curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I think they're pointed out as physical symptoms of aging. You can see some of it by watching his TV appearances, he often seems to blink much less than he should and his eyes often seem a bit narrow and scrunched.
but how will the bureaucratic weirdness that would be necessary to do this affect the voters' confidence in the Democrat ticket
I don't really buy this. People are voting against Biden and Trump more than they're voting for them, and a young and confident voice saying all the right things will pick up a lot of votes, I think. "They're both too old" is an extremely common position, and I think that'll dominate any concerns about someone who wins a second "primary".
How much of a mess might Biden and/or Harris make on the way out
In terms of accusations / insults, past Dem nomination fights were bloody but that didn't really spill over into the general. And we're still months out, elections take around a month in some nations. In terms of throwing up procedural / legal issues, I doubt that's too big of an issue.
Not to mention the optics of kneecapping the female POC with the progressive wing.
I think it's a much bigger problem with the progressive wing of the elites than it is with the voters. Could just go Whitmer w/ black VP or something.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I strongly disagree, actually! I think a non-Biden/Harris/Newsom nominee is around 50% to win. Both Biden and Trump are historically unpopular presidential candidates, they poll terribly, both in approvals and in poll questions like 'are they fit to / too old to run'. I don't think the short period of time between now and the election is an issue, in part because American election seasons are just so much longer than other countries. There are a lot of options (Shapiro? Beshear? warnock?). Whitmer and co tie with biden in head-to-head polls, but I think that's mostly name recognition, once everyone's seen their face and the energy of a young candidate charismatic enough to be popular in their own state they should surge.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
What happens if one or both of them don't
Yeah, most Biden-alternative discussion is premised on Biden choosing to back out, since he controls the delegates. There's a general sense there's a solid chance this happens.
Does the Democrat party actually have good options to replace them without their cooperation
Delegates could, in theory, reject Biden, the delegates are only obligated to "in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them". This seems difficult and unlikely though.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I don't think this is exactly a pendulum swinging back. I think if an assassination attempt against Trump had happened in 2020, people'd still be fired for saying it should've happened. 'killing the president is bad' is a very strong political norm that is fairly independent of anti-racism or rape c. If the attempt had been on Biden instead (which might've been possible, the shooter searched for both trump and biden and trump had a rally near his home), we'd see something similar.
I think framing this as striking back against the left's cancel culture power, fighting fire with fire, is confused for that reason among others. This isn't training a muscle you can use to cancel trans activists or anti-white DEI racists. Nor will punishing random cashiers for saying things like this make it less likely popular progressive twitter users will say things you dislike. Cancelling a popular twitter user or celebrity is very different from cancelling a random old woman. It kinda feels like PUSHING BACK, it sorta feels like the same sort of thing as cancelling a beloved actor or tech CEO, but it really isn't
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Yes, they all deserve each other. Eventually they'll end up in Hell and spend eternity applying arbitrary tortures to members of the other 'side', not even remembering why there are sides in the first place.
More seriously. Neither really accomplish anything. You note that the shoe is 'momentarily' on the other foot, it's not like this little outburst will make future cancellations less likely! It might if one targeted people with cultural power on the left, but they aren't!
Semi-relatedly, I think a post thinking how the attitude towards the 'racial reckoning' has significantly soured on the center-left, putting it in the context of history. 2020 was hardly the first progressive "excess" that was later disavowed as too exuberant. What comes next?
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
This is a bit dumb, but I don't think anyone checked to see if that woman endorsed cancel culture before getting her fired, so that fits hypothesis 1 more than hypothesis 2.
I disagree. People have always made crude and violent comments in small scale conversations. As the Internet has grown, the chatter that once took place in a tavern or next to a fireplace now happens where billions of people can see it. This may be ill-advised, but it's what we have, and it's what we should design norms around. I don't think we should get people fired for saying 'i hate n***ers and k*kes' or 'we should kill all landlords', nor should we for this. An explicit reason, given by the Supreme Court among others, for not making support for political violence is illegal is that abstract support for violence inevitably comes along with justified political grievances, and I think that's a similarly good reason to not make it a social taboo punishable by excommunication. The First Amendment and freedom broadly correspond to values about how society should be, not just procedures the government must follow. It's perfectly legal for me to be unpersoned by everyone I know for supporting Trump, and not served by every business, but that's still, I would think, bad.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I disagree, and Nate does too in the post. Even given that Biden can't run a normal campaign, polls are just wrong sometimes, and even if the polls widen a bit more it's still within polling error precedent that Biden wins.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Machine learning isn't a necessary ingredient here! Cops will tell you that they know very well which individuals have the highest risk (of both being the offender and victim), but they can't do anything about it until after the fact. It's not difficult to notice who keeps going through the system.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Can you elaborate?
Idk I agree with the general point but #AdjusterTok is sampling the bottom percentiles of insurance conversations, which are already going to be selected for appearing dumb. Also you're seeing the ones that get 500k views which is, you know, more selection. I think it's a mistake to build intuition for the behavior of a 33rd percentile human based on that!
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I don't think this makes sense. Good insurance will cover large infrequent expenses, insurance companies have expertise and economies of scale in getting things done, and good health insurance gets you better care than trying to pay your way through the complex healthcare system yourself unless you're quite rich I think
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Idk I think these are things that many of these people (not the bottom percentile people we see in AdjusterTok, but say the 25th-40th percentiles) would be able to understand if they spent a lot of time just grinding basic examples and thinking through it, over and over, instead of spending that time trying to understand sports or TV or relationship drama. Relatively dumb people can learn to perform simple jobs that'd be outside their capability to do on the fly by just repeating the task over and over. Not to suggest that usual claims of "it's our fault for not teaching this in schools" aren't stupid, just having an extra financial literacy class isn't enough, but I don't think it's a totally intractable problem even without coercion.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
If you sit down and explain things calmly, slowly, and carefully you can explain most things to people
... Sure, but it's easy to massively overestimate how well they understand what you've explained. One consistent experience I've had teaching average students higher-level subjects is you'll explain something to them, work them through some problems, and they'll seem to get it. And they'll happily say that they get it. But give them the same kind of problem in a slightly different context, or just wait a month and give them the same problem, and they'll totally fall over in a way that makes you question how they even thought they understood it initially.
So I don't think society merely saying it is enough. I think that, like with teaching, you can counteract that by just drilling them hard enough for long enough - it doesn't really build intelligence, but it gets them through tests and would probably get our below-average people through car and health insurance better than they do today.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Fortunately for Trump's chances, the party's rapidly coalescing around Harris, with 125 endorsements from house democrats and a lot of state dems and delegates endorsing Harris. Dems weren't willing to rock the boat with the last terrible candidate, and when the debate forced them to notice, they immediately make the same mistake again and pick the obvious "consensus" candidate who happens to be mediocre. I'll again post How Democrats Got Here
Harris had just mounted an exceptionally lackluster bid for the presidency. Then a California senator, Harris had entered the race for the Democratic nomination with strong donor support and an early surge in the polls. Despite these early advantages, Harris failed to maintain — let alone build out — her coalition over the ensuing months, and her campaign collapsed before the primary’s first ballots were cast. Nor was Harris’s electoral track record before 2020 especially encouraging. She had never won an election in a swing state or competitive district. And in her first statewide race in deep blue California in 2010, Harris defeated her Republican rival by less than 1 percentage point. Two years earlier, Barack Obama had won that state by more than 23 points.
Given that Biden was 77 in August 2020, the likelihood that his running-mate would one day become his party’s standard-bearer was unusually high ... Biden’s primary consideration in choosing a running-mate should have been his or her electability. Instead, he put enormous weight on demographic considerations. “I think he came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman,” former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the New York Times in the summer of 2020. “They are our most loyal voters and I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice-presidential candidate.”
On Polymarket, Harris's chance of winning is 30%, to Trump's 64%. Trump was up 71% right after the debate. Better than Biden's conditional probability of 25%, and Harris'll probably go up a bit when she gets the nomination, conditionally that's 35% but while that's better than Biden's 25%, it's not a great outcome for dems.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Trump is not popular! His approval/favorability is terrible compared to past presidential candidates. He's only winning the election because Dems managed to nominate someone worse. Kamala isn't eighty, she can say more than ten words in sequence without pausing or stuttering. She's not a good Dem, but she's still just a mediocre generic Dem, and that's good enough for a lot of voters.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I would expect it to boost him by a point or two, and for that boost to fade out over the next few months. He's down by much more than a point or two
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I mean, yeah, it is objectively unpleasant. Look at this guy, who shilled for Biden's fitness right until he dropped out, and pivoted to Harris, renaming his account, without even thinking about it.
On the other hand I don't think this is a Democrat thing, it's just as unpleasant how many anti-trump reps who had "principled disagreements" pivoted and fell in line behind trump when the party moved that way.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I mean, down in popularity relative to history's presidential candidates, not down head to head against Biden https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/14/biden-trump-are-least-liked-pair-of-major-party-presidential-candidates-in-at-least-3-decades/ https://abcnews.go.com/538/americans-hated-candidates-biden-trump/story?id=108655435
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
A few general condemnations of political violence. One "this is the dems' fault for calling trump a fascist", which mentioning the guy's apparent conservatism and google searches about the time of dem events didn't really help dispel. One "I wish he'd gone for Biden and it landed, then we'd have a better candidate!"
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
given I watched the entire video and it led to the best comment of the week so far, I think it was a fine post, cheerleading or not
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
And yet, she is miles better at most practical matters than I am, and it turns out that those practical matters are extremely important every day of the week, while my academic knowledge is mostly useful for arguing on the internet
I suspect your wife is intelligent, and specializes in something different from you. Most people are not that intelligent, and are mediocre at both practical and intellectual tasks! You didn't randomly select a wife from the American population.
More generally, I think the standard Rationalist discourse on intelligence is badly flawed. To put it bluntly, I do not observe a correlation between intelligence and "correctness" in any objective, holistic sense
Do you think that, if society had an IQ cap of 100, we would understand quantum field theory, or general relativity, or have most of the technology we use so much? This is a bizzare statement. The average person mostly can't do algebra, and genuinely doesn't understand why they keep getting inflation when they vote for more spending and less taxation. Yes, smart people use their intelligence to be wrong in novel ways, but it's a process that in many areas converges.
Von Neumann was not, in fact, the God-Emperor of mankind; he was in the end successfully yoked to a society of his supposed inferiors
This is conflating the fact that Von Neumann's technical aptitude was controlled by highly intelligent people with social and political aptitude with strong progressive / democratic values guiding public opinion with a sense that Von Neumann was being guided by the People and their average intelligence.
but rather is values-neutral
If the world were entirely composed of 100 IQ people, the world would be so much worse by any reasonable set of values. We wouldn't have an internet, we'd be missing most treatments for currently existing diseases, we'd lose great art and music (Scott Alexander's brother is a famous musician. Coincidence? lol). This isn't neutral!
Since you asked, to give the other side, I think you should split up, so long as you're young-ish and would be dedicated to finding a new wife afterwards. You're going to spend two decades of your life raising the children, each individual moment working, consciously or not, to help your children be successful in life. And the highest impact thing you can do to ensure the kids have successful, interesting good lives is to ensure they have good genes. The idea marriage is about entirely personal romantic feelings detached from other material considerations is a modern one, an idea of irrational, overpowering romantic love isn't new but it coexisted more with real interests in the ancestry and health of the children. I wouldn't worry about the lower-class part - a lot of of smart people come from middle-class families - but the intelligence part is more important.
Also, HBD generally refers to the association of race and IQ, which is very contested. The heritability of individual intelligence is less contested, it is the mainstream scientific consensus, and it's just extremely obvious.
Is that alone enough to say I should break up because that shows how I don't really love her etc
You probably do love her? Romantic love isn't an overpowering metaphysical principle that overrides other facts or beliefs. You can genuinely love someone and at the same time rationally (or mistakenly) think being with them is a mistake.
To some of the points from other commenters:
It seems to me like you are far too focused on the idea of children getting good genes. Having children isn't a eugenics program, it's something you do (or don't) because it's meaningful in itself.
I understand why this feels true, but does it actually mean anything? Having children is - literally, words mean things - a eugenics program, in that your instincts for sexual attraction, both physical and social, are very clearly selecting for some sense of good genes to pass onto your children. Being successful and intelligent are attractive! And surely their intelligence and general mental qualities are more important than how tall they are or what their waist/hip ratio is! Most of the people replying to you, like most people in general (due to assortative mating), will likely marry someone of their social/economic class, as that's just what we instinctively do. (Assortative mating for class is stronger than for IQ, which on an individual level is imo a mistake). The experience of your children in life in the future surely does matter. Imagine if your five year old fell off of a bike without a helmet and lost 10 IQ points. I feel like that'd be tragic! Part of the "meaningfulness" of being a parent is protecting the kid from things like that! And yet... (I'd enthusiastically bite the bullet on every unintuitive consequence of this thought experiment)
Let's turn it around and say you're the prole dum-dum and she's the elite status genius. How would you feel if she harboured these doubts about you? Called it off because although you click on every level, she just doesn't want her kids to be stuck going to a state school because they inherited your midwit genes?
Interactions between people aren't symmetric when the interactions have other effects! It's good when a company fires a bad worker, even when the person firing them wouldn't want to be fired themselves. It's a good thing that the smartest archaic human 500k years ago tried to pick a smart partner and didn't settle for a dumber one because it'd be mean to do that! It's how we got here.
More generally, I think the standard Rationalist discourse on intelligence is badly flawed. To put it bluntly, I do not observe a correlation between intelligence and "correctness" in any objective, holistic sense
This is just, like, false? Whether it's high school math, basic facts about how the world, government, economy, etc function, or the ability to accomplish one's goals, intelligence is enormously important. To the point that if your wife was 85 IQ (or even 100), you wouldn't have gotten together in the first place because the contrast would be too apparent.
I strongly suspect the last commenter's wife is not an average person, they're an intelligent practical-minded person, and a genuinely randomly-selected person would produce different intuitions. It's berkson's paradox https://brilliant-staff-media.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tiffany-wang/1Mvt8RPtlU.png for "academic" vs practical intelligence.
I'll still give Biden some personal credit for the Afghanistan withdrawal though.
I think this is wrong and misses why people support Harris, it's not exactly a tactical decision. Money isn't as important as people think for presidential elections - voters are voting for, above all, a party and a candidate, it's the face they'll see and the voice they'll hear. And Dem donors will still have piles of money available for any non-Harris candidate. Harris is, in my opinion, not a good candidate. She's not popular, with an approval rating virtually equivalent to biden's 37% (although biden's disapprove is 6 higher). She was received poorly in the 2020 primary. I don't feel the charisma whe nwatching her. The clips of her going viral on social media are of her making statements that are ironically endearing for their strangeness, greatest hits compiled here, and I'm not sure this'll translate to excitement among swing voters. In head to head polls she doesn't do much better than Biden, and though none of the governor alternatives do better either Harris has less of a name recognition gap to make up for. And she's burdened with the Biden brand - inflation, the age issues, and a cloud of malaise generally. I don't think money can make up for this! The recent Republican local races demonstrate the importance of candidate quality over anything else.
Even ignoring that, though, I think the campaign finance issues are overstated. The articles claiming this supports harris say things like:
Sure, "coordination costs" and "ad rate questions" mean it's "not necessarily as effective" as if Harris gets the money directly. It's not ideal. That language is a bit wishy-washy though. And using it to justify "practically speaking, Biden and Harris are really the only two choices available at this late stage of the campaign" seems to overstep.
And reviewing the language in those articles
One gets the sense that the desire for nominee Harris doesn't come entirely from pragmatism. She's the First Black Woman Vice President, and denying her the nomination SHE deserves is an insult. I get the same feeling from other pro-Harris arguments - "voters will be outraged that you passed over the Black Woman VP". Someone will be outraged, sure, but is it really voters, or is it the author? I taste notes of RBG's and Sotomayor's potential retirements here. It's not just that though, speculating, I think a novel and complicated plan like 'hold mini-primaries' is difficult to believe in, and feels dangerous in, in an environment with a weak 'party' where power is very decentralized and depends on networks of relationships. "The CEO will just declare it's time for primaries and pick someone good to run them" isn't the kind of thing that happens, but "she's my guy so I'll support her" and "looks like the consensus is moving towards her so i'm moving there too" is something that happens a lot. It's not an environment that cultivates the agency of individuals or the group.
A Matthew Yglesias post, "VP selections aren’t taken seriously enough" (of course with Matt, there's a framing making it look like he isn't picking on Harris), touches on all of these issues.
Yes, indeed, Matthew. Oops. Oops all around.
Framing!
Sure. If she does this and wins the mini-primary with that, more power to her.
More Matt, "Kamala Harris should try to be really popular ... In spite of all!":
Powerful framing. I do kinda enjoy reading matt's subtle contortions.
To give the dems some credit, there's been a lot of talk about nominating someone other than Harris and miniprimaries, it could even happen.
(matt's source for obama biden age isn't great, but other reporting linked from here confirms it)
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