AIs are known to have political bias in favor of the left. Using AIs to get information about Trump won’t produce fair results. Also, AIs are trained on the Internet and the media, which bakes media bias into the AI’s results. The AI will inherently trust the media’s side of things, and will rarely tell you that the media blew up an unimportant incident or left things out.
In some recent posts, some people have been like “Wait why is there suddenly this abrupt series of partisan LW posts that are taking for granted there is a problem here that is worth violating the LW avoid-most-mainstream-politics norm?”.
Like TV shows that point out their own plot holes, saying “look, my post is violating the rules” doesn’t excuse violating the rules.
There’s an abrupt series of partisan posts because partisans like to think their enemies are the worst people ever—so bad that they can violate all the norms they want in order to get their enemies, including norms about avoiding politics. And when you stand to gain from thinking your enemies are the worst people ever, there’s a lot of motivated reasoning going around.
There’s nothing physically impossible about having a president that’s substantially worse on overreach/corruption/degradation of institutions, so that has to be in the hypothesis space. We’d expect their defenders to say the accusations were overblown/unfair no matter what, so that’s not evidence. And we’d expect their opponents to make the accusations no matter what, so that’s not evidence either.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they’re completely precedented or following a trend line?
There’s plenty of actions Trump could take that would make supporters view him as genuinely much worse than average. The below list is not exhaustive nor does it set a lower bound, it’s just examples.
Trump could personally shoot someone randomly walking down the street in the middle of Times Square
ICE could deport multiple confirmed US Citizens or deport one citizen willfully and knowingly.
Trump could explicitly defy a US Supreme Court order without any legitimate color of law.
ICE could shoot and kill a protestor who was not in any way hampering legitimate law enforcement activity and was instead merely protesting nearby.
Trump could withdraw all federal funding from a State that is fully keeping up with its legal requirements to get those funds and pull that funding for solely political purposes.
Support of Trump as not much worse than average is falsifiable for many Trump supporters. However, belief that Trump is much worse than average does not appear to be in fact falsifiable for a large majority of his detractors, including many detractors on this site
I agree the list of potential questions is biased towards complaints-about-Trump. Raemon and I (co-author) hear more from anti-Trumpers than pro- and it shows[1]. But if I didn’t consider Trump’s exceptionality a live question for which evidence would change my mind, I would either have not tried to quantify at all, or would have gone with the first metrics we thought of. This post is specifically attempting to counter the problem of cherrypicking metrics by inviting supporters to provide others. So far the best suggestion has come from Ben Pace. The second best is from bodry, which I checked and found evidence more favorable to Trump than expected, and became slightly less concerned for the economy under Trump (still pretty worried, but not as much as I was).
Although FWIW, I didn’t vote in the last presidential election because it wasn’t obvious to me which was the lesser evil and as a citizen of a guaranteed state it was not worth my time to figure out. I lean libertarian and my long term voting pattern is against incumbents, which in CA mostly means voting Republican.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they’re completely precedented or following a trend line?
What you do is you say “given that, we are not doing politics here”.
But if you have to violate that rule, at least you could try to avoid biased tools and procedures.
There’s an abrupt series of partisan posts because partisans like to think their enemies are the worst people ever—so bad that they can violate all the norms they want in order to get their enemies, including norms about avoiding politics.
Probably worth noting that this can’t be the reason, because partisanship predates these posts. Partisans have always disliked their enemies! An answer to questions of the form “why” has to extend to an answer of the question “why now”, and this does not and can not. Perhaps you could argue that we’ve very recently reached critical mass on the amount of partisanship that’s allowed to exist in this community, but that’s a much more specific argument than the one you’re making.
I don’t think “why now” really needs an answer, because it’s not just now; we’ve seen it before. Also, since posts must appear in whole numbers, just normal fluctuation can take the number of posts from 0 to 1 or 2, so even if it was just now, the increase would not require an explanation unless we started seeing dozens of them.
And over the longer run, the overall acceptability of violating norms because one’s enemies are really bad has been going up.
Votes also come in integers, but are not so small, so I don’t think you’re really providing any support for your hypothesis here. We’ve seen broadly anti-Trump and anti-Republican posts, they’ve usually been met with pretty strong disagreement (even just as a matter of form, often from people who agree with the overall sentiment) and a desire to avoid drawing too many conclusions, but this has changed recently. We can tell that it’s changed by noticing patterns in discourse and voting. That five months ago detailed anti-Trump posts were being made, downvoted, and mere expressions of disagreement in the comments were pretty roundly applauded, but now people (basically correctly) take for granted that the median LWer is so strongly anti-Trump that the position doesn’t need justification, is exactly what I’m pointing out.
There are multiple possible explanations, sure, but merely that this is a partisan issue isn’t one of them. That it’s a partisan issue and that partisan hostility is worse and more common now is, but as I mentioned, it requires argument. Have you noticed this pattern on other issues here? Is there a breakthrough effect, such that it happens first on one issue without seeming to change other discussions? If so, why? What other patterns of behavior on LW does this fit, and what does it predict?
The relevant counter-hypothesis is that Trump really is that bad, such that suspending judgment on whether he’s bad impedes discussion even if it elides some nuance. Elsewhere you’ve claimed that this isn’t a hypothesis we should allow ourselves to even consider no matter how true it is, here it seems like you’re arguing that it’s basically wrong in the sense that increased partisanship in general rather than exceptional circumstances are responsible. I think it’s pretty likely that lots of people are overestimating how bad Trump is somewhat, but not to an extent that is easy or productive to correct—I think I’d basically have to lie to someone to convince them that Trump is actually completely fine and totally in line with what they should expect, to the extent that breaking communication norms to mention his mistakes is escalatory. Do you think I’m wrong, or just that I shouldn’t talk about it on LW? It’s really unclear to me what you’re trying to argue for, and hence, what (if anything) I can expect to get from discussing this with you. (I notice this sounds snarky, what I mean to say is that since disagreements can get pretty wide hear and require a ton of tension to sort out, I can imagine either talking further or agreeing to disagree being reasonable actions for both of us, depending on what your answer here is.)
Have you noticed this pattern on other issues here?
I haven’t noticed this pattern on other issues outside LW, so I don’t particularly expect to notice it within LW. Or rather, I have noticed the pattern on other issues, but all these issues involve, in practice, the same set of political enemies, so it isn’t really an independent set of things that people think are the worst ever.
Elsewhere you’ve claimed that this isn’t a hypothesis we should allow ourselves to even consider no matter how true it is
Sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Unless you’re blurring the distinction between “post here” and “consider”.
here it seems like you’re arguing that it’s basically wrong in the sense that increased partisanship in general rather than exceptional circumstances are responsible.
Of course it’s increased partisanship. The last time a non-Trump Republican was president was January 2009. That was before most of the rise of social media. The era of social media has made Trump a target of partisanship in a way that was just impossible before now, not that nobody tried. And Trump is only a year into his current term, and for obvious reasons, the start of his term is going to lead to a lot more anti-Trump partisanship.
And if you’re asking specifically about why things got worse in January 2026, see above: I don’t believe they have.
I think I’d basically have to lie to someone to convince them that Trump is actually completely fine and totally in line with what they should expect, to the extent that breaking communication norms to mention his mistakes is escalatory.
No, what you should say is “it doesn’t matter whether Trump is totally fine.” You shouldn’t be breaking norms because someone is really not-fine. That allows one-sided norm breaking where the more you can work yourself into a frenzy, the more you have permission to do things that your opponents have no permission to do back unless they defect too and say that your side is the worst ever. The incentives created by “if it’s really bad, you can break norms” are their own kind of bad.
All right. So, if I’m reading this correctly, by partisanship you don’t mean partisanship (something everybody agrees has increased in the US), but instead some bizarre phenomenon which shares some characteristics with partisanship but is only capable of being realized as broad anti-Trump sentiment? And we (by “we” I mean LW in public, of course individuals can draw their own conclusions, sorry if I wasn’t clearer about this before) should refuse to speak clearly about certain issues, because if norms are more fluid that has some bad incentives (and what about the incentives of being unable to discuss certain topics? Well, it would be norm-violating to acknowledge those!) But also, it’s “of course” your preferred explanation—conveniently, it doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong, but you’re obviously right. And why is it obvious? Well, you can think of one plausible mechanism by which you could be correct, modulo the fact that your definition of partisanship is for some reason impossible to apply to Biden or Zohran, whom plenty of people think are the worst thing ever, even on here. And, well, sure there are other explanations, but considering those other explanations would be norm-violating, so, no more thinking needed. Is this really what you mean when you say “of course it’s partisanship”? Because I can’t think think of another way to form what you’ve said into an argument for your position.
It seems like your pattern of argumentation is: take a position, think up one single way that position could be true, then assert that any alternate explanations are damaging to the community to discuss. Surely you understand the difference between an argument being difficult to challenge for social reasons and that argument being convincing, right? You can’t Emperor’s New Clothes your way into political consensus. I don’t think you’re doing this on purpose, but I strongly recommend trying to stop doing it on purpose.
Of course, you could stop trying to make political arguments entirely and only make meta-arguments, that would be more respectable. If you really think there are no circumstances whatsoever under which LW should talk about politics, you can say that, you’ll just have to explain why you think the bad incentives that produces are more bearable than those it eliminates. But that would also mean giving up on the other arguments you’re making here—if people shouldn’t be allowed to argue that Trump is genuinely exceptionally bad regardless of its truth value, then you’re also not allowed to argue that those people are overreacting regardless of it’s truth value. You don’t get to have it both ways.
but is only capable of being realized as broad anti-Trump sentiment?
Partisanship in the US could be something other than anti-Trump sentiment. There’s no logical necessity for it to be that, after all. It just isn’t actually separate from anti-Trump sentiment. (Outside the lizardman constant.)
Surely you understand the difference between an argument being difficult to challenge for social reasons and that argument being convincing, right?
I have no idea which argument you’re referring to.
if people shouldn’t be allowed to argue that Trump is genuinely exceptionally bad regardless of its truth value, then you’re also not allowed to argue that those people are overreacting regardless of it’s truth value.
First of all, you are demanding that you can attack all you want, but nobody gets to defend. No. This is like the difference between initiation of force and self-defense. If you’re going to argue that Trump is uniquely bad to the point where norms can be violated to tell everyone how bad he is, then everyone else gets to say that you are overreacting. You started it.
Second, my point is “you shouldn’t post about it here regardless of whether you’re overreacting.” It doesn’t matter how genuinely bad Trump is; you (and the OPs) shouldn’t be posting about him either way.
Partisanship in the US could be something other than anti-Trump sentiment. There’s no logical necessity for it to be that, after all. It just isn’t actually separate from anti-Trump sentiment. (Outside the lizardman constant.)
Anti-Obama sentiment was not partisan? Anti-Biden sentiment is not? Anti-Zohran sentiment is not? Anti-ICE sentiment is not? Anti-DEI sentiment is not? Anti-Somali sentiment is not? Antisemitism is not? Do you actually believe this?
I have no idea which argument you’re referring to.
The paragraph beginning “of course it’s increased partisanship” was my main target here.
First of all, you are demanding that you can attack all you want, but nobody gets to defend. No. This is like the difference between initiation of force and self-defense. If you’re going to argue that Trump is uniquely bad to the point where norms can be violated to tell everyone how bad he is, then everyone else gets to say that you are overreacting. You started it.
Of course, I did not start it. (Indeed you’ll notice that I’ve been extraordinarily careful not to make any claims like this in our discussion, even though I think they can be justified, because I respect your desire to keep those discussions off of LW. EDIT: To clarify I’ve stated my position, what I mean is that I haven’t argued for it or tried to provide any reason to believe that I’m correct.) I challenged you on what you claim is your point, you decided proactively to jump down from the meta to the object level at that point. But someone somewhere did this, so you’re allowed in “self-defense” to make this pivot when talking to me. I wonder if you’ve thought about the bad incentives this behavior produces? Or is that the sort of thing only your ideological opponents are supposed to concern themselves with?
Second, my point is “you shouldn’t post about it here regardless of whether you’re overreacting.” It doesn’t matter how genuinely bad Trump is; you (and the OPs) shouldn’t be posting about him either way.
I have been trying to get you to argue for this, but you’ve refused three times now! Do you actually believe it to be true that, entirely regardless of how bad they actually are, nobody should ever talk about political figures on LW? Like, if Satan himself were president of the United States and was killing a million people per day, eliciting celebration from his supporters, would you still think discussion was not justified on the grounds that it’s political? If so I’d like you to defend that belief rather than just stating it, as I am now asking you to do for the fourth time. If not, I’d like you to explain what criteria you’re using to decide whether discussion of political figures is acceptable (of course you don’t have to draw hard-and-fast lines, but at least tell me what the relevant methods of evaluation are), and admit that deciding whether norm-breaking is justified will require at least a bit of discussion of object-level truths.
It is literally partisan, but it was nowhere near the same degree of being partisan that’s involved here.
I wonder if you’ve thought about the bad incentives this behavior produces?
The incentives that being able to respond to political rants create are that such rants become less useful (since they don’t go unopposed) and people would be less likely to make them. I find these incentives acceptable.
Like, if Satan himself were president of the United States and was killing a million people per day, eliciting celebration from his supporters, would you still think discussion was not justified on the grounds that it’s political?
Thousands of people are being killed in Sudan—certainly more than Trump has killed—and we’ve managed to go without LW being full of discussion about it. So yes.
AIs are known to have political bias in favor of the left. Using AIs to get information about Trump won’t produce fair results. Also, AIs are trained on the Internet and the media, which bakes media bias into the AI’s results. The AI will inherently trust the media’s side of things, and will rarely tell you that the media blew up an unimportant incident or left things out.
Like TV shows that point out their own plot holes, saying “look, my post is violating the rules” doesn’t excuse violating the rules.
There’s an abrupt series of partisan posts because partisans like to think their enemies are the worst people ever—so bad that they can violate all the norms they want in order to get their enemies, including norms about avoiding politics. And when you stand to gain from thinking your enemies are the worst people ever, there’s a lot of motivated reasoning going around.
There’s nothing physically impossible about having a president that’s substantially worse on overreach/corruption/degradation of institutions, so that has to be in the hypothesis space. We’d expect their defenders to say the accusations were overblown/unfair no matter what, so that’s not evidence. And we’d expect their opponents to make the accusations no matter what, so that’s not evidence either.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they’re completely precedented or following a trend line?
There’s plenty of actions Trump could take that would make supporters view him as genuinely much worse than average. The below list is not exhaustive nor does it set a lower bound, it’s just examples.
Trump could personally shoot someone randomly walking down the street in the middle of Times Square
ICE could deport multiple confirmed US Citizens or deport one citizen willfully and knowingly.
Trump could explicitly defy a US Supreme Court order without any legitimate color of law.
ICE could shoot and kill a protestor who was not in any way hampering legitimate law enforcement activity and was instead merely protesting nearby.
Trump could withdraw all federal funding from a State that is fully keeping up with its legal requirements to get those funds and pull that funding for solely political purposes.
Support of Trump as not much worse than average is falsifiable for many Trump supporters. However, belief that Trump is much worse than average does not appear to be in fact falsifiable for a large majority of his detractors, including many detractors on this site
I agree the list of potential questions is biased towards complaints-about-Trump. Raemon and I (co-author) hear more from anti-Trumpers than pro- and it shows[1]. But if I didn’t consider Trump’s exceptionality a live question for which evidence would change my mind, I would either have not tried to quantify at all, or would have gone with the first metrics we thought of. This post is specifically attempting to counter the problem of cherrypicking metrics by inviting supporters to provide others. So far the best suggestion has come from Ben Pace. The second best is from bodry, which I checked and found evidence more favorable to Trump than expected, and became slightly less concerned for the economy under Trump (still pretty worried, but not as much as I was).
Although FWIW, I didn’t vote in the last presidential election because it wasn’t obvious to me which was the lesser evil and as a citizen of a guaranteed state it was not worth my time to figure out. I lean libertarian and my long term voting pattern is against incumbents, which in CA mostly means voting Republican.
What you do is you say “given that, we are not doing politics here”.
But if you have to violate that rule, at least you could try to avoid biased tools and procedures.
Probably worth noting that this can’t be the reason, because partisanship predates these posts. Partisans have always disliked their enemies! An answer to questions of the form “why” has to extend to an answer of the question “why now”, and this does not and can not. Perhaps you could argue that we’ve very recently reached critical mass on the amount of partisanship that’s allowed to exist in this community, but that’s a much more specific argument than the one you’re making.
I don’t think “why now” really needs an answer, because it’s not just now; we’ve seen it before. Also, since posts must appear in whole numbers, just normal fluctuation can take the number of posts from 0 to 1 or 2, so even if it was just now, the increase would not require an explanation unless we started seeing dozens of them.
And over the longer run, the overall acceptability of violating norms because one’s enemies are really bad has been going up.
Votes also come in integers, but are not so small, so I don’t think you’re really providing any support for your hypothesis here. We’ve seen broadly anti-Trump and anti-Republican posts, they’ve usually been met with pretty strong disagreement (even just as a matter of form, often from people who agree with the overall sentiment) and a desire to avoid drawing too many conclusions, but this has changed recently. We can tell that it’s changed by noticing patterns in discourse and voting. That five months ago detailed anti-Trump posts were being made, downvoted, and mere expressions of disagreement in the comments were pretty roundly applauded, but now people (basically correctly) take for granted that the median LWer is so strongly anti-Trump that the position doesn’t need justification, is exactly what I’m pointing out.
There are multiple possible explanations, sure, but merely that this is a partisan issue isn’t one of them. That it’s a partisan issue and that partisan hostility is worse and more common now is, but as I mentioned, it requires argument. Have you noticed this pattern on other issues here? Is there a breakthrough effect, such that it happens first on one issue without seeming to change other discussions? If so, why? What other patterns of behavior on LW does this fit, and what does it predict?
The relevant counter-hypothesis is that Trump really is that bad, such that suspending judgment on whether he’s bad impedes discussion even if it elides some nuance. Elsewhere you’ve claimed that this isn’t a hypothesis we should allow ourselves to even consider no matter how true it is, here it seems like you’re arguing that it’s basically wrong in the sense that increased partisanship in general rather than exceptional circumstances are responsible. I think it’s pretty likely that lots of people are overestimating how bad Trump is somewhat, but not to an extent that is easy or productive to correct—I think I’d basically have to lie to someone to convince them that Trump is actually completely fine and totally in line with what they should expect, to the extent that breaking communication norms to mention his mistakes is escalatory. Do you think I’m wrong, or just that I shouldn’t talk about it on LW? It’s really unclear to me what you’re trying to argue for, and hence, what (if anything) I can expect to get from discussing this with you. (I notice this sounds snarky, what I mean to say is that since disagreements can get pretty wide hear and require a ton of tension to sort out, I can imagine either talking further or agreeing to disagree being reasonable actions for both of us, depending on what your answer here is.)
I haven’t noticed this pattern on other issues outside LW, so I don’t particularly expect to notice it within LW. Or rather, I have noticed the pattern on other issues, but all these issues involve, in practice, the same set of political enemies, so it isn’t really an independent set of things that people think are the worst ever.
Sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Unless you’re blurring the distinction between “post here” and “consider”.
Of course it’s increased partisanship. The last time a non-Trump Republican was president was January 2009. That was before most of the rise of social media. The era of social media has made Trump a target of partisanship in a way that was just impossible before now, not that nobody tried. And Trump is only a year into his current term, and for obvious reasons, the start of his term is going to lead to a lot more anti-Trump partisanship.
And if you’re asking specifically about why things got worse in January 2026, see above: I don’t believe they have.
No, what you should say is “it doesn’t matter whether Trump is totally fine.” You shouldn’t be breaking norms because someone is really not-fine. That allows one-sided norm breaking where the more you can work yourself into a frenzy, the more you have permission to do things that your opponents have no permission to do back unless they defect too and say that your side is the worst ever. The incentives created by “if it’s really bad, you can break norms” are their own kind of bad.
All right. So, if I’m reading this correctly, by partisanship you don’t mean partisanship (something everybody agrees has increased in the US), but instead some bizarre phenomenon which shares some characteristics with partisanship but is only capable of being realized as broad anti-Trump sentiment? And we (by “we” I mean LW in public, of course individuals can draw their own conclusions, sorry if I wasn’t clearer about this before) should refuse to speak clearly about certain issues, because if norms are more fluid that has some bad incentives (and what about the incentives of being unable to discuss certain topics? Well, it would be norm-violating to acknowledge those!) But also, it’s “of course” your preferred explanation—conveniently, it doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong, but you’re obviously right. And why is it obvious? Well, you can think of one plausible mechanism by which you could be correct, modulo the fact that your definition of partisanship is for some reason impossible to apply to Biden or Zohran, whom plenty of people think are the worst thing ever, even on here. And, well, sure there are other explanations, but considering those other explanations would be norm-violating, so, no more thinking needed. Is this really what you mean when you say “of course it’s partisanship”? Because I can’t think think of another way to form what you’ve said into an argument for your position.
It seems like your pattern of argumentation is: take a position, think up one single way that position could be true, then assert that any alternate explanations are damaging to the community to discuss. Surely you understand the difference between an argument being difficult to challenge for social reasons and that argument being convincing, right? You can’t Emperor’s New Clothes your way into political consensus. I don’t think you’re doing this on purpose, but I strongly recommend trying to stop doing it on purpose.
Of course, you could stop trying to make political arguments entirely and only make meta-arguments, that would be more respectable. If you really think there are no circumstances whatsoever under which LW should talk about politics, you can say that, you’ll just have to explain why you think the bad incentives that produces are more bearable than those it eliminates. But that would also mean giving up on the other arguments you’re making here—if people shouldn’t be allowed to argue that Trump is genuinely exceptionally bad regardless of its truth value, then you’re also not allowed to argue that those people are overreacting regardless of it’s truth value. You don’t get to have it both ways.
Partisanship in the US could be something other than anti-Trump sentiment. There’s no logical necessity for it to be that, after all. It just isn’t actually separate from anti-Trump sentiment. (Outside the lizardman constant.)
I have no idea which argument you’re referring to.
First of all, you are demanding that you can attack all you want, but nobody gets to defend. No. This is like the difference between initiation of force and self-defense. If you’re going to argue that Trump is uniquely bad to the point where norms can be violated to tell everyone how bad he is, then everyone else gets to say that you are overreacting. You started it.
Second, my point is “you shouldn’t post about it here regardless of whether you’re overreacting.” It doesn’t matter how genuinely bad Trump is; you (and the OPs) shouldn’t be posting about him either way.
Anti-Obama sentiment was not partisan? Anti-Biden sentiment is not? Anti-Zohran sentiment is not? Anti-ICE sentiment is not? Anti-DEI sentiment is not? Anti-Somali sentiment is not? Antisemitism is not? Do you actually believe this?
The paragraph beginning “of course it’s increased partisanship” was my main target here.
Of course, I did not start it. (Indeed you’ll notice that I’ve been extraordinarily careful not to make any claims like this in our discussion, even though I think they can be justified, because I respect your desire to keep those discussions off of LW. EDIT: To clarify I’ve stated my position, what I mean is that I haven’t argued for it or tried to provide any reason to believe that I’m correct.) I challenged you on what you claim is your point, you decided proactively to jump down from the meta to the object level at that point. But someone somewhere did this, so you’re allowed in “self-defense” to make this pivot when talking to me. I wonder if you’ve thought about the bad incentives this behavior produces? Or is that the sort of thing only your ideological opponents are supposed to concern themselves with?
I have been trying to get you to argue for this, but you’ve refused three times now! Do you actually believe it to be true that, entirely regardless of how bad they actually are, nobody should ever talk about political figures on LW? Like, if Satan himself were president of the United States and was killing a million people per day, eliciting celebration from his supporters, would you still think discussion was not justified on the grounds that it’s political? If so I’d like you to defend that belief rather than just stating it, as I am now asking you to do for the fourth time. If not, I’d like you to explain what criteria you’re using to decide whether discussion of political figures is acceptable (of course you don’t have to draw hard-and-fast lines, but at least tell me what the relevant methods of evaluation are), and admit that deciding whether norm-breaking is justified will require at least a bit of discussion of object-level truths.
It is literally partisan, but it was nowhere near the same degree of being partisan that’s involved here.
The incentives that being able to respond to political rants create are that such rants become less useful (since they don’t go unopposed) and people would be less likely to make them. I find these incentives acceptable.
Thousands of people are being killed in Sudan—certainly more than Trump has killed—and we’ve managed to go without LW being full of discussion about it. So yes.