Sorry, I give up.

In past elections, I've covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cranks. In 2022 there were twenty-six of them, and I covered them all.

But sorry, I give up. This year there are sixty. It's too many. I can't disambiguate them all into unique individuals with their own personalities, hopes, and dreams. So as consolation for the list I'm not giving you, here are the basic types, and a few examples of each.

One of these people will definitely win, but what else is there to say about them? They're all the same. They've all paid the danegeld to some set of unions and interest groups, then put up some kind of incredibly generic platform about how they're compassionate but also a fighter. I can't bring myself to name any of them or discuss them further.

More or less the same as the top-tier Democrats, minus the chance of winning. They all have cowboy hats and flag pins. They all pose on horseback at their ranch. They all promise to Take Back California for the forces of America and its god, Donald J. Trump. None of these people are actually interesting, but honorable mention to Sheriff Chad Bianco, whose name is Italian for "white Chad". He might be the perfect Republican candidate:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-types-of-candidate-you-find-in

In conclusion, the only good theory of taste is Nostalgebraist's.

He wrote a post called Hydrogen Jukeboxes, analyzing the literary output of an AI called R1. This AI tried hard to write good fiction, which was part of the problem. It crammed its stories with what Nostalgebraist called (stealing a term from Ginsberg) the "eyeball kick" - a flashy stylistic move that immediately catches the reader's attention and "wows" them. Here are examples - some from R1, others from an experimental OpenAI model trained specifically for fiction-writing:

• "There is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief, and the rest of this is scaffolding—protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences."
• "When the jar of Sam's laughter shattered, Eli found the sound pooled on the floorboards like liquid amber, thick and slow. It had been their best summer, that laughter—ripe with fireflies and porch wine—now seeping into the cracks, fermenting."
• "And so I built a Mila and a Kai and a field of marigolds that never existed. I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens."
• "The morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke."

Nostalgebraist and another writer, Coagulopath, catalogue some of the most common AI eyeball kicks, each occurring across multiple LLM models:

• "An overwhelming reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random."
• "Conjunctions combining one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal with another thing that is concrete and/or sensory."
• "Repetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms…the way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit."

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes

(a continuation of yesterday's post)

Vexillology is the c. elegans of aesthetics - the simplest model organism that lets us observe dynamics of interest. I haven't read enough MFA books to do more than relay the thoughts of my betters, and you probably haven't either. But anyone can have opinions on flags.

If you're like me, you learned the following code of good flags:

1. They should be so simple that a child could draw them.
2. No images, no "busy" areas, and - for God's sake - no text
3. The rule of tincture: "never put metal on metal, or color on color". In medieval heraldry, "metals" were yellow and white (sometimes implemented with literal gold and silver) and "colors" were every other color (except black, which is a "fur" and has its own rules). A good flag shouldn't have a metal touch another metal, or a color touch another color. So the French tricolor (blue then white then red) is okay, but a hypothetical (blue then red then white) tricolor wouldn't be okay, because blue would be touching red, which would be "color on color".

Every so often, a US state will decide that its flag is politically incorrect and sponsor a contest to design a new one. Then online vexillologists will go over the entries, savaging any that violate the code. "Look how busy this one is! It has four different colors!" "Oh god, this one literally included text! Can you believe it!" They'll moan and scowl and ask why everyone can't be more like Indonesia. Good old Indonesia, they know how to follow the rules:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/three-model-organisms-for-taste

Constraint consequentialists believe that you should try to do good things that improve the world, unless those break hard-and-fast rules ("deontological bars").

For example, you shouldn't assassinate democratically-elected leaders, even very bad ones. Why not? Since bad leaders set bad policy, and bad policy can kill many thousands of people, wouldn't it be for the greater good? Because there's always one gun-owner who thinks any given leader's policies are bad, so without the rule, every leader would face constant assassination attempts, probably some of them would succeed, and the nation would either crumble or degenerate into a security state.

This explanation combines two sub-explanations. In the first, you are wrong about whether assassinating the leader would produce good consequences - you think it would, but actually it would produce instability, tyranny, etc. In the second, you're right - maybe you're a brilliant forecaster who can see that this particular assassination would end with an orderly succession by a superior ruler. But you know that there are far more people who think they are such brilliant forecasters than who actually are, and you either use the Outside View to suspect that you are also deceiving yourself, or at least realize that the only stable bright-line equilibrium is for everyone - true brilliant forecasters and wannabes alike - to refuse to act upon their apparent foreknowledge.

"Don't kill people" is a gimme. What other deontological bars constrain our actions?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-deontological-bars

As a blogger, I hear about lots of projects to "solve debate", or "disagree better", or "map arguments". Often these are ACX grant applications. I always turn them down. They're well-intentioned, sophisticated, and doomed.

I appreciate that Internet arguments usually don't go well, that there are lots of ways to improve them, and that this is a worthy cause. But I've also seen a dozen projects of this sort fail. Here's why I think yours will too:

"Debate" almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest "solve debate" proposal is the argument map. Some technology helps people decompose arguments into premises and conclusions, then lets skeptics point out where the premises are wrong, or where the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

But almost no real argument works that way.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-attempt-to-solve-debate-will

[I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2026