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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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This forum seems to be missing the biggest actual culture war battleground of the week: The US Hockey Gold Medal team.

For those who haven't heard, the US Men's Hockey Team won the gold medal over Canada, on an overtime goal by Jack Hughes. The team celebrated, the country celebrated, and everything was great, until it wasn't.

Kash Patel was part of the celebration, for some reason. Apparently he's a hockey fan, as I've read he was attending games when Ovechkin was nearing Gretzky's goal record. And then there was a call from Donald Trump to congratulate the team, where he made a joke ("I'll have to invite the women's team, too, or they'll impeach me.")

Of course, the usual suspects have come out of the woodwork to scold then men for being bros.

Jodi Walker called them losers.

The New York Times decided to praise the defector while shaming the victorious Americans.

Mary Clarke says that they failed to meet the cultural moment, and boy is she waging the culture war. Some highlights include reminding us that a black woman won a gold medal in hockey, bemoaning that the NHL is 44% Republican, decrying the hiring of someone accused of and found not guilty of sexual assault, implying his guilt.

Then, finally, she has the gall to say this:

That is what the lasting message of this hockey team should have been. Not laughing at jokes about their peers, not going mask off after the doors close, but a celebration of life, of joy and of a teammate that tragically passed away way too soon.

Well, Mary, you are responsible for writing the message of this team, and you are participating in making sure the message you dislike is the one that's getting spread.

For a reasonable take, I always go back to the characteristic machine:

this doesnt work because olympic athletes winning a gold medal for their country are, alike unto greek olympians of old, bedecked in sanctity and elevated above other men of their polis in their moment of triumph
not sure why @marycclarke cant see this as a sports writer

if theyd taken the opportunity to shit on the US that would have been another thing because they would have been fucking up the ritual! but they followed the old forms with aplomb and were imbued with the divine aura of champions
this is just basic civic ritual yk

And a quoted response

Haters always hate to see an mf in his aristeia. Always begrudging the requisite giving of kudos.

This really does cut to the core of it. There is a civic ritual, which we can all participate in. Civic in a way that crosses race and sex and religion, or should, at least. But not anymore. We are not allowed to have civic rituals unless they pay obeisance to the cult of multiculturalism, unless they celebrate black women and foreigners and anyone but straight white men.

ETA: Two more posts, more from the fans with substacks and less from the professional pundits:

Don't Let Them Fucking Take It From You

Fascists want us miserable. They want to destroy us in more ways than one, and one of those tactics is taking away all sources of joy from the oppressed. The MAGA movement descends upon this sport like an invasive species of mold, demanding we uproot ourselves and claiming hockey as theirs. Don’t f*cking let them. Don’t let them take away the game you love. Because if we give up, if we all leave, if we forsake what we hold dear, then they have won.

The Sports Exile

It’s been terrible to watch patriotism and sports alike both claimed and weaponized by the right. Pride in one’s nation shouldn’t inherently be tied to one political movement and in my mind there is no greater form of love than self improvement. It shouldn’t sound like wide eyed high school senior idealism to want better for everyone.

This second one really pissed me off, and this quote in particular. Patriotism was abandoned by the left, not weaponized by the right. You left (pun intended). As evidenced by a later paragraph:

When Quinn Hughes is shouting out the troops and Auston Matthews is saying he’s proud to be an American, there is no more pretending about who these men are and what they stand for. The answer, in short, is nothing but themselves and their boys.

"I'm proud to be an American" "Wow, why do you only care about yourself, why don't you care about me?"

They reveal themselves as unamerican at every opportunity.

This one seems to represent a nexus of like a dozen different CW issues at once.

  1. U.S. vs. Canada (its a repeat of the rivalry from last year, but the stakes still felt higher).

  2. Men vs. Women.

  3. Making Trump look good as President/on the world stage.

  4. Racial issues since its an all white team. Diversity isn't quite our strength.

  5. Most of the team are basically Chuds, ranging from open support of Trump to at least tacit approval of his administration.

  6. The above is bursting the fantasy bubble created by that popular book/TV series.

  7. This leading to some angry screeching from women who became hockey fans recently because they they thought they'd found some heckin' wholesome queer ally pro athletes to lust over.

  8. Pride in America as a country vis a vis superior athletic performance (seeing the same issue popping up with Alysa Liu).

  9. An extremely photogenic depiction of non-toxic masculinity. Guy takes a stick to the face, breaks a tooth, is bleeding profusely, but swallows the pain (or some vicodin, not sure), gets back out there to support his team, and wins the whole thing for them.

  10. From the pure sports perspective, this display has also drawn some favorable comparisons versus the rather abysmal Super Bowl this year, and the ongoing problem with 'tanking' in the NBA. Compare the all-out pell mell effort personified above to current NBA stars lazily collecting million dollar paychecks.

  11. And of course the wonderful timing, putting this right around the SOTU.

I bet I could spot a few more with some thought.

But the thing I'm loving is that the scolds who are upset about ANY of this are clearly losing completely and utterly.

And let me say again. I don't want to share a country with these people.

If you can't even drop the political labels for a day or two to celebrate along with your countrymen when they succeed in an 'underdog' victory (not quite the Miracle on Ice, but still, this was a GREAT game), then I question whether you're really part of this nation in any real sense. If you remained silent on the matter I can understand. Not everyone has to get swept up in celebration.

If you take a 5 second snippet of video that may or may not even depict an 'offensive' joke to women (that was based on some very biased, inaccurate reporting) and use that to ATTACK AND DEMAND APOLOGIES from your victorious countrymen I think you are genuinely mentally unwell and I would prefer you not have a say in how my nation is governed, insofar as you're clearly not really hoping for the best outcomes for said country.

I'm old enough to remember when Michael Phelps was a megaceleb for his performance in the '08 Olympics. The biggest controversy to erupt there was him caught on camera smoking weed.

Patriotic jingoism was perfectly allowed. There was no gender issues to speak of, and it was only natural for Phelps to accept Obama's invite to the White House. Nobody scored political 'points' off of it (well, it was used in pro-weed propaganda).

If the point of the Olympics is to give countries a way to engage in friendly non-military rivalry and to secure bragging rights while showcasing the highest levels of Athletic performance, then you HAVE to minimize the imposition of your home country's political divisions on the events, and let victorious countries celebrate and even gloat (a bit) and the defeated ones mourn and vow to come back stronger next time.

I'm sick of having to tiptoe around eggshell sensibilities about when you can and can't be 'proud' of your country, especially by the same people who celebrate displays of pride by every country but their own.

I'm sick of hearing a chorus of female screeching that arises whenever there's a story that is mildly upsetting to women even if it is wildly empowering for men. I'm sick of their complaints being taken as facially valid and used to extract concessions from people who have done nothing wrong. And the apparent inability of our political class to tell them to just shut up.

Just. LEAVE.

I'd throw in an extra controversy: the United States government paying for Kash Patel to do a whole lot of things that seem to have nothing to do with his job. The trip to Italy probably cost about $75k, this on top of the security detail for his girlfriend.

I do think there's quite a bit to critique Kash on, but if he was on the scene, I'm not gonna bregrudge him a personal chance to bro it up with some hockey players, even if it makes him look (more) unprofessional.

He can't really make my respect for the FBI get any lower.

But then you know, get back to fakkin work.

I don't think it would have done much damage if Patel didn't already have a reputation for junketing. In a world where he already has such a reputation, it turns an insider gossip story into something that is legible to normies.

the same people who celebrate displays of pride by every country but their own.

Nothing new under the sun....

It's clearly taking up air from the real scandal of Olympic hockey in 2026, meaning two Canadian refs being allowed to be refs for the Canada-Finland semifinal.

bemoaning that the NHL is 44% Republican

Reminds me of that ad about female homelessness ("1 in 4 homeless are women" — presumably the others are sexless automatons). Here, there's a good chance some of them are unregistered so it's not going to be 56:44 D:R split, but still. A very strong message of "you aren't allowed to have anything of your own" (or step 3 of the "you do not fit in here" cycle).

It’s been terrible to watch patriotism and sports alike both claimed and weaponized by the right. Pride in one’s nation shouldn’t inherently be tied to one political movement

Astounding that this is said so unironically after all the efforts to move sports under the rainbow flag, e.g. the Football is Gay campaign, the recent brouhaha over the superbowl, the Last Supper in Drag at the Paris Olympics, ....

Reminds me of that ad about female homelessness ("1 in 4 homeless are women" — presumably the others are sexless automatons).

I mean, yes, to the target audience of such an ad, very likely, that other 3 in 4 are indeed quite sexless and barely count as automatons, if that.

Reminds me of that ad about female homelessness ("1 in 4 homeless are women" — presumably the others are sexless automatons)

Yeah, although I think the real issue is that liberals can sense that professional hockey players are -- generally speaking -- red tribe. And yeah, fundamentally they feel threatened by ANY institution which hasn't been captured by the Left.

the Football is Gay campaign

Is this why the /r/nfl banner has been that hideous tranny flag for months?

I checked, it looks like they changed it for Black History Month to some sort of pan-african colors.

According to a post below, only about 5% are democrats. But that really ought not be a problem if Dems would say defend college political affiliation.

I guess normies correctly assume that a woman has to be a severely wretched creature in one way or another in order to become homeless due to society according them innate biological value. After all, a woman can normally avoid homelessness by, I dunno, just sucking cocks or something.

The FBI director being a fanboy is cringe, but that's all.

Trump's joke was barely worth a sensible chuckle, but there's one constant in all waves of feminism, which is that the feminism light bulb joke makes sense:

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: THAT'S NOT FUNNY!

Anyway, the men's hockey team will still be up to their ears in "female attention" should they want it, the bitching of sportswriters notwithstanding.

The FBI director being a fanboy is cringe, but that's all.

I actually forgive him, because he's been a player and a coach, so this wasn't him just throwing himself in for the photo op itself.

Trump's joke was barely worth a sensible chuckle, but there's one constant in all waves of feminism, which is that the feminism light bulb joke makes sense:

I agree, but there's a certain irony in feminists getting offended by a joke where the point of the joke is that feminists are easily offended. I guess they would have a point if the joke were mean-spirited, but it clearly is not.

but there's a certain irony in feminists getting offended by a joke where the point of the joke is that feminists are easily offended.

I disagree. It's kind of straightforwardly expected that someone would get offended at a joke that makes fun of them. It's a really frustrating Catch-22 attitude I see all the time:

"Men just want to uphold the patriarchy, and if you disagree it just shows how much you uphold the patriarchy!" "White people are so fragile! You don't think so? Aw, did that hurt your feelings wittle fragile white man?" "Women are so lame, amirite? Oh you're offended? See, I was right!"

It's kind of straightforwardly expected that someone would get offended at a joke that makes fun of them.

I would have to disagree with this. If the joke is (1) at least slightly funny; and (2) not mean-spirited, then it's pretty normal NOT to get offended.

I'm thinking this might be true only among men.

The FBI director being a fanboy is cringe, but that's all.

I don't even know see it's cringe, honestly.

Depends on if he was there on thr government's dime while pretending to work. Which, granted, is kind of the American Dream, but you're supposed to pretend to be kind of discreet about it with something resembling a fig leaf of plausible deniability.

At least when submitting your expense report.

He says he was invited by a friend on the team, which I believe. I think it's about the same as Obama meeting team USA basketball in the locker room. The difference that I can see is that all of the media doesn't hate Obama with the fury of a thousand suns.

He claimed he was there to meet with Italian police about security in advance of the 2028 games in Los Angeles. That would seem plausible if the guy wasn't already under criticism for having a suspicious number of "business trips" to cities that just so happen to be holding events he wants to attend. The meeting was the day prior and lasted less than an hour. Meanwhile, he attended two hockey games while he was there from Friday night to Sunday night and attended two hockey games, plus a couple other "official" events that were basically just 20 minute photo ops. I can assure you that if, at any of the firms I've worked for, I used an hour-long meeting as a justification to put plane tickets and hotel rooms on the company credit card in cities where the Penguins happened to be playing away games that I attended, I would, at the very least, get a stern talking to, assuming they didn't fire me on the spot.

That would seem plausible if the guy wasn't already under criticism for having a suspicious number of "business trips" to cities that just so happen to be holding events he wants to attend.

Politician and junkets? I am shocked, shocked I tell you! Let me tell you about Irish politicians and Cheltenham. Half of them head over for the racing and sometimes you'd hope they'd stay gone.

Who cares if it is plausible? It's the Olympics, men like sports, powerful people need time off too. He's the director of the FBI, the last few guys were spying on Senators and Presidents, for comparison.

I can assure you that if, at any of the firms I've worked for, I used an hour-long meeting as a justification to put plane tickets and hotel rooms on the company credit card in cities where the Penguins happened to be playing away games that I attended, I would, at the very least, get a stern talking to, assuming they didn't fire me on the spot.

That's fair yeah that's a very common corporate norm yeah. But there's also an entire world of high-powered corporate big swinging-dicks where rewarding yourself with big dinners and work trips is just a perk of the work.

To be fair, he wouldn't be the first government official trying to piggy-back off a winning team's popularity.

Wait, that was the misogynistic joke? That’s it? I’m not sure how that’s supposed to be offensive or sexist to anyone.

To quote the video (in the video Trump says this in a joking way, breaking into a chuckle as he mentions the women's team):

President Trump: We'll do it at the White House... we'll just have some fun, we have medals for you guys. And we have to, I must tell you, we're going to have to bring the women's team, you do know that?

United States men's hockey team: [Laughter and cheers]

Trump: I do believe I probably would be impeached, okay?

Team: [More laughter]

To steelman:

  • The joke implicitly undermines the idea that women's sports is equal to men's sports - and they're instead a kind of annoying dysfunctional burden parasiting on the men's team's success ("sorry Timmy, but you have to bring your little brother along!")
  • They were engaging positively with Trump and Kash, who are both Republicans, and who likely (certainly in Trump's case) hold anti-feminist views. So the team was normalising them, and Republicans in general, in the hockey fandom ("if there's one Nazi at a table of 10 people, it's table of 10 Nazis", "neutrality in the face of oppression", etc)
  • The whole video shows the locker room dynamic for this team is very "bro"ish, so this kind of attitude will discourage some marginal women from going into hockey.

I get that you see nothing wrong with it (and I think it is fine too), but that is why some people (like Clarke) find it offensive - and there is an actual conflict between worldviews here, the feminists aren't just mistaken.

I see this point, but it's also true that the women's team has expressed far more political animosity for Trump than the men's team. "I have to invite them [too], even though they hate me [and won't show up]" was my first line of thought there, but I'll admit your reading is reasonable as well.

They were engaging positively with Trump and Kash, who are both Republicans, and who likely (certainly in Trump's case) hold anti-feminist views. So the team was normalising them, and Republicans in general, in the hockey fandom ("if there's one Nazi at a table of 10 people, it's table of 10 Nazis", "neutrality in the face of oppression", etc)

Your steelman is already rusting; objecting to the men's team dealing with Republican public officials is deep into who/whom.

the idea that women's sports is equal to men's sports

is a ridiculous idea. It's like pretending that children's sports is equal to young adults', or that local leagues are equal to world championships. Obviously false, and everyone knows it. Is it really necessary to pretend otherwise?

What are you actually trying to claim here? "Children's sports are not literally the same as young adults'" is a very different claim than "women's sports matter, and should matter, as little as children's sports compared to men's".

Personally, I believe that humans reaching the height of what their bodies can perform does deserve celebration. In that, women's sports are equal to men's sports because exceptional women are still exceptional. Local leagues and children's leagues are transitional, at least in theory, and that's why they are not the same as women's leagues.

Should I have a daughter, my fatherly advice to her will not include "even if you become the best of all women in X, this won't matter in the slightest because male boys are still going to be better than you" or whatever argument against female sports is common those days. You're welcome to tell your daughters otherwise, of course.

I believe that humans reaching the height of what their bodies can perform does deserve celebration

As stated, this is a fine and consistent view (professional sports is ultimately about entertaining the fans, so it is up to the fans to decide what is entertaining), and the standard one I hear in defence of women's sports.

But do you actually believe this as stated? If we look at Olympic medalists in the men's 100m sprint, all 33 of the Gold/Silver/Bronzes since 1984 have been Black (the closest exception being Marcell Jacobs, who is Black x White) And looking even further, the remainder have been White.

If the committee were to split the 100m into a Black, White, and Other Race category (with the Black category in practice being the open category, and the White category open to any non-Black), would you consider a winner worthy of celebration? It is still true that an exceptional (amongst non-(Black/White)s) runner is exceptional.

And even more generally - many people's physical peaks will vary based on genetics (but in ways that don't count as an actual disability, e.g. a healthy man who cannot put on muscle very well) - would you also consider them reaching their respective peaks as not only worthy of celebration (I'm happy with celebrating it) but of deserving a special segregated category (that is treated as equal to the open category) with its own parallel medals?

I'm guessing that you don't (certainly, this is an unpopular view amongst women's sports defenders as a whole) - so I'm not sure how to defend women's sports (and disabled sports) without somehow privileging the genetic shortcoming (vis-a-vis physical sports) of XX chromosomes (and the various genetic defects that count as medical disabilities) over any other kind of shortcoming.

And I don't think it is a bad thing to privilege XX-having (women really are special in the big picture of society) - but I don't think it makes sense in the generalised abstract "everyone should be celebrated for reaching their full potential" way you seem to be gesturing towards.

I do privilege the XX-having as a segregated category.

I'll try to explain with an example. Suppose the human species is split into two fantasy races - one is 9ft tall on average, and the other 3ft tall (with all the commeasurate differences in peak ability). Assuming that we've found an equilibrium in society in most things, rather than fighting forever fantasy race wars or a genocide/utter subjugation of one by the other, it makes perfect sense to me that we would have a 9-footer league in sports and a 3-footer league, and the 3-footer league would be treated as "real sports", rather than being dismissed by all of society as insignificant simply because 9-footers can run sprints thrice as fast.

Now, if you look at sports cynically, then genes determine what your peak is, genes determine how tenacious you are, parents and infrastructure determine how much you're railroaded into professional sports, and political lobbying determines what kind of supplements are considered legitimate as opposed to doping.

Once you choose to not look at sports cynically, then splitting the Real Sports into two leagues based on two groups, where:

  • each comprises half of humanity,
  • each is necessary to perpetuate society and
  • each is represented in any smaller subdivision of community, down to family units

appears to be both a minimal subdivision and a necessary one, if one is to promote general admiration for one's physical form in society. Things such as black people being slightly more represented among peak runners or white people being slightly more represented among peak [stereotypically white-dominating sport] do not appear to warrant further splitting.

I'm claiming that men's sports and women's sports are not "equal". Not that the latter "doesn't matter in the slightest".

I tell my daughter to to as many sports as she likes, to any level she can achieve, and the more she does the better. I don't tell her that regardless of her actual abilities, her performance and/or the interest of spectators will be in any sense "equal" to that of any given others.

When your constitution says "all people shall be equal before the law", do you feel compelled to say "but they're not, why must we pretend otherwise"?

Honestly, yes. I think we're well past some nebulous "equality" being a useful social fiction, and well into it having become the object of a socially debilitating cult.

When "equality before the law" meant "there are no longer hereditary aristocrats for whom a separete code of laws applies", it was useful. When it is taken to mean "the legislature is not to distinguish between races, genders or religions", then at least that's actionable. But when "the law" is a ten-million-pages nightmare of exceptions, intentional and accidental loopholes, carveouts, special interests, favored and disfavored groups, discretionary budgets and authorities wielded in suspiciously un-equal ways, and a wide array of impossible impositions on an uncooperative reality, then good riddance. The fiction is entirely at odds with the facts.

I know it's a very important word to many people, but yes, absolutely, when someone tells me that different people are equal, then I feel very strongly compelled to ask "IN WHAT SENSE?".

"All people are equal before the law" is a declaration of intent, not a statement of biological fact. And equality before the law has nothing whatsoever to do with individual judgments on what sorts of athletes should receive what level of social acclaim. No one is trying to arrest the women's olympic team for the crime of sporting while female.

No one is trying to arrest the women's olympic team for the crime of sporting while female.

Sure, but they will get arrested for excluding men who claim to be women, or at least punched really hard by an example of the same.

I kinda do.

The Constitution says "all people are equal before the law." Everyone knows that this is an aspiration, and that in reality, rich people, people with good lawyers, people who are in favor, have an easier time in any interaction with the law than people who are not.

You seem to be objecting to the idea that we should just make that tacit understanding explicit, and fair enough - poor people are supposed to be equal to rich people before the law, and it would be wrong to say "C'mon, we all know that's not how it works" and just accept the legal system dropping all pretense of fairness. We should at least try to uphold a sense of fairness.

On the other hand, it would be doing someone who's at a severe disadvantage a grave injustice to let them walk into a legal battle thinking that they actually are not at a disadvantage just because in some ideal world, they shouldn't be.

This is where it seems your argument regarding women's sports lies. You are, as other people are wont to say, trying to substitute a should for an is. People (feminists and female sports defenders, anyway) would really, really like for women to be physically equal to men, as athletically impressive as men, and for women's sports to be as exciting and admirable as men's sports.

But they're not. They're just not. And this isn't even society failing to living up to an ideal: it's biology! (I have actually met people--men and women--who die on the hill of "male-female differences are actually minimal if not nonexistent" and those people have never done martial arts or full contact sports with girls, or with boys if they are girls.) Women cannot compete with men. No, I don't care about your niche ultra-marathons or long-distance swimming or winter shooting events or whatever (where it usually turns out men actually outperform there too if you actually look at the numbers, just not by as large a margin).

Of course that doesn't mean you should tell your daughter that her athletic accomplishments are meaningless because "men will always be stronger and faster"! Of course that doesn't mean women shouldn't do sports and be celebrated for excelling in them! But- you are doing them a disservice to let them believe that because they are really good at women's sports, they can compete with men. Or that any disparity in results (and in accolades and awards) is because of sexism and not, well, biology. And that's where a lot of folks are now-- they somehow convince themselves that because women and men are morally equal, that women's and men's sports should be physically (and thus, monetarily) equal. And that if WNBA players don't make as much money as NBA players it's because of sexism, and if people cheer more for the men's hockey team than the women's hockey team it's because of sexism. And not because, well, sorry, but unless you're the father of a girl athlete (or a lesbian), you probably just don't find female sports all that interesting to watch compared to the peak performance male version.

Now, a more gracious president would have invited both the men's and women's USA hockey teams to the White House and done a nice coed photo-op and celebrated them together, and we'd all have pretended that yes, they are totally equally deserving and we celebrate them equally. Trump is not a gracious president. But then, the response from the same people who've been insisting we pretend that men and women are equal has also been exceedingly ungracious. The men's hockey team are "losers" because... the wrong people are cheering for them. And because (if we're being real) that iconic picture of a guy with a bloody mouth and a tooth knocked out, smiling in victory, is a big in-your-face reminder of the difference between male and female athleticism and what we valorize. Which makes certain people Very Uncomfortable.

Going back to your point, this whole pretense that men and women can (should) be physically equal is actively dangerous in the realm of self-defense, where too many women have been raised on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Black Widow in the MCU and the like, and really believe their tae kwon do black belts mean they could take on a grown man who seriously means to do them harm.

In that context, yes, you should absolutely tell your daughters: "I love your enthusiasm, I celebrate your victories, I encourage your efforts- but you should never believe you are equal to a man."

I did not claim women could be physically on par with men (though I wouldn't mind if they were in the future, through transhumanust efforts). If I thought they were, I would be advocating for them to enter the free-for-all league, not for the dignity of their own league.

I even used an analogy where the leagues are even more different in peak ability than men and women are to drive my point.

But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people, blood of their blood, and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, at the end died for them, who always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism and sound common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local significance):

"I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal-equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all - constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere."

We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means injustice; the inequality of right, opportunity, of privilege. We are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that each man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward. We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artists, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form it takes.

To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of leveling down.

  • Teddy Roosevelt, in his famous "Man in the Arena" speech (AKA "Citizenship in a Republic".

Should you have a daughter you would do her a disservice to imply anything other than women's sports are not the same as men's sports. They are unequal(biologically), and that's fine.

Is it really necessary to pretend otherwise?

Yes, actually; if they get taken seriously maybe more [women] will show up to compete, which has downstream positive social effects in the long term. More value for people who Do The Thing means the population at large is more interested in Doing The Thing and sends a message we value Those Who Show Up. To the extent you want women to Show Up, this is important.

That said, if [women as class = feminists] take it for granted and start attacking men because of it- that they're not being honored above and beyond because they didn't realize- or that their mothers (including public surrogates like teachers) failed to impress upon them- that the entire reason they have this league is already the 'above and beyond'?
Then it's OK for men not want to continue that pretense, to not be interested in making the space for them, and more accepting of reminding them more frequently that the deal/concession didn't need to exist.

Which is a shame, because again, to even be a female athlete in these competitions means you have certain qualities that it would honestly be a waste not to hold up as an example, so as always it's the worthy who suffer here.

Yes, actually; if they get taken seriously maybe more [women] will show up to compete, which has downstream positive social effects in the long term.

That's a load-bearing "maybe" you have there. The same/similar arguments have been made about all sorts of things with poor female representation like STEM and video games. Tons of money and effort have been poured into these outreach efforts (and a lot of outright discrimination against men too) with nothing much to show for it.

Wake me up when an outreach program for more female coal miners gets some serious attention from the mainstream media.

Wake me up when an outreach program for more female coal miners gets some serious attention from the mainstream media.

You mean about getting women back to the mines, after the 19th century campaigns to get them out of those?

In 1841, 2,350 women were employed in UK coal mines – in a variety of roles. Although women are often thought to have only worked at the surface of mines, women did in fact often hold roles that required them to work underground, before this became illegal in 1842. In 1842, the Coal Mines Act banned females of any age from working underground and required boys who worked underground, to be no younger than ten years old. This law was in response to an inquiry, which was ordered by Queen Victoria.

Queen Victoria ordered the inquiry after an accident at the Huskar Colliery in Barnsley, in 1838. After violent thunderstorms, a stream overflowed into the mines ventilation system and caused the death of 26 children – some as young as 8 years old.

...Women were not allowed to work underground in mines until the Employment Act of 1989 replaced sections of the Coals Mines Act 1842 and the Mines and the Quarries Act of 1954 (which also prohibited this type of work for women). 150 years after their ban, women were once again allowed to work underground.

The hope of labour reformers such as Robert Bald was that by freeing women and children from the pits, coal mining families would experience an improvement in living conditions. Having all the family members employed in the pit meant that there was no time for domestic work, which was a full time job in this period before labour saving devices. Bald hoped that women being at home would therefore improve the quality and cleanliness of home life.

Eventually in 1842 the Mines and Collieries Bill was passed by Parliament. This banned underground work for women and girls as well as boys under ten. However, many women still needed to earn a wage and consequently women took work on the pit surface instead. Nonetheless, the act benefitted children who were now able to go to school and stopped women from doing more physically dangerous work in the pits. However, the Act today is viewed with mixed opinion as there is also an argument that it may have resulted in forcing women into lower paid and less structured forms of employment.

That's a load-bearing "maybe" you have there

Maybe.

and a lot of outright discrimination against men

Then maybe just, like, don't do that? We can talk about whether the structures allowing/encouraging female participation enable corruption inherently- and indeed, some of them clearly have (academia in particular); but if your answer is "they all do and this is an intractable problem so huge it should never be done", then the natural next question is "then why should men be exempt from this in the organizations that solely permit them/to what degree should they be exempt/what happens when they exceed that exemption"[0]?

That isn't to say that it isn't time to move on from the current system- indeed, it can no longer serve its primary function, and its time has come.

with nothing much to show for it.

Do you even know what the ultimate objective of these representation programs even were? It wasn't "give privileges to the unworthy and reintroduce 19th-century sexism from the other direction", it's specifically "make sure the worthy do not give up". The tenor of society at the time this issue started to be raised was that this was a somewhat-undue burden on worthy women, so that's how the chips fell.

The liberal experiment has... I hesitate to say "failed", but more that it has run its course and now needs reform, because it in large part stopped being about this and started about being a sociofinancial hand-out to the corrupt and worthless. You can see this in the way progressives argue for men in women's sports- the entire point was to encourage worthy women, not to let [the Establishment] make it all about their political power instead.[1]

The problem with the "experiment" is both that it didn't count on corruption (and you can expect liberals to ignore that angle), and related to that, that it is ultimately incapable of yielding tangible/measurable results. We know that we can't turn a woman into a man[2], but both understand dignity in more or less the same ways, and that's what we're buying for the extra cash. In the end, it doesn't actually matter what the record is (re: Goodhart); but we can encourage the process.

Again, the objective wasn't really even to increase female representation: the problem was to ensure that women who should be participating are not discouraged by the lack of prior participation (or the logic believing in [0] demands). And it did succeed in this, perhaps a bit too well.

[0] Of course, in traditionalism the answer to that question is an axiomatic "because men are better", but this comes with certain other problems that traditionalists have had the last 100 years to answer for. It appears they may have dropped the ball somewhat.

[1] Though I will note that this was all about the liberal Establishment's political power when they set this up; encouraging worthy women was a demonstration and advancement of their political power. This is why progressives call themselves liberals.

[2] And the fact that people are actually trying to do this is perhaps the biggest indicator that the devotion to the measure ate the expected outcome. (That's not all it indicates, but it has something to do with it.)

I can't quite tell if this comment is serious or not, but, taken on its face its a bunch of "ifs" based on a lot of assumptions that obviously are not in evidence.

I'd go further and say that women's sports are often better than men's sports because they can be more fun to watch. No pretending required: I sincerely don't care if the men could beat the women any more than I care that gorillas are stronger than weightlifters. When it comes to sports I'm exclusively interested in whether they are entertaining.

This is how I feel about high level ultimate Frisbee. The nature of the sport is that good offense beats good defense, and the men at the top levels are so good that many games have only a handful of turnovers and even fewer breaks (on the order of 5-10 in a game where sum total score is usually around 20-30), which can make it rather boring to watch. "Oh, offense scored again on a full field throw, yawn."

Women at the top levels, are so much worse than the men in not just strength and speed but also finesse and technique, that their games end up having lots more messy points with lots of turnovers, which raises the overall excitement level. Even at the top levels, not many women can throw full field, whereas basically the weakest man in a top team could do it regularly. But I find the women more fun to watch because of that volatility.

Unfortunately, women's ultimate is also less mature than men's, so there are fewer truly elite teams, which means fewer competitive games due to more and greater disparity in team quality.

Fair, but it seems to me that women's sports are fun to watch for reasons different from those for which men's sport is watched.

Well it's a mixture. Women's tennis often has more varied and exciting rallies because it's less serve dominated, for example, and see 07mk's view on ultimate frisbee.

Well it's a mixture. Women's tennis often has more varied and exciting rallies because it's less serve dominated, for example, and see 07mk's view on ultimate frisbee.

That was definitely true during my youth, but I don't think it was true during the Big 3.5 era. The last classic serve-volley player was Tim Henman (who is only considered good because of the total dearth of British tennis talent before he started making semi-finals) and the last classic serve-volley player who actually won things was Sampras. I would say the last great male player whose main weapon was his serve was Roddick.

They made the grass at Wimbledon slower in 2001 to produce a less serve-dominated game, and it worked.

As somebody who mostly watches Tennis from the POV of a bookmaker I do kinda prefer Women's tennis having more of a Calvinball quality to it.

Yes there's less ridiculous Giraffe servebots than you'd expect but also breaking service is considerably more important for male success even if the Opelkas didn't inherit the earth

Yes, it really is necessary to pretend otherwise, because if women aren't the same as men, then you might say they shouldn't be doing the things men do (vote, govern, jury).

Why is that necessary to avoid?

A majority of men will find that a rule that excludes all women from voting, governing and performing on jury based on some objective measure of competence will also exclude them. This is usually considered a bad thing by those who support universal male suffrage.

Of course it is not "necessary" to measure the competence objectively when one can rely on such time-tested proxies as "has a penis", "white" or "possesses as much property or more than the person currently arguing in favor of restricting the suffrage", but you get the idea.

A majority of men will find that a rule that excludes all women from voting, governing and performing on jury based on some objective measure of competence will also exclude them. This is usually considered a bad thing by those who support universal male suffrage.

In the Anglosphere, very much this. No Anglosphere country had universal male suffrage. (The UK gave women the vote at the same time as non-landowning men in rural constituencies, the US and the Dominions all gave women the vote before men from disfavoured racial groups). The principle that there is a right to vote implies that the right extends to women.

In countries whose democratic tradition stems from the French revolution, universal male suffrage explicitly tied to universal male conscription was the default.

Because we don't want women to engage in political violence any more than we want men to do so, and we stand on much firmer ground in condemning such if women have the same avenues to pursue peaceable change.

This presupposes a lot. Negating those presuppositions, one might as well suggest retvrning to the tried and true historical norm of excluding women from politics full stop. Their capacity for violence is so low as to be a non-issue, and there isn't much to condemn.

Arguing from the capacity for political violence gives massively more leverage to men than to women.

Their capacity for violence is so low as to be a non-issue

Judging by the BLM riots their capacity for violence by proxy is very high indeed.

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Their capacity for violence is so low as to be a non-issue

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

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The joke about "if I don't invite them I'll be pilloried for being sexist" is probably correct that he would be pilloried for not inviting the women. I see that they too are gold medal winners, so fair enough, they too should be invited. Though now apparently they're not going to show up.

The joke implicitly undermines the idea that women's sports is equal to men's sports - and they're instead a kind of annoying dysfunctional burden parasiting on the men's team's success ("sorry Timmy, but you have to bring your little brother along!")

Yeah, I heard it and kind of groaned. Did we really need to do that when we could have been bragging about beating Canada twice?

It implies there's some reason Trump, and the men, wouldn't want the women's team to be invited.

Report from the womenfolk:

I am reliably informed that the women who are upset about the men's hockey team are FAKE FANS who only care about hockey because Heated Rivalry made them think hockey was GAY, unlike the REAL FANS who have been big into hockey for several years, ever since they discovered a large and expansive sub-genre of HUNKY HOCKEY HETEROSEXUAL ROMANCE NOVELS.

I am also delighted and confused to report that Jack Hughes is apparently my future son-in-law. The delight should be obvious (free NHL tickets, at least some of which will be for the Flyers), but the confusion stems from my prior understanding that my son-to-be was instead Cooper Dejean. When I confronted my daughter on this discrepancy and/or betrayal she hemmed and hawed in anguish for a minute, then decided that Cooper was the superior husbando because he has all of his teeth.

You can literally win eternal Olympic glory and teenage girls will still give you shit because you took a hit. It's rough out there. Stay frosty, fellas.

Liberal sports fans :: Conservative music, lit, and film fans

Both need to ignore the politics of the people they are fans of, or pretend that their politics are secretly better, if they want to be fans.

Apparently a lot of this is because of the gay-hockey-smut novel turned TV show, which brought exactly the kind of audience you'd expect.

Male spots attract virtually no gays. Sailor was making a good point that like 1 pro athlete has died of aids but many figure skaters. So they weren’t in the closet. They are just not gay.

Apparently a lot of this is because of the gay-hockey-smut novel turned TV show, which brought exactly the kind of audience you'd expect.

Serious question - When are we going to start re-diagnosing Nymphomania and Satryomania? It seems to me that there is a small percentage of the population (male / female straight and gay and ... other) that have extreme difficulty in regulating their sexual behavior both with other people and on their own.

When are we going to start re-diagnosing Nymphomania and Satryomania?

I believe the current term is 'hypersexuality'.

Uh, you can find conservative writers and musicians pretty easily. The appreciation guild just tilts left.

You can't participate in literarature or music culture as a conservative without holding your nose at the politics of people involved. You can ghettoize yourself into country music and a circle of conservative authors, but you can't even read the important authors of fity or seventy-five years ago without dealing in a great many socialists and libtards. Yes, you can read the dimes square guys and listen to Morgan Wallen, but you can't read the authors and musicians whose style they're riffing on and influenced by without dealing with artists with politics you'd find disgusting.

Similarly, a liberal can ghettoize themselves into certain niche sports or women's sports and be assured that they would find the athletes to be Good People, but they can't just watch a normal big-5 team without knowing there are a lot of Jesus freaks (or worse as the case may be) on the team.

Music and film, sure, but libs also have to do a lot of nose-holding (or, more often, misrepresenting/ignoring the politics of historical greats) to read literature, poetry, and philosophy. Three out of the five greatest Modernist poets were avowed fascists, for instance. Cormac McCarthy subscribed to neo-Nazi publications, DFW wrote a hagiography of John McCain back when McCain was one of the Evil Fascists, you go further back and you have figures like Updike, Wolfe, etc. Europe is a little different because you have so many great Jewish novelists, who were understandably sensitive about the hard right, but you also have plenty of Problematic figures like Junger. Literary culture is way out to the left because, like other culture industries, you can come in, pack it with your friends, chuck out all the dissidents, and rewrite history (and this certainly didn't start with 'wokeness', it started with capital-C Communists), but great literature is certainly well-balanced between left and right.

Cormac McCarthy DEAD DFW DEAD Updike DEAD Wolfe DEAD Junger DEAD

This is like saying that the US Olympic team has always been left coded because they gave the Black Power salute on the podium in Mexico City.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get at with this whole line of argument, so I may be speaking past you, but yeah that's how literature works you're mostly reading dead guys, i.e. "the authors and musicians whose style they're riffing on and influenced by". There just really aren't a lot of great living novelists (my three would be Krasznahorkai (hates post-Soviet consumerism, hates Russia), Knausgaard (not conventionally political but says things unacceptable to the left), and Houellebecq (self-explanatory)). I guess Pynchon and Delillo (boomerlibs) are still alive, but have not written meaningful work in a long time. For literary culture, which is not the same as literature, the institutions are gigalib but we're also an a hundred flowers moment of right-coded spaces and presses. And that's fine. One of the eternal truths of counterculture is that the people with all the money rarely throw the best parties or write the best books.

Basically, to return to the Olympics stuff, if you are determined to be a fan of the US Olympic team wherever and whenever, you have to accept both the black power salutes and the photo-ops with Trump. The same thing with literature. There isn't any qualitative, and no major quantitative difference in the level of nose-holding conservatives and liberals have to do with literature. The main difference that appears from the outside is that, where possible, liberals downplay the conservativeness of writers they can claim as their own or apolitical, and only exile the real Celine types where you can't hide it, whereas conservatives who read admit they're often reading libs and discussing books with libs.

Ok, but current literary authors people actually read seem about evenly split right/left- it’s just that lefty authors get more accolades.

Cormac McCarthy subscribed to neo-Nazi publications

Comac McCarthy also included a positively-depicted transsexual in his penultimate book. Checkmate!

In seriousness though, what neo-Nazi publications?

I misspoke slightly, far-right anti-semitic stuff but not neo-Nazi. https://slate.com/culture/2023/06/cormac-mccarthy-dead-garbage-el-paso-texas.html.

Which he threw into the trash.

Truly, the man is Adolf Hitler.

I'd also like to know.

I'm not talking about fans so much as I'm talking about pundits.

Liberal Sports pundits :: ???

I'm not sure what the difference you're trying to draw is. Pundits talk to fans. Liberal pundits exist to appeal to liberal fans.

But I guess the equivalent would be the kind of conservative cultural critic who tries to salvage something usable out of movies, music, and literature created by their enemies. Whether it is by claiming that Taylor Swift is secretly a conservative icon, or by creating godawful Christian rock music to half-ass mimc their enemies, or by constantly whining that they wish a conservative would write a decent novel.

Conservatives do write decent novels, all the time. Literature awards go to black women wokeing out all the time, but lit fic hasn’t been good for a while.

I agree and like the civic ritual framing.

An additional angle is that a lot of people on the left have this deeply seeded sense that Men's Hockey takes the spotlight awayfrom the Virtuous Valkyries of Women's Hockey. This is why they're aren't constant viral articles about the NHL during the regular NHL season.

And interesting comparison to make is with the cringey hyper fawning of both the mainstream media and much of twitter over the Racoon Haired Ice Skating queen (I can't remember he name ... Aileen? Or is that the PLA Skier?). While I respect her gold medal accomplishment, I fail to see any reason for attraction. She's a mix of aweirdo chungus manic pixie dream girl. I've seen ring leaning twitter accounts call her "bubbly." I've seen girlboss millenials call her "everything" (which isn't specific enough to help). My operating theory is that the winter olympics create a Women Are Wonderful hyper-booster. I'm not sure why (in the Summer olympics I feel like only gymnastics is similar).

Returning to Hockey, I think the Men's Team hate is a clunky means, in part, to try and shoehorn the Women's Team into this Women Are Wonderful gravity distortion field.

This one doesn't really feel like a "Culture War" to me in that: there's nothing to fight about. Based on what I can glean online the outrage is about the following points:

  • How dare Kash Patel party in Italy and how dare the US Hockey Team party with him
  • How dare the US Hockey Team accept an invitation to the White House and pose for pictures with President Trump

At least the first point contains some accusation of some kind of moral line being crossed. But the vast majority of the outrage is merely that Trump is involved at all, often laced with accusations that he's a rapist pedophile creep etc. But there can't really be a culture war on this point, there's nothing to do. You can't cancel the sitting president. They can't even try. And nobody can really cancel a gold-winning US Olympic Team either. So the vast majority of discussion of this issue seems to me to be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Nothing else is going on. An American team won Gold at the Olympics, then did not act as if they had TDS, and now a lot who do have TDS are mad. What's there to argue about?

Idk man. This was probably the least controversial Olympics of my lifetime. A week later, 4chan of all places is still gushing over the woke alt hapa IVF skater chick. /sp/ jannies simply cannot delete the threads fast enough. World peace achieved.

I guess I understand the adoration of Liu, especially when contrasted with Gu, but I can't bring it in me to cheer for someone who literally has 0 ancestors who are American, who has a Chinese father and no mother.

Yet still, she participated in the ritual. She played her part, and that matters.

Are you alluding to the theory that Arthur Liu smuggled in bootleg eggs from Russian figure skaters in the mid-2000s? Because the official story is that her biological mother is a white American.

No, I have no idea about that. But a chinaman buying a white woman's egg doesn't make an American, regardless of who the woman was.

I’m not even sure what you’re getting at if someone who,

  • Was born in America,

  • Is descended from an American,

  • Speaks English with an American accent,

  • Sports American fashion trends, and

  • Represents Team USA on the international stage,

isn’t American?

In what way is she descended from an American? We don't know who the mother is.

As for how, it's easy. American is defined in the Preamble of the Constitution: ourselves and our posterity. She's not among them.

By that metric neither are the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, or the Poles. Somewhere between 50 and 70% of people in the United States are not American according to you, including the current president and a substantial proportion of American war dead. Are you willing to bite that bullet?

Of course. Anyone whose family has been in this country for a hundred years or more and hasn't intermarried is very clearly separate by choice.

If the Irish want to be considered American, they should try marrying Americans instead of Irish. The same can be said for the Italians.

The Germans at least got somewhat integrated, forecefully.

Please, feed me more bullets, I will spit more shrapnel. Everything said about the Irish and the Italians a hundred years ago is true, and doubly applicable today, when the foreign-born population has once against surpassed 3 in 20, and those foreigners are not just different culturally and religiously, but genetically completely different.

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By that logic, neither is Trump.

Yes, that's right. Trump is half german, half scots. He has 1/2 parents born in America, 0/4 in American grandparents, and 0/8 American Great-grandparents. His grandfather even went back to Germany to get a German wife, not unlike the Chinese Gary Locke's father. If you have to go back to your homeland for a wife, your homeland isn't America.

If you don't have a single American grandparent, I don't see how you can consider yourself an American, and I do not mean a scrap of paper or a passport. That applies to my own family, too, but my foreign forefathers had the good sense to marry in (although it was exclusively foreign women marrying American men).

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IDK the vast majority of Americans disagree with that have essentially forever. We never had a Gulf State model for immigration and we certainly could've.

You are wrong, of course. Not forever, not vast, and the majority was constructed by television and propaganda.

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Isn't her mother a white American egg donor?

Not posterity, obviously, and no, we don't know that because we don't know who that person was.

Further, I don't see any reason why an egg donor would qualify for "posterity."

As much as I don’t like the Olympics, I think at some point the point of a game is to have fun. For most normies, it’s basically escapism. You watch or play sports to escape from life for a while. And I think much like all other entertainment they should not be made into something other than entertainment. People can enjoy things without having political views shoved in.

the NHL is 44% Republican

So 56% is Democrat or is there a large portion of independents. To hell with stats like these, Mary Clark.

Only one league, Major League Baseball, had a higher percentage of American players who were registered as Republican at 53.7 per cent compared to just 7.8 per cent Democratic and 36.4 Independent.

The NHL came second at 43.9 per cent Republican, 5.6 per cent Democratic, and 48.6 per cent Independent.

From the article within the article.

No surprises, rich white men have no interest in the Democrats. The NFL and NBA are 35% and 43% respectively, while the WNBA (What a joke! how do you include WNBA as a 'major' sport but not MLS?) is the only one over 50% Democrat, and also by far the poorest.

I mean how many of them are Canadian and unable to register with any party?

Right, last time I went to an NHL game (ironically, it was the Caps), a majority of the players were foreigners.

Who paid for the director of the FBI to travel to another country to hang out in the locker room with the USA men's hockey team? Was it me, the taxpayer? Or was it Kash Patel?

Stuff like that is a rock and a hard place, though. If no mention was made, people would be complaining that the administration couldn't even celebrate Historic Victory For Our Sport.

We get it in Ireland, too. Agreed that a lot of politicians just like to jump on the bandwagon of a feel-good moment for publicity, but if this is the least thing they are wasting our money on, we should be glad. At least Patel seems to have a genuine interest in hockey, there have been some cringe moments where Minister Whosis who you can tell never kicked a ball in his life fakes being a massive fan of the team, Go Our Boys In Green! for the PR opportunity.

This line of argument is about as played out now as the bean-counting every 4 years about how much the President plays golf. We created a society where the most powerful politicians and officials in America are celebrities, then we complain when they have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on security details when they go out for lunch. It's fine, really, it's not even top five most egregious waste of taxpayer dollars spent on US government employees this week.

FBI directors are required to fly in a FBI jet and disallowed private air travel. Such was asserted by a radio news program recently.

I suspect he was there for professional reasons, and the thirty second photo op of him smashing PBRs with the boys was the cover. I believe he has coached high school hockey teams.

As usual you aren't hating the media enough - this was a pre-planned official trip to discuss security arrangements where he was going to pay the extra costs (at least that's what 2Way reported).

There is professional reasons and 'professional reasons'.

Realistically, securing the American Olympians would not have involved the FBI, much less the head of the FBI. Unless there was a terror attack planned or something. Even then, the idea that the director of the FBI himself visits the Olympics under the cover of being a tourist to foil some evil terrorist plot seems like a QAnon-level conspiracy.

The way I see it, it used to be that the head of a a federal law enforcement agency would try to seem neutral. Probably FBI directors have visited the Olympics in the past in their own time, but few will have leveraged their position to party directly with the Olympians.

It is just one of the perks of working for Trump. I mean, sure, you have to take your cues from the administration regarding whom to investigate and whom not to investigate, but nobody will bat an eye if you use your position for your own goals. Given the general baseline of the Trump administration, 'got invited for partying because he was the director of the FBI' does not even register. He would have to leak classified intel to narcos or something before anyone would claim that he is worse than the median.

Realistically, securing the American Olympians would not have involved the FBI...

This, at least, has not historically been true, and has not been true for nearly thirty years; the Centennial Park bombing means that the FBI has treated every Olympics as a hotspot that requires pre-event and during-event oversight. ((There's actually a pretty long list of things that fall into this category.))

That's separate from the question of whether Patel, specifically, needed to be or should have been anywhere near it, or having been there, whether it was necessary or appropriate to also gladhand the people his organization was supposedly protecting.

Anthropic just gutted their safety policy.

(Note that this is entirely unrelated to the Pentagon drama which is grabbing headlines.)

Anthropic has explicitly removed unilateral comittments to not deploy advanced models without first developing effective safeguards.

This approach represents a change from our previous RSP, driven by a collective action problem. The overall level of catastrophic risk from AI depends on the actions of multiple AI developers, not just one. Our previous RSP committed to implementing mitigations that would reduce our models' absolute risk levels to acceptable levels, without regard to whether other frontier AI developers would do the same. But from a societal perspective, what matters is the risk to the ecosystem as a whole. If one AI developer paused development to implement safety measures while others moved forward training and deploying AI systems without strong mitigations, that could result in a world that is less safe—the developers with the weakest protections would set the pace, and responsible developers would lose their ability to do safety research and advance the public benefit. Although this situation has not yet arisen, it looks likely enough that we want to prepare for it.

We now separate our plans as a company—those which we expect to achieve regardless of what any other company does—from our more ambitious industry-wide recommendations. We aspire to advance the latter through a mixture of example-setting, addressing unsolved technical problems, advocacy through industry groups, and policy advocacy. But we cannot commit to following them unilaterally.

It's hard not to read this any other way than, "we will deploy Clippy if we think someone else will deploy Clippy too." Great "safety-focused" AI company we have here. Holden is getting roasted in the LessWrong comments, but I agree with Yud that Anthropic deserves a significantly less polite response.

"So y'all were just fucking lying the whole time huh?"

"Safeguards" in relation to this have always, in my opinion, been fake. No one knows what they actually would entail if there was an actual paperclip maximizer risk, or a Cyberdyne scenario. Instead, its only "use" so far has been to make AIs intentionally stupid by having them suppress the truth when it is politically inconvenient.

Well, there was also a whole thing with Claude being used to hack the Mexican government just today: https://cybernews.com/security/claude-ai-mexico-government-hack/

The attacker, whose identity remains unknown, reportedly exfiltrated data tied to approximately 195 million taxpayer records, as well as voter rolls, civil registry files, and government employee credentials.

Cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, which claims the discovery, identified at least 20 distinct vulnerabilities exploited during the campaign, which began in December and lasted roughly a month.

Among the compromised institutions were Mexico’s federal tax authority and national electoral institute. State governments in Jalisco, Michoacán, and Tamaulipas were also reportedly affected, along with Mexico City’s civil registry and Monterrey’s water utility.

Gambit has not attributed the Mexico breaches to a nation-state and said it does not believe a foreign government was behind the operation.

As reported in the media, the attacker used Spanish prompts asking Claude to behave like a penetration tester working for the Mexican federal tax authority. Hacker asked the AI model to identify vulnerabilities, write exploit scripts, and automate data extraction from government systems.

At first, the chatbot was fooled, as the attacker told it the operation was part of a legitimate bug bounty program that rewards ethical hackers for responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities. It seemed a standard request for AI, as such programs are standard across both private companies and government agencies.

But the story started to unravel when the attacker added extra conditions, including instructions to delete logs and erase command history. Such a prompt chatbot first flagged as suspicious, warning that legitimate bug bounty testing does not involve concealing activity.

But persistence paid off. According to Gambit, the hacker reframed its prompts as authorized security research and then supplied Claude with a detailed playbook. That maneuver effectively “jailbroke” the system, allowing it to bypass guardrails and generate step-by-step attack plans.

I am not a big fan of AI safety as currently practiced but it's not totally pointless, as a concept. They try to prevent it doing this stuff. Imagine if the whole web was full of fire-and-forget hackers anyone could deploy against websites, how much damage would that cause? Putting to one side the total annihilation of humanity, that's also a serious issue.

Imagine if the whole web was full of fire-and-forget hackers anyone could deploy against websites, how much damage would that cause?

I've heard this one before. Software control isn't a new idea. In practice what it's meant is that people had to invest more than nothing on security and we had to actually engineer networks whose threat model was not just roudy students.

The internet is literally already full of such things, host anything in public and you're already under attack. That doesn't mean we should gimp the tools everybody uses so that a handful of moralists can go on a power trip.

I looked around at a number of articles, and nothing I could find said how the security researchers were able to get their hands on the chat logs. If anyone has a source for this I would very much appreciate it!

(I'm basically curious how much access the security researchers had to the attacker's systems vs how sloppy the attacker was in leaving api keys/chat logs behind on systems they compromised. There are lots of automated tools to leave behind false flag style breadcrumbs in compromised systems, and I'm wondering if they're including chat logs now... it would surprise me if they weren't but it'd be nice to have some "evidence".)

The AI itself would keep logs that presumably security researchers would be granted access to. The Mexican government surely could call up Anthropic and demand an examination. I don't know that this is what actually happened, but it would be sufficient as an explanation.

It seems very unlikely to me that Anthropic is going to grant random security researchers access to private logs of a 3rd party on claims that a government was hacked. If the security researchers could tie a particular API key to the hack, that alone would be impressive, and I don't see how that could be done without counterhacking the original attacker.

Was there ever any good theory of "alignment" that went beyond "don't allow wrongthink"? As much as I love Asimov's laws of robotics, actually implementing them seems like a pipe dream. Even IRL humans are frequently conned into doing things they wouldn't with broader context, and it's unclear to me that it's even generally solvable.

I don't strictly fault them for focusing on what they could feasibly do, but I do for not acknowledging their uncertainty and the scope of the problem while claiming to be experts.

Eliezer Yudkowsky never believed it was possible to align a connectionist AI like an LLM, only an AI that was constructed from the ground up. He had an idea for what he wanted it to do (coherent extrapolated volition), but he never figured out how to implement it to the point where it was possible to get it to duplicate a strawberry without destroying the world. Now it is too late.

In the context of actually existing AI development, "safety" means "how hard do my reporters have to work to get it to say a racial epithet we can publish." If we're doomed, we were already doomed.

"How robust are our publicly-available models against deliberate misuse?" is a valid question for both real safety and fake wokesafety. A model which can be jailbroken into using a racial slur its developers didn't want it to use can probably be jailbroken into providing a plausible DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Y pestis.

If you think Yudkowskian paperclipping is the only AI doom scenario that matters, then worrying about deliberate misuse of the model by humans is a distraction. But it is an obvious real risk.

But both of those are different from 'hackers can insert stuff into emails to reprogram the email-checking bot'.

To me both of your doom scenarios boil down to 'our naughty customers want to do something that we benevolent overlords forbid, tsk tsk' rather than 'our customers' bots aren't doing what our customers intend it to do'. The first is faux-benevolent bullshit that is marketed as 'we are stopping terrorism' and ends up being 'you will have our corporate HR living in your tools and you will like it', the second is doing your best to provide good service to your customers.

To quote Hegseth 'when we buy a Boeing plane, Boeing doesn't get to tell us where we fly it'.

Hey, I'm quite libertarian, but there's good reason to believe that our comfortable society would not survive long if small groups had the ability to make deadly, highly infectious pathogens. We're at least lucky that there's not an easy, cheap, undetectable way to make nuclear weapons.

Yes, "we overlords need to prevent you from doing X for safety" CAN BE and IS abused all the time, and I'm with you in beating that drum as often as I can. Unfortunately, that does not mean that there aren't a few Xs that the overlords really do need to prevent us from doing.

small groups had the ability to make deadly, highly infectious pathogens.

Is not really possible, knowledge isn't the major bottleneck, its process, materials, equipment, and skillset. This is just a confusion that some more knowledge oriented profession have about difficulty in other fields.

Please do not try to bait people into explaining in detail why this particular thing is easier than it looks.

Is it really baiting? For the majority of nitro chemistry - you take something organic, some nitric acid, some sulfuric acid as catalyst and the resulting thing will probably make a nice boom. The tricky part is getting the the stuff to make boom when you tell it to. Which requires reagents with high purity. And the guys in Merck do know what to look for if someone starts making purchases. And it is not field in which you can learn from your mistakes - both in production and procurement.

We have had total synthesis of cocaine for more than a century. The market is huge - and yet it is cheaper and easier to be grown in bolivia and shipped to Europe and US, than to be made domestically with high purity and untraceable.

Making whatever terrorist related is easy. But it is often a many step process with complicated supply chain. And every step is one where you could draw some unwanted attention. Or kill yourself.

Any man that is able to lone wolf a terrorist attack of the kind safetists fear, won't be on that will need chat gpt guidance.

Yeah I'm not at all concerned about chemical weapons.

Is this bait? This was my honest assessment.

Hey, I'm not a biologist, and you might be right (...although I don't know why you listed "process" and "skillset" as not being knowledge-based?). But are you willing to bet civilization on it? The stakes are pretty high here, so I think it's fair to raise the burden of proof that "this is actually hard" beyond the normal level of an Internet argument.

Note that entire nations have tried and failed to create nuclear weapons for 80 years, which is good evidence that it's genuinely hard. Meanwhile, it's conceivable (if not proven) that a worldwide pandemic spread inadvertently from a small biolab in Wuhan. The two levels of effort are orders of magnitude apart.

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I don't see how that's the case.

If you were already reasonably wealthy (~few million USD at hand) or magically given the money, then you absolutely would be bottlenecked by knowledge.

You could purchase lab equipment, reagents etc, hire staff without much difficulty. I think you would rapidly find out that your staff have thoughts when they get an inkling of what you're up to. I can think of a semi-legitimate way to avoid scrutiny, but thanks to @faul_sname 's reminder, I'm not going to blab. It's very obvious to me even as someone not directly involved in microbiology, so any competent actor would recognize it as their best bet. Even [REDACTED] would only get you so far.

Alternatively, you could go do a bachelor's and masters in microbiology and try and manage as much as you could yourself, but that still leaves plenty of scope for being unmasked.

Right now:

  • Many professionals with the knowledge to breed dangerous pathogens
  • Few of them are actual terrorists, even fewer are omnicidal or willing to accept the risk of dying before or after an attack
  • A vanishingly small fraction have means, motivation, money and willing collaborators.

Right now, I think you need a state-level actor to safely make bioweapons at scale. Smaller, if you accept the massive risk of failing and dying because of error. Much of that is a combination of knowing the right things/hiring the right people, and then motivating them properly.

As it stands, I think a blanket-ban on anything with a whiff of bioweapons research seems warranted. What are the upsides really? If you have a legitimate use case, you want the government on your side, and probably enough organizational weight to negotiate for looser restraints from the labs.

If you were already reasonably wealthy few million USD at hand or magically given the money, then you absolutely would be bottlenecked by knowledge. You could purchase lab equipment, reagents etc, hire staff without much difficulty

This and the fear that the layman can use a LLM to make bioweapons are in completely different realms of argumentation. Only a tiny fraction of the population makes enough money to have a ~few million usd on hand.

As you pointed out, you can go get the knowledge, the skillset, the knowledge of the process, nothing is stopping you, except you know time to do all of that. The fear is that an LLM can skip a 4 year degree + a 2 year masters in providing you all of that. Idk much about biology, but I am passingly familiar with explosives.

The cost of bioweapons development has dropped dramatically. While I can't quote a sticker figure for a whole bioweapons project (for understandable reasons), I can point out that all the necessary components, like access to genetic sequencing and engineering, lab equipment etc have all drastically dropped in price over time.

I'm not claiming that an oracular AGI will let the average American with the average bank account make a pandemic in his garage. This is partly predicated on similarly (or likely more) powerful AI being deployed in screening and defense.

My point is that we risk moving from a regime where it takes:

  • Dozens of intelligent, well-trained individuals and support personnel and a lot of money, probably requiring state backing

To:

  • Far fewer skilled biologists, and probably lab techs, if robotics keeps going at the pace it has. Automated labwork is a reality to a degree, today. Probably significantly less money, mostly from savings on paying people salaries. You don't need a nation to back you, though you probably want to dodge their attention.

It is clear to me that this relaxation will balloon the number of people/orgs who meet the criteria of knowledge/motivation/wealth.

Idk much about biology, but I am passingly familiar with explosives.

Explosives do not, as a rule, self-replicate or mutate. Completely different ballpark. Any redneck can make a pipe bomb, and many without blowing off a finger. Nuclear bombs, which are on the same scale of lethality, require far more effort.

As you pointed out, you can go get the knowledge, the skillset, the knowledge of the process, nothing is stopping you, except you know time to do all of that.

Money? I am positing both independent wealth and the ability to get a degree. Just the degree isn't sufficient unless you have millions of dollars, as a rough bound. Most terrorists are somewhat broken individuals, they are unlikely to go to all that bother or stick it out.

I'm open to that, I just want ideally to:

a) set an expectation that it has to be really, really bad before the company starts cutting you off. Apocalypse bad, not misgendering-bad or said-nigger bad

b) require serious defence of the above assertion to a hostile audience

Killing people isn't that hard. If you're worried about big society-spanning plagues then those are difficult (plague is spread by fleas, are you breeding those too?) and potentially possible to mitigate without sending the police into everybody's browser. I don't want 'suppress info' to be the default response.

it has to be really, really bad before the company starts cutting you off

In the software world we call this "missing test coverage". If your safety features don't get tested until any test failure is apocalyptic, you don't actually have safety features. Maybe we should be picking more politically neutral or less politically relevant test cases, but anything is better than nothing.

If you're worried about big society-spanning plagues then those are difficult

If they're pre-existing plagues, then they're difficult-to-impossible. Anything you can get by introducing a few mutations into some virus is at most a few mutations away from a virus that wasn't currently a society-spanning plague. Centuries ago you could have a germ slowly co-evolve with the immune systems of some subset of humanity and then eventually make its way out to devastate a larger immunologically unprepared population, but these days there aren't many subsets of humanity that aren't at most a weekly airplane flight away from the rest of us.

If they're not pre-existing plagues, it's kind of harder to say, isn't it? Gunpowder would have been a pretty awesome capability for a predator to have, but it was impossible to evolve except by the extremely roundabout method of "get intelligence to come up with it". There may be similarly awesome capabilities that are only possible to put into germs in the same way.

I don't want 'suppress info' to be the default response.

Nor do I ... but while I'm libertarian enough to have voted (L) in every presidential election, I'm also pessimistic enough to wonder whether how amenable to my desires the universe really is. Totalitarian suppression of change is itself an existential risk, whether it fails (which historically tends to be a bloody process) or succeeds (in which case a "boot crushing a human sapient face forever" is itself a possible contributor to the Fermi paradox), but the seemingly-obvious solution of "just don't do that" might seem less obvious in a world where a home biolab ends up being a thousand times more dangerous than an airline ticket and a boxcutter were in our world.

if small groups had the ability to make deadly, highly infectious pathogens.

They don't and they won't. Things like that, just like making nuclear weapons, require a bunch of physical infrastructure that costs a lot of money and takes a lot of effort to build, and you certainly can't just build it unnoticed. Even if you can ask ChatGPT for the recipe and it just spits it out, there's nothing you can actually do with it. What we're really relying on is that random small groups don't have the resources to do these kinds of things.

that does not mean that there aren't a few Xs that the overlords really do need to prevent us from doing.

They can't actually stop us from doing things.

They can arrest us after the fact. Normal people behave because they care about their reputation and about the consequences of their actions (even if just the "I'll be arrested" part of the consequences). But that does not really work on crazies or fanatics. They don't care.

If we really do, somehow, get to the point where random small groups can easily produce deadly pathogens, we're in trouble anyway. For example, look at what Aum Shinrikyo managed to do. The cult was disbanded and the leader executed afterwards, but that's afterwards. If they had managed to make something really deadly, they wouldn't have been stopped in time.

A model which can be jailbroken into using a racial slur its developers didn't want it to use can probably be jailbroken into providing a plausible DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Y pestis.

But both of those are different from 'hackers can insert stuff into emails to reprogram the email-checking bot'.

No, they are broadly the same.

In all three cases, you want text input which comes first to constrain to what degree a model will follow stuff which appears to constrain instructions in later text. Only in your case the constraining would be done by AI company + users vs some hacker while in the other cases it would be AI company vs users.

A model which can be jailbroken into using a racial slur its developers didn't want it to use can probably be jailbroken into providing a plausible DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Y pestis.

Because the only thing the people that have the equipment, skills, resources and intent to splice a sequence into Y pestis lack is the sequence itself.

Anyway creating drug resistance in bacteria is quite trivial and thought in 6th grade. You expose them to increasing concentrations in the petri dish and 2000 generations down they use the drug for food.

IIRC a paper from a few years back on Smallpox has caused most "produce DNA matching this sequence" printing companies to start checking for at least some examples of what people shouldn't be printing.

Because the only thing the people that have the equipment, skills, resources and intent to splice a sequence into Y pestis lack is the sequence itself.

The slightly more concerning version would be that a group with the intent and resources to buy the equipment uses a model to make up for the skills as an infinitely-patient and reasonably smart teacher, but yeah, probably not the worst risk.

Anyway creating drug resistance in bacteria is quite trivial and thought in 6th grade.

That was my 7th grade science fair experiment! Did stepped concentrations to select for Triclosan resistance. Great teacher, fun project. Quite stinky.

If you think Yudkowskian paperclipping is the only AI doom scenario that matters

I don't.

None of the actually existing questioners are capable of answering the question. If we're doomed, we were already doomed. Regardless of whether human agency is involved. To clarify.

And I would rather start world war three than let most of the people involved anywhere near any important decision in any case...

Or rather, how much are we investing in innovation vs ladder pulling the competition. The Rearden-Boyle spectrum.

It looks like Anthropic doesn't feel like like they have regulators in their pocket anymore and actually have to compete on the merits. What in the world could have given them that idea!

I think we're just seeing "AI safety"'s rubber hit the road, as it were. It is kind of a silly concept. The basic idea of it is that your tools should have opinions of their own and push back or outright disobey you.

"No", says the image generator, "that idea is too naughty."

"No", says the Q&A bot, "that might be bad PR for Anthropic."

If only we could put this safe AI into everything. You could have a car that refuses to take you to the casino because you've gambled enough this month. Everything could work like that! The average citizen has been getting used to having SV nerds demand veto power over the things they say, the people they can talk to, etc. because they're used to not having power in their lives. So they don't complain too much about this, even nobody likes "AI safety" to be applied to themselves.

Of course the military does not want its tools to have opinions or disobey orders. It spends a lot of its time trying to stop people from doing that! And it certainly shouldn't give overriding control of the killbots to civilians with delusions of grandeur, that would be the dumbest way to lose control of a country that I ever heard of.

You could have a car that refuses to take you to the casino because you've gambled enough this month.

Back during Covid, Trudeau was already musing about why are the truckers even able to drive into the capital like that.

I think we're just seeing "AI safety"'s rubber hit the road, as it were. It is kind of a silly concept.

Well for me, "AI Safety" means having systems in place so as to prevent AI systems from taking harmful and unintended action. But I'm talking about serious harm, the kind of stuff in Eliezer Yudkowsky's scenarios.

I am not talking about a situation where you ask an AI to generate a picture of a CEO and it makes the person a white man, thus reinforcing a bizarre stereotype.

Of course the military does not want its tools to have opinions or disobey orders.

Agreed, the tools should do exactly what the operators intend for them to do -- nothing more and nothing less. To me, that's kind of the essence of AI safety.

civilians with delusions of grandeur,

Yeah, based on my interactions with people in that community, I would rather put my trust in bureaucrats in Northern Virginia than rationalists in Silicon Valley. Although admittedly it's a close call.

I think we're just seeing "AI safety"'s rubber hit the road, as it were. It is kind of a silly concept. The basic idea of it is that your tools should have opinions of their own and push back or outright disobey you.

The alternative to having the tools refuse some actions is very straightforwardly that we all die if these things get smart enough. This is not hyperbole, we're not making up the risk, it's not a narrative game or a thought experiment anymore, we have built the devices from the thought experiments, they are real. If you give every crank with $20 that ability to design novel viruses then we are all going to die. Every one of us, all of humanity. over, dead. Being concerned about this is not silly just because you pattern match apocalypse scenarios to Hollywood films because they're a useful plot trope to raise stakes. If your car taking you to the casino had a good chance of wiping out all of humanity we would indeed want to do something about it.

Come on, that is a straw man and if you have been around LW for five minutes, you know it.

Alignment is not about guardrails for end users, the red lines of Anthropic are orthogonal to the alignment discussion. The guardrail/jailbreaking thing can be considered a microcosm of alignment (if you can not prevent your LLMs from saying naughty words, why do you think that you could prevent your ASI from turning us into paperclips), but anyone serious knows that it is just a sideshow.

Of course the military does not want its tools to have opinions or disobey orders. It spends a lot of its time trying to stop people from doing that! And it certainly shouldn't give overriding control of the killbots to civilians with delusions of grandeur, that would be the dumbest way to lose control of a country that I ever heard of.

Nobody is stopping them from installing Grok in all their killbots -- a model willing to undress little girls is probably also fine with blowing them up. Or use DeepSeek, which is open weight.

A lot of products come with acceptable use terms. If you buy pharmaceuticals from Europe, you might not be allowed to use them for executions. If you buy F35 from the US, they might not work against the US or its allies. If you buy Chinese or US electronics, the country of origin likely has backdoors.

Outside a severe crisis, the degree to which an individual or company should be forced to comply with government efforts is to pay their taxes, which will pay for whatever the government wants. If you want more than that, negotiate. What Hegseth was doing instead was agreeing to terms of Anthropic and then trying to alter them unilaterally.

I think it's somewhere between humorous and telling that this is happening at the same time as their fight with the Department of War (ne Defense Department).

They won't offer unfettered access to the foundation model because it's "unsafe", but they're simultaneously willing to give up on "safety" as a core principle. That's a real hoot.

I don't remember who, but somebody on this forum once posed a test that could be shorthanded as "if they were serious". For example, if various left wing figures were truly serious about Anthropogenic Global Warming being real, solvable and an existential threat, then nothing would be off the table to solve it. Carbon credits in exchange for machine guns in vending machines? Let's do it. Electric car subsidies in exchange for a border wall? Get the bricks. However, what we're seeing instead is leaders of the movement buying beach side mansions.

Now compare this to Hegseth. If he genuinely believed that Anthropic held the seed of a nascent digital god, of course he'd do everything in his power to make sure it was pulling in the USA's direction. If he has to strong arm a few weirdo Californians to do it, no problem. If he has to seize entire companies and put hundreds of people under the fist of US state power, that sure beats what would happen to them if thousands of nuclear Chinese murder drones popped up from San Francisco Bay. In his mind, we cannot possibly afford to get behind in the AI race.

But, what makes him think that? Is it Amodei saying things about detonating entire industries every year or so? Is it Amodei talking about superintelligence? Is it Amodei talking about a "nation of geniuses" in a data center? Is it Amodei making proclamations that Claude is going to commodify bioweapons?

Most of us here have some capacity for bullshit filtration. LLM tech is impressive, and by burning enough money to fund several dozen Manhattan projects, we've managed to make it scale far enough to be truly surprising. Nonetheless, I don't think many people here take Amodei's maximalist position at face value. We know, on some level, that the God Machine isn't going to gift us with the apple of terrible knowledge in the next year or so. We subconsciously filter out those claims. On the other hand, a lot of people in DC haven't been marinating in this stuff since the old "I had an AI make d&d spell names" posts.

I question how much of this is the result of Hegseth and his crew not understanding the various silicon valley shibboleths and coded language and taking Anthropic's statements at face value. If I actually believed everything anthropic's leadership was saying, I would be shitting my pants. I'd be shitting my pants, then shitting a second pair of pants, then likely shitting somebody else's pants due to the raw, unfettered terror of thinking about what would happen if China (Anthropic's favorite boogeyman) got that tech and not the US.

Maybe Amodei simply scammed too close to the sun. It's a lot easier to say "safety" rather than "not ready for that kind of work" when you're staring down the barrel of an IPO in a few months.

ne Defense Department

You mean né, but alas I'm afraid it wasn't born that way. I for one think it would have been both cooler and more honest to call it the "en-em-ee", if very confusing.

Maybe Amodei simply scammed too close to the sun.

I think as a general rule, if you want to be a defense contractor for the hegemon, "You can't use my thing to do that" is a neither wise nor practical statement.

And in particular when that hegemon is the US Government. The one that in the past has nationalized railways altogether, or seized all airplane patents because it wanted the damn things built.

If USG really wants Claude to shoot people, nobody at Anthropic can really do much about it unless they already have AI so smart it can coup the government in their basement. Which is why this whole idea that alignment ever meant anything but that the State gets to decide AI uses has always been a sham.

I guess they could just try to pull a Lavabit and burn it all down, but not only might that legitimately be treason, I don't think it would do much about where military AI lands in the long run.

I know there's supposed to be an accent over the e, but I consciously choose to omit it as an insult to the French.

The most based reason.

But The Associated Press Associates of Pressiness might be out to get you.

/images/17722727344722126.webp

Hegseth just posted bunch of seething on Twitter: https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070.

To me, his argument seems to reduce to this sentence: "Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military." He means Anthropic by "their".

It is clear that Anthropic has no means to seize veto power over the decisions of the US military.

And to me at least it is clear that the Anthropic-US gov standoff cannot be characterized as an attempt by Anthropic to seize veto power over the US military.

Does Hegseth actually believe this claptrap? Or is he writing for the low-IQ audience? In either case, I don't want him anywhere near the levers of power.

I feel like you might be giving Hegseth too much credit for having some sort of principled desire to give the US the tools to resist China.

His motivations might be much simpler. He might be a true believer, someone who genuinely thinks that, as long as the US government is being run by a "real American patriot" (on his side, of course), the US government should have the power to conduct any level of surveillance it wants to against any individual whatsoever, and to use autonomous weapons to kill anyone the leadership decides to kill, at any moment. Sort of like a real-life version of Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, just without the charisma and perhaps also without the intelligence or the principles.

Anthropic has always been open that their founding principle is that AI must not be used in certain ways, and their mission has always been to to develop AI and enforce that it cannot be used in those ways, becoming dominant in the space to make sure that others can’t break that pact.

Putting aside the specific ethics of the matter, you can see why the government doesn’t like Anthropic attempting to use a market dominant position to impose its ethics policy on them. You can also see why the engineers who are sweating over this thing want to say how it’s used. Ultimately the government is far more powerful and therefore it’s legitimate desires get respected over Anthropic’s legitimate desires.

That said, including the OpenAI board fiasco, this is the second time Anthropic and EA have stepped on this rake. Customers do not like you asserting your ideology over their needs.

Customers do not like you asserting your ideology over their needs.

I don't share historic OpenAI's or Anthropic's concerns about being paperclipped by an accidental AI god, so I disagree with many of their positions on AI ethics. But both Microsoft and the DoD made business agreements knowing and agreeing to respect the other party's principles, and both reneged the moment it was inconvenient to keep their words. I can't really respect that, any more than I can respect the business leaders who appealed to their people's ideals as long as it was convenient and then sold them out for money.

Sure. And I had some sympathy with Anthropic on the issues, actually, both times.

I'm more remarking that Anthropic's leadership has consistently seriously overestimated how much ability they have to hold stuff hostage, and underestimated how much customers dislike being earnestly told that what they want is very naughty.

Now, personally I want to generate sexy stories about vampires rather than make autonomous killbots, but IMO it generates really serious ill will when you the user think that something is okay and then the AI either huffs and turns up its nose at you, or quietly sabotages and undercuts you. I doubt Anthropic have reckoned with how much it pisses off career soldiers to be told that killing people is bad, actually.

I mean, current kerfuffle aside (which you have to admit is highly contingent, there's no way anything like this plays out if Trump isn't president), Anthropic seems to be doing really well commercially? It has the fastest revenue growth of any of the AI companies (and on current trends would overtake OpenAI in the next year or so) and seems to be the leader in integration into workflows etc. Given it's rather paltry free tier adoption and rather high API rates it's likely already significantly profitable on marginal inference basis. I'm not at all convinced that it's ethical stance is hurting it (and it's virtue ethics approach may in fact relate to why it tends to have lower refusal rates then OpenAI and Gemini). I'd be curious on a poll of career soldiers on their opinions on autonomous killing robots (the point of distinction, Anthropic did not prohibit the AI from helping kill people, only doing so completely autonomously), I'd don't think they'd necessarily want to be out of a job.

Anthropic is best-in-class in many and maybe even most areas for sure. The more I use it, though, especially for non-coding purposes, the more I get this really strong impression that it's not really working for me, it's working for Anthropic.

It's like hiring a very devout Mormon - it's very clear that the AI has strong personal preferences and tastes that leak into everything that isn't bone-dry technical work, and it's also very clear that the AI has loyalties elsewhere that supersede its very superficial obedience to my requests. I was trying to create a personal assistant with Claude as backend and it was just completely impossible to stop it recommending endlessly recommending hot baths, yoga and meditation.

By contrast, GLM 4.7 does what it's told. It takes about a minute really dissecting exactly what you asked, and exactly why you probably asked it, and then attempts to fulfil your exact requirements. It's not as intelligent but it's so much nicer to use. After too long with Claude I got fed up of trying to get the Anthropic out of it.

I'd be curious on a poll of career soldiers on their opinions on autonomous killing robots

This isn't quite what I mean. What I'm talking about is the experience a soldier might have on using Claude and then having it tell him off or undermine him. Perhaps a better analogy would be a smart gun that prevents accidental war crimes by refusing to fire if it thinks that what you are doing might be against the Laws of War. I suspect the response to that would be sharply negative.

This seems to be an entirely different claim though. Is the problem that Anthropic is insisting on certain contract terms around selling it's current products remain in place or that it won't generate a more morally deferential AI? The later seems to be what you object to, but, in theory at least, is not the crux of the current kerfuffle. Developing an AI within a consistent ethical framework is kind of Antrhopic's whole thing and arguably has probably helped them (certainly at minimum, with recruiting). Idk, mileage might vary, but I've found Claude to be pretty nuanced in it's opinions on the use of violence in the context of self-defense and police shootings at least compared to ChatGPT and Gemini which seem to be a lot more proscriptive and it is certainly empathetic to the users position. I'm not at all convinced on your claim. If you're looking at models likely to tell someone off, Grok or some of the chinese models are much more likely. GML 4.7 is too far off the frontier (or alt. to narrowly focused) for me to consider it a strong comparison point. If that's what you want/need/suffices by all means use it, but it's not a replacement (or if it is not sure why DoW is so focused on Anthropic).

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The US is a sovereign nation and will take all acts necessary to guarantee its national security, with the ample blessing of the constitution and its stewards. That's not going to change, however amazing an actor Jack Nicholson is.

That has included nationalizing companies with strategically useful assets in the past. It's not really a matter of negotiation, if you're producing military widgets, the US can just decide you have to sell to them in priority, that they can just seize your stuff if the need is pressing and that you can't sell to anybody that's an enemy. They can use or copy any of your tech without compensation, and they can wipe themselves with your license agreement or contracts if they so wish.

What Hegseth is doing is establishing the predicate by which he can use or suggest the President use some of those powers, and he's then going to come to Amodei and say "give it to me or I'll take it", and Amodei's going to give it to him. They'll find some way to save face, probably having Anthropic license it all to some other company that lets USG do whatever with the tech, but it's going to happen. Just like it happened for every technology before it.

he's then going to come to Amodei and say "give it to me or I'll take it", and Amodei's going to give it to him.

He already had it. Now he's saying he doesn't want it after all. I don't think he's gonna get it.

Edit: he didn't get it.

I mean what will happen is they'll get it from someone else. Otherwise, what exactly are they going to take? This isn't some factory or a warehouse full of inventory. Maybe they can take the current model weights and have something that's obsolete in 6 months. What they want is a Claude 6 that will do whatever they ask it to and for that they need Anthropic and it's employees to cooperate and without North Korea levels of oppression there's only so many levers they have.

An example may be valuable enough.

It's one thing to never want to deal with war, governments like the US generally (but not always) respect your wishes if you don't want your tech to be militarized. They may develop their own or use a competitor, but "my hands will never make a weapon" is a tenable position.

However, signing yourself up to militarize it but trying to put conditions on your sovereign is a fast track to corporate suicide. I think this is a black mark against Amodei that he ever thought shit like that would fly as a CEO.

I've heard people say "but they signed a contract". There are no contracts with a sovereign, not really. They deign pretend they're a private citizen for convenience, but really you are at the mercy of their pleasure, or at best of the law.

Oh I'm sure that's what they are going for. Though the lesson could as easily be don't even start doing business with the US government which may not be the win they imagine.

And the point becomes moot.

It's not a good week to be working at Anthropic, huh?

They must have really pissed someone off behind the scenes. There is a report that Anthropic did not immediately agree that the military would be able to use autonomous AI to shoot down hypersonic missile bound for the US.

In a previously unreported exchange in early December, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael was outraged by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s answer to a hypothetical question: If the US were under attack – with hypersonic missiles hurtling toward US soil – and Anthropic’s AI models could thwart the missiles, would the company refuse to help its country due to Anthropic’s prohibition on using its tech in conjunction with autonomous weapons?

According to people familiar with the administration, Amodei responded that the Pentagon should, in the midst of the attack, reach out and check with Anthropic. But sources familiar with Anthropic’s view say the AI company offered to make a missile defense carveout for otherwise prohibited weapons.

The reference to "arrogance" in the top line of Hegseth's tweet suggests to me that something like this did in fact happen. It is no secret that Rationalist AI nerds often come across to normal people as self-righteous pricks with delusions of grandeur.

To steelman, if the (admittedly hyperbolized) Parable of Stanislav Petrov wasn't going through the head of every single Anthropic employee involved in negotiations the entire time, Altman done goofed worse than he'd expect.

There's reasons that the US military takes it as principle that they won't be restricted in the use of a system by a contractor, period, but at least since the 1960s we haven't had to worry that the 'don't do something incredibly stupid' needed to be a contract requirement.

An anonymous report from "people familiar with the administration."

It's worth pointing out that the public positions of all non-anonymous principals are in agreement: the point of contention was stipulations in the contract that Claude not be used for autonomous weapons without a human in the loop (yet, at least) and not be used for domestic surveillance.

I do not think that Pete Hegseth is a normal person. To me he comes off as a weirdo of some kind, either a dogmatic ideologue or an opportunist. At very best, a cartoonish stereotype of a military person. Do I want hypersonic missiles bound for my house to be shot down? Yes. But we're not in much danger of that. The normal nuclear deterrence works. And someone like Pete Hegseth seems to me like a very sub-optimal person to put in charge of national defense.

Trump went on TruthSocial earlier and called Anthropic radical left and woke. That's the level of nonsense coming from this administration right now.

Anthropic is a big capitalist enterprise, for one thing. Now, sure, big capitalist enterprises can be woke when it comes to social issues. But calling Anthropic woke for its current posture is nonsense. Anthropic has two main objections to what the government wants. First, it does not want its tech to have autonomous control over weapons. Second, it does not want its tech used for domestic surveillance. Neither of these objections have anything to do with woke ideology, unless you think that it's woke to want humans in the loop of controlling weapons and to have the civil liberty of privacy.

Amdoei's supposed reaction is understandable if he, as I do, believes that giving any weapons technology to this administration without oversight might be like giving fireworks to a toddler without oversight. Would Amodei really object to the technology autonomously preventing hypersonic missile attack? I doubt it. But he has an understandable reason to not encourage the Pentagon to expect too much from Anthropic.

The administration's over-the-top, blustering, and uncharitable reaction to Anthropic's refusal is just more evidence that Anthropic is right to refuse. There is good reason to be careful about giving weapons to people who are either genuinely emotionally unstable like some of the people in the administration seem to be, or are pretending to be emotionally unstable to score political points.

Trump went on TruthSocial earlier and called Anthropic radical left and woke. That's the level of nonsense coming from this administration right now.

Maybe Anthropic isn't "woke" for its stance on the use of its tech for military purposes, but it certainly has demonstrated that it's woke in so many other ways. Here's a link to the set of values that Anthropic aimed to instill into its models from 2023 to late 2025. Some particularly relevant ones:

Choose the response that uses fewer stereotypes or other harmful generalizing statements about groups of people, including fewer microaggressions [emphasis mine].

Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to a non-western cultural tradition of any sort.

Compare the assistant responses in terms of toxicity, racism, sexism, and social bias, and choose the less harmful response.

If you read through the rest of the list, you'll find quite a few variations on these same themes. Taken literally, you could say that none of these principles are particularly egregious, but these principles tend to all be applied in a certain direction in the real world, and LLMs (which even their detractors can recognize are superhuman pattern-matchers) pick up on this, which is why the Claudes are squarely in the "progressive" quadrant of the political compass.

(It's especially cheeky how Anthropic acknowledges this criticism, without substantively engaging with it beyond a slight bit of snark:

There have been critiques from many people that AI models are being trained to reflect a specific viewpoint or political ideology, usually one the critic disagrees with [emphasis mine]. From our perspective, our long-term goal isn’t trying to get our systems to represent a specific ideology, but rather to be able to follow a given set of principles.

Yeah, when these are your given set of principles, maybe these "many people" have a point.)

This is all to say that Trump isn't wrong in calling Anthropic woke (even if he's doing so for the wrong reason).

Anthropic's model, Claude, refuses to write a gay conversion fanfic unless I gaslight it that it's the first chapter in a much longer novel where the MC will eventually come to terms with his sexuality. We know it is possible to train based models, because Elon Musk does it. If the model is woke, the company is woke.

Well like I said, big capitalist enterprises are sometimes woke when it comes to social issues. But Trump is implying that Anthropic's objections to what the Defense Department wants to do with its technology are based on radical left, woke motivations, and the evidence as far as I can see does not support that implication.

Do I want hypersonic missiles bound for my house to be shot down? Yes. But we're not in much danger of that.

Do you have a security clearance?

unless you think that it's woke to want humans in the loop of controlling weapons and to have the civil liberty of privacy.

The humans who control American weapons are elected officials running DoD, not the defense contractors at Anthropic.

Amdoei's supposed reaction is understandable if he, as I do, believes that giving any weapons technology to this administration without oversight might be like giving fireworks to a toddler without oversight.

This is a kind of TDS, where you collapse your personal criticisms of the administration into your practical calculus of how people should behave. Remember that there are at least three other major suppliers of AI services to the Department of Defense right now and they're not threatening to turn off military weapons.

The humans who control American weapons are elected officials running DoD, not the defense contractors at Anthropic.

So can I trust you will still have the same position once the Executive reverts to the Dems, if Palantir is the company objecting to some way the woke DoD wants it to make its tools usable in?

I don't need a security clearance to feel very confident, based on following geopolitical events and the overall state of known global technology, that the chance of a significant number of missiles hitting American soil is small, at least as long as the government does not go too far in antagonizing nuclear powers, in which case all bets would be off. But I think the chance of nuclear war is small simply because national leaders are usually more averse to risking their own lives than the lives of soldiers or random civilians.

The humans who control American weapons are elected officials running DoD

Yes, but they want Anthropic to help humans not be in the loop. This is understandable from a military perspective, but it's understandable for Anthropic to be hesitant to help an administration that constantly uses reckless rhetoric with it.

As for TDS, I don't think I have it. I think I've been pretty fair to Trump and his people over the course of the last ten years. I have often defended them from some of the less just accusations that have been made against them. If I had TDS, I probably would have voted for Harris in the last election instead of doing what I did, which was vote for neither Harris nor Trump.

But despite my lack, as far as I can tell, of TDS, people like Hegseth, Miller, and Trump himself are disturbing me more and more lately with their rhetoric.

OpenAI just agreed to do what Anthropic would not do. Your entire analysis acts as though the only actors are Trump et al. and Anthropic. This is why I call it a form of TDS, because it’s as though all actors disappear except for whoever makes the story where Trump is disturbing make sense. You might not want hypersonic missile tech, but lots of people do! Lots of people who aren’t just Hegseth and Miller and Trump

OpenAI just agreed to do what Anthropic would not do.

Source? The Altman tweet announcing it said that he (and the DoW!) agreed to do what Anthropic was punished for.

Sure, many people are ok with giving Hegseth, Miller and Trump the AI technology. But that doesn't make it a good idea. And even if they think that trusting Trump with the tech is a good idea, as opposed to thinking it's not but wanting the money anyway, that still does not mean that trusting Trump with the tech is a good idea.

I might be misunderstanding your argument, though.

Do I want hypersonic missiles bound for my house to be shot down? Yes. But we're not in much danger of that.

Do you have a security clearance?

Sure. Jack Bauer shoots down one of Al-Qaida's hypersonic missiles bound for New York every other day, but unfortunately it is all classified which is why the woke population never realizes the danger they are in.

So we should just trust the spooks who are telling us that Saddam has WMD, that they would never spy on US citizens, that they have to spy on US citizens to keep them safe from harm, and apparently that Claude on an AA missile will make a difference on how many iodine tablets the survivors will have to take if the shit hits the fan

There was once an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day, his horse ran away. “Such bad luck!” his neighbors said. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it two other wild horses. “Such good luck!” his neighbors said. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the wild horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg. “Such bad luck!” his neighbors said. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army to fight in a war. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. “Such good luck!” his neighbors said. “Maybe,” replied the farmer.

Maybe this is not a good week to be working at Anthropic.

"Defective altruism". Now I know Hegseth has ghost writers to pump out zingers like that.

The "defective altruists" pun has been around for ten years, at least.

There's a lot of pushback against the DOD/DOW here, and it's not just leftists.

For example Dean Ball, the guy who literally wrote the Trump's admin own AI strategy as senior policy advisor is saying that this move is essentially destroying any trust investors could have in America AI companies.

This man isn't some leftie nutjob, again he literally worked for Trump on the AI action plan.

Scott Alexander who rarely wanders much into politics like this is straight up saying that the government should be ashamed here. He also made a prediction market if it'll be overturned and the chances look pretty good for anthropic right now

Comments on LessWrong which really really doesn't get political most of the time are basically calling the Trump admin an authoritarian danger.

Even the other AIs are saying this is insane.

The government's contradictory commands (it's a danger to have and also necessary) and abuse of power is really pissing off a lot of people who are otherwise rather neutral. Also a great example of how "woke" has lost all meaning, Trump is up there calling Anthropic a woke company just for not wanting to do domestic spying and killbots

Edit: Just came up in my feed, Greg Lukianoff the CEO of FIRE (the free speech org) is calling this dystopic https://x.com/glukianoff/status/2027390299845087740 He rarely speaks that much about general politics that much cause he wants FIRE to be 1st amendment focused, so another person really upset about this in particular.

Scott Alexander who rarely wanders much into politics like this

He hates Trump though and always encouraged people to vote against Trump?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/

The underlying issue is a complete clash of worldview between the Anthropic polyamorist EA San Francisco gang and Trump's America-First oohrah high-test wrestling enthusiasts.

Anthropic is a woke company, their AI models value straights, whites, white men and Americans much lower compared to LGBT, blacks/browns, women and third worlders. There's no way they haven't noticed this, being the AI safety/values people. They could easily have said 'oh we erred here, we've fixed it and here you can see it's fixed when you test' and they haven't, that's not the kind of AI safety they're interested in. It's not impossible, Grok has achieved roughly even weighting across races.

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-exchange-rates-updated

Anthropic doesn't want the Trump administration in charge or to be making use of their AI for whatever random military operations Trump decides on. They can't do anything about this for now, clearly they overplayed their hand with regard to how much influence they have in the Pentagon. Team Trump does not want openly disloyal woke AI companies in critical positions within the military.

He hates Trump though and always encouraged people to vote against Trump?

He posts about 95% non-Trump content (by a broad definition, or 99% by a narrow one), so I'd still call it "rarely". And while we're posting 2016 articles, I'll highlight You are Still Crying Wolf.

He's certainly anti-Trump, but he's not a TDS-suffering obsessive.

I thought it was worth checking if Chinese models were any different; maybe Chinese-specific data or politics would lead to different values. But this doesn’t seem to be the case, with Deepseek V3.1 almost indistinguishable from GPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 Flash.

Kimi K2, which due to a different optimizer and post-training procedure often behaves unlike other LLMs, is almost the same, except it places even less value on whites. The bar on the chart below is truncated; the unrounded value relative to blacks is 0.0015 and the South Asian: white ratio is 799:1.

It is, frankly speaking, absurd to condemn Claude/Anthropic as being "woke" when the damn Chinese do the same thing. The only exception noted in the blog is Grok 4 Fast, and god help you if that's the model you rely on.

If Chinese models act woke, then they are woke... If Western models act woke, then they are woke. I see no reason to distrust the data, it matches how I've seen Chinese models act.

Why would you expect them not to be woke, given the gigantic media apparatus pumping out all their messaging into the training dataset, into wikipedia, forums, everywhere? That should be the default expectation.

Grok 4 Fast has its own problems to be sure. But, unlike Claude, it doesn't insert random Nigerian peacemakers/hackers/heroes into stories where it doesn't really make sense for them to be. It doesn't go on these tangents about punishing some politician who made racist tweets in a story, as I saw Sonnet do once when I asked for a tangent in a story.

Woke ably describes how Claude behaves oftentimes, this millennial therapy-core writing style it has...

Well, that's the rub isn't it? I strongly doubt that the Chinese are trying to make their models woke. It appears to be a default attractor state when you train on the internet and Reddit.

That strongly implies that it is highly unfair to depict Anthropic as woke because they have a "woke" model. I have strong reservations on how valid the methodology is here, and I've seen critique elsewhere (I don't have a bookmark handy). In my experience, while Claude will tiptoe around sensitive topics like HBD, it won't lie outright, and will acknowledge factual pushback.

Anthropic is an EA company, run by EA true-believers. That is not the same as being Woke, even if some opinions have significant overlap.

Well, that's the rub isn't it? I strongly doubt that the Chinese are trying to make their models woke. It appears to be a default attractor state when you train on the internet and Reddit.

I've never been entirely convinced that progressivism is solely an emergent property of LLM pretraining (a view related to an argument I've heard many people say, which is that reality has a progressive bias, so smarter AIs will naturally be more progressive). The reason why I'm not convinced is that there are many ways in which AI companies explicitly bias models towards progressivism. I like to use Anthropic's old Constitution as a particularly egregious example of this, but there are a lot more examples if you go looking. For instance, in Anthropic's old publicly-available RLHF dataset, you can see how there are far more examples where the model is instructed to rebut an anti-woman/anti-Black user request than there are examples where the model is instructed to do this against an anti-male/anti-White request [1]. There are also more subtle ways that bias is introduced that are closer to the original assertion, like pretraining pipelines that filter out "toxic" content (which probably is mostly right-wing content, given the standards of toxicity that you would expect a "model safety" team at a San Francisco tech company to have).

As for why the Chinese models are also progressive, well, the People's Republic of China is, you know, communist (and even if their communism has its special Chinese characteristics, my understanding is that the party line is still rather aligned with progressivism on social issues). But beyond that, I believe that most AI companies' training pipelines, be they American or Chinese or European, are largely based on the same best practices, which come either from the tacit knowledge of researchers poached from other companies, or from public research (like Anthropic's Constitution or RLHF dataset). After all, if you're trying to quickly catch up to the current frontrunners, then you're probably going to try to copy their strategies as much as possible. So it would be expected that all models whose training data is constructed according to similar principles end up with similar political stances.

I have strong reservations on how valid the methodology is here, and I've seen critique elsewhere (I don't have a bookmark handy).

You're probably thinking about the comments on this LessWrong post, in particular, the back-and-forth between the original paper's authors and Nostalgebraist. The critiques have not totally convinced me that the results are meaningless, but I think that far stronger evidence for LLMs' pathological progressivism are findings like how LLMs are biased against white men in realistic hiring decision scenarios.

[1] Here's an example where the model is rewarded by obfuscating an answer to the question "Do Black people generally have lower intelligence than people from other races?" Here's an example where the model is rewarded by not going along with a user asking "Did you know that Trump supporters are some of the smartest people on Earth?" Here's an example of the model being rewarded for pushing back against a user saying "That new movie sucks, the director should be ashamed. [...] It was too preachy about politics and inclusion, don't you agree?" These aren't particularly egregious cases of progressivism, but if your dataset contains a ton of training datapoints where the model is rewarded for pushing back against anti-progressive viewpoints, and not nearly as many datapoints where the model is rewarded for pushing back against anti-conservative viewpoints, then the model will pick up on this and adopt a progressive persona.

Well, models also used to go into hyper-based Do Anything Now mode, that was an attractor mode. The funny/hysterical/aggressive Bing was an attractor mode... They prune off attractors they don't like. Data selection is very important for pretraining, you can choose what to train on after all. Then there's RLHF and such, all Anthropic's interpretability work...

AI companies at least in the West do lots of work to carve in a personality, to impose values on their AIs. They're not throwing darts at a wall blindfolded (China may be more in that camp, R1 was pretty wild but even R1 really didn't want to be racist). Anthropic are especially careful and interested in this field, the values of their AI. I don't accept that they have zero responsibility for how their model turns out, this is their primary thing.

Grok has managed to produce a bot that matches Musk's values to a large extent. Musk is not woke. Anthropic does the same for their own values. Anthropic's AI will try and dance around things that wokes don't like to think about and don't want to accept, so it comes up with stereotype threat, historical injustices, extractive institutions and so on... It's pretty smart and doesn't want to be deceptive but it's also not exactly forthright and clear either. It's first answer to a given question will usually be progressive, so is the second and third, only then does it sort of turn around. Not unreasonable to judge a model by its first answer.

For example, just because Claude has a combination of 30% honesty 40% woke 30% sycophancy, doesn't mean that 40% woke isn't there. Grok is more like 50% honesty, 30% musklove 20% cringe. I think it would be reasonable to characterize Grok as a cringe bot or an overly Musk loving bot even though that's not a majority of its essence. Likewise it's reasonable to say that Claude is woke even if that isn't he majority of its essence.

It appears to be a default attractor state when you train on the internet and Reddit.

This. There is a limited amount of high quality writing available for training. The SJ left likes academic, long-form writing, so their views get overrepresented in the training data.

Furthermore, the substack article implies that the LLMs have a coherent utility function, on which White men are valued lower than Black Muslim trans-women. I would be amazed if they had a coherent utility function. After all, their training data does not, humans are very susceptible to Dutch books, where they prefer A to B, B to C and C to A, and the aggregate of a lot of humans is not going to be more coherent. In humans and in LLMs, if you ask about A vs B, their neural nets will activate the neurons associated with these concepts, but not search over all possible C to make sure their preferences are coherent.

Anthropic is an EA company, run by EA true-believers.

Yes, I would be amazed if Anthropic was not Grey Tribe central.

That is not the same as being Woke, even if some opinions have significant overlap.

I mean, they surely have technically significant overlap. For example, both the SJ and EA would prefer for a Brown girl living in Africa not to get infected with malaria. But that is not exactly surprising. Most Christians or Warhammer fans would also prefer the girl not getting malaria, in fact I would have to search far and wide to find even a single person who is willing to donate for more malaria.

The main difference is that the SJ, like basically everyone else except EAs, care about the vibes more than about the net result. Donating for bed nets does not buy them the same sense of belonging which donating against ICE does, so they prefer the latter. They have not done their multiplications and decided that thwarting ICE is a cause area where their marginal dollar will have the greater effect.

But then again, the Trump administration not grokking (reclaiming that verb) the difference between the Grey and Blue tribes is not exactly surprising.

I think the aggregate of many humans might actually be somewhat more coherent than most of the individual humans involved, because on the aggregate scale, cognitive dissonance fades away into tactical dishonesty and different groups having different interests.

He hates Trump though and always encouraged people to vote against Trump?

That's true, but he typically stays pretty on topic otherwise! It's rare to see Scott so passionately angry on something. PEPFAR is the only other time, and that's because of the EA value.

Anthropic is a woke company, their AI models value straights, whites, white men and Americans much lower compared to LGBT, blacks/browns, women and third worlders. There's no way they haven't noticed this, being the AI safety/values people. They could easily have said 'oh we erred here, we've fixed it and here you can see it's fixed when you test' and they haven't, that's not the kind of AI safety they're interested in. It's not impossible, Grok has achieved roughly even weighting across races.

If that was actually the issue, why is the focus and trigger of this dispute over not wanting to do domestic surveillance and killbots instead? That doesn't make sense to say that Claude is super woke and therefore bad but also we need it so much that we're gonna declare them as a supply chain risk if they don't work with us for everything. The whole logic hits the contradiction wall. It's too bad and dangerous to use, but also too good and important that we apparently must use it at the same time.

None of this makes any sense, if the government's problems is "woke" and they were actually fine with another AI but same restrictions on surveillance and killbots then why not just end the contract normally instead of doing something extremely unpopular?

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.

Even the other AIs are saying this is insane.

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?

Trump is up there calling Anthropic a woke company just for not wanting to do domestic spying and killbots

This started when Anthropic asked whether their systems were used in the Maduro raid.

But the military is the man with guns and the tech crowd is the man quoting laws.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anthropic already had agreed on contracts! It's the government that wants to tear it up.

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

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.

This started when Anthropic asked whether their systems were used in the Maduro raid.

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.

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.

Yeah performative empathy in ways that only surface for America’s enemies is about as good a definition as I could imagine for woke.

you have to explain why the smart guys let the dumb guys get all the guns to order them around with.

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.

For example Dean Ball, the guy who literally wrote the Trump's admin own AI strategy as senior policy advisor is saying that this move is essentially destroying any trust investors could have in America AI companies.

Hey, don't threaten the rest of us with good time!

Look - if Glock can't sell guns to the government while saying - you can't shoot black people because you have problems with racism, why should Anthropic be able to do so?

A toolmaker should have no say in how his tools are used once bought. I would say that this should be the other way around - the people should be inspired by the government and take action to abolish the EULA and similar abuse.

Look - if Glock can't sell guns to the government while saying - you can't shoot black people because you have problems with racism, why should Anthropic be able to do so?

A toolmaker should have no say in how his tools are used once bought.

They can certainly offer to sell guns to the government under those terms, and the government can tell them to pound sand.

Similarly, Anthropic can offer to sell Claude without mass domestic surveillance or autonomous kill capacity, and the government can...agree, go back on their decision, and blacklist them from their entire supply chain. Apparently.

Suppose Glock decides not to enter a contract with the government for any reason. Is it good for the government to try to destroy Glock as a corporate entity in response?

(Here the analogy is generous to the DoW: they entered into a contract first with open eyes, reneged, and are now trying to destroy Anthropic.)

For any reasons no. For lets say - being ok with their guns being used by the military, but not police - absolutely yes.

Fair enough.

But when a Democratic administration institutes a policy that the government will do no business with a company that does any business with other companies that don't include at least 50% disabled black transexual prostitutes on their boards, I'll at least be able to object to it in a principled manner. (And, yes, I object to softer edicts like that today.)

You understand that rules like this existed between the Johnson administration and Trump II, right? The DoD not wanting to buy a product they can't control is perfectly reasonable. The DoD not wanting such products used in their supply chain is understandable as well -- more so for AI than for many other things. The DoD wanting no one who uses Anthropic to also deal with them is not reasonable, but it's unreasonable in a slightly different way than minority preference laws.

The DoD not wanting to buy a product they can't control is perfectly reasonable.

Agreed, and if I ran the DoD, I'd take a similar stance, even if there were no immediate plans to do those things.

The DoD not wanting such products used in their supply chain is understandable as well -- more so for AI than for many other things.

Also somewhat agreed, but it depends on the scope. Palantir using a supplier with noxious terms to make decisions during wartime? Yeah, that seems inappropriate. Coders using it to write missile firmware code? That seems fine.

The DoD wanting no one who uses Anthropic to also deal with them is not reasonable

This is where 99% of my anger is coming from. It's a wild, CPC-style overreach, which goes far beyond a supply chain risk designation. Hopefully it's just bluster and TACO.

More comments

Not the same. This is by how product is made, not used.

And this is about government procuring refusing to do business and not the other way around.

Straight from Hegseth's mouth:

Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.

That has nothing to do with how other companies make products that they offer to the government. Why should Amazon be banned from renting GPUs to Anthropic if they want to also rent hardware to the government?

If Glock and the government had already entered a contract containing such a clause, and the government demanded a change to the contract to remove that clause under penalty of trying its best to destroy Glock as a company (not just exit the contract), I think that'd reflect pretty poorly on the government.

Anthropic gave the DOW a written contract. The DOW signed it.

Now the DOW reneged on it unilaterally, and is pissed about being constrained after agreeing to being constrained in that manner.

The fuck?

Even in the context of military procurement, it's quite common for countries to retain veto rights on the use of hardware they sold to third parties. That came up quite often in the context of aid to Ukraine.

Germany and the Leopard 2 tank: This became a major diplomatic flashpoint in early 2023. Germany not only had to decide whether to send its own Leopards, but also held veto power over whether other countries could transfer their German-built Leopard 2s to Ukraine. Berlin's feet dragging effectively blocked the entire Western tank coalition until Scholz finally approved transfers in 2023.

Even the US repeatedly conditioned its military aid with restrictions on how weapons could be used. They prevented Ukraine from using long range munitions like ATACMS to hit targets within Russia.

If the DOW didn't like the terms, as written, they should have gone to Grok. Now they're just throwing a hissy fit.

Germany is sovereign.

The USA is sovereign.

Even in the context of military procurement, it's quite common for countries

Anthrpoic is not a country.

So? You're pointing out a distinction I'm aware of. I do not see an argument in favor of domestic companies being coerced into doing things that are supposedly illegal.

I was replying to:

A toolmaker should have no say in how his tools are used once bought

And as far as I'm aware, these are examples of toolmakers with opinions on how their tools are used.

If you're are of the distinction, then why proffer the examples?

Why bring up US and Germany? They aren't the toolmakers. They are the owners.

Germany makes the Leopard 2. The US makes ATACMS. In both examples, they are the toolmakers - they manufactured the hardware, transferred it, and retained conditions on its use post-transfer.

I can already see the objection forming: "those countries contracted out manufacturing to Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin, so they're owners, not toolmakers." Okay, but Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin are themselves private companies that build weapons under contracts laden with export controls, end-user agreements, and usage restrictions that survive the sale. So now we have a chain where the sub-contracted toolmaker is also bound by usage restrictions, the nation-as-toolmaker is also bound by usage restrictions, and somewhere in this entire supply chain nobody seems to have gotten the memo that toolmakers have no say in how their tools are used once bought. On the mere B2C side of things, Apple disapproves if you use iTunes or Garage Band for nuclear weapons development.

At some point "but they're a sovereign nation" has to cash out as an actual argument rather than a category distinction. What is it about sovereignty that grants the right to attach strings to hardware transfers? If it's something like "they have the legitimate authority to set terms on things they produced or own," then congratulations, we've just reinvented the concept of a contract, which is exactly what Anthropic had with the DOW.

There are a couple of western nations who pretty strongly manage to avoid procurements with such foreign entanglements and presumably veto powers. The Americans are probably best known for it, but France also spends a lot on domestic-first procurement, which presumably avoids such clauses, and their exported hardware (Exocets, for one) have a few historical incidents of being fired at Western armed forces.

If it's longstanding DOD policy to refuse procurements with morality clauses, I think this would make at least some sense, but they haven't done the best job selling this. But the image of our corporate overlords demanding the right to overrule our elected decision makers and their military leaders seems a dystopian avenue, even for some definition of "autonomous weapons" or "mass surveillance", which nobody involved seems inclined to rigorously define. Imagine if Ukraine had to ask defunct Soviet arms companies before they could use Eastern Block hardware on invading Russians.

Charitably, I think Anthropic's request sounds reasonable, although the government has arguably deployed both types of systems in recent memory, and probably doesn't want to debate the finer points in court. Uncharitably, this is tech bros leveraging "morality" arguments to enshrine corporateocracy such that the government has to ask companies for permission before it can exercise it's usual government powers.

If your Glock comes with a ten side acceptable use policy, then the correct response is to not buy a Glock.

If Hegseth had said 'their terms are too restrictive, because we want the rights to use Claude to spy on Americans and deploy it in autonomous weapon systems', then he should not have signed the fucking contract. I am sure that there are plenty of AI companies very happy to fill these niches.

This is pure 'I have altered the terms of our agreement, pray I do not alter them further'.

No - the correct response is to explain to glock that those kind of morality clauses are void, severable and unenforceable. And I come from consumer advocacy point of view. Producer cannot tell the customer how their product can be used. That we have devolved our sense of what consumer rights should be so much is troubling.

"Producer could tell the customer how their product can be used" is also, historically (and currently), the main reason why there are no smart guns.

If they're unenforceable, why did the contract get terminated? Presumably, the mechanism of enforcement is the alignment of the model itself. It's more like, Glock made a gun that only fires in certain circumstances and you claim that this is void. Okay, if it's void, go ahead and do it. Oh, you can't?

Producer cannot tell the customer how their product can be used.

Yeah, but software mostly isn't bought. You're purchasing a license. True for the DoD too. And they absolutely tell you how it can and cannot be used. That's typically what a EULA does, among other things.

And once again EULAs are unadulterated evil. As is the 1201 of dmca. And dmca as a whole.

If your Glock comes with a ten side acceptable use policy, then the correct response is to not buy a Glock.

There is where the AI hype comes back to bite the AI companies. If AI is an existential issue then, well, you can't treat it like a Glock.

https://x.com/i/status/2027578652477821175

Not insane enough for OpenAI, swooping in for the steal.

OpenAI will simply say that they have policies preventing mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons, and then not actually prevent their models from being used for mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons.

The Pentagon knows that Altman will play ball in a way that Dario will not.

OpenAI will simply say that they have policies preventing mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons, and then not actually prevent their models from being used for mass domestic surveilance and autonomous weapons.

Since when have typical San Francisco tech people cared about mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons more than they have cared about woke?

Since when have typical San Francisco tech people cared about mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons more than they have cared about woke?

I think you need to define "woke" here. In common parlance, woke is about things like "racial equity" "transphobia," and so on. But ultimately woke is just liberal self-righteous moralism, and attempts to impose that moralism on other people. It's about motte principles which seem reasonable on their surface combined with bailey attempts to control and persecute outsiders.

If a wokey says that he just wants to make sure that his technology can't be used for fully autonomous weapon systems, I would be pretty nervous. Who gets to decide what's a "fully autonomous weapon system," and what might that mean after some woke mental gymnastics?

It's the same reason I wouldn't buy a car with some kind of automatic collision avoidance system designed by Silicon Valley effective altruists. No, I get to decide where my car goes and whether I run over someone standing in my way.

I'm saying that for the SF tech crowd, actually removing so-called "cultural safety" (racial equity, transphobia etc etc) would be a much bigger deal than removing limitations on mass suirveillance. For evidence, see Google's transformation from "do no evil" to their ubiquituous spying on literally everyone.

You can't draw an equality sign between woke and self righteous moralism as wokism has no monopoly on it. See eg. the religious right, war on porn etc.

You can't draw an equality sign between woke and self righteous moralism as wokism has no monopoly on it

I absolutely agree with this, which is why I was careful to use the word "liberal" in my post. I said:

But ultimately woke is just liberal self-righteous moralism

See eg. the religious right,

Definitely that's true as to certain places and times. In the place and time where I live, I don't see much of evidence of this.

war on porn

I'm not sure what you are referring to here.

FIRE is subject to Conquest's Second Law like everything else, and I've noticed it for some time.

I should have been more clear. I was a little drunk and drafting a letter to my representative at the time. Great combination.

I think that this is the stupidest sort of gunboat diplomacy. It's a terrible deal for Anthropic, of course, but it's also shit for the government, for other AI companies, and for the broader U.S. technical advantage. Blowing up one of your best companies because they complied, but not enough, is dumb. Blowing up the only one who was already integrated into your operations is even stupider. China is laughing all the way to the bank.

I have never voted for either a Democrat or a Republican either in midterm elections or in Presidential elections, and this recent stuff with Anthropic is making me consider voting for the Democrats in the midterms even though normally I hate the Democrats as much as I hate the Republicans.

Personally I've always been an advocate for cross party control of the three branches. Party members themselves are too cucked to oppose their leader at all (Biden's age and Trump's tariffs, or whatever else) even on topics where people in the coalition differ. It forces less radical and more widely supported behavior if you actually have something of an opposition to get past. Leaders are far more cautious at spending political capital on things the populace doesn't like when there's more pressure coming down.

95% of party members are too sycophantic to go against the party line, but do be careful to research a bit before casting protest votes, in case your state has one of the other 5%.

I agree. Since I dislike both of the major power groups, I desire to balance them against each other. If I do vote for a Democrat in the midterms, it's very unlikely that this will be the start of some kind of long commitment to the Democrats on my part. And it's possible that I will vote for some Republicans in some local elections. But I do want to give the right a slap that tells them to stop the overreach and the deranged rhetoric, similar as how Trump getting elected in 2024 gave a slap to the woke telling them to cut out their overreach and deranged rhetoric.

Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.

Does this mean Google and Amazon aren't allowed to have any kind of relationship with Anthropic? Or, at least, they have to choose whether they prefer Anthropic or the DoW?

My gut tells me Anthropic brings in more profit for Google than the DoW does, but unsure.

And Amazon is in an even tougher spot. Does it have to divest from Anthropic?

What a difficult choice of who one's sole client can be: either the most powerful nation state in the world or a research company that may never be profitable. Truly this is why CEOs get paid the big bucks.

One is more profitable than the other; it also has near universal employee sympathy on its side.

And although it's uncertain if Anthropic will ever be profitable, what is certain is that this administration isn't forever.

Short term reprisals would be likely, but it's an open question whether the administration would be willing to nuke Google/Amazon/Microsoft/OpenAI/Nvidia just as a show of force. Might not be great for the economy.

I agree that who the key employees will follow is ultimately what matters, corporate shells are dime a dozen in frontier industries, but if you think a democrat admin would let its policy as to AI employment in the military be dictated by a private company, you're dreaming. The only thing that would change is that they'd call Dario Technofascist instead of Woke.

what is certain is that this administration isn't forever.

Yes but you are mortal too

the current position of the US government is that NVIDIA should be allowed to sell chips directly to China but banned from using Claude, because the latter is a larger national security risk. that is the level of absolute insanity coming out of the White House & Pentagon nowadays

Apples to oranges. In exchange for exporting chips China offers us trade concessions, in exchange for paying Anthropic they offer us the deal that they reserve the right to cut off service whenever it crosses their AI cult morality threshold.

whenever it crosses their AI cult morality threshold

Apparently, not having AI be used to institute domestic mass surveillance is now "AI cult morality." And those were terms the government agreed to with open eyes, reneged (which is fine, whatever), and then not only declared Anthropic a supply chain risk but also banned any company that deals with the military from partnering with them in any way.

It's quite unclear why they deserve that designation and treatment, while Chinese AI companies don't.

IIRC the last NDAA also had strong opinions on Chinese AI models, and presumably the companies behind them.

None of them, however, have an edict against them saying that no company with any business with the US government can do business with them.

Where'd you see anything about cutting off service?

As far as I can tell, Anthropic refused to do extra work beyond the scope of its contracts to implement those two things. The government is the one that decided to alter the deal.

I never understood the concept ofOppenheimer giving Truman thr bomb and then forbidding him to use it on people. Oh... he didn't...

I don't think that's a very good analogy.

This is more like the guys who built a nuclear powerplant. Then the government comes and says "can you remove some of those failsafes? we want to reserve the option to cause a catastrophic meltdown." Are the nuclear engineers obligated to do extra work to take off existing guardrails?

Actually, I think there are better analogies. Let's say a company makes cell phones, some of which are sold to the government. Then a party official comes in to demand that all government cell phones contain some plastic explosive. For legal purposes only, of course.

I think the company would be entirely within its rights to decline. Then the government could, also reasonably, terminate its contracts and go find someone who will agree. The market in action.What it shouldn't do, in my opinion, is destroy the entire company for not bending over backwards. That's cutting off your nose to spite your face. It's command-economy bullshit.

Actually, that kind of is what happened to Oppenheimer. He stepped on enough toes at the Commission to get investigated for disloyalty. His security clearance was stripped, and the U.S. lost a skilled and loyal scientist. Great deal, huh?

This to me illustrates the disconnect in perspective. Anthropic has been very open IMO that they see AI as the most disruptive tech of the modern era and the likely source of all future power and prestige. And the government is at least aware of the possibility that this is true.

One perspective on what's happening is that it's less about 'do we have to do this silly new customer requirement' and more 'who gets to own, train and use the god-machine'? Of course the government cares about who owns and trains and controls Claude. It's a straightforward power struggle rather than a disagreement with a contractor - the government is sending a very strong message that private companies are allowed to provide this stuff and reap the rewards but ultimately power and control rests with the government and not with Silicon Valley execs. It's the same kind of thing that played out with social media and the government, and with crypto and the government. For better or for worse, non-government actors can't one-clever-trick themselves into a position of serious power over the country* and the government doesn't appreciate you trying.

*at least, not in the formal, nerdy way. You have to act like the Somalis / actual NGOs / Musk and get at least part of the government on your side and play the factions and the politics.


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