Updating My Priors: Short Takes 9/2025

Top forecaster Peter Wildeford was interviewed and explained his heuristics:

• Follow a "nothing ever happens" approach, betting against dramatic predictions since most provocative forecasts don't materialize; people overestimate the likelihood of exciting but unlikely events.
• Rather than relying solely on his own analysis, he built a network of domain experts across different topics and aggregates their insights; his edge comes from having good sources rather than original analysis.
• "For example, when Israel attacked Iran, I know three people with good track records on Middle East issues. I talk to all of them and try to draw the through line. To be frank, I add very little of my own value in my forecasting. I just make out like a bandit by having these people I trust and drawing good averages across them."
• Embrace humility: realizing there's a lot he doesn't know and learning when to bow out.

The last bit reminds me of a line by Nassim Taleb that it is important to surround yourself with books you have not read to remind yourself of how much you do not know.

---

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher and media theorist best known for pioneering the study of media theory and coining the phrase "the medium is the message" to highlight how the form of communication (not just its content) profoundly shapes society. 

He developed a concept of information overload that centers on the idea that the advent of electronic media introduced a state where individuals are constantly exposed to more information than they can process. 

McLuhan observed that "one of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with". 

He argued that the constant bombardment of stimuli and information through media leads not only to overwhelm but also fundamentally alters how people perceive, process, and engage with the world.

When we are faced with information overload,' he taught; 'the mind must resort to pattern recognition to achieve understanding' seeking to make sense of chaotic, fragmented information by identifying simple narratives or overarching pattern.

It reminded me of the Kafka/Lynch study I reference in Agency Detection and the Confident Pundit where people got better at a pattern recognition game after reading Kafka or watching a David Lynch film, since the content is so bizarre as to appear meaningless.

---

Nate Silver on when prediction markets are reliable.

There’s not a super simple answer to that question, but here are some factors I’d consider:

• How liquid is the market?
• How sophisticated is the modal trader in having domain knowledge about the subject at hand?
• Whether or not the average trader knows what he’s doing, is there a class of professional traders with the capital to correct any imbalances?
• Is the situation easy to model through statistical techniques?
• Is it a repeated event where traders have the opportunity to refine their estimates through trial and error?
• And is there local knowledge — or even insider knowledge — that might contribute to the wisdom of crowds?

---

In the New York Times, David Brooks writes:

“The anti-institutionalists have advantages. It’s much easier to degrade and destroy than to preserve and reform.”

This reminds me of a James Lindsay analogy about the seduction of being in a demolition crew. It doesn't take much to tear something down; much harder to build. I have little faith that those who want to tear down institutions can rebuild something better. And now the right has fallen to the same folly as the postliberal left. They have become anti-builders.

---

In Masculinity and Dignity, I wrote about the 60/40 rule: In any given group, when the gender ratio exceeds 60% women, men start to leave and it becomes harder to recruit new men. However, there is at least one exception: nursing.

From The Wall Street Journal: 

The number of male registered nurses has increased from about 140,000 in 2000 to about 400,000 in 2023. This means that about 14% of nurses are now men, up from about 9% roughly two decades ago.

But …

About 46% of nurse anesthetists, who administer anesthesia and help patients recover from it, are men. The job currently requires at least a master’s degree, and the average salary is $214,000.

At the other end, only about 10% of certified nursing assistants are men.

… so men might be going into specializations that are below 60% women. This seems to track with Scott Alexander’s finding that although doctors have achieved gender parity, the specialities men and women go into track with gender stereotypes; with men doing systems-based things like surgery and women doing people-based things like pediatricians. 

It's the End of Democracy As We Know It (And I feel fine)

 I know I said I was done with posts about Trump, but this is actually a post about people's reaction to Trump. 

Yes, you can see the paralells between his appointments of loyalists and the chilling of speech from his executive orders, and how those paralells match historical examples of dictators overthrowing governments. 

But how likely is that to happen?

The best way to answer that question is to not just rely on my judgement or on the thoughful articulation of some writer who already agrees with all of my opinons. That's right, baby. Time for some prediction markets!

First off: we need something specific and measurable to know if change has occurred. The global democracy index seems well suited for this. The Economist recently ran an article about this. They have the U.S. listed as a "flawed democracy" with a score of 7.85. (Full report here.) A hybrid regime would be less than 5 and an authoritarian regime would be less than 4.

Kalshi, which is real people betting real money, asks "How much will US democracy weaken under Trump?" They give an 86% chance of being below 7.80, so it's unlikely to go up, and a 31% chance of going below 7. There aren't any markets below that, so the people with skin in the game seem to be betting that it is unlikely we are anything below a flawed democracy. 

Next up, Metaculus. Not money being exchanged, just superforecasters chasing after bragging rights. However, they have shown to have the most calibrated and accurate forecasts of all the prediction markets.  When I search on their site I can find the question "Will the United States drop below a 7 on the democracy index by 2040?" but when I click on it I get an error message. Now, that's a long time line and there are only 37 forecasters (but given their historical accuracy, I don't ding them too many points for that sample size) but the consensus is 40%. Higher than I am comfortable with but still seems unlikely for us to fall into an authortarian regime. 

Finally, Manifold. Like Metaculus, no actual money. But unlike them, anyone can throw up a precition market. This gives us lots of questions to explore but spreads out the sample size a bit. 

First up, with 191 traders: "If Trump is elected, will the US still be a liberal democracy at the end of his term?" At the time of the election this was 80%. It has now dropped to 58%.

With 39 traders: "Will the democracy score for the United States significantly decrease by the end of 2025?". On Feb. 4, this was 28%. It is now 76%. This uses a different ranking, which has the U.S. at 0.892 and defines a decrease as sliding down in score by 0.1.

With just 11 traders we are using another index that has the U.S. at 83/100. "If Trump wins, what will the Democracy Index be for the US at the end of his presidency?" Only 25% of traders think it will be below 78, but even a score of 68 would still put us in their highest category of "consolidated democracies".

Trading at a sample size of 21, "If Trump wins, will the US electoral democracy index fall below 0.80 by 2025?" They reference Our World in Data, which uses the V-DEM index and has us at 0.85. They give it a 91% chance. I don't know how to put that number in context, but they note "0.80 is the lowest central estimate for the US since 1975."

Lastly, with 277 traders, "Will Trump 2.0 be the end of Democracy as we know it?" They define this as "Will there be a major change with Trump's election such that the U.S. does not live in a traditional US Democracy anymore? Such conditions would include things like: Trump running for a 3rd term, declaration of Martial Law at any point, removing Supreme Court Justices or ignoring a material order from SCOTUS, Executive Branch overturning a certified election result, refusing a transition of power, etc."

Finally, a bold stance! Anyway, the traders have converged on a 33% of this happening.

The Upshot: first, we should put more stock in what these markets tells us than what your wacky aunt posts on Facebook or your favorite cable news host rants about every evening. Second, it seems that our democracy ranking is likely to decrease but not at a level that we should be worrying about, like our country being overthrown by MAGA heads. 

But things can change. I look back to revisiting this post and these markets over the next four years to know how much I should be updating my priors. 

My Final Trump Post

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rickfoster/8760051427

I recently watched Mr. McMahon, the Netflix documentary on WWE titan Vince McMahon. It was entertaining on several levels but the one part that stuck was the section on Donald Trump. Vince kinda sorta took credit for Trump’s ascendency to the White House. Not through any sort of cross promotion or campaign donation or election strategy. Vince’s claim, which I believe, is that Trump learned from WWE wrestlers how to be a performer and then appropriated that to his public image.

It is something that now feels blindingly obvious in retrospect. The boasting, the narcissism, feeding off both the audience’s adulation and the scorn of one’s enemies—these are all traits that Vince and Triple H and Steve Austin have been honing for decades. 

Wrestling legends like Ric Flair built their characters around ostentatious displays of wealth, unrelenting self-promotion, and a refusal to show humility. Trump employed the same persona in his campaign, boasting about his wealth, intelligence, and business success, much like Flair’s infamous catchphrase: “To be the man, you gotta beat the man.”

Pay attention to their blatant rule-breaking. In wrestling, heels cheat openly—whether through eye pokes, low blows, or interference from an ally—only to then revel in their lack of consequences.

Heels thrive on eliciting a reaction. Whether being showered with boos or ironically cheered, they control the crowd by feeding off their emotions. Trump’s campaign rallies functioned much like WWE events, complete with entrance music, taunting slogans (“Lock her up!” “Fake news!”), and call-and-response interactions with the audience.

I recently read a quote from a swing voter who had decided to support Trump, saying “At least he’s an honest liar.” Out of context, that sentence makes no sense. And yet, I know exactly what he means.

I found professional wrestling to be more entertaining once I learned it was all fake. You become more focused on the personalities and how they perform for the crowd. With Trump, most of his supporters know he is lying when he gets up on stage and makes outrageous claims. But they know this is part of the act, and they find it entertaining enough to put up with all the corruptiony stuff that gets reported on in The New York Times.

Yes, the WWE heel is not a good person and all of the fans know that. You know who else isn’t good? The arena’s security guards who keep pulling fans out of the stands for holding up offensive homemade signs, escorting them out of the building, and putting them in cuffs. Only they are not a part of the show. And when the heel, in full character, promises to demolish those security guards, whose side will the fans be on?

This is where Trump feels authentic to his voters. All his lies appear to be on the surface, so they let their guard down. The so-called "honest liar" allows them to feel vulnerable in comparison to the traditional politician who appears to be lying with a straight face, and the median voter feels unable to get a read on them.

When I think of all of the presidents of my lifetime, I can surmise a reason that compelled them to run for the executive office. Some feel overregulation has harmed small businesses, others feel inequality has made it near impossible for people to succeed without a robust welfare system. But for the life of me, I cannot think of a consequentialist reason that Trump wants to be president, what he gets out of it. I think he simply likes being president, all the pomp and circumstance and attention.

So here is my goal for the next 4 years: I am not going to give him the thing he wants, my attention. If Ezra Klein does a 3 hour podcast episode about what to expect from Trump's first term I will gladly skip over that and wait for him to interview someone about AI. If The Atlantic runs a column about how broad tariffs or DEI crackdowns are terrible, I’m not going to read those.

Inevitably, I will hear about some policies he has passed and what they have done. But I don’t care and don’t want to know about the latest outrageous thing he says. He is not worthy of my attention or frustration. The paraphrase Adam Serwer, the attention is the point. Stop giving him what he wants.

Masculinity and Dignity

from Imgflip Meme Generator

The movie The Way Back, starring Ben Affleck, is about a former high school basketball star who is asked to coach said school’s struggling basketball program. 

The first game of the season is against one of the best teams in the league and his boys are getting pummeled.  The other team is starting to show off by dunking on his players and hanging on the rim.

Affleck calls a timeout and, after some colorful language that honestly should have gotten him fired, he gives his players the following instructions:

“The next time 32 goes over your back like that, put an elbow in his stomach. And if Childress tries to put you on a poster again, you hit so  fucking hard he never comes down the lane like that again. Have a little fucking pride. I don’t give a shit if we lose every fucking game this year. I will not coach a team that has been out-toughed.”

To those who are not familiar with basketball, I need to give even more context to my intro. What was happening on the court to Affleck’s players was humiliating. I cannot stress that enough. 

Affleck’s response to his players is completely out of place in today’s education system. But I think his response is the correct one to give to his boys and I think there is a reason that so many educators get it wrong when it comes to these situations.

60/40

First, a little background. Education was primarily done by men in the 19th century. As more women entered the workforce, the gender ratio became more diverse. 

Then it flipped.

By the 1980-81 school year, about 67% of public school teachers were women. By 2015-16, that number shot up to 76%.

The increase in principals has been even sharper, from 31% in 1987-88 to more than 50% by 2011-12. The increase in principals is more influential, as they dictate policy and punishment. I will return to this in a bit.

Research shows that the shift in the gender ratio has less to do with an increase from women and more to do with a decrease in men entering the education profession. Why is that? 

Academic Celeste Davis asked that very question in regards to the out of balance gender ratio in college enrollment. To her, than answer is clear. In any given group, when the gender ratio exceeds 60% women, men start to leave and it becomes harder to recruit new men. The reason boys are not going to college is because it has become female-coded. 

This reasoning can very easily be extended to K-12 schools and explain why fewer men are teaching and working in administration, and also why boys in the classroom feel alienated and are falling behind. 

We also see it in politics. In 1998, the number of college-educated women in the Democratic Party was 13%. It has now more than doubled to 30%. Today, women of all education levels make up 62% of the party, which has remained stable since 1998 and is unlikely to reverse since it has crossed the 60/40 line. It's not influencers like Andrew Tate or the supposed masculinity of Trump that is luring men to vote for the GOP. It's that the Democratic Party has become female-coded.

Diversity is our strength

Infusing a male-dominated industry with women will bring new perspectives and help solve problems that men could not solve alone. Likewise, when males leave an industry, their unique perspective goes with them and more problems go unsolved.

Now, I’ve been talking about male perspectives, principals who dole out puinishmnent, and high school boys dealing with humiliation. What do these things have to do with one another? The answer is bullying. More specifically, how modern schools respond to bullying.

My 12-year-old son was recently the victim of middle school bullying. I’ve been trying to help him with strategies. The adult part of my brain wants to say, “Tell your teacher” or “tell the principal.” But the part of my brain that remembers what it was like to be a middle school student overwhelms that part. 

I’m not worried about him being labeled a tattle tale or a snitch. I’m just disappointed that our school disciplinary system has had decades to figure this problem out and we keep trying to solve the wrong problem. I don’t want the bully to get detention. I don’t want some bullshit restorative justice program where my son says how he was hurt and the bully says he’s sorry and promises not to do that again. 

None of these things fix the problem. 

The problem is that the bully took something from my son. He didn’t just tease him; he teased him in the cafeteria, in front of everyone. He took my son’s dignity. He took his status. I don’t want an apology from the bully. I want to extract a proportionate amount of status from the bully. 

I want my seven fucking pounds.

The bully attempted to elevate his own status at the expense of my son. The only way to restore that justice is to take an equal amount of status away from him. My son should be able to humiliate the bully in front of an equal number of peers. Then there will be balance. Until then we are just kicking the tires on trying to solve the bullying problem.

(I unsuccessfully tried to coax my son into using the school’s punishment for bullying as leverage to humiliate the bully by making him give my son his lunch, in front of everyone, then for my son to proceed to throw the bully’s lunch into the trash. That woulda been a baller move imo.)

40/60

I believe that the reason we are not equipped to properly address the problem is the out-of-balance gender ratio in education professionals. Being bullied as a boy is a unique problem that requires a solution from an administrator who understands what it is like to be a boy. A female-coded administration is going to design policies that work for girls, which is why we end up with things like restorative justice programs, bias response teams, and social-emotional learning.

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning wrote a paper examining the transition of moral cultures; from an honor culture in the pre-industrial era to a culture of dignity in the 20th century, to our current victimhood culture in the 21st century. The latter takes place mostly on college campuses and it's hard to pinpoint the exact date of the transition but it does seem to coincide with the 60/40 phenomenon making the campus a feminine-coded environment.

Let's return to Coach Affleck's quote:

“The next time 32 goes over your back like that, put an elbow in his stomach. And if Childress tries to put you on a poster again, you hit so  fucking hard he never comes down the lane like that again. Have a little fucking pride. I don’t give a shit if we lose every fucking game this year. I will not coach a team that has been out-toughed.”

Okay, maybe I would suggest something less violent. But Affleck understood that the issue was that his players were being humiliated. Their dignity was stolen. It was too late in the game to mount a comeback and too early in the season for the coach to improve his play with better conditioning and game planning. His message was to tell the other team, "You might win the game, but if you try to show-boat (ie take our dignity), you are going to regret it."

I'm sure there are millions of reasons why boys are falling behind girls in school. But a significant one is that there are not enough people making the rules who understand boys. And too many suggestions to "fix" boys just sound like deprogramming them and grinding them down until they more closely represent their female classmates.

On Writing and AI

The sad thing about chatgpt killing essays is that essay writing is a very effective way to learn.

I remember the main ideas of every research essay I wrote in undergrad but only a fraction of what I was tested on.

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) September 6, 2024

From an essay on Inside Higher Ed, writer and professor John Warner wrote:

“The difficulty of writing is the point. If students don’t find the writing hard, something has gone wrong.”

As someone who writes for a career, I am of course conflicted about ChatGPT. It is great at giving me a first draft similar to something I would have taken days to write. Then I just have to edit and revise and now I have something that would have taken me much longer to produce alone and is probably better.

Over the years I have gotten much better at editing other people’s work to improve their writing. Like most people, I’m not good at editing my own work and with ChatGPT I don’t have to. But I feel like the reason I have gotten better at editing is from all my years of writing and revising and getting feedback. I have a better sense of what makes for good writing. In other words, the process of writing—from blank page to the final print—has made me better at editing and revising other people's work (and my own work if it's been a while since I've looked at it).

I Imagine John Warner and Tanner Greer would agree with me that if the next generation of students learn to produce essays via entering a prompt into ChatGPT and editing it, they probably will not be as good as what I am producing simply because they will not be good editors because they’ve never written from scratch.

But maybe we’re asking the wrong question here. Shouldn’t the question we’re asking be: Do student want to be good writers? And if the answer for one student is yes, then wouldn’t they follow their professor's advice and start writing from scratch rather than using ChatGPT?

The answer seems obvious. Most students are not interested in writing. And those that might be are more interested in getting a good grade as efficiently as possible. Chalk up another victory for Bryan Caplan and his theory that education is not about building human capital (ie writing skills) but about signalling (getting a degree, graduating with honors, etc.).

So as for the question of what has gone wrong, the answer is the model of college.

I want to return to a quote from Michale Lind in which he suggests breaking up colleges as others wanted to break up the Big Banks. 

"Why not just break up Big U? Why not apply the logic of antitrust to the bloated, wasteful nonprofit academic sector? Let corporations do their own vocational training, like McDonald’s with Hamburger University, or contract with free-standing trade and professional schools. Let research be done by independent science and engineering institutes, with apprenticeships for young scientists and engineers. Let gender and ethnic studies departments be left-wing nonprofits..."

A signaling device is still necessary for employers so they can tell how competent you are. But I wish that the process of obtaining that signal was not tied up in developing skills.

Imagine a world in which a student interested in journalism scores a high SAT score. The New York Times hires them in some apprentice program and pays for them to attend a writing workshop to improve their craft. Do you think that student is going to use ChatGPT to aid in their first assignment? I’d say hell no.

At that point they will actually be interested in being a better writer, a better thinker, and more open to the idea that the difficulty might be the point. And I know: that is what college is supposed to be. But, for a growing percent of students, it's not. When getting a good grade as easily as possible conflicts with building skills, most students will opt for the easy grade.

(It's also possible that none of the difficulty that Warner and Greer go through in the writing process actually matters at all and they are just doubling down on meaning.)

Review: Civil War (2024)

I love everything Alex Garland has done so far. I’ve come to expect two things from his work: gorgeous cinematography and tackling Big Ideas. Civil War stuck to the former, but I’m unsure of the latter.

While I was a little underwhelmed, I still want to rewatch this if for no other reason than to spend more time marveling at shots like this:

Source: https://clutchpoints.com/civil-war-review-alex-garland-controversy

For a movie called Civil War, you would expect this to be a story about war. It wasn’t. It was a story about journalism.

I don’t know if this has been done this way before.  A quick Google search reveals that The Killing Fields is about war journalists, but it seems that it is still a movie about war that the viewer sees through the eyes of the journalist protagonists. What’s interesting about Civil War is how much of the war is in the background. None of the four main characters are concerned with which side wins or what they are fighting over. They just want to be able to break a story.

There are several scenes where the journalists are following a group of armed men and women shooting at another armed group. It’s never clear what side is aligned with the president and his military and which is a secessionist group. There’s even a scene where one of the reporters asks a sniper who he takes orders from. The sniper dismisses the question as superfluous and basically says he’s just a guy trying to kill the guy who's trying to kill him. This was one of the most important parts of the movie.

The other important part comes at the end. When Jessie, the aspiring photojournalist, is pushed out of the way of gunfire by Lee, the well-established journalist. Lee is shot, and as she falls, Jessie takes her photo. Jessie gets up and the camera lingers on her as she looks back at Lee before leaving her dying mentor to get a photo of the president before he is executed. Whatever Big Idea Garland wants us to know about, it takes place in that scene.

I think there are two ways to interpret that moment and the Big Idea it reaches at. One is that Jessie became wrapped up in a cause that overwhelmed her ability to see the humanity in her fellow citizens. This would apply to the soldiers on both sides of the conflict as well, whose cause became putting their respective people in control of the government. Jessie’s cause was journalism, getting the story, informing the public, etc. It became more important to get a photo of her dying colleague than to her camera down and hold Lee's hand in her final moments.

The other interpretation is that Jessie had a hero complex. She admired, almost worshiped, Lee and her work as a photojournalist. Jessie could even recite Lee’s Wikipedia page. Jesse became so obsessed with wanting that level of status that it became more important to get a great shot than to be there for Lee, who had just saved her life.

Either way, I think Garland is trying to say something about human connection. A common criticism I read about the film was that it resisted explaining how things got to be the way they were. Maybe, to Garland, the answer isn’t an over militarized police state, soft-on-crime politicians, runaway inflation, massive inequality, loss of natural resources, capitalism, communism, or some other poor policy choice. Maybe what leads to civil war is when we stop seeing one another as our brothers and sisters, all deserving of respect and dignity, and instead see them as means to an end.

The Lindy Case for Believing in God

There is an exchange in Braveheart between William Wallace (Mel Gibson) and Hamish (Brendan Gleeson) that goes like this:

Hamish : Your dream isn't about freedom. It's about Murron! You're doing this to be a hero, 'cause ya think she sees ye!
William Wallace : I don't think she sees me. I know she does. And your father sees you, too.

For context, Murron is Wallace’s wife who was killed early in the movie. If you recall, the final scene is Wallace lying on the executioner's block and staring into the crowd and thinking he sees Murron walking among the citizens cheering on his death. The sight of her puts him at peace.

I remember talking to an older man in his 70s who, although he probably mostly voted Democrat, gave a rather old-guy conservative take on youth and crime. He thought the problem was a lack of faith since young criminals didn’t believe there was someone in the sky watching and judging their actions.

I thought of the disproportionate number of atheists in the science and engineering community, and how they manage to hold back their impulse to rape, murder, and steal so they can design sky scrapers and discover the cure to terminal diseases, but I said nothing.

And yet, I kinda think the idea has merit.

First, let’s talk about Lindy. Yes, most religions probably have their roots in farming culture. People performed rituals to please the Gods so they would have a good harvest. But for a really long time now, religion has been wrapped up in morality. Religious people believe they are supposed to behave a certain way and someone is always watching, judging.

This general belief has been around for a while now, making it very Lindy and Chesterton Fence-y. In other words, let’s not tear it down just because it is irrational. Let’s try to understand it first, as that might explain why the idea has lasted as long as it has.

When you believe that a God is always watching you, you are incentivized to perform good behavior in public and in private. But when you don’t believe, the private incentive goes away.

Secular humanists are correct. You can absolutely be “good without God.” You can derive your moral code from any of the philosophical traditions. But we are social creatures and we are wired to WANT others to know that we abide by a particular moral code. So we must always be monitoring our statuses within this public square so that others know “I’m with These Guys and I stand against Those Guys.” Another way of saying this is that being “good without God” incentives virtue signaling.

The Chesterton Fence of theistic belief is that it builds a structure that prevents virtue signaling. You don’t need to perform your prescribed moral behavior in public because you know that God is watching you and his opinion matters the most.

So I can give money to the panhandler even if no one is watching me and I get no tax write-off since I know Jesus said “Blessed is the poor,” and God will reward my Christ-like behavior in the next life.

But if I am a secular adherent of Social Justice ideology, I need to put a Black Lives Matter sign in my yard and make Facebook posts every time Trump does a racism. People need to know “I’m one of the good guys!” because there is no man in the sky to see my private deeds of social justice. I need the social validation.

Religion, such as Christianity, is at its worst when it becomes too public and people virtue signal their faith to one another in public. The private virtue signaling pulls back some non trivial portion of theists that would otherwise do things that range from annoying—like protesting outside soldier’s funerals—to dangerous, like shooting up abortion clinics.

But in the absence of a belief that incentives private virtue signaling to some deity, you get a much higher percentage of public virtue signaling that is a net negative for society. This behavior ranges from annoying—like telling people to check their privilege—to hurtful—like getting someone fired because you thought he was making the white power sign.

So while you cannot rationalize your way into believing in God just because you think it provides good public value, you can at least leave alone the faith of a harmless theist who performs his behavior in private.