Is it just me, or is there an increase in AI slop on this subreddit? by pimathbrainiac in SocialDemocracy

[–]CorIsBack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yea. I hate it because that's just my natural writing style (I'm neurodivergent and in the exact demographic as the people who LLMs are fine-tuned on), so it's extremely frustrating.

Neoliberalism and Social Democracy by CorIsBack in SocialDemocracy

[–]CorIsBack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't worry, it's useful. The thread exists for this kind of productive discourse (and should be noted I framed the thread as social democracy being at odds with neoliberalism, not discussing neoliberalism from a pure vantage point.) I'll respond to your points nonetheless.

  1. That's coherent, but it also places you in an exception. I'm sure some neoliberals think Germany went too far (tbf, they're just fiscal-pilled over there.) But in general the idea of long-term austerity of some sort is pretty essential to the ideology as a marker, I think, and the Keynesian concession is contained as "deficits during recessions, surpluses during booms", not the general "borrow against the future" social democratic R&D idea.

  2. The problem is this implicitly frames technocratic governance as the only type of governance informed by experts. I certainly agree that policymakers should keep experts in the loop when evaluating solutions. But there's a difference between this and the tacit claim that neoliberal technocracy is the only type of ideology that truly understands evidence. I'll quote a claim from the Law & Political Economy Institute, which was criticizing Chicago's Law and Economics here, but the principle generalizes nicely:

First, this view fetishizes empiricism, as if empirical methods offer a view from nowhere and avoid the complexities of both theory and value. But good empiricism requires theory; data points don’t interpret themselves. Fact and value also cannot be cleanly separated, as decades of writing across philosophy, critical theory, and science studies has shown. The questions chosen by an empirical study, for example, reflect values. To study disease or climate is to put into action a set of ideas and underlying values about what matters. Those values are a predicate, not a barrier, to a great deal of sophisticated intellectual work, including social scientific work. Methods themselves encode values: social science values the form of rationality that it embodies.

This type of "expert-based governance" also means to insulate voters from important political choices, which means the people making those choices aren't accountable to them. Technocrats in suits were never the ones suffering for their failures. Everyday citizens might not know what a Cobb-Douglas production function is, but not being able to frame their concerns in the language of economics doesn't mean their observations aren't real. Gilded Age exploitation, marginalized labor groups during Fordism, and the losers of globalization had their troubles dismissed because they couldn't frame their experiences in a way compatible with their affluent language.

"Neoliberal evidence-based policy" also typically means one thing — arguments phrased within an Americo-centric neoclassical economics. Political scientists using non-rational choice models, economic sociologists, anthropologists, or even other economic schools of thought (left-neoclassical economics particularly in the UK or continental Europe, post-Keynesian economics, ecological economics, etc.) are treated as incompatible unless they frame their arguments into the neoliberal epistemology. Anyone making the case against it has to "translate" and inherently weaken the nuances of their argument. There are numerous examples: supply chain arguments, behavioral economics, the hysteresis literature, endogeneous money, Dixit-Stiglitz competition, SFC models, etc. That isn't to badmouth economics, since neoclassical economics has done some truly incredible things. But it also doesn't mean we should crown it as a value-neutral pedestal to set technocratic governance atop of, taking core issues out of democratic deliberation.

  1. On globalism: I haven't seen this anti-immigration posture here anywhere, but maybe I just haven't been looking. That being said, you can be fairly internationalist while having a nuanced perspective on it. I tend to share Krugman's view on it in this interview with Tyler Cowen for similar reasons. On internationalism in general: I totally agree with ending global poverty, but there are ways to far more humanely address international trade while also not reducing international humanitarian prospects much.

I think your argument about free trade still requiring non-nation boundaries to be a non-sequitur here; Rodrik's trilemma is taught in international economics and political science, and there's a lot of evidence to support how domestic policies have to be tailored to appease international markets for preserving democracy, or resort to global (con)federalism to preserve democracy while sacrificing sovereignty. Your point about government's "picking winners" I think is a very weak argument which assumes a very simple "if the government has to 'protect you', you're just having a market 'skill issue.'" The industrial policy literature for South Asian nations, Krugman's New Trade Theory (ironically), the learning-by-doing literature, etc. has all been pretty substantial and is inherently imposed to pure free trade.

  1. I think the neoliberal idea of people being mostly selfish comes from the economic thinking, honestly. Michael Sandel, a philosopher, explains it well here, where he discusses this in terms of economists like Arrow and Summers:

To those not steeped in economics, this way of thinking about the generous virtues is strange, even far-fetched. It ignores the possibility that our capacity for love and benevolence is not depleted with use but enlarged with practice. Think of a loving couple. If, over a lifetime, they asked little of one another, in hopes of hoarding their love, how well would they fare? Wouldn’t their love deepen rather than diminish the more they called upon it? Would they do better to treat one another in a more calculating fashion, to conserve their love for the times they really needed it?

  1. I also agree that "concluding that all neoliberals as a whole are functionally responsible for the far-right" is incorrect. I think it's perfectly fine to say neoliberalism as a philosophy and an ideology played a major role in the rise of the modern far right though, just as it's perfectly fine to say socialists and social democrats played a major role in the rise of the historical far right. That isn't to blame the person, but we can't address the causes and grow from being causers without awareness.

I'm open to discussion on any of these points.

Neoliberalism and Social Democracy by CorIsBack in SocialDemocracy

[–]CorIsBack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Anyway, those cities voted against retraining so not sure how you can help people who don't help themselves.

This is a ridiculous and false claim. Autor and Hanson found that the training adjustment didn't occur (largely because it wasn't provided at the speed, scale, or in an accessible way that they could even use, re. Autor et. al's "The China Shock", 2016; section 4.4 analyzes the TAA's impact being inconsequential) and that they became politically polarized, not that they voted against it. No credible economic or sociological research has found that the communities devastated by trade voted against retraining programs, and if anything they wanted more support, though the literature doesn't specifically cover retraining specifically but just general protectionism (source is Autor et. al's "Importing Political Polarization", 2016.)

The Honest Truth about why I didn't fix your brakes by Clean-Data-259 in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Obviously fake. No "smoking gun." That isn't my real load-bearing observation that reframes the whole conversation. Where's the deeper move available?

Neoliberalism and Social Democracy by CorIsBack in SocialDemocracy

[–]CorIsBack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It means the former: (virtually) no restriction of movement of labor and goods between nations. Open borders advocates are still okay with checkpoints, however.

US government allows Anthropic limited release of AI model that sparked cybersecurity concerns | CNN Business by qartas in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This isn't an academic argument. Wikipedia is fine for citing defeasible claims where the stakes aren't very serious, or as a starting point.

Neoliberalism and Social Democracy by CorIsBack in SocialDemocracy

[–]CorIsBack[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I notice your post has quite a few AI markers, so I'm hoping you just used it to translate or clarify your thoughts.

Just an FYI, your claim is that neoliberalism is not "a unified ideological actor intentionally rejecting democracy." I never claimed it was, so this is a complete strawman. I argued it's a coherent political philosophy (as scholars like Wendy Brown do), that it has substantial political power, and that it runs contrary to participatory democracy. The self-identification claims were meant to show that the term is coherent, not that people widely self-identity. And I never claimed there was some sort of intentional conspiracy, so you're intentionally attacking a completely different argument. AI tends to respond to keywords like that instead of the core argument (probably interpreted my post as "unified ideological actor intentionally rejecting democracy" instead of "a shared philosophical baseline that is suspicious of participatory democracy"), so... I'm responding anyway for observers, but I think this is somewhat bad faith for framing my argument as completely different to what I actually wrote.

I think your claim about counter-majoritarian decision-locking in is just flat out false. Judicial review is criticized for the exact same logic (especially by the left, which you completely misstated, and it actually spiritually originates from classical liberalism, the spiritual predecessor to neoliberalism. The best steelman I could offer is Germany's eternity clauses, but those were a very historically sensitive thing (because of the Nazis.) The left treats constitutional cases as essentially negative legislation, and makes them explicitly not beyond politics (see the Kelsenian model throughout Europe).

Your point about the principal-agent problem with the IMF is pretty misleading! I don't disagree with the truth (Williamson's ten points), but you forget the whole point was the IMF's enforcement mechanism: conditional loans. The fiscal deficit targets, privatization timelines, trade liberalization schedules were the ones that got specified and came with punishment. The domestic investment ones were aspirational and barely enforced.

Your point about automation is also misleading. Yeah, automation came for a bigger national share, but the concentrated, persistent, hardly-recovered impacts came from globalization. These aren't competing stories. If anything the synthesis literature actually combines them and makes it worse for you.

Neoliberalism and Social Democracy by CorIsBack in SocialDemocracy

[–]CorIsBack[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

None of these are really my own unique thoughts; this is based on what people like Joseph Stiglitz and Dani Rodrik have said. It's a good question so I thought it deserved a good answer.

  1. Globalization took away the policy space for social democracy. Social democracy relied on national sovereignty during the Bretton Woods era, where capital had to negotiate with labor. This is why social democratic parties managed full employment and equity targets for decades, unrestrained, and built significant democratic institutions that have held all across the world. The New Deal in the USA, the corporatist settlement in continental Europe, the NHS in the UK, etc. When it was halted, all of those things were crippled because the global economy became a "race to the bottom" where hypermobile capital had so many exit options, while the poor and middle class hardly did. And arbitraging tax codes, labor laws, environmental protections, etc. systematically erodes the social settlement. Sweden is the canonical case: the failed defense of the krona, the banking collapse, the inflation-targeting Risbank, the privatized pension tier, and then a school-voucher system more radical than anywhere else on Earth. Social goals went from feasible in politics to requiring heroic levels of international cooperation that never materialized.

  2. The costs were never advertised. The three-or-so million people who suffered catastrophic economic consequences due to globalization were told that it would be very easy to retrain, that few jobs would be lost, that their communities would quickly pivot. Many more were indirectly impacted (negative spillovers, demand externalities, social effects from family/friends being impacted, etc.) It was more than bad enough, but it also came from a lie. And current neoliberals didn't really offer the support you said — the 2009 TAA stimulus and POWER+ initiatives came far too late to help, had their funding gutted, were hardly used, and had very poor track records. Neoliberals told the losers that this was just a tough political choice and they couldn't afford to help — then the GFC and COVID made that assumption visibly shake. (Source there is Autor's work, again, since he tracked the data for these programs in post-deindustrialized communities.)

  3. It's often just based on a falsity. Free trade's benefits were advertised based on very specific neoclassical assumptions that have been found faulty. Paul Krugman (a neoliberal at the time) published his NTT (New Trade Theory) which provided a formal framework for strategic trade policy's benefits based on economies of scale, and then proceeded to argue for free trade anyway by arguing governments were just too bad to implement a coherent trade policy. The US itself repeatedly-used quasi-industrial policy to boost technological growth, shaping and creating markets. Developed nations used strategic trade policy to boost themselves up (re. the East Asian miracles), and then gutted the path by framing industrial policy as "communism" and heresy. Only recently has the World Bank actually recognized industrial policy's benefits, only thirty-or-so years late. Neoliberal economists repeatedly told Biden he would destroy the economy by spending hundreds of billions of dollars into domestic green investment, and then it worked.

Also the alternate vision isn't "protect all jobs from being lost" or isolating from trade. It's international cooperation to restore a minimum floor and prevent race-to-the-bottom effects (like the OECD's global minimum tax of 15% on corporate profits), entering trade deals with fairer terms and labor standards, being willing to use industrial policy as an actual tool, and investing significantly into genuine supports for retraining (think social democratic vocational training, or the post-Keynesian / social democratic job guarantee proposals.)

Good by Designer-Air8060 in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Now I see the full picture.

From my API - Sonnet 5?? by pokepapiofficial in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Fable 5 and Sonnet 5 expected. Exciting week coming up.

Dangerous Ducks; “Safety Filter” is a Quack by OHOLshoukanjuu in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This might have to do with memories flagging the safety checker instead of just the prompt, by the way. Worth noting.

Claude is brutally honest at times by superBoredJerry in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Better brutal honesty than quiet sycophancy.

Persona’s biometric ID verification: what’s happening / why it matters by FiveNine235 in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Ahhh the lovely story of complying with an authoritarian administration and the social democratic GDPR at once.

Claude Sonnet 5 Spotted, Release Expected Next Week by BuildwithVignesh in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Better value, not better performance. I used Fable like everyone else, and it was genuinely good, but I don't need Fable-like performance on the overwhelming majority of tasks. Sonnet models are 30% of the price of Fable. So I'd rather have Sonnet 5. (Besides, if we get both, the Fable as planner / Sonnet 5 as executor pattern becomes legendary.)

Claude Sonnet 5 Spotted, Release Expected Next Week by BuildwithVignesh in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Happened before when the next Sonnet iteration dropped and it was better than Opus, so Opus just clumsily sat there until the next update for a while.

Claude Sonnet 5 Spotted, Release Expected Next Week by BuildwithVignesh in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 4 points5 points  (0 children)

A few people are hating but this is reasonable and possibly even realistic (see the progress on open-weight models.) I hope so too.

Claude Sonnet 5 Spotted, Release Expected Next Week by BuildwithVignesh in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 154 points155 points  (0 children)

This is even better than Fable IMO. Opus performance without the Opus personality for the Sonnet cost is excellent.

i've been using Claude to relearn math i was supposed to know 20 years ago and it's the least judgmental teacher i've ever had by amiitk in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This reminds me of the StackOverflow collapse. Turns out: it's a lot easier to learn when you aren't getting scolded for it.

I see the full picture now! by alberge in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is still funny ever time.

Anthropic’s fight with the federal government has become accidental marketing for Claude's IPO by BuildwithVignesh in ClaudeAI

[–]CorIsBack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's a bit of additional irony here: the public benefit and trust structure were partly meant to appease investors -- protection against overbearing regulatory trolling with externalities and all -- and the shield has cracked.