(Audio) Breakneck, by Dan Wang

Thursday November 20, 2025

It's about China as contrasted with the US, mostly via critiques as in Abundance. The US is "the lawyerly society" and China is "the engineering state," and while the one child and zero covid policies are criticized (for example) the eventual recommendation is to be more like China, more like Robert Moses.

I learned about China's "Industrial Party," which is interesting. Sort of techno-optimism as a nationalist prescription.

Does anybody else remember Vonnegut's Slapstick? In which "Western civilization is nearing collapse as oil runs out, and the Chinese are making vast leaps forward by miniaturizing themselves and training groups of hundreds to think as one. Eventually, the miniaturization proceeds to the point that the Chinese become so small they cause a plague among those who accidentally inhale them, ultimately destroying Western civilization beyond repair."

There's some interesting stuff about process knowledge and encouraging communities of practice. I don't know whether this is what makes Shenzhen successful, or whether the lack of it is what's troubled Boeing, but I agree that process knowledge is something and that it's too often ignored or undervalued.

Is Boeing's problem really loss of process knowledge, or is the problem too much belief in the Friedman doctrine, too much blind focus on near-term profit?

I tried to find where Heidegger said that philosophy was dying, to be replaced with cybernetics, and it seems to be The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking. How could anyone ever be taken seriously who wrote like this?

Only a country ruled by engineers could be so single-minded about pursuing a number. (page 123)

This reminds me of The Tyranny of Metrics, and the kind of cynical "data driven" perversions you can find in industry.

In the United States, physics and mathematics PhDs hardly have a chance to consider working in their field before a tech giant or hedge fund picks them up at the sidelines of a conference, flashes them with a humongous pay package, and folds these eager minds into their glamorous embrace. Senior government advisers have more or less stated that Beijing intends to block these temptations. Yao Yang, a dean at Peking University, has remarked with satisfaction that salaries have fallen in the financial industry after regulators imposed a salary cap of $400,000 on the financial sector. Its idea, Yao said, “is to reduce the attractiveness of finance and to increase the development of manufacturing.” (page 162)

This reminds me of Jeff Hammerbacher's quote, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."