Worst President Ever
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
- Trump ranked as worst president https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/20/presidents-ranking-trump-biden-list?
- George W Bush the worst president ever https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/george-w-bush-the-worst-president-in-history-192899/
- The Secretary Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive
Fraser McGruer:Engineering Podcast, brought to you by Aleph Insights and
Fraser McGruer:produced by me, Fraser McGruer. On this podcast, we take a look
Fraser McGruer:at a wide range of topics, and today, we'll be asking the
Fraser McGruer:question, Is Donald Trump the worst president ever?
Fraser McGruer:It's been a while since I've seen you. It's very nice to see
Fraser McGruer:you again. Here we go, right? Nick, Donald Trump, worst
Fraser McGruer:president ever, yeah.
Nick Hare:Well, as you know, we don't, we're not a political
Nick Hare:podcast. We don't have an opinion about whether Donald
Nick Hare:Trump is any good. But according to the famously unbiased source,
Nick Hare:the guardian in 2024 mind you. So discussing his first term,
Nick Hare:Donald Trump finished 45th and bottom of a list ranking US
Nick Hare:presidents by greatness. And I think his list was compiled by a
Nick Hare:bunch of, again, famously unbiased academics and people
Nick Hare:like that. Yeah, probably from Harvard, yeah, that kind of
Nick Hare:thing. So according to them, here's but let me tell you what
Nick Hare:the Rolling Stone magazine said in 2006 George W Bush, the worst
Nick Hare:president in history. Many historians are now wondering
Nick Hare:whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst
Nick Hare:president in all of American history. So, and I recall, I
Nick Hare:still remember the 80s, when I recall my parents and their
Nick Hare:right on friends talking about Ronald Reagan and how utterly
Nick Hare:dreadful he was compared to the great presidents of the past and
Nick Hare:so well, the question is, how do we make sure we're not just sort
Nick Hare:of being biassed by recent events. And, you know, how can
Nick Hare:we tell if, if our judgement that something it seems uniquely
Nick Hare:bad, is actually correct, but, but just before we tackle that
Nick Hare:sort of general question, just looking at presidential ratings,
Nick Hare:which actually is something relatively objective, in the
Nick Hare:sense that they're just measures of you know what is? What's the
Nick Hare:average approval rating of every president during the course of
Nick Hare:their term? Donald Trump is, in fact, lowest, well, at least of
Nick Hare:all presidents since the 1950s and Kate, would you like to
Nick Hare:guess who's top? It's quite an easy one. I think Obama. No no,
Nick Hare:it's going to be Obama's mid, mid range, Roosevelt, Abraham
Nick Hare:Lincoln, no, is since the fifth, oh, sorry, since the 50s. Oh,
Nick Hare:Abraham Lincoln, then not those 50s. Since the 50s. I think this
Nick Hare:is quite easy, if you think about probably it's somewhere
Nick Hare:never got a chance, really. Yeah, Kennedy's at the top by a
Nick Hare:long, long shout, and then it's Dwight Eisenhower, remarkably,
Nick Hare:George H W Bush, I suspect, yeah, and so, but so according
Nick Hare:to that right, according just looking at the ratings, average
Nick Hare:ratings for their term, and sorry, was that Trump did come
Nick Hare:lower. Sorry, did you say that's average approval ratings during
Nick Hare:Yeah, so in other words, you said, average out their approval
Nick Hare:throughout their term, and and just looking at that number,
Nick Hare:Trump's at the bottom, and Kennedy is very much at the top,
Nick Hare:bit of an outliner outlier. So, so there we are. So it is. Can
Nick Hare:we therefore conclude that Donald Trump is indeed going to
Nick Hare:go down in history as the worst president ever.
Fraser McGruer:Okay, so I mean, one of the things I think of,
Fraser McGruer:first of all, is how useful are ratings in terms of an actual
Fraser McGruer:judgement, because opinions change about people over time.
Fraser McGruer:That's the first sort of thing that I think of. But anyway,
Fraser McGruer:it's not me answering this, it's you guys. So where do we start
Fraser McGruer:with this? Chris, what are your thoughts? What have
Chris Wragg:you got on this? Well, I think there's a specific
Chris Wragg:issue with with Donald Trump, and the perception of Donald
Chris Wragg:Trump, which is one of the reasons why Donald Trump is
Chris Wragg:viewed as a bad president. And that's really like if you look
Chris Wragg:at his phraseology, it's kind of at the level of a a playground
Chris Wragg:child. His eloquence is very low, and I think that's what a
Chris Wragg:lot of people would say they talk about the weave, and is
Chris Wragg:really him being pretty inarticulate and and not trying
Chris Wragg:to hide that fact. And I think so for a lot of people, I think
Chris Wragg:there's this sort of connection, maybe a dubious connection,
Chris Wragg:between eloquence and intelligence and ability to
Chris Wragg:lead, and I think Donald Trump is uniquely bad at that,
Chris Wragg:whereas, if you look at his antithesis, somebody like Obama,
Chris Wragg:exactly, Obama was highly eloquent and viewed by lots of
Chris Wragg:the intelligentsia as Being an excellent president. So I think
Chris Wragg:this, there's this conflation going on between ability to
Chris Wragg:articulate oneself and ability to preside.
Fraser McGruer:Yeah, I think there's an interesting thing
Fraser McGruer:there about, you know, can intelligent, clever people be
Fraser McGruer:wrong? Unthinkable.
Nick Hare:Yeah. And well, and also it does. How much does that
Nick Hare:actually matter when you're being a president? Because the
Nick Hare:thing is, I think what people miss, well, particularly kind
Nick Hare:of, you know, anti, anti Trump, people miss, is that, yeah, he
Nick Hare:isn't very eloquent, but he's very good at kind of reading the
Nick Hare:room. I mean, there's something quite impressive about him, and
Nick Hare:the way that he, he kind of manages a crowd. And, you know,
Nick Hare:I'm not saying any of that is conscious. I mean, I suspect
Nick Hare:it's just a sort of accident or something that he has learned to
Nick Hare:do, but he's good at something when it comes to well, and if
Nick Hare:you look at his what it isn't is, is spinning an excellent off
Nick Hare:the cuff phrase. I mean, you can't really imagine him
Nick Hare:delivering a speech
Chris Wragg:and about his sort of his debate performance in the
Chris Wragg:original set of primaries and then against Hillary Clinton,
Chris Wragg:when he was, you know, elected for his first term. There, there
Chris Wragg:are some very sort of famous asides that he, that he makes,
Chris Wragg:that are considered to be kind of quick, quick with but they
Chris Wragg:are. They are not. They're not high Brower sides, you know,
Chris Wragg:they're,
Nick Hare:they're and, I mean, that's all of a piece with him,
Nick Hare:and his appeal in general, yeah, is what you'd expect. Yeah,
Nick Hare:yeah. And I think, you know, there's something Republican
Nick Hare:presidents are supposed to be hokey, you know, they're
Nick Hare:supposed to be kind of common, the common man, I know, yeah,
Nick Hare:that's sort of so you get your you know, Bush was the same,
Nick Hare:Reagan was the same. You know, they're not meant to come out
Nick Hare:with intellectual things that sound like you're a history
Nick Hare:professor from Harvard. That's the job of Democrat presidents,
Nick Hare:isn't it? So that's right, but, but anyway, I mean, look, I
Nick Hare:think, I think the problem we really want to talk about is,
Nick Hare:how do we know how much of that is our immediate investment in
Nick Hare:the kind of low recent local political situation? So how much
Nick Hare:of the reaction that people have to Trump and their judgement
Nick Hare:that he's the worst president ever, how much of that is is
Nick Hare:based on some on a kind of objective judgement of the kind
Nick Hare:that you might be able to have about a 19th century president,
Nick Hare:and how much of it is merely recency, you know, that's,
Nick Hare:that's, that's really the question I think we want to look
Nick Hare:at because, you know, this is, this crops up all the time,
Nick Hare:right? You this common pattern of, I come along and say that
Nick Hare:here is something that's kind of uniquely bad and terrible and
Nick Hare:needs to be dealt with. And then, you know, the flip side of
Nick Hare:that argument is, well, people have said that in the past. It's
Nick Hare:what they said about George W Bush, what they said about
Nick Hare:Reagan, you know, or I come along and say, Look, you know,
Nick Hare:global warming is going to destroy the world. And you go,
Nick Hare:Well, that's what they said about acid rain and global
Nick Hare:cooling and the population. Why should we listen Yeah, why
Nick Hare:should we listen to you? And so we have this, this common
Nick Hare:pattern that you get of this is uniquely bad and terrible, and
Nick Hare:we've got to do something about it versus but uniquely bad and
Nick Hare:terrible things, according to people like you, happen all the
Nick Hare:time. So one side is saying, you know, you're being alarmist, and
Nick Hare:the other side is saying you're being complacent. And how do we
Nick Hare:make sure? Because you know people are wrong. Intelligent
Nick Hare:people are wrong. You know, you think of like the Yeah, Paul
Nick Hare:Ehrlich's Population Bomb, 1968 well now you know. And now, of
Nick Hare:course, everyone's being alarmist about population
Nick Hare:collapse. So how do we, how do we know whether we should be
Nick Hare:scared of something, or whether we should say, Yes, this is
Nick Hare:actually uniquely terrible, versus how much are we going to
Nick Hare:go, Well, you know what? In the morning, it'll look different.
Nick Hare:So let's say that we, that a lot of people in the US think that
Nick Hare:Donald Trump is this kind of, you know, once in a lifetime,
Nick Hare:threat to democracy, to democratic institutions, and you
Nick Hare:know, he's going to impose martial law on the US. He's
Nick Hare:going to try and run for a third term. It's going to become his
Nick Hare:personal dictatorship. It does seem to be trying. So that's
Nick Hare:what a lot of people perceive, you know, and well, but
Nick Hare:obviously, you know. And so the question is, Well, should we do
Nick Hare:something about that? How much should should we believe that
Nick Hare:that's true? And therefore, how much should we, you know,
Nick Hare:resist? How much effort should we put into resisting that which
Nick Hare:is not dissimilar from, you know, this question of, well,
Nick Hare:what do we how much effort should we put into preventing
Nick Hare:climate change, because, you know, yeah, well, this is all
Nick Hare:doom and gloom, but at the same time, that's what they said
Nick Hare:about, you know, the ozone layer, and that seems to have
Nick Hare:fixed itself, admittedly, thanks to human intervention. But, you
Nick Hare:know, you get the idea it's like, okay, well, how do I know
Nick Hare:how alarmed to be when it's of kind of battle between the
Nick Hare:alarmists and the complacentists in general. Is there a general
Nick Hare:pattern of better thought that we should use to try and solve
Nick Hare:that problem?
Chris Wragg:Yeah, and I think there's a, I think there's a
Chris Wragg:second sort of factor about judgement to do with judging
Chris Wragg:things in your own time, and that. It's not only that you you
Chris Wragg:get these, these emotional you know, when you're judging things
Chris Wragg:in your own time, you are affected by them, and so you
Chris Wragg:have an emotional response to them. So it's easier to be
Chris Wragg:objective about something that's 100 years ago than it is
Chris Wragg:something today, right? But I think also that the second
Chris Wragg:factor that means time is a factor when, when, sort of
Chris Wragg:considering whether something's good or bad, is that, over the
Chris Wragg:course of that time, what is good or bad changes according
Chris Wragg:to, you know, cultural standards. So, you know, you
Chris Wragg:take somebody like Washington, who you know, is still perceived
Chris Wragg:to be a great president, obviously, but you bring in
Chris Wragg:factors like slave ownership, or, you know, other sort of
Chris Wragg:positions that he took that are now totally unpalatable because
Chris Wragg:of the shift of what is considered to be, you know,
Chris Wragg:okay, by today's standards, what's what's good by today's
Chris Wragg:standards as a president, is partially subjective. There are
Chris Wragg:certain things where you can say, yes, okay,
Nick Hare:I feel like not owning slaves is probably a
Nick Hare:right, probably something that some of the voters are going to
Nick Hare:look for. Yeah, right, exactly,
Fraser McGruer:which also beggars the question how the
Fraser McGruer:Confederacy won the war right? The end of civil war, let's say
Fraser McGruer:yeah. And let's say there were, had they won? Yeah, right. Let's
Fraser McGruer:say that. So you ended up with two Americas. Let's say in the
Fraser McGruer:South. I'm guessing that Abraham Lincoln would probably be
Fraser McGruer:thought of being a bad president, probably. I think he
Fraser McGruer:is, in some ways, some but that's what ties into this
Fraser McGruer:thing. I'm sort of labouring the point there, really. But you
Fraser McGruer:know, the context changes.
Chris Wragg:Yeah, yeah. So, so I guess what I'm saying is, not,
Chris Wragg:not only do we have to aim off for the emotional aspect of the
Chris Wragg:near term versus the longer term in the past, there's also a
Chris Wragg:change in values that occurs, which then, you know, you assess
Chris Wragg:things differently.
Fraser McGruer:So that's helps us with this sort of ratings,
Fraser McGruer:real time ratings, as it were, that sort of helps answer that
Fraser McGruer:sort
Nick Hare:of question. But it also, I mean, it suggests that
Nick Hare:it's not dissimilar to that question of like, would you, you
Nick Hare:know, would you take a pill that changed your your preferences
Nick Hare:and made you, you know, want to desert your family, and you run
Nick Hare:off with a supermodel and you know. And then you actually, you
Nick Hare:might just, you know, you might enjoy that if you took that
Nick Hare:pill, you wouldn't, then care that you've done that, but you
Nick Hare:now do care about that. And so like, let's say someone observes
Nick Hare:that. Well, if we, if we leave Trump running, and he runs for
Nick Hare:another two terms, you know, we will all start to accept that
Nick Hare:America looks like Trump's America, and kids will grow up
Nick Hare:and think it's normal, and people will stop caring about
Nick Hare:they'll go, yeah, I remember when we had those annoying
Nick Hare:democratic institutions that were slowing everything down
Nick Hare:and, like, really getting in the way and gumming up our ability
Nick Hare:to govern properly, you know. So you might observe that, well,
Nick Hare:we, you know, we, we actually won't care in the future as much
Nick Hare:as we think we care now. So perhaps that's that, you know,
Nick Hare:that's an argument in favour of the complacency people is that,
Nick Hare:well, you know, even though, actually, yes, us now care about
Nick Hare:this, us in the future will just accept it well. And I suppose
Nick Hare:you can make a similar argument. I think some economists have
Nick Hare:made the same argument about about global warming. It's like,
Nick Hare:well, we actually will just adapt to it. And, yeah, it'll be
Nick Hare:a bit chaotic to begin with, but in 100 years time, you know,
Nick Hare:it'll just be hotter, and we'll have, will have got
Peter Coghill:used to it, yeah, we're quite growing our grapes
Peter Coghill:in in Surrey, yeah.
Chris Wragg:But, I mean, there's a, there's a parallel,
Chris Wragg:I'm not a sort of Stark here, but, you know, famously terrible
Chris Wragg:Roman leader Julius Caesar, obviously changed the foundation
Chris Wragg:of of the Republic, you know, and subsequent to that, while
Chris Wragg:people complained about the sort of erosion of democratic
Chris Wragg:institutions, arguably, you know, Rome's power grew after
Chris Wragg:that. But nobody looks back. And really, you know, when you think
Chris Wragg:of Caesar, 90% of people don't think about what he did to Roman
Chris Wragg:institutions. Do they close out the territory
Peter Coghill:confident and the and this sort of the the getting
Peter Coghill:used to the normalisation of the new bad. Kind of assumes that
Peter Coghill:there is a continuum of bad, bad scale you can slide Exactly.
Peter Coghill:There might be things like global warming and other and
Peter Coghill:catastrophic, you know, not necessarily, but sort of
Peter Coghill:systemic changes in government and things can actually be a
Peter Coghill:sort of threshold beyond which change happens very much more
Peter Coghill:rapidly. So it might be. That when you're plumbing the depths
Peter Coghill:of the bottom, you sort of fall off a cliff, rather than just
Peter Coghill:keep finding new depths of it, yeah, so it
Nick Hare:might be that the barrel is five times deeper than
Nick Hare:you thought.
Peter Coghill:Yeah. You suddenly fall off a shelf down
Peter Coghill:into a
Unknown:cloth, a cliff, yeah, under a barrel, yeah?
Peter Coghill:So, you know, so it might be that Trump's seeming
Peter Coghill:efforts to dissolve the institutions of democracy, if
Peter Coghill:he, if he succeeds, means that they can't, you can't, then
Peter Coghill:climb back out of that anymore. And global warming gets to a
Peter Coghill:point where the the the Gulf Stream shuts off, and we're
Peter Coghill:stuck in a localised Ice Age in the north in North Europe,
Peter Coghill:Northern Europe. So there's like, it's yeah, it's not.
Peter Coghill:Things aren't continuous, yeah, in complex systems,
Fraser McGruer:we are. So where are we with this? At the moment,
Fraser McGruer:we've,
Nick Hare:well, we haven't mentioned the secretary problem,
Nick Hare:which is not dissimilar to this kind of thing, where you're
Nick Hare:trying to form some judgement or adopt some strategy of sort of
Nick Hare:trying to work out you don't know how good or bad things can
Nick Hare:get, and you're trying to work out how you know good or bad.
Nick Hare:The current situation is, say, Yeah, and you haven't you know
Nick Hare:that you've only got a limited sample. Well the so the
Nick Hare:secretary problem, the idea is you've got to choose a secretary
Nick Hare:for a number of candidates. You, let's say, you know, there's
Nick Hare:going to be 100 candidates. You're going to see them all,
Nick Hare:one off the other, and you can tell how good they are when they
Nick Hare:walk in and and your job is to work out, or at least, maximise
Nick Hare:your chances of choosing the best one. And it turns out, the
Nick Hare:strat, the optimal strategy with this is to sample. Just treat
Nick Hare:the first 30 as a sample against which you then, you then sort of
Nick Hare:use that as a baseline, and you then pick the next person who
Nick Hare:walks in, who's better than the best person from that sample.
Nick Hare:And if that doesn't happen, well, you fluffed it. But the
Nick Hare:thing is that that strategy turns out to be mathematically
Nick Hare:optimal, so I think the analogy here is, well, actually, you
Nick Hare:know, we should, you we should use the past, to some extent, as
Nick Hare:a sample, and then make our judgments based on that sample.
Fraser McGruer:How, how do you measure, though, and how do you
Fraser McGruer:know that what you're measuring is the right stuff?
Nick Hare:Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the problem. You can't
Nick Hare:really apply it to the real world, where there's no sort of
Nick Hare:finite, it's not like there's some finite number of samples,
Nick Hare:but you should think in terms of, well, we've got a kind of,
Nick Hare:there's a certain amount of information we're getting, you
Nick Hare:know, and then there's, and then there's a, you know, a certain
Nick Hare:amount of action that we perhaps want to apply. So, you know,
Nick Hare:there's every, everything that happens, gives you. Gives is
Nick Hare:valuable for for information purposes. Let's put it that way.
Nick Hare:So on one hand, you might think, well, we don't know if Trump is
Nick Hare:uniquely bad or whether it can get worse. Let's let it run for
Nick Hare:a bit. Let's give him another five terms, and we'll see what
Nick Hare:happens. And then we'll have some really good information
Nick Hare:about how bad things can get, and then we'll know what to do
Nick Hare:next time. But obviously, at the same time, you might think,
Nick Hare:well, well, we don't really want to pay the potential cost of
Nick Hare:doing that like it's not worth we think this actually might be
Nick Hare:particularly terrible, and so we are going to try and put a stop
Nick Hare:to it now. So I'm just, I'm just saying that, you know, it is,
Nick Hare:there is a bit of both going on, and the amount of effort you
Nick Hare:might think, well, the amount of effort we put into stopping it.
Nick Hare:Put in stopping him, you know, actually maybe ought to be
Nick Hare:proportional to how bad he really is. And we don't know
Nick Hare:actually how bad he really is, because, you know, there could
Nick Hare:be someone a lot worse down the line. And then we'll really want
Nick Hare:to say, No, this one really is bad, you know, the the actual
Nick Hare:Hitler turns up, you know, and, and then you think, Well, no, we
Nick Hare:now, we, you know, now it really is this guy makes, you know,
Nick Hare:compared to this guy, it makes Trump look like Bush compared to
Nick Hare:Trump. Yeah, I mean, what I mean? It makes
Fraser McGruer:me think, sort of everyone's sitting there,
Fraser McGruer:sort of wondering about Hitler, and going, No, this is this? Is
Fraser McGruer:it actually, this is as bad as it gets. Maybe they were wrong.
Fraser McGruer:Maybe there could be someone worse than Hitler. I don't know,
Chris Wragg:but I guess the advantage of having had someone
Chris Wragg:like Hitler, yeah, is that other countries have, like, your
Chris Wragg:sample, and you've got a baseline of what really, really
Chris Wragg:bad looks like.
Fraser McGruer:That does look so bad, yeah,
Nick Hare:yeah, something to avoid. Yeah, it's good. So he
Nick Hare:did us a favour, really. I mean, he was the sort of the sort of
Nick Hare:bad secretary, yeah. And now we well, but in a sense that's
Nick Hare:true, right? I mean, in a sense it is true that is useful to
Nick Hare:have this historical comparison. I mean, at the time we stopped
Nick Hare:Hitler right at Munich, if we'd have actually deterred him from
Nick Hare:doing it, there could well have been a worse Hitler, because we
Nick Hare:wouldn't have had Hitler. We would have had all the same
Nick Hare:technology as we've got, you know, today, but we wouldn't
Nick Hare:have had a Hitler to kind of switch on our, you know, Hitler
Nick Hare:detection algorithm.
Peter Coghill:Because, I think, you know, certainly anecdotally
Peter Coghill:sending out. At the time, there was disbelief in in France,
Peter Coghill:Germany, sorry, France, UK and America, about the activities,
Peter Coghill:the sort of the genocidal activities of Stalin and Hitler
Peter Coghill:that like, surely, nobody would actually ever do that, but only
Peter Coghill:when presented with hard evidence. So they go, my God,
Peter Coghill:these people are sorry.
Fraser McGruer:So we're saying Stalin was bad as well, right?
Fraser McGruer:Stalin was, I thought they were on opposite sides, therefore he
Fraser McGruer:wasn't great.
Nick Hare:I got to rethink this whole stuff. Yeah. So, so I
Nick Hare:think, and I think that is true in general, in terms of actually
Nick Hare:being able to get people to do things, a prediction isn't often
Nick Hare:enough. So, I mean, you know that, as I said, like, I don't
Nick Hare:think it's reasonable to have expected us to declare war on
Nick Hare:Hitler after he invaded Czechoslovakia, for example,
Nick Hare:like we wouldn't have had the support for it. It would have
Nick Hare:looked like, you know, the UK was being the aggressive one.
Nick Hare:You know, people were able to make excuses, and then it's
Nick Hare:like, even after Poland, well, there's still kind of a sense
Nick Hare:of, it's not really our business, you know, but you but
Nick Hare:you can't. There's some point at which you can't act before it's
Nick Hare:got worse, because people won't believe that it's not too bad,
Nick Hare:just until it does exactly. Yeah, I wonder as well. It just
Nick Hare:feels like a very perennial
Chris Wragg:problem, yeah, but there's so the question of
Chris Wragg:whether or not something can get worse, whether or not leaders
Chris Wragg:can get worse, and what the theoretical minimum quality
Chris Wragg:worst is, the absolute worst president is, and where, where
Chris Wragg:the current President sits on that, that scale is one thing.
Chris Wragg:So you know, you can say, right? Well, let's assume the best
Chris Wragg:president is here and the worst president is here,
Chris Wragg:theoretically. And you know Trump's about in the middle,
Chris Wragg:right of the of the full scale of presidential terribleness,
Chris Wragg:badiosity. Your badiosity? Exactly. That's interesting. But
Chris Wragg:you might decide there's some level at which you don't want to
Chris Wragg:go below anyway, regardless of how much further there is to go.
Chris Wragg:You know, it might be like you set, you know, a height, like
Chris Wragg:they used to have height limits for the police, for example, you
Chris Wragg:know, you've got to be over five foot 10 to be in the police. We
Chris Wragg:know there's people a lot shorter than that, but, you
Chris Wragg:know, that's where we're drawing our line for this, this quality.
Chris Wragg:You've got a rubber rugby tackle, a six foot four, right?
Chris Wragg:Robber, exactly. Yeah, you can't be three foot four. No, no. So,
Chris Wragg:so, yeah. So I So, I think that the point is is not, how much
Chris Wragg:worse could it get, but what is an acceptable standard to
Chris Wragg:perform this role?
Nick Hare:Yeah, and, and, I mean, I get, I suppose part of
Nick Hare:the problem is that we form our view about what the distribution
Nick Hare:of standards should be based on historical experience, right? So
Nick Hare:we, we don't, we don't really come free with a kind of sense
Nick Hare:of, Well, that's the absolute line in the sand. I mean, as you
Nick Hare:said, you know the debate about slavery, which these days we
Nick Hare:would consider to be very much you know, the line of where what
Nick Hare:was acceptable in 1850 is absolutely miles away from the
Nick Hare:discourse about what's acceptable now, right? But at
Nick Hare:the time, you know, as far as they were concerned, actually,
Nick Hare:there were kind of all these positions in between which kind
Nick Hare:of involved actually owning slaves being okay, yeah. And so
Nick Hare:how do we know? I mean, the idea, then, that you might get
Nick Hare:to a situation where it was owning slaves was as
Nick Hare:preposterous as we think it is, would have seemed ridiculous
Nick Hare:then. So, you know, we we might think, well, we've got our
Nick Hare:sliding scale of badness, and you know, Trump is skating at
Nick Hare:just where that line is. But who knows, another 100 years, we
Nick Hare:might look back and go, God, I wish we could get Trump back.
Nick Hare:That guy was amazing, yeah, you know.
Peter Coghill:Or things might, things might generally improve,
Peter Coghill:such that we think drum is a lot worse than we currently think he
Peter Coghill:is. Yeah, a
Fraser McGruer:couple of things, yeah. We actually need
Fraser McGruer:to sort of draw us to a conclusion reasonably soon. But
Fraser McGruer:this sort of feels, I don't know if you're familiar with the
Fraser McGruer:concept. This is something called the Aleph and and it sort
Fraser McGruer:of this feels surprisingly familiar to other sort of things
Fraser McGruer:that we've talked about, like, how do we know when change is
Fraser McGruer:happening, for example, but I just wanted to sort of make that
Fraser McGruer:observation, we do found, yeah, is quite profound. Thank you.
Fraser McGruer:Now we do need to sort of move towards a conclusion. What do we
Fraser McGruer:got? What do you want to finish off?
Nick Hare:I've got a well, I've got a number. Okay, so is Trump?
Nick Hare:Is Trump? Like, well, just we've only got average approval
Nick Hare:ratings for his first term. And as I said, of all the
Nick Hare:presidential terms since the 50s, that he is the lowest 41.1
Fraser McGruer:right, just to check. So when we say average,
Fraser McGruer:is it taking average over that term, but across all sorts of
Fraser McGruer:different kind of points? Calling sources and,
Nick Hare:okay, sorry, no, it's Gallup. So Assistant survey that
Nick Hare:they would, I, I would guess that, you know, every month or
Nick Hare:something, throughout the throughout the you know that the
Nick Hare:term they are then just taking the average, because, of course,
Nick Hare:it always starts out high and falls Yeah. So, you know, there
Nick Hare:are other measures you could look at, like approval after a
Nick Hare:certain amount of time or whatever. But this is quite
Nick Hare:it'll do, is what I'm saying. And if you is kind of, they're
Nick Hare:roughly, they're not, but not far off a kind of normal
Nick Hare:distribution. And if you take, if you assume it's a normal
Nick Hare:distribution, and that each time we draw a presidential approval
Nick Hare:rating from this distribution, Trump is sort of roughly at the
Nick Hare:10% point right? So 41.1 as an approval rating is, is, sort of
Nick Hare:cuts, is above about 10% of presidents. You could, you could
Nick Hare:have, if so, if that's true, it means that he's one in a 40 year
Nick Hare:level of badness. Okay, yeah. So basically, you know, in other
Nick Hare:words, every 10 presidents, you get one as bad or worse than
Nick Hare:Trump, purely, and by bad or worse I mean purely in terms of
Nick Hare:average approval, right? And in fact, lo and behold, if you look
Nick Hare:at the his approval at the beginning of this term, 2025 it
Nick Hare:was actually higher than his approval at the beginning of
Nick Hare:2016
Chris Wragg:Ryan, believe that. And I think this is a sort of
Chris Wragg:key factor in in that that form of measurement of average
Chris Wragg:approval rating over the term, if you take somebody like Joe
Chris Wragg:Biden, actually the second lowest, right, okay, so, but I
Chris Wragg:would imagine that at the point at which it was apparent that
Chris Wragg:he, you know, he had sort of advanced dementia, or whatever,
Chris Wragg:that his, his, you know that that sort of six or 12 month
Chris Wragg:period towards the end of his presidency, I can only imagine
Chris Wragg:his approval ratings were, were very low at that point and and
Chris Wragg:that he was deemed, you know, if you're a terrible president for
Chris Wragg:let's say you start A nuclear war, or you're or like Nixon,
Chris Wragg:yeah, you know, you eat one lousy foot. They call you a
Chris Wragg:cannibal, right? Exactly at that point. You may have been
Chris Wragg:perfectly mediocre throughout the rest of your presidency, but
Chris Wragg:if you do one really terrible thing, right, in the last you
Chris Wragg:know, the dog days of your your incumbency, you could be the
Chris Wragg:worst, the worst president, yeah.
Nick Hare:I mean, I think if you if, if you imagine having a
Nick Hare:president who actually has dementia for one quarter of his
Nick Hare:term, I think you might say, well, you know, that's not
Nick Hare:great, yeah. That's not what we kind of ideally would have,
Nick Hare:yeah. So, you know, I think it seems for that period, they were
Nick Hare:the worst president, well, ever been? Yeah, yeah.
Fraser McGruer:Possibly, I got a question finish off, but just
Fraser McGruer:before we do, it makes me wonder, like, if you were living
Fraser McGruer:in an autocracy that you know I you would still be having these
Fraser McGruer:same debates. Let's say if you were allowed to right, which you
Fraser McGruer:wouldn't. But let's say you're in the People's Republic of
Fraser McGruer:China. Wouldn't publish them. Yeah, you wouldn't publish them.
Fraser McGruer:You wouldn't talk to them about it. You huddle quietly in a cup
Fraser McGruer:and talk about it, but you'd still be talking about leaders
Fraser McGruer:that are better or worse than others. Yeah, I don't know.
Chris Wragg:It's because, and of course, approval rating in
Chris Wragg:that context is less important. It's not like approval doesn't
Chris Wragg:count in autocracies, because, you know, revolutions topple
Chris Wragg:them, yeah, you get killed exactly, but, but it is less
Chris Wragg:immediate. And, you know, actually approval is, is, is
Chris Wragg:quite a fickle thing, right? And so that's why, perhaps the
Chris Wragg:retrospective judgement about presidents is different, because
Chris Wragg:you actually can then look at things like what their record
Chris Wragg:was, what did they achieve? You know, large infrastructure
Chris Wragg:projects that might be massively unpopular at the time suddenly
Chris Wragg:turned out to have been a really good idea. I mean,
Fraser McGruer:it makes me think that I wonder if it will
Fraser McGruer:always be the case that people be looking at stuff and
Fraser McGruer:wondering, Is that good or bad?
Unknown:Well, there's something to that's, you know, to chew on.
Unknown:I'll let
Fraser McGruer:you, you know, let that one sit with you. I've
Fraser McGruer:got a question. I want to keep it on you, as presidents,
Fraser McGruer:actually, and I was wondering if there are some precedents which
Fraser McGruer:are kind of more or less universally viewed as being bad,
Fraser McGruer:not good. But are there any of those presidents that you've got
Fraser McGruer:kind of a sneaking regard for? You think, actually, there was
Fraser McGruer:bits and pieces they did. I rather like about them. So
Fraser McGruer:Peter, go for
Peter Coghill:it, yeah. So Richard Nixon wasn't very well
Peter Coghill:liked. Did some bad things. Wasn't pretty popular, but was,
Peter Coghill:yeah, it was that. Middle of the table, turns out, in middle of
Peter Coghill:the table. But yeah, he Yeah. Famously, was impeached for
Peter Coghill:trying to rig the election, which is a bit of a no, a bit of
Peter Coghill:a no go area in the United States. Well, he resigned in the
Peter Coghill:end there, he did, yeah, yeah, but did some pretty decent
Peter Coghill:things. So he ended the Vietnam war,
Unknown:peace with honour. Yeah, Vietnam. He, he
Peter Coghill:opened relations with China. Debatable.
Fraser McGruer:China thing is very Yeah, go, yeah, quite
Peter Coghill:a big deal. So paved the way for globalisation
Peter Coghill:in the last part of the 20th century, which has uplifted the
Peter Coghill:standards of life for many, many around the world, environmental
Peter Coghill:protection, civil rights, Native American self determination and
Peter Coghill:lowering the voting age plus space exploration, the
Peter Coghill:continuing the Apollo missions throughout his tenure. Yeah.
Peter Coghill:Okay, so some big things
Unknown:good old Nixon.
Chris Wragg:I also, what I also really like about Nixon is that
Chris Wragg:he had a chip on his shoulder, and that he railed against the
Chris Wragg:sort of liberal intellectualism, and he hated that sort of clique
Chris Wragg:of ivy league, sort of Kennedy type, right? Exactly. So
Chris Wragg:personality wise, I'm much more on his side as a bit of an
Chris Wragg:outsider, not a not a terribly naturally popular man. I
Chris Wragg:thought, yeah,
Fraser McGruer:yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's some
Fraser McGruer:good points there.
Nick Hare:Chris Nick, well, I I'd like to put in a word for
Nick Hare:LBJ, you still mind go, yeah. Keep going, yeah. Well, he
Nick Hare:mainly because he was obsessed with his balls. I'm not
Nick Hare:interested in the he was always going on. It was apparently used
Nick Hare:to ring up his tailor and moan about the fact that his
Nick Hare:testicles weren't sitting comfortably, and like, where,
Nick Hare:where his knob should be, and stuff. But he used to get,
Nick Hare:apparently used to get his genitals out, to to sort of
Nick Hare:deliberately intimidate people and things. I mean, I just feel
Nick Hare:like that's not I feel like, if
Chris Wragg:Donald's not used enough, I feel like,
Nick Hare:if Donald Trump did that in a way, nobody would be,
Nick Hare:nobody would be. I actually think it would raise an eyebrow,
Nick Hare:even if Donald, like Donald Trump, has done incredibly
Nick Hare:outrageous things, I still think he got his, he got his genitals
Nick Hare:out. It would make the news.
Fraser McGruer:I think you're probably right. Yes, I wonder if
Fraser McGruer:it made the news at the time
Unknown:with LBJ, though I doubt it was no biography, yeah,
Unknown:yeah, yeah.
Fraser McGruer:We've done everyone. We have done Chris.
Fraser McGruer:Oh, sorry. Chris,
Chris Wragg:yeah, well, Nixon would have been my shout. But I
Chris Wragg:also have a, have a strong, sort of soft spot for George W Bush.
Chris Wragg:I think he was just an extreme, like in terms of presidents that
Chris Wragg:actually do what they think needs to be, needs to be done.
Chris Wragg:You know, act on the basis of integrity. I felt he did.
Chris Wragg:Whether he got things right or not is another matter, but I
Chris Wragg:felt like he's one of the few presidents you can look back on
Chris Wragg:that didn't feel like a bit of a shyster. And he also did a lot
Chris Wragg:in terms of tackling HIV and AIDS in, you know, across Sub
Chris Wragg:Saharan Africa. So, I think, and he came up with the that
Chris Wragg:immortal line, didn't he about the problem with the French, as
Chris Wragg:they have no word for entrepreneur, which I think is,
Chris Wragg:is just such a brilliant quote.
Chris Wragg:So,
Fraser McGruer:so George W Bush, yeah, no. Good shout. Good
Fraser McGruer:shout, yeah, I shan't bother because LBJ was mine for the
Fraser McGruer:same reasons. Yeah. All right, lovely. Let's stop there. You've
Fraser McGruer:been listening to the cognitive engineering podcast, brought to
Fraser McGruer:you by Aleph insights and produced by me, Fraser McGruer.
Fraser McGruer:If you haven't already, please like and subscribe. We try to
Fraser McGruer:release an episode every week or two. If there are any topics
Fraser McGruer:you'd like us to cover, please do get in touch via email. You
Fraser McGruer:can find out more about Aleph Insights at Alephinsights.com
Fraser McGruer:thanks as always for listening until next time. Goodbye.
