I'm not sure I fully understand what you're pointing to, but you might be interested in 80k's profile on Stable Totalitarianism or this recent piece from Forethought on AI-Enabled Coups.

Thanks for writing this up! It's great to know what [doesn't] work, and kudos for doing so much outreach!

This is great, I'm glad you're doing it.

Let us act as if this emergency is real.

Banger

Sure, but I just genuinely don't know what you are complaining about here. I can make a few guesses but it seems better to just ask what you mean.

Why do you think we were too ready to trust them? Are you implying that they later violated what Jaime says here?

Not to my knowledge. I agree with your point that maybe it's just too soon to see any results (this is why I put "yet" in the title).

I've been trying to think about what a good prediction market for this post would be, because I'd like to get some signal on whether this is the explanation - any thoughts? Maybe something like "if I run this exact same analysis one year from now, will at least two 2024 batch companies be on the list of 20 fastest 2-year growth YC startups?"

Ah ok thank you! I removed them from the list.

He's been saying the same thing for a while. E.g. here:

back in the day when we were working with companies you know what was sort of a aspirational growth rate what would we tell people to try to do week on week. Well 10% week on week is is an amazing metric to hit yeah and I think back then if uh you were like maybe the top one or two you know maybe even the top one or two companies in the whole batch you'd be able to achieve that. And since summer of last year the wildest thing is realizing that uh both summer and fall [2024] batch in aggregate on average over the batch in 12 weeks average 10% week on week growth so not just the very best the Airbnb of the batch but the batch overall 

I will add this as a footnote to clarify though, thanks for pointing it out!

How much could the DOGE cuts reasonably have been prevented? And would the prevention there even have been politics-shaped (vs. e.g. being friends with Musk)?

I have some sense that getting a bunch of congresspeople to feel more positively about foreign aid would have done ~0 to block these cuts (unless the congressperson was really willing to die on the foreign aid hill), but I'm not sure.