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Since @Amadan had apparently deemed me not deserving of a ban yet (a bold strategy), I'll take this as an opportunity to explain myself, hopefully for the last time, in plain language.
It's tempting to answer «See? Nothing of value will be lost». More specifically: what made people fond of me was, I think, merely the style of my writing. I'm a talented polemicist, if I do say so myself. My prose at its best has a poetic dimension, my ESL idiosyncrasies add some cute novelty and charm, my arguments are emotionally charged and my metaphors evocative. It's as satisfying for me to write as for the reader to watch me rip into his tribal enemies. Less charitably put, I'm a content creator, a journalist, appreciated for entertaining commentary on current events. My pulpit was akin to some American comedian's show, Stewart or Colbert's, or a podcast in this era, where Fuentes runs his mouth off on the hot topic of the day, with a dash of Russian perspective that, for the reader, was a market-differentiating gimmick. But journalists aren't human beings, are they? Much less respected thinkers. Nobody needs the opinion of a journalist; his job is to affirm the opinion of the consumer. So when I deviate from the prevailing sentiment, I get insults, mockery, I'm called a naive shmuck or an enemy propagandist, and receive condescending personal advice. Ah well! Journalists come and go. It's really not worth remembering their transient blather, you're doing it right.
The thing is, for all the pride I have in my writing ability, I look down on journalists too. It's my thoughts that I am trying to share. Mainly thoughts about the evolution of civilization and communities under effects of technology, and large-scale cultural dynamics seen through the prism of archetypal events and artifacts; and the style is supposed to be a simple appetizer (which in fact often gets in the way – it's not a cultivated skill but just how I write, how I talk naturally… See – another overlong too-Russian sentence, a digression that flows well phonetically but makes the reader's eyes glaze over).
I think about this stuff because that's what had always been interesting to me, everything else being only instrumentally significant. I came here from SlateStarCodex, which – no idea if you're aware, it's been long ago – is part of the LessWrong sphere; and LessWrong, with all its rational thinking and ratfic and general discussion and weird autist sex things ephemera, had always been a wrapper for the community obsessed with problem of artificial general intelligence. Under pretty sensible and obvious assumptions, this is the most important facet of the causal backbone of reality. Now LessWrong readers had graduated into employees and CEOs of megacorps whose projects the United States Government is treating as the Hail Mary in a geopolitical competition at the end of history. So am I coming back to the core issue.
So, what would I want to be remembered for, if it were a choice? This piece about DeepSeek, from July 2024. I did some honest work. Observed the market, inspected the models, read the tech reports, and highlighted a thing that will significantly redefine the US-PRC AI race. Long before it caused the panic at Meta and imposion of their LLaMA project (and rendered the entire Western LLM open source scene obsolete). Long before R1 set fire to Nvidia's stock, and the founder going on to meet with Xi Jinping and Trump name-dropping DeepSeek as a wake-up call for the US a week after inauguration. Over a year prior to the entire Chinese tech pivoting on a dime and starting to spawn DeepSeeks, so that now even Meituan (yes the food delivery company) is contesting OpenAI at the frontier and open sourcing their work. Back then, in the summer of 2024, I said: «…confident vision, bearing fruit months later. I would like to know who's charting their course, because they're single-handedly redeeming my opinion of the Chinese AI ecosystem and frankly Chinese culture.» That someone was Liang Wenfeng. In 2025 he was on Nature 10, and the vibe was as follows: «DeepSeek has also become a symbol of a transition in the country’s reputation — from master imitators to true innovators, according to Liang and other Chinese researchers. “The shift is real, and it’s accelerating,” says Yu Wu, a researcher at DeepSeek. Now the world is eagerly awaiting the firm’s next reasoning model, R2, which is rumoured to have been delayed by issues with hardware and training data. One good bet is that Liang’s company plans to give R2 to the world for free. “We’re committed to open source forever,” says Wu.» This is representative, you can doubt me but I say quite confidently that the self-perception had already changed. Roughly a year ago I submitted a post on the deeper cultural priors and possible outcomes of this transition event, too, cheekily written in tandem with R1 to illustrate the point of its genuinely unusual cognition compared to Western LLMs of the time; it got downvoted to hell for «AI slop», earned me some warnings, so it's deleted now. A pity, I'd like to link it to show how my/R1's predictions were prescient. Instead we still have the endless rehashing of boomer takes about Chyna stealing-copying-faking, no soft power, bad media exports, counterproductive propaganda, nobody likes them etc – missing the point entirely.
Subjectively, I believe it's about as interesting as if someone in the 1970 discovered that the Soviet Union had quietly opened a Special Economic Zone in the Khabarovsk Krai and they're speedrunning to a Japan-style Neon Cyberpunk there. What does this say about the ideological competition between the Free World and the Warsaw Pact? About the assumptions we're reliant on for predicting the Communist Party's strategy and future outcomes? In the 1970, such a report would be a bombshell in the USA, I'd wager. Today, in this forum, people will create megathreads (actually fail to create a megathread, so it's just dozens of threads cluttering the main one) about some ICE dude shooting some protestor woman. Charitably that's the same logic as mine – an outlier event that may be the herald of a bigger trend or at least can serve as a focal point for a big picture discussion. That's fine, I'm simply saying the big picture is bigger than the intra-American culture war and deserves at least a fraction of attention. In fact, I believe that the current form of the culture war, with the empowerment of Trump as a Caesarist figure, the growing influence of the Tech Right, progressives losing all their cancel power, even these land grab attempts and bizarrely high American belligerence and contempt towards allied nations — is driven not just by the endogenous trend of woke fatique, but by the undercurrent of existential anxiety about the Chinese rise, not dissimilar to the Sputnik shock. The failure of the fast AGI gambit, the resilience of their economy, the authority in international organizations flowing their way, are gnawing at the roots of American confidence, some left unarticulated in the polite society – national, political, cultural, civilizational, even racial. And DeepSeek was what had put it into focus for me.
But enough about DeepSeek. The point is, I wanted to share my surprising finding about the contemporary Chinese culture in a consequential domain, seen through the keyhole of this specific open source research program.
And I don't want to claim prescience. It's not like I've always been so China-pilled. On the contrary, my predictions had been lousy and highly biased in the opposite direction, if anything; they were worse than that of our resident, less prolific China bulls like @RandomRanger. As late as in 2020, I had leaned towards modeling them as a large, superficially significant, but non-live player compared to the US, doomed specifically by cultural rigidity and myopia of the elites, a paper tiger/dragon – a theory that's still finding quite some purchase here. In my 2020 Viewpoint Focus, I've said
July 2022, about their first mass produced 7nm chip:
By September 2023, I've updated to this–
– but I still held to the idea that odds are stacked in the West's favor. Tech is one thing, culture is another. And even my knowledge of the tech progress was lacking, nevermind the culture, to say nothing of its changes. In my defense, one had to have direct exposure to intra-Chinese discourse (and then, very specific circles) to get that part right then.
To my embarrassment, even in the DeepSeek post, I've been hedging:
My «realistically» amounted to saying they're strategically dumb and myopic and unable to capitalize on their advantages the way Americans can on their own. I've been extremely, catastrophically overrating Western exceptionalism and profoundly incurious about China, partially due to the influence of this America First community. Not blaming anyone here; mea culpa.
So for over a year I've been trying to steer the discussion so that my errors and my negative contributions were negated. All I've got is steady erosion of my reputation and, by 2026, accusations of working for the Ministry of State Security from some Canadian who, family lore aside, might know less about China than I now do.
And now this shit:
Thanks. Now how about you stop condescending and try to actually fucking read? How much more must I chew it for you to make it digestible?
I hope this clarifies my position somewhat.
I really appreciate how you keep tediously yelling into the void, getting mostly dismissals and accusations in return, and yet still choose to engage with people even if losing your temper at times. Not unlike most of my experiences engaging with non-Chinese (or Chinese, frustratingly) online, it’s incredibly frustrating and infuriating to never be taken seriously, but I’m naively optimistic about everything, so here we are. I hope this isn’t the last time I see you posting here. It’s of course interesting to see the progression of your takes too.
On the off chance that you disappear from this forum forever, I’d really like to ask where exactly you got any exposure at all to intra-Chinese discourse even if indirect. There are discussions on Zhihu (which I’ve seen you cite before, though the platform is now nowhere near its peak), as well as on Weibo, Bilibili, etc. But those spaces are mostly surprisingly barren, especially on sensitive topics, where people have to communicate in something close to Morse code. There are very few places on Chinese social media to hear anyone with enough intellectual curiosity talking about sensitive topics. You also can’t really find good takes from overseas Chinese, or from Hong Kongers or Taiwanese, for reasons I’m sure you understand. I’ve found that frustrating as well, which is partly why I’m here. I want to see what a few gems of non-Chinese takes on China look like, even if they’re buried in a sea of noise.
It would be great if you could at least leave your methods here, in case anyone manages to overcome the activation energy and actually wants to know what’s happening in the country. Or just to satisfy my curiosity.
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Right. So here's the thing: expressing an unpopular opinion is not unique here, nor is getting a lot of flack for it. You started this thread by saying everyone here is too dumb and American to be worth talking to, and telling people who disagreed with you that they don't know what they're talking about. Now you're throwing an undignified tantrum because people returned the sentiment.
I'm not going to ban you unless I have to, because you are acting like a jackass here but you do have a long record of AAQCs as well. Your statement that you do not intend to change your behavior is duly noted: if you continue being a condescending jackass to everyone who disagrees with you, you will continue to accrue warnings and eventually a ban. We would prefer you didn't.
You're constantly lying and twisting my words, even in this case –
– which seriously undermines your judgement of what is or isn't undignified in my eyes.
To be precise, my words were:
Do you believe you're following the spirit or at least the letter of the rules by construing this as «everyone here is too dumb and American to be worth talking to»? How's this doing on charity?
You posture as a neutral arbiter, but at the very least you are «returning the sentiment» like the rest of us.
Did you delete your post agreeing with this faggot, by the way?
You are following the pattern of every poster on here that gets a reputation as some sort of big shot, you have become a jackass that believes you're better than everyone else here because of a posting reputation from years back. Amadan is willing to give you leeway because of "a long record of AAQCs" which you feel entitles you to just be an ass and sneer at everyone. It's always amusing to see this process happen and inevitably lead to flameouts and permabans, I enjoy it immensely every single time :)
We don't appreciate the goading either. Knock it off.
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I don't give a rat's ass about my reputation on this forum or any other, and this account (as well as its predecessor) is a tiny part of my online presence. For the purpose of the discussion, I'm better than my opponents for the specific reason that I've thought of more important things and thought better before making my top post 1 day ago, and can defend my position candidly, whereas they need to move goalposts, change topics and fall back on fallacies.
I am extremely tired of @Amadan's regular appeals to AAQCs and have equally regularly stated that I do not want any special treatment, indeed I consider these passages a way to undermine my current (obviously correct and fair) arguments, because it invites the assumption of some DEI quality, and this dumb sneering and psychologizing from petty status-conscious anklebiters giddy to see a «big shot» fall below their level. The whole ethos of kid gloves for the «AAQC caste» and high standards for The Rest never sat right with me, same as any other casteism and nepotism, and it's in violation of Good Governance 101:
So if my behavior merits punishment on general grounds, I publicly ask for the rules to be upheld without any unfairness and bias at least in my case. I'm just not going to petition the mods for special treatment in the other direction, in some bizarre act of performative masochism.
P.S. Personally I don't even understand the theory behind special treatment. Presumably the idea is that Quality Posters are exactly divas of the sort you think me to be, narcissists who might feel slighted by having rules applied to them fairly, and would leave, taking their Quality Contributions with them. Inasmuch as that's the case, I believe it's long term preferable to filter such Quality out, because Actually Quality Posters have both confidence and self-control to behave prosocially and accept the law with equanimity.
But I have no ambition of litigating for rule amendment this late into the game.
Fine. 1-day nap since you're just descending to namecalling and chest-puffing belligerence.
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