4 ms·

Going to use a throwaway here as I'm afraid of professional repercussions, despite being from the "land of the free." Reading the comments here are just so fun

Going to use a throwaway here as I'm afraid of professional repercussions, despite being from the "land of the free." Reading the comments here are just so funny. Why is it whenever a Chinese person does something, or rather an "Asian person," it must be attributed to their culture? Do Chinese people not have personal traits? Could this guy just not be greedy? There are 1.4 billion Chinese people. The ones that come to the US are over achievers. It should not be surprising in a group of over achievers to have a high percentage of greedy and opportunistic people. Recently Ron Rockwell Hansen was arrested for spying for China. I wonder what type of cultural norms caused him to do so?

throwaway234970 8y ago
Also posting as a throwaway for similar reasons. This comment brings up a valid point. When I was working in academia, a lab from $large_and_famous_west_coast_university copied some code from a set of open source scripts from another lab in my field on Github, erased the Git history, and then created a new repo with a footnote in passing that they had been "inspired" by the original scripts- pretty much a textbook case of plagiarism. No one involved was Chinese (most were actually white male Europeans). In general, high profile researchers take incredibly morally repugnant / unethical actions to get ahead.
- philipodonnell 8y ago
  Not using a throwaway but isn't there a difference between forking a public Github repository without attribution and stealing industrial secrets encrypted into photographs?
  - throwaway234970 8y ago
    Yes, there is a difference, but that's because academia is not industry. Since academia's main goal is to publicize findings rather than keep them secret, plagiarism is the academic analogue of stealing "industrial secrets" and then giving them to a competitor (i.e., increasing the prestige of a rival university). The overall effect is comparable, even if the currency (reputation instead of money) is different, and the decision to steal is still rooted in the same sense of ethics / morality.
    - throwaway234970 8y ago
      As an addendum, it should be noted that reputation and money are not unrelated, and that when stealing ideas from other labs and taking credit for them, scientists are effectively putting on a false show for funders that can increase their ability to get grants.
- rellui 8y ago
  It's "Open source". That's the whole point of open sourcing code. As long as the lab attached the license provided it's good. This is completely different than copying code from private internal repositories.
  - throwaway234970 8y ago
    You're missing the point / haven't read my other comment- in the context of academia plagiarism amounts to stealing. Sure, there's nothing that's legally preventing you from copying code and passing it off as your own so long as the license is preserved, but in academia this has political and sometimes economic ramifications.
kodablah 8y ago
> Reading the comments here are just so funny. Why is it whenever a Chinese person does something, or rather an "Asian person," it must be attributed to their culture? I am not seeing this as a common attitude in the comments. Save for a few, I see those blaming a government and its operatives. I think the oh-woe-is-us-stop-with-the-stereotypes is just a convenient way to detract from the story or recognize actions of a nation's government as a whole. There's not really any stereotyping going on of any real size, please don't try so to make victims. As an exercise while you're reading these funny comments, do this: count the comments that are saying this isn't cultural and it's not about the Chinese as a culture, and compare it to the count of people that are saying this is cultural as opposed to related to the nation's government.

throwaway234970 8y ago

Also posting as a throwaway for similar reasons. This comment brings up a valid point. When I was working in academia, a lab from $large_and_famous_west_coast_university copied some code from a set of open source scripts from another lab in my field on Github, erased the Git history, and then created a new repo with a footnote in passing that they had been "inspired" by the original scripts- pretty much a textbook case of plagiarism. No one involved was Chinese (most were actually white male Europeans). In general, high profile researchers take incredibly morally repugnant / unethical actions to get ahead.

philipodonnell 8y ago
Not using a throwaway but isn't there a difference between forking a public Github repository without attribution and stealing industrial secrets encrypted into photographs?
- throwaway234970 8y ago
  Yes, there is a difference, but that's because academia is not industry. Since academia's main goal is to publicize findings rather than keep them secret, plagiarism is the academic analogue of stealing "industrial secrets" and then giving them to a competitor (i.e., increasing the prestige of a rival university). The overall effect is comparable, even if the currency (reputation instead of money) is different, and the decision to steal is still rooted in the same sense of ethics / morality.
  - throwaway234970 8y ago
    As an addendum, it should be noted that reputation and money are not unrelated, and that when stealing ideas from other labs and taking credit for them, scientists are effectively putting on a false show for funders that can increase their ability to get grants.
rellui 8y ago
It's "Open source". That's the whole point of open sourcing code. As long as the lab attached the license provided it's good. This is completely different than copying code from private internal repositories.
- throwaway234970 8y ago
  You're missing the point / haven't read my other comment- in the context of academia plagiarism amounts to stealing. Sure, there's nothing that's legally preventing you from copying code and passing it off as your own so long as the license is preserved, but in academia this has political and sometimes economic ramifications.

kodablah 8y ago

> Reading the comments here are just so funny. Why is it whenever a Chinese person does something, or rather an "Asian person," it must be attributed to their culture? I am not seeing this as a common attitude in the comments. Save for a few, I see those blaming a government and its operatives. I think the oh-woe-is-us-stop-with-the-stereotypes is just a convenient way to detract from the story or recognize actions of a nation's government as a whole. There's not really any stereotyping going on of any real size, please don't try so to make victims. As an exercise while you're reading these funny comments, do this: count the comments that are saying this isn't cultural and it's not about the Chinese as a culture, and compare it to the count of people that are saying this is cultural as opposed to related to the nation's government.