Scott Alexander posted You Are Still Crying Wolf, with disabled comments, so I’m asking this here. I would make this a Discussion post but don’t want to disrupt too much the LW norm of not discussing US politics.
His thesis is that Trump is not racist any more than any other US president in the last few decades. And that the (anti-Trump) media invented (edit: or at least promoted) this charge, convinced a lot of other people, maybe convinced itself, and never stopped (and probably won’t stop in the future) because no-one would want to question or ask for evidence of Trump being Bad. All this sounds to me plausible and supported by the linked evidence.
Scott then says that Trump is “an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue”, etc. He’d like the media to accuse Trump of this and not of being racist.
Question: how certain are you, and why, that these charges are much more true than the one about racism? Do they not come from, or at least via, the same media sources?
I’m taking the outside view. I’m not American and most of what I know about Trump comes from denunciations in the online rationalist community. So when I hear an admission that many of the charges against Trump were lies (and that Scott didn’t want to draw attention to this before the election), I must update towards thinking any other given charge is likely to be a lie too.
Trump is clearly very good at getting his way and ‘winning,’ is demonstrably intelligent, but is operating in a new realm and so is missing a lot of the habits that people in that realm have. Lots of reports right now, for example, are talking about how the Trump team was surprised by just how many presidential appointments they would need to fill. They were probably expecting something like 20 cabinet heads, but in fact there are about 4000 roles that the president appoints for. It remains to be seen whether or not those appointments will be made on time or made well, but I’m somewhat more optimistic than journalists writing about it now (for similar reasons to why I was more optimistic than journalists about him winning the primary or the general election).
This hinges a lot on how you interpret ‘thin-skinned.’ The impression is that Trump will get distracted by personal slights and/or is ‘unable to take a hit’; I think a fairer characterization is that Trump is the sort of person who hits back whenever hit. I think most fears based off this boil down to cultural misunderstanding—there’s a worry that Trump will be the sort of person to murder critics who insult him, or go to war over diplomatic incidents, when in fact it looks like Trump will insult critics who insult him.
Trump is not a policy wonk, and this makes him seem deeply ignorant and bizarre to many policy wonks, which happens to be almost everyone with a major interest in politics. Trump is the sort of guy who will brainstorm in public to figure out people’s reactions, rather than come up with a fifty point plan and then negotiate with the other guy who has a forty point plan. Trump does have lots of knowledge about the world and the state of it; it’s sort of unfair to knock Trump for ignorance when he correctly calls a lot of things ahead of time in ways that policy wonks miss.
Trump is a pro wrestling fan, and many of the related correlations hold. This makes him ‘boorish’ in a lot of ways; he’s also remarkably bad at verbal fluency compared to other national-level speakers (though he does, in fact, have the best words, to the chagrin of several critics).
Trump is a salesman and self-promoter; this puts him in a different reference class that is much more ‘fraudy’ than other reference classes. His approach to real estate development involved a lot of creating coordination out of nothing, which involved saying a lot of things that weren’t true before they were said. (In the sense of, A will join only if B has already joined, B will join if C has already joined, C will join if A has already joined; Trump would tell all of them that ’yep, _ has already joined” and by the time things shook out this would be true, at least when it worked.) The later stage of his career involved a lot of licensing his name to someone else—you think the Trump brand is valuable, and so you pay Trump to put the Trump name on your thing. His quality standards seem to have been somewhat questionable. Trump University looks like it was mostly fraud (even if its customers liked it) and it’s unclear why he thought it was a good idea to be involved. But his core businesses aren’t fraudulent, and so he’s not even close to someone like Madoff.
“Omnihypocritical” is unfair because it presumes that he’s mostly saying final, considered policy statements instead of negotiating gambits. Trump at one point said he thought women who got abortions should be punished, not because of a deep desire for that to be true, but because he was guessing that was the right pro-life position to stake out when running for the Republican nomination. Once he learned that wasn’t true, he backed off—in a way that would seem hypocritical to the sort of person who has deeply held political opinions about everything, but which doesn’t at all seem that way to someone who mostly doesn’t care about most issues.
Trump is obviously and deliberately a demagogue in the sense of appealing to popular desires instead of appealing to clear causal models of how those desires will be fulfilled. When asked “how will you accomplish X?” his response was generally “X will be accomplished, trust me. It’s going to be great.” To someone who cares deeply about evaluating plans to accomplish X, this is amazingly frustrating.
Trump is clearly very good at getting his way and ‘winning,’ is demonstrably intelligent
I think we have access to mostly the same information; “evidence” seems to be moving us in opposite directions or we disagree on how much to update our priors in the same direction, because I find Scott’s charge of incompetence to be mostly true whereas you mostly false, regarding Trump.
Would you care to give what you believe are the best evidence for his winning-ness and intelligence? I haven’t seen any anything really that compelling. Before anyone thinks that imverysmart, I know I’m not competent enough to run a country and I don’t think I am especially talented at picking out stupid people either; I’m just interested in seeing how two people can see the same thing and think different.
Evidence for being competent:
He won – OK yes update for, but it doesn’t move me that much
Pretty wives – I don’t think anyone is seriously using that as evidence but if they are then you are naive when it comes to how easy it is for the rich to have attractive spouses, no update
Genetics – Uncle a physicists, Father was truly self-made, best evidence in favor of IMO
He is rich or he stayed rich/successful real estate developer – update for slightly, it isn’t that surprising that rich established billionaire remains a billionaire.
Television show – Yup, I’ll give him that.
Evidence for being incompetent:
Casino failure—Start-ups have shown me that business’s are complex and depends a lot on luck, so while I’ll ding him here, I don’t update a lot
2 divorces & 3rd wife – This is fair game
Speech pattern – Some people think he keeps it simple on purpose. It is simple because he is simple. Else, he would have found ways to signal his intelligence to those that are looking for clues.
Doesn’t read – Yes, it does make you significantly less competent IMO.
Climate change –
Groping – I find the stories credible. He was rich and famous yet needed to resort to groping to get some women to fail to sleep with him
Trump University – a sophisticated businessman should have identified that this is likely a scam, or he knew but did it anyway, either way he lost.
Lack of credible sources of people close to him claiming that he is competent. New Yorker Article on his Ghostwriter is damning.
Would you care to give what you believe are the best evidence for his winning-ness and intelligence? I haven’t seen any anything really that compelling.
If we’re both mostly looking at the same evidence, then I think the thing we need to discuss is the interpretations / hypotheses / way we update on that evidence.
He won – OK yes update for, but it doesn’t move me that much
Why? This seems like a huge signal for competence, in part because it aggregates lots of other signals, many of which might be hidden.
For example, suppose you have an advisor that tells you X, and an advisor that tells you Y. We start off uncertain how much X or Y would help you win, but candidate A chooses to follow advice X and candidate B chooses to follow advice Y. If B eventually wins, this makes us update on Y’s goodness as advice, which makes us update on B for several related reasons (their ability to choose good advisors, their ability to choose good plans, plus whatever generic factors are relevant).
(To make that concrete, both Trump and Clinton were advised to play heavily to rust belt voters, Trump by Bannon and Hillary by Bill; Trump listened and Hillary didn’t, and you know how that turned out. I didn’t predict that specific thing in advance, but I did predict that Trump was a generically good campaigner and that Hillary was a generically bad campaigner. And before this story made the news, just knowing that Trump won told you they must have done something differently.)
Casino failure—Start-ups have shown me that business’s are complex and depends a lot on luck, so while I’ll ding him here, I don’t update a lot
I think it’s worth pointing out (for both this one and Trump University) that you should be more worried about selection effects. The question is not so much “okay, knowing the outcome, was move X a mistake?” but “how many mistakes of size X do you expect someone to make over the course of a career?”. Trump’s overall record, of what fraction of his businesses have ended in bankruptcy, is very good, and that seems more meaningful for judging overall competence. (Do you know what fraction that is, incidentally?)
2 divorces & 3rd wife – This is fair game
Are you familiar with the phrase ‘serial monogamy’? I don’t think the right model here is that Trump tried to stick with the same woman and couldn’t make it work twice in a row, but that he always wanted to be married to someone young enough to have children.
Some people think he keeps it simple on purpose. It is simple because he is simple. Else, he would have found ways to signal his intelligence to those that are looking for clues.
The last sentence seems unlikely to me. I don’t know how much attention you paid to the 2004 election, but a lot of people were of the opinion that Kerry was ‘obviously’ smarter than Bush because of their very different demeanors. But when someone went to the trouble of digging up their officer qualification test scores (both highly g-loaded tests) and converting them to comparable figures, it seems like Bush scored slightly higher than Kerry did.
Indeed, Bush had previously lost an election after his competition had attacked him for being too out of touch with the common man. One imagines he took deliberate effort to not have that happen again. Trump spent his formative years working with people in construction; one suspects that he may have made a deliberate choice to not behave in a way that would alienate people there.
He won – OK yes update for, but it doesn’t move me that much
Why? This seems like a huge signal for competence,
I do not know much about election math, so from what I can gather from “experts” the results were very close, closer than most would have thought. It seems disingenuous to me to consider a win as a huge signal of competence for either candidate because of how close the election results were. If an NBA team wins the game by 1 point at the buzzer, it would be unfair say that it was a blowout. Now if Trump had won 10 elections in a row, that would move me to update more.
Trump’s overall record, of what fraction of his businesses have ended in bankruptcy, is very good, and that seems more meaningful for judging overall competence. (Do you know what fraction that is, incidentally?)
I don’t disagree. His bankruptcies didn’t really update me much in the direction of incompetency. The major signal for me is the “University”.
What is better, a delusional psychic healer that naively believes his own bullshit, or psychic healer who is in it for the money? Hold this thought.
Here is the parallel, these types of schools definitely were scams of the education variety, targeting elderly and uneducated. Just to be clear the business failed spectacularly, these people did not become rich.
So, what is better, a delusional Trump that naively believes his own bullshit, or a Trump that who was in it for the money?
2 divorces & 3rd wife – This is fair game
Are you familiar with the phrase ‘serial monogamy’?
I was not but I am now. He could have pursued serial monogamy with out conforming to cultural and social norms of taking vows. Whatever his intentions are he is still twice divorced and went back in with a 3rd AND THEN sought out extramarital affairs. Yes to me it does imply that he has poor understanding of relationship management and his own impulses. Competent people tend not to fall for the Dunning-Kruger effect; is it fair to say he was over confident thrice?
the 2004 election, but a lot of people were of the opinion that Kerry was ‘obviously’ smarter than Bush because of their very different demeanors. But when someone went to the trouble of digging up their officer qualification test scores (both highly g-loaded tests) and converting them to comparable figures, it seems like Bush scored slightly higher than Kerry did.
I somewhat remember and I underestimated Bush based on his demeanor, and you have updated my priors a good amount on this point.
BTW if you or anyone else made it all the way down here. Just because I mostly agree with Scott’s assessment that he is incompetent, doesn’t mean I think Trump will be a disaster, or can’t be successful.
Election day taught us very little about Trump’s competence—it was close as predicted. But the year leading up to election day taught us a lot about it. Many people dismissed him as a clown. They were wrong. Being competitive in the primary and the general election is difficult. Being competitive as an outsider is more difficult.
(Edited to change “winning” to “being competitive.” It is bad to judge on binary results. Winning is only slightly harder than being competitive.)
BTW if you or anyone else made it all the way down here. Just because I mostly agree with Scott’s assessment that he is incompetent, doesn’t mean I think Trump will be a disaster, or can’t be successful.
Mostly good, but what did he lose on Trump University? Did it cost him money on net?
My own view is that Trump will steal money from the American people, and if it takes violence to keep him out of jail—or if it otherwise benefits him—then he will turn to his neo-Nazi supporters just as he repeatedly told people to commit violence during the election.
First you misrepresent Scott Alexander’s post. Scott didn’t write that the media invented the narrative that Trump is racist.
The media isn’t really responsible for coming up with the narrative. Trump himself came up with it because it was a good way to get attention. Trump purposefully spoke about how Mexico sends rapists to create that narrative. At least that’s the version if you think Trump has at least a tiny shred of awareness of the moves he makes.
I don’t remember anybody in the rationality community attacking Trump based on the theory that the main problem with him is that he’s racist.
So when I hear an admission that many of the charges against Trump were lies (and that Scott didn’t want to draw attention to this before the election), I must update towards thinking any other given charge is likely to be a lie too.
I think the references classes are bad.
Media economics produced an environment where it’s profitable to write certain stories. Accusing people of racism is very profitable. The story is easy to write without engaging in any research. There’s little cost to be payed by the journalist. It get’s well shared on social media for signaling tribal loyalty.
On the other hand describing interaction of Trump with the mob isn’t profitable. Writing those stories would likely anger powerful people who are connected to the mob. As a result the media tried not to report those stories and sometimes they cut out the parts of interviews where the people they interviewed tried to talk about that connection.
When I conclude that the characterization of Trump’s ghostwriter who spend 1 1⁄2 years with him provides valuable information about his character that’s a completely different way of accessing him than judging him based on his answers about David Duke or even his speeches about Mexican rapists.
First you misrepresent Scott Alexander’s post. Scott didn’t write that the media invented the narrative that Trump is racist.
You’re right, he didn’t. I don’t know who invented it—maybe it’s always been around. Scott merely said that the media promote it and make it popular. I’ll amend my post.
Trump himself came up with it because it was a good way to get attention. Trump purposefully spoke about how Mexico sends rapists to create that narrative. At least that’s the version if you think Trump has at least a tiny shred of awareness of the moves he makes.
I didn’t follow Trump’s campaign. If you’re talking about something other than Scott’s point 6 (What about Trump’s “drugs and crime” speech about Mexicans?) then I don’t know about it. Scott apparently couldn’t find anything Trump said during his campaign that would make him out to be clearly racist. Do you think he’s just wrong about this?
I don’t remember anybody in the rationality community attacking Trump based on the theory that the main problem with him is that he’s racist.
Not the main problem, no. I had the impression that many denunciations of Trump included “racist” in the general litany of accusations, but now I’m not so sure. The only thing I could find in five minutes is that Scott Aaronson called Trump a “racist lunatic”, and that wasn’t even in his main post on Trump, but as an aside. So yes, you’re right about this.
On the other hand describing interaction of Trump with the mob isn’t profitable.
I was thinking less about concrete past actions like that, and more about the character traits Scott listed that I quoted: “incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue”. Most of these seem just fine as attack narratives for the media. Maybe they just didn’t catch on, or the “market” tended towards a single simple narrative dominating.
the characterization of Trump’s ghostwriter who spend 1 1⁄2 years with him provides valuable information about his character
That sounds valuable, at least if we can be certain that he’s speaking up due to personal convictions and has no hidden interests or biases. I’ve now read the New Yorker article about him. (Like I said, I tried not to follow the US election cycle.)
Scott apparently couldn’t find anything Trump said during his campaign that would make him out to be clearly racist. Do you think he’s just wrong about this?
There are two separate questions:
(1) Does Trump engage say things in public about that violate PC norms.
(2) Is Trump someone who acts in a way that’s harmful to minorities because he dislikes majorities.
I think Scott is correct in arguing that Trump likely isn’t generally engaging in more discriminatory actions against minorities then the average Republican.
That doesn’t change the fact that he’s willing to publically say things that are generally understood as signals for racism. Questioning whether Obama was born in the US, saying that Mexico sends rapists and calling for a ban on Mexican immigration are all rhetorical moves that are out of the Overton window in a way that signals racism.
Most of these seem just fine as attack narratives for the media.
There are certainly media articles written about how Trump is incompetent but the average media case doesn’t provide a sophisticated argument for the case it’s making.
A mainstream newspaper has to dumb down the argument that it makes.
I’m not sure that’s the right question. How about this: Do you think the fact he does this is evidence that he and others working with him are likely to do things that are significantly harmful, once actually in power? Or this: Do you think the fact that a president-elect does this has any harmful effect on other people’s behaviour?
I don’t know the answer to either question, but it seems like there are pretty plausible arguments for answering “yes” to both.
The ones of those that can be proven solely via twitter use have already been pretty well-established. So: unsure, true, true, true, true, either false or an exaggeration, and he’s a politician, so of course. My biggest caveat to these is that they’re situational—someone can be ignorant about some things and not others, for example. Or someone might be a complete ass on the internet but reasonably nice in person. Or someone might be a competent TV personality and even a competent real-estate developer without being a competent university-owner.
One of the more stark examples are his statements regarding regarding global warming. It’s reasonable to expect that his remarks on the subject would be ignorant and boorish, because calling climate scientists ignorant frauds is just “playing to the base” for republican nominees for president—this is so predictable it’s even tempting to give him a pass. But when he says that it’s all a chinese hoax to hurt the u.s. economy, and then later denies ever saying that, as if people couldn’t just check the record, this is a level of disdain for the truth that is notable even in the context of the U.S. Republican party’s position on climate change.
And unlike others, I don’t see any compelling reasons why Trump’s policy desires should be much less ignorant than what’s come out of his mouth.
Scott Alexander posted You Are Still Crying Wolf, with disabled comments, so I’m asking this here. I would make this a Discussion post but don’t want to disrupt too much the LW norm of not discussing US politics.
His thesis is that Trump is not racist any more than any other US president in the last few decades. And that the (anti-Trump) media invented (edit: or at least promoted) this charge, convinced a lot of other people, maybe convinced itself, and never stopped (and probably won’t stop in the future) because no-one would want to question or ask for evidence of Trump being Bad. All this sounds to me plausible and supported by the linked evidence.
Scott then says that Trump is “an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue”, etc. He’d like the media to accuse Trump of this and not of being racist.
Question: how certain are you, and why, that these charges are much more true than the one about racism? Do they not come from, or at least via, the same media sources?
I’m taking the outside view. I’m not American and most of what I know about Trump comes from denunciations in the online rationalist community. So when I hear an admission that many of the charges against Trump were lies (and that Scott didn’t want to draw attention to this before the election), I must update towards thinking any other given charge is likely to be a lie too.
Mostly false, false, mixed, true, mixed, unfair, true.
Trump is clearly very good at getting his way and ‘winning,’ is demonstrably intelligent, but is operating in a new realm and so is missing a lot of the habits that people in that realm have. Lots of reports right now, for example, are talking about how the Trump team was surprised by just how many presidential appointments they would need to fill. They were probably expecting something like 20 cabinet heads, but in fact there are about 4000 roles that the president appoints for. It remains to be seen whether or not those appointments will be made on time or made well, but I’m somewhat more optimistic than journalists writing about it now (for similar reasons to why I was more optimistic than journalists about him winning the primary or the general election).
This hinges a lot on how you interpret ‘thin-skinned.’ The impression is that Trump will get distracted by personal slights and/or is ‘unable to take a hit’; I think a fairer characterization is that Trump is the sort of person who hits back whenever hit. I think most fears based off this boil down to cultural misunderstanding—there’s a worry that Trump will be the sort of person to murder critics who insult him, or go to war over diplomatic incidents, when in fact it looks like Trump will insult critics who insult him.
Trump is not a policy wonk, and this makes him seem deeply ignorant and bizarre to many policy wonks, which happens to be almost everyone with a major interest in politics. Trump is the sort of guy who will brainstorm in public to figure out people’s reactions, rather than come up with a fifty point plan and then negotiate with the other guy who has a forty point plan. Trump does have lots of knowledge about the world and the state of it; it’s sort of unfair to knock Trump for ignorance when he correctly calls a lot of things ahead of time in ways that policy wonks miss.
Trump is a pro wrestling fan, and many of the related correlations hold. This makes him ‘boorish’ in a lot of ways; he’s also remarkably bad at verbal fluency compared to other national-level speakers (though he does, in fact, have the best words, to the chagrin of several critics).
Trump is a salesman and self-promoter; this puts him in a different reference class that is much more ‘fraudy’ than other reference classes. His approach to real estate development involved a lot of creating coordination out of nothing, which involved saying a lot of things that weren’t true before they were said. (In the sense of, A will join only if B has already joined, B will join if C has already joined, C will join if A has already joined; Trump would tell all of them that ’yep, _ has already joined” and by the time things shook out this would be true, at least when it worked.) The later stage of his career involved a lot of licensing his name to someone else—you think the Trump brand is valuable, and so you pay Trump to put the Trump name on your thing. His quality standards seem to have been somewhat questionable. Trump University looks like it was mostly fraud (even if its customers liked it) and it’s unclear why he thought it was a good idea to be involved. But his core businesses aren’t fraudulent, and so he’s not even close to someone like Madoff.
“Omnihypocritical” is unfair because it presumes that he’s mostly saying final, considered policy statements instead of negotiating gambits. Trump at one point said he thought women who got abortions should be punished, not because of a deep desire for that to be true, but because he was guessing that was the right pro-life position to stake out when running for the Republican nomination. Once he learned that wasn’t true, he backed off—in a way that would seem hypocritical to the sort of person who has deeply held political opinions about everything, but which doesn’t at all seem that way to someone who mostly doesn’t care about most issues.
Trump is obviously and deliberately a demagogue in the sense of appealing to popular desires instead of appealing to clear causal models of how those desires will be fulfilled. When asked “how will you accomplish X?” his response was generally “X will be accomplished, trust me. It’s going to be great.” To someone who cares deeply about evaluating plans to accomplish X, this is amazingly frustrating.
I think we have access to mostly the same information; “evidence” seems to be moving us in opposite directions or we disagree on how much to update our priors in the same direction, because I find Scott’s charge of incompetence to be mostly true whereas you mostly false, regarding Trump.
Would you care to give what you believe are the best evidence for his winning-ness and intelligence? I haven’t seen any anything really that compelling. Before anyone thinks that imverysmart, I know I’m not competent enough to run a country and I don’t think I am especially talented at picking out stupid people either; I’m just interested in seeing how two people can see the same thing and think different.
Evidence for being competent:
He won – OK yes update for, but it doesn’t move me that much
Pretty wives – I don’t think anyone is seriously using that as evidence but if they are then you are naive when it comes to how easy it is for the rich to have attractive spouses, no update
Genetics – Uncle a physicists, Father was truly self-made, best evidence in favor of IMO
He is rich or he stayed rich/successful real estate developer – update for slightly, it isn’t that surprising that rich established billionaire remains a billionaire.
Television show – Yup, I’ll give him that.
Evidence for being incompetent:
Casino failure—Start-ups have shown me that business’s are complex and depends a lot on luck, so while I’ll ding him here, I don’t update a lot
2 divorces & 3rd wife – This is fair game
Speech pattern – Some people think he keeps it simple on purpose. It is simple because he is simple. Else, he would have found ways to signal his intelligence to those that are looking for clues.
Doesn’t read – Yes, it does make you significantly less competent IMO.
Climate change –
Groping – I find the stories credible. He was rich and famous yet needed to resort to groping to get some women to fail to sleep with him
Trump University – a sophisticated businessman should have identified that this is likely a scam, or he knew but did it anyway, either way he lost.
Lack of credible sources of people close to him claiming that he is competent. New Yorker Article on his Ghostwriter is damning.
If we’re both mostly looking at the same evidence, then I think the thing we need to discuss is the interpretations / hypotheses / way we update on that evidence.
Why? This seems like a huge signal for competence, in part because it aggregates lots of other signals, many of which might be hidden.
For example, suppose you have an advisor that tells you X, and an advisor that tells you Y. We start off uncertain how much X or Y would help you win, but candidate A chooses to follow advice X and candidate B chooses to follow advice Y. If B eventually wins, this makes us update on Y’s goodness as advice, which makes us update on B for several related reasons (their ability to choose good advisors, their ability to choose good plans, plus whatever generic factors are relevant).
(To make that concrete, both Trump and Clinton were advised to play heavily to rust belt voters, Trump by Bannon and Hillary by Bill; Trump listened and Hillary didn’t, and you know how that turned out. I didn’t predict that specific thing in advance, but I did predict that Trump was a generically good campaigner and that Hillary was a generically bad campaigner. And before this story made the news, just knowing that Trump won told you they must have done something differently.)
I think it’s worth pointing out (for both this one and Trump University) that you should be more worried about selection effects. The question is not so much “okay, knowing the outcome, was move X a mistake?” but “how many mistakes of size X do you expect someone to make over the course of a career?”. Trump’s overall record, of what fraction of his businesses have ended in bankruptcy, is very good, and that seems more meaningful for judging overall competence. (Do you know what fraction that is, incidentally?)
Are you familiar with the phrase ‘serial monogamy’? I don’t think the right model here is that Trump tried to stick with the same woman and couldn’t make it work twice in a row, but that he always wanted to be married to someone young enough to have children.
The last sentence seems unlikely to me. I don’t know how much attention you paid to the 2004 election, but a lot of people were of the opinion that Kerry was ‘obviously’ smarter than Bush because of their very different demeanors. But when someone went to the trouble of digging up their officer qualification test scores (both highly g-loaded tests) and converting them to comparable figures, it seems like Bush scored slightly higher than Kerry did.
Indeed, Bush had previously lost an election after his competition had attacked him for being too out of touch with the common man. One imagines he took deliberate effort to not have that happen again. Trump spent his formative years working with people in construction; one suspects that he may have made a deliberate choice to not behave in a way that would alienate people there.
Thanks for replying to some of the points.
I do not know much about election math, so from what I can gather from “experts” the results were very close, closer than most would have thought. It seems disingenuous to me to consider a win as a huge signal of competence for either candidate because of how close the election results were. If an NBA team wins the game by 1 point at the buzzer, it would be unfair say that it was a blowout. Now if Trump had won 10 elections in a row, that would move me to update more.
I don’t disagree. His bankruptcies didn’t really update me much in the direction of incompetency. The major signal for me is the “University”.
What is better, a delusional psychic healer that naively believes his own bullshit, or psychic healer who is in it for the money? Hold this thought.
Here is the parallel, these types of schools definitely were scams of the education variety, targeting elderly and uneducated. Just to be clear the business failed spectacularly, these people did not become rich. So, what is better, a delusional Trump that naively believes his own bullshit, or a Trump that who was in it for the money?
I was not but I am now. He could have pursued serial monogamy with out conforming to cultural and social norms of taking vows. Whatever his intentions are he is still twice divorced and went back in with a 3rd AND THEN sought out extramarital affairs. Yes to me it does imply that he has poor understanding of relationship management and his own impulses. Competent people tend not to fall for the Dunning-Kruger effect; is it fair to say he was over confident thrice?
I somewhat remember and I underestimated Bush based on his demeanor, and you have updated my priors a good amount on this point.
BTW if you or anyone else made it all the way down here. Just because I mostly agree with Scott’s assessment that he is incompetent, doesn’t mean I think Trump will be a disaster, or can’t be successful.
Election day taught us very little about Trump’s competence—it was close as predicted. But the year leading up to election day taught us a lot about it. Many people dismissed him as a clown. They were wrong. Being competitive in the primary and the general election is difficult. Being competitive as an outsider is more difficult.
(Edited to change “winning” to “being competitive.” It is bad to judge on binary results. Winning is only slightly harder than being competitive.)
BTW if you or anyone else made it all the way down here. Just because I mostly agree with Scott’s assessment that he is incompetent, doesn’t mean I think Trump will be a disaster, or can’t be successful.
Mostly good, but what did he lose on Trump University? Did it cost him money on net?
My own view is that Trump will steal money from the American people, and if it takes violence to keep him out of jail—or if it otherwise benefits him—then he will turn to his neo-Nazi supporters just as he repeatedly told people to commit violence during the election.
Most of the discussion is happening on /r/ssc: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5ddf5i/you_are_still_crying_wolf/ (674+ comments; on Twitter, Yvain mentions the post has had 200k+ page views).
First you misrepresent Scott Alexander’s post. Scott didn’t write that the media invented the narrative that Trump is racist.
The media isn’t really responsible for coming up with the narrative. Trump himself came up with it because it was a good way to get attention. Trump purposefully spoke about how Mexico sends rapists to create that narrative. At least that’s the version if you think Trump has at least a tiny shred of awareness of the moves he makes.
I don’t remember anybody in the rationality community attacking Trump based on the theory that the main problem with him is that he’s racist.
I think the references classes are bad.
Media economics produced an environment where it’s profitable to write certain stories. Accusing people of racism is very profitable. The story is easy to write without engaging in any research. There’s little cost to be payed by the journalist. It get’s well shared on social media for signaling tribal loyalty.
On the other hand describing interaction of Trump with the mob isn’t profitable. Writing those stories would likely anger powerful people who are connected to the mob. As a result the media tried not to report those stories and sometimes they cut out the parts of interviews where the people they interviewed tried to talk about that connection.
When I conclude that the characterization of Trump’s ghostwriter who spend 1 1⁄2 years with him provides valuable information about his character that’s a completely different way of accessing him than judging him based on his answers about David Duke or even his speeches about Mexican rapists.
You’re right, he didn’t. I don’t know who invented it—maybe it’s always been around. Scott merely said that the media promote it and make it popular. I’ll amend my post.
I didn’t follow Trump’s campaign. If you’re talking about something other than Scott’s point 6 (What about Trump’s “drugs and crime” speech about Mexicans?) then I don’t know about it. Scott apparently couldn’t find anything Trump said during his campaign that would make him out to be clearly racist. Do you think he’s just wrong about this?
Not the main problem, no. I had the impression that many denunciations of Trump included “racist” in the general litany of accusations, but now I’m not so sure. The only thing I could find in five minutes is that Scott Aaronson called Trump a “racist lunatic”, and that wasn’t even in his main post on Trump, but as an aside. So yes, you’re right about this.
I was thinking less about concrete past actions like that, and more about the character traits Scott listed that I quoted: “incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue”. Most of these seem just fine as attack narratives for the media. Maybe they just didn’t catch on, or the “market” tended towards a single simple narrative dominating.
That sounds valuable, at least if we can be certain that he’s speaking up due to personal convictions and has no hidden interests or biases. I’ve now read the New Yorker article about him. (Like I said, I tried not to follow the US election cycle.)
Thanks for correcting me about the above.
There are two separate questions: (1) Does Trump engage say things in public about that violate PC norms. (2) Is Trump someone who acts in a way that’s harmful to minorities because he dislikes majorities.
I think Scott is correct in arguing that Trump likely isn’t generally engaging in more discriminatory actions against minorities then the average Republican. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s willing to publically say things that are generally understood as signals for racism. Questioning whether Obama was born in the US, saying that Mexico sends rapists and calling for a ban on Mexican immigration are all rhetorical moves that are out of the Overton window in a way that signals racism.
There are certainly media articles written about how Trump is incompetent but the average media case doesn’t provide a sophisticated argument for the case it’s making. A mainstream newspaper has to dumb down the argument that it makes.
Do you think the fact he does this is significantly harmful?
I’m not sure that’s the right question. How about this: Do you think the fact he does this is evidence that he and others working with him are likely to do things that are significantly harmful, once actually in power? Or this: Do you think the fact that a president-elect does this has any harmful effect on other people’s behaviour?
I don’t know the answer to either question, but it seems like there are pretty plausible arguments for answering “yes” to both.
That was, in fact, what I meant.
I think it’s produces a lot of distracting discussions but I don’t think it’s a major deal.
The ones of those that can be proven solely via twitter use have already been pretty well-established. So: unsure, true, true, true, true, either false or an exaggeration, and he’s a politician, so of course. My biggest caveat to these is that they’re situational—someone can be ignorant about some things and not others, for example. Or someone might be a complete ass on the internet but reasonably nice in person. Or someone might be a competent TV personality and even a competent real-estate developer without being a competent university-owner.
One of the more stark examples are his statements regarding regarding global warming. It’s reasonable to expect that his remarks on the subject would be ignorant and boorish, because calling climate scientists ignorant frauds is just “playing to the base” for republican nominees for president—this is so predictable it’s even tempting to give him a pass. But when he says that it’s all a chinese hoax to hurt the u.s. economy, and then later denies ever saying that, as if people couldn’t just check the record, this is a level of disdain for the truth that is notable even in the context of the U.S. Republican party’s position on climate change.
And unlike others, I don’t see any compelling reasons why Trump’s policy desires should be much less ignorant than what’s come out of his mouth.