I seem to be frustrating you with my answers, but I am doing what I can to be helpful. That is genuinely my goal here. Simple understanding is what the original question was about, since not too many people here understood why people supported Trump, and understanding, not political fighting is my entire point in engaging. I don't actually feel any need (or even desire) to defend Trump or bash Biden/Harris. If you wanted to have a conversation on specific scenarios, you may need to suggest them yourself. 'If <scenario A> happened', what would you think?' I would answer, though I might also explain why I think it doesn't apply if that seems pointed. You might also want to read my responses to Pazzaz if you want to understand how I engage with a more limited question in greater depth. We had a lot of fundamental disagreements, but I think we understood each other's points well and recovered from misunderstanding each other.
I listed why getting exactly the best 10 on short notice was impossible, and then I answered all of your questions as you asked them other than them not literally being the best possible reasons. You can not like the reasons (it may even be reasonable), but I answered your questions. You wanted to know details about why, and I gave them to you. If you are trying to understand them, try not to assume things are irrational when you don't understand at first. I believe the frustration you express throughout your responses is making you miss what I am actually saying. You seemed to pattern match what I am saying to things you haven't liked in the past about kinds of answers, rather than considering them as pieces. I think that a lot of the time you don't realize that I am saying I want a certain approach to solving problems. If you want a more specific conversation, you may need to reduce the scope of what you are asking considerably.
I mentioned an exact mechanism for lowering regulation, and explicitly told you it was about the mechanism rather than an individual regulation. That is an exact answer.
Inflation was much lower than with Biden, who had literally the worst in my lifetime, which is why I wrote 'Kept inflation low' rather than 'Made inflation low'. He didn't make it explode, while Biden did, and we could directly compare their results. I make it clear in the Biden part that Biden is at fault for inflation, not that there was necessarily any special policy during the Trump years.
I wrote 'Kept unemployment low' because unemployment was low. Things going well doesn't have to be a change, but it is still valuable. I evaluated his entire presidency, not just what he changed. A good president doesn't ruin things their predecessor had at a decent level.
Some presidents start new wars. Some don't. It isn't entirely up to them either way, but it isn't irrational to think a president that doesn't start new wars is better than one that does, all else equal.
I explicitly told you how he lowered taxes. He lowered the marginal rates in corporate taxes, and increased the standard deduction for normal citizens. Those are exact details. I could have added the numbers, (for instance, marginal corporate tax rates went from about 35% to 21% if I recall correctly,) but you don't really seem to care about them.
Donald Trump spoke more to the populace than other presidents, and his theme was more often the greatness of America. Neither Obama nor Biden spoke frequently of that subject from what I saw.
Vague reasons can be important too, and saying that, as far as I know, he didn't support anything I find egregious is completely clear. If he'd done things I thought were terrible I obviously would lessen my support or eliminate it. I also acknowledged that we were unlikely to agree on the interpretation of any of the events you find egregious.
'Worked within the structure of the government' means I think his actions were all completely legal, and not overly disruptive of the functioning of the government. It's an important part to note when his foes constantly claim he didn't. His actions in regards to disputing the election followed precedent, and it had been previously ruled by courts that disputes must involve an alternate slate of electors or they are moot; claims otherwise were clearly just meant for outrage. His speech did not foment a mob to the capital, as I explain at length in a reply to someone else; it was not physically possible for someone to listen to his speech to the end and be there for the early stages of the capital riot (and it was just a riot, not some kind of insurrection). He also didn't ever support the riot. Additionally, the left supports a lot of riots.
'Was the person actually doing the job' is a clear contrast to Biden, who was mentally unfit for much or perhaps all of his term. It also means he was making the decisions, not just letting bureaucrats and underlings determine things.
Supreme court justices that rule against him (as happened many times) are hardly evidence of Trump selecting purely for loyalty to him or the party. His judicial choices are roughly as moderate as the people they replaced, except for one of them being slightly center-right (Amy Coney Barett) instead of left. I never said why he selected them either; I only said he did a good job, and that he selected textualist and originalist judges. Results matter for judging the process.
There is an obvious meaning to saying I selected Trump to keep doing what he was doing. Past results aren't proof of future ones, but they are a good place to start. When you select a president, you are selecting the system.
'Enforcing the border' was clearly about keeping out new illegal crossers and the things they bring with them, which Biden did abysmally and Trump did much better. This is a security concern. The "more generally, enforce the laws that the left doesn't" is a simple statement of fact, but also a pointer to which crimes I want enforced more. Rioting was supported by Democrats throughout both Trump's and Biden's terms. Many Democrat run cities and states also refuse to prosecute many crimes, for example, California for a long time refusing to prosecute theft in many jurisdictions. I clearly acknowledged that federal law enforcement will only have a small effect on most of them because most crimes are state level crimes. I never said that Democrats don't enforce any laws; I only said that I want the ones they don't enforce to be enforced. I didn't even say that they enforce fewer laws than the Republicans.
You keep claiming 'evil taxes' as if that is somehow related to my points. I never called taxes in general 'evil' at all. This is a clear misrepresentation. I also already said which taxes I wanted to not expire; corportate marginal rates that were lowered, and a higher deduction for individuals.
You keep ignoring points you don't like. Being willing to confront China is an obvious foreign policy objective that many people share. Foreign policy is one of the primary responsibilities of the presidency. I explicitly state that I don't know what China will do, but that I believe they will need to be confronted.
I clearly explain later why preventing Kamala Harris from becoming president is a good thing from my perspective. It is okay to write your response in order, but you should acknowledge when I have addressed your point. Additionally, in a two party system, it is normal to vote against a candidate you dislike as well as for the one you like.
These points aren't arguments. They are reasons, as I directly state. If you want to understand, you need to understand the reasons, not simply the arguments. I am not here to argue. And, as I explain later, I want the Democrats to avoid accruing more power because I believe they are more powerful than the Republicans, as well as because the platform the Democrats subscribe to is worse.
We should only make good deals with foreign powers, and that means all of them. I can't see the future spotlessly, so I obviously don't know which deals he should take and which he should walk away from before they have been offered. Again, you asked for what I voted for him to do, and that is not some specific deal, but an approach.
Presidents often don't support Israel. Many times presidents have urged Israel to not use means at their disposal to protect themselves. There is no use pretending that there is never a president that supports Israel less than others. Also, when I am selecting someone to do something, that doesn't necessarily mean that I know the other candidates won't do it. I could even believe that they will. As I write later, I had more faith in Biden supporting Israel than Harris, and Trump more than Biden.
I very clearly never said I wanted war with Iran. I said I wanted them to not get nukes Those are two separate things. Who wants rogue powers to get nukes? I also don't like war, and explicitly stated that one of the things I liked about Trump's first term was 'no new wars'. A well followed deal would obviously be preferable, and Trump prefers that as well. Even now he is attempting to negotiate with Iran despite his ally (Israel) thinking it is pointless. I definitely would prefer a workable nuclear deal to war with Iran.
Biden literally dropped out of the presidential race because of his inability to keep doing it mentally was noticed by the country at large, including the Democrats who forced his replacement, and perhaps physically. We later learned he has advanced cancer which also takes a toll, especially if they were treating it aggressively (which we don't know).
Trump, on the other hand, gave countless demanding long speeches where he improvised to the satisfaction of the crowds and seemed physically well during them. He is an old man, but one in much better physical and mental condition than Biden.
Your claim that we should 'stick with facts' seems difficult when you refuse to engage with the facts I provided.
Calling border enforcement 'a joke' is obviously a statement of values, but also clearly true if you consider a massive influx of illegal immigrants a problem. The Biden administration clearly kept a very porous border.
I don't consider promises of future infrastructure to be an accomplishment of Biden's. Likewise, I don't think all of the promises of future infrastructure people have given Trump after his tariffs to be an accomplishment until they come true. Our infrastructure did not suddenly become great. See also 'bipartisan'. The money spent here also leads into the next point...
Raining money from the sky led to very high inflation during the Biden administration. His administration kept pouring government money into these giveaways extremely far into his term, after the inflation was already roaring. Again, inflation was literally the highest since Carter. It did come down toward the very end of his term, but the damage was already done. And extremely high inflation is obviously a point against him.
You like to claim that I 'stated without evidence' things when you asked for reasons, not ten paragraphs on each item. You asked many questions, and this isn't a research paper. Your calling me 'super racist and super sexist' is mere ad hominem sneering. It was stated at the time (and no, I didn't memorize exactly when) that Biden was looking for a black female vice president and a black female supreme court justice. When he found them, that means that it appeared to be based on those things, regardless of what their personal merits may or may not be. If a business said 'only women may apply', then you know they are selecting on the basis of whether the people are women or not. This is true even if they end up hiring the person who would have been single best candidate even if they didn't have that rule. I also later state exactly why I am against Kamala Harris, it is an entire section. When I was reading about Ketanji as a nominee, there seemed to be very little support for her, and I haven't heard any since. It is fair to call what Biden did racist and sexist when he stated it was about that. (And no, I don't have the time to find that again.)
I definitely believe that Trump was and is divisive, which I noted explicitly! It is still a negative for Biden who was equally divisive. You never asked what I thought was negative about Trump (which I explicitly stated were serious), or positive about Biden/Harris, which I noted at the end of the comment. I very much had a number of them, but you were already objecting to the length. You could have simply asked for my positives regarding Biden and negatives regarding Trump.
Anyone who thinks Biden didn't support the legal attacks on Trump was clearly not paying attention. And as I clearly state, I believe the legal attacks on Trump were meritless. I never attempted to make an argument on that point in this subthread.
Biden's corruption is well known, but again, I was answering your questions about my reasons, not trying to prove anything.
Trump didn't get an airplane, the United States of America did. This is entirely normal. Stop twisting things. I also don't believe the other things you stated.
An 'unprecedented pardon' is unprecedented regardless of if you think it was okay. The length, generality, and preemptiveness were all unprecedented. He did it for Hunter and Fauci over a long period of time, and Hunter's was literally unrestricted! I don't remember the other names, but looking at an article, he also pardoned several other family members. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8r5g5dezk4o "In the final minutes of his presidency, Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned several family members, including his brothers James and Frank Biden, and sister Valerie Biden Owens." (The excerpt is the first paragraph.)
Then you again dismiss anything you don't want to hear. You asked for reasons why I was against Biden, and that I felt he didn't respect "the constitution, laws of the land, or the importance of faithfully executing his duties as president." is obviously one of my more important reasons. You are objecting to my being honest.
As we get to Kamala Harris, you again simply sneer rather than wanting to know what my reasons are. "I don't know" of her accomplishing things is extremely specific. You could try to make an argument that she accomplished things, rather than simply implying I don't like justice for children. Also, a name is not an accomplishment. How did it actually improve justice for children?
Kamala Harris dropped out of the primary because she had no support among Democrats. It was during said primary and after that I heard many Democrats (not just a few) say such things. I don't have links. Why would I have saved them?
Kamala campaigned and did not put forth an overarching vision in a way that reached people, which is perhaps why she lost. An unexpressed vision is not a vision that makes sense to voters. I read many things relating to her campaign, but it is literally on Kamala for needing to get her vision out there, if indeed she had one. What exactly did she think that America should be like. If you like, you could state what you believe her vision was (though you don't need to). (Trump's was literally his slogan 'Make America Great Again', which he then constantly expanded with specifics.)
You are seriously out of step if you think Biden being so incapable that he couldn't run a campaign would leave him capable for the much more difficult job of being president. They replaced him as candidate for a reason. Running for president is hard, but it is still the easy part. If, in fact, he was perfectly capable and they forced him out to run Kamala that is also bad! And if that were the case, she should have said so.
Everyone knows there were a massive number of illegal immigrants during Biden's term. Stop pretending otherwise.
You shouldn't accuse me of bad faith when you refuse to understand or engage with so many of the things I am saying. Everyone know that the Democrats, including Kamala Harris, supported DEI.
How does calling a wealth tax 'the worst tax' mean that I think taxes are evil? Also, a reason, not an argument. If you really wanted to know why I am against wealth taxes, you could have just asked that. Wealth taxes fundamentally force people to stop having goods or other items and convert them to money, regardless of whether or not that makes sense, since wealth is not usually in the form of money. For instance, if a stock doubles in value, you now have to sell either that stock or other stocks if there is a wealth tax on stocks, regardless of if that makes sense. If I recall correctly, she and her proxies supported a tax on 'unrealized' capital gains, which is a wealth tax on stocks. Also, capital gains taxes are themselves bad even on already sold stocks, but I don't think you want to go over that too much.
Sneering at me is also not a rational argument. She was clearly against what she and her proxies claimed was 'price gouging' and laws against price gouging are literally a form of price controls.
It is simple logic that if you can prevent someone from becoming president by simply claiming that they are a criminal, that people will claim there opponents are criminals. As already mentioned, I believe the charges were all baseless, and thus lawfare, as do a very large number of other people. Everyone already has their position on this matter, so there is little point discussing it further.
Why do you constantly mock the idea of taxes mattering? And I even say which ones.
I think you shouldn't accuse me of ad hominems just because you don't like my statements. It isn't an ad hominem to state that she wouldn't reform the government, it is a simple statement about her counterfactual actions as president. I obviously wouldn't be able to prove what Kamala would have done even if she was trying to, since she never became president. But she made few or no statements that I interpreted as wanting to reform the government, while the opposition made a great many (whether you chose to believe Trump or not).
I don't have links for her doing so right now, but have you read the news lately? About the anti federal government riots/ The Democrats are very clearly favoring 'protestors' that are doing quite a bit of rioting, and have done so in many other cases over the years.
We do vote for president. This is why we could reject the Democrats switching out their candidate without consulting the country. It would obviously be a precedent if the voters had simply gone with what the party did.
You seem fixated on the idea of calling me irrational. It is an entirely rational to not want the president to lead from behind. You could say that you believe the premise that she would is wrong, but you didn't.
Then you claim the next point is somehow 'random words'. It is very clear they are not. I am stating that those things (cheap prices, functional markets, abundant goods, physical safety, and equal enforcement of laws) seem to be in conflict with DEI and green energy, and that she would choose the latter. Again, you could disagree that it is true, but nothing about it is random. (And all of those things obviously go together.)
Then you accuse me of irrationality and a lot of bad faith when you simply refused to engage meaningfully with what I said. Should I believe that you are operating in good faith? I hope that you are and we can turn this conversation around.
I can assure you that literally everything I wrote was in good faith, as an attempt to answer your questions honestly. I am still willing to respond if you engage with what I wrote in the areas you respond to, or if you ask genuine questions in an attempt to understand, not fight. Limiting your questions might get more focused answers if that is what you object to.
Your final claim that I missed a question is untrue. "what would it take you to regret voting for Trump and admit that he is a disaster as a president? (be realistic no zombie apocalypse scenario allowed)". I answered it in the sixth paragraph.
"There is only one thing that would make me regret voting for Trump: The feeling that America is worse off because of Trump being president than if he hadn't been. Yes, a feeling. It's vague for a reason. I can and do compare general factors for goodness and badness multiplied by his responsibility for them versus counterfactuals, but after that, it is all intuitive. All analyses I do on any subject are heavily dependent on intuition. Comparing a gestalt to a counterfactual gestalt is hard to put into small details. I don't stare at the trees to discover the broader trends of the forest."
There is no way I could give a more precise response to a completely open counterfactual, and still be telling the truth. Once again, you can object to my answer for various reasons, and claim it is a bad answer, possibly including that you don't like to base evaluations off of feelings, but the claim I didn't answer is false. (It might be quite reasonable to accidentally skip it, but I did answer.)
To briefly defend feelings, I see feelings as a shorthand for the entire situation. It is not possible to keep infinite details in mind, but you can aggregate them together (in a somewhat unreliable way) subconsciously, and then use those to determine how your conscious mind reacts to the number of things it can process in more depth. The conscious mind is much better at logic, but much worse at using all of the information you get. You can train your mind by carefully evaluating it before adding it to the pile, but you still add it to the pile in the end. And be careful in using it of course, because feelings are often wrongly applied.
A lot of people have bad feelings about engaging with political opponents from many unproductive engagements, and this makes everything look worse when you know an opponent is making the statements and /or questions (including to me). This is reasonable, but I don't think it is serving you well when you meet someone who is engaging in good faith (which again, I assure you I am, even though I find your responses very frustrating as well).
I am willing to be more specific, but you aren't even engaging with what I've written at all; and there is no way I can deliver something that is true in the exact format you are requesting. Also, if you read my initial postings, I was stating a position to help others understand what it is (they asked for understanding of Trump supporters), not trying to write a persuasive essay. This quote from the end of my first thing is very important "I would prefer to talk in general, rather get bogged down in details that are not actually important to how people actually view the situation." I am still only trying to help my interlocutor understand the though process, not make an argument. I am not trying to be persuasive.
(Do people appreciate me doing this? Hard to tell. My overall karma is slightly positive on these comments as a whole but the comment you are replying to seems to only have 'disagreement' votes. I'm not sure whether that means they think I shouldn't make the comments.)(Yes, all of my asides seem necessary to me.)
Distilling a gestalt down to a list is very lossy and not very good. I wrote long because I had to so that I could get across the extremely many points inherent in honestly answering the question (and didn't have the many hours necessary to produce a high quality essay). If I have to choose between honesty and brevity, I have to choose honesty. I very much would like to be able to get across all of my many points in fewer words, but your comment about ChatGPT was completely unhelpful. If you think I didn't make any points you are simply wrong, and if you think I belabored them, perhaps you are right, but they were as brief as my skill could manage. This post again turned out long, because it had to be. Perhaps if I was a more gifted writer it could be shorter, but I am not.
A presidency cannot be judged based off 10 exact actions unless someone starts World War III. Summary is often necessary, and things like 'less regulation' are the only reasonable level to do it at. (A very large portion of the information involved in anything is stored in summary form even within the person themself.)
I can't possibly have the reasons exactly sorted out in the format you want. I can give you 10 details, but they won't be the best details that are possible, because that would require many, many hours to put all of the reasons into words, and think through exactly what order reasons should be in. The posts you found unsatisfyingly general already took at least a few hours each to lay it out in detail. I provided so many details at only a moderate level of abstraction (with some being quite concrete), and a lot of summary with it, along with a great deal of my reasoning. You need to engage more fully with the gestalt if you actually want to understand.
I am willing to answer your questions, but I cannot follow exactly what you asked in making them the '10 best'. Now to answering the questions.
There is only one thing that would make me regret voting for Trump: The feeling that America is worse off because of Trump being president than if he hadn't been. Yes, a feeling. It's vague for a reason. I can and do compare general factors for goodness and badness multiplied by his responsibility for them versus counterfactuals, but after that, it is all intuitive. All analyses I do on any subject are heavily dependent on intuition. Comparing a gestalt to a counterfactual gestalt is hard to put into small details. I don't stare at the trees to discover the broader trends of the forest.
Some good things Trump did in his first term:
*You mentioned hated my mentioning 'lowering regulation' but he clearly did (I forget the numbers, but he genuinely reduced them). I liked the method through which he did it, and the fact that it happened, not based on individual regulations. He implemented a simple rule with two factors. The factors were that the agencies had to get rid of more regulations than you formed anew, and that the estimated financial impact of compliance needed to be equal or less than the current rules. I thought that was brilliant and every president should do it until we get down to a reasonable amount of regulation.
*Kept inflation low
*Kept unemployment low
*No new foreign wars
*Reduced taxes on business (lower marginal rates), reduced taxes on individuals (increased standard deduction)
*Spoke directly to the populace frequently on the theme of America and Americans being great
*Did not support anything I find especially bad (obviously this is important, no matter the vagueness!) (Whatever you find outrageous, I obviously don't agree it happened, who is responsible, and/or the interpretation thereof)
*Worked within the structure of our government (also vague but important)
*Was clearly the person actually doing the job
*He picked judges for the supreme court that support textualism and originalism (which are the only schools of jurisprudence I can support)(I strongly favor textualism if there is any conflict)
Some things I voted for Trump to do in his new term:
*Most importantly, continue his governance from the first term since I think it went well. (Only as vague as it has to be.) Try to make America stay great. Protect America from its enemies. Etc.
*Enforce the border, preventing as much illegal immigration as reasonably possible while also preventing smuggling of things like drugs or weapons or whatever, and more generally, enforce the laws the left doesn't (vague for obvious reasons, but obviously including things like deporting illegal aliens, keeping public order, and prosecuting rioters). Most laws are enforced by states of course, so I don't and didn't expect him to have much effect on most crime, but still.
*Prevent his tax cuts from expiring
*Be willing to confront China to prevent their bad actions from having the effects they desire. (Vague because those actions are chosen by China, and I object to the leadership's choices but don't know in advance what they will be. I also don't know the ideal way to confront China.) China cannot be allowed to become a great power under current leadership (which I believe is evil).
*Prevent Kamala Harris from becoming president
*Prevent the Democrats from accruing more power in general
*Make deals with foreign powers but walk away from bad ones
*Support Israel against terrorist governments (including Hamas and Iran's government) rather than hamstringing them
*Prevent rogue nations like Iran from getting nukes (whether by peaceful means or not)
*Prevent lawfare against Trump from making the party guilty of it win
Some reasons Biden was a terrible president:
*He was mentally incompetent for at least a large stretch of his presidency! We don't even know which parts he was competent during. He was completely unwilling to admit this and remove himself from the presidency. I despise Kamala Harris, but he should have made her acting president after voluntarily stepping down, especially after it became clear to the world that we had a mentally incompetent president. (Luckily there were none of our foes used that fact to their fullest advantage.) He presumably never realized how incompetent he was, which means he certainly couldn't have planned for his own lack of capability in planning things.
*Border enforcement was a complete and utter joke. A country that has no border is incredibly vulnerable. (See what Israel just did to Iran.)
*He never achieved anything positive of which I am aware.
*Inflation was the highest since Carter! (Also a one term president for obvious reasons.) His policies of pumping way too much money through the government are the likely cause (including the absurdly misnamed 'Inflation Reduction Act').
*The selection of egregiously incompetent people for his administration, like Kamala Harris. He selected both her and supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson based on what appears to be demographics / DEI. He selected people in general based on demographics. (This is both super racist and super sexist.)
*The feeling that politics got a lot more divisive during his term (which also occurred during the Trump and Obama presidencies, to be fair)
*He supported lawfare against Trump (I believe that none of it was justified), severely damaging our traditions against it (and inviting retaliation).
*Clearly extreme corruption involving enriching himself and his family through his son Hunter's accepting money to put people into contact with, and get favorable treatment from Joe Biden
*Unprecedentedly pardoning people (especially his son) for things they did over an extremely long period of time and not even in a restricted category! (Obviously after the election)
*I feel that he had absolutely no respect for the constitution, laws of the land, or the importance of faithfully executing his duties as president.
*The world became a more dangerous place under his watch (including Hamas's actions, Russia's invasion, China getting a more advantageous position, etc)
I think all of that easily qualifies as Biden being a terrible president, but I won't say they are necessarily the best reasons. They are just what I could think of now.
Some reasons I believe Kamala Harris would have been a terrible president:
*I am Californian, and she literally never did anything I heard of in state politics that was positive. When I compared her to her (also a Democrat) opposition in statewide office, I very clearly knew I should vote for her opponent.
*Even Democrats generally said she was incompetent before they ran her
*She had no vision for America that made any sense. I can't even say what she might have claimed it would be.
*She failed to do her duty to the country and invoke the 25th amendment to remove Biden from the presidency when he was mentally and physically incompetent, putting her ambitions ahead of her loyalty to the country, and leaving the US in a vulnerable state without leadership if something drastic happened. (Even Kamala Harris would have been a better choice for that interim than Biden.)
Some terrible things Kamala would do as president:
*Continue her wretched performance in border control (and likely worsen it)
*Continue to promote DEI in her administration and the country / not select for merit
*Wealth taxes (the worst likely tax)
*Price controls (the worst likely economic policy) / anti-'price gouging' laws (ensuring you get shortages instead)
*Continue and escalate lawfare against opponents since it would have worked against Trump in this scenario
*Raise tax rates in general (marginal, corporate, and miscellaneous) / let the Trump tax cuts expire (even with the Trump tax cuts, rates were still too high)
*Fail to reform the government at all
*Egg on rioters and support law breakers from the office of the presidency / fail to faithfully follow the constitution and faithful execute our laws
*Serve as an example that parties can simply decided who our next president will be
*Be extremely weak in foreign policy / lead from behind
*Fail to prioritize the needs of the country to have a functioning market, cheap prices, abundant surplus of goods, physical safety, and equal enforcement of laws because she believes that would inhibit 'green energy' and DEI
Far less likely but still too high a likelihood:
*Some chance (I don't know how likely) she would side with the genocidal antisemitic strain of her party (I think few Democrats support that, but a disturbingly high percentage of their activists do, and I don't remember her pushing back against said activists.) She seemed much more likely than Biden to support them (and Trump obviously supports the Jews).
There are also some minor positives for Biden/Harris and some serious negatives for Trump, but you didn't ask for those.
Both examples are harder to understand than necessary. Either "The firefighters who'd been sleeping jumped into action when the alarm sounded." or "When the alarm sounded, the firefighters who'd been sleeping jumped into action." seem much more understandable. The actual short version that flows would be "Then sleeping firefighters jumped into action when the alarm sounded."
Long version: The problem I see with the examples of Hypotaxis and Parataxis might be that it is artificially chunking up the ideas involved into separate bits when it is unnecessary, and so the idea the sentence is trying to get across requires stitching it back together, distracting from the meaning.
Short version: The Hypotaxis and Parataxis examples are hard to understand because you have to stitch the ideas back together.
Which of those two explanations is easier to understand?
Bonus medium length explanation: The Hypotaxis and Parataxis examples are hard to understand because they artificially break up ideas which have to be put back together to make sense out of the sentence.
I think the medium length explanation is what happens when you try to make the long version make more sense without losing any meaning. The short explanation makes the most sense, but it does lose a little meaning. I think the long versions exist mostly because it is harder to due medium length, and the short ones exist people got tired of the long ones but still don't want to go through all the effort of fixing them.
I know I could have written a much more concise and understandable version of this comment without losing any meaning, but I usually pick one of the two easy ways.
This treatment of the idea of complexity is clearly incorrect for the simplest possible reason... we have no idea what the Kolmogorov complexity is of these objects versus each other, since the lower bounds are exactly identical! (Said bounds are just, a hair above zero because we can be relatively sure that their existence is not absolutely required by the laws of the universe, but little more than that.) The upper bounds are different, but not in an illuminating manner.
Thus, we have to use other things to determine complexity, and the brain is clearly far more complex in the relevant ways than something like Microsoft Word™. Word processors of similar use can fit into a tiny fraction of the size of Microsoft Word without losing much in terms of features and usefulness, and may not be any simpler. So with the entire premise incorrect, it makes the rest of the post uninteresting. (Yes, I only skimmed the rest to see you didn't address the issue.)
To illustrate the issue, people like me believe that software is mostly bloat (which is only complex in the other sense). The same program can take 1 MB or 10,000MB simply by changing compression scheme (especially if we are assuming the latter was done very badly, by people who have no idea what they are doing). More concretely take the example of a music video which might be 300 MB for 180 seconds after compression, but before compression might be 100GB (3 bytes per pixel for 3840 * 2160 pixels for 24 frames per second for 180 seconds / 1024^3 = 100.1129150390625 GB and the result could easily be higher since it could realistically be 4 times the pixels at 2.5 times the fps at 4/3 the bytes per pixel which would push it over a terabyte). Note that the compressed music video isn't necessarily any simpler by Kolmogorov than the uncompressed version despite the latter being about 333 times the size, since we don't actually know the simplest representation of the music video (and generic compression algorithms often find the lossily compressed version harder to compress and end up being much larger than the original).
Note: I wrote my comment while reading as notes to see what I thought of your arguments while reading more than as a polished thing.
I think your calibration on the 'slow scenario' is off. What you claim is the slowest plausible one is fairly clearly the median scenario given that it is pretty much just following current trends, and slower than present trend is clearly plausible. Things already slowed way down, with advancements in very narrow areas being the only real change. There is a reason that OpenAI hasn't dared even name something GPT 5, for instance. Even 03 isn't really an improvement on general llm duties and that is the 'exciting' new thing, as you pretty much say.
Advancement is disappointingly slow in AI that I personally use (mostly image generation, where new larger models are often not really better overall for the past year or so, and newer ones mostly use llm style architectures), for instance, and it is plausible that there will be barely any movement in terms of clear quality improvement in general uses over the next couple years. And image generation should be easier to improve than general llms because it should be earlier in the diminishing returns of scale (as the scale is much smaller). Note that since most are also diffusion models, they are already using an image equivalent of the trick o1 and o3 introduced with what I would argue is effectively chain of thought. For some reason, all the advancements I hear about these days seem like uninspired copies of things that already happened in image generation.
The one exception is 'agents' but those show no signs of present day usefulness. Who knows how quickly such things will become useful, but historical trends on new tech, especially in AI, say 'not soon' for real use. A lot of people and companies are very interested in the idea for obvious reasons, but that doesn't mean it will be fast. See also self-driving cars which has taken many times longer than expected, despite seeming like it is probably a success story in the making (for the distant future). In fact, self-driving cars are the real world equivalent of a narrow agent, and the insane difficulty they are having is strong evidence against agents being a transformatively useful thing soon.
I do think that AI as it currently is will have a transformative impact in the near term for certain activities (image generation for non-artists like me is already one of them), but I think the smartphone comparison is a good one; I still don't bother to use a smartphone (though it has many significant uses). I would be surprised if it had as big an impact as the worldwide web has on a year for year basis counting from the beginning of the www (supposedly in 1989) for that and 2014 when transformers were invented (or even 2018 when GPT1 became a thing) for AI, for instance. I like the comparison to the web because I think that AI going especially well would be a change to our information capacities similar to an internet 3.0. (Assuming you count the web as 2.0).
As to the fast scenario, that does seem like the fastest scenario that isn't completely ridiculous, but think that your belief in its probability is dramatically too high. I do agree that if you believe that self-play (in the AlphaGo sense) to generate good data is doable for poorly definable problems that would alleviate the lack of data issues we suffer in large parts of the space, but it is unlikely that would actually improve the quality of the data in the near term, and there are already a lot of data quality issues. I personally do not believe that o1 and o3 have at all 'shown' that synthetic data is a solved issue, and it wouldn't be for quite a while if ever.
Note that the image generation models already have been using synthetic data by teachers for a while now with 'SDXL Turbo' and other later adversarial distillation schemes. This did manage a several times speed boost, but at a cost of some quality, as all such schemes do. Crucially, no one has managed to increase quality this way, because the 'teacher' provides a maximum quality level you can't go beyond (except by pure luck).
Speculatively, you could perhaps improve quality by having a third model selecting the absolute best outputs of the teacher and only training on those until you have something better than the teacher, and then switching 'better than the teacher' into teacher and automatically start training a new student (or perhaps retraining the old teacher?). The problem is, how do you get that selection model that is actually better than the things you are trying to improve in its own self-play style learning rather than just getting them to fit the static model of a good output? Human data creation cannot be replaced in general without massive advancements in the field. You might be able to switch human data generation to just training the selection model though.
In some areas, you could perhaps train the AI directly on automatically generated data from sensors in the real world, but that seems like it would reduce the speed of progress to that of the real world unless you have that exponential increase in sensor data instead.
I do agree that in a fast scenario, it would clearly be algorithmic improvements rather than scale leading to it.
Also, o1 and o3 are only 'better' because of a willingness to use immensely more compute in the inference stage, and given that people already can't afford them, that route seems like a it will be played out after not too many generations of scaling, especially since hardware is improving so slowly these days. Chain of thought should probably be largely replaced with something more like what image generation models currently use where each step iterates on the current results. These could be combined together of course.
Diffusion models make a latent picture of a bunch of different areas, and each of those influences each other area in the future, so in text generation you could analogously have a chain of thought that is used in its entirety to create a new chain of thought. For example, you could use a ten deep chain of thought being used to create another ten deep chain of thought nine times instead of a hundred different options (with the first ten being generated by just the input of course). If you're crazy, it could literally be exponential, where you generate one for the first step, two in the second... 32 in the fifth, and so on.
"Identifying The Requirements for a Short Timeline"
I think you are missing an interesting way to tell if AI is accelerating AI research. A lot of normal research is eventually integrated into the next generation of products. If AI really was accelerating the process, you would see the integrations happening much more quickly, with a shorter lag time between 'new idea first published' and 'new idea integrated into a fully formed product' that is actually good. A human might take several months to test the idea, but if an AI could do the research, it could also replicate the other research incredibly quickly, and see how it works when combined with the other research.
(Ran out of steam when my computer crashed during the above paragraph, though I don't seem to have lost any of what I wrote since I do it in notepad.)
I would say the best way to tell you are in a shorter timeline is if it seems like gains from each advancement start broadening rather than narrowing. If each advancement applies narrowly, you need a truly absurd number of advancements, but if they are broad, far fewer.
Honestly, I see very little likelihood of what I consider AGI in the next couple decades at least (at least if you want it to have surpassed humanity), and if we don't break out of the current paradigm, not for much, much longer than that, if ever. You do have some interesting points, and seem reasonable, but I really can't agree with the idea that we are at all close to it. Also, your fast scenario seems more like it would be 20 years than 4. 4 years isn't the 'fast' scenario, it is the 'miracle' scenario. The 'slow scenario' reads like 'this might be the work of centuries, or maybe half of one if we are lucky'. The strong disagreement on how long these scenarios would take is because the point we are at now is far, far below what you seem to believe. We aren't even vaguely close.
As far as your writing goes, I think it was fairly well written structurally and was somewhat interesting, and I even agree that large parts of the 'fast' scenario as you laid it out make sense, but since you are wrong about the amount of time to associate with the scenarios, the overall analysis is very far off. I did find it to be worth my time to read.
Apparently the very subject coming up led to me writing a few paragraphs about the problems of a land value tax before I even started reading it. (A fraction of the things in parenthesis were put in later to elaborate a point.)
There's nothing wrong with replacing current property taxes with equivalent (dollar value) taxes that only apply to the value of the land itself (this would be good to avoid penalizing improving your own land), but the land value tax (aka Georgeism) is awful because of what its proponents want to do with it. Effectively, they want to confiscate literally all of the value of people's land. This is hugely distortionary versus other forms of property, but that isn't even the real problem.
The real problem is that people don't want to live lives where they literally can't own their own home, can't plan for where they will live in the future, and can be kicked out at any time easily just because someone likes the idea of claiming their land became valuable. This turns all homeowners into renters. There are in many places (such as California) very distortionary laws on property tax because people hate the idea of their land being confiscated through taxes. There are also very many laws on making it hard to kick out renters because renters hate being being kicked out too. Stability is important and many people currently pay massive premiums to not rent (including taking out massive 30 year loans on a place where they often don't even plan to live for half that long). Also, being forced to move at an inconvenient time is very expensive and has a hell of a lot of deadweight loss both economically and personally. (People also hate eminent domain.)
Of lesser but not no importance is fact that their taxes can go up to ridiculously high levels just because someone else built something valuable nearby will cause present day nimbyism to look very nice and kind (though it is kind of funny that people will likely switch what kind of nimbyism they support as well).
So, does your post bring up what I think are the problems with an land value tax? Yes, though I somewhat disagree with some of the emphasis.
Searching for new uses of land is pretty important especially over time, but we don't need new uses for things to work right now whereas the disruptions to people's lives would make things unworkable right now, and a lot of searching for new uses of land is done by people who do not currently own said land.
Implicitly taxing improvements to nearby land is obviously related to my point on nimbyism so we agree there, though it is interesting to note that seem to prefer talking about the internal version why I mostly reference the political version. The internal issue could obviously be 'fixed' by simply consolidating lots, but the political cannot without completely destroying the idea of individual ownership.
Your statements about the tax base narrowing issue is largely correct, but I would like to emphasize a different point of agreement that supporters seem to see it as simple, elegant, and easy but each patch makes it more complicated, kludgy, and difficult. I think that the very idea of evaluating the value of the land itself as separate from improvements actually starts out pretty difficult, so the increase in difficulty is a huge problem. Any incorrect overvaluation makes land worse than useless under this system! A system where a lot of land is useless very obviously leads to a lot of unused valuable land... which is exactly why people are currently complaining about speculation in land, but worse! (This is also deadweight loss.)
You don't go far enough when decrying the effect on people's confidence in the government, because it isn't just a confidence thing. Confiscating people's property without extremely good cause is one of the primary signs of living in a country that's either dirt poor, or right about to be, and will definitely stay that way (except in some rare cases where it only leads to massive famines, death, and stagnation rather than becoming poorer monetarily at first). It is also massively immoral.
The problem with your section on disrupting long-term plans is that you emphasize only the immediate problem of the transition, but don't mention that it also prevents the creation of new long term plans for a stable life unless you are willing to live a very bad life compared to how you could otherwise live. A full land value tax is therefore extremely dystopian.
Luckily, the proponents aren't currently finding much luck in their desired tax actually happening, and I hope it stays that way.
Math is definitely just a language. It is a combination of symbols and a grammar about how they go together. It's what you come up with when you maximally abstract away the real world, and the part about not needing any grounding was specifically about abstract math, where there is no real world.
Verifiable is obviously important for training (since we could give effectively infinite training data), but the reason it is verifiable so easily is because it doesn't rely on the world. Also, note that programming languages are also just that, languages (and quite simple ones) but abstract math is even less dependent on the real world than programming.
Math is just a language (a very simple one, in fact). Thus, abstract math is right in the wheelhouse for something made for language. Large Language Models are called that for a reason, and abstract math doesn't rely on the world itself, just the language of math. LLMs lack grounding, but abstract math doesn't require it at all. It seems more surprising how badly LLMs did math, not that they made progress. (Admittedly, if you actually mean ten years ago, that's before LLMs were really a thing. The primary mechanism that distinguishes the transformer was only barely invented then.)
1
I believe that the most important fundamental flaw for Futarchy isn't what is written here, but that the flaw this essay identifies is in fact sufficient to be described as an important fundamental flaw. I do not believe it is possible to patch out the most fundamental flaw.
My thought is that the most fundamental flaw is that you are asking for how people think the question will be resolved, and not the thing that is being referenced, so I think that prediction markets in general should be seen as just a (slightly unusual) type of opinion polling where you can theoretically win money by guessing other people's opinion's in the future. It's very meta. Prediction markets are very heavily selected for a specific type of person, so it is also an extremely biased poll. I do not believe that the self-selection is notably for accuracy. The chance to win money is likely to lead to notably more rigor than many other forms of polling (but also attracts gamblers).
Futarchy is just an unusual patch on top of prediction markets, and doesn't fundamentally change what a prediction market is. Like noted in the essay, that question is: what is the world like if this happens? And not: what effect does doing this have?