is the author of this post in thread? i do not like the AI voice it reads like.

I didn't notice any obvious markers, weird prose, or meandering in this one.

It's clearly written by AI. I find it interesting that some people recognize it immediately and others do not. I don't know what to make of it.

No it's not, your detector is broken.

Seems like yours is?

FWIW, on your own blog, the most recent post also reads as at least AI helped "Navigator Theory". This sentence in particular sticks out: "They affect what the person notices, what they dismiss, what they measure, what they trust, and what they do when reality pushes back."

The one earlier post I read does not ("toxicity of ideas").

And fwiw, online detectors seems to agree with my own judgement here.

I am absolutely shocked and freaked out by the number of long lived accounts on this thread that can't detect the fact that this is Ai composed.

Cunningham's law. :)

It absolutely was written with Claude. There are so many Claude-isms in the second half that it was hard for me to digest, despite enjoying the ideas.

Like what?

> Hesiod felt it. Plato theorized it. Polybius mechanized it. Sallust prosecuted it (while guilty). Ibn Khaldun put it on a timer. Five civilizations, twenty-one centuries, one diagnosis. The only thing missing was proof.

> For most of history, “too many assholes ruin everything” remained a vibe. A well-documented, five-civilization vibe, but a vibe. Then, in the twentieth century, it became math.

> Sallust, it turns out, was doing game theory in a toga. He just didn’t have the notation.

> That’s not my characterization — it’s the title of the paper. And the researchers defined the term with clinical precision

> That single belief turns out to be a genetic marker. Everything else travels with it.

^^ that one in particular is a VERY strong Claude-ism

> Now, the finding inside the finding

> The study is not a catalog of monsters [...] It’s a measurement [...] with polling-grade precision

> Political violence wasn’t rhetorical; it was a body count

There are a lot in here, I could keep going...

Every one of those is also an example of how people have written and spoken since before AI existed. But then, I don't 'Claude', so I'm not sensitised by exposure.

Sure, LLMs learned them from somewhere, but when you use it a lot you see that it has very specific, very repetitive writing patterns. This article makes little effort to adapt the writing away from those patterns.

It is like a code smell, when you see it, it is obvious.

Also: load-bearing!

Yeah, I've changed my evaluation. The lists didn't do it for me, because they don't follow the usual rule-of-three, but the "genetic marker ... travels" line seems egregious. And the "not X, but Y".

More recent Claude models tend to do these new longer lists. I think they've trained it on more varied sentence structures to give it a less monotonous feeling when reading, which worked, but now it has this tendency to go for "punchy" in a way that becomes grating.

> A thing. Another thing. More thing. But this thing. Four things, one common thread through time.

The trend that bothers me the most is excessive use of the em dash accompanied by awkward use of semicolons.

> Cooperators who are scattered among cheaters get eaten alive — the lone honest man in a crooked ward is not noble, mathematically speaking; he’s lunch.

There's also the not-quite-right logical link between clauses (I see this a lot in Opus output):

> Parasites are a constant; every era grows them to maximum greed, because that’s what parasites do.

("era grows them" doesn't fit with "that's what parasites do." If the era grows them, the parasites aren't doing their own growth.)

Yep. Very slop-like. I found it grating and had to stop reading, even though I thought the subject was interesting.

I made it through because the content was interesting, but I am definitely not going to read more from this author because the AI-wordsmithing is so grating (I read loads of it at work, don't need to read any more of it).

It's rather full of "it's not X, it's Y" and expository paragraph followed by short sentence counter-point, and "read that again".

But no, I don't think it's AI, I think it's just written in a style that happens to be an attractor for LLMs.

I also got strong AI vibes, but I enjoyed the content. I thought it was a interesting summary of topics I've read many times before and even if the content was AI-assisted, does it matter? It seems there was a strong guiding hand in presenting a popular topic in a new way.

It matters because I don't like the style. I wouldn't like it if a human wrote it. I don't like the style so much that I won't read things written with it.

So maybe she had something interesting to say, but it was not communicated to me because I bounced.

And then you came to tell the rest of us that "you did not read it?" Why do that?

I would believe she wrote it in this style if you can point to any of her writing pre 2022 that is similar in style.

Does that exist? Genuinely curious.

“Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books.”

All of her books seem to be children's books and many of the 13 are illustrator credits.

I found this blog from late 2021: https://medium.com/grimhistorian/coffee-the-sexiest-drink-in...

I can only see the beginning of it, but to me the style is obviously different from the thread's linked article.

That would be disappointing, as the author is a fairly known writer.

It's remarkable that this article talks about Tammany Hall, Plato, and MAGA, without mentioning the throughline among them: immigration. Tammany Hall’s peak century coincided with mass immigration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall.

As Wikipedia explains: "In the 1840s, over 130,000 Irish immigrants arrived in New York City to escape the Great Famine, arriving in poverty and joining scores of thousands of their fellow countrymen who had arrived over the prior decades. By 1855, 34 percent of the city's voter population was composed of Irish immigrants. By providing these new arrivals with patronage employment, job referrals, legal aid, food, shelter, employment insurance, and other extralegal services, including citizenship and naturalization services, Tammany secured the lifelong support of the large and growing Irish population, which would form the majority of its electoral base for the next century. In exchange for these services, the Tammany political machine harvested Irish immigrant votes."

The article also quotes Plato, who predicted Tammany Hall 2,400 years earlier. Plato saw good government as a precarious and fragile thing that could be achieved only through careful cultivation of the polity's "constitution"--not just a legal document, but the political "way of life." As a result, Plato's ideal city had strong borders and was insulated from both trade and immigration: https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/983154/1/EXO....

"In most states of course, such confusion is a way of life with which people learned to cope by various compromises, as was the case when immigrants are allowed into a country (PS, 293d). But such compromises were neither necessary nor desirable for Plato, since any policy of unrestricted immigration would destroy his political constitution (PL, 736c; 950a). Aristotle agreed that immigration was a dangerous thing because it pitted newcomers against those already established, thus creating tensions and frictions between them."

Plato's Republic describes a society's descent into anarchy as involving the erasure of distinctions between citizens and foreigners: "the metic" (legal permanent resident) "becomes the equal of a citizen and the citizen of a metic, and similarly with the foreigner."

The author sets up an astute point linking Tammany Hall, Plato, and MAGA republicans, but somehow whiffs the conclusion. The U.S. didn’t defeat Tammany Hall through unspecified “fighting back”—it did so through assimilation and homogenization. The U.S. enacted restrictive immigration law in 1921. That, coupled with a population boom, dropped the foreign born population from 15% to under 5% and largely erased the separate identity of Ellis Island immigrants. That neutering of ethnic attachments made it impossible to sustain political machines that were built on ethnic solidarity.

Tammany Hall did not happen because they were immigrants it happened because someone thought it was a good idea to have people who could not even write their own name vote. Democracy hinges on a well educated populace who actually gives a shit- which as we all know has not and never will happen.

The worst form of government- except for all the others so far tried.

[delayed]

Liberals are also assholes, but this article chose to come to a biased conclusion that involves MAGA Republicans.

“This article reached a conclusion from the author’s perspective” is not a criticism of writing. It is a description of writing.

Good writing is almost never neutral. It can be fair, careful, honest, and proportionate. But if it has nothing to say, it isn’t good writing.

I learned that I don't need to agree 100% with an author's premises to find value in what she writes.

She is a bit partisan, but on the other side, it is about time for us on the right to completely re-evaluate MAGA, and go about creating a third way, distinct from the old mainstream republicanism of the McCains and Bushes, but also critical of what MAGA turned out to be.

I'd settle for a return to McCain.

what would consider to be the essential characteristics of a third way?

“ Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and deny the results of that election. The dividing line is the denial itself: the willingness to hold that an election was stolen in the absence of evidence. That single belief turns out to be a genetic marker. Everything else travels with it.”

He doesn’t seem to be talking about conservatives or republicans broadly; seems like he’s focusing on a much smaller minority of people in society with very specific and fringe views. Perhaps it is “bias” to lump these people with the rest of conservatives.

Do you seriously buy the "explanation" that "liberals vote so much more by mail-in" that both Pennsylvania and Georgia flipped even though Trump was largely ahead in both?

Two states that, btw, were won by the Republicans in 2024. Which should give some food for thoughts too.

I think Trump is both crazy and senile now but I also think he may be the only US president to have ever won the elections three times.

Now I do also believe that, even in the face of cheating (probably by the same who then guided senile-Biden's auto-pen for four years), republicans should have accepted the defeat instead of trying to launch an insurrection.

Plenty of things to take issue with here, but I'll only mention the least controversial -- FDR won four elections.

In the absence of any legally-valid proof to the contrary in 60 court cases, then yes, I do buy that explanation.

Yes and there is nothing suspect about liberals voting more by mail. Demographically it checks out.

Complains about biden auto pen and biden are kind of clearly fake given Trump mental state.

If anything the voters are completely in line with what their respective candidate told them to do.

You've identified yourself on the metric. I'm trying to decide if that's a result of self-reflection, or its absence.

"liberals vote so much more by mail-in"

They do. See page 4. (https://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2020-12/How-...)

Buddy I lived in Georgia during that election. I definitely believe it based on vibes alone.

It’s also not complicated: the respective voters simply did what trump or Biden told them to do.