Laukhi
1d ago
Thanks for the update; I'll be sure to check out Moonshot at some point. My expertise in AI is limited to being a casual user of ChatGPT and DeepSeek, so I won't say more about the technical side of things, but I wanted to comment on the cultural points.
Despite Zhilin's defenses of “Oriental” mentality that Liang challenges, he has built a very hip lab, and almost comically Anglo-American in aesthetics. “We're a team of scientists who love rock (Radiohead, Pink Floyd) and film (Tarantino, Kubrick).” Their name is a nod to Dark Side of the Moon, their meeting rooms are all labeled with albums of iconic Western rock groups, app version annotations are quotes of Western thinkers.
In contemporary philosophy, there's an attitude towards ideas that tends to ignore their historical, cultural, etc. context and treat them "in themselves." I guess this is a "high-decoupler" attitude. Anyways, despite the obvious demerits to this approach, I think that it's basically correct, so I have a hard time with explanations of East/West differences based on culture or historical philosophies. In this case, the difference between supposed "Oriental utilitarianism" and "Western idealism" doesn't seem too different from what's already present in the West. We also have a contrast between the "pragmatic businessman" archetype and the "dreamer" archetype.
(In regard to Zhilin's words, if I may psychologize a little, I think that it's very natural for a Chinese person with close knowledge of and experience with Western ideas and societies - but also an attachment to an identity as Chinese - to conceptualize things in terms of a dichotomy between East and West, and it doesn't cause problems as long as one doesn't place too much weight on that way of thinking.)
In my (admittedly somewhat myopic and unresearched) view, the cultural problems in China's business community seem quite contingent. As everyone is, businesspeople, investors, etc. are subject to groupthink, prejudices, and bias towards past successes. But since it's not a matter of "deep roots," it makes sense that a single breakout success like DeepSeek could precipitate a shift in orientation. So I think that if China doesn't end up catching up in AI, the reasons will not be intrinsic to the Chinese, but extrinsic; for example, perhaps capital controls work, or it turns out that the open-source model doesn't work well in AI after all.
To go far afield of my knowledge, it seems as though these extrinsic factors might end up being better for China than for the US. Although the party is hardly omnicompetent at picking winners, as demonstrated by their prior neglect of DeepSeek, the benefits of taking a relatively consistent, unified stance (at least within Xi's tenure) might be enough to overcome the US's inherited advantage of a superior ecosystem, since our political system's replacement-level regulation and industrial policy is not exactly stellar. The US scores own-goals all the time; the CPC may well score one even worse, but it's not as consistent.
Laukhi
3mo ago
I'm not very familiar with House procedure specifically; I just know a bit about general parliamentary law. Wouldn't any member simply be able to make a point of order to take the vote once the parliamentary situation is in breach of the rules? And if the chair then rules the point of order not well taken, then one would appeal.
I think I pretty much agree with you.
I don't object to that way of thinking per se, but I doubt that it does much work, either for them or for us third-person observers. (I might be wrong - it seems to me that the strongest objection is that it's a very live option for Chinese people to take the West, or at least what the West is perceived to do well in, as a model, whereas it might be less so for Americans.) My armchair psychological theory is that talented, smart Chinese people are often those who assimilate into Western society most easily, and they - or we, I guess I should say - graft this way of thinking on top of prior instincts, desires, etc.
Not to say that it's entirely an inert superstructure, but my overall view is that it's significantly more informative to look at structural features of China's economy, such as regulations on investment or whatnot, etc., than at how it gets conceptualized in this sort of discourse. Unless one is interested in China's self-image for its own sake, naturally.
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