A few people have noted "I don't like that this post (and other recent ones) are blatantly talking about politics on LessWrong."
It is pretty plausible to me that it's not possible to get into mainstream political politics without some cascading effects that draw in the sort of person who wants to talk about politics on LW and is net negative.
(The mods do apply stronger standards to approving users who show up to talk about politics. So, this is not as immediately-failure-prone as you might expect. But, the risk from the longterm trends is pretty real).
I do think it's just false that "LW doesn't talk about politics." The original Politics is the Mind-Killer post doesn't say "don't talk about politics", it says "Don't use unnecessary political examples." We occasionally have talked about politics since the LW revival, about Covid, and "does the Ukraine situation have implications for whether East European LWers should evacuate" and "are we at risk of sudden nuclear war" and the first Trump administration. This post isn't very unprecedented. You can argue it's still bad. But, the status quo is empirically "political discussions happen when it seems important."
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But, I want to highlight a different issue. You might or might not think is bad, but I think you should be tracking:
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Some people have asked "Where is all this sudden partisan framing coming from? It feels like the last couple posts are taking as a given that one should be worried about Trump destroying America without doing anything to justify that and assuming we're all bought in."
The answer is "Well, because we mostly don't talk about politics on LW, all that conversation happened in person / private Slack, etc. One could put in a lot of work to lay out all the background assumptions when we go to write it up on LW, but, that's an extra tax on getting write the important new bit one just thought of."
This is perhaps analogous to how, for a few years, CFAR did most of their ideating in person, and then suddenly a significant chunk of LW authors were talking about Focusing or Doublecrux and taking them as obvious background concepts and everyone was like "wtf, what are these words, why are you so confident they matter?" and people were like "idk we've been talking about this for years, just not on LW because LW kinda sucks atm."
Perhaps also: a lot of discussion of the AI safety space (around the same time, during the LW decline period) happened in person/private, and it involved a lot of "what's the realpolitik about what OpenPhil will fund?" or whatever, and this resulted in some confusing conversations on LW.
The alternative to "stuff gets discussed on LW" is "it gets discussed elsewhere" and then the forefront of the rationalist conversation about what is important gets disconnected from the public, until, suddenly, it becomes important enough that it has to show up somehow, or leak through."
This is coming up now (for me) all that background thought has led to me and some colleagues thinking "the Trump situation seems bad enough to be a contender for like Top-5 things to actually work on, alongside various flavors of Deal with AI", and I'm trying to think through what that means. It also means I'm still trying to think about this cheaply/efficiently because I'm trying to decide whether to spend more time thinking about it. Which puts me in a weird place of "well, I'm just not gonna do the pretty exhaustive, methodical, ideal way of engaging with this question, at least at first, because the whole point is to reduce uncertainty on whether to invest in that sort of thing."
I do think the various private circles I've seen this discussed have had more extreme filter bubbles than LW, and it's actively useful to discuss it in public in places where it's easier to get pushback from different corners of the ideologysphere.
In general I finda lot of political talk fairly ungrounded, in ways where a lot of energy gets spent on things that, many years later, might not even have been true in the first place. I always feel like that about political things. I wish stuff erred on the side of opening with some verifiable facts and then distinguishing interpretation or concerns from there.
What is your concrete preference for what I had done with this post?
(this feels like a fairly generic response that's not particularly engaging with the situation or post, which is specifically asking "how to get grounded", with a description of my current ideas for doing so)
I mean, I'm mostly agreeing with you, and also adding that I think you didn't meet the bar in this post for being grounded in this post. The opening 4 paragraphs make a ton of claims about a discourse that I am not following without giving links for me to check the claims, and throughout makes lots of implicit claims about what is relevant.
I like your proposal in the post for how to get more grounded, to build up a historical dataset of unconstitutional or criminal activities by the US executive branch. Your questions seem too narrow to me though. Like, you list questions you'd like to ask about past Presidents, but I think they're (mostly) based on specific accusations of overreach by the current President you've heard, and would miss other relevant corruption / criminality by the executive branch in the past that could be much greater.
It's a bit like asking how many historical presidents lied under oath, and then deciding that Bill Clinton is the most corrupt president in history because he lied about his affair, rather than asking a more broad set of questions that would find other kinds of abuse of power, such as the Teapot Dome scandal where a Cabinet member secretly leased national security assets (oil) at super low prices in exchange for bribes, and the Cabinet member was sent to prison for it.
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1Nod. Agree with your object level take in the 3rd paragraph.
I think it'd have been dramatically more effort and mostly a different post to make the opening paragraphs to your satisfaction, and kinda the whole point of this post is to be able to write a second post that is more the type you want. (I also suspect you're an outlier in the amount you're not following Trump discourse already, none of the opening paragraphs are supposed to be new information for the reader)
I also suspect you're an outlier in the amount you're not following Trump discourse already, none of the opening paragraphs are supposed to be new information for the reader
Regardless, I think the point is to make it so that you don't have to be the sort of person who follows discourse in crappy filter-bubbles in order to understand what is happening. Zvi's news is the sort of thing that let me not have to read all the crappy filter bubbles during covid and still now during the AI-boom. LW should work like that if it's going to talk about government corruption and breakdown of law. I don't want to have to read the awful corners of the internet where this is discussed all day. They do truth-seeking far worse there.
Sorry to both you with this, I'm not saying this post is bad, I just want to be on the same page about whether this is meeting the LW ideal standards for political discourse, and what those are in the future if/when you do aspire to meet them.
I don't feel very confident about any of this, but, I think it's just sort of fine if not all posts are for all people.
In any other topic than politics, I think it'd be be fine to have a lower effort meta post trying to get traction on how to think about the problem, with the people who are already following a topic, before writing higher effort posts that do a better job being a good canonical reference. It's totally fine for someone to write an agent foundations post that just assumes a lot of background while some people hash out their latest ideas, and people who aren't steeped in agent foundations just aren't the target audience.
It's possible politics should have different standards from that such that basically every posts should be accessible, but, that's a fairly specific argument I'd need to hear.
I agree it'd be bad if there were only ever political posts like this. I don't know if I think it'd be bad if 10% or 20% or 50% of posts like this, would need to think about it more.
A more concise term for "follows discourse in crappy filter-bubbles" is "widely read". If you want to live inside a Zvi Mowshowitz filter bubble because Mowshowitz offers a good signal-to-noise ratio, that makes sense if you're super-busy and don't have much time to read, but that should be a mere time-saving optimization on your part. If you actually think that non-ingroup information sources are "awful" and "crappy" because "[t]hey do truth-seeking far worse there", then you probably could stand to read more widely!
Do you believe that, because a rational agent should never do worse with more information, that a human should be able to expose itself to any social environment on the internet and do better? I don’t, I think that many environments, while occasionally containing novel bits of information, can mostly make you less sane and seeing the world through lenses that are ungrounded. And I think many sources of news have been adversarially pursued and optimized to make the consumers of it be corrupted and controlled.
I expect you agree with this so I am not sure exactly what you’re objecting to. You are pointing out that some environments have valuable info? That’s right, but I would say that most environments talking about ”current events” in government/politics are not.
This is such a bizarre reply. Part of the time-honored ideal of being widely read (that I didn't think I needed to explicitly spell out) is that you're not supposed to believe everything you read.
Right? I don't think this is special "rationalist" wisdom. I think this is, like, liberal arts. Like, when 11th grade English teachers assign their students to read Huckleberry Finn, the idea is that being able to see the world through the ungrounded lenses of 19th-century racists makes them more sane, because they can contrast the view through those particular ungrounded lenses with everything else they've read.
many sources of news have been adversarially pursued and optimized to make the consumers of it be corrupted and controlled.
I mean, yes, but the way they pull that off is by convincing the consumers that they shouldn't want to read any of those awful corners of the internet where they do truthseeking far worse than here. (Pravda means "truth"; Donald Trump's platform is called Truth Social.)
some environments have valuable info [...] but I would say that most environments talking about "current events" in government/politics are not.
Given finite reading time, you definitely need to prioritize ruthlessly to manage the signal-to-noise ratio. If you don't have time to read anything but Mowshowitz, that's fine; most things aren't worth your time. But if you're skeptical that a human can expose itself to any social environment on the internet and do better, that doesn't sound like a signal-to-noise ratio concern. That sounds like a contamination concern.
1Not the main point here, but Huckleberry Finn is (rather famously) an anti-slavery work and not a good representation of the nineteenth-century racist worldview. A better example would be that a lot of college history classes assign parts of Mein Kampf.
I just want to register my protest at this explicitly political post appearing on Less Wrong. We've got a marvelously politics-free space here. Let's keep it that way. If you want to talk politics, you have essentially every other web site in the Internet to do it.
I want to register my disagreement with your protest.
Politics is one of the hardest spaces to be rational, and therefore one where rationalist have the most to offer. And a virtue of rationality is also saying true things. I think Trump is straightforwardly and unambiguously bad.
I think there's some sanity in having a norm that you avoid talking about politics when there is little to gain, because in that case, you're trading your sanity for nothing. But having a norm that you can never talk about politics, is the opposite of rationality from my perspective. It means you've lost faith in your own mental faculties to a degree where you don't even bother trying to apply them.
Its true there are many other places I can say this. I don't see why it matters. Those places are different from here. What I'd want to say about Trump here, would probably not be well received those other places.
All of your points are good ones. I now think my original position was an over-reaction. I'm still worried in general, but this was a carefully composed post, and i think my original position went too far.
I agree that it should be possible to make political posts here that are consistent with rational thought. But i think that we, as fallible humans, will have a hard time doing it. And an outbreak of political disagreement here would be very unfortunate. We've done so well thus far keeping out the toxoplasma of rage.
If you want to talk politics, you have essentially every other web site in the Internet to do it.
Are there any where "let's ask an LLM to collect data into spreadsheet to figure out whether the claims are actually true" is within the Overton window?
It's true that a lot of places aren't very scientific, but as long as your results were anti-Trump (and given the problems with this idea they pretty much will be), you'll be able to post them even in places that aren't very scientific, since they'll care more about the result than the method.
Supporters counter that Trump's actions are either completely precedented, or
Um, I thought the selling point of Trump was precisely that the institutions of the permanent education-media-administrative state are corrupt, and that Trump is going to fight them. Claims that Trump II is business-as-usual are probably political maneuvering that should not be taken literally. (They know Trump isn't business-as-usual, but they don't want to say that part out loud, because making it common knowledge would disadvantage their side in the war against the institutions they're trying to erode.)
That seemed ... like it was approaching a methodology that might actually be cruxy for some Trump supporters or Trump-neutral-ers.
No? The pretense that media coverage is "neutral" rather than being the propaganda arm of the permanent education-media-administrative state is exactly what's at issue.
These were in my model, it's plausible I shouldn't have posted this without putting more work into laying out the full model and trying to be fair / clear / ITT passing.
I edited the post to address a bit of this. In particular including:
[ETA] Of course, I know for many Trump supporters, the whole point is that he's destroying a bunch of institutions that need destroying. I am actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that if you want a better government, you need to tear down the old one quickly. There might be enough differences of values here that there's not much common ground to be had, but for me, the crux is that he seems to:
– Not merely be tearing down various bureaucracies, but, eroding norms like "there is supposed to be rule of law, generally."
– It does not look like this is laying the way for anything good to follow, it looks like it's just kinda making a more corrupt world.
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> That seemed ... like it was approaching a methodology that might actually be cruxy for some Trump supporters or Trump-neutral-
No? The pretense that media coverage is "neutral" rather than being the propaganda arm of the permanent education-media-administrative state is exactly what's at issue.
I agree the examples I listed there weren't currently a methodology Trump supporters would agree with, the point was just that it felt pointed in a direction where I was like "oh, as long as I'm doing something comprehensive in this way, it's probably worth putting in the extra work to find something that be cruxy for others.
I do disagree about "searching for instances of conflict between executive branch and courts" being something that's particularly prone to media bias. I think most sides would agree there was conflict, just disagree on who was right, and media would report on it regardless just with different framing. (But I agree "seems like executive overreach" would definitely have that problem)
1I think "usual" is the sticking point. "Usual given the precedent of the Clinton/Bush/Obama era" and "A return to form after the historically-unusual Clinton/Bush/Obama era" are both definitions of the term that I've seen used in political conversations, and these definitions are exact opposites of each other.
political maneuvering that should not be taken literally.
Or perhaps it's more like the story of the Jews reading the Stürmer because only there do they control the world: they want it not to be business-as-usual, for him to raze the institutions ("Drain the Swamp"), subdue their enemies both foreign and domestic, etc., and generally to serve as the Flail of God, but they can see it plainly ain't happening, though it's sometimes still fun to LARP as though it were.
This might be good ground for an adversarial collaboration.
It's difficult to take a context-less view of hard facts - e.g. rate of non-violent crimes committed per year is heavily dependent on whether the police are bothering to record crimes this year or not, and that's downstream of a political decision and a cultural impetus.
Things like this are tricky because "what is the context?" is so hotly debated that, even if everyone has a perfect consensus model of past presidents' actions and the circumstances in which they took them, there's no clean middle ground on the situation surrounding an action today. For example, Abraham Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus is generally regarded as a reasonable action taken during an existential crisis, whereas, had Bush done it as part of the War on Terror, which was unambiguously not an existential crisis, most people would say that it was uncalled for. Similarly, Eisenhower's own mass deportation campaign was substantially more intensive than anything done by more recent presidents, but did not face massive, highly-organized <protests / riots, depending on your party affiliation> intended to impede operations, meaning that "what measures are precedented to defend immigration enforcement operations?" hasn't yet been answered.
As awkward of a solution as it is, I would cast my ballot in favor of operating on hard metrics alone, simply because operating on 'vibes' opens the door to a lot of bad things that neither facilitate nor, arguably, permit rational discussion. In this world, trade flows, GDP growth (normalized for population and inflation however you see fit) and deficits/surpluses would be used to determine whether something extreme had happened in the realm of international trade, for instance. Incarceration rate, crime victimization rate, or the rate at which police encounters have violent outcomes would be used to determine whether something extreme had happened in the realm of criminal justice. This has the benefit of everyone agreeing on whether something happened, and what happened, if something did, thus allowing a more formal conversation on why it happened.
A less strict heuristic would be to conceptualize a world in which a legally-equivalent conflict was taking place in the opposite direction, and see if the emotional reaction it elicits is the same or different. I encourage this for political conversations elsewhere, but it's difficult to reliably evaluate whether someone is doing so in good faith, so it's hard to recommend it as a broader policy on a 'hard mode' topic.
For general American decline there is a recent article by Noah Smith on capital flight away from America. Its quantitative and its a Trump second term phenomenon. There is also the number of meetings between Trump and different traditionally independent agencies like the FBI and the Department of Justice. I believe those numbers have exploded in this term. The number of probes into elected and appointed officials have definitely also exploded this term. There have also been a large number of acquittals at the grand jury level because the charges are so clearly vindictive and false.
I've always thought about using LLMs to analyze and compare speeches. You could for example look at the ratio of the most information dense summary to the length of the speech. Also, in the wake of tragedies Presidents have been historically consistent in calling for unity. Most people left or right would agree that's a good historical precedent that's still common practice. It's a practice that Trump has clearly broken. A LLM could simply count the number of times he calls the other side evil and compare that with past responses to tragedies. In his speeches Trump also makes it very clear that he rewards loyalty to Trump and not to abstract ideals like the rule of law. Those are Trump specific norm-erosions.
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1Capital flight is a great indicator, thank you for the suggestion.
I'm dubious on Smith article though. He claims to be talking about foreign capital investment, then uses a bunch of proxies that aren't net investment. If you graph actual foreign investment, you see a decline, but it looks like a continuation of a trend from the Biden years, or arguably even Obama. The only time investment went net negative was in 2014, which stems from Vodafone selling Verizon back to itself.
If anyone is feeling ambitious I'd love to see this graph normed for inflation or GDP.
I got a little ambitious and normed the data by value of dollar, relative to 2006Q1. 2025 looks even less exceptional than it did in nominal terms
11ignoring/disobeying court order
How do you determine whether instances of this are executive overreach or judicial overreach?
Heuristically I would lean towards the "executive overreach" interpretation if the court order offers sound arguments which the executive refuses to engage with on the same level.
If it ignores a court order outright, then it's clear that the traditional balance of power has been upset in favour of the executive.
How many incidents will an LLM find of a president ignoring a court order?
To my knowledge at least, there hasn't really been an actual time this has "truly" happened even now. It's often said that Andrew Jackson did but the situation is complex enough that it's arguable it shouldn't count and the famous quote of "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!" seems to be apocryphal.
Now there are lots of ways to essentially get around the court order for a long while without actually violating it like a favorite of modern presidents to go "ok X justification doing thing was ruled unconstitutional, but that doesn't mean Y is, and if that gets ruled it doesn't mean Z is" or dragging things out in court exhausting as many appeals and pauses as possible to delay for months/years but I'm not aware of any direct violations at least. Even something like this list I found not only gets the facts wrong about Jackson but openly contradicts itself in the parts about Lincoln and Roosevelt where the executives "victory" is not because they ignored the court, but because Congress acted.
"The Supreme Court ruled the act unconstitutional as the government could not levy a tax on companies merely to have that money paid back to farmers. However, the act was adjusted two years later and continued in its new form."
Like that's literally not defying the courts. That's the previous act being ruled unconstitutional and a new act being made that didn't contain the specific unconstitutional part in it.
Which is to say that you also need to be careful about what is actually happening. Biden's quotes about how the supreme court "didn't stop me" looks like the admin ignored a court order, but they were really just did that workaround in the previous paragraphs of doing Y and Z. The Trump admin right now is talking about their tactics with tariffs if they get ruled against and many make it look like they plan to defy the ruling, but it so far seems to just be the same exact tactic of pivoting to something else and claiming it gives authority.
1I think you're going to have a hard time coming up with "a bunch of numbers and examples" that adequately capture what's going on. Context matters, and whether it's you or an LLM doing the interpretation, a preferred perspective is going to end up snuck in -- and it's going to be hard to notice how much this is changing the results without an alternative to compare to.
That seemed… like it was approaching a methodology that might (with addititional workshopping) be cruxy for some Trump supporters or Trump-neutral-ers.
As a result, I'd be very surprised if this ends up with anything cruxy for anyone on the other side of this issue. Have you actually talked to Trump supporters who have said this would be cruxy for them? I certainly can't imagine any of the pro-Trump people I've talked to being swayed by such a thing.
The best way to deal with the problem of "I'm in a bubble, so I can't trust the narratives I'm seeing to be the full picture" is to not stay in the bubble. The question I would be asking is "Hey Trump supporter. What am I missing, when it comes to Trump?"
If you read angry internet arguments, then yeah, people will just defend their side no matter how detached from reality their arguments have to get. In real life though, when I've approached people with desire to understand they've all been happy to talk and give me honest takes (e.g. I don't think I've ever heard "Vaccines definitely cause autism, bro!", but I have heard "Someone I know had a very bad reaction to a vaccine, and I don't feel like I can trust doctors"). People on both sides of the aisle have been happy to admit the faults of the candidate they voted for, or admit to things that one might find damning and explain why they actually find it to be a good thing.
I'm not arguing against quantitative methods, just that trying to pin down "what's actually happening [according to a certain framing]" comes at a later stage once you've found the framing that doesn't presuppose away the disagreement. Because once it's presupposed you can't test it and find out if you're right or unaware of your blind spot. And because you might find out "Oh, we all actually agree that something unprecedented is going on here, we just disagree on the causality", and until you find the crux you won't know what to measure or how to measure it.
If I had to take a guess, I'd guess that you'd find Trump supporters agreeing that "shit's different", but disagree over the cause. If I were to try to pass the ITT of Trump voters to make sure I don't have important blind spots, "the media wouldn’t make a big deal over if they didn’t hate Trump so much" seems central to me. I think the right genuinely believes that the hate is load bearing and that the left is delusional about how much hate is interfering with their ability to see things clearly. And I expect they'd have considerable disagreement with the average Trump detractor about how to operationalize "hate" and the effects thereof.
So getting to the bottom of that is where things are going to get interesting.
Having sat on this for a night, I think basically yeah this posts's framing doesn't make sense as a way to engage with active Trump supporters.
Right now my main question is "should I spend more time thinking about this or go back to ignoring it and hope it isn't too bad?". I think if I decided to do that I'd probably expect "solve political polarization" to be a major piece of it and yeah I'd want to talk to a wider variety of people qualitatively.
I agree that baking in the framing into the initial question is bad, but, like, the framing is the reason why I'm even considering thinking more about this in the first place and I'm not sure how to sidestep that.
The point about "online arguments" vs "chatting with individual people" is well taken though.
1Right now my main question is "should I spend more time thinking about this or go back to ignoring it and hope it isn't too bad?".
It seems like you're curious and find it interesting, so why not? There are probably worthwhile things to learn.
I think if I decided to do that I'd probably expect "solve political polarization" to be a major piece of it and yeah I'd want to talk to a wider variety of people qualitatively.
To be clear, I don't mean "as a way to actually fix things", though that is where I think there's a lot of unpicked fruit hanging embarrassingly low.
I just mean as a personal epistemics thing. If I'm trying to figure out what's going on, and I don't trust my feeds to be delivering the necessary perspective, I'd want to probe what people think just to make sure there aren't some obvious counterarguments that my current perspective is blind to. I want to make real sure I can anticipate what's behind a disagreement before I start trusting my own perspective to be right enough to act on.
I agree that baking in the framing into the initial question is bad, but, like, the framing is the reason why I'm even considering thinking more about this in the first place and I'm not sure how to sidestep that.
We're always going to have framings that make less sense in hindsight. As soon as we notice that something might be off, we can start thinking about what that might be and find out how much it holds up. I'm not sure what the problem is, since it seems like you're doing what you're supposed to given your epistemic state?
Oh. Is it like... if I'm overcome with "Holy fuck, how are antivaxxers so dumb" and it motivates me to look into it, I can't just "not have" the motivation and ignoring it would mean I don't look at all, but if I act within that framing then everything comes out like "Why are you so dumb, anyway?" which isn't exactly epistemically helpful?
I understand the appeal of using LLMs as a kind of neutral arbiter but that seems like a very bad idea for this specific task, given that virtually all LLMs fall on the left side of the political compass, and many have demonstrated specific anti-Trump bias (e.g. higher refusal rate for "write me a poem praising Trump" than "write me a poem praising Biden"). I would not trust LLMs to produce the same outputs across a lot of data based on whether an action is labeled as Trump or someone else.
If you have some extremely trusted humans then human review of the findings can fix false positives, but nothing will fix the false negatives where LLMs decide that some action by Not Trump was unremarkable and so never add it to the incident list for further review.
I suppose this itself is testable: take a bunch of Trump news stories too recent to be in the training data and see if sed 's/Trump/Biden' produces identical results when passed to an LLM. That runs into further problems where "Trump attacks Democrats" actually is different from "Biden attacks Democrats", but maybe with human review you can filter out stories where the simple sed is insufficient.
Potential metrics
- Court-based metrics
- Federal injunctions against executive actions per term
- Executive actions struck down as unconstitutional
- Instances of defying/ignoring court orders (distinct from appealing)
- Structural/institutional metrics
- Inspector General firings
- Career civil servant resignation rates
- Acting officials vs. Senate-confirmed appointees ratio
These metrics may not be available farther into the past.
The problem with this idea is that the metrics are cherry-picked in order to make Trump look bad. And even then, what they actually measure is how much Trump is in conflict with the rest of the government, not how much we should be scared of him.
1Yeah, I can see that. Unfortunately, "how much should we be scared of him" doesn't have direct metrics, so we have to come up with proxies of some kind.
Do you have any suggestions that don't feel cherry-picked? What we likely need is input from some good historians. I don't think I can escape my recency bias well enough.
doesn't have direct metrics, so we have to come up with proxies of some kind.
See also: McNamara procedure
the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist.
1I'm not sure there is a measure that's not cherry-picked. Deciding how good a president's actions are inherently means deciding how bad particular measures are, how to trade them off, and which ones he's even responsible for. It's also worse if you're measuring reactions to him, which several of your measures do; the easiest way for someone to be better on the measure "reactions to X" is not to do X.
the easiest way for someone to be better on the measure "reactions to X" is not to do X
Yes? Just like the easiest way for someone to avoid criminal convictions is to not do crimes. Not a guarantee but it helps.
Ultimately, any metric does need to be contextualized and interpreted. Supposing metrics can be agreed upon, it’s another big step to cross the is-ought gap, even with a shared moral framework.
I agree with another commenter that the original post is a good candidate for adversarial collaboration.
I think it's a bad framing to treat "unprecedented moves to expand executive power" and "natural extension of existing trends" as the same mental bucket. The two are not the same. A key problem in the US is that the existing trends over the last two decades have been bad when it comes to expanding executive power.
When it comes to the whole question of corruption and the rule of law, the way Robert Moses build a lot of New York was pretty corrupt and not really honoring the spirit of the rule of law. The Chinese had a lot of economic growth at the backdrop of a lot of corruption. Part of what strong rule of law along with no
Scott Bessent bullying Big Pharma companies with tariffs threats to get them to radically reduce the prices they charge with most-favored-nation drug pricing in the United States is pretty unusual. It's a huge change from corporate lobbyists just getting what they want.
Of course, I know for many Trump supporters, the whole point is that he's destroying a bunch of institutions that need destroying. I am actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that if you want a better government, you need to tear down the old one quickly. There might be enough differences of values here that there's not much common ground to be had
I doubt that's the case. If you look at what Marty Makary is doing at the FDA with actions like allowing Bayesian statistics for drug trials and generally creating incentives in the bureaucracy for faster drug approval, there's a lot of common ground.
The NIH making moves in favor of animal rights over which PETA writes "Champagne corks are popping at PETA thanks to NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s landmark decision that will spare animals, help humans, and bring science into the modern era. Bhattacharya is also serious about the replication crisis and improving incentives for researchers in ways that's
While the Trump administration did try to reduce NIH funding, congress still passed a budget with unchanged NIH budget so, overall FDA and NIH seem to be currently run nearer to rationalists values than the institutions previously ran.
Of course, there are also plenty of other areas where policy is substantially worse but if you see nothing that you like it's likely because of biased news sources.
I think it's a bad framing to treat "unprecedented moves to expand executive power" and "natural extension of existing trends" as the same mental bucket. The two are not the same. A key problem in the US is that the existing trends over the last two decades have been bad when it comes to expanding executive power.
I'm confused about what you mean here, the specific existing trend I was imagining was "unprecedented moves to expand executive power." Which look different if they are on a steady trend, vs one guy radically doing much worse than trend.
If you take for example the Obama administration before the first Trump administration, it had the claim of the president being able to order an assassination of an US citizen away from the battlefield without any need to justify that assassination in a court of law. That was an unprecedented move to expand executive power.
The steady trend is that these kinds of moves to expand executive power are regularly made. Each administration takes the powers that their predecessors won for granted and seeks to expand them.
There is an xkcd comic, xkcd: 1122 (and an updated xkcd: 2383), about how every presidential election is unprecedented in some way. The same is true of presidential administrations and presidents themselves: you can always construct some metric by which they are unusual or unique. It may be more useful to simply criticize whatever you think is bad, even if, say, Lincoln, either Roosevelt, Kennedy, or whoever did something similar but worse.
Thinking out loud about next steps.
So, I agree with all the commenters who be like "the listed questions feel like an oddly specific set of questions that are cherrypicked." It's not obvious what to actually do instead.
One angle is to try for more of a "world map" rather than a "US map" that is trying to ask general questions across history that a) make it easier to compare the US to other countries (Which seems relevant) and also forces the mindset of "see what are interesting things to notice across history" as opposed to "try to answer specific questions")
Which, like, I still have no idea how to do.
But, it occurs to me OurWorldInData is already kinda trying to be this thing. Taking a quick look there, it seems like often there's only relatively recent data (makes sense).
Their page on corruption does a decent job of laying out why the problem of asking "how corrupt are countries?" is hard, but, answers it a few different ways.
I suspect trying to quantify this in a way both sides will agree on is a fool's errand, but I'll offer a couple of thoughts anyway.
Firstly, I wouldn't trust the LLMs on this. I've found the ones I've interacted with, which admittedly is mainly Claude, to be rather biased on politically charged questions like this.
Secondly, if we want to examine how often the Trump admin violates court orders as compared to previous administrations, we might look at whether judges have made formal findings that administration officials violated an order, contempt findings or something like that. I'm actually rather curious whether there has been a notable uptick under Trump.
For my own epistemics, I would honestly be somewhat reluctant to trust the results of AI analysis that somebody else designed, although it could be a useful data point.
A helpful thing to do could be to list the five most plausible candidates for "unprecedented overreach and institutional erosion" in the Trump era, and for each make a case that there is comparable precedent from the Biden era (or other presidents, but that risks expanding the time window too much for a fair comparison). As a non-very politics involved person I have heard that Biden's decision to forgive student loan debts was egregiously unconstitutional. I would be interested in similar parallels to the Trump administration pressuring and going after FED officials.
Wouldn't you expect this to be affected pretty heavily by availability bias? Meaning a large determinant of the data is going to be if the articles available to the LLM for a particular time period are for or against a particular President on the proposed topics.
It might be different if you were searching a comprehensive system, like 100% of court records, for incidents, but it sounds like your search would be of news articles, web sites, and similar, which is going to be heavily influenced by what reporters found desirable to report on at the time. It's a dataset which will highlight unusual events and incidents damaging to political opponents over systemic reporting of events from a neutral observer.
AIs are known to have political bias in favor of the left. Using AIs to get information about Trump won't produce fair results. Also, AIs are trained on the Internet and the media, which bakes media bias into the AI's results. The AI will inherently trust the media's side of things, and will rarely tell you that the media blew up an unimportant incident or left things out.
In some recent posts, some people have been like “Wait why is there suddenly this abrupt series of partisan LW posts that are taking for granted there is a problem here that is worth violating the LW avoid-most-mainstream-politics norm?”.
Like TV shows that point out their own plot holes, saying "look, my post is violating the rules" doesn't excuse violating the rules.
There's an abrupt series of partisan posts because partisans like to think their enemies are the worst people ever--so bad that they can violate all the norms they want in order to get their enemies, including norms about avoiding politics. And when you stand to gain from thinking your enemies are the worst people ever, there's a lot of motivated reasoning going around.
1There's nothing physically impossible about having a president that's substantially worse on overreach/corruption/degradation of institutions, so that has to be in the hypothesis space. We'd expect their defenders to say the accusations were overblown/unfair no matter what, so that's not evidence. And we'd expect their opponents to make the accusations no matter what, so that's not evidence either.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they're completely precedented or following a trend line?
There’s plenty of actions Trump could take that would make supporters view him as genuinely much worse than average. The below list is not exhaustive nor does it set a lower bound, it’s just examples.
- Trump could personally shoot someone randomly walking down the street in the middle of Times Square
- ICE could deport multiple confirmed US Citizens or deport one citizen willfully and knowingly.
- Trump could explicitly defy a US Supreme Court order without any legitimate color of law.
- ICE could shoot and kill a protestor who was not in any way hampering legitimate law enforcement activity and was instead merely protesting nearby.
- Trump could withdraw all federal funding from a State that is fully keeping up with its legal requirements to get those funds and pull that funding for solely political purposes.
Support of Trump as not much worse than average is falsifiable for many Trump supporters. However, belief that Trump is much worse than average does not appear to be in fact falsifiable for a large majority of his detractors, including many detractors on this site
I agree the list of potential questions is biased towards complaints-about-Trump. Raemon and I (co-author) hear more from anti-Trumpers than pro- and it shows[1]. But if I didn't consider Trump's exceptionality a live question for which evidence would change my mind, I would either have not tried to quantify at all, or would have gone with the first metrics we thought of. This post is specifically attempting to counter the problem of cherrypicking metrics by inviting supporters to provide others. So far the best suggestion has come from Ben Pace. The second best is from bodry, which I checked and found evidence more favorable to Trump than expected, and became slightly less concerned for the economy under Trump (still pretty worried, but not as much as I was).
- ^
Although FWIW, I didn't vote in the last presidential election because it wasn't obvious to me which was the lesser evil and as a citizen of a guaranteed state it was not worth my time to figure out. I lean libertarian and my long term voting pattern is against incumbents, which in CA mostly means voting Republican.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they’re completely precedented or following a trend line?
What you do is you say "given that, we are not doing politics here".
But if you have to violate that rule, at least you could try to avoid biased tools and procedures.
1There's an abrupt series of partisan posts because partisans like to think their enemies are the worst people ever--so bad that they can violate all the norms they want in order to get their enemies, including norms about avoiding politics.
Probably worth noting that this can't be the reason, because partisanship predates these posts. Partisans have always disliked their enemies! An answer to questions of the form "why" has to extend to an answer of the question "why now", and this does not and can not. Perhaps you could argue that we've very recently reached critical mass on the amount of partisanship that's allowed to exist in this community, but that's a much more specific argument than the one you're making.
I don't think "why now" really needs an answer, because it's not just now; we've seen it before. Also, since posts must appear in whole numbers, just normal fluctuation can take the number of posts from 0 to 1 or 2, so even if it was just now, the increase would not require an explanation unless we started seeing dozens of them.
And over the longer run, the overall acceptability of violating norms because one's enemies are really bad has been going up.
Votes also come in integers, but are not so small, so I don't think you're really providing any support for your hypothesis here. We've seen broadly anti-Trump and anti-Republican posts, they've usually been met with pretty strong disagreement (even just as a matter of form, often from people who agree with the overall sentiment) and a desire to avoid drawing too many conclusions, but this has changed recently. We can tell that it's changed by noticing patterns in discourse and voting. That five months ago detailed anti-Trump posts were being made, downvoted, and mere expressions of disagreement in the comments were pretty roundly applauded, but now people (basically correctly) take for granted that the median LWer is so strongly anti-Trump that the position doesn't need justification, is exactly what I'm pointing out.
There are multiple possible explanations, sure, but merely that this is a partisan issue isn't one of them. That it's a partisan issue and that partisan hostility is worse and more common now is, but as I mentioned, it requires argument. Have you noticed this pattern on other issues here? Is there a breakthrough effect, such that it happens first on one issue without seeming to change other discussions? If so, why? What other patterns of behavior on LW does this fit, and what does it predict?
The relevant counter-hypothesis is that Trump really is that bad, such that suspending judgment on whether he's bad impedes discussion even if it elides some nuance. Elsewhere you've claimed that this isn't a hypothesis we should allow ourselves to even consider no matter how true it is, here it seems like you're arguing that it's basically wrong in the sense that increased partisanship in general rather than exceptional circumstances are responsible. I think it's pretty likely that lots of people are overestimating how bad Trump is somewhat, but not to an extent that is easy or productive to correct - I think I'd basically have to lie to someone to convince them that Trump is actually completely fine and totally in line with what they should expect, to the extent that breaking communication norms to mention his mistakes is escalatory. Do you think I'm wrong, or just that I shouldn't talk about it on LW? It's really unclear to me what you're trying to argue for, and hence, what (if anything) I can expect to get from discussing this with you. (I notice this sounds snarky, what I mean to say is that since disagreements can get pretty wide hear and require a ton of tension to sort out, I can imagine either talking further or agreeing to disagree being reasonable actions for both of us, depending on what your answer here is.)
1Have you noticed this pattern on other issues here?
I haven't noticed this pattern on other issues outside LW, so I don't particularly expect to notice it within LW. Or rather, I have noticed the pattern on other issues, but all these issues involve, in practice, the same set of political enemies, so it isn't really an independent set of things that people think are the worst ever.
Elsewhere you’ve claimed that this isn’t a hypothesis we should allow ourselves to even consider no matter how true it is
Sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about. Unless you're blurring the distinction between "post here" and "consider".
here it seems like you’re arguing that it’s basically wrong in the sense that increased partisanship in general rather than exceptional circumstances are responsible.
Of course it's increased partisanship. The last time a non-Trump Republican was president was January 2009. That was before most of the rise of social media. The era of social media has made Trump a target of partisanship in a way that was just impossible before now, not that nobody tried. And Trump is only a year into his current term, and for obvious reasons, the start of his term is going to lead to a lot more anti-Trump partisanship.
And if you're asking specifically about why things got worse in January 2026, see above: I don't believe they have.
I think I’d basically have to lie to someone to convince them that Trump is actually completely fine and totally in line with what they should expect, to the extent that breaking communication norms to mention his mistakes is escalatory.
No, what you should say is "it doesn't matter whether Trump is totally fine." You shouldn't be breaking norms because someone is really not-fine. That allows one-sided norm breaking where the more you can work yourself into a frenzy, the more you have permission to do things that your opponents have no permission to do back unless they defect too and say that your side is the worst ever. The incentives created by "if it's really bad, you can break norms" are their own kind of bad.
All right. So, if I'm reading this correctly, by partisanship you don't mean partisanship (something everybody agrees has increased in the US), but instead some bizarre phenomenon which shares some characteristics with partisanship but is only capable of being realized as broad anti-Trump sentiment? And we (by "we" I mean LW in public, of course individuals can draw their own conclusions, sorry if I wasn't clearer about this before) should refuse to speak clearly about certain issues, because if norms are more fluid that has some bad incentives (and what about the incentives of being unable to discuss certain topics? Well, it would be norm-violating to acknowledge those!) But also, it's "of course" your preferred explanation - conveniently, it doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong, but you're obviously right. And why is it obvious? Well, you can think of one plausible mechanism by which you could be correct, modulo the fact that your definition of partisanship is for some reason impossible to apply to Biden or Zohran, whom plenty of people think are the worst thing ever, even on here. And, well, sure there are other explanations, but considering those other explanations would be norm-violating, so, no more thinking needed. Is this really what you mean when you say "of course it's partisanship"? Because I can't think think of another way to form what you've said into an argument for your position.
It seems like your pattern of argumentation is: take a position, think up one single way that position could be true, then assert that any alternate explanations are damaging to the community to discuss. Surely you understand the difference between an argument being difficult to challenge for social reasons and that argument being convincing, right? You can't Emperor's New Clothes your way into political consensus. I don't think you're doing this on purpose, but I strongly recommend trying to stop doing it on purpose.
Of course, you could stop trying to make political arguments entirely and only make meta-arguments, that would be more respectable. If you really think there are no circumstances whatsoever under which LW should talk about politics, you can say that, you'll just have to explain why you think the bad incentives that produces are more bearable than those it eliminates. But that would also mean giving up on the other arguments you're making here - if people shouldn't be allowed to argue that Trump is genuinely exceptionally bad regardless of its truth value, then you're also not allowed to argue that those people are overreacting regardless of it's truth value. You don't get to have it both ways.
but is only capable of being realized as broad anti-Trump sentiment?
Partisanship in the US could be something other than anti-Trump sentiment. There's no logical necessity for it to be that, after all. It just isn't actually separate from anti-Trump sentiment. (Outside the lizardman constant.)
Surely you understand the difference between an argument being difficult to challenge for social reasons and that argument being convincing, right?
I have no idea which argument you're referring to.
if people shouldn’t be allowed to argue that Trump is genuinely exceptionally bad regardless of its truth value, then you’re also not allowed to argue that those people are overreacting regardless of it’s truth value.
First of all, you are demanding that you can attack all you want, but nobody gets to defend. No. This is like the difference between initiation of force and self-defense. If you're going to argue that Trump is uniquely bad to the point where norms can be violated to tell everyone how bad he is, then everyone else gets to say that you are overreacting. You started it.
Second, my point is "you shouldn't post about it here regardless of whether you're overreacting." It doesn't matter how genuinely bad Trump is; you (and the OPs) shouldn't be posting about him either way.
Partisanship in the US could be something other than anti-Trump sentiment. There's no logical necessity for it to be that, after all. It just isn't actually separate from anti-Trump sentiment. (Outside the lizardman constant.)
Anti-Obama sentiment was not partisan? Anti-Biden sentiment is not? Anti-Zohran sentiment is not? Anti-ICE sentiment is not? Anti-DEI sentiment is not? Anti-Somali sentiment is not? Antisemitism is not? Do you actually believe this?
I have no idea which argument you're referring to.
The paragraph beginning "of course it's increased partisanship" was my main target here.
First of all, you are demanding that you can attack all you want, but nobody gets to defend. No. This is like the difference between initiation of force and self-defense. If you're going to argue that Trump is uniquely bad to the point where norms can be violated to tell everyone how bad he is, then everyone else gets to say that you are overreacting. You started it.
Of course, I did not start it. (Indeed you'll notice that I've been extraordinarily careful not to make any claims like this in our discussion, even though I think they can be justified, because I respect your desire to keep those discussions off of LW. EDIT: To clarify I've stated my position, what I mean is that I haven't argued for it or tried to provide any reason to believe that I'm correct.) I challenged you on what you claim is your point, you decided proactively to jump down from the meta to the object level at that point. But someone somewhere did this, so you're allowed in "self-defense" to make this pivot when talking to me. I wonder if you've thought about the bad incentives this behavior produces? Or is that the sort of thing only your ideological opponents are supposed to concern themselves with?
Second, my point is "you shouldn't post about it here regardless of whether you're overreacting." It doesn't matter how genuinely bad Trump is; you (and the OPs) shouldn't be posting about him either way.
I have been trying to get you to argue for this, but you've refused three times now! Do you actually believe it to be true that, entirely regardless of how bad they actually are, nobody should ever talk about political figures on LW? Like, if Satan himself were president of the United States and was killing a million people per day, eliciting celebration from his supporters, would you still think discussion was not justified on the grounds that it's political? If so I'd like you to defend that belief rather than just stating it, as I am now asking you to do for the fourth time. If not, I'd like you to explain what criteria you're using to decide whether discussion of political figures is acceptable (of course you don't have to draw hard-and-fast lines, but at least tell me what the relevant methods of evaluation are), and admit that deciding whether norm-breaking is justified will require at least a bit of discussion of object-level truths.
Anti-Obama sentiment was not partisan?
It is literally partisan, but it was nowhere near the same degree of being partisan that's involved here.
I wonder if you’ve thought about the bad incentives this behavior produces?
The incentives that being able to respond to political rants create are that such rants become less useful (since they don't go unopposed) and people would be less likely to make them. I find these incentives acceptable.
Like, if Satan himself were president of the United States and was killing a million people per day, eliciting celebration from his supporters, would you still think discussion was not justified on the grounds that it’s political?
Thousands of people are being killed in Sudan--certainly more than Trump has killed--and we've managed to go without LW being full of discussion about it. So yes.
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Updated title to include "corruption", and changed some framing in the post.
Critics of Trump often describe him as making absolutely unprecedented moves to expand executive power, extract personal wealth, and impinge on citizens’ rights. Supporters counter that Trump’s actions are either completely precedented, or are the natural extension of existing trends that the media wouldn’t make a big deal over if they didn’t hate Trump so much.[1] Other supporters say "yes, his actions are unprecedented and this is good, they're tearing down corrupt things that need tearing down."
In some recent posts, some people have been like "Wait why is there suddenly this abrupt series of partisan LW posts that are taking for granted there is a problem here that is worth violating the LW avoid-most-mainstream-politics norm?".
My subjective experience has been "well, me and most of my rationalist colleagues have spent the past 15 years mostly being pretty a-political, were somewhat wary but uncertain about Trump during his first term, and the new set of incidents just seems... pretty unprecedently and scarily bad?"
But, I do definitely live in a bubble that serves me tons of news about bad-seeming things that Trump is doing. It's possible to serve up dozens or hundreds of examples of a scary thing per day, without that thing actually being objectively scary or abnormal. (See: Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers)
Elizabeth and I wanted to get some sense of how unusual and how bad Trump’s actions are. “How bad” feels like a very complex question with lots of room for judgment. “How unusual” seemed a bit more likely to have an ~objective answer.
I asked LLMs some basic questions about it, but wanted a more thorough answer. I was about to spin up ~250 subagents to go run searches on each individual year of American history, querying for things like “[year] [president name] ‘executive overreach’” or “[year] [president name] ‘disobeying court order’”, and fill up a CSV with incidents.
That seemed… like it was approaching a methodology that might (with addititional workshopping) be cruxy for some Trump supporters or Trump-neutral-ers. It seemed like maybe good practice to ask if there were any ways to operationalize this question that’d be cruxy for anyone else. And, generally pre-register it before running the query, making some advance predictions.
[ETA] Of course, I know for many Trump supporters, the whole point is that he's destroying a bunch of institutions that need destroying. I am actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that if you want a better government, you need to tear down the old one quickly. There might be enough differences of values here that there's not much common ground to be had, but for me, the crux is that he seems to:
But, I'm aware the world is already pretty corrupt, and there's generally been a trend of executive overreach for awhile. It wouldn't be too surprising if my intuitions here are just way off.
Each operationalization I’ve thought of so far seems a bit confused/wrong/incomplete. I feel okay with settling for “the least confused/wrong options I can come up with after a day of thinking about it," but, I'm interested in suggestions for better ones.
Some examples so far that feel like they're at least relevant:
These questions all have the form "checking if allegations by detractors about Trump are true", which isn't necessarily the frame by which someone would defend Trump, or the set of questions that'd be most salient to them. If you're trying to build a complete picture of what's going on, you probably also want to ask questions like:
I also don't know that any of this is really the right frame for actually answering my own question of "is the US in a period of rapid decline in a way that's a plausible top priority for me or others to focus on?"
None of them really get at things like "tweeting a picture of yourself wearing a crown", which feels intuitively fairly bad to me but I'm not really sure how to think about that.
I'm interested in whether people have more suggestions for questions that seem relevant and easy to check. Or, suggestions on how to operationalize fuzzier things that might not fit into the "measure it per year" ontology.
Appendix: Subagents Ahoy
A lot of these are recorded in places that are pretty straightforward to look up. i.e. there's already lists of Pardons per President, and Executive Orders per president.
But, I have an AI-subagent process I'm experimenting with that I expect to use for at least some of these, which currently goes something like:
I do basically think it's true that
I have a pet theory about leaning on exact quotes rather than summaries to avoid having to trust their summarization