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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   33967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Are they merely «industrious» and «good at math», myopic, cheap, autistic narrow optimizers, natural nerdy sidekicks to the White Man with his Main Character Energy and craaazy fits of big picture inspiration, thus doomed to be a second-tier player as a nation; with all cultural explanations of their derivative track record being «stereotype threat» level cope – as argued by @SecureSignals? Or are they just held back by old habits, path-dependent incentives and lack of confidence but in essence every bit as capable, nay, more capable of this whole business of pushing civilization forward, and indeed uplifting the whole planet, as argued by Chinese Industrial Party authors – doing the «one thing that Westerners have been unwilling or powerless to accomplish»?

Evolutionary theory to explain disparities in conformism are at least as plausible as i.e. Cold Winter Theory to explain disparities in IQ. The descendants of a race that invented wheeled transport, domestication of horses, and then conquered/colonized virtually the entire world, and then invented pretty much everything else in history, does have a spark of Main Character Energy that fundamentally lacks in a race of eternally subjugated rice peasants. "Guess which people are more conformist and which are more bold and daring?" People can/will scoff at that argument, and its relationship to HBD but in my opinion it has more evidence than it does for the notion that IQ differences emerged because of cold winters (not that it isn't a decent theory as well).

The more important fact is that AI may become the Great Equalizer on these higher-order traits. A spark of genius that does, I think, give whites the "main character energy" can be integrated into AI just the same and maybe allow the Chinese to escape some local minima downstream from their own psychology. For example, if the Chinese diligently follow AI-generated plans prompted to achieve Chinese geopolitical goals, that will simulate a different racial psychology than world history has manifested until this point, because the strategy of the plans and their underlying innovation, aggressiveness, creativity and so-on will be a product of AI and not of Chinese psychology- except the extent to which Chinese psychology influences the LLM which was also a point I touched on before. I think that argument applies to whites as well, who also demonstrably suffer from being stuck in local minima but may able to escape them if their own psychological weaknesses are overcome with assistance from AI.

The descendants of a race that invented wheeled transport, domestication of horses, and then conquered/colonized virtually the entire world, and then invented pretty much everything else in history, does have a spark of Main Character Energy that fundamentally lacks in a race of eternally subjugated rice peasants.

The pedant in me feels the need to point out that half of China grows wheat, not rice. Interestingly, there is some evidence that the psychological differences observed between wheat and rice farming societies are not deeply rooted and are subject to change on the scale of one or two generations, but I digress.

As far as the relative achievements of these two peoples in the grand scope of human history, I think it's entirely possible that Europe and her children will be devoured by the consequences of their own philosophical and technological creations, leaving Asia to pick up the pieces and integrate them into some sort of sustainable paradigm. Who then is superior, the tragic genius driven to suicide or his diligent successor without whom his ideas would be lost to history?

I think this is still too self-serving and frankly racist a spin: “Chinese are robots, sure, but they can train robots on Western genius and follow their lead, still copying the West by proxy”.

I try to approach this technically. Technically you say that Asians are incapable of thought in full generality, that – speaking broadly – they can only “execute” but not come up with effective out-of-the-box plans; that their very robust IQ edge (Zhejiang, where DeepSeek is headquartered and primarily recruits, and where Wenfeng comes from, has average around 110 - that's on par with Ashkenazim!) – is achieved with some kind of interpolation and memorization, but not universal reasoning faculties. To me this looks like a very shaky proposition. From my/r1's deleted post:

The West’s mythos of creative genius – from Archimedes to Musk – emerged from unnaturally prolonged frontiers. When Europe lost 30-60% of its population during the Black Death, it reset Malthusian traps and created vacant niches for exploration. The American frontier, declared "closed" by the 1890 Census, institutionalized risk-taking as cultural capital. By contrast, China’s Yangtze Delta approached carrying capacity by the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE). Innovation became incremental: water mills optimized, tax registers refined, but no steam engines emerged.

This wasn’t a failure of intelligence, but a rational allocation of cognitive resources. High population density selects for "intensive" IQ – pattern-matching within constraints – rather than "extensive" creativity. The same rice paddies that demanded obsessive irrigation schedules cultivated the hyper-adaptive minds now dominating international math Olympiads. China’s historical lack of Nobel laureates in science (prior to 1950) reflects not a missing "genius gene," but a Nash equilibrium where radical exploration offered negative expected value.

R1 might understate the case for deep roots of Western exploratory mindset, but where we agree is that its expression is contingent. Consider: how innovative is Europe today? It sure innovates in ways of shooting itself in the foot with bureaucracy, I suppose. Very stereotypically Chinese, I might say.

What I argue is that whereas IQ is a fundamental trait we can trace to neural architecture, and so are risk-avoidance or conformism, which we can observe even in murine models, “innovativeness” is not. It's an application of IQ to problem-solving in new domains. There's not enough space in the genome to specify problem-solving skills only for domains known in the bearer's lifetime, because domains change; Asians are as good in CTF challenges as their grandfathers were in carving on wood. What can be specified is lower tolerance to deviating from the groupthink, for example as cortisol release once you notice that your idea has not been validated by a higher-status peer; or higher expectation of being backstabbed in a vulnerable situation if you expend resources on exploration; or greater subjective sense of reward for minimizing predictive error, incentivizing optimization at the expense of learning the edges of the domain, thinking how it extends, testing hypotheses and hoping to benefit from finding a new path. Modulo well-applied and tempered IQ, this eagerness to explore OOD is just a result of different hyperparameter values that can also produce maladaptive forms like useless hobbies, the plethora of Western sexual kinks (furries?) and the – no, no, it's not just Jewish influence, own up to it – self-destructive leftist ideologies.

One anecdote is illustrative of the conundrum, I think. Some time ago, a ByteDance intern came up with a very interesting image generation technique, VAR. It eventually won the NeurIPS best paper award! Yandex trained a model based on it already, by the way, and Yandex has good taste (I may be biased of course). But what else did that intern do? Driven by ambition to scale his invention and make an even bigger name for himself, he sabotaged training runs of his colleagues to appropriate the idle compute, fully applying his creative intelligence to derail an entire giant corporation's R&D program! Look at this cyberpunk shit:

  • Modifying PyTorch Source Code: Keyu Tian modified the PyTorch source code in the cluster environment used by his colleagues, including changes to random seeds, optimizer's direction, and data loading procedures. These modifications were made within Docker containers, which is not tracked by Git.
  • Disrupting Training Processes: Keyu Tian deliberately hacked the clusters to terminate multi-machine experiment processes, causing large-scale experiments (e.g., experiments on over thousands of GPUs) to stall or fail.
  • Security Attack: Tian gained unauthorized access to the system by creating login backdoors through checkpoints, allowing him to launch automated attacks that interrupted processes of colleagues' training jobs.
  • Interference with Debugging: Tian participated in the cluster debugging meeting and continuously refined the attack code based on colleagues' diagnostic approaches, exacerbating the issue.
  • Corrupting the Experiments: Tian modified colleagues' well-trained model weights, making their experimental results impossible to reproduce.

Upon uncovering clear evidence, ByteDance terminated Tian's internship. Instead of taking responsibility, he retaliated by publicly accusing other employees of framing him and manipulating public opinion in a malicious manner.

This, I think, is peak of non-conformist genius, the stuff of the Romance of Three Kingdoms and warlord era. This is the essence of what the Confucian paradigm is trying to suppress, crushing benign self-expression at the same time.

But what if your peers cannot backstab you? What if resources are abundant? What if all your peers are rewarded for exploration and it clearly has positive ROI for them? It might not transmogrify the Chinese into archetypal Hajnalis, who engage in these behaviors without stilts, but the result will be much the same.

Only on greater scale.

R1:

Liang’s meta-derisking – making exploration legible, replicable, and prestigious – could trigger a phase shift. But true transformation requires more than outlier firms. It demands ecosystems that reward speculative genius as reliably as rice farmers once rewarded meticulousness. The question isn’t whether Chinese minds can innovate, but whether China’s institutional lattice will let a thousand DeepSeeks bloom – or if this lone swallow merely heralds a cultural spring that never comes.

"Guess which people are more conformist and which are more bold and daring?"

Descendants of serfs who were subjugated to their lords for millenia with little protest, or descendants of peasants who were continuously revolting for all recorded history? Hard guess.

I would have thought that it is visibly the case that both Chinese and Europeans have been extraordinarily restive throughout history?

The generalisation you're responding to is indeed obvious nonsense, but I take a certain baseline level of rebelliousness as a constant. The idea that Chinese people are hereditarily passive, obedient, and conformist, in contrast to wild Westerners, is one that has snuck into some Chinese writing as well, but I think it can only be sustained by an arbitrary cherry-picking of history. The same is true for Europe as well.

I realise you're probably just parodying the claim to show how silly it is, but I sometimes completely miss humour, so...

I think a case can be made that whenever the Chinese state is stable, it is very stable and very good at suppressing peasant rebellions. This is perhaps grounds for an unflattering stereotype about cruelty and power distance, but not so much about obedience of the masses.

Even stronger case could be made that no matter how weak is traditional European feudal system, it is excellent in suppressing peasant rebellions. There is no case in recorded European history of peasant revolt even slightly endangering TPTP (unlike China).

See the ease how even the most extensive revolts were put down. And they were, by Chinese standards, not very revolting at all.

edit: links linked properly

Yeah my ancestors were probably serfs in Old Europe, then they got bored and decided to conquer America. Many such cases- a very classic Indo-European impulse.

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