China values shares certain types of knowledge but it doesn’t value sharing information about mistakes. Sharing information about mistakes is vital to building scientific knowledge and will be vital to achieve further goals such as during cancer and fighting aging.
Instead of valuing the scientific progress and the freedom it needs to talk about what doesn’t work the Chinese government pushes traditional Chinese medicine and got the WHO to adept classifications about blocked Chi flow.
Even when China has plenty of smart people who are willing to work long hours it won’t be able build to the kind of scientific productivity that brought the West it’s wealth as long as it’s not more open about talking about what goes wrong.
Chinese are strong on propaganda, Americans are weak on teaching evolution at schools… how could we achieve a middle way, where the established knowledge is neither “sacred” nor “just your opinion, man”?
I suppose in the West at least you can have a bubble that promotes good knowledge, and the theory is that in competition between bubbles, the good thoughts will prevail in long term. Except… academia does not really work this way, at least when it comes to funding, does it? So maybe we are getting the worse of both systems here, where it’s neither competition of ideas (as the tradition would suggest in West), nor governance by highly educated experts (at the tradition would suggest in China), but rather decisions of bureaucrats-managers optimizing to do the safe thing and cover their asses. (I am probably exaggerating here a lot, dunno.)
There are parts of academia that work and parts that doesn’t. At the moment many parts of Western academia struggle with the replication crisis and that struggle is about accepting that errors are made. The progress is not as fast as I would like it, but in China this kind of looking at what went wrong is much harder.
Losing face is a big deal in China and it prevents analysis of what goes wrong.
China values shares certain types of knowledge but it doesn’t value sharing information about mistakes. Sharing information about mistakes is vital to building scientific knowledge and will be vital to achieve further goals such as during cancer and fighting aging.
Instead of valuing the scientific progress and the freedom it needs to talk about what doesn’t work the Chinese government pushes traditional Chinese medicine and got the WHO to adept classifications about blocked Chi flow.
Even when China has plenty of smart people who are willing to work long hours it won’t be able build to the kind of scientific productivity that brought the West it’s wealth as long as it’s not more open about talking about what goes wrong.
Chinese are strong on propaganda, Americans are weak on teaching evolution at schools… how could we achieve a middle way, where the established knowledge is neither “sacred” nor “just your opinion, man”?
I suppose in the West at least you can have a bubble that promotes good knowledge, and the theory is that in competition between bubbles, the good thoughts will prevail in long term. Except… academia does not really work this way, at least when it comes to funding, does it? So maybe we are getting the worse of both systems here, where it’s neither competition of ideas (as the tradition would suggest in West), nor governance by highly educated experts (at the tradition would suggest in China), but rather decisions of bureaucrats-managers optimizing to do the safe thing and cover their asses. (I am probably exaggerating here a lot, dunno.)
There are parts of academia that work and parts that doesn’t. At the moment many parts of Western academia struggle with the replication crisis and that struggle is about accepting that errors are made. The progress is not as fast as I would like it, but in China this kind of looking at what went wrong is much harder.
Losing face is a big deal in China and it prevents analysis of what goes wrong.