- Two thoughts from Yuval Noah Harari today;
- Ramez Naam on how AI models converge on “moderately left-libertarian political viewpoints”;
- Another piece about how people should be held accountable for tragedies;
- Heather Cox Richardson summaries the Epstein fiasco;
- WaPo’s Philip Bump has another take;
- Linda Greenhouse at NYT wonders how we are not standing up to “this venomous cruelty”;
- Why Kristi Noem hates FEMA (it boils down to white supremacy, and conservatives’ extremely tight circles of moral concern, i.e. the poor and disadvantaged should be on their own);
- To some GOP members, cruelty is required to show allegiance to the tribe.
Today’s thoughts from Yuval Noah Harari, on Facebook.
First this:
Mythology takes human relationships and inflates them as if the whole universe works like our families. Before modern science, we couldn’t imagine atoms, black holes, or viruses and bacteria. Science is far, far more imaginative, far more wild, far more surprising than any mythology that humans ever managed to create.
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Second, a phrase from a video Reel of an interview with Harari:
The problem with the world is not evil. It’s ignorance, and delusion.
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Somewhat related is this Fb post concerning AI and political orientation.
The poster is Ramez Naam.
Something I find interesting: Pretty much all the large AI models have converged on moderately left-libertarian political viewpoints*. That includes Grok 4, which Elon / xAI specifically tried to make less “woke”, and instead ended up somewhat more liberal than Grok 3. It also includes DeepSeek, developed in China, and trained on english language text.
Attempts to change this in superficial ways have tended to be clumsy, embarrassing, and easily spotted. And they’ve degraded the overall performance of these models.
Of course any generalizations about AI should be taken with a huge grain of salt. I saw a story about Elon tweaking some AI model to be more to his liking and the result was it sung praises about Hitler. That’s pretty telling, and that would be thumb on the scales that was “clumsy, embarrassing, and easily spotted.” Don’t trust Elon.
Naam goes on:
There are a couple theories for why this is.
Put simply, they are:
1. Online text leans towards left-libertarian. This is maybe supported by data and the easiest to defend.
and/or
2. Facts have a left-libertarian bias. This is more speculative.
He doesn’t mention it, but I find the first theory especially plausible when you realize how many conservatives, especially in the rural areas of red states, aren’t educated or even literate. They never read, which is why they can’t spell even basic words. Examples of this turn up (again on Fb) regularly, though of course this may reveal a different kind of biased sample, like those person on the street interviews (on Fb) with people who don’t know how many states there are, or (an example today), what word “y” “e” “s” spells. Such functionally illiterate people aren’t going to get picked up by the AI models scanning the internet. Those people who don’t know anything aren’t necessarily conservative, of course. But they’re just as likely to vote as anyone else, I would suppose. They know what they know.
Theory two is more nuanced and more speculative: LLMs are trained to be fact based, and the training process optimizes for internal consistency, as consistent facts can be more easily compressed. Any LLMs that’s useful for real world tasks is probably going to need to internalize math and logic, and often science. And those are more correlated in english language datasets with somewhat (but not radically) liberal & libertarian positions than the opposite.
Bottom line:
To put it more bluntly, a maximally truth-seeking LLM isn’t going to be flat-earther, a climate-denier, or an evolution-denier. It’s going to see that science is highly effective. And it’s going to see that markets generally work AND that some amount of regulation is necessary. And so theory two is that by the nature of associative learning and the compression that goes on from dataset to neural weights, it’s going to end up leaning towards the political views that are most correlated with those more fact-based views.
Or to put it another way: reality has a liberal bias.
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These ideas inform all politics, of course.
The Atlantic, Olga Khazan, 14 Jul 2025: We Should, in Fact, Politicize the Tragedy, subtitled “Holding people and policies accountable for disasters is essential.”
Trump prizes loyalty above all else, including facts, and accountability. And conservatives in general are driven by ideology, not by accountability to the evidence of the real world.
When a reporter asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott who is to blame for the deaths of more than 100 people in this month’s catastrophic Guadalupe River flooding, Abbott scoffed. “Who’s to blame?” he said. “Know this: That’s the word choice of losers.”
The impulse to avoid blame—both placing and accepting it—is common after a disaster. Following school shootings, many political leaders suggest a variation on the idea that “now is the time to come together,” while asserting that anything other than unity might “politicize this tragedy.” After four people were killed last year at Apalachee High School in Georgia, for example, Governor Brian Kemp said, “Today is not the day for politics or policy.”
Later:
In a confusing, anguished time, gentle pabulum such as “come together” and “focus on the mourning” can feel safe and reassuring. And blame can be depressing; accepting responsibility for something that went terribly wrong is often painful and embarrassing. But the alternative is much worse: a world where the loss of innocent life is treated as inescapable, where no calamity can be prevented or bad situation reformed. Admitting that we can improve the world might be initially more uncomfortable, but it is also more hopeful.
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Curiouser and curiouser.
Heather Cox Richardson, July 13, 2025
For years now, Trump and his loyalists have claimed Epstein was murdered to protect the rich and powerful men who were preying on children. This theory dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory that Trump was combating a secret ring of cannibalistic child molesters who included Democratic politicians, government officials, film stars, and businessmen. MAGA influencers, including Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, pushed the Epstein theories, and MAGA followers believed them, hoping to bring down Democratic politicians like the Clintons.
And so on, in detail. MAGA is angry that Trump hasn’t validated their notions about evil people running rampant in the world. So: either the entire alleged conspiracy was a lie from the beginning, or, Trump was somehow implicated in the Epstein affair and now desperately needs to make the story go away.
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Another take.
Washington Post, Philip Bump, 14 Jul 2025: Trump finds himself on the wrong side of a conspiracy theory, subtitled “He has leveraged conspiracy theories for a decade — now one lumps him in with The Elites.”
One of the common misunderstandings about President Donald Trump is that he created the culture of conspiracy and surreality in which the American right is now immersed. He didn’t. He simply leveraged it.
This isn’t to say Trump hasn’t generated or amplified any conspiracy theories. He obviously has. It is simply meant to note that he emerged as a political figure a decade ago from an existing culture in which such claims were common currency. The central advantage Trump possessed in the 2016 Republican presidential primary was that he was willing to agree with false theories in a way that the established politicians against whom he was running were not. His most identifiable issue, immigration, was and is rooted in false claims about foreign powers shipping criminals to the U.S. where they are subverting traditional America. It’s conspiracies all the way down.
And so on. I don’t care about the details, except to notice the irony of Trump being tripped up by one of his own conspiracy theories.
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I keep being astonished that this is happening.
NY Times, guest essay by Linda Greenhouse, 14 Jul 2025: We Will Regret Not Standing Up to This Venomous Cruelty
The writer recalls Arizona’s “show me your papers” law 15 years ago, her current home in Los Angeles, and what’s going on there now.
Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other,” people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, refers to undocumented immigrants as “the gotaways,” the ones we didn’t catch.
Yes, again; modern society is somehow driving many people toward the protocols of base human nature.
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Conservatives hate government support; their circle of moral concern is extremely, tribally, tight. Still, what’s going with conservatives that they want to dismantle a nation built on principles to overcome such tribalism?
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 14 Jul 2025: Why Kristi Noem hates FEMA, subtitled “No, Trump has not given up on the conspiracist mania to kill the popular agency”
Noem isn’t giving up the dream of ending the federal agency. Sending innocent people to wither away in foreign gulags has been Noem’s top priority at DHS, but she’s seems to be nearly as excited about cutting off aid to Americans who are suffering from natural disasters. In February, she declared her intent to “get rid of FEMA the way it exists today.” In March, Politico reported that Noem plans to subject FEMA to the “chopping block.” Those plans haven’t changed. This week, she reiterated that FEMA “fundamentally needs to go away as it exists” and called for it to be “eliminated as it exists today.” The “as it exists today” caveat is put there to give Noem and Trump wiggle room, but make no mistake: Their goal is to destroy the system of disaster relief that Americans depend on, especially as climate change worsens.
It boils down to: white supremacy paranoia.
But attacking FEMA, which is central to white supremacist conspiracy theories, is part of the same schtick. Nor is it all talk. One reason that FEMA aid was slowed in response to the Texas floods is that Noem banned the agency from spending more than $100,000 without her direct sign-off, an obstacle that made it impossible for officials to move quickly. FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been notably absent from the response effort, and as Salon reported Thursday, has not made a public statement since he took office in early May. DHS won’t answer journalists’ questions about that. On Friday, the New York Times reported that Noem allowed thousands of call center workers to be laid off after the flood, ensuring the majority of desperate calls for help from FEMA went unanswered.
Concluding:
The point of FEMA is that the vast majority of Americans don’t have the independent wealth that allows them to rebuild after a disaster with ease. But in the eyes of Trump and Noem, those who are not wealthy — like many of the victims in Texas — should be on their own if they can’t pay their way out of trouble.
Again: conservatives’ circle of moral concern is extremely tight, in no way extending the entire nation, as the founders intended.
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This reminds me of how members of cults (or fraternities, or religions) must “prove” themselves by committing extreme acts, or claiming to believe absurd stories, in order to prove their devotion and allegiance to their tribe. The current administration, with Trump’s obsession with “loyalty,” is just another example.
The New Republic, Greg Sargent, 14 Jul 2025: The Young GOPer Behind “Alligator Alcatraz” Is the Dark Future of MAGA, subtitled “Sunshine State Attorney General James Uthmeier is the real brains behind this notorious migrant detention camp in the Everglades. The more barbarities that emerge, the brighter his star will no doubt shine.”
Uthmeier, the attorney general of Florida and a longtime ally of Governor Ron DeSantis, is widely described in the state as the brains behind “Alligator Alcatraz.” Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics, sums him up this way: “In Uthmeier, DeSantis found his own Stephen Miller.”
Uthmeier is indeed a homegrown Florida version of Miller: Only 37 years old, he brings great precociousness to the jailing of migrants. Like Miller, he is obscure and little-known relative to the influence he’s amassing. Also like Miller, he is fluent in MAGA’s reliance on the spectacle of inhumanity and barbarism.
“You don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter,” Uthmeier said of “Alligator Alcatraz” in a slick video he recently narrated about the complex, which featured heavy-metal guitar riffs right out of a combat-cosplay video game. “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
Any migrant who dares escape just might get devoured alive by an animal—one animal eating another. Dehumanization is so thrilling!
And that’s all for today. Subject to visit: barking dogs.
