We Need to Talk

On a micro- and a macro-level, the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination has been revelatory. From the jaw-dropping gall of the Trump administration's flagrant attempts to capitalize on the anger and shock of the moment to target and silence anyone who disagrees with them; to my own experiences of interacting with people in the comments sections of articles, Bluesky, and X. It seems clear that the present moment holds some valuable lessons, if only we can stop, pay attention, and learn new ways to challenge our current circumstances.

To me, the most revelatory discussions center around the work of Ezra Klein in the New York Times. He has generated three pieces in the aftermath of Kirk's killing: (a) an article on the day after the shooting:"Charlie Kirk as pursuing Politics the Right Way" that praised Kirk as a persuasive political operative, (b) a follow-up that focused and emphasized the importance of political argument with people from the other side (including a very recent interview with Ben Shapiro); and (c) a substantive and thoroughly excellent discussion with Governor Spencer Cox from Utah. Governor Cox has been acting as the primary political spokesperson for Charlie Kirk's murder 'on the ground' in Utah and has been one of the few conservative voices calling for calm and trying to calm everyone down.   

The clear, unambiguous point that Ezra Klein has been making has been that we must reinstate political argumentation across the political left and right and re-engage with each other. There is a rising tide of political violence that is symptomatic of a deeper alienation between the two sides and has the potential of being disastrous for America as a country in the very near future.

Personally, I would claim that Trump's election in 2016 and in 2024 are clear evidence of that already - but now, I fear, the worst is yet to come for the unfolding disaster that we are all facing day-by-day in the USA in 2025.   

These articles and podcasts attracted a lot of criticism from progressives, who were clearly frustrated with Ezra Klein's tone. In his first article, published the day after the murder, he was civil, generous, warm even. 

In my own online discussions, it was immediately apparent that this was unacceptable to many people in my circle. The pervading perception was a strongly negative portrayal of Kirk as a polemicist, a pure antagonist for almost every progressive position, and a generally evil person. Any sense of moderation was met with derision, dismissal, and personal attack. In these interactions, it felt like the goal was simply to dismiss my point of view, shut me down, and shut me up.

I feel, that in this moment, Ezra Klein is onto something. Many of the rebuttals and counter-arguments being published name him directly, and the fact that he is attracting such a strong reaction is telling.

Why could that be?

The majority of criticism for his approach seems to be that acknowledging Kirk's effectiveness with his audience in any positive light somehow legitimizes what Kirk was doing (see Notes below). In his articles, Klein seemed quite level-headed, accurate, and critical of some of the actions that Kirk had taken (such as creating a list of academics to persecute, calling for the execution of Joe Biden, etc). He always maintained a tone of civil discussion, never adopting the approach of a moralistic condemnation that could only block off and destroy the possibility of future debate. 

This is the key issue.

Listening to Ezra's Klein's interviews, he gives his subjects a great deal of deference and allows them to speak extensively. He does not attempt to browbeat them into submission. He doesn't try to 'win' the argument through rhetorical tricks, volume, moralistic posturing or even raising his voice. He just lets them talk. 

This is excellent - and very much in-keeping with his apparent mission of having people on the left and right have meaningful and productive arguments with each other. 

When the most objectionable people on his show are required to actually explain their political positions, it becomes very clear just how weak and frankly bizarre many of them are. Not only that, but many of the interactions are incredibly insightful to help all of us understand the other. Just why do right-wingers frame their thoughts in this way? Why do they support Trump even now? What is the real motivation for their thinking? 

Providing such a resource for us all is incredibly valuable. 

Having said that, I find myself reacting with annoyance to his interviews. They feel somewhat anodyne, polite, and shallow. A really good argument really gets into the meat of something and he only ever makes individual counterpoints before moving on. But, he does make the counterpoint in the moment and still manages to keep the conversation going. Would going deeper run the risk becoming so contentious that people would stop participating? This is the fine line Mr Kline navigates expertly in these interviews. I’d like to believe that this is deliberate whilst being backed by a full-throated commitment to the same kinds of viewpoints that I share, but it’s hard to tell.

The other interesting side effect of these discussions, however annoying, is that they spur people to write, to criticize, and further engage. Being annoyed is good in this context. It makes us want to respond and further the conversation.

A moralistic reaction that we shouldn’t talk to ‘these people’ because they are evil kills conversion and blocks any effort to even try to persuade them. Even though we may never succeed in that persuasion, the fact that these discussions are happening in public serves to promote discourse in onlookers. 

In the words of Hal Wyner from season 1 of Netflix’s The Diplomat (an entirely fictional character) “One of the boneheaded truisms of foreign policy is that talking to your enemies legitimizes them.Talk to everyone. Talk to the dictator, and the war criminal. Talk to the poor schmuck three levels down who's so pissed he has to sit in the back of the second car, he may be ready to turn. Talk to terrorists. Talk to everyone. Fail, and fail again. And brush yourself off. And fail again. Because maybe... Maybe…”.

We have to talk. It is essential. It’s the only way we exert our power in this situation. When we do talk, we need to do it well - perhaps through better ways to argue that use modern AI to help find authentic solutions. We have to make the argument for honesty, compassion, and understanding more compelling than the one currently employed by our adversaries- those arguing for lies, cruelty, and blind faith. 

Our future depends on it.

Notes

[1]. Some people who have offered excellent counterpieces to Ezra Klein's wrirting about Charlie Kirk are Marisa Kabas in the Handbasket Direct Email to Ezra Klein, Elizabeth Spiers in the Nation: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning; Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New Yorker Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Causel; Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs: As The Far Right Rises, Don’t Be Ezra Klein. 

Moment of Truth

We stand at a moment in time of astonishing magnitude - on the one hand, the richest and most powerful economic superpower in the world is undergoing an authoritarian takeover whose hallmark is a flagrant disregard for the truth. On the other hand, modern AI technology has suddenly permitted machines to accurately process complex natural language, images, speech, other complex structured and semi-structured signals so that now humanity has broader access to incredibly powerful tools that permit us to understand and use information in unprecedented ways.  

Leading frontier language models are the most rapidly adopted and widely used information technology that has ever existed. They democratize intelligence. They make it easy for normal people to access expertise far beyond their own, and on the whole, they perform well. Serious issues with 'hallucinations' (where models invent facts) are increasingly less common and AI is becoming a widely accepted computational toolset across almost any task where complex reasoning and information use is required. 

It is only a matter of time before this technology is weaponized as a tool for disinformation across various areas of public life. Up until now, such efforts (such as Elon Musk's attempts to heighten awareness about so-called 'white genocide' in South Africa) have backfired dramatically, but it would be naïve to suppose that all such attempts can be so easily spotted. Given the importance of information networks to secure and exploit power (see Yuval Harari's book 'Nexus'), we should likely expect there to be concerted and intense effort from stakeholders to have AI models and agents tailor their answers to support their pursuit of power rather than to provide the most accurate and truthful responses as a matter of principle

Having said that, we have a pre-existing runway to drive AI technology in an arc that bends toward truth. This is for two reasons:  (A) models' dependence on high-quality training data for good performance is hard to circumvent with disinformation; (B) we have only begun to scratch the surface of how we can best use these tool to solve real problems. 

I believe that a key part of developing this technology lies in how we address the core underlying process of how humans ascertain 'what is true': Argumentation.

Argument is present across all human endeavor involving competing approaches to the use of information. It is a centerpiece of philosophy, law, politics, academia, science, and business. It is a key, but largely understated component of writing, espionage, warfare, terrorism, and even medicine (for example, consider the role that advocacy and argument played in removing homosexuality as a pathology from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or 'DSM' in 1973). Even though it is the water in which we all swim, it is currently only well-modeled and understood by AI technology in a small number of domains (such as Mathematical Olympiad proofs).

For AI technology, it is essential that we understand (A) how argument works in a human context and (B) how we can transcend the constraints of that paradigm to solve previously seemingly impossible challenges. Human argumentation is beset by unproductive methods and patterns (see 'Argumentation Schemes' by Walton et al 2013) which mostly do not center the standard scientific model of 'abductive reasoning' (in which we seek explanations of observations). Thus, in fields where text is dominated by  human discussion that is geared towards securing power for one party over another, any attempt to learn how to effectively construct a compelling argument that drives outcomes will be dominated by human interactions with all their ineffective, complex, flawed approaches. 

How then, can we find workable solutions? Could we condition reasoning / argumentation AI models and systems attempting to solve complex problems (like cancer, homelessness, gun violence, drug policy, political redistricting, etc.) to approach these problems scientifically - and find explanations for phenomena based on curating and organizing observations judged to be relevant. Pragmatically, this  approach could use reinforcement learning methods to train specialized models capable of domain-specific problem-solving based on an abductive reasoning methodology (such methods have been used in biology already: see the `rbio` project at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative). 

Naturally, the discussion presented here is hardly a detailed, concrete solution (which would require detailed modeling, training set curation, and rigorous AI-research to truly instantiate it), but I present it as a viable strategy for tech leaders. Given resources, it could enable truth in people's lives. It is essential that we act now, immediately, before it is too late. 

It may be possible to entrench the usefulness of such truth-empowering tools by helping humanity  understand and accomplish more than we have ever been able to do before and generate true societal change. If we can do this, then the short runway we currently enjoy against authoritarian disinformation may extend by a month or a year. If successful, it could even server to inoculate people from disinformation. If all such efforts fail, modern AI is likely to be used to consolidate large-scale surveillance, propaganda, and authoritarianism - to the detriment of all but a few.

I feel that we really are living in a 'moment of truth', and we must act creatively to rise to the occasion.  

American Evil - Part Two

Eight years ago, I wrote an essay about Trump’s first presidential election titled‘American Evil’. In that piece, I spoke about three broad types of Trump supporter: the dupes, the pragmatists, and the true believers. I put forward the fervent hope that people from the first two groups would come to their senses, recognize the venal, self-serving depravity of the man and his administration, and never ever do anything as idiotic as vote for him again.

Clearly, that was naïve.

My naivety somewhat reflects that of many progressives. It seemed so glaringly obvious that a second Trump term would be such a horrifying disaster that we did not sufficiently engage with the conversation to make that case. 

From day one of Biden’s term, there was a steady campaign of propaganda that spun him as incompetent, old, feeble, dangerously radical, and anti-American. 

This is the playbook at the heart of American Evil - cynical myth-making around a distorted view of patriotism, freedom, religiosity, and violence (masquerading as ‘fighting for freedom’) - all with a straight-talking’ tone that portrays itself as factually authoritative, based in common sense, and with a hyper-entitled context that says “this is the way it is and always has been - this is America!”.

In reality, it’s utterly driven by Bullshitting - the act of saying anything (even in court, even under oath) to achieve political objectives. This could be to bully others, to provide a test of loyalty to ‘test’ your underlings, or even to just insist that people adhere to your version of the truth even if it starkly contradicts observable reality. 

In its current form, the most disturbing aspect of the current regime is how this appetite for bullshit is very well tolerated by American society as a whole. This problem is described in detail in this piece on the ‘public notice’ Substack. They describe the administration’s approach to bullshit as ‘cognitive irresponsibility’- which is, to my mind, overly ornate and far, far too polite. It’s just bullshit, and we should call it out as such.

Trumpy Bullshit is now endemic. We have been inoculated to it to such a degree so that we’re either exhausted and resigned on the left or emboldened and overconfident on the right. 

Combine an effective political campaign, the repurposing of widely used information networks for propaganda, a decade of continuous scrutiny with no repercussions and you have the current iteration of American Evil. Combine that with Elon Musk’s perfidious influence and you have the current disastrous blend of kleptocracy, oligararchy, and god knows what else in the months to come.

At its heart, American Evil is simply about deception, raw privilege and power. This is notably driven entirely by bullshit, and so the way out of it may well be driven by improving our search for truth.

Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book Nexus is pitch perfect in this discussion. He makes the point that information generally serves two, orthogonal purposes: truth and/or power. 

Truth is hard. It is difficult to put together, hard to understand, and likely uncomfortable to confront. Power is easier. It is driven by storytelling, and tailoring the information you provide to some purpose. It aligns with money and usually has no difficulty amplifying its signal.

Hard-hitting investigative journalism that exposes government corruption by surfacing hidden facts centers on truth. Politically manufactured narratives that distort reality to serve a narrow purpose (such as Trump’s entire narrative about immigration) center on power.

All areas of life that involve human knowledge mix truth and power: science is fiercely political and showcases hidden power dynamics; politics occasionally touches on profound important realities that makes a huge difference, journalism can showcase astonishing corruption or honesty. 

So it’s important to look for each component separately and pay attention to the balance of the two forces at play.

The way we fight evil here is to (a) recognize where information is being used to drive power (and reduce our trust of that information in order to minimize its impact) and (b) distinguish what information is being used to uncover truth and focus on that as trustworthy.

More than ever, we need truth. It is in short supply, becoming scarcer and less empowered by the day. We need champions and societal structures as advocates but it is unclear where they may reside. Perhaps the best place to look for champions are those standing for it and being targeted by Trump for doing so - these include conservative district attorneys, democrat lawmakers, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, park rangers, comedians. 

Find the shared conversation for truth and stand by others willing to fight for it. Only then can we save ourselves.