Three Months In, Evaluating Three Rationalist Cases for Trump
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I think another general mistake here is nerds thinking that they can ride a tiger, instead of getting eaten by it.
The wannabe 4D-chess thinking goes like this: "Here is a group of people who hate reason and experts. Therefore they have no experts among themselves. Therefore, if I join them and gain their trust, as a smart person I will quickly rise to the top, and then I will have an unparalleled opportunity to change the world."
What actually happens: The guy joins the movement, and as long as he follows the crowd, he can get quite popular. But the first moment he tries to do something different, his popularity/influence drops instantly.
I respect Hanania for admitting his mistake. Everyone else is delusional. This is basically the same mistake Dominic Cummings made a few years ago, and apparently we didn't learn a bit.
5The doubling down is delusional but I think you're simplifying the failure of projection a bit. The inability of markets and forecasters to predict Trump's second term is quite interesting. A lot of different models of politics failed.
It reminds maybe of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson. The Silicon-Valley + Trump combo feels somehow analogous.
in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany
I don't know much about freedom of speach in US, but all the free speech indexes that I've found with a quick search show that European countries are ahead of US. Am I missing something?
https://rsf.org/en/index
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-index
https://futurefreespeech.org/who-supports-free-speech-findings-from-a-global-survey/
Very hard to take an index about "freedom of expression" seriously when the United States, a country with constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, is ranked lower than the United Kingdom, which prosecutes hundreds of people for political speech every year.
The index by Reporters Without Boarders is primarily about whether a newspaper or reporter can say something without consequences or interference. Things like a competitive media environment seem to be part of the index (The USAs scorecard says "media ownership is highly concentrated, and many of the companies buying American media outlets appear to prioritize profits over public interest journalism"). Its an important thing, but its not the same thing you are talking about.
The second one, from "our world in data", ultimately comes from this (https://www.v-dem.net/documents/56/methodology.pdf). Their measure includes things like corruption, whether political power or influence is concentrated into a smaller group and effective checks and balances on the use of executive power. It sounds like they should have called it a "democratic health index" or something like that instead of a "freedom-of-expression index".
The last one is just a survey of what people think should be allowed.
It might be the case that the US has higher protections for freedom of expression, in terms of spoken or written text. I would certainly agree that some of the restrictions in central Europe are rather onerous. However, as someone who has lived in central Europe, it seems that central Europe allows for considerably higher freedom of political expression for the average person where it counts: at the polls. We have various voting systems that favor a plurality of parties instead of first-past-the-post systems like in the UK or the US.
Therefore I would call the statement from the OP by Richard Ngo "unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany." factually incorrect.
central Europe allows for considerably higher freedom of political expression for the average person where it counts: at the polls.
This looks like a cached thought from before Romania annulled the presidential election because the wrong guy won.
On the other hand, people from the United States are often the first to tell you that "freedom of speech" is not a general aspiration for making the world a better place, but merely a specific amendment to their constitution, which importantly only applies to censorship done directly by the government... therefore it does not apply to censorship by companies or mobs or universities or whatever.
(As an extreme example, from this perspective, a country without an official government would count as 100% free speech, even if criticizing the local warlord gets you predictably tortured to death; as long as the local warlord is not considered a "government" because of some technicality.)
The indexes above seem to be concerned only with state restrictions on speech. But even if they weren't, I would be surprised if the private situation was any better in the UK than it is here.
Am I missing something?
Yes: those indices are bullshit, and don't measure what they purport to. I expect they're faithfully reporting the results of whatever metric they constructed without falsifying any data, but that metric is entirely disconnected from what the median American would consider "freedom of speech."
What you're doing is essentially pointing at a map like this, and taking it seriously.
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1That's a good map; it changed my mind on how seriously to take these sorts of rankings. Do you know the original source? On reverse image search I just found a bunch of reddit posts with hosted copies of the image.
No, sorry. I think it's a now-deleted tumblr post, but I first saw it it on one of those reddit posts.
These indices are probably not meaningful. It's easy to find news stories of ordinary people in England and Germany being arrested for their opinions or even for mocking elected officials.
German criminal law actually adds special penalties for "defaming" politicians (Defamation of persons in the political arena, Section 188, German Criminal Code) as part of a dozen free-speech limitations that would violate the First Amendment here. And truth isn't an ironclad defense the way it is here.
In England, content that's merely "grossly offensive" or "menacing" is illegal under their Communications Act 2003, and similar laws date back earlier.
There are multiple cases even in the last few months alone of these laws being used vigorously in both countries (e.g. this case in England in which someone was jailed for insulting a politician)
In contrast, in America since Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech is criminal only when it is (a) intended, and (b) likely to produce imminent lawless action, or when it is a true threat, obscenity, or narrow category such as child‑pornography.
What I find lacking is any depth to the retrospection. Hanania's willingness to update his position clears a rather low bar. To go further one has to search for systematic causes for the error. For example, being wrong with the markets seems like a good opportunity to examine the hidden incentives that cause the market to get it wrong, not shrug and say "who could have known?"
I really, really hope at some point the Democrats will acknowledge the reason they lost is that they failed to persuade the median voter of their ideas, and/or adopt ideas that appeal to said voters. At least among those I interact with, there seems to be a denial of the idea that this is how you win elections, which is a prerequisite for governing.
The way you stated this makes it seem like your conclusion for the reason why the Democrats lost (and by extension, what they need to do to avoid losing in the future) is obviously correct. But the Median Voter Theorem you invoked is a conditional statement, and I don't think it's at all obvious that its conditions held for the 2024 US presidential election.
That's true, and you're right, the way I wrote my comment overstates the case. Every individual election is complicated, and there's a lot more than one axis of variation differentiation candidates and voters. The whole process of Harris becoming the candidate made this particular election weird in a number of ways. And as a share of the electorate, there are many fewer swing voters than there used to be a few decades ago, and not conveniently sorted into large, coherent blocks.
And yet, it's also true that as few as ~120,000 votes in WI, MI, and PA could have swung the result, three moderate states that have flipped back and forth across each of the past four presidential elections. Only slightly more for several other combinations of states. It's not some deep mystery who lives in the rust belt, and what positions on issues a few tens of thousands of voters who are on the fence might care about. It's not like those issues are uncorrelated, either. And if you look at the last handful of elections, a similar OOM of voters in a similar set of states could have swung things either way, each time.
And it's true that Harris underperformed Biden-2024 by vote share in every state but Utah (and 37.7% vs 37.8% does not matter to the outcome in any plausible scenario). If I'm reading the numbers correctly she also received fewer votes numerically than Biden in all but 6 states.
So yes: I can very easily imagine scenarios where you're right, and the fact that we don't meet the theoretical assumptions necessary for the median voter theorem to apply means we can't assume an approximation of it in practice. It's even possible, if the Dems had really started organizing sustained and wide-ranging GOTV campaigns fifteen years ago, that there could be the kinds of blue wave elections I keep getting told are demographic inevitabilities just around the corner, as long as they keep moving further towards the current set of progressive policy goals. But what I cannot imagine is that, in July 2024, in the country as it actually existed, Harris wouldn't have done better by prioritizing positions (many of which she actually already said she held!) that a relative handful of people in an actual handful of states consistently say they care the most about, and explaining why Trump's usually-only-vaguely-gestured-at plans would make many of their situations worse. Would it have been enough? I don't know. But it is a better plan than what happened, if what you want is to win elections in order to govern.
The view shared by Hanania in 2024 that Trump would be reined in by others seems less solid now: whereas during his first term Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn allegedly twice stole major trade-related documents off of his desk, nothing like that seems to be happening now.
This is an aside, but yesterday the WSJ reported something like this happening:
On April 9, financial markets were going haywire. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wanted President Trump to put a pause on his aggressive global tariff plan. But there was a big obstacle: Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff-loving trade adviser, who was constantly hovering around the Oval Office.
Navarro isn’t one to back down during policy debates and had stridently urged Trump to keep tariffs in place, even as corporate chieftains and other advisers urged him to relent. And Navarro had been regularly around the Oval Office since Trump’s “Liberation Day” event.
So that morning, when Navarro was scheduled to meet with economic adviser Kevin Hassett in a different part of the White House, Bessent and Lutnick made their move, according to multiple people familiar with the intervention.
They rushed to the Oval Office to see Trump and propose a pause on some of the tariffs—without Navarro there to argue or push back. They knew they had a tight window. The meeting with Bessent and Lutnick wasn’t on Trump’s schedule.
The two men convinced Trump of the strategy to pause some of the tariffs and to announce it immediately to calm the markets. They stayed until Trump tapped out a Truth Social post, which surprised Navarro, according to one of the people familiar with the episode. Bessent and press secretary Karoline Leavitt almost immediately went to the cameras outside the White House to make a public announcement.
"Richard Hanania was basically wrong, but so were the markets"
I do not see the markets giving a big vote in favour of trump at the election. I cannot even pick out where the election is. To me, an equally plausible theory is that markets carried on seeing economic growth until the tariffs (which are very visible).
Does Ngo think land is valuable even if it is unsuitable for agriculture , lacks mineral resources, and is nowhere near a city?
Ok, Greenland has mineral resources. But does Ngo think that regulation is preventing them from being extracted?
Most people's main mistake boils down to the assumption that his 2nd term would be more in line with his first - which, while full of quirks, was overall closer to business as usual. His 2nd term in comparison steers much further and the negative effects are much larger.
1I think the major impacts that matter are on war, pandemic risk, and x-risk. I rarely see anyone try to figure those out, perhaps the sign is too uncertain due to complexity.
The overwhelming priority for EAs should be to serve as peace emissaries and advocates in the culture war.
War is an ethical inversion: acts that are plainly evil in peacetime become heroic and praiseworthy in times of war. War destroys value at a double rate: the warrior's honor is to accept pain, suffering, and the risk of death in order to inflict those ills on his enemies. Further, in wartime the opposing parties cannot pause their hostilities to make side deals, even if those deals would be mutually beneficial (the Russians and Ukrainians are not going to pause the fighting to ink a trade deal or build a gas pipeline, even if those plans were beneficial to both sides).
If an EA could go back in time to the era of the European wars of religion, it is obvious that the ethically correct strategy would be to attempt to promote peace and understanding between Protestants and Catholics (it would be comically evil and irrational to pick a side and wage war against the other). Our current culture war of Woke vs MAGA is just another instance of this type of conflict and we must draw the same ethical conclusion.
If an EA could go back in time to 1939, it is obvious that the ethically correct strategy would be to…?
3Another broad problem is not noticing (or caring) about the degree to which being a good administrator of the federal bureaucracy, is a critical skill for a president. The things where it seems like Trump has no clue what is going on was baked in in P2025, when it talked about doing things that disrupted the normal function of agencies, because 90% of what the president knows he is getting from his secretaries and advisors, which get stuff from their departments. The fact that Trump watches Fox but sometimes ignores briefings is in fact a big deal.
Harris winning probably would not stop the democratic civil war, (unless she got some deals done), because the democrats have a civil war every election cycle and did not get a chance to do so in the primaries. We don't know how she would govern through that.
I noticed another thing.
All these analysis put a lot of stock on the democrats being Anti-market, because well, it is in the democratic discourse. But I think that is misreading that discourse. A lot of it is that the democrats are rightly very scared and suspiscious (almost paranoid), over monopolies, monopsonies, and cartelization. And they don't just endorse the obvious solution of agressively breaking up companies. (since it is bad for buisnesses even though it is good for competition)
But i just don't think that it is the only way to frame that. Especially Biden's SEC and FTC are very skeptical of M and A because they are very scared of monopolies, and most of the democratic policies make sense in a we think that there might be an x monopoly, and we dont just want to point antitrust at it, so what should we do.
And generally the solution that they come up with is that government should engage in effectively price negotiations with the monopoly provider, where they use to law to get people to coordinate in bargining for a better price, so you end up with 2 agent no alt bargianing as the pricing mechanism), hopefully to agree to something closer to the free market pricing (the price capping). That is a bad pricing mechanism (often ending up below market). It is really hard to figure out the coordination method used so as to break them up. This is a bad solution. If you think there is a cartel, you don't put in a price cap, you break the cartel.
1Curated and popular this week
