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4Chan's First Feature film is also the first Feature length AI Film.
The Conceit? Aside from a few Joke stills, none of the visual film is AI. It is a "Nature Documentary" Narrated by David Attenborough... It is also maybe the most disturbing film ever made, and possibly the most important/impactful film of the decades so far.
Reality is more terrifying than fiction.
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Notes -
Just for the sake of rigour:
What makes anyone think that this is another other than more Chinese robbers? That it isn't just two hours of misleading vividness?
There are one and a half billion Indians. It is the largest country in the world. Do I believe that a dedicated troll could find two hours of footage of Indians being disgusting or immoral? Certainly. I would be shocked if that weren't the case. I am sure you could easily do the same thing for China or the United States or Egypt or any country of reasonable size.
Meanwhile let's make a quick sanity-check. If we believe this premise, the Indians as a whole are incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic, whereas the Han Chinese, with their statistically higher IQs, should be far more successful. Yet if we do a quick comparison of India and China - it doesn't seem like the Chinese are outdoing the Indians by that much. They have the edge in a few places, but it's not a massive or universal advantage. This is even more the case if we look at history. Broadly speaking, which country has been more productive, in terms of art, science, religion, philosophy, engineering, or any similar field? If there's a Chinese advantage, it doesn't look immediately overwhelming, to me. India and China look pretty comparable.
Why should we take this seriously? We ought to predict that such a film could be made regardless of whether its general claims about Indians are true or not. Knowing that, the film presents no compelling reason to believe that its general claim is true.
A few places? Where's the Indian space station, where's the Indian navy, the Indian air force, the Indian high-tech industries in comparison to China? Where are the robotized gigafactories?
Xiaomi car factory: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5KhnLLpoQ0
High quality scientific papers by country: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/annual-tables/2022/country/all/all
India is apparently less scientifically productive than Australia, albeit improving. The population of Australia is 26.6 million. There's an absolutely monstrous gap between India and China. China makes 5x more cars than India, they're so far ahead in AI and computing it's incomparable. In China big cities have this cyberpunk aesthetic - during COVID lockdowns they had drones flying around saying "Please restrain your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing." I don't want to live there - I want freedom and artistic expression. Even so, the aesthetic is pretty good!
Shanghai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bw3yXaVHuLs
Big Indian cities have a Malthusian slum aesthetic - a totally different kind of dystopia. When it comes to cybercrime, Indian thieves tend to prefer scamming credulous octogenarians with gift cards - Chinese hackers steal 5G tech, turbines, sensitive and secret documents. When it comes to climate change, China builds all the solar panels and wind turbines, India asks for climate finance. There's a qualitative difference between India and China.
Mumbai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gV5EU6daoVI
Even in history, India was conquered by the British - China got wrecked but not colonized. They fought bravely and desperately against all comers rather than rolling over. China was if not one of the Big Three in WW2, at least the Fourth of Roosevelt's Four Policemen. They got their UNSC veto, India begs for one. Postwar, China fought the US to a stalemate in Korea, skirmished with the Soviet Union and Vietnam. India just clobbered Pakistan a couple of times and lost a skirmish with China.
This is what irks me most about westerners, they would look at disparaging differences between two culture and rather than dig deep just blame it on "qualitative differences" between countries.
What you need to understand is India's history is quite different from what China went through. Both of their growth stories were stunted considerably by Socialist ideas, but India not only lagged behind the reforms but also has much more baggage per say with things needed to be sorted out.
A lot of the system is inherited from the British-era system and is archaic. Adding to that the socialist era baggage that was introduced, there are a mountain of things that needs reform. The fact that unlike China, which historically had strong states and weak societies, India had strong societies and weak state. What this means is no matter what reform you introduced there is much harsher resistance towards them. India has problems, but not the kind you understand.
For example, take difference between India and China in industrial might. On the surface the disparity does look large enough to conclude a "qualitative difference" but are perfectly explainable if you see how heavily regulated Indian industries are. How can you expect a big enough gigafactory to be developed when there is a piece of legislation that prevents a factory owner to fire anyone from the factory employing more than 500 without the permission of the sitting MLA(member of state legislative assembly) for the region. The only way there is any headway for the economy is through the establishment of Special Economic Zones, where labor laws need not apply. Indian Industries are heavily regulated even if you do not consider labor laws. Any attempt to reform these or deregulate the economy results in massive protests. Even Modi with all his popularity can't even touch them.
That's a dumb argument. What is wrong with asking that the rich countries whose excessive consumption landed us in the climate crisis in the first place paying more to fix the damn thing? Why should the developing and poor countries sacrifice their economic interests to the first world worry of climate change? Why should the production of solar panels and wind turbines(which IMO are bad solutions to climate change) be a better metric of measuring contribution to the mitigation of climate change? Why do you think China that dropped down to 51st spot on Climate Change Performance Index is better than India that ranks 7th.
Yeah, you wouldn't have happened to hear about the 700 years of constant Islamic conquest we as a nation had to go through. Just as the Marathas and Sikhs were done cleaning up fallout from it, lo and behold the British show up.
Yeah, the seat that the UN originally offered to India and India conceded to China. That was a pretty big blunder.
Case in point. China created SEZs, India didn't. China deregulated its economy, India didn't. Was Chinese liberalization traumatic, were there people angry about losing their iron rice bowls, was there inflation and inequality? Of course! Yet they struggled through rather than shying away from reform. You say 'weak state, strong society', I say 'qualitative difference'. Build up a strong state, change those labour laws, compete or lose - that's the rule of this world.
Did China have foreign invasions? Yes, they had to deal with the Mongols and the Manchus. They had to deal with the Japanese. They had to deal with the Europeans too.
OK, so India made a massive blunder helping the PRC. Nevertheless China was rewarded for its wartime performance with a veto, they used their strength and diplomatic abilities to take their seat from ROC. And it's the same today. All around the world, China flexes its muscles - they help Russia in Ukraine, they arrange Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. What does India do? Buy Russian oil and military technology because their own defence-industrial base is pretty poor. India's influence in world affairs? Pretty minimal.
The reason India ranks so highly on the Climate Change Performance Index is because it's poor - I bet if they included Congo or Malawi they'd be even higher still - the Phillipines is even higher than India. Very low emissions there! Climate change is a joke and the Chinese clearly don't care - they're building loads of coal power as well. Yet they see renewables as a market to dominate like all the others.
Modi boasts about reaching 1/4 of Chinese coal production, India doesn't care either but they'll opportunistically ask for aid: https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1774844651394228422
Compare the national attitudes! China says 'we're a renewables/electric cars/industrial superpower' as they advance their own global strategy as a competitor to the West, India says 'give us more money', coming to the West as a supplicant.
I agree with the conclusion, but that doesn't mean you can just steamroll the reforms. The Chinese system has its advantages, being able to get unpopular but necessary reform done and set a long term objectives, but the major flaw is that people will only accept it if the state doesn't fuck things up. The PRC state is standing on two legs of economic growth and nationalism, that was what the weak society accepted. Economic growth is already gone, and if the nationalism bit get destroyed from let's say a major loss in a war, the Chinese state would Balkanize. In democracy on the other hand, even though it takes consensus building to get reforms done, the state much more stable to external shocks.
Yeah, China had major foreign invasions, but they had quite some time to settle down as a state before the next invasion. India on the other hand waltzed from one invasion to others.
The premise that "rich countries will perform poor on Climate Change because they use the bulk of the energy" that's a rabbit hole in itself if you want to go there. Now coming to your point, CCPI does factor "richness" of a country, but not in a way you would presume. It does take into account the current energy usage and the share of renewables in it, in addition to policy regarding the emissions. It uses a pretty balanced in evaluation of policy, energy usage and change in GHG emissions to rank.
C'mon, your argument is not rooted in reality and is just cherry-picking of instances that serve your argument. There is ample proof that India is not only seeking aid but also working the money properly to ensure it reaches it targets. The CCPI ranking and India's performance in it is ample evidence about how serious it is about tackling the Climate Change. India's hybrid car demand is through the roof and Government is also investing heavily.
You strike me as an individual not familiar with India and relies on cursory knowledge and stereotypes to evaluate the country. Either way, whether India is able to overcome its disadvantages or not in the future will be clear by 10 years.
So far I've brought up space capabilities, naval power, air power, high tech industries like car factories, high quality scientific papers, AI, urban development and skylines, cybercriminals, green industry, coal production, diplomatic influence, cybercrime, market reforms, resistance to colonizers and post-WW2 military performance. Is that cherry-picking?
Where does India outperform China? In a green index which declares the Philippines a major leader? Meanwhile, big industrial powers like Taiwan, China and South Korea are right at the bottom.
India's level of development is just lower. I have a special interest in military affairs - the comparison is marked. The Indian army - a whole fleet of Russian T-90s and T-72s, Russian BMP-2s, Russian Tunguskas, Konkurs, Iglas. There are some Indian light vehicles, helicopters and missiles but even Brahmos is codeveloped with Russia. Most of their arsenal is imported. It's the same in aviation, they fly Migs, Su-30s, Rafales, Jaguars... and a few domestically produced and long-delayed Tejas fighters.
China is a different story. Nearly all their vehicles and equipment is made domestically. Like India they bought aircraft from the Soviets but supplemented them with hundreds of domestic J-10s and their own 5th gen aircraft, which India doesn't have at all.
India has lower CO2 emissions than China and higher birthrates. That's it. OP's original point was that China wasn't much more successful than India, which is bizarre. China is way more successful than India.
What I referred to as cherry-picking is your dismissing of CCPI ranking just because it doesn't align with your worldview.
I know better than anyone how India is dependent on foreign tech for defense, but I wouldn't dismiss other achievements just because of this thing.
C'mon bro, India rivals china in space tech even with the fraction of budget. India lags in hardware manufacturing, but has the most software exports. China is a juggernaut for sure, but the difference is not worlds apart.
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India wasn't an unified entity when the British first showed up. The very concept of India, as a coherent ethno-lingual entity, was created both for civic convenience by the Colonial administration, and embraced by the leaders of the Independence movement.
It had the then decadent Mughal empire dominating the north, and a few of its rump states to the east and west, and multiple independent and flourishing kingdoms that were quite successful in holding off initial Portuguese colonial endeavors.
What the British did was a combination of enormous shrewdness and gunboat diplomacy (in the metaphorical sense, most of the country is too far inland for naval supremacy to particularly matter). They first established a beachhead by subverting then conquering Bengal, a vassal of the Mughals, and then steadily, over the course of decades, fought their way west and south. They were temporarily stymied by the Rajputs and the southern rulers, who had been giving the Mughals a headache, and heavily relied on friendly local powers they played off each other, as well as the massive Sepoy forces they raised to supplement the relatively minuscule number of beef-fed Britons who managed to survive in the those climes. (The beef fed bit contributed to the Sepoy Revolt, but that's a long story)
And complete conquest took, I don't recall, but a couple centuries I'd wager, at least one. And even then, colonial control was mostly through systems of vassalage, with many rulers, big or small, retaining a great deal of local power until they grew complacent and then had their demesnes snatched on technicalities (the most memorable example was a ruler who was infertile, and hence adopted a child when his death was imminent. The British rejected the heir and declared their intent to annex his territory, and when he passed away, his queen took up arms in his name to fight, not that they won)
China was a unified state, and has been for millenia. They're rightfully proud of it.
I can't critique the rest of your post since you're correct that India is far behind China when it comes to development and human capital, and not all of it can be blamed on late liberalization either. I accept that reality, and besides, I'm getting out. However, it wasn't a pushover, the British paid quite dearly to take the whole subcontinent.
It's also relevant, to the best of my knowledge, that the British didn't even try to conquer China in a similar way to India. They wanted Chinese goods, and for China to be subject to their power, certainly, but when British contact with China really started ramping up in the 19th century, they did not want another India. They explicitly didn't want a second India. One subcontinental Asian empire was enough, and the burdens of trying to directly govern and administer China were more than anyone wanted to assume - especially not when it was viable to instead get everything they wanted from China through less extreme means, going through a subject Chinese government.
There are plenty of reasons why the British didn't conquer China the way they did India, but in addition to China being a unitary reasonably powerful country rather than feuding states, and reaching China almost two centuries after reaching India, I think we have to add the fact that they, as a matter of policy, chose not to try. The expense that would have been involved in trying to conquer China just wasn't worth the potential gain, and that's even before we factor in the other European empires with stakes in China that might have objected. It doesn't seem like we need to rush to racial explanations.
This isn't to say that I am rejecting out of hand the idea that there might be genetic differences between Indians and Chinese. Heck, I'm sure there are lots of genetic differences within each category as well - both 'Indian' and 'Chinese' (even if we restrict ourselves to Han!) include a lot of historically divided subgroups. Rather, I just mean that conquest of one but not the other seems plenty explainable by contingent, non-racial factors.
I appreciate the additional context you provided, wasn't aware of it myself!
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I saw some random twitter nonsense about what makes a "genius". And sure, IQ was on the list, but so was disagreeability. You have to be willing to go "Everyone else is wrong, fuck you, I don't care what you say about it." In business, you have to be willing to put your money where your mouth is, and stake your life savings and generational wealth on the fact that everyone else is leaving money on the table that only you see.
I don't have a study about how Asians score on agreeability versus Europeans or Americans. But anecdotally, a buddy of mine moved to Japan with his wife, and his half-Japanese kid was entering kindergarten. The first day involved an hour of speeches all the 4 year old Japanese kids sat perfectly still through. His half-Japanese kid was all over the place trying to play and talk to people. My own kid, who's plenty smart and generally ahead of her peers, would probably be similarly incapable of sitting still for a whole ass hour. We took her to a 75 minute show for kids full of dog tricks, with ample calls for audience participation, and she made it roughly 45 minutes before she simply could not stay butt in seat one moment longer. We were fairly proud of her. But hearing about that Japanese kindergarten class made us wonder, are we retarded or are they aliens?
There are plenty, although definitely not universal, tradcath children who can sit through mass(hour or so) without needing to leave at 4. So it’s probably just down to different child rearing, not HBD.
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Well, Mao managed to be far more successful at being incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic. Does it count? :)
I think someone here linked this review (or linked to something else that linked to said review) of a book by Mao's former personal doctor, which detailed how closed-minded, filthy, perverted, and short-tempered Mao could be. As per Olive's reply, the totalizing ideology of Communism in China, paired with the general ability of the Chinese to go along with a proclaimed direction, would naturally have led to Mao dragging an entire country down with him.
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Touché.
Mao seems like a good example of the power of institutional structure and ideology, to be honest. The disaster of the Great Leap Forward didn't happen because Mao was an idiot - or at least, not because Mao had low IQ. Neither did it happen because the Chinese in general are low IQ, or have a racial disposition towards stupidity, laziness, fractious and inability to work together, or anything like that. On the contrary, the usual HBD line is that Han Chinese are unusually intelligent, hard-working, and cooperative. And yet they managed to cause the single greatest human calamity in the 20th century (against some stiff competition), and it was entirely self-inflicted!
If nothing else, it seems like a reminder just that, well, organisation and structure matter, and that bad theory and misaligned incentives can do more harm than any putative lack of intelligence.
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