site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   14339 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

That's a funny perspective to me. Russians have negligible industrial base, atrophied Soviet military-industrial complex, and mainly export stuff like oil, gas, grain and fertilizers. We also simply don't have many smart people remaining, and instead have a population of jingoistic TV-watching cattle that needs steady supply of copium in the face of a protracted war that's going badly. Of course we have televised fantasies about Wunderwaffes. The US is, for all its grandeur, similarly a corrupt Soy and Gas Empire that struggles with building physical things relative to its consumption and ambition, we see whining about the Rust Belt, Powerpoints with 6th gen fighter jets and «Trump class battleships», and the whole AGI project is supposed to restore the claim to primacy. And even in Ukraine, Americans heroically grappled with the costs of exporting this or that long range wundermissile or Smart Shell, and thought that their Wunderwaffes like HIMARS, or Palmer Luckey's gadgets, will make more of a difference than commodity drone parts from Aliexpress procured by both sides. They did not.

China is the factory of the world and the source of almost all new process innovation and, say, the bulk of Californian top patent holders. The Chinese are not advertising their ion implantation techniques, procurement plans, fabs, they are quietly doing business and actively avoid international publicity on these matters. No, I don't think this is a Wunderwaffe. Yes, we'll see what they can actually produce in 2026.

Alternative explanation: Jensen Huang won the game of "be the last person to talk to Trump", since he knows Trump is a waffling buffoon and Huang just wants to maximize Nvidia's stock, US security concerns be damned.

This is still denialism of the erosion of fundamentals, I think. Classic stabbed-in-the-back-by-Jews [of Asia] doctrine. Huang founded Nvidia over 30 years ago, I don't believe he's a petty merchant optimizing for quarterly reports.

This is still denialism of the erosion of fundamentals, I think. Classic stabbed-in-the-back-by-Jews [of Asia] doctrine. Huang founded Nvidia over 30 years ago, I don't believe he's a petty merchant optimizing for quarterly reports.

Classic stabbed-in-the-back-by-Jews [of Asia]

Good grief x2.

The goal of the CEO of any American company is implicitly if not explicitly the maximization of shareholder value. Selling chips to China is just how Jensen Huang can achieve that better. The idea that Huang is doing it as some grand geopolitical play (and where his company's bottom line is a secondary concern) is a bit hard to take seriously. Like, he might be doing that, but you'd want to have a decent amount of evidence to convince people that it's not just the cynical moneygrubbing play.

No, we do not need allusions to Nazi conspiracies of the Jews to say "the CEO is probably just trying to make more profit".

The goal of the CEO of any American company is implicitly if not explicitly the maximization of shareholder value

You're so confident. On what time horizon? One quarter? One year? Decades? As long as the company gets to exist? Do you realize that Jensen is a founder, and founders are not equal to board-appointed CEOs?

The idea that Huang is doing it as some grand geopolitical play (and where his company's bottom line is a secondary concern) is a bit hard to take seriously.

If the only way you can think of this is myopic mercantilism, then you are indeed culturally and civilizationally inferior to the Chinese and deserve to lose, get dunked on and consigned to the dustbin of history. You're inferior people, xiaoren. The Teacher had said:

The nature of the noble man is like the wind, the nature of the inferior man is like the grass. When the wind blows over the grass, it always bends.

Get bent already.

…But I think people like Jensen and Elon — tellingly, not Americans, but those who have adopted the nobler American ideal — are different. Jensen says:

First, in order to have a race to do well in a race, you have to understand the race and you have to understand the resources that you’re working with, the assets that you have, the assets you don’t have, your advantages and your disadvantages. And some of the things to realize is that AI is fundamentally at its core level. And going back to the three levels that we’re talking about, at each level we have to make sure that we understand the game.

And this game isn’t. There’s no 60 minute clock on this thing. This is an infinite game. And so most people aren’t very good at playing infinite games. You know, Nvidia is now 33 years old. We’ve been through three computer revolutions, from the PC revolution to the Internet to mobile, and now we’re in AI. And so you have to, in order to thrive across all of these different changes in the environment, you have to understand how to play games.

And so the things that I just described, understanding the game, understanding the assets, you have really important at the first layer, at the technology layer, the most important thing to understand is that the intellectual capital, and remember, 50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese. First, just take a step back and recognize that that important factor has to play into how we think about the game.

The next is AI factories. In order to do well there, you need to have energy. Because fundamentally we transfer, we transform electricity into digital tokens. Just as the last industrial revolution transformed atoms through energy into, you know, steel things and physical things that we know cars and things like that, buildings and things like that. And the generation before that, we gave it water into a machine called the dynamo. And what came out was electricity. And so now we have electricity go in and tokens come out. So the next layer requires energy.

The layer above that is just happening now. And it’s really, really important that we understand that ultimately the winners of the last industrial revolution wasn’t the country that invented it, it was the country that applied it. And the United States applied. Applied steel, applied energy faster than any country. Everybody else was worried about things like labor and, you know, horses being replaced by cars and, you know, those kind of matters. But the United States just. We just took it and ran with it.

And so the infrastructural layer above that is about the application of the technology. It’s about not being afraid of it, wanting to engage it, reskilling. Reskilling our workforce so that we’re able to apply it, encouraging people to adopt it. And so when you look at the, when you look at AI through the lens that I just described to the framework I just described, each one of the layers has its own, if you will, challenges and opportunities, and the game’s a little different in each one.

I don't think Jensen wants to sell out to China to make line go up. He wants to keep playing the infinite game.

But inferior men can only interpret a superior man's vision in terms of profit.

I still don't understand how exporting chips to China is supposed to help the US in the long run when the Chinese long run plan is to not import chips.

How is it not supposed to help? Money is good, market share is good. It reduces US trade deficit, providing funds for more useful things. Just 1 million chips is $25B, it's equal to the annual worth of those soy exports Trump frets so much about, it's like 5 times more than the much-hyped LNG boom. It derisks the circular investment bubble with NVidia as the nexus that's now a large part of US economy, and extends the timeline on which China stops importing them (ie the moment where domestic computing platforms are adopted by their top labs and shutting Nvidia out is not disruptive to DeepSeek V5 or Doubao-Seed 3 or whatever).
In a more relaxed geopolitical environment, they may not even stop 100%, just like they're still buying high-end Western CNC machines, despite being able to make functionally similar ones now. Nvidia will still have better yields, lower unit prices, higher power efficiency, more polished software, likely for decades. It's not like they have a philosophical commitment to not buy at all, they are simply focused on becoming strategically invulnerable to export controls after years of American gloating about how they'll fall behind and die, starting with Huawei.

The main argument against this has nothing to do with Chinese plans to stop buying chips later, it's just that they'll develop and deploy stronger AI at larger scale and secure some advantages in the short term, in the limit literally ASI. An auxiliary argument is that they will use extra compute to speed up the necessary research. That can be debated and weighed against standard economic arguments.

How is it not supposed to help? Money is good, market share is good.

We were just discussing long vs short term thinking. Money and market share are the short term returns, the question is about the long term.

In a more relaxed geopolitical environment, they may not even stop 100%, just like they're still buying high-end Western CNC machines, despite being able to make functionally similar ones now. Nvidia will still have better yields, lower unit prices, higher power efficiency, more polished software, likely for decades. It's not like they have a philosophical commitment to not buy at all, they are simply focused on becoming strategically invulnerable to export controls after years of American gloating about how they'll fall behind and die, starting with Huawei.

We're not in a more relaxed geopolitical environment. We're in an environment where China is doing everything it can to stimulate domestic chip production including by banning imports of certain chips in the first place, which sounds like a philosophical commitment to not buying at all to me.

If you believe that China is interested in being invulnerable to export controls and you believe that Nvidia use can lead to lock-in, it follows that China's strategy would be to avoid the lock-in in the first place, which means that there is no long term market for Nvidia chips in China.

The main argument against this has nothing to do with Chinese plans to stop buying chips later

Correct. I brought up the other argument in a previous thread where you responded with a non-sequitur about orange man having bad trade policy. Here I'm limiting myself strictly to your claim that chip exports would be beneficial in the long run for Nvidia.

Money and market share are the short term returns, the question is about the long term.

I have the exact opposite view on this. Market share is the long term play – maybe 30 years. Your “long term” AGI supremacy play is a no-term Hail Mary premised on some dubious assumptions and, frankly, low IQ racism about Chinese capacity for independent R&D.

including by banning imports of certain chips in the first place, which sounds like a philosophical commitment to not buying at all to me.

It's a philosophical commitment to independence. They enact protectionist measures for fledgling industries, and scale them down after achieving competitiveness, like they cut subsidies for EVs or batteries.

As I've repeatedly said, current Chinese AI software has low adoption, especially by talented collectives, and thus low development velocity; so long as it doesn't get adoption it doesn't matter if they can physically make good chips, they'll remain vulnerable to export controls and will have to do another multi-year moonshot after the next Democrat opportunistically cuts them off. H20 and RTX Pro 6000D are just not providing enough value to justify further software stagnation (not to mention reduced revenues to domestic manufacturers). H200, because it is both a powerful GPU and scales to large training clusters, seems to be marginally valuable enough so we see more nuanced regulation. After domestic chips become better than H200 (or rather, domestic systems + power subsidy become competitive with Nvidia clusters) and there's wide adoption of Huawei CANN and Cambricon NeuWare, I predict that they will relax controls on imported chips, maybe replacing it with a simple tariff. Your model suggests that they will tighten controls. It's an empirical matter, we will see in a matter of 2 years, most likely.

it follows that China's strategy would be to avoid the lock-in in the first place, which means that there is no long term market for Nvidia chips in China

As explained above, it does not follow and you're refusing to understand what they're doing.

After domestic chips become better than H200 (or rather, domestic systems + power subsidy become competitive with Nvidia clusters) and there's wide adoption of Huawei CANN and Cambricon NeuWare, I predict that they will relax controls on imported chips, maybe replacing it with a simple tariff. Your model suggests that they will tighten controls. It's an empirical matter, we will see in a matter of 2 years, most likely.

Hardly. If Chinese chips become better than the best Nvidia has to offer, there is, as you say, little reason to ban imports since approximately nobody will want to use them. EVs are a good example - how many Chinese people buy American EVs? I'd assume the number is approximately zero since American EVs are about 5x the price for a comparable product.

Of course, if Chinese chips are better than Nvidia's best, the prospects for Nvidia market share become quite slim. You seem to want it both ways - Nvidia exports to China will ensure Nvidia's dominance in China (lock in! Efficiency! Yields!), but also China is going to ensure that domestic chips are the market leader.

EVs are a good example - how many Chinese people buy American EVs? I'd assume the number is approximately zero since American EVs are about 5x the price for a comparable product

Well, this reveals the problem with first principles thinking popular among rationalists. Tesla model Y is consistently one of the hottest EVs in China. They totally love Teslas. It genuinely has advantages over domestic cars, they constantly make videos where its FSD dunks on Xiaomi and other competition. Upper class Chinese buy Teslas.

(Of course, it's Tesla made in Shanghai. It so happens that Shanghai Gigafactory is about 2.3x more productive per worker.)

Similar logic can apply to Nvidia.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats