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Scott has a new post on AI and money in politics. I'd like to take a step back and talk about how we got here.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda. But in the years after the decision, the feared corporate catastrophe failed to materialize. Trump didn't win in 2016 because of corporate support. In the primary, he bragged that he was self-funding his campaign and so wasn't beholden to special interests. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders got a lot of milage out of constantly reminding people that he didn't have a SuperPac.
In 2019, Scott wrote the prophetic Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, in which he pointed out that wealthy actors are probably underspending on politics and then brainstormed ways to turn money into political influence. By 2022, we started to see serious attempts at using previously-unheard-of amounts of money to systematically affect the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was too-clever-by-half donating money he didn't technically own, but Elon Musk's aquisition of Twitter ended wokeness overnight and likely won Trump the 2024 election. If Scott is to be believed, the cryptocurrency and AI industries are well on their way to fulfilling SBF's dream of rooting the state.
Why did it take 10+ years for this to happen? My hypothesis: cultural inertia (and shame).
Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.
I think a big reason money in politics didn't manifest the way the doomers predicted is because money in politics just isn't that effective when employed the way envisioned by the doomers. Taking out hundreds of hours of ads just doesn't move the needle all that much. Instead, as Elon showed, what actually matters is institutions. Buying twitter isn't really something exxon or disney is realistically going to do.
The question is, for political purposes, is any of this affordable? Can you buy Harvard and the rest of the Ivy league? Probably not. Can you buy disney, youtube, etc? For most people, the answer is going to be no. And even if you can, like Bezos did with the Washington Times*, you'll discover your ability to influence the influence your institution wields is still limited by staff.
Edit: Meant the Post.
You could buy an astroturfing campaign.
I sometimes wonder why this isn't more common. It should be very cost-effective, given how few people participate in online discourse, social-desirability bias, and crowd behavior dynamics mean you only need ~5% of that small minority to start forming consensus around something.
You could, with a small team and a stock of authentic-looking sockpuppet accounts, own the reaction comments around some political podcast, the chat for popular streamers, the topics in political subreddits, etc. For a pittance in paid subscriptions to influential writers, you could maybe even turn the direction of their output - audience capture is a thing.
Astroturfing doesn't work, the ground withers if theres no traction. No amount of leftist 'trans women are women' in vidya or policy or media made trannies more popular, the only thing that made trannies popular was bailey jay for a brief while in the mid 2010s.
Influential writers lose influence when they start pushing stupid points, Jordan Peterson went downhill when he became weird lobster medicine man, Ibram X Kendi and all the antiracism shills died when the thermostatic moment passed and you didn't get cancelled for not doing the public prayers.
Creators botting up their numbers lose real humans because real humans aren't sheep just following a flock, we don't even care about comments unless we're validating our own biases. Left wing news media are the ones that curtailed all their comment sections, right wing media all let their comment sections run free. Astroturfing comments to talk about how Mirpuris aren't actually grooming kids and its actually white pedos largely responsible for CSE doesn't make people go 'oh wow thats true I was just being racist' it makes people go 'fuck these gaslighters'.
Astroturfing is easy to blame for outcomes because it externalizes blame - we don't need to change we just need to stop the evil baddies from doing their bad thing and our Good Easy Moral Message will come forth! Staying the path is easy if you don't actually care about how destroyed your entire reputation is on the path.
Just when did JBP become this? This seems more like a caricature by ignorant detractors rather than an earnest condensation of what he espouses. JBP always used serotonin in lobsters to exemplify how despite 500 million years of divergent evolution, we still share a lot of psychological commonality in the function of serotonin in how we process defeat and dominance.
The only woo he pushes is that carnivore diet, but considering the historically unreliable and still indecisive state of nutrition science, I don't believe this and other theory about ketogenic diets have been proven to be ineffective.
As soon as offputting woke types stopped going on live TV debates against him, the guy pretty much ran out of anything interesting or new to say. You can talk about bible metaphors on Joe Rogan only so many times. Also didn’t the guy go insane at some point?
The TV debates are what's really boring. His interesting discussion is in psychology. What I find most fascinating are his ideas of human perception, like such relating to the orienting reflex with error detection and novelty in the environment; how our value judgements shape our cognition not only in the decision making domain but in the very way that we perceive the world; and him likening such to modern AI where bottom-up approaches have triumphed over top-down manual programming of structure into ANNs because of the frame problem and such, where AI can't even see the toy environment without integrating an unexpectedly massive amount of information. I also find his ideas about the useful information narratives and archetypes to be interesting and gets me thinking about why humans find stories so entertaining in the first place.
As for going insane, that just sounds like more gossip by detractors. He did have his run-in with benzos, which seems more like an error with the medical establishment not properly advertising the risk of physical dependency that prescription use can induce. Then he tried to detox by putting himself into a coma in Russia which was also a pretty big error, and he seemed cognitively devastated for a little while, but his slump was nothing I'd say resembled insanity.
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