I lived in China for 8 months while I worked on a project in Shenzen. Unfortunately, cheating is endemic in Chinese culture. They have many idioms about cheating and the one I heard the most from Chinese speakers is "neng pian jiu pian" which translates roughly to "if you can cheat and get away with it, then cheat". I've seen business deals fall apart and contracts being withdrawn because Chinese factories would scam people out of some quick money instead of collecting a large sum at the end of the project.
Whatever changes they plan to enact to stop this cheating will take several generations to eradicate.
South China Morning Post has an article on academic cheating:
I was pretty surprised when I moved to Prague to learn that students both Czechs but especially students from the former USSR (the *stans and Russia) expected to be able to work together on exams. Having gone to school in the US and been graded on a curve I just couldn't understand these people actively wispering and showing echother answers letting others read over their shoulders. There were groups of people who would have one person study and sit in the row bellow them in the auditorium and then there would be three rows of students above all copying in a game of telephone from one to the other. I remember a very serious incident in college in the US when our history professor found two answers to be similarly worded. The two students were kicked out of the class with a warning that if they were caught copying from eachother again they would be kicked out of school. In Prague, the professors obviously knew about the copying and didn't say a word. Indeed, some of them helped us cheet by showing the answers during the test. They only wanted to be able to document our results to prove to the acreditation comitee that we had studied, and they cared not for our actual qualifications at the end of the degree.
There is a saying that cheating may teach you more than memorizing everything.
Sometimes the tests are given not by the teacher himself but by the state/school or some other third party and the teacher has a feeling of “In it together” with the students by helping them out a bit. They understand that its not the most important subject in the lives of the students and rotte memorization will not help them that much anyway.
There’s also a saying that cheating encourages teamwork. I’ve had a biolagy teacher (In a programming-oriented school) actually assign us into teams for the exams where we were encouraged to specialize and devide our learning so we could better “solve” the exam. She knew that people were not there for her subject anyway, and wanted us to learn actual practical skills - and in so doing had made such a strong connection with all of her students that we actually learned much more about biolagy from her than my peers from other schools.
And sometimes teachers just dont care - they are graded by their students’ academic sucesses somewhat. They will not be given promotions if students all have top grades, but will be “talked to” if they perform poorly. Such a feedback mechanism practically begs teacher sponsered cheating.
But yeah having a degree is way overvalued for historical reasons. Though companies have started to “wisen up” a bit not really accepting college degrees at face value as they previously did.
I can't speak for Russia and "*stans", but this is patently untrue for the Czech Republic (where I come from).
Obviously it may depend on the particular institution -- with new, for-profit, private universities (milking rich foreigners who've come to Prague for the beer and fun) having much worse reputation than the public venerable ones like the Charles University (est. 1348). Saying students are "expected" to plagiarise is simply insulting.
I wonder if a lot of it has to do with the collectivist nature of the society --- both the former USSR and China are notably communist, and the general expectation is that you help others.
I know that in China, there's plenty of "under the table" IP "sharing" happening amongst tech companies too.
I’m Russian living in Asia now and I agree with this hypothesis.
Soviet education and propaganda both nurtured collaboration over competition. “Individualsist” was definitely a bad label to have in my Soviet childhood. Egoism was and still is considered one of the worst qualities of all.
I feel that pre-Soviet fables and other lore had similar moral message.
Togetherness and group benefit are definitely valued higher than individual profit, needs of the many outweigh needs of the few and so on.
Though not extreme similar situation exists in India. I think it is due to the forcing of western education standard on other countries who were not given time to naturally progress into formal education. It resulted in a situation where the economic prospects of who got a degree(not necessarily real knowledge) was much higher(20x) than those who don't. This resulted in majority of the students studying just for the degree not out of interest of the subject. And this trickled down into next generation as they become teachers as well and solidified into a copy and pass culture, not gain real knowledge. However there is a small percentage of students who still want to learn but they are often at a disadvantageous position as even as a community nobody values original work anymore. It's unfortunate but it generates large number of 'skilled labourers' (even if it's low quality) which helps improve human capital.
That is one reason you see very less innovation from here. Not because of actual lack of skills but original work is not much valued as much as if you can make money even if by copying existing work..
It will definitely change when the economic disparity neutrkises to some extend and people value original work more
It's more like chew and pour. Cram and pass. Photocopy.
>'Three Idiots'
Where silencer says, "I don't care what it means. I'll memorize it." Describes Nigerian, Ghanaian and Indian school system.
This is what results when lecturers also crammed and passed without understanding. Since they don't know what's important, they favor trivial parts of their subjects.
For instance on an Excel course, the lecturer asked us to draw the exercises in drawing books after every class.
When most exam questions are patterned after "Who wants to be a millionaire?" The only way to get good grades is to cram.
But these issues are Child's play compared to the real issue: In public schools what you know doesn't matter. If you've not "sorted" the lecturer, it's an automatic E, F, or D.
When a lecturer tells you on your first day that A is for alpha and omega. B is for the lecturer. And C is for bright students...
I've not made anything up.
Basically, the bribery in developing or underdeveloped countries is simply a reflection of what goes on in schools.
Chinese culture is very competitive, and if there is a score and a 'winner' I find that people will work very hard to achieve the highest possible score. I think it is inevitable that some of those competitors will use a creative interpretation of the rules to "win" and there are so many people competing it will lead to large numbers of people cheating even if the per capita numbers are similar for other groups.
There was a very funny movie (it was a comedy of course) called "Kung Fu Mahjong II" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_Mahjong_2) in which a central theme was that everyone was cheating at the game and they all knew it. So at that point it isn't really "cheating" if the cheating is part of the game.
What is interesting is that science itself is not amenable to cheating, only the reporting of it is. And to the extent that reporting is a good proxy for the science, cheating there works. But failure to produce the actual science is like having someone else take your driving test, it puts your own life (and those driving around you) in danger.
I don't know "Chinese culture is very competitive" compared to others. It may be the long tail you are seeing from the large population.
As I mentioned earlier, China is very relation based and Chinese themselves know that. To counter that performance evaluation tends to be very quantified. You could say there is a number fetish. College admission used to be based on one score. Introducing flexibility causes a lot of anxiety about "hou men" (backdoor or favoritism). GDP growth needs to be above 6.5%. I just read a policeman commenting that they have numerical targets for the number of arrests they make.
Anyway because of the emphasis on relationship there is actually a heavy price to pay if you are thought of a cheater in private social networks. It is another story
though dealing with strangers/abstract public interests/intrusive governments so there is a degree of split personality there.
My son is graduating from a US high school this year. He is an academic star. On his brag sheet he lists what he is most proud of himself as doing all his work honestly. Not all those academic achievements that he worked hard for. It goes to show what he thinks of academic honesty here. It does not make him like his classmates less though. It does not make me think cheating endemic to the US either. There is always grayness. I am proud of his integrity but I wouldn't automatically think a lot less of a kid because he cuts some corners once in a while.
With your 8 months experience you are making quite broad claims. Let's take the example used in the NYT report: doctors buying reviews to get their papers published. It has a clear root that is actually mentioned in the article: "Many of those authors were clinical doctors, who in China face intense pressure to publish." See also "Young Chinese doctors and the pressure of publication" http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... So this is really a management induced problem (just compare the number of doctors China produces and the number of available SCI journals to publish in). I don't see why it has to take generations to address.
China is to a very large degree a relation based society. How to temper favoritism in academic evaluations is a real issue. It seems many organizations in China have outsourced this function to SCI publications. While quantification is a lesser evil their trust in SCI seems misplaced. There are for profit publishers out there who are happy to accommodate this demand for publications and these publishers are not necessarily Chinese.
BTW "neng pian jiu pian" is a derogatory term for cheaters not something people take pride in.
Giving heavy weight to publishing is actually a good thing in the Chinese context. I hope they can fix the process instead of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
In China medical education for most doctors is a post-secondary one instead of post-graduate. For a doctor to be able to write a proper paper, it shows at least a few qualities many others do not possess including abilities to read and write in English, keep up-to-date with medical research in one's specialty, and do some quantitative analysis etc. This is regardless of the originality or importance of the findings. Yes it is a low bar but it is still better than alternatives.
The hospitals have a need to outsource evaluations to outside experts. SCI journals are the wrong targets to outsource to and the hospitals individually do not have resources to come up with alternatives. However regulators and funding agencies can. They should black list journals that are known to publish trash for profit. They should work with publishers to come up with alternative formats that de-emphasize impact factors but instead focus on the rigor of reporting: to publish your research does not need to be original as long as it is adding independent and verifiable data points to our knowledge base; you do need to be up-to-date on your methodology and rigorous in documenting the quality of your data, however. Indeed to ease the English writing difficulty, they can provide standardized templates that could actually ease the collection of machine readable data. This way while each publication may be low value, in aggregate they can provide real value. They could treat this as a "continuing medical education" issue.
Of course this does not prevent real geniuses from publishing ground-breaking research in reputable journals. They need to be realistic in that most people are simply not qualified or lucky enough to come up with ground breaking research in their career, esp. when their main job is clinical rather than research.
We had a lot of foreign exchange students from there, many of whom I found out in labs had very poor writing skills.
I asked my roommate how so many Chinese students found their way to this college and why the writing seemed so bad.
He explained to me there was literally a whole industry in China dedicated to faking the scores and documents required to get Chinese kids into good schools in the US.
This included all sorts of College apps, essays, and probably some of the tests like the ACT.
He said wealthy families in China valued education as a status symbol and would pay top dollar to get their kid into Harvard or so on to make them look good, himself included
I have observed the same. In my masters, Chinese friends were asked to join meetups and classes for improving english speaking. When I asked how they cleared Toefl(https://www.ets.org/toefl), which is required along with GRE score for getting admissions into US university, they mentioned its very easy to buy these scores. Somebody appears on their behalf in the test.
Judging by the cars some Chinese students drive, it appears it's very easy for them to buy anything. McLarens, Maseratis, Ferraris, top-end models from BMW, Mercedes, Porche and Audi are not uncommon around campus and it's always a Chinese kid at the wheel.
Cheating and corruption is infectious and once it starts spreading it can turn into an epidemic. The reasons is if everyone cheats those who evaluate the results adjust their expectations. "Oh look, everyone can solve this problem we thought was hard, Ok, let's make the problem even harder", kind of idea. That puts pressure on those who don't cheat, because now they have to work even harder to keep up with cheaters, or start cheating.
When bribing is involved, those who receive bribes start factoring regular bribes as a line item in their monthly or yearly revenue. In other words, next time they interact with someone and they don't get a bribe, they will go out of their way to ensure they fail to get what they want until the customer "gets the message". Someone refusing to pay the bribe is seen as taking the bread away from their kids' table.
Eventually becomes part of the culture, the common sense, so to speak. You're simply expected to cheat or to bribe in any kind of governmental, business, educational or other institutional transaction. It starts from birth in the hospital to the burial in the cemetery. It is not called a bribe anymore just a "gift" or "help" or something like that. Someone who doesn't understand or participate in this corruption is seen as goofy or stupid ("How can you expect to get anything done, what planet did you come from, of course you have to pay").
Regarding bribes. In the US I would be afraid to offer money to an officer, because that is clearly illegal. I would expect offering a bribe to make things worse for me.
Also in the US, I feel like if I don't offer "help" to subsidize the work that a waiter does then I am essentially taking money away (they get paid sub minimum wage).
I feel that "help" should only be offered after the work is done, and well done.
Are bribes in other cultures almost considered more like tips are considered in the US?
Western Europe seems to be a low tip, low bribe culture. What are the opinions / standards coming from there?
> In the US I would be afraid to offer money to an officer, because that is clearly illegal.
Yeah that's the nice thing for all the criticism people have for US it still has a relatively well functioning justice system compared to those other country. People simply have no idea what it is like to live with pervasive corruption on all levels of society.
Handing money to a police officer was expected and sometimes even asked for blatantly. It is still illegal just that nobody cares. It never called a bribe but something like "Maybe we can come to an understanding..."
> I don't offer "help" to subsidize the work that a waiter does then I am essentially taking money away
That's a good way to understanding it. Except you'd pay "tips" ahead of time, they'd be large, and would be for random things like kids getting good grades, or doctor not messing the surgery up, and the judge to get off murder.
A particularly evil case, was a neighbor I had who knew the guy who worked in a DNA testing lab. That guy had a huge house, cars and lived the good life. Why? He offered falsifying DNA results for criminal and paternity tests as a service.
Just thinking about the damage that one person did, and I am sure he wasn't the only one.
> What are the opinions / standards coming from there?
I have mostly been in Eastern Europe. It's much, much worse. US might have high level corruption - nepotism, lobbying, regulatory capture but it is still doing pretty well compared to many other places.
Scientific progress (reluctantly) happens when the established is criticized, allowing new ideas to form.
How can a nation which censors the internet in order to avoid critique, ever expect to become world-class in something that’s essentially founded on well-argued critique?
Imagine a Chinese scientist rising to fame, because of a revolutionary new theory in some area, and then imagine a fellow countryman finding holes in this theory — literally ripping it apart by showing why it can’t be true. That’s scientific progress. How would China handle a case like this? Would Chinese people even dare act this way, or would they be afraid of the consequences? Does their culture even allow it?
China wants a lot of things that come out of personal freedom — e.g. a healthy financial market, higher living standards, innovation — but it always ends up building something fragile and corrupt because of its top-down approach, robbing individuals from expressing themselves freely and building something unsupervised.
To me, it’s no wonder if cheating is rampant in a society where the government instates rules with the sole purpose of protecting itself. Cheating (i.e. getting around these rules) is the only sensible action for human beings living under such conditions.
I stopped reading after this line in your comment
> How can a nation which censors the internet in order to avoid critique, ever expect to become world-class in something that’s essentially founded on well-argued critique
You guys are delusional and brain washed about the impact of the internet in producing constructive progress. Look at Japan or South Korea - they have the best internet in the world and have turned their society into a bunch of mindless zombies overoptimizing everything for the sake of overoptimization and producing no science whatsoever.
South Korea's science happens in the private sector, and it is exceptional. Samsung could build you an automated antipersonnel gun turret in 2003, now they're competing directly with Intel on semiconductor process. As for Japan, I'd chock it up to demographics, and a general sense that things are already pretty great.
China, on the other hand, has a problem of culture in their way.
It’s not about the internet. It’s about a government that’s fearful of losing its power. Feeling a need to suppress information means the government knows it’s doing something wrong, and it doesn’t want the people to know this. A government without a guilty conscience has no need to restrict the people in what information they can access about the government and its history. It’s a sign that something is wrong, and in no way is it limited to free internet access — internet censorship is just one symptom out of many.
I mean, doesn't the west have the exact same issues? p-Hacking, lack of repeat studies, focusing on experiments that will make the biggest headlines, etc.
The issues are the same, but the frequency of them is very important. Academic fraud is like crime: it's always going to happen, but a little is very different to a lot.
“Since 2012, the country has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer reviews than all other countries and territories put together, according to Retraction Watch”
Along with the entire rest of the article filled with quotes and stats.
Do you believe that China published more papers than everyone else put together in the same period?
I helped run a large international conference recently, with 900 published papers. Of these 66 (7.3%) were from China, and 280 (31%) from the US. Germany had 104 (12%). The numbers will vary by field, of course, but I've no reason to believe that this meeting was an outlier.
>Do you believe that China published more papers than everyone else put together in the same period?
I don't hold a belief, I haven't seen data that you seemed to be using to make conclusions. Or you're making somewhat large assumptions based on a few pieces of information. A little is different than a lot, both could have a little or a lot though.
> I've no reason to believe that this meeting was an outlier
Here's one, it was presumably run across the Pacific ocean from China.
You’re trying too hard. There is no reason to believe that China is publishing papers faster than the rest of the world put together, unless you have data to that effect.
China is big, but not bigger than everyone else put together. Less than one person in six is Chinese.
And your presumption happens to be accurate, but 1 in 3 editions of the conference happen in Asia including China and China is still out-published by the USA by 4 to 1 or so even when the event is held in China. Chinese outnumber Americans five to one. Americans outpublish Chinese people many times over. As an aside, Swiss people outpublish Americans 8 to 1.
So, while skepticism is noble, when a country of 1/6 the people in the world has a retraction rate higher than everyone else put together, you need extraordinary data to decide that they are not in a mess. And “I don’t have data” is no such argument.
So in a discussion about research fraud, you're chastising me for wanting data you call important, putting complete trust in the data of a blog that you haven't seen, and posted random data you claim to have helped collect without giving me any reason to believe it's accurate.
Looking for retraction watch's numbers gave me a study that shows the US having the most retractions.[1] So again, if rates are what is important, you need data showing the rates.
The issue is as much a cultural one. I used to work with an editor of one of the worlds most prestigious chemistry journals, and she oft remarked how Chinese scientists didn't think accusations of plagiarism were sufficient grounds for rejection of a paper.
In some cultures, cheaters try to keep it secret from the people they care about, because ostracism might follow. In other cultures, successful cheating is praised.
To the degree science is a matter of writing academic papers, there is probably some truth to the assertion. To the degree experiment and the application of scientific discoveries matter more...well, Shenzhen.
There are two kind of science. One consists of incremental improvement research. Copying a master and then adding of additional perfection is the default method here.
This one usually holds little risk and is prefered by companys and western governments alike.
Then there are the great leaps, usually possible due to breakthroughs or other wild recombination of existing ideas. These are feared- for as they offer bright rewards at the end of the road- they contain unknown problems, as in sub-problems that need often a combination of further break-throughs and/or incremental research.
Fusion research is a great example here.
Some great leaps also turn into great very expensive wild goose chases.
Such risks make no buisness sense, but a central government can overcome the captialistic shortsigthedness - and attempt this research anyway and actually be better at it.
But if you can cheat (avoid risk) then cheat(avoid risk). Let others feed the crocodiles first - so chinese companys research will be as risk shy as western companys research.
I wonder how Einstein fits into the great leap narrative of science. I mean, Germany (or Switzerland) did not get the atomic bomb and no country whatsoever had it in the four decades following the miracle year of 1905. Then after 1945, the Soviets and the Chinese had it pretty quickly.
The Soviet Union obtained the technology through espionage against the United States and the UK. China's program was greatly accelerated with help from the Soviet Union. China's current program is based on espionage against the United States, dating back at least to the 1970s.
suppose that all of the world's scientific and engineering researchers migrated into a single new country, Researchistan, with plenty of research funding. imagine further that all of their results were published in public journals.
finally, imagine that the rest of the world's people, though not researchers themselves, had access to all of the research journals.
does that arrangement in and of itself determine which country or countries will have the highest per-capita GDP?
> does that arrangement in and of itself determine which country or countries will have the highest per-capita GDP?
Scientists and engineers, in my experience, cross-pollinate. As much as the dream of distance-less communication abounds, this cross-pollination exhibits geographic clustering. Defense research spending in Massachussetts and the Bay Area spawned Route 128 and the Silicon Valley, respectively.
The idea of a research-focused technocracy is something I often fantasize about as well.
The sad thing is, while most of the world remains the way it is, they WILL need a military to safeguard them, and sooner or later, whoever provides their protection will get to dictate what they research and that research's applications.
Maybe if such a establishment was founded on the Moon, or even Mars, and can grow their own food etc.?
This article is nationalistic propaganda. It basically admits that every country has the same problem [0], and the recent scandals can be explained in terms of China's sheer scale, and growing pains.
In the US, they just don't call it a scandal, they call it the "reproducibility crisis." But that crisis reflects a just barely more sophisticated response to the same skewed incentives.
Yes, you're partially right but the thing is the sheer scale and size of China's problem dwarfs everyone else's. China's problems with cheating & corruption has been around for centuries if not longer, and it's really ingrained into its core culture; Confucius and his movement came into existence as a way to fix it. It's a low trust society that relies on family clans ie no one else matters but your family. Confucius was right. The rule of law would fix a lot of this over time. The problem is that you're not going to get the rule of law without transparency and openness, especially when it comes to freedom of speech. XJ is singlehandedly doing all he can to reverse all the gains from DX.
Encouraging innovation in China is a much easier problem than this, yet both have the same pragmatic solution.
What aboutism is an attempt to draw a moral equivalence. The thrust of the article is that China's ambition to become a "science superpower" whatever that means is severely impeded by this fraud, which is not a moral question and does not stand up to comparison of the misaligned incentives and bad science in extant "science superpowers."
China attempts to be a scientific super power for its own benefit, not to win some moral pissing contest. If china is hurting itself in this endeavor via fraud, then that has nothing to do with the USA.
Agree completely with this post. Based on the number of publications and number of Chinese authors in leading ML conferences, the majority of comments in this thread are nonsense [1].
It would be even better to establish a global standard on peer review and adhere to it.
A first step would be to move to a preprint model and require full disclosure of data sets, turn in of source code, and pre-registration of clinical studies. In turn reviewers must be required to publish their reviews and sign them with their name.
This would help keeping the business honest on both sides of peer review.
Require? Who would be enforcing this standard? The law?
As of now, journals decide who gets to be published, and the scientific community (or in an indirect sense, the public) decides which journals get read.
So the scientific community has to come to a global consensus, or all countries must come to a consensus and enforce it legally (whereas we can't even agree that nukes are bad).
Once all that's done, we still need trust. Researchers can remove data selectively, use altered versions of published code, etc.
To say nothing of countries who would pretend to adopt the law without enforcing it, with or without malicious intent.
We need trust, and trust is built on a case-by-case basis, it requires judgment. We as a community simply need to be more critical with new research.
> the scientific community has to come to a global consensus, or all countries must come to a consensus and enforce it legally
The scientific community isn't homogenous. Some communities are better organized than others. This is visible in their varying quality and journals' openness (e.g. arXiv).
The communities with strong nexuses with industry, e.g. oncology, would stand to enforce reproducibility the best. A grand bargain whereby pharmaceutical companies (and others who would commercially benefit from more-reproducible research), or even just the NIH, include reasonable standards as part of their grant requirements would move the needle forward. It would also help us troubleshoot what works and what doesn't.
However, I don't think our first priority should be trust.
Our first priority should be public availability of data and reviews. With this information, we get reproducibility and accountability for wrongdoing. In the long run, this will be worth more than trust.
Not trying to say a little bit of cheating is fine but that's total number of retracted papers right? I can't seem to find a list that shows it as a percentage out of published papers for comparison with other countries. Is there one?
It's a problem, but given their pop, they can sustain more corruption and fraud than anyone else. They can sustain 4x our fraud and be even, given their production.
I think the NYT and others keep clawing at China simply because China has an agenda which diverges from the globalist vision of the NYT. They care for themselves and will do it by themselves by their own philosophy which happens to be less introspective. This means that while it can bring great value to Chinese, they may not feel like redistributing their largesse in any way with the rest of the world.
I don't think it works that way. Fraud in Chinese academia doesn't just mean that westerners can't trust their academics: it also means that their fellow countrymen can't trust each other's research.
If there's 4 times as much fraud in China, then good Chinese researchers have to sift through 4 times as much bullshit, and are much less likely to trust and expand upon any new research, which slows down progress.
If anything, I expect that the country the most hurt by Chinese research fraud is China itself.
Many Chinese feel like this. When the NYT was banned for exposing the wealth of...I think Wen Jiabao's family, many Chinese shrugged it off as common knowledge (all the senior leaders are corrupt, Xi didn't send his daughter to Harvard on just his official salary after all); that the NYT was just rubbing it in their face. At no point did the argument against the NYT go to false or fake data. WSJ, Bloomberg, etc...have all been banned on stories that the Chinese never tried to seriously refute. It was more about face than fact.
I think in the past that may have been true, but they are now pretty anti the current admin. If we evaluate on their rhetoric then we should be on the verge of war with Russia rather than N Korea.
You haven't noticed that USA is in constant war in many different parts of the world? You might be a Washington Post reader!
Many other nations are not in such a state of constant war, since their respective military-industrial complexes do not dictate acceptable public discourse in the way that ours does. It doesn't require a "conspiracy" as such. Reporters and pundits sing for their suppers, as it were, and they find that singing some tunes gets them on the right shows, the right "inside" access, etc. Singing other tunes leaves them on the outside looking in, with "insane" pacifists. This is how we can all be "sure" e.g. that Assad used chemical weapons against Syrians when not a shred of evidence ever existed for that.
> Many other nations are not in such a state of constant war, since their respective military-industrial complexes do not dictate acceptable public discourse in the way that ours does.
That seems like an oversimplification. I can also say that many countries around the world _are_ involved in multiple ongoing military conflicts just as the US is. You bring up Syria as though the US were the only other country involved...
But that's not the point I was making. My response was to the notion that the news and government were somehow masterminding the flow of information in order to prepare the population for specific wars. As though multiple parties were conspiring. Which seems a bit hard to swallow to me.
In addition to other countries like France, Russia, Iran, African Union, etc involved different ways in foreign affairs, some times, or often times those involvements are stabilizing. Sometimes they're very destabilizing.
> read up on NYT's Iraq War lies told on behalf of USG. This is how America works
TL; DR the New York Times unquestioningly published what the government told them, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction [1]. This reminds me of the faith Americans had in their government preceding the Vietnam War.
Saying this is "how America works," however, is a willful short-circuiting of cognitive faculties. It's how any trusting society works until it's burned. We got burned, again, and now the press is more critical of anything the government says.
I know a few reporters at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Catching the government (or anyone occupying a position of power) in a compromising lie is a prize they aggressively seek.
It seems like whenever articles critical of significant foreign governments come up on Hacker News, these sorts of comments materialize. Just because the American media is criticizing a country doesn't mean (a) the criticism is invalid, (b) it was directed by the U.S. government or (c) said organization isn't similarly critical of the American government. (It's still good to read multiple countries' newspapers, though. On the topic at hand, Der Spiegel and Le Temps have written extensively.)
The NYT could give a rat's ass about Taiwan and SEA politics when it does not dovetail into their worldview.
China is complicit in much of what you say, but the great majority of Chinese will take that bargain, no questions asked. When China looked a little different, the NYT sang a different tune --perhaps they thought China could be "westernized" and coopted into their vision, but as that has not come to fruition and China cares about China and little else, they are coming down on it --not because they care about Chinese people (Chinese overwhelmingly approve of their leadership) but because they want to promulgate their vision of the world.
What don't you understand about the _______ being evil? It has a globe spanning empire a secret ruling organisation. It imprisons democracy protestors. It vannishes its leadership critics. It floods the atmosphere with C02, and wages war for ressources. It acts like a crybaby whenever a dictator trys to wriggle out of its totalitarian rule by building a nuke. It acts like a bully against all of its neighbors. It gives its poor neighbors trade agreements and then takes foreign citizens rights when they actually live democracy.
It sends its data-fishermans around the world and buys up any meaningfull competition to silicon vally life. It floods the world with shoddy products and destroys their community, jobs, and well beings.
At least cheating allows to fullfill the diversity quota.
I have yet to see a single wholly positive article in western media about Chinese innovation. I feel that we on the west are plugging our ears and going nanananana, rather than facing up to the fact that we have a really competent new super power on our hands.
China is evil, they are exploiting 3rd world mineral reserves in the most unjust and environmentally destructive manner possible. Their democracy is even more of a joke than that of the US. But they aren't stupid or incompetent, and how well the west trusts their scientific results means nothing to nobody.
We should stop trying to convince ourselves that China is failing and start trying to understand what it means to have a non-democratic sci-fi dystopia in charge of the world and how we can escape that totalitarian fate.
Can you relate this concern back to the article, or is it orthogonal to the thread?
Abstract, orthogonal concerns are often easier to discuss than the particulars of the articles we're talking about. Anyone can have an opinion about the relative merits of "superpowers", whether or not they've read the article. So even when the root orthogonal comment is well-intentioned and informed, the subsequent comments may not be, and will end up crowding out informed discussion.
It's a frustrating recurring pattern on HN and one we'd do well to push back on. And I think all we have to do to accomplish that is to tie our abstract concerns back in some way to the actual article.
I agree with you that HN is often getting distracted by the endless cycle of "debate about nothing" in which people debate things in abstract terms pushing in abstract directions. And I see now, that my post has generated more debate about nothing and very little usefull discussion.
So to the point. I don't think that international credibility is a metric that means much to China. They have never sought it. They have had a quality problem for a very long time and done nothing to improve their image in manufacturing. However, all would agree that they have become a manufacturing powerhouse. This is because it matters more that they can deliver a good to the hands of consumers than what the consumers think of the manufacturer. If they invent a way to instantaneously communicate over long distances [1] or to make meta-materials with surprising properties [2] , they can exploit these results. Whether "the West" beleives those results or not is probably not of much interest to them. Indeed, it might be in China's interest that we don't beleive in Chinese science. Perhaps, China will become a magician to us, a box which produces goods which we do not understand. An alien civlization. Would that not be in their interest? They already do medical research which the west does not have the stomach to discuss. Genetic research on live subjects and fetuses. We don't even have a framework for replicating that research and medical students in "the West" do not learn from the results. But someday rich people will fly to China and beg for their magical cures. "Oh yes. Mr. Jobs, we have nanobots that can cure your cancer. Just give us a stake in Apple." And we won't even understand the medicine, we won't consider it to be real science. We'll call it "Eastern medicine". But it will work. And people will pay their life savings for it.
I think that the NYT is writing to an audience what the audience wants to hear. Their headline is tabloidesque, which is odd for The Times which prides itself with measured professionality. And their reasons for publishing this article seem to have more to do with my overall claim than actual newsworthiness.
It also got far fewer upvotes. It was almost certainly TLDRed by half the people who scrolled passed it. It lost thousands of readers in the time it took to write (it took ten times longer to write than the origonal comment). And since it doesn't contain an abstract opinion that people will upvote simply because they agree, had I posted it to the article directly, it would almost certainly appear near the bottom of the page.
I have a feeling this upvote system might need some work.
Thank you. I am often disappointed in links posted here only to find the top comment thread goes off on some related point leaving actual discussions about the link somewhere out of scroll range.
I feel like I'm contributing to this problem right now.
I totally agree with the broader point. I recently traveled to China for the first time, and was amazed by how far out of line my preconceived notions were. I think it's a mental block that keeps the West from learning from Chinese innovation.
That said, Chinese academia has a massive credibility problem for a good reason. I know a PhD working in materials science and organic chemistry, and after being burned multiple times by unreproducible papers that PhD doesn't even bother to spend time trying out methods reported by Chinese researchers. Yes, this is anecdotal but it correlates strongly with the wider reporting on the issue. I'm sure there are many good researchers in China - part of the problem is that their work won't be disseminated because it will be written off.
However when public hospitals actually have a TCM department, it's hard to take them very seriously, at least in medical science. Actual medical science is referred to as "Western" medicine. Zuo Yue Zi (坐月子) -- the list of rules Chinese women must follow after giving birth, for example, is about the most absurd "medical" practice I've ever witnessed. Yet there are highly educated Chinese people that actually believe that stuff.
I lived in China for over 3 years, in Korea a few years prior to that, and while the culture has a rich history and it's a fascinating and generally friendly place, we're talking about people who are often one generation from living like it is still the 18th century. A place where black rhino horn has medicinal properties despite chemically being identical to my toenails and eating dog imparts sexual prowess, especially when the dog is beaten to death. These aren't niche beliefs, these are pretty mainstream attitudes, though it's definitely changing with the younger crowd.
The Cultural Revolution certainly didn't help -- essentially created a generation of people fearful of too much independent thinking. In 1965, there were over 400 technical journals in China. In 1969 -- 20.
You also have the very real problem of the government setting research agendas. It's not far from Lysenkoism. In fact, Lysenko contributed substantially to the 1959-61 famine that killed 30 million Chinese.
Chinese research, in my experience, has rarely been field-leading. It's generally derivative, rarely novel -- or at least if it is novel, it is rarely repeatable. There are a few exceptions, but compared to US, Korea, British, Japanese, German innovation, they aren't even close.
Thus is very domain dependant. Methods papers in organic synthesis _need_ to be reproducible because it is likely others will use the published results when performing synthesis. This is very different than a field like behavioral psychology.
I think it is possible that the Chinese actually want to be disregarded. They know that intelectual property rights laws are useless in the international arena, but what if they could inovate and have their inventions not copied because no one beleived them?
Despite IP laws being useless in the international arena it's not too far fetched that even the Chinese, despite being so large, are aided by the whole global scientific community reviewing and replicating their results. It makes progress all that much faster and easier.
I think China will be quite good at applying existing methods or creating derivative works (despite the frauds) and ultimately that's what matters. Most applications in AI rely on simple systems, only a small part of them require cutting edge architectures or ideas.
My point was, that people are always saying the same thing about China and AI. "They might have solved this problem, but they will never be truely creative."
I prefer the chart of Japan's GDP. Didn't you hear? They conquered the world, their influence was undeniable. Their competence was feared across the globe.
By 1988 Japan had surpassed the US in GDP per capita. The US is now ~53% ahead. That's no discredit to Japan, they're a very advanced industrial nation. The US simply happens to be the greatest economic train in history, one that has rarely stopped expanding in the last two centuries.
Maybe China will manage a century of mostly unbroken growth. We'll see what they do now that the easy growth - filling in their vast economic slack and correcting particularly extreme inefficiencies - has long since ended (which is why they took on tens of trillions in debt post 2007).
I have been following HN threads related to China and working with customers/partners there, and, in general, I find black and white ideas. Corruption and non-democracy are big issues there but Americans mainly should learn more about how to compete with them because there are many many smart bussinesmen and they work much harder than Americans.
"I feel that we on the west are plugging our ears and going nanananana"
About what? Nobody's shouting down actual Chinese achievements in science. We've learned from experience to be dubious about any scientific announcements out of China, because so very frequently, they turn out to be bogus. They make the western reproducibility crisis look like a few un-dotted i' s in comparison. I can't think of the last discovery out of China I heard of that didn't get retracted or turn out to be fraudulent.
Right now, science is not a field I'm even slightly afraid of China taking a lead on, any time soon. Maybe in a generation or two, after a lot of reform. (Space, now, maybe. You can use decades-old, already-done science to get into space. You just need money.)
Your comment doesn't address the issues presented in the article. What the article describes isn't racist westerners dismissing good science because of racism or fear. It describes fraud and retractions because other scientists cannot reproduce the results.
Seriously I'm all for criticizing USA since they're onto a weird path and the glow of the 20th century is starting to fade. But after reading 60% of the article, I didn't even bother finishing it. It's such a sad bag of tricks to get money on publication for no reason that it casts doubts on everything China's research is outputing. Not long ago I read some medical papers about cancer for real purpose, I now wonder if I was fooled by some bad claims..
My POV about China, there are two points:
- a history of low grade copy: this is not how you discover or get attention/credibility
- a booming growth: as the article says, they "want" to become a science leading country, but you can't rush it, skipping steps now may cause implosion later on (as the amount of paper retraction shows).
Other than that, nobody says China or any country cannot do science, but it needs proper dedication to the method and patience...
China isn't failing, it's just succeeding in a different direction. They're extremely good at what they do, however, "innovation" isn't what they care about. They're stockpiling. They're preparing for a difficult world future. They are the international equivalent of "preppers."
I can only imagine that the Chinese middle-class feel the same way towards the USA.
>Their democracy is even more of a joke than that of the US
I never understood the idea that democracy was a superior form of government. If, in the future, China (or some other nation) becomes the next world power, with superior scientific innovation, larger industry, higher standards of living, etc, will you still prefer Democracy to what they have?
It seems incredibly naive to assume the present state of the west is somehow the final and ultimate condition we can hope to obtain. If this is as good as it gets, I think I want to move to China.
> I can only imagine that the Chinese middle-class feel the same way towards the USA.
Well, there's plenty of middle class in the US who think the Republican party and Trump is evil, so that sounds plausible.
> I never understood the idea that democracy was a superior form of government.
Winston Churchill quotes might be cliche, but still warranted. Democracy is superior in the sense that it provides a release valve for replacing incompetent or malicious government less catastrophic than peasant uprisings or Coup d'états.
Fortunately, it's still an open question whether repressive regimes can become superior. Or whether repressive regimes will continue their repression as the population thrives.
> I think I want to move to China.
Voting with your feet -- What a very democratic idea!
> Voting with your feet -- What a very democratic idea!
GP might want to consider that affluent Chinese (i.e. those with the means to) are trying leave China at record rates before he gets on a boat.
> I never understood the idea that democracy was a superior form of government. If, in the future, China (or some other nation) becomes the next world power, with superior scientific innovation, larger industry, higher standards of living, etc, will you still prefer Democracy to what they have?
Well of course I would. Would you rather be married to a rich man who beats you?
> It seems incredibly naive to assume the present state of the west is somehow the final and ultimate condition we can hope to obtain. If this is as good as it gets, I think I want to move to China.
I am extremely sceptical of American "democracy" but I see Chinese totalitarianism to be a step in the wrong direction.
In China the government will toss you in jail if you complain about pollution. There us no freedom of religion. State sponsored organ legging was widespread until recently. Who cares about an extra few thousand compared to freedom?
China is a democracy. Almost all countries are. They even have fair elections I beleive. However, they do not have OPEN and fair elections. Only people who have been approved by the communist party can ever appear on a ballot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China
And to be sure, the same thing happens in the US: try running for prosecutor without a police union endorsement. It's not codified like it is in China, but it has the same effect.
and even if it did mean anything, it wouldn't mean anything to most US residents -- except an opportunity to join the world's largest military machine.
Please, nytimes, stop caring so much about China, because you don't. Let them cheat, and let them rot. The truth is China doesn't need the west as much as the west needs China. The west really wants to see China fail. But, Whatever happening in China is actually working. Even something is not working initially, Chinese are smart enough to figure them out themselves. Too bad the west can not force opium into China anymore.
Whatever changes they plan to enact to stop this cheating will take several generations to eradicate.
South China Morning Post has an article on academic cheating:
http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1974986/...