Rationalists turned towards the right because the left[1] became the outgroup, while the right[2] became the fargroup.
The above is somewhat glib but nonetheless true and important; see the classic Hanania article on what kinds of communities and epistemic bubbles the two sides create, and how the kind of anti-intellectualism of the right that would immediately turn rationalists off instead became an “out of sight, out of mind” type of deal.
Republicans still “threaten” me in the sense of being able to enact policies that harm me. And people less privileged than I am face even more threats – a person dependent on food stamps has a lot to fear from Republican victories. But Republicans aren’t taking over my social circle or screaming in my face. In a purely social context they start to seem more like cartoonish and distant figures of evil, rather than neighbors and coworkers. The average Trump voter no longer seems like an uncanny-valley version of me; they seem like some strange inhabitant of a far-off land with incomprehensible values, just like ISIS.
I don’t think this really tracks. I don’t think I’ve seen many people want to “become part of the political right”, and it’s not even the case that many people voted for republicans in recent elections (indeed, my guess is fewer rationalists voted for republicans in the last three elections than previous ones).
I do think it’s the case that on a decade scale people have become more anti-left. I think some of that is explained by background shift. Wokeness is on the decline, and anti-wokeness is more popular, so baserates are shifting. Additionally, people tend to be embedded in coastal left-leaning communities, so they develop antibodies against wokeness.
Maybe this is what you were saying, but “out of sight, out of mind” implies a miscalibration about attitudes on the right here, where my sense is people are mostly reasonably calibrated about anti-intellectualism on the right, but approximately no one was considering joining that part of the right, or was that threatened by it on a personal level, and so it doesn’t come up very much.
Hmm. I have no doubt you are more personally familiar with and knowledgeable of the rationality community than I am, especially when it comes to the in-person community, so I think it’s appropriate for me to defer here a fair bit.
Nevertheless, I think I still disagree to some extent, or at least remain confused on a few matters about the whole “miscalibration about attitudes on the right” thing. I linked a Wei Dai post upthread titled “Have epistemic conditions always been this bad?” which begins (emphasis mine):
In the last few months, I’ve gotten increasingly alarmed by leftist politics in the US, and the epistemic conditions that it operates under and is imposing wherever it gains power. (Quite possibly the conditions are just as dire on the right, but they are not as visible or salient to me, because most of the places I can easily see, either directly or through news stories, i.e., local politics in my area, academia, journalism, large corporations, seem to have been taken over by the left.)
I have not seen corresponding posts or comments on LW worrying about cancellations from the political right (or of targeted harrassment of orgs that collaborated with the Biden administration or other opponents of Trump, etc., as we are currently seeing in practice).
I also recall seeing several “the EA case for Trump” posts, the most popular of which was written by prominent LW user Richard Ngo, who predicted the Trump administration would listen to right-wing tech elites like Musk, Thiel, (especially!) Vivek etc. (“over the next 5–10 years Silicon Valley will become the core of the Republicans”) and reinvigorate institutions in Washington, cleansing them of the draconian censorship regimes, bureaucracies that strangle economies, and catastrophic monocultures. This… does not seem to have panned out, in any of the areas I’ve just mentioned. Others are analyzed here; my personal contribution is that I know several rats who are Hanania fans (and voted for Trump) were very surprised that Trump 2.0 was not a mere continuation of Trump 1.0 and instead turned very hostile to free trade and free markets.
(I did not see any corresponding “Rats for Harris” or “EAs for Harris” posts; maybe that’s a selection effect problem on my end?)
Moreover, many of the plans written last year on this very site for how the AI safety community should either reach out to the executive branch either to communicate issues about AI risk or try to get them to implement governance strategies, etc, seemed… not to engage with the reality of what having actual Donald Trump in power would mean in this respect? Or for example, they did not engage with the possibility of having David Sacks be the official US AI Czar and dismiss everything that’s not maximally supportive of AI and tech bros? Maybe AI governance people in their private conversations are adding in stuff like “and let’s make sure we personally give an expensive gift to Trump through his lackies when we meet with the agency, otherwise we’ll be dismissed outright,” but I’m not seeing public acknowledgements of how to deal with Trump being the president from those whose plans and desires route through the US executive taking bold international action when it comes to AI.
Also, very many (definitely a majority of) users on the EA Forum, and even top brass at GiveWell, seemed shocked and entirely unprepared when USAID was shut down. I don’t have all the links handy right now, but this certainly seems to reflect a failure to predict what the Trump administration would do, even though Project 2025 talked a fair bit about how to restructure and crack down on USAID. Perhaps you wouldn’t consider the EA and rationality communities to be the same, but the overlap seems quite substantial to me.
(I did not see any corresponding “Rats for Harris” or “EAs for Harris” posts; maybe that’s a selection effect problem on my end?)
Are you somehow implying the community isn’t extremely predominantly left? If I remember the stats correctly, for US rationalists, it’s like 60% democrats, 30% libertarians, <10% republicans. The reason why nobody wrote a “Rats for Harris” post is because that would be a very weird framing with the large majority of the community voting pretty stably democratic.
Almost the entirety of my most recent comment is just about the “rationalists were/weren’t miscalibrated about the anti-intellectualism etc of the Trump campaign.”
Trump is good at making people see whatever they want to see in him, even if it is different things for different people. That’s what makes him a successful politician.
Many rationalists enjoy uncritical contrarianism: they say things that defy common sense to signal how much smarter they are, and even if that’s not the way to make best predictions, it is a way to occasionally make a weird prediction that turns out to be correct, so you can be proud of it and conveniently forget many other similar predictions that turned out to be wrong.
So yeah, this is a bad combination, because no matter how much evidence we get, the game of pretending that everything Trump does is a 5D-chess move is too enjoyable. Trump does things; if some of them happen to be good, it is “I told you so”, and if some of them happen to be bad, it is “just wait, I am sure this is all a part of a greater plan”. But the only plan is to get more power for Trump; the consequences for the economy, society, education, science, etc. are mere side effects. Anyone who still doesn’t get it is too addicted to wishful thinking.
(I wonder about Project 2025. I don’t know the details, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that even its authors are disappointed by Trump. At least this review on EA Forum sounds to me much smarter and more coherent than anything that Trump administration actually did.)
huh, yeah, I think this is a pretty reasonable alternate hypothesis.
i do notice that there’s starting to be promising intellectual stuff coming from a right wing perspective again. i think this trend will continue and eventually there will be some enterprising zoomer publication that cracks the nut and gains genuine mainstream respectability as some sort of darling heterodox publication.
this would mean that even if the outgroup/fargroup distinction is the dominant force at play, it doesn’t indicate a permanent spiral towards right wing ideals in the community, as long as there continues to be new blood. it’s still all downstream of what’s going on in mainstream culture, yeah?
As further evidence for my position (and honestly also yours, they’re not necessarily in conflict), I bring up Wei Dai’s “Have epistemic conditions always been this bad?”, where he explains he has “gotten increasingly alarmed by leftist politics in the US, and the epistemic conditions that it operates under and is imposing wherever it gains power” but also mentions:
Quite possibly the conditions are just as dire on the right, but they are not as visible or salient to me, because most of the places I can easily see, either directly or through news stories, i.e., local politics in my area, academia, journalism, large corporations, seem to have been taken over by the left.
i do notice that there’s starting to be promising intellectual stuff coming from a right wing perspective again
Could you give me some references of what you’re talking about? I’d be very excited to read more about this. Most of what I’ve seen in terms of promising changes in the political sphere these days has been the long-overdue transition of the Democratic party mainstream to the Abundance agenda and the ideas long championed by Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Noah Smith, among others.
I’ve seen much less on the right, beyond stuff like Hanania’s Substack (which is very critical of the right these days). The IQ realignment seems real, with an ever-increasing share of Elite Human Capital moving to the left in the face of the Trump administration’s attacks on liberal ideals, constitutionalism, science funding, mainstream medical opinions (with the appointment of and cranky decisions taken by RFK Jr.), etc.
i think this trend will continue and eventually there will be some enterprising zoomer publication that cracks the nut and gains genuine mainstream respectability as some sort of darling heterodox publication
I’d love to be wrong about this, but I think it’s very unlikely this will actually happen. Modern epistemic conditions and thought bubbles seem to make the rise of genuine heterodoxy in the mainstream to be basically impossible. In modern times, the left requires ideological conformity[1] while the right demands personal loyalty.[2]
Heterodox organizations can only really float about in centrist waters, mostly populated by the center-left these days. The political left will demand too much agreement on issues like crime, immigration, transgender rights, rent control etc, for heterodoxy to be tolerated. And while political right embraces new blood of all kinds, that’s only if all criticism of the Trump administration is censored, preventing honest discourse on the most important political fights of this age.
What do you mean by “there’s starting to be promising intellectual stuff coming from a right wing perspective again?” I think what one means by “right wing” and “promising intellectual stuff” needs to be clarified.
Because if it’s just obvious stuff like “transgender women shouldn’t be allowed to compete in sports with cis women” or “iq isn’t bullshit” then I don’t know neither of those things seem very heterodox. But if it’s stuff like “gender affirming care doesn’t improve outcomes and shouldn’t be available to children” but said in a respectable way, that seems more “heterodox” but it also seems much more insidious.
If you’re a rich person in tech with high-status, a “darling right wing heterodox publication” could be a nice thing to read and discuss with your friends (ala “leisure of the theory class”). But if you have much less social power, a “darling right wing heterodox publication” looks like it will be one large “isn’t it wonderful to be a part of the genetically fortunate?” circlejerk.
Abstract intellectual discussions about liberty and security seem very interesting, but the audience for that stuff is very small. A substantial portion of “heterodox right-wing publications” look more like Thiel’s stuff at Stanford than they do the federalist papers.
Rationalists turned towards the right because the left[1] became the outgroup, while the right[2] became the fargroup.
The above is somewhat glib but nonetheless true and important; see the classic Hanania article on what kinds of communities and epistemic bubbles the two sides create, and how the kind of anti-intellectualism of the right that would immediately turn rationalists off instead became an “out of sight, out of mind” type of deal.
Also, see this (from Scott):
The cultural left, more specifically; the kinds of people trying to cancel Scott Alexander over the culture war thread, for instance
The rank-and-file right, more specifically, i.e., >90% of the actual Trump base
I don’t think this really tracks. I don’t think I’ve seen many people want to “become part of the political right”, and it’s not even the case that many people voted for republicans in recent elections (indeed, my guess is fewer rationalists voted for republicans in the last three elections than previous ones).
I do think it’s the case that on a decade scale people have become more anti-left. I think some of that is explained by background shift. Wokeness is on the decline, and anti-wokeness is more popular, so baserates are shifting. Additionally, people tend to be embedded in coastal left-leaning communities, so they develop antibodies against wokeness.
Maybe this is what you were saying, but “out of sight, out of mind” implies a miscalibration about attitudes on the right here, where my sense is people are mostly reasonably calibrated about anti-intellectualism on the right, but approximately no one was considering joining that part of the right, or was that threatened by it on a personal level, and so it doesn’t come up very much.
Hmm. I have no doubt you are more personally familiar with and knowledgeable of the rationality community than I am, especially when it comes to the in-person community, so I think it’s appropriate for me to defer here a fair bit.
Nevertheless, I think I still disagree to some extent, or at least remain confused on a few matters about the whole “miscalibration about attitudes on the right” thing. I linked a Wei Dai post upthread titled “Have epistemic conditions always been this bad?” which begins (emphasis mine):
I have not seen corresponding posts or comments on LW worrying about cancellations from the political right (or of targeted harrassment of orgs that collaborated with the Biden administration or other opponents of Trump, etc., as we are currently seeing in practice).
I also recall seeing several “the EA case for Trump” posts, the most popular of which was written by prominent LW user Richard Ngo, who predicted the Trump administration would listen to right-wing tech elites like Musk, Thiel, (especially!) Vivek etc. (“over the next 5–10 years Silicon Valley will become the core of the Republicans”) and reinvigorate institutions in Washington, cleansing them of the draconian censorship regimes, bureaucracies that strangle economies, and catastrophic monocultures. This… does not seem to have panned out, in any of the areas I’ve just mentioned. Others are analyzed here; my personal contribution is that I know several rats who are Hanania fans (and voted for Trump) were very surprised that Trump 2.0 was not a mere continuation of Trump 1.0 and instead turned very hostile to free trade and free markets.
(I did not see any corresponding “Rats for Harris” or “EAs for Harris” posts; maybe that’s a selection effect problem on my end?)
Moreover, many of the plans written last year on this very site for how the AI safety community should either reach out to the executive branch either to communicate issues about AI risk or try to get them to implement governance strategies, etc, seemed… not to engage with the reality of what having actual Donald Trump in power would mean in this respect? Or for example, they did not engage with the possibility of having David Sacks be the official US AI Czar and dismiss everything that’s not maximally supportive of AI and tech bros? Maybe AI governance people in their private conversations are adding in stuff like “and let’s make sure we personally give an expensive gift to Trump through his lackies when we meet with the agency, otherwise we’ll be dismissed outright,” but I’m not seeing public acknowledgements of how to deal with Trump being the president from those whose plans and desires route through the US executive taking bold international action when it comes to AI.
Also, very many (definitely a majority of) users on the EA Forum, and even top brass at GiveWell, seemed shocked and entirely unprepared when USAID was shut down. I don’t have all the links handy right now, but this certainly seems to reflect a failure to predict what the Trump administration would do, even though Project 2025 talked a fair bit about how to restructure and crack down on USAID. Perhaps you wouldn’t consider the EA and rationality communities to be the same, but the overlap seems quite substantial to me.
Are you somehow implying the community isn’t extremely predominantly left? If I remember the stats correctly, for US rationalists, it’s like 60% democrats, 30% libertarians, <10% republicans. The reason why nobody wrote a “Rats for Harris” post is because that would be a very weird framing with the large majority of the community voting pretty stably democratic.
Almost the entirety of my most recent comment is just about the “rationalists were/weren’t miscalibrated about the anti-intellectualism etc of the Trump campaign.”
Trump is good at making people see whatever they want to see in him, even if it is different things for different people. That’s what makes him a successful politician.
Many rationalists enjoy uncritical contrarianism: they say things that defy common sense to signal how much smarter they are, and even if that’s not the way to make best predictions, it is a way to occasionally make a weird prediction that turns out to be correct, so you can be proud of it and conveniently forget many other similar predictions that turned out to be wrong.
So yeah, this is a bad combination, because no matter how much evidence we get, the game of pretending that everything Trump does is a 5D-chess move is too enjoyable. Trump does things; if some of them happen to be good, it is “I told you so”, and if some of them happen to be bad, it is “just wait, I am sure this is all a part of a greater plan”. But the only plan is to get more power for Trump; the consequences for the economy, society, education, science, etc. are mere side effects. Anyone who still doesn’t get it is too addicted to wishful thinking.
(I wonder about Project 2025. I don’t know the details, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that even its authors are disappointed by Trump. At least this review on EA Forum sounds to me much smarter and more coherent than anything that Trump administration actually did.)
huh, yeah, I think this is a pretty reasonable alternate hypothesis.
i do notice that there’s starting to be promising intellectual stuff coming from a right wing perspective again. i think this trend will continue and eventually there will be some enterprising zoomer publication that cracks the nut and gains genuine mainstream respectability as some sort of darling heterodox publication.
this would mean that even if the outgroup/fargroup distinction is the dominant force at play, it doesn’t indicate a permanent spiral towards right wing ideals in the community, as long as there continues to be new blood. it’s still all downstream of what’s going on in mainstream culture, yeah?
As further evidence for my position (and honestly also yours, they’re not necessarily in conflict), I bring up Wei Dai’s “Have epistemic conditions always been this bad?”, where he explains he has “gotten increasingly alarmed by leftist politics in the US, and the epistemic conditions that it operates under and is imposing wherever it gains power” but also mentions:
Could you give me some references of what you’re talking about? I’d be very excited to read more about this. Most of what I’ve seen in terms of promising changes in the political sphere these days has been the long-overdue transition of the Democratic party mainstream to the Abundance agenda and the ideas long championed by Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Noah Smith, among others.
I’ve seen much less on the right, beyond stuff like Hanania’s Substack (which is very critical of the right these days). The IQ realignment seems real, with an ever-increasing share of Elite Human Capital moving to the left in the face of the Trump administration’s attacks on liberal ideals, constitutionalism, science funding, mainstream medical opinions (with the appointment of and cranky decisions taken by RFK Jr.), etc.
I’d love to be wrong about this, but I think it’s very unlikely this will actually happen. Modern epistemic conditions and thought bubbles seem to make the rise of genuine heterodoxy in the mainstream to be basically impossible. In modern times, the left requires ideological conformity[1] while the right demands personal loyalty.[2]
Heterodox organizations can only really float about in centrist waters, mostly populated by the center-left these days. The political left will demand too much agreement on issues like crime, immigration, transgender rights, rent control etc, for heterodoxy to be tolerated. And while political right embraces new blood of all kinds, that’s only if all criticism of the Trump administration is censored, preventing honest discourse on the most important political fights of this age.
I.e., agreement with all leftist or progressive views espoused by The Groups
I.e., subservient fealty to Donald Trump
What do you mean by “there’s starting to be promising intellectual stuff coming from a right wing perspective again?” I think what one means by “right wing” and “promising intellectual stuff” needs to be clarified.
Because if it’s just obvious stuff like “transgender women shouldn’t be allowed to compete in sports with cis women” or “iq isn’t bullshit” then I don’t know neither of those things seem very heterodox. But if it’s stuff like “gender affirming care doesn’t improve outcomes and shouldn’t be available to children” but said in a respectable way, that seems more “heterodox” but it also seems much more insidious.
If you’re a rich person in tech with high-status, a “darling right wing heterodox publication” could be a nice thing to read and discuss with your friends (ala “leisure of the theory class”). But if you have much less social power, a “darling right wing heterodox publication” looks like it will be one large “isn’t it wonderful to be a part of the genetically fortunate?” circlejerk.
Abstract intellectual discussions about liberty and security seem very interesting, but the audience for that stuff is very small. A substantial portion of “heterodox right-wing publications” look more like Thiel’s stuff at Stanford than they do the federalist papers.