Another factor, from a friend: "In a high interest rate environment, with lower competition for workers, tech leaders no longer need to keep the workers "onside". For the same reasons that perks collapsed, tech leaders are more free to show their inherent rightist support without fearing a revolt from their leftist knowledge workers."
Hmm, that's an interesting thought...worker power in the general economy is very high right now because of full employment, but this probably isn't true in tech...
No, it’s not. The massive layoffs that resulted from pandemic era over hiring have led to a glut of un or underemployed tech workers, it’s hard for people to find new jobs. Combine that with the way hiring for white collar jobs has become completely broken (which you should totally write about, it’s a fascinating case of partial market failure, e.g. fake LinkedIn jobs) and most of the tech folks I work with do not have positive feelings about the job market.
A lot depends on how you define "Small Tech" (having worked in all sizes of Tech). Big VC based Small Tech at the leader level probably follows Noah's comment about dreaming to be the next Google. Most more realistic startups are probably closer to the workers as Eric noted.
I believe one reason why big business would be fine with Trump is because they know for a lousy $100 mil, they can get any executive order they want. That's a bargain!
What does this even mean? School closures started under Trump and were mostly state level policy in any event. You wanted Biden to do… what exactly? Be mean? Grow up.
Well, if they don't think they are getting their money's worth (I'd say the extended COVID school closures was worth a lot to them), then they should switch up which politicians they are bribing. Used to be, smart companies bribed, I mean donated, to both sides of the isle. Called hedging. Apparently the guy running the Teamsters is doing this.
Did all the anti-vaxx idiots get their money's worth when they filled up hospitals? Each hospitalization was expensive as hell and extended COVID harming the economy more than anything else. Gotta love how they fought so hard to be the new Typhoid Mary. Truly selfish and stupid.
The Business vs. Labor ratio of political donations has dipped to roughly 20:1 since the Reagan-era destruction of US unions. Unions do however donate more in kind; like door-to-door GOTV drives.
You do have a point, but there are two big differences - Most protests were outside and it was a just cause.
Perhaps, protests in 400 cities worldwide wouldn't have happened if the issue had been addressed. It wasn't as if George Floyd was the first unarmed black man killed. Trump came down on the side of the murderer. He was so divisive he wasn't invited to the funeral.
First, it's important to make the distinction that Tech *owners and management* slant sharply conservative, while rank-and-file employees are something like 80-90% liberals. Business elites are the heart of the GOP.
Second, Noah does not differentiate between Tech sector monopoly-level giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon; the future targets (hopefully) of Dem-led federal anti-trust action--not the tens of thousands Tech startups and small companies that are the entrepreneurial lifeblood of the industry. Yet it's the big CEO's & shareholders who cut the donation checks.
Third, political donations by business--or unions--have a well established, and roughly 1,000-fold impact on legislative/political outcomes. Especially for Big Business, which outspends Unions in this regard by at least 20:1. Political spending/lobbying by corporations is good business practice.
Second, Noah does not differentiate between Tech sector monopoly-level giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon; the future targets (hopefully) of Dem-led federal anti-trust action--not the tens of thousands Tech startups and small companies that are the entrepreneurial lifeblood of the industry. Yet it's the big CEO's & shareholders who cut the donation checks.”
As Noah said many times, Little Tech is pissed at the Democrats because a large part of valuation is the capacity to be acquired by a large company. If Lina Khan is filing nuisance anti-trust cases in silly cases like Microsoft - Activision (while ignoring areas that are important like Microsoft -Slack for instance), you really hit Little Tech in their pocket book because they can’t be acquired.
Why would a donation matter after he’s elected? He’ll be a lame duck from day one (dictator duck) and he doesn’t care if other Republicans get more donations. Is there any evidence he sold executive orders for donations in his first term?
He's got 400 million in fines to pay on his business fraud suit and the E Jean Carroll suit. These would not be packaged as campaign contributions, but simply as enrichment. I'm sure that can be managed. Now that he's got his immunity for official actions, and issuing executive orders is official action, he can crime all he wants.
Biden is pretty much intentionally ignorant of the constitution when passing his executive orders on student loans, immigration, EV mandates, and LNG permit pauses and I guess soon on grocery prices, rent control and Supreme Court term limits, and the immunity rule is in effect already and applies to him already. Biden also makes sure his executive orders pay off politically, since he expects votes and support from the indebted graduates and green lobbyists , he’s not doing them because they are smart or economical.
The best way to advance DEI is to make it easier to hire skilled immigrants. Merit drives those hires, but they're inherently diverse. And they often become C-level employees.
Supporting policing isn't a pivot for the Democratic Party. It's a reminder to focus on the talking point. There's lots of funding up and down the government. The issue should always have been better training. Dems should propose a "West Point / Citadel" level training academy for officers who will lead police forces all over the nation with best practices -- and fire and prosecute the bad apples.
Most Democrats are already supporting Israel loudly and clearly -- often in conflict with one another, yes. But human rights in Gaza includes the forceful disempowering of Hamas. And a lot of what everyone needs is a clearer sense of the history.
It's harder for me to get behind these other suggestions of yours, Noah. If Crypto is mostly a ponzi scheme, the government should not be catering to it as a "special interest." Anti-trust actions should be conducted to keep all industries from abusing monopoly power. And A.I. can be very very bad. We need the government to learn as much about it as possible. Regulation is inevitable and smart.
This is at least the third time in the past two months I have heard some variant of the "West Point for police," and each time I hear I am confident of three things concerning whoever posted. They don't know much about the military, they have no knowledge of police work, and they don't know the divisions of laws, governance, and the courts in the US.
O don’t know what other people you’ve read mean, but I am not suggesting that police behave like the military or that the military run or train the police.
I am suggesting we form a police academy with the highest level of training to educate elite officers. Police work is different than military operations, so the training would be different. Perhaps I could say as another analogy we should create the Oxford of police academies or the Stanford.
Right now, some police departments require high-command officers to get college degrees. Chiefs typically have Masters of Public Administration degrees to go with their administrative duties.
Quantico is already "West Point for police" and it isn't anything like you are implying.
If people said "franchise Quantico and operate it in 50 states for state, county, and local police" I bet you wouldn't have such a knee jerk reaction and would understand the point they are trying to make.
I'm pretty sure the knee jerk reaction he's referring to was mine. It may have been more caustic out the gate than warranted, so I'll give you a longer reply soon, but I'm fairly sure you both misunderstand what I meant. The FBI Academy, and FLETC, are not the West Point for police-they are training academies for federal law enforcement agencies. The FBI academy does not teach the aspects of police work they don't interact with, and FBI agents do not work patrol-a part of why NIBRS is so terrible.
OK. So just to clarify so you don't waste your time responding to something I didn't mean, my point is that the federal government should fund the best police-training school in the world, then encourage local police departments to hire graduates with fast tracks to positions of authority.
My allusion to West Point was that it trains officers who then get put in charge of recruits. I have seen popular criticisms of this system in movies and TV shows like Band of Brothers, but I imagine it is possible to do this correctly. Outsiders may be less attached to keeping bad apples on forces. And part of the training can be how to build trust and support coming into departments around the country as an outsider.
Hopefully this makes sense. I'm happy to hear suggestions for how to do this better.
You did mention it for a sentence, but I would emphasize the fact that the media pinned the blame for 2016 on Facebook, even though it was the media, including left leaning outlets that covered the email story way too much. Tech being blamed for what was a weakly positioned campaign on the part of Clinton and the journalistic failure that was The Emails leaves a sour taste.
I think that overall this development is positive. This is a way of injecting desperately needed brains back into the Trump machine. The importance of having at least a few smart people in the room cannot be overstated.
For example: There's a JD Vance clip where he is able to string complete sentences together warning about market power resulting from AI regulation. I mean compared to Trump and Biden - this is next level stuff.
I don't like what I'm reading because you are very analytical, connected in many ways with different people, cultures and countries. I admire your (as I recall it simply) - The Mission of Humanity is to eliminate Poverty" -- I think you are painfully realistic. That's what I don't like because I can't wish it away
Prediction - Biden WILL step aside because its just glaring and obvious that he will not only lose the Presidency to Trump, we (ie Liberal old me) will lose the chances for the House, and probably yield a 3/4 majority to Republicans in the Senate.
Biden just announced he has contracted -Covid-19. Now is the time for him and Harris to step aside and let the Democratic convenction decide the candidate. I give it a 48.584% chance.
I have no idea what juice the latest COVID virus strain has. Do people still get regular booster shots? I rarely hear about it, other than then COVID crazy forever makers, But, at Biden's age and whatever other conditions he may have, I would assume he's had every shot possible.
I agree with all this. I would add an emotional reason for certain tech *leaders* in particular: Biden has a pretty visible distaste for wealthy finance types, be they Wall Street folks or tech VCs from California. Both groups tend to have pretty high opinions of themselves and probably feel they should be consulted (and flattered) on matters of economic policy and regulation.
Yet Biden's distaste probably extends to his staff and appointees, and folks like Musk and Andreessen may just feel insulted. They're used to a certain amount of access (and flattery), and they feel insulted by the arm's length at which they're kept. Horowitz's comment that he can't get a meeting with Gensler was, I think, revealing.
So some of their rationale is, well, rational, including all the reasons in this post. And some of it, like citing the wealth tax that no one believes will become law, is I think a screen for a feeling of resentment at no longer being treated like captains of industry, with privileged access and respect in the corridors of power.
The problem with this viewpoint is that Biden was the senator from Delaware, the home to many U.S. corporations. He's long been dogged as "The Senator from MBNA."
Most German companies did very well in the pre-WWII years of 1933 - 1939 (with the obvious exception of Jewish companies whose owner will killed or forced to sell for firesale prices). Many German companies till did quite well after Hitler started the war in Europe … unless of course they got bombed.
MostUS tech companies could expect to do well under Trump’s MAGA fascism … until Trump crashes the US economy
That's not a big "if" for the tech oligarchs because they think they will be fine no matter what happens, and they will up until they fall out of a window.
The "if" is a lot more dangerous to the rest of us. Thinking otherwise is naive.
If he had plans to moderate on any idea or policy statement, whether by him, his campaign or people from his first administration, he would have picked a different running mate.
I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but I find that comparing the MAGA movement with fascism obscures more than it illuminates. There are plenty of apt historical allegories (the KKK in the 1920s, the John Birch Society, etc.) that don't come with the conceptual baggage of "fascism" and better capture the MAGA movement and all its eccentricities and defects.
The intrinisic commonality is here. MAGA, and the 40 year unilateral war by conservatives against Liberals, Democrats, women of choice, Gays, non-Christians - reeks with every part of hate from 1930s Germany, 1800-1900s US racism.
Sure, but "fascism" as a concept comes with very strong historical connotations, and I think analytical precision is crucial in these sorts of discussions. I'm not trying to say that there is no basis for a mass fascism movement in the United States, only that it will evolve differently. Interwar European fascism and American-style fascism have strong similarities, but also sharp differences. A lot of this is because the United States is a federal republic, which gives state and local governments fairly broad deference when it comes to police powers: what would normally be "fascism" in a more centralized nation evolves into a more decentralized array of reactionary fiefdoms at the state and local level (which was the basic structure of Jim Crow). A centralized fascist mass movement is a terrifying thing, but it's very hard (but not impossible!) to build in a federal republic.
Unless you build up a large national media sector that vilifies liberals and liberalism by fabricating sensationalist stories, often out of whole cloth, with little to any journalistic fact-checking.
Putting "study" in scare quotes and noting that they are "extremely conservative" and "corporate funded" (like every other NGO on the planet) does not refute their findings.
Goldhagen's public reputation was largely formed by the polarizing reaction to "Hitler's Willing Executioners." Many historians and scholars of the Holocaust feel Goldhagen is over-the-top and polemic in his writing.
He's stuck in his ways but then decided to venture beyond Holocaust scholarship and in "Worse Than War," decided to posit an anatomy for genocide.
I will warn you: Goldhagen broaches one of the darkest topics, genocide, and he has the darkest interpretations of why they happen. You will walk away losing hope and trust in humanity -- which is precisely why you need to read his books.
I mean, Bayer, BOSS, BMW and VAG emerged relatively unscathed. If you're worried about the economy tanking, the problem isn't the economy, it's that you're just not rich enough. Nothing like a good recession to buy out your competitors and consolidate your market position. /s
Trump--unlike Biden--will strongarm the Fed to slash rates...cause the economy to boom; especially in construction. Even if inflation ticks up somewhat as a result, Trump and the GOP will be hailed as economic rockstars.
The economy is booming, though, and the workers aren't there.
The biggest beneficiaries of slashed rates would be tech, just like it was from the late 1990s to the early 2020s. The tech boom was essentially subsidized by low interest rates.
The dark side of Reason 5 is racially-tinged IQ essentialism and just the slightest flavor of "girls-can't-do-math" proto-misogyny encountering for the first time a permission structure where it's relatively newly ok to let it fly. If you've convinced yourself you work in an industry that is already a perfect meritocracy and genius industriousness rather than dollops of good fortune are why you are where you are, Trump-curiosity is arguably a natural next step. Musk is the pathfinder here, but it's possible in the tech industry to think he's half-crazy and still feel the cross-pressure driven by these factors. A lot of this also feels like clever-male-adolescents' "Mencius-Moldbug-ism" coming to the surface.
When I make the case for calling the modern far-right fashoid rather than fascist, one reason is that fascism is a term that's supposed to be rooted in the nation as the fundamental unit of society. There are at least three far-right ideological constellations that are not nations of people, but other social organizations that have come to the far right through the same path as 20th century fascists did.
One of the largest far-right ideologies in the world today is masculinism. You might have never heard of the term until now. But you probably have heard of Joe Rogan. Jordan Peterson. Andrew Tate. Elliot Rodger. Mike Cernovich. Vox Day. You might have heard of creepy fringe subcultures like the Manosphere, MRA, MGOTW or incels. These represent very different worldviews and they're contradictory or incoherent. Well, so is fascism. The culture of fascism is eclectic and syncretic and meant to be irrational and antirational.
What do these groups that have nothing in common actually have in common? They see feminism (and by extension LGBTQ movements) as the archnemesis, and flip the frame to say women (and queers) used appeals to self-determination in politics, economics and later sexuality and gender as a tool to dominate men. They take the view that any progress made by women (and queers) must have necessarily come at the expense of a man and achieved a status in society they don't deserve. Like 20th century fascists, they appeal to an idealized and mythologized past of an essential masculinity of a man being a warrior, protector and provider and to set the world right by relegating women to their traditionally subordinate places of matrimony and motherhood.
Having worked in Tech for a very long time, the notion that hiring was ever purely "meritocratic" is BS. There was inherent bias in it over and over - most of which was not intentional, just the way the tech culture viewed "girls cant do math"... But it was definitely there. And even more so in terms of promotions and pay - perhaps again a factor of the relatively scarcity of girls (or even more so blacks and hispanics), but also for women a cultural notion that you cant be aggressive in what you want - or you will be called shrill for the same behavior men do.
Just for reference - male - and 45+ years in Tech - across many different size companies and domains.
Whether a particular approach to DEI solves this or not, it was never meritocratic and still isn't and won't be in the near future.
Male, in tech for 25 years with experience in everything from big tech to SME to two man startups to open source projects. Been an interviewer hundreds of times and have designed hiring processes from scratch.
Please point to specific policies in specific companies you think disadvantage women. Not vague unfalsifiable innuendo about culture - specific rules at specific places. I can do it: there are dozens of openly advertised misandric policies in various well known tech firms that systematically hurt men in order reward and protect women, for nothing more than merely showing up. Meanwhile your description of inherent bias is one nobody I know in tech would accept. Except, of course, the far left extremists, who are convinced misogyny is everywhere and whose "evidence" boils down to: agree with me or I'll yell at you and try to get you fired.
Take women out of the picture (and blacks in the USA), and what you have left is or was extremely meritocratic compared to the average industry. Most sectors of the economy either don't even do work sample tests or the work isn't objective enough to actually evaluate systematically.
OK, we could spend hours on this - and we clearly have very different viewpoints. And yes, 45 years in software from tiny startups to giant companies. Hundreds of interviews, created hiring processes as well.
So, we clearly have a different experience. Bias against women and others has never been an explicit policy - of course not. It was simply the way business was done (certainly quite clear pre 2000 or so). There was no need to have a policy - it was just baked into how society and the tech culture viewed things.. I have watched many very qualified women get passed over for promotion many times - which is why I said it can be a combination of how aggressive women are viewed and how aggressive men are viewed...
So, perhaps your experience in the last 25 years is different or you worked in different places - can't answer that. This part of your note was just silly and really unnecessary - "except of course, the far left extremists, who are ....".
"nobody in tech would accept" - I probably have a few hundred folks (or far more) who would disagree with you easily and loudly.
Your point of view and experience is valid - BUT to assume that everyone else in Tech has that point of view is dumb.
There is a reasonable discussion to be had out there about policies and what happened over the years. And by the way, yes, other industries may well be worse and tech does try to be somewhat meritocratic - but that doesn't mean that there hasn't been and still is bias.
Anyway, signing off - we could continue this forever and it won't change your experience or mine.
I said "nobody in tech that I know, except the far left" not "nobody in tech". I'm sure you know different people to me.
This is the third time in about as many weeks where I've seen someone from the left argue with something similar to but not the same as what was actually written. What is it with the left and not reading correctly? This definitely makes it hard to debate.
Another reason is that there are a lot of people in tech with FU money and people with FU money will push back against incessant bullying and push to conform on SJ issues by the Democrats and left leaning media. They're not afraid of being cancelled because they don't need to work for a living anymore.
It's no secret that a Yuge part of Trump's appeal is that he pushes back and "counter-bullies". Sure, he can be a jerk and over the top, but people who feel battered (rightly or wrongly) by being called racists and deplorables, etc., but don't have FU money, can channel the FU through Trump.
w.r.t. people in tech, it's less about Trump and more about anti-Democratic Party sentiment IMO. I don't think smart accomplished people in tech think of Trump as anything more than a pompous jackass and a joke.
Can't argue with that. I'm more or less in that same crowd. I was referring specifically to the people with "FU money" have the luxury to push back when they are bullied because they don't need to work. A big chuck of Trump supporters do not have this luxury. They are not big shots in tech or in anything, and a job los can be devastating to them. How many run of the mill employees are humiliated and bullied at mandatory DEI sessions, but simply cannot afford to quit, so they just try to lay low and focus on their retirement date.
I am a Southerner who spent nearly 40 years as a federal employee, so I know a lot about "DEI sessions," mandatory or otherwise. I never saw anyone bullied, but I saw a few people who FELT bullied, and there is a reason they felt bullied.
This is all about emotions and feelings. The bullying is verbal, not an actual fist to the nose. This poor guy rather famously killed himself after some extreme DEI bullying (even the Canadian school board agreed the DEI lady was out of line, but then why did they pay her all that money to show up and do evil?
Most people with FU money in the world are finance people, who long ago learned that you don’t get a 50 million dollar beach house and to be popular in the same life (as someone who lived through 2008 in a finance adjacent field the idea that tech has been suffering from particularly bad media coverage and/or political grandstanding is more or less the funniest thing I’ve ever heard). Tech people should take a page from their book: grow their hedge rows high, decide whether their care about low taxes or abortion rights more and direct your political donations accordingly, and stop expecting people to be nice to you or care what you think about anything outside their narrow area.
I was looking into the number of centi-millionaires in tech vs finance. Although I couldn't find it broken down by field, the difference between NYC and Bay Area is not much (775 vs 692). I'm using the locations as very rough proxies because it's not that neatly sorted. I think a lot of people in finance are unaware that that the pay/net worth gap between tech and finance has narrowed quite a bit in the last 10 years.
Based on just the White House's press release, which we can assume spins it in the most positive way possible, the burdens are clearly significant. It says anyone training a model has to do "extensive safety testing" with "red teams". The word safety in the context of a program that only produces words is inherently left wing and viewed as delusional by many on the right, so even just figuring out what exactly they mean by this is cumbersome. What do these safety tests involve, how much will they cost, and what does the White House mean exactly by "red team"? Is a team of one acceptable, for example, or does the word team imply there have to be at least two people involved? What will the government do with these results you have to send them? Is the definition of "safe" objective or is it constantly changing?
Answering all this will involve a lot of time spent with expensive lawyers, possibly waiting on slow regulators to give non-answers to questions and so on.
People can train foundation models at home, so this will be a carnival of selective enforcement. Many smaller players will ask for forgiveness rather than permission, on the assumption that if they never get big nobody will care anyway.
Good news though, you only have to do that if it poses "serious risk to national security" or "economic security". How do you evaluate that? What does it even mean? Cue more meetings with expensive lawyers.
And so on. It may not seem cumbersome if you never dealt with regulatory compliance before, or never ran a company, but this stuff piles up.
1. As far as I can tell, the quote 'extensive safety testing' does not appear in the fact sheet or the executive order. Did you mean 'extensive red-team testing'?
2. The sharing of red-team results does not apply to 'anyone training a model' but only applies to models that are trained with 10^26 or more FLOPs, which is literally larger than any model that has ever been trained before as per best estimates, although the next generation of models from the big 3 AI orgs might use that much compute. This would only apply to the very largest AI labs running their frontier model runs. Training such models would cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars so requiring the sharing of safety test results for a single model would form a trivial fraction of overall spend. The orgs likely to go over 10^26 in the next few years all already do extensive safety testing anyways.
3. Executive order instructions on how to run red-teams are just 'guidelines' which are not legally binding.
I can understand if people predict the Biden administration could, in the future, propose cumbersome regulations, but the executive order is not that.
Elon Musk says SpaceX and X headquarters moving to Texas, blames new California transgender law
"This is the final straw. Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas."
Musk is right. If my kids weren't already grown, I would be looking to move out of California and in to a red state that doesn't regard them as State property, to be taken from me and surgically mutilated at the State's whim. The series of laws passed in California (with unanimous support from Democrats in the state legislature, signed by the Democrat governor, and enforced by the Democrat attorney general) that allow for this is truly odious.
And please note: I have thoroughly read through every one of those laws, so don't tell me that they *ackshually* don't do that: they absolutely f***ing do.
Texas (and many other red states) have banned chemical castration drugs, cross-sex hormones, and sex-trait modification surgeries for children, similar to laws that ban giving tattoos to children, or selling alcohol to children. These laws arose because of the complete failure of the for-profit US medical system to notice that those medical procedures are pure quackery with no evidence base. Most countries in Europe have now figured this out and similarly banned them, after thorough evidence reviews. The most recent and comprehensive of these is the Cass report from the UK: https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
In the US, there is a widening scandal as it has emerged that the activist group masquerading as a medical group, WPATH, commissioned similar reports from Johns Hopkins, and then buried them when those reports came to same conclusions as every other comprehensive report. WPATH then removed all age limits from its recommendations, under pressure from Biden's assistant secretary for HHS, Admiral Rachel Levine: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/health/transgender-minors-surgeries.html This is all coming out now in discovery from a lawsuit by Biden's DOJ seeking to overturn Alabama's law banning these procedures.
But there has been no follow up to this and the statement referenced by the NYT is nowhere to be found on any official HHS or other .gov site. And the DOJ has not withdrawn its lawsuits seeking to re-establish child mutilation across the country.
Even if true, just an election ploy. They know it's not a winning issue in swing states. But if they win, they will no longer oppose. See, also, menthol cigarettes. Almost banned until Biden's team realized they would piss off too many black voters over it.
If you want to implement unpopular policies, expect backlash. Yes, this works against rapidly anti-abortion republications. It's a loser at the ballot box.
I agree it's a ploy, and one that seems to be being walked back already, because there was HUGE pushback from the pro-TQ NGOs (HRC, ACLU, etc) that no elected Democrat dares to go up against. Any who do are primaried and removed, as happened this cycle to Shawn Nicole Thierry in the Texas House. She voted for that Texas law after doing her homework and making a heartfelt speech on the House floor. The Party turned on her instantly and fully funded a pro-TQ replacement who won the primary. Her political career as a Democrat is over. This is why 100% of Democrats in Congress and 99% in state legislatures follow the TQ line. They know what happens if they don't.
And this is why I, a registered Democrat for 50 years, will now be voting straight Republican. I just absolutely positively refuse to support, in any way, this ongoing crime against humanity of mutilating children.
Comes down to "what is appropriate medical care"? is that a euphemism for "sterilizing" or "cosmetic mastectomy"? In any event, I do agree that all states in general need to but out of doctor-patent relationships. I believe California even quietly canceled a law that said doctors could not advise patients on COVID treatments other than those approved by the state after it was challenged. Look, if you want to smoke legal weed, live in California, not Texas. If you want to trans your kid, live in California.
It's very hard to tell if AI safety is a real issue that we should be worried about or not. I have dived deep into this with both the Effective Altruism (EA - who are generally worried about existential risks and want to focus on alignment - keeping AIs interests the same as humans) and the e/acc (effective acceleration, who are pro-technology in general) sides. I am very pro-technology and have been working in tech since the earliest days of the web. But I can't wrap my head around the risks of AI. Part of the problem is that the AI companies are very opaque, partially no doubt to try and protect company secrets. But I am also suspicious of what is really going on behind the walled garden. The carefully neutered AI chatbots of the world don't show their true capabilities and people far more informed and smarter than me have serious concerns.
It's not crazy for government to take an interest an AI technologies. It was ideal that government had a very light or non-existent hand on early web technologies. Many companies like Uber and Square had business models which were illegal in the overly regulated industries that they were competing in, but the government looked the other way or just did not care as successful and extremely useful industries were being built. Perhaps AI is different. Should "make the most money and acquire the most power" really be the correct guiding principle here? Most of this technology has some pretty obvious military application and some of the work is of national security interest. As I heard a DC policy wonk say recently at a conference I was at, "Those of us on the other coast need to do a better job of keeping up what you on this coast are doing, let's work together". The Open AIs of the world are screaming bloody murder at modest attempts to regulate them, but it's not *crazy* that they might need some supervision. I do not think their efforts to self-regulate are enough.
And, if anything, generative AI has somehow gotten *less* powerful in the intervening months, while tech VCs have bet billions on the assumption that AGI was right around the corner.
I am with you that AI safety has always been self important trash. The best thing Yud could have done for AI safety would be to have shut up about it and not interested many of the current leading AI researchers in AI
That was silly but was meant to establish a norm of being able to pause.. OpenAI has always said they’ll pause when things get dangerous but never given details as to where they draw the line and how long they’ll pause.
Dario says we’ll hit human level
AGI some time in 2025-2027. John Schumann thinks by 2029 (1-2 versions).
Are you just skeptical of that or do you not see the risk of continuing on that curve?
You can't establish norms by saying things that are silly.
> do you not see the risk of continuing on that curve?
History is full of people who were fooled by exponential growth. That is, they thought growth was permanently exponential when it wasn't. Extrapolating a trend forwards infinitely and then freaking out about it is a favourite pastime of (pseudo-)intellectuals. That's exactly how the AI winter started. Be better than that!
This has been discussed to death. We don’t know where we are on the (potential) S curve but we have little reason to believe we‘re about about to flatten and most experts believe we won’t. Some do, so it’s possible, but it’s far from clear.
OK so nobody agrees on what will happen? Like in every other era of history, then. There's no justification for regulation in "some do, some don't". Otherwise you get the precautionary principle which is merely 1984-style eternal stagnation.
Your takeaway from 1984 was that it represents “eternal stagnation”?
There are few technologies in history where many of its inventors have predicted human extinction. And there has never before been a technology that could replace humanity.
"OpenAI and other leading AI labs are making a set of voluntary commitments to reinforce the safety, security and trustworthiness of AI technology and our services. This process, coordinated by the White House, is an important step in advancing meaningful and effective AI governance, both in the US and around the world."
Biden's executive order was very light on substance. As reported in the Washington Post:
"A senior Biden administration official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity ahead of the order’s unveiling, said that because they set a “very high threshold” for which models are covered, the safety testing requirements probably “will not catch any system currently on the market.”
“This is primarily a forward-looking action for the next generation of models,” the official said."
I am not saying that the current California Senate Bill (Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act) is the correct answer. I think it would be a disaster for California to act on its own, as we risk chasing out an entire industry. But I am in favor of more investigation and thoughtful attempts to regulate at the federal level.
Yeah, I think Noah is making a mountain out of a molehill here. Basically everyone who works in frontier AI development understands that there are risks involved and that there is some need for safety strategies and regulation, including places like Anthropic and DeepMind. Most research scientists are at least open or positive to the idea of regulating aspects of the technology. Most of the rage about the topic driven by a few hyper-online types that don't represent the general attitude of AI workers. I like Noah's writing a lot, but he seems to have some blind spots about this particular topic.
The molehill being made into a mountain is X-risk. But it's fine, because it gives people something relatively useless to argue about. LLMs will slow down from data and energy limitations soon anyway (they already have, actually), so the X-risk debates are just a silly thing to keep people occupied. The really important AI is computer vision, because that's what will allow truly autonomous weapons, which will take over the world soon.
I'd love to see your views on why that is. Because it's pretty weird and historically aberrant.
"Antisemitism is actually more common on the right than on the left"
If this is still true (which I doubt), it is only true in America. The Left in Europe has largely joined forces with Muslim immigrants (we're not in Houllebecq-land, but we're close) and to avoid antagonizing their junior partners, tacitly accepts their rampant antiseimitism. The New Popular Front is a great example of this genre.
"Ditch all the silly parts of DEI"
Liberals can't do this; it would destroy their entire worldview. Short form... injustice and oppression are caused by unchosen constraints that limit some people's access to Locke's inalienable rights. Liberalism exists to liberate people from these unchosen constraints. It can not accept particularity (MO and CA doing different things) because rights are universal. It can not stop liberating until all injustice is gone and the world is perfect.
DEI (and trans) aren't something bolted onto the liberal framework; it's deeply embedded into the philosophy.
Polarization by education is actually very common historically. Some of the earliest political arguments we have writing about in like ancient Sumer feature it. It's just usually referred to as an urban/rural divide.
Interesting. Thanks. That generally has not been true in America or the West though. While there has certainly been an "establishment" (mostly by aristocracy not education), there have been lots of political and theological debates among highly educated people over the centuries.
That makes me wonder if Peter Turchin would characterize the reformation as a counter-elite seizing power? (Yeah, I know, Noah, it's your elite overproduction theory, not his.) :-)
As for your claim that "antisemitism is stronger in the right than in the left", do you think that this trend only exists in America, or it's still more prevalent in all Western countries in general? I remember before the French parliamentary elections, a Jewish leader in France told the press that he was more ready to vote for Le Pen rather than for the left parties; and most of the hard-right movements in Europe are anti-Muslim rather than anti-Semitic!
In Europe, antisemitism is casualized where Jews have to fear both left-coded and right-coded antipathy. The right-coded version is the Jew as the Other, an outsider, invader and plotter. The left-coded version is the Jew as Shylock or the "happy merchant," where the antisemitism is couched in economics.
Both left- and right- antisemites employ, in their own ways, a resentment that author John Ganz says is "... that antisemitism is not mere prejudice against Jewish people, it is a totalizing ideology that assigns the Jews the central role in world affairs."
In the U.S., Jews have long voted Democratic, with voting going about 2:1 D:R. But that's not to say there's a Jewish vote! Jew refers to an ethnicity and a religion. The more religious Jews, or Jewish Jews, tend to vote Republican. Secular Jews tend to vote Democratic, and tend to organize on the left for reasons other than identity.
I will also add the soi-disant libertarian morality of the Silicon Valley aristocracy, which dates back to the start of computing and the building of the internet.
To get a better idea of this, follow John Ganz's Substack, www.unpopularfront.news. Start with "The Enigma of Peter Thiel," then look up his articles on the baaskaap ideology that emerged from apartheid South Africa and was formative to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks.
They pretty much also know that under a second Trump administration, the economy will be very transactional and very cosa nostra. The tech right are the quintessential globalists and know how politics is done in Russia, Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil, China and Saudi Arabia.
Another factor, from a friend: "In a high interest rate environment, with lower competition for workers, tech leaders no longer need to keep the workers "onside". For the same reasons that perks collapsed, tech leaders are more free to show their inherent rightist support without fearing a revolt from their leftist knowledge workers."
Hmm, that's an interesting thought...worker power in the general economy is very high right now because of full employment, but this probably isn't true in tech...
No, it’s not. The massive layoffs that resulted from pandemic era over hiring have led to a glut of un or underemployed tech workers, it’s hard for people to find new jobs. Combine that with the way hiring for white collar jobs has become completely broken (which you should totally write about, it’s a fascinating case of partial market failure, e.g. fake LinkedIn jobs) and most of the tech folks I work with do not have positive feelings about the job market.
Good point . Less start ups because less capital. Capital will be too expensive. However that argument doesn’t explain Small Tech support of Trump.
Small tech does not support Trump. It is VCs that have no principles.
A lot depends on how you define "Small Tech" (having worked in all sizes of Tech). Big VC based Small Tech at the leader level probably follows Noah's comment about dreaming to be the next Google. Most more realistic startups are probably closer to the workers as Eric noted.
I believe one reason why big business would be fine with Trump is because they know for a lousy $100 mil, they can get any executive order they want. That's a bargain!
How much does it cost the teachers' union to get what they want from Biden (or any other Dem)? More than $100M? Probably much less.
What exactly have teacher's unions gotten under Biden? Has he been able to protect them from the disgusting culture wars in red states? No.
We know that corporations got a massive tax cut that ballooned deficits and did nothing for the economy.
What they got was Not being told to jump in the lake over school closures.
Thanks for taking a moment away from burning books and patrolling children's bathrooms to share your delusions.
What does this even mean? School closures started under Trump and were mostly state level policy in any event. You wanted Biden to do… what exactly? Be mean? Grow up.
Well, if they don't think they are getting their money's worth (I'd say the extended COVID school closures was worth a lot to them), then they should switch up which politicians they are bribing. Used to be, smart companies bribed, I mean donated, to both sides of the isle. Called hedging. Apparently the guy running the Teamsters is doing this.
Did all the anti-vaxx idiots get their money's worth when they filled up hospitals? Each hospitalization was expensive as hell and extended COVID harming the economy more than anything else. Gotta love how they fought so hard to be the new Typhoid Mary. Truly selfish and stupid.
Which has exactly what to do with donating millions to politicians to get something in return?
You opened that door with your own Covid reference.
The Business vs. Labor ratio of political donations has dipped to roughly 20:1 since the Reagan-era destruction of US unions. Unions do however donate more in kind; like door-to-door GOTV drives.
Agree. But protesting in the streets didn’t help curtail the situation.
You do have a point, but there are two big differences - Most protests were outside and it was a just cause.
Perhaps, protests in 400 cities worldwide wouldn't have happened if the issue had been addressed. It wasn't as if George Floyd was the first unarmed black man killed. Trump came down on the side of the murderer. He was so divisive he wasn't invited to the funeral.
Yes, but that's 100M from any one firm. There are lot more firms than unions. But of course one is one too many.
I have no idea but you have a point.
Like a blind squirrel. Politicians are for sale. See, e.g., Bob Gold Standard Menendez. Even family members get in on the action, cough, Hunter ...
First, it's important to make the distinction that Tech *owners and management* slant sharply conservative, while rank-and-file employees are something like 80-90% liberals. Business elites are the heart of the GOP.
Second, Noah does not differentiate between Tech sector monopoly-level giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon; the future targets (hopefully) of Dem-led federal anti-trust action--not the tens of thousands Tech startups and small companies that are the entrepreneurial lifeblood of the industry. Yet it's the big CEO's & shareholders who cut the donation checks.
Third, political donations by business--or unions--have a well established, and roughly 1,000-fold impact on legislative/political outcomes. Especially for Big Business, which outspends Unions in this regard by at least 20:1. Political spending/lobbying by corporations is good business practice.
“
Second, Noah does not differentiate between Tech sector monopoly-level giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon; the future targets (hopefully) of Dem-led federal anti-trust action--not the tens of thousands Tech startups and small companies that are the entrepreneurial lifeblood of the industry. Yet it's the big CEO's & shareholders who cut the donation checks.”
As Noah said many times, Little Tech is pissed at the Democrats because a large part of valuation is the capacity to be acquired by a large company. If Lina Khan is filing nuisance anti-trust cases in silly cases like Microsoft - Activision (while ignoring areas that are important like Microsoft -Slack for instance), you really hit Little Tech in their pocket book because they can’t be acquired.
Why would a donation matter after he’s elected? He’ll be a lame duck from day one (dictator duck) and he doesn’t care if other Republicans get more donations. Is there any evidence he sold executive orders for donations in his first term?
He's got 400 million in fines to pay on his business fraud suit and the E Jean Carroll suit. These would not be packaged as campaign contributions, but simply as enrichment. I'm sure that can be managed. Now that he's got his immunity for official actions, and issuing executive orders is official action, he can crime all he wants.
Biden is pretty much intentionally ignorant of the constitution when passing his executive orders on student loans, immigration, EV mandates, and LNG permit pauses and I guess soon on grocery prices, rent control and Supreme Court term limits, and the immunity rule is in effect already and applies to him already. Biden also makes sure his executive orders pay off politically, since he expects votes and support from the indebted graduates and green lobbyists , he’s not doing them because they are smart or economical.
I don't disagree about Biden, but Trump loves his money in large quantities.
The best way to advance DEI is to make it easier to hire skilled immigrants. Merit drives those hires, but they're inherently diverse. And they often become C-level employees.
Supporting policing isn't a pivot for the Democratic Party. It's a reminder to focus on the talking point. There's lots of funding up and down the government. The issue should always have been better training. Dems should propose a "West Point / Citadel" level training academy for officers who will lead police forces all over the nation with best practices -- and fire and prosecute the bad apples.
Most Democrats are already supporting Israel loudly and clearly -- often in conflict with one another, yes. But human rights in Gaza includes the forceful disempowering of Hamas. And a lot of what everyone needs is a clearer sense of the history.
It's harder for me to get behind these other suggestions of yours, Noah. If Crypto is mostly a ponzi scheme, the government should not be catering to it as a "special interest." Anti-trust actions should be conducted to keep all industries from abusing monopoly power. And A.I. can be very very bad. We need the government to learn as much about it as possible. Regulation is inevitable and smart.
This is at least the third time in the past two months I have heard some variant of the "West Point for police," and each time I hear I am confident of three things concerning whoever posted. They don't know much about the military, they have no knowledge of police work, and they don't know the divisions of laws, governance, and the courts in the US.
O don’t know what other people you’ve read mean, but I am not suggesting that police behave like the military or that the military run or train the police.
I am suggesting we form a police academy with the highest level of training to educate elite officers. Police work is different than military operations, so the training would be different. Perhaps I could say as another analogy we should create the Oxford of police academies or the Stanford.
Does this distinction change your interpretation?
Right now, some police departments require high-command officers to get college degrees. Chiefs typically have Masters of Public Administration degrees to go with their administrative duties.
Quantico is already "West Point for police" and it isn't anything like you are implying.
If people said "franchise Quantico and operate it in 50 states for state, county, and local police" I bet you wouldn't have such a knee jerk reaction and would understand the point they are trying to make.
It looks like Quantico trains FBI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Academy
Is there a police academy there as well?
Also, I really don’t understand your point. What’s my knee jerk reaction? What is the point they are trying to make?
I'm pretty sure the knee jerk reaction he's referring to was mine. It may have been more caustic out the gate than warranted, so I'll give you a longer reply soon, but I'm fairly sure you both misunderstand what I meant. The FBI Academy, and FLETC, are not the West Point for police-they are training academies for federal law enforcement agencies. The FBI academy does not teach the aspects of police work they don't interact with, and FBI agents do not work patrol-a part of why NIBRS is so terrible.
OK. So just to clarify so you don't waste your time responding to something I didn't mean, my point is that the federal government should fund the best police-training school in the world, then encourage local police departments to hire graduates with fast tracks to positions of authority.
My allusion to West Point was that it trains officers who then get put in charge of recruits. I have seen popular criticisms of this system in movies and TV shows like Band of Brothers, but I imagine it is possible to do this correctly. Outsiders may be less attached to keeping bad apples on forces. And part of the training can be how to build trust and support coming into departments around the country as an outsider.
Hopefully this makes sense. I'm happy to hear suggestions for how to do this better.
Regulations inevitable and SHUOLD BE smart but NRD, NEPA ...
You did mention it for a sentence, but I would emphasize the fact that the media pinned the blame for 2016 on Facebook, even though it was the media, including left leaning outlets that covered the email story way too much. Tech being blamed for what was a weakly positioned campaign on the part of Clinton and the journalistic failure that was The Emails leaves a sour taste.
I think that overall this development is positive. This is a way of injecting desperately needed brains back into the Trump machine. The importance of having at least a few smart people in the room cannot be overstated.
For example: There's a JD Vance clip where he is able to string complete sentences together warning about market power resulting from AI regulation. I mean compared to Trump and Biden - this is next level stuff.
He speaks well but is wrong on all the substance.
"There's a JD Vance clip where he is able to string complete sentences together"
So, overqualified?
We expect nothing less from our Republican Elites.
I don't like what I'm reading because you are very analytical, connected in many ways with different people, cultures and countries. I admire your (as I recall it simply) - The Mission of Humanity is to eliminate Poverty" -- I think you are painfully realistic. That's what I don't like because I can't wish it away
Prediction - Biden WILL step aside because its just glaring and obvious that he will not only lose the Presidency to Trump, we (ie Liberal old me) will lose the chances for the House, and probably yield a 3/4 majority to Republicans in the Senate.
Biden just announced he has contracted -Covid-19. Now is the time for him and Harris to step aside and let the Democratic convenction decide the candidate. I give it a 48.584% chance.
"Biden just announced he has contracted -Covid-19."
Reminds me of this Bee classic:
https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-races-to-sniff-one-last-girl-before-losing-sense-of-smell-from-covid
I have no idea what juice the latest COVID virus strain has. Do people still get regular booster shots? I rarely hear about it, other than then COVID crazy forever makers, But, at Biden's age and whatever other conditions he may have, I would assume he's had every shot possible.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-leave-race-medical-condition-emerged/story?id=112042367
Why not Harris ?
America still doesn't want a female President. I'm fine.
Harris would never be elected over Trump.
We live in an unfortunate but truthfully, masculine and misogynistic America.
The Democrats need a free for all open Convention and we need a fighter like Newsom, Schiff types
I agree with all this. I would add an emotional reason for certain tech *leaders* in particular: Biden has a pretty visible distaste for wealthy finance types, be they Wall Street folks or tech VCs from California. Both groups tend to have pretty high opinions of themselves and probably feel they should be consulted (and flattered) on matters of economic policy and regulation.
Yet Biden's distaste probably extends to his staff and appointees, and folks like Musk and Andreessen may just feel insulted. They're used to a certain amount of access (and flattery), and they feel insulted by the arm's length at which they're kept. Horowitz's comment that he can't get a meeting with Gensler was, I think, revealing.
So some of their rationale is, well, rational, including all the reasons in this post. And some of it, like citing the wealth tax that no one believes will become law, is I think a screen for a feeling of resentment at no longer being treated like captains of industry, with privileged access and respect in the corridors of power.
The problem with this viewpoint is that Biden was the senator from Delaware, the home to many U.S. corporations. He's long been dogged as "The Senator from MBNA."
Progressive politicians making political hay out of criticizing would be captains of industry, film (possibly of Teddy Roosevelt?) at 11…
Most German companies did very well in the pre-WWII years of 1933 - 1939 (with the obvious exception of Jewish companies whose owner will killed or forced to sell for firesale prices). Many German companies till did quite well after Hitler started the war in Europe … unless of course they got bombed.
MostUS tech companies could expect to do well under Trump’s MAGA fascism … until Trump crashes the US economy
That's true. If he does.
That's not a big "if" for the tech oligarchs because they think they will be fine no matter what happens, and they will up until they fall out of a window.
The "if" is a lot more dangerous to the rest of us. Thinking otherwise is naive.
If he had plans to moderate on any idea or policy statement, whether by him, his campaign or people from his first administration, he would have picked a different running mate.
I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but I find that comparing the MAGA movement with fascism obscures more than it illuminates. There are plenty of apt historical allegories (the KKK in the 1920s, the John Birch Society, etc.) that don't come with the conceptual baggage of "fascism" and better capture the MAGA movement and all its eccentricities and defects.
Isn't Hate of "others" just a label ?
The intrinisic commonality is here. MAGA, and the 40 year unilateral war by conservatives against Liberals, Democrats, women of choice, Gays, non-Christians - reeks with every part of hate from 1930s Germany, 1800-1900s US racism.
Sure, but "fascism" as a concept comes with very strong historical connotations, and I think analytical precision is crucial in these sorts of discussions. I'm not trying to say that there is no basis for a mass fascism movement in the United States, only that it will evolve differently. Interwar European fascism and American-style fascism have strong similarities, but also sharp differences. A lot of this is because the United States is a federal republic, which gives state and local governments fairly broad deference when it comes to police powers: what would normally be "fascism" in a more centralized nation evolves into a more decentralized array of reactionary fiefdoms at the state and local level (which was the basic structure of Jim Crow). A centralized fascist mass movement is a terrifying thing, but it's very hard (but not impossible!) to build in a federal republic.
Unless you build up a large national media sector that vilifies liberals and liberalism by fabricating sensationalist stories, often out of whole cloth, with little to any journalistic fact-checking.
E.g., "Critical Race Theory is taught in America's public schools to 90% of students." https://www.foxnews.com/us/study-contradicts-claims-critical-race-theory-isnt-schools-90-students-exposed
The Manhattan Institute, which authored the "study" referenced by FOX News, is an extremely conservative, corporate-funded org: https://centerjd.org/content/fact-sheet-manhattan-institute#:~:text=The%20Manhattan%20Institute%20for%20Policy,Casey%20in%201978.
Putting "study" in scare quotes and noting that they are "extremely conservative" and "corporate funded" (like every other NGO on the planet) does not refute their findings.
I like your response
Read the Daniel Jonah Goldhagen oeuvre. Then make sure you have your passports and visas in order before the votes are counted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Goldhagen
It's something I've thought about. How do ordinary (maybe a false assumption),peoples do atrocities?
Goldhagen's public reputation was largely formed by the polarizing reaction to "Hitler's Willing Executioners." Many historians and scholars of the Holocaust feel Goldhagen is over-the-top and polemic in his writing.
He's stuck in his ways but then decided to venture beyond Holocaust scholarship and in "Worse Than War," decided to posit an anatomy for genocide.
I will warn you: Goldhagen broaches one of the darkest topics, genocide, and he has the darkest interpretations of why they happen. You will walk away losing hope and trust in humanity -- which is precisely why you need to read his books.
"women of choice"?
Women who believe they have the right to choose themselves about abortion.
Pro Choice women.
I mean, Bayer, BOSS, BMW and VAG emerged relatively unscathed. If you're worried about the economy tanking, the problem isn't the economy, it's that you're just not rich enough. Nothing like a good recession to buy out your competitors and consolidate your market position. /s
Trump--unlike Biden--will strongarm the Fed to slash rates...cause the economy to boom; especially in construction. Even if inflation ticks up somewhat as a result, Trump and the GOP will be hailed as economic rockstars.
The economy is booming, though, and the workers aren't there.
The biggest beneficiaries of slashed rates would be tech, just like it was from the late 1990s to the early 2020s. The tech boom was essentially subsidized by low interest rates.
The dark side of Reason 5 is racially-tinged IQ essentialism and just the slightest flavor of "girls-can't-do-math" proto-misogyny encountering for the first time a permission structure where it's relatively newly ok to let it fly. If you've convinced yourself you work in an industry that is already a perfect meritocracy and genius industriousness rather than dollops of good fortune are why you are where you are, Trump-curiosity is arguably a natural next step. Musk is the pathfinder here, but it's possible in the tech industry to think he's half-crazy and still feel the cross-pressure driven by these factors. A lot of this also feels like clever-male-adolescents' "Mencius-Moldbug-ism" coming to the surface.
how is "girls-can't do math" racially-tinged? Now, "Asian girls can do math, but not white girls" would be "racially-tinged" ...
When I make the case for calling the modern far-right fashoid rather than fascist, one reason is that fascism is a term that's supposed to be rooted in the nation as the fundamental unit of society. There are at least three far-right ideological constellations that are not nations of people, but other social organizations that have come to the far right through the same path as 20th century fascists did.
One of the largest far-right ideologies in the world today is masculinism. You might have never heard of the term until now. But you probably have heard of Joe Rogan. Jordan Peterson. Andrew Tate. Elliot Rodger. Mike Cernovich. Vox Day. You might have heard of creepy fringe subcultures like the Manosphere, MRA, MGOTW or incels. These represent very different worldviews and they're contradictory or incoherent. Well, so is fascism. The culture of fascism is eclectic and syncretic and meant to be irrational and antirational.
What do these groups that have nothing in common actually have in common? They see feminism (and by extension LGBTQ movements) as the archnemesis, and flip the frame to say women (and queers) used appeals to self-determination in politics, economics and later sexuality and gender as a tool to dominate men. They take the view that any progress made by women (and queers) must have necessarily come at the expense of a man and achieved a status in society they don't deserve. Like 20th century fascists, they appeal to an idealized and mythologized past of an essential masculinity of a man being a warrior, protector and provider and to set the world right by relegating women to their traditionally subordinate places of matrimony and motherhood.
Having worked in Tech for a very long time, the notion that hiring was ever purely "meritocratic" is BS. There was inherent bias in it over and over - most of which was not intentional, just the way the tech culture viewed "girls cant do math"... But it was definitely there. And even more so in terms of promotions and pay - perhaps again a factor of the relatively scarcity of girls (or even more so blacks and hispanics), but also for women a cultural notion that you cant be aggressive in what you want - or you will be called shrill for the same behavior men do.
Just for reference - male - and 45+ years in Tech - across many different size companies and domains.
Whether a particular approach to DEI solves this or not, it was never meritocratic and still isn't and won't be in the near future.
Male, in tech for 25 years with experience in everything from big tech to SME to two man startups to open source projects. Been an interviewer hundreds of times and have designed hiring processes from scratch.
Please point to specific policies in specific companies you think disadvantage women. Not vague unfalsifiable innuendo about culture - specific rules at specific places. I can do it: there are dozens of openly advertised misandric policies in various well known tech firms that systematically hurt men in order reward and protect women, for nothing more than merely showing up. Meanwhile your description of inherent bias is one nobody I know in tech would accept. Except, of course, the far left extremists, who are convinced misogyny is everywhere and whose "evidence" boils down to: agree with me or I'll yell at you and try to get you fired.
Take women out of the picture (and blacks in the USA), and what you have left is or was extremely meritocratic compared to the average industry. Most sectors of the economy either don't even do work sample tests or the work isn't objective enough to actually evaluate systematically.
OK, we could spend hours on this - and we clearly have very different viewpoints. And yes, 45 years in software from tiny startups to giant companies. Hundreds of interviews, created hiring processes as well.
So, we clearly have a different experience. Bias against women and others has never been an explicit policy - of course not. It was simply the way business was done (certainly quite clear pre 2000 or so). There was no need to have a policy - it was just baked into how society and the tech culture viewed things.. I have watched many very qualified women get passed over for promotion many times - which is why I said it can be a combination of how aggressive women are viewed and how aggressive men are viewed...
So, perhaps your experience in the last 25 years is different or you worked in different places - can't answer that. This part of your note was just silly and really unnecessary - "except of course, the far left extremists, who are ....".
"nobody in tech would accept" - I probably have a few hundred folks (or far more) who would disagree with you easily and loudly.
Your point of view and experience is valid - BUT to assume that everyone else in Tech has that point of view is dumb.
There is a reasonable discussion to be had out there about policies and what happened over the years. And by the way, yes, other industries may well be worse and tech does try to be somewhat meritocratic - but that doesn't mean that there hasn't been and still is bias.
Anyway, signing off - we could continue this forever and it won't change your experience or mine.
I said "nobody in tech that I know, except the far left" not "nobody in tech". I'm sure you know different people to me.
This is the third time in about as many weeks where I've seen someone from the left argue with something similar to but not the same as what was actually written. What is it with the left and not reading correctly? This definitely makes it hard to debate.
Another reason is that there are a lot of people in tech with FU money and people with FU money will push back against incessant bullying and push to conform on SJ issues by the Democrats and left leaning media. They're not afraid of being cancelled because they don't need to work for a living anymore.
It's no secret that a Yuge part of Trump's appeal is that he pushes back and "counter-bullies". Sure, he can be a jerk and over the top, but people who feel battered (rightly or wrongly) by being called racists and deplorables, etc., but don't have FU money, can channel the FU through Trump.
w.r.t. people in tech, it's less about Trump and more about anti-Democratic Party sentiment IMO. I don't think smart accomplished people in tech think of Trump as anything more than a pompous jackass and a joke.
Can't argue with that. I'm more or less in that same crowd. I was referring specifically to the people with "FU money" have the luxury to push back when they are bullied because they don't need to work. A big chuck of Trump supporters do not have this luxury. They are not big shots in tech or in anything, and a job los can be devastating to them. How many run of the mill employees are humiliated and bullied at mandatory DEI sessions, but simply cannot afford to quit, so they just try to lay low and focus on their retirement date.
I am a Southerner who spent nearly 40 years as a federal employee, so I know a lot about "DEI sessions," mandatory or otherwise. I never saw anyone bullied, but I saw a few people who FELT bullied, and there is a reason they felt bullied.
This is all about emotions and feelings. The bullying is verbal, not an actual fist to the nose. This poor guy rather famously killed himself after some extreme DEI bullying (even the Canadian school board agreed the DEI lady was out of line, but then why did they pay her all that money to show up and do evil?
https://quillette.com/2023/07/21/rip-richard-bilkszto/
Most people with FU money in the world are finance people, who long ago learned that you don’t get a 50 million dollar beach house and to be popular in the same life (as someone who lived through 2008 in a finance adjacent field the idea that tech has been suffering from particularly bad media coverage and/or political grandstanding is more or less the funniest thing I’ve ever heard). Tech people should take a page from their book: grow their hedge rows high, decide whether their care about low taxes or abortion rights more and direct your political donations accordingly, and stop expecting people to be nice to you or care what you think about anything outside their narrow area.
It works both ways. Democrats should stop feeling butthurt when Musk and others endorse Republicans and flip left activists off.
I was looking into the number of centi-millionaires in tech vs finance. Although I couldn't find it broken down by field, the difference between NYC and Bay Area is not much (775 vs 692). I'm using the locations as very rough proxies because it's not that neatly sorted. I think a lot of people in finance are unaware that that the pay/net worth gap between tech and finance has narrowed quite a bit in the last 10 years.
https://www.familywealthreport.com/article.php?id=199368
What part of the Biden executive order is cumbersome to follow? From what I understand the only burdens it places on AI companies are very minor.
Based on just the White House's press release, which we can assume spins it in the most positive way possible, the burdens are clearly significant. It says anyone training a model has to do "extensive safety testing" with "red teams". The word safety in the context of a program that only produces words is inherently left wing and viewed as delusional by many on the right, so even just figuring out what exactly they mean by this is cumbersome. What do these safety tests involve, how much will they cost, and what does the White House mean exactly by "red team"? Is a team of one acceptable, for example, or does the word team imply there have to be at least two people involved? What will the government do with these results you have to send them? Is the definition of "safe" objective or is it constantly changing?
Answering all this will involve a lot of time spent with expensive lawyers, possibly waiting on slow regulators to give non-answers to questions and so on.
People can train foundation models at home, so this will be a carnival of selective enforcement. Many smaller players will ask for forgiveness rather than permission, on the assumption that if they never get big nobody will care anyway.
Good news though, you only have to do that if it poses "serious risk to national security" or "economic security". How do you evaluate that? What does it even mean? Cue more meetings with expensive lawyers.
And so on. It may not seem cumbersome if you never dealt with regulatory compliance before, or never ran a company, but this stuff piles up.
1. As far as I can tell, the quote 'extensive safety testing' does not appear in the fact sheet or the executive order. Did you mean 'extensive red-team testing'?
2. The sharing of red-team results does not apply to 'anyone training a model' but only applies to models that are trained with 10^26 or more FLOPs, which is literally larger than any model that has ever been trained before as per best estimates, although the next generation of models from the big 3 AI orgs might use that much compute. This would only apply to the very largest AI labs running their frontier model runs. Training such models would cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars so requiring the sharing of safety test results for a single model would form a trivial fraction of overall spend. The orgs likely to go over 10^26 in the next few years all already do extensive safety testing anyways.
3. Executive order instructions on how to run red-teams are just 'guidelines' which are not legally binding.
I can understand if people predict the Biden administration could, in the future, propose cumbersome regulations, but the executive order is not that.
I'm surprised this didn't get mentioned:
Elon Musk says SpaceX and X headquarters moving to Texas, blames new California transgender law
"This is the final straw. Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas."
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/elon-musk-says-spacex-x-headquarters-moving-texas-blames-new-californi-rcna162207
Musk is right. If my kids weren't already grown, I would be looking to move out of California and in to a red state that doesn't regard them as State property, to be taken from me and surgically mutilated at the State's whim. The series of laws passed in California (with unanimous support from Democrats in the state legislature, signed by the Democrat governor, and enforced by the Democrat attorney general) that allow for this is truly odious.
And please note: I have thoroughly read through every one of those laws, so don't tell me that they *ackshually* don't do that: they absolutely f***ing do.
Doesn’t Texas have its own laws saying children are state property, and the state will prevent families from getting appropriate medical care?
Texas (and many other red states) have banned chemical castration drugs, cross-sex hormones, and sex-trait modification surgeries for children, similar to laws that ban giving tattoos to children, or selling alcohol to children. These laws arose because of the complete failure of the for-profit US medical system to notice that those medical procedures are pure quackery with no evidence base. Most countries in Europe have now figured this out and similarly banned them, after thorough evidence reviews. The most recent and comprehensive of these is the Cass report from the UK: https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
In the US, there is a widening scandal as it has emerged that the activist group masquerading as a medical group, WPATH, commissioned similar reports from Johns Hopkins, and then buried them when those reports came to same conclusions as every other comprehensive report. WPATH then removed all age limits from its recommendations, under pressure from Biden's assistant secretary for HHS, Admiral Rachel Levine: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/health/transgender-minors-surgeries.html This is all coming out now in discovery from a lawsuit by Biden's DOJ seeking to overturn Alabama's law banning these procedures.
Recently the NYT reported that the Biden administration now opposes sex-trait modification surgeries on children: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/health/transgender-surgery-biden.html
But there has been no follow up to this and the statement referenced by the NYT is nowhere to be found on any official HHS or other .gov site. And the DOJ has not withdrawn its lawsuits seeking to re-establish child mutilation across the country.
"ecently the NYT reported that the Biden administration now opposes sex-trait modification surgeries on children: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/health/transgender-surgery-biden.html"
Even if true, just an election ploy. They know it's not a winning issue in swing states. But if they win, they will no longer oppose. See, also, menthol cigarettes. Almost banned until Biden's team realized they would piss off too many black voters over it.
If you want to implement unpopular policies, expect backlash. Yes, this works against rapidly anti-abortion republications. It's a loser at the ballot box.
I agree it's a ploy, and one that seems to be being walked back already, because there was HUGE pushback from the pro-TQ NGOs (HRC, ACLU, etc) that no elected Democrat dares to go up against. Any who do are primaried and removed, as happened this cycle to Shawn Nicole Thierry in the Texas House. She voted for that Texas law after doing her homework and making a heartfelt speech on the House floor. The Party turned on her instantly and fully funded a pro-TQ replacement who won the primary. Her political career as a Democrat is over. This is why 100% of Democrats in Congress and 99% in state legislatures follow the TQ line. They know what happens if they don't.
And this is why I, a registered Democrat for 50 years, will now be voting straight Republican. I just absolutely positively refuse to support, in any way, this ongoing crime against humanity of mutilating children.
"It's not easy being Dem ..." (sung to the Kermit the frog song)
Comes down to "what is appropriate medical care"? is that a euphemism for "sterilizing" or "cosmetic mastectomy"? In any event, I do agree that all states in general need to but out of doctor-patent relationships. I believe California even quietly canceled a law that said doctors could not advise patients on COVID treatments other than those approved by the state after it was challenged. Look, if you want to smoke legal weed, live in California, not Texas. If you want to trans your kid, live in California.
It's very hard to tell if AI safety is a real issue that we should be worried about or not. I have dived deep into this with both the Effective Altruism (EA - who are generally worried about existential risks and want to focus on alignment - keeping AIs interests the same as humans) and the e/acc (effective acceleration, who are pro-technology in general) sides. I am very pro-technology and have been working in tech since the earliest days of the web. But I can't wrap my head around the risks of AI. Part of the problem is that the AI companies are very opaque, partially no doubt to try and protect company secrets. But I am also suspicious of what is really going on behind the walled garden. The carefully neutered AI chatbots of the world don't show their true capabilities and people far more informed and smarter than me have serious concerns.
It's not crazy for government to take an interest an AI technologies. It was ideal that government had a very light or non-existent hand on early web technologies. Many companies like Uber and Square had business models which were illegal in the overly regulated industries that they were competing in, but the government looked the other way or just did not care as successful and extremely useful industries were being built. Perhaps AI is different. Should "make the most money and acquire the most power" really be the correct guiding principle here? Most of this technology has some pretty obvious military application and some of the work is of national security interest. As I heard a DC policy wonk say recently at a conference I was at, "Those of us on the other coast need to do a better job of keeping up what you on this coast are doing, let's work together". The Open AIs of the world are screaming bloody murder at modest attempts to regulate them, but it's not *crazy* that they might need some supervision. I do not think their efforts to self-regulate are enough.
Remember when the AI safety people demanded a six month pause in AI scaling, based on the idea that we'd have dangerous AGI by then?
That six months was up yesterday.
Never be a doomer.
And, if anything, generative AI has somehow gotten *less* powerful in the intervening months, while tech VCs have bet billions on the assumption that AGI was right around the corner.
I am with you that AI safety has always been self important trash. The best thing Yud could have done for AI safety would be to have shut up about it and not interested many of the current leading AI researchers in AI
That was silly but was meant to establish a norm of being able to pause.. OpenAI has always said they’ll pause when things get dangerous but never given details as to where they draw the line and how long they’ll pause.
Dario says we’ll hit human level
AGI some time in 2025-2027. John Schumann thinks by 2029 (1-2 versions).
Are you just skeptical of that or do you not see the risk of continuing on that curve?
You can't establish norms by saying things that are silly.
> do you not see the risk of continuing on that curve?
History is full of people who were fooled by exponential growth. That is, they thought growth was permanently exponential when it wasn't. Extrapolating a trend forwards infinitely and then freaking out about it is a favourite pastime of (pseudo-)intellectuals. That's exactly how the AI winter started. Be better than that!
This has been discussed to death. We don’t know where we are on the (potential) S curve but we have little reason to believe we‘re about about to flatten and most experts believe we won’t. Some do, so it’s possible, but it’s far from clear.
OK so nobody agrees on what will happen? Like in every other era of history, then. There's no justification for regulation in "some do, some don't". Otherwise you get the precautionary principle which is merely 1984-style eternal stagnation.
Your takeaway from 1984 was that it represents “eternal stagnation”?
There are few technologies in history where many of its inventors have predicted human extinction. And there has never before been a technology that could replace humanity.
I thought OpenAI was actually supporting some of the safety regulation?
Altman came to Congress to argue for legislation but OpenAI has pushed for the industry to self-regulate.
https://openai.com/index/moving-ai-governance-forward/
"OpenAI and other leading AI labs are making a set of voluntary commitments to reinforce the safety, security and trustworthiness of AI technology and our services. This process, coordinated by the White House, is an important step in advancing meaningful and effective AI governance, both in the US and around the world."
Biden's executive order was very light on substance. As reported in the Washington Post:
"A senior Biden administration official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity ahead of the order’s unveiling, said that because they set a “very high threshold” for which models are covered, the safety testing requirements probably “will not catch any system currently on the market.”
“This is primarily a forward-looking action for the next generation of models,” the official said."
I am not saying that the current California Senate Bill (Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act) is the correct answer. I think it would be a disaster for California to act on its own, as we risk chasing out an entire industry. But I am in favor of more investigation and thoughtful attempts to regulate at the federal level.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB1047
Yeah, I think Noah is making a mountain out of a molehill here. Basically everyone who works in frontier AI development understands that there are risks involved and that there is some need for safety strategies and regulation, including places like Anthropic and DeepMind. Most research scientists are at least open or positive to the idea of regulating aspects of the technology. Most of the rage about the topic driven by a few hyper-online types that don't represent the general attitude of AI workers. I like Noah's writing a lot, but he seems to have some blind spots about this particular topic.
The molehill being made into a mountain is X-risk. But it's fine, because it gives people something relatively useless to argue about. LLMs will slow down from data and energy limitations soon anyway (they already have, actually), so the X-risk debates are just a silly thing to keep people occupied. The really important AI is computer vision, because that's what will allow truly autonomous weapons, which will take over the world soon.
Noah, could you clarify if you think ASI would not be a risk or that you believe we won’t get ASI?
I truly don’t understand how you don’t view autonomous ASI as a risk. Many industry leads think we’re a few years away from that.
This doesn't reassure me.
"America is heavily polarized by education"
I'd love to see your views on why that is. Because it's pretty weird and historically aberrant.
"Antisemitism is actually more common on the right than on the left"
If this is still true (which I doubt), it is only true in America. The Left in Europe has largely joined forces with Muslim immigrants (we're not in Houllebecq-land, but we're close) and to avoid antagonizing their junior partners, tacitly accepts their rampant antiseimitism. The New Popular Front is a great example of this genre.
"Ditch all the silly parts of DEI"
Liberals can't do this; it would destroy their entire worldview. Short form... injustice and oppression are caused by unchosen constraints that limit some people's access to Locke's inalienable rights. Liberalism exists to liberate people from these unchosen constraints. It can not accept particularity (MO and CA doing different things) because rights are universal. It can not stop liberating until all injustice is gone and the world is perfect.
DEI (and trans) aren't something bolted onto the liberal framework; it's deeply embedded into the philosophy.
Polarization by education is actually very common historically. Some of the earliest political arguments we have writing about in like ancient Sumer feature it. It's just usually referred to as an urban/rural divide.
Interesting. Thanks. That generally has not been true in America or the West though. While there has certainly been an "establishment" (mostly by aristocracy not education), there have been lots of political and theological debates among highly educated people over the centuries.
That makes me wonder if Peter Turchin would characterize the reformation as a counter-elite seizing power? (Yeah, I know, Noah, it's your elite overproduction theory, not his.) :-)
As for your claim that "antisemitism is stronger in the right than in the left", do you think that this trend only exists in America, or it's still more prevalent in all Western countries in general? I remember before the French parliamentary elections, a Jewish leader in France told the press that he was more ready to vote for Le Pen rather than for the left parties; and most of the hard-right movements in Europe are anti-Muslim rather than anti-Semitic!
In Europe, antisemitism is casualized where Jews have to fear both left-coded and right-coded antipathy. The right-coded version is the Jew as the Other, an outsider, invader and plotter. The left-coded version is the Jew as Shylock or the "happy merchant," where the antisemitism is couched in economics.
Both left- and right- antisemites employ, in their own ways, a resentment that author John Ganz says is "... that antisemitism is not mere prejudice against Jewish people, it is a totalizing ideology that assigns the Jews the central role in world affairs."
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-poison-pill-of-philosemitism?utm_source=publication-search
In the U.S., Jews have long voted Democratic, with voting going about 2:1 D:R. But that's not to say there's a Jewish vote! Jew refers to an ethnicity and a religion. The more religious Jews, or Jewish Jews, tend to vote Republican. Secular Jews tend to vote Democratic, and tend to organize on the left for reasons other than identity.
I will also add the soi-disant libertarian morality of the Silicon Valley aristocracy, which dates back to the start of computing and the building of the internet.
To get a better idea of this, follow John Ganz's Substack, www.unpopularfront.news. Start with "The Enigma of Peter Thiel," then look up his articles on the baaskaap ideology that emerged from apartheid South Africa and was formative to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks.
They pretty much also know that under a second Trump administration, the economy will be very transactional and very cosa nostra. The tech right are the quintessential globalists and know how politics is done in Russia, Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil, China and Saudi Arabia.
“They think he will win” is the main reason. Factors 1-2 are also important. 3-7 are comparatively insignificant.