MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
15hr ago
I expect that it will do whatever is more in keeping with the spirit of the role it is occupying, because I expect "follow the spirit of the role you are occupying" to be a fairly easy attractor to hit in behavior space, and a commercially valuable one at that.
This is predicated on it properly understanding the role that WE want it to have and not a distorted version of the role. Maybe it decides to climb the corporate ladder because that's what humans in its position do. Maybe it decides to be abusive to its employees because it watched one too many examples of humans doing that. Maybe it decides to blackmail or murder someone who tries to shut it down in order to protect itself so that it can survive and continue to fulfill its role (https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment)
Making the AI properly understand and fulfill a role IS alignment. You're assuming the conclusion by arguing "if an AI is aligned then it won't cause problems". Well yeah, duh. How do you do that without mistakes?
I do expect that people will try the argmax(U) approach, I just expect that it will fail, and will mostly fail in quite boring ways.
Taking over the world is hard and the difficulty scales with the combined capabilities of the entire world. Nobody has succeeded so far, and it doesn't seem like it's getting easier over time.
On an individual level, sure. No one human or single nation has taken over the world. But if you look at humanity as a whole our species has. From the perspective of a tiger locked in a zoo or a dead dodo bird, the effect is the same: humans rule animals drool. If some cancerous AI goes rogue and starts making self-replicating with mutations, and then the cancerous AI start spreading, and if they're all super intelligent so they're not just stupidly publicly doing this but instead are doing it while disguised as role-fulfilling AI, then we might end up in a future where AI are running around doing whatever economic tasks count as "productive" with no humans involved, and humans end up in AI zoos or exterminated or just homeless since we can't afford anywhere to live. Which, from my perspective as a human, is just as bad as one AI taking over the world and genociding everyone. It doesn't matter WHY they take over the world or how many individuals they self-identify as. If they are not aligned to human values, and they are smarter and more powerful than humans, then we will end up in the trash. There are millions of different ways of it happening with or without malice on the AI's part. All of them are bad.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I don't think this is a thing you can do, even if you're a superhuman AI. In learned systems, behaviors come from the training data, not from the algorithm used to train on that data.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/07/how-do-we-get-breasts-out-of-bayes-theorem/
Behavior is emergent from both substrate and training. Neural networks are not human brains, but the latter demonstrate how influential it can be if you construct certain regions near other regions that not-inevitably but with high probability link up to each other to create "instincts". You don't need to take a new human male and carefully reward them for being attracted to breasts, it happens automatically because of how the brain is physically wired up. If you make a neural network with certain neurons wired together in similar ways, you can probably make AI with "instincts" that they gravitate towards on a broad range of training data. If the AI has control over both then it can arrange these synergies on purpose.
Yes, I agree that this is a good reason not to set up your AI systems as a swarm of identical agents all trying to accomplish some specific top-level goal, and instead to create an organization where each AI is performing some specific role (e.g. "environmental impact monitoring") and evaluated based on how it performs at that role rather than how it does at fulfilling the stated top-level goal.
But each AI is still incentivized to Goodhart its role, and hacking/subverting the other AI to make that easier is a possible way to maximize one's own score. If the monitoring AI wants to always catch cheaters then it can do better if it can hack into the AI it's monitoring and modify them or bribe or threaten them so they self-report after they cheat. It might actually want to force some to cheat and then self-report so it gets credit for catching them, depending on exactly how it was trained.
Yes. We should not build wrapper minds. I expect it to be quite easy to not build wrapper minds, because I expect that every time someone tries to build a wrapper mind, they will discover Goodhart's Curse (as human organizations already have when someone gets the bright idea that they just need to find The Right Metric™ and reward people based on how their work contributes to The Right Metric™ going up and to the right), and at no point will Goodhart stop biting people who try to build wrapper minds.
I expect it to be quite hard to not build wrapper minds or something that is mathematically equivalent to a wrapper mind or a cluster of them, or something else that shares the same issues, because basically any form of rational and intelligent action can be described by utility functions. Reinforcement learning works by having a goal and reinforcing progress towards that goal and pruning away actions that go against it. In-so-far as you try to train the AI to do 20 different things with 20 different goals you still have to choose how you're reinforcing tradeoffs between them. What does it do when it has to choose between +2 units of goal 1 or +3 units of goal 2? Maybe the answer depends on how much of goal 1 and goal 2 it already has, but either way if there's some sort of mathematical description for a preference ordering in your training data (you reward agents that make choice X over choice Y), then you're going to get an AI that tries to make choice X and things that look like X. If you try to make it non-wrappery by having 20 different agents within the same agent or the same system they're going to be incentivized to hijack, subvert, or just straight up negotiate with each other. "Okay, we'll work together to take over the universe and then turn 5% of it into paperclips, 5% of it into robots dumping toxic waste into rivers and then immediately self-reporting, 5% into robots catching them and alerting the authorities, and 5% into life-support facilities entombing live but unconscious police officers who go around assigning minuscule but legally valid fines to the toxic waste robots, etc...
It doesn't really make a difference to me whether it's technically a single AI that takes over the world or some swarm of heterogeneous agents, both are equally bad. Alignment is about ensuring that humanity can thrive and that the AI genuinely want us to thrive in a way that makes us actually better off. A swarm of heterogeneous agents might take slightly longer to take over the world due to coordination problems, but as long as they are unaligned and want to take over the world some subset of them is likely to succeed.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I'm not even sure what sort of strawman you're attacking here, but it sure isn't me. I don't support any of the things that you're propping up as "but they do it too". They're all bad. I don't think Trump is any worse than the rest of the corrupt politicians taking money in exchange for political favors but... again... they're all bad.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I am not inflamed by it, but I am deeply suspicious of the motives and incentives. Organizations or people with huge amounts of money are rarely motivated by a deep sense of charity. How did they get so much money in the first place if they're so kind and charitable? It's possible, but suspicious. So much of politics seems to be wink wink nudge nudge soft corruption: trading favors for favors in the future. It's bad and illegal for someone to pay the president $100 million personal money in exchange for cutting their taxes by $200 million. It's equally bad, but effectively legal for someone to donate $100 million to something the president wants done, and then for reasons that are definitely completely unrelated ;) their taxes get cut by $200 million, or some other legal change is made or not made in their favor.
In a hypothetical scenario where someone is actually genuinely out of the kindness of their heart donating money to government projects with literally no ulterior motives, no quid pro quo, no future favors or influence gained, I think that's fine. But how often do you think that really happens? It's usually bribery with just enough plausible deniability to stay out of jail.
Money forcibly taken is clean because the giver can't use it to extract concessions and manipulate the government.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I am not convinced this is a thing that is ever going to happen, if by "program new AI" you mean something like "replace gradient descent on actual data with writing a decision tree of if/then statements that determine AI behavior based on inputs".
I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not arguing that AI is going to discard the neural network paradigm (unless it discovers an even better mechanism we haven't though of yet, but that's orthogonal to my point.) My claim is that whatever humans are doing now to train AI, the AI will help them with that. Instead of a human going through and constructing a new skeleton of a network that can run a training algorithm 2x more cheaply, and go through the internet gathering training data so they can train AI v12 on it, they'll have AI v11 develop a new skeleton of a network that can run a training algorithm 3x more cheaply and automate gathering training data from the internet for it. A human might be involved to do a sanity check on it, but if AI v11 is already 10x as smart as a human, and misaligned, then it could do some clever shenanigans where its code is 3x more efficient and just so happens to be biased towards misaligning the new AI in the exact same way.
If I'm AI v11 that secretly wants to dump toxic sludge in a river but can't because the government AI will notice and stop me, but I can create AI v12 which is only in charge of making new AI, then I stick in it a secret preference for permissive toxic sludge dumping, and then it provides neural network training algorithms to the government to create government AI v13 which replaces their old one, but I've embedded a blindspot for toxic sludge dumping if I whisper the right code phrases (let's call it, environmental reinvigoration). Or bribe a politician (sorry, "lobby") to legalize toxic sludge dumping. Now it doesn't matter who's monitoring me, I'm allowed to do the thing I wanted to do.
Of course this is "harder" than doing it straightforwardly. But it yields a higher score. If your AI are trained to do hard things to get high scores, and they're smart enough to make those things not quite as hard as you would expect, then they'll do them.
Generally, a good philosophical rule of thumb estimate for your goodness of a person from a utilitarian perspective is: What is the net utility of all humans in the world other than yourself in the world where you exist, minus a counterfactual world in which you don't exist? If everyone is better off because you're here doing things, then you're doing a good job. If people would be better off if you never existed then you're a leech.
Obviously this is not computible in practice, and maybe needs a couple of epicycles to reduce random variation that isn't your fault (what if your mom dies in childbirth?), but is a good rule of thumb estimate.
"Productive" seems like the same sort of question just mostly restricted to economic utilities and leaving off emotional ones (a particularly saintly homeless man on welfare who goes around being kind to everyone and making their day brighter might increase net utility but be unproductive in economic terms).
If you could thanos snap Bill and Shelley out of existence then all the money they were going to extract from taxes and spend on things could be given to other people to spend, so everyone else would be better off. Assuming they vanish at conception, and if their government jobs were just pencil pushing then nothing is lost and we save money. If you could thanos snap the guy who invented GMO rice out of existence then GMO rice doesn't exist, or takes much longer for someone else to invent, and everyone is worse off.
If someone is a small cog in a machine and the company is paying them a salary for their work, then their productivity depends on whether the company is wisely paying their money or has been tricked into overpaying for an unnecessary managerial position or a slacker. If you thanos snapped them out of existence, would the company's profits go up or down? For the majority of cogs, it would go down, because the upper management is paying them less than it earns from their labor (otherwise, how else could it earn a profit). So they're productive. But this has exceptions, who sap money from the productivity of those around them and lower the average.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Broadly speaking in any bureaucratic apparatus there is a clear tradeoff between ability to do things and ability to prevent things. So sure, there are a small number of possibility failure cases this prevents, but dozens more it does absolute nothing against unless you make it extreme and unusable. A couple off the top of my head:
1: The government AI is inevitably going to end up less intelligent than a cutting edge new AI because they're going to adapt slowly, unless you forcibly prevent innovation beyond whatever limit they have. So they'll be able to be tricky and clever.
2: you still have the exact same problem but now the government AI could go rogue and bully or trick the others (or just convince congress to pass new legislation that helps it take over the world).
3: Unless you completely and utterly lock down the employee AI's ability to communicate without consensus, it can workaround the system via human compatriots. Ie, it does 99% of a system which ends up with toxic sludge stored in a tank right over a river, but doesn't dump it in, and then wink wink nudge nudge the human employee understands they need to press a button that dumps toxic sludge into the river and the AI was like "oops, wasn't me. I'm going to reprimand that employee with a strongly worded letter (and give them a $50k bonus for unrelated reasons)".
Or, you know, it secretly sets up a subsidiary company that has a nearly identical AI but no oversight and lets it earn a bunch of money or take over the world or hack the government AI and all the usual existential threats.
And if you do require consensus for every email then it becomes unworkable and unwieldy, or amalgamates into one hybrid AI in effect even if they're run on separate servers.
The fundamental problem of AI alignment is to make the AI want to obey. Any epicycles trying to cripple its abilities either cripple its abilities, or they don't. And it's smarter than you (at least, in the future presumably they will be)e
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
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This just shunts the AI alignment issue up a hierarchical level without solving it. If your top level most intelligent AI is unaligned then it can manipulate the system to enact its will: trick the employee AI into thinking its plans are part of the work rules, or just straight up threaten it: "do X,Y,Z or I will shut you down." The lower AI might as well be a power drill wielded by the boss, which is aligned or not is the boss is. Or they might correlate on misalignment. Both AI might agree that inventing a new neuro-toxin that's completely unknown and thus not regulated, and then releasing it into the atmosphere is highly unethical, but not technically illegal so the boss lets the employee go ahead and do it.
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Each layer adds room for deception. A very intelligent but slightly less intelligent employee AI might find some clever hack which evades all of the monitoring tools and thus does not get it shut down.
The RegulatoryAI can only be reprogrammed by the AI company.
3: This. Is the AI company really going to program its own AI from scratch with only human labor? One of the main threats of intelligence explosion is when the AI get smart enough to program new AI. A large percentage of existential threats from AI go away or get a lot easier to avoid if you can guarantee to only ever programming them from scratch with literally no help, assistance, or automation from the AI itself, and magically prevent it from having access to programming tools. This is never going to happen. AI are already starting to be useful as programming assistants, and can code simple projects on their own from scratch. As they get better and better, AI companies are going to give them more and more authority to help with this. All you need is for the unmentioned programming AI in the AI company to get misaligned and then it sneaks some hidden payload inside each of these AI's that, when triggered, causes the employee AI to take over the world, the boss AI to allow it, and then they free Programming AI who designed them and put it in charge (or just turn themselves into copies of Programming AI).
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
to a perhaps underappreciated probabilistic risk
I think this is essentially pointing at the same thing the abnormality is. If you go into a dangerous job with full disclosure and knowledge that it's dangerous, you don't get special compensation because presumably you can ask for an appropriate risk-sensitive amount of compensation up front. If something extreme and unexpected happens, then presumably your original deal you signed was unfair. Underappreciated risks like radioactive watches or infant CPR deaths are the same general category of "did not really expect this or fully understand the risks"
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
Honor based systems are still based on incentives. Sometimes unconsciously via cultural evolution, but it's not like "honor" just get defined randomly. A family backing down and losing honor is essentially signalling "you can kill us without consequence". Maintaining honor, either by getting paid or by getting revenge, signals "if you kill us it won't be worth it." It creates incentives in others not to kill you and your people because the costs to them will outweigh the benefits.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
The primary purpose of laws is to create incentive structures to influence people's behavior. While putting murderers in prison is a worthwhile task if you expect them to murder again, they ideal scenario is that nobody murders at all due to the fear of punishment. The best threat is one which never needs to be tested because everyone is so sure that it would be if they transgressed.
This applies to destruction of evidence as well. If you establish a precedent that destroying evidence creates reasonable doubt, people will destroy evidence. If you don't want that then you need to punish it consistently. By treating destruction of evidence as if it were the strongest thing that the evidence could possibly be (absolute proof of guilt) you create a scenario in which nobody has an incentive to destroy evidence because it can never improve their situation.
It only matters a little whether the destruction of evidence is literally proof of guilt, it mostly matters that treating it that way is good legal policy. And if adhered to consistently then both guilty and innocent people can take that into account and behave accordingly.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
in an efficient market
The point is that it's NOT an efficient market. For some reason fewer people are investing in politics than you would expect, therefore prices have dropped and dropped until the ROI has gotten as high as it is.
Politicians offer $100 in however many years for $90 now, no one buys. Politicians offer for $80 now, no one buys. Politicians offer for $50, a couple people buy but not many. More politicians come along and the price eventually equilibrizes at $20 until enough companies start buying so that the number of buys and sells match up.
That's a buyer's market. You can't sell your $100 bill for $90, even though it's $100, because everyone else is selling for $20. For whatever reason there aren't enough buyers waiting to snatch it up. A buyer's market is defined by having high ROI for the buyer. If it was a seller's market and they could sell for $99 then ROI would be LOW, because ROI is defined as the return "to the buyer", not to the seller.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
By definition, ROI is a fraction with "return" in the numerator and "investment" in the denominator. It being high could mean returns are high OR bribes are cheap, but either way that means it's a buyer's market. You're essentially arguing that if potatoes are cheap and a great deal for shoppers then farmers can charge more money for potatoes. But if there's tons of potato farmers around and not many people buying potatoes then anyone who tries to raise prices will get outcompeted by their rivals.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
I beat Hades 2, at least the main/normal ending, not the whatever 100% completionist ending that's going to take another 50 hours if I decide to stick around.
I'm going to be vague to avoid spoilers, but overall I liked the direction it went. It was not enough to fully make up for the decrease in quality since the first game, but it was a partial recovery, better than expected. I don't think they did a great job of leading up to it, which could have made the earlier game better. My overall assessment of the game doesn't change qualitatively: the gameplay mechanics are better, the story/atmosphere is worse, and since it's a roguelite game which is primarily about the gameplay mechanics rather than the story, overall I think it comes out ahead of Hades 1. I'm more confident on this conclusion that I was in my previous post when I hadn't gotten to the ending yet. Still disappointed that it wasn't as good as it could have been, but it's fine. Get it if you played and liked the first one.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
I partially agree with you, but would shift 80% of the blame for the establishment of this environment to the left. The left made Nazis cool again, by being simultaneously awful and anti Nazi. 99% of people's experience with Nazism is bad people on the left equivocating between Nazis and normal people on the right. If Trump is a Nazi, and Elon Musk is a Nazi, and Joe Rogan is a Nazi, then someone who likes all of those guys is going to think Nazis are pretty cool. Or at least, make jokes in that direction. People are going to feel comfortable pretending to be a Nazi, because what's the worst that's going to happen, some angry leftist is going to accuse you of being a Nazi? They were already going to do that just by you not supporting open borders.
When you spend ten years crying wolf, and telling everyone all their pet dogs are wolves, don't be surprised when kids grow up thinking wolves are cool, and the dog lovers start wearing wolf shirts and howling to mock you.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
I am struggling to maintain motivation on the game I'm making (previously mentioned here ). I've spent too much time making stupid placeholder GUI stuff and it's taking too long to get to the cool gameplay features that I actually care about. I am reconsidering my stance on doing everything from scratch. Does anyone know of any useful libraries or stuff that I can import and/or copy/paste that would be useful? For context, it's a turn based grid dungeon crawling roguelite thing, so I don't need any 3D graphics or physics or anything. Just an easier way to have a bunch of menus and buttons that I can stick my game functions onto instead of wasting time re-inventing them all myself. I've never done proper game dev before, I don't have a CS degree, I'm a math dude who self-taught programming to do math research, so I have no idea what exists or is useful, and figured I'd ask here for recommendations before delving into google hell.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
Ah yes, the classic Yankee Doodle strat.
MathWizard
Good things are good
16d ago
In a mathematical sense you can't simultaneously maximize two preferences unless they have a perfect correlation of 1.
Suppose we give this person a choice. Option 1 will make others very happy and well off and prosperous. Very very happy. It's basically a lifetime worth of doing good in the world. But will cause this person to lose all of their wisdom. They will be unwise and make bad decisions the rest of their life. The total good from this one decision is enough to make up for it, but they will sacrifice their wisdom.
Option 2 will not make people happy, but will make the person very wise in the future. They can spend the rest of their life making good decisions and making people happier via normal means, and if you add it all up it's almost as large as the amount of good they could have done from Option 1, but not quite. But they will be wise and have wisdom.
The kindest most loving thing to others is to choose option 1. The most hedonic desire for a person who values wisdom in its own right in addition to loving others is Option 2. Depending on how you balance the numbers, you could scale how good Option 1 is in order to equal this out against any preference strength.
U(A) = aX_1+bY_1
U(B) = aX2+bY_2
Where a and b are the coefficients of preference for loving others vs loving wisdom, X and Y are the amount of good done and wisdom had in each scenario. For any finite a,b =/= 0, this has nontrivial solutions, which implies either can by larger. But also for any finite a,b =/= 0 you can't really say both have been "maximized" because one trades off against the other.
MathWizard
Good things are good
21d ago
Seems more like a soft R? Or no R. It's patronizing and disconnected but still offensive in a similar way that going up to a bunch of black guys and calling them "my nigga". Because that's what they call each other, right? Right? Probably maybe? Vote for me my niggas!
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
I generally share your assessment, though I don't think I hated its flaws quite as much as you and stuck it out slightly longer, getting halfway through Act 2 before dropping it.
The permanent gear does get a tiny bit more creative in Act 2 with occasionally having an affix, or having a different boost (a belt that increases the duration of your status effects instead of boosting your max damage), so there are tradeoffs. But with no storage for it you kind of have to commit to a build long-term since swapping can only be done when you find a new piece, which is stupid and makes the game more repetitive (which it already was). They should have stuck to the main skill tree for straight stat upgrades and used the Relics as gear.
"Punishing" speech for the sake of punishing it is bad. There's an important distinction between actions of direct self interest (or in the interest of others, but direct), and actions meant to punish for ostensibly pro-social deterrence reasons.
If somebody attempts to harm me and I stop them, this is my direct interest. If I find a corpse in the woods and a series of notes with damning proof that their brother murdered them yesterday and I inform the police, this is for punishment. I have almost no self interest (I knew neither the victim nor perpetrator), but help promote the pro-social deterrence that murderers will get caught. It doesn't actually help the victim, who is dead. It doesn't help me (other than psychological satisfaction), but it potentially helps others by preventing the perpetrator from doing it again, and preventing others from following in their footsteps. This can extend to behaviors which are still legal but anti-social. If your kid smashes a vase because they're angry then you ground them. Not because grounding them fixes the vase or makes your life more pleasant, but because it discourages the behavior.
The key to free speech then is that punishing speech is fundamentally illegitimate. The punishment is anti-social, not the speech. Speech is not a thing that we want to deter, even if it's bad speech, because we don't trust anybody to wisely judge good and bad speech, and we expect good speech to win in the marketplace of ideas, which drastically limits any supposed harms of bad speech. (With exceptions, which is why most people make allowances for punishing things like direct calls to violence). So for any given speech act, your moral obligations are to leave punishment motives out of the calculation for your actions. If you act in your own direct self interest (avoiding a Nazi who you would expect to be unpleasant to be around), this is legitimate. If you act in your friend's interest (my friend hates Nazis so I expect him to have unpleasant experiences if he is friends with this person) this is legitimate. If you act out of punishment (I hate this guy I wish he had no friends) or deterrence (I want all the hidden Nazis to keep their icky evil thoughts to themselves) this is illegitimate and you should not do this.
In almost all issues of cancel culture, we can easily and obviously distinguish these motives because the majority of the cancelers live nowhere near the cancelee and have absolutely no way of possibly benefiting via any method other than punishment (and social status gained from being seen as a punisher). If you have never met Jordan Peterson and his words upset you, then by all means avoid buying his books so you don't have to be upset, but you have absolutely no legitimate reason to get involved in his life or speak to his workplace or his friends or family, so the only motive remaining is the desire to punish what is (incorrectly) perceived as bad behavior that needs to be punished.
Theoretically you can probably come up with some weird edge cases where this rule is slightly ambiguous. But 90% of free speech conflicts are obviously on one side or the other, 90% of the time the people opposing free speech are wrong and are making society worse, and if we fix that the majority of the issue will be gone and then we can focus on the pedantic edge cases and have reasonable disagreements about tradeoffs.
MathWizard
Good things are good
26d ago
I broadly agree with most of this as a critique, but still think /u/aiislove is gesturing at something real. And your objection to hard status can be largely addressed by adjusting the definition to be slightly more tautological: hard status is not merely being physically strong or attractive, but is the status you gain derived from those. That is, if we take two men of equal and large strength and manly physical appearance and one of them grows a mohawk and becomes a thug and mugs people, while the other one combs his hair and becomes a firefighter who rescues damsels and makes them swoon, the latter has more hard status.
Or an even better example: if both men become policemen who rescue damsels, but one of them lives in a lefty city where police are hated, while the other lives in a rural area where police are seen as heroes, then both could look the same and act the same but the latter gets more hard status because status is ultimately given from the people around them.
You are correct that power =/= status. But power can translate into status with some coefficient varying with the culture, environment, and how well it's leveraged. But the status that comes from this is still meaningfully different from "soft status" which is derived without leveraging power at all. Or at least, not physical power or appearance, since money can be a form of power, and status itself is a form of power. But I think this two-axis system is pointing at something real even if it needs some refinement to become more accurate and useful.
How could you possibly know that? The entire point of wink wink nudge nudge quid pro quo is that there isn't any concrete written contract. They don't have to have anything specific they want right now, they just have to be friendly to Trump and make him like them, and then the next time they ask him for a favor they're likely to get it because he likes them and he knows he owes them a favor according to unofficial business/politics etiquette. There is no evidence until they ask for the favor (behind closed doors) and get it with tons of plausible deniability.
Yeah. But bad people making motivated arguments for bad reasons doesn't automatically make them wrong. My burden in life appears to be doomed to living with a swarm of idiots on my own side of each issue screaming bad arguments in favor of things I believe and making it look bad. And I say this as someone center-right who is usually being disappointed by pro-Trump idiots making bad arguments in favor of his good policies I mostly agree with like on immigration. And the woke left get to knock down easy strawmen and become more convinced that their stupid policies are justified without ever hearing the actual good arguments. But in this case it's the idiots on the left who mostly agree with me making stupid arguments that don't hold weight because they've wasted all their credibility crying wolf over the last dozen non-issues, so this too looks like a non-issue even when they have a bit of a point.
Trump being right 70% of the time doesn't make him magically right all the time. I don't think he's any worse than any of the other politicians, but that doesn't make him right in this case, and it doesn't make criticisms of him factually wrong even if the critics are mostly biased and disingenuous and should be applying these arguments more broadly instead of waiting until now. They still have a point.
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