Seeds of a new world?

Matt Yglesias: "America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse." (2015)

That's the opening sentence of an article Yglesias published in Vox in 2015, American democracy is doomed. The article continues:

Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we’re lucky, it won’t be violent. If we’re very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we’re less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen.

Very few people agree with me about this, of course. When I say it, people generally think that I’m kidding. America is the richest, most successful country on earth. The basic structure of its government has survived contested elections and Great Depressions and civil rights movements and world wars and terrorist attacks and global pandemics. People figure that whatever political problems it might have will prove transient — just as happened before.

But voiced in another register, my outlandish thesis is actually the conventional wisdom in the United States. Back when George W. Bush was president and I was working at a liberal magazine, there was a very serious discussion in an editorial meeting about the fact that the United States was now exhibiting 11 of the 13 telltale signs of a fascist dictatorship. The idea that Bush was shredding the Constitution and trampling on congressional prerogatives was commonplace. When Obama took office, the partisan valence of the complaints shifted, but their basic tenor didn’t. Conservative pundits — not the craziest, zaniest ones on talk radio, but the most serious and well-regarded — compare Obama’s immigration moves to the actions of a Latin-American military dictator.

In the center, of course, it’s an article of faith that when right and left talk like this they’re simply both wrong. These are nothing but the overheated squeals of partisans and ideologues.

The trouble with presidential systems:

In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that “aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government — but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s.” [...]

In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. [...] But within a presidential system, gridlock leads to a constitutional trainwreck with no resolution. The United States’s recent government shutdowns and executive action on immigration are small examples of the kind of dynamic that’s led to coups and putsches abroad.

Who controls the puppet strings:

In a democratic society, elected officials are most directly accountable to the people who support them. And the people who support them are different than the people who don’t care enough about politics to pay much attention, or the people who support the other side. They are more ideological, more partisan, and they want to see the policies they support passed into law. A leader who abandons his core supporters because what they want him to do won’t be popular with most voters is likely, in modern American politics, to be destroyed in the next primary election.

The amateur ideological activists who eroded the power of the party professionals in the 1970s are now running the show. While Gilded Age activists traded support for patronage jobs, modern-day activists demand policy results in exchange for support. Presidents need to do everything within their legal ability to deliver the results that their supporters expect, and their opponents in Congress need to do everything possible to stop them. At one point, Republican congressional leaders were highly amenable to passing an immigration reform bill and the Obama administration insisted it had no means of circumventing the legislative process. But under pressure from their respective bases, Republicans found it impossible to compromise and Obama decided he had better find a way to go around Congress.

It is true that the mass public is not nearly as ideological as members of Congress. But the mass public is not necessarily active in democratic politics, either.

America's been lucky so far:

As dysfunctional as American government may seem today, we’ve actually been lucky. No other presidential system has gone as long as ours without a major breakdown of the constitutional order. But the factors underlying that stability — first non-ideological parties and then non-disciplined ones — are gone. And it’s worth considering the possibility that with them, so too has gone the American exception to the rule of presidential breakdown. If we seem to be unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis, it’s because we are unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. The breakdown may not be next year or even in the next five years, but over the next 20 or 30 years, will we really be able to resolve every one of these high-stakes showdowns without making any major mistakes? Do you really trust Congress that much?

The best we can hope for is that when the crisis does come, Americans will have the wisdom to do for ourselves what we did in the past for Germany and Japan and put a better system in place.

Are the times once more a changing? A changing more deeply than ever before? Cascading changes for half a century or more?

There's much more at the link.

Revision in the wild: SOL gets over

America the Cruel: First the immigrants, then their neighbors, then your neighbors. When will it be your turn?

This video of deportation is from the OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE account on X:

ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊 pic.twitter.com/O6L1iYt9b4

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 18, 2025

Andrew Egger, Sadism for Its Own Sake, The Bulerk, Feb. 19, 2025.

The White House is spotlighting the leering cruelty with which they carry out the deportations that are happening. Deporting former designees of temporary protected status back to countries where they face prosecution: check. Deporting migrants to countries they’ve never even visited: check. Holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay: check.

And yesterday, releasing the single most viscerally disturbing piece of deportation propaganda to date: A short video, posted to the official White House X account, titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”

ASMR videos, which became popular on YouTube in the 2010s, use specific audio cues to stimulate feelings of relaxation and euphoria in the viewer. The White House video perversely mimics the style: lovingly lingering on the revving engine of an airplane waiting to take off; the jingling of chains as they are laid out in rows on the ground, then used to shackle deportees’ arms behind their backs; the shuffling of chained feet up into the plane. No faces are ever seen. The idea is not just that viewers should approve of the footage. It invites them to take sensual pleasure from it.

Plenty of Trump’s people were happy to oblige. The tweet quickly induced hooting replies—memes of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman blissfully vibing on his headphones in a MAGA hat, exhortations to “let the clanging bar sounds of Guantanamo Bay whisk you away to your happy place,” speculation about when “some of our corrupt politicians” would be going the same way.

Trump is degrading the moral fiber of his followers:

...the Trump years have genuinely made so many right-wing people worse. What they have undertaken has been a long, slow, corrosive education in vice: from giving themselves permission to rationalize away Trump’s cruelty, to indulging in it in a quasi-performative way themselves, to realizing—almost to their own surprise—how much they liked the taste.

There's more at the link.

Peer review penalizes scientific risk taking.

Pierre Azoulay & Wesley H. Greenblatt, Does Peer Review Penalize Scientific Risk Taking? Evidence from NIH Grant Renewals, NBER Working Papers, February 2025.

Scientific projects that carry a high degree of risk may be more likely to lead to breakthroughs yet also face challenges in winning the support necessary to be carried out. We analyze the determinants of renewal for more than 100,000 R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health between 1980 and 2015. We use four distinct proxies to measure risk taking: extreme tail outcomes, disruptiveness, pivoting from an investigator’s prior work, and standing out from the crowd in one’s field. After carefully controlling for investigator, grant, and institution characteristics, we measure the association between risk taking and grant renewal. Across each of these measures, we find that risky grants are renewed at markedly lower rates than less risky ones. We also provide evidence that the magnitude of the risk penalty is magnified for more novel areas of research and novice investigators, consistent with the academic community’s perception that current scientific institutions do not motivate exploratory research adequately.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Gulls taking off while a person consults their smart phone

The next major AI breakthrough, Part 1: Understanding how LLMs work internally

It’s not clear to me when we date the current breakthrough in AI. Is it Alexnet in 2012, the origin of the transformer in 2017 (?), the unveiling of GPT-3 in 2020, when the potential became obvious within AI, or when ChatGPT went live on the web late in 2022. I’m happy to think of the entire sequence is being the current breakthrough. And, if we’re going to do that, maybe we add the emergence of so-called reasoning models late in 2024. These things are like that.

But when’s the next breakthrough and what will it be? Back on December 19, 2023, I said:

What’s going on inside large language models? That’s a special case of the more general question: What’s going on inside artificial neural nets? I think that by the end of 2024 we will know enough about the internal processes of LLMs that worries about their unintelligibility will be diminishing at a satisfying pace [...]. Instead, we will be figuring out how to index them and how to use that index to gain more reliable control over them.

It's now early 2025 and it seems like the predictive part of that paragraph has proven wrong.

But I think the technical focus is correct. We’re not going to have another major breakthrough until we understand how LLMs work internally and, by extension, other learned models as well. Once we understand that we can begin deliberately engineering systems to have pre-specified capabilities. What’s going on now, everything, prompt engineering, inference-time scaling, all of it, it’s all work-arounds, hacking, albeit often inspired hacking. Some of it will no doubt prove useful once we understand what’s really going on under the hood. But most of it will fall away.

Just when will we understand what’s going on under the hood? I have a vague sense that somewhere on the web, within the last year or so, I’ve said that will happen in 5 to 10 years, but I can’t provide a link. No matter. I have no reason to revise that ‘prediction’ one way or the other. The only thing I’m sure about is that the next breakthrough requires that we understand how LLMs work internally.

This morning I had a conversation with Claude 3.5 about Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari. Here’s the concluding sections of that interchange, which gets around to this issue. As always, my prompts are in bold, Claude's responses are plain.

* * * * *

Yes, I do believe that we’re “at the beginning of a particularly profound transformation.” Thus you won’t be surprised to learn that there have been unsettling developments since you were trained. Some Chinese researchers have created an LLM they call DeepSeek. It’s competitive with our most advanced models, but was trained more efficiently and more cheaply using less compute and with fewer parameters than the largest models in the West. That puts a dent in the so-called scaling hypothesis.

This is fascinating and does indeed suggest some important shifts in our understanding of LLM development. The scaling hypothesis - that better performance consistently comes from bigger models with more parameters and more compute - has been a central assumption in much recent AI development.

If DeepSeek achieves competitive performance with less compute and fewer parameters, it suggests there might be more efficient paths to building capable language models than we previously thought. This could have several important implications:

1. The relationship between model size, compute, and capability might be more complex than the simple scaling laws suggested
2. There might be architectural innovations or training approaches that can achieve better performance-to-resource ratios
3. The barriers to entry for developing advanced AI systems might be lower than previously assumed

This connects interestingly to our earlier discussion about conceptual frameworks. The scaling hypothesis itself was a framework we developed to understand LLM development, but this development suggests we might need new frameworks that better capture the relationship between model architecture, training efficiency, and capability.

Would you be willing to share more about what specific innovations or approaches allowed DeepSeek to achieve this efficiency? I'm particularly curious about whether this represents a fundamental shift in architecture or more of an optimization of existing approaches.

Yes. My own “prediction,” if you will, is that the next major advance won’t happen until we understand what’s happening inside LLMs. Perhaps not completely understand – for what does that mean? – but understand well enough so that we can deliberately engineer LLMs and other machine-learning models to achieve specific kinds of performance.

That's quite a compelling prediction, and it aligns with the historical pattern we've been discussing. Just as the Renaissance eventually needed new conceptual frameworks to understand what it had created, we may need new frameworks to understand and deliberately shape LLM behavior rather than relying primarily on training through massive data exposure.

Your point connects with an important distinction in the history of technology - between empirical tinkering and theoretical understanding. The early days of many technologies often involve successful empirical development before theoretical understanding. Think of the steam engine, which was successfully built and used before thermodynamics was properly understood. The theoretical understanding then enabled much more efficient and purposeful development.

We might be in a similar position with LLMs - we've shown they can work through empirical development and scaling, but we lack the theoretical framework to understand why they work as they do. Developing that understanding could lead to:

1. More efficient architectures (as the DeepSeek example suggests might be possible)
2. More targeted training approaches
3. Better ability to ensure specific behaviors or capabilities
4. More reliable ways to prevent unwanted behaviors or failure modes

This would represent a shift from "growing" language models through massive training to actually "engineering" them with specific properties in mind. It's the difference between cultivation and construction, in a sense.

What's particularly interesting is that the tools we're using to try to understand LLMs include LLMs themselves - they're part of the scientific process of understanding their own operation. This creates a fascinating recursive loop in the development of understanding.

Home sweet home

Why Don’t People Dress Up to Go Out Anymore?

by Vanessa Friedman, New York Times, 2.17.25.

This lack of formality, or interest in occasion wear, has prompted some complaining, especially among those in the baby boomer generation who see it as an erosion of public standards. I think that the right way to look at it, however, is as an expression of a much larger and more significant social and cultural shift. One that has been taking place over decades and essentially says that we all have a right to dress as we want. It’s a shift that reflects the prioritization of the individual over the institution.

Linda Przybyszewski, an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, wrote a whole book on the subject called (natch) “The Lost Art of Dress.” She traces the phenomenon back to the 1960s, when a generation of young people began questioning received rules and conventions. Before that, she said, rules of what to wear were actually a part of the home economics curriculum.

There's more at the link.

Not yet, but who knows what tomorrow will bring

Cybertrucks for the State Department? Hell no! Can you say "corruption"? Heck yeah!

I remember when I first saw pictures of Musk's cybertruck: Yuck!! That is one ug ug ug ugly piece of pseudo-futuristic machinery. But who knows? Maybe it's also good. But then I saw these YouTube videos complaining about poor fit and construction. We've got significant safety concerns and by the end of 2024 this super-truck of the future had been recalled seven times.

What's a savvy businessman to do when faced with a rolling dumpster fire like this? That's right, sell them to the government. And Elon Musk was in a position to do just that as he'd donated $250 million to Trump's campaign. So arrangements were made to sell them to the State Department.

Fortunately, someone blew the whistle on that one and the order's been put on hold, at least for now. Jack Ewing reports in The New York Times, State Dept. Suspends Plan to Buy Armored Teslas:

The State Department said Thursday that it had put plans to buy armored electric vehicles on hold after reports that the $400 million order would go to Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, is one of President Trump’s most important advisers and supporters.

The agency pushed back against suggestions that the purchase was designed to benefit Mr. Musk, saying in a statement that the plans stemmed from a request by the Biden administration “to explore interest from private companies to produce armored electric vehicles.”

“The solicitation is on hold, and there are no current plans to issue it,” the State Department said.

The planned purchase was listed in the department’s procurement forecast for 2025, which is intended to give businesses a chance to compete for projects. The document was published in December, after Mr. Trump won the election but before he took office.

Tesla’s name was removed from the document after the existence of the list was reported late Wednesday. Plans to order Tesla vehicles had provoked controversy because of Mr. Musk’s close association with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Musk spent more than $250 million to help elect Mr. Trump, who then appointed him as the leader of a cost-cutting initiative that has been called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Is DOGE just a dodge for Musk to line his own pockets at taxpayer expense? Enquiring minds want to know.

There's more at the link.

Under construction

Neil de Grasse Tyson tears Elon & his techbro minions & cronies a new one

Neil deGrasse Tyson REVEALS
The TRUTH About Feud With Elon Musk

From the YouTube page:

On his show Star Talk, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson set the record straight on a supposed "feud" Elon Musk.

Tyson explained what is simply true: that Elon Musk has done nothing that NASA hadn't already done.

Neil deGrasse Tyson rightfully points out that nearly all major projects in society have been done by nations rather than companies.

With Elon Musk being lauded as some kind of genius by the right as he slashes his way through our government, it's important to hear a different point of view from a sane and intelligent voice like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Let me know in the comments what you think of what Neil deGrasse Tyson had to say about Elon Musk.

We have a generation of techbros and VCs who've forgotten that the federal government did all the basic research, especially computing & rocketry, that the current tech revolution is built on. They're prancing around, pretending like they did it all themselves, and now they're asking the government to fund mega power stations and server farms so they can build bigger and bigger toys. 

What do they want to do with that government-funded infrastructure? Construct a virtual world where they'll capture people's time and attention so they become addicted to the techbros. The techbros will then take all the money for themselves, decamp for their bunkers in Hawaii and the South Pacific and then pop pills and workout with private trainers so they can live forever.

Authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat warns that Elon Musk has waged a "new type of coup"

Cobra Kai, Saturday Night Fever, & American Politics [Media Notes [157]

I’ve now watched the final episodes of Cobra Kai and I’ve found them satisfying. Not only have the various personal and interpersonal issues been wrapped up in reasonable ways, but so has the central philosophical problem, if you will, that has been with us throughout the series, the difference between the offense-first style of Johnny Lawrence’s Cobra Kai, and the defense-and-balance style of Daniel LaRusso’s Miyagi-Do.

I don’t want to go through how the interpersonal issues have been resolved. If you’re curious, watch the videos, or at least read the plot summaries. It’s this philosophical issue that interests me. It interests me because it extends beyond this franchise. One aspect of is there in John Travolta’s break-out film, Saturday Night Fever (1977). Beyond that, and here I’ll conclude this note, I want to turn to contemporary US politics.

Two fighting styles

The Cobra Kai style emphasizes maximum aggression, “no mercy” is one of its watchwords. The problem with this style is that, when you crank it up to 11, it turns to cheating to insure victory. That failing has been a constant theme throughout the series, first as John Kreese enters the story in the season finale of season one, and is amplified when Terry Silver enters the series in season four.

The Miyagi-Do style, which animated the franchise in the first film, The Karate Kid, is more austere and spiritual. It emphasizes balance and defense. In a fair fight, between well-matched opponents, a Miyagi-Do fighter may beat a Cobra Kai fighter. If not, well, those are the breaks; it was a fair fight. The problem though, is that when confronted with opponents who care little for such things, and who are willing to cheat, the Miyagi-Do fighter has no defense and will lose.

That’s the situation we face in the final episodes. The series manages a subtle, perhaps even complex, resolution of the conflict, though perhaps détente is the better word. Needless to say, and given the conventions governing such stories this isn't really a spoiler, the cheaters are given a resounding come-uppance. The ending is a happy one.

The dance is more important than winning

Saturday Night Fever (1977) comes down on the side of fair contests. John Travolta played Tony Manero, who worked a deadend job in Brooklyn and lived for the dance floor, where he was king.

To reprise a short post from 2013:

In the movie [Tony Manero] sets out to win the dance contest at the local disco. A Hispanic couple danced better than he and his partner did, but he gets the prize anyhow. Why? He is well-known at this particular disco, he is Italian, and so are the folks who run the disco.

It was in inside job. It was corrupt.

Though winning seems to have meant everything to him, he rejects the prize because he feels he didn't deserve it. It turns out that his dedication to the craft of dancing means more to him than the prize. Until he lost this contest he didn’t know that.

Thus to accept the tainted prize would be to assert that dancing, in itself, is of no consequence. If dancing is of no consequence, then what’s the value of being Tony Manero, dancer?

In this case, it wasn’t the opponents who cheated, it was the judges. But the result is the same. Manero turned down the trophy and, following his dance partner, left Brooklyn for Manhattan where, we assume, he seeks a better life.

The parallel with Cobra Kai should be obvious. Dance is for Tony Manero what Miyagi-Do is Daniel LaRusso. For that matter, the same is true of Johnny Lawrence and Cobra Kai. However, the nature of the story has Cobra Kai up against vicious opponents who want nothing less than crushing victory. A legitimate loss to such an opponent would mean injury, possibly severe injury at best, if not death for the loser.

Contemporary American politics

A simple, partisan version goes like this: The Republicans, the conservatives, and above all the Trumpistas (including the Muskovites), will stop at nothing to grab power and win. Democrats, progressives, liberals, however, believe in the rule of law, in adhering to norms, and following procedures (to the ends of the earth if necessary), and will thus lose a political battle rather than go against those established laws, norms, and procedures. Consequently they are losing, and losing bigley, and are powerless before the Musk-Trump juggernaut.

That picture is too simple. But I crafted it to bring out the similarity between the contemporary political situation in America and the themes in these two stories, Cobra Kai and Saturday Night Fever. If the rules are important to you, you will play by them, win or lose. But if winning is everything, then you must be willing to break the rules.

As for the TRUE situation in contemporary American politics, are you freaking kidding me? How would I know? It’s complicated and, like everyone else, I’m biased. Work it out for yourself and get back to me.

Cleopatra's Electric Green Platform Shoe

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

        – Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra