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Scientific progress (reluctantly) happens when the established is criticized, allowing new ideas to form. How can a nation which censors the internet in order
by runeks 9y ago
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.
- 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.
- runeks 9y agoIt’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.