Just like they told us that Trump was against "lawfare", that Trump was against cancel culture, that Trump wanted to continue Lina Kahn's aggressive antitrust policies, that Trump would end the Ukraine War within days, that Trump would bring back manufacturing jobs and reduce prices.
Sumner, it's a two party system, and yet, I don't think I've ever seen you advocate for voting system reform. I, for one, support approval voting, so that the president can win with more than 80% of the vote.
There's some weird game-theoretic stuff going on here. If people freak out, Trump backs off, while if they don't then we get the results of his terrible policies. As you mention in the post, in this model our amount of panic is perfectly negatively correlated with the actual outcome!*
I think there's also a collective action problem here. If enough people panic, then Trump backs down. But this doesn't require everyone panicking. So if everyone is self-interested and rational but coordination is too difficult, we get less panic than we'd like.
There are also some asymmetric costs that lead to a sub-optimal amount of panic. You have to pay capital gains taxes if you sell your stocks, it takes time and effort to protest, and there's a social cost of looking like Chicken Little if you raise a fuss and everything turns out fine. All of this makes it even more tempting to hope that other people will panic for you.**
*I can't quite make the analogy work, but this seems closely related to the Parfit's Hitchhiker scenario. There's an underlying structure to these situations where acting according to your beliefs or goals leads to your belief being falsified or your goal being unmet.
**This reminds a lot of the AI situation. Some acquaintances of mine do in fact think I sound crazy when I talk about the possibility of AI killing of us. Unfortunately, by construction if AI kills all of us then there's no short I'll be able to profit from, and even worse I won't have the satisfaction of saying "I told you so" ;)
"There's an underlying structure to these situations where acting according to your beliefs or goals leads to your belief being falsified or your goal being unmet."
Good point. You can think of this post as an attempt to raise the social status of panic.
" The real TDSers are the people who go to bed at night firmly opposed to neoconservative projects to engage in regime change and wake up the next day sounding more hawkish than John Bolton, all because Trump was depressed by low poll numbers and felt a need to “do something”.
This still continues to surprise me. I live in a purple area and have lots of friends on both sides of the political debate. I hear them supporting Trump's latest whim and I remind them that for many years they had taken the opposite side of the issue. Why would they change just because Trump said something? The rationalizations provided are mostly disappointing, especially knowing that Trump doesnt appear to have any real deep understanding of issues on which he bases his whims. To be fair I have had some friends on the left change positions automatically to oppose Trump but not generally on issues for which they have held long term beliefs.
The key variable fir "is the freak out effective?" is if it occurs within a group that could constitute undeniable marginal vote losses. Which is why markets freaking out is effective, because they're objective (with relation to this) - you can't claim that all those investors are just Democrats.
If T does something and only people who were already guaranteed to be voting Democrat freak out, it won't change anything. It's far more effective to focus the criticism on the actual "bad effects" because if you can make it clear to those marginal voters that it is Time To Freak Out In Proportion To How Bad This Is, then you actually have leverage. If all one has is "I will fill in the Democrat bubble on my ballot even more furiously" then you have very little leverage.
Can you recommend forms of panic we should use? I don't want to sell my index funds with each new crazy act. I vote. I've gone to No Kings Rallies. I've written my Congressional reps (a lot). What else?
I'm not sure there is any one solution; it depends on the ability of the person or institution to exert pressure. Thus markets, politicians, pundits, foreign governments, and individual voters all have a role to play. The role may differ from one case to another.
I would say "costly/credible signalling" and "actually trying to win", both of which are legitimately pretty rare (outside of the few instances mentioned here, which are notable for mostly being led by non-democrats).
(In particular, I don't think I've ever had someone make a genuine attempt to convince me to go back to supporting Democrats. Whenever I mention having recently flipped parties I get either sympathy or hostility - I don't think I've ever gotten a real attempt to get me to flip back. This might just be because I'm very non typical and smart mass persuasion campaigns go for people very different from me but still, I'd be surprised if most people who flipped at any point since 2008 have had a substantially different experience).
Youre on to something here, that runs pretty deep in both camps. Boiled down, it amounts to hate. Neither side is really presenting a "unity" message, its all "us vs them" to the end. I dont think either side cares if they win over the other, they just want to win by crushing the opps.
Nothing ive heard from the left really convinces me theyd do a good job running the country. Less bad maybe, but then again maybe not(at this point i expect the democrats, if back in power, to match or exceed the level of what maga has been up to). The extremes have taken over the conversation, the moderate voices on either side just dont get much promotion. The "united" in United States has become a joke.
This is a serious problem, i think. The path back to a strong and successful country really will need some version of unity. A house divided and all that.
Theres a top vs bottom element to all this thats harder to address, but is certainly a big driver of the factionalism thats so prevalent, and is a great tool for manipulation.
Idk, if i think about it too much it all seems rather hopeless. We certainly havent turned any corners yet.
"The extremes have taken over the conversation, the moderate voices on either side just dont get much promotion."
In this day if you aren't personally curating your feed, that's really on you.
Personally I'm pretty happy with what I hear from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's YouTube channel, as well as Elizabeth Warren's. As well as commentators such as Belle of the Ranch. And presumably so are most of the hundreds of thousands who watch each of their videos.
I dont have any feeds, im much too clever for all that nonsense. Scrolling feeds are where critical, independent thought goes to die, and amplified emotional response takes its place(regardless of content, a more perfect echo chamber is still an echo chamber. In fact, it feels even better). In this day and age if youre still exposing yourself to such manipulation, thats really on you.
My entire media consumption consists of the nyt morning email and 2 subs here, scotts and persuasion(persuasions beginning to feel like a waste of time tbh, though occasionally they send me something im glad i read. And its kind of exemplary of whats wrong with the left, so its a way for me to keep my ear to the ground i guess).
Hundreds of thousands is great, good for them, but its not what i would consider a broader audience. Its a respectable fan base, and i look forward to hearing their message when it hits the nyt
I meant "feed" in the broadest possible sense, as mediums through which you are 'fed' knowledge. The NYT email and 2 substacks would count as your feed in this broader sense. "Channel" might have been a more precise term. This compares to doing original research yourself, in which you may still ingest someone else's idea of what you should know, but you aren't being actively 'fed' it.
Mass media has a larger reach, sure. The hundreds of thousands is just YouTube subscribers. I don't know what's typical, but they probably have single-digit millions of unique monthly watchers, including on Facebook and the like. And that's just the few I watch. There are probably tens of millions who get the same kind of information from all such ideologically similar channels. Still small(er) scale, but it does have some reach, including hate-watchers and those just curious from the other side.
Well in that broader sense, theres really no one that doesnt personally curate the information they receive. It would be impossible for a person to know *all* the information available for knowing at any given time, and so choices must be made, and selection occurs first with the person. So in this broader sense, suggesting that anyone isnt "personally curating their feed" is erroneous, is it not?
This all really stretches the definitions of our words. You can say that it *means* this other thing, but when anyone talks about "curating their feed" its commonly understood to be referring to their algorithm driven scrolling feed. At least its common enough that googles ai had this to say; "Curate your feed" means intentionally selecting, managing, and filtering the content you see on social media to create a more positive, relevant, and inspiring experience".
I dont mean to beat a dead horse here but we cant really converse if we dont employ words as theyre commonly understood.
But back to my original point, the one you quoted, its not to say that moderate voices dont exist, or even that they arent popular. Im saying that way down here where i exist(admittedly not paying *too* much attention, which is part of the point) those voices dont make it. Nobodies watching the same "feeds", so the only voices we *all* hear are the most extreme, the ones that get discussed by the majority of everybody. That seems like a real problem to me, and acts as a huge wall to getting any of these moderate voices in positions of power.
As much as i hate to give him credit, trumps brilliant stroke was recognizing this state of affairs and exploiting it. For 10 years now all we hear is trump trump trump and really no one else has been able to reproduce this result, certainly no moderate voice has even come close.
To tie it all together, i suggest it is the curated feed itself that has led to this situation we find ourselves in. While everyone is pleased hearing what they like best(or what they think they like best), bad actors are having their way with our country. To my mind, the solution isnt a more perfectly curated feed, the thing that created the situation in the first place(something here about doing the same things and expecting different results). And until *one* moderate voice can find a way into everyones feeds, moderates will remain fractured and ununified, and the extreme voices will continue to win the day.
"In particular, I don't think I've ever had someone make a genuine attempt to convince me to go back to supporting Democrats."
Climate-wise we've basically got two choices now: 1) Technodystopia solar radiation management (SRM) in which corporations such as SpaceX disproportionately profit on our tax dollars, and resource wars; 2) Less severe SRM combined with mitigation in which the pain and profit are more widely distributed.
The first option is what we face with the current Republican party in power. The second option is what we face with the current Democratic party in power.
I don't think the democrats offer option 2? When I go outside in Manhattan what I see is rallies supporting Iran, the Houthis, and a mayor who wants to raise property taxes on normal people by 10% and raid the city's pension to give himself and his cronies raises. Nothing about actually making normal people's lives better.
As an aside, I decided to looked up Mamdani's policy on heat mitigation. And he has one, along with conventional energy efficiency policies (which help reduce waste heat), you just have to know what key words to look for:
Of course they are offering #2. You simply have to pay attention to the Democrat *politicians, candidates, and wonks* talking policy in these areas. These policies are mostly at the state and federal level, by necessity, not at the city level, even for a city as big as New York (though trees and green spaces are very important for cities in terms of mitigation).
I'm in California, but I follow Rhode Island's Senator Whitehouse, as well as various left-wing climate channels.
Better intra-social networking, instead of 350-million single links between each person and the Pedophile-in-Chief, so that there is actually a SOCIAL STRUCTURE.
I like the examples you open with, and in those cases people really should be proud for having panicked.
As the post goes on though I worry you stretch the concept of panic so far that it’s not meaningfully distinct from proposing that more voters should disapprove of Trump. I agree with that, but constantly operating in what most people consider panic mode can often be counterproductive.
There's probably some betting market for this already, but I'm wondering what the TACO odds are on a ceasefire in the Iran war if gas hits $4 a gallon.*
And when is the Cuba takeover scheduled? Next month, or will he wait until May when Iran has Unconditionally Surrendered?
*Yeah, I know that for folks in California that would be a decrease!
More or less respectable post, Sumner. IMO the whole war has been due to the fact Trump has pulled out of the Iran Deal -and I saw very few cases of Democrats calling Biden to come back into the Iran Deal.
As for the theory of evolution for humans, I don't believe in it, given, as Yudkowsky said,
"The Evolution Fairy, as we all know, is obsessed with inclusive genetic fitness. When she decides which genes to promote to universality, she doesn't seem to take into account anything except the number of copies a gene produces. (How strange!)"
As a biologist (though not a geneticist or population or evolutionary biologist), I doubt it's as straightforward as Yudkowsky suggests. There are equilibriums and tradeoffs in which expansion of an allele (or new gene) would be slowed or even reversed for a time in certain populations. And no gene is universal, else all of life would all be one species.
He's also wrong on a trivial level, as certain species have many dozens, or even hundreds, of copies of the same gene in the genome of single individuals. This is an easy way for plants, for instance, to increase resistance to herbicides. On balance these may be the genes with the most copies in the species, but there will be strains that may lack the gene altogether, because they aren't under the same herbicidal pressure.
It is hard to see how much the American Rigth has destroyed itself precisely when it was so necessary. Thanks to those of you that have kept faithful to the doctrine.
"Trump is the one guy with an actual shot at becoming president who dissents from Washington’s long-standing, pointless war agenda”
They really nailed that one, huh.
Just like they told us that Trump was against "lawfare", that Trump was against cancel culture, that Trump wanted to continue Lina Kahn's aggressive antitrust policies, that Trump would end the Ukraine War within days, that Trump would bring back manufacturing jobs and reduce prices.
Sumner, it's a two party system, and yet, I don't think I've ever seen you advocate for voting system reform. I, for one, support approval voting, so that the president can win with more than 80% of the vote.
"so that the president can win with more than 80% of the vote."
I think you underestimate how divided our politics are. I'd be shocked if anyone could get more than 60% these days, even on bare approval.
"Pointless" is the operative word.
If by "operative word" you mean "weasel word that can be used to rationalize even the most asinine wars", then sure.
You could do a lot worse summing up the present moment than “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” “Trouble Every Day,” and “It Can’t Happen Here,” that’s for sure.
Ha! Good point.
There's some weird game-theoretic stuff going on here. If people freak out, Trump backs off, while if they don't then we get the results of his terrible policies. As you mention in the post, in this model our amount of panic is perfectly negatively correlated with the actual outcome!*
I think there's also a collective action problem here. If enough people panic, then Trump backs down. But this doesn't require everyone panicking. So if everyone is self-interested and rational but coordination is too difficult, we get less panic than we'd like.
There are also some asymmetric costs that lead to a sub-optimal amount of panic. You have to pay capital gains taxes if you sell your stocks, it takes time and effort to protest, and there's a social cost of looking like Chicken Little if you raise a fuss and everything turns out fine. All of this makes it even more tempting to hope that other people will panic for you.**
*I can't quite make the analogy work, but this seems closely related to the Parfit's Hitchhiker scenario. There's an underlying structure to these situations where acting according to your beliefs or goals leads to your belief being falsified or your goal being unmet.
**This reminds a lot of the AI situation. Some acquaintances of mine do in fact think I sound crazy when I talk about the possibility of AI killing of us. Unfortunately, by construction if AI kills all of us then there's no short I'll be able to profit from, and even worse I won't have the satisfaction of saying "I told you so" ;)
"There's an underlying structure to these situations where acting according to your beliefs or goals leads to your belief being falsified or your goal being unmet."
Good point. You can think of this post as an attempt to raise the social status of panic.
I believe its called something along the lines of being a "cassandra" from the ancient greek.
Still, if the IRGC goes down, there won't be a wet eye in the Middle East, or globally.
Even a volcano blast fertilizes fields around for generations.
OK, cheap analogy, but works for me.
" The real TDSers are the people who go to bed at night firmly opposed to neoconservative projects to engage in regime change and wake up the next day sounding more hawkish than John Bolton, all because Trump was depressed by low poll numbers and felt a need to “do something”.
This still continues to surprise me. I live in a purple area and have lots of friends on both sides of the political debate. I hear them supporting Trump's latest whim and I remind them that for many years they had taken the opposite side of the issue. Why would they change just because Trump said something? The rationalizations provided are mostly disappointing, especially knowing that Trump doesnt appear to have any real deep understanding of issues on which he bases his whims. To be fair I have had some friends on the left change positions automatically to oppose Trump but not generally on issues for which they have held long term beliefs.
Steve
The key variable fir "is the freak out effective?" is if it occurs within a group that could constitute undeniable marginal vote losses. Which is why markets freaking out is effective, because they're objective (with relation to this) - you can't claim that all those investors are just Democrats.
If T does something and only people who were already guaranteed to be voting Democrat freak out, it won't change anything. It's far more effective to focus the criticism on the actual "bad effects" because if you can make it clear to those marginal voters that it is Time To Freak Out In Proportion To How Bad This Is, then you actually have leverage. If all one has is "I will fill in the Democrat bubble on my ballot even more furiously" then you have very little leverage.
Thankfully, Trump is losing independents overwhelmingly these days.
Turnout is also key in the midterms, even if not a single vote changes.
AKA, don't reason by a policy change.
Yes, it's another example of the "identification problem".
Can you recommend forms of panic we should use? I don't want to sell my index funds with each new crazy act. I vote. I've gone to No Kings Rallies. I've written my Congressional reps (a lot). What else?
I'm not sure there is any one solution; it depends on the ability of the person or institution to exert pressure. Thus markets, politicians, pundits, foreign governments, and individual voters all have a role to play. The role may differ from one case to another.
I would say "costly/credible signalling" and "actually trying to win", both of which are legitimately pretty rare (outside of the few instances mentioned here, which are notable for mostly being led by non-democrats).
(In particular, I don't think I've ever had someone make a genuine attempt to convince me to go back to supporting Democrats. Whenever I mention having recently flipped parties I get either sympathy or hostility - I don't think I've ever gotten a real attempt to get me to flip back. This might just be because I'm very non typical and smart mass persuasion campaigns go for people very different from me but still, I'd be surprised if most people who flipped at any point since 2008 have had a substantially different experience).
Youre on to something here, that runs pretty deep in both camps. Boiled down, it amounts to hate. Neither side is really presenting a "unity" message, its all "us vs them" to the end. I dont think either side cares if they win over the other, they just want to win by crushing the opps.
Nothing ive heard from the left really convinces me theyd do a good job running the country. Less bad maybe, but then again maybe not(at this point i expect the democrats, if back in power, to match or exceed the level of what maga has been up to). The extremes have taken over the conversation, the moderate voices on either side just dont get much promotion. The "united" in United States has become a joke.
This is a serious problem, i think. The path back to a strong and successful country really will need some version of unity. A house divided and all that.
Theres a top vs bottom element to all this thats harder to address, but is certainly a big driver of the factionalism thats so prevalent, and is a great tool for manipulation.
Idk, if i think about it too much it all seems rather hopeless. We certainly havent turned any corners yet.
"E Pluribus Unum" is a more powerful motto than "In God We Trust". I wish we could bring it back.
"The extremes have taken over the conversation, the moderate voices on either side just dont get much promotion."
In this day if you aren't personally curating your feed, that's really on you.
Personally I'm pretty happy with what I hear from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's YouTube channel, as well as Elizabeth Warren's. As well as commentators such as Belle of the Ranch. And presumably so are most of the hundreds of thousands who watch each of their videos.
I dont have any feeds, im much too clever for all that nonsense. Scrolling feeds are where critical, independent thought goes to die, and amplified emotional response takes its place(regardless of content, a more perfect echo chamber is still an echo chamber. In fact, it feels even better). In this day and age if youre still exposing yourself to such manipulation, thats really on you.
My entire media consumption consists of the nyt morning email and 2 subs here, scotts and persuasion(persuasions beginning to feel like a waste of time tbh, though occasionally they send me something im glad i read. And its kind of exemplary of whats wrong with the left, so its a way for me to keep my ear to the ground i guess).
Hundreds of thousands is great, good for them, but its not what i would consider a broader audience. Its a respectable fan base, and i look forward to hearing their message when it hits the nyt
I meant "feed" in the broadest possible sense, as mediums through which you are 'fed' knowledge. The NYT email and 2 substacks would count as your feed in this broader sense. "Channel" might have been a more precise term. This compares to doing original research yourself, in which you may still ingest someone else's idea of what you should know, but you aren't being actively 'fed' it.
Mass media has a larger reach, sure. The hundreds of thousands is just YouTube subscribers. I don't know what's typical, but they probably have single-digit millions of unique monthly watchers, including on Facebook and the like. And that's just the few I watch. There are probably tens of millions who get the same kind of information from all such ideologically similar channels. Still small(er) scale, but it does have some reach, including hate-watchers and those just curious from the other side.
Well in that broader sense, theres really no one that doesnt personally curate the information they receive. It would be impossible for a person to know *all* the information available for knowing at any given time, and so choices must be made, and selection occurs first with the person. So in this broader sense, suggesting that anyone isnt "personally curating their feed" is erroneous, is it not?
This all really stretches the definitions of our words. You can say that it *means* this other thing, but when anyone talks about "curating their feed" its commonly understood to be referring to their algorithm driven scrolling feed. At least its common enough that googles ai had this to say; "Curate your feed" means intentionally selecting, managing, and filtering the content you see on social media to create a more positive, relevant, and inspiring experience".
I dont mean to beat a dead horse here but we cant really converse if we dont employ words as theyre commonly understood.
But back to my original point, the one you quoted, its not to say that moderate voices dont exist, or even that they arent popular. Im saying that way down here where i exist(admittedly not paying *too* much attention, which is part of the point) those voices dont make it. Nobodies watching the same "feeds", so the only voices we *all* hear are the most extreme, the ones that get discussed by the majority of everybody. That seems like a real problem to me, and acts as a huge wall to getting any of these moderate voices in positions of power.
As much as i hate to give him credit, trumps brilliant stroke was recognizing this state of affairs and exploiting it. For 10 years now all we hear is trump trump trump and really no one else has been able to reproduce this result, certainly no moderate voice has even come close.
To tie it all together, i suggest it is the curated feed itself that has led to this situation we find ourselves in. While everyone is pleased hearing what they like best(or what they think they like best), bad actors are having their way with our country. To my mind, the solution isnt a more perfectly curated feed, the thing that created the situation in the first place(something here about doing the same things and expecting different results). And until *one* moderate voice can find a way into everyones feeds, moderates will remain fractured and ununified, and the extreme voices will continue to win the day.
"In particular, I don't think I've ever had someone make a genuine attempt to convince me to go back to supporting Democrats."
Climate-wise we've basically got two choices now: 1) Technodystopia solar radiation management (SRM) in which corporations such as SpaceX disproportionately profit on our tax dollars, and resource wars; 2) Less severe SRM combined with mitigation in which the pain and profit are more widely distributed.
The first option is what we face with the current Republican party in power. The second option is what we face with the current Democratic party in power.
And that's only on one environmental topic.
I don't think the democrats offer option 2? When I go outside in Manhattan what I see is rallies supporting Iran, the Houthis, and a mayor who wants to raise property taxes on normal people by 10% and raid the city's pension to give himself and his cronies raises. Nothing about actually making normal people's lives better.
As an aside, I decided to looked up Mamdani's policy on heat mitigation. And he has one, along with conventional energy efficiency policies (which help reduce waste heat), you just have to know what key words to look for:
https://usfblogs.usfca.edu/sustainability/2025/11/25/new-yorks-future-is-looking-green-mayor-elect-mamdanis-environmental-policy-platfor/
"transforming 500 asphalt schoolyards into vibrant green spaces" <...> "greening schoolyards will reduce urban heat island effect".
Of course they are offering #2. You simply have to pay attention to the Democrat *politicians, candidates, and wonks* talking policy in these areas. These policies are mostly at the state and federal level, by necessity, not at the city level, even for a city as big as New York (though trees and green spaces are very important for cities in terms of mitigation).
I'm in California, but I follow Rhode Island's Senator Whitehouse, as well as various left-wing climate channels.
Or do nothing.
SRM is a global phenomenon. Someone will do it. And once someone is doing it, we'll do it too.
"I don't want to sell my index funds with each new crazy act."
You can always rebalance to international funds.
Good suggestion. Thanks!
Better intra-social networking, instead of 350-million single links between each person and the Pedophile-in-Chief, so that there is actually a SOCIAL STRUCTURE.
Excellent post.
Oops. My bad. I'll delete that part.
I like the examples you open with, and in those cases people really should be proud for having panicked.
As the post goes on though I worry you stretch the concept of panic so far that it’s not meaningfully distinct from proposing that more voters should disapprove of Trump. I agree with that, but constantly operating in what most people consider panic mode can often be counterproductive.
There's probably some betting market for this already, but I'm wondering what the TACO odds are on a ceasefire in the Iran war if gas hits $4 a gallon.*
And when is the Cuba takeover scheduled? Next month, or will he wait until May when Iran has Unconditionally Surrendered?
*Yeah, I know that for folks in California that would be a decrease!
Some voter opinions have indeed changed, and Dems have (by far) the enthusiasm advantage in the midterms.
More or less respectable post, Sumner. IMO the whole war has been due to the fact Trump has pulled out of the Iran Deal -and I saw very few cases of Democrats calling Biden to come back into the Iran Deal.
As for the theory of evolution for humans, I don't believe in it, given, as Yudkowsky said,
"The Evolution Fairy, as we all know, is obsessed with inclusive genetic fitness. When she decides which genes to promote to universality, she doesn't seem to take into account anything except the number of copies a gene produces. (How strange!)"
and yet, the global TFR is below replacement.
As a biologist (though not a geneticist or population or evolutionary biologist), I doubt it's as straightforward as Yudkowsky suggests. There are equilibriums and tradeoffs in which expansion of an allele (or new gene) would be slowed or even reversed for a time in certain populations. And no gene is universal, else all of life would all be one species.
He's also wrong on a trivial level, as certain species have many dozens, or even hundreds, of copies of the same gene in the genome of single individuals. This is an easy way for plants, for instance, to increase resistance to herbicides. On balance these may be the genes with the most copies in the species, but there will be strains that may lack the gene altogether, because they aren't under the same herbicidal pressure.
Our cultural and material environment is quite novel. And in novel situations behavioral sinks can occur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
If genes drove everything related to fitness, we wouldn't have the ability to consider.
It is hard to see how much the American Rigth has destroyed itself precisely when it was so necessary. Thanks to those of you that have kept faithful to the doctrine.