How China Built Tech Power with Limited Critical Thinking

It's important to remember that even the most intelligent people fall into the trap of selective critical thinking, because intelligence was never about critical thinking, intelligence is the efficiency of your brain to achieve it's goals and avoid unpleasant circumstances.

This isn’t a Chinese-only issue. Feynman talked about it during his tenure in a Brazilian University during the 50’s. He noticed his students, the best in Brazil, could recite what they would read on the books but couldn’t, as is usually said, think outside the box. 70 years later and that still happens. 4 of my aunts are teachers and I told them that the school doesn’t prepare kids to think, it prepares them to work, to be another cogwheel of the proverbial machine. We actually managed to find a way to format people to solve problems without actually thinking about them.

this is a perfect reflection of why ai is so popular for tech giants. they dont need creative innovative thinkers, they just need someone/something that does stuff when it is asked. the workers dont need to know the why, they just need to know the how.

I've never heard anyone talk about this. I lived in China for a year teaching English and while I was incredibly impressed by Chinese students' potential, I was equally discouraged by the lack of true intellectual freedom in society as well as the classroom. Thanks for sharing.

So in other words, let people from non-Chinese regime countries innovate, then the Chinese regime receives the innovation blueprint, produces for clients while secretly producing other, more optimized competing products. For example: solar panels were first innovated in the United States, then China mastered the production blueprint and optimized the rest until it became the number 1 producer today. That way, the current Chinese regime de facto does not need people with critical thinking needed for innovation, the regime only needs people with optimization thinking to beat competitors. In other words, the current Chinese regime also actually has a symbiotic relationship with innovator countries.

“Treating thinking as optimization, not exploration” and “Questions in the category of critical thinking” Both shocked me Thank you for sharing your perspective

I’ve been reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, and this video is a perfect example of how governments can weaponize "System 1" (fast, intuitive thinking) to bypass "System 2" (slow, critical analysis). When information is pre-packaged and labeled as "news," people become prone to reactive conclusions. We see this clearly in the hostile framing of the US and Japan in Chinese media; people draw conclusions without verifying sources or asking if what they're hearing is actually true. However, this isn't unique to one place. In the US, we see similar tactics where complex issues are reduced to simple labels and slogans. People often absorb these narratives completely without questioning the underlying logic or engaging their critical thinking

This is something I noticed as a high school teacher here. I was surprised that students don't write essays, even in Chinese. In the US, I wrote countless essays. Even though I hated writing them, I'm so grateful now because they sharpened my critical lens. In my school in China, I noticed that most (if not all) exams are multiple choice questions rather than free response. I teach math and a lot of students don't like the idea that they have to "show their work" on my exams. When I ask them open-ended questions, I usually get a one-word response and they expect me to understand what they mean. So when I ask for elaboration, I usually get strange and annoyed faces.

I work in AI alignment and you could be talking about AI here. The optimisation is the same, but the difference is that with AI it's going to lead to catastrophic consequences when they start "snapping". It's already happening in experimental conditions and the industry doesn't really want to understand what's going on because optimisation is more important. And I can only imagine how much worse the situation is in China because the people are being optimised the same way.

German psychologist here. This was one of the most interesting videos I have seen in a while. I subscribed :)

8:49 "It didn't force people to believe anything; it made the truth feel irrelevant" You just summed up why cults, religion, and corporate jargon work very well

Youtube having dropped me unexpectedly into this fascinating video, I crudely sense a transition from living inside Orwell's "1984" in to the society of "Brave New World" but keeping the language and thought restriction elements.

The most concerning thing that was mentioned in this wonderful video essay was that people are happy to be ignorant just so they can have their comfort “optimise the walls surrounding them”. I see it everywhere in my country as well. The government doesn’t even care to show how viscous they are but what do people do? Instead of talking this out FEEL that rage and grief for the past careless life they say “I don’t want to talk about it.” Or “it was always like this, you just need to know how to survive”…. We’re doomed and unfortunately we will take the planet with us(

Ecclesiastiastes 1:18 ”For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

People forgot that critical thinking is not solely exclusive in one way of thinking. But combining several discipline, like basic knowledge, synthesis, cross reference, and context senstivie judgement. It's hard to take this video as critical thinking, but rather critical response to a certain context of chinese education system and how its implied on several greater contexts.

感謝分享收穫良多，這分析簡直就是批判性思考的盛宴。

Every single country in the world of 2026 be like: Criticize China, understand China, become China. I think this phenomenon tells a lot.

as another east asian, i can deeply relate...we're after all, still confucian...

I worry for humanity's future. We seem to be on a course for a hybrid dystopia of shiny distractions for the masses along with brutal surveillance and ostracization for any who are not lulled into passivity. Hopefully China and other nations will reform into something better, but the powerful people who run our nations have powerful incentives to maintain the status quo.

This is the same vibe as those 'but at what cost' articles