[DiscourseFan]

I'm not sure why my experience differs from yours. When I was in the northeast recently I got into heated arguments with people, one person said they "hated Waymo" and refused to elaborate (but also said they used AI everyday for work), another said flat out that technology is evil, so I asked them if poor people should go without electricity. Then they restricted their argument to AI is evil, and that was a more nuanced (if not trite) debate, which they eventually conceded. But not without some gnawing and thrashing!

But I don't think that hating AI or technology or whatever to be contrary to Trump is a genuine political statement, its just reaction. It involves politics in the same way that everything we do involves politics, but it is not "consciously" political in the same way that a baby demanding care from an overworked mother is also not consciously political. Baby wants milk, your average liberal wants to feel self-righteous (they would honestly do better with the milk). Someone can claim anything they want is political, it does not mean they are doing it for genuinely political reasons, they are probably just doing it because they fear the censure of their friends and the dissolution of their social life. Not engaging with something because you are afraid of how it could harm you personally, consciously or no, is not an objective way of making a decision that effects society more broadly. Like, a baby will just die if it doesn't get milk, you won't necessarily die because some of your friends stop talking to you.

[amalcon]

If you were in NYC, some of this may be a Boston/NYC difference. NYC is much more anti-Waymo (which I interpret mostly as an extension of being much more anti-car in general). There are also substantially different cultures between the two re: art and finance, which may have reflected on the AI questions.

I don't think you can decouple Trump from himself in this way without a concrete explanation. If some factor causes one to dislike something just because Trump likes it, then that same factor would influence voting. We have numbers for voting. When there are lots of other plausible explanations than Trump, the onus would be on you to demonstrate why more people are taking reverse-psychological cues from Trump in a place where more people also voted for him. Gesturing at "culture" doesn't do that.

[DiscourseFan]

I’m not sure I understand your point. Its not the case that more people voted for Trump in a place where more people are taking reverse psychological cues from him, but precisely the opposite case, the more people take reverse cues the less vote for him, which implies their positions are on account of reaction and not because they are genuinely reflecting on their social and political condition, which would elevate them to conscious political actors rather than people following a trend because they are afraid of going against it.

[amalcon]

You are simply incorrect about that. More people voted for Trump in NYC (the typical exemplar of "the northeast") than in SFO (the exemplar of the part of California that is more pro-AI than NYC).

[DiscourseFan]

I think that absolute numbers in specific cities don't tell the full story. NYC also has far fewer people with college degrees than SFO, which would correlate more strongly with Trump supporters. I think that if you polled those who voted against Trump in NYC now, and asked them about their opinions on AI, you'd find they diverge significantly from those who did vote for him, whereas if you asked the same question to Trump voters and non Trump voters in SFO they would answer pretty much the same. SFO is also in California which does not have the same cultural relationship with technology as NYC or much of the Northeast, although the culture I'm describing stretches basically all over the east coast.

[amalcon]

So, you're postulating that there is something of a Simpson's paradox going on in NYC between two largely separate cultures -- that of people with college degrees, and that without? This is theoretically possible, but conveniently not directly testable due to secret ballots. It is however indirectly testable in two different ways -- and the numbers still don't back you up.

1) Exit polling (https://www.timesunion.com/capitol/article/voted-trump-new-y...) does not back you up. More college educated New Yorkers reported voting for Trump than total fraction of San Franciscans that voted for Trump.

2) Middlesex County, Massachusetts (roughly, the north half of greater Boston) is an alternative example to NYC that has a very similar proportion of college degrees compared to SFO (about 1% less). Middlesex County is in the northeast. About 42% of those voters voted for Trump, which is more than New York and more than double SFO. Suffolk County (with Boston proper) has very similar numbers to NYC for both college education and voting for Trump. This can't be explained as a cultural difference between NYC and Boston because the Suffolk ratios are so similar. It can't be explained as an educational difference between SFO and Boston because the Middlesex educational numbers are so similar but there are proportionally more Trump voters than NYC. It can't be explained as a cultural difference between Suffolk and Middlesex because first, they are direct neighbors sharing a public transit system, and second, Middlesex is considerably more traditionally leftist than Suffolk (leaning on that cultural difference would undermine your original argument).