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Notes -
Big Peter Thiel interview with John Gray H/T MarginalRevolution
This hits quite a few topics, but one cluster I'd pull out is science/achievement/religion/wokeness:
The theme is that science used to be ambitious, especially ambitious in thinking that it would easily replace religion in all aspects, even in hope. I don't think he's claiming here that science has directly stalled out technologically, but the way the culture views it and uses it is uninspired and uninspiring. He seems to extend this decline to the science of social technology:
I think that toward the end, he possibly comes to some sort of root of it:
That is, I think he is saying that the problem with society and science stems (STEMs?) not from the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up, but from the fact that people just didn't take seriously the idea that number don't go up (of faculty), which could be the fundamental driver for why there is the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up. That this core problem drove the messed up incentive system, made the whole thing go sociopathic, generating apathy/lack of ambition (you can't have that wide-eyed of an optimistic ambition within the muck of a clearly sociopathic endeavor), and ultimately giving birth to extremely degenerate behavior like wokeness.
I think some here would say that the only reason why number don't go up (of faculty) is a problem is because society has this strange idea that everyone is completely equal in terms of potential/capability, so they think there's no reason why we couldn't have vastly higher quantities of faculty-capable people. But I'm not sure whether that's the case or if we're genuinely dealing with a weird numbers problem. Literally this morning, I saw a new video from a top chess grandmaster, talking about how the rating system is messed up post-COVID. How a ton of young kids across the world poured obscene amounts of their lives into online chess during that time, due to quarantine/addition/general rise in popularity, and they genuinely got really good at chess. But their skill isn't reflected by the traditional "over the board" rating, because they may just not have played enough games in those settings to have it adjust properly.
I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up. Then, even though the quantity of reasonable-tier candidates (and their general quality) may be higher, Goodhart's law still takes over, and you end up selecting the ones that are just better at gaming your metric or stabbing each other in the back (and they focus their efforts on gaming metrics/backstabbing, so that even if they're actually more capable, their output becomes generally worse, which would explain how many crap papers are out there). Apathy, lack of ambition, and dysfunction follow.
(I still don't know whether I actually think the 85th percentile of potential faculty actually has gone up, or just people really want to believe in the absence of an actually good measure.)
I think a big issue with modern culture is the loss of the idea that people can actually make a positive difference or that progress is possible and desirable. If you read (or watch) science fiction up through modernism, you’ll find descriptions of humans having overcome their problems, building successful colonies in space, dealing with poverty or disease or pollution or whatever other problems that they faced. They described futures that people would want to live in. And I think this kind of bleeds into the issue of whether we can solve our problems. We’ve sort of lost that imaginative muscle to various forms of cynicism and defeatism in all of our systems. Nobody seriously thinks that politics can offer real solutions to social problems. We don’t really think that we can build cities people want to live in. We don’t really think we can solve crime problems. We don’t think we can fix education or transportation or infrastructure or housing. It’s weird that nobody thinks anything about our society will be better in a generation or two.
There's a very good Tanner Greer post about this. Wang Huning identified the defining feature of the US in the 80s as techno-optimism, not liberty or democracy. But that's a quality that has been lost and inherited by the Chinese. If someone proposed building a bridge over the Pacific today, it would be China, not America.
I agree overall, although I'd argue that the progress enjoyed by the current generation of Chinese adults is highly unlikely to be replicated by their children. I expect they'll go down the same path we did unless 'Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics' and endless readings of 'Xi Jinping Thought' can save them.
My money is on pessimism setting in 20-30 years from now, and foreign capital moves to Vietnam or Africa or whatever the next manufacturing base will be.
I agree that it remains to be seen whether this can be sustained. And the US also still has a lot of visionaries like Elon Musk. But it seems like the tide is going out for them.
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The "lying flat" movement in China would seem to buttress what you're saying.
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