China Torpedoes Biosingularity Bid

From the indispensable BioHackInfo:

China’s new Criminal Code, which came into effect four weeks ago on March 1st, has a new section dedicated to ‘illegal medical practices’, which makes it a punishable crime to create gene-edited babies, human clones and animal-human chimeras.

The new section is an amendment to Article 336 of China’s Criminal Law, and officially outlaws “the implantation of genetically-edited or cloned human embryos into human or animal bodies, or the implantation of genetically edited or cloned animal embryos into human bodies,” — with penalties ranging from fines to seven years imprisonment.

Back in 2018 on November the 25th, Chinese biophysicist Dr He Jiankui announced that he had used gene-editing tool CRISPR to create the world’s first gene-edited babies. Dr He had modified the babies’ CCR5 gene — which the HIV virus uses as a pathway enter the cell. Through this CCR5 modification, the babies were made immune to HIV infection, and quite possibly had their cognitive capabilities enhanced.

Dr He was widely rebuked for this experiment, and after a storm of media-generated outrage and mounting pressure from influential Western bioethicists, Dr He was detained, and on December 30th 2019, a Chinese court sentenced him to three years in prison.

And so China takes itself out of the race towards the Biosingularity.

This is arguably a more monumental development than the ordinary humdrum of news about Corona or Ukraine or Taiwan or whatever the latest /r/worldnews headline is, though one that will only be recognized as such decades hence.

Nor is it an entirely unexpected one:

Anyway, what I’m saying is, one shouldn’t necessarily expect the biosingularity to originate in East Asia. While before I thought China had much better prospects than the US, now I rate them about equally.

As I wrote back then, contra stereotypes about “rationalist” East Asians, in reality:

  1. Opinion polls show Chinese support for genetic edits to remove disease or increase IQ is very similar to American/Western ones;
  2. Chinese laws were already more restrictive on the matter (human germline modifications are outright banned);
  3. The prominence of SJWs aside, there is less acceptance of evolutionary approaches to human behavior amongst Chinese social scientists relative to North American ones.

It’s also not extremely surprising from a deep historical perspective. This was, after all, the civilization that gave up on oceanic expeditions because nomads were harassing their peasants (or some similar banality), and banned unsanctioned maritime trade (haijin) because they were afraid of Japanese pirates. It’s at root a very risk-averse culture, but only those who take risks get to drink champagne, as the Russians say.

Hilariously, it seems that this was in part thanks to the influence of Western bioethicists, a parasitic caste that should unironically be sent off to Gulags. It is amusing how, thanks to the respect and prestige they enjoy in the world, Westerners often end up “winning” even when they’re working to torpedo themselves (China sabotaging itself thus being good for the Western Powers). Then again, the early Chinese were apparently hanging on the words of Caucasoid shamans thousands of years ago, so has anything really changed?

 

That said, this doesn’t materially change the fact that the twin forces of SJW egalitarian zealotry and religious fundamentalism may yet make the Biosingularity unrealizable in the West too.

So which civilization is now humanity’s best bet to avoid the Age of Malthusian Industrialism – assuming, at least, that mainstream AGI timelines don’t pan out?

The answer may surprise you!

Partial list of worldwide opinion polls on genetic editing:

U.S., 1996: 35% support editing for physical traits
U.K., 1994: 8% support, 88% oppose editing for intelligence*
New Zealand, 1993: 24% support, 67% oppose editing for intelligence (n = 329)
Australia, 1993: 27% support, 62% oppose editing for intelligence (n = 201)
Japan, 1993: 26% support, 54% oppose editing for intelligence (n = 352)
India, 1993: 70% support, 23% oppose editing for intelligence** (n = 568)
Thailand, 1993: 74% support, 22% oppose editing for intelligence** (n = 680)
Russia, 1993: 35% support, 49% oppose editing for intelligence** (n = 446)
Israel, 1993: 22% support, 70% oppose editing for intelligence** (n = 50)

More recent poll:

Vedic Hyperpower 2100?

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.

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  2. hotdogstreetseller says

    India a hyperpower

    Cringe and cope.

  3. Indians and Thais FTW!

  4. inertial says

    The higher the IQ of a country is, the less likely it is to support genetic editing for intelligence. If you are surprised by this you have low IQ

  5. songbird says

    “How do they do a survey in India?” is what I’d like to know. Would the average Untouchable even understand what DNA is?

  6. FWIW, gametogenesis + IVF + embryo selection for desirable traits/genes would still be legal in both China and the West, no? If so, this would still leave open a slower but also safer path to a biosingularity.

  7. Westoids, Sinoids, and Russoids alike will doubtless be doing a lot of cringing and coping as they kneel to be decapitated by the fiery sword of immanentized Kalki and have their very souls burned to be reforged into NFTs, to be traded and casually disposed of at the whim of their Vedic post-human masters.

  8. Vishnugupta says

    One of the reasons why gene editing will be enthusiastically adopted in India is because Hindus collectively will prefer such a quick fix to taking a long hard look at their civilization and try to discard very damaging beliefs like the cult of vegetarianism.

    I belong to one of the few Brahmin communities (Bengali/Kashmiri/some Bihari brahmins) who are proudly non vegetarian but the majority of Brahmins/other Upper Caste Hindus still believe vegetarianism is a brilliant idea despite all evidence to the contrary. So a genetic engineering solution to enhance physical strength and IQ without fundamentally changing diets will be very enthusiastically adopted.

    I suspect this will be big with Muslims too.I forsee a much greater acceptance among Muslims to engineer out the ill effects of first cousin marraiges than as a society look at the evidence and ban such marraiges.

  9. hotdogstreetseller says

    truly believing that some pajeet will be the world’s master by 2100

    NGMI

    When the rich and powerful get their hand on those technologies, the population sentiment will rapidly change and demand that that everyone has a access to embryo selection and editing, so say goodbye to dreams of a Hindu century, it was over even before it started.

  10. Chrisnonymous says

    What you call SJWism is actually a rational human intuition. If post-humans are fundamentally different from other humans, then we have an evolutionary psych reason to feel averse to them. (This is true for the CCP too. Do you want your subjects creating supermen who will vie with your children for power?) It is very possible that India will follow China’s path. The most likely developers of biosingularity are a society in which profit>ethics is a standard that subverts the public’s wanted outcomes.

    It’s also possible this law is meant to keep the Party/Govt with a monopoly on this tech, not stop its development altogether.

  11. Caspar Von Everec says

    Kind of glad tbh. While I despise the Judeo-American Empire as the pinnacle of evil, i’m no China simp like a lot of people here.

    The Chinese are effectively national socialists. They’re Hitler but short and yellow. The idea of them turning their nation into a race of high IQ ubermensch is kind of frightening.

    They’re already a race of slave-like dronish people, bred for obedience and passivity for millennia. Combine that with ubermensch abilities and a totalitarian national socialist state, they could achieve what fringe elements in the Nazi party dreamed off: Extermination of rival populations and replacing them with native colonists.

    They are doing it in a small scale in Tibet right now. Colonizing them with Han Chinese, turning the Tibetans into minorities in their own homeland.

    Whites are being murdered by Jews, and once they’re gone, there won’t be any race capable of standing up to China. They are already a 1.3 billion man nation with an average iq of 105 and the world’s largest industrial base. As they’re the size of a continent, they can be an effective autarky unlike Germany in the world wars.

    The inbreds of the middle east are little more than a nuisance, India has an average IQ of 80 and its small brahmin fraction is either caste mixing or engaging in sterile feminism. In any case, a high IQ smart fraction can’t pull a country of imbeciles too far. One only needs to look at Brazil or South Africa to see that.

    Blacks are a complete non-entity, incapable of higher thought or brilliance, destined to forever shine the boots of greater races. Once it was the Arab, then it was the Aryan, now its the Jew, and soon it will be the Chinaman.

    South-east Asia has decent IQ but they’re too diverse and still heavily outnumbered. They have no industrial or scientific capability to resist China. Japan and Korea are very intelligent, but they’re old and tiny.

    Honestly, once Jews have wiped out whites, the whole world will fall into Chinese hands. Mixing genetic engineering will only make the situation even worse.

    At the moment, the only good news from China is the massive dysgenics its undergoing. 60% of its population lives in the cities, and these are the smarter half. For 40 years these urban populations have been subjected to the 1-child policy while dimmer villagers have been allowed to have two kids.

    Now even as the policy has been revoked, the cities remain nightmarish hell holes. The only difference from New York is the lack of vibrant knifings and rapes, and competent governance. Regardless, they are IQ shredders and Shanghai has a TFR of .8.

    Mind you, Shanghai is the brightest city in the world.

    Honestly, the best outcome for humanity would be an all out nuclear war between the two evil empires. A Chinese nuclear strike on major US cities like NY, LA, DC and Miami would wipe out the neoliberal regime along with Jewish power and wealth.

    In turn, a US nuclear strike would depopulate China and destroy the CCP. The world will be spared enslavement by neoliberal Jewry and national socialist China

  12. The Hard Life of Homo Erectus says

    This is great news. As someone who has already been born, I consider germline engineering to be an utter waste of precious resources. Focus those energies on augmenting those of us who are already alive, thx bye.

  13. The magical niche of Chinese people is fastidiousness and patient conscientiousness; deployed at a reasonably high IQ — but not TOO high. If you enhance that IQ, you might well undermine that fastidiousness niche. You will get, to analogize, a genius Border Collie; it will cleverly open your cabinets etc, a wonderful dog in its way, but outside the great-doggie niche. What does it mean to be a dog? I will be seen by my Chinese-American dermatologist in 2 days for a top-to-bottom inspection. Don’t mess with any genes involving cognition, because that might impair her incredibly patient and meticulous mental style — and she already has enough IQ points to do the job.

  14. You cannot enjoy food as a computer.

  15. The Borg will do wonders for those to care about personal privacy?

  16. When they stop open defecation. How does India rank in the cleanliness of the streets compared to China?

  17. Daniel Chieh says

    A few things I noted – I want to do more research on Chinese-language sources as well and might add more then. But I actually think that you’re overegging it, after thinking about it for awhile, though I want to talk about the sources of opposition to it in China(much which I find unjustified).

    the implantation of genetically-edited or cloned human embryos into human or animal bodies, or the implantation of genetically edited or cloned animal embryos into human bodies

    I want to note one thing involving genetically-edited human embryo research, and likely a direct reason for such opposition: experimenting with manifested effects in human embryos involves allowing the fetus to grow to a significant extent to see if the expected changes have happened and then sacrificing them. For intelligence, it may involve allowing clones of a fetus to be born, permitting some time for clones to grow and develop cognitive skills, and then sacrificing them. I’m not really sure any country has the gumption for mass infanticide, and while abortion is pretty accepted, sacrificing fetuses en masse in the name of science is likely seen as ghoulish by many.

    India is culturally and traditionally much more accepting of inequality, so they are well suited for the consequences of economically disparate transhumanism, but I’m not sure if they’re willing to sacrifice fetuses and infants en masse. Perhaps our Indian collaborators could advise and contribute their thoughts on this.

    Notably, this does not prevent the main source of near-human genetic research in China, which is monkey research. We can trace a couple of these right away:

    https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201904/02/WS5ca31228a3104842260b3fa3.html

    Researchers from China and the United States have created transgenic monkeys carrying a human gene that is important for brain development, and the monkeys showed human-like brain development.

    Scientists have identified several genes that are linked to primate brain size. MCPH1 is a gene that is expressed during fetal brain development. Mutations in MCPH1 can lead to microcephaly, a developmental disorder characterized by a small brain.

    In the study published in the Beijing-based National Science Review, researchers from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of North Carolina in the United States and other research institutions reported that they successfully created 11 transgenic rhesus monkeys (eight first-generation and three second-generation) carrying human copies of MCPH1.

    https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/01/25/246975/first-monkeys-with-autism-created-in-china/

    Years of studies with mice suffering from autism-like disorders have provided disappointingly few leads on how to solve the problem in people. But mice have very different brains from our own. For instance, they lack a prefrontal cortex, the brain area where some human psychiatric disorders seem to be centered.

    Qiu says that’s the reason his institute chose to create autistic monkeys. He says scientists would now be able to study what brain networks had been disrupted, as well as try out treatments, such as deep-brain stimulation. Qiu says his group would also attempt to reverse the symptoms it created by erasing the genetic error in live animals. That could be done using new genome-editing technologies, such as CRISPR, he says.

    https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6477/496.2

    A prominent neuroscientist whose lab in Germany was targeted by animal rights activists is heading to China, where he says he will be freer to pursue his work on macaques and other monkeys. Nikos Logothetis, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, told colleagues last week that several group leaders from his department would move in the coming months to a new International Center for Primate Brain Research in Shanghai…

    China has apparently a strong lead in resources and interest in near-human research, and may not be willing to engage in mass infanticide to test designer babies in the way that we do with animal genetic research. That said, near-human models may be the better way about it, and help better translate into better results when they are finally applied to humans. In fact, one could argue that it is adaptive for China to attempt to lead a worldwide ban on human embryo experimentation, because since China has positioned itself as the leader in primate research, it means that China has a tactical advantage there.

    https://www.nature.com/news/monkey-kingdom-1.19762

    With China fast becoming a global centre for primate research, some scientists fear that it could hasten the atrophy of such science in the West and lead to a near monopoly, in which researchers become over-reliant on one country for essential disease research and drug testing.

    We should consider now the negative aspects of Chinese culture and personality, and to some extent, East Asian culture and personality on biosingularity. Risk-avoidance is one, but I think that’s not the most significant source of opposition. I’ll list a two others I recall from when Dr He first announced his stunt:

    1) Anti-equality in a Red Queen society. In some wierd ways, Chinese society praises egalitarianism; its based out of a worship of meritocracy, and such a worship is essentially unsustainable if people are literally made better. One of the mockeries after Dr He that was on the SinoNet was a joke of children bemoaning how their parents didn’t get them the best “genetic package.”

    An annoying aspect of Chinese culture is the “crab bucket” mentality, from the idea that every time a crab attempts to escape the bucket, the other crabs pull it down to their common doom. Unfortunately, this is essentially the norm of Chinese culture: in that sense, an exceptional refutation of the idea that the Chinese cooperate like eusocial insects – the Chinese really lean toward family-orientation and have no meaningful racial or nationalistic consciousness that allows them to cheer posthumans of the same race or nation.

    Since egalitarianism is seen as a terminal good and effort valorized as the ultimate good, the idea of children with “gifted packages” is quite fiercely opposed, especially by those who don’t feel that they would benefit.

    And of course, this sort of makes sense because China is a pressure cooker, Red Queen society where if a kid doesn’t get ahead and hit the right credentials, he’s screwed for life. Everyone who isn’t already ahead will protest anything that augments humans, and everyone who is ahead will keep doing so secretly. In practice, the crab bucket becomes terribly real.

    2) Worship of Naturalism/naturalistic fallacy. This has been a large part of Chinese culture, integral even to Taoist/Confucianist conflicts. By and large, “what is natural” carries significant weight in the consciousness of the population, even if “what is natural” can be defined quite wildly in a society that also often accepts Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chi meridians, and Yin/Yang foods.

    This isn’t just Chinese: this is significant to East Asian culture, and as one writer noted, is the origin of a lot of body horror in Japanese media. Resident Evil, for example, carries a lot of such an attitude, where the idea of biological human research is a kind of black science. To some extent, even medical interventions are seen as overreaching and to be avoided, e.g. Japanese avoidance of painkillers in birthing procedure:

    https://www.tokyoreview.net/2017/08/japan-numbers-birth-painful-japan/

    Japan has one of the lowest rates of pain-free delivery in the developed world: only 5.2 percent of mothers were given epidural anesthesia in fiscal 2016. Compare that to estimates from France (77.8 percent), the United States (61 percent), the United Kingdom (33 percent), and Norway (26 percent), and it’s clear Japan is an outlier.

    This shift in emphasis to preventative medicine and good living in this case is probably not a net negative: Japan has a great life expectancy and lower infant mortality(1.684 deaths per 1000 live births) than in the Western Europe(3.6 deaths per 1 000 live births). But it reinforces the naturalistic fallacy of minimal intervention, and to avoid “tinkering” with the body which leads to opposition to transhuman editing.

    I don’t have a third point to follow up on opposition, but I do have one last point on the likelihood that human enhancement research is still continuing. The first is that within China, there’s an assumption that it is happening anyway, and it likely is, though perhaps veiled or via transgenetic primate research. The second is that the appeal of human enhancement in a Red Queen society is very, very high, and while the government almost certainly passes laws to prevent an outcry, the truth is that even vague ideas of human enhancement rapidly get bought in China:

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25703942/

    Our results suggested that the increased availability of oxygen can, to some extent, improve memory performance.

    https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/07/brain-hacking-smart-drugs-electrical-stimulation-iq-mensa-modafinil

    Without waiting for the results, ambitious families are booking their teenagers into these chambers the night before the pivotal Gaokao school-leaving test, the traditional route to higher education and a secure career with the state.

  18. Daniel Chieh says

    The Chinese are effectively national socialists. They’re Hitler but short and yellow.

    Yeah, just like the Nazis, the Chinese are opposed to eugenics. Another triumph of deductive reasoning.

  19. Mulga Mumblebrain says

    Your racist pig ignorance is pre-genocidal, a trait that is becoming more and more evident among Western psychopaths.

  20. Abelard Lindsey says

    I can venture a guess about India. First, they have a caste system with huge performance differences in the various peoples and castes. Secondly, they are socialized since birth to accept these differences, and the resulting social status, to be innate characteristics. Since genetics has come to represent the underlying basis for “innateness”, they are more likely to see and embrace the possibility of changing the personal status of their kids using genetic engineering. This also implies a certain form of inspiration among Indian people.

    Do remember that Khan came from India. A name like Singh Noonian Khan suggests his parents were Sikhs, looking to give an even further leg up for their firstborn son. Gene Roddenberry got one detail wrong. Sikhs have “Singh” as their middle name, not their first name.

  21. Abelard Lindsey says

    I want to note one thing involving genetically-edited human embryo research, and likely a direct reason for such opposition: experimenting with manifested effects in human embryos involves allowing the fetus to grow to a significant extent to see if the expected changes have happened and then sacrificing them. For intelligence, it may involve allowing clones of a fetus to be born, permitting some time for clones to grow and develop cognitive skills, and then sacrificing them. I’m not really sure any country has the gumption for mass infanticide, and while abortion is pretty accepted, sacrificing fetuses en masse in the name of science is likely seen as ghoulish by many.

    I consider myself a hard core transhumanist and I have a problem with this scenario. You can count on most other people to have issues with it as well. This is also the problem with developing exowombs as well, which is why we will not see them anytime soon.

  22. JohnPlywood says

    As I predicted, the ambition of China emerging as a genetic engineering powerhouse were a lot of dreamy bullshit. Despite the Communist ideology, with its rich history of environmental destruction in the former Soviet Union, Chinese people are intelligent and have foresight. They understand the enormous potential consequences of genetic engineering and, being highly concerned with the stability of the world, decided to tighten the garrote around geneticists.

    China is financially prudent, as well. The genetic engineering research was producing very little in the way of results, anyway. It’s been 30 years in the USA and there are few cures available using gene therapy, all of them experimental and dangerous. Despite billions of dollars spent, we aren’t growing back our missing teeth and arms, we aren’t seeing an increase in crop yields despite the GMO, and we haven’t cloned a Neanderthal. Thankfully, for the time being, genetic engineering is a medical dead end. China has seen this weakness and called the bluff of the geneticist parasites, which stiffle research in other countties as well, as their governments no longer feel compelled to compete. Another false hope for the 21st century bites the dust.

  23. India is no more a hyper power now, than it was two centuries ago when their teeming numbers were easily subjugated by a handful of well-fed and (at the time) well-led British troops.

    How was it that in the 19th century even before the mass wave of immigration, the low-fertility United States had become the pre-eminent industrial and technological power of the world, while the vaster numbers of chronically malnourished peasants in China were collectively weak and useless? And China was easily dictated to by a relatively few weak gunboats?

    All other things being equal, numbers win, but a million chronically malnourished peasants wallowing in the mud, or a billion, makes no difference. There may be profit off of all that cheap labor for the elites, but net total state power? Not so much.

    Or maybe you think that Bangladesh is a match for Russia?

  24. Felix Keverich says

    It’s also not extremely surprising from a deep historical perspective. This was, after all, the civilization that gave up on oceanic expeditions because nomads were harassing their peasants (or some similar banality), and banned unsanctioned maritime trade (haijin) because they were afraid of Japanese pirates. It’s at root a very risk-averse culture, but only those who take risks get to drink champagne, as the Russians say.

    Still think that this “very risk-averse country” is destined to be global superpower?

  25. EternalSpring says

    That’s assuming there are no black projects already underway to develop enhanced-intelligence humans. Come on, Anatoly. If you were in charge of Chinese military programs, would you scream from the rooftops about doing possibly-unethical probably-game changing research? Especially if for all you know your adversaries have already started their own research?

    There are all kinds of things technically less than legal in the world, at least for civilians. Breeding weapon-grade plutonium. Developing novel viruses. Yet somehow nukes and bioweapons exist. I wouldn’t be surprised if ten-fifteen years from now China will start getting an usually large cohort of genius kids. ‘CRISPR? Gene modifications? Must be increases in Chinese ecology, comrade’.

  26. reiner Tor says

    The Chinese are effectively national socialists. They’re Hitler but short and yellow.

    That’s a strong endorsement!

  27. Caspar von everec says

    Ok oblongoue

  28. reiner Tor says

    Well they will be big. Like, very big. Bigger than anyone else. Possibly bigger than the whole of NATO put together.

    And based on the historical track record, this risk-averse country has engaged in a couple surprisingly risky adventures, like entering the Korean War against the US or provoking military conflict with the USSR.

  29. Caspar von everec says

    Scary. Though civilization cones in steps and they still haven’t figured out the toilet part

  30. Yellowface Anon says

    Gene editing is veering off the natural way of human evolution. Be and let things be, if this means hitting a civilizational and biological bottleneck, that is the Way.

    The decision is Taoist at its core.

  31. Daniel Chieh says

    Every day I am gladder that I was introduced to Hermeticism.

  32. Felix Keverich says

    That was done under lunatic Mao regime. And being big doesn’t necessarily confer power and influence. Do you know that China used to account for something like 20% of the world’s GDP around 1800?

  33. Caspar Von Everec says

    Yeah, for Chinamen. If I was Chinese I’d be a CCP loyalist. But those who are on the receiving end are less so inclined.

    Think of it like this: Every Russian nationalist here wishes Putin was like Hitler who’d kick out all the central Asians, put women back in the kitchen, get birth rates up and actively fight to retake the Russian lands.

    But all of them at the same time hate the actual Hitler who attacked them and tried to take their territories

  34. Plus, absorbing bacon through the skin.

  35. Daniel Chieh says

    China is definitely proceeding with animal CRISPR; you could look up pork genetic manipulation but there are tons of efforts in that effort. And plants definitely are a target:

    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/feed-its-14-billion-china-bets-big-genome-editing-crops

    But yes, from what I can tell, machine learning is the biggest return at the moment:

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/08/behind-chinas-pork-miracle-how-technology-is-transforming-rural-hog-farming

  36. Erik Sieven says

    Once at least one country succeeds with real cognitive enhancement this will not stay secret and the public opinion could change drastically.

  37. This sounds like a good premise for a Jeff Noon-ish “Dreampunk” story.

  38. Felix Keverich says

    Hitlerism at its core was a settler-colonial project, more akin to Zionism, than anything Russian nationalists advocate.

  39. The Big Red Scary says

    Imagine not being able to discern a moral difference between gassing the Jews and not renewing work permits of Tajiks.

  40. reiner Tor says

    I guess you also know why preindustrial GDP was so difficult to translate into military power. China is going to be fully industrialized, in fact, it basically already is.

  41. reiner Tor says

    Umm, that was a joke.

  42. The Big Red Scary says

    :happy-hitler

  43. Blinky Bill says

    This Blood Libel against the Chinese must be dispelled.

    The Chinese are effectively national socialists. They’re Hitler but short and yellow.

    A recent report in the medical journal Lancet says Chinese people have been gaining in height in the past 30 years. The report says the average height of 19-year-old Chinese males is 175.7 centimeters, making them the fifth tallest in Asia and the tallest in East Asia; the average height of Chinese females is 163.5 cm, the tallest in the region.

    More importantly, from 1985 to 2019, the average height of Chinese males saw the biggest rise among all the 200 countries and regions surveyed, while that of women ranked third.

    https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSEC81QXQxZhNMJtCt6h__V9Dh0qfR7eaqESQ&usqp.jpg

    https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTbdjVAdYRuF8w230Do7FxeN0v9CY2O7STmfw&usqp.jpg

    https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRRsyAppPxJoY2HOgfKplQvmLIHoOGHNt0q_w&usqp.jpg

  44. There are just so many dimensions to the subject as presented by the author here. How to proceed?

    Then again, the early Chinese were apparently hanging on the words of Caucasoid shamans thousands of years ago, so has anything really changed?

    No, not really, except that the Chinese are still here – all 1.5 billion of them. Meanwhile, now that Western civilisation is hanging on the words of Caucasoid shamans like creepy billionaire eugenicist Bill Gates and his Mini-Me Dr. Anthony Fauci, as well as crafty Uncle Klaus there in the background, will the West still be thriving in a couple thousand more years? Just saying – remember, you asked the question.

    And so China takes itself out of the race towards the Biosingularity.

    Clearly, the author is a solid fan of the “Biosingularity” – it’s even capitalised.

    But the “Biosingularity” can mean different things to different people (or to different types of people). I rather suspect this line of thinking plays right into the hands of those people who are convinced it is their Divine Destiny to decide the future of the planet, and relegate the rest of humanity to the role of productive units (whether as Goyim – animals with souls – or “useless eaters”) to be employed or disposed of at their whim.

    So which civilization is now humanity’s best bet to avoid the Age of Malthusian Industrialism…?

    Malthus theorised that population tends to increase at a faster rate than its means of subsistence and that unless it is checked by moral restraint or disaster (such as disease, famine, or war) widespread poverty and degradation inevitably result.

    Note particularly the factor of “moral restraint” as a brake on the inevitable descent into widespread poverty and degradation, with the alternative being disaster.

    But the author apparently holds Malthus’ regard for moral restraint with disdain –

    Hilariously, it seems that this was in part thanks to the influence of Western bioethicists, a parasitic caste that should unironically be sent off to Gulags.

    So paradoxically, throwing caution to the wind in the drive to the “Biosingularity”, we are indeed on the Malthusian path to destruction, though in the absence of moral restraint, the Malthusian result must be disaster.

    Given the state of the world right now, I think it’s a fair bet that said disaster will manifest as war. Although I wouldn’t dismiss the notion of a rapid-onset ice age either – which would be rather ironic, with Mother Nature smacking humanity down just as he was starting to get ahead of himself (no disrespect to the dozens of other genders out there in the West).

    It is amusing how, thanks to the respect and prestige they enjoy in the world, Westerners often end up “winning” even when they’re working to torpedo themselves

    … Do we really need to go there? How about we ask the average American if they feel like “winners” right now? In truth, most of them don’t really have much idea what’s going on in the rest of the world because they’re too busy just trying to survive.

    “…thanks to the respect and prestige they enjoy in the world…” ? Really?

    “…even when they’re working to torpedo themselves…” It appears to me they’ve been doing a pretty good job of this. Whenever they do end up “winning”, it seems to be just a tiny minority who both make all the decisions and reap the windfall benefits while the rest of the Western lemmings and the rest of the world wear the costs. A zero-sum civilisation.

    Just ask any of those 100,000 Kenyan women sterilised without consent by creepy Bill’s tubercolosis “vaccine”. Ask the many millions of people around the world poisoned by the miracle of Big Pharma in agriculture and medicine. Ask the whole frigging world right now as it enjoys the benefits of “science” saving it from Corona Chan while the medicines we already have for the purpose are literally banned and we all march happily in lockstep down the road to George Orwell’s 1984.

    And the author thinks bioethicists are parasites? How would he describe our ruling class? What would Malthus have to say about all of this?

    Is this the kind of world in which we can abandon caution and place our trust in these people to bestow the “Biosingularity” on humanity? Are we prepared to be reduced to expendable designer livestock? How do we expect the likes of creepy Bill and Uncle Klaus to manage their new-found ability to create and manage the Master Race? How do we expect the Chosen People to manage the Goyim with such technologies at their disposal?

    China’s new Criminal Code, which came into effect four weeks ago on March 1st, has a new section dedicated to ‘illegal medical practices’, which makes it a punishable crime to create gene-edited babies, human clones and animal-human chimeras.

    As one might expect from a resilient and incomparably persistent civilisation such as China, there is great wisdom in their judgement on this matter. I remember quite some decades ago, my mother telling me about a prophecy by a Catholic mystic woman centuries ago, which foretold scientists blending “the essence of a man and a beast” to produce hybrid soldiers for use in war.

    With the current sorry state of humanity, if you think the pursuit of the “Biosingularity” is the path to Utopia, think again. The “IT singularity” will lead to Skynet. The “Biosingularity” will lead to expendable designer human livestock and chimeric soldiers.

    The Chinese have got it right on this one.

  45. YetAnotherAnon says

    “They are doing it in a small scale in Tibet right now. Colonizing them with Han Chinese, turning the Tibetans into minorities in their own homeland.”

    Thank God such a thing could never happen in the West.

    https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/apr/05/black-history-should-be-taught-across-all-subjects-in-uk-schools

    https://www.theday.com/storyimage/NL/20190911/NWS13/190919906/EP/1/4/EP-190919906.jpg

  46. A lot of the Indian youth nowadays seem to be meat-eaters, although unlike the West where the selection of meats is quite diverse, in India it is mostly chicken and perhaps mutton that is most commonly available.

    The influx of Western fast food joints has also contributed to this trend, even youths from the Jain community are meat-eaters in increasing numbers.

    If the BJP were a semi-serious party, they would be pushing for meat consumption instead, they do things like this


    https://cdn.thewire.in/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/08172311/Saffron-wave-sweeps-Eggs-in-Schools-and-Anganwadis-8-July-2018-1.png

  47. reiner Tor says

    Hitler was just 175 cm himself.

  48. The_seventh_shape says

    Thailand doesn’t surprise me in that survey. Many people in Thailand would like to mate with someone with lighter skin, no matter what their race. Mixed race people are all over their billboards and other advertising (including Thai/North Asian mixed) and not, apparently, because some hostile minority is trying to undermine the country’s racial purity.

  49. It is partly that certain countries–and the ruling elites within them– think they already have an advantage, but also that the Chinese know from their 2010 experience that any attempt to do cutting edge gene–IQ research will lead to uproar in the West and the termination of the project.

    https://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-genetics-of-genius-1.12985

    Moreover, from the failure to find big effect genes in that project (which Robert Plomin was involved in) China also knows that thousands of small effect genes are where the real action is. The Chinese know gene editing can’t really pay off in a time frame that makes it tempting, and would surely begin an genetic research and editing arms race with America. The stratagem that has served CCP-China well since the 1930s is maintaining the best possible relations with American MSM, and thereby infusing US opinion, Deep State included, with an idea of China as essentially harmless. Trump was China’s worst nightmare, but Biden is on record as saying –repeatedly saying from the podium–that China is not competition for the US (May 2019) .

    The other month at a Town Hall meeting Biden “And I came back and said they’re going to end their One China—their one child policy, because they’re so xenophobic they won’t let anybody else in, and more people are retired than working. How can they sustain economic growth when more people are retired?”. Biden also tried to say (he got very mixed up) that the minimum wage would have been $24 per hour in 2020 if it had kept pace with productivity growth since 1968. But I think we know a lot of the alleged productivity is shareholder value due to cutbacks in things like R&D, which bodes ill for America.

    In no way will China risk another Trump by being perceived as challenging America. The US is impregnable in notions of their system’s categorical superiority in peaceful economic engagement with China. America is still the world’s most formidable country, and that is why the US is a sleeping giant that China will let lie. The only things china will be willing do scientifically will be international collaboration projects into abstruse matters without obvious effect of the balance of power that the West has come to see as a waste of money. China will be willing to pay the cost on goodwill and global PR grounds. For example.

    https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1189391.shtml
    Research and development for the first batch of key equipment for the world’s most powerful electron collider, the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), in China, ($5.05 billion)

    Robert Plomin’s polygenetic score percentile rank for predicted academic achievement: “99-point-something”.

    https://www.unz.com/isteve/2018/04/04/
    So, do smart people tend to be smart because theirs genes are like how the blueprints of a 12 cylinder Jaguar are designed to impart a high maximum speed?

    Or do smart people tend to be smart less because they have rare patterns of high-performance genes that, if all worked well, would grant them unusually high IQs the way a Jaguar could go really fast, if all worked well … but instead, smart people tend to be smart because their brains were assembled with fewer glitches, the way a Camry built at the Nagoya factory in 1985 was likely to need fewer lifetime repairs than a Jaguar built at the English factory?

  50. Hitler was just 175 cm himself.

    Quite tall for someone born in 1889

    https://i.imgur.com/mW327Eo.png

  51. Passerby60 says

    In summary, the lower your IQ is, the more you can accept intelligence gene-editing for your offspring.

  52. HenryBaker says

    So nazi that they imposed a 1 childe policy on Han while giving minorities exceptions.

  53. HenryBaker says

    Based Westerners colonizing ourselves

  54. Caspar Von Everec says

    As strange as it sounds, yes. They would’ve probably opposed genetic engineering. They had a blood and soil view of the world where nature and the human form was sacred. Thus, the world’s first animal welfare laws and the best environmental regulations.

    They wanted to uplift the Teutonic race through eugenic breeding, not gene editing. Frankly, genetic engineering is an extremely dangerous gamble. Genes work in tandem with multiple other genes and often have ripple effects down the line. For all we know, increasing people’s IQ could result in debilitating mental illness and physical deformities down the line.

    And this catastrophe would more or less be impossible to reverse. Eugenic breeding is the way to go. The Chinese mind you have been looking into the genes of mathematical geniuses

  55. sudden death says

    Just ask any of those 100,000 Kenyan women sterilised without consent by creepy Bill’s tubercolosis “vaccine”.

    And this is somehow bad, because we have such a striking deficit of Africans in the world? In fact Gates should be the new WN hero for this feat 😉

  56. reiner Tor says

    It probably played a role in him being so charismatic.

  57. Caspar Von Everec says

    Yeah, what Jews are doing to whites is monstrous. Its a shame that Hitler didn’t actually gas them. Half the world’s evil would disappear if Hitler had actually ordered their elimination

  58. reiner Tor says
  59. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    I highly doubt this as even Yao Ming only has one kid (a girl).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Li

    Yao should be having 10 kids each with 50 wives

    https://i.insider.com/5437f6b6ecad04cc2be71697?width=1100&format=jpeg&auto=webp

  60. Yellowface Anon says

    And you suppose the CCP isn’t secretly shaking hands with Gates and Schwab.

    The only singularity in front of us is one of the natural economy. Industrial modernism is just a blip in the world of harsh survival and the cosmos of the Fermi Paradox.

  61. So I had this thought. What if Ukraine is massively reinforcing the frontlines not to stage an attack on the republics, but to eventually write them off, as well as Crimea, making sure they are unable to advance any futher, and then apply to join NATO?

    Zrada or peremoga?

  62. Daniel Chieh says

    Genes work in tandem with multiple other genes and often have ripple effects down the line

    Yeah, so does everything. That’s why experiments exist. It’s not like CRISPR is making edits to the germline in anything I saw.

    The rest of your post is blissfully free of anything meaningful to engage with. It’s safe to assume that Mengele would disagree with you on the value of genetic alterations.

  63. Daniel Chieh says

    Also relevant to embryo research:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01906-4

    A suite of experiments that use the gene-editing tool CRISPR–Cas9 to modify human embryos have revealed how the process can make large, unwanted changes to the genome at or near the target site.

    Which is a reason to research more, not a reason to give up.

  64. The Alarmist says

    Yes, a world shaped in the form of India can only be a better place, if only for the savings on toilet paper, water, and plumbing.

  65. India is actually a perfect candidate. It’s abysmal average IQ but ludicrous population allows for a smart fraction that is large in absolute numbers, large enough to carry out such a project, and a very big motive to do it in the first place.

    Combine it with the fact they absolutely detest those beneath them means they’ll experiment on those ultra poor untouchables with impunity.

    On the other hand, I wouldn’t count the Chinese out just yet. They might not be able to do it in China itself, but there’s all of Africa to do this shit. Even if the natives complain out of their superstitious beliefs, they won’t do shit, let alone enforce laws.

  66. Nah. I want the eternal wes*id to suffer for their insufferable personalities and other historical reasons. Chinese domination is essential.

    We will make hell on Earth then factor the suffering by a gogoolplex.

    I hereby welcome the very very long reign of ultramalthusian industrialism. Imagine Somalia combined with the Khmer Rogue but everyone has McNukes.

    Globally.

    Which is no problem. After all – coal turns to diamond under pressure.

    And if we maximize the pressure, we get to the end result faster.

  67. Ah transhumanism, another sci-fi fantasy that dorks with too much time on their hands want to see come alive. Has the author tried joining a neo-Crowleian sex-magick cult? Perhaps he can escape the Age of Malthusian Industrialism that way…. SMH.

  68. Caspar Von Everec says

    Lol. Mengele?

    What’s next? Are you going to tell me the Germans gassed Jews, joined twins and put needles into children’s eyes?

    Stop believing in allied war propaganda and you might learn a thing or two. The original Aushcwitz camp was destroyed before the Soviets conquered it. The camp we see today was entirely built up from scratch by the Stalinist government. Supposedly a perfect replica.

    It had wooden doors on gas chambers and no trace of Prussian blue on the wall that would’ve happened if Hydrogen Cyanide was used as that’s the product upon reaction with concrete. Plus the Germans had hundreds of tons of Sarin and chlorine gas in stock.

    Why would they twist their arms to use Zyklon B, a pesticide?

    The Germans wanted to gas the Jews so badly that they built swimming pools and gyms at the camp.

    Most of all, where are the six million bodies? Where are they? Where are these mass graves?

    The Germans were so evil to the innocent Jews that when given the offer, most of the inmates at the camp chose to rather go with the Germans west than stay with the Soviets who raped and robbed any sentient being in site including their own people.

    Millions of Jews did die in WW2, but not because they were gassed. Some 7 million Jews lived in the pale of settlement, approximately on the lands of the old Polish Lithuanian commonwealth. These regions saw the heaviest combat in all of human history.

    Biyalistok-Minsk, Uman, Brody, Raesani, Kiev, the four battles of Kharkov, Crimea, the Orel counter offensive, the Dnieper campaign, Operation Bagration, Bautzen, Vistual-oder offensive…the amount of land combat fought on these lands surpass that of all other WW2 fronts combined.

    These lands suffered extensive depopulation as a result. Starvation due to allied bombing and German requisitions and scorched earth tactics, collateral damage, exposure to the elements and sickness…this killed most civilians. Poland lost a quarter of its people, Belarus over 30%, Ukraine similar.

    Since Jews concentrated in these lands, they too suffered a 25-30% casualty rate or higher. Its nothing out of the ordinary for such wars. During the thirty years war when armies numbered in the 30,000 range and soldiers fought with swords and muskets, Germany lost 30% of its population.

    The six million figure is totally bogus and has been refuted multiple times on THIS SITE. The six million figure appeared first in the 19th century, it again appeared in 1944 before the war even ended. It has a special meaning in their weird Kabbalahistic religion.

    The holocaust is such a true event that no US president even talked about it till the 70s. Only in the 70s when Jews fully supplanted the idiotic WASP establishment did Holocaust fan fiction spread like wildfire.

    Its so grounded in fact that if you question or debate it you can be sent to jail in two dozen countries.

    This cartoonishly evil portrayal of a defeated Germany isn’t even new. Even in WW1, the Anglo-American media made such claims. Germans rape Belgians on an industrial scale, Germans practice bayonets on Belgian babies, Germans are planning to starve and depopulate Poland…after the war all was proven to be BS.

    After WW2, it was not because the Jews had firm control of US politics and this became their rallying cause, the center of the new religion of anti-racism and globalism.

  69. Caspar Von Everec says

    Stop believing in allied war propaganda. The original Aushcwitz camp was destroyed before the Soviets conquered it. The camp we see today was entirely built up from scratch by the Stalinist government. Supposedly a perfect replica.

    It had wooden doors on gas chambers and no trace of Prussian blue on the wall that would’ve happened if Hydrogen Cyanide was used as that’s the product upon reaction with concrete. Plus the Germans had hundreds of tons of Sarin and chlorine gas in stock.

    Why would they twist their arms to use Zyklon B, a pesticide?

    The Germans wanted to gas the Jews so badly that they built swimming pools and gyms at the camp.

    Most of all, where are the six million bodies? Where are they? Where are these mass graves?

    The Germans were so evil to the innocent Jews that when given the offer, most of the inmates at the camp chose to rather go with the Germans west than stay with the Soviets who raped and robbed any sentient being in site including their own people.

    Millions of Jews did die in WW2, but not because they were gassed. Some 7 million Jews lived in the pale of settlement, approximately on the lands of the old Polish Lithuanian commonwealth. These regions saw the heaviest combat in all of human history.

    Biyalistok-Minsk, Uman, Brody, Raesani, Kiev, the four battles of Kharkov, Crimea, the Orel counter offensive, the Dnieper campaign, Operation Bagration, Bautzen, Vistual-oder offensive…the amount of land combat fought on these lands surpass that of all other WW2 fronts combined.

    These lands suffered extensive depopulation as a result. Starvation due to allied bombing and German requisitions and scorched earth tactics, collateral damage, exposure to the elements and sickness…this killed most civilians. Poland lost a quarter of its people, Belarus over 30%, Ukraine similar.

    Since Jews concentrated in these lands, they too suffered a 25-30% casualty rate or higher. Its nothing out of the ordinary for such wars. During the thirty years war when armies numbered in the 30,000 range and soldiers fought with swords and muskets, Germany lost 30% of its population.

    The six million figure is totally bogus and has been refuted multiple times on THIS SITE. The six million figure appeared first in the 19th century, it again appeared in 1944 before the war even ended. It has a special meaning in their weird Kabbalahistic religion.

    The holocaust is such a true event that no US president even talked about it till the 70s. Only in the 70s when Jews fully supplanted the idiotic WASP establishment did Holocaust fan fiction spread like wildfire.

    Its so grounded in fact that if you question or debate it you can be sent to jail in two dozen countries.

    This cartoonishly evil portrayal of a defeated Germany isn’t even new. Even in WW1, the Anglo-American media made such claims. Germans rape Belgians on an industrial scale, Germans practice bayonets on Belgian babies, Germans are planning to starve and depopulate Poland…after the war all was proven to be BS.

    After WW2, it was not because the Jews had firm control of US politics and this became their rallying cause, the center of the new religion of anti-racism and globalism.

  70. Caspar Von Everec says

    Volunteer. Chinese coal mines need labor.

  71. Daniel Chieh says

    Do you also think that Germans didn’t use Panzerschokolade because of its artificial effects upon the human body? Or that the German shepherd wasn’t basically made by the genetic engineering of the way, by mass breeding of puppies for traits followed by slaughter of any puppies that showed any issues?

    The reason why I mentioned Dr. Mengele was because he was a scientist clearly interested in advancing his knowledge(and by all evidence, human enhancement). And this research isn’t “faked” because some of it has been used in modern science, regardless of its sourcing.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation#Bone,_muscle,_and_nerve_transplantation_experiments

    At any rate, this is not the best thread for you to go on a long and extended Holocaust diggression.

  72. Yellowface Anon says

    I’m not sure if there will be firm industrialism anywhere by 2050 – China still being industrial is a big possibility.

  73. Yellowface Anon says

    Karlin is full of this sh*t while the real post-industrial world cracks apart.

    The best survival strategy is necessarily reclaiming productive labor by your own hands, without depending on fickling machine power.

  74. Daniel Chieh says
  75. Yellowface Anon says

    So what? The Biden regime wants to have a motoring tax levied per mile.

    You might expect me to say “they are right for the wrong reasons”, but I see cyclical history and periods of high connectivity followed by darker ages of isolation. Some trends are inevitable, like how we’ve passed peak mobility for now. Maybe decades or centuries later trends will become favorable again.

    Do you think mobility is a good thing to pursue?

  76. Daniel Chieh says
  77. Do remember that Khan came from India. A name like Singh Noonian Khan suggests his parents were Sikhs, looking to give an even further leg up for their firstborn son. Gene Roddenberry got one detail wrong. Sikhs have “Singh” as their middle name, not their first name.

    I used to have this strange theory about Khan, back when I had some wrong ideas about names and hadn’t seen something with the character in it for a while.

    I thought “Khan” was a Muslim name, so that he was a Sikh-Muslim combo, and I thought “Noonian” was “Nguyen”, a Vietnamese name. That the whole combination was subtle nod to the idea that Central Asia became some big battlefield, during WW3.

  78. Or that the German shepherd wasn’t basically made by the genetic engineering of the way, by mass breeding of puppies for traits followed by slaughter of any puppies that showed any issues?

    Go back 130 years or so and look at old dog registrations out in the country. You will find very few female dogs. And very few long-lived dogs.

  79. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    That was done under lunatic Mao regime. 

    Hyperbole. Korean War was started by Kim with Stalin’s approval. As US Army approached Yalu River, Mao was the only Commie leader to support intervention. Everyone else in Politburo did not believe the new PRC had a chance against Americans who just came off victories against Wehrmacht and Japan. Today in PRC this decision by Mao is viewed overwhelmingly positive even heroic.

    The flip side was that Mao’s prestige both inside PRC and Socialist Camp became bloated that he came to clearly overshadow Khrushchev. He was even consulted during the Polish/Hungarian uprisings.

    According to some sources, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong played an important role in Khrushchev’s decision to suppress the Hungarian uprising.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956#Soviet_perspective

    And this let to some of Mao’s questionable moves with respect to Sino-Soviet split. But unlike another megalomaniacal dictator, Mao made sure his bets were hedged before he messed with Soviet Union, by becoming nuclear armed first.

    It’s difficult get a nuanced understanding of Mao, as there aren’t many good English sources. There are also a lot of unopened/hidden archives, in Chinese and Russian.

  80. But this research has zero need for human embryos.
    To tinker CRISPR–Cas9 to work reliably on eucaryotic genomes (probably not achievable), mouse embryo is exactly as good as human one. And at current stage a cell-line is even better. Embryo editing makes nice headlines in press but adds very little scientific value in comparison with more straightforward approaches.
    If gene editing of children proves to be viable, the path to go is probably to make cell-lines from parents, introduce targeted changes, test thoroughly, then convert these cell-lines to gametes and create embryo.

  81. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    At the outbreak of Sino-Japanese War in 1937, China had a larger GDP than Japan. But no match in terms of industrial capacity.

    As of 2018, China’s industrial capacity > US+Japan+Germany https://www.statista.com/chart/20858/top-10-countries-by-share-of-global-manufacturing-output/

  82. Boomthorkell says

    Typically the people doing opens defecation in any society aren’t the ones developing genetics, so this really shouldn’t be an issue.

    Besides, China finally got rid of its open defecation and look where that got them? Maybe America finally embracing this path will lead us to a better…A Eu-future. Lol.

  83. I highly doubt this as even Yao Ming only has one kid (a girl).

    I’m not sure trying to breed Yao Mings makes sense.

    We are not really evolved for being tall. It creates back and knee problems. I don’t know if tall people make good soldiers anymore, now that we shoot bullets at each other. Plus, I’m not sure it is a good idea to promote basketball in China, as it has really become a black sport, as has spectator sports in general.

    Though, perhaps, there is a case to be made for breeding tall people to make imposing baddies in action movies. Or as policemen to manhandle people.

  84. Daniel Chieh says

    To tinker CRISPR–Cas9 to work reliably on eucaryotic genomes (probably not achievable), mouse embryo is exactly as good as human one. And at current stage a cell-line is even better. Embryo editing makes nice headlines in press but adds very little scientific value in comparison with more straightforward approaches.

    If you look at one of the links in the article, efforts to duplicate human brain conditions on mice have been proving fruitless. Mouse embryo is not exactly just as good for such things – the brain is too different, though a primate embryo might be.

    But yes, I overall agree that right now, messing with human embryos isn’t all that useful so this “ban” doesn’t prevent biosingularity.

  85. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    I don’t disagree you but there are some harsher passages in Dao De Jing that are debatable in interpretation:

    天地不仁,以万物为刍狗;圣人不仁,以百姓为刍狗。

    can be translated more softly as

    But for heaven and earth’s humaneness, the ten thousand things are straw dogs.
    But for the holy man’s humaneness, the hundred families are straw dogs.

    or more harshly as

    Heaven and earth do not act from (the impulse of) any wish to be benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt with. The sages do not act from (any wish to be) benevolent; they deal with the people as the dogs of grass are dealt with.

    https://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/daodejing05.php

    Problem is authorship attribution, we don’t know if Lao Zi was a real person (maybe another Caucasoid shaman Lol)

  86. Boomthorkell says

    The best focus would be blood-regeneration therapy, which has floated around in Science Fiction since Heinlein, and is now being put into practice. Things also like PRP stem-cell therapy. These are things that can help most normal people, including regrowing limbs, and don’t require any genetic editing.

    I wouldn’t be so negative on any gene-therapy. We don’t know what is actually being done to some secretive elite somewhere.

    You’re calling the Chinese prudent for once! Here I thought (according to you) they were a wasteful society of communists who don’t breed and are inhuman slime.

  87. Dacian Julien Soros says

    This may be an upsetting setback, but I am sure that you, Yudkowski and Church, with your excellent genetic and genomic skills, will more than make up. I hear Yuda-kowski lost some of his fat, shattering the myth that some deeds are beyond the abilities of transhumanists.

  88. Boomthorkell says

    India didn’t exist back then, in the same sense China didn’t exist when the Mongols invaded. The geographical entity existed. A shared super-culture existed. India definitely did not. If the British had tried “invading” (they didn’t really invade much in India, truth be told) the Mughal Empire in its prime, or an equivalently “powerful” UK military now against a modern India (leave nukes out it), they would not habe had the success they did.

    This doesn’t detract from their accomplishments of course. Taking over a fractured region is still taking over a region, and much smarter than trying to take on a entire Eurasian Empire, etc.

    As for the Qing, you’re dead right there! One can’t get slack. Those gun boats though were representative of a collective European military which would represent…millions of terrifyingly advanced soldiers at the time. Not a tiny force in toto.

  89. Abelard Lindsey says

    I remember Yao Ming with the Houston Rockets. I was one of his biggest fans. He was a very “economical” player in that he was very effective at handling the ball with comparatively little movement compared to other players. The problem with such extreme height is that injuries are easily come by. I believe Ming was sidelined by an injury after only a few years of play.

  90. Abelard Lindsey says

    Its Star Trek “canon” that Khan came from northwest India, which is where the Sikhs live. The Sihks tend to be bigger, physically stronger, more intelligent, and MUCH more entrepreneurial than most other Indians. In intelligence, they are in second place to the Parsis, the latter numbering only around 75,000.

  91. Daniel Chieh says

    When they stop open defecation.

    Maybe our future Indian masters will simply genetically engineer away defecation, preventing the need for toilets and saving considerably on water and infrastructure costs. That’ll show all those people making “streetshitter” comments forever.

  92. Keep it as an adaption against globalist invasion?

    (India has less tourists than Hungary.)

  93. The plans of the Chinese leaders, for the improvement of intelligence, are unknown to outsiders.

    It matters not what the opinion of the Chinese masses is on this subject…just as in America. The difference is Americans think it matters…Chinese know it doesn’t.

  94. Black projects are overrated.

    Reliability is maxed out when you have quantity. Black projects can’t do quantity by definition (otherwise they get noticed). Limited scope for iterative improvement.

    It also implies there exist highly energetic, imaginative, and ambitious people in these bureaucratic structures. This isn’t true. Such people gravitate towards commercial structures.

    There’s a good chance China doesn’t even have thousands of nukes.

    There are Western and Russian theories that it does (e.g. see Karber and so forth which I have blogged about). But more likely this is just Indo-Europeans projecting their own psychopathy, paranoia, and lust for power onto “calmer”, much less warlike peoples.

  95. But GDP per capita was very low, barely above subsistence (i.e. very low surplus, which is what you actually need to get interesting things done), coupled with weak state capacity; neither of these two conditions apply now.

  96. Abelard Lindsey says

    On deeper thought, this Chinese policy is not such a big deal either way. The only relevant traits from a societal-level long term perspective are IQ and executive function. We know that IQ is determined by at least 1000 genes acting in concert. Executive function is determined by an even larger number of genes. Modifying this number of genes is way beyond the capabilities of CRISPR. We need whole chromosome synthesis for this, which is a good 15-20 years away. That’s why “designer” babies are not showing up any time soon despite the hype, which is why the hype is going away. The earliest designer babies will be born during the 2040’s.

    The Chinese policy makes sense, especially in view of the development process of trials and errors as someone pointed out earlier here. CRISPR is not useful for this and the whole chromosome synthesis technology is still 15 years away.

    Something else to consider is that the correlation between IQ and socioeconomic success breaks down somewhere between 105 to 115 IQ. The reason is simple. Most success stories involve building businesses of a non-technical nature. A chain of tire shops, for example. You need some accounting skills. But most business activity on a day to day basis is the “grunt” stuff that you have to do on a timely basis. It is not technical rocket science. It is only technology work that requires the high IQ’s, and that is actually a small part of the total economy.

    Where i think the biosingularity might have significance is if that 250 IQ designer kid born in 2045 invents the traversable wormhole in 2062.

  97. Thomas Faber says

    Ah, it seems the wisdom of the Tao is still alive in the ancient kingdom!

    Work with nature, not against Her. All else is foolishness.

    All that money, all that effort… there are better ways to spend it.

    The genome is a monster of complexity – and the machinery of the cell an utterly, awesomely incredible creation. Tinkering with it, with our pitiful knowledge of it, really strikes me as a fools gambit. And AI is a dead end. AI winter coming soon! Space travel? Forget it. Outside of the magnetic field of the Earth is a veritable bombardement of charged particles and electromagnetic radiation – biological life is toast there – except perhaps if we understand electromagnetics better (where’s Tesla when we need him? 🙂 ).

    On the other hand, there are very exciting frontiers in science: the electric universe theory of physics, including plasma physics – the electromagnetic radiation/frequency/quantum biochemistry, and psychic research.

    I do hope that the secrets of Tesla and Royal Raymond Rife see the light of day soon, too – they were both operating in the electric paradigm – one in physics, the other in medicine. We shall see 🙂

    Here’s a 2 hour documentary on Royal Raymond Rife for those who haven’t seen it – extremely interesting! His profound research was stolen, and stowed away in secret – just like Tesla’s.

    “The rise and fall of a scientific genius – the forgotten story of Royal Raymond Rife”
    https://www.bitchute.com/video/3QBjjdqk0Sc/

  98. Daniel Chieh says

    including plasma physics – the electromagnetic radiation/frequency/quantum biochemistry, and psychic research.

    Powerful.

    Please hang out here more often.

  99. Thomas Faber says

    Check out Dean Radin’s “The Conscious Universe” if you haven’t read it. Rock-solid statistical evidence of psychic phenomena. Combined results 1 / 10.000.000.000.000 chance of it being random results (meta-statistical aggregate of the results of many years, and from many scientists), if remember correctly.

  100. Shortsword says

    Do you know that China used to account for something like 20% of the world’s GDP around 1800?

    And 30% of the world population (according to the estimate on Wikipedia). That was before industrialization had taken off so GDP per capita only differed by a factor of maybe 3 times between the more developed countries and the comparatively undeveloped ones.

  101. Abelard Lindsey says

    The primary trait associated with success and simple functional living is executive function, much more than IQ itself. The genetics behind executive function are even less defined than that of IQ. More significantly, many of the personality traits that comprise executive function are optimized at intermediate levels (for example, agreeableness). Optimization at intermediate values will prove to be very difficult to design apriori in germline genetic engineering. I think the Chinese leaders are likely aware of these realities and are setting policy based on them. I actually do not see much downside to them for the reasons posted here and previously.

    Even as the hard core trasnhumanist that I am, I find the necessary trial and error process of development (as someone posted earlier) to be highly repellent. Remember, transhumanism is supposed to be about increased liberty and self-empowerment, not about turning some humans into disposable research tools. I think the Chinese policy is quite reasonable, for now.

  102. Daniel Chieh says

    Dean Radin is often accused of manipulating his methodology to get what he wants, and he’s never seen an occult phenomena that he doesn’t seem to believe:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Radin

    But that said, yes, I’ve actually read his work, including his latest book. Perhaps surprisingly, but then again perhaps not so much given my own debt to Hermeticism, I have considerable interest and acceptance in the potential validity of occult phenomena and have practiced some of the initiation as per Franz Bardon.

    I don’t think that negates the potential of CRISPR, though, but is just another layer of truth atop the physical dimension that we generally exist and concern ourselves with.

  103. Thomas Faber says

    Oh, CRISPR works, allright. But our understanding of genetics is like an ant before a Sun God. You should watch that Raymond Rife documentary – there seems to be much more to the genome than what is currently believed.

    Regarding Dean Radin – well, accusations are accusations. I don’t think it a stretch to believe that some people would have a great interest in smearing his name, especially people who find it easier to control the masses if the masses believe that they are nothing but bags of flesh and bone.

  104. Daniel Chieh says

    We’ve been breeding plants and animals for quite some time, often with terrible ideas of inheritance(horses were sometimes bred with only consideration for the stallion’s qualities, or the mare’s or only to have the youngest mares, etc). I think that we’ll manage, so as long as we humble ourselves and learn. And in learning of the universe, so we learn of the Divine.

    The great Hermetic students like Isaac Newton, I think, were unified by their love of God and sought to see His face and reveal His work in the laws he set forth: even the very notion of the occult itself, after all, merely means “secret” but to that which is revealed and standardized, now we know as “science.”

  105. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    From here
    https://www.eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Broadberry.pdf

    China’s GDP per capita reached its peak level during the Northern Song dynasty, before entering a long decline which lasted through the Ming and Qing dynasties

    From an international perspective, Northern Song China was substantially richer than Domesday Britain in 1090, but by 1400 Britain had overtaken China. During the Ming dynasty, China’s per capita income fluctuated around 90 per cent of the British level.

    By the mid-nineteenth century, China’s GDP per capita was around 20 per cent of the British level. Although China led the world in living standard during the Northern Song dynasty, China had fallen behind Italy by 1300.

    All reasonable here, Northern Song was considered pre-industrial civilization par excellence and high point of Chinese history. But unfortunately they were nerds who got beat up by Altaic jocks.

    At this point, however, and even until the seventeenth century, it is quite possible that a relatively rich Chinese region such as the Yangzi Delta was on a par with the most developed parts of Europe.

    Per AK earlier thread on China 2050 GDP. Without significant change in creativity levels, I see unlikely that GDP per capita levels reach Germany or even Japan’s level. But Tier 1 cities have US/Germany potential.

  106. HenryBaker says

    But more likely this is just Indo-Europeans projecting their own psychopathy, paranoia, and lust for power onto “calmer”, much less warlike peoples.

    That’s a very interesting thought, actually. To what extent might our fears about China just be projection? Then again, a ‘calm’ people like the Japanese was very capable of massive warfare and imperialism. Why not the Chinamen…

  107. Daniel Chieh says

    For better or worse, the Japanese have always been much more into war: much higher mobilization, greater valorization of violence, and a ruling caste of warriors rather than scholars. China seems to have exhausted themselves out of valorization of war, perhaps by the end of the Warring States era(possibly earlier, I read some analysis that even very early on, Chinese fiction saw the warrior’s lot as necessary, while Indo-European fiction was much more likely to portray it as a heroic).

    At any rate, Confucianists put soldiery among the lowest of professions and while the actual status of it was variable, its definitely has the association of low status, even to this day.

  108. Sexpat Westerners are a hostile minority.

  109. I suspect this will be big with Muslims too.I forsee a much greater acceptance among Muslims to engineer out the ill effects of first cousin marraiges than as a society look at the evidence and ban such marraiges.

    Banging one’s cousins is just too tempting, eh?

  110. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    Though, perhaps, there is a case to be made for breeding tall people to make imposing baddies in action movies. Or as policemen to manhandle people.

    There’s already a black aristocracy in NBA/NFL as former bn superstars have tons of sons who make it.

    as it has really become a black sport

    Obviously. But would be good to see where’s East asian genetic limit. See here Chinese Basketball Association slam dunk contest, not bn level but hardly embarrassing.

    Height is not a problem and neither is leaping ability. There is though a shortage of I think spontaneity and creativity that blacks and meds/Latins (they tend to be the best white bballers) have more.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxRIZMs8LuI

  111. reiner Tor says

    Mao made sure his bets were hedged before he messed with Soviet Union, by becoming nuclear armed first.

    But he didn’t have delivery systems until much later. I read somewhere (but maybe it’s an urban legend) that the Soviets asked the Americans in the 1960s if they would be okay with it if they destroyed the nuclear plants of this lunatic Mao. The Americans said no, because they were already inching closer to China.

    Anyway he did have a relatively dangerous period for a while during and after the cultural revolution, when his relations with the USSR had already broken down, but his relations with the Americans were still hostile.

  112. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    I followed his career closely. They thought he would be a big stiff like Manute Bol initially, because he had short/weak arms, and can’t jump very high.

    But turned out his legs are huge so that no one Shaq incl’d could push him around. Very soft hands, ball skills, and passing ability.

    His feet broke down b/c he always played over the summer with China National team. Had he played a full career, most assess he would have been a top 15 all time center

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DzSGPad_z4

  113. Rattus Norwegius says

    While that is probably true, once one country begin the research and get results, then everyone will desire access to it no matter how it was discovered. Perhaps the research will be denounced at first, but over time it will seen as a neccessary evil, or even as morally acceptable.

  114. reiner Tor says

    Without significant change in creativity levels, I see unlikely that GDP per capita levels reach Germany or even Japan’s level.

    It will have Korean levels of creativity and thus should have similar GDP, but it will have way better economies of scale, so it will be better. Perhaps between Japan and South Korea. Perhaps even Japanese level.

  115. AnonFromTN says

    I don’t see that China torpedoes anything. They always operate under the rule that what’s forbidden to unauthorized people is allowed to the government.

    I also don’t see how with scant knowledge of what genes affect intelligence (real one, not IQ) any meaningful boost can occur within the next 10-20 years, regardless of technology. As far as CRISPR/Cas9 is concerned, quite a few studies found that you actually unintentionally change dozens of other genes in addition to the ones you wish to target. It’s usually OK in cultured cells, but it would be a disaster in an animal (including human animal), where all your genes are involved in the development and proper function. FYI, we have more than 25,000 protein-coding genes and likely as many regulatory non-coding sequences in our genome. Non-coding sequences are at least as important as protein-coding ones. E.g., our protein-coding genes are ~98% identical to those of chimps, but humans (at least many of them) are quite different.

    Bottom line is, right now we don’t have means to target exclusively the genes we want, and we don’t know which genes need to be targeted and how exactly they need to be changed to boost intelligence. Sorry, transhumanists, that’s where we are.

  116. Vishnugupta says

    That plus their prophet declared it halal so that is the will of god… discussing a ban on cousin marraiges is therefore blasphemy..

  117. Mr. Hack says

    I had similar thoughts today after I read this piece within Ukrainska Pravda, one of the most popular news outlets in Ukraine. It looks like the New Biden administration is starting a full court press to get Ukraine into NATO. I’m sure that you can have this piece translated into English, or if you know Russian, you can read it quite easily for I’ve been led to believe from those that know that read this blog, that Ukrainian is just a dialect of Russian, with a few Polish word thrown into the mix: 🙂

    https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2021/04/6/7289255/

    https://img.pravda.com/images/doc/6/4/64997ed-caba2c7-usa-russia690.jpg

  118. Mulga Mumblebrain says

    That’s cryptic. I rather admired the idiocy of your assertion that the Chinese were ‘docile’. Given China’s history or revolts, peasant uprisings, civil conflicts and the like, that was remarkably ignorant, to be kind.

  119. Mulga Mumblebrain says

    I think that assertions that the Chinese lack ‘creativity’, a favourite for some time of frightened Western racists, are really quite stupid, but there’s a lot of that about these days.

  120. Mulga Mumblebrain says

    Completely wrong. The Chinese leadership endlessly surveys public opinion to ensure that policies have mass support, hence the 95% favourable or highly favourable public opinion of the Government revealed by a recent Harvard survey.

  121. But unfortunately they were nerds who got beat up by Altaic jocks.

    They got punished for devaluing military strength.

    Without significant change in creativity levels, I see unlikely that GDP per capita levels reach Germany or even Japan’s level. But Tier 1 cities have US/Germany potential.

    China has massive economies of scale – it is a world-civilization unto itself. This will make up for a lot of hindrances.

  122. songbird says

    How practical would it be to make superdogs? I really feel like that what transhumanists should get excited about, as a demonstration of technology.

    The market for superior pet/working dogs could be big. And there are many ways you could improve them.

    For example: smarter scent dogs that need less training, and that can be in service for a long time without getting old or dying. Or dogs that could be companion animals for progressives and detect an attack of poz, and bite them or start barking, when one is coming on.

  123. So, if their prophet also declared banging nine-year-olds halal, then there should be no attempt by Muslims to change their views on this even 1,500 years later when other people have a vastly different moral system than their ancestors had in 600 AD?

  124. China has massive economies of scale – it is a world-civilization unto itself. This will make up for a lot of hindrances.

    Just how many people is necessary for a genuine economy of scale?

  125. Boomthorkell says

    Starship Troopers had them, and they were great.

    As for practicality…well, if a society does have the means, someone can find it practical for something. Dogs would likely be a more practical animal to do it to than Zerbras or Cats.

  126. Daniel Chieh says

    https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warframe/images/2/2e/SahasaKubrowCodex.png

    China did create the supermuscular dog and I believe they speculated if it had military use. Who knows. I have some awareness of the scores they use to measure for rescue and search dogs:

    1) Footing. The dog has to reach its target through fake rubble without stumbling excessively. This is a measure of his ability to move.

    2) Distractability. For this, the dog is tossed a toy but to reach the toy, he has to cross by a bowl of food or other distraction. This is a measure of his executive control.

    https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Training_the_Search_and_Rescue_Dog/Candidate_Selection

    All of those cognitive traits are pretty far from our ability to control, right now its mostly by breed, but yes, its something that one could probably genetically create and perhaps give us the wardogs-equivalents of Warframe.

  127. reiner Tor says

    South Korean scientific paper production is lower. I know most of these are useless, but probably they produce fewer of the useful variety, too. Also I think most people do realize that there is a difference, and based on the somewhat lower GDP, it must be relevant.

    Whether it’s creativity, or risk taking, or whatever, it doesn’t matter. Asians seem to have a lower ability to generate GDP relative to IQ, even if globally that’s still a high number.

    I was also responding to a commenter (himself apparently Chinese) that the Chinese are going to have a lower GDP based on their lower creativity. I think the South Korean per capita number is a reasonable floor to eventual Chinese GDP, but it will probably be higher, possibly much higher, due to economies of scale.

  128. reiner Tor says

    What kind of question is that? Obviously the more the better, but the benefits constantly slow down with size. So the difference between 10 and 100 million might be similar or even bigger than between 100 million and a billion.

    There might be a human society which is actually bigger than the optimal and has negative economies of scale, but it’s around the size of the Galactic Empire in Asimov’s works.

  129. Levtraro says

    It also implies there exist highly energetic, imaginative, and ambitious people in these bureaucratic structures. This isn’t true. Such people gravitate towards commercial structures.

    Totally wrong. The State attracts ambitious mediocrities through the electoral process in western democracies, but it also attracts highly energetic, innovative and creative people through other means in the West and even more so in China. Commercial structures, with their limited scope (mundane profit, selling trinkets), only attract second-tier innovative, creative and ambitious people. The truly creative and innovative and ambitious gravitate towards special slots in the State structure created for them, where they enjoy seeing the vast impact of their work in the wider scope of national objectives.

  130. EternalSpring says

    I cannot agree. I have to remind you that Manhattan Project was a black project. A bunch of incredibly smart, highly motivated people developed a weapon that forever changed the world in almost complete secrecy. If Americans can do it, why do you assume that Chinese can’t? Or even wouldn’t want to?

  131. Levtraro says

    Generally, we have severe problems dealing with systems composed of multiple interacting components, and the genome as you say is a super-highly complex system. I think the only achievable way to truly fine tune those systems to obtain specific desired results and control most if not all unexpected outcomes lies in algorithms executed by AIs using quantum computing (QAI).

  132. reiner Tor says

    But it was in wartime. It couldn’t have been done in peacetime. Also more difficult in the age of the internet and ubiquitous smartphones and cameras.

  133. EldnahYm says

    It also implies there exist highly energetic, imaginative, and ambitious people in these bureaucratic structures. This isn’t true. Such people gravitate towards commercial structures.

    There are energetic, imaginative, and ambitious people in DARPA. You’ve been hanging around “rationalist” (I can’t think of a more ill-fitting name) people too long. The private sector itself is next to useless for big projects unless they have large government funding, usually with some connection to the military. Most “new” technology around you is a result of former military research. Otherwise it’s agricultural or energy research, research which wouldn’t exist without government subsidies.

    The nearest exception I can think of is a field no one cares about, manufacturing, namely production processes. There, it’s relatively cheap for private sector firms to carry out their own research and implement. But breakthroughs don’t come often in that field. It’s almost all small iterations.

    Reliability is maxed out when you have quantity. Black projects can’t do quantity by definition (otherwise they get noticed). Limited scope for iterative improvement.

    Maxing out reliability usually comes later in the lifespan of a technology. The critical research and early creation part comes earlier, when private sector incentives would not justify the research.

    Many technological deployments don’t require the same type of reliability anyway as consumer products. It’s relatively simple to figure if you’re bomb is likely to work. It’s mostly testing. You don’t have to worry about all the myriad of dumb things a consumer will use the product for that could get you sued, or have to go through the same regulatory process. You can even get away with killing people on accident.

    Also, modern corporations have a strong tendency to become conservative, bureaucratic, and full of parasites. They’re not very different from the public sector in this respect, contrary to popular belief.

  134. EldnahYm says

    Economy of scale is good for producing more stuff. That’s all. You need people to buy that stuff to generate income. Not a problem in a war economy, but otherwise economy of scale doesn’t automatically make your GDP per capita higher. There is a reason Switzerland is not a backwater.

  135. EternalSpring says

    Guess the security personnel overseeing various secret projects all over the world should close down their shop and go home; it simply cannot be done unless UN declared there is a World War going on.

    I’m being ironic here, but it’s really quite ridiculous to assert that secret research cannot be done when we literally see the results of it everywhere. Even measly tech companies generally manage to create phone lineups without leaking details in the open, all kinds of military technology was secret when it was first developed, states conceal information all the time. It can be done, there are people for whom it’s literally their livelihood. Besides, I find this idea that Leslie Groves had some kind of unique ability to do stuff that Chinese state simply cannot replicate because they don’t have enough power very strange. Are we talking about the same China here? Who says it doesn’t have a dozen of their own Leslies or two?

  136. I would be very leery of any poll that shows 95% agreement on anything.

    And I would never believe any survey by Harvard.

  137. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita

    See here breakdown for both nominal and PPP by region.
    Let’s only speak of Han majority provinces (not metro-cities).

    Jiangsu 80mil pop/ 18k nom/29k ppp — already mid-EU level

    But

    Gansu 26mil/ 5k nom/ 8k ppp

    That’s almost 4x regional discrepancy. Much bigger than Denmark vs. Greece (2x)

    So by 2050, Korea could be a baseline for national GDP per cap. But with still more regional variation than EU,
    Jiangsu and Tier 1 regions i.e. top 300mil pop— close to Germany,
    Gansu, bottom 300mil pop — Mexico level

    Total GDP China vs. US would be 2x

    National GDP per cap at Japan’s level is hard to say, that would make China vs. US 3x, and probably 50% of global GDP

    Per AK’s comments on Japan being ~80% of Germany per capita. 20 years ago the relationship was reversed. ($27k vs 36k in 1999) vs. (45k vs 39k in 2020). So again hard to say at that level

    There also a question of GDP per capita per hours worked. This would further lowering effect on East Asian numbers vs. Europe/US

  138. songbird says

    Been a while since I read Starphip Troopers. Almost forgot about neo-dogs.

    Since dogs were the first animal to be domesticated, it makes sense that they would be the first to be undergo substantial genetic modification for intelligence or other factors.

    One thing that could be done is disease resistance. Fleas. Ticks. Ringworm. Heart worms, tapeworms, Lyme. The veterinarian industry would probably lobby to prevent these improvements from being made.

    You could probably made a dog that would have different security modes. Yellow/red alert. Stop barking – bark at the drop of a hat. Accept anyone with a chip.

  139. songbird says

    Can’t huskies just about run forever, except for cooling issues? Seems like that would be a good trait in many work dogs. One could probably combine the traits of different breeds – give bloodhounds more bite. Give sight dogs better noses.

    Maybe, it would be possible to make dogs that sweat or have other means of cooling down. Or better methods to adjust to the cold. It would probably be easy to cold-adapt different breeds for colder climates (Canadian Chihuahua), or make them better in the water. I’ve been hit by a labrador’s tail before (like a rudder), and it feels like getting wacked by a stegosaurus without the spikes.

    Perhaps, smarter dogs could be made by trying to make dogs with bigger brains. Or rather, by trying to map the brain connections of puppies, based on what works for people. One approach might be take dogs that recognize the names of a lot of objects and try to duplicate or increase that. I’b be surprised if there wasn’t some crossover potential with human GWAS.

    One could probably come up with a more humane way of sterilizing dogs.

    Personally, I’d like to see them bring back the original Irish wolfhounds. And make them live longer, as big dogs tend not to live for long. Also, create coprophagy-free breeds.

  140. Thomas Faber says

    I agree.

    But most scientists are not so humble – and their paymasters are certainly not!

    AnonFromTN (comment #106) expresses something very close to my views on the matter.

    And I would also say, as long as there is intense evil in the power structures of the world, there is no need, nor prudence, in putting more toys and trinkets into their hands. But I am not worried that they’ll crack the genetic code – it’s too profound and obscure for humanity’s present evolution, I believe. Better strive to rediscover Tesla and Rife – they already have that – and it certainly seems like incredibly useful and interesting knowledge.

  141. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    China has massive economies of scale – it is a world-civilization unto itself. This will make up for a lot of hindrances.

    So here I see some wild cards

    1. CNY appreciation— if CNY/USD rate stays fixed and nominal GDP grows to SK level, then China vs. US is 2x. But if CNY/USD moves closer to purchasing parity, say from 6.9 to 4, that means total nominal GDP China vs. US is 3x. Also China becomes more destination for high skilled talent
    2. Academic Standards— to not displace but provide an alternative to Anglo Neo-Liberal Globohomo institutions, especially to Global South. Mandarin gaining as 2nd language, Chinese Univs are still pretty weak at grad level. PRC elites almost exclusively go abroad for grad school. But that might change as they take more lead on emerging techs.

    3. Industrial Standards— This where size comes in as Japan is not able to do this, EU maybe as a whole. PRC can have their versions of IEEE or the analogous thing for microprocessors

    4. CNY as reserve currency — this I see as unlikely as it really pushes US bottom line. But then again, an Asian Euro with Japan/SK has been pushed before

    I know people here get super anxious think about China being 50% of world GDP ’n stuff. But barring major tech breakthroughs in which case all bets are off, per historical pattern Song-Ming-Qing is hit new high, plateau and stagnation.

  142. Daniel Chieh says

    Even semi-secret projects use so much boutique materials, cost-skipping and poor documentation that not only does the US not have the ability to build Apollos, but the US is attempting to reverse engineer their own Spirits now to find out how they work.

    https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39537/the-air-force-needs-to-reverse-engineer-parts-of-its-own-stealth-bomber

    Truly secret projects lack the transparency to contribute technology to the world; they turn out more like Warhammer40k-like mystery projects, which produces the object of desire once, and then the team falls apart, the tooling is lost, and the blueprints are never written(for fear of theft), and you end up with equipment or technology that no one fully understands anymore, let alone can replicate.

    DARPA companies are private companies that bid for government money, and are often not very large. I can think of a few which are innovative in that space: Kraig Biocraft is one of my favorites that is seeking to push dragon silk and of course, Boston Dynamics with their robots, etc. They do not operate particularly as “secret projects”, at least not for the major part of their lifespan – there’s often a period of silence if the government has decided to “go ahead”, and proceeded from prototype to implementation. If there was widespread genetic engineering, etc, we’d see such companies pushing and marketing their accomplishments, because getting DARPA contracts is partly marketing.

    There’s a few old queens that are almost part of the government, the so-called MIC like Lockheed Martin and they suffer a lot of challenges partly due to their near-government nature: Lockheed Martin ended up outsourcing a lot of the software coding to the F-35 to Google, and the M-16 was at one point a terrible weapon:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-bureaucratic-horror-story/545153/

    And of course, let’s not forget the famous M14:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ5Ru7Zu_1I&t=82s

    Today we look at what happens when you mix the Bureau of Ordnance with a cost-cutting Congress and a few people pathologically incapable of admitting to making a mistake, then try and get a working torpedo out of them.

    I suspect Karlin’s opinions are formed less by being around “rationalists” but rather actually working with technology in the Bay Area. Its possible that there’s a bit of bias toward smaller and more agile companies due to software and its low cost of entry, but it seems pretty obvious now that transparency vastly improves delivery in technology, and definitely improves the likelihood that it won’t become a boutique project with no documentation that’s essentially incapable of being modified.

  143. Daniel Chieh says

    Or rather, by trying to map the brain connections of puppies, based on what works for people.

    lol, from what I can tell, we’re still at the level of “Let’s add this gene and see what happens.” Thus the need of trial and error, and many sacrifices.

    https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/mice-become-smarter-with-addition-of-single-human-gene

  144. Daniel Chieh says

    Guess the security personnel overseeing various secret projects all over the world should close down their shop and go home; it simply cannot be done unless UN declared there is a World War going on.

    Should add – many classified labs do testing rather than basic research, at least in the US. Given that companies angling for DARPA contracts have every reason to try to exaggerate to make the sale, the labs are supposed to maintain standards and advise the military on who the winner of such contracts should be. Sometimes, it can be bitter, like when Dragon Skin was rejected:

    https://archive.defense.gov/DODCMSShare/briefingslide/304/070521-D-6570C-001.pdf

    And yes, the top secret masters of the world use powerpoints.

    So while performance characteristics, etc are still important to be kept “secret”, its hardly a good environment to conduct basic research. Exceptions include avonics labs and the like, but as we can see from the Spirit, it ended up requiring a gigantic black ops budget to build something that is poorly documented to the point that the military is trying to reverse engineer it to understand it.

  145. AnonFromTN says

    I think the only achievable way to truly fine tune those systems to obtain specific desired results and control most if not all unexpected outcomes lies in algorithms executed by AIs using quantum computing (QAI).

    That AI would still need correct info input. As computer people say, garbage in – garbage out.

  146. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    In the early 1960s, the United States had “probed” the level of Soviet interest in joint action against Chinese nuclear weapons facilities; now the Soviets probed the US reaction would be if the Soviets attacked the facilities

    the Chinese adopted an asymmetric deterrence strategy that threatened a large conventional “People’s War” in response to a Soviet counterforce nuclear first strike.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict#State_of_near_war

    Yes. Mao really roll the dice there.

    One thing is Japan was by then back on its feet and would have likely intervened if Soviets got too much of an upper hand. As I mentioned on other threads their main motivation for getting into WWII was reaction to Soviet expansion.

    In the aftermath of the conflict, China gained newfound respect in the US, which began to see it as a competent ally against the Soviets during the Cold War.

    But as in case with Korea the gamble paid off. Setting stage with US-Rapprochement and rest is history.

    The latest PRC Cold War research basically saids Soviets mostly gave PRC a fair deal. Provided basis for industrialization, support for taking back Xinjiang/Tibet/Manchuria, etc.

    But Mao was such an Alpha that he only accepted Stalin as boss, tried to bulldoze over Khrushchev on a bunch of issues including Taiwan Question.

    Also for Mao, Great Leap Forward was not about catching up to the Capitalists, but rather to Soviets.

  147. Brain size has around a .25 or .3 correlation with intelligence. Probably, works cross-species as “smarter” species have greater encephalization quotients. In theory, measuring regions discretely or mapping connections – coming up with connectomes using existing brain imaging technology would give you better correlations.

    Dogs reach sexual maturity fast and have large litters. We’ve already bred them to do remarkable things – no other animal understands humans pointing as intuitively as a dog – even wolves. And it is doubtful that any animal is as good at reading the human face.

    It is not a question of knowing 100% what every gene does – that’s backwards thinking – but merely breeding and selecting, as has been done for thousands of years. Or more recently in the silver fox experiments in Russia – it would be good to continue their work and make more doglike foxes.

    Euro dogs largely replaced Amerind ones, probably because they were superior.

    Anyway, people still like dumb dogs, so “mistakes” can be sold and even in a way so as to not effect the genepool. No question it could be done, starting now, if the right resources were put into it. Personally, I’d rather use the money we spend on blacks to do things like make smarter dogs. Dogs at least tend to be loyal.

    not only does the US not have the ability to build Apollos

    It is not just a question of following the blueprints. We don’t have the same industrial capacity and supply chains to make the countless parts that were in it, and it would not be wise to try to copy it – you want to use modern electronics and manufacturing methods to cut down the number of parts and expense. Of course, SLS is a nightmare of waste already, but trying to duplicate ’60s tech which used many mechanical parts, in a diverse modern environment would be chancy, to say the least.

  148. Daniel Chieh says

    Correct. Quantum here, I think, is being used totemistically.

    All machine learning at the moment is based on gigantic datasets, and we have a lack of data to feed our AI for genetic engineering. AI can assist in some parts of this, like recognition of changes, etc, but ultimately its just a lot of hard, old-school trial and error.

  149. Ray Caruso says

    “India, 1993: 70% support, 23% oppose editing for intelligence** (n = 568)”

    Why not? The Indian gene pool is already f***ed up. They are fugly, slightly built and their average IQ is lower than that of African Americans. Might as well throw some badger and jellyfish genes in there to see what happens.

  150. A bunch of incredibly smart, highly motivated people developed a weapon that forever changed the world in almost complete secrecy.

    In addition to what reiner Tor said-

    In 1942, the Soviets noticed that publications on nuclear research had completely stopped in Western physics journals and made the correct conclusions from that. In today’s hyper-globalized world, with prominent researchers having profiles on multiple databases, do you really think marshalling the world’s top people in some strategic sphere would go unnoticed?

  151. ” It couldn’t have been done in peacetime.” – More true for America than for China. China’s peacetime is America’s wartime.

  152. “In 1942, the Soviets noticed that publications on nuclear research had completely stopped in Western physics journals and made the correct conclusions from that.” – I do not know about the Soviett but I have noticed that IQ GWAS studies came to halt. And speculated about it no so long ago:

    https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-136/#comment-4414650
    It seems awfully quiet on the IQ GWAS front. Where are the promised breakthroughs that were to materialize once we genotyped millions of people. Where is cocky Setphen Hsu and his lasso method? Did his dick go limp? He got a good start of up 9% educational attainment explained with 10,000 or so SNP’s and then went silent.

    It seem that there is barrier of 10% variance explained that can’t be crossed. It seems that the missing heritability problem is real pointing finger at twin studios that possibly have a hidden flaw, that the true heritability is much lower than what twin studies were telling us. The IQist were fooling themselves and us for last 70 years.

    OR is it possible that DARPA and China classified further genetic IQ studies, and they are in the process of breeding SuperJews and SuperChinese?

  153. I’m inclined to agree that it’s exactly that, either a lack of creativity or risk-taking, or some combination of both. I think even a society that lacks either of these on a genetic basis can still incentivize them a helluva a lot beyond their genetic potential if they had leadership who recognized the problem. Much easier to improve risk-taking or even creativity through extreme policies than to boost IQ.

    Of course none of them do, some in fact naturally fall into electing leadership that are actually the opposite, mindlessly producing policies that placate their and their peoples’ natural desires to look inward and avoid standing out too much in the pursuit of amazing dreams of the future, or wealth, or fame. In China of course it’s even worse though it will improve significantly still before complacency sets in.

    But where does that show up in GDP? They keep their nominal per capita figures low to increase the competitiveness of their exports. Their PPP per capita export levels are at Germanic levels. Sure it might be at lower Germanic levels, and their IQs might imply they should exceed them but we all know IQ (or creativity/risk-taking) isn’t everything.

    Now if we’re talking productivity adjusted for working hours converted into PPP, then yes you see something really strange. The highest East Asian countries score at Latin levels, all the way down to the level of Greeks (!!). (Of course China scores much lower for now, for obvious reasons.)

    In that respect there’s a simple explanation. If you have much higher working hours, which are completely unproductive (in Japan everyone waits around for hours doing nothing until the boss leaves at 2 am) then divide that time by the mean productivity you’re going to get a lower average.

    If you look at the state of Greek or Spaniard or Italian (or even to an extent French) living standards, competitiveness, technical innovation, and industrial ability, do you really think even on a per capita level that they’re anywhere close to Korea/Japan/Taiwan.

  154. Boomthorkell says

    I never got that whole “peace” thing. It always seemed so…what’s the word…demeaning? I mean, why say anything at that point.

    Sure, there wasn’t much on it. It was a couple pages (a page?) at most talking about genetic and cybernetic engineering, and how they were of comparable intelligence to a retarded child, but that that was an unfair comparison, because the child was functioning below capacity, while the K-9 was functioning well above its original capacity.

    That link should have at least had that information in it. Shame on them.

  155. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me.

    … But Einstein’s understanding was deeper even than von Neumann’s. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann’s. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci’s brilliance, he never produced anything as original.

    —Wigner

    Von Neumann’s IQ was considered higher than Einstein’s. But Einstein had more creativity and in the end made more profound impacts.

    So maybe 4 types

    1. Pure Genius— von Neumann (IQ ~200?)
    2. Pure Genius+Artist / — Einstein (IQ 170)
    3. Polymath — Kant (IQ 150)
    4. Polymath+Artist — Goethe (IQ 140)

    You need all 4 types to push a paradigm change like Enlightenment/Industrial Revolution.

    Currently amongst orientals, I see good number of potential Type 1’s. Shinichi Mochizuki
    and Terrence Tao maybe.

    The latter three types not as much.

  156. I don’t see how a slowdown proves your point, it’s not like this never happens in technology.

    https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Abdelkader-Mazouz/publication/331976444/figure/fig1/AS:740633522212864@1553592200022/The-S-curve-and-innovation-window.png

    Anyhow one of the big problems now AFAIK is getting bigger datasets.

  157. Boomthorkell says

    Ah, that would be aggravating. Alright, you’ve sold me on it. I won’t be annoyed when you do it.

    Ha ha ha, I’ll content myself that if anyone cares enough, they’ll read the book.

  158. jon halpenny says

    Israel will possibly be the world’s transhumanist superpower of the future.

  159. “I don’t see how a slowdown proves your point” – And what was my point? My point was an alternative that either (A) we have reached the dead end and gene explanation of IQ beyond 10% of variance is not possible or (B) that it is possible to go beyond 10% and research is being conducted in dark projects while a secret moratorium was imposed on open projects.

    Personally I am rooting for (A) but I accept a possibility that it might be (B).

  160. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    I can’t refute you definitely.

    My counterargument is that —
    Obviously PRC is obsessed with Olympic medals, if they were bent on genetic engineering some SuperHans they’d mix the genes of these people or at least have them breed like rabbits

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Weili (UFC Champion)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yang (World record swimmer)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Bingtian (sub-10s sprinter)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BC_Xiaojun (world record weightlifter)

    All this together plus Yao Ming you get Lebron James like bn size/explosiveness, plus swimming ability and Han intelligence.

    But all I see is that they came from normal one-child families, and are forming normal at-most-two-child families.

  161. Bardon Kaldian says

    I’ve been speculating on gene editing for some time, but eventually came to the conclusion that anti-editers are, generally, right.

    China & most of the West are right, simply because this is a step in the direction of total annihilation of human life, worse than total nuke war. Of course, it is possible that such experiments & even something stronger may, one day, become a serious stuff, but it may as well end up with complete destruction of a human society.

    Could be that Montaigne was right: They want to become more than human, and they end up lower than beasts.

    As for India- nothing surprising, because it is a childish civilization, still living among shadows of infantile projections.

  162. songbird says

    I think I would want to breed Jackie Chans, but I’m not sure how much of it is genetic and how much due to the brutal training he went through in childhood.

  163. Could be that Montaigne was right: They want to become more than human, and they end up lower than beasts.

    I prefer caution and am naturally skeptical of such an unnatural intervention. But a 200 or 250 IQ human is still human, just as a 60 IQ human is still human (I realize that at such high levels IQ scores become almost meaningless). This isn’t some inhuman, unthinking AI, though it may be terrible in its own way. A childlike intellect in an adult body (with an adult’s physical power, sexual needs, etc.) may be considerably less dangerous than a godlike intellect with a normal human’s emotions, jealousies, etc.

  164. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    Jackie Chan’s early career was so brutal that he was forced to make Skinemax films (!)

    Chan plays a rickshaw driver. It contains one of only two sex scenes which Chan has done

    In 2006, Information Times quoted Chan’s response to an article in the Hong Kong media regarding the film, referring to it as a pornographic film.[1] However, the film is not actually pornography.[2]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_in_the_Family_(film)

    http://qqpublic.qpic.cn/qq_public/0/0-3042358968-15BD010C360CC12728B657E040D0F5D3/0?fmt=jpg&size=38&h=582&w=640&ppv=1/0

  165. B is contained by C. You seem to insist that B is not the case but you do not specify what C-B might be that would account for slowdown, stagnation and halt of research. The picture you like so much is not an explanation.

  166. reiner Tor says

    for all of Jansci’s brilliance

    Sorry it’s just wrong. It should be:

    for all of Jancsi’s brilliance

    Jancsi is diminutive for János, von Neumann’s original Hungarian first name.

  167. AnonFromTN says

    Agree with one nuance. We have nothing to worry about in that department. With our current knowledge and available technology, it is much easier to build a permanent colony on the Moon or Mars than to boost intelligence (real one, not IQ; the comparison of Einstein and von Neuman above shows the difference) by genetic engineering.

  168. James Forrestal says

    It’s safe to assume that Mengele would disagree with you on the value of genetic alterations.

    And on the scientific value of walls of butterfly-like human eyeballs, of course. Let’s let Jona Laks describe this technological wonder — she’s an officially-certified member of the Tribe of Supreme Victims, so you can rest assured that her account is true in every detail:

    https://i.postimg.cc/Mpxjpy74/Mengele-Wall-of-Human-Eyeballs.jpg

    An incredible story. Who could even dream up such a cruel, horrific method for persecuting the Tribe under the guise of “science?” Unbelievable. Very sad.

    NEVER AGAIN! NO MORE EYEBALL-STEALING GOYIM!!!

  169. The new Chinese law does not apply to embryo selection, which is the only non-traditional form of eugenics that is currently reliable and affordable. With today’s tech, selection only confers a small advantage over natural conception: on the order of 0.2 SD advantage for cognitive, psychological, and physical traits. Still, that’s just about sufficient to cancel the effects of the dysgenic breeding found throughout the world today–if everyone does it.
    In any case, who will be afflicted by actual enforcement of these laws? Aren’t their laws against selectively aborting female embryos in China? Will Party members really be prevented from seeing to the genetical well-being of their offspring (and future Party members)? In the end, legal questions in China are almost always payoff questions.

  170. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says
  171. James Forrestal says

    In 1942, the Soviets noticed that publications on nuclear research had completely stopped in Western physics journals and made the correct conclusions from that.

    Sure, Georgii Flerov noticed that — but it didn’t hurt that more than one of the “Cambridge Five” traitors had already given the Bolsheviks a heads up about US/ British nuclear weapons research a year earlier. Then there was the constant stream of incoming intelligence from “American” assets:

    https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/espionage

    https://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/historians-find-a-family-of-jewish-spies-who-passed-atomic-secrets-to-the-ussr/2019/11/24/

    Etc.
    If you believe Sudoplatov, it went all the way up to Oppenheimer.

    Of course, characterizing these people as “Soviet spies” kinda misses the point — they were not really motivated by loyalty to Russia, or even a determination to impose a “dictatorship of the proletariat” on America, but by their shared loyalty to the “principles” of rootless cosmopolitanism [i.e. their own perceived ethnic interests]. Stalin’s rejection of the Baruch Plan is an underrated factor in the genesis of the Cold War — though of course, once the A̶m̶a̶l̶e̶k̶i̶t̶e̶s̶ Germans were subjugated and H̶a̶m̶a̶n̶ Hitler* deposed, the guy who eliminated Trotsky and many of the (((Old Bolsheviks))) was pretty high on the list for the next target anyway.

    *Not to be confused with “Haman-Stalin” — https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Purim-miracle-of-1953-483994

  172. James Forrestal says

    There are Western and Russian theories that it does (e.g. see Karber and so forth which I have blogged about). But more likely this is just Indo-Europeans projecting their own psychopathy, paranoia, and lust for power onto “calmer”, much less warlike peoples.

    Perhaps there’s an element of truth to this in the current year — though I suspect the Vietnamese would disagree. But attempting to trace it all the way back to the Yamnaya as a deep-seated cultural difference seems like a bit of a stretch. “Daniel Chieh” already mentioned the Warring States period. Then there’s the guy who literally wrote the classic book on war

    Also, Chieh’s invocation of the alleged peaceful saintliness of Confucianism is a bit misleading. Legalism is what unified China, and while Confucianism served as the “official” ideal for most of Chinese history, the reality always incorporated major elements of legalism.

  173. Daniel Chieh says

    “Peaceful saintliness” isn’t accurate as much as “low status”, the actual word I used. As another commentator noted, as the militaries began to increasingly staff with low-cost levies, it was pretty much associated with criminals, impressed peasants, etc. Sun Tzu may have advocated otherwise(the Art of War itself comments on the ever-increasing use of levies and his recommendations against it), but the constant fear of highly trained soldiers taking over the government was a real and constant concern for China, eventually leading to the Song basically disbanding huge portions of the military.

    The Song military was chiefly organized to ensure that the army could not threaten Imperial control, often at the expense of effectiveness in war. Northern Song’s Military Council operated under a Chancellor, who had no control over the imperial army. The imperial army was divided among three marshals, each independently responsible to the Emperor. Since the Emperor rarely led campaigns personally, Song forces lacked unity of command. The imperial court often believed that successful generals endangered royal authority, and relieved or even executed them .

    Legalism doesn’t give high status for soldiers either, at any rate. As a system dedicated to supporting the machinery of the state, the Qin state destroyed hereditary aristocracies, practicing the pattern of “low+high”(peasants and the monarchy) against the “middle”(aristocracy) that is a common pattern in history. Qin also encouraged immigration from neighboring states, diluting the power of rooted aristocracy as well as to weaken the population of neighboring states.

    Among these foreign talents, Shang Yang successfully conducted a series of Legalist reforms in Qin with the support of Duke Xiao, despite facing strong opposition from conservative Qin politicians. Dire primogeniture were abolished, with all commoners granted citizenship rights. Many were resettled in new clusters focusing on increasing agricultural output. Meritocracy was practised throughout, especially in the military, with soldiers and officers receiving due rewards according to their contributions, regardless of their backgrounds. However, tough and strict laws were imposed as well, with draconian punishments being meted out for the slightest of offences, and even the nobility and royalty were not spared. After decades, the reforms strengthened Qin economically and militarily, and transformed it into a highly centralized state with an efficient administrative system.

    Legalism was a form of universalism, though a very brutal one. There’s a Legalist parable: “One man becomes a thief when he crosses the fence into another country, but becomes a good person when he is within a [legalist] country. Why is that?” Legalism believed that humans were essentially, innately selfish and evil, and therefore laws, incentives and controls would bring harmony through relentless enforcement.

    Inherent therefore in this idea excluded the notion of any particular heroic valor, but rather on mass conscription, mass industrialization, and standardization leading to mass production of weaponry.

    https://imperialqin.weebly.com/technology.html

    This worked very well, of course, they conquered China. But its legacy was that of a military that was part of a machine, without much romance.

  174. For all the talk we do about China here, we do not have any culturally Chinese Chinese to share their opinions of China in blog, I mean as in Chinese Chinese, not American or Western Chinese for are too influenced by living in the West and Western culture for a long time to be considered authentically culturally Chinese enough, and also should be Han Chinese, rather than a member of an ethnic minority, and living in a Tier 2 or 3 city, rather than a Tier 1 city. Basically the Chinese version of an American living in the interior red states, rather than New York, Chicago, or the West Coast.

  175. I mean like a a Chinese living in Changsha, Datong, or Harbin.

  176. Daniel Chieh says

    How’s your Chinese? Why do you think that a Chinese equivalent of a vatnik would be on an English website, then?

  177. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    Ancient
    Xia dynasty (2070 – 1600 BC)
    Shang dynasty (1600 – 1046 BC)
    Zhou dynasty (1046 – 256 BC)
    Spring and Autumn period (722 – 476 BC)
    Warring States period (476 – 221 BC)
    1st Reich
    Qin dynasty (221 – 206 BC)
    Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 220)
    Three Kingdoms (AD 220 – 280)
    Jin dynasty (AD 266 – 420)
    Northern and Southern dynasties (AD 420 – 589)
    2nd Reich
    Sui dynasty (AD 581 – 618)
    Tang dynasty (AD 618 – 907)
    Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (AD 907 – 960)
    Song, Liao, Jin, and Western Xia dynasties (AD 960 – 1279)
    3rd Reich
    Yuan dynasty (AD 1271 – 1368)
    Ming dynasty (AD 1368 – 1644)
    Qing dynasty (AD 1644 – 1912)

    Spring and Autumn is comparable of European/Japanese feudal age, i.e. Europe from Middle Ages to French Revolution, Japan until Meiji Restoration. Where there was a military aristocracy like the knight/samurai.

    During Warring States it intensified to Total War with conscription like Europe from Napoleonic Wars to 1945.

    Since Qin/Han Unification two thousand years on its been a gradual transition from partial aristocracy to full meritocracy. Ming was an extreme Meritocracy where the Emperor’s own clan was barred from serving office.

    Han and Tang had good jock/nerd balance mostly so were kicking ass. But both went down because regional commanders got too powerful. (In Tang’s case it was another Caucasoid shaman lol)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan

    Song tried to reign this in by having a centralized Imperial Garde subordinate to Meritocrats. This leads to high culture and GDP growth, but severe asswhuppin’ from Altaic warriors.

    So during 3rd Reich, Han nerds were mostly rule by Yuan and Qing Altaic horseriding jocks. The Ethnic Chinese Ming also had to rely Manchurian Frontier Heavy Calvary 关宁铁骑

    Until the gunpowder age, the best soldiers were Northern Altaic/Han calvary. By late Qing, the best infantryman came from militias from rugged mountainous southern regions like Hunan. But still led by meritocrats like Zeng Guofan.

    So it depends how you view the current PRC, if they are like the Song, then they are at all warlike.

    But you might view CCP Commies as a warrior aristocracy, since like the Banner Armies, Lin Biao’s Northeastern Field Army also conquered China from Manchuria.

    The aristocratic heir are Xi’s and other Princelings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princelings

    For the new meritocrats, the template of merit is instead of Neo-Confucianism, Marx-Leninism plus Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

    Then PRC is more like Tang or Qing, which is moderately warlike, but limited within boundaries of mainland East Asia.

  178. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    Since Han, China has always been some type of 外儒内法 Confucianism on the outside, Legalism on the inside.

    Legalism has bad PR. So the scholars are taught and tested on Confucian classics.

    You are expected to be well rounded and know Han Feizi and Sun Tzu, but they are not on Imperial Exams.

  179. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    So it depends how you view the current PRC, if they are like the Song, then they are at all warlike.

    So it depends how you view the current PRC, if they are like the Song, then they are not at all warlike.

  180. AltanBakshi says

    Thank you for your entertaining, but surprisingly profound, analysis! But don’t forget that the original capital of Commies was Yanan near the heartlands of Qin and Tang. CCPs power grew out of Shaanxi and Manchuria, therefore CCP is definitely a Northern dynasty or power unlike KMT.

    Since Qin/Han Unification two thousand years on its been a gradual transition from partial aristocracy to full meritocracy.

    Qing was less meritocratic than Song or Ming, there was a system of ethnic quotas for Manchus and Mongols.

  181. Because a Chinese posting here who is a non-vatnik may be as representative of the common people as a McGovern voter from 1972 or a Mondale voter from 1984 is? How much would you get to know the US from visiting Berkeley in 1968? Or Manhattan and Portland only now for that matter? And calling everyone who does not live in the 3 cities as an ignorant numbskull is a bit presumptuous right? How do you think the typical Trump voter thinks about people living in Portland? What I have heard is that there is also a red blue state type divide in China between the interior and the rich coastal cities, and pro-Western orientations tend to be in the coastal areas, while the interior provinces are more conservative.

  182. Basically the Jiang Hu faction tends to pro-Western, while there is a more tankie pro-state faction in the CCP that is less well known in Western Circles, I do not know where Xi is here, though Bo Xilai is with the later faction, there is also a Confucian faction among the government and the scholar class, though ironically they tend to side with the tankie faction and think that the pre-Xi CCP made Chinese too liberal. If Bo Xilai instead of Xi Jinpjng had taken charge in 2012, what would Chinese policy be like now?

  183. Han Confucian civil servants basically ran the government, the influence of the Manchu was limited to the banners system. And the royal household and their close assistants. Also the Manchus got less influential the further into the Qing you go, especially after Chien Lung.

  184. China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms says

    You bet!

    Pure meritocracy leads to gayness, factionalism and backstabiness. Having some warriors on top to bitchslap and keep the nerds in line tends to be a more stable solution.

    Qing was less meritocratic than Song or Ming, there was a system of ethnic quotas for Manchus and Mongols.

    Same for PRC. All the main civilian/military posts are reserved for Commie Party and especially Princelings.

    CCP is definitely a Northern dynasty or power unlike KMT.

    Yes, even though the founders are predominately Southern. It built up in Qin 秦during WWII with the backing of a Northern Empire, this time USSR. After Operation August Storm, the Soviets occupied Manchuria, Commies were able to move in faster.

    Whereas Generalissmo Chiang was hole up in Shu 蜀, the first Kingdom to go down in Three Kingdoms. After Soviets left they had to first go to Nanjing, then to Manchuria.

    It all makes sense if you can zoom into this map. The East Asian mainland is surrounded by sea to east, jungles to south, mountains to west, deserts to north, a world in itself.

    Qin sits high on the plateaus to the west of Central Plains, like an eagle. Its very difficult to attack Qin because it has to through a very narrow pass between high mountains, Tungkwan. But you can amass troops in Qin plateau and sweep down the northern plains.

    Whereas Shu, located in southwest Sichuan, is in a huge basin. Its very difficult also to attack the basin, as the Japs found. But also hard to launch offensives from out Shu.

    https://imgur.com/TMoKFUB

  185. Yevardian says

    Indians as a whole have the lowest human capital of any major population group except Africans, their entire history is one of repeated subjection to numerically tiny foreign elites. Say what you will about East-Asian risk-aversion, but at least they invented gunpowder, printing press and oceanic-capable ships in the first place, which you can’t say for India. It has the advantages of sheer scale and nothing else.
    Pegging humanity’s future on the last remaining caucasoid breeders, glory to greater Albania-Chechenia!

  186. I think the Romans and Greeks invented them first (triremes were capable of surviving an Atlantic journey).

  187. Wrong century? And during that time Wu was basically a barely populated back country. There was virtually no one south of the Yangtze at that time.

  188. The bulk of Han migration to the south happened during the later part of the Jin dynasty after the northern part was conquered by the Huns.

  189. triremes were capable of surviving an Atlantic journey

    I really don’t think it would work. Maybe, if you blocked up the holes and shortened it? But I think it would have just been better to use either a regular Roman sailing cargo ship, or, probably better, a Veneti design.

  190. Vishnugupta says

    I don’t really have that much of a problem with someone constantly hating Indians.If anything its a bit amusing.

    I do notice however that this sort of sentiment is usually consistently demonstrated by people from small irrelevant countries which have no practical control over their future.

    Armenians last year got comprehensively outsmarted and militarily thrashed by a Turkic people.Do you think this is because people in your homeland share your trait of underestimating and unnecessarily offending other people despite having very little achievements of your own ?

    I noticed even your traditional protectors the Russians displayed very little sympathy towards Armenians (in contrast to what they previously expressed for say Serbians) last year.

  191. I do notice however that this sort of sentiment is usually consistently demonstrated by people from small irrelevant countries which have no practical control over their future.

    Indians and Armenians are two peas in a pod, little wonder Yevardian hates in Indians the qualities he sees most in his own people, so much so that he writes a serious reply to Karlin’s obviously facetious comment about India’s coming hyperpower status.

    As George Orwell wrote

    After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian

    I have heard similar sentiments expressed about Indians, especially the upper-caste service nomad types in South-East Asia.

  192. Super-babies made by genetic engineering are probably a long way off.

    What I think would naturally come sooner is simple embryo selection. If you can select the best or better embryo, most of the time, then that will have very significant cumulative effects.

    The Chinese haven’t banned embryo selection, have they? Imagine, if they managed to move their average IQ up just 5 points. That would be a pretty big deal. Might bring about major scientific advances.

  193. Abelard Lindsey says

    Effective iterative embryo selection is also likely 15 years off. There is a lot of research needed to identify all of the relevant genes, then develop the ESC to gamete to ESC production cycle. However, one advantage to this process over whole chromosome synthesis is that, since there is no denovo design involved, the resultant embryos can be taken to term, and resultant kids able to live a normal life. The downside is that there is no intermediate payoff to iterative human embryo selection as there is with whole chromosome synthesis (which has huge potential application in animal husbandry, for example).

    Guys, here’s the best scoop I’ve been able to find on the whole designer baby enterprise:

    https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection

  194. AnonfromTN says

    Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian

    Maybe my personal experience is not representative, but here it is. I know three Armenians (two males and one female), all pretty decent people. (Disclaimer: none of them grew up in Armenia, none speaks the language, all three married to Russians). I know two Greeks, both good people. One of them grew up in Greece and speaks Greek. He is the smarter and nicer of the two. I know quite a few Jews, they range from people I’d prefer to avoid to very decent people I like being around. Most of the latter are not married to Jews, though. I met many Indians, one very smart, two reasonably smart (all three females), two OK, two on a dumber side, and one dumb as a brick (all five males). So, I don’t see any correlations with predictive value. If you do, let me know.

  195. I’ve met and known many Ukrainians and people of Ukrainian descent (people you call “Ukies”) throughout most of my life. Two were extremely smart and could actually prove it by living an extremely rich lifestyle due to rents being received through dozens of patented profitable inventions. 9-10 were productive and tenured college professors, one even being a dean of a business college too. All others, except maybe one or to were good hard working people that would be considered exemplary good citizens. All of them, in varying degrees, knew that they were a part of a great Ukrainian nation, and were proud to exhibit Ukrainian ethnic dress in public, especially on holidays. All except for one. Can you guess who that may be, Professor? 🙁

  196. Your experience of diaspora Indians seems representative. I’ve come across Indians who were quite smart and among the hardest working people in the firm, and others who are totally incompetent. Even in “high skilled” occupations, one can find incompetent Indians. My overall impression of Indians in the United States is that there are both a disproportionate amount of talented people, but also a high degree of variability.

  197. Morton's toes says

    In my sheltered and ignorant existence my exposure to people from India suggests that the first thing they might genetically innovate is SuperSuckAssKiss. The one thing they inevitably excel at is groveling. N~70-120.

    Do you know a lot of people from India?

  198. AnonfromTN says

    If you wish to talk about people born in Ukraine, I know quite a few. First, my parents, my aunt, two cousins, and three of their children used to live there. My father passed away before the coup, my aunt after. I had to evacuate my mother from Lugansk after Ukie shelling broke the window in her apartment. One of my cousins lives and works in Russia, none of his two children live in Ukraine, both left for good after the coup (both have college education). The other cousin lives in Kiev; her son left after the coup, lives and works in Russia. She is a Ukrainian, but certainly not a Ukie (thank goodness). A lot of my acquaintances and many of my former school classmates live in Lugansk. They have different levels of hatred for Ukies, but the last thing they want is Ukraine. They are a good illustration of the saying that the army shoots its own people only once, after that it shoots foreign people.

    I’ve also met many people born in Ukraine in North America. The majority is against 2014 coup. The only feeling they have for the current Ukie government is contemp. All work hard, most have PhD, have strong publication and citation records, quite a few are professors in various US universities. One tried working in after-coup Ukraine, he is a professor in Russia now. I’ve also met two Ukies, one in the US and one in Canada. Don’t know much about them otherwise, because after I learned that they are Ukies, I stopped communicating with them.

  199. A lot of my acquaintances and many of my former school classmates live in Lugansk. They have different levels of hatred for Ukies, but the last thing they want is Ukraine.

    So many of your relatives and acquaintances show so little regard for Ukraine…probably like you are working against its best interests. No wonder Ukraine has so many problems, if so many of its own people show so little patriotic support for their own country?

  200. AnonfromTN says

    Ukrainian governments (all of them since 1991) worked against Ukraine’s best interests. This suicidal “work” intensified after 2014 coup. Remember the first rule of holes: if you are in one, stop digging. The most patriotic things Ukrainians can do now is to hang all banderites and their enablers on lampposts. That won’t return Crimea and Donbass (life is irreversible, what’s done is done, cannot be undone), but it would at least stop further rot and disintegration. Then a slow and painful process of recovery can begin, in much harder conditions than existed before the coup.

  201. Can you name even one Banderite politician in Ukraine today that needs to be hanged? One that has even a modicum of influence over Ukraine’s internal or foreign policy?

  202. AnonfromTN says

    Can you name even one Banderite politician in Ukraine today that needs to be hanged?

    I said banderites and their enablers. The latter category includes previous and current clown, both their puppet “governments”, and at least 2/3rd of current and previous Rada. Porky, Turchinov, Ze, Avakov, and their ilk have so much blood on their hands that they deserve to be hanged publicly.

  203. So who exactly are the “enablers” enabling that are Banderites?

  204. Altan Bakshi – it’s getting typical of you to call me a troll when all I’m trying to do is get at the truth of the matter. Bandying around the outdated term “Banderite” for any Ukrainian you don’t care for is fruitless and unproductive.

  205. AnonFromTN says

    So who exactly are the “enablers” enabling that are Banderites?

    For the particularly gifted, these crooks and murderers enable and use as shock troops the following scum:
    1. Those who organize Nazi-stile torchlight processions in Kiev on Bandera’s birthday every year and participate in these disgusting processions.
    2. Those who recently demonstrated near the offices of current clown demanding that he changes his policies to more banderite.
    3. Those who demanded and received the freedom of convicted murderer Sternenko.
    4. Those who keep murderers of Oles Buzina scot-free.
    5. Those who never punished anyone guilty of mass murder in Odessa Trade Union building in 2014, but keep surviving victims in jail for seven years.
    6. Those who pretend that Azov battalion, displaying Nazi insignia, is nothing to worry about.
    7. Everyone participating, directly and indirectly, in criminal war against former Ukrainian citizens in Donbass.
    8. Those who shot down MH17 and with the help of their masters still try to push the blame on others.
    9. Those who cover up numerous human rights violations by SBU, including unlawful imprisonment and torture.
    10. And too many others to list.

  206. 8. Those who shot down MH17 and with the help of their masters still try to push the blame on others.

    I’m glad to see that you also despise the Donbas separatist forces.

    Even the anti-Banderist, anti-Maidanist Ivan Katchanovsky blames them for that:

    https://twitter.com/I_Katchanovski/status/1381239433194827779

  207. AnonFromTN says

    Sorry to disappoint, but the reality equally does not give a hoot about opinions of pro-Maidan or anti-Maidan commenters who know about the events about as much as I know about sexual habits of Martians.

  208. AnonFromTN says

    BTW, your selective comment reminds me of modern Russian joke.

    Stalin came back to life, gathered Russian leadership, and said:
    – I have three suggestions. One, shoot all oligarchs and confiscate their property. Two, send all members of government and Duma (Russian parliament) for hard labor in Siberia for life. Three, paint Lenin mausoleum green. Questions?
    – Why do you want mausoleum painted green?
    – I knew that there would be no questions about the first two suggestions.

  209. I just focused on that point.

    This one was nonsense also:

    Those who never punished anyone guilty of mass murder in Odessa Trade Union

    http://khpg.org/en/1407453894

    And here, you would also have to include pro-Russian Rambos who chose to use civilian areas as their playground, alongside pro-Ukrainian Rambos:

    Everyone participating, directly and indirectly, in criminal war against former Ukrainian citizens in Donbass.

  210. The only singularity in front of us is one of the natural economy.

    I tend to agree with this, while noting that “singularity” probably means different things to different people.

    Industrial modernism is just a blip in the world of harsh survival and the cosmos of the Fermi Paradox.

    Again, broad agreement – current recorded history shows a sequence of empires rising and falling, with changing (I think “advancing” is too generous a term) technologies and world views.

    More than a few great empires have collapsed with environmental changes, and possibly even cataclysmic natural disasters. None of them last forever.

    As for Fermi’s paradox, I think it is an intellectually manufactured quandry, a product of scientific paternalism and unwarranted respect for the contemporary world view and its attendant assumptions and calculations.

    Even Einstein got it wrong big time. His famous equation [ E=m.C^2 ] is absolutely correct and intuitively apparent from the understanding that energy is motion and matter manifests as motion in the aether, ie, the two are not just equivalent,they are the same.

    However, to say that “nothing can go faster than the speed of light” is like saying “nothing can go faster than the speed of sheep”. They used to tell us that “nothing can go faster than the speed of sound”, until it did.

  211. Yellowface Anon says

    As for Fermi’s paradox, I think it is an intellectually manufactured quandry, a product of scientific paternalism and unwarranted respect for the contemporary world view and its attendant assumptions and calculations.

    Fermi’s paradox rests on the assumption that extraterrestrial life forms have a tendency to evolve complex civilizations resting on intellectual development and even scientific industrialism, which is projecting our own organization as a Terran species onto other life forms. Instead, there are many types of environments as the laws of physics allow, and as many type of life forms that have been selected and adapted to such environments, even the types our carbon-based primate brains haven’t conceived.

    If one of the aims (if it can be said) of any singularity is to provide a way past the great filter, than by undermining Fermi’s paradox, this drive vanishes into the sophistry of a few progressive scientistic thinkers. We should give up our civilizational hubris and deal with the reality of our existential condition.

  212. From your reply, it looks that “those’ are the Banderites in Ukraine? All of the boogeymen that keep you up at night. Check under your bed for any octogenarian Banderites that may still be around. Most of the ones that I used to know in the US have long ago passed away. Most of their kids have moved on too, and have seamlessly integrated into the Western world. Most of them though, still think fondly of Ukraine, and that may still irk you to no end. 🙂

  213. AnonFromTN says

    Most of them though, still think fondly of Ukraine

    In English, there is a saying “like father, like son”. In Russian the saying “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” has the same meaning.

  214. True. But there’s always a rotten apple or two that manages to mess up the landscape. 🙂

  215. I went to UCB and lived in Bay Area. So yes, I knew quite a few.

  216. I would not be so quick to label China as playing it safe in any activity, to include genetic engineering and the rush to transhumanism.

    https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-04-21/international-team-of-researchers-creates-132-human-monkey-embryos-in-china.html?fbclid=IwAR2Fp8sCcgnaxj5WoiHZbkxhsaJ9c2D7uJ_4QGUDQLJL0Ldoh8zwX_x2ZkM

    My sense is its simply their usual pattern. Make laws, and quietly ignore them. Ethics? What’re those again?

    Hard to stereotype them at this point, pretty unpredictable if you ask me.

  217. Confucianism is no longer the dominant or even the proclaimed paradigm of China itself.

    In this matter, Mainland Chinese are not like Overseas Chinese. Quite divergent, really.

    In my interactions with both types (decades with the Overseas, and years on the Mainland), it seems to me that the Overseas are far more traditional, more conservative, punctilious, conformist and over-all more conscious of clan and lineage, with a nod to race and tribe. IE, they are quite classically “Confucian” in outlook. And Overseas Chinese really do exhibit all those media stereotypes of the Chinese – geeky, nerdy, judgmental, conformist. Confucian.

    A lot of these traits are muted, or even inverted in the Mainland. Mainlanders are all about country, race and tribe, with a nod to clan and lineage. Country over province, province over hometown, China over surname. They do work equally hard as any Chinese, but are less status conscious, and care less for pedigree, clan reputation or social censure, than Overseas Chinese. Mainlanders retain their most ancient tradition – Daoist Cosmic Spirituality – but express this via industry, science, technology and yes, even in the preparation for unavoidable war. Confucius is a valued philosopher, with many profound ideas, but far from worshipped.

    Chinese on the mainland neither worship war and warriors, nor disdain it. War simply is, it exists. Preferably avoided, deflected, and deferred. But war, should it come, must nonetheless be won, with however much violence and destruction that will entail. Even ultimate destruction. The military is a very prestigious profession in China, without people being in awe of soldiers.

    The analogy I would make is to compare China and Japan to the ancient Mediterranean, and/or Dark Ages Europe.

    In this analogy, Japan would be Sparta or the Vikings. A warlike, warrior-dominated culture.

    China would be the Republican Rome/Macedon hybrid, or Carolingian France/Germany. A culture able to wage war, having warriors, but not culturally focused on that one aspect.

    This is only one foreigner’s experience, so YMMV.

  218. AltanBakshi says

    In my interactions with both types (decades with the Overseas, and years on the Mainland), it seems to me that the Overseas are far more traditional, more conservative, punctilious, conformist and over-all more conscious of clan and lineage, with a nod to race and tribe. IE, they are quite classically “Confucian” in outlook. And Overseas Chinese really do exhibit all those media stereotypes of the Chinese – geeky, nerdy, judgmental, conformist. Confucian.

    A lot of these traits are muted, or even inverted in the Mainland. Mainlanders are all about country, race and tribe, with a nod to clan and lineage. Country over province, province over hometown, China over surname. They do work equally hard as any Chinese, but are less status conscious, and care less for pedigree, clan reputation or social censure, than Overseas Chinese.

    Almost all overseas Chinese have their origins in Southern China, so you are just making list of common differences between Northerners and Southerners. Communist China is led from the North, so it’s not strange that in the era of mass communications, the Northern(superior) way of culture is spreading into South. Southerners have been traditionally very, or even extremely Clannish, when in the North central authority has always been more present than in the South.