What's happening to fireflies around the world?

Here's a video:

Here's a post by biologist Jerry Coyne.

Humans learn new chess concepts from AlphaZero

L. Schut, N. Tomašev, T. McGrath, D. Hassabis, U. Paquet, & B. Kim, Bridging the human–AI knowledge gap through concept discovery and transfer in AlphaZero, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (13) e2406675122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2406675122 (2025).

Significance

As AI systems become more capable, they may internally represent concepts outside the sphere of human knowledge. This work gives an end-to-end example of unearthing machine-unique knowledge in the domain of chess. We obtain machine-unique knowledge from an AI system (AlphaZero) by a method that finds novel yet teachable concepts and show that it can be transferred to human experts (grandmasters). In particular, the new knowledge is learned from internal mathematical representations without a priori knowing what it is or where to start. The produced knowledge from AlphaZero (new chess concepts) is then taught to four grandmasters in a setting where we can quantify their learning, showing that machine-guided discovery and teaching is possible at the highest human level.

Abstract

AI systems have attained superhuman performance across various domains. If the hidden knowledge encoded in these highly capable systems can be leveraged, human knowledge and performance can be advanced. Yet, this internal knowledge is difficult to extract. Due to the vast space of possible internal representations, searching for meaningful new conceptual knowledge can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Here, we introduce a method that extracts new chess concepts from AlphaZero, an AI system that mastered chess via self-play without human supervision. Our method excavates vectors that represent concepts from AlphaZero’s internal representations using convex optimization, and filters the concepts based on teachability (whether the concept is transferable to another AI agent) and novelty (whether the concept contains information not present in human chess games). These steps ensure that the discovered concepts are useful and meaningful. For the resulting set of concepts, prototypes (chess puzzle–solution pairs) are presented to experts for final validation. In a preliminary human study, four top chess grandmasters (all former or current world chess champions) were evaluated on their ability to solve concept prototype positions. All grandmasters showed improvement after the learning phase, suggesting that the concepts are at the frontier of human understanding. Despite the small scale, our result is a proof of concept demonstrating the possibility of leveraging knowledge from a highly capable AI system to advance the frontier of human knowledge; a development that could bear profound implications and shape how we interact with AI systems across many applications.

Friday Fotos: An act of quiet despiration, leavened with bacon

If no longer America, then what nation or nations will answer the calls of freedom and dignity? [Claudia Sheinbaum]

I was raised believing that America was the greatest country in the world, the home of the free and the brave, leader of the free world. I continued to believe that, or something like it, well into this century. To be sure, I found the war in Vietnam disillusioning, heartbreaking, as well as the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I found the rise of inequality dismaying, though the Occupy movement gave me some hope, alas, short-lived. Obama was disappointing. Trump's first term wasn't as bad as it could have been. Biden? Another disappointment.

And now, Trump's let loose the dogs of war in his own country, even on the people who elected him. To be sure, that's not what he thinks he's doing. And his many followers don't seem to realize what he's doing to them. Well, some of them know well enough, and they're fine with that, the ones with means. But the rank and file MAGA, they're still under the spell, most of them. It does not look good.

But if not America, what's the alternative?

Michelle Goldberg has a suggestion: Is Claudia Sheinbaum the Anti-Trump? NYTimes, April 4, 2025. She was elected president of Mexico in October 2024.

Around the globe, liberal humanism is faltering while the forces of reactionary cruelty are on the march. So Sheinbaum, who has adopted López Obrador’s slogan “For the good of all, first the poor,” can seem like a shining exception to the reigning spirit of autocratic machismo. Goldberg's column is a long one, too long for me to summarize. Here's how she characterizes Sheinbaum:

“I feel very proud about her,” Marta Lamas, an anthropology professor and leading Mexican feminist who has known Sheinbaum for years, told me in Mexico City last week. “She is a light in this terrible situation that we are facing: Putin, Trump.”

Lamas said she’d feared a sexist backlash against Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, but six months into her term, there’s no sign of one. Sheinbaum was elected with almost 60 percent of the vote. Today her approval rating is above 80 percent. Last week, Bukele [president of El Salvador], who likes to call himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” asked Grok, Elon Musk’s A.I. chatbot, the name of the planet’s most popular leader, evidently expecting it would be him. Grok responded, “Sheinbaum.”

For those of us steeped in American identity politics, it can be hard to understand how a woman like Sheinbaum came to lead the world’s 11th-most-populous country. Her parents, both from Jewish families that fled Europe, were scientists who’d been active in the leftist student movement of the 1960s. As a child, Sheinbaum was a dedicated to dancing ballet, a discipline that still shows up in her graceful posture and in the many social media videos of her doing folk dances with her constituents. She did research for her Ph.D. in energy engineering at UC Berkeley and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

She is, in short, part of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia typically demonized by populist movements. But as I was told again and again in Mexico, her rarefied background meant little in light of her close relationship with López Obrador, who she’d worked beside since he was mayor of Mexico City 25 years ago, and whose economic populism earned him the enduring devotion of many downtrodden citizens.

At the end:

An easy riposte is that democracy means more than just elections. But that argument is convincing only if you’ve already accepted that liberal democracy is a superior system, and it’s increasingly clear that many people do not. In elections across the globe, we’re seeing how little many voters care about abstract liberal proceduralism; they’re happy to cede power to the executive branch if they think it will improve their lives.

I find this trend tragic, but there are no signs that it’s going to reverse any time soon. Given this reality, we should judge politicians not just on how they amass power, but also on what they do with it.

In the United States, centralized authority has allowed Musk, inspired by Argentina’s Milei, to take a metaphorical chain saw to all sorts of federal programs, including those that help the most vulnerable. Sheinbaum, by contrast, is trying to build a national care system for children, the disabled and the elderly, lifting the burden of unpaid labor from many Mexican women. American progressives should be cautious about projecting their desperation for a heroine onto Sheinbaum. But at least right now, her kind of populism looks far better than the alternatives.

There's much more in the article.

Regardless of what happens with Trump's current term, or for that matter, with Sheinbaum's (six years), the America I had believed in, the one that would save the world, that America is gone forever. We may well be able to recover from the depredations of the Trump presidency, but that America, leader of the free world etc., that America is gone forever.

* * * * *

Over at The Bulwark William Kristol writes:

Yesterday afternoon, having dispatched his regular mid-day newsletter, my friend and colleague Jonathan Last was moved—compelled, I think—to write a second, emergency newsletter. His eloquent and powerful missive arrived in our inboxes around 6:30 p.m. If you haven’t yet read it, do so now.

The heart of Jonathan’s argument is that yesterday, April 3, 2025, was the day that, in his words, “The age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended.”

We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.

It was almost 111 years earlier, on August 3, 1914, that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, stood with a friend at dusk at a window of his room in the Foreign Office, looking out across St. James’s Park. Seeing the first lights being turned on along the Mall, Grey famously remarked, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

The Liberal statesman was right. World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, Stalin and Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust—these all followed in the space of three decades. The lamps were not to be lit again in Grey’s lifetime. A century of relative stability and peace, of progress and prosperity, was followed by thirty years of chaos and war, of darkness and misery.

Later on he writes: “But now a new time of monsters—of terrible mistakes, monstrous deeds, and disastrous consequences—could well be upon us.”

A short note on the importance of fun [Homo ludens]

Tyler Cowen has just interviewed economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie on a variety of topics:

...the economic impacts of historical pandemics, the “happy story” of the Black Death and why it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, the history of variolation and how entrepreneurs created vaccination franchises in 18th-century England, why local communities typically managed epidemics better than central authorities, the dastardly nature of medieval guilds, the European marriage pattern and its disputed contribution to economic growth, when sustained economic growth truly began in England, why the Dutch Republic stagnated despite its early success, whether she agrees with Greg Clark’s social mobility hypothesis, her experience and conducting “anthropological fieldwork” on English social customs, the communitarian norms she encountered while living in Germany...

It's all interesting. But, given my current interests, this passage caught my eye:

COWEN: Let’s say an 18-year-old, highly intelligent young woman comes to you. She’s moving to England; she might want to be a professor. What advice do you give to her? From America, let’s say.

OGILVIE: [...] I would say, and this is actually not just England-specific, but changing cultures. When I was 20, I went to live in Germany. I lived there, actually, for quite a long time while I was doing research for my doctorate.

When you initially go to a foreign place, whether it’s Germany — or later, I lived in the Czech Republic for a year — you won’t figure out right away what people in this culture do to feel comfortable and have fun. But you have to have the faith that they do have things that they do, and you need to learn what those things are that they do in this culture to be comfortable with one another and to have a great time.

The sooner you learn that, the happier you’ll be fitting into a new culture. I think that would be my general life advice to anyone who is moving to a new country. Find out what people do for fun, and then start doing it.

I suspect that there is more to that advice than the fact that fun is, well, fun. There's something deeper going on. It is not just that fun is a better way to pass the time than boredom or even work, but that it puts you more fundamentally touch with the people.

Summertime, Sarah "the voice" Vaughan

Lawrence Summers on why universities must resist Trump

Lawrence H. Summers, If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can? NYTimes, April 3, 2025.

The U.S. government is trying to bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission. [...] The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means.

Summers asserts that elite universities do have problems with antisemitism, identity and diversity issues, and "have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order." Reform is needed. However:

...the Trump administration is not acting in good faith in its purported antisemitism concerns, nor is it following the law in its approach to universities. [...] Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act appropriately allows that federal funding of universities can be made contingent on their avoiding discrimination. But as a recent statement by a group of leading law professors points out, it also protects against this power’s being used to punish critics or curtail academic freedom. Among the law’s requirements are notice periods, hearings, remedies that are narrowly tailored to specific infractions and a 30-day congressional notification before any funding is curtailed.

None of this appears to be part of the Trump administration’s approach to universities.

The White House has not confined its efforts to claims about discrimination. The administration seeks to dictate what universities do on matters ranging from student discipline to academic organization to campus policing.

His penultimate paragraph:

Institutions such as Harvard, the administration’s most recent target, have vast financial resources, great prestige and broad networks of influential alumni. If they do not or cannot resist the arbitrary application of government power, who else can? Without acts of resistance, what protects the rule of law?

Flash!

Perspective on musical neurodynamics

Harding, E.E., Kim, J.C., Demos, A.P. et al. Musical neurodynamics. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00915-4

Abstract: A great deal of research in the neuroscience of music suggests that neural oscillations synchronize with musical stimuli. Although neural synchronization is a well-studied mechanism underpinning expectation, it has even more far-reaching implications for music. In this Perspective, we survey the literature on the neuroscience of music, including pitch, harmony, melody, tonality, rhythm, metre, groove and affect. We describe how fundamental dynamical principles based on known neural mechanisms can explain basic aspects of music perception and performance, as summarized in neural resonance theory. Building on principles such as resonance, stability, attunement and strong anticipation, we propose that people anticipate musical events not through predictive neural models, but because brain–body dynamics physically embody musical structure. The interaction of certain kinds of sounds with ongoing pattern-forming dynamics results in patterns of perception, action and coordination that we collectively experience as music. Statistically universal structures may have arisen in music because they correspond to stable states of complex, pattern-forming dynamical systems. This analysis of empirical findings from the perspective of neurodynamic principles sheds new light on the neuroscience of music and what makes music powerful.

Generative AI Chatbot for Mental Health Treatment

Michael V. Heinz, Daniel M. Macklin, Brianna M. Trudeau, et al., Randomized Trial of a Generative AI Chatbot for Mental Health Treatment, The New England Journal of Medicine, VOL. 2 NO. 4, March 27, 2025, DOI: 10.1056/AIoa2400802

Abstract

Background

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) chatbots hold promise for building highly personalized, effective mental health treatments at scale, while also addressing user engagement and retention issues common among digital therapeutics. We present a randomized controlled trial (RCT) testing an expert–fine-tuned Gen-AI–powered chatbot, Therabot, for mental health treatment.

Methods

We conducted a national, randomized controlled trial of adults (N=210) with clinically significant symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), or at clinically high risk for feeding and eating disorders (CHR-FED). Participants were randomly assigned to a 4-week Therabot intervention (N=106) or waitlist control (WLC; N=104). WLC participants received no app access during the study period but gained access after its conclusion (8 weeks). Participants were stratified into one of three groups based on mental health screening results: those with clinically significant symptoms of MDD, GAD, or CHR-FED. Primary outcomes were symptom changes from baseline to postintervention (4 weeks) and to follow-up (8 weeks). Secondary outcomes included user engagement, acceptability, and therapeutic alliance (i.e., the collaborative patient and therapist relationship). Cumulative-link mixed models examined differential changes. Cohen’s d effect sizes were unbounded and calculated based on the log-odds ratio, representing differential change between groups.

Results

Therabot users showed significantly greater reductions in symptoms of MDD (mean changes: −6.13 [standard deviation {SD}=6.12] vs. −2.63 [6.03] at 4 weeks; −7.93 [5.97] vs. −4.22 [5.94] at 8 weeks; d=0.845–0.903), GAD (mean changes: −2.32 [3.55] vs. −0.13 [4.00] at 4 weeks; −3.18 [3.59] vs. −1.11 [4.00] at 8 weeks; d=0.794–0.840), and CHR-FED (mean changes: −9.83 [14.37] vs. −1.66 [14.29] at 4 weeks; −10.23 [14.70] vs. −3.70 [14.65] at 8 weeks; d=0.627–0.819) relative to controls at postintervention and follow-up. Therabot was well utilized (average use >6 hours), and participants rated the therapeutic alliance as comparable to that of human therapists.

Conclusions

This is the first RCT demonstrating the effectiveness of a fully Gen-AI therapy chatbot for treating clinical-level mental health symptoms. The results were promising for MDD, GAD, and CHR-FED symptoms. Therabot was well utilized and received high user ratings. Fine-tuned Gen-AI chatbots offer a feasible approach to delivering personalized mental health interventions at scale, although further research with larger clinical samples is needed to confirm their effectiveness and generalizability. (Funded by Dartmouth College; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT06013137.)

This song has been been haunting me for two or three days: Chan Chan

This is the original version:

From the webpage:

The original Buena Vista Social Club album was recorded for World Circuit Records over six days at the vintage EGREM studios in Havana. Released in 1997, the album went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, selling over 8 million copies and contributing to the rise in popularity of Cuban, as well as Latin American, music.

This is a version by Playing for Change:

From the webpage:

This song reached the masses from the Buena Vista Social Club project and I have heard so many variations and versions performed around the world ever since. We decided to create our own version while on a trip recording and filming music in Cuba in 2015. The Legendary Pancho Amat on the Cuban tres along with the incredible piano playing of Roberto Carcasses set the framework for this song, and then once we heard Teté Garcia Caturla sing lead vocals we realized exactly why we do what we do. Listen to how well Cuba, the USA, and the Middle East all get along when the music plays. - Mark Johnson, PFC producer and co-founder

AI & humans, then and now

In “The Evolution of Cognition” (1990) David Hays and I argued that the long-term evolution of human culture flows from the architectural foundations of thought and communication: first speech, then writing, followed by systematized calculation, and most recently, computation. In discussing the importance of the computer, we remark:

One of the problems we have with the computer is deciding what kind of thing it is, and therefore what sorts of tasks are suitable to it. The computer is ontologically ambiguous. Can it think, or only calculate? Is it a brain or only a machine?

The steam locomotive, the so-called iron horse, posed a similar problem for people at Rank 3. It is obviously a mechanism and it is inherently inanimate. Yet it is capable of autonomous motion, something heretofore only within the capacity of animals and humans. So, is it animate or not? Perhaps the key to acceptance of the iron horse was the adoption of a system of thought that permits separation of autonomous motion from autonomous decision. The iron horse is fearsome only if it may, at any time, choose to leave the tracks and come after you like a charging rhinoceros. Once the system of thought had shaken down in such a way that autonomous motion did not imply the capacity for decision, people made peace with the locomotive.

The computer is similarly ambiguous. It is clearly an inanimate machine. Yet we interact with it through language; a medium heretofore restricted to communication with other people. To be sure, computer languages are very restricted, but they are languages. They have words, punctuation marks, and syntactic rules. To learn to program computers we must extend our mechanisms for natural language.

Back then the question was mostly an academic one. That is to say, it had little purchase on the daily lives of most people. Consequently, however intently a relatively small cadre of academics debated the question, it was of relatively little interest to ordinary people.

That changed quite dramatically when, late in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT on the web where anyone with an internet account and a web browser to access it and play with it. Overnight millions did so. The question of whether or not this thing was dead or alive, that is inanimate or animate, mindless or conscious, impressed itself on millions of users. It was no longer an academic question. It was a live question, and to some it was even existential: How long before this, this, this THING, goes rogue and destroys us?

Fortunately, that has not happened. We are all alive to debate the issue. And we do so, using terms that existed long prior to the release of ChatGPT. That’s a problem.

Back in the days when the questions of computer intelligence, of computational minds, and of artificial consciousness were academic, we had no examples of devices whose behavior was phenomenologically problematic. Computers played an inferior game of chess, though that ended in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, and were at best halting, clumsy, and relentlessly stupid with language. You could take whatever position you wished about the possibility of artificial intelligence (AI), artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term coined early in the millennium, or even superintelligence, a term popularized by Nick Bostrom’s 2013 book of that title, when it came to actual devices, it was clear that they were not intelligent or conscious.

ChatGPT could “talk,” just like a human being, or so much so that one had to work hard to find a meaningful difference. Many users proceeded as though there were no meaningful difference. Now the question of AI, AGI, or even superintelligence has taken on a different valence. Any chatbot “knows” a wider range of subjects than even the most brilliant and learned of humans. In that specific and limited sense, these things are superintelligent. While no one, so far as I know, has claimed that these chatbots are superintelligent in the fullest sense (as in Bostrom’s Superintelligence) you see the problem. Don’t you?

Just as we don’t know how the human mind, the human brain, works. So we don’t know how these chatbots, these large language models (LLMs) work. Do they work like we do or not? At some level obviously not. Computer hardware is quite different from biological “wetware” (brains). But when we consider function, that we don’t know. As long as we stick to symbolic behavior, the ability to write natural language, and increasingly to speak it, to write computer code, and to worth with mathematics, our ability to distinguish the real, that is, humans, from the artificial, that is, computers, is problematic. Thus the terms, the concepts, we have inherited from the pre-GPT-3 era are no longer adequate to problems we now face.

That is what makes the question of computer intelligence both so urgent and so deeply problematic. For the moment, I’m fond of a formulation Steven Harnad expressed somewhere on the web: The behavior chatbots exhibit is astonishing when you consider the fact that they don’t understand another. Those words are mind, but the though is Harnad’s. But this formulation is no more than a stop gap.

We need new concepts, and new conceptual framework. That’s easier called for than accomplished. The accomplishment will take an intellectual generation.

* * * * *

I’ve made this general point, but at greater length and in different terms in a paper I finished in January of 2023: ChatGPT intimates a tantalizing future; its core LLM is organized on multiple levels; and it has broken the idea of thinking.

Caught in delium [blossoms]

Tyler Cowen interviews Ezra Klein on abundance, kludgeocracy and so much more

Here's the link, and the intro:

What happens when a liberal thinker shifts his attention from polarization to economic abundance? Ezra Klein’s new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance, argues for an agenda of increased housing, infrastructure, clean energy, and innovation. But does abundance clash with polarization—or offer a way through it?

In this conversation, Ezra and Tyler discuss how the abundance agenda interacts with political polarization, whether it’s is an elite-driven movement, where Ezra favors NIMBYism, the geographic distribution of US cities, an abundance-driven approach to health care, what to do about fertility decline, how the U.S. federal government might prepare for AGI, whether mass layoffs in government are justified, Ezra’s recommended travel destinations, and more.

The interview covers a lot of territory. Check it out for yourself. I present two excerpts below:

On the abundance agenda as an elite movement

COWEN: Is the abundance agenda primarily a view of elites? And insofar as it succeeds, it will succeed to the extent that politics is not directly ruled by democratic forces?

KLEIN: I don’t know that I think that’s true, but it’s always a little bit true. In my own head, I think there are two kinds of policy and procedure overhang. One is the kind people actually want. A lot of NIMBYism is popular at the level at which it is happening.

But then, there’s a kind that comes from drift. It doesn’t end up being in the book, but I wrote a Times piece about this. I don’t know if you tracked the story a while back that there was this public toilet being built in Noe Valley in a park — I used to live near this park — that was hooked up for water. The cost estimate was $1.7 million. They released a ribbon cutting for this. [laughs] They came out to announce that they had gotten the money from the State of California to build this $1.7 million toilet.

Then my colleague, Heather Knight, back then at the San Francisco Chronicle, reported on this, and people freaked out. They were not happy that the city had gotten $1.7 million for a toilet. They thought, “Why?” I went and tracked down, how does a toilet get to $1.7 million? One of the justifications from Rec and Parks in SF was, “Look, we’ve built all these other toilets that were $1.6, $1.7 million, and nobody complained about that.”

It’s this baroque process where you have seven, eight, nine agencies. You have all these public comment periods. There are all these rules on the grant proposal, and how that goes out, and what the procurement is, and how you do the bids on the contracts. Nobody asked for that. That’s drift. That is process building on top of itself. That is nobody really having the power to say no or wanting to go through the difficulty of saying no.

I cut that differently from some of the — there are places where people do not want to see an affordable housing complex built down the block. Then there are places where people would actually like to have an affordable public restroom next to the playground where there are kids who — I’ve been through this period of mine very recently — who are not fully potty-trained, playing. They’re not out there hoping that we can add $1.3 million in cost by process; they just don’t really know that it has happened.

COWEN: If the abundance agenda is, to some extent, an elite movement, it seems that high density, for the most part, is bad for elites. In California, very wealthy elites — they want to move to Woodside. In Northern Virginia, they want to move to McLean. Does this mean the NIMBY part of the movement is just never going to get very far? That you can take a bunch of places, say, near metro stops, and allow for somewhat denser housing, but it will stop there.

KLEIN: Is that true, though? I live in New York City now, and my sense is, very wealthy elites — while they have a weekend house or vacation house, possibly in the Hamptons, they live in Manhattan in glass towers, or they’ve started to buy really expensive property in Brooklyn or in —

COWEN: But that’s one state, right? The country as a whole — the elites want the ranch two hours from Houston.

KLEIN: It seems they want both, to me. I feel like, the elites of DC live in McLean — that was true 20 years ago, and it feels less true now. You still live there, but is that really what people do when they get rich in DC now? I feel like they buy expensive DC property because DC got safer, and the food got better, and all the things that everybody knows.

Kludgeocracy and DOGE

COWEN: You know full well Steven Teles’s work on kludgeocracy. We have at least 50 years of the kludge that is just accumulating. Everyone in government knows about this. It’s not some secret. Various administrations have tried to address it. Al Gore did a bit — that was fine, but it didn’t really stop it. I don’t see that there’s any other recipe besides quite a bit of disruption. Again, there’ll be future administrations to sort it out.

Like the New Deal agencies — they weren’t so great to begin with. They didn’t have experience or data or staffing, but over time, pieces fell into place. Maybe the options are just more and more Steven Teles’s kludgeocracy or we take some chances today and do some things that actually hurt. Then over an 8- to 12-year period sort it out with AI and most of all, with future administrations, I don’t really see what the alternative is.

KLEIN: Well, I think there are two questions here. Let’s say there’s a good version of this and a bad version of this. I’ll outline the way I see both. Let me start with a good version of this. If I was saying what I hope the story of this period will ultimately be, I have to describe it as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which I think is a little bit of what you’re saying.

My critique of Democrats is, they became culturally process- and bureaucracy-obsessed. They saw the state and inside their own agencies, inside things they, in theory, run, they were anything a lawyer said you had to take as holy writ. No matter how off the wall or stringent the interpretation of what was clearly a looser original statute was, it was careful. Every process had to be followed to a T. Democrats, in theory, the party of government, cannot run government effectively because of some of the reasons you just described and some of the reasons I just described.

Then in comes Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and if they have proven anything, it is that a lot of the things that previous administrations — by the way, Democratic and Republican — treated as inviolable were just not. They weren’t real. They were norms, not rules, norms not laws. It is clear that some of the firings were illegal. Clearly not all of them. It is clear that some of the withholding of money is illegal. My gut is, having seen the five-four decision the other day at the Supreme Court which went against the Trump administration — but it was a five-four decision — it’s not going to be all of it.

There is a lesson that is being taught here by Musk, which I think liberals have to look at very uncomfortably, which is that things that they treated as facts of the system that could not be in any way altered and then used as excuses for low-performing government services for genuinely . . . Probably what Elon Musk is calling waste and what I would call waste are not the same thing, but there is what I would think of as a lot of waste. They allowed a civil service system to emerge and evolve that everybody knows is crazy. Everybody knows it’s crazy.

Here comes Musk and Trump — antithesis. I don’t think they’re trying to make things work. I don’t think it’s zero-based budgeting. I don’t think they’re holding things to a standard. I think they’ve cut off huge amounts of lifesaving work. I think they are creating a lot of risk in parts of the system that could really blow up. I think what they want is control, not a working government.

Authoritarianism in the US and Abroad | Robert Wright & Almut Rochowanski

0:00 Almut’s first-hand acquaintance with authoritarianism
2:00 Trump 2.0’s authoritarian hallmarks
19:13 What should worry us most about Trump 2.0?
25:51 Trump 2.0 vs post-Soviet oligarchy: compare and contrast
32:44 Is Trump an ethno-nationalist?
38:38 Heading to Overtime

The whole discussion is interesting, but I'd like to call your attention to the discussion at 19:13, where Wright poses the question: How worried should we be? That is, how close are we to losing the republic and tipping over into a full-blown authoritarian state, if not in name, but in practice? Her reply (c. 19:58):

Rochowanski: All of this happens on grade, right? Like on a curve like it's already this is already it has already happened in a way. And positionality comes in very much here. Like if you've been a migrant belong to certain groups of migrants in this country this has already been your reality for a very long time, for decades possibly. It's not for nothing that ICE has the reputation that it has. It's just you know until recently this happened to uh migrants of different classes and now it happens to migrants who are at Ivy League graduate programs. That is new, right.

But this is you know in many ways that has already been true. I mean and certainly you know like been there. I mean I remember you know I was already here and already doing this work you know, when Citizens United happened. And like sort of the the howling and gnashing of teeth that that was heard around the time. Saying like this is going to be the end of the republic. And guess what? You know this is going to be the old lead us into the oligarchy and it very much looks like it has? So in a way like you should have been worried a long time ago.

Later, they're discussing Roe vs. Wade (c. 24:37):

Rochowanski: You know like. you really shouldn't do victimhood Olympics and all of that. But in the end you know women still are, sort of our rights are the most disposable of all, the the ones about which one can you know reasonably have discussions about, like they are up for debate and other things are not so much up for debate. Like freedom of speech. But I mean yeah it does certainly like there's something new about it. I don't want to deny that; I don't want to like you know sort of like say, oh nothing to see here. Not at all. But I just, you asked me like should we be worried and my point is you should have been worried a long time.

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