TWUSCN

We will finally get to try "real" communism thanks to ASI.

Tsinghua and the Haidian AI innovation ecosystem are truly impressive. It's changed so much since I went to Tsinghua in 2018 to my most recent visit in May. While the ecosystem is incredibly valuable for the technical side of research – the Chinese open-source culture is also amazing – the lessons it has for the global policy establishment may not be able to achieve the international recognition it ought to. The world needs to get a handle on global AI cooperation and we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to understand what AI safety "means" in Chin... (read more)

I think we are optimizing for the wrong thing. The accumulation of wealth is essentially meaningless; making your job a source of personal identity and value is equally so. We're already living in a world with an insane concentration of wealth at the very top of all societies (more pronounced in some than others). Owning assets may make the average person appear wealthy, but having no liquid capital or easily accessible capital means the assets are largely useless. It's just pressure to accumulate assets, which comes with pressures to achieve status, which... (read more)

1. Chinese nationalism as collective insecurity. The narrative is that China experienced a “century of humiliation” being brought to its knees by western colonizers, the Opium War, and Japanese atrocities in WW2, and the world still sees Chinese as “East Asian weaklings.” Through this lens, the primary drive of Chinese people is to prove themselves equal or superior to westerners and usher in the Chinese century.

I don't think we can categorically say that Chinese nationalism is based on insecurity when taking into account younger generations. At its base, the... (read more)