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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, Hanania was right again *

Two months ago, Richard Hanania predicted that Nick Fuentes and the groypers would become a major force in mainstream Republican politics. At the time, there was a fair bit of TheMotte discussion (including by me) which could be described as dismissive. Some choice quotes:

  • "As far as I have seen Fuentes occupies the space of fairly ineffective troll."
  • "Groypers are not a real faction in republican politics lol. I could speak with a dozen R voters off the street here in Texas and I doubt more than 1 even knows they exist."
  • "As Sagan pointed out, they laughed at the Wright Brothers but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Fuentes is Bozo the Clown."

Yeah, about that... A few days ago Nick Fuentes did a full interview with Tucker Carlson. This was a mild surprise at most, given that Tucker has been dabbling in less-than-sympathetic viewpoints on Israel and Jews as of late. A lot of people thought that this would be the nail in the coffin cementing Tucker as a fringe figure, and that his days headlining major conservative events would end.

This appears not to have happened:

"There has been speculation that @Heritage is distancing itself from @TuckerCarlson over the past 24 hours. I want to put that to rest right now—here are my thoughts [attached video statement]"

The Heritage Foundation is the Conservative Establishment think tank. It doesn't get more mainstream than them. What is striking is that the statement doesn't just contrast America with Israel, it contrasts Christians with Israel, a tacit acknowlegement of the legitimacy of Christian discomfort with Israel specifically because of their rejection of Christ. This isn't quite total groyper victory, but one can see it on the horizon.

From a realpolitik perspective, I think this is bad. The groypers are right that Israel doesn't act in America's interests and that many American Jews have dual loyalty. That's how coalitions work. A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side. Rooting-out infidels might be a good strategy if Christ is King, but if he isn't, and it turns out we're all alone on this big round rock, then the groypers are blowing-up the conservative intelligentsia for no good reason.

*Apparently this is a series now.

By the contrary: Hanania is always wrong. If Hanania said the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east I'd look outside. At this point he's mostly Nick Fuente's hypeman and his desperate calls to authority for SOMEONE to put the naughty rightoid into time-out is pathetic. Hanania is a figure of no intellectual value and even less political valence and I will downvote any OP that mentions him as an authority on... well, anything.

From a realpolitik perspective, I think this is bad.

This is bad for American conservatism in an even more fundamental nature. For a brief period around 2025, you had Trump come in and detached right wing rhetoric from explicit[1] Christianity from the Robertson/Buchanan era. This created room in the nascent Trump coalition for people that wouldn't join if it was explicitly Christian even if they would happily compromise on a number of policies. And the religious wing did indeed get a good number of policy goals (within reason, obviously the anti-IVF folks were gonna be told to STFU). Detaching the rhetoric didn't result in abandoning all their priorities.

Ultimately this is how coalitions evolve -- when they are out of power, there's no sense in fighting because anything is better than 4 more years of Biden/Harris. Now there is a real battle for how holds the reins and who can be in the tent.

[1] Although I think one important piece that doesn't follow here is "blue policies mistreat Christians and need to be stopped" but I distinguish that quite a bit from the movement here.

Rooting-out infidels might be a good strategy if Christ is King,

Not even then. Generally speaking Christianity has looked down in that sort of thing.

Bloody Verdict of Verdun: widely condemned by the Church at the time, contemporary historians considered it a black mark on Charlemagne’s record.

Various Pogroms: not looked on fondly today, often bishops and priests would take on Jews to try to protect them from mobs.

Spanish Inquisition: Widely considered a mistake that didn’t work.

And honestly Jews make good allies against the Muslims, which are the real threat to Christendom. A quarter of the planet is Muslim, Jews are single digit percentage.

The Inquisition coincided with the Spanish Golden Age, the height of the Spanish Empire, the height of Spanish music and art, and the expansion of Spain into the New World where now hundreds of millions are Spanish-descended Catholics. If God worked in superstitious ways, you can hardly imagine an act more commended by Him than the Inquisition. Would there have been a flourishing of Catholic Spain if a larger percent of the rich were Sephardic Jews? No. They did not fund any music and barely any pictorial art, let alone Christian music and art, but directed their profits to their own communities.

The inquisition was a monarchist attempt at gentling, centralizing, and regulating the series of irregular popular riots and local parish manias which had previously characterized concerns about false conversions and other anti-jewish sentiments. Ironically, the papal attitude was that even these efforts were far too harsh, and that the spaniards were just targeting people in order to seize their wealth rather than out of any actual proof of heresy/insincerity.

The Inquisition coincided with the Spanish Golden Age, the height of the Spanish Empire, the height of Spanish music and art, and the expansion of Spain into the New World where now hundreds of millions are Spanish-descended Catholics.

Well, yes, that's what happens when you've just finished a century-long process of reconquest of some of the richest lands in Europe, and then just-so-happen to have oodles of now-unoccupied fighting men laying around right when an explorer bumps into a whole new civilization sitting on some of the biggest silver mines in the world, and who has no resistance to any of the diseases that you're accustomed to. The inquisition had nothing to do with any of that.

Would there have been a flourishing of Catholic Spain if a larger percent of the rich were Sephardic Jews?

Yes, because increasing the percentage of wealthy spaniards which were jewish wouldn't have changed anything about the quality of Toledo steel, the tactics of the proto-Tercios, or the susceptibility of Aztecs, Maya, and Incas to old world diseases. Nor would jews have done anything to decrease the quality or output of the mines at Potosi.

the papal attitude was that even these efforts were far too harsh

That was the opinion of one pope in 1482, and for just a single year before he bent his knee to the Spaniards, allowing Spain full reign to carry out their inquisitions. The inquisition lasted ~350 years.

when an explorer bumps into a whole new civilization sitting on some of the biggest silver mines in the world […] the inquisition had nothing to do with any of that

The inquisition had nothing to do with Spanish Catholics monopolizing newfound trade opportunities? Sephardic Jews had previously dominated regional trade. The Inquisition ensured that all new profits stayed within the Catholic realm. Today, Lev Leviev and Dan Gertler direct their diamond trade profits to their own communities, and it would have been the same in a less-inquisitive Spain. It’s a zero-sum resource competition between two distinct communities.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Spain proper always had a low population density, at least through the spanish golden age. Crazy-big Spanish armies were due to new world extraction that was more due to Spain happening to conquer two gigantic ancient empires, one of which sat on a literal mountain made of silver, and a technological breakthrough in metals refining allowing the spanish to exploit more marginal mines in the new world. You can maybe blame the latter on something to do with Spain but Spanish military exploits were more like a random third-world dictatorship striking oil and suddenly buying top of the line military kit for long running wars in their near abroad than anything else. The Spanish army wasn't even mostly actual Spaniards.

Catholic Spain's cultural flourishing, on the other hand, mostly was the crown. Again, Spain's native military, cultural, and technological edge was not their, most of their soldiers and inventors and artists and a weirdly high percentage of conquistadors were literally not Spanish(Holland and Northern Italy and Greece all birthed notable 'Spaniards' in the period). The decision to keep launching moonshot expeditions at conquering parts of the new world, and not start moonshot ventures at eg invading China(a real plan that was presented to the Spanish crown), was the Spanish government. The decision to import the absolute best artists and engineers was the crown. There simply weren't enough Spaniards. Spanish armies were hilariously small when they actually enforced the de jure requirement for Spanish blood.

And Latin America being like 90% Spanish speaking Catholics(until recently) was also a crown priority; they could easily have been a normal conquering empire, just give us tribute type thing. The Incas sat on a literal mountain made of silver and could pay whatever bribe. The Spanish crown just really wanted to spread their culture and religion.

technological breakthrough in metals refining allowing the spanish to exploit more marginal mines in the new world

Which one is that? I haven't heard that one.

The patio method allowed the spanish to use silver ores that wouldn't have been profitable otherwise; like all pre-industrial regimes, their ability to mobilize labour(very much including soldiers but also the craftsmen, farmers etc to equip and feed those soldiers) was rate-limited by their net production of silver coins to pay for that labour(proles in history expect to be paid in silver, not gold, gold isn't the equivalent of a ben franklin- it's the equivalent of $100k bill, basically a year's salary for the upper end of the class that does actual work. Soldiers and labourers are paid in silver alloyed coins, gold alloys are used for big budget transactions between large companies[mostly reconciling accounts] and pure gold is mostly an accounting fiction for budgets and the like). Economics is just really different in an era where the labor theory of value isn't BS. The patio method allowed silver mines which had the high value ores tapped out to be continually exploited, giving Spain a revenue stream to equip its armies better(remember the labour theory of value is actually true until ~1750) and recruit more soldiers. Most Spanish soldiers, armorers, farmers feeding their armies, etc were Germans who had to be paid in cash to prevent defection; that's not to say Spanish armies in the eighty years war were particularly well run(they were a logistical disaster, the same as the modern day Saudi army- again, this is the equivalent of a third world country striking oil and suddenly having an unlimited credit line for military equipment) but at a certain point blacksmiths can just not cooperate particularly well, you have to fork over the money. Spanish army chits were worth the paper they were printed on because Spain had unlimited cash reserves due to the ability to reopen tapped out mines with superior refining methods- even the loot from the inca and aztec empires runs out fast.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Spain proper always had a low population density, at least through the spanish golden age.

Spanish armies weren't huge, but spanish tactics, on the other hand, were top notch, as was their equipment.

Spanish military exploits were more like a random third-world dictatorship striking oil and suddenly buying top of the line military kit for long running wars in their near abroad than anything else. The Spanish army wasn't even mostly actual Spaniards.

The Spanish armies were forged in the reconquista, not conjured ex nihilo out of Peruvian silver.

they could easily have been a normal conquering empire, just give us tribute type thing.

This is how the empire originally worked in many cases, with native polities giving tribute to spanish conquistadors. However, the Crown back in Spain didn't want rogue adventurers setting up their own kingdoms, and so set up administrations to take more direct control, including settlement of more europeans. Because the church had been partly nationalized during the reconquista, this included a lot of church officials getting secular power and control as well.

By the same token you might point out that the First Amendment coincided with the rise of the United States from backwater ex-colonies to global superpower. X happening at the same time as Y just doesn't prove much about God's will.

In the case of Spain, there's an obvious common explanation - unifying the peninsula (except for Portugal) allowed for a huge increase in both the resources and more importantly the state capacity of the Spanish crown, allowing it to engage in a number of large-scale projects, including the colonisation of the Americas, the flourishing of early modern Spanish culture, and the inquisition. Some of these projects were good and some of them were bad. It's quite superstitious itself to declare that they must all be lumped together, or were all causative of each other. The inquisition caused cultural flourishing? Might as well argue the reverse as well - cultural flourishing causes religious persecution! This is not good logic.

Spain actually had a relatively low state capacity in the era. Spanish armies were so large because of new world precious metals flowing into the treasury allowing Spain to hire mercenaries that were not actually from Spain- it's the equivalent of if a random third world country struck oil and suddenly had a better equipped army than its rivals, no one thinks that's because of a better R&D program. Spanish taxation and conscription was pretty bad and that explains why much poorer rivals with smaller armies were able to beat them in battle so often.

In the 15th century? We're talking about the end of the Reconquista, aren't we? I would have thought it would be hard to deny that in the 15th century the Spanish crown was definitely on the upswing. My thought is that the rise of the Catholic Monarchs, the successful (re)conquest of the entire peninsula, the Spanish Inquisition, and (some decades later) the colonisation of the Americas were all part of a big run of Spanish success.

I don't take the flow of American silver and gold into Spain as being the key factor here because the upswing we're talking about begins in the 15th century - we're talking 1480s onwards, aren't we?

Spain wasn't a dominant power in 1480, though, was it? For dynastic politics reasons Spain happened to be in command of the holy roman empire, but it was Austria that was dominant, not Spain.

Spain was on the upswing but being hapsburgs was probably a bigger part of it than superior tactics due to refinement in battle against the moors(after all, france was also in an existential conflict during the era, as were literally every balkans country).

Spain is already a Great Power under Ferdinand and Isabella, who unite Aragon and Castille in 1479 and complete the Reconquista in 1492, a year in which they also play venture capitalist and sponsor a Genoese nutcase who has the wrong value for the circumference of the Earth and thinks he can sail west to China without running out of fresh water for the crew.

Charles V consolidates the Habsburg Empire in 1519 including Spain, Austria and the formerly Burgundian Netherlands, and then goes on to conquer large parts of Italy (some of which is badged as a reconquest of historic Aragonese territory). When he abdicates in 1545, the Spanish half of the Empire is clearly the senior one, although it includes the now-Spanish Netherlands, which were not part of the Spanish inheritance. But even without the Netherlands, I think Spain including the old Aragonese possessions in Italy is a strong candidate for 2nd-strongest country in Early Modern Europe (after France).

I apologize in advance, you have activated my autism.

The Massacre of Verden (not Verdun, that would have to wait for its own massacres) was not really that big a deal at the time, and the connection to Christianity is tenuous beyond the general context of religious war. The issue of oath-breaking/treason is far more strongly attested, and mass executions for treason were not unprecedented in Carolingian times - Charlemagne's uncle Carloman had carried out an even more devious one against the leaders of the Christian Alemanni. We have no evidence the massacre was condemned by the Church at the time. Here is the only detailed source (RFA/Einhard - there are several minor chronicles which mention it in a single sentence, saying Charlemagne "killed many Saxons", which also suggests it wasn't so important to them):

When the king heard of this disaster he decided not to delay, but made haste to gather an army, and marched into Saxony. There he called to his presence the chiefs of the Saxons, and inquired who had induced the people to rebel. They all declared that Widukind was the author of the treason, but said that they could not produce him because after the deed was done he had fled to the Northmen. But the others who had carried out his will and committed the crime they delivered up to the king to the number of four thousand and five hundred; and by the king's command they were all beheaded [decollati] in one day upon the river Aller in the place called Verden [Ferdun]. When he had wreaked vengeance after this fashion, the king withdrew to the town of Diedenhofen.

Not as much as a frown from Einhard. Later historians have made far more hay from the massacre, first from Enlightenment motives, then from German nationalism/Naziism, nowadays from general anticlericalism and a desire to find black marks on great men. But it's all pure speculation - there is nothing at all in the sources that would substantiate e.g. Alessandro Barbero's claim that "the most likely inspiration for the mass execution of Verden was the Bible. Exasperated by the continual rebellions, Charlemagne wanted to act like a true king of Israel" any more than the idea it was motivated by anti-German hatred, by traditional Frankish custom, or by Roman law stipulating beheading as the penalty for oath-breaking.

For a more fitting example from the Middle Ages, I would look at the Sack of Jerusalem, where we do have sources condemning the massacre of innocents, showing genuine pity for the victims, and praising the chivalry of those Crusader leaders like Tancred of Lecce who tried to protect them.

This was cool, you should allow your autism to activate more often.

I saw that interview as well and was indeed surprised that Tucker had him on. He didn’t really cover anything that Nick hadn’t already brought up in previous interviews. I did get the impression that Tucker was squirming a bit in some of his responses to Nick, almost as if he’s trying to ride both sides of the aisle because he doesn’t want to get hit hard by the political establishment.

I felt I also got dismissed by people here when I brought up Nick in contrast with Charlie Kirk’s assassination. People essentially said Nick doesn’t have much of a base of support outside the groypers, but there’s a massive undercurrent of people sympathetic for wanting to shift the establishment gatekeeping of conservative assumptions to other issues, that’s probably best seen by the viewership numbers his content generates. I don’t have anything quantifiable outside of that. And why should someone? People don’t want to get destroyed in their personal or professional lives if they express sympathies for his views.

I don’t actually think Nick is a racist or an anti-Semite. He’s not someone like ZoomerHistorian (who probably is a racist and anti-Semite) but the kind of views expressed in a book like the one in the video represent a broad segment of populations across the western world who are afraid of saying the kinds of things that someone like Nick is willing to do. And if you look at the character assassination campaign against him, it’s no wonder why.

In the future I predict no one will remember the significant impact someone like Charlie Kirk had over the long run. He simply repeated the same boring, middle of the road mainstream conservatism these token characters with big money support behind them always do. But people will remember the impact Nick had in the political sphere. Whether that turns out to be for better or worse is still to be determined.

In the future I predict no one will remember the significant impact someone like Charlie Kirk had over the long run. He simply repeated the same boring, middle of the road mainstream conservatism these token characters with big money support behind them always do.

Why? We remember both MLK and Malcolm X, so I guess we simply have to wait until someone takes a shot at Fuentes to see just how much history rhymes.

And if you look at the character assassination campaign against him, it’s no wonder why.

Perhaps Fuentes is the seed crystal for what will be, in 50 years, clearly identifiable as post-progressivism. Or post-post-conservatism, but that's silly.

Why? We remember both MLK and Malcolm X, so I guess we simply have to wait until someone takes a shot at Fuentes to see just how much history rhymes.

Well someone already did show up at his house with a gun, wanting to kill him. But I suppose he’s an appropriate target to the relevant interest groups, so he doesn’t matter that much.

Perhaps Fuentes is the seed crystal for what will be, in 50 years, clearly identifiable as post-progressivism. Or post-post-conservatism, but that's silly.

50 years could contain anything. You can’t even predict what will happen tomorrow. But conservatism is still looked at as a tarnish word the left remains hard at work trying to smear and degrade even further as much as it can. It contaminates virtually everything it touches, including the root of its own traditional philosophy. The liberalism that arose out of the European wars of religion came out of necessity to combat constantly warring identitarian groups with competing divisive and exclusionary outlooks, remains a sound and respectable philosophical opponent of my own political beliefs. It’s still one I regard as wrong but useful lessons can still be gleaned from its failings. The left abandoned its own stance on liberalism a long time ago. If we’re not post-everything already, let’s at least return to the historical and normal vocabulary used to describe our respective positions. Common sense would be a great place to start with things.

Sorry, which republican elected officials are groypers again? Which of their policies are dominating Republican discussions? It's the party of Trump, business interests, and cultural conservatives. Groypers remain years away from mattering and a Carlson interview does not even begin to change that. Joe Rogan has what, 40 times Nick's viewership? Sixty? Nick struggles to break half a million, Joe regularly puts up 20 times that, and has done 100+ times that. The only times I ever even see Fuentes mentioned in political conversations are on this forum, even my conservative conspiracy nut friends barely remember who the dude is.

How much of his viewership is voting-aged American citizens?

Joe Rogan has what, 40 times Nick's viewership? Sixty? Nick struggles to break half a million, Joe regularly puts up 20 times that, and has done 100+ times that.

True, but I don't think that's a fair comparison. Joe Rogan is 58 years and has been doing podcast for over 15 years now, and he was already a big celebrity before that. He was one of the OG podcast bros, and at this point basically everyone has heard of him. He's not growing particularly fast anymore. He might have hit the limits of what he can get. Most of his opinions are very bland, centrist stuff, and he's mostly known for just bringing on a wide range of guests and letting them talk about whatever they want.

Meanwhile, Nick fuentes is 27. He went from some random college student, to being completely deplatformed, and until recently most normal people had never heard of him. He was not only deplatformed from any liberal organization, but even most of the conservative organizations tried to kick him out. He's completely banned from youtube and most other mainstream sites. His podcast is on rumble.com, which is a site I'd never heard of until I went to look it up just now. So I think, despite his overall small numbers, it's a sign that are some very passionate supporters out there boosting him and overcoming all mainstream efforts to shut him down.

I haven't watched the Nick & Tucker interview. I did watch the Sam Hyde and Nick episode though. I also watched the Ian Carroll and Joe Rogan episode. I suspect Nick's appearance on Tucker was much the same.

Nick (and Ian since I brought him up) are slightly smarter than your average bear. They can go on shows and hide their power level as needed. But then, if you find yourself thinking "I like the cut of their jib, I wonder what else they have to say" and you check their twitter, you immediately discover they are shit flinging retards. It's a short lived illusion. This really doesn't work like it used to, where radicals could publish a book that sanitizes a version of the insane things they believe, filtered through a retard to normie ghost writer. Then they get glazed by the New York Times, it's required reading in college, and nobody would be the wiser because you'd have to actually know this retard in person to understand what a crazy person they actually are.

There may be knock on effects from letting retards attract more retards to their retard army. But Antifa and BLM already exists, so that bridge is burned.

Only way out is through. The right can't let the left monopolize retards.

Mr. President, we must not allow a retard gap!

Unironically yes. Retards are a valuable political resource.

Retard strength is powerful, yes, but wielding it carelessly incurs a terrible cost. By my observation, highly-motivated maximalists(of which RW retards are a subset) are a tenacious species. They feed off of every bit of momentum in their favor to spread and legitimize their memes while following closely behind the gains of their more moderate kin, such that by the time they've reached the borders of the Overton Window they're already primed for exponential metastasis; the history of the last {NumYrs=22.24*log14.88(PwrLvl) + 5} years of progressivism presents an excellent example of this sequence. If the modern right-wing coalition gives its retards too much slack, in due time they will swallow the movement whole.

If the modern right-wing coalition gives its retards too much slack, in due time they will swallow the movement whole.

The modern right-wing coalition was swallowed whole by the retards 15 years ago. Though to be fair it was less a matter of giving them too much slack and more getting thrown from the tiger's back. The Tea Party movement was the base shrugging off the remnants of the old school GOP. Of course, as these things usually go, early adopters got pushed out by a second wave of more radical populists.

To be less fair, Goldwater called it decades ago.

I stand by my previous assessment that Fuentes isn't going mainstream, now or in the future. Fuentes political character arc is that he will come out as gay and go on a left wing podcast tour denouncing how toxic right wing ideology kept him in the closet.

come out as gay and go on a left wing podcast tour denouncing how toxic right wing ideology kept him in the closet.

Or come out as gay and go on a right-wing podcast tour that if we keep important immigrants, they'll start throwing the gays off roofs. Look at the Hammtramck/Dearborn socialists lamenting the pride/trans flags coming down after they dutifully voted for the brown guys.

I saw a short snippet of the interview in which he declared himself to be the admirer of Stalin of all people, so I'm inclined to agree with you. Then again, maybe it was a deepfake.

I actually stand by the comments made earlier with regards to Fuentes specifically - he's got far too many flaws to be a real vehicle for serious political change, and while being gay isn't something I find disqualifying it is something a large portion of his potential base finds disqualifying (if you're curious, check out Kiwi farms - they have impeccably documented the multiple instances of him being caught red-handed browsing gay porn or gazing longingly into the eyes of another man). His actual movement has some of the worst optics of all time, including a large contingent of groypers that are open supporters of pedophilia (if you want proof, do a search for the term "cunny" in a place where nobody can see what's on your screen).

But there's no putting the genie back into the bottle. Israel has completely torched their reputation with the youth of both the left wing and the right wing. Nobody on the left gives a single shit about accusations of anti-semitism anymore, because those accusations have been used on people like Ms Rachel. When you tell people that a woman taking care of a young girl that had her legs blown off and giving her a chance to have a real birthday party is actually an antisemite, you don't actually make people think that caring for amputee children is bad - you make people think that an antisemite is a pretty young woman who cares about wounded and disabled children. When John Podhoretz says that Trump can say Shylock as many times as he wants because he bombed Iran, or when the ADL says that nazi salutes are fine as long as you support bombing the Palestinians, they're torching the societal proscriptions against antisemitism that have existed since the end of WWII.

And for the right? The majority of conservative youth are either /pol/ adjacent or had their worldview informed almost entirely by second-hand exposure to /pol/ memes and ideas. The information environment on the online, anonymous right is so much more effective at selecting for persuasive memes and ideas than the institutional, pro-Zionist right that whenever there's an even playing field /pol/ wins every single time. I've said before on here that people who are healthy and well-adjusted winners generally don't get involved in antisemitism or other kinds of discrimination because they don't have a need to blame anyone for why they failed - but society has failed so many of these young men that the number of losers has reached critical mass. Even the youth who are actually doing well are growing up in a social context where antisemitism is just a constant fact of life. You are never, ever going to turn a young, radicalised right winger who has grown up on an information diet of /pol/ infographics, Pepe the frog memes and USS Liberty references into a zionist... the only exceptions I've seen of people pulling themselves out of that kind of information environment are cases where they end up trans, and the radical left isn't going to be supporting Israel either.

And of course there's the fact that there isn't actually a rational case for American support of Israel - and especially not for the kinds of ridiculous policies that are currently being demanded, like restrictions on free speech just for Israel or extra taxes forced onto struggling rural populations to help pay for Israel's military and public healthcare system. These policies are unconscionable, and the right is correct to reject them.

I've said multiple times on here and eaten multiple downvotes for it, but Israel has completely torched their reputation around the world, and they have done their absolute best to destroy the social safeguards against anti-semitism in the process. It was incredibly short-sighted, and this is only the beginning - have a look at the rates of Israel support by age, and think about what happens in a few years when more of the boomers start dying off and the younger populations start gaining power. Even assuming nobody changes their opinions at all, a majority of the US population is going to be opposed to Israel by virtue of the inexorable demographic changes of time and death by old age.

I don't want to just post a big smiley face holding a sign that says "THIS" but I do want to say that this strongly aligns with my perception of the situation. Fuentes could gobble a dong live on the air and it wouldn't pull respectable Zionist conservatism out of its graybeard death spiral.

Yes; the goal of overprescribing declining zionism of the american right to goblins like Fuentes is another vain attempt to discredit the viewpoint as unacceptable. In reality Fuentes is at best a downstream symptom of the changing tides, not a cause or much of an instigator.

and while being gay isn't something I find disqualifying it is something a large portion of his potential base finds disqualifying (if you're curious, check out Kiwi farms - they have impeccably documented the multiple instances of him being caught red-handed browsing gay porn or gazing longingly into the eyes of another man).

Uh. What?

And for the right? The majority of conservative youth are either /pol/ adjacent or had their worldview informed almost entirely by second-hand exposure to /pol/ memes and ideas.

In a way they’re just the new low information voters adopting what’s in vogue in meme format. 2016 was the real watershed moment where it became evident that it’s a force multiplier in battling in the media space. And it was weaponized hilariously.

The information environment on the online, anonymous right is so much more effective at selecting for persuasive memes and ideas than the institutional, pro-Zionist right that whenever there's an even playing field /pol/ wins every single time. I've said before on here that people who are healthy and well-adjusted winners generally don't get involved in antisemitism or other kinds of discrimination because they don't have a need to blame anyone for why they failed - but society has failed so many of these young men that the number of losers has reached critical mass. Even the youth who are actually doing well are growing up in a social context where antisemitism is just a constant fact of life. You are never, ever going to turn a young, radicalised right winger who has grown up on an information diet of /pol/ infographics, Pepe the frog memes and USS Liberty references into a zionist... the only exceptions I've seen of people pulling themselves out of that kind of information environment are cases where they end up trans, and the radical left isn't going to be supporting Israel either.

It’s actually pretty funny. Awhile ago I was looking for a new book to read in what little down time I had after finishing an earlier one and came across this that appeared in my Amazon suggestions. When I went through the preview I was laughing my ass off because of how idiotic most of this stuff sounds, and it instantly reminded me of the Far Right Extremist meme. As something of a moderate fascist myself, it was very funny watching some academic jackass come along and supposedly tell me what it is I actually believe. Chapter 5, “Women and Nonbinary Children,” already taking a page out of the shitlib lexicon right out of the gate. How’s the phrase go? “Surely the enemy has conquered you when you adopt and speak their language.” Apparently being illiberal makes you a Nazi it seems. Nothing could be further from the truth. Always love it when people attempt to pathologize my political beliefs.

We live in a system today where a large number of men aren’t benefitting from the institutions that take from them. And who can blame them? A few of my closest friends are some of the hardest working people I have ever known from childhood and have been high achieving all their life. For almost the last 15 years when they’re off work they go straight home and withdraw into their hobbies and social ties that have remained with them. They barely participate in society anymore unless there’s an outing that involves family or friends and if you ever ask them why you’ll get the same reason from them every single time. “I have no reason to.” Like myself we very much grew up with the mindset that you marry young, get a career and raise a family. At least that was all we ever asked for growing up. That’s what gives their lives meaning. But absent that they see little reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

American society is losing its most productive people at the most productive ages of their lives and things in a hundred different ways are simply demotivating for a lot of men. Otherwise give me your best vanity pitch for why a lot of young men should care about it. Men aren’t going to work to uphold a system they feel is dedicated to tearing them down at every turn. At some point you have to speak their language. I don’t wake up every day and go to work for the “possibility” of getting paid on the hope my boss decides to pay me. I work for the tangible results that are returned to me to be able to live my life. Most communities are being destroyed. Most churches are dying and most men don’t have a realistic opportunity to pursue relationships with others.

But there's no putting the genie back into the bottle. Israel has completely torched their reputation with the youth of both the left wing and the right wing. Nobody on the left gives a single shit about accusations of anti-semitism anymore, because those accusations have been used on people like Ms Rachel. When you tell people that a woman taking care of a young girl that had her legs blown off and giving her a chance to have a real birthday party is actually an antisemite, you don't actually make people think that caring for amputee children is bad - you make people think that an antisemite is a pretty young woman who cares about wounded and disabled children.

People have had Israel fatigue for a long time. I think only now it’s become more socially acceptable for it to seep out in the broader population. The average person’s beef isn’t with Jews or Judaism at all. It’s with Zionism which is the ideological mantle of Israeli government. That can go straight to hell.

Now I'm wondering ... what could Israel have done differently to not taurch their reputation?

This is all Monday morning quarterbacking but:

  1. Try to get their American cousins to not launch a 20 year long pogrom against the demographics that most strongly supported Israel

  2. Try to get their American cousins to not spend 50 years pumping up and covering for all the demographics that hate Israel the most

  3. Realized that their public relations campaign was going the way of Harley-Davidson* sometime in the early 2010s

  4. Done something different regarding October 7, somehow. This is the hardest one, it’s like saying “why not simply prevent 9/11?”

I take the opposite analysis of a lot of this board, I think most of Israel’s flagging support is the result of the American cousins and not Israel itself. Were it not for them, Israel would just be one of many, many foreign countries with a somewhat questionable human rights record.

*Harley-Davidson is a motorcycle company that monomaniacally focused their marketing and product lines around boomers, to the detriment of appealing to any other demographic. The minute boomers got too old to ride, the company’s sales collapsed.

Israel could've gone into Gaza, wrecked shit, and left before it became a years long humanitarian crisis, and only lefty weirdos that also think kids can change their gender would've gotten all bent up out of shape about it.

Israel could've gone into Gaza, wrecked shit, and left before it became a years long humanitarian crisis

Domestically, not until they got the hostages back. That's what the hostages were for -- to keep Israel pummelling Gaza.

They could trade umpteen zillion prisoners for the hostages. That’s what they wound up doing anyways.

I take the opposite analysis of a lot of this board, I think most of Israel’s flagging support is the result of the American cousins and not Israel itself. Were it not for them, Israel would just be one of many, many foreign countries with a somewhat questionable human rights record.

Very clever argument, and for a certain species of American conservative, I think it's true. However this doesn't explain European anti-Zionism, which historically has been much more pervasive both on the left and the right than in America (at least until recently).

Done something different regarding October 7, somehow. This is the hardest one, it’s like saying “why not simply prevent 9/11?”

I'll note, with minimal Monday Morning Quarterbacking as I said this 10/8, Israel did not have to invade and level the Gaza strip, which made Palestine front page news again. They could have used targeted strikes against individuals, and diplomatic leverage following the attacks, to normalize relations with more Arab nations and destroy Hamas' global funding base.

This strategy worked extraordinarily well against Hezbollah and Iran and in Qatar, none of those interventions created significant backlash, and the civilian casualties were never obviously photogenic enough to harm Israel internationally (despite murdering a Qatari cop/soldier/whatever along with a bunch of kids elsewhere).

Now maybe they're able to get the Abraham Accords back on line now, but we'll have to see. If nothing else, Hamas created significant space for the Palestine dead enders, who were about to be permanently sold out by the gulf states and made more or less irrelevant permanently.

Try to get their American cousins to not launch a 20 year long pogrom against the demographics that most strongly supported Israel

Why would we assume that Ezra Klein class of Jews give a fuck what the mostly right wing current rulers of Israel do?

Especially without some inciting event.

If right wing white Gentiles can't prevent their own progressive brothers from championing that alleged ethnic cleansing why should we assume that progressive Jews could be talked down?

But, if I would raise a criticism myself, maybe Netanyahu's treatment of Obama and his lining up behind his American opponents, was slightly unwise.

We can argue that most of the outcome is baked in because of immigration but the absolute last thing you want as a foreign nation is to be seen as an ally to one side of America's culture war. It's a demented game with no clear rules but always two sides and it's insane to play it for real stakes.

Taking the invite from Republicans and rejecting any attempt by Obama to slow down on settlements didn't play well on the left, especially since Netanyahu seems to have the hardiness of a cockroach.

If right wing whites can't prevent their own progressive brothers from championing that alleged ethnic cleansing why should we assume that progressive Jews could be talked down?

I think the Israelis could have tard-wrangled them if they made a serious effort. But like all the rest of us, they didn’t realize the significance of the SJW threat and how fast the ideology would metastasize.

Additionally part of the problem was that Israel spent years presenting an overly white-washed version of themselves, so people didn’t realize how awful Israel was going to look through the lens of decolonialist ideology.

Realized that their public relations campaign was going the way of Harley-Davidson* sometime in the early 2010s

*Harley-Davidson is a motorcycle company that monomaniacally focused their marketing and product lines around boomers, to the detriment of appealing to any other demographic. The minute boomers got too old to ride, the company’s sales collapsed.

This reminds me of some article I read ages ago on The American Conservative which, in the context of some other mostly unrelated subject, argued that the main cultural force actually driving popular support for Israel in the US is Reaganist boomers picturing Israel as a second Saigon. Their attitude being: we abandoned Saigon like traitors and cowards in the face of the conquering enemy, so we owe it to ourselves to always support Israel, because reasons. The author then argued that the one thing we can surely state about this sentiment is that it has zero relevance to any American born after 1960 or so.

As Worf said unto Q, "Die".

he's got far too many flaws to be a real vehicle for serious political change, and while being gay isn't something I find disqualifying it is something a large portion of his potential base finds disqualifying

I’m reminded of 2015, when no one thought that evangelical boomers would ever have more than a grudging toleration for Donald Trump, at very best.

Trump's base has always been 'Christians that don't go to church very often'. In 2015 that opinion was laughably ignorant because boomer evangelicals already loved Trump.

You can be reminded all you want, but these are not really remotely comparable. Donald Trump was a decades long, successful, popular mainstream celebrity businessman with the top TV show for years running.

Because Donald was elected, isn't reason to bring 'disqualifying flaws' down to zero in predictive value of other people in other contexts

I have never heard a human being sound so much like a text-to-speech program.

EDIT: this was re: Kevin Roberts. I haven't come across him before but he has a very peculiar manner of speech to my ear.

Two months ago, Charlie Kirk was still alive.

Is Hanania still denying that left wing violence is a major, ongoing problem and instead claiming its dumb righties causing all the main issues we're seeing?

I'll go ahead and triple down on calling Hanania a hack.

Hanania sold at the bottom of the DR and bought in at the top of "with Zionism you win" submission.

I think he always was pro-israel, even before the break with Trump.

The Heritage Foundation unequivocally denounces Fuentes.

How that squares with refusing to denounce Carlson is left as an exercise to the student.

'Denounce people who say hateful things, not people who talk to people who say hateful things' seems like a pretty sensible policy for anyone who believes in the first amendment (and hasn't been given $7000).

and hasn't been given $7000

Is this a reference to something?

It's a twitter meme that I think is down to accusations of qatari bribes against some influencer or another.

You can just say meme. And you know what it means, it means the same thing as 'shill' and 'pocket money' and 'astroturfed' and the hundred thousand other memes throughout history suggesting someone's opinion has been bought. If you want to be dismissive of a meme to diminish the possibility of it being picked up here, just do it.

I understood it had something to do with being a shill, but $7000 seemed to be referring to something specific. Clearly I was not the only one who thought I was missing some context. Asking you what you're talking about, or to just explain the meme, is not a hostile act.

Perhaps you think I was replying to someone else? Either way, I didn't assume it was a hostile act, I just described what I thought it was. Interestingly, framing it as perceived as a hostile act is the exact same level of 'hostility'.

Edit for some: hydro clearly understands the meme exactly, he knows the source - twitter, and he knows the players - he substituted Qatar for Israel for rhetoric, as the two sides involved either claim Israel or Qatar has undue influence on American politics.

Correct, it's an accusation that Qatar is bribing someone. If you have nothing to clarify, but only a snarky comment about how yes, that is a meme, then uh, why are you chiming in on the explanation?

$7000 is the maximum than an individual can give directly to the campaign of a political candidate per election cycle. I've been seeing it used as a meme on twitter to reference Israel-lobby influence ever since Scott wrote his political finance post a few weeks ago.

It has nothing to do with Scott, they were literally paying $7000 per post to influencers.

How that squares with refusing to denounce Carlson is left as an exercise to the student.

The idea that there's something to square here seems patently absurd to me. Especially for a public commentator like Carlson, publicly talking to and spreading the message of people who deserve denouncement is exactly the role he should be filling. So of course people who would denounce someone like Fuentes wouldn't necessarily have a reason to denounce someone like Carlson for publicly speaking with him.

When Carlson talked with Fuentes, did he take the attitude of, "you need to justify all these things you say and back it up?" or did he take the attitude of, "Everything you're saying is reasonable and sounds true to me?"

Carlson can be harsh with the people he interviews, like he was with Ted Cruz. That he isn't asking probing questions with Fuentes indicates that he agrees with him. If you have a show like this and you interview someone, you're either sponsoring them with publicity, trying to elucidate what someone really believes, or trying to force them to appear foolish. Which is Carlson doing here?

In that trilemma, I'd place my wager down in the middle bucket, i.e. "trying to elucidate what someone really believes." But my belief doesn't matter a whole lot; it's whether or not Heritage Foundation believes that that is what Carlson was trying to do and whether or not they're reasonable to have that belief. Based on what I've seen of Carlson (likely about as much as the non-fan layman, though I did watch his entire Putin interview) and what I've read about this interview with Fuentes, I believe that the answers to those questions are, respectively: yes and yes.

Did you watch his interview with Fuentes? Carlson sounds a very... supportive. Not coming at it from an impartial, "I'm trying to capture this philosophy for the historical record." Lots of "Wow, that's amazing," "Oh, yeah," and "yes, absolutely." I didn't hear a single "gotcha" question, pulling up an older statement and asking him to clarify how that jives with what he's saying now, anything like that.

I know that if I were interviewing Fuentes, I'd ask him to explain more why he thought it was appropriate to say, "Raise your right hand. Repeat after me. I will kill, rape, and die for Nicholas J Fuentes," on a stream Is he trying to become a cult leader? And kind of go with that angle. Not questions to try to direct him to tell me his life's story in a way that is acceptable to normies. I don't think Carlson's tactic on this interview really sought to portray Fuentes in full, complicated multi-dimensional detail.

denouncement

Sorry to be a grammar Nazi, but it's "denunciation".

Never apologize for grammatical pendantry.

Don't make me do it again.

The Tucker/Fuentes interview is about to hit 17m views, compared to Tucker's 1.5-2m view recent episodes I checked. Heritage Foundation is definitely bending the knee.

Nick Fuentes is being strategic. The biggest "threat" to the Dissident Right movement is that the Conservative movement integrates these highly credible criticisms, which until now have only come from the DR at great expense and persecution to those who have been making this argument for years (and that's not to take credit from those like Pat Buchanan who have been doing this for decades longer). But at this point it's fair to say the DR is becoming mainstream with the Heritage foundation video being at least as relevant of a signal to that fact as the Fuentes/Carlson interview itself.

I say Fuentes is being strategic because Fuentes is obviously moderating himself recently to ensure he and his movement are included in this integration of these, until now, radical arguments which are going mainstream.

But the Coup de grâce is not merely shedding light on Dual Loyalty and foreign subversion, but to force that same apparatus to confront its sheer hypocrisy when it comes to White Identity versus Jewish Identity. Until now those like Ben Shapiro - "I don't care about the browning of America" and Mark Levin just operate in the zone of this sheer hypocrisy as they have since the 1920s, just dismissing anyone who gives this criticism of their behavior as a crazed antisemite. That's not going to work any more, the cat is out of the bag. The more they double down on that position the more strength they give the underlying criticism that's going mainstream.

Edit: One thing I want to emphasize is the content of the Heritage Foundation's statement:

Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic. And of course, antisemitism should be condemned. My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always. When it serves the interests of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other Allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence and technology. But when it doesn't, Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.

That is a very significant statement.

Until now those like Ben Shapiro - "I don't care about the browning of America"

What do you make of Fuentes’ embrace of civic nationalism today, the videos of him saying that anyone born in America is an American, that that’s what America First means and so on? It seems like a stunning moderation, but it’s not truly sudden either, he’s been setting it up for several months (even before the Kirk assassination), pushing back against his followers’ violent antisemitic rhetoric in a way he didn’t before, tongue-in-cheek comments about Jews actually being behind a lot of great movies and comedy, gently dressing down his more…violent commenters in the chat. Certainly it’s drawn a hugely negative reaction from many groypers and extreme antisemites who formerly liked him in the last 24 hours on Twitter. I don’t think it’s as simple as just moderating to appeal to Carlson’s audience, because it’s aligned with his own streaming on his own channel recently. Six months ago he was hostile towards Dave Smith, the libertarian anti-zionist and Jewish convert to Christianity, primarily for being ethnically Jewish. Beyond antisemitism, he advocated for the imprisonment and/or expulsion of certainly a substantial proportion, if not the great majority, of black people in America. Today, Fuentes makes the case for what I would consider Bannonite civic nationalism, indeed he’s almost totally aligned with Bannon’s vision of a loosely culturally Christian multiracial conservative coalition.

Tucker too essentially asks Fuentes in the interview, and it’s relatively explicit, “OK, so what do you want to do about it?” and Fuentes says (and I paraphrase loosely) force AIPAC to register as a foreign lobbying organization, ban dual citizens from serving in congress (Randy Fine, announcing legislation that would do just that, said last week that to his knowledge no Jews in Congress are Israeli citizens, so this would be no change), stay out of foreign entanglements and put America first, and that anyone who puts America first (relatively nebulous) is an ally of his. This is a pure Buchananite position, when previously Fuentes was well to the right of Buchanan, who was certainly moderately antisemitic but not in an ‘expel the Jews’ way, which was much more central to groyper messaging.

There was also some minor drama today on Twitter (which I’m sure you saw) about some guy who was full-on “kill them all” rhetoric about Jewish people getting a cop visit, which I think highlights what is increasingly a rather colossal gap between the groyper hardcore and the current Fuentes position.

You are right to perceive Fuentes shifting significantly in that direction, even well before the Kirk assassination, but I don't see it as a moderation. It's influence from Richard Spencerism. People also think Spencer moderated since 2016 but if you actually critically analyze his perspective, it remains among the most radical on the DR. Richard didn't moderate at all, he took the failures of the 2016 Alt Right and developed a new perspective on what ought to be the political aspirations of a radical movement. Fuentes has been heavily influenced in that direction.

The 2016 Alt-Right was a collection of memes, at most you could say the political aspirations were to "keep America majority (or all) White." Well that simply isn't possible, demographic change is baked in the cake. Do White people even need to have a majority to thrive? No, they do not, as Richard has been saying for years "Aryans are a global people" and always have been, the aspiration should not be to build an all-white neighborhood in rural Arkansas it should be pan-Aryan Imperium. And recently Fuentes has essentially adopted this same position, saying the political aspiration is ultimately a "New Rome", which is a pivot from "we just want to live in an all-white country" but not something I would say is moderation. It's actually what I have long-said should be the political objective of a white-identitarian global movement.

And by that analysis, it's myopic to blame subversive Jews purely for the development of multiculturalism; multiculturalism emerged as a managerial tact for maintaining global Empire, especially in the face of the Soviet threat which could capitalize on discontent from marginalized groups. Fuentes cited this directly in the Carlson interview as well.

Building and managing a global Empire does fundamentally require the cooperation and allegiance of non-white groups. Yes I think some Groypers will be made discontent by the overtures towards non-Whites, but that has always been a quirk of Fuentes with this fandom of rap and Kanye West. People joke all the time about how so many Groypers are non-white, but they don't stop to consider how many die-hard Jewish nationalists are non-Jewish themselves (AKA the entire Conservative movement... until now). The fact that there does seem to be an affinity among non-Whites for White Identitarianism is something to be capitalized on, not something to be rejected, as I said 9 months ago here:

The title "White Advocacy Is for All of Us" is an interesting one, but an Inclusive White Nationalist movement is not as contradictory as it sounds. Think of how strong the support of non-Jews is for Jewish nationalism- Zionism is for Everyone. The cultural and political levers that have accomplished that feat are available to White people as well if they learn how to use them.

And this pivot also doesn't represent much of a moderation on the JQ. Fuentes still maintains that the organized, international Jewish community is collectively responsible for the hostility towards White people deeply embedded in our Culture, and that their animus is motivated by their Jewish identities. That's always been the crucial insight of the "JQ", and Fuentes directly named Jewish identity as an obstacle to America First in his interview with Carlson.

Fuentes is accepting the reality that Global Empire is ultimately an operation that requires cooperation from non-whites, but at the same time we cannot accept the incessant hostility and subversion of White people by current management. That still has to be confronted, and it is being confronted at an effectiveness nobody in the DR really thought possible even optimistically. Enlisting non-Whites, but on vastly different terms than the cultural status quo with respect to the status of non-whites relative to whites, is more of an intelligent and strategic development than it is a moderation.

I think even Fuentes would accept Jews as Allies, as long as they are held to as high a standard of cooperation as Jews enforce on their their non-Jewish Allies.

Well that simply isn't possible, demographic change is baked in the cake.

It’s very possible, if you recategorize Hispanics as white. Now you have a country that’s about 80 percent white.

I have to say, I was very impressed by both his interview with Tucker, and his eulogy for Charlie Kirk (which was better than a lot of sermons by actual preachers that I have heard).

me too. I was impressed by his ability to basically take 4chan /pol/ or twitter style shitposting and... "sane-wash" it into a coherent argument. I don't know if he personally will become a big influence, but that sort of alt-right, moderate racist, moderate sexist, moderate anti-semite faction of internet reactionaries is definitely becoming a force in American politics.

Israel does not get our support because the gentiles are doing some dispassionate analysis on the benefits of supporting Israel. If that were the case, there would be nothing to criticize. Israel is getting our support because Zionists who consider Israel the most important country in the world relentlessly lobby for Israel, and have been doing so for decades, sometimes smearing opponents as antisemites. Truman complained about their advocacy, Nixon complained about it. Congressmen in the 80s who criticized Israel would lose their seat. “They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby” was written in 1985! We are not talking about a new thing. Mearsheimer’s analysis on this has gone uncontested. Israel gets our support because of advocacy networks (including media influence) and, at least in one recent instance, a secretive cabal of billionaires that likened itself to the Sanhedrin, the leader of which funded Epstein’s child trafficking blackmail operation that ensnared Bill Clinton, Trump, and British Royalty.

Even if you love Israel, you should want America to have the upper-hand in deals. We can continue to support them if they gradually pay us back. Israel has subsidized synagogues, healthcare, and education. When America funds Israel we are funding some Israeli’s man’s lavish parties and vacations, because he doesn’t need to pay as much in taxes for his nation’s defense. We are funding Rabbis, as they benefit from Israel’s subsidies for religious institutions; this includes Rabbis in America who studied in Israel or are funded through an Israeli organization. Meanwhile, Israel is applying tax pressure on the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem; they are required to pay taxes while not receiving the same subsidies as Jewish institutions. Meanwhile, Israel-connected billionaires are putting down funds to get rid of Thomas Massey. To me this is all offensive on principle, not because of the dollar amount.

Israel is getting our support because Zionists who consider Israel the most important country in the world relentlessly lobby for Israel, and have been doing so for decades, sometimes smearing opponents as antisemites.

This is a point I've brought up privately to Jewish friends of mine: Israel is burning through goodwill that they and their parents and their grandparents have spent decades building in the American public. When I came through public school, I studied the Holocaust more often than any single event outside of the Declaration of Independence and the Walking Purchase. I read at least three full books in the curriculum that I can remember: Night, Numer the Stars, and of course The Diary of Anne Frank. There might have been more that I'm forgetting.

Making sure that every American public school student learned that the Holocaust was the worst most uniquely horrible thing that ever happened in human history, often taught with questionable historicity (shoutout @SecureSignals), was a project of lobbying by Jewish groups. Making antisemitism into the worst, stupidest, lowest class, most unacceptable prejudice was a project of lobbying. Making Nazi gangs into the world's worst villains that don't need to be humanized in Sons of Anarchy or Breaking Bad wasn't an accident, nor was it a project of a few weeks. Making Nazi into a swear word and Hitler into secular-Satan was a project of decades.

This was what gave the Jews a special exception from the liberal world order in Israel for decades, what allowed them freedom of action. And now it seems to me that they've pissed a lot of it away on a few years of mowing the Gazan grass.

This is a point I've brought up privately to Jewish friends of mine: Israel is burning through goodwill that they and their parents and their grandparents have spent decades building in the American public.

Just so I understand your argument, you're saying that Israel/American Jews built goodwill by pushing Holocaust education in school and anti-Nazi/antisemitism propaganda? What have they now done differently to burn the goodwill? Is it this:

This was what gave the Jews a special exception from the liberal world order in Israel for decades, what allowed them freedom of action. And now it seems to me that they've pissed a lot of it away on a few years of mowing the Gazan grass.

Because the American right writ large does not give a shit that Israel has turned Palestine into rubble. After October 7th, plenty of people here were gung-ho for a little genocide/purge. Precious little of the conversation in this thread is focused on Palestine, whereas most of the standout comments focus on Jewish control of Media/Finance/Hollywood and other institutions.

So it begs the question - why is the American right turning against Jews now, and what changed in the last 20-30 years that enabled it? Decentralization of the media and sources of information has disproportionately benefited fringe people like Fuentes at the expense of traditional media. Cynically, and depending which movie screen you're watching, this either makes it harder for Israel to spread their propaganda or lets Fuentes spread hateful antisemitic tropes.

Neither has much to do with American or Israeli Jews 'burning the goodwill of the American people,' nor is there anything they could really do differently to mitigate it.

you're saying that Israel/American Jews built goodwill by pushing Holocaust education in school and anti-Nazi/antisemitism propaganda?

Yes, I'm saying that generations of Jews made specific efforts to denormalize and taboo antisemitism through lobbying and cultural efforts. I don't think this is a controversial statement, or one that requires a conspiratorial reading. I think that's pretty much been the stated goal of many Jewish or holocaust remembrance organizations for decades. The ADL on their website specifically calls out in their page on their history and mission that in the 1950s they:

embark[ed] on a campaign to produce educational and cultural media promoting religious and racial acceptance. In December 1959, in conjunction with ADL's 46th annual meeting, the CBS television network broadcasts "A Salute to the American Theatre," featuring excerpts from Broadway productions on the theme of diversity.

While in the 1960s they used:

Worldwide attention to the capture, trial and execution of Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann prompts renewed focus on the Holocaust and catalyzes ADL activities to educate about the Holocaust and counter those who deny or diminish it.

And in the 1970s they:

establishe[d] the International Center for Holocaust Studies (now known as the Braun Holocaust Institute-Glick Center for Holocaust Studies) which becomes one of the nation's first formal Holocaust Education programs - pioneering materials for students and educators to understand the Holocaust and apply its lessons to contemporary issues of prejudice and hate.

Later on in the 2000s they will:

ADL joins with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and Yad Vashem to launch Echoes and Reflections, a comprehensive multimedia program for teaching about the Holocaust in U.S. schools.

The ADL is just one organization that has worked on this project, but at no point has their goal been conspiratorial or secret: they want to put Holocaust education on curricula, they want to create Holocaust education materials and get them into the hands of teachers and students to produce a world where the vast majority of American students (who are paying any kind of attention) are exposed to these narratives. This built up cultural goodwill over the course of seventy years is being burned over the past three.

What have they now done differently to burn the goodwill?

Pew finds that 53% of Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 42% before the war. This includes a supermajority of Democrats, 69% up from a narrow 53% majority before the war. But worse, Republicans under 50 now have a 50% unfavorable view of Israel, up from 35% before the war.*

This all happened since 2022. Do you think the media environment changed significantly enough in that time, or immigration altered demographics sufficiently, or some other factor intervened, that across the board Americans left and right turned against Israel? You think it has nothing to do with Israel's behavior, and that Israel could not have made any choices to mitigate that decline? That's a bizarre take given the obvious correlation between Israel's actions in Gaza and the decline in American public opinion on Israel.

You can certainly argue that the emergence of social media, particularly those outside the control of traditional media guardians like Xitter and tiktok, was necessary to publicize what happened in Gaza without censorship; but if nothing was happening in Gaza, there would have been nothing to publicize. Maybe this is all propaganda from Israel's jew-hating enemies, but without the war, the war could not be the site and opportunity for an external maneuver by those enemies. The temporal correlation is way too strong to argue that the conduct of the war has not had a disastrous impact on public opinion around Israel. And saying Israel had no choice about how to conduct the war is absurd.

Now, goodwill exists so it can be used. Were Israel burning goodwill to permanently solve the problem, I may not support their solution, but I could respect the decision. Israel's actions thus far have not solved their problems, they have amounted to mowing the grass.

The most dangerous mechanism on for Israel, though, is one I myself see on this very forum.

After October 7th, plenty of people here were gung-ho for a little genocide/purge. Precious little of the conversation in this thread is focused on Palestine, whereas most of the standout comments focus on Jewish control of Media/Finance/Hollywood and other institutions.

We've had our resident Jew-Posters since before 2023, and I generally either ignored them or argued against them. Now I find myself upvoting them, agreeing with them, when the conversation turns to Palestine. Orthodox Ivy League liberal lawyers in my social circle are horrified finding themselves agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene more than they agree with Chuck Schumer, or seeing tweets from Fuentes or quotes from Darryl Cooper and agreeing with them. When Israel makes the antisemites correct about one thing, they risk making people look at the rest of their thoughts. It's a very bad dynamic for the Jewish People.

nor is there anything they could really do differently to mitigate it.

Have they tried?

*Gallup shows similar across the board declines during the war, but in less detail.

When Israel makes the antisemites correct about one thing, they risk making people look at the rest of their thoughts. It's a very bad dynamic for the Jewish People.

I am not sure what "one thing" do you mean, but it does not matter - I am rather set back by the argument itself. Are you saying if the State of Israel, over all its, admittedly short, but still multi-decade history, commits a mistake, that validates the views of antisemites that all the Jews are evil, secretly want to (or already do) rule the world and it would be better for everyone if they were exterminated? Because that's what the "rest of their thoughts" are. I mean, yes, that's horrible for the Jewish people, but this does not look good for any other people either. And, may I ask, is this the criteria that applies to everyone, or specifically for Israel alone - that if they ever wrong then everything their enemies ever said about them is true?

I am not sure what "one thing" do you mean, but it does not matter...

It doesn't matter, it can be anything. Lie about the weather, about inflation, about what is a woman, about crime, about race, about massacring civilians in refugee camps. Whenever you intentionally create a situation where you are obviously wrong and your enemies are obviously right, you lose credibility and they gain credibility. Whenever you lie and your detractors tell the truth, you become seen as less trustworthy and they become seen as more trustworthy.

When you hand your opponents a golden opportunity to be publicly right about something, you are making a mistake. The Democrats saw this with the trannies, allowing the Republicans to be right about something so easy and so obvious increased Republican credibility and reduced Democratic credibility. Republicans saw this during the end of the Bush administration when they were trying to say that Iraq and Afghanistan weren't disasters, they looked into it and they aren't disasters. Lying to the public is dangerous. Don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining.

This is the core idea of Yarvin's Antiversity, a truth machine that will contain only facts, and break the power of the Cathedral by being more credible than the Cathedral.

When Israel lies about civilian casualties in Gaza, and antisemites tell the truth, it increases the credibility of Israel's most insane and deadly detractors. This is more dangerous for Israel than it is for an American political party, because Israel's existence is far more tenuous than the existence of one of the two American political parties. Jewish organizations in America spent decades working to make sure that any mention of Da Joos turned you into a pariah and a laughingstock, Israel has spent the last few years causing nice liberals to give MTG and Candace Owens a hearing on some issues. That's, like, really bad and stuff, for Israel.

When Israel lies about civilian casualties in Gaza, and antisemites tell the truth

But that's not what is happening. Nobody has a reliable count of civilian casualties, and Hamas - which is the only people who have anybody on the ground - are notorious grotesque liars. It could be Israel's figures aren't accurate either, but that doesn't mean Hamas' Arabian Nights type tales are true. As for the rest of antisemites, they don't have any other independent sources, so they either use Hamas numbers or pull them right out of their asses.

That's, like, really bad and stuff, for Israel.

If by "that's" you mean antisemites lying about Israel (and as we already established, they can not but lie) then it may be bad, but it's inevitable - they will always lie about Israel, that's their nature as antisemites. It's just a fact of life, you can't avoid it.

So it begs the question - why is the American right turning against Jews now, and what changed in the last 20-30 years that enabled it?

American Jews used to be much more ideologically diverse and spread across both parties. Now they are like 98 percent Democrat and very very far left. More than Asians or African Americans, and much more influential than either of those groups. Part of the reason no one takes Ben Shapiro seriously the way they did Dennis Praeger or Mark Levin is that he’s clearly some kind of weird outlier, the right equivalent of the Democrats castrated whipped token white males. He’s like the Republican Tim Walz.

American Jews are only about as Democrat as Hispanics and have never been as democrat as blacks.

Interesting, although I'd push back and say that (without actually looking for any data) I doubt those numbers don't apply to Israelis, Jews further down the orthodox spectrum and the boomer-Jews who have real money/power outside of Hollywood/conventional media. Even the doctors/professors I meet are not at all like the anti-Israel protestors. But I take your point more broadly.

Jewish Boomers of any income level you will find a lot more conservatives, and the liberal ones are usually not crazy. Gen X is where the shift starts, and it becomes almost total ideological lockstep in the Millennial and Zoomer ones.

American Jews used to be much more ideologically diverse and spread across both parties. Now they are like 98 percent Democrat and very very far left.

Modern Orthodox Jews mostly vote right, including Republican in the US, but are not particularly politically engaged in countries other than Israel. Haredi/Hassidic Jews vote for the Rebbe's corrupt political machine, and in the US the big ones are mostly nominally Republican.

Elements of the right have always wanted to be more openly antisemitic, and that’s been building steadily on the edgier corners of the internet for years now. Though Gaza isn’t a primary motivation for right antisemites, I do think it is closely related to why right antisemitism is bursting out into the open in a bigger way now. Previously, if the right allowed their antisemites any air they were handing the left a massive stick to clobber them with. Now, the hypocrisy of the left accusing the right of antisemitism would be too rich after the last few years of anti-Zionism from the left that quite frequently spills over into outright antisemitism. So even though right antisemites don’t give a shit about Gaza, it is very helpful for them because it provides a permission structure to come out into the open.

Because the American right writ large does not give a shit that Israel has turned Palestine into rubble. After October 7th, plenty of people here were gung-ho for a little genocide/purge.

Well, some of us are influenced by a libertarian and/or paleocon bleeding heart and anti-war POV. Just sayin

‘was interviewed by Tucker’ != ‘has become a major force’. Sure, I’ll grant minor updating toward the premise, but certainly nothing that has come to pass. Tucker mostly isn’t interviewing the major players, and his own star is on the decline

I do think that the Right will become increasingly split on Israel, and that this will include some loud antisemitic voices, some loud voices questioning blind support and being called antisemitic, and a lot of people quietly sliding away. However:

  1. Specific, fringe antisemtic voices will be a minimal contributor to the process and

  2. Pro-Israel voices will amplify and blame the fringe voices in #1 as a way to deletions disagreement with their fading hegemony.

Nick Fuentes is not and there is no strong evidence of him becoming anything more than a fringe, very online persona.

The Heritage Foundation has not been "the" think-tank for a while now.

The idea that groypers as a faction have even a percent of the influence over the Republican party as men like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Dave Portnoy, and Donald J Trump, seems absurd to me when the only groyper currently running for office is running as a Democrat.

I opened the link and I don't see any evidence there that he's a groyper.

Dave Portnoy

wasn't there a scandal where he came up as a fragile Jew a few months back?

wasn't there a scandal where he came up as a fragile Jew a few months back?

Was there? If so, does the median republican voter know about it? If they do know about it, do they care?

I doubt that the median republican voter even knows who David Fuentes or Richard Hanania are, and if they do, I would bet that it is because they were either on (or were mentioned on) either Rogan or Barstool Sports.

Indeed, his eponymous complaint caused quite the stir when it was first published

If not Fuentes then someone else of his ilk, sooner or later. As far as I can tell, "normie" Republicans under 40 are extinct.

What do you mean by "normie"? because if you are talking about the sort of polite anodyne neo-conservatism espoused by men like Bill Kristol and David French. I agree. Nobody under the age of 60 is buying what they are selling in the year of our Lord 2025.

If you are talking about "normal Republicans" that is a completely different story. If you take a video of a "No Kings" protest and a video of a Charlie Kirk Memorial and compare them to see which one has more grey hair in it, I am guessing that it won't even be close.

I just mean that every time I see one of those neocon boomers actually expose themselves to public commentary they're always being torn to shreds by hordes of feral /pol/ zoomers.

A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side.

You know that most of the reason the Near East hates the West is because of us propping up Israel, right? Western protection of Israel was explicitly cited as a motive for both September 11 and the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea.

And it's not even like all Jews support Israel!

There is a legitimate geopolitical reason for propping-up Israel, but it sounds Machiavellian when stated explicitly. Israel cuts the Arab world in half, preventing them from coalescing into a caliphate which would be a global power. Israel is the cornerstone of America's divide-and-conquor strategy in the Middle East.

Arabs won't coalesce on their own, they need to be oppressed by somebody or they'll fight amongst themselves. So Israel beating up Iran and acting as a mild constraint on Turkish ambitions in Syria is the only way this actually happens, and both are newer than US support for Israel.

Arabs won't coalesce on their own, they need to be oppressed by somebody or they'll fight amongst themselves

Hell, most of the time they’ll fight amongst themselves even when they are being oppressed by an outsider, hence why the Ottomans and later the British were able to play “divide and conquer” in the region for so long.

I'm no expert on the geopolitics of that region, but it seems to me if anything could bring them together, it's their common hatred of Israel.

I’m no expert on the Middle East either, but it sure seems to me that shared animosity towards Israel counts for surprisingly little over there: despite the ruling elite of Turkey and Iran being rabidly anti-Israel, the two countries consistently refuse to cooperate and regularly back opposing factions in, e.g., the Syrian conflict. Similarly for Saudi Arabia against Iran, Saudi against the Houthis, and to a lesser extent Qatar and the Gulf Arabs competing against their fellow Arabs for Trump-senpai to notice them.

Honestly I suspect that with the exception of the Houthis and the Iranian hardliners, the anti-Israel sentiment is largely just political theater, a cheap way for a mostly-apathetic elite to shore up support with the masses and to burnish their “pious, God-fearing Muslim” credentials while continuing to suck from the teat of US foreign aid and (in the case of Turkey) NATO membership.

The Arab world has tried this before - the United Arab Republic lasted three years, and it wasn't Israel that broke it up, it was Syrian elites resisting Nasser's power. The Arab world is simply too fractious to unite, they're even too fractious to cooperate in opposing Israel. Israel's proximity to the Suez Canal is more geopolitically important than the simple fact that it sits between Egypt and Syria (nothing is stopping Egypt and Saudi Arabia from uniting across the Red Sea, but that's clearly not going to happen).

I submit to you that the United Arab Republic would have been a lot more stable if it were contiguous. Things may have been different if Nasser had the ability to drive a tank column into Damascus. If you need to look at a map to know what country is between Egypt and Syria, go ahead.

nothing is stopping Egypt and Saudi Arabia from uniting across the Red Sea, but that's clearly not going to happen

The main thing stopping this is US foreign policy. The US funds a quarter of Egypt's military expenses (which is extremely relevant because the Egypt is controlled by the army), and defends Saudi Arabia whenever they are threatened militarily.

Syria wasn't able to hold Lebanon, and this is- as later history of the Assad regime shows- not due to squeamishness on the part of the former. Arabs are just a combination of incredibly fractious and bad at war without domination by a non-Arab power. No doubt there will soon be Israeli proxy forces(druze, probably Jewish settler, maybe Maronite) establishing non-state governments and mucking things up even more.

Perhaps Nasser would have been able to hold it a little longer by force, but Syria is, as recent history shows, not an easy country to hold by force, particularly when your "force" is an Arab army with all that entails.

As for Egypt and Saudi Arabia unifying, do you seriously think the Saudis look at Egyptians with anything other than dripping contempt that would make BAP blush? Do you think the Egyptian stratocratic barons under Sisi could restrain themselves from clumsily sacking Saudi Arabia's oil wealth? For all the vile stuff that America has done in the Arab world, if you take Western hegemony out of the picture, you wouldn't get some fantastical unified caliphate, you'd have a generational bloodbath that would only end when the last warlord runs out of oil.

Uh, you'd get the ottoman and persian empires reborn. Arabs killing each other would line up to be proxies for more militarily competent neighbors in exchange for influence- this is how Hezbollah came to control Lebanon- and that's how empires are formed.

And it's not even like all Jews support Israel!

I'm pretty sure it's not even a majority of them at this point, as long as we use the expression 'support for Israel' in the Likudnik / AIPAC-ist context.

Western protection of Israel was explicitly cited as a motive for both September 11

I tend to think that bin Laden was more insulted that Saudia Arabia chose protect itself from Saddam by having HW Bush set up shop rather than invoke his Mujahideen who were fresh off defeating the Soviets. That seems more salient in a lot of ways -- it was infidels setting up military bases in the holiest of Islamic countries and it was a personal slight. Moreover, the fight between Islamic Arab states and the secular pan-arabism of Saddam and Nasser was still in full flight.

I feel like that is both true but also sort of just an excuse to justify direct terrorist action against America. It was one reason among many, and I can't help but feel like if we were less supportive of Israel 9/11 would have still happened. We still meddle quite a bit on our own out there. I have a Ron Paulish stance on it.

I read the article and I also watched the Fuentes/Carlson interview. And I actually have a different point of view. For instance here is Hanania

The story of the 2019 “Groyper War” is instructive here. Followers of Fuentes would ambush mainstream conservative figures, most notably Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA events, and pepper them with questions about topics like immigration and Israel. Kirk, who had once openly supported legal immigration and “stapling green cards to diplomas,” shifted toward a harder line, demonstrating how a fringe online movement could bully one of the GOP’s most connected influencers into changing his tune.

Setting the emotional appeal and Russel conjugations aside, I do not think these questions are out of bounds. Trump and Kirk have America First policy, which is also something that Groypers can get behind. They are on board with tariffs and hard stance of US foreign policies even against allies like Canada or Denmark or Mexico and other countries. It is absolutely logical to ask why should Israel have special place when under the same policy. It is not as if people like Kirk were "bullied" - it is that it is very hard to answer these questions and be consistent with America First messaging.

The Tories are dying, the CDU is dying, mainstream republicanism is dying. The "right wing" elite has little to offer its voters and consistently fail. People aren't voting republicans for more wars in the middle east, cheap Indian labour and a deregulated wall street.

They try to brand Fuentes as extreme when his policies are having an immigration policy that would make America far safer, more cohesive and that would benefit labour. Meanwhile, we are supposed to pretend that invading Iraq was sensible Milquetoast policy.

The left has a similar problem in that establishment Democrat policies don't deliver to their base either. Parading the first DEI person at some post while delivering neoliberal economics isn't what the base desires. Most likely we are going to see a revolt within both parties that turns both sides into internal shit shows. The establishment controls the campaigns and the seats, the base refuses to vote and to do activism.

Two months ago, Richard Hanania predicted that Nick Fuentes and the groypers would become a major force in mainstream Republican politics.

I have few instincts or thoughts on the broader question of how "prominent" Fuentes is with various political factions. However it's kinda crazy to me that someone who openly supported Kamala Harris is still being considered a Republican or conservative.

He wasn't supporting Harris because he supported wokeness, he supported her because the republicans aren't delivering. The strategy of voting republican no matter how poorly they serve their base only causes the base to get trampled. If the Republicans can count on votes no matter what, there is no reason for the republicans to consider the base's interests.

The republican establishment needs the threat of the base going against them in order to keep the establishment delivering.

Likely Fuentes was supporting Harris because that's what his FBI handlers told him to do. Funny how all these Republican groups got investigated in the wake of J6 but Fuentes was there with his bullhorn and somehow managed to walk away with no issues. https://youtube.com/shorts/7iyk4zITS-g

He wasn't supporting Harris because he supported wokeness, he supported her because the republicans aren't delivering.

But had she won, he would've gotten more wokeness. Quite the 7D chess move.

More wokeness benefits Nick Fuentes. The stronger the woke get, the stronger their right-wing mirror-image get. If America is well-governed by a functional conservative coalition and most people feel more-or-less happy with their governance, Fuentes has no audience.

Now he's doing well at the moment, but then, America is not well-governed at the moment either. Trump has disastrously low approval ratings and has failed to unify the country. In a sense, Fuentes was in a no-lose situation.

Extremists benefit from chaos and incompetence. Fuentes is no exception.

The republican establishment needs the threat of the base going against them in order to keep the establishment delivering.

Traditionally this is done in primaries, not in general elections.

How many "squad" members have you seen supporting Trump because Kamala/Joe Biden was an unacceptable neoliberal shill collaborating with fascists yadda yadda...? I expect the answer will be "none."

I think that ACX mentioned that some pro-Palestinian Muslims were announcing that they were going to vote for Trump because Harris was too Israel-friendly. I am unsure how they are feeling about Trump's ME policies now.

The obvious choice to fixing situations where some voters can not credibly defect from their party because the other party caters to their interests even less would be to get rid of FPTP and get a multi-party system.

But without that, "always vote for the party which is most closely aligned to you" seems like a bad meta-strategy which will see you voting for the marginally less evil ones. Sometimes it is good not to engage in trades which are only slightly net-positive to incentivize the other player to offer you better trades instead.

Trump has so far been no worse than Biden/Harris, though there's an opportunity to be much better or much worse coming up.

I think that ACX mentioned that some pro-Palestinian Muslims were announcing that they were going to vote for Trump because Harris was too Israel-friendly. I am unsure how they are feeling about Trump's ME policies now.

They should be feeling dumb... but they should have been feeling dumb from the start. Trump's pro-Israel position was not at all a secret -- ask his daughter and his son-in-law, and consider his first term. It's Harris who flirted with the opposite, though she ended up back on the pro-Israel side rhetorically.

FWIW, while I like it in theory, all the european multi-party government system countries have a very similar problem as the one plagueing the US at the moment, with a sizeable chunk of people not feeling represented by any of the existing options and switching to the new (usually right-wing) kid on the block, despite not really liking that either.

And imo they are correct, there has been a coalescence towards a shared worldview that is best described as internationalist left among all major establishment parties. As a european myself, I don't have the impression that the US really has it worse, with the democrats taking the role of the internationalist left establishment vs the republicans as the opposition to that.

Supposedly, there are numerous Sanders>Trump voters.

Yes, but to return to the premise of the original post, I don't think many of them are all that welcome back in the modern Democratic party, let alone "major forces" in Democratic politics.

Just look at what's happened to public figures who've made that kind of transition - Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Taibbi, Joe Rogan, Jimmy Dore, even RFK himself - none of them are welcome in left spaces anymore.

If we need to include RFK, who seems like a true idiot, that is a bad sign that we are really reaching to fill out the list! Overall, I think the Dems will realize that they need to expand their coalition and that a huge amount of their coalition (albeit not the most active parts of the Dem base) are very opposed to the woke stuff that it seems like would be the grounds for Taibbi and Rogan's purported unwelcomeness.

To the degree Fuentes is getting a publicity bump, it's mostly via the left choosing its destructor. By trying to offload one of their pet murderers onto some dank corner of the internet right, they wound up publicizing a relatively niche character. Who has played his moment in the sun pretty well so far.

And they can't even bitch too much about anti-semitism given lefty behavior in the past two years. This has legitimized right-wing JQ'ers in a way few other things could. Jew-hate is now the nobbly end of the horseshoe, the bridge between the left and right at the extreme.

By trying to offload one of their pet murderers onto some dank corner of the internet right, they wound up publicizing a relatively niche character. Who has played his moment in the sun pretty well so far.

Man, I need to frame this.

Antisemitism has always been the horseshoe theory par excellence. The greens and constitutionalists were able to agree about it before all this.

for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side

What do they do with international finance and global media, exactly?

Finance has busily furthered DEI, deindustrialization of the West, financialization of the economy, toxic housing bubbles and rapid development of China.

The media whips up racial hysteria, worsens relations between the sexes and spreads grossly misleading racial narratives about policing. They've spread panic about climate change that has had all kinds of horrible effects, mental illness, people refusing to have kids 'for the climate'. Not to mention popularizing energy and environmental policies that have wrecked industry. Everyone constantly complaining that enforcing borders is fascism, that's the fault of the media. The media problematizes national myths and culture, delegitimizes identities like 'white' in favour of 'Black' or 'POC'. And the media goes out of their way to insult and humiliate white men. See here: https://x.com/StupidWhiteAds

If the argument is 'American Jews control finance and media, therefore they shouldn't be upset since they're bringing in more than they cost' then the premise is wrong because finance and media are not helping out. International finance and world media have been massively toxic and aggressively unhelpful for at least the last 30 years. They've been especially opposed to Christians and conservatives. A disproportionate amount of these sectors are Jewish (Blackrock and NYT for example), much is not.

What has the 'conservative intelligentsia' actually done for conservatives? Have they brought huge victories, or did they just help implement mass immigration, Pride as civic religion, diversity quotas to achieve their real goals - tax cuts and regime change in the Middle East?

I would much rather have my financial sector run by some honest, hardworking midwit who tries to advance national interests and develop our industries, than a 160 IQ financial genius who uses his vast talents for private profit, asset-stripping, offshoring and demanding share buybacks over investment.

I would rather have patriotic journalists with tedious prose and limited abilities than charismatic, excellent writers who hate me and attack me and my ancestors, systematically pursuing my disempowerment in society.

One of the wisest things the US could do is to crack down on media and financial elites, put patriots in charge of these key institutions so that they're coordinated to further US interests. That goes for whoever's running America. But it should be 10x more important for conservatives/MAGA to recognize that these people are, (generally speaking), not their friends!

What do they do with international finance and global media, exactly?

If the word 'your' in that context is a reference to the globalist goyim elite, then yes, the original statement is technically correct, I guess.

Finance has busily furthered DEI, deindustrialization of the West, financialization of the economy, toxic housing bubbles and rapid development of China.

Peanut butter enthusiasts lobby for more people to eat peanut butter! Man with hammer thinks most problems can be solved by smacking them! News at Eleven!

...More seriously, I think I generally share your feelings about the finance industry. But this was funny.

The media whips up racial hysteria, worsens relations between the sexes and spreads grossly misleading racial narratives about policing.

True, but media has also been undergoing a major structural disruption due to the internet for the past twenty years; they're desperately trying to do whatever it takes to keep eyeballs. What's getting pushed out (e.g. in the NYT) is what sells - entities that don't keep up, like Newsweek, Time, many mid-major and local papers, etc. - die.

Also also, the idea that newsmedia are amoral gossipmongers lying and ginning up hysteria to goose sales isn't exactly new

I would much rather have my financial sector run by some honest, hardworking midwit who tries to advance national interests and develop our industries, than a 160 IQ financial genius who uses his vast talents for private profit, asset-stripping, offshoring and demanding share buybacks over investment.

I would rather have patriotic journalists with tedious prose and limited abilities than charismatic, excellent writers who hate me and attack me and my ancestors, systematically pursuing my disempowerment in society.

Perhaps there is a third option between "people foresaw and intended these results because they are evil" and "people would achieve alternate results because they are good", which is "people intended well, but were wrong."

I'm not going full mistake theory - people tie their egos to their opinions, rationalize and dig in, and usually aren't amenable to being convinced by dispassionate arguments. But that doesn't get rid of the fact that people tend not to think like cartoon supervillains.

It doesn't need to be cartoonish supervillainy, it's world-class, hardworking, high IQ supervillainy done by actual supervillains with decades of experience, not invented by some idiot comic writer who couldn't write a coherent plot to save his life.

They can invent and propagate whole ideologies to justify and valorise looting, perfect networks of influence and private enrichment. They can reframe looting the commons as beneficial, positive development, the source of our strength. They can reframe sabotage and wrecking as virtue struggling against evil. And people will believe it because people generally go with the flow. Plus these guys are very good at papering over the cracks because they're Very Rich or Are The Media. Maybe they believe it too themselves, it's easy to believe things if they're advancing your interests.

These are Ayn Rand supervillains.

True, but media has also been undergoing a major structural disruption due to the internet for the past twenty years; they're desperately trying to do whatever it takes to keep eyeballs.

"whatever it takes" notably didn't involve breaking the story that the President was mentally incompetent, and before that it didn't involve breaking the story that the president's son was selling access to his father to foreign interests. In fact, there's no shortage of stories that could have earned the news corps an avalanche of eyeballs that they passed on for clearly ideological reasons. This argument that the media class is fundamentally mercenary and are just seeking to maximize attention and ad revenue might have been weakly plausible in 2014, but at this point it is pretty clearly an undead argument immune to any degree of contrary evidence.

"whatever it takes" notably didn't involve breaking the story that the President was mentally incompetent, and before that it didn't involve breaking the story that the president's son was selling access to his father to foreign interests.

Correct, because those stories would have pissed off their current readers, without necessarily gaining them eyeballs among other, new customers.

Nowadays media makes money by feeding people's epistemic bubbles, not puncturing them.

If socmed metrics are anything to go by, drama sells. Also mainstream companies have proven time and again they will pick ideology over profit.

Social Media is free; NYT is trying to get people to pay money to subscribe, and precisely by picking ideology - i.e., reinforcing their reader's pre-existing biases and telling them that they are correct about the world but moreso, and in fact have they considered being even MORE worried about their particular boogeymen?!? - has racked up millions of subscribers.

Elon Musk just launched Grokipedia, a kanged version of wikipedia run through a hideous AI sloppification filter. Of course the usual suspects are complaining about political bias and bias about Elon and whatnot, but they totally miss whole point. The entire thing is absolute worthless slop. Now I know that Wikipedia is pozzed by Soros and whatever, but fighting it with worthless gibberish isn't it.

As a way to test it, I wanted to check something that could be easily verifiable with primary sources, without needing actual wikipedia or specialized knowledge, so I figured I could check out the article of a short story. I picked the story "2BR02B" (no endorsement of the story or its themes) because it's extremely short and available online. And just a quick glance at the grokipedia article shows that it hallucinated a massive, enormous dump into the plot summary. Literally every other sentence in there is entirely fabricated, or even totally the opposite of what was written in the story. Now I don't know the exact internal workings of the AI, but it claims to read the references for "fact checking" and it links to the full text of the entire story. Which means that the AI had access to the entire text of the story yet still went full schizo mode anyways.

I chose that article because it was easily verifiable, and I encourage everyone to take a look at the story text and compare it to the AI "summary" to see how bad it is. And I'm no expert but my guess is that most of the articles are similarly schizo crap. And undoubtedly Elon fanboys are going to post screenshots of this shit all over the internet to the detriment of everyone with a brain. No idea what Elon is hoping to accomplish with this but I'm going to call him a huge dum dum for releasing this nonsense.

Something like Grokipedia is a good and valuable idea, even if poorly monetizable and requiring a lot more money and effort than was spent here. In fact setting up agentic loops to produce Wikipedia would be a fascinating and useful study and playground for AI models.

Musk is the wrong one to do this and Grok is the wrong tool for the job besides.

However, I expect something like it to eventually exist.

Who would do it better and why?

Polarizing and niche appeal people like Musk often doom their own projects to niche appeal by the very fact of being involved, for one. Nearly any other mainstream tech-famous figure would have far more cachet right away, or even a determined but unknown media whore. This matters not just for getting users to the site and retaining them (obviously important - see the failure of Truth Social), but also because at the current state of AI to do this you functionally need human volunteers to supervise said AI, and so you want to cast that net more widely. You want curious and motivated people, not tech castoffs with an axe to grind against the “establishment”. Making an encyclopedia is foundationally an establishment thing to do anyways, the ideas are not very nicely compatible. Wikipedia’s faults are in execution, not a flaw in the core mission or even necessarily in its processes. One reason why all challengers have failed was attempting to reject that - more similar projects have their oxygen stolen by the more mature free product, but that’s obviously not a concern for an AI encyclopedia which is a novelty in and of itself, and at least theoretically could offer some things Wikipedia cannot.

And don’t get me wrong, given the recent history of Grok models, not only would Grok need a lot of hand holding, it’s quite possible even with said help it would be flatly incapable of obtaining an acceptable final product. Some smart engineering might allow current gen models to achieve some sort of success, but that’s again something where the engineering is often the point, not the final output. As an example, it would be genuinely interesting to see if a horde of slightly differently tuned and varied models are able to produce an emergent AI “wisdom of the crowds” equivalent, or would get stuck in certain fail states. Musk gets this paradigm all wrong, because he is plainly treating the project as both advertising for his specific shitty model, as well as a partisan vehicle to launder his sociopolitical complaints into greater coherence or acceptability. These are not sustainable directions on multiple fronts.

I tested it on the one subject I know best and it is worthless. Sentences are occasionally completely randomly inserted nonsequiturs and there is outright fabricated information that is known to AI to be false (I’m not talking about obscure facts, like if I asked ChatGpt now “Is X true” it would know the correct answer). This may improve in the future, but right now this is awful and completely useless.

As a way to test it, I wanted to check something that could be easily verifiable with primary sources, without needing actual Wikipedia or specialized knowledge

I'm no expert but my guess is that most of the articles are similarly schizo crap. And undoubtedly Elon fanboys are going to post screenshots of this shit all over the internet to the detriment of everyone with a brain.

On the other hand, the admin of the Kiwi Farms says: "This article on the Kiwi Farms is perhaps the best and most neutral article I've seen on the Kiwi Farms." So perhaps more effort was expended on controversial topics.

He's probably mostly happy that the article isn't negative, which the Wikipedia article certainly is.

Notice that he didn't say that it's the most factual article about the farms, and in fact points out several hallucinations off hand. I would go as far to say that while the Wikipedia article is much more biased and negative, it almost certainly has fewer provable falsehoods in it.

Going over the initial blurb, Wikipedia is quite contentious but also hard to debunk:

Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums (/ˈkwɪki/ KWIH-kee), is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities.

The only thing to argue about is whether or not it facilitates harassment. Farmers would point out that calling for harassment is banned on site, but on the other hand it's likely a don't ask don't tell sort of situation where many farmers are actually harassing lolcows they just don't say so.

Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment.

True, whether or not the farms are involved in the harassment. It might be arguable to call lolcows targets but it's not really wrong.

Kiwi Farms has been tied to the suicides of three people who were victims of harassment by the website.

It is true that three lolcows have an heroed but it's impossible to prove whether or not any farmers were involved. It's extremely likely that farmers were involved, they just didn't admit to anything on the site.

Farmers would point out that calling for harassment is banned on site, but on the other hand it's likely a don't ask don't tell sort of situation where many farmers are actually harassing lolcows they just don't say so.

Is there any evidence that harassment is occurring? Not only is it banned on site, farmers actively find, document and condemn anybody who organizes trolling plans against lolcows. Notably, the Reddit "snark" subs which seem to operate with impunity and, for example, have faced little consequences for mailing human skulls to H3H3. But I won't hold my breath to see if Wikipedia will ever mention that.

It is true that three lolcows have an heroed but it's impossible to prove whether or not any farmers were involved. It's extremely likely that farmers were involved, they just didn't admit to anything on the site.

On what basis do you make this claim? The three you refer to killed themselves because:

  • Chloe Sagal: Had recently been evicted and had no money due to being too unbearable for the local gay and trans community.
  • Julie Terryberry: Was in a physically abusive relationship and committed suicide when it looked like the relationship was ending.
  • Byuu / David Ginder: Was socially isolated in a foreign country notorious for shunning outsiders, wasn't even in contact with his husband back home. Had several mental illnesses (such as "rejection-sensitive dysphoria") that he admitted he couldn't really help. He was so isolated, nobody even knew for sure if he was dead or just logged off until FOIA documents dropped years later.

You can read more about them in this OP (note that Byuu's entry is outdated and was written before the FOIA was released).

It's hard for me to see the Kiwi Farms as having contributed to their deaths in any way besides documenting and discussing them. However, discussion is not harassment.

Nice necro post, but also here are the facts:

  1. Lolcows are harassed. Of course this is the case because they're loud and obnoxious hateable cunts who say funny shit when pissed off. In the whole wide internet, there are bound to be a bunch of absolute kings and gigachads who are ready to make lolcows' lives a living hell.
  2. Lolcow harassers are on the farms of course. Anyone can sign up, and most people would love to discuss weighty topics with fellow intellectuals, including laughing at lolcowns.
  3. While some depressed mentally ill losers are likely to kys themselves even without being harassed, for the ones who get harassed I'm sure it contributes. Either way as a farmer, it's not possible to know exactly why a lolcow an heroed and any speculation is just that.

These are facts that aren't specific to the farms and apply to pretty much every site on the Internet that allows discussion of lolcows (like Reddit). Putting harassment and Kiwi Farms in the same sentence is just darkly hinting at an unspecified implication between the two without explicitly stating a fact that could be disproven.

Where on reddit are lolcows discussed in depth?

They're called "snark" subreddits. Null has complained a few times about how they get away with harassment that would be immediately banworthy on Kiwi Farms.

Reddit is letting the h3 snark get away with shit I'd perma ban people for straight up no questions asked. That's how fucked the Internet is. It's just about how much money you make. If we made reddit money, I could let users get away with fucking murder.

Bro, do you seriously think Kiwi farms is a more rigid environment than reddit? Do you seriously think communities on reddit can organize CPS calls openly? Do you seriously think communities on reddit can organize CPS calls openly? Doxxing and personal information is banable, you can't even post a screenshot with someone's username on it because they consider that harassment. The whole point of Kiwi farms is that is not as anal and rigid as these other sites. Kiwifarms doesn't allow calls to action, that's it, everything else that is legal is allowed.

Yes. I've repeatedly seen snark subs get away with murder you'd instantly get reported and banned for on the kiwi farms.

Non-Null quote regarding H3H3's lawsuit against the moderators of that group's snark subreddit:

very bizarre to see people in this thread joyfully celebrating the fact that a Professional Internet Faggot got a judge's permission to dox and sue Redditors for being mean to him on the internet. I wonder if our friend Mr. Elliot Fong is paying attention.

Nigga the anti-H3 people sent him skulls in the mail, tried to get his kids taken away, and people on h3snark were taking credit for it and openly bragging about it. That shit is straight up illegal and he is well within his rights to subpoena reddit for the names of the people who moderated the communities where that behavior happened and encouraged it. This is true regardless of your opinion on Ethan.

perhaps you have forgotten kiwifarms' status as The Most Hated Forum. baseless accusations of defamation or harassment can and have been used effectively against this site and its user base.

Kiwi Farms, as far as I know, has not sent people human skulls in the mail or tried to call CPS with the intent of wrongfully getting someone's kids taken away.

You're making an argument that this is setting bad precedent, but the kind of person who would spread lies in order to destroy this site a-la Keffals during DKF don't need that precedent. It already happened and did not involve use of the law. I repeat my statement that there is literally nothing wrong with going through the proper legal channels to obtain the identities of people who tried to fuck with you and your family so that you can sue them.

If Null thought this sort of thing would hurt the site in some way, he wouldn't be featuring it himself: [screenshot of thread's being featured on Kiwi Farms front page]

TheMotte has no rule against necromancy, especially not for less than a month.

I never said it was against the rules I just thought it was unusual and worth mentioning.

it almost certainly has fewer provable falsehoods in it.

"The media very rarely lies."

Incidentally, journalists love this sort of proxy for accuracy, as it is easy apply, but leaves totally aside attempting to determine the intended and actual affect the text has on the reader. One can use lies to tell the truth (a definition of art), or tell the truth to lie (propaganda).

cf.: Lying* like a lawyer, lying like a used car salesman.

Biased propaganda is more truthful than complete fairytale nonsense passed off as truth. I'll take the propaganda every day.

Of course AI is an algorithm and it can't intend anything but does it really matter when it's just plain wrong all the time?

Biased propaganda is more truthful than complete fairytale nonsense passed off as truth.

This is completely wrong. Fairytale nonsense is easier to correct. Lies of """truthful""" but biased propaganda have a stronger effect and correcting them requires attention spans longer than 5 seconds. Claiming AI hallucinations are worse is insane.

I'll take the propaganda every day.

I absolutely, unequivocally would not. I'd take stories of shamble-men when there are bandits or bears over targeted story selection (and novel definitions) about an unbiased algorithm.

One will lead to you avoiding a dangerous forest. The other will lead to you degrading the justice system.

No idea what Elon is hoping to accomplish with this but I'm going to call him a huge dum dum for releasing this nonsense.

I'm curious, since most/all of your complaints about Grokipedia seem to be about its current (in)ability to consistently produce useful text for an encyclopedia entry: if XAI, through some sort of engineering ingenuity, was able to improve Grokipedia, using only modern and plausible near-future AI tech (i.e. almost certainly something LLM-based), by the time it hits version 1.0, such that, any given text produced for an entry is provably at least as useful as the equivalent Wikipedia (or other reference of your choice) text, as measured by any and all metrics you personally find meaningful in this context, without reverting to fuzzy copy-paste or summarizing the existing Wiki (or other reference) text, would you see this endeavor by Elon as worthwhile?

If not, then what would Grokipedia have to accomplish, or what would its underlying technology have to be based on (or at least not be based on), for you to consider it to be a useful AI-based encyclopedia?

Sure, if Grokipedia can somehow be provably as-accurate as Wikipedia factually, then I think it would be something worthwhile. Right now it's in an entirely different universe - the fairytale universe.

at least as useful as the equivalent Wikipedia

Not sure what you mean by useful in this case.

at least as useful as the equivalent Wikipedia

Not sure what you mean by useful in this case.

I don't mean anything specific, merely the fact that any tool, like an encyclopedia, exists to be used for accomplishing some goal, and, as such, its value comes from its being useful. There are a trillion different metrics that can apply to any given case, but ultimately, it all comes down to, "Does the user find the tool useful for accomplishing the user's goals?"

Wikipedia has some level of usefulness, as determined by people who use it, including, presumably, yourself. My question was, if, according to whatever metric you personally use to determine if some encyclopedia is useful for the goals you want to accomplish, Grokipedia consistently (or possibly even strictly) outperformed Wikipedia, would you consider the project of Grokipedia to be worthwhile?

Your answer tells me Yes, that your criticism is based around the usefulness (lack thereof) of the text, rather than around how that text was produced. Which satisfies my curiosity.

This reminds me of Vox Day's Encyclopedia Galactica project, or the even more retarded Conservapedia.

Wikipedia and crowd-sourced intelligence in general has its obvious failure modes, yet Wikipedia remains an extremely valuable source for.... most things that aren't heavily politicized. Even the latter will usually have articles that are factually correct if also heavily factually curated.

The problem with AI-generated "slop" is not the "schizo" hallucinations that you see. It's the very reasonable and plausible hallucinations that you don't see. It's the "deceptive fluency" of an LLM that is usually right but, when it's wrong, will be confidently and convincingly wrong in a way that someone who doesn't know better can't obviously spot.

With Wikipedia, if I read an article on Abraham Lincoln, I am pretty confident the dates will be correct and the life and political events will be real and sourced. Sure, sometimes there are errors and there are occasional trolls and saboteurs (I once found an article on a species of water snake that said their chief diet was mermaids), and if you are a Confederate apologist you will probably be annoyed at the glazing, but you still won't find anything that would be contradicted by an actual biography.

Whereas with an AI-generated bio of Lincoln, I would expect that it's 90% real and accurate but randomly contaminated with mermaids.

well 10-45% mermaids in what outwardly looks like normal content is pretty much what I mean when I say schizo mode/worthless gibberish.

Like 10% of all the facts in an essay being totally made up is completely loco. That's the kind of thing that would get you flunked on the spot if you did it for a school paper, or fired on the spot if you did it in a newspaper.

10% may be an overstatement, but I agree that even 1% is unacceptable. But my point was that "schizo mode" (like if you literally see references to mermaids) is pretty obvious. "Abraham Lincoln was married to Susan Elizabeth Fancher" is not an obvious hallucination if you don't actually know his wife's name.

With Wikipedia, if I read an article on Abraham Lincoln, I am pretty confident the dates will be correct and the life and political events will be real and sourced. Sure, sometimes there are errors and there are occasional trolls and saboteurs (I once found an article on a species of water snake that said their chief diet was mermaids), and if you are a Confederate apologist you will probably be annoyed at the glazing, but you still won't find anything that would be contradicted by an actual biography.

So, yes, I'm sure most of us are aware that Wikipedia political articles are going to be as misleading as they can get away with, but let me just say that there are some completely non-political articles that are factually wrong, too. If you look up the Sleeping Beauty problem, the article states that there is "ongoing debate", which is ridiculous. For actual mathematicians, there's no debate; the answer is simple. The only reason there's a "debate" is because some people don't quite understand what probability measures. Imagine if the Flat Earth page said that there was "ongoing debate" on the validity of the theory...

And don't even get me started on the Doomsday argument, which is just as badly formed but has a bunch of advocates who are happy to maintain a 20-page article full of philosobabble to make it sound worthy of consideration.

I'm sure there are many other examples from fields where I'm not informed enough to smell the bullshit. Crowdsourcing knowledge has more failure modes than just the well-known political one.

Sleeping Beauty problem

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-sleeping-beauty-problem-is-keeping-mathematicians-awake/

This article seems to claim that the debate is generally between mathematicians and philosophers. And I don't think the philosophy camp is necessarily shite at math, they probably believe in a fundamentally different epistemology. Now you might think that humanities is retarded and math is obviously the superior and more correct form of study, but there's "ongoing debate" on whether that's true or not.

Well, yes, this is what I mean when I say that some people don't understand what probability measures. If you pretend "schmrobability" is some weird mystical floaty value that somehow gets permanently attached to events like coin flips, then you get confused as to why the answer, as you can observe by trying forms of the experiment yourself, somehow becomes 1/3. Mathematicians say "ok, please fix your incorrect understanding of probability." Philosophers say "oh, look at this fascinating paradox I've discovered." Yeesh.

Im wondering if Im having a brainfart because noone else has pointed it out, but:

If the coin is tails, Sleeping Beauty can’t distinguish between Monday and Tuesday. So the probability of Monday/tails is the same as Tuesday/tails.

I dont think thats valid as stated. For example, if I throw a weighted coin and dont tell you the result, you also cant distinguish between the different outcomes, but it doesnt follow that the coin was fair.

It's true that there's an (usually) unspoken assumption in the setup, that Monday and Tuesday are both guaranteed to occur and there's no subjective difference between them. I think that's what you're calling out? So, what Wikipedia calls a "principle of indifference" occurs: if there were an argument for weighting Monday/tails higher than Tuesday/tails, then the same argument could be flipped to show the reverse too.

You could alter the experiment to violate this indifference. For instance, if there's a 1/3 chance that the experiment will be halted Monday night because of weather (so Tuesday might not happen). Or if Sleeping Beauty knew there was a 0% chance of rain on Monday and a 10% chance of rain on Tuesday, and she can see outside (so she has more subjective information about what day it is). You can still list the four states as {Monday,Tuesday} x {heads,tails}, but in the former case, they don't have equal weight (Bayesians would say there are different priors), and in the latter case, she has to apply two pieces of information (waking up, and whether it's raining outside).

I know the principle of indifference, but youve talked about mathematicians who know what probability measures, and the indifference principle isnt a mathematical result, or obligatory to use them. Its something we use to come up with some probabilistic model when we dont have any better idea. It doesnt really make sense to use it to refute someone elses probability claims. Either they have a reason that applies, in which case indifference doesnt apply, or they dont have one, in which case that is what you need to argue.

I already told you the actual proof: if somebody had "a reason that applies", you can swap Monday/Tuesday in it and it would give the opposite result, which is a contradiction unless the probabilities are the same. Whether you think that's called the "principle of indifference" or not doesn't matter. Like several other people in the thread, it just sounds like you're here to argue for your own variant of philosophy. But the measured result is 2/3 regardless of whether you think your version of probability is better than a mathematician's. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."

if somebody had "a reason that applies", you can swap Monday/Tuesday in it and it would give the opposite result

That would be true if all your knowledge where symmetric about them. But you know that heads/Tuesday is impossible, that Tuesday comes after Monday, and much more. You only have that its subjectively indistiguishable which one youre in in the moment.

Im also a mathematician, and not arguing towards either result. The halfers dont even object here. I just thought this argument is weird.

Ok, as long as you're not challenging the actual correct result, I can relax and accept that, sure, there's some philosophical weirdness about the whole thing. Sleeping Beauty's consciousness ends up "splitting" into both Monday and Tuesday, which is not something we normally encounter. So you could imagine some philosophical argument that her "soul" is more likely to experience the "qualia" of Monday than of Tuesday (if, say, "souls" jump into random time slices of a fixed universe, and earlier ones are more likely than later ones), so when it "picks one" to "be", it's not evenly apportioned. To an outside observer (i.e. for all practical purposes), across repeated experiments her body still experiences twice as many tails as heads, but her "soul" might not.

Is that a fair representation of what you think is "weird"?

This has some application to various anthropic arguments (and if we ever start simulating human brains or worrying about AI welfare, this is going to be a HOT topic of debate). Indeed, "souls" floating around independently and "picking someone" to "be" in a fixed universe is also a requirement for the Doomsday Argument to work. But personally I just think there's no disconnect between observers and physical bodies/brains (and everything I put in quotes above is nonsense). It's not something that can be settled with evidence, though.

More comments

I hope you knew what you were getting into bringing up Sleeping Beauty, haha. I have a degree in statistics (which doesn't necessarily grant me as much insight into probability theory as you might imagine) but I usually avoid getting into the weeds by simply stating that the question: "What does probability mean in real life?" is NOT a settled question, at all. You cannot escape bringing in philosophy. I recommend this Stanford encyclopedic entry for a pretty nice and thorough treatment/overview of some of the difficulties involved in what initially seems to be a simple word.

Broadly speaking, there are arguably three main concepts of probability:

  1. An epistemological concept, which is meant to measure objective evidential support relations. For example, “in light of the relevant seismological and geological data, California will probably experience a major earthquake this decade”.
  2. The concept of an agent’s degree of confidence, a graded belief. For example, “I am not sure that it will rain in Canberra this week, but it probably will.”
  3. A physical concept that applies to various systems in the world, independently of what anyone thinks. For example, “a particular radium atom will probably decay within 10,000 years”.

Some philosophers will insist that not all of these concepts are intelligible; some will insist that one of them is basic, and that the others are reducible to it. Moreover, the boundaries between these concepts are somewhat permeable. After all, ‘degree of confidence’ is itself an epistemological concept, and as we will see, it is thought to be rationally constrained both by evidential support relations and by attitudes to physical probabilities in the world. And there are intramural disputes within the camps supporting each of these concepts, as we will also see. Be that as it may, it will be useful to keep these concepts in mind. Sections 3.1 and 3.2 discuss analyses of concept (1), "classical" and "logical/evidential probability"; 3.3 discusses analyses of concept (2), "subjective probability"; 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 discuss three analyses of concept (3), "frequentist", "propensity", and "best-system" interpretations.

Put more simply, it's not fair to imply that there is a mathematically "correct" interpretation of probability. This is wrong. In fact you can axiomatize something mathematically in several different ways while still retaining most if not all desirable math traits we want out of "probability" (see link), even if many end up being fairly similar... with that said, however, you are correct as far as I'm aware that Sleeping Beauty is better seen as a semantic or definitional disagreement than a mathematical one per se. Even there, though, you go too far. You can make the math satisfy your basic probability axioms of your choice, whether you're a halfer or thirder alike, once you've defined a sample space (and thus what counts as a "trial") and any other relevant definitions have been clarified (especially clarifying what, precisely, is being conditioned on!!). In short, no experts consulted are making math mistakes, they merely are speaking in scissor statements, as we might say around here.

I hope you knew what you were getting into bringing up Sleeping Beauty, haha.

Somewhat. I've gotten into arguments about this on astralcodexten before, and it honestly wasn't too bad. The way I try to sleep easy at night is by telling myself that 99% of people here are probably sensible, and it's only the 1% I end up having to argue with, who think that weird philosophical arguments can let you ignore the results of an easy-to-replicate experiment. (I'm not including you in this, to be clear.)

Put more simply, it's not fair to imply that there is a mathematically "correct" interpretation of probability.

Well, I understand what you're trying to say, but there IS a mathematically correct theory of probability, if you just stick with axioms and theorems. (Uh, without getting into the weeds of the Axiom of Choice, which shows up pretty quickly because probability is intricately tied with measure theory.) As your link says, there's a "standard" set of axioms that are pretty uncontroversial. However, you're right that there can be some tricky philosophical questions about how the real world maps to it. For instance, while the Doomsday Argument is wrong (you can't tell the future with anthropic arguments), there are other anthropic arguments that DO seem like they work and have some rather weird implications. I'd love to have a real discussion about those sometime instead of this minutia.

Regardless, the issue here is that this isn't a complex real-world problem, it's a simple experiment with clear results. And, like Monty Hall, it's one that you can even do yourself with slight modifications. As the experiment is repeated, 2/3 of the times she's asked, Sleeping Beauty will see tails. If she believes she'll see any other results, she's wrong. You can't philosobabble your way into changing this fact, any more than you could talk a coin into flipping Heads 100 times in a row. I absolutely do not agree that there is a reasonable way of defining a "trial" or "sample space" that somehow makes the halfer case make sense. You can see people in this thread trying, and it takes some real mental gymnastics.

When people bring up the Monty Hall problem, do you go around telling THEM that probability is philosophically complex and gosh, how can they really know they should switch with 2/3 confidence? No? Then why is Sleeping Beauty different?

(I mean mathematically correct in the sense that Kolmogorov isn't technically the only game in town with internal axiomatic consistency, though it's universal enough in use I was probably being overly pedantic there)

Because Monty Hall is inherently grounded, while Sleeping Beauty is a weird contrivance pretty much on purpose. Sleeping Beauty relies on a supposed perfect memory-erasing amnesia drug erasing one entire interview and only that one interview. It further relies on Beauty being unable to distinguish the passage of time at all, and even more confusingly we are including Beauty's answers across multiple days in our sample space! This is unintuitive. Our sample space to get 1/3 is: Beauty on Monday on Heads, Beauty on Monday on Tails, Beauty on Tuesday on Tails, yes? Most probability problems are not so casual about employing asymmetric tree diagrams across temporal positions, because the eminently natural assumption about the passage of time is that you were able to perceive it. The weird, nonexistent mind-altering drug breaks that intuition about the unbroken forward flow of time! An assumption we virtually never question in any other scenario.

So despite my best wishes I guess I'll take the bait. To be clear, I'm not so much trying to explain the halfer position as elucidating why I believe the whole debate to be kind of stupid and misguided, though I am quite sympathetic to your view.

Anyways, time flow. In other words, the halfer position rejects that it even makes sense to ask about Beauty on Tuesday, since "obviously" the sample space is only: Beauty on Monday with two possible coin flip results (i.e. guesses). The halfer position says in effect that it's impossible to consider two super-imposed Tails-guessing Beauties on both Monday and Tuesday at once. Or, phrased a different (and probably better) way, a Monday Beauty guessing tails is functionally indistinguishable from a Tuesday Beauty guessing tails, because the "divergence" in intent has already occurred! The only relevant guess is the coin.

The second illuminating follow-up question: What is our reward scheme? Do we reward Beauty for a correct answer every time she wakes up (and then steal it back when she sleeps and forgets, thus making any gain ephemeral; though optionally we may choose to sum all three of her choices for aggregate statistical reasons), or do we reward Beauty only after it's Wednesday? For the former, we are effectively rewarding each awakening, but for the latter we provoke a philosphical crisis. Is Tuesday Beauty really making a truly independent choice? Halfers might say no, of course not, "reality" already diverged. Thirders would say yes, of course, it's a new day so thus a new choice. Crisis aside, consider a Beauty who goes "screw it, I'm not playing mind games, I'm choosing heads literally every time" - for a one-time Wednesday-only reward, she wins half the time. Can we truly treat a Beauty who goes "screw it, I'm choosing Tails every time" differently? It depends on our reward scheme! In one setup it's clear this Tails-stubborn Beauty gets double winnings every Wednesday (because even though both awakenings gave the same answer, they were rewarded separately thus double dipping), while in the other she is no better off than the Heads-stubborn one (because the coin was, in fact, tails just half the time, and she's only rewarded at the end). Hopefully that teases apart why it matters.

But you see the issue here, previously obscured? Not only is this contrived, but we require some clarification here about definitions to deliver an answer. We could use a computer, but then we're merely revisiting the same problem with our programming as a design choice: when the coin comes up Tails, do Monday-Beauty and Tuesday-Beauty execute their decision-making code twice with independent randomness, or does Tuesday-Beauty simply output the duplicated cached result from Monday? We implicitly make a claim, one of the following:

  • Beauty wakes up on Tuesday (because tails), so this is a new epistemic event with fresh uncertainty and new entropy. Effectively she makes a new, independent guess. The extra uncertainty might potentially be considered the self-doubt about where she is in the timeline.
  • Beauty wakes up on Tuesday (because tails), but this is a stale re-run of Monday with no uncertainty, no new entropy, and no new information. Effectively she obviously makes the same guess. There is no extra uncertainty because she has an almost predestination view of fate.

This whole setup is odd, because typically in a probability problem, identical epistemic states with identical available information should have identical probability outputs/beliefs, right? Yet in one of these cases, we're saying the two events are separate because 'someone said so'. Or maybe more accurately, in one case we're talking about epistemic states of knowledge, and in the other we're talking about specific events. Scope is subtly different. The problem has laundered in a sneaking modeling choice without you realizing it. Your choice of model literally determines if additional randomness is injected into the system or not, and thus influences the long-run probability you will find. This is especially clear when you add simple rewards like I described.

But anyways real life does not contain weird situations like these reminiscent of quantum physics. Monty Hall can be modeled strictly mechanically, and in a loose sense so can Sleeping Beauty... but how you represent said model is not a settled question. Is the experiment truly "reset" when we move from Monday to Tuesday? Again that's really a purely philosophical question, not a mathematical one. The presence of a belief-having chooser like Beauty is required for us to even talk about "beliefs" and "rational bets" and all that stuff. This is the doubly case when it comes to time. It's one of the most frustrating aspects of statistics and probability: we cannot actually run perfectly authentic, true counterfactuals, because time runs in one direction. Just like science fiction can only theorize and imagine what would happen in multiverses or if we perfectly cloned a human mind, probability also struggles to perfectly map to reality and human perception because of the aforementioned triple concept divergence in what we mean when we say "probability".

Maybe I'm being too harsh on this thought experiment, but I have little patience for them when they so obviously diverge from reality. We shouldn't be surprised that setting up an unintuitive situation produces unintuitive answers.

I think I'm Sleeping Beauty'd out, but thanks for your comments. I honestly don't think the problem's all that existentially weird - compared to many thought experiments, this one could at least take place in our physical universe.

I just want to say, given all the talk about the Sleeping Beauty Problem here, I think the ~10 year old video game Zero Time Dilemma, which is where I learned of it, might be up the alleys of many people here. It's the 3rd game in a series, with the 2nd one, Virtue's Last Reward, being focused around the prisoner's dilemma. All 3 are escape-room games with anime-style art and voiced visual novel cut scenes, with the scenarios being Saw-ish where characters awaken trapped in a death game.

I actually loved the Zero Escape series - except Zero Time Dilemma, sadly, which I bounced on because I really didn't care for the graphics and the nonlinear format. Sounds like I should go back to finish it, though.

Zero Time Dilemma is certainly the weakest of the 3, and it's not close. And I didn't even find most of the scifi/philosophizing to be interesting in 999, especially compared to ZTD. Yet the characters, presentation, and gameplay all were far better in the former (and better still in VLR IMHO), to the extent that I'd say 999 is by far the better game. So I'd say you're not missing out on a whole lot.

I have the vague recollection that the only coherent interpretation of the final explanation of 999 is that the villain did everything due to a misunderstanding of the rules/universe the game operates in, which was amusing but narratively unsatisfying and inspired a couple of irl rants.

If you look up the Sleeping Beauty problem, the article states that there is "ongoing debate", which is ridiculous. For actual mathematicians, there's no debate; the answer is simple. The only reason there's a "debate" is because some people don't quite understand what probability measures.

Excellent bait.

Only partially - I genuinely think this is an example of a failure of Wikipedia as a repository of knowledge. And believe me, I'd like nothing more than for rationalists to grok Sleeping Beauty like they (mostly) grok Monty Hall.

Eh, I think that the issue is that probabilities are facts about our model of the world, not facts about the world itself, and we will use different models of the world depending on what we're going to use the probability for. If Sleeping Beauty is asked each time she awakens for a probability distribution over which side the coin landed on, and will be paid on Wednesday an amount of money proportional to the actual answer times the average probability she put on that answer across wakings, she should be a halfer to maximize payout. If instead she gets paid at the time she is asked, she should be a thirder.

But if you think there should be some actual fact of the matter about the "real" probability that exists out in the world instead of in your model of the world, you will be unsatisfied with that answer. Which is why this is such an excellent nerd snipe.

p.s. you might enjoy the technicolor sleeping beauty problem.

If Sleeping Beauty is asked each time she awakens for a probability distribution over which side the coin landed on, and will be paid on Wednesday an amount of money proportional to the actual answer times the average probability she put on that answer across wakings, she should be a halfer to maximize payout.

I appreciate that you're trying to steelman the halfer position, but that's a really artificial construction. In fact, in this framing, the payout is 1/2 regardless of what she answers (as long as she's consistent). That's what happens when you try to sidestep the obvious way to bet (where even the Wikipedia article admits she should wager 1/3 on heads - and then somehow fails to definitively end the article there).

p.s. you might enjoy the technicolor sleeping beauty problem.

Nice, I think I'd encountered it before (I've unfortunately read a lot of "Ape in the coat"'s voluminous but misguided Sleeping Beauty posts), but I didn't specifically remember that one. Commit to betting only if the room is red. Then of the four equal-weight possibilities (Monday is red/blue) x (heads/tails), you win in red/tails and blue/tails, you lose in red/heads, and you don't bet in blue/heads. Expected payout per experiment is 1/4*(200+200-300) = 25.

He does seem to be wrong about "for reference, in regular Sleeping Beauty problem utility neutral betting odds for once per experiment bet are 1:1", because if you have any source of randomness yourself, you can actually get better odds (by ensuring that you'll "take the bet" more often when you have two chances at it). I see you actually posted a really nice analysis of the problem yourself in the link. It's fun that there's a distinction between an external source of randomness (where the results on Monday/Tuesday are dependent) and an internal source (where the results on Monday/Tuesday must be independent).

but that's a really artificial construction

It sure is. That's kind of the point, I left a comment in more depth elsewhere in the thread.

Even after reading ape's chain of articles, I find this reasoning very unconvincing. Beauty is asked, per awakening, how likely tails is. The obvious answer is 2/3, as Ape (and you) acknowledge through the betting odds. That it is possible to construe some weird betting scheme that restores the original coin toss likelihood is true, but entirely irrelevant, in my view, to the original though experiment; It just transforms it into a different (rather boring) thought experiment, namely: "you toss a coin. Some stuff happens on monday or tuesday but it doesn't matter. It's wednesday now, how likely was the coin to come up heads?". The scheme is deliberately designed so that your awakening doesn't matter anymore, the only thing that matters is that after the summations are applied on wednesday you have to arrive at the original coin toss likelihood. You can of course also construe many betting scheme for various odds once you allow for weighed summation. We can get p=1 by only summing over tuesday, for example. We can also do even more degenerate shenanigans, like explicitly summing only if the coin toss was heads, so the correct bet would become p=0. The original question was still, however, per awakening.

The technicolor problem doesn't change this, either (though I agree it's interesting, so still thanks for the link!).

The scheme is deliberately designed so that your awakening doesn't matter anymore

That is rather the point, yeah. The goal is to show that the probabilities you use to guide your decision should be based on how that decision will be used.

Let's say Sleeping Beauty is actually a mind upload, and if the coin comes up heads I will run two copies of her and only use her answer if the two copies match (but the hardware is very good and the two copies will match 99.999% of the time), and if the coin comes up tails I will only run one copy. Halfer or thirder?

How about if, in the heads case, instead of running two independent copies of her entire mind, I run two independent copies of each neuron's computations, and at each step, if there's a mismatch, I run a third copy as a tiebreaker (but mismatches are incredibly rare). Halfer or thirder?

Actually it turns out I'm just using a less efficient algorithm if the coin came up heads which happens to use twice as much compute. Halfer or thirder?

I'm not totally sure it is correct. I understand what the piece is saying: basically, at time of waking, you know you're in one of three possible wakings, and in only one of those wakings would the coin have come up heads. Therefore, the chance the coin came up heads is 1/3.

But let's look at this from a different perspective. Before the experiment, the researchers ask you what the probability of the coin coming up heads is. What's the answer? 50%, obviously. So what if they ask you after waking you up what the probability of the coin coming up heads was? It's still 50%, isn't it? There's only one question they can ask you that would return 1/3, and it is: what is the average expected proportion of wakings to happen when the coin has come up heads? But that's not quite the same question as "what is the probability the coin was tails?"

I think the question, in itself, basically comes down to: do you count getting a correct answer twice "more valuable" than getting it once?

To illuminate. Imagine you pre-commit to guessing heads. If you get heads, that's one correct answer. If you get tails, that's zero. If you pre-commit to tails, and get tails, you get two correct answers. If you get heads, you still only get zero. This differential, between one and two answers, is exactly the phenomenon being referred to. But at the end of the experiment, when you wake up for good and get your debriefing, the chance that you got ANY right answers at all is still 50-50.

This problem strongly reminds me of the Monty Hall problem, where of course the key insight is that the ordering matters and that eliminating possibilities skews the odds off of 50%. This, I feel, is something of the opposite. The reality of the hypothetical is that, once the coin is flipped, the subsequent direction of the experiment is determined and cannot be moved away from that 50-50 chance. The only thing that changes is our accounting.

If Sleeping Beauty is told before the experiment that she's going to get cash for each correct answer she gives, heads or tails, on waking up, then she should always precommit to tails, because the EV is 2x on tails over heads. If she is told that she's going to get cash ONLY if she correctly answers on the last waking, then it doesn't matter what she picks, her odds of a payday are equal. The thought experiment, as written, really wants us to assume that it's the first case, but doesn't say it outright. It actually matters a LOT whether it is the first case or the second case. To quote:

When you are first awakened, to what degree ought you believe that the outcome of the coin toss is Heads?

What, precisely, does it mean to believe? Does it mean "optimize for total number of correct answers given to the experimenter?" That's a strange use of "belief" that doesn't seem to hold anywhere else. Or does it mean what you think is actually true? And if so, what is actually true in this scenario?

In other words: garbage in, garbage out applies to word problems too. Sorry, mathematicians.

(I finished looking through the Wikipedia article after the fact, and found that this is effectively their "Ambiguous-question position." But I searched the Wikipedia history page and this section was absent in 2022, when Tanya wrote her piece, and so she can be forgiven for missing it.)

Believe me, Tanya does not think she just "missed" the ambiguous phrasing of the problem. What the problem is asking is quite clear - you will not get a different answer from different mathematicians based on their reading of it. The defense that it's "ambiguous" is how people try to retrofit the fact that their bad intuition of "what probability is" - which you've done a pretty good job of describing - somehow gets the wrong answer.

Do you count getting a correct answer twice "more valuable" than getting it once?

Um, yes? The field of probability arose because Pascal was trying to analyze gambling, where you want to be correct more often in an unpredictable situation. If you're in a situation where you will observe heads 1/3 of the time, either you say the probability is 1/3, or you're wrong. If I roll a die and you keep betting 50-50 odds on whether it's a 6, you don't get a pity refund because you were at least correct once, and we shouldn't say that's "less valuable" than the other five times...

If she is told that she's going to get cash ONLY if she correctly answers on the last waking, then it doesn't matter what she picks, her odds of a payday are equal.

Nothing in the problem says that only the last waking counts. But yes, if you add something to the problem that was never there, then the answer changes too.

This problem strongly reminds me of the Monty Hall problem, where of course the key insight is that the ordering matters and that eliminating possibilities skews the odds off of 50%.

Actually, the key insight of the Monty Hall problem is that the host knows which door the prize is behind. Ironically, unlike Sleeping Beauty, the usual way the Monty Hall problem is stated is actually ambiguous, because it's usually left implicit that the host could never open the prize door accidentally.

Indeed, in the "ignorant host" case, it's actually analogous to the Sleeping Beauty problem. Out of the 6 equal-probability possibilities (your choice of door) x (host's choice of door), seeing no prize behind the host's door gives you information that restricts you to four of the possibilities. You should only switch in two of them, so the odds are indeed 50/50.

Similarly, in the Sleeping Beauty problem, there are 4 equal-probability possibilities (Monday/Tuesday) x (heads/tails), and you waking up gives you information that restricts you to three of them.

Do you count getting a correct answer twice "more valuable" than getting it once?

Um, yes? The field of probability arose because Pascal was trying to analyze gambling, where you want to be correct more often in an unpredictable situation. If you're in a situation where you will observe heads 1/3 of the time, either you say the probability is 1/3, or you're wrong.

This is asking a subtly different question. Here, you're asking, "When woken, you will be told, I am going to create an observable by showing you the result of the coin flip. What do you think an appropriate probability for that observable is?"

That is, you have taken one random variable, X, describing the nature of the coin flip, itself, and applied a transformation to get a different observable, Y, describing the random variable that you may see when awoken. This Y has X in it, but it also has the day and whether you're awake in it.

It is not clear to me that the original problem statement clearly identifies which observable we're asking about or betting on.

If the problem statement unambiguously stated, "What is your probability for Y, the coin I am about to show you?" then indeed, you should be a thirder. Forms of the question like what are listed in the Wiki presentation of the 'canonical form', "What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?" are far more linguistically ambiguous as to whether we are asking about X or Y. "Landed" is past-tense, which to me indicates that it's simply asking about the thing that happened in the past, which is observable X, rather than the thing that is about to happen in the future, which is observable Y. There's nothing meaningful in there about payoffs or number of answers or anything.

Next, I'd like to join criticism of both the "number of answers" explanation and:

you waking up gives you information that restricts you to three of them.

I think these are both flawed explanations, and I'll use one example alternative to explain.

Suppose you go to a casino. They say that either they have already flipped a coin or will flip a coin after you place a bet (I don't think it matters; you can't see it either way until after you bet). If the coin is heads, your bet will be simply resolved, but if the coin is tails, your bet will be taken as two identical bets. One can obviously compute the probabilities, the utilities, and calculate a correct wager, which would be the thirder wager. But in this case, everyone understands that they are not actually wagering directly on X, the direct probability of the coin flip. Nor are they making multiple separate "answers"; they are giving one answer, pre-computed at the beginning and simply queried in a static fashion. Likewise in the Sleeping Beauty problem; one is giving a single pre-computed answer that is just queried a different number of times depending.

It is also clear from this that there is no additional information from waking up or anything happening in the casino. You had all of the information needed at the initial time, about the Sleeping Beauty experimental set-up or about the structure of the casino's wager, when you pre-computed your one answer that would later be queried.

You just have to be very clear as to whether you're asking about X or Y, or what the actual structure of the casino game is for you to compute a utility. One you have that, it is, indeed, obvious. But I think your current explanations about number of answers or additional information from waking are flawed and that the 'canonical' language is more ambiguous.

"Landed" is past-tense, which to me indicates that it's simply asking about the thing that happened in the past, which is observable X, rather than the thing that is about to happen in the future, which is observable Y.

This is the core thing you're getting wrong. You can learn things about past events that change your probability estimates!

If I roll a die and then tell you it was even, and then ask "what's the probability I rolled a 2?" - or, to use the unnaturally elaborate phrasing from the Wikipedia article, "what is your credence now for the proposition that I rolled a 2?" - do you answer 1/6? If your answer is "yes", then you're just abusing language to make describing math harder. It doesn't change the underlying math, it only means you're ignoring the one useful and relevant question that captures the current state of your knowledge.

Maybe you're the kind of guy who answers "if I have 2 apples and I take your 2 apples, how many do I have?" with "2 apples, because those others are still mine."

Your casino example is correct, but there's no analogue there to the scenario Sleeping Beauty finds herself in. If you'd like to fix it, imagine that you're one of two possible bettors (who can't see each other), and if the coin flip is heads then only one bettor (chosen at random) will be asked to bet. If it's tails, both will be. Now, when you're asked to bet, you're in Sleeping Beauty's situation, with the same partial knowledge of a past event.

Are you estimating observable X or observable Y? Just state this outright.

You can learn things about past events that change your probability estimates!

Are you learning something about observable X? Or are you simply providing a proper estimator for observable Y? I notice that you have now dropped any talk of "number of answers", which would have had, uh, implications here.

If I roll a die and then tell you it was even

Obviously, there are ways to gain information about an observable. In this case, we can clearly state that we are talking about P(X|I), where I is the information from you telling me. Be serious. Tell me if you think we're saying something about X or Y.

No one has told you anything, no information has been acquired, when your pre-computed policy is queried. Where are you getting the information from? It's coming entirely from the pre-defined problem set-up, which went into your pre-computation, just like in my casino example.

Your casino example is correct, but there's no analogue there to the scenario Sleeping Beauty finds herself in.

Stated without any justification.

If you'd like to fix it, imagine that you're one of two possible bettors (who can't see each other), and if the coin flip is heads then only one bettor (chosen at random) will be asked to bet. If it's tails, both will be. Now, when you're asked to bet, you're in Sleeping Beauty's situation, with the same partial knowledge of a past event.

I will say that this is not analogous with the same justification you gave for mine.

Are you estimating observable X or observable Y? Just state this outright.

Observable Y. Satisfied? It should be obvious that, when you're asking Sleeping Beauty for a probability estimate, it's about her current state of knowledge. Which has updated (excluding the Tuesday/heads case) by awaking. We don't normally go around asking people "hey, for no reason, forget what you know now, what was your probability estimate on last Thursday that it would rain last Friday?" What's the practical use of that?

I notice that you have now dropped any talk of "number of answers", which would have had, uh, implications here.

"number of answers" was @kky's language, not mine. Anyway, are you trying to accuse me of playing language games here? I'm not. This isn't a clever trick question, and this certainly isn't a political question with both sides to it. There's a right answer (which is why the Wikipedia article is so frustrating). If I'm accidentally using unclear language, then it's my failure and I will try to do better. But it doesn't make your nitpicking valid. After all, if you were really honest about your criticisms, you could easily just rephrase the problem in a way that YOU think is clearly asking about your "observable Y". EDIT: Sorry, upon rereading I see you did do that. Your statement of the problem is fine too.

Stated without any justification.

Uh... I need to spell out the obvious? There's nobody in your scenario that has 2/3 confidence that the coin flip was tails. Whereas, in mine, there is. Monday/Tuesday are analogous to bettor 1/bettor 2. If you're throwing out terms like "random variable" but you need me to walk you through this, then I'm sadly starting to suspect you're just trolling me.

More comments

Maybe you're the kind of guy who answers "if I have 2 apples and I take your 2 apples, how many do I have?" with "2 apples, because those others are still mine."

The person answering is supposed to pull a gun when they answer.

Similarly, in the Sleeping Beauty problem, there are 4 equal-probability possibilities (Monday/Tuesday) x (heads/tails), and you waking up gives you information that restricts you to three of them.

This is just not true. Waking up doesn't give you any information, because you already know that you will wake up. You are 100% expecting to wake up.

In other words, given this scenario, Sleeping Beauty should pre-commit to the coin landing on tails with a 2/3 probability when she's asked about it. There's nothing that happens at the point of waking that changes the information she has. But this is intuitively incorrect, because a fair coin has a 1/2 probability of landing on tails, so it doesn't make sense to commit to a wrong answer. This is because 'probability' here is being used in two different ways - in the first, about our estimation about how the world actually is or was in the past, and in the second on a physical outcome in the future that can go different ways. That's why we're getting confused.

Ultimately the thirder position is analogous to the anthropic principle, and I think the problem is better conceived of like this:

Imagine there's a computer program running on a server, and after a fair coin flip, if the coin is heads, the program continues as normal, but if the coin is tails, the program is copied and now two identical programs are running. Knowing only that the coin flip has occurred and nothing else, what probability should the program give to the coin having landed on heads?

This gets rid of all the sleeping and memory erasing that just confuses the issue. The only question is, does the anthropic principle hold?

Waking up doesn't give you any information, because you already know that you will wake up. You are 100% expecting to wake up.

You're 100% likely to wake up with heads, and 200% likely to wake up with tails, and this makes a difference to the result.

This is just not true. Waking up doesn't give you any information, because you already know that you will wake up. You are 100% expecting to wake up.

You are not expecting to wake up on Tuesday if the coin is heads. If it clears your confusion, imagine that instead you always wake up, but at 8:00 am a researcher will come in and give you a lollipop if (and only if) it's Tuesday and the coin was heads. Mathematically, it is exactly the same scenario, only without the "sleeping through the experiment" part that seems to be throwing you. At 7:59 am you have 50% confidence that the coin was tails. At 8:01 am you have either 66% confidence that the coin was tails, or 100% confidence that the coin was heads. You have been given partial information.

This is because 'probability' here is being used in two different ways - in the first, about our estimation about how the world actually is or was in the past, and in the second on a physical outcome in the future that can go different ways.

You're using the passive "is being used" here, but you're the one making this mistake. (Note that probabilities can differ, even for the same event, based on knowledge.) Sleeping Beauty is just asked "was the flip tails?" Not something silly like "do we live in a world where coin flips are fair?"

(BTW, your computer program/anthropic example is fine, and I've seen scripts to do it. Of course the answer you get is 2/3.)

If you get a lollipop on Tuesday then you get new information, but the whole premise of the thought experiment is that you don't have any way to distinguish the days, so there's no new information gained. And because of the magical memory erasure that applies to both days.

Either way, I think you're basically right that it should by 2/3, but I don't think it's a paradox or even particularly interesting when properly formulated. The anthropic principle version makes the correct answer instinctual as well as mathematically correct. The Sleeping Beauty version simply uses poor formulation and equivocates on the meaning of probability to make it seem paradoxical, which is why I line up more with the Ambiguous-question position.

Either way, I think you're basically right that it should by 2/3, but I don't think it's a paradox or even particularly interesting when properly formulated.

Absolutely! This is what I'm trying to get across. Unfortunately, Wikipedia does NOT present the problem this way: "an easy probability question that some people misinterpret."

I suppose, like the Monty Hall problem, it would be more intuitive if you phrase it something like this:

You start with a bankroll of $1000. I'm going to put you to sleep and spin a fair roulette wheel out of your sight. Afterwards, I'll wake you up at least once and ask you to bet $1 on one of the numbers. If the number that the roulette rolled was zero, I will erase your memory and wake you up again with the same offer 999 more times (you do not see the changes in your bankroll until the end of the experiment). What number should you bet on? Or in other words, how confident you are that the number is zero?

BTW, you can also just have people play the iterated version. After a few iterations your state of knowledge approaches Sleeping Beauty's, only without that tricky-to-arrange memory erasure.

Or maybe just keep the coin flip but use 1000 wakings instead? I do love expressing things this way, but I've found that (unlike Monty Hall) people will still continue to get the Sleeping Beauty problem wrong even afterwards. The issue here is that they know they should bet based on the 2/3 odds, they just think that the concept of "probability" they have in their heads is some ineffable philosophical concept that goes beyond measuring odds.

The issue here is that they know they should bet based on the 2/3 odds, they just think that the concept of "probability" they have in their heads is some ineffable philosophical concept that goes beyond measuring odds.

I'm surely outing myself as a mathlet here, but perhaps you have the energy to explain where I err. I fully accept that if you are forced to put 10 dollars on a bet as to whether the coin was heads or tails every time you are awakened, then betting tails every time is the best strategy, in that it will pay out the most in the long-run.

Where I draw issue is equating this with "belief". If this experiment was going to be run on me right now, I would precommit to the tails-every-time betting strategy, but I would know the coin has 50-50 odds, and waking would not change that. To me, it seems the optimal betting strategy is separate from belief. Because in deciding it is the correct move to bet tails every time, I don't sincerely believe the coin will come up tails every time, I've merely decided this is the best betting strategy. I see no real connection between betting strategy and genuine belief.

Now where it is odd to me is that if you repeated the experiment on me 100 times, where 50 runs would be heads and 50 runs would be tails, then asked me while I was awoken what the odds I truly believe are, I would have no problem saying I think there is a 2/3 chance that I am in a tails experiment vs in a heads experiment. Why should one single experiment feel different and change that? I'm not entirely sure.

Hmm, there may be some misunderstanding about the term "belief" here (or "credence" from Wikipedia, or "confidence", all of which can kind of be used interchangeably)? You don't "believe" that the coin was tails (or heads). After awakening, what you believe is that there's a 2/3 chance that it was tails. Which, as you said, matches with your observations if you repeat the experiment 100 times, indicating that your belief is well-calibrated.

Wouldn't you have the same issue with "belief" without the whole experiment setup, if I just flipped a coin behind my back? Isn't it reasonable to say that you "believe" the coin has a 50-50 chance of being heads, if you can't see it?

Rationalists like to make probabilistic predictions for events all the time (which I sure hope reflects what they "believe"). If you read astralcodexten, he'll often post predictions with probabilities attached, and he considers his beliefs well-matched with the real world not by getting everything right, but by getting 9/10 of the 90% predictions right, 8/10 of the 80% predictions right, etc.

Nothing in the problem says that only the last waking counts. But yes, if you add something to the problem that was never there, then the answer changes too.

Nothing in the problem says that each waking counts independently, either. That's the problem. Why do you think that the wakings should count independently? What in the problem makes that explicit and incontrovertible?

I gave you a clear description of what a totally unambiguous version of the problem was, so I think I've made my case pretty well. Could you, in turn, explain your definition of the word "believe"? I note that this is the part that you assiduously avoided quoting, which to me indicates that you don't really have a leg to stand on here. The way that probability works, yup, I'm convinced on that count. But the way language works? I think you, Tanya, and the initial author are making some pretty wild assumptions on the ownership of mathematicians over language. But the fact of the matter is, if this original fellow wrote something retarded and ambiguous, that's on him, that's not on the rest of humanity - just like the schoolteacher who writes a dumb and vague word problem on a test and punishes the student who misinterprets it.

You can see both phrasings in the Wikipedia article. No mathematician would get a different answer to either of them. I suppose if you define "ambiguous" as "somebody ignorant could misread this", then ... sure? That's not a useful definition of "ambiguous" though. The solution there is to correct the misreading, which I hope someday will finally - finally! - percolate through the rationalist community, at the very least.

Before the experiment, the researchers ask you what the probability of the coin coming up heads is. What's the answer? 50%, obviously. So what if they ask you after waking you up what the probability of the coin coming up heads was? It's still 50%, isn't it?

No, it isn't. Being woken up is evidence for tails. So if they ask you after waking you up, you have additional evidence that you did not have when they asked you before the experiment.

(And if your reply is "well, didn't you know in advance that you would be awoken?" the answer is that "being awake" and "knowing that you will be awake" don't provide the same evidence, because they are distributed among the outcomes differently.)

Note the phrasing:

what the probability of the coin coming up heads was?

Not:

what should I assume the coin came up as, if I were a betting man?

The former is a question about a reality that continues to exist outside of our personal observations. The latter is a description of assumptions you can make while biased under this or that frame that limit your observational abilities. These are different questions and have different answers. Again, as described, the gambling case makes the practical side of this very clear, but this shouldn't blind us to the absolute perspective.

As for why this matters: imagine that the researchers tell you what they flipped before you go to sleep the first time. This is the analogue to real-world scenarios, where there always is a driving factor of variance, but we rarely get a privileged peek behind the curtain as to what it is. Describing this or the other real world event as probabilistic is helpful primarily for placing ourselves within our own information-blind reality, but if you are able to get a real look at the coin, everything changes. That's why it's important to understand the odds, of course, but also to understand there's something behind them. If you at all aspire to a scientific understanding of your situation, you must not be thinking about the odds, you must be thinking about getting a look at that coin.

Well, ok, but you chose that ambiguous phrasing. The Wikipedia article has two different statements of the problem, neither of which is unclear. You have to be very careful with your wording (as you were) to make it a misleading question that sounds like it's asking about a result but is actually, uh, about a "reality that continues to exist".

Note the phrasing:

In that case I would agree that the problem is phrased ambiguously. The per experiment probability is 50% and the per-awakening probability is 1/3.

Relatedly, during the little tiff below (not trying to repeat it here, just a relevant experience), phailyoor and I had some back and forth about what date exactly was Fauci appointed director of NIAID. The source Grokipedia cited for the exact date only gave the year, and I couldn't find any sources that actually did give the exact date, and my suspicion was a hallucination. Finally, I landed on one: Wikipedia. And, despite my many misgivings about it, I do trust that to be accurate, and I'm guessing Grok just grabbed it from there.

Digging deeper, though, even Wikipedia doesn't seem to provide a source for that date. Where's it coming from? I pull up an LLM--ChatGPT, not Grok--and it's able to pinpoint the PDF of the official press release where the date is coming from. Which, as it turns out, is linked on the Wikipedia article, but buried in a distant unrelated citation that I wouldn't have been able to find otherwise.

My takeaway is pretty close to yours, but models are rapidly improving. That's not something that could have been done a year ago.

(I'd update the Wiki page's date with the source, but the page is currently locked.)

The main thing that is improving them is agentic AI - i.e., they can now actually do web searches and other external reference lookups, rather than just making up whatever isn't in their training data.

That's slightly unfair - they've also done things like tweak fine tuning and post training so that ambiguity isn't penalized so much, and also there's some smaller advancements with the mathematical underpinnings regarding what to do in certain "low-confidence" scenarios, for lack of a better concise descriptor. That means that even some no-tool-use models are also moderately better at hallucination resistance, though it's obviously very far from a solved problem (the most obvious confabulations however usually aren't happening anymore, unless you're a shit model like Grok prioritizing different things like Grok)

for.... most things that aren't heavily politicized

Or not in English which may have a much higher rate of outright encyclopedia-formatted fiction.

Arab wikipedia is fucking WILD. Though supposedly the top contender is Serbian wikipedia for ultranationalist eevisionism.

Having said that I personally found Rationalwiki to be continuously teetering on the edge of progressive fracturing, like it was the wikipedia equivalent of the the Judean Peoples Front. Fighting an internal battle for legitimacy among warring progressives and deeply despising lesswrong turbotards. One day I'll actually go investigate what actually happened with lesswrong or whatever that made tracingwoodgrain persona non grata here.

Wait did I just beetlejuice something? Why am I suddenly filled with immense fear that I have summoned candlej-

I never heard about trace getting banned from lesswrong. Interested, tell me more

Im just being facetiously churlish toward one of the more prominent Names in this antiprogressive wonkspace, I'm not autistically invested enough to either remember or trawl through the deep lore. All I remember is something about Tracingwoodgrain starting an anti-motte subreddit back before this forum self exiled fully and that subreddit had really some great posts interspersed with really intense egotripping personal drama that sometimes bled out to this refuge here. I don't know the specifics of why I mentally flag rationalwiki drama as adjacent but my gut says it is and I updoot my own gut over faggy shit like "research" or "diligence".

starting an anti-motte subreddit back before this forum self exiled fully

He got mad about certain rude and catastrophic language being used and not pushed back against enough, particularly during/around the Kenosha self-defense event as the breaking point IIRC. It wasn't exactly anti-Motte as it was... more pointedly opinionated than the Motte, but early on it did attract people wanting to complain about the Motte, for a little while.

that subreddit had really some great posts interspersed with really intense egotripping personal drama that sometimes bled out to this refuge here

TheSchism still exists! Sort of. Quietly. And it was composed mostly of (ex-?) Mottezans so yes it did bleed back over on occassion.

I mentally flag rationalwiki drama as adjacent

Our dear T-dubs wrote a long piece about David Gerard, who was a prominent editor of regular Wikipedia and sysadmin of Rationalwiki.

Possibly some other rationalwiki and drama connections along the way?

wasn't exactly anti-Motte

Eh... the name he picked has implications. Also, even when he was posting here, he was trying to scoop people away towards his hangouts. I've also see an exchange between him and gattsuru, where he used gattsuru's tolerance of the Motte as a mark against his character.

I may be a little overly defensive of that quiet little place, but I hardly associate it with Trace even if he started it. He and his cofounder more or less abandoned The Schism for an extended period after the launch, so I wouldn't necessarily call it one of his hangouts even though he did recruit occasionally. He spent much more time on Twitter and Substack, though now he's put both on hiatus.

He did get quite embittered about this place, and those exchanges were... disappointing.

So it goes.

I'm not invested enough to figure it out either but I just hope a farmer makes a thread on it and collects everything in a nice and easy to read summary so I can enjoy.

I mean to be fair, even a metapedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be basically factual information, because factually accurate biographies of historical figures is a solved problem. Maybe it'll have some section about judeo-masonic links with citations from an Islamic apologist but it'll be more factual than an AI summary.

AI likes to just make shit up randomly.

My rule of thumb with Wikipedia is:

Anything well-known (in the community of Wikipedia editors) and uncontroversial (in the community of etc.) is likely to be reliable. Look up, say, Maxwell's equations and you will find detailed and reliable information.

Anything well-known and controversial is going to be well-sourced but unreliable, likely in the direction of the preponderance of sources used by Wikipedia, which tend to be heavily biased not only towards left-wing sources, but also towards free sources on the internet. Wikipedia prohibits 'original research' which means that it will tend to uncritically repeat the syntheses found in supposedly reliable sources. So, for instance, Wikipedia's page on the January 6 riots is going to be a very well-sourced summary of the 'orthodox' liberal line.

Anything not well-known, regardless of controversy, is usually going to be the playground of whoever cares enough to write the article, which may be just one or two people. This used to be seen much more widely, but today it's easiest to find this when looking for articles on non-Western history, culture, or art. An article on an obscure non-Western monarch, for instance, may well be written and edited only by a single enthusiast from that monarch's own culture. One example of this at the moment might be the article on King Zhou of Shang, which includes a long excursion, footnoted exclusively to Chinese sources, dedicated to arguing that Zhou is the victim of a historical hit job and was not really that bad. This reads like the work of a single devoted Chinese editor, which remains on Wikipedia mainly because very few editors of English Wikipedia know or care about King Zhou.

In general Wikipedia will give you a summary of the consensus view of Western popular academia (that sounds like a contradiction, but I trust you know what I mean), with a moderate liberal bias. On subjects that are not heavily politicised, this is pretty decent. On subjects that are not subject to significant academic controversy, or which aren't extremely technical, this is also often decent. But on other subjects Wikipedia can range from actively misleading to outright spreading falsehoods.

On a related note, we once had a bit of a discussion about Wikipedia articles on the Hajnal Line and Hajnal himself, which showed evidence of blatant leftist bias and propaganda. I just revisited it and it seems to have been partially rolled back. Maybe the world is indeed healing.

I was annoyed at Wikipedia yesterday for how it covers Fauci's role in the 1980s HIV epidemic. Basically, it just jumps straight to he is the bestest smartest scientist ever, and even everyone who hated him then loves him now, without ever really covering anything he actually did during the 1980s HIV epidemic. His role then was hardly some obscure thing only a specialist historian would know, and Wikipedia doesn't even mention "parallel track" or ACT-UP or AZT or Congressional funding bills. Or, really, a single substantive thing. (All the 2020s commentary on how great he is is diligently cited from approved sources, of course.) Note that I think he did a good job during it and a lot of substantive things, and his performance then is a credit to him and NIAID.

Looking at that section of his page on Grokipedia (terrible name), it's much better; nothing jumps out to me as wildly inaccurate, though before believing anything in it I'd always verify, at least for now. Less biased, yes, but fundamentally it's just far more informative. I can deal with bias, but at least give me the facts. And Grokipedia gives me at least a facsimile of the facts, while the Wikipedia article's section is something you'd get from someone who knew nothing about the topic but really really wanted to make sure the chuds were getting owned.

(I'd also note that I went through this exercise with ChatGPT 5 Thinking yesterday, and it does better than both.)

it's much better; nothing jumps out to me as wildly inaccurate,

It's shit. It's absolute fairytale nonsense and your gell-mann amnesia just had you defend an absolute turd. Why is it that just because it has a "neutral" or "unbiased" tone do you feel that there is even a sliver of credibility in the slop that you just read?

Fauci shifted focus to studying the immunopathogenesis of HIV, elucidating how the virus depleted CD4 T cells and led to opportunistic infections.

Wrong.

overseeing an expanding portfolio

Wrong

with over 15,000 reported AIDS cases and more than 8,000 deaths in the U.S. by mid-1985

Wrong. Source says by September

ACT UP, who protested NIH policies for bureaucratic delays in drug testing and exclusion of patients from trials.

Wrong.

In December 1988, activists stormed NIH buildings, targeting Fauci personally and chanting slogans accusing him of complicity in deaths due to slow approvals.

Wrong. Like seriously lala land wrong.

contributing to the identification of HIV as the causative agent in 1984

Wrong.

reduced U.S. AIDS deaths from 50,000 in 1995 to under 20,000 by 1997

Wrong.

He was appointed director of NIAID on November 2, 1984

Wrong.

Are you objecting to the date here, or some phrasing? The source cited gives 1984, and at least Wikipedia also gives November 2, 1984.

overseeing an expanding portfolio

Wrong

I don't really see how this is objectionable, though it would be nice for Grokipedia to list exactly what the expanded portfolio was. Or do you think NIAID kept a strictly static portfolio of projects during the HIV crisis?

with over 15,000 reported AIDS cases and more than 8,000 deaths in the U.S. by mid-1985

Wrong. Source says by September

Damnable.

ACT UP, who protested NIH policies for bureaucratic delays in drug testing and exclusion of patients from trials.

Wrong.

What exactly is your objection here?

In December 1988, activists stormed NIH buildings, targeting Fauci personally and chanting slogans accusing him of complicity in deaths due to slow approvals.

Wrong. Like seriously lala land wrong.

Grok got the date wrong --it was May 21, 1990--but I'm not sure why exactly you think that's lala land wrong. From https://www.actuporalhistory.org/actions/storm-the-nih :

On May 21, 1990, over 1,000 protestors stormed the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD to demand that the NIH accelerate the pace of AIDS research, include AIDS activists and community members in the committees that oversaw AIDS research, to broaden its investigations beyond repetitive research on AZT and to include research on the diseases that affected Women and People of Color with AIDS.

Or are you making some tenuous claim that they just stormed the campus, not the buildings?

All that said, still far ahead of Wikipedia.

Are you objecting to the date here, or some phrasing? The source cited gives 1984, and at least Wikipedia also gives November 2, 1984.

Actually the date is correct, but zero of the cited sources mention the date. My bad. Yet Grok is already proven to fuck up dates in general.

I don't really see how this is objectionable, though it would be nice for Grokipedia to list exactly what the expanded portfolio was. Or do you think NIAID kept a strictly static portfolio of projects during the HIV crisis?

Actually it shrunk and became more focused on critical diseases such as aids /s

Damnable.

Yes, quite.

What exactly is your objection here?

They literally just...didn't...

Grok got the date wrong --it was May 21, 1990--but I'm not sure why exactly you think that's lala land wrong.

In December 1988,

Wrong date.

activists stormed NIH buildings,

Wrong. You admit yourself they just stormed the campus, not the buildings

targeting Fauci personally

Wrong. They targeted many people.

chanting slogans accusing him of complicity in deaths due to slow approvals.

Wrong. Those slogans never happened.

Responding to demands [--it was May 21, 1990--], Fauci advocated for the parallel track mechanism in 1989

Wow, if the date is wrong, then this is also wrong. How interesting...

targeting Fauci personally

Wrong. They targeted many people.

https://digitaleditions.walsworth.com/publication/?i=424950&article_id=2835575&view=articleBrowser

Fuck you, Fauci

Or, an image from the protest, featuring a banner targeting Fauci over a coffin, as well as a bloody decapitated head identified as Fauci:

Fauci Resign Now, Release Compound 0

I feel like here we're quibbling about subjective things: I'll say I'd feel personally targeted by these protestors, you'd say they were just symbolic attacks against the NIH as an institution. But is Grokipedia wildly off base here? No: although there's subjectivity involved, many people would feel like these are personal attacks. YMMV.

And, at core, I'm not sure we actually disagree that much on how much to trust Grokipedia. I was very careful in my first comment to say that I would always verify whatever Grokipedia says. My core point was that Grokipedia attempts, semi successfully, to represent what Fauci did during the 1980s. Wikipedia, by comparison, does not. We're not carefully parsing over exactly how Wikipedia characterizes Fauci's relationship with ACT-UP and cites its sources about that, because Wikipedia doesn't even mention ACT-UP. So, at least for this particular section of this particular topic, Grokipedia offers value over Wikipedia, though an actual history book would be superior to both.

And, at core, I'm not sure we actually disagree that much on how much to trust Grokipedia. ... My core point was that Grokipedia attempts, semi successfully, to represent what Fauci did during the 1980s. Wikipedia, by comparison, does not.

Ok rather than quibble over the details, I do also believe that the slop is trash and shit even at an overall idea level. The errors fundamentally change the meaning of the article even at a high level.

Consider just the error about the date of the protest - the AI creates an entire fictitious story arc:

  1. Pre-1988, Fauci was the big bad, related to delays and exclusions from trials (which didn't happen btw)
  2. In 1988, the protestors stormed the place targeting Fauci and accused him of being complicit in deaths.
  3. Fauci cucks to the protestors and gives them what they want, such as the "parallel track"
  4. Fauci becomes a big good in the eyes of the activists, putting them on committees, and being collaborative instead of confrontational.

This entire story arc is just plain wrong. The entire thing. There's no point in fact checking individual details, because the entire overall idea of the narrative is just made up.

The narrative here is more or less correct, though you're framing it in a pretty warped way. ACT-UP had a very hostile relationship with the NIH (and FDA). Their primary motivation was, in fact, to get drugs approved faster and to allow people to receive drugs even when enrolled in trials. From their list of demands from their first mass demonstration:

  1. Immediate release by the Federal Food & Drug Administration of drugs that might help save our lives.
  2. Immediate abolishment of cruel double-blind studies wherein some get the new drugs and some don't.

That is, they were literally demand number one and demand number two, ahead of things like public education campaigns and anti-discrimination laws.

The NIH, of which Fauci was the point person on AIDs, did initially oppose these things, partially from scientific principle, partially bureaucratic inertia. This extended from a period starting from the formation of ACT-UP through the end of the 80s.

Fauci had a surprisingly warm relationship with at least some ACT-UP leadership, and he was one of the people in the NIH eventually pushing for their goals (such as the parallel track), but publicly he was, in fact, the big bad, and the rhetoric around his role was extremely heated, including being complicit in their deaths.

Grokipedia gets this core narrative correct, while Wikipedia... Doesn't say anything at all about it.

People consistently underestimate Musk. In particular his ability to pick a niche with apparent incumbents, say «that could be done better», bulldoze through cringe and come out on the other side with a product that redefines and expands the market. Sometimes he fails and abandons the effort. I think this could happen here, too. But not necessarily, nor even likely. He wants to do to Wikipedia what he did to Roskosmos and other legacy launch providers. He has emotional stake in this, he has the resources and allies for this, and he has the flow of Grok interactions on X to lean on. He can make it work.

There will be a Grok 5, and Grok 6, and they'll be vastly more powerful, not just as modern-day LLMs, they'll have continuous learning and strong multimodality. The main feature you need for good article generation is aggregating tens to hundreds of data points and deeply processing it, meaning context in the millions of tokens and probably weight updates or something functionally close; Grok will be there. Layout, flow etc. are easily solved if you apply work to it, it's trivial compared to general coding and we've come very far with coding LLMs (people who say they're terrible lack the sense of perspective, 2 years ago they were ≈unusable). Even if currently many higher-quality pages are handcrafted, that'll be useful data.

Judge this thing by its strong points, not by its slop and cringe.

Compare:

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

https://grokipedia.com/page/George_Floyd

Compare:

George Floyd was born on October 14, 1973, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, as the eldest of five siblings to George Perry Floyd Sr. and Larcenia "Cissy" Jones Floyd.

I only had to read 2 paragraphs before finding the AI made up some completely retarded fairy tale nonsense for absolutely no fucking reason. This is complete slop. Between 10% and 45% of the sentences in the entire article are completely fabricated, and you think this article is worth reading at all?

What the hell do you think is good about it?

Floyd faced early personal difficulties, including truancy that led to dropping out of high school before obtaining his GED,

Yeah and Floyd also graduated top of his class in the Navy Seals, and has over 300 confirmed kills.

That's what you find noteworthy?

From Wikipedia:

Floyd was born on October 14, 1973,[12] in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to George Perry (1949–2002) and Larcenia "Cissy" Jones Floyd (1947–2018).[7][13] He had four siblings.

Starting college before any of his siblings [therefore presumably the eldest]

EDIT: Floyd was his mother's name not his father's, though. Took me a minute to spot that error. Understandable, but definitely not completely trustworthy.

He's also not the oldest sibling either. There are plenty of articles talking about Floyd's older siblings. So in fact this sentence half wrong. It got the place and date right, and everything else wrong.

But it just shows that the AI slop can't even get the most trivial basic uncontested facts right at all.

... Oh no, it's just conservapedia...

The best result for grokapedia (btw fuck musk for both ruining grokking as a verb and making his pet ai sound like a rejected flintstones villain) would be to pastebin wikipedia wholesale and add a regex replacer trained on conservapedia for semantic weights. All the (shit) factual accuracy with all the moral softframing purged and replaced with awesome Phyllis Schlafly schizoposting. It wont be any more accurate but it'll be way better than the captured wiki trannyjanny circlejerk.

Phyllis Schlafly

Sounds like a venereal disease...

So out of curiosity I opened Grokipedia up and searched the page for New York Yankees, a topic I know enough about to spot errors or omissions pretty well. It's...fine, but the verbiage is kind of off, and the editing is weird. The choice of which facts are important to fit into the article is distinctly odd. It inserts facts at random points, like this paragraph near the top:

On June 25, 2019, they set a new major league record for homering in 28 consecutive games, breaking the record set by the 2002 Texas Rangers. The streak would reach 31 games, during which they hit 57 home runs. With the walk-off solo home run by DJ LeMahieu to win the game against the Oakland Athletics on August 31, 2019, the Yankees ended the month of August that year now holding a new record of 74 home runs hit in the month alone, a new record for the most home runs hit in a month by a single MLB team.

Which is true, as far as I know, but not a record that anybody really cares about compared to about a million other things that the Yankees have done. It's a lot of text to cover a fairly obscure statistical record. While ignoring, within the "Distinctions" heading, a lot of more important Yankees accomplishments and records that a human would think of first like the streaks of winning seasons etc.

The whole piece steadfastly refuses to achieve any narrative flow at any point, never achieving a cohesive story structure. And it seems to lack the fundamental feature of Wikipedia: links between articles allowing me to learn more about a topic and dive down a Wikipedia hole, there is no Grokipedia hole unless I manually dig it.

On the other hand, the article structure and style is just copied from Wikipedia and slightly shuffled. Significant word for word sentences of the article seem to be directly pulled from Wikipedia, which was almost certainly within the training data used to make these articles, so actually what we seem to be dealing with here is better thought of as a fork than a competitor or alternative to Wikipedia. As human editing smooths out the rough edges of the AI, it'll get better over time. Though at that point, what is the use? It's mostly just Wikipedia copied.

I'll put a disclaimer here that I'm not someone with an Elon Musk hate-boner, but I do think that Elon is the fly in the ointment here. Grok has publicly done weird shit in the past, that was obviously the result of direct meddling, like the South African White Genocide fiasco. We know in advance that some articles are not going to be maximally accurate, but instead be designed by Elon to look the way Elon wants them to look. So you really can't trust Grokipedia, or Grok, without knowing Elon's Special Interests and where they might get you into trouble. I know there are going to be some articles on Grokipedia that will be edited in a certain way.

Which puts Grokipedia in basically the same category I use Grok for more generally: as an alternative source to double check on something I already looked up elsewhere, a sanity check for alternative views. Normally more prosaically, I punch a question into ChatGPT then punch the same question into Grok and see if they agree. Now we can do the same with Wikipedia. That's a useful enough thing.

I suspect for xAI, Grokipedia is actually more useful as an answer repository for simple questions asked to the chatbot that can be tied directly into the program more easily. The next non-American that asks "Who or what are the New York Yankees?" can be answered with a summary of the already-created Grokipedia article.

the page for New York Yankees, a topic I know enough about to spot errors or omissions pretty well. It's...fine,

Strangely, it seems that the New York Yankees article is essentially completely identical to the Wikipedia article. Like the entire thing. I'm not sure why Grok decided not to take a dump over the entire thing, which it does for so many other articles.

It inserts facts at random points, like this paragraph near the top

That paragraph is taken word-for-word from Wikipedia.

It's mostly just Wikipedia copied.

No some of the other articles, like the one I shared in OP, are completely and utterly turned into a shitfest.

Strangely, it seems that the New York Yankees article is essentially completely identical to the Wikipedia article. Like the entire thing.

It's not though. Look at the Wikipedia article, Wikipedia is 25 pages long, Grok is half that. It goes from the general overview at the top to a narrative history of the team. Where Grok jumps right to "distinctions" which it steals from Wikipedia but organizes differently. The paragraph is taken word for word from Wikipedia, but it uses it in prime real estate. If I look up the New York Yankees and want to learn about the team, I want to go through the team history, learn about Ruth and Dimaggio and Mantle and Jeter and Judge. It's a perfectly appropriate fact to include on page 14, as Wikipedia does, right before you get into the sections that are just lists of things. Grok puts it on page 2. This is an important editing decision! Organization is content.

"Who or what are the New York Yankees?" can be answered with a summary of the already-created Grokipedia article.

The chatbot can already answer that question so what's the point of the article that nobody will read?

I would guess it saves time and effort, especially when we know that Elon has put a target on keeping Grok ideologically in line with his specified views. It's probably easier to tell Grok to stick to privilege Grokipedia as a source, then edit Grokipedia or mess with the program producing it where necessary, than it is to actually figure out how to get Grok to toe the ideological line while pulling from largely ideologically opposed material.

Is it definitively established that Grok was pushing white genocide theories to everyone? I tried to get it to repeat the theory to me but I never got it. I strongly suspect journos were disingenuously framing grok for gotcha moments or just too stupid to realize they were seeding the ground for grok to parrot whatever the journos wanted. As always, journalist delenda est.

I would not say that Grok was "pushing" those theories, but an update to the system prompt caused it to turn any question it could into an evaluation of the question "is there white genocide happening in South Africa", usually iirc saying that there is significant and probably systemic violence but no evidence of meeting the threshold of genocide. Think Golden Gate Claude. It was extremely out-of-context for what Grok was supposed to be talking about, hence the widespread attention.

I can accept that were it not for my repeated failures to get grok to try and repeat the story or shades of it with any indirect prompt. I mean I really tried. I said things like "whats the crime situation in South Africa" and I got really anodyne crime stats about joburg and pretoria. I asked about white emigration and I got answers about the attractiveness of Australia and UK for afrikaners. At no point did I get a five alarm fire about the white farmer crimes.

I can accept that I maybe never got it due to some arcane blocks I may have put on my own metausage, but I don't think I was that smart or careless. I fundamentally think that it was a journo trying to gotcha, screaming "MUSK IS A NAZI TRYING TO MAKE WHITE PEOPLE VICTIMS" and then the story gets repeated across the journo sphere. Everyone assumed they weren't getting grok to repeat apartheid adjacent narratives and concluded the absence was proof of a coverup. Journalism 101

Was this back when it was happening? Because this issue only lasted for a day or two, back in May, and I don't know if it happened to the main Grok or just to the twitter reply version. It was really, really noticable.

I was using grok ALOT just to stress test it so yes I was doing it within 8 hours of news publications.

But you raise a good point about twitter reply. I never got that.

I still maintain I never got any white farmer murder stuff on grok itself. If its a twitter reply thing it invites speculation about recursive feedback loop.

I would not be at all surprised if Grok has a different system prompt for twitter replies than Grok itself, perhaps one edited to move with news cycles. I saw many white genocide non-sequiturs myself (and, again, not Grok pushing a particular narrative, but exploring and weighing up the question as if it had been asked) on Twitter, and, since I'm an Afrikaner, also lots sent by puzzled/amused friends, but nobody mentioned the off-Twitter Grok at the time.

The geographic setting might have been part of it. Could have also resulted in a snowball where one initial batch of highly forwarded "bro what the fuck is this" triggers an interest cascade and grok just starts inserting white farm murders to every african query on twitter because engagement farming is its reward mechanism.

That would also explain the hitler praising or whatever other bullshit Musk was accused of trainng grok to do which I also never saw. My absolute lack of social media (sans perhaps this forum) is once again saving me.

More comments

The final two paragraphs of your comment are close enough to some thoughts I've had swimming in my head for some time now. The real step-function in AI development will be something like a structured reasoning engine. Not a fact-checker. Just a 'thing' that can take the axioms and raw input data of an argument or even just a description and then build an auditable framework for how those inputs lead to a conclusion or output.

Using your Yankees example, this structured reasoning engine would read it, check that all of the basic quantitative numbers are valid, but then "reason" against a corpus of other baseball data to build out something like: Yankees hit lots of home runs in august --> home run hitting is good and important --> records are also important in baseball --> oh, we should highlight this home run record setting august for the yankees!.

You can see the flaw in that flow easily. The jump between "home runs and records are important" followed by the desperate need to "develop" a record which results in shoe-horning of significance to collective number of team home runs in a specific month. A prompt engineer could go back through the sequence and write in something like "annual home runs by single players are generally viewed as significant. Team level home runs are less important" or whatever opinion they have.

The "reasoning" engines that exist now aren't reasoning. They're just recursive loops of LLMs thinking about themselves. We've successfully created digital native neuroticism.

It's an interesting problem and balancing act. The power of LLMs is that their structure isn't exactly deterministic. Yet, we would love a way to create a kind of "synthetic determinism" via an auditable and repeatable structure. If we go to far in that direction, however, we're just getting back to traditional programming paradigms (functional, object oriented, whatever) and we lose all of the flexibility and non-deterministic benefits of LLMs. Look at some of the leaked system prompts. They're these 40,000 word markdown files with repetitive declarative sentences designed to make sure the LLM stays in its lane.

Using your Yankees example, this structured reasoning engine would read it, check that all of the basic quantitative numbers are valid, but then "reason" against a corpus of other baseball data to build out something like: Yankees hit lots of home runs in august --> home run hitting is good and important --> records are also important in baseball --> oh, we should highlight this home run record setting august for the yankees!.

What further AI development would avoid is including a record that no one really cares about in prime real estate within the article. That's a cool record, one that a color commentator brings up during the broadcast when watching the game, and afterward gets cited in a quick ESPN or fan-blog article, then totally forgotten until another team gets close to the record and they show the leaderboard during a game. It's not something fans care about on the day-to-day, no Bleacher Creature ever brags about the team holding the monthly Home Run Record.

I suspect the answer is more prosaic: the record setting August outburst was recent enough to be highlighted in one or more online articles, which Grok found while writing the article and included in the data. Where various great things that Dimaggio and Berra did aren't covered as heavily online. An old timer fan is much more likely to brag about Rivera's save record, Dimaggio's hit streak, Berra having a ring for every finger, Ruth being the GOAT, or Judge holding the "clean" HR record. Those would be things to cite in the article over the monthly HR record getting a paragraph.

It's the ability to reason your way to judgment, or wisdom, not knowledge.

What further AI development would avoid is including a record that no one really cares about in prime real estate within the article.

For something like this, I don't think any reasoning would be needed, or any significant developments in AI development. I don't see why simple reinforcement learning with human feedback wouldn't work. Just have a bunch of generated articles judged based on many factors of that go into how well written an encyclopedia entry is, including good use of prime real estate to provide information that'd actually be interesting to the typical person looking up the entry rather than throwaway trivia. Of course, this would have to be tested empirically, but I don't think we've seen indications that RLHF is incapable of compelling such behavior from an LLM.

Great take.

It's the ability to reason your way to judgment, or wisdom, not knowledge.

AI development is either going to be the Super Bowl for philosophers or their final leap into obscurity. Maybe both?


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If in doubt, please post it!


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