Apropos Ike, one of the biggest mistakes in analyzing the right is thinking that the right ever became 100% liberal, centrist, conservative, populist under Ike, Nixon, Reagan, &c.

This is especially so under Ike, who people think tag-teamed with Rocky to basically crush anyone who wasn't part of the old NE establishment. It's a nice story, but it's not really true.
Ike was very popular afterward, but he did not sweep the GOP primary in 1952. He instead ran neck and neck with Old Righty Robert Taft and had to play all sorts of backroom deals to get a majority of delegates.
He spent much of the primary "playing to the base" in a way that Goldwater fans would like and at least rhetorically was pro-smaller government.
Even so, many R Senators and Congressmen were not Ike men, and they often gave him trouble or killed reform ideas he had. National politics is not just the President.
It's true that the NE establishment was very powerful (the only real bastion to survive and endure the FDR sweep, but it was weakening already then. There's a reason Rocky said "I'm all that's left" of it in 1964.
We also forget that while Ike did expand Social Security, he was a genuine budget hawk, was quite cautious in foreign affairs and intervention. His efforts to keep the defense establishment trim was not out of pacifism but to make sure it did not overwhelm the country.
*in the sense of budget needs and such.
Another important fact is Ike was def. a driver of religious revival in the 1950s, adding "under God" to the pledge of allegiance and starting the National Prayer Breakfast.
He had his flaws and drawbacks, too. He was too slow to move against McCarthy and his insinuations against Truman as too soft on the Cold War were absurd. He was also a little *too* cautious on civil rights sometimes, tho not always.
We also forget that the GOP was already moving in a more conservative direction by his second term, pushing right to work. Twas really bad timing - union membership was at an all-time high and there had just been a short but sharp recession - and the GOP was hammered.
But already by the late 1950s and 1960, the more conservative parts of the right were reasserting themselves under Goldwater (after Taft had passed). They did not all suddenly drop dead or bow to Rocky, and most came from outside the South at this time.
IRL, the wing that dominated in Ike's time was the rough middle ground, and Ike was the linchpin. The liberal and conservative wings waxed and waned but never died. Same under Nixon.
All this rambling for a core point: The two parties are coalitions. Always were, always will be. No one wing remains entirely dominant for long. Tis a matter of historical circumstances, social realities, and even sometimes the refutation of ideas from time to time.
If the Ds do have one advantage over Rs - and it's a big one - it's that they generally share the same overarching goals and mostly disagree on tactics and how to distribute the spoils. Rs, being all about principles good and bad, often deeply disagree on goals.
Left hatred is more than enough for it to be an opposition and to win elections...but that lack of real concensus hampers governance. The best Rs were able to form ad hoc coalitions of the wings based on shared strategy.

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The common understanding of propaganda is that it is intended to brainwash the masses. Supposedly, people get exposed to the same message repeatedly and over time come to believe in whatever nonsense authoritarians want them to believe /1

And yet authoritarians often broadcast silly, unpersuasive propaganda.

Political scientist Haifeng Huang writes that the purpose of propaganda is not to brainwash people, but to instill fear in them /2


When people are bombarded with propaganda everywhere they look, they are reminded of the strength of the regime.

The vast amount of resources authoritarians spend to display their message in every corner of the public square is a costly demonstration of their power /3

In fact, the overt silliness of authoritarian propaganda is part of the point. Propaganda is designed to be silly so that people can instantly recognize it when they see it


Propaganda is intended to instill fear in people, not brainwash them.

The message is: You might not believe in pro-regime values or attitudes. But we will make sure you are too frightened to do anything about it.
1. The death of Silicon Valley, a thread

How did Silicon Valley die? It was killed by the internet. I will explain.

Yesterday, my friend IRL asked me "Where are good old days when techies were


2. In the "good old days" Silicon Valley was about understanding technology. Silicon, to be precise. These were people who had to understand quantum mechanics, who had to build the near-miraculous devices that we now take for granted, and they had to work

3. Now, I love libertarians, and I share much of their political philosophy. But you have to be socially naive to believe that it has a chance in a real society. In those days, Silicon Valley was not a real society. It was populated by people who understood quantum mechanics

4. Then came the microcomputer revolution. It was created by people who understood how to build computers. One borderline case was Steve Jobs. People claimed that Jobs was surrounded by a "reality distortion field" - that's how good he was at understanding people, not things

5. Still, the heroes of Silicon Valley were the engineers. The people who knew how to build things. Steve Jobs, for all his understanding of people, also had quite a good understanding of technology. He had a libertarian vibe, and so did Silicon Valley
@snip96581187 @Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen Clearly, because as I have been saying for 8 months now, DTRA and DARPA have been using Ecohealth and UC Davis to collect novel pathogens for gain of function work back in the USA. I have documented this in many threads which I will post here just to annoy everyone.

@Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen


@Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen


@Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen


@Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen
Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?


I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.

explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?

An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.

The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.

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