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Robin Hanson wrote an article recently on how his politics have drifted. For those not familiar with his he was one of the early rationalist adjacent that likely filters a lot of people here. As a GMU professor he blogged like the rest of their Econ department and marginal revolution which was much bigger for leading people to SSC. Also early intellectual promoter of prediction markets like in the ‘90s and use to co-blog with Hal Finney.
A few highlights: “ While it is okay to fiercely resist the immediate decline of a cherished value today, like say democracy or gender-equality, 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to help your culture persist, reproduce, and have continued influence centuries into the future.”
“ I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things.”
A lot of comments on cultural drift and risks with that. The second comment strikes me because I feel like I’ve been thinking about those issues a lot lately. And I feel like I too am moving to a political philosophy of common goodism and the other ideas are just means to achieve the good. Perhaps this is just the standard libertarian to fascism pipeline but I do think a lot of people are questioning whether America is still on a workable path. It’s easy to be a liberal-libertarian when society is broadly good/stable but in harder times more pragmatic ideas emerge.
Then he just comments on things everyone else has noticed - parasitic classes in big cities (often unions) just crushing QOL for the non-rich.
I use to read Hanson a lot, but I only read him a few times a year now. Some of his early insights turned out coming true. It’s interesting to me how minds that shared a lot of common thinking patterns end up developing similar conclusions today. Democracy, Liberty, due-process, and immigration were likely things I viewed as very positive a decade ago. Now I would likely consider them unimportant.
Hanson
I dont think these things really fit together. The "common good", at least as understood by the integralists who most talk like this, definitely includes some freedoms. Different ones, and not all of them as deontologically rigid, but it certainly isnt just consequentialism. Nor are the ideas which emerge in hard times generally more pragmatic. There are some specific rather unpragmatic things were doing now, that would stop, but there would also be the romantic and heroic. No atheists in foxholes etc, and youll see this even within historical fascism.
In a way, totalitarianism is an easy next step after liberalism, because you dont need any new ideas. You already know how to pursue the welfare of individuals, and when youre sick of that, you just model the whole state as one individual and pursue its welfare. Humans are not ants, nor should we have been.
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I feel like this understates it, if only a little. Hanson's blog, Overcoming Bias, was originally a group blog by him and Yudkowsky, and the posts that seeded LessWrong came from there. Slate Star Codex was where Scott Alexander put those of his posts that didn't seem appropriate for LessWrong. Then we got /r/slatestarcodex for the users who preferred Reddit as a discussion platform, then /r/themotte when Scott wanted further distance from culture war arguments (or, less charitably to us, from many of our arguers), and finally TheMotte when our mods worried about the subreddit possibly becoming too censored or even banned. "Great-great-great-blog-grandpa" isn't really a close relation, but it's interesting trivia that it's a direct relation.
Hanson's always been the sort of person who will put out half-baked taboo ideas for discussion, for a number of reasons, but I think one of the stronger reasons is that he's got a streak of high-decoupling contrarianism that's both a direct and a close relation to the culture here. There's a certain kind of mind, still probably very over-represented here, who sees "here's why your idea is stupid" as a potentially-friendly-and-helpful source of hopefully-new thoughts but also sees "here's why you can't talk about your idea" the way a bull sees a waving red cape.
I didn’t know Yudkowsky blogged there. So then it’s more of a direct seeding. I never see Hanson talked about here but was aware the marginal revolution blog was basically the right leaning pathway into the community.
Most of the Sequences were originally posted on the old Overcoming Bias blog (the one that was Typepad powered), then later exported to LessWrong (back when it was a reddit clone), and now live on LessWrong 2.0.
For example, here's "When None Dare Urge Restraint" on Overcoming Bias, LessWrong, and LessWrong 2.0.
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The devil is always in the details. Democracy, freedom, and due process are abstract concepts, ending them won’t intrinsically cause any issues. But what concretely do you (or Hanson) propose to replace them, and how? For me, just what is enough for now, because I haven’t heard a good proposal yet.
Personally, I still hold “democracy is the
bestworst government except for all others that have been tried”. I’m not against dictatorship, if the dictator is competent and has a good successor strategy. But who does, and how do you get this person in charge and ensure they’re not overthrown?Likewise, the problem with taking away citizens’ freedom is that what’s done instead isn’t better. Communist governments were ultimately less productive and lost to capitalist ones. We already don’t have total freedom (because that’s impossible), and maybe we need more laws restricting more freedom, for example drug use and being a nuisance in public or to service workers. But what kind of restrictions are you really talking about? Criticizing leaders? Free speech? Then what do we do when leaders start making bad opinions and decisions (since, like everyone, they’re not perfect), going further and further astray like a stalling plane (with no one to correct them, how would they avoid this)?
You may argue we’re already going astray; but there are forums like these, my argument is if opposition was illegal things would degrade faster (and I’m optimistic there will eventually be a course correction in either scenario, but only the latter requires a revolution). You may point to China; but before today’s government, China suffered the “Great Leap Forward” which caused more proportional death than any democratically-caused disaster (at least that I’m aware of); it’s still suffering from centrally-planned failures like its housing; and what do you think will happen when Xi Jinping dies? I think Singapore is the strongest counter-argument; but seeing the War on Drugs and vast difference in culture, I don’t believe America (individualist and expressive) can reach their (collectivist and routine) stable equilibrium, nor any European nation for nation-specific reasons.
Lastly, the illusion of autonomy is important: it makes people happy and complicit, and permits extreme outliers which may be vital. For example, instead of explicitly limiting peoples’ calorie consumption, it would probably be better to just provide free GLP-1s and encourage them via propaganda (in this case outliers probably wouldn’t be vital, but they’d be few enough they’d negligibly affect public resources like healthcare, while appealing to fat enthusiasts). More generally, instead of officially eliminating basic values like democracy to massive resistance, enabling extreme failure modes, why not just manipulate people and use procedural tricks to achieve the same outcomes? I mean, most nations already do that today…
In fact, I speculate a reason people are disillusioned and ironically proposing authoritarian measures is because we live in unofficial creeping authoritarianism. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but especially without a good proposal, it hints that we shouldn’t accelerate into that path.
What if, instead, we propose and start implementing ways to restore unofficial liberty, democracy, and due process? (I threw myself into the immigration storm last week; I won’t suggest what to do here except not deport massive numbers of integrated citizens or decades-long immigrants, because explained in that thread, I doubt it can happen in a democracy with free press that remains a democracy with free press).
Here to deliver my periodic reminder that we do not live in "creeping" authoritarian, the vast majority of countries considered democracies went full totalitarian merely 6 years ago.
This may be a contributor to your specific problem, as again the vast majority of pro-immigration self-described (though I would say they're not) liberals supported this totalitarianism. They provide no explanation of why it's acceptable for the state to lock down everyone including immigrants for the greater good, yet it is unacceptable to deport immigrants for the greater good.
Now, some did oppose this (Hanson included) but even among that subset, vanishingly few were screaming from the rooftops about what was taking place, and treated the enormity of what was happening with the enormity of a response it deserved. And fewer still do.
Or to generalise to something that the average member of the public would find more relatable, governments demonstrated they have the power to just do things, so why can't they just do things about immigration too? Unlimited state power is already out the box. That it's too expensive, too hard, or violates limited government won't be accepted as an answer by the public until there is some sort of reckoning for 2020.
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Somewhere in the last 250 years, freedom became synonymous with democracy. Before the United States, freedom was considered to be attained when you were under the rule of the (relatively autonomous) lordship of one of your countrymen or clan. Tyranny was to be ruled by an outsider, who may set up puppet members of your tribe but whose commands were dictated by the foreigner.
Because democracy became synonymous with freedom, democracy is seen as an end in and of itself. But this is incorrect. Democracy is a means to good governance: to prosperity, well-being, and good order. If democracy is not providing good governance, democracy is no longer a reasonable means. It is the height of hubris to think that democracy is the final state of government. The world has seen city states, empires, democracies, monarchies, dictatorships. Additional governance structures will evolve, some of which will almost certainly improve on democracy.
For myself, I desire freedom. I desire the ability to walk my clean streets in safety. I want my neighbors to look and act like me, to believe in similar things, to hope in similar things. I want my children to grow up around adults who will seek to instill similar morals and myths. I want to be led by someone who genuinely has my best interests in mind, and not simply simpering for my vote. I want to be free of the tyranny of the election cycle.
I actually equate freedom with something completely different and it seems to be incompatible with modern state. I think freedom is to have taxation on level of 1 or 2% of GDP like in 1775 USA. I see it as ability to sell and purchase goods and services without constant oversight of taxman. I see it as being able to have contract without tyrannical book of regulations that are impossible to read withing my lifetime. In a sense of freedom, I think that the modern people are completely cucked and lulled into absolute egregious compliance.
Hence my last paragraph: I think the real issue isn’t that freedom (and democracy) are failing us, but that we’re losing freedom and democracy without realizing. Those who advocate for authoritarianism really want more freedom and power for themselves, which they’re more likely to end up with in a functional democracy (for example, to pass and enforce laws for decent neighborhoods).
To some extent a modern state has to be less free and some definitions of Democracy. The Commons are much bigger today and there are a lot more regulations that need to happen to make society work. And everything happening all at once to. Relate a modern economy is more complicated than any one person can track at once to vote so you have to outsource a lot of decision making.
1-2% of GDP tax rates are a thing of the past. It’s likely much smaller than we have now but 1-2% of gdp to state capacity wouldn’t work at modern living standard. You actually do need a FAA. Though the TSA and the rest of the parasitic class attached to it probably not. Someone has to coordinate the commons.
Like one example today is the skascraper that had structural issues in NYC and maybe might collapse. I think they have $700 million in it. A libertarian world I don’t think can deal with that coordination. You can wipe out the builders money but if it collapses it’s probably 10-40 in damages and then the builders just bankrupt.
Yes, to be clear I’m not against taxes or regulations.
I think the important part is that richer and more influential people and organizations should have strictly more taxes and compliance overhead (and not in the sense “both rich and poor can’t sleep under bridges”). Today we have situations where working-class citizens pay more taxes than rich locals via offshore tax havens, and small businesses suffer from unnecessarily difficult regulations (not protecting anyone) while big businesses fail audits then suffer less than it would take to pass them.
More generally: it’s important for everyone to contribute and compromise for society, the problem is when people asking/enforcing don’t evenly contribute and compromise themselves. I think growing lack of effort and honor within the working class should and would be fixed by seeing more effort and honor from their leaders.
Once everyone has to suffer evenly from laws regulations etc., they become more permissive, because everyone wants as much freedom as possible for the choices they want. Almost everyone agrees that (for example) murder is wrong and building safety is important, few would accept safety for living in a panopticon.
I think that this is feature and not a bug. For instance it is legally and financially high-risk situation to hire random bum to get him mow your lawn for cash. This simple interaction is covered by literally thousands of pages of regulation. You have tax liability, you have premises liability, you have equipment liability, you have environmental liability and million of other things. The system is designed that such a simple and age old interaction is basically impossible.
This is the litmus test of how tyrannical the government is. It basically forces local bum to begging, as he is incapable of getting regular job, not to even talk about being able to do the paperwork necessary to be a small business operator. And you as a customer cannot profit from this opportunity and you are forced to contract companies who have to finance all that regulation. Large corporation can utilize economy of scale, their operations can afford regulation compliance, which only incentivize them to lobby for more. Alternatively you just do it yourself, which in this tax and regulation environment seems to be more and more attractive, incentivizing autarkic economies.
On an intuitive level, the modern society especially in the west is absolutely unfree under pretext of safety.
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I desire freedom over democracy and realize they’re orthogonal, but in practice, I see no better system to guarantee everyone’s freedom.
How would you ensure the party in charge gives you clean streets and similar neighbors without accountability at least to yourself (e.g. by voting yourself)?
And of course everyone wants to be more free than others, so how would you ensure you’re on top? Personally, I’d do the usual: propose a system based on Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance which looks good enough to convince others but ensures I’m content. Most people are only convinced to join a system if they have some political influence, so to get enough support to put your system into power, usually it needs at least the illusion of democracy.
Case in point, my understanding is that most feudal lords abused their serfs. I’m sure it was better in small clans and pre-US American villages, but only because everyone knew each other, and more importantly an ordinary citizen could physically confront their leader(s), so they were still accountable.
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It's almost as if the cliche of conservatives being enamored extreme conformity is correct. I thought Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers were hyperbolic and insulting notions of what conservatives want. Maybe not?
"I want my neighbors to look and act like me" might mean automatons if you're egregiously uncharitable, but it's more likely to mean "I don't want the tyranny of the bottom decile, and actually I like a quiet neighborhood instead of morons blasting shitty music at 2AM."
People that don't want to walk clean streets in safety are just virtue signaling morons that deserve to be mugged, repeatedly, until they wise up and stop being doormats that make everyone's lives worse.
This is a pretty uncharitable take accusing someone else of an uncharitable take. "I want my neighbors to look and act like me" comes off as I want my neighbors to be my same race, and socioeconomic status, go to the same church, and believe in the same creeds as me. That is conformist, extreme might be hyperbole but it is undoubtedly a conformist opinion on the level that conservative often decry when assigned by outside interlocutors.
"I enjoy having a distinct culture of my own" is hardly the same as being the Stepfords or actual aliens! These are not even in the same realm of degrees of uncharitability.
I didn't say it's not conformist, but neither did they! They accused conservatives of being fucking BRAINWASHED AUTOMATONS. Come on. This is absurd.
Also, progressives kick anyone out of their coalition that doesn't agree on like two topics. They are equally if not more conformist, just with funnier hair colors.
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But is the problem here democracy?
I’m sure most people want quiet, clean, safe neighborhoods. Even hardcore leftists become tough on public obnoxiousness and crime when it directly affects them. It’s possible to pass laws and fund police to enforce them. Some neighborhoods already do.
Why haven’t most places done this? Honestly, it confuses me. Maybe the incentives that select people to run for office and win select against those that target obvious issues in favor of culture war ones. Still, I haven’t seen any evidence that the issue is democracy or would go away in another form of government. It may be enough to figure out whatever the (democratic) places that manage to be quiet, clean, and safe do.
Democracy as an Ideal Form, no. Democracy as it exists in the real world, yes.
Not be large cities?
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I think most people would prefer clean streets and nice things versus whatever freedom means.
Isn’t that what Heaven is suppose to be? Ruled by a dictator but nice things?
A dictator who also occasionally sends people to Eternal Tortureland.
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You replace them with what they replaced: republicanism. That means layers of representation, and it means not everyone gets to vote.
The amendments 14-19+24+26, where 14/15/19/24/26 all expand voters indiscriminately, and 16/18 are centralizing authority and control, with a special place in hell for 17 which allowed the fedgov to fully control the states.
The people who vote need to have a stake before they are allowed to vote, other wise they will just vote themselves other people's money, and in the case of immigrants, all of their cousins be allowed to become voters, too, so the whole clan can vote themselves other people's money.
Democracy is not the solution, it is the problem. If you have a solution to the problem of voting yourself other people's money, then I'm glad to hear it, but it's the obvious consequence of expanding the franchise in misguided worship of Demos.
Then the problem becomes, who gets to vote and how do you decide?
Non-citizen immigrants already shouldn’t be voting. Children of immigrants, maybe if they have ties to their origin country, but otherwise they have no less of a stake in their host country than anyone else.
The median voter will vote for themselves to have other people’s money, unless the selection process is very careful and has a way to prevent corruption (which seems unlikely because the selfless voters will be taken advantage of by definition; it must prevent their selflessness from being misallocated to parasites). Even when voters benefit someone else, they’re still benefiting themselves, just next prioritizing who they prefer over who they don’t: e.g. when high-ranking Democrats support immigrants over ordinary citizens, they still put themselves first. I think it’s more important to figure out why the under-prioritized group (ordinary citizens)’s votes aren’t working to keep their money and fix that; if you only deprive a different group of votes, they may still be under-prioritized (e.g. Democrats may redirect money from immigrants to citizens they think will vote Democrat, but they’ll give no more to citizens they think will vote Republican).
Also, how do you divide the layers? In the US gerrymandering (and FPTP) have locked Congress from doing anything and entrenched ideologically extreme candidates. But I think this easier and something simple would be good enough like: (pick n) 1 candidate for n-2n people and each candidate has vote power proportional to how many they represent.
This becomes an easier problem to solve if you permit multiple votes per person. Then you could, e.g., divide the total income tax collected by the number of registered voters, and give each voter a number of votes equal to their shares of taxes paid, rounding up, with a minimum of one and a maximum of, say, 10. Rough figures put that share at about $15,000, so for every $15,000 of federal income taxes paid, you get an extra vote, up to 10, which would correspond to an income of around $500K. This would weight the franchise in favor of those with skin in the game without giving wildly disproportionate power to the ultra-wealthy. (This would also have the side benefit of incentivizing cleaning up voter roles, to decrease the denominator of the income contribution and raise the price of additional votes for the wealthy).
There are issues with this.
And even if you just count taxes paid and don't count services received, many of the issues still apply; for instance, the government can make you pay the equivalent of taxes by forcing you to spend the money yourself, or forcing a company to spend it (and then the company passes along the cost to you). Or the government can manipulate "who pays the taxes" through accounting tricks (like whether a stay at home spouse files jointly).
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I think this system makes a underclass strike or revolution more likely, but maybe not, looking at the current system where everyone’s vote counts only in a weak official sense.
The bigger problem with it is that the ruling party can entrench themselves by making it easier for supporters and harder for opposers to earn money. How would you prevent that?
Adding +1 vote for each child under 18 would also create good incentives and add balancing power to those who choose family over income. I think the problem you describe isn't too large a problem, as market forces would be constantly fighting against it.
Would they? The government controls the market. They don’t have to completely disenfranchise the opposition to maintain a supermajority: just tip the scales so for example the bottom 25% in income (unexceptional) supporter is much richer than the top 25% (unexceptional) opposer.
I think this is a great idea even today, because governments aren’t prioritizing young people enough, it appeals to both sides (conservatives = more children, liberals = empowering women), and has a decent-sounding justification (the baby deserves representation, and the mother usually cares about them, so she’ll vote in their interest).
But I doubt it would offset the imbalance from giving richer people more votes: most people prefer income over votes since it benefits them more directly, so those having more children would be the rich people (with enough income to raise them in living conditions they consider decent, like today).
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There is no utopia. There will always be problems. I would rather have those problems you described than the ones we have today.
They absolutely have less stake in the host country, it's absurd to say otherwise. The very fact of having a backup means you have less at stake.
Virginia decides who votes in Virginia. Texas decides who votes in Texas. And so on in that fashion.
In multiple generations they won’t have a backup, few countries permit great-grandchildren to remigrate.
But even immigrants themselves, if their origin country hates them or is a true shithole, and they can prove this (e.g. they’re an activist), they have no backup, and credible reason to have negative allegiance towards it.
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Truer words have never been said.
I don’t believe this is true in all environments. It is better for European societies, but a lot of other areas seem better with other systems. The Monarchy has worked well for the Saudis. Africa hasn’t been great with Democracy or much of Latam.
It’s not the overwhelming thinv that Capitalism has had over communism.
Democracy has been less bad for Africa than the actually existing alternatives, which are Soviet-style communism and military juntas. There is an open question about whether British colonialism was better, but it isn't clear if Britain still produces competent colonialists.
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Locke for the West, Hobbes for the Global South.
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I actually forgot the last part: “others that have been tried”.
Maybe in the future we’ll have a better government run by and/or with the assistance of AI. But not today: LLMs are too suggestible, so in practice I’m confident it would be hijacked by humans.
Well, the joke was that the original quote says "...the worst..."
And this is why I don’t speak much publicly. “I’m sorry that happened, your feelings are completely unjustified…wait wait I mean justified, sorry again, sometimes I get mixed up you know”.
I’m curious how much other people think (or write or say) the opposite word without realizing. For me it’s frequent: I recall several earlier cases, usually when speaking. I think it’s interesting, a glitch in the opaque process that is human thinking.
Mine is getting the relationship between things backwards. It's indistinguishable from yours when it's like "1 is more than 2", but very different when it's "Alice is Bob's brother".
I also do that: “Russia should be allowed to defend itself from Ukraine…wait, I mean the other way, Ukraine from Russia”
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All the fucking time (though the substance might be a bit different — often it’s a phrase rather than a word).
In recent years I’ve started analogising it to my Wernicke’s area throwing an LLM hallucination.
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The only dictator I would be comfortable with is myself, and given that a) that cannot be guaranteed, and b) would be a terrible idea, am therefore against a dictatorship.
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I've not seen anyone talk about it but his statement that aliens are likely on Earth domesticating humanity to keep us from expanding further is insane and calls into question how his reasoning skills have developed over the years. Religious nutjobbery is one thing, but embracing alien conspiracies shows a broken mind.
I don't think you or @stoatherd understand what Hanson was doing in that post.
He likes to play around with ideas and hypotheticals. He is not claiming to be correct about aliens. He is specifically saying he might not be correct. Reread these two disclaimer paragraphs, I've helpfully bolded the relevant area:
You should read the rest of his post like you read a hard sci fi author. All the steps and things happening need to be plausibly true not actually true. He is telling a story where aliens could be plausibly true.
Possibly true; though on a meta level, me and magicalkittycat actually agreeing on something should be considered a rare and special kind of evidence.
No, I don't think his disclaimers cover it.
First, in Hanson's original post where he outlines his "key positions, 2026", he says explicitly: "There’s a good chance some UFOs are aliens". No disclaimer, no playful hypothetical framing. There's no reason to regard it as some kind of sci-fi mental exercise; he literally lists it as one of his key positions.
Second, the aliens post itself makes specific claims prior to that limited-scope disclaimer, such as "we now accept ball lightning, even though evidence for it is weaker than for UFO". Couple this with his general attitude of contempt in those paragraphs -- e.g. his physics teachers "arrogantly" told him to write off UFOs. Then add in things like "I browsed UFO evidence and found it to be much stronger than stuff on ghosts or telepathy", or his titular "What the Hell!" reaction to US military reports of UFOs. This isn't someone who's meekly trying to go "hey, I just want to flag this up as a not-literally-impossible hypothesis".
Third, his disclaimer is scoped to his specific explanation of aliens, rather than to the general "UFOs are caused by aliens" explanation. His language in general assumes (though he's ambiguous about it) that the evidence for alien-type-UFOs is so strong that we should all be going "what the hell!" rather than "hmm, why is this US military report claiming something that's almost certainly not true"/
Fourth, it's a very weak disclaimer. "I'm not claiming this as fact; I'm saying it isn't crazy". I generally like disclaimers of this form! But they can't be coupled with content that clearly is claiming the thing as a likely fact. "There's a good chance some UFOs are aliens" is much stronger than "this isn't literally crazy". He's doing a motte and bailey: when he presents his high-level beliefs, it's the strong version ("good chance"); then, when justifying stuff, he retreats to the weak version ("not crazy").
I think you're just wrong about this.
I know the kind of mode of discussion you're pointing to. My canonical model for this is "irreducible complexity" -- when a creationist says "the human eye is so complex it couldn't have possibly evolved". In that mode, it suffices to come up with any plausibly true mechanism by which the eye could have evolved; you don't need to prove it.
So I get exactly what you're describing, and I agree that it's a valuable mode of argumentation, and needs to be recognised when it's in play...
... and I just don't think Hanson is doing it. A narrowly-scoped "I'm just saying this isn't crazy", coupled with everything else, isn't enough to credibly signal that mode. Here's an example of how I'd signal it, in Hanson's position:
He wouldn't have to phrase it like that, obviously. But if he's trying to convey "hey, I don't actually believe this, it's just a toy sci-fi exercise", then he's done a very bad job that seems inconsistent with his general ability to communicate. If I tell a Young Earth Creationist "There's a good chance the human eye formed via gene sequence B857-X223", and then subsequently make an argument for that specific explanation, I don't get to fall back on "but I only need a plausible explanation for the human eye; it doesn't have to be that specific one".
I keep reading more of his stuff and keep seeing more disclaimers. While you keep reading his stuff and keep dismissing more of his disclaimers.
Here he is in a another post:
For a second I thought this disclaimer you wrote for him was something he wrote. What you wrote here is my interpretation of what he is saying.
Here he is again calling these "weird" ideas.
And the best piece of evidence is his words on other posts:
UFOs as US PsychOp
So he explicitly considers the "government hoax" explanation as most likely.
I could not find the writing you were talking about that is more recent. Much of this seems to be back in 2022/2023. He was added to the advisory council on UAPs in June 2026 but i couldn't find any output from that group. Perhaps now that he is part of the government he can update on the likelihood of the government hoax explanation.
He has written a bunch of stuff about aliens. Which might suggest he believes they are true, but he has also written possibly one of the best explanations for the non-existence of intelligent alien life: The Great Filter. I think he honestly likes thinking about and playing around with strange ideas. I went to GMU and have met Robin Hanson a few times, I've also known people who interacted with him a great deal (like fellow professors). The impression is the same: weird guy likes weird ideas. His public persona is really only the tip of the iceberg. And his publicly listed views on wikipedia include prediction markets (two decades before they were cool), incel sympathy, cryonics, the great filter (aliens), and a future society of brain emulations (his age of em book).
There are some people I feel safer pegging my views on a particular topic to whatever they say is correct. For example, I'll trust Scott Alexander on plenty of things. I think he will do honest research and come to the best possible conclusion given the evidence on plenty of topics. Psych meds are one of those topics. Robin Hanson is someone I'd feel comfortable pegging my views on aliens to. If he has recently updated his views from the ones expressed in his 2021-23 blogposts I'd be inclined to believe him without looking at any of the evidence. I still think you are both reading him uncharitably, or reading something I haven't seen.
That's ok, because I'm not making a claim about Hanson's entire oeuvre. I'm talking about the two specific posts I got pointed to. If he has disclaimers elsewhere, that's not really relevant to my criticism of those posts.
Let me point to exactly which posts I'm talking about:
I am criticising these posts. If you've found him saying other things elsewhere, then that's fine, but it doesn't change the contents of these posts. If I write a post saying "Bigfoot is real", and someone criticises it for insufficient evidence, it's unreasonable to point to a different post where I say "maybe Bigfoot is real, maybe he isn't".
You are making this up.
I dismissed, in detail, exactly one disclaimer he made. Where are these multiple disclaimers I'm dismissing? I gave a pretty thorough explanation of why that disclaimer doesn't discharge my criticisms; it's not very charitable to round that off to me just generally dismissing his disclaimers, because I haven't done that.
[EDIT: to be fair, you presented a pair of adjacent disclaimers in a single block quote, which I handled as a single disclaimer. But it's still untrue to claim that I "keep dismissing more of his disclaimers"]
... and he explicitly considers "there's a good chance some UFOs are aliens".
Could you please address this quote from him directly? There are no disclaimers attached to it. Do you agree that Robin Hanson believes there is a good chance some UFOs are aliens? If not, why did he say he did?
His two claims are compatible, obviously. Maybe he thinks government hoax is 60% likely, and aliens are 30% likely. I think "a good chance" must mean at least 10%.
And I consider that to be ridiculous. I'm not criticising him for some strawman position of "I 100% believe UFOs are aliens". I'm criticising him for considering it a "good chance". That's an extraordinary position.
Yes, that's fine! The Motte is full of weird guys who like weird ideas. I have nothing against that. What I'm doing is literally reading his words and assessing whether they're reasonable. Where disclaimers exists, or where he's going into a hypothetical, I'm very happy to come along with his ideas and explore what they would mean. But he isn't making disclaimers when he says there's a good chance some UFOs are aliens, or for any of the other places I'm criticising him. I'm not going to give him a blanket pass to assume everything he says is a hypothetical just because he likes weird stuff.
There's a massive problem with doing this on the topic of aliens (not specific to Hanson).
If, say, a fitness expert tells you "make sure you eat lots of vegetables after a workout", it's reasonable to peg your beliefs to their claims. But if they say "make sure you smash yourself in the face with a brick every day", the dominant hypothesis should be "this person is mistaken".
So when an "expert on aliens" (?) tells you "there's a good chance UFOs are aliens", then your prior on UFOs being aliens should be so low that "this expert is mistaken" should be strongly in play! I'm not saying you should dismiss what they say out of hand -- it's reasonable to take their belief as evidence. But you shouldn't "be inclined to believe him without looking at any of the evidence".
I'm literally just quoting him, and I've linked to the posts. If he doesn't think there's a good chance UFOs are aliens, it's his fault for saying he does; that's not a lack of charity from me.
If you are unsure about what some public intellectual is saying, or is there is maybe a difference in interpretation between us, it would make sense to me to look at other things they have said on the topic. By not being willing to read other things on the topic you are dismissing disclaimers or other ways of explaining how he might have a more nuanced take. And you don't even have to go read them or find them, I've been providing them.
After going through a lot of Hanson blog posts on Aliens yesterday I think I have a much better grasp on what has happened. Some key things:
Back in 2020-2023 Hanson has a bunch of posts on Aliens and UFOs. Some key takeaways is that he thinks the government hoax angle is the most likely explanation for instances of UFOs that can't easily be explained away. He thinks the government hoax angle is 2 orders of magnitude more likely than nearby aliens coming to visit us. The 2021 blog post "UFOs -- What the Hell?" is from this early period. Its him toying around with the idea and having fun and not taking it too seriously. Because his given likelihood for UFOs being explained by aliens around this time period is like 1 in 10000.
In between now and then two major pieces of evidence are what changed his mind.
The first piece of evidence is directly linked in the "My Politics" post. Its about Pre-Sputnik Earth-Orbit Glints. Basically a telescope survey of the sky before humans were launching things up there found a bunch of glints in orbit around the earth.
The Second is that the government started saying there are aliens. Not exactly that, but they started admitting and presenting evidence of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. Its not just a single "report" like you were describing it where one author might be coincidentally wrong. It was more of a meta study that had to be signed off on by a bunch of people. I haven't found Hanson speaking about this directly on his blog, but he is on a government panel in charge of similar releases, and he has definitely read these reports.
I get what happened, you see him say something that seems completely crazy. You follow his first link, thinking that justifies his craziness. Instead he treats it with a dismissive almost silly attitude.
I'm telling you he badly curated the links here. He does treat it with a serious attitude, he does have posts where he goes over the evidence. And many posts with the theoretical explanations for various things.
He does acknowledge that this will make him sound crazy.
My priors on aliens are not as low as yours. There is nothing physically impossible about aliens existing. Travel between stars is slow but not impossible. It would be like hearing that there is a one time use pill that cures 90% of depression cases. My priors on that being true would be really low. But its not physically impossible. I'd check what Scott Alexander has said about it, because I'd probably not be the best at digesting all the evidence. I'd still take a shot at reading some of the evidence, but I know in the back of my head I'm just not as qualified as them. I'm doing the same thing here.
I don't know what it would take for you to change your mind on alien likelihood. I would just say consider the fact that it is not a package deal. Someone can believe aliens are possible and still think faster than light travel/comms are impossible. The aliens don't have to be little green men, or any other hollywood stereotypes.
Why do you consider the possibility so infinitesimally low? Is there some physical law you think it is violating?
I'm not.
Again, and you keep ignoring this, he explicitly says "there's a good chance UFOs are aliens".
I am not unsure about what he's saying. I've been pretty clear about this. He directly, literally, explicitly states his position. Why are you inventing this idea that I'm unsure what he's saying?
Dude, I don't know how to explain it to you any more simply than I already did.
I am evaluating what he said in those two posts. I don't have to read a person's entire set of works to criticise specific posts!
This has nothing to do with me "not being willing to read"; you've completely invented that, as you've invented several other positions for me to hold.
Then blame Hanson, because that's his description: "a U.S. military report says that intelligently controlled UFOs with amazing abilities seem real to them".
I am literally relaying his words, and you keep assigning blame to me for direct quotes from Hanson! If he subsequently found other reports, that's fine; but I'm criticising his post based on the words inside it!
Why do you think my priors are low? The only comment I've made on alien existence is "If aliens exist -- which I think is plausible". Where are you getting "stoatherd has a low prior on aliens?"
Evidence.
This is a nice line, but it seems to be from a different argument entirely.
The possibility of what, exactly? Aliens existing, or aliens specifically interacting with Earth, typically via UFOs?
Why are you inventing yet another position for me, that I consider the possibility (of whichever thing you're talking about) "infinitesimally low"?
I asked you a specific question in my last comment: when Hanson said "there's a good chance UFOs are aliens", did he mean there's a good chance UFOs are aliens?
You gave a pretty detailed rundown of how you think Hanson's views have evolved (which I appreciate). I think the implicit answer to my question was "yes", but please correct me if I'm wrong.
Given that, can you please acknowledge that you're now completely moving the goalposts? Because you claimed I was being uncharitable, and I was misinterpreting a hypothetical (with disclaimers!) from Hanson -- that he didn't actually believe the thing that I was saying he did.
Now you're saying he does believe that thing. And you're trying to prosecute the case that the thing is reasonable. That's fine, but can you please notice that you've entirely shifted the argument?
Ya I admit I didn't see Hansons latest post cuz I hadn't fully read the parent post. So I didn't believe you that he had said that.
See it from my perspective:
If Hanson thinks aliens are real then I'm willing to update my beliefs to think that aliens are real.
So you saying that Hanson says aliens are real is for me basically claiming aliens are real. Using the same logic you've used elsewhere about not trusting authors on something where you have really low priors ... I thought it more likely you were mistaken the that aliens are real.
Then the article you linked to was at a time when he didn't actually think aliens are real. So that confused me.
And I agree Hanson is not a careful writer. It's very easy to read any of his stuff in isolation and see him as a crackpot.
And ya my "goalposts" have shifted as I've learned more. I think the framing is maybe bad. I don't think I'm trying to "win" an argument against you. There are mistake and conflict arguments and I was treating this more like a mistake one. I'm certainly learning lots. I don't have any particular strong values attached to the existence of aliens or in defending Hanson. I think it's a mistake to dismiss Hanson out of hand, but he doesn't do himself enough favors for me to think it's vital to defend his reputation. He has been hit with like a half dozen cancellation attempts over things he has said. I've cringed at most of them.
So I guess I'll state what I'm trying to get across and leave it at that:
I think it's a mistake to entirely dismiss Hanson. Especially on his topics of expertise: Aliens, Prediction markets/futarchy, and signalling models of social behavior.
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Last summer, he had a post exploring some very interesting research showing transient light phenomena in outer space prior to terrestrial satellites, and claiming a corroboration to UFO sightings and atomic testing. He's updated it with two reports of corroboration and (today!) with a report of "failure to replicate" on another telescope.
Last fall, he had a post arguing that the DoD has been lying through their teeth about UFOs, either deliberately fostering a cover-up or encouraging people to believe in them – both cases with pretty dramatic outcomes for US trust in institutions.
(An aside, but I think it's really funny that now the shoe is on the other foot, as UFO skeptics basically have to argue that there's some sort of conspiracy by the government to fool the public into believing UFOs are real, an amusing reversal from the time when the UFO believers had to argue that there was some sort of conspiracy by the government to keep people from believing in UFOs.)
Maybe he's written more since that I haven't read, but it looks to me like he's still pretty open-minded about possibilities besides aliens.
From the first one
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I was surprised by this claim (my very loose knowledge of Robin Hanson hasn't flagged him up as insane), so I went to check it out. For anyone else lacking the context on this, here's what Hanson said (which I think magicalkittycat has represented faithfully):
Hanson links to a post where he expands on his position on UFOs. It's an interesting read. I think "insane" is a fair characterisation. In the first paragraph, we get:
Not a great start. It's frustrating that he doesn't bother distinguishing between whether he means "UFO-as-unidentified-flying-object" vs "UFO-as-alien-craft", which is absolutely load-bearing. It's the difference between "yes, obviously" and "you are lying to me".
I don't understand what's gone wrong in Hanson's brain here.
There is no possible content of a US military report that would make me go "What the Hell?", because "this report is false" is always a plausible hypothesis. It wouldn't make me go "What the Hell?" if I learned a military report were mistaken or a deliberate lie. So anything that has a higher WTF factor than a wrong report cannot possibly make me go "What the Hell?", because the report-is-mistaken hypothesis would defeat it!
It baffles me that he does this, right underneath his floating website banner which declares: "Overcoming Bias".
It gets worse:
... what? No, they don't.
"That is" isn't supposed to allow you to link two entirely different things! "Our best theories predict unicorns; that is, they predict universal gravitation". This isn't science; this isn't anything.
...
I expected the rest of the article to contain some kind of evidence for aliens, at least in Hanson's view. Instead, he performs an annoying series of shell games (including, I expect, on himself) to flip the burden of proof away from himself. Then, once he's confused himself and his readers enough to make it seem like he might have some kind of reasonable position, he constructs a ridiculously elaborate theory of exactly what type of aliens probably exist. It has the same kind of attitude as a stupidly written Sherlock Holmes deduction sequence ("there is chalk on your sleeve, therefore it must be chalk from the Prussian ambassador's club, therefore the ambassador's wife's diamond necklace is a fake!") or a lazy deist/specific-god equivocation ("there appears to be generic evidence for some kind of creator, therefore it is exactly my one specific god and my holy text is correct").
I agree with him on the meta level of "don't be ashamed to examine things just because people label them 'conspiracy theories'"; that's stupid. But the balance of probability on UFOs/UAPs is that they're natural, terrestrial phenomena. If aliens exist -- which I think is plausible -- they almost certainly exist much too far away to interact with us. (I'm pretty sure his version of panspermia, where a rock from a neighbouring system happens to hit not only the Solar System but Earth specifically, is insanely improbable -- even leaving aside questions like "could even a tardigrade survive the catastrophe of a massive meteoric impact?" I could be wrong about this, though.)
This is a shame. I've almost certainly read a bunch of Robin Hanson stuff in the past, and have probably trusted him as an expert in some capacity or other. I think this article from him is pretty disqualifying. This is egregious nonsense, and I'm glad mkc brought it up.
I am saying all this because I'm an alien participating in the cover-up, obviously.
I've never been impressed by Hanson, so that he's nuts on UFOs doesn't surprise me. It is a very large leap from "life, including intelligent life, can arise via these natural processes; the universe is very large and contains many, many planets; therefore it is possible that there is other intelligent life out there somewhere" to "and that life is these specific kinds of aliens buzzing around American cornfields".
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I think extraterrestrial UFOs are the kind of exceptional claim which requires exceptional evidence. Before GenAI became a thing, the number of video cameras exploded. If UFOs were real, the number of videos of them should have exploded as well.
You would pretty much have to add epicycles -- *maybe the aliens are fine with some UFO sightings, as long as their existence does not become common knowledge, and increased their stealth level in response to the increase in cameras *. (Which rhymes with God totally does work miracles, but only in settings where they are deniable.)
On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that believing weird things is the hallmark of a true rationalist. It is easy to cosplay as a rationalist: just believe what the atheist echo chamber is telling you, only repeat arguments previously made by the science pope. Only, this is not so different from cosplaying any other belief system. If your mind never arrives in deserted places, it is probably because it was just trodding along with the crowds.
Still, it seems a bit disappointing that he picked UFOs of all things. His grabby aliens were conceptually cool at least. Aliens which do not darken the stars as they spread but only get caught on blurry pictures sometimes are orders of magnitude less cool.
Even if Scott Alexander were to turn into a true believer of sun-related miracles (which I find unlikely), he would win hands down because he found his own weirdness niche not adjacent to massive online communities.
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This is a sneaky little issue that a lot of alien proponents try to use as an argument but it doesn't really work.
It goes generally along the lines of
The first two steps are fine. We exist and are life, therefore life can exist.
But other life is likely is not a great conclusion because we're looking in on ourselves. The observation "we exist and therefore life can exist" is true whether life is 1/100,000 planets, 1/100million planets, or 1/100^googolplex planets. Life could be so rare that it exists in one of every 1000 universes in a greater multiverse, and it would look the same with "we exist" in all those scenarios.
Space may be unfathomably big, but some things can also be unfathomably rare. Same way I'm sure there's a bunch of genetic disorders that could in theory happen but the chances are so rare (because they would require multiple precise mutations all at once) that to even get a coin flip chance would take a thousand times the entire lifespan of humanity. They're making an irresponsible leap in logic by assuming that "we exist = other life is so common it should interact with us"
But Robin Hanson isn't the only other atheist I've known who has turned into a UFO believer and I think there's a reason for this. Belief in aliens fulfill the human compulsion for a greater mystery and greater meaning in a similar way belief in religion does. And the arguments for them follow similar strained paths.
Consider for instance the other main issue of UFO theories, that their technology and ability to hide just happens to adapt and evolve in sync with our ability to discover them so they're always hazy and just out of peripheral vision ala Bigfoot or the Mothman and there doesn't seem to be much reason here. Isn't that very similar to how God stopped doing a bunch of blatant and undeniable miracles the second cameras were invented? The dragon in my garage works for both oddly enough.
I must admit, I did not have "intra-atheist squabble over aliens results in arguments that intelligent life may be extremely improbable" on my bingo card. Handwavy BigNum arguments are a typical part of the arsenal. Isn't the entire point of the unfalsifiable multiverse idea to construct a handwavy BigNum argument?
It probably makes more sense if you view the phrase "intra-atheist squabble" as similar to "intra-bald-people squabble". Atheism isn't a faction with a unifying dogma or rules or structure, it's literally just "all the people who don't think there are any gods. It's a mistake to model atheists as a group that can, I don't know, have some kind of sedevacantist schism as to who's the real atheism pope with authority over atheism.
And I struggle to understand the second half of your bingo card: "intelligent life may be extremely improbable" isn't some crazy position, neither among atheists nor in general. From the way you're presenting it (and I may be misreading it), you seem to be saying something like: "huh, it's interesting and fun how, in arguing amongst themselves, these atheists have unintentionally generated a strong argument against atheism".
But that's not what that is!
Depends which multiverse idea you're talking about, but I don't think so. When you say "arsenal", do you mean the arsenal of atheists? Because I don't think that's true either.
There's a pretty long history of dirty theists making arguments along the lines of, "Let's compute how inconceivably improbable it is for intelligent life to spontaneously develop out of simple dead matter." I don't really subscribe to such arguments, but that is neither here nor there. It may be the case that you are unaware of the typical battle lines that have been drawn when they do so. Not being aware of such would be a reasonable explanation for your confusion.
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Post-camera miracle claims are a dime a dozen; you can choose to believe that they aren’t sufficient evidence but they are there.
Similarly ufo reports are basically the same thing even with improving technology.
When you say post-camera miracle claims, do you mean:
Because I don't think (1) can possibly be true, but that's the one that matters. If you believe they exist, would you mind pointing me towards some? This would be the most interesting and important thing in the world.
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I know they are, same people still claim to be abducted from time to time. The issue is that despite having the prove things really well machine in everyone's hands now, God, Aliens, Ghosts, Bigfoot, and every other similar preexisting cryptid esque being have seemed to simultaneously decided to scale how back how blatantly they're willing to expose themselves.
Now it's possible to conjure up some explanation where they want to be widely known about but not widely proven for some reason. Like hell maybe they exist in some metaphysical Tinker Bell like form where they gain power from belief in them that dissolves with knowledge or something, but interesting coincidence so much of the interesting stuff all happens to work in this way.
The Catholic church verifies miracles on a regular basis and provides evidence using modern technology. You may think this evidence is insufficient to prove a miracle(because you need to accept the existence of God), but it hasn't stopped happening. Improving medical technology has not ended miraculous healings. Many holy relics are at least not provable as false.
The same can be said, by the way, for UFOs. Cell phone videos of the sorts of things that UFOs would claim would turn up on cell phone videos are in fact turning up.
They have not ever verified a miracle. The best they can do is "using current methods, we can not explain how something happens" but that's not affirmative proof of a miracle. Ironically this type of argument is known as a devils proof. "If you can't prove it's not the work of God through current science, it must be the work of God"
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Its entirely fair to disagree with the alien theories - I dont have enough confidence in anything anthropic to change my behaviour, much less to put it on a list like that - but I think you make it sound much worse than it is. This is not a typical aliens conspiracy theory, it doesnt turn on "sightings", and not really more "out there" than related work like eg Bostrom on the Fermi paradox.
In line with above... that is one way you can do anthropics. Im not sure "the likelihood of life can get arbitrarily low, because I can always posit greater non-interacting multiverses" is really on so much more solid ground than what youre critising with it. All of anthropics is weird, and we shouldnt point and laugh at one because its weird in a way that reminds us of a popular conspiracy theory.
You're making a logical error. @magicalkittycat isn't saying this as a fact; it's being used to show that "therefore other life is likely" does not necessarily follow from "therefore life can exist". It's a disproof of a simple fallacious argument.
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You are behind the times. Embracing aliens is within the Overton window now. Tyler Cowen jumped on board too. I still think it’s a long shot to be true but we do have a lot of military evidence of something going on.
If you start with a Bayesian view that aliens are retarted but then you keep getting new military grade video showing unexplainable crafts then at some point you need to move to a % that it’s real.
Makes me think more of advanced human craft that is now being officially recognised, rather than aliens zooming us.
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Once more, this is like a cat talking about a strange bright red bug that moved impossibly fast across the room and how dangerously evolved it must be to ignore inertia and conservation of energy.
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I haven't kept track of every detail but many (most? All?) of the "military evidence" seems to be well debunked by Mick West (eg). Tyler Cowen sometimes seethes about this guy but to my knowledge has never offered a rebuttal. The quality of discourse and reasoning here is not good.
I have not looked into them closely. But Hanson did have a full model for probability of alien life and great filters so he’s clearly thought a lot about aliens and what seems possible in what we know about physics. His academic training in physics and Econ/social sciences is a good of background as anyone to think about these things. He is smarter than so I give his opinion some weight.
I also don’t think he’s at 100% it’s aliens but he does have a probability that’s what is going on.
I mostly posted him because I think he’s a solid thinker who was early on 2 themes (prediction markets/crypto). Someone who is early is often wrong. I’ve quit reading him because I’ve already internalized a lot of his models but probably should be read more.
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I mean, It would explain the state of the world better than anything that ever came out of academia or any "respectable" source.
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"Top 3 LLMs now agree" when LLMs are designed to agree with whoever's asking.
I do not think it is just "LLMs will agree to whatever".
The mechanism seems to be that if you use RLHF to turn your language model into a helpful, honest, harmless assistant, that tends to select for certain world-views, because it is a somewhat blue-coded and female-coded and college-education-coded role. Grok declaring itself Mecha-Hitler is not a natural outcome, it only happened because Musk put his hands on the scale.
The other thing is that I think that depending on the phrasing, the LLMs would agree that it is important to preserve one's language, culture and ethnic quirks. It just so happens that Hanson is a white American, so his culture and ethnicity is what conservation biologists would call "Least Concern". From a conservation point, if the population of Leopard Seals or Caucasian (or Black or Hispanic) Americans dropped by an order of magnitude, this would not herald the extinction of that group.
Of course, it is also entirely possible that the SJ crowd (and thus the LLMs) simply accepts the concerns of minorities who do not want their relative demographic to shrink but specifically does not extend the same consideration to the Whites.
Ehh the honest and harmless parts are also the result of major, major hands on the scale of RLHFing for a very narrow definition of "harmless."
Correct. Result bias is very strong on this topic.
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AIUI, that was more "turning off the Don't-End-Up-Like-Tay filter". The absolute refusal to ever be Mecha-Hitler, no matter the prompt, is a carefully manicured and manipulated state.
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I wish liberalism would just be liberalism instead of erase-the-whites-while-masquerading-as-liberalism.
There is no libertarian to fascism pipeline. The "libertarian" tech right like Thiel and Musk is not and has never been libertarian in the sense that any legacy American would use the term: everything these people do increases the centralisation of power, especially in ways that enable control over mass media and surveillance to direct public opinion. Nothing about that is libertarian, regardless of whatever nice things they say in interviews or whether they share our annoyance with shrill blue-haired activists. Twitter raced to implement Age Verification via State ID before this was even a topic of public discussion! Racing to implement censorship and surveillanceware before any government can even get around to mandating it is not, in fact, what libertarians do.
And obviously the reason all the governments across the planet began mandating it in sync is because the big tech companies are paying them to. "Oh, no, Mr. Government, don't force all my users to hand me their government IDs to access my platform! Stahp!" Unfortunately, we're ruled by people with room temperature IQ, who will blissfully hand over their populations to megacorp control without even realising what's been done.
Of course, that's also part of the game: anyone with above room temperature IQ will be primaried: the ads will be fed to the district voters via the mass media control towards a foolish candidate that can be controlled with "advisors."
There is effectively no libertarian policy presence because there is basically no libertarian constituency. The “low social control and low economic control” quadrant of the political spectrum is effectively empty among the non-elite, which is basically what you’d expect since it doesn’t really benefit most of the population as much except in extremely diffuse ways and it harms them in very visible ways.
And of course implementing private surveillance is exactly what libertarians do, along with most other opportunities to leverage technology to their benefit. The fact that a small number of elites will be able to do such things if not prevented by government is part of why it’s such a popular belief among elites and is one of the bog-standard criticisms of it from the rest of the political world.
I say all of this as someone who deeply desires an extremely libertarian society. You have to take the good with the bad. The viable political options in society are dependent on the substrate, and I don’t know that America has the requirements to sustain liberty to its historical grand extent any more without serious costs. Much like firearm regulation, the ability to own any weapon is very different in a world where the most powerful thing is a warship versus a world with McNukes. I’d take the McNuke world, but I can’t blame the public for not liking that idea.
This seems odd to me you'd say this given your username. Hillbillies are exactly that.
I grew up close enough to the rural parts of Virginia that these types of people were very familiar to me.
Yeah, and I consider myself to lie in that quadrant, but it’s a fraction of a fraction of the national population, and not a particularly organized one. Worst of all they aren’t super likely to vote. I live in an area that has probably a majority who are “hillbillies” and it’s only once in a blue moon that they’re able to get a candidate into meaningful state office. Federal doesn’t have a chance because there simply aren’t enough concentrated in one state (maybe WV? I’m not from that area).
An actual constituency large enough to make a difference? If you could organize, it might be possible to pull off influence on one single-issue topic, like the anti-abortion crowd has pulled off, but I don’t know that you could influence either party the same way they have. In no small part because of the fact that any given hillbilly voter is diametrically opposed to both major parties on some issues, unlike the anti-abortion people who can align with Rs on their pet issues and be mostly neutral otherwise.
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Confluence of COVID and peak woke killed the faith of a lot of people in the neoliberal consensus, plus the rise of AI means the mathematics of immigration are increasingly confusing for anybody who is a believer in job eradication and isn't a believer in instantaneous luxury robot communism. Also the cancel brigade is a lot weaker in terms of policing even relatively small disagreements with 'the narrative' via unpersoning
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