Dispatches from the Group Chats, Vol 4

Tech Right vs Nationalist Right, Nerds vs Jocks, Tiger Mom Discourse Returns

I recorded an interview with Marc Andreessen the other day, here it is:

Big week this week from the group chats, especially for our friend Sriram. Quotes below:

1. Recapping the Twitter drama

Not exactly that, but directionally close.

2. A nuanced response

Racism" is a misreading. There's a lot of resentment politics for sure, but that can be stripped off to find the rational core of opposition to scab workers, hostile foreign cultures, immigration fraud, and systematic anti-white racism, which are legitimate concerns.

It's obvious we need immigration reform especially of the H1B. It's way too hard to bring in actually qualified high quality people, and way too easy to abuse. To simply remove the cap is going to make the abuse an order of magnitude worse.

Elon and broader pro-immigration people seem to be kneejerking against the loser resentment politics, ignoring the rational objections, and doubling down on something that's going to be a disaster. I hope they reach a more rational middle ground (like auctioning H1B's) soon.

…

Well, we have the first rift in our new governing coalition, between techno-libertarian meritocrats and populist Jacksonian America-firsters.

The real America-firsters don't just want to stop low-education criminal illegals...they also don't want the high-IQ immigrants from Asia and India and wherever.

They think the H1B visa system is a grift (which it kinda is for many employers), and just want to get rid of it, not reform it.

Now that this side has won, we'll see sub-divisions form. Someone like Vance is straddling this divide personally.

3. To back up for a second, it’s worth noting anyone can now support Trump without social disapproval anymore.

I personally was a bit skeptical about how deep this Trumpian revolution ran since it was only post-FU money people publicly backing him.

But...if even tech execs are hitching their wagon to the bucking Trump horse, and everyone is patting them on the back for it, well, then perhaps the revolution is real.

We're at the stage where the greengrocer no longer needs to have the communism poster in his window.

I wonder if the new elite will get to the point where the old elites now have to put up a new regime poster, so to speak.

Will the Google mid-tier people who once went along with objecting to working with the US military now have to grit their teeth and post a US flag emoji every once in a while.

(As people once had to post that BLM fist...)

4. All of this Twitter drama is just small potatoes

This is a marginal issue in the immigration debate which is overwhelmingly focused on “low skilled” illegals. And Trump doesn’t like caving anyway as it comes across as weak. As Sacks says, there is 90% agreement between tech and nationalist right

It’s Laura Loomer and some ethnonationalist Twitter anons vs a bunch of triggered Valley ethnics.

H1B is only 85,000 per year. O1 is under 20,000 per year. Probably there is a move to raise the bar for H1B and expand O1. Raise the pay minimum for H1B. Close the arb.

5. Of course there is downward pressure on wages.

Correct claim, incorrect visa attribution. Most of the “abuse” is via the L1 visa, not H1b. Scare quotes because I don’t buy the premises of the whole discourse. And of course there is downward pressure on wages. It’s basic economics and supply scarcity of relevant aptitudes. And would exist even with zero immigration and sharp restriction of L1 durations because software jobs are very portable and will get more so with AI. “Values/culture alignment” is very relevant of course, but nobody actually talks about it. They just cite it as a lofty abstraction to ally around and practice don’t-ask-don’t-tell about what it means. To some it means American business and innovation culture. To others it means buying into spirit of liberal pluralism and its mechanisms, viz separation of church and state, freedom of speech, respect for contracts etc. SV people usually mean some combination of these two. But to the majority who use the term it means some combination of: nativism, Christian dominionism, European cultural heritage, and race. That’s why it’s already a faultline in the SV-MAGA alliance. The two sides dont mean the same thing when the use terms like “values alignment” or “cultural assimilation.” The same is unfolding worldwide.

To be clear, there’s not ethnic favoritism in hiring. It’s economic exploitation closer in spirit to indentured servitude. The motive is not ethnic solidarity but pure profit.

6. Programming is supply constrained

From what I can tell high-end programming is severely supply constrained and anyone who can cut it at all should still be fielding multiple offers though it’s slowed a bit. Low-end is offshore and likely to stay there. I’m inclined to react to such anecdata with heavy skepticism. If they really wanted to make their case they’d share the rejected resumes for scrutiny. Highly doubt it’s A-players were talking about here who are losing out on jobs. Mid-level is actually kinda interesting since it’s where AI tools I think add most leverage at low end people don’t have enough experience to use the tools effectively).

7. Coding is no longer fun….but that may be changing

There’s actually a deeper, longer-term problem here than race labor wars… programming has gone from being fun 20 years ago to mostly not-fun grindwork. As a side effect, when things get to be non-fun grinds, usually it’s hungrier immigrants who are willing to do it at whatever level, kinda like Mexicans being the only ones willing to work in the worse corners of farming and meat processing. But AI might make it fun again. I used to enjoy programming back in the day but now it looks like endless tedious environment management, configuration, orchestration… if you’re not one of the geniuses who can breeze through it all and have motivation left over to work on the Olympiad grade stuff and go John Henry against the machines, you’ll never make it out of the salt mines levels. Unlike other kinds of engineering software evolves in the direction of least fun apparently. But I really do hope AI makes programming fun again. https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2024/12/22/making-programming-more-fun-with-an-ai-generated-debugger.html

8. Eric Weinstein’s case against high skilled immigration.

Everyone should have a problem with the structuring of high skilled immigration.

It is structured as an involuntary transfer from a narrow base of native STEM workers to their employers and their investors.

But the fun part is that the VCs and C-Suite get to claim they don’t get or understand why *anyone* of quality fears the best and the brightest. It’s diabolical genius.

It’s totally anti-free market, where the socialists (VC, C-suite) get to call the pro market workers “Commies who can’t compete!”

We should be talking about restructuring immigration around Coasian market rights to keep the. Enormous ”Borjas rectangle” in labor’s pocket so that labor and capital can split the “Harberger triangle” effiency gain.

Instead we become assholes to each other.

9. America is a people, not just an idea.

Person A: “But America is not just an idea. America is a nation. It’s a group of people with a common history and a common future.” … what “people” does Vance have in mind? Do people who buy Vivek’s idea join the “history and future”? Vance got attacked for his wife being Indian at one point didn’t he? So his definition can’t be Loomer’s. But if it’s not Vivek’s either, it’s not actually clear to me what if anything he’s saying. It sounds like an uncritical turn of phrase that just rhetorically gestures at nativism but in a noncommittal way. I doubt there’s a serious debate there especially since it unfolded in public speechifying.

Person B: I think Vance means people with bones in the dirt. As the song goes “land where my fathers died” — I heard Vance mentioned his family’s ancestral cemetery plot to his wife when he was proposing because he had no money but that’s what he did have.

10. Anti-white racial resentment has been mainstreamed

Person A: Anti white racial resentment has been totally mainstreamed. This was all inevitable IMO. The next turn is the realization of the combination of DEI and H1B's. And the systematic disenfranchisement of white Americans from the hiring and promotion pipelines of big companies in the US for 60 years. Scott Adams talks about how, twice, at two different large American companies, he was told flat out in the 80's and 90's that he would never be promoted because he's a white male. But even he was only willing to say that out loud AFTER he was cancelled. I wonder how many people have that same story

Person B: Everyone can feel that white rule of the world is over, and that whites are dying out/being killed. It’s a history changing shift but because everyone’s so dishonest and constipated about race in this country, no one can say anything about it out loud and that makes everyone anxious and indirect and you wind up with hysterical debates about H1b. It’s crazy that we’ve been banned from saying that whites have been targeted because nothing is more obvious. You’d think people would feel sorry for the whites. So diminished. But no one does. Only hate. It’s weird.

11. DEI for Americans is a bad argument. Americans need to work harder.

I think it is both: 1) opportunities for Americans have waned and we teach them nothing useful in school, and 2) American work ethic and value around education is weaker than many immigrant groups, most notably Chinese and Indians. I am very fired up about opportunities to make the next generation of Americans stronger faster better, and to invest more heavily in them. I am less excited about the argument that they should do commodity shit and get paid more for it than low cost foreign labor today. If 100% of illegal immigrants were deported (which is to say we just…enforce the law) mulching will get more expensive. But I’m not sanguine on higher compensation for landscaping labor saving 22 y/os from video games, Mountain Dew, and opioids.

1) enforce all laws (including deporting those in violation of immigration law and enforcing civil rights laws and prosecuting companies for illegal affirmative action programs that have unfairly disadvantaged American candidates) 2) have a debate about what is “cream” and then go skim it. 3) tell our kids they need to work a lot harder and winning matters and we need to outcompete people who eat sleep and shit a desire to beat us. We do need to do all these things, but we should do them in this order The white welfare socialism thing is not the answer. But neither is telling American workers who’ve had to deal with illegal and unfair competition that they should suck it up.

An example here is that becoming a plumber or HVAC tech today actually pays really well, but it’s a bit of a status bridge people don’t want to cross. It’s also actually hard work and people perceive you’ll be viewed as less than a gender studies grad. I’m fine w the public position “kick them all out before we let anyone in!” But if we are being honest w ourselves we need to restore the value for work, work ethic, and candidly probably culturally devalue the college degree. If you looked at where the best and brightest were in the 60s they were studying aerospace and nuclear engineering. Now they do cs, banking, or yearn to be a nicotine pouch influencer. Space race, Cold War, etc were motivators. We need to stir the spirits of our young men to pursue bigger things. Rebuild the manufacturing base, push on the boundaries of physics, rebuild the American military, automate an awful lot of the things we import labor for today. We need people to do all these things.

I do believe we should have the very best talent around the world. I agree this doesn’t include a horde of mediocre SAAS employees. It seems like a worthwhile conversation of what is “best” and how to thoughtfully sap it.

12. Americans want their cake and to eat it too

The chud vote here is "fuck the entire outside world, we need to focus on us" as if there's even the internal appetite for the sort of America first policies this would really entail. At every turn, when an American had the choice between paying less for a thing (either a good or a service) or paying more for an American version, they've done the former.

Again, I'm in Europe so channeling that view, but everywhere you look here, you see endless preference for locally-made everything, down to the car industry protected by tariffs. It also means food and other goods are more expensive as a fraction of income, but even if it wanted to, the local oligarchy couldn't just sell the working classes down the river by outsourcing manufacturing to China and importing a slave class.

(And no, you can chide Europeans for the immigration policies, but whites are down to 30-40% in Texas and California, Europe isn't even remotely close to that.)

Again, I'm in Europe so channeling that view, but everywhere you look here, you see endless preference for locally-made everything, down to the car industry protected by tariffs. It also means food and other goods are more expensive as a fraction of income, but even if it wanted to, the local oligarchy couldn't just sell the working classes down the river by outsourcing manufacturing to China and importing a slave class.

Are Americans really going to make these tradeoffs? With Trump, maybe, we'll see. But I'm a bit skeptical.

It's a very hard trade to unwind, selling out your middle class for an Asian one.

Right wing commies. Rockefeller wasps are dead

long live enjoy work life balance trads. Oh, I want US GDP but with European work culture. Don't we all, dude. Don't we all.

13. We need immigrants to build

‘I don't care that my kid can't out-think or out-muscle some ruthless Indian kid, I'm an American, and we should make it so the middle American has a decent shot at life, no matter what, and if that mean less economic productivity so be it’

Which, well, OK. But it's not exactly "Valley values"

Which is (channeling Elon) "anything and everything to get a Mars colony"

So which is it, America? Because without the Jews and the Italians and the Indians and all the rest of it, this place would be Canada or Australia or whatever. Probably better run and lower crime, but also culturally irrelevant and far less wealthy.

The most important paper in AI in the past decade, potentially a human inflection point...and well, what do you know?

None of those surnames were on the Mayflower passenger registry.

The reality is the US is terrible at high culture and intellectualism, and was a scientific non-entity until WWII, and then had to bootstrap its great successes like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program off imported talent, because native talent wasn't good enough. And it's the same deal now with AI.

The H1B debate is but a side quest to that larger arc.

14. But Immigrants need to assimilate

The immigrant groups who’ve succeeded in America did so by becoming Americans. We have a bit of a melting pot problem. It’s clear the wave of immigrants we have is too high to absorb properly. This is in addition to the left actively fighting absorption. You used to get here and be told you fucking won the lottery, now you arrive and an NGO shows up and tells you all the ways you have been wronged.

This point isn’t made enough. One of the most evil things the left has done in the last 30 years (a long list) is to inculcate to Americans that the melting pot is evil and to immigrants that we owe them something. They were doing this at least as early as the early 90’s; it was part of the same fetid spring that gave us critical race theory and intersectionality.

In theory, the American experiment is the thought you can inoculate Anglo-Saxon mores into anyone, given enough education and social engineering.

The nativists in this picture (Sailer, the MAGA chuds, etc.) would claim otherwise.

Which to a certain part you did with Germans, Scandos, Irish, Italians and Jews

The US is such poor soil for real ethnonationalism though. There's so little 'there' there, in terms of an actual ethnos.

WW2 as the great reset on who is white

15. Vivek misses the point in his nerds vs jocks tweet

This isn’t correct.

In its glory days, NASA was all jocks.

Former (and active duty) fighter pilots, submariners, heavy drinkers, smokers, etc.

The American space program was so defined by jocks its *nerds* were jocks, too.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

Only someone whose parents and grandparents did not grow up here could believe that in the era of Apollo it was the class nerd who was venerated.

Vivek sounds like a leftist, believing that people like what they like because they’ve been socially conditioned. No, American people love the jock for deep, visceral reasons. Hollywood hasn’t been telling them to. They just are drawn to that. Vivek is representing a want to socially engineer Americans out of loving what they reflexively love. Horrible message!

The vVvek post accurately conveys the strain of contempt, within immigration maximalism, for american culture and western culture generally. The implication is basically “we should replace American culture with Asian grind culture”… So it was like a bill cosby cultural pathology “pull up your pants” speech, except instead of “stop listening to rap music” the injunction was “stop letting your kids go outside”

Good tweet response: https://x.com/realjeremycarl/status/1872348978798571710?s=46

16. What does Vivek tweet mean for Vivek?

Person A: He will be known from here on out as someone who wants America to get rid of sleepovers, hanging out with friends, and prom queens. Declaration of war on the American dream that, for better or worse, his potential voter base believes in

Maybe he can live it down eventually, I’m not sure. But it’s a gaffe on the level of “47%” or “you didn’t build that” and maybe worse. Linguistic suicide shot.

Person B: He’s fine. No one will care about this tweet in a week. [Broad agreement]

17. Problems with American Education

My take here is that American education system is super damaging because there’s a very low skillcap. It’s pretty easy to get all As and 2300+ on your SAT, so most very smart American high schoolers learn that effort doesn’t matter. And if you don’t have self esteem issues you won’t push yourself to win on competitive math/chess/etc.

In general, there’s a positive correlation in America between intelligence and laziness, which I think is a learned behavior

<- this combined with an incredibly low quality/lazy teacher base that is threatened by smart students AND DEI that tries to “dismantle colonial algebra” and lower the ceiling

If you are able to qualify for USAMO/MOP you are 100% smarter than the smartest math teacher in your school district in 2024.

Students benefitted from a powerful arbitrage in American education for a long time when most brilliant women who wanted to work could only aspire to careers in teaching

Now that those brilliant women are now litigators and corporate executives, students no longer have access to them

18. Well, Chinese talent is often better

Tbh I find Chinese entrepreneurs on average more creative than American ones, they are just repressed by a bad governmentSo we’re all stuck in this shitty catch 22. The Chinese immigrants are too good. Way too good

This is the problem with Chinese spy programs. If you say you won’t hire Chinese immigrants, your company will just be 30% worse

xAI, for a while, was 13 cracked Chinese immigrants and 100k GPUs

Maybe the term I’d use is ambitious.

PDD, Bytedance, and BYD are ridiculously ambitious companies. More ambitious than FAANG these days tbh. The only western ambition that matches it is Elon’s.

If Xi supported his entrepreneurs, US tech would feel way more heat

19. But we don’t want to become Asia

A huge issue that is going to hurt too many feelings in the other chat, is that white people don't like being surrounded by nerdy Asians. My sister was extremely talented at Math and Science. She attended X (the science high school, which is now about 70% asian at the time it was like 35%. She got into whatever the special super math program there was within it, and ended up dropping out of it because it was all nerdy asian guys and high school girls don't want to be surrounded by it. She ended up majoring in sociology at Harvard--and blames sexism for why she didn't do Math. Going back to X-which is now a major "anti-Asian" affirmative action case--When my sister attended in the late 1990s, people just took the test and they got in. Then sometime in the mid 2000s test prep for X exploded--almost entirely asians. I know people whose entire tutoring is test prep for X; and they say its entirely asians and some people start in the 3rd grade. There is nothing superior culturally or IQ in this.

The conventional wisdom among meritocracy Asian simps is: In response to Bakke, schools emphasized "soft factors" (e.g. community service, internships etc.) as a way to allow blacks and hispanics with lower test scores into elite schools without explicit quotas. This ironically (or perhaps intentionally) had the side effect of helping elite whites who know how to game system, while harming poor super genius Asians who get perfect test scores but aren't good at faking community service projects.

I hypothesize (with nothing other than anecdotal experience) that this ignores how schools have dumb downed almost all standardized tests to make them less g-loaded (e.g. removing analogies). This makes test prep/tiger parenting more valuable. This has benefitted Asians. I suspect if you look at the average IQ of a white vs. asian non-athlete at elite schools, whites score higher...So someone who studies a ton and has a 120IQ now has advantage over someone who has a 130 IQ and didn't do more prep--which helps a small number of Blacks and a lot of Asians. (Again, this is my hypothesis--I don't know of any studies on this)

20. Perils of Tiger-mom culture

Oh lord, second-generation “tiger mom” myth-making returns. I recall in round 1 CBS ran a breathless 60-minutes segment in 2003 about how the IITs produced hardened engineers by making us do hand-tool shop work in freshman year. Made us look like academic Genghis Khans. We were cracking up on alumni mailing lists about that. Asian test-prep culture is dumb and toxic and produces undermotivated and creativity-destroyed drones. While the US extreme of trying to get rid of testing entirely is bad, the Asian extreme is a whole different sort of bad. I don’t think Asian culture produces either academic excellence or career success at a disproportionate rate. It just produces zombie test-takers. It just has too few other options for a good life outside of STEM and that’s thankfully changing.

21. The merits of Whiplash as motivating

Person A: Niche gripe with Vivek’s tweet but Whiplash is *not* a good model for how to be a highly successful person, much less an artist

My mom is a professional musician and I know that it takes intense effort and practice to get there. But the idea that you should slavishly work away at your craft while worshipping a bully without a mind of your own is deeply dystopian

Person B: Kobe Bryant loved Whiplash, and it fit with his cultivated image as the artist who works obsessively. The image was incredibly resonant in American culture. One reason Vivek’s tweet is a bit off is that a love of the jock reflects a love of this pursuit. Americans are an ambitious people

Person C: Whiplash is deeper than obsession. It’s about the psychological torture that leads to greatness. You either see the professor as evil and toxic or Virgil, an artist who can guide you through the depths of hell. That’s why the ending hits so hard.

Person D: Taken literally, Whiplash is an insane model for society becuse it’s about a silly jazz band. We need some sectors to operate with its ethos, and also need less vital ventures to operate with perspective and sanity. In other words, we don’t need to be a place like Japan, where pursuit of perfection is totalizing

Person E: Doesn’t port. There’s a reason these cultures get so bad in stylized closed domains. If there are legible performance standards, hierarchies, and prizes, you get the potential for brutality. It’s a combination of Goodhart’s’s law, authoritarian high modernism, and a version of Sayre’s law (“"Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.”) No disrespect to jazz drumming, chess, Olympic sports etc. but on a civilizational scale they’re low-stakes activities. Higher stakes domains are fundamentally more illegible. You can’t tiger-mom your way through or grind out the scales etc. You have to constantly reorient in an open world. This is also why I raise an eyebrow at people like Josh “Art of Learning” Waitzkin. Chess prodigy —> martial arts —> surfing or whatever hes up to now. The “art of learning” that type of performance domain is not the same as that of open-world creativity. It’s different in kind. Higher stakes is different stakes. It can be brutal in other ways, but the brutal legible performance standards and rationalized sadism ain’t it.

I think the main issue is that most tiger-style parents pursue an optimisation strategy based on winning the world of their own childhoods and the world has changed so much. The pianist/chess player to college and lawyer/doctor as career were a very good strategy 1960-1990 but the quality of life given by those professions has declined.

But not only do the optimal activities change but the ontology of those does. So to win in 1970 then one should be a tiger mom as the winning paths has low creativity and high returns to rote learning.

In say 2000 it was best to be high-standards (but not tiger mom) as the optimal strategy was to develop high agency people who could adapt to the high uncertainty environment of entrepreneurship. Going forward one needs to guess the winning skill set of 2040. Tricky question? Maybe intelligence struggles against AI and maybe leadership ; but not jock in person leadership of men; but more building tribes or creating world views becomes the winning strategy Historical take: in Rome create a General - we remember Caesar and Pompey.

In the dark ages create a priest. We remember no generals but Augustine and Aquinas.

22. Memes