Pigeon
coo coo
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
To add onto this, the lack of an objective grading criteria meant that -- even moreso than in modern times -- whether people passed or not would be at the whims of the examiners, and being able to cotton onto the latest trends in political thought could be quite important lest an otherwise excellently argued answer be marked down for being against the prevailing opinion (...or the examiner's opinion). There are also opportunities for unfair discrimination -- Lu You famously finished first in his regional examinations in his second try ~1154, but was disqualified (along with all other regional examination...valedictorians?) for threatening the progression of Qin Hui's grandson.
Unfortunately can't recall my sources, but interestingly the imperial exams also had a sort of affirmative action -- different districts and provinces would have quotas for how many people could advance to the next stage of examinations, and generally the less well-off districts and provinces would get a higher per-capita quota to fill. This lead to situations where families would try to (at least in paper) go to bumfuck nowhere, bribe a local with the same surname to lie that they are some sort of long-lost family (so that their son would be able to be registered as a resident there), and try to game the system that way.
This sounds like questions that would be asked perhaps since Wang Anshi's reforms from the 11th century up to the end of the examinations in 1904. I believe the late imperial exams had three sections -- on the interpretation of classics, commentary on history, and commentary/analysis of current events and policy suggestions thereof.
The earlier examinations had a greater focus on pure rote memorisation and poetic ability, IIRC, though there would still be analytical questions on politics and policy. Some of the classics questions during the Tang dynasty had the first examples of fill-in-the-blank questions in history. (This is not to mention the other early examinations that were easier -- there was a pure classics examination that was easier, as well as a law exam (I believe there were a few more but cannot recall immediately).
I only got vague answers as to what the actual questions were—something about understanding Confucius' ideas or writing about proper government structures.
It would be difficult to answer succinctly, as there were initially several sorts of examinations during the Tang which (IIRC?) coalesced into the one examination stream that we associate with the imperial exams; as you note, there are different levels of exams, so there would be different types of questions for each; and the contents and style of the exams themselves vary over time.
The hike up is relatively uneventful; the path is nearly deserted. Hiking doesn't seem as popular in China as other activities. At the top, we stop for KFC. They have hamburgers and grilled chicken but no actual fried chicken—a sad state of affairs that may have cost them their lives in the States, but it is still crowded. The burgers were... weird, kind of loose and almost wet.
If the mainland is anything like Hong Kong, McDonalds might have better chicken than KFC.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I'm pretty sure he's referring to a heart attack, and I'm guessing the analogy refers to that "not liking how something looks" can reflect a more serious underlying cause than pure aesthetic distaste.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Maybe the languages/culture are to different. Maybe the style of translation differs, and Chinese translators mostly refuse to translate in a free/dynamic equivalence style.
Speaking purely for myself here...
I find eloquent works, composed by a speaker fluent in the style of high-register inspired by classical Chinese, to be very difficult to translate to English. It's somewhat difficult to explain, but Chinese has this relatively unique quality where the old prestige language is both very terse and very prone to historical references/idioms/poetic allusions/metaphors/etc... . That literary Chinese has such a different sort of rhythm to literary English doesn't help matters, either.
This leads to a situation where both literal and free translations of compositions that draws from these classical elements often loses both some nuance and undertones of the original phrasing (if the translator isn't incredibly liberal with their word count), and almost always loses the lyrical quality of the text.
We see this classical influence in the language even for more low-brow settings, as well. Here is a youtube video by a Taiwanese youtuber about "cabbage in boiling water", a soup with a misleading name; the speech is clearly in the vernacular, however you can hear in many sections a rather poetic, almost a sing-song quality to the sentence composition and the use of rather extravagant -- for English standards -- use of flowery language that nonetheless feels perfectly at home.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I do not think that putting on high heels and bribing my way into Mensa achieves my goal.
I doubt you wouldn't be able to get into Mensa legitimately, the IQ bar is not that high. Save your bribing for some other exclusive club!
The recent "laboratories of socialism with Chinese characteristics" is correct. As far as I understand, regional governors have great latitude to experiment with policy, with successful cases transplanted into other provinces (as with the original "laboratories of democracy").
But the heightened autonomy also makes sense, looking back further in history. The division of China into its provinces goes back a long way; though the modern system (with adjustments) dates back to the Mongols, many of these territorial units trace their origin to antiquity; going into the 20th century, provincial feeling within China would have been much stronger and more deep-rooted than e.g. the same between US states. IIRC early observers of republican China thought that China would most likely be heavily federalised in large part due to this; even with Maoist destruction of China's cultural heritage, some of this still stays.
And historically while imperial China was theoretically totalitarian, in practice -- especially late into the imperial era, where the bureaucracy was increasingly lean and population increasingly large -- regional leaders had quite a lot of freedom as long as they were sufficiently obsequent to the Dragon Throne. (When central power was weak, of course, even that didn't apply -- see how the Beiyang fleet was snubbed by the other three Chinese fleets during the first Sino-Japanese war, or how during the Boxer rebellion governors of the southern provinces refused to heed the declaration of war on the Europeans and Japanese and withheld knowledge of the edict from their populations.)
Edit: a word
Hm. I was thinking more paper charts, but I suppose if there are fonts in a digital system that works.
I was also under the impression that dyslexic fonts don’t have a great track record, but if it works for someone…
Now I wonder if there is a difference in difficulty reading for dyslexics when they have to read from an alphabet or syllabary vs when they read from a logographic script.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I'm genuinely very curious, being also a medical professional, how a person who "literally can't read [text] without making symbol transposition/translation errors" could read medical histories and patient documentation, or keep up with new literature. I could not do my job if I was dyslexic to that level, or at least I would be performing much more inefficiently.
If there's some sort of intervention that "cures" the dyslexia so much so that word and sentence recognition and parsing becomes "native" or at the very least second nature, that would make sense -- but I am to understand that dyslexia isn't really "curable". Or if psychiatrists to read very little medical documentation, which...seems incorrect to me in experience.
Open to be wrong, I don't have any experience with this personally.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
It's quite funny that the myth cropped up while Einstein was still alive, and Einstein himself was rather confused about why that myth came to be.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Also, I'm tired of the Dora the Explorer shit in every fucking game.
I don't play RPGs much anymore, do explain?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
As you might expect, really. Isn't Li Ka-Shing rather on the outs with the Party at the moment?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
It’s far enough from trump’s actual style that I believe this is the real deal.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I thought this was the med reg's job in the UK?
Is this scope creep?!?!
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I think it was reasonably easy to infer that given the text in the original argument --
5/5! I had a similar fear of "this seems too easy I must be missing something" for some of these.
I do think for #3,
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Guerilla warfare is a defensive strategy against symmetrically matched opponents.
Surely you mean "asymmetrically"?
That said, I agree. I was more quibbling with this part of an above comment.
That last one is the most important. No "guerrilla" or "terrorist" insurgency has ever won a civil war against a domestic enemy.
If we take "no guerrilla or terrorist insurgency has ever won a civil war" as "no group has won a civil war while still being guerrillas" rather than "no group starting out as guerrillas has won a civil war", the number of eligible groups you could apply this to changes.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
For what it is worth, the diction and grammar makes this seem less likely to be AI to me.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
As an aside, see this r/askhistorians comment about a Song dynasty literati who got domesticated by his cat.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Yeah, no disagreement — it’s as benign as it can get, really. I actually thought this sort of habit came from the West though!
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
The close analogue to that might be med students who are tempted to take them to cope with the enormous amounts of coursework, but I have not heard of abuse at rates >> than any other class of students.
I think the most unique and widespread-enough example I can think of with medics “misusing” a drug more than other professions would be beta-blockers prior to interviews and exams.
Perhaps a more accurate description would be members of an upper class in the same way that samurai were in Edo society, literati were in China since essentially the Warring States, or Brahmins in India?
To be honest the pessimistic case of the AI "only" being able to do 99% or even 90% of human cognitive work scares me in terms of social upheaval. It might be better off in the long run, but it sure looks like it'll be a bumpy ride...
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