Dwarkesh Patel interviews Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College:
In this first episode, Prof Paine talks about key decisions by Khrushchev, Mao, Nehru, Bhutto, & Lyndon Johnson that shaped the whole dynamic of South Asia today.
Sarah Paine on The War For India
Friday, January 17th, 2025He wanted it to look as if he were being dragged reluctantly to lifelong power
Thursday, January 16th, 2025
Although the ten-year term of the Consulate was not due to expire until 1810, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), in May 1802 a Senate motion to extend it for a second ten-year term passed by sixty to one:
This led to seemingly spontaneous but in fact well-orchestrated calls for a new Constitution of the Year X, under which Napoleon would become First Consul for life. ‘You judge that I owe the people another sacrifice,’ he disingenuously told the Senate. ‘I will give it if the people’s voice orders what your vote now authorizes.’ Like Julius Caesar refusing the Roman diadem twice, he wanted it to look as if he were being dragged reluctantly to lifelong power.
So the kids’ shows are slop, and now adult shows will be slop too
Wednesday, January 15th, 2025Erik Hoel notes that big tech corporations have recently been doing quite a few things that can be described as “pretty evil” without hyperbole:
What’s weird is how open all the proposed evil is. Like bragging-about-it-in-press-releases levels of open.
A few examples suffice, such as the news this month (reported in Harper’s) that Spotify has been using a web of shadowy production companies to generate many of its own tracks; likely, it’s implied, with AI. Spotify’s rip-offs are made with profiles that look real but are boosted onto playlists to divert listeners away from the actual musicians that make up their platform.
Meanwhile, child entertainment channels like CoComelon are fine-tuning their attention-stealing abilities on toddlers to absurdly villainous degrees.
[…]
More recently, it was revealed that Netflix will be purposefully dumbing down its shows so people can follow along without paying attention.
[…]
So the kids’ shows are slop, and now adult shows will be slop too as characters narrate their own actions and repeat everything twice to make up for lapses in attention as people scroll on their phones.
And then, right on the heels of this, it turned out Meta has been filling up Facebook and Instagram with bots on purpose, like this new AI “Momma of 2,” in order to flatter us with fake attention.
[…]
To provide context for the criticisms of these moves here: I’m not normally someone who gets mad at companies for just existing. I don’t hate commerce.
They thought of Vance as their in-house anthropologist
Tuesday, January 14th, 2025
In January 2011, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua was in the middle of her book tour for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in her hotel room in Seattle, when an email came in from a first-year law student who had a question about his upcoming exam in her Contracts class:
Three hours later, probably after a beer, he writes me another email, and he’s like, ‘You know what? I should be studying, but I’m so curious about all this furor, so I went to Barnes & Noble, and I read it,’” she said, referring to her book. “He’s like, ‘I do not know why this is controversial.’”
Then, he told her, “You remind me of Mamaw” — Vance’s grandmother, who raised him with the same tough love that courses through Tiger Mother.
Vance added that he “felt a little bit bad” for giving her the impression that he came from an intact family, saying things were “more complicated” back home. He attached a document to the email, “and it’s the opening of Hillbilly Elegy,” Chua said, “and even though I was in trauma about my own situation, I read this thing, and I said, ‘J.D., you have to write your own book.’?”
Which, of course, he did.
Chua connected Vance with her agent, and in June 2016 — just over four months before Donald Trump was elected to the White House for the first time — the book was published. Progressive America loved it. They thought of Vance as their in-house anthropologist, the man who could explain these sad, strange people who had just voted for The Great Satan.
“She helped create the origin story for the person who’s the future vice president of the United States,” a former student, who is now an attorney in New York, told me. “That’s classic Amy Chua.”
There will always be prigs
Monday, January 13th, 2025The word “prig” isn’t very common now, Paul Graham notes, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar:
Google’s isn’t bad:
A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.
This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it’s an instance of a much older one.
There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.
So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.
The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.
[…]
Basically, the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the Establishment they’d protested against two decades before. Now they were in a position not just to speak out about their ideas, but to enforce them.
A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting was that they were allowed to attack professors. I remember noticing that aspect of political correctness at the time. It wasn’t simply a grass-roots student movement. It was faculty members encouraging students to attack other faculty members. In that respect it was like the Cultural Revolution.
[…]
Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase “people of color” is considered particularly enlightened, but saying “colored people” gets you fired. And why exactly one isn’t supposed to use the word “negro” now, even though Martin Luther King used it constantly in his speeches. There are no underlying principles. You’d just have to give him a long list of rules to memorize.
The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary, but that their elaborateness made them an effective substitute for virtue. Whenever a society has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you’re orthodox you’re better than everyone who isn’t. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people.
[…]
One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged. We’re so used to this idea now that we take it for granted, but really it’s pretty strange. Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn’t expect people to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want to share it.
[…]
For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren’t the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences between the two waves of political correctness: the first was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren’t directly in the flow of the organization’s work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it.
[…]
This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence.
[…]
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 also accelerated wokeness, particularly in the press, where outrage now meant traffic. Trump made the New York Times a lot of money: headlines during his first administration mentioned his name at about four times the rate of previous presidents.
[…]
Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
[…]
Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It’s not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can’t call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
[…]
The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder. Here we’re up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.
We all laughed and laughed at the lunacy of Political Correctness…
Because Britain gained so little, her commitment to the peace was correspondingly weak
Thursday, January 9th, 2025On Thursday, March 25, 1802, after nearly six months of negotiations, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), France and Britain signed a peace treaty at Amiens:
France had kept all her ‘natural’ frontiers up to the Rhine and the Alps, retained hegemony over western Europe, and had all her colonies restored to her. Yet in a sense Joseph and Talleyrand had been too successful: because Britain gained so little, her commitment to the peace was correspondingly weak.
[…]
On the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens, around 5,000 Britons descended on Paris. Some were curious, some wanted to see the Louvre collections, some wanted to use that excuse to visit the fleshpots of the Palais-Royal (which did a roaring trade), some wanted to renew old friendships and almost all of them wanted to meet or at least catch a glimpse of the First Consul.
[…]
The Irish MP John Leslie Foster attended one of Napoleon’s levées at the Tuileries, and described him as:
delicately and gracefully made; his hair a dark brown crop, thin and lank; his complexion smooth, pale and sallow; his eyes grey, but very animated; his eyebrows light brown, thin and projecting. All his features, particularly his mouth and nose, fine, sharp, defined, and expressive beyond description … He speaks deliberately, but very fluently, with particular emphasis, and in a rather low tone of voice. While he speaks, his features are still more expressive than his words. Expressive of what? … A pleasing melancholy, which, whenever he speaks, relaxes into the most agreeable and gracious smile you can conceive … He has more unaffected dignity than I could conceive in man.
Similarly, a former captive of the French called Sinclair wrote of ‘the grace and fascination of his smile’, and a Captain Usher said he had ‘dignified manners’.
[…]
Napoleon took this opportunity to infiltrate spies to make plans of Irish harbours, but they were soon unmasked and repatriated.
Why is India still so poor?
Wednesday, January 8th, 2025India is by far the poorest country Bryan Caplan has ever visited:
While I am well aware that life in India has drastically improved since 1991, the poverty that remains is still pretty horrifying. Uber drivers were lucky to net ten dollars a day. In every city I visited, I saw children under the age of ten begging in the midst of chaotic street traffic. Sometimes they were with their moms or older siblings, but these pitiful kids usually seemed to be all on their own. While most of them were inured to their plight, I also witnessed a few sidelined child beggars crying their hearts out with no one to comfort them. All Effective Altruism aside, I was tempted to hand each of them a day’s worth of rupees. But I didn’t. The situation was so hellish I felt paralyzed.
Why is India still so poor? “Lack of human capital” is only a minor problem. Even the lowest-skilled Indian workers I saw could easily prosper in the United States as drivers, waiters, cooks, maids, and janitors. “Dysfunctional culture” is also a distraction. Ordinary Indians have a great work ethic, grace under pressure, and passable English.
OK, so why is India still so poor? All libertarian bias aside, India’s central problem is absurd regulation and state ownership. Absurd how? To start: The Indian government strictly protects legal employees, so 90%+ of Indians work “informally.” Our bus driver to Agra was required to take a rest stop every two hours — in a country packed with tuk-tuk drivers zooming around like maniacs. The government caps the maximum size of farms — and bars foreigners (including Non-Resident Indians!) from owning farms at all. A great way to strangle the food supply and impoverish farmers at the same time. The Indian government also crushes construction, most notably with its infamous Floor Area Ratio regulation — in a country where plenty of people sleep on the streets. Developers aren’t even allowed to build skyscrapers in slums — and housing prices in major cities rival those in top Western cities. What about state ownership? Locals told me that private Indian schools cost parents one-tenth as much as public Indian schools cost taxpayers.
Indians often speak of British influence, for good and ill. No one, however, spoke of Soviet influence, which was strong from India’s independence until the USSR’s 1991 collapse. Independent India aped the Soviets’ “Five-Year Plans” until 2017, which probably explains the crazier agricultural policies. For me, the Soviet influence was most blatant at the airports. Not only are they ridiculously bureaucratic, with two or three times the normal number of redundant paperwork checks; India is also the only country I ever visited that makes it hard to leave. Seriously, what were they planning on doing to me if my exit papers were not in order?
India is the most unequal country I have ever visited. Officially, granted, it’s more equal than the U.S. But I strongly disbelieve the official statistics. In India, the worst slums I’ve ever seen are walking distance from some of the most lavish malls I’ve ever seen. These malls were vast and packed, their prices were as high as northern Virginia’s, and almost none of the customers were foreign. The upshot is that plenty of rich Indians were spending as much on a fast food lunch or a two pints of ice cream as an Uber driver earns all day.
India is the filthiest country I have ever visited. Outside a few prime locations, garbage and rubble line the streets. Skinny stray animals — including stereotypical sacred cows — abound. 98% of the inhabited areas I saw were comparable to the bottom third of Palermo, Italy. And that’s saying a lot!
India has the most frightening traffic of any country I have ever visited. Walking from one tourist site to another — or even from your hotel to the closest restaurant — is almost impossible. Usable sidewalks are virtually non-existent. Except in the dead of night, the roads are jammed with a kaleidoscope of buses, cars, tuk-tuks, pushcarts, bicycles, horse-drawn wagons, random cattle, and stray dogs. The three times I tried walking, I ended up fleeing for safety in a matter of minutes. My taxi driver assured me that the Jama Masjid was only two minutes away on foot. But after vainly trying to navigate the traffic, I beat a hasty retreat without even gazing upon the famous mosque.
Everyone liked her except the man Napoleon selected to marry her
Thursday, January 2nd, 2025At 9 p.m. on Monday, January 4, 1802, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon’s brother Louis was married to Josephine’s daughter Hortense by the mayor of Paris’ 1st arrondissement:
It was only one of a large number of marriages arranged by Napoleon, whose involvement in the nuptial lives of others was almost uniformly disastrous–certainly so in this case, as very soon Louis, who was in love with someone else at the time, could hardly bear to share a room with Hortense, and vice versa. Napoleon treated Hortense as his own daughter. Everyone liked her except the man Napoleon selected to marry her.
[…]
Reviving the old royal practice by which generals and senior dignitaries had to ask the head of state’s permission to marry, Napoleon attempted to marry his generals into Ancien Régime families. The marriages that Napoleon opposed, such as Lucien’s and Jérôme’s (to his first wife), tended to be happier than the ones that he and Josephine matchmade.
Today the prediction is at 20%
Wednesday, January 1st, 2025Alex Tabarrok remains stunned at how poorly we are responding to the threat from H5N1:
Our poor response to COVID was regrettable but perhaps understandable given the US hadn’t faced a major pandemic in decades. Having been through COVID, however, you would think that we would be primed. But no. Instead of acting aggressively to stop the spread in cows we took a gamble that avian flu would fizzle out. It didn’t.
[…]
The case fatality rate for cows appears to be low but significant, perhaps 2%. A small number of pigs have also been infected. On the other hand, over 100 million chickens, turkeys and ducks have been killed or culled.
There have now been 66 cases in humans in the US. Moreover, the CDC reports that in at least one case the virus appears to have evolved within its human host to become more infectious. We don’t know that for sure but it’s not good news. Recall that in theory a single mutation will make the virus much more capable of infecting humans.
When I wrote on December 1 that A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History, Manifold Markets was predicting a 9% probability of greater than 1 million US human cases in 2025. Today the prediction is at 20%.
What really happened in Wuhan
Tuesday, December 31st, 2024Matt Ridley looks back at what really happened in Wuhan five years ago:
At one minute to midnight, US East Coast time, on the last day of 2019, there was a brief ‘request for information’ on ProMED-mail, an online newsletter that monitors unofficial sources to gather intelligence about new disease outbreaks affecting people and animals. It read, simply: ‘Undiagnosed pneumonia: China (Hubei).’
Dr Marjorie Pollack, the deputy editor of ProMED-mail, had been alerted by a Taiwanese colleague to a message on WeChat, the Chinese social-media site, sent by an ophthalmologist in Wuhan named Dr Li Wenliang: ‘Seven cases of SARS have been diagnosed at the Huanan Fruit and Seafood Market, quarantined in our hospital’s emergency department.’
Li had learned of this from a colleague, Dr Ai Fen, the director of the emergency department of the Wuhan Central Hospital, who had sent samples from her latest pneumonia patient for testing. The results came back on the afternoon of 30 December: ‘SARS coronavirus’, a shocking diagnosis not seen in China for 15 years. Ai circled the word ‘SARS’, photographed it and copied it to a friend at a different hospital.
Dr ‘George’ Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control in Beijing, saw the WeChat message. Just a few weeks before, he had made a rather bold claim: ‘SARS-like viruses can appear at any time. However, I am very confident to say that “SARS-like events” will not occur again, because the infectious-disease surveillance network system of our country is well established, and such events will not happen again.’
So Gao was especially alarmed to hear about an outbreak of a SARS-like virus not through the official surveillance network, but through social media. He raised the alarm with China’s health minister. Liang Wannian, head of the National Health Commission, was despatched to Wuhan on 31 December. Immediately on arrival he took the decision to close down the Huanan Seafood Market, despite the fact that Ai’s latest patient had no connection to the market.
The local officials were already acting fast – but not to stop the disease, only to stop the news of it spreading. Within hours of his WeChat post, at 1.30am on 31 December, Li Wenliang was summoned to an interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait until 4am before being interviewed and forced to sign a humiliating confession of sharing ‘untruthful information’. Six weeks later, he would die of Covid.
[…]
Shi Zhengli, head of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was at a conference in Shanghai. On 30 December she was ordered by the head of the WIV to drop whatever she was doing, abandon the conference and catch a train back to the lab to examine samples that had been sent there from the hospital.
I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong’, she later told a journalist. ‘I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.’ She then recalls worrying: ‘Could they [the viruses] have come from our lab?’
Well might she worry. In the preceding 20 years, her lab had been responsible for tracking down the source of the SARS outbreak of 2003. To do this, they had sampled animals and people from all over China, zeroing in on horseshoe bats in southern Yunnan near the border with Laos, from where thousands of bat faeces and blood samples had been sent a thousand miles north to Wuhan. Her lab contained more SARS-like viruses in its freezers than the rest of the world put together: none came from Wuhan itself. These included the closest known relative of what would soon be called SARS-CoV-2. Quite a coincidence.
But it was worse than that. Shi had supervised a team, led by Ben Hu, to do a series of experiments with these bat viruses, swapping their spike genes between strains, infecting human cells with them and infecting mice with human genes. In one experiment, the virus had gained a 10,000-fold increase in infectivity. Some of these experiments had been done at inappropriately low biosafety levels. The risk of a scientist falling ill with a human-trained version of a SARS-like virus was high.
Still more worryingly, the previous year Shi had worked on a plan to insert a feature called a furin cleavage site, known to increase infectivity in human beings but not bats, into a SARS-like virus for the first time. SARS-CoV-2 is still today the only SARS-like virus known with a furin cleavage site.
[…]
The authorities excluded from testing all potential cases that had no connection or proximity to the seafood market. They insisted the virus could only be caught from animals, despite nurses and doctors falling sick. They went ahead with a huge banquet for the Chinese New Year and encouraged people to travel abroad. By mid January at the latest, the virus was already in a dozen countries, every index case tracing back to a traveller from Wuhan.
If there was a correlation with HR and improved outcomes it would be rational for leaders to invest more
Tuesday, December 31st, 2024Pamela Dow explains how human resources captured the nation of Great Britain:
Until I started working in the Cabinet Office in 2020 I hadn’t paid much attention to human resources (HR). I had rolled my eyes at more time wasted circumventing another rigid recruitment policy, which, although introduced to make things better, was in fact making them worse. I assumed HR was unavoidable in large organisations, and mostly there to help.
My role was to restore relevance and rigour to civil service training, from entry to leadership. It brought me close to the gatekeepers of employee relations.
[…]
Why were recruitment processes taking so long? To ensure fairness. Who decides what’s fair? The Public Sector Equality Duty, in precedents set by courts and interpreted or pre-empted by employment lawyers and HR advisers.
Why were so many employee grievances settled at such great expense, before and after employment tribunals? Because there were so many transgressions of HR policy, often by the very people who had codified the rules.
Why did every internal meeting start with a lengthy “emotional check-in”? For psychological safety. Where are people learning about that, and similarly subjective concepts? In acquiring vocational credentials from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and other HR representative bodies, and attending their courses. In September, Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes published their “Foundations” essay, which attracted significant attention in the national policy debate. It details how Britain is an outlier, lagging behind comparable G7 nations since the financial crisis, and struggling with growth, productivity, and weak state capacity.
The authors explain why, with clarity and precision: private investment is over-regulated and distorted by complex tax codes; infrastructure projects are stymied by lobbyists and lawyers; and the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act removed the incentive for local councils to permit building infrastructure.
The essay does not mention that Britain is also an international outlier in its dominant and expanding HR sector. We have one of the largest in the world, second only to the Netherlands. HR jobs have been growing steadily in most Western countries but the UK is top of the league* (turn over to see tables evidencing this). The British Labour Force Survey (LFS) shows a steady, 83 per cent increase, from just under 300,000 workers in 2011 to more than 500,000 in 2023. Might this also be an explanation for our national sluggishness?
[…]
Alongside good pay and job security, in many organisations HR allows influence on high-status topics, incommensurate with position: global social justice and identity campaigns.
[…]
In Britain the share of HR directors on boards has increased sharply, from 47 per cent in 2005 to 85 per cent in 2017. More than 70 per cent of FTSE 100 companies have a chief HR or people officer on their executive committee.
The UK legal and policy framework has also been fertile ground for HR growth over the past 20 years. The Equality Act assigns rights that have been interpreted well beyond their intent of fair opportunity, and definitions of “protected characteristics” are increasingly unhelpful. For example, graduates checking “disability” on their application to the Civil Service Fast Stream rose from 11 per cent in 2014 to 23 per cent in 2020. At the time, this allowed candidates to skip an assessment stage, perhaps an incentive to disclose an anxiety disorder. The civil service now is less certain how many people are blind, bipolar, using a wheelchair, or with self-diagnosed ADHD. It’s not a great leap to appreciate both the work this creates for HR, as well as the impact it has on productivity.
If we could track trends towards higher retention, happier workers, fewer grievances, this growth would be welcome. If there was a correlation with HR and improved outcomes it would be rational for leaders to invest more. There is evidence for the opposite. As HR roles have increased so too have the number of tribunals and days lost to work-related illness, while productivity has flatlined. HR expansion is not coinciding with desirable things and appears to be coinciding with undesirable ones.
Taiwan’s presidential office runs first ‘tabletop’ simulation of Chinese military escalation
Sunday, December 29th, 2024Taiwan’s presidential office Recently ran a war game, or tabletop simulation, of Chinese military escalation:
Unlike traditional war games by the military, the tabletop exercise was aimed at testing how different government agencies could “ensure the normal functioning of society” in times of crisis, according to Taiwan’s presidential office.
It simulated two scenarios: one where China imposes “high-intensity” grey-zone warfare tactics, and a second where Taiwan is “on the brink of conflict,” the office said. Grey-zone tactics refer to actions that fall just below what might be considered acts of war.
Government agencies were not allowed to prepare notes in advance and had to react immediately to different contingencies, the presidential office said, without elaborating on the exact circumstances featured in the simulation.
While Taiwan’s military regularly holds tabletop war games to test its defense readiness, Thursday’s exercise was the first time that the presidential office has held a simulation that focuses specifically on civil responses to the threat of a Chinese invasion.
[…]
Liu said that while Taiwan’s defense ministry was well positioned to respond to different situations, many government agencies struggled to clarify falsehoods during electricity or internet outages, highlighting the need for Taiwan to have a backup mechanism to ensure the flow of information.
She added that authorities have plans to recruit and train 50,000 volunteers across Taiwan to assist in disaster relief by the end of next year, which will include workers from the public sector.
U.S. higher education is going to muddle through
Saturday, December 28th, 2024With apologies to Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowan believes U.S. higher education is going to muddle through:
Adjusting for grants, rather than taking sticker prices at face value, the inflation-adjusted tuition cost for an in-state freshman at a four-year public university is $2,480 for this school year. That is a 40% decline from a decade ago…
As might be expected, the trajectory for student debt is down as well. About half of last year’s graduates had no student debt. In 2013, only 40% did. That famous saying from economics — if something cannot go on forever, it will stop — is basically true. Due to changes in the formula, aid for Pell Grants is up, which helps to limit both student debt and the expenses of college.
The scale was almost comical
Friday, December 27th, 2024Last month, Dwarkesh spent two weeks in China, visiting Beijing, Chengdu, Dujiangyan, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hangzho:
It’s funny how China has basically the inverse problem as America. We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand. We can’t rebuild fallen bridges. They build bridges to nowhere. In the most desirable cities in this country, every random Victorian house and park bench is a historic site that can’t be disturbed. There, they’ll bulldoze a 500 year old temple to build an endless skyscraper complex that no one wants to live in.
My overwhelming first impression was: wow this place is so fucking big. Travel often teaches you things about a country which you honestly should have intuited even without visiting. Obviously, I knew that China is a big country, with over 1.4 billion people. But it was only after I visited that the visceral scale of the biggest cities was impressed upon me.
Even in Dujiangyan, a city of just half a million people (considered a quaint countryside town by Chinese standards), we found a Buddhist temple of staggering proportions. The scale was almost comical — we’d enter what seemed like an impressively large compound, only to discover it was merely the entrance to an even grander structure right behind it. This pattern repeated 5 or 6 times, each subsequent building larger and more ornate than the last, like some kind of inverse nesting doll.
I asked a monk at the temple how they funded this massive site in a city of just half a million people. He told us that it was simply through donations. We probed further about how such an enormous project could have been financed by just ordinary people’s donations. He responded, “We’ve got a lot of supporters, dude”, and changed the topic.
Chongqing is by far the coolest city I’ve ever visited. It’s this insane cyberpunk multi-level metropolis of over 20 million people. I wouldn’t know how to begin describing it, but there’s a bunch of great YouTube videos which will show you what I mean. I got a really nice nice 2-floor hotel room that overlooked two rivers and one of the most insane skylines in the world for 60 bucks – highly recommend visiting Chongqing if you get the chance.
He also thinks that current liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction
Sunday, December 22nd, 2024The Guardian is writing about the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration:
Curtis Yarvin is hardly a household name in US politics. But the “neoreactionary” thinker and far-right blogger is emerging as a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration in particular over potential threats to US democracy.
Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.
Trump’s legal moves against critics in the media, Elon Musk’s promises to pare government spending to the bone, and the deployment of the Maga base against Republican lawmakers who have criticized controversial nominees like Pete Hegseth are among the measures that resemble elements of Yarvin’s strategy for displacing liberal democracy in the US.
One of the venues in which Yarvin has articulated the strategy include a podcast hosted by Michael Anton, a writer and academic whom Trump last week appointed to work in a senior role under secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio.
[…]
Yarvin is the originator of the neoreactionary or “dark enlightenment” movement, whose early ideas he developed on a blog called Unqualified Reservations in 2007 and 2008 under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He now writes a Substack newsletter under his own name and the far-right imprint Passage Publishing recently published an anthology of his earlier writing.
The Guardian previously reported that Passage Publishing’s founder is Jonathan Keeperman, a former UC Irvine lecturer who had previously operated under the pseudonym “L0m3z”.
For years, Yarvin has consistently held to a number of explicitly anti-democratic beliefs: republican self-government has already ended; real power is exercised oligarchically in a small number of prestigious academic and media institutions he calls the Cathedral; and a sclerotic democracy should be replaced by a strict hierarchy headed by a single person whose role is that of a monarch or CEO.
He also thinks that current liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.