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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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The remarkable predictive accuracy of Nick Fuentes on the Israel Conflict

I'm sure most here have heard of Nick Fuentes, maybe seen clips where he's said something funny or outrageous. I do not consider myself a follower of Fuentes, I have my criticisms of him and his movement, but I have to give credit to Fuentes for churning out consistently correct predictions.

When it came to the Israeli-Gaza war, Nick Fuentes registered these predictions in this short clip, in summary from just the first 60 seconds:

  • The Oct. 7 attack is going to be the tripwire that enables Israel to finally solve the Gaza Question with ethnic cleansing.
  • Israel is going to conduct a "brutal campaign against Gaza" which they "know Iran has to respond to."
  • In doing so, their retaliation against Gaza will knowingly provoke a retaliation from Iranian-backed militias against Israel.
  • This will give Israel an excuse to widen the conflict and "to do what they always wanted to do, which is bomb Iran's nuclear program".
  • This will initiate war between Iran and Israel, and Israel will draw the United States into the war with Iran- Israel brings in the United States to "put Iran in check."
  • This will culminate in an end to the regime in Syria and an end to the regime in Iran.
  • This is the big play Israel is making.

Nick Fuentes registered these predictions on October 8th, less than 24 hours after the Hamas attack on Israel. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say Fuentes may have registered the best predictions out of anyone in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7th (feel free to keep me honest here if you think someone else was even more on the money).

Hindsight bias being what it is, the accuracy of Fuente's predictions may seem less impressive than they actually are. But I still remember the huge amount of uncertainty leading up to the Gaza campaign, including a high degree of uncertainty over the strength of Israel's retaliation against Gaza- whether they would show restraint or even put boots on the ground in the first place, and even if they put boots on the ground would it be a relatively short and mostly symbolic campaign. Certainly at the time "Israel is going to ethnically cleans Gaza, provoke escalations from Iranian militias, and widen the conflict to try to draw the US into war with Iran" was a prediction registered by not very many people.

Fuentes drew a huge amount of criticism for vocally opposing Trump's campaign due to his belief that Israel would draw Trump into war with Iran. A lot of that criticism comes from the "Bronze Age Pervert" sphere, and BAP is a sharp critic of Fuentes for Fuente's low-IQ obsession with da Joos. But we can contrast Fuente's sober-minded and accurate predictions with BAP's own incoherent analysis of the conflict he published last week, chalking it up to some old-man syndrome while remaining baffled as to why Israel is pursuing the strategy it has engaged in since the beginning of the conflict.

Nick Fuente's live-stream on Rumble in the aftermath of the US bombing campaign against Iran had something like 66,000 live viewers, with overall viewers on that VOD now around 530k, putting his viewership on par with Ben Shapiro despite the fact Fuentes is banned from YouTube so his content is relegated to a much less mainstream platform.

One of the most remarkable parts of the Ted Cruz / Tucker Carlson debate was that Ted Cruz:

  • Said one of his primary motivations to become Senator was to be Israel's greatest defender.
  • AIPAC is not a strong enough lobby.
  • Said that his support for Israel is personally motivated by God's command in Genesis that those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.

And then, just a few minutes later, Ted Cruz accused Tucker Carlson of being "obsessed with Israel" for Carlson's pointed questions on AIPAC as a foreign lobby. The turnaround of why are you so obsessed coming from someone who just said God has commanded him to support Israel is just a discredited attempt to derail the conversation.

Fuente's obsession with Israel appeared to result in what is perhaps the most accurate prediction of the series of events following Oct. 7th among anyone else.

As far as punditry goes, he was right on the money and deserves credit where due. Whatever that is.

Fuentes being in the ballpark of accurate wouldn't be a big deal, given how much pundits talk, except calling attention to this instance drives a lot of people towards needless argumentation and grievance. I'd be interested to hear what people want to be said instead, and by whom, in contrast to what Fuentes is saying. Given he can drive up so much ire even when apparently accurate.

Has Gaza been ethnically cleansed, or is this ethnic cleansing ongoing? If so, that's news to me.

Gaza is already ethnically spotless; it's basically all Palestinian Arabs, and all Sunni at that, with few exceptions.

Ethnic cleansing, as a distinct concept from genocide, has traditionally involved there being a territory where the population being cleansed is cleansed to. Thus far, Israel has not succeeded in finding such a territory.

Under a very loose definition of "ethnic cleansing", the IDF forcing Jews out of Gaza in the 2005 withdrawal (in some cases unwillingly) fits the definition, but is hardly the central example you're looking for.

You can bet on Conservative inc ( yes even Trump) doing Israel's bidding and you'd be right 10 out of 10 times. The level of influence AIPAC has over the us is disgusting, especially when contrasted with the histrionics we got from the left and the media for 4 years alleging all sorts of non-existent bullshit wrt Trump/Russia. At one point they were throwing a hissy fit about Russian citizens existing in the vague proximity of Trump.

The Oct. 7 attack is going to be the tripwire that enables Israel to finally solve the Gaza Question with ethnic cleansing.

Has it? Was Israel unable to, before? Are 18+ months later, is Gaza being ethnically cleansed?

Israel is going to conduct a "brutal campaign against Gaza" which they "know Iran has to respond to."
In doing so, their retaliation against Gaza will knowingly provoke a retaliation from Iranian-backed militias against Israel.

How is this different than the pre-October 7 Iran-backed terror attacks?

This will give Israel an excuse to widen the conflict and "to do what they always wanted to do, which is bomb Iran's nuclear program".

Was the stated motivation state-sponsored terrorism, or progress towards nuclear weapons?

This will initiate war between Iran and Israel, and Israel will draw the United States into the war with Iran- Israel brings in the United States to "put Iran in check."

Bombing initiating war isn't much of a prediction, so let's focus on the US - was the US drawn-in by Israel or self-motivated and seizing an opportunity?

This will culminate in an end to the regime in Syria and an end to the regime in Iran.

When did the bombing occur, and when did the regime in Syria end?

This is the big play Israel is making.

Are we going back to the theory that Israel deliberately let the October 7 attack happen, to use it as justification for war in Gaza?

These predictions are pretty damn weak, man. Fuentes isn't making any good predictions. "The terrorist attack on Israel will encourage Israel to attack back!" is not prescience. Nor is proclaiming that this is what gives us license to attack Iran's nuclear facilities; we've been dealing with their attempts to go nuclear for years and years at this point.

Predicting retaliatory violence after an attack isn't foresight.

"The terrorist attack on Israel will encourage Israel to attack back!" is not prescience.

Not very many people predicted the extent of the destruction of Gaza, not to mention that escalation path that would ensue from that response. Many here were consistently underpredicting the Israeli response every step of the way.

The Israeli response has been quite measured -- Gaza still exists, and its population has even climbed, last I checked. They should go harder, but they seem unwilling.

People were protesting and demanding ceasefires almost immediately after October 7. I assume this was because they expected destruction.

At least on the left some personalities like Cenk Uygur - whose geopolitical acumen I don't value particularly highly - were explicitly condemning Hamas because they thought Israel would just absolutely wreck Gaza in response. (This bit faded as Oct. 7 became more distant and now it's mostly Israel criticism)

A lot of these people overestimated the damage (they assumed much heavier starvation much earlier on) they didn't downplay it.

In that case it should be easy to provide an example of others that made the same predictions.

Sure, I personally responded to October 7th with "oh, damn, Gaza's gonna get fuuuucked."

Didn't we all? One only needed to have looked at the Palestinian-to-Israeli death ratio in any given scuffle to have known how this was gonna turn out

I think what's actually going on with Fuentes is that he's alienated with what he sees as the low-class nature of modern conservatism. Here for instance he attacks conservatives for being "openly hostile to all the good things about liberals" and being "low-IQ hillbillies who take pride in being simple and hate the rich:"

https://x.com/FuentesUpdates/status/1908187813117411525

The problem with populist political movements is that the people who rise to the top tend to have psychological traits more characteristic of elites, intelligence, drive, and ambition, which wind up alienating them from the populist masses.

Bold of you to claim that intelligence, drive, and ambition, are qualities incompatible with being a populist.

You, Fuentes, and Hanania are all coping hard. If somone disagrees with your takes it must be because they are stupid and lazy not because of legitimate differences.

That said, congratulations to Fuentes for being the first gay man invited to speak on Iranian State TV.

Ah, yes, notoriously high class… Nick Fuentes?

At the risk of sounding, I dunno, petty? Did Fuentes put any money on the line, did he find someone to take the other side of his position, reduce the bet to fairly specific terms, and have someone willing to judge who won by a given deadline?

Bryan Caplan puts money on all of the bets he makes and chronicles them in a wiki he maintains. He's got a great record against some very smart people.

There's specific lose conditions, plus incentives to be accurate/not bullshit.

Fuentes also didn't put any specific confidence estimates on those bets, so he can always walk back the ones that were off base if he wants "oh that was a long shot anyway." Well you never said if you thought it was a 10% chance of a 90% chance, so I guess you can retroactively change that belief.

This is how pundits operate. Throwing a bunch of vague predictions against a wall, phrased to feel specific and of course they never let someone take up the other side of the position who can then call them out later.

Like when I was talking about how Tariffs would play out I really tried to be specific enough that I can be judged wrong and lay out a strict 'I was wrong' scenario.

Speaking of, looks like the time is ticking down for some more 'permanent' deals to be worked out in the next month or I'll have missed the mark on the most recent extension.

Edit: And I'm still confident (80% to be specific) that they get it done soon. 20% is reserved b/c we're in a time where crazy events can happen in short time frames.

EU is allegedly pretty close:

https://archive.is/WmZRp

As is India:

https://archive.is/1An8l

Caplan's record, as he readily admits, is somewhat less impressive when you account for the fact that he wins by consistently betting in favor of consensus and the future being like the past. He's not successfully predicting black swan events, but arbitraging others' overestimation of the frequency of black swan events.

Yes.

My point is he records everything and has a clear counterparty rather than just spitting predictions with no skin in the game and crowing that he was right when a few of them land.

But Fuentes ain't predicting black swans either. "Israel and Iran will try to hurt each other" is a generally reliable prediction at its base.

And once you've been given the information "Hamas just killed a bunch of Israeli Civilians, in Israel" there's a few straightforward guesses from there RE: Israeli response.

I'll say there's zero chance I would have correctly predicted the Pager operation, even in the broad "Mossad wipes out Hezbollah's entire command in a single attack" strokes.

But "Hezbollah gets decimated by Israeli espionage" is not a wild, out there guess by any means.

If Fuentes was specific enough to say "The U.S. drops bunker busters on Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities" as a likely outcome I'd start to give him credit.

Of course this is going to end with Iran conducting a nuclear test. You know that, right? The ayatollah will take a break from tweeting out relationship advice and repeal the fatwa(or reinterpret it) and Iran will launch a volley of conventional missiles which get through and then conduct a nuclear test.

My continual take away is that I don’t like war being called ethnic cleansing.

It’s just war. It’s even a just war based on any literal thing I can think of in our psyche over the last several decades, much less the last two thousand years.

My prediction is Iran squirreled away its nuclear stuff and they’ll bomb a few bases and we’ll all call it a day - no idea if the regime is falling or not.

And I’m sure Israel wants leaders around them in various countries that don’t want to slaughter them completely.

Fighting Hamas is a just war. Reprisals against civilians, on the other hand, are broadly prohibited. Since Hamas has a vested interest in entangling the two, it is very hard for Israel to keep its hands clean.

The strongest criticisms of Israel involve the parts of it which appear profoundly uninterested in doing so. There are more of these than I would like.

Regardless of intent, every dead civilian lets critics pattern-match to My Lai. That’s the kind of event which shaped the antiwar psyche.

Even though they're outlawed and abhorrent, reprisals are still a frequent though unfortunate part of war and occupation. They have happened in many cases without a significant genocidal or ethnic cleansing objective.

True, but they don’t help beat the allegations.

It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.

But of course that would come at some cost in Israeli lives. Understandably not popular in Israel.

It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.

Sure, and then they couldn't hit Hamas. This is the same Hamas that builds command centers under hospitals, then accuses Israel of war crimes when said command center gets bombed. Anyway, the various violations Israel is accused of are typically either nonsense (that is, there's no such rule in international law) or they are violations of treaties Israel has not agreed to, such as Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention.

It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.

I really don't think it would. I would describe their current conduct as studiously avoiding the general populace, but the nature of the place of combat means even an 'A' student is going to kill or injure a ton of "civilians" (a term I hesitate to use when the population has elected Hamas, and the only people who would have a chance if another election were held were people calling Hamas too soft on killing Jews).

It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.

I would say that Israel is not treated quite fairly here. Russia is way more indifferent to civilian casualties, they hammer the energy infrastructure of ukraine more, blew up a fucking dam and so on. And yet no one is seriously accusing them of being genocidal.

Israel decided instead of doing the fast, cheap and easy way - cover from end to end with napalm and throw a match, to actually put their men in street and urban fights. And also why no is accusing Egypt of starving Gaza when there is another border there. And in theory this is Egypt territory. And they didn't just throw some dry ice or lpg in the tunnels. Now probably not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they care of PR and anyway they are paying the price of a genocide anyway.

no one is seriously accusing them of being genocidal.

Ukraine's population is 20x the size of the population of Gaza, but the civilian death toll in Ukraine is 3x lower.

So on a per capita basis, Gazan's are dying at a per capita rate of ~42x higher. My incredibly rough math has 1 civilian death per 3,158 Ukrainian citizens (using 2022 population) versus 1 death per 74 Gazans.

Couple of orders of magnitude there.

Ukraine's leadership has a vested interest in protecting its citizenry, while Hamas has an official policy of intentionally putting Palestinian citizens in harm's way. Hamas and the Arab world have continually refused to allow Palestinian refugees safe passage into neighbouring countries.

I'm not saying the manner in which Israel is prosecuting this war has nothing to do with the rate at which Palestinian civilians are being killed, but suggesting that they are solely responsible for the level of civilian collateral damage is literally falling for Hamas propaganda hook, line and sinker.

You're absolutely correct

What’s the civilian death rate in Bakhmut/mariopol/etc? Ukraine’s land area is pretty big, and life in Gaza and life in bakhmut or chernihiv might be a one to one comparison but live in lviv definitely isn’t.

Also, as I understand it, the government of Ukraine doesn't make it a deliberate tactic to hope their own population gets killed so they can get PR wins which bring international pressure on their behalf.

And yet no one is seriously accusing them of being genocidal.

I think "no one" is excluding a lot here: the governments of several NATO member states have made such claims, and the ICC (which admittedly isn't held in the highest esteem everywhere) has issued arrest warrants for Russian leaders on genocide or genocide-adjacent charges.

I'm not suggesting you have to agree with those descriptions, but I think it falls well short of "no one."

Probably I didn't phrase it well. Because those are performative pearl cluthing mostly. I don't believe that anyone smart and informed sincerely believes Putin wants or is committing genocide.

I think Putin's stated goals of destroying the idea (the meme as it were) of a distinct Ukrainian identity is, under the more expensive definitions, considered "genocide", but I will concede that it's a much less central example than "industrially kill them all" or just "evict them from their lands and ignore the obvious implications" that people would typically point to in WWII.

It didn’t help them in previous wars. No matter what Israel did to avoid casualties, it either wasn’t enough, or it was considered evil. I think this is why they’ve been so gloves off this time. The gloves are pointless, as any sort of fighting back is demonized as apartheid or genocide. So, rather than risk their soldiers to prevent such war crimes, just go for it.

The strongest criticisms of Israel involve the parts of it which appear profoundly uninterested in doing so. There are more of these than I would like

That's basically the first example Bryan Caplan gives in missing moods about why he doesn't trust the war hawks defense of civilian death.

What he expects is more like "It's a sad but necessary drawback to the messy reality of war that sometimes peaceful civilians are swept up as collateral" and yet instead often sees stuff more like "Hell yeah let's wipe them out, the only good [nationality] is a dead one!"

Caplan isn't that much older than I am, so he's mostly seen the same wars I have. These have been predominantly wars in Islamic countries, where his argument doesn't hold much grip on reality. We are talking about Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, now potentially Iran. These are territories where "Death to Israel" holds 90%+ popularity and "Death to America" is only a few clicks behind.

I've always been very ambivalent on the 'missing mood' argument.

On the one hand, if someone's explicitly-stated argument seems like it implies a particular emotion, and the person making the argument lacks that emotion, that does seem like a good sign that the argument is not motivating for them. The argument is excuse or justification, rather than the real motivation for the position.

On the other hand, taken too seriously, the missing mood argument also sounds a lot like, "You don't feel the way that I imagine you ought to feel - therefore you are not serious." But human psychology is extremely diverse and unpredictable, the way people express their deep emotions varies very widely as well, and you should not typical-mind. Caplan summarises it as, "You can learn a lot by comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold", but the phrase "the mood reasonable proponents would hold" is doing a lot of the work there. What is the mood reasonable proponents would hold? Are you sure? Is there only one such possible mood? How confident are you of what's going on inside another person's head?

I suppose I think missing moods can be a weak piece of evidence, which may suggest that we ought to look more deeply into a person's agenda, but nothing more than that. Unfortunately the actual examples Caplan gives in his piece are unconvincing and suggest a lack of moral imagination on Caplan's own part. Other people don't appear to feel what Caplan thinks they should feel, so he concludes they're insincere. But maybe Caplan is just wrong about they ought to feel. Maybe he's assuming that they accept facts and moral principles that Caplan himself accepts, and if he looked closer he would realise that they don't.

I think the examples from Caplan are more like

"Ok I can just consider that it's the morals that we disagree with, that they are just people who I find to be monsterous in ethics but just assuming "disagreement = evil" is bad, so I should look at the logic I expect from aligned morals making that argument and see if people are doing that"

Unfortunately the actual examples Caplan gives in his piece are unconvincing and suggest a lack of moral imagination on Caplan's own part. Other people don't appear to feel what Caplan thinks they should feel, so he concludes they're insincere. But maybe Caplan is just wrong about they ought to feel. Maybe he's assuming that they accept facts and moral principles that Caplan himself accepts, and if he looked closer he would realise that they don't.

Well that's the question. "Do people disagree because of a different logic or evidence base, or do they disagree because they genuinely just do not care about or actively want to harm other people, which I think is a Monster behavior"

He looks at it and says "huh, this isn't what I would expect if they weren't monsters, this is behavior I expect if they were. Oh god, these people seem like Monsters"

I can think of examples, I suppose, where mood is a relevant piece of evidence for judging a person's sincerity.

Suppose I'm favour of stronger welfare policies and more generous handouts for people in poverty, and I'm arguing with a person who believes that, however well-intentioned, public handouts like this are bad. They disincentivise people working to better themselves, they involve the government in what ought to be private charity, and so on. The state providing free welfare for the poor is ultimately detrimental both to the poor and the state. I suggest that their position is heartless, and they protest, "Not at all! My heart goes out to the poor as well. I really care about their plight. We just disagree about the best way to help them."

Suppose I then discover this person cheering as people get kicked off the dole and laughing. I would probably conclude that they're insincere and that their real motives are not empathy. Even if they sincerely think the dole is bad, mockery of desperate people is a cruel thing to do, and unlikely to coexist with genuine empathy. Alternatively, suppose I instead discover that this person volunteers at the soup kitchen run by their church. I would probably conclude that they are sincere, they really do empathise with and want to help the poor, and that they realy do believe there's an important moral distinction between public and private interventions.

I'm sure you can think of lots of examples like that. The key there is that the person presents as having certain motives, but behaves consistently or inconsistently with that motive.

The typical case is when someone neither particularly hates or helps the poor. But the missing mood test looks at how things are framed and at superficial elements. So if he thinks the dole is good for the poor, he doesn't need to prove himself, because the belief itself already says that he "wants to help the poor". But if he thinks the dole is bad for the poor, he faces an uphill battle. The problems with this are obvious.

This also leads to moral busybodies. How exactly do you know that someone hates the poor privately? Well, if he's a friend or relative, maybe you know him. But if he's a politician or someone else you don't know personally, this is an incentive to dig up ten year old Twitter posts out of context to "prove" that he's cruel so you can dismiss his beliefs.

And then there's the situation where someone who thinks some policy harms themselves always fails the missing mood test. After all, they aren't showing concern for the other people who are helped by the things that harm themselves. (And "I think my harm is more important than someone's benefit" is selfish, so it doesn't count as showing concern even if you acknowledge that someone benefits.)

No, that's just how human psychology works. Earnestly keeping in mind the pain suffered by the innocent in the prosecution of a just/necessary/Good war is just asking for your enemies to act like puppy-killing utility demons. That's what dehumanization is for, so you can fight and win without being hobbled and cripped (and eventually, raped, murdered and genocided) by your own suicidal empathy.

It's the same reason conservatives post Ghibli memes about crying deportees. They are no longer willing to give a shred of concern or credibility for crocodile tears of the people who caused the situation on purpose. Accusations of cruelty are met with mockery, because if you give an inch they'll let in another 50 million unvetted randos.

It's the same reason progressives never, ever, ever express any concern about the feelings and harm they may cause to their outgroup. It's the same reason no one is even bothering to try to use anything like this argument on Hamas or Iran, or their supporters in the US.

Just round the situation off to "blame goes to the aggressor" and win the damn war.

No, that's just how human psychology works

If he says "X happens", a response of "Yeah that's how people work" is an agreement that X happens, is it not?

Earnestly keeping in mind the pain suffered by the innocent in the prosecution of a just/necessary/Good war is just asking for your enemies to act like puppy-killing utility demons. That's what dehumanization is for, so you can fight and win without being hobbled and cripped (and eventually, raped, murdered and genocided) by your own suicidal empathy.

That can serve as an explanation for why they do it, but it doesn't dispute Caplan's claim whatsoever then, it's in agreement with it! That instead of taking a somber "sad but necessary" view, they appeal to collective guilt and laugh about it.

You frame your comment like a dissent, while the actual substance is the same just under a different framing.

A: "Why is this marathon runner sweating so much? I would expect them to not want to be sweating. Do they not realize that sweating is unpleasant?"

B: "They're sweating because they are running a marathon. The sweat is an adaptive strategy that makes them better at running marathons. If they did not sweat, they would be worse at running marathons, and probably not be able to do so at all."

A: "Isn't that what I just said?"

B: "No. It really isn't."

Bad analogy.

Caplan points out that they aren't somber about civilian deaths, but instead often cheer it on/laugh about it.

An explanation why that happens isn't a dispute if it is happening.

Nope, you and Caplan are both just wrong about what the "reasonable hawk" looks like. You are the ones missing a mood, namely "competing when the stakes really, really matter". Actively hemming and hawing over the acceptable costs of a desired, good outcome is retarded and maladaptive. The overwhelming majority of human beings, even highly intelligent ones, are not psychologically capable of the the level of sociopathic, rationalist autism required to attempt his "reasonable hawk" nonsense - and even one of those 0.0001% decouplers would rapidly find themselves dehumanizing the enemy because it's just wildly more efficient in terms of mental load.

Worrying about the feelings of a lethal, intractable enemy is the sort of luxury you spare for things you outclass on the same level that we outclass wolves and bears. And even then, the people who actually live in areas with wolves and bears are less sympathetic about it than urban fools.

My continual take away is that I don’t like war being called ethnic cleansing.

Yeah that’s one of the obnoxious aspects of the post-WW2 mythos.

Stop trying to guilt trip me into seeing one side or the other as intrinsically righteous. Everything has to be a “genocide” or an “ethnic cleansing”. Why can’t it just be a fight? Men fight with each other. Always has been always will be.

The difference being Israels exceptional brutality, their politicians using references to biblical genocides and the high civilian death toll.

High Civilian death tolls according to whom.

I have such a hard time determining anything accurate here b/c both sides have major pressure to lie. And very early on Hamas got caught in an apparently blatant lie about a Rocket hitting a hospital, leading to civilian casualties. Note that Gazan authorities ALSO misstated the number of injured and dead!

So now I have to take all their claims with a veritable pound of salt.

Whoops.

And of course the October 7 event was specifically a bunch of Hamas warriors attacking, massacring and kidnapping civilians. So I'm pretty inclined to say "A pox on both your houses" for the duration of the conflict. Yes, I am aware that U.S. tax dollars and weapons are streaming to the Israeli side of the fight.

Finally, the incidents I CAN generally verify include a dude in the U.S. Setting Jews on Fire and another shooting two unarmed Jewish Embassy staffers.

Don't know of any incidents in the U.S. going the other way.

So these Hamas rockets that have barely been able to kill anyone leveled an entire hospital during Israeli bombing. Seems like something AIPAC cooked up.

As for October 7 Israel was engaging in military operations against Gaza, they had murdered hundreds of civilians and taken thousands of hostages.

There war a roughly 50% civilian death rate on the Israeli side. Is 1 civilian death for every military death acceptable or not? Why isn't it terror when Israel kills more than one civilian for each military casualty?

According.

to.

Whom.

So these Hamas rockets that have barely been able to kill anyone leveled an entire hospital during Israeli bombing. Seems like something AIPAC cooked up.

There were ample photographs of the rocket impact site

It didn't even hit the hospital proper. By most appearances, it landed in a parking lot and set a bunch of cars on fire. Even the trees in the immediate surrounding area are still intact.

It was the Gaza side that was alleging it was a mass casualty event at all.

So yes, this absolutely looks like a Hamas rocket flew off course, set things on fire, and Hamas decided to cast blame away from themselves since this would inevitably make them look like idiots.

If you're suggesting that the war in Gaza is a genocide because half of all deaths in Gaza were civilians rather than combatants, that would imply that virtually every modern war was a genocide, as many wars had a vastly higher ratio of civilian to combatant deaths (as high as 9:1 in some cases). If you're happy to call the Korean war, the Gulf war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq genocides, all well and good, just as long as we're consistent.

There is also a point of comparing Gaza to other cases of dense urban warfighting where the millions-scale civilian population is stuck in the dense urban area. There aren't many other examples, but in the closest analogs (such as the fall of the ISIS caliphate), the casualties are pretty analogous when controlled for time.

Turns out, urban fighting is dangerous for attacker, defender, and bystander alike. Who would have guessed?

There is a difference between men fighting one another (Hamas vs. IDF) and men fighting unarmed civilians (Hamas vs. Israelis; IDF vs. random Palestinians).

As much as I would prefer the former, it’s not on the table. Hamas can’t stop hiding behind civilians without getting slaughtered. Israel can’t stop killing civilians without giving Hamas opportunities to slaughter Israelis. Neither side is willing to let it “just be a fight.”

So yes, it’s teetering on the edge of ethnic cleansing. Not because of a psyop to claim righteousness, but because all the remaining options look an awful lot like killing noncombatants and driving them off.

Neither side is willing to let it “just be a fight.”

I don’t understand this perspective. Obviously the fair fight is Hamas/palestinian army versus IDF, and Hamas are the ones who refuse to fight it. Therefore, the blood of civilians is entirely on Hamas’ hands.

If throughout history's wars the defeated party's army said ‘we’re not surrendering, we’re just going to do terrorism in civilian clothes now’, genocide would be the routine consequence.

I more or less agree, but I was trying to argue against @Mihow and @Primaprimaprima’s complaint about the term “ethnic cleansing.”

If Israel is fighting a just war, then it has a legal war goal which isn’t ethnic cleansing. Therefore activists who insist otherwise are being disingenuous.

If Israel isn’t fighting a just war, though, its war aims might include things like killing all Palestinians. This is verboten in the post-WW2 world. Naturally, Hamas has made it impossible for Israel to fight without killing some noncombatants and, in doing so, casting doubt on its war aims.

My point is that calling it ethnic cleansing isn’t a sign of mindkilled bad-faith partisanship. It is an intended outcome of Hamas’ strategy.

I count 3/8 accurate predictions.

◪ Non-meaningful prediction to say Israel would respond to Oct 7

☒ "Solve the Gaza Question"

◪ Non-meaningful prediction to say anti-Zionist militias would continue fighting Zionism

☑ Iran has to would respond, but splitting hairs

☑ Israel, Iran exchange strikes

☑ Would precede (US) strikes on Iran nuclear program

☒ Initiates war between Iran and Israel

☒ US drawn into war

☒ Syrian regime fell, but not as consequence of US-Iran war

☒ Iran regime change†

†Fuentes' predictions conclude it from a US-Iran war; it might happen as a result of the instability from Israel walking all over the nation's ADS and domestic security apparatus.

The meaningful prediction is strikes on Iran's nuclear program, except it was the US and not Israel, and it didn't start a war. Trump's already joking about it, and there's this meme.

Concur. He legitimately got his first and most important prediction wildly incorrect.

You don't count that conflict as war between Iran and Israel? That's just bad faith. Even Trump is lobbying to call it the "12 day war." America undeniably was drawn into the war, both defensively and offensively. Syria falling was directly related to the conflict between Israel and Iran's proxies, Hezbollah in particular.

"Solve the Gaza Question" is undeniably underway, he didn't say it would be resolved immediately he said the attack gave the Israelis cover to solve it, which is ongoing. Basically Iran regime change is the only thing that hasn't happened yet, even though that was clearly an objective of Israeli aggression.

In doing so, their retaliation against Gaza will knowingly provoke a retaliation from Iranian-backed militias against Israel.

Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, began attacking Israel on 10/8 though, before Israel did anything.

Nasrallah characterized it as follows:

“Some say I’m going to announce that we have entered the battle,” Nasrallah said Friday. “We already entered the battle on Oct. 8.” He argued that Hezbollah’s cross-border strikes have pulled away Israeli forces that would otherwise be focused on Hamas in Gaza.

I am not watching the video, but I notice that the tweet said:

It will draw America into a war where they finally decapitate Iran and Syria.

The Assad regime did not end because Israel drew the US into a regional war. The US did fuck-all to bring about its end. In a nutshell, Israel took out Hezbollah, Turkey sponsored the Jihadists who defeated Assad and Russia did not offer less than usual military support to their ally because they were otherwise occupied.

Fuente's obsession with Israel appeared to result in what is perhaps the most accurate prediction of the series of events following Oct. 7th among anyone else.

They're still not accurate. You snuck in there "enables Israel to finally solve the Gaza Question with ethnic cleansing" as a "successful" prediction. It's actually a failed prediction.

"Knowingly" and "will give Israel an excuse to" are not successful predictions either, unless you can read minds.

Both the US and Israel have at this point made it clear the Gaza population is going to be deported and not allowed to return. It hasn't happened yet but both Trump and Israel have stated this position. Gaza is completely destroyed, even if they wanted to keep the Gazans in Gaza it's hard to see how that would be possible at this point even with a good-faith effort. But the overtures from both Trump and Israel is that the population is going to be deported; sorry, "allowed to leave."

"Nobody is expelling any Palestinians," Mr. Trump told reporters.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-gaza-war-not-expelling-palestinians-egypt-post-ceasefire-plan/

Gaza is completely destroyed, even if they wanted to keep the Gazans in Gaza it's hard to see how that would be possible at this point even with a good-faith effort.

If nobody will take them, then they will remain in Gaza. There's an entire wall around the place.

They are going to couch it mostly as voluntary emigration, but if you blockade a region and completely level the cities and make intolerable conditions, and then set up offices to facilitate "voluntary emigration" that is an expulsion as far as I'm concerned. The extent of the destruction of Gaza doesn't point in a different direction with respect to longer-term plans.

That is called a siege. It is a legitimate military tactic, albeit one that Israel has not employed in this current engagement.

I want to talk about genetics. Scott Alexander has a new piece out about Missing Heritability, basically going through the issues with twin studies:

Twin studies suggested that IQ was about 60% genetic, and EA about 40%. This seemed to make sense at the time - how far someone gets in school depends partly on their intelligence, but partly on fuzzier social factors like class / culture / parenting. The first genome-wide studies and polygenic scores found enough genes to explain 2%pp1 of this 40% pie. The remaining 38%, which twin studies deemed genetic but where researchers couldn’t find the genes - became known as “the missing heritability” or “the heritability gap”.

Scientists came up with two hypothesis for the gap, which have been dueling ever since:

Maybe twin studies are wrong.

Maybe there are genes we haven’t found yet

He goes through a TON of research literature, basically describing how the entire scientific apparatus in genetics tried to figure out why twin studies couldn't be confirmed via actual genetics. To me, it sounds like an extremely robust way to prove that the twin studies were wrong. However, his ultimate conclusion appears to be:

So how heritable are complex traits, and why can’t different methods agree on this?

I think the twin / pedigree / adoption estimates are mostly right. They are strong designs, their assumptions are well-validated, and they all converge on similar results. They also pass sanity checks and common sense observation.

Although polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression are also strong designs, they’re newer, have less agreement among themselves, and have more correlated error modes in their potential to miss rarer variants and interactions. Although it’s hard to figure out a story of exactly what’s going on with these rarer variants and interactions, there seems to be some evidence that they exist (again, see 1, 2, 3)15, and it seems easier to doubt this new and fuzzy area than the strong and simple conclusions from twin / pedigree / adoption work.

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.

Overall I'm very curious where the life sciences will go. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary as well as other books, makes some interesting comments in a recent post where he excerpts his own book:

As David Bohm commented in the 1960s, it is an odd fact that, just when physics was moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology were moving closer to it. ‘If the trend continues’, he wrote, ‘scientists will be regarding living and intelligent beings as mechanical, while they suppose that inanimate matter is too complex and subtle to fit into the limited categories of mechanism.’[9] He was not mistaken.

Nonetheless, in the first half of the twentieth century, many philosophically minded biologists, including such eminent British figures as John Scott Haldane and his better-known son, J.B.S. Haldane, as well as Conrad Hal Waddington, moved decisively, like the physicists, away from the machine model. Less renowned, largely by his own choice, but no less distinguished, was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the great Austrian biologist and polymath who originated general system theory. In 1933 he wrote: ‘we cannot speak of a machine “theory” of the organism, but at most of a machine fiction’.[10]

Despite this encouraging development, a more or less abrupt reversion to the seventeenth-century Cartesian model came over the life sciences with the rise of molecular biology, and its language of ‘programmes’, ‘codes’, and so forth, in the twentieth century’s second half. According to Carl Woese, writing in 2004, ‘biology today is little more than an engineering discipline’.[11] And Woese was no embittered outsider. His pioneering work revolutionised mainstream biology; he was one of the most influential and widely honoured microbiologists of all time, described by a colleague as having ‘done more for biology writ large than any biologist in history, including Darwin’.[12] But he was disturbed by what he saw.

We'll have to see if biologists are actually able to move beyond the mechanistic model and into a more complex, realistic view of life. The obvious CW implications here are how the scientific/materialist worldview and the religious worldviews continue to interact. Right now, the Left seems to be mostly materialist, whereas the right is (nominally) religious. If we can work to merge these two views, we may find more political unity or at least a new set of combinations for our political approaches.

He goes through a TON of research literature

And is really really really well written! I read last week the easthunter substack about this topic (which is also linked by Scott in his post) and I got totally lost halfway through. But Scotts strength is to communicate complicated topics clearly. And he makes his opinion visible but still gives room for the other side without snark.

Exceptional blog post! Must have been a ton of work and I was not suprised that at the end he thanked a few other (presumably very smart) people who helped.

He must have been working on it a while. Feels like it's been actually over a month since we had an actually good post? Maybe it's just me

I mean IQ itself is a fuzzy concept. We can only really measure it by proxy, which by itself would create some added complexity here. The more precise way to say this would be “twins are 60% likely to score the same IQ on an IQ test.” The test doesn’t directly measure IQ, and depending on which test you take, when you take it, and under what conditions, you might get some different scores just from those things even if the same person is being tested. Then you have environment, one kid is encouraged to read a lot and do math puzzles. The other plays lots of sports. One eats nothing but junk food, the other eats clean. Those differences can affect brain development.

It’s both and, to my mind.

It's another step removed from that, most of these studies are looking at Educational Attainment (e.g. highest degree received) which itself is a (highly) imperfect measure of IQ (which itself is an imperfect measure of General Intelligence 'g' which is the name given to the statistical observation that many different measures of what we consider intelligence correlate pretty tightly). The Genome Association studies are further largely using SNP databases which themselves more often only correlations to whatever loci are actually impacting things rather then directly impactful themselves.

There are at least three pieces at play here: first, the question of deterministic heritability of mental characteristics; second, the question of how genes as we currently understand them map to mental characteristics; and third, the question of what, precisely, IQ is measuring in relation to mental characteristics.

As far as mental characteristics go, I think it’s fair to say that some are pretty clearly innate and inherited and others are not. There are a lot of children out there who pretty obviously derive their mental abilities from whatever their parents have. However, that’s not the whole story. There are habits of thought that can dramatically improve or sabotage a person’s performance. A simple example is just whether someone cares or not. When I play chess, my level of play whiplashes severely based on how focused I am, on the order of a few hundred Elo. When I’m not focused and don’t really care, I just play moves. I believe this replicates across most fields of activity, and that caring has a very strong cultural component. Of course, a few hundred Elo is not multiple standard deviations of performance, but I think it could explain half an SD pretty easily, which is actually quite a lot.

Genes are a stickier question. My rough viewpoint is that our current understanding of genetics is far too coarse to pick up on anything but the simplest behaviors, where a gene encodes a pretty straightforward protein with one real use case. But in real life, all of the body’s systems are expected to interact quite intricately, and we should expect some novel properties to emerge at the intersection of genes. I’m far from an expert here, so this is all I’ll say. I’m not surprised that efforts to reverse engineer the hack job that is evolution are hitting difficulties, but all it proves is the lingering inadequacy of our science.

IQ is the fun part. On the one level, it’s quite simple: IQ is just a measurement of how you do on a specific batch of tests. But those tests claim to be an imperfect measurement of intelligence, and that intelligence is a singular value. This I am not remotely convinced of.

The typical argument is that because different mental functions correlate, there must be some underlying characteristic that powers all of them, and that they’re all secretly linked. But this doesn’t hold much muster with reality. If our various mental abilities were merely outward expressions of a single underlying scalar, we would expect to see people at the far reaches of intelligence be great at everything. In reality, we tend to see them be amazing at one thing, and somewhere between good and terrible at the rest. Another personal example: I am >3SD on the right for analytical intelligence (measured, in this case, by visual puzzle solving) and dead middle on “processing speed”, which means the rate of quickly mapping trivial inputs to trivial outputs, as measured by a professionally administered adult IQ test. This is irreconcilable with the notion that both are just expressions of an underlying “intelligence.” How could that intelligence be both perfectly average and massively out of the ordinary at the same time? It’s nonsensical. What actually makes sense is that these are different capabilities of the mind, and for whatever reason I am much stronger in one than the other. That leaves the question of why these disparate capabilities correlate in most cases, to which I’ll just leave two hypotheses: first, adverse circumstances that lower all abilities, like how being severely obese will undermine pretty much all athletic performance; second, that humans are sorted into classes in a social hierarchy and that these traits are then selected for in groups based on what the class does. Those are explanations that are plausible and do not require a general intelligence.

Anyway, interesting topic, and I do agree that too many of the opinions here come down to faith over examining what’s going on and flexibly adjusting based on new information.

I think its fairly clear that there is a general intelligence, even if there are subfactors. There is some correlation between different abilities even across animal species, where it makes no sense for a whole species to be adversely effected wrt intelligence. You might say this is just parallel selection, but then you have to explain why needing those abilities correlates so broadly.

I really like your explanation as to why individual components of IQ correlate so much. It makes a lot of intuitive sense that its partially a selection effect. Surprised ive never IQ seen truthers mention it.

You're first and last point are strongly related. Back when we were introduced into chess as kids, I was exceptional at it compared to most of the others, because I could use raw logic better than them. But once some started to train and I didn't, I predictably slipped behind. Based on my skill with other games and the fact that I started from a higher floor, I could probably keep being better than them, I just didn't focus on it. I liked other games more. If you investigated skill in different board games that all need broadly similar traits and talents, I'm pretty sure you'd find results akin to our IQ results: There is quite a strong correlation between them, and especially on the >1SD and >2SD level you find a lot of people who are just generally good at everything with mild specialisation. But to reach the >3+ SD and more, you need some serious over-focusing and specialisation to the exclusion of other things in addition to the naturally high general talent. Mind you, you somewhat misrepresent the state of the research AFAIK; Even the people at the top end for one category still tend to be significantly above average in other fields, they just aren't at the top end of everything simultaneously.

That's not to say that there aren't other skills critical for only one subfield, or even other relevant general skills. EQ, for example, really needs good face reading to work. Meaning if you have some degree of prosopagnosia, it will be much harder for you, even if you try to focus your intelligence on it. Likewise, if you think about problems in physical space, then a talent for innate 3d visualisation is extremely useful (something I relied on a lot when studying math; I always prefer to move everything towards geometry, which some other students didn't understand, while others also found it intuitively helpful).

Nevertheless, once I account for these other skills, I still use my general reasoning in everything. I use it to mentally move and manipulate shapes, I use it to understand people, I use it to time-plan.

For another example, memory is also a fairly general skill, though not equally so for everything, and I have always really noticed the impact of focus there. Back when I played Battlefield Bad Company 2, I memorized every single weapons traits: Damage, mag size, recoil, delay between bullets, reloading time, even the exact shape of the damage-distance curve ... Same goes for other games. Meanwhile my social memory used to be awful, to the degree that I once forgot my own name when introducing myself (awkward!). I used to tell myself that these are just totally separate things and that it's not my fault, but now that I'm a dad and office worker, I find myself having much less trouble remembering social details about various people, as long as I think they matter. In the same vein I have less patience to remember all the detailed mechanics of arcane games. It's increasingly clear to me that I'm merely re-directing a general skill towards the things I care about, as opposed to there being different skills.

I like your examples of face-reading and 3D visualization. Doesn’t it sound a lot like these are distinct mental capabilities that certain people have distinct from their other capacities? And the idea of using your visualization skills to understand other mathematical realms suggests that your “general” intelligence in this case is informed by your ability to generally apply a more specific talent - and this works for students in proportion to their capacity with that specific talent. Presumably the students who don’t get it but who are still good at the subject are channeling a different underlying ability.

Flipping it around heavily, the memory example is also great. I’ve seen this as well: pretty much everyone I’ve met who was not heavily brain damaged has had some category of thing which they remember quite a lot about, corresponding tightly to their areas of interest. Presuming that “my results on a test” can be an area of interest, does that mean that the means of measuring abilities can identify divides in capacity when it’s really just a divide in focus?

My biggest sense for IQ and intelligence is that we just don’t really have a good idea of what’s going on. We’ve found certain capabilities which are confusingly harsh yes/no values, like the internal monologue and the ability to envision things, considering that there is no evidence that someone is one or the other without asking them: you would expect the difference to be night and day, like it is for children and adults! But we’ve also found certain capabilities that appear to be a single thing, like memory, but which express themselves in such radically different ways that you’d be forgiven for thinking they were entirely different capabilities, and which differences are immediately obvious upon meeting someone. That is, our intuition struggles to break intelligence down into real atoms, and naive external analysis carves at awkward joints.

To the extent I have a point, it’s that intelligence is way, way more complicated than the IQ test model makes it out to be, that we know effectively nothing about it, and that we should be really, incredibly humble about our proclamations about it. We’re all out here debating the four humors; that’s how bad it is. People back then would talk very confidently about the humors, and now they look ridiculous. They may have been smart, but the reality was that they were fools, and they could have been less foolish by being honest on what they didn’t know.

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

80% of the people whose job theoretically is to determine the validity of twin studies are psychologically invested into finding them not true.

If twin studies are correct and most outcomes are due to 'lack of abuse' and 'genetics', as theorized by people such as fascists or authors of the 'Nurture assumption', then the bulk of policies liberals like are going to be found wanting. Scientists are generally left of center (won't punch left) and sometimes hard left (Gould, for example, who probably falsified evidence in the Morton case or was deliberately sloppy)

I have little confidence that these studies are being carried out by impartial parties and in good faith.

I'm pleasantly surprised that Scott said this much.

So twin studies are disproven because scientists have only found 2% of the genes? Don’t you think there might be a bunch of genes they just haven’t found yet?

Basically the whole point of the article is that they have been searching for these genes for 20 years and have only found more and more complexities.

That said, a comment on the article from Scott:

I know of two secret results I'm not supposed to talk about, by people claiming they've found very large amounts of "missing heritability". Not yet peer-reviewed or confirmed by anything except rumor. I expect one to be out within six months, and the other maybe eventually.

Genes are a complex topic, I’d expect complexities to be discovered.

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

There's two sides to this tango, they've not been proven right, but neither have they been proven wrong. The pathway between genes and outcomes is very complicated. It would have been nice if there ended up being some really simple way to map everything out but we can't even do that for height, let alone something as difficult to nail down as intelligence. The question is nurture vs nature and the twin studies convincingly argue that nature is a very large share. Scott convincingly points out that educational attainment may itself have some problems as a proxy for intelligence.

I think the reality of the situation is that we still do not understand, outside of some special basic cases, in the slightest how genes correspond to phenotypes, beyond a sort of general sense that should make it clear to us that we do not even have the vocabulary and abstractions to describe such an understanding if it were handed down to us by divine inspiration. I'd expect the simplest nontrivial gene-IQ relationships to look something like "the presence of sequence A slightly reduces the frequency sequence B is transcribed into proteins in neurons when they contain between x and y concentration of transcripts of sequence C, so in individuals whose genetic makeup causes the concentration to converge to that band in their frontal lobe, they get slightly thicker myelin sheaths in that part of their brain, which might make you more smart except if it also happens in the temporal lobe in which case you just turn out schizo". Do we have analysis techniques that would pick this sort of thing up? My impression is that expecting our current ones to do so is comparable to trying to debug slowdowns in complex distributed systems by big-data search for correlations between system performance and the frequency (possibly joint) of individual words in source code.

To introduce a juicier culture war angle, the confusion about the discrepancy, i.e. the expectation that techniques like GWAS would pick up the heritability we expect from twin studies, seems to be motivated by the usual prior that surely the top-of-the-line techniques that the community of experts in a given area are excited about must at least be somewhat good (see also expectation that architects have good taste in architecture, artists have good taste in art, or social justice researchers can correctly identify and redress injustice in society). If you expect geneticists to not be meaningfully competent at genetics in absolute terms, then "geneticists could not find the mechanism of heritability that we are fairly certain exists" is an unsurprising outcome.

To introduce a juicier culture war angle, the confusion about the discrepancy, i.e. the expectation that techniques like GWAS would pick up the heritability we expect from twin studies, seems to be motivated by the usual prior that surely the top-of-the-line techniques that the community of experts in a given area are excited about must at least be somewhat good

I believe this is not incorrect take. There are ton of methodological assumptions researcher makes when they run a GWAS study, you could make many of them differently, and it would still be genome-wide. I doubt we have seen the latest and best GWAS yet.

One must hand it out to GWAS that become the hot method of choice because it was impressive how well it appears to predict other stuff (depression, schizophrenia, breast cancer, other disease). I don't know if there ever was twin studies of coronary artery disease, which are not such a hot CW topic as educational attainment, but I have not heard of debates "GWAS doesn't predict coronary artery disease as well as twin studies".

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

Because he goes through the potential mistakes twin studies could be making and convincingly dismisses them all. The only likely source of error would be assortive mating, which would be under estimating genetic impact. If you have an alternative explanation of what mistake the twin studies could be making and how they could correct for it, I'd love to hear

A first impression: If we take a lot of leftist dogma as being true and discard obvious analogs to reality and claim they might be inaccurate, then we might just be able to explain why our ideology is seemingly not mapping on to the world around us.

Now queue the arguments through analogy, 'what if's' about reality, and a mountain of research motivated entirely by a need to collapse all genetic gravity into a neat environmentalist fold.

Scott Alexander seems to have a good eye for strategy. The article is effectively just an advertisement for a few plucky anti-hereditarian rebels who want to expose the fatal flaw of the hereditarian Death Star. Scott speaks highly of the effort, but obviously signals that he is going to wait until the rebels actually fire a torpedo into the thing. And there in lies the problem for the rebels.

For every alleged fatal flaw exhaust shaft that the hereditarian Death Star has, environmentalism has less than nothing. Every proposed theory has failed to explain the big problems. So... What's the point? What exactly are we doing here?

The fundemental problem the hereditarians face is that thier entire edifice rests on an assumption that biology, psychology, and anthropology are not only rigourous and mechanisistic, but sufficiently understood that outcomes can be manipulated in a near deterministic manner. This is manifestly not the case.

Sure biology may be more rigorous than psychology which is in turn more rigourous than anthropology, but none of them are even in the same zip code (much less the same ballpark) as electrical engineering.

The fundemental problem the hereditarians face is that thier entire edifice rests on an assumption that biology, psychology, and anthropology are not only rigourous and mechanisistic, but sufficiently understood that outcomes can be manipulated in a near deterministic manner. This is manifestly not the case.

It's also not required. No manipulation is necessary to observe heritability.

It is required if there are numerous potential varieties/mechanisms of heritability other than genetic.

And within the context of twin studies, those are?

Any number of things, thats the point. Social status, economic status, family dynamics, cultural affiliation, level of interest, environmental factors (hot/cold, wet/dry, average exposure to sunlight).

The only way any of those would be relevant would be if parents treat fraternal and identical twins very differently, and in the linked article, Scott discusses why that's probably not the case.

Did you read the linked article?

How do you think a twin study works? How would economic status have any effect on a twin study?

Can you be more specific?

How would social status vary more among fraternal twins than identical twins? Are there family dynamics that push fraternal twins apart (on whatever stats you use) while pulling identical twins together? Do fraternal and identical twins live in different climates?

Fraternal twins are slightly more likely to be different sexes than same sex; thats a pretty big confound.

More comments

Why? If IQ is determined through spooky undetectable woo that is inherited rather than genes, it's still heritable.

It matters because if "spooky undetectable woo" or even "ordinary detectable woo" such as cultural affiliation, economics, or social status can be demonstrated to have an effect, it will (at a bare minimum) weaken the genetic hypothesis, and if the effec sizes are large enough wreck it outright.

Adoption studies have already debunked those other explanations. Why are people always forgetting those exist? Environmentalist arguments have been DOA for decades now

Because heritability keeps coming up "missing".

People obeserve the world around them and see fucked up kids coming from successful parents, successful people with fucked up parents, and siblings (even twins) who's attitudes and outcomes diverge wildly from eachother. Observations that would all appear to contradict the strict hereditarian model.

Finally people observe that academia appears to be hopelessly culturally compromised, see the Marxist (and deeply anti-Western) origins of Id-Pol/CRT, and @FCfromSSC's comments on materialism.

The "ordinarily detectable woo" is classified under "shared environment" and has already been examined. Postulating spooky undetectable woo that is heritable doesn't weaken anything.

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

This feels like it's setting an incredibly high bar for "proven". If the studies replicate, which is already amazing in our current era, but the specific mechanism can't be isolated, that doesn't mean it's not proven. I mean, famously, a lot of the "why"s of gravity aren't well understood. Notably why it's so weak compared to other forces. But you'd be insane to go full retard and deny the accuracy of the models that match observable gravity.

But you'd be insane to go full retard and deny the accuracy of the models that match observable gravity.

Just watch me.

No, but that's completely fair. I suppose they are proven that they replicate - what isn't proven is that there's a specific genetic mechanism that causes this replication to happen. That being said, I will admit I skimmed most of the sciencey part. I have a pretty strong bias in this area, if it wasn't obvious from the post.

Yeah. Simultaneously it can be hard to exactly explain gravity due to nested complexity in the real world, regardless of improved sensory equipment and yet still practical to assume that we're not gonna wake up tomorrow morning and fall into the sky.

Very relevant further reading for the interested from Kirkegaard and Seb Jensen.

One thing missing from Scott's review is that Gusev and Turkheimer have publicly stated that they consider the possibility of IQ being substantially genetic abhorrent, especially for racial differences, akin to the dangerousness of the atomic bomb. Neither is a complete hack like say Kevin Bird, thankfully, but their results have to be taken with a great heaping of salt; they are not at all neutral, they don't even claim to be. If you read between the lines for Turkheimer in particular, it becomes clear that he considers hereditarian research very compelling, he just wants the bar for it to be considered true extremely high, and he wants us to by default believe in a mostly-environmental explanation not because it is scientifically compelling, but because it is the theory with more benign implications.

So, the first conclusion is that sibling-based analysis' aren't actually consistently in disagreement with twin experiments; A particular set of sibling-based analysis' chosen by people who have publicly exclaimed how much they hate the results of twin experiments is in disagreement with twin experiments. There are other studies that are in good alignment.

The second, which many here have already mentioned and which Scott also correctly calls out but you seem to have missed, is that both Gusev and Turkheimer willfully misrepresent underpowered GWAS results as disproving heritability in general, which is just silly. We know how complex genetics is, and GWAS is still missing large parts. The tan paper cited, for example, is just using genotyping! For those who don't know, there are three currently available levels of genetic informations: WGS looks - in theory - at the entire genome, but even the best available approaches are still having trouble with larger structural variants and variants in highly repetitive regions. WES looks at only the exome, which is the roughly 1% of the genome that is properly transcribed into RNA (and a subset of which is coding for proteins). Then there is genotyping, which is literally only looking at specific locations. The list is usually extended through imputation, but this has its own issues. This is akin to claiming that cartography got debunked by an approach that can only look at specific houses (not even randomly chosen ones so you could make a map through repeating the experiment - always the same few houses).

Another important part is the connection between materialism and genetic IQ determinism; First, genuine genetic IQ determinism is extremely rare, the common arguments are between people who claim genetics is negligible (excluding rare high-impact variants) on one side, and people who claim genetics is non-negligible. Even Scott AFAIK has the position of IQ being somewhere between 30-70% genetic, which is a far cry from outright determinism, especially once you consider these percentages are for inter-developed-states differences. Among the dominant materialist ideologies, the favored hypothesis is some variant of blank-slatism. It has many desirable qualities, and even I would prefer it were true; For one, it would mean that we can fix all problems just through environmental changes such as social engineering, without ever having to change anything about the fundamental building blocks of our biology. That would be awesome! But it is trivial to show how important genetics is for a long list of traits, and it is usually uncontroversial where it's considered convenient. It's always EA and IQ that get singled out for special treatment because people don't want those to be partially, let alone substantially, genetic.

materialism / genetic determinism

What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.

It seems like you want to associate these things because you want to strike a blow against materialism, but it’s just unrelated.

The former is a foundational axiom of the latter. People latch on to genetic determinism as "obvious" and "true" because they reject the validity of non-material/non-quantifiable explanations.

It’s not though. A universe containing non physical things could very easily contain organisms with wholly genetically determined intelligence. They just don’t have anything to do with one another.

Imagine a purely material universe with species A that is intelligent and has its intelligence completely determined by genetics. Now imagine that one day in that universe species B evolves and has souls (just an example of non physical things, it could be anything you like that is non physical). Nothing has changed for species A, they are still genetically determined.

I feel like you are conflating neccesary and sufficient conditions. A non-materialist model of the universe can readily accommodate physical elements. But a materialist model can not readily accommodate the non-physical.

The strong arguments for heritability being purely genetic are premised on the assumption of a deterministic universe. The existence of non-material causes would cast doubt upon this premise, and by extension the conclusion.

This is wrong for two reasons:

  1. Genetic determinism does not require a deterministic universe. At this point, I don't think many people who are aware of quantum mechanics think we live in a deterministic universe, and it is totally reasonable to believe in genetic determinism WRT intelligence anyway. While intelligence can be measured, it can't be measured down to the planck length. There's a level of precision that's just impossible to achieve, and so long as genetics determine intelligence closely enough, it's fine if the biological processes are a little fuzzy because of quantum uncertainty or whatever your preferred source of non-determinism is.
  2. A non-material universe is orthogonal to its materiality. There is no reason that non-material objects need to be non-deterministic. For a great example of this, consider the various "hard magic" systems in fantasy books that have clear and well defined rules for magic, but contain obviously non-material objects like souls.

To be honest, I don't much care for the term "genetic determinism" in this context. I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role. In my experience the debate is between hard core blank slateists, who deny the impact of genetics at all because they understand that it would wreck the foundation of much of their worldview, and hereditarians who think that there is a mix of genetic and environmental factors. "Genetic determinism" is generally leveled as a slur against hereditarians because it's pretty silly to think that genes are the only thing that matters and that your exposure to lots of words and symbols as a kid has zero impact. Can you point to someone making a "strong argument for heritability" that really says things are 100% genetic?

Niether of those manage to refute anything ive said. Again i feel like you are mixing neccesary with sufficient and trying to control the conversation by controlling the null hypothesis. Asserting that because i have not shown x i must accept y but i am under no such obligation.

I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role.

Then you must be new here (that or The Motte doesn't meet your criteria for "serious") because i have had precisely that argument multiple times here in the last 6 months, including with at least one user active in this very thread.

What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.

Typically the standard materialist/scientific worldview sees most things as genetically determined, as far as I'm aware! That may be changing.

I agree that you can believe in genetics without necessarily adopting a materialist frame.

Perhaps history's most infamous materialists were also dogmatically blank slatists.

I don’t think that’s true at all. There are plenty of materialists who think things are environmentally determined. This is liberal blank slateism in a nutshell. The opposite of genetic determinism is environmentalism in almost all debates on intelligence. This is actually the first time that I’ve encountered someone saying that variations in intelligence originate from something non-physical like the grace of God (this seems like what you are saying, but maybe you mean something else, it does seem like an odd thing for God to do to me).

Okay, mea culpa!

Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia.

Just wanted to drop a quick correction here: “qualia” does not mean “non-physical”. Qualia just means “conscious experience”. The word is entirely neutral regarding the question of what conscious experience actually is or what causes it. It could be physical, or it could be non-physical. But it’s still a qualia all the same.

I say this because the word “qualia” has gotten a reputation in some circles as being a “woo word” which causes people of a more materialist bent to nope out of the conversation whenever it comes up, and I really don’t think that has to be the case. It’s just a convenient word for describing the, well, actual conscious-experience part of conscious experience, as opposed to say its objectively observable behavioral or neurophysiological correlates. It’s just a handy word for talking about a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with. That’s all.

Yeah totally agree. Before I believed in god, I was a superveniance functionalist (now I’m confused). I think qualia are just one more superveniant thing in that frame.

A lot of people who are not materialists and also don’t believe in god cite qualia as the reason why, so I was trying to make the case in a way that would appeal to those people. It was sloppy and I regret the error, since I don’t actually think that makes sense.

I'm not sure I understand what would it mean exactly for qualia to be physical. Isn't it like...obviously something fundamentally distinct?
Mainstream secular stance of "conscious states trace material configurations" feels more like soft-dualism where the mind part plays the junior role, but it's still there

Well, the problem is that some people have the exact opposite intuition! They can’t see why qualia should pose a problem for physicalism at all. Thus the debate carries on interminably.

Are you suggesting that this proves souls exist and they are also subject to evolutionary processes?

LOL, not even close. I'm suggesting that biology is stuck in a mechanistic paradigm and needs to move beyond it to make progress. I'm not saying this "proves souls" or anything whacky, though I doubt we would be in the same ballpark of what we think "souls" are.

What could possibly be not "mechanistic paradigm" yet not be souls either?

What makes something mechanistic isn't a label of "mechanistic" slapped on it, it's that you can actually demonstrate the gears by doing gear things with them: turn gear A, which turns gear B, and so C, and so D, and so E. Stop gear A, and gear E also stops. People can and have slapped a "mechanistic" label on the conscious human mind. That doesn't change the fact that they can't actually point to gears or do gear things with them when it comes to those minds. The distinction is crucial, and the blind spot created by ignoring it is considerable.

I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.

Now, there hasn't been to my knowledge any proof of reliably producing very specific effects or decisions. This doesn't look like as knock-down a deboonk of materialism as opponents of materialism seem to think, to me. If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.

I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.

We already know that our minds and wills interact with the material world. You can make me experience pain by poking me with a pin, or deaden the pain with morphine. You can make me feel euphoria by putting me on a roller coaster. You can make me stop completely by damaging my brain.

Think about it in computer terms: I/O is not Read/Write; naïvely, mouse and webcam drivers are not alone sufficient to work with CPU and RAM. Empirical demonstration of the brain equivalent of Read/Write would be mind reading or mind control. If this were even weakly possible, the world around us would look very, very different than it does. You can induce subjective experiences by zapping the brain. You cannot predict behavior to any significant degree by reading the brain, and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.

If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.

We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc. Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead. All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.

[EDIT] - It should go without saying that none of the above supports a claim that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Odinism, the Imperial Cult, Shinto, Buddhism or any other non-materialistic system of belief has a better claim to truth than Materialism. We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.

Think about it in computer terms: I/O is not Read/Write; naïvely, mouse and webcam drivers are not alone sufficient to work with CPU and RAM. Empirical demonstration of the brain equivalent of Read/Write would be mind reading or mind control. If this were even weakly possible, the world around us would look very, very different than it does. You can induce subjective experiences by zapping the brain. You cannot predict behavior to any significant degree by reading the brain, and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.

You are very good at explaining this sort of thing! Do you write anywhere besides here? I'd love to quote you on my Substack hah.

I've thought about starting a substack, just to have a place to collate ten years of writing if nothing else. Sadly, for the moment, no dice. You can always link to comments here if it helps.

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This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed.

I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will. But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?

We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.

While determinism is currently unfalsifiable, we do fact have a significant amount of empirical evidence that the mind in materially embodied in the brain. But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).

I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will.

I have had materialists very directly deny the existence of free will in extended argumentation with me. I have observed other materialists, here and elsewhere, insist that no evidence against Materialism exists, and also that we know free will cannot actually exist because otherwise it would break materialism. Noting these positions is not a "pretense".

But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?

Things can work without us knowing how they work on a mechanistic level. Starting a fire is mechanistic; people worked with fire long, long before they had a mechanistic explanation of how it worked.

We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.

But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).

They are not my absurd standards, they were the absurd claims of the scientists and philosophers who built the paradigm of the material mind. These men claimed their axioms were empirical facts for more than a century, and used those claims to wield vast social, economic and political power while steadily retreating from every scrap of empirical evidence available. It is not my fault that much of the modern world was built by lying to people about empirical fact. I will not stop pointing that the lies were in fact lies, nor tracing the social consequences of those lies down to the present day. Nor will I cease to note the evidence of my own self-reported mind-states, and the ways in which simple observation entirely contradicts the materialist narrative.

Nor will I claim that I have knowledge that I do not, in fact, have. Determinism is a perfectly respectable axiom, and utility can be acquired through its use. but it is an axiom, the utility is acquired strictly through its use as an axiom, and it pays no direct rent at all.

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If this were even weakly possible

Mind reading is weakly possible. Elon Musk is doing it right now, amongst others. It's just that it's very difficult to extract useful information against someone's will.

Not to mention that some human actions can be predicted before they're made by reading the brain: https://qz.com/1569158/neuroscientists-read-unconscious-brain-activity-to-predict-decisions

There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc. Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead.

The chip die for the human mind is encased in a woman's uterus. The BIOS is encased in the human genome. It's just that the production process is insanely complicated.

The resurrection of Christ is a totally different kind of matter.

Mind reading is weakly possible. Elon Musk is doing it right now, amongst others.

I've seen Musk and others doing I/O. I/O is not read/write. The difference is one involves with a widget and your mind that you could otherwise do with your hand and your mind, and the other involves directly reading or changing your mind. When Musk has a working, rigorously accurate lie detector, let me know.

It's just that it's very difficult to extract useful information against someone's will.

If this is true, as opposed to it being strictly impossible, could you give me some examples of mental information being extracted deterministically from a human mind?

The chip die for the human mind is encased in a woman's uterus. The BIOS is encased in the human genome. It's just that the production process is insanely complicated.

A chip die is a tool we use to make a chip the way we want it. A BIOS is a tool we use to make basic adjustments to how a computer functions. We cannot make human minds the way we want them, with a uterus or by any other known means. We cannot make basic adjustments to how they operate, through the genome or by any other known means. It is not that the production process is insanely complicated; that would imply we could have some reasonable certainty that if we buckle down and work at it we should crack it in short order. But in fact, we do not know how to make significant positive changes to the human brain, and we have no idea if significant positive changes to the human mind are possible even in principle. Von Neumann seems to have had a superior human brain. He does not seem to have had a superior human mind; all evidence I've seen indicates that he was quite human in all the usual ways. I do not believe that a civilization of Von Neumanns would achieve Utopia, nor even lack criminals; I do not think you should believe this either.

The resurrection of Christ is a totally different kind of matter.

Why bring it up then? My point was that confident claims about things you believe will happen in the future are not evidence.

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and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.

I recall a notorious manipulation of brain matter that had been popular just a century ago and demonstrably controlled behaviour. Destructively so, yes, but, again, not any more a debunkment than medieval amputations were of modern surgery.

As for mind reading, developments appear to be underway on that front.

All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.

When I look at the pattern of history it appears exactly the opposite of what you said - it is non-determinism that has steadily retreated, from inscrutable fate woven for each and every object in the world by deities beyond our reach or understanding to sub-atomic processes that light is too big to observe and constructs with states too fluid, ephemeral and non-uniform to categorize. Many aspects of the world that we considered unfathomable and/or random are now predictable. I do not consider myself married to Scary Capital Letter Materialism, but the odds simply appear to be largely in its favor.

Can you give me a quick summary of your understanding of Materialism and Determinism in the scientific era, and also your understanding of when Materialism, Determinism and Atheism began being taken seriously as workable axioms?

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I/O is not Read/Write

You dont really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope. The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.

we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them.

Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable. Its not the least bit difficult to write a programm or OS that doesnt have meaningful interactable gears for you, and transistor-level analysis is not the best, most efficient way to interact with computers. I mean, we talk a lot about LLMs here, and I dont think they are the same thing as humans, but it seems like they pass an non-mechanical by your criteria.

You don't really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope.

But you can in fact open it up and look at it with a microscope. Moreover, you can make a new one from scratch with tools, and make it to your exact specifications. You cannot open the mind and look at it with a microscope, and you cannot make a new mind to-spec with tools.

The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.

And this is distinct from the access you have working in the hard drive factory. But there is no hard drive factory for minds; the normal user access is all the access any of us have ever observed or confirmed empirically.

Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable.

The computer is matter. Matter was not "designed" to be understandable and manipulable. It is understandable and manipulable, and so complex arrangements of matter that we intentionally construct with tools generally retain this property. To the extent they lose this property, it is generally because multiplicative complexity accelerates their mechanics from within our grasp to outside it, and we can generally simplify that complexity to make them graspable again. In the same way, we construct LLMs from mechanical components, and to the extent that they lose the predictable and controllable mechanistic nature, it is through the multiplication of complexity to an intractable degree.

We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them; we can neither point to nor manipulate the gears themselves. Minds might well may be both mechanical and intractably complex, but the intractable complexity prevents the mechanical nature from being demonstrated or interacted with empirically. Hard Determinism is a viable axiom, but not an empirical fact. The problem is that people do not appear to understand the difference.

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We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc.

The computer analogy is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but it's carrying more weight than it can bear. Yes, if you take a soldering iron to your CPU, you'll break it. But the reason we know computers are deterministic isn't because we can point to individual transistors and say "this one controls the mouse cursor." It's because we built them from the ground up with deterministic principles, and we can trace the logical flow from input to output through layers of abstraction.

Compare that to any more tangled, yet mechanistic naturally occurring phenomena, and you can see that just knowing the fundamental or even statistical laws governing a complex process doesn't give us the ability to make surgical changes. We can predict the weather several days out with significant accuracy, yet our ability to change it to our benefit is limited.

The brain is not a tool we built. The brain is a three-pound lump of evolved, self-organizing, wet, squishy, recursively layered technology that we woke up inside of. We are not engineers with a schematic, I'd say we're closer to archaeologists who have discovered an alien supercomputer of terrifying complexity, with no instruction manual and no "off" switch.

The universe, biology, or natural selection, was under no selection pressure to make the brain legible to itself. You can look at our attempts at making evolutionary algorithms, and see how the outputs often appear chaotic, but still work.

Consider even LLMs. The basic units, neurons? Not a big deal. Simple linear algebra. Even the attention mechanism isn't too complicated. Yet run the whole ensemble through enormous amounts of data, and we find ourselves consistently befuddled by how the fuck the whole thing works. And yet we understand it perfectly fine on a micro level! Or consider the inevitable buildup of spaghetti code, turning something as deterministic (let's not get into race-conditions and all that, but in general) as code into something headache inducing at best.

And LLMs were built by humans. To be legible to humans. Neuroscience has a far more uphill struggle.

And yet we've made considerable progress. We're well past the sheer crudeness of lobotomies or hits on the head.

fMRI studies can predict with reasonable accuracy which of several choices a person will make seconds before they're consciously aware of the decision. We've got functional BCIs. We can interpret dreams, we can take a literal snapshot of your mind's eye. We can use deep brain stimulation or optogentics to flip individual neurons or neural circuits with reproducible and consistent effects.

As for "determinism of the gaps". What?

Two hundred years ago, the "gap" was the entire brain. The mind was a total mystery. Now, we can point to specific neural circuits involved in decision-making, emotion, and perception. We've moved from "an imbalance of humors causes melancholy" to "stimulating the subgenual cingulate can alleviate depressive symptoms." We've gone from believing seizures were demonic possession to understanding them as uncontrolled electrical storms in the cortex. The gaps where a non-material explanation can hide are shrinking daily. The vector of scientific progress seems to be pointing firmly in one direction. At this point, there's little but wishful thinking behind vain hopes that just maybe, mechanistic interpretation might fail on the next rung of the ladder.

I am frankly flabbergasted that anyone could come away with the opposite takeaway. It's akin to claiming that progress from Newton's laws to the Standard Model has somehow left us in more ontological and epistemic confusion. It has the same chutzpah as a homeopath telling me that modern medicine is a failure because we were wrong about the aetiogenesis of gastric ulcers.

This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed.

Citation needed? I mean, what's so non-deterministic about the advances I mentioned? What exactly do you think are the "non-deterministic" techniques that work?

I see that you've been answering like this, but to me this means absolutely nothing. How is moving beyond a "mechanicistic paradigm" going to help us? What are you suggesting in concrete terms?

Read the article I linked by McGhilchrist if you want to understand more of what I'm talking about.

Iain McGilchrist comes across to me as a religious mystic and obscurantist. Yes people find it exceptionally easy to delude themselves for entirely explicable reasons (see e.g. Hanson & Simler's book) and science is hard, but entirely mechanical phenomena can create incredible complexity without major problems.

McGilchrist is very ready to make sweeping conclusions that veer into outright hallucinations (metaphysics etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_with_Things

In Part III, "What Then is True?", McGilchrist asks and attempts to answer the question "what is truth?", before turning to a wide-ranging exploration of the nature of reality: the coincidence of opposites (the idea that at a deeper, higher or transcendent level, apparent opposites may be reconciled or find union); the one and the many; time; flow and movement; space and matter; matter and consciousness; value; purpose, life and the nature of the cosmos; and the sense of the sacred. McGilchrist further argues that consciousness, rather than matter, is ontologically fundamental.[5]

That all seems like someone who doesn't understand that 'believing you are the center of the universe and somehow matter' is an adaptive psychological mechanism you'd expect to find in any vital organism, but unlikely to be actually true in the sense that 'the universe came into being to create humanity'.

So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."

Twin studies are robust and reproducible. What can't be "proven" is the particular genes behind the heritability.

Are you suggesting that the gap between inheritability and discovered genes is some kind of psychic connection between twins that other siblings do not have? Or are you making a broader point that genes are not actually connected to our personality and other traits and something else determines our personality (which weirdly chooses to give people similar traits based on degrees of consanguinity?)

The broader points I'm making are:

  1. Modern sciency people tend to have axioms they don't quite realize.
  2. Biology is stuck in a mechanistic model of genetics and life, which holds it back.

It was a neat article. I do think you’ve kind of missed the point. The twin studies are aren’t “wrong.” They replicate, their math works. But they don’t line up with these other studies which are supposed to measure the same thing. That could mean they’re wrong, or it could mean they aren’t actually measuring that thing.

materialism / genetic determinism

For example, these are not the same. Materialism supports models with irreducible randomness. We do not control enough of the inputs to be sure of every output. For the hard sciences, we’ve gotten reasonably certain in our models, but for genetics, there’s still plenty unexplained. The error bars are large.

beyond the mechanistic model

Into what? How could accepting dualism possibly improve this model?

Genetics is just really complicated. It is not at all simple like the 'blue eye gene recessive, brown eye gene dominant' charts you might have studied in school. It is not designed to be comprehensible, it's a giant mess that somehow works most of the time.

Why don't everyone's kids look like models? Why are some people born retarded goblin-creatures with gruesome, deformed faces? Why are people dying of old age? Because we don't have a good understanding of genetics, because it's just very difficult. Nobody even knows what 98% of the genome does, it was thought to be 'junk'. We know about as much about genetics as we know about the high-level structure of the universe, nothing of any significance. There too, 95% is 'dark'.

Not to mention that measuring intelligence is complicated, whether it's people or AI. Intelligence is a vibe, a fuzzy, qualitative thing. You can tell the difference between smart and dumb, that is immediately obvious. But quantifying it is very hard.

It is completely understandable for the genetic basis of intelligence to be very murky and unclear. Meanwhile, heritability is possibly the oldest branch of biology. Animals were being bred millennia ago, we know it works, few things have a stronger basis in fact.

Nobody even knows what 98% of the genome does, it was thought to be 'junk'. We know about as much about genetics as we know about the high-level structure of the universe, nothing of any significance. There too, 95% is 'dark'.

See I very much agree with both of these points. What I resent is scienctism salesmen claiming that we have cracked the code and are about to figure out how to print designer babies on command.

Nobody is saying that. Nobody can even alter fifty places in the genome safely today, certainly not in a human embryo.

Well we can be pretty sure genetics is the substance behind heredity. I see no reason to give up on mechanistic models when good progress has been made. It's just difficult. Certainly not helped by the amount of fear and politics involved. Gene-editing is functionally illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui

Reading the above wikipedia article is soul-destroying given the context of what we now know about other genetic bioresearch in China in the late 2010s.

To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.

Just because the train is late, it doesn't follow that it will never come or that trains don't work at all. There is a lot of trackwork and bad weather plus the conductor has been derailing it!

You can sort of have designer babies

Just pick your mates carefully! Ideally for multiple generations.

At just 2 children per generation, you'd have 32 great-great-great-grandchildren to choose from!

A moderately interesting interview with Eric Trump just dropped in the FT. (Limited-use gift link - the article is paywalled but may also be accessible on a 5/month basis with free registration)

The headline is "Eric Trump opens door to political dynasty." It isn't explicit, but applying bounded distrust it looks like the FT reporter raised the issue and Eric responded mildly positively. It is consistent with the Trump family's general approach of keeping the idea of an illegal 3rd term and/or a dynastic successor in the public eye while maintaining plausible deniability about actually doing it.

I don't find Eric's denials that the family is making money off the Presidency interesting - the Mandy Rice-Davies principle applies. Eric is lying here and the FT makes this clear to a reader who is paying attention while avoiding words like "lie" and "falsely". It is an interesting example of a political reporter trying to write about a lying politician without engaging in either hostile editorialising or "opinions about shape of earth differ" non-journalism.

If I had to guess, Eric is positioning himself, personally for a future move into politics. Over the last few years Eric has been running the Trump Organisation while Don Jr and Barron support their father's political operation. With Barron taller and more talented, but still a long way off 35, Don Jr is the obvious dynastic successor at the moment. But the bit of the interview about a Trump dynasty is explicitly about the idea of Eric and not Don Jr being the politician.

You can just post the archive link for people who don't want to pay. I don't know why more news sites haven't cracked down on it yet, but it's a trivially easy way to pirate most articles still.

I don't see what's particularly interesting about the article. The family is obviously directly profiting from the presidency, and here Eric gives non-arguments that the family would be richer if it didn't get into politics (perhaps true, but not a germane rebuttal). As for the "political dynasty" stuff, what makes Trumpism so unique is the cultism, and that almost certainly dies with Donald. Maybe Eric could scratch out a future riding on daddy's coattails like a populist version of Jeb Bush, but people like JD Vance and even still Ron Desantis are more well positioned to lead that movement.

As for the "political dynasty" stuff, what makes Trumpism so unique is the cultism,

The cultism, indeed. Imagine thinking a President was practically the Second Coming, and deifying him in art, or admitting that you wept with joy when he was elected. That'd be crazy.

Well, okay, so that was Obama, not Trump, but still. Pretty crazy! Or do you perhaps mean something different by 'cultism'?

The cult of personality around Obama didn't hold a candle to Trump's. Obama was regularly attacked from both the left and right within his own party. You could be a Democrat in good standing and also an Obama critic. Meanwhile, in Trump's GOP absolute fealty is the bare minimum. Criticism, where it exists, is either of the 50 Stalins variety or carefully suggesting that perhaps the Tsar is being poorly advised.

What you say here is directly opposite to what I've observed in my own life throughout both presidencies. Trump faces significant more pushback than Obama ever did. I'm unsure how to reconcile this -- one of us is simply wrong in our understanding of reality, there's no other way around it. And I don't think it's me.

If pushback against Trump is so widespread, it should be trivial to demonstrate. Where are the high profile Republicans standing in opposition to Trump? Where is this significant pushback?

one of us is simply wrong in our understanding of reality, there's no other way around it. And I don't think it's me.

Look, I don't know you. I can't speak to your personal experience. All I can observe is that on a national level, every prominent Republican who has stood up to Trump has either been whipped into line or is effectively no longer part of the American conservative coalition. On a personal level, I can observe that family members who were literally Republican party officers for decades were chased out of the party for not being sufficiently deferential to Trumpist conspiracy theories.

The cult of personality around Obama didn't hold a candle to Trump's.

Thrills up the leg? The Light Worker? The oceans stopped rising?

Granted, all that was his first term, the gloss had worn off by the time the second one came around.

The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump, it was taken up ironically because hell, yeah it was funny and cool at the same time.

Not to mention having the instincts that let him react like this in the immediate wake of the assassination attempt, leading to what you have to admit is an iconic image.

Not even close. If the argument was merely "some people really like Trump" vs "some people really liked Obama", sure, but it's not. It is that you cannot criticize Trump and be a member of the GOP in good standing. Musk tried and very rapidly learned that if you tried to break ranks you were going to be whipped into line.

There's no Obama equivalent to cabinet secretaries beginning meetings by verbally fellating Trump. The degree of personal devotion demand and received by Trump from his followers is pretty much without parallel.

The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump

If you mean literal GEoM memes, perhaps yes. If you mean artwork where Trump is portrayed as a heroic and/or borderline deific figure (often in comical contrast to his actual appearance), no. Maybe it was started by some internet troll, but his base picked it up and ran with it.

The oceans stopped rising?

...one of your examples of a cult of personality around Obama is a misphrased version of his own speech?

Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless.

This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

This was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

He's exhorting the troops ('if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it'), and he's not even saying that the oceans stopped rising but that the rise begins to slow.

Meanwhile, a considerable share of American Protestants believe(d) that Trump is anointed by God to be the President, and the share is not insignificant even if there's a comparison question regarding whether all Presidents are anointed by God.

The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump, it was taken up ironically because hell, yeah it was funny and cool at the same time.

I'm not sure what the satire part is in reference to. Probably the first memes I saw about Trump (his campaign didn't instantly take off in the online crowd so it ook a bit of time for them to start accumulating in places where I'd spot them) were God-Emperor memes, presented in a ha-ha-only-serious tone.

I think if, in your very own acceptance speech, you are already writing your place in the history books of tomorrow about future generations recognising the great job you did, that counts as "establishing a cult of personality".

I think a cult of personality is when a statesman is treated not merely as a statesman who did a great job, but an exceptional, well, personality. It's when sycophants say "Stalin raised this country from its knees (and no one else could)", not "we raised this country from its knees under Stalin (he was a great help)".

And this applies to both Obama and Trump, although Obama played more in keeping with the mos maiorum and Trump is just straightup the great MAGA king.

Where was there criticism of Obama from Democrats that was not of the 50 Stalins variety?

From the right of the party and from the left of the party. (Of course Sanders is technically not a Democrat, but in practice, he was and is.)

Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat", and I think this counts as saying that the Tsar is poorly advised:

Manchin said he is a proud Democrat, having been raised with the values of “always reaching out, trying to help others have a better quality of life and help themselves” and taking care of those who cannot help themselves.

But he said sometimes his party’s priorities in Washington are “out of balance with … how we do business in West Virginia.”

Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism. And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.

Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism

This is very silly. On this basis it is impossible for a left-winger to give anything but 50 Stalins criticism to those on the centre-left. Obviously Sanders will claim Obama isn't left-wing enough, because he's... to his left.

Scott originally gave as an example "There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country!" There isn't enough leftism is an obvious extension.

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Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat".

So? He's still a Democrat.

Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism.

That's not what 50 Stalins means. As it was originally used, it was "Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”"

It's supposed to be a completely facile pseudocriticism, not an actual criticism that is simply coming from a different direction than where you yourself are coming from. If we loop back to actual Stalin, it was just as dangerous to attack him from the left (like Trotsky did) as from the right (like Bukharin did), originally even considerably moreso. The only way to stay say would have been not to attack Stalin at all but "attack the system" while praising Stalin, like the 50 Stalins example guy does.

And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.

This is someone obscure enough that I have never heard of them before you linked this, and the whole piece starts with him taling about how his criticisms of Trump get him constantly attacked by dozens of readers. Not a particularly worthy example, this.

So? He's still a Democrat

Not a normal and mainstream one. He was a well known and prominent 'blue dogger', which exempts him from the usual rules around democrats. It could mean many things but 'moderate republican who steals more' is a reasonable and common formulation.

Can you show non-blue dog democrats criticizing Obama without careful phrasing?

It's supposed to be a completely facile pseudocriticism

I understand a 50 Stalins criticism to be that someone's positions aren't extreme enough and he should lean into them even more. Claiming that a Democrat is not left-wing enough would be a 50 Stalins criticism. (And likewise, something like "Trump isn't doing enough to stop illegal immigration" would be a 50 Stalins criticism of Trump.)

It's true that it would be dangerous to do this to actual Stalin, but that's not how the metaphor works.

This is someone obscure enough that I have never heard of them before you linked this,

It was the first one I found by googling that sounded good enough.

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To name a few:

  • Pushback from conservative Democrats on ACA. Nowadays, it's popular to blame the GOP for the ACA being the watered down version that finally passed, but it faced significant opposition from conservative Democratic senators (most notoriously Lieberman, but he took a lot of the heat for a larger body of centrist Dems).
  • Left-wing critiques of Obama foreign policy (and before you suggest it, no, this is not '50 Stalins' criticism), especially re: drone strikes
  • The Trans-Pacific Partnership was opposed by both progressive Democrats and more traditional labor Dems
  • Joe Manchin openly set himself up in opposition to Obama's policies, especially on the environmental front.

Among other things, it bears pointing out that there was no republican support for ACA, and no republican support was expected. The final version was a compromise between mainstream democrats and blue doggers, not between republicans and democrats.

Imagine thinking a President was practically the Second Coming

The QAnon stuff goes here.

and deifying him in art

...and the "God-Emperor" memes, among others, go here.

The QAnon stuff goes here.

Yes, QAnon is a similar sort of crazy.

...and the "God-Emperor" memes, among others, go here.

The difference is irony, though I understand a third party might not believe this. The worship of Obama was sincere in a way Trump never has been. Trump is a creature of social media and deeply performative displays.

Anybody who refers to Trump as God Emperor is putting on a trollish performance. Maybe they do support Trump across the board, or maybe they're more mixed, but it is not to be taken as sincerely held belief. It is said specifically for other people to hear and see, prompting either a high five or a sour facial expression to be mocked. One should also consider its usage in our ironic/post-ironic/sincere-but-not-really discourse.

I refer to him as God Emperor with some regularity, and I am nether religious nor an imperialist. This wasn't a good gotcha even when Kimmel did it. "Oh wow, did you see this photoshop of Trump on a golden chariot ascending to heaven wearing glowing laurels and weilding the Ancient Sword of Prophecy? How insane! Yikes".

I don't think the Left got this excessive with their Obama worship, but I think that's because it WAS taken more seriously. You don't want it to seem like a big joke. With Trump, just putting his face anywhere out of context feels like a punchline on its own. "Trump is watching you poop".

I believe that most people don’t actually think of Trump as a god emperor, but do be wary - every insane position on the left also started with “no one taking it seriously” (usually through being “just on tumblr” or “just some kids on campus”). Some people are definitely taking it too seriously, even accounting for the lizard man principle.

Lot's of people unironically treat Trump as a king/emperor. He's the American Marius and everyone knows he represents a break in the system, personalizing power into more personalistic arrangements.

Now which of his associates will turn Sulla?

All large political movements have some amount of cultists, but it's a matter of degrees. Biden had almost no cultists. Obama had some cultists especially amongst blacks. But for Trump the cultists are very mainstream. That's how you end up with situations like this, or this, or blatant hypocrites like Catturd becoming leading figures of the movement.

That you think Obama's cult was in blacks, and not the whites who fetishized him, suggests to me we fundamentally don't see the same world. Obama's cult was significantly larger and more mainstream than anything of Trump's. What are you even suggesting with Catturd as a leading figure? He posts on Twitter. He doesn't make any kind of decisions or influence any thought, he's just an aggregator of outrage.

Obama might have had a broader left cult during the election and shortly thereafter, but there was a ton of disillusionment afterwards with the left thinking he was too moderate. This disillusionment was a nontrivial part of why wokeness started gaining steam. Blacks broadly stayed with him the entire time, while proto-woke white leftists felt betrayed pretty quickly.

"Catturd posts on Twitter" is a non-argument. Joe Rogan just posts podcasts. Greta Thunberg just does publicity stunts. Yet we keep hearing about all of these people because they're important for one reason or another. I didn't claim Catturd was a politician himself, but he undoubtedly has influence on the broader base, which trickles up to those in power through various means.

This depends on your definition of mainstream.

If Trump declared elections suspended tomorrow and proclaimed himself first emperor of America, he would have more supporters than Obama trying to run for a third term, and lots of his opponents would object less. But CNN would run one with the headline 'fascism is here- Jews bewarned' and the other with the headline 'respected elder statesman reenters the ring'.

If Trump declared elections suspended tomorrow and proclaimed himself first emperor of America, he would have more supporters than Obama trying to run for a third term, and lots of his opponents would object less.

I'm not convinced this is true. I think Obama would absolutely cinch the vote if he ran for a third term, especially given the other options Democrats have to choose from.

Agreed on the headlines, though. Obama had significantly more earnest and intense elite buy in than Trump. They loved Obama as much as they hate the orange man.

This is a bizarre statement to me, Trump's cultists are not "mainstream" in any meaning of the word.

I'm old enough to remember the dozens of covers of actual mainstream newspapers and magazines with pictures of Obama with the Presidential seal positioned just so behind his head to give the appearance of a halo.

Do I need to provide links to the "Lightworker" articles or the newsweek "god of all things" Shiva cover? This is either absurd revisionism or you're very young.

Trump's cultists are mainstream within the Republican party. I think you're interpreting "mainstream" as in "mainstream media" or something like that, which wasn't what I meant.

I think it’s the decline of social trust coupled with the decline of religion. People no longer have the sort of bedrock idea that things are “true and right”. They think that society is full of cheats and liars, that everyone is lying to them, that the political class either doesn’t care about them or hates them, that there’s no person or group out there that actually cares about the country, and that essentially you can’t fully trust anyone or any institution. You also don’t have religion in an organized sense. You might vaguely believe, but it’s not a bulwark of truth where you can trust that you have it right.

In that situation a person who promises to fucking fix it is a relief. It’s how humans evolved. And whether or not it works, humans evolved to hand power to a guy who promises he can and will fix it. Even if you don’t agree with him, it’s a relief to finally put down th3 burden of having to worry about costs going up, crime, corruption, housing crisis, and wars. Trump or Obama have it, go back to grilling and watching baseball and living life.

Yes, the government's total inability to meaningfully make life better anymore has cratered faith in every institution across the board. Too many neutral bodies captured by one tribe, too much bad faith, too much accumulated ill will.

Same reason everyone wants fighters now, and why any political compromise is a death sentence to one's popularity. Everyone is collectively sick of the problems being compromised on, and the solutions never coming.

Yes, the government's total inability to meaningfully make life better anymore has cratered faith in every institution across the board.

The reasons are far beyond just blaming the government. There's the whole Meaning Crisis, death of God aspect as well.

In part, the other part is social media and the 24 hour news cycle effectively preventing compromise. The government used to be much much less transparent, in large part because whatever news there was traveled slowly enough and was infrequent enough that by the time the public found out about something, chances were pretty good that the deals had been worked out in the back rooms of congress before you could find out about them. In the 21st century, that’s impossible— the media is broadcasting everything in near real time with social media encouraging everyone to opine, get mad, and call the switchboard to demand that the only acceptable way forward is to do exactly what we want you to do.

How do you solve real problems when you’re on Big Brother 24 hours a day?

It's the transparency that ruins it, not the news. If government was impenetrable and its records masked instead of openly presented, compromise could still happen.

I mean demand for news by 24 hour cable news stations and the people who watch them would create the transparency because if the workings of government are not disclosed they’d dig until the information that they need to keep the station on air.

When Obama was elected I met an older white woman who wept tears of joy and said he'd come to do the work of Christ.

I'm sure there's old people who wept for Trump, too, but Obama's religious significance was a core part of his campaign and presidencies; the left worshiped him.

Any claims of MAGA "cultism" fall on deaf ears without a good explanation for why MAGA -- who routinely argue with Trump, even publicly -- are cultists without addressing the Obama elephant in the room.

Even Biden, to a lesser extent, but mostly due to relation to Obama as VP.

the left worshiped him.

Maybe for a short while but left-wing opinion turned cool on Obama surprisingly quickly, and the 'anti-imperialist' Chomskyite left never liked him. As early as 2009 not-exactly-radical-lefist Bill Maher said that:

Barack Obama is not a socialist -- he’s not even a liberal....this country needs a left wing. It doesn’t have it, and part of the reason is the media... I don’t know if this administration has really caught up to the idea that Americans are a lot more liberal, perhaps, than we think they are- or they think they are

More importantly, I think the election denial/J6 clearly puts MAGA a class apart from any other modern American political movement in terms of cultishness.

I definitely know a few hard leftists/socialists who were quick to go cold on him as well. But in general Dem normie-sphere, he was a gold standard POTUS who reigned without controversy, and his photos were posted wistfully in the Age of Trump.

I sense that too has been fading, though. Although I think that's more due to aging out of relevancy than a reappraisal of the man and his admin.

You could say they're not the real Left, but they're the one that matters.

And as a big Obama supporter for both his terms... yeah, there was a 'culty' (generously described as enamored) vibe going on. Even the Daily Show poked fun at this, with John Oliver even going to the DNC in 08 and getting little more than 'Obama will fix everything' from the crowd attendees.

Maybe for a short while but left-wing opinion turned cool on Obama surprisingly quickly, and the 'anti-imperialist' Chomskyite left never liked him. As early as 2009 not-exactly-radical-lefist Bill Maher said that:

No, it endured his entire Presidency, and even beyond it. While there's a slice of the left that dislikes Obama, it's not at all mainstream opinion.

More importantly, I think the election denial/J6 clearly puts MAGA a class apart from any other modern American political movement in terms of cultishness.

Definitely not. Challenging elections is simply what one does in such a competitive system -- there are entire Reddit communities devoted to conspiracies about 2024, you know. And J6 wasn't even the worst mostly peaceful protest at the Capital, let alone remarkable at all compared to the Burn, Loot, & Murder riots. Indeed, J6 was actually uniquely acceptable compared to other protests, given it actually directed itself against the ruling elites rather than terrorize innocent, unrelated people in cities across the country.

it's not at all mainstream opinion

Being very critical of Obama wasn't mainstream among Democrats, but obviously being critical of your own sitting President is generally unheard of these days. How many mainstream Republicans criticised GWB? Left and right factions of the Democrats criticised Obama to what I would consider a normal degree for a sitting President - there were Blue dogs who attacked him semi-regularly and some progressives who did the same.

That most obvious bellwether of mainstream liberal opinion, the New York Times wrote an endorsement for re-election in 2012 that was very enthusiastic, yes, but very conventional and offered such qualifications as

We have criticized individual policy choices that Mr. Obama has made over the last four years, and have been impatient with his unwillingness to throw himself into the political fight

Elsewhere, the NYT editorial board was sharply critical of Obama on all sorts of issues all the time. There are too many to list here but here are a few from various points in his Presidency:

Deepwater Horizon:

But a year and a half into this presidency, the contemplative nature that was so appealing in a candidate can seem indecisive in a president. His promise of bipartisanship seems naïve. His inclination to hold back, then ride to the rescue, has sometimes made problems worse.

It certainly should not have taken days for Mr. Obama to get publicly involved in the oil spill, or even longer for his administration to start putting the heat on BP for its inadequate response and failure to inform the public about the size of the spill. (Each day, it seems, brings new revelations about the scope of the disaster.) It took too long for Mr. Obama to say that the Coast Guard and not BP was in charge of operations in the gulf and it’s still not clear that is true.

He should not have hesitated to suspend the expanded oil drilling program and he should have moved a lot faster to begin political and criminal investigations of the spill. If BP was withholding information, failing to cooperate or not providing the ships needed to process the oil now flowing to the surface, he should have told the American people and the world

Libya:

Mr. Obama made the wrong choice, trying to evade his responsibility under the 1973 War Powers Act to seek Congressional authorization within 60 days of introducing armed forces into "hostilities" -- or terminate the operation. The White House claimed that the Pentagon's limited operations are not the sort of "hostilities" covered by the act. It is not credible.

NSA:

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

2011 Budget:

What Mr. Obama’s budget is most definitely not is a blueprint for dealing with the real long-term problems that feed the budget deficit: rising health care costs, an aging population and a refusal by lawmakers to face the inescapable need to raise taxes at some point. Rather, it defers those critical issues

Privacy Bill:

The draft bill released by the White House on Friday only vaguely reflects those ideas and is riddled with loopholes. It seems tailored to benefit Internet firms like Google and Facebook and little-known data brokers like Acxiom that have amassed detailed profiles of individuals. For good reason, many privacy groups and some Democratic lawmakers have criticized the draft.

there are entire Reddit communities devoted to conspiracies about 2024, you know

I can't quite tell if you're joking. On the one hand, we have the sitting President of the United States alleging that millions of votes were cast fraudulently. On the other, we have "Reddit communities". I wonder, might there be a slight asymmetry between these two things?

Indeed, J6 was actually uniquely acceptable compared to other protests, given it actually directed itself against the ruling elites

This is such a strange rendering of the riot in abstract terms. Indeed it was directed against ruling elites, but unfortunately in this case those elites were democratically elected representatives of the people certifying a fair election, and the rioters were targeting them because the process had failed their cult leader. Good job for those J6ers that the same election riggers who had the power to magically turn the result against Trump didn't show up for 2024 (or 2016), I suppose. Perhaps they overslept.

Not a one of those criticisms of Obama is more severe than criticism I see of Trump.

I can't quite tell if you're joking. On the one hand, we have the sitting President of the United States alleging that millions of votes were cast fraudulently. On the other, we have "Reddit communities". I wonder, might there be a slight asymmetry between these two things?

No, though feel free to look back on Russiagate if you want similar elite conspiracies. There are plenty of Democrats decrying the election, just like with Gore, just like with the next election they'll lose, too. The only reason no Democrat President is pushing this is that there's no Democrat President, period.

This is such a strange rendering of the riot in abstract terms. Indeed it was directed against ruling elites, but unfortunately in this case those elites were democratically elected representatives of the people certifying a fair election, and the rioters were targeting them because the process had failed their cult leader.

And Trump is the democratically elected representative of the country, yet people still rioted against him -- only the left destroyed innocent people's property, lashing out in blind rage at the fact their cult lost. The government is not more sacred than the people it rules. We are citizens, not subjects, and not lessers.

Good job for those J6ers that the same election riggers who had the power to magically turn the result against Trump didn't show up for 2024 (or 2016), I suppose. Perhaps they overslept.

The ability to rig an election does not mean a guarantee of success; elections have many moving parts. This is why it took 2020, and sweeping, unprecedented changes to the voting process, to properly fortify the election.

And of course, once that context couldn't be repeated, Trump won again. Fortifying an election, and loudly bragging about it, makes it easier to counter the second time around. The Trump campaign was much more aggressive this time around, to their success.

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Oh yeah, edited to be clear I meant Obama.

As for the "political dynasty" stuff, what makes Trumpism so unique is the cultism

At this point this can only be called projection. Half of his base had their fingers on the trigger in case he listened to the neoccons, and went to war with Iran.

Compare and contrast to refusing to answer basic questions like "what is a woman?" for fear of how the rest of the cult will react.

What? MAGA was largely against attacking Iran, right up until Trump did so, then they became very much in favor.

I don't know what your second paragraph is in reference to.

I know what I saw on my timeline. And Trump didn't keep his intervention limited because everybody was so supportive of it.

I don't know what your second paragraph is in reference to

Really? You never ever heard any public official or intellectual from a particular political side being evasive on the question?

Nope, Trump did what neocons failed to accomplish during any previous GOP administration over the last 40 years, namely direct, massive US air strikes on the Iranian nuclear program, and he did it over the wishes of isolationists like Carlson and to the approval of the great majority of his base. Framing this as a win for principled anti-intervention rightists is ridiculous.

And Trump didn't keep his intervention limited because everybody was so supportive of it.

Ground invasion of Iran is impossible and externally-forced regime change is impossible without ground invasion. Trump picked the most maximalist neocon option realistically possible, just like when he had Soleimani assassinated over the suggestions of the DoD and most of his own senior advisors.

Framing this as a win for principled anti-intervention rightists is ridiculous.

Who said anything about a "win for principled anti-intervention"? They wanted to do much more than this, but didn't.

Ground invasion of Iran is impossible and externally-forced regime change is impossible without ground invasion.

I'm sure all these calls for regime change were just kayfabe, as were Israeli attempts to break the cease fire.

The Israelis are delusional and wrong about regime change. It’s strange that critics of Israel seem to be so heavily invested in Mossad’s infallibility (even ‘October 7th was allowed to happen’ etc). The only way regime change happens in Iran is if the Tehran middle class get fed up enough to make it happen. That will be independent from Israel.

The Israelis are delusional and wrong about regime change. It’s strange that critics of Israel seem to be so heavily invested in Mossad’s infallibility

Well, between those pager bombings, and the precision of the recent strikes that they're bragging about, few people are putting Mossad's competence in doubt. It's their good faith that people are doubting, and this is the case here as well. I don't think they're delusional, I think they know full well regime change without ground troops is impossible, but they're trying to lure the US to put said boots on said ground via the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

MAGA is/was strongly opposed to sending troops to Iran, and is broadly in favor of how things actually played out. There is no contradiction there.

MAGA was against intervention broadly. I don't think I heard a single MAGA aligned person say "boots on the ground are my specific redline" beforehand.

What MAGA was/is against is yet more on-going foreign entanglements consuming blood and treasure for little gain. See ou (the US's recent experience in) Afgahnistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Et Al.

A quick surgical strike followed almost immediately by a negotiated peace is pretty much the exact opposite of an on-going entanglement.

Maybe Eric could scratch out a future riding on daddy's coattails like a populist version of Jeb Bush, but people like JD Vance and even still Ron Desantis are more well positioned to lead that movement.

The more interesting question to me is: would Eric or Don Jr. draw enough attention to fatally weaken another MAGA candidate and throw the race into confusion? Trumpism has always had multiple facets: some people like him because he's a fighter who wins for traditional conservative causes like reducing the size of government or abortion issues, others like him as an explicit repudiation of the prior GOP consensus on issues like foreign intervention and tariffs, still others just like Trump personally as a celebrity showman.

A TrumpSon run would almost certainly capture significant quantities of credibility on the third leg, and probably carry more credibility on the particular mix of traditional Republican policies and MAGA policies than most older line GOP candidates like Rubio or Desantis. A Trumpson run would also be ruinous to Vance, as it would rob Vance of the title of Heir.

Even if neither Eric nor Don Jr. can win, and I don't particularly think they can as they haven't thus far shown the kind of talent that would get them over the finish line, their run could still be important. Which is why they're NEVER going to say they aren't running: the threat of entering the race, even if only for a quixotic Connor Roy spoiler run, is leverage. And the Trump's are old-school moguls, they never let go of leverage*. So whether they actually plan to run or not, they'll hang the threat of a run over Vance and Desantis, and demand loyalty and service in exchange.

*I personally remain convinced that Trump's entire 2020 election theft bit was a clash of worldviews. In real estate, when you have a claim, even a weak claim, it represents leverage, and you can get your counterparty to negotiate and give you something for it. You never let it lapse for nothing. Trump thought he could cash out the vague election theft allegations for something from Biden's handlers; Biden's handlers don't think that way and wanted Trump gone so they weren't in the mood to play. In his efforts to hang onto the bit, Trump lost control of it, and wound up with a lot of things happening that did not benefit him at all.

some people like him because he's a fighter who wins for traditional conservative causes like reducing the size of government

??????

Trump hasn't significantly reduced the size of the government, and even explicitly refuses to touch the largest parts of it (bloated elder care in the form of Social Security and Medicare).

I vaguely agree with everything else you said in your post, and thought it was a bit more interesting and insightful than the article the OP posted.

A TrumpSon run would almost certainly capture significant quantities of credibility on the third leg

Unlikely; I've seen no evidence that any of Trump's kids possess his humor or stage presence - major reasons he did so well.

would Eric or Don Jr. draw enough attention to fatally weaken another MAGA candidate and throw the race into confusion?

Did Jeb! work to weaken the Republican alternatives to Trump, by which I mean had he not been in the race, would the support and party machinery have gone to someone else (maybe Ted Cruz) who would have been stronger and therefore successfully challenged Trump, or was it Trump's moment and the rest of them were fatally flawed as being identifiably part of the Establishment? (Do we really want the world where there was a President Cruz instead?)

I don't think Jeb's support, such as it was, mattered that much in the end - he had four pledged delegates to Cruz' five hundred and fifty-one, so clearly the support wasn't behind him despite being a Bush. I think the same would be true for Eric or Don Jr., they just wouldn't have enough recognition of their own to do any real damage as splitting a MAGA vote. I think anybody wanting to vote for deSantis or Vance (if they go in 2028) would be deterred by "vote for Eric Trump instead".

In real estate, when you have a claim, even a weak claim, it represents leverage, and you can get your counterparty to negotiate and give you something for it. You never let it lapse for nothing.

This is somehow the most logical explanation I've heard for 2020, and I hadn't heard of it before.

Same! It's making me think.

For instance - I wonder what he could've gotten that would've appeased him?

Color me skeptical that there's going to be any direct dynastic successor to Donald Trump. None of his children seem to have his sheer unprincipled audacity, nor will they inherit his cult of personality. I think once Trump himself is out of the picture, the knives are going to come out and the Trump children are going to discover their fellow Republicans don't like them very much.

The Trump name will be enough to get them instantly top 2 in any statewide primary. They wouldn’t need too much talent to have a political career if they want it, though capturing the Presidency is a difficult feat

As a Desantis supporter, I was disappointed by the power of the Trump name with your typical chud Republican. But nevertheless it exists

DeSantis' problem was a combination of timing (he would have been giving up his governorship if elected POTUS) and the fact that no one wants the diet option when they can have the real thing.

You can take solace in the fact that he's still under 50 and well positioned to run again in 2028 or '32 depending on how things shake out.

I do find it interesting that Trump, for all of his self-vanity, does seem to genuinely care about leaving a legacy behind him and grooming successors. I suppose it could be an extension of his vanity, in an old sort of "having a grand legacy men will speak about for a thousand years" sort of way, but it strikes me as quite different from most other politicians that operate at the moment.

It seems underappreciated that regardless of how much or how little he was actually involved in raising them, every single one of Trump's kids have seemingly turned out well-adjusted (especially controlling for being raised with absurd wealth), irrespective of their birth mother.

Often enough major politicians' or business magnates' children can turn into embarrassing thorns in their side, maybe going to the press with stories of neglect or outright abuse, of being two-faced and dishonest. Or just being badly behaved and unworthy to fill their parents' shoes. (I'm constantly reminded of Tom Hanks' son Chet as a reminder for how far the apple can fall.)

Somehow he got five kids to adulthood (Barron's got a ways to go but just look at the guy) and no major blowouts, four of the five with kids of their own now.

The first couple steps to having any kind of Dynasty is raising your kids right and making sure they go on to expand the brood themselves so you have a diverse portfolio of possible heirs (tongue in cheek). It'd be worth trying to figure out what the Trumpian secret sauce is.

I think you’re going from the wrong assumption here. Kids and grandkids of Trump have much more in common with stereotypical children of wealth than they do children of celebrities. Confusing the two is a common mistake, but they are extremely different. A child of wealth learns that they have a parachute if they screw up. A child of celebrities learns that attention = survival, and are clearly poised to learn counterproductive lessons.

Speaking of children of politicians as a sort of weird third category doesn’t make sense. Either they are kids of the attention seeking variety (where some craziness is expected) or wealth (where they largely turn out fine). And I think you far oversell the number of crazy kids of wealth. Now I grant you part of that is wealth does better at hiding even after being busted for something (eg the children of the Reuters guy and their nanny). Despite that it’s impressive how relatively few wealthy kid screwups there are.

The deal with children of wealth is: if they turn out rotten, now it’s everyone’s problem. You never hear about the poor kid who blows a 1k inheritance in a strip club in one night, but the dumb company heir who goes bankrupt brings a lot down with him.

I think my main point is that Trump, for all his weirdness, apparently has pretty decent genes and can't be a particularly bad parent if his kids are all successful in their own right and are still on good terms with him.

Someone else pointed out Elon's kids as a comparison and, yeah.

Hmm. I was going to disagree, but some back of envelope bayes-rule calculations actually do seem to agree I understated the case so I guess I stand corrected on that front.

Good on ya for doing some math.

I haven't looked to see if there's any reliable research, I'm just kind of going off the general odds that the more kids you have, the higher chances that at least one of 'em will be a screwup.

Kids and grandkids of Trump have much more in common with stereotypical children of wealth than they do children of celebrities.

By comparison with Hunter Biden, though they may not be perfect, they're not as messy. Even The Onion can only mock Eric and Don Jr. for being childish idiots, whereas they had to go from 'Biden won't pardon Hunter' to 'Biden pardoned Hunter'.

I'm not comparing with the Bidens, though. To me that's too much selection bias, of a sort, but there's more than that besides. We should compare Trump's progeny to other business magnates - the original claim from faceh was that Trump is underappreciated for having well-adjusted progeny, and I reply that no no, he's merely doing par for the course. Billionaire kids, near as I can tell, aren't poorly-adjusted all that often. Politician kids, which were lumped in the same category, are not the same category. They are in fact on the spectrum that leads toward celebrity kids, which is definitely not the same category, despite conflation in that same comment! Trump is a businessman who, in the twilight of his life, decided to be a politician (and some think didn't even fully intend to, alleging he expected to lose). That's a very different thing than a political dynasty family. And even then... you know, children of major politicians being an embarrassment is probably still the exception rather than the rule.

Trump has grandchildren that are probably turning out ok themselves, too. It’s a contrast to Elon Musk’s ki

I'm constantly reminded of Tom Hanks' son Chet as a reminder for how far the apple can fall.

Look, someone had to tell us it was a white boy summer.

That song is unironically a banger if all you want is a party jam. Should pair well with Ye's recent hit single "Heil Hitler," although the vibes are very different.

I do find it interesting that Trump, for all of his self-vanity, does seem to genuinely care about leaving a legacy behind him and grooming successors.

Huh? I'm totally lost: one of Trump's defining political characteristics over his decade in politics is his lack of successors. That's why Butler, PA was so crazy: everyone knew that if Trump died the policy direction of the United States would change. And it would have! The entire world economy would be in a different place today if Trump hadn't turned left at the last second.

Where Biden died on the job, and no one even noticed, and on the ballot he was replaced by Harris with no real change in policy plans, and if Harris hadn't taken the nomination we have a list of generic "qualified" Democrats pages long who would all implement more or less the same policies. Romney, McCain, Dubya, Dole all had pretty similar policy platforms, as did many of their primary competitors. Trump? No one has his policy platform, except inasmuch as they copy it from him.

In a decade in office, Trump has done nothing to groom a successor publicly as the "next one up."

Hmm you do have a point here. I suppose I see the Democratic party more as one undifferentiated blob, although that's likely my personal bias peeking in.

I think Trump does plenty to allow others to take the spotlight though - J.D. Vance has been doing the rounds quite publicly for a while, which Trump could easily put a stop to if he wanted.

I think that was definitely true for the first Trump admin, one of the many personnel problems it had. But my reading of the tea leaves is that Vance is absolutely being groomed as Trump's successor- he is being sent out to do the sort of foundational policy making that you wouldn't fob off on the average do-nothing VP. Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference is one of biggest moments in international relations of the decade, fundamentally changing the relationship between the US and EU, and full of lines that I would imagine Trump himself would have loved to drop, and yet JD is the one doing it.

Also, Vance is low key probably the smartest (in terms of IQ) major figure in American politics today, which is always a plus for his future prospects.

Wow, child of political officeholder is open to idea of someday running for office themselves. This has never ever happened in the history of the world before. Nope, no dynasties of Dalys, Bushes, Kennedys, Gandhis, every local politician round my way... this is why there isn't a whole Wikipedia article about US political families besides one about the practice in general. Yes, this is all about "an illegal 3rd term" for Trump.

The “third term” thing has always been crazy to me. The guy is 78 now, if he wins a third term, he’ll be 82 at the start and 86 at the end. I don’t think anyone could do the job at that advanced age. I’m not sure about Eric Trump in any case, but he’s much more logical than Trump term 3.

It's crazy on multiple levels. His age, like you said, but also that it's blatantly illegal. I guess in theory the constitution could be amended, but does anyone seriously think that's likely? I certainly don't, at least. And without an amendment, a lot of Trump's supporters are going to refuse to support him any more (because they don't like flouting the law), at which point he can't win an election anyways.

To me, the whole idea of a third Trump term is just another in the long line of people freaking out about how he's the worst thing to ever happen to America. As the saying goes, the demand for authoritarianism from Trump outstrips supply.

Trump's appeal to his base is in large part being the legitimate ruler who performs the proper rites of rulership with the right pomp and doesn't do anything worse with their tax money than steal it. They didn't abandon him after J6(I did; Trump proved himself weak by not doubling down). 'Legality' has nothing to do with it. It's about 'better coverage than 5g'.

But he wouldn't be the legitimate ruler in this case, because he can't be. I don't deny that there's a group of people who are so fanatical about Trump that they will follow him no matter what he does. But it's not enough to get him re-elected.

'Legitimacy' means 'Emperor who is at worst neutral about my tribe'. The US isn't a nation anymore and everyone accepts it; an imperial government which takes your tax money(ideally as little as possible) to fuck off and spend on its own pet projects but doesn't demand anything else is far from the worst thing in the world- it's the default human governance arrangement. Trump makes a big show of this and that is why he's so successful at campaigning on 'legitimacy' when he's blatantly wrong. He has more black support than previous republicans because he doesn't talk about rap music and 70% illegitimacy and sagging pants- he doesn't want to impose red tribe values and religion(socially conservative but orthopraxic Christianity) on the black tribe. That plus caudillismo plus pomp is the secret sauce to Trump's 'mandate of Heaven'.

I'm not sure that the percentage of people who just want a good strong emperor to make the government leave them alone is a majority yet- I think Trump is Marius, not Caesar. But it's clearly a rapidly growing percentage that explains a huge chunk of Trump's appeal. The people who feel like their tribe's values and religion are something Washington wants to replace love him because of it, even if they're not ready to crown him with laurels when his troops force the senate to suspend elections.

It's crazy on multiple levels. His age, like you said, but also that it's blatantly illegal.

This isn't crazy once you accept a not insignificant number of people -- an amount I perceive to be growing, not shrinking, with time -- believe the laws are already being routinely broken, including constitutional rights, with no penalty.

Sure, a third term's unconstitutional. So is the constant deprivation of my gun rights in blue states. I'm not convinced the third term rule is more important than the gun rule.

But the bit of the interview about a Trump dynasty is explicitly about the idea of Eric and not Don Jr being the politician.

The obvious move is senator, here- is there a safe red state senate seat opening up? Eric can presumably establish residency wherever he wants and most people are voting for a replacement level party-line voter for senate.

Mitch McConnell has announced he's not running again, so Kentucky is open for 2026. McConnell has a replacement planned but Mitch is less popular with his electorate than Trump is.

Lindsey Graham is also up in 2026 but is planning to run again as far as I know. South Carolina.

They've both been thorns in Trump's side and aren't very popular in their states. However they both have the state primary apparatus locked down and could engage in shenanigans to stop an unwelcome competitor.

In theory Eric Trump has the access to money and connections to make it a real fight.

Right, John Cornyn is also probably going to lose his primary but the seat’s not really ‘open’- Trump risks a humiliating defeat if he endorsed Eric. Kentucky is probably the only real shot.


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