Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America (1995)

  > It's illogical to call to "Make America Great *Again*"

I think there's some bad logic from a different perspective too. That time marches on, the world changes, and thus too does the definition of "great" change. So it would be extremely naive to say "let's go back to what we were doing to resolve our decline." Because then you're heading for the wrong optimization point. The world is entirely different than it was in the 50's or 20's (idk which time they /actually/ mean tbh), in a large part due to America. Hell, we turned China into a superpower by throwing shit tons of money at them. Sure, they got the "worse" end of the deal, but at the same time one cannot deny their growth. Not to say it is all America's doing either, it was the symbiotic relationship that created the result we see. Without America, China wouldn't be where it is today, but neither would they be had they not put in a lot of hard work and made the most of the situation. Analogous to how an investor can claim they "caused" a unicorn company to become said unicorn, while the founders likely attribute their success to their hard work. Both are right since the result couldn't happen without the combination. (I do find it weird that the consequence is we end up being at odds with one another instead of trying to repeat that magic, but I hate politics and we're getting off topic).

So if we want to be "great" again we gotta do something entirely different. The problem seems more similar to that of big companies and monopolies. A monopoly isn't an inherently bad thing, it is just that they frequently abuse their positions as it is easier to extract wealth by using your weight than it is to innovate. Even though a monopoly is in a far better position to innovate than they had been at any other point in time! (You can take on far riskier problems, ones that have high likelihood of failure but that the success would similarly be enormous. That failure kills many startups but is nothing to big company. Google can run X at billions in losses and Zuckerberg can throw money as fast as he can at the Metaverse without real risk of the companies failing). The problem is that in general systems optimize towards their "lowest energy state", which is __not__ innovation (directly. It does include absorbing innovators). It is laziness. In optimization, it is that you stop exploring and rely entirely on exploiting your established knowledge. You're stuck in a local optima if you do this. The problem is that we tend to rest upon our laurels.

Is this not the same thing? American can't repeat the magic of that time period any more than Google can repeat the magic that happened in the early 2000's. Just a few days ago I was arguing that we should be taking higher risks and throwing more money into the sciences[0]. The pushback is about ensuring that the money made its way to productive projects and not conmen. But neither have we stopped conmen nor have we significantly improved in predicting what constitutes the most groundbreaking research. So America relies upon its status to extract money from the system we've created over innovation. We were forced to innovate before, and now we don't. In our fear of losing our status we take fewer risks, but by doing so, we ironically end up taking even greater risks. It is the problem of delayed reward systems and recognizing the difference between long term investments and short term. So I think China's rise can cause America to re-establish it's dominance, but it depends at our reaction. Competition is good because it forces one to not be lazy, but recognizing this cause allows us to approach competition differently and even recognize the results can be obtained without it. Do we rely upon our status to main status or do we recognize that we've become fat and need to "hit the gym." I'm not confident this administration understands the difference nor am I confident that the interest is in that goal. So I worry we will just repeat the process, getting too caught up in the moment that we lose sight of what actually matters. Losing sight of the actual reasons that "made us great" in the first place, being unable to differentiate the real factors. Might as well be a cargo cult.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42925648

Likewise! At least there are still some venues online where partisan sloganeering hasn't totally overwhelmed discourse.

Aye. Explore/exploit tradeoff, where any one person is incentivised to start on exploration and switch to exploit.

Optima at 1/e of an opportunity's lifetime, IIRC? May be over specific to the "secretary problem".

I began reading the book (The Demon Haunted World) and it shocked me how casually Sagan states that he hallucinated, and it gave me an epiphany:

The schizophrenic doesn't understand that other people are sane!

Suddenly, it makes perfect sense - a schizophrenic (or perhaps a group of them) somehow came up with science. And for them it was a world changing event, as they could disprove their hallucinations one by one. It turned them from something that was barely surviving on the outskirts of society into somewhat functional beings.

But, for the same reason why he was insane in the first place, sooner or later he corrupts his science as well.

However the schizophrenic doesn't uderstand that others are sane.

So, when he was convincing the sailors that scurvy isn't from the lack of fruit, he fought their insane belief, like when he believed a leprechaun stabbed him. When he is convincing you that there are more genders than men and women, he is fighting your insane delusion, like when he disproved that there were fire spitting dragons flying in the sky! He's merely trying to bring you out of darknes, just like he did himself.

Yup, I'm going to dogpile on this:

> favorable environment for innovation

I may be wrong, but all indications are that this is a sort of "past glory".

I've not personally visited Shenzhen, but every online account (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toizHWGD-rE) shows that they are making everything there -- the "Designed in California, Made in China" is a tenuous situation, and not guaranteed to last.

Like how DeepSeek was a wake-up moment, there are several more waiting to happen.

Again, this is my very much "secondhand" perspective, but I think the GP's assertion is on borrowed time.