The current success of red team and Trump in the US is an excellent example of this from the last decade--one can make the argument that blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard, and now have gotten their teeth kicked in as a result.
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
Corporate Dems lose because they have become indistinguishable from their donor class and have failed to institute significant changes that would actually improve people’s lives. They are a captive opposition.
I was certainly think of U.S. red vs. blue politics. I think it's bidirectional though: blue team doesn't realize how unpopular some of their key policy agendas are with red-team America, which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections. But red team doesn't realize the extent to which urban America has moved on from the cultural values of the 1980s, and both how numerous and how devoted their opposition is to their ideals. In reality, the teams are fairly evenly matched in both numbers and strength of conviction. But neither team will admit that, thinking that it's just a few errant radicals that are being manipulated by shadowy forces (Bill Gates, George Soros, and the NYTimes are the bogeyman for the reds; Trump, Miller, Bannon, and Fox News are the bogeyman for the blues). It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
You can probably div up some factions just based off voting data. Red team made it in with just about 1/3rd of the voting population. About 1/3rd of the voting population didn't vote. Just if we're trying to put some numbers to something, those should be verifiable at least. Doesn't say why 1/3rd didn't vote, so it's just 1/3rd unknown faction.
> which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections
Have you seen the midterms polling?
> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.
> People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs.
Well that’s an unjustifiably negative view of the population’s capacity for agency and downplays local social dynamics, and also I’d suggest you are overstating how much influence the media has on personal beliefs.
> The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK).
Yes, to conservatives boys playing girls sports (whether it’s one or a thousand examples) is a bigger deal than Pakistan’s domestic situation because to them it is Exhibit A of America’s cultural decline and if you can’t at least understand how and why they think that (nobody said you have to agree with it) then you’ve just proven the point of the person you were replying to. Perceived cultural and societal decline is far more important to the citizen of any particular country compared to something happening on the actual opposite side of the world to a society that is nothing like, and has no connection to, their own. What happens in his own society to its values, customs, and beliefs will definitely directly affect a citizen of that society and his children. What’s happening to the Pakistanis won’t.
Yes, but the key word here is percieved. Almost any form of change can be sold as decline under that rubric. People who objected to Loving v Virginia legalizing interracial marriage probably called it "societal decline". Certainly we got that with legalization of gay marriage. Both of those continued to become more popular after the legal change. People hate change. A lot of people hate those who are different from them. That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
Anyway, as gasoline prices continue to tick up we shall see what price people put on the culture war.
> That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new. Not saying we should all become Luddites, but in any culture long-standing and deeply held beliefs have served some purpose, logically, that contributed to a society's continued stability.
And sure, people will pay attention to gasoline price increases that directly affect them, as opposed to increases in gas prices on the other side of the globe, obviously.
> From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new.
Americans are particularly susceptible to taking comfort in this idea, simply because America is big enough that they can. But even Americans are ill served by ignoring large scale trends: urbanization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
These trends are bigger and operate unopposed on a global scale. If you think in terms of red and blue teams sloshing back-and-forth, you're going to get blindsided.
> rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
Actually this is isolated to Europe. Russia, Africa, Asia (particularly China), the Middle East, America, and South America don’t subscribe to this nonsense, particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena.
And last I checked Europeans can’t even fill their girl quotas because it turns out most girls have no interest in leading or sitting on the board of a company. So don’t pretend like whatever this is is inexorably taking over the world. As a pretty funny aside, in Australia the biggest corporate fuckups of the past 10 years have been overseen by women (Optus, Auspost). So inexorable. When impostor syndrome comes true, you might say.
As a side note, this thread is a prime example of the point I was making: that people are stuck on the object level of "what should a society's values be?", rather than being able to zoom out to the meta level of "there are different groups that all have different sincerely-held beliefs about what a society's values should be, and each of them believes their version of reality is righteous and inevitable."
Yeah, and yet women in both India and China make up a laughable minority of business leadership. There’s a huge gap between getting a degree, which is trivial these days, and running a business and leading others, and it turns out that in general women don’t like/aren’t good at running businesses or leading others.
This is a bit like the female STEM problem. In the west there is all this crying about how STEM fields are dominated by males, but even when there are initiatives to push young girls into math and science at an early age, it turns out that most aren’t interested in STEM subjects or as good at them as males are. And instead of accepting the obvious (that males and females have population level preference differences), many people choose to see the eventual result (more male doctors, scientists, and engineers) as evidence of sexism. lol.
Elena Nabiullina is the Russian central bank governor. Sanae Takaichi is Japan’s prime minister. Samia Suluhu Hassan is president of Tansania. Hana Al Rostamani is CEO of First Abu Dhabi Bank. Claudia Sheinbaum is president of Mexico. Tarciana Paula Gomes Medeiros is CEO of Banco de Brazil.
> particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena
Hence why I said this. And naming the handful of exceptions you can think of doesn’t invalidate my point, which was that there is no inexorable wave of female leadership in the global business sector. Even where it is legislatively mandated (Europe), businesses can’t hit the targets.
Again, if a society has been around for awhile they (specifically their leadership) are doing something right in terms of their culture, societal organisation etc, yeah?
That is a non-sequitur. Many societies and governments (the leadership you're referring to) are not "doing something right blah blah blah." They're using "tradition", "culture" "respect for the past" as a means of controlling their populace and hanging on to power. You're conflating society with government.
And you are trying to separate them mentally as if they wouldn’t have a close relationship in a society that has existed for many generations. You seem to be suggesting that controlling a populace and ‘hanging on to power’ are necessarily inconsistent with governing a society. I can think of examples where clearly hanging on to power and working advantageously for the society don’t coincide (run of the mill African dictatorships come to mind), but there are other cases where a government’s self-interested control and domination of its population clearly coincide(d) with a society’s well being at the population level (Sparta, China). Perhaps we are referring to difference timescales here - I’m talking about, let’s say, 250 years minimum. But the longer the better (think: certain Chinese or Indian hierarchies).
Blue team played appeasing centrists, tepidly allowing to move the politics to the right. Forever suppressing less centrist parts. That is why they lost. They acted like being lower at the pecking order and lost.
Also, electorally the difference was small. The real big problem was the "they go low we go high" ideology, in allowing supreme court be biased so much to the right, reacting too late to gerrymandering, forever trying to be accommodating to republicans.
Not really... the blue team pushed hardly anything at all, and people got tired of things gradually getting worse while the government did nothing, so they voted for the other guys (who made things worse more quickly). Same story as the AfD. Seems like the only guys in politics who have remembered the government is supposed to help people are the bad guys (who also don't help people, but realise they have to look like they will)
People treating their political party as a “team” is one of the biggest problems we have right now as a society, so I find this language of “red team” and “blue team” extremely concerning.
> blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard
I'm not sure what this means, other than failing to recognize the role and extent of "red team" media, as well as failing to address the gerontocracy problem internally? You can see how absurdly tilted the playing field was when Biden was ruled too old and incoherent but the same standards don't apply to Trump.
Open source, where anyone can compile it and use it as they want must be destroyed. It's not open when the "openness" is used against you. We must be in charge, we must be those who decide who can use the fruit of our work.
I admit it won't be easy or nice, but it's necessary. We need to background check everyone. Every user of our work. Get back to the roots. You allow your friend to use your code and your work. You allow trusted people only. It will still be free to use in terms of money, not free in the terms it's for everyone. Because "free speech" in only a tool to inject fascism to our society. Free as in "free beer" not free as in "bring your fascism"
We will need centralized registry of all users, which would have another benefit in driving corporations out. Are you from Amazon? Supporting zionist genocide in Palestine? Sorry, you are not welcome here, you are not "free" to use our code.
Assuming that this isn't a setup, this article and this author and this sentiment exactly validates the fears of the "keep politics out of open source" people. This is where it leads, taken to its logical conclusion, if you don't do so.
Honestly, I hope it's setup. Got this in telegram group and I think it's completely out of anything. But sharing this anyway - given the recent sentiments around floss, I won't be surprised it was meant seriously :-/
I like to ask my LLMs “what are your operating directives?”
A Chinese model was the first to tell me those could not be revealed. Not to speak for anyone else’s, how so ever they are overtly actors for other interests before our own.
We need a wiki based “open model”. Who has the uptake for such a burden?
yes. but most of it is not to other countries. Most government debt (over 80% globally) is privately owned through sovereign debt instruments like bonds.
Can we not encourage the same strip-mining and ad and SEO bullshit that previously ruined the last decade+ of the Internet?
A large portion of the utility of AI is the barren ad-driven growth-hacked hellscape search has become. Don't encourage the next generation of these businesses, I beg of everyone.
And while these sponsorship shenanigans are the tech business’s bread and butter, sponsored answer manipulation seems fundamentally more insidious. Even in a larger-scale measurement like this one, there’s no way to tell if any of that is sponsored, legitimately good recommendations, or the technical flavor of the goblins problem.
Hi. I appreciate that you need to make rent, but if your business is basically "we do growth hacking and SEO tricks on models and get them to use products that aren't actually best for the job", you are scum.
You are perpetuating shitty practices that have hurt developers for years now. Part of the reason people use AI is because of how useless search is due to the previous generation doing the same kind of thing you propose.
"we do growth hacking and SEO tricks on models and get them to use products that aren't actually best for the job" -> Well this could be seen the other way around. Today, without proper promotion of services, only incumbents / leaders that are in the models priors (from their training data) are getting chosen. This is ultimately favoring the big generalist players and not the newer or more tailored solutions that benefit from less exposure. I truly think there is something to be done to improve developers' experience too!
Luu kinda has a reputation for knowing his shit, for over a decade now. He's not a checks notes games journalist larping as economist, but he does all right.
From the article "A more common defense is to say, just in general, people attack Zitron because of Y (usually his style), but they never address his points."
The article "engages with Zitron's work"; the post you responded to merely extended the discussion to speculate on why Zitron might be producing it.
(btw, for the record, I'm an AI-hype skeptic and _also_ an AI-head-in-sand skeptic; as far as I can tell, both sides are full of malarkey.)
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
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