Not directly relivant, but Mao seems to have known that his policies were causing mass starvation. Of course, with a tame AGI he could have achieved communism with a very different kind of Great Leap.
Oh yes, I see I’ve inadvertently fallen into that sordid old bromide about communism being a good idea that unfortunately failed to work, still- committing to an action that one knows will cause millions of deaths is quite different to learning about it as one is doing it. Certainly in the case of the British in India, their Malthusian rhetoric and victim-blaming was so at odds with their earlier talk of modernizing the continent that it sounds like a post-hoc rationalization of the genocide. I realize now though that I don’t know enough about the PRC to judge whether a similar phenomenon was at work there.
Not directly relivant, but Mao seems to have known that his policies were causing mass starvation. Of course, with a tame AGI he could have achieved communism with a very different kind of Great Leap.
Oh yes, I see I’ve inadvertently fallen into that sordid old bromide about communism being a good idea that unfortunately failed to work, still- committing to an action that one knows will cause millions of deaths is quite different to learning about it as one is doing it. Certainly in the case of the British in India, their Malthusian rhetoric and victim-blaming was so at odds with their earlier talk of modernizing the continent that it sounds like a post-hoc rationalization of the genocide. I realize now though that I don’t know enough about the PRC to judge whether a similar phenomenon was at work there.