Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
There are no ways to do it but drill and kill.
There are two ways to approach the problem: you can start with a textbook that introduces characters as they are used in speech/practically, or you can use a book that introduces characters by their component parts like this one https://amzn.to/3YylneH or this one https://amzn.to/3qjWDdB. The advantage of the first approach is that you will learn to write the words you are actually using; the benefit of the second (much like learning words in English by way of Latin roots) is that you will probably remember them better on the long term. It will just take a long time to learn many of the words that are used all the time in daily speech.
No way to do it but to write characters hundreds of times.
Jake–
How would you characterize the “WASP” project? I actually have a draft series on the WASPS and am still formulating my ideas on this, so would love to hear more of your thoughts on this.
Ethan–
A second speech you should read: https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/roosevelt-strenuous-life-1899-speech-text/
This speech also has some banger quotes. This is my favorite:
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
But the quote reads differently when you recall its context. This is an argument for war. TR views war not just as a tool to defeat evil and defend righteousness, but as a field in which men become more righteous.
As I pointed out in my much despised National Review essay from earlier this year, this is very similar to how many of the folks on the right saw and argued for the Iraq War/GWoT as the early stages were unfolding (see here: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/03/why-the-iraq-war-felt-right/).
I am always very suspicious of arguments like these–if you need a war to confirm your manhood you have problems. But the thing about Iraq (much like WWI in this regard) is that it did not re-enshrine the masculine virtues. We continued on our march towards left coded gender values despite the existential war–the GWoT turned out to be far less existential than expected. It became a hiss and a byword, a source of shame, a never-ending slog going on in the background, a waste of resources and potential.
I think this is part of the reason the younger folks turned away from a muscular foreign policy. If part of the purpose was internal purification, and this purification did not occur, then what is the point?
Signfield–
Is there a particular reason they could not move to highly educated but apolitical Indian women?
The other question here is at what point in the conflict things escalate up. Frankly, if 150,000k have died already in bomb I, the desire to justify their deaths might lead to acceptance of even heavier casualties. You see this dynamic in many wars–the US Civil War and WWII on the Axis side are fairly good examples of it.
I do not think we will go to war for Taiwan if we knew that scenario A was the likely outcome. But once engaged in war we might accept escalation to scenario A level exchanges.
Some thoughts:
*Is it really producing that much bleak stuff–or is it just the bleak stuff is the only stuff to get international recognition? i.e., you would have a seriously distorted picture of China if your main frame for China was Zhang Yimou movies! His movies are good–but are probably a less telling window into contemporary China than romantic comedies like Women who Flirt or Lost on Journey.
*Is Taiwan worse, or comparable to, South Korea? I associate their culture with even more bleakness.
*Taiwan is a demographic collapse country. I sometimes think melancholy or ennui to be the default emotion of societies where old outnumber the young, and growth is a thing of the past. You are living in the decline, and you know it–and it is not even an exciting decline, but a numbing slide down the hill.
Addendum: one of the reasons I have not written about this is that I don’t have the time at the moment to collect all the studies and literature that basically show how little education matters. If someone wants to do that for me, or even coauthor a piece with me, we might be able to get it published. But I don’t have the bandwidth for a rigorous presentation of all this stuff this month.
Here is my basic reasoning on why I feel like this is a very poorly conceived policy and also somewhat of an inhumane one.
Let’s start with that final point actually. There is a real human cost to decisions like these. Hundreds of thousands of people have hopes, dreams, and plans that intersect with America. Some of these people are cynical money gobblers who only see America as the means for narrow economic ends back in China; Some of these are spies. But a great number of these people, many of whom whose lives would be ruined if the money, time, and training they have invested in their American experience was to be stripped from them, look towards America for entirely commendable reasons. There are times in history where it is necessary to ruin lives for the sake of a more important and pressing national aim. If I have to choose between ruining tens of thousands of Chinese and American lives for the sake of saving 23 million Taiwanese from war and tyranny, I will go with the former every time.
But the standard must be high. I must be shown that such and such life ruining course of action actually will have a meaningful, undeniable, and measurable impact on the national aim in question. Doing anything less is in my view a betrayal of basic Christian principles. It is cruelty masquerading as security.
So that is the question: are PLA gains here great enough to justify ruining so many lives?
But there is another set of questions that matter too.
Where people come down on this issue depends in part on their assumptions about long term competition and the nature of human capital. I am not a great believer in the power of formal education. The “send all the Chinese students home” idea assumes a model where human capital is generated by engineering schools. in this model, China’s brightest and most intelligent students will not be able to amount to much unless they have access to American STEM university programs. Color me skeptical. In my mind smart people generally end up doing high performance staff regardless of the specific university programs they have access to (especially at the BA level). The question is thus less whether we are inadvertently turning China’s low human capital into high human capital and more question of where China’s brightest individuals end up living. Every Chinese scientist, or potential scientist, who emigrates to the United States is one that does not contribute to Chinese research and development. In the Internet age the belief that blocking Chinese students from physically coming to the United States will in any significant way retard the progress of Chinese science seems ludicrous. On the other hand…. brain draining China’s best and brightest out of the country might have a chance for success. This is an argument for less restrictive immigration rules, not more restrictive.
Then there’s also the problem of long-term strategic narratives. What the Communist Party of China fears most is ideological contamination and threats to its political security. The history of the communist movement suggests that it is not military advance but economic stagnation and ideological sabotage that will be most likely to undermine Chinese efforts at expansionism, global hegemony, and so forth. ideological competition plays out at a very long scale. We introduced narratives now that might only have their full practical political culmination in decades to come.
Consider the “we stand by the Chinese people which is different from the Communist Party of China” line. This line officially entered US discourse later than it should have. it would have been more effective had it been uttered a decade earlier. But having been uttered it is important to consider whether or not we live up to it, and what effect our living up to it might have on the stability of the Chinese regime on the long term. Banning Chinese students indiscriminately is targeting the Chinese people not the Chinese Communist regime. It drives the two together, it does not split them further apart. It may be necessary to drive people and party together, but again if we do actions that lead to that outcome we must be very sure that doing so will produce other tangible benefits that outweigh the costs of undermining our own ideological campaign.
I simply have not been provided evidence that this will do anything other than damage the American University system. That might be a laudable goal but it’s not one that stands on nat/sec grounds.
the other thing about this narrative is that it assumes that banning Chinese students is the better course of affairs for U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence efforts. this is probably not true. It is very very difficult to recruit spies and compromise Information networks inside China itself. One of the safest places two turn a potential Chinese security researcher, or put the right sort of USB drive into the laptop of a party secretary’s daughter is in the United States itself. Sealing America off from China means cutting ourselves off from the most accessible espionage targets.
This does not mean that the university system’s approach to China does not need reform; I’ve worried often, and publicly, that the thoughtless and shoddy way Chinese students are pumped through an education system that mostly uses them for money (by a society which is somewhat alienated from their presence) turns many Chinese students who might otherwise be sympathetic to American ideas or ideals into anti American ideologues. There are many famous cases of this occurrence; anecdotally I can add quite a few personal contacts where this has occurred to that list. In my mind the university system should restrict the number of Chinese students who come to America on the basis of English skill. We let in too many students who are not actually prepared for success in an English language academic environment. Many of the problems that plague Chinese students in America—impenetrable “China bubbles,” a lack of real experience with American life, professors who must lower standards to accommodate students who don’t speak or write English good enough to participate fully, and so forth—could be easily solved by raising the standard by which Chinese students must reach an order to be admitted to an American university. That is the route I would prefer to go if we are looking to improve the Chinese student experience in America and utilize these students as a resource in long term competition with China.
I do not follow him closely, only thought that his China doomerism was too doomer. What is the best *short* read here of his work?
My apologies for missing this!
I am very bearish on AI generally, and LLMs in particular. Looking at your three proposals:
1) How much easier than before? Weren’t all the tools to do this (OCR, scanning, search functions) already around? At best we get a sort of LLM search function that allows something a bit more refined than key term searches, right (e.g., “find and put into a list with sources all discussions of Hannibal’s personality in the Loeb library.”) This sort of thing might be more efficient—but that more efficient?
2) But is it really? The LLM can only generate the sort of alternatives that have already been imagined; it does not do original combinations.
Something like Alphafold for history might be moe interesting — cliometrics powered by AI. But the real problem here is that the data we have to feed into the thing is not good enough. At least not before the 19th century.
I could see something like a macroeconomic model that makes predictions based off of different inputs in the mode of an Alphafold. I suspect its main use will not be historical analysis though.
3) As a teaching tool there is something to this one. Main problem I see is what I mentioned earlier–data to feed into these things not robust enough to really work.
Another example of what I mean — big donors in conservative world like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Singer_(businessman) are very much in the fusionist mode, despite having no official online presence. But being very online = being influential and powerful.
Fusionists are not the same as libertarians. Friedersdorf and Young were never really conservatives — the counterpoint is really the Jonah Goldberg types. And of course, their diminished posture in the intellectual sphere doesn’t stop a great number of elected conservatives of being exactly this type.
or at least this is my read.
Hmm. I very much put Rufo on the new right.
I suppose I make a distinction though between the “new right” and the “dissident right.” My definition of “new right” is much simpler, really: people who want to tear down the old fusionist, libertarian infused conservatism and replace it with something more openly statist, something that does not take “freedom” as the starting point.
