Sorry for the slightly clickbait-y title.
Some commenters have expressed, in the last open thread, their disappointment that figureheads from or near the rationality sphere seemed to have lost their cool when it came to this US election: when they were supposed to be calm and level-headed, they instead campaigned as if Trump was going to be the Basilisk incarnated.
I've not followed many commenters, mainly Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and they both endorsed Clinton. I'll try to explain what were their arguments, briefly but as faithfully as possible. I'd like to know if you consider them mindkilled and why.
Please notice: I would like this to be a comment on methodology, about if their arguments were sound given what they knew and believed. I most definitely do not want this to decay in a lamentation about the results, or insults to the obviously stupid side, etc.
Yudkowsky made two arguments against Trump: level B incompetence and high variance. Since the second is also more or less the same as Scott's, I'll just go with those.
Level B incompetence
Eliezer attended a pretty serious and wide diplomatic simulation game, that made him appreciate how difficult is to just maintain a global equilibrium between countries and avoid nuclear annihilation. He says that there are three level in politics:
- level 0, where everything that the media report and the politicians say is taken at face value: every drama is true, every problem is important and every cry of outrage deserves consideration;
- level A, where you understand that politics is as much about theatre and emotions as it is about policies: at this level players operate like in pro-wrestling, creating drama and conflict to steer the more gullible viewers towards the preferred direction; at this level cinicism is high and almost every conflict is a farce and probably staged.
But the bucket doesn't stop here. As the diplomacy simulation taught him, there's also:
- level B, where everything becomes serious and important again. At this level, people work very hard at maintaining the status quo (where outside you have mankind extinction), diplomatic relations and subtle international equilibria shield the world from much worse outcomes. Faux pas at this level in the past had resulted in wars, genocides and general widespread badness.
In August fifty Republican security advisors signed a letter condemning Trump for his position on foreign policy: these are, Yudkowsky warned us, exactly those level B player, and they are saying us that Trump is an ill advised choice.
Trump might be a fantastic level A player, but he is an incompetent level B player, and this might very well turn to disaster.
High variance
The second argument is a more general version of the first: if you look at a normal distribution, it's easy to mistake only two possibilities: you either can do worst than the average, or better. But in a three dimensional world, things are much more complicated. Status quo is fragile (see the first argument), surrounded not by an equal amount of things being good or being bad. Most substantial variations from the equilibrium are disasters, and if you put a high-variance candidate, someone whose main point is to subvert the status quo, in charge, then with overwhelming probability you're headed off to a cliff.
People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists, thinking that civilization is robust, the current state is bad and variations can definitely help with getting away from a state of bad equilibrium.
I'd agree that Jan 6th was top 5 most surprising US political events 2017-2021, though I'm not sure that category is big enough that top 5 is an achievement. (That is, how many events total are in there for you?)
I wasn't substantially surprised by it in the way that you were, however. I'm not saying that I predicted it, mind you, but rather that it was in a category of stuff that felt at least Trump-adjacent from the jump. As a descriptive example, imagine a sleezy used car salesman lies to me about whether the doors will fall off the car while I drive it home. I plainly didn't expect that particular lie, since I fell for it, but the basic trend of 'this man will lie for his own profit' is baked into the persona from the get go.
My model of American voters ending American democracy remains extremely low. For better or for worse, that's just not in any real way how we roll. Take a look at every anti democratic movement presently going, and you will see endless rhetoric about how they are really double secret truly democratic. The clowns who want to pack the supreme court/senate are just trying to compensate for the framers not jock riding cities hard enough. The stooges who want the VP to be able to throw out electors not for his party invent gibberish about how the framers intended this. The people kicking folks off voter rolls chant about how they are preventing imaginary voter fraud. That kind of movement, unwilling to speak its own name, has a ceiling on how hard it can go. I believe that ceiling is lower than the bar they'd need to clear to seize power, and I think the last few years have borne this sentiment out.
I'm not sure I exactly get your point re: how to measure Trump's time vs. hypothetical Clinton's time. I will just repeat my sentiment that we can't know how they would have compared to one another, because Clinton's time will remain hypothetical. It might have had more or less terrorism. I will reiterate that the odds of terrorism being the key point to compare those points is miniscule. If we'd picked Clinton instead of Trump in 2016, things would be wildly different today. For 3 likely differences, we'd probably have a Republican president instead of Biden right now, we'd have had a technocrat beloved of the media instead of a maniac loathed by them when Covid hit, and we'd probably be fighting wars in Syria and Afghanistan, with Russia unlikely to have invaded the Ukraine. It would be a substantially different place in a lot of ways that had nothing to do with whether or not the capital was occupied for an afternoon.
As far as putting money down, I will bet on 'the US continues to be a functioning democracy' long before I bet on what kind of calamity might befall us. I think that a successful insurrection is less likely to be the end of our democratic experiment than a nuclear war, but both remain comfortably in 'far mode', so to speak.
I do buy the idea that citizens are moving left/right and a middle ground is becoming harder to find. I think anyone as online as our generation is would have to see that much. I just don't think that results in a civil war of the kind you envision. Before being ideologues, left and right alike, these voters are lazy and selfish. We will sit tight, clutching our votes and bemoaning the failures of our political masters/servants, as the world rolls along.