I'm taking that title from Matt Yglesias' latest column. He's right, and that's good.
Let's be clear, I really really don't like Trump. And while I think Elon is brilliant and his tech has done, is doing, and will do much good, I also think he's looking nuttier than a fruitcake. I think this new AI technology is wonderful, I also think we're looking at this 21st century technology through an imagination that's still mired in the 19th century and hasn't yet managed to break free. That's not good.
Still, on the whole, the vibes are somehow good.
Does that mean that at long last the techtonic plates are beginning to shift? I sure hope so. And if they're shifting, it remains to be seen just who'll be guiding them into a new configuration. That is not at all written in stone.
From Yglesias, who names Tyler Cowen as the one who first identified the shift:
I liked Ezra Klein’s exploration of this theme on January 19, which he glossed with the observation that Trump’s narrow popular vote win (smaller than Biden’s in 2020 or either of Obama’s or even Hillary’s in 2016) feels like a kind of psychic landslide. And Klein rightly notes that the vibes, in this sense, are badly misaligned with the actual vote count in Congress. I find Trump to be a hard figure to predict. But looking up the size of his House majority is easy, and it would be deeply strange for a majority this thin to generate a large quantity of highly partisan policy change. And yet, the vibes! It feels like American culture is primed to turn decisively to the right.
The vibes they are good.
Later:
There’s been so much attention paid to the apparent realignment of a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires that I don’t have much to add to this.
What I actually think is more important with regard to “vibes” is the strong realignment of the youngest cohort of voters toward Trump. Trump did strikingly better with voters under 30 than he had in his prior two races, winning young men by a large margin.
YES!
There's more in the post that's publicly available, and I assume there's much more behind the paywall. But if I paid for a subscription to every Substack written by a smart person who every so often writes one I really like, if I did that, then I couldn't pay the rent. Sigh...
I'll take the typo at face value Larry: "the techtonic plates are beginning to shit". . . All the man-child vibes are finding each other to form a dog pile? or are they going to grow up and realize they're not the world?
ReplyDeleteOh, and the under 30 crowd are probably the ones who also like Andrew Tate -- wealthy man who lived a flashy lifestyle and "influencer" who is an (alleged) sex trafficker.
ReplyDeleteSee this discussion at 31:00; the under 30 year old men.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpBnYB0I6_0
Thanks for the link,,Sally. Interesting discussion. I still think the vibe is good. We'll see what happens when the people who voted for Trump figure out that, while he'll make a big show out of deporting a bunch of aliens and (probably) getting revenge on some of the officials and journalists who went after him and his MAGAs, he won't be able to do much of anything to make their lives better.
DeleteYes, this whole discussion was really good. I've seen these men in other discussions and find them thoughtfully nuanced. As for Elon, France has spoken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEnJORtSUB0
DeleteAnd here are some journalists from Britain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diHcpZvBjT0
ReplyDeletePlease Bill, do a looong post on...
ReplyDelete"Open letter to any Shtetl-Optimized readers who know Elon
"Did Elon Musk make a Nazi salute? Well, not exactly. As far as I can tell, the truth is that he recklessly and repeatedly made a hand gesture that the world’s millions of Nazi sympathizers eagerly misinterpreted as a Nazi salute. He then (the worse part) declined to clarify or apologize in any way, opting instead for laugh emojis.
"I hasten to add: just like with Trump’s Charlottesville dogwhistles, I find it ludicrous to imagine that Elon has any secret desire to reopen the gas chambers or whatever—and not only because of Elon’s many pro-Zionist and philosemitic actions, statements, and connections. That isn’t the issue, so don’t pretend I think it is.
"Crucially, though, “not being a literal Nazi” isn’t fully exculpatory.
...
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8591
Of course you'll need to grok a grok comparison.
3 x ai's in convo with Scott Aaronsson, zig heil, musk, right left and all over the place commentators.
My take. The most dog whistling trolling ever in the whole of time and space.
Dipity.
Elon Musk, nuttier than a fruitcake.
DeleteI've got a particular bone to pick with Elon. He believes that we will one day be able to link two brains directly together so that they can exchange thoughts directly. I'd been thinking about that since the early 2000s and decided that it, even if we could develop the tech to do it, that is was all but impossible. Here's what I wrote about it: Direct Brain-to-Brain Thought Transfer: A High-Tech Fantasy that Won’t Work:
Abstract: Various thinkers (Rodolfo Llinás, Christof Koch, and Elon Musk) have proposed that, in the future, it would be possible to link two or more human brains directly together so that people could communicate without the need for language or any other conventional means of communication. These proposals fail to provide a means by which a brain can determine whether or not a neural impulse is endogenous or exogenous. That failure makes communication impossible. Confusion would the more likely result of such linkage. Moreover, in providing a rationale for his proposal, Musk assumes a mistaken view of how language works, a view cognitive linguists call the conduit metaphor. Finally, all these thinkers assume that we know what thoughts are in neural terms. We don’t.
Here's the link: https://www.academia.edu/44109360/Direct_Brain_to_Brain_Thought_Transfer_A_High_Tech_Fantasy_that_Wont_Work
And, on the savanna: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/brain-to-brain
This is so interesting to me, Larry. I really enjoyed your paper, too. FWIW the most important sutra in Buddhism, the Heart Sutra, is vitally concerned with some of the issues you discuss. Training in Buddhism in recent years in the sect in which I practice has even arrived at "a new definition of faith: clarity of thought". Putting aside the to and fro of whether there is a "self", the vitality of clarity of thought is anchored by a person's ability to weight thoughts in such a way that harmony with the moment distinguishes the boundaries (i.e.internal and external) of one's presence expressed, thus making way for needs of other people/the situation to be driving the connection to action. The Heart Sutra has been examined and discussed by many scholars. The essential mystery of what it describes
Deletein human experience is partly the very boundary conditions your describe. ( -- Although, there is more, I must add, and that "more" is the gist of my own speculative work about the vestibular system.)
Larry? Bill? ???
ReplyDeleteWe are the same. William Lawerence Benzon.
Delete"one day be able to link two brains directly together so that they can exchange thoughts directly."
ReplyDeleteNot for want of trying.
"Qualia computing
"Let us step now into a hypothetical – I’d like to imagine we now possess an idealised, qualia-complete brain-computer interface, one with direct read-write access to the phenomenal fields. This is a system which can induce any visual or somatic percept the user might conceivably desire."
...
https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2024-07-19-qualiatech.html