Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Right, let's not take those lessons. Those are very bad lessons. You just see those two patterns of correlation so often that it's worth emphasizing that you can have a productive relationship with a country and still think that not only is authoritarianism morally wrong, but it actually has had bad impacts on growth or on the day-to-day life of people and their culture or whatever else. I think people sometimes have trouble just holding two thoughts in their head at the same time there. There's also a very strong pattern. There have been a few good books written about this. American attitudes towards China in particular have tended to swing from one extreme to the other. Americans and Chinese are kind of the same because they're both pragmatic. They like money, they like business. If you go to China, it's very easy in my experience to chat with people and get along. So that level of connection is fairly easy. Then the other swing of the pendulum is that they're this enormous amorphous force that is committed to a devilish system that we don't like. Finding the middle ground in that historically has been very, very difficult for the US to do.…

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