Scott Alexander, curated
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Quality
67
Strong
Claude Shift
48
Moderate
RWI
2
of 10

Summary

An argument against socially pressuring the Trump-adjacent insiders who quietly block the administration's worst ideas. Opens with the recurring pattern he has watched from the periphery in medicine and AI: an official floats something insane, everyone affected scrambles, and protests from liberals reliably backfire because the administration enjoys offending liberals — what sometimes works is objection from Republicans who have banked loyalty and finally spend it. Those people are a depleting resource: the Bush-era professionals and libertarians who seeded Trump I crashed out one by one and were replaced by 'grifters, groypers, and podcasters' selected purely on loyalty, which is why Trump II is worse-managed than Trump I. Hence the ask: don't demand that a trusted person additionally denounce the administration; don't demand that a paper aimed at persuading policymakers also insult its audience (he cites his own Trump II Health Policy Proposals and the 'whitewashing' accusations it drew); don't let movements purge their minority political wing, since the Liberal Gun Club / Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation structure is what buys access when the other party holds power. Answers the legitimation objection empirically — voters are too uninformed and polarized for policy to move them (the Iran war hasn't moved approval; gas-price effects decay before election day; the blocked flu vaccine wouldn't have registered) — while conceding a narrow class of high-vote-relevance issues where accelerationism might pay. Closes on the non-consequentialist worry about staining your soul, which he takes seriously but declines to apply social pressure to.

Why this score

Quality 67 · Strong. Strong. A clear, practically useful coordination argument with a genuinely generative core — thoughtful insiders modeled as a depleting stock, and movements as needing both partisan branches to retain access across administrations. The T.A.C.O./flu-vaccine and Liberal Gun Club examples are concrete, and the legitimation rebuttal is argued rather than asserted. Held below the Excellent floor because it is short, pegged to a news cycle, partly inside-baseball about his own circles, and the central claim (don't purge your moderates) is a familiar institutionalist position rather than a new one; the contribution is the framing and the specific asks, not a reframing of the subject.

Claude’s paradigm shift 48 · Moderate. Moderate. The underlying position — work from inside, keep your cross-partisan wing — is long-standing, and 'don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good' politics is not new. What is fresh at publication is the depleting-stock model of collaborators and the explicit Trump I vs Trump II comparison as evidence for it, plus the observation that a persuasion document is being asked to double as a denunciation. A non-obvious angle on a much-discussed subject, clearly building on existing ideas.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Influential within a niche professional sphere — the policy/think-tank/AI-and-medicine advocacy world it is addressed to, where he reports his own earlier health-policy post had some effect. It is an appeal to change how a small community treats its own members, with no measurable change to laws, institutions, or ordinary lives.