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Fraud Scandals Sap China’s Dream of Becoming a Science Superpower
- timthelion 9y agoI 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.
- rhizome 9y agoThe US is so far down a hole that its identity now rests on denigrating others, casting itself as the big crab in the bucket.
- sampo 9y agoThese days, Americans are busy denigrating other Americans. I wonder how much attention they have left for denigrating China.
- lstyls 9y agoI 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.
- timthelion 9y agoI 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?
- pishpash 9y ago"Keep a low profile and cultivate thyself quietly."
- visarga 9y agoI 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.
- timthelion 9y agoWait, are you talking about China or AI?
- visarga 9y agoTalking about benefitting and application of AI in China.
- timthelion 9y agoMy 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."
- hetspookjee 9y agoI do not understand how that is, even remotely, a plausible explanation for the fraud scandals. It makes me think of this comic http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-was-only-pretending-to-be-retarded http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-was-only-pretending-to-be-re... 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.
- tptacek 9y agoCan 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.
- diminish 9y ago"orthogonal" in this case is too strong for GP comment on OP.
- timthelion 9y agoAre you saying that my comment was "not even orthogonal"? I've ready your post several times and still don't understand what you meant.
- diminish 9y agoSorry, what I mean is that your comment is quite in the right place. "Orthogonal" isn't true.
- timthelion 9y agoI 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. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/teleportation-china-earth-orbit-quantum-internet-2017-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/teleportation-china-earth-orb... [2] https://phys.org/news/2009-10-chinese-scientists-metamaterial-black-hole.html https://phys.org/news/2009-10-chinese-scientists-metamateria...
- wslh 9y agoI 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.
- rhizome 9y agoIt takes attention off the corruption and non-democracy we see in the US.
- sidlls 9y agoYour 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.
- lstyls 9y agoI think what OP means isn't racism, but that only negative issues get attention.
- agumonkey 9y agoSeriously 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...
- pavanred 9y agoWhat does being "in charge of the world" mean anyway?
- HillaryBriss 9y agoit doesn't mean anything. 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Afforess 9y ago>China is evil 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.
- timthelion 9y ago> 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.
- HillaryBriss 9y agofreedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
- jldugger 9y ago> 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!
- taway_1212 9y ago> Their democracy is even more of a joke than that of the US. What democracy?
- timthelion 9y agoChina 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China
- rhizome 9y agoAnd 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- briandear 9y agoChina 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." This Zak Slayback article (which itself is summarizing Peter Thiel) explains it exceptionally well. https://zakslayback.com/2014/10/07/pessimism-optimism-definite-indefinite-societies-according-to-peter-thiel/ https://zakslayback.com/2014/10/07/pessimism-optimism-defini... >Their democracy is even more of a joke than that of the US. Really? You're actually going to make that statement? Calling China a democracy is beyond ridiculous.
- Semiapies 9y ago"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.)
- stretchwithme 9y agoPart of fixing the problems is to admit them.
- sddfd 9y agoIt 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.
- gboudrias 9y agoRequire? 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.
- sddfd 9y agoI agree with your general argument. 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.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> 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.
- brudgers 9y agoTo 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.
- louithethrid 9y agoThere 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.
- brudgers 9y agoI 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.
- shakethemonkey 9y agoThe 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.
- ehsankia 9y agoI 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw
- robotresearcher 9y agoThe 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.
- boomboomsubban 9y agoThe frequency is very important. Where is any evidence that the Chinese have a higher rate?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- robotresearcher 9y agoFrom the fine article that we are discussing: “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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 9y agoNumber of faked papers isn't a frequency.
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- godzillabrennus 9y agoThe solution to this is creating the right kind of framework for reproducible research...
- mc32 9y agoIt'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.
- hugecynic 9y agoa major component of the nytimes' function is to align the american populace against any country the US may eventually go to war with. if you just assume that you're being conditioned for war, everything makes a lot more sense.
- mc32 9y agoI 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.
- wybiral 9y agoReally? So exactly who is deciding where the US goes to war with? And who pulls the strings to control the media to align the people? It seems like that would be quite a conspiracy if it were true...
- dilemma 9y agoAnd it's happened before - read up on NYT's Iraq War lies told on behalf of USG. This is how America works.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> 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.) [1] http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/ http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/
- HillaryBriss 9y agosuppose 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?
- Razengan 9y agoThe 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.?
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> 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.
- Jerry2 9y agoI 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: http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1974986/why-do-chinese-students-think-its-ok-cheat http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1974986/...
- timthelion 9y agoI 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.
- userbinator 9y agoI 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. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
- cgb223 9y agoKind of related: One of my roommates in college was from China. 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
- uji 9y agoI 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 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.
- ams6110 9y agoJudging 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.
- raverbashing 9y agoFunny, you would think that the exam vendors would be interested in curbing that, but it seems their concern is not that big
- AlexCoventry 9y agoThis 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. [0] http://making-of-a-fly.me/files/pdf/lt_2011_02_24_31.pdf http://making-of-a-fly.me/files/pdf/lt_2011_02_24_31.pdf
- chaostheory 9y agoYes, 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.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoJust because nothing is black or white, but some shade of grey, doesn't mean all the shades of grey are equivalent. Also, isn't this just a what aboutism anyways?
- AlexCoventry 9y agoWhat 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."
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- alistproducer2 9y agoMy propaganda alarm is going off pretty loudly with this article.
- seanlinmt 9y agoNot 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?
- longcheng 9y agoPlease, 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.
- rdtsc 9y agoCheating 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").
- daveguy 9y agoRegarding 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?
- rdtsc 9y ago> 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.
- runeks 9y agoScientific 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.
- noj78 9y agoI 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.
- microcolonel 9y agoSouth 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.