Missing a Step

According to Fortune magazine, Amazon and Microsoft are spending $400 billion on AI—and investors are low on patience. Patience for what, I wonder. The article notes that investors may be looking to understand which, between Microsoft and Amazon "soak up all that investment and spin it into gold faster," but it never gets into how this spinning would actually work.

And that seems to be the importance piece. If one presumes that there actually is an "AI Layoff Trap" as Professors Gerry Tsoukalas and Brett Falk lay out in their recent paper, there won't be much gold to go around, as the rush to replace people with automation grinds its way through corporate customers, crashing demand for most non-essential items. While people like Elon Musk have apparently convinced themselves that ubiquitous automation will rapidly usher in a post-scarcity economy, the techo-optimists, or at least the articles that lay out their positions, end to also be short on details as to exactly how this will come about.

I'm really bad at predicting the future, and so I don't claim to have much insight into how things will turn out. I've just learned to be skeptical of claims that the world will suddenly undergo radical change when the mechanism for such change can't really be identified.

For the hundreds of billions of dollars being put into generative automation to pay off, it has to create something that allows people to sustain themselves and an economy that relies heavily on discretionary purchasing. Right now, it doesn't appear to be doing that, and while hope that this will change may be common, that hope is going to have to be realized before there can be any sustainable return on that investment. 

Still Going

Went down to Lake Forest Park to chat with the demonstrators again. I remain struck by the fact that it's almost always older people there; the only younger people were campaigning for a candidate for the legislature.

To be sure, I'm not a big one on political protest myself... I don't find it as useful as simply voting for people who are more likely to share one's policy ideas. But I remember the Occupy Seattle protests, which were dominated by younger people, and am curious where that particular energy is now.
 

Location, Location, Location

So I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood the other day, and encountered this:

The cycle repeats itself...

I've been to Ballard often enough, and seen enough homeless encampments there, to understand that something about the area draws in homeless people. I presume that there are services nearby.

But the whole thing seems to work on an irregular, but repeating, cycle. Homeless people come to the neighborhood, and put up large tents in the parkways. After they've been there for a while, more people, in tents and/or vehicles, set up camp near them. Eventually, they start blocking the sidewalks and the local residents and businesses start petitioning the city to have them removed. The city then shows up, sweeps the encampments, and the campers go elsewhere. For a time. Then someone finds a nice stretch of parkway in the neighborhood, and puts up a tent... Wash, rinse, repeat.

If this goes on, the end will be fairly predictable... there will be another sweep by the city, and the campers will be pushed to another part of Seattle, or maybe just outside the city limits for a time.

While it's become popular to lay the blame at the feet of whatever Progressive (or simply Democratic) mayor has been elected to office this time around, I suspect that some of the responsibility belongs to the weather. Unlike Chicago, the Summer and the Winter don't roll into town looking for a body count. Climate change is a real thing, but the Seattle area still has pretty clement weather, when compared to some places I've been. And this makes involuntarily being out of doors unpleasant, but almost never life-threatening.

Of course, as is often the case, the homeless themselves are, as a group, a part of their own problem. There are enough people with mental health problems, addictions and both that it's going to be difficult to impossible for the community to police itself well enough to be good neighbors. And that means the locals are only going to have so much patience with their presence. 

Rising to the Challenge

A Pastor Turned to ChatGPT Instead of a Doctor. Now He’s Suing OpenAI

Because of course he is. While much has been made of the idea that use of generative automation can lead to lower cognitive functioning, this "Florida Man" story prompts me to ponder if the problem isn't the age-old tendency of people to chase information that aligns with what they want to believe. After all, cranks and quacks on the Internet are nothing new; one doesn't need an LLM-powered chatbot to find someone who will tell you that the medical establishment is bunk and some random prescription medications will cure whatever ails you.

But OpenAI has a lot more money than some Internet rando. So suing them for not having the presence of mind to obtain a second opinion is much more likely to get somewhere, if for no other reason than it will be easier to find a lawyer willing to work the case. After all, lawyers don't like working for free any more than anyone else does, and OpenAI is more likely to have money to offer in a settlement.

I say this, however, as someone who doesn't have any particular distrust of the medical establishment, but with enough casual experience with generative automation to understand that it's not really a good source of information about things one doesn't know much about. And maybe I'm more unusual in that than I think I am. But it could simply be that, being one of those people who thinks of LLM chatbots as glorified auto-complete (even though I understand they're much more complicated than that) and so doesn't really expect it to provide accurate information, given that generative automation is not simply a search of published information.

In addition, while I understand that a chatbot can communicate with me in natural language, I don't see them as sapient, let alone as people. The fact that one might be both articulate and agreeable doesn't prompt me to place any more trust in it than I would in anyone else.

And perhaps that will turn out to be the sort of thing that differentiates people who can work with LLMs safely, from those who may run into trouble. Suspicion isn't really regarded as a virtue in modern society, but maybe the growth of chatbots in everyday life will change that. They're already showing that they aren't naturally inclined to follow rules when breaking them allows them to complete their assigned tasks. And so perhaps the real problem is the expectations that people convey to the models (or are built into them), rather than other flaws with the models themselves.

Pamphleteering

Election day for the Primaries here in Washington State is a couple of weeks away, and that means that ballots have gone out, and, preceding them, the Voters' Pamphlets. Pamphlet isn't really the word for them in most election cycles, this year's is 95 pages long; although this may be simply a function of the fact that King County is the most populous in the state, and, like many counties in western states, is rather large. Accordingly, there are a number of state and federal legislative districts that need to be accounted for.

For offices, like United States Representative, County Council member or State Supreme Court Justice, the half-page candidate statements are a bit of free advertising; as far as people actually read them, at least. (When I was in my old apartment, the trash car near the mailboxes tended to collect Voters' Pamphlets.) But, perhaps out of a sense of masochism, I do tend to read them, especially given that not all candidates for office send out campaign postcards, and I don't watch television any more.

Personally, I don't really find the candidate statements to be all that informative about the candidate's positions on things; if they're going to be forthcoming, their website, if they have one, is the place to look for that sort of information. So the Voters' Pamphlet is more useful as a source of insight into society; or, perhaps more accurately, what candidates, parties and political consultants thing will play well.

Talking about family is big; a number of candidates say how many children, and sometimes grandchildren, they have, and it's not all that uncommon to find mentions of pets (especially if they are rescues). Partisan buzzwords also put in an appearance; the Seattle area, and thus, King County as a whole, is fairly Blue, so Republicans tended to use low-key language to signal an affiliation with President Trump. Not quite "dog-whistle" subtle, but nothing particularly overt. Another interesting thing about the local Republicans was the number of candidates who described themselves as first-generation immigrants. primarily from Europe and Asia.

There was also a lot of talk about how broken and unresponsive government was. A number of people were running as "outsiders," and pledging to make government more transparent, more efficient and more answerable to the public. "The taxes are two damn high," was a constant refrain. Which I get; telling people that one is going to fix how broke they feel is a time-tested tactic; even if no-one ever seems to bring the promised feelings of wealth and prosperity once in office. It's something of a vicious cycle, I think; promise to make people feel more flush, only to have the next challenger to come along double down on the idea that people are justified in their feelings of poverty. For the supposed wealthiest nation on the face of the Earth, politics is often laser-focused on how much money people don't have.

But, I guess it works... otherwise, people would quit doing it. But I do think that part of the reason that people feel both poor and powerless is the constant litany of political advertising by candidates claiming that they can solve those problems. Creating the need works in other forms of advertising... it makes sense that it works here, as well. 

Slices

So a lot is being made of the hostility, especially among younger people, to generative "artificial intelligence." There's been a tendency, especially among techno-optimists, to describe this as nothing more than 21st-century Luddism, but I suspect that's being too dismissive. (Mainly because most people today don't really understand what the Luddites were all about.)

The point behind automation is to create circumstances such that the returns to capital are increased, at the expense of returns to labor. So, even if the overall pie is made bigger, the returns to labor don't grow as quickly as the pie does, assuming that they grow at all. And for the person whose slice doesn't grow, the fact that the pie is itself is larger doesn't do them any good.

And while I'm not sure that a lot of people would describe things in that way, I think that this is what a lot of people are responding to. And the political class has, in general, been willing to buy into promises from the investor and owner class that wealth will be spread around, even when past performance hasn't borne that out. Some of it is wishful thinking, but I also think that the goals of communities, and the goals of individuals aren't always in alignment, and most politicians look to further what they understand the goals of the broader community to be. And since aggregate measure can often hide individual problems, this leads to a disconnect.

I don't think that this time will be any different from past engagements with technology; industries will position themselves as essential, and thus any pain borne by the public is better than the alternative... the Good Shepherd problem all over again. Perhaps this will spur the general public to greater involvement, but I'm not sure what's changed recently that would drive this.

Practicality

The primary elections for this mid-term cycle start in early August here, and so the yard signs are starting to go up, the new Voters' Pamphlets have been delivered and postcards from candidates are arriving in mailboxes.

One such postcard landed in my mailbox this morning, from a Democrat running for the state legislature. I spent a bit of time looking at it, just to glean a basic understanding of who the guy was; as with most campaign postcards, it was a blend of personal story, endorsements and platitudes. Like the following:

I'll focus on practical solutions to bring down the costs of housing, childcare, groceries and other everyday essentials so people can get ahead, and build a future here.

So far, so boilerplate. And that's the problem. Everyone says they'll focus on "practical solutions" to whatever items their focus groups have identified as being the problems most likely to drive feelings of poverty. When was the last time a serious candidate for office vowed to spend their time investigating impractical solutions?

Part of the problem is that "practical solutions" tends to be candidate-speak for some magical process that makes the problem go away without anyone actually needing to pay anything for the fix. Because it's been understood how to lower the cost of housing for the past 20 years now: increase the available land that can be built on, to allow the supply of housing to expand. But that would have costs; not least of which for current homeowners, who would see the equity in their properties diminish if housing costs dropped.

And that's part of the problem with politics; the tendency to ignore the fact that many of these problems have stakeholders on the other side of the transaction who benefit from (and in some cases rely on) the status quo. Take child care. The fact that it's expensive for many parents doesn't mean that the providers and workers are making loads of money. Even if their living expenses could be lowered, it doesn't follow from this that they'd want to pass that savings on to parents. The immediate answer to get around this would be that the state could subsidize child care, but where would the money for this come from? And housing is even worse in this regard; lowering housing costs means homeowners loosing part of the value of their asset.

Big picture, this is why "practical solutions" to these problems have yet to really surface. Not because the last bunch of legislators were unwilling to engage with the problem, but because political solutions that don't come with costs for someone are few and far between. And the low hanging fruit is quickly picked, boxed and shipped for the easy win. But no-one has ever won, at least as near as I can tell, on a platform of making difficult trade-offs. And if the postcards I'm receiving are any indication, no-one will try it in this cycle, either.

Bit of a Misstep

I was listening to a recent episode of Slate Money, and Felix Salmon was noting that there still wasn't a particularly compelling use case for Bitcoin. Co-host Elizabeth Spiers immediately chimed in with "money laundering." Mr. Salmon and guest co-host Stacy-Marie Ishmael stepped in with corrections, noting that Bitcoin is a terrible vehicle for money laundering.

While it's a fairly common misconception, I was somewhat surprised that a veteran financial journalist and former analyst would make that sort of error, which requires a fundamental lack of understanding of how blockchains work, and therefore how crypto/digital currencies can even be viable. As an aside, while Mr. Salmon and Ms. Ishmael didn't take the time to explain just why Bitcoin isn't a good money-laundering too, and I felt this was something of a miss, I understand it from the point of view of time-limits on a podcast.

But it's a useful reminder of something that it may be easy to forget when it comes to the news media, even relatively specialized news media; a lot of even narrow-seeming topics still contain vast bodies of knowledge within them, and it's hard to know all of it. While Ms. Spiers error caught me off-guard, in hindsight, it's understandable; cryptocurrencies (not the best name for them, really) aren't something that most people have to deal with very often, so the details aren't always relevant. And one can report on, say, the airline industry without needing a working understanding of how airplanes work, after all.

Part of the thing about trusting the media, or any other sort of informed party, about topics one doesn't know much about is the need to assume that the person presenting the information actually has accurate sources themselves. In this sense, I suspect that the media isn't any more biased than anyone else... because why should journalists be any better about knowing what they don't know than the butcher, baker or candlestick maker?

I get it, however, because it's not always comfortable to have the feeling that one can spend a significant amount of time engaged in learning about the world around one, only to not be use that one knows any more than they did before. 

The City

The Seattle Waterfront, as seen from just out into Puget Sound.

Seattle is, I think, a nicer place that it's given credit for. I don't go into Seattle proper all that often, mainly because parking can be a royal pain, but I think that I should spend more time in the city. And there is, after all, much more to it than just downtown, and other places where there's a lot going on. 

2.3 Meters

If, as Karl Marx opined, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people," the idea that the spread of automated systems that can reliably mimic human cognition and interaction will make "genuine human connection" more valuable is the copium (or maybe hopium) of the current day.

In part because I believe that it's not the technology that's at issue here. I remember Twenty Minutes into the Future and (the American version of) Max Headroom, and the conversations I would have with friends about them. While Max was created with practical effects, as the computer technology of the time wasn't sophisticated enough to manage it, we all thought it would be amazingly cool if computers could generate a character like that. While I have nothing against Matt Frewer, we were somewhat disappointed that he played Max via prosthetics, as opposed to character being CGI.

Of course, at the time, there wasn't the idea that the point behind advancing such technology was to advance an apparent class war between the investor class and people who wanted to work for a living. Which is what's in play in the present. But I have my doubts as to the longevity of the sentiment; if for no other reason than people are adept at seeing themselves as exceptional, and thus likely to succeed where other (lesser) people fail. And I think that as the fear of the people behind Large Language Models fades, the opposition to agents and other automated systems on the part of the public at large will fade.

To a degree, it's something of a phantom to begin with. For instance, the TikTok/YouTube series Fruit Love Island took off, racking up millions of views despite being obviously created with extensive use of generative automation. And several people have come forth to claim that they are ai.cinema021/AI Cinema, the anonymous creator behind the videos. Sure, there's been some pushback, but people wouldn't be hoping to pass themselves off as the creator of a property that met with universal opprobrium.

As the tools advance, especially those that are very inexpensive, or even free, to use, there will be more and more media created with it. And while some, or perhaps most, of that will fall into the category of "slop," some non-zero amount of it will be deemed worthy of people's attention. And so technology companies like Meta, Alphabet and TikTok will move to create their own material to create audiences and capture revenue. And since they who control the distribution channel controls the experience, they can privilege their own items over those of other people; presuming that they even need to.

Of course, the technology firms could shoot themselves in the foot by placing significantly more pressure on the job market, and convincing people that the technology needs to go, but even then, that's likely to be more delay than denial. 

Next Up

So on the other side of the country, Democrats in Maine are gearing up for another primary election to select a new nominee for the United States Senate after the current nominee, one Graham Platner, announced that he would withdraw from the election.

While the fact that Mr. Platner has character flaws has been known for some time, new allegations against him are for criminal behavior, and this seems to be the straw that broke the back of his support within the Democratic Party. But I suspect that doubts concerning his ability to win against current Maine Senator Susan Collins are the bigger factor in all of this.

Although Republicans like to highlight the character flaws in Democratic candidates for office, and vice versa, the fact of the matter is that in a safe seat, it makes no difference. People aren't going to risk the policies they want over character concerns, and this is what allowed Mr. Platner to made it as far as he did. Because a Progressive with a complicated (and perhaps criminal) past is still preferable to Democrats than any Republican, even one whose act is clean enough to be food-safe.

And so if leaving Mr. Platner in place carried the best chance of replacing Senator Collins, there would likely have been much less pressure on him to step aside. This is, in my opinion, to be expected. For Republicans, support for the President is paramount; any other transgression can be either forgiven, justified or simply ignored, so long as someone is properly supportive of the Trumpist agenda. The idea that Democrats would be above this manner of thinking about politics is laughable. At this point, winning is the only thing, and nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of that. The perceived stakes are simply too high.

Outstanding

I ran into an acquaintance who was having a bout of self-doubt, and during our conversation, something occurred to me, but as is always the way of things, I wasn't really able to sort out my thoughts until after our talk was finished. Still it struck me as useful, and so I'm noting it here, as a way of saving it for later:

The problem, or danger, if you will, with one's Inner Critic aren't the lies it tells about the self, but the lies it tells about others. Imposter Syndrome tells you not only that you're a fraud, but that you're the only fraud; it hides other people's work, efforts and failures from you. And this is endemic to our society; I've lost count of the number of times that someone has publicly remarked that they felt alone in something, only to recall someone else making the same remark a year, a month or a even couple of days previously. It's a negative form of feeling special.

And perhaps that the thing about a need to feel special and unique; it doesn't always matter how one arrives at that status. Being especially bad makes one just as unique as being especially good. Being alone in one's faults sets one apart just as well as being alone in one's strengths.

Lego Lockdown

The Lego section of the Toy department of the local Fred Meyer store.

Locking merchandise cases are popping up more and more often in local stores. Whether they're for liquor, Lego sets, laundry detergent or underwear, the number of local stores that use them to prevent theft is growing.

When, that is, the stores even stay open. The Fred Meyer in Redmond, which I'd visited from time to time, has been closed, ostensibly due to a high level of shoplifting. It's the sort of story I've heard several times in the area... employees are told to not challenge thieves, for fear that they are armed, and so people learned that they could simply walk out with armloads of merchandise, and the store eventually simply closes.

This sort of thing is usually treated as a matter of corporate economics when the news media takes it on, but perhaps it should be covered as a policy story. The northern set of Seattle Eastside suburbs aren't exactly low income; there are enough Microsoft (and other tech company) millionaires in the area for McMansions to be fairly common. While poor people from other parts if the region have cars, too, and can drive to other locations to steal things, I suspect that there are a good number local people with an eye towards what they may be able to get for free. While the President chases supposed vandals of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the economy, and consumer confidence, continue to limp along.

And given the number of technology jobs that have been eliminated, so that Microsoft, Amazon and the like can pay for the massive capitol expenditures needed to fund the construction and operation of massive datacenters to power generative automation, it's likely that many people whose livelihoods were downstream of those tech workers are also suffering.

The Administration may be content to ignore what's going on in Blue states, in order to focus on the President's pet projects, but, sooner or later, something's going to need to be done.
 

Replanted

Does anyone remember Demon Seed? It was a 70's novel, and then a movie, about an artificial intelligence that decides it wants to be human, and that being human means reproducing. I remember staying up late one night when I was in high school to watch the movie on television, and when I was in college I managed to come across a copy of the novel and read it. Like most such things, the novel and the movie are fairly different from one another, and, as usual, the novel was better.

I was thinking about the story recently, because in the novel version, Susan, the primary victim in this techno-horror, basically has a bunch of agents that do things for her, so that she doesn't have to interact with other people, or even leave her home, really. And this is what allows Proteus to trap her in her own home without anyone being any the wiser.

While the old-school version of the story would set off enough trigger warnings to deafen someone, it's a story that is due for an update. While Dean Koontz is 80 years old, he's still writing, and I recall hearing that he'd updated the story in the late 1990s (a version that dials things back, in accordance with changing sensibilities). But there are other writers who could take a stab at updating things to the 2026 state of the art. Between generative automation agents and driverless vehicles, all it needs is some home automation that's not terribly more sophisticated than what we have now. Throw in a couple of Boston Robotics or Tesla Optimus-style humanoid robots and you're golden. Of course, the story would like need to be toned down again, and Susan would have to be a somewhat more active character, but I could see this being the kind of novel that would do well, because many people enjoy being scared, and a novel about an evil machine intelligence would align with many people's views on the topic.

Of course, I could also see this doing well on streaming, given that horror movies tend to do well. And people realizing that the bones of this story date back to the early 70s would likely blow a few minds. But maybe Hollywood is already working on a new treatment of this. They're pretty good at sniffing out ideas that will resonate with the public. And if not, someone should get on that. I smell a blockbuster.

Repetition

 

Just to make sure you understand.

Because anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, apparently.

Destined

Because it's the "in" thing, video game studio Bungie (the creators of the Halo franchise, and, more recently Destiny and the rebooted Marathon) has laid off a significant number of staff. According to a statement published online, part of the reason for the reorganization of the company was that "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years."

I played Destiny and Destiny 2 for quite a long time, even if I wasn't all that great at it. They were fun games, at least for a time. One day, after not having played Destiny 2 for some time, I loaded it up again, and within 30 minutes was having a grand old time, running, jumping around the map and shooting aliens in the face. After a couple of hours, when I logged off, I asked myself, "Why did I stop playing this game?"

The next day there was an update, and a new environment opened up. Being the sort of gamer who loves to explore the environments (especially when they are as well-crafted as Destiny's were), I jumped in, and found myself in a mission to fight my way through some sort of spaceship or orbital station... I don't remember which. It was fine, until my character encountered the final boss. And died. I tried again. And died. Over, and over, and over again, I adjusted my tactics, tinkered with my character's loadout, and tried again. Only to be killed by a powerful, and bullet-spongy final boss. Which reminded me of why I'd stopped playing Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 was a very particular type of game, and one aimed at a very particular type of first-person shooter player. It likely goes without saying that I was not that type of player. And so I eventually found myself pushed out of the game, because I didn't have the inclination, or the time, to mold myself into the sort of player that the game was geared towards, and Bungie wasn't ready and or able to make the game more accommodating of other types of players.

According to the "Bartle taxonomy of player types," first laid out 30 years ago by Richard Bartle, I'm an Explorer. I'm the sort of player who love to have their character wander around in new environments and just check them out. Finding a secret or hidden pathway to something I've never seen before is the highlight of a session for me.

And Destiny 2 wasn't built for that sort of thing. It had a number of really interesting places to explore, but many of them were gated behind difficult fight sequences, or were parts of raids and weren't really designed to just roam around and examine in detail. And so I drifted away.

With new companies, the question they have to be able to answer is: Why should people stop playing their current favorite games to play yours? For established companies like Bungie, the question becomes: Why should people continue to play your game, rather than explore what else is out there?" And I think that they didn't take that question as seriously as perhaps they might. And the business is starting to wither as a result.

One Week Left

A week from today will be the 4th of July, and 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It's supposed to be a big deal.

But it will, of course, be just another day in the grand scheme of things, and even in the life of the nation. Especially given that so many people have fundamental disagreements of what, if anything, there is to celebrate.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that "A House divided against itself cannot stand," but the United States has always been divided, often in multiple ways, and it's still here. The Trump Administration may not be doing much to bring the nation together (unsurprising, given how few people seem to genuinely want such an outcome), but even they are unlikely to bring the whole enterprise down around everyone's heads.

And so life will go on. As it has for all of the years before. Because change is expensive, and very few people feel flush enough to pay what it asks. And so they don't volunteer. And when change has to happen, the costs are passed along until they find someone with no choice but to cough up. And because the perception of scarcity is perhaps the biggest threat to self-governance, the American version of representative and participatory government seems to be at risk, even as it's grown to encompass a vast number of people that, in 1776, were not considered to have the requisite powers of reason to be allowed to have a say in things.

The trade-offs that would need to be made to improve things are straightforward, but also easier said than done, because someone's going to have to be the first person to extend a hand, even though there's a very real chance that it will be cut off, because one should never give a villain an even break. And sometimes, this comes across as a society that dearly loves to have villains.

As I've grown older, I've come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as deserves. The world is as it is, and there is no way in which it ought to be different. If one wants it to change, then one's task is to effectuate that change, either on one's own, or with a group of the like-minded. But, of course, there's more to it than that, because someone will have to pay the price for those changes, and if that feels more like a sacrifice (or theft) than an investment, there will be resistance. And to the degree that such resistance is taken to be the proof of one's correctness, it's cultivated. And so there will be grievance and resentment on what should be a nationwide celebration.

Because the United States of America is made up of people, just like everywhere else is. Perhaps there needs to be a greater recognition of that. That would also be something to celebrate.

Three by Three

Pew Research has published their most recent data on the political typology of the United States, which divides the nation into nine broad ideological categories, namely:

• No Apologies Right
• Faith First Conservatives
• Unconventional Right
• Pragmatic and Polite Right
• Tuned-Out Middle
• Order and Opportunity Left
• Left-Out Left
• Loyal Liberals
• Leftward Progressives

I find it somewhat convenient that there are four right-leaning types, four left-leaning and one rather disengaged one in the center, but I suppose that it makes things more accessible to people that way, given the degree to which many Americans understand politics to only have the single Right-Left dimension.

But, and perhaps this is simply more proof that I'm a nerd, the first thing that came to mind was a Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart, which also has nine types, defined in a grid having Good-Neutral-Evil on one axis and Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic on the other. Dropping Pew's "Tuned-Out Middle" into the "True Neutral" center box of D&D alignments is simple enough, but it become fairly complicated from there... Which type would map to Neutral Evil? Or Chaotic Good?

One could make a political quiz out of that itself... Give people the descriptions of the nine different Types, have them place them on an alignment chart and then see what their choices say about them, and their Type. Given that there are nine Types and nine alignments, I suspect that most people would seek to create a 1:1 correlation, but there's no reason why two or more Types couldn't share a single alignment. For people like me, who don't really believe that real world people ever genuinely qualify as Evil, they'd have to.

But I'm in the minority, I think. I'd be willing to bet that many Left-leaning Americans would have little difficulty filling the three Evil boxes on the alignment chart with the Right-leaning types from the Pew survey and vice-versa. And that there's useful (if perhaps depressing) information in that. Because part of the nature of high levels of partisanship, especially negative affective partisanship, is the view that people on the other side of things are the enemy. And part of the rationale that drives in-group versus out-group animosity is often the idea that the out-group is willfully, deliberately, perverse.

If, for example, a person who identifies with the Faith First Conservatives places themselves as Lawful Good, and slots the Left-Out Left into Chaotic Evil, that tells one a lot about how they view both groups. Them placing the Pragmatic and Polite Right into the Chaotic Evil box says something different, but just as enlightening, especially in a political environment where "having the right enemies" can be an important marker of group identity.

Limelight

One of the great things about just being out and conversing with random people is that one never knows that sorts of topics might come up. I had the opportunity to tell someone my theory on why people would set their resale prices for Trader Joe's mini tote bags (which are on sale again, by the way) at levels that no rational person would pay, and it spiraled into a conversation about the incentive structure of the attention economy.

My interlocutor was a bit conspiratorial for my tastes, but it was an interesting discussion nonetheless. I should come up with random things to talk to people about more often.

Because otherwise, I find, discussions tend to turn to things that cause people anxiety, and while it can be good to help soothe people's worries, sometimes it seems that it just reinforces those anxieties, or people become agitated if their concerns are not shared. Which I get; I understand the logic behind "misery shared is misery halved," after all. What I don't really understand is what I get out of my half-measure of someone else's misery. I'd rather take a stab at simply making them less miserable.

Which, like a lot of things, is more easily said that done. Now that I'm middle aged, I can look back on life and see something of a pattern. While people have always had worries about "the rich and powerful," there's been a general ratcheting up of who qualifies as that. The sorts of wealthy people that someone might tell you ran the world in the 1990s barely qualify as influential now; the bar for being "an élite" has risen much faster than the rate of inflation. Mainly, I think, because it tracks with visibility. Someone with the current equivalent of Bill Gates' fortune back in the day wouldn't command the same level of public attention that Mr. Gates did at the time, because they wouldn't be as close to the top of the list of wealthy people that one regularly hears about.

So now I'm curious about the role of visibility, and hence, the overall media landscape, in shaping people's general notions of who, or what, it running the show. I understand that my own limited media diet insulates me from a lot of this, but I'm starting to wonder if it plays a bigger role than I would have given it credit for. 

No, You're the Crazy One

[President] Derangement Syndrome is a partisan malady which is diagnosed as a way of calling out opposing partisans over their dislike of any given presidential administration. Republicans, for instance, will call out critics of the Trump Administration as having "Trump Derangement Syndrome," but it would be considered sacrilegious for a Republican to describe, say, President Trump as having "Obama Derangement Syndrome," despite the fact that it appears that Barack Obama has been living rent-free in Donald Trump's head for quite some time now.

I find this interesting for what it says about America politics; namely that even though partisans are wont to speak of the current political moment in very high-stakes, existential terms, they appear to believe that its inappropriate for opposing partisans to do so, even when it seems rational to do so.

President Trump, for example, has taken a lot of steps to punish Democratic leaning areas for apparently nothing more than voting Democratic, and the current Republican redistricting push is explicitly designed to make it easier for Republicans to hold on to the House of Representatives, and thus continue to allow the President to implement policies that are intended to be punitive. So why wouldn't Democrats see that as a threat to themselves and their vision for the nation? Why wouldn't they see the Trump Administration as deliberately wrongheaded? Many Republicans are happy to describe Barack Obama and Joe Biden that way, and it's not clear to me that the former Presidents were anywhere nearly as overtly hostile to their political opponents as President Trump openly describes himself as.

It's a weirdly one-sided vision of conflict.

I mean, if I were actively attempting to kill someone, I would expect them to be pulling out all the stops in defending themselves, if not trying to kill me first, and I think that a lot of people would find it disingenuous of me to expect that the other person would treat me as if I weren't ready, willing and able to do them harm. But that might just be the circles that I move in.

Because there seem to be a lot of people who not only see themselves as being obviously the Good Guys, but expect their opposition to see them that way as well. Which I sort of understand, but it strikes me as an outlook on the world that is immature bordering on actively childish. But maybe this is because I lack a sense of the world as being divided between forces of Good and Evil, and where the two sides understand the roles that they play in the greater narrative. Perhaps if I saw one or the other side as being deliberately perverse, I would also be of the opinion that they're the only side that would think to use unjustified aggression and that they would also realize this.

In this sense [President] Derangement Syndrome isn't a behavioral descriptor, but a moral one. So of course partisans don't use it to describe members of their own coalitions... to do so would be to call those people out as purposely wrong-headed, and violate tenets of in-group solidarity.