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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe the article is bad (I haven't looked), but a bad article does not justify a shallow dismissal. We want curious conversation here.

Does selecting standout quotes to the forefront not foster curious conversation more than headline reactions?

Perhaps it does. "This is just bizarre" doesn't do much to promote curious conversation, though. Maybe say what you think is wrong with it?

(I mean, sure, you're saying it's self-evident what's wrong with it. And, to many people, maybe it is. Your words are still a shallow dismissal, though.

No—based on long experience I'd say it doesn't. What fosters curious conversation is thoughtful, reflective* responses.

* by 'reflective' I mean something like the opposite of reflexive: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I listened to one of this guy's podcasts recently. The guest was impressive but Dwarkesh... Not so much. His questions were meandering and made it clear he didn't have much of a grasp on the subject matter. Does not surprise me that he is perplexed about the totalitarian regime's penchant for watching people.

For someone who interviews experts across a wide variety of disciplines (I've watched military professors, anthropologists, AI experts on his channel), I'd say Dwarkesh does a pretty damn good job. His interview with the Naval War college, he asked some mid questions, but the professor was able to use his questions as a launching platform to give informed insight, and it's one of my favorite interviews. I can't think of anyone else who interviews as well with such a balance of depth and breadth. It's clear he's a voracious learner and I'd bet he'll be even better than he is now in a few years. He's also really young, I'm not sure he's 30 yet.

So he would be doing exactly what the Chinese government wants. As a US president the guy would shoot himself in the foot.

It's not wrong, though. If your goal is purely "win hearts and minds in China," doing whatever the Chinese government wants is good step. It is, however, not clear that this would be a good primary goal for a US president.

Clearly it would only win hearts, the point of winning minds is to persuade them to your viewpoint.

If you really want to win hearts alone, drop all visa and foreign registration requirements, close Pacific military bases, cede Hawaii. There's so much you can do to win hearts.

The easiest way to win minds to your side is to change your mind to match theirs.

Yea not knowing why cameras are everywhere is naive.

And the fix to “winning” Chinese citizens over is to dismantle the CCP, by practicing asymmetric warfare - like economically weakening them - until citizens are ready for change.

In the 1980s, "Reagan's great director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, asked the CIA's Soviet Division two obvious questions: Where is the Soviet Union weak? and Where is it most vulnerable? The answer he received was: We don't know. No one's ever asked this before."

Yeah its really weird because the US already did this stuff during Obama's presidency, hell talk of the town was the US and China should form a G2 back then. Trump also recently made same sort of G2 comment, China declined both times.

You had China bailed out the US and what did China get in return the US destabilising Asia with their Pivot to Asia policy. Trump started out this way and what did trump do start a trade and tech war with China. I don't US word or signature is worth shit tho all it has is violence and fear to work with these days.

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