Laukhi
10mo ago
I think I pretty much agree with you.
If that is how the Chinese actors themselves conceptualize this, does it matter if we can object to such thinking as historically reductionist and stereotypical?
I don't object to that way of thinking per se, but I doubt that it does much work, either for them or for us third-person observers. (I might be wrong - it seems to me that the strongest objection is that it's a very live option for Chinese people to take the West, or at least what the West is perceived to do well in, as a model, whereas it might be less so for Americans.) My armchair psychological theory is that talented, smart Chinese people are often those who assimilate into Western society most easily, and they - or we, I guess I should say - graft this way of thinking on top of prior instincts, desires, etc.
Not to say that it's entirely an inert superstructure, but my overall view is that it's significantly more informative to look at structural features of China's economy, such as regulations on investment or whatnot, etc., than at how it gets conceptualized in this sort of discourse. Unless one is interested in China's self-image for its own sake, naturally.
Laukhi
10mo ago
Thanks for the update; I'll be sure to check out Moonshot at some point. My expertise in AI is limited to being a casual user of ChatGPT and DeepSeek, so I won't say more about the technical side of things, but I wanted to comment on the cultural points.
Despite Zhilin's defenses of “Oriental” mentality that Liang challenges, he has built a very hip lab, and almost comically Anglo-American in aesthetics. “We're a team of scientists who love rock (Radiohead, Pink Floyd) and film (Tarantino, Kubrick).” Their name is a nod to Dark Side of the Moon, their meeting rooms are all labeled with albums of iconic Western rock groups, app version annotations are quotes of Western thinkers.
In contemporary philosophy, there's an attitude towards ideas that tends to ignore their historical, cultural, etc. context and treat them "in themselves." I guess this is a "high-decoupler" attitude. Anyways, despite the obvious demerits to this approach, I think that it's basically correct, so I have a hard time with explanations of East/West differences based on culture or historical philosophies. In this case, the difference between supposed "Oriental utilitarianism" and "Western idealism" doesn't seem too different from what's already present in the West. We also have a contrast between the "pragmatic businessman" archetype and the "dreamer" archetype.
(In regard to Zhilin's words, if I may psychologize a little, I think that it's very natural for a Chinese person with close knowledge of and experience with Western ideas and societies - but also an attachment to an identity as Chinese - to conceptualize things in terms of a dichotomy between East and West, and it doesn't cause problems as long as one doesn't place too much weight on that way of thinking.)
In my (admittedly somewhat myopic and unresearched) view, the cultural problems in China's business community seem quite contingent. As everyone is, businesspeople, investors, etc. are subject to groupthink, prejudices, and bias towards past successes. But since it's not a matter of "deep roots," it makes sense that a single breakout success like DeepSeek could precipitate a shift in orientation. So I think that if China doesn't end up catching up in AI, the reasons will not be intrinsic to the Chinese, but extrinsic; for example, perhaps capital controls work, or it turns out that the open-source model doesn't work well in AI after all.
To go far afield of my knowledge, it seems as though these extrinsic factors might end up being better for China than for the US. Although the party is hardly omnicompetent at picking winners, as demonstrated by their prior neglect of DeepSeek, the benefits of taking a relatively consistent, unified stance (at least within Xi's tenure) might be enough to overcome the US's inherited advantage of a superior ecosystem, since our political system's replacement-level regulation and industrial policy is not exactly stellar. The US scores own-goals all the time; the CPC may well score one even worse, but it's not as consistent.
Laukhi
1yr ago
I'm not very familiar with House procedure specifically; I just know a bit about general parliamentary law. Wouldn't any member simply be able to make a point of order to take the vote once the parliamentary situation is in breach of the rules? And if the chair then rules the point of order not well taken, then one would appeal.
Others have made good responses, but from what you've said, I think you might be interested in Carl Hempel's paper "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning," which runs through lots of the difficulties that you encounter when you try and develop a rigorous criterion of observability, testability, falsifiability, or what have you. Turns out it's very hard to even delineate hokum, much less show that philosophy is all that! Anyways, I mostly want to nitpick about Searle.
It's been some time since I read Searle on this topic, but I think that this interpretation, though common, is a misunderstanding of Searle's position. I recall thinking that he expresses his overall view more clearly in his article "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?"
Here's a comparison from Searle that I half-remember. Suppose you're interested in frogs - you want to explain some process they do, like vision. The full explanation of this should cite some underlying biological process in frogs; you might want to describe their eyes and nerves or whatever. It is not enough to omit the biology and say "there's a pattern x, and frog vision instantiates x." There's lots of things that instantiate whatever pattern, and you haven't really explained anything about frogs by saying that.
---"'understanding' means something functionally undetectable." Well, if you're the type to say that the system 'understands,' then this is true. Nothing then hinges on whether you call it 'understanding' or not, since the function/behavior of the Chinese room is the same either way. But that's exactly why this functional meaning of understand isn't what we actually mean by the word. Understanding is a process in human organisms, and we need a biological explanation rather than a abstract, mathematical, computational one. Comparison: JJ Thompson discovered the electron, and then we found out more about it. Humans discovered understanding a long time ago, but only now are cognitive scientists discovering more about it. Understanding is not just the observable criteria through which we coined the term, but the underlying, biological, physical process.
Now I actually disagree with the above reconstruction of Searle's view, since I think that the program of explaining the mind through computation has been rather successful, even if we might also like to have a biological explanation. (Although I hear that there's plenty of controversy in cognitive science about this.) Scott Aaronson also makes some compelling points about Searle's views in "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity." But the usual objections to Searle are not good objections---like most famous philosophers, he has thought of the obvious replies.
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