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.
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