Shakes
1d ago
You clearly aren’t reading what I’m writing because I have to repeat the exact point I just made: I am using the word “superintelligence” in exactly the sense you describe. I said that all the compute being built would be used because the possible uses of superintelligence are infinite.
Shakes
1d ago
Yeah, Trump started using “Superintelligence” and I thought “that is better in certain contexts”. Such as the one in which I used it. You yourself were arguing that SI has a distinct meaning from AI — would you not use SI at all now even when it’s the better term?
Shakes
2d ago
I am speaking in the hypothetical. Yet-to-be-built compute will be used because demand for Superintelligence approaches infinity.
Shakes
2d ago
This is not really the thread or the moment in which I want to have this debate. But for the sake of mutual understanding I will say: your position reads to me as, “Yeah we won militarily but we don’t like the war and want to surrender, therefore, we did lose.”
Shakes
2d ago
Hm. Maybe you and I have gotten off on the wrong foot too many times or something. And I apologize if I’ve been rude to you. So you’re welcome to get your licks in.
But I’m also not a dumb or mean guy and we’ve had this argument many times now and I think you know what I think. And I hope that in the new year, let’s say, we can have more productive conversations.
Shakes
2d ago
Is it still a military success if Congress defunds the war Vietnam style?
That’s a military victory and a political loss. Neither invalidates the other.
Shakes
2d ago
I mean, I know what you’re saying and if you bought Cisco at the bubble your investment would have gone down 80%. But today it would be worth twice what it was worth then. Multiples more if you bought at the post-crash bottom.
Shakes
2d ago
I use both terms interchangeably and in fact “Superintelligence” expresses my argument in that sentence better than “Artificial intelligence”. “Superintelligence can be used to solve, by definition, almost any problem.” “Artificial Intelligence” does not carry the same semantic meaning here.
I generally prefer “Superintelligence” to “Artificial Intelligence” but “AI” to “SI”. I use it because it is genuinely a better term to describe what we are talking about in most applications. (Which, for what it’s worth, is also why Trump picked it.)
Shakes
2d ago
Boebert was too lazy or stupid to make the requisite phone calls.
I'm glad Boebert lost, she was the last of the "MAGA Barbies" and they hurt the Republican brand in countless ways.
Shakes
2d ago
To be explicit, I simply do not get why "50% + 1" is anything other than an arbitrary standard for passing rules that govern a whole. I mean, sure, its an intuitively pleasing one, but does it correlate with better outcomes than, say 53%? 55%?
Ok, I think I understand your point better now in a way I didn't before. I misunderstood you.
I counter that democratic majorities are not stable. A 51% majority is constrained by the public. It can't act in inherently unpopular ways or it will lose its majority in the next election. It can't use its majority to rig the next election because of the other checks and balances inherent in the system.
An escalating see-saw between Democrat majorities and Republican majorities passing narrow majority laws is not the healthiest dynamic, but it's healthier than a system in which nobody can ever pass anything.
As I understand it, the Civil War happened at a time when there was no Filibuster, or at least it wasn't used as such. I don't think it would have prevented the war, mind, but it might have given slaveholding states a little reassurance that they wouldn't get steamrolled if they stayed in the Union.
I wrote out a response to this and then I thought some more and I wondered if maybe you had a point, but came back to thinking that it would not have made much of a difference. Republicans in 1860 won a plurality in the House and tied the Democratic Party in the Senate. (The House was split between six parties, meaningfully three.) The Republicans didn't have a majority that could have steamrolled slavery. The South was incensed by the prospect of any national power used to restrict slavery at all.
Filibuster from the Constitution is an interesting thought experiment though. I wonder what parts of American history would have changed. A lot of the compromises before the Civil War itself would not have passed -- I think the Missouri Compromise is dead, for example. Maybe some of those votes against were "fake" and would have switched with a higher ceiling. A lot of the early tariffs would have been impossible. I think a lot of the Progressive Era reforms would be dead, but not the New Deal. You'd still have the Civil Rights Act, Hart-Celler, the ADA, Obamacare, the 19th Amendment, Sherman Antitrust, the Food and Drug Act, the entire New Deal, the charter of the Bank of the United States, the Fed.
The more I think about it maybe this is a compelling argument, and I can't find many examples off the top of my head of important legislation that would not have passed the Senate with a permanent filibuster.
Shakes
2d ago
I think that we will eventually swallow all that capacity and more. Superintelligence can be used to solve, by definition, almost any problem, and there are functionally infinite problems. How to drive cars, how to design a new rocket ship part, how to identify defective potatoes on the factory line, how to build robots to paint your house, how to build more efficient chips to power the robots, how to build factories to build the chips. ChatGPT, process these dexa scans and blood work and design a diet for me to lose twenty pounds by summer. Make it more suitable for an Asian palate. Automate a weekly grocery list on a $120 budget and ship everything to my address. Find a cheap vacation rental near the beach in August. Scan this satellite imagery of Nunavik for likely undiscovered oil reserves. Design a 3D print of an art deco cornice to be glued above my mantle. Scan this image to match this color of paint. Spitball ideas for how to process and sell 3,000 pounds of spinach before it rots. Design the marketing. Anything.
That this hasn't happened yet is because 1) the AI isn't quite good enough yet 2) most people do not understand the scale of change or even what's possible.
At the same time I'm not meaningfully worried by a pause. A pause can basically be marketing. A pause might even lead to a buildout, if voters are assuaged that datacenters have been defeated forever so now we're going to give "compute campuses" a try.
Shakes
2d ago
Trump was told that it would be unpopular and he did it anyways. He is saying that he stopped Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and that he would do it all over again.
Shakes
2d ago
Malice as a fantasy is a sign that you are lashing out emotionally. You want people who didn't want to lose their jobs to lose their jobs? I wouldn't gloat about that if I were you.
Shakes
2d ago
how do you feel about the procedural aspects of how the war was started?
Voters feel betrayed. I don't know that there is any procedural difference that would have mattered. I don't know that a different explanation would have solved what is perhaps an emotional problem. Perhaps more salesmanship on the war would have been more offensive, felt like an even bigger betrayal.
I think there is something deeper afoot than a communications problem.
It is my observation that leaders in a Democracy have a ten-year lifespan. I mean this in the sense that your dog lives a dozen years, a man has a natural lifespan of something like eighty years. A natural lifespan can be extended but it's more often a ceiling. Most leaders don't even last ten years. Those who do are epoch-defining. Thatcher was kicked out after ten years by her own party, not even for good reasons, almost like an impulse. French presidents get two terms of five years in a system designed to make the presidency akin to a monarchy. Merkel lasted longer than ten, and her tenure defined an entire era of European politics. Trump, likewise, enters this pantheon by virtue of Biden's term, and yet having been a leader for the Republicans the entire time. Ten years or thereabouts seems to me like something of a rule and not a coincidence and I think it merits explaining.
(It's different in monarchical and dictatorial systems but I think a similar constraint is at play. Generally ministers change over more frequently than every ten years. Bismarck, who lasted as Chancellor for about twenty years, formed a cabinet that basically totally changed over ten years in. The Chinese were operating on ten-year leadership cycles until Xi Jinping. Putin has had to shuffle around his government quite a few times now. And frequently those systems that don't make this kind of shuffle blow up in revolution, or completely stagnate.)
My theory is that ten years is roughly the amount of time it takes for people to totally change into a new phase of life. Kids become teenagers, teenagers become adults, adults reach middle-age, then age. Individuals pass through markers at different times but within a population changes averages out to about ten years.
One of the key markers of Trump's success has been his total dominance of media. He essentially invented twitter for politics. His mastery of the rally as a genre gave him a direct connection to his base, which always gave him better instincts than even his smartest advisers. He fundamentally re-ordered the news cycle as such, entire media ecosystems emerged downstream of the changes he wrought in how people consume news.
It's been ten years now since Trump worked through the system and people do consume news differently now. The Democrats are not the same shrill resistance libs they used to be. Trump's rally base isn't a wire directly to the American psyche anymore, the people who still go are a particular kind of people. Media patterns are different. This is why I'm hesitant to say Trump just needed to sell the war better: Trump did give speeches justifying the war, nobody watched them. I don't think it's simple Trump fatigue either (although that's what everybody will say). I think it's more a fundamental shift in how people live, which implies a fundamental shift in how they think of Trump, which, honestly, at this point, is not much at all.
A lot of MAGA is going to absorbed into the core American synthesis, for both parties.
Yes, this is essentially my thesis. This is what happened with, e.g., pardon the grandiosity, Napoleon and Alexander. I suspect that part of MAGA is going to be absorbed into the system and assimilated in ways that would be even surprising to MAGA itself, let alone Democrats. There is another part of MAGA that will refuse to assimilate and possibly fuse with the Groypers, or be scapegoated for Trump's sins, or whatever. I use the comparison to Napoleon especially because it's possible that this all goes "South" and Trump and MAGA suffer bigger losses than anyone can even imagine right now. At what point would you have abandoned Napoleon? And yet, essentially, Napoleon won in a much bigger sense because the political order that defeated him had to accommodate itself to him after all. This is one extremely plausible theory for what happens next (although not the only one -- Republicans could just win in 2028 and then we go back to the seesaw).
Shakes
2d ago
The filibuster is not an integral feature of democracy, republican norms, constitutional government, etc. It is an obstacle to enacting even extremely basic legislation without supermajority consent, which is extremely impractical. It actually encourages a dramatic blowup some day, because eventually the weight of our sins will pile up until a supermajority is given. What happens for example of Republicans don't turn it around, and Democrats win in 2028 with 2026 numbers? The rate of change will escape velocity and probably lead to a lot of really bad outcomes.
But I think I'm getting away from your point. I support getting rid of the filibuster and having a system similar to basically every other bicameral state. Almost none of the 50 states requires a supermajority to pass business in the Senate. I don't believe supporting a system like that, which works fine basically everywhere, requires me to logically continue to direct democracy.
Shakes
2d ago
Europe has a lot of problems that go beyond immigration. Look at the mounting French debt crisis. They do not have the money to continue to live in the manner in which they have become accustomed. Macron has been unable to do much of anything about it. The French do not seem to want to do anything about it. Le Pen wants to address it with a modest savings package that can not go far enough. Melechon wants to default (lol).
My experience dealing with Europeans is that they are unwilling to make the hard choices necessary to sustain their sovereignty. They are very confused when America does, and in fact use America as an example of what not to do. This has burned them on Russia, gas prices, Chinese imports, tech, SpaceX, etc. etc.
Shakes
2d ago
? I didn't realize we were debating the question of representative democracy as such. I'm not sure supporting the end of the filibuster logically entails supporting direct democracy. Sounds like a disaster.
As for how "the system is designed" -- the filibuster was never "designed". The Founding Fathers did not intend that the Senate require a supermajority to pass business. (Not that I would agree if they had.) The Filibuster as it currently exists emerged out of speech and debate norms which no longer apply. It was never intended as a constraint on actually governing. That the filibuster has stuck around using the vaneer of tradition is because it's a perfect excuse for never doing anything.
Shakes
2d ago
I really don't like making grand pronouncements (I think it's a bit narcissistic) but since I seem to have a reputation on The Motte I think it's only fair to take my licks:
- Midterms were worse than I thought. I would have guessed 49-53 Senate seats for Dems and 220-230 seats in the House.
- The collapse is so bad that I think it necessitates some new theories about how American politics works. I.e. I don't think Trump's record right now is worse than Bush in 2006 or Obama in 2010 or Biden in 2022. Voters clearly disagree? Inflation reached 8% in 2022, gas right now is lower adjusted for inflation than it was under Obama.
- Obviously, Iran is very unpopular. I still accept Trump's judgment that it was the right thing to do and I still believe that the war is (plainly) a military success. (Call me crazy!)
- Trump is a fighter and is going to strike back. I think all calls for his impeachment or step down are bad politics and also bad reads of Donald Trump.
- Texas with Blue governance would be worse value than California or Illinois, because you don't even have the nice beaches and beautiful cities. But predictions that Texas is about to precipitously decline are overblown. (Texas has a lot of hot smart and beautiful people.)
- I think the AI buildout will probably not stop, although it will have to reassess. I maintain that AI is so powerful that it's bad for Democrats to hand it over to Republicans even if it polls extremely well in the short and medium-term. I expect that a lot of AI Pause rhetoric will merely grease the wheels for Dems and tech to come to a new arrangement.
- A lot of my friends who were loyal Trump guys are crashing out now. I do think it's still too soon to call this the death of MAGA, and there is no going back to the old establishment Republican consensus.
- We're probably closing the window, globally, on a 10-year exuberance of populism and replacing it with something else. To those inclined to gloat, I suspect that whatever comes next will actually be worse for everybody. (For example, imagine a MAGA-Groyper fusion.) (You're going to miss Trump when he's gone.)
- I think the Groypers might be earning a place in the future.
- There have been a lot of predictions about Dems undergoing a realignment 10 years after the Republican realignment. I don't think this will happen at all. DSA and center-lib-left Dems will coexist quite peaceably in the way that only political allies that hate each other can.
- The results were worse than I expected and losing will carry a lot of political consequences. But I maintain that midterms still matter for very little. The powers that Democrats are unlocking for themselves (such as imperiling the future of a Republican SCOTUS) are weak compared to the powers of the president.
- I do not believe that Democrats are on the cusp of a permanent one-party state or any other despair narratives I see on the right. I don't think this will be true even if they do win in 2028.
Blah blah blah, words words words, excuses excuses, feel free to get your licks in now.
Shakes
3d ago
It really depends. I wouldn't be so confident. Most staffers, in general, are pretty powerless, the vast majority spend their time on tasks like the Senator's email and arranging flights and cars. Most of them have to answer calls from constituents which means a lot of time spent talking with what I call "the UFO people". They have to arrange favors for veterans and constituents and write home to help people who have questions about their benefits. Then when they get to actually exercise policy, it's on drafting bills that won't make it out of committee.
There are a few staffers who are very powerful, perhaps more powerful than the average Congressmen. I.e., Susan Collins has been chair of Appropriations, which writes the budget, and she's been around for so long that I bet whoever's served her staff for a long time would have immense and obscure power. But from the outside looking in it's actually hard to make strong pronouncements about which staffers actually have power. It's very opaque.
Also, not all the groypers are necessarily young. Everybody knows who Nick is now and he has some unexpected acolytes. Clearly someone is keeping him well-informed. I don't know enough to say confidently whether those people are powerful or not. Everyone in Washington likes to imagine themselves an insider.
Shakes
3d ago
I hope Democrats get rid of it. It's simply good policy. A majority should govern and it is bad for democracy to invent excuses and traditions of impotence.
Shakes
3d ago
I'm probably the most openly partisan MAGA Republican floating around here but I'd be shocked if I were really the only Republican voter.
Shakes
3d ago
My read is that the "50%+ Republican staffer groyper hegemony" is fear porn that conflates MAGA and true groypers. Both Democrats and Establishment Republicans have motivated interest and simple bias to do this. But there are groypers running around on the Hill, I've met plenty. And I've heard that Fuentes gets his news directly from sources in the White House.
Shakes
4d ago
when I was convinced Trump was going to do his clownishly stupid Iran strikes
I thought the Trump's clownishly stupid war against Iran
Instead, his administration quickly became the administration for Epstein, Billionaires and Israel. His second term has been an administration so riddled with clownish levels
the terrible, awful, no good generic GOP derp
FYI Trump tried to redo the 2020 census and Republican leaders told him no, Trump tried to exclude illegal immigrants from the 2020 census in his first term and John Roberts told him now, and now that the 2030 census is coming up Trump is trying to keep illegal immigrants from being counted there too.
“Superintelligence” is a more useful term in several contexts than “AI” was. If every time now you hear the term “Superintelligence” you freak out about Trump, that is actually the definition of TDS.
Try again.
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