This is all quite a truthnuke, and reflects what I discussed in my own article on China. The rampant cheating of Chinese students, the relentless study culture, the corruption in Chinese academia and the unreliability of the Chinese IP bureaucracy. It all returns to the old Chinese Confucian state ideology. For thousands of years, China’s elites were chosen through civil service exams where students recited or analyzed Confucian poetry and passages of the analects. The grading of this exam were not particularly objective, so a big part of it was simply memorization and signaling agreement with Confucian ideology.
That being said, artificial intelligence seems to be going in a very wordcelly direction of LLM chat bots and the like. It’s not good at math. Chinamen are pretty good at math, and also they love StarCraft and I think managing a bunch of Chatbots 24/7 would be kind of like playing StarCraft. So, who knows how it’ll pan out for them
I am open to being proven wrong with some evidence about how China has more math proofs and engineering patents than the west, per capita, but I haven't ever seen that. I agree with you that AI is bad at doing advanced math (Real Analysis or Partial Differential Equations.)
How many math geniuses does China have? How many math geniuses does the west have? Where is AI being developed? China claims to have more geniuses, but I don't see the evidence for this. It's just extrapolation from Bell Curves. My argument is that the Chinese average is higher, but the Bell Curve is narrower. So yes, the average Chinese person is better at highschool level math (and maybe even college level math), but that doesn't mean that China has more math geniuses than the west.
One way to measure this would be to see how many math professors are Asian. From what I could find, "11-13% of math professors in the United States are Asian, which is significantly higher than the general Asian population but still considered underrepresented in the field." Compare that to the number of doctors: "22.2% of physicians in the United States are Asian." So the higher we go up on the math chain, the less Asian overrepresentation we see.
Fields Medals are a small sample size (64 over the last 100 years), but they are 78% white+Jewish. If we exclude whites and Jews (small sample size of 13 people), the biggest ethnicities are Japanese (23.1%), and Indian (15.4%). The two "Chinese" were actually Hong Kongese, and therefore more culturally western, and were ethnically and linguistically not Mandarin Han, but Cantonese or Hakka. The Mandarin Han Chinese speakers haven't won a single Fields Medal. That's really bad, and it has nothing to do with discrimination against non-whites, because the Indians are beating them hands down, despite an average Indian IQ below 90. Something is wrong with the "symmetrical" Bell Curve model of Chinese math genius.
We don't need a million highschool math teachers. We need like 1,000 geniuses who can work on the next Manhattan Project. We have that, China doesn't. If I'm wrong, then most AI development in the next 10 years should come out of China, not London / San Francisco / Berlin. I'll be waiting to see who's right.
You won't like a cultural / environmental argument, but a lot of people point out that western companies hire a lot of Chinese people. If Chinese people aren't geniuses, why do tech companies hire so many Asian immigrants? Why do they do so well in our universities? Maybe Chinese people have a very high innate capacity, but Chinese culture is inherently so smothering that this capacity is not realized in real-world results. In China, smart people are captured by the Han-House, forced to spam-copy-paste on cheap housing projects that no one lives in for a shrinking population. When Asian people move west, their capacities are liberated to do useful work. In that case, my arguments about China declining in the face of AI still hold water. But even from a hereditarian perspective, I'm very skeptical that Chinese people are genetically more likely to prove math geniuses. Your point is a common one and if I was less lazy I would reform this comment into an article.
I believe the Chinese are simply less genius in other faculties. Genius is only partially a function of intelligence. It also requires a certain open-minded and perhaps even disagreeable disposition which is less common in the collectivist East Asians. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if East Asians had a narrower bell curve but I don’t know any evidence for it.
I tried to see if there was any evidence for a narrower bell curve and couldn't find it. Conceptually it makes sense to me, and I didn't see anything refuting it or even trying to test the hypothesis. This is frustrating, because if you have a database of 1000 IQs you should be able to use the math to determine the spread of IQs. One of the issues with this is that IQs above 150 might be so rare (one in a million) that unless your study includes millions of people, a random study will not accurately capture the right end of the bell curve.
Another way to approach this question would be to say that women have less variance as a result of low testosterone (hypothesis); then leap to say that low Chinese T results in less variance. But according to Seb, Chinese have much higher T than anyone in the west:
I did find a study on genetic diversity within China, which found an Fst distance of 0.003952 between "Northern" and Cantonese. It's similar to the minimum difference between Swedes and Finns (.005); Swedes and Spanish (0.004); Swedes and Russians (.003), but half as big as the difference between Swedes and Greeks (.008). I was interested in this because the Fields Medal winners were Cantonese/Hakka. There does seem to be a big difference between Northern and Southern Euros in terms of Nobel Prize winning, so maybe that is also the case between Han and Hakka. This doesn't necessarily need to be genetic, but genetic distance could help measure cultural difference between nations (the more genetic distance, the more likely there is to be cultural difference).
I did also find this funny anti-Chinese article from an Asian writer from 2006:
Looks like the high T effects in those places are environmental, as the author points out western testosterone used to be ~ 650ng/dl on average. Good evidence for this is that East Asians in Western countries are low testosterone compared to Caucasians. Testosterone levels are also kind of fickle from what I’ve heard, they are quite reactive and also different types of testosterone effect someone differently and when they get that testosterone matters too. I think obesity and especially childhood obesity is the culprit here
AI does have a lot of disruption potential, even if it fails to live up to "the Singularity" in the short and medium term. Otherwise I would like to correct the part mentioning society transition from "90% in agriculture to 90% in Industry". This is not correct, the Services sector rose in tandem with Industry and continued to do so, even after the first waves of automation. All in all, in places like the US the Secondary sector never rose above 40%, and if we exclude times like WW2, the medium for Western countries pre-offshoring was around 30%.
That's a fair correction. It would have been more accurate of me to say, "the economy was 90% farmers, and then was replaced by factory and service workers. Now automation is taking the place of factory workers, and service work continues to increase."
I would ask what have the Greeks done lately? When was the last time they did something impressive? The Egyptians pioneered the territorial state 5000 years ago. The pyramids were enormous undertakings operating at the very forefront of technology, the Manhattan Project of its time. During the time of the Greeks, the Egyptians were about as dynamic as the Greeks have been in recent centuries (and about as much time had elapsed in both cases).
Like the Egyptians, the Chinese have enjoyed a civilizational continuity unrivaled by any contemporary. The price for this is a conservative culture.
The West has benefitted from its WEIRDness. But there is always the threat from conservatives. The issue is innovation leads to advantage, and that leads to wealth and power. These things create an elite who desires to retain their wealth and power. The rise of neoliberalism, as I define it,* is a clear sign of the onset of this civilizational stagnation in our own civilization.
For example, the table below shows that US companies no longer invest their profits in economic growth, preferring to buy financial assets instead. This builds portfolios, creating "monumental financial architecture" but nothing real. It's a clear sign of civilizational decay. And associated with this decay are things like declining fertility. But as you would expect, those most concerned about fertility decline are blind to the core problem, that we invest in market capitalization rather than real things (and the downstream effects of this on family formation). Even our startups are projects focused on a financial objective, the IPO, when those who got in at the ground floor cash in.
I never said that Greece hasn't changed culturally in the last 2000 years. But so did Egypt between 3000 BC and 500 BC. Egypt was not dynamic at all in 500 BC. You conflating the pyramid builders with the last dynasties of Egypt actually engages in the same fallacy you accuse me of, ironically.
I did not accuse you of anything. You were implying there was a fundamental difference between Greece and Eqypt. I was pointing out that you were comparing the two civilizations at different ages. When you compare at similar ages the difference disappears
There was a fundamental difference by 500 BC. Maybe you're trying to defend Egyptians from some kind of implicit racism on my part, and suggesting that I think "Greeks" are inherently superior to "Egyptians" over all timescales, which I am not. But it sounds like we actually don't even disagree on this point. I would say similarly China used to be much more dynamic at other periods of history, as well.
The point I am making is you are comparing one civilization in the springtime of youth with another in the winter of old age. Can you think of one civilization that maintained its creativity for a thousand years?
You are confounding the variables of civilization type and age. A better comparison would be to compare civilizations during their heyday. For example, old kingdom Eqypt compared to Periclean Athens, compared to Tang China, compared to Antoine Rome.
All civilizations, if they last long enough, are more dynamic at some periods than others.
I disagree that 1,000 years is a hard axiomatic limit. I would argue that western Christian Civilization started around 800 AD and has remained fairly dynamic for 1200 years, 2,000 years if you call it "Christian civilization." 2,500 years if you call it "Platonic civilization." Egypt was probably pretty dynamic from 4000 BC until the Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC. But these are very ambiguous assertions on my part so maybe you're right.
I'm grant you the victory to say that "ancient China was more dynamic than ancient Greece and Egypt" because it has nothing to do with my argument that China has been fairly stagnant for the last 500 years and will continue to be impacted by the cultural factors that I lay out.
I don’t see AI replacing work whose nature is political to begin with. An AI can do the job of a DMV worker or CCP apparatchnik better, but having such workers be efficient was never the point.
I didn’t make the claim that AI would take over “political work.” I also don’t care what “the point” was intended to be; I am writing about actual effects.
I think the vast majority of bugman jobs are political work. I don’t think the tech / science sector would be nearly so big without the government pouring rivers of grant and investment money into it. So if AI was to result in layoffs or replacement it would just be banned, and the official reason for why would be that AI is racist
I have no clue what you're saying. Are you arguing that being a truck driver, fast food worker, nurse, or software developer is "political work?" What? I'm not sure what views you're ascribing to me since they have seem to have nothing to do with what I wrote. Maybe try quoting me so I can understand what you're trying to respond to.
“The kids who go to Kumon and study 14 hours a day will be crushed, like the peasants and the factory workers before them. The future has no need for human robots. AI is crushing the bugman. It is the chariot of our age, and the future lies in wait like the Ganges river.”
I think that, even if AI makes bugman qualities obviously useless, they will still be selected for, because the subconscious goal of government policy is to create bugmen for the sake of creating bugmen, not to create bugmen because bugmen so useful work.
Oh, I would agree that there are non-economic reasons for bugman-production, but that economically, bugmen will be worse off in the future. This isn't a contradiction.
What's up with carving out an exception for innovation and creativity, which you assume will leave room for humans in a post-AGI world ...and not, as is essentially inevitable, to see those domains dominated by AI as well? I agree with the core thesis (China's anti-Faustian Logos is self-sabotaging; it punches massively below its weight thanks to a culture of inane optimization of arbitrary customs, etc. etc.) but this bit smells like a self-motivated thumb is on the scale. Just place AI's limit at the point where it renders most Chinese obsolete in the political economy, but leaves room for some Westerners ...ah, how clever. Sorry, but it's likelier that _everyone_, barring just a handful of elites, will be disenfranchised in the coming Singularity, unless AGI is open-sourced quick enough to create a stable equilibrium of massive, decentralized power proliferation resistant to monopolizing power-grabby shocks. But probably not.
The Anglos who conquered the world did memorise long and complicated poetry though. Many soldiers in WWI trenches consoled themselves with lines from Homer and Horace.
Quotation from the article: "Whatever the origins of Chinese conformism, it has always had its own parallel in the west. The memorization of poetry, of rituals, and obeisance to meaningless cargo cults of custom, politeness, and manners, all can be found in western culture."
Then you contrast them with mavericks who built and expanded civilisation: "The more a man ignores these things, the more he is a savage, a pirate, an outlaw, an adventurer. It was these men who conquered America, and most of the world." But my point is, in reality, the two are often the same group of people. Learning classical literature by heart is not meaningless cargo cult, it's the same package of elite production that advanced the West.
I don't dispute that China has emerged as a world power within the last four decades, to the surprise of everyone, despite 500 years of stagnation. The argument I make, very specifically, is that the Chinese economy is less equipped to deal with the shock of AI than the west. Specifically, this is because the Chinese economy is much more driven by reproduction of technology rather than innovation.
AI is mostly snake oil sold as innovation for the sake of innovation. Genuine innovation occurring elsewhere , like drone warfare, Chinese industry seems to work well with this far.
I agree with you that AI is definitely oversold in some respects. For example, AI is not going to exceed human general intelligence, or cause a "singularity." However, I think it absolutely has industrial applications.
The death of homework would absolutely be for the best for all our civilizations. It's an utterly pointless bullshit exercize even by its own standards, and a lasting shame upon all educational institutions which have adopted it. Cheating on it's both morally justifiable and pratically beneficial, and hopefully will help us move towards the general-intelligence-based form of education we should've gone towards generations ago, yet have only retreated from post-Civil Rights Movement.
I'd argue that homework has more to do with Prussianism than Civil Rights, and the move away from private tutors toward general education, but both have their own part to play.
Interesting. I don’t think comparing David Bowie, a unique guy who became a superstar after having a hit novelty song, to K-Pop stars is fair, K-Pop is the product of a tightly controlled process. Compare K-Pop to the Backstreet Boys.
I'm not sure how to communicate the point I'm making, but I'll try:
1. David Bowie is a unique product of western culture. People like him because he is unique, edgy, transgressive, gender-bending, fascistic, and contradictory. He stands out.
2. Davie Bowie is not alone. He's just one example. There's literally of hundreds of western singers who were distinct, unique, transgressive, and weird. This is a uniquely western phenomenon, that other cultures have emulated and copied due to neocolonialism.
3. Backstreet boys were indeed similar to K-pop, but no one would say that backstreet boys was the "national band" of America or that Backstreet boys "define the essence of america," (I guess you could say that but you'd be wrong) whereas people would say that Elvis or the Beatles "defined an era."
4. K-pop defines Korean culture. You can't escape K-pop. It's not just a genre -- it's the entire culture. Very uniform. You can definitely escape the backstreet boys. It's funny how you have to go back 20 years to come up with something equivalent to K-pop, because I think you're making my point for me.
so the typical Chinese diasporas being unable to completely adapt to the new cultures, end up resorting to establishing ghettos but with tasty food and lots of red colors is basically just a kidnapped robot problem?
This is all quite a truthnuke, and reflects what I discussed in my own article on China. The rampant cheating of Chinese students, the relentless study culture, the corruption in Chinese academia and the unreliability of the Chinese IP bureaucracy. It all returns to the old Chinese Confucian state ideology. For thousands of years, China’s elites were chosen through civil service exams where students recited or analyzed Confucian poetry and passages of the analects. The grading of this exam were not particularly objective, so a big part of it was simply memorization and signaling agreement with Confucian ideology.
That being said, artificial intelligence seems to be going in a very wordcelly direction of LLM chat bots and the like. It’s not good at math. Chinamen are pretty good at math, and also they love StarCraft and I think managing a bunch of Chatbots 24/7 would be kind of like playing StarCraft. So, who knows how it’ll pan out for them
I am open to being proven wrong with some evidence about how China has more math proofs and engineering patents than the west, per capita, but I haven't ever seen that. I agree with you that AI is bad at doing advanced math (Real Analysis or Partial Differential Equations.)
How many math geniuses does China have? How many math geniuses does the west have? Where is AI being developed? China claims to have more geniuses, but I don't see the evidence for this. It's just extrapolation from Bell Curves. My argument is that the Chinese average is higher, but the Bell Curve is narrower. So yes, the average Chinese person is better at highschool level math (and maybe even college level math), but that doesn't mean that China has more math geniuses than the west.
One way to measure this would be to see how many math professors are Asian. From what I could find, "11-13% of math professors in the United States are Asian, which is significantly higher than the general Asian population but still considered underrepresented in the field." Compare that to the number of doctors: "22.2% of physicians in the United States are Asian." So the higher we go up on the math chain, the less Asian overrepresentation we see.
Fields Medals are a small sample size (64 over the last 100 years), but they are 78% white+Jewish. If we exclude whites and Jews (small sample size of 13 people), the biggest ethnicities are Japanese (23.1%), and Indian (15.4%). The two "Chinese" were actually Hong Kongese, and therefore more culturally western, and were ethnically and linguistically not Mandarin Han, but Cantonese or Hakka. The Mandarin Han Chinese speakers haven't won a single Fields Medal. That's really bad, and it has nothing to do with discrimination against non-whites, because the Indians are beating them hands down, despite an average Indian IQ below 90. Something is wrong with the "symmetrical" Bell Curve model of Chinese math genius.
We don't need a million highschool math teachers. We need like 1,000 geniuses who can work on the next Manhattan Project. We have that, China doesn't. If I'm wrong, then most AI development in the next 10 years should come out of China, not London / San Francisco / Berlin. I'll be waiting to see who's right.
You won't like a cultural / environmental argument, but a lot of people point out that western companies hire a lot of Chinese people. If Chinese people aren't geniuses, why do tech companies hire so many Asian immigrants? Why do they do so well in our universities? Maybe Chinese people have a very high innate capacity, but Chinese culture is inherently so smothering that this capacity is not realized in real-world results. In China, smart people are captured by the Han-House, forced to spam-copy-paste on cheap housing projects that no one lives in for a shrinking population. When Asian people move west, their capacities are liberated to do useful work. In that case, my arguments about China declining in the face of AI still hold water. But even from a hereditarian perspective, I'm very skeptical that Chinese people are genetically more likely to prove math geniuses. Your point is a common one and if I was less lazy I would reform this comment into an article.
I believe the Chinese are simply less genius in other faculties. Genius is only partially a function of intelligence. It also requires a certain open-minded and perhaps even disagreeable disposition which is less common in the collectivist East Asians. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if East Asians had a narrower bell curve but I don’t know any evidence for it.
I tried to see if there was any evidence for a narrower bell curve and couldn't find it. Conceptually it makes sense to me, and I didn't see anything refuting it or even trying to test the hypothesis. This is frustrating, because if you have a database of 1000 IQs you should be able to use the math to determine the spread of IQs. One of the issues with this is that IQs above 150 might be so rare (one in a million) that unless your study includes millions of people, a random study will not accurately capture the right end of the bell curve.
Another way to approach this question would be to say that women have less variance as a result of low testosterone (hypothesis); then leap to say that low Chinese T results in less variance. But according to Seb, Chinese have much higher T than anyone in the west:
https://x.com/sebjenseb/status/1730510841836188044
I did find a study on genetic diversity within China, which found an Fst distance of 0.003952 between "Northern" and Cantonese. It's similar to the minimum difference between Swedes and Finns (.005); Swedes and Spanish (0.004); Swedes and Russians (.003), but half as big as the difference between Swedes and Greeks (.008). I was interested in this because the Fields Medal winners were Cantonese/Hakka. There does seem to be a big difference between Northern and Southern Euros in terms of Nobel Prize winning, so maybe that is also the case between Han and Hakka. This doesn't necessarily need to be genetic, but genetic distance could help measure cultural difference between nations (the more genetic distance, the more likely there is to be cultural difference).
I did also find this funny anti-Chinese article from an Asian writer from 2006:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/147470490600400110
East Asians are clearly less sexually dimorphic than white people, so it would make sense if they were lower in variance too
Looks like the high T effects in those places are environmental, as the author points out western testosterone used to be ~ 650ng/dl on average. Good evidence for this is that East Asians in Western countries are low testosterone compared to Caucasians. Testosterone levels are also kind of fickle from what I’ve heard, they are quite reactive and also different types of testosterone effect someone differently and when they get that testosterone matters too. I think obesity and especially childhood obesity is the culprit here
AI does have a lot of disruption potential, even if it fails to live up to "the Singularity" in the short and medium term. Otherwise I would like to correct the part mentioning society transition from "90% in agriculture to 90% in Industry". This is not correct, the Services sector rose in tandem with Industry and continued to do so, even after the first waves of automation. All in all, in places like the US the Secondary sector never rose above 40%, and if we exclude times like WW2, the medium for Western countries pre-offshoring was around 30%.
That's a fair correction. It would have been more accurate of me to say, "the economy was 90% farmers, and then was replaced by factory and service workers. Now automation is taking the place of factory workers, and service work continues to increase."
AI is now going after the Tertiary sector. Though office drone type jobs are going down first.
What's the difference between tertiary, service, and office?
Not much. Like the term Secondary, that covers everything from paper straws to 7nm chips, Tertiary usually covers most service and bureaucratic stuff.
https://www.ft.com/content/1e9e7544-974c-4662-a901-d30c4ab56eb7 vindicated?
Fascinating analysis.
I would ask what have the Greeks done lately? When was the last time they did something impressive? The Egyptians pioneered the territorial state 5000 years ago. The pyramids were enormous undertakings operating at the very forefront of technology, the Manhattan Project of its time. During the time of the Greeks, the Egyptians were about as dynamic as the Greeks have been in recent centuries (and about as much time had elapsed in both cases).
Like the Egyptians, the Chinese have enjoyed a civilizational continuity unrivaled by any contemporary. The price for this is a conservative culture.
The West has benefitted from its WEIRDness. But there is always the threat from conservatives. The issue is innovation leads to advantage, and that leads to wealth and power. These things create an elite who desires to retain their wealth and power. The rise of neoliberalism, as I define it,* is a clear sign of the onset of this civilizational stagnation in our own civilization.
For example, the table below shows that US companies no longer invest their profits in economic growth, preferring to buy financial assets instead. This builds portfolios, creating "monumental financial architecture" but nothing real. It's a clear sign of civilizational decay. And associated with this decay are things like declining fertility. But as you would expect, those most concerned about fertility decline are blind to the core problem, that we invest in market capitalization rather than real things (and the downstream effects of this on family formation). Even our startups are projects focused on a financial objective, the IPO, when those who got in at the ground floor cash in.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F72e95ed8-3c30-45aa-bb64-dd564442e92c_1016x313.png
* https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/why-i-dont-think-neoliberalism-is#:~:text=I%20see%20neoliberalism,SP%20cultural%20variant.
I never said that Greece hasn't changed culturally in the last 2000 years. But so did Egypt between 3000 BC and 500 BC. Egypt was not dynamic at all in 500 BC. You conflating the pyramid builders with the last dynasties of Egypt actually engages in the same fallacy you accuse me of, ironically.
I did not accuse you of anything. You were implying there was a fundamental difference between Greece and Eqypt. I was pointing out that you were comparing the two civilizations at different ages. When you compare at similar ages the difference disappears
There was a fundamental difference by 500 BC. Maybe you're trying to defend Egyptians from some kind of implicit racism on my part, and suggesting that I think "Greeks" are inherently superior to "Egyptians" over all timescales, which I am not. But it sounds like we actually don't even disagree on this point. I would say similarly China used to be much more dynamic at other periods of history, as well.
The point I am making is you are comparing one civilization in the springtime of youth with another in the winter of old age. Can you think of one civilization that maintained its creativity for a thousand years?
You are confounding the variables of civilization type and age. A better comparison would be to compare civilizations during their heyday. For example, old kingdom Eqypt compared to Periclean Athens, compared to Tang China, compared to Antoine Rome.
All civilizations, if they last long enough, are more dynamic at some periods than others.
I disagree that 1,000 years is a hard axiomatic limit. I would argue that western Christian Civilization started around 800 AD and has remained fairly dynamic for 1200 years, 2,000 years if you call it "Christian civilization." 2,500 years if you call it "Platonic civilization." Egypt was probably pretty dynamic from 4000 BC until the Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC. But these are very ambiguous assertions on my part so maybe you're right.
I'm grant you the victory to say that "ancient China was more dynamic than ancient Greece and Egypt" because it has nothing to do with my argument that China has been fairly stagnant for the last 500 years and will continue to be impacted by the cultural factors that I lay out.
"I would argue that western Christian Civilization started around 800 AD"
Interesting, we apparently see a similar dynamic, I date the start at 910 AD.
I don’t see AI replacing work whose nature is political to begin with. An AI can do the job of a DMV worker or CCP apparatchnik better, but having such workers be efficient was never the point.
I didn’t make the claim that AI would take over “political work.” I also don’t care what “the point” was intended to be; I am writing about actual effects.
I think the vast majority of bugman jobs are political work. I don’t think the tech / science sector would be nearly so big without the government pouring rivers of grant and investment money into it. So if AI was to result in layoffs or replacement it would just be banned, and the official reason for why would be that AI is racist
I have no clue what you're saying. Are you arguing that being a truck driver, fast food worker, nurse, or software developer is "political work?" What? I'm not sure what views you're ascribing to me since they have seem to have nothing to do with what I wrote. Maybe try quoting me so I can understand what you're trying to respond to.
“The kids who go to Kumon and study 14 hours a day will be crushed, like the peasants and the factory workers before them. The future has no need for human robots. AI is crushing the bugman. It is the chariot of our age, and the future lies in wait like the Ganges river.”
I think that, even if AI makes bugman qualities obviously useless, they will still be selected for, because the subconscious goal of government policy is to create bugmen for the sake of creating bugmen, not to create bugmen because bugmen so useful work.
Oh, I would agree that there are non-economic reasons for bugman-production, but that economically, bugmen will be worse off in the future. This isn't a contradiction.
What's up with carving out an exception for innovation and creativity, which you assume will leave room for humans in a post-AGI world ...and not, as is essentially inevitable, to see those domains dominated by AI as well? I agree with the core thesis (China's anti-Faustian Logos is self-sabotaging; it punches massively below its weight thanks to a culture of inane optimization of arbitrary customs, etc. etc.) but this bit smells like a self-motivated thumb is on the scale. Just place AI's limit at the point where it renders most Chinese obsolete in the political economy, but leaves room for some Westerners ...ah, how clever. Sorry, but it's likelier that _everyone_, barring just a handful of elites, will be disenfranchised in the coming Singularity, unless AGI is open-sourced quick enough to create a stable equilibrium of massive, decentralized power proliferation resistant to monopolizing power-grabby shocks. But probably not.
I am totally against the idea of a singularity as even remotely plausible.
The Anglos who conquered the world did memorise long and complicated poetry though. Many soldiers in WWI trenches consoled themselves with lines from Homer and Horace.
Quotation from the article: "Whatever the origins of Chinese conformism, it has always had its own parallel in the west. The memorization of poetry, of rituals, and obeisance to meaningless cargo cults of custom, politeness, and manners, all can be found in western culture."
Then you contrast them with mavericks who built and expanded civilisation: "The more a man ignores these things, the more he is a savage, a pirate, an outlaw, an adventurer. It was these men who conquered America, and most of the world." But my point is, in reality, the two are often the same group of people. Learning classical literature by heart is not meaningless cargo cult, it's the same package of elite production that advanced the West.
Soldiers in the trenches aren't elites. Columbus didn't memorize anything.
lmao yes the nation that caught up in a few decades will falter with **checks notes** the rise of AI
I don't dispute that China has emerged as a world power within the last four decades, to the surprise of everyone, despite 500 years of stagnation. The argument I make, very specifically, is that the Chinese economy is less equipped to deal with the shock of AI than the west. Specifically, this is because the Chinese economy is much more driven by reproduction of technology rather than innovation.
China's Scientific Output
China has overtaken the United States as the world leader in scientific research output in recent years. Specifically:
In 2022, China produced 27% of global scientific publication output, compared to 14% for the United States.
Between 2018-2020, China published an average of 407,181 scientific papers per year, accounting for 23.4% of world research output.
According to the Nature Index 2024 (covering data from 2023), China had the highest "Share" of 23,171.84 for high-quality scientific articles.
Comparison to Other Countries
The top countries for scientific publication output in 2022 were:
China (27% of global output)
United States (14%)
India (third place, specific percentage not provided)
Growth Trends
From 2012 to 2022, China's yearly publication total grew by 173%, compared to just 6% growth for the United States.
China's rapid growth has been particularly notable in fields like materials science, chemistry, engineering and mathematics.
Impact and Quality
While China leads in quantity, the United States still performs strongly in measures of research impact:
The U.S. accounts for 24.9% of the top 1% most highly cited research studies, compared to China's 27.2%.
The U.S. remains highly influential in science and engineering research, as measured by citation rates
Here's how China's numbers are fake:
https://www.ft.com/content/32440f74-7804-4637-a662-6cdc8f3fba86
AI is mostly snake oil sold as innovation for the sake of innovation. Genuine innovation occurring elsewhere , like drone warfare, Chinese industry seems to work well with this far.
I agree with you that AI is definitely oversold in some respects. For example, AI is not going to exceed human general intelligence, or cause a "singularity." However, I think it absolutely has industrial applications.
The death of homework would absolutely be for the best for all our civilizations. It's an utterly pointless bullshit exercize even by its own standards, and a lasting shame upon all educational institutions which have adopted it. Cheating on it's both morally justifiable and pratically beneficial, and hopefully will help us move towards the general-intelligence-based form of education we should've gone towards generations ago, yet have only retreated from post-Civil Rights Movement.
I'd argue that homework has more to do with Prussianism than Civil Rights, and the move away from private tutors toward general education, but both have their own part to play.
Interesting. I don’t think comparing David Bowie, a unique guy who became a superstar after having a hit novelty song, to K-Pop stars is fair, K-Pop is the product of a tightly controlled process. Compare K-Pop to the Backstreet Boys.
I'm not sure how to communicate the point I'm making, but I'll try:
1. David Bowie is a unique product of western culture. People like him because he is unique, edgy, transgressive, gender-bending, fascistic, and contradictory. He stands out.
2. Davie Bowie is not alone. He's just one example. There's literally of hundreds of western singers who were distinct, unique, transgressive, and weird. This is a uniquely western phenomenon, that other cultures have emulated and copied due to neocolonialism.
3. Backstreet boys were indeed similar to K-pop, but no one would say that backstreet boys was the "national band" of America or that Backstreet boys "define the essence of america," (I guess you could say that but you'd be wrong) whereas people would say that Elvis or the Beatles "defined an era."
4. K-pop defines Korean culture. You can't escape K-pop. It's not just a genre -- it's the entire culture. Very uniform. You can definitely escape the backstreet boys. It's funny how you have to go back 20 years to come up with something equivalent to K-pop, because I think you're making my point for me.
so the typical Chinese diasporas being unable to completely adapt to the new cultures, end up resorting to establishing ghettos but with tasty food and lots of red colors is basically just a kidnapped robot problem?
I actually think the Chinese diaspora is extremely successful everywhere, in contrast to the dysfunction of China.