<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # Politicians know how their voters think, and they... > {{Politicians know how their voters think, and they manage them as coalitionary apes: grooming alliances, displaying against rivals, punishing defectors, and keeping the herd from stampeding. Every official who has watched a zoning hearing, a school-board meeting or a cable-news cycle knows that the median voter cannot hold two true propositions in tension for longer than a headline. The consequence is a public policy that runs on two channels. On the public channel, the message is confidence, dominance and speed. On the institutional channel, the work is monitoring, classification, red-teaming, defensive consortia, hardware isolation and quiet coordination among the laboratories and the national-security state.}} {{**Full steam ahead is the public channel of a policy whose safety work runs on the institutional channel, and the division exists because the public cannot be trusted with both at once.** That is an indictment of the public, and it is the only arrangement that keeps the country building while the danger is managed out of the herd's line of sight.}} **Source:** [[articles/The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public|The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Politicians know how their voters think, and they manage them as coalitionary apes: grooming alliances, displaying against rivals, punishing defectors, and keeping the herd from stampeding. Every official who has watched a zoning hearing, a school-board meeting or a cable-news cycle knows that the median voter cannot hold two true propositions in tension for longer than a headline. The consequence is a public policy that runs on two channels. On the public channel, the message is confidence, dominance and speed. On the institutional channel, the work is monitoring, classification, red-teaming, defensive consortia, hardware isolation and quiet coordination among the laboratories and the national-security state. Full steam ahead is the public channel of a policy whose safety work runs on the institutional channel, and the division exists because the public cannot be trusted with both at once. That is an indictment of the public, and it is the only arrangement that keeps the country building while the danger is managed out of the herd's line of sight.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-politicians-know-voters-herds-line-sight ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->