Adam Weil

Chicagoan

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@TomFornelli Woke up and chose violence I see

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@brittanybussemd Single most helpful app when having a baby. Made anyone watching our daughters download it and they found it so helpful!

[Chuck Todd @chucktodd]

There really is only one way to improve representation for all Americans in Congress: UNCAP THE HOUSE! It’s what the founders intended; they did NOT want to see Congressional Districts that were bigger than most major cities. Want to dilute the influence of courts and partisans, UNCAP THE HOUSE!

[Daniel DePetris @DanDePetris]

Some fundamental things to remember as the Iran War hits Week 4:

1. Iran was not an “imminent” threat to the United States: its nuclear program was heavily degraded during the June strikes; it had no ICBM capability to speak of; and Iran’s medium to short-range ballistic missiles we’re only a threat if the U.S. attacked the country. This entire crisis is manufactured.

2. The Strait of Hormuz was always a leverage point for the Iranians. It was Tehran’s biggest card, and it turns out the regime was more than happy to play it if it believed its survival was at stake. Every war game known to man anticipated this, yet the Trump administration was apparently caught flat-footed to the point where it’s now allowing other countries to purchase Iranian oil to help calm the market. This policy change could net the regime another $14 billion, which means we’re now essentially funding the very adversary we’re currently fighting. Either Trump and his advisers don’t read or they’re laughably incompetent. Maybe both.

3. Congress has been pathetic throughout this entire ordeal. Not only has it failed to debate and authorize the war, but the congressional leadership has refused to even schedule open hearings to talk about it. And I’ll remind everybody that the war is almost one-month old. Mike Johnson, John Thune and the chairman of the various national security committees ought to be ashamed of themselves for turning a once-proud institution into a rubber stamp body of useless specimens that can’t even do the most basic thing imaginable: oversight.

4. Trump’s decision to wage war in Iran is now undermining other aspects of his foreign policy. Russia is taking advantage of higher oil prices to fund the war in Ukraine, which makes Trump’s desire to strike a settlement there virtually impossible. China is happy to see the U.S. military bottled up in the Middle East yet again—I’ve lost track of how many U.S. military assets have been re-deployed out of Asia. And because Middle East oil is not a sure thing anymore, China will probably buy more from Russia, further solidifying the relationship between two powers that Trump would like to pull apart (although we can debate whether this would even be possible).

5. Finally, the war exposes just how little we’ve learned as a country. People have short memories. The same public intellectuals and former officials who rooted for the war in Iraq are also rooting for the war in Iran. The same assumptions—the U.S. can will a new Middle East into existence—still hover over U.S. foreign policy like a bad cold.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

It does not speak well of us as a nation that so many of us have gotten used to how bonkers this is.
It also reeks of status envy and insecurity, which you'd think wouldn't really afflict the most powerful man in the world, but he seems acutely aware that he's not very smart.

[Tommy Vietor @TVietor08]

All those years demagoguing Benghazi and pretending to give a shit about Americans overseas, and now the White House starts a reckless war with Iran and tells everyone trying to escape the chaos that you're on your own.

[Andy Hall @ahall_research]

One of the deepest fears about AI is that it concentrates power so dramatically that it enables a new kind of dictatorship, whether by a government that wields it or a company that controls it.

The current confrontation between the Department of War and Anthropic brings both fears to life at once.

Anthropic has genuine, well-founded concerns that its technology could be used in ways that are deeply problematic and that exist in a legal gray area. No serious person should want AI companies handing over their most powerful capabilities to the military without any thought as to whether they are ready to be used in life-or-death situations. We know what happens when the government gets unchecked access to powerful new technology and decides the rules don't apply.

But the government’s concerns are critical, too. I wrote last month about how Anthropic has behaved at times like an “enlightened absolutist” and the current flashpoint underlines this point. Under normal circumstances, a private company should be free to take or leave contracts from the federal government. That's how markets work, and no one thinks twice when a consulting firm turns down a Pentagon engagement. But AI is not a normal technology.

The decisions Anthropic is making about what the military can and cannot do with its models are not ordinary business decisions. They are, functionally, determinations about the future of American national security made by a private company whose leadership answers to no electorate.

When the technology is this profound, corporate discretion starts to look less like market freedom and more like an unaccountable veto over sovereign functions. That should trouble anyone who cares about democratic governance, regardless of whether Anthropic's specific judgments are correct.

Both concerns are legitimate, and there is no clean principle that resolves the tension. "The government is always right" is a road to tyranny. "The company is always right" is a road to corporate oligarchy. The answer depends on the specific circumstances of specific cases, which means someone has to evaluate those circumstances with both technical competence and democratic legitimacy.

Historically that someone has been Congress and the courts. The reason this feels like a crisis is not that the problem is unprecedented but that the institutions designed for exactly this kind of problem are operating so poorly that nobody trusts them to do it. Congress has demonstrated almost no capacity to regulate technology intelligently. Courts move too slowly for a technology evolving this fast. So the vacuum fills with direct confrontation between executive power and corporate power, with no democratic input and no neutral adjudication.

That is the real danger. Not that Anthropic is wrong or that DoW is wrong, but that the democratic machinery for deciding who is right has rusted to the point where the question defaults to whoever has more leverage in a given moment. Generals and CEOs end up making judgments that belong to the public, not because they seized that authority, but because nobody else showed up to claim it.

I hope that in the coming months the American system will do what it still does well—bring messy issues to the fore, galvanize public interest, marshal new information, and find the right compromise to this particular flashpoint, which sounds based on Sam Altman’s comments today like it may already be starting.

But we also need to be thinking much more expansively about how we can use AI to transform our ability to bring democratic input and independent expertise to bear on deciding who can do what with this technology and how, before it's too late.

[Kevin A. Bryan @Afinetheorem]

Dean literally wrote the Trump admin's (very good!) AI policy. He is no left-wing activist. Today's insanity is just like the rest of the lack of stewardship of institutions we keep seeing: Harvard, AIDS treatments, NATO, Canada, courts - it's always full leverage abuse of power.

[Packers History @HistoricPackers]

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime".

-- Mark Twain

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@VictoryBellOSU Treyveyon had a nasty habit of doing this

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@RossRFulton I honestly don’t think Sayin can see it bc of his height

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@bluebyninety Made a Faustian bargain

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@Jermiah_Smith1 LFG

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@RossRFulton Its honestly embarrassing how much we’ve spammed it this year

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@MaizenBrew Grow up you babies

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@QwertyTrawew @notthefakeSVP Cry more

[Will Compton @_willcompton]

All for Coach Ryan Day to say “we’re going to win with humility”

That man out-coached & out-classed Michigan

Much respect

Big time win today for Ohio State

[Mark Pantoni @markpantoni]

“Fun is kicking ass”

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@CFBNerds 100%. I think ND is absolutely a playoff team right now

[Adam Weil @admwyle]

@CieGrant @ryandaytime How firm thy friendship!