Wang
Article
Wang is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 07, 2023 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Wang is also surprised that so much regulation can coexist with so much crime”; “Wang is smart and careful and rarely makes factual mistakes”; “and Wang is always surprised by this”. It most often appears alongside China, 747, 767 AD.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: June 07, 2023
- Last seen: October 30, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- 747 (1 shared issues)
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- 767 AD (1 shared issues)
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- @Scientific_Bird (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX community (1 shared issues)
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- AI 2027 (1 shared issues)
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- Alzheimer’s (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- America Against America (1 shared issues)
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- American (1 shared issues)
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- American conventional wisdom (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
Enter Wang Huning, a young political scientist at Fudan University. He wanted to become an “America expert”. Toward that goal, he got a visiting scholar position in the most dynamic corner of the US - Iowa City, Iowa. His quest: to poke around Iowa until he figured out what the heck was going on with the United States, then report back. The result: America Against America, a 200 page book on US culture and institutions.
Inline links: America Against America
Another result: a career boost for Wang Huning. He got asked to head the Party’s “political research” office, then gradually rose higher and higher through the ranks. Today he’s considered the CCP’s chief intellectual, and has been called the second most powerful man in China (alternately “the most influential man in China”). He’s used his position to push China against American values and towards a sort of anti-Western cultural conservatism. Whatever he saw during those six months in Iowa must have scared him hard. I thought I would pick up America Against America to figure out what it was.
I’m going to start by going over some parts I found surprising, interesting, or just funny, then return to this question of what could have scared Wang so badly:
36: Wang, Visscher, et al is a step up in studying the genetics of racial differences. It looks at a sample of Mexican families of mixed white-native heritage. By coincidence, some of their children will inherit more genes from the white side, and others more genes from the native side. These children will have identical social situations (since they’re from the same families) but different proportional ancestry, so we should expect any racial differences among them to come from the genetic rather than the social aspect of race (except that we can’t rule out “colorism”, ie genes making people look different and then causing discrimination). The paper finds that racial genetic differences directly affect height, diabetes risk, and other medical traits, but not educational attainment. Twitter discussion here. Cremieux argues here that genes don’t predict educational attainment in developing countries at all, so it’s unsurprising that the particular genes associated with race wouldn’t do so, and so this says nothing about the racial component of traits that are genetically heritable. He claims to have a version of the same analysis with UK whites vs. blacks that gets opposite results. Sasha Gusev critiques Cremieux’s analysis here, including pointing out that it fails to find racial differences in skin color to be genetic. Cremieux says that skin color is determined by such a small number of genes that this method, designed for truly polygenic traits, shouldn’t be expected to classify it properly.