The last 3 years have led me to a deep philosophical acceptance of Milton Friedman’s principle that effective politics is often about getting the wrong people to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Much as I detest Trump as a person, he sometimes rises to that level.
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This generally happens when he’s at his most random GAN-like petty level of grievance-driven button pushing. He sometimes does right thing for wrong reason.
But the more he thinks he knows what he’s doing (as in “business”) the less the chances of him being accidentally right
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Barbell principle: I’ll take either a GAN bot-politician OR a wonk who works hard to master difficult policy areas.
Shitshows happen when careful wonks try random-bot player style (they’re never random enough) or when random-bot players pretend they have achieved wonk-mastery.
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There’s a general principle here: you are weakest around your history of unprocessed failures, where you have not reconciled a sense of your own competence with the outcomes you got. You keep trying to prove you still have it. Every new attempt is an attempt to revise history.
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Especially if you succeed later in a game you see as lower status, you’ll even more desperately try to recenter your rep around the high-status failure and distance yourself from the low-status success. Trump failed at actual business, succeeded in a reality show about business.
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Trump is more dangerous on business/trade policy than on race relations or immigration precisely because he *thinks* he knows what he’s doing, and is not just trying to push the buttons that get the biggest rise out of his targets, or spitballing random opinions
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Imagine a multiple choice test where a canny test-setter always includes one tempting, seemingly intuitively right answer, a counter-intuitive right answer that takes expertise, and 2 red herrings
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A random guesser would score 25%
A true wonk would score 25% too (100% in expertise areas, falling for intuitive wrong option in 75%)
Guesser who goes intuitive in shallow expertise areas would do worse than 25%.
So would wonk who second guesses themselves in expert areas
Replying to
I’d like to see an argument that nature is kinda like such a canny test setter
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The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
😂
That’s what slouching towards utopia looks like sometimes I guess.
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