Founding fathers on today's America (book review by O1 Pro Alexander Scott)

Written by o1-pro and prompted by Theodor Marcu. Original post by Andrej Karpathy.

Created by asking o1-pro to review Andrej Karpathy's book "Founding Fathers" and write a short review in Alexander Scott's voice. First asked it to rewrite the original text in Scott Alexander's voice, then asked it to rewrite it in Alexander Scott's voice, then asked to write a review in Astral Codex Ten/Slate Star Codex style.

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I just finished “Founding Fathers On Today’s America,” a curious and surprisingly addictive new volume that tries to do something ridiculous and yet sort of pulls it off: it transports the Framers of the Constitution into 2024 and asks them to comment, Federalist Papers-style, on America as it stands now. Imagine Thomas Jefferson binge-watching cable news, Hamilton reading SEC filings on Apple’s trillion-dollar valuation, and James Madison staring slack-jawed at a Senate filibuster livestream on C-SPAN. The result is a literary chimera—part historical fanfiction, part constitutional analysis, part political commentary—and it works better than it has any right to.

At first glance, this sounds suspiciously like the premise of one of those lazy alternate history novels: “George Washington and the Time-Traveling iPhone.” You’d expect cheap gags or an easy morality play: “Founders Good, Moderns Bad,” or the opposite. But the author (o1-pro, guided by a series of AI prompts—this is 2024, after all) doesn’t give us neat didactic lessons. Instead, they produce something that manages to reflect the full complexity of the American experiment as it’s evolved. The text leaps from chapter to chapter, touching on constitutional strain, surveillance, partisanship, big corporations, civil rights, civic education, religious pluralism, foreign policy, and the epistemic chaos wrought by modern media. It’s like the Founders’ worldview got thrown into a blender with The Federalist Papers, The Righteous Mind, and a few episodes of Yes, Minister, then garnished with wry rationalist commentary.

If this were pure constitutional analysis, it might be a slog. Luckily, the author seems to have a sense of humor. The text repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, interrogating how an eighteenth-century statesman would navigate the weirdness of, say, persistent corporate lobbying or the NSA’s digital surveillance. In these moments, it conjures the spirit of Slate Star Codex’s best book reviews: the ones where you find out that The Republic is secretly about mental models, or that Moby-Dick can teach you more about Bayesian updating than about whales. The Founders-as-commentators feel distinct. They’re not bland mouthpieces; they come across as intellectually curious, sometimes horrified, sometimes impressed. They’re like an ancient rationalist reading LessWrong for the first time: “What is this strange custom you have, calling truth-seeking ‘Bayesian reasoning’? We simply called it reason and virtue.”

The best chapters are the ones that tackle modern paradoxes head-on. The surveillance bit, for instance, reads like a conversation between James Madison and Edward Snowden co-hosted by David Brin. It reminds us that the Fourth Amendment isn’t just ink on parchment—it was a principle of limiting state intrusion. The author’s analysis suggests the Founders, who risked their lives to prevent a distant empire from rummaging through their papers, would find our digital panopticon disquieting at best. But they might also concede that some cunning re-application of old rules might handle new tech—maybe some thoroughly modern “algorithmic warrant” or a code of conduct for digital searches, tested in the Supreme Court’s modern halls (Madison on a SCOTUS livestream, anyone?).

The chapter on partisanship feels eerily relevant right now. The Founders feared factions like we fear superintelligent AI misalignment (okay, maybe not that much, but close). They warned that stable party systems might ossify debate. Reading “Founding Fathers On Today’s America,” you realize they’d see our two-party duopoly as a sort of degenerative outcome, a stable Nash equilibrium in which everyone’s stuck. The text imagines them suggesting new electoral designs—ranked-choice voting, open primaries, something more “liquid democracy”-esque. It’s not a simple condemnation; it’s more like, “Look, some factionalism is inevitable, but must it be stuck in a loop of angry stalemate forever?” The book nudges you to wonder what structural tweaks a bunch of Enlightenment geeks would propose if given Moloch, game theory, and a thorough browsing session of The Party Decides.

Then there’s the look at economic power. Our Founders imagined a nation of yeomen farmers and small merchants. Instead, we have trillion-dollar corporations influencing policy like shadow governments. The text captures the “Founders meet Succession” vibe. Hamilton, ambitious as he was, never envisioned CEOs who could outspend entire states or data oligopolies that can shape elections. If the original Constitution had “balance of powers” in mind, now we need “balance of powers plus antitrust scrutiny, plus algorithmic transparency, plus robust conflict-of-interest rules.” The book suggests the Founders wouldn’t just scream “destroy the corporations!” They might say, “Cool innovation, but let’s ensure these big guys don’t hijack the Republic’s steering wheel.” A nuanced take, which is rare in modern political commentary that tends to either lionize or demonize big business.

The most surprising delight might be the chapter on equality and civil rights. The Founders were famously flawed on that score—some owned slaves, none granted women suffrage. But the book gives them the benefit of a moral update, letting them see how American ideals played out over centuries, culminating in (imperfect but real) expansions of rights. The text suggests they’d be proud, maybe astonished, that we took their vague principles and hammered them into something more just. It’s a plausible and optimistic stance: the Founders didn’t fail to see slavery was morally fraught (some of them wrote extensively about it); they simply didn’t know if the republic could survive without compromising. Seeing today’s moral arc might reassure them that their experiment could self-correct over time.

Toward the end, the author shifts tone slightly, from analysis to a kind of hopeful prescription: a reminder that the Constitution was never meant to be a static relic. The Founders would have urged us to keep tinkering—iterate, run better experiments, check for institutional drift, fix incentives. If you’re a longtime reader of Slate Star Codex or Astral Codex Ten, you’ll recognize the underlying rationalist mantra: Update your priors, embrace Bayesian humility, don’t get stuck in ideologies that no longer serve you. The Founders were Enlightenment-era rationalists before “rationalist” was a thing. (Madison would totally read The Sequences if handed a Kindle.)

This last bit might be the book’s main contribution. Most political commentary today either venerates the Founders as quasi-divine or rejects them as outdated. But “Founding Fathers On Today’s America” takes a third path: it treats them as brilliant yet fallible intellectual ancestors who built a flexible framework meant to be debugged as new problems arise. It’s like reading a constitutionally-themed remix of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Inadequate Equilibria, where the Founders first identify equilibrium traps, then suggest ways to escape them.

Downsides? Sure. The conceit sometimes stretches thin. Some chapters read like historical fanfic where the Founders conveniently agree with modern liberal values. Others are a bit repetitive, hammering home the complexity of the modern state apparatus more times than necessary. And I’d have liked more direct references—like the Founders encountering The Federalist Society (would Madison join?), or reading modern foreign policy analyses (imagine Hamilton’s reaction to The Pentagon Papers or Jefferson on The Prince 2.0). But these are small gripes. The text’s novelty and depth overshadow minor flaws.

In the end, “Founding Fathers On Today’s America” does something genuinely interesting: it resurrects the original spirit of American political theory and, rather than worshipping it, uses it as a tool to reason about 2024’s messy reality. It’s not a utopian call to return to a romanticized past. It’s a subtle reminder that the best solutions often come from questioning assumptions and gently nudging institutions back toward their guiding principles.

If you like reading SCOTUS blog posts, if you’ve ever tried to imagine what James Madison would think of Twitter debates, or if you think America’s current mess needs an old-school rationalist perspective, you’ll enjoy this. It’s the kind of book that Scott Alexander himself might pick up, read, then produce an epic 10,000-word review (well, shorter than his Hanson on Health Care marathon, but you get the idea). If we’re awarding best-in-class “rethinking-the-Founders” book reviews, this is definitely a contender. It’s like the Federalist Papers for a digital republic—and it might help us think a bit clearer about how to keep the entire machinery from grinding to a halt.

In short, recommended.