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Curious that this is a collaboration with a Chinese university giving the ongoing US-China tech war.

adrian_b 3y ago
If you cannot beat them, you must join them. In my opinion, the theory that I have seen expressed very frequently by US citizens on various Internet forums, during the last few years, that the Chinese progress mainly by copying US and Western technology, is dangerously delusional. That theory was true a couple of decades ago, but it has stopped being true many years ago. In the last few years, I have been frequently surprised when searching research papers about certain subjects to find many more innovative research papers coming from China than from USA. They seem to have been much more willing to try to follow lines of research for which there is a high risk that they will not be successful. This policy results in a large number of useless research papers, but also in a decent number of advances over the state of the art. Recent research in USA, at least what is published, seems very risk-averse, with only a few notorious counter examples, e.g. how SpaceX works.
- obscurette 3y ago
  It's not this or another. In autocratic systems you use whatever methods you can – you steal, you copy, you cheat, you buy, you do your own research and you invent. And it's not so much about policy, but about money. Soviets for example did all of that as well, but eventually run out of money for various reasons.
dekhn 3y ago
Scientists frequently take a global view and work with people who are in countries that are ostensibly competitors or enemies. The collaborators here work at Tianjin University- a very well regarded engineering university which likely has some of the world's best material scientists. To me the closest analog would be England and Germany between 1800 and 1920. The two countries were intense competitors in science/technology/engineering, and it was typically rare for scientists in one country to be fully aware of what was going on in the other. However, the Dutch, who are between the two countries, played a key role in identifying and translating important scientific ideas, such as advanced microscope technology and the underpinnings of quantum mechanics. In short, many scientists are globalists, while the nations that house them are less so.

If you cannot beat them, you must join them. In my opinion, the theory that I have seen expressed very frequently by US citizens on various Internet forums, during the last few years, that the Chinese progress mainly by copying US and Western technology, is dangerously delusional. That theory was true a couple of decades ago, but it has stopped being true many years ago. In the last few years, I have been frequently surprised when searching research papers about certain subjects to find many more innovative research papers coming from China than from USA. They seem to have been much more willing to try to follow lines of research for which there is a high risk that they will not be successful. This policy results in a large number of useless research papers, but also in a decent number of advances over the state of the art. Recent research in USA, at least what is published, seems very risk-averse, with only a few notorious counter examples, e.g. how SpaceX works.

obscurette 3y ago
It's not this or another. In autocratic systems you use whatever methods you can – you steal, you copy, you cheat, you buy, you do your own research and you invent. And it's not so much about policy, but about money. Soviets for example did all of that as well, but eventually run out of money for various reasons.

dekhn 3y ago

Scientists frequently take a global view and work with people who are in countries that are ostensibly competitors or enemies. The collaborators here work at Tianjin University- a very well regarded engineering university which likely has some of the world's best material scientists. To me the closest analog would be England and Germany between 1800 and 1920. The two countries were intense competitors in science/technology/engineering, and it was typically rare for scientists in one country to be fully aware of what was going on in the other. However, the Dutch, who are between the two countries, played a key role in identifying and translating important scientific ideas, such as advanced microscope technology and the underpinnings of quantum mechanics. In short, many scientists are globalists, while the nations that house them are less so.