which he brings humanity a technology alternately called YBR or “the micro-economy”, which seems to be some sort of perfected version of his edtech product which allows people to organize into communities (it involves “3D immutable ledgers”, although in places these are called “3D leggers”, which also sounds interesting). Everyone uses stories/ledgers to coordinate in a narrative frame which works better than capitalism.

Louis, perhaps aware that he is unlikely to win this election, writes about The Power Of Aiming For Third Place. I think a more achievable goal would be to aim for getting well-known enough that Google no longer tries to correct search queries for his name to “barracuda”.

????????????????????????

Dawit Kellel’s site begins with this plea:

California, choosing a Democrat or a Republican has meant repeating the same cycle and expecting a different result. By voting for them, you are consenting to continue the direction they’ve set. It’s time to break that pattern. Vote Independent — vote Kellel. This is a once‑in‑a‑generation opportunity to take the key away from the house. Don’t let it slip away. If this opportunity slips by, it won’t be because it wasn’t there, it will be because we didn’t act when we could. Share this website with your family, friends, and co-workers. Especially, since they are working hard to keep this option off your radar.

You might expect the “share this website” link to go to his campaign page or a plea for donations. Wrong! It goes to the full text of the Book of Enoch, a 3rd century BC apocryphal work whose first half describes how the fallen angels interbred with the daughters of men and produced a race of monstrous hybrids called the nephilim. God punished mankind with Noah’s flood, and punished the fallen angels by chaining them beneath the earth for seventy generations. In the second half, the archangel Uriel takes the patriarch Enoch to Heaven and gives him a series of lectures on geography, astronomy, and angelology.

The rest of Mr. Kellel’s site doesn’t mention this at all. It’s bog-standard proposals to cut taxes and support veterans. There is discussion of the candidate’s two decades of military service, his love of California’s natural beauty, and his commitment to representing non-partisan independent voters. His top priority is to balance the budget.

{I’ll try to have a real ballot with further thoughts on the top-tier candidates up before the election.}

1: Primary elections are coming up in many US locales. If your ACX meetup group wants to create a voter guide (samples from last election here), I’m happy to signal boost it here if your city is big enough and has enough likely ACX readers. Email me if interested.

2: New subscribers-only post, Every Magazine Piece On The SF AI Scene:

On a chilly San Francisco day, I found myself in a “group house”, a house where multiple people live in the same house. My host, a bespectacled man named Theodore Wong, grabbed a Dasani water bottle and half-eaten burrito from the refrigerator (a device used to keep food cold - according to Wong’s health-conscious bio-hacker roommate, it “prevents spoiling”). Then he started to speak.

“There is a serious risk that artificial intelligence is going to kill everyone in the world. You really need to explain this to your readers. We are desperate to get this information out. I’m begging you, please don’t make this a human interest story like all the others. We need for people to know the exact arguments,” he intoned nerdily, and proceeded to give me a twenty minute lecture including lots of words like “compute”, “exponential”, and “slaughterbot”.

This was my introduction to the wacky world of the San Francisco tech scene, where people drink Dasani water and say things about AI - a technology which, they tell me, “no really your readers need to know this, stop looking at my water bottle and listen to what I’m saying, I beg you.”

3: An Inkhaven-like writing/blogging residency in Barcelona, late Aug - early Sep.

….and points out that it seems like AI capabilities could soon reach the level marked “High”, then the height of intelligent debate is to point out that actually, the trend could go like this:

…and then it would never reach the level marked “High”!

In slogan form, this is “all exponentials eventually become sigmoids” (a sigmoid is the s-shape of the second graph, which starts exponential but gradually flattens out). It’s technically true. No process can keep growing forever; eventually it hits physical or practical limits. For example, total cases during an epidemic is classically sigmoid:

They start slow - patient zero infects patient one, and so on. They grow exponentially until most people are infected. Then, as almost everyone is infected and they can only mop up the last few holdouts, they slow down again. Finally, after everyone has been infected, the growth rate is zero.

Technological progress in a given field can also be sigmoid. Here’s airspeed record over time:

My understanding is that this represents 3-4 “generations” of different technology (propellers, turbojets, etc). Each technology went through normal iterative improvement, then, when it reached its fundamental limits, got replaced by a better technology. The last technology, ramjets, reached its limit at about 3500 km/h, and there wasn’t the economic/regulatory will to develop anything better, so the record stands.

You can imagine something similar happening with AI at some point. Does that mean people are right, and there’s no need to worry that the graph will ever reach the line marked “high”?

Before we come up with a general answer, let’s look at the Sigmoid Misidentification Hall Of Fame.

Third place goes to UN birthrate projections in countries with declining birthrates. These countries’ birthrates keep going down at a constant rate, and the UN keeps predicting they will flatten out and go down at some lesser rate. On this graph, red is the real data, and each blue line is a different UN attempt from a different year to “extrapolate” the “trend”.

It’s true that birth rates must eventually flatten out and become sigmoid (this may have happened last year in South Korea, although Colombia and Chile are still declining), but this doesn’t necessarily happen at the exact moment that forecasters in the UN start feeling like the decline has gone too far.

Second place goes to predictions of solar power deployment, as chronicled by A.E. Hoekstra.

The various WEO lines are World Energy Organization predictions for how quickly solar power will get deployed. Every year, the WEO thinks “Wow, lots of solar power got added last year, probably this year it will level out and people might even back off a little”. Every year, the amount of solar power deployed grows at the same rate.

First place goes to this paper on the METR graph of AI capabilities. In early 2026, when the underlying data looked like this:

…a team from Wharton tried to model different curves and predicted that the likely future trajectory was this:

@Tenobrus ably chronicles what happened next (the green curve is their original; the star marks the next AI model to be released after their analysis):

The moral of the story is that, even though all exponentials eventually become sigmoids, this doesn’t necessarily happen at the exact moment you’re doing your analysis. Sometimes they stay exponential for much longer than that!

How much longer?

The best way to predict this is to fully understand the process generating the trend. For example, you can forecast an epidemic by knowing how quickly it replicates, how likely it is to be cured, and how large the susceptible population is. Even in harder cases like airspeed records, a smart engineer could determine that ramjets max out around 3500 km/h, and a smart economist could predict that no country was incentivized to spend enough money to bring the next paradigm to fruition.

What if you don’t fully understand the process? AI forecasters know some things (like how data centers work and how much it costs to build them). But they’re unsure about other things (researchers keep inventing new paradigms of data generation that get over data walls, but for how long?), and other things are entirely opaque (What is intelligence really? Why do scaling laws work? Might they just stop working at some point?) Is there anything you can do here?

In conditions of true ignorance, the default assumption should be Lindy’s Law: on average, a process will continue about as long as it’s continued already.

To build intuition: suppose you walk past a geyser, and see a sign saying “This geyser last erupted 100,000 years ago”. You know nothing else about geysers. What’s the chance it will erupt in the next hour? It must be very low, right? If it erupted in the next hour, you would have walked past it 99.99999% of the way through its eruption cycle - in other words, your random sample had a higher value than 99.99999% of points. That’s not how random samples usually work! On the other hand, suppose you walk past another geyser, and see a sign saying “This geyser last erupted 10 minutes ago”. What is the chance that this geyser will erupt in the next hour? Pretty high, right? It seems like this geyser’s eruptions occur on a scale of every few minutes. When you calculate it out, your median prediction for the length of time until the next eruption should just be the number on the sign. In the same way, your median prediction for how long it should take before an entirely-mysterious trend changes shape should be the amount of time since the last change.

Applying this to AI: the forecasters who try to get deep understanding of the dynamics of AI progress think that we can keep scaling up AI at the current rate for another few years (by building more data centers, etc), and might or might not be able to scale it up faster after that by leveraging recursive self-improvement. But suppose you don’t trust those people. What should your default be?

AI has been improving dramatically since at least GPT-1 in 2017, although most people sort of arbitrarily date “the scaling era” as 2019 to present. So naively, ignoring everything we know and considering the whole field to be a total mystery, we might expect the trend to continue for, on average, another seven years. Assuming a Pareto distribution (what does this even mean in the case of AI? I don’t know) the chance that it continues for less than another two years is 22%.

It’s cheap and easy to make fun of people who extrapolate trends too far:

But if someone claims that the trend toward increasing AI capabilities will never reach some particular scary level, then the burden is on them to explain either:

• If they’re not treating AI as a black box, and claim to be modeling the dynamics explicitly, then what is their model? Have they calculated the obvious things, like projected data center growth and speed of algorithmic progress? Are they familiar with the modeling work that’s already been done in this field, like the AI Futures Timeline Model? Do they have specific opinions on how the others went wrong, and where their model differs?

• If they are treating AI as a black box, why isn’t their default expectation based on Lindy’s Law?

He wrote a post called Hydrogen Jukeboxes, analyzing the literary output of an AI called R1. This AI tried hard to write good fiction, which was part of the problem. It crammed its stories with what Nostalgebraist called (stealing a term from Ginsberg) the “eyeball kick” - a flashy stylistic move that immediately catches the reader’s attention and “wows” them. Here are examples - some from R1, others from an experimental OpenAI model trained specifically for fiction-writing:

• “There is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief, and the rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences.”

• “When the jar of Sam’s laughter shattered, Eli found the sound pooled on the floorboards like liquid amber, thick and slow. It had been their best summer, that laughter—ripe with fireflies and porch wine—now seeping into the cracks, fermenting.”

• “And so I built a Mila and a Kai and a field of marigolds that never existed. I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens.”

• “The morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke.”

Nostalgebraist and another writer, Coagulopath, catalogue some of the most common AI eyeball kicks, each occurring across multiple LLM models:

• “An overwhelming reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random.”

• “Conjunctions combining one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal with another thing that is concrete and/or sensory.”

• “Repetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms…the way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit.”

R1 is a small model - certainly today, but even by the standards of early 2025 when it was trained. We don’t know how big OpenAI’s experimental fictionbot was, but since Altman mentioned it once and never again, it probably didn’t receive too many company resources, either in terms of compute or human attention.

Both models were likely trained through RLHF; it tried various styles, minimally-trained humans rated which ones were good and bad, and then it auto-adjusted in favor of the good ones.

When you combine low mental capacity (= low ability to tolerate complex abstractions) with high pressure to perform well, you get something that learns a few cheap tricks that work well on untrained readers. This is what Nostalgebraist is complaining about. If you read “Her lips were the whispering echo of a granite conundrum”, then it sounds literary as hell for the 0.5 seconds it takes before you realize it’s meaningless. It’s also computationally cheap: memorize 20 - 30 words that sound really good (“echo”, “whisper”, heartbeat”), have a pseudoscript for generating pseudoprofound analogies (CONCRETE_OBJECT + ABSTRACT_OBJECT), have another pseudoscript that peppers them across your writing in semi-appropriate places, and you’re done. And R1’s eyeball kicks weren’t really as bad as all that. “The rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences” - basically achieves meaningfulness and self-consistency. There’s nothing wrong with it besides how it becomes grating when you see it every three sentences and realize what the AI is trying to pull.

(the infamous em-dash comes from the same imperative — common in formal literature, rare in low-IQ Reddit comments, it’s a cheap way to signal sophistication with a single character)

I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me describes the struggle of non-English speakers who learned to write passable English in school and are now being told that they sound like AI.

ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. Or, more accurately, it writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape.

The bedrock of my writing style was not programmed in Silicon Valley. It was forged in the high-pressure crucible of the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education, or KCPE. For my generation, and the ones that followed, the English Composition paper - and its Kiswahili equivalent, Insha - was not just a test; it was a rite of passage. It was one built up to be a make-or-break moment in life: A forty-minute, high-stakes sprint where your entire future, your admission to a good national high school, and by extension, your life’s trajectory, could pivot on your ability to deploy a rich vocabulary and a sophisticated sentence structure under immense, suffocating pressure.

And that one moment wasn’t an aberration. Every English class and every homework assignment for three years prior (and more, it could be argued) was specifically designed to get the teacher marking your composition to award you a mark as close as possible to the maximum of 40. Scored a 38/40? Beloved, whoever is marking your paper has deemed you worthy of breathing the same air as Malkiat Singh [...]

There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. You didn’t just ‘see’ a thing; you ‘beheld a magnificent spectacle’. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these “wow words,” their synonyms and antonyms drilled into us like multiplication tables.

The writer argues that these are signs of learning a language in a formal, ossified, officially-good way rather than as the living organism of a spoken tongue. But he could equally note that his Kenyan essay test involves people with limited knowledge of English under high pressure to sound smart, being graded by other people with limited knowledge of English. This is the same levels-of-abstraction bottleneck that produces AI writing, and with the same result.

Think about the hallmarks of AI writing. “It’s not X — it’s Y!” Direct, simple, catchy, clarifying. This is a great writing technique, used in moderation. AI takes all the great easy techniques that work and can be reduced to a simple script, then overuses them until your eyes bleed.

This is the essence of bad taste: things that are easy even for a dumb artist, work very well at wowing dumb audiences, and become so overused that smart people get tired of them.

I think about this a lot, because I currently live with the dumbest and most gullible audience of all: small toddlers. I am exposed to a steady diet of children’s books, toys, food, and music. Here’s a typical piece of children’s art:

There are bright rainbow colors (children love bright rainbow colors). There are lots of cute animals (children love cute animals). There are sparkles (children love sparkles; “sparkly” is even a synonym for the sort of overdone eyeball kick that tasteful people dislike). Everyone is smiling (nuclear-grade smiles must be the cheapest possible way to invoke positive feelings about a work!). There are clouds, grassy meadows, flowers, and other pretty natural scenes. The scene is very busy, because the higher the density of cute animals, flowers, and smiles you can cram in, the more positive feelings, and the better the art - right?

Each of these is a cheap trick; with the exception of some of the cuter animal faces, even a child can do them. Each appeals to a natural, perhaps innate urge: it’s no mystery why evolution would make us like lush, flowery, butterfly-filled meadows, and I can tell just-so stories about the rest: in the ancestral environment, most bright sparkling objects colors were dew-covered fruits - right?

My daughter’s favorite song is “Choo Choo Train” (my son’s favorite song shifts with time of day, mood, and the alignment of the planets). It’s the auditory equivalent of the Lisa Frank poster. A woman who sounds like she is on several hundred milligrams of cocaine sings “Cha cha cha cha CHOO CHOO TRAIN!” in the most chipper voice you can imagine, accompanied by an in-your-face melody and the sound of train whistles. My wife and I have both gotten it stuck in our heads and it will likely stay there until the day we die. Both twins like the song “If You’re Happy And You Know It”, because it contains the word “happy”, which makes it cheerful, and it gives them an excuse to dance and clap their hands.

(meanwhile, the sophisticated people are into atonal music with no detectable melody or lyrics, which has systematically stripped away all of the things normal people like about music to produce a form of quality that hinges entirely on a set of mathematical relationships incomprehensible to 99% of the world).

My children’s favorite food item is juice. Their particular favorite orange juice is calorically 90% sugar, with a tiny amount of orange-associated chemicals for flavoring. There’s no mystery why we are innately/evolutionarily attracted to sugar, and it’s hardly difficult to make this: I’ve created similarly delicious lemonades with just lemon and sugar.

(meanwhile, the sophisticated people are into some kind of incomprehensible foam with 296 ingredients, which only one chef in the world can prepare properly, which tastes slightly like the color chartreuse).

I previously talked about cases where I think taste is fake, but admitted there was a core definition that seemed to be “really there”. I claim that poor taste is what happens when an artist overuses the cheapest and easiest tricks that everyone naturally innately likes, the sort you could compress into a small AI model, and which people with long exposure to the form find irritating through overuse. Good taste is when you deliberately avoid these blaring klaxons, leaving room for the attention to settle on subtler, more complex patterns that only a master could get right. This definition lets me voice both my pro-taste and anti-taste cases in explicit language.

In poetry, the one art form where I have a tiny smidgen of taste, I feel sensitized to cliches and stock images. It’s very easy to use a lot of “thees” and “thous”, rhyme “love” with “dove”, and say something about the grandeur of humanity and/or nature, and the AI poems that beat human poets in blind competitions do exactly this:

Look how the smallest sparrow, winter-worn,
Still grips its branch against the battling blast;
Each dawn declares that darkness cannot last,
Each breath births future moments yet unborn.

The best human poets have some kind of je nes sais quoi both in their technical proficiency and in the things they say, even though I can’t give a short list that distinguishes it from the sort of mediumqualityslop above (if I could, then R1 could memorize the list and write genius-level poetry).

In architecture, I freely admit that the lowbrow architecture I like, juxtaposed against the modern architecture I find myself unable to appreciate, has more than zero resemblance to a Lisa Frank poster:

The use of color, curves, ornament, symmetry, and - yes - having statues of awesome dragons all over the roof - are essentially cheap easy tricks compared to having something which apparently “reimagines the nature of the house”, even though nobody can explain how this is, or why the reimagination is good, in terms that I can understand. I can only claim that I am not yet so overexposed to these “cheap tricks” that they read as bad/annoying, nor so sophisticated that I can get any benefit from house-reimaginings, and I don’t consider this a character flaw.

If we ban all the cheap tricks for making people happy, and then all the medium-cost tricks, then we end with strategies so difficult that only ten geniuses in the world are skilled enough to execute them, and only ten connoisseurs sophisticated enough to appreciate them. Then the overwhelming majority of everything is ugly to everyone, broken only by a tiny minority of genius-crafted objects that are ugly to everyone except a tiny sophisticated minority. Remind me again why is this is good?

Suppose a superintelligence says “To me, even your most sophisticated and difficult tricks seem cheap. Here, have one million schematics for reimagined-houses that I spit out in five minutes. Now they’re just reimagined-houseslop. The only trick which feels expensive to me is something no human can comprehend. To you, it just looks like a featureless sphere, but there are actually imperceptible changes in the texture on certain areas.” Must we pooh-pooh the work of the greatest artists across history and even of our own day, and only ever appreciate featureless spheres from now on? If not, then why do we care when a smart human expert makes the same argument?

I think the strongest argument in favor is that tasteful people claim to get a higher level of pleasure from their sophisticated art than normal people can ever achieve from their cheap tricks. I’m skeptical. For one thing, tasteful people spend most of their time criticizing one another’s art and saying that it sucks. For another, my daughter gets more joy from “Choo Choo Train” than I remember ever getting from anything.

1: US Congress is considering an agriculture bill which would revoke all existing state animal welfare protections (for example, it would revoke California’s law banning farmers from keeping pigs in crates too small to turn around it for their entire lives). The animal welfare people are calling it “the most important legislative threat to farmed animal welfare in US history”. If you want to learn more, including how to contact your Senator, see this post.

2: Former book review contest winner Ethan Ludwin-Peery is a professor at Hampshire College, which he describes as “the greatest model of higher education ever invented, [producing] a higher proportion of research doctorates than almost any other school in the nation.” Unfortunately, the administration made some boneheaded financial decisions and now it’s in the process of shutting down. Ethan would like someone to save it. He thinks it would take $30-$60 million to buy the campus outright, plus another $40 million to operate it for the first few years until it regains a sustainable funding model. He points out that building a good college from scratch nowadays is near-impossible, and this represents a once-in-a-lifetime chance to acquire one at fire-sale prices. If you’re a billionaire who wants to prove some theory about tertiary education, or a smaller investor who wants to join a coalition, read Ethan’s plea to save Hampshire, then email him at ethanludwinpeery@gmail.com.

Reddit Vexillology

Vexillology is the c. elegans of aesthetics - the simplest model organism that lets us observe dynamics of interest. I haven’t read enough MFA books to do more than relay the thoughts of my betters, and you probably haven’t either. But anyone can have opinions on flags.

If you’re like me, you learned the following code of good flags:

1. They should be so simple that a child could draw them.

2. No images, no “busy” areas, and - for God’s sake - no text

3. The rule of tincture: “never put metal on metal, or color on color”. In medieval heraldry, “metals” were yellow and white (sometimes implemented with literal gold and silver) and “colors” were every other color (except black, which is a “fur” and has its own rules). A good flag shouldn’t have a metal touch another metal, or a color touch another color. So the French tricolor (blue then white then red) is okay, but a hypothetical (blue then red then white) tricolor wouldn’t be okay, because blue would be touching red, which would be “color on color”.

Every so often, a US state will decide that its flag is politically incorrect and sponsor a contest to design a new one. Then online vexillologists will go over the entries, savaging any that violate the code. “Look how busy this one is! It has four different colors!” “Oh god, this one literally included text! Can you believe it!” They’ll moan and scowl and ask why everyone can’t be more like Indonesia. Good old Indonesia, they know how to follow the rules:

But the non-Indonesians are starting to fighting back. Search the keyword “reddit vexillology” on X to make contact with the Resistance.

There are even memes!

If the vexillological resistance marches under a banner, it must be the flag of medieval Venice (c. 1000 - 1797):

The Reddit Vexillologist arguments are:

• Flags were originally intended to distinguish friend from foe on the battlefield. To serve this purpose, they ought to be easily distinguishable from far away, through smoke, dust, etc. There’s no way anyone could read text in these conditions.

• Sometimes your militia will need Betsy Ross - a random seamstress without fancy equipment - to sew them a flag out of bedsheets. Your flag should be simple enough that Betsy can do a good job.

• Patriotic young children will sometimes want to draw flags, and we should let them. This means no complex shapes that a child would get wrong.

• The Rule of Tincture is obviously correct. A color on a color looks like crap! Come on, can’t you see this?

The resistance counterarguments are:

• Battlefield recognition is no longer a main use case for flags, so this is no longer relevant. Besides, the medieval flags, which actually did get used in battle, mostly break your rules. You are trying to out-medieval the medievals.

• A modern Betsy Ross could order the most complex flag in the world off CafePress for $19.99 with same-day shipping.

• Young children aren’t going to object to having to draw a lion with wings. Young children love drawing lions with wings. No child has ever said “I hate lions with wings, I wish my country’s flag was something cool, like a red square on top of a white square.”

• The origins of the Rule of Tincture are unclear, but plausibly related to medieval craftsmen using literal metals, and crafting heraldic crests using techniques where it was practically difficult to get metals to join with other metals (or colors to join with other colors) properly. It would be a wild coincidence if the limitations of medieval craftsmanship just so happened to correspond to timeless aesthetic truths. You just think flags which break the rule look like crap because you’ve been so acculturated into the rule that any violation of it feels jarring on a preconscious level.

• Many of the most iconic flags in the world, including America, Brazil, California, Spain, the Vatican, Iran, and the United Nations, violate the conventions. A theory of vexillology where all of these are wrong would be like a theory of drama where Shakespeare sucked.

To all of these objections, I would add a broader one: sure, the Reddit vexillologists say that this is all about what’s easy for soldiers and children and Betsy Ross. But flags from back in solders/children/Betsy’s day were more complicated (eg Venice). And in every other form of art, the past two hundred years have seen detail gradually give way to minimalism. Prose has become less flowery, architecture has become less ornamented, dress has become plainer. And now there’s a movement for minimalist flags. Hmmmmmm. Are you sure you’re thinking of poor Betsy, or have you been unknowingly seized and by the zeitgeist and dragged off?

I think this is a successful model organism. We meet all the same considerations of context, history, aesthetics, and pattern languages. But here it’s obvious that many of the “rules of good taste” are obsolete historical artifacts (and pseudo-historical artifacts!) that got trapped because people who are familiar with them think everything else “looks wrong”, and which threaten to homogenize the field into a slurry.

And that’s why I think American greatness depends on adopting X user @Sven_Etienne’s US Flag In The Style Of Venice:

2: Movie Plot Holes

There’s a whole literature on why the eagles couldn’t have flown Frodo to Mordor (or, if your answer is that the Dark Lord would have noticed when they got close, fly him halfway). I’m not touching that one with a ten-foot-pole.

Here’s one that AFAIK nobody defends: when Obi-Wan was charged with hiding baby Luke from Vader, how come - out of an entire galaxy of places to conceal him - he placed him with Vader’s stepbrother, in Vader’s hometown, without even changing his last name?

On the one hand, this is extremely dumb, and makes me think less of George Lucas. On the other, it doesn’t change my enjoyment of Star Wars at all. Hundreds of millions of people have watched and loved Star Wars, and either not noticed this, or loved it despite this flaw.

Is this what people mean by “paying attention”? You might not think of these things on a first or second viewing. But some movies reward careful thought by showing hidden depths, and others punish it when a seemingly coherent story breaks down into nonsense.

You can go further. A nitpicky uber-nerd will spot that Ultra-Man’s laser is described as having a range of 1,000 feet in “Ultra-Man Behind The Scenes”. But in Ultra-Man #88, he was seen flying above the Empire State Building and shooting someone on the ground, even though the building is 1,250 feet tall. Is a comic series that doesn’t make any of these mistakes “better” than one that does? Are people who care about these things better, more tasteful readers than the rest of us?

Maybe. A superhero story that hangs together nicely is a more elegant and impressive artifact than one which constantly contradicts itself. This doesn’t affect whether normal people like the story or not, but we already agreed that taste is in many ways supposed to stand apart from the judgment of normal people (who like slop).

Is this just telling us that we respect taste when the taste-haver is an aristocrat with strong opinions on wine, but don’t respect it when the taste-haver is an uber-nerd with strong opinions on Ultra-Man’s blaster range?

Tech Company Names

I wanted to title one of the articles in this series “Against Taste”. In the end, what stopped me was one of my model cities posts. A project mentioned there is called Infinita. The project is fine, but I can’t get over the name. Sure, infinity is cool. But that’s exactly the problem. It tries too hard for an easy win. What’s cool? Infinity. How do you turn something into a name? “A” at the end. You feel like they’re manipulating you into feeling impressed.

But Infinita’s predecessor Vitalia had a good name. Superficially it’s the same idea: cool concept + A at the end. But it combines a useful description (Vitalia focused on biotech and longevity) with a subtle nod to its inspiration and chief supporter, Vitalik Buterin. Even though the two company names superficially resemble each other, those of us who really understand tech companies realize that the latter is actually quite clever in context.

This is taste. But it doesn’t seem exactly like any of the eight categories at the beginning of yesterday’s post. It’s closest to “novelty and innovation”. “Infinita” doesn’t do anything new or interesting with tech company names; it just takes the absolute easiest lowest-hanging fruit there is. But it’s more than that; “City Project Investors, Inc” is also extremely easy and not new or interesting, but it doesn’t seem as bad. Above, I used the word “manipulating”, and I sort of stand by that. It’s too much of an “easy win” - too good with too little work.

Part of my “Contra Everyone On Taste” crusade is to be against this sort of thing. There are people who think that any poem that rhymes is an “easy win” and therefore tasteless, or any art that looks like anything, or any building with ornament or symmetry. I hate this outlook, but then what do I mean when I admit there’s some sense in which easy wins are bad?

There was an AI generated poetry Turing Test a while ago. People revealed their bad taste by liking some AI poems that I considered absolutely horrid:

Yet in this fleeting dance, we find our grace
For time’s own rhythm guides us, slow or fast
Each second lived, a treasure we embrace
For in its flow, we find our lives amassed

Though time may steal what once was bright and true
The sun will rise again - and so shall you

Bits of this are nonsensical - why would you use the word “amassed” there? do we really embrace treasures? - but this isn’t the main problem. If it were only that, it would be no worse than Ultra-Man’s blaster having the wrong range. I think what makes me violently allergic is that this is stringing too many cliches together. “The sun will rise again - and so shall you”? Really?!

Maybe this isn’t actually a cliche, I’ve never heard that particular phrase before, but it’s the sort of thing that could be a cliche. I don’t know how else to describe it! You’re trying to manipulate me by doing easy things that you know will work, and the fact that it slightly does work just makes it even more galling!

More on this topic later.

1: Sensory Delight. Ode To Joy makes the listener feel joyful. Michelangelo’s David fills the viewer with awe at the human figure. The great cathedrals are impressive buildings, in a way that hits you like a punch to the gut. These judgments are preconscious, widespread, and don’t necessarily require artistic sophistication.

2: Novelty and Innovation: Someone gets credit for doing art in a way that has never been done before. The early Impressionists invented a new way of looking at the world and explored all of its little corners. A modern Impressionist painter may be able to match their technical skill, but not their novelty; therefore, the modern would be a mere curiosity while the originals were great artists. For a modern person to be a great artist, they would have to explore entirely new media - hence the surprising and transgressive nature of modern art.

3: Paying Attention / Pattern Language: Tasteful people, viewing art over the generations and paying deep attention to it, have developed a sense of balance, composition, contrast, and what should and shouldn’t be done. We can debate how predetermined the exact grammar of this language was a priori, but for better or worse people are sensitized to it and will judge works with it in mind. A good work of art should either conform to this language, or defy it deliberately and thoughtfully (that is, in a way that transcends it rather than ignores it).

Along with these three big ones, here are smaller ones that might or might not be combinations or subvarieties of these:

4: Context And Discussion: Some great art raises questions, and subsequent great art proposes answers, or variations on the questions, or further elucidates the subject. The great artists of any given time are in conversation with their peers and the great artists of all past ages; new art can be judged on whether it shows awareness of, and contributes to, this conversation. Other forms of context are more personal - is a book about human evil more aesthetic if its author survived the Holocaust?

5: Literal Ability To Understand A Work: You can’t fully appreciate Animal Farm unless you know the history of Soviet communism and recognize the book as an allegory for that history. If someone who knew nothing about this liked it as a cute story about talking animals, their appreciation would be different from (inferior to?) that of more knowledgeable people.

6: Changing Fashions: In 1940, Beaux-Arts and Frank Lloyd Wright were the heights of American architecture. By 1950, nobody who was anybody was doing Beaux-Arts or Prairie; it was all International Style. One could very charitably attribute this to the novelty-seeking drive above; but it’s implausible that Prairie style architecture was novel and beloved in 1940, a few houses completely exhausted its potential, but the explosion of International Style buildings didn’t restore the balance such that the low-hanging-fruit level level was lower in Prairie style again. More likely this was just a fashion effect where Prairie style was cool in 1940, then uncool in 1950.

7: Political And Ideological Point-Making: Great art may convey some truth about the world. This could be a purely aesthetic truth. But in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the truth was “slavery is bad”. Other truths are conveyed symbolically (for example, cathedrals being shaped like crosses) or through design choices (for example, the austerity of Bauhaus architecture making it more suitable for socialist housing).

8: Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You: Maybe this one is emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making. But some people say they come away from art transformed, in a way which is neither just sensory delight nor just political ideology. Philosophers have argued for millennia about exactly what way this is, but hopefully we’ve all had this experience and can accept an extensional definition.

These people enumerated these things to defend taste. I will instead take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad: it frees people from thinking too hard about any particular one of them, or the ways they interact. Here are my arguments for deliberately ignoring about half of these.

The Parable Of The Steakhouse

All discussion of aesthetics must in some sense be personal. So: young Scott was deeply disappointed to learn how restaurant critics worked.

In his imagination, a critic’s assistant would deliver dishes to her house, so she wouldn’t know which restaurant it came from. Otherwise, the critic might let her preconceptions influence her judgment, and a restaurant’s reputation would become self-reinforcing. She would eat blindfolded (or be spoon-fed?) so the food’s appearance couldn’t distort her judgment either. A typical tasting would intersperse food from dozens of different restaurants, with each dish tried multiple times (obviously the critic wouldn’t know it was the same dish) to ensure that the ratings were consistent. Any critic whose ratings were unreliable - two blind tastings of the same dish were no more likely to correlate than tastings of two different dishes - would be laughed out of the business.

Imagine how I felt when I actually read restaurant criticism. It was all stuff like “Oh, the ambience here is very nice; I had a great conversation with the chef who told me about how his childhood in Sardinia motivated new takes on traditional dishes.” How can you be sure the chef’s personable manner isn’t influencing your impression of the food?! Haven’t you ever heard of the Pepsi Paradox in psychology? Aaargh!

The type of critic young Scott dreamed of could make true discoveries. They might learn that the family restaurant down the street makes a steak that beats the $100-a-plate Michelin-starred steakhouse. Probably the average claim like this isn’t true. But probably there’s some claim like this which is true, and they could learn it. The real-world restaurant critic who writes stuff about “ambience” never will. Even if they’re honest and bold enough to risk their reputation on a crazy claim that would open them to ridicule and offend foodies everywhere, the placebo-esque effects of context and branding would bias them without their knowledge. They are doomed to repeat conventional wisdom, at best shifting it a little around the edges.

I’ve since made my peace with real-world restaurant criticism. I suppose it’s true that real people go to a restaurant and soak in the ambience, and that’s part of what makes restaurants fun. I suppose it’s true that making a visually appealing dish succeeds at delighting the senses no less than making something delicious. Even getting to hear about the chef’s dumb childhood in Sardinia is potentially part of the “experience”, if you like this sort of thing.

Still, it rankles. I’m at peace with there being some real-world food critics. But shouldn’t there be a few of the other type, too?

It wouldn’t take a psychoanalyst too long to uncover why I think like this. I grew up in a medical family; I knew why observational studies were worse than RCTs before I was entirely sure how sex worked. In a medical study, you have to ruthlessly control out everything except the drug itself. If one center has doctors in white coats administer the drug, and another has doctors in fancy suits administer it, that’s a potential bias (Bernstein et al, 2019). Predictive coding unifies these phenomena with their restaurant-related counterparts: all perception, whether of pain relief or the taste of a steak, is biased by contextual clues. Yet in medicine, we don’t shrug and say it’s “all part of the experience”. We challenge ourselves to isolate each factor - with the drug itself being the most important - and then recombine them in the way most conducive to patient care.

Dostoevsky says that “the world will be saved by Beauty”. I’m busy trying to save the world through Truth, so I can’t personally work on Dostoevsky’s project, but I think it deserves the same level of dignity. If seekers of Truth respect their discipline enough to separate real from placebo effects, why shouldn’t Beauty-seekers do the same? If you randomized-controlled-trialled art so mercilessly that all the novelty effects and context effects and pattern language effects got eliminated, would Beauty be what was left?

Okay, But Do You Like Art?

Suppose you go into a museum and you see a Renaissance-style sculpture. It fills you with awe, and you feel changed by what it tells you about the vitality and divinity of the human form.

Now suppose you read the placard, and it says “made c. 1995 by a Boomer from Ohio, who mass-manufactured it and sold copies to rich dentists to put in their McMansions.”

Is there some sense in which, retroactively, you were wrong to feel awe and inner transformation? A sense in which it would have been correct to have deep feelings about the nature of humanity if it had been by a real Renaissance master, but now it’s embarrassing? Suppose that a sense of artistic responsibility (or a sense of cringe) causes you to root these feelings out of yourself, until you can only regard the sculpture with snide contempt - and then the curator tells you that the placard was a prank, and the sculpture was by Michelangelo after all?

If you genuinely believe in the power of art to awe and transform, it’s strange to also care about its novelty and provenance. It would be as if people took medications based on how cool the story behind their invention was. Everyone agrees that the medications treat diseases, everyone agrees that the cool stories contribute nothing to their efficacy, but people had somehow forgotten to philosophically separate their disease-curing attribute from their fascinating provenance, and doctors would constantly be saying things like “Sure, Abilify works just as well as Thorazine with fewer side effects, but it’s boring and derivative, so take the Thorazine instead.”

The synthesis here - so obvious that many of you are probably screaming at me to address it - is that the first few Renaissance statues that you see should awe you and transform your mind - whether they are by Michelangelo or a talented forger - but that by your hundredth statue your mind has already been transformed in this particular way and you should move on to other things.

I agree this weasels out of the problem, but it’s not how real art lovers behave. If a Michelangelo exhibition came to their town, most art lovers wouldn’t say “Sorry, I’ve learned everything that I can from Renaissance statues, I only benefit from modern art now.” They would attend the exhibition and claim to be awed and transformed. If a new Michelangelo statue was discovered, it would be a great event in the art world (there was something like this with a new Da Vinci painting ten years ago) and the people who say they are awed and transformed by art would feel awed and transformed by it.

But also, this isn’t my personal experience of loving great art! I have no taste in visual art, but I love some poetry - enough that I’m willing to make the cringe statement that it awes and transforms me. Not every poem. Not even every poem by universally-recognized great poets. But some small subset of poems consistently astonish me. If my usual response to modern art is “I could draw that with a bucket of crayons and ten minutes”, my response to a really good poem is “I couldn’t write that in ten million years”. A really good poem feels like an artifact sent down by some god to prove his superiority to mortals, an impossible flex by a brain light-years beyond my own.

I’ve read most of the poems by the really great poets who I like - I’ll use G.K. Chesterton as an example here, since a reader reviewed his work in one of our contests. I don’t feel like I have exhausted my appreciation of them, or that my love of novelty drives me on to want something different. If someone discovered a book of a hundred lost Chesterton poems, I would treat it as Christmas, Hanukkah, and my birthday all at once.

And if I read those poems, and enjoyed them, and agreed they were as good as Chesterton’s best work elsewhere - but the “discoverer” triumphantly revealed they’d been a forgery the whole time - that would plunge me into some kind of aesthetic crisis. In the best-case scenario, I’d decide the forger was the same one-in-a-billion talent as Chesterton, in which case I would happily consider him one of my favorite poets - maybe less of a genius than Chesterton, since he didn’t come up with the style, but no less delightful to read. If I didn’t have that option (maybe the forger exhaustively trained and tested random members of the population, found that 5% of people could write as well as Chesterton if prompted correctly, and randomly sampled from that 5% to produce his fake book) then my crisis would be deeper, but maybe more productive. I would glut myself on Chesterton-quality poems until I really did get bored of them. I don’t know how long that would take. Maybe forever. If it took some limited amount of time, then next I would ask myself - if the top 5% of the population can write Chesterton-quality poems given the right training and prompt, doesn’t that imply that the top 0.001% of the population, given the same, could write even better poems? How do we identify these people? How do we get them to drop what they’re doing now and work on these masterpieces?

But I hope I wouldn’t say “Oh, 5% of the population can write Chesterton-quality poems? Wow, I didn’t know that. You’re telling me for the first time. But I still like Chesterton better because he was the first person to write in that style, and I don’t care at all about any of these other people, and I have no followup questions.” If I said that, I would feel contempt for myself; I would have to abandon all claim to have any true poetry appreciation. Anyone who says such a thing obviously doesn’t like poetry, they like - I don’t know, the experience of affiliating themselves with cool famous poets.

When people say “I think it’s really cool that this Impressionist painting was one of the first Impressionist paintings ever, and not just some modern version of an Impressionist painting that didn’t even participate in the original discussions around Impressionism”, I want to answer - okay, but do you like art?

Sing, O Muse, Of Rage

Freddie de Boer writes his opinion on the poverty of modern literature reviewers, one which I’ve heard in one form or another from every thoughtful person with an MFA. The forms allowed for the modern novel have been constricted over the course of the century, so that now every book that “makes it big” in the critical world is a slight variation on the same form. Erik Hoel, in his version of the same essay, says:

Consider the minimalism of many current novels, their brevity—all to shrink the attack surface. Oh, the prose is always well-polished, with the occasional pleasing turn of phrase, but never distinctive, never flowery nor reaching. This defensiveness extends even to the ontology of their fictional worlds. A lot of today’s literary fiction could be set on some twin earth where everything about history, science, philosophy, the universe, even what humans evolved to look like, could all be totally different. Yet the novel is so situated in the writer’s low-attack-surface manifest image of the world that the reader would never know. Unnamed narrators and characters are given only descriptors like “my divorced friend” or “L came over,” making everything surface.

What is auto-fiction but a form of defense? For if it really happened, who can criticize? Similarly, a dominant theme of a lot of contemporary fiction is social justice—for again, who can criticize? Even the use of first-person, so ubiquitous now, is defensive, for it protects you from getting the inner life of someone unlike yourself wrong. And none of this is helped by social media, which has increased the attack surface of pretty much everything and everyone, meaning that all art is now far more defensive and wary.

Without saying anything that thousands of other people haven’t said before me - there is a million-item checklist every modern book must follow not to get panned as “gauche” or “unsophisticated”, and almost no great book of the past followed any of these rules. The Iliad certainly didn’t. Which is more likely - that Homer (and millennia of classical and medieval commentators) simply didn’t realize the eternal truth that all prose must consist of short clear sentences vaguely reminiscent of Hemingway - a truth which can be grasped by anyone who pays sufficient attention to art and to their own emotions upon reading a book? Or that moderns have gotten trapped in a pointless cage of their own devising?

When I ask art critics about this, they say that it would sound ridiculous to write a Homeric-style epic poem today. It would be a conscious choice to take an extreme outlier literary position, in a way where it wasn’t a conscious choice for Homer. Homer was just describing the Trojan War in the idiom that felt most natural to him. You would have to either be engaging in self-parody, or be the least in-touch person in the world.

This is true, but it’s the failure mode that Lincoln memorably called “killing your parents, then begging clemency because you are an orphan”. Yes, if critics make a pact to excoriate any book more than 5% different from the median Jonathan Franzen novel, then every book outside that 5% margin of error will sound weird and jarring and involve a conscious decision to ruin one’s own career. And since Homer wasn’t trying to ruin his career, that makes the book different from Homer, and hard to judge outside the context of weirdness and professional self-immolation. But why stop there? If critics decided to pan any book that wasn’t about Joe Biden eating a hot dog, then after a decade of this, any book about any other topic would sound weird and jarring and cringe. We haven’t discovered a new aesthetic truth that, in the context of the 21st century, all art must be about ex-presidential meat consumption. We’ve just gotten stuck in a bad equilibrium. Insofar as there’s such a thing as Art - as opposed to mere sophistication - shouldn’t its chief job should be to escape?

The Angel Of History

I want to look in more detail at Frank Lantz’s reply to my post on taste (and AI Turing Test).

Lantz basically says - yeah, the AI Art Turing Test was an interesting examination of one aspect of art - the picture itself, abstracted into a 600 x 400 JPEG. But real art is situated in the world. It comes from an artist. It’s painted on some medium and displayed in some gallery. There’s discussion around it. It sits at a particular historic moment, and alters the stream of artistic history in some distinct way.

The meaning and purpose of an individual work of art is inextricably linked to its context, to the situation within which it was created, to the other works that came before, beside, and after it, and which form a larger conversation of which it is a part. This is true of 18,000-year-old bison drawings, Renaissance church frescos, Dada collages, Warhammer 40k fanart, and everything else […]

In fact, this is a point that has, in one way or another, been at the heart of art as a project for over a century, wrestled with by the very people who make up this clique, and for whom these codes and signals, and the profound and sacred activity they represent or simulate or obscure, have become a subject of endless, obsessive, self-critical fascination. How else do you explain Jeff Koons? How do you explain Andy Warhol?

When you look at art as a project, you recognize that Koons, and Warhol before him, and Duchamp before him, were themselves wrestling with the kinds of questions raised by this very quiz, questions about the relationship between art and jpegs, between what art purports to do and what it is actually doing, between the serious pursuit of profound and sacred truths and a speculative market in tax-avoidant ultra-luxury hyper-objects, between tacky, obscene wealth and abject, hipster coolness, between looking as optical experience and looking as social ritual, between a bunch of recursive, cerebral puzzles about the structure and limits of meaning and a bunch of pictures that may or may not make you feel a special tingle in the bathing suit area, between philosophy and decoration, between what kinds of image-making can and can’t be automated, between the irreducible particularity of the trembling human hand and the generalizing universality of formal symbol manipulation, and the capacity of either to gesture at, point to, grasp, or transmit, the infinite […]

He concludes:

I would like to be able to defend art, fine art, modern art, as a project, in terms that they would find convincing, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

Perhaps, as a preliminary sketch of such a defense, I would start by calling attention to the dynamic nature of art - its necessary and unavoidable restlessness. Every work of art is both embedded within a process of perception, reaction, evaluation, and interpretation, and also an intervention into this process. Think of, at a basic level, the relationship of an artist to their audience, the artist’s desire to make something that is both genuinely new and recognizably good, the audience’s desire to see something they can understand and appreciate and, at the same time, their aversion to the formulaic, the rote, the predictable, the corny. This is the process at the heart of creativity, a process which, by its very nature, is recursive, dialogical, even, in a way, adversarial. And it is deeply relevant to a number of important issues within the general scope of the rationalist project as I see it - the reach and limits of formal systems, our ability to recognize, avoid, or extract ourselves from collective traps in behavior space, the origin and evolution of values, value drift and meta-values, coherent extrapolated volition, prediction markets, the alignment problem, all of the complicated theoretical and practical questions about how to make a loving, joyful, interesting world without using lies, and superstition, and fear. How to be embedded in a system and, at the same time, outside of it, looking in and looking out.

He offers as an example Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, which I agree is an inspired example. I’d actually heard of this one before, in the same context Lantz uses it: art historian Walter Benjamin wrote a spectacular commentary on it:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

I’m not usually one for art history, but Benjamin has caught me. As a writer, I tip my hat to him: I will never compose a paragraph this good. If Angelus Novus can spark commentary like this, surely it - and the artistic project itself - is deeply valuable.

Except that I guarantee you that you will not be prepared for the actual Angelus Novus painting. Whatever you imagine it to be, it’s not that. I read Benjamin’s commentary first and I Googled Angelus Novus second, and I thought somebody was playing some kind of prank. Better if I had never seen it, and had kept the beauty of Benjamin’s prose unsullied in my mind. Still, if you insist on looking, you can see it here.

If a food critic writes a restaurant review that rings with the beauty of a Byron or Shakespeare; if it praises the food as ably as a Handel oratorio praises God - and then you eat it and it’s lukewarm slop - how many Michelin stars should that restaurant get? Can we give it a star for being part of a cultural thread that ends in greatness? Or is that a betrayal of the food critic’s solemn duty? Am I revealing myself as an autistic high-decoupler for even worrying about this?

Even if you think that dialectic and “being part of the conversation” is important, it’s obnoxious and in some sense parasitic to demand that it occupy the same part of semantic space as sensory delight. Imagine that you go to a restaurant and the food tastes terrible. When you complain to the chef, he objects “Ah, but this is a response to Mario Alberti’s famous meal of 1974, trying to demonstrate that the difference between lasagna and tortellini is only in your mind. Didn’t you catch that the juxtaposition between cloves and truffle salt represents the juxtaposition between fascism and the superego?” I think a reasonable response is to wish the chef good luck with whatever he is trying to do, but suggest that he make more of an effort to advertise that he isn’t doing the normal thing where people try to make food that tastes good. This was my original objection in the architecture review too. It’s cute that architects can argue with each other about the nature of socialism in a unique language made entirely of housing projects, I just would also like to be able to go outside and see something other than concrete boxes.

If the whimsical adversarial philosophical point-scoring game has the same name as the creating-beautiful-things game, everyone will get confused, and only one of them can survive. This is sort of like the steelmanned argument against cultural appropriation. If Native Americans are doing their traditional rain dance, and white people riff off of it to create some hip new form called the “rain dance” which goes viral and makes millions of dollars, then the conceptual beacon becomes so confused that traditional rain dancers can no longer coordinate with each other: any institution they form quickly gets infiltrated by a separate competing tradition that doesn’t even realize it’s a separate competing tradition. This is especially true if the white people keep rolling their eyes and saying “Oh, that rain dance is so five years ago, don’t you realize we’ve moved beyond that and all rain dances are trance synthwave techno now?”

The Eternal Return Of Dolphin Pancreas Baby

But fine, whatever, grant that all art is historically-informed commentary on the nature of art. I still think it’s bad commentary that fails to say interesting things. The five hundredth dissected shark in formaldehyde (or equivalent) just doesn’t add much to the conversation.

My understanding of this, from the little art history I’ve read (including this review) suggests that artists thought the traditional forms were played out. There was nowhere left to go with poetry that rhymes - nowhere left to go with heavily ornamented buildings - nowhere left to go with representational painting. The ancients might have been able to combine beauty and novelty, but they picked all the low-hanging fruit, and now all that’s left is to go mechanically through a checklist of things that have never been done before. In 1920, declaring a urinal to be art had never been done before, but Duchamp ruined that one, guess the next step is sharks in formaldehyde. Next year it’ll be, I don’t know, a baby with a dolphin pancreas on its head. People will say the same boring things - “This challenges us to ask whether a baby with a dolphin pancreas on its head can truly be art - the answer may surprise you!” Some rich person will buy it for $200 million as part of a tax evasion scheme. The people who scoffed at Dolphin Pancreas Baby will get told that by expressing an opinion at all, they are participating in exactly the kind of conversation that Dolphin Pancreas Baby was meant to evoke, and therefore retroactively vindicating its existence.

I admit that I cannot, personally, figure out some way to marry beauty and novelty into a greater whole which both Michelangelo and Salvador Dali would admit are worthy successors to their respective traditions. That’s why I’m not some tortured genius living in a flat in Paris with only a crust of bread, a canvas, and a personality disorder diagnosis to my name. But if you are that person, surely there is nothing more valuable you could be doing with your life. Surely, even if you fail, this is a worthier goal than drowning yet another marmoset in vodka. (“Could a marmoset drowned in vodka really be art? The answer may surprise you!”)

This is why I find it so obnoxious when people say things like “You wish that this concrete cube looked more like a Gaudi building? Aha! You’ve fallen into a trap! Don’t you realize that Gaudi himself was trying to break with stale tradition and expand the horizon of what was possible?” Yes, I do realize that. But he was good at it and you are bad. If you can’t figure out how to do it well, stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along.