> since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves.

This implies copying what someone else did. Rather than inventing something new. I know it's not what you meant but if it wasn't made by God it's because it's already made by someone else. The sentence says to me more about copying than some relentless pursuit. The people who invented the thing to copy, those were more relentless presumably.

And then again the Chinese invented plenty over the years. These generalizations are bit meh.

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kaycey2022 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't see why copying is unnatural or even bad. Maybe within a single economy or a group of economies which share a common understanding and laws, chosing to discourage copying to incentivise other citizen innovators makes sense.

But in the global context, between adversarial nations, or even countries that don't see each other as equal, it is absolutely foolish not to copy. Since everything is framed in terms of game theories, what is even the benefit of not copying and being a "good boy" country?

In fact in this situation a country's IP is almost its liability and not its asset. Because it should cost the holding country money and resources so their citizens' IP is protected. And these resources are better off preserved for more crucial knowledge.

None of this even makes the copier's actions bad or immoral. They have a moral imperative to succeed.

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mensetmanusman 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Some copying creates a first mover disadvantage in game theory in regards to capital resource allocation. It requires second order thinking to understand, but it’s not super complicated.

	▲	Urahandystar 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes but thats not the copyers problem is it? Risk is inherent in all things the second order requires that you keep advancing by attracting resources.

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yanhangyhy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You’re not wrong to think that way. But now there’s less and less left for China to “copy,” and it’s hard to argue that many things aren’t being invented by China itself.

Perhaps the real question is this: why is it that places that used to be technologically advanced no longer produce new, original inventions? Is it fear of China copying them? Did the U.S. decide not to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet because it was afraid China would copy it? Did it stop working on battery technology because it feared China would copy that too?

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fragmede 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The joke is, if you want a consumer good to exist, but you don't want to do it yourself and you want it for cheap, just make a flashy Kickstarter for it, buy marketing, then cancel the Kickstarter and wait for Chinese"clones" to hit the market!

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gpt5 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can you clarify what are you talking about? The US has been developing 6th-gen fighter since the mid mid-2010s - not that I'd consider it as an important new original invention.

What I would consider as the most impactful inventions of the last decade would be things like mRNA, Generative AI, and reusable rockets - all came from the US and the US is maintaining the lead in them.

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DrScientist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> What I would consider as the most impactful inventions of the last decade would be things like mRNA, Generative AI, and reusable rockets - all came from the US and the US is maintaining the lead in them.

This so myopic. The covid mRNA vaccine that Pfizer made billions from was done by BionTech a company in Germany led by immigrant turks.

Sure some American's recently got the Nobel prize for the pseudouridine modification - and whiles that's enabling it's not sufficient - you also need LNPs and a whole bunch of other stuff to make it all work - some of which was invented in America and some of which wasn't.

The nature of international science is collaboration.

The danger the for the US right now is it's cutting itself off from one of the biggest sources of innovation right now - China.

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gpt5 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m sorry, but you are completely missing the point.

Nobody disputed that mRNA, like all science, has many inventors. And that many people in the west as a whole has worked on the technology. Everything you said about the contributions to mRNA is correct, and doesn’t diminish US’s critical part in it.

The point was, and remains, that saying that the US has stopped becoming innovative, is just nonsense.

	▲	DrScientist 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Aren't we are talking about relative innovation? Of course the US is still innovative - I think the question is whether countries like China are simply copying or now out innovating in some areas. Their appears to be a lack of acknowledgement in the US about the current rate of innovation coming out of China these days - the days of only cheap knock-offs ( as with Japan before them ) is largely over. In the areas I know - I see increasingly impressive innovation coming out of China right now. The way the US is treating China right now is counter productive in my view. The biggest risk isn't the Chinese stealing US innovation - the biggest risk is the US cutting itself off from a key source of new ideas. In my view the next Biontech is more likely to come from China than Germany. I don't know why the US is treating it as a zero-sum game.

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alexnewman 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All of the US military is a waste including 6th generation fighters. We hope china copies our disinformation campaign. In fact as the usa has been taken apart almost all of our big secrets are just disinformation

- stealth (not really) - aliens (sure....) - 6th gen jets (where are the jets?)

The reality is that everything that you do in peacetime is just to scare the enemy and will have very little effect in war. Since the US doesn't have as much industrial capacity the only winning war is nuke from space first or learn to get along

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yanhangyhy 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Can you clarify what are you talking about? The US has been developing 6th-gen fighter since the mid mid-2010s - not that I'd consider it as an important new original invention.

So you think that, as an advanced military project that should have been kept under the strictest secrecy, the Chinese somehow obtained it and, based on that, developed their own sixth-generation fighter—and even managed a successful test flight while the U.S. is still at the PowerPoint stage? I don’t know which scenario would be worse for the United States.

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gpt5 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, if we compare what we know about China's NGAD, which is almost nothing, with what we know about US NGAD, which is also almost nothing, we can safely conclude almost nothing.

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foldr 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

China doesn’t yet have the jet engine technology to compete with American 5th gen fighters. I certainly don’t think the US or anyone else should be complacent, but the US has a substantial lead for now.

	▲	DrScientist 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not sure fighters matter as much these days - Russia has air superiority in terms of jets over Ukraine - but it uses them infrequently - appears the problem is the ground based counter measures are quite effective and much cheaper. If they want to attack by air - drones and missiles rather than planes appear to be the way to go. Similarly aircraft carriers - they can only really be used now to bully small countries. To anybody with significant missile/drone tech they are just massive, slow, sitting ducks. What matters is drones and missiles etc and how fast you can churn them out. Who would win that? The US is going to have to find a way to live with countries like China and India, rather than trying to suppress them. The current US policy of trying to dismant all the organisations that were set up post world war II in order to keep the peace is madness.

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krona 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can't wait to see the first Nobel prize in physics being awarded to a scientist who is actually a product of Chinese academy. Any moment now.

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jampekka 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nobel prizes in physics are awarded typically with lag of 20-30 years. In early 2000s China was still a relative backwater economically (and academically). In 2000 US R&D spending was over 8 times China's. Now China has likely surpassed USA. It surpassed EU already in about 2014.

Working in academia, the rise of China academically is palpable. There's an avalance of Chinese research published, and a reasonable chunk of it very high quality, and getting better.

https://www.statista.com/chart/20553/gross-domestic-expendit...

https://itif.org/publications/2025/06/30/china-outpacing-us-...

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CuriouslyC 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nobel prizes are almost as sus as Oscars now. Corina Machado tells you all you need to know.

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jabl 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The peace price is different, and it's been a bit of a hit and miss at least since Kissinger got it.

And the economics prize, though it's not officially really a Nobel prize.

But the core science prizes, AFAICT, are pretty spot on. Of course there are always many worthy contenders of a prize and one can quibble should this or that person really deserve to get it instead of another person, but I haven't heard of any outright frauds or some trivial advancement getting the prize.

	▲	DrScientist 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's still very political - with a small p. For example the recent nobel prize for Chemistry being awarded to David Baker, Dennis Hassabis and John Jumper. Why the hell is David Baker on that list? He was just the head of a very big lab that was working in the traditional way using largely physics based approaches, making incremental progress. AlphaFold blew that whole approach out of the water. They cite the design of Top7 back in 2003 - it's not at the level of impact as Alphafold. The impact of Alphafold is obvious to all - the importance of the 2003 Baker paper doesn't stand out to me from 1000's of other possible candidates - that's where self-promotion, visibility and politics plays a part. The 2003 Baker paper has 2249 citations over 22 years. The 2021 AlphaFold paper has had 43876 citations in 4 years..........

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shrubble 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Reminder that there are two different organizations that award “Nobel” prizes; one is the actual organization and the other is the Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden. Not the same people, etc.

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darkstar_16 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but it will happen sooner or later.

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yosefk 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Chinese are ahead at too many things at this point to think they're only good at copying

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Ekaros 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And it is not like making a copy for cheaper isn't something that requires skill and innovation. Or then iterate on that copy. Didn't Roomba just fail to these copies. If west was truly so much more innovative and better shouldn't they as company be infinitely ahead still?

	▲	_heimdall 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That depends heavily on where the cost saving came from. For a long time China made cheap copies with extremely cheap labor, though that may no longer be the case as it seems they're innovating on the manufacturing process these days.

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vasco 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I never said that, or that there's something wrong with copying. I just said the sentence implies copying. Which it does.

And in fact this meme Chinese only copy is crap as I point out in my last paragraph. Over the centuries the Chinese were the first at quite a few things.

But the sentence says what it says.

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kavalg 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And that copying was largely enabled by our greedy western bean counters that outsourced so many things in the first place.

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nosianu 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Which in turn was fueled by the consumers' desire for cheap stuff, and for their portfolios to earn them a lot of money to be able to retire early and live comfortably while letting a cheaper workforce far away do more and more of the dirty and dangerous jobs.

The "bean counters" are under pressure just like everybody else. They didn't come up with their targets and incentives out of nowhere.

	▲	kavalg 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's a fair point! I am myself wondering how much of this is policy and how much is the "natural way".

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mensetmanusman 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair, they were uncoordinated actors in a prisoner’s dilemma competition.

This was the role of government to manage but there weren’t enough non-lawyers at positions of power to understand fixes.

Now with the massive fraud seen in local states, civilians will rightfully trust institutions less and the downward trend will continue.

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dleeftink 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All is copied in one way or another, progress in a vacuum is truly artificial and those who've been singularly credited for certain inventions likely have so because of the luck of the draw.

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never_inline 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If I was in china's position and so much is at stake, how can I go towards engineering all the tech from scratch when I can reverse engineer existing tech from west?

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vasco 7 hours ago | parent [-]

You wouldn't and you shouldn't. You should copy. It's what I would've done also. It's just what it is.

	▲	everfrustrated 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's also the foundation of the US economy. Look up the cotton gin patent some time. And the early days of Hollywood.