naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Problem is that the US is higher trust than ten years ago.
That seems much more like an epicycle than anything I've suggested--your article shows 29% as a low point in the assertion "most people can be trusted," around 2014, but then suggests a rise to 34% in 2018--and then a flat line to 34% again in 2024. This, against a trend of clear decline since the 1970s, with no sign of a recent upward trend in sight--at best, it's flat (and still historically low) despite slight recovery from a local minimum. Your "upswing for the past ten years" seems like an exaggeration at best--and probably just tendentious. I have a variety of other concerns about this particular measure of social trust, which I suppose you would also call epicycles, but I'm not sure it matters, as it's not entirely clear to me what you're trying to actually say.
it's getting to be a little much at this point
If your point is something like "actually this 'vibecession' stuff is super complicated and certainly not attributable to a single influence" then, I mean, sure? I'm sure most people wouldn't even get through Scott's whole writeup before saying "it's getting to be a little much at this point." Sociological inquiry is often like that. I don't even think it would be wrong to say, as you did, "only high mortgage rates and a frozen housing market remain as plausible explanations of 'wtf happened in 2020.'" But those things still happened against a background of longer-term social developments that hadn't happened before. Mortgage rate and housing market problems aren't particularly novel. The slow but increasingly unmistakable unraveling of the American social fabric definitely is, and we're reaching levels of animosity I don't think we've really seen since the Civil War. I'd be much more persuaded if you tried to boil the whole conversation down to smartphones or social media, than to housing and mortgage rates. Or COVID, for that matter. But I think stuff like COVID and markets are things that shock our social system, at various times; they don't explain what happens in response to that shock. A different society would, presumably, have responded differently. That sort of thing seems, to me, worth thinking about.
I kept wondering when Scott would finally ask, "is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?"
This doesn't explain why there's a step change in consumer sentiment after 2020.
"Gradually, then suddenly." I like the metaphor of, say, super-cooled water suddenly crystalizing into ice on impact. All the ingredients for the trust collapse were there; various people have been sounding the alarm bells for decades, in various guises. Charles Murray's Coming Apart came out 15 years ago. Bowling Alone is a quarter century old. Amusing Ourselves to Death, older still. If you're old enough to remember Pat Buchanan and his crusade against "cultural Marxism," you might also be old enough to remember the John Birch Society. Once people might have suggested that this is a list of racist or conspiracy-theory-driven weirdos; today most people don't even seem to know what I'm referring to. The Postwar Consensus (as it is sometimes called) was firmly globalist; America played the role of Rome, and all along conservatives (usually, fringe conservatives) have been saying "this is going to end badly."
Well, it hasn't ended yet! In various ways things don't seem to be going well. And that itself may be an illusion--but it does seem to be the vibe.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Thanks for writing this up, I have been wanting to write something very similar to this all day, but I have not had the chance.
My favorite comment from the SSC sub:
This was less than I wanted to know.
But my favorite substantive comment, from the Substack:
Something that gets hidden in the aggregate is that consumer sentiment among democrats is much higher than among republicans from 2021 until 2025, and then they switch. This seems relevant.
https://en.macromicro.me/charts/110438/us-michigan-consumer-sentiment-index-within-political-party
This feeds into the "media" argument, too, given that news and entertainment media are both aligned with the blue tribe. And this doesn't even just have to be a purely tribalistic thing; if you're an illegal immigrant from Mexico, there are probably very obvious reasons for you to have felt more optimistic about the state of things in 2022 than you do in 2025 (namely, in 2022 you probably weren't too worried about ICE raids, and in 2025 you probably are more worried about ICE raids, even if in absolute terms your risk hasn't actually changed much).
I kept wondering when Scott would finally ask, "is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?" I feel like he probably has a better grasp of the relevant data than I do, but that may also be why he didn't hit this angle? It would surely be outside the Overton window to suggest that the "vibecession" is just the natural result of decades of broadly unchecked immigration from low-trust societies, but to me that seems like the most obvious hypothesis. Economic "Brazilification" (as explained by Faceh and discussed by me) would also, presumably, underwrite "vibe" Brazilification. Whether the gaps between rich and poor actually widen, or are merely seen to widen, is irrelevant to the vibe. Whether politics is genuinely polarized, or only seems polarized: again, the vibe is the same. Whether public infrastructure really is garbage, or only seems to be garbage--and so on. Importing the attitudes of developing nations transforms those attitudes into a self-fulfilling prophecy concerning the state of things.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4d ago
Banned for a week, albeit not strictly for this comment.
This is the comment that got you reported for antagonism. Certainly it is an uncharitable response, left on its own--if you have some good reason to doubt someone has engaged with the proffered material, you can explain that in an effortful way, but on its own there's nothing on offer here but heat.
When I came to check out this particular report, however, I saw that you had, in rapid succession, led with not one, nor two, but three low effort, top level posts. On the surface, all three posts concern different events, but the substance of each post is to cast the Trump administration in the least charitable light available--sometimes, by "just asking questions."
Taken together, you seem to have decided "flood the zone with low effort anti-Trump takes" is a good way to bait other users. Any possible doubts I might have entertained about that were eliminated by this response; the slightest pushback on your low-effort narrative resulted, not in an effortful attempt to expand on the conversation, but with a (completely unjustified) dismissal. This shows you to be here, not to test your ideas in a court of people who don't share your biases, but to simply wage culture war as you see fit.
You are not fooling anyone, but we do try to extend charity even to the likes of you. You have been warned twice before, by two other mods, about low effort top posts, and here I see that you have made three of them, and then antagonized other users, so warnings do not seem adequate anymore. Now we move to bans.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5d ago
It is certainly interesting to see what catches people's fancy!
naraburns
nihil supernum
5d ago
In a hypothetical future age of abundance, how much better can things really be?
I was just this weekend reflecting on the extent to which we already live in this future. Specifically, I was purchasing over-the-counter medicine for a family member's lingering cough, and thinking about the mass produced medicinal miracles of modern chemistry. With the cost of open-market health insurance premiums set to rise next year, there is a lot of public discourse on the state of modern medicine (and how it gets funded). But for the vast, overwhelming majority of health concerns we have today, we live in an age of remarkable abundance and shocking affordability. Furthermore, we live in an age where there is very little difference in the treatments and medicines available to the rich versus the poor.
Now, don't misunderstand--I am absolutely aware of the eye-watering costs of some treatments, particularly experimental or end-of-life treatments, and the relatively better care available to people with money. But the kind of care that costs serious "rich person" cash is also the kind of care very few people would benefit from receiving. The vast majority of medical maladies you will face in your life are treatable by a nurse practitioner with medicine you can buy for less than an hour's wages, and a billionaire in your place would receive the very same prescription at the very same price.
Furthermore, though not everyone benefits in the same way or at the same level, most Americans do have some kind of health insurance that genuinely protects them from bankruptcy while providing them with treatments they could otherwise not possibly afford. Countries with socialized health care are arguably more efficient in how they structure the financing of all this, but either way the risk pooling that modern industrialized nations do with health care costs seems to work pretty well to everyone's absolute benefit, despite the persistence of individual disparities in particular cases.
Your mention of "if everyone went to college" is particularly noteworthy given that anyone who genuinely wants to learn something, today, is far better situated to make that happen than they would have been even twenty years ago. The existence of online college and satellite internet means you never even have to leave your house to get an education, often of a quality much higher than you could get at a top tier university a century ago. We have more knowledge, we disseminate it more smoothly, the costs are minimal and almost always subsidized. I have more books stored in my cell phone than I could physically fit in my house and office--combined. Someone with a loose attitude toward copyright infringement could very easily download several PhD's worth of knowledge for actual pennies (or, at their local library, possibly gratis).
Of course, credentials are a different story, but that's evidence of a society with so much abundance that it actively works to rate limit expertise. America's physician shortage (which is much less than the physician shortage in many other places) is driven in substantial measure by the profession's reluctance to increase the availability of training. This has resulted in a proliferation of paraprofessionals (who often think they are professionals)--but I digress. The point is that we have so much abundance, actually, many of our current sociocultural systems are kind of choking on it.
I sometimes wonder if this is why we are seeing a rise in political movements that, on my view, promise to function by ending abundance. On my view, trade is the lifeblood of prosperity; interfering with trade reduces abundance. On my view, free discourse generates a bounty of ideas; restricting discourse reduces abundance. Asceticism is often a kind of allergic reaction to abundance. Probably someone reading this comment is thinking of Universe 25 and wondering how it relates! Yes: possibly we are poorly evolved to thrive in an environment of abundance.
But I feel like the alternative is strictly worse. Better to wrangle with (and perhaps evolve beyond) our pyschological hangups in an environment of peace and plenty, I think, than to RETVRN to 50% infant mortality rates on grounds that this better reflects the ancestral environment. To answer the question directly, I think things could still get better in a variety of cool ways (I would like to live much, much longer then 100 years, for example!) but I do think we already live in an age of remarkable abundance, for which many, maybe most people are shamefully ungrateful, because they insist on thinking about wealth comparatively rather than in absolute terms.
naraburns
nihil supernum
13d ago
I mean...?
The Groypers, or the Groyper Army, are a far-right group loosely defined as followers, fans, or associates of the American white nationalist political commentator, activist, and live streamer Nick Fuentes. They are named after a variant of Pepe the Frog, an Internet meme.
Basically, (mostly) young (mostly) men who are engaged with (whether seriously or as a LARP or meme) ideas on the identitarian right, in particular taking their cues from Fuentes. It's sometimes hard to tell whether they're being serious or just being incendiary for the lulz. Maybe they would say it is always or often both.
naraburns
nihil supernum
23d ago
...the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.
Do you have some example in mind, here? Everything I've seen from this latest release appears to simply confirm what has long been known: that Trump and Epstein were substantially birds of a feather, but Trump kicked Epstein to the curb for stealing his girls. Since that time, Epstein has occasionally ranted about having some kind of dirt on Trump, which for some reason he never actually used and of which there is (still!) apparently no plausible evidence.
I would stop well short of describing Trump as "innocent" of anything and yet the plainly intended implication of all these reports--Trump had sex with underage girls on Epstein island or at least with Epstein's knowledge or assistance--appears to still remain purely in the realm of the undemonstrated, indeed, in most contexts the unstated. Nobody wants to get sued for defamation, and they all know Trump will happily sue them for defamation, so they are just continuing to parrot vague claims while winking and nodding in the direction of Prince Andrew, producing many guns but none smoking, nor even bearing fingerprints.
Trump has spent his adult life a man of wealth and fame, albeit also the butt of many jokes. I would honestly be surprised to learn he hadn't had more than a little bit of illicit sexual contact in his life; I would in that case need to revise my priors on the nature of rich, powerful men. But it seems like there are a lot of people out there who are utterly convinced of the details on this, who keep telling me that some bombshell or other is going to drop (including Pam Bondi!), only for those bombshells to never actually manifest. It was the same with the whole "Russian watersports" thing ten years ago. If Trump were guilty of 1% of the weird, crazy, illegal things he's accused of doing, I would expect at some point for someone to be able to produce hard, non-circumstantial evidence of something. Instead we get lawfare on novel legal theories and this recurrent "this time, we've got him!" nonsense from breathless (and brainless) journalists.
I'm open to evidence! I would not be at all surprised to see it! But again, it seems, no such thing is on offer.
Elsewhere in this thread I mentioned Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death--if you haven't read it, I recommend it. A lot of his concerns about television apply all the more so to the Internet, particularly as people shift to Discord.
I agree with you that LLM spam is well on its way to really wrecking the whole enterprise.
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