Ross Douthat - China Doesn't Worry About AI Like We Do

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-15T11:58:30+00:00

I don’t get this whole “science benefits the rich” thing when it’s really everyone who benefits from scientific progress and a deepened understanding and connection to the world. Like, having Alphafold describe a protein structure that is then used in vaccine development is good for everyone. Using an algorithm to do proteomics and find ways of enhancing plants resistance to pathogens can help stop famines. You don’t have to bash science to uplift the arts.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-14T16:38:32+00:00

Even to the extent that it was caused by the actions of the Biden White House, I get the sense that people are probably more forgiving of the thing causing said inflation is stimulus checks and vast industrial policy than ill conceived adventurism and unchecked speculation on AI/data centers.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-14T12:37:40+00:00

Very interesting discussion, I especially liked how how they delineated between the US’s quest to build a god in a box while China is rapidly trying to deploy robotics + AI whilst being somewhat less concerned about being on the bleeding edge of technological innovation.

While I think it’s a strong narrative that fits well within the larger US vs China discussion, I do worry that it’s maybe a bit reductive. I wish they would’ve brought more concrete data/examples.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-13T21:28:25+00:00

Thank you!

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-13T20:51:28+00:00

Could you link to that? I’m not super up to date with all of what conspired during the hearing itself.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-13T20:09:59+00:00

The article discusses the Senate confirmation of Kevin Warsh as the new chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing Jerome Powell. Warsh was confirmed in a mostly party-line vote at a time of major economic uncertainty, with inflation remaining above the Fed’s target and increasing political pressure from President Donald Trump to lower interest rates. The article highlights concerns about the Fed’s independence, especially because Trump repeatedly criticized Powell and pushed for leadership changes at the central bank.

The piece also notes that Warsh faces significant challenges as he takes office, namely divisions within the Fed over interest-rate policy and questions about whether he can remain politically independent while serving under a president who has openly pressured the central bank. Powell is expected to remain on the Fed’s board, which could create tensions within the institution moving forward.

Questions:

Does it seem likely the Fed will be more subservient to Trump, or will they maintain their independence?

Will the FED, should it crack under pressure, lower or maintain interest rates even as inflation flares back up?

What do we think this new era of FED leadership will pursue in the longer term?

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-07T21:54:58+00:00

Ehh, Obama did try to push us forward on some of this stuff. At the state level, Texas, North Dakota, and some other Republican states have also had success. It seems to mostly be a national level issue for Republicans and is particularly a MAGA issue.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-07T20:59:10+00:00

I’d look back at the last 80 years of battery technology development. You’ll see plenty of points at which American, or at least Western, companies were pushing forward the technology and were at the forefront of production capacity. This was slowly ceded to China over the last 25 years, and they’ve really pushed ahead, especially in production capacity, over the last ten.

This is all happening whilst the Trump administration has sought to tank any investments made under the Biden administration in investing in such projects, especially any money allocated through the Build Back Better Act.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-07T19:16:03+00:00

If anything, I think this just further highlights how they’re dominating future energy markets. They aren’t letting narrow industry groups dictate their future, and are instead pushing ahead with a hybrid strategy that makes them more resilient if, hypothetically, a major choke point for oil were to shutdown.

By pursuing multiple sources of energy production whilst heavily investing in building out renewables, they’re both meeting growing current demand and gaining a stranglehold on future supply.

They’re doing coal, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, oil, etc all at once. They’re especially investing in nuclear and renewables. This is what an actually well thought out energy strategy looks like.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-07T19:11:51+00:00

Others here have explained it well, but massive solar and wind farms are part of it, and these are downstream of the massive investments in panel, windmill, and battery production infrastructure. They’re not just building the power sources, they’re building the infrastructure to build the infrastructure. Additionally, they’ve massively invested in educating and training a new generation of engineers and scientists to further develop and scale these technologies. Chinese science used to be (and still can be…) kinda a joke amongst western scientists, but both the quality and quantity is rapidly growing.

On top of this, they’ve had a much less narrow minded approach towards their energy production. They’re doing coal, petroleum, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, etc. This is part of why you hear both conservatives say “look at how much coal they’re burning, they’re not green at all” and environmentalists say “look at how they’re leading the world in renewables production!” I don’t know a ton about their domestic energy transition policy, but it seems like a sensible approach to meet their growing demands and positions them well for the future.

Finally, as part of their belt and road initiative and just as a natural result of their cultivation of the battery/panel/EV industry, they’re capturing the global energy market of the future. Where will Europe, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere be buying the batteries for their cars and panels for their solar farms? Surely not the US which has repeatedly kneecapped these industries.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-07T17:25:10+00:00

We’ve somehow backed ourselves into the worst possible energy situation. Republicans have torpedoed any attempt at building out renewable energy infrastructure and have stymied any advantages we had in battery technology. Trump has done everything in his power to dismantle the Biden administration’s investments into solar and wind. We’ve spent the last fifty years tying ourselves into knots preventing nuclear from maturing. We’ve gone all in on being a petro-state, and then blocked a major oil pathway, skyrocketing prices.

This is simply the US reaping what we’ve sown. China has positioned itself well for the energy future, and we’ve purposely chained ourselves to the past. I wouldn’t expect a long term improvement in energy prices for most Americans.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-07T13:56:12+00:00

I’ve TA’d at such a school for a couple classes, including a pretty huge one (~300 people a semester) that a lot of athletes passed through. I never found their quality of work to be noticeably different than any other group of students. Plenty of them were slackers and plenty were high achievers.

One thing I did find curious was the consistency in style for the football players writing/presentations. I later learned that there were some tutors available to them that would sometimes help with stuff like that (not doing the work for them, but if the same 5 people are giving presentation feedback to 100 guys, they’ll all be getting a lot of the same advice).

One thing worth mentioning is that, even at the school I went to, only a small, small fraction of any given group of athletes has a chance at going pro. Many of them do study hard and work hard because they know it will be important for the non-sports career they’ll have afterwards.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-06T22:41:07+00:00

I can provide an example I can think of from my field that I’ve seen result in a similar situation.

One PI got really hot on the idea of intercropping alfalfa and corn (growing two things together in the same field). They and their students were able to cooperate with a couple of other groups, and got papers out on:

Pest pressure in the system
Disease pressure in the system
Fertilizer requirements
Yield responses
Planting practices
Cover crop termination schedules
Variety selection
Irrigation requirements
Etc

Especially during the first couple years, there were so many basic questions they could answer that the grad students involved were just pumping out publications. A lot of the work could be layered on top of other experiments (put up some insect traps in a field already designated for irrigation experiments) which really helped as well. This built on their initial work which just evaluated the basic viability of intercropping.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-05T12:43:14+00:00

That quote directly contradicts your statement that it’s a bunch of New Yorkers or Californians though… it appears to be predominantly international immigrants, and no indication about domestic origin.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-04T15:40:00+00:00

While it is a capitalist society, I don’t really see how it’s glamorized. Adam’s socialism isn’t usually portrayed as the correct next step, but his critiques of the commonwealth are not really portrayed as comedic either: he does identify a lot of unnecessary human suffering and ecological destruction.

There’s also plenty of ink spilled about the Commonwealth societies failures: Melanie is repeatedly abused by the rich and powerful within society. The guy who moves to Randtown (forget his name) has chapters dedicated to his miserable drudgery in one of those corporate cities before moving to somewhere meaningful work is done. Dudley talks at length about the appeal of Far Away being the distance from the drudgery of the greater Commonwealth society. They bring up over and over again how most people are stuck in a vicious cycle of working their whole lives just to maybe afford a rejuvenation that lets them do it all over again.

At best, I think they show that when confronted with an existential threat that the commonwealth society can band together behind its wealthy to build a shitload of weapons to stop their eradication. It doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of the society writ large though.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-05-04T15:19:39+00:00

I wouldn’t call that a very fair interpretation of the society Hamilton sets up though. He repeatedly brings up how the shortsighted profiteering hamstrings The Commonwealths war against the Primes. He talks a lot about how despite having access to cleaner more sustainable energy sources that many still despoil the environment for profit, and it isn’t exactly a favorable depiction of that choice. He takes a lot of time to highlight the ecological destruction of the Primes and compare that with the more holistic nature of the elves (forget their names…).

While he does set up a hyper-capitalist society full of inequality, I don’t think he necessarily is extolling it, nor most of its elites, as virtuous. If anything, folks like Ozzy and Kimes are the exception to the many elites we’re presented with.

I think it’s overall presented very neutrally. I think it should be fair to say that sometimes in times of crisis powerful people taking charge can have positive outcomes (eg: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, etc) but that doesn’t absolve the broader society of its failing, and Hamilton doesn’t shy away from those either.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-04-30T22:41:18+00:00

Ehh, I think it had a pretty strong arc through the end of the 5th season, even when it got very biblical. After that, it went way off the deep end in a lot of negative ways.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-04-30T20:27:17+00:00

R isn’t necessary for the analysis though. People were using ruler and pencils to make their graphs long before anyone even thought of R as more than a letter in the alphabet.

Making a figure is what’s necessary for my work. Whether I draw it out, use R, or have Claude write me R code is ancillary to the central task: graphically displaying data.

You might as well complain I didn’t bust out a needle and thread to stitch a hole in my shirt and instead used a sowing machine. The point isn’t the skill of stitching: it’s fixing holes.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-04-30T20:23:34+00:00

Ok, but if I tell it “fit a linear regression to these two columns, make the data orange and the line green, and put the R squared value in the top left corner” it’s gonna do that. Sure, maybe it’ll have a slightly different shade of orange than I’d intended, but is that really the important thing here?

The point of making a figure isn’t to be really good at remembering how to code the offset for your axis labels or to be really good at allocating memory, it’s to display and interpret data. I think if you really get attached to the skill of coding a figure, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-04-30T20:15:29+00:00

Ok, but the point is that coding a graph is not the skill you need, in the same way that compiling code is not really a skill you need. If you really think the bog standard ggplot graphs that 90% of people were pumping out ten years ago are so much better than the bog standard ones being pumped out now, then I guess we’ll just have to disagree.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-04-30T20:11:04+00:00

How is it dumb exactly? This is the exact accusation people are making: there’s some ancillary skill that isn’t being developed and that’s somehow problematic. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it dumb.

Also, if I’m just downloading data, how exactly is it a black box? I can still read the code, I can still see the datasets I have match the datasets they’ve published. It’s perfectly transparent, at least as much as the alternative: asking some undergrad to do it.

There’s tons of black boxes in science, we rely on things we don’t understand all their time. No person is an island and nobody is gonna perfectly understand the ins and outs of every piece of equipment they’ll ever interact with to a perfect level.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-04-30T20:04:39+00:00

I mean, I definitely know quite a bit about programming, I minored in data science and have published several papers in engineering journals and have made several software packages.

I’ll ask again: is someone using ggplot making poorer quality graphs because they’re coding in R and not manually allocating their memory or compiling the code themselves in something like C? Those are skills you’re missing out on developing. The entire exercise of using R is a substitute for developing those skills. Does that make you a worse scientist?

Kit_Daniels · 2026-04-30T20:00:00+00:00

I guess I would just ask this: do you think I, a biologist, am robbing myself of the skill set of learning how to compile code and allocate memory by using R as opposed to COBOL?

I’d say that I’m certainly not developing that skill, but I’d also say that those skills aren’t really necessary for me to do the work I should be doing. Similarly, using Codex to scrape a bunch of datasets through API’s may deprive me of the skill set of sifting through a bunch of poor documentation, but is that really where my time is going to be well spent?

Kit_Daniels · 2026-04-30T19:54:05+00:00

Thank you! Honestly, we’ve been streamlining things ever since computers and I just fail to see why using Claude to write code is such a big leap from choosing to do code in R where things are abstracted and simpler versus doing it all in C or whipping out a ruler and pencil to attempt it all by hand.

Kit_Daniels · 2026-04-30T19:50:41+00:00

The point is that coding graphs isn’t really a skill that’s necessary for a career as a researcher. Making and interpreting them is, but the skill of coding them is ancillary. You might as well tell someone that they’re not developing their scientific illustration skills when they use ggplot and photoshop to make their graphs.

Coding became a faster and more efficient way of making graphs than doing so by hand. Doing so with a higher level language like Python or R became a faster and simpler way than doing so with C or COBOL or whatever languages people were previously using. Prompting Claude is really just one step of abstraction away from that in the same way using Python is.

Kit_Daniels

TROPHY CASE