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America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

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Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the classic blunders: never get involved in a land war in asia.

unless you are Alexander the great and even then, your armies would get tired of fighting for so long for a piece of land far far away from their homeland and they would wish to get homes.

[dead]

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#22

[flagged]

The destruction of the research and development education pipeline in the USA that took 75 years to build because “college and women and minorities bad/Israel always good” was vying for the title only a few months ago.

Turns out there's a nice phrase that neatly describes these seemingly disparate trends.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#23
post #4

If you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...

Why would anyone spend the time to read something so long that's been generated by an LLM? The topic seems super interesting otherwise and would benefit from the real human voice. OP, can you elaborate on why you decided to go this direction?

> Why would anyone spend the time to read something so long that's been generated by an LLM?

What diference does it make as long as the content is interesting and the tone not grating?

It's possible for a human being to use an LLM but guide it to a well-written piece that's worth consuming.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#24

Reminds me of the results of a large Slavic country going to war with a much smaller, once subordinate, now independent republic that was the source of their best engineers.

It's a false analogy. Ukraine was no such source. It's just happened after WW2, that as a part or rebuilding a devastated territory, plus a better climate, resulted in USSR relocating several of its best aero/space and in general military institutions to what is now known as Ukraine. For example, their space engines engineers were educated in Russia till 2008 at least, maybe even longer.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#25
post #3

I doubt it's the greatest given all that's happened in the past year. But it's certainly up there, no pun intended.

It's hard to say how much it contributed to the pre-eminence of modern-day China. But overall the rise of China surely dominates anything that's happened in the last year. No other nation even comes close to vying for hegemony with the US. We could have another full-on Vietnam-esque quagmire in Iran and it wouldn't even be a blip in comparison.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#26
post #18
post #4

If you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...

This is an incredible piece of writing, to accuse it of LLM voice borders on sacrilege

It is LLM with a clever prompt that avoids the most egregious tells (though "load-bearing" appears).

The number of times the article goes on complete tangents, introducing new irrelevant names and the general useless level of detail, all in perfect verbose English points to an LLM. So does the upbeat and persuasive style.

If you write that level of detail, use a historian's style and footnotes. Do not use the synthetic LLM voice that is optimized for rhetoric.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#27
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredible piece of writing, to accuse it of LLM voice borders on sacrilege

It is LLM with a clever prompt that avoids the most egregious tells (though "load-bearing" appears). The number of times the article goes on complete tangents, introducing new irrelevant names and the general useless level of detail, all in perfect verbose English points to an LLM. So does the upbeat and persuasive style. If you write that level of detail, use a historian's style and footnotes. Do not use the synthet…

I don't really think there's a tangential detail that is related to the message. Which one are you referring to?

Also, the upbeat and persuasive style ... is my style kek, is it me being too pushy or?

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#28

Reminds me of the results of a large Slavic country going to war with a much smaller, once subordinate, now independent republic that was the source of their best engineers.

It's a false analogy. Ukraine was no such source. It's just happened after WW2, that as a part or rebuilding a devastated territory, plus a better climate, resulted in USSR relocating several of its best aero/space and in general military institutions to what is now known as Ukraine. For example, their space engines engineers were educated in Russia till 2008 at least, maybe even longer.

This is literal Russian propaganda.

Re: America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

#29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone spend the time to read something so long that's been generated by an LLM? The topic seems super interesting otherwise and would benefit from the real human voice. OP, can you elaborate on why you decided to go this direction?

> Why would anyone spend the time to read something so long that's been generated by an LLM? What diference does it make as long as the content is interesting and the tone not grating? It's possible for a human being to use an LLM but guide it to a well-written piece that's worth consuming.

The tone is grating. That’s why we notice it.

If the LLM output was indistinguishable from real human text nobody would say anything, because by definition we wouldn’t be able to tell.

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