I recently read Bad Blood and Original Sin. Bad Blood is about the downfall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes and the fraud that she committed. Original Sin is about the uncovering of Biden's mental degradation and the lead up to his decision to drop out of the presidential race.
I liked both books quite a bit, and I learned more from them than from most things that I read. I particularly enjoyed reading them one after the other because I thought that, despite addressing in many superficial ways very disparate situations, they had a lot of interesting commonalities that seem like they say something important about human nature and epistemics (including reinforcing a bunch of lessons I feel like I learned from the experience with FTX).
A few of those commonalities:
A few lessons I took from them (not new, but I thought they were particularly poignant examples):
From Original Sin
And from Bad Blood in particular:
I loved Original Sin. Most of it is very depressing, but one brighter moment is the story of Chuck Schumer visiting Biden a week before he dropped out:
“Mr. President, you’re not getting the information as to what the chances are. Have you talked to your pollsters?”
“No,” Biden said.
Schumer said to him, “If I had a fifty percent chance of winning, Mr. President, I’d run. It’s worth it. But, Mr. President, your chances of winning are only five percent. I’ve talked to your pollsters; I know all three of them. I’ve talked to Garin and Pollock and Murphy. And they think it’s a five percent chance. Five percent.”
“Really?” Biden said.
“They’re not telling you,” Schumer said of Donilon and Ricchetti. “The pollsters told me, ‘He’s not seen our polls. It all goes to Donilon, and Donilon interprets it.’ Okay? You have a five percent chance. The analytics guy who probably knows this best said it’s one percent.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t run,” Schumer said. “I’m urging you not to run.”
“Do you think Kamala can win?” Biden asked.
“I don’t know if she can win,” Schumer said. “I just know that you cannot.”
Biden said that he needed a week.
They stood. On their way out, Biden put his hands on Schumer’s shoulders. “You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met,” Biden told him.
The thing I found most interesting about Original Sin is that Biden's senility was incredibly big-if-true and incredibly plausible-on-priors, but evidence of it still didn't manage to make it to a bunch of key decision makers who were extremely strongly motivated to understand it. I think that along some important dimensions it's the most extreme example of mass epistemic failure that I'm aware of.
is this a case where many decision makers were kept in the dark, or where one key decision maker - Biden himself - was kept in the dark about his political chances by his inner circle?
Mass epistemic failure seems a lot less plausible to me than what amounts to a case of epistemic elder abuse.
Biden's inner circle seemed to have conspired to keep many people (other senior party officials, members of Congress, Republican Party members, the media, the public, leaders of foreign states) in the dark about Biden's condition. How involved Biden was in that, or how self-aware he was of his own deterioration, seems a bit unclear. The book describes extensive measures taken to make Biden seem more competent than he was to a vast array of different audiences.
Theranos was a conspiracy, but in the two chapters of Original Sin I’ve read so far, it seems to be describing a presidential campaign that went badly awry. It’s very interesting and maybe more important to understand, precisely because it’s much more normal. I’m just not sure I’d use the term “conspiracy“ to describe what I’ve listened to so far.
mass epistemic failure
It seems to me an example of "epistemic failure" to think the "key decision makers" genuinely didn't understand and not simply lying.
The book seems like it doesn't really want to call out prominent Democrats other than Biden's inner circle as having fucked up.
My read is that the book thinks it would have been harder for them to do much better.
But assessing the suitability of the presidential candidate really seems like one of the most important roles and responsibilities of senior party officials, so I feel pretty bad about their performance there.
I think this is just literally not how political parties in the U.S. work. The party apparatus has very little hard power over the nomination, and they were afraid to use the power that they had because of the risk that a split between them and Biden would make Trump win.
I like Matthew Yglesias's discussion of this here. "If you decide after delving into the data that you need to warn “Democrats” about something and you give them a call, it turns out there’s nobody picking up the phone."
Another interesting quote from that Yglesias article:
“You could run against Biden by saying age isn’t just an electoral liability, he’s actually senile and unfit to serve, but most Democrats don’t believe that (it’s not true) and you’d lose.”
Imagine if any Democrat had had the guts to run, force Biden to get on the stage and debate them, and gotten the big reveal of his senility in the Democratic primary to lift their candidacy instead of in the national debate to lift Trump’s.
This is a pure calculus failure on Yglesias’s part. He implies total confidence that Biden wasn’t senile. Even if he thought it unlikely, which was more reasonable, the possibility that he was would have completely changed the calculus for a Democratic challenger. Probably Biden’s fine, but if he’s not, you look like a hero for saving the party from him. Anyone whose career wasn’t dependent on the Democratic Party or who just had enough ambition and guts could have taken that bet.
Yeah, Yglesias was extremely wrong about this, and I think that it's extremely interesting that he got it so wrong.
I actually wonder if the Democratic disarray stems from a particular failure mode due to their high level of education. Hypothesis:
Dems culturally believe in data-based decisions, accuracy, cooperation and the greater good. So they lean on polls, focus on the maximum likelihood outcome, and sacrifice their ambitions in service of a perceived need for unity.
But polling is notoriously unreliable. They get confused by it. Their focus on the most likely outcome leads them to underrate tail risks and opportunities. And their self-abnegation leaves them vulnerable to both inertia and to exploitation by selfish actors within their party.
The cure would be to encourage aggressive, self-serving political ambition within the Democratic party. Instead of Ds being nicey-nice with each other, they show sharp elbows and openly focus on their own political career advancement not as an exception but as a rule.
Though, in the book, the polls were pretty on track, and the problem was that they were not being communicated to, believed in, or listened to.
We don’t know if they were on track, because Biden ultimately did not run, so we did not get a chance to find out. But the main issue I’m trying to highlight is that the Democratic Party may have a tendency to assign too much decision-making weight to polling data, despite its inaccuracies and the challenge of interpreting it. And this applies to Biden too - he should have looked himself in the mirror and said “I’m too old to run,” not assigned so much weight to his own beliefs about how he was polling.
I don't know if the book thinks it would have been hard for them to do much better, but I certainly didn't come away believing that that's true, given that, once the distastrous debate had happened, it seemed like they were pulling a lot of different levers at the same time and could have been even more aggressive.
I felt like the book was just pretty slow to criticize people who failed to act, as opposed to criticizing people in the inner circle who actively made the situation worse, but I think that there was an abdication of responsibility.
I agree that senior party members didn't have direct levers, and it wasn't directly in their job description to assess the suitability of a candidate, and it seems like a correct update that if something isn't literally part of someone's job description, it is a lot less likely that they will act on it than if it is. This is why I think DRIs are a good and important concept. But I don't agree that it wasn't fundamentally and spiritually their job / part of overall ensuring a good future for the Democratic Party (especially given that they knew that it was not anyone else's job more than it was their job). And while the party has little hard power, I think they have a ton of soft power. For example, they have the power to talk to donors, they have the power to coordinate Congress people, they have the power to throw support behind other candidates (and if I recall correctly, you start to see these levers get used, just way too late)