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 -
Your timing is perfect because I was having this argument this weekend with someone who claimed to be a mutual of both of us (a mutual mutual if you will).
Overall I have a lot of respect for the Chinese and their systems, I spent a lot of time in China in a former life (还能懂一点中文), and I think they might have the best food on Earth. China's progress is very serious and I've come to accept that almost nobody in the English language knows what they're talking about with China, so it's not usually even worth getting into. But I also felt, after my time in China, that the time I spent learning Mandarin was a "waste" in that China is not going to take over the world.
I still believe, fundamentally, that the 21st Century is an American century and I don't think it's really close.
My reasons get into some theories about industrial society, but let me knock out a few other points first:
In fact, this gets to the heart of a point I consider very important: Most Chinese and most Americans, also, are not participating in industrial sovereignty. It is not the case that America has an entrepreneurial culture and China has an engineering culture. I think it is more accurate to say that America has entrepreneurial cultures (sub-cultures) and China has engineering cultures. We can draw the lines however we like -- Shenzhen, Beijing, Texas, Silicon Valley, Shanghai, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Taiwan, Arizona, etc. etc. But fundamentally the engineers inventing the future are not just expressions of national forces. They are particular individuals and factories and networks.
What I mean is that I view policies and incremental technical advances as only marginally important. The prime mover is genius, and then, a culture that rewards it.
And it is the American system, overall, that is more tolerant of genius, eccentricity, fault, the great man.
In anticipation that we would continue this argument at some point I spent a few weeks a few months ago reading all the books on space development I could find (until I got bored).
I had wanted to profile some of the players and establish a pattern. It goes something like this:
Space X and Elon Musk: Falcon 1 -> Falcon 9 -> Starship, Starlink, multi-billion dollar business invented out of air. Elon was an eccentric autist raised in a dysfunctional family environment in South Africa, moved to Silicon Valley, struck it rich on Paypal, decided, essentially, on a whim, to invest in space, almost lost it all, doubled down, almost lost it all again, doubled down, doubled down, incredible improbable success, private rockets reaching orbit, Tesla, the story is famous, Elon is the richest man in the world and invented modern space.
Rocket Lab: Peter Beck was a young mechanic in southern New Zealand who never finished college, obsessively started working on rocket engines in his backyard and somehow, improbably, incredibly, turned that into a rocket company capable of reaching orbit. As the company started reaching milestones it had to integrate into the American economy to receive funding and talent which also went hand-in-hand with working for the American military. The company's Electron rockets (picking up the business model abandoned by SpaceX when they jumped from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9) are, essentially, the product of one improbable genius who was rewarded at every milestone with money and power.
Ames Research Center: Ames is one of the major NASA labs, located in Silicon Valley, a remnant of an earlier era when the American government was at the center of Space. NASA became bloated with bureaucracy and procedure over the course of the 20th Century, but Ames is interesting because of one man, former Ames director General Simon "Pete" Worden. His historical claim to fame is probably convincing Reagan of the importance of building what was called the "Star Wars" system. (This was seen as impossibly impractical at the time but is basically the basis now of Trump's Golden Dome system.) Worden was constantly stymied by the bureaucracy but worked to turn Ames into a connector between NASA and Silicon Valley, which would spawn a new generation of "Pete's Kids" playing at running next-generation space companies. I liked Worden's remark that the military is mostly for corporate suits but keeps a few genuine oddballs around in case of genuine emergencies, and one day he looked up and realized he was one of those oddballs!
Planet Labs: Former NASA scientists (some of "Pete's kids") got together to build build satellites, got interested in CubeSats, realized that the specialized satelite companies were dinosaurs and they could probably make small-scale satellites an order of magnitude cheaper by using the same off-the-shelf components from an iPhone. They succeeded and have been able to build one of the largest fleets of satellites in space.
LandSpace: In 2014, the Chinese government, realizing the growing importance of space, issued Document 60 under the Development and Reform Commission, which opened up the Chinese space sector to private sector capital. Financier Zhang Changwu took advantage of the opportunity and began pitching LandSpace not only to private investors but to municipal governments. With capital and backing from the state, Zhang was able to hire many of the best engineers in China and, so far, the decisions they have made have worked out better and faster than those of many of their competitors.
Chinese Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology: Facing pressure from SpaceX, the Chinese government concluded to compete in re-usable rocket technology, in order to meet China's need to build out its 10,000-strong GuoWang satellite network. The project, considered a high priority by the Chinese state, has received enormous support and was able to acquire some of the best engineers in the country. In part by reverse-engineering SpaceX, in part by using SpaceX as an example, in part by making decisions different from SpaceX uniquely suited to Chinese conditions, CALVT was recently able to launch a re-usable rocket and is looking to begin ramping up their productions to meet important state goals.
I could go on, but this was the point in my own reading where I got bored and I imagine the reader is too. I think the point here is obvious (and I'm not trying to BLAST my conclusion in every line): the Western space industry has advanced through the vision of eccentric geniuses; the Chinese space industry has advanced through the high directives of the state, in accordance with the national goals, national pride, etc. etc.
This was in effect the thesis of Peter Thiel's Zero to One, that it is more difficult to create genuinely new technologies than it is to take existing ones and scale them up. Not to deny the Chinese anything, not to deny them their engineering prowess and creativity under trade war constraints.
But also: what does it mean for China to "catch up"? They study the hardest and train the most engineers and then they go build the most rockets and they win? Yes, yes, well done Slytherin, well done Slytherin... HOWEVER --
When does China start to exhibit the originality of Zero to One? Because it's not enough for them to master what the Americans have already invented. That's enough to maintain a novel technological stack and maintain Industrial Sovereignty, but when it comes to overtaking America... SpaceX built re-usable rockets ten years ago, and sure, China is catching up fast and is less than ten years behind, but it's not as though SpaceX is standing still in place either...
A few months ago I read Dan Wang's 2025 book "Breakneck," which is about China's rapid extraordinary growth. Actually I found most of it was a criticism of the Chinese system -- these kinds of books are really just human interest stories in my experience. China builds bridges, they're really good at that for reasons I'll dumb down for the general reader which reminds me of this really good bowl of noodles I ate in Guizhou. etc. etc. Actually I liked it quite a bit and am being unfair to summarize which I also did on my twitter but nobody cares about that etc. etc.
The point being, well, let me go on.
The Chinese state has been very good at building things. Bridges and highways and trains, cement and steel tubes and now robots and rockets. This is obviously a huge feat and deserves much praise and understanding, because clearly so few countries in the world are capable of doing anything close to what China is doing. But it comes with a cost.
Wang's chapters on the One Child Policy and Covid are, I think, devestating. They totally dismantle the myth of the competent Chinese state. It sounds good, I think, to have your state run by engineers who can build things and to give that state total power over society. Mostly, in order to run a successful state, you do have to care for the people and so you have to grow immense quantities of food, give them meaningful jobs and vacations, well-run schools, promotions, clean air, etc. But the, occasionally, the power you give this "The Engineering State" warps in on itself in strange and disturbing ways.
Wang recounts how, for example, Corona almost destroyed Shanghai. It starts off so nice, we have an all-powerful "Engineering State," they can reach into society and extract all sorts of efficiencies Western Democracies can't, we just lock people down and achieve Zero Covid and everyone wins. And that works for a while. It's harder to travel and some people get locked up in camps, but the city can stay open with vegetable markets and normal business in a way America didn't. And that works for a while. Until it doesn't. One day a few cases pop up in Shanghai and the covid tests are inherently half-broken and you have to put a city of 20 million people under lockdown. It's an epistemological problem. The same engineering tools that gave you power are incapable of solving life's deepest problems. The Covid tests are flawed, every time you take one you run a small risk of being sent to quarantine. The city has to shut down and nobody can get food and so you have to start rationing but even the system that brings food runs the risk of producing more Covid so a bureaucrat decides to lock up even the truckers bringing the food in. Pets get killed, some families start to starve. And it sounds like a temporal problem, maybe the Chinese government screwed it up but that doesn't say anything about their industrial policy, aren't these unrelated problems? But they're deeply related. The same systems that promoted engineers to build highways also reward bureaucrats chasing impossible zeroes. What happens when a problem can't be solved by adding more efficiency and engineering? What happens when the numbers are wrong or the measures are actually impossible to read? What happens when the most important things cant' be ground out and studied by engineers learning all the right answers in schools?
I want to come back to that. I will also add here that the One Child Policy was even more destructive, and that it will have a much more immediate and obvious impact on China's medium-term ability to threaten the West in any significant way.
In another of Wang's chapters, he details some of the Chinese diaspora spread out across Asia and the West. By a Shakesian reverse-logic, I think that diaspora actually benefits the CCP more than it hurts it, because it puts networks of Chinese citizens with one-foot-in-one-foot-out everywhere in the world. However, I think there's another important implication here, which is that a lot of China's most talented do not feel rewarded in the Chinese system. It sounds great to live in a world run by competent engineers who can actually build things and produce efficient outcomes. But what happens when they decide that it's not efficient to placate you? What happens when you want to invent something the engineers can't measure? Can't understand?
It seems, demonstrably, that many Chinese move to the West for exactly this reason. And there are many plenty smart enough who are rewarded fairly with money and status and national pride. But can they be rewarded with liberty? Can they be rewarded with safety from the caprices of the CCP? This might sound like a cliche schlock argument but I don't mean it that way at all: clearly, the American system attracts far more talent than the Chinese system. For obvious reasons.
It's great that China can reinvent things America invented first. It's great that they can achieve supremacy in e.g. electric batteries, after everybody decides that this is good and mainly a problem of technical working-out.
Ok now, what happens when China needs to invent something new? To not just go from One to Many but from Zero to One? What would have happened if a Chinese entrepreneur invented the internet, and the CCP feared the social repercussions? Could China have invented the internet? The iPhone? AI? It's easy to say that China can achieve supremacy in biomedicine, they can become powerful curing diseases. But what happens when someone invents a cure for pregnancy or AIDs? What happens when the high bureaucrat decides that these inventions enable degeneracy and Western decadence and are to be suppressed? (These are toy examples really, China isn't that socially conservative in fact, although note again that this is because the West invented modern values and China merely decides the pace at which it will integrate them.)
Because this has happened in recent Chinese history an awful lot: China's private sector builds tech companies or media behemoths or fashion or art, then the state decides that the billionaires are getting too uppity and it squashes them so it can retrench on expertise in building rockets and trains. This is not actually a system that can achieve world-dominance. It can be excellent in many things. But it will never have the same deep capital that the West has, because it destroys capital. It will never have the same talent that the West has, because it can't reward it. The Chinese system is still fundamentally incomplete.
So I'm willing to grant that the Space Race is really just China vs. SpaceX, which means that the Space Race is really just China vs. Elon. Let me consider what that really means.
The Chinese system looks the much more impressive. They can build schools and engineers, they can do it as massive scale, they can efficiently reroute the entire economy of China to support national goals. They can take their smart men and direct them away from frivolities like plastic surgery and social media algorithms and direct them toward material science and hard math. They can reward efficient bureaucrats and promote only the best. They still suffer the same corruption and succession problems of any human society, but they don't have to deal with the AOCs rising to the top. Space is important, so they'll build a whole system about Space, appoint engineers to work on efficient rocket fuels, cone designs, iterate on landing pad designs, allocate land, train children in the right fields from a young age, etc. etc. etc. And Elon will die some day or hit a bottleneck and the Chinese system can continue indefinitely. It's inevitable that they will catch up and win.
But one man is actually more important than all that. Basically, I think Elon is worth more than all of China. Demonstrably. Because he can go from zero to one. We can only talk about the Chinese catching up in terms that Elon invented. Elon invented reusable rockets. Elon invented Starlink. Elon invented private companies that can go to space at all.
And America's space system was in a bit of a shambles before Elon, and it's possible or even likely that happen after him, and maybe China will "catch up" in this particular narrow sense. Reversion to the mean. But there will be other Elons. Before Elon it was Bezos and Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg. After Elon it will be Dario or Sam or Aschenbrenner. They will invent whole new industries and new categories and China will send scientists to study the problem and copy the right answers and grind out all the implications after the breakthrough is done. But they will never have their share of the breakthroughs, because they can't, they constitutionally can't, it's the epistemological hole in their entire system. They can't build something unless they can measure it, they can't measure it if it hasn't been created, and they can't create it because there are no rewards for someone who might do anything that fundamentally changes the world. Because anything that so changes the world could change the CCP.
The West does not have this problem. The West can afford to reward geniuses with almost unlimited power. And that's really all that matters. Because this isn't really a battle between America and China, in the abstract sense. Most Americans and most Chinese will have nothing to do with it. Because at the frontiers of human excellence it is not entire nations that matter but a few specific networks of singular men. Everything else is just wrapping paper and wordslop around these facts.
Thank you, this was very interesting. What I got out of this is that Huawei was able to optimize incredible efficiency out of old systems by eliminating huge abstraction layers that generally come with the ecosystem. But I'm not sure how sustainable this is (probably some of the answers I would need would be classified). For one thing, it's relatively easy to gain in efficiency at the start but it's much harder to maintain over time, what happens when Huawei's architecture diverges so much from standard that it becomes more and more difficult to hire engineers who can understand it. If it is easy enough (AI does everything now), there's nothing stopping Western firms from doing the same. And if Western companies aren't doing the same, it's because they're genuinely working on bigger stages of the problem. Huawei is budgeting, OpenAI is getting a raise.
I appreciate the gesture of goodwill, but frankly it's still a lot of dreck. Let me just nitpick at one detail first:
Noted.
There is no need for a niche between Falcon 1 and Falcon 9. Rocket Lab can just as well be understood to be a low-energy fast follower whose research program has hit a wall. Gushing poetic about the "improbable genius" who started 9 years before LandSpace, in a far richer and more advanced aerospace bloc, and is yet to make anything half as impressive as ZQ-3 is a bit over the top. They operate with incomparably greater resources than LandSpace. Beck has 2600 employees on LandSpace's 1200. Rocket Lab announced Neutron back in 2021 yet won't be flying until early 2027; ZQ-3 went from an announcement to a landing in 3 years. Rocket Lab is worth $50B though, which is maybe 10-50 times LandSpace's estimate, so there's that. Rewarded indeed.
You lovingly regurgitate this biopic narrative of charismatic American autists, oddballs and mavericks (who are all sucking the government teat, reuse govt R&D or just work for the state directly), and then drop this "the Chynese government", very unsubtly (though I guess subtly enough for you) insinuating the essential difference in where the initiative comes from. Do you honestly not notice what you're doing here? For you, American state is not really a state, it's a background for colorful characters inside and outside it; the Chinese one is a hivemind machine dispatching soulless (but you'll generously grant that they're industrious and clever) workers. This is the most tired trope in how Americans engage with Communists or, really, with any geopolitical adversary, by alienating and dehumanizing them. "Document 60". "Financier Zhang Changwu" – at least not the Imperial Eunuch. He's LandSpace CEO, what does it matter that he worked in finance? LandSpace as such is a non-entity, a creature of external scheming. It's all, shall we say, rather dickless, huh? Not main character coded. So of course your position as the main characters is unassailable. Even if the Chinese can be pretty hardworking.
The Document 60 came out 11/26/2014.. Almost 9 months prior: «The 2nd Session of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) opened in the Great Hall of the People. Li Yanhong, known as Robin Li, the CEO of the nation’s top search engine Baidu, expresses two proposals on March 4, 2014:
2 Suggest the educational resources of some major cities should be openly pushed on the Internet.
The following are the details of the two proposals:
In recent years, China developed rapidly in aerospace industry and made a series of remarkable achievements. These achievements affect and prompt the development of the relevant industry and the whole economy in China. However, compared to the United States, Russia and Europe, China still need improvement in aerospace industry. Be aimed at current situation Robin Li encourages private enterprises to develop, build and launch rockets and satellites for the aerospace industry. In addition, he suggests the cooperation between the private enterprise and national aeronautic companies to promote the development of aerospace industry, to use space technology in other related industries.…»
Far as I know, this proposal by Robin Li is the real start of Chinese private space. We won't know if there was any maverick autist inside the CCP annoyed with the bureaucracy at CASC who had orchestrated this, or helped promote this. They don't get biopics. That's not CCP style. Maybe Netflix could dig something up. I doubt "The Chinese Government" is a hivemind capable of just Realizing This Was An Option without any individual first mover, however. Even the whole priority on industrial sovereignty versus more engagement was nontrivially shaped by input from private citizens, even nobodies. I'll find the receipts when I have the time or inclination.
And also, here's how your story looks from the perspective of LandSpace's chief engineer
Do NASA engineers who left for SpaceX feel anything similar about the National Team?
That's some solid state backing, man. The Document 60 sure did a lot of work.
…
Is the crayfish anecdote not "American maverick" coded enough? Was a Document 60.1 dispatched to make this happen? Did the Financier Zhang Changwu promise behind the scenes to compensate the crayfish dude for his downtime? (he probably did) You guys make entire soapy movies out of such stuff, with Silicon Valley nerds peering into the monitor autistically, green glow on their faces, and no-bullshit Texas bros grunting homoerotically in rundown sheds, as they forge the American Dream. Maybe in 10 years they'll make a movie about LandSpace too. And about DeepSeek (have you heard of that time Liang Wenfeng drove into the vast emptiness of Tibet and totaled his car? Or the three years he was a shut-in in Chengdu, making money to bootstrap his eventual rise as a quant trader and an AGI maverick?), and about the Unitree CEO guy who's too autistic to learn to spell, and about the Moonshot guy who had everything in the US and came back to build his own thing, a whole bunch of others. And even the national team will get some spotlight: Rear Admiral Ma Weiming is the man who made EMALS on aircraft carriers work (yours is inferior btw, to the point Trump considers scrapping it – maybe too many mavericks for once), because he was just that "autistically" convinced that his scheme will work. Frank Wang will definitely be appreciated more as drones grow more important. You can surely say he didn't invent "the drone". Well, Musk didn't invent "the rocket". No, he didn't. He didn't go from "Zero to one". In fact I'd say this Thielian frame is an insult to what Musk does. He, in my opinion, does a very Chinese thing, just better. He picks up an underrated tech tree and finances it until it works.
Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying your propaganda is false. I've spoken here in defense of Musk, for instance. These men are real, they do have certain noble ambitions and qualities of character, and championing them and their archetype is a great achievement, merit and source of power for the American nation. It's just very tedious after a lifetime of huffing it without being an imperial citizen. And it's depressing to see this being appropriated as an oversaturated marketable aesthetic by your grifters who chase said deep capital – domestic grifters and, increasingly, imported ones. And it's obnoxious how you are, perhaps without even realizing it, trying to monopolize the status of men. It all comes down to this. One side has eccentric geniuses with Faustian visions, the other "directives of the state".
Dan Wang is a midwit who found a nice simplifying pitch for airport reading. China is, at least for now, ran by Communists first and engineers second (Xi's pipeline is oversaturated with Tsinghua STEM Ph.Ds though so it may change). Why China doesn't make a lot of new categories of products or technologies, and whether stuff like BYD/CATL batteries can be brushed off with "everyone knows this is a matter of technical working out" is a complex question. The biggest part of the answer is "in 2000, they had $1000 GDP per capita, they physically couldn't fuck around with shoveling money at frivolous mavericks until very recently, they didn't have even a fraction of the capital needed".
Still, I agree that any honest answer will be at least somewhat damning to policies of Communists, and perhaps to the Chinese character as such. Liang Wenfeng says that what they lack is confidence to dare. But looking at, for example, the trend in novel biomedical research, I'd say this answer will be of mostly archival significance, whereas "can they catch up" is very salient in a geopolitical sense, and the discourse about caprices of the CCP sounds increasingly quaint. Jack Ma got disciplined for overestimating his leverage and going through with his scammy fintech idea, and a thousand op-eds were written on how the CCP "crushes innovation", and today Jack Ma's company publishes near-frontier models on Huggingface and develops pretty decent AI accelerators. This is all concern trolling. I don't advise the US to adopt their ways, but if you think you've calibrated your arrogance down far enough, I think you're still wrong.
They can, and they will, and the CCP is confident enough in its power to allow it. But more importantly, China is already advanced by singular men, you just don't notice them.
Yes, it's a "gain in efficiency". That's kind of the whole deal with semiconductors. Of course you find a deflationary way to put it.
It's mainly that there isn't a single Western company comparable to Huawei in breadth of relevant expertise. Nvidia does chips, TSMC does manufacturing, ASML does lithography. Huawei is a networking giant plus everything all at once. They can, in fact, simply do some necessary and important things first.
I agree that within your paradigm, that would be a huge problem for Huawei. Luckily, Moore is dead and, as per their argument, everyone else will also have to do natively 3D design and logic folding for increasingly large chips, so they'll manage somehow. Just gotta wait to copy from eccentric geniuses who are copying them. In the meantime they'll be busy developing their 3D EDA tools. Whether it'll get a biopic or not, we'll eventually see the product.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link