[notacoward]

Exactly. China is very deliberately not allowing the ad-click business to divert talent from more strategic sectors. Whether you think it's a good idea or not, acceptable or not in the sense of market freedom, it's a rational move.

[djohnston]

My counterpoint is that you can make a rational decision and still be wrong. Ad click business is how they can build a facial recognition database of 3 billion people, and China is uniquely positioned to immediately apply that dataset to training ML with military applications.

[notacoward]

It's absolutely possible to be rational and yet wrong. It's also entirely possible to promote or allow something for a while and then decide it has finished serving its purpose.

[tablespoon]

> It's absolutely possible to be rational and yet wrong. It's also entirely possible to promote or allow something for a while and then decide it has finished serving its purpose.

Yeah. Also, generalizations can be true but misleading in a particular instance. I think a lot of people make that mistake with China, assuming because in general democracies have been more successful than autocracies [1], they can be complacent because China will fail. There's no reason autocracy with a talented leader (or one who's lucky) can outperform a democracy.

[1] People also often say that free markets are "more successful" than less free markets, and it's probably true to an extent, but there's also a lot of problems/disagreement defining what "success is." For instance, the US has traded away a lot of its general manufacturing capacity leading to more "success" by some financial metrics but failure by many others.