Did you actually read the paragraph? He's basically saying that, that overall they'll have massively overpredicted AI progress but the progress that does get made will be used to "prove" Gary was wrong.
When self driving cars were really big in the news, it was driving in nice weather with a human there to correct issues. Many sources were saying the human was not really needed (only there because of regulations) and that the number of human interventions was going down. A bit contradictory there, but the trend was mostly right. Basically, we did/do have self-driving cars, if you want them to only drive on certain roads with certain conditions. A general self-driving car that can drive in the rain and snow, or other tricky situations (especially including other drivers) may never happen. Even human-level AI may not be able to do it, and it may not be an AI's fault. Those systems are highly dependent on sensory input, particularly cameras. Cameras can get dirty, break, or struggle to see in low-visibility environments.
For one thing, a person can blink and clear local obstructions. For an externally mounted camera, road dust and other debris would be a constant issue and cleaning it off far less convenient.
I would guess that just as human eyes are inside the vehicle, and can blink, it would be possible to have cameras inside the vehicle, with a blink mechanism.
I was being overly facetious with the blink comment, but the underlying concern is still there. It takes a lot of engineering to put a camera system inside that can watch all the different ways that a human can just by adjusting their head and eyes. It takes just as much or more engineering to mount external systems that can do the same, and I doubt there's a system that will clean off six+ inches of snow.
I have a backup camera that beeps when it thinks I'm too close to something. It's frequently wrong, usually beeping when there's nothing very close (false positive) but sometimes fails to beep when something is there (false negative). Either one could result in significant driving issues.
I am not interested in where Marcus' predictions beat some outgroup's. I am interested in where he makes more meaningful predictions that might reasonably be surprising, and I don't think I've seen one yet. Do you know of any?
The outgroup are those you're willing to derisively dismiss. Has Marcus made a prediction in contradiction to, say, Scott Alexander? What predictions has he made that we're waiting on more evidence to evaluate.
I am once again asking for specifics. I have seen him push back on Elon Musk's timelines, for one, but at this point that's just picking on the chronologically challenged.
If Marcus only engages with "certain groups" in the first place, his predictions aren't interesting. He isn't "doomed" with *anyone*, he's just generally irrelevant.
You’re very fortunate then. I’ve come across several people that seem to believe in him verbatim lol! Of course they also thought the earth would end in 2012 - the Mayan calendar thing. And the earth is only 7-8 thousand years old because that’s when god created it. Anddd that’s enough for tonight lol
Haha, those irrational people, believing things that we can instantly dismiss as dumb. Things we feel no temptation, not one bit, to believe. It must be that they are defective and we are rational.
I notice you’re not arguing any of those things are actually true, though. Irrational people who believe all those things do, in fact, exist, and aren’t even very rare.
I don't like this general practice of saying "Haha, look at those stupid people believing stupid things. We are so much smarter than them." Stigmatizing non-mainstream non-institutional belief is corrosive to all forms of knowledge discovery, and kills millions.
> Of course they also thought the earth would end in 2012 - the Mayan calendar thing. And the earth is only 7-8 thousand years old because that’s when god created it.
That sounds like something hard to reconcile. I mean if you believe the Bible literally, shouldn't there be angels and trumpets and beasts coming out of the sea and all that jazz having nothing to do with some pagan Mayans?
Dunno about "Angel Cards", but the Tarot, properly interpreted, always applies. Of course, what it's doing is saying "pay attention to this option", sort of like the I Ching. The trick is in the interpretation, and you've got to do that for yourself. Nobody else can do it for you. (It usually isn't worth the effort if you're rather introspective anyway.)
Tarot and I Ching are one thing but these “Angel cards” are little more than cute little sayings to make you feel good. There isn’t a bad card in the deck lol! The last time I had my (Tarot) cards read she told me a man would come that would be bad news and he would try to cheat me. Not a month later I met someone that tried to cheat me on some antiques I had for sale.
The thing about Nostradamus is that at least 95% of people who have been presented with one of his quatrains have never actually sat down and just started reading the quatrains for themselves. They've only ever heard the most cherry-picked and massaged versions of his predictions, from someone trying to create entertainment or controversy. If they're on the older side, I'll particularly point fingers at that extremely credulous Orson Welles TV special.
And for the most part these people say, "Wow, this Nostradamus guy sure did predict a bunch of things, pretty eerie," and then move on and don't think again about him until the next time someone brings him up.
I think the post was taking that as read, but making an interesting point contrasting the psychology of reactions to his positive(*) predictions and reactions to Fukuyama's, Pinker's, or Scott's own negative(*) ones.
(*) Positive and negative in the sense of "things will happen" and "things won't happen", not good and bad
Tarot cards serve as a medium for psychological projection to connect with ones deeper thoughts. it's a Rorschach test with a mild spiritual component.
Tarot cards can be used for prediction, like a crystal ball, and that is where I would say they lose their value.
" Fukuyama said some (no offense) kind of vapid stuff" -- I'm afraid that has to be filed under "Tell me you haven't read The End of History and The Last Man." It can be described in many ways, but "vapid" is not one of them.
I feel like 99% of the problem for Fukuyama is the title. If he'd titled it something dull like "Speculations on the reduction in ideologically fueled conflict" there would be far fewer complaints, but also far fewer people would have read it. Something of a monkeys paw situation
I think it’s actually worked out pretty well for Fukuyama. His reputation these days is back to where it was in the late ‘80s, plus he gets the advantage of having had his name in media discussion for decades.
He would still be wrong, ideologically-fueled conflict is very alive and well. But maybe the sheer boringness of the title will make anybody who tries to look at it to make fun of him fall asleep and wake up with amnesia.
International ideological conflict seems to have peaked though, at least for the time being. Ideological opposition to liberal democracy might see occasional resurgences, if we think of Islamic fundamentalism as a resurgence, but so far each resurgence has been weaker than the last one. Even most countries that aren't liberal democracies still more or less pretend to be. China runs a dual act where it pretends to be both a multiparty democracy and a Marxist-Leninist state instead of what it really is, a basically non-ideological republican autocracy.
Prior to the dominance of liberal democracy, autocrats used to openly eschew it and condemn it, instead of half-ashamedly wearing it like a skinsuit as they do nowadays.
I dunno, I thought The End of History and the Last Man was kinda vapid. Especially the overall premise that we need an grand overaching theory of history, Marx and Hegel propose them so one of them must be right, it wasn't Marx so it must be Hegel. His later books, but especially The Origins of Political Order, were so much better.
Well, we really *do* need a "grand overarching theory of history". We just don't have one that works, or any clear guide as to how to develop one. Psychohistory is a plausible candidate, but nobody knows how to build it. Even a really good sociology would help, but we don't seem to have that, either. (Perhaps the folks who developed it needed to keep it secret, ala Hari Seldon, but that seems quite unlikely.)
Why do we need an overarching theory of history? When I studied history, it seemed what mattered most was gaining little insights that add up to wisdom over time. No theory can provide a full-resolution picture of reality, just as no maps can provide no perfect picture of reality. It is for this reason that we do not have "one grand map," but many maps for different purposes.
The reason that you didn't get an understanding of history when you studied it is that we don't have a good framework to fit the data into. We've got pieces here and that that sort or usually work.
E.g., "Do democracies and republics always turn into dictatorships?" Justify either a yes or a no answer. Or. from Frank Herbert, "Do civil services always turn into aristocracies?" We've got several examples where they did, but there were always complicating factors. (Actually, I think there were some that didn't survive an invading army, so in a strict sense the answer should be no, but that's a rather unpleasant way to avoid the problem, as the invading army turned into the aristocracy.)
We need a good theory of history to predict the results of actions that we are taking in present time. (Of course, we might not pay attention to it anyway.) E.g., I thought the US civil rights movement was too abrupt, and needed to be more gradual. But on consideration I realized that there's no way such a movement could be continued over a sufficient period of time to allow a gradual transition. But perhaps my basic idea was just wrong. There's no way to know.
For this to work you need a theory that allows you to handle the interactions of the various segments. I.e. and overarching theory. It doesn't need to be complete, but it needs to allow the parts that it doesn't handle to be considered "noise" and still produce the correct answers.
As for your note, perhaps we have different definitions of "understanding". To me the best understanding of history that I've seen resembles the understanding of an accurate astrologer. Any result can be explained afterwards, but not predicted.
I think if a superintelligent alien species (or AI) were to simply hand us such a guide, we would just immediately reject it, because it would undoubtably start with an unflattering assessment of our nature as an animal species, and put us within the same framework of known instincts, limitations, and tendencies as we use when we describe the behavior of crocodiles or donkeys. (For example, I imagine a great deal of what we do can easily be explained by wired-in instincts for sexual competition, familial and tribal preference, fear of mortality.) We would absolutely hate that. We long to believe we behave the way we do from conscious choice arrived at after long and brilliant thought. To believe we are 85% biological robots enslaved by our base drives like so many dogs baying at the moon or a bitch in heat would be unbearable.
I recently listen to Origins of Political Order, Political Decay, and End of History. They work well together, End of History lays out this "soft determinist" framework of historical evolution through well observed trends in economic growth and technological development. The Order series then comes in and highlights all the historical and social contingencies that put the "soft" in soft determinism.
And granted its very much on my brain now, but it's hard not to see our identity obsessed culture war and not see "the struggle for recognition" as an incredibly useful lense to observe politics with.
I admit I haven't read it, but the thesis statement is pretty vapid. The government we have now is as good as it is going to get? Forever? Just seems obviously silly (and I was thinking this in the mid 90s too when I first encountered him). Certainly young me though a technology aided radical democracy or some sort of smaller scale stakeholder run polyarchy seemed like avenues for possibility, not to mention all the ones I couldn't imagine.
It isn't, that is pretty much how literally everyone describe sit. "Liberal democracy won, and it will not be supplanted because there are no superior competitors". You are syaing this isn't what the book is about?
> Why does everyone say that is what the book is about, if that isn't true?
The same reason you are... people like to repeat what others say if it makes them feel some type of way, even if they haven't come to their own understanding.
I haven't read the book, but if it is so, I wouldn't be particularly surprised, considering the title, and how I've seen Malthus and the 1972 Limits to Growth being strawmanned...
Looking back to reviews from mjaor publicaitons from the early 90s, that certainly is what they all think the book is about. I am confused that such an influential book is supposedly about some totally different thing that what society claims it is about.
Why is it obviously silly? Do you expect horses to invent calculus, eventually? Or honeybees to some day come up with much more efficient organizations of hive labor? All species have limitations, because no species is infinitely capable or infinitely smart. We have ours, too. It could be the government models we have now are the best *we* are capable of inventing, or comprehending, or working with. Perhaps only a much smarter species could do better.
Basicallly I think our technology is moving too quickly, our circumstances changing too radically, that we won’t find some alternate options to a model that is already 200 years old and quite bad.
But why would technology change our models of government? You'd think the latter derive from stuff like our inherent psychology and social psychology ("trust people who look like you more, or at least handsome/pretty people more") or our inherent mental limitations (Dunbar Number). How would having much more powerful smartphones change anything? It feels like we'd just do what we already do, only perhaps faster and harder.
Indeed, isn't that a lesson one could draw from social media? Rather than free us to develop more nuanced and complex models of social interaction, as Berners-Lee might have mused in 1989, it has enabled us to be gossipy cliquey 1958 high-school seniors on a much grander scale.
Because technology changes what is possible. Radical democracy (which I don't necessarily think is good) is absolutely feasible today in a way it never would have been 100-200 years ago.
You could have the whole populace making decisions thesmelves without representatives. Technology can also lead to problems or issues that are so big democratic/representative government cannot be trusted with them. you might need a leviathan to make society work. All sort so fpossibilities.
Ethics and politics is VERY situaitonal, and our situaiton is changing.
I mean even social media provides a good exmaple, yes it has turned general politics into a gossipy mess, which mighrt mean social media necessitates a move away from representative politics in an era when the mob is so "self-frothing".
How is it possible ? Are you suggesting voting machines ? Have you forgotten how every. single. expert. says they cannot be relied enough on ? (I guess they could be still used for non-important decisions... but why do we need direct democracy for those ?)
Personally I thought the Origins of Political Order was great. I only skipped the End of History because it seemed less interesting from 2nd-hand accounts of what it's about. I might have to revisit.
Well the biggest issue is that a lot of people predict a lot of things and so someone has probably predicted any given event. Probably lots of people predicted a peaceful fall of the Soviet Union. Many of them also predicted many other things but generally you only hear about successful predictions.
That book that predicted the peaceful fall of the Soviet Union was just some guy getting lucky. Predictions of the future is very much 1 million monkeys on typewriters.
Politics is a great example. Every cycle we get a dozen new guys who predicted shocking thing and a dozen guys from the previous cycle who predicted shocking thing but were wrong this time.
Maybe 10% of the population if not 5%, understands statistics and also applies it effectively in their actual life outside of academia. So predicting stuff is is always gonna be a shitshow and the media, both sincerely and cynically for profit is going to misunderstand predictions and take one lucky guess guys too seriously and guys with high calibration on important predictions not seriously at all.
Neither the average reporter or the average cashier is gonna check the calibration record of someone who predicts a high intensity issue wrong or right.
Reagan was convinced it was doomed (“will be consigned to the ash heap of history”) - though he didn’t specify the means - but was dismissed for his naïveté by his betters.
Thing is: IF you find one, people will argue about the NON-peacefulness of that fold (+ that is was not a "fold"). Not me, but if one paid me ... "January 1991 - Troops crush pro-independence demonstrations in the Baltics, killing 14 people in Lithuania and five in Latvia." 'peaceful?! Gotcha! BTFO!' add Nagorny, Chechnya, Putin's wars (really 'direct after-shocks' of this 'active conspiracy or whatever', just a WWII was 'clearly caused' by WWI).
"For hope no room, Be all gloom; all the world loves a doom. Give 'Em Threats, Play G. Thun., And They'll Pay To Say You're A-1."
When you say “no one” do you mean that literally not one person made such a prediction, or that out of the millions of people who made predictions about the Soviet Union, only a few tens of thousands predicted this?
Okay well I wasn't specifying experts, though I also don't believe no experts predicted it. That's just very unlikely.
Of course many people who had a salary depending on the USSR not falling would have argued heavily that it wouldn't. Military industrial complex and so forth.
Well I mean, this guy did. Presumably at least one other guy did. Probably more than one, in fact!
The point isn’t that this was a particularly popular opinion, it’s that there were 5 billion people alive around that time; of course at least a few thousand would have guessed that.
See the willful misinterpretation of Nate Silver's 2016 prediction.
He put a 30 something % chance of Trump victory right before the election, based on the idea that "if the polls are undercounting republicans, it means these states are actually R states, and Trump would win, but we have no idea, right now, how much, if any, the polls are undercounting republicans"
That later got spun into "Nate Silver was totally wrong about the 2016 election!"
There's definitely a level of willful stupidity and innumeracy that continues to this day, but there's also an element of how most of the election predictors were so off that 2016 results killed them outright, and 538 was left as the only target for folks in the "anger" stage of grief to vent at despite being one of the least deserving. Simple age is a worthwhile first metric for a prediction shop even before you look at their record, because the failures get selected away in anything that actually needs a budget and expertise (but not before poisoning the discourse).
This reminds me of an old scam. You send letters to 1024 people (or a much larger number) advising half that "this stock will go up big time" and other half that it will go down. You do that about 4-5 times. Add in traditional fraudster techniques, such as explaining a secret/new approach to investing, or how it is risky so you don't want them to invest, you could be wrong after all. In fact, you can even keep some of the cohorts where you were wrong, to help maintain creditability. Then you make an offer to invest. Some fraction of those that have seen repeated successes demonstrated (and you are guaranteed those for at least 2^[n-1] predictions and people) and will be crawling over themselves to give you money.
Yeah like 11 years ago in one of my social science classes we actually had a lecture on that for sports betting. I can't remember the details due to the time frame but it certainly stacks up amazingly to, say, political polling in the last few elections.
Yes, but I think his point is that this time he’s not talking about actually making accurate predictions - he’s talking about making predictions that people say good things about. He specifically doesn’t want to bring in the Tetlock stuff here.
Yes. But it's fucking difficult enough to make good predictions, without also trying to make predictions that won't make people want to rip your face off. Social media's fostering of face-ripping is probably making it even hard for all of us to think well.
I only do Twitter now, & on Twitter only follow doctors & scientists plus a few civilians whom I've found to be smart and civilized. I get way more detailed and up-to-date info about topics of interest on Twitter than I could get anywhere else. I'm not willing to give that up. Problem is, I'm so interested in these topics I can't refrain from commenting or asking questions, & my tweets sometimes get savaged. Also, I see attempts to discredit and dismantle good ideas in the replies that follow them, and sometimes argue back. It is just not possible for me to be deeply interested in these subjects yet have no interest in the responses to them, mine and others. Doubt that I'm unusual in that respect.
Scott specifically said, "This post is... not about how to make good predictions. It’s about how to make predictions that don’t make you miserable and cost you lots of credibility."
I think making bets with knowledgeable and honest people is a good way to make predictions.
This way you can point to you winning the bet as evidence enough that you were right (or wrong).
The betting mechanism tends to nail down definitions and appoint arbiters etc. So that's not purely down to public opinion. (Of course, no one can force other people to defer to the judgement of your arbiter. But it's a strong Schelling point.)
Absolutely. AI met Scott’s terms of the bet, but I’m not convinced it is actually even doing any better than the original round of image generation that led to the forecast as an improvement.
AFAIKT, most people think the current "AI artists" are a huge improvement over the prior generation.
And I am personally convinced that the "give me a bit of text and I'll give you a few pictures" form of control is not sufficient for a decent product. It should first iterate around rough sketches for a few generations and then only fill in the final choice. The current controls wouldn't give you what you want with a human artist, unless you were just collecting works by that artist.
3) phrasing things so that resolution is unambiguous
The problem with hypothesis generation being hard is that it can legitimately be a great prediction even if it’s only 10% likely to happen—if I predict 10 really surprising things 100 years out, and 1 of them comes true, that’s AMAZING, not a failure.
The problem with calibration being hard is that without stating actual probabilities and averaging over a long period of time, people will interpret all of your predictions as 100% confident. And even if you do, you’ll get bad press every time you make a 70% prediction and it’s wrong (c.f. five thirty eight in 2016)
The problem with ambiguous resolution is that companies write 100 page contracts and then spend 100 million in court trying to solve this problem and it’s still a shitshow.
Depends if there's a way to get economic value from your predictions. In an extreme case, if you could predict the winning lottery numbers 10% of the timez that would be very valuable.
You could take the pulp science media portrayals of advanced technology and just predict each of them coming true on a really long timetable. Fusion, AI, flying cars, whatever. You're pretty much guaranteed to be okay doing this, because you are either right (could be entirely by chance, it doesn't matter) or everyone forgets you made the prediction by the time it doesn't pan out.
I've complained about the "30 years from now" predictions before. That's sufficiently long from now that the people making the claims will be retired or close to it by the time their reputation is at stake, and they also have plenty of time to adjust their timeline as more information is known - commonly by saying "30 years from now" again, even if we're 10 years later.
5 and 10 year predictions at least require that most predictors will still be relevant and remembered, and we can at least see if some progress has been made.
If you care primarily about reputations, I see that. But if you care about truth, well some truths are just hard to adjudicate, but they may still be worth predicting.
In that case, I guess my position would be to properly discount anything too far out. 30 years away, to me, just means that people are still studying it and expect that's it's theoretically possible.
Writing something unambiguous is hard, but not that hard if you have a few iterations (which is part of the problem with both contracts and laws - there's no reward for finding an ambiguity in a contract/law the way there is for finding a vulnerability in software, so the iterations take decades rather than weeks).
But also, most contract and law writing isn't even trying to resolve ambiguities; it's trying to write something that both parties (in a contract) or a big enough coalition (in legislation) can agree to. Instead of trying to avoid ambiguities, the process positively incentivises them.
The result is: very powerful judges, as they are the ones that end up interpreting this stuff. Sometimes the intent is obvious and they will abide by it; other times the intent is obvious and they will choose to go with the literal text; other times it really isn't obvious, but they still have to pick one option.
For a really classic example, consider the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
So:
What does "well regulated" mean in this context?
How are the two clauses connected - is the first clause explanatory (the reason why the right exists but without effect), limiting (ie the People only have the right to keep and bear arms to the extent necessary for the militia), conditional (ie the right exists only if the militia is necessary, and the necessity of the militia is a judiciable question)?
Is the right collective to the People or individual to each person? If collective, how big of a collective, can people set up their own collectives? If individual, are there people excepted, e.g. felons? If so, on what basis can we determine who those exceptions are?
What are "Arms" in this context? Is this all weapons, or is it only a subset of weapons?
You could run an iterative process until you got rid of ambiguities - ie keep going until the people asking questions are clearly just being awkward. But that would mean answering these questions - and that might deprive you of the support necessary to get the law passed or the contract signed.
A common contract example is that you might contract someone to "make reasonable efforts to" build something. You and they might have very different idea of how much effort is reasonable, and if you actually talked it out, the negotiations would break down. If there is a problem, you'll go to court and the judge will decide what is and isn't reasonable.
As someone who works in federal regulation, I can second that the ambiguities are absolutely a "feature not a bug" in a lot of cases, and that a lot of what I get paid for is helping people navigate through those dangerous reefs.
"homo sapiens" means humans. A supremacist is someone who thinks that a group is much better than the others. In this context, that tweeter is saying that Stephen pinker, who wrote "the better angels of our nature" which is a book about how humanity is solving problems like war, is letting his pro-human bias make him blind to the fact that that his claims are wrong.
Humans may be pretty mediocre at solving these problems, but is there evidence that some other entities are better? Supremacy doesn't require perfection, just being better than all the competition.
I think the point isn't "he thinks humans are doing well because he doesn't see how well other entities are doing" but "he thinks humans are doing well because he doesn't pay attention to our impacts on other entities". Extinction of other species, using other species for food, that sort of thing.
I'd say that the very fact that this point of view has legitimacy these days shows just how confident humanity's supremacy has gotten. When the order of the day was bringing down woolly mammoths with sticks and stones, I doubt that there was much concern about their possible extinction (except insofar as that would necessitate a change in the diet, I guess).
Isn't that kind of the point, though? If I were a devil's advocate, I would say of course we wouldn't need to have worried about humanity's impact back when we were hunting mammoths with sticks, because tautologically humanity's impact was not significant at the time.
In a modern context, where humanity is by far the dominant species on the planet, has spread to compete with other animals in almost every location-based niche, and has a bunch of fancy industrial / ag processes with side effects that are nigh-universal.... surely there's a different frame of reference with which to evaluate the claim.
This is all sort of beside the object-level point, because the commentor on Pinker cited in the post seems a little too smug and pithy to be framing their criticism in any balanced context.
Sure, I would agree with some claim in the vicinity of this, like that humanity's wisdom doesn't appear to grow commensurably with its technological prowess. But I don't think that trying to deny or disclaim obvious supremacy is particularly wise either.
But it's rather odd that mammoths tended to disappear shortly after humans with decent hunting tools showed up.
I think you underrate the effect humans (an invasive species) had on the environment. Now whether this is good or bad depends on how you evaluate things, but it happened somehow. (Perhaps humans carried diseases that mammoths were susceptible to. But they are know to have driven entire herds of mammoths over cliffs. Probably by setting fires, but that may have been a guess. And I don't think there's any estimate of how often they did that.)
As an anti-homo sapiens humanist, it's good to often remind oneself that supremacy only matters if it's at a game that matters. If you're a drug addict or a gangster thug boasting about your objectively good rate of escaping police, nobody is going to be much impressed.
When somebody says you suck despite objective evidence to your prizes, this is best interpreted as the speaker saying that your prizes are stupid prizes won in stupid games, not that they don't exist.
Other non-human creatures don't have to solve war because they never invented civilization and it's centralizing effect on institutions and populations, so war can rage forever between individuals and small tribes and not affect anyone or anything else. They never had to invent nuclear treaties because they don't know what atoms are and never will. Sometimes, merely playing the game is losing, and the reason nobody else is playing it is that they were smart\lucky enough to realize this.
Someone who believes the interests of humanity as a whole are above the interests of nations, corporations, or animal rights groups. Formerly referred to as a "thoughtful and reasonable person."
My guess would be the same. People already trim the "predictions" to something less clumsy than the original form. E.g., let's just chop off "if the polls are right".
You shouldn't be able to write about Fukuyama unless you've read The End of History and the Last Man, which it's clear you haven't. Fukuyama makes pretty much the opposite claim of what everyone says he does in that book.
I find it very surprising to find this comment here, as fukuyama and the end of history have been talked to death on SSC, I feel like we've had conversations about whether he was right or wrong that could fill entire books, and yet I've never seen anybody making this claim. Could you point to the specific things you think Scott is getting wrong?
The last part of the book is about the conflict between those whose desire for success can be fulfilled within the established social order and those whose desire for success can only be fulfilled through finding new areas in which to succeed, even if it means tearing down the existing social order. This is an old theme. Lincoln spoke about it perhaps more eloquently than anyone before or since in his Lyceum Address. This theme is core to Fukuyama's work and to not grapple with it means you are not seriously engaging with Fukuyama's argument. Perhaps this is fine in Scott's case since he is (knowingly) putting forth the caricatured view that most people hold, but in my opinion putting forward this view without acknowledging its inadequacies, which were directly addressed by Fukuyama in his book, promulgates a flawed view.
But I will concede that opposite was too strong a word. The view that Fukuyama argues for by the end of the book is pretty much the view that most left-liberal people in the world today have about progress. But saying that "I agree with Fukuyama" would 1) require people to actually read and understand him and 2) not be noteworthy enough to attract attention.
As someone who has not read Fukuyama and had not heard of the Lyceum Address, thank you for writing this. It's a powerful frame, and contains a solid thinking-past-the-sale. I.e. anyone who doesn't agree with the momentum of the social order is selfishly seeking power/success outside of it in an inherently bad way. So-called conservatives here in America seem not to understand how powerful the frame is, or that every time they quote Jefferson about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants they are taking the bait in a deadly trap.
>the view that most left-liberal people in the world today have about progress
They do appear to get fewer in number and more pessimistic in outlook as the time goes on though. Both radical left and right claim ever more boldly that the present course is unsustainable (and immoral), and these opinions seem to only grow in popularity.
This is something that you can expect to continue. It's been exacerbated by social media, but the population in general is becoming more elderly, and this naturally tends to cause it to become less willing to change. (I want to say "more conservative" as, in a sense, that's more what I mean, but the term has become so debased that this wouldn't convey my meaning.) And when things change anyway, they tend to look for scapegoats.
Your point may be valid. I've never read the book, so I can't judge. But it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Scott's point. His point is based around what people who want to approve/denounce will extract WRT the work, and has little to nothing to do with what the work actually says.
Scott says Fukuyama is making vapid claims. But Scott just repeats the popular understanding of Fukuyama, rather than the more specific claims he makes.
Did anybody bother to review Fukuyama for the recent contest? Because a three-line "you should read Fukuyama's entire book or shut up about him" blog post isn't going to convince anyone, but an ACX-level review might be interesting and useful.
If you think Fukuyama was wrong, you haven't read Fukuyama but a 'summary' of him that got it backwards.
Here's the money quote:
" men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”
tell me that doesn't sound spot on to what's happening now
"There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once, the US got angry and invaded a few countries, and then everything continued as before."
Scott, I think you forgot the part where the US spent ~$2.3 trillion on Afghanistan and ~$3 trillion on Iraq, with enormous negative consequences to American's long-term well-being. Even if that money is funded by deficit spending that isn't directly paid, it gets amortized in inflation and other indirect ways.
(1) Citation needed for enormous. For reference, during this time total US government spending was about $100 trillion dollars [35% of US GDP from 2002 to 2022, which I'm approximating as 2002 GDP * 20 + (2022 GDP - 2002 GDP) * 20 / 2].
"Osama Bin Laden got America to waste 6% of its government spending for 20 years" is not nothing, but it's not enormous either. Bad land use regulations about housing construction cost far more than that, as do slowness / incompetence on infrastructure construction, as do high healthcare costs, as do inflated K-12 costs, as do...
(2) How confident are you of those figures? They don't add up with the size of the US military budget during the relevant years.
(2) The official estimates of the U.S. Government, e.g., from CBO, along with those of various think tanks, vary, of course, depending on what is included, but they are all on this order of magnitude. You might find plus or minus 40%, but you won't find, say, 3x.
(1) It's not whataboutism to point out that $6 trillion over 20 years is not "enormous"
(2) Your $6 trillion figure comes from the Brown University "Costs of War" project. I haven't seen an official CBO estimate for this, and since the annual military budget varies from $500 billion to $800 billion over this time frame, it's pretty hard to get to $300 billion per year.
A more normal accounting would peg the cost of the Iraq war at $838 billion, which is in fact more than 3x lower than you quoted:
"The Pentagon had been allotted approximately $838 billion in "emergency" and "overseas contingency operation" for military operations in Iraq from the fiscal year 2003 to 2019, including operations fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria."
Its also ignorign that the US would be having *some* foreign policy adventures in those years. The army needs its walks like a dog. Probably wouldn't have been as large without 9/11, but there would have been some.
Probably true, but that can probably be rounded to zero. America's operation in Grenada cost approximately $0, if we are using a yardstick with a scale in the hundreds of billions.
Oh I can see a world where 9/11 doesn't happen where instead we end up with troops in Venezuela or something. And I am kind of convinced Iraq was happening regardless. I definitely was convinced at the time (on like 9/12 I was saying eventually we would invade Iraq over it facts be damned).
Right, but why, though? There was no compelling reason to invade Iraq, just as there would be no compelling reason to invade Venezuela.
FWIW, Latin America governments are unstable enough that I would be very surprised if the US invaded Venezuela in any timeline near ours -- toppling the Castros could be done by injecting sufficient money + CIA support for an army coup.
Because the MI complex will find ways to make itself useful. Just like the man who is given a powerwasher for his birthday suddenly finds all sort so things that need powerwashing.
I think you are assuming US foreign policy is more raitonal and less driven by congressional and defense industry sca re mongering than it is.
If everything went as planned, US would be controlling the flow of Mid-Eastern oil, including who it could be sold to. Much easier and safer than a direct war with China.
I guess the actual cost is deadweight loss from the taxation needed to generate those revenues, equivalent to foregone economic activity, and whatever resources were used to these ends which could have been used for other purposes- whatever weapons were built that otherwise would not have been needed, people spending their time on this, etc.
The money just gets shuffled around to different people, if it goes to defense contractors then they spend it on something else. I'm not sure if the amount of money is a good measure of this waste of resources or not.
There's also the cost of the hundreds of thousands of persons killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, only a tiny proportion of whom had any connection to 9/11. Maybe we shouldn't zero-weight that.
If you assume the military-industrial complex is a constant, such that the resources go to it in any case, and all we're talking about is how those resources get shuffled, then of course the amount of money doesn't matter much.
I think that's a horrible way to think about it. It should by no means be a given that those resources go to the military-industrial complex in anything like the form that took in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
And having trillions of dollars sucked out of your economy with, not neutral, but strongly net-negative consequences absolutely does matter. It's magical thinking to imagine otherwise.
There were about 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed, and about 60,000 Afghani civilians. Notably, the rates of civilian death for both of those countries during the time they were occupied by America were comparable or lower than the rate of civilian deaths in the preceding 20 years. Saddam Hussein killed a lot of people, as did the Russians / Afghan Civil war.
Staying as long as America did in Afghanistan was a mistake for America's foreign policy, and invading Iraq was also a mistake, but its very not clear that those interventions net-killed Iraqis or Afghanis compared to the counterfactual.
"And having trillions of dollars sucked out of your economy with, not neutral, but strongly net-negative consequences absolutely does matter. It's magical thinking to imagine otherwise."
It certainly matters. But (1) most of those trillions weren't "sucked out" but instead spent on other businesses operating in the US and (2) the resources expended are a very small fraction of America's total resources so the impact was not enormous, contra to your claim.
Again, my point is that the trillions were not sucked out of the economy, they were put into the economy where they remained. Some real resources were taken out of the productive economy and put to arguably unproductive uses, that's the primary cost to the U.S.
Yes civilian deaths were costly to Iraq, you do have to offset this against whatever improvement in quality of life has resulted for the current citizens.
I think the bigger negative consequence was the violation of the norm that you don't just invade another country because you want to. The pretext for invading Iraq was totally ludicrous, and set a terrible precedent.
Did it set a terrible precedent though? Did it change the way other countries do things? Russia will mention it as a justification for Ukraine and stuff but they of course would have done it either way.
FWIW, the American intervention in Kosovo seems to have had a larger impact on the Russian psyche than the American intervention in Iraq, probably because Kosovo was a breakaway region from a Slavic-speaking Christian country and therefore much more threatening to Russia specifically.
> With fears rising that Amin was planning to switch sides to the United States, the Soviet government, under leader Leonid Brezhnev, decided to deploy the 40th Army across the border on 24 December 1979. Arriving in the capital Kabul, they staged a coup (Operation Storm-333), killing General Secretary Amin and installing Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal from the rival faction Parcham.
Invading a country to kill its dictator (and 349 loyalists) is not an example of invading a country to overthrow its government? Perhaps you are technically correct.
Whether or not this was a deviation from the previous behavior of the U.S. or other nations, I agree that it was, on its own merits, a very bad exercise of foreign/military policy.
Modern-day Iraq is probably better off than it would have been if Saddam Hussein had continued to rule without a second American intervention, but it's hardly a shining beacon of democracy.
It's still a poor, at beast semi-democratic country with voting polarized along ethnic lines, substantial interference from next-door theocratic Iran, and a tendency to elections produce violence and/or require election-ignoring coalition building to avoid violence.
I find it strange that both of you seem to think the success of a response to an attack on the US should be judged based on whether it helped the country that got blamed for the attack. Shouldn't the primary question be whether the war made Americans safer? I think the answer is a clear no on that front.
Freedom was assessing the invasion on whether or not it turned Iraq into a democracy, I was adding my perspective on its democratic progress (limited) but also its status compared to the counterfactual in that lens.
I agree that this isn't the way that US decision makers should evaluate past or future decisions. From the US perspective, the invasion of Iraq was almost certainly net-negative for US interests due to the combination of:
(1) contributing to the rise of ISIS
(2) tying up scarce US governmental attention for 10+ years
(3) non-trivial amounts of money spent to limited return
(4) strengthening Iran
(5) weakening America's claim to the moral high ground, which is a very important foreign policy asset that contributes to it maintaining its large network of valuable alliances
Is there a period of history in which you believe that norm was operative, and in fact exerted effective restraint on military action that would otherwise have been undertaken?
The smartphone is having a homogenizing effect on language, culture, entertainment, and the like, particularly for young people who don't really remember a world without them. This homogenization is proving to be a detriment for a lot of counter-cultural movements, not just fundamentalist Islam.
I would have said "photos" and "rapid communication" were what killed/"altered the basis of" jihadism. Photos of animals and people violate the Koran. Rapid communication exposes people to lots of ideas. Smartphones are one embodiment of that, but it was already in process before the smartphone showed up.
But I suspect "altered the basis of" is closer to accurate than "killed". Don't judge things on too short a time frame.
I don't think prominence in history books 300 years from now is a great test. Lots of enormously catastrophic things don't pass that test. Take the Armenian genocide beginning in 1915. People don't talk about it much even now, but something like a million people were murdered, and it seems really weird to say it wasn't a big deal.
The Armenian genocide was definitely a big deal, not least of which because before the Armenian genocide the Anatolia peninsula was much more ethnically mixed between Armenians, Turks, Greeks, and Kurds. Those million people who were killed made up a large fraction of the Anatolian population at the time, which attendant consequences for the future trajectory of Turkey & the region.
The reason people don't talk about it much is because there's a major regional power deliberately making an effort to suppress discussion of it. Ironically, I think *more* people will know about the Armenian Genocide a century from now, because the Turkish government's ability to stifle that information has been declining and will likely continue to decline.
The role of the Turkish government is definitely a factor. It illustrates the more general point that extent of discussion correlates only weakly with actual importance.
Come. The US spent an extra $2.2 trillion in a *single year* in 2020 with the CARES Act. We're long past the point when Iraq or Afghanistan war spending is a significant delta to fiscal profligacy.
+1 to this take. The US's ability to authorize ~$5 trillion in new spending in a single calendar year ($2.2 trillion CARES, $1.9 trillion ARP, $900 billion Dec. 2020 stimulus) really shows that $6 trillion over 20 years is a drop in the bucket.
Also, that $5.3 trillion over 20 years is 2-4x overestimate using funny math. The cost of the Iraq war using normal accounting was $838 billion not $3 trillion.
If you read the popular press now there is a lot of angst/hand wringing on the Democratic side due to Hispanic defections in the voting public to the GOP. Trump kicked that off when somehow he increased his share of the minority (and recent immigrant) vote from 2016 to 2020.
So Trump's political opponents may have been eager to brand him as the white supremacist president but in terms of how minorities actually view him to this day? I would say that Scott's prediction is actually looking pretty good. And if Trump is re-elected in 2024 because minority (especially Hispanic) working class voters continue to migrate to the Republicans?
The real issue is that working class voters are switching to the GOP regardless of race. That is the most significant demographic change in politics in generations.
It isn’t exactly “regardless” of race. Working class Blacks and Hispanics are still majority Democrats. The *movement* is in the same direction for each racial grouping, but the absolute level is still quite distinct.
Working class whites used to be staunch Democrats as well. Their political migration is pretty much complete. What is significant and interesting now is that minority working class voters appear to be undergoing the same migration, a somewhat surprising development given that it happened under Trump was who supposedly the white supremacist president
It's an apples to oranges comparison because the metric that's being used right now is public polling and a handful of offseason electoral results. That should be expected given that we are trying to analyze a phenomenon that is unfolding in real time in the present.
And Bush didn't shift hispanic voters at a greater rate than Trump. Trump won about 40% in 2020, a result that surprised just about everyone given his status as the white supremacist president.
I think Axioms was referring to the hypothetical President Jeb! Bush, noted guac bowl merchant.
I think President Jeb! is doubly hypothetical because I don't believe that he could have beaten Hillary.
But I think it's an interesting question. Jeb! pandered to Hispanics specifically but not to the working class, while Trump pandered to the working class specifically but not to Hispanics. It is an interesting question which of these two approaches is more attractive to working class Hispanics.
GWB is famous for attracting Hispanic voters at a rate that constituted a modern record for Republican presidential contenders--until Trump in 2020 who tied him.
And I would characterize is this way: Trump is the symptom, not the underlying cause. He was the inflection point of the migration of the white working class to the GOP but that process literally started in the 1960's. Similarly Trump may be the beneficiary of Hispanic defections to the GOP in 2024 but this is a broad based migration that is larger than any one candidate.
Short term I think pandering to demographics can be more enticing, but that appealing to class has stronger and longer-lasting effects.
For one thing, I used the word pandering for a reason - appealing to race/ethnicity tends to look like racism or other kinds of bigotry, especially to everyone else. That turns people off. Appealing to class appeals to their well-being no matter who they are, even if they really don't want to support you otherwise.
Jeb speaks very good Spanish, with a Mexican accent. Which makes sense because his wife is Mexican. He was the governor of Florida.
I think Jeb does beat Clinton. Most people would. First because you almost never get a party with 12 years in a row and second because she had a lot of troubles at the time, overdramatized or not. I think Jeb could win Colorado, Nevada, and maybe VA while losing Michigan or Wisconsin. He'd have done better in Florida IMO for obvious reasons. Also Trump could have lost PA/MI and still won so Jeb could as well. Maybe he gets CO/NV and loses PA/MI. Still wins.
It didn't surprise just about everyone, though? Biden was notoriously weak among Hispanic voters in the primary. Like absolutely trash tier. Lots of people expected a Hispanic swing to Trump.
Scott's prediction had a lot more to do with ridiculous predictions that Trump's opponents were making (black people in concentration camps) than that Trump was going to be specifically positive for minorities. That he increased his vote share among Hispanics and all other minorities was a surprise to both Scott and Trump's other opponents.
I've had the same complaint that Scott did, that hyperbole was making it hard to criticize Trump for what he was actually doing, because what he was actually doing (beyond "mean tweets" and speaking like a buffoon) were far less than his opponents said he would do.
I suspect it’s precisely that that is going on. In 2016, many Hispanic people that *would* have voted Republican were turned off by Trump’s rhetoric and the way it got repeated across the political spectrum. But after 4 years, many of those people realized it was just rhetoric and went back to voting how they would have.
(There may also be a separate movement of non-college voters to the Republicans across racial groups.)
The number of off season electoral votes available for examination is small but intriguing (Youngkin). That has to be supplemented with the polling, which is interesting to say the least. The NY Times/Siena poll had Hispanics giving Democrats a 40+ point lead on the generic congressional ballot in 2018. The same poll had the Hispanic vote split evenly in July. Assuming that's not (massive) polling error that seems significant.
The common narrative on the left and right is that pro-choice voters are moving the numbers in Democrats favor. How would that square with Hispanic voters moving from an even split in July to 40 points to Democrats now?
Either the polling is wrong, pro-choice isn't the reason for the movement back to Democrats, or Hispanics are far more in favor of abortion than anyone ever suspected.
I'm leaning towards polling error, given those choices, but that's a *lot* of polling error, so I'm not super confident about it.
To be clear, just to make sure that we're on the same page the NY Times/Siena poll in 2018 showed Democrats with a 40 point advantage among Hispanic voters on the generic congressional ballot. Now in 2022 a July poll showed Republicans and Democrats splitting the Hispanic vote evenly. So that 40 point advantage that the Democrats had has been erased in four years.
As for the effect of abortion on the November electoral season I would recommend caution.
I can't find the July instance of that poll to figure out whether this is just a noisy indicator that moves up and down quickly (perhaps because it's based only on the Hispanic fraction of a sample that was sized for its overall power, but not power within subgroups) or whether there was a slightly different indicator being used.
Both articles give the overall edge in the Hispanic voting bloc to the Democrats but point out those margins are shrinking as some Hispanic voters defect to the Republicans. I think that's a fair summary. Remember, white working class voters started defecting from the Democrats in the 1960's and I would argue that Trump represents the inflection point for that migration. That is a sixty year process.
For whatever reason the process seems to be vastly accelerated for the Hispanic voting bloc. As to the why it is difficult to say but Josh Kraushaar at Axios speculated that inflation was acting as "rocket fuel" in driving their migration. The pace of defections is probably significant with respect to November. From the second article:
"The problem for Democrats is that winning the Hispanic vote by only 26 points may not be enough for the party to accomplish its main goals.
“Let’s not forget that 2020 levels of Hispanic support were nearly catastrophic for Democrats,” Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, told me. It helped cost the party House seats in California, Florida and Texas and allowed Republicans to win statewide races comfortably in Florida and Texas. It nearly helped Trump win re-election."
And for 2024, from the first article:
"Republicans also have strength among Latino men, who favor Democrats in the midterm election but who say, by a five-point margin, that they would vote for Mr. Trump if he were to run again in 2024. Young men in particular appear to be shifting toward Republicans. They are a key vulnerability for Democrats, who maintain just a four-point edge in the midterms among men younger than 45."
Latino men voting Democrat in congressional races but favoring Trump by five points in 2024 is, on its face, confounding and contradictory. Like I said, the Hispanic migration to the GOP is without a doubt the most interesting and significant demographic change in politics that is occurring right now.
People on both sides have been saying for years that it was odd that Hispanics were so socially conservative but voted so consistently for Democrats. Maybe we hit upon something that eroded the core reason they voted Democrat (I'm not going to speculate what exactly that is), and the social conservatism is making that change go much faster - like a dam breaking and letting large amounts of water through very quickly, verses the spillway that was moving consistently but slowly.
Josh Kraushaar speculates that it's the economy, that inflation is acting as "rocket fuel" in driving the shift for a Hispanic population that is largely working class and thus much more vulnerable to bad economic conditions.
I would also offer up that it seems significant to me that older Hispanics are still faithful Democrats and that all of this change is being driven by the younger generations, if you want to think about your "core reason" for reluctance to change.
I dunno. Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama are both incredibly well-known public intellectuals whose ideas are endlessly discussed and debated, and Scott Alexander has done pretty well for himself in the "driving discourse" department, so the main thing I take away from this post is that it's probably a good idea to care less about people with dumb opinions on Twitter.
Probably harder to do when they aren't staying on twitter but are in your email inbox, with your name on them and filled with nasty language. It's easy to say "just ignore the haters", but I think it's psychologically a lot harder to really do in practice.
Yes, it is absolutely practicable to care less. Many rationalists like to flirt with Stoicism, a philosophical tradition that preaches caring less. One of the central conceits of Buddhism is to care less. Scott is a psychiatrist, so presumably he believes that on the margin it is possible to change one's emotional state in a positive direction.
I didn't say anything about this being simple or easy. But it certainly seems like the most sensible path. If the price for being in the mix is that people are sometimes going to have dumb opinions about your opinions, you can either try to idiot-proof your opinions -- which I absolutely do not think is practicable -- or you can rail against the idiots or you can move on. I'd vote for moving on.
Is something that is quite possible for 1 percent of people something you can call "practicable"? It's like...if people don't like that they can't post world-class marathon times and you say, "just dedicate years of your life and train hours a day and go through tons of pain and BTW you might not have the right genetics after all that"... obviously some people will do that and post world-class marathon times.
It strikes me that caring less could be the same sort of thing.
As an active practicer of caring less, I too vote for moving on, but I'd be interested to know if that's even possible for most.
Very few people can post world-class marathon times. But most people can run a 5k if they put in some effort. Caring less is more like the latter. In fact, I'd say caring less is more like taking a two-mile walk -- not really difficult at all, but something most of aren't inclined to do if we can hop in a car instead.
Interestingly (to me), two decades ago, I gave up giving the advice to care less because it seemed like to most people it ended up being more like the marathon advice than the 5k advice.
I'm searching here for the reason for the disparity between the two of us because I certainly agree it's a good course of action and I'll restart giving the advice if I was previously incorrect in my assessment of people's ability to do this thing.
Fwiw (not much!), I think the problem with the advice is not so much that it's hard to follow but that people just aren't generally inclined to take advice. I suspect that the average person hears the advice that they should care less and has one of two reactions: either they take umbrage at the notion that anyone would trivialize the enormous injustice they have suffered by suggesting they could possibly ignore it; or they agree in principle and immediately continue to obsess. I don't think many people actually attempt to go through the motions of caring less.
I used to work as a crisis counselor. People would reach out via a hotline when they were in the throes of some sort of emotional crisis. The circumstances were incredibly varied, ranging from teenage relationship angst to honest-to-goodness suicide attempts. In our roles as crisis counselors, there was absolutely nothing we could do to fix the underlying problems in these people's lives, which were often quite severe (homelessness, mental health disorders, sexual trauma, addiction, etc.). Our goal was simply to get them through the moment of crisis to a calmer place. This was by no means always easy, but the techniques we used for doing it were somewhat rote and very often effective. Affirmation. Breathing exercises. Exercise. Engaging in a favorite hobby. Reaching out to a friend. Etc. It wasn't really rocket science, and I don't want to overstate the outcome -- the people reaching out still had a lot of real issues to deal with.
But still, it was hard not to be struck. Especially if you're not dealing with something as overwhelming as a severe mental health crisis, there are steps you can take. You can to a degree choose how you want to engage with the world. I am far from a perfect example of this. But I do think it is possible.
I don't think caring less can be accomplished by direct effort: "Just don't focus on it, move on," etc. What works better is to build up the rest of your life so that you more deeply engaging things to move on *to*. That's not easy either, but it's a task where determination and willpower can help you, because it involves changing behavior rather than feels. You can't make yourself feel less bothered by being attacked, but you can make yourself try new things, meet new people, spend time on deeply satisfying activities rather than random online browsing, etc.
Well, NYT was on his case for more damning wrongthink than being insufficiently critical of Trump, and the implications of that are likewise somewhat different.
I expect Scott has had more criticism from big media outlets on a variety of topics than just the one big NYT debacle we know about.
In this post, he was talking about how it's psychologically easier to weather criticism from random Twitter trolls when you're pushing the majority view than to weather criticism from big media outlets when you're pushing a minority view. So I was responding to the poster saying it's just about ignoring random Twitter trolls.
Random NYT journos shitpost on Twitter as readily as anybody else, so that much may be true, but I don't think that they deserve attention there any more than anonymous trolls. Twitter is just an irredeemable cesspool IMO, and the fact that even the ratsphere apparently can't afford to entirely disengage from it is very dispiriting.
I was going to suggest something similar, but then I remember it was quite a different experience for someone now effectively a public speaker with a known real name...
To the contrary I think Francis Fukuyama has gotten a lot of mileage out of publishing his thesis with an inflammatory title. How many political scientists can you name that get namedropped whenever people discuss political events?
If I was trying to develop myself as a thought leader in a field, my first move would be to make a brazen and marginally thought provoking statement to tie my name to the field as tightly as possible. Imagine if Leibniz had published "The End of Calculus'; he'd probably be better known.
Like Bishop Berkeley in “The Analyst” where he accused Newton of working with “the ghosts of departed quantities” when he used infinitesimals that were sometimes nonzero and sometimes zero. Berkeley was totally logically right, but mathematicians kept doing it anyway, until the late 19th century when Weierstrass came along and gave new definitions to limits, and then mathematicians decided Berkeley had been right all along.
It’s a little hard for me to say what this does for their reputation, because Berkeley and Leibniz are both about as well-known as it is possible for a 17th or 18th century thinker to be - probably only Newton and Descartes outrank them.
And more recently, infinitesimals were further rehabilitated as being a sound foundation for an alternative formulation of analysis. While it's surprising for laymen, mathematics historically has been far from rigorous, with the best of mathematicians managing to intuit the truth sometimes centuries before it's conclusively proven.
I think this advice you’re giving seems to be something that might make sense for an individual but be terrible if everyone adopted it.
And aren’t Steven Pinker and Fukuyama still pretty famous and successful despite idiots on Twitter dunking on them? The more hysterical and pessimistic other intellectuals are, the more of a market it opens up for people who say something different. Twitter is where particularly dumb and lazy people congregate, it’s not the entire literate public.
Just tell the truth, be honest, and careful with your predictions. You might end up like Fukuyama, who wrote the most well known political science book of the last century.
Glad to see you're thinking about writing stuff that may make people say you have bad takes again. Felt like this was trying to address part of https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck where your interesting pieces had a habit of getting annoying responses from 0.5% of your audience, which stopped you writing them (totally understandable, but subtly disengaging for the silent majority).
I am very sympathetic to your desire to not be at the center of another "You are still crying wolf" mess. But a lot of your guidance seems to come down to, don't make the sort of prophecies that are most likely to be accurate and useful, because fools will jump all over you for them. Which, yes, they will, but it would be a shame to throw out volumes of accurate and useful prophecy over that.
I mean, I don't read it as actual guidance. It's sarcastic guidance. The message is "I understand that the optimal sort of predictions to get lauded as a clever prophet are very different to the optimal sort of predictions to be right or useful. I'm planning on optimising my predictions for something other than getting lauded as a clever prophet, so please be nice"
I shared that post with 3 friends when it came out. All of us live in a deep blue city. One of them hated it; one of them got confused by it; one of them told me it opened their eyes.
Posts like that are going to be polarizing. The ones that help some and give them comfort are going to be really hated by others.
It was the first neutral or left-leaning person I saw who wanted to be accurate on Trump, instead of throwing random stuff at him to see what would stick. Scott may or may not have realized it, but it was the random lies about Trump (or hyperbole, or exaggeration) that cemented his place with his voting base. If the regular media had limited itself to true and negative aspects of Trump - which everyone agrees were legion! - then his base *and* the intellectually honest (like Scott) wouldn't have felt the need to defend him at all.
It didn't help that there was a group of people perfectly willing to call Trump's base a "basket of deplorables" or similar.
I broadly agreed with the overall message of the piece, while still thinking the predictions at the end were hot garbage. I've tried to make my critiques specific enough to be useful in the past when it's come up, but I think this is a "no green stars" situation - discussion dynamics are such that object-level engagement will almost never be the dominant flavor.
Has Scott officially scored his predictions anywhere? Let's have a quick look:
1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
Score: False, the FBI classified 8052 "single-bias incidents" (what a classification!) in 2020 compared to 5818 in 2015.
This one seems to have been a bad prediction to start with; even random crime rate volatility makes it likely that at least one year will be 125% of some reference year, and there has been a long-term trend towards classifying (though not necessarily committing) increasing numbers of hate crimes. Of course 2020 being 2020 I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if actual numbers increased too.
2. Total minority population of US citizens will increase throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 99%]
Score: True. I don't have any data handy but am still confident that it's true.
3. US Muslim population increases throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 95%]
Score: True, as for 2.
4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.
Score: I couldn't be bothered figuring this one out in detail but here's a list of Trump cabinet appointees https://www.senate.gov/legislative/nominations/Trump_cabinet.htm -- Carson and Chao are definitely nonwhite and were around for the whole time putting a floor of 15% on it... I can't be bothered looking up the exact ancestry of all the others but let's say the 10% prediction was correct.
5. Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]
Score: true
6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].
7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].
Score: true.
("Oh but didn't he say there were fine people on bo..." no, shut up, stop being an idiot)
8. No large demographic group (> 1 million people) get forced to sign up for a “registry” [confidence: 95%]
Score: true
9> No large demographic group gets sent to internment camps [confidence: 99%]
Score: true
10. Number of deportations during Trump’s four years will not be greater than Obama’s 8 [confidence: 90%]
Anyway, it looks like a decent round of predictions to me. A couple wrong with 70% confidence and one wrong with 80% confidence, but all the high-confidence ones were right.
Ok, well, I'm predicting that we will keep seeing small incremental improvements in AI (perhaps enough to finally allow self-driving cars into the mainstream); the power and influence of the US will continue to decline; and the climate will keep warming pretty much in line with the median projections. Does that make me Nostradamus or Fukuyama ?
I think on AI you'll get both the Nostradamus and Fukuyama treatment. Some would say you're already proven wrong daily, given (for example) the recent advances in language and image models. Meanwhile some will never say you were wrong; none of the improvements we're seeing are truly large or surprising.
My big prediciton that would cause huge twitter callouts if I had any sort of public profile would be somehting like "we will be too stupid and shortsided to successfully stop climate change but the negative impacts will be wildly less severe than advertised and it will mostly be fine (if expensive to deal with)".
I am sure everytime there is a drought/stomr/heatwave/whatever I would get a million callouts.
I think you're being incredibly optimistic WRT climate change. And I'm willing to count your prediction as including both New York City and Washington, DC being largely submerged.
Niether will be largely submerged in timelines that matter. The AVERAGE elevation of NYC is ~15ft. DC is ~150ft.
The maximum predicted water level increase by 2100 in the last IPCC report is I think half a meter above 1990 levels.
So ~1.6 feet. Does that count as NYC and DC being "submerged"? And that you would even say such a silly thing is exactly why I am right. poeple believe absolutely gonzo shit is going to happen, and what actually is going to happen won't be nearly so bad.
No.
Over the very long run (thousands of years) a warmer earth would thermally expand the ocean, and the sea level might say 200ft.
Except regardless of what you think about climate change, we will have it under control one way or another long before "thousands of years". That isn't a time horizon of relevence.
The IPCC report was intentionally excessively conservative. This was so that people wouldn't just disbelieve it as "too extreme", but it also means that we don't really have a good handle on what the reasonable extremes are.
P.S.: If a city's sewer systems are underwater, that city is in trouble, unless they were designed with that situation in mind. Few are.
P.P.S.: I'm not predicting that NYC and DC will be under water, but I don't think there are reasonable grounds for predicting that they won't be. The error bars are HUGE.
Good question. When I read him, I get the impression his focus is on predicting racism and its consequences, while his critics accused him of endorsing or justifying racism. As we also see in the examples discussed here, the is-ought fallacy seems especially useful for people making ideologically-motivated "debunkings" of potentially inconvenient points. Of course, Powell didn't exactly go out of his way to condemn racism either, which would have alienated him from his support among definite actual racists.
Interested to hear what others think. Perhaps the ostracism and cancelling of people with unfashionable ideas is the price we must pay for a society that's becoming genuinely more tolerant and compassionate in other ways.
I thought Scott was going to say this one was also about the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Amongst several transported to the isles: Obviously the isles are Japan, and the several transported there are the two nuclear bombs
One to be born with two teeth in his mouth: The one to be born was Little Boy. The two teeth are the two lumps of U-235 that were brought together inside the bomb.
They will die of famine the trees stripped: Well, a lot of trees definitely got stripped. Some would say that they primarily died of things like burning to death rather than famine, but famines were definitely a problem for the survivors.
For them a new King issues a new edict: Japan's government is overthrown (admittedly with the exception of the King)
The two teeth being the lumps of fissile material is so good I'm disappointed Scott didn't write it into the post himself. Nothing is ever a coincidence, after all
Thanks for finding that! I'm so confused - it looks like about half of those prophecies are real, the other half are made up, and the made up ones aren't especially even made up to match true events up to that point. I wonder what they were doing.
That *is* a head-scratcher. I can't find the Thomas More prophecy anywhere outside The People's Almanac and quotes thereof. FWIW one of the authors, David Wallechinsky, is age 74 and splits his time between Santa Monica and France; if you run into him on 3rd Street Promenade please ask what the deal is (and thank him for me, for many hours of good bathroom reading).
Wallenchinsky co-authored the People's Almanac series of books with his father Irving Wallace and sister Amy Wallace. This family tossed off eclectic books (including some real tomes) like it was going out of style. Amy (who appears to have been the family underachiever) contributed to The Book of Lists during school breaks while living on her brother's commune in Berkeley in '77, coauthored numerous additional books with David and Irving, wrote a book centered on her 1990s relationship with Carlos Castaneda, authored a bio of William James Sidis, wrote one erotic novel, and co-authored (with Handsome Dick Manitoba) The Official Punk Rock Book of Lists.
Thanks, Scott. I appreciate the insight both into your own thinking and into the social dynamics that constrain public thinkers. I hope you will continue to explore the areas where you are comfortable pushing boundaries. Your "I suck" post a while back led me to reflect on the issues where wizened and experienced Scott has the advantage over young and brash Scott, and I'd love to see my own predictions confirmed, even if there's no one but myself to praise or blame me.
These insights aIso help to explain the changes in Internet culture c. 2007.
By a strange coincidence, I have just picked up a copy of Nostradamus (Henry C. Roberts's 1947 edition updated for 1994 by his grandson Robert Lawrence) at a particularly jejune university library sale. Figured I'd flip through it for some vague post-rationalist thought-jog, or at least for a few smirks at compelling hindsight interpretation.
It really is the most horrendous rubbish, though. It's not just that the quatrains are vague and malleable, some of the interpretations (don't know if this problem is peculiar to Roberts and Lawrence) simply march over clearly contrary elements.
One example of many, Century V, #55:
"Out of the country of greater Arabia,
Shall be born a strong master of Mohammedan law,
Who shall vex Spain and conquer Grenada,
And by sea shall come to the Italian [the French text specifies Ligurian] nation."
This is interpreted as 'from a country of Mohammedan law (Morocco), shall come one who is a strong master of their law - the sword: Khomeini and the Moslem revolution in Iran.'
Khomeini did not come from Arabia and never visited Spain, Italy, or Morocco, to say nothing of conquering Grenada in even the most figurative sense. I really wonder how this stuff has managed to fascinate so many people for so long.
Rules "first" and "fourth" (and maybe "second") can be summarized as a more general rule: predict the alternate media-reality, which is the reality through the lens of media.
Mentioned among "losers" Pinker wrote how media makes us to see reality in a distorted way. This picture can be seen as an alternate reality were the most of consumers of media live. All you need is to map your predictions from a "real" reality to an imagined media-reality, and then to think about how it can backfire.
I believe that this more general rule is better, because it makes you more prepared to new effects which you didn't identify yet. Though it probably needs more efforts to follow: you need to think of it explicitly, not just pattern-match.
Interesting, I always considered You are still Crying Wolf, to be one of your best pieces, but noticed that you shied away from writing articles like it, since. I had no idea you had to deal with so much criticism after that article. I completely get why you avoid articles like that, but I do hope you will find some middle ground where you are able to predict the future accurately, without being harassed.
Saying USSR has dissolved "without strife" is kinda painting over a lot of things. Without war - sure, but there was plenty of strife. Enough, in fact, that one of major propaganda themes used by Putin to consolidate his power was "you don't really want to go back to how it was in the 90s, do you?!"
Also, shouldn't London be considered the birthplace of communism (or, alternatively, Germany)?
And another part of this is that much of Putin's propaganda strategy is claiming that defeat in the Cold War was just a temporary humiliation, and Russia will reclaim its rightful place at the world stage any day now. Ukraine's existence outside of Russian domination is one of the most salient counterarguments to that, and thus the present situation.
Meh I think compared to what most people feared it was increidbly tame. I think a huge number of people in the west always assumed they would go down swinging, or there would be enough anarchy it would cause international problems. Instead the problems were mostly internal.
I mean the territory they lost was a huge deal, nations spend hundreds of years getting legitmate claim to places like that. And the party got a huge black eye and official embarassment of a huge degree. IDK I think it was a legit huge change, and especially was a huge change in eastern Europe.
More like the Communist Party has been transformed (or, has completed its transformation - it started decades ago) into the KGB Party. However, the power of the Russian Empire (whatever the current smokescreen name is) has greatly diminished - from controlling half of Europe and significant parts of Asia and Africa to basically a regional second-grade party. Yes, they still have nukes - so does Pakistan. They even had a brief period of democracy - a thing mostly unheard of in Russia, which never managed to keep the democracy around for long. Neither did it this time. So I'd say yes, there was a defeat of the USSR but not strong enough to transform the Russian Empire into something else. It just slightly mutated.
Correct, for "local" meaning "about 2500 km". Enough to reach Israel, and a fair chunk of Turkey, Russia, and China though not the most populous parts. All of India, of course.
Pakistan also has close ties to whatever the remains of Al Qaeda are calling themselves, if they want semi-deniable covert nuclear delivery worldwide.
I think it depends on with what you identify "the USSR." If we identify it with the nomenklatura and central rulers of the USSR, then surely yes. Those people -- staring with Gorbachev himself -- lost their jobs and influence. If you mean Russia itself, and the Russian elite class, perhaps it's less clear. Russia was the biggest chunk of the USSR, but a fair amount of Soviet leadership came from outside Russia, and and it's not entirely clear to me (and I think it wasn't entirely clearly to that class in 1991) that the USSR put Russia's interests first. I would speculate that in 1991 there was a fair amount of sentiment in Russian upper classes that Russia's interests were sufficiently separate from those of the USSR that there was something to be gained by the former's abolition. Putin seems to have tapped into a vein of feeling that this was wrong.
Although...isn't his power base a bit more eastern? One can imagine the urban upper classes of Moscow and St. Petersburg still thinking, yeah, the abolition of the USSR was a win for us -- now we can travel, do deals, get rich, buy nice things. But one can imagine a village on the Amur thinking no this sucks, we're still poor, maybe even poorer, and we don't even read about our glorious national victories at the Olympics, space probes, or the General Secretary negotiating solemnly with the US President over our terrible nukes, because those assholes in Moscow and St. Petersburg sold us out so they could buy Gucci handbags and vacation in Geneva.
I think you are projecting our current knowledge backwards. Huge number of people in the West thought nothing like that would happen at all and USSR is here to stay with us indefinitely, and the West has to learn to live with it. Reagan was considered a deranged cowboy for promoting the idea that USSR could be defeated and not appeased. Mainstream Sovietology basically considered the idea of the collapse a fringe scenario fit to the crazy "the end is nigh" street preachers and not a serious political scientist. So no serious discussion on *how* it mat happen happened, because pretty much everybody agreed it won't *happen at all* anytime soon.
Bari Weiss has an interesting story about Trump. It seems that Black people are Jewish people weren't allowed to play golf in the big resorts in the northeastern states. That is until Trump bought the big resorts. Trump resorts were the first big resorts open to Black people and Jewish people ... but somehow Trump gets painted the racist.
I think he is racist in the ordinary sort of way, that is, he has particular expectations of people based on their race. He will make an exception for individuals that he knows personally, and may even accept a trusted recommendation that goes against his racial priors (I'd have said "prejudices", as this is the literal meaning of prejudice, but there's too much risk of being misunderstood). This also means that, in situations where he is dealing with large groups of a particular race, he will be inclined to develop policy based on those priors (so his idea of border policy is based on his racial priors for "Mexicans", but that won't stop him hiring and trusting an individual Mexican-American).
Aside from the fact that he is much more transparent about this, he's not all that different from many other politicians (or many other people). He's not the sort of racist who will refuse to make exceptions for individuals of his personal acquaintance.
This is still racist, but it's not exceptionally or unusually racist and a lot of people from minorities expect this level of racism and many don't think that they're going to get any better from a politician or other powerful person - and they like that Trump is more transparent about this (which is what people mean when they say he is "honest" - they mean you can tell what his motives are and what he really wants, not that his factual statements are accurate).
To be honest, that kind of "racism" is rather forced on one. If I'm walking down a street at night, and someone else is doing the same thing behind me, I'll check unobtrusively to see what they look like, to decide how worried I should be. When all you know about someone is what's prominently visible, you make decisions based on that, and you don't ignore obvious elements.
However, to express those "prejudices" in public without sound statistics behind them is improper, unethical, and sometimes immoral.
Seems to me he is not really interested in people beyond their utility to him, and does not give a damn whether they are black, jewish, white, gay, straight. But it would probably have been of use to him politically to sound racist -- so as to scoop up the anti-black and antisemitic voters.
Quite right. Trump is far too self-centered to be genuinely racist. To be genuinely racist, you have to be willing to sacrifice your own self interest in pursuit of your ideological goals, e.g. you have to refuse to serve black customers even if you would make good money.
It was legal until the civil rights movement, I think. I had a book of Isaac Asimov's old jokes, and there are jokes about trying to not let the resort know you're Jewish.
Remember, these are private clubs, though, where you have to apply or be invited to join, and they can always turn down your application with justifications like "sorry, membership list is full right now" or "I don't think you'd be such a great cultural fit here" or what have you. Not saying the story is true or not, just that that kind of discrimination could have continued in pricey golf clubs without it being obvious to the general public.
It's not resorts, it's clubs. A private members' club can exclude people (even now) for just about any reason - and, more particularly, doesn't have to give a reason for blackballing them. If they just blackball all black/Jewish people without putting up a sign saying "no blacks or Jews", then there's nothing to sue over; they can just say "we rejected this person because someone voted against them".
Trump bought them and turned them into businesses - or, more often, set up his own courses which were businesses from the start - which do have legal obligations under the Civil Rights Act, and therefore took anyone who could afford to pay.
Courts have regularly ruled that private club memberships are not a public accommodation and therefore are not subject to Civil Rights rules. They can't have it as a policy, but if they just don't admit anyone, then that's that. The Augusta National golf club (which hosts the US Masters) had Tiger Woods as its first black member because the winner of the US Masters is automatically granted membership. Other black members were then admitted after that presumably because the (anonymous) members who had been blackballing them stopped doing so. Note that services provided by a private club to the general public (e.g. admission to guests of members) are public accommodations and they are subject to the usual Civil Rights laws.
The term "blackballing" originates with London clubs giving every member a white ball (marble sized) and a black ball to vote on a new member; if there were any black balls, then the new member was rejected. Some version is relatively common in member's clubs; if any existing member rejects a new one, then that person is excluded; the member doing the rejection does not have to supply a reason.
It's not true that Tiger was Augusta's first black member--for one, Masters winners are only automatically made honorary members, and anyway, they had their first black member in the early 1990s after another golf club, Shoal Creek, found themselves mired in controversy over their racial policies.
"The local country clubs had a rule: no blacks or Jews allowed. In 1996, “when Trump’s club opened up, it was like, ‘If you can pay, you’re welcome!’ So my dad formed his own community there,” Laub said in an interview. "
Thanks. This was where I sort of thought the story fit. It is one guy's remembrance 30 years later about local country clubs. Not that this isn't true, just it is anecdata.
The idea that country clubs would still be excluding black and (especially) Jewish people from membership *in the 1990s* just seems hard for me to believe, although given the example of the Augusta golf club I suppose I can't rule it out entirely.
It’s very easy to be a racist while doing some anti-racist things. You can’t settle this sort of thing with one-off examples, much as people on all sides of the issue want to. Don’t buy into the idea that one act makes someone a racist or that one act makes someone not a racist.
I personally don't think it's reasonable to classify people into "racist" and "not racist". It can be reasonable to sort people on a scale of more racist to less racist, but to recognize that there's a lot of blurriness here.
It's better to sort individual actions into "racist" and "not racist" than people.
> It's better to sort individual actions into "racist" and "not racist" than people.
On one hand, yes, on the other hand, it might be useful to have shortcuts for "this person makes racist actions frequently" and "this person makes racist actions rarely".
It's not just a shortcut, though -- it's a change in model. For the person who makes racist actions frequently, you're now picturing there being this intellectual/emotional entity inside them called racism, from whence flow the many racist actions. So long as you are working from that model, the reasonable thing to do is to tell the person they are racist. That is unlikely to effect much change in them -- they will mostly experience it as an insult. But also, what does "being racist" really mean? Seems like there are many feelings and ideas that could lead to frequent racist acts: fear of the racial other, dislike of the racial other, beliefs that the racial other dislikes me; ignorance of how the racial other will react to certain actions; deficits in empathy or just interpersonal alertness; habits. If you're going to speak up to somebody who does lots of racist things it's really better to look for the inner source of the actions, rather than to say they flow from "racism." So you say something like, "she [racial other] was startled and annoyed by that thing you did, and I can see why. How come you did that?"
With the sorry state of legal prediction markets (PredictIt shutting down, Kalshi very limited and not liquid), this guidance only applies to a very limited set of people. Unless you're writing a book or already have a national pulpit as a writer or an "intellectual," nobody cares about your predictions and you won't make any money by being accurate. The only exceptions are business-type predictions that are reflected in the market but the number of public companies or other securities on which you can make clean bets is limited.
I predicted the 2020 homicide spike and gave reasons about why it will happen (https://twitter.com/LechMazur/status/1267863723013820416) but it was barely worth the minimal effort of a Twitter post. It's same situation as with betting on Metaculus or Manifold Markets - might be fun to think about things in a systematic way and keep track of your predictions but ultimately it'll always be meaningless for almost everybody.
I must say the Climate Change thing looks perfectly optimized for this. Any weather happening (hot weather obviously, but cold weather too), any strong wind, and rain, or any absence of rain - all proves it. The press would never say "the weather this year wasn't substantially different from how it has been for the last 20 years" but will yell "This July 12th was the HOTTEST JULY 12TH ON RECORD!" It can not lose, really.
Apparently the blood red color absolutely must be used, for "accessibility" reasons, and this somehow "debunks" the tweet (even though it didn't comment on why it changed, just noted the difference in appearance).
But even if we accept that the change wasn't done to scare people about high temperatures, they literally say later in that article: "It’s no coincidence that deep red (dangerous) colours are used for temperatures in the high 30s because these are life-threatening"!
Also, turns out 33 is "high 30s" (that's the highest number there). So high that these areas aren't red anymore - they're black, to show that apparently all has been burned to ashes there, no chance of survivors.
But that's the actual worry. The immediate risk of climate change isn't the polar ice caps melting tomorrow. It's "PAKISTAN IS UNDERWATER" or "NORTH INDIA IS 49 DEGREES."
It's the long tail of making things that were exceedingly rare because they were at one end of the normal bell curve of weather events, into things that are merely uncommon with some catastrophic effects.
We'd want the media to highlight these events.
The red thing is odd. I feel like it is the BBC seeing places that did have unusually high temps and then wanting to get in on the action.
No, ideally we'd want them to highlight whether these events happen more often than they historically were. But that requires engaging in boring things like statistics, and the media is generally not in the business of doing that.
Except just a couple years ago it seemed like the press would always say “look it snowed in February, therefore global warming is a hoax” and would never mention high weather events. It’s possible for press to twist things either way on this.
But now snow in February is an extreme event which confirms climate change.
To be clear, climate change is a real phenomenon. But people seem to either opt for "climate change is only harmful" or "climate change does not exist." Of those two, "only harmful" is the more defensible position. However climate change also has benefits that people ignore. Increased CO2 increases growth of many crops as well as drought tolerance. All climate change models include increased precipitation. And while those models also include things like increased evaporation rates, the net balance as of about 5-10 years ago was towards increased global greening due to climate change. But saying "climate change is both good and bad" is anathema to the media narrative. We even get peer reviewed papers about how climate change has increased the growth of poison ivy. And that's... technically true. But glaringly selective.
This is exactly my issue. You have a thing which has trillions and trillions of positive benefits, and trillions and trilions of negative costs, and then ONLY look at the cost and say "see this is going to be the apocalypse".
A relevant example that I saw/lived through. Britain privatised its railways in the 1990s, and within the next ten years there were two headline-making derailments and crashes that killed people. Obviously it looked pretty bad for the private company running the railway infrastructure (Railtrack) and for the notion of privatisation in general. But a statistician went and ran the numbers and found, even including those big fatal crashes, there was an ongoing downward curve of railway accidents from the 1960s onwards, with a visible downward discontinuity at the time of privatisation - meaning that the railways got safer at that time. But to a casual observer, it really didn't look or feel that way. *On rereading the analysis now, I see that actually fatalities were higher post-privatisation because of one of the big accidents. But all other safety indicators were improved.
This is flagrantly ignoring *why* Hatfield and Potters Bar were so bad for Railtrack, and how the investigations done into its causes found Railtrack responsible. Comparing statistics says very little without deeper analysis into *why* safety improved under Railtrack, and whether or not the changes that improved safety would have occurred under BR.
Also, renationalisation under Network Rail improved safety relative to the private Railtrack which was itself safer than the nationalised BR.
One of the problems with "it's more complicated than that" as a story is that very often you need to go not one or two but many levels deep to get a real explanation - and no single individual can do that across enough fields to get a statistically valid sample of reality.
I feel the idea that “some guys in some caves got lucky once then the United States bombed some countries” fails to take history seriously.
Al-Qaeda enunciated a coherent vision for a world order to compete with liberal democracy. Many called this doctrine “Islamofascism” at the time. This was a misnomer, as fascism is an inherently racist doctrine, always seeing the state as the highest embodiment of a racial group. Al-Qaeda’s vision, however, was anti-racist. Regardless of where you came from, you were not only able to convert to Islam, you were very warmly invited to convert to Al-Qaeda’s version of Islam.
After 9/11 it was not clear Al-Qaeda, or some similar group, lacked the ability to obtain nuclear weapons. After-all, Pakistani society’s compatibility with Al-Qaeda’s vision for the world was on the same order of magnitude with Pakistani society’s compatibility with the western liberal vision. The same could be said of Indonesia, Malaysia, and myriad other smaller muslim nations.
This interpretation of Al-Qaeda and its philosophical legitimacy is well described by Paul Berman in his 2003 book “Terror and Liberalism.”
Al-Qaeda then, represented a clearly articulated challenge to the western liberal world order. The Bush Administration recognized that challenge, and set about destroying it. Significantly, the Obama administration continued Bush’s policy to completion. Drone war was stepped up. Guantanamo was not closed. Edward Snowden was not feted, he was chased to exile.
In short, the Bush and Obama administrations both agreed the political philosophy Al-Qaeda expounded was a serious threat the needed to be met and defeated. We only dismiss the seriousness of that threat today because it was so resoundingly defeated.
I don’t know how one can point to Al-Qaeda in 2001 and categorically state they were less serious a threat than the Bolsheviks in November of 1917, or the Nazis in 1923.
Indeed, one feels that if, in 1923, Hitler had been dealt with “Obama Style” then the Nazis would be remembered as a comically ineffective right-wing militia.
Anyway, pet-peeve of mine. Just because western liberalism has been reliably winning for the last 70yrs does not mean those victories are guaranteed forever and automagically.
>This was a misnomer, as fascism is an inherently racist doctrine, always seeing the state as the highest embodiment of a racial group. Al-Qaeda’s vision, however, was anti-racist. Regardless of where you came from, you were not only able to convert to Islam, you were very warmly invited to convert to Al-Qaeda’s version of Islam.
As good a critique of "anti-racism" as any.
But of course, I love how you apparently think the problem with "fascism" is the promotion of racial interests, as if being a murderous fanatic seeking to impose authoritarian rule is fine as long as you (ALLEGEDLY) don't have any racial preferences. "Anti-racism" really is is a religion.
And by your definition, the CCP are functionally a fascist government.
>Al-Qaeda then, represented a clearly articulated challenge to the western liberal world order.
One, of course, that appealed to only the most backward of countries, and one whose very similar instantiations produced absolutely nothing of value unless you're a fundamentalist muslim.
No, but really, you can say this stuff over and over again, but why not just come out and say exactly what was so "coherent" and "philosophically legitimate" about it?
>In short, the Bush and Obama administrations both agreed the political philosophy Al-Qaeda expounded was a serious threat the needed to be met and defeated. We only dismiss the seriousness of that threat today because it was so resoundingly defeated.
So, to be clear you disagree with all left-wing explanations for the war?
>I don’t know how one can point to Al-Qaeda in 2001 and categorically state they were less serious a threat than the Bolsheviks in November of 1917, or the Nazis in 1923.Indeed, one feels that if, in 1923, Hitler had been dealt with “Obama Style” then the Nazis would be remembered as a comically ineffective right-wing militia.
If the nazis in 1923 achieved what they set out to, they would come to control Germany, giving them the resources to have/build one of the strongest militaries in the world and the possibility of controlling most of Europe. The US weren't as dominant then, and the UK's military power had declined since WW1.
How is there any analogy to Al-Qaeda? They had no way of ever getting enough power to counter the military might of even just the US. Even if they got a nuke, so what? They might kill a bunch of people and then the middle east gets turned to glass.
>Anyway, pet-peeve of mine. Just because western liberalism has been reliably winning for the last 70yrs does not mean those victories are guaranteed forever and automagically.
Al-Qaeda never had any chance of displacing liberalism. It seems you hate the west and have concocted some fantasy with no connection to reality. Islam is in decline and the most powerful islamic countries are going to be greatly diminished once their oil becomes much less valuable. If something replaces liberalism before a singularity etc, it certainly won't be anything related to Islam.
> But of course, I love how you apparently think the problem with "fascism" is the promotion of racial interests, as if being a murderous fanatic seeking to impose authoritarian rule is fine as long as you (ALLEGEDLY) don't have any racial preferences. "Anti-racism" really is is a religion.
Part of the definition of fascism is its hyper-racialized (or nationalized, or ethnicized - however you prefer to put it) view of the world. If you do not have a hyper-racialized view of the world, you are not fascist. Islamism is not a hyper-racialized view of the world, but a universalist one oriented around religion. That doesn't mean that Al-Qaeda has a good policy - it simply means they aren't fascists.
Honestly I think we'd be a lot better off if the word "fascist" were used only to describe the Partito Nazionale Fascista, and using it to describe vaguely-similar movements in other parts of the world had never caught on.
Words have meaning. Saying that fascism is nationalist/racist/ethnosupremacist is like saying that Marxists care about class. To quote Mussolini himself: "[Fascism] is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and ending to express itself in the conscience and the will of the mass, ***of the whole group ethnically molded by natural and historical conditions into a nation***, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self same line of development and spiritual formation."
> Saying that fascism is nationalist/racist/ethnosupremacist is like saying that Marxists care about class
OK, but if you take Fascism and you make the in-group a religion (especially a large old established religion that is endemic in a large slice of the globe) rather than a nationality or a race is that really such a major change? It still seems like basically the same sort of thing.
I think you lose explanatory power if you conflate race and religion. For instance, compare Bolshevism to Fascism.
Bolsheviks were universalists. They were communists, and viewed the state as a means to provide material well-being to the masses everywhere on earth. One of the consequences of this is that, in the early years, the Soviet Union was truly a multi-ethnic empire with both Stalin and Khrushchev being ethnic minorities.
Contrariwise, let's take Russia today. Russia today is more fascist, more avowedly devoted to providing glory and material well-being to ethnic Russians. It would be unthinkable for a Dagestani Muslim to succeed Putin without utterly transforming the Russian state.
I suspect China, as others have noted, is also fascist. It's difficult to imagine a China in which, say, a Tibetan communist becomes the next General Secretary. I'm open to being convinced otherwise on this, as I'm by no means a China expert. But the Chinese Communist Party does seem to be about Han supremacy.
So, for both Russia and China, correctly identifying the polities as having fascist tendencies has both explanatory and predictive power.
I suspect one could make a similar argument to explain why the West and USSR, as universalist ideologies, were able to much more effectively make common cause agains the Axis in WWII. But that's a suspicion, and not fully thought out. Still, it's the type of investigation that suggests itself when one is picky about definitions.
<i>OK, but if you take Fascism and you make the in-group a religion (especially a large old established religion that is endemic in a large slice of the globe) rather than a nationality or a race is that really such a major change? It still seems like basically the same sort of thing.</i>
A lot of other fascist beliefs are, to put it mildly, difficult to square with traditional Abrahamic religions. For example, the fascist exaltation of the race above everything else doesn't really leave much room for God, who's generally considered to be infinitely above even the most ubermenschy of pure-blooded Aryan ubermenschen. Nor does the emphasis on the national will really work when it's the will of God that's supposed to be important, and people are expected to conform their wills to his.
Of course, you could say that all these other aspects of fascist belief aren't really important either, but then "fascism" ends up meaning little more than "people who support the ingroup at the expense of the outgroup too much", which is a lot less useful and meaningful and leaves us having to invent some other term to describe strongly voluntarist philosophies which make the racial group the most important aspect of life.
This citation (between the ***, out of context) is just your usual civic nationalism that liberal democracies still use today (but turned up to 11 because of the totalitarian doctrine of fascism aka groupism). I guess that this turning up to 11 is what almost immediately results in seeing other ethnicities as inferior, and in the context of the 20th century science, to racism ? (Honestly, I don't know much about Mussolini, my impression is that while he was no choir boy, still Hitler had quite the bad influence on him?)
I'm surprised your take-away from my comment is"he hates the west!" I suppose that proves Scott's point in his essay!
Personally, I am a reluctant western liberal imperialist. In general I dig western liberalism because, for me, the individual should be the fundamental unit of moral worth. Giving individuals agency to pursue happiness is a moral good. A materialist focus powers health and happiness both in the short-term (toilets), and long-term (getting off earth).
I am "reluctant" because, as a western liberal, imperialism doesn't sit well with me. But one of the lessons I take from history is that organizing philosophies must be imperialistic. An organizing philosophy that does not seek converts will eventually be overwhelmed by a philosophy that does. So, if we want western liberalism to survive, it must conquer.
Once this idea is in mind, I don't think one can safely assume certain organizing philosophies won't defeat us. You can say "the west is so much richer and educated than Islam, so Islam can't win." But I think the Etruscans would have said the same about the Romans, the Greeks would have said the same about the Romans. All the way to Chinese or Indians about the Europeans.
In any event, my point is simply that to dismiss the war against Islam waged by Bush and Obama from 2001 to 2016 as a side-show is missing the point. It was not a side-show. It was an extraordinarily successful implementation of a policy to discredit Islam as a competitor to western liberalism as an organizing philosophy for society.
Sure, lots of money got spent and people died. Those countries we invaded weren't turned into "Desert Denmarks." But to the extent those were goals at all, they were stretch goals, ancillary to the main policy goal of destroying the idea that Islam could organize the world.
Islamism is most popular among people who are a LOT less competent than Germans or Russians. Western scientists were worried about whether Germany would beat us to the atom bomb, and there was a "space race" between the US & USSR (both of whom used German scientists). Nobody is worried about Saudi Arabia advancing ahead of us scientifically/technologically. Nor would they be capable of conquering big chunks of Europe.
Also, Italian fascism was not really focused on race but instead culture.
I believe Islamic societies have a clear advantage in fertility. I don't know we can count that out as an important advantage.
Furthermore, my argument isn't that I believe Islam was a favorite to win. My argument is simply Islam was a plausible rival as an organizing philosophy for mankind.
Islamism is reasonably popular among Pakistanis, and Pakistanis are competent enough to build nuclear missiles. "But we are so competent that our nuclear missiles are much better", isn't going to change anything for anyone unfortunate enough to be at ground zero for one of Al Qaeda's hypothetical Pakistani-made nuclear missiles.
So, yeah, preventing that unholy matrimony was worth a fair bit of drone-striking and whatnot.
Yes! I was waiting for someone to point out that Italian Fascism *wasn't* racialist. There were Jewish members of the Fascist party up until Mussolini allied with Hitler.
This is a helpful comment. I’m not sure I agree with your claims, but they do sound a lot more plausible than the versions of the claims I had been imagining for decades.
I don't know that people develop a thick skin so much as those without thick skins naturally fall out of being a public figure, leaving behind only those who have thick skins.
David Graeber had a famously thin skin and yet kept inciting controversy with his books. It’s probably best for his legacy that he died before his last (co-authored) book came out, so that his responses to the responses didn’t discredit himself further. (But he still had a devoted following.)
Another thing that can doom predictions is predicting the upside on things that take the stairs up and the elevator down. This is most notable when predicting market recessions - If anyone was dumb enough to predict there's no recession coming up, , they'd get buried in the news every time the market has a bad day (somehow people became aware of this, which is why people pretty much always predict a recession in the near future, at least since 2008).
This also applies to AI development: A month with nothing exciting happening should probably push your timelines back by about a month or two on average, but a single exciting event would make it jump down, which means that predicting "AI is coming faster than you think, no matter how fast you think" is great media - every time people adjust timelines down you get to be all smug, but adjusting timelines up is gradual and boring and no one talks about you when that happens.
(It feels like this is Eliezer's shtick this day, which is why people are right to be annoyed at him for refusing to make any concrete timeline predictions).
Well, he as good as made the prediction that the world will suddenly end within this decade, and that nothing too unusual will happen beforehand. If this won't come to pass he's going to get plenty of deserved mockery.
If he really did predict the end of the world within 10 years, then he should be soundly mocked when it doesn't happen.
My guess - he repeatedly updates his prediction throughout that time period such that he can plausibly downplay any strong predictions long before they come due. If we don't even have AGI by then, he'll have a harder time with that, but he can always take credit for slowing AGI down through his push for safety, or if AGI exists in 10 years, take credit for the fact that it doesn't kill us all through his push for safety.
That would be a noticeable U-turn from him. So far he appears to say that AGI only ever seems closer (to fools who haven't updated as fast as him), that pushing to slow down is pretty much hopeless, and that everybody is clueless about how even to approach meaningful safety.
I agree that if it was his only public statement on the topic, it wouldn't count as a serious prediction. But, even though he's been pretty careful lately in avoiding to mention any concrete numbers, his overall behavior leaves no doubt that it is completely in earnest. A couple of representative examples:
He claims that a drop in an AGI forecast from 2042 to 2034 is movement in an "excruciatingly predictable direction"
And for the end of the world part, while he has long been heavily hinting at this attitude, he recently spelled it out plainly as "doubling our chances of survival will only take them from 0% to 0%"
This sounds like precisely the secret behind the success of QAnon. It helps to align yourself with a paranoid sect desperate for recognition.
Nostradamus codes as fairly harmless and fun. It's a bit more striking when you put your takeaway as wondering, "How can I be more like QAnon and less like Steven Pinker?"
Striking enough if the takeaway is “how can I be treated in the media more like QAnon and less like Steven Pinker”.
A lot of perception of media perceptions is misguided. Steven Pinker is still on net treated quite respectfully by the media even though there are also prominent haters.
Funny enough, my response to hearing about QAnon predictions was to compare them to Nostradamus. You can read any outcome into a prediction if either are vague enough. At that point, I concluded that, even if QAnon was completely correct, it provided no actionable information.
QAnon was initially not vague at all. The first Qanon post was extremely specific:
> HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major cities.
When, for some reason, his posts continued to attract attention despite being immediately proven wrong by real world events, he must have shifted to being vague to keep the lulz coming.
I remember once getting into an argument with a Q believer on thedonald.win, who thought that the definitive proof of Q being real was that Q had posted something like "Keep an eye on John McCain" and John McCain died, one year to the day later. If that's the kind of hit rate you need to be a convincing prophet then I'm in the wrong industry.
Problem is society expects people who r famous shouldnt change their predictions just like politicians shouldnt change their views or promises ( watch how the opposition usually comes with a statement of politician who made 30 years ago in contrary what he says today). When i was doing superforcasting i had to change and update my predictions often based on the new data i got or change of opinion. I face no repercussions if i am wrong (except maybe lose a spot in leaderboard). If u r public person you better be transparent about your predictions and “come clean” thats better way than your suggestion of not makig any predictions about certain events
Probably you wont be regarded as great predictor but you should have never be considered a great predictor in the first place. No one is in chaotic world
It's all about framing, as usual. If the book name was not "The End Of History And The Last Man" but something like "The Decline of Ideological Postmodernism and The Resurgence of Realpolitik" (just making something up), it would be far harder to throw cheap shots at. Not as catchy though.
AI will be given its target function by humans, who are optimising for status and reputation.
GPT and Dall-E weren't written to make money, they were written to get fawning "ooh look what AI can do now" articles written in the press. The first GAIs will probably be written for the same reason, meaning they will be optimised for similar things -- sound smart and don't say anything that brings the company bad publicity.
I doubt that there are many smart things that can be said that won't bring attacks. All the smart things most people agree on have been said so much they sound obvious -- so an AI saying them wouldn't sound smart. Platitudes go over well with the majority, but don't sound smart.
The sub-goal would be to manipulate people into assisting with the primary goal. Sounding smart or dumb or anything else is beside the point. Platitudes might be exactly what is required. Prediction: a smart AI will intentionally sound dumb in order to be mis-under-estimated.
Sure, but remember the joke about the talking dog, it's not what the dog says, it's that a dog is saying it. An AI that can roll out platitudes and bromides like a Presidential candidate on the stump would be sensational, at first. You'd have to develop some new shtick after a while of course, but that's the nature of trying to be famous.
I agree. Status can operate within narrow domains so that a given in-group maintains cohesion even with outside attacks. The AI could initially learn how to dominate such obscure domains, then expand to other broader domains (e.g. politics) once the ground rules have been learnt. No doubt it would also learn how to attack the reputations of others to advance its own status. A good training dataset would be reputation based online forums such as Stack Overflow.
Never say never (my take away from the article)! Reputation and status appear to have crucial survival benefits to humans who must coexist in groups or face overwhelming odds if they strike out alone. AI is initially playing in the human milieu so it would follow that impressing us (positively or negatively) would advance its primary goals.
I've lived long enough to be able to recall many times I was wrong about the future, so I'm averse to forecasting.
For example, as a child of the 70s, I long assumed that inflation was a major threat that could come back at any moment. But, after the early 1980s, it usually didn't. So my worries about inflation usually turned out wrong. Until covid followed by Biden, when spending like a drunken sailor was in fashion. After all, inflation worriers had been wrong so many times over the last 35 years, so what's the worst that could happen? 4% inflation?
Anyway, rather than try to predict the future, I focus on noticing the present. For example, not only did homicides shoot upwards after George Floyd's death, but so did traffic fatalities. In fact, during the Great Awokening, homicide deaths and auto accident deaths have been closely correlated, probably because encouraging traffic stops discourages both bad driving and carrying an illegal handgun, while anti-police criminal justice reforms during the Ferguson Effect and the Floyd Effect encourage speeding and packing heat. That's an interesting current reality that nobody had noticed before, as far as I can tell.
The good side of my orientation is that I'm not wrong often. The bad side is that being cautiously right a lot hasn't made me terribly popular. I'd probably be much more popular if I were wrong more about current affairs.
If your aim is your own peace of mind through reduced heckling, I can see why you'd want to do this - though for *you* Scott, surely this is bolting the door after the ship has sailed.
If the aim is to effect change through becoming a thought leader... The Prophet and Caesar's Wife comes to kind.
It's received wisdom in my circles that a significant long-term effect of 9/11 and 7/7 was the removal of many rights and civil liberties in the US and UK (and I believe other democracies though I'm less familiar with other jurisdictions). This does seem quite important to me and doesn't seem as though it was particularly likely to have happened without the excuse offered by terrorist attacks. Curious to check the vibe on this.
Definitely true, but not as generally as often described. Homeland Security and the FBI both gained significant powers because of it, and also significant freedom of movement to do what "needed to be done" to get the bad guys. The TSA is an obvious example, and watching pre-9/11 movies with people at airports is a eye-opener, as people can walk right up to the gates with no security to see their loved ones off.
Local police and agencies like ICE didn't change as much, or the changes were shorter lived.
> as people can walk right up to the gates with no security to see their loved ones off.
That doesn't sound right. There was always security, _but_ you could go through it without a ticket to see your loved ones off. US airports have universally had metal detectors and some form of luggage search since 1973.
Here's a pre-9/11 movie showing airport security https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fFzu8i7e8w as Kevin Kline's character casually slips a gun through the metal detector with a flip of the wrist (which realistically you probably couldn't actually do but it's a neat solution to the problem of how he can have a gun at an airport in the next scene).
Or something worse than security theatre, which is at least a coherent plan that someone might have consciously put together. Shoes and liquids are more like organisational scar tissue, a knee-jerk reaction to something that _might_ have occurred twenty years ago. It no longer makes a lick of sense from a cost-benefit standpoint but nobody with the power to remove it is willing to do so -- whether it's because they're scared of the tiny possibility that something _might_ happen and they'll get the blame, or whether they simply don't want to make the TSA process faster and smoother because that would reduce the size and scope of the TSA.
I wonder what crazy covid-related things we'll still be doing in 2044. Most of the rules have thankfully gone away, but I still theoretically have to wear a mask on the train for some reason.
Hmm, I'll not give movies the benefit-of-the-doubt about accurate portrayals of security, but I do have my own memories of meeting my dad as he got off an international flight in the early 90s. I don't recall going through security, but that's an old enough memory that maybe I'm wrong. I can't remember being at a large airport between then and 2001.
NSA ? Snowden scandal ? USA not being trusted any more and its companies becoming (so far, theoretically) illegal in EUrope because there is no way to be sure the US government / spy agencies won't just do what they want with the data ?
And yeah, quite a lot of wannabes in EUrope too aping USA's gradual descent into police state after the Patriot Act...
I think the basic problem is that people don't have the time or will to independently evaluate factual matters, so they have to rely on the general vibes from authorities in their ingroup (such as the media or the political leaders and activists in theor ingroup).
Those vibes are generally not very accurate, so this prevents forecasters from being accurately evaluated, in particular in the ways you describe in the post. It is perhaps exacerbated because when the outgroup wants to push back against the ingroup's vibes, they will tend to link to articles that seemingly contradict them - I bet it's regularly happened that someone said that Trump was bad, and then someone else linked your Crying Wolf post to contradict them, even though your post admitted that Trump was bad.
This seems like a quite problematic overall situation, as it actively discourages accuracy among those we'd specifically like to judge for accuracy. I think the only solid way to solve it would be to somehow allow people to quickly evaluate accuracy, which presumably means setting up some sort of organization that does it for them. Of course then one has to ensure that that organization does not get corrupted.
I wonder if you could have done better with the Crying Wolf case if you had collected a bunch of objective predictions from people who *did* believe that Donald Trump was a white supremacist, and then shown how your predictions were objectively more accurate than theirs. But that's difficult...
Matthew Yglesias, who was too sensible for Vox, wrote "My guess is that in a Trump administration angry mobs will beat and murder Jews and people of color with impunity”, but because he regularly deletes his tweets you have to rely on his detractors to preserve the evidence.
I don't understand how Matthew Yglesias enters the picture. Like yes maybe he said something stupid about Trump, but so did lots of people. This post is not so much about those people as it is about Scott Alexander.
I don't think individual examples are good because anyone can cherry-pick examples of stupidity on either side. I think there's a need for something more systematic to properly evaluate track records.
Matt Yglesias is a well known writer and journalist. Do you have criteria in mind that excludes him but would pull in a representative set of people or organizations to follow?
Or are you more concerned about looking at him alone, but would be okay including him in a set?
I'm quite concerned about *any* mainstream journalist, politician, or similarly often read person who makes such claims and isn't generally called out for it. Having lived through those years, there sure were a lot of people making claims about Trump and his followers very similar to Matt's, that turned out to be false.
Yglesias explicitly doesn't stand behind anything he writes in tweets, which he considers a low effort and transitory medium in which he can say whatever random thing that pops into his head. That's why he deletes his tweets freely and often. So what would it mean to "call him out" for it?
I was thinking more something like Scott putting out a survey for people asking them whether they consider Trump a white nationalist and having them predict a number of issues. I would also be open to other options, but just randomly picking someone post-hoc without proper thought put into it seems like a bad idea, as it doesn't make it any easier to evaluate the big picture of things.
If you're going to pretend Twitter is a platform that everyone uses for sober analysis, it has been less than 24 hours since Yglesias called Vladmir Putin "the principled 'keep it in the ground' climate champion the world needs." Just use that.
To put it mildly, I disagree with interpretation and question how familiar its speaker is with Yglesias' different posting styles. Straight-faced hyperbole in response to breathless doomsaying is hardly a novel piece of rhetoric.
I've done annual predictions on my blog for 20 years now, and my top takeaway is that making good predictions is really, really hard. The world is a chaotic system, and even when one gets the underlying social or political circumstances suggesting the prediction basically right (in retrospect), random small events routinely end up having enormous short-to-medium-term impact--and of course long-term trends routinely shift circumstances significantly over time. Hence prognostications that seem highly likely to occur soon and practically inevitable within the next twenty years can be delayed for ten years by "random noise" events, at which point the conditions that made the prediction inevitable have shifted sufficiently that it's now quite unlikely after all. So while I continue to make annual predictions--more as an excuse for expressing my perception of the social or political circumstances that motivate my prediction--I no longer really expect them to hold up even remotely well over time.
In 1971, Talcott Parsons made three predictions about the Soviet Union: 1) It would fall, 2) it would fall peacefully, 3) it would be dismantled from inside the communist party.
The third one is the most impressive one. Parsons was able to predict how it would fall (dismantled from inside the ruling elite), not only that it would fall, and peacefully. This, and more, in the half-forgotten book "The structure of modern societies" (the Fukuyama-type book of its day). Still very readable. Perhaps worth a review in a future book contest?
....Parsons was the dominant figure in macro-sociology in the 1950s and 60s. He went out of fashion in the late 1970s, with neo-Marxism on the rise and all that, but has made a comeback in some circles today. If you are interested in how to locate societal mechanisms that may lead to predictions, his structural-functionalist paradigm for understanding the world & predicting future developments, offers some possible intellectual tools. There you'll find the reasoning behind his 1971 predictions of the future of USSR, and much more.
Not exactly how I remember it. (Less 'the horseman made the horse lay down' and more 'the rider realized the horse was falling and stepped off at the end.)
Not how I remember it either, because I was young and let myself be bombarded by ideological media onslaught. Which is to say, 1990 era articles are the last thing you want to read about this subject. (To wit, an 1990 era article would cite Fukuyama approvingly. The reason he's now a symbol of the short-sightedness of the 1990 era liberal triumphalism is precisely that he first became a symbol of the 1990 era liberal triumphalism. People dunking on him may have a wrong idea about his theses, but their target is not his theses, but the predominant media mood of the era.)
I always wonder what academia in the social sciences and humanities would have come up with if it hadn't been taken over by Marxists. Similarly, it's interesting to read, say, J.G. Cozzens or Herman Wouk, who wrote critically acclaimed novels at just the last time you could do that as a conservative. Makes me wonder what could have been.
What does 2 without 3 (at least superficially from the inside) look like? Somebody else walzing into a nuclear-armed state uncontested as if they were William of Orange?
I think you're reading too much into the Twitter mob/ newspaper writers. You're never going to please those people. Being a thought leader isn't about making those people proud of you, all you have to do for that is pander to their prejudices, sound fancy, offer new bs evidence supporting their prejudices ("ivermectin 92% effective"). Its low hanging fruit. I know this is going to make me sound super elitist, but being a thought leader isn't about those people. Those people don't even want to think critically about their own opinions. Being a thought leader is about having a conversation with the people who actually really want to know what is going on/ are carefully trying to figure that out (even if the truth they find turns their whole life upside down). Talk to those people, move that conversation in a useful direction, then boom- you're a "thought leader", even though 80% of Twitter thinks you can be dismissed with a gotcha and a lol. The people on some ideological crusade/ just begging for likes are not the people you want to have a conversation with. They aren't even trying to find the truth (they already have it). I'm not saying these people are evil or anything, I'm saying that engaging with them rhetorically is kind of a trap/ a poor use of time. Don't focus on packaging predictions creatively/ sounding cool/ not having the Twitter mob hate you. That will just water down your genius, imo. Just say what you think is going on now, predict what you think is going to happen tomorrow, and know that we will forgive you when you aren't 100% right all the time. We know how this shit works.
>There was not a rising Islamofascism, there was not a clash of civilizations. There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once.
That's a very american-centric point of view. For many in western Europe, the clash of civilization is a very real concern, and if islamofascism isn't a word that really survived in the discourse, far right parties break records in one european country or another nearly every year. Even at the time, terrorists got lucky once in new york, then again in London, then again in Madrid, then after a lull (in the west, at least. The rest of the world got it's share. Remember Boko Haram?) until it came back with a vengeance in the mid-2010, and became a steady flow of shootings, trucks attacks & stabbings.
Yes, and the claim that if you asked people to "[rank] threats to the world order now" they would not include Islam also seems very American-centric to me. As evidence, consider that a driver of the success (relative to the past few decades) that right-wing parties in Europe are currently enjoying is fear among voters of the perceived growth and influence of Islam where they live. I would bet if you surveyed Western European voters about threats to the world order, while Islam might not make the top 5 concerns it would probably make the top 10, and definitely would make the top 20.
But those shootings, truck attacks, and stabbings aren’t actually killing any more people than gun violence in the United States or traffic fatalities in either continent, let alone COVID, right?
There’s an important subpopulation that thinks of this as significant, but they’re as mistaken as the people that think gun violence will lead to the downfall of the United States.
>But those shootings, truck attacks, and stabbings aren’t actually killing any more people than gun violence in the United States or traffic fatalities in either continent, let alone COVID, right?
That's an irrelvant metric. Nuclear armageddon did 0 victims in the last decades, it's still driving policy & causing great powers to invest in nuclear triads (or parts of it).
Political Islam itself is probably a worse issue, since it's incompatible with liberal democracy. Before Samuel Paty was murdered, it was the *parents* themselves that were calling out for his lynching.
Note that in a lot of ways it's the USA that is responsible for its rise, and they arguably did most of the damage *before* 9/11, which was a consequence.
P.S.: So yeah, this kind of glib dismissal really sticks out in a post trying to be careful about predictions...
People would argue that Trump "kids in cages" fit the concentration camp prediction, but that is then complicated by the fact that the Biden administration, while ending family separation, is still using the same facilities.
Similarly, it's interesting how Drone Warfare is remembered as an Obama specific thing when it only increased after 2016 and even after leaving Afghanistan, the US is still using drones in West Africa.
Defining the terms of the prediction is crucial and no one gets points for "X will probably continue."
>People would argue that Trump "kids in cages" fit the concentration camp prediction
They would argue that because they're hysterical left-wing ideologues. Apprehending people illegally entering the country with children and putting the children in the same facility as their parents is categorically different to "rounding up minorities and putting them in concentration camps".
The drone thing is interesting precisely because the left criticized Bush for doing it, and then Obama not only continued it but ramped it up. Obama is the one who went after a US citizen without any due process, which was a clear escalation of policy. I don't think anyone was at all surprised that Trump would continue the practice - the Republicans were never against it!
The "kids in cages" thing is less interesting and more infuriating, because that dated back to the Clinton years, continued throughout Bush and Obama (and then again under Biden), and suddenly became an issue under Trump (but not again under Biden). If we're against something, let's be against it. If we're only against it when an opponent is doing it, then that's no way to approach anything.
Well, so did Obama, and we have no counterfactuals of how it would have gone differently if McCain+Romney were president instead of Obama, or if Hillary Clinton had become president instead of Trump. I don't think you could say with a straight face that *Hillary Clinton* would have increased transparency or reduced the use of military projection.
How's the drone program under Biden? I honestly don't know, but suspect that transparency is no better, possibly worse. No idea about the frequency of use.
Supposedly Obama introduced that procedure where he would sign off every strike, but I am not sure how much that was the journalist describing that trying to find a way to make him look good ?
This is totally ignoring the family separation policy, which is what actually caused the national outcry. When that ended the outcry died down. Yes, you would occasionally hear the people who were very anti-whatever comment that, "Ya know, we still have kids in cages. And kids in cages is still bad." But they didn't get any traction with it. Not for nothing, but I'm still seeing those takes from those people.
"Pasteur is just French for “pastor”, and an honest translation would have just said “the pastor will be celebrated…”"
Maybe the pun is the prophecy, that it turned out to be a name all along... But yeah, we should only give this credence with a clear prior in favour of Nostradamus's work being prophetic, and that would be a silly prior to hold.
It's important not to get different epistemological frameworks mixed up. It's decades since I had much to do with Nostradamus, but I do remember that he saw himself as the heir to a tradition of receiving visions about the future which were not necessarily comprehensible even to him, and then trying to find words to express them. He was not "predicting the future" in any sense that we would understand it.
Fukuyama, on the other hand, has largely himself to blame for his reputation, because he chose a title for his original essay that was almost wilfully misleading. (In any case he was less forecasting the future than interpreting the present and saying it could continue). I was involved in international political events at the time, and if there was one thing that was obvious, it was that "history" (in the sense of world events) had never been more active. Indeed, the years from about 1988-93 were in many ways overwhelming. But he was right about the triumph of liberal-democratic ideas (not necessarily practices) to an extent that I don't think has been acknowledged. Effectively, since the end of the Cold War, Liberalism, previously a doctrine among many, has expanded to be almost the only political ideology that you can discuss in polite company, and the overwhelmingly preferred ideology of the international Professional and Managerial Class, and bodies like the EU.
Consider, when Fukuyama was writing, there was a Socialist government in France, and across the water, a decent prospect of a left-wing Labour Party returning to power. Today, the Socialist Party has effectively disappeared as a political force and the Labour Party is just another neoliberal technocratic managerialist collection of nonentities. At the time, Liberalism, had to contend with a whole set of Marxist and non-Marxist parties of the Left, as well as traditionalist parties of the Right, based around family, community and often religion. Now, right-wing parties have been taken over by neoliberalism, and left-wing parties mostly neutered.
The result -sometimes called the Davos Party - is an international ideological tendency built around extreme social and economic liberalism, which dominates political life and discussion, dominates the international media and international organisations. Its ideas are not actually very popular, but it has managed to acquire effective ideological hegemony because of the power and money it has at its disposal. Political leaders who stray from the path either to the left (like Corbyn) or the Right (like Orban) are marked for purging.
Thus, in true Hegelian fashion, Liberalism has won the war of ideas. But most people on the planet are not Liberals, and never have been: indeed, given that Liberalism is essentially an elite doctrine, it's hard to see how they could be. And they want action, not ideas. (I've covered the deficiencies of Liberalism in facing up to contemporary crises in a number of my Substack essays, so I won't go into that now). The problem is the lack of a coherent alternative ideology: Political Islam, for example, was supported out of desperation in a number of countries (Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt) simply because all of the other alternatives, generally imported from the West, had been tried and found wanting. But at least that was an ideology. In the West we have no alternative to Liberalism at all.
I wonder. A lot of the American public still seems to like the idea of free speech, if only because they don't trust woke people *or* the alt-right. Are we giving up too easily?
Agreed. And it's not only free speech, public (state and big organisation) is medling more and more in private affairs (gathering info, over regulating and micro managing what used to be purely individual hobbies and life choices). What we (the west) were so happy to point as Chinese Orwelian surveillance 5 y ago is becoming the norm in the west. Sure, China is still ahead on the curve and remains a political Bogeyman for various reasons, but the trend is clear, liberalism as individual liberty first is on the way down, at least since Covid and even sep 11. Probbaly since the fall of USSR, which beg the question: was it a king of PR to oppose communism/socialism appeal to the masses, that is no longer needed? I think there is that, together with the renewed attraction of pure political power caused by slowed down technical progress...
Americans love the *idea* of free speech, but when push comes to shove they have never supported it. The Woke are no worse than the general public on any of this.
There’s a lot of crying wolf about free speech and free association in circles like these. I don’t see that it’s actually gotten any harder to state your views, despite leftists putting kids in concentration camps or whatever is supposedly happening to Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer.
That isn’t remotely incompatible with there being a big change in how hard it is “to state your views”. Which by any objective measure there has been a HUGE change from 5-10 years ago.
Eugene Debs got locked up for protesting WWI. Did anyone go to jail for sedition during this most recent generation? Fred Hampton was murdered in 69 for criticising the Chicago DA. What are the similar cases today?
I at least don't think the statement is absurd on its face
Well Snowden and Assange certianly faced similar prosecution to Debs. You don't think people get murdered today over their criticsm of powerful figures?
You are right of course that the government is less willing/able to bring its big hammer down on individual people, but in part that is because it doesn't need to.
The corporate world and the social media mob do it for them with some subtle and not so subtle proding from the intelligence officials who get interviewed as "experts".
You don't think campuses/board rooms are a more stultified careufl polace with more heavily gaurded and policed political and personal views than they were 10-20 years ago? Becuase I just find that arugment impossible to relate to.
No no one is literally being killed. Lot sof people have lost their jobs, and millions more shut up and eat shit for fear of losing their jobs.
It is also just a different environment due to technology, so much of what is the "public discourse" is taking place on corporate platforms. Few in 1930 or 1960 would have thought it was appropriate for the US government to open up every single person's mail and police it for thoughtcrime, it was something trotted out regularly as an exmaple of those horrible no good very bad places where Americans wouldn't wan tto live. But that is in effect what we have today.
Just as a specific example, my public school district is monomaniacally dfocused on racial disparties to the near exclusion of all else. Meanwhile the white and aisan population continues to plummet as parents with well raised kids flee to charter and private schools. you might think this would lead to a re-examination of priorites. Maybe don't scrap the gifted program (which they tehcnically didn't do, but now ALL kids are in it, which what is the point).
10-15 years ago I and many other parents would have felt perfectly comfortable going to a schoolboard meeting and expressing our thoughts about this focus on "achievement gap" uber alles. Might have been a little socially dicey, maybe not gone over well if you work at the non-profit, but mostly fine. These days a lot of us are frankly concerned we would lose our jobs or access large swathes of our social circle, and if you are a dread white male forget about it.
No it probably isn't as bad as 50s era Macarthism, but I didn't know that was something we were striving to get back to.
"It's decades since I had much to do with Nostradamus, but I do remember that he saw himself as the heir to a tradition of receiving visions about the future which were not necessarily comprehensible even to him, and then trying to find words to express them. He was not "predicting the future" in any sense that we would understand it."
This distinction is blurrier than you make it out to be. I think most sensible people today can agree that he wasn't *actually* seeing visions of the future. He may have been having hallucinations. More likely, though, he was simply lying for the sake of personal benefit - in which case I'd imagine he would've tried to write out predictions that he believed would come true, or at least seem to come true. In other words, attempting to predict the future by reasoning out the most likely possibilities based on existing trends, just like futurists today. The fact that he was particularly bad at it (and particularly good at dressing up his bad guesses in vague poetic language to fool the rubes) doesn't mean it was categorically different from what more rational predictors do.
Six years ago people rated it really highly as a threat. I didn’t get it then, though when they had taken over a chunk of Syria I briefly thought there was something to it.
Shouldn't we wait more than two or three decades though? You had hundreds of years of feudalism in which to tell people that feudalism would never end and be proven correct. And then....
Complete agree about uncharitable readings of Fukyama. There's a decent chance that by the time the next wave rolls around nobody will remember his work, or any of the rest of us.
On the other hand, if you lengthen the timeframe too far, then the only thing it proves is that everything must *eventually* end, which is a rather banal observation.
"The liberal order is guaranteed to fall at some point because the sun will eventually explode, destroying Earth and all life on it" is a prediction that says nothing remotely interesting or useful about liberalism or the various alternatives to it.
Plenty of ideologies have been hegemonic for much longer than two or three decades. If liberalism's hegemony only lasts a few decades, then (a) that's not actually all that impressive, and (b) it's quite a stretch to describe a thirty-year period as "the end of history", even allowing for hyperbole.
That's what you think, DeBoer. 2/3 of London still belongs to the hereditary peer whose ancestors owned it centuries ago. Feudalism didn't end, it just got better at hiding.
Here’s the part where I defend Obama. My least favorite President ever.
I was on active duty doing an operational mission at GTMO during his term. He did not fail to close it.
In order to “close” it, all of those detainees had to go somewhere. Having seen most of their files, I can tell you that no matter what you think about the GWOT or the legal status of the detainees these are really scary people. They were caught on the battlefield chopping peoples heads off, digging mass graves, etc.
Each one (about 140 at the time) had to be negotiated for a place to go in some country somewhere. And each time we got close to sending one to some third world South American country, they would send a delegation to interview them and realize that they were psychopathic murderers and say “nope. Keep ‘em.”
They didn't really have to do that. You cannot put foreign nationals captured on the battlefield in a US prison. The legal status of those people prevents it.
Some Malaysians have set up a terrorist training camp in the outback of Australia. They are planning an attack on France. Australia tolerates their presence there because they think the French are a bunch of limp-wristed champagne-drinking pansies.
The attack occurs. Everyone directly involved in the attack is dead, except one guy who gets caught and has his day in court.
France then invades Australia in an undeclared war. While they are there, some Tunisians and New Zealanders show up, not in uniform, not fighting under any particular flag.
While occupying Australia, France captures some Malaysians, Tunisians, and New Zealanders. They take them to a French military base that is in internationally disputed territory. They do this because they figure their legal status as POWs will be easier to dispute that way. Eventually, a new French president is elected and everyone grows tired of the war in Australia.
France detains them for a little while longer, and interrogates them. New Zealand, Malaysia and Tunisia don't want them back because they are super horrible people.
The decision is made to move them to a French prison for...what exactly?
Weird. Wouldn't it have been easier to just write the words "is it moral to let people rot in prison having never been convicted of a crime?" No, its not.
This whole time I thought this was a subthread about the legal and procedural hurdles that Obama faced in trying to keep his promise about closing GTMO.
Its hard to say. I happen to be pretty gracious/forgiving when it comes to elected officials, probably because I am related to one.
In other words, I generally expect democrats to do democrat-y things, and vice versa when they are elected. (Things that are consistent with their stated worldview and vision for how things are supposed to work). I am willing to accept that the Obama administration really believed that they were operating in good faith and they could just close GTMO, and find places for all these people with some hard work and negotiating.
I have my preference for more conservative ideologies and world views, but I would hate to deal with the pressures these people do.
The alternatives are that they were really stupid or it was politics
(Like they knew all this was going to happen so they could say “see. We tried to close GTMO but Bush and the republicans handed us this impossible situation)
I would say it was convincing to me, but I'll confess that's how I thought of Trump anyway - negative in almost all the relevant variables but not remotely racist. I don't even believe he thinks of people in groups - he's narcissistic enough to only think 'what can I get out of this individual?'
Whenever I heard the 'Trump racist!' accusation it always sounded like it was a necessary addition to all his other faults because without it he was not genuinely evil. So it felt extra important that questioning his racist credentials was seen as heresy. And thus entirely predictable that Scott would get abused for pointing out that there was precious little evidence for Trump's racism.
I'm a Trump supporter (in the sense that I think he was better than Jeb or Hillary or Biden or any other realistic alternative) but I think he's done at least one "racism-adjacent" thing that people are okay to have concerns about -- specifically proposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country "until we can figure out what's going on" in response to some terrorist attack.
(I use the term "racism-adjacent" because, well, Muslims aren't a race, but I don't much like the idea of evaluating things on whether they're "Racist" or "Not Racist" as if that's the only important criterion that exists. I think we need to develop a far more sophisticated vocabulary than "Racist" to describe all the things that are classified as racism and all the things which are similar to but not exactly fitting the definition.)
The initial proposal was a ban on Muslims; he seems to have been told "you can't do that" so he came back a few days later with a revised proposal to ban people from certain countries.
I think it's a complicated moral question under what circumstances it's reasonable to treat demographic chunks of people differently based on statistically valid risks. On one hand it's sensible, but on the other hand it makes life miserable for innocent people who just happen to share observable characteristics with high-risk people. It's a social debate we should have but aren't having because we get stuck debating "Racist Or Not Racist" instead of "True Or Not True" or "Wise Or Not Wise".
I laughed because I had just made a casual prediction in the Comments section of Common Sense regarding the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for gender-transition surgery. "The transition movement is beginning to wake up to the tsunami of lawsuits we will be seeing within the decade. ... The legal judgements are going to be staggering. A jury is going to listen to the stories of regretful young people, permanently deformed as minors by deep pockets institutions, and they are going to dole out financial remunerations of equally life-changing magnitude."
As an obscure non-thought-leader commenting to those with whom I already agree, I predict I will not experience the repercussions Scott describes.
I so love Astral Codex Ten. In real life, I have no one to talk with who understands my way of looking at things, and my circle is highly educated and accomplished. Agreement with conclusions is not enough. One wants to encounter others who have more deeply considered ideas than one's own, from whom one can learn and grow.
It needs to be said: someone complaining about upheaval and instability in 21st century Britain is some real first world problems type stuff. The transition from Theresa May to Boris Johnson, the Brexit negotiations, and the Northern Ireland question? Uh...not exactly the Cromwellian Interregnum, was it? The death of Queen Elizabeth II? Not quite as impactful as the death of Queen Elizabeth I, I'll wager. If you squint hard enough, I say that tweet inadvertently vindicates both Fukuyama and Pinker. Don't @me, bros!
The question is whether Northern Ireland goes back to what it was in the 80s. Still no Cromwell though.
I had predicted Brexit would be an awful disaster that kills tens of thousands through economic problems, but after seeing the result of the COVID shutdowns, which were much bigger than Brexit, I can’t tell if I was overpredicting, or just better understanding how well a modern society can adapt to tens of thousands of additional deaths, or both.
Do they have to play this game? That depends on whether the people you disapprovingly quote matter. I think they don’t. What the Twitter mob tweets about Fukuyama, or you, is irrelevant for how the arguments he or you put forth are considered by those who matter. Because those who matter also know the Twitter mob is ignorant. Otherwise they wouldn’t matter.
How much is the seemingly prevalent anti-Pinkerism mostly the work of the media/twitter Misery Kingdom? Most people I know act as if life will in fact continue as normal. Is pessimism actually popular, or is it just that public speech is dominated by Career Loud Minorities?
I don’t think it’s mostly media/Twitter. The harshest opposition to him is from academics in the humanities, whether or not they are on social media.
Ordinary people on the street have never heard of Steven Pinker. But I think ordinary people generally won’t believe him either - “kids these days” declinism is always wildly popular.
I think Vox plays a good role by talking about all the “right” concerns for the media/Twitter set but then occasionally writing an article about how things are better in the world than they ever have been, despite the problems we still have.
TL;DR: People intentionally misinterpret the statements of people who have legitimately earned respect to borrow their clout and gain broader reach. Don't play their game.
I don't have any interest in re-litigating your Trump stuff either, but I do feel like those predictions were harder to falsify than others you make. I think you're held to an absurd standard of rigor that other commentators aren't because you sometimes reject dominant narratives. That's a broader problem that you can't really solve. If people are prosecuting heretics and you commit heresy they'll find a palatable charge besides heresy to get you on.
But often your predictions are literally "this specific event with these well-defined terms will happen by this date" while occasionally your political predictions are more of the "This politician won't have racist policies" variety. And when people say "uh, this seemed pretty racist to me" and you say "It might have disparate impact based on race, but you can't prove it was racist" now you're in semantics hell, where nobody will ever admit you're right, and *you* will never admit you're wrong.
tl;dr: I think all of the above was kind of nonsense - it's true that some types of predictions are more fraught than others, but the real issue is making predictions with clear terms and falsifiable premises.
Scott, I just want to say that while I disagree with your old article about Trump and think you're wrong not to have updated your opinion on the subject...I subscribe to you largely because of it. It was deeply useful to me to read a well reasoned opinion from someone to my right politically. I was, at the time, starting to feel deeply angry and resentful at anyone (including family members) who was willing to countenance the possibility of Donald Trump as president, and your arguments (while not convincing to me) showed me some ways it was possible to disagree on the topic without total war.
I get that it's been unpleasant for you, but I hope that you do write some more things I can really disagree with.
See I never really got this point of view. I remember being surrounded by hysterical friends in the immediate aftermath of the Turmp election. Releatively sane raitonal people who seemed convinced concentration camps, nuclear war, and god knows what else were right around the corner.
I was very surprised he won, and I thought he would be bad, but my repsonse was "ah I don't think it is going to be nearly that serious". And he did turn our to be quite bad, as bad as I expected and dumber/less politically deft. But he absolutely didn't do any of the things they were freaking out about in the week after his election. Yet 4 years later they were even more panicked about him.
IDK I wasn't reading SSC at the time and didn't know who Scott was, but that article is pretty much sums up my state of mind at the time. I felt like I was taking crazy pills and my friends were just unhinged. I stopped listening to a lot of long time media resources because their coverage was just so divorced from reality.
The one general-purpose piece of political wisdom I've picked up over the years is due to Glenn Reynolds, who said something like: "the ones you support are never as good as you hope, and the ones you oppose are never as bad as you fear".
This has been true over my lifetime. Of all the elections I've seen since I started paying attention to politics in the 90s, roughly half of them have been won by the jerks I hate more and the other half by the jerks I hate less. I've hoped, I've dreaded, I've celebrated, I've despaired. And yet in all that time I'm hard pressed to think of any examples where a change in government has actually changed my life in any meaningful way.
I'm not sure that pessimism is an easy win. At least when it comes to human actions, a lot of people seem to have this weird unconscious superstition that predicting an outcome somehow makes it more likely. E.g., when Russia invaded the Ukraine, people like Edward Luttwak who'd predicted some big dust-up over Ukrainian NATO membership got a lot of flak for having done so.
I suspect that part of the reason why Nostradamus doesn't stir up the same controversy as Fukuyama or "You're Still Crying Wolf" is that Nostradamus' predictions, being extremely vague, don't really play into any of the big partisan debates going on today. A lot of people would have to update their metaphysical views if it turned out that supernaturally predicting the future was actually possible, but whilst that might have caused a big dust-up back in the New Atheist days, now everybody's busy arguing about wokeness and Trump and heaven knows what else, and statements such as "They will think they have seen the Sun at night, When they will see the half-pig half-man: Noise, song, battle, fighting in the sky perceived, And one will hear brute beasts talking" don't have any obvious relevance for those issues. On the other hand, "Everywhere will inevitably become a liberal democracy" and "Donald Trump will put minorities in concentration camps" are/were obviously much more linked to current debates, and so attract much more passionate support and opposition.
i know you really hated 'bingoing' people instead of arguing with them but you should have set a kind of counter when you made your prediction, with space for a copy of someone's post/tweet whatever and space underneath [maybe a fake dial/guage] for you to point out/mock how far of the mark it is/will be [no, the ridiculous orange man is not remotely hitler for being an idiot again/ the machines haven't risen up because alexa was rude to you etc]
It's remarkably unpleasant to be publicly sneered and jeered at, and especially so if you experienced the kid version of it in school. And lots of people who have a quirky kind of smarts have endured that. I sure did. Wouldn't surprise me at all if Scott did too. And social media now makes it possible for thousands of people, rather than dozens, to unite in hating on somebody's ideas and attempting to discredit and even sort of dismember the self that produced them. I really don't know what to do about it. Something about the way social media works seems to neutralize any impulse to disagree in a limited and respectful way. You know how when you're driving and annoyed by the car ahead you look at the slow, badly-navigating butt of the car and it's almost as though you hate the car? If you think of the driver at all, they're just "the asshole driving that thing." Well social media fosters seeing the other speakers in the same impoverished way as we see the car's driver -- but simultaneously gives us access to some of their private, deeply held beliefs -- and also allows us to attack savagely in a way that has no analog on the highway. It's a bad set-up. I'm sure it must help some to have a setting where one's thoughts are admired and respected.
Excellent analogy - flamey social media spats are a LOT like road rage. People feel more powerful and protected when driving or posting crap on the internet and, sadly, this often brings out people’s most self-centered, tantrum-throwing tendencies
Slightly analogous to the asymmetry between the reaction to predicting good things and the reaction to predicting bad things that you noted, there is a similar asymmetry in how easy it is to review something with praise and with criticism, and in how much debate each is likely to inspire. In light of that, I hope I can be excused, as someone who loves this blog and agrees overall with the ideas in this post, in jumping to a harsh criticism of one of its smaller points (and yes, this is in the assessment of the "still crying wolf" reaction, as you could probably guess).
> I expected his policies on race to be about the same as any other Republican president’s (rather than, say, putting minorities in concentration camps - which people were literally saying he might do!)
This is blatantly a weakman, and beneath what I've come to expect from the intellectual who introduced me to the term "weakman". Yes, some people were literally afraid that Trump would perpetrate a genocide, a relatively few extremely anti-Trump people (half of whom probably weren't being entirely honest with others or with themselves about what they truly expected). I'm not going to look up and reread the "You Are Still Crying Wolf" essay right now, but I pretty confidently remember that it didn't come across as addressed to the extremists saying things like that, that it was aimed at everyone who was saying that Trump was unusually racist for a president in an attempt to rebut this by demonstrating that nothing Trump said conveyed racist sentiments at all (which is a stronger claim than a prediction that Trump's *policies* would be no more racist than that of any other Republican). If the goal were simply to quiet fears that Trump would aim to be the next Hitler, this could have been accomplished by sympathizing or even endorsing the view that Trump's attitudes on race (or the attitudes of his supporters which he was winking to) were concerning and then explaining why Trump couldn't possibly have the inclination or gain the power to start wiping out minorities.
When I hear of someone thinking Trump said "unusually racist" things for a US President I can't help thinking he's either rather young or hasn't studied history closely.
I think part of the problem is competition for attention. It's hard to be noticed if you say something will be pretty bad, and easier to be noticed if you say it will be disastrous.
Broadly I agree with the thrust of this post. However you need a different example than Fukuyama, because he is an example of a different problem: people straw-manning a book from secondhand ignorance of it. His book was actually far more thoughtful and interesting than either its title (which I wonder whether he even picked) or the way it is summarized in media accounts and whatever. Honestly his book doesn't much resemble that title at all.
It's similar to how pretty much everyone thinks they know what Adam Smith wrote in "Wealth of Nations". I was one of those for a long time myself until finally getting around to actually reading the book. (The resulting realization was really mortifying, in some weird way I had a desire to go back in time and apologize to Smith.)
Among Calvino's 14 definitions of a "classic," I often find this one particularly apt:
"9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them."
Oh that's a good one, though a bit dated in the specifics. (de Tocqueville was much more widely quoted in Baker's era, which was my parents' as well, than he is today.)
"Of all the great unread writers", hah!
So....who right now would be the top unread writers that are most quoted/referenced by Americans who haven't directly read them? [meaning Baker's de Tocqueville example of people quoting and namechecking the unread writer; not his Shakespeare example where people are using a phrase that they don't know the origin of.]
Just off the top I'd nominate, in no particular order,
Tentatively, this essay has a self-pitying tone that's unusual here. Does it seem self-pitying to anyone else? I'm sure I'm feeling this reaction, but not sure I'm right.
Take heart, almost no one gets a big reputation of any sort for forecasting, though I grant you have better odds than most.
It seemed that way to me too, at least a little bit. Not as much as "Why Do I Suck?", but that one was more deliberate and more self-aware about it.
And I strongly doubt that linking this post will make the slightest bit of difference to the people who criticize Scott for his predictions. Especially since that crowd almost certainly has some heavy overlap with the crowd that makes fun of him for being a hateful right-wing bigot or a spineless leftist simp. As the old saying goes, haters gonna hate.
Yes, it does. But I think there is still a trenchant and important observation in there, which is that *even if* you are a pretty darn good prognosticator, the chances that you will ever lived to be feted for it are low. (So being a prognosticator for the sake of public repute, as opposed to private income let us say, is a fool's errand.)
The point is as old as the tale of Cassandra, but it doesn't really get stale.
My personal opinion is that this post focuses on the wrong metric. I realize that Scott is not necessarily endorsing making vague, catastrophic predictions but is only saying that making such predictions is 'safer' and perhaps necessary for those who want to become thought leaders. My contention is that, yes, perhaps acting in this way could be narrowly beneficial to some, but I don't believe this would be good for people in this community nor would it attract a thoughtful audience like the one this blog has.
I think one of the best features of the rationalist community is the willingness to be honest about beliefs. It is funny because many rationalists are consequentialists, and I think this is strictly speaking somewhat of an irrational behavior from that perspective. A strict consequentialist would seek to have an internal model of the truth, but would also behave in a way that best serves their goals, which could entail deception or at least lack of transparency. There are consequentialist arguments for truth telling (e.g. others will trust you less in the future if they find out you lied, so in order to maximize your influence you ought to refrain from lying when this is a possibility) but likewise there are counterarguments, etc.
I thus think the great thing about rationalists is that the commitment to truth comes *before* consequentialism. This is what makes me favor this blog as a place to gain insights over traditional media. The latter takes the opposite tack-- it is ostensibly devoted to the pursuit of the truth but is heavily consequentialist in what it chooses to report. Readers who discover this become immensely disillusioned with the news, a major cause of the political polarization we see today. My worry is that if rationalists adopt these sorts of tactics, deciding what to say based on how they will be perceived, they will lose goodwill and essentially become no better than politicians and journalists. The wonderful community that has developed in these comments sections will disperse if and when people realize they are being (however slightly) manipulated. You may attract more people, but they will have worse epistemic hygiene and will not be able to contribute to your movement in any way other than blindly repeating your talking points and perhaps voting the way you ask them to.
I think the example of Nassim Taleb is actually a good case study. I haven't read his popular books, but I have spent some time seeing how he interacts with his followers on Twitter. When it comes to pure statistical theory, everything he says seems to be fine. However, when it comes to the application of his statistical ideas to real life, he seems to be very dogmatic about where his ideas do and don't apply, and goes so far as to insult those who come to different conclusions (he openly calls Steven Pinker, Phil Tetlock, and Nate Silver frauds). Even if he is often correct, the average reader has no way to verify who is correct in any particular case. The only way to be consistent with Taleb is thus to be bullied into accepting his opinions as ground truth, as there is no way to use his high-level insights on black swans and heavy tails independently in one's everyday life in a way that one could know he would sanction.
This is why I would prefer that rationalists stick to being as clear as they think is necessary to properly convey truths that receptive people will be able to absorb. Forget about what people with negative intentions will say, and focus on clear insights that willing people can apply in their lives rather than vague ones which have to constantly be clarified by some authority.
At the end of the day, Pinker and Fukuyama are still highly respected academics on their field. They're household names among even the moderately educated, and there are plenty of college courses where their books are required reading. That's basically the pinnacle of success for academics! Why does this article treat them as though they're laughing stocks? Just because some random idiots on Twitter like to make fun of a highly inaccurate caricature of their ideas? Who cares?
Also, the Twitterati's myopic focus on current events isn't as one-sided as you say. Over the past two weeks, I've actually seen a ton of tweets saying "look, Russia's loss in Ukraine and the anti-government protests in Iran prove that Fukuyama was right all along, it's actually his critics who were the short-sighted morons!" Of course, it's based in the same shallow misunderstanding of his work as all the "9/11 proves Fukuyama wrong forever" comments, but it still goes to show that the effect you're talking about works both ways.
I also think it extremely unlikely Pinker gives a crap what the Internet commentariat thinks about his predictions. The nature of things pretty much guarantees that what the majority thinks about any seriously complex subject is wrong, because being right is difficult, and even more so recognizing the right answer any time before it becomes blindingly obvious or a shibboleth. I'm sure Pinker knows that, and would only be troubled if experts whose opinion he has good reason to weight heavily were laughing at him. Are they? I kind of doubt they would express that in Tweets.
True, and likely even more true for Fukuyama. The man is arguably the most important political scientist of the century, and he has a ton of influence in both the academic world and in the political sphere. He's not going to care about people depicting him as a soyjak in dumb internet memes. Honestly, he probably doesn't even care all that much if The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times occasionally publishes a scathing critique of his work, because he knows that the majority of the establishment is still largely on his side, and a few contrarian thinkpieces don't change that.
I don't want to sound disrespectful towards our host, but some of this seems kinda like projection on his part. I can't blame him for being upset when he gets dragged on Twitter, and definitely can't blame him for being upset when he gets dragged by mainstream media outlets. I'd be incredibly upset too! But Pinker and especially Fukuyama are successful enough that they don't have to worry about stuff like that. Short of a scandal involving some kind of deeply unethical personal behavior or actual crimes, their reputation will continue to be overwhelmingly positive regardless of what a few obnoxiously vocal critics say.
I don't agree with you that history suggests Marcus must be wrong within our lifetimes, let alone ever, because technology always marches on. Rather the contrary. Certainly technology in general always marchs on, but it does not do so equally in all directions, and certainly in quite a number of areas it often becomes completely static. What's the last bold advance in pencils you've seen? Or shopping carts?
In my lifetime I've seen any number of straight-line extrapolations of exponentially advancing tech turn out to be ludicrous because exponentials never last, and it turns out by the time the tech is well known and amateurs are making bold predictions about it, it's actually already reached almost its peak. I mean, in 1970 the future was going to be interplanetary, and we could take a Pan Am shuttle to the space station and visit Saturn on a honeymoon at the latest by 2000. Oops. Enthusiastic predictions of talkign sentient computers go back even further, and many in the 70s or 80s would be a bit surprised how far we remain from them 50 years later. For that matter, aren't the confident predictions of self-driving cars from a mere 10 years ago rather a cautionary tale?
History unquestionably shows that breakthroughs happen in a regular way, and that once they do, we can go back and dig up someone who predicted they wouldn't and laugh at him. Unfortunately, what history also shows is that breakthroughs don't happen very often in areas where people fully expect breakthroughs. They are usually surprises, and happen in areas where people in general *aren't* expecting breakthroughs, or even much that's interesting.
That's why if in 1988 you'd asked people -- including many experts -- "What wil be the most amazing technology shift of the early 2000s?" nobody at all would've predicted the smartphone. And many of the things they *would* have predicted -- orbital hotels and commercial LEO space tourism, say -- turn out to have not come even close to being true, and look like long-term projects or dead ends now.
That's hardly surprising from a general social point of view: pretty much by definition, a breakthrough is an advance that is forseeable to only a very few individuals -- whichever lucky or brilliant people make them -- because that's what makes it a "breakthrough," and not just some plodding 100% forseeable engineering tweak that upper management can totally schedule on a Gantt chart and set a deadline on.
The only way I think you can be confident that Marcus will be proven wrong in a timescale less than a century is if you want to assert that no breakthroughs at all are needed, that in fact aware AIs, or whatever exactly it is you predict, are just at this point a series of 100% predictable and schedulable engineering advances -- that nobody needs to come up with any unexpected clever new insight, no new methods need to be invented, it's just a question of scraping up more Internet data or adding enough nodes to your neural net. I would gather this is exactly where Marcus disagrees with you: he thinks there *does* need to be one or more additional breakthroughs, and the timescale on which they will appear (if they appear at all) is as unknown as the timescale of breakthroughs usually is.
The faker knew that Russian communism would collapse in the same way as the Russian communists knew that capitalism would collapse. It happens that the faker got lucky and the Russian communists didn't (so far, at least), that's all.
Except that this was *not* the mainstream view at the time, which was that the Communists were doing great economically, but were tyrannical and expansionist.
I don't have any data (maybe you do, and I'd be interested if so) but I'd bet that _a substantial number_ of people on each side thought the other side was doomed to fail, and _a substantial number_ of people on each side thought the other side was doing fine but was evil.
Random example: there's a book from 1980 by Robert Wesson called "The aging of communism". A few bits from its preface: "Nonetheless, a decade ago the idea that Communist systems were necessarily decaying was heretical. Many claimed that Communist states were evil, oppressive, and wasteful, but that they were not viable was hardly to be considered. By now, the manifest troubles of Communist states are common knowledge [...] Unless they can find some magic to turn the trend around, they seemed doomed to decadence". (I am fairly sure that's a typo for "seem", at the end. The author plainly believes that communism is crumbling -- though he also plainly doesn't expect it to collapse quickly.)
That's 1980, so a bit later than the fake Nostradamus prediction of 1975, but if people were publishing books in 1980 saying it's common knowledge that communism is likely to fail then I bet our faker was not alone in thinking (or at least hoping) the same in 1975.
I'm sure he wasn't alone. I'm also confident (without data, based on various readings) that, like I said, this was not the mainstream view. On the other hand, the idea that capitalism was necessarily doomed to fail was the *only* publicly expressible view in the USSR.
Your "crying wolf" post about Trump 6 years ago is what got me reading your blog ever since. It's interesting reading stuff that goes against the grain—so long as it is intelligent of course.
He's right: I do want to be a thought leader in land policy. I am completely surprised to have my ambition included in this list. Nailed that prediction.
Coincidentally, Dan Luu has recently done a survey of selected futurists and their predictions. (Duckduckgo for Dan Luu Futurist Predictions.)
The one who comes out best is the world-renowned expert in things future, Bryan Caplan. (Bill Gates and the old guard at Microsoft also do "uncannily" well, according to Luu.)
Who? Bryan what? Exactly, kind of. Is the point to be right and unknown, or is it to get onto the promotional circuit? (Well, perhaps not for Nostradamus. But posterity can be a motivator for some people.)
I think Gary Marcus is in a pretty good spot, actually. No matter how hard people try to typecast him as the "AI won't have advances" guy, his actual position is more like "deep learning models are just big lookup tables".
Here's the thing, I've been observing the Stable Diffusion enthusiast community recently, and nobody is more keenly aware that the model is just a big lookup table than them. As soon as the models get impressive enough to produce something people want, people start using them, and then discover that the way to get it is not well-formed, clear sentences in natural language, but a seemingly random set of arcane keywords that force the generator on just the right path.
If Gary's right, and I do think he's right, then each crazy advance the current paradigm produces will necessarily be of the type that makes the models more capable while not changing that particular trait of theirs. So, all we'll get is more practical uses of AI, meaning more users of AI, meaning more people aware of how the AI should be approached, and this results in Gary's position becoming the widespread common sense. (And I don't think he's famous enough, or the current community big and loud enough, to shape his name into a symbol of something else entirely, Charles Murray-style.)
I would argue Nostradamus and Fukuyama are largely used in the same way by now, as in journalists who are lazy and looking for an easy way to open their article refer to one's or the other's prediction, without really being interested in their work or trying to contribute to a discussion of it. This is not to say Fukuyama and Nostradamus had the same scholarly value, but just as even those who don't like the concept still have to mention "Orientalism" when writing about the West's relation with the East, you just cannot get around it.
"With the benefit of hindsight, everything about 9/11 and the War On Terror was a random blip in history with no broader implications. There was not a rising Islamofascism, there was not a clash of civilizations. There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once, the US got angry and invaded a few countries, and then everything continued as before. If people were ranking threats to the world order now, Islam and terrorism wouldn’t make the top twenty. "
The problem with this take is that the West wasn't passive in the face of the prediction. The actions that were taken as a result of the prediction changed the outcome. It might have been true otherwise.
Again, possible, but it seems rather unlikely that this academic book had a large effect on foreign policy. And it's unclear what direction it would have pushed things in any case.
It was a popular book, rather than an academic book. I have no idea if it actually motivated any Islamist, but it isn't inconceivable that an apparently smug (unfair to author) declaration of the final ascendancy of liberal democracy might enrage someone who considers it to be a positively evil form of government.
One of the things I admire most about Matt Yglesias is that he seems to be utterly impervious to bad take criticism. You (Scott) should talk to him about this and adopt more of whatever he does to insulate himself. I’d love for you to be less wary. Some of the takes you are criticized for are some of your best/most useful takes. Your critics (the mostly sneering far left) want to break you as a person, not discredit your ideas.
This could also be said about politicians who we agree with, especially conservatives if for nothing else to add balance and maintain diversity. Liberals are the least inclusive group around. It is either their way or your canceled.
" Your critics (the mostly sneering far left) want to break you as a person, not discredit your ideas."
Strongly agree with this, and I'd like to add that their intermediary goal is to put fear into him so he won't say certain things just in the way he's outlining/hinting at in the post – e.g. "not saying that Trump won't actually be the red and leaping Devil because of the amount of disingenuous pushback".
fwiw I found your blog through You Are Still Crying Wolf (from Scott Adams’ blog), got totally hooked, and have been a raving fanboy ever since.
(I had already been on LessWrong though years before and was into the Sequences etc, but had kinda forgotten about it, and finding your blog was like ‘coming home’)
I mean if you are trying to be popular in this way why make predictions at all?
Do the Thomas Friedman thing and use language that is just vague enough that you can play word lawyer and never seem dumb. Or better yet, do the post scholar Jordan Peterson thing and make bombastic tweets designed to rile people up and then define them in an unusual way such that under this new way they are reasonable.
Constantly switch between scholar mode for when you want to have a decent conversation, and media pundit mode for when you wanna piss of the libs that axed your early career IQ funding and or harvest money from the republicans that really love having a renowned psychiatrist actually agree
with them for once.
I think Tetlock found a negative correlation with popularity and accuracy iirc, lol. Makes sense, how can you whoo an audience with constant allusions to probabilities and hedging?
It's a bit of a coordination problem -- I think ideally all the thought influencers would just say their most crazy opinions, and then nobody can be canceled if everyone is, but in practice, everybody just hides them except in the rare edge case where they think they can make a difference in a specific domain or something. I think the Overton Window should be as wide as possible, but it seems to eb and flow due to variables I can't suss out.
The name of the game in this media world is to never specifically talk about anything ever yet somehow be extremely interesting.
And then people find out many of his quatrains are dated... like calling the death of the queen in 2022 from 462 years ago. And then the matter of King's coming abdication... I have found the vast majority of his misses are his interpreters.
While I hope this thinking helps you to figure out ways to accomplish the same things while suffering fewer attacks, please don't let it dissuade you from saying what you think is important.
I don't mean to be insensitive, but I strongly believe that you have a responsibility to say these things and that ultimately they make the world a better place.
Similarly, we readers have a responsibility to send as much positive reinforcement your way as possible when it seems like the rest of the world has pitchforks out for statements you didn't make. If this blog can't be a beacon of rational authenticity, it's hard to imagine one that can be.
9/11 had no wide implications? Maybe not in California. Completely changed European immigration thus demographics and its future, fundamental in Europe’s right wing turn. And for Iraq and Afghanistan? Also brought Islam as one of the major religions into world wide public consciousness for the West in general. And the mere symbolism of those two towers burning forever a wake-up call about US foreign policy and invincibility.
Have not actually read Fukuyama, so I'll just respond to one of your claims about history relative to your characterization and not relative to whatever Fukuyama said:
> With the benefit of hindsight, everything about 9/11 and the War On Terror was a random blip in history with no broader implications.
Surely, this was a bit facetious? Setting aside the costly and protracted foreign interventions, the U.S. significantly ramped up its security state after 9/11. That event obviously paved the way for the Patriot Act, enhanced airport security, the morally dubious Guantanamo Bay, and perhaps "normalized" much of the domestic spying by media and tech companies that we all now take for granted. If the American government wasn't seriously threatened by 9/11, I think you *could* argue the American way of life was. And hasn't fully recovered since.
Sure, it doesn't feel like the world ended. But it does feel like our liberal democracy is a different kind of liberal democracy now than 30 years ago (perhaps less classically liberal, perhaps even less democratic). I would be surprised if 9/11 and the changes within American society that followed were not linked together by future historians and described as a major transitional period when our self-conception as citizens and individual sense of autonomy shifted towards the more paranoid and atomized, perhaps in ways we haven't fully comprehended and whose full consequences we have not yet experienced.
Did you actually read the paragraph? He's basically saying that, that overall they'll have massively overpredicted AI progress but the progress that does get made will be used to "prove" Gary was wrong.
When self driving cars were really big in the news, it was driving in nice weather with a human there to correct issues. Many sources were saying the human was not really needed (only there because of regulations) and that the number of human interventions was going down. A bit contradictory there, but the trend was mostly right. Basically, we did/do have self-driving cars, if you want them to only drive on certain roads with certain conditions. A general self-driving car that can drive in the rain and snow, or other tricky situations (especially including other drivers) may never happen. Even human-level AI may not be able to do it, and it may not be an AI's fault. Those systems are highly dependent on sensory input, particularly cameras. Cameras can get dirty, break, or struggle to see in low-visibility environments.
Are cameras any more sensitive to those conditions than human eyes? Will they continue to be?
For one thing, a person can blink and clear local obstructions. For an externally mounted camera, road dust and other debris would be a constant issue and cleaning it off far less convenient.
Anecdote: I recently got the FSD beta on my Model 3, and it proactively sprayed washer fluid & wiped the windshield when it's camera was obscured.
Sounds like it can blink!
I would guess that just as human eyes are inside the vehicle, and can blink, it would be possible to have cameras inside the vehicle, with a blink mechanism.
I was being overly facetious with the blink comment, but the underlying concern is still there. It takes a lot of engineering to put a camera system inside that can watch all the different ways that a human can just by adjusting their head and eyes. It takes just as much or more engineering to mount external systems that can do the same, and I doubt there's a system that will clean off six+ inches of snow.
I have a backup camera that beeps when it thinks I'm too close to something. It's frequently wrong, usually beeping when there's nothing very close (false positive) but sometimes fails to beep when something is there (false negative). Either one could result in significant driving issues.
Human eyes are just *better* than cameras, by several orders of magnitude. There are a small handful of exceptions (for instance, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/camera-bound-space-telescope-takes-3200-megapixel-photos-180975758/) but they're all incredibly bulky. The one in my example is a 13 ft. x 5 ft. cube, not exactly the sort of thing you can easily build into a vehicle.
Short answer: yes.
I am not interested in where Marcus' predictions beat some outgroup's. I am interested in where he makes more meaningful predictions that might reasonably be surprising, and I don't think I've seen one yet. Do you know of any?
The outgroup are those you're willing to derisively dismiss. Has Marcus made a prediction in contradiction to, say, Scott Alexander? What predictions has he made that we're waiting on more evidence to evaluate.
> I believe he has made anti predictions.
I am once again asking for specifics. I have seen him push back on Elon Musk's timelines, for one, but at this point that's just picking on the chronologically challenged.
If Marcus only engages with "certain groups" in the first place, his predictions aren't interesting. He isn't "doomed" with *anyone*, he's just generally irrelevant.
>be charismatic and charming enough to gather legions of fans
Up there with "draw the rest of the fucking owl".
Hehehe I love that one. Applies ot so many work situaitons too.
Interesting commentary. I’ve always believed Nostradamus was full of shit lol
I haven't encountered (personally or virtually) anyone who didn't, or mentioned Nostradamus in any other context than "for lolz".
You’re very fortunate then. I’ve come across several people that seem to believe in him verbatim lol! Of course they also thought the earth would end in 2012 - the Mayan calendar thing. And the earth is only 7-8 thousand years old because that’s when god created it. Anddd that’s enough for tonight lol
Haha, those irrational people, believing things that we can instantly dismiss as dumb. Things we feel no temptation, not one bit, to believe. It must be that they are defective and we are rational.
Lol obviously
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong
I notice you’re not arguing any of those things are actually true, though. Irrational people who believe all those things do, in fact, exist, and aren’t even very rare.
No, this was a reference to https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/
I don't like this general practice of saying "Haha, look at those stupid people believing stupid things. We are so much smarter than them." Stigmatizing non-mainstream non-institutional belief is corrosive to all forms of knowledge discovery, and kills millions.
> Of course they also thought the earth would end in 2012 - the Mayan calendar thing. And the earth is only 7-8 thousand years old because that’s when god created it.
That sounds like something hard to reconcile. I mean if you believe the Bible literally, shouldn't there be angels and trumpets and beasts coming out of the sea and all that jazz having nothing to do with some pagan Mayans?
Oh shit if that happened I would be running for my camera!! I have a friend that reads “Angel cards.” I’m like no thank you. My Angel left long ago.
Dunno about "Angel Cards", but the Tarot, properly interpreted, always applies. Of course, what it's doing is saying "pay attention to this option", sort of like the I Ching. The trick is in the interpretation, and you've got to do that for yourself. Nobody else can do it for you. (It usually isn't worth the effort if you're rather introspective anyway.)
Tarot and I Ching are one thing but these “Angel cards” are little more than cute little sayings to make you feel good. There isn’t a bad card in the deck lol! The last time I had my (Tarot) cards read she told me a man would come that would be bad news and he would try to cheat me. Not a month later I met someone that tried to cheat me on some antiques I had for sale.
The thing about Nostradamus is that at least 95% of people who have been presented with one of his quatrains have never actually sat down and just started reading the quatrains for themselves. They've only ever heard the most cherry-picked and massaged versions of his predictions, from someone trying to create entertainment or controversy. If they're on the older side, I'll particularly point fingers at that extremely credulous Orson Welles TV special.
And for the most part these people say, "Wow, this Nostradamus guy sure did predict a bunch of things, pretty eerie," and then move on and don't think again about him until the next time someone brings him up.
Those people are a hoot lol.
I thought he was a decent subplot for Alias, but that's about it.
I think the post was taking that as read, but making an interesting point contrasting the psychology of reactions to his positive(*) predictions and reactions to Fukuyama's, Pinker's, or Scott's own negative(*) ones.
(*) Positive and negative in the sense of "things will happen" and "things won't happen", not good and bad
AS HE PREDICTED
An excellent introduction into how to perform a tarot reading.
Tarot cards serve as a medium for psychological projection to connect with ones deeper thoughts. it's a Rorschach test with a mild spiritual component.
Tarot cards can be used for prediction, like a crystal ball, and that is where I would say they lose their value.
" Fukuyama said some (no offense) kind of vapid stuff" -- I'm afraid that has to be filed under "Tell me you haven't read The End of History and The Last Man." It can be described in many ways, but "vapid" is not one of them.
+1
Yeah, it's kind of a shame, Fukuyama gets mentioned as if he were just a fancier version of, I dunno, Thomas Friedman.
I feel like 99% of the problem for Fukuyama is the title. If he'd titled it something dull like "Speculations on the reduction in ideologically fueled conflict" there would be far fewer complaints, but also far fewer people would have read it. Something of a monkeys paw situation
I think it’s actually worked out pretty well for Fukuyama. His reputation these days is back to where it was in the late ‘80s, plus he gets the advantage of having had his name in media discussion for decades.
Possibly worth it, but he keeps getting nagged about the end of history and he's tired of it.
He would still be wrong, ideologically-fueled conflict is very alive and well. But maybe the sheer boringness of the title will make anybody who tries to look at it to make fun of him fall asleep and wake up with amnesia.
International ideological conflict seems to have peaked though, at least for the time being. Ideological opposition to liberal democracy might see occasional resurgences, if we think of Islamic fundamentalism as a resurgence, but so far each resurgence has been weaker than the last one. Even most countries that aren't liberal democracies still more or less pretend to be. China runs a dual act where it pretends to be both a multiparty democracy and a Marxist-Leninist state instead of what it really is, a basically non-ideological republican autocracy.
Prior to the dominance of liberal democracy, autocrats used to openly eschew it and condemn it, instead of half-ashamedly wearing it like a skinsuit as they do nowadays.
I dunno, I thought The End of History and the Last Man was kinda vapid. Especially the overall premise that we need an grand overaching theory of history, Marx and Hegel propose them so one of them must be right, it wasn't Marx so it must be Hegel. His later books, but especially The Origins of Political Order, were so much better.
Well, we really *do* need a "grand overarching theory of history". We just don't have one that works, or any clear guide as to how to develop one. Psychohistory is a plausible candidate, but nobody knows how to build it. Even a really good sociology would help, but we don't seem to have that, either. (Perhaps the folks who developed it needed to keep it secret, ala Hari Seldon, but that seems quite unlikely.)
For me, Toynbee, modified by Carroll Quigley. Under-rated.
Why do we need an overarching theory of history? When I studied history, it seemed what mattered most was gaining little insights that add up to wisdom over time. No theory can provide a full-resolution picture of reality, just as no maps can provide no perfect picture of reality. It is for this reason that we do not have "one grand map," but many maps for different purposes.
The reason that you didn't get an understanding of history when you studied it is that we don't have a good framework to fit the data into. We've got pieces here and that that sort or usually work.
E.g., "Do democracies and republics always turn into dictatorships?" Justify either a yes or a no answer. Or. from Frank Herbert, "Do civil services always turn into aristocracies?" We've got several examples where they did, but there were always complicating factors. (Actually, I think there were some that didn't survive an invading army, so in a strict sense the answer should be no, but that's a rather unpleasant way to avoid the problem, as the invading army turned into the aristocracy.)
We need a good theory of history to predict the results of actions that we are taking in present time. (Of course, we might not pay attention to it anyway.) E.g., I thought the US civil rights movement was too abrupt, and needed to be more gradual. But on consideration I realized that there's no way such a movement could be continued over a sufficient period of time to allow a gradual transition. But perhaps my basic idea was just wrong. There's no way to know.
Theories, sure. But one overarching theory? You would need to justify that specifically.
Note: I did not say I failed to get an understanding of history.
For this to work you need a theory that allows you to handle the interactions of the various segments. I.e. and overarching theory. It doesn't need to be complete, but it needs to allow the parts that it doesn't handle to be considered "noise" and still produce the correct answers.
As for your note, perhaps we have different definitions of "understanding". To me the best understanding of history that I've seen resembles the understanding of an accurate astrologer. Any result can be explained afterwards, but not predicted.
I think if a superintelligent alien species (or AI) were to simply hand us such a guide, we would just immediately reject it, because it would undoubtably start with an unflattering assessment of our nature as an animal species, and put us within the same framework of known instincts, limitations, and tendencies as we use when we describe the behavior of crocodiles or donkeys. (For example, I imagine a great deal of what we do can easily be explained by wired-in instincts for sexual competition, familial and tribal preference, fear of mortality.) We would absolutely hate that. We long to believe we behave the way we do from conscious choice arrived at after long and brilliant thought. To believe we are 85% biological robots enslaved by our base drives like so many dogs baying at the moon or a bitch in heat would be unbearable.
I recently listen to Origins of Political Order, Political Decay, and End of History. They work well together, End of History lays out this "soft determinist" framework of historical evolution through well observed trends in economic growth and technological development. The Order series then comes in and highlights all the historical and social contingencies that put the "soft" in soft determinism.
And granted its very much on my brain now, but it's hard not to see our identity obsessed culture war and not see "the struggle for recognition" as an incredibly useful lense to observe politics with.
I admit I haven't read it, but the thesis statement is pretty vapid. The government we have now is as good as it is going to get? Forever? Just seems obviously silly (and I was thinking this in the mid 90s too when I first encountered him). Certainly young me though a technology aided radical democracy or some sort of smaller scale stakeholder run polyarchy seemed like avenues for possibility, not to mention all the ones I couldn't imagine.
That really, REALLY isn't the thesis statement, though.
I actually summarized the book here if you're interested - https://bookreview.substack.com/p/the-end-of-history-and-the-last-man
It isn't, that is pretty much how literally everyone describe sit. "Liberal democracy won, and it will not be supplanted because there are no superior competitors". You are syaing this isn't what the book is about?
No.
Why does everyone say that is what the book is about, if that isn't true?
Because almost nobody actually read the book, they just repeat what they've heard about it.
> Why does everyone say that is what the book is about, if that isn't true?
The same reason you are... people like to repeat what others say if it makes them feel some type of way, even if they haven't come to their own understanding.
I haven't read the book, but if it is so, I wouldn't be particularly surprised, considering the title, and how I've seen Malthus and the 1972 Limits to Growth being strawmanned...
Looking back to reviews from mjaor publicaitons from the early 90s, that certainly is what they all think the book is about. I am confused that such an influential book is supposedly about some totally different thing that what society claims it is about.
I suggest you just read it for yourself and make up your own mind.
Why is it obviously silly? Do you expect horses to invent calculus, eventually? Or honeybees to some day come up with much more efficient organizations of hive labor? All species have limitations, because no species is infinitely capable or infinitely smart. We have ours, too. It could be the government models we have now are the best *we* are capable of inventing, or comprehending, or working with. Perhaps only a much smarter species could do better.
Basicallly I think our technology is moving too quickly, our circumstances changing too radically, that we won’t find some alternate options to a model that is already 200 years old and quite bad.
But why would technology change our models of government? You'd think the latter derive from stuff like our inherent psychology and social psychology ("trust people who look like you more, or at least handsome/pretty people more") or our inherent mental limitations (Dunbar Number). How would having much more powerful smartphones change anything? It feels like we'd just do what we already do, only perhaps faster and harder.
Indeed, isn't that a lesson one could draw from social media? Rather than free us to develop more nuanced and complex models of social interaction, as Berners-Lee might have mused in 1989, it has enabled us to be gossipy cliquey 1958 high-school seniors on a much grander scale.
Because technology changes what is possible. Radical democracy (which I don't necessarily think is good) is absolutely feasible today in a way it never would have been 100-200 years ago.
You could have the whole populace making decisions thesmelves without representatives. Technology can also lead to problems or issues that are so big democratic/representative government cannot be trusted with them. you might need a leviathan to make society work. All sort so fpossibilities.
Ethics and politics is VERY situaitonal, and our situaiton is changing.
I mean even social media provides a good exmaple, yes it has turned general politics into a gossipy mess, which mighrt mean social media necessitates a move away from representative politics in an era when the mob is so "self-frothing".
How is it possible ? Are you suggesting voting machines ? Have you forgotten how every. single. expert. says they cannot be relied enough on ? (I guess they could be still used for non-important decisions... but why do we need direct democracy for those ?)
Personally I thought the Origins of Political Order was great. I only skipped the End of History because it seemed less interesting from 2nd-hand accounts of what it's about. I might have to revisit.
Political Order and Political Decay is also good and continues on from origins
Second this. An excellent survey.
agree
Well the biggest issue is that a lot of people predict a lot of things and so someone has probably predicted any given event. Probably lots of people predicted a peaceful fall of the Soviet Union. Many of them also predicted many other things but generally you only hear about successful predictions.
That book that predicted the peaceful fall of the Soviet Union was just some guy getting lucky. Predictions of the future is very much 1 million monkeys on typewriters.
Politics is a great example. Every cycle we get a dozen new guys who predicted shocking thing and a dozen guys from the previous cycle who predicted shocking thing but were wrong this time.
Maybe 10% of the population if not 5%, understands statistics and also applies it effectively in their actual life outside of academia. So predicting stuff is is always gonna be a shitshow and the media, both sincerely and cynically for profit is going to misunderstand predictions and take one lucky guess guys too seriously and guys with high calibration on important predictions not seriously at all.
Neither the average reporter or the average cashier is gonna check the calibration record of someone who predicts a high intensity issue wrong or right.
>>>Probably lots of people predicted a peaceful fall of the Soviet Union.
No. Nobody did. No one.
That's the thing - no one, including a bunch of experts in the field- thought the USSR would fold peacefully, if at all.
Reagan was convinced it was doomed (“will be consigned to the ash heap of history”) - though he didn’t specify the means - but was dismissed for his naïveté by his betters.
Thing is: IF you find one, people will argue about the NON-peacefulness of that fold (+ that is was not a "fold"). Not me, but if one paid me ... "January 1991 - Troops crush pro-independence demonstrations in the Baltics, killing 14 people in Lithuania and five in Latvia." 'peaceful?! Gotcha! BTFO!' add Nagorny, Chechnya, Putin's wars (really 'direct after-shocks' of this 'active conspiracy or whatever', just a WWII was 'clearly caused' by WWI).
"For hope no room, Be all gloom; all the world loves a doom. Give 'Em Threats, Play G. Thun., And They'll Pay To Say You're A-1."
When you say “no one” do you mean that literally not one person made such a prediction, or that out of the millions of people who made predictions about the Soviet Union, only a few tens of thousands predicted this?
or that the rate at which people made such predictions increased nearer to the time when the soviet union collaped?
Okay well I wasn't specifying experts, though I also don't believe no experts predicted it. That's just very unlikely.
Of course many people who had a salary depending on the USSR not falling would have argued heavily that it wouldn't. Military industrial complex and so forth.
https://www.amazon.com/Will-Soviet-Union-Survive-until/dp/B0006CPGLA/
(I read this book when it was first published, in 1970.)
Well I mean, this guy did. Presumably at least one other guy did. Probably more than one, in fact!
The point isn’t that this was a particularly popular opinion, it’s that there were 5 billion people alive around that time; of course at least a few thousand would have guessed that.
See the willful misinterpretation of Nate Silver's 2016 prediction.
He put a 30 something % chance of Trump victory right before the election, based on the idea that "if the polls are undercounting republicans, it means these states are actually R states, and Trump would win, but we have no idea, right now, how much, if any, the polls are undercounting republicans"
That later got spun into "Nate Silver was totally wrong about the 2016 election!"
Particularly since others were saying that it was 99/1 and mocking Silver for his prediction at the time
I liked Andre Cooper's writeup here: https://goodreason.substack.com/p/nate-silvers-finest-hour-part-1-of
There's definitely a level of willful stupidity and innumeracy that continues to this day, but there's also an element of how most of the election predictors were so off that 2016 results killed them outright, and 538 was left as the only target for folks in the "anger" stage of grief to vent at despite being one of the least deserving. Simple age is a worthwhile first metric for a prediction shop even before you look at their record, because the failures get selected away in anything that actually needs a budget and expertise (but not before poisoning the discourse).
This reminds me of an old scam. You send letters to 1024 people (or a much larger number) advising half that "this stock will go up big time" and other half that it will go down. You do that about 4-5 times. Add in traditional fraudster techniques, such as explaining a secret/new approach to investing, or how it is risky so you don't want them to invest, you could be wrong after all. In fact, you can even keep some of the cohorts where you were wrong, to help maintain creditability. Then you make an offer to invest. Some fraction of those that have seen repeated successes demonstrated (and you are guaranteed those for at least 2^[n-1] predictions and people) and will be crawling over themselves to give you money.
Yeah like 11 years ago in one of my social science classes we actually had a lecture on that for sports betting. I can't remember the details due to the time frame but it certainly stacks up amazingly to, say, political polling in the last few elections.
No love at all for Tetlock's Superforecasting?
https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136696/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1664333430&sr=8-1
I feel like tetlock has been already discussed to death on this blog, going back like, 10 years
He is definitely not feeling a lack of love from Scott
Got it-thanks!
But still...seems particularly relevant for this topic, no?
Yes, but I think his point is that this time he’s not talking about actually making accurate predictions - he’s talking about making predictions that people say good things about. He specifically doesn’t want to bring in the Tetlock stuff here.
Yes. But it's fucking difficult enough to make good predictions, without also trying to make predictions that won't make people want to rip your face off. Social media's fostering of face-ripping is probably making it even hard for all of us to think well.
Why not just quit social media? It isn't very ahrd ot give up twitter/FB/etc.
I only do Twitter now, & on Twitter only follow doctors & scientists plus a few civilians whom I've found to be smart and civilized. I get way more detailed and up-to-date info about topics of interest on Twitter than I could get anywhere else. I'm not willing to give that up. Problem is, I'm so interested in these topics I can't refrain from commenting or asking questions, & my tweets sometimes get savaged. Also, I see attempts to discredit and dismantle good ideas in the replies that follow them, and sometimes argue back. It is just not possible for me to be deeply interested in these subjects yet have no interest in the responses to them, mine and others. Doubt that I'm unusual in that respect.
Scott specifically said, "This post is... not about how to make good predictions. It’s about how to make predictions that don’t make you miserable and cost you lots of credibility."
He wrote a book review for Superforecasting several years ago: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/04/book-review-superforecasting/. But this post has a different purpose.
Thanks! I missed that-much appreciated.
I think making bets with knowledgeable and honest people is a good way to make predictions.
This way you can point to you winning the bet as evidence enough that you were right (or wrong).
The betting mechanism tends to nail down definitions and appoint arbiters etc. So that's not purely down to public opinion. (Of course, no one can force other people to defer to the judgement of your arbiter. But it's a strong Schelling point.)
The outside discussion of Scott's AI image generation bet is illuminating: the properties discussed above seem to predominate the discourse.
Yes. But it's not something Scott has to defend.
(I believe his betting partner was too confident and agreed to terms that were too soft.)
Absolutely. AI met Scott’s terms of the bet, but I’m not convinced it is actually even doing any better than the original round of image generation that led to the forecast as an improvement.
AFAIKT, most people think the current "AI artists" are a huge improvement over the prior generation.
And I am personally convinced that the "give me a bit of text and I'll give you a few pictures" form of control is not sufficient for a decent product. It should first iterate around rough sketches for a few generations and then only fill in the final choice. The current controls wouldn't give you what you want with a human artist, unless you were just collecting works by that artist.
On the contrary, Scott was overconfident in choosing terms that would be impossible to fulfill due to content filters.
There’s three hard parts to predicting things:
1) hypothesis generation
2) calibration
3) phrasing things so that resolution is unambiguous
The problem with hypothesis generation being hard is that it can legitimately be a great prediction even if it’s only 10% likely to happen—if I predict 10 really surprising things 100 years out, and 1 of them comes true, that’s AMAZING, not a failure.
The problem with calibration being hard is that without stating actual probabilities and averaging over a long period of time, people will interpret all of your predictions as 100% confident. And even if you do, you’ll get bad press every time you make a 70% prediction and it’s wrong (c.f. five thirty eight in 2016)
The problem with ambiguous resolution is that companies write 100 page contracts and then spend 100 million in court trying to solve this problem and it’s still a shitshow.
I mean, predicting 10 10% things 100 years out and getting one right is "amazing" for data nerds or w/e but is it valuable practically?
Sorta like people are super impressed by a trivia nerd but that knowledge is still "trivial".
Depends if there's a way to get economic value from your predictions. In an extreme case, if you could predict the winning lottery numbers 10% of the timez that would be very valuable.
Sure. But generally these types of predictions are not financially useful. Also lottery numbers are much harder to predict.
You could take the pulp science media portrayals of advanced technology and just predict each of them coming true on a really long timetable. Fusion, AI, flying cars, whatever. You're pretty much guaranteed to be okay doing this, because you are either right (could be entirely by chance, it doesn't matter) or everyone forgets you made the prediction by the time it doesn't pan out.
I've complained about the "30 years from now" predictions before. That's sufficiently long from now that the people making the claims will be retired or close to it by the time their reputation is at stake, and they also have plenty of time to adjust their timeline as more information is known - commonly by saying "30 years from now" again, even if we're 10 years later.
5 and 10 year predictions at least require that most predictors will still be relevant and remembered, and we can at least see if some progress has been made.
If you care primarily about reputations, I see that. But if you care about truth, well some truths are just hard to adjudicate, but they may still be worth predicting.
In that case, I guess my position would be to properly discount anything too far out. 30 years away, to me, just means that people are still studying it and expect that's it's theoretically possible.
Put it this way - If I predicted 100 lottery numbers and one of them won the the jackpot, that would be very useful.
Writing something unambiguous is hard, but not that hard if you have a few iterations (which is part of the problem with both contracts and laws - there's no reward for finding an ambiguity in a contract/law the way there is for finding a vulnerability in software, so the iterations take decades rather than weeks).
But also, most contract and law writing isn't even trying to resolve ambiguities; it's trying to write something that both parties (in a contract) or a big enough coalition (in legislation) can agree to. Instead of trying to avoid ambiguities, the process positively incentivises them.
The result is: very powerful judges, as they are the ones that end up interpreting this stuff. Sometimes the intent is obvious and they will abide by it; other times the intent is obvious and they will choose to go with the literal text; other times it really isn't obvious, but they still have to pick one option.
For a really classic example, consider the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
So:
What does "well regulated" mean in this context?
How are the two clauses connected - is the first clause explanatory (the reason why the right exists but without effect), limiting (ie the People only have the right to keep and bear arms to the extent necessary for the militia), conditional (ie the right exists only if the militia is necessary, and the necessity of the militia is a judiciable question)?
Is the right collective to the People or individual to each person? If collective, how big of a collective, can people set up their own collectives? If individual, are there people excepted, e.g. felons? If so, on what basis can we determine who those exceptions are?
What are "Arms" in this context? Is this all weapons, or is it only a subset of weapons?
You could run an iterative process until you got rid of ambiguities - ie keep going until the people asking questions are clearly just being awkward. But that would mean answering these questions - and that might deprive you of the support necessary to get the law passed or the contract signed.
A common contract example is that you might contract someone to "make reasonable efforts to" build something. You and they might have very different idea of how much effort is reasonable, and if you actually talked it out, the negotiations would break down. If there is a problem, you'll go to court and the judge will decide what is and isn't reasonable.
As someone who works in federal regulation, I can second that the ambiguities are absolutely a "feature not a bug" in a lot of cases, and that a lot of what I get paid for is helping people navigate through those dangerous reefs.
OK, not the topic, but... WTF is a "homo sapiens supremacist"??
"homo sapiens" means humans. A supremacist is someone who thinks that a group is much better than the others. In this context, that tweeter is saying that Stephen pinker, who wrote "the better angels of our nature" which is a book about how humanity is solving problems like war, is letting his pro-human bias make him blind to the fact that that his claims are wrong.
Humans may be pretty mediocre at solving these problems, but is there evidence that some other entities are better? Supremacy doesn't require perfection, just being better than all the competition.
I think the point isn't "he thinks humans are doing well because he doesn't see how well other entities are doing" but "he thinks humans are doing well because he doesn't pay attention to our impacts on other entities". Extinction of other species, using other species for food, that sort of thing.
I'd say that the very fact that this point of view has legitimacy these days shows just how confident humanity's supremacy has gotten. When the order of the day was bringing down woolly mammoths with sticks and stones, I doubt that there was much concern about their possible extinction (except insofar as that would necessitate a change in the diet, I guess).
Isn't that kind of the point, though? If I were a devil's advocate, I would say of course we wouldn't need to have worried about humanity's impact back when we were hunting mammoths with sticks, because tautologically humanity's impact was not significant at the time.
In a modern context, where humanity is by far the dominant species on the planet, has spread to compete with other animals in almost every location-based niche, and has a bunch of fancy industrial / ag processes with side effects that are nigh-universal.... surely there's a different frame of reference with which to evaluate the claim.
This is all sort of beside the object-level point, because the commentor on Pinker cited in the post seems a little too smug and pithy to be framing their criticism in any balanced context.
Sure, I would agree with some claim in the vicinity of this, like that humanity's wisdom doesn't appear to grow commensurably with its technological prowess. But I don't think that trying to deny or disclaim obvious supremacy is particularly wise either.
But it's rather odd that mammoths tended to disappear shortly after humans with decent hunting tools showed up.
I think you underrate the effect humans (an invasive species) had on the environment. Now whether this is good or bad depends on how you evaluate things, but it happened somehow. (Perhaps humans carried diseases that mammoths were susceptible to. But they are know to have driven entire herds of mammoths over cliffs. Probably by setting fires, but that may have been a guess. And I don't think there's any estimate of how often they did that.)
As an anti-homo sapiens humanist, it's good to often remind oneself that supremacy only matters if it's at a game that matters. If you're a drug addict or a gangster thug boasting about your objectively good rate of escaping police, nobody is going to be much impressed.
When somebody says you suck despite objective evidence to your prizes, this is best interpreted as the speaker saying that your prizes are stupid prizes won in stupid games, not that they don't exist.
Other non-human creatures don't have to solve war because they never invented civilization and it's centralizing effect on institutions and populations, so war can rage forever between individuals and small tribes and not affect anyone or anything else. They never had to invent nuclear treaties because they don't know what atoms are and never will. Sometimes, merely playing the game is losing, and the reason nobody else is playing it is that they were smart\lucky enough to realize this.
Someone who believes the interests of humanity as a whole are above the interests of nations, corporations, or animal rights groups. Formerly referred to as a "thoughtful and reasonable person."
Or animals.
See also r/HFY
I predict that linking this at the top of predictions will have no discernible effect on the potshots Scott will get.
(I can't lose because there'll be plenty and we can't be sure how many there would have been.)
My guess would be the same. People already trim the "predictions" to something less clumsy than the original form. E.g., let's just chop off "if the polls are right".
You shouldn't be able to write about Fukuyama unless you've read The End of History and the Last Man, which it's clear you haven't. Fukuyama makes pretty much the opposite claim of what everyone says he does in that book.
Err
I find it very surprising to find this comment here, as fukuyama and the end of history have been talked to death on SSC, I feel like we've had conversations about whether he was right or wrong that could fill entire books, and yet I've never seen anybody making this claim. Could you point to the specific things you think Scott is getting wrong?
The last part of the book is about the conflict between those whose desire for success can be fulfilled within the established social order and those whose desire for success can only be fulfilled through finding new areas in which to succeed, even if it means tearing down the existing social order. This is an old theme. Lincoln spoke about it perhaps more eloquently than anyone before or since in his Lyceum Address. This theme is core to Fukuyama's work and to not grapple with it means you are not seriously engaging with Fukuyama's argument. Perhaps this is fine in Scott's case since he is (knowingly) putting forth the caricatured view that most people hold, but in my opinion putting forward this view without acknowledging its inadequacies, which were directly addressed by Fukuyama in his book, promulgates a flawed view.
But I will concede that opposite was too strong a word. The view that Fukuyama argues for by the end of the book is pretty much the view that most left-liberal people in the world today have about progress. But saying that "I agree with Fukuyama" would 1) require people to actually read and understand him and 2) not be noteworthy enough to attract attention.
As someone who has not read Fukuyama and had not heard of the Lyceum Address, thank you for writing this. It's a powerful frame, and contains a solid thinking-past-the-sale. I.e. anyone who doesn't agree with the momentum of the social order is selfishly seeking power/success outside of it in an inherently bad way. So-called conservatives here in America seem not to understand how powerful the frame is, or that every time they quote Jefferson about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants they are taking the bait in a deadly trap.
>the view that most left-liberal people in the world today have about progress
They do appear to get fewer in number and more pessimistic in outlook as the time goes on though. Both radical left and right claim ever more boldly that the present course is unsustainable (and immoral), and these opinions seem to only grow in popularity.
This is something that you can expect to continue. It's been exacerbated by social media, but the population in general is becoming more elderly, and this naturally tends to cause it to become less willing to change. (I want to say "more conservative" as, in a sense, that's more what I mean, but the term has become so debased that this wouldn't convey my meaning.) And when things change anyway, they tend to look for scapegoats.
Your point may be valid. I've never read the book, so I can't judge. But it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Scott's point. His point is based around what people who want to approve/denounce will extract WRT the work, and has little to nothing to do with what the work actually says.
Scott says Fukuyama is making vapid claims. But Scott just repeats the popular understanding of Fukuyama, rather than the more specific claims he makes.
Yup.
Read this summary that argues people misunderstood Fukuyama:
https://news.yahoo.com/fukuyama-end-history-misunderstood-critics-103037504.html
Did anybody bother to review Fukuyama for the recent contest? Because a three-line "you should read Fukuyama's entire book or shut up about him" blog post isn't going to convince anyone, but an ACX-level review might be interesting and useful.
Here's a decent explanation of what he actually predicted and what people are getting wrong
https://news.yahoo.com/fukuyama-end-history-misunderstood-critics-103037504.html
Theoretically, would it be against the rules for one to divulge if one is preparing such a review for the next contest?
100% Agree.
If you think Fukuyama was wrong, you haven't read Fukuyama but a 'summary' of him that got it backwards.
Here's the money quote:
" men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”
tell me that doesn't sound spot on to what's happening now
Nice
"There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once, the US got angry and invaded a few countries, and then everything continued as before."
Scott, I think you forgot the part where the US spent ~$2.3 trillion on Afghanistan and ~$3 trillion on Iraq, with enormous negative consequences to American's long-term well-being. Even if that money is funded by deficit spending that isn't directly paid, it gets amortized in inflation and other indirect ways.
Ah yes, I too remember the quaint bygone days when $6 trillion over the course of 20 years was considered shocking.
Indeed. These things don't much matter, e.g., in causing inflation –– until they do.
Gradually, then suddenly.
Bitcoin.
(1) Citation needed for enormous. For reference, during this time total US government spending was about $100 trillion dollars [35% of US GDP from 2002 to 2022, which I'm approximating as 2002 GDP * 20 + (2022 GDP - 2002 GDP) * 20 / 2].
"Osama Bin Laden got America to waste 6% of its government spending for 20 years" is not nothing, but it's not enormous either. Bad land use regulations about housing construction cost far more than that, as do slowness / incompetence on infrastructure construction, as do high healthcare costs, as do inflated K-12 costs, as do...
(2) How confident are you of those figures? They don't add up with the size of the US military budget during the relevant years.
(1) Not interested in whataboutism.
(2) The official estimates of the U.S. Government, e.g., from CBO, along with those of various think tanks, vary, of course, depending on what is included, but they are all on this order of magnitude. You might find plus or minus 40%, but you won't find, say, 3x.
(1) It's not whataboutism to point out that $6 trillion over 20 years is not "enormous"
(2) Your $6 trillion figure comes from the Brown University "Costs of War" project. I haven't seen an official CBO estimate for this, and since the annual military budget varies from $500 billion to $800 billion over this time frame, it's pretty hard to get to $300 billion per year.
A more normal accounting would peg the cost of the Iraq war at $838 billion, which is in fact more than 3x lower than you quoted:
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-taxpayers-spent-8000-each-2-trillion-iraq-war-study-2020-2
"The Pentagon had been allotted approximately $838 billion in "emergency" and "overseas contingency operation" for military operations in Iraq from the fiscal year 2003 to 2019, including operations fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria."
Its also ignorign that the US would be having *some* foreign policy adventures in those years. The army needs its walks like a dog. Probably wouldn't have been as large without 9/11, but there would have been some.
Probably true, but that can probably be rounded to zero. America's operation in Grenada cost approximately $0, if we are using a yardstick with a scale in the hundreds of billions.
Oh I can see a world where 9/11 doesn't happen where instead we end up with troops in Venezuela or something. And I am kind of convinced Iraq was happening regardless. I definitely was convinced at the time (on like 9/12 I was saying eventually we would invade Iraq over it facts be damned).
Right, but why, though? There was no compelling reason to invade Iraq, just as there would be no compelling reason to invade Venezuela.
FWIW, Latin America governments are unstable enough that I would be very surprised if the US invaded Venezuela in any timeline near ours -- toppling the Castros could be done by injecting sufficient money + CIA support for an army coup.
Because the MI complex will find ways to make itself useful. Just like the man who is given a powerwasher for his birthday suddenly finds all sort so things that need powerwashing.
I think you are assuming US foreign policy is more raitonal and less driven by congressional and defense industry sca re mongering than it is.
If everything went as planned, US would be controlling the flow of Mid-Eastern oil, including who it could be sold to. Much easier and safer than a direct war with China.
I guess the actual cost is deadweight loss from the taxation needed to generate those revenues, equivalent to foregone economic activity, and whatever resources were used to these ends which could have been used for other purposes- whatever weapons were built that otherwise would not have been needed, people spending their time on this, etc.
The money just gets shuffled around to different people, if it goes to defense contractors then they spend it on something else. I'm not sure if the amount of money is a good measure of this waste of resources or not.
There's also the cost of the hundreds of thousands of persons killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, only a tiny proportion of whom had any connection to 9/11. Maybe we shouldn't zero-weight that.
If you assume the military-industrial complex is a constant, such that the resources go to it in any case, and all we're talking about is how those resources get shuffled, then of course the amount of money doesn't matter much.
I think that's a horrible way to think about it. It should by no means be a given that those resources go to the military-industrial complex in anything like the form that took in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
And having trillions of dollars sucked out of your economy with, not neutral, but strongly net-negative consequences absolutely does matter. It's magical thinking to imagine otherwise.
There were about 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed, and about 60,000 Afghani civilians. Notably, the rates of civilian death for both of those countries during the time they were occupied by America were comparable or lower than the rate of civilian deaths in the preceding 20 years. Saddam Hussein killed a lot of people, as did the Russians / Afghan Civil war.
Staying as long as America did in Afghanistan was a mistake for America's foreign policy, and invading Iraq was also a mistake, but its very not clear that those interventions net-killed Iraqis or Afghanis compared to the counterfactual.
"And having trillions of dollars sucked out of your economy with, not neutral, but strongly net-negative consequences absolutely does matter. It's magical thinking to imagine otherwise."
It certainly matters. But (1) most of those trillions weren't "sucked out" but instead spent on other businesses operating in the US and (2) the resources expended are a very small fraction of America's total resources so the impact was not enormous, contra to your claim.
Again, my point is that the trillions were not sucked out of the economy, they were put into the economy where they remained. Some real resources were taken out of the productive economy and put to arguably unproductive uses, that's the primary cost to the U.S.
Yes civilian deaths were costly to Iraq, you do have to offset this against whatever improvement in quality of life has resulted for the current citizens.
True, deadweight loss of increased taxation can be higher, but the $6 trillion figure actually comes from inflating well past that:
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-taxpayers-spent-8000-each-2-trillion-iraq-war-study-2020-2
I think the bigger negative consequence was the violation of the norm that you don't just invade another country because you want to. The pretext for invading Iraq was totally ludicrous, and set a terrible precedent.
Did it set a terrible precedent though? Did it change the way other countries do things? Russia will mention it as a justification for Ukraine and stuff but they of course would have done it either way.
I’m not sure how you can be so confident about that counterfactual.
FWIW, the American intervention in Kosovo seems to have had a larger impact on the Russian psyche than the American intervention in Iraq, probably because Kosovo was a breakaway region from a Slavic-speaking Christian country and therefore much more threatening to Russia specifically.
To set a terrible precedent, I would imagine the norm was strong in the quarter century before the invasion. Was it?
In that period, invasions in which a foreign military overthrew a de facto (not necessarily recognized) government, include at least:
-Tanzania invaded Uganda
-Vietnam invaded Cambodia
-US invaded Grenada
-USSR invaded Afghanistan
-US invaded Panama
-US invaded Haiti
-Rwanda & Uganda invaded Zaire (more complicated than the others)
-Nigeria-led coalition invades Sierra Leone
-US-led coalition invades Afghanistan
See also Stephen Krasner. "Organized hypocrisy — the presence of longstanding norms that are frequently violated — has been an enduring attribute of international relations." (https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691007113/sovereignty)
USSR did not overthrow the government in Afghanistan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
> With fears rising that Amin was planning to switch sides to the United States, the Soviet government, under leader Leonid Brezhnev, decided to deploy the 40th Army across the border on 24 December 1979. Arriving in the capital Kabul, they staged a coup (Operation Storm-333), killing General Secretary Amin and installing Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal from the rival faction Parcham.
Afghans killed defending the palace: 350 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm-333).
Invading a country to kill its dictator (and 349 loyalists) is not an example of invading a country to overthrow its government? Perhaps you are technically correct.
The point is that Afghan government was already a Soviet client. Soviets invaded to reinforce it, not to overthrow it. It's pretty complicated, read this section of the same article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War#Soviet_deployment,_1979%E2%80%931980
It was still undoubtedly a massive invasion by any commonsense measure, I'm just saying that your definition is too strict.
Whether or not this was a deviation from the previous behavior of the U.S. or other nations, I agree that it was, on its own merits, a very bad exercise of foreign/military policy.
And yet it actually turned out fairly well, so far, with Iraq now a democracy.
Modern-day Iraq is probably better off than it would have been if Saddam Hussein had continued to rule without a second American intervention, but it's hardly a shining beacon of democracy.
It's still a poor, at beast semi-democratic country with voting polarized along ethnic lines, substantial interference from next-door theocratic Iran, and a tendency to elections produce violence and/or require election-ignoring coalition building to avoid violence.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/muqtada-alsadr-ap-baghdad-iraq-shiite-b2177319.html
I find it strange that both of you seem to think the success of a response to an attack on the US should be judged based on whether it helped the country that got blamed for the attack. Shouldn't the primary question be whether the war made Americans safer? I think the answer is a clear no on that front.
Freedom was assessing the invasion on whether or not it turned Iraq into a democracy, I was adding my perspective on its democratic progress (limited) but also its status compared to the counterfactual in that lens.
I agree that this isn't the way that US decision makers should evaluate past or future decisions. From the US perspective, the invasion of Iraq was almost certainly net-negative for US interests due to the combination of:
(1) contributing to the rise of ISIS
(2) tying up scarce US governmental attention for 10+ years
(3) non-trivial amounts of money spent to limited return
(4) strengthening Iran
(5) weakening America's claim to the moral high ground, which is a very important foreign policy asset that contributes to it maintaining its large network of valuable alliances
Invading Iraq was definitely a mistake by US decision makers, from the perspective of US interests.
Is there a period of history in which you believe that norm was operative, and in fact exerted effective restraint on military action that would otherwise have been undertaken?
Hot take: the smart phone is ultimately what killed off jihadism, anyway. The drones and A-10s and the depleted uranium shells: mostly useless.
Care to elaborate on what the smart phone did?
The smartphone is having a homogenizing effect on language, culture, entertainment, and the like, particularly for young people who don't really remember a world without them. This homogenization is proving to be a detriment for a lot of counter-cultural movements, not just fundamentalist Islam.
Except ISIS = Al Qaeda + smartphones...
I would have said "photos" and "rapid communication" were what killed/"altered the basis of" jihadism. Photos of animals and people violate the Koran. Rapid communication exposes people to lots of ideas. Smartphones are one embodiment of that, but it was already in process before the smartphone showed up.
But I suspect "altered the basis of" is closer to accurate than "killed". Don't judge things on too short a time frame.
Meh I like to think about reading a history book that is written 300 years from now. I doubt 9/11 and the reaction is coming up at all.
That entire period will be about the ris eof computing and the globalizaiton of the economy and its impacts.
I don't think prominence in history books 300 years from now is a great test. Lots of enormously catastrophic things don't pass that test. Take the Armenian genocide beginning in 1915. People don't talk about it much even now, but something like a million people were murdered, and it seems really weird to say it wasn't a big deal.
The Armenian genocide was definitely a big deal, not least of which because before the Armenian genocide the Anatolia peninsula was much more ethnically mixed between Armenians, Turks, Greeks, and Kurds. Those million people who were killed made up a large fraction of the Anatolian population at the time, which attendant consequences for the future trajectory of Turkey & the region.
The reason people don't talk about it much is because there's a major regional power deliberately making an effort to suppress discussion of it. Ironically, I think *more* people will know about the Armenian Genocide a century from now, because the Turkish government's ability to stifle that information has been declining and will likely continue to decline.
The role of the Turkish government is definitely a factor. It illustrates the more general point that extent of discussion correlates only weakly with actual importance.
Come. The US spent an extra $2.2 trillion in a *single year* in 2020 with the CARES Act. We're long past the point when Iraq or Afghanistan war spending is a significant delta to fiscal profligacy.
+1 to this take. The US's ability to authorize ~$5 trillion in new spending in a single calendar year ($2.2 trillion CARES, $1.9 trillion ARP, $900 billion Dec. 2020 stimulus) really shows that $6 trillion over 20 years is a drop in the bucket.
Also, that $5.3 trillion over 20 years is 2-4x overestimate using funny math. The cost of the Iraq war using normal accounting was $838 billion not $3 trillion.
Re: Trump and minorities.
If you read the popular press now there is a lot of angst/hand wringing on the Democratic side due to Hispanic defections in the voting public to the GOP. Trump kicked that off when somehow he increased his share of the minority (and recent immigrant) vote from 2016 to 2020.
So Trump's political opponents may have been eager to brand him as the white supremacist president but in terms of how minorities actually view him to this day? I would say that Scott's prediction is actually looking pretty good. And if Trump is re-elected in 2024 because minority (especially Hispanic) working class voters continue to migrate to the Republicans?
I think the important question is Trump's "minority vote share above replacement".
The real issue is that working class voters are switching to the GOP regardless of race. That is the most significant demographic change in politics in generations.
It isn’t exactly “regardless” of race. Working class Blacks and Hispanics are still majority Democrats. The *movement* is in the same direction for each racial grouping, but the absolute level is still quite distinct.
Working class whites used to be staunch Democrats as well. Their political migration is pretty much complete. What is significant and interesting now is that minority working class voters appear to be undergoing the same migration, a somewhat surprising development given that it happened under Trump was who supposedly the white supremacist president
I'd expect that President Bush would have shifted Hispanic voters at even higher rates than Trump. That's my point.
It's an apples to oranges comparison because the metric that's being used right now is public polling and a handful of offseason electoral results. That should be expected given that we are trying to analyze a phenomenon that is unfolding in real time in the present.
And Bush didn't shift hispanic voters at a greater rate than Trump. Trump won about 40% in 2020, a result that surprised just about everyone given his status as the white supremacist president.
I think Axioms was referring to the hypothetical President Jeb! Bush, noted guac bowl merchant.
I think President Jeb! is doubly hypothetical because I don't believe that he could have beaten Hillary.
But I think it's an interesting question. Jeb! pandered to Hispanics specifically but not to the working class, while Trump pandered to the working class specifically but not to Hispanics. It is an interesting question which of these two approaches is more attractive to working class Hispanics.
GWB is famous for attracting Hispanic voters at a rate that constituted a modern record for Republican presidential contenders--until Trump in 2020 who tied him.
And I would characterize is this way: Trump is the symptom, not the underlying cause. He was the inflection point of the migration of the white working class to the GOP but that process literally started in the 1960's. Similarly Trump may be the beneficiary of Hispanic defections to the GOP in 2024 but this is a broad based migration that is larger than any one candidate.
Short term I think pandering to demographics can be more enticing, but that appealing to class has stronger and longer-lasting effects.
For one thing, I used the word pandering for a reason - appealing to race/ethnicity tends to look like racism or other kinds of bigotry, especially to everyone else. That turns people off. Appealing to class appeals to their well-being no matter who they are, even if they really don't want to support you otherwise.
Jeb speaks very good Spanish, with a Mexican accent. Which makes sense because his wife is Mexican. He was the governor of Florida.
I think Jeb does beat Clinton. Most people would. First because you almost never get a party with 12 years in a row and second because she had a lot of troubles at the time, overdramatized or not. I think Jeb could win Colorado, Nevada, and maybe VA while losing Michigan or Wisconsin. He'd have done better in Florida IMO for obvious reasons. Also Trump could have lost PA/MI and still won so Jeb could as well. Maybe he gets CO/NV and loses PA/MI. Still wins.
It didn't surprise just about everyone, though? Biden was notoriously weak among Hispanic voters in the primary. Like absolutely trash tier. Lots of people expected a Hispanic swing to Trump.
Did anybody actually predict Trump to pick up minority voters? Who specifically?
And the issue isn't Trump. He was one dramatic example but the issue appears to be working class voters switching to the GOP in general.
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/are-hispanic-americans-becoming-republicans/
Why exactly does that article stop at the 2016 presidential election instead of including polling for 2020? The article was written in 2022.
Scott's prediction had a lot more to do with ridiculous predictions that Trump's opponents were making (black people in concentration camps) than that Trump was going to be specifically positive for minorities. That he increased his vote share among Hispanics and all other minorities was a surprise to both Scott and Trump's other opponents.
I've had the same complaint that Scott did, that hyperbole was making it hard to criticize Trump for what he was actually doing, because what he was actually doing (beyond "mean tweets" and speaking like a buffoon) were far less than his opponents said he would do.
I suspect it’s precisely that that is going on. In 2016, many Hispanic people that *would* have voted Republican were turned off by Trump’s rhetoric and the way it got repeated across the political spectrum. But after 4 years, many of those people realized it was just rhetoric and went back to voting how they would have.
(There may also be a separate movement of non-college voters to the Republicans across racial groups.)
The number of off season electoral votes available for examination is small but intriguing (Youngkin). That has to be supplemented with the polling, which is interesting to say the least. The NY Times/Siena poll had Hispanics giving Democrats a 40+ point lead on the generic congressional ballot in 2018. The same poll had the Hispanic vote split evenly in July. Assuming that's not (massive) polling error that seems significant.
The common narrative on the left and right is that pro-choice voters are moving the numbers in Democrats favor. How would that square with Hispanic voters moving from an even split in July to 40 points to Democrats now?
Either the polling is wrong, pro-choice isn't the reason for the movement back to Democrats, or Hispanics are far more in favor of abortion than anyone ever suspected.
I'm leaning towards polling error, given those choices, but that's a *lot* of polling error, so I'm not super confident about it.
To be clear, just to make sure that we're on the same page the NY Times/Siena poll in 2018 showed Democrats with a 40 point advantage among Hispanic voters on the generic congressional ballot. Now in 2022 a July poll showed Republicans and Democrats splitting the Hispanic vote evenly. So that 40 point advantage that the Democrats had has been erased in four years.
As for the effect of abortion on the November electoral season I would recommend caution.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/07/midterm-elections-poll-republicans/
Ah, thanks. I thought you meant the swing was all this year. Yes, I can believe a huge swing (40 is still a lot though!) over four years.
In September, that poll shows Hispanic voters at 56% for Democrats, 32% for Republicans.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/18/upshot/times-siena-poll-hispanic-crosstabs.html
I can't find the July instance of that poll to figure out whether this is just a noisy indicator that moves up and down quickly (perhaps because it's based only on the Hispanic fraction of a sample that was sized for its overall power, but not power within subgroups) or whether there was a slightly different indicator being used.
I can't find the crosstabs but the NY Times article on the July instance is at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/upshot/poll-2022-midterms-congress.html
As for the September poll see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/politics/latino-vote-polling.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/briefing/poll-hispanic-voters-us-elections.html
Both articles give the overall edge in the Hispanic voting bloc to the Democrats but point out those margins are shrinking as some Hispanic voters defect to the Republicans. I think that's a fair summary. Remember, white working class voters started defecting from the Democrats in the 1960's and I would argue that Trump represents the inflection point for that migration. That is a sixty year process.
For whatever reason the process seems to be vastly accelerated for the Hispanic voting bloc. As to the why it is difficult to say but Josh Kraushaar at Axios speculated that inflation was acting as "rocket fuel" in driving their migration. The pace of defections is probably significant with respect to November. From the second article:
"The problem for Democrats is that winning the Hispanic vote by only 26 points may not be enough for the party to accomplish its main goals.
“Let’s not forget that 2020 levels of Hispanic support were nearly catastrophic for Democrats,” Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, told me. It helped cost the party House seats in California, Florida and Texas and allowed Republicans to win statewide races comfortably in Florida and Texas. It nearly helped Trump win re-election."
And for 2024, from the first article:
"Republicans also have strength among Latino men, who favor Democrats in the midterm election but who say, by a five-point margin, that they would vote for Mr. Trump if he were to run again in 2024. Young men in particular appear to be shifting toward Republicans. They are a key vulnerability for Democrats, who maintain just a four-point edge in the midterms among men younger than 45."
Latino men voting Democrat in congressional races but favoring Trump by five points in 2024 is, on its face, confounding and contradictory. Like I said, the Hispanic migration to the GOP is without a doubt the most interesting and significant demographic change in politics that is occurring right now.
People on both sides have been saying for years that it was odd that Hispanics were so socially conservative but voted so consistently for Democrats. Maybe we hit upon something that eroded the core reason they voted Democrat (I'm not going to speculate what exactly that is), and the social conservatism is making that change go much faster - like a dam breaking and letting large amounts of water through very quickly, verses the spillway that was moving consistently but slowly.
Josh Kraushaar speculates that it's the economy, that inflation is acting as "rocket fuel" in driving the shift for a Hispanic population that is largely working class and thus much more vulnerable to bad economic conditions.
I would also offer up that it seems significant to me that older Hispanics are still faithful Democrats and that all of this change is being driven by the younger generations, if you want to think about your "core reason" for reluctance to change.
I dunno. Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama are both incredibly well-known public intellectuals whose ideas are endlessly discussed and debated, and Scott Alexander has done pretty well for himself in the "driving discourse" department, so the main thing I take away from this post is that it's probably a good idea to care less about people with dumb opinions on Twitter.
Here here
"Hear, hear".
lol thanks, have never seen that phrase in print.
Probably harder to do when they aren't staying on twitter but are in your email inbox, with your name on them and filled with nasty language. It's easy to say "just ignore the haters", but I think it's psychologically a lot harder to really do in practice.
Is it practicable to care less?
Yes, it is absolutely practicable to care less. Many rationalists like to flirt with Stoicism, a philosophical tradition that preaches caring less. One of the central conceits of Buddhism is to care less. Scott is a psychiatrist, so presumably he believes that on the margin it is possible to change one's emotional state in a positive direction.
I didn't say anything about this being simple or easy. But it certainly seems like the most sensible path. If the price for being in the mix is that people are sometimes going to have dumb opinions about your opinions, you can either try to idiot-proof your opinions -- which I absolutely do not think is practicable -- or you can rail against the idiots or you can move on. I'd vote for moving on.
Is something that is quite possible for 1 percent of people something you can call "practicable"? It's like...if people don't like that they can't post world-class marathon times and you say, "just dedicate years of your life and train hours a day and go through tons of pain and BTW you might not have the right genetics after all that"... obviously some people will do that and post world-class marathon times.
It strikes me that caring less could be the same sort of thing.
As an active practicer of caring less, I too vote for moving on, but I'd be interested to know if that's even possible for most.
Very few people can post world-class marathon times. But most people can run a 5k if they put in some effort. Caring less is more like the latter. In fact, I'd say caring less is more like taking a two-mile walk -- not really difficult at all, but something most of aren't inclined to do if we can hop in a car instead.
Interestingly (to me), two decades ago, I gave up giving the advice to care less because it seemed like to most people it ended up being more like the marathon advice than the 5k advice.
I'm searching here for the reason for the disparity between the two of us because I certainly agree it's a good course of action and I'll restart giving the advice if I was previously incorrect in my assessment of people's ability to do this thing.
I would guess the problem is that "care less", on it's own, is not specific enough. It's a good idea, but then you have to figure out, "how?".
There are specific techniques for achieving it, and I think people need to hear about those techniques instead of just being told the broad advice.
Fwiw (not much!), I think the problem with the advice is not so much that it's hard to follow but that people just aren't generally inclined to take advice. I suspect that the average person hears the advice that they should care less and has one of two reactions: either they take umbrage at the notion that anyone would trivialize the enormous injustice they have suffered by suggesting they could possibly ignore it; or they agree in principle and immediately continue to obsess. I don't think many people actually attempt to go through the motions of caring less.
I used to work as a crisis counselor. People would reach out via a hotline when they were in the throes of some sort of emotional crisis. The circumstances were incredibly varied, ranging from teenage relationship angst to honest-to-goodness suicide attempts. In our roles as crisis counselors, there was absolutely nothing we could do to fix the underlying problems in these people's lives, which were often quite severe (homelessness, mental health disorders, sexual trauma, addiction, etc.). Our goal was simply to get them through the moment of crisis to a calmer place. This was by no means always easy, but the techniques we used for doing it were somewhat rote and very often effective. Affirmation. Breathing exercises. Exercise. Engaging in a favorite hobby. Reaching out to a friend. Etc. It wasn't really rocket science, and I don't want to overstate the outcome -- the people reaching out still had a lot of real issues to deal with.
But still, it was hard not to be struck. Especially if you're not dealing with something as overwhelming as a severe mental health crisis, there are steps you can take. You can to a degree choose how you want to engage with the world. I am far from a perfect example of this. But I do think it is possible.
I don't think caring less can be accomplished by direct effort: "Just don't focus on it, move on," etc. What works better is to build up the rest of your life so that you more deeply engaging things to move on *to*. That's not easy either, but it's a task where determination and willpower can help you, because it involves changing behavior rather than feels. You can't make yourself feel less bothered by being attacked, but you can make yourself try new things, meet new people, spend time on deeply satisfying activities rather than random online browsing, etc.
Depends. Some people could care less, but some people couldn't care less.
He said he can ignore them when they're just randos on Twitter but finds it harder when they're the likes of the NYT.
Well, NYT was on his case for more damning wrongthink than being insufficiently critical of Trump, and the implications of that are likewise somewhat different.
I expect Scott has had more criticism from big media outlets on a variety of topics than just the one big NYT debacle we know about.
In this post, he was talking about how it's psychologically easier to weather criticism from random Twitter trolls when you're pushing the majority view than to weather criticism from big media outlets when you're pushing a minority view. So I was responding to the poster saying it's just about ignoring random Twitter trolls.
Random NYT journos shitpost on Twitter as readily as anybody else, so that much may be true, but I don't think that they deserve attention there any more than anonymous trolls. Twitter is just an irredeemable cesspool IMO, and the fact that even the ratsphere apparently can't afford to entirely disengage from it is very dispiriting.
As they say, no publicity is bad publicity. It works for Trump.
That was said by someone who had a secretary to filter his mail for him.
Yeah I just wouldn't worry about these people at all.
I was going to suggest something similar, but then I remember it was quite a different experience for someone now effectively a public speaker with a known real name...
To the contrary I think Francis Fukuyama has gotten a lot of mileage out of publishing his thesis with an inflammatory title. How many political scientists can you name that get namedropped whenever people discuss political events?
If I was trying to develop myself as a thought leader in a field, my first move would be to make a brazen and marginally thought provoking statement to tie my name to the field as tightly as possible. Imagine if Leibniz had published "The End of Calculus'; he'd probably be better known.
Like Bishop Berkeley in “The Analyst” where he accused Newton of working with “the ghosts of departed quantities” when he used infinitesimals that were sometimes nonzero and sometimes zero. Berkeley was totally logically right, but mathematicians kept doing it anyway, until the late 19th century when Weierstrass came along and gave new definitions to limits, and then mathematicians decided Berkeley had been right all along.
It’s a little hard for me to say what this does for their reputation, because Berkeley and Leibniz are both about as well-known as it is possible for a 17th or 18th century thinker to be - probably only Newton and Descartes outrank them.
Hmmm. Galileo? Locke? Kant did his best stuff in the 18th century.
Galileo and Kant are good ones. I was thinking that Hume and Locke and Smith would rank equal to Berkeley and Leibniz.
And more recently, infinitesimals were further rehabilitated as being a sound foundation for an alternative formulation of analysis. While it's surprising for laymen, mathematics historically has been far from rigorous, with the best of mathematicians managing to intuit the truth sometimes centuries before it's conclusively proven.
"The ghosts of departed quantities" is a lovely phrase.
I think this advice you’re giving seems to be something that might make sense for an individual but be terrible if everyone adopted it.
And aren’t Steven Pinker and Fukuyama still pretty famous and successful despite idiots on Twitter dunking on them? The more hysterical and pessimistic other intellectuals are, the more of a market it opens up for people who say something different. Twitter is where particularly dumb and lazy people congregate, it’s not the entire literate public.
Just tell the truth, be honest, and careful with your predictions. You might end up like Fukuyama, who wrote the most well known political science book of the last century.
Glad to see you're thinking about writing stuff that may make people say you have bad takes again. Felt like this was trying to address part of https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck where your interesting pieces had a habit of getting annoying responses from 0.5% of your audience, which stopped you writing them (totally understandable, but subtly disengaging for the silent majority).
I am very sympathetic to your desire to not be at the center of another "You are still crying wolf" mess. But a lot of your guidance seems to come down to, don't make the sort of prophecies that are most likely to be accurate and useful, because fools will jump all over you for them. Which, yes, they will, but it would be a shame to throw out volumes of accurate and useful prophecy over that.
I mean, I don't read it as actual guidance. It's sarcastic guidance. The message is "I understand that the optimal sort of predictions to get lauded as a clever prophet are very different to the optimal sort of predictions to be right or useful. I'm planning on optimising my predictions for something other than getting lauded as a clever prophet, so please be nice"
I'm pretty left-leaning, and I found "You Are Still Crying Wolf" quite comforting throughout the Trump administration, so thank you.
I shared that post with 3 friends when it came out. All of us live in a deep blue city. One of them hated it; one of them got confused by it; one of them told me it opened their eyes.
Posts like that are going to be polarizing. The ones that help some and give them comfort are going to be really hated by others.
It was the first neutral or left-leaning person I saw who wanted to be accurate on Trump, instead of throwing random stuff at him to see what would stick. Scott may or may not have realized it, but it was the random lies about Trump (or hyperbole, or exaggeration) that cemented his place with his voting base. If the regular media had limited itself to true and negative aspects of Trump - which everyone agrees were legion! - then his base *and* the intellectually honest (like Scott) wouldn't have felt the need to defend him at all.
It didn't help that there was a group of people perfectly willing to call Trump's base a "basket of deplorables" or similar.
Michael Moore, more than a year before Trump's election ?
And then 4 months before the election again ?
https://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/
I broadly agreed with the overall message of the piece, while still thinking the predictions at the end were hot garbage. I've tried to make my critiques specific enough to be useful in the past when it's come up, but I think this is a "no green stars" situation - discussion dynamics are such that object-level engagement will almost never be the dominant flavor.
Has Scott officially scored his predictions anywhere? Let's have a quick look:
1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
Score: False, the FBI classified 8052 "single-bias incidents" (what a classification!) in 2020 compared to 5818 in 2015.
This one seems to have been a bad prediction to start with; even random crime rate volatility makes it likely that at least one year will be 125% of some reference year, and there has been a long-term trend towards classifying (though not necessarily committing) increasing numbers of hate crimes. Of course 2020 being 2020 I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if actual numbers increased too.
2. Total minority population of US citizens will increase throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 99%]
Score: True. I don't have any data handy but am still confident that it's true.
3. US Muslim population increases throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 95%]
Score: True, as for 2.
4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.
Score: I couldn't be bothered figuring this one out in detail but here's a list of Trump cabinet appointees https://www.senate.gov/legislative/nominations/Trump_cabinet.htm -- Carson and Chao are definitely nonwhite and were around for the whole time putting a floor of 15% on it... I can't be bothered looking up the exact ancestry of all the others but let's say the 10% prediction was correct.
5. Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]
Score: true
6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].
Score: false. Oh wow, looking at the poll in question this one has gone terribly over the past nine years https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].
Score: true.
("Oh but didn't he say there were fine people on bo..." no, shut up, stop being an idiot)
8. No large demographic group (> 1 million people) get forced to sign up for a “registry” [confidence: 95%]
Score: true
9> No large demographic group gets sent to internment camps [confidence: 99%]
Score: true
10. Number of deportations during Trump’s four years will not be greater than Obama’s 8 [confidence: 90%]
Score: seems to be true https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/table39
Anyway, it looks like a decent round of predictions to me. A couple wrong with 70% confidence and one wrong with 80% confidence, but all the high-confidence ones were right.
I'll decline to relitigate it in any detail here, per Scott's request. Maybe in a future OT if it seems relevant. But you can see plenty of discussion in the comments of this post, including a few of my gripes: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-grading-my-trump-predictions
Ok, well, I'm predicting that we will keep seeing small incremental improvements in AI (perhaps enough to finally allow self-driving cars into the mainstream); the power and influence of the US will continue to decline; and the climate will keep warming pretty much in line with the median projections. Does that make me Nostradamus or Fukuyama ?
I think on AI you'll get both the Nostradamus and Fukuyama treatment. Some would say you're already proven wrong daily, given (for example) the recent advances in language and image models. Meanwhile some will never say you were wrong; none of the improvements we're seeing are truly large or surprising.
My big prediciton that would cause huge twitter callouts if I had any sort of public profile would be somehting like "we will be too stupid and shortsided to successfully stop climate change but the negative impacts will be wildly less severe than advertised and it will mostly be fine (if expensive to deal with)".
I am sure everytime there is a drought/stomr/heatwave/whatever I would get a million callouts.
I think you're being incredibly optimistic WRT climate change. And I'm willing to count your prediction as including both New York City and Washington, DC being largely submerged.
Niether will be largely submerged in timelines that matter. The AVERAGE elevation of NYC is ~15ft. DC is ~150ft.
The maximum predicted water level increase by 2100 in the last IPCC report is I think half a meter above 1990 levels.
So ~1.6 feet. Does that count as NYC and DC being "submerged"? And that you would even say such a silly thing is exactly why I am right. poeple believe absolutely gonzo shit is going to happen, and what actually is going to happen won't be nearly so bad.
No.
Over the very long run (thousands of years) a warmer earth would thermally expand the ocean, and the sea level might say 200ft.
Except regardless of what you think about climate change, we will have it under control one way or another long before "thousands of years". That isn't a time horizon of relevence.
The IPCC report was intentionally excessively conservative. This was so that people wouldn't just disbelieve it as "too extreme", but it also means that we don't really have a good handle on what the reasonable extremes are.
P.S.: If a city's sewer systems are underwater, that city is in trouble, unless they were designed with that situation in mind. Few are.
P.P.S.: I'm not predicting that NYC and DC will be under water, but I don't think there are reasonable grounds for predicting that they won't be. The error bars are HUGE.
What's the verdict on Enoch Powell as a forecaster?
Good question. When I read him, I get the impression his focus is on predicting racism and its consequences, while his critics accused him of endorsing or justifying racism. As we also see in the examples discussed here, the is-ought fallacy seems especially useful for people making ideologically-motivated "debunkings" of potentially inconvenient points. Of course, Powell didn't exactly go out of his way to condemn racism either, which would have alienated him from his support among definite actual racists.
Interested to hear what others think. Perhaps the ostracism and cancelling of people with unfashionable ideas is the price we must pay for a society that's becoming genuinely more tolerant and compassionate in other ways.
This month’s Hindu-Muslim riots in Leicester: “no-one saw it coming”:
https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newssearch&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiF6qmFxLf6AhXFoVwKHZzQAOYQxfQBKAB6BAgJEAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fuk%2Fhome-news%2Fleicester-riots-muslims-hindus-protests-b2173443.html&usg=AOvVaw1pI_oY83MY31muW_Me6F_e
> Amongst several transported to the isles,
> One to be born with two teeth in his mouth
> They will die of famine the trees stripped,
> For them a new King issues a new edict.
Well this one is obviously about Easter Island.
I thought Scott was going to say this one was also about the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Amongst several transported to the isles: Obviously the isles are Japan, and the several transported there are the two nuclear bombs
One to be born with two teeth in his mouth: The one to be born was Little Boy. The two teeth are the two lumps of U-235 that were brought together inside the bomb.
They will die of famine the trees stripped: Well, a lot of trees definitely got stripped. Some would say that they primarily died of things like burning to death rather than famine, but famines were definitely a problem for the survivors.
For them a new King issues a new edict: Japan's government is overthrown (admittedly with the exception of the King)
The two teeth being the lumps of fissile material is so good I'm disappointed Scott didn't write it into the post himself. Nothing is ever a coincidence, after all
I think I read the same weird almanac as a kid. Was it the People's Almanac?
I was going to ask the same thing. The supposed prediction about Communism's downfall is here: https://archive.org/details/peoplesalmanac00wall/page/14/mode/1up
Its quote is:
---
The philosophy of life according to Thomas More,
Will be unsuccessful, and will give way to another much more seductive,
In the land of cold winds is where it will first fail,
Because of the deeds and language of one more attractive.
---
The People's Almanac #2 has a bio on Nostradamus as well.
Thanks - I was guessing it must’ve been the People’s Almanac. That takes me back! It was like the Buzzfeed of the 70’s.
Thanks for finding that! I'm so confused - it looks like about half of those prophecies are real, the other half are made up, and the made up ones aren't especially even made up to match true events up to that point. I wonder what they were doing.
That *is* a head-scratcher. I can't find the Thomas More prophecy anywhere outside The People's Almanac and quotes thereof. FWIW one of the authors, David Wallechinsky, is age 74 and splits his time between Santa Monica and France; if you run into him on 3rd Street Promenade please ask what the deal is (and thank him for me, for many hours of good bathroom reading).
Wallenchinsky co-authored the People's Almanac series of books with his father Irving Wallace and sister Amy Wallace. This family tossed off eclectic books (including some real tomes) like it was going out of style. Amy (who appears to have been the family underachiever) contributed to The Book of Lists during school breaks while living on her brother's commune in Berkeley in '77, coauthored numerous additional books with David and Irving, wrote a book centered on her 1990s relationship with Carlos Castaneda, authored a bio of William James Sidis, wrote one erotic novel, and co-authored (with Handsome Dick Manitoba) The Official Punk Rock Book of Lists.
Afterthought: If there are any Republicans in that family, I'd really appreciate hearing the details.
Yes!
Great essay; I think there is a lot to what you say.
Thanks, Scott. I appreciate the insight both into your own thinking and into the social dynamics that constrain public thinkers. I hope you will continue to explore the areas where you are comfortable pushing boundaries. Your "I suck" post a while back led me to reflect on the issues where wizened and experienced Scott has the advantage over young and brash Scott, and I'd love to see my own predictions confirmed, even if there's no one but myself to praise or blame me.
These insights aIso help to explain the changes in Internet culture c. 2007.
By a strange coincidence, I have just picked up a copy of Nostradamus (Henry C. Roberts's 1947 edition updated for 1994 by his grandson Robert Lawrence) at a particularly jejune university library sale. Figured I'd flip through it for some vague post-rationalist thought-jog, or at least for a few smirks at compelling hindsight interpretation.
It really is the most horrendous rubbish, though. It's not just that the quatrains are vague and malleable, some of the interpretations (don't know if this problem is peculiar to Roberts and Lawrence) simply march over clearly contrary elements.
One example of many, Century V, #55:
"Out of the country of greater Arabia,
Shall be born a strong master of Mohammedan law,
Who shall vex Spain and conquer Grenada,
And by sea shall come to the Italian [the French text specifies Ligurian] nation."
This is interpreted as 'from a country of Mohammedan law (Morocco), shall come one who is a strong master of their law - the sword: Khomeini and the Moslem revolution in Iran.'
Khomeini did not come from Arabia and never visited Spain, Italy, or Morocco, to say nothing of conquering Grenada in even the most figurative sense. I really wonder how this stuff has managed to fascinate so many people for so long.
Clearly with the benefit of hindsight we can see that it was actually about Osama bin Laden, who was definitely born in Arabia.
Rules "first" and "fourth" (and maybe "second") can be summarized as a more general rule: predict the alternate media-reality, which is the reality through the lens of media.
Mentioned among "losers" Pinker wrote how media makes us to see reality in a distorted way. This picture can be seen as an alternate reality were the most of consumers of media live. All you need is to map your predictions from a "real" reality to an imagined media-reality, and then to think about how it can backfire.
I believe that this more general rule is better, because it makes you more prepared to new effects which you didn't identify yet. Though it probably needs more efforts to follow: you need to think of it explicitly, not just pattern-match.
Interesting, I always considered You are still Crying Wolf, to be one of your best pieces, but noticed that you shied away from writing articles like it, since. I had no idea you had to deal with so much criticism after that article. I completely get why you avoid articles like that, but I do hope you will find some middle ground where you are able to predict the future accurately, without being harassed.
Saying USSR has dissolved "without strife" is kinda painting over a lot of things. Without war - sure, but there was plenty of strife. Enough, in fact, that one of major propaganda themes used by Putin to consolidate his power was "you don't really want to go back to how it was in the 90s, do you?!"
Also, shouldn't London be considered the birthplace of communism (or, alternatively, Germany)?
Paris has a decent claim, too.
And another part of this is that much of Putin's propaganda strategy is claiming that defeat in the Cold War was just a temporary humiliation, and Russia will reclaim its rightful place at the world stage any day now. Ukraine's existence outside of Russian domination is one of the most salient counterarguments to that, and thus the present situation.
Meh I think compared to what most people feared it was increidbly tame. I think a huge number of people in the west always assumed they would go down swinging, or there would be enough anarchy it would cause international problems. Instead the problems were mostly internal.
Was the USSR ever really defeated though? It lost some of its fringe territory and the Communist Party changed its name, but what else changed?
I mean the territory they lost was a huge deal, nations spend hundreds of years getting legitmate claim to places like that. And the party got a huge black eye and official embarassment of a huge degree. IDK I think it was a legit huge change, and especially was a huge change in eastern Europe.
More like the Communist Party has been transformed (or, has completed its transformation - it started decades ago) into the KGB Party. However, the power of the Russian Empire (whatever the current smokescreen name is) has greatly diminished - from controlling half of Europe and significant parts of Asia and Africa to basically a regional second-grade party. Yes, they still have nukes - so does Pakistan. They even had a brief period of democracy - a thing mostly unheard of in Russia, which never managed to keep the democracy around for long. Neither did it this time. So I'd say yes, there was a defeat of the USSR but not strong enough to transform the Russian Empire into something else. It just slightly mutated.
AFAIK Pakistan only has "local" nukes, not intercontinental ones ?
Correct, for "local" meaning "about 2500 km". Enough to reach Israel, and a fair chunk of Turkey, Russia, and China though not the most populous parts. All of India, of course.
Pakistan also has close ties to whatever the remains of Al Qaeda are calling themselves, if they want semi-deniable covert nuclear delivery worldwide.
They lost about half of their subjects – not just some fringe territory – plus all their client states. Sounds like a defeat to me.
I think it depends on with what you identify "the USSR." If we identify it with the nomenklatura and central rulers of the USSR, then surely yes. Those people -- staring with Gorbachev himself -- lost their jobs and influence. If you mean Russia itself, and the Russian elite class, perhaps it's less clear. Russia was the biggest chunk of the USSR, but a fair amount of Soviet leadership came from outside Russia, and and it's not entirely clear to me (and I think it wasn't entirely clearly to that class in 1991) that the USSR put Russia's interests first. I would speculate that in 1991 there was a fair amount of sentiment in Russian upper classes that Russia's interests were sufficiently separate from those of the USSR that there was something to be gained by the former's abolition. Putin seems to have tapped into a vein of feeling that this was wrong.
Although...isn't his power base a bit more eastern? One can imagine the urban upper classes of Moscow and St. Petersburg still thinking, yeah, the abolition of the USSR was a win for us -- now we can travel, do deals, get rich, buy nice things. But one can imagine a village on the Amur thinking no this sucks, we're still poor, maybe even poorer, and we don't even read about our glorious national victories at the Olympics, space probes, or the General Secretary negotiating solemnly with the US President over our terrible nukes, because those assholes in Moscow and St. Petersburg sold us out so they could buy Gucci handbags and vacation in Geneva.
I think you are projecting our current knowledge backwards. Huge number of people in the West thought nothing like that would happen at all and USSR is here to stay with us indefinitely, and the West has to learn to live with it. Reagan was considered a deranged cowboy for promoting the idea that USSR could be defeated and not appeased. Mainstream Sovietology basically considered the idea of the collapse a fringe scenario fit to the crazy "the end is nigh" street preachers and not a serious political scientist. So no serious discussion on *how* it mat happen happened, because pretty much everybody agreed it won't *happen at all* anytime soon.
He didn't exactly say "Communism", and Russia is where Lenin took the words of Marx and twisted them into something that had a chance of working.
Bari Weiss has an interesting story about Trump. It seems that Black people are Jewish people weren't allowed to play golf in the big resorts in the northeastern states. That is until Trump bought the big resorts. Trump resorts were the first big resorts open to Black people and Jewish people ... but somehow Trump gets painted the racist.
Yeah, for all his faults, racism is not really anywhere prominent. As long as you are loyal and useful to him, that's all that matters.
I think he is racist in the ordinary sort of way, that is, he has particular expectations of people based on their race. He will make an exception for individuals that he knows personally, and may even accept a trusted recommendation that goes against his racial priors (I'd have said "prejudices", as this is the literal meaning of prejudice, but there's too much risk of being misunderstood). This also means that, in situations where he is dealing with large groups of a particular race, he will be inclined to develop policy based on those priors (so his idea of border policy is based on his racial priors for "Mexicans", but that won't stop him hiring and trusting an individual Mexican-American).
Aside from the fact that he is much more transparent about this, he's not all that different from many other politicians (or many other people). He's not the sort of racist who will refuse to make exceptions for individuals of his personal acquaintance.
This is still racist, but it's not exceptionally or unusually racist and a lot of people from minorities expect this level of racism and many don't think that they're going to get any better from a politician or other powerful person - and they like that Trump is more transparent about this (which is what people mean when they say he is "honest" - they mean you can tell what his motives are and what he really wants, not that his factual statements are accurate).
To be honest, that kind of "racism" is rather forced on one. If I'm walking down a street at night, and someone else is doing the same thing behind me, I'll check unobtrusively to see what they look like, to decide how worried I should be. When all you know about someone is what's prominently visible, you make decisions based on that, and you don't ignore obvious elements.
However, to express those "prejudices" in public without sound statistics behind them is improper, unethical, and sometimes immoral.
Seems to me he is not really interested in people beyond their utility to him, and does not give a damn whether they are black, jewish, white, gay, straight. But it would probably have been of use to him politically to sound racist -- so as to scoop up the anti-black and antisemitic voters.
Quite right. Trump is far too self-centered to be genuinely racist. To be genuinely racist, you have to be willing to sacrifice your own self interest in pursuit of your ideological goals, e.g. you have to refuse to serve black customers even if you would make good money.
When is that supposed to have happened? How did those resorts manage to say "Sorry, no blacks or Jews allowed" without getting sued into oblivion?
It was legal until the civil rights movement, I think. I had a book of Isaac Asimov's old jokes, and there are jokes about trying to not let the resort know you're Jewish.
Remember, these are private clubs, though, where you have to apply or be invited to join, and they can always turn down your application with justifications like "sorry, membership list is full right now" or "I don't think you'd be such a great cultural fit here" or what have you. Not saying the story is true or not, just that that kind of discrimination could have continued in pricey golf clubs without it being obvious to the general public.
It's not resorts, it's clubs. A private members' club can exclude people (even now) for just about any reason - and, more particularly, doesn't have to give a reason for blackballing them. If they just blackball all black/Jewish people without putting up a sign saying "no blacks or Jews", then there's nothing to sue over; they can just say "we rejected this person because someone voted against them".
Trump bought them and turned them into businesses - or, more often, set up his own courses which were businesses from the start - which do have legal obligations under the Civil Rights Act, and therefore took anyone who could afford to pay.
Courts have regularly ruled that private club memberships are not a public accommodation and therefore are not subject to Civil Rights rules. They can't have it as a policy, but if they just don't admit anyone, then that's that. The Augusta National golf club (which hosts the US Masters) had Tiger Woods as its first black member because the winner of the US Masters is automatically granted membership. Other black members were then admitted after that presumably because the (anonymous) members who had been blackballing them stopped doing so. Note that services provided by a private club to the general public (e.g. admission to guests of members) are public accommodations and they are subject to the usual Civil Rights laws.
The term "blackballing" originates with London clubs giving every member a white ball (marble sized) and a black ball to vote on a new member; if there were any black balls, then the new member was rejected. Some version is relatively common in member's clubs; if any existing member rejects a new one, then that person is excluded; the member doing the rejection does not have to supply a reason.
It's not true that Tiger was Augusta's first black member--for one, Masters winners are only automatically made honorary members, and anyway, they had their first black member in the early 1990s after another golf club, Shoal Creek, found themselves mired in controversy over their racial policies.
Link? This seems like a "just so" story to own the libs. I'd be curious about the specifics.
https://www.commonsense.news/p/in-this-house-we-believe-family-trumps
"The local country clubs had a rule: no blacks or Jews allowed. In 1996, “when Trump’s club opened up, it was like, ‘If you can pay, you’re welcome!’ So my dad formed his own community there,” Laub said in an interview. "
Thanks. This was where I sort of thought the story fit. It is one guy's remembrance 30 years later about local country clubs. Not that this isn't true, just it is anecdata.
The idea that country clubs would still be excluding black and (especially) Jewish people from membership *in the 1990s* just seems hard for me to believe, although given the example of the Augusta golf club I suppose I can't rule it out entirely.
It’s very easy to be a racist while doing some anti-racist things. You can’t settle this sort of thing with one-off examples, much as people on all sides of the issue want to. Don’t buy into the idea that one act makes someone a racist or that one act makes someone not a racist.
Well fair enough, but is it still reasonable then to classify people into the categories "racist" and "not racist"?
Is there anyone sufficiently not racist to deserve a seat in the "not racist" category?
Maybe it makes sense to classify people into "regular nice person but still racist" and "somewhat obnoxiously racist" and "really really racist".
I personally don't think it's reasonable to classify people into "racist" and "not racist". It can be reasonable to sort people on a scale of more racist to less racist, but to recognize that there's a lot of blurriness here.
It's better to sort individual actions into "racist" and "not racist" than people.
I agree.
> It's better to sort individual actions into "racist" and "not racist" than people.
On one hand, yes, on the other hand, it might be useful to have shortcuts for "this person makes racist actions frequently" and "this person makes racist actions rarely".
It's not just a shortcut, though -- it's a change in model. For the person who makes racist actions frequently, you're now picturing there being this intellectual/emotional entity inside them called racism, from whence flow the many racist actions. So long as you are working from that model, the reasonable thing to do is to tell the person they are racist. That is unlikely to effect much change in them -- they will mostly experience it as an insult. But also, what does "being racist" really mean? Seems like there are many feelings and ideas that could lead to frequent racist acts: fear of the racial other, dislike of the racial other, beliefs that the racial other dislikes me; ignorance of how the racial other will react to certain actions; deficits in empathy or just interpersonal alertness; habits. If you're going to speak up to somebody who does lots of racist things it's really better to look for the inner source of the actions, rather than to say they flow from "racism." So you say something like, "she [racial other] was startled and annoyed by that thing you did, and I can see why. How come you did that?"
With the sorry state of legal prediction markets (PredictIt shutting down, Kalshi very limited and not liquid), this guidance only applies to a very limited set of people. Unless you're writing a book or already have a national pulpit as a writer or an "intellectual," nobody cares about your predictions and you won't make any money by being accurate. The only exceptions are business-type predictions that are reflected in the market but the number of public companies or other securities on which you can make clean bets is limited.
I predicted the 2020 homicide spike and gave reasons about why it will happen (https://twitter.com/LechMazur/status/1267863723013820416) but it was barely worth the minimal effort of a Twitter post. It's same situation as with betting on Metaculus or Manifold Markets - might be fun to think about things in a systematic way and keep track of your predictions but ultimately it'll always be meaningless for almost everybody.
I must say the Climate Change thing looks perfectly optimized for this. Any weather happening (hot weather obviously, but cold weather too), any strong wind, and rain, or any absence of rain - all proves it. The press would never say "the weather this year wasn't substantially different from how it has been for the last 20 years" but will yell "This July 12th was the HOTTEST JULY 12TH ON RECORD!" It can not lose, really.
Reminds me of this: https://twitter.com/jamesmelville/status/1547536170992779266
And just in case you were wondering: yes, that tweet was "fact-checked" and thoroughly "debunked" by several media sources. No, seriously.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-weather-climate/fact-check-british-weather-maps-have-changed-for-better-accessibility-idUSL1N2Z30KX
Apparently the blood red color absolutely must be used, for "accessibility" reasons, and this somehow "debunks" the tweet (even though it didn't comment on why it changed, just noted the difference in appearance).
But even if we accept that the change wasn't done to scare people about high temperatures, they literally say later in that article: "It’s no coincidence that deep red (dangerous) colours are used for temperatures in the high 30s because these are life-threatening"!
"That's not happening and it's good that it is"
Yes, a hilarious example.
Also, turns out 33 is "high 30s" (that's the highest number there). So high that these areas aren't red anymore - they're black, to show that apparently all has been burned to ashes there, no chance of survivors.
In Australia we call that "light pink": https://images.theconversation.com/files/466254/original/file-20220531-16-mcvtf.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip
I was hoping you’d have a Substack featuring more of these. I find hysteria increasingly entertaining
That is pretty funny.
But that's the actual worry. The immediate risk of climate change isn't the polar ice caps melting tomorrow. It's "PAKISTAN IS UNDERWATER" or "NORTH INDIA IS 49 DEGREES."
It's the long tail of making things that were exceedingly rare because they were at one end of the normal bell curve of weather events, into things that are merely uncommon with some catastrophic effects.
We'd want the media to highlight these events.
The red thing is odd. I feel like it is the BBC seeing places that did have unusually high temps and then wanting to get in on the action.
>We'd want the media to highlight these events.
No, ideally we'd want them to highlight whether these events happen more often than they historically were. But that requires engaging in boring things like statistics, and the media is generally not in the business of doing that.
Temperatures in North India and Pakistan flooding to this extent are new.
We have a good 200 years of data on that thanks to industrious British bureaucrats.
Except just a couple years ago it seemed like the press would always say “look it snowed in February, therefore global warming is a hoax” and would never mention high weather events. It’s possible for press to twist things either way on this.
But now snow in February is an extreme event which confirms climate change.
To be clear, climate change is a real phenomenon. But people seem to either opt for "climate change is only harmful" or "climate change does not exist." Of those two, "only harmful" is the more defensible position. However climate change also has benefits that people ignore. Increased CO2 increases growth of many crops as well as drought tolerance. All climate change models include increased precipitation. And while those models also include things like increased evaporation rates, the net balance as of about 5-10 years ago was towards increased global greening due to climate change. But saying "climate change is both good and bad" is anathema to the media narrative. We even get peer reviewed papers about how climate change has increased the growth of poison ivy. And that's... technically true. But glaringly selective.
This is exactly my issue. You have a thing which has trillions and trillions of positive benefits, and trillions and trilions of negative costs, and then ONLY look at the cost and say "see this is going to be the apocalypse".
A relevant example that I saw/lived through. Britain privatised its railways in the 1990s, and within the next ten years there were two headline-making derailments and crashes that killed people. Obviously it looked pretty bad for the private company running the railway infrastructure (Railtrack) and for the notion of privatisation in general. But a statistician went and ran the numbers and found, even including those big fatal crashes, there was an ongoing downward curve of railway accidents from the 1960s onwards, with a visible downward discontinuity at the time of privatisation - meaning that the railways got safer at that time. But to a casual observer, it really didn't look or feel that way. *On rereading the analysis now, I see that actually fatalities were higher post-privatisation because of one of the big accidents. But all other safety indicators were improved.
Link:
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2007.00213.x
Nice try, you big rail shills.
A hundred people dead in a plane crash is world news, a thousand people dead on the roads that day is a mundane statistic.
This is flagrantly ignoring *why* Hatfield and Potters Bar were so bad for Railtrack, and how the investigations done into its causes found Railtrack responsible. Comparing statistics says very little without deeper analysis into *why* safety improved under Railtrack, and whether or not the changes that improved safety would have occurred under BR.
Also, renationalisation under Network Rail improved safety relative to the private Railtrack which was itself safer than the nationalised BR.
One of the problems with "it's more complicated than that" as a story is that very often you need to go not one or two but many levels deep to get a real explanation - and no single individual can do that across enough fields to get a statistically valid sample of reality.
Well said.
"It is very hard to make predictions especially about the future."
Yogi Berra*
(*bad attribution: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/)
I feel the idea that “some guys in some caves got lucky once then the United States bombed some countries” fails to take history seriously.
Al-Qaeda enunciated a coherent vision for a world order to compete with liberal democracy. Many called this doctrine “Islamofascism” at the time. This was a misnomer, as fascism is an inherently racist doctrine, always seeing the state as the highest embodiment of a racial group. Al-Qaeda’s vision, however, was anti-racist. Regardless of where you came from, you were not only able to convert to Islam, you were very warmly invited to convert to Al-Qaeda’s version of Islam.
After 9/11 it was not clear Al-Qaeda, or some similar group, lacked the ability to obtain nuclear weapons. After-all, Pakistani society’s compatibility with Al-Qaeda’s vision for the world was on the same order of magnitude with Pakistani society’s compatibility with the western liberal vision. The same could be said of Indonesia, Malaysia, and myriad other smaller muslim nations.
This interpretation of Al-Qaeda and its philosophical legitimacy is well described by Paul Berman in his 2003 book “Terror and Liberalism.”
Al-Qaeda then, represented a clearly articulated challenge to the western liberal world order. The Bush Administration recognized that challenge, and set about destroying it. Significantly, the Obama administration continued Bush’s policy to completion. Drone war was stepped up. Guantanamo was not closed. Edward Snowden was not feted, he was chased to exile.
In short, the Bush and Obama administrations both agreed the political philosophy Al-Qaeda expounded was a serious threat the needed to be met and defeated. We only dismiss the seriousness of that threat today because it was so resoundingly defeated.
I don’t know how one can point to Al-Qaeda in 2001 and categorically state they were less serious a threat than the Bolsheviks in November of 1917, or the Nazis in 1923.
Indeed, one feels that if, in 1923, Hitler had been dealt with “Obama Style” then the Nazis would be remembered as a comically ineffective right-wing militia.
Anyway, pet-peeve of mine. Just because western liberalism has been reliably winning for the last 70yrs does not mean those victories are guaranteed forever and automagically.
>This was a misnomer, as fascism is an inherently racist doctrine, always seeing the state as the highest embodiment of a racial group. Al-Qaeda’s vision, however, was anti-racist. Regardless of where you came from, you were not only able to convert to Islam, you were very warmly invited to convert to Al-Qaeda’s version of Islam.
As good a critique of "anti-racism" as any.
But of course, I love how you apparently think the problem with "fascism" is the promotion of racial interests, as if being a murderous fanatic seeking to impose authoritarian rule is fine as long as you (ALLEGEDLY) don't have any racial preferences. "Anti-racism" really is is a religion.
And by your definition, the CCP are functionally a fascist government.
>Al-Qaeda then, represented a clearly articulated challenge to the western liberal world order.
One, of course, that appealed to only the most backward of countries, and one whose very similar instantiations produced absolutely nothing of value unless you're a fundamentalist muslim.
No, but really, you can say this stuff over and over again, but why not just come out and say exactly what was so "coherent" and "philosophically legitimate" about it?
>In short, the Bush and Obama administrations both agreed the political philosophy Al-Qaeda expounded was a serious threat the needed to be met and defeated. We only dismiss the seriousness of that threat today because it was so resoundingly defeated.
So, to be clear you disagree with all left-wing explanations for the war?
>I don’t know how one can point to Al-Qaeda in 2001 and categorically state they were less serious a threat than the Bolsheviks in November of 1917, or the Nazis in 1923.Indeed, one feels that if, in 1923, Hitler had been dealt with “Obama Style” then the Nazis would be remembered as a comically ineffective right-wing militia.
If the nazis in 1923 achieved what they set out to, they would come to control Germany, giving them the resources to have/build one of the strongest militaries in the world and the possibility of controlling most of Europe. The US weren't as dominant then, and the UK's military power had declined since WW1.
How is there any analogy to Al-Qaeda? They had no way of ever getting enough power to counter the military might of even just the US. Even if they got a nuke, so what? They might kill a bunch of people and then the middle east gets turned to glass.
>Anyway, pet-peeve of mine. Just because western liberalism has been reliably winning for the last 70yrs does not mean those victories are guaranteed forever and automagically.
Al-Qaeda never had any chance of displacing liberalism. It seems you hate the west and have concocted some fantasy with no connection to reality. Islam is in decline and the most powerful islamic countries are going to be greatly diminished once their oil becomes much less valuable. If something replaces liberalism before a singularity etc, it certainly won't be anything related to Islam.
> But of course, I love how you apparently think the problem with "fascism" is the promotion of racial interests, as if being a murderous fanatic seeking to impose authoritarian rule is fine as long as you (ALLEGEDLY) don't have any racial preferences. "Anti-racism" really is is a religion.
Part of the definition of fascism is its hyper-racialized (or nationalized, or ethnicized - however you prefer to put it) view of the world. If you do not have a hyper-racialized view of the world, you are not fascist. Islamism is not a hyper-racialized view of the world, but a universalist one oriented around religion. That doesn't mean that Al-Qaeda has a good policy - it simply means they aren't fascists.
This seems like a No True Fascist argument.
Honestly I think we'd be a lot better off if the word "fascist" were used only to describe the Partito Nazionale Fascista, and using it to describe vaguely-similar movements in other parts of the world had never caught on.
> This seems like a No True Fascist argument.
Words have meaning. Saying that fascism is nationalist/racist/ethnosupremacist is like saying that Marxists care about class. To quote Mussolini himself: "[Fascism] is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and ending to express itself in the conscience and the will of the mass, ***of the whole group ethnically molded by natural and historical conditions into a nation***, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self same line of development and spiritual formation."
> Saying that fascism is nationalist/racist/ethnosupremacist is like saying that Marxists care about class
OK, but if you take Fascism and you make the in-group a religion (especially a large old established religion that is endemic in a large slice of the globe) rather than a nationality or a race is that really such a major change? It still seems like basically the same sort of thing.
I think you lose explanatory power if you conflate race and religion. For instance, compare Bolshevism to Fascism.
Bolsheviks were universalists. They were communists, and viewed the state as a means to provide material well-being to the masses everywhere on earth. One of the consequences of this is that, in the early years, the Soviet Union was truly a multi-ethnic empire with both Stalin and Khrushchev being ethnic minorities.
Contrariwise, let's take Russia today. Russia today is more fascist, more avowedly devoted to providing glory and material well-being to ethnic Russians. It would be unthinkable for a Dagestani Muslim to succeed Putin without utterly transforming the Russian state.
I suspect China, as others have noted, is also fascist. It's difficult to imagine a China in which, say, a Tibetan communist becomes the next General Secretary. I'm open to being convinced otherwise on this, as I'm by no means a China expert. But the Chinese Communist Party does seem to be about Han supremacy.
So, for both Russia and China, correctly identifying the polities as having fascist tendencies has both explanatory and predictive power.
I suspect one could make a similar argument to explain why the West and USSR, as universalist ideologies, were able to much more effectively make common cause agains the Axis in WWII. But that's a suspicion, and not fully thought out. Still, it's the type of investigation that suggests itself when one is picky about definitions.
<i>OK, but if you take Fascism and you make the in-group a religion (especially a large old established religion that is endemic in a large slice of the globe) rather than a nationality or a race is that really such a major change? It still seems like basically the same sort of thing.</i>
A lot of other fascist beliefs are, to put it mildly, difficult to square with traditional Abrahamic religions. For example, the fascist exaltation of the race above everything else doesn't really leave much room for God, who's generally considered to be infinitely above even the most ubermenschy of pure-blooded Aryan ubermenschen. Nor does the emphasis on the national will really work when it's the will of God that's supposed to be important, and people are expected to conform their wills to his.
Of course, you could say that all these other aspects of fascist belief aren't really important either, but then "fascism" ends up meaning little more than "people who support the ingroup at the expense of the outgroup too much", which is a lot less useful and meaningful and leaves us having to invent some other term to describe strongly voluntarist philosophies which make the racial group the most important aspect of life.
A Christian Arab can become Muslim; he cannot become Turkish. This is a *very* big difference.
This citation (between the ***, out of context) is just your usual civic nationalism that liberal democracies still use today (but turned up to 11 because of the totalitarian doctrine of fascism aka groupism). I guess that this turning up to 11 is what almost immediately results in seeing other ethnicities as inferior, and in the context of the 20th century science, to racism ? (Honestly, I don't know much about Mussolini, my impression is that while he was no choir boy, still Hitler had quite the bad influence on him?)
I'm surprised your take-away from my comment is"he hates the west!" I suppose that proves Scott's point in his essay!
Personally, I am a reluctant western liberal imperialist. In general I dig western liberalism because, for me, the individual should be the fundamental unit of moral worth. Giving individuals agency to pursue happiness is a moral good. A materialist focus powers health and happiness both in the short-term (toilets), and long-term (getting off earth).
I am "reluctant" because, as a western liberal, imperialism doesn't sit well with me. But one of the lessons I take from history is that organizing philosophies must be imperialistic. An organizing philosophy that does not seek converts will eventually be overwhelmed by a philosophy that does. So, if we want western liberalism to survive, it must conquer.
Once this idea is in mind, I don't think one can safely assume certain organizing philosophies won't defeat us. You can say "the west is so much richer and educated than Islam, so Islam can't win." But I think the Etruscans would have said the same about the Romans, the Greeks would have said the same about the Romans. All the way to Chinese or Indians about the Europeans.
In any event, my point is simply that to dismiss the war against Islam waged by Bush and Obama from 2001 to 2016 as a side-show is missing the point. It was not a side-show. It was an extraordinarily successful implementation of a policy to discredit Islam as a competitor to western liberalism as an organizing philosophy for society.
Sure, lots of money got spent and people died. Those countries we invaded weren't turned into "Desert Denmarks." But to the extent those were goals at all, they were stretch goals, ancillary to the main policy goal of destroying the idea that Islam could organize the world.
Islamism is most popular among people who are a LOT less competent than Germans or Russians. Western scientists were worried about whether Germany would beat us to the atom bomb, and there was a "space race" between the US & USSR (both of whom used German scientists). Nobody is worried about Saudi Arabia advancing ahead of us scientifically/technologically. Nor would they be capable of conquering big chunks of Europe.
Also, Italian fascism was not really focused on race but instead culture.
I believe Islamic societies have a clear advantage in fertility. I don't know we can count that out as an important advantage.
Furthermore, my argument isn't that I believe Islam was a favorite to win. My argument is simply Islam was a plausible rival as an organizing philosophy for mankind.
Islamism is reasonably popular among Pakistanis, and Pakistanis are competent enough to build nuclear missiles. "But we are so competent that our nuclear missiles are much better", isn't going to change anything for anyone unfortunate enough to be at ground zero for one of Al Qaeda's hypothetical Pakistani-made nuclear missiles.
So, yeah, preventing that unholy matrimony was worth a fair bit of drone-striking and whatnot.
Yes! I was waiting for someone to point out that Italian Fascism *wasn't* racialist. There were Jewish members of the Fascist party up until Mussolini allied with Hitler.
This is a helpful comment. I’m not sure I agree with your claims, but they do sound a lot more plausible than the versions of the claims I had been imagining for decades.
One of the most valuable talents for any public figure to develop if they want to stay sane is a thick skin.
I don't know that people develop a thick skin so much as those without thick skins naturally fall out of being a public figure, leaving behind only those who have thick skins.
David Graeber had a famously thin skin and yet kept inciting controversy with his books. It’s probably best for his legacy that he died before his last (co-authored) book came out, so that his responses to the responses didn’t discredit himself further. (But he still had a devoted following.)
Another thing that can doom predictions is predicting the upside on things that take the stairs up and the elevator down. This is most notable when predicting market recessions - If anyone was dumb enough to predict there's no recession coming up, , they'd get buried in the news every time the market has a bad day (somehow people became aware of this, which is why people pretty much always predict a recession in the near future, at least since 2008).
This also applies to AI development: A month with nothing exciting happening should probably push your timelines back by about a month or two on average, but a single exciting event would make it jump down, which means that predicting "AI is coming faster than you think, no matter how fast you think" is great media - every time people adjust timelines down you get to be all smug, but adjusting timelines up is gradual and boring and no one talks about you when that happens.
(It feels like this is Eliezer's shtick this day, which is why people are right to be annoyed at him for refusing to make any concrete timeline predictions).
Well, he as good as made the prediction that the world will suddenly end within this decade, and that nothing too unusual will happen beforehand. If this won't come to pass he's going to get plenty of deserved mockery.
If he really did predict the end of the world within 10 years, then he should be soundly mocked when it doesn't happen.
My guess - he repeatedly updates his prediction throughout that time period such that he can plausibly downplay any strong predictions long before they come due. If we don't even have AGI by then, he'll have a harder time with that, but he can always take credit for slowing AGI down through his push for safety, or if AGI exists in 10 years, take credit for the fact that it doesn't kill us all through his push for safety.
That would be a noticeable U-turn from him. So far he appears to say that AGI only ever seems closer (to fools who haven't updated as fast as him), that pushing to slow down is pretty much hopeless, and that everybody is clueless about how even to approach meaningful safety.
If you are referring to the bet with Bryan Caplan, in context it really isn't the sort of prediction where someone loses Bayes points for being wrong.
I agree that if it was his only public statement on the topic, it wouldn't count as a serious prediction. But, even though he's been pretty careful lately in avoiding to mention any concrete numbers, his overall behavior leaves no doubt that it is completely in earnest. A couple of representative examples:
He claims that a drop in an AGI forecast from 2042 to 2034 is movement in an "excruciatingly predictable direction"
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10160260422389228
He says "I cannot but acknowledge that my outward behavior seems to reveal a distribution whose median seems to fall well before 2050"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works
And for the end of the world part, while he has long been heavily hinting at this attitude, he recently spelled it out plainly as "doubling our chances of survival will only take them from 0% to 0%"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy
This sounds like precisely the secret behind the success of QAnon. It helps to align yourself with a paranoid sect desperate for recognition.
Nostradamus codes as fairly harmless and fun. It's a bit more striking when you put your takeaway as wondering, "How can I be more like QAnon and less like Steven Pinker?"
Striking enough if the takeaway is “how can I be treated in the media more like QAnon and less like Steven Pinker”.
A lot of perception of media perceptions is misguided. Steven Pinker is still on net treated quite respectfully by the media even though there are also prominent haters.
I would say it really depends on whether "media" includes "social media".
I think even on social media, you'd be hard-pressed to say that Steven Pinker is treated more harshly than QAnon.
Funny enough, my response to hearing about QAnon predictions was to compare them to Nostradamus. You can read any outcome into a prediction if either are vague enough. At that point, I concluded that, even if QAnon was completely correct, it provided no actionable information.
QAnon was initially not vague at all. The first Qanon post was extremely specific:
> HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major cities.
When, for some reason, his posts continued to attract attention despite being immediately proven wrong by real world events, he must have shifted to being vague to keep the lulz coming.
I remember once getting into an argument with a Q believer on thedonald.win, who thought that the definitive proof of Q being real was that Q had posted something like "Keep an eye on John McCain" and John McCain died, one year to the day later. If that's the kind of hit rate you need to be a convincing prophet then I'm in the wrong industry.
Problem is society expects people who r famous shouldnt change their predictions just like politicians shouldnt change their views or promises ( watch how the opposition usually comes with a statement of politician who made 30 years ago in contrary what he says today). When i was doing superforcasting i had to change and update my predictions often based on the new data i got or change of opinion. I face no repercussions if i am wrong (except maybe lose a spot in leaderboard). If u r public person you better be transparent about your predictions and “come clean” thats better way than your suggestion of not makig any predictions about certain events
Probably you wont be regarded as great predictor but you should have never be considered a great predictor in the first place. No one is in chaotic world
It's all about framing, as usual. If the book name was not "The End Of History And The Last Man" but something like "The Decline of Ideological Postmodernism and The Resurgence of Realpolitik" (just making something up), it would be far harder to throw cheap shots at. Not as catchy though.
Prediction: AI will optimise for status and reputation.
I don’t think so - only to the extent that status and reputation are relevant for its goals (assuming it has some goals).
AI will be given its target function by humans, who are optimising for status and reputation.
GPT and Dall-E weren't written to make money, they were written to get fawning "ooh look what AI can do now" articles written in the press. The first GAIs will probably be written for the same reason, meaning they will be optimised for similar things -- sound smart and don't say anything that brings the company bad publicity.
I doubt that there are many smart things that can be said that won't bring attacks. All the smart things most people agree on have been said so much they sound obvious -- so an AI saying them wouldn't sound smart. Platitudes go over well with the majority, but don't sound smart.
The sub-goal would be to manipulate people into assisting with the primary goal. Sounding smart or dumb or anything else is beside the point. Platitudes might be exactly what is required. Prediction: a smart AI will intentionally sound dumb in order to be mis-under-estimated.
Sure, but remember the joke about the talking dog, it's not what the dog says, it's that a dog is saying it. An AI that can roll out platitudes and bromides like a Presidential candidate on the stump would be sensational, at first. You'd have to develop some new shtick after a while of course, but that's the nature of trying to be famous.
I agree. Status can operate within narrow domains so that a given in-group maintains cohesion even with outside attacks. The AI could initially learn how to dominate such obscure domains, then expand to other broader domains (e.g. politics) once the ground rules have been learnt. No doubt it would also learn how to attack the reputations of others to advance its own status. A good training dataset would be reputation based online forums such as Stack Overflow.
Never say never (my take away from the article)! Reputation and status appear to have crucial survival benefits to humans who must coexist in groups or face overwhelming odds if they strike out alone. AI is initially playing in the human milieu so it would follow that impressing us (positively or negatively) would advance its primary goals.
I've lived long enough to be able to recall many times I was wrong about the future, so I'm averse to forecasting.
For example, as a child of the 70s, I long assumed that inflation was a major threat that could come back at any moment. But, after the early 1980s, it usually didn't. So my worries about inflation usually turned out wrong. Until covid followed by Biden, when spending like a drunken sailor was in fashion. After all, inflation worriers had been wrong so many times over the last 35 years, so what's the worst that could happen? 4% inflation?
Anyway, rather than try to predict the future, I focus on noticing the present. For example, not only did homicides shoot upwards after George Floyd's death, but so did traffic fatalities. In fact, during the Great Awokening, homicide deaths and auto accident deaths have been closely correlated, probably because encouraging traffic stops discourages both bad driving and carrying an illegal handgun, while anti-police criminal justice reforms during the Ferguson Effect and the Floyd Effect encourage speeding and packing heat. That's an interesting current reality that nobody had noticed before, as far as I can tell.
The good side of my orientation is that I'm not wrong often. The bad side is that being cautiously right a lot hasn't made me terribly popular. I'd probably be much more popular if I were wrong more about current affairs.
If your aim is your own peace of mind through reduced heckling, I can see why you'd want to do this - though for *you* Scott, surely this is bolting the door after the ship has sailed.
If the aim is to effect change through becoming a thought leader... The Prophet and Caesar's Wife comes to kind.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wife
I suspect Fukuyama has had much more influence on public policy than has Nostradamus.
And is also treated as much more of a serious figure in popular discussions and media discussions, even on Twitter.
So section IV lists things that you shouldn't do. Can we list some things that you should do?
If you could send a memo back to Scott when he was writing You're Still Crying Wolf with tips based on this post, how would YSCW look different?
It's received wisdom in my circles that a significant long-term effect of 9/11 and 7/7 was the removal of many rights and civil liberties in the US and UK (and I believe other democracies though I'm less familiar with other jurisdictions). This does seem quite important to me and doesn't seem as though it was particularly likely to have happened without the excuse offered by terrorist attacks. Curious to check the vibe on this.
Definitely true, but not as generally as often described. Homeland Security and the FBI both gained significant powers because of it, and also significant freedom of movement to do what "needed to be done" to get the bad guys. The TSA is an obvious example, and watching pre-9/11 movies with people at airports is a eye-opener, as people can walk right up to the gates with no security to see their loved ones off.
Local police and agencies like ICE didn't change as much, or the changes were shorter lived.
> as people can walk right up to the gates with no security to see their loved ones off.
That doesn't sound right. There was always security, _but_ you could go through it without a ticket to see your loved ones off. US airports have universally had metal detectors and some form of luggage search since 1973.
Here's a pre-9/11 movie showing airport security https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fFzu8i7e8w as Kevin Kline's character casually slips a gun through the metal detector with a flip of the wrist (which realistically you probably couldn't actually do but it's a neat solution to the problem of how he can have a gun at an airport in the next scene).
For all that people like to say "hurr durr it's just security theatre", there was a point in the 1960s when airliners were getting hijacked twice a week: https://www.datagraver.com/case/airline-hijackings-1945-2015
But were airliners getting hijacked twice a week with shoe bombs and liquid containers larger than 3 ounces?
No, that part is security theatre.
Or something worse than security theatre, which is at least a coherent plan that someone might have consciously put together. Shoes and liquids are more like organisational scar tissue, a knee-jerk reaction to something that _might_ have occurred twenty years ago. It no longer makes a lick of sense from a cost-benefit standpoint but nobody with the power to remove it is willing to do so -- whether it's because they're scared of the tiny possibility that something _might_ happen and they'll get the blame, or whether they simply don't want to make the TSA process faster and smoother because that would reduce the size and scope of the TSA.
I wonder what crazy covid-related things we'll still be doing in 2044. Most of the rules have thankfully gone away, but I still theoretically have to wear a mask on the train for some reason.
Hmm, I'll not give movies the benefit-of-the-doubt about accurate portrayals of security, but I do have my own memories of meeting my dad as he got off an international flight in the early 90s. I don't recall going through security, but that's an old enough memory that maybe I'm wrong. I can't remember being at a large airport between then and 2001.
NSA ? Snowden scandal ? USA not being trusted any more and its companies becoming (so far, theoretically) illegal in EUrope because there is no way to be sure the US government / spy agencies won't just do what they want with the data ?
And yeah, quite a lot of wannabes in EUrope too aping USA's gradual descent into police state after the Patriot Act...
I think the basic problem is that people don't have the time or will to independently evaluate factual matters, so they have to rely on the general vibes from authorities in their ingroup (such as the media or the political leaders and activists in theor ingroup).
Those vibes are generally not very accurate, so this prevents forecasters from being accurately evaluated, in particular in the ways you describe in the post. It is perhaps exacerbated because when the outgroup wants to push back against the ingroup's vibes, they will tend to link to articles that seemingly contradict them - I bet it's regularly happened that someone said that Trump was bad, and then someone else linked your Crying Wolf post to contradict them, even though your post admitted that Trump was bad.
This seems like a quite problematic overall situation, as it actively discourages accuracy among those we'd specifically like to judge for accuracy. I think the only solid way to solve it would be to somehow allow people to quickly evaluate accuracy, which presumably means setting up some sort of organization that does it for them. Of course then one has to ensure that that organization does not get corrupted.
I wonder if you could have done better with the Crying Wolf case if you had collected a bunch of objective predictions from people who *did* believe that Donald Trump was a white supremacist, and then shown how your predictions were objectively more accurate than theirs. But that's difficult...
Matthew Yglesias, who was too sensible for Vox, wrote "My guess is that in a Trump administration angry mobs will beat and murder Jews and people of color with impunity”, but because he regularly deletes his tweets you have to rely on his detractors to preserve the evidence.
https://dailycaller.com/2016/10/11/prominent-liberal-under-a-trump-administration-mobs-could-kill-minorities-with-impunity/
I don't understand how Matthew Yglesias enters the picture. Like yes maybe he said something stupid about Trump, but so did lots of people. This post is not so much about those people as it is about Scott Alexander.
It's an example of one of those failed predictions about Trump.
I don't think individual examples are good because anyone can cherry-pick examples of stupidity on either side. I think there's a need for something more systematic to properly evaluate track records.
Matt Yglesias is a well known writer and journalist. Do you have criteria in mind that excludes him but would pull in a representative set of people or organizations to follow?
Or are you more concerned about looking at him alone, but would be okay including him in a set?
I'm quite concerned about *any* mainstream journalist, politician, or similarly often read person who makes such claims and isn't generally called out for it. Having lived through those years, there sure were a lot of people making claims about Trump and his followers very similar to Matt's, that turned out to be false.
Yglesias explicitly doesn't stand behind anything he writes in tweets, which he considers a low effort and transitory medium in which he can say whatever random thing that pops into his head. That's why he deletes his tweets freely and often. So what would it mean to "call him out" for it?
I was thinking more something like Scott putting out a survey for people asking them whether they consider Trump a white nationalist and having them predict a number of issues. I would also be open to other options, but just randomly picking someone post-hoc without proper thought put into it seems like a bad idea, as it doesn't make it any easier to evaluate the big picture of things.
If you're going to pretend Twitter is a platform that everyone uses for sober analysis, it has been less than 24 hours since Yglesias called Vladmir Putin "the principled 'keep it in the ground' climate champion the world needs." Just use that.
He was joking there in a way unlike the referenced tweet about Trump, which was part of a serious conversation with Jamelle Bouie & Ross Douthat.
To put it mildly, I disagree with interpretation and question how familiar its speaker is with Yglesias' different posting styles. Straight-faced hyperbole in response to breathless doomsaying is hardly a novel piece of rhetoric.
Yglesias was not trying to mock Bouie's doomsaying at the time.
I do not find naked assertions the least bit compelling.
or it could be a shitpost designed to get engagement - you know, typical twitter fare.
It was part of a conversation between writers.
sarcasm, facetiousness, hyperbole, and parody are all common methods of communication on twitter - even between writers.
The communication between those writers was not in the form of "a shitpost designed to get engagement".
Which doesn’t rule out sarcasm, facetiousness, hyperbole, or parody
But feel free to post the complete context so that others can judge for themselves.
I've done annual predictions on my blog for 20 years now, and my top takeaway is that making good predictions is really, really hard. The world is a chaotic system, and even when one gets the underlying social or political circumstances suggesting the prediction basically right (in retrospect), random small events routinely end up having enormous short-to-medium-term impact--and of course long-term trends routinely shift circumstances significantly over time. Hence prognostications that seem highly likely to occur soon and practically inevitable within the next twenty years can be delayed for ten years by "random noise" events, at which point the conditions that made the prediction inevitable have shifted sufficiently that it's now quite unlikely after all. So while I continue to make annual predictions--more as an excuse for expressing my perception of the social or political circumstances that motivate my prediction--I no longer really expect them to hold up even remotely well over time.
Here is a really impressive prediction:
In 1971, Talcott Parsons made three predictions about the Soviet Union: 1) It would fall, 2) it would fall peacefully, 3) it would be dismantled from inside the communist party.
The third one is the most impressive one. Parsons was able to predict how it would fall (dismantled from inside the ruling elite), not only that it would fall, and peacefully. This, and more, in the half-forgotten book "The structure of modern societies" (the Fukuyama-type book of its day). Still very readable. Perhaps worth a review in a future book contest?
....Parsons was the dominant figure in macro-sociology in the 1950s and 60s. He went out of fashion in the late 1970s, with neo-Marxism on the rise and all that, but has made a comeback in some circles today. If you are interested in how to locate societal mechanisms that may lead to predictions, his structural-functionalist paradigm for understanding the world & predicting future developments, offers some possible intellectual tools. There you'll find the reasoning behind his 1971 predictions of the future of USSR, and much more.
>>>dismantled from inside
Not exactly how I remember it. (Less 'the horseman made the horse lay down' and more 'the rider realized the horse was falling and stepped off at the end.)
Do you have a link/ cite to a 1990 Era article?
Predicting the fall of USSR & how it would happen in the 1990s Era is not much of a challenge, since the Soviet Union was dismantled in 1991:-)
Not how I remember it either, because I was young and let myself be bombarded by ideological media onslaught. Which is to say, 1990 era articles are the last thing you want to read about this subject. (To wit, an 1990 era article would cite Fukuyama approvingly. The reason he's now a symbol of the short-sightedness of the 1990 era liberal triumphalism is precisely that he first became a symbol of the 1990 era liberal triumphalism. People dunking on him may have a wrong idea about his theses, but their target is not his theses, but the predominant media mood of the era.)
I always wonder what academia in the social sciences and humanities would have come up with if it hadn't been taken over by Marxists. Similarly, it's interesting to read, say, J.G. Cozzens or Herman Wouk, who wrote critically acclaimed novels at just the last time you could do that as a conservative. Makes me wonder what could have been.
What does 2 without 3 (at least superficially from the inside) look like? Somebody else walzing into a nuclear-armed state uncontested as if they were William of Orange?
'Discredited pastor' could easily be MLK.
I think you're reading too much into the Twitter mob/ newspaper writers. You're never going to please those people. Being a thought leader isn't about making those people proud of you, all you have to do for that is pander to their prejudices, sound fancy, offer new bs evidence supporting their prejudices ("ivermectin 92% effective"). Its low hanging fruit. I know this is going to make me sound super elitist, but being a thought leader isn't about those people. Those people don't even want to think critically about their own opinions. Being a thought leader is about having a conversation with the people who actually really want to know what is going on/ are carefully trying to figure that out (even if the truth they find turns their whole life upside down). Talk to those people, move that conversation in a useful direction, then boom- you're a "thought leader", even though 80% of Twitter thinks you can be dismissed with a gotcha and a lol. The people on some ideological crusade/ just begging for likes are not the people you want to have a conversation with. They aren't even trying to find the truth (they already have it). I'm not saying these people are evil or anything, I'm saying that engaging with them rhetorically is kind of a trap/ a poor use of time. Don't focus on packaging predictions creatively/ sounding cool/ not having the Twitter mob hate you. That will just water down your genius, imo. Just say what you think is going on now, predict what you think is going to happen tomorrow, and know that we will forgive you when you aren't 100% right all the time. We know how this shit works.
If anything, the fact that so many people criticize Fukuyama and Pinker is a sign of how respected they are.
agree there, especially on Pinker.
The End of History is a much subtler and vastly weirder book than the cereal box summary makes it seem. Would make for a good book review.
>There was not a rising Islamofascism, there was not a clash of civilizations. There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once.
That's a very american-centric point of view. For many in western Europe, the clash of civilization is a very real concern, and if islamofascism isn't a word that really survived in the discourse, far right parties break records in one european country or another nearly every year. Even at the time, terrorists got lucky once in new york, then again in London, then again in Madrid, then after a lull (in the west, at least. The rest of the world got it's share. Remember Boko Haram?) until it came back with a vengeance in the mid-2010, and became a steady flow of shootings, trucks attacks & stabbings.
>That's a very american-centric point of view.
Yes, and the claim that if you asked people to "[rank] threats to the world order now" they would not include Islam also seems very American-centric to me. As evidence, consider that a driver of the success (relative to the past few decades) that right-wing parties in Europe are currently enjoying is fear among voters of the perceived growth and influence of Islam where they live. I would bet if you surveyed Western European voters about threats to the world order, while Islam might not make the top 5 concerns it would probably make the top 10, and definitely would make the top 20.
But those shootings, truck attacks, and stabbings aren’t actually killing any more people than gun violence in the United States or traffic fatalities in either continent, let alone COVID, right?
There’s an important subpopulation that thinks of this as significant, but they’re as mistaken as the people that think gun violence will lead to the downfall of the United States.
>But those shootings, truck attacks, and stabbings aren’t actually killing any more people than gun violence in the United States or traffic fatalities in either continent, let alone COVID, right?
That's an irrelvant metric. Nuclear armageddon did 0 victims in the last decades, it's still driving policy & causing great powers to invest in nuclear triads (or parts of it).
Political Islam itself is probably a worse issue, since it's incompatible with liberal democracy. Before Samuel Paty was murdered, it was the *parents* themselves that were calling out for his lynching.
Note that in a lot of ways it's the USA that is responsible for its rise, and they arguably did most of the damage *before* 9/11, which was a consequence.
P.S.: So yeah, this kind of glib dismissal really sticks out in a post trying to be careful about predictions...
A bit of a missed opportunity.
People would argue that Trump "kids in cages" fit the concentration camp prediction, but that is then complicated by the fact that the Biden administration, while ending family separation, is still using the same facilities.
Similarly, it's interesting how Drone Warfare is remembered as an Obama specific thing when it only increased after 2016 and even after leaving Afghanistan, the US is still using drones in West Africa.
Defining the terms of the prediction is crucial and no one gets points for "X will probably continue."
>People would argue that Trump "kids in cages" fit the concentration camp prediction
They would argue that because they're hysterical left-wing ideologues. Apprehending people illegally entering the country with children and putting the children in the same facility as their parents is categorically different to "rounding up minorities and putting them in concentration camps".
They would, though it's not like the Jews were illegally trying to enter Germany in the 30s (quite the opposite!)
The drone thing is interesting precisely because the left criticized Bush for doing it, and then Obama not only continued it but ramped it up. Obama is the one who went after a US citizen without any due process, which was a clear escalation of policy. I don't think anyone was at all surprised that Trump would continue the practice - the Republicans were never against it!
The "kids in cages" thing is less interesting and more infuriating, because that dated back to the Clinton years, continued throughout Bush and Obama (and then again under Biden), and suddenly became an issue under Trump (but not again under Biden). If we're against something, let's be against it. If we're only against it when an opponent is doing it, then that's no way to approach anything.
Trump massively escalated the drone program and reduced transparency.
Well, so did Obama, and we have no counterfactuals of how it would have gone differently if McCain+Romney were president instead of Obama, or if Hillary Clinton had become president instead of Trump. I don't think you could say with a straight face that *Hillary Clinton* would have increased transparency or reduced the use of military projection.
How's the drone program under Biden? I honestly don't know, but suspect that transparency is no better, possibly worse. No idea about the frequency of use.
Much less drone usage but that's related to leaving Afghanistan rather than a change in drone policy
Sounds about what I would have thought. Thanks
Supposedly Obama introduced that procedure where he would sign off every strike, but I am not sure how much that was the journalist describing that trying to find a way to make him look good ?
This is totally ignoring the family separation policy, which is what actually caused the national outcry. When that ended the outcry died down. Yes, you would occasionally hear the people who were very anti-whatever comment that, "Ya know, we still have kids in cages. And kids in cages is still bad." But they didn't get any traction with it. Not for nothing, but I'm still seeing those takes from those people.
> People would argue that Trump "kids in cages" fit the concentration camp prediction
It's also complicated by the fact that this didn't start with Trump, happening under Obama and Bush (and to lesser extent prior admins).
"Pasteur is just French for “pastor”, and an honest translation would have just said “the pastor will be celebrated…”"
Maybe the pun is the prophecy, that it turned out to be a name all along... But yeah, we should only give this credence with a clear prior in favour of Nostradamus's work being prophetic, and that would be a silly prior to hold.
Consider adding content from this to section IV: https://www.militantfuturist.com/rules-for-good-futurism/
It's important not to get different epistemological frameworks mixed up. It's decades since I had much to do with Nostradamus, but I do remember that he saw himself as the heir to a tradition of receiving visions about the future which were not necessarily comprehensible even to him, and then trying to find words to express them. He was not "predicting the future" in any sense that we would understand it.
Fukuyama, on the other hand, has largely himself to blame for his reputation, because he chose a title for his original essay that was almost wilfully misleading. (In any case he was less forecasting the future than interpreting the present and saying it could continue). I was involved in international political events at the time, and if there was one thing that was obvious, it was that "history" (in the sense of world events) had never been more active. Indeed, the years from about 1988-93 were in many ways overwhelming. But he was right about the triumph of liberal-democratic ideas (not necessarily practices) to an extent that I don't think has been acknowledged. Effectively, since the end of the Cold War, Liberalism, previously a doctrine among many, has expanded to be almost the only political ideology that you can discuss in polite company, and the overwhelmingly preferred ideology of the international Professional and Managerial Class, and bodies like the EU.
Consider, when Fukuyama was writing, there was a Socialist government in France, and across the water, a decent prospect of a left-wing Labour Party returning to power. Today, the Socialist Party has effectively disappeared as a political force and the Labour Party is just another neoliberal technocratic managerialist collection of nonentities. At the time, Liberalism, had to contend with a whole set of Marxist and non-Marxist parties of the Left, as well as traditionalist parties of the Right, based around family, community and often religion. Now, right-wing parties have been taken over by neoliberalism, and left-wing parties mostly neutered.
The result -sometimes called the Davos Party - is an international ideological tendency built around extreme social and economic liberalism, which dominates political life and discussion, dominates the international media and international organisations. Its ideas are not actually very popular, but it has managed to acquire effective ideological hegemony because of the power and money it has at its disposal. Political leaders who stray from the path either to the left (like Corbyn) or the Right (like Orban) are marked for purging.
Thus, in true Hegelian fashion, Liberalism has won the war of ideas. But most people on the planet are not Liberals, and never have been: indeed, given that Liberalism is essentially an elite doctrine, it's hard to see how they could be. And they want action, not ideas. (I've covered the deficiencies of Liberalism in facing up to contemporary crises in a number of my Substack essays, so I won't go into that now). The problem is the lack of a coherent alternative ideology: Political Islam, for example, was supported out of desperation in a number of countries (Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt) simply because all of the other alternatives, generally imported from the West, had been tried and found wanting. But at least that was an ideology. In the West we have no alternative to Liberalism at all.
I wonder. A lot of the American public still seems to like the idea of free speech, if only because they don't trust woke people *or* the alt-right. Are we giving up too easily?
Agreed. And it's not only free speech, public (state and big organisation) is medling more and more in private affairs (gathering info, over regulating and micro managing what used to be purely individual hobbies and life choices). What we (the west) were so happy to point as Chinese Orwelian surveillance 5 y ago is becoming the norm in the west. Sure, China is still ahead on the curve and remains a political Bogeyman for various reasons, but the trend is clear, liberalism as individual liberty first is on the way down, at least since Covid and even sep 11. Probbaly since the fall of USSR, which beg the question: was it a king of PR to oppose communism/socialism appeal to the masses, that is no longer needed? I think there is that, together with the renewed attraction of pure political power caused by slowed down technical progress...
Americans love the *idea* of free speech, but when push comes to shove they have never supported it. The Woke are no worse than the general public on any of this.
There’s a lot of crying wolf about free speech and free association in circles like these. I don’t see that it’s actually gotten any harder to state your views, despite leftists putting kids in concentration camps or whatever is supposedly happening to Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer.
>I don’t see that it’s actually gotten any harder to state your views
You cannot be serious?
I am serious. There’s a lot of crying wolf about cancel culture.
That isn’t remotely incompatible with there being a big change in how hard it is “to state your views”. Which by any objective measure there has been a HUGE change from 5-10 years ago.
Eugene Debs got locked up for protesting WWI. Did anyone go to jail for sedition during this most recent generation? Fred Hampton was murdered in 69 for criticising the Chicago DA. What are the similar cases today?
I at least don't think the statement is absurd on its face
Well Snowden and Assange certianly faced similar prosecution to Debs. You don't think people get murdered today over their criticsm of powerful figures?
You are right of course that the government is less willing/able to bring its big hammer down on individual people, but in part that is because it doesn't need to.
The corporate world and the social media mob do it for them with some subtle and not so subtle proding from the intelligence officials who get interviewed as "experts".
You don't think campuses/board rooms are a more stultified careufl polace with more heavily gaurded and policed political and personal views than they were 10-20 years ago? Becuase I just find that arugment impossible to relate to.
No no one is literally being killed. Lot sof people have lost their jobs, and millions more shut up and eat shit for fear of losing their jobs.
It is also just a different environment due to technology, so much of what is the "public discourse" is taking place on corporate platforms. Few in 1930 or 1960 would have thought it was appropriate for the US government to open up every single person's mail and police it for thoughtcrime, it was something trotted out regularly as an exmaple of those horrible no good very bad places where Americans wouldn't wan tto live. But that is in effect what we have today.
Just as a specific example, my public school district is monomaniacally dfocused on racial disparties to the near exclusion of all else. Meanwhile the white and aisan population continues to plummet as parents with well raised kids flee to charter and private schools. you might think this would lead to a re-examination of priorites. Maybe don't scrap the gifted program (which they tehcnically didn't do, but now ALL kids are in it, which what is the point).
10-15 years ago I and many other parents would have felt perfectly comfortable going to a schoolboard meeting and expressing our thoughts about this focus on "achievement gap" uber alles. Might have been a little socially dicey, maybe not gone over well if you work at the non-profit, but mostly fine. These days a lot of us are frankly concerned we would lose our jobs or access large swathes of our social circle, and if you are a dread white male forget about it.
No it probably isn't as bad as 50s era Macarthism, but I didn't know that was something we were striving to get back to.
"It's decades since I had much to do with Nostradamus, but I do remember that he saw himself as the heir to a tradition of receiving visions about the future which were not necessarily comprehensible even to him, and then trying to find words to express them. He was not "predicting the future" in any sense that we would understand it."
This distinction is blurrier than you make it out to be. I think most sensible people today can agree that he wasn't *actually* seeing visions of the future. He may have been having hallucinations. More likely, though, he was simply lying for the sake of personal benefit - in which case I'd imagine he would've tried to write out predictions that he believed would come true, or at least seem to come true. In other words, attempting to predict the future by reasoning out the most likely possibilities based on existing trends, just like futurists today. The fact that he was particularly bad at it (and particularly good at dressing up his bad guesses in vague poetic language to fool the rubes) doesn't mean it was categorically different from what more rational predictors do.
<< If people were ranking threats to the world order now, Islam and terrorism wouldn’t make the top twenty.
But... ISIS?
Is the only thing that Russia and USA agreed on in the last 15 years?
Six years ago people rated it really highly as a threat. I didn’t get it then, though when they had taken over a chunk of Syria I briefly thought there was something to it.
Shouldn't we wait more than two or three decades though? You had hundreds of years of feudalism in which to tell people that feudalism would never end and be proven correct. And then....
Complete agree about uncharitable readings of Fukyama. There's a decent chance that by the time the next wave rolls around nobody will remember his work, or any of the rest of us.
On the other hand, if you lengthen the timeframe too far, then the only thing it proves is that everything must *eventually* end, which is a rather banal observation.
"The liberal order is guaranteed to fall at some point because the sun will eventually explode, destroying Earth and all life on it" is a prediction that says nothing remotely interesting or useful about liberalism or the various alternatives to it.
Plenty of ideologies have been hegemonic for much longer than two or three decades. If liberalism's hegemony only lasts a few decades, then (a) that's not actually all that impressive, and (b) it's quite a stretch to describe a thirty-year period as "the end of history", even allowing for hyperbole.
"And then...."
That's what you think, DeBoer. 2/3 of London still belongs to the hereditary peer whose ancestors owned it centuries ago. Feudalism didn't end, it just got better at hiding.
The best thing about Nostradamus is that he inspired Al Stewart's great album "Past, Present and Future".
Here’s the part where I defend Obama. My least favorite President ever.
I was on active duty doing an operational mission at GTMO during his term. He did not fail to close it.
In order to “close” it, all of those detainees had to go somewhere. Having seen most of their files, I can tell you that no matter what you think about the GWOT or the legal status of the detainees these are really scary people. They were caught on the battlefield chopping peoples heads off, digging mass graves, etc.
Each one (about 140 at the time) had to be negotiated for a place to go in some country somewhere. And each time we got close to sending one to some third world South American country, they would send a delegation to interview them and realize that they were psychopathic murderers and say “nope. Keep ‘em.”
Obama could not do anything about that.
Why did Obama have to send them to a "third world South American country"? Why couldn't he send them to a prison on the US mainland?
He tried to, but Congress forced through a law that stopped him from doing so.
They didn't really have to do that. You cannot put foreign nationals captured on the battlefield in a US prison. The legal status of those people prevents it.
They were not convicted of a crime according to US law.
US prisons would have effectively become POW camps with all that comes with that.
Why couldn't he try to get them convicted under US law?
I mean, I guess they could have tried.
But most of them were foreign nationals captured in Afghanistan and places like that.
American prisons are for people in the US who commit crimes that violate our internal laws.
Imagine this scenario.
Some Malaysians have set up a terrorist training camp in the outback of Australia. They are planning an attack on France. Australia tolerates their presence there because they think the French are a bunch of limp-wristed champagne-drinking pansies.
The attack occurs. Everyone directly involved in the attack is dead, except one guy who gets caught and has his day in court.
France then invades Australia in an undeclared war. While they are there, some Tunisians and New Zealanders show up, not in uniform, not fighting under any particular flag.
While occupying Australia, France captures some Malaysians, Tunisians, and New Zealanders. They take them to a French military base that is in internationally disputed territory. They do this because they figure their legal status as POWs will be easier to dispute that way. Eventually, a new French president is elected and everyone grows tired of the war in Australia.
France detains them for a little while longer, and interrogates them. New Zealand, Malaysia and Tunisia don't want them back because they are super horrible people.
The decision is made to move them to a French prison for...what exactly?
The question you keep dodging is the morality of letting people rot in prison having never been convicted of a crime.
Weird. Wouldn't it have been easier to just write the words "is it moral to let people rot in prison having never been convicted of a crime?" No, its not.
This whole time I thought this was a subthread about the legal and procedural hurdles that Obama faced in trying to keep his promise about closing GTMO.
So he sounds like he failed to close it?
If I promise to do something impossible, and then fail to do it because it turns out to be impossible, I don't get a passing grade.
I don’t think the Obama administration anticipated the results of his executive order.
Should they not have?
Its hard to say. I happen to be pretty gracious/forgiving when it comes to elected officials, probably because I am related to one.
In other words, I generally expect democrats to do democrat-y things, and vice versa when they are elected. (Things that are consistent with their stated worldview and vision for how things are supposed to work). I am willing to accept that the Obama administration really believed that they were operating in good faith and they could just close GTMO, and find places for all these people with some hard work and negotiating.
I have my preference for more conservative ideologies and world views, but I would hate to deal with the pressures these people do.
The alternatives are that they were really stupid or it was politics
(Like they knew all this was going to happen so they could say “see. We tried to close GTMO but Bush and the republicans handed us this impossible situation)
Been giggling over "beclowned" for a good while, thanks.
FWIW, your Trump post was convincing to me and I thought it aged real well.
I would say it was convincing to me, but I'll confess that's how I thought of Trump anyway - negative in almost all the relevant variables but not remotely racist. I don't even believe he thinks of people in groups - he's narcissistic enough to only think 'what can I get out of this individual?'
Whenever I heard the 'Trump racist!' accusation it always sounded like it was a necessary addition to all his other faults because without it he was not genuinely evil. So it felt extra important that questioning his racist credentials was seen as heresy. And thus entirely predictable that Scott would get abused for pointing out that there was precious little evidence for Trump's racism.
I'm a Trump supporter (in the sense that I think he was better than Jeb or Hillary or Biden or any other realistic alternative) but I think he's done at least one "racism-adjacent" thing that people are okay to have concerns about -- specifically proposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country "until we can figure out what's going on" in response to some terrorist attack.
(I use the term "racism-adjacent" because, well, Muslims aren't a race, but I don't much like the idea of evaluating things on whether they're "Racist" or "Not Racist" as if that's the only important criterion that exists. I think we need to develop a far more sophisticated vocabulary than "Racist" to describe all the things that are classified as racism and all the things which are similar to but not exactly fitting the definition.)
Interesting
I thought it was a ban from certain countries not people. It seemed like a reasonable policy based on aggregated risk from those areas.
The initial proposal was a ban on Muslims; he seems to have been told "you can't do that" so he came back a few days later with a revised proposal to ban people from certain countries.
I think it's a complicated moral question under what circumstances it's reasonable to treat demographic chunks of people differently based on statistically valid risks. On one hand it's sensible, but on the other hand it makes life miserable for innocent people who just happen to share observable characteristics with high-risk people. It's a social debate we should have but aren't having because we get stuck debating "Racist Or Not Racist" instead of "True Or Not True" or "Wise Or Not Wise".
Agreed
Also agreee that it’s a conversation that will never happen as long as noticing empirically valid data is known as “racist”
Another delightful exploration.
I laughed because I had just made a casual prediction in the Comments section of Common Sense regarding the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for gender-transition surgery. "The transition movement is beginning to wake up to the tsunami of lawsuits we will be seeing within the decade. ... The legal judgements are going to be staggering. A jury is going to listen to the stories of regretful young people, permanently deformed as minors by deep pockets institutions, and they are going to dole out financial remunerations of equally life-changing magnitude."
As an obscure non-thought-leader commenting to those with whom I already agree, I predict I will not experience the repercussions Scott describes.
I so love Astral Codex Ten. In real life, I have no one to talk with who understands my way of looking at things, and my circle is highly educated and accomplished. Agreement with conclusions is not enough. One wants to encounter others who have more deeply considered ideas than one's own, from whom one can learn and grow.
It needs to be said: someone complaining about upheaval and instability in 21st century Britain is some real first world problems type stuff. The transition from Theresa May to Boris Johnson, the Brexit negotiations, and the Northern Ireland question? Uh...not exactly the Cromwellian Interregnum, was it? The death of Queen Elizabeth II? Not quite as impactful as the death of Queen Elizabeth I, I'll wager. If you squint hard enough, I say that tweet inadvertently vindicates both Fukuyama and Pinker. Don't @me, bros!
The question is whether Northern Ireland goes back to what it was in the 80s. Still no Cromwell though.
I had predicted Brexit would be an awful disaster that kills tens of thousands through economic problems, but after seeing the result of the COVID shutdowns, which were much bigger than Brexit, I can’t tell if I was overpredicting, or just better understanding how well a modern society can adapt to tens of thousands of additional deaths, or both.
I said don't @me!
Do they have to play this game? That depends on whether the people you disapprovingly quote matter. I think they don’t. What the Twitter mob tweets about Fukuyama, or you, is irrelevant for how the arguments he or you put forth are considered by those who matter. Because those who matter also know the Twitter mob is ignorant. Otherwise they wouldn’t matter.
How much is the seemingly prevalent anti-Pinkerism mostly the work of the media/twitter Misery Kingdom? Most people I know act as if life will in fact continue as normal. Is pessimism actually popular, or is it just that public speech is dominated by Career Loud Minorities?
I don’t think it’s mostly media/Twitter. The harshest opposition to him is from academics in the humanities, whether or not they are on social media.
Ordinary people on the street have never heard of Steven Pinker. But I think ordinary people generally won’t believe him either - “kids these days” declinism is always wildly popular.
I think Vox plays a good role by talking about all the “right” concerns for the media/Twitter set but then occasionally writing an article about how things are better in the world than they ever have been, despite the problems we still have.
TL;DR: People intentionally misinterpret the statements of people who have legitimately earned respect to borrow their clout and gain broader reach. Don't play their game.
A little associated music. Are there any songs about Fukuyama?
Your songs are leaves upon the sea....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMR6qPn1nPI
What the hell was that? I was looking for Peter Gabriel (which was a mistake, should have been Al Stewart), and youtube didn't even offer him.
Something like reggae played fast and hard, maybe. A good version.
Now have some Al Stewart, the original was much more gentle music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa89bt0GZvQ
End of History by Bad Religion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63o26RCEiHw
Love me some Bad Religion.
I don't have any interest in re-litigating your Trump stuff either, but I do feel like those predictions were harder to falsify than others you make. I think you're held to an absurd standard of rigor that other commentators aren't because you sometimes reject dominant narratives. That's a broader problem that you can't really solve. If people are prosecuting heretics and you commit heresy they'll find a palatable charge besides heresy to get you on.
But often your predictions are literally "this specific event with these well-defined terms will happen by this date" while occasionally your political predictions are more of the "This politician won't have racist policies" variety. And when people say "uh, this seemed pretty racist to me" and you say "It might have disparate impact based on race, but you can't prove it was racist" now you're in semantics hell, where nobody will ever admit you're right, and *you* will never admit you're wrong.
tl;dr: I think all of the above was kind of nonsense - it's true that some types of predictions are more fraught than others, but the real issue is making predictions with clear terms and falsifiable premises.
Scott, I just want to say that while I disagree with your old article about Trump and think you're wrong not to have updated your opinion on the subject...I subscribe to you largely because of it. It was deeply useful to me to read a well reasoned opinion from someone to my right politically. I was, at the time, starting to feel deeply angry and resentful at anyone (including family members) who was willing to countenance the possibility of Donald Trump as president, and your arguments (while not convincing to me) showed me some ways it was possible to disagree on the topic without total war.
I get that it's been unpleasant for you, but I hope that you do write some more things I can really disagree with.
See I never really got this point of view. I remember being surrounded by hysterical friends in the immediate aftermath of the Turmp election. Releatively sane raitonal people who seemed convinced concentration camps, nuclear war, and god knows what else were right around the corner.
I was very surprised he won, and I thought he would be bad, but my repsonse was "ah I don't think it is going to be nearly that serious". And he did turn our to be quite bad, as bad as I expected and dumber/less politically deft. But he absolutely didn't do any of the things they were freaking out about in the week after his election. Yet 4 years later they were even more panicked about him.
IDK I wasn't reading SSC at the time and didn't know who Scott was, but that article is pretty much sums up my state of mind at the time. I felt like I was taking crazy pills and my friends were just unhinged. I stopped listening to a lot of long time media resources because their coverage was just so divorced from reality.
The one general-purpose piece of political wisdom I've picked up over the years is due to Glenn Reynolds, who said something like: "the ones you support are never as good as you hope, and the ones you oppose are never as bad as you fear".
This has been true over my lifetime. Of all the elections I've seen since I started paying attention to politics in the 90s, roughly half of them have been won by the jerks I hate more and the other half by the jerks I hate less. I've hoped, I've dreaded, I've celebrated, I've despaired. And yet in all that time I'm hard pressed to think of any examples where a change in government has actually changed my life in any meaningful way.
"3. Prophet"
Bravo, bravo!
I thought that was the funniest part too.
So some predictions impress and win admiration, and others are magnets for abuse.
Is the difference just, saying that X
* will happen = easy win (Nostradamus predicting vague happenings, Taleb and something weird)
* won’t happen = epic fail (Fukuyama and liberal democracy won’t decline, Marcus and AI won’t do this and that)
Or, is the difference - saying
* a pessimistic thing = easy win (death and famine, weird things happening)
* an optimistic thing = epic fail (end of autocracy, no AI apocalypse)
This might also explain the difference in response to predictions, as Scott mentions.
I'm not sure that pessimism is an easy win. At least when it comes to human actions, a lot of people seem to have this weird unconscious superstition that predicting an outcome somehow makes it more likely. E.g., when Russia invaded the Ukraine, people like Edward Luttwak who'd predicted some big dust-up over Ukrainian NATO membership got a lot of flak for having done so.
I suspect that part of the reason why Nostradamus doesn't stir up the same controversy as Fukuyama or "You're Still Crying Wolf" is that Nostradamus' predictions, being extremely vague, don't really play into any of the big partisan debates going on today. A lot of people would have to update their metaphysical views if it turned out that supernaturally predicting the future was actually possible, but whilst that might have caused a big dust-up back in the New Atheist days, now everybody's busy arguing about wokeness and Trump and heaven knows what else, and statements such as "They will think they have seen the Sun at night, When they will see the half-pig half-man: Noise, song, battle, fighting in the sky perceived, And one will hear brute beasts talking" don't have any obvious relevance for those issues. On the other hand, "Everywhere will inevitably become a liberal democracy" and "Donald Trump will put minorities in concentration camps" are/were obviously much more linked to current debates, and so attract much more passionate support and opposition.
Posts like this are why I got hooked on SSC back in 2015.
i know you really hated 'bingoing' people instead of arguing with them but you should have set a kind of counter when you made your prediction, with space for a copy of someone's post/tweet whatever and space underneath [maybe a fake dial/guage] for you to point out/mock how far of the mark it is/will be [no, the ridiculous orange man is not remotely hitler for being an idiot again/ the machines haven't risen up because alexa was rude to you etc]
It's remarkably unpleasant to be publicly sneered and jeered at, and especially so if you experienced the kid version of it in school. And lots of people who have a quirky kind of smarts have endured that. I sure did. Wouldn't surprise me at all if Scott did too. And social media now makes it possible for thousands of people, rather than dozens, to unite in hating on somebody's ideas and attempting to discredit and even sort of dismember the self that produced them. I really don't know what to do about it. Something about the way social media works seems to neutralize any impulse to disagree in a limited and respectful way. You know how when you're driving and annoyed by the car ahead you look at the slow, badly-navigating butt of the car and it's almost as though you hate the car? If you think of the driver at all, they're just "the asshole driving that thing." Well social media fosters seeing the other speakers in the same impoverished way as we see the car's driver -- but simultaneously gives us access to some of their private, deeply held beliefs -- and also allows us to attack savagely in a way that has no analog on the highway. It's a bad set-up. I'm sure it must help some to have a setting where one's thoughts are admired and respected.
Excellent analogy - flamey social media spats are a LOT like road rage. People feel more powerful and protected when driving or posting crap on the internet and, sadly, this often brings out people’s most self-centered, tantrum-throwing tendencies
Slightly analogous to the asymmetry between the reaction to predicting good things and the reaction to predicting bad things that you noted, there is a similar asymmetry in how easy it is to review something with praise and with criticism, and in how much debate each is likely to inspire. In light of that, I hope I can be excused, as someone who loves this blog and agrees overall with the ideas in this post, in jumping to a harsh criticism of one of its smaller points (and yes, this is in the assessment of the "still crying wolf" reaction, as you could probably guess).
> I expected his policies on race to be about the same as any other Republican president’s (rather than, say, putting minorities in concentration camps - which people were literally saying he might do!)
This is blatantly a weakman, and beneath what I've come to expect from the intellectual who introduced me to the term "weakman". Yes, some people were literally afraid that Trump would perpetrate a genocide, a relatively few extremely anti-Trump people (half of whom probably weren't being entirely honest with others or with themselves about what they truly expected). I'm not going to look up and reread the "You Are Still Crying Wolf" essay right now, but I pretty confidently remember that it didn't come across as addressed to the extremists saying things like that, that it was aimed at everyone who was saying that Trump was unusually racist for a president in an attempt to rebut this by demonstrating that nothing Trump said conveyed racist sentiments at all (which is a stronger claim than a prediction that Trump's *policies* would be no more racist than that of any other Republican). If the goal were simply to quiet fears that Trump would aim to be the next Hitler, this could have been accomplished by sympathizing or even endorsing the view that Trump's attitudes on race (or the attitudes of his supporters which he was winking to) were concerning and then explaining why Trump couldn't possibly have the inclination or gain the power to start wiping out minorities.
When I hear of someone thinking Trump said "unusually racist" things for a US President I can't help thinking he's either rather young or hasn't studied history closely.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lyndon-johnson-civil-rights-racism-msna30559
I think part of the problem is competition for attention. It's hard to be noticed if you say something will be pretty bad, and easier to be noticed if you say it will be disastrous.
Isn't what you're saying just a matter of picking the rhetorical explanations of the future that you like the most?
Yeah, no, everyone got Nostradamus wrong because they completely misinterpreted him. An alter ego of mine set the record straight starting here: https://specgram.com/CLXXVII.1/11.claremont.nostradamus1.html
At least I can thank Nostradamus for my favorite scene in the Sopranos
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, Jordan Ellenberg (2014).
Broadly I agree with the thrust of this post. However you need a different example than Fukuyama, because he is an example of a different problem: people straw-manning a book from secondhand ignorance of it. His book was actually far more thoughtful and interesting than either its title (which I wonder whether he even picked) or the way it is summarized in media accounts and whatever. Honestly his book doesn't much resemble that title at all.
It's similar to how pretty much everyone thinks they know what Adam Smith wrote in "Wealth of Nations". I was one of those for a long time myself until finally getting around to actually reading the book. (The resulting realization was really mortifying, in some weird way I had a desire to go back in time and apologize to Smith.)
Among Calvino's 14 definitions of a "classic," I often find this one particularly apt:
"9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them."
I'm reminded of this classic Russell Baker column:
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/11/23/archives/off-the-top-of-de-tocq.html
Oh that's a good one, though a bit dated in the specifics. (de Tocqueville was much more widely quoted in Baker's era, which was my parents' as well, than he is today.)
"Of all the great unread writers", hah!
So....who right now would be the top unread writers that are most quoted/referenced by Americans who haven't directly read them? [meaning Baker's de Tocqueville example of people quoting and namechecking the unread writer; not his Shakespeare example where people are using a phrase that they don't know the origin of.]
Just off the top I'd nominate, in no particular order,
Piketty/Saez
Adam Smith
Fukuyama
Kendi
The authors of the U.S. Constitution
The U.S. Supreme Court
Tentatively, this essay has a self-pitying tone that's unusual here. Does it seem self-pitying to anyone else? I'm sure I'm feeling this reaction, but not sure I'm right.
Take heart, almost no one gets a big reputation of any sort for forecasting, though I grant you have better odds than most.
It seemed that way to me too, at least a little bit. Not as much as "Why Do I Suck?", but that one was more deliberate and more self-aware about it.
And I strongly doubt that linking this post will make the slightest bit of difference to the people who criticize Scott for his predictions. Especially since that crowd almost certainly has some heavy overlap with the crowd that makes fun of him for being a hateful right-wing bigot or a spineless leftist simp. As the old saying goes, haters gonna hate.
Yes, it does. But I think there is still a trenchant and important observation in there, which is that *even if* you are a pretty darn good prognosticator, the chances that you will ever lived to be feted for it are low. (So being a prognosticator for the sake of public repute, as opposed to private income let us say, is a fool's errand.)
The point is as old as the tale of Cassandra, but it doesn't really get stale.
My personal opinion is that this post focuses on the wrong metric. I realize that Scott is not necessarily endorsing making vague, catastrophic predictions but is only saying that making such predictions is 'safer' and perhaps necessary for those who want to become thought leaders. My contention is that, yes, perhaps acting in this way could be narrowly beneficial to some, but I don't believe this would be good for people in this community nor would it attract a thoughtful audience like the one this blog has.
I think one of the best features of the rationalist community is the willingness to be honest about beliefs. It is funny because many rationalists are consequentialists, and I think this is strictly speaking somewhat of an irrational behavior from that perspective. A strict consequentialist would seek to have an internal model of the truth, but would also behave in a way that best serves their goals, which could entail deception or at least lack of transparency. There are consequentialist arguments for truth telling (e.g. others will trust you less in the future if they find out you lied, so in order to maximize your influence you ought to refrain from lying when this is a possibility) but likewise there are counterarguments, etc.
I thus think the great thing about rationalists is that the commitment to truth comes *before* consequentialism. This is what makes me favor this blog as a place to gain insights over traditional media. The latter takes the opposite tack-- it is ostensibly devoted to the pursuit of the truth but is heavily consequentialist in what it chooses to report. Readers who discover this become immensely disillusioned with the news, a major cause of the political polarization we see today. My worry is that if rationalists adopt these sorts of tactics, deciding what to say based on how they will be perceived, they will lose goodwill and essentially become no better than politicians and journalists. The wonderful community that has developed in these comments sections will disperse if and when people realize they are being (however slightly) manipulated. You may attract more people, but they will have worse epistemic hygiene and will not be able to contribute to your movement in any way other than blindly repeating your talking points and perhaps voting the way you ask them to.
I think the example of Nassim Taleb is actually a good case study. I haven't read his popular books, but I have spent some time seeing how he interacts with his followers on Twitter. When it comes to pure statistical theory, everything he says seems to be fine. However, when it comes to the application of his statistical ideas to real life, he seems to be very dogmatic about where his ideas do and don't apply, and goes so far as to insult those who come to different conclusions (he openly calls Steven Pinker, Phil Tetlock, and Nate Silver frauds). Even if he is often correct, the average reader has no way to verify who is correct in any particular case. The only way to be consistent with Taleb is thus to be bullied into accepting his opinions as ground truth, as there is no way to use his high-level insights on black swans and heavy tails independently in one's everyday life in a way that one could know he would sanction.
This is why I would prefer that rationalists stick to being as clear as they think is necessary to properly convey truths that receptive people will be able to absorb. Forget about what people with negative intentions will say, and focus on clear insights that willing people can apply in their lives rather than vague ones which have to constantly be clarified by some authority.
At the end of the day, Pinker and Fukuyama are still highly respected academics on their field. They're household names among even the moderately educated, and there are plenty of college courses where their books are required reading. That's basically the pinnacle of success for academics! Why does this article treat them as though they're laughing stocks? Just because some random idiots on Twitter like to make fun of a highly inaccurate caricature of their ideas? Who cares?
Also, the Twitterati's myopic focus on current events isn't as one-sided as you say. Over the past two weeks, I've actually seen a ton of tweets saying "look, Russia's loss in Ukraine and the anti-government protests in Iran prove that Fukuyama was right all along, it's actually his critics who were the short-sighted morons!" Of course, it's based in the same shallow misunderstanding of his work as all the "9/11 proves Fukuyama wrong forever" comments, but it still goes to show that the effect you're talking about works both ways.
I also think it extremely unlikely Pinker gives a crap what the Internet commentariat thinks about his predictions. The nature of things pretty much guarantees that what the majority thinks about any seriously complex subject is wrong, because being right is difficult, and even more so recognizing the right answer any time before it becomes blindingly obvious or a shibboleth. I'm sure Pinker knows that, and would only be troubled if experts whose opinion he has good reason to weight heavily were laughing at him. Are they? I kind of doubt they would express that in Tweets.
True, and likely even more true for Fukuyama. The man is arguably the most important political scientist of the century, and he has a ton of influence in both the academic world and in the political sphere. He's not going to care about people depicting him as a soyjak in dumb internet memes. Honestly, he probably doesn't even care all that much if The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times occasionally publishes a scathing critique of his work, because he knows that the majority of the establishment is still largely on his side, and a few contrarian thinkpieces don't change that.
I don't want to sound disrespectful towards our host, but some of this seems kinda like projection on his part. I can't blame him for being upset when he gets dragged on Twitter, and definitely can't blame him for being upset when he gets dragged by mainstream media outlets. I'd be incredibly upset too! But Pinker and especially Fukuyama are successful enough that they don't have to worry about stuff like that. Short of a scandal involving some kind of deeply unethical personal behavior or actual crimes, their reputation will continue to be overwhelmingly positive regardless of what a few obnoxiously vocal critics say.
I've stumbled on an interesting critique of Pinker's *Enlightenment Now* :
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/enlightenment-how-pinkers-tutelary-natures/
I thought your post on why Trump wasn't literally Hitler was one of your stronger ones.
I don't agree with you that history suggests Marcus must be wrong within our lifetimes, let alone ever, because technology always marches on. Rather the contrary. Certainly technology in general always marchs on, but it does not do so equally in all directions, and certainly in quite a number of areas it often becomes completely static. What's the last bold advance in pencils you've seen? Or shopping carts?
In my lifetime I've seen any number of straight-line extrapolations of exponentially advancing tech turn out to be ludicrous because exponentials never last, and it turns out by the time the tech is well known and amateurs are making bold predictions about it, it's actually already reached almost its peak. I mean, in 1970 the future was going to be interplanetary, and we could take a Pan Am shuttle to the space station and visit Saturn on a honeymoon at the latest by 2000. Oops. Enthusiastic predictions of talkign sentient computers go back even further, and many in the 70s or 80s would be a bit surprised how far we remain from them 50 years later. For that matter, aren't the confident predictions of self-driving cars from a mere 10 years ago rather a cautionary tale?
History unquestionably shows that breakthroughs happen in a regular way, and that once they do, we can go back and dig up someone who predicted they wouldn't and laugh at him. Unfortunately, what history also shows is that breakthroughs don't happen very often in areas where people fully expect breakthroughs. They are usually surprises, and happen in areas where people in general *aren't* expecting breakthroughs, or even much that's interesting.
That's why if in 1988 you'd asked people -- including many experts -- "What wil be the most amazing technology shift of the early 2000s?" nobody at all would've predicted the smartphone. And many of the things they *would* have predicted -- orbital hotels and commercial LEO space tourism, say -- turn out to have not come even close to being true, and look like long-term projects or dead ends now.
That's hardly surprising from a general social point of view: pretty much by definition, a breakthrough is an advance that is forseeable to only a very few individuals -- whichever lucky or brilliant people make them -- because that's what makes it a "breakthrough," and not just some plodding 100% forseeable engineering tweak that upper management can totally schedule on a Gantt chart and set a deadline on.
The only way I think you can be confident that Marcus will be proven wrong in a timescale less than a century is if you want to assert that no breakthroughs at all are needed, that in fact aware AIs, or whatever exactly it is you predict, are just at this point a series of 100% predictable and schedulable engineering advances -- that nobody needs to come up with any unexpected clever new insight, no new methods need to be invented, it's just a question of scraping up more Internet data or adding enough nodes to your neural net. I would gather this is exactly where Marcus disagrees with you: he thinks there *does* need to be one or more additional breakthroughs, and the timescale on which they will appear (if they appear at all) is as unknown as the timescale of breakthroughs usually is.
Well said.
The faker knew that Russian communism would collapse in the same way as the Russian communists knew that capitalism would collapse. It happens that the faker got lucky and the Russian communists didn't (so far, at least), that's all.
Except that this was *not* the mainstream view at the time, which was that the Communists were doing great economically, but were tyrannical and expansionist.
I don't have any data (maybe you do, and I'd be interested if so) but I'd bet that _a substantial number_ of people on each side thought the other side was doomed to fail, and _a substantial number_ of people on each side thought the other side was doing fine but was evil.
Random example: there's a book from 1980 by Robert Wesson called "The aging of communism". A few bits from its preface: "Nonetheless, a decade ago the idea that Communist systems were necessarily decaying was heretical. Many claimed that Communist states were evil, oppressive, and wasteful, but that they were not viable was hardly to be considered. By now, the manifest troubles of Communist states are common knowledge [...] Unless they can find some magic to turn the trend around, they seemed doomed to decadence". (I am fairly sure that's a typo for "seem", at the end. The author plainly believes that communism is crumbling -- though he also plainly doesn't expect it to collapse quickly.)
That's 1980, so a bit later than the fake Nostradamus prediction of 1975, but if people were publishing books in 1980 saying it's common knowledge that communism is likely to fail then I bet our faker was not alone in thinking (or at least hoping) the same in 1975.
I'm sure he wasn't alone. I'm also confident (without data, based on various readings) that, like I said, this was not the mainstream view. On the other hand, the idea that capitalism was necessarily doomed to fail was the *only* publicly expressible view in the USSR.
Your "crying wolf" post about Trump 6 years ago is what got me reading your blog ever since. It's interesting reading stuff that goes against the grain—so long as it is intelligent of course.
He's right: I do want to be a thought leader in land policy. I am completely surprised to have my ambition included in this list. Nailed that prediction.
Scott, I won't presume that you are going to read this, but I hope you do. I was going to comment, but just made my own post. Take care.
https://ageofsubjectivity.substack.com/p/futurism-sounds-kind-of-fun-but
Coincidentally, Dan Luu has recently done a survey of selected futurists and their predictions. (Duckduckgo for Dan Luu Futurist Predictions.)
The one who comes out best is the world-renowned expert in things future, Bryan Caplan. (Bill Gates and the old guard at Microsoft also do "uncannily" well, according to Luu.)
Who? Bryan what? Exactly, kind of. Is the point to be right and unknown, or is it to get onto the promotional circuit? (Well, perhaps not for Nostradamus. But posterity can be a motivator for some people.)
Saying "Who's this Caplan guy?" to *this* audience will likely not get the expected result.
I think Gary Marcus is in a pretty good spot, actually. No matter how hard people try to typecast him as the "AI won't have advances" guy, his actual position is more like "deep learning models are just big lookup tables".
Here's the thing, I've been observing the Stable Diffusion enthusiast community recently, and nobody is more keenly aware that the model is just a big lookup table than them. As soon as the models get impressive enough to produce something people want, people start using them, and then discover that the way to get it is not well-formed, clear sentences in natural language, but a seemingly random set of arcane keywords that force the generator on just the right path.
If Gary's right, and I do think he's right, then each crazy advance the current paradigm produces will necessarily be of the type that makes the models more capable while not changing that particular trait of theirs. So, all we'll get is more practical uses of AI, meaning more users of AI, meaning more people aware of how the AI should be approached, and this results in Gary's position becoming the widespread common sense. (And I don't think he's famous enough, or the current community big and loud enough, to shape his name into a symbol of something else entirely, Charles Murray-style.)
The human brain often acts like a poorly programmed lookup table.
True! As Scott has pointed out. But that's not what we really consider "intelligence," is it?
I would argue Nostradamus and Fukuyama are largely used in the same way by now, as in journalists who are lazy and looking for an easy way to open their article refer to one's or the other's prediction, without really being interested in their work or trying to contribute to a discussion of it. This is not to say Fukuyama and Nostradamus had the same scholarly value, but just as even those who don't like the concept still have to mention "Orientalism" when writing about the West's relation with the East, you just cannot get around it.
"With the benefit of hindsight, everything about 9/11 and the War On Terror was a random blip in history with no broader implications. There was not a rising Islamofascism, there was not a clash of civilizations. There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once, the US got angry and invaded a few countries, and then everything continued as before. If people were ranking threats to the world order now, Islam and terrorism wouldn’t make the top twenty. "
The problem with this take is that the West wasn't passive in the face of the prediction. The actions that were taken as a result of the prediction changed the outcome. It might have been true otherwise.
Possible, but the *known* effects of that action were to *exacerbate* the problem.
Maybe the effect of declaring "The End of History" was also to exacerbate the problem...
Again, possible, but it seems rather unlikely that this academic book had a large effect on foreign policy. And it's unclear what direction it would have pushed things in any case.
It was a popular book, rather than an academic book. I have no idea if it actually motivated any Islamist, but it isn't inconceivable that an apparently smug (unfair to author) declaration of the final ascendancy of liberal democracy might enrage someone who considers it to be a positively evil form of government.
One of the things I admire most about Matt Yglesias is that he seems to be utterly impervious to bad take criticism. You (Scott) should talk to him about this and adopt more of whatever he does to insulate himself. I’d love for you to be less wary. Some of the takes you are criticized for are some of your best/most useful takes. Your critics (the mostly sneering far left) want to break you as a person, not discredit your ideas.
This could also be said about politicians who we agree with, especially conservatives if for nothing else to add balance and maintain diversity. Liberals are the least inclusive group around. It is either their way or your canceled.
" Your critics (the mostly sneering far left) want to break you as a person, not discredit your ideas."
Strongly agree with this, and I'd like to add that their intermediary goal is to put fear into him so he won't say certain things just in the way he's outlining/hinting at in the post – e.g. "not saying that Trump won't actually be the red and leaping Devil because of the amount of disingenuous pushback".
Prediction Markets Solve This.
fwiw I found your blog through You Are Still Crying Wolf (from Scott Adams’ blog), got totally hooked, and have been a raving fanboy ever since.
(I had already been on LessWrong though years before and was into the Sequences etc, but had kinda forgotten about it, and finding your blog was like ‘coming home’)
I mean if you are trying to be popular in this way why make predictions at all?
Do the Thomas Friedman thing and use language that is just vague enough that you can play word lawyer and never seem dumb. Or better yet, do the post scholar Jordan Peterson thing and make bombastic tweets designed to rile people up and then define them in an unusual way such that under this new way they are reasonable.
Constantly switch between scholar mode for when you want to have a decent conversation, and media pundit mode for when you wanna piss of the libs that axed your early career IQ funding and or harvest money from the republicans that really love having a renowned psychiatrist actually agree
with them for once.
I think Tetlock found a negative correlation with popularity and accuracy iirc, lol. Makes sense, how can you whoo an audience with constant allusions to probabilities and hedging?
It's a bit of a coordination problem -- I think ideally all the thought influencers would just say their most crazy opinions, and then nobody can be canceled if everyone is, but in practice, everybody just hides them except in the rare edge case where they think they can make a difference in a specific domain or something. I think the Overton Window should be as wide as possible, but it seems to eb and flow due to variables I can't suss out.
The name of the game in this media world is to never specifically talk about anything ever yet somehow be extremely interesting.
And then people find out many of his quatrains are dated... like calling the death of the queen in 2022 from 462 years ago. And then the matter of King's coming abdication... I have found the vast majority of his misses are his interpreters.
While I hope this thinking helps you to figure out ways to accomplish the same things while suffering fewer attacks, please don't let it dissuade you from saying what you think is important.
I don't mean to be insensitive, but I strongly believe that you have a responsibility to say these things and that ultimately they make the world a better place.
Similarly, we readers have a responsibility to send as much positive reinforcement your way as possible when it seems like the rest of the world has pitchforks out for statements you didn't make. If this blog can't be a beacon of rational authenticity, it's hard to imagine one that can be.
9/11 had no wide implications? Maybe not in California. Completely changed European immigration thus demographics and its future, fundamental in Europe’s right wing turn. And for Iraq and Afghanistan? Also brought Islam as one of the major religions into world wide public consciousness for the West in general. And the mere symbolism of those two towers burning forever a wake-up call about US foreign policy and invincibility.
Have not actually read Fukuyama, so I'll just respond to one of your claims about history relative to your characterization and not relative to whatever Fukuyama said:
> With the benefit of hindsight, everything about 9/11 and the War On Terror was a random blip in history with no broader implications.
Surely, this was a bit facetious? Setting aside the costly and protracted foreign interventions, the U.S. significantly ramped up its security state after 9/11. That event obviously paved the way for the Patriot Act, enhanced airport security, the morally dubious Guantanamo Bay, and perhaps "normalized" much of the domestic spying by media and tech companies that we all now take for granted. If the American government wasn't seriously threatened by 9/11, I think you *could* argue the American way of life was. And hasn't fully recovered since.
Sure, it doesn't feel like the world ended. But it does feel like our liberal democracy is a different kind of liberal democracy now than 30 years ago (perhaps less classically liberal, perhaps even less democratic). I would be surprised if 9/11 and the changes within American society that followed were not linked together by future historians and described as a major transitional period when our self-conception as citizens and individual sense of autonomy shifted towards the more paranoid and atomized, perhaps in ways we haven't fully comprehended and whose full consequences we have not yet experienced.