Five more years

Scott Alexander’s predictions for the next year have become ever more cautious, thus ever more boring and ever less likely to be falsified.  And then he came up with a pile of wild assed stuff for the next five years:

AI will be marked by various spectacular achievements, plus nobody being willing to say the spectacular achievements signify anything broader. AI will beat humans at progressively more complicated games, and we will hear how games are totally different from real life and this is just a cool parlor trick.

In other words, he will say it is spectacular, and I will say it is more of the same boring stuff.

AI translation will become flawless,

No it will not. AI translation is as good as it is going to get – gives you a good guess as to what the speaker is actually talking about, while remaining unacceptable as a finished product. You get the gist of things when AI translating between closely related languages like English and Spanish, and near gibberish when AI translating between distantly related languages like Chinese and English – a marginal improvement on what you would get by language dictionary lookup.

1. Average person can hail a self-driving car in at least one US city: 80%

2. …in at least five of ten largest US cities: 30%
3. At least 5% of truck drivers have been replaced by self-driving trucks: 10%

Nah.

4. Average person can buy a self-driving car for less than $100,000: 30%

But he will have to sit at the wheel, and will likely die if he falls asleep at the wheel.

The European Union will not collapse.

The EU is a branch of the US empire, and I have long predicted failure or similar crisis for the US empire in 2026. As long as the US stands, its servants in Europe will continue to do as they are damn well told.

Countries that may have an especially good half-decade: Israel, India, Nigeria, most of East Africa, Iran. Countries that may have an especially bad half-decade: Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UK. The Middle East will get worse before it gets better, especially Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula (Syria might get better, though).

“May have”? What sort of a prediction is that? Might be right, cannot be wrong.

Here is my actual prediction. Russia will have a great decade. South Africa will drift from a shit hole to a hell hole.

Religion will continue to retreat from US public life.

Scott has not noticed that the US has an official religion that daily becomes more extreme, deranged, puritanical, and oppressive

As it becomes less important, mainstream society will treat it as less of an outgroup and more of a fargroup. Everyone will assume Christians have some sort of vague spiritual wisdom, much like Buddhists do. Everyone will agree evangelicals or anyone with a real religious opinion is just straight-out misinterpreting the Bible, the same way any Muslim who does something bad is misinterpreting the Koran. Christian mysticism will become more popular among intellectuals. Lots of people will talk about how real Christianity opposes capitalism. There may not literally be a black lesbian Pope, but everyone will agree that there should be, and people will become mildly surprised when you remind them that the Pope is white, male, and sexually inactive.

OK, this prediction will come true, but this, like Europe continuing, is just the official religion of the US empire continuing. The official religion of the US empire will fall, but probably survive for more than five years.

1. Trump wins 2020: 20%

Trump will win in 2020, assuming no coup or violent death. Democracy has already expired. The question is how soon this becomes obvious, and to what extent violence will ensue when people realize it.

On the other hand, everyone will have underestimated the extent of crisis in the Democratic Party.

The misconduct of the Clinton presidential campaign was a manifestation of the fact that the pretense of democracy in the Democratic party was irrelevant to outcomes. It will go right on being irrelevant to outcomes. With the Clinton machine at best falling apart, and at worst being sent to jail, power in the Democratic party will fall into the hands of a Lenin type individual who realizes the irrelevance of electoral politics and proceeds to grab power directly. Primaries will remain irrelevant to the outcome, but the man seizing power will probably be radically left.

Slate Star Codex predicts politics as normal, the usual stuff in the usual ways, that something like what recently happened will happen again. I predict the unexpected – at least as startling as Trump himself, probably a lot more startling. Expect the unexpected. The Republic approaches its end. It will probably not end in five years, but the storms of its coming fall will rage.

The culture wars will continue to be marked by both sides scoring an unrelenting series of own-goals, with the victory going to whoever can make their supporters shut up first. The best case scenario for the Right is that Jordan Peterson’s ability to not instantly get ostracized and destroyed signals a new era of basically decent people being able to speak out against social justice; this launches a cascade of people doing so, and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc coalesces into a perfectly respectable force no more controversial than the gun lobby or the pro-life movement or something. With social justice no longer able to enforce its own sacredness values against blasphemy, it loses a lot of credibility and ends up no more powerful or religion-like than eg Christianity. The best case scenario for the Left is that the alt-right makes some more noise, the media is able to relentlessly keep everyone’s focus on the alt-right, the words ALT-RIGHT get seared into the public consciousness every single day on every single news website, and everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. I predict both of these will happen, but the Right’s win-scenario will come together faster and they will score a minor victory.

Slate star predicts politics as they are now continuing, but politics as they are now are already extraordinary and remarkable by the standards of two years ago. Again, I predict the unexpected – a significant likelihood of democide or ethnic cleansing, with whites being driven out of large areas, and then blamed for the ensuing ruin that follows when they are no longer holding stuff together. More drama, more surprises, more shock.

The last two years have been very surprising for everyone except me – I predicted Trumps victory shortly after he announced. And I predict the next two years to be even more surprising, and the three years after that to be even more surprising, with a continuing drift towards civil war, democide and genocide, though we probably will not see democide, genocide, and civil war for about six years or so.

First World economies will increasingly be marked by an Officialness Divide. Rich people, the government, and corporations will use formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions. Poor people (and to an increasing degree middle-class people) will use informal gig economies supported by Silicon Valley companies whose main skill is staying a step ahead of regulators. Think business travelers staying at the Hilton and riding taxis, vs. low-prospect twenty-somethings staying at Air BnBs and taking Ubers. As Obamacare collapses, health insurance will start turning into one of the formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions limited to college grads with good job prospects. What the unofficial version of health care will be remains to be seen. If past eras have been Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Information Age, etc, the future may be the Ability-To-Circumvent-Regulations Age.

On this, we agree.

Cryptocurrency will neither collapse nor take over everything. It will become integrated into the existing system and regulated to the point of uselessness. No matter how private and untraceable the next generation of cryptocurrencies are, people will buy and exchange them through big corporate websites that do everything they can to stay on the government’s good side.

Nah. Bitcoin may well collapse, and its successor (probably Monero) may also collapse, but one cryptocurrency, maybe Bitcoin, maybe Monero, maybe something not yet on the radar, will eat the world. If it has not eaten the world in five years, the storm of its coming will nonetheless be evident, and will profoundly undermine the government’s ability to control the economy.

Multinationals will occasionally debate using crypto to transfer their profits from one place to another, then decide that would make people angry and decide not to.

Already false.  Crypto transfers are already big – and already cryptic.

Skipping most of his predictions as boring and hard to decide what would constitute fulfillment of the rather vague prediction.

3. Paris Agreement still in effect, most countries generally making good-faith effort to comply: 80%

Already false. No one is making a genuine good faith effort to comply.

4. US still nominally committed to Paris Agreement: 60%

Already false. In 2017 June the US announced it had ceased all implementation of the Paris Accord. That is something a bit less than being “nominally committed”. That will not change, and people are already forgetting that there ever was a Paris agreement. The only real action item on the Paris accord was smashing Americans in flyover country, making them suffer, and providing political cover for smashing Americans in flyover country. If Americans in flyover county are not being smashed, not one gives a tinker’s dam about the rest of it. It is already sliding out of sight and out of mind.

107 Responses to “Five more years”

  1. Piers says:

    with a continuing drift towards civil war, democide and genocide, though we probably will not see democide, genocide, and civil war for about six years or so.

    What is your prediction for Auatralia in particular? As a man with young children what should I be preparing for?

    • jim says:

      Australia will I think be fine when the US empire falls, because it has its own, relatively sane, deep state. Local authority will be quietly and uncontroversially asserted when the US is too busy looking inwards to bother them.

      Australia is one of the five eyes, one of the four states of the US empire that have their own deep state, which has been known to act quite forcefully against the blue empire of the consulates.

      Recollect World War II. Britain told Australia to move the Australian military and key leadership personnel to Europe, because the British navy would defend the the British empire – then surrendered in Singapore, thereby effectively abandoning Australia to the Japanese. At which point somehow Australia quietly discovered it was independent of Britain and always had been, and re-oriented to America. There followed the battle of the Coral Sea, in which the American Navy and air force fought the Japanese to a draw, denying them control over the Coral Sea, and thus preventing their planned invasion of a largely undefended Australia. Subsequently Australia got its military stuff together, behind the shield provided by the American navy, and set to killing Japanese with impressive ferocity, thoroughness, and effectiveness.

      I see preparations for a re-run of that history, this time re-orienting from the US to China as Australia previously re-oriented from Britain to the US. Looks to me that while Europe is drifting without a rudder, and America is drifting because they are quarreling as to who gets hold of the rudder, the Australian deep state is prepared to act as necessary in the coming crisis.

      • Pooch says:

        I’m not sure about this. Reorienting to the US was easy because they were going from Anglo to different Anglo leadership. It was easy. Reorienting to China leadership would require the Asianification of Australia in which Asians were majority and white Anglo was a minority. This very well may be the case in the future of Australia but then that would mean moving to Australia as a white man isn’t such a great idea.

        • jim says:

          Latin Americans will eat us. Conservative Muslims will enslave us. East Asians are reasonably civilized.

          • vOrtex says:

            Unit 731

          • Piers says:

            I have lived with East Asians and done business with them. They only appear civilized.

            • jim says:

              This is a major improvement on all other non whites, who do not appear civilized.

              OK, some Indians also appear civilized, but most of India is covered with a thin layer of human feces.

            • Steve Johnson says:

              Whites are civilized, East Asians are alien, the rest are savages.

              You can deal with aliens with very high cognitive overhead. You can’t deal with savages – as shown by the fact that they can’t deal with each other either.

        • Mike says:

          So Australia becomes Singapore? Sounds great.

          • vOrtex says:

            Boomercuckfaggotry in 6 words.

            • jim says:

              Australia is well on the way to becoming a Singaporean colony. Which is a lot more civilized than becoming a Latin American colony like the US, or dhimmis in the Muslim Caliphate like Europe.

              • vOrtex says:

                Your country is equally dead either way. Do you prefer its flame extinguished in the throes of fire and steel, or by a pretty young mongoloid nurse bending over its hospital bed to inject its voluntary assisted death serum into its weak, white man veins?

                • jim says:

                  Australia is in far better shape than the USA.

                • Mike says:

                  >flame extinguished in the throes of fire and steel

                  corny WN fantasies in nine words

                • vOrtex says:

                  >Australia is in far better shape than the USA.

                  But her destination is the same.

                  >corny WN fantasies in nine words

                  If you’re going to die, you can die by surrender + cancer or you can die by the sword. Of course, it’s better not to die at all, which means that your endeavors will aim to revitalize the body by expelling the foreign agents.

                  WN maaturbatory fantasies specifically may lie in a glorious death against overwhelming odds, which would explain some things, actually.

            • Mike says:

              There is nothing worth saving in Australia.

              • jim says:

                Plenty of rural whiteopia in Australia. And the substantial number of nonwhites are considerably higher IQ and less violent and criminal than the nonwhites in the US.

                Eighty five percent to ninety percent of Australians are white, eight percent are Asian, mostly east Asian, which are the best kind.

                • Mike says:

                  Overall Australia’s racial makeup is in much better shape than the US, and the prognosis is better because the immigration is mostly high-functioning (ie. Asian).

                  The problem is that Australian whites are British-grade, not as good as Canadian or American whites.

                • vOrtex says:

                  You seem to think that a country is something other than its people. This is ridiculous. Asians are part of no possible definition of “Australian civilization”. Australia populated by Chinese people, for instance, is merely an overseas Chinese colony. Now, maybe that’s what you want — I’m not here to judge, you know, maybe you’re just a self-interested Chinaman, in which case good for you for promoting your self-, ethnic, and civilizational interests.

                • jim says:

                  Australia can be ruled by China, and still be Australia. Australians are rather good at politely ignoring distant rulers.

                • Mike says:

                  >You seem to think that a country is something other than its people.

                  I’m just sick of Australians and want to replace them. Of course, to make this worthwhile you have to replace them with something better, ie. not Africans, Muslims, etc. East Asians look like they’ll do.

                  >Australia populated by Chinese people, for instance, is merely an overseas Chinese colony.

                  And an Australia populated by Europeans is what, a colony of Europe?

                  Britain didn’t exactly send its best, either.

                • vOrtex says:

                  >Australia can be ruled by China, and still be Australia. Australians are rather good at politely ignoring distant rulers.

                  China does not even yet rule Australia, and it is already repopulating that absurd continent.

                • vOrtex says:

                  >And an Australia populated by Europeans is what, a colony of Europe?

                  Yes, Australia is literally a colony of Europeans; specifically, it is a colony of middle- to working-class Brits, probably mostly from that region of England concentrated around London and whatever are (were) its other major industrial centers.

                  >But, you know, regression, to the mean, and the Brit mean, even the not-so-upper-class mean, is better than the mean of at least every other country outside the Hajnal line, probably better even than every other country outside the much more restrictive Blue Banana.

                  >I’m just sick of Australians and want to replace them. Of course, to make this worthwhile you have to replace them with something better, ie. not Africans, Muslims, etc. East Asians look like they’ll do.

                  So you hate people very much like you and want to replace them with people almost entirely unlike you. Where have I heard this before?

                • vOrtex says:

                  Oops. Try again:

                  >And an Australia populated by Europeans is what, a colony of Europe?

                  Yes, Australia is literally a colony of Europeans; specifically, it is a colony of middle- to working-class Brits, probably mostly from that region of England concentrated around London and whatever are (were) its other major industrial centers.

                  >Britain didn’t exactly send its best, either.

                  But, you know, regression to the mean, and the Brit mean, even the not-so-upper-class mean, is better than the mean of at least every other country outside the Hajnal line, probably better even than every other country outside the much more restrictive Blue Banana.

                  >I’m just sick of Australians and want to replace them. Of course, to make this worthwhile you have to replace them with something better, ie. not Africans, Muslims, etc. East Asians look like they’ll do.

                  So you hate people very much like you and want to replace them with people almost entirely unlike you. Where have I heard this before?

                • Mike says:

                  >middle- to working-class Brits

                  Yeah I think this is the problem – Australia is saddled with those losers. At least Britain has upper-class Brits. Australia has what, convicts? Australia didn’t get the upper class bits.

                  >So you hate people very much like you
                  Nah. Australians like gun grabbing, the award system, high taxes, social democracy, feminism, celebrity politics, single motherhood, the Labor party, global warming hysteria, and other retarded crap I don’t like, want, or need. So, fuck them, let’s replace them with chinks, they can’t possibly be any worse.

                • nils says:

                  “Nah. Australians like gun grabbing, the award system, high taxes, social democracy, feminism, celebrity politics, single motherhood, the Labor party, global warming hysteria” ozzies are no more dem then washinton, dont apply emperial physics to the grossbund, the kiwis held against the auto-ban stronger then amerikqwa, stop hating on the ozzies for shit you dont get, they have a good deal of Godly hope

  2. Anonymous Reader says:

    OT, but I’m angry that Goolag and all these email providers have “anti-spam” measures that conveniently ban Tor users. Facefuck accounts require a real name, and a link to an actual phone number, so commenting there, or on any site using their comments plugin, is impossible for anyone to the right of the Overton window who wants to keep his job. For that matter, even 8chan’s /pol/ bans Tor users. Disqus doesn’t ban temporary e-mail domains, but it looks like a lot of sites that use it ban Tor IPs. Those who think like I do have been effectively muzzled online if we want to remain untraceable using Tor. (And it’s not Tor that I particularly like, given their SJW statements in the past, but isn’t it the closest you can get to being untraceable besides going out to a public WiFi?)

    How else am I going to post my Tim May-style comments about how it would be such a “shame” if the Secret Service “accidentally” opened fire and killed, say, three dozen of these astroturf gun-control “protesters” who held a “die-in” in front of the White House today?

    • Nerevar says:

      Make a pseudoanonymous facebook account. Warm it up with a gradual increase in activity, don’t join groups and stuff too quickly or it’ll get flagged. Add some people with Pepe avatars and other alt-right references. There’s a good community of fake accounts and pseudoanonymous accounts. I’m there on Joseph Cassidy if you need somewhere to start

      Phone number isn’t required if the IP is fresh but it helps to buy a cheap burner and add it if you want to warm the account against the zucc

  3. Dave says:

    “if Jim loses, gets to see his country turning into Latin America”

    What’s the downside, other than having to learn Spanish? White people own all the good stuff in Latin America and niggers know their place. No civil rights movement and no welfare — you work or you starve. Not much feminism either, a few rich girls spout nonsense after coming back from American colleges, and normal women laugh in their faces.

    When I visited Brazil, every Brazilian guy with a decent job had a smoking hot, stylishly-dressed young girlfriend. Not a lot of cutting-edge technology going on there, but do you really care when your balls are being expertly drained four or five times a day?

    Jim, you did an great essay on why converting to Islam is not the answer. Care to do the same for Latinization?

    • jim says:

      What’s the downside, other than having to learn Spanish?

      Venezuela.

      Whites in Latin America wind up ruling, but ruling in Latin America still sucks.

      Observe whites fleeing latin dominated parts of California. It is not so much racist violence, though there is some of that, it is more drunken violence and theft. Especially theft. You cannot make a living, because everything not nailed down walks, a problem painfully visible in the Bay Area south of the Bay, and even more visible in Venezuela, where theft has manifested as the political movement of socialism.

      Latin America is not well governed, and will be much worse governed if the US falls. Likely without rule from the USA or Spain, will return to eating each other. If you live in a latin part of California, everything not nailed down gets stolen, and the roads are full of drunks. Arabs are better. We had to restrain Arabs from enslaving us, but never had to restrain Arabs from eating us.

      • PBW says:

        This is a good essay on the problems of South America, and how even if whites rule it is never ending racial antagonism at the ballot box. http://takimag.com/article/looking_southward_costin_alamariu

        • vOrtex says:

          What do you care what lesser people think?

          • pdimov says:

            People accustomed to high-trust societies don’t really get what’s life like in a low-trust society.

            • vOrtex says:

              Are not high trust societies imposed by high trust elites?

              • pdimov says:

                No. It’s not possible to impose high trust. You get a high trust society by having high trust people, and you get high trust people by systematically eliminating people who can’t be trusted over a number of generations.

                • jim says:

                  Let us consider the problem of lending and microlending.

                  For microloaning to work, need to cherry pick good people. Thede homogeneity required between screeners and screened. And your screeners need to be good people. The worst of the Great Minority Mortgage Meltdown was crooked white social justice loan officers writing loans for NAM outgroup members, followed by crooked NAM bank executives selling these dud mortages to outgroup Jews to be resold as mortgage derived securities to outgroup non Jews, to people who were an outgroup relative to those securitizing the mortgages.

                  It was thede membership and ethnic conflict all the way up and all the way down.

                  The great minority mortgage meltdown worked exactly as someone from Stormfront would have imagined it, except that the loan officers were not all Jewish.

                  Diversity plus proximity equals financial crisis.

                  The entire processing of each loan, from the loan officer writing it up to the mortgage derivatives being sold and resold was race centered and race conscious. Also immigration status conscious, with illegals being aggressively recruited. Financial transactions between outgroup thedes are inherently dangerous, and this was spectacularly on display during the great minority mortgage meltdown. The financial transactions of the Great Minority Mortgage Meltdown were in substantial part driven by hostility to outgroups. “Lets be inclusive of minorities, redlining is horrid”, in practice turned into “Let us stick it to that white cishet Goy male scum”

                  The converse of this is, however, that if you manage to get away with redlining, calling it “affinity group based microloans”, should be able to profit. But if you try to invest in microloans, they consolidate their information to stop you from doing that, for fear of being hit by antidiscrimination provisions.

                  Diversity plus proximity equals war. If you make microloans and are prevented from discriminating, you will find that as in the great minority mortgage meltdown, you are lending to people who are consciously hostile to you and consciously organized to make war on you collectively and individually, consciously intend you harm and rationalize that you have it coming. Lending presupposes peace. Antidiscrimination presupposes war.

    • peppermint says:

      > Not a lot of cutting-edge technology going on there, but do you really care when your balls are being expertly drained four or five times a day

      Degenerate. Whites need to know that they are contributing to the future or they get depressed. Christcucks call this the spiritual impulse but we know it’s the nationalistic impulse.

    • pdimov says:

      Plus, any random person you pull off the street is woker than Andrew Anglin. What more can one possibly want?

    • Pooch says:

      Care to link to the post on why converting to Islam is not the answer?

  4. Scott Alexander says:

    I accept your expertise on a few things like machine translation. And I’m not certain that the US isn’t teetering toward collapse, just that it will maintain something like the current level of order for at least the next five years (as you seem to think also).

    I do disagree with you on a few things strongly enough to want to bet you, if you’re open to it. I would give you pretty good odds. These include:

    – Trump wins 2020 (I would bet against)
    – Winner of 2020 Dem primary is radically left (let’s say more left than Bernie Sanders; I would bet against)
    – Whites driven out of large areas, if this means anything more drastic than existing white flight (I would bet against)

    Since some of these are subjective, I would be willing to have some honorable person on the right as a judge – Steve Sailer seems trustworthy.

    Are you interested?

    • vOrtex says:

      individual bets or 2 out of 3 aggregate?

      either case is essentially betting against Trump’s competence

    • Steve Johnson says:

      “Winner of 2020 Dem primary is radically left (let’s say more left than Bernie Sanders; I would bet against)”

      You are incapable of noticing if someone is radically left because you constantly update to stay within the acceptable to progressives window.

      “Whites driven out of large areas, if this means anything more drastic than existing white flight ”

      So except for whites being driven out of large areas, show you examples that you’ll acknowledge of whites being driven out of large areas.

      • vOrtex says:

        hence the involvement of Sailer presumably

      • peppermint says:

        For example: last year, when Michael Moore gave up his reactionary insurgency against the DNC after the hackers.ru hoax cemented the status quo, did he get pulled to the left, or to the right?

        The correct answer is to the left. Leftism isn’t an ideology, it’s a bunch of slogans for grabbing power, and whichever slogans are leftist are the leftist slogans.

    • Starman says:

      @Scott Alexander

      It’s doubtful that the Democrats will defeat Trump electorally in 2020 (although assassination and coups are an option for the Deep State). That’s because it takes the Deep State weeks and months to engineer a linguistic killshot and subconscious manipulation while it takes President Trump only minutes to do so. Plus, President Trump isn’t the only powerful charismatic billionaire to notice that the Deep State is turning into an evil Jim Jones-style cult and that dark clouds are on the horizon.

      Flight tests of the fully reusable BFR are slated for the early 2020’s.

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        More prosaically, only 10 presidents have failed a re-election bid. They are:

        Bush Senior (Economy)
        Jimmy Carter (Economy)
        Gerald Ford (Economy)
        Herbert Hoover (Economy)
        Taft (3 way race)
        Benjamin Harrison (Economy)
        Grover Cleveland
        Martin Van Buren (Economy)
        John Quincy Adams (3 way rematch)
        John Adams

        Unless the economy disintegrates in the next two years, it is hard to see how Trump loses.

    • jim says:

      Proposed bet on Trump: 0.30 XMR if you have an investment in Monero. 0.01 BTC if you do not have an investment in Monero, but do have an investment in bitcoin.

      If Trump runs and wins in 2020 I win. If he runs and loses, you win. If he dies of plausibly natural causes or retires because of plausible ill health, no bet.

      If Trump impeached by the regular constitutional process before winning the 2020 election, you win. If Trump murdered or removed from office by some new and unusual process, such as tanks on the White House Lawn serving a Mueller indictment, I win.

      I don’t think even an honorable person on the right will be able to make a whole lot of sense out of the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. The whole Russian scandal is that someone, maybe a Russian, maybe a Russian who arguably had some vague connection to the Trump campaign, got hold of emails revealing that the Democratic Party presidential primaries did not matter and leaked those embarrassing emails to Wikileaks, causing Bernie voters to stay home and refuse to vote for Clinton in the presidential election, and my prediction is that Democratic Party presidential primaries will matter even less in 2020. The proposed bet presupposes what I deny: The proposed bet on the primaries presupposes that politics as usual will resume, while my prediction is that politics will be ever more unusual, deviant, and Latin American, especially in the big coastal Democratic Party strongholds. The official press is pretending that politics as usual is continuing, just as everyone in Rome during the early Roman Empire pretended that the Roman Republic was still functioning.

      Betting on 2020 primaries would be like betting on Roman elections in 50BC.

      Ferguson means that I won the bet on outright ethnic cleansing already, but official truth is in denial. And likely the same will happen in California by 2020. “Existing white flight” in California is that engineers who used to work in tilt ups in Southern parts of the Bay Area are moving to San Francisco, and sometimes to Austin, which is not yet ethnic cleansing but is rather more “existing white flight” than a couple of years back. Those Southern parts of the bay area, south of the Bay, went directly from being orchards to being full of middle class whites, and now, not. I don’t expect whites to flee ethnic cleansing in San Francisco any time soon, only moderate acceleration of white flight, but the writing is on the wall – on the walls of tilt ups south of the Bay.

      It also written in the blood of Kathryn Steinle on the wharf in San Francisco. If a white male leaves San Francisco because white girls are leaving because of Kathryn Steinle, that is “white flight”, but when you flee a race based murder because the murderer is let off because of race, flee because it is OK to murder people of your race, such “white flight” is getting rather close to ethnic cleansing. Similarly, whites fled Detroit because their homes were being burned down around their ears. Supposedly white flight, but looked mighty like ethnic cleansing.

      So I could argue that I have already won the bet in the Bay area, in that a significant number of white chicks are leaving because of Kathryn Steinle, making a noticeable dent in quantity and quality of pulchritude you see on the Embarcadero, and you could argue that I had lost, even if by 2020 we saw white people being driven out by straight forward uncomplicated racial violence after the fashion of Detroit and Ferguson, because the mainstream consensus clearly is that Ferguson and Detroit were not ethnic cleansing, even though they were obviously ethnic cleansing.

      Less pulchritude on the Embarcadero because of race based justice in a race based murder is a definite start on ethnic cleansing. Not only do we disagree on what will happen, we disagree on what recently has happened.

      • Steve Johnson says:

        Scott should stake something he cares about rather than an insignificant amount of crypto.

        How about betting for the unbanning of all the NRx commenters that populate the ban list on his blog?

        • jim says:

          If he allows us back in, going to lose his job.

        • pdimov says:

          How about

          – if Scott loses, gets to spend four more years under Trump
          – if Jim loses, gets to see his country turning into Latin America

          The stakes aren’t entirely symmetric but what can you do.

      • alf says:

        Waiting on SA to accept the bet… >_>

    • Javier says:

      White flight is the only form of ethnic cleansing that gets blamed on it’s victims.

  5. Eli says:

    Question: why year 2026?

    • BomberCommand says:

      2026 is Jim’s general placeholder for the American crisis that a lot of people have been predicting for a while now. Generally, the range is 2020-2030. These predictions are pretty similar to the range people were predicting before the first American civil war.

      I was expected civil war by the mid-2020s if Hillary or Jeb won and I hoped that Trump’s victory would stop the forces of history in this regard, but that now appears unlikely. Trump’s more of a Sulla than a Ceasar which means we still get to go through the pain of civil war next decade.

      • Oliver Cromwell says:

        There is not going to be a civil war. There are really three possibilities:

        1. the US military chooses a side and and can fight, it wins instantly

        2. the US military chooses a side and is prevented from fighting, the left wins

        3. the US military has become incapable of operating, parts of the US become de-facto independent and no one actively tries to stop it

        In no case is there any significant fighting.

        • jim says:

          If the US military is prevented from fighting, (perhaps because leftists suspect that they might fight on the wrong side) we win easily and overwhelmingly, the left loses. The only reason the left won at Charlottesville is that the police supported and protected them, and we were reluctant to fight the police.

          • glosoli says:

            This ‘we’ will of course still be ‘them’.

            NWO looks nationalist, rightist, religiousist, free marketist, but it will be the leftist NWO nevertheless.

            Hungary is a good example.

            They will destroy America financially, destroy (fake) radical Islam, then take control of the UN and all religions, which they’ll attempt to merge.

            satan and his army want it all, but they’ll be thwarted by Jehovah.

            • Gustav says:

              “Hungary is a good example.”

              Perceptive.
              What is your opinion on Poland in this regard?

            • peppermint says:

              Q: why will the right lose once the left no longer has the ability to use state power to force people to pretend that reality has a left-wing bias?
              A: because it is written in the Holy Book that X, therefore I am high status for believing X

              No, I am high status for boldly contradicting X despite what the Holy Book says.

              • glosoli says:

                You have an inability to even know what is left and what is right, what is good and what is evil. It’s complicated, but it’s all there in the bible. Takes a bit of thinking and humility, and a good mentor. But well worth the effort.

                Once you grasp which way is right, you can help to save your nation. Until then you’ll be chasing your tail. You do not have the answers, and you know it.

                The founding fathers were leftists. So were the Puritans. And the Roman Catholics. And look at their nations. FUBARd. Alfred the Great tried it Gods way, and Britain was blessed for a long time.

                There is no nation on earth currently worthy of God’s blessing. But one or two will arise eventually. If not, it’s reset time.

                • peppermint says:

                  tl;dr no argument for how leftism works without military and police power, but paragraphs caling anyone who doesn’t understand the plain meaning of books by kikes a demon-infested moron

                  pesach is coming. You are required to acknowledge summoning demons to kill children as a military strategy.

                • glosoli says:

                  I empathise with your frustration, I was like you not very long ago, in terms of the frustration, not your weirdness.

                  But you ignore my point, because you don’t grasp what is left and what is right.

                  Keep searching, otherwise you will be permanently frustrated, as nothing but the word of God produces the nation you desire.

                  The search is easy for you, you know where to look. If you need help with biblical matters, I can help you, or a good friend of mine. Do you realise the bible clearly and explicitly demonstrates how totally useless and evil the Israelites were? It’s far from pro-Jewish, the opposite in fact. Another reason to believe it’s all true.

          • Oliver Cromwell says:

            I understand and agree with the sentiment behind what you are saying but disagree on the specific point.

            The left controls all the lesser institutions. You don’t get a rightist victory until entirely unofficial militias can start asserting power. That is my case 3. At Charlottesville, the rightists could have overpowered the police or at least stopped them operating, but they chose not to. That wasn’t wholly out of fear of military intervention.

            • jim says:

              Widespread preference falsification. The chans reveal what people really think.

              To fight and win a civil war, we will need leadership and legitimacy. We already have numbers and guns. You are saying we have no leadership and no legitimacy.

              And indeed, we do not.

              Yet.

              But comes the hour, comes the man.

        • Bombercomand says:

          >There is not going to be a civil war.

          The civil war in Spain says otherwise. Obama did a good job turning the US military into a half assed Marxist organ so the army is likely to crumble and break apart along with the country, just like it did in Spain in 1936. The Chinese and EU will probably ship arms and volunteer units to the left. There’s going to be a lot of blood spilled.

          • Oliver Cromwell says:

            I know several members of the US military, enlisted and officer. It is loyal to the Constitution, in the popular understanding of that phrase. If the right can convince the military that the Constitution has been defiled several times (as it has), and that the left is a vast conspiracy against the Constitution, the right wins by default. If the left can continue to convince the military that its control of the lesser institutions is legitimate, the left wins by default. There is no explicitly leftist constituency within the military.

            • BomberCommand says:

              >I know several members of the US military, enlisted and officer. It is loyal to the Constitution, in the popular understanding of that phrase.

              Obama effectively purged most rightwing officers during the second half of his administration and replaced them with boot kissing SWJ political commissars. The next generation of officers are even worse:

              http://www.weeklystandard.com/what-is-happening-at-west-point/article/2010027

              During the Spanish civil war, the Army went about 1/3 for the Communists and 2/3s for the Nationalists, with the 1/3 mostly being the younger officer core and their less effective liberal troops. I can’t predict exactly how the US army would crumble, but it is likely to do so. In Spain, the left generally didn’t use loyalist troops in battle because they didn’t trust them, but they did take their weapons and use them against anti-communist forces and civilians.

              In the advent of a civil war the right will have a major advantage for about the first 6 months due to having the best troops, more arms, but then superior manpower of leftist held cities and foreign arms will even out the fight. Worse most rightist wants to sit back in the countryside and starve the cities out in the advent of war sort of like what the white Russians tried. That’s a recipe for disaster.

              • Oliver Cromwell says:

                I don’t know any officers over 35.

                • BomberCommand says:

                  You also don’t know the officers who just decided to eliminate the ability to toss grenades in order to qualify for combat:

                  https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/army-basic-training-drop-hand-grenade-competency-graduation-requirement?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

                  Or the Marine Generals reducing physical fitness requirements for Marine officers to increase female officers. Those are the guys picking and choosing who’s going to be promoted up the officer ranks. And based on past historical performance I would bet they’re currently selecting people for promotion on the basis of politics and making sure right wing officers have a had time advancing or staying in the military.

                • Oliver Cromwell says:

                  Those decisions were made by politicians.

                • Nerevar says:

                  The officers put diversity statements onto the wall of their HQ, sign the statement, and do their best to enact it, by finding convenient ways to get blacks and women into positions of power, in order to make a good impression onto the politicians in order to get further career advancements and promotions

              • Starman says:

                Grab the nuclear weapons. That’ll fix the cities.

              • glosoli says:

                We had a civil war in England.
                The bad guys lost.
                The bad guys won. The bankers were the real winners, and the rights of parliament. Great result.
                All leftists.
                All evil. Cromwell was a mass murderer, God killed him for his Irish atrocities, he never got back to England.
                Don’t fret, you’ll win your civil war.
                But you’ll end up in exactly the same mess.
                It’s time to emulate Alfred the Great.

        • Pooch says:

          The US military would likely be split and fractured depending on what side individual generals pledged their loyalty too.

          Source: Every civil war ever.

  6. Pooch says:

    Why is Monero potentially Bitcoin’s successor?

    • Dave says:

      Because its blockchain is fully encrypted, making transactions untraceable except to the parties sending and receiving them. How miners validate transactions they can’t decipher is a mystery to me, but it works.

      The Bitcoin blockchain is open for all to see. With Monero, the feds know you bought $1000 worth of XMR on June 11 (like other financial institutions, exchanges are required to collect and report their customers’ real names), but they have no idea what you spent it on, or if you’re still holding it.

  7. Alrenous says:

    “1. Trump wins 2020: 20%”
    “So I was wildly mistaken about Trump’s odds of winning the first time, but I’m sure the exact same model I used last time will be right this time.”

    The sequences don’t work. Either you already know or you will never understand.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      We can formalize it.

      Information is known- doctrinal
      Uncertainty is known- frequentist
      Uncertainty is random- Baysianism
      Uncertainty is manipulated- you are here

      Or to put it into English, the Sequences fall down whenever people have an incentive to coordinate lying. Which is all the time.

      • jim says:

        The sequences boil down to consensus and trust that respectable people are acting in good faith. Obvious failure mode ensues.

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        Do you have anything to add? We are aware Less Wrong slogans are a bit empty and lacking on the ground and in implementation.

        • Anonymous says:

          My point is that here the sequences actually work, it’s just that the accurate prediction they make is of the “you’re fucked” variety. The slogan and the post it is associated with predict you won’t be able to outsmart the political part of your brain even when familiar with the sequences.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            And yet oddly enough people manage to pull it off. Steve Sailer for instance came up (in 2000) with the strategy Trump used to win the election; it is hard to beat predicting the results of an election against the conventional wisdom 16 years in advance.

            The other issue is politics consists of 1) beliefs that benefit you and 2) beliefs other people hold strongly. If you have trouble dealing with such topics, it isn’t clear why you are bothering to study rationalism since ‘copying beliefs of people around me’ would give you the same result with much less effort.

            • Anonymous says:

              What was Steve Sailor’s social circle like in 2000? His friends probably didn’t signal progressive beliefs super hard all the time.

              As for studying rationalism, you might do it for benefits in other areas of your life that are less directly affected by politics. If you knew a convergence was unavoidable, just copying your friends’ political beliefs is also the sort of thing a rationalist would suggest.

              • Samuel Skinner says:

                Steve Sailor is on the edge of the altright.

                “As for studying rationalism, you might do it for benefits in other areas of your life that are less directly affected by politics.”

                Or you can just copy what other people in the field are doing. If you are weak to group think and self justification, that applies to all areas of thinking. You are better off working out and raising your self esteem and testosterone levels.

                The reason most people can carry out compartmentalization is because they do not believe the things they are saying- they are just slogans they repeat to show they are part of a group.

  8. Even if I control for Scott trying very hard not to wander off the reservation, I still don’t understand how he is sometimes insightful and sometimes extremely clueless. Just a whole ago: a good vs. evil moral dichotomy is a modern invention, really, did he miss the whole thing about Gnosticism? And now that Europeans are gonna dislike the nationalist right more? Why, the immigrants are suddenly going to integrate and behave better or what?

    It is not wishful thinking when I say that anti-immigrant sentiment can only go up pretty much everywhere, it is the rational consequence of 1) problems can only become worse 2) the taboo on raycism is a post-WW2 phenomenon and slowly fades out, after some point “you are like Hitler” carries as much a punch as “you are like Tamerlane”. Old forgotten history.

    The EU is going to get its economic shit together? How? Ah, I see that one, he thinks the ECB does not like printing money enough, like how Yudkowsky thinks Japan does not like printing money enough. Because things aren’t expensive here already. Of course! Sure €500K for a basic family flat instead of the current €400K for a basic family flat would help.

    • peppermint says:

      His audience is the lesswrong cult. I know some people in that cult, they have the same perspective.

      The question is, as Moldbug put it, is the active ingredient of their red pill sugar. I expect lesswrong to institutionally side with dhimmicrats every time, and I expect them not to be, as they hope, either the intellectual core of the dhimmicrats, or parachuted into comfy positions through the power of the dhimmicrats. The dhimmicrat establishment sees them as troublesome youth and doesn’t let them get away with zoning violations.

      When this is over and the right has triumphed, they will crawl out of their cult houses and say that they weren’t dhimmicrats, the cult leaders will marry the groupies and both will be happier about that than poly, and they will try to establish normal lives.

  9. PBW says:

    That man lives in a bubble so thick it has crown molding, a nice kitchen and walk in closets. He must believe that status quo will continue and that his status quo is not the real situation on the ground because he is very dependent on it.

  10. pdimov says:

    “The crisis of nationalism will briefly die down as the shock of Syrian refugees wears off…”

    For some reason I don’t think it works like that.

  11. Samuel Skinner says:

    The confidence intervals and ‘things will continue as normal’ mean pretty big deviations from reality.

    “and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt,”
    “everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. ”

    So free speech will be considered mainstream AND more and more topics will be censored. That isn’t stable. Haidt is willing to discuss sexual differences in career choices; pointing out exceptions to blank slate is considered altright.

    This comes across as ‘people who I look up to will be higher status in the future’.

    “4. Percent transgender is higher on 1/1/2023 than 1/1/2018: 95%”

    While progressives are willing to pave their path with the blood of children, I suspect this may burn out; the high suicide rate (about 40%) means this is really hard to maintain over an extended period of time.

    “5. Social justice movement appear less powerful/important in 2023 than currently: 60%”

    This is on par with predicting communists would be less powerful/important in the future. It is true, but only because they have changed their labeling; the behavior is exactly the same.

    “1. Widely accepted paper claims a polygenic score predicting over 25% of human intelligence: 70%
    2. …50% or more: 20%”

    Hasn’t that already been published?

    • Mike says:

      Pretending that the genotypic component of intelligence is below 50 per cent is purely political positioning on Scott’s part. No intelligence researcher seriously believes the genotypic component of IQ is below 50 per cent.

      • Anonymous says:

        Scott’s prediction is not about the genotypic component of intelligence, it’s about what sort of papers are going to be published.

        • Mike says:

          My point is that it’s already well-established that the genotypic component is over 50 per cent, so it’s purely political positioning to suggest that it’s going to be revised downward: he’s predicting that there’s a 50 per cent (70% – 20%) chance the paper will predict a genotypic component of 25% to 50%.

          Which is crap, of course. It’s already irrefutably obvious that the genotypic component of IQ is over 50%

          • pdimov says:

            It’s fairly obvious that it’s 100% (absent brain damage or impeded development due to f.ex. malnourishment etc.)

  12. glosoli says:

    ‘will profoundly undermine the government’s ability to control the economy.’

    The government doesn’t control the economy at all.
    At best (or worst) it can nationalise everything and it will all grind to a halt.
    Even then, it’s not control.

    Jehovahs 50th year jubilee in 2032, that’s the date for US hyperinflation, time to prepare.

    • Dave says:

      “Control” can also mean to watch over something. E.g. the government does not control the Internet in the sense that you need their permission to connect, but they do control it in the sense that if you do something bad, they will analyze the NSA logs and trace it back to you.

      I love that Monero encrypts the blockchain so outside observers can’t see who’s sending how much to whom, but it also means you can’t check your balance while your private key is on a thumbdrive locked in a safe. Might that encourage users to keep their private keys close at hand, where they’re easier to steal? Or is a different private key needed to send money?

    • Mycroft Jones says:

      Can you provide more information on the year 2032? Based on the signs in the heavens, specifically the 50 year cycle of Sirius B, I expect Jubilee to be 2044.

      • glosoli says:

        The last big debt bubble bust ended in 1982, interest rates and inflation peaked then.
        The bubble burst in 1929, the bottom was 1932.
        I did some cursory research backwards, and I found debt bubbles bursting back as far as 1730, every 50 years.

        I suspect it would keep appearing further back.

        Certainly I think 2032 fits with my time frame for the interest rate cycle to peak.
        Martin Armstrong has that year as a big cyclical switch too.

        • Mycroft Jones says:

          Ok, that is interesting about the debt bubbles bursting. Remember the Great Depression didn’t really end until WWII did… 1944. Are you able to look at 1830-1844 and 1730-1744 and see if it was similar?

          • Mycroft Jones says:

            Also, great religious revivals toward Biblical Christianity have coincided with the 1844, 1894, 1944, 1994 timeframes.

            • peppermint says:

              nigga i live thru 1994

            • glosoli says:

              1994 wasn’t a year of note for debts. That was definitely 1982, peak of the interest rate cycle, peak defaults, peak price inflation.

              I don’t read the bible as suggesting the jubilee years are tied with any great uprising of faith, just Jehovah’s wisdom in cleaning the slate of debts every 50 years to avoid bubbles. We don’t clean the slate any more as we head into the jubilee, so bubbles develop, crazy big ones, but Jehovah’s cycle still works in cleaning the slate when He determines, it’s just more painful for humanity.

  13. […] Five more years […]

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