People who have worked in both China and Silicon Valley tend to comment on the similarities: the belief in rapid change, the power of engineers, the odes to humanity that mask impatience with actual humans.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
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I submit that Europeans ought to be more circumspect in their self-satisfaction. Chaos is only one election away. Right-populist parties are outpolling ruling incumbent parties pretty much everywhere, and it is as likely as not that Trumps with European characteristics will engulf the continent by the end of the decade.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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The United States has a knack of going down in flames and then rejuvenating. China does not.
~ Joerg Wuttke, former head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China via The New Yorker
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The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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In some ways, Anthropic’s terms resemble these traditional examples of privately imposed contractual limits on the military’s use of technology. The company’s position on autonomous lethal weapons, for example, is not one of outright opposition to the use of such weapons but instead a judgment that today’s frontier AI systems are not capable enough to autonomously make decisions about human life or death.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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Roy Cohn was a master of situational immorality. He had rules about how to exercise power. You would always try to goad your enemies into being the worst they possibly could be and then turn that against them, so that Cohn would actually look like the good guy, which he virtually never was.
~ Sam Roberts, city politics reporter for the Daily News via The New Yorker
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So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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For years, China’s rising power has rested on a fragile balance of economic freedom and political control, in what early Party reformers called the “birdcage economy”—airy enough to allow enterprises to thrive, but not capacious enough to sacrifice power. That arrangement has rarely looked more tenuous.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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Call me a romantic, but I believe that there will be a future, and indeed a long future, beyond 2027. History will not end. We need to cultivate the skill of exact thinking in demented times.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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At root, intersectionality teaches that the relative victim status of various groups is the deepest truth, and this framework must drive our interpretation of both natural and built reality. Truth, moral claims, beauty, dignity, the explanatory value of a research insight—all of these must be subjugated to a prior determination of the historical power or powerlessness of certain sociological categories.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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