This reminds me of the way Howell Raines described the NYT as a way for different parts of the American elite to communicate with each other: "It is the indispensable newsletter of the United States' political, diplomatic, governmental, academic, and professional communities, and the main link between those communities and their counterparts around the world." I think one of the reasons why we get the sense of more chaotic vibe shifts is that the NYT has been replaced by social media, with all of its noise and confusion.
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It’s overwhelmingly because Elon bought and changed Twitter. He tilted the vibe-space heavily to the right. Twitter had played a ridiculously large role in elite discourse — the architecture is optimized for communicating vibes.
That’s just what vibes are. That’s why we talk about “vibes” now—even the question is endogenous.
It’s unclear what you’re implying about the ontology of “public opinion.” Is this just equated to opinion polls? Could we actually answer the question of what the ground truth of vibes are with surveys?
I don’t think so. I think a quantitative analysis of Twitter would tell us what “the vibes” are, at least roughly. And it’s an indictment of this slice of academia (my slice, to be clear) that we don’t have that data.
There's an argument that I very deliberately did not want to get into, because complex and only quasi-relevant, but have briefly adverted to in forthcoming work, about how much 'public opinion' and even the notion of a 'democratic public' is a product of the technologies we use to depict it. This is the 'at greater length but I don't think I've quite gotten it right yet' version - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rvu10o9s688wrwlw9tec0/LLMs_Make_Democratic_Publics.pdf?rlkey=baa05d76enz5ufcg7euuxkxje&dl=0.
Haha yeah I 100% agree. I’m not a “social scientific realist”—I think that the idea that these concepts are fundamentally real outside of our measurement of them is ridiculous. Which is not to say that it’s an uncommon view, that “public opinion” exists
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Given the slippage of Dem support among the youngest cohort, I definitely think TikTok is part of the story as well.
The changes are marginal, but they add up to a pretty distinct collapse in the sense that MAGA is a small and unacceptable minority. The center quite literally did not hold.
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I agree that quantitative analysis of full, transparent set of social media data would be invaluable to better understanding public opinion today. But that also wouldn’t be “ground truth”, it would be as much a construct as surveys were, as representations of modern xx century societies. Twitter gives us a sense of direct access to public vibes, sentiments, collective imaginative. But its representativeness is even more biased, due to the way the space is shaped by opaque, proprietary algos, through which public opinion is constantly filtered.
Any leading Democratic candidate other than Biden/Harris would beat Trump which is - i think - a confirmation of your thesis: That the vibes that Tyler observes are mostly just confirmation of his prejudices, while they have very little to say about the public opinion outside of Sillicon Valley.
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1) If vibes are "no more and no less than a given political elite’s theory of public opinion" - isn't it just as relevant that the non-elite public is itself too diverse to be captured as one mass "public opinion," and more likely to consist of many clusters of public opinion associated with different local communities and subcultures? At what level of granularity can public opinion be analyzed and still be a useful concept?
2) It seems that what we pay most attention to (e.g. elites' priorities) cannot be separated from beliefs about public opinion. But is it also possible that public opinion itself (to the extent this is a coherent thing) is defined as much by which stuff that public pays attention to, as it is by their opinion about it? I guess I'm wondering if attention is a constitutive feature of public opinion, not just something that biases us in evaluating it.
3) Doesn't all of this point to a role for qualitative research such as discourse analysis, in drawing out better what is "vibey" about a purported vibe, and where? Or do vibes by their very nature imply such massive social scale that they can only be studied quantitatively with huge datasets?
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that was a spam comment, probably a phishing attempt - do not respond to it! The spammer has been attacking the comments all afternoon using slightly different addresses.
I'm not sure what Cowen would be doing would be a "cognirive" test. Vibes are not about thinking, after all. But its all of a piece with Cowen's general sloppy approach to everything but economics (which I am wildly unqualified to judge). That list of Cowen's generic assertions is a pretty good summary of the absorbtion of compatible Republican tslking points into the SV body politic. They elevate the things they believe they are responsible for (social media, crypto) or confirm their view of themselves above the lesser peoples who need their guidance (everything we hate or don't control is turning thigs to shit). I do know about SV culture, and it is impossible to overstate how much they view themselves, from top to bottom, as Masters of the Universe and the Future. Their views, needs, and feelings are the things that define how the world should be run, and their success has convinced them they must seize the chance and run it.
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1. Trump supporters don't care what he says. The more outrageous the better. His words become passcode for MAGA socializing
2. Independents don't care that Biden is policy competent. It's his aging is irreversible
3. People strongly "ridin' with Biden" are makin' a big mistake thinkin' that words or policy will change swingstate polls
4. Possible exception is ridin' this entire election on abortion
Accordingly, the Dems should have an open convention. The Dems will rally around the new ticket, and pick up swing state independents who are double-haters. Trounce Trump by 8 points
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Thats a reading of the reading of public opinion. Is that what you meant? The first is demonstrably true, the rest are assertions backed by nothing but assertions. Could be true, but a lot of things could be true.
That's a loaded question. "Independents" by definition, especially these days, have no fixed opinions on politics beyond generalities of what they consider "good" government, if they care at all about government. Their belief, like their support, is ephemeral. The traditional answer to appealing to opinion polls is to hammer the focus-tested message you hope will attract their interest and support/vote. That's not a great answer, but there is no better one. Don't forget what opinion polls are measuring, the way people feel at this moment in time, 4 months before the election, and about 6 weeks before "independents" traditionally start paying attention. The quote from screenwriter WIlliam Goldman about Hollywood applies equally to politics, in the same way: Nobody Knows Anything. The probabilities people are throwing around, like an "open convention" are nothing but hope based on a WAG as a way to deal with a level of fear and uncertainty they consider unbearable. Politics ain't beanbag, as Yogi Berra used to say.
If independents have no fixed opinions on politics, then independents don't care if Biden is policy-competent because they don't care about policy or else they would have chosen a policy side (D or R) and not identify as independent. Meanwhile around 80% of voters think Biden is too old to be President. So my #2 Q.E.D.
Swingstate polls haven't changed much despite Biden's policies or Trump's rhetoric. #3 Q.E.D.
Now my conclusion. Independent voters are more prevalent in swing states which is why they are swing states. Meanwhile about 25% of voters dislike both Trump and Biden ("double-haters"). Not clear how many of them identify as independent but likely enough to swing a swing-state to blue. Conclusion Q.E.D.
"No fixed opinions on politics" != "don't care about policy". By definition independents are unsatisfied with both parties on policy. They don't pick a side (beyond voting) for any number of reasons beyond dissatisfaction. Where is your 80% number coming from?
Polls haven't changed much because the bulk of voters aren't paying attention. There's a reason "the campaign starts Labor Day" is a trusim older tham me (b. 1952).
Appealimg to swing/independent/uncommitted voters (and non-voters) is SOP in an era of coin-toss elections like ours. Your assertion that Anybody But Biden will appeal more is based on what?
We may not have to wait until Labor Day in this cycle because voters' views of both candidates are ALREADY pretty well-formed. The fact that Pelosi, Schumer and Jeffries have publicly expressed concern suggests that Democratic internal polls are just as bad.
Vibe-reading and vibe-making is not about the analysis of events per se, it's the kind of language that courtiers speak to their kings--it is a language of persuasion, flattery, and influence. Which I think is the major point you're getting at. It is nudgery in the opposite direction of Sunstein's nudgery--Sunstein's nudgery is about educated elites and experts in a duck-blind manipulating the proles into behaving better, whereas vibes nudgery is about the vizier wheedling the monarch into right thinking. As you say, that's kind of what Tyler is doing with Silicon Valley. (Silicon Valley requires a lot of this kind of fluffing from the class of experts who want to be favored by them.)
But also, as you suggest, I do think there's a sophisticated way to incorporate vibe-tracking into analysis, and styles of analysis that refuse to admit anything smacking of vibes are often impoverished and in their way just as wrong-headed. Tetlock and Gardner's Superforecasters does a pretty good job of pointing out that the few people who seem to be right more often than wrong when it comes to projecting the near-term future do so by being intelligently multi-modal in their methods, often including some more ethnographic approaches or 'reading' the text of public culture in an intuitive way. They also point out that the people who are right more often than wrong all share a willingness to abandon interpretations or analyses and to not being trying to relentlessly push the projections towards some preordained conclusion. (Which definitely disqualifies most of the pundit class and a fair number of scholarly experts.)
The bit about how "there is variation. Some people are more careful about marking their claims to external evidence that might correct their impressions, and about taking counter-arguments seriously" is supposed to wave in that general direction. But in general, I am a little more in tune with the 'collective structures' than 'improving individual forecasting' agenda for better decision making, while recognizing the good work on the latter - this, stealing all the good ideas from more intelligent co-authors, is roughly where I would like to head - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000715
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This reminds me of the way Howell Raines described the NYT as a way for different parts of the American elite to communicate with each other: "It is the indispensable newsletter of the United States' political, diplomatic, governmental, academic, and professional communities, and the main link between those communities and their counterparts around the world." I think one of the reasons why we get the sense of more chaotic vibe shifts is that the NYT has been replaced by social media, with all of its noise and confusion.
That Raines quote is really useful.
Here's the source. It remains one of the key ways I think about the media: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/my-times/302952/
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It’s overwhelmingly because Elon bought and changed Twitter. He tilted the vibe-space heavily to the right. Twitter had played a ridiculously large role in elite discourse — the architecture is optimized for communicating vibes.
https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/what-medium-is-twitter
That’s just what vibes are. That’s why we talk about “vibes” now—even the question is endogenous.
It’s unclear what you’re implying about the ontology of “public opinion.” Is this just equated to opinion polls? Could we actually answer the question of what the ground truth of vibes are with surveys?
I don’t think so. I think a quantitative analysis of Twitter would tell us what “the vibes” are, at least roughly. And it’s an indictment of this slice of academia (my slice, to be clear) that we don’t have that data.
There's an argument that I very deliberately did not want to get into, because complex and only quasi-relevant, but have briefly adverted to in forthcoming work, about how much 'public opinion' and even the notion of a 'democratic public' is a product of the technologies we use to depict it. This is the 'at greater length but I don't think I've quite gotten it right yet' version - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rvu10o9s688wrwlw9tec0/LLMs_Make_Democratic_Publics.pdf?rlkey=baa05d76enz5ufcg7euuxkxje&dl=0.
Haha yeah I 100% agree. I’m not a “social scientific realist”—I think that the idea that these concepts are fundamentally real outside of our measurement of them is ridiculous. Which is not to say that it’s an uncommon view, that “public opinion” exists
??
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Given the slippage of Dem support among the youngest cohort, I definitely think TikTok is part of the story as well.
The changes are marginal, but they add up to a pretty distinct collapse in the sense that MAGA is a small and unacceptable minority. The center quite literally did not hold.
A general fyi which I am putting on all comments - someone seems to be going through the comments and sending messages pretending to be "programmable mutter" and suggesting contact be made on Telegram. This is presumably a phishing attack, so ignore all such messages!
I agree that quantitative analysis of full, transparent set of social media data would be invaluable to better understanding public opinion today. But that also wouldn’t be “ground truth”, it would be as much a construct as surveys were, as representations of modern xx century societies. Twitter gives us a sense of direct access to public vibes, sentiments, collective imaginative. But its representativeness is even more biased, due to the way the space is shaped by opaque, proprietary algos, through which public opinion is constantly filtered.
Any leading Democratic candidate other than Biden/Harris would beat Trump which is - i think - a confirmation of your thesis: That the vibes that Tyler observes are mostly just confirmation of his prejudices, while they have very little to say about the public opinion outside of Sillicon Valley.
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Unlike columnists, there's no deadline to post wretched shit on MR. Tyler is doing this voluntarily!
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Three questions, as a non-expert in this field:
1) If vibes are "no more and no less than a given political elite’s theory of public opinion" - isn't it just as relevant that the non-elite public is itself too diverse to be captured as one mass "public opinion," and more likely to consist of many clusters of public opinion associated with different local communities and subcultures? At what level of granularity can public opinion be analyzed and still be a useful concept?
2) It seems that what we pay most attention to (e.g. elites' priorities) cannot be separated from beliefs about public opinion. But is it also possible that public opinion itself (to the extent this is a coherent thing) is defined as much by which stuff that public pays attention to, as it is by their opinion about it? I guess I'm wondering if attention is a constitutive feature of public opinion, not just something that biases us in evaluating it.
3) Doesn't all of this point to a role for qualitative research such as discourse analysis, in drawing out better what is "vibey" about a purported vibe, and where? Or do vibes by their very nature imply such massive social scale that they can only be studied quantitatively with huge datasets?
A general fyi which I am putting on all comments - someone seems to be going through the comments and sending messages pretending to be "programmable mutter" and suggesting contact be made on Telegram. This is presumably a phishing attack, so ignore all such messages!
that was a spam comment, probably a phishing attempt - do not respond to it! The spammer has been attacking the comments all afternoon using slightly different addresses.
I'm not sure what Cowen would be doing would be a "cognirive" test. Vibes are not about thinking, after all. But its all of a piece with Cowen's general sloppy approach to everything but economics (which I am wildly unqualified to judge). That list of Cowen's generic assertions is a pretty good summary of the absorbtion of compatible Republican tslking points into the SV body politic. They elevate the things they believe they are responsible for (social media, crypto) or confirm their view of themselves above the lesser peoples who need their guidance (everything we hate or don't control is turning thigs to shit). I do know about SV culture, and it is impossible to overstate how much they view themselves, from top to bottom, as Masters of the Universe and the Future. Their views, needs, and feelings are the things that define how the world should be run, and their success has convinced them they must seize the chance and run it.
A general fyi which I am putting on all comments - someone seems to be going through the comments and sending messages pretending to be "programmable mutter" and suggesting contact be made on Telegram. This is presumably a phishing attack, so ignore all such messages!
My reading of public opinion:
1. Trump supporters don't care what he says. The more outrageous the better. His words become passcode for MAGA socializing
2. Independents don't care that Biden is policy competent. It's his aging is irreversible
3. People strongly "ridin' with Biden" are makin' a big mistake thinkin' that words or policy will change swingstate polls
4. Possible exception is ridin' this entire election on abortion
Accordingly, the Dems should have an open convention. The Dems will rally around the new ticket, and pick up swing state independents who are double-haters. Trounce Trump by 8 points
A general fyi which I am putting on all comments - someone seems to be going through the comments and sending messages pretending to be "programmable mutter" and suggesting contact be made on Telegram. This is presumably a phishing attack, so ignore all such messages!
Thats a reading of the reading of public opinion. Is that what you meant? The first is demonstrably true, the rest are assertions backed by nothing but assertions. Could be true, but a lot of things could be true.
What do independents believe? What will change swing state opinion polls?
That's a loaded question. "Independents" by definition, especially these days, have no fixed opinions on politics beyond generalities of what they consider "good" government, if they care at all about government. Their belief, like their support, is ephemeral. The traditional answer to appealing to opinion polls is to hammer the focus-tested message you hope will attract their interest and support/vote. That's not a great answer, but there is no better one. Don't forget what opinion polls are measuring, the way people feel at this moment in time, 4 months before the election, and about 6 weeks before "independents" traditionally start paying attention. The quote from screenwriter WIlliam Goldman about Hollywood applies equally to politics, in the same way: Nobody Knows Anything. The probabilities people are throwing around, like an "open convention" are nothing but hope based on a WAG as a way to deal with a level of fear and uncertainty they consider unbearable. Politics ain't beanbag, as Yogi Berra used to say.
If independents have no fixed opinions on politics, then independents don't care if Biden is policy-competent because they don't care about policy or else they would have chosen a policy side (D or R) and not identify as independent. Meanwhile around 80% of voters think Biden is too old to be President. So my #2 Q.E.D.
Swingstate polls haven't changed much despite Biden's policies or Trump's rhetoric. #3 Q.E.D.
Now my conclusion. Independent voters are more prevalent in swing states which is why they are swing states. Meanwhile about 25% of voters dislike both Trump and Biden ("double-haters"). Not clear how many of them identify as independent but likely enough to swing a swing-state to blue. Conclusion Q.E.D.
"No fixed opinions on politics" != "don't care about policy". By definition independents are unsatisfied with both parties on policy. They don't pick a side (beyond voting) for any number of reasons beyond dissatisfaction. Where is your 80% number coming from?
Polls haven't changed much because the bulk of voters aren't paying attention. There's a reason "the campaign starts Labor Day" is a trusim older tham me (b. 1952).
Appealimg to swing/independent/uncommitted voters (and non-voters) is SOP in an era of coin-toss elections like ours. Your assertion that Anybody But Biden will appeal more is based on what?
another one from today
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/biden-poll-democrats-drop-out.html
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2024/07/17/new-polling-bolsters-dump-biden-push-00168943
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-expands-lead-over-biden-after-debate-as-voters-age-worries-grow-wsj-poll-finds-c3a793ab
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/poll-americans-on-biden-age/story?id=107126589
We may not have to wait until Labor Day in this cycle because voters' views of both candidates are ALREADY pretty well-formed. The fact that Pelosi, Schumer and Jeffries have publicly expressed concern suggests that Democratic internal polls are just as bad.
Vibe-reading and vibe-making is not about the analysis of events per se, it's the kind of language that courtiers speak to their kings--it is a language of persuasion, flattery, and influence. Which I think is the major point you're getting at. It is nudgery in the opposite direction of Sunstein's nudgery--Sunstein's nudgery is about educated elites and experts in a duck-blind manipulating the proles into behaving better, whereas vibes nudgery is about the vizier wheedling the monarch into right thinking. As you say, that's kind of what Tyler is doing with Silicon Valley. (Silicon Valley requires a lot of this kind of fluffing from the class of experts who want to be favored by them.)
But also, as you suggest, I do think there's a sophisticated way to incorporate vibe-tracking into analysis, and styles of analysis that refuse to admit anything smacking of vibes are often impoverished and in their way just as wrong-headed. Tetlock and Gardner's Superforecasters does a pretty good job of pointing out that the few people who seem to be right more often than wrong when it comes to projecting the near-term future do so by being intelligently multi-modal in their methods, often including some more ethnographic approaches or 'reading' the text of public culture in an intuitive way. They also point out that the people who are right more often than wrong all share a willingness to abandon interpretations or analyses and to not being trying to relentlessly push the projections towards some preordained conclusion. (Which definitely disqualifies most of the pundit class and a fair number of scholarly experts.)
The bit about how "there is variation. Some people are more careful about marking their claims to external evidence that might correct their impressions, and about taking counter-arguments seriously" is supposed to wave in that general direction. But in general, I am a little more in tune with the 'collective structures' than 'improving individual forecasting' agenda for better decision making, while recognizing the good work on the latter - this, stealing all the good ideas from more intelligent co-authors, is roughly where I would like to head - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000715
A general fyi which I am putting on all comments - someone seems to be going through the comments and sending messages pretending to be "programmable mutter" and suggesting contact be made on Telegram. This is presumably a phishing attack, so ignore all such messages!