Pigeon
coo coo
No bio...
User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
2d ago
It should obvious to anyone that the US in 2025 is not China ca. 1930.
China circa 1946, more like. The Nanjing decade was relatively stable for most Chinese people; the KMT lost an enormous amount of credibility from the general population during WW2. Mao has explicitly referenced this when speaking to Japanese officials.
TENS is mostly commonly associated with skin (it's in the name, after all) and maybe the lungs but in cases with intestinal involvement the intestinal epithelium sloughs off as well. So if you're willing to stretch the claim...
It's also not an infection but a hypersensitivity reaction (potentially from an infection), but losing the epidermis does pretty heavily predispose to (further) infection.
Pigeon
coo coo
2d ago
I don’t know how to interpret chasing off famine relief with gunboats… it far exceeds any of the evidence for the intentionality of the Maoist famines.
Not sure about this one as IIRC starving people were killed when trying to access grain in warehouses during the Great Leap Forward, and one of the reasons why the famine was so horrific was because Mao and co. continued to export food for political gain and refused foreign aid for at least a year or two.
Pigeon
coo coo
2d ago
Maybe it makes your skin fall off and your guts come out while leaving you in crippling agony (I'm like 50% certain there's an actual disease like this, but it's probably something that happens to premature infants. That, or acute radiation poisoning I suppose).
TENS might be close enough?
Pigeon
coo coo
10d ago
*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750?
Didn’t kaczynsci think that we should return to pre-civilisation?
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I’m guessing this is a reference to the early Ming treasure fleets, in which case this is inaccurate as the treasure fleets were not exploring as much as they were re-establishing relations, and the ships were built for such.
Or this could be a reference to a brief period of theoretical Chinese naval superiority in technology between the Song and the Ming, before the Ming went all sea-ban and lost a lot of knowledge about building seaworthy ships.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Have you seen pictures of any large Chinese city in 1990 and compared it to the same city in 2020?
Pigeon
coo coo
17d ago
I think I'd be more wary about calling Confucianism a religion or religion-like without bounding what is meant by religion and Confucianism respectively.
Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West.
It is true that Confucius has a temple, and he was himself strict about the preservation of the rites of Zhou and other traditional religious institutions, and many aspects of Confucian thought has seeped into Chinese folk religion; the Classic of Changes literally originates from treatises on divination...
But when I read most works in the Confucian school I get a different sense -- that it is "religious" to the extent that all political systems and philosophies in classical antiquity are religious, and it is less overtly religious than many of its contemporaries!
樊遲問知。子曰。務民之義、敬鬼神而遠之、可謂知矣。
Analects 6:22. Fan Chi asked what constituted wisdom. The Master said, "To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom."
子不語怪，力，亂，神。
Analects 7:21. The subjects on which the Master did not talk, were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.
On the other hand, many of the Socratic dialogues reference gods and the divine much more directly than the Confucian classics do, but I think we would still consider Euthyphro more of a philosophical work than a religious one, right?
Regardless the ancients would have drawn less stark a divide than we would regarding the secular and the religious, if they did so at all.
And Confucianism is also -- I think more commonly -- referred to as 儒家 rujia (家 jia, lit. family/home, in this case meaning "school of thought"). Other contemporary examples of this usage include 法家 fajia (the Legalists) and 墨家 mojia (the Mohists), part of the Hundred Schools of Thought which we identify nowadays as primarily political or philosophical schools rather than religious ones, even if these philosophical schools were bound at the time to various superstitions and religions as well.
This is not to obfuscate the mystical parts of Confucianism, of course. The Classics referencing rites implies a certain belief in the validity of those rites, and we have further developments (e.g. 理學 lixue, often translated as neo-Confucianism) that have a more explicit focus on the metaphysical. But I would still put it as that Confucian thought is a largely humanistic school of moral philosophy that was nevertheless grounded in a superstitious and religious society, and thus utilises the assumptions and language of that society.
Accordingly all Chinese-speaking people I've talked to about it swear up and down that R1 is profoundly poetic and unlike anything else they've seen in its native tongue, they almost cry from how well it weaves together some classical Chinese literature and aphorisms and whatnot.
I can attest to this.
One of the first things I did with DeepSeek, knowing that it was a Chinese model, was to prompt it for a poem about pigeons, written in the style of Du Fu, as a joke. It surprised me, replying with a polished, if not very inspired, poem that obeyed not only general conventions about rhyme, meter, and parallelism; it even rhymed in a way that isn't natural for mandarin, but would have been in Middle Chinese (情 and 聲)! I've since then kept on prompting it occasionally with increasingly bizarre and unhinged requests for Chinese poetry in various forms, including:
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Improving a silly poem about a lonely cat, which it did reasonably well
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A recontextualisation of two of Martial's epigrams (5.34, 10.61)
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Two poems about a fat pigeon
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A poem recasting Lu You's pet cat as a pigeon
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Two unhinged poems about "carnivorous pigeons benching 80kg"
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Another unhinged poem about "pigeons in pink suits eating penguins while pretending to be fish" (suitably for such an insane prompt it took wild liberties with metaphors regarding "pink suits", "eating", "pretending", and "fish")
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Rewriting the Ballad of Mulan with a pigeon in place of Mulan
(please don't wonder too much about why I make a habit of feeding unhinged pigeon prompts to be made into Classical Chinese poetry, I just find it very funny)
All of them have been have something of beauty in their construction, even if they are a bit basic, and some have surprising bite. (The two fat pigeon poems were variously interpreted as a metaphor for decadence and over-abundance being a sort of gilded cage, and a more nostalgic/regretful look at previous glory respectively, for example.) I certainly couldn't write poetry of the same quality, at least not without extensive dedicated study.
And I find the surprising poetic knack to almost be less impressive than its general responses, where it effortlessly weaves together literary allusions updated with context and modern words together in sentences that wouldn't be out of place if it was a planned speech written by Chinese speakers much more erudite than myself, complete with references to classical texts when appropriate — this is especially true if you try to engage it with prettier language or some pretension towards the classical language. (If you write to it in very conversational Chinese, I find that it will reply back in that same register but with a more official phraseology.) The explanatory notes in the pastebin are illustrative of this elegant colloquial Chinese *(and I have to note that this is already rather on the colloquial and vulgar side for DeepSeek commenting on poetry; it can do much better). I wouldn't be overly surprised if at some point in the near future, speeches from the CCP (esp. from lower rank functionaries) suddenly improve significantly in lyricism and style from people prompting DeepSeek or some similar AI; for what it is worth, IIRC Taiwan's official communications often hew somewhat closer to classical language (though it will still be modern), so it may be less of a shift there.
Are there bits and pieces where there could be improvements? Yes, of course. I've caught it making mistakes occasionally in rhyme, and some of the metaphors/plot in the poetry (as well as some of the phraseology in the poetry) can be improved. The poem above is a bit disjointed with the last phrase being a bit odd; I've found some occasional misunderstandings of rhyme between some characters; one time I tried to get it to parse a passage in an old Chinese agricultural encyclopedia (齊民要術) and found that it misunderstood a character. But these are mistakes that could also be made by a person, and in general I would eat my left nut to be as good as DeepSeek is in the context of Classical Chinese.
(Though I might be a chump and not realise that it's been feeding me shit poetry this whole time since I'm not actually good at Classical Chinese)
I've also tried prompting DeepSeek with requests for original 和歌 (without even using bizarre prompts), and it is much, much worse at this than it is at 絕句 or 律詩 or whatever Chinese poetic form — it often can't even keep the number of syllables straight! So it does seem to be mostly trained on Chinese data, which might naturally corrupt Japanese output when it's as finicky as poetry, especially when many of the logographic glyphs used are shared but have different phonetic content in different languages. I wonder what would happen if you tried prompting it for poetry in other (non-Sinosphere, non-English) languages.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
I know that there is that one family in Hokkaido that is explicitly a harem, but otherwise I’m kind of drawing a blank.
Unless we are counting the “rich/hot dude screwing multiple women and not committing to any one of them” as similar…?? I don’t think it’s the same though.
I’d appreciate if you could elaborate.
There are at least two things here that are worth noting.
One is that prerequisites required, both in terms of knowledge and (market/social/political/geological/etc.) conditions for a technology or piece of engineering to first appear are often not obvious to us at first glance as we look in retrospect. @MadMonzer discusses the example you gave of calculus, but I'd like to consider the steam engine for this. After all, the aeolipile as described by Vitruvius and Hero is a rudimentary thing with a turbine powered by steam, and the Romans had sophisticated and complicated designs like the Ctesibius water pump; surely they could've gotten to steam engines by the 2nd century!
Except that the steam engine that was eventually found useful required several technological and scientific developments that were simply not available to the Romans. It required a concept of pressure differentials, in particular the idea of a vacuum, as well as a sophisticated understanding of thermodynamics; it required advances -- with respect to both technology and scale -- in metallurgy (e.g. cast iron, which made the entire thing much cheaper, was available in classical China but would not be known in Europe until the early modern era) and manufacturing (e.g. machining techniques and precision tools) for steam engines to be feasible or economical to manufacture. (This list is by no means exhaustive.)
And even that isn't enough to spur the development and adoption of the steam engine historically! Many of these conditions were met in Europe, which certainly had tinkerers working on steam-based engines and contraptions in the 16th and 17th century, including a steam-powered cannon by da Vinci. They may even have been present in China, even with the relative decline in Chinese science by that time.
The conditions required for adoption of the primitive steam engine was present in England, which had a persistent relative labour shortage (so that it's worth investing in an early machine to do work) and coal mines with groundwater that needed to be pumped out; in one fell swoop you had a fuel and a method to get rid of groundwater flooding the mines!
From that point, incremental improvements start to occur fairly rapidly; but even these improvements required the existence of an economy that is growing to a scale where these improvements would've paid off. (In this case it seems like it was a virtuous cycle.)
There are other low-hanging-fruit examples like wheels not taking off in the Incan empire -- they had the concept of a round thing turning on an axle in toys and such, but due to the geography of their land and lack of pack animals, primitive wheeled transport wasn't really efficient -- and so it wasn't further developed!
I suppose what I mean is that for a technology (or an industrial revolution, for that matter) to take off, many things have to align at the same time -- in terms of technological knowledge, but also in terms of the right political institutions, social and population trends, financial incentives and economic landscape, geographic luck, and so on.
The other point is that historical cultures may have had similar insights, but -- due to circumstance, ideology, etc. -- these insights are applied in different and sometimes diametrically opposite ways.
You can find many classical Chinese texts extolling the virtues of laissez-faire governance, as well as texts discussing supply-and-demand, business cycles (and an early form of Keynesian economics), inflation, issues with monopolies, early forms of regulatory capture and the principal-agent problem, recognition of economic speculation, economic inequalities secondary wealth and capital accumulation, appreciation of differences in incentive and efficiency between the public sector and the private sector, and other ideas in economics and political economy. The ancient Chinese had a nuanced, if unsystematic, understanding of market forces.
But these texts, drawing from a zeitgeist of a different era, operating under different assumptions, and penned by a bureaucrat class under an imperial government, advance arguments and rationales that are often bizarre to our modern ears. Laissez-faire governance (of markets as well as of society broadly), often discussed as wu wei (無為), is often not recommended for price-finding efficiency, improved market incentives, or on grounds of liberty; but because of an idealisation of a distant government that does not interfere with the natures and desires of men so as to turn them greedy and capricious (rather than simple and honest agriculturalists), and from a Confucian idea that rulers should lead by example, and when they do the entire nation will follow suit.
As an aside, you see a smidge of this influence in the development of modern classical economics, as the Physiocrats drew significant inspiration from China; the word laissez-faire is in fact a loose translation of wu wei!
I think this take is grossly correct, with the addition that the Chinese language — being relatively poor in range of sounds, as well as being monosyllabic for characters — would find the transition to a sound-based script more difficult than imagined. I’d also hazard a guess that logographs add an additional layer of difficulty in learning, but isn’t actually that much more onerous to read once learned — see the studies that show ability to recognise scrambled or deformed English words as long as certain signposts of a word are present like the initial and last character, which suggests a logograph-like recognition of words even in people only literate in an alphabetic language.
Add to that that most Chinese characters have a phonetic component, borrowing sounds from more common characters along with a helpful radical… (incidentally iirc simplification has actually fucked some of this up)
It's effective enough that in premodern East Asia, people from the Sinosphere who did not speak the same language could often write conversations instead.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
Stereotype accuracy is one of the strongest results in social science. The word stereotype is not a synonym for 'myth'.
I'm curious as to how good stereotypes are in terms of magnitude of belief (compared to...directionality/descriptive accuracy?). I suspect it is still somewhat accurate, but less so than the qualitative aspect of stereotypes.
Pigeon
coo coo
3mo ago
One of the schism mods wrote something about being part of a Quaker team at some leftist protest that was a really interesting read, I'll see if I can find it. IIRC it was the "death to terfs" contingent that made her notice something was off.
If you can find it I’d be interested.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
There is an argument that a man wearing a dress for Halloween is doing something sexualised; he's just doing a sexualised thing as a joke rather than as an integral part of his identity.
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
the rude and awkward behaviour I've seen in Western online gaming communities towards even those merely suspected of being girls
Curiously I’ve observed enough of women I know playing games like LoL and Guild Wars (etc.) on international servers, and have had a ?feminine enough username in some games and been taken for a woman in games (???), to have had an experience of this around 2000s-2010s.
Most people were actually supportive, some to the point of white-knighting. I thought the proportion of men who were actually foul to women was probably well under 10%. But most of the games where communication are usually team games (and so you have (1-x)^9 chances of not rolling a shithead for a solo queue 5v5 game, which is going to be significantly higher than 1-x), and these people could be so foul (or wildly inappropriate, or just plain weird), that it does mar the experience a bit.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
finding racism in ham sandwiches
Whereas if the Politburo demands good literature you can hand them a pamphlet denouncing the latest object of the Politburo's denunciation and even if it's quite bad by what standard, the Politburo isn't a literature department, and even if it's obviously bad can they condemn a condemnation of the thing they wanted condemned?
Not related, but reminds me of a recent Chinese commentary in some newspaper that slobbered praise all over Xi Jinping, comparing him to Mao and Deng — it got pulled very quickly, and the suspected reason for the censorship was that Xi considered himself an equal to Mao only, and superior to Deng.
I actually disagree -- some premodern states were powerful enough to potentially enable free markets; however, as you allude to, most of the time states that were this powerful (or, at least, the people controlling these states) often had insufficient incentive, and in many cases a significant disincentive, to promote institutions of free trade. The Brits who pioneered it had a relative incentive compared to other states to put in the legwork in creating the ideological framework and the sophisticated mechanisms that would allow free trade both due to internal factors (e.g. such as that which lead up to the English Civil War, or the French political situation in the late 18th-19th centuries) and external (e.g. profitable colonial enterprise for Britain); it riding in a package with other European liberal ideas at the time also helped. I think this explains much of the difference; I wouldn't be sure that the Russians or Spanish or Ottomans wouldn't develop similar ideas if they had similar incentives and pressures.
You see a similar thing in Song China (as alluded to by @BurdensomeCount) -- which had the makings of a modern fiscal state, with sophisticated monitoring of markets, indirect taxes (rather than land/population taxes), professionalised administration for taxes, heavy monetisation, debt financing, etc. -- due to the government decision to tax trade rather than land. The land tax was insufficient to fund its military against strong quasi-Chinese states to the north and treaty obligations (towards the same states), and the Song had to find some other way to raise revenue.
The Yuan that followed was part of the Mongol empire which kind of just screwed up everything, and the Ming that followed the Yuan was, in hindsight, highly economically regressive, even if it had the state capacity (at least at first, probably) to encourage institutions of free trade; the Song Chinese fiscal state was still immature and weak, and did not survive dynastic transition.
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo 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
1mo ago
men claim to be straight, but constantly joke about fucking femboys, twinks, and trannies
What really?
Pigeon
coo coo
2mo ago
Due to differences in skeletal muscle composition, differences in metabolism esp. re lipids, and difference in anatomical structure mean that women are often more suited for endurance compared to bursts of physical activity. Men still top the charts when it comes to endurance running and swimming but it is a closer call than it is with sprinting, where there is just no hope for women to ever catch up with men.
In particular I think this would come into play more than we would expect from looking at competitive results when we consider the endurance required for e.g. farming.
This is often not the case and is counterintuitive for many.
I recall when I was a student, an ICU consultant asked us to guess whether most people who go to ICU die from the initial resuscitation or escalation of intensive treatment; the time during of intensive treatment; or the time when we try to step down patients from intensive care; he was impressed at the few of us who guessed the last. Turns out we’re quite good at maintaining signs of life with technology, even as we are helpless to fix an otherwise nonviable body — at least if you’re stable enough to get into ICU and didn’t have your chest caved in by a bus.
This probably makes more sense once you try to guess about how often ICU doctors have to have difficult family meetings with patients’ families about withdrawing life support, versus patients dying while on life support.
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