On a recent trip to DC, I was surprised to notice that the Watergate Hotel is not only still there, it’s still called that. I thought it would have at least changed its name, the way the scandal-ridden military contractor Blackwater keeps changing its name (to Xe and then Academi and later Constellis). But the Watergate is still there, its reputation apparently unaffected by the scandal, or possibly bolstered by it. Maybe the name is so famous that some people stay there as a kind of historical novelty.

Watergate still comes up fairly often and it feels familiar to us. Perhaps it’s ridiculous to review such well-trod territory. But, like all well-studied facets of history, it inspires that sense of illusory depth that we must already know all about it, or at least somewhere some boring historian must. So I spent some time asking around: What do people know about Watergate, and when did they know it?

The Public Memory

So that we don’t deceive ourselves, go on and spend a minute yourself trying to recall what facts you remember about Watergate. What was it, what happened, and why?

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If you don’t know too many specifics, you’re not alone. I knew almost nothing about the scandal, which happened about a decade before I was born. I knew that there was a burglary at the Watergate and something something this caused Nixon to resign. It’s possible I only knew even this much because it comes up as a joke in Forrest Gump. But I assumed that it must be the greatest of all scandals, because all subsequent scandals are named whatevergate in honor of it.

To see if my memory was worse than average, I went around for a couple weeks annoying everyone I know by asking them what they remembered about Watergate.[1] Some were old enough to remember it firsthand, and others surely would (should) have learned something about it in history class, or through the telephone game of culture. Here’s some representative recollections:

Younger people...didn’t know much. A middle school student I asked had never heard of Watergate, and thought “Nixon” might be one of Santa’s reindeer. Young adults remembered bits and pieces, but it tended to be fairly garbled. They had at least heard of Watergate, and remembered there was a burglary, but most didn’t remember who the target was. One person said that they broke into a psychiatrist’s office to get political dirt on their enemies. Almost everyone knew that Nixon resigned in the end. Someone remembered that he first gave an “I’m not a crook” speech.

Older people, who experienced some of this firsthand, did a little better. Most of them remembered that it was the Democratic National Committee headquarters that was burglarized. Some remembered watching the hearings about this live on TV, and that investigators were trying to determine “what did Nixon know and when did he know it?” One person said that they used to call taping a door latch open “Watergating the door” (more on this later). People remembered that there was a battle over tapes from the Oval Office, and that some of the tapes had been erased by an implausible “Rose Mary stretch” (more on this later too). Someone from a Republican family remembered the prevailing attitude was “both sides do this kind of thing but the Republicans got caught”.

They also tended to characterize Nixon as paranoid. He didn’t have to tape his conversations in the Oval Office, but he did it anyway. They remembered the Watergate break-in itself as a small crime by modern standards, and thought it was completely unnecessary since he won the next election in a landslide. Some thought Nixon had personally ordered the burglary, and some thought he didn’t even know about it, but that he was implicated after the fact in the cover-up. Someone mentioned that he was never impeached, but that he would have been because the Republicans turned on him when they heard what kinds of things he’d been saying behind closed doors.

For it being so long ago, the people who lived through it still remembered quite a lot. That being said, let us look into what, with 50 years of perspective, some boring historians say actually happened.[2]

The Crime

Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, three hippies with guns arrested five men in suits and ties inside the Democratic National Committee offices on the 6th floor of the Watergate Complex. The hippies were undercover cops. The men in suits and ties were former CIA agents and Cuban anti-Castro political activists. Frank Wills, the security guard at the Watergate, had noticed a piece of tape covering the latch of the door from the parking garage, keeping it from locking. Wills removed the tape, but half an hour later he came back and saw that someone had replaced it, so he called the police. The on-duty officer first called to respond was too drunk to go, so any nearby officers were called to respond to the Watergate. This is how they got the bum squad: three officers dressed as hippies and driving an unmarked car.

The burglars were wearing gloves and had cameras and 39 rolls of film with them, as well as radios, electronic bugging equipment, and $2400 in sequentially numbered $100 bills. This all looked very unusual and suspicious to the responding officers, but it wasn’t immediately clear who they were or why they were there. The burglars were brought to the police precinct, where a lawyer showed up to represent them despite the fact that they hadn’t made any phone calls yet. One of them had an address book which included the name of E. Howard Hunt, listed at the “W. House”.

Howard Hunt, it turned out, both planned the break-in and did actually work for the White House. He, along with G. Gordon Liddy, was a member of the secretive White House Special Investigations Unit, also known as the White House Plumbers. The “Plumbers” had been formed in 1971 after the leak of the Pentagon Papers, which were a series of leaked government reports revealing embarrassing lies and omissions about the war in Vietnam. Their name was a joke: The Plumbers were hired by the Nixon administration to prevent future “leaks”.

Hunt and Liddy had been in another room at the Watergate during the burglary, and were listening to events unfold on the radio. They knew their operation had been bungled and quickly packed their things and left along with their not-terribly-effective lookout Al Baldwin, who had been watching from the Howard Johnson across the street. On arriving home that night, Liddy told his wife that he’d probably be going to jail. The cover-up began almost immediately. Liddy went back to his office the next day and began shredding various now-incriminating documents, eventually going so far as to shred the rest of the $100 bills. He found Attorney General Richard Kleindienst at a golf club and asked him to intervene to get the burglars out of jail. Kleindienst had no idea what was going on and, perhaps unsurprisingly, refused.

The burglars initially gave false names, but their real identities were quickly discovered. One of them, James McCord, had worked as the security coordinator for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP), Nixon’s 1972 campaign organization. The head of CRP (and former Attorney General) John Mitchell issued a statement that McCord was a private contractor no longer employed by the campaign. A few days later, Nixon himself disavowed involvement, saying at a press conference that “The White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident”.

But other links to the campaign quickly became obvious. Reporting for The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein found that a $25,000 check had been deposited from Kenneth Dahlberg, Nixon’s midwest finance chair from the ‘68 election, to Bernard Barker, one of the five Watergate burglars. Disgruntled former CRP Treasurer Hugh Sloan told Woodward and Bernstein that there was a CRP safe containing about $700,000 in cash campaign donations (over $5,000,000 in 2025 dollars) to be used for “unreported” expenses. Sloan implied that Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, was one of the people with authorizing power over the money. This, it would turn out, was the illegal slush fund that financed the Watergate break-in, among many other things.

It should be noted, before we continue, that it’s still unclear today what the exact reason for the break-in was. According to Watergate historian Garrett Graff, “No one was ever charged with ordering the break-in, nor has anyone ever confessed or presented conclusive evidence one direction or another about what the burglars hoped to accomplish that night.” The testimonies of the people involved disagree with each other. Some of them may never have been told the real reason for the break-in, or were told a false reason.

The most common theory is the one remembered by the public: simple espionage. They were there to bug the phone of DNC chair Larry O’Brien and photograph as many documents as they could, hoping to find some scandal to be used against the Democrats. It’s also possible that they were looking to see if the DNC had a secret file of dirt on Nixon’s camp; this is what Liddy writes in his memoir. Others theorize that they were there to see if Democrats had evidence tying Republicans to a high-end DC escort service, or to other illegal campaign contributions in the ‘68 election. It’s possible it was some combination of such motives, and we may never know for sure. But suffice it to say, all of the theories fall into the category of “illegitimate-seeming political shenanigans”. No one, not even Nixon and his lawyers, contended that the burglary was a legitimate national security operation of any kind.

Ratfucking and Other Misadventures

Seven people, the five burglars plus Hunt and Liddy, were indicted in September. Although newspapers were reporting various links between them and the Nixon White House, the trials hadn’t started yet, and the scandal had little effect on public opinion before the ‘72 election. Nixon defeated George McGovern in a historic landslide, with over 60% of the popular vote.

In the background, however, more and more facts started coming out. By 1973 there was an ongoing FBI investigation into Watergate, the trial of the original Watergate burglars, a $1,000,000 civil suit brought by the Democratic National Committee against CRP, and a Senate Watergate Committee led by Democratic Senator Sam Ervin. Some of these focused narrowly on the break-in itself, but others, including ongoing reporting by Woodward and Bernstein at The Washington Post, branched out to other secret dealings of CRP and the Nixon White House. Modern researchers have discovered even more details of these from memoirs, recordings, and interviews. In no particular order, these are some of the things they found:

Some of Nixon’s aides, including press secretary Ron Ziegler and appointments secretary Dwight Chapin, had gone to University of Southern California together, and had been part of a campus group called “Trojans for Representative Government”. The Trojans participated in student elections and engaged in what they called “ratfucking”, which involved printing fake campaign literature in the name of their opponents, placing spies in other campaigns, and stuffing ballot boxes. Later, Chapin hired fellow USC grad (and Trojan) Don Segretti to do some ratfucking for the President. Segretti, a lawyer by training, was hiring other lawyers to “volunteer” as campaign staffers for the Democrats and relay information back to Nixon’s people. The idea was to hire people who could disrupt things, but who would know enough not to do anything actually illegal.

Segretti and his recruits played other “pranks” against the Democrats running in the 1972 primaries. They did things like calling venues for Democratic rallies and saying the event was postponed, and awarding Ted Kennedy a fake “safe driving” award (Kennedy was famously involved in a vehicular manslaughter). They stole stationery from Edmund Muskie’s campaign and wrote fake letters pretending that Muskie was accusing other Democrats of having affairs, or implying that Muskie was racist against French Canadians. They called voters in the middle of the night, pretending to be Democratic campaign staffers, just to annoy them.

In parallel Hunt, Liddy, and Jeb Stuart Magruder of the CRP were running their own operations. They paid a man named Elmer Wyatt to volunteer for the Muskie campaign as their cab driver, but secretly take pictures of all the documents that went back and forth. They hired someone called Roger Greaves to follow Democratic campaigners around and do things like take the keys out of idling cars, or steal the shoes they left out in hotels at night to be shined. After Greaves quit they hired Roger Stone (yes that one) to hire spies to infiltrate the campaigns of Muskie and Hubert Humphrey. Sometimes the spies reported sensitive information back, and sometimes they caused disruptions by just doing their jobs as poorly as possible.

Most of these shenanigans paled in comparison with what Liddy originally wanted to do. In January he presented to CRP his plan for Operation GEMSTONE, an array of interlocking efforts to disrupt all parts of the Democratic campaigns. This included subplans such as DIAMOND (kidnapping demonstrators against the RNC and holding them in Mexico), RUBY (planting spies in various Democratic campaigns), EMERALD (equip a spy plane to follow the eventual Democratic nominee around and eavesdrop), SAPPHIRE (entice high profile Democrats with prostitutes), OPAL (“black bag” break-ins of Muskie and McGovern offices), and TURQUOISE (sabotage the air conditioning at the Democratic convention, which was in Miami). This was all deemed to be a bit too much by the rest of the committee, but largely only because it would be too expensive. Liddy was not exactly told not to do all this, he was merely told to scale it back.

Nixon, it turned out, also had an angle on the previous election in 1968, which had been a close race between Nixon and Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey (and third party segregationist George Wallace). Humphrey was initially behind in the polls, but made up a lot of ground by promising to end the bombing of North Vietnam. Nixon realized that if a deal were reached before the election it would greatly favor the incumbent party, so he sought to delay the peace process. Through the intermediary of Anna Chennault, a major Republican fundraiser, Nixon and then-campaign-manager John Mitchell made contact with the ambassador to South Vietnam and convinced them that they’d get a better peace deal from Nixon. The ambassador was asked to delay the Paris talks until after the election, which he did. President Johnson was aware of this plot, even going so far as to call the Republican Senate minority leader to complain of Nixon’s “treason”. Johnson knew that Nixon was doing this solely to hurt Humphrey’s campaign, but he did not disclose it to the public since his information came from secret wiretaps. Nixon went on to win the election with just a 0.7% margin in the popular vote. The peace talks would not reach an agreement for five more years.

In the wake of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon and his team began to worry about what other secret documents had the potential to be leaked. One of his aides, Tom Huston, believed that the Brookings institute had documents about the political machinations of both the Johnson administration and Nixon’s campaign during the ‘68 election. It would be politically damaging to the Democrats if they could prove that the Johnson administration halted bombing in North Vietnam merely to improve the poll numbers of his Vice President. But it could be even more damaging to Nixon’s credibility if his interference in the peace talks through Anna Chennault came out. Nixon directly ordered Haldeman to break into Brookings and steal the files back, saying “I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” Nixon was quite serious about this, and followed up several times to complain that the operation hadn’t been executed yet. Planning fell to Special Counsel Chuck Colson, who suggested that they set fire to the building, break in dressed as firemen, and steal the files before the real firemen showed up. A second version of the plan involved actually purchasing a fire engine to use in the heist, and training in basic firefighting skills. The whole venture ended up being canceled because, according to Liddy, it was simply too expensive. In any case, there’s no evidence that Brookings ever had any such documents.

The other “black bag” break-in job they did execute was targeted to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND consultant who had leaked the Pentagon Papers in the first place. Nixon had been initially dismissive of the leaks, as it was just a collection of documents cataloguing mistakes of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. But Henry Kissinger, then the National Security Advisor, convinced Nixon that the revelation was a stain on the presidency, that the office would lose prestige if people believed that former presidents had lied. Perhaps this wasn’t Kissinger’s real motivation: He had mentored Ellsberg personally and felt betrayed. Ellsberg was already facing over 100 years in prison for violating the Espionage Act, but Hunt and Liddy nonetheless developed a plan to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to find discrediting information about him. The plan was approved in writing by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief advisor on domestic affairs. Some of the burglars used in this escapade were the same men as in the later Watergate break-in, who Hunt knew from the failed Bay-of-Pigs invasion during the Kennedy era. They successfully broke into the office, but couldn’t find any papers related to Ellsberg. When all this was later revealed during the Watergate investigation, as well as unapproved wiretaps against Ellsberg, all charges against him were dropped due to gross governmental misconduct.

In 1971, the Justice Department settled several antitrust lawsuits against the ITT Corporation, already one of the largest conglomerates in the world. ITT was seeking to merge with Hartford Insurance in what would be the largest corporate merger in history at the time. Coincidentally, ITT had just made a $400,000 donation to the Republican National Committee in order for them to hold their upcoming convention in San Diego. Journalist Jack Anderson uncovered and published a memo, which would become known as the Beard memo, between ITT lobbyist Dita Beard and the Vice President of ITT, outlining an explicit quid-pro-quo between the RNC donation and the dropping of the antitrust lawsuits. When Dita Beard was located by the FBI, Colson dispatched Hunt (wearing a red wig for some reason) to bring her an envelope full of CRP cash, convincing her to disavow the memo as a forgery. This didn’t really fool anybody, and Beard eventually had to get out of a Senate inquiry about it by (probably) faking a heart attack. In the wake of the scandal, the RNC event in San Diego was canceled and relocated to Miami.

Colson later told Hunt that Nixon has had it with Jack Anderson and his leaks. Anderson, no stranger to dirty tricks himself, had previously disclosed a large loan from Howard Hughes to Nixon’s brother, and had become a “thorn in the side” of the President. Colson told Hunt that he was authorized to “do whatever was necessary” to stop him. Hunt convened Liddy and a retired CIA doctor and they brainstormed various methods of assassinating the journalist, including replacing his aspirin with poison, putting LSD on his steering wheel, or simply staging a mugging-gone-wrong. Liddy said that, because of the importance of the operation, he would do it personally if needed. Fortunately for Anderson, the “go” order never came.

I pause here to note that I haven’t even listed all of the Nixon team’s known misdeeds here. There was also more dirty campaign financing, the outright selling of ambassadorships, problems with Nixon’s personal taxes, politically motivated wiretaps of journalists, Vice President Spiro Agnew’s bribery scandal and resignation, dairy lobbyist kickbacks, and an aborted plan to put LSD in Daniel Ellsberg’s soup at a public event. Many more schemes are likely lost to history altogether. They of course deserve more blame for the things they actually did than the things they merely considered doing. But the overwhelming laundry list of improper behavior is likely the reason the public remembers, more or less, only the “main story”, the Watergate break-in itself. Watergate, broadly construed, was more than this. The true scandal was that, once investigations of the burglary got underway, they began finding unethical and illegal behavior everywhere they looked. It wasn’t a single offense on the part of the White House and the CRP, it was an infinite fractal of abuses of power and below-board tactics showing that Nixon’s men were driven by a single guiding principle: You can do anything you want as long as you don’t get caught.

Assigning Blame

Four of the original five burglars unexpectedly plead guilty to all charges, leading many to suspect (correctly) that they are being paid for their silence. The last one, James McCord, refuses to do so, believing he is being unfairly punished for going through with what he thought was an officially sanctioned operation. McCord writes a letter to the judge saying that there was political pressure being applied to the defendants to keep silent, and that there had been significant perjury at the trial. Realizing they may now face perjury charges, Magruder and White House Counsel John Dean begin cooperating with the prosecutors.

This leads to a lot of finger pointing: Magruder tries to blame everything on Dean and John Mitchell. Realizing they may now be implicated, Ehrlichman and Haldeman also start trying to blame everything on Mitchell, although Mitchell continues to claim he didn’t authorize any of this. Dean goes directly to Nixon, to brief him that there is a “cancer” on the presidency and that his aides are covering it up with hush payments. Nixon, to Dean’s surprise, seems to already know all about it.

To try and distance himself from his tainted staff, Nixon asks for the resignations of Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Attorney General Kleindienst, and fires John Dean. But this doesn’t stop either public interest in the matter or the investigations. The new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, appoints a special prosecutor Archibald Cox to investigate Watergate. Meanwhile, Ervin’s Senate committee is still ongoing, and learns through Haldeman aide Alexander Butterfield that there is a secret taping system inside the Oval Office itself, which almost no one knew about. Nearly all of Nixon’s conversations in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and on various phone lines and executive offices had been recorded, unbeknownst to most of the people involved.

Once the taping system is made public, all of the investigations into Watergate begin to subpoena tapes of potentially relevant conversations. Nixon refuses to turn them over, citing “executive privilege” and “instability in the Middle East” as reasons why the tapes cannot be released. When Cox refuses to drop the subpoena, Nixon orders Attorney General Richardson to fire him. Richardson refuses to do this and resigns in protest, with Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus also resigning. The Justice Department’s third-in-command does follow through with the order to fire Cox, and by now the media are calling the string of departures the “Saturday Night Massacre”, with public opinion almost universally against the President. With Congress beginning to draft impeachment resolutions, the White House is pressured into appointing a new special prosecutor. Law professor Leon Jaworski is selected as someone acceptable to both Nixon’s team and the Justice Department.

Jaworski continues the battle for the tapes, and Nixon’s lawyers are forced to reluctantly admit that a key tape from June 20, 1972, just three days after the break-in, has an 18-1/2 minute erasure of its audio. Their excuse for this was that Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, had accidentally erased the tape using a foot pedal on the tape machine while answering the telephone, which would have involved reaching across her desk and keeping her foot in exactly the same position for 18 minutes. No one buys this version of events.

Meanwhile, Nixon is trying to argue that transcripts of the tapes prepared by his staff are an acceptable substitute for the actual tapes, and in April 1974 releases 1300 pages of transcripts of executive conversations. This quickly becomes a national sensation, being republished in paperback format and selling out to an interested public. Many people are shocked at Nixon’s unprofessionalism and profanity, as well as his callous attitude towards foreign nations, the public, and the very idea of the rule of law. Further, the transcripts clearly don’t satisfy the subpoena: They contain many omissions and editorial “choices”, and they don’t even cover all of the requested conversations. Jaworski asks the Supreme Court to rule on the matter, bypassing the Court of Appeals entirely. The Supreme Court rules unanimously in July that Nixon has to turn over the actual tapes.

Nixon had spent weeks at this point listening to the tapes again, and warns his lawyers that one of them, from June 23, 1972, looks particularly bad for his defense. He then considers several options left to him, including burning the tapes and resigning rather than comply. He considers pardoning everyone involved and then resigning. He considers simply refusing the order and arguing his case before the inevitable impeachment trial. Eventually his lawyers, now concerned about prosecution themselves, convince him to simply comply with the order and turn over the tapes.

In what came to be known as the June 23rd “smoking gun” tape, Nixon and Haldeman discuss the FBI investigation into Watergate just six days after the break-in. Together they plan to tell the CIA to obstruct the FBI investigation, claiming it would tread on important national security matters (it wouldn’t). When discussing who knew about “this thing” (Watergate), Haldeman says John Mitchell probably knew about it, but not the details. “Well, who was the asshole that did?” Nixon asks. “Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow? He must be a little nuts.” Although Nixon seems not to have known about the operation ahead of time, he is clearly told that his campaign staff were involved, something he had repeatedly denied knowledge of.

By this time impeachment articles against Nixon had already been passed through the House Judiciary Committee and would soon be advanced to a full House vote. Nixon knows he will lose the vote in the House but thinks he may prevail in a Senate trial, where he only needs 34 votes to prevent removal from office. On August 7th, just after the release of the smoking gun tape, a Congressional delegation visits the White House to tell Nixon that only a handful of senators still support him, and that if it goes to a trial he is sure to be removed from office. That night, a drunk and emotional Nixon breaks down in a private meeting with Henry Kissinger, saying “How has it come to this? How has a simple burglary, a breaking and entering, done all this?”

The next day Nixon announced to the nation that he would resign the presidency.

You’re Not Paranoid If You’re Winning

Many people’s interpretation of the aggressive and lawless behavior of Nixon’s team was that Nixon was simply paranoid. Wrapped up in this characterization is the implicit belief that he was needlessly paranoid, that is, he would have been more successful had he not been. I’m suspicious that this is a kind of moralistic confabulation, a cautionary tale we tell ourselves in hopes of preventing future Nixons. Yes, society would surely be better off if no politicians employed dirty tricks to get elected, and yes, society would be better off if all politicians believed that they personally would lose elections if they employed underhanded tactics. But the widespread use of such tactics implies that either A) those politicians are making a simple error, or B) they actually do work some of the time. Nixon was eventually forced from office because of his team’s dirty tricks, and we can take some comfort in that. But it’s quite likely that Nixon was in office in the first place precisely because of the extraordinary success he had using those same methods throughout his political career.

By the time of the Watergate break-in, Nixon was already over 10 points up in the polls against Democrat George McGovern, and indeed he eventually won with over 60% of the popular vote. This suggests that Nixon could have easily won an “above board” election and saved himself the investigations and ignominy that followed. However, Nixon’s main goal had been the disruption of the Democratic primaries, with the ultimate aim of ensuring that the weakest Democratic candidate would be advanced to the general election. Although we can’t prove that Nixon’s team’s espionage and deception efforts were what made the difference, McGovern, the eventual nominee, was in fact Nixon’s preferred opponent.

Ted Kennedy, brother of JFK, was initially considered to be a frontrunner for the 1972 Democratic nomination, and during Nixon’s first term Howard Hunt was busily investigating Kennedy for political dirt. Fortunately for Hunt (and Nixon), Kennedy withdrew himself from primary contention amidst the scandal about the Chappaquiddick incident (wherein Kennedy had driven his car off a bridge and into a pond, killing the passenger). Attention then turned to Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, a moderate who could have been expected to do well against Nixon in a general election. But Muskie’s campaign was derailed during the New Hampshire primary when a local newspaper published what came to be known as the “Canuck letter”, a forgery penned by Don Segretti’s ratfucking campaign. The letter implied that Muskie was prejudiced against Americans of French-Canadian descent, of which there were many in New Hampshire. Muskie gave a speech in a snowstorm defending himself, during which he appeared to be crying. His credibility never quite recovered from this.

Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post suspected at the time that the Canuck letter was a Nixon campaign trick, and called up several Muskie campaign staffers. “One by one,” Bernstein reports, “they had told horror stories about how their campaign had been repeatedly victimized by unexplained accidents that seemed as if they could only be the results of an organized effort: stolen documents, fake campaign literature, canceled rallies, outrageous telephone calls to voters in the name of Muskie campaign workers, schedule breakdowns and—of course—the Canuck letter.” Later, Bernstein met personally with Muskie, who was bitter about the whole affair and said he thought his family had been followed, but they couldn’t prove who was behind it.

In the end Nixon achieved his goal: George McGovern, considered too liberal to prevail in a general election, narrowly won the Democratic primary. Nixon’s camp also arguably succeeded at sowing discontent among the Democrats by creating the illusion of infighting using fake campaign materials aimed at “fellow Democrats”. The theory was that this would depress fundraising and voter enthusiasm. Just as they predicted, McGovern was too liberal for moderate voters, and Nixon won the election easily, with even 33% of registered Democrats voting for him.

It is of course possible that Nixon could have won the ‘72 election without these efforts, and it’s true that the Watergate break-in was likely unnecessary by the time it occurred. It probably wouldn’t have helped much even if it had been successful. But Nixon and his team had little reason to abandon the practices and mindset that had been successful throughout his entire career. He’d been known as Tricky Dick as far back as his 1950 Senate campaign, where he ran in both the Republican and Democratic primaries and was accused of representing himself as a Democrat to Democratic voters (he was a Republican Congressman at the time). He had won the ‘68 election after directly interfering in the Vietnam peace process as a private citizen, and the Democratic incumbents, despite knowing about this, chose not to reveal it to the public. After getting away with that, it must have seemed like they could get away with anything.

Many of the schemes of Nixon and his subordinates were completely impractical and never would have worked (How easy would it really have been to break into the Brookings Institute, locate a specific document, and ensure it’s the only copy of said document, all while the building is on fire?). Many others were unhelpful and directly counterproductive (they never found Ellsberg’s psychiatric file, but the break-in led to Ellsberg’s charges being dropped). But the common thread was that, until Watergate, they never faced any meaningful consequences. They always had the opportunity to try again. They considered clandestine operations such as these to be low-risk, medium-reward. Many of the plans didn’t work, for which they paid no penalty, but a few of them did work and may have pushed the needle on their campaigns.

Because the Watergate break-in—the thing they did get caught for—is the only thing people generally remember, many people see Nixon as almost a crazy person, who was doing pointless and illegal things to his own detriment. They think, therefore, that a more rational Nixon would decline to use these illegitimate campaign practices, since they would inevitably lead to his downfall. But it was far from inevitable. He had gone his whole career without paying a penalty for similar schemes. In the end it was mere luck that Frank Wills noticed the tape on the parking garage door, realized it was significant, and called the police. It was luck that the burglars weren’t notified in time to flee the scene. If the Republicans had held a majority in either the House or the Senate, investigations could have been delayed or might never have taken place. If Nixon hadn’t taped his own conversations, or had destroyed the tapes as soon as they were discovered, the truth of his involvement might never have been known.

The Changing Times v. Richard M Nixon

Was Nixon actually more corrupt than other politicians? That is, was it merely bad luck that he got caught? He certainly didn’t invent dirty politics. Nixon himself was plagued by a Democratic prankster named Dick Tuck (really) who had been playing political pranks on him since 1950. Former presidents had been no angels either. Lyndon Johnson, Nixon’s immediate predecessor, had won his 1948 Senate primary by only 87 votes, after 200 clearly fraudulent votes for Johnson had been hastily added at the end of the list in alphabetical order. Nixon had arguably abused the power of his office by ordering the IRS to audit his political enemies, but this had long been a practice of FDR and J. Edgar Hoover. JFK and his Attorney General (his brother RFK) approved FBI wiretaps for political reasons, including on Martin Luther King Jr.

The break-ins, the “black bag jobs”, also didn’t originate with Nixon. After Watergate, the Senate convened the Church Committee to investigate other possible intelligence abuses, and found that the FBI had conducted over 200 such black bag jobs between 1948 and 1966 for purposes such as photographing or seizing documents. Hoover nominally banned the practice in 1966, which was one of the reasons Nixon had to run his operations directly out of the White House.

There’s a sense in which we can never know if Nixon’s abuses were worse than those of other politicians, because only unsuccessful schemes tend to get recorded by history. Nixon became the most investigated president of all time, so it’s not surprising that we know of many of his crimes. Probably Nixon was somewhat worse: It seems unlikely that he and his underlings had hatched a below average number of secret plots. Unlike his predecessors, he was running his operations using campaign funding and White House staff and, perhaps stupidly, recording it all for posterity.

But in another sense, he was simply a victim of the changing times. Nixon was running an old political playbook in a new era, and the rules were starting to change. The investigations into the Watergate burglary and other Nixon and CRP activities were so great in scope that they likely couldn’t have been carried out a generation earlier. Prosecutors and newspaper reporters delved through troves of bank records, credit card histories, and phone call lists to determine who was in contact with who and where money was being sent. The Nixon White House itself kept more records than any previous administration, spurred by technical advances in mundane seeming things like electronic typewriters and Xerox photocopiers, and lost-to-time technologies like the “Dictabelt”, a short magnetic strip for recording audio notes after meetings. Nixon’s Oval Office recording system wasn’t the first taping system in the White House; there had been one as far back as FDR. But Nixon was the first to attempt to record nearly all of his White House conversations, and was able to do so partially because of improvements in the technology.

The Nixon White House was thus more legible to potential investigations than any previous administration, and investigators had more tools to do it. The Ervin Senate Committee had access to so many memos and notes from Nixon’s archives that they used a computer to track and cross-reference the information, a first in Congressional history. All this technical advance added up to an environment in which complex conspiracies could be unwound and understood, where previously this would have been nearly impossible. Even simple burglaries were getting harder to pull off as better locks, cameras, and security systems began to be used. Hunt and Liddy had previously planned to break into McGovern’s campaign headquarters, but abandoned the idea when they couldn’t figure out a way to get in the building undetected. Indeed, total burglaries in the US were beginning to decline around this time.

This is not to say that technology necessarily makes it harder to get away with political crimes overall. New technologies can help either the attackers or the defenders in such cases. Modern politicians (probably) no longer attempt to break into offices to steal documents because there are cameras everywhere. They (probably) don’t hire large numbers of in-person volunteers to spy on opposing campaigns, because it’s too likely that one of those people would leak the scheme to social media. At the same time, technological changes have opened up new possibilities in digital money laundering, social media astroturfing, and AI-generated fake images. The set of political tricks that succeed is continuously changing over time. Nixon’s problem was just that, by the 1970’s, his tricks were past their sell-by date.

A Falling Tide Lowers All Boats

Nixon had two secrets that he felt had to be kept from the public at all costs. First was the obvious: the campaign tricks, the break-ins, the wiretaps, the bribery. He had to hide all of the illegitimate methods he used to attain and retain power. And he was perfectly correct about the need to hide them: The public would have found these things unacceptable, and they would also seem unacceptable today. Indeed, when these secrets were revealed, he was removed from power, just as he always feared.

The second secret was that Nixon wasn’t much like the man he pretended to be. The presidency was seen as a kind of mythic, larger-than-life office, and Nixon tried to meet the public’s expectation of this, at least when people were watching. He had to do so in his personal life by appearing to be a family man who was religious, friendly, selfless, even-tempered, and had no apparent vices. He also had to try to live up to this standard in his public office by being dutiful, law-abiding, competent, well-spoken, and tirelessly engaged in improving the lives of the American people.

The release of the Oval Office transcripts and other revelations from the Watergate proceedings shattered this illusion for many. They revealed a President who used profanity constantly, drank too much, was often uninformed, sometimes apathetic about his job, indifferent to the rule of law, hateful towards vast swaths of the American people, and, incidentally, was covering up a criminal conspiracy. This was shocking to most people, even to some who knew him personally. They had only ever seen the carefully crafted persona of Nixon, the character he played on TV. One of his lawyers, Leonard Garment, later mused that “With the release of the transcripts Nixon had allowed America into the ugliness of his mind—as if he wanted the world to participate in the despoliation of the myth of presidential behavior. The transcripts were an invasion of the public’s privacy, of its right not to know.”

Watergate had pierced the veil of presidential exceptionalism. But, like the eventual failure of his toolkit of political tricks, the implosion of Nixon’s public persona was as much a result of the changing times as anything else. The public-private divide, the gap between how public figures present themselves and who they really are, was shrinking slowly over time. Nixon’s public appearances and television addresses were carefully sculpted political artifacts, created using a team of speechwriters and strategists. This was how he wanted to be perceived. But as the twentieth century progressed, the number of ways of finding out what someone was like behind closed doors was increasing. The likelihood of the public gaining knowledge of leaked memos, candid audio, compromising photographs, or simple gossip was increasing over time, making it harder and harder for public figures to hide their real personality from the people.

Nixon was the first major casualty of this changing reality, but the public-private divide was shrinking for everyone. Technology recorded more and more of people’s lives, and the media made it more legible to the public. Over time unsavory details came out about many public figures. But there was a compensatory effect: As people realized that certain types of wrongdoing were more common than they thought, the scandals started to seem less scandalous. When things like divorce, profanity, drug use, health problems, mild corruption, and extramarital affairs were easier to hide, the public disclosure of them was more damaging. But when such things started to be reported more and more frequently, the public outcry at each instance diminished.

Politics is a relative competition, and when voters realized that most people had at least some skeletons in their closet, they couldn’t demand moral perfection anymore: They still had to support someone. But as the public slowly lowered their expectations, the less ethical politicians were in a position to weather even more scandals, leading over time to further lowering of the public’s standards. This feedback loop brought more and more of the political class’s wrongdoing into the light, but simultaneously eroded the public’s ability to demand better behavior from them, amidst a growing sense that there just weren’t as many good options anymore.

The public-private divide is shrinking still. Not to literally nothing (people still have some secrets), but to much less than it was in Nixon’s time. Now everyone has a camera and video recorder in their pocket, more communication than ever is in searchable text formats, and many of people’s inner thoughts are published straight to social media. Sometimes you can see the feedback loop of changing standards happen in real time. When I joined Facebook in 2006, the common wisdom was that you couldn’t post any pictures with alcohol in them, because future employers would see this and wouldn’t hire you. A few years later, after we got used to having pictures of everyone’s private life posted publicly, it became obvious that most people sometimes drank, so no one expected you to hide this anymore. Similarly, tweets from politicians that would have been career-ending 20 years ago are now shrugged off: Lots of people say offensive or stupid things online, so this doesn’t shock us anymore. What modern people would be shocked by is how small the career-ending scandals used to be. McGovern’s running mate had to drop out of the race when the public found out he once underwent electroshock therapy for depression. Edmund Muskie’s presidential run was ended when it kind of looked like he was crying in the snow.

In some cases the narrowing of the public-private divide has been a good thing, such as when it destigmatized common mental health issues. It also made it much harder to keep Nixon’s first secret: Truly secret Nixonesque ratfucking operations had become harder to pull off. But it made keeping something like Nixon’s second secret, the secret of his character, less necessary over time. As we started to realize that our leaders weren’t the moral exemplars we used to think (or pretend) they were, we lowered our expectations for their future behavior as well. Unsurprisingly, some of them responded by behaving worse.

Value Alignment

Although the Watergate investigations were technically an example of our system of checks and balances working, they took enormous effort over two years to run their course, and their outcome was far from certain. If Nixon had held out hope for acquittal in the Senate, the trial was expected to take months and would tie up all three branches of government simultaneously. Fortunately he resigned first, and in the years that followed new laws were passed concerning governmental ethics, campaign finance, and presidential record-keeping, all to ensure that this exact kind of scandal couldn’t happen again.

This was of course a good thing. But checks and balances, especially against the executive branch, are a kind of last resort. They provide a modest disincentive for unscrupulous actors to seek power in the first place, and can be a messy political weapon to use against them in extreme circumstances. But they can’t be the first line of defense to save us from leaders that act in bad faith. The exact methods of viable corruption are changing constantly, and we can’t expect to legislate against the new ones ahead of time.

The older I get, the more I think that character matters. We’ll never be able to perfectly safeguard our political system from bad actors by specifying in advance every single thing that they’re not allowed to do. Our only real choice is to elect leaders of good character, who seem like they wouldn’t do corrupt things even when they have the opportunity. Nixon was not such a leader. He wasn’t the worst person in history, but he turned out to be far worse than we thought the US President should be. Watergate was, in essence, a long string of revelations that Nixon was willing to do anything he thought he could get away with to attain power and stay in power.

But in the grand scheme of things he actually couldn’t get away with that much, and so he spent most of his time playing the role of the president as he understood it. Parts of the job appealed to him personally: He thought that his foreign policy would be his legacy, and so he secured important victories in the opening of China and arms limitations with the Soviet Union. Domestic policy was less important to him, but he worked at it anyway because he thought that was what the public expected of him. It comes up now as a kind of trivia fact that “evil Nixon” was the one who oversaw the creation of the EPA and OSHA, expanded the Clean Air Act, ended the military draft, and even tried to implement an early kind of universal basic income. We know from his tapes that he personally held racist and antisemitic views, and that he hated hippies and Vietnam War protesters and much of the news media. But he was mindful of his image: He never said any of this in public, and he worked to help many of the people he personally disliked, because that was what he thought was demanded of the office. Today even many liberals remember Nixon’s presidency, Watergate aside, as being moderately positive.

Watergate precipitated the end of an era when many people saw the presidency as a special, almost sacred office. This likely would have happened over time anyway as the public-private divide continued to shrink and some other scandal came out, but Watergate changed perceptions quite suddenly. People lost the belief that their leaders were the virtuous people they pretended to be, and over time they stopped expecting them even to pretend.

We may have been better off when the public believed the myth. Nixon was no moral hero: He did his job exactly to the degree that he thought he needed to in order to maintain his power. But because of the high—actually the unrealistically high—public expectations of the office at the time, he often successfully did the job that the people elected him to do.

A modern Nixon would be less constrained by such public expectations, and possibly also less constrained by the law. Technology is changing the world faster than ever, and it’s probably harder than ever to constrain powerful bad actors through rules and regulations. We should still try, but there will always be loopholes. An important aspect of any successful political system, then, will be electing only people known to be of good character, those who aren’t looking for the loopholes.

This task is not impossible. Humans specifically evolved to evaluate each other’s actions and emotional states to infer their commitments to certain values, and thus predict their likely future actions. Of course, they also evolved to hide their emotional states to deceive others, but they usually aren’t successful at doing so over long periods of time. Nixon was a master politician, an expert in presenting himself a certain way to the public, and even he got caught.

Now, because of the continued shrinking of the public-private divide, we are in a better position to identify and reject future Nixons than we were in Nixon’s own time. But, paradoxically, we’ve also significantly lowered our ethical standards for elite behavior. This need not be the case. We now have more information than ever about the character of people who aspire to political power. We should stop ignoring it.

Endnotes

[1] Interviews for this piece were conducted “on background”, meaning that statements were on the record, but only on the condition that the sources of the information are not revealed.

[2] The main boring historian was Garrett Graff (sorry Garrett) and his “Watergate: A New History”. Also consulted were Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s “All the President’s Men” and Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s “The Final Days”.

It’s been too hot lately for soup, so instead I’ve been thinking about epistemology. As in, there’s a lot of people worried about AI’s potential effect on our ability to comprehend reality. This concern is only newish: Deepfakes have been around since 2017, and at the time a major concern was that no one would be able to distinguish real from fake images anymore. The internet would soon be awash in AI-generated political propaganda, celebrity nudes, and “proof” of UFO’s and conspiracy theories, confusing the hell out of the average person.

More recently, chatbot driven AI psychosis has been in the news. Some models have a tendency to flatter users and tell them whatever they want to hear, even when the users have clearly gone bananas. This has led to many anecdotes of previously normal people having their pet ideas reinforced and elaborated by chatbots to the point where they now believe they are the messiah, or that the AI is some kind of sentient god.

Further, even the most advanced AI’s are still prone to frequent hallucinations (a sentence that would have sounded like a bad sci-fi plot five years ago). In situations of uncertainty, they will make up plausible sounding but fake information, or cite fictitious sources. Sometimes they will pretend to have access to information they don’t, helpfully summarizing a book they haven’t read or that doesn’t exist.

But, at least so far, none of this has been a particularly big problem for societal epistemology. Fears that all political discourse would be derailed by literal fake images have turned out to be overblown. AI psychosis is a real and disturbing trend, but back-of-the-envelope estimates imply that it affects only 1 in 10,000 people, making it about 50x less common than schizophrenia. There have been some widely publicized cases of e.g. lawyers leaving AI hallucinations in court filings, but this feels more like people not knowing how to turn the cat filter off on Zoom than it does a reality-fraying crisis for the legal profession.

All of these things might be a larger problem in the future. But I fear we’re forgetting that we still haven’t really reckoned with our previous epistemological disaster: The internet. It’s hard to imagine now, but at the dawn of the web most people were optimistic that the widespread availability of information would make the average person more informed and more rational, improving the quality of our public discourse and our democracy. Few to no people think this now, so let’s ask the question: What went wrong?

Plausibly the answer lies in the sudden and enormous changes the internet imposed on the structure of our social graph, the network of information flow through society. This graph wasn’t exactly static prior to the internet, but it was a fairly slow-changing network of informational connections based largely on either in-person interactions or broadcast media. Information was generally transmitted via centralized media sources (newspapers, radio, TV) and was relayed outward towards the informational peripheries:

In the toy model above, nodes in the graph represent people, and arrows represent the flow of information. People here are divided into three broad groups: Researchers, communicators, and the populace. These groups differ with respect to their relationship with information: Researchers (think scientists or historians) are the people who collect or refine new knowledge. Communicators (think teachers or journalists) parse and transmit this information. And the populace is everyone not primarily engaged in the creation or transmission of information (think nurses or plumbers). Blue arrows are down-links, information flowing from a higher level to a lower level. Red arrows are up-links, from lower to higher, and black arrows are side-links, representing information flow within a level.

Some disclaimers on the model: I am aware that this is overly simplistic and that in reality there isn’t a literal hierarchy with clean breaks between layers. Scientists can and do write books for popular audiences. An investigative journalist is part researcher and part communicator. Perhaps a random member of the populace might craft novel soup recipes, and thus in some sense be a researcher. Anyone might be a member of any layer in some facet of their life. Still, I am going to handwave and say that something like this sort of represents information flow in the pre-internet society, so we can get on with the fun part: analyzing graph structure.

In this graph, most information flow is either within layer, or flows from a higher layer to a lower one. Researchers investigate “ground truth”, with information flowing from reality down to them. There is a lot of information flow between researchers as they compare and criticize each other’s ideas. Then there is information flow from researchers to communicators, who in turn have many side-links as they share information with each other. The communicators transmit information to the populace, and the populace primarily communicates with other members of the populace (that are geographically nearby).

Of course, even prior to the internet, information flow was more complicated than this neat story. There was some flow from the populace up to communicators and from communicators up to researchers, as well as some flow directly between researchers and the populace. It’s not depicted here, but everyone has at least some access to ground truth. But still, there is something like an information pseudo-hierarchy here, and the graph structure promotes a constraint on information that I think of as “trickle-down epistemology”.

That is: Much of the information that people receive has a total path in the graph back to the ground truth, and it was mostly relayed via nodes that had standards for what information they transmit. A random member of the populace had probably heard, for example, that there was a hole in the ozone layer, and that it was a problem, and that aerosol sprays were somehow to blame. They didn’t determine this themselves: They read about it in a newspaper, or heard about it from someone else who had. The newspaper writer got their information by interviewing a scientist about it, and the scientist got the information from direct experimentation.

This paradigm certainly wasn’t perfect. First of all, the researcher could have been wrong, and then everyone down the chain would be receiving wrong information. Further, at each link in the graph, the information can lose fidelity or be modified by the person transmitting it. Perhaps people who read about the ozone hole in the newspaper didn’t understand it and explained it wrong to their friends. Maybe the article didn’t even explain it correctly. But the graph of information flow at least gives the populace some assurance that information that reaches them mostly originated in reality, and was mostly transmitted to them by people who knew what they were talking about.

Now let us consider the way the graph changes after the internet and social media are available. These are the same nodes as before, but with different connections:

The first thing to notice about this new graph is that there are more total links, representing a real increase in the total amount of information flow. The internet made communication cheaper, so many new interactions occur that just wouldn’t have happened before (imagine a modern youtuber having to mail videotapes of their posts to subscribers).

There are also more red and blue links between the layers. We’re still showing the layers as distinct, but in fact they are much less so than in the previous graph. Members of the populace are receiving more information from communicators, but they’re also sending more information back (e.g., by arguing with them on twitter or in comments sections). Researchers are also communicating more directly with the public, and are more likely to hear back from them.

If you look at the populace level, geographic distinctions are flattening. Whereas previously most communication was between pseudo-cliques of people living near each other, now increasing amounts of information is flowing between these cliques to more distant areas. This also means that there are fewer local links between the populace, with more of their information coming from people farther away or from higher levels of the graph.

So far none of this is obviously bad. Maybe people are missing out on some in-person connections or local news, but they could be learning a lot by hearing more from people in distant places, or by reading more from various communicators and researchers. Journalists and scientists could potentially benefit from hearing more feedback from the public.

But if we zoom in on some individual nodes, we’ll start to see some concerns. Node A (bottom right) has a large out-degree (information going out) but a very low in-degree (information coming in). This person has become a sort of “influencer”: Despite not receiving much information themselves, they can now use the broadcast abilities of the internet to cheaply publish their content online. It is of course possible that this person is a lone genius, but they might just as easily be a conspiracy theorist.

Node B is also an aspiring influencer, with new side and up-links. They at least have more information coming in from various sources. Still, they are acting like a communicator, but potentially without the fact-checking standards or reputational stakes that come with being a professional journalist or educator. They cannot be fired for making egregious mistakes. In cases of anonymity they might not even be able to be blamed for them. Such a person might be spreading information in a beneficial way, but they might not.

Node C has become a kind of thought leader: A popular communicator that is widely read by both the populace and by researchers. Again, this could be very useful. But it also might be the case that this non-expert is so good at communicating (in some domain) that their content supplants that of experts who actually understand the subject matter better.

At the researcher level, nodes D and E have increased their total number of links, both within the researcher community, and with communicators and the populace. But they have done so at the expense of their links to ground truth, i.e., they no longer have time to do direct research. Even this isn’t provably bad: There were always some researchers who didn’t directly investigate reality, but merely synthesized information from other researchers. But you might worry in these new cases that they’re getting farther away from the ground truth, and might be spending all their time defending their existing opinions without examining any new evidence.

There are also some new structural problems unrelated to any particular node.

Because of the increase in total links, and especially because of the increase in up-links, there are more and longer information flow loops in the system. This means that information that reaches any particular node, even if it did begin in ground truth, possibly did so through a much longer total path. This is also not necessarily bad. At each node in the graph, information can theoretically be either degraded or improved before being passed on. And it was always possible to have arbitrarily long information pathways even in the pre-internet graph, although loops were more likely to have been within-level. Still, now with longer informational chains that are also more likely to repeatedly cross layers, you could be suspicious that more is being lost than gained here.

Also due to increased connectivity, information that was previously somewhat compartmentalized is going through a process of de-compartmentalization. Sometimes this is good: Some researcher somewhere probably already had an estimate of how prevalent sexual assault was, but it took the internet-enabled #metoo movement to make such information common knowledge. Similarly, various types of institutional dysfunction are more apparent to the public now than they were when it was easier to keep embarrassing information under wraps.

But some things were compartmentalized for a reason. Previously internal academic debates are spilling out into distant parts of the graph, potentially derailing discourse. If philosophers or policymakers want to seriously discuss a sensitive topic, they now have to fear this being picked up on social media and endlessly misconstrued based on out-of-context audio clips, to which they will feel forced to respond, and so on. Meanwhile, events that previously would have been a local news story can go viral and receive global coverage, with the unwanted attention often massively disrupting people’s lives. Members of the public are also increasingly expected to have detailed opinions about debates regarding highly publicized political or social issues, even when they have no expertise or even interest in that subject.

Finally, each node (person) has a limited amount of information they can consume (i.e., a maximum in-degree). In the pre-internet graph, nodes were farther from being information-saturated. Back then, people were capable of consuming more information, but it wasn’t easily available to them. In the modern graph, nodes are closer to information saturation, meaning the opposite is true for them: There is more cheap information available, but they are already near the maximum of what they can consume. Under these conditions, information has to “compete” for attention to a degree that it didn’t before.

Between the de-compartmentalization, longer information paths, and higher competitiveness for information, a new dynamic arises. The graph has become an evolutionary environment that puts selective pressure on information to be the right kind of information. In order to survive and propagate, information has to be a good meme. Accuracy and logical coherence are still positive memetic traits, but they are increasingly competing with other qualities like outrageousness, surprise, humor, simplicity, shareability, actionability, and sexiness. Some information that originated in ground truth is no longer attentionally grabby enough to survive and propagate through much of the graph. Worse, information that didn’t originate in ground truth, or was substantially modified somewhere in the middle of the graph, now is the right kind of meme to replicate its way through the nodes.

Under these conditions I worry that we’re moving from our trickle-down epistemology paradigm to something more like “memetically-evolved epistemology”. And while there was always a memetic component to culture, it was previously tempered to a larger degree by information flowing from reality. In the hyperconnected and more saturated modern network, evolutionary pressures operate over longer paths and larger areas of the graph, giving information the time and space to mutate into memes that are highly effective at spreading. In this new paradigm, unsexy information which happens to be true is often at a competitive disadvantage.

Most of these aren’t exactly novel concerns. Almost everyone is aware by now of problems caused by internet filter bubbles, social media attention hacking, conspiracy theory rabbit holes, clickbait, ragebait, etc. But most critical discourse on these issues focuses on blaming big tech companies and their evil algorithms. My purpose here is to emphasize that much of the societal and epistemological disruption caused by the internet is inherent to the way it restructured our informational graph. This would have caused major problems even if we were lucky enough to have non-evil tech companies with good algorithms.

Prior to the internet, it was natural to imagine that more communication was always better. In reality, we are now in a world where roughly 10% of Americans think the Earth is flat, or that vaccines “implant a microchip”, with younger people even more likely to believe such things. Depression and anxiety are up. Attention spans are down. In a hard-to-articulate way many people seem to have lost cognitive agency, their attention being batted from one meme to another by the network, with little conscious intent on their part.

Maybe all this shouldn’t have been so surprising. Imagine we were to radically increase the number of connections between neurons in a human brain, holding the number of neurons constant, but massively connecting areas that were previously distinct regions. I’m not sure exactly what would happen, but you wouldn’t predict this would improve the functioning of the organism. If it would, why didn’t evolution do that in the first place?

The pre-internet information graph wasn’t perfect and it didn’t arrive to us fully formed, but over time it had reached an equilibrium that was compatible with society more-or-less functioning. Links in the graph that tended to provide false, harmful, or irrelevant information were selectively pruned based on the judgments of the people they connected. But that process is slow and technological change is much faster now. It’s unclear if we’ll be able to keep up.

I’m not saying the internet is all bad, or that it will always be a net-bad. There are surely some people who are using it “well”, for whom it is beneficial to their understanding of reality. We’ve had social media for ~20 years and in this time we have learned to adjust a few connections in the graph, pruning some and promoting others. Community notes and volunteer moderators have the ability to correct or remove some of the more blatant misinformation from spreading. Wikipedia still seems to work somehow. It’s not necessarily hopeless.

But as we enter the AI era, I want us to remember that, far from having a forward-looking plan to deal with the next reality-warping technology, we are still reeling from the previous blow dealt to our epistemology by the internet.

Then again, maybe you shouldn’t listen to me. I’m just node A, after all.

Today we're doing a white chicken chili, which is one of my favorite ways to justify eating a whole block of cream cheese. I'll be doing this one in the crockpot on low, which will give me just enough time to listen to a classic 80,000 Hours episode with Daniel Ellsberg. This one's from a few years ago but I put it back in my queue when I heard he’d died (at the age of 92).

If you've heard of him it's probably because he was the pentagon papers guy in the '70s, but he came on the podcast because he'd written a new book about his real passion: nuclear weapons. As in, he's worried about them. His main concern is that the US and Russia are both acting as if a nuclear war is "winnable", ignoring the fact that neither side can “win” a nuclear war because of the global famine that would be caused by nuclear winter. He also says that we have far more weapons than are needed for deterrence. And he thinks the land-based ICBM's are a particular liability since their locations are all known to the Russians.

The history here is interesting: The reason we have underground silos in the first place is that in the 1950s and '60s the Russians had powerful nuclear bombs, but their missile guidance systems weren't very accurate. A hardened underground silo couldn't be destroyed by anything but a direct hit, so our missile launch capability was fairly safe. But over time both US and Russian guidance systems got better to the point where even the underground silos weren't safe anymore, meaning they could be destroyed by a nuclear first strike.

In a crisis, this can put enormous time pressure on the president to decide whether or not to retaliate with our land-based missiles, since it's use it or lose it; they might only have five to ten minutes to decide whether to launch the missiles before they are presumably destroyed. This increases the likelihood of catastrophic accidents: If our early warning systems are imperfect (they are), a false alarm could lead to us launching our weapons needlessly, causing a full nuclear retaliation. This has almost happened numerous times, such as in 1979 when NORAD incorrectly informed our national security adviser that hundreds of Soviet missiles were headed to the United States, and in 1983 when a Soviet satellite warning system incorrectly reported that US missiles were headed toward Russia.

Each such crisis was averted in time, but the point is they didn't have much time before the land-based launch capability might have been lost. By contrast, our submarine-launched missiles are comparatively safe: Since their locations are secret, they're not vulnerable to a first strike. This gives us more time to decide whether or not to launch, and is therefore less prone to such an accident. Since we have plenty of submarine-launched nuclear weapons for deterrence, Ellsberg suggests that not only do we have no use for the land-based missiles, but that they're actually making us less safe.

Why then, do we still have them? Ellsberg gives two reasons. First, a standard military-industrial complex explanation: A lot of money goes into building and maintaining the bombs and the delivery systems, representing a lot of peoples' jobs, a lot of companies' profits, and a lot of congresspersons' districts. Once we started building them, there was a large economic and political incentive to just keep going.

But he also gives another, more game theoretic reason: Since there's no rational reason to have them, keeping them around makes us seem crazy. A perfectly rational United States would never launch their missiles first, because they know the counterattack would destroy everything. A rational actor would only keep enough missiles as needed for deterrence, for which our submarine-launched missiles would suffice. But the fact that we have so many missiles, including a large number of highly vulnerable land-based ones at known locations, signals to other nations that we aren't a perfectly rational actor.

A rational America couldn't use its nuclear weapons for leverage to extract concessions from our enemies, since they know we aren't crazy enough to use them. But a crazy leader, or even one with a small probability of being crazy, could credibly threaten use of such weapons to get other countries to fall in line. This logic is associated with the “madman theory”, a phrase coined by Richard Nixon himself. Now, Ellsberg admits, as many disarmament proponents would not, that there is at least some advantage to being seen as threatening in this way. But, he stresses, that advantage is not worth the risk.

The expected value calculation of this strategy must compare the upside, which is various small diplomatic concessions, to the probability of the downside, which is the destruction of our society and the killing of nearly everyone on earth. And the downside isn't unlikely: A 2008 survey of catastrophic risk experts puts the probability of nuclear war in the 21st century (that kills at least 1 billion people) at 10%, and a 2024 RAND study concludes that “estimates that a nuclear war will occur during the 21st century vary from negligible to greater than 80%”. We can meaningfully reduce this risk by eliminating our land-based silos, even unilaterally. But since the downside seems very abstract, we prefer to look menacing and unpredictable on the world stage, even though the benefits of doing so are not very large.

The current administration seems particularly prone to this kind of thinking. We are now in the middle of a trade war which consists of a hard-to-follow regime of proposed tariffs, postponements, counter-tariffs, name-calling, boycotts, and a general loss of goodwill. This all adds up to a sort of madman theory of international trade. Economists broadly agree that tariffs, especially nonspecific ones, end up harming the economy by forcing inefficient allocation of labor and capital. A rational leader therefore would never employ them because it's not in their nation's self-interest. But a crazy-seeming leader could use the threat of them to extract concessions from trade partners.

We should, like Ellsberg, admit that there could in theory be at least some benefit to having the ability to make such threats. We are getting at least nominal concessions from Mexico and Canada on immigration and drug trafficking. But, like in the ICBM case, those concessions are small or symbolic, and the harms from the trade war will be real and large. There are the direct harms of higher prices borne by American consumers. But there are also the indirect harms of the loss of trust by our longtime trade partners, and the possible restructuring of global supply chains to increasingly exclude the United States. These harms are hard to quantify, but in expected value they likely dwarf any benefits.

We are also now implying that we won't defend certain NATO allies unless they "pay up". Some countries like Estonia and Poland exceed the 2% of GDP which is the NATO military spending target, but others like Spain and Italy fall well short of it. Because of this, we now say we are justified in abandoning our Article 5 obligation to come to their collective defense. Again, this madman theory of alliances works at least a little: European countries really are stepping up to spend more on defense. But the harm to the alliance is enormous.

Loss of faith in NATO’s bedrock principle of collective defense renders it substantially less effective at deterrence, making everyone, including the US, less secure. Uncertainty about future NATO protection also seems likely to lead to new arms races and nuclear proliferation, a major dynamic that NATO exists to prevent in the first place. Put another way, there has been a long-term trend since WWII of reducing global military expenditures as a percentage of world GDP, but total defense spending is just now starting to creep up again. It would be a real failure of coordination if this trend reverses after decades of relative peace.

At the same time, we are now firing tens of thousands of federal workers, seemingly at random, sometimes without realizing what those workers did, sometimes attempting to rehire them the next day or after courts deem the firings illegal. The administration is proceeding here at lightning speed, as if they know it must be done before finding out what those workers do, or they'll lose their nerve. The ostensible purpose of doing this, to balance the budget, seems implausible. The government is also planning sweeping new tax cuts, firing the IRS workers needed to collect any money, and has in any event spent more money so far than it did over the equivalent period last year. And if the goal is merely to shrink the size of the federal government, why do it so haphazardly?

The real reason seems to be simply to communicate vindictiveness and capriciousness to the remaining federal workforce as a tactic to cow them into compliance. It will be much harder to speak out against immoral, stupid, or illegal executive actions when everyone knows they can be fired at a moment's notice. This may seem like a kind of political victory to a White House that wants absolute control over the federal agencies, but the cost of all this will be very high, even from their perspective. Thousands of Americans have lost their jobs, and many more are unsure if or when they will lose their jobs. Workers are angry, and much of the usually nonpolitical federal workforce now seems galvanized against the executive. In the likely event that the chaos caused by all this causes any new problems, and those problems eventually have to be fixed at the taxpayer's expense, it's not obvious that this will even save any money in the long run.

In 1988, economist Robert Frank wrote a classic book examining the game theory and evolution of human emotions. Emotions, he explains, serve as commitment devices that allow us to credibly communicate to others that we will behave in a certain way, even when it would be "unopportunistic" in the present moment.

For example, if Alice experiences strong guilt about lying, she can be expected to be honest even in situations where honesty isn't in her interest. If this tendency toward honesty is recognized by others, either through visible signs of her emotions or from her reputation, then she can benefit from positive interactions with people who would not otherwise have been able to trust her. Similarly if Bob is a vengeful person, someone known to be prone to anger, he can be expected to act punitively toward others in response to real and perceived slights, even when this results in violence that would harm him too. This can be, and often is, disastrous. But it can also be broadly rational in the sense that Bob's reputation for retributiveness can deter cheating against him and allow him to gain concessions from others who might fear violence.

Frank also discusses the possibility of strategically pretending to have a certain emotion: "If there are genuine advantages in being vengeful or trustworthy and being perceived as such, there are even greater advantages in appearing to have, but not actually having, these qualities." This, in essence, is the basis of the madman strategy. That is, we'd like to have our reputational cake and eat it too. We'd like to have others think we are honest, but still be able to keep the money we find in a wallet in an empty parking lot. Nixon would like to attain the benefits of seeming irrational to his adversaries (such as a stronger bargaining position), while secretly being too rational to suffer the risks (such as the harms from actually following through on his threats in a way that might lead to war).

Could such a strategy work? In theory, yes, but it's worth remembering that Nixon's madman strategy wasn't particularly successful. His canonical example was wanting the North Vietnamese to think he was so crazy that they'd sue for peace, which they didn't. Often Nixon incurred the risks of appearing irrational while still not receiving the purported benefit.

To wit: In October of 1969, he ordered the Pentagon to come up with options to substantially increase US military readiness in a way that would be detected by the Soviet Union, but could be kept secret from the American public. The result was Operation Giant Lance, wherein the US loaded thermonuclear weapons onto B-52 bombers and flew them in ellipses around the north pole, straying close to Soviet airspace. No one, not even the military officers in charge of the operation, were informed of the reasons for doing this, but later interviews of officials in the White House showed that the purpose was to put pressure on the USSR to end the war in Vietnam.

Although Nixon ordered the operation to be "safe", there were still real risks. It was opposed by his own secretary of defense as too dangerous, and indeed later review showed that the bombers were sometimes flown dangerously close together. Further, while the Soviet Union was aware of the US increased readiness posture, there is no evidence that they understood it had anything to do with Vietnam, and they were in any event distracted by a serious border conflict with China. In short, Nixon neither ate nor had his cake.

But Nixon was at least self-aware enough to conceive of seeming to be a madman as an intentional strategy. The fact that he explicitly intended to look irrational to his enemies implies that he understood that the president appearing to be angry and irrational might be beneficial, but the president actually being angry and irrational would not.

Our current leaders are deploying what appear to be madman strategies left and right, not against our enemies but against ourselves and our allies, and the madness might not be feigned. One could debate how well-suited anger is to even an individual in our modern society, but it's certainly not well designed to direct policy at the scale of nations. States and state institutions don't necessarily respond like individuals, and often foreign leaders cannot give up demanded concessions, even if they wanted to, because of domestic political pressure. Thus, threatening various kinds of brinkmanship every time a foreign leader shows insufficient gratitude, or in some cases, refuses to be annexed, will lead to a world permanently on the brink.

Could this really all be for show? Maybe behind closed doors they really are thinking carefully about this and have determined that this is all in the nation's best interests? Insider accounts of the 2017-era White House do not bode well for this hypothesis, and we have every reason to expect the level of competence, comprehension and carefulness to be lower this time around. The madman strategy never worked very well, but every day it looks more and more like this isn't even a strategy. It looks like impulsive, emotional, and reactive decision-making on the national and international stage. The current administration is modifying America's reputation toward one of a country that is angrier, less cooperative, and less trustworthy. There have been many attempts to reverse engineer some kind of underlying strategy behind all of the recent contradictory actions. But really, isn't the current chaos exactly what we would expect if there was no strategy at all?

Meanwhile, the missiles still sleep in their silos. We seem quite far from a world in which we perform sober cost-benefit analyses to determine the net outcomes of our national strategies, and farther still from a world in which our leaders pay attention to them. Daniel Ellsberg died in June 2023 of pancreatic cancer. In a final interview, he concludes saying "...my work of the past 40 years to avert the prospects of nuclear war has little to show for it. But I wanted to say that I could think of no better way to use my time and that as I face the end of my life, I feel joy and gratitude." I'm sure gonna miss Daniel Ellsberg.

• 1-1/2 lbs boneless skinless chicken thighs

• 1 yellow onion, diced

• 1-1/2 tablespoons minced garlic (about 3 cloves? I don’t know we cheat and use the stuff from a jar)

• 4 cups chicken broth

• 1 (15 oz) can black beans, drained and rinsed

• 1 (15 oz) can pinto beans, drained and rinsed

• 2 (4 oz) cans diced green chiles (1 hot, 1 mild)

• 1 (10 oz) can Rotel diced tomatoes with green chiles, (don't drain)

• 1 (15 oz) can corn, drained

• 1-1/2 tsp cumin

• 1 tsp chili powder

• 1 tsp onion powder

• 1 tsp salt

• 1/2 tsp black pepper

• 1 tsp oregano

• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (or up to 1 tsp if you hate yourself)

• 8 oz cream cheese, softened and cubed

• 1/4 cup half and half

• Sliced jalapeños (for topping)

• Sour cream and/or shredded cheese (for topping)

• Wonton strips (trust me about this)

Instructions

1. Pan-fry the chicken thighs, about 5 minutes per side on medium heat (you can skip this step if you want, we're just slightly paranoid)

2. Place chicken thighs on the bottom of the crockpot

3. Add diced onion, minced garlic, beans, corn, green chiles, and Rotel tomatoes

4. Pour in the 3-1/2 cups (almost all) of the chicken broth

5. Add the seasonings: cumin, chili powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, oregano, and cayenne pepper

6. Stir to combine

7. Cover and cook on low for 6 hours (or on high for 3-4 hours), until chicken is tender

8. Remove chicken and shred with two forks, then return to the pot

9. Add cream cheese and half and half. Stir until cream cheese is fully melted, about 15 minutes

10. If the chili is now too thick you can add some of the extra chicken broth as needed

11. Serve hot and top with jalapeños, sour cream, shredded cheese, wonton strips

12. Try to eat the soup before my cat does (he is in your house somehow)