What fascinated me about Cracker Barrel is - it’s not that I can’t see why people think Cracker Barrel is coded right, and yet, underlying all that I don’t think it is. And I remember - all of my liberal friends missed Cracker Barrel, but I remember watching like all these conservative pundits talk about it, and to a person none had been to one recently!

It was this weird obsession with this idea of Americana none of them actually wanted!

But take away the hostility and conservatives wouldn’t self selection into an institution that doesn’t prioritize the things conservatives prioritize.

I 100% believe the country has gone too far in discounting traditional/conservative values. (On both the left and right, but I digress) And I think this divide is unhealthy for the future of the country.

I think it would be healthier for the country if there was a greater balance in education. But I don’t think you can prove that the right in this country hasn’t itself opted out. You hear it in thought leaders at the top and bottom of the economic spectrum. More trade schools, less college. And all the like tech thought leaders valuing experience over education.

Anyway Christopher Rufo is on a tear and the Trump administration has declared victory over woke, so maybe we’ll see the tides turn.

What if there’s just something about academics (and I do actually think this is true) that is not attractive to conservative professionals. The prestige of academics has been falling. Salaries aren’t equivalent to the private sector.

So why are we looking at equality of outcomes and assuming there’s a problem with equality of opportunity?

Also and of course like this may be the most relevant point, the political realignment of the past 15 years has been around educational attainment! How can you design a Republican Party that specifically realigns around education level and not expect that to show up in academics.

Why is it inherently bad that university faculty lean left?

Yes? I have been divesting from big tech. Not only do I feel good about it but the side effects have been positive too.

To be honest I don’t think an LLM that more accurately represents this kind of reasoning would actually be more representative, per your observation, I’ll say plainly I don’t think the types of people on the right who are most likely activists in this area are doing so because of a passion for different types of reasoning. I think it specifically does desire to advance positions without needing reason.

If an LLM equally weighted flat earth and spherical earth or creationism and evolution so I could decide I would never use that LlM again. And I suspect I’m not alone. I think you’ve outlined an LLM that would hypercharge my concerns.

But also I want to point out the specific nature of my concerns isn’t monodirectional - it’s that if a political position is not arrived to rationally, and it is trained to ignore structured argument - than does that form of epistemology bleed over into subjects they aren’t specifically political.

I’ve been going down a bit of a conservative philosophical rabbit holes lately — and while conservatism may be maximally truth seeking in a religious sense, in an epistemological sense, it’s suspicious that rationality is the right way to determine how institutions should be organized. Conservative arguments aren’t meant to be built on a rational foundation.

Not that liberal positions are inherently rational, but if you’re position is that there should be no abortions no exceptions, than the entire chain of thinking that may lead to some kind of compromised position on abortion is inherently “liberal”.

And so managers are feeling social pressure to hire under qualified Asians as well? I must not be up to date on the latest culture war talking points, because I thought Asians were underrepresented.

1. We should absolutely pursuing these kind of ideas but given then nature of technological progress and our history with “democratization” things are likely to get worse before we get better. Matt is hedging a lot here reflecting this.

2. Maybe all this stuff is as promising as the various threads suggest but it’s bizzare that this is all being argued in culture war terms (you vs the gatekeepers) and not like shared human flourishing terms. Again maybe it’s working, but it’s also being marketed to a certain kind of persons fears, not as the future of human understanding.

True, none of us are innocent.

> When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.

WTF?

Mandatory disclaimer - im not a socialist and dont have a problem with wealth accumulation, but it really feels like in 2026. I would spend a lot of time thinking about how to thought lead around the good old traditional “business owners create jobs” and not “billionaires=good”. Also, in our regulatory captures, giving companies $60 billion dollars - it’s not the hardest working founders that win, it’s the best capitalized.

Sure Uber made a better product, but was it that or the subsidized rides that truly allowed them to capture the market.

So, I want people to dream big, but what happened to medium sized businesses where you could make $20 or so million dollars. Why advocate for consolidation in this scale?

It’s not the same mistake. I’m doing fine. I have completely tuned my life and aspiration to my income. I need know more and I am personally satisfied. But forget morality and “who has enough”. Money is just not moving sufficiently in the system. And even traditional capitalists are sounding the alarm on this. It’s not about how much Elon Musk has compared to me. It’s looking at the total distribution of money.

But like all the rules about the economy and capitalism not being a zero sum game are dependent on moderation and a set of rules. AI companies really are sucking up all the capital leaving less money for smaller firms.

Depending on how AI companies tie themselves to the government, you could see bailouts and inflation that make us all poorer.

JD Rockefeller aside from starting a monopoly had deals with the railroads most people at the time found immoral and this was either against or before the concept of common carrier.

So like - there are a lot of ways in which - I want to be a sort of economically conservative capitalist. I want to live in a world where we have a set of rules that create a level playing field. But we’ve had this slow drip of deregulation and norm breaking over the past 100 years, and yet debates of socialism vs capitalism still sort of come down to oversimplified debates of “are you meritocratic or not”.

And then cap this off with the fact that business wealth is extremely concentrated in the magnificent 7; capitalism isn’t capitalism without competition. I forget the name of the group, but there are even though leaders on the right that see that like wealth is not currently distributed the way any reasonably moderate person - left or right - idealizes it to be. It feels like we are so far from the colloquial definition of - “someone has a good idea, invents it, sells it to people, and gets rewarded”.

On some level, if Elon musk sold 100 million cars and pocketed 10k each, I might not care if he was a trillionaire, but we need to realign incentives with tangible value and not financial games.

I think it’s more of a bell curve. Andrej and I clearly have different definitions of fun, if he doesn’t think deep learning is fun. In fact I’d say I’ve only learned anything when I’m having fun. I might add almost every time I’ve sweat it’s been out of fun. I’ve never gotten a good workout from “vegetables” (though I like vegetables). Being miserable might work for him, but I don’t know if this advice is generalizable (his point is not entirely terrible, but maybe taken a little far. I think the problem is less “is this entertaining” and more “is this deeply enganging”