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In my experience the "tech right" and the rationalist Austin/SF crowd all thought they were smarter than MAGA and that MAGA was something they could outsmart, which means they get very angry when they don't actually get their way.
That description probably includes the culture that informs this discussion forum.
In this case, this entire subculture wants to dictate tech policy to the administration and not the other way around.
But the military is the man with guns and the tech crowd is the man quoting laws. They don't get to bid for government contracts and then try to curtail what the government can do with their systems. They can try to make it about bigger moral issues, but this is very much a case of what happens when a stoppable force meets an immovable object.
I can get Claude to write a letter to Dario begging him to change his mind, what exactly is your mental model of what these AIs are doing here?
This started when Anthropic asked whether their systems were used in the Maduro raid.
There are countries where the most successful military men call the shots. The term we use for these men is 'warlords', and an adjective which has been prominently used to describe such countries is 'shithole'.
MAGA won not through violence, in fact when they tried it they did not even come close to achieving any strategic objective, but though Trump getting more EC votes than Harris, that is to say, the law. And for all their insane stunts, Trump was not insane enough to order the Marines to seize Anthropic -- which is exactly what one would expect the man with the gun to do.
In the end, the US has checks and balances in place which prevent Trump from becoming a warlord (and turning the US into a shithole in the process, because these things go together). So Anthropic quoting the law and trusting that the man with the gun will be able to follow his own self-interest enough to not shoot them seems a winning strategy.
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No, the tech guys definitely are way smarter overall. It's just that smarts doesn't matter as much when one side has the guns and government.
Anthropic already had agreed on contracts! It's the government that wants to tear it up.
It was just for humor. If you describe what is happening then the default response built in is "wow that's pretty bad". Of course you could manipulate it all you want, just a funny observation.
Ah ok, it's woke because they were asking about how exactly it was deployed in the Maduro raid. That's what wokeness is, got it.
I know the tech guys and I know MAGA. The tech guys are way overestimating their intelligence or are applying success to domains where it doesn’t transfer. Otherwise you have to explain why the smart guys let the dumb guys get all the guns to order them around with.
Yeah performative empathy in ways that only surface for America’s enemies is about as good a definition as I could imagine for woke.
In a democracy with lots of dumb people in the electorate, that’s not all that hard to explain. The electorate needs to be good enough at gauging authenticity to pick aligned dumb people over misaligned smart people as their rulers. Actually, the electorate doesn’t even need to be dumb, they could just be angry enough that none of the smart ruler options share their values to just say fuck it.
This is smart people cope. The voters are too dumb to understand us, we’re too rational. I guess the smart people also too honest and pure to lie, which is how anyone with intelligence might solve that problem. And too poor to buy power anyways, even though they’re definitely smart enough to get money if only they weren’t so unlucky etc etc
It’s perfectly possible for dumb people to disagree about policy and to outnumber smart people. Also, since we are talking about the tech right here, the thing about money is very silly. Yes the smart people are very rich in this case.
The point I’m making is that “if you were really smart, you would have power” just is not true in general. Intelligence can help in getting power but it doesn’t always.
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