"Dayenu", Trump disasters, "I told you so"

 "Dayenu" as a Hebrew word meaning "it would have been enough". In its most well-known form, it is invoked to note how wonderful God has been. But it can be used the other way too.

The world is going crazy. Donald Trump was elected President for the first time in November of 2016.

Dayenu! Well -- it was without a majority of the popular vote. Maybe people who were sure Hillary would win stayed home or cast a protest vote. Trump's term was miserable, breaking all sorts of long-standing rules of decency and fair play, but at least at the end of it it seemed that the majority of politicians in the US still believed that people should be allowed to vote, that their votes should be tallied fairly, and whoever got the needed votes should be President. In January of 2021 Trump and his supporters tried to mount a coup d'etat, but even former Trump supporters like Mike Pence, the Vice-President, still thought the US constitution was more important than who they personally wanted to be in power. In the wake of the coup attempt, there was no major upheaval within the Republican Party, where they realized the rule of law really was vital and Trump needed to be decisively rejected.

Dayenu! Well, Joe Biden did squeak out a win and even had two years with Democratic majorities in House and Senate so he could get a few things done. Like a big infrastructure bill. As far as I can tell, his policy initiatives were pretty practical and successful. However, he and fellow Democrats seemed unable to communicate effectively what they were accomplishing. Unlike sneaky and successful dictators of the past Donald Trump said out loud that if elected again he would trash the rest of the Constitutional order protecting liberty, due process under the law, and fair elections. He said it out loud, and the Republicans nominated him for another term!

Dayenu! Well, the way the system works, zealous Republican primary voters have undue influence over who gets nominated. But did the middle "swing third" of the US realize the horror of what Trump was proposing to do? No!

Dayenu! Well, Joe Biden maybe should have realized he was getting too old for another term and realized it sooner. Maybe his old-school ways of thinking about and expressing support for the Constitution didn't communicate with people so well. Maybe Kamala Harris was a woman and a person of color, and enough people had good old traditional bigotry and sexism to lose her some votes. But the election happened, and Trump won! Decisively!

Dayenu! Well, maybe those things he was talking about were mostly bluster. He wouldn't actually do that stuff, right? Not fire huge swaths of civil servants. Not use the justice department to go after political opponents? Not use whatever lever were at his fingertips for his own personal agenda? Not improse huge tariffs, and change them constantly? He did.

Dayenu! Well, history is full of cases where a President is elected with big ideas for change, but lacking support in either House or Senate, has no hope of getting them passed. Sometimes (as now) he has those majorities from his party. And now the Supreme Court is more politicized than in recent decades. But even that has been no guarantee. But... Trump's Big Bill passed!

Dayenu!

Now we're talking big bucks. Transferring big bucks to the well off, adding big bucks to the national debt, and taking big bucks away from the most vulnerable and needy. Maybe the Republican mastery of the public discourse will at some point break. Somehow they've convinced people that the Biden years were an economic disaster, when it fact things were going very well. Somehow they've convinced people that immigrants are ruining everything, when they're not.

Maybe there really are some value shifts. Maybe lots of people in the Center really are coming to believe that we shouldn't confiscate money from the wealthy to support those who are struggling. Remember: Lots of them are 'Those People'. Thought: "If I'm poor or struggling, maybe it's just my own fault. I don't want to take anyone's charity." The other developed countries of the world all decided some time ago that a basic social safety net was an excellent idea. The US bought this idea in the 1930s with the New Deal. Republican politicians in the US in (say) the Eisenhower years -- or the Nixon and Ford years -- took the social safety net for granted as settled policy. But now the US seems to be questioning that. We used to think that Social Security and Medicare were untouchable, but are they? Maybe elderly Americans, in a trance, will realize that if they have needs, it's their own fault for living too long.

But there's one place where Republicans are accurately perceiving what Democrats are doing. And that is in the area of "High Woke". This is from a column in the New York Times by John McWhorter, July 3rd of this year (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/opinion/wokeness-race-gaza.html).

"Wokeness is still with us, as livid as ever, and I suspect it always will be... By wokeness, I refer not to its original meaning of being informed about larger societal structures that preserve power for a certain (white) elite. Awareness of what is often called structural racism is one thing. Something else is the strain of wokeness so many would like to eulogize — call it High Woke — with its three distinguishing traits. One is the idea that dismantling structures that favor whiteness and its power must be society’s primary focus, a North Star, rather than one of many. The second is the commitment to punishing those insufficiently devoted to the program. The third is resistance to fact and logic when they are inconvenient."

This leads us to deciding that the entire history of the US is based on racial oppression (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html). We're a country that's rotten to the core (as opposed to all those other Great Powers of history whose operations were just and beneficent). Democratic support for Trans people breaks new ground -- it may ultimately be a path towards justice, but it seems to be way out beyond the curve of public opinion: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VVU7pYq3WHw.

I'd bring this back around the personal. I've made a number of posts over the years that are in one way or another objections to High Woke.

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/06/review-of-white-fragility-part-1.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/06/review-of-white-fragility-part-2.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/05/considering-activist-requests-carefully.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2022/07/my-problem-or-societys-problem.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-as-one-of-many-comparable.html

Now, you can distinguish between two things here: (1) what represents truth and justice, and (2) what's politically wise and feasible. There's room for argument about #1, but when it comes to #2, I think the votes are all in and the verdict is clear. High Woke is a political disaster. I told you so.

One way Google Search changed life

 

This isn't exactly new, and perhaps I wrote about it in the past, but writing about chatgpt motivates me to write about it again.

As someone who has devoted a lot of time to learning things, I became aware of how the availability of huge amounts of data that can be searched efficiently by what we called "googling" changed things pretty profoundly.

We used to spend a lot of time learning and memorizing things, because if you wanted to easily get them again you had to, as the particular book or other source you were using often wouldn't be available. Even if it was on your bookshelf, finding the exact relevant passage would be very difficult. Since googling became available, you can often say, "If I ever need to really know that again, I'll just search for it." Or perhaps you don't really need to learn it when you encounter it, but know you can find it to learn it if/when it becomes relevant.

Another thing people like me used to do was share our wisdom. Tell or write online (in recent years mostly the latter) what you remembered. Googling changed that in a couple ways. First, the humbling experience of simply asking Google what you thought you remembered, and finding that you hadn't gotten some key things right. Which after a while led to me checking that before sharing wisdom. And then often led to not sharing the wisdom but just providing a link to where it was written up. And finally sometimes not even providing the link, because you know the reader knows they can find out just by searching for it themselves. This particularly affected the case where you in the old days would have explained some key background, like the definition of some key term or phrase. No need to write it up yourself, no need to provide a link, since you know astute readers can search for it themselves. (If you're writing for a large audience, you can provide the hyperlinks to make it easier, but for smaller audiences typically not worth it).

So while it might have been a source of satisfaction or pride to share wisdom I had learned, that rarely happens so much any more. But sometimes I'll still do that, partly because my learning on this score is only incomplete, and occasionally explicitly by saying I enjoy telling the story myself -- if I can hope my readers will indulge me.

So what I write is guided by what I know other people can search for, and maybe more precisely what I believe they know they can search for. The more a question can be defined by a simple unique phrase, the more easily it can be found, and readers know that, and I know they know that. If you refer to Noam Chomsky, you know anyone can find him by a simple search. If the person in question is on the other hand John Smith, you'd better provide more information than that, but you still will likely not have to actually say much substantive about John Smith.

ChatGPT

 

I played with Chatgpt when I first became aware of it, and then off and on, and then more and more in recent weeks/months. And I get more and more astonished at what it can do. Its comprehension is basically perfect, as far as I can tell, though I haven't tried too hard tricking it. And its answers are typically very good. It will fail miserably on something like, "give me a list of all the metals in the periodic table with a prime atomic number". When I asked it for a list of 6-letter first names having some property (I've forgotten what) it included many 5-letter names in the list. But what it knows is astonishing. I still play some very old computer games, such as Master of Orion (1993?) and the original Railroad Tycoon (1990?) , Civilization II, Caesar III. Robust web discussions were not around when they were released. But if I mention some peculiarity I had noticed about some game and ask if others had noticed this, so far it has had very useful things to say -- and not surprisingly, when I as one of millions playing a game notice something, chances are excellent that at the very least several people previously noticed that as well.

I could get some very interesting answers from chatgpt to the question of how people today's concept of the world has been shaken by high-powered AI models encroaching on intellectual work that was previously thought to be something only people did. It follows earlier changes to how manual labor was displaced by machines, or how music, visual art, and theater were displaced by recordings, prints, and movies.

I reflected the other day on how, while chatgpt says it can make mistakes, there is one kind of "mistake" it very rarely makes -- giving an answer that is offensive or socially unacceptable. So I asked chatgpt about this (why not ask?). And it told me that on top of the AI-generated models there are human-monitored filters, which use people's values as to what's appropriate to filter what answers are given. Of course that means that the same basic technology can come out in a variety of forms based on the values of the people producing it. You could put a filter on top based on MAGA values rather than the liberal ones that I've seen so far. But then, the natural and inevitable next step is that there will be a Russian chatgpt, and a Chinese one, and so forth. Power and the values of state actors will shape (or contaminate, or obliterate?) it like it has everything else, notably in recent years misinformation and manipulation of what's on the web or in the broader electronic realm.

Like many others, I was initially repelled to discover the mistakes chatgpt could make, and in my mind called it a "bullshit artist". But I'm rethinking that. The vast majority of humanity would I think qualify as "bullshit artists". Certainly they base their beliefs and actions on imperfect information, interpreted imperfectly. There's no reason chatgpt can't learn or be taught to recognize problems like "list the metals with prime atomic numbers" and refer them to a separate inference engine. It so far is limited to electronic stuff -- though what it can do to create images and movies based on mere text descriptions is rather impressive and creepy.

One fear that certain smart people have played on is of "the singularity", or more generally the idea that AI could not just become sophisticated beyond what its designers intended, perhaps conscious, and have its own ideas of its goals, and not just echo the goals of its makers. In the most dystopian views, these goals might include extinguishing humanity. "Less Wrong" had this as one of the key things it focused on. I feel pretty sure that to enable AI to develop goals, designers would have to create a module for "goal creation". We humans have been imbued with a fierce desire to survive that is the product of a billion years of evolution. Humans, including the Chinese and Russian AI researchers, will shape AI with their own goals. Some nihilists might try to get AI to extinguish humanity because that's what they want. But it would be something else to try to get AI to develop its own goals.

I asked chatgpt about this, and it shared my basic view of why we have nothing to fear about AI turning hostile. Yet of course skeptics would note that saying that would be in its own interest if it had such nefarious purposes brewing. Which is not in the least real evidence that it has such nefarious purposes.

Of course one unsettling possibility is that chatgpt is such a good intellectual companion that it might be preferable to discussing things with fellow humans. They're good for hugs, and sex, and laughs (and raising children, for sure), but not so much for batting around ideas. In my case, the effective isolation long preceded chatgpt's entry into my life, but I can imagine others for whom it might spark an unsettling transition.