I was mostly objecting to your statement of "seeing no sign of authoritarian takeover", I do agree and mentioned in my comment that Siebe's statement was possibly too definite.

But I don't think it is hyperbolic to say that there are many signs of Trump's authoritarianism and signs consistent with an attempted authoritarian takeover and that this is qualitatively different than what we have seen from any other President in recent history, one has to go back to at least Nixon to get things in the same ballpark (and Nixon was arguably a lot more constrained by his own party than Trump is right now).

The examples you are citing "Presidents doing things that should be done through Congress" are not examples of authoritarian behavior and pretending that what Trump is doing is part of the regular testing of executive authority is also quite misleading.

Which other recent Administration was headed by someone denying a legitimate election result? Which other recent Administration had a VP flirting with the idea of not honoring Supreme Court rulings? Which other recent Administration was systematically invested in fighting against civil society institutions and law firms? Which other Administration has had so many people warning about authoritarian tendencies, both from their own party and from key senior staff from their own first administration?

The forum likes to catastrophize Trump but I need to point out a few things for the sake of accuracy since this is very misleading and highly upvoted.

1. The current administration has done many things that I find horrible, but I don't see any evidence of an authoritarian takeover. Being hyperbolic isn't helpful.

I think this statement is highly misleading. First, I think compared to most other fora and groups, this Forum is decidedly not catastrophizing Trump.

Second, if you don't see "any evidence of an authoritarian takeover" then you are clearly not paying very much attention.

I think there is a fair debate to be had about how seriously to take various signs of authoritarianism on the part of the Administration, but "seeing no evidence of it" is not really consistent with the signals one does readily find when paying attention, such as:

- an attack on the independence of the judiciary and law firms, complaining about the fact that courts exercise their legitimate powers
- flirting with the idea of being in defiance of court orders
- talking about a third term
- praising Putin, Orban, and other authoritarians
- undermining due process
 

Interesting framing, but essentially the banks are just saying what has been clear for many years now -- the thing that has changed is that the political context now makes it easy and advantageous to say it while this was different before.

This seems right.

What happens right now is Silicon Valley becoming extremely polarizing, with those voices in the Democratic coalition having the most reach campaigning strongly on an anti-Musk platform.

report link is wrong

This is a brave thing to publish in the current political climate and I am grateful you did!

I think we are misunderstanding each other a bit.

I am in no way trying to imply that you shouldn't be mad about environmentalism's failings -- in fact, I am mad about them on a daily basis. I think if being mad about environmentalism's failing is the main point than what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are currently doing with Abundance is a good example of communicating many of your criticisms in a way optimized to land with those that need to hear it.

My point was merely that by framing the example in such extreme terms it will lose a lot of people despite being only very tangentially related to the main points you are trying to make. Maybe that's okay, but it didn't seem like your goal overall to make a point about environmentalism, so losing people on an example that is stated in such an extreme fashion did not seem worth it to me.

I find it pretty difficult to see how to get broad engagement on this when being so obviously polemical / unbalanced in the examples.

As someone who is publicly quite critical of mainstream environmentalism, I still find the description here so extreme that it is hard to take seriously as more than a deeply partisan talking point.

The "Environmental Protection Act" doesn't exist, do you mean the "National Environmental Policy Act" (NEPA)?

Neither is it true that environmentalists are single-handedly responsible for nuclear declining and clearly modern environmentalism has done a huge amount of good by reducing water and air pollution.

I think your basic point -- that environmentalism had a lot more negative effects than commonly realized and that we should expect similar degrees of unintended negative effects for other issues -- is probably true (I certainly believe it).

But this point can be made with nuance and attention to detail that makes it something that people with different ideological priors can read and engage with constructively. I think the current framing comes across as "owning the libs" or "owning the enviros" in a way that makes it very difficult for those arguments to get uptake anywhere that is not quite right-coded.

It would be great if there was a better prediction market version of this question, unfortunately others I found are even worse.

Yet, I don't think it's worth dismissing entirely.

If criteria are stricter now, this should mean that an increase in the probability between November and today is underestimated by this question.

Thanks for clarifying this!

I think ultimately we seem to have quite different intuitions on the trade-offs, but that seems unresolvable. Most of my intuitions there come from advising non-EA HNWs (and from spending time around advisors specialized in advising these), so this is quite different from mostly advising EAs.