| Tweet Text,Clip Transcript,Likes,Reposts,Quotes,Link | |
| "Tony Blair explains the 3 key decisions Lee Kuan Yew took that made Singapore rich. | |
| “Each one of them now seems obvious. Each one at the time was deeply contested.” | |
| ","If you were advising Lee Kuan Yew in the 60s with the advice you would likely give to a developing country now, would Singapore have been even more successful than it ended up? Would it have been less successful? What would the effect of your advice now have been on Singapore in the 60s? With Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore... I mean, it's the wrong way around. I learned so much from him. The fascinating thing about Lee Kuan Yew is he took 3 decisions, really 3 important decisions right at the beginning for Singapore. Each one of them now seems obvious. Each one at the time was deeply contested. Number one, he said, ""everyone's going to speak English."" | |
| There were lots of people who said to him at the time, ""no, no, we've been thrown out of Malaysia, effectively, we're now a fledgling country, a city-state country, we need to have our own local language, we need to be true to our roots."" He said, ""no, English is the language of the world and we're all going to speak English."" Secondly, he said, ""we're going to get the best intellectual capital and management capital from wherever it exists in the world and we're going to bring it to Singapore."" And again, people said, ""no, we should stand on our own 2 feet, and you're also bringing in the British who we've just... who we've got all these disputes with."" And he said, ""no, I'm going to bring in the best from wherever they are and they're going to come to Singapore."" Today, Singapore exports intellectual capital. And the third thing he did was he said, ""There's going to be no corruption and one of the ways we're going to do that is we're going to make sure our political leaders are well paid, which the Singapore leaders are the best paid in the world by a factor of about 10. And, there's going to be zero tolerance of corruption. Zero tolerance of corruption. And those are the 3 decisions that were instrumental in building Singapore today. | |
| ",12100,3110,606,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1806003543075426308 | |
| "Dominic Cummings: | |
| ""Imagine if Steve Jobs or Tim Cook or Patrick Collison actually spent a large part of their day just doing photo ops. | |
| You have a person whose time is the single most precious asset. | |
| Yet, they're actually standing with the ambassador from Tonga Zonga, just doing photo ops for a large part of the day or going to stupid ceremonies. | |
| These people have all grown up in a system where they just don't know any better than dealing with the media all day."" | |
| @Dominic2306, former Chief Advisor to PM, on the complete misprioritization of ministers' time and efforts. | |
| ","Imagine if Steve Jobs or Tim Cook or Patrick Collison or someone actually spent a large part of their day just doing photo ops as well. That’s actually the reality about how a lot of these jobs have evolved. So you have a person whose time is the single most precious asset, who, because of the dysfunctional bureaucracy, his decisions or her decisions, is the only thing that can actually break down the bureaucratic resistance and make sure something happens. Yet they’re actually standing with the ambassador from Tonga Zonga, whatever country, just doing photo ops for a large part of the day or going to stupid ceremonies or whatever it might be. | |
| So again, I think that analogy also shows some of the central problems. These people have all grown up in a system where they just don’t know any better than dealing with the media all day. Now, if you actually understand communication, you know that communication is not the same as answering questions to the media, but that’s not what they think, and it’s not the environment in which they operate, and also it’s not the incentives in which they work. | |
| Again, one of the funny conversations I had with Boris was, you know, we should say to the ministers that here’s your actual priorities as defined by us. Whether or not you get promoted and whether or not your career goes well is going to be defined by how well your department actually fulfills these goals. We don’t care about all of your interviews. We don’t care if you are on TV or never on TV. That’s not how we’re going to judge. Because they’ve all grown up in a culture where they think whether or not they’re going to be promoted really depends on: Are they seen as a good media performer? Or do they botch things on the media? Well, that’s just a fundamentally bad criteria | |
| ",2501,276,61,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1724172764406505950 | |
| "I have been obsessed with what the geneticist David Reich told me in our interview together. | |
| The story of human evolution we're now learning from new evidence is so crazy. | |
| 70,000 years ago, half a dozen different species of humans (Neanderthals, Denisovans, 'Hobbits', etc) lived across Eurasia. | |
| And then some small group of modern humans (only 1,000 to 10,000 people) drove all of them to extinction. | |
| Everyone native to Eurasia and America is descended from this one tribe. | |
| Here's the crazy part - modern humans with language and big brains have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. | |
| And we had ventured out of Africa before. But we were always beat back by these other humans. | |
| What did this small group of humans 70,000 years ago figure out such that they completely dominated the planet? | |
| ","70,000 years ago, there are half a dozen different human species all around the world And then this group explodes all across the world. So something seems like it changed. What do you reckon it was? | |
| The large brain was already in place prior to the separation of Neanderthals and modern humans, and maybe Denisovans as well. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that it's hardly genetic. So I think that this is cultural innovation. In every group of human beings of hundreds of people, which is the size of a band or sometimes a thousand of people, they accumulate shared cultural knowledge. But if you have a limited size group of people that's not interacting with the sufficiently large group of people, there's a natural disaster, key elders in the group die and knowledge gets lost and there's not a critical mass of shared knowledge. But once it goes above some kind of critical mass, the group can get larger. The amount of shared knowledge becomes greater and then you have a runaway process where an increasing body of shared knowledge of how to make particular tools, how to innovate, language, conceptual ideas run amok. | |
| So what you actually have in the world 50,000 years ago is tens or hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of different human groups, each of them possessing local knowledge, rarely exchanging with each other. When we get lucky in ancient DNA and sample them, they're quite isolated from each other. The great majority of them are wiped out by encounters with natural disasters or other groups of humans or other animals. And so what you have is a vast experiment with an archipelago of these groups. And what might be happening is that you just have a process of accumulation of cultural knowledge and loss of cultural knowledge. But since there's many of these experiments going on, maybe something takes off somewhere and maybe that's what happens 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. | |
| ",2509,215,56,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1828464163796197765 | |
| "Liang Mong Song was TSMC's renegade genius. He gets frustrated with the leadership, so he defects to South Korea and single handedly pushes Samsung to overtake TSMC. Then SMIC, China's main foundry, poaches him. He becomes CEO and brings along a conga line of Samsung and TSMC's top talent. He is responsible for pushing China to 7nm (close to the leading edge). ""That guy's a genius. He's like 78 and he's beyond brilliant. Does not care about people.""","Liang Mong-Song is a nut. And I've met him. I've not met him. I've met people who worked with him. And they say he is a nut. He is probably on the spectrum. He does not care about people. He does not care about business. He does not care about anything. He wants to take it to the limit. The only thing, that's the only thing he cares about. | |
| He worked for TSMC. Literal genius, 300 patents or whatever, 285. Works all the way to the top tier. And then one day he loses out on some sort of power game within TSMC and gets demoted. | |
| And he was like head of R&D, right, or something? | |
| He was like one of the top R&D. He was like second or third place. | |
| And it was for the head of R&D position, basically. | |
| Correct. He's like, “I can't deal with this.” And he goes to Samsung and he steals a whole bunch of talent from TSMC, just like a conga line of like Taiwanese… just like, they get on the plane and they’re flying over. And he goes over there and he's like, we will make Samsung into this monster. Forget everything. Forget all of the stuff you've been trying to do. Like incremental… Toss that out. We are going to the leading edge and that is it. | |
| They win Apple's business. | |
| They win it back from TSMC. And then TSMC, Morris Chang is like, “I'm not letting this happen.” That guy, toxic to work for as well, but also goddamn brilliant. He's like, “we will work literally day or night. There is no rest at the TSMC fab.” They basically just blow away Samsung. And at the same time, they sue Liang Mong-Song directly for stealing trade secrets. Samsung basically separates from Liang Mong-Song and Liang Mong-Song goes to SMIC. | |
| So Samsung like at one point was better than TSMC. And then he goes to SMIC and SMIC is now better than… well, or not better, but they caught up rapidly as well after... | |
| Very rapid. That guy's a genius. I mean, I don't even know what to say about him. He's like 78 and he's beyond brilliant. Does not care about people.",2276,234,55,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1840797317257154949 | |
| "On the odds of a Taiwan invasion & how the CCP thinks | |
| w. Naval War College historian Sally Paine | |
| Full episode out tomorrow: | |
| ""the West learned that you read improbable speeches ... let's judge Xi Jinping at his word, & he says he's going to go for it | |
| We're at an inflection point - a lot of educated people and businesses want to make autonomous decisions ... and the Communist Party said that's off the table.""","It's guaranteed that if they go into Taiwan, it is a high consequence event without a doubt. What the odds are, I don't know. However, if you listen to their speeches, they tell you they're going to do it. They're consistent. | |
| The West learned that you read improbable speeches, right? People read Mein Kampf and said, “Oh, this is a nutcase. No one would ever do that.” Well, it quite accurately represented people. Even in dictatorships, they have to transmit messages to the population and they quite often very accurately tell you what they're going to do. | |
| Putin has been quite clear of what he's been up to. Stalin was very clear of what he was up to. So let's judge Xi Jinping at his word and he says he's going to go for it. Now, whether he's still in power, I don't know. But here's a problem for which we don't have a solution, that Chinese people have to figure out the solution.The Chinese Communist Party has clearly made the decision that it wants to maintain a monopoly of political power. And for a while there, during Deng Xiaoping, that worked because the reforms that they wanted to make for agriculture and things, they can maintain their monopoly of power but also do things that allow people to get much wealthier. So that went in tandem for a number of years. | |
| Now we're at the inflection point where you have a lot of educated people and businesses who are really integrated into the world and they want to make autonomous decisions. Also, you have some very large, very successful companies and they have quite a bit of clout. The Communist Party worries about this because what do people want at that point? It's probably some influence over political decisions. And the Communist Party said that's off the table. Okay, if it's off the table, how do you keep it off the table? All the things that you're talking about. This 24x7 surveillance state. | |
| Since you have a computer science background, you'd have a better understanding of this than I. Think about the cost if the United States had a 24x7 surveillance system where you're literally doing it down to who's jaywalking and who's not, in order to put it into their social security score. Whose kid in their classrooms rolling their eyes at their teachers, I kid you not, and putting it down as a ding on that kid's social score. | |
| And also, who knows what's accurate and inaccurate on the facial recognition stuff. So they start chalking up the wrong scores for the wrong people. The cost would be incredible. All the people power you're going to have to devote to this. And then all the false positives, which will be incendiary for the people who are falsely considered disloyal. This is where they're at. And now they’re doing the National Disappearing Act. We don't know where their minister of defense is. He's a non-person. And oh, by the way, what happened to the foreign minister? Give me a break. Let's do grown-ups day.",1916,234,47,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1709229893756784804 | |
| Will Zuck open source the $10 billion model?,"Would you open source the $10 billion model? | |
| As long as it's helping us then yeah. | |
| But would it? $10 billion of R&D and now it's open source. | |
| That’s a question which we’ll have to evaluate as time goes on too. We have a long history of open sourcing software. We don’t tend to open source our product. We don't take the code for Instagram and make it open source. We take a lot of the low-level infrastructure and we make that open source. Probably the biggest one in our history was our Open Compute Project where we took the designs for all of our servers, network switches, and data centers, and made it open source and it ended up being super helpful. Although a lot of people can design servers the industry now standardized on our design, which meant that the supply chains basically all got built out around our design. So volumes went up, it got cheaper for everyone, and it saved us billions of dollars which was awesome. | |
| So there's multiple ways where open source could be helpful for us. One is if people figure out how to run the models more cheaply. We're going to be spending tens, or a hundred billion dollars or more over time on all this stuff. So if we can do that 10% more efficiently, we're saving billions or tens of billions of dollars. That's probably worth a lot by itself.",1749,140,60,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1781397949538603071 | |
| """I wonder for people in their 20s if they shouldn't go to San Francisco. | |
| The entrepreneurs are held in excessively high regard in my view. | |
| I think that San Francisco doesn't really encourage the pursuit of really deep technical depth."" | |
| - @patrickc | |
| Full episode out tomorrow","I said that people in their teens should go to San Francisco. I wonder if people in their 20s shouldn't go to San Francisco. I feel like in San Francisco the entrepreneurs are held in excessively high regard. And, look, I like entrepreneurs. There is a set of career paths that people ought to pursue and would derive most fulfillment from pursuing, that are also really valuable for the world, that require accumulating a lot of expertise and studying a domain in tremendous depth. | |
| I think San Francisco valorizes striking out on your own, iconoclastically dismissing the received wisdom. That's great, I'm happy that this phenomenon exists in the world. But the world needs lots of other things. And I don't think San Francisco encourages the pursuit of really deep technical knowledge. | |
| We're recording this in South San Francisco, which is most noteworthy in the corporate world for being the headquarters of Genentech. Genentech was co-founded by Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer. They produced cheap insulin for the first time with recombinant DNA. Like Herb Boyer couldn't have done that at age 23. Herb Boyer first had to accumulate all of the knowledge and the skills required to be able to invent that over the course of a multi-decade career. I don't know what age he was when he finally went and invented it, but he was not in his 20s. I feel like San Francisco doesn't culturally encourage one to become Herb Boyer. ",1665,112,76,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1759955799802294299 | |
| "How | |
| @_sholtodouglas | |
| got scouted by Google DeepMind: | |
| “Every night from 10 PM till 2 AM, I would do my own research. | |
| @jekbradbury | |
| saw some of my questions online and was like, ‘I thought I knew all the people in the world who were asking these questions. Who on Earth are you?’”","I studied robotics in undergrad. I didn't get into the grad programs that I wanted to get into. If you just read all the NLP work and all the computer vision work and like all the robotics work, you see all these patterns that start to emerge across subfields. And in the meantime, on nights and weekends, basically every night from 10pm to 2am, I would do my own research. And every weekend, for at least 6-8 hours each day, I would do my own research and coding projects and this kind of stuff. | |
| That sort of switched in part from quite robotic specific work. After reading Gwern’s scaling hypothesis post, I got completely scaling-pilled and was like, “okay, clearly the way that you solve robotics is by scaling large multimodal models.” | |
| James Bradbury, who at the time was at Google and is now at Anthropic, saw some of my questions online where I was trying to work out how to do this properly and he was like, “I thought I knew all the people in the world who were asking these questions. Who on earth are you?” He looked at that and he looked at some of the robotic stuff that I'd been putting up on my blog. He reached out and said, “hey, do you want to have a chat and do you want to explore working with us here?” I was hired, as I understood it later, as an experiment in trying to take someone with extremely high enthusiasm and agency and pairing them with some of the best engineers that he knew. | |
| Being bootstrapped immediately by these people. It means that since you're getting up to speed on everything at the same time, rather than spending grad school going deep in one specific way of doing RL, you can actually take the global view and aren't totally bought in on one thing. So not only is it something that's possible, but it has greater returns potentially than just hiring somebody at a grad school. | |
| You come at everything with fresh eyes and you don't come in locked to any particular field.",,,,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1774846075523977670 | |
| "A friendly debate about whether the US should fight China if they invade Taiwan | |
| Would a China/US war go nuclear? And would the CCP collapse if it failed to take Taiwan? | |
| w. Sarah Paine, Professor of History & Strategy at Naval War College. | |
| Full episode out now","For the People's Republic to take Taiwan, I presume it's going to begin with an artillery barrage. I presume that's going to be leveling Taiwanese cities, right? We've watched how it goes in Ukraine. I can't imagine the Chinese being less brutal. You're going to say that's okay. Our whole thing about this maritime system of international law. What is the fundamental underlying principle of it all? It's sovereignty. It's the notion that just because you're big, you can't go and destroy someone who's small. This is the fundamental basics of the whole thing. | |
| Yeah, although in the case of Taiwan, it's hard to argue that one island that is right off the coast of China, and China, unlike any other area, has for decades said that they want to conquer. It's not like they've been saying that once we get Taiwan, we also really want to conquer India and Burma and Vietnam. | |
| Actually, they've just been redoing their maps. They say what is Uttar Pradesh is ours. That would be a detail, right? | |
| Yeah, but it's hard to see. They conquer Taiwan and they get emboldened to then conquer Korea? What's the cascading effect to worry about? | |
| Well, look at Chinese history. It is a continental empire. What is the paradigm? Territorial conquest. Take a look at it. This is it. And they're not off that paradigm. They're still on it. | |
| On the doctrine of strategic ambiguity, what is your opinion on this? Because in World War I wasn't the Kaiser surprised that Britain intervened on behalf of Belgium? And he was so upset about it. | |
| I don't know the details, but someone said that man wasn't the sharpest quill in the porcupine? | |
| But just generally, is it wise to have this, will they, won't they attitude? Does it do a good job of deterring them? | |
| I think you want to be ambiguous in the United States because otherwise it would enable Taiwan to do crazy stuff. Like under Chiang Kai-shek, if we had been unambiguous, the man might have done crazy stuff and then all of a sudden we get pulled into a World War. | |
| But if you think about a Taiwan conflict, just because there's a conflict there does not mean the United States has to send its military toe to toe. I would think it would give China a long lasting time out from the international world order. It'll be sanctioned. | |
| This is what's so tragic about China. Think about how many people have been lifted out of poverty. So many since Deng Xiaoping. Hundreds of millions. It is a great achievement of our lifetime. This has happened since you were born. And why did that happen? It's China's reintegration into the rest of the world, of joining the maritime order, following the basic credit card rules of paying for transactions and then your transactions are also guaranteed. | |
| That is the win for China, the true win. And taking Taiwan, who needs it? The Taiwanese are perfectly fine doing their own thing. And they've made it clear they don't want to be taken over by force. Who would be? | |
| The problem in China is a Communist Party wants to maintain its monopoly on power. It used to claim the moral rectitude card. Well, they can't do that anymore. They're so corrupt. They used to claim the economic growth card. Well, that one's going away. They're left with one card. It's the nationalism card. And they're playing it hard because it's a unifying thing for Chinese, for the Han ethnic group in China, who constitute the overwhelming majority, that Taiwan should be theirs. It's a mistake. It will be a pivotal error if they make that mistake. But guess what? Other countries cannot control what the Chinese government decides to do. It's foolish to think you can control it. It's beyond your abilities. | |
| Although we can control whether we get into a head war with another global superpower. What are the odds you would give to a war between China and the U.S. going nuclear? | |
| It would be the most catastrophic error imaginable for the United States and China to have a military conflict. There will be no winners. There will be massive numbers of losers. | |
| Let's talk about nuclear weapons for a minute. Think about how Americans are so mad at each other about wearing a mask or not wearing a mask. Talk about something that's stupid. Talk about something that's not a big deal, wearing a mask or not. If anybody nukes anybody else's city, do you think the world is going to be remotely the same way? Can you imagine? | |
| We can't even be logical about masks or just letting other people do their thing about masks. We can't even do that in the United States. We have many diplomats who are doing their best to prevent this eventuality but understand that we do not control the decisions of others. | |
| For instance, I'm going to make a guess that you don't have children. But if you ever have children and little ones that you could pick up and put down, they will wind up doing things that you cannot fathom. You're genetically related to these people. You love these people. And they will do stuff that you think is just wild. You will put enormous pressure on them not to do these things and they'll do it anyway. So the notion that we can take a country of one billion and change and make them do anything… | |
| But the reason I ask is, is an island of 20 million people worth getting into an altercation that could potentially lead to a nuclear war? | |
| Ah. The global order, going back full circle, is based on sovereignty. If you allow this, it doesn't mean you have to go to a nuclear war. You just never recognize whatever it is and then you sanction China from then until kingdom come, so that they are not part of the maritime trading order. And you tell them they need to cough up Taiwan. | |
| Understanding China and the way the government works, could the CCP survive a failure to take Taiwan? If they invade, they fail. And then because of that, they get kicked out of the global order. What do you think happens to the CCP? | |
| I don't know. But look at North Korea. Talk about a failed place. It's amazing to me how long the Kim dynasty has maintained its power. It's just unbelievable. They're starving. Don't count on any short-term ending. Those countries that are willing to cooperate with each other, not invade, negotiate their disagreements, work through international organizations, improve international organizations, that world is what you want to protect. And you want to allow people to come and join. So if Russia changes its mind, new government, etc, you want to bring them back into just the way Japan and Germany were brought back in. You want to protect that order forever. Our prosperity is based on it. And it involves serious defense spending, etc. | |
| The problem with the Communist Party, the paradigm of we're going to have a monopoly, it's a route to poverty. Think about it. When the communists took over, they didn't restore the grain harvest that had happened during the Civil War. The 1930s version until after Mao was dead, it's incredible. It's a really lousy system for promoting economic growth, and it matters in a poor country. It's going to determine your per capita standard of living. And the poorer you are, the more that makes a huge difference to you to have somebody say. Communism doesn't produce wealth. It's an incredibly effective way for taking power within a failing state and putting a dictatorship in power. It's incredibly good at that. But it doesn't deliver prosperity afterwards. | |
| ",781,134,,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1709591168890355851 | |
| "How Xi & Putin think | |
| Historian Sarah Paine's biggest career takeaway is the distinction between maritime & continental powers | |
| Continental powers focus on negative sum territorial conquests | |
| Martime powers use international law & powerful navies to protect trade & growth","The difference between a continental and maritime power is. And that's one of my big career takeaways. It's a fundamentally different way of looking at the world. | |
| Putin honestly looks at the world like, “If I control territory, that's what makes me secure.” Maritime powers, start with Britain, which is, “Hey, mine's secure if I can maximize money from commerce.” Because then I can buy a Navy and buy allies with armies and stuff. And then eventually this order of organizing trade by international law, and the Dutch Republic is instrumental in this with Hugo Grotius, who is the founding father of international law. They want to run transactions by law, et cetera. This is an international order that's win-win. You join it, you get security. You have input on how it evolves because it's a work in progress. | |
| Whereas this continental thing is negative sum. And you can see it in Ukraine. Putin wants more territory. Okay, he took Eastern Ukraine and he took Crimea in 2014. But it's negative sum because he destroys whatever businesses had been being run in Donbass and he absolutely kills most of the tourist industry. And then you can look to today, it's so negative sum in Ukraine. He is destroying wealth at a really rapid clip. It's really a stupid way to run things. | |
| If the PRC tries to take Taiwan, it's a continental view. Somehow they think more territory is going to improve their security. No, they'll level it and they'll hurt themselves. Whereas if they just ignore the Taiwan thing and say, “Oh, they're so annoying, let them run their own place who wants them anyway.” and then trade with them, they'll both make money. That's my biggest career takeaway. | |
| Political scientists love to talk about America, the hegemony. No other country in the world wants an American hegemony. There may be some people in the United States who think that looks great, but no one's going to buy into a world order in which the United States is the hegemony who pushes everyone else around. I get it, we're big and we're influential, but other people are influential too. This maritime order where, yeah we're an important part of it, but we have many other people in it. It's a win-win. | |
| Biden is doing all of these meetings with Europeans managing what's going to go on in Ukraine, et cetera. And it's based on agreement of all these different countries chipping in big and small. Who's prosperous and who's not, may I ask? | |
| Dwarkesh Patel 2:12:36 | |
| The Maritimes. | |
| Sarah Paine 2:12:38 | |
| Yeah, they're the ones who have massively increased their standards of living since the Cold War. It was really the third world. Except now we got Wagner or whatever's left of it and also China's now got these private military things running roughshod over Africa. All that's going to do is tank African growth rates, which for a while were going double-digit. So that's one of my big career takeaways.",294,43,,https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1709654056669741207 |