Hi. Thanks for your comment. I thought about it some. I’m inclined to disagree with the comment more after thinking about it, compared to when I initially read it. I’ll try to give some non-exhaustive reasons below.
Re 1: I did bring it up first, sorry. But I don’t think whether Iraq War is actually more or less important than PEPFAR is a central crux for me; Trump isn’t running against Bush. So probably not worth getting into much detail. Two quick points I will quickly contest that he opposed the Iraq War before it happened (as opposed to claiming so much later). re: “this reflects someone that was unusually thoughtful/changed their mind early relative to public convo (and their political party) at the time.” I don’t know if this was what you had in mind, but I want to note that Trump was a Democrat at the time.
Re 2: I think we broadly agree then that Trump is worse for animal welfare, and that this isn’t the most important question for this election. I do think this subclaim is confused “Right now, to the degree there are any health trade-offs, the veganism focus tends to make the EA coalition intellectually weaker and more politically polarized,” as in it ties together two mostly unrelated things.
Re 3: This comment feels wrong to me but I feel like I’m not qualified/knowledgeable enough to assess this.
Re 4: “On competence: I think Trump has more of a world model than Biden or Harris, does more reasoning for himself, and yet also delegates more decision making.” But independent thinking and world models are only good if it systematically leads you to have more correct beliefs! Note that there is a pretty obvious tension with your later comment “My main observation is that he and his people really do think the election was stolen from them.” I think you need to believe one of:
A. Trump’s independent thinking leads him to believe false(r) things, and this is good.
B. Trump’s independent thinking leads him to believe true(r) things, and he was correct in believing that the election was stolen from him.
C. Trump’s independent thinking leads him to believe true(r) things, the heuristic misfired this one time, but it pays off in other important areas. (which ones?)
Note that being wrong about the election has massive downstream consequences!
”Trump is also more willing to fire people whether for competence or personal loyalty, but the net result is more competence in decision making relative to the incentives provided by not firing people for anything other than scandals” Do you have empirical evidence here? It’s easy to form a toy model where firing people for insufficient loyalty is worse for competency than not firing people (many people would consider this to be a major issue for Biden’s inner circle).
“On character, I think Trump is just braver, more independent, and has a more valuable form of honesty despite being a chronic exaggerator” He’s auditioning to be one of the most powerful people in the world! I really don’t think a lack of “bravery” is anywhere near the most likely failure mode!
More importantly, I think a lot of what you see as heroically not falling prey to groupthink I see as “soon to be 82-year-old in an extremely powerful position doesn’t listen to others and trusts his own gut over other voices or objective reality.” If you have more examples of him coming to object-level true beliefs over expert-led consensus (even including all the problems that experts have) I’m willing to be swayed here; but the comment as it stands feels like applying rationalist-y local catechisms to a very different context.
“California isn’t doing well” Huh? Not sure how much responsibility Harris has for California’s status but also it’s one of the richest places in the country and people’s most common complaint is the lack of housing.
“On being able to deal with people honestly: When talking with people from other countries who focus on foreign policy, most experts I engaged with from ally countries thought Trump and his admin were easier to deal with than Biden.” I have no way to verify this. I agree that this may be good evidence for you. (I feel similarly about the rest of this section)
Re 5:
(Some of your other claims in this section also seem implausible to me. Not addressing everything).
“It doesn’t matter if QAnon dude on the internet says unhinged stuff when Republican appointees and their staff aren’t actually as crazy or coerced into non-sensical beliefs.” Eh, more than half of Republican Congresspeople say they don’t believe climate change is caused by humans. This isn’t even getting into the culture war stuff, where Republicans place more prominence on culture war issues than Democrats do, and are kinda crazy about it. I don’t think most EAs, or most Americans, would view Republican elected officials as more “normal” in their beliefs and values than Democrat elected officials.
In general I find it very confusing when people take wokeness that seriously as an issue. I live in what has got to be literally one of the wokest places on the planet (Berkeley) and I can’t say wokeness is more than a minor inconvenience in my day-to-day life. Both NIMBYism and car culture have more clear and negative ramifications in my day-to-day life, for context.
(I think you also haven’t explained why you think people will be more woke if Harris wins than if Trump does; many of my ~centrist friends would consider 2020 to be peak woke)
”(minor note) Where in Trump’s Jan 6th speech does he praise dictators?” I’m pretty sure I’ve never said this. Maybe you just misread my comment?
“I’m not surprised JD emotionally reacted in the way he did to the Trump assassination attempt.” ???? What. Basic emotional regulation for your political speech acts is kind of a bare minimum for the VP job description? The guy’s not applying for some junior programmer job in a tech company. He’s applying to be (among others) in charge of the US nuclear arsenal in a not-that-unlikely event that an 82-year old dies or is otherwise incapacitated. Being “emotional” is very much not an excuse here.
re: science, labor, and natalism, I still stand by what I originally said.
re: immigration. I don’t buy this line of reasoning narrowly. Biden specifically pushed for a bipartisan bill for border control that Trump shut down. I also don’t buy the argument spiritually. Something about it just feels very off.
(I also note that you conflated “high-skilled” with “legal” and “low-skilled” with “illegal”).
re: ai, I kinda feel like “I think a lot of the good stuff is likely to come back in a Trump admin even if the whole order were cut at the start. ” sounds like wishful thinking to me. But the more positive vision here is that the future is not set in stone. If Trump wins, I hope many people, ideally people who can honestly stand him, will try to work actively with the Trump admin in e.g. being minimally sane and preventing ideological capture by e/accs, at least.
(I’d also be interested in you listing specific sections of the White House EO that you think should be cut, though it’s not cruxy for me).
I agree that under some reasonable definitions Trump is more politically centrist than Harris. But I also think the most concerning issues, or greatest opportunities for improvement, are neither right- or left- wing. Eg authoritarianism is neither left nor right.
Re 1, I think we are on the same page now. I’ll consider his Iraq war views as basically not strong evidence either way.
Re 2, I don’t think the second part is confused, but agree it is not relevant to Trump, just strategy selection for EAs.
Re 3, this is something I’d put like ~80% credence in, and I think it is more important than most points. The 20% comes from increased volatility/unpredictability.
Re 4, I believe C, and put a very low probability on B. I think it was rational for Trump, given his info state, to believe that he lost at least one state due to illegal voting. I think the vast majority of spammy claims and cases Republicans pressed were not credible at all, and I don’t know how to feel about these overall in terms of norm decay, vs. attempting to get the legal system to check a lot of potential claims quickly when you don’t yet have good evidence (I oppose anyone that was knowingly making false claims/cases). I do think their worries about mail-in ballots and vulnerability to illegal voting are justified, and that there is a lot gov could do to increase justified confidence in the elections. The states close to or below 1% margins went D with mail-in votes: its not surprising mail-in votes were more D heavy, but it’s easy to see why they thought they got cheated. I’m pretty sure things like the Electronic Registration Information Center don’t work super well given that I received mail in ballots and political calls for places I deregistered and no longer lived.
On the part about firing, see this NBER paper. It is necessary to firing people for political reasons to increase competency, and the left purges the bureaucracy more thoroughly that the right historically, granting the left cost advantages for programs they want. The problem is choosing good programs to do.
Re: Resisting expert pressure areas I think Trump made good decisions despite expert pressure: - High confidence: Energy policy (also in Europe) + strategy for getting allies and NATO to pay more, negotiating the Abraham accords. - Medium confidence: his version of the Afghan pullout strategy (keeping Bagram), striking Soleimani, using tariffs to renegotiate trade deals (though bad execution in some areas) - Mixed: COVID: bad cuts (justified citing CFHS on the U.S. being the most prepared), bad to initially downplay, good on travel relative to experts at the time, good to do Operation Warp Speed and push for earlier scaling, inconsistent on masks, good on re-opening earlier and schools.
On Harris’ record: It’s fair she didn’t have much influence on CA policy and wasn’t in a good position to influence much in Congress either. The bills she’s proposed would have cost more than $20 trillion by now, but those didn’t pass and may have just been to send signals.
I agree you have no reason to take anything I say on expert interviews at face value. I think your set of views is reasonable to have given your network.
Re 5: Due to greater economic policy rationality, explicit false beliefs on climate change that are typical of many Republicans are less costly in practice than Democrat implicit false beliefs on climate trade-offs. Texas is building more clean energy capacity than basically everywhere else in the U.S. combined. Environmental reviews, lawsuits, and over regulation of nuclear power are all issues that largely come from the left and make it hard to do any construction that would reduce emissions. Because climate is a virtue signaling topic for the left, typical proposals sacrifice more value than they could hope to save due to uneconomical spending proposals and bans (e.g. on pipelines with allies, fracking, etc.) To be fair, Harris has shifted to be pro-fracking now I think, but she did propose $10 Trillion in climate spending before. We could debate the merits of the Paris agreement pull out and I agree the U.S. should be more energy efficient per capita, but fundamentally it doesn’t make sense to handicap the U.S. economy more than the Chinese economy and have allies free-ride on U.S. defense spending at the same time.
Agree that NIMBYism and car culture pose big problems and conservatives can be worse on both, though as Dems control the cities and the policies that drive cost growth in them, I think they are more to blame in the worst cases. As an example, the environmental review to even look at digging another metro tunnel under the bay was set to cost a billion dollars. In the bay most of the NIMBY arguments complain about gentrification, stopping greedy developers, and protecting the environment. For national policy, Trump’s head of HUD claimed to be anti-NIMBY and aimed to condition HUD fundingon local zoning reform. That said, Walz is YIMBY too, the Biden admin does seem to be trying harder to increase housing supply now, and some of the permitting form looks potentially promising provided lots of the things they add on don’t become veto points. Overall, I do think conservatives will be more NIMBY in the suburbs, but will open more areas to development and lower crime in a manner that facilitates relatively more urban density.
In terms of reducing wokeness there’s both policy and attitudes. A Trump admin can continue repealing policies that incentivize and force people and companies to be more woke if they want to succeed or to defend rights that have little to do with discrimination. At the same time, people being mad about Trump will increase woke reactions, so that’s fair and I am not sure how things net out on polarization. Causing the far right to go nuts doesn’t sound great either when they have all the guns, but either way I don’t want to be held hostage by extremist reactions.
On the praise for dictators thing, I misinterpreted your comma. Disregard.
Re: JD’s statements around the assassination: I directionally agree, though if we consistently apply the standard that people who publicly jumps to conclusions about responsibility in response to violent events shouldn’t be in office, then I’m not sure that many presidents/VPs reach the bar.
On immigration: my understanding was that the border proposal was unacceptable because it explicitly tolerates allowing just under 5,000 people in per day via illegal border crossings rather than via border control points. If this specific claim is not true, that would substantially change my view of how bad his opposition to the border compromise is.
On AI I share the same hopes as you. I don’t want ideological capture by e/accs or EAs though, because both are too myopic. I want them counter balancing each other, and I want tech acceleration mostly focused on things other than AI and narrow/harder to abuse applications of AI. I think we need substantial growth to deal with the debt burden, and generate enough value to have more positive-sum politics and foreign policy. At the same time, I think it is hard to directly attack most of the EO as stated. One issue is largely on how the involvement of the government to assure that AI increases equity will lead to a lot of negative-sum behavior and censorship that has nothing to do with safety. Thiel sometimes articulates the more extreme version of the longer-term concern in terms of authoritarianism, but that seems further off.
Overall, I agree the biggest threats and opportunities aren’t necessarily right or left wing. I feel now like I have a few points on foreign policy and immigration policy that could cause me to make large updates if I find more decisive counter-evidence to my current position. I think it may take me longer to sort through cruxes/points of info that would make me decisively more fearful of dictatorship risk.
(Quickly noting for casual readers that I didn’t say all the things or hold all the views that this comment ascribed to me, though no particular detail was especially egregious. Just wanted to provide a heads-up for any onlookers to reread my own comments to understand any specific claims I make; people who know me well can also DM for clarifications).
to the degree there are any health trade-offs, the veganism focus tends to make the EA coalition intellectually weaker and more politically polarized.
I mean that I expect veganism’s health tradeoffs and political polarization to almost be entirely independent of each other. It could be the case that veganism has no health tradeoffs but nonetheless EA should not focus on it because there is extreme political political polarization. It could also be the case that veganism has many health costs but its support is divided equally among partisan lines.
I also would be surprised if there’s a strong correlational case. In general the world isn’t that neat.
So I basically think your claim is pretty close to formally invalid. I’m a bit surprised people haven’t noticed this even after I pointed it out initially.
Hi. Thanks for your comment. I thought about it some. I’m inclined to disagree with the comment more after thinking about it, compared to when I initially read it. I’ll try to give some non-exhaustive reasons below.
Re 1: I did bring it up first, sorry. But I don’t think whether Iraq War is actually more or less important than PEPFAR is a central crux for me; Trump isn’t running against Bush. So probably not worth getting into much detail. Two quick points I will quickly contest that he opposed the Iraq War before it happened (as opposed to claiming so much later). re: “this reflects someone that was unusually thoughtful/changed their mind early relative to public convo (and their political party) at the time.” I don’t know if this was what you had in mind, but I want to note that Trump was a Democrat at the time.
Re 2: I think we broadly agree then that Trump is worse for animal welfare, and that this isn’t the most important question for this election. I do think this subclaim is confused “Right now, to the degree there are any health trade-offs, the veganism focus tends to make the EA coalition intellectually weaker and more politically polarized,” as in it ties together two mostly unrelated things.
Re 3: This comment feels wrong to me but I feel like I’m not qualified/knowledgeable enough to assess this.
Re 4: “On competence: I think Trump has more of a world model than Biden or Harris, does more reasoning for himself, and yet also delegates more decision making.” But independent thinking and world models are only good if it systematically leads you to have more correct beliefs! Note that there is a pretty obvious tension with your later comment “My main observation is that he and his people really do think the election was stolen from them.” I think you need to believe one of:
A. Trump’s independent thinking leads him to believe false(r) things, and this is good.
B. Trump’s independent thinking leads him to believe true(r) things, and he was correct in believing that the election was stolen from him.
C. Trump’s independent thinking leads him to believe true(r) things, the heuristic misfired this one time, but it pays off in other important areas. (which ones?)
Note that being wrong about the election has massive downstream consequences!
”Trump is also more willing to fire people whether for competence or personal loyalty, but the net result is more competence in decision making relative to the incentives provided by not firing people for anything other than scandals” Do you have empirical evidence here? It’s easy to form a toy model where firing people for insufficient loyalty is worse for competency than not firing people (many people would consider this to be a major issue for Biden’s inner circle).
“On character, I think Trump is just braver, more independent, and has a more valuable form of honesty despite being a chronic exaggerator” He’s auditioning to be one of the most powerful people in the world! I really don’t think a lack of “bravery” is anywhere near the most likely failure mode!
More importantly, I think a lot of what you see as heroically not falling prey to groupthink I see as “soon to be 82-year-old in an extremely powerful position doesn’t listen to others and trusts his own gut over other voices or objective reality.” If you have more examples of him coming to object-level true beliefs over expert-led consensus (even including all the problems that experts have) I’m willing to be swayed here; but the comment as it stands feels like applying rationalist-y local catechisms to a very different context.
“California isn’t doing well” Huh? Not sure how much responsibility Harris has for California’s status but also it’s one of the richest places in the country and people’s most common complaint is the lack of housing.
“On being able to deal with people honestly: When talking with people from other countries who focus on foreign policy, most experts I engaged with from ally countries thought Trump and his admin were easier to deal with than Biden.” I have no way to verify this. I agree that this may be good evidence for you. (I feel similarly about the rest of this section)
Re 5:
(Some of your other claims in this section also seem implausible to me. Not addressing everything).
“It doesn’t matter if QAnon dude on the internet says unhinged stuff when Republican appointees and their staff aren’t actually as crazy or coerced into non-sensical beliefs.” Eh, more than half of Republican Congresspeople say they don’t believe climate change is caused by humans. This isn’t even getting into the culture war stuff, where Republicans place more prominence on culture war issues than Democrats do, and are kinda crazy about it. I don’t think most EAs, or most Americans, would view Republican elected officials as more “normal” in their beliefs and values than Democrat elected officials.
In general I find it very confusing when people take wokeness that seriously as an issue. I live in what has got to be literally one of the wokest places on the planet (Berkeley) and I can’t say wokeness is more than a minor inconvenience in my day-to-day life. Both NIMBYism and car culture have more clear and negative ramifications in my day-to-day life, for context.
(I think you also haven’t explained why you think people will be more woke if Harris wins than if Trump does; many of my ~centrist friends would consider 2020 to be peak woke)
”(minor note) Where in Trump’s Jan 6th speech does he praise dictators?” I’m pretty sure I’ve never said this. Maybe you just misread my comment?
“I’m not surprised JD emotionally reacted in the way he did to the Trump assassination attempt.” ???? What. Basic emotional regulation for your political speech acts is kind of a bare minimum for the VP job description? The guy’s not applying for some junior programmer job in a tech company. He’s applying to be (among others) in charge of the US nuclear arsenal in a not-that-unlikely event that an 82-year old dies or is otherwise incapacitated. Being “emotional” is very much not an excuse here.
re: science, labor, and natalism, I still stand by what I originally said.
re: immigration. I don’t buy this line of reasoning narrowly. Biden specifically pushed for a bipartisan bill for border control that Trump shut down. I also don’t buy the argument spiritually. Something about it just feels very off.
(I also note that you conflated “high-skilled” with “legal” and “low-skilled” with “illegal”).
re: ai, I kinda feel like “I think a lot of the good stuff is likely to come back in a Trump admin even if the whole order were cut at the start. ” sounds like wishful thinking to me. But the more positive vision here is that the future is not set in stone. If Trump wins, I hope many people, ideally people who can honestly stand him, will try to work actively with the Trump admin in e.g. being minimally sane and preventing ideological capture by e/accs, at least.
(I’d also be interested in you listing specific sections of the White House EO that you think should be cut, though it’s not cruxy for me).
I agree that under some reasonable definitions Trump is more politically centrist than Harris. But I also think the most concerning issues, or greatest opportunities for improvement, are neither right- or left- wing. Eg authoritarianism is neither left nor right.
Thanks Linch!
Re 1, I think we are on the same page now. I’ll consider his Iraq war views as basically not strong evidence either way.
Re 2, I don’t think the second part is confused, but agree it is not relevant to Trump, just strategy selection for EAs.
Re 3, this is something I’d put like ~80% credence in, and I think it is more important than most points. The 20% comes from increased volatility/unpredictability.
Re 4, I believe C, and put a very low probability on B. I think it was rational for Trump, given his info state, to believe that he lost at least one state due to illegal voting. I think the vast majority of spammy claims and cases Republicans pressed were not credible at all, and I don’t know how to feel about these overall in terms of norm decay, vs. attempting to get the legal system to check a lot of potential claims quickly when you don’t yet have good evidence (I oppose anyone that was knowingly making false claims/cases). I do think their worries about mail-in ballots and vulnerability to illegal voting are justified, and that there is a lot gov could do to increase justified confidence in the elections. The states close to or below 1% margins went D with mail-in votes: its not surprising mail-in votes were more D heavy, but it’s easy to see why they thought they got cheated. I’m pretty sure things like the Electronic Registration Information Center don’t work super well given that I received mail in ballots and political calls for places I deregistered and no longer lived.
On the part about firing, see this NBER paper. It is necessary to firing people for political reasons to increase competency, and the left purges the bureaucracy more thoroughly that the right historically, granting the left cost advantages for programs they want. The problem is choosing good programs to do.
Re: Resisting expert pressure areas I think Trump made good decisions despite expert pressure:
- High confidence: Energy policy (also in Europe) + strategy for getting allies and NATO to pay more, negotiating the Abraham accords.
- Medium confidence: his version of the Afghan pullout strategy (keeping Bagram), striking Soleimani, using tariffs to renegotiate trade deals (though bad execution in some areas)
- Mixed: COVID: bad cuts (justified citing CFHS on the U.S. being the most prepared), bad to initially downplay, good on travel relative to experts at the time, good to do Operation Warp Speed and push for earlier scaling, inconsistent on masks, good on re-opening earlier and schools.
On Harris’ record: It’s fair she didn’t have much influence on CA policy and wasn’t in a good position to influence much in Congress either. The bills she’s proposed would have cost more than $20 trillion by now, but those didn’t pass and may have just been to send signals.
I agree you have no reason to take anything I say on expert interviews at face value. I think your set of views is reasonable to have given your network.
Re 5: Due to greater economic policy rationality, explicit false beliefs on climate change that are typical of many Republicans are less costly in practice than Democrat implicit false beliefs on climate trade-offs. Texas is building more clean energy capacity than basically everywhere else in the U.S. combined. Environmental reviews, lawsuits, and over regulation of nuclear power are all issues that largely come from the left and make it hard to do any construction that would reduce emissions. Because climate is a virtue signaling topic for the left, typical proposals sacrifice more value than they could hope to save due to uneconomical spending proposals and bans (e.g. on pipelines with allies, fracking, etc.) To be fair, Harris has shifted to be pro-fracking now I think, but she did propose $10 Trillion in climate spending before. We could debate the merits of the Paris agreement pull out and I agree the U.S. should be more energy efficient per capita, but fundamentally it doesn’t make sense to handicap the U.S. economy more than the Chinese economy and have allies free-ride on U.S. defense spending at the same time.
Agree that NIMBYism and car culture pose big problems and conservatives can be worse on both, though as Dems control the cities and the policies that drive cost growth in them, I think they are more to blame in the worst cases. As an example, the environmental review to even look at digging another metro tunnel under the bay was set to cost a billion dollars. In the bay most of the NIMBY arguments complain about gentrification, stopping greedy developers, and protecting the environment. For national policy, Trump’s head of HUD claimed to be anti-NIMBY and aimed to condition HUD funding on local zoning reform. That said, Walz is YIMBY too, the Biden admin does seem to be trying harder to increase housing supply now, and some of the permitting form looks potentially promising provided lots of the things they add on don’t become veto points. Overall, I do think conservatives will be more NIMBY in the suburbs, but will open more areas to development and lower crime in a manner that facilitates relatively more urban density.
In terms of reducing wokeness there’s both policy and attitudes. A Trump admin can continue repealing policies that incentivize and force people and companies to be more woke if they want to succeed or to defend rights that have little to do with discrimination. At the same time, people being mad about Trump will increase woke reactions, so that’s fair and I am not sure how things net out on polarization. Causing the far right to go nuts doesn’t sound great either when they have all the guns, but either way I don’t want to be held hostage by extremist reactions.
On the praise for dictators thing, I misinterpreted your comma. Disregard.
Re: JD’s statements around the assassination: I directionally agree, though if we consistently apply the standard that people who publicly jumps to conclusions about responsibility in response to violent events shouldn’t be in office, then I’m not sure that many presidents/VPs reach the bar.
On immigration: my understanding was that the border proposal was unacceptable because it explicitly tolerates allowing just under 5,000 people in per day via illegal border crossings rather than via border control points. If this specific claim is not true, that would substantially change my view of how bad his opposition to the border compromise is.
On AI I share the same hopes as you. I don’t want ideological capture by e/accs or EAs though, because both are too myopic. I want them counter balancing each other, and I want tech acceleration mostly focused on things other than AI and narrow/harder to abuse applications of AI. I think we need substantial growth to deal with the debt burden, and generate enough value to have more positive-sum politics and foreign policy. At the same time, I think it is hard to directly attack most of the EO as stated. One issue is largely on how the involvement of the government to assure that AI increases equity will lead to a lot of negative-sum behavior and censorship that has nothing to do with safety. Thiel sometimes articulates the more extreme version of the longer-term concern in terms of authoritarianism, but that seems further off.
Overall, I agree the biggest threats and opportunities aren’t necessarily right or left wing. I feel now like I have a few points on foreign policy and immigration policy that could cause me to make large updates if I find more decisive counter-evidence to my current position. I think it may take me longer to sort through cruxes/points of info that would make me decisively more fearful of dictatorship risk.
(Quickly noting for casual readers that I didn’t say all the things or hold all the views that this comment ascribed to me, though no particular detail was especially egregious. Just wanted to provide a heads-up for any onlookers to reread my own comments to understand any specific claims I make; people who know me well can also DM for clarifications).
To quickly clarify what I mean by “confused,”
I mean that I expect veganism’s health tradeoffs and political polarization to almost be entirely independent of each other. It could be the case that veganism has no health tradeoffs but nonetheless EA should not focus on it because there is extreme political political polarization. It could also be the case that veganism has many health costs but its support is divided equally among partisan lines.
I also would be surprised if there’s a strong correlational case. In general the world isn’t that neat.
So I basically think your claim is pretty close to formally invalid. I’m a bit surprised people haven’t noticed this even after I pointed it out initially.