[Answer] Why wasn’t science invented in China?

[Ruby]

Credit for the question to Eli Tyre.

Preface + Epistemic Status

I spent roughly two days attempting to learn the answer this question plus several more writing it up. What is presented is more accurately described as a partial answer or contribution towards answering the question—this report isn’t actually a confident, solid answer. The question is too large for that.

I need to provide a couple of epistemic caveats:

• I am not experienced at this kind of research, I don’t know what kind of rookie mistakes I might be making.

• I have not attempted to assess the reliability of the historians who I quote, though my prior is to be less than completely confident. It might to be too easy to start with a conclusion, a nice narrative, and just find evidence for that. Though I quote what they say, I urge skepticism.

  • I have relatively more trust in statements like “Ibn al-Haytham lived in Cairo in the around the year 1000 and wrote the Book of Optics” more than broad statements like “[there was a] virtual absence in ancient Chinese philosophy of anything resembling the socratic method.”

• Writing a research report like this one turned out to be remarkably effortful, more so than the pure research and obtaining answers for myself. To keep it from being even longer and more time-consuming, I found myself having to simplify heavily and then often fearing that the result is too simple and leaves too much out (and possibly important stuff out).

Clarifying and Refining the Question

If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you’re likely to instantiate a version of it which doesn’t help your upstream goal, assuming it’s the right general thing at all. This applies to research too: almost all questions are sub-questions.

In this case, I didn’t have an expansion of the question from its author, but I did have their other questions and was aware of their general interests. Other questions they had were: Are there patterns in what makes great scientists? Were there other intellectual subcultures anything like the rationality community any time in the past few hundred years? What was it that made the intellectual high points of human history high? What made the renaissance, the enlightenment, etc., work?

The real agenda is clearly about understanding the factors which cause intellectual progress. The expanded question is more like What were the factors which were present in Europe but absent in China which led to science being invented in the former? In particularly, were there factors which caused Europeans to be more intellectually generative on this front than the Chinese?

Clarifying terms: Science, Scientific Method, etc.

A few terms worth disentangling: empiricism is the notion that you should look at the world to learn about it, and that’s a very old idea even when not widely adopted. I wouldn’t equate science with empiricism for this question. Science can either refer to a body of knowledge or the method used by which that knowledge is generated. Though they’re tightly connected, I’ve interpreted this question is primarily about “why wasn’t the scientific method invented in China?”

Also in this space is the Scientific Revolution and, somewhat more weakly, the Industrial Revolution. The research here has some relevance to those, but I wasn’t trying to answer questions about why they didn’t occur in China which I expect to possibly involve different economic and social factors then the pure intellectual development of scientific methods by some individuals. I’m looking at invention, not adoption.

Abridged History of the Scientific Method

What follows here is a slightly shortened and heavily simplified summary of Wikipedia entries, primarily from History of the Scientific Method with embellishment from other pages.

Different Scientific Methods over Time

First, it’s important to note that there hasn’t been just a single the scientific method which we can point to having been invented at a single time and space. There have been successively refined methods of generating scientific knowledge developed over time. Scientific methods were possessed by:

• at least one person who wrote an Egyptian medical textbook, (c. 1600 BCE)

• the Babylonians with their mathematical astronomy

• the Greeks (who were foundational)

• the Arabs

• the Chinese Mohists (more on them later)

• the Indian Charvaka school.

This is important because it means in answering the question I’m not looking for factors which caused something to happen at a very particular time and place, e.g. not what made Francis Bacon very special or the like. Instead, I’m looking for factors which held over Europe (and the Middle East) for over a thousand years.

To better understand what the relevant factors might be and to have a more precise of idea of the thing we care about having been invented, I read through the history of scientific methods as developed in Europe.

An ongoing debate in the philosophy of science is the relative role of observation vs reasoning in the scientific method, e.g. rationalism vs empiricism, and by extension the role and nature of experimentation. Another difference is whether a theory starts with general theories which leads to experimental work or the reverse. The different scientific methods from different thinkers were largely playing with the same elements. Still, they are united by all involving some degree of empiricism, some degree on reason, and are for the purpose of producing naturalistic explanations of physical reality.

In his work on logic, The Organon (Greek: Ὄργανον, meaning “instrument, tool, organ”) Aristotle (384 BCE to 322 BCE) lays out his inductive-deductive method of generating scientific knowledge. Short version: a) via inductions one can discover universals by generalization, b) using deductive reasoning in the form of syllogisms, one can infer new universal truths from those already established. However, Aristotle did not consider the inductive step to be scientific reasoning itself—merely preliminary to real the business which was the deductive reasoning. It’s also worth noting that Aristotle performed no modern-style experiments.

Several scientists from the Middle East pushed much closer to what we recognize as modern science. Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham (~965 to ~1040) combined observation, experiments, and reasoned argument to his study of optics proving the models held by Ptolemy, Euclid, and Aristotle to be wrong. He criticized Aristotle’s handling of induction. Persian scientist Al-Biruni (973 to ~1050) used repeated experimentation in his work and was concerned with systematic errors and observational biases. He held that “universals came out of experimental work” and “theories are formulated after discoveries.” Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980 to 1037) combined induction and experimentation, criticizing Aristotle’s induction with the claim “it does not lead to the absolute, universal, and certain premises that it purports to provide.” Ibn Sina might also have been the first to describe several of the methods of induction listed by John Stuart Mill in 1843. Avicenna’s scientific method is one in which “general and universal questions came first and led to experimental work.” [Note these guys all seemed very impressive to me.]

During the Renaissance of the 12th century, ideas on scientific methodology, including Aristotle’s empiricism and the experimental approaches of Ibn al-Haythem and Ibn Sina were introduced to medieval Europe via Latin translations of Arabic and Greek texts together with commentaries.

Robert Grosseteste (~1175 to 1253) was probably one of the first European thinkers in Europe to understand Aristotle’s vision of the dual nature of scientific reasoning. His conception was of going from particular observations to universal laws back to prediction of particular observations. “Resolution and composition.” He’s been called the real founder of the tradition of scientific thought in medieval Oxford.

Roger Bacon (~1219 to 1292) was inspired by the writings of Grosseteste. He describes a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation plus the need for independent verification. With special permission from the Pope (necessary since he was a friar) he published three large treatises.

At this point in the history it is noted that in 1562 “Outlines of Pyrrhonism” by Sextus Empiricus (c. 160) were printed in Latin and circulated in Europe, placing the arguments of classical skepticism in the European mainstream.

In 1620, Francis Bacon (1561 to 1626) published his Novum Organum, the title a reference to Aristotle’s Organon. Countering Aristotle, he said that induction must be used “for proving and discovering not first principles only, but also lesser axioms, the middle, and indeed all.” Unlike Aristotle, Bacon insists on induction throughout the entire process, not just at the beginning to derive universals. He was very committed to experimentation, including “crucial experiments” to differentiate between competing hypotheses. However, unlike in modern scientific process, hypothesizing forms only a small part of Bacon’s method. In his method hypotheses were supposed to arise in the process of investigation (contrast this with Avicenna who was happy to start with general theories and then experiment).

Isaac Newton (1642 to ~1726) embraced Bacon’s empiricism and outlined four rules on reasoning in the Principia. Some of his methods were systematized by John Stuart Mill.

The “hypothetico-deductive” method with its focus on the formulation and testing of hypotheses which can be falsified arose in the 18th century. Major contributors towards this refinement of the method were Charles Sanders Pierce (1839 to 1914) and Karl Popper (1902 to 1994). Pierce made induction and deduction complementary and put forth the basic schema for hypothesis testing we have until this day. Popper is the famed champion of falsification.

In the 20th century, Bayes’ theorem was brought to bear on the scientific method, though it is a lens not yet universally adopted.

So when was “science invented”?

When starting this project, my vague conception was something like “the scientific method was invented in the 17th century by Francis Bacon.” After reading this history, I realize what an extreme, perhaps laughable, simplification—the things you believe when you haven’t thought about them for even five minutes.

The modern scientific method as we know it is the result of over a thousand years of intellectual tradition. It was built piece by piece, eminent scholars each providing their own contribution. Contrary to my starting conception, it’s not that meaningful to say that it was “invented” specifically in the 17th century.

However, it does still seem that something significant happened in the 17th century or then abouts. I didn’t go into this in any depth, but the following pieces might be involved:

• The improvements in the methods Francis Bacon and Newton caused a dramatic difference in the power of the scientific method leading to significant breakthroughs.

• Major scientific breakthroughs, caused by improved method or other causes, occurred around this time causing widespread interest and enthusiasm for science, leading to social change. The social change cause these developments to be especially noteworthy.

• Social change happening for multiple reasons at this time caused the improved scientific method to gain a lot of traction at this time.

• Newton and Galileo (though not Bacon) had impressive scientific breakthroughs which caused their methods to get a lot of attention.

I’ll quote the entry on Scientific Revolution:

In the 19th century, William Whewell described the revolution in science itself—the scientific method—that had taken place in the 15th–16th century. “Among the most conspicuous of the revolutions which opinions on this subject have undergone, is the transition from an implicit trust in the internal powers of man’s mind to a professed dependence upon external observation; and from an unbounded reverence for the wisdom of the past, to a fervid expectation of change and improvement.”[12] This gave rise to the common view of the Scientific Revolution today:

A new view of nature emerged, replacing the Greek view that had dominated science for almost 2,000 years. Science became an autonomous discipline, distinct from both philosophy and technology and came to be regarded as having utilitarian goals.[13]

. . .

In 1984, Joseph Ben-David wrote:

Rapid accumulation of knowledge, which has characterized the development of science since the 17th century, had never occurred before that time. The new kind of scientific activity emerged only in a few countries of Western Europe, and it was restricted to that small area for about two hundred years.

This last quote raises an interested related question to the main one being answered here: if true, what factors caused the rapid accumulation of knowledge in specifically only a few countries and for only those two hundred years?

Perhaps the issue was that China wasn’t included in the intellectual tradition?

Reading the history of the scientific method and noting that there was this long intellectual tradition and it depended on translations and ideas spreading from one place to another, I wondered whether the lack of (supposed) scientific development in China was that China wasn’t exposed to this tradition. Perhaps they didn’t get the translations. Later reading suggested this wasn’t true—China had sufficient exposure but for some reason didn’t latch on and didn’t develop its own science or scientific method in the same way.

Toby Huff writes in The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, 2nd Edition:

By the end of the fourteenth century in the areas of mathematics, astronomy, and optics, there was a considerable debit on the Chinese side, despite the fact that there had been many chances for the Chinese to benefit from Arab astronomers and to borrow or assimilate the Greek philosophical heritage through constant interchanges between the Arabs and the Chinese. During Yuan times (ca. 1264-1368) Needham tells us, the Arabs or, more probably, the Persians played a significant role in bringing new mathematical ideas to Chinese science, and this role paralleled that played by Indians in T’ang times. (p. 242)

Apparently the Chinese ended up employing Muslim astronomers in their astronomy bureau because they hadn’t mastered their superior methods yet.

Their deficiencies in this area, moreover, led the Chinese to employ Muslim astronomers in the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy continuously from the thirteenth century onward. Indeed, in 1368 a special Muslim Bureau of Astronomy was established in China that was still functioning at the time of the arrival of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century.16 Upon the arrival of the Jesuits, there were four competing astronomical systems: the traditional Chinese system; that of the Muslims (based on the lunar calendar); the new European; and that of the so-called new Eastern Bureau.17 For these reasons Needham notes that “there can be no doubt but that there was every opportunity for Arabic and Persian mathematical influences (as from the observations of Maragha and Samarqand) to enter Chinese traditions.”18 Even more tantalizing are the reports that a Mongol ruler in China, Mangu (d. 1257; the brother of Hulagu who ordered the construction of the Maragha observatory), is said to “have mastered difficult passages of Euclid by himself.”19 In what language was this version of Euclid, and why is it that Mangu’s successor—Khubilai Khan—did not suggest the learning of Euclid to the court officials surrounding him ?20 These facts make it all the more puzzling why it was that the Jesuits are credited with having introduced Western astronomy to the Chinese (albeit incompletely because of the Galilean controversy just then unfolding) as well as geometry, when the Maragha models clearly assumed all the fundamentals of Western astronomy at that time except the heliocentric orientation. In other words, given the direct contact in the capital city between some of the best Muslim astronomers of the time and the Chinese astronomers in the official Bureau of Astronomy, the Chinese ought to have had nearly two centuries to translate Euclid’s Elements and to assimilate the Ptolemaic models (as perfected by al-Tusi, al-’Urdi, aI-Shirazi, and Ibn al-Shatir) before they were transformed into the Copernican models by Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (p. 244)

It looks like the Chinese had many opportunities to absorb and build upon foreign knowledge. For some reason they didn’t, instead employing foreigners for centuries. This is evidence against my hypothesis that China wasn’t as intellectual generative because they didn’t get to be part of the same intellectual tradition. They could have been, but something got in the way.

Perhaps China didn’t have networks of scholars the same way?

Related to the idea of an intellectual tradition which built upon itself, I believe I hit upon the topic of various communities of thinkers which exchanged ideas in Europe.

Invisible College is the term used for a small community of interacting scholars who often met face-to-face, exchanged ideas, and encouraged each other. One is examples is Robert Boyle’s network of natural philosophers who had a focus on acquiring knowledge through experimentation. They were supposedly a precursor to the Royal Society. The Hartlib Circle, a network of correspondence across Western and Central Europe, was another instance of an invisible college.

Relatedly, the Republic of Letters was a long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. I didn’t look into this or any of the others, but the Republic of Letters was bound up with the Royal Society, famed institute and network of Science.

It’s been asserted [source] that having Latin as a lingua franca was important for Europe integrated market for ideas. Makes sense if scholars who otherwise speak different languages are going to be able to communicate.

These communities and networks of thinkers maybe a factor which contributed towards the development of the scientific, its spread, and associated social change. A question I had, yet didn’t fully get into, is the extent to which China has similar communities and networks of thinkers. I do have some early indication that travel was more difficult in China and that China had a powerful censoring system, though it is unclear to me the effect that censor would have had on scholars exchanging letters given that its primary target were officials in the bureaucracy.

Science and Scientific Methods in China

Main article: History of Science and Technology in China

An Existing Literature

Working on this project, I found that there is an existing body of work on the related questions “why wasn’t science invented in China?”, “why didn’t China have a scientific revolution?”, “why didn’t China have an industrial revolution?” and “why did China fall behind Europe?”

A launching for this literature is the Scientific and technological stagnation section of the History of science and technology in China Wikipedia entry. And relatedly, The Great Divergence

Key historians on this topic include Joseph Needham, Toby E. Huff, Nathan Sivin, Derek Bodde and Justin Lin. Most of the early Western work in the history of science in China was done by Needham. He wrote a series of books/​encyclopedia called Science and Civilisation in China. In 1969 he asked:

“Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo?” “Why modern science had not developed in Chinese civilization … ?” He adds a second question that makes the larger problem more interesting: “why, between the first century B.C. and the fifteenth century A.D., Chinese civilization was much more efficient than occidental in applying human natural knowledge to practical human needs.” (Needham cited by Sivin in Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China—or Didn’t It? P. 2 )

Is it a reasonable question?

At least some question that asking why science/​the scientific revolution didn’t happen in China is a good question. Maybe it’s like asking why your neighbor’s house didn’t burn down. But there are some good reasons.

First, China had a long history of being quite technologically advanced.

“Chinese civilization was much more efficient than occidental [civilization] in applying human natural knowledge to practical human needs.” (Needham cited by Huff, p. 241)

They invented the abacus, the crossbow and the Four Great Inventions of the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing which Francis Bacon considered the most important inventions facilitating the West’s transformation from Dark Ages to the Modern world [Lin]. They possessed these a thousand years before Europe did. Early China had matches, dry docks, piston pumps, cast iron, the wheelbarrow, parachute, natural gas as fuel, and the suspension bridge. They had technology and they had a wide range of sciences. They had many sciences even if they didn’t have a unified science [source].

Second, China had a popular large than Continental Europe [source].

Given technological prowess and population size, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to ask why China didn’t generate the modern scientific method or undergo a scientific revolution.

So why not in China?

I collect here reasons from Toby E. Huff’s book The Rise of Early Modern Science (overwhelmingly), Wikipedia, and a few other papers I glanced at. Huff’s book itself is something of a summary which is incorporating views from Needham, Sivin, Bodde, and others. What is presented here is primarily taken from Chapters 6 and 7 from Huff’s book, about 75 pages. It is a very interesting and worthwhile read which I’ve done a so-so job of summarizing. Possibly this answer could have been framed as a book review.

Some of reasons taken from the Wikipedia entry on The Great Divergence [between China and the West]. These are less directly about the development of science specifically than overall economic divergence, but I’ve included the few which might also apply in the specific case here.

Huff writes:

If one takes the point of view that science is above all a system of error detection, not a set of skills for building machines, mechanical or electronic, then attention must be directed toward those abstract systems of thought and explanation that give higher order to our thinking about the natural realm. Science at its heart is systematic and theoretical knowledge about how the world is and how it works. It is episteme as opposed to techne. It is speculative in that it is always conjecturing the existence of new entities, processes, and mechanisms, not to mention possible new worlds. Its task is to determine which of these ideas and entities have a real existence in the world. Karl Popper’s description of this process as “conjectures and refutations” aptly captures this dynamic.4 From such a point of view, science is about how to describe, explain, and think about the world and is not concerned with how to make labor easier or how to control nature. (p. 241)

We are differentially looking for factors which facilitate the develop of science and scientific thinking, not technological progress more broadly. Building technology is a safer endeavor, politically and metaphysically, with less opportunity to challenge the prevailing worldview.

Overview of Huff

Huff’s overall thesis is that China was unable to produce modern science primarily because a lack of the requisite intellectual freedom. Unlike Europe, China’s political, religious, legal, and education systems did not afford the neutral spaces where novel ideas could be advanced and old ideas questions. Culturally, it may have lacked the practice of debate and dispute, including anything resembling the Socratic dialog. Further, philosophically and conceptually, China’s neo-Confucian worldview which viewed the world through correlations and binary pairs may not have lent it itself to the causal thinking necessary for science.

. . . it did not encourage or tolerate thinkers who were essentially disputatious and critical of the intellectual status quo . . There was no Chinese equivalent to the Scholastic method of disputation, no canons of logic a la Aristotle, and no mathematical methods of proof such as one finds in Euclid’s geometry. Derk Bodde points out, “Throughout its history Confucianism has deprecated the use of debate as a means of advancing knowledge.” (p. 279)

I expand on these points in the following sections. Unless otherwise stated, statements are coming sourced from Huff.

More Detailed Summary of Huff

In the 12th century, Europe had a legal revolution which redefined the nature of social organization with significant political, social, and economic, and religious effects. In particular, legally autonomous collectives emerged including cities, towns, universities, interest groups, and professional groups. While overall subject to an overall law, these groups could still operate fairly autonomously, and could set their own rules and regulations, could owe land, could sue, could have legal representation before the king’s court, and generally operate without too much interference from the authorities.

I didn’t properly read or think about Huff’s chapters on the legal revolution and its significance, and therefore can’t do it justice, however other relevant points: a) this being the beginning of separation of state and religion, b) this legal revolution represented an adaptation of Roman civil to the European’s needs.

[Huff makes the broad assertion that modern science arose in Europe due to the unique combination of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian theology. I didn’t read enough to fully understand this model, however.]

Legally autonomous collectives of special interest to the development of science are the European universities which arose in 12th century around the time of the legal revolution. Though many grew out of cathedral schools and religious orders, that wasn’t always the case, and the universities “sprang into existence . . . without express authorization of king, pope, prince, or prelate.” Crucially, they were able to set their own curricula. Practically, they taught a lot of Greek philosophy including its naturalistic and scientific parts.

In the Byzantine Empire, the “pagan curriculum” of the Greeks, based on the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, followed by arithmetic, geometry, harmonics, and astronomy [the quadrivium]), was taught from the “fifth to the fifteenth century.”3 Naturally, the curriculum was infused with the Greek philosophical outlook, and that doubtless was the rub. (p. 140)

In contrast to the legal autonomy developing in Europe, from the 12th century (and earlier) China was (with only a few exceptions) a unified, top-down and bureaucratically run empire where there was no separation of state and religion and all power flowed down from the emperor upon whom there were no legal checks or balances.

Legally and bureaucratically, there was a hierarchy of officials which eventually rolled up into the emperor. Lower-level officials had almost no authority or independence from higher ups. Any collectives which might be created were not autonomous from the larger empire. There was nowhere safe to venture any revolt against authority.

The Chinese also did not have a system of law as we would recognize in the west (a system with universally applicable rules, rights, due process, interpretation of the law) and instead something more simply a penal code with no clear rules, variable enforcement, and many exceptions to be made at the discretion of whichever authority is applying punishment.

The legal system is relevant is both to lack of autonomous spaces and also the possibility that due to lack of a conception of a universal law which was binding to all citizens, the Chinese lacked the metaphor to laws which were binding to nature, and therefore did not seek them out.

Significantly, the vast Chinese imperial bureaucracy was staffed semi-meritocratically based on the imperial examination. This system stood intact from 1400 to 1905. The effect of the examination was standardize Chinese education. However, it was rigidly controlled and focused on literary and moral learning—not mathematics or the sciences—and largely consisted of rote memorization of hundreds of thousands of words of Chinese classic. There are nuances to these states as at various periods there were questions about mathematica, music, and astronomy on the exam, however they were never a focus. In contrast, European universities were free to set their own curricula.

Philosophically, in place of Western atomism/​reductionism governed by mechanical and impersonal laws of nature, China viewed the world as made of primary forces (yin and yang) and the five phases (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth) constantly shifting in recurrent cycles. Things are not to be understood through laws governing parts, but through the unity of the whole. The patterns of the natural world were studied to find correlative correspondences between the conduct of the emperor and the patterns of the heavens. In this vein, there was a strong focus on binary pairs like light vs dark, hot vs cold, heaven vs earth—but all understand as natural complements which follow an inscrutable patterned progression. To translate into more typical LessWrong language, the Chinese didn’t look for gears-levels models, because they didn’t have a conception of gears—just patterns in the organic unity of the whole. Or something.

Even if we grant Aristotle was a little confused, we can see he was trying to explain things in terms of universal laws which explained things with a causal structure. From that point, you can progress to finding better universal explanations. I can imagine if you’re not thinking causally, you can’t embark on a process of science. Though I must confess, having very little grasp of Chinese philosophy, I cannot appraise the claims about historical Chinese philosophy and worldview.

An exception of the above point on philosophy is that the Chinese Mohist school of thought might have been on track to develop a solid scientific method, but unfortunately they and their thinking died out.

Although it seems doubtful that early Chinese methodological discussions were equivalent to those of Aristotle and Plato, it must be said that in the work of Mo-tzu (fourth century B.C.) there are keen methodological insights that, in Needham’s words, “could have become the fundamental basic conceptions of natural science in Asia. “38 Perhaps one could even agree with Needham that the Mohists “sketched out what amounts to a complete theory of scientific method. “39 The problem is that the Mohists and their thought faded into Chinese history and apparently had little influence on Chinese natural thinkers and none at all on Western thought. Despite the promising beginnings one sees in Mohist philosophical thought, it never gained much influence in the Chinese thought world. (p. 247)

Other Factors

There are at least a couple more factors not covered in Huff’s work which contributed to the rise of modern science Europe. rather than China.

Political fragmentation

It may be macro-politically relevant that because China was a unified empire, there was nowhere that thinkers seeking more intellectual freedom could migrate too. In Europe, if a nation’s policies hampered scientific or technological progress they would be soon be outcompeted by others who didn’t. Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel that the European balkanization into smaller states was the result of geography with China’s geography being more conducive to a large, monolithic, isolated empire. [Wikipedia]

Economic freedom

Related to intellectual freedom, economic freedom may have been quite relevant. David S. Landes writes in Why Europe and the West? Why not China?:

China had two chances: first, to generate a continuing, self-sustaining process of scientific and technological advance on the basis of its indigenous traditions and achievements; and second, to learn from European science and technology once the foreign “barbarians” entered the Chinese domain in the sixteenth century. China failed both times. What explains the first failure? I stress the role of the market: the fact that enterprise was free in Europe while China lacked a free market and institutionalized property rights; that in Europe innovation worked and paid, while the Chinese state was always stepping in to interfere with private enterprise. As for the second failure, China’s cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny made it a singularly bad learner.

I did not explore this factor. The natural question to me here is how much the potential for profit or other gain incentivized the development of science. For example, astronomy was arguably the foundational scientific field and had important applications. How did these incentives affect academics, scholars, and the men of means who already had enough wealth they could engage in scientific discovery?

Europe’s escape from the Malthusian trap

My colleague, jimrandomh, brought this to my attention. The thesis is that due to plague, war, and urbanization, early Modern Europe escaped the Malthusian trap which kept everyone at subsistence with no resources left for advancing science and technology. One source for this is here.

The High-level equilibrium trap

A similar economic point has been made by Mark Elvin to explain why China didn’t develop its own revolution. From the Wikipedia entry:

Essentially, he [Mark Elvin] claims that the Chinese pre-industrial economy had reached an equilibrium point where supply and demand were well-balanced. Late imperial production methods and trade networks were so efficient and labor was so cheap that investment in capital to improve efficiency would not be profitable.

The relevance to the development, as above, would depend on how strongly the demand for profit-increasing technology impacted the development of science.

See The Great Divergence for more factors and more detail.

Conclusion

This project simultaneously took far more time than expected and yet also still feels very shallow, heavily simplified, and bluntly presented. I do find Huff’s account, which I have cited extensively quite compelling, but I have made no attempt to verify his reliability or the reliability of his sources.

Though it is already intuitive to say that intellectual freedom was crucial for the development of science, I think Huff’s work is an impressively detailed case that Europe had this freedom in a way China did not. I did not cover it here, but Huff’s book also explores the situation in the Islamic world adding another point of comparison to his analysis.

My LessWrong associations are biasing me here, but it does seem important that Europe had a sustained intellectual tradition reaching back through the Arab scholars to the Greeks. The modern scientific method wasn’t developed de novo, but rather it was built up by piece by piece from antiquity. I think that’s an argument for technologies that better collect, curate, and transmit knowledge.

I didn’t explore economic explanations more, and there might be something to them, but I imagine that the political, religious, and cultural structures upstream of intellectual freedom were also upstream of economic factors. A fully comprehensive picture would probably include all three.

Overall, I do conclude a firm conclusion that even I’m not sure of the details, there were almost certainly concrete systematic factors which caused Europe to develop modern science and the scientific method even when China and the Islamic world didn’t. And that studying these factors probably does help us identify which factors are core to further intellectual progress in the present.

Related Questions

• What made the ancient Greeks so generative? It seems they founded the Western philosophical and scientific traditions, but what led to their innovativeness?

• What is the relationship between the development of science and economic incentives to do so?

• Q. What kind of things where the people who innovated on science researching? E.g. those from history of science. How much immediate practical value did those things have?

• What is a detailed account of how Bacon’s scientific method different from Aristotle’s inductive-deductive method?

• How much was the scientific revolution caused by the innovations in the scientific methods at the time vs more general circumstantial factors?

• How much was science/​the scientific method responsible for the Great Divergence?

• Q. What did China have which was similar to the Republic of Letters, Royal Society, Invisible College?

• Q. Why exactly was astronomy so important? Time-keeping, setting calendars, navigation . . . I’m interested in a more detailed understanding of how astronomical knowledge was used and how much it mattered.

• Is Joseph Ben David’s claim that there was a rapid accumulation of scientific knowledge in only a few countries of Western Europe and only for about 200 years accurate? If so, why?

Reflections on the Research Experience

My background motivation for this work was to research the research experience as part of the validation and design of LessWrong’s efforts to build an Open Questions research platform. I collect here a few observations/​notes:

• I did this work with relatively little evaluation of the ideas presented. It seems it would be an additional skill to learn how to evaluate historians and their historical work. Ideally I’d have been thinking quantitatively and assigning credences to the points I reported.

• I do feel somewhat suspicious of Wikipedia, it paints very neat narratives and I’m doubtful that reality is that neat.

• In our early thinking, the LessWrong team was approaching research with something roughly like asking a question, asking sub-question, asking sub-sub-questions and so on. There are elements of this, but overall it didn’t feel like that. A lot of it felt like realizing I needed knowledge of a topic and then just trying become a mini-expert in that topic. For example, having decided I need to understand the development of the scientific method, I was just reading a bunch of Wiki articles not holding explicit questions in my mind, instead letting my intuition guide me.

• Writing is time-consuming and constituted the bulk of time spent on this project.

  • When reading just for myself, it was okay if not every idea was crystallized, however to write things for others I really had to first get them clear in my own head.

  • I’m not sure how the writing effort scales with the amount of research done, but I’m pretty sure it’s sub-linear. More research might actually result in a much clearer picture making it easier to write.

    • During the writing stage, I was progressively reading more and more of Huff’s book which actually made it easier to write and I more properly absorbed the picture he was painting.

• I wonder about the alternative approaches to conducting and communicating this research. Possibly I went into too much depth (as shallow as it felt) and would have been better to write much more condensed, lossy summaries. And either separately or additionally, perhaps provide an annotated set of references, i.e. collecting all the sources I read, explaining what one should read to arrive that the same picture I developed.

• I wonder how much this research could have been split into parts. Was it necessary that same person researched both the history of the scientific method and also the history of science in China? It feels like I had a better perspective for having done so, but maybe it wasn’t necessary and this could have been two smaller projects.

[DanielFilan]

A seemingly good overview of a fair bit of work done on a pretty important question. Note that I think the comment section adds a lot to this post.

[Ericf]

Worth a re-read. This is a humble, but extensive look at an interesting question, and a good model for future inquiry.

[jacobjacob]

The modern Scientific Revolution occurred in Europe between the 16th and 18th Centuries. Why did it not happen in China? Historian Toby Huff claims the reason is that China was unable to produce modern science primarily because a lack of the requisite intellectual freedom. Was he basically correct?

(You can find a list of all review poll questions here.)

[dadadarren]

As a Chinese I want to contribute some thought into this topic.

One thing I want to mention is the difference in language. Classical Chinese is a language extremely difficult to master. It literally take decades of effort to be able to write a decent piece. It is hard not because of complicated grammar or complex sentence structure. But because it focus on poetic expressions and scholarly idioms. This language is very enjoyable to read and relatable when used in expressing emotions and ideas. However it is quite cumbersome in expressing precise logic and definitions. Yet at least before the new cultural movement in 1916 it is generally regarded that anything worth put into writing should be done in Classical Chinese. This severely limits the participation of the general populace. Even if someone is trained enough to put down scientific related topics in Classical Chinese it is unlikely to be regarded as a masterful piece and gather much audience. Just like if a poorly written piece is posted in lesswrong we are more likely to skip it regardless of the content it is expressing.

[Wei Dai]

Classical Chinese is a language extremely difficult to master. It literally take decades of effort to be able to write a decent piece. It is hard not because of complicated grammar or complex sentence structure. But because it focus on poetic expressions and scholarly idioms.

Sounds like writing became mainly a way to signal one’s intelligence and erudition, instead of a tool for efficient communications. But why didn’t Western civilization fall into the same trap, or how did it manage to get out of it?

[dadadarren]

I am by no means expert in this. My theory is effective writing in general is a way to signal one’s intelligence in most medieval societies. This is especially so if one can write and read in a form of ancient text. But in Western Europe this was achieved by directly using a old language—Latin. Proficiency in a different language by itself is enough to be an indicator of intelligence. However the Chinese to an extent have been using the same language (or at least writing) for the entire history. An example would be for a typical grade 8 Chinese language textbook would include many old passages some of which was written 18 centuries ago. Being able to write plainly in an everyday language is not something hard. So the Chinese scholars have a greater urge to show their status by using poetic and archaic expressions. Very often at the expense of clarity.

[Ruby]

Huff had a section on this which I didn’t cover for space reasons but which matches what you say. (p. 293)

In his analysis of the Chinese system of written communication, Derk Bodde points to the many weaknesses of the Chinese language as an instrument of clear and unambiguous communication. These include its ancient lack of punctuation, the habit of ignoring paragraph indentations, capitalization of proper names (or the use of other signibers), and the lack of continuous pagination, as well as the absence of a system of alphabetization. 17 The importance of the last of these as an aid to the organization of knowledge can hardly be overstated. This state of affairs is itself related to the absence of Chinese grammarians until the twentieth century.18

Professor Bodde also notes that Chinese characters tend to be monosyllabic, and although they have undergone relatively little morphological change, they are capable of taking on very different meanings. Indeed, alternative translations (which are grammatically correct) may produce diametrically opposite meanings (on which more later). On another level, Bodde accentuates the tendency of writers of literary Chinese to use a great variety of archaic metaphors, allusions, cliches, and notoriously unmarked direct transcriptions from ancient authors. These practices obviously present many pitfalls for the unwary reader or unfortunate translator. 19

The ambiguity of Chinese words and their use is illustrated by the following example. A simple phrase from Confucius is composed of eight terms: Kung hu yi tuan ssu hai yeh yi. This phrase, Bodde tells us, could be given two literal translations which are apposite: “Attack on strange shoots this harmful is indeed” or “Study of strange shoots these harmful are indeed. “20 Given a fluid English translation, this phrase has four equally correct translations according to Bodde:

1. “To attack heterodox doctrines: this is harmful indeed!”

2. “Attack heterodox doctrines [because] these are harmful indeed!”

3. “To study heterodox doctrines: this is harmful indeed!”

4. “Study heterodox doctrines [because] these are harmful indeed!”

[dadadarren]

Ahh, the famous Lun Yu. It is full of such expressions that direct translation gives you a headache. To me the most famous example would be “民可使由之不可使知之”. Due to the lack of punctuation it can be translated in two different ways:

1: 民可使由之，不可使知之：common people shall be commanded, (but) not enlightened.

2: 民可，使由之。不可，使知之。：(if) common people are well educated let them act on their own. If not, enlighten them. Pretty drastically different political ideal here.

[orthonormal]

I’m not convinced that Europe had more intellectual freedom on average than China, but because of the patchwork of principalities, it certainly had more variation in intellectual freedom than did a China that was at any given time either mostly unified or mostly at war; and all that you need for an intellectual revolution is the existence of a bastion of intellectual freedom somewhere.

[Yuxi_Liu]

China’s neo-Confucian worldview which viewed the world through correlations and binary pairs may not have lent it itself to the causal thinking necessary for science.

I am very doubtful of this. Humans are hardwired to think in cause-and-effect terms, and Confucianism does not explicitly deny causality.

There was no Chinese equivalent to the Scholastic method of disputation, no canons of logic a la Aristotle

In very early China (about 500 BC), there was a period of great intellectual diversity before Confucianism dominated. There was a School of Names which is very interested in logic and rhetorics. Philosophers in that school have been traditionally disparaged, which seems to explain why formal logic has not developed in China. For example, the founder, Deng Xi, ’s fate was used as a cautionary tale against sophistry.

Things are not to be understood through laws governing parts, but through the unity of the whole.

This has been demonstrated to persist even in modern times, by psychology studies. A reference is (Nisbett, 2003).

What made the ancient Greeks so generative?

My guess is that in any large population of humans (~1 million), there are enough talented individuals to generate the basic scientific ideas in a few generations. The problem is to have a stable social structure that sustains these thinkers and filters out wrong ideas.

They were also lucky that they got remembered. If their work didn’t get copied that much by the Arabs, we would be praising the medieval Arabs instead of ancient Greeks.

Also, a personal perspective: in current Chinese education (which I took until high school), Chinese achievements in science and math are noted whenever possible (for example, Horner’s Method is called Qin Jiushao Method), but there was no overarching scheme or intellectual tradition. They were like accidental discoveries, not results of sustained inquiries. Shen Kuo stands out as a lone scientist in a sea of literature writers.

Confucian classics, which I was forced to recite, is suffocatingly free from scientific concern. It’s not anti-science, rather, uninterested in science. For example:

Strange occurrences, exploits of strength, deeds of lawlessness, references to spiritual beings, such-like matters the Master avoided in conversation. -- Analects chapter 7.

(子不语怪力乱神。)

[PeterMcCluskey]

This is impressive given the amount of time you put into it.

There’s more evidence in the book State, Economy, and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s − 1850s, by Peer Vries, which I reviewed here. In particular, Vries disputes the claim that property rights were secure in Britain before the industrial revolution.

[johnswentworth]

What made the ancient Greeks so generative? It seems they founded the Western philosophical and scientific traditions, but what led to their innovativeness?

Hypothesis: they weren’t any more innovative than anyone else; their language and culture just got transmitted over a much larger area. In the wake of Alexander’s conquests, Greek became the working language of government bureaucrats across most of the Middle East. It quickly turned into a status symbol and a credential, sort of like a college degree today. Speaking, reading and writing Greek automatically put you into the educated social class. A working knowledge of Greek culture followed along naturally with the language.

Without Alexander’s conquests, I very much doubt that Aristotle’s name would be at all known today.

[jmh]

And it probably did not hurt that the Romans saw the Greeks as “thinkers” and also spread their ideas westward (north?).

[Mitchell_Porter]

Count me as one of those who regards the question as dubious. At various points in this essay, the thing that was to be invented becomes “*modern* science” or “scientific *method*”. China always had plenty of people who wanted to know the truth, who devised systematic models of the world, and who managed to discover things. Out of human civilizations, Europe certainly hit the scientific jackpot, in the sense that numerous developments came tumbling out of Pandora’s box together. But the spirit of inquiry had already existed in many times and places.

Also, I would like to see an investigation like this, directed at answering the question: Why didn’t Less Wrong (or MIRI) invent deep learning?

[Ruby]

I made the deliberate and explicit choice near the beginning of this project to focus on the scientific method since that’s precisely where the clear differences lie.

A few terms worth disentangling: empiricism is the notion that you should look at the world to learn about it, and that’s a very old idea even when not widely adopted. I wouldn’t equate science with empiricism for this question. Science can either refer to a body of knowledge or the method used by which that knowledge is generated. Though they’re tightly connected, I’ve interpreted this question is primarily about “why wasn’t the scientific method invented in China?”

[romeostevensit]

I don’t see Szabo linked:

http://​​unenumerated.blogspot.com/​​2010/​​09/​​malthusian-mystery.html

http://​​unenumerated.blogspot.com/​​2010/​​12/​​some-conjectures-and-facts-regarding.html

http://​​unenumerated.blogspot.com/​​2010/​​10/​​malthus-and-capital.html

http://​​unenumerated.blogspot.com/​​2013/​​11/​​european-asian-divergence-predates.html

http://​​unenumerated.blogspot.com/​​2013/​​07/​​a-very-underrated-invention.html

[ChristianKl]

They invented the abacus, the crossbow and the Four Great Inventions of the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing which Francis Bacon considered the most important inventions facilitating the West’s transformation from Dark Ages to the Modern world [Lin]. They possessed these a thousand years before Europe did.

The Chinese were able to produce paper but they didn’t had water driven paper mills that were able to produce cheap paper. There paper wasn’t much cheaper then parchment/​ vellum the way the European paper at the dawn of the printing press. That printing press was also much more cost effective then the way the Chinese printed.

Nuernberg and Mainz were Free Cities that allowed a debt funded startup like Gutenberg’s to employ over a dozen people on an economically driven project that was about selling books.

In the Chinese empire it wasn’t possible for traders that wanted to make money to own private property without government interference in the same way.

When Europe sailed over the ocean, they did it for reasons of trade. When China did it, they did it to bring back gifts for the emperor.

[brendan.furneaux]

I think I parsed this quote differently than you.

The new kind of scientific activity emerged only in a few countries of Western Europe, and it was restricted to that small area for about two hundred years.

Your question from the following paragraph:

[W]hat factors caused the rapid accumulation of knowledge in specifically only a few countries and for only those two hundred years?

suggests that you interpreted the quote to mean “The new kind of scientific activity was restricted to the few countries of Western Europe where it emerged, and a period of about two hundred years [before dying out/​being replaced by new kinds of scientific activity].” This would suggest that we should look for causes in Western Europe at the beginning and end of this time period.

I interpreted it to mean “After emerging in a few countries of Western Europe, the new scientific activity was restricted to that small area for two hundred years [before spreading to other areas]”. This would suggest that causes are to be found in Western Europe at the beginning of this time period, and in the rest of the world at the end of it.

You have read the whole work and not just isolated quotes, so you are much more familiar with the context. Do you think as a whole it supports your parsing over mine?

[Ruby]

Nope, I think you’re just plain right. I parsed that poorly. Thanks for point that out! I should make an edit.

[Ruby]

This is important because it means in answering the question I’m not looking for factors which caused something to happen at a very particular time and place, e.g. not what made Francis Bacon very special or the like.

A little at odds with things I wrote in the early paragraphs, I now think that the changes to modern science around the 16th/​17th century were likely quite meaningful and worthy of special investigation. This might have been more apparent if I’d gone into more depth on each the scientific methods proposed by different people.

Overall though, I do think I overall got a better answer from not looking narrowly at that period.

[Vaniver]

Ruby, you might also want to borrow Why the West Rules—for Now from me; it focuses less on the scientific question and more on the economic and technological one (which ends up being connected), but I’m not sure it’ll be all that different from Huff.

[Jackson Wagner]

As a fellow fan of Morris’s book, you might enjoy my alternate-history Song Dynasty parody post, “Why the East Rules”.

[habryka]

My colleague, jimrandomh, brought this to my attention. The thesis is that due to plague, war, and urbanization, early Modern Europe escaped the Malthusian trap which kept everyone at subsistence with no resources left for advancing science and technology. One source for this is here.

Also, covered in Scott Alexander’s latest post: “1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled”

Some people argue Europe broke out of the Malthusian trap around 1300. This is not quite right. 1300s Europe achieved above-subsistence GDP, but only because the Black Plague killed so many people that the survivors got a windfall by taking their land.

Malthus predicts that this should only last a little while, until the European population bounces back to pre-Plague levels. This prediction was exactly right for Southern Europe. Northern Europe didn’t bounce back. Why not?

Unclear, but one answer is: fewer people, more plagues.

Broadberry 2015 mentions that Northern European culture promoted later marriage and fewer children:

The North Sea Area had an advantage in this area because of its approach to marriage. Hajnal (1965) argued that northwest Europe had a different demographic regime from the rest of the world, characterised by later marriage and hence limited fertility. Although he originally called this the European Marriage Pattern, later work established that it applied only to the northwest of the continent. This can be linked to the availability of labour market opportunities for females, who could engage in market activity before marriage, thus increasing the age of first marriage for females and reducing the number of children conceived (de Moor and van Zanden, 2010). Later marriage and fewer children are associated with more investment in human capital, since the women employed in productive work can accumulate skills, and parents can afford to invest more in each of the smaller number of children because of the “quantity-quality” trade-off (Voigtländer and Voth, 2010).

And:

British population maxes out around 1300 (?), declines substantially during the Black Plague of 1348-49, but then keeps declining. The List Of English Plagues says another plague hit in 1361, then another in 1369, then another in 1375, and so on. Some historians call the whole period from 1348 to 1666 “the Plague Years”.

It looks like through the 1350 – 1450 period, population keeps declining, and per capita income keeps going up, as Malthusian theory would predict.

[Vaniver]

It’s been asserted [source] that having Latin as a lingua franca was important for Europe integrated market for ideas. Makes sense if scholars who otherwise speak different languages are going to be able to communicate.

But the Muslim world was much better off in this regard, with Arabic, and while China has major linguistic variation I think it also had a ‘shared language’ in basically the same way Latin was a shared language for Europe.

It seems to me like the thing that’s important is not so much that the market is integrated, but that there are many buyers and sellers. The best works of Chinese philosophy, as far as I can tell, come from the period when there was major intellectual and military competition between competing factions; the contention between the Hundred Schools of Thought. And then after unification the primary work available for scholars was the unified bureaucracy, which was interested in the Confucian-Legalist blend that won the unification war, and nothing else.

[habryka]

Promoted to curated: I think the history of science is one of the most natural places to look for insights into rationality. And in the history of science, the question “Why the west?” is one of the most obviously important ones that could shed light on what allows people to make scientific discoveries. I am pretty excited about similar analysis and summary like this on LessWrong, as well as people taking what has been written here so far and asking more followup questions.

I also found a lot of the discussion and comments quite valuable, which is also worth highlighting and is another reason for curation.

I think my biggest problem with this post is the degree to which it does end up mostly being a summary of other people’s work, in a way that feels like it makes it harder to really grok. I feel like a lot of things are lost if someone tries to summarize someone else’s view, instead of trying to explain their own view, and I feel like this shows in at least some parts of this post.

[RocksBasil]

I think there are economic factors under the play, although it will be more subtle than just a plain comparison of “alleged GDP per capita”.

I recall that both China and the Middle East went through a process of “de-industrialisation“ from the European High Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. Essentially both China and the Middle East started substituting machines for simple human labour, causing cranes, water mills, etc to become rarer over time.

And strangely enough a study showed that when this was happening there was little difference in real wages between Western Europe and the Middle East (so the substitution of capital with labour was not due to low wgaes), and I guess China won’t be too different in this regard.

Why did this happen is beyond me, I think susceptibility to nomadic raid/​invasion was mentioned.

[ChristianKl]

“why wasn’t the scientific method invented in China?”

It’s my understanding from reading historians of science like Kuhn, that it’s popular opinion in that field that there’s isn’t one single scientific method that deserves to be called the scientific method . When clarifying terms it would make sense to be more precise.

[Ruby]

Indeed, this is the subject of my Abridged History of the Scientific Method and So when was “science invented?” sections.

Different Scientific Methods over Time

First, it’s important to note that there hasn’t been just a single the scientific method which we can point to having been invented at a single time and space. There have been successively refined methods of generating scientific knowledge developed over time. Scientific methods were possessed by:

at least one person who wrote an Egyptian medical textbook, (c. 1600 BCE)

the Babylonians with their mathematical astronomy

the Greeks (who were foundational)

the Arabs

the Chinese Mohists (more on them later)

the Indian Charvaka school.

This is important because it means in answering the question I’m not looking for factors which caused something to happen at a very particular time and place, e.g. not what made Francis Bacon very special or the like. Instead, I’m looking for factors which held over Europe (and the Middle East) for over a thousand years.

Is there something which you think wasn’t precise enough in those sections?

[ChristianKl]

Despite listing the Arabs as having had one of the instances of “scientific methods over time” you latter say in your conclusion:

″ Overall, I do conclude a firm conclusion that even I’m not sure of the details, there were almost certainly concrete systematic factors which caused Europe to develop modern science and the scientific method even when China and the Islamic world didn’t.”

It’s unclear towards what exactly you are pointing here when you say the scientific method .

On the other hand, I don’t think I would have written the comment if I had read the whole article at the time of writing it.

[habryka]

That is indeed acknowledged in the post:

The different scientific methods from different thinkers were largely playing with the same elements. Still, they are united by all involving some degree of empiricism, some degree on reason, and are for the purpose of producing naturalistic explanations of physical reality.

[ChristianKl]

I wrote the comment before I read the rest and the ability to delete commands was thrown out from the UI. It’s worth noting her that the old LW did allow the deletion of retracted commands if nobody answered them.

[habryka]

True, though in this case someone had made a reply, so it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Agree though that we should probably get around to building UI to delete leaf-comments.

[ChristianKl]

No, by the point I was first thinking about whether or not to let the comment stand, there was no reply.

[habryka]

Oh, interesting. But why didn’t you retract it then?

[ChristianKl]

The point is still defensible (as demonstrated in my reply @ruby) but not necessarily important enough to consume attention. Retraction doesn’t prevent a comment from taking up attention.

[habryka]

Interesting. I will have to think about that as a use-case for deletion as something separate from “retracting but harder”.

[jmh]

Two responses from skimming the essay. 1) I didn’t see much about culture in the comparison. Certainly the Chinese, and other Asian cultures of the time, were aware of things like gun power before Europeans. But when I think of things like science and how it relates/​is interpreted by society I get the impression much depends on the application of the technology. 2) Relates to culture but is more about what lens we apply in viewing the progress. Many think Chinese Medicine is voodoo and BS and that view was I think largely pushed by a narrow vision from a European perspective. I think any fair assessment would say eastern medicine is not really inferior to western medicine—both have strengths and weaknesses. I would say both derive from science and a scientific method.

I suspect both these aspects, the underlying culture and the type of lens that culture imposes if one is not careful may have played a role in casting your question and the answers you tentatively find.

[ChristianKl]

There’s not one thing that’s well defined as Western medicine both homeopathy and chemotherapy are “Western” medicine. They are even both modern Western medicine and not something premodern like acupuncture.

Premodern Western medicine like that which was based on Aristotle’s four humors also existed in the past but now seems nearly completely eliminated.

Thomas Kuhn suggests that to be a science, a field has to make progress. What progress do you think Chinese medicine has made in the last 100 years?

[Ruby]

It’s true that I didn’t give culture as much attention as it could have gotten. It’s a very large topic.

It’d help me understand your comment if you could offer some more concrete examples of your points, e.g.

• What are the different lenses one can apply when viewing progress? Which different conclusions do they lead to?

• Do you have examples of what you’d consider fair assessments of Eastern medicine? I am among those who are highly doubtful of Chinese medicine. Can you say more about the scientific method you think was used to derive it?

• I’m open to my cultural background imposing a lens, but curious if you can point at what kind of lens/​distortion you think I might be vulnerable to here.

[Isaac Fernandez]

Framing is interesting.

Your question is: why wasn’t it in China. (somewhere, lots of reasons, easy to digest and deliberate on)

A more interesting question to me is: why was it. (somewhere, lots of reasons, potentially provable hypothesis)

[Raemon]

I think this question is best understood as part of a broader question about how good intellectual processes are developed, of which science is a subset. And of which “why not china?” is a sub-question.

[Raemon]

(See the section on clarifying the question)

[RedMan]

Was there anything similar to this in ancient China: https://​​en.m.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Disputation#Inter-faith_disputations

I wonder if the presence of arguments between separate groups who disagreed about absolute truth (in the religious sense) eventually led to arguments about the natural order, and the presentation of experiments to resolve them. Given the presence of religious figures (monks like Mendel, friars like Bacon, etc) in the early sciences, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s evidence for this, though I don’t have any.

‘my god says the cannonball hits before the feather, mine says they hit at the same time, screw you I’ve got a cannonball, a feather, and a tower, let’s settle this’

If the argument happens in an environment where ‘you made the higher status person look silly, so now you have to be punished’, this does nothing, if it happens in an environment where the crowd can theoretically embrace one or the other on the spot, and it is an actual contest, then that might lead somewhere interesting.

If the Chinese language permits the statement, ‘what I said can be read as disagreeing with you o higher status one, but what I intended was the read that exactly supports your beliefs which is totally consistent with the beautiful grammar’, then this sort of disputation cannot happen.

I offer the example of Puritanism and Judaism as well.

Puritans believed that salvation was not assured and constantly engaged in introspection to answer the ‘am I right with god’ question, which required a great deal of ‘examination’ in a sense that may be relevant to science—see Scott Alexander’s post on Puritans for examples of prominent ones.

As I understand it, ‘argument’ is also core to the practice of Talmudic studies in Judaism, which I suppose could lead to experiments like the above, or at least the development of formal logic. To use von Neumann as an example, if he had not been a scientist in an era where the Jews of Hungary were integrating into wider society (see Scott Alexander’s post on the contribution of this group to modernity), he would have (maybe he was? I don’t know) made an amazing scholar of the Talmud—he could repeat verbatim everything he had ever read and was an absolute master of reasoning.

Could the insanity of European religious conflict have led directly to the development of modern science? I don’t have an answer, or sources, but maybe the idea is interesting.

[Douglas_Knight]

This (especially Huff) seems like a very fine-grained question, as if you already know the answers to coarser questions, like why not Rome or the Song dynasty or Roger Bacon? If you see history as a long arc of progress with China a little ahead, then it is natural to ask what happened at the end, a sudden sprint or a stumble. But do you understand history well enough to justify such a question?

History is not monotone. There are definite dips, such as the Western Dark Ages and the chaos between Chinese dynasties. But is each dynasty better than the last? You should try to plot a rough curve, rather than asking the binary of science being invented or not. Trying to explain more bits of information is usually easier.

Progress is not uni-dimensional. The Song was the most commercial dynasty. But should we expect it to be the most scientific? People usually say that the Greeks were better at science, the Romans at engineering. Instead of asking why China failed to progress, ask why Roman regressed, without the obvious cause of a collapse. How is uneven progress possible?

[Spencer S]

Chinese, and Northern East Asian’s in general, tend to have fewer geniuses. Europeans have a lower average IQ than NE Asian’s, but the tail end on the right side of the bell curve extends further out—Europeans have more geniuses.

Explosive technological progress is entirely dependent on having a critical mass of geniuses. It’s really that simple. Below average people, average people, even very bright people, don’t event technologies that create a paradigm shift(to use the cliche).

Those with an outlier IQ—high abstract reasoning, but also high creativity, a sort of autistic, maverick attitude, are the ones who make earth shattering technologies and discoveries. The spirit of independentness may also be a factor in the gap between East and West. NE Asian’s might lack psychological traits of independeness and high creativity. Ot at least they may lack them to the degree that Europeans have them.

The European gene pool seems to have reached the peak of this genius sometime in the later 19th century and has been slowly declining since then. This explains the deceleration of progress.

[the gears to ascension]

holy citation needed batman! among other serious issues with this perspective, variance in capability has many input factors; while genetics is involved, memetics and material circumstances also make a significant difference—guns, germs, and steel all can serve to amplify or reduce effective intelligence. society has been on a 12k-year energy availability growth process since the start of farming, and there have been many variations on the way—I don’t deny that there may be genetic differences. but I don’t think we can even conclude there’s been a deceleration in overall rate of insight with the deceleration in generally useful insight.

my view is that almost any human brain is theoretically capable of strong generalization and genius, given training data tuned for that human’s learning capabilities. which means that memetic contribution by a smart person can make everyone who encounters their knowledge smarter, and can lead to future contributors producing even more enlightening knowledge—though there’s no guarantee that new things retain all benefits of old things, the highest usefulness knowledge generally overrepresents new insights about how to better encode old knowledge. and as a result, it’s very hard to conclude anything specific about genetics.