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The CCP really did a number on perception here with their thousand talents program and the naked espionage efforts. It is not right if this is racial profiling

The CCP really did a number on perception here with their thousand talents program and the naked espionage efforts. It is not right if this is racial profiling but the blame for it is on the CCP. The article itself mentions that the numbers affected are a fraction of total Chinese students so I’m inclined to believe it is not racial in nature. It is more a response to Chinese pillaging of Western intellectual property, explicitly in the service of overtaking/dethroning the West. Another example of what we as open society citizens must deal with, how do we tackle such issues without sacrificing our values.

ndriscoll 2y ago
> how do we tackle such issues without sacrificing our values. Recognize that "intellectual property" and restriction of knowledge is incompatible with our values. Any publicly funded research should be part of the public domain and published to the world online. Publicly funded universities should be required to post lectures and assignments to the world online. Shorten patents and copyright. Eliminate math/software patents. Eliminate trade secret protections. If a company wants protection, it can get a patent and publish the information. The ideal citizen in a liberal democratic society is an infinitely knowledgeable one. They can make better voting decisions and are more able to start their own businesses as they understand how the world and their specific industry works.
- skulk 2y ago
  I'll voice the obvious objection to this: what happens if you share everything you do, then someone else stands on your shoulders and invents a world-changing technology, then refuses to share it back and completely ignores your patent claims? Now they dominate you economically and perhaps militarily.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    If your own engineers and scientists already have access to almost all knowledge in their field, it seems unlikely that an invention would be so novel that they couldn't reverse engineer it. You could have military engineering kept to a more select group, but independent reinvention by researchers or commercial entities should void any secrecy. Otherwise you get silliness like imported Chinese commodity thermal cameras being better than American ones because of ITAR. Or shutting down hobbyist radar projects; if a hobbyist can do it for fun, adversarial military engineers probably can too. The other defense of course is to base our economy on making things. Pour more resources into manufacturing, industrial automation, and standardization so that when a new technology comes along, we can scale it up. An economy based on knowledge restriction is precarious exactly because others can simply ignore our restrictions. We're hamstringing ourselves and it's an illiberal policy.

ndriscoll 2y ago

> how do we tackle such issues without sacrificing our values. Recognize that "intellectual property" and restriction of knowledge is incompatible with our values. Any publicly funded research should be part of the public domain and published to the world online. Publicly funded universities should be required to post lectures and assignments to the world online. Shorten patents and copyright. Eliminate math/software patents. Eliminate trade secret protections. If a company wants protection, it can get a patent and publish the information. The ideal citizen in a liberal democratic society is an infinitely knowledgeable one. They can make better voting decisions and are more able to start their own businesses as they understand how the world and their specific industry works.

skulk 2y ago
I'll voice the obvious objection to this: what happens if you share everything you do, then someone else stands on your shoulders and invents a world-changing technology, then refuses to share it back and completely ignores your patent claims? Now they dominate you economically and perhaps militarily.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  If your own engineers and scientists already have access to almost all knowledge in their field, it seems unlikely that an invention would be so novel that they couldn't reverse engineer it. You could have military engineering kept to a more select group, but independent reinvention by researchers or commercial entities should void any secrecy. Otherwise you get silliness like imported Chinese commodity thermal cameras being better than American ones because of ITAR. Or shutting down hobbyist radar projects; if a hobbyist can do it for fun, adversarial military engineers probably can too. The other defense of course is to base our economy on making things. Pour more resources into manufacturing, industrial automation, and standardization so that when a new technology comes along, we can scale it up. An economy based on knowledge restriction is precarious exactly because others can simply ignore our restrictions. We're hamstringing ourselves and it's an illiberal policy.