
A Revolutionary Discovery in China - lermontov
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/revolutionary-discovery-in-china/
======
simula67
The revolutionary discovery is some ancient manuscripts. These manuscripts
show that early Chinese philosophers may have argued that rulers should
abdicate the throne in favor of the the one with most merit. Rulers should not
pass the title to their children.

~~~
danielhunt
I tend to read comments, and not articles - as a result, sometimes I wish that
HN had a special `TLDR` subsection, directly below a posting, that used vote-
based mechanics for the selection of a post like this.

Kudos to you for such a concise summary :thumbsup:

~~~
alexandrerond
Part of the problem is that the title of this article (and many others these
days) is pure clickbait. :/

~~~
jacobolus
The NY Review of Books is still primarily designed as a print publication. The
title here shows up on their table of contents page, so you might better
describe it as “flipbait”. Notice that on the NYRB ToC page, the title of the
book under review – _Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government
in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts_ – is also printed, giving additional
context to the review.

There’s nothing especially “these days” about magazine essay titles with puns
in them. Catching a reader’s eye and enticing him to start reading is the
title’s primary purpose. This isn’t a newspaper story, where the reader might
be trying to get a clear idea of the day’s main events just by skimming the
headlines.

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oska
Relevant wikipedia articles:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guodian_Chu_Slips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guodian_Chu_Slips)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Allan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Allan)

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eggoa
"Then he outlined some of the new texts soon to be released: a chart for
multiplying and dividing complex numbers"

I'm assuming that this a journalist using the word "complex" in a vaguer sense
than a mathematician would. But that would be a pretty stunning thing to find
on 2500 year-old strips of bamboo.

~~~
nabla9
It's decimal multiplication table. More details in this nature article:
[http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-times-table-hidden-in-
chi...](http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-times-table-hidden-in-chinese-
bamboo-strips-1.14482)

~~~
jerryhuang100
further illustrated here in Chinese:

[http://www.wikiwand.com/zh-
mo/%E7%AE%97%E8%A1%A8_%28%E6%B8%8...](http://www.wikiwand.com/zh-
mo/%E7%AE%97%E8%A1%A8_%28%E6%B8%85%E5%8D%8E%E7%AE%80%29)

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calibraxis
The Mohists seem very appropriate to HN:

 _" The Mohists, egalitarian rationalists whose social base seems to have been
urban artisans, not only were philosophically opposed to war and militarism,
but organized battalions of military engineers who would actively discourage
conflicts by volunteering to fight in any war against the side of the
aggressor."_

— David Graeber, "Debt"

(Well, an alternate-universe HN where participants commonly considered "social
justice warrior" as an ancient tradition to aspire to, rather than a
pejorative.)

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debacle
The JavaScript on this page absolutely destroyed my browser for close to a
minute. Content creators take note - this is why many people choose to block
unnecessary JavaScript and/or ads.

~~~
restalis
I don't they give a damn, but... this only encourages me about a business idea
I thought about a while ago - a subscription-based service to pre-render
JavaScript-laden content!

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ww520
He mentioned the discovering professor doing the presentation avoided making
grand conclusion. I think the presenter not making preconceived conclusion is
just basic academic discipline and is a good thing. His job is to decipher the
text and present them as raw as possible to the others. The debate,
conclusion, and implication should be drawn by the others.

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jxy
Large amount of texts written 2500 years ago is quite impressive, considering
they were written on bamboo strips. It proves that most of the old texts we
see today were actually written down instead of passing down orally. I can't
imagine how they transported their "text books" then. I feel our paper books
are too weighty.

~~~
aandrieiev
Chinese characters allow to "compress" information, at least compared to
alphabetic writing systems. That made them relatively transportable.

A good example of how a library might look like at that time can be found here
-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3cnH5-nMbM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3cnH5-nMbM)
Those rolls of slips around characters are books.

