Marcus Seldon

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@TheStalwart Claude: Joe, I'mma let you finish, but it's not a good guest. It's the perfect guest.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@ettingermentum The left is learning in real time why the establishment often errs on the side of nominating bland "boy scout" candidates.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@lxeagle17 To be fair, the establishment completely dropped the ball in terms of recruitment here. Their recruit was a 78-year-old with mid approval ratings who didn't even seem to want the job that badly. I blame Democratic elites much more than the base on this one.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@Noahpinion This is not correct. The report excludes pay-as-you-go pension systems, which excludes pensions in many other wealthy countries besides the US.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@mattyglesias Attention matters less in tiny states where candidates can build real relationships with a non-trivial portion of the electorate, esp for candidates who built those relationships pre-Trump. The "politics of attention" matters much more for big states and the presidential level.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@PoliticalKiwi Calling the US occupied Native American land at this point is like calling England occupied Celtic land.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@emollick Or, perhaps there are real gaps between theoretical capabilities and real world reliability that make applying them to tasks, especially outside of coding and math, more difficult than AI enthusiasts think.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@mattyglesias Jared Golden was polling behind LePage when he dropped out, and no better than other Democrats against LePage. It didn't seem like he was going to be an overperformer this year had he stayed in and gotten the nomination.

https://t.co/hHh5MTuAX6

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@mattyglesias Isn't the big difference here their positions on Israel-Palestine?

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@InquisitiveUrsa @lxeagle17 I know it was lightly polled, but Golden wasn't exactly polling well there in the general election before he dropped out.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@lxeagle17 The big distinction I see is that, with the possible exception of Planter, they're not throwing away winnable races. Democratic primary voters in contested races have largely been responsible and savvy.

[Ezra Klein @ezraklein]

Enough people have asked me about the Peter Thiel-Dialog story that I think it's worth saying what it is, or at least what I saw it to be. So:

–Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret.

–My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog.

–Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks.

–You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society.

–The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent.

–In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.)

–That said, Dialog was a pretty ideologically diverse crowd. I met some people there who were *extremely* far left and far right. I met some real eccentrics and weirdos. I appreciated that about it.

– I’m a journalist, I go to lots of things in the hopes of getting to know people, hearing new ideas, finding podcast guests, etc.

–Being at something does not mean I endorse it, or everyone at it, or everyone who organized or founded it. I try to go to things where I don’t share the politics and perspectives of the crowd, for obvious reasons.

–I am surprised how credulous some people have been on this story. You have to believe some weird things about the world to believe Julián Castro and Peter Thiel are somehow engaged in a common project. Secret societies, I imagine, need a lot of trust to function, but the people being named here do not trust each other and do not have aligned agendas.

So that’s what I saw at Dialog. I’ll just end by saying it’s a weird experience to have a conference you haven’t thought about for years become the center of a new conspiracy theory.

https://t.co/bG2fPmE3ke

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@_fat_ugly_rat_ One of the best neighborhoods in town too, imo

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@davidshor Isn't AI still pretty low priority for most voters still?

Of course this is changing and in a year or two it might be different, but as of now I don't think any meaningful part of the electorate is making voting decisions based on politicians' views on AI.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@ECaliberSeven I think the other factor is that wages have been rising for the bottom quartile for a while now. Essentially nobody works for the federal minimum wage anymore, and this is well-understood by voters.

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@KobiHackenburg @AISecurityInst @UniofOxford For example, an interesting study would be: are humans or AI more persuasive in a 1000 word column format?

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@KobiHackenburg @AISecurityInst @UniofOxford This is interesting but I think you're overhyping the results. As you say, AI only out-performed via superior throughput. These experiments, conducted in real-time text-only chats with strangers who are only there for the money, are not at all representative of the real world.

[Cartoons Hate Her! @CartoonsHateHer]

It's not every day that the Internet personality who *you* have a sliiiightly parasocial relationship with messages you and tells you they want to be on their podcast. But that's what happened to me, and now, my Search Engine episode is here! https://t.co/IvXx7xluY4

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@SeanTrende @PatrickRuffini How much do you think this cultural relevance has really benefitted him politically though? He underperformed the fundamentals in every general election he's run in. Yeah it gets people talking about him and may win unlikely allies, but how much does that really matter?

[Marcus Seldon @marcusseldon1]

@databyler For example, Trump's supposed mastery of attention helped him win primaries but also led to him underperforming the fundamentals in all three of his general elections.