American dystopia; The assault on science; Trade war eternal; Abundance and redistribution; Fertility and the draft; AI and skills; Smartphones and competence
Re phones: it’s absolutely them, but I would zero in further on the ubiquitous mechanic of the Feed. No matter where you find it (X, Facebook, Reddit, now on Substack) the Feed is a high-cardinality information flow - you get the hilarious, the outrageous, the baffling, the poignant, the enraging all at once in a never ending barrage that the human mind did not evolve to handle and easily becomes addicted to. For the last six months I’ve done an experiment on myself: I’ve stopped spending any time with any app or site that has that mechanic as its main interaction point.
The result is that I feel myself returned to an ability to contemplate, to be still, to spend more time reading books and magazines and other long-form pieces without interruption. Frequently a lot of that reading happens on my phone, but it’s not kicked off by encountering something on a Feed.
This rings true! And I think the addictive quality of the Feed doesn't even necessarily have that much to do with the cardinality of the content.
Anecdote: when my son was 2, we introduced limited screentime – Netflix shows that we had vetted (sadly the best option we had at the time). What very quickly became apparent was that when he had control of the device, and could scroll Netflix's recommendations, he was unable to watch an episode of any show to completion. He was too distracted by the allure of scrolling, of seeing what the next thing to appear would be. When we took away his ability to do that, his attention span "magically" increased.
I think it's criminal that streaming services have Kids mode and parental controls, but don't allow you to disable the "feed" or only show allowlisted content. These particular feeds have very much proven a case of "the medium is the message" for our family!
One thing I've noticed with my own small children is that streaming means an inability to tolerate anything less than 100% exactly what you want at this moment.
Try putting on the radio and they get very frustrated/angry/meltdown over commercials and "I want to listen to the Wiggles for three songs and then Numberblocks for two songs and not what the radio is choosing to play" tantrums.
I don't want to over extrapolate and catatrophise but I wonder how much thing inability to tolerate anything less than 100% contributes to things like declining fertility, friendships, etc in society at large.
Oh yeah, that's a doozy. Even without extrapolating to a societal level, I'm pretty confident there's a significant mental health cost to that inability to tolerate boredom, frustration, etc (if left unchecked).
I think you are correct. It's the feed not the phone. I spend very little time on the phone because I find it absolutely unusable compared to a computer with a keyboard. But I still feel the same effect.
Feed formatting is intentionally addictive (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11dYx_rW_Ks), yet that's but the tip of the iceberg. Email is also addictive. Watching colorful, surprising, fast-moving images is, too. By bring the constant expectation of calls to your pocket, so is the mere telephonic aspect of the cell "phone" itself. It is the devil's own tech, and it's nigh-on impossible to imagine it being put into a decent, healthy place now...
This is correct. The algorithms are so powerful that the DOD has used public social media platforms as testing grounds for (benign) experiments in mind control for years. Using them to shape consumer behavior (especially in children) is wildly unethical and clearly detrimental—to say nothing of the potential for political weaponization in the wrong hands. These technologies are dangerous. There needs to be mass exodus from these platforms.
1.) Regarding MAGA’s war on American science—It is going to shrink the U.S. as a global power, but they see that as a net “good”.
A shrunken, stunted America where they control everything in a vice grip is, in their minds, far preferable to a strong, prosperous America where they are one voice among many, drowned out by the more cosmopolitan and educated among us.
They would rather rule over a ruin than share power in an empire. They would rather be a big fish in a small pond than a medium-sized fish in a teaming lake.
There are many drivers behind that misanthropy—Boredom with prosperity, simple jealousy, religious fanaticism, existential angst—but it’s the one lodestar that seems to adequately explain how self-destructive, how vengeful and purposelessly nihilistic, MAGA is.
It also explains why a small but critical faction of the far left is either ambivalent or outright allied with MAGA. The “big fish little pond” mentality is, if nothing else, what drives Jill Stein, and what drove Ralph Nader in the past. But that’s a subject for a whole new thread.
2.) I don’t think Gretchen Whitmer herself consciously, sincerely believes tariffs will lead to a “revival of manufacturing”.
I think she’s just trapped by the essential fantastical world that one must vocally buy into if one is to be a successful local politician, in certain places.
In Michigan, you cannot get elected if you do not repeat the catechism that “NAFTA is the worst thing to ever happen to manufacturing jobs.”
You cannot gain purchase with any number of voters if you do not talk about free trade and free flow of goods as if it were the Devil himself. They simply do not want to hear you.
I think it’s not so much a matter of economic reasoning for those voters, quite honestly, as it is an issue of loss and grief.
They’re not looking for politicians or leaders that will maximize their prosperity or well-being. (They tried that stuff; it was dissatisfying.)
They’re looking for leaders who will channel their sense of anger at losing the past, angst at the passage of time. They feel they were wronged by change, writ large, quite simply, and they want punishment.
When Whitmer does things like give qualified praise to Trump’s trade war, she’s appealing to that emotional, glandular vibe in her voters, not making a reasoned economic argument about manufacturing and trade. She’s, again, kinda trapped by it.
Honestly, I have no idea what to do about dysfunctional politics like that.
Electing other leaders, and empowering other, less fantasy-driven voters, is a start, I guess. (Jared Polis, for all his (mild) faults, is a good counter-example.)
Whatever the reasons may be for Whitmer’s support for tariffs, this is the kind of thing that makes the transition from a state politician to a national politician hard. Nationally, Democrats don’t need to equivocate on tariffs and they can even go further and say that it was wrong for Biden to do it, as Bill Maher got Al Franken to admit on his show.
Without having seen the segment in question, I would say it depends on the tariff, though.
Biden kept—and actually expanded—some of Trump’s first-term tariffs towards China as a matter of national security. He also kept a few on European industries, in part because of political incentives from states like Michigan.
Naturally, that went over poorly with many economists, particularly from Europe—who tended to lump Biden’s China policy and tariffs on their own countries together as one big soft-Trumpist surrender to protectionism and “no different” than Trump.
It’s imperative on all of us to discern the difference between what Biden was doing and the insane, pointless destruction Trump is trying to pancake the world with. Noah himself, I believe, has gotten into it in multiple forums with said European economists on their refusal to make that distinction—justifiably so, IMO.
Again, without having seen that segment, I’m skeptical of Maher’s ability to parse policy and see that distinction—He tends to be keenly attuned to vibe, narratives, and entertainment, less so to the details of policy. Also, let’s be honest; he’s never really liked old man Biden all that much. But maybe he’ll surprise me.
Also, people understand the difference between Biden and Trump’s tariff policies. It’s a question of what’s the best political messaging to attack it? It makes very little sense to use nuance here. Tariffs for protectionism is bad.
Biden was a terrible and unpopular President. Bill Maher was on the side of the majority, not an outlier. At least he has some consistent classical liberal principles, unlike partisan hacks who defend bad policies from their own party.
Also, funny story: No, it’s not true that those tariffs have “nothing to do with national security”. Scroll to the end of that article for a discussion on that.
Of course, I’m not one to agree with Noah on everything he says, but I’d be interested to see what objections you have to that, specifically.
And as much as I, too, have nice things to say about Bill Maher and his classical liberalism and what-not, I am about 99% sure he’s not read or considered Noah’s analysis on this policy matter. Or anything like it, ever.
Like I said, that’s not his wheelhouse. Not an insult to the man, just a fact.
Let’s say that I don’t agree with you or Noah that national security is a factor here. If national security was a factor, even our allies would be shutting out BYD. They are not. So, the main reason is protectionism and as a classical liberal, it is my belief that protecting specific industries instead of considering the broader benefits to US consumers and businesses hasn’t worked well in the long run.
You’re right that Bill Maher is not a policy wonk like Noah or MattY but he’s honest and not a partisan hack, which allowed him to be way ahead of the curve when he called out that Biden was unfit for a second term.
I remain skeptical of linearly extrapolating the abilities of AI. Maybe I'm going to look stupid, but my bet remains on asymptoting utility.
My theory here is it's not a technical question so much as a conceptual one. I'm an R&D engineer in a generalized physical science space. I've come to use AI quite a lot - it's a incredibly useful tool that can give quick and mostly correct answers to mid-complexity technical questions; can kinda summarize research on high difficulty technical questions (I imagine it will continue to improve at this), and is pretty good at writing python code so long as you carefully structure what it's doing.
So in that sense, it often saves me an hour of reading papers or an hour of mundane coding. It's simultaneously incredibly impressive, incredibly useful... but also pretty mundane when you really think about it.
Because everything it does is basically consistent with thinking of as a super search engine, basically, with the ability to assemble chunks of ideas people have already figured out.
I don't fear for my job because I think there's a limit to the true originality of its ideas. Like, just to take the software aspect, which is a small part of my job but something lots of people understand, the truly intellectual part of software creation has never been "write the function that sorts the list". It's figuring out what you're trying to make and why, and creating structure for that solution. I think flippantly assuming it will just do more and more forever is not understanding what it's really doing. AI can't write code because it's "intelligent" in the human sense, it can write code because it read all of Stack Exchange.
But maybe I'm wrong. I've been assured by more software/big tech type friends that this is all intelligence is, really, that's all the human brain is doing, and so the only limit is computational power.
We'll see. My guess, useful tool, not fundamentally world breaking.
Even if all AI can do is save a typical employee an hour of work every so often, as you say it has done, it will definitely increase productivity substantially, even if it isn’t intelligent, but only book smart and won’t break the world.
The stupidest thing about the administration's claim that there's nothing they can do to get Abrego Garcia back is the fact that they are paying El Salvador to imprison those people. It's not like they just dumped them on foreign soil and the local authorities independently picked them up to throw them in the gulag.
The Trump war on Science is much worse than described in the short summary.
1. Freezing of university funds has already caused grad school funding offers to be rescinded
2. Firing of probationary employees at HHS, NOAA .... will further decimate early career scientists
3. Key mid-career scientists have been forced out, crippling science leadership
4. Disabling the grant approval process is hurting new scientific research
5. The failure to understand the role of fundamental long-term research in the drug development process, device (phones, computers, cars) development is leading to elimination of programs that reduce scientific progress in the mid to long-term. This damage will not show up next quarter or this year so it will be easy for people to say look we just saved some money when the reality is that they've given up the benefit of long-term compounding of our research effort.
And, like so much else, science has a crisis of confidence. Will research funding be available in the future? How will we collaborate on global scientific projects (CERN for example). Loss of confidence will reduce science productivity.
I haven't spoken with anyone in industry or academia who doesn't foresee a greatly damaged US scientific enterprise. Apologies for the doom and gloom but then Noah started the dystopia discussion.
And now the FDA ending the use of animals (almost always mice) to test for toxicity and animal models for research. I understand it is not pleasant, but it makes me more comfortable than an AI model.
Everyone would like to reduce the use of animals in pharmaceutical research and toxicology. However, we're not close to being able to model all the toxicology that might arise from a drug. Problem with RFK Jr/Makary approach is that it is just like "we'll cure autism in 6 months". No thought, just we'll do it. Ridiculous. Trump has found his groove: Act on impluse, discover problem, backtrack. Fire and Rehire nuclear safety, shut down and restart phone service for Social Security, and the endless loop of apply import tax (Tariff), remove, try a new one ..... Hard to believe that there are three firing neurons in the whole Cabinet. Maybe we'll get a neuron count from Trump's annual physical, I predict single digits.
I noticed the same thing about smart phones at the gym of the university I work at. I looked around and was absolutely stunned by all the people just sitting on weight machines, staring at their phones. Once in a while one would randomly break off and start doing a set, then go back to the phone.
It's also an almost daily occurrence that I get on an elevator and find a person standing inside staring at their phone, and discover they haven't even selected a floor to go to. They're just riding up and down according to the whims of whoever decides to press a button
Of course, pre smart phones, folks on the equipment would stare at the cable TV feed.... I do agree that smart phones and feeds have created a bigger problem, but folks at gyms often were just as distracted (just less portable distractions)
Watering down of chips and IRA respectively, coupled with Draghi report in EU, is the EU’s ticket back to relevance. Trumps policies snatching defeat from jaws of victory.
Has the Draghi report actually resulted in anything concrete? (Honest question, I don't pay close enough attention to Europe to know.) I know it has "only" been seven months but also... It's already been seven months....
Fair question, but I feel the Draghi report has resulted in a shift in attitudes and direction of the European Commission . This time last year, we were on the cusp of a range of environmental legislation being introduced onto business in the EU, already,
onerous regulations such as CBAM CSRD CSDDD EUDR (you can look up the acronyms!) have been heavily watered down primarily to assist competitiveness. Ok , so it’s not a panacea but it’s a solid start to address the EU’s penchant for business crushing regulation while balancing the needs of the global environment.
There are a lot of ways AI technology will increase efficiency and expand human capability.
BUT if it is true smartphones are potentially addicting, and even causing widespread deficits in social and reasoning skills-
Then shouldn’t we be worried about how much greater societal damage will be caused by generative AI that can tell us how to solve any problem, and pretend to socialize with us when we are lonely?
The birth rate: Is there any evidence to support the loss of testosterone among males? Also, it seems to me that in pushing female empowerment OVER everything feminine itself has done some major damage to the male/female companionship problem. However, this could be another "it's the phone" thing.
The bigger question is whether PFAS and micro-plastics are having a significant effect on sperm quality and quantity. Again, hard to prove and hard to do a random trial, but there is definitely correlative evidence...
As always, probably lots of factors going on - unfortunately (like so many things), it has become a political football instead of serious and focused investigation
You are exactly right. I didn't realize it was a political issue. Whoops. I'd think we'd need to be open to all of the above until we've figured put the cause.
I think new entrants to the workforce have always been a bit useless. The difference now is that organizations have to be so efficient, that there simply isn't the latitude to accommodate them. When organisations had a bit of slack in them, they could afford to employ clueless young people and then take time to shape them into something useful - I speak as one such clueless new recruit myself. Also, Ockham's razor forbids multiplying entities beyond necessity, it doesn't endorse explaining everything reductively. It says don't use two factors to explain a phenomenon if one of them completely explains it on its own. If both individually can only partially explain the thing whilst together they explain the thing more completely, then both are necessary.
When you say "So far, a lot of Trump’s actions in his second term seem almost intentionally designed to weaken the U.S. economy and American power in general. I highly doubt this is actually deliberate, of course, but the consistency so far is uncanny." Can you explain your phrase ”highly doubt”? Why doubt and especially why highly? Is it difficult to imagine it being true? Does the information not support it being true? Does what we know of Trump suggest it is unlikely?
“I still remember back in 2002, when the Bush administration declared Jose Padilla an “enemy combatant” and deprived him of his legal right to trial.”
What is it about Republicans presidents who think they’re tough guys. W spends trillions to destabilize the Mideast with Iraq War 2.0, creating a power vacuum for Iranian influence and proxy wars. Now Trump seeks to dismantle and weaken NATO as a response to Russian aggression on the European continent and launch an economic war against the entire world outside the U.S. is just plain stupid.
Re phones: it’s absolutely them, but I would zero in further on the ubiquitous mechanic of the Feed. No matter where you find it (X, Facebook, Reddit, now on Substack) the Feed is a high-cardinality information flow - you get the hilarious, the outrageous, the baffling, the poignant, the enraging all at once in a never ending barrage that the human mind did not evolve to handle and easily becomes addicted to. For the last six months I’ve done an experiment on myself: I’ve stopped spending any time with any app or site that has that mechanic as its main interaction point.
The result is that I feel myself returned to an ability to contemplate, to be still, to spend more time reading books and magazines and other long-form pieces without interruption. Frequently a lot of that reading happens on my phone, but it’s not kicked off by encountering something on a Feed.
I’m never going back.
This rings true! And I think the addictive quality of the Feed doesn't even necessarily have that much to do with the cardinality of the content.
Anecdote: when my son was 2, we introduced limited screentime – Netflix shows that we had vetted (sadly the best option we had at the time). What very quickly became apparent was that when he had control of the device, and could scroll Netflix's recommendations, he was unable to watch an episode of any show to completion. He was too distracted by the allure of scrolling, of seeing what the next thing to appear would be. When we took away his ability to do that, his attention span "magically" increased.
I think it's criminal that streaming services have Kids mode and parental controls, but don't allow you to disable the "feed" or only show allowlisted content. These particular feeds have very much proven a case of "the medium is the message" for our family!
One thing I've noticed with my own small children is that streaming means an inability to tolerate anything less than 100% exactly what you want at this moment.
Try putting on the radio and they get very frustrated/angry/meltdown over commercials and "I want to listen to the Wiggles for three songs and then Numberblocks for two songs and not what the radio is choosing to play" tantrums.
I don't want to over extrapolate and catatrophise but I wonder how much thing inability to tolerate anything less than 100% contributes to things like declining fertility, friendships, etc in society at large.
Oh yeah, that's a doozy. Even without extrapolating to a societal level, I'm pretty confident there's a significant mental health cost to that inability to tolerate boredom, frustration, etc (if left unchecked).
I think you are correct. It's the feed not the phone. I spend very little time on the phone because I find it absolutely unusable compared to a computer with a keyboard. But I still feel the same effect.
Feed formatting is intentionally addictive (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11dYx_rW_Ks), yet that's but the tip of the iceberg. Email is also addictive. Watching colorful, surprising, fast-moving images is, too. By bring the constant expectation of calls to your pocket, so is the mere telephonic aspect of the cell "phone" itself. It is the devil's own tech, and it's nigh-on impossible to imagine it being put into a decent, healthy place now...
This is correct. The algorithms are so powerful that the DOD has used public social media platforms as testing grounds for (benign) experiments in mind control for years. Using them to shape consumer behavior (especially in children) is wildly unethical and clearly detrimental—to say nothing of the potential for political weaponization in the wrong hands. These technologies are dangerous. There needs to be mass exodus from these platforms.
Couple thoughts:
1.) Regarding MAGA’s war on American science—It is going to shrink the U.S. as a global power, but they see that as a net “good”.
A shrunken, stunted America where they control everything in a vice grip is, in their minds, far preferable to a strong, prosperous America where they are one voice among many, drowned out by the more cosmopolitan and educated among us.
They would rather rule over a ruin than share power in an empire. They would rather be a big fish in a small pond than a medium-sized fish in a teaming lake.
There are many drivers behind that misanthropy—Boredom with prosperity, simple jealousy, religious fanaticism, existential angst—but it’s the one lodestar that seems to adequately explain how self-destructive, how vengeful and purposelessly nihilistic, MAGA is.
It also explains why a small but critical faction of the far left is either ambivalent or outright allied with MAGA. The “big fish little pond” mentality is, if nothing else, what drives Jill Stein, and what drove Ralph Nader in the past. But that’s a subject for a whole new thread.
2.) I don’t think Gretchen Whitmer herself consciously, sincerely believes tariffs will lead to a “revival of manufacturing”.
I think she’s just trapped by the essential fantastical world that one must vocally buy into if one is to be a successful local politician, in certain places.
In Michigan, you cannot get elected if you do not repeat the catechism that “NAFTA is the worst thing to ever happen to manufacturing jobs.”
You cannot gain purchase with any number of voters if you do not talk about free trade and free flow of goods as if it were the Devil himself. They simply do not want to hear you.
I think it’s not so much a matter of economic reasoning for those voters, quite honestly, as it is an issue of loss and grief.
They’re not looking for politicians or leaders that will maximize their prosperity or well-being. (They tried that stuff; it was dissatisfying.)
They’re looking for leaders who will channel their sense of anger at losing the past, angst at the passage of time. They feel they were wronged by change, writ large, quite simply, and they want punishment.
When Whitmer does things like give qualified praise to Trump’s trade war, she’s appealing to that emotional, glandular vibe in her voters, not making a reasoned economic argument about manufacturing and trade. She’s, again, kinda trapped by it.
Honestly, I have no idea what to do about dysfunctional politics like that.
Electing other leaders, and empowering other, less fantasy-driven voters, is a start, I guess. (Jared Polis, for all his (mild) faults, is a good counter-example.)
"A shrunken, stunted America where they control everything in a vice grip is, in their minds, far preferable."
That attributes reason and strategy to them. That's extremely debatable.
OK, say "as if"
It's also debatable that they are just stupid.
What's the evidence that they're smart?
Whatever the reasons may be for Whitmer’s support for tariffs, this is the kind of thing that makes the transition from a state politician to a national politician hard. Nationally, Democrats don’t need to equivocate on tariffs and they can even go further and say that it was wrong for Biden to do it, as Bill Maher got Al Franken to admit on his show.
Without having seen the segment in question, I would say it depends on the tariff, though.
Biden kept—and actually expanded—some of Trump’s first-term tariffs towards China as a matter of national security. He also kept a few on European industries, in part because of political incentives from states like Michigan.
Naturally, that went over poorly with many economists, particularly from Europe—who tended to lump Biden’s China policy and tariffs on their own countries together as one big soft-Trumpist surrender to protectionism and “no different” than Trump.
It’s imperative on all of us to discern the difference between what Biden was doing and the insane, pointless destruction Trump is trying to pancake the world with. Noah himself, I believe, has gotten into it in multiple forums with said European economists on their refusal to make that distinction—justifiably so, IMO.
Again, without having seen that segment, I’m skeptical of Maher’s ability to parse policy and see that distinction—He tends to be keenly attuned to vibe, narratives, and entertainment, less so to the details of policy. Also, let’s be honest; he’s never really liked old man Biden all that much. But maybe he’ll surprise me.
He was referring to cars, which is not a national security issue.
https://youtu.be/0Xq7vfwE_9Q?si=WW_9bQKWZIm9jB6K
Also, people understand the difference between Biden and Trump’s tariff policies. It’s a question of what’s the best political messaging to attack it? It makes very little sense to use nuance here. Tariffs for protectionism is bad.
Biden was a terrible and unpopular President. Bill Maher was on the side of the majority, not an outlier. At least he has some consistent classical liberal principles, unlike partisan hacks who defend bad policies from their own party.
Having watched it now:
Maher and Franken are talking about BYD. And funny story:
Noah dedicated an entire article last year to exactly those tariffs, on exactly that Chinese car company. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-big-tariffs-are-here
Also, funny story: No, it’s not true that those tariffs have “nothing to do with national security”. Scroll to the end of that article for a discussion on that.
Of course, I’m not one to agree with Noah on everything he says, but I’d be interested to see what objections you have to that, specifically.
And as much as I, too, have nice things to say about Bill Maher and his classical liberalism and what-not, I am about 99% sure he’s not read or considered Noah’s analysis on this policy matter. Or anything like it, ever.
Like I said, that’s not his wheelhouse. Not an insult to the man, just a fact.
Let’s say that I don’t agree with you or Noah that national security is a factor here. If national security was a factor, even our allies would be shutting out BYD. They are not. So, the main reason is protectionism and as a classical liberal, it is my belief that protecting specific industries instead of considering the broader benefits to US consumers and businesses hasn’t worked well in the long run.
You’re right that Bill Maher is not a policy wonk like Noah or MattY but he’s honest and not a partisan hack, which allowed him to be way ahead of the curve when he called out that Biden was unfit for a second term.
I remain skeptical of linearly extrapolating the abilities of AI. Maybe I'm going to look stupid, but my bet remains on asymptoting utility.
My theory here is it's not a technical question so much as a conceptual one. I'm an R&D engineer in a generalized physical science space. I've come to use AI quite a lot - it's a incredibly useful tool that can give quick and mostly correct answers to mid-complexity technical questions; can kinda summarize research on high difficulty technical questions (I imagine it will continue to improve at this), and is pretty good at writing python code so long as you carefully structure what it's doing.
So in that sense, it often saves me an hour of reading papers or an hour of mundane coding. It's simultaneously incredibly impressive, incredibly useful... but also pretty mundane when you really think about it.
Because everything it does is basically consistent with thinking of as a super search engine, basically, with the ability to assemble chunks of ideas people have already figured out.
I don't fear for my job because I think there's a limit to the true originality of its ideas. Like, just to take the software aspect, which is a small part of my job but something lots of people understand, the truly intellectual part of software creation has never been "write the function that sorts the list". It's figuring out what you're trying to make and why, and creating structure for that solution. I think flippantly assuming it will just do more and more forever is not understanding what it's really doing. AI can't write code because it's "intelligent" in the human sense, it can write code because it read all of Stack Exchange.
But maybe I'm wrong. I've been assured by more software/big tech type friends that this is all intelligence is, really, that's all the human brain is doing, and so the only limit is computational power.
We'll see. My guess, useful tool, not fundamentally world breaking.
Even if all AI can do is save a typical employee an hour of work every so often, as you say it has done, it will definitely increase productivity substantially, even if it isn’t intelligent, but only book smart and won’t break the world.
I agree!
I think you’re right and fwiw there are plenty of other people in tech who agree with us both.
The stupidest thing about the administration's claim that there's nothing they can do to get Abrego Garcia back is the fact that they are paying El Salvador to imprison those people. It's not like they just dumped them on foreign soil and the local authorities independently picked them up to throw them in the gulag.
The Trump war on Science is much worse than described in the short summary.
1. Freezing of university funds has already caused grad school funding offers to be rescinded
2. Firing of probationary employees at HHS, NOAA .... will further decimate early career scientists
3. Key mid-career scientists have been forced out, crippling science leadership
4. Disabling the grant approval process is hurting new scientific research
5. The failure to understand the role of fundamental long-term research in the drug development process, device (phones, computers, cars) development is leading to elimination of programs that reduce scientific progress in the mid to long-term. This damage will not show up next quarter or this year so it will be easy for people to say look we just saved some money when the reality is that they've given up the benefit of long-term compounding of our research effort.
And, like so much else, science has a crisis of confidence. Will research funding be available in the future? How will we collaborate on global scientific projects (CERN for example). Loss of confidence will reduce science productivity.
I haven't spoken with anyone in industry or academia who doesn't foresee a greatly damaged US scientific enterprise. Apologies for the doom and gloom but then Noah started the dystopia discussion.
Yep
And now the FDA ending the use of animals (almost always mice) to test for toxicity and animal models for research. I understand it is not pleasant, but it makes me more comfortable than an AI model.
Everyone would like to reduce the use of animals in pharmaceutical research and toxicology. However, we're not close to being able to model all the toxicology that might arise from a drug. Problem with RFK Jr/Makary approach is that it is just like "we'll cure autism in 6 months". No thought, just we'll do it. Ridiculous. Trump has found his groove: Act on impluse, discover problem, backtrack. Fire and Rehire nuclear safety, shut down and restart phone service for Social Security, and the endless loop of apply import tax (Tariff), remove, try a new one ..... Hard to believe that there are three firing neurons in the whole Cabinet. Maybe we'll get a neuron count from Trump's annual physical, I predict single digits.
I noticed the same thing about smart phones at the gym of the university I work at. I looked around and was absolutely stunned by all the people just sitting on weight machines, staring at their phones. Once in a while one would randomly break off and start doing a set, then go back to the phone.
It's also an almost daily occurrence that I get on an elevator and find a person standing inside staring at their phone, and discover they haven't even selected a floor to go to. They're just riding up and down according to the whims of whoever decides to press a button
Of course, pre smart phones, folks on the equipment would stare at the cable TV feed.... I do agree that smart phones and feeds have created a bigger problem, but folks at gyms often were just as distracted (just less portable distractions)
Watering down of chips and IRA respectively, coupled with Draghi report in EU, is the EU’s ticket back to relevance. Trumps policies snatching defeat from jaws of victory.
Has the Draghi report actually resulted in anything concrete? (Honest question, I don't pay close enough attention to Europe to know.) I know it has "only" been seven months but also... It's already been seven months....
Fair question, but I feel the Draghi report has resulted in a shift in attitudes and direction of the European Commission . This time last year, we were on the cusp of a range of environmental legislation being introduced onto business in the EU, already,
onerous regulations such as CBAM CSRD CSDDD EUDR (you can look up the acronyms!) have been heavily watered down primarily to assist competitiveness. Ok , so it’s not a panacea but it’s a solid start to address the EU’s penchant for business crushing regulation while balancing the needs of the global environment.
I got a bit of whiplash going from 6 to 7!
There are a lot of ways AI technology will increase efficiency and expand human capability.
BUT if it is true smartphones are potentially addicting, and even causing widespread deficits in social and reasoning skills-
Then shouldn’t we be worried about how much greater societal damage will be caused by generative AI that can tell us how to solve any problem, and pretend to socialize with us when we are lonely?
The birth rate: Is there any evidence to support the loss of testosterone among males? Also, it seems to me that in pushing female empowerment OVER everything feminine itself has done some major damage to the male/female companionship problem. However, this could be another "it's the phone" thing.
The bigger question is whether PFAS and micro-plastics are having a significant effect on sperm quality and quantity. Again, hard to prove and hard to do a random trial, but there is definitely correlative evidence...
As always, probably lots of factors going on - unfortunately (like so many things), it has become a political football instead of serious and focused investigation
You are exactly right. I didn't realize it was a political issue. Whoops. I'd think we'd need to be open to all of the above until we've figured put the cause.
Get Oren Cass to discuss tariffs with you. It’s a debate we need to hear!
Will do
No one needs to hear from Oren Cass about anything, he’s just a less dumb version of Peter Navarro.
Hard to believe that it is possible to maintain that "Navarro-ness" but be less dumb. Charade?
I think new entrants to the workforce have always been a bit useless. The difference now is that organizations have to be so efficient, that there simply isn't the latitude to accommodate them. When organisations had a bit of slack in them, they could afford to employ clueless young people and then take time to shape them into something useful - I speak as one such clueless new recruit myself. Also, Ockham's razor forbids multiplying entities beyond necessity, it doesn't endorse explaining everything reductively. It says don't use two factors to explain a phenomenon if one of them completely explains it on its own. If both individually can only partially explain the thing whilst together they explain the thing more completely, then both are necessary.
When you say "So far, a lot of Trump’s actions in his second term seem almost intentionally designed to weaken the U.S. economy and American power in general. I highly doubt this is actually deliberate, of course, but the consistency so far is uncanny." Can you explain your phrase ”highly doubt”? Why doubt and especially why highly? Is it difficult to imagine it being true? Does the information not support it being true? Does what we know of Trump suggest it is unlikely?
Not on topic but just wanted to drop a comment to say I love your blog and podcast, Noah. Been a subscriber for a year and reader for longer.
“I still remember back in 2002, when the Bush administration declared Jose Padilla an “enemy combatant” and deprived him of his legal right to trial.”
What is it about Republicans presidents who think they’re tough guys. W spends trillions to destabilize the Mideast with Iraq War 2.0, creating a power vacuum for Iranian influence and proxy wars. Now Trump seeks to dismantle and weaken NATO as a response to Russian aggression on the European continent and launch an economic war against the entire world outside the U.S. is just plain stupid.
What exactly does Joe Rogan imagine "the cause" to be?
Egypt had (has?) policy linking kids and length of draft, if I remember right.