It's something worth thinking about, because it's trivially true one could be a socialist and socially conservative, the same way someone can be "socially liberal and fiscally conservative," and so on. More precisely, it's trivally true one can believe anything.
What the author is leaving out (and this is what makes it just a complaint, rather than analysis) is why the coalition formed. Instead, he just says "The mystery is why," and hand-waves it as "whatever the reason..." But it's the reason that's central to the issue. This didn't happen out of nowhere.
Some of the reasons are just arbitrary. It is just coalition arithmetic. There's an argument that it was racial politics that flipped the parties (cf. Carmine and Stimson, Issue Evolution (1989)). It's disputed, but it's less ideological than it is political calculus (at least in America). People want to win elections. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights. And then eventually, Nixon looked at a map in 1972 and turned it into strategy. Nobody sat down and reasoned from Marxism to racial equality, it's the side-effect of a two party system. You can say the same for why there are a lot of conservatives who are both fiscally and socially conservative, so much that being "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" became a meme and clarification.
The other reason is de-industrialization. In the 50s, if you were young and left-wing, you go to your union hall. The labor movement was a huge part of the ground operations for the Democratic Party. Fast forward to today. The same person would probably be going to college, in large part because manufacturing employemnt has been dropping for decades. The factory is not culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. The campus is culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions.
That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics, but what they got instead was black workers taking over and bringing their own institutions with them: the black church, spirituals as organizing songs, people reading Lenin and scripture in the same evening, and so on. The author of the FT article is being pretty narrowminded or is just simply ignorant, to talk about "moderate socialism" and ignore the history of black communism, which is as significant as it gets, at least in the United States.
So the fusion -- even if it's not necessary nor sufficient for left-wing politics -- makes sense, and extends beyond race. We're looking at a social phenomenon where groups of people are left out, either by not having money or being the wrong kind of person. And I think when we're talking about a "culturally moderate socialism", it's inevitably going to invite the question "Who gets to count?" I don't have any theories on whether this is 'good' or bad for socialism, and I'm not interested in debating pros and cons of leftist versus neoliberal theories, but that's where it comes from, and I think the author should at least bother to think about it before dismissing it as a "mystery".
As a non-leftist and therefore an outside observer on these things, it seems to me that the "left" (= Democrats) really blew their messaging from, say, 2016 to 2024.
They moved too far to culturally left issues (gays, trans, and immigration, in particular), to the point that they lost the factory workers who were economically liberal but socially conservative. Those people were made to feel that if they had reservations about gay marriage, or trans people in womens' sports, or immigrants in the numbers (and lack of documentation) that were happening, then they were viewed as moral lepers, incapable of redemption by anything short of permanent abasement for their views. There was nowhere for them to go that would represent their economic interests without cultural suicide.
Well, that didn't work out for the Democrats. Too many of their normal base of voters (the blue collar workers) turned their backs, and we got Trump twice.
The complaint is that if you strip the controls out, then you're no longer betting on diet. Because whoever maintains a fully plant-based diet is drawn from a population that 'probably' smokes less, drinks less, sees doctors, sleeps, blah blah. True.
But nobody constructs elaborate arguments about hypothetical Oreo-vegans because they're worried about hypothetical Oreo-vegans. The same person who wants a randomized control trial about how 'healthy' a plant-based diet is versus an omnivore diet will happily take creatine on the strength of a forum post.
A thought experiment: bet money on who you think will live longer. Someone vegan or someone who isn't. No whining about controls like "how well planned is the diet", how much they exercise, if they smoke, and so on. Just a deadpool bet at a dive bar.
Ultimately, I've never found any of this research showing that vegan diets are good for you to be worth the controversy. It's not that 'veganism' is intrinsically better than eating meat. Fiber up, saturated fats down, and so on, and a vegan diet is a very good implementation of it. I have a feeling the reason why it makes peoples throats so tight has nothing to do with health.
This does make me think about Kuhn's concept of scientific revolutions and paradigms, and that paradigms are incommensurate with one another. Since new paradigms can't be proven or disproven by the rules of the old paradigm, if an LLM could independently discover paradigm shifts similar to moving from Newtonian gravity to general relativity, then we have empirical evidence of an LLM performing a feature of general intelligence.
However, you could also argue that it's actually empirical evidence that general relativity and 19th century physics wasn't truly a paradigm shift -- you could have 'derived' it from previous data -- that the LLM has actually proven something about structurally similarities between those paradigms, not that it's demonstrating general intelligence...
His concept sounds odd. There will always be many hints of something yet to be discovered, simply by the nature of anything worth discovering having an influence on other things.
For instance spectroscopy enables one to look at the spectra emitted by another 'thing', perhaps the sun, and it turns out that there's little streaks within the spectra the correspond directly to various elements. This is how we're able to determine the elemental composition of things like the sun.
That connection between elements and the patterns in their spectra was discovered in the early 1800s. And those patterns are caused by quantum mechanical interactions and so it was perhaps one of the first big hints of quantum mechanics, yet it'd still be a century before we got to relativity, let alone quantum mechanics.
I'm working on a Yelp alternative called Vibehuntr -- just something different to browse venues using Google's API, with a social layer so I can see what my friends like. It's very rough around the edges right now and it might be completely different by next week. It's been a fun experiment in vibe coding on a full stack. https://vibehuntr.io
Depending on the story, the examples have to be adjusted. But of course, logical reasoning from humans cannot be replicated just like that, by the machines.
The real question is this: Suppose a person was great at reasoning the last 100 years, but with zero knowledge. That person might not attended any school, almost illiterate. But his reasoning is top notch. I don't know if you are familiar with Sultan Khan [1] for example.
With no formal training to absorb a lot of knowledge, that person is totally economically crashed. There is no chance of being competitive at anything, not involving muscles anyway. Now suppose that this person can complement his lack of knowledge with a magical knowledge machine. Suddenly he is ahead of a competition, involving people with 10 Phds, or doctors with 30 years of experience.
I was thinking about how the point of reading isn't to literally 'internalize' what you've read. When you're engrossed in a piece of literature, you don't remember the specifics of the last page you read. What's more important is what the book is doing to your mind as you read -- it triggers a set of processes that force you to imagine and therefore form connections that you haven't made before, even if subtle and unrelated to the content of the book.
It's the same with writing. Writing isn't just a way to produce a good piece of writing, it's what the process of writing does to your brain as you think aloud, connecting words and sentences together. The same with painting, gardening, and organizing your stamp collection. The final 'product' isn't actually important. The significance lies in the process of immersion from the creator and the people who witness it.
I just don't find that convincing. If every aspect of human planning, skill, and knowledge are reproducable via classical computing then it seems unlikely that consciousness is some special case that requires quantum processes.
Today's classical computing accomplishments are impressive, but nowhere near what a human can do. Perhaps someday soon a single AI could (in the words of Heinlein) "change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly" but that day is not yet here. If we struggle to build such a device, we might consider that our computers are too limited.
I have some family in Hong Kong that lived in public housing for the longest time. Some of the newer apartments were pretty good. 40th floor, nice view, free WiFi.
I agree. You don't need someone's ketamine use to explain why they're a Nazi.
You know who else uses a lot of ketamine? The rave scene, the queer scene, and people treating PTSD. And those are some of the most un-Nazi folks out there.
It's a dissociative drug. It can be used recreationally, it can be used therapeutically, and of course, for medical purposes.
Let's be real. Why is Musk a megalomaniac? Because he is a megalomaniac. The end.
The public impression of him radically changed in recent years, and -- like old friends and family trying to make sense of the person who "became someone else" after getting involved in a dark scene -- people are naturally looking for an understanding that can make sense to them.
I think many of us see the the through line in Musk's story the same way we can see how our friends who spiraled into chaos and self-destruction had always been fragile or angry or hurt or whatever, but for others who were never perceptive or open enough to have seen the already-troubled side of these people, a drug abuse narrative (which often can have truth to it) can help it all become less bewildering.
> Let's be real. Why is Musk a megalomaniac? Because he is a megalomaniac. The end.
Why, how, and when did he become a megalomaniac? Was he always this way? Did he start believing his own press at some point?
Body chemistry can affect how one cognates, perceives the world, and reacts to external (and internal) events. Half the world's population undergoes such effects naturally throughout their life:
It would not be surprising if folks who alter their brain chemistry without medical supervision may have their (perception of) reality changed due to it.
What the author is leaving out (and this is what makes it just a complaint, rather than analysis) is why the coalition formed. Instead, he just says "The mystery is why," and hand-waves it as "whatever the reason..." But it's the reason that's central to the issue. This didn't happen out of nowhere.
Some of the reasons are just arbitrary. It is just coalition arithmetic. There's an argument that it was racial politics that flipped the parties (cf. Carmine and Stimson, Issue Evolution (1989)). It's disputed, but it's less ideological than it is political calculus (at least in America). People want to win elections. Kennedy moved cautiously on civil rights. And then eventually, Nixon looked at a map in 1972 and turned it into strategy. Nobody sat down and reasoned from Marxism to racial equality, it's the side-effect of a two party system. You can say the same for why there are a lot of conservatives who are both fiscally and socially conservative, so much that being "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" became a meme and clarification.
The other reason is de-industrialization. In the 50s, if you were young and left-wing, you go to your union hall. The labor movement was a huge part of the ground operations for the Democratic Party. Fast forward to today. The same person would probably be going to college, in large part because manufacturing employemnt has been dropping for decades. The factory is not culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. The campus is culturally liberal. That's the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions.
That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics, but what they got instead was black workers taking over and bringing their own institutions with them: the black church, spirituals as organizing songs, people reading Lenin and scripture in the same evening, and so on. The author of the FT article is being pretty narrowminded or is just simply ignorant, to talk about "moderate socialism" and ignore the history of black communism, which is as significant as it gets, at least in the United States.
So the fusion -- even if it's not necessary nor sufficient for left-wing politics -- makes sense, and extends beyond race. We're looking at a social phenomenon where groups of people are left out, either by not having money or being the wrong kind of person. And I think when we're talking about a "culturally moderate socialism", it's inevitably going to invite the question "Who gets to count?" I don't have any theories on whether this is 'good' or bad for socialism, and I'm not interested in debating pros and cons of leftist versus neoliberal theories, but that's where it comes from, and I think the author should at least bother to think about it before dismissing it as a "mystery".