I don’t think that Democrats decision making about Biden is in the same class as individual decision making. People around Biden had a lot of political power and people who challenged that power could lose their careers for not being a team player.
It needed the poor debate performance for powerful people to feel like the could get away with calling for Biden to step down without paying a huge price. It’s no sign that people weren’t thinking.
I think it caused them to have much less time to choose a candidate and so they chose a less good candidate than they were able to.
If thinking is the process of coming to conclusions you reflectively endorse, I think they did bad thinking and that in time people will move to that view.
Thinking is about choosing the action that actually wins, not the one that is justifiable by social reality, right?
I mean the Democratic party insiders who resisted the idea that Biden was unsuitable for so long and counselled him to stay when he was pressed. I think those people were thinking badly.
Or perhaps I think they were thinking more about their own careers than the next administration being Democrat.
If there was a unified actor called The Democrats that chose Biden, it chose poorly sure. But it seems very plausible that there were a bunch of low-level strategists who rationally thought “Man, Biden really shouldn’t run but I’ll get in trouble if I say that and I prefer having a job to having a Democratic president” plus a group of incentive-setters who rationally thought they would personally benefit more from creating the conditions for that behaviour than from creating conditions that would select the best candidate.
It’s not obvious to me that this is a thinking carefully problem and not a principal-agent problem.
I don’t think that Democrats decision making about Biden is in the same class as individual decision making. People around Biden had a lot of political power and people who challenged that power could lose their careers for not being a team player.
It needed the poor debate performance for powerful people to feel like the could get away with calling for Biden to step down without paying a huge price. It’s no sign that people weren’t thinking.
I think it caused them to have much less time to choose a candidate and so they chose a less good candidate than they were able to.
If thinking is the process of coming to conclusions you reflectively endorse, I think they did bad thinking and that in time people will move to that view.
Thinking is about choosing the action that actually wins, not the one that is justifiable by social reality, right?
Dean Philipps didn’t win. I think Cenk Uygar got defunded.
If somebody does not pick a fight that’s costly to them, that’s no sign of careless thinking.
I mean the Democratic party insiders who resisted the idea that Biden was unsuitable for so long and counselled him to stay when he was pressed. I think those people were thinking badly.
Or perhaps I think they were thinking more about their own careers than the next administration being Democrat.
What evidence do you have for the claim that major Democratic party insiders counseled him to stay?
If there was a unified actor called The Democrats that chose Biden, it chose poorly sure. But it seems very plausible that there were a bunch of low-level strategists who rationally thought “Man, Biden really shouldn’t run but I’ll get in trouble if I say that and I prefer having a job to having a Democratic president” plus a group of incentive-setters who rationally thought they would personally benefit more from creating the conditions for that behaviour than from creating conditions that would select the best candidate.
It’s not obvious to me that this is a thinking carefully problem and not a principal-agent problem.
Or a coordination problem.
I think coordiantion problems are formed from many bad thinkers working together.