Conversation

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 ā€œbusinessā€) 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
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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. šŸ˜‚ That’s what slouching towards utopia looks like sometimes I guess.