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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I do speak other languages and in fact even speak a little Chinese but I'm trying to make a larger point: China is supposedly on the cusp of global dominance, OK, where are all the people learning Chinese? Globally, who is actually adapting to a future of Chinese supremacy? Mostly people are continuing to learn English as their lingua franca, even though there are billions of Chinese people who could be unlocked by learning Chinese. It's not a small language. But you don't see people adapting themselves to a future of Chinese domination because in their bones nobody believes this is coming.
Well again I'm making a bigger point that this is passing over: America invented the modern world (ok, America invented a lot of the modern world) and it is continuing to invent the world of the future. Planes trains and automobiles. Nuclear weapons and the power grid. Satellites and rockets. Cell phones and social media. Now it's AI and Falcon.
It's fine or whatever if China is going to lead in material sciences and building ships and you can draw the trendline and predict, China will overtake America in the future and America is decadent and gay. Ok, but America is still inventing the future, observably, I can see it. And if we're debating in these terms, it is not the case at all that China is obviously poised to take over the future and America can't do anything but sit in the corner and watch. It is very much open to debate. And it's very reasonable of me to notice that America is continuing to grow, China faces deep structural problems, America still leads where it counts, and nobody is learning Chinese.
Obviously I don't mean to call China "parasitic" in some kind of moral sense. I am noticing the fact that their industrial development was bootstrapped by the existence of Western economies that modernized first. They didn't have to invent the modern university system, or capital markets, or automobile factories. They merely had to copy what had already been done. In many (many) cases they stole IP. They used cheap peasant labor to arbitrage western economies that had modern labor laws and unions. This is not to deny China the incredible progress they have made modernizing, but to notice that at no point has China actually been in the driver's seat. They still have a tremendous way to go. This is the difference between what Peter Thiel called "Zero to One" and "One to Many". They have not provably developed a Zero to One culture. That's something that can't be copied. It has to actually be developed on Chinese soil on its own terms. And it's reasonable to notice that most of China's development is merely copying what the West has produced first. And it's reasonable to notice that Chinese science still has deep structural problems that have to be overcome.
At the same time sure yes China is starting to develop some culture of innovation and progress. But it isn't a given at all that China will successfully develop a true culture of science that surpasses what has existed in the West. It's actually an open question. And what happens when China's population begins to age and the economy stagnates and someone has to replace Xi Jinping? What happens when tariffs from the West and export restrictions eat into the easy margins China has enjoyed while industrializing until now?
Right, so what? America also has companies that outperform India, Japan, and all of the EU in AI. Partly because more and more of the world speaks English (not Chinese) and anybody so inclined can move from Europe to America if they want to work at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence. The reverse, Europeans moving to China to work at the cutting edge, is much more rare.
It was never close at all. Moreover, Japan was even an ally. At the time that Japanese auto companies were disrupting Detroit, American soldiers were stationed in Okinawa. Japan competed with America because America allowed it to happen, because that is the global system America set up.
You proclaim that China is larger than America, but China is not larger than the global system at which America is the center. Yes, America is the center. It is a leaky system and there might be lots of cooperation with China i.e. German companies are happy to interface with Huawei instead of AT&T. But China has to begin to replace America in ways that are conspicuously not happening. I.e., people would still rather conduct trade in the dollar and not the renminbi. People would rather conduct business in English and not Chinese. People would rather hire graduates from Stanford and not Tsinghua. Nations rely on American ships to protect the global sea lanes, not Chinese ships.
China exists within a world which the Americans created and has not even properly begun to contest and replace America. It will take a generation or more for China to mature into this task, if it is ever ready, if it can ever be ready. On balance it is actually extremely likely they will fail.
Well I understand why people here would think that but my "information environment" is mostly panicans predicting that the United States is doomed, that Trump has failed, that America is declining forever, and reading lots of books. I promise that my views are actually bespoke and of my own creation and not merely the dumb talking points of whatever low-grade MAGA podcaster it is presumed I downloaded this week.
Well I disagree with your point because people who matter do. Russian elite is supposedly hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies for their children. American elite – Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Trumps – do the same. Some random Africans do. TraceWoodgrains did, like a quarter of this forum did. Hell, you did to an extent. High agency people learn Chinese. An average American isn't doing international business and needn't even be verbal or numerate (or independently physically mobile) to live a good fat life, so of course there's little demand for Mandarin in those circles. But Germans thought similarly, and where are they now? China is kicking them out of their main industrial markets, for all their racist hubris about "German quality" and, I bet, smug sense of superiority when they heard a Chinese engineer humbly speaking German just to accommodate them. A lesson in there.
More boringly, we live in an age where technology seems certain to make multilingualism a rather worthless skill. Real-time AI translation is getting really good.
And what beyond AI and Falcon? That's your last frontier now. They're roughly where you were in 1980 in GDP per capita, and yet the technological gap has shrunk to about 5 years. The best current Chinese AI model is 6-8 months behind. They have a Raptor 2 class engine in testing, will probably land a rocket this month, and also show a Blackwell-level AI training cluster. They're even building fighter jets faster than you now, and people with a clue say that copes about J-20 or J-35 being junk or "not really 5th gen" will get people killed. It just, I dunno, it doesn't look intimidating. Pull out some other rabbit out of this future hat. The entire US is becoming an overleveraged bet on transformative AGI, and I'm not sure <12 months of lead will be enough for… whatever it is the plan is.
That is true but in practice American countermeasures mostly amount to tariffs, more tariffs on third parties, subsidies, export controls, and hare-brained attempts to rally or strongarm the "allies". Which is rather amateurish and primitive compared to their model of governance. Americans acting != Americans acting effiiciently.
Have you considered that one reason China copies good stuff from the West/US but the opposite doesn't happen is simply that you can't, even if you honestly try, which you often don't because of hubris and brainwashing that prevent you from the recognition of a shortcoming? You're not a very adaptive society. You can't copy meritocracy, because it's at odds with democracy. You can talk about "wake-up calls" for decades but can't develop industrial policy that isn't just picking winners or corruption with extra steps, so you cope that this is what they do too. You can't have a decent drone manufacturer even after years of handwringing about the natsec threat of DJI. You can't form a non-primitive theory of how subsidies work, and you are still coping about "cheap peasant labor" after their wages grew 17x and the competitiveness didn't budge. Your solution to your fentanyl epidemic was begging China to help out on their end. You can't copy the "don't start pointless wars with no theory of victory" trick, and you've even lost the basic Western technology of recognizing failure instead of saving face. You famously can't build the high speed rail system or the secure quantum communication network, though I agree that's unnecessary. Over roughly 8 years of the trade war and "decoupling", more of "friend-shoring", you've become more dependent on their supply chains for your core, singular Hail Mary bet against them, but not the other way around, and your elites are still confused as to what is happening and believe the solution is more Being Tough On China. It's hard for you to reform the FDA the way they did their reforms – though you are trying, yes you are reacting to copy Chinese policy, yes there is a "we much copy the Chinese" mindset in some strata already. I think there'll be more of that; Trump clearly envies Xi in many ways, and one of his few great personal qualities is that he's not invested in saving face for the nation of the United States or for the American people, his ego is too big to care about you, so maybe he'll succeed somewhat just to make simself look good on merit of fixing the mess. But again, hard without meritocracy, surrounded by mediocre sniveling viziers. Trumpism is a very Oriental phenomenon.
I wouldn't worry about their science. It's well-funded, it has a path to commercialization and it's flush with talent. That's everything that made American science great, except more so.
I wanted to call out an inconsistency but actually if you think they're far behind in AI, I guess this makes sense. America will have AGI and a new century of greatnessl the Chinese, being incapable of Real Progress, will have a "demographic crisis". Nevermind that they're running circles around the entire world in robotics.
Well that's plausible, if pointless except for getting to China. then they'll raise their own export controls (as they already do sometimes) and keep exporting to the entire rest of the world, watching as "the West" collapses like a house of cards, I guess. We've seen a small scale test with Nexperia. I repeat, this is insane hubris. The reason China is relevant today is their own productivity owing to human capital and adequate governance, not some charity from the West and certainly not minor market access tricks.
Just the point that their talent is not particularly valuable. They don't produce a lot of talent. Just how it is.
This is more tryhard grandiosity and frankly close to "But I did have breakfast this morning" reasoning. You lost Detroit auto industry not because you casually permitted it to happen out of some leonine generosity towards an ally. The Japanese just were better and took it away. They were getting likewise better in chips. That you have imperial means of compelling Japan is irrelevant for purposes of the argument because you don't have such means in China, nor soldiers in Shanghai. So the real comparison you should make is to "how would we fare if we could NOT compel Japan AT ALL".
This is, hilariously enough, a very traditional Chinese posture, almost word for word. They tried this thing with tributary states, it was net negative. The job of the champion is to be able to bear all the costs of hegemony alone, only then do the vassals feel emboldened to contribute; if the champion retreats, he risks provoking a rout. You've already retreated a few times in the last 2 years. You're the center of a world-system where a treaty-bound ally can deny his airspace to your air force. This isn't a system you own or control, it's just something you earn rent on.
China has replaced the US as the physical center of the industrial civilization over the last generation. That is strength, that is what is hard, and that, not sentimental bullshit in the European manner about attractive culture, is what made the US the 20th century superpower. Factories, cities, jets, ships, rockets, Silicon Valley, exponentially growing material abundance. You also mentioned "cities" above, do you really think they still envy your cities? Does anyone outside, like, Latin America? One by one, these check boxes are getting filled. You need to keep making new ones.
I'm really unsure about this, any statistics? Which people? I only recall that time Stanford students stole an AI model built by Tsinghua students, shallowly obfuscated and rebranded as their own for clout. That, too, is a perk of being the center of the World. Indeed, no such people would think of trying to enroll in Tsinghua. I bet they love America.
On balance they have, conservatively, 2x your industrial capacity, 3x intellectual and (very conservatively) no less capable governance or markets. Unless you show some unprecedented overperformance, it's wholly their game to lose.
Whether they do, and on what scale, is not too relevant - remember that the civilized world of antiquity continued to speak Greek while being under Roman Empire. The Romans forced their language only on barbarians of the West, never ever thought to do it in the East (the famous scene from Life of Brian is fictional, real historical Eastern natives and Roman legionaires would be speaking Greek and understanding each other rather well).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link