Max Kagan

@maxkagan.bsky.social

353 Followers 1213 Following

Postdoc at Columbia Business School studying partisan sorting at work. https://www.maxkagan.com/

It’s the same with Claude Code. You just have to use it, you just have to trust that in the limit — and trust me, you reach that long run limiting point within no time, seriously — it will figure you out. That’s the thing — it won’t be you figuring out Claude Code. It’ll be Claude Code figuring you out! So you just have to do it. You don’t start with starter kits. You start with directories. I mean it! You start with this: Please look around this directory and tell me what the hell is going on in here. It looks like a hoarder’s nest! Please help me make this deck of slides for my class! I’m overwhelmed with work. Use beamer, and install it if it’s not installed. I don’t even know how to use that frankly. Do the whole thing for me. I am anxious about the class, and I am anxious about the research project, and I am anxious about you. I need help. So please make a beautiful, beautiful deck based on this chapter, on this thing we’re doing in class, and here — here’s last year’s exams, here’s last year’s homework. Here’s a couple of papers. Just please read them, and come up with a beautiful deck. Make my life easier, not harder. I am living on my budget constraint and if you can help me, I will really appreciate it.
Such a desire to focus on ideology rather than on acquiring power was common among the Democratic clubs. According to Wilson, the professional class involved in the clubs tended to believe that if all voters thought through the issues as deeply as they did, their side would eventually win. The party regulars, on the other hand, who interacted daily with working-class voters, saw this view as naïve. The typical voter does not wish to think through public policy. The best thing to do is convince them, through actions, that Democrats care about them. Show voters you care, serve them, empathize with their day-to-day concerns. They will connect your expressions of concern with the Democratic brand. The Republican on the playground, like the Democrats in the clubs, brought to politics both a romantic vision of persuasion and a smug disdain for those who just don’t get it. One organizer I talked to in 2018 told me that his Democratic friends who aren’t involved beyond newsfollowing believe that their political positions are self-evidently correct. They don’t volunteer in politics because if they have to convince anyone of their ideas, that means the ideas aren’t self-evidently correct. So the friends don’t want to struggle to move politics toward what they think is right because they think they shouldn’t have to. It’s a strange, utterly doomed logic, but it encapsulates the mores of hobbyists from that New Hampshire playground to social media newsfeeds everywhere.