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Notes -
Some not-bare links, words, and a Scott watch.
1 a. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing
First, a Scott post on Biden, debate, and a personal accounting of The Big Reveal. The curtain drawn across the stage to lay bare Biden's cognitive decline for the world to see. This is the common framing and narrative, anyway. He writes:
He then suggests Biden drops out, dropping Kamala as well, and throwing in some "purple-state Governor". Like Scott, this seems rather late in the game to me. There is still plenty of time to the election, as I'm sure the Biden loyalists are also telling themselves, so anything can happen. Who knows, maybe Biden gets a war? Wars are good for incumbents.
1 b. https://eigenrobot.substack.com/p/come-on-man
Eigenrobot, Twitter poaster extraordinaire, has some good thoughts looking at the same theme, but with regards to the media. He lays some groundwork with articles speaking of Biden's potential decline as an elderly gentleman some dating back to 2017.
Finishing with something that's been mentioned here many times:
Biden is old! This reaction with CNN anchors exclaiming, "how could the Whitehouse aides forsake us" is funny. Journalists have gotten worse at their jobs, that's how. There was space and time to talk about Biden's age and its potential impact it may have on the election. All well within the Overton window, even. Some journalists did write about it-- even those in Respectable Publications. That this idea was pushed into right-wing meme territory is an apparent, notable, visible failure for journalists. Not only do they feel lied to, they feel inadequate that they allowed themselves to be lied to. An outrage!
I listened to this Q&A with Scott and Nate Silver at the allegedly controversial Manifest conference that happened in June. There's some interesting tidbits in there if you're interested in prediction markets, Nate Silver+election models, AI risk, and so on. Perhaps not anything new for your ears that these two haven't written about.
The time stamp shows Scott answering a question about AI and how that may play into the risk of future wars. He first says that wars between great powers have a good chance of going nuclear and that is bad. However you want to define "good chance", fine. Then he goes on to say how it is his impression that "often [wars between great powers happen because] everybody was trying to do brinksmanship and made a mistake".
Scott is answering questions off the cuff in an informal, impromptu format. He's not some foreign policy wonk and neither am I. Brinkmanship is a thing. Some conflicts may escalate to unwanted, outright hostilities due to brinkmanship, political grandstanding, or get accidentally'd into full blown war. My impression is that escalation is usually not a mistake, though. Ukraine is not some exception as Scott suggests.
Escalation can be a proactive, reactive, or provocative measure to induce war. Escalation can be seen as a deterrent by one side, then used as a provocation to the other, sure, but I don't think it's fair to call these things mistakes. They are realities. Over stepping, going a little to far, these things can happen between states as they do people. Maybe he means a war that led to nuclear exchange would be considered a mistake. Which is probably true if it happens.
Liberals read. Conservatives watch tv. All of Scott's excuses make perfect sense if the only information one gets from the political sphere is text. I suppose he had good reasons to doubt the credibility of all those people who said Biden was senile, I remember many of them claiming that Hillary was about to keel over in 2016 too.
What he apparently didn't do was watch the clips.
To be totally honest from time to time I go "Hmm maybe a tiny bit of TV could actually be useful", because the medium does have some actual advantages, but I would say my preference goes deeper than just politics -- I don't even like YouTube videos and will do almost anything possible to get tutorials/answers/information from written form instead. I do kind of wonder how alone I am in this, because a lot of people I speak to, and especially my age or slightly younger, vastly prefer YouTube. But I was raised in a house where the TV was rarely on (live programming), and certainly not tuned to the news. Also, not on TikTok either, so there's that. I imagine Scott is much the same.
YouTube is uniquely bad and transmitting information via video through what they incentivize and how they do it. A sub 2 minute video that gets directly to the point of its subject matter, for instance a how-to video on completing some task (car repair, video game level, homework question), while obviously superior at its intended function is less likely to appear in search results and offers next to nothing to its creator. What you tube actually incentivizes are 10 minute+ videos, with ads, that keep people watching. Effectively communicating information is, at best, a happy accident. This also occurs in text based communication as well, were a single sentence answer to a question (a personal example from recently: an excel formula I'd forgotten), will be stretched to 7+ paragraphs of useless words with at least 3 ads, one of which is a video that auto-plays, with the actual answer to the question (a single sentence often less that 10 words long) being buried in the 2nd to last paragraph. At least with text you can ctrl+F.
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