<!-- 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. **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.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/quotes/quotes-politicians-know-voters-national-security-state ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->