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The biggest internal problem for China is a Canton/Pearl River Delta that is rapidly eclipsing every other part of the country in nearly every measurable dimension, and knows it.
The biggest internal problem for Russia is that all the Turkic peoples that the Tsars and the Chairmen forcibly Russified are beginning to recover a common cultural identity in the internet age. Putin will eventually attempt to repress Tengriism.
Soviet math education was miles better than anything the US came up with until Sal Khan showed up.
If you did neuroimaging of an anti-miscegenation white 50s racist and a contemporary woke opponent of interracial relationships while showing a slideshow of interracial couples you'd see the exact same spots light up.
There's an inverse relationship between strength of belief in rational homo economicus and rational homo democraticus. Both priors are bad and dangerous, but rational homo democraticus is much more so.
Reaganite conservatism was never an actual ideological thing, just a shared linguistic window dressing that allowed libertarians and center-right liberals to share a political tent with hill-and-swamp populists and religious fundamentalists.
Following on that point, religious fundamentalists don't get nearly enough credit for the work they do to make life better for marginalized groups. For example, Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church was a active pro-bono litigant on the behalf of African Americans.
The Standard Model of Physics is probably wrong, and much of the experimental success of the last few decades is the result of people tweaking parameters and then yelling "eureka!"
This is not an argument against building much bigger colliders, as long as the amount of funding doesn't come out of other areas of research.
The best heuristic for determining whether somebody's opinions about the tech industry circa 2016 were worth listening to was bullishness on Snap. To all the people who made money on that trade based on my ranting about the enormous value of facial datasets, you're welcome.
The press is a top tier source of social dysfunction and lacks the ability to internalize that fact because of a self-serving ideology promulgated by the j-schools and sustained by major newspapers.
The New York Times has a greater net negative effect on the world than Fox News despite being less bad in general because serious people take the New York Times seriously.
Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow are more essential to the character of the Grateful Dead than Jerry Garcia.
Reliance on the Westphalian nation-state as a problem-solving unit is more dangerous long-term than just about any other major feature of the global political structure.
Bernie Sanders is heavyweight prizefighting, Beto O'Rourke is judo, Andrew Yang is drunken boxing
Joe Biden, Liz Warren, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker are bantamweight prizefighting. Tulsi Gabbard is former MMA now competing in bantamweight prizefighting. Pete Buttgieg is chess boxing.
John Hickenlooper is karate. Mike Bloomberg and Howard Schultz are krav maga. Amy Klobuchar is entry-level krav maga pretending to be karate. Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump are WWE.
History Channel's "Vikings" is better than HBO's "Game of Thrones"
Rabbits are inferior to chinchillas, particularly in terms of smell https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1113920726069727232
The best Michigan beer is from Shorts, but Founders is a close second. Bells is overrated. Most of the small Grand Rapids breweries are not that great. Vivant is an exception.
The Crossfit people are right about almost everything they go on about, but they fail to gain broader traction because they're annoying.
The welfare system as currently constructed is disgustingly paternalistic and does little to actually grant agency to the poor and marginalized, instead enforcing a rotating set of moralisms.
Relatedly, the welfare system is constructed to employ lots of case workers and bureaucrats to gatekeep benefits. This has turned into a self-perpetuating system of exploitation of both taxpayers and benefit recipients.
Lee Kuan Yew was leaps and bounds more liberal than the average mayor of large English-speaking city during the 20th century, to say nothing of his regional or Chinese mainland contemporaries.
The PAP's political dominance in Singapore has a lot more to do with their astonishing competence and the tendency of cities to turn into single-party polities over the long run than any (mild) political restrictionism they practice.
To extend this point a bit, Lee Kuan Yew easily wins a "who's the greater liberal" contest with LBJ or JFK https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1113991045803589637
Last point on Singapore and LKY: the only realistic political alternatives to the PAP when it was initially coming up were actual violent Stalinist-Maoist revolution or domination by a conservative Malay mainland ruled by an elite that was openly racist to the Chinese.
While we're doing conventionally controversial 20th century leaders, Richard Nixon is up there with Norman Borlaug as one of the great humanitarians.
Late Gen X and early Millennial hipsters are an interesting cultural product worthy of more serious consideration.
The only reason Half Life isn't the greatest game series of all time is because Valve won't finish it
The optimal default is to be more trusting of individual people and less trusting of groups of people, ceteris paribus
Kubernetes is not the path forward
Sock puppet Twitter accounts are an underrated form of political expression https://twitter.com/TEAPartyKen/status/1114373278506860544
We're in another AI winter, new GPUs won't give us Banksian Minds without a lot more work on the algos and math side, probably decades
Relatedly, those decades of work will probably involve all manner of expert systems, but ultimately ones that are still under full human control. And frankly, AGI probably will be under full human control as well, and will prefer things to be that way by design.
This whole AI-as-God thing is just annoying nonsense that almost always devolves to Roko's basilisk. While you're worrying about AI there are trillions upon trillions of ebola viruses bruteforcing the "how do we go airborne?" question. Worry about that.
People who work with computers and don't have investors/donors/department chairs/naive grad students to impress aren't afraid of malevolent AGI, they're afraid of memory management on device drivers, because that's what could actually kill people.
Kanye's MAGA era wasn't him going nuts, it was performance art. Britney Spears didn't shave her head because she was nuts, she did it because she had a hair test coming up and didn't mind the tabloid coverage anyway.
Your average successful pop singer/celebutante is probably rocking an IQ at least a standard deviation above your average symphony conductor, and at least two above your average successful actor.
Golf is a better sport than football. Baseball and basketball are athletic triumphs and in leagues of their own. The most entertaining thing about soccer is how insane people go over it. Went to a Boca Juniors game in Buenos Aires once, it was 10x louder than Spartan Stadium
A crash-out Brexit is a bad idea, but so is staying tied to Europe long-term. The "Singapore in the North Atlantic" meme that went around the British neoliberal crowd for a while is actually the right move, the only problem is that it has a support base of about 2000 voters total
Relatedly, England would end up the best off economically if it broke with Scotland and Northern Ireland. Nobody wants that to happen, but that doesn't make it untrue.
If you think about it all of Britain is just a colony of London.
Anyways, never count the Brits out. Their cultural and state capacity is so profoundly deep that it's hard to imagine them not bouncing back to lead the world in certain areas. Two examples: their nuclear regulator is the world's best, and they invented ARM chips & Raspberry Pi.
The dominance of the English language has less to do with 19th century imperialism (still a factor of course) than with the fact that's it's a hyper-malleable harbor creole that promiscuously integrates features from everything it touches.
American progressivism is just a branch of New England Protestantism. American conservatism is a mixture of low church tent revival Protestantism and trad Catholicism. American (neo)liberalism is a mixture of the enlightenment and high church Protestantism.
That's hot take number fifty five, which is the number of likes on the lead post. Leaving it here, this kinda turned into a hodgepodge manifesto.
