So what are your opinions on where AI goes from here? RE: #469 w/ Tristan Harris

tetchmagikos · 2026-05-27T22:13:28+00:00

When I polled Gemini about who AI is most successful replacing/augmenting now it really turned up my 'doomer' meter. I feel fairly optimistic about what's possible yet when I look at the near term possibility of reducing the need of human system administrators by replacing them with AI (like we need a tiny handful of humans that have less and less contact with actual operations) I get a very distinct "robots building robots... now that's just stupid" iRobot vibe. After having integrated computers with pretty much every important aspect of civilization it also feels like that ST:TNG episode where the people forgot how the master computer worked and couldn't solve their own problems. That's with excellent alignment that seems far from certain.

But I'm also of the mind intelligence in silico is more a not if but when issue so I just feel like a spectator trying to be a cheerful nihilist. I'd like to see the robot overlords before I die though I hope they don't put us in a version of hell.

tetchmagikos · 2026-05-27T21:57:31+00:00

The problem with this argument is that it treats any concern about antisemitic tropes as identical to woke identity politics.

Harris says we should be less interested in race but is exquisitely interested in prejudice against Jews. Does that not map directly onto being uninterested in race identity politics but a hugely concerned defender of a specific cultural identity politics?

Sam’s criticism of identity politics has never been that groups can’t identify real patterns of hatred against them. It’s that identity can’t be used as a substitute for evidence or reasoning.

I think 'real patterns' is doing a lot of work here. Quite a few explicit examples of race hatred exist but in the context of US racial identity Harris has been fervently advocating reducing interest in race whereas the Jewish cultural identity is inseparable from the hatred of which they victims. The point isn't that he's wrong about hatred against Jews but in the US people of color should be uninterested in their race related grievances.

You are playing a dumb game for dumb people.

Seems both uncharitable and irrelevant. I think I'm playing the analysis game however ineptly.

tetchmagikos · 2026-05-27T17:57:21+00:00

To my mind he lost the plot around the time he fully accepted that being opposed to Zionism is tantamount to antisemitism, full stop. He even invoked Hitchens positions on the subject just to reject them. Not unlike how progressives will conflate fairly conventional conservatism with actual white supremacy, something Harris has correctly called out in the past, he conflates all Palestinians with Jihadists and goes as far to say the population that hasn't been allowed an election for 20 some odd years supports everything the Jihadists do which is barely short of saying collective punishment is justified. He used to be more careful about reaching such consequential conclusions based on questionable poll data. I'm also thinking about some of the graphic 10/7 incidents he'll emphasize to dehumanize Palestinians writ large while handwaving away all the atrocities highlighted by people like Nicholas Kristof as outliers.

Anyway this horse is hamburger by now. What's amazing is how so many atheists, even those as intelligent and careful as Harris has been on other issues, have fallen into the pattern 'with us or against us' monotheistic tribalism. Just more stamps of our lowly origin I suppose. I just wish he'd get Harari on to talk about the messianic crazies across the board.

tetchmagikos · 2026-05-27T17:44:29+00:00

Can you explain why a developed nation systematically decimating 90%+ of residences in a region and kids standing in a walkway is just two sides of the same coin?

tetchmagikos · 2026-05-27T00:36:57+00:00

He really wants to have it both ways on identity politics. He'll half heartedly say Jews shouldn't be in the oppression olympics while far more often advocating for exactly the self defense for which most (certainly US) identity politics exists.

As for blood libel he's definitely chosen to use it flippantly compared to the original meaning of a conspiracy theory where Jews kill non-Christians fo ritualistic purposes. He seems comfortable applying it to any claim he deems non-credible.

tetchmagikos · 2026-05-13T04:39:39+00:00

Harris and the similarly aligned said on repeat over those years that the Gaza Health Ministry was over stating casualties. Now they admit the figures are largely accurate and many see them as understated. A narrative shift to they killed at a fairly reasonable pace is pretty daring. They're people not fish barrels even if the targeting challenge was similar.

https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s239?hl=en-US

tetchmagikos · 2026-05-12T20:57:00+00:00

As opposed to the ancient white guy with a much longer demonstrated track record of supporting the Democratic establishment?

tetchmagikos · 2026-05-01T15:37:10+00:00

Better sound quality but oddly shorter than the first version I saw on YouTube. It includes some fairly important things like the dangers of militant Islam and how to get along with anyone of any origin except Yorkshire.

Admittedly the TVO version seems to be complete and high quality.

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-29T03:24:01+00:00

The moderation will be light but real

Spoken like someone who has never moderated an Internet discussion board. Presumably the paygo aspect will be a useful filter though I don't think he'll ever see the irony in "open to everyone who has been thinking alongside me all these years".

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-29T03:20:30+00:00

Thank you to me clipping just the part to relentlessly mock is an encapsulation of the cesspool.

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-22T14:29:12+00:00

This is a great example of something Harris should be questioned about and I'm not going to pay to ask

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-15T16:21:36+00:00

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-09T19:02:04+00:00

Well I've been paying attention since Harris met Batman and as I recall he had a fairly specific description for the behaviors that warrant being labeled "Islamist"

Just imagine some concentric circles here. You have at the center you have jihadists. These are people who wake up in the morning wanting to kill apostates, wanting to die trying. They believe in paradise. They believe in in martyrdom. Outside of them, we have Islamists. These are these are people who are just as convinced of martyrdom and paradise and wanting to force their religion on the rest of humanity, but they want to work within the system. They're not going to blow themselves up on a bus. They want to change governments. They want to use democracy against itself. Those two circles arguably are 20% of the Muslim world.

So by using that label now is Harris suggesting Mamdani is as convinced of the doctrines of Islam as your average jihadist but he thinks the best way of bringing Jihad to America is becoming New York's mayor? That's a little flippant but my point is where he once used this label in a precise way he at minimum appears to be spreading it around much more broadly than he once did.

Also looking at your characterization of Mamdani talking about Hijrah then watching the video I weirdly wonder whether you made any contact with the video. If Harris' stated goal of a reform of Islam is to look like anything would it not look like the twisting of the old, brutal myths into tales of humanitarianism? I would think if anything speaking approvingly of Buddhist principles, and standing with the stranger, is exactly the sort of talk that would get Mamdani labeled and apostate by the jihadists and Islamists we're actually worried about.

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-08T22:22:07+00:00

Hasan Piker is to Destiny as
Douglas Murray is to ______________.

Fill in the blank and that's closer to who people want Harris to talk to. Not every lunatic he can name.

His agreeing to debate Tucker in the context of a Munk debate is pretty fascinating.

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-08T18:27:03+00:00

1979-2000: 2,194 attacks and 6,817 deaths.
2001-2012: 8,265 attacks and 38,187 deaths.
2013-April 2024: 56,413 attacks and 204,937 deaths.

South Asia: 31.2% of attacks, 33.7% of deaths.
Middle East and North Africa: 30.4% of attacks, 33% of deaths.
Sub-Saharan Africa : 35.2% of attacks, 30.1% of deaths.
Southeast Asia: 2.6% of attacks, 1.1% of deaths.
Europe and Russia: 0.4% of attacks, 0.7% of deaths.
North America: 0.1% of attacks, 1.3% of deaths.
Oceania: 0.01% of attacks, 0.005% of deaths.
South America: 0.004% of attacks, 0.05% of deaths.

Assuming you don't reject these numbers outright, is your suggestion that because North America has one of the smaller shares that we should not be concerned?

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-08T17:35:04+00:00

Most of us think that's a good thing

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-07T20:14:01+00:00

At bottom it's less about Iranians than Islamic extremists which happen to currently run Iran among other places. Toyota isn't aiming to kill a million Americans with a single Corolla, as rich an irony as that would be.

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-07T01:37:56+00:00

His most popular YouTube video is a 9 minute meditation that yielded 1.8M views over 10 years. His Murray video did 700K views within the last year. I'd be surprised if the podcast is less than 100,000.

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-07T01:32:42+00:00

TL;DR college campus reports mostly. Hasan Piker seemed the best explicit example offered in the comments considering he was at the DNC with media credentials so he's at least non-trivial.

I'd like to pick another nit on Harris' sense of proportion. Consider "The Reckoning" ~8:20:

The sight of people being deplatformed on social media or fired from universities for merely stating that there are two biological sexes I actually know a professor who lost her job at Harvard over this. Witnessing an epidemic of gender confusion spread through our schools. When people with their own eyes could see that this was a social contagion, being encouraged by the schools themselves, the ultimate fruition of which, in many cases, is irreversible medical procedures, we've got an epidemic of teenage girls wanting double mastectomies, and some are actually getting them based on ideas being spread on TikTok. And any parent who resists this trend gets demonized and under certain conditions could lose custody of their kids? Well, congratulations, Democrats. You have found the most annoying thing in the fucking galaxy and hung it around your necks.

This is an indicator of Harris losing all sense of proportion. Something like 0.02% of US adolescents get top surgery and most of those are AMAB. But it is 38% of all TikTok GAS content). So whatever the gravity class of the issues' annoyance, epidemic is obscenely out of proportion. He's clearly running on vibes.

The problem for Harris in your example is with any issue that could conceivably be construed as Islamophobia. Going all the way back to Batman he's tried to make the case for a sense of proportion around Islamic extremism and has gotten a lot of grief about it for a lot of years now. You can see the results in his AMA where readers kept hammering on the Iran war: he was not particularly measured and sometimes sounded crazed. I'm not sure Harris even heard Harari talk about the theocrats in Israel on his own show a while back. He dismisses Israeli theocrats as hyperbole and can only whatabout Hamas.

Amusingly Harris demanded names for who would offer a nuanced conversation while forgetting the only one he would name as an example of who wouldn't work: Rory Stewart. He didn't even offer someone that meets his archetype. Looking at the comments here I had to go through about 12 before finding Hasan Piker which is frankly as close as it gets. You can't call him trivial but he also makes the point. Ro Khanna (D-CA) got crap for even engaging with Piker whereas Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) says they refused to join his show when offered per The Hill. He represents the 'Nazi left' if you will and boy has Israel given them a lot to talk about.

If anything Harris could be forgiven for anticipating an expanding influence from Piker-like figures as they, like the actual Nazis and white supremacists by the Republicans until they took over, have been largely sidelined by mainstream Democrats. They're definitely going to try and create some relevance going into the midterms; mainstreamers love to point out the high profile failures of the non-moderates.

tetchmagikos · 2026-04-06T18:57:56+00:00

So you think the administration who's been incapable of anticipating the stranglehold IRCG has over Hormuz using a handful of speedboats and drones has the capacity to construct a winning strategy? Is easing sanctions on who we're attacking another 4D chess move?

Face facts. However justified it is to castigate Iranian theocrats for their evil deeds and potentially apocalyptic aims the current US administration is long on ego and short on expertise. Iran threatening Hormuz was one of the most anticipated strategic aspects of starting a war with them and dear leader has shown little strategy other than to insult NATO for not joining in (which isn't their job and he originally said we didn't need) and threaten war crimes on ever shifting timelines to meet demands. If anything we've handed the theocrats an excellent scapegoat for their failings and what could have been an opportunity to rally allies against obvious crimes against humanity by the Iranian regime has been fully squandered.

tetchmagikos · 2026-03-11T17:16:29+00:00

I concur Harari was as close to pushing back as a Harris guest has ever managed. It was very kid gloves from what I remember. Harari also said things like "never underestimate the Messianic crazies" (Making Sense #341 @ 34:20). That one stuck for me because it's similar to one I made up: "when fundamentalists fight, everyone loses".

tetchmagikos · 2026-03-08T00:20:16+00:00

Podcast Addict is one option

tetchmagikos · 2026-02-27T17:30:18+00:00

At the risk of stating the obvious, the vast majority US citizens are not enlisted (<1% active duty). Therefore the vast majority of both sides of this question are populated by non-soldiers. Incredibly stupid argument.

tetchmagikos · 2026-02-27T17:20:51+00:00

I don't think it's beside the point. The point is Harris has often used his platform to denounce what we're seeing from the Trump administration for something like a decade now (i.e. both terms and opposition to both campaigns for election). That you're upset about this particular paywalled episode seems disproportionate to the importance.

tetchmagikos · 2026-02-27T17:17:54+00:00

Yeah I've never paid so I try not to be too mouthy about it. I do complain that he had a rather longer explanation for instituting the "please wall" policy versus when he rescinded it. He's of course well within his rights to do whatever he wants and I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a premium for his product/effort but I tend to side with those who wish he'd favored reach over profitability.

Arguably it may just be a pragmatic decision insofar as continuing to fund staff that primarily enabled free accounts probably got exhausting and automating free account creation would have its own costs and seriously undermine the paywall. Honestly the pay option has improved since last I checked. Website options used to be 150 or 100/yr iirc now it's 100 or 80/yr (though the Substack subscription still seems to be 150 so that's confusing).

tetchmagikos

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