I agree. It's also good to have more diversification of science and technology progress. That way if one country gets an anti-science leader, it makes less of a difference to overall human progress.
I don't really think China is luring too many U.S. scientists... Most of the scientists I know pretty much ignore research out of China, because a large portion of it is just not replicable (and / or lies).
Well I guess the first step would be luring Chinese scientists currently in US back to China (many of those have US citizenship and would also be counted as US scientists)
I'm sure there are lots of Chinese scientists that would never go back, but at the same time there're also plenty of Chinese immigrants (including scientists) actually went back or are considering going back when the time is right, including myself. I think overall more people are considering that as a viable option over the years.
We have only had one leave and go back to China and he was terrible and only here to get the "worked in the USA" seal so he could go back and get a better and higher paying professorship in China.
It's not necessarily a sampling issue. Of course they could work with scientists that go back. You work with them, then they go back. The implication is clearly that the parent could have already worked with scientists that have gone back and that isn't occuring.
Survivor Bias at play, the ones do go back, go back. I think the mentality among Chinese research community had changed rapidly, especially in Computer Science field, where China is as practical a choice as US.
The problem with US is for foreign nationals, there is a preset role for us to fit in, while in China, it offers more potentials. I won't say certain it is black and white question at this moment, there is trade-off in between. Living in US is no longer the non-brainer
Please look at the number of papers from China in top CS conferences.
In general, the reviews are double blind, making it as objective as possible at this moment.
For those wondering, I just clicked through a few randomly and I only saw ~1/10 from China, and it was fairly applied (i.e. not especially novel research). I'd be interested in a more thorough analysis.
You probably should search for Chinese names. While a good portion of them will live in US, the consensus is 1) The career ceiling is significantly higher in China 2) increasingly hostile social environment 3) separation with family and the culture (food) not worth it at some point 4) no underlying racial bias
China has been progressing quite quickly considering how young their academic/research institutions are.
A very common path for Chinese scientists is to go to a western university for their doctorate and post-doc, develop a research program, and return to a faculty position in China.
Many Chinese grants include salary for the PI, so an investigator getting multiple grants can earn a lot of money. It's an attractive incentive that appears to be working quite well (from my limited exposure).
As for reliability, there are certainly some issues, but I hesitate to paint with a broad brush. Science is often very discipline-specific in terms of reproducibility, openness of collaboration, funding, etc. etc. There absolutely are fields where the Chinese are quite strong.
Chinese AI/CS papers are definitely not going to be ignored. They are really strong on that front, for they have a huge domestic industry to sustain such level of researches and there is economical benefit to going after.
I was just at Ubicomp, and I'd say the level of quality coming out of China was lacking (and a lot of universities outside of China to be fair). But only the papers from China raised red flags if their results were real or not...
Ignoring disreputable journals from China is one thing, but I doubt any serious scientist would claim there are not incredible advances coming from that country. In field after field they've shown they can produce amazing scientific work. There is plenty of low-quality work but let's not forget the amazing work too.
When I did research and at grad school a large percentage of my peers were either Asian American or Asian, with a large percentage being immigrants from China. As a researcher in the US you spend too much time writing grants and now equity initiatives introduce extra risk in the tenure system for anyone of the wrong identity. I would not underestimate the lure of easy access to grants and a less politicized tenure track system for anyone of Asian or Asian American heritage.
It is probably true for the proverbial early birds who went to China, but these days grants won't be that easy unless you are established or well-connected. There are also a lot of complaints about "politicized tenure track system".
China's current academic system is mostly a copy of that of the United States, and all of the current reforms are pushing further to be more like the United States. Whatever flaws of American grad school are and will be in China's grad school.
> Most of the scientists I know pretty much ignore research out of China ...
Ranking by the 1% most highly cited papers in math and computing for those published between 2013-2016:
6 of the top 15 universities are in mainland China,
6 USA,
2 Singapore, and
1 Hong Kong.
Tsinghua is at number 1. Singapore also seems to employ a number of researchers from China.
The article does state that MIT still leads in the broader STEM fields, but Tsinghua may soon take over.
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) still leads in the top 1% of stem papers, but Mr Marginson says Tsinghua is on track to be “number one in five years or less”.”
In condensed matter physics, there is a lot of good and original work coming out of top Chinese universities and being published in top journals. Also, for those in the 1000 talents programs, the startup grants that they receive are draw dropping.
Great news. It is very important that we have as much competition as possible in science. And China, being a rising power, can force western countries to invest more in technology.
I would look at it a different way: this is akin to Hitler Germany hiring nuclear scientists and eugenics specialists from US.
Except this time, China is hiring for genetic specialists to experiment on Uighur babies in concentration camps, AI scientists to experiment with computer-only surveillance and AI guided trans-pacific nuclear missiles, and biologists to experiment with AQI resistant humans. (incidently, AQI is around 800 in Shangdong, China today)
Where on earth did you get that from? Which part of the article, or any evidence at all, supports your statement? And in what situation do you think it's acceptable to write in such a way?
How on earth do you not know to google? And in what situation do you think it's acceptable to keep asking people to post easily found links?
'Of course it's not ethical': shock at gene-edited baby claims. Chinese geneticist He Jiankui’s claim to have altered embryos prompts outcry from scientists
Your specific claim was that scientists are being recruited from abroad for work on these things, except, they're not ("Except this time, China is hiring for genetic specialists to experiment on Uighur babies in concentration camps").
Trying to shove some other agenda into anything China-related is becoming really dull. You're trying to start some sort of ideological war when we really should be discussing science funding.
China's cameras? Well, the US is the surveillance champion of the world. Maybe search "snowden". And unlike China, it also violates my privacy as a European.
>"Time to Address China's Expanding Nuclear Weapons Program"
Well, China doesn't get support for European governments, (unlike e.g. the US) to put their surveillance equipment in here, they weren't caught red handed spying on our top politicians (unlike the US), and while they could very well be targeting Chinese targets or people of interest, I'm 100% certain they don't mass track everyone in Europe.
All agreed up until the "100% certain they don't mass track everyone in Europe part"—what's the basis for that strong certainty? That they don't want to, they realize it would be wrong, they don't think it would be worth it, or just that they can't because the European governments aren't facilitating it or looking the other way when they do it?
There are quite a few mass surveillance techniques that don't require support from a local government:
* undersea cable tapping
* hacking routers
* hacking servers
* bribing people
* backdooring hardware
* spy satellites
* RF surveillance from embassies or shell companies
Several of those seem pretty plausible for me for the PRC to be using against Europeans. :-(
Indeed it is surely not true that they have camps where they do large scale genetic experimentations on babies... But from what we know they still at least did one such experiment. And this is completely insane and past any most basic ethics to do a non-consenting human experiment that moreover does not even aim to cure him but tries to find out how to build a stronger race.
As a Chinese person the thing I find most dispiriting is that, if this comment had been made in a slightly more subtle and polished way (without a Hitler comparison right at the start, for one thing) it would have received a lot more upvotes and given a lot more credence
I agree that the comparison to Hitler is a non sequitur.
However, as a citizen in a democracy, I am pretty sure the writer of that posts intends it to be a criticism of an authoritarian dictatorship and not China's people or people of Chinese descent.
I'm sure he's not a monster. Thing is, Americans find it very hard to see us as anything other than monsters. It's exhausting to try and have a conversation when the interlocutor is ready to terminate it at any point because s/he decides that you are either evil or brainwashed. (To me, that's where the real prejudice lies - the inability to imagine other people as moral, not just intellectual, equals)
I should also say that the distinction between "criticizing government" and "criticizing people" is routinely not observed, even by Democrats. When Obama was making a case for the TPP, one of the main argument he gave was "The TPP would let America, not China, lead the way on global trade". Zero-sum language like this sends a signal to Americans that if doing something X is bad for this other group of humans, then that's an argument in favor of doing X, not (crazy thought!) an argument against doing it. That's how you get to where we are now where prominent Democrats like Chuck Schumer can say "we must be united in our fight against the Chinese" and not a single American, liberal or conservative, even took issue with that kind of language.
Us Americans consider any non democratic government to be immoral and can't imagine putting up with it. Even if the Chinese population is ok with it we still think it's evil. Those are our values.
Well China is doing total surveillance, even the most dystopian sci-fi are now an everyday reality of China, some BlackMirror episode like the one on Social Credit which were meant to be sci-fi are now more of a documentary on China's Score system.
And now China announced they edited a baby's gene not to cure him but just to test if they can buit a new generation of more resistant humans.
Please tell me how this is not completely screwed up ?
(I'm not defending the US, they are in the top of the most mass surveillance countries too, I'm just defending some basic notion like "We should not use non-consenting people as guinea pig to build a stronger race of human" and this kind of stuff...)
I wish, people would pick their example dictators for internet discussions from the appropriate magnitude of evilness pot. If you would swap "Hitler" with "Honecker" the point would still be terrifying (surveillance state, human rights violations, unjustified killings and imprisonments) but not as over the top and far away from reality (gigantic genocide).
I am confident that most scientists would never want to work on any of the projects you've mentioned nor could China lure people in to work on such things.
Instead, just the fact that one day China might be the first destination for young talent instead of the US will be enough to give them the edge in their fight for superiority. Whatever the case humanity will see at least some benefit from these type of competitions.
You followed the news right ? They removed a gene from a baby not to cure him but just to experiment and see what's going to happen to him. This absolutely inhumane. This children had scientist messing with his DNA without his consent, just to see if they can create a new generation of more resistant humans. So scientists are perfectly fine with doing inhumane experiments it seems...
Air quality indices, at least measured in PM2.5 or PM10, seem to be closer to 200-600 for the overwhelming majority of places in Shandong (which I assume is what you meant), currently and for the past 48 hours. I could only find one place [0] exceeding 800. Those levels are already appalling, but your statement suggests that it is 'around 800' for the entire state/province, not that a few locations peaked at 800.
That's true of most scientists from non-English-speaking countries. By the by, there's a market for proofreading those translations (e.g. ThinkScience for the Japanese-to-English market). You won't learn Chinese, but if you're learning Chinese, it might be a good way to see how the Chinese make mistakes going back to English.
China has a population of 1.3B. Isn't it possible that a lot of them have starred it because it is in Mandarin and targeted primarily towards them? You're not accounting for bias.
Presumeably the number of open issues should be proportional, no? A high star/open-issue ratio suggests people like the library and are not having problems with it. (And if they do have problems those problems are addressed -- i.e. issues are getting closed.)
Closed issues do not necessarily imply that problems are being addressed. Sometimes issues are closed because the maintainer has decided not to address the problem. Sometimes the project simply uses an external bug tracker instead of GitHub issues. Some projects do fix bugs reported in an issue, but they don't have a dedicated person managing issues, so they remain open long after the problem has been solved.
I think a high star/open-issue ratio is only a very weak indicator, that you should only use when you have hundreds of repos to evaluate and no domain expertise to decide which actually solves your problem.
Closing issues without addressing them does indeed present a problem for this approach. The guy behind lodash is especially aggressive about this which is why lodash is the #1 repo on all of GitHub according to this metric (http://repoq.com/lodash/lodash/).
But I find that people closing issues without addressing them is actually a very rare thing. Far more common is for a project to be abandoned by the maintainer. And this heuristic is quite good at raising a red flag in that situation.
Taking a deep dive into a library is of course the most reliable option. But in my experience, really getting an understanding of a large project is a multi-day or even multi-week affair, and this thing serves as an excellent first pass filter.
Indeed over time a project will accumulate more stars and issues. It's the ratio that's important. You can think of them as something like upvotes vs downvotes. Except the downvotes are much more meaningful because it takes a drastically greater effort to open a ticket than to star a project.
Sure but issues signify actual usage. You open an issue because you’re using the project and ran into a problem, possibly an edge case. A star can be just a low comittmwnt upvote. I’d almost consider open issue to be a good sign.
Stars can indicate interest where as issues are correlated with both usage and quality. A star is not nearly as strongly correlated with either usage or quality, it is most strongly correlated with interest. I star a thing because I think it is interesting and what to learn more about it.
If I'm writing an issue on a thing I never even have to star it because I am either actively using it (and thus perhaps watching it) or I'm a drive-by issuer that just stumbled on this thing and thus will either star the project because it interests me or not.
Stars to Issues is Interest to Usage, the more interesting a thing is an the least used it is the better it scores.
In theory you are correct, but in my practical experience, I've found that the ratio does in fact convey quality quite strongly.
The original motivation behind this project was this: I wrote a script to take a screenshot of my desktop every 10 seconds and upload them to S3. I used boto to do the uploading (https://github.com/boto/boto). Boto leaked memory and eventually the background script would cause my laptop to crash. When I figured out the problem I noticed boto has a large number of open issues (http://repoq.com/boto/boto). This indicates that the project is not well maintained.
Obviously this is not a perfect heuristic. But it's a lot better than one might think.
China's policy towards political/ideological freedoms and "luring US academics" seems distinctly at odds. Many in academia are ideologically motivated.
Well, you know, it’s not like the USA isn’t luring a lot of Chinese researchers and students already.
Speaking as an American who worked as a researcher in China for almost 9 years, China is way late to the “leveraging global talent” game. They should catch up, it’s only natural.
Seems like it's much easier to leverage global talent when you are leading the research at a global level. This has arguably not been this case for (modern) china until recently.
Well, there is also a bit of xenophobia against foreigners that they have to sort out. It manifests in weird ways, like not being able to give foreigner employees options in local companies.
Keep in mind that the number of foreigners in China is about the same as the number of foreigners in Tokyo.
It wasn’t too long ago (the 90s?) when all foreigners were thought to be spies and needed minders to travel outside of big cities. It is obviously much better now, but not all of that sentiment has washed out (see recent Beijing subway posters encouraging girls not to spill state secrets to foreign boyfriends).
I’m not really sure when someone would say bias has crossed over into xenophobia, they are not very distinguishable anyways.
Not parent but I think secrets in this case are similar to the divide of information between FTEs and Contractors in many companies. In addition, this is more of an exercise in cementing patriotic duty in the minds of citizens rather than actually preventing classified information leakage.
I presume that financial equivalents to options are allowed, but that China forbids foreigners controlling non-cash capital in China, since that complicates the Communist's Party's exercise of authoritarian power over the operation of the nation.
> This is fantastic news. Science will eventually benefit all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted.
> I welcome increased science funding regardless of who is doing it
Would you say the same about Nazi science? The world depicted in the Man in the High Castle has some very impressive scientific achievements.
The idea that science and knowledge are an unalloyed good to humanity no matter who develops the expertise is a fairy tale. Scientific knowledge and the technical skill that flows from it are weapons. Weapons are tools that can be used for good or ill, so we want them to be in the hands of those who can be (more) trusted to use them for good and out of the hands of those who can be less trusted.
Yes, worse, the atrocities committed by Unit 731 even.
So long as it is actual science being conducted, all science contributes to the global body of knowledge.
That's not to say one should condone science done unethically, but in hindsight one can't deny that the world benefits from science regardless of who conducts it.
How the results of scientific study are used is altogether another matter.
When you're fanning the flames of nationalist fear like this, comparing the rising power to Nazis.. are you thinking of yourself as an anti-nazi?
Anyone could pull up 3 links about the USA, UK or Russia being really bad to Muslims.. why single out China? Do we want cooperation or do we want to fight it out?
Only one of those links was about Muslims. One was about the terrible conditions in labor camps that even Han Chinese are sent to, and another was about the jailing of human rights and defense lawyers for doing their jobs.
I don't care what nationality advances science, but I do want unabashedly authoritarian regimes to be at a technical and scientific disadvantage to ones that at least pay lip service to human rights.
Lip service indeed. We imprison our own at 4x the rate they do, and spend all our surplus capital on bombs and guns while they build trains and bridges. 2 of the past 3 Presidents had less votes than their opponent.
But hey, we've got lip service!
Not that there aren't problems in China. But people should check their biases and learn some history before advancing radical hot takes.
China is officially communist, officially a republic. Actually neither.
As far as atheism goes, the government propaganda under Xi has been including a lot of Taoist imagery and references lately, from what I understand.
What I'm saying is that they're people and demonization serves nobody. I'm also saying that the demonization I've seen lately from the tech industry correlates negatively with actual knowledge of the country.
The US state is officially atheist, yet somehow requires people to be non-atheist to become a govt official. There has been only one avowed atheist in Congress in recent memory, and several more who felt necessary to lie about being non-atheist.
Do you equate the Chinese to nazis? Because that's insane and totally fear-mongering, especially if you think China is evil but other countries would use scientific research for only rainbows and puppies.
No, I emphatically do not. That's the most false and inflammatory misreading of my comment possible. The Chinese people are not villains, full stop.
The point I was making is that political regimes matter when it comes to the desire for progress in science and technology, and the idea that it doesn't is naive. I'm glad the Nazis and the Soviets were technically and scientifically behind the Allies and the West, and I think the world would be better off they had stayed even further behind -- even if that meant that humanity as a whole has its scientific and technical progress retarded for the want of their contributions.
As bad as the US is in many different ways, China is immeasurably worse. A future dominated by a hegemonic China would be a dark world. Little steps like these are helping to contribute to that possibility in 50-100 years.
Great powers historically have not usually been the largest countries population-wise. That would seem to indicate that there's no reason we should expect the inevitability of all else becoming equal.
> If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.
Or any other regime.
My comment was not hyperbolic, as WWII is pretty much the perfect real-world example of the political ramifications of scientific and technological advancement. Far from "benefit[ing] all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted," if the Nazi's had invented the atom bomb before the allies, mankind would have suffered more than it has.
Just to provide some historical context, our space program that ultimately put a man on the moon was largely driven by Nazi science. In particular, Wernher von Braun was a key figure in the design and development of the Nazi's V-2 ICBM, receiving accolades and rewards directly from Hitler himself for his successes. After WW2 he, along with hundreds of other Nazi scientists and engineers, were secretly recruited (see: operation paperclip [1]) to the US where he worked on ballistic missiles before eventually moving onto NASA where he served as the chief architect of the Saturn V that brought us to the moon.
Braun was primarily interested in space travel, but it does lead to a good satirical quote, "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."
Exactly my point. Science wasn't neutral in WWII, and it's not neutral now. If von Braun hadn't been part of their regime, they may not have had V-weapons. If Hitler hadn't been such an anti-Semite, Jewish scientists may not have fled Europe en masse and instead helped the Nazi's develop the atom bomb.
Back then, if people celebrated and supported Nazi science in the name of an idealistic concept of politically-neutral human scientific advancement, Europe and maybe even America may be subjugated under a Nazi flag.
Everyone who cares about liberal political institutions should hope that authoritarian regimes are scientifically and technologically backwards, and work to keep it that way.
There is a yin and yang to nearly everything in reality. Without this great evil, it's entirely possible humanity might have remained completely stagnant, or even have begun to regress. Stick 1000 people in a utopia where they have everything they need to subsist and endless digital entertainment. You've now set those people on the path to idiocracy. By contrast, put 1000 people in an oppressive environment where the only path to survival is ingenuity and you've laid the groundwork for creating the great thinkers, and creators, of tomorrow.
The Nazis were a large part of the reason that our technological development accelerated like nothing before, or since. We went from having never even put a man in orbit to putting a man on the moon in less than a decade - which remains what I think is by far the greatest achievement in the history of our species. A great evil created resulted in the most unimaginable good.
The times since then remained dominated by yang. We've had relative peace, prosperity, and our greatest threat was literally just a threat. And so now we are in an era where after decades of technological devolution we struggle to even fly a rocket by the moon, unable to come even close to replicating what we achieved with seeming ease some 50 years ago.
This may not be accurate, but I feel like the US benefited a lot from many foreigners knowing English. This does not seem to be the case for Chinese, though I imagine that will change.
It's regular-ish grammar helps. It has simple conguation rules and almost no declensions. Its irregular pronunciation rules do not, but in practice they only make the speaker sound foreign, and do not make them unintelligible.
If English isn't an easy language, what is? Is there any language that is universally easy?
While it's not "widely adopted" in comparison to other languages in the world, it's still the most successful constructed language in the world. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
I think that our collective understanding of how constructed languages could influence study is very lacking, but could probably take some hints from our experience with computer programming languages. Some languages could have grammars that lend themselves more easily to technical writing while others lend themselves to casual conversation. Historically, this took the form of having technical writing in Latin in English-speaking countries.
History also shows us that a world with "domain-specific human languages" might be a little too idealistic. Our minds cannot simply download the latest linter for Latin/Esperanto/English to keep the language consistent. However, the rise of the dictionary, and spellchecking/grammar software could be what prevents us from repeating history.
I've heard English described as "fault tolerant". Sure it's hard to get completely correct, but people can still communicate usefully even while messing it up quite badly. Which helps makes it useful as a de facto standard.
Probably because even most native English speakers don't know how to get it completely correct either (I count myself in that group).
> It's regular-ish grammar helps. It has simple conguation rules and almost no declensions. Its irregular pronunciation rules do not, but in practice they only make the speaker sound foreign, and do not make them unintelligible.
Are you talking about Chinese or English here? It would apply to both. The hard part in learning Chinese is the script, which simply requires a lot of time spent memorizing. If you're willing to settle for the literacy of an uneducated villager, learning Chinese isn't that difficult.
2. No genders for nouns.(As an Eastern Asian, I have serious problem understanding the motivation of introducing such concept into a language.)
3. Reasonable number of tenses comparing with rest of European languages, with the exception of probably present perfect tense, which can be fairly confusing.
It CAN be hard for the following reasons:
1. Huge amount of French/Latin borrowed words that don't follow the orthodoxical way of word construction in Germanic language family, unlike German. This leads to a lot of cognitive overhead having to memorize those words since they tend to appear more often in advanced writings.
2. Related to the first argument, English pronunciation CANNOT be reliably inferred from its letter representation. Again leads to a lot of mistakes and force memorization.
I think English is easier as a language for everyday use. But to read and write academic text, it still requires years of training. Personally, it takes me about 10 years to reach a certain level of confidence in writing and conversation, for speaking it is even longer.
3. Use of four or five characters to express a single sound with the rest mangled or silent. But one single character often represents two sounds, just because.
The basic grammer is kinda hard if you aren't exposed to similar languages or didn't learn it in school, but after that I'd say it's one of the easiest.
Because of the difficult writing system (thousands of characters to memorize, rather than a mere 26), Mandarin is unlikely to replace English as a world language.
i don't know about this. how much worse, really, are hanzi (which do have a loose structure to them, it's not just brute memorization) than the deranged English spelling system?
if there's anyone who learned both as additional languages I would be interested in hearing.
this is fantastic, thanks. I can definitely attest that Chinese people are very proud of the difficulty of their language. One possible factor that isn't mentioned: I believe that culturally, the Chinese value learning and education more.
Your belief needs evidence. Or a more precise definition of "learning" and "education." My experience, both East and West, is that the typical person is just too busy trying to survive to care much about learning or education (in almost any sense).
You can bluff your way through English spelling and let the computer fix 90+% of it and let human readers fix most of the remainder. Can you do that with Mandarin characters?
Yes. If you just type ahead in Pinyin and accept whatever the input method makes out of it, human readers will be able to fix the remainder. It works analogously with handwritten characters, where you don't need to remember every stroke, so long as the general shape is recognizable.
When I was little a game I would often play with myself is to switch on the Pinyin IME, keep pressing random keys for a minute or two, and then try to make sense of the ridiculous stuff I typed out. It was a lot of fun because you can always make some kind of sense of it.
And quality of mandarin content is deterioting ever faster these days, thanks to low quality school education, generally shit-tier English translators, and the self-media sensationalism cottage industry that Wechat and Toutiao from Bytedance helped created.
I always considered this a bizarre argument. Chinese characters are more alike English words than English letters. English also has thousands of words, prefixes required to achieve competency. Chinese characters consist of only around 200 radicals, more than 26, but hardly thousands. I would say the smallest unit in Chinese is a stroke, of which there are 10. Theres just an extra dimension about where strokes are placed relative to each other that makes the characters seem complex, but if you study it for a few days you would find that there arent actually that many degrees of freedom. In other words,
- strokes to letters
- radicals to prefixes, suffices
- characters to words
Frankly, it's embarrassing how an absolutist regime can create a sense of more on-the-ground intellectual freedom than can a supposedly free country. Socially enforced censorship of painfully obvious facts in the west has gotten out of control, and unless we place limits on our newfound authoritarian impulses, we're going to be out-competed. While it's true that we've been very successful for a long time, success breeds complacency. Objections to things like genetic editing of humans on vague ethical grounds will just leave the advantage with others.
Are you saying the west should allow human experiments on innocent (to-be-born) humans like in China just to keep the pace ?
The right to decide what we do to your body, the right to not serve as guinea pig to experiments that aim to achieve a Nazi-like goal of creating a superior race... These are "vague" ethics? If you were currently dieing because of secondary effects due to an experiment we did on you as an embryo (and that you never needed) maybe you wouldn't find those "vague" ethics so useless.
The west performs human experimentation all the time for the sake of validating new drugs and surgical devices. While current standards are, IMHO, too strict, the system more or less works, and few people have serious ethical problems with clinical trials, despite clinical trials being literally human experimentation.
wow that's messed up :(. We experimented on a baby that :
1) never had the need of this experiment, it was not to cure him but to test the effect of messing with a certain gene.
2) we never had its consent (obviously)
I don't know about US, but in EU we don't experiment with people, without their concent and in order not to cure them, but to find how to build a stronger race.
That's a whole higher level of screwed up that just happened in China.
This is non-consenting human experiment in order not to cure but to find how to build a stronger race. This is not (as far as I know) in any way comparable to what is happening in the West
> in EU we don't experiment with people, without their concent and in order not to cure them, but to find how to build a stronger race.
"Involuntary Sterilization and Castration in Sweden and the Nordic Countries"
"In 1934, the first sterilisation act was enacted in Sweden followed by the first castration act in 1944. In 1972, Sweden became the first country in the world to enact legislation for the amendment of legally registered sex, however preconditioned on sterilisation. In the implementation of all these laws, voluntary and involuntary interventions have been made with legislative support... The involuntarily castrated [in the period 1972-2013] have still not received any reparations from the Swedish State [2018]"
It is not allowed in China either if you are referring to the recent gene editing experiment. The researcher is widely denounced in China and will likely be in legal trouble.
I don’t think the ethical grounds for objecting to gene editing are vague at all. Taken to logical extremes, the ability to edit out ‘undesirable’ qualities in our descendants should ring alarm bells in anyone - who decides what is undesirable?
There are plenty of practical grounds too. They don’t just turn off the cancer switch - gene editing ‘turns off’ some deep cellular function that is involved in cancer developing. But that function might regulate something else we don’t understand - we don’t yet know the consequences 40,50 or 100 years later of doing that.
If you had the option to grant your child the ability to live to 150 in perfect health, and if, experimentally determined, the risk of negative side effects were the same as, say, postponing childbirth by five years, would you withold this advantage from your child, sentencing him or her to a shorter and more miserable life? How could a responsible parent choose to do that?
> and if, experimentally determined, the risk of negative side effects were the same as, say, postponing childbirth by five years,
To determine that some change is safe during the expected 150 year of life, you must measure the effects during … at least 150 years (preferability more).
How would be you sure that there are no tradeoff? Perhaps it reduce the chance of reproduction by a 1%. Perhaps it affect the ability to climb very tall mountains or very deep scuba diving. Perhaps it will make your grandgrandchildren more weak during a famine (sooner or later, some of your descendants will suffer a famine) or an epidemic. What are the good genes for surviving a war? How do you average the advantages and disadvantages of the normal times and the war times? And there are some adaptations that cause problems but makes you more resistant to malaria, how long you expect your descendants to live in a malaria free zone?
How are you sure that the proposed changes are real advantages and not just some fads? (Consider that it's not clear how many eggs should you eat weekly, the recommendation changes every ten years.)
What about exchanging 10 years of life for a 1% more chance of reproduction. Perhaps 1% is small, but it accumulates during the generations.
You can imagine an infinite set of negative consequences of practically any action --- your choice of breakfast cereal, via a chain of consequences, might cause the end of the world. Still, we make choices, because we have to terminate the chain of hypothetical situations at some point, using the heuristic that without a specific reason to believe that some effect happens, it doesn't.
With respect to the topic under discussion: absent any particular reason to suppose that this kind of gene editing causes your hypothetical wartime probability difference or your hypothetical 1% fertility drop, there's no reason to use the possibility of these effects to ban the treatment, since there's as much reason to believe you're making these things less likely as reason to believe that you're making these things more likely.
Regarding changes being advantages: do you really believe, deep down, that being weak is just as useful as being strong? That being resistant to disease is just as good as being vulnerable? That being dumb is just as good as being a genius? Give me a break: I can't seriously entertain the idea that we don't know which traits we'd want our children to have, given a choice.
Two easy ways to encourage foreign talent. Put huge investments into English training within the country. Or as they could. Put huge investments into a far simpler language such as Esperanto to create an easier to learn (world) language. Secondly, drop the firewall so that foreign talent and local talent don’t feel so divided.
As a former researcher I am not surprised to see another nation capitalizing on the counter-productive politicization of US science.
I used to be a researcher and writing proposals suddenly started taking up much more time around 2010 to 2013 because each grant became much smaller. Each grant also became more specific in what science you were expected to produce, which essentially made us all contractors for NSF plus DOE and winning a grant was sometimes more about politics than producing excellent scholarship. This pushed a lot of great scientists out of the field.
After I left research radical leftists started a more expansive politicized attack on science that is further politisizing who gets tenure or grants essential to making scientific progress.
- Biology as a subject is the most affected right now [1], because biology shows that there are biological differences that contribute to individuals choices in a way that invalidates the univariant equity doctrine political explanations. Women on average does are as capable as men in the sciences, but they differences in choices increase the more equal the societies are.
- Science as a competence hierarchy is under attack by the equity initiatives [2], making it so that the most important factors for getting grants and tenure is often not competence.
The fact is unfortunately that these programs have been shown to not increase the production of great science [3]. Moreover, these efforts further demoralize and alienate scientists.
We should at this point not be under any doubt that unless we defeat the politicization of science the US will not remain competitive. We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to.
How do you then explain that the gender gap increase the more equal countries are [1, 2]?
This doesn't mean that one gender is more capable than the other, women actually do as well on average in the sciences as men, but it seems to indicate that the genders does not make the same choices if social or economic limitations are removed. Also, why are the choices women make in countries like Norway inferior to the choices they make in less gender equal countries?
I think the main reason there is so much opposition is what happens when it does. Then there is no reason to change the laws/policies (because they don't override how humans are built). That means there is no reason for the careers of politicians and activists and no money for the initiatives to fix it. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In practice, of course, biology explains a large portion of differences between humans, both where it pertains to gender, and where it pertains to race.
There are a few "forbidden truths" for them:
1) That there are in fact biological reasons for some aspects of a gender gap.
2) More general there are reasons for discrimination in certain limited cases (it used to be the case that the law had specific exceptions for diversity regulations. The big example given was "no cripples in the emergency response team in the fire department" (I think you can imagine why). That was a valid discriminatory demand that could be put in job applications)
3) There can be no differences in the source population (because ... well if you calculate it out specifically, then the Bay Area is not racist in hiring at all. But wait ! Why are there soooo few blacks working for the Bay Area tech companies ? Why so many Asians ? Well ... those values are very close to what you'd expect them to be if well-established (but heavily denied) racial differences in intelligence are taking into account and one assumes that when silicon valley invites 10 people to compete for a job, they hire the smartest)
So in order to have "equality", defined as "distribution in the winners of competitions is the same as the distribution of participants" you can't have even tiny differences at all in the population beyond their proportion of the population, otherwise that'll never happen. Unfortunately there's another problem here (see next point)
Of course the whole reason different races exist is to have them be different. I mean from the perspective of evolution, which while it isn't a conscious entity, does have both the means to change humans and a reason to do so (a goal to achieve). This means races/genders don't just differ in skin color, they differ in anything. Obviously the skin is one important difference, but it is just one component of profound differences in energy regulation of the body, which affects nearly everything relating to energy use in the body, which ... even affects brain size. Specifically one big difference between races is how much energy gets dedicated to body temperature maintenance (cooling and warming are different systems, so that's 2 separate things), digestion, muscles/movement, and ... yes ... how much energy gets dedicated to thinking, and even the balance between cortex and neocortex. And if it favors the cortex, that is just not going to help out your chess game. It even affects how big you are on average (of course bigger = everything requires more energy, because the human body is not that different from a robot. Fortunately bigger requires exponentially more energy, so the differences there can't be that big)
4) The effect of average differences on competitions. Specifically, say you have group 1 and group 2, and they compete. Let's assume N(100, 10) distribution. Let's say group 1 has a x% higher average, how often would a one-on-one competition between a member of group 1 and group 2 end in favor of the member of group 1 ? Let's call that value y.
for x = 1%, odds of group 1 winning = 53.01%
for x = 2%, odds of group 1 winning = 55.57%
for x = 5%, odds of group 1 winning = 64.04%
for x = 10%, odds of group 1 winning = 76.08%
for x = 20%, odds of group 1 winning = 92.19%
And if you have repeated competitions (you only advance to the next round if you win round 1, and there's N rounds) ... it gets pretty bad pretty rapidly.
So unfortunately competition amplifies small differences in averages. Although this is to be expected, this is ...
You make some good points, but I would like to add caveats on the usefulness to think in terms of groups when judging an individual and make the point that group inferences has severe limitations when making decisions about an individual.
There are bigger differences within groups than between them, although there are also large differences between groups. For instance, people of jewish descent have an average IQ that is much higher than any other group. However, if you are trying to find the best person for a cognitively demanding job or to build a relationship with them then it doesn't matter what the average for any group you might perceive them as part of is as you might need an individual that belong to a small subset of any group.
That is why we in the west made the essential discovery that we are different amongst so many dimensions that we in the end are a group of one, the individual, and that we should aspire to judge a person as an individual on their merit in any situation.
Judging people as individuals goes against some of our basic tendencies as humans. Our natural tendency is to be tribal and to judge individuals for group "guilt". Our judicial and political system is intentionally adversarial to counter this tendency, and that is why we need to fight hard against anyone trying to destroy this process in the name of equity or because they think they deserve special treatment due to their group belongings.
I am explicitly talking about the generally used definition of diversity, which I believe boils down to what I put in the comment:
> "distribution in the winners of competitions is the same as the distribution of participants"
(and sometimes even extended to the distribution of the population)
Like you say, an individual's performance, like any other individual data point in statistics, can be anything, or anyone in this case. I should probably have mentioned that.
Yes, only a small subset of people in general have a good understanding of statistics.
- People on the radical left without a good understanding of statistics are often outraged by how they misunderstand how statistical should be interpreted
- People on the identarian right make outrageous statements the statistics can't support.
I try to avoid both misunderstandings by explicitly stating the caveat.
>We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to.
I think, there's a very solid cause behind it. Most of "competing individually" is essentially making different decisions and benefiting/losing from the consequences. Except over the past few decades our society has automated/protocolized those decisions away. We follow rules and documented best practices (or just let a database search figure out the right thing for us) much more than we have to improvise. So the society is looking for alternative planes for people to compete and ironically, due to our sense of compassion, the competition shifted to demonstrating that you suffer more than your peers. I'm afraid, this is also responsible for declining willingness of westerners to make families/raise kids.
I think if we were all the same and we could use a few group identities to understand individuals you would be right. However, maybe there is a great deal of variety within us that is not expressed because of the measures applied in the name of compassion and equity. The sta
The equity agenda is inherently a very pessimistic agenda in the same way that communism is pessimistic. It assumes that our current tangible as well as intangible resources is a good approximation of what can be, and I think we over the last 100 years have proven that this is not true.
On [1], I found that tptacek's commentary [4] was much helpful to shape my own opinion about it. At the very least I believe the Quillette article is inadequate as an example of, say, biology under the leftist attack.
I think the problem with tptacek's explanation is that it does not address the larger context of how certain topics have become sacred in academia [5], and how breaking or criticising these sacred ideas leads to an outsized reaction. Do you think the reaction was focusing on merits and that it was not an outsized reaction due to someone violating something sacred?
Lets dig more into evidence of suppression of biological research:
How would you then explain the reactions to anyone stating the biological fact that human gender is overwhelmingly bimodal with almost everyone being male/female [1], suppression of research into intelligence [2], or the diversity pledges some candidates now have to write before becoming professors [3].
The grievance studies hoax proved how grievance studies is acting like ideological whitewashing of extreme political ideas that would be unacceptable otherwise [4]. These ideas are used to justify political actions in universities and in culture to suppress sacrilegious ideas [5], and it is a concept of sacred only a small very loud minority of progressives believe in and these comprise 8% of the population [6].
Personally I find the radical leftist explanation of these two incidences unconvincing:
- it seems like the opposition to McKinnon’s paper was argued primarily from a moral angle due to his violation of some progressive sacred principles, and other explanation does not seem to explain the size of the response
- The reaction to the grievance studies hoax was that peer review is flawed and them still claiming that it is fair to use favored political views as a valid criteria of what should be publishing of papers of very poor scholarship. This does not engage with the real very disturbing conclusions of this study, and the fact that their hoax papers in addition to winning prices within grievance studies are also indistinguishable from other scholarship regularly published there.
You seem to complain to tptacek for not addressing the "larger context" but you don't really give any alternative explanation of the event. I'm just pointing out that the event is probably not a good example given the context, and tptacek in the linked thread just presents that context. I'm pretty much aware that, for example, variability hypothesis is being thoroughly attacked while there are evidences supporting some (but not all) sorts of variability and you don't have to repeat your claim to me.
I think you are missing my claim that the severity of the response seem to be due to him violating a sacred value and that this was a large part of the justification of the response, regardless of the merit of any other claim they could have made on the merits of the paper itself.
My second follow-up claim is that if the response had been entirely based upon merits then the response would have not been anything remotely this severe. tptaceks claim is on the merits of the paper, which might or might not be correct to some degree, but does not address this concern with the response and how problematic it is that sacredness is now part of the academic review process.
Ideas should be engaged with and critiqued through scholarship, and basing any rejection of scholarship partially or fully on an idea of sacredness is dangerous to the integrity of our scholarship. We need to have zero tolerance of this, and McKinnon’s situation or the reaction to Charles Murray before it shows how sacredness stops us from properly critiquing ideas through scholarship.
So you are not concerned about the response itself; you are concerned that the response is too severe. How can that be relevant to my initial reply assuming that?
And I think his response was severe exactly because sacredness had won over merits---reviewers accepting a sub-par paper for a political reason. He even explicitly stated that Mathematical Intelligencer could be a reasonable fit for the paper.
My point is that science isn't clear cut, and by definition a minority dissenting opinion is what furthers science. Sometimes that dissent violates a sacred principle, such as Galileo and many others did. The concept of what is sacred evolved and now practically all of us believe in modifications that allow these ideas. Science is a process that aids this change.
Therefore if a scientist when expressing an idea meet an opposition that;
- involves sacredness partially or fully as a principle for rejecting it
- threatens with severe social sanctions or exceptional actions if their favored sacredness isn't respected
Then we have hit something where the ones that have these sacred principles should have to justify their arguments as papers as well. There needs to be some negative response to using sacredness partially or fully as a way to reject ideas, because that is how we protect the scientific process from the corruption due to flaws in human nature.
If the only thing that stops that from happening is publishing the paper then we should err on publishing it when in doubt so that we can find the truth. If they believe so much that this is wrong, let them put their reputation behind their sacredness principles in another paper objecting to this paper and let us all criticize those as well.
The bigger impact isn't luring U.S. scientists to China. It's keeping top Chinese scientists/students in China. Chinese grad students/postdocs are highly represented at elite U.S. universities. With recent political changes in the U.S. making more difficult for international students to come to the U.S. or at least giving the impression that the U.S. is not as friendly to immigration, enrollment from international students have started to drop in the past 2 years.
I am employed by one of the big tech companies in the bay and was recently chosen to interview candidates for our new grad program. I was astonished by how many top of class graduate students we brought into the program that had identical backgrounds. Around 90% had studied in and were from China, usually undergrad there and Ivy League grad school with close to perfect GPAs. If they are keeping their students, I haven’t seen it yet. Will see how it plays out in the near future
The presence of Chinese students interviewing for your grad program says nothing about the percentage of equivalent performance students who choose to remain in China.
The American Physical Society recently found that international enrollment in graduate physics programs I'd down by around 10%. But, it's uneven. At say Harvard or Stanford, things are probably still fine, but a smaller institutions, it can be much greater. What's worrisome (as an American) is that these trends may not be reversible
How many of them will still be at your company in 3 years time though? Chinese companies are realizing that students with a little bit of work experience at Western firms are a lot more valuable than new grads (especially because a lot of new grads nowadays are kids of rich parents who couldn't hack it in the Chinese education system).
Smart, ambitious Chinese students are now planning the right new work experiences in the US with an eye towards returning back to China as a junior VP at Tencent or Alibaba when they go back. The way to retain them in the US is to give them the same career opportunities here but a lot of Chinese students are realizing they can climb the ladder a lot faster and further in China and making the rational choice to go back.
I can explain where your astonishing comes form(maybe off topic): there are something to do with how China built the nation yet not quite visible to westerners.
There are many factors. One important factor which amplifies other factors is related to big number theory: quantity is translated into quality. Average Chinese are not quite different from other nationals.(Let's put down controversial conclusion for now) . However China has 1.3 billion people.
With such a big number , a small shift of the average on the IQ bell curve doesn't matter. What you have met are a vary small portion of top talent from China. As analogy, you can image a typical top NBA athlete would be black. But with 1.3 billion people there exists a Yao Ming who is not a typical Chinese.
Then why it happened recently? That's related to last 30 years rapid development.But that's invisible part. China not only build road , bridge, bullet train, etc. more importantly which also matches Chinese traditional value: China invest heavily in Education. In 80's (i.e. my generation ) only 5-10% of high school graduate can be accepted by limited universities at the time. But money poured into Education increased year by year incrementally like crazy. Today there are enough universities to provide any qualified students an opportunity for education. The consequence is there's a big change on human capital. This is not limited to what you observed but also in other areas. For example, China is exporting the infrastructure building expertise all over the world. Quite often the builders have to bring whole teams from China because qualified teams are only available there. Those are experienced skill construction workers but not academically competitive students.
The significant increase in human capital is less visible than infrastructure improvement, yet it has a bigger impact
And also the competition to get into good school etc.
Basically a student life doesn't start at 18, 16, or 12, but 2years old, if not one and half (interviews for kindergarten).
Constant ranking, placement exams, number of school hours etc makes western education pathetic.
At the end of P1, Chinese kids are supposed to read something like 800 Chinese words, write 60% of them (if my memory serves me well), in France/Switzerland, most kids can barely read at that age. And poor them if you even think to enforce that. We are destroying generations if the parents don't realize how fucked up is our system: education is a building process, with layers and layers of foundation.
Meanwhile in China, people are bashing the education system hard as well, saying it "Teaching to the test" (a Wikipedia term [0]), "Serving political purpose" and "Like a factory".
In my opinion, a successful education system is the one which can produce people who are capable of learn new knowledge my themselves, resolve problems by themselves and create new things by themselves.
So maybe, reading 800 Chinese words in a very young age is impressive, but there is more important things to do.
And in France people are saying the same bullshit over bac and classes préparatoires.
Same in Switzerland.
It's lieing to students, reality is a harsh one. If you don't perform during your studies, your life will be tough unless you are an outlier.
The research quality and funding is just one factor. The more important factor is quality of life. Things like air quality and being able to get along without knowing Chinese.
Air quality improves every year, and cities try to plant as much as trees as possible. What I like - they even plant ivy or similar things to climb highway pylons. It looks very beautiful during the summer.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadI welcome increased science funding regardless of who is doing it, particularly when we're talking about non-military scientific research.
If this makes the US feel competitive and they increase funding state-side then so much the better. We'd all benefit from that too.
The problem with US is for foreign nationals, there is a preset role for us to fit in, while in China, it offers more potentials. I won't say certain it is black and white question at this moment, there is trade-off in between. Living in US is no longer the non-brainer
My sample based on my circle of Chinese PhD students that have graduated in the last 5 years indicates a more willingness to go back and several have.
Example: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2018/Schedule
A very common path for Chinese scientists is to go to a western university for their doctorate and post-doc, develop a research program, and return to a faculty position in China.
Many Chinese grants include salary for the PI, so an investigator getting multiple grants can earn a lot of money. It's an attractive incentive that appears to be working quite well (from my limited exposure).
As for reliability, there are certainly some issues, but I hesitate to paint with a broad brush. Science is often very discipline-specific in terms of reproducibility, openness of collaboration, funding, etc. etc. There absolutely are fields where the Chinese are quite strong.
Ranking by the 1% most highly cited papers in math and computing for those published between 2013-2016:
6 of the top 15 universities are in mainland China,
6 USA,
2 Singapore, and
1 Hong Kong.
Tsinghua is at number 1. Singapore also seems to employ a number of researchers from China.
The article does state that MIT still leads in the broader STEM fields, but Tsinghua may soon take over.
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) still leads in the top 1% of stem papers, but Mr Marginson says Tsinghua is on track to be “number one in five years or less”.”
https://www.economist.com/china/2018/11/17/tsinghua-universi...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-professor-notes-narrow...
https://www.chinalawblog.com/2016/09/the-china-stock-option-...
Except this time, China is hiring for genetic specialists to experiment on Uighur babies in concentration camps, AI scientists to experiment with computer-only surveillance and AI guided trans-pacific nuclear missiles, and biologists to experiment with AQI resistant humans. (incidently, AQI is around 800 in Shangdong, China today)
'Of course it's not ethical': shock at gene-edited baby claims. Chinese geneticist He Jiankui’s claim to have altered embryos prompts outcry from scientists
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/27/he-jiankui-c...
"China is putting Uighur children in 'orphanages' even if their parents are alive"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighurs-...
"Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras"
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/china-surveillan...
"Time to Address China's Expanding Nuclear Weapons Program"
https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2018-08-22/time-address-chi...
"Air pollution is killing 1 million people and costing Chinese economy 267 billion yuan a year"
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2166542/air-...
"True grit: clouds of Chinese dust descend on southern Japan"
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2093573/tru...
Your specific claim was that scientists are being recruited from abroad for work on these things, except, they're not ("Except this time, China is hiring for genetic specialists to experiment on Uighur babies in concentration camps").
Trying to shove some other agenda into anything China-related is becoming really dull. You're trying to start some sort of ideological war when we really should be discussing science funding.
You can easily find stuff about western gene-editing research and plans, just not a 'me first' for babies:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608350/first-human-embryo...
China's cameras? Well, the US is the surveillance champion of the world. Maybe search "snowden". And unlike China, it also violates my privacy as a European.
>"Time to Address China's Expanding Nuclear Weapons Program"
Actual action, not mere "program": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
And air-pollution? Do you know how US cities were back in the day? Or even today? And that's without being the world's top manufacturer...
https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/08/10/southern-californ...
I'm happy to agree that U.S. surveillance activities violate your privacy, but I'm not sure you should say "unlike China" in this context.
There are quite a few mass surveillance techniques that don't require support from a local government:
Several of those seem pretty plausible for me for the PRC to be using against Europeans. :-(> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In what situation do you think it's acceptable to look the other way?
However, as a citizen in a democracy, I am pretty sure the writer of that posts intends it to be a criticism of an authoritarian dictatorship and not China's people or people of Chinese descent.
I should also say that the distinction between "criticizing government" and "criticizing people" is routinely not observed, even by Democrats. When Obama was making a case for the TPP, one of the main argument he gave was "The TPP would let America, not China, lead the way on global trade". Zero-sum language like this sends a signal to Americans that if doing something X is bad for this other group of humans, then that's an argument in favor of doing X, not (crazy thought!) an argument against doing it. That's how you get to where we are now where prominent Democrats like Chuck Schumer can say "we must be united in our fight against the Chinese" and not a single American, liberal or conservative, even took issue with that kind of language.
And now China announced they edited a baby's gene not to cure him but just to test if they can buit a new generation of more resistant humans.
Please tell me how this is not completely screwed up ?
(I'm not defending the US, they are in the top of the most mass surveillance countries too, I'm just defending some basic notion like "We should not use non-consenting people as guinea pig to build a stronger race of human" and this kind of stuff...)
Locking a million muslims up and exterminating them isn't genocide?
"It is actually designed to exterminate — eliminate — the whole Uighur nation as people," he said.
"Children are being removed even when their families are willing to care for them, according to Financial Times Beijing correspondent, Emily Feng."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-28/china-working-to-elim...
Instead, just the fact that one day China might be the first destination for young talent instead of the US will be enough to give them the edge in their fight for superiority. Whatever the case humanity will see at least some benefit from these type of competitions.
Well, speaking of "nuclear scientists", only one country has dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, and it wasn't China.
0: http://aqicn.org/city/shandong/caoxian/caoxianwenhuazhongxin...
Time to learn Mandarin I guess.
And the pretrained models it ships with are trained against a Mandarin corpus.
http://repoq.com/baidu/Familia/
http://repoq.com/nltk/nltk
http://repoq.com/RaRe-Technologies/gensim
http://repoq.com/lists/natural_language_processing
I think a high star/open-issue ratio is only a very weak indicator, that you should only use when you have hundreds of repos to evaluate and no domain expertise to decide which actually solves your problem.
But I find that people closing issues without addressing them is actually a very rare thing. Far more common is for a project to be abandoned by the maintainer. And this heuristic is quite good at raising a red flag in that situation.
Taking a deep dive into a library is of course the most reliable option. But in my experience, really getting an understanding of a large project is a multi-day or even multi-week affair, and this thing serves as an excellent first pass filter.
Wonder if there are cross-cultural differences in starring/issue-opening frequencies, since the assumption here is that there are none
Stars can indicate interest where as issues are correlated with both usage and quality. A star is not nearly as strongly correlated with either usage or quality, it is most strongly correlated with interest. I star a thing because I think it is interesting and what to learn more about it.
If I'm writing an issue on a thing I never even have to star it because I am either actively using it (and thus perhaps watching it) or I'm a drive-by issuer that just stumbled on this thing and thus will either star the project because it interests me or not.
Stars to Issues is Interest to Usage, the more interesting a thing is an the least used it is the better it scores.
The original motivation behind this project was this: I wrote a script to take a screenshot of my desktop every 10 seconds and upload them to S3. I used boto to do the uploading (https://github.com/boto/boto). Boto leaked memory and eventually the background script would cause my laptop to crash. When I figured out the problem I noticed boto has a large number of open issues (http://repoq.com/boto/boto). This indicates that the project is not well maintained.
Obviously this is not a perfect heuristic. But it's a lot better than one might think.
Speaking as an American who worked as a researcher in China for almost 9 years, China is way late to the “leveraging global talent” game. They should catch up, it’s only natural.
Keep in mind that the number of foreigners in China is about the same as the number of foreigners in Tokyo.
I’m not really sure when someone would say bias has crossed over into xenophobia, they are not very distinguishable anyways.
No need to answer if you are still in China at the moment.
I presume that financial equivalents to options are allowed, but that China forbids foreigners controlling non-cash capital in China, since that complicates the Communist's Party's exercise of authoritarian power over the operation of the nation.
> I welcome increased science funding regardless of who is doing it
Would you say the same about Nazi science? The world depicted in the Man in the High Castle has some very impressive scientific achievements.
The idea that science and knowledge are an unalloyed good to humanity no matter who develops the expertise is a fairy tale. Scientific knowledge and the technical skill that flows from it are weapons. Weapons are tools that can be used for good or ill, so we want them to be in the hands of those who can be (more) trusted to use them for good and out of the hands of those who can be less trusted.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/prison-camps-in-china-th...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/china-is-creating-co...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa...
Yes, worse, the atrocities committed by Unit 731 even.
So long as it is actual science being conducted, all science contributes to the global body of knowledge.
That's not to say one should condone science done unethically, but in hindsight one can't deny that the world benefits from science regardless of who conducts it.
How the results of scientific study are used is altogether another matter.
You could have just said: “what do the Nazis have to do with Chinese academics conducting research at universities?”
No true scotsman? .
The Americans certainly thought so. And you should check out the length of this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio... .
How do you define science?
> You could have just said: “what do the Nazis have to do with Chinese academics conducting research at universities?”
I could if that's what I wanted to say.
Science doesn't have morals. You hypothesise, you experiment, you observe, you document. That's why we have ethics courses.
Anyone could pull up 3 links about the USA, UK or Russia being really bad to Muslims.. why single out China? Do we want cooperation or do we want to fight it out?
I don't care what nationality advances science, but I do want unabashedly authoritarian regimes to be at a technical and scientific disadvantage to ones that at least pay lip service to human rights.
But hey, we've got lip service!
Not that there aren't problems in China. But people should check their biases and learn some history before advancing radical hot takes.
and which one of these states is officially atheist and requires the same to become a govt official?
realize oversimplification is a problem, but false equivalence also runs both ways.
there is likely room in the middle, which perhaps is what you are saying..
As far as atheism goes, the government propaganda under Xi has been including a lot of Taoist imagery and references lately, from what I understand.
What I'm saying is that they're people and demonization serves nobody. I'm also saying that the demonization I've seen lately from the tech industry correlates negatively with actual knowledge of the country.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/atheists-in-congre...
Several US states are in fact officially theist and requires the same to become a govt official (despite apparently violating the US Constitution.)
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2009/12/15/which-states-...
No, I emphatically do not. That's the most false and inflammatory misreading of my comment possible. The Chinese people are not villains, full stop.
The point I was making is that political regimes matter when it comes to the desire for progress in science and technology, and the idea that it doesn't is naive. I'm glad the Nazis and the Soviets were technically and scientifically behind the Allies and the West, and I think the world would be better off they had stayed even further behind -- even if that meant that humanity as a whole has its scientific and technical progress retarded for the want of their contributions.
People just heard al Qaeda.
Why not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
https://qz.com/906142/a-chinese-medical-study-is-being-retra...
They are conducting ethical cleansing right now.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546130 and marked it off-topic.
If you weren't aware: Godwin has repealed "Godwin's law":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/14/...:
> If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.
Or any other regime.
My comment was not hyperbolic, as WWII is pretty much the perfect real-world example of the political ramifications of scientific and technological advancement. Far from "benefit[ing] all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted," if the Nazi's had invented the atom bomb before the allies, mankind would have suffered more than it has.
Braun was primarily interested in space travel, but it does lead to a good satirical quote, "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Back then, if people celebrated and supported Nazi science in the name of an idealistic concept of politically-neutral human scientific advancement, Europe and maybe even America may be subjugated under a Nazi flag.
Everyone who cares about liberal political institutions should hope that authoritarian regimes are scientifically and technologically backwards, and work to keep it that way.
The Nazis were a large part of the reason that our technological development accelerated like nothing before, or since. We went from having never even put a man in orbit to putting a man on the moon in less than a decade - which remains what I think is by far the greatest achievement in the history of our species. A great evil created resulted in the most unimaginable good.
The times since then remained dominated by yang. We've had relative peace, prosperity, and our greatest threat was literally just a threat. And so now we are in an era where after decades of technological devolution we struggle to even fly a rocket by the moon, unable to come even close to replicating what we achieved with seeming ease some 50 years ago.
If English isn't an easy language, what is? Is there any language that is universally easy?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
I think that our collective understanding of how constructed languages could influence study is very lacking, but could probably take some hints from our experience with computer programming languages. Some languages could have grammars that lend themselves more easily to technical writing while others lend themselves to casual conversation. Historically, this took the form of having technical writing in Latin in English-speaking countries.
History also shows us that a world with "domain-specific human languages" might be a little too idealistic. Our minds cannot simply download the latest linter for Latin/Esperanto/English to keep the language consistent. However, the rise of the dictionary, and spellchecking/grammar software could be what prevents us from repeating history.
Probably because even most native English speakers don't know how to get it completely correct either (I count myself in that group).
'Hello World' is easy.
Even hacking your way through something is possible.
Even if the rules are weird and nobody seems to get it totally right.
Are you talking about Chinese or English here? It would apply to both. The hard part in learning Chinese is the script, which simply requires a lot of time spent memorizing. If you're willing to settle for the literacy of an uneducated villager, learning Chinese isn't that difficult.
1. Very analytical, wake in inflections.
2. No genders for nouns.(As an Eastern Asian, I have serious problem understanding the motivation of introducing such concept into a language.)
3. Reasonable number of tenses comparing with rest of European languages, with the exception of probably present perfect tense, which can be fairly confusing.
It CAN be hard for the following reasons:
1. Huge amount of French/Latin borrowed words that don't follow the orthodoxical way of word construction in Germanic language family, unlike German. This leads to a lot of cognitive overhead having to memorize those words since they tend to appear more often in advanced writings.
2. Related to the first argument, English pronunciation CANNOT be reliably inferred from its letter representation. Again leads to a lot of mistakes and force memorization.
I think English is easier as a language for everyday use. But to read and write academic text, it still requires years of training. Personally, it takes me about 10 years to reach a certain level of confidence in writing and conversation, for speaking it is even longer.
if there's anyone who learned both as additional languages I would be interested in hearing.
And evin bad spelers can riit undrstandabbel englush.
u ll maek urlself look dum tho
* http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
China has started the The Thousand Talent program to recruit professors from all over the world: http://www.1000plan.org/en/. Also, Chinese govt now offering international students scholarships to cover the cost if they enroll: https://www.scholarshipsads.com/china-scholarships/.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/226950.html
In English, we'd have a "Million Dollar Talent" program and a Chinese would say it unfortunately evokes "Millon Dollar Baby"
Can you explain?
1) never had the need of this experiment, it was not to cure him but to test the effect of messing with a certain gene.
2) we never had its consent (obviously)
I don't know about US, but in EU we don't experiment with people, without their concent and in order not to cure them, but to find how to build a stronger race.
That's a whole higher level of screwed up that just happened in China.
This is non-consenting human experiment in order not to cure but to find how to build a stronger race. This is not (as far as I know) in any way comparable to what is happening in the West
"Involuntary Sterilization and Castration in Sweden and the Nordic Countries"
"In 1934, the first sterilisation act was enacted in Sweden followed by the first castration act in 1944. In 1972, Sweden became the first country in the world to enact legislation for the amendment of legally registered sex, however preconditioned on sterilisation. In the implementation of all these laws, voluntary and involuntary interventions have been made with legislative support... The involuntarily castrated [in the period 1972-2013] have still not received any reparations from the Swedish State [2018]"
https://www.soclaw.lu.se/en/node/394
It seems that authists and trans people were actively targetted for a long period of time.
There are plenty of practical grounds too. They don’t just turn off the cancer switch - gene editing ‘turns off’ some deep cellular function that is involved in cancer developing. But that function might regulate something else we don’t understand - we don’t yet know the consequences 40,50 or 100 years later of doing that.
To determine that some change is safe during the expected 150 year of life, you must measure the effects during … at least 150 years (preferability more).
How would be you sure that there are no tradeoff? Perhaps it reduce the chance of reproduction by a 1%. Perhaps it affect the ability to climb very tall mountains or very deep scuba diving. Perhaps it will make your grandgrandchildren more weak during a famine (sooner or later, some of your descendants will suffer a famine) or an epidemic. What are the good genes for surviving a war? How do you average the advantages and disadvantages of the normal times and the war times? And there are some adaptations that cause problems but makes you more resistant to malaria, how long you expect your descendants to live in a malaria free zone?
How are you sure that the proposed changes are real advantages and not just some fads? (Consider that it's not clear how many eggs should you eat weekly, the recommendation changes every ten years.)
What about exchanging 10 years of life for a 1% more chance of reproduction. Perhaps 1% is small, but it accumulates during the generations.
With respect to the topic under discussion: absent any particular reason to suppose that this kind of gene editing causes your hypothetical wartime probability difference or your hypothetical 1% fertility drop, there's no reason to use the possibility of these effects to ban the treatment, since there's as much reason to believe you're making these things less likely as reason to believe that you're making these things more likely.
Regarding changes being advantages: do you really believe, deep down, that being weak is just as useful as being strong? That being resistant to disease is just as good as being vulnerable? That being dumb is just as good as being a genius? Give me a break: I can't seriously entertain the idea that we don't know which traits we'd want our children to have, given a choice.
I used to be a researcher and writing proposals suddenly started taking up much more time around 2010 to 2013 because each grant became much smaller. Each grant also became more specific in what science you were expected to produce, which essentially made us all contractors for NSF plus DOE and winning a grant was sometimes more about politics than producing excellent scholarship. This pushed a lot of great scientists out of the field.
After I left research radical leftists started a more expansive politicized attack on science that is further politisizing who gets tenure or grants essential to making scientific progress.
- Biology as a subject is the most affected right now [1], because biology shows that there are biological differences that contribute to individuals choices in a way that invalidates the univariant equity doctrine political explanations. Women on average does are as capable as men in the sciences, but they differences in choices increase the more equal the societies are.
- Science as a competence hierarchy is under attack by the equity initiatives [2], making it so that the most important factors for getting grants and tenure is often not competence.
The fact is unfortunately that these programs have been shown to not increase the production of great science [3]. Moreover, these efforts further demoralize and alienate scientists.
We should at this point not be under any doubt that unless we defeat the politicization of science the US will not remain competitive. We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to.
[1] https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-activists-campaign-ag... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil...
This doesn't mean that one gender is more capable than the other, women actually do as well on average in the sciences as men, but it seems to indicate that the genders does not make the same choices if social or economic limitations are removed. Also, why are the choices women make in countries like Norway inferior to the choices they make in less gender equal countries?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-personality-differences-sexes-...
In practice, of course, biology explains a large portion of differences between humans, both where it pertains to gender, and where it pertains to race.
There are a few "forbidden truths" for them:
1) That there are in fact biological reasons for some aspects of a gender gap.
2) More general there are reasons for discrimination in certain limited cases (it used to be the case that the law had specific exceptions for diversity regulations. The big example given was "no cripples in the emergency response team in the fire department" (I think you can imagine why). That was a valid discriminatory demand that could be put in job applications)
3) There can be no differences in the source population (because ... well if you calculate it out specifically, then the Bay Area is not racist in hiring at all. But wait ! Why are there soooo few blacks working for the Bay Area tech companies ? Why so many Asians ? Well ... those values are very close to what you'd expect them to be if well-established (but heavily denied) racial differences in intelligence are taking into account and one assumes that when silicon valley invites 10 people to compete for a job, they hire the smartest)
So in order to have "equality", defined as "distribution in the winners of competitions is the same as the distribution of participants" you can't have even tiny differences at all in the population beyond their proportion of the population, otherwise that'll never happen. Unfortunately there's another problem here (see next point)
Of course the whole reason different races exist is to have them be different. I mean from the perspective of evolution, which while it isn't a conscious entity, does have both the means to change humans and a reason to do so (a goal to achieve). This means races/genders don't just differ in skin color, they differ in anything. Obviously the skin is one important difference, but it is just one component of profound differences in energy regulation of the body, which affects nearly everything relating to energy use in the body, which ... even affects brain size. Specifically one big difference between races is how much energy gets dedicated to body temperature maintenance (cooling and warming are different systems, so that's 2 separate things), digestion, muscles/movement, and ... yes ... how much energy gets dedicated to thinking, and even the balance between cortex and neocortex. And if it favors the cortex, that is just not going to help out your chess game. It even affects how big you are on average (of course bigger = everything requires more energy, because the human body is not that different from a robot. Fortunately bigger requires exponentially more energy, so the differences there can't be that big)
4) The effect of average differences on competitions. Specifically, say you have group 1 and group 2, and they compete. Let's assume N(100, 10) distribution. Let's say group 1 has a x% higher average, how often would a one-on-one competition between a member of group 1 and group 2 end in favor of the member of group 1 ? Let's call that value y.
for x = 1%, odds of group 1 winning = 53.01% for x = 2%, odds of group 1 winning = 55.57% for x = 5%, odds of group 1 winning = 64.04% for x = 10%, odds of group 1 winning = 76.08% for x = 20%, odds of group 1 winning = 92.19%
And if you have repeated competitions (you only advance to the next round if you win round 1, and there's N rounds) ... it gets pretty bad pretty rapidly.
So unfortunately competition amplifies small differences in averages. Although this is to be expected, this is ...
There are bigger differences within groups than between them, although there are also large differences between groups. For instance, people of jewish descent have an average IQ that is much higher than any other group. However, if you are trying to find the best person for a cognitively demanding job or to build a relationship with them then it doesn't matter what the average for any group you might perceive them as part of is as you might need an individual that belong to a small subset of any group.
That is why we in the west made the essential discovery that we are different amongst so many dimensions that we in the end are a group of one, the individual, and that we should aspire to judge a person as an individual on their merit in any situation.
Judging people as individuals goes against some of our basic tendencies as humans. Our natural tendency is to be tribal and to judge individuals for group "guilt". Our judicial and political system is intentionally adversarial to counter this tendency, and that is why we need to fight hard against anyone trying to destroy this process in the name of equity or because they think they deserve special treatment due to their group belongings.
> "distribution in the winners of competitions is the same as the distribution of participants"
(and sometimes even extended to the distribution of the population)
Like you say, an individual's performance, like any other individual data point in statistics, can be anything, or anyone in this case. I should probably have mentioned that.
Yes, only a small subset of people in general have a good understanding of statistics.
- People on the radical left without a good understanding of statistics are often outraged by how they misunderstand how statistical should be interpreted
- People on the identarian right make outrageous statements the statistics can't support.
I try to avoid both misunderstandings by explicitly stating the caveat.
I think, there's a very solid cause behind it. Most of "competing individually" is essentially making different decisions and benefiting/losing from the consequences. Except over the past few decades our society has automated/protocolized those decisions away. We follow rules and documented best practices (or just let a database search figure out the right thing for us) much more than we have to improvise. So the society is looking for alternative planes for people to compete and ironically, due to our sense of compassion, the competition shifted to demonstrating that you suffer more than your peers. I'm afraid, this is also responsible for declining willingness of westerners to make families/raise kids.
The equity agenda is inherently a very pessimistic agenda in the same way that communism is pessimistic. It assumes that our current tangible as well as intangible resources is a good approximation of what can be, and I think we over the last 100 years have proven that this is not true.
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340
Lets dig more into evidence of suppression of biological research:
How would you then explain the reactions to anyone stating the biological fact that human gender is overwhelmingly bimodal with almost everyone being male/female [1], suppression of research into intelligence [2], or the diversity pledges some candidates now have to write before becoming professors [3].
The grievance studies hoax proved how grievance studies is acting like ideological whitewashing of extreme political ideas that would be unacceptable otherwise [4]. These ideas are used to justify political actions in universities and in culture to suppress sacrilegious ideas [5], and it is a concept of sacred only a small very loud minority of progressives believe in and these comprise 8% of the population [6].
Personally I find the radical leftist explanation of these two incidences unconvincing:
- it seems like the opposition to McKinnon’s paper was argued primarily from a moral angle due to his violation of some progressive sacred principles, and other explanation does not seem to explain the size of the response
- The reaction to the grievance studies hoax was that peer review is flawed and them still claiming that it is fair to use favored political views as a valid criteria of what should be publishing of papers of very poor scholarship. This does not engage with the real very disturbing conclusions of this study, and the fact that their hoax papers in addition to winning prices within grievance studies are also indistinguishable from other scholarship regularly published there.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phePAZueQw [2] https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/douglas-murray/ [3] https://www.thecollegefix.com/ucla-to-require-diversity-pled... [4] https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8 [6] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...
My second follow-up claim is that if the response had been entirely based upon merits then the response would have not been anything remotely this severe. tptaceks claim is on the merits of the paper, which might or might not be correct to some degree, but does not address this concern with the response and how problematic it is that sacredness is now part of the academic review process.
Ideas should be engaged with and critiqued through scholarship, and basing any rejection of scholarship partially or fully on an idea of sacredness is dangerous to the integrity of our scholarship. We need to have zero tolerance of this, and McKinnon’s situation or the reaction to Charles Murray before it shows how sacredness stops us from properly critiquing ideas through scholarship.
And I think his response was severe exactly because sacredness had won over merits---reviewers accepting a sub-par paper for a political reason. He even explicitly stated that Mathematical Intelligencer could be a reasonable fit for the paper.
Therefore if a scientist when expressing an idea meet an opposition that;
- involves sacredness partially or fully as a principle for rejecting it
- threatens with severe social sanctions or exceptional actions if their favored sacredness isn't respected
Then we have hit something where the ones that have these sacred principles should have to justify their arguments as papers as well. There needs to be some negative response to using sacredness partially or fully as a way to reject ideas, because that is how we protect the scientific process from the corruption due to flaws in human nature.
If the only thing that stops that from happening is publishing the paper then we should err on publishing it when in doubt so that we can find the truth. If they believe so much that this is wrong, let them put their reputation behind their sacredness principles in another paper objecting to this paper and let us all criticize those as well.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/13/new-internati... https://cgsnet.org/first-time-over-decade-international-grad...
And Trump made it
The number of returnees has risen, but so has the overall number of non-returnees (the result of a lot more Chinese students studying in the states).
Smart, ambitious Chinese students are now planning the right new work experiences in the US with an eye towards returning back to China as a junior VP at Tencent or Alibaba when they go back. The way to retain them in the US is to give them the same career opportunities here but a lot of Chinese students are realizing they can climb the ladder a lot faster and further in China and making the rational choice to go back.
There are many factors. One important factor which amplifies other factors is related to big number theory: quantity is translated into quality. Average Chinese are not quite different from other nationals.(Let's put down controversial conclusion for now) . However China has 1.3 billion people. With such a big number , a small shift of the average on the IQ bell curve doesn't matter. What you have met are a vary small portion of top talent from China. As analogy, you can image a typical top NBA athlete would be black. But with 1.3 billion people there exists a Yao Ming who is not a typical Chinese.
Then why it happened recently? That's related to last 30 years rapid development.But that's invisible part. China not only build road , bridge, bullet train, etc. more importantly which also matches Chinese traditional value: China invest heavily in Education. In 80's (i.e. my generation ) only 5-10% of high school graduate can be accepted by limited universities at the time. But money poured into Education increased year by year incrementally like crazy. Today there are enough universities to provide any qualified students an opportunity for education. The consequence is there's a big change on human capital. This is not limited to what you observed but also in other areas. For example, China is exporting the infrastructure building expertise all over the world. Quite often the builders have to bring whole teams from China because qualified teams are only available there. Those are experienced skill construction workers but not academically competitive students.
The significant increase in human capital is less visible than infrastructure improvement, yet it has a bigger impact
In my opinion, a successful education system is the one which can produce people who are capable of learn new knowledge my themselves, resolve problems by themselves and create new things by themselves.
So maybe, reading 800 Chinese words in a very young age is impressive, but there is more important things to do.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test