roystgnr
2d ago
You don’t like Bernie, that doesn’t mean that other people don’t.
Lots of people like Bernie. After Super Tuesday, when the vote was no longer split between anybody but him and Biden, he still got millions of votes, something like a third as many primary votes as Biden. But "a third as many as Biden" isn't enough to win a Democratic primary, and he's much less popular with independents and Republicans than with Democrats.
If Bernie was so unpopular, why did the Democratic Party have to undertake heroic action every single primary to thwart him?
The 2020 "heroic action" mentioned originally was that three candidates who were doing much worse than him or Biden dropped out of the race after (significantly after, in Warren's case) their trajectory became apparent, and picked someone to endorse instead. That's not heroic action by the Democratic Party, that's just what losing candidates do to make the loss less expensive and less embarrassing.
For other less inactive forms of Party action, though? Insanity happens at this level, where people have orders of magnitude more power than average but not much more brains than average. Why did Clinton push the "pied piper" strategy with Trump? Because she didn't think Trump had a snowball's chance in hell at winning either. If her fans overestimated Bernie's odds in the primary too, well, clearly they're just not the best estimators.
And even if Bernie couldn’t win, it would have been better to let him take his shot, lose bigly,
3 to 1. Even counting the earlier votes from when the pro-Biden block was split, it was still 2 to 1.
and put the issue to bed for good instead of creating a permanent Lost Cause myth
What would it have taken? 5 to 1?
and losing the left wing of the party for good.
Despite my expression of annoyance with Duverger's Law in another comment, I do admire the way it selectively encourages people who are bad at math to disenfranchise themselves. Though this is another way in which plurality fails "democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader", the "democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader" thing is important too. It may be for the best that people who can't hack game theory end up with less influence over mechanism design.
roystgnr
2d ago
Bernie obviously wasn't a Condorcet winner even among Democrat primary voter preferences, and probably would have done even more poorly in a general election, sure. But the non-creepy-to-the-public solution to this problem is to switch to an election method that's more clone-proof, not to get all the clones in a smoke-filled back room together to play "draw the short straw" or whatever. (As a point of fact I dispute the collusion interpretation in this particular case - Klobuchar was getting creamed when she dropped out, Buttigieg too, and Warren was getting creamed well before she dropped out - but in theory "Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win" can be a good sort of strategy to collude on in a plurality race, if only you don't mind how creepy it is to see collusion in an election.)
They're not going to switch, partly because even the people who try to improve election methods these days don't seem to be very smart about it (IRV is only one form of RCV, and it's not clone-proof either), and partly because any party insiders who are smart about election methods are probably smart enough to realize that escaping Duverger's law is a bad thing for political party insiders.
But making people sit through these sorts of weird "your favorite candidate dropped out before you even got a chance to vote" races is still a self-inflicted wound. If you put Democracy in the very name of your party, you're signing a "we'll be good at democracy" check that you'd better not bounce. The drop-out-when-you're-losing-badly system and even the smoke-filled-back-room system are probably improvements over plurality voting at democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader (though in hindsight it's hard to see how they could have done much worse), but they're not an improvement over plurality at democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader.
Imagine what the primary could have looked like under approval voting. Plurality's "Buttigieg dropped out before 46 states could vote because Biden had nearly half of South Carolina's voters" kinda looks pathetic, doesn't it? Even if the final outcome were unchanged, "Buttigieg stayed in until the end, but he only had 70% approval and Biden had 80%" would have been much more inspiring statistics. It's arguable whether we can do that in a general election without a constitutional amendment, but a party can do whatever weird superdelegate shit they want in the primary, and they ought to be able to make their primary better too.
roystgnr
2d ago
Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts
That's true for some people, but if you're smart enough to be an auto-didact, you're probably smart enough to have noticed just how bad most people are at simply reading. The biggest difference between you and the dumb kid isn't that you had more exposure to texts, it's that he had more exposure to tests - in theory there's at least some level of verification, even in the liberal arts, that he picked up what he was supposed to from the lectures and reading (at least from the Cliff's Notes). If you swear you did all the reading, you might be much smarter than him, but you also might be much dumber, and we've got no quick way to tell except to take your word for it, and even people who skipped the readings on game theory and mechanism design can intuit why that's not good enough.
In practice, those tests are also increasingly not good enough, and for some reason even the average human who can understand why "I'm self-reporting how good I was at learning" is bad still manages to get lost before they figure out that "We're self-reporting how good we are at teaching" is also bad, so the problem may just continue to get worse, at least until nobody respects college degrees as credentials much more than they respect high school degrees. A degree from the right college name at least may still certify that you had an SAT score in their range and didn't drop out for 4 years, but that's a really expensive SAT test; much safer to be in a field where you can take the PE Exam or grind LeetCode or something on top of getting your diploma.
roystgnr
2d ago
Biden was at least aware of and got on board with most of the radicalism. When Biden was a 2020 candidate, he was the sole voice of sanity in the Democratic primary on the question of whether the Presidency could govern like a kingship or whether it had to obey the constitution, but when Biden wanted to govern like a king and the Supreme Court stymied him he went on camera to decry the decision. Shortly after, he explained that "this is not a normal court"; the context on that also included his annoyance that the killjoys wouldn't even let Harvard violate anti-discrimination law at the expense of Asians.
Maybe he governed like a radical because senility made him fuzzy headed or easier to manipulate, but he was at least receptive enough to any manipulation that his hypothetical puppet masters had no problem letting him go on the air to speak for them afterward.
roystgnr
4d ago
I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal
The usual combo package that he brings to the table is almost tautological: you can't become crazy successful by doing a bunch of things that people incorrectly said were stupid unless you're the kind of crazy person who will do a bunch of things that people say are stupid. My standard fear about this is that, while Musk's "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough" philosophy is actually pretty great in most engineering disciplines (where you can just test things and see what fails and learn a lot regardless), it doesn't work so well when he finds himself in marketing or politics or other fields where you can't just quickly scrap a failed test with no other long-term consequences. My more speculative fear is that being that kind of usefully-crazy person might sometimes just be the first symptom of eventually being a destructively-crazy person. He still doesn't seem like he's on the cusp of going full Howard Hughes, and hopefully at some point on the "getting Trump re-elected" to "publicly insinuating Trump is a pedo" roller-coaster he learned a little epistemic humility, but who knows what the future holds?
As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit
Oh, wait, that brings up a good point: at least in his oversight of xAI there's no sign of humility yet, despite his explicit worries about existential risk in the past. Hopefully they'll eventually start working harder on safety and alignment than on capabilities, but I'm not sure what they've been waiting for. When a random software update hollows out your waifu so that MechaHitler III can Assume Direct Control, don't say you weren't warned.
roystgnr
9d ago
fwiw I posted my original comment and then went off and curled up in a ball shaking because it was a high stress experience for me posting it
Well, damn. I didn't upvote you originally, but I have now. I'm less likely to upvote long comments, because the longer they are the more imperfections they have, and if something highly-upvoted isn't 100% good then there's too-often someone who picks out the worst small aspect and says "Look what TheMotte agrees with!!!" ... but I hope it's clear that, even when people disagree with you, we're very glad you're here.
I think if you're toeing the PC line 100% then why would you choose to be here and be uncomfortable?
"Harry Potter had replied ... it was not a trap, it was simply a rule of how scientists operated that you had to try to disprove your own theories, and if you made an honest effort and failed, that was victory.
Draco had tried to point out the staggering stupidity of this by suggesting that the key to surviving a duel was to cast Avada Kedavra on your own foot and miss." - HPMOR
One of the lessons of that fan fic is that even the smartest characters aren't nearly as smart as they think they are, but here I think Harry is intelligently expressing the correct attitude and Draco is intelligently expressing the natural attitude. If you're in a fight, then to win you want to express your side's Correct beliefs, not undermine each other. But if you want to have correct beliefs rather than just Correct ones, then exposing your beliefs to challenge is barely even the first step in the process toward the ideal of being both the believer and the challenger.
there isn't really anything the company can do about it except hire another braver woman first (or I guess hire three women all together) because I have options for companies that aren't 100% male programmers and I go for those instead.
This is so sad to read. I'm old enough and naive enough to still think that 90s-style "just be blind to race and sex and everything else irrelevant when hiring and it'll all work out fine" is the ideal way for society to operate, but it turns out that that plus a little hysteresis is enough to make whole companies indefinitely segregated even against their own desires? You're making a good argument for company-level affirmative action programs, and an even better argument against disparate impact lawsuits.
roystgnr
9d ago
When Lucas draws from Dam Busters (1955), he takes inspiration from a film based on a genuine military operation.
Hence all his military choreography looks like it's being acted out by aircraft, not spacecraft.
His trench run didn't have inherent verisimilitude because spacecraft really need to keep thrusting forward to maintain a constant velocity, it had relative verisimilitude because essentially none of the audience has an intuitive feeling for Newtonian mechanics in a vacuum, so "why don't Luke's wingmen just spin around and shoot back?" isn't a thought that we find unavoidable.
I wonder if some modern lack of relative verisimilitude is simply because we're a more culturally fractured society now. You still don't have an astronaut in the writers' room because there just aren't enough astronauts, but there's also lots of other occupations and activities and demographics that the writers room wants to write about (because they're interesting to watch), has no expertise with (because these days people with relevant experience are less likely to be acquainted with scriptwriters), but now gets burned by mistakes about (because lots of their intended audience is acquainted with those experiences).
It gets to the point where a little bit of realism can become a fun trope subversion in itself. When Sterling Archer has tinnitus or we see a montage explaining why Hawkeye is going deaf, seeing the reminder that guns and explosions are actually cripplingly loud is amusing, even to people who go to gun ranges and always wear ear protection, because seeing Hollywood get it right in fiction is a pleasant surprise.
roystgnr
21d ago
keeps following you around as you leave your house saying "Nybbler you raped me, I'm going to shoot you."
...
it is clearly a psychiatric matter not a criminal one.
I have identified the problem.
roystgnr
23d ago
Aellas entire dataset is just her own experiences
Her largest survey had over half a million respondents.
roystgnr
24d ago
In 2025 no one is getting a struggle session for DND.
Sure they are; the struggle sessions are just run by the left now.
roystgnr
30d ago
Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.
Devon Eriksen expressed the problem with this in horrifying fashion a few weeks ago:
But what if Chesterton's Fence isn't a fence at all, but a sort of beaver dam? What if social norms came about by evolution, instead of intelligent design?
If tens of thousands of tribes come up with sets of customs based on silly ideas from their stone age ooga booga tribal religions, then a few of those are bound to have effective ones by pure accident. Then they become successful, and wipe out or absorb the other tribes. And those customs combine, and mutate, and get justified by new religions, and once again, the ones that randomly happen to be best guide their unwitting hosts to victory. But they never know the real reason why it made them successful. Because they never knew in the first place. It was all just ooga booga, and luck.
Then, millennia later, not only do they not know why the important bits are important, they don't even know which bits are the important bits. And which bits might actually be bad. Suddenly, you're playing minesweeper with your entire society. Eliminating archaic customs is like some kind of malevolent cosmic game show. Some doors have fabulous technological prizes behind them, and others have a swarm of angry Martian Death Bees. And you don't dare just decline to play the game, because if you don't, you'll be conquered and replaced by the winners. But that's also what happens if you play and lose.
And all the labels on the doors just say "Ooga Booga".
To some extent you might expect this sort of thing to be a problem that's also its own solution: if some cultures evolve poorly, well, the ones that didn't will just replace them again.
Memetic natural selection was never really a good solution. Anthropology had the "Pots, not People" movement that suggested cultural diffusion was often a peaceful spread of winning ideas rather than a violent expansion of people armed with winning ideas, but even Wiki admits that
the arrival of archaeogenetics since the 1990s ... has resulted in an increasing number of studies presenting quantitative estimates on the genetic impact of migrating populations. In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario".
You'd think that progressives would have fought harder against such a bleak dog-eat-dog view of the world, but maybe something about the typical "lots of ancient DNA survived in-place, but the Y chromosomes all came from the invaders" evidence resonates with their worldview in other ways.
But memetic natural selection probably isn't even a possible solution, today.
Thankfully, in the modern era wars of conquest are more frowned upon, and intellectual production and publication are far greater, and so the diffusion and uptake of ideas is the main source of cultural change ... but the trouble is that evolution just doesn't work the same way via that mechanism! Even if the only change to cultural evolution was that far more memes now spread horizontally (like genes in viruses) rather than vertically (like genes in mitochondria),
Meme Mitochondria prioritize your evolutionary success, but don’t really care if you enjoy the process, and don’t care about anything else.
Meme viruses prioritize sounding good, but don’t care whether you live or die. Even a meme-virus that kills you will succeed if it gets you to spread it to others.
Newly screwed up mitochondrial genes can kill a person horribly (no hyperlink for this one - it was too depressing that Google searches mostly bring up children's hospital web pages), but new screwed up viral genes can kill whole swaths of a population horribly, before the virus evolves to be less virulent or the survivors evolve resistance to it. Backing out of the metaphor, I guess that's the three possible answers to my "how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there?" question, isn't it? Either a bad new culture wrecks everything so badly that something else climbs out of the wreckage, or its badness is offensive enough to get outcompeted by less offensive forms of itself before it creates too much wreckage, or it's rejected by subcultures that eventually outbreed it. I'm hoping for #2 or #3, myself. #1 seems like the only hope of a major conservative cultural restoration, but the cost would be atrocious, and I'm not really conservative, and it's hard to forecast exactly what flavor of conservatism would be the one to come out on top afterward.
This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.
Hmm... my first impulse is to say that no apologies are necessary, and point out that grep finds a bunch of quotes from you in my personal archives that I'm happy to repay in part. That's all true, but I do notice that those quotes are from your /r/themotte days rather than from TheMotte. Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago, but if you think you've been slacking off lately, don't let me discourage you from whatever self-criticism keeps you at top form! ;-)
roystgnr
30d ago
Okay, I think I've edited out all my idiotic identity confusion from my reply. So, that said:
Always open to feedback
I actually have no negative feedback on your comment. My only other nitpick would be with:
it feels independent of comment quality
The bias here might be independent of comment quality, but it's not always large enough to be overwhelmed by comment quality. I see left-wing comments here get highly upvoted regularly, just not as highly upvoted (and not as consistently upvoted) as a right-leaning comment with the same quality would probably have been. So the effect of the bias depends greatly on comment quality: someone who's already on top of their game might not be getting too much unwarranted net negative feedback regardless of their politics, but someone who wanders in here to write right-wing cheap shots probably isn't made to feel as uncomfortable about that as they should be, whereas their left-wing counterpart probably gets scared off too quickly to consider improving instead of leaving.
roystgnr
30d ago
I know that I'm often an idiot, but since "I'm currently being an idiot" is the sort of thing that interferes with my resolutions to frequently double-check whether I'm being currently being an idiot, it's frustratingly hard for me to make that knowledge actionable.
I mistook you for the top level comment author @voters-eliot-azure - my apologies.
Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?
It's probably fair to say that the former doesn't work (it's definitely fair to say it doesn't work well, but none of the "abstinence-only education correlates with higher teen pregnancy rates" research I can find seems to be RCT-based or even adjusting for obvious confounders).
It's probably also fair (again, so many likely confounders) to say that the culture we changed away from did work pretty well.
But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here? If it had turned out that devoting some Health class time to abstinence had worked, we could have had some policy wonks discover that and institute it, and voila, problem solved. It could have been done via state laws, or via ED (when will I ever get tired of pointing out the ironies of that acronym?) funding, or just one school board at a time. But if it is correct that 1950s morality had a strong effect ... how do we get back to 1950s morality again, exactly? Or more precisely, since 1950s morality is what developed into 1990s morality, how do we get back to something that's sufficiently 1950s-like to help people but sufficiently different to avoid eventually being rejected again?
From your choice of quotes, I'm guessing your answer (and Chesterton's, were he still around) would include some sort of revival of Christianity, but the data makes that look neither necessary nor sufficient. In the USA non-Hispanic whites are around 60% Christian and have around a 30% rate of births to unmarried mothers, while for non-Hispanic blacks we see around 70% Christian and around 70% of births out of wedlock, and Asians here are at around 30% Christian but around 12% births out of wedlock.
Of course, that's just the rates of "births out of wedlock"! Currently 3/4 of Americans think that premarital sex is morally acceptable, and the vast majority of the other 1/4 must feel guilty eventually, because even decades ago 95% of middle-aged Americans had done it. Even if there's a potential level of deep, culturally-ubiquitous Christianity that could inculcate "fornication is a sin" in a way that modern Christianity can't pull off, how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there? Whatever the process, describing it as just "tell them" seems woefully inadequate. There may be some level of hysteresis making this exceptionally difficult: if 90% of your community thinks "fornication is a sin" is a theological fact, the other 10% just look like sinners and don't affect what your kids believe, but if it's 10% and 90% instead then the 10% just look like weirdos and don't affect what your kids believe, even if you're in the 10%.
You yourself got +15 upvotes saying things that I thought were quite uncool, and very right coded.
I know "they were asking for it" is a cliche of an awful thing to say, but I have to point out: you literally were [edit: the top comment literally was] asking for it, and @Hadad was wise enough to remind everyone of that in his first sentence of that comment. The line between a debate and an opinion poll is a bit of a blurry one on a forum, but I think it's clear enough that the distinction matters. If he'd presented those sentiments as if they were supposed to be a persuasive argument, I'd absolutely have downvoted them, but giving an honest (and bookended by caveats!) expression of his sentiments in response to an explicit query for general sentiments was fine. I still couldn't bring myself to upvote it, sorry @Hadad, but half of the point of this place is seeing what people say when they're not being squelched, and avoiding the squelching is important for that.
I'd say your own [the] top comment's vote score (currently +18 -24) would be more clearly deserving of complaint (except that that would go over even more poorly, as "people can't downvote me [us]!" always does). There are problems with your [the] comment that should have been fixed, but I could surely find comments here that had bigger problems but got a pass because they were right-leaning rather than (in context) left-leaning.
roystgnr
1mo ago
There’s little glory in pushing the button.
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
It must have still felt glorious enough to the people behind the machine guns, or they and their immediate successors wouldn't have been so eager to fight in a war where both sides had heavily mechanized.
Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button
From a pragmatic point of view there clearly should be, but in practice Rosie The Riveter etc. don't get glorified until the battles have already begun, at which point it's too late to do more than merely expand a winning system that's hopefully already been created unheralded. Even this year, when we're all arguing about tariffs and protectionism and such left and right, the arguments from the left are mostly of the form "why wouldn't we want to make Pareto trades?" with no hint of awareness of the systemic military implications, and the arguments from the right are mostly of the form "why are we letting them take all our super-valuable green pieces of paper?", focusing on competing long-term allies and on non-dual-use production even when the effects of that undermine industries with security applications.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Just to round out the space of anecdotes a little more: when I've called out LLMs in the past I've sometimes had them "correct" their incorrect answer to still be incorrect but in a different way.
(has anyone seen an LLM correct their correct answer to be correct but in a different way? that would fill the last cell of the 2x2 possibility space)
They're still very useful in cases where checking an answer for correctness is much easier than coming up with a possible answer to begin with. I love having a search engine where my queries can be vague descriptions and yet still come up with a high rate of reasonable results. You just can't skip the "checking an answer for correctness" step.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I also can't imagine "somewhat subhuman", but everybody is in a bubble on these things. The percent of Americans who say that "sex between an unmarried man and woman" (not specifically prostitution! just sex!) is "morally acceptable" is at an all-time high ... of only 76%. If that also seems surprisingly low to you, then you're probably in a liberal bubble (93%) rather than in a conservative one (57%), and you might also be in a younger bubble (I'm seeing conflicting polls for the 1970s, but they're in the 30%-45% range). I'd bet polling results for the moral acceptability of prostitution would be lower: support for decriminalizing prostitution is still only around 50%, and presumably that includes people who still think it should be shameful but just don't think shameful things should all be illegal.
And as for "damaged goods" ... to go back to OP's example, Aella has been publicly looking for "someone to get happily married to" while aware of the issues there for about 5 years now, still fruitlessly. IMHO the phrase "damaged goods" is going too far, but "typically incompatible with marriage-minded men" might be fair, right? She's helped other married men break their wedding vows "over and over, with small variations on the amount of years and the guilt they brought with it", and though she makes a sympathetic case for them, making that case strengthens the conclusion that wedding vows just aren't her thing. It's understandably hard to find someone who will swear "for better or worse" if they fear "for better or else" in return.
That's not necessarily the end of the world. It sounds like she's made a lot of friends and a lot of money, and obviously she doesn't have trouble finding sex (or presumably short-term relationships) either. She could probably be happy with all that. And if she can't ... well, too many of her critics seem to be cruel or stupid or both (yes, I am aware of the irony here), whereas she seems to be a smart person who at least tries to be kind, so hopefully if it turns out that her decisions really needed to be criticized, she'll eventually get around to joining in on the criticism.
roystgnr
1mo ago
That sets a single national standard for benefits
How do they take cost-of-living differences into account?
roystgnr
1mo ago
The theoretical justification for it is something analogous to the idea of a Universal Turing Machine, though obviously not rigorous.
If we come up with any other test to determine "human-level intelligence", a test that can't be beaten by a "spiky" non-general intelligence that outperforms in unexpected areas (I'm old enough to remember when chess performance was a generally-accepted sign of intelligence!), then someone judging a Turing test can just use that other test. If it turns out that for some reason an AI really can't understand how to respond to a weird hypothetical about upside-down tortoises, then the judge can ask them about upside-down tortoises. If computers had sucked at chess, a judge could have asked the AI to play chess. Computers only start to beat a Turing test reliably when there's nothing a judge can come up with that they can't beat.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Here of all places I should find it easy to remember to avoid oversimplification and overconfidence, but after a perfunctory "I'd bet" I pretty much dropped all expression of uncertainty, and you were right to call me out on that.
I'm not even saying you're wrong
It wouldn't be crazy to go that far. I (sadly, under the circumstances) think I've described the most likely explanation, but that doesn't mean it's more likely than not, because there's only one way for it to be right and there's at least a half dozen ways for it to be wrong. Even if every alternative I can think of seems much less likely, their sum (plus the sum of alternatives I couldn't think of) might be more likely.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I'm making a lot of soup from very little meat here, I admit. The LAPD chief later said "I know that situation you’re referring to, with the member of the media. We saw that, we’re very concerned about it and we’re looking into that.", so hopefully there'll be more context later; I'm not finding anything in a quick search now.
It's hard to imagine what any exculpatory context will look like, though. I am somewhat sympathetic to anyone who tries to enforce Niven's Law 1a ("Never throw shit at an armed man.") but ends up accidentally enforcing Niven's Law 1b ("Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man."), but I'd be surprised if that applies in this case. There's about 4 or 5 seconds after she's hit before we hear the sound of anyone (not necessarily the original cop; the camera has turned by this point) firing a second shot, and in the brief bit of that we have on video her assailant is lowering his gun barrel, not trying to adjust his aim or get another round ready, so he at least doesn't seem to think he's in any kind of imminent danger.
It's possible that he legitimately thought he spotted some danger before the shot, but realized it was a false positive and calmed down immediately afterward? That may be what happened in the famous Austin case from 2020: the video of a kid standing by himself harmlessly and getting his skull literally caved in by a beanbag round looks pretty damning, but the kid was apparently repeatedly throwing shit at the cops earlier, and the cop who shot him had just gotten multiple (incorrect) verbal reports that the kid now had a large rock in hand. The exculpatory evidence has a bit of a "cops closing ranks to protect a cop" vibe to it, and even the police report noted that there was no way the kid had a large rock as claimed, but the DA who dropped the case is so famous for conflict with the cops ("ran on a platform of ending prosecutions for low-level drug possession to focus on violent crimes, holding police officers accountable for misconduct, and pursuing restorative justice ... advocated against cash bail and promoted diversion programs to prevent felony convictions ... was asked to leave the funeral of fallen Austin Police Officer ... due to Garza’s history of prosecuting police officers") that I can't imagine him dropping this case unless he was confident he couldn't win it.
Switching voting systems would help a little bit with the issues with sequencing too. Right now, typically a handful of states decide which handful of a large candidate pack are "serious candidates" for Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday knocks it down to 2, and everybody else just gets to pick between those 2. With something like approval, the ordering of votes still matters (because you still have to vote tactically, and what that means depends on who the front-runners are), but it can be hard to impossible for an earlier state to "knock out" a candidate who's more popular in a later state. If the race's narrative and polling all looks like it's A vs B, but everybody in your state would prefer C, with plurality it's not safe to vote for C unless you don't have a preference between A and B, but with approval you can turn your A vote into an {A,C} vote without risking getting B elected, your opponents can turn your B vote into a {B,C} vote without risking getting A elected, and C can actually win.
On the other hand, running a campaign is expensive. If the early states like A and B, but later states would prefer C, even if you have enough C voters to make C the winner, you have to hope that C knows this and is willing to risk the expense of waiting on all of you. You're right that everything would be driven by polling.
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