Pigeon
coo coo
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
11mo ago
The only comparable situation I can imagine from history is Republican Spain throwing an excess of resources to holding Madrid, of planning offensives for newspapers and prestige.
The Battle of Shanghai would be another partial example, where Chiang Kai-Shek intentionally spent his best men and disproportionate amounts of armor to defend Shanghai both to buy time to move industry and to try to provoke an international reaction.
Pigeon
coo coo
11mo ago
I was just giving another example of a military decision made explicitly for international optics rather than for strategy or propaganda, etc. Doubtless there are many examples of militarily ineffective overcommitments throughout history.
Pigeon
coo coo
10mo ago
Communism has some atrocities with higher death counts (e.g. perhaps Mao's Cultural Revolution)
You are thinking of the Great Leap Forward, not the Cultural Revolution (which was devastating to China and cost 1-2 million lives, but is a separate incident).
For example, if the distinction between wheat- and rice-growing parts of China really exists, that's fascinating.
My guess is that the specific statement -- that rice-farmers are more interdependent, holistic, less prone to creativity, etc., while wheat-farmers are the reverse -- is from some highly cited papers from Thomas Talheim. You might find similar speculation in previous decades about how rice-farming promotes a culture of hard work and incremental progress (etc etc.) compared to wheat farming which is less rewarding per joule of human effort spent, invoked in a similar manner as how the Protestant ethic used as a rationale for differences in development in European/Euro-descended countries.
Outside of that, there are definite stereotypes -- both premodern and modern -- about the differences between northern and southern Chinese, but usually seem to be of the vein that northerners are more honest and hardy and brash (and uncultured etc.), while southerners are more savvy and shrewd (and more effete and cowardly etc.)
(I make no comment on the validity of either.)
Likewise, I never thought of the fact that Europe suffered the Black Plague while China remained saturated, and what effect that might have had on their respective trajectories.
This is a partial hypothesis for the Great Divergence: The Black Death, + other 14th century wars and calamities, wiped out >33% of Europe's population, which lead to a significant increase (almost double?) in wages and the decline of feudalism. During this time, higher wages, lower rents, higher costs to trade e.g. compared to intra-China trade, and other factors produced large-scale supply/demand disequilibria after the Black Death that increased the demand for labour-saving technology as well as the incentives for innovation from each class of society e.g. from people no longer being serfs.
On the other hand, it would be negative EV for a Chinese merchant or industrialist -- who had lower labour costs to deal with and more efficient internal markets -- to spend a lot on innovation, when you could just spend more money on hiring more people. And this is before we add in things like the shift to neo-Confucianism in the Ming period, awful early-Ming economic policy, Qing paranoia etc.
For what it's worth, I don't find this to be anywhere near a complete explanation. There is a corresponding divergence within Europe of countries that maintained that level of growth in per capita income and those who didn't. China also has had its share of upheavals and famines without a corresponding shift in this sense (although arguably none were as seismic population-wise as the Black Death was for Europe), and more recent reconstruction of historical Chinese wages does see them near their peak at the start of each dynasty and dropping off gradually as the dynasty goes on, which both kinda confirms the supply/demand effect of reduced population on wages after social turbulence but also doesn't seem to really map neatly onto any bursts of innovation. Additionally, the period of time associated with rapid innovation in imperial China, the Tang-Song period, is associated with a population increase.
But even if it doesn't explain China, I think it at least explains the European story partially, about how potential preconditions for industrialisation and scientific development were met.
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
Whatever the reputation of their leaders today, clearly many rank-and-file Soviets and Nazis of the time also weren't averse to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manner...
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
Mao probably counts. The Houthis count. The Syrian rebels probably count.
I think it depends heavily on what it sounds as "guerrilla or terrorist insurgency" -- do they have to stay guerrilla the whole time?
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo 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.
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo 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
5mo ago
As an aside, see this r/askhistorians comment about a Song dynasty literati who got domesticated by his cat.
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo ago
For what it is worth, the diction and grammar makes this seem less likely to be AI to me.
Pigeon
coo coo
5mo 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.
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
5mo ago
I think it was reasonably easy to infer that given the text in the original argument --
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
I thought this was the med reg's job in the UK?
Is this scope creep?!?!
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
It’s far enough from trump’s actual style that I believe this is the real deal.
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
As you might expect, really. Isn't Li Ka-Shing rather on the outs with the Party at the moment?
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo 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
4mo 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
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.
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.
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
They do?
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