Comment by TrainedMonkey
3 months ago
I noticed that people love pointing how far AI field has advanced in a few years and extrapolate next few years. While at the same time being dismissive of Chinese semiconductor manufacturing process. In similar vein I also remember claims that TSMC Fab in Arizona can never work, and yet it does. So I don't know man, I wouldn't underestimate what a billion of enterprising people can do. Especially when paired with the system that has a pipeline of funneling smart people into elite schools.
Underestimating China seems like a really, really, really stupid thing to do.
I don't think the US is underestimating China... I do think that the US is preemptively shoring up a domestic posture against long term changes. It would be a pretty bad strategy to continue to outsource everything and continue to see a massive trade imbalance with the outside world for a prolonged period of time.
> It would be a pretty bad strategy to continue to outsource everything and continue to see a massive trade imbalance with the outside world for a prolonged period of time.
It's not actually a strategy at all. It's the organic result of being the global reserve currency. Foreigners want American dollars so that they can trade with everyone else and are incentivized to do whatever it takes to get it.
Also, the "massive trade imbalance" is only an imbalance in goods. When you take services & the flow of foreign investments/loans into consideration as well, things don't look anywhere near as uneven as Donald Trump would like you to believe.
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Yes, we are doing a bad job of updating our priors.
Is that sarcastic? Isn’t underestimating by definition a bad thing?
Taking this as an earnest question—no, I don’t get that sense from that word. To me it describes the direction of an error, not the error itself.
It’s a thing you’d prefer to avoid, sure; but some degree of prognostic uncertainty is totally routine (in fact I would call that definitional: no predictions are truly certain until they’ve come to pass, and by the time that happens it’s usually too late to act). It’s not “bad” any more than mortality is “bad”—it just is, whether or not we wish it were; wisdom lies in managing it as best you can.
In the sense that the gp used the word, I think they allude to a tradeoff: you can reduce the probability of an underestimate by increasing the probability of an overestimate. I took their comment to imply that it would be wiser to risk an overestimate than to risk an underestimate on questions of “can Chinese society achieve a massive goal on a tight timeframe if their leadership decides it’s important.”
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It's definitionally non-ideal, but not definitionally really, really stupid.
Perhaps the USA feels that it has a reputation to downhold?
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