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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.
I at least find your content more interesting than your style!
Journalists are over-hated. They provide a valuable service of collecting, verifying, and disseminating raw facts like "white house staffer told me this EO is coming" or "this company is merging with that company". It's not as noble a profession as they think it is, and they are of course not perfect at it, but merely being passable at it while making frequent mistakes with significant bias is still very valuable.
That's what trade journalists do.
Normal journalists have political agendas.
This is also just false as factual matter. Most normal journalists, including at the NYT, are writing articles like "Major US Public Transit Systems Brace For Storm With Detours And Warnings", and even the politics ones are mostly writing articles that are accurate.
Sure. It's not lying when, while covering a topic you engage in wholesale misdirection by deliberately burying the lede in one half of a sentence 3/4 down the article.
That's fine. It's not deceptive at all.
Yeah I do consider that lying but just as a factual matter most NYT articles don't do that. Some do! Most don't! I never claimed they never do that! But it seems to be quite difficult to report on facts that are of interest to politics without lying frequently, approximately nobody on any political side seems to do it well, and it's still useful to know the things the news reports despite that.
There is no moral difference between being a liar and someone who achieves the same ends with deliberate misdirection.
One could even argue someone like NYT who is usually somewhat correct if selectively ignoring certain things, but will readily deceive in critical moments is worse than a liar, because they're better at deception.
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