Astral Codex Ten

Jiang

10 min read

Jiang

Article

Jiang is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 25, 2021 and April 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing”; “Hu was not quite as adept a politician as Jiang”; “five of the-then nine members … belonged to Jiang’s faction”. It most often appears alongside Deng, Hu, Bo Xilai.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: November 25, 2021
  • Last seen: April 28, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For November
November 25, 2021 · Original source
Boris Johnson (left) is 5’9, so the guy in the middle must be gigantic. Who is he? Looks like it’s Milo Djukanovic, President of Montenegro, who’s 6’6 (198 cm). Is he the tallest world leader? It seems like he’s tied with his colleague across the border, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic. Why are Balkan leaders so tall? As usual, the answer is “genetics”. This article says: It has been noted that men from Herzegovina are taller on average than men in other places—the average male height is just over six feet...Putting all the data together, researchers concluded that the most likely cause of larger-than-average height of Herzegovinian men is lifestyle during the Paleolithic—men hunted large animals such as mammoth for survival—such a diet, heavy in protein, combined with small population densities, would have provided ideal conditions for height selection, resulting in increasingly taller men who passed the trait down through their I-M170 chromosome to future generations. Some sources note that they manage to beat the Dutch despite the latter country’s much higher human development index. The Dutch are probably tall through a combination of nature and nurture; Balkan people are tall through nature alone. 7: Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t need more ego boosts, but an idea he had a couple of years ago - using strings of bright lights to provide a better and brighter experience for Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers than regular light boxes - spread from him to the rationalist community to the wider world, and has finally gotten tested in a formal study (see Acknowledgments section). Results seem vaguely positive: "SAD symptoms of both groups improved similarly and considerably...exploratory analyses indicate that a higher illuminance is associated with a larger symptom improvement in the BROAD light therapy group" 8: Percent of people who choose woke options on polls very tentatively and preliminarily seems to be going down post-Trump (h/t Richard Hanania). 9: Twitter conspiracy theories 10: Did you know: all those reconstructions of “how classical art would have looked with the original paint” are probably inaccurate. There is no reason to think the Greeks and Romans used garish technicolor hues on their statues; what evidence we have suggest they were good at shading, and the statues were probably colored very tastefully. 11: Complaints about how Karl Friston uses the term “Markov blanket” 12: Trevor Klee on the claim that cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia. Apparently there was a big study where basically nobody on the immunosuppressant cyclosporine ever got dementia, and there are some theoretical reasons why cyclosporine might prevent neurodegeneration. But another study found people on cyclosporine got dementia at the usual rate. I think in a situation like this you should have a really high prior on “the people who got the crazy result bungled their study somehow”, but I’m interested in hearing what other people think. 13: Also from Trevor: a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID. 14: To tide you over until the next book review contest, here is awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread. 15: Claims: cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam…\nft.com/content/dcb75a… (better article, but paywalled)","username":"moskov","name":"Dustin Moskovitz","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Nov 05 15:49:46 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":184,"like_count":1188,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.ft.com/content/dcb75a56-ca23-439c-96db-56483979bf34","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/80a58c96-c72f-4301-b571-aa9384f132bd_2400x1350.jpeg","title":"Subscribe to read | Financial Times","description":"News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication","domain":"ft.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 16: Big trial on Vitamin D for depression finds null result. Peter Attia tries to tear it apart here, but I am unconvinced, especially in the context of Vitamin D never working for any of the things people say it does besides the most boring aspects of bone health. 17: “California is actively considering the adoption of flawed and inequitable guidance on math curricula based on misleading data and inaccurate success metrics reported by San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)...Based on our review of the data, we found misleading, unsupported, and cherry-picked assertions of success for the new math program. We noted that overall test scores are down and enrollments in UC-approved advanced math classes have dropped as well.” It looks like San Francisco is trying the good old “lower standards, then when more kids meet the standards, claim your school reform plan worked” trick again. 18: A new study claims that self-reported “Long COVID” symptoms are more associated with believing you’ve had COVID than with actually having it (as measured by serologic testing), which sounds like pretty strong evidence that it’s psychsomatic. Expert reactions are mixed-to-negative, although the only one of these that doesn’t sound like excuse-making is Dr. Rossman’s about the unreliability of the tests. I haven’t confirmed test reliability stats but Philippe Lemoine also thinks this is a plausible confounder. 19: Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? I appreciated this for making me think, and for underlining the extent of the difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing. I especially appreciated this line, which I’d never thought about before: Xi presided over the end of China’s hypergrowth. To some extent this is not his fault. No country can grow at 10% forever, and there were many structural forces pushing downward on China’s numbers — the end of the demographic dividend, the exhaustion of rural surplus labor (the Lewis Turning Point), the saturation of export markets, and so on. But China is also slowing down earlier than South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan did in their day. China’s per capita GDP (at PPP) is still only about 1/3 that of a developed country, so if they stop catching up at about half of developed-country levels, that will not be a great showing. A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point. 20: Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion. 21: You’ve probably heard about the University of Austin, the new project by a bunch of wokeness-critical academics to start a new university that won’t cancel people or force conformity (New York Post article, Politico article - these were the two least “you need to be super-outraged about this right now” articles I could find). Tyler Cowen and Larry Summers are involved; Steven Pinker was supposed to be but left for unclear reasons. My thoughts, in no particular order: Even forgetting the political aspect, attempts to start new universities are always welcome.
Inline links: Milo Djukanovic, Aleksandar Vucic, This article, in a formal study, Richard Hanania, Twitter conspiracy theories, There is no reason to think, Complaints about, cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia, a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID, The Conquest Of Bread, Vitamin D for depression, here, is trying, A new study, Expert reactions, Philippe Lemoine also thinks, What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent?, Lewis Turning Point, slowing down earlier, per capita GDP (at PPP), the great mystery, Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion, New York Post article, Politico article
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 06, 2022 · Original source
Mao Zedong was definitely an autocrat. After his death, everyone backstabbed each other furiously for several years and Deng Xiaoping ended up on top. Deng had absolute power but thought that was bad, so he created lots of institutions that were supposed to prevent future leaders from exercising the control he had, then sort of backed down. He appointed former Shanghai mayor Jiang Zemin as his successor. Jiang followed Deng’s anti-absolute-power rules, but he was able to get most of what he wanted anyway. Partly this was because he was a really skilled politician, partly it was because he had a really good secret police force with personal loyalty to him and lots of blackmail on everyone else.
“Toad Worship” is a class of Chinese internet meme where people ironically pretend to admire Jiang Zemin. No, I don’t get it either. When Jiang took power, he filled important positions with his clients. Mostly these were his underlings from Shanghai; they became known as the Shanghai Gang. The Shanghai Gang stuck together and supported its own, and operated kind of as a “political party” “representing” the interests of east coast urban elites.
Inline links: “Toad Worship”
Xi was a loyal Shanghaier. He was the client of Zeng Qihong, himself a client of Jiang Zemin, and had been party secretary in Shanghai. His loyalty to the faction was unimpeachable.
Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping
April 28, 2022 · Original source
I think "admiration of Dengism" and "shadowy network" kind of understates the main force holding Jiang back which is that Deng himself was still alive for a good portion of his rule. Had Jiang tried to seize power, Deng could simply have swept back in. Jiang likely had the same influence on Hu, and indeed reports often pin Jiang as the main opposition to Xi - Scott asked why the Shanghai Gang didn't oppose the Tsinghua Gang, but the answer is that they did, but chances are Jiang's power had just waned sufficiently by then that he couldn't do much. And though he is still alive, Jiang certainly couldn't just march back into power the way Deng could have.
One other factor was that the anti-corruption drive coincided with a widespread perception of corruption and party disunity. People forget how common petty corruption was in the Hu and Jiang times. Bribes to civil servants, doctors, teachers etc. were a lot more common. It was also much easier for officials to patronize businesses and demand bribes.