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From /u/gwern (@gwern ?): analysis on China’s semiconductor industry.
Recent export controls are directly targeting the Chinese ability to fabricate cutting-edge chips. The subsequent effect on electronics prices and the much-maligned supply chain won’t be pleasant—especially for China, and especially if their industry is already slumping. Consequences for the rest of the world are left as an exercise to the reader.
Given the forum, it’s not surprising that the focus is on AI. I’m more interested in the geopolitical outlook. This is an incentive to retaliate, perhaps even against the other regional semiconductor fabricator. And it is suggested that the timing is a calculated insult to Chinese leadership, as they are apparently going through a periodic dog-and-pony show of elections. Gwern suggests that China would otherwise be raising hell.
The counterpart in US domestic politics: crunching semiconductor supply will not mix well with inflation. I don’t think adding $50 to the next iPhone will make or break Democrats, but it seems unlikely to help.
I want to place predictions, but I don’t have a good grasp of the metrics involved. Place your bets, I guess, for:
China taking economic action
China taking military action
Consequences on Chinese industry
Tech policy towards China becoming a wedge issue in American politics
My response on reddit:
All those alarmist articles about China growing to eclipse the US by 2032 or whatever, and then making a move on Taiwan... (On Iran making da bomb...) If it's clear to analytics what «will» happen in 2025-2032, then why wait and allow it to happen? Why not counter it the instant the advantage is sufficient, if that's what is plainly implied? Did everyone buy into the assumption that American decision makers are uninformed bureaucrats just going through the motions reactively, because that's implied by how some of our pet priorities with high expected utility get treated? Just the psyop known as Hanlon's razor?
Earlier discussion.
My belief is that I cannot predict the details of the next stage and will inevitably get embarrassed, but that my Political Von Neumanns thesis will be vindicated, as it is already vindicated by this extremely effective economic war – a classic problem with predicting entities smarter than oneself. The US of A is one of a handful of countries with intelligent elites, and it's an economic, military, cultural hegemon, therefore possessing great freedom of action. Its laws, sanctions, fashions and even risible delusions of its campus activists hold exterritorial power. It will win one way or another; does it matter which disaster move exactly they'll get to exploit? China, meanwhile, has only disaster moves left.
Open military moves? What can that achieve? (Though I'd have advised an attempt at annexing Taiwan, and escalation to a total nuclear war. It won't do them any good in the moment but may secure some possibility for surviving people of Han background to have agency in the future. Naturally, no sane decision maker and no CCP apparatchik reasons like that). There's no chance of a fait accompli annexation, especially after the Ukrainian case. They'll have all targets of value destroyed, probably fail the annexation anyway, get embargoed and starve; strategically significant Taiwanese will either refuse to cooperate or flee with American and Japanese aid. Even in the absolute best case, by the point PRC gets anywhere with plugging seized assets into their supply chains and replacing the unobtainable imports, Americans will be launching domestic 3nm fabs and finishing their military AGI development.
Keep biding their time, now with deflating economy? To what end? In a few years, Taiwan will leapfrog the Mainland in military technology both domestic and imported, and eventually declare independence and enter defensive pacts, precluding the success of conventional attacks. I have to remind people here that the idea was to build competitive economy in Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, edging out Taiwanese businesses, brain-draining the island, lowering the «Taiwanese identity»'s relative prestige and eventually just swallowing it by fiat, sort of like it was done with Hong Kong (and even then it relied much more on brute force). Can't really do that when the gap with Taiwan is growing, not shrinking; the gap in scientific productivity e.g. Nature Index, GDP per capita, comprehensive economic health, life satisfaction, everything.
Economic action? Like what? They need the world more than the world needs them; much of our common prosperity over the last few decades is powered by Chinese labor, and we shall weep for its passing, but prosperity is not strategically vital. Even those fancy new TSMC chips are not vital – Arizona, Israel, South Korea can produce adequate ones. Everything that the Chinese do is commodified and reliant on higher-margin, more sophisticated Western tools which could just as well be utilized to rebuild industry elsewhere. Realistically they only have monopoly on rare earth metals, and it's wholly a matter of political will on the West, preparedness to weather a few hard years. I am positive that when presented with the frame of an «existential conflict with fascists», people of the «free world» will not just forgo buying another iPhone but proudly starve and freeze to death, if politely asked to. The assumption of materialism and small-mindedness of the opposing side is a characteristic failure mode of authoritarian regimes, and in this particular case a projection (same story with jaded Russian «ilita»).
In the end it's very trivial. Rule one: be attractive. Rule two: Don't be unattractive. If you cannot attract talent and cannot keep domestic talent in, you will fail – you'll just bleed to half-death and begin making erratic self-defeating moves that only talentless people consider reasonable. Of course, if you lack talent yourself, you'll fail to realize the depth of those rules to begin with. Xi is not very talented, and it seems like he doesn't listen to talented people.
So it goes.
I've been meaning to address this thesis for a while, but always missed the time window of when your posts on it were fresh, so here goes nothing anyway. I think there is a difference between the natural sciences and the political/interpersonal domain in that we have figured out (or at least made very nontrivial advances on) the question of how to preserve, filter for quality and transmit knowledge in the former, but I don't see the evidence that the same happened for the latter. Von Neumann may have been a genius, but he still went to school and learned from teachers who learned from textbooks built upon generations more of textbooks and teachers, and whatever innate abilities he had served him well in a world that was already a well-kept garden of formalisms and abstractions and symbol-pushing problems that he could crunch in his oversized cranium. If von Neumann had been born as a contemporary of Isidore of Seville, or Caesar, or Hammurabi, or Grug the 3rd, would he have achieved anything that would have actually impressed a middling modern PhD student in maths or a natural science? Far from helping design the atomic bomb, could he have even figured out the physics to accurately trebuchet a boulder into a castle on the first try, given no calculus? I think not, so how many grunts would an ancient von Neumann have been worth to Caesar's army?
On the other hand, I really see no political equivalent of calculus, or the notion of formal proof, or atomic theory, and no circumstantial evidence that such a thing exists somewhere where I can't see it. Cicero's speeches read no worse than Joe Biden's, and their schemes, modulo amplification of their physical power by the ilk of physicists, seem no wilier than those I hear of of the Medicis or the Ottoman court. Given that, why should we assume that a political von Neumann today should be more formidable than a scientific von Neumann in Cyrus the Great's army would have been to the Greeks?
This is in my opinion a very consumer-like idea of intelligence. «Intelligence is useless unless you already have an infrastructure to plug it into». Or maybe nerdish «Returns to intelligence only scale in very legible technical domains». No, intelligence includes the ability to figure out and devise «sockets» for itself in any domain; and Fat Tony is not dumber than an IYI, for street smarts are a straightforward application of g. Without his scientific education, von Neumann would have plausibly become one of the most powerful bankers in history, greatly pleasing his father. But this should make us wonder why he was born into a banker's family in the first place; and how smart people of old banker dynasties (like Warburg are), seeing as there hasn't been a solid theory of financial capital until recently. In fact, their prominence has only declined with the increase of legibility and theory.
With any luck, he'd have been worth a few generals, irrespective of his ability to improve on contemporary siege weaponry, and perhaps he'd have replaced Caesar himself in textbooks – which is, in fact, my point; Ceasar was a genius himself, from what we can tell. Intelligence has become a potent multiplier of power long before the industrial age or the dawn of science. Napoleon wasn't smarter than him, but he was smart enough even outside his domain, and he's still our symbol of military genius.
Maybe what you see is the result of the latter being flooded with adversarial stimuli. We discuss absolutely inane ideas for reasons that there is a social norm against rejecting them outright and that they are accepted by a significant percentage of the public. Add a little extra noise – and the discourse degenerates into incoherence, and then no progress in scholarship is possible.
But this allows incumbent actors to keep their advantage with no specialized scholarship, with little more than general intelligence, processing speed, access to new data, memory of historical precedents, and networks made of sane allies with healthy epistemology.
Your modus tollens is my modus ponens. The more mediocre «Joe Biden» gets despite the increasing hegemony of the US achieved by well-timed and savvy moves (like this devastation of Chinese IC industry), the more reason I have to suspect that inputs into his political behavior are produced by a sophisticated intelligence not unlike that of STEM geniuses, who are of course privy to the idea of information asymmetry and are happy to keep the spotlight on Biden.
The former exaggerates my position way beyond what I'm willing to subscribe to. The latter... maybe, though I don't like the injection of "technical" there in particular. I think there are domains that are legible but not technical in which we also see returns to talent scale more thanks to the legibility, one good example being music. YouTube is awash with amateur musicians who, given an afternoon with FLStudio, can produce something that would leave the greatest musical geniuses of the ancient world (and even of the 1400s) in the dust as far as emotional impact, memorability etc. is concerned, at least based on what ancient music has been recovered. Surely this is in part due to the existence of musical notation, widespread understanding of chord progressions and the circumstance that you can turn on the radio and hear points whose convex hull covers a fairly big subvolume of the possible good auditory experiences we can have. I can't muster enough relativism or speculative theory of mind to not see the Epic of Gilgamesh as unambiguous drivel next to, I don't know, Twilight, either. In short - if legible patrimony doesn't matter for leveraging talent, where are the ancient literary or musical von Neumanns? Unlike in the political case, it's hard to posit adversarial action concealing their existence from us, unless you think that the political cabal anticipated this line of argument and wrote an entire history concealing its existence, Tartaria-style.
This is awfully speculative, given what we know about von Neumann's rhetorical skill and charisma. Either way, I think the argument you are implicitly making there is somewhat beside the point - an ancient would-be von Neumann turned Caesar would not prove that mathematical skill is formidable even in the absence of formal mathematics, but would just prove that political talent, whether accidental or ascribed to the hypothetical individual by correlation with his posited mathematical talent, can make you as formidable as Caesar even in the absence of legible political theory. But this, we already know, because we had Caesar. Are the "political von Neumanns" whose existence you are positing merely on the level of a Caesar or Napoleon? Because then sure, they probably still exist, but I doubt that they have the all-conquering abilities you ascribe to them, any more than the historical ones did; and it is not even clear if the expected existence of more Caesars makes Caesarhood more rather than less potent in the shrunken pond of a well-connected world.
I think the argument still remains to be made that US success is at all surprising and in need of such an explanation. I've been hearing geopolitical arguments that a singular entity that controls the North American coast and heartlands will almost necessarily become an unmatched industrial juggernaut due to the combination of productivity, logistical access and defensibility; that something with such a starting advantage would go on to crush the fractured, isolated, parasite-ridden competition, as long as it succeeds at preventing itself from footbulleting for long enough, seems plausible even without positing political superpowers operating in the shadows.
...Were you under the impression that I assert that a «political von Neumann» is a guy who can do mathematics well and excels in politics on the basis of that sort of ability?
I straight up do not believe in the existence of any specialized «mathematical talent» or «political talent» or any other talent for that matter. Barring the minor effect of subfactors, it's all just general intelligence, general ability to get things done, plus part-innate, part-taught fascination with math or with power over human affairs, respectively. The former fascination guides one into legible transparent domains like math olympiads and then STEM careers, where one's intelligence becomes easy to rank and be written about in textbooks if deemed remarkable. The latter leads elsewhere. Ed Witten could have continued on the track of politics and journalism; he didn't become any smarter after dropping it. I am not sure if he specifically would have made it big, but what I am sure about is that he wouldn't have become as much of a symbol of high intelligence.
Some people say that power over humans is just fundamentally not as interesting to intelligent people as playing with abstractions and earning six figures while being a vulnerable serf, which entirely filters out geniuses. I call them nerds and press (x) for doubt.
Even if so, do you see a lot of those in the official politics? Does, like, Blinken or DeSantis (admittedly, sharp folks) strike you as an equal of Napoleon Bonaparte, with his near-eidetic memory and incredible breadth of competence?
Even if that is some fundamental ceiling, how many of them and their networks would there need to be to make discussions about «memetics», «parties» and «populism» laughably deluded and ignorant of the true power dynamics at play?
Moreover, why would they be «merely» on the level of those two? We have a much bigger population today, better-networked, with smarter smart fractions. And much easier, institutionalized means to hide behind the noise.
I think we could make some other arguments about inevitabilities (about Heartland or about Old Europe or about the inevitable rise of East Asia or even about the promise of Africa), and also look at collapses of earlier civilizations. Those are mere narratives. The fact remains that American competition falls exactly to shooting themselves in the foot. Zero Covid is not a consequence of the country having issues with indefensible borders. Invasion of Ukraine probably is, but only because we accept the idiocy of Russian governance as a given. The European Union didn't ruin its energy policy because of being fractured more than the US of A is. It's clearly the difference in intelligence; the difference in being able to not make damning mistakes while your opponents mysteriously commit to them.
If it were true, Napoleon's romantic novel would be known as masterpiece belonging to the pinnacle of world's literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clisson_et_Eug%C3%A9nie
Yes, Napoleon like every young man of his time, dreamed to be a romantic artist and worked on it as hard as he worked on everything else. The result is ... similar what would happen if Goethe was given command of an army.
Napoleon is no exception - numerous great and accomplished men - politicians, generals, businessmen, scientists, etc... wrote memoirs of their lives. How many of them are known for their literary, artistic value?
Was he known as rising star in the world of journalism and politics?
Are "Are You Listening, D.H. Lawrence?" and "The New Left" known for their genius insight?
(anyway, political genius would pick other place to start his career than McGovern campaign)
Power? Job of modern politician is office job that consists of meetings and endless powerpoint presentations, job where you are as easily replaceable cog of machine as in every other job.
Nerd serf worth six figure pay could be fired, could be cancelled and blacklisted if he fucks up badly, and in this is no different from politician (except that the politician would fall much harder).
People interested in raw up your face "powah" become cops, border or prison guards, this is work where you can bully and brutalize your fellow human beings with impunity.
Does non-existence of distinct specialized talents eliminate the role of experience, including experience of your and your family's network? Does the «job» of someone like Putin or Xi consist of powerpoint presentations? And since when is political power (a separate notion from «political office») a job at all, isn't this a hyperstition that commoners (very reasonably, but with incomplete success) try to force onto the class of masters? Do you assert that Derek Chauvin is psychologically the modern day Caesar, while the modern day's intellectual peer of Caesar is fiddling with Haskell monads, and there is no intersection of those categories?
You probably do not. But this is the level of your intellectually dishonest, motivated nitpicking that is not responsive to what I have said.
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