In the end be it democracy or totalitarianism there's always a small elite controlling discourse. And I'm starting to think china's is managing their country better than ours
The promise was that we would bring democracy to China. I think the opposite happened to a large extent. It's like doing business with the cartel, you're bound to get corrupted.
Even by official Chinese numbers ~10 million is a pretty low estimate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward Wikipedia has it as "between 15 and 55 million" deaths just to the Great Leap Forward alone.
Yes, the transition to modernity was almost as much of a shock for China as it was for the west. Nonetheless, the net effect is raising about 800 million people out of poverty in a little over a generation, an achievement that has no historical precedent.
>Nonetheless, the net effect is raising about 800 million people out of poverty in a little over a generation, an achievement that has no historical precedent.
Taiwan, Singapore and Korea started from around the same starting point as China after World War Two, and all became developed countries much faster (compare their GDP per capita now to China's). You could say "their populations aren't as big as China", but in that case wouldn't the ideal solution have been to split China up into a bunch of smaller countries that could grow just as fast as Korea etc?
There's no theoretical reason a political region should develop slower if the population is larger, if anything economic theory suggests the opposite (a common argument for why America's GDP is higher than Europe's is that it has a larger homogenous internal market). So China's size can't be used as an excuse for its slower development.
China didn't really attempt to start the process of increasing until the late 70s to early 80s. Their cultural revolution was focused on rooting out hidden vestiges of the old power structures before attempting to modernize. Since that point their growth rate has been quicker, they just got started later.
What? The highest points on that graph are Chinese. And there are similar Chinese bursts to the Korean one you're talking about, followed by China sustaining higher growth.
The highest single point is China, followed by a very low point the following year. If you average the growth rate over 3-5 year period their maximum rates are similar.
Well, the highest four points on the graph are Chinese. Yes you can cherry pick a three year period that makes Korea look good, but you can do the same with China.
You reject population as a factor in modernization (along with, apparently, initial development level, initial education level, initial infrastructure, etc.) and you offer instead... longitude? Why are you comparing China to Singapore?
China developed more slowly than its neighbors, unsurprising given the communist party’s crushing of free communication and enterprise and the killing of tens of millions of people. You’ve gotta be playing really dumb to pretend there’s anything complicated about that.
"Neighbors"? Singapore is 2000km from the closest part of China! I'm not "playing" dumb; in this entire thread you have given us no reason to expect Singapore and China to have similar modernization performance. Less charitable people than myself might suspect that your personal reason is one you can't mention in polite company.
>"Neighbors"? Singapore is 2000km from the closest part of China! I'm not "playing" dumb; in this entire thread you have given us no reason to expect Singapore and China to have similar modernization performance.
Sorry, what does relevance geographic proximity have to economic growth? The point is that those countries all have similar cultural and racial backgrounds to China, yet developed much faster.
Obviously, relative proximity has very little to do with economic growth. No one ITT ever mentioned any other unifying factor, so I was being charitable by suggesting it. You seem less sophisticated than 'woah, in that you've openly stated the racial assumption that 'woah left unsaid.
Are you seriously calling people racist for comparing China with the islands and peninsulas surrounding it? Is it racist to compare Germany with England?
If you invoked race as an explanation for e.g. why South Korea and Taiwan had similar modernization experiences, that would be weird but maybe not obviously wrong. Among the dozens of other similarities between these two nations, race as perceived by white Americans is one similarity. It's not the most salient similarity to reasonable people, but there's no inherent contradiction involved.
That's not what's going on ITT. China has had a different modernization experience from the other nations discussed above, which is entirely understandable given their very different histories, assets, infrastructures, populations, demographics, educations, etc. Your racism is that you ignore all those obvious differences in favor of one trivial, contingent aspect in which to an ineducable white American they might seem similar.
In an effort to silence legitimate criticism of a totalitarian regime, you are making the assertion that comparing a country to its neighbors is racist. Amazing.
Dude this thread is buried under several flagged posts. No one is reading this. No one will care about racism here. The things we're saying won't silence anyone.
However, you could still learn something. When you compare two different groups of people, be sure to have something besides "they have the same skin color" to say when someone asks the obvious follow-up question.
Huh? China literally slowed its pace of development intentionally so they didn’t kill millions more. They learned that the Great Leap Forward was too fast so they slowed it down and made it a multi-decade project. Interior China was largely subsistence farming 50 years ago and now boasts some of the largest cities in the world. They have industrialized incredibly quickly given the scale of the challenge. You can’t bootstrap enough industry to modernize 1.6 billion people overnight; it takes decades to build.
They haven’t gone faster because a country like Singapore can buy enough industrial output from Japan or the US to bootstrap their industry. Nobody has enough spare capacity to build at the scale of China, so the Chinese had to cultivate industry over a period of decades. Given that most of the worlds manufacturing is done there now, I’d say they’ve been quite successful.
So what we are saying is that the dropping of socialism and adoption of capitalism lifted 800 million people out of poverty in a generation? I don't think that's a bad review of capitalism at all.
Yeah, that’s what happens when you try to undo 200 years of colonial rule. It’s actually a surprisingly low number as a percentage of population when compared to Russia or Eastern Europe.
That's ridiculous. Most of the deaths were due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward; how could any part of that be justified as "undoing 200 years of colonial rule"? That wasn't even a justification used by the Commmunist Party at the time.
Well, when the youth wing of Lumumbians started practicing a nutritionary democracy (that is, murdered and had a nurse from the West for dinner) this was exactly the justification used by the socialists. "They are undoing the colonial rule", -- they said. That's even more ridiculous and yet they find this theory convincing. So, I don't think it can be helped.
There’s no playbook for undoing colonial rule at mass scale. Said colonial rule prevented China from participating in the industrial revolution, so converting an agrarian economy to an industrial one is in fact undoing colonial rule.
So yeah, they made mistakes and a lot of people died. I’m not going to glorify Mao but you can’t argue with results. The Great Leap Forward largely succeeded, they just realized it needed to be rolled out at a smaller scale over a longer period of time.
That's disingenuous. The government of China, People's Republic of China, has only been around since 1949 and even if you include the ROC's mainland tenure that only extends it back to 1912.
China got lifted out of poverty after they abandoned communism and transitioned to a mixed economy with respect for private property rights. So I'm not sure what your point is.
In ninth grade my biology teacher took a vote about whether to do this for one test. I voted against it (in the minority). It didn’t take three tests to see the effect. Immediately people stopped studying for the test. We failed. The teacher cheated and gave us all a C.
Ok, cool. Despite Snopes saying that never happened, China doesn’t do that; in fact they have more billionaires than the US. It’s almost like they learned from the failures of other communist states and adapted their system.
What they have done is create a base standard of living that is dependent on location. They can’t move every rural farmer to urban population centers all at once, so they’ve been doing it gradually over time. Do a lot of Chinese live in poverty? Yeah, but they’ve been living in poverty for a few hundred years. A lot fewer live in poverty in 2021 than in 1990.
Why would you want to move farmers to cities where they cant farm? who would do the farming then? why not just pay farmers what you would pay a factory worker in the city?
Because agricultural modernization universally requires at least an order of magnitude less labor, and society is then better served by those workers being in urban centers where they can work first in factories then transition to a service economy for the ones who'll work unskilled labor, and concentrate access to quality education for the ones that can contribute intellectually.
Those "ghost cities" that the media pearl clutched for a while there have for the most part been slowly filled in with previously agrarian workers making the urban transition.
No but they can bear the blame until they burn out and afterwards be replaced by a fresh bundle of youngsters. That's how it usually goes at the companies I consult to clean the mess
Liveleak made me appreciate just how fragile our abstractions of human rights and rule of law are. When the chips are down reality can transform into a hell few can imagine.
These foundations have always been a thorn in the sides of corporate interests. Kicking their teeth in under the guise of tolerance is an efficient way of doing it. Weird how the movement is as tolerant as the nazis to whoever doesn't subscribe to their buzzwords and blatant exploitation of minorities' problems for faux outrage.
Neither of which, one should point out, is actually "meth," not that that detracts from the GP comment's point. Prescription methamphetamine is called Desoxyn. Ritalin is not even technically an amphetamine. :P
The lack of this being seriously addressed and remedied hurts the reputation of science in general. It also undermines the argument in areas of public policy around say Covid, where "listen to the science" has to overcome the perception that a lot of what passes for science... isn't.
In Covid it was far more visibly clear this was and continues to happen. Everyone knows in their hearts that temp check is bullshit but that’s something everyone does even today. The about face on mask policy initially probably still plays a role in people’s perception and inability to follow rules today.
> Everyone knows in their hearts that temp check is bullshit but that’s something everyone does even today.
All our local visitor attractions (and I suspect it's the same UK wide) do temp checks on condition of entry. Pointing out the flaws with it is futile as it's the covid equivalent of security theatre. It ticks a box and makes it look like they are taking precautions.
It reminds me of those snake oil bomb detectors that are still used in some parts of the world despite the fact that the 'inventors' have been jailed for selling the fraudulent devices: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29459896
if it's being sold as a silver bullet that stops all covid (or something else) , well sure, obviously that's bullshit.
or is it the idea that it's OK to open everything if you just do temp checks, cause yeah, I can see how that would be bullshit too.
But set a high enough threshold (to escape measurement error) and with accurate enough tools, it's one of the few public health things that seems somewhat evidence based: if you've got a verifiable fever, you probably shouldn't be out and mixing with others in confined spaces.
hell, it probably made community health sense before COVID.
obviously this doesn't stop non-fever, non symptomatic transmission, or people who dope themselves or their kids up to avoid detection, and it doesn't magically get rid of covid, but it picks out the low hanging fruit, and assuming properly calibrated equipment, seems like an obvious public health win to me (as I said, if you've got a fever, you should bloody well be going home/ denied entry to a workplace even in non-covid times).
By the time the 75% of patients get fever from Covid they are often fully aware that something’s not right and are probably not leaving home or have already gotten tested, only the crazy ones would still venture out in that stage.
Importantly, the reason Covid spread this fast is because the disease seems to attain peak infectiousness before symptom onset and definitely before fever onset. This is why SARS was nipped in the bud with IR scanners while Covid wasn’t.
You say that temperature checks don’t hurt but they most definitely do, most places where they do a check, especially in places like India, they think they’ve done enough and don’t enforce strict mask policies or distancing measures any further. If people are forced to stop using temp screening then these places will have to come up with alternative methods of comforting their audience they are taking measures so they would be forced to do actually effective screening methods like taking o2 measurements. So yeah it’s stupid to allow temp checks to pass for any theatre.
>only the crazy ones would still venture out in that stage.
Depending on location, that could still be a useful segment to exclude. People takkng their kids on a long-planned and long-promised visit to an attraction, who wake up feeling 'a bit under the weather' may be tempted to go anyway.
Internal temperature is indeed a pretty decent indicator. Yes, everyone's normal body temperature varies a bit (and thus their fever threshold), and, yes, different activities will swing your temperature around a bit, so it is sometimes tricky, but internal temperature works.
The problem is that no one measures internal temperature outside a hospital (partly because of sanitation issues). Everyone measures external -- skin -- temperature, usually using an infrared (IR) thermometer.
Those things are terrible to begin with. But they're not even used properly!
To get good results from an IR thermometer, you have to perform an emissivity correction. Which is easy enough for one measurement on one person in a lab, but it will and does vary between people by more than enough to cross the fever threshold. We've got a Flir E60 at work and have tried to use it to make this measurement reliably. We can't do it. It just isn't accurate enough. (You can get relative differences shockingly accurately, but unfortunately temperature screenings need an absolute temperature.) And that's a $10,000 IR camera, set up by skilled R&D personnel. Most places have a cheap Amazon-junk IR gun "thermometer" operated by the hapless.
Maybe we could fix that somehow, so we always get an accurate measurement of skin temperature. But, as you've probably noticed by now, skin temperature isn't internal temperature. If you, for example, walk a mile outside to reach the "temp check" station, on a chilly day... your skin will be colder than the rest of your body. Well below any fever threshold, in fact, unless your fever is so strong that you're already well aware of it (and therefore actively lying, or you'd be in some kind of quarantine by now).
So it's just not a measurement that you can make accurately enough to mean anything, at any kind of scale.
Thus, the cries of "security theater". Because it is.
I wish temperature screening worked, but it simply doesn't. Not the way it's used in practice, anyway. (And don't ask what thermal camera someone is using, because it kinda-sorta looks like the high-end one you tried out that doesn't work at all... you'll just get that good old deer-in-the-headlights look. Or worse. I was probably lucky.)
Case in point - I was stopped from entering the supermarket here in Singapore because I measured over 37 degrees Celsius....but 5 seconds later I re-measured at 32 degrees, and was waved in.
So this comes back to my statement about proper equipment and proper thresholds.
obviously 37 practically isn't a fever, and 32 is ridiculous.
But let's accept it on face value, so it gave you a false positive, which caused you to pause for a second reading, and then a true negative (well, unless you count the 32 as a false positive for hypothermia) and you went in.
That temp checks create false readings isn't really news: for me the question is so they create statistically significantly better outcomes. As a statistics guy, my head says they do. The objections I hear to them sound to me like the objections to bmi: that it's not universally perfect is not reason to dismiss it. This seems to me like the perfect being the enemy of the good enough.
You called yourself a stats guy so I’m going to push, can you show any rigorous analysis by anyone suggesting that theres any benefit to doing temp checks? Is there any number anywhere that gives false positive rate estimates for typically used temperature checking methods? Or false negatives?
First of all, the important thing is the R number - how many people does the average infected person infect. If that is above 1, you get spread. Below 1, it dies out. Without mitigations, R is estimated at about 3. With mitigations, the UK is posting various numbers in the 0.7-1.0 range. (See https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52473523 for a source.) Let's assume that the USA is similar.
The question to ask is this. Do the temperature checks make the difference between being above or below 1.0?
Per https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210110/59-percent-of-covid... about 60% of spread comes from people who are asymptomatic. So about 40% happens from people who are symptomatic. Per https://www.healthline.com/health-news/what-is-the-risk-of-g... about 55% of spread happens at stores. If those factors were independent, about 1/4 of the spread would happen from symptomatic people at stores. If the temperature checks avoid a significant fraction of those, then in the real world it may indeed be the difference between pandemic spread and dying off.
Well in case of public policy it's rather lack of trust in public policy. And in cases like Covid public policy should be ahead of science anyway, because there is no time to wait.
Science (especially social sciences) is many, many times wrong, by definition (that's what science does, it gets less and less wrong until it reaches a certain epsilon of "less wrong" which it considers as the "truth").
This is not the fault of science because, again, errors/being wrong are included in its definition, so to speak, the problem is that those errors/wrongs, when applied to the life of real people, with real human lives, will most probably kill them or affect their lives negatively in very big ways, especially so if it's a concerted effort coming from the top.
There are countless examples for that, the latest that comes to my mind is the pro-austerity policy imposed by the IMF on Greece, because that's what the science of economics was advising at the time, i.e. austerity. It turned out that that was a mistake (and IMF were quick to acknowledge it), but by that moment the damage had already been done.
There's also the example of failed policies imposed by the likes of Robert McNamara and his men (they were mostly men) back in the 1960s, but I didn't catch those times in person, so I only know about those failures via links found on this website (and which I'm too lazy to search for right now).
The way I read your argument is "science is not 100% correct, only 85% correct. That means they are 15% wrong. Since science is 15% wrong and those 15% wrong will have negative consequences, we should ignore science and do what we feel is the right".
I acknowledge that science doesn't have all the answers and probably never will. However, I believe it is better to take its results into account when making public policy instead of relying on gut feeling or ideology.
I certainly hope science is taken into account when deciding things like building regulations, fisheries quotas and food additive regulations.
If we disregard "science" how are we going to make any decisions? It's not like we're using magic here. Science is simply a way of attaining and verifying knowledge. To abandonment means to abandon those thought process for evidence, etc. Rejecting bad science is important, but science is the thing most equipped to do that. The alternative is doing things based on personal experience or a belief system, which historically have had worse results.
Every way of thinking is wrong, but science very quickly becomes least wrong.
Yes of course there will be cases where doing what the science says produces a bad result, but that is no reason to trust the tea leaves instead. The question is not who is right, it's who is closest to being right. On average, science will consistently outperform all other approaches.
there's lots of public policy that is antagonistic to more grounded science than the social sciences, science that while it can be proven wrong at some point is unlikely to be and if it is proven wrong will probably be in small particulars rather than in the large. Evolutionary theory would be one obvious example.
Some social sciences are not even trying to be scientific anymore. They have denounced even the mere concepts of truth and of the scientific method as a tool to approximate it. These people need to be removed from academic life and from all teaching positions as a matter of self defence.
(Ed. And they and their sympathisers obviously know who they are.)
The difference with CS is that there's no one to trust. Everything you need is right there.
Other disciplines have people fake results. You can't fake a result in CS since people only really attack decidable problems, and you need no empirical results for any. It's like how even though mathematicians ultimately do make errors, Mathematics has no replication crisis.
However, most so-called 'hard' science are also full of knowledge that poorly models the world. Sadly, since most people who say this are also climate kooks, everyone will label you as a climate kook if you say this, though.
People constantly downvote me on HN for claiming that there are photoshopped papers out there. I'm not complaining about the downvotes. We make the culture of this place together and I can accept if I say things that you believe aren't right. But I am right.
Edit since rate limited: oh, I didn't consider ML. Okay, consider my position reversed. Yeah, the empirical sciences do have reproducibility issues.
The ML field alone is full of unreproducable papers.
Example: "“Probably 50%-75% of all papers are unreproducible. It’s sad, but it’s true,” another user wrote. “Think about it, most papers are ‘optimized’ to get into a conference. More often than not the authors know that a paper they’re trying to get into a conference isn’t very good! So they don’t have to worry about reproducibility because nobody will try to reproduce them.” https://bdtechtalks.com/2021/03/01/papers-without-code-machi...
This does not seem very good data to empirically underlay the claim of 50%-75% papers being irreproducible. I don't doubt that there are (too) many of them, but having some real data before making strong claims about numbers would be more credible.
When I said that psychology was ground zero, I did not intend to imply that there wasn't a significant blast radius.
That said, the blast radius is significantly less than you're describing. Most research in the hard sciences was not impacted at all. But that is in large part because they absorbed lessons about the difficulty and importance of replication many decades ago. And some of the lessons that they absorbed are being passed along in Feynman's speech.
I have seen this happen a few times in my career however the bias against ugliness is so ingrained there's no possible way of bypassing it. I think the current consensus is that exclusion based on physical characteristics is ethical because it is a very natural behaviour. I don't really believe this but it is what it is.
