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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   35487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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In the end X.com HBD stans overcorrected on the ‘population differences aren’t just for IQ, they also explain why Chinese etc inherently aren’t as creative / innovative’ front, which was extreme cope from day one. They were always capable, they just needed to borrow the Silicon Valley move fast and break things culture in addition to the technical foundation.

Now we can see that 1.5 billion people with an IQ 105 average is entirely capable of competing with a population of 300 million with a 100 average + some smart Jews, Europeans, Chinese emigrants and 4 sigma third worlders.

In the end, and this isn’t just because I mostly like the Chinese, I truly think this makes a major war less likely and therefore means those of us living in major Western (and Chinese) cities are more likely to keep on living.

I think Hong Kong has been making it clear for a long time that the main problem with Chinese isn't the human hardware, it's the culture. I don't think I can think of any clearer example of "the human hardware is fine, but the culture sucks" than the East Asian model of humanity. Of course their culture is much better than some other cultures, but it is largely stuck in a local maximum that continuously prevents the human hardware from unleashing its full potential. Which is not to say that the human hardware itself is superior to European human hardware. It may or may not be, in any case I see no convincing evidence that it is, despite the 105 IQ data point. It might even be inferior, although if it is then I think it is probably at most only slightly inferior. But probably the only way we can really find out is if we can figure out how to liberate them from some of their culture.

They were always capable, they just needed to borrow the Silicon Valley move fast and break things culture in addition to the technical foundation.

They needed to borrow the Culture and they needed to borrow the technical foundation, so this still seems pretty much aligned with the HBD stans to me, who never doubted their intelligence or ability to adopt and improve upon Western innovations. Now if LLMs had had the OpenAI-tier breakthrough in China that would have been a challenge to the HBD stans, but this development basically aligns with the HBD take on the comparative advantage of Chinese talent in adopting Western stuff and then making marginal improvements with their own intelligence and grit.

Now if LLMs had had the OpenAI-tier breakthrough in China that would have been a challenge to the HBD stans, but this development basically aligns with the HBD take on the comparative advantage of Chinese talent in adopting Western stuff and then making marginal improvements with their own intelligence and grit.

The problem is that there haven't been substantial breakthroughs in LLMs in the West too. China runs Transformers and you guys run Transformers. I see Western papers full of unnecessarily clever bullshit that doesn't really work, and I see Chinese papers full of derivative bullshit that barely works. DeepSeek's MLA came out in May, and it remains SoTA cache optimization, and it's actually clever. GRPO, too, was quietly announced and seems to hold up very well despite dozens if not hundreds of cleverer results by "crazy geniuses" in the West (increasingly Indian). Today, the Chinese innovate on exactly the same plane.

I think it's time to admit that the famed Western creativity is mostly verbal tilt plus inflated self-esteem, not an advanced cognitive capability. I'm mildly surprised myself.

I think it's time to admit that the famed Western creativity is mostly verbal tilt plus inflated self-esteem, not an advanced cognitive capability. I'm mildly surprised myself.

Trust me, I hope I'm wrong! But the fact is, as I go throughout my day 99% of the innovations I rely on and impact my daily life and our economy as a whole were invented in the West, and have been refined/manufactured/redesigned/made cheaper in China. Not the other way around, and if it were the other way around surely you would point to a HBD explanation. Yes, I do think there's an HBD basis for that and it would be absurd to deny that, a priori it would be silly to doubt there's an HBD basis for any sort of stark pattern like that one Murray observes. I don't think LLMs are a counterexample of that trend.

It would be like if China made a better and cheaper Tesla than Musk, OK that's great but it doesn't really contradict the observation that these innovations are born in the West and then get adopted and modified/improved in China.

The problem is that there haven't been substantial breakthroughs in LLMs in the West too.

Honestly this feels like a cope to me. There obviously was a breakthrough in LLMs in the West: politically, economically, technologically, culturally. It wasn't born in China, but they obviously have a significant part to play downstream of their undeniable talent pool.

It's hard to say Deepseek would have accomplished these things without drafting on OpenAI's introduction of LLMs to the world, and all of the downstream political, economic, geopolitical, cultural impact resulting from that disruption- and it was OpenAI that did the disrupting there is simply no denying. On the other hand we know OpenAI did not need Deepseek.

Honestly this feels like a cope to me. There obviously was a breakthrough in LLMs in the West: politically, economically, technologically, culturally. It wasn't born in China, but they obviously have a significant part to play downstream of their undeniable talent pool.

What are you talking about? Have you stopped reading my post there?

It's hard to say Deepseek would have accomplished these things without drafting on OpenAI's introduction of LLMs to the world,

Here's what I think about this. The Chinese are not uncreative. It's worse: they're cowardly, conservative, and avoid doing exploratory shit that seems high-risk, and they buy into your theory of their own inferiority, and steelman it as “good at execution”. As Wenfeng says:

Another reason that domestic large models have rarely dabbled in innovation at the architectural level before is that few people have dared to go against the stereotype that America is better at the technological innovation from 0 to 1, while China is better at the application innovation from 1 to 10. Not to mention that this kind of behavior is very unprofitable -- the usual thinking is that, naturally, in a few months, someone would have made the next generation of models, and then Chinese companies can just follow the leader, and do a good job of application. Innovating the model structure means that there is no path to follow, and there are a lot of failures to go through, which is costly in terms of time and money.

There will be more and more hardcore innovation in the future. It may not be yet easily understood now, because the whole society still needs to be educated by the facts. After this society lets the hardcore innovators make a name for themselves, the groupthink will change. All we still need are some facts and a process.

You are watching these facts come in.

I repeat, I've been a believer in this theory of “fundamental Western progress, incremental Eastern refinement”. Eight years into Transformer era (Ashish Vaswani et al., 2017), I start to doubt it. Whites are just people who are sexually attractive, relatively trustworthy, and provide linear labor to verbal-tilted Brahmins who max corporate KPIs leveraging even more verbal-tilted Ashkenazim like Altman who are good at raising capital.

That's about it at this point.

The most credible, big-brained, innovation-heavy alternative to Transformer was Mamba (Tri Dao, Albert Gu). It also didn't go far. I've read perhaps hundreds of Western papers of purportedly brilliant innovations, they're narcissistic shit that doesn't scale. Sepp Hochreiter is peddling his xLSTM that has no utility, Schmidhuber is making some boastful noises as usual, Sutskever and Karmack are supposedly doing… something. Mistral is dead in the water…

I am not saying this out of racism. I am reporting on what I see happening. All historical inventions and discoveries of note? Yes, those were White work. But time is accelerating. Maxwell's equations seem not far from "muh gunpowder" of the Middle Kingdom now, to my eyes. Do something new, folks. You're losing face.

On the other hand we know OpenAI did not need Deepseek.

Sure, OpenAI needed another company. OpenAI built its legend on scaling up a Google paper. By your own standards, it's not creative brilliance. It's the sort of talent you condescendingly concede Chinese people have.

I start to doubt it. Whites are just people who are sexually attractive, relatively trustworthy, and provide linear labor to verbal-tilted Brahmins who max corporate KPIs leveraging even more verbal-tilted Ashkenazim like Altman who are good at raising capital.

That's about it at this point.

Again, it seems very doubtful to me that these groups have significantly different distributions of sexual attractiveness, trustworthiness, labor value, verbal, IQ, but they are all the same when it comes to affinity for breakthrough innovation. People think differently...

I actually agree with Wefang's summary you posted, but Wefang is implying basically stereotype threat: that the Chinese don't innovate from 0 to 1 because there's a stereotype that job belongs to the West. Ok, so we are in the familiar HBD-denial territory by using Stereotype Threat to explain a very long-standing disparity in behavior: the Chinese don't innovate from 0 to 1 because there's a stereotype that they don't do that. I think you're leaning into that as well.

I don't think architectural innovations, even very clever ones the Chinese come up with, are the "0 to 1" that was already accomplished by OpenAI and the West. And as my last post said, that is not just or even mostly about the papers, it's about the technological, political, economic, geopolitical influence- they got the ball rolling on those fronts. I don't doubt the ability of the Chinese to perhaps even outcompete the West on going from 1 to 10 for the reasons you said, but 0 to 1 was already done by the West and this pattern is consistent with that stereotype which HBD stans claim is derived from differences in cognitive profile.

I am not saying this out of racism. I am reporting on what I see happening. All historical inventions and discoveries of note? Yes, those were White work. But time is accelerating. Maxwell's equations seem not far from "muh gunpowder" of the Middle Kingdom now, to my eyes. Do something new, folks. You're losing face.

Sure, maybe we'll be proven wrong! But it hasn't happened yet, LLMs are following the "West does 0 to 1, then West competes with China on 1 to 10" pattern that follows the basic stereotype.

Wefang is implying basically stereotype threat: that the Chinese don't innovate from 0 to 1 because there's a stereotype that job belongs to the West

Wenfeng.

No, it's not a stereotype threat argument, it's an argument about perceived opportunity cost of exploration vs exploitation which is miscalibrated in the age of large domestic revenue generators. He's not arguing they should be like Whites. He's arguing they can now afford to do what Whites do compulsively, if you will.

Your condescension and willful misinterpretation will be your undoing in this dialogue and outside it.

I look down on WEIRDs for one more reason. You are ultimately tool-like, your mentality is that of servitors and cowering peasants. Your "internal dignity" is inextricably bound to collective judgement, you feel the need to justify your value to some imagined audience, to some Baron, some market or some Moral Community. You are ashamed of brute, terminal-value ethnocentrism the sort of which Judaism preaches, so you need to cling to those spiritualist copes wrapped in HBD lingo. "H-here's why we are Good, why we still deserve a place under the sun, sire!" This exposes you to obvious predation and mockery by High-Skill Immigrants like Count.

On the object level: yes, probably on average the Chinese are indeed less "creative" even with optimal incentives, and this has obvious implications at the tails. (though if we think OpenAI is an impressive example of bold creativity, what about NVidia? What did Jensen "merely improve"? As a CEO, he's roughly in the same league as Altman and Musk, I think). The question – raised by R1 there – is, how many more True Breakthrough innovators do we even need before innovation begins to accrete on itself without human supervision? Maybe just a handful. Again, there's been virtually no fundamental progress in AI since 2017, and we're all doing just fine. It may be that architecturally V3 is more sophisticated and innovative than the modern OpenAI stack. Imagine that. After all, Western geniuses are afraid to show their work these days.

Incidentally, I myself have submitted several minor ideas to DeepSeek; maybe they found use for those, maybe not, but I'll find use for the result of their labor and not cope that they needed my input.

It may be that the mode of production implied by the stage of our technological development makes your race, with all its creative perks and industrial drawbacks, less economically useful than it used to be. This only means you need to move that much faster to find reasons to protect your interests unconditionally, before everyone turns equally economically useless.

On the object level: yes, probably on average the Chinese are indeed less "creative" even with optimal incentives, and this has obvious implications at the tails

Started arguing, seemingly about Chinese HBD, leaned into some tangential points at best, non-sequiturs at worst, gave some half-baked takes about why white people suck, then unceremoniously conceded the argument. Scratching my temple wondering what was your game here
My guess is you had something pent up that might have been interesting had it been properly developed and formatted as a top level post

My argument is I don't think this argument matters. Maybe they will produce 10x fewer Newtons (–Creativity + Intelligence). With current population that's the same as total global production around Newton's time. With the current economic structure, marginal value of one more Newton as opposed to a 1000 PhDs is plummeting. I don't want to lose time arguing details auxiliary to my thesis (or not conductive to banter).

Incidentally, I myself have submitted several minor ideas to DeepSeek; maybe they found use for those

DeepSeek results copped from the White Man, confirmed.

Seriously though, my only point was that I don't think the HBD perspective is surprised that the Chinese are doing well competing on the development of LLMs, after that technological race was kicked off by the West. No more, no less. And I think a lot of your criticisms of Western AGI establishment are cogent. I don't think race is a deprecated question, it may even become more important on the eve of AGI.

The Chinese may be smart but they're uninspired robots was always finest grade copium. It turns out that in the end whites as a race are certifiably mid and they don't take the news of this very well.

EDIT: I protest this ban. I sincerely mean what I say here and don't think calling whites mid as a race is even an insult, it would only be perceived as such by someone who puts particular pride in the race they were born into by chance. Had I said blacks as a race are mid nobody would have raised even a peep (and fwiw, my opinion of whites is higher than my opinion of blacks).

I'm not joking or trolling here. Seriously considering decamping off to Twitter at this moment (would have been Bluesky because I think the algorithm there is better, but alas, like for lots of other things, the worst thing about Bsky is the people there).

Also:

It turns out that in the end whites as a race are certifiably mid and they don't take the news of this very well.

Really proving the point of my statement with that ban.

  • -17

I think he's got a point, and the ban was retarded. The funny part is that he made the same slightly catty remarks about white identity people that certain mods do, it was apparently just the wrong kind of catty.

Had I said blacks as a race are mid nobody would have raised even a peep

Come on, man. You're living in a city built by ethnic Britons, and you've been on record relishing their demographic demise as you enjoy the institutions they built. It gives people the creeps and you know it.

Okay, you're back to baiting. You've been told about this before. A lot.

I'm kind of torn on what to do here. You're a long-timer who many people enjoy reading, you have interesting perspectives, and you've earned one (but only one) AAQC.

On the other hand, you seem to always just be biding your time until you can unload more sneering at "mayos." I am not fond of people who are only here to shit on the people they hold in contempt, who are just itching to let those people know how much contempt they hold them in.

You are overall someone who probably is a net positive here, as annoying as you are, but you've got a long rap sheet, and the last few bans have been of increasing length, with notes that this is your "final warning" and you probably deserve a permaban next time. In fact, at one point you were permabanned but enough members spoke up in your favor that we reduced it to 20 days.

That was four bans ago.

Most people would have been permabanned by now. You probably should be permabanned. You do seem to have a pattern of toning it down for a while after you return from a ban, but you don't really learn your lesson, because the seething contempt is always boiling just below the surface.

Against my better judgment, I'm only banning you for 90 days. (That was your last ban length also.) This comment in itself was pretty mild, it's just that it's the kind of comment you make over and over and over again every time you think you can get away with some more baiting.

Next time will probably depend on which mod deals with you, but I will have no mercy.

ETA: Post-ban editing to whine about the ban IMO deserves a permaban, but I'll throw it to the other mods to decide if they want to shorten it.

Really proving the point of my statement with that ban.

Dude, accusing me of all people here of feeling some sort of white ethnic defensiveness is both ridiculous and proves you just meant to insult people. I don't care if you think I, personally, am "mid" because of my mayo pallor, but you are not allowed to just throw generalized insults at your racial outgroup.

Had I said blacks as a race are mid nobody would have raised even a peep

You know this is not true. People say shit about whites, blacks, Jews, and Indians all the time here, but just dumping on an entire race because you want to express your contempt has always been modded.

Another (probably irrelevant) plea for some degree of clemency when it comes to BC, if only because while provocative he adds some interesting ideological diversity IMO. OTOH I recognise that being a mod is a thankless task and you've had to put up with him for longer than I've enjoyed him.

I think mods should either be AAQC-blind or make it explicit in the rules that if one has "good contributions", one can get away with blatant asking-for-it shitlording.

We have never been AAQC-blind and we've always been explicit that good contributors get more slack. The slack is finite, though. We've banned people with tons of AAQCs for repeated shitlording.

90 days is already very harsh, please do not permaban him.

Can't we reach a compromise in which he's not banned, but we're free to call him a Jeet?

This is the sort of diplomacy most international conflicts are sorely missing.

I like having BurdensomeCount around, and would be sad to see him banned.

My opinion probably doesn't count for all that much, but I like to think I'm one of the relatively more measured users here.

Mid by what metric, pray tell?

Intelligence, creativity, humour, how good they look after age 30, you name it etc. etc.

True creativity comes through working with constraints imposed like China (be it sanctions or cost pressure or whatever). Unconstrained problems are often underdetermined which means every midwit can find their own "unique" solution which then lets them pretend they are special.

  • -12

In case you're banned, I suppose you can't reply to this. But I will have to disagree that whites are mid.

Most of the giants of humanity (Einstein, Tesla, Hawking, any "great person") were white. This is a good marker of intelligence. Asians are better at rote memorization, but that is a very bad marker of higher intelligence, and it's mostly a result of spending 40% more hours studying on average.

I will have to disagree with creativity too when it means "originality" due to the collectivist nature of Asia. If you mean "artistic skills" however, I will have to agree with you, asians win.

Working with constraints results in creativity for everyone. There's a reason why writers block mostly occur as a result of a blank page. This is how the human mind works, and it's merely a coincidence that the Chinese are more restrained at the moment.

As for "How good the look after age 30", I mostly agree, but it doesn't seem very related to other metrics.

Most of the giants of humanity (Einstein, Tesla, Hawking, any "great person") were white

Classifying Einstein as white is somewhat controversial (at least around these sorts of places)

I see, I just went by skincolor. If possible, I don't want to overcomplicate things by taking "jews are in a super-position of white and non-white, collapsing to the state which benefits them the most at any given time" seriously. Genetically they might be a little different, though, I'm even open to the idea that jews are objectively superior in some sense (e.g. often intelligent), but I think they're also inferior in others. The use of deception is an indicator that one has difficulties competing fairly, after all.

Despite being white I don't care that much if another race is "superior" though, the only hill I'm willing to die on is that "mid" is too harsh an assessment

route memorization

I assume you mean 'rote memorization'. Unless there's studies about Chinese pathfinding ability.

Oops, yeah, thanks! But if you use the Method of Loci, you can technically have both!

Okay, now I see you were joking, good thing I decided to check before sperging out with a serious rebuttal

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