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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.
It's easy to see why the left didn't catch onto Biden's age problem sooner: negative partisanship. Intense polarization clouds everybody's eyes and means neither side is really looking at the evidence in an unbiased way. The Right has been banging the "Biden is senile" drum for a long time now, long before it was persuasive to people outside the conservative information bubble. They'd post something like Biden flubbing numbers or stuttering as "irrefutable proof" that he had dementia, despite Biden having issues with those for his entire political career. When the evidence actually started getting more persuasive, it was still easy enough to ignore since the people most interested in it had been crying wolf for years. Some on the left saw it sooner, but most only really started believing it once it was impossible to deny during the debate.
Of course the Right is going to take a victory lap, but it's pretty silly to see them do this while also ignoring Trump's own cognitive decline. It's nowhere near as advanced as Biden's is, but compare his most recent debate performance to his debates in 2016 and its clear that his brain is slowing down as well. I'd peg the Trump of today roughly where Biden was 4 years ago, i.e. not terrible, but there are definitely worrying signs. He's always had a meandering speaking style, but it's gotten noticeably worse over time. There's funny stuff too, like Trump challenging Biden to a cognitive test while in the next breath forgetting the name of his own doctor. Trump is only 3 years younger than Biden and would be older than Biden is today when he would leave the White House.
When people on the right encounter this opinion, they mirror what the Left's reaction has been for years and say that not only is it utterly ludicrous to think this, but that it's so ridiculous that the person saying it must be a liar engaging in bad faith.
"Republicans might have been right all along, but instead of lingering in that uncomfortable truth, let's consider the ways in which Republicans are still wrong and I am still right."
Don't uncharitably put words in someone else's mouth. Don't do this sort of "Rewriting someone else's post to make it sound simplistic and dumb and what I think they actually meant."
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