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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   27329 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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is the recent spate of deaths among American and Chinese scientists the beginning of a -hot- warm war with China?

From Newsweek: Chinese Scientists Have Been Dying Mysterious Deaths Too

The star of China's booming artificial intelligence defense sector had been working on Taiwan invasion scenarios—until he died in an unexplained car crash in the early hours of the morning in Beijing, aged just 38.

Many questions remain over the July 1, 2023 death of Feng Yanghe, a professor at the National University of Defense Technology, who had won national competitions with his pioneering "War Skull" platform. Such as, why did an obituary in the state-run science news website, Sciencenet .cn, say he was "sacrificed"? Why was the brilliant scientist from Gansu province buried in a special cemetery in Beijing for the Communist Party elite, state heroes, and revolutionary martyrs?

The phenomenon mirrors the wave of disappearances or deaths among American scientists that is now being investigated by Washington. In the U.S, there have been 11 cases, in China at least nine. It's prompted a disturbing question among some military analysts: Is there a silent "scientist war" going on?

”Feng was a mastermind behind AI simulations of potential Taiwan scenarios and it's very odd that the accident happened in the middle of the night," said an experienced researcher of the Chinese military who works at a Western think tank and who has been monitoring the situation.

The author is a senior reporter for Newsweek, with publications in the NYT and some other major publications. She is also a former senior fellow in the Asia Program at the German Council on Foreign Relations and a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Not a crackpot contributor as might be expected from the insane premise! She seems to have connections within the Chinese circle of influence.

If there’s really a tit for tat of targetting each other’s scientists, then I think our immigration policy will prove to be a grave mistake. There are 265,000 Chinese students in America, and probably hundreds of thousands of Chinese who own or work in the huge nationwide Chinese restaurant industry. The CCP would be able to place agents around America with complete ease. America would have a difficult time doing the same. We saw recently in Iran how effective it is to place drones around an enemy country, and Iranians were so afraid of threats from their immigrant community that they deported 1.5 million Afghans.

This theory would explain why America has had disappearances and not just deaths:

Also missing is William Neil McCasland, a retired Air Force major general, who hasn’t been seen since he walked out of his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home on February 27, leaving behind his phone, prescription glasses and wearable devices […] McCasland was at the center of some of the Pentagon’s most advanced aerospace research and once commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Months after the 68-year-old went missing, officials still can’t say where he went, why he left or whether someone else was involved.

The above sounds to me like a VIP being escorted to a safe area where he can’t possibly be targeted, hence the leaving behind of electronics.

Also missing is William Neil McCasland, a retired Air Force major general, who hasn’t been seen since he walked out of his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home on February 27, leaving behind his phone, prescription glasses and wearable devices […] McCasland was at the center of some of the Pentagon’s most advanced aerospace research and once commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Months after the 68-year-old went missing, officials still can’t say where he went, why he left or whether someone else was involved.

If this is the guy I am thinking of then the rumor is that the situation is completely understood it is just being withheld for family privacy reasons. Aka the guy wandered off and died from early dementia, killed himself or something similar.

it's very odd that the accident happened in the middle of the night

Guy has car accident driving home in early hours of morning after long work day/possibly after having a few drinks. Gee, how mysterious, it must be political assassination!

If all those 11 deaths have zero evidence of Chinese involvement (same for the 9 Chinese deaths), wouldn’t coincidence be more probable?

The alternative is that one (or both) intelligence agencies are anomalously good at espionage and the other are much worse at detecting it (or hiding they know, but why?)

Many questions remain over the July 1, 2023 death of Feng Yanghe, a professor at the National University of Defense Technology, who had won national competitions with his pioneering "War Skull" platform. Such as, why did an obituary in the state-run science news website, Sciencenet .cn, say he was "sacrificed"? Why was the brilliant scientist from Gansu province buried in a special cemetery in Beijing for the Communist Party elite, state heroes, and revolutionary martyrs?

“Why did China visibly honor this model Chinese citizen so much after his newsworthy death?” In a socialist country, every life is a sacrifice to the nation.

The reason to hide the real cause of death would be: to not alarm the public; to not accelerate a hot war with China; and lastly, to not make your own priceless talent fearful of working on government projects

The Hanania approach is that there's not really anything weird going on to begin with and I think he might be right. https://unherd.com/2026/04/behind-the-disappearing-scientists-hysteria/

First of all, a lot of these scientists are crackpots or retired (so we have a very expensive view of what counts as a scientist here and thus a pretty large base group) or have known suspects involved.

Like

Nearly everything about Eskridge’s background raises red flags about any narrative that might include her in a list of important scientists. She was the co-founder of an organization called the Institute for Exotic Science, where she purported to be working on something called “gravity-modification research,” which isn’t a recognized branch of science. In 2020, she claimed to be ready to present groundbreaking work on “antigravity” but needed approval from NASA.

And

They included a retired Air Force major general,

And

Two of the names were shot and killed. Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor, was murdered by a former classmate from Portugal. This has led some to speculate that a personal dispute or professional jealousy might have been the motive, though we may never know, since the suspect killed himself. Carl Grillmair was a Caltech astrophysicist whose alleged killer had previously been reported for trespassing on his property. In addition to Grillmair’s murder, the 29-year-old suspect in the case has been charged with carjacking and burglary in separate incidents.

So these don't seem to be top targets to kill, and a good chunk aren't even suspicious deaths cause we know the killers. He also adds

In a country with an estimated 2 million researchers, some of them are bound to fall victim to unfortunate events, possibly even within a short span of time. And there is nothing to indicate that the events that have been linked together in the Right-wing media have any connection to one another.

But he's actually wrong here, cause again remember that we're including the crackpots, administrators, professors, military, and retired ones of all those groups too! The number is significantly higher than 2 million then. This highly expansive group, with three known false positives, still reaches only 11 people in four years. Most of whom don't even seem to be important.

I think this could just be a "people don't look up" type scenario where dumbasses saw airplanes and thought they were foreign drones, but instead it's people not realizing that death and disappearances happen from time to time and in the ridiculously large populations we're pulling from it's statistically likely you'll find a few.

behind AI simulations of potential Taiwan scenarios

Not to derail, but does anyone have any idea of what this actually means? I work with defense modeling and sims folks and I am an AI/ML person but whenever I hear the words AI Simulations I'm left scratching my head. Is this just making world sims for RL models? But then why would you be training an RL model to invade Taiwan? Simulations are generally done on big HPC rigs with tons of variables, ie. Finite Element Modeling. This isn't something that really benefits from neural nets. Maybe my technical classification is different than the non-technical, but this guy is supposedly some researcher I feel like the classification would be more precise.

just_like_the_simulations.jpg

Also I'm sure it's worthwhile to run the simulations but I don't think there's some superhax geniusbrain strategic approach that's going to render the potential invasion of Taiwan an easy and non-costly war.

Could be referring to AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and the follow ups of RL models that play Starcraft and other games, but moved to military scenarios. You would have one model invading Taiwan, the other model defending Taiwan, and they play each other. But of course you can’t train a model to defend Taiwan without training a model to invade Taiwan.

These fall into the RL side, specifically Model-based RL. The dirty open secret about model based RL is that the RL-policies(ml-models) trained are only as good as the sim-models (there are two types of "models" here that mean different things, smh...), they don't generalize well. So for the RL trained on Starcraft, it is also then tested on Starcraft, so good training results in good testing results. The major leap comes when you transfer it to a real world scenario, where it will not perform, because Starcraft is not a good model of the real world. Part of this is strictly technical, RL models/policies learn a mapping of states to actions, ie which action to take in a given state for the best reward now or in the future. The Starcraft world actions don't exist in reality. The models don't really learn high level tactics that can be extracted and re-used (unfortunately)

Modeling the real world with finite states is probably impossible. Near infinite/continuous states is going to be insanely hard to model, so if they are doing this, then good luck but it's a likely dead end.

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