Overton window fragmented such that it is currently non-overlapping. Some fragments consider the behaviors that Snowden reported on abhorrent; others consider them fine; still others think it's a moot point because they are powerless and can't do anything about it anyway; and others think it's a moot point because they're going to overthrow the government and remake it in their image anyway.
We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.
You can see this in the framing over ICE, and before that the response to BLM: a lot of Americans want an unaccountable paramilitary police force.
You're not going to get serious opposition to mass surveillance until you kill the desire of curtain twitchers to report their neighbors to the Gestapo. People will even install their own mass surveillance cameras linked to the police! (Ring etc)
Historically, one of the biggest issues that the Gestapo (and I would imagine any other such organisation) had to deal with was all the false neighbour and similar complaints from the "curtain twitchers" getting in the way of the actual surveillance and persecution work.
Idaho has had an in-migration of retired cops and neonazis (insert Venn diagram here). There are other places in the country that have a reputation for being hostile to non-white, non-straight, non-authoritarians. Some of them like to larp as revolutionaries, and some notable tech billionaires and VCs post sympathetic screeds about these people, but would never deign to live among them.
But this doesn't add up to Civil War anytime soon.
I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.
History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
There is nothing like "the most powerful", though.
Already at individual level, even the last "powerless" isolated homeless can go out, steal a gun and start to kill random people in the street, no matter how wealthier and more prominent in martial art they are.
And at geopolitical level, representations are even more scattered. "Swallow its pride" might work with small groups, but at larger scale, there is no nation that can prevent some of its own side of the line to go into asymmetric engagement. Even in the most efficient totalitarian government, there will always be insiders willing to get rid of a head that is is considered weak with outsiders and abusive with insiders, and hurt in all reachable manners the outsiders.
>People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
That really sounds like "prediction are hard especially about the future"; as everyone is basically operating with limited knowledge, limited resources to acquire and process accurate data, biological and cultural biases. Streets are not exactly crowded with legions of buddha acknowledging each other enlightenment by mere deep and significant sights. Plus rationality is unable to serve as foundation for itself.
The current success of red team and Trump in the US is an excellent example of this from the last decade--one can make the argument that blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard, and now have gotten their teeth kicked in as a result.
(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
Corporate Dems lose because they have become indistinguishable from their donor class and have failed to institute significant changes that would actually improve people’s lives. They are a captive opposition.
I was certainly think of U.S. red vs. blue politics. I think it's bidirectional though: blue team doesn't realize how unpopular some of their key policy agendas are with red-team America, which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections. But red team doesn't realize the extent to which urban America has moved on from the cultural values of the 1980s, and both how numerous and how devoted their opposition is to their ideals. In reality, the teams are fairly evenly matched in both numbers and strength of conviction. But neither team will admit that, thinking that it's just a few errant radicals that are being manipulated by shadowy forces (Bill Gates, George Soros, and the NYTimes are the bogeyman for the reds; Trump, Miller, Bannon, and Fox News are the bogeyman for the blues). It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
You can probably div up some factions just based off voting data. Red team made it in with just about 1/3rd of the voting population. About 1/3rd of the voting population didn't vote. Just if we're trying to put some numbers to something, those should be verifiable at least. Doesn't say why 1/3rd didn't vote, so it's just 1/3rd unknown faction.
> which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections
Have you seen the midterms polling?
> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.
> People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs.
Well that’s an unjustifiably negative view of the population’s capacity for agency and downplays local social dynamics, and also I’d suggest you are overstating how much influence the media has on personal beliefs.
> The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK).
Yes, to conservatives boys playing girls sports (whether it’s one or a thousand examples) is a bigger deal than Pakistan’s domestic situation because to them it is Exhibit A of America’s cultural decline and if you can’t at least understand how and why they think that (nobody said you have to agree with it) then you’ve just proven the point of the person you were replying to. Perceived cultural and societal decline is far more important to the citizen of any particular country compared to something happening on the actual opposite side of the world to a society that is nothing like, and has no connection to, their own. What happens in his own society to its values, customs, and beliefs will definitely directly affect a citizen of that society and his children. What’s happening to the Pakistanis won’t.
Yes, but the key word here is percieved. Almost any form of change can be sold as decline under that rubric. People who objected to Loving v Virginia legalizing interracial marriage probably called it "societal decline". Certainly we got that with legalization of gay marriage. Both of those continued to become more popular after the legal change. People hate change. A lot of people hate those who are different from them. That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
Anyway, as gasoline prices continue to tick up we shall see what price people put on the culture war.
> That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new. Not saying we should all become Luddites, but in any culture long-standing and deeply held beliefs have served some purpose, logically, that contributed to a society's continued stability.
And sure, people will pay attention to gasoline price increases that directly affect them, as opposed to increases in gas prices on the other side of the globe, obviously.
> From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new.
Americans are particularly susceptible to taking comfort in this idea, simply because America is big enough that they can. But even Americans are ill served by ignoring large scale trends: urbanization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
These trends are bigger and operate unopposed on a global scale. If you think in terms of red and blue teams sloshing back-and-forth, you're going to get blindsided.
> rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
Actually this is isolated to Europe. Russia, Africa, Asia (particularly China), the Middle East, America, and South America don’t subscribe to this nonsense, particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena.
And last I checked Europeans can’t even fill their girl quotas because it turns out most girls have no interest in leading or sitting on the board of a company. So don’t pretend like whatever this is is inexorably taking over the world. As a pretty funny aside, in Australia the biggest corporate fuckups of the past 10 years have been overseen by women (Optus, Auspost). So inexorable. When impostor syndrome comes true, you might say.
As a side note, this thread is a prime example of the point I was making: that people are stuck on the object level of "what should a society's values be?", rather than being able to zoom out to the meta level of "there are different groups that all have different sincerely-held beliefs about what a society's values should be, and each of them believes their version of reality is righteous and inevitable."
Yeah, and yet women in both India and China make up a laughable minority of business leadership. There’s a huge gap between getting a degree, which is trivial these days, and running a business and leading others, and it turns out that in general women don’t like/aren’t good at running businesses or leading others.
This is a bit like the female STEM problem. In the west there is all this crying about how STEM fields are dominated by males, but even when there are initiatives to push young girls into math and science at an early age, it turns out that most aren’t interested in STEM subjects or as good at them as males are. And instead of accepting the obvious (that males and females have population level preference differences), many people choose to see the eventual result (more male doctors, scientists, and engineers) as evidence of sexism. lol.
Elena Nabiullina is the Russian central bank governor. Sanae Takaichi is Japan’s prime minister. Samia Suluhu Hassan is president of Tansania. Hana Al Rostamani is CEO of First Abu Dhabi Bank. Claudia Sheinbaum is president of Mexico. Tarciana Paula Gomes Medeiros is CEO of Banco de Brazil.
> particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena
Hence why I said this. And naming the handful of exceptions you can think of doesn’t invalidate my point, which was that there is no inexorable wave of female leadership in the global business sector. Even where it is legislatively mandated (Europe), businesses can’t hit the targets.
Again, if a society has been around for awhile they (specifically their leadership) are doing something right in terms of their culture, societal organisation etc, yeah?
That is a non-sequitur. Many societies and governments (the leadership you're referring to) are not "doing something right blah blah blah." They're using "tradition", "culture" "respect for the past" as a means of controlling their populace and hanging on to power. You're conflating society with government.
And you are trying to separate them mentally as if they wouldn’t have a close relationship in a society that has existed for many generations. You seem to be suggesting that controlling a populace and ‘hanging on to power’ are necessarily inconsistent with governing a society. I can think of examples where clearly hanging on to power and working advantageously for the society don’t coincide (run of the mill African dictatorships come to mind), but there are other cases where a government’s self-interested control and domination of its population clearly coincide(d) with a society’s well being at the population level (Sparta, China). Perhaps we are referring to difference timescales here - I’m talking about, let’s say, 250 years minimum. But the longer the better (think: certain Chinese or Indian hierarchies).
Blue team played appeasing centrists, tepidly allowing to move the politics to the right. Forever suppressing less centrist parts. That is why they lost. They acted like being lower at the pecking order and lost.
Also, electorally the difference was small. The real big problem was the "they go low we go high" ideology, in allowing supreme court be biased so much to the right, reacting too late to gerrymandering, forever trying to be accommodating to republicans.
Not really... the blue team pushed hardly anything at all, and people got tired of things gradually getting worse while the government did nothing, so they voted for the other guys (who made things worse more quickly). Same story as the AfD. Seems like the only guys in politics who have remembered the government is supposed to help people are the bad guys (who also don't help people, but realise they have to look like they will)
People treating their political party as a “team” is one of the biggest problems we have right now as a society, so I find this language of “red team” and “blue team” extremely concerning.
> blue team failed to recognize the actual pecking order, and pushed too far and too hard
I'm not sure what this means, other than failing to recognize the role and extent of "red team" media, as well as failing to address the gerontocracy problem internally? You can see how absurdly tilted the playing field was when Biden was ruled too old and incoherent but the same standards don't apply to Trump.
I think this is overly simplified. The other reason people fight is that they feel they have no chance otherwise or they feel like their values are attacked. Small group that fight dont think they are stronger, they think they are right and willing to sacrifice (or feel like they have nothing to loose, or just feel hate so much).
Also, more confident about own power go to war because they want to. See WWII - it does not matter how many concessions would be done to nazi, the ideology itself demanded the war. That is why it happened.
Or look at Iran war. Iran was making concessions, USA attacked anyway because it wanted to. American leadership valued war and lethality and wanted to demonstrate it. Irans strategic appeasement was seen as sign of weakness.
Or look at Canada trade war. Canada does not think it is stronger, it thinks concessions will lead to further bullying from stronger neighborhood.
The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war).
Iran didn’t agree to all US/Israel points. Iran felt that they have leverage and can resist. (On the other side, Iran’s leverage/power was not obvious enough to US administration, so US started the war hoping to win quickly).
Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense. e.g. Vietnam didn’t win the war on the battle field, US got politically exhausted/tired and retreated (non-military victory is still a victory)
In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
> The parent point still stands. Poland and England and everybody could have just not resisted, and accepted occupation, then there would be no war. (Most probably slavery or something, but not war)
It does not stand and frankly, you are guessing too much about history and motivations of past actors.
The plan for Poland was literal genocide, so no. The plan was not "the occupation" the plan was "the place is ours now, the people who lived there are about to be removed and killed within 2 generations". The difference between "there is a war" and "we are violently removing locals and killing them" is immaterial.
The implementation of that plan even started. Besides, an American once said "slavery is the war against people".
> Guerrilla groups fight because they believe they can win / make s difference, not necessarily in military sense.
The problem here is that this claim is based on imagining what guerrilla groups fight for rather then past reading about what their motivations really were. It is easy to make claim about groups or peoples motivations and then project them on past people. It is not the same as taking effort to analyze motivations of those groups and then making claims.
> In all cases groups that fight believe they can win somehow eventually. Brainwashed suicide bombers, also believe (less due to ambiguity, more due to brainwashing part)
And again, you are making confident claims based on imagined motivations - or outcomes.
Based on everything I thus far know about WWII, I do not have the impression that Hitler wanted war [1], nor do I have the impression that their ideology demanded it.
If you also read what they published about themselves, instead of only what others wrote about them, the whole thing becomes a lot more nuanced.
Why do we need to go to the Stone Age, maybe we go to Pre-cold war diversity of said windows? Or to Cold War stalemate with just a lot more actors?
I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.
Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).
If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.
India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.
Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.
Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?
This is part of it. Previously governments felt the need to hide skullduggery, but the Trump admin doesn't even bother to pay lip service to this, so to the public revelationa about whatever the Obama admin was up top don't really register. And the political polarization where the mere word "Obama" gets half the population for thing at the mouth doesn't help.
All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
Sounds like you want a capital-P Professional, but one who is willing (and permitted) to do direct consulting.
That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent.
So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.
This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't!
Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.
A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.
When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.
Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.
And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.
I think it's more than "you need to know them". You need to be a friend to them and do things for them in turn. Play a part in the mutual help network. If many people free ride on it, it dies.
I think you're making my point though, all of those connections required "knowing a guy", and the odds that for all the problems you might need expertise for, you won't know enough guys.
And it sounds like they did the work 'under market' which implies they don't do very much of it.
For your experience to be generally available for all people and all skills, I think you need a market.
Opus 5 specifically seems to be affected by a severe case of turbo-encabulationitis, almost as if it was trained to spit out as complex of sentences as it can.
And may your deity of choice help you if you decide to venture on subjects which you don't have a deep understanding of, as half the sentences it generates will be (barely) cohesive.
> almost as if it was trained to spit out as complex of sentences as it can.
It probably was, at least inadvertently.
Very easy to imagine that one of the post-training step (RLHF, DPO etc) reinforced the "sounds clever" behaviour.
I knew which car it was instantly based on the headline - I go back and forth on whether to get one or to continue to abuse my 2000s Matrix manual which is like the GRC's puny brother.
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