2026-03-18
contrails (feat. tegan quin)
Afra Wang with an interview of Ma Qianzhu of Illumine Lingao. I’m currently in the process of reading this novel, and having just gone through the reforms put in place following the “Maid Revolution”, it occurs to me that there’s a lot of truth in the idea that there’s no such thing as Chinese philosophy; but if so, then neither does political science exist as a real scientific discipline within Western thought1. In any case, after reading this interview, I now understand why the Chinese state insists on describing itself as both Marxist and democratic, labels which are obviously and absurdly contrary to reality. But if one accepts that the underlying rationale for democracy is to raise the utility of the majority of the population, then rule by the elite can be just as legitimate as by representative, since selection by ballot box is just one means among many of delivering feedback and not “democracy’s” actual defining characteristic. The question of who gets to constitute the elite, and therefore gets to determine what how utility ends up being measured, is the key that defines Ma’s “Marxism”. Essentially the distinction between the Anglo and Chinese economic models is the question of who is granted discretion by the system and who is being constrained. When a producer and a consumer is matched by a middleman, value is created as a result: in Anglo society, how much the middleman receives from this interaction is limited primarily through competition, and so middlemen differentiate themselves around illegible factors like personal taste, reputation, and access to relationships2. The inconvenient aspect about AI disruption is that these middlemen, who are already a very powerful but correspondingly unpopular minority, will likely only increase in value as automation accelerates the commoditization of production. Whereas in Ma’s ideal Chinese system, it is the system itself which is the focus of automation, for the purpose of replacing and eliminating all middlemen, so that the “advanced productive forces” at the top of the supply chain are the ones who retain ultimate decision-making power3. It’s therefore unsurprising that the plan always ends up being more production.
Charles Olney has an interesting piece on conflict as a result of failing to coordinate goals. This is something which is true for people both in a micro, and a macro context: insofar as having elites is necessary, it’s due to the infeasibility of coordinating action without a fully shared contextual understanding, necessitating the imposition of limits on the size and diversity of who gets to be involved in the decision-making process. As the cost of doing business, we accept some level of corruption in over/under-production and self-dealing as inevitable, necessary to achieving a local optima in utility maximization. After AGI, I can see why some people will still want to retain the benefits of corruption and nepotism, but it’s less clear to me why the rest of us should need to accept it. The fact that coordination is scarce has led to a habitual strategy of hoarding, and if this continues with AI augmentation then the likely result will be an irreversible monopolization of power within the hands of a small hereditary elite. Rather than choosing between abundance or distribution as the outcome of a fight between producers and middlemen attempting to automate each other, it seems to me that the real goal needs to be the project of commoditizing coordination, expanding its production until cooperation it becomes too cheap to meter.
80K Hours podcast has an interview with Rose Hadshar on essentially this topic. The frustrating thing about Forethought is that they are obviously brilliant in their ability extrapolate down our current trajectory, but I’m rather confused by their approach which seems to be primarily reactive and defense-oriented. This sort of abstraction makes it feel impossible to apply, resulting in a sort of confusion as described by Zhengdong Wang reflecting on his recent attendance at a “transformative AI” workshop, where his conclusion is that nothing can be maintained, with every special interest being reduced and cannibalized by all others. Perhaps this maintenance strategy is based off an assumption that our current processes are already sufficient, but it seems to me that a better approach would be one which takes the initiative, with the creation of concrete frameworks around “three key points: the power structure, the distribution of benefits, and the bottom line of our conduct”. Questions of power, inequality, and rights are all ultimately about the design and implementation a system for allocation of resources and the distribution of benefits: aggregating preferences to determine which goals should be pursued and how rewards are to be divided.
Ajeya Cotra on guilt as an unfortunate but entirely necessary part of accepting the Effective Altruist worldview. It seems to me that rather than blaming the ideology for the feeling, it’s the personality which generally finds the worldview. It’s exactly because EA is not suitable for me that I am not an EA, even though I agree with many of their underlying ideas.
Nicholas Rombes in Republic of Letters on the contradictory experience of teaching transgressive fiction. Insofar as the modern instinct towards discomfort is classification, and so with the internet, by the time a student reaches university age it is already far too late for most to actually feel transgression. If the goal is to give the student the experience of being punched in the face and knocked on their back, then you have to do it early enough that they can’t already see it coming ahead of time.
Samuel Arbesman linkthread on developing models of rational understanding. Stefan Schubert linkthread on ongoing cultural and economic trends.
By which I mean, political philosophy and science in the West is generally a description of how politics ought to be structured, so as to preserve the goals described by particular descriptions of philosophical morality. Whereas an actual science would be a description of what actually exists, and how it can be applied towards one’s chosen ends. Somewhat related, JingYu has a piece in ChinaTalk on Edict, an organization framework for OpenClaw based on Tang Dynasty bureaucracy and the philosophy of Mencius.
Zichen Wang has a proposal about Chinese investment in American manufacturing which demonstrates the Chinese view that production is where value truly resides. Within my more Western viewpoint, it seems to me that an even better approach would be for the Chinese to invest their export surplus directly into the S&P, resulting in a mutually beneficial trade which resolves the American trade deficit and Chinese “excess savings”. In the long run, this would produce exactly the sort of system that they ostensibly desire, one where allocation is proportionally determined by the “productive forces” of the world.
As an example, see Naomi Kanakia with a review of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction.