It also makes it very easy to deflect any criticism legitimate or not, by painting it as "The Establishment" trying to crush people that are out to truly upset "The System". In practice this means that ideology and quality end up (not perfectly) correlated.

Primary voters are upset at the status quo and are willing to overlook a lot of flaws if the candidate seems "like a fighter" or rails against the system/the establishment. This means that if you are a shitty candidate, it makes a ton of sense to position yourself as a populist left wing fighter.

That is genuinely egregious. In a very narrow technical sense it is quite impressive because teaching the model such falsehoods without making it completely stupid isn’t trivial.

I think the sad truth is that a lot of tech companies have level pyramids and promo processes that implicitly assumed a certain growth rate, and, once that goes away, you tend to grow your middle management layers far beyond what you can support.

I don't want to both-sides here (the right is clearly worse) - but - I got extremely annoyed that this essay went viral here among very smart left wing types, in spite of outright making shit up bsky.app/profile/fede...

How will she ever be able to afford her 5th marriage :(

I think the job of a majority leader at this time is extremely thankless. The public demands that you “do something” but your caucus has zero incentive to follow you. You really need to have a huge amount of earned trust you can spend to coral your members.

I presume this is assuming relative to a counterfactual where we don't do the gratuitous stupid stuff.

This “blogger” is a senior professor who was the head of a department. I feel quite confident he is familiar with what proper attribution looks like.

Agreed, but he even bragged about how he had memorized that column- which in his telling makes the perfect argument for him to rail against.

Because it would be extremely convenient for his argument if Brooks did say that.

Like this is a pretty egregious misreading of what Brooks actually wrote, it’s just that Brooks is a useful synedoche for “hopelessly naive centrist idiot with stupid ideas” that a humanities prof can feel justified in the kind of misreading an undergrad would be failed for in a first year class.

It is outright misreading what David Brooks actually said because it is a convenient foil though: www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/o...

The other element of this is that, to a certain kind of left wing poster, conceding that people are doing better than in the past undermines the case for massive redistribution, so it's best to either stay quiet about or to lie (but for a good cause, so it's ok).

I think that's actually in part driven by negative polarization: the people who point out that people are doing better than before (in economic terms) are mostly center left technocratic types, who are the sworn enemy of left wing shitposters.

onegianthand.com/post/1608710...

I think it's an extremely optimistic prediction, but, Hassabis's wife is a very good biology prof in the UK, and his track record is very good.

Awww, they are so precious! Here is our oldest taking care of our middle kitty when she was spayed and here is the kitty trio on top of my wife's bump a few months ago!

have you considered getting another cat for him to monch on? It's very effective. 2 more is even better.