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 -
The US is an extremely individualist country and is good at individualist projects which makes the US high in innovation. Meanwhile the US is terrible at large scale collective projects. California high speed rail, Vogtle nuclear power plants and a third of the country doing full lockdown during covid while another third are militantly refusing are examples of Americans being incapable of going with one strategy and ramming it through. Going Belarus and having no lockdowns for anyone, or going China and having lockdowns makes more sense than having half the population locked down while others are having raves.
Manufacturing chips is less about individual genius and more of a grand collective vision. The true innovation and genius is a decade ahead of what can be mass-produced. The timeline from physics genius inventing having a stroke of genius on a black board to manufacturing is long. These genius strokes of ingenuity are difficult to keep secret when they are going to be mass-produced. Taking an idea and building a 20 billion dollar plant requires a Herculean effort of tens of thousands of high skill workers pulling together for a common cause. Building high speed rail is less dependent on the next cool startup and more dependent on society as a whole coming together for a prime directive. China didn't invent the electric car, the mosfet chip, nuclear power or high speed rail, but they excel at scaling production.
Nuclear power is similar. The ideas for fourth gen nuclear power are not new, they are 60 years old. To be leading in nuclear power a country needs legislators, engineers, and technicians who can pull together to make fourth gen nuclear real. They don't need people who can invent novel exotic designs for power plants that won't be built.
As for black people they are useful for the system. A black lesbian woman with a rainbow flag is ideologically loyal. There is no risk that she will turn against the system or be disloyal, she truly believes in the liberal project. White men are a risk group. Chinese and Russian men are the most suspect. When France colonized Vietnam they promoted hmong people to positions of power. The Hmong people have been a minority in a weak position throughout history and had a grudge against the rest of society. They truly benefited from being a part of the French empire. Their loyalty made them good employees. A trustable mediocre employee is better than a disloyal genius.
Sounds pretty much like dictatorship allocating chief positions for loyalty over competency.
Blacks are not neccessarily loyal to liberal project. Blacks have highest transphobia amongst US race groups, in opposite what you could think if you just voted on them voting R vs D. There are more of such issues.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah I read a book that had the thesis "AI is switching from the era of cutting-edge innovation to scaling and iteration so China will start to pull ahead of the US". It was written back in 2021 though, so pretty obsolete.
I was tempted to say that the US should also try for the 'science->military' feedback loop. They did do it back in the 1950s with Eisenhower's post-Sputnik space effort. I reckon that's too hard now, the ship of state is too big and hard to steer. On the other hand, it's not like the freedom-centric strategy is realistic/feasible either.
I realize it's not hugely discussed, but isn't this (to some extent) still the case? The US has no shortage of scientists working on military(-ish) technology. Those National Labs all work for the Department of Energy, which, as Rick Perry found out, has surprisingly little to do with energy qua energy, and a lot more to do with nuclear power and defense research. There's also DARPA and similar programs that are more explicitly labeled "defense", and plenty of research grants from the intelligence community and the various services. Even NASA is distinctly defense-adjacent and their funding usually comes with security requirements. And "securing defense supply chains" has been a big reason for funding projects like the CHIPS Act.
It's not exactly a new example, but ARPANET was, for a long time, a defense project, and DARPA was funding a lot of the early self-driving car research. It's hard to see the current picture more clearly (I certainly don't claim to), but there's plenty of reason to hold results like this fairly quietly. I also won't claim that it's done optimally at a good scale, but the idea that science and military aren't linked currently is at least missing some of the forest for the trees.
Sure, the US does do this but not quite at the scale and commitment China's working at. How much money has the US promised on the CHIPS act? Tens of billions. Is the US willing to build nuclear plants? Not really. Other considerations come before aggressive implementation of technology. Musk has to file his environmental impact statements before launching his rockets.
China is spending in the hundreds of billions on chips. They're building the most nuclear plants in the world. They've got a huge industrial policy machine, they really put in effort when it comes to technology. When it comes to high-speed rail, they don't just talk about it, they build it. They don't care about environmental impact in China like they do in the US. Technology comes second only to communist party control.
The US still spends more on research but they're not exactly growing their research spending like China is:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS?locations=US-CN
So long as the US economy has as much or more real growth than China- and there many reasons to believe it is- that is precisely what your own link indicates is happening.
Just at an initial look, both China and the US have been increasing their % of GDP to science at about the same rate for the last decade, with the US staying between .7 and 1% of GDP ahead of PRC. Not only would the US be spending nearly an entire % of GDP more, and not only would the GDP have grown faster, but the overall economy remains much larger, meaning the same % growth actually entails larger numbers of $ being spent.
Now, you could try to change the terms by arguing effective spending should be considered in PPP terms, and the general pro-China economic framing at the moment is to make PPP rather than nominal measures, but not only would you have to significantly re-do your money argument and support the implicit claim that science-per-PPP is a consistent metric worth using, you'd have to factor in the US's extended scientific partnerships with other countries, and how their money should be factored in.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not hugely discussed because it's not particularly controversial, to the point that it's like water that the fish swimming through don't recognize.
The 'issue' is that many scientific developments with military applications aren't actually all-that visible, being more about integration of capabilities than distinct form. A 'post-sputnik space effort' is visually impressive when there are no space rockets. A re-usable space-launch rocket is not visually all that distinct from a non-reusable one, and only (greatly) expands the amount of material moved into space, rather than introducing first-of-its-kind capabilities.
Another issue is that a lot of significantly advancing technology is also a lot more democratized, with periods of sole-state advantage being shorter than ever before. Thirty years ago, GPS-guided weapons and real-time tracking of forces was an unprecedented technological advantage that allowed the Gulf War US to slice through one of the largest Soviet-style armies in the world to an unprecedented degree. Now you have the same technological capability in your pocket, in some cases provided by the same companies putting satellites into orbit rather than the states that once had a monopoly on doing that. What isn't invented can still be replicated, often for a fraction of the cost.
That doesn't mean that the technology -> military loops isn't occuring, or having strategic payoffs. After being the target of proxy war for the better part of two decades, the US is arguably waging one of the most effective proxy wars in human history, in large part because of the technologies it has developed and deployed in favor of it's backed party while using lessons from the previous conflicts. The advent of drone warfare is a revolution in military affairs which will be a great weakness to all major military powers by greatly increasing the costs when operating in hostile terrain- but effect the US less due to the US's geographic and alliance contexts. This is far more relevant and impressive on a strategic level than, say, a carrier-killing ballistic missile, a weapon with only about 50 applicable targets in the world.
But drones aren't sexy a decade after the Iraq War, and a carrier-killing missile is whoosh.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link