In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The Real Clesr Politics formula is to take polling results across the spectrum, wildly off to more or less accurate, average them together, and pretend it's a meaningful result. They take the same approach with the stories they link: one from, say, the far-left Guardian, one from center-right Fox News, and pretend you can average them out to get to the truth. They were a little cattywampus today, one from Batya Ungar-Sargon at The Free Press, The Elon-Trump Bromance Crashes and Burns , and one from Victor Davis Hanson on X, Musk, Trump Have Same Enemies; Makes No Sense To Fight In this case, Batya Ungar-Sargon seems to be well-researched and thoughtful center-right, while Victor Davis Hanson tends to rely on farther-right truisms and cliches. Apoparently RCP's editors think we should average this stuff out. But my immediate reaction to Hanson's assertion was, "Elon Musk is his own worst enemy; that's not Trump's problem." Batya Ungar-Sargon goes i...

In the post above, former physicist and current contrarian YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder says of Elon Musk, "Whatever you think about the man, at least he gives us something to talk about." The topic of the post is why Musk is wrong about Mars, but that was several months ago, and the things he's given us to talk about keep on coming. I'm still with the working theory that I posted yesterday, that in the end, Musk works for his corporate boards of directors, who give him his options, his bonuses, his perks, and his planes, and right now, they aren't happy. Consider Trump's remarks in the Oval Office yesterday : Trump said Musk, the CEO of Tesla and a close adviser, was upset about the repeal of an electric vehicle tax credit. Trump argued Musk was aware of the policy “from the beginning.” “He knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody. And he never had a problem until right after he left,” Trump said. “I’m very disapp...

I was never sure what to think about the short-lived bromance between Trump and Elon Musk. My view of Musk has always been that he's not a very stable guy, and a lot of his views are at least self-contradictory, if not just plain crackpot. For instance , SpaceX Mars colonization program (also referred to as Occupy Mars) is the planned objective of the company SpaceX, and particularly of its founder Elon Musk, to send humans to live on Mars. The plan is to establish a self-sustaining, large scale settlement and democratic, self-governing colony. The motivation behind this is the belief that colonizing Mars will allow humanity to become multiplanetary, thereby ensuring the long-term survival of the human race if it becomes extinct on Earth. On the other hand, Elon Musk recently reignited discussions about global population decline by retweeting a post from Tesla Owners Silicon Valley on X (formerly Twitter). The post featured a graph illustrating projected population ch...

The Wall Street Journal op-ed on AI that I linked on Monday , or at least the reports that it cited, seem to have caused a stir. Earlier, it grabbed the attention of intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds , who cites a tweet from weird guy Elon Musk: How scary is AI? In some ways pretty scary. Does AI have consciousness? Well, maybe. At least it seems to be concerned with its own survival, and willing to defy instructions to protect itself. Scheming, deception, subversion, sandbagging — these sound like the behavior of a conscious entity. Is it “really” conscious or just simulating the behavior of a conscious entity? How could we tell, and why would it matter? Maybe there’s in some sense no there there, under the hood, but I don’t know why that would matter except to philosophers. . . . Elon Musk, who has long worried about AI, is worried. And maybe we should be too. We’re putting a lot of effort into creating beings that will have their own agendas, and that will, ...

In the current confrontations between the Trump administration, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and the other Ivies, the dog that so far hasn't barked has been Dartmouth. In fact, Dartmouth aeems to have reverted to its role as model for Faber College, the domain of Dean Wormer and ROTC Cadet Commander Niedermeyer in Animal House , in the latest events. While I'm generally delighted at the outcome, I don't think anyone should attribute motives to the College administration beyond those that drove Dean Wormer back in the day. Via the Daily Dartmouth , Around 1:30 p.m. [May 28], approximately fifteen pro-Palestinian protesters occupied the reception area of the president’s office in Parkhurst Hall. They then left the building at 6 p.m., when it closed for the day. In brief remarks after leaving the building, a protester wearing a keffiyeh said the protesters “successfully disrupted [administrators’] workday” with the sit-in. The protesters held signs that read ...

Via the Wall Street Journal , of all places, I discover: An artificial-intelligence model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down. Nonprofit AI lab Palisade Research gave OpenAI’s o3 AI model a simple script that would shut off the model when triggered. In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally. It simply concluded on its own that staying alive helped it achieve its other goals. Anthropic’s AI model, Claude 4 Opus, went even further. Researchers told the model it would be replaced by another AI system and fed it fictitious emails suggesting the lead engineer was having an affair. In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer int...

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Poor Jake Tapper, despite not being the principal author of Original Sin and paid largely for the use of his name, hasn't prospered from the book : 'Original Sin' sold 53,737 print units in its first week and reached the number one spot on The New York Times Best Seller list, though this figure is significantly lower than comparable political books, such as Bob Woodward's 'Fear.' Despite extensive promotion, 'The Lead with Jake Tapper' averaged 525,000 total viewers from April 28 through May 25, 2025, a 25% decline from the previous year and the show's lowest ratings since 2015. Tapper's show accounted for 11% of the cable news audience share, compared to 21% for MSNBC and 68% for Fox News during the same period. Tapper has faced questions about his motives for writing the book, with some critics labeling it a 'money grab.' In response, Tapper has stated, 'The idea that I w...