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Comment by bumbledraven | Hacker News Reader

"7% Documentary: Behind the scenes of Fine Art AI - 纪录片《7%》：揭秘人工智能“绝艺”夺冠幕后腾讯网 - English subtitles" (https://v.qq.com/x/page/r0025m06t5o.html) is a neat 2018 documentary about Fine Art, a world-class Go AI created by Chinese developers at Tencent. The documentary features extensive commentary by the main programmers, Ma Bo and Tang Shanmin, as well as the project lead Liu Yongsheng.

This bit from 4:02 stuck out to me:

INTERVIEWER: What level do you think Fine Art has reached?

MA BO: About the same level AlphaGo had when playing against Li Shiqi last year.

INTERVIEWER: Then wouldn't you regard what you do as a redundant work?

MA BO: How should I say this? Its like, when China made the atom bomb after America. Was that redundant work?

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The Chinese have a level of nationalism that many nations lack.

That is a good thing.

no it's not

"identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations."

I feel it just artificially and pointlessly divides us and create needless "us vs them" situations.

Nationalism has interesting "properties".

It carries with it the implicit assumption that people miles away in the same nation that you have never met share some of the same beliefs and values you do.

It somehow justify you taking credit for the accomplishments of others in the same nation even though you haven't done anything to contribute to said accomplishment.

> I feel it just artificially and pointlessly divides us and create needless "us vs them" situations.

You may be objectively correct, but if it weren't for nationalism, my culture wouldn't exist today and I would have been a German, as would have been my ancestors for more than a century. Just because something is "artificial and pointless" doesn't mean that it's bad.

> but if it weren't for nationalism, my culture wouldn't exist today

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Frequently the conqueror gets culturally influenced by the people they conquer - especially 100+ years ago where totalitarian levels of control were much harder to implement.

Also when your people repelled the Germans, it might have more to do with cultural differences than nationalism - empires who succeed in holding on to capture territory are often those that absorb and incorporate the culture of the people they conquered.

Nationalism itself has a lot to do with cultural differences. Especially Czech nationalism.

> empires who succeed in holding on to capture territory are often those that absorb and incorporate the culture of the people they conquered

Well I didn't notice a lot of Germans and Austrians speaking Czech, to be honest.

Well, there are many "nationalists" everywhere but, for example instead of going:

"hey, China built the most extensive high speed railway network in the world in the last 15 years and the fastest operating trainsets, we can and should do better" they do something else entirely.

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