Evidence Suggesting Voter Fraud in Milwaukee

 I posted a version of this on twitter, but a) the writing format there is so ugly, and b) who knows how long that thread might last. So here it is for the record. 

I’ve been looking at the vote counts within Milwaukee, and there’s suspicious patterns in the data that need explaining. Proving fraud is difficult, but there’s a lot of irregularities here that point in that direction. First, the tl;dr, then the main analysis.

1. Democrat votes started increasing massively relative to Republicans after Tuesday night counts. This can’t be accounted for by explanations like heavily Democratic wards reporting later. When we look at the changes *within wards*, 96.6% of them favored the Democrats.

2. Democrats also improved massively against third party candidates, whereas Republicans and third party candidates showed similar changes to each other. Since there’s little incentive to manipulate third party counts, this implies that the big change after Tuesday night is in Democrat votes, not in Republican ones.  

3. When we compare different down ballot races, we find that Democrat increases within each ward were larger in races where the Democrat candidate was initially behind in the overall race on Tuesday night – that is, relatively more Democrat votes appeared in races where they were more likely to alter the outcome.

4. This result is easy to explain by fraud, but is much more complicated to explain by other explanations like Democrats mostly voting by mail. Most such theories predict all Democrat candidates should benefit in equal proportions within a ward, not that more votes come in exactly where they’re most needed.  

Ward-level vote counts are from the Milwaukee County Clerk at 7pm last night  and the archived version from the count as it stood on election night . 

This idea came from Spotted Toad, who’s been doing great work on this too. I’m looking at Presidential, Congress, State Senate and Assembly races. One way to look at what happened is to compare the percentage increase in votes for Republican Candidates versus Democrat candidates within each ward after election night.

For instance, suppose the Democrat candidate vote total went up 200% from initial counting to Thursday night. How much did the Republican vote total go up? If the distribution of votes before and after is the same, the percentage gains for each group should be similar, regardless of who was ahead.

This is very different from the normal reason where candidate totals in the entire state might change as counting goes on, as different reports come in from other parts of the city. That just shows that wards differ from each other. Rather, we’re testing whether the *same ward * should continue to find the same distribution of votes before and after Tuesday night. 

In other words, if the before and after distributions were the same, as votes come from the same pool, you’d expect that half the time, the Republicans got a slightly unlucky draw in the early votes, and end up improving their position (regardless of whether they ultimately win or lose). And roughly half the time, the Democrats should increase their votes by more. 

What actually happens? The Democrat candidate vote increases relative to the Republican candidate a crazy fraction of the time. The variable in question is percentage increase in Democrat vote totals for that ward (that is, the percentage change from Tuesday night to Thursday night), minus percentage increase in Republican vote totals. 

So a value above zero means that Democrat totals went up more than Republicans in that ward/race. A value of 500 means that the Democrats went up 500% in excess of the republicans (e.g. D votes grew 600%, R votes grew 100%). Here’s a graph of the histogram. 

You see an enormously right skewed distribution –tons of large gains for Democrats, very few gains for Republicans. Not only do Democrats very often increase more than Republicans, but when they do, it’s often by a colossal amount. 

Out of the 1217 ward/race combinations with non-missing early votes for both parties, 1037 saw relative increases for the Democrats, 37 saw relative increases for Republicans, and 143 were ties. Excluding the ties, the D “win” fraction here is 96.6%.  A remarkable feat!

Depending on how you assign ties, if this were a 50/50 coin (i.e. D and R were equally likely to gain relative to the other), the probability or p-value for this is between 10^-147 and a number Excel just lists as “0”.

So, this proves incontrovertibly that something about the count skews crazily towards the Democrats after 2am Wednesday. But it doesn’t prove what it is. Maybe they counted different types of ballots or something, but only starting at 4am. 

However, there’s one thing we can test – from which party’s votes is the weirdness coming from? We can answer things by looking at vote changes for other candidates – third party races, write-in candidates etc. 

We can be virtually certain that nobody is bothering to manipulate the vote totals for fringe, no-hope write-in candidates. These form a great placebo group – what might you expect the changes to look like for a group where nobody is manipulating the totals?

So let’s do the same thing as the earlier graph, but compare each part with “Miscellaneous”, which because the count is small, I aggregate together. I also limit the sample here to cases where there’s at least 5 votes for “Misc” in that ward by 2am Wednesday, to make sure that this isn’t coming from rounding (e.g. if you have only 1 vote, the minimum increase is 100%). 

What are we predicting to find? Well, if it’s the Democrat total that’s being wildly inflated, Democrats should also be increasing relative to Miscellaneous. Meanwhile, if Republicans are just being counted as normal, then their changes should look similar to the Miscellaneous Group.

And that’s basically what we find. First, Democrats vs Miscellaneous. Visually, the picture looks even more crazily skewed than the previous one. In terms of counts, Democrats improve relative to Miscellaneous in 520 ward/race observations. They tie 89 times, and Miscellaneous improves in relative terms just 3 times. That’s not a typo.

This corresponds to p-values between 10^-73 and 10^-177. The fraction of Democratic “wins” here (520/523), excluding ties, is a ludicrous 99.4%. 

So how do Republicans compare with Miscellaneous? It turns out that while they’re not exactly the same, they’re far, far more similar to each other than either is to the Democrats . Other than a few outliers (because “Miscellaneous” has very few votes in total, remember), the distribution is fairly symmetric around zero. 

In terms of counts, Republicans improve relative to Miscellaneous 179 times, Miscellaneous improves 251 times, and there are 74 ties. As a result, which p-value you get here depends enormously on how you allocate the ties. Give them to M, and it’s 10^-11. Give them to R, and it’s 0.55, or almost exactly chance (253 vs 251). 

Excluding ties, the R “win” percentage is 41.6%. So under some measures, they look slightly worse, but this ends up being affected by questions of rounding and the small vote totals for M. What’s incontrovertible is that D looks wildly, wildly different from either of them.

This is exactly what the null would predict, if votes before look like votes after. So this *does* roughly hold, but only when comparing Republicans vs Miscellaneous. This story is also inconsistent with the driver being something Trump did, like telling all his supporters to vote in-person. If so, why do changes in Miscellaneous votes look about the same? The important difference after Tuesday night, whatever you think it is, is coming on the Democrat side.

So maybe you’re wondering – are there reasons other than fraud that the ballots might be different before and after? If the ordering is random and they’re drawn from the same pool, no. But if each ward counts different types in a different order (those at 9am versus 4pm, or in-person versus mail-in), then this could happen. 

Whatever is making the vote distributions different before and after, it’s a factor that’s overwhelmingly just impacting Democrats, not Republicans. If you think it’s about in-person versus postal voting, you have to hypothesize that Republicans look kind of similar to Miscellaneous in this respect. This is possible, but not nearly as obvious. 

But there’s another more important aspect we can test here. In particular, if some of these Democrat increases are due to fraud, we would expect that the increases should be larger *when the fraud is more likely to impact the race. And since these include lots of down-ballot races like State Assembly Representatives, we have quite a lot of variation here. 

Sometimes the Democrat is way up after early counting, at which point it doesn’t matter much if they post big relative gains after that. But if the Democratic candidate is down early on, jacking up the total becomes much more important. I’m assuming that if the Party wants to rig votes, they’d also like to win as many races as possible for the least amount of rigging.

In other words, the comparison is now between two different races at the same ward. A Democrat voter comes to the ballot box or mailbox, and sees a number of races. For some, like President, it’s going to be a close call. For others, it might be a heavy favorite for the Democrat. 

The voter is a Democrat, so presumably he’s inclined to vote Democrat for both. We can compare within a given ward which of the two races showed bigger improvement for the Democrats in that particular ward after Tuesday night. 

Sure enough, the increase in Democrats relative to Republicans (the variable in our first histogram) is significantly higher when the Democratic race-wide vote share is lower during the early counting. In other words, within each ward, late vote counts break more heavily to Democrat in exactly those races where the change in votes is likely to affect the result.

How big is this effect? Well, one way to measure it is to see how many races it impacted. There were 8 races where Republicans were ahead on a two-party basis on Wednesday morning. By Thursday night, half of them had flipped to Democratic. By contrast, there were 19 races where the Democrat was ahead, and not a single one flipped to the Republicans. 

And again, let’s recall what we’re observing here. It’s not that the races flipped because suddenly wards that were known to be heavy Democrat strongholds started reporting in. Rather, more votes started coming in for Democrats relative to the ratio that was coming in for that exact same ward the previous night. Moreover, within each ward, the votes also skewed more for races that the Democrats looked like they might lose. 

Importantly, this finding is surprisingly hard to explain with the commonly cited reasons for Democrats pulling ahead overall. For instance, one of the claims is that mail-in ballots are counted late, and these are more heavily Democrat. In general, this doesn’t explain why within the same ward, some races later skew Democrat more than others.

The key part is that for each voter, the decision to take a mail-in ballot is common to all races. In other words, a single voter can’t vote for some races by mail, and others in person. So if your claim is that the overall skew to Democrats is a mail ballot effect, most versions of this explanation predict that all races should be equally affected.

To simplify the logic, consider a stylized example where all Democrats and Republicans vote straight ticket. More Democrats vote by mail, and these are counted late.  This would predict that Democrats overall would improve, but the expected improvement is the same for all races, regardless of whether the Democrat is ahead or behind. 

More ballots come in Democratic, they each vote for every Democrat, so all Democrats increase in the same percentage terms. This isn’t what we find. In the data, within a ward, the important races go up more than the unimportant races.

And this prediction, that all races should be equally affected, holds for a lot of other variations too. Does the answer change if every Democrat voter has a 90% chance of voting for each Democratic candidate, if this attitude is the same between Democrats who vote in-person versus those who vote by mail? No. The increase should be the same in all races.

The answer doesn’t even change if Democrat voters in general can’t be bothered as much voting for shoo-in candidates, and only cast their votes for tight races. As long as this instinct is the same in Democrats who vote by mail and those who vote in person, there should be no difference across races in how much they break late towards Democrats.

What you need is something complicated. Democrat voters can’t be bothered voting for candidates they like but who they know are going to win anyway, AND this instinct is somehow larger in Democrat voters who vote by mail than those who vote in person, AND there has to be a larger share of mail voting by Democrats overall. 

This may sound like a confusing and complicated explanation. And it is! That’s kind of the point. We’re now a long way from the simple explanation that Democrats vote more by mail. It’s not impossible, of course, and we can’t rule it out. There are other variants on this story, but if you think this is all about mail-in ballots, there has to be some difference *within Democrat voters* who vote by mail versus in person.

In other words, the bare fact is that races swung much more towards Democrats exactly for those races where the Democrats were down on Wednesday early morning. To explain this with mail-in ballots needs a very complicated story. To explain it with fraud needs a very simple story – you commit fraud more where the fraud matters more. 

This is why the evidence suggests fraud to me, but your mileage may vary here. I’ve tried very much to stick to the facts, because I don’t have any special ability to interpret the numbers above. Whatever is going in is crying out for explanation, and the simple alternatives don’t do it. To me, it looks pretty suspicious. 

A final question worth pondering. What should our null hypothesis be here? When we say “there’s no evidence of it”, we’re claiming “no fraud” as the null hypothesis. But as I’ve argued (by metaphor), the system of vote counting is so rickety and broken that this is an incredibly difficult null to justify. 

A metaphor for the likelihood of voter fraud, for people who insist that it's a conspiracy theory, or there's no evidence of it.

Suppose Amazon wanted to know how many packages it had. Packages were kept in warehouses all over the country. The system was different in every warehouse.

Some people need to move packages around, and there's a list of who is allowed to do that in each warehouse. But if you go in and say you're that person, nobody checks. If someone else has already done that for you when you arrive, you just get another package.

Some packages get driven around by people in their own cars, some get moved around by the post office, some by volunteers or low paid government employees, and in each case they're largely unmonitored - there's no clear record of which ones left or arrived.

Packages are, by common consent, valuable for people to take. But nobody investigates closely what happens in each place, and very rarely are package thieves caught.

For what package system other than "votes" would this be considered a reliable and acceptable system?

For what important corporate outcome, if you proposed this setup as a manager, would you not be fired?

If someone told you there was no evidence of package fraud, how plausible would that claim be?

I find the possibility of voter fraud entirely plausible, and that belief has nothing to do which party you think is doing it. At a minimum, I feel strongly that this possibility needs to be investigated more seriously than it is, given the evidence above.

The fate of great research

In one of the more poignant remarks to come from stand-up comedians, Conan O'Brien once wonderfully observed that, eventually, all graves go unattended. 

I was reading a while back this fantastic talk by Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research". Byrne Hobart linked to it in one of his newsletters, when describing the nature of remote work:

[Hamming]: "I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

[Hobart]: Working remote is a modern analog to Hamming’s closed-door policy: there’s an immediate productivity boost from reduced interruptions, but some of those interruptions are long-term course-corrections, and they’re valuable.

 Hamming's whole talk is fantastic, talking about how to do what he calls "great research"

And for the sake of describing great research I'll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn't have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon's information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. 

Well I now come down to the topic, ``Is the effort to be a great scientist worth it?'' To answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, ``Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together,'' or if it's a woman she says, ``It is as good as wine, men and song put together.'' And if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying to participate in those moments of discovery. They're always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared to go out and ask those who didn't do great work how they felt about the matter. It's a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.

So what happens when you do good research, or even great research? Does everything suffer the Conan O'Brien fate?

Let us start with a simple observation, so basic as to almost be trite.

All knowledge only exists in people's heads. 

In the limit, if great knowledge is written down in a book, and then people never read the book, in some practical sense, it may as well not have existed. Sometimes, it has to be rediscovered again and again, after being forgotten. This happened with the cure for scurvy, until vitamin C was isolated.

How does information get into people's heads? Well, they either have to read something, or get told it, or rediscover it themselves. 

So far, so obvious. 

For all the advances in technology, has our ability to read improved, or our ability to listen to conversation? Not obviously. Reading speed may have variation across people, but I've yet to come across anything indicating that it's improving. So let's assume that people's ability to read new source material is no better than in the past. 

Now, as you look out on the world, you see that ever more people are doing research, and writing books and papers. Even if some large fraction of this is junk, and some proportion is active stupidity and anti-knowledge, the amount of genuine new knowledge is surely going up every year. 

The amount of hours of life you have to read it all, even just the most important bits, in order to make advances at the frontier, is a little higher, but not much. And most of the increase happens at ages long past when you're likely to do any of Hamming's first-class work.

So how do people actually learn enough to advance knowledge? 

Well, one way is to spend longer studying and become more specialised. The number of genuine polymaths making contributions in lots of different areas seems to be a lot less than in the days of the Royal Society. This is not a coincidence. Every now and then you get a Von Neumann or a Frank Ramsey, but they are towering and rare geniuses.

The other fate of great research, which is less discussed, is that if it is not to be forgotten, it must be summarised. 

How much debate and experiment went into establishing that matter is discrete, and made of atoms, rather than continuous? Or that atoms contain protons, neutrons and electrons? These were colossal contributions, made in painstaking ways by very smart people, resolving a debate that had gone back to the ancient Greeks and before. How do we reward such great work? They become the first sentence of a chemistry class. "Matter is made up of atoms". Boom. Next. There simply isn't time. One can go back to first principles, and read the individual experiments of Dalton and others that established this - that certain combinations of gases tended to combine in fixed proportions, for instance. The Royal Society had the wonderful motto of "Nullius in verba" - take no man's word for it. This is a great aspirational attitude to have, but in practice one can't run all the experiments that make up all of human knowledge. You may well want to know what the experimental evidence actually is. But you probably will end up taking someone's word for it, somewhere, about how those experiments proceeded. How could it be otherwise? How many hours are there in a life?

For the true giants like Newton, their names stay attached to the principles they come up with. But even this is rare. Knowledge of authorship is additional bits of information that people have to carry around in their heads. Is it crucial to know who established each experiment? Or could the time spent learning this be better spent learning more actual facts or principles about the world?

In the fullness of time, if you actually do great work, the praise of posterity will sooner or later be that your work becomes a sentence or two in a summary of a textbook, a contribution to the body of research that every scientist must ingest as fast as possible in order to be able to spend the rest of their lives advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Every page you write, every concept you advance, competes for space in the heads of readers, the pages of textbook authors, and the minutes of this short life. The competition is brutal and Darwinian. Knowledge must evolve to get condensed into shorter and crisper forms, or it risks simply being forgotten. As the time increases, and the amount of new work increases too, the probability of one or other of these outcomes goes to one. 

In this respect, one of the great unappreciated works of public service are the efforts of those who do the reading and summarising. Scott Alexander is extremely high on this list - his summaries of other people's books are fantastic, often way more pithy than the original, and include important editorial judgment on strengths and weaknesses. Mencius Moldbug did a similarly great service by reading and synthesizing a huge number of old primary sources that you and I would never have come across otherwise. I have a strong suspicion that over 99% of people currently living who have read Thomas Hutchinson's Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence are no more than one degree removed from a Moldbug reader.

I think that from this point of view, one should also not be ashamed about mostly reading the abstracts of papers. You can convert the number of hours left in your life, to a number spent reading, to a reading speed, to a total number of pages of text that you will be able to absorb before you die. What shall that text contain? Every paper and book you read in its original and entirety is taking something from the budget available to other great works. Do budget constraints not bind, even for speed readers?

The other point that is worth noting is the disparity between fiction and non-fiction. Science can be summarised. History can be summarised. But fiction and poetry largely cannot, except without stripping out all the art and beauty that made them great. The idea of all of us reading only the cliff notes version of Shakespeare is simply too tragic to bear. But the result of this love is that fiction works stand a much higher chance of being forgotten altogether. 

If a man has a genetic mutation that is reproductively advantageous, in the short run, he has more children, and all his traits get passed on. Then his children have more children, and the advantageous gene and the other tag-alongs also get passed on. But roll the tape forward 100 generations, and the only thing left of the original man is the advantageous gene itself. This gets selected on, and the rest gets forgotten.

So too it shall be with memes. You may bequeath an entire volume, but after 100 generations of re-learning, only the crispest, shortest version shall remain. And that is your final contribution to posterity.

The thorny problem of inconstant judges

One of the periodic themes of this journal is that the reality of power is everywhere and always messy. I have described my conception that the most important high-level problem to be solved is well-defined and secure property rights in the state itself. This is a slightly more formalized way of saying "secure power".  I'm certainly not claiming originality in this idea - Moldbug's formalism is what got me started thinking about this.

In viewing matters this way, I think it's important to know what we're studying. Perfectly secure power in a governing regime seems to be somewhat akin to a perfectly efficient engine. 

In both cases, it's easy to design one on paper. The process is entirely straightforward! Fuel is mixed with air, then inducted into the cylinder, then the spark plug ignites it. What could be easier than that? There's an absolute monarch, and everyone just follows his orders.

And then when you actually implement the thing, you find all sorts of leakages due to annoying complications in details of the machine that you'd largely abstracted away from. Understanding these turns out in many ways to be more of an engineering problem than a pure science problem. 

But even though the perfectly efficient engine or perfectly secure monarch may be a platonic ideal, that doesn't mean that the forces preventing you from getting there should be viewed as mysterious. Indeed, if you do that, you'll have a very hard time improving things. Maybe you can be a menshevik, and slightly improve the design. Maybe you need bolshevism, to start with a new design that doesn't produce these specific frictions (although, of course, it will produce others, perhaps others you hadn't encountered or thought about).

More importantly, in either case you should care very much about how far away you are from the platonic ideal. Otherwise you're just committing Asimov's Relativity of Wrong. Is your government the equivalent of a nuclear power plant, or a coal power plant? And if the latter, how might you change that? Moreover, the messy world of the social sciences makes things hard. Physicists love to mock the social sciences as being unscientific, but there's no escaping the fact that we have to design this particular power plant based on the computational output of a large number of meat sacks, all designed slightly differently, all interacting with each other. 

The modern world presents us with very few serious monarchs to examine. This also liberates us from focusing on the specifics of what went wrong in any one case (what could Louis XVI have done differently? Lots of things, as it turns out). 

A lot of people on the dissident right have thought hard about the problem of delegation, which is definitely a first order problem, probably the largest one. No man rules alone, and the sovereign's decisions have to implemented by his subordinates. What are their incentives to implement it honestly, or competently, or not divert resources to themselves?

But there is another problem that I think gets relatively less focus. Which is the following: how does the monarch prevent himself from being psychologically manipulated or pressured by those around him?

Among the closest modern analogs to an absolute monarch is a US Supreme Court Justice. The analogy is not exact, because there's a very small-scale democracy going on within the nine of them. But this is voting at a level where your vote often might matter, and you know the parties, and it's a repeated game. 

In the court context, the delegation problem is how to make sure the court's decisions get implemented by lower courts, and by other governmental agencies. This is still challenging - what happens if lower courts routinely ignore your precedent, and you have to slap them down over and over (or just let your decision get undermined)? What happens if people just refuse to follow it? That used to be a big problem but is less so these days. 

But if you're on the right, the delegation question is not the central problem with the court today. The Republicans have long made a point of trying to get better, more conservative justices appointed to the court. And yet, as night follows day, maybe half of the supposedly conservative justices turn out to become liberals. Maybe if we vote for Trump, we can get some more rock-ribbed conservative justices like Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, John Roberts, or, increasingly, Neil Gorsuch. 

This problem seems to be wonderfully emblematic of the failures of the mainstream right. They keep losing. They know they keep losing. They are unhappy about the fact that they keep losing. And yet, their state of the art solution is just "push harder!". More of the same should do the trick! More voting. More rallies. More donations to National Review. More Republican Senators and Presidents, so we can get more Republican-appointed judges, just like...the same ones that put us in the unsatisfying position.  For republicans, it's basically a coin flip. Appoint the guy to the court, and maybe he turns out to be a stalwart judicial conservative, like Scalia or Thomas. Maybe he turns out to be mushy, like Roberts. Maybe he turns out to be a complete liberal, like Souter. 

If your best case scenario is a 50/50 chance at being right, congratulations, you getting to appoint every single judge results in a random walk over judicial appointments. Lose a single election, and it's downward drift.

At almost no point does it seem to occur to the mainstream right- why do half the Justices we appoint turn out to be traitors? And more importantly, what can we do to stop this happening? 

Perhaps, dear Republicans, this is a problem you ought to spend more time seriously studying, rather than just turning the same crank over and over and expecting different results

There are a few ways to think about what might be going on.

The first possibility is treachery. Everyone has to hew to a narrow set of Overton Window beliefs to get appointed. Prospective Supreme Court Justices are all skilled at concealing their true feelings, if such feelings should be undiplomatic. They're experts at saying the right thing to get ahead. Republican party chiefs will just never know what a person will do until he's finally unconstrained. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton put it. These guys don't get absolute power, but they get enough of it that when you can't force them to do what you want, they do as they please.

The main problem with this hypothesis is that it stumbles on the fact that Democrats never seem to have this problem. When the chips are down, and the issue before the court is politically charged, rather than just some arcane matter of trusts law, Democrat appointees always seem to toe the party line.

So if this is our explanation, we've largely just kicked the can down the road a little. Why is there treachery among Republican appointees, but not Democrat ones? Even if the field is littered with sociopath traitors, is there nobody talented enough to get appointed by a Democrat, then drop the mask and reveal their inner Scalia?

Let us instead consider an alternative. All these justices started out intending to be conservative, but instead buckle under the social pressure brought to bear upon them. 

From the comfortable distance of one's armchair, this seems like a small thing. So what if some law school students don't like you? 

Reader, do you know what it's like to be hated? I mean, viciously hated, smeared in the New York Times, denounced as a stoolie or a rapist or sexual harasser or an Uncle Tom, day in, day out? Publicly stabbed in the back by people you helped and trusted, over and over? Like the pressure brought to bear on people by hostile journalists and the police, this is something that it's easy to sneer at until it happens to you. 

The reality is that most people just aren't good at dealing with being hated in a vicious and public manner. Despite their best intentions, it sways their choices. 

It's tempting to explain this in terms of concrete quid pro quo arrangements. If you switch to writing liberal judgments, you get invited to better parties and events, or have more fun friends or whatnot. This is definitely part of it. But I suspect there's a pure psychology aspect too. 

To pile metaphor on metaphor, look at the home team advantage in sports. Mosokowitz and Wertheim looked at this. The main driver of the home field advantage is not that it makes the players perform better. I was always skeptical of this myself,even before this study. These are professional athletes, with huge amounts of money at stake. Do they just not try their hardest without cheering? As it turns out, no, the effect seems to mostly be on the referees. And this is nothing but pure psychological pressure, on people literally selected and professionally rewarded for impartiality. The referee is anonymous. He's not getting invited to any swank parties. Even if he makes a lousy call, it's very unlikely that he's going to be harassed by name. The cost is just fifty thousand angry people yelling at you if you grant the penalty kick, and the same fifty thousand cheering if you just let it slide. 

And I suspect this is a large part of what's going on with Republican appointed justices too. Most of these people are law school strivers. They've been groomed for success for a long time, told they were the smartest in their class, voted most likely to succeed in high school, all that stuff. Then, they get made into some lower court judge, where they get less power, but almost total deference. Yes, your honor! No, your honor. And if you do something controversial, what happens?  You are mostly just "a federal court judge in Hawaii". You are the epitome of the machine - a cog, implementing something, replaceable with another cog. No sense hating the cog! But once you're on the Supreme Court, you are now Chief Justice Roberts, and your choices reflect on you, not the machine. 

Look at smiling John Roberts in his confirmation hearing:

Do you think that, before he took on the job, this guy had any experience of being hated? To ask is to laugh. The words on everyone's lips were "looks like nice guy". Good luck with that. He's a nice guy alright.

This is part of what soft power is. It's not always just a euphemism for hard power in disguise, the polite note before the US air force crushes your town. The reality is that psychological constraints are real constraints. We can't see them, but that doesn't mean they're not there. Most people simply aren't good at dealing with this pressure, or at a minimum, will be worse at dealing with this pressure than they think they will be if they haven't yet been subjected to it. It's reminiscent of the Randall Collins point about violence. Most people also don't like inflicting random violence on people, except in a limited range of circumstances. 

Most people also don't like being yelled at with curses and hatred, even if that hatred is very unlikely to result in actual violence to them. Monkey brain knows what's going on. Monkey brain knows that an angry crowd yelling at you is highly correlated with you being dismembered. Monkey brain responds, for the same reason that you get queasy when walking on a glass floored skyscraper walkway. 

To solve the problem of the social pressure being brought to bear on Supreme Court Justices is probably a coup-complete or regime-complete problem - something you can't solve without first changing the government. A good giveaway for such things is if at any point they involve the step "next, we reform or replace the New York Times".

But if you were of the menshevik mindset, there is probably still progress that can be made. The petrol engine can be improved, even if we can't yet turn it into a fusion engine. 

In particular, one useful rule of thumb when judging appointees - what experience do they have with being smeared and hated? And do they have a personality likely to be more resistant to this, inasmuch as it's possible to forecast this. Are they naturally combative and devil-may-care, like Scalia? Do they thrive on having haters? Do they have a history of being outspoken? Unfortunately, this tends to make it hard to get confirmed in the first place these days, so that may not be possible.

In an ideal world, they might have some concrete experience with similar jobs. One obvious case - running a medium sized business, and having to fire people. Yeah, you'd better believe that will toughen you up. Can you inflict pain upon people, and deal with their anger and contempt, while keeping your eye on the larger purpose? Have you had to command troops in battle, and know that making the wrong call on whether to breach that door will likely result in either your guys getting shot, or civilians being shot?

Ironically, the main pre-job exposure people have to being hated is from Democratic and media efforts during the confirmation hearings. While you have very small number of observations here, I suspect that Clarence Thomas being viciously smeared before he started probably had a searing effect on his choices. It likely made him permanently bitter, as there was basically no worse smears that could be thrown at him than what he faced before he started the job. But he knew what his enemies were like,  and exactly what their good opinions were worth, and wasn't going to cave to them after that. 

An interesting question will be to see what happens to Kavanaugh. I think it's easy to overextrapolate the Thomas outcome, and ignore the possibility that some people overreact in the other direction - they cave harder sooner in order to make the smearing stop, or they rationalise it. I'll show I'm the bigger man by not being the right wing monster they accused me of being, and instead implement this unprincipled exception for liberalism. 

You may think this doesn't really apply to monarchs. They can just fire the hostile press, or implement lese majeste laws to execute people who insult them. 

But remember, the pain point is psychology. What if you get a monarch who just really wants to be loved, and can't deal with being despised, or even just with causing necessary pain on citizens? 

I don't hold myself out as any kind of expert, but that's certainly the description I've read of Louis XVI. He wore civilian attire, rather than military. A man of the people! That worked out well for him.

Maybe you think this is all old hat. Very well. Here's a simple test. Take the sentence 

"Previously conservative judges are susceptible to public pressure, and probably will end up changing their views to conform to it."

Ask yourself - would this apply to...me? Would I be susceptible to public pressure, and change my views to conform to it?

Ha, no, of course not. Biases for thee, cold-iron robotic logic for me. 

If you are certain that the answer is "no", and yet you've never had any firm experience of resisting exactly such pressure, I suggest that there is a large chance that you may be greatly underestimating the forces at work here. 

To paraphrase one half of my nom-de-plume:

Hath not a judge eyes? hath not a judge hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you scream in his face, does he not flinch? If you mock him, does he not feel stung? If you slander him, does he not bristle? If you selectively apply pain, does he not learn the lesson?

The Covid19 death rate is higher than 2%

I understand why Moldbug wanted to write a post on the coronavirus. As usual, Moldbug was ahead of the curve. The reason is that he reads sources that other people don’t read. If you read the same as everyone else, you think the same as everyone else. This is the main (respectable) reason I’m on twitter, (other than the shitposting which is like terrible cheap carbs of reading material). 95% of it is garbage, but the remaining 5% is stuff you just don’t find anywhere else.

And what Moldbug, and MorlockP, and Loki Julianus and some others have figured out is that there’s a decent chance that this is the start of the shit hitting the fan, but nobody in the west seems much concerned yet. It’s a fascinating insight into how people respond to gradually unfolding disaster. We expect disaster to strike out of the blue. One day, the Soviets nuke us, or an asteroid strikes. Or, failing that, we expect to see a fairly rapid and linear growth of things getting worse, like in a disaster movie where the plot has to unfold in a predictable manner to all be wrapped up in 90 minutes.

What our instincts don’t work well for, however, is exponential growth. It just doesn’t fit people’s casual intuitions about what’s going to happen. The probably mythical story about the inventor of chess is that he asked to be paid as a reward by the king in a grain of rice for the first square, two grains for the second square, four for the third square, and so on. Of course, the point of the story is that the king was an idiot and by the end figured out he couldn’t possible pay. Ha ha ha. Nobody would be that dumb.

Well, here’s some grains of rice accumulating.

If you take the number of coronavirus cases reported, it’s close to an exponential curve. Not quite, however. If you plot things on a log scale, you can see the rate of increase in reported cases slowing down.

By eyeballing the log scale graph, you can see that things started to decline starting around Jan 30^th. If you run a regression of log number of cases on number of days since outbreak, from Jan 30^th until February 13^th, you get a coefficient on time of 0.126, or e^0.126= 13.4% growth per day. If you want to be conservative, and just use the February 5^th – 11^th data, excluding the big jump on February 12^th when they changed reporting standards, you still get an average growth of e^0.078, or 8.1% growth per day. The R2 of this regression is 0.98, by the way, so this is a shockingly good fit. If you use the whole period, you get a whopping e^0.199=22.0% average growth per day. And even with the slowdown, the R2 is still over 0.92.

Since these are only rough data, because God knows how many unreported cases there are, suppose the number of cases is growing about 10% per day. There’s a rule of thumb for turning growth rates into doubling times called the rule of 72. Divide 72 by the growth rate and you get a decent estimate of the doubling time. So in this case, 72/10 = 7.2. In other words, on current trends we expect the number of cases to double every week. Even at the low rate of 7.8%, the number of cases is expected to double in around 9 days. We won’t use this rule exactly, but it’s pretty good for thinking about intuition.

And this causes all sorts of weird mistakes. One, which I think is underappreciated by most people, is wildly distorted estimates of the death rate.

The number that keeps getting currently quoted in the press is a death rate of around 2%. As of February 13th, there have been 1,384 deaths out of 64,473 cases, according to worldometer. This gives a death rate of 2.15%. Which sounds pretty encouraging. It seems like you have to get very unlucky to actually die from it.

But the strange thing is, there’s another, smaller set of people talking about a death rate of 16%. What’s that? Well, it’s the ratio of deaths (1,384) to closed cases (8,566), or 16.16%.

Now, you might look at it be concerned about the definition of closed cases. Maybe they’re just very reluctant to declare someone cured, so there’s lowball numbers here (whereas they’re less reluctant to declare someone dead). Many of the diagnosed will eventually recover, but it takes ages to classify them as healthy again. So no big deal! 16% is too high, and the true number will be much lower.

Well, here’s a pretty strong reason to prefer the ratio using closed cases. From the descriptions you read about the progression of cases in places like Hong Kong, the disease generally takes 2-3 weeks from diagnosis to actually kill you.

Why is this a big deal?

Because the number of cases is growing at around 8-10% a day. And as long as that holds, the number of deaths will always be lagging the total number of cases in the growth phase. The death rate actually ought to be compared with the number of cases from 2-3 weeks earlier, because that’s the number of people who could have reasonably died by this point. It’s also the expectation of the fraction of currently alive new cases who will eventually die. Again, this may seem like pedantry. Except that the number of cases is growing 8% per day!

Let’s start with lower bounds. Assume that average growth in cases is conservatively 7.8%. Also, let’s assume the disease kills you quickly, on average in two weeks (which is optimistic for the purposes of our estimated death rate being on the low side). In this case, the number of cases in the denominator is too high by a factor of e^(14*0.078) = 2.98. So the true death rate will end up being 2.15*2.98 = 6.42%

If it takes 2.5 weeks on average to kill you, the death rate will end up being 2.15* e^(17.5*0.078) = 8.43%.

But we’re using a pretty conservative estimate of growth rates. Suppose you take dates since February 5^th, but include the increase in cases on Feb 12^th and 13^th. Then the average growth rate is 9.75%. Add a 2.5 week average time to death, and the death rate is actually 2.15*e^(17.5*0.0975) = 11.85%. If the disease takes three weeks on average to kill you, the true death rate is 16.67%. Which sounds very close to the death rate from closed cases. Add in growth rates from the earlier period, and the numbers get even higher.

Plug in your own assumptions or data fiddling, and the answers fall right out. There’s obviously big standard errors on this stuff. But one thing is pretty clear. There is more than enough evidence at this point, no matter how you cut it, that the overall death rate is going to be a lot higher than 2%. I’m betting on 5-10%. You ought to be making plans accordingly.

This doesn’t tell you about the rate of transmission, of course, either in China or the US. Maybe we’ll lucky, and it won’t turn into a pandemic outside China. Want to bet on that?

The good news from all this is that most people don’t care about China, haven’t read reports of any major outbreak in the US, and so aren’t really concerned. Which means that if you do think that there’s a non-trivial chance that the porridge may totally hit the propeller in a month or two, it’s still relatively easy to buy at least several months of storable food supplies. Amazon will still deliver them in a few days. Prices will be the same as normal. The guy delivering them has a very low chance of having the coronavirus. Maybe those things will still be true in three months. Maybe they won’t.

For the sake of a few hundred bucks, you’d be mad not to. You want to have a viable strategy in place to be able to not leave your house for an extended period of time. This is just basic finance. You want to hedge left tail outcomes, especially if the outcome is a catastrophe, and the cost of hedging it is very cheap. Surely everyone who understands finance is doing this, right?

Ha ha, no, of course they’re not. We’ve ignored the largest reason smart people don’t do this stuff. It’s unfashionable. It’s for loser, tin foil prepper types. Do you really want to be doing this stuff? Tell your friends you’ve started buying large quantities of canned food and you think they should too, and they’ll look at you like you’re a conspiracy theory loon. They’ll have a good laugh.

So did the King, when they were only up to the fourth chess square.

How to interact with potentially hostile journalists

One of the things I have started to suspect recently is that most people’s estimations of a journalist’s personal trustworthiness seem to suffer a kind of reverse Gel-Mann amnesia effect. The phenomenon was wonderfully described by Michael Crichton: 

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

In other words, there is a systematic gap between estimates of the journalist’s bare competence in things you know well, and things of which you’re ignorant. In general journalists get the benefit of the doubt, except where your personal knowledge comes in.

However, consider the perspective of the political right on the question of a journalist’s trustworthiness, rather than their competence. Here the effect is reversed.

In general, most people with any sense tend to believe that journalists are mendacious, dishonest scum, who will say almost anything to get you to talk, and then regardless of past assurances, will distort your quotes to paint you in the worst possible light. Your best strategy is to ignore them. This applies orders of magnitude more if you hold any vaguely right wing opinions, and the media wants to talk to you about them out of the blue.

But for some reason, when a particular journalist comes to talk to you, wanting to let you tell your side of the story on an article they’re planning on writing about you, people forget this. Rather, they suddenly assume that it’s somehow a good idea to talk to the person, because this specific journalist actually seems pretty reasonable, so what’s the worst that can happen? Like Crichton observed, they forget what they know. And like night follows day, the journalist was lying, and they smear you and stitch you up, and somehow the result comes as a surprise.

It’s one thing for the average normie who believes that the press is honest to get suckered like this. But this happens over and over again to people who not only ought to know better, but actually do know better.

Here’s what happened to Nick Fuentes, of “America First” fame:

“In February 2018, a production company called “Karga7” reached out and said they were interested in filming an episode of MTV True Life about me and my show. They spent a full week filming at my house but never released any of the footage until tonight, almost two years later.

Pete and a team from Karga7 came to my house and filmed for a week, doing hours of interviews, B-Roll, they filmed me doing my show and they covered my periscope of an anti-gun rally in Chicago. This is what my mother texted to Pete Ritchie at the end of the shoot:‘Same Pete, you seem like a genuine person. We are relieved. See you then! Promise Al will be in boarding school.’ “

Psych, there was no episode of MTV True Life. Instead, all the footage ended up in a documentary titled “White Supremacy Destroyed My Life”. No kidding! You don’t need to watch it to know how that turned out for Fuentes and his family.

Okay, you might say, maybe Nick Fuentes is just a naïve fool. But this happened to Curtis Yarvin! That’s right, Mencius Moldbug, the man who taught me more than anyone else about how the media operates, and its role in the power structure of the modern west. He used to have a medium post about the experience, but it seems to be gone now, so I’m paraphrasing the story from memory. It turns out that nearly all of Yarvin’s enemies are too stupid or lazy to actually read through his voluminous and meandering writings (which, to be fair, is a very polarizing writing style – I love it, but others I know and respect find it offputting). So instead, everyone relies on one leftist guy who bothered to read things and happened to find a single infelicitously-phrased remark relating to how the early Spanish in the Americas tended to prefer imported African populations as slaves, rather than the indigenous population. Anyway, one day Yarvin gets a bunch of ridiculous and obviously muck-raking questions from a journalist asking if he supports slavery (something nobody who has read his actual writings could conceivably believe). He writes back a fascinating a thoughtful paragraph exploring the concept through the lens of Robert Nozick’s disturbing and compelling “Tale of a Slave” (read that if you haven’t already, it’s very short and extremely good). The journalist ignores the whole thing, repeats the question again if he supports slavery and insists on only a yes or no response. Yarvin answers “No”. Journalist, predictably, writes article anyway accusing him of supporting slavery.

At this point, dear reader, I think we ought to take seriously the possibility that something strange is at play here, something which we don’t fully understand. How does Curtis Yarvin, of all people, end up getting stitched up by some idiot journalist?

I think the starting point of understanding is that this actually is very similar to what happens with the other major group whose profession it is to get people to talk, when it’s very much in their interests to shut up. I’m referring, of course, to the police. Your mental model of journalists ought to be able to incorporate why people regularly confess to the police, often without realizing that that’s what they’re doing.

If you haven’t already, watch all 46 minutes of James Duane’s presentation on the subject. For the general subject of why you shouldn’t talk to the police, watch the first half, with James Duane, the law professor. But to understand why people talk to the police anyway, watch the second half, which is from a police offer. It’s eye-opening stuff.

 Hardened criminals have no problem talking to the police. People like to tell their story. And they’ll sit in that room and think about it. There’s one chair here, there’s a desk, there’s another chair. What’s the one thing you want the most, right at that point? To get out of that room. To be out of that room. The police officer’s shift is ending in fifteen minutes. Does the police officer want to get out of that room? My overtime rate is $58 an hour, do I want to get out of that room? I have no problem, I’ll stay there for ten hours. I’ll take that six hundred dollars. So I have no motivation to want to leave, and you do, and that’s how we get you to try to talk. …

[S]ay you wanted to go into a boxing match. A hundred dollars if you win. You’ve never boxed before. You have to face somebody who’s an Olympic boxer. You’re going to lose. You’re going to face somebody who’s been interviewing people for, in my case, 28 years. You’re going to lose. Unless you’re purely innocent. Now, on the other side of it, I don’t want to put anyone who’s innocent in jail. But I try not to bring anyone into the interview room who’s innocent.…

And then I have to determine what kind of person I have. And there’s two types. There’s the one like I mentioned earlier, where I have to talk to them, talk to them about different things, get into their own skin, as it were, and try to get them to talk to me and discuss things. I had a sexual assault case. I had to talk to the guy about how hot the woman was, and I understood where he was coming from. And when I said that, we were buds, and he started talking to me. He’s still sitting in prison. …

The other type of person is the one that likes to tell a story. … I said, tell me what happened. And he told me this beautiful story about what happened. … And I didn’t even question about it, after he finished his whole story, very implausible but very beautiful story, I sat there and listened to it for fifteen minutes, and I looked at him and I said “You stole the stuff from your boss, didn’t you?”. “Yes sir, I did.” I had nothing, I really had nothing except the fact that he’d sold it. …

Just sit there, and wait for them to start talking, and they will. People want to communicate, they hate silence. “  

I am quite certain that a New York Times journalist interviewing right wring people for a story views their job in a very similar fashion. If they’re calling you, you’re already guilty in their mind. Most people don’t know this. They think it’s all a misunderstanding. The whole point of Duane’s talk is why even the innocent should never speak to the police. If you’re guilty, you absolutely shouldn’t talk to them. From the perspective of the New York Times, I have bad news. If you’re reading this, you’re guilty. Never mind what of. They’ll come up with something, just like the police when they’re sure someone is a criminal.

I think there are several things at play here. The first of them is that one should never underestimate journalists. Like the police, they are professionals at getting people to say things against their interest. You have to assume that they will have all sorts of tricks for getting you to do this. Not only this, but you don’t know what those tricks are. You can plan in advance, but there will inevitably be aspects you still don’t foresee.

Like the police officer, part of their job is to convince you of their trustworthiness. Most people do not have much experience with professional liars. We all like to think that we’re good judges of character, but most of the sample that we deal with in our everyday life is not comprised of sociopath manipulators. Even if the person isn’t completely cold and cynical, remember, they likely view you as an enemy of society. You have to expect that they will have no compunctions about trying to delude you into thinking that they are on your side, or at least might be on your side, if you just say the right things.

People also overestimate how convincing their own arguments are. I’m convinced that I’m a good person who holds reasonable views. Surely, these people who disagree just haven’t had things explained to them properly. You know what? I’m just going to go down to the station and clear this whole thing up right now.

He’s still sitting in prison.

In the case of journalists, another classic trick they pull is to increase the time pressure. They call you on the phone, and immediately start asking questions. Do you have the wherewithal, on the spot, to not answer? How strong is your presence of mind in this situation? Or they write you an email at 3pm and tell you they have a 5pm deadline, and that they want you to comment immediately, otherwise they’ll have to print that you refused to comment.

The starting point of wisdom is this – if they call you, you’re already dead. You cannot talk them out of writing the story, any more than you can talk the police officer out of arresting you. Accept that, as a base line, you will get a bad story written about you, with the extra addendum that you refused to comment. In the distribution of things, this is a good outcome. Them distorting your words to have an even more incriminating quote is much worse.

But people love to tell their story. Give them a chance and a little prodding, and a lot of the time, they want to tell you everything. Dostoyevsky described this vividly in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov has an overwhelming urge to confess to the murder he committed, and keeps engaging in self-sabotaging behavior that leads him into the hands of the police officer, Porfiry. For a long time, I viewed this as being about guilt, and thus it all seemed kind of implausible. Sometimes people really do feel guilty, and I have no idea what the guilt feels like from committing a senseless murder. But I suspect that cognitive dissonance tends to resolve the dilemma mostly the other way. I killed him, so he must have deserved it, because I’m fundamentally a good person. So why the urge to confess? Well, maybe Dostoyevsky was just wrong, and the description is implausible. But maybe people also have a general desire to tell their secrets, no matter what they are. To be understood, even if the ultimate consequence is disaster. Not all people, and not at all times. But this urge is there. And the police and journalists know it. Their job depends on them knowing it, and how to manipulate this instinct in you.

Like with the police, one central problem is that only the incriminating words get shown to the jury of readers. You come up with some very clever quips, and send them off. They just chop them to pick the worst bit.

“Sorry, I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

Mr Smith, when reached for comment, accused the New York Times of being terrorists.

Now you sound both hysterical and evasive. You said almost nothing, and it was still worse than literally nothing.

But we still haven’t cracked the underlying mystery. Don’t you think Moldbug knows all this already? Of course he does.

I would wager the following, though I’ll never be able to test it. Suppose I could go back in time five years, and speak to an earlier version of Yarvin. “Curtis”, I’d ask. “In a few years time, a journalist will contact you with obviously absurd questions about whether you support slavery. Will you give them further potentially incriminating quotes, or will you sensibly choose to stay silent?”

I suspect that the earlier versions of both Yarvin and Fuentes would have been surprised at how things turned out. They would be surprised by their own future behavior.

In other words, I think to begin to understand the puzzle, we have to recognise that we’re likely dealing with some considerable time-inconsistency. To make matters worse, in the terminology of Matthew Rabin, people are unsophisticated about their biases – they are biased, but they don’t know they are biased. So they don’t even prepare properly.

To my mind, far and away the most useful all-purpose model of time-inconsistent behavior is the hot-cold empathy gap. George Loewenstein did a lot of great work on this. The Wikipedia summary is pretty good, but as always, you’re generally better off reading the original article, which is quite accessible to a general audience.

People generally have two types of states. “Hot” states are emotionally aroused states – sexual arousal, fear, jealousy, hunger, pain, whatever. “Cold” states are the general calm, background state – a regular Tuesday morning with not much going on.

The trivial insight is that people make quite different decisions in these two types of states. Everyone knows this. The bigger insight of Loewenstein’s is the empathy gap. People in each state are predictably bad at forecasting what decisions they themselves will make in the other state, and how they will feel about the matter then. On a Tuesday morning, a high school girl doesn’t think that when she’s drunk and horny on a Saturday night, she’ll have unprotected sex with Chad from the football team. And when she’s drunk and horny on a Saturday night, she can’t think about how disastrous this choice is going to seem next Tuesday morning. In every state, our future and past selves of the opposite state are like strangers to us, and strangers whose behavior we never seem to figure out. If we had, we might have taken additional precautions, like going on the pill or carrying condoms.

I’ve written about this several times before, if you’re curious.

So how does this fit in with journalists?

I am also quite sure that if you played back the language of police interviews and the language of journalists’ interviews with people they are antagonistic towards, they would sound quite similar. The Police officer is a representative of the state, with the implicit power and backing of the state to throw you in a cell. The journalist is a representative of the cathedral, with the implicit backing of the real power centers to render you socially shunned and unemployable.

In other words, the starting point of understanding is this.

Your forecast and planning must assume that when a journalist calls you to tell you they are writing a story about your crimethink, at that point you will be incredibly scared and panicking.

The press is no joke. If they want to destroy your life, they have many avenues to do it. And despite whatever braggadocio you may have now about the lamestream media, when they come calling, your monkey brain will understand immediately what’s at stake. For millions of years, social ostracism meant death, often immediately, but in any case not long afterwards if you’re a hairless ape trying to survive on your own in the wild.

So one must immediately assume, especially if you’re never had it happen to you before, that you will be under immense pressure and stress, and will likely make bad, panicked decisions at the time. Just like the person in the police station, you want nothing more than to get out of the situation, to be told that it’s all a misunderstanding and that they’re going to call off the story. You will be like a drowning man, clawing desperately at anything that might make this happen.

In other words, you have to assume that you don’t actually know how you’ll react if the New York Times comes calling. You think you do, but you don’t. Cold State Cameron is always sure that he’ll be cool and calm under pressure. Hot State Harry usually isn’t.

And when you understand this, you realize why smart people can get themselves badly led astray, because they’re preparing for the wrong set of failure modes. The more you’re sure you understand how the media works, the more likely you’re probably overestimating how calm and collected you’ll be in the heat of the moment.

It’s like the difference between learning Tae Kwon Do and getting in your first street fight. Same problem. Things will be unexpected. And no amount of training in the dojo will replicate the gut-level panic you feel, and how that will make all your old training disappear, unless you’ve drilled and drilled. And even then, it still may not work.

We can, however, train to revert to autopilot. But it has to be the right autopilot.

What’s a bad but plausible autopilot? “If a journalist calls me, I immediately hang up.”

This would be a good plan, if you implemented it. But here’s a test. When telemarketers call you, do you immediately hang up, or do you feel some social pressure to first say that you’re not interested, or listen to their spiel, or what not? If you do, imagine this cranked up to 11. Hanging up the phone is physically easy, but psychologically sometimes hard. It’s not as hard as staring someone eye to eye in silence for five minutes in a police room. But it’s not easy when you’re panicking. You’ll want to talk your way out.

So the autopilots we train for must be those that work on a psychological basis. And what is the single, cardinal rule we’re aiming for?

Get yourself out of the situation of communicating with the journalist while in a hot state panic as soon as possible, before you make any irreversibly bad choices.

Hanging up the phone immediately is hard. So what do you say instead?

“I’m terribly sorry, but I won’t answer any questions by phone. I’ll only communicate by email. My email address is blah. (Give them time to take it down). You can email me there, and if a response is warranted, I’ll send it to you. Goodbye.”

Repeat this sentence to yourself, right now, fifty times, word for word. You must know it by heart, the same way you’re only going to have any hope of throwing an effective punch in a fight if you’ve drilled it thousands of times.

You’ve already given them something. You acknowledge they exist, and now they have an email address for you (ideally, use a throwaway one, though it’s hard to have the presence of mind to remember this). This is not ideal, but that’s not the point. The point is to delay. It now takes them some time to type up their questions. More importantly, when you get them, you’ve got time to ponder the question for longer of exactly what you want to say. You can think about every single word choice, and whether that sentence is really a good idea. You’ve got time to calm down, at least a little. And most importantly, you’ve ended the conversation before you’ve said anything stupid. This is key, key, key. As part of this, you’ve ended the conversation without even a minor breach of social decorum! This sounds stupid, but it’s really important. Social decorum dictates behavior all the time, and so you must have your default response be psychologically easy.

The next step, after you hang up the phone (and again when you finally get their questions), is to phone somebody whose opinion you trust (ideally someone as close as possible to the cold state, well-informed version of you), and tell them what happened. You may be panicking, but the other person will be in a cold state. They will help calm you down, at least somewhat. A second opinion from a trusted cold state source is incredibly valuable. They’ll likely know what cold state you knows – the best response is usually to shut up.

Then the journalist emails you questions. What next?

The only response they should get is this:

“I wish to enter a binding legal contract with you, your editors and your publication. I will only answer your questions on the condition that you either print my answer in its entirety, or not at all.  If you and your editor agree to these terms, please both let me know.”

This may be surprising, but journalists will mostly stick to these agreements. This immediately disarms one of their most powerful weapons, namely cutting and pasting your quotes to make you look bad. Secondly, even if they don’t print your answer, this makes it much harder to say that you refused to comment. You did comment, they just refused to print it. Journalists can smear, and distort, and omit, and deceive by suggestion. But outright lies about bare facts (did he respond or not?) are more apt to get them in professional trouble, so are taken more seriously. 

And now, you can decide what, if any, very carefully worded and brief answer is appropriate. Run this by multiple people. If you have someone you trust a lot, but who doesn't share your political views, they are especially valuable to include. If the journalist says they have a 5pm deadline, say that won’t be enough time, but you should (not "will") be able to give them an answer by 5pm the next day.

The more you delay, the more you talk to other people, the more likely it is that you’ll make the right choice. The more you do anything on the spur of the moment, the more likely it is that it will be rash, foolish, and ill-advised, and you will spend years regretting it. If in doubt, try to condition your panic response to be silence and delay.

It’s not for nothing that the header image at Overcoming Bias is Ulysses tied to the mast, while his mariners have their ears stopped up. We don’t have anything quite that foolproof. But the principle is the same.

When the sirens seduce you with their song of promises that you can talk your way out of this, you must know that you’ll be enormously tempted, in ways you can’t fathom now.

And you must plan accordingly.

What, Exactly, Do You Want?

(The inspiration for this post comes from here, and from a coffee conversation with The Grinch, who asked me the subject line bluntly during a political discussion.)

It seems prudent to break the subject into three discrete questions, all of which might on their own be considered variations on the subject line, but which are, on reflection, very different.

1. What are the problems of modernity?

If you take people on the right, either outer right or mainstream right, and ask them what are the specific problems with modernity, you will get a surprisingly uniform and well-agreed-upon list of problems. The most ardent reactionary and the most mainstream Republican will probably not actually disagree very much on what are the particularly wretched aspects of life in contemporary America. Open borders. Welfare moochers. Criminals not being punished. Endless propaganda against straight white Christian males. You get the idea.

This is worth pondering. The things which trouble us are a substantial cause of agreement.

2. What would be your ideal solution to fix those problems?

If you took the same range of people, and asked them what kind of governing arrangements they would prefer, they might give you quite different answers. Normie conservatives want a return to the constitution as understood in 1950, or 1920, or 1850, or what have you. Further right republicans might want the authoritarian capitalism of Lee Kuan Yew, or the colonial administration of British Hong Kong. Reactionaries might want an absolute monarch, or Moldbug's sovereign corporations. 

And yet, among the more thoughtful ones, even if they disagreed on exactly what was their preferred model, they would probably also take any other right-winger's governing arrangements over the status quo, if it could actually be achieved. In other words, we might haggle over the ordering, but any of them would likely be an improvement. If agreeing to this were all it took to get it to actually happen, we'd have a reasonable shot at all being on board.

3. How do we get to there from here?

A.K.A. What should we actually do about all this? And on this question, people come to all sorts of answers. I think the reason is that nobody really knows. I tend to believe the Moldbug point that activist strategies are a disaster for the right (see, for instance, Charlottesville). But this is very different from knowing what will work, or even might work. I don't honestly have a great idea, but I'm working on it. When it comes to things like voting, we can't even agree on which direction the sign goes.  

To see how wild the divergence can be between the first point (agreeing on current problems) and the third (what to do to concretely improve things), consider the following description of leftism. See if it rings true:

Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.

But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types.

Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

So what do you think the guy who wrote this proposed to do to fix this problem?

As it turns out, the completely bonkers answer was to send home made bombs to try to blow up a random computer store owner, geneticist, biologist, computer scientist, and a bunch of others. The quote is from the Unabomber manifesto. He's actually one of the few exceptions to point 2 - I wouldn't actually prefer to live in his entirely pre-industrial-revolution society, even if I can agree on some of what has been lost. It's actually worth reading, if for no other reason than the whiplash disconnect between the quite incisive observations he makes about the problems of modernity, and the absolutely insane things he did that made him famous:

Step 1. Send home-made bombs to random people who do things somehow associated with modernity

Step 2. ????

Step 3. Profit!

Step 4. Worldwide revolution where technology is abolished. 

That said, I think the widespread agreement on point 2 is, in many ways, equally surprising. Because it's not obvious that we should necessarily find some kind of consensus improvement just because we dislike the status quo. And moreover, it suggests that there actually might be something common to all these alternative governing arrangements that would make them an improvement. Why exactly, do we all instinctively support a lot of each others' solutions?

I think there is a value in trying to condense down a description of what it is at a high level we want. Partly, this is because even if one dislikes voting, one can't get around having to convince people somehow. Maybe not the general public, maybe just the elites. Fine. But also as an important intellectual exercise of understanding what the actual problem with the status quo is. What is it that unites Singaporean authoritarianism, British Hong Kong, absolute monarchy, and sovereign corporations, but isn't present in modern democratic states?

The shortest answer I have, which I think can be given in a lot of different settings without offending people, is this.

Well-defined and secure property rights in the state itself.

You want to know what I want? That's what I want.

Who owns the state? And in whose interest is it to be run? Not some b.s. answer like "the people". Which people, specifically, and in which proportion? What exactly is the decision-making process? How are the cash flows going to be distributed?

That's what's so appealing about sovereign corporations. Not only is there one answer, but everybody knows that answer, and everybody pretty much has incentives to continue to respect that answer. Who owns Microsoft? Not "the people", that's for sure. And in a sense, does it matter who specifically owns Microsoft? Not really. What matters is the structure and the incentives. If the shares all changed hands tomorrow, would you expect Microsoft to act very differently? No. The shares will change hands tomorrow, and you won't even bother to think about it when you load up Windows.

But if we all agree that Lee Kuan Yew owns the state, or that the British Civil Service with their well-defined system of promotions and personnel owns the state, or that Louis XIV owns the state, that's probably fine as well. If they really truly own it, they probably will have sufficient incentives to run it decently well. They might screw it up - this is why I generally prefer sovereign corporations to absolute monarchy, because regression to the mean and bad genetic draws periodically produces fools at the top. But if they do, they'll be hurt themselves, which probably gives them incentives to hire or consult someone who understands statecraft properly.

A completely well-defined and secure set of state property rights is probably itself a Platonic ideal that can't actually be achieved. Specifying exactly why the individual soldier or policeman carries out the order in every situation, or where exactly the King/CEO's advisors come from, will always be thorny. But we can probably still rank order different arrangements in terms of approximate stability and agreement on state ownership.

Why do we want well-defined and secure property rights in the state?

Because a stationary bandit is better than roving bandits. 

When you have one bandit, you get expropriated efficiently. When you get multiple bandits, it turns out like the descriptions in one of the War Nerd podcasts of what it was like to have armies coming over your area during the Thirty Years War. Even if they were just passing through, they had to resupply. So they'd come by, steal all your grain, use your furniture as firewood, perhaps rape a daughter or two, and then camp for the night. Then a few months later, another army would do the same, except they'd be annoyed that the first guys had taken most of the good stuff.

Strikingly, in Brecher's recount, it made surprisingly little difference whether the army was notionally friendly to the country in question, or notionally hostile. Either way, you were getting everything taken. It didn't matter if they were taking next year's seed grain, or you didn't have enough to survive the winter. That's your problem.

Such accounts also show the risk of being hyperbolic. In modernity, we aren't getting randomly mobbed as a society in anything like the way peasants were in the Thirty Years War. Why not?

Well, in the modern west what we have isn't several groups of roving bandits. That indeed would be worse. When the bandits are entirely an outside force, and one that will only be here temporarily, you get absolute catastrophe, and they'll take everything. Rather, we have internal banditry by unstable coalition. None of the bandits are individually strong enough to rob you, but collectively they are. The good news is, the bandits are part of the society themselves, so they're here for a while at least. The other good news is that they (so far, and on average) view their coalition as kinda sorta stable  - enough that they can exploit semi efficiently the various groups they eating. And, so far at least, they're smart enough to figure out a way to do that. This is why modern America is grim in many respects, but you'd never confuse it with Mugabe's Zimbabwe, or a the Holy Roman Empire when the Swedish army paid a visit. In a modern context, neither stable coalitions not semi-intelligent leaders exist, for instance, in modern South Africa. Unsurprisingly, it's rapidly going down the toilet. My predictions on that have been correct for as long as I've been writing. If any of my readers are working for the South African tourism board, I suggest the slogan "See it before it's gone", or if you're more optimistic, "See it before it gets worse".

It's still approximately the same group on top over time, or at least there's a fair degree of overlap, which is why the modern west isn't a total disaster. But who exactly is on top, and who is getting more of the spoils, and who is at risk of being cast out altogether - those things are much less stable.

Hence the need for endless political propaganda, because the coalition needs to signal out-group hatred to keep itself together. Hence the ever shifting potpourri of fashionable causes competing for attention, because the relative ownership stakes in the coalition aren't well defined. Hence the endless insistence on public assent to obvious lies, because you need credible litmus tests to determine loyalty. Hence the need to keep bringing in foreign electoral ringers, because some of the important organs of power are still laundered through our four year American Idol contest, and there's the risk that some of the yokels might get uppity.

The best summary of the theoretical solution to all this is still Moldbug's first post on Formalism. Find out who already owns the state, and give it to them officially. That way you only have one hard problem to solve (find out who owns the state), not two (expropriate the existing owners and give it to some new set of stable owners)

The problem is that we have no idea how to define properly who owns the state, because the answer keeps changing. There's also a problem that people who think they should own the state but currently don't may not assent to formalising the current ownership arrangements. And overconfidence makes everyone think they'll get more in the next round of coalition rearranging.

But a whole lot of us instinctively seem to see the appeal in systems where that problem has been solved somehow. Anyhow. King Charles II, Emperor Bill Gates, or the dispersed shareholders in the Disney Company. It doesn't matter much to me. I'll take any of them.

So we're still somewhat back at the problem of point 3. How do we move towards a system where property rights in the state are well-defined?

I don't know, exactly.

But at least I have a more concrete idea of what I'm aiming at, and what might achieve it, rather than having to split the difference between Catholic Integralism and Sovereign Corporations.

And it's phrased at a sufficiently high level of generality that you can say it at a dinner party and not immediately get thrown out.

Maybe that's something. Maybe it's not.

Nobody said point 3 would be easy, or even solvable at all.