Intelligence vs Production

"Optimize for intelligence" says Anglo accelerationist praxis. "Seize the means of production" says the Chinese. Who's right? It is widely assumed in Western discourse that intelligence, the ability to comprehend all the signals and digest them into a plan of action that controls of all the variables, is the ur-instrument that begets all other forms of power. Whatever is the right strategy, intelligence is how you find it. Given intelligence you can think your way out of any box. Any other form of power will end up outmaneuvered and controlled by whoever musters the most intelligence.

This makes sense. It's closely related to why our collective hopes are deeply staked on breakout growth from software and AI (PE ratios in the hundreds!). It's also closely related to the high capital efficiency, abstract-financial, high-on-the-value-chain, branding-and-ownership neoliberal theory of economic power that's been serving us so well for the past 50 years.

But I want to make a few observations: we're in the process of getting taken economically by the guys who have been focusing on production for the past 50 years. Relatedly, our intelligence has become terminally unmoored from reality, trapped in spectacle, lacking productive outlets. As just one example, consider the phenomenon of video games (and other entertainment media including much of politics) as a way to burn off excess intelligence that has found no productive outlet. Is it possible that we simulate realities for ourselves where applied intelligence is the bottleneck because we haven't got that in reality? We dream of working on a real factory, but then wake up in a surplus-intelligence reality, stuck playing factorio.

How could there possibly be surplus intelligence? We deny the possibility: "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Our popular model of intelligence imagines someone with perfect executive function poring over every bit of signal and modelling out the consequences of every bit of control to optimize a singular meta-strategy, for whom there can be no surplus intelligence. But no amount of intelligence can make up for broken executive function or lack of clear strategy (they are equivalent), and a great deal of "executive" function in practice comes from the feedback signals of contact with the right reality. In the absence of the right reality-contact strategy, "optimize for intelligence" collapses into attention-deficit circularity, and intelligence becomes worthless. Intelligence in practice is downstream of strategy, not upstream of it.

The reason the Chinese are getting rich is clarity of strategy, embodied in the wise guiding hand of the Chinese Communist Party, directing their ample intelligence to optimize the means of production.

By production I mean the physical transformation of energy and matter into tools that can accomplish valuable tasks. Because this contains the possibility of not only end-use tools but also self-reproduction of production tools, this whole process has a runaway compounding logic that's far more real and proven than the supposed runaway compounding of intelligence. The latter may just be an ideological hallucination, but compounding growth of physical capital has been demonstrated in practice to the point of transforming the whole world and winning multiple wars.

Optimizing the means of production is the open-ended reality contact game that was proven to be strategically decisive 80 years ago, and is about to be proven again. From the perspective of intelligence, it offers rich feedback from non-spectacle reality, and a rich field of opportunity. It's a perfect strategy to focus intelligence into something actually useful. It's probably not the only such strategy, but it's certainly the most fundamental.

Since the means of production anywhere can be exported to solve problems everywhere (in return for buying power in materials and political concessions), mastering the means of production may mean mastering the world.

How do we get in on that?

Nice post. I'd say the anglo strategy is defined by Motivation instead of Intelligence but I hear you. The defining moment for the anglo world was the english population boom and subsequent exporting of that excess population along with law to the rest of the world. A population that's willing to colonize distant lands is defined by motivation, not intelligence. So really the constrast in strategies is that of efficient production and exporting which is the route the Chinese have taken and maxed their skill points on and for the Anglo it's the ability to implement law in foreign lands and attract migrants.

I think it's easy to look at the Chinese strategy and say "we should be doing that" but this ignores the fact that we are alien states and populations. This is for a few reasons:

1) We have a much smaller population
2) We have a much richer population
3) Our services based economy supports the financial sector which is (unfortunately) where we're finding an edge for now
4) We have a political economy that gets pulled in different directions by sloshing political and cultural tides and can't focus on one thing for an extended period

We absolutely should have domestic steel, drone, and semi production, but any lower level production would require either 1) forfeiting much our financial strength by moving Americans down the production chain or 2) importing tons of labor to do the lower level production. Nobody wants to nuke the economy and nobody on the right wants to import tons of migrant labor (and nobody on the left wants to import labor in a strategic way, only an ideological way). Sticky situation!

I'm an advocate of "playing your position". We should play our position as the legal and financial powerhouse of the world while also putting on some "fat" like onshoring the aforementioned areas of production. But we should absolutely not try to compete directly in the position that China already dominates.

>>3038
Yeah I don't mean to historically characterize the anglo and chinese strategies in their whole nature. Just to contrast these two particular strategies (intelligence and production) which happen to be currently aesthetically associated with the two civilizational poles. Good call on motivation towards expansionary order-out-of-chaos as the defining historical anglo strength. I don't disagree.

>We have a much smaller population
This isn't as true as you might think. If you include the continent, the western bloc has just as many core westerners as the Chinese have han.

>the financial sector
Yeah we're finding an "edge", but it's increasingly unclear whether this edge is actually real, or just juking numbers around to mask our loss of actual ownership and actual productive skill capital to China while the finance class gets rich on zero-sum internal parasitism. To the extent that our financial system extracts actual money from Asia without just selling debt and equity, then I would believe in it, but I'm skeptical whether it's actually extractive or just cover for selling debt and scamming ourselves.

>forfeiting much our financial strength by moving Americans down the production chain
I don't really believe this either. Most smart people I know work in fakeshit prestige jobs and would basically be zero-opportunity-cost labor if they were put to work on actual production. A lot of people are effectively sitting on their thumbs for lack of physical-technical labor demand.

>importing tons of labor to do the lower level production
And of course this doesn't appear to work out even economically, as I read the numbers. Even if it did, it has the same control-loss problem as offshoring. We thought offshoring resulted in us owning them, it didn't. Labor immigration is similar.

>I'm an advocate of "playing your position".
I agree with this in principle. But one of the most important parts of playing your position is figuring out what your position actually is, and what strategy is appropriate and actually viable for it. If there's some actual strategy that lets us play a strong position against an unaligned Asia that has ~all the manufacturing capital, I basically still haven't heard it. What exactly is this "financial powerhouse" strategy and how does it help?

I agree trying to directly compete with China in a head-on symmetric way is stupid. That's not what they did to beat us at production. But if we're not able to build the means of our own way of life, we're beholden.

There can be surplus intellect, but in that case there's been a misallocation of resources and thus the system in toto isn't as intelligent as it could be. I agree that certain sub-spheres of Anglo thought have cultivated a kind of silly mystery cult of intelligence, but that's a misapprehension of the idea.

I think a reframing that inches a little closer to the proper strategic distinction here is one that is historically the subject of much debate in chess, which is the question of "which is better, dynamics or material?". 19th century play was fantastically dynamic, full of bold sacrifices, dashing human creativity, etc, but as the game evolved it became more and more dominated by preparation and memorization of opening lines in obsessive depth. Then the computers came along and the debate seemed even more settled on the side of material, with their soul-sucking style of minmaxing the thinnest of advantages. But then comes along something like AlphaZero and what the hell, it's playing like a 19th century master, focusing on things like sacrificing material if it means more opponent material is disabled for effective play.

Therefore to me the best question instead is "*When* is dynamic play better and *when* is material play better?".

Moreover, if intelligence is maximization of future freedom of action, there's an implicit dependence upon available substrate, as is true of any kind of variational principle, because that means playing well, and you can't play without pieces! Hence the Bitter Lesson in all its forms.

I would question that it's clarity of strategy per se, but the presence of genuine strategy at all. To play better you have to see further, and to do that you need to bind components (for technical reasons) into some greater body. Formal affiliation is not the same as functional integration, and I think the problem with the west is the absence of that, because it's fascism (binding) or "collectivist", "authoritarian", whatever, I fucking guess. The evidence of this for me is the sheer full-spectrum of overgrazing on human substrate that you can see on every single domain of life in the west. Fat fucks, sterile girlbosses, imported vote blocs, diploma mills, thinly-veiled schemes leeching money from the tax base (e.g. fat contracts for housing migrants in hotels). Not that the Chinese of all people are famous for loving their neighbor, but there's enough control structure to direct activity strategically where it counts.

There are very few things which are universally dominant. Almost all strategies have de facto operational ranges, natural habitats where their characteristics become advantages, and that includes individualist liberalism. Has the context changed enough to turn it into a liability instead of a strength?

"What should we do?"
"What you mean 'we', Kemo Sabe?"

>>3062
Most of the ideological points we are citing (mystery cult of intelligence, anti-authoritarianism, obesity, finance maximalism) masquerading as strategy are in fact copes for the lack of strategy. The whole cannot direct the parts by any higher logic, so we come up with excuses to explain why what we're doing instead is actually good. It's the same for our very noticeable ideologies: in the degenerative end-times of an empire, everyone becomes fat, gay, and brown. Therefore that must be OK, or at least bad to notice in any negative way, so as not to imply that we are actually on a bad track.

Much of anglo thought at this point is just this sort of collective face-saving rationalization. China must be failing economically. Our dwindling edge in certain technologies must confer some actual advantage. The fact that we're unable to keep faith with each other or say what we mean and mean what we say must not be particularly important. This is connected somehow to the monetary situation: American buying power is propped up by belief in the power of America's economy manifested in asset prices and dollar demand, and we produce belief in the power of our economy by... having a lot of buying power. The whole thing is powered by face saving spectacle. How can we expect anything but psychosis?

But rationalization isn't quite all of it. Much is actually enforced. "we hate fascism because we can't into fascism anymore" well ackshually we hate fascism because we fought a holy war against fascism on behalf of the enemies of fascism (collective strategy), who then proceeded on a long march through our institutions to root out the last vestiges of fascist (strategic) possibility. And a combination of their power and the face saving logic means we have a hard time noticing that this was a mistake. Thanks, Franklin!

>the presence of genuine strategy at all ... you need to bind components (for technical reasons) into some greater body
Let's get a little more concrete: specifically, we need the binding to have a strategic conversation that means anything at all: the conclusions made in that conversation result in something like the actions discussed. This is a particular instance of the more general problem of the binding of our words to reality. This I think more than anything is the essential matter accounting for much of the problems we face.

Most people really aren't good at binding their actions to the words and their words for reality, for lack of training and enforcement, and because doing so is often punished in various ways. Public discourse is totally detached from the possibility of action-in-reality. Private discourse is no better. Philosophy has nothing in particular to say about this. I hear there used to be a concept "the Logos" that had something to do with this. Intelligence without logos is just noise. Even production without logos is just noise. The problem of life is how to have matter-in-reality bound to some kind of logic of self-intelligibility, integrity of function, and necessity of action. How to put the logos into flesh...

I'd like to see more "accelerationist" study of this issue in particular: the binding of logic to matter, especially at scale when there are multiple agents involved. Getting good at this seems like the essential power core of a civilization far superior to our own.

Tolkien made a big deal about the rigors of "truth speaking" both because he was a logos-respecting christian, because he was a germanophile who saw integrity as the foundational virtue, and because he saw we didn't have enough of to live. He failed, but maybe something can be done.