These notes are incomplete and are not a review.

Life in the Bay Area, an economic dynamo in America’s richest state, can feel awfully dysfunctional. San Francisco has been unable to serve its homeless population, and even many wealthy people have to keep a generator for their extraordinarily expensive houses because the state can’t keep the lights on.

I would like to give Mr. Wang the benefit of the doubt and assume that his editor pushed him to dramatize the introduction—he alluded to his editor pushing him to narrativize the book at his book talk. As a Bay Area native, it doesn’t sound to me like he has spent much time living among normal people in San Francisco or the Bay Area. I think he pulls a motte-and-bailey where the easy defensible claim is that there are things about the Bay Area that are not great (the levels of homelessness, “even many wealthy people” having backup generators¹). The harder implied claim is that the Bay Area is more dysfunctional than the rest of the US, nay, the world. I would harp on this less except that this particular motte-and-bailey seems constructed to make the book feel like more of a hot take than it is.

Looking at these two countries, I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies. Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist.

During his book talk Mr. Wang mentioned that the reason he chose to emphasize the engineering vs. lawyerly state dichotomy is that there had already been enough discussion of other dichotomies, in particular democratic vs. authoritarian. I think this is a reasonable argument except that the implication of the book is that we ought to adopt some of China’s practices, presumably hoping to become more of an engineering state while not also importing authoritarianism. During his book talk he said as much, viz. that the U.S. ought to become 20% more of an engineering state, while China ought to become 50% more lawyerly, especially with respect to individual rights.

When reading the book the burning question I had throughout was what practices we might actually adopt. The idea that America has too many regulations (which seems reasonable as a general principle to me) has been more recently discussed recently among Democrats. But I finished the book a little confused as to what specific policy proposals Mr. Wang had. Instead he mostly mentions things that the U.S. shouldn’t adopt, like the One Child Policy or state-manufactured economic involution, e.g. the party secretary of the city of Liupanshui, Li Zaiyong, being sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve² for getting his city into $21B of debt to fund nonsensical infrastructure projects.

The questions asked by the book talk crowd were almost identical to the questions I had myself, and Dan Wang seemed to anticipate them, which makes me confident that I am not the only one to have noticed the shadow of this question in his book. Unfortunately he did not have much of an answer to the question of why the Soviet Union didn’t qualify as an engineering state and what will prevent China from mirroring Soviet stagnation. This question was actually asked by the faculty interviewer, Stephen Kotkin, who noted (perhaps Mr. Wang mentioned it during his introduction?) that Xi borrowing of Stalin’s phrase that the Party ought to be “engineers for the soul”. One also wonders why the strategy of physical projects promoting political resilience attributed by Mr. Wang to China didn’t pay off for the Soviets, who if anything were even more ambitious—for example, transforming the Aral Sea into a desert in order to make cotton a cash crop for Uzbekistan; refer to Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation Nature.

Separately Mr. Wang gave his answer to the question of what is actually to be done in the U.S. to make it more of an engineering state when asked by another member of the audience. He observed that although the U.S. has a cursus honorum for lawyers to enter into government (getting into an Ivy League Law School, editing the law review there and clerking for a Supreme Court Justice, and so on), there is no equivalent for engineers. This is a fine proposal but feels underwhelming.

To be continued.

Lectio difficilior potior (Latin for “the more difficult reading is the stronger”) is a main principle of textual criticism. Where different manuscripts conflict on a particular reading, the principle suggests that the more unusual one is more likely the original. The presupposition is that scribes would more often replace odd words and hard sayings with more familiar and less controversial ones, than vice versa. … Erasmus expressed the idea in his Annotations to the New Testament in the early 1500s: “And whenever the Fathers report that there is a variant reading, that one always appears to me to be more esteemed (by them is the one) which at first glance seems the more absurd-since it is reasonable that a reader who is either not very learned or not very attentive was offended by the specter of absurdity and changed the text.”

From Wikipedia.

First download the existing tokenizer to ./my_tokenizer/tokenizer.json. You only need tokenizer.json; for example, GPT-2’s can be obtained here.

Then open up a Python REPL and run some commands. I’m adding task & sentinel tokens for UL2R:

from transformers import AutoTokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("./my_tokenizer/")
tokenizer.add_tokens(["<|r|>", "<|s|>", "<|x|>"])
# 3  
tokenizer.add_tokens([f"<|mask_{i}|>" for i in range(100)])
# 100
tokenizer.save_pretrained("./my_tokenizer")

Lawrence Jones: … it’s not our job; we shouldn’t have to live in fear while they figure out what’s going on. Put him in a mental institution or a jail and let the system figure it out. People are having to duck and die on the trains and the buses, walk through the street—this is just one case, but it’s happening all across the country. And it’s not a money issue. Billions of dollars have been given to mental health and the homeless population. A lot of them don’t want to take the program; a lot of them don’t want to get the help that’s necessary. You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources we’re offering, or you get locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.

Brian Kilmeade: -or involuntary lethal injection or something.

Source: Brian Kilmeade on murdering homeless people (September 10, 2025)

Jimmy Kimmel: We hit new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can can to score political points from it. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff, which got some criticism. But on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half? I think very good. … This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody he called a friend. This is how a 4-year-old mourns a gold fish.

Source: Jimmy Kimmel on the murder of Charlie Kirk (September 15, 2025)

Donald Trump: It’s weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks. But the glass it seems was broken from the inside to the out. So it wasn’t a break-in; it was a breakout. I don’t know. You hear the same things I do.

Source: Donald Trump on the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi (2022)

⁸Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. ⁹Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” ¹⁰ And the Lord said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.

Source: Genesis 4:8-10, ESV

From Towards a Liberatory Technology by Murray Bookchin, writing under the pseudonym Lewis Herber (emphasis mine):

Thus far every social revolution has foundered because the peal of the tocsin could not be heard over the din of the work-shop. Dreams of freedom and plenty were polluted by the mundane, workaday responsibility of producing the means of survival. Looking back at the brute facts of history, we find that as long as revolution meant continual sacrifice and denial for the people, the reins of power fell into the hands of the political “professionals,” the mediocrities of Thermidor. How well the liberal Girondins of the French Convention understood this reality can be judged by their effort to reduce the revolutionary fervor of the Parisian popular assemblies—the great sections of 1793—by decreeing that the meetings should close “at ten in the evening,“or, as Carlyle tells us, “before the working people come. . .” from their jobs. The decree proved ineffective, but it was well aimed. Essentially, the tragedy of past revolutions has been that, sooner or later, their doors closed, “at ten in the evening.” The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever!

From How Americans Used Time in 1965 by John P. Robinson, published in 1977:

Numbers are minutes spent per day (out of 1440 total).

Employed Men

Employed Women

Unemployed Women

🎶 Ihni binni dimi diniwiny anytime
Ihni binni dimi dini one more time
Or ihni binni diniwiny anytime
Oh, Ihni binni dini one more time 🎵

Because of you – because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met, Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny. That’s part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right. There can be no fuller expression of America’s support for self-determination than our leaving Iraq to its people. That says something about who we are.

From Remarks by the President and First Lady on the End of the War in Iraq.

…there is credible evidence from the same scholarly sources that articulate the unwillingness or inability of francophone sub-Saharan African nations to embrace these new forms of governance apparently because the status quo serves the interests of the political leaders of these countries and their external mentor-France. The various economic, cultural and security arrangements that France established with its former colonies in Africa in the 1960s have enabled the French to maintain unprecedented influence in the domestic and external affairs of nations such as Cameroon, Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in over fifty years after independence. Sustained by institutions such as La Francophonie and France-Afrique, French leaders since De Gaulle have supported African leaders, even if those leaders were engaged in practices that stymied efforts at democratic transitions and transparent governance, as long as French strategic interests (political, economic and cultural) were advanced (Martin 1997). By contrast, the British have not sought to exert undue influence in the internal affairs of its former colonies in Africa and have largely left leaders and citizens of those nation to embrace the kinds of democratic transitions that are compatible with their values and historical experiences. It is against this background that this paper proposes a thorough re-examination of American support for democratic transitions in Africa in large part because it was American leadership (with the support of its western allies) that stimulated, energized and supported the movements for transitions across Africa in the early 1990s (Kpundeh 1992).

(Emphasis mine.)

From Ngwafu, Peter A. (2016) “U.S. Support for Democracy in Africa: Discrepant Orientations of Anglophone and Francophone Africa towards Democratic Practices, Good Governance & Human Rights,” African Social Science Review: Vol. 8: No. 1, Article 2. Available here.

… when reelected, McCarthy gained the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, a position he used, according to biographer David Oshinksy, “to undermine government morale, damage numerous reputations, and make America look sinister in the eyes of the world.”

From The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers.