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Sorry if you addressed this elsewhere in the thread, but I’m curious your thoughts on birth rates and its long term impact.
If you tried to reduce a whole country into a single metric of greatness, I think you can argue over whether China or the US is higher, but I’m sympathetic to the argument that the derivative of this metric is clearly greater for China. What about the second or third derivative though? The biggest thing that makes me think the US’s might be higher is birth rates. According to the UN as summarized by Wikipedia, the US is substantially below replacement at 1.6, but China is at 1.0, which seems catastrophic to me. Indeed, there’s news article from this week saying China now has more deaths than births (a cursory search shows this is not the case for the US after a bit of die-off of elderly people during the peak of the pandemic). If these numbers continue to hold (or decline at the same rate) then 2 generations from now the American cohort will be larger than the Chinese one. My sense, though this could be Western propaganda, is that the US is also more attractive to and welcoming of immigrants than China (averaged over a few presidential administrations anyway) and the US has relatively high fertility religious subgroups that are still compatible with modernity like Mormons and some Jewish sects (does China have any equivalents? I honestly don’t know. I suppose the Uyghurs might have been).
The result is that I could see China overtaking the US on a number of metrics in the next couple decades, but then slinking into economic and cultural decline as the younger Chinese generations become smaller in relative and absolute terms compared to the US. Some on this board may believe that will be irrelevant due to AI and robotics, but I’m skeptical of that and certainly wouldn’t bet the farm on it if I were in the Politburo.
But I also grant I have a very siloed information diet on the topic - is there something I’m missing? Maybe population size doesn’t matter that much? After all, during the US’s period of unquestioned dominance it had a much smaller population than China. Still, I think the birth rates point at something important, and China is definitely doing worse in that regard at least.
China is on a roughly South Korean demographic trajectory. I think their population will fall even faster than pessimistic UN predictions. To what extent that matters, I am not sure. They'll probably have an advantage in workforce with tertiary education over the entirety of the "developed world" for the next two-three decades, by which point labor may become irrelevant. If the problem were the lack of labor in the shorter term, we wouldn't be seeing increasing youth unemployment while productivity keeps ballooning. (The absence of it in eg Japan is not so much about better economy or more advanced stage of demographic transition as about cultural mandate for low productivity of service employment; China isn't willing to subsidize that many bullshit jobs and Chinese graduates are not willing to take full-time low status menial jobs, they'd rather live on parents' savings and do gigs). At this rate of automation, I expect nations will become more preoccupied with reducing population, and China will be one of the most automated and the fastest-shrinking societies, so optimistically it'll cancel out. Then there is the political issue of aging; I am pessimistic about the culture and politics of old societies. Homogeneity and lack of politically significant subgroups with markedly different productivity (as in the US with its racial spoils system) at least reduce the tension.
As of now though, Chinese government is the most vigorous of all I know in trying to boost fertility, they're running policy experiments across provinces and have some results. If all goes well, they may pull back to 1.1-1.2 TFR, and I expect the productive subgroups of the West to naturally stabilize around the same point.
I'm answering tersely because I'm expecting a permaban, as requested.
What the hell is wrong with you?
You swoop in with a sideswipe about how we're not cool enough for your attention anymore, drop your signature huge block quotes, add your own commentary which is soaking wet with the disdain dripping from your fangs, and when anyone returns serve, you escalate the hostility another notch ad nauseum!
Now you're trying to leave forever out of what seems like pure spite? Why? Did we not respond adequately to your provocations? What kind of discussion would have made you happy? "Oh yes, Ilforte, every country is incompetent and arrogant except for China. Russia is poetic and sad and bad. The US is productive and cocky and bad. Glad you brought this to our attention." @2rafa hasn't even earned a response from you, when she clearly respects you and would like to hear from you more often. You were a respected user of this forum! Alas, I can't remember what originally made me so fond of you. Like, I literally can't remember the things you would talk about before February 2022.
I hope you find a nice girl in Argentina man.
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.
Your other post was bad, this one is better. The problem appears to be that you were trying to say the problem isn't chinese culture, it was that other people just aren't paying attention. You might not agree with that interpretation but that is definitely the message you seemed to be putting out there.
I'm of the view that nobody can get to know China when the CCP so seriously restricts organic engagement from the bottom up with top down censorship and control. The CCP does not know how to generate meaningful alliances or relationships, which implies that they are not going to be able to guide Chinese society more broadly towards cultural exchange. They just don't have the skillset.
It seems like some contrast between "our product is great! Why aren't these idiot consumers buying our microwaves?" Vs "maybe they aren't what people want."
When I responded to you I had no idea you had all this baggage as some Big Deal VIP poster. And I took the post at face value, not that you were trying to claw back previous dismissals of China (or something?).
I stand by my previous comments. But I also think you should keep posting about China if you want. I'll read your takes and be interested in your opinion. I don't really get the meltdown-coded follow up comments, and think you were happy to mock me and then got pissy when I did it back to you. Otherwise I don't think you did anything wrong and you shouldn't be looking to terminate all your engagement with the forum over a minor tiff.
Perhaps try talking to Chinese people? The great firewall is one way restricting Chinese from accessing google or facebook, they've got wechat and bilibili and xiaohongshu. Nothing stopping you from shitposting on XHS to see whats up there, mainlander degeneracy is pretty top tier brainrot that doesn't need translation to understand.
Its not that Japanese are any less inscrutable than Chinese, whatever caricature of the Japanese or Korean people that has been internalizes as a representative modality is almost purely inference. Talking to westerners makes it sound like Japanese offices are filled with dead overworked corporate lifers and panty vending machines while Korea is the end boss of narcissistic consumerism.
Seriously, its like none of you guys here whining about China or Chinese people actually met anyone based in the mainland. No one is obligated to talk to someone for the sake of it, but assigning population level mystique is a category error. Talk to chinese people online, they're much more retardedly normal than you think. Less nefarious intent on dominating westoids, more shitposting on shopping livestreams.
Can you make a basic effort to understand what I'm saying?
To put it more succinctly, China has very little cultural impact on the world. And in the few mediums that they try to, it comes off poorly.
If your answer is to log into billbill or xiaohongshu to experience chinese culture, you're making my point for me. Nobody is doing this. Normies have no idea what you're even talking about.
"Just go talk to them". I don't "just go talk to" Americans. American culture is so pervasive that I organically experience their culture daily, passively.
I can't scroll on this forum without being blasted with "Europeans are pussies lol". I have no issue saying "chinese culture is uncharismatic" when it's a model that describes why Chinese politics, diplomacy and cultural engagement largely fails. I can say it when nobody outside of the Chinese political elite actually really know whats going on in china.
Every one of these responses that says "actually China is good at engaging with the world, you're just too ignorant to know it" has made some incredibly poor assumptions about me. I'm not saying this because I'm not looking. I'm saying this because I'm looking and noticing.
You specifically state that the CCP restricts bottom up engagement. China may be invisible at engaging the world, in which case their shit just sucks too hard for people outside to care about (a valid take indicative of preference shaping) or the Chinese propaganda effort is just not working - which is a less valid take since it assigns intent where none reasonably exists. Chinese media isn't interested in getting money from foreigners, when theres 1.4 billion people domestically.
granted, the Chinese state DID make an attempt at engaging the world directly for awhile, and those efforts sucked shit. Confucius institutes, hypernationalist movies with weird foreign tokenism (The Great Wall, Wolf Warrior 2, probably some other crap not worth remembering) and the brief time Zhang Ziyi was let out her cage were all probably attempts to directly showcase CHINA AWESOME, to manifest failure.
Right now many China boosters are mainly antiwokes holding up the proximate enemies greatest threat as proof of the failure of their foe, not necessarily admiration for Chinese products or media. Chinese vidya and donghua has escaped the parties notice for now and is baller as fuck, but thats the domain of weebs, so obviously beyond cultured intellectuals such as ourselves.
I swear to all of you guys though on the bottom of my overweight ass, if you want to experience true China domination, go eat their supermarket sandwiches. Chinese supermarket chains on the mainland must have kidnapped the best Japanese food scientists and forced them to make unfairly good food, and it is shockingly price to quality effective. Something about supermarkets just seems indicative of Real Quality Of Life to my animal brain, and cracking the supermarket quick food aisle is what made me convinced Japan was a real country just like how the costco chicken is proof of US dominance.
Yeah businesses are notorious about their lack of interest in breaking into new markets with high disposable incomes.
All jokes aside, it's not like they don't try. They do. Sometimes successfully. But more frequently not. Which is a summary I could use for virtually all Chinese interactions outside of China.
I'll check them out.
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