But if an individual American really thinks Europeans are as smug as described in this article, or if Europeans really think the way this article describes, there is a more concerning, deeper issue with the worldview of these historically well-aligned peoples.
> I feel it’s impossible to convince Europeans to act in their self interest. You can’t even convince them to adopt air conditioning in the summer.
doing in an article that seems to strive for serious reflection on different societies?
I think it is a bit of a trade-off, his writings are engaging, but to discuss Europe in a serious way a blog wouldn't cut it, and it would make it possibly quite dry nonetheless. One has to not only understand the EU, their limited budget and mandate, but also the various parties in each country. This is just incredibly difficult to form an accurate picture of, even if there wouldn't be things like centuries old cultures and various languages.
To take away from the doom and gloom, iff the EU is really able to integrate in the next decade(s), form a shared market, my money would be on them. Both the current US government and Russia fear an integrated Europe, as they would be too big as a prey. Meanwhile, many countries want to join the EU, despite it being a "hell hole", at least if one believes the adversarial content promoted on the big tech platforms. At this moment the current US government supports "nationalistic" parties and corrupt kleptocrats like Orban, trying to break it apart from inside.
20k people died from heat exposure last summer in Europe! That seems crazy to me, though what do I know? What am I missing?
I presume his eyes are mostly fixed on the "old EU".
Europe as a whole has a lot of good things going for it but I do agree that it's less ambitious on average than these 2 power blocks.
However the same dynamic that was described in the article where nobody wants to lack behind is also true for Europe.
Also, yes Novo Nordisk plundered their GTM in the US and lost market valuation but you can still get the same medical outcome in Europe as a patient based on a European invention. Another one: The first Covid vaccine came out of Germany.
More interestingly is the question on degrowth. I personally believe that growth is the more tempting path in general, but we do live on a finite planet and no system is on a path or has a good framework on how to grow sustainably or responsibly. Maybe AI is going to figure it out for us, but maybe it involves some hard tradeoffs that intelligence alone can't solve.
On industrial infrastructure
On technology innovation
On internet regulation
On central planning
Otherwise, your comment becomes an anecdote supporting the common stereotypes (assuming you’re from Europe).
So I am betting that the US and China are more compelling forces for change. Stalin was fond of telling a story from his experience in Leipzig in 1907, when, to his astonishment, 200 German workers failed to turn up to a socialist meeting because no ticket controller was on the platform to punch their train tickets, citing this experience as proof of the hopelessness of Germanic obedience. Could anyone imagine Chinese or Americans being so obedient?
This isn’t a serious analysis of German culture. It’s perfectly fine to argue that certain countries are economically or industrially problematic, but when you throw in comments like this, it really doesn’t help your argument.
And I’m not from Europe, but I have lived here for years. The constant clueless comments by my fellow North Americans about the somehow monolithic entity of “Europe” are irritating.
"I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting. European prices and taxes can be so high while salaries can be so low."
This particular kind of American perspective on Europe always falls into the same trap: Not understanding a world where economic performance is _not_ the be-all-and-end-all, not understanding the connection between the benefits of such a world (things that consider externalities - not individuals - in order to exist) with the costs of such a world (taxes).
It also defies easy summaries, but my biggest takeaways were that 1) the CCP really doesn't care about the costs any of its policies (one-child, zero COVID, etc) impose on its citizenry, and 2) that the CCP is actively preparing China for a world where it's entirely cut off from the West, because it realizes that's the price to pay for invading Taiwan.
"In vain do I protest that there are historical and geopolitical reasons motivating the desire, that chip fabs cannot be violently seized, and anyway that Beijing has coveted Taiwan for approximately seven decades before people were talking about AI."
Consider the historical timeline: "Fortress China" policies coincide with the rise of American protectionism on both sides of the aisle and the introduction of chip restrictions and punishing tariffs. Taiwan is an emotional/nationalist issue for China, but it's only one part of their policy, not the lynchpin as your comment suggests.
the UK is seriously broken, I always reflect on the energy generation statistics of the UK per capita
while in the US you see automated car washes, in the uk most car washes are Albanians n other immigrants etc
Bear in mind that obviously the mean salary in London is going to be far higher than the median (the finance industry will skew it), while I'm not sure that's as extreme as Mississippi. Additionally median salaries reflect a lot of service jobs and similar labour. Dubai has a lower median wage than either London or Mississippi, but people don't think of it as economically broken.
Comparing California (an extremely large state that I presume has cheaper housing outside major urban areas) to a city seems a bit of a poor comparison.
I don't disagree that the UK has high energy costs.
Dubai isn’t sold as a place to belong long-term. Most people move there knowing it’s temporary. The Bay Area is drifting in the same direction too with the increased cost of living around here. (but the same could be said about most big cities, maybe?)
Compare the housing costs of London to the housing costs of San Francisco and then swap out those Bay Area salaries with your “slightly above Mississippi” wages and you’ll see why London looks so broken to people used to LA/SF/NY.
From my experience the ratio of savings was similar, but the ppp of course favored US for absolute numbers.
The issue is all the things blocking supply. As long as supply is blocked, prices will go up, Period
Housing in Vienna is still affordable, only due to their very successful public housing programs. Public housing can be both beautiful and highly affordable if you want it to be, it's not like we don't know how to make good quality homes with lovely public amenities. It's mostly developers that want to skim on everything while selling it at the highest cost possible.
Poor system if this is the outcome: unaffordability.
This is terrible for normal people, and slightly bad for the investors, but only a crisis or organized government action can reset the damage done by decades of investment in already existing buildings.
The former is much more likely to happen.
Have you lived in the UK at all, or at least spent considerable time there?
I've lived in the UK and America, and America seems far more broken to me.
Can you elaborate on this?
From what I can tell, the UK's per-capita electricity generation has dropped steadily from a 2003 high[0] (4,069 kWh in 2024, 6,657 in 2003, 5,266 in 1985) and per-capita energy consumption has been going down since 2005,[1] but energy intensity (read: inverse of efficiency) has been decreasing consistently since at least 1965.[2] Domestic electricity production is down 24% since 2000,[3] whilst imports (which I don't think includes Albanians) are up 206% in the same period.[4]
That all reads to me as a country whose domestic generation has been replaced by imports and whose consumption has been reduced by efficiency gains, but I'm aware that I'm conflating figures here for 'energy' and for solely 'electricity'; I couldn't find anything for per-capita energy generation, as you specified.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-kingdom#in-...
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-kingdom#wha...
[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-kingdom#ene...
[3]: https://www.iea.org/countries/united-kingdom/electricity#whe...
[4]: https://www.iea.org/countries/united-kingdom/electricity#whe...
Source: UBS Global Wealth Report 2025
Of course US does has a much higher mean wealth…
Honestly I am shocked at the recent rise of anti-UK comments with horribly incorrect information or skewed views and curious about what is sourcing this.
Er what? I moved away from the UK in 2007 but even then the only place I or my parents washed a car was the ubiquitous petrol station automated car wash.
Such gems as
> I like SF house parties, where people take off their shoes at the entrance and enter a space in which speech can be heard over music, which feels so much more civilized than descending into a loud bar in New York. It’s easy to fall into a nerdy conversation almost immediately with someone young and earnest.
As if there is a single Asian-American culture and no Asian-Americans like going out to bars…
The whole piece is littered with weird over generalizations over huge and diverse groups of people.
I’ve lived in both SF and now NYC, and that characterization is painting with a broad brush, but isn’t ridiculous.
Woz had that (still does). He was smart enough to take his winnings and bail. I think that many in SV can't fathom why, but I suspect I know exactly why.
I do remember the tech community as being full of humor and whimsy. I miss that.
>A rule of thumb is that it takes five years from an American, German, or Japanese automaker to dream up a new car design and launch that model on the roads; in China, it’s closer to 18 months.
Not only is China 3 - 5 times faster in terms of product launches, they would have launch it with a production scale that is at least double the output of other auto marker. If you were to put capacity into the equation as well, China is an order of magnitude faster than any competing countries, at half the cost if not even lower.
Every single year since 2022 China has added more solar power capacity than the entire US solar capacity. And they are still accelerating, with the current roadmap and trend they could install double the entire US solar power capacity in a single year by 2030.
CATL's Sodium Ion Battery is already in production and will be used by EVs and large scale energy storage by end of this year. The cost advantage of these new EV would mean there is partially zero chance EU can compete. And if EU are moaning about it now, they cant even imagine what is coming.
Thanks to AI pushing up memory and NAND price. YMTC and CXMT now have enough breathing room to catch up. If they play this right, I wont be surprised by 2035 30 - 40% of DRAM and NAND will be made by the two Chinese firms. Although judging from their past execution record I highly doubt this will happen, but expect may be 10-15% maximum.
Beyond tech, there are also other part of manufacturing that China has matched or exceeded rest of the world without being noticed by many. Lab Grown Diamond, Cosmetic Production, Agricultural Machinery, Reinforced glass etc. Their 10 years plan on agricultural improvement also come to fruition especially in terms of fruit and veg. I wont be surprised if they no long need US soy bean within 10 years time.
All in all a lot of things in China has passed escape velocity and there is no turning back. China understand US better than US understand themselves, and US doesn't even have any idea about China. I think the quote from the article sums this up pretty well.
"Beijing has been preparing for Cold War without eagerness for waging it, while the US wants to wage a Cold War without preparing for it.".
Western countries should do the same and do it continuously without consider the economic reward.
TBH Anything strategic, expect PRC to adopt energy-to-matter to substitutes when the teach stack is figured out. Or at least have as less economic backup, i.e. PRC has unlimited cheap fertilizer (was top fertilizer producer via coal gasification) just more emission heavy. They're on way to displace all oil imports with coal to olefin/liquidation and EV. HQ steel via simply hammering energy into mid ores. All signs point they're moving towards strategic domestic abundance / autarky where they can.
But for global picture, if we are comparing Western World: US+Canada+EU vs China in technological domination, the picture is likely not super-clear and more complex analysis is required. Even if we consider manufacturing output, where China is supposedly global leader, we see it is 5.5T for Western world vs 4.6T for China (according to my brief google searching).
If China can't make something, it's considered high tech. Once china makes it, it's no longer high tech.
PRC makes high tech products into low margin commodities. That's what happens when they have roughly oced combined in stem talent and vast industrial base to value engineer. And most of it happened in last 15 years. The point is PRC catches up fast (including extreme frontier), and when they do, they can scale and cut margins, which is more interesting direction than west who seemingly can't. The point is that is obviously the superior dominance recipe vs west who has vanishing frontier lead that will continue to be lost because western margins is PRC opportunity. The point is when PRC makes >50% of global stuff materially but charges <50%, it's exceedingly likely that will take over everything, at PRC speed, and will not leave west any high margin, leading edge niches, unless west can learn to operate with low margins as well.
I would bet the unit volume of manufacturing with those 4.6T is more than double that of 5.5T. And those 5.5T likely have some very high value, high margin leading edge equipment.
Not only is China catching up to those sectors, they are continuing their momentum to accelerate and expand in other low value market. They key here isn't to maximise profits, it is to maximise control.
If Trade is war, which is the fundamental of principle of what "Art of War" is about, then I dont see how the west could win this war without some very drastic changes.
Oh come on, this is so untrue. Silicon Valley loves credentialism and networking, probably more than anywhere else. Except the credentials are the companies you’ve worked for or whether you know some founder or VC, instead of what school you went to or which degrees you have.
I went to a smaller college that the big tech firms didn’t really recruit from. I spent the first ~5 years of my career working for a couple smaller companies without much SV presence. Somehow I lucked into landing a role at a big company that almost everyone has definitely heard of. I didn’t find my coworkers to necessarily be any smarter or harder working than the people I worked with previously. But when I decided it was time to move on, companies that never gave me the time of day before were responding to my cold applies or even reaching out to _me_ to beg me to interview.
And don’t get me started on the senior leadership and execs I’ve seen absolutely run an entire business units into the ground and lose millions of dollars and cost people their jobs, only to “part ways” with the company, then immediately turn around and raise millions of dollars from the same guys whose money they just lost.
You could argue that getting a job at X or Y company by itself conveys some level of skill - but if we are honest, that is just version of saying you went to Harvard.
There's lots of cliques everywhere in life, and various ways to show status, SV is definitely not immune to that.
and the story told is "no judgement on skill, only on being in-group. It's just the in-group is caused by previous employment and not birth-right/nationality/etc"
So, for your quote, a skeptical interpretation of the text may assert the author was merely praising SV in the same fashion one might appraise the party.
We can read Dan Wang and Tyler Cowen and whoever else to educate ourselves on the idea that {interests aligned with the further concentration of capital} are the real reason why we the people of the middle class can’t afford to buy a home, and actually you should be grateful you have antibiotics and shelf-stable, flavorless tomatoes and Instagram Reels. Your forebears were not so lucky!
The government also subsidized mortgages for the prior generation to increase asset values and now that time is up. Subsidized demand = inflation
Finally, you likely want a bigger house than your parents had. And most people want it to be in the cooler area, not somewhere in Iowa where schools are great but restaurants and non-remote jobs are lacking
With AI coming along, productivity is about to get another boost. Maybe a big boost. But will most people benefit from it? Under capitalism as currently implemented, no. That's the meaning of Sam Altman's “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”
Universal basic income is not the answer. That's welfare 2.0, leading to high-rises of useless people. Altman doesn't have the answer. Wang doesn't have the answer. They both see the problem coming but suggest no viable solutions.
This is a problem.
A parting thought: from a geo-political perspective, I understand the purpose of essays like this but like I said I think its losing the forrest for the trees and at great risk.
Sure there was some evidence of wealth concentration mattering. But there was also evidence against it (like Jack Ma). Power is still the ring to kiss.
And hopefully it’s very understood to the parent comment and agreers, wealth creation is not zero sum. When something new is created the pie gets bigger. All wealth inequality discourse is driven by that misunderstanding and a lack of building more homes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429212...
Maybe your brick wall is the singularity instead and I misread you but I don’t think so.
Entirely not the point. We know that monopolies and wealth _concentration_ reinforce each other, at the cost of wealth creation.
Every time a monopoly buys a company, a chance of competition gets eliminated. As monopolist have enough money to buy the government by regulatory capture or even state capture, competition cannot grow, stifling innovation and growth. Parasitism is the most apt way to understand, because the host will wither away from it.
that's not the case though and Dan is implicitly addressing this given that China is the subject of a decent chunk of the letter. Wealth in the global system is much more evenly distributed these days. We're much closer to a multi-polar world than we used to be in a long time. A lot of the emerging economies are building middle classes of serious size, it's a whole other world compared to 20 to 30 years ago. The developed world's been mostly stable inequality wise, the only outlier being tech oligarchs in the US but that's hardly a defining feature of the global system.
But globally we're likely living now in the first time in human history when the median human is going to see a drastic increase in their fortunes.
https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...
great line
Here is a fun representation I have in my mind:
Galactic Emperor
but main divide seems to form on "ngo vs government" lines, imo - and ironically the exact opposite way of the proclaimed "authoritarian China vs USAID america" of the previous decade-or-two. (As always, best path is somewhere in the middle between the two)
the main thing that will happen for sure - globalization, unification into bigger and bigger pieces will continue. Sure, big pieces might go further from each other - but smaller ones will will get closer and closer (unless we all die, of course)
They don't even have a concept of a plan.
Insofar as there is any plan, the current officeholder's priorities are to project the appearance of personal power on television. If you're wondering what's going on strategically, don't go thinking that there's some grand plan, or even an intention to benefit the United States in the long term. There are some people in the cabinet who are thinking long term, but that's not universal, and that's not what they're selected for. Every action that is taken is to satisfy the president's narcissism and ego in the present moment. You have to understand the "US plan" in this light for anything coming out of the executive office to make sense.
Anything beyond that is just like a kid playing an arcade game without putting any quarters in.
There's stock market bros, kill people bros, government welfare bros and some mega business bros.
None of them want to know anything beyond my kids go to private school, get nepo baby job.
This is what humans are capable of - not just in USA, as a species. USA's 'plan' or rather inevitability is to fall apart. China will be the next power and it'll also fall apart, like USSR fell apart and USA is falling apart for the world to see.
Maybe in another few thousand years it'll be different, I doubt it. Read Plato's Republic you're above 140 IQ - it spells it all out so nicely that one you grok it, you need not know much of anything else regarding politics.
He talks about "European" prospects and his trip to Denmark but then cites London as a representative example?
This almost broke my brain it felt so incoherent.
Never mind that (despite my personal wishes) we're not even part of the EU (which I assume is what he means by "Europe"). Surely he knows what an anomaly London is? It's not representative of anything except itself.
Referencing the extreme wage dispersion and severe housing pressure of London in a rant about Europe in general is a completely pointless endeavour.
He did say one thing I agree with. If you like good food, rich culture and great surroundings, "Europe" is indeed a lovely place to be for the most part.
Maybe I'll just keep that as my takeaway. It's too early in the year for doom and gloom anyway
It's very similar to "Europeans" broadly generalizing the US as one homogenous country, assuming everyone and everything in Chicago is the same as New York or Dallas.
Source: me, a brit, who has lived and worked in UK and US.
That’s OK.
We all have some approximation of reality in our brains which is necessarily shaped by our life experiences.
China also has many different cultures, languages and so on for the over 1.4 billion people who live there. Why would the “nuance” of Europe be “lost” on a Chinese person?
I don’t know about the author in particular, but Americans are generally aware of the “nuanced” European history of near constant war between rival nations, states, factions, and religions.
Nah, Americans aren’t particularly interested in which Europeans are offended by being identified as “Europeans” this week. If we say “Europe” without qualification we’re probably just talking about the continent. (And no, we don’t even use the word “continent” as a distinction within Europe, except when referring to hotel breakfasts.)
Americans don’t really have much of a concept of what European identity is, and we don’t really care (other than being grateful for a few decades of relative peace after 1,000 or so years of near constant war).
Cool. Look, I made that comment with a lot of fondness, but if this is the case, maybe leave the European analysis to someone else..
Dallas and San Francisco are both English speaking cities with a shared recent history of being part of the same nation. Most cities in Europe are as close as New York and Mexico City - Dallas and San Francisco is probably more analogous to Milan and Naples (different cultures, different histories, but now speak the same language and are part of the same nation).
He mentions Europe without more nuance for the same reason he mentions China without more nuance: he’s talking big picture.
As someone who didn't study China's tech sector, but spent more than a decade working in it, my view is similar on Dan Wang's writing on China.
“ the median age of the latest Y Combinator cohort is only 24, down from 30 just three years ago “
does yc publish stats to validate?
https://tomtunguz.com/founder-age-median-trend/
YC trends younger given what they’re looking for
- There's a hard edge to the distribution that isn't far from 24 (I'd expect relatively few sub-18-year-old YC founders, but more 31+-year-olds)
- Older founders (with more experience, larger networks and less life flexibility) aren't a good fit for incubators.
The stereotype about German engineering is bolstered by the fact that everyone there is on speed and has 4 extra hours in the day to do nothing but clean and tidy up.
One of my intentions for this coming year is to critically examine and (if appropriate) alter or dispel some preconceptions I have. To that end, I'm curious about this part:
> You don’t have to convince the elites or the populace that growth is good or that entrepreneurs could be celebrated. Meanwhile in Europe, perhaps 15 percent of the electorate actively believes in degrowth. I feel it’s impossible to convince Europeans to act in their self interest.
Can someone elaborate on how growth is aligned with the general interest? To my mind, although growth could _theoretically_ lead to a "lifting all boats" improvement across the board, in practice it inevitably leads to greater concentration of wealth for the elite while the populace deals with negative externalities like pollution, congestion, and advertizing. Degrowth, on the other hand, would directly reduce those externalities; and, if imposed via progressive taxation, would have further societal benefits via funded programs.
I'd very much like to hear the counter-argument. It would be pleasant and convenient to believe that growth and industry are Good, Actually, so that I needn't feel guilty for contributing to them or for furthering my own position - but (sadly!) I can't just make myself believe something without justification.
Empirically, the past 200 years have seen high growth globally, and human well being has improved massively as a result. Life expectancy has skyrocketed, infant death, hunger have gone down to near zero, literacy has gone up, work is much more comfortable, interesting and rewarding, etc. But at a more fundamental level, our material quality of life is that of literal kings. The 1st decile poorest people in the US or Europe have much better living conditions than a king of 500 years ago. We are so lucky to benefit from this, yet we completely forgot that fact. You complain about congestion and advertizing, but with degrowth you would complain about hunger and dying from cold during winter.
This cannot be overstated. To wit, a Honda Accord (or equivalent mid-range car of today) is objectively superior to a Rolls Royce from the 90s in terms of amenities, engine power/efficiency, quietness, build quality, safety, etc. The same is true for quality-of-life improvements across a vast swath of consumer goods, and therefore consumer lifestyles.
Without growth, it's unlikely we'd see those improvements manifest. Carefully consider the lifestyle of someone living several decades ago. Would you honestly want to live such a lifestyle yourself? That's where degrowth likely leads. As the article says, "I feel it’s impossible to convince Europeans to act in their self interest. You can’t even convince them to adopt air conditioning in the summer."
It's not that all his takes are wrong, it's the exaggeration, the doom and gloom and a somewhat dismissal or some unsolved personal issues he has with "Europeans".
The irony is not lost that Dan acts as smug and dismissal as he accuses Europeans to be.
Regarding the whole "Degrowth" thing: yes Europe has those and they found their gold in Governmental entities and they entertain the rich. But.. that's exactly what happens in the US too and Dan as knowledge as he is should know this was mostly an American academia export, he just needs to talk with some people in the very same colleges he regularly set foot into.
Also, he should take a hint when he says historically liberal societies have fared much better than autocratic ones even if those are very focused and appear to make progress very quickly. Having a few mega-bilionaires directing what the populace do or not do might not be a smart move as it sounds. We'll see when the AI musical chairs stops.
Btw, Europe has been dead and on the brink of destruction for a few centuries by now. And according to experts the EU is about to collapse 3 or 4 times a year - minimum.
It’s something that regularly has to be dealt with in societies separately from the economic situation.
And believing this, is the single thing keeping the entire world running.
Germany is currently ruining itself because its stagnating economy means that it can not keep up with the rising costs for its pension system and has to increasingly raise more funds from a smaller, population which is seeing little productivity gains.
>Degrowth, on the other hand, would directly reduce those externalities; and, if imposed via progressive taxation, would have further societal benefits via funded programs.
Do you think that Germany will have social benefits at all, when the auto industry collapses. Where is the money coming from?
Economic growth has enabled mass literacy. It has created industrial agriculture, which eliminated hunger for economic reasons in all countries which practice it. Degrowth means turning our back on the single process which caused the greatest increase in human quality of life.
if you grow - you increase total progress (and your influence on it)
but if you degrow - you concentrate your progress into smaller amount of hands, making their life better
seems reminiscent of "left vs right" debate in politics with its "wealth disperse vs wealth squeeze" - but with humans themselves instead
I don't think degrowth is necessary to solve this problem, although I'm sure it has its merits. But I think growth can still occur without the trend toward oligarchic or feudal society, and in fact a society with a vibrant economy would have more growth than we do today.
I just wonder if his aversion to AI as a panacea merely failed to displace his adherence to competition as a panacea. In the long run he's probably betting on a better horse, at least on one with better history and staying power; and we all need gods to believe in. However, it does feel like articles of faith still, but with a broader church.
His focus on capacity and planning is the golden nugget.
I loved the book recommendations. Generally the political and military history of the late Austro-Hungarian empire is incredibly interesting, and remains good signage on navigating current central- and eastern- Europe's situations.
The supposed niceness of the cities also is just not true. Many European cities are awful places. Where, maybe with the exception of a few tourist areas, you will only find dirty streets, rows of old apartment building regularly smeared with graffiti, shops selling used phones and vapes and food stores competing over who can sell the cheapest, still edible Kebab.
And given what is currently coming out of the US in terms of worldwide cultural impact, I'm ok to be anti-whatever that is.
I have been to some countries outside of Europe. Some were much worse some were much better, but I do not particularly care. So many cities in Europe are awful places to live.
During all this time I've tried to think of a way to invest in this belief in a monetary way, but I've failed to come up with anything. Chinese stocks? Foreigners' holdings will likely be worthless when the slightest crisis happens. Then what is left? Without going and living there, I'm not sure. Has anyone thought about this?
> The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things.
> There’s a general lack of cultural awareness in the Bay Area. It’s easy to hear at these parties that a person’s favorite nonfiction book is Seeing Like a State while their aspirationally favorite novel is Middlemarch.
It's refreshing to read someone addressing this aspect of the Mecca of the tech word.
For the reasons above the tech elites are the ones I trust the less and fear the most when they are involved in national and international politics. And I think the current state of the US is directly caused by the rise of post dot com Silicon Valley.
There are two kinds of people in San Jose: locals who are normal folks you'd find anywhere, and techies with the AI brainworm. People who are astonished by the natural beauty of this place, and people who are astonished by an office park because there are Apple and Nvidia logos on it. It's all incredibly weird and I don't like it much.
I've known people who are walking contradictions (I'm one of them), but SV is a place of contradictions. I've never seen that before.
But I stopped at this:
> “AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.” It’s a Pascal’s Wager
That's not what Pascal's wager is! Apocalyptic religion dates back more than two thousand years and Blaise Pascal lived in the 17th century! When Rosa Luxemburg said to expect "socialism or barbarism", she was not doing a Pascal's Wager! Pascal's Wager doesn't just involve infinite stakes, but also infinitesimal probabilities!
The phrase has become a thought-terminating cliche for the sort of person who wants to dismiss any claim that stakes around AI are very high, but has too many intellectual aspirations to just stop with "nothing ever happens." It's no wonder that the author finds it "hard to know what to make of" AI 2027 and says that "why they put that year in their title remains beyond me."
It's one thing to notice the commonalities between some AI doom discourse and apocalyptic religion. It's another to make this into such a thoughtless reflex that you also completely muddle your understanding of the Christian apologetics you're referencing. There's a sort of determined refusal to even grasp the arguments that an AI doomer might make, even while writing an extended meditation on AI, for which I've grown increasingly intolerant. It's 2026. Let's advance the discourse.
Pascal's wager isn't about "all or nothing", it is about "small chance of infinite outcome" which makes narrow-minded strategizing wack
and commenter is much more pro-ai2027 than article author (and I have no idea what it even is)
I believe I read that 27% of the founders in the YC Spring 25 class went to an Ivy League school and 40% previously worked at a magnificent 7 company. I'm not saying this is any worse than the east coast, but so much for name and pedigree not mattering.
Northern California is what it always has been: the barrier wall of manifest destiny, where instead of crossing the ocean the pioneers and all subsequent generations stayed to incubate the same incentives, and have been relentlessly in pursuit of the next gold rush. Gold, yellow journalism, semiconductors, personal computing, SaaS, crypto, AI, etc. It's the sink drain attractor of people looking to improve their fortunes in one way or another, but almost always around some kind of bonanza of concentrated opportunity. The concept of it being "meritocratic" is a rephrasing of ideology that's always existed about the region: you too could get rich here. But I don't really see any difference in the networks of power that exist in SV as do the rest of the country.
I grew up in the bay area and am far happier living outside it. I'm happier to be in a place where art and the humanities are valued instead of cast aside as immaterial or silly or a distraction. I'm happier to live in a place where people have varied interests instead of orienting their life around whatever the prevailing Big Thing is.
> So the 20-year-olds who accompanied Mr. Musk into the Department of Government Efficiency did not, I would say, distinguish themselves with their judiciousness. The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things. It is not surprising that hardcore contingents on both the left and the right have developed hostility to most everything that emerges from Silicon Valley.
I see some positive aspects as to more inclusive definitions of autism and neurodivergence, but I hate that we're at the point where "trying to get rich at all costs" is now perceived as autistic (and let's be clear: using mobile gas turbines that get people sick to generate power for AI is not "autistic"). Greed is not autistic, but of course the ideology of SV is that nobody actually cares about money there. Why else would they have apartments without furniture and piles of pizza boxes. It must be the autism.
> While critics of AI cite the spread of slop and rising power bills, AI’s architects are more focused on its potential to produce surging job losses. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei takes pains to point out that AI could push the unemployment rate to 20 percent by eviscerating white-collar work. I wonder whether this message is helping to endear his product to the public.
The animating concern of developing AI since 2015 has basically been "MAD" applied to the technology. The Bostrom book mentioned later in this article was clearly instrumental in creating this language to think about AI, as you can see many tech CEOs began getting "concerned" about AI around this time, prior to many of the big developments in AI like transformers. One of the seminal emails of OpenAI between Musk and Altman talks about starting a "Manhattan Project for AI". This was a useful concept to graft the development of these companies onto:
1. Firstly, it's a threat to investors. Get in on the ground floor or you will get left behind. We are building tomorrow's winners and losers and there are a lot of losers in the future.
2. Secondly, it leads to a natural source of government support. This is a national security concern. Fund this, guarantee the success of this, or America will lose.
On both counts, this framing seems to be working pretty well.
Remove the tech, what does SF contribute to the world wrt culture? Especially when compared to other metropolitan cities: NY, London, LA, Tokyo.
"Whimsical"
this part has me confused
can someone explain to me why Zero Covid - the most successful program that minimized Covid deaths - is a tragedy?
imo it was better than whatever clusterfuck was happening pretty much everywhere else
1.At the beginning of the pandemic. It was successful in terms of reducing the death count of population but at the cost of freedom that also widely criticized in Western countries.
2.Because of the early success, the government continued the policy even it was not necessary till close to the end of the Covid. This is one of the biggest policy failure in recent Chinese history. It caused resentment and was exploited by anti-government parties, even partially caused the illegal emigrant wave to the States through south border during 2023, which was reported on mainstream media. Finally it ended due to protests.
Dan Wang's observation about China in his book is mostly accurate, except this part that he has some twisted view on CPP, which is not his fault but CPP's fault.
Give us your take, we're listening. Curious to hear.
and it's kinda stupid to say "even deaths" on the background of Italy, India and even million dead in the US
The reality is zero covid is the greatest epidemiology response in human history that insulated against ridiculous covid R value variants, when most countries didn't have system capacity for even basic lock downs and simply forced to gamble on vaccines. And when zero covid became unsustainable because R-value rose, it took CCP like weeks to end it, again unprecedently fast response time. Meanwhile new variants less deadly, PRC vaccines 90% as effective after 2 dose, parity effective after 3 dose and openning up resulted in significantly less deaths as % of population (using western excess death numbers not PRC gov numbers).
Yeah lockdown was harsh but they didn't force people to take vaccines, which frankly was a little retarded, also arguably less authoritarian.
And it makes sense they would do so. Isn't US isolationism their best ally ?
Making up a Sun Tzu quote for this occasion: "If your enemy is about to step in poop, show him how beautiful the sky is"
Dan still one of the sharper PRC writers, but like all analysts who moves from PRC to stateside, he used to be Canadian in China writing about China to US, now Canadian writing in US about China, Dan starts peddling Murican dynamism cope, maybe something in the water. i.e. see his his post breakneck Chinatalk interview: Humorless engineering governance can't beat very funny Trump/US governance is... certainly a take. Maybe he should do his audience a favor and elucidate why boring competent engineer government is less dynamic/resilient than lawyers other than elections can pivot fast to reduce lawyers (kek) and something something and see see pee can't pivot fast to make productive innovative libtards, since seeseepee STEM can't innovate. Because as we know fast 4 year election cycles work better than slow 5 year plans. CCP certain needs 50% more lawyers... to slow it down.
There is a commedy show literally called Silicon Valley making fun of what's going on in the valley and everybody I know in tech loves it and appreciates the humor.
There WAS a comedy called Silicon Valley that wrapped more than 5 years ago ABOUT the valley made in Hollywood by a guy with a science background who grew up in NEW MEXICO and SAN DIEGO, featuring ACTORs, none of them actual techies from the bay area.
>But American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems.
China has stayed on trajectory of improving life of its society for a long time. USA has been in decline all that time and decent accelerated after Cold War with Russia ended.
All of China's growth comes from its internal resource. Growth in the USA had been driven by exploiting other countries.
>I made clear in my book that I am drawn to pluralism as well as a broader conception of human flourishing than one that could be delivered by the Communist Party.
Pluralism had been eradicated in the western society. I can't speak freely in Canada. People get cancelled or jailed for speaking their mind in UK. US is not too far behind in that.
There is no meaningful pluralism in the West. They never make a long term plan they can follow for many years.
China has monolithic ( more so ) society with shared culture, language(s) and national identity that runs deep to the gene level. They don't don't allow foreign influence to erode it. It's much easier to make progress when people share the same long term vision and goals.
CPC is doing just fine leading the country into the future. Sure, it has a monopoly on power, but it also owns its mistakes and fixes them. Multiparty systems of the USA and the rest of the West are just two curtains on the stage, and when you draw the curtains you see the same people attending the same party.
Elected officials aim to earn as much as they can in their short stay in power. After all, they only have a few years before they get replaced, better make use of the short time you got.
China IMO has a much brighter outlook for the future
I share your concerns over effective loss of freedom of expression in western countries. In the USA at least cancel culture seems to be dying out and people no longer feel as obligated to be politically correct or self-censor. But the UK may be permanently lost.
this kinda ignores the whole "Asia unification" that is happening right about now
Russia created connection from Iran to North Korea. SCO coordinates economy of the internalities. India-Russia-China are cooperating in BRICS. China stabilized Afghanistan and builds trade routes in the Pakistan. Even US' efforts of supporting Turkey-centered Pan-Turk organizations in the Middle Asia turn un-american as Israel-Turkey tensions are on the rise
China may have resources limited. Whole Asia tho? Don't really think so
Americans have always been assholes and proud pedophiles. What are you referring to?
Exactly when do you believe this decline started? I have some major concerns about the current trajectory of the USA, but it seems like nonsense to say that the US has been in decline since well before the Cold War ended.
> I can't speak freely in Canada
I wonder what it is that you want to say but can’t.
Comparing China positively against western nations and then griping about limits on freedom of speech in western nations seems suspect regardless.
> Elected officials aim to earn as much as they can in their short stay in power.
That’s true. Unelected officials can stay in power and accrue wealth for much longer than elected officials.
>I wonder what it is that you want to say but can’t.
Nice try, this won't provoke me.
>That’s true. Unelected officials can stay in power and accrue wealth for much longer than elected officials.
Sure, sure. The systems are setup differently but you are using the same logic for both coming from the assumption that power is used to acquire personal wealth.
For some (many) power isn't about acquisition of wealth but about responsibility, taking care of a hard chore. It's a mistake to think that Xi is in power for wealth.
I often draw a parallel with being a father. You have some power, but mostly you have responsibilities.
This is just not accurate though? For example, this post from a tech titan might not necessarily be that funny but it's neither blandly corporate nor philosophical: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2006548935372902751
