Fuzzy Subjective Human Factors I Am Not Really Qualified To Talk About
Many people on Twitter are asking “how could anyone possibly have been stupid enough to not realize that Biden was senile?”
I was that stupid. I didn’t say it openly, because I’m at least smart enough to have a high threshold for giving my opinion on political things I don’t know much about. But I thought it in my heart. So in case the people asking “how could anyone have been that stupid?” actually want an explanation, here’s my former reasoning.
Republicans have been accusing Biden of being senile (and the Democrats of hiding it) for at least five years now. Before the 2020 debates, they were excited that this was when they could finally prove once and for all that Biden was senile. Then Biden did fine, and they retreated to “well he’s senile but they have some secret drug they’re giving him, just during debates, that makes him look fine”.
I think a lot about experimental cognitive enhancement drugs, and I can say with confidence that nothing like that exists. Stimulants can help people with mild dementia be more active and motivated, but they don’t really improve cognition directly, and they can’t make a demented person temporarily lucid.
Still, for the past four years, every time Biden was going to do something - a press conference, a State of the Union, whatever - the Republicans would say “ha, this time is going to be the proof that he’s senile!” And then he would always do fine, and they would retreat back to “I guess he used the secret drug this time too”. The satire site Babylon Bee had some funny articles about this:
Meanwhile, the Democrats were spreading the alternate narrative that Trump was senile. This one has gotten less press, because I don’t know how many people really believed it. But it came up occasionally, along with out-of-context video snippets where Trump said or did something dumb or meandering. Of course, anybody with a presidential candidate’s level of public exposure will have a few gaffes. Even if they don’t, you can always deceptively crop something so it looks like they did.
So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, and the constant retreat into conspiracy theories of “I guess he used the magic drug again but we’ll get him next time!”, I just tuned out this entire category of thing. And I guess I kept it tuned out longer than I should have, whoops.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Even if liars are saying something for their usual liar reasons, it can still be true. For twenty years, people spread false rumors that Castro was on his deathbed, but this didn’t make Castro immortal. In the same way, I should have figured out that even if I couldn’t trust any particular claim that Biden was senile, the prior for an 81 year old becoming senile was still high.
But I guess I assumed that if he was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years.
I’m still confused what those elites were thinking. Reading the news coverage for the past few days (including some video clips from a post-debate rally where he seemed noticeably better) it seems like some combination of:
He has good days and bad days, and they were hoping this would be a good day.
He’s better in the daytime than at night (this is a classic dementia symptom called “sundowning”), his aides mostly only saw him during the day, but this debate was at night (9 - 11 PM in his time zone).
He’s still good at simple tasks like reading from a teleprompter, and they hoped this would extend to harder tasks like a debate.
I think the most likely story is that his aides noticed he had good days and bad days, thought that most days were good, and figured they’d roll the dice, schedule him for two debates, and hopefully they’d be good days and this would defuse questions about his health. But their luck ran out, they got a bad day, and also they were caught unprepared for how bad he was during the evening.
If this is true, they were probably telling themselves something like “well, he’s an incumbent, the party is united around him, it would be a disaster if we had to replace him, and we can probably make it through the election before this blows up. Since he’s often mostly lucid, we’ll say he’s always completely lucid. It’s just a few white lies, and it will save our party a lot of trouble”.
If that was their thought process, then I think it’s a good lesson in how bad what seem like “a few white lies” can be.
I support the Principle of Charity. Nobody ever thinks in their own head “Haha, I am an evil person who is deceiving my friends and the world”. They think “I’m telling little white lies that don’t matter, for the greater good”. But the flip side of that is that every horrible giant deception was perpetrated by people saying “I’m telling little white lies that don’t matter, for the greater good”. And so if you are ever tempted to tell what seem like little white lies that don’t matter for the greater good, you should consider the possibility that actually, you’re being about as mendacious as anybody ever gets, and you have a decent chance of causing a disaster. And if you do cause a disaster, the fact that you didn’t go into it smirking “muahaha, now I shall be an evil person and cause a disaster” won’t be exculpatory.
My quick scan of the law suggests that although DNC delegates can vote their conscience, they were selected for being hardcore Biden supporters, and there’s no way to convince them to ditch him unless he bows out gracefully. I think he should bow out gracefully - not just for pragmatic reasons about helping his party win the election, but because it seems like his administration lied to the American people every time they said he was lucid and things were fine.
In normal times, I wouldn’t blame him for this. Every early-stage dementia patient (and their family and friends) always tells themselves (and everyone else) that they’re fine. It’s an easy thing to think, there’s never a clear bright-line where things obviously stop being fine, and the charade saves them from having to confront horrifying questions about their own mortality. When I start getting demented, I plan to also insist I’m fine, and you guys will just have to cope with whatever incomprehensible garbage ends up on this blog. But Joe Biden and his family have the future of the country in the balance. They need to step up and do the hard thing.
So I think he should decline the nomination and endorse some likeable purple-state governor. If Kamala Harris gets angry, he should just say “sorry, I’m a demented old man, you can’t blame me for my actions”. If she gets angry at the other Democrats, they should just say “sorry, it’s an old man’s dying wish, it would be cruel not to honor it”. If Biden endorses Newsom, fine, whatever. I don’t like Newsom because he’s all style and no substance, but maybe that’s what we need for a time like this. He’s the closest we can come in the real world to literally putting Generic Democrat on the ballot. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
But the markets say there’s only a ~25% any of this will happen. So maybe it’s too late to fix things. I think the proper Rationalist response is - okay, we screwed this one up. Now that we’ve learned our lesson, what’s the next upcoming thing like this - the one where we really are still in the window where we can affect it?
I think it’s Sonia Sotomayor. Nate Silver, who was right on Biden very early, has been pushing this really hard. Sotomayor is getting old and unhealthy, and might die within the next four years. If she dies, and Republicans win the Presidency and Senate, Trump will get to nominate her replacement, making the Supreme Court 7-2 conservative. This is the same thing that happened with RBG. Most Democrats wish RBG would have retired when she had the chance. Now Sotomayor has the chance, so she should do it. If we’re going to have a national moment where we worry about aging government officials staying on longer than is good for their party or their country, she should be the next target. Elites can sublimate whatever emotions they’re having about Biden onto Sotomayor, and maybe it’ll do some good.
(I hate saying “elites should” as if I’m just lodging a complaint into the ether. But I genuinely don’t know who I would pressure, or how, to make this happen. I don’t think calling my representative is appropriate here. If someone knows what is appropriate, let me know.)
Speaking of elites - one other update I’ve had from this situation is that I’m less confident that some group fairly called “Democratic elites” is in control in any meaningful way. I always knew that the party had different factions and nobody had obvious, trivial control. But I thought if the party was threatened, some important people could meet in a room and talk things out. Wasn’t this what happened when Obama endorsed Biden over Bernie, everyone pivoted in lockstep, and Bernie’s campaign imploded? I mean sure, maybe this was bad, but didn’t it at least demonstrate “state capacity” that the party could use in more important situations? I don’t know, maybe that was just a fluke and the party has no state capacity at all. I’m not even sure Biden’s aides have state capacity. Maybe the answer to “why didn’t his aides come up with a better plan for this debate?” is just “it wasn’t any particular aide’s job to do that, and they didn’t coordinate”.
This is getting depressing, so here are my prediction market sources for the summary above. Some of these are embeds, which mean they auto-update, which means by the time you read this they might not say what I said they said - all of my numbers are correct as of 1 AM on July 1.
