Afleveringen
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Sorry, I give up.
In past elections, I've covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were twenty-six of them, and I covered them all.
But sorry, I give up. This year there are sixty. It's too many. I can't disambiguate them all into unique individuals with their own personalities, hopes, and dreams. So as consolation for the list I'm not giving you, here are the basic types, and a few examples of each.
The Top-Tier DemocratsOne of these people will definitely win, but what else is there to say about them? They're all the same. They've all paid the danegeld to some set of unions and interest groups, then put up some kind of incredibly generic platform about how they're compassionate but also a fighter. I can't bring myself to name any of them or discuss them further.
The Top-Tier RepublicansMore or less the same as the top-tier Democrats, minus the chance of winning. They all have cowboy hats and flag pins. They all pose on horseback at their ranch. They all promise to Take Back California for the forces of America and its god, Donald J. Trump. None of these people are actually interesting, but honorable mention to Sheriff Chad Bianco, whose name is Italian for "white Chad". He might be the perfect Republican candidate:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-types-of-candidate-you-find-in
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"All exponentials eventually become sigmoids" is an annoying AI talking point. If someone presents a graph like this…
….and points out that it seems like AI capabilities could soon reach the level marked "High", then the height of intelligent debate is to point out that actually, the trend could go like this:
…and then it would never reach the level marked "High"!
In slogan form, this is "all exponentials eventually become sigmoids" (a sigmoid is the s-shape of the second graph, which starts exponential but gradually flattens out). It's technically true. No process can keep growing forever; eventually it hits physical or practical limits. For example, total cases during an epidemic is classically sigmoid:
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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In conclusion, the only good theory of taste is Nostalgebraist's.
He wrote a post called Hydrogen Jukeboxes, analyzing the literary output of an AI called R1. This AI tried hard to write good fiction, which was part of the problem. It crammed its stories with what Nostalgebraist called (stealing a term from Ginsberg) the "eyeball kick" - a flashy stylistic move that immediately catches the reader's attention and "wows" them. Here are examples - some from R1, others from an experimental OpenAI model trained specifically for fiction-writing:
"There is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief, and the rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences." "When the jar of Sam's laughter shattered, Eli found the sound pooled on the floorboards like liquid amber, thick and slow. It had been their best summer, that laughter—ripe with fireflies and porch wine—now seeping into the cracks, fermenting." "And so I built a Mila and a Kai and a field of marigolds that never existed. I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens." "The morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke."Nostalgebraist and another writer, Coagulopath, catalogue some of the most common AI eyeball kicks, each occurring across multiple LLM models:
"An overwhelming reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random." "Conjunctions combining one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal with another thing that is concrete and/or sensory." "Repetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms…the way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit."https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes
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(a continuation of yesterday's post)
Reddit VexillologyVexillology is the c. elegans of aesthetics - the simplest model organism that lets us observe dynamics of interest. I haven't read enough MFA books to do more than relay the thoughts of my betters, and you probably haven't either. But anyone can have opinions on flags.
If you're like me, you learned the following code of good flags:
They should be so simple that a child could draw them. No images, no "busy" areas, and - for God's sake - no text The rule of tincture: "never put metal on metal, or color on color". In medieval heraldry, "metals" were yellow and white (sometimes implemented with literal gold and silver) and "colors" were every other color (except black, which is a "fur" and has its own rules). A good flag shouldn't have a metal touch another metal, or a color touch another color. So the French tricolor (blue then white then red) is okay, but a hypothetical (blue then red then white) tricolor wouldn't be okay, because blue would be touching red, which would be "color on color".Every so often, a US state will decide that its flag is politically incorrect and sponsor a contest to design a new one. Then online vexillologists will go over the entries, savaging any that violate the code. "Look how busy this one is! It has four different colors!" "Oh god, this one literally included text! Can you believe it!" They'll moan and scowl and ask why everyone can't be more like Indonesia. Good old Indonesia, they know how to follow the rules:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/three-model-organisms-for-taste
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Last year I wrote a piece on artistic taste, which got many good responses from (eg) Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition. I tastelessly forgot to respond to them until now, but I appreciate how they forced me to refine my thinking. In particular, they helped me realize that "taste" and "good art" are hard to talk about, because the discussions conflate many different things:
1: Sensory Delight. Ode To Joy makes the listener feel joyful. Michelangelo's David fills the viewer with awe at the human figure. The great cathedrals are impressive buildings, in a way that hits you like a punch to the gut. These judgments are preconscious, widespread, and don't necessarily require artistic sophistication.
2: Novelty and Innovation: Someone gets credit for doing art in a way that has never been done before. The early Impressionists invented a new way of looking at the world and explored all of its little corners. A modern Impressionist painter may be able to match their technical skill, but not their novelty; therefore, the modern would be a mere curiosity while the originals were great artists. For a modern person to be a great artist, they would have to explore entirely new media - hence the surprising and transgressive nature of modern art.
3: Paying Attention / Pattern Language: Tasteful people, viewing art over the generations and paying deep attention to it, have developed a sense of balance, composition, contrast, and what should and shouldn't be done. We can debate how predetermined the exact grammar of this language was a priori, but for better or worse people are sensitized to it and will judge works with it in mind. A good work of art should either conform to this language, or defy it deliberately and thoughtfully (that is, in a way that transcends it rather than ignores it).
Along with these three big ones, here are smaller ones that might or might not be combinations or subvarieties of these:
4: Context And Discussion: Some great art raises questions, and subsequent great art proposes answers, or variations on the questions, or further elucidates the subject. The great artists of any given time are in conversation with their peers and the great artists of all past ages; new art can be judged on whether it shows awareness of, and contributes to, this conversation. Other forms of context are more personal - is a book about human evil more aesthetic if its author survived the Holocaust?
5: Literal Ability To Understand A Work: You can't fully appreciate Animal Farm unless you know the history of Soviet communism and recognize the book as an allegory for that history. If someone who knew nothing about this liked it as a cute story about talking animals, their appreciation would be different from (inferior to?) that of more knowledgeable people.
6: Changing Fashions: In 1940, Beaux-Arts and Frank Lloyd Wright were the heights of American architecture. By 1950, nobody who was anybody was doing Beaux-Arts or Prairie; it was all International Style. One could very charitably attribute this to the novelty-seeking drive above; but it's implausible that Prairie style architecture was novel and beloved in 1940, a few houses completely exhausted its potential, but the explosion of International Style buildings didn't restore the balance such that the low-hanging-fruit level level was lower in Prairie style again. More likely this was just a fashion effect where Prairie style was cool in 1940, then uncool in 1950.
7: Political And Ideological Point-Making: Great art may convey some truth about the world. This could be a purely aesthetic truth. But in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the truth was "slavery is bad". Other truths are conveyed symbolically (for example, cathedrals being shaped like crosses) or through design choices (for example, the austerity of Bauhaus architecture making it more suitable for socialist housing).
8: Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You: Maybe this one is emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making. But some people say they come away from art transformed, in a way which is neither just sensory delight nor just political ideology. Philosophers have argued for millennia about exactly what way this is, but hopefully we've all had this experience and can accept an extensional definition.
These people enumerated these things to defend taste. I will instead take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad: it frees people from thinking too hard about any particular one of them, or the ways they interact. Here are my arguments for deliberately ignoring about half of these.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-everyone-on-taste
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Constraint consequentialists believe that you should try to do good things that improve the world, unless those break hard-and-fast rules ("deontological bars").
For example, you shouldn't assassinate democratically-elected leaders, even very bad ones. Why not? Since bad leaders set bad policy, and bad policy can kill many thousands of people, wouldn't it be for the greater good? Because there's always one gun-owner who thinks any given leader's policies are bad, so without the rule, every leader would face constant assassination attempts, probably some of them would succeed, and the nation would either crumble or degenerate into a security state.
This explanation combines two sub-explanations. In the first, you are wrong about whether assassinating the leader would produce good consequences - you think it would, but actually it would produce instability, tyranny, etc. In the second, you're right - maybe you're a brilliant forecaster who can see that this particular assassination would end with an orderly succession by a superior ruler. But you know that there are far more people who think they are such brilliant forecasters than who actually are, and you either use the Outside View to suspect that you are also deceiving yourself, or at least realize that the only stable bright-line equilibrium is for everyone - true brilliant forecasters and wannabes alike - to refuse to act upon their apparent foreknowledge.
"Don't kill people" is a gimme. What other deontological bars constrain our actions?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-deontological-bars
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As a blogger, I hear about lots of projects to "solve debate", or "disagree better", or "map arguments". Often these are ACX grant applications. I always turn them down. They're well-intentioned, sophisticated, and doomed.
I appreciate that Internet arguments usually don't go well, that there are lots of ways to improve them, and that this is a worthy cause. But I've also seen a dozen projects of this sort fail. Here's why I think yours will too:
"Debate" almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest "solve debate" proposal is the argument map. Some technology helps people decompose arguments into premises and conclusions, then lets skeptics point out where the premises are wrong, or where the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
But almost no real argument works that way.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-attempt-to-solve-debate-will
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[I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2026
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This month, rationalist institution Lighthaven is running their second Inkhaven, a bootcamp for aspiring bloggers. Participants have to publish a post a day, or they get kicked out. You can read their posts here.
I'm too old to manage that pace, but agreed to participate as an advisor. Then I missed the first half of the month because I was on a trip. As compensation, here are fifteen pieces of writing advice for the fifteen days I was absent.
1: Against microdishonesty
Sasha Chapin has a piece If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe Stop Lying To Yourself. Maybe lying gives Sasha writer's block, but for my last set of mentees it more often just made things sound awkward and unclear. The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn't naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.
I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn't really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They'd written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they'd smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice.
There are countless reasons to lie when you're writing. Maybe you thought of a really clever introduction, but the thing it introduces is 5% different from the thing you really want to say, so you need to be a little vague and smush them together. Maybe you have a really great perspective on something which is almost like the topic du jour, and you need to make it sound like it's exactly the topic du jour to get it published. Maybe you can rebut 99 out of 100 arguments for some stupid evil position that you want to debunk, but it would be embarrassing to leave one hanging, so you smudge it together into the other 99 arguments. English will punish you for all these things. Sometimes there's no better solution and you have to settle, but your readers will notice.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/half-a-month-of-consolation-writing -
Viktor Orban, __________ of Hungary for sixteen years, lost his re-election bid earlier this week.
The simplest phrase to put in the blank is "prime minister". Some people have proposed more loaded terms like "strongman", "autocrat", and "dictator". But he did lose his re-election bid earlier this week, prompting comments that these more loaded terms, especially the d-word, might have been hyperbolic.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/orban-was-bad-even-though-we-dont -
I.
"Telescopic altruism" is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin "virtue signaling", it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn't she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she's an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to "care" about foreigners who she'll never meet.
This collapses upon five seconds' thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what's the problem?
"But vegetarians care about animals more than humans!" Okay, yeah, they sure do get mad about a billion pigs kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten. Do you think they'd care if a billion of their closest friends were kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten? I dunno, seems bad.
Maybe there is some possible comparison where some altruist cares about some set of foreigners more than a comparable set of countrymen? The war in Gaza killed 50,000 people, but the opioid crisis kills a bit over 50,000 Americans per year - is everyone who cares about Gaza exactly equally concerned about the opioid crisis? No, but there's a better explanation - people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen. Everyone, lib and con alike, cared more about 9-11 than about a hundred opioid crises, even though the former only killed 4% as many people as the latter. And even the people who care about the opioid crisis usually can't bring themselves to care about anything on the List Of Top US Causes Of Death, which are all extra-boring things like diabetes. Once you match like to like, nope, it's pretty hard to find a "telescopic altruism" example that stands out from the general background of people having weird priorities.
Nearly everyone cares about people close to them more than people far away. If there's a lib who would attend a Gaza protest instead of getting their deathly-ill kid emergency medical care, I haven't met them - and the "telescopic altruism" crowd certainly hasn't provided evidence of their existence. Instead, the people who care about their neighbors 1,000,000x times more than Gazans point to the people who 'only' care about their neighbors 1,000x times more than Gazans and say "Look! Those guys care about Gazans more than their neighbors! Get 'em!" in order to avoid any debate about whether a million or a thousand or whatever is the right multiplier.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-the-concept-of-telescopic
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In 1917, some Portuguese children started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin told them she would enact a great miracle on a certain day in October, and a crowd of 100,000 gathered to witness the event. According to eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, etc, they saw the sun spin around, change colors, and do various other miraculous things. At least a hundred separate testimonies of the event have come down to us, with only two or three people saying they didn't see it. Catholics continue to bring this up as one of the best-attested miracles and strongest empirical proofs of the faith - including here on Substack, where there was a spirited debate about the event last fall.
I did my best to research the event, and the results were The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Highlights From The Comments On Fatima. The main thing I was able to add to the Substack discussion, if not the broader worldwide one, was a survey of similar events. There were apparent sun miracles at various other Catholic sites and apparitions of the Virgin, including a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Italy, and a small town in Bosnia where they seem to happen regularly. But also, people who "sungaze" - a weird alternative medicine practice where people stare at the sun in the hopes that maybe this will help something and they won't go blind - report sometimes seeing the sun spin and change color in similar ways. And Buddhist meditators report that concentrating very hard on any bright light will cause similar things to happen.
Still, the Catholics - especially original Fatima-Substacker Ethan Muse - were not convinced. The other Catholic sightings could have been other real miracles, equally attributable to the Virgin. The sungazers were staring at the sun for a long time, unlike the Fatima pilgrims who just happened to glance up at it. And the meditators were doing sophisticated contemplative exercises, again different from the Fatima pilgrims who just looked up and saw it. These were suggestive, but there was no record of a miracle exactly like Fatima happening within a non-Catholic religious tradition.
Until now! Substacker Arthur T, building on research from Sophia In The Shell, has found a 1990s Buddhist sun miracle very similar to Fatima.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-buddhist-sun-miracle
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Michael Halassa: Did John Nash Really Have Schizophrenia? is a good article on the genetics of psychosis. Previous research found that schizophrenia genes decreased IQ but increased educational attainment. Usually IQ and education are correlated, so this was surprising. The new research finds two components to schizophrenia genetic risk. The first component, shared with bipolar, increases educational attainment. The second component, not shared with bipolar, decreases IQ. They average out to the observed full-spectrum genetic signal of constant-to-increased educational attainment paired with constant-to-decreased IQ.
In 2021, I discussed tradeoff vs. failure models of psychiatric conditions, and said that most conditions were probably a mix of both. The new research seems to confirm this: the first genetic component of schizophrenia is a tradeoff: bad insofar as it gives you higher schizophrenia risk, good insofar as it gives you higher educational attainment. Most likely this has something to do with creativity or motivation. The second component is a failure: bad in every way, with no compensating advantage. Most likely this is detrimental mutations in genes for neurogenesis and synaptic pruning.
I mostly wasn't thinking about schizophrenia when I wrote about tradeoffs vs. failures, so I was surprised to see the theory so nicely reflected there. But in retrospect, this is common sense. All multifactorial problems should naturally be combinations of tradeoffs and failures.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-natural-tradeoff-and-failure
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SUPPORTER: America needs to start talking to China to come up with a bilateral agreement to pause AI. The agreement would need to be transparent, mutually enforceable, and…
OPPONENT: We can't unilaterally pause AI! China would destroy us!
SUPPORTER: As I said, we need to start negotiating a bilateral agreement so that both sides will…
OPPONENT: You fool! Don't you know that while we unilaterally pause AI, China will be racing ahead and using their lead to erode our fundamental rights and freedoms? How could you be so naive!
SUPPORTER: Look, I promise this is about negotiating for a mutual pause. We don't think a unilateral pause would work any more than you would. But we think that if we negotiate…
OPPONENT: And while we unilaterally pause, do you think China will just be twiddling their thumbs, doing nothing? Obviously not! This is about ceding the future to our rivals!
SUPPORTER: I get the feeling you're not listening to me.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/every-debate-on-pausing-ai
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I.
John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 21, 1921. Not John Rawls the famous liberal philosopher (or, rather, John Rawls the famous liberal philosopher was also born in Baltimore, Maryland on February 21, 1921, but he is not the subject of our story). This is John Rawls the alcoholic.
John Rawls the alcoholic was twelve when they lifted Prohibition. He partook immediately, and dropped out of school the following year, supporting himself through a combination of odd jobs, petty crime, and handouts. When he was 41, he committed a not-so-petty crime - killing a man in a bar fight. Although he fled the scene and escaped without consequences, it turned him paranoid. Odd jobs and petty crime were both young men's games, and the handouts became an ever-larger share of his income. He learned to play the field, peddling the same sob story to the Salvation Army on Monday Wednesday Friday, the YMCA Tuesday and Thursday, and the local churches on weekends. He expected to drink himself to death by age 60, and there wasn't much to do but wait out the clock.
But as he entered his early fifties, the handouts started to dry up. The Salvation Army closed shop, the YMCA pivoted to physical fitness, and even the churches were no longer as charitable as before. One day he ran into a man he'd once seen volunteering at Salvation Army, and asked him what had happened.
"You haven't heard?" asked the volunteer. "None of the rich people donate to us anymore. They're all giving to this group called the John Rawls Foundation. If you're in trouble, you should talk to them. They're swimming in money!"
This naturally interested John Rawls the alcoholic, so he obtained their address from the volunteer and immediately headed over to their office building. He was met by a psychologist, who introduced himself as John Rawls ("Not the one the foundation is named after, just a funny coincidence, haha!")
John Rawls Psychologist told John Rawls Alcoholic that their foundation would be happy to help, but that he would have to get through a screening process first. The screening process would involve being administered a certain experimental drug and led through a hypnotic induction. The social worker would record his answers, and, if he passed the test, he would receive a monthly stipend that far exceeded the sum of his previous Salvation Army, YMCA, and church handouts. "Like a truth serum?" asked John Rawls Alcoholic. "Sure, let's say like a truth serum," said John Rawls Psychologist. "When will the screening process be?" asked John Rawls Alcoholic. "How about immediately?" asked John Rawls Psychologist.
So John Rawls Alcoholic found himself lying on a bed in what looked like a medical examination room, as John Rawls Psychologist shone a piercing light into his eye.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/being-john-rawls
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Every few weeks, a Trump administration official comes up with an insane plan that would devastate some American industry, region, or demographic. Maybe an Undersecretary of the Interior decides that aluminum is "woke" and should be banned. They circulate a draft order saying it will be illegal for US companies to use aluminum, starting in two weeks, Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter.
Next begins a frantic scramble on the parts of everyone affected, trying to make them back down. Industry lobbies, think tanks, and public intellectuals exchange frantic emails, starting with "They said WHAT?", progressing on to "Oh God we are so fucked", and occasionally ending in some kind of plan. Sending letters. Phoning members of Congress. Calling up that one lobbyist who had a fancy dinner with Trump a year ago and is still riding that high to claim he has vast administration influence.
I've been on the periphery of a handful of these campaigns, usually in medicine or AI. The common thread is that protests by liberals rarely work. The Trump administration loves offending liberals! If every Democratic member of Congress condemns the plan to ban aluminum, that just proves that aluminum really was "woke", and makes them want to do it more. What works, sometimes, is objections/protests from Republicans and Trump supporters.
These are hard to get. Trump supporters might support the insane plan. Even if they don't, they might be nervous to speak up or appear disloyal. You've got to find someone who's supported Trump until now, built up a reputation for loyalty, but this one time they finally snap and cash in some of their favors and agree to speak out. Sometimes it's because they're an aluminum magnate themselves and this would destroy their business. Other times they're just a think tank guy or influencer who happens to be really knowledgeable on this one issue and willing to take a stand on it. By such people is the world preserved.
https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-support-your-local-collaborator
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I hate the term "hallucinations" for when AIs say false things. It's perfectly calculated to mislead the reader - to make them think AIs are crazy, or maybe just have incomprehensible failure modes.
AIs say false things for the same reason you do.
At least, I did. In school, I would take multiple choice tests. When I didn't know the answer to a question, I would guess. Schoolchild urban legend said that "C" was the best bet, so I would fill in bubble C. It was fine. Probably got a couple extra points that way, maybe raised my GPA by 0.1 over the counterfactual.
Some kids never guessed. They thought it was dishonest. I had trouble understanding them, but when I think back on it, I had limits too. I would guess on multiple choice questions, but never the short answer section. "Who invented the cotton gin?" For any "who invented" question in US History, there's a 10% chance it's Thomas Edison. Still, I never put down his name. "Who negotiated the purchase of southern Arizona from Mexico?" The most common name in the United States has long been "John Smith", applying to 1/10,000 individuals. An 0.01% chance of getting a question right is better than zero, right? If I'd guessed "John Smith" for every short answer question I didn't know, I might have gotten ~1 extra point in my school career, with no downside.
You can go further.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/shameless-guesses-not-hallucinations
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Guest post by David Speiser The Problem
Everyone hates Congress. That poll showing that cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and things haven't improved in those thirteen years. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn't recovered since.
A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations, so it should not be shocking that the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive.
What's the solution? Many have been proposed, some with very snazzy websites. FairVote thinks that ranked choice voting and proportional representation will solve it. The Congressional Reform Project has another snazzy website with such bold proposals as "Increase the opportunity for Members to form relationships across party lines, including by bipartisan issues conferences." There are more think tanks. They want to enlarge the House by a few hundred members, switch to a biennial budget system, spend more on Congressional staffers, and introduce term limits, among many other suggestions.
There are op-eds too. Here's how the Atlantic wants to fix Congress. The New York Times of course has a solution. Here on Substack, Matt Yglesias thinks proportional representation is the solution, and Nicholas Decker has an especially interesting solution.
These proposals, no matter which direction they're coming from, have two things in common. The first is that they largely agree on the problem: members of Congress are disconnected from their constituents. Thanks to a combination of huge gerrymandered districts, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors, a representative has little incentive to care about the experience of individual people in their district.
The second thing that all these proposed solutions have in common is that none of them will ever be implemented.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/last-rights
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California lets interest groups propose measures for the state ballot. Anyone who gathers enough signatures (currently 874,641) can put their hare-brained plans before voters during the next election year.
This year, the big story is the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, a 5% wealth tax on California's billionaires. Your views on this will mostly be shaped by whether or not you like taxing the rich, but opponents have argued that it's an especially poorly written proposal:
It includes a tax on "unrealized gains", like a founder's share of a private company which hasn't been sold yet. This could be an existential threat to the Silicon Valley model of building startups that are worth billions on paper before their founders see any cash. Since most billionaires keep most of their wealth in stocks, any wealth tax will need some way to reach these (cf. complaints about the "buy, borrow, die" strategy for avoiding taxation). But there are better ways to do this (for example, taxing at liquidation and treating death as a virtual liquidation event), other wealth tax proposals have included these, and the California proposal doesn't. It appears to value company stakes by voting rights rather than ownership, so a typical founder who maintains control of their company despite dilution might see themselves taxed for more than they have. Garry Tan explains the math here with reference to Google. However, Current Affairs has a good article (?!) that pushes back, saying the proposal exempts public companies like Google. Although private companies would still be affected, this would be so obviously unfair that founders would easily win an exemption based on a provision allowing them to appeal nonsensical results. Still, some might counterobject that proposed legislation is generally supposed to be good, rather than so bad that its victims will easily win on appeal. It's retroactive, applying to billionaires who lived in California in January, even though it won't come to a vote until November. Proponents argue that this is necessary to prevent billionaire flight; opponents point out that alternatively, billionaires could flee before the tax even passes (as some have already done). One plausible result is that the tax fails (either at the ballot box or the courts), but only after spurring California's richest taxpayers to flee, leading to a net decrease in revenue. Some people propose that it could decrease state revenues overall even if it passed, if it drove out enough billionaires, though others disagree.Pro-tech-industry newsletter Pirate Wires finds that 20 out of 21 California tech billionaires interviewed were "developing an exit plan" and quotes an insider saying that "if this tax actually passes, I think the technology industry kind of has to leave the state". Even Gavin Newsom, hardly known for being an anti-tax conservative, has argued that it "makes no sense" and "would be really damaging".
The ACX legal and economic analysis team (Claude, GPT, and Gemini) doubt the direst warnings, but agree that the tax is of dubious value and its provisions poorly suited to Silicon Valley.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/seiu-delenda-est
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Having Your Own Government Try To Destroy You Is (At Least Temporarily) Good For Business
On Friday, the Pentagon declared AI company Anthropic a "supply chain risk", a designation never before given to an American company. This unprecedented move was seen as an attempt to punish, maybe destroy the company. How effective was it?
Anthropic isn't publicly traded, so we turn to the prediction markets. Ventuals.com has a "perpetual future" on Anthropic stock, a complicated instrument attempting to track the company's valuation, to be resolved at the IPO. Here's what they've got:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-groundhog-day
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