didericis

I’ve been operating under the assumption that most online discourse has been heavily and increasingly gamed in a variety of different ways for at least the past 6 years, and that simpler versions of what we’re seeing publicly released have been in use for a long time.

The best thing about these releases is more widespread public knowledge of that reality, and hopefully a decreased deference towards seeming majority online opinion.

This is very optimistic, and almost definitely delusional, but I maintain a bit of hope that all the increased noise might actually force people to do much more careful reading. People may attempt to get much more context about the writer they’re conversing with in order to verify whether they are talking to a human, and in doing so, be forced to actually expose themselves to a larger context.

Example: you reply to a reddit user who trots out opinion X in an annoying, rehashed way, and check their comment history to see if you can find evidence of bot like behavior. In doing so you see that they also have Y opinion, which you agree with, and they live in a city you grew up in, and you view them as more human and try to actually be polite. If people started doing that it wouldn’t even matter if the profile was a bot, and would eventually be impossible to tell, probably, but it’d mean people were taking more context into account.

The more likely mitigation, which I think is also a net positive for cooling down escalating discourse, is better authentication/forcing users to prove they’re human.

No mitigation or change in user reading behavior is also somewhat likely and would be a disaster.

What happens when you fake danger to get robots to murder people for you. Or when the robot has “bugs” that kill demographics you don’t like more often.

This is a horrifically terrible idea.

It is imperative that a human always be a decision maker about lethal force so proper judgement can be made and someone can be held accountable if it is made badly.

This requires context.

The current global trade network is a consequence of a massive coordination of many nations helmed by the United States during the cold war. That empire is not an empire of one, it is an empire of many. All conflicts the US has been involved in during and since are downstream of a geopolitical chess game aimed at coordinating many many nations against would be hegemonic challengers.

That may seem like a preposterous justification given some of the conflicts the US has been in and the death of the USSR, and there is certainly plenty to criticize about our stupidity and unilateral behavior and corruption. But I don’t think it’s possible to overemphasize just how big World War 2 was or what the lessons were.

An even bigger global dictatorship than Hitler’s helmed by Stalin was very much a possibility. And the only way to stop a nuclear superpower helmed by a ruthless dictator from building a global network and achieving hegemonic power is to build your own first. World War 2 taught the world that dismantling your war machine allows the ruthless to build a juggernaut while you sleep.

The lesson of World War 2 was to keep the war machine in democratic republics dominant at all costs because dictatorships will surpass you militarily if you don’t.

The reality of that is ugly and in many ways the actions of the US are unjust. I think it can and has been made more just over time and can and should be kept in check by as many independent actors as possible that ensure overreach is impossible and bad actions are addressed.

But it is not comparable to China, not just because the CCP is far less powerful externally and far less accountable internally, but because China is not coordinating with the world in ways that benefits the world. China is far more authoritarian than the US, far less sophisticated in it’s propaganda than the USSR, and far more reliant on home base when extending itself. The US managed to build global logistical networks because more countries benefitted from the US global trade network than didn’t and our propaganda about the material well being we can deliver is actually true, albeit with caveats. The scale of US hegemony is impossible to enforce without the majority of participants voluntarily cooperating. In fact one of the populations hurt the most (though obviously not nearly as much as those killed in the wars that enabled the hegemony necessary for global trade, whether ostensibly or in reality) was the domestic middle class of the US itself.

Despite the flaws, and no matter what some claim, the US is the most foreign friendly benevolent global empire in world history, and the prosperity we ushered in is unprecedented. The technology that has lifted the world out of poverty simply would not be possible without global trade, and the amount of global conflict has (or had, considering how disruptive the Ukraine conflict has been) never been lower. The framework about rule of law violations and unjust conflict used to criticize the US most is something the US made possible on a global scale.

Criticism of the US is vital. It is valid. Our flaws need to be reckoned with, and we are currently facing a crisis of purpose that we have played a significant part in creating with our overemphasis on consumerist material well being at the expense of other considerations, which has created domestic decay. That does not mean a world without a corrupt and stupid global policeman optimizing for material prosperity over other forms of prosperity would be better than the one we have, or that any other organization is better suited to guard against would be global tyrants on the level of Stalin.

It is also imperative to get as many good people high up in that hegemonic military machine as possible. If we denigrate our military too much due to its (many) failures, we risk repelling good people who could keep it in check from enduring that grinding machine and steering it for the better.

So tl;dr, I love my country too, and hope we keep it together and make sure we fix and improve what we’ve got, not dismantle it out of a sense of global fairness that history has sadly shown we cannot rely on.

Centralized finance and inflationary consumerist policies seem to be a major underlying contributor in all of this.

Credit is most available and most advantageous to those higher up that get new money first, and creates a moving target that makes long term stability artificially difficult for those with no capital.

Material poverty was much more prevalent in the past than now, but the kind of housing instability and moving goalposts people experience is I think relatively new for the US. I’m not entirely sure/my history is not good enough to know, but I think local ties and familiarity with neighbors used to be much more instrumental for housing stability. Local banks used to be way different/loans were much more about community buy in and local sponsorship than the kind of disconnected financial blob it is now. That came with all kinds of cons, but I think there were some unappreciated pros we’ve forgotten about; I think the different social dynamics when banking was local is part of why housing was treated like more like a commodity than an investment.

A lot of the problems we have now seem to be a consequence of scale and increasing disconnect. Modern access to cheap low interest credit seems increasingly political and disconnected from the real economy, and responsible for keeping old, creaky, dysfunctional behemoths from imploding and restructuring.

That kind of credit heavy policy made sense when there was massive growth opportunity, but it seems increasingly perverse and going to maintaining existing systems instead of investing in new systems, and is I think partially responsible for the amount of centralization of assets we’ve been experiencing.

Without cheap credit, it’s much harder to suck up as many assets as have been centralized the past couple of decades, and wage decreases are much more transparent and difficult to get away with. Cheap credit also severely distorts prices signals/makes it hard for both consumers and producers to know what is getting cheaper to produce and what isn’t.

On the other hand, without cheap credit, a lot of capital intensive research heavy startup companies would be much more difficult to start, which is essential to lowering production costs. The material advances due to production efficiency are under-appreciated in the US, which makes sense when cost of living and basics keep expanding, but are still extremely beneficial, especially on a global scale.

I wish it was easier to know what a good solution was to lowering the cost of living without hampering innovation. They seem somewhat inversely related right now. But this stuff gets complicated and is not my area of expertise.

It's a useful thing to keep in the back of your head to inoculate yourself against marketing shenanigans.

The basic underlying principle of a product/service should be communicable and relatively universal. The details are of how it's tailored to your specific situation should come with cons and unknowns in other situations.

If it's not communicable and/or sounds like there are no cons they're not being honest about what it is (intentionally or unintentionally).

Thank you, I'll see if I can actually force myself to do it this time.

If the assumption is that as a consequence of allowing people to filter things themselves more, everyone will just get along, understand each other, and all political problems will disappear/people will become enlightened and cease to be ignorant, then yes, it's incredibly naive. This was the case made by people setting up these platforms without filters.

That's not my assumption. I think echo chambers are impossible to prevent and ignorance is something most people gravitate towards. I think many people are likely to find reasons to vilify and misunderstand each other until the end of time.

What I think is possible to curtail and is being ramped up now is viral conflict escalation. If active conflict is curtailed, that expands the amount of peace time available for actually effective communication if and when the opportunity arises over long stretches of time with a lot of effort. If you have an irrational hatred towards people with X quality/opinion because of bad information, are you more likely to become agitated and attack people if you a) people with X quality/opinion aren't visible b) people with X quality/opinion are unavoidable?

The ideal is obviously to get people to understand each other better, but I think we're seeing you can't just do that by superficially exposing everyone to everyone else. It requires a more sophisticated approach that respects people enough to have their own autonomy and seek out understanding and better information voluntarily through more personal interaction and influence.

There are natural forms of competency and organizational filters that allowed us to progress to where we are today and nudge people towards greater understanding of each other and cooperation which punish bigotry and unintelligent assumptions through natural rather than artificial consequences. Increased social cohesion and progress was not a top down process in the past and does not need to be a top process down now, and I think an attempt to manage global conversation is just as naive as the naive open global village kumbaya assumptions that got us into this mess. People's autonomy needs to be respected if you want them to consider a more enlightened perspective.

I blame both, but I think the audience/reach factor is more ubiquitous. Specifically, I think the problem is an inability for most people to properly filter in sufficiently large rooms, not the audience/reach factor in and of itself.

This commenter is talking about whatsapp behavior in Brazil and gives an example of a seemingly similar situation where there doesn't seem to be as much engagement focused algorithmic influence at play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33459878

Interesting, that violates some of my assumptions. I think the basic model I'm suggesting might still be at play, though. I'm guessing most of those whatsapp groups are really big, so they effectively prevent people from insulating themselves from outrage if they just want to know whats happening. They can't just form a group with their friends and find other channels just to stay informed with minimal outrage and can't find news that's just straight news, the main source of news is the big viral firehose where outrage dominates. Does that seem accurate?

This conversation also speaks to the social complexity that gets obfuscated by some of these big platforms and the fact that things are different in all kinds of ways in different parts of the world. I don't know really anything about Brazil besides some fairly superficial basic history/culture and have pretty much zero contextual understanding of what it's like to live/communicate there. The fact that the same thing seems to be happening all over the world is really weird.

That's why I think it has a tight relationship to scale of communication channels, as that seems to be the main thing that's changed recently and is consistent regardless of specific platform/means of communication.

This is a political minefield/one of the most polarized topics of conversation in a minefield of extremely polarized topics, and I greatly value this forum as a place for intelligent conversation. Please don't jump to any assumptions about my presentation of this perspective, or endorsement of crazy people who say similar sounding things, this is simply a summary of why this story is important to the right.

The Hunter Biden story is significant because there are emails which suggest Hunter Biden had ties to foreign companies that wanted access to his father. This could be grounds for a criminal case implicating his father.

Now, in a sane society during a less polarized election, this would have been discussed in the open, and people would make cases as to the relevance or irrelevance of the evidence, relevance to Joe Biden specifically, and whether the evidence merits investigation through proper channels in an open and transparent way.

Since Trump was viewed as even more corrupt and more of a threat by enough people capable of suppressing the story, the story was suppressed, and this conversation didn't happen until after the election. That does not mean the entire FBI and judicial process is broken like some people on the right claim, which is an extremely dangerous accusation, and the lack of a proper case means we do not know the extent or non extent of corruption, but the suppression of the story was a violation of public trust by those who suppressed it and poured a lot of fuel on an already raging fire.

People are not seeking those groups out of nowhere.

Most of them are getting pushed there from automated platforms bombarding them with things they can't stand. The automated outrage machines are what radicalize people, not the private message groups.

By the time you have private message groups propagating the same messaging the damage has already been done. To get people out, you need to cut off the source of the outrage and soothe whatever fear is being ramped up.

Censoring the outrage and dismissing/patronizing people from a position of authority doesn't work, it just acts as an accelerant.

I think the crazy groups will sputter out if there's enough space for venting, free association, and ability for the average person to turn off things they don't want to see. I think that last point is the key. Millions of people are bombarded with things they really don't like in systems they have no way to really manage themselves. The legitimate complaints will filter up and out of the crazy circles if people are allowed to form their own groups and don't feel forced to pack themselves together around the loudest people who can given them a voice on the big automated feeds they don't really understand.

People have a much better chance at effectively communicating with their neighbor or family member or old friend with a different perspective than a stranger online with a different perspective, and they are much more likely to engage when in a frame of mind that will actually accept differences of opinion if they are managing their own connections and exposure themselves.

Everything in that thread seems correct, but it doesn't address why its so bad on social media sufficiently, as those philosophical language and principal problems apply to all forms of written communication that have managed to avoid the problems of social media, including wide open written communication (remember actual bulletin boards instead of virtual bulletin boards? Wide open text forums are not a new thing)

I'm very confident at this point that the problem is the enormous size of the rooms where everyone is talking.

I don't think user behavior will ever be better in a sufficiently large room. Effective communication requires shared context which is impossible to establish when a room is sufficiently large and sufficiently diverse.

What we're seeing with increased political polarization is I think an attempt by most people to differentiate themselves into groups of like minded people not just so they can form echo chambers, but so they can actually talk and be heard, and hear what other people are saying. You don't get that when the room becomes global in scale, you just get a bunch of noise, as is mentioned.

I think we're in a particularly nasty situation in tech because most of the people involved in creating and administering these platforms have a huge blindspot when it comes to the lack of context hopping ability in the average person, because the people that tend to get into tech tend to be very open to global connectivity and actually do have somewhat of a capacity to hop around and absorb a huge range of different contexts (although much more superficially than I think they realize/that's the price of extreme openness).

I am also fairly confident the solution is to create user managed and federated platforms. The problem would I think solve itself if people were better able to control what online social groups they expose themselves to. We've been organizing ourselves for thousands of years into a hierarchical networks of different families/towns/cities/states because those are the only long term stable systems that can deal with the huge variations in contextual difference between people. You can still have egalitarian cosmopolitan global villages for people who want that, and you can still have emissaries and exchange programs and global shared interest channels and encourage cooperation amongst different groups and avoid conflict, but I think the idea of a singular all encompassing global village was always a terribly thought out, completely untenable idea that would never work at scale.

I was going to write an article on this a long time ago after a similar thread came up here, but I don't have any clout and ended up getting swamped in other things, so I never did. Properly making this case would also require a lot of research and historical comparison to really evaluate, but the more time passes, the stronger and stronger my hunch is that we need to do almost exactly the opposite of what most people seem to think we should and allow people to differentiate themselves instead of forcing them to be together and all play by the same rules. The echo chambers will become less echoey if you allow people to build their own and feel safe enough to poke their heads out of when they feel sufficiently understood in their corner. The echo chambers are the result of gamed automated feeds where people are trying to signal I want my space by pulling harder and harder in a direction that makes them less and less likely to be bombarded with stuff they don't want entering their space involuntarily.

To control people through selective access to alternatives they've set up.

Exactly. A related deep millennia old observation is that no one has actually seen the real world. Everything we’ve ever experienced has been filtered through our minds. Every experiment, every measuring device, every meticulously crafted model of reality… it is all inescapably limited by what we are able to experience.

One could and many have argued that the reality we’ve been observing and operating in is consciousness. The “real” world could be entirely different and largely inaccessible.

These kinds of thought exercises don’t have much practical utility, apart from one very important feature; they humble you. At the end of the day we don’t fundamentally know anything, and should always recognize that at its most basic root level, everything we do is an educated guess. A fundamentally skeptical and curious outlook that acknowledges our perceptual limitations is how we got all of the sophisticated models of very difficult to observe phenomenon in the first place. If we want to continue to get the best understanding of whatever it is we’re experiencing, I think it’s very important to stay humble and ensure our knowledge is treated as a hard earned set of well reasoned guesses rather than unquestionable dogma. 99.9% of objections to well established ideas and models might be a waste of time entertaining, but you never know what might turn out to be the seeds of a whole new universe of understanding that invalidates huge swaths of our existing corpus of knowledge.

Most of what I’m saying here is probably obvious to a lot of readers, and I don’t think anyone in this thread is being particularly arrogant or dogmatic, but I think it’s worth reiterating. If people who understand the limits of knowledge aren’t constantly emphasizing the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know, that creates fertile ground for both dogmatic assertions and unreasonable skepticism, and I think a huge amount of dysfunction in the culture at large is explained by insufficient well calibrated humility amongst otherwise very intelligent people who set an example for others.

Synesthetes with perfect pitch and strong associations to musical keys report associations consistently. The associations aren’t universal, though/not everyone would agree with Shubart.

As far as I know, all sensory evolution prior to this point has been motivated based on incremental gains in fitting a changing environment.

True vision requires motive and embodied self. I’m ignorant about the state of the art here, but I’m way more terrified of what these things don’t see than interested in what they could show us. It seems to me that the only human motives accessible to machines are extremely superficial and behavioral based.

Knowledge is not some disconnected map of symbols that results in easily measurable behavior, it has a deep and fundamental relation to conscious and unconscious human motivation.

I don’t see any possible way to give a machine that same set of motives without having it go through our same evolutionary and cultural history, and strongly believe most of our true motives are under many protective layers of behavioral feints and tests and require voluntary connection and deep introspection to fractionally expose to our conscious selves, let alone others, let alone a computer.

These models seem to be amazingly good at combining maps of already travelled territory. Trying to use them to create maps for territory that is new to us seems incredibly dangerous.

Am I missing something here, or is it not true that AI models operate purely on bias? What we chose to measure and train the model on seems to predetermine the outcome, it’s not actually empirical because it can’t evaluate whether it’s predictions make sense outside of that model. At some point it’s always dependent on a human saying “success/fail”, and seems more like an incredibly complicated kaleidoscope. Maybe they can cause humans to see patterns we didn’t see before, but I don’t think it’s something that could actually make new discoveries on its own.

That quip also acts as a healthy reminder that money is a tool, not an end. At the end of the day what matters is building a world that works and enables us to live meaningful lives. Money in a world where things don’t work and don’t enable us to use our time in meaningful ways means nothing.

That's something I think we need to spend a lot more time acknowledging. The preeminent idea makers that have created a lot of our modern framework of thinking about the world were not very good at answering the question "what's the point?"

Slow loss of ability to function and then death is inevitable. People are not going to be optimal workers their whole lives. We still need to keep the machines running, which is incredibly difficult and probably always will be due to the majority of us being limited bumbling morons, and the safeguards we need to put in place to prevent the morons who think they aren't morons from messing up the efforts of the minority of competent productive people hiding out there. But being the best worker for as long as you can is not the point of life.

This sounds trite to most modern thinkers, but it's not: genuine, actual, familial support, acceptance and loyalty between you and your tribe is something that can transcend the trials and tribulations of life and our inevitable death. Another ingredient in acceptance of the human condition is acknowledgment of the mysteries of the world and the strangeness of human perception and consciousness. Neither of those are sufficiently reflected upon in any organized manner like they used to be.

And yet people keep pushing for more and more AI. At least according to a lot of content that the AI recommends for me. Wait a minute...

> Due to the low perigee and aerodynamics of the X-15, no retrorocket was required, although the X-15's restartable engine could be used if necessary. Using its cross range capability of about 800 to 1,000 km, the X-15 would ditch in the Gulf of Mexico. The heat shield would consist of beryllium oxide and Rene 41 alloy. The pilot would eject and land by parachute, with the aircraft being lost.

Slowing down from orbit and then requiring the pilot to ditch via parachute over the Gulf of Mexico seems insane even by 50s test pilot standards, although I wouldn’t be surprised if pilots have done crazier.

You don’t need to make that trade off.

I also don’t think a world where 10 geniuses go untapped in any context is a positive. The reason so many people can read in the first place is that a small number of geniuses created the prerequisite understanding to shape the modern world. Everyone put in massive amounts of work to achieve all we have achieved, but the key ingredients were a small number of people spearheading foundational ideas. People underestimate the impact of a very small number of people on the massive quality of life benefits we enjoy.

You can’t create genius. The most you can do is create the optimal conditions for the geniuses to take advantage of/manifest and push themselves to that level. Highly intelligent and creative people that make breakthroughs often come from unpredictable backgrounds. In order for them to thrive, you need to provide as many open doors where competency and demonstrable ability is the only prerequisite for entry.

This idea that spending on students correlates with performance is I think entirely wrong and a consequence of the limited metrics we have and attempts to raise money for education.

Education could be WAY cheaper and WAY more effective if we had the proper cultural understanding of what it should provide, and were wise enough to differentiate the needs of different areas. Many areas where reading comprehension is garbage are really in need of like a secondary non-dysfunctional family and job opportunities that are relatively high status/relatively high paying even if you aren’t that smart and just work hard/learn basic skills. If people were sorted into groups based on what their needs were, you could create and advertise doors the smart kids would walk through, and keep it open to anyone who puts in the work regardless of where they’re at, while also serving the needs of people who don’t care about school and are cheaper to bring to baseline if you do it right and don’t force people struggling for basic reading comprehension to be educated by people with a masters degree.

Things are currently falling apart because we’re not willing to admit that people have different needs and abilities and have created extravagantly expensive metrics and interventions to pretend we can equalize all outcome with enough resources. We can’t.

I think we can in fact create better outcomes for everyone, but we have to admit that everyone is different. You can’t have a one size fits all pipeline. Especially if you don’t want to demoralize like 90% of the people in the country that can’t get to the top of that particular giant leaderboard. The internet exacerbates this, and has destroyed borders in which someone who might have otherwise had relatively high status in a particular easily achievable niche accessible to them is now seeing all the people miles beyond them.

The way in which the upper classes currently pity people who don’t have high academic achievement and want to equalize experience in the same pipeline they benefitted from sounds good superficially, but it’s really toxic when you think about it. It assumes people need to have the kind of success that those who’ve done well in that academic pipeline have had in order to be treated with respect.

I think all of this could be fixed with one relatively simple guiding principle: keep metrics in a voluntary, competitive school system for those who have the aptitude and desire to pursue advanced study. Remove most metrics and bureaucracy from a base, mandatory public education much more about civics, basic skills, and introducing people to career paths relevant to their particular local area. I think that principle would ultimately lead to MORE people getting benefits from a traditional pipeline than do currently, free teachers to let the needs of the students actually direct how class time gets spent, and require way less administrative overhead.

EDIT: I rambled way too much here. The current state of education in the US drives me crazy.

The fact that you consider stable systems edge cases speaks to the issue.

Wealth is built up over generations via systems that are extensible and reusable by those that come after. If we changed the standard size of screws because we thought it looked better aesthetically, we'd instantly make massive swaths of previous work unusable.

Exploratory change is needed to figure out where improvements can be found, and I generally enjoy building and working with novel technology much more than trying to interface with older systems, but there should be some sort of purpose for the change. Older systems also need a certain amount of pruning and destruction to remove accumulated cruft, so it's not like it's always best to use what's been accumulated.

The correct balance is hard. Achieving that balance requires intentional effort, not arbitrary change or arbitrary preservation, if only in some sort of testing/evaluation phase (sometimes it does make sense to just arbitrarily tweak stuff and see if it ends up working better, but you need to actually do some sort of intentional verification to see if it's worth keeping).

That doesn't sound like compression, that sounds like a way to look up a stored picture from a massive dataset that's been turned into neural net goo. I'm guessing the neural nets that can do that are WAY bigger than a 512px wide jpeg and a jpeg renderer.

It's still cool, but calling that compression is like calling a link to a website compression.

Being stuck due to arrogance is bad. Changing arbitrarily is also bad. Being open to new things does not mean all new things are automatically good. Being like old things does also make things automatically good. What is "good" is very very tricky to define, and context dependent.

Counter argument: I disagree with most of what you say here.

I think what impacts all people, regardless of age, is much less about the medium and much more about message. I disagree with the "medium is the message" idea being applied universally. Zelda Breath of the Wild has the same spirit as the Gameboy games, and the NES games. And before that, the same spirit of the games and fantasy books about knights, and forts with secret passageways made out of sticks and renaissance fairs. Super Mario Odyssey is a digital evolutions of the same kind of playgrounds and energy like jungle gyms, or tag, and running around and collecting things like hide and go seek or a scavenger hunt. Splatoon is like a soccer game, or an airsoft game, or any kind of childhood battle/skirmish game. Each of those types of games I think map to styles of play that are really, really old.

I do think there is a message in the medium, though, and that the message is "we think this game/story is important enough to convey properly that we'll invest cutting edge technology to enable the best possible experience". I think each generation actually does in fact experience the same impact when that message is received. They way it is conveyed changes, because the cutting edge changes.

You can tell when media hits that Goldilocks zone; it's not something frozen in any particular time. It moves and evolves. The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings holds up. The original Star Wars holds up. The first James Bond holds up. The Wizard of Oz holds up. Metropolis holds up. Shakespeare holds up. Etc etc. You can trace stories back eons, and the ones that convey core messages about human experience in a time/era appropriate way are an essential part of how we think of ourselves. People who feel rooted and secure in their cultural context don't find the past contemptible, they are reassured and feel connected to an evolving set of stories.

You can still see that with modern media. It will vary person to person, each cultural niche and personality type has a different Goldilocks zone preference.

I don't think variety and saturation with more different forms of expression than we could dream of is actual sophistication. In a lot of ways it's actually more difficult than I think it's ever been to really convey a compelling story in a cutting edge manner. The army of people and resources needed to make a modern movie is insane, as it is for a cutting edge video game. I think that's leading to less sophistication, because the inevitable bureaucratic behemoths that are needed to create cutting edge story telling tends to kill off a lot of the best storytellers. The best story tellers should be more discoverable than ever, but it's increasingly difficult to plug them into these incredibly expensive projects.

The issue isn't group membership. It's what's being prioritized.

If you prioritize truth over group membership, you are more likely to see your own flaws, the flaws in others, and prevent yourself from making catastrophic errors in your inevitable ignorance.

If you prioritize group membership over truth, you are more likely to fall prey to lies that have only short term benefits for one or more members of the group and eventually lead to catastrophic errors.

The best groups are the groups of people who are legitimately pursuing the truth, even if they are temporarily ignorant, which again, is inevitable due to information constraints.

We've become so saturated with power dynamical thinking we've forgotten that it is possible to be motivated to try to see the world accurately so as to best cooperate with it regardless of power differentials.

The uplift in China has been staggering and should be celebrated.

A large part of that uplift is due to massive US investments. US leaders knowingly sacrificed a lot domestic industry in order to build up a China that we thought would liberalize and act to counterbalance the Soviet Union.

What should have been a cause for solidarity and cohesion and mutual uplift, and was functioning that way until relatively recently, has turned sour. China is starting to stagnate drastically, and we have not managed to create the service economy in the US we thought could sustain the middle class in spite of the transfer. The demographic issues in China were created decades ago, as were the supply chain issues affecting the global economy. The massive real estate fraud also didn't help. Instead of actually working to productively address these issues, Xi has pumped up nationalistic rhetoric, is clamping down on business, and seems hell bent on returning to a Maoist cult of personality.

These problems will not be addressed by chest pumping about which dysfunctional system is less dysfunctional, or which past glories are brightest. The present requires focus on the problems we have in front of us, and are best addressed with eyes wide open and a hard look at the practical problems in both the Chinese and US economies.

The US is definitely on the wrong track, but I think the more we think emulating China will “fix” things (especially under Xi), the worse things will get. Look at what we did with Covid. We had existing pandemic response strategies that were thrown out to mimic China, and we destroyed our economy, didn’t save anyone, and stunted child development. Sweden was much more rational and adhered to much saner western policies that we abandoned due to panic and false advertising from China.

There are things about China worthy of emulation, like how easy it is (or was, not sure if this is still true) to set up factories, the cultural emphasis on hard work and education, the stronger generational family support networks, the sense of unity and cooperation and trust in authority. But there are also severe problems that China doesn’t talk about, many of which are side effects of some of the same things that are admirable when moderated, and extremely dysfunctional when under poor leadership.

I’m not so sure about that… look at the demographic issues and the current banking collapse. China looks like it’s starting a pretty precipitous decline.

I hope things stabilize and people there DO keep improving, I have no desire to see anywhere stagnate or start declining. But I’m also extremely aware of how much of the Chinese state apparatus is dedicated to lying and distorting public perception, and what I hear about what’s been going on behind the scenes sounds really bad right now.