I can’t even. Two choice bits:
Beijing’s urban design looks like something straight out of James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”. The city is dominated by these enormous apartment complexes - blocks of 10 adjacent 30-story buildings demarcated by 8-lane roads. The government buildings follow the same pattern: huge structures divided by extremely wide boulevards. This layout seems designed partly for social control - during zero-COVID, authorities could lock down 10,000 people by simply guarding a few entrance gates. The wide roads would also make it easy to move military forces through the city.
I kept asking young people about the public intellectual landscape in China - who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris? The sense I got is that this kind of popular intellectual ecosystem just doesn’t exist there. Sure, there are viral Bilibili videos from professors talking about practical matters like how to manage your finances. But grand takes about what’s happening in the world and what we should do about it? Not much going on.
This guy is well meaning the way effective altruists are well meaning. He probably is one himself too.
The article implies as much.
I mean EA types are similar to people who participate in MLM schemes in a sense; there are people who are participating because they are organizing it in their favor and then there are others participating in it because they are hapless rubes who got duped. This author strikes me as the latter category of participant. And that is why I say “well-meaning”, which is increasingly more often my polite way of saying naive fool.