Thanks for writing this. I’m worried that it’s going to be ignored or downvoted because (1) the English is hard to read, as you predicted, and (2) you didn’t make it obvious why it’s relevant to LW.
For (1), maybe this is too costly, but possibly you could find an English-speaking friend who’d be willing to co-write the post with you.
For (2), well, generally I think LW should be more exploratory. Not in the sense of trying to import practices from ancient Chinese witchcraft, but in the sense of trying to know what is going on with religion, witchcraft, politics, the state, etc. etc., which you touch on. I think your post actually makes a fair number of interesting points, e.g. of the form “you might think politics and religion work like X; but actually Chinese history gives a large counterexample to X”. But it’s hard to parse, and you don’t say enough, IMO. It might help to explain, in the title and at the beginning of the post, why a rationalist might be interested in concepts about wu. It might also help to just explain where you’re coming from; what connects all these facts, why are you giving all these particular facts.
The English translation is extremely bad if you are talking about the authenticity of the content being translated. The Chinese version contain terms that most Chinese wouldn’t even know and have to look up, let alone written in pinyin form that has no corresponding English translations. The English version was too disjointed for me to understand anything.
The Chinese version contain terms that most Chinese wouldn’t even know and have to look up,
It seems like the author is using terms that specialized anthropologists might use; is that impression wrong, e.g. it’s just unnecessarily obscure words?
The English version was too disjointed for me to understand anything.
I get this; I got a small amount of value from it, but had the sense that there’s more value to be gotten.
My impression is that this person has actually done a fair amount of research, and I think LW should be open to people who have surprising new information. I agree the net quality of the post is low, but there’s potential there; whereas a well-written but boring, trite post IMO is worthless and has no potential to be worthful, and often gets like 10 or 20 upvotes, and that’s really really stupid.
I agree that the author seems to be quite knowledgeable in the subject he has written. He might have a history background. I’m not very familiar with Chinese history myself other than popular stories that most people have heard. He basically gave an overall view of the Chinese belief system and how it has evolved in different periods of Chinese history and their roles in those societies, mostly regarding how people of different status use them differently. He didn’t really mention the schools of thought other than Confucianism in passing. He’s clearly focused on mysticism rather than things like Buddhism, Taoism, Mohism, etc.
I wanted to talk about how old literature give a different type of perspective on that subject looking back at older history (i.e. historical historian perspective) than how modern scholars might view it now, but that comment got marked as spam for some reason.
Some of the stuff don’t really make much sense semantically. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually AI generated content. At first I suspected it might be a copy and paste from baidu. Most of it makes sense but there are a few phrases and words scattered throughout that just doesn’t make any sense why they are there, like 大草. Maybe it’s one of those GPT-3 stuff and someone is just having fun on here. The text sounds too scholarly, not something you’d see a normal person write, but then you see phrases like 写累了……先这样吧，我后面在这个基础上再修改, which sounds like someone wrote the English version first and passed it through Google translate and tack onto the end of the wall of text just to make it sound like a human wrote it. 非常谢谢 is just hilariously bad. There are also very conversational phrases that sound normal and seems like someone wrote that in the form of an actual human conversation. Who knows, people like to play games on here. I don’t know why they didn’t bother removing the weird parentheses or other weird punctuation you usually get from GPT-3. It’s not actually hard to simulate this type of linguistic incompetence by hand, but given how hard the author tries, I think he just doesn’t really understand Chinese very much. He didn’t remove the weird punctuation because he had no idea wtf was going on. I’m not doubting the competence of the original author that GPT-3 extracted the text from as I was mostly talking about the original author above regarding the actual content.
About the English translation, I am sorry that this is limited to my English level can not express the meaning I want to express in Chinese. And for Chinese people also to look up the meaning of these words …...… writing the article is my way of categorizing the flow of information, so it probably seems very confusing. But since I posted it here, I will change or explain the terms, thank you.
In fact, I am not very good at mysticism and I am not a scholar specializing in this area, but I can write about church culture related knowledge …… This article is just the tip of my information flow, I am more good at aerospace science or philosophical discussions, but I can’t write about it in easy to understand English for now.
I’m Chinese, but researching Chinese history related is just one of my interests when I’m bored. If you get a chance, you might see me writing about convolutional neural networks, military ships, pure mathematical science, or the different problems brought by language sorting and language families and history later. I will revise the article based on feedback, but due to my English language skills, I will choose to remove the English version or just write down the general version of this article.
For the problem of some meaningless words, I can only repeat the above explanation for this is my information flow categorization, which is one of my habits, I will remove these meaningless texts afterwards, thank you for your feedback.
Thanks for your comments!
For (1), I have a friend who is a native English speaker, but she is busy with work. So I chose to use translation software plus myself to write the English version, and I will try to write the article in English later.
For (2), I actually have not explored most of the things in LW yet, so I will choose an article that is not very well formed to post here to test the water, this article is my own categorization of the information flow in my head, so maybe it does not look very logical, thank you for the information, I will change this article effectively afterwards. Of course the English version will be much worse than the Chinese version …… I choose to remove the English version for now until I can express the meaning of this article in a more understandable way.
Thanks for writing this. I’m worried that it’s going to be ignored or downvoted because (1) the English is hard to read, as you predicted, and (2) you didn’t make it obvious why it’s relevant to LW.
For (1), maybe this is too costly, but possibly you could find an English-speaking friend who’d be willing to co-write the post with you.
For (2), well, generally I think LW should be more exploratory. Not in the sense of trying to import practices from ancient Chinese witchcraft, but in the sense of trying to know what is going on with religion, witchcraft, politics, the state, etc. etc., which you touch on. I think your post actually makes a fair number of interesting points, e.g. of the form “you might think politics and religion work like X; but actually Chinese history gives a large counterexample to X”. But it’s hard to parse, and you don’t say enough, IMO. It might help to explain, in the title and at the beginning of the post, why a rationalist might be interested in concepts about wu. It might also help to just explain where you’re coming from; what connects all these facts, why are you giving all these particular facts.
The English translation is extremely bad if you are talking about the authenticity of the content being translated. The Chinese version contain terms that most Chinese wouldn’t even know and have to look up, let alone written in pinyin form that has no corresponding English translations. The English version was too disjointed for me to understand anything.
It seems like the author is using terms that specialized anthropologists might use; is that impression wrong, e.g. it’s just unnecessarily obscure words?
I get this; I got a small amount of value from it, but had the sense that there’s more value to be gotten.
My impression is that this person has actually done a fair amount of research, and I think LW should be open to people who have surprising new information. I agree the net quality of the post is low, but there’s potential there; whereas a well-written but boring, trite post IMO is worthless and has no potential to be worthful, and often gets like 10 or 20 upvotes, and that’s really really stupid.
I agree that the author seems to be quite knowledgeable in the subject he has written. He might have a history background. I’m not very familiar with Chinese history myself other than popular stories that most people have heard. He basically gave an overall view of the Chinese belief system and how it has evolved in different periods of Chinese history and their roles in those societies, mostly regarding how people of different status use them differently. He didn’t really mention the schools of thought other than Confucianism in passing. He’s clearly focused on mysticism rather than things like Buddhism, Taoism, Mohism, etc.
I wanted to talk about how old literature give a different type of perspective on that subject looking back at older history (i.e. historical historian perspective) than how modern scholars might view it now, but that comment got marked as spam for some reason.
Some of the stuff don’t really make much sense semantically. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually AI generated content. At first I suspected it might be a copy and paste from baidu. Most of it makes sense but there are a few phrases and words scattered throughout that just doesn’t make any sense why they are there, like 大草. Maybe it’s one of those GPT-3 stuff and someone is just having fun on here. The text sounds too scholarly, not something you’d see a normal person write, but then you see phrases like 写累了……先这样吧，我后面在这个基础上再修改, which sounds like someone wrote the English version first and passed it through Google translate and tack onto the end of the wall of text just to make it sound like a human wrote it. 非常谢谢 is just hilariously bad. There are also very conversational phrases that sound normal and seems like someone wrote that in the form of an actual human conversation. Who knows, people like to play games on here. I don’t know why they didn’t bother removing the weird parentheses or other weird punctuation you usually get from GPT-3. It’s not actually hard to simulate this type of linguistic incompetence by hand, but given how hard the author tries, I think he just doesn’t really understand Chinese very much. He didn’t remove the weird punctuation because he had no idea wtf was going on. I’m not doubting the competence of the original author that GPT-3 extracted the text from as I was mostly talking about the original author above regarding the actual content.
About the English translation, I am sorry that this is limited to my English level can not express the meaning I want to express in Chinese. And for Chinese people also to look up the meaning of these words …...… writing the article is my way of categorizing the flow of information, so it probably seems very confusing. But since I posted it here, I will change or explain the terms, thank you. In fact, I am not very good at mysticism and I am not a scholar specializing in this area, but I can write about church culture related knowledge …… This article is just the tip of my information flow, I am more good at aerospace science or philosophical discussions, but I can’t write about it in easy to understand English for now. I’m Chinese, but researching Chinese history related is just one of my interests when I’m bored. If you get a chance, you might see me writing about convolutional neural networks, military ships, pure mathematical science, or the different problems brought by language sorting and language families and history later. I will revise the article based on feedback, but due to my English language skills, I will choose to remove the English version or just write down the general version of this article.
For the problem of some meaningless words, I can only repeat the above explanation for this is my information flow categorization, which is one of my habits, I will remove these meaningless texts afterwards, thank you for your feedback.
Thanks.
Thanks for your comments! For (1), I have a friend who is a native English speaker, but she is busy with work. So I chose to use translation software plus myself to write the English version, and I will try to write the article in English later. For (2), I actually have not explored most of the things in LW yet, so I will choose an article that is not very well formed to post here to test the water, this article is my own categorization of the information flow in my head, so maybe it does not look very logical, thank you for the information, I will change this article effectively afterwards. Of course the English version will be much worse than the Chinese version …… I choose to remove the English version for now until I can express the meaning of this article in a more understandable way.