Pigeon
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
4d 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.
Pigeon
coo coo
23d ago
Have you seen pictures of any large Chinese city in 1990 and compared it to the same city in 2020?
Pigeon
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25d 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
30d ago
You're right in geological terms, which I definitely missed in the original comment, but I think it's more circumstantial than "high demand for coal". Imperial China, for example, had similar issues with deforestation as Britain did, and had widespread adoption of coal both as a daily fuel and as a metallurgical resource in response to this especially in the Song dynasty; Marco Polo notes the predominance of coal as a fuel, for a European source that's a couple hundred years down the line.
I'm not completely sure why Britain had the need to artificially drain its waterlogged mines while China didn't, despite widespread use of coal. I do recall that the Chinese generally didn't employ shaft mining until quite late, that shaft mines would just be abandoned rather than drained even in the late Qing, and that some Chinese mines had relatively efficient natural drainage that made them less flood-prone; perhaps the geological details of the mines themselves, and the mining techniques necessary for them, were significant factors. I'm also of the impression that viable mines in Britain were able to be operated very close to waterways in a way that e.g. China's (or perhaps other European countries, as well) didn't, which may have lead to different financial bottlenecks.
Speculatively, I also wouldn't be surprised if coal and firewood consumption fell significantly, at least at a per capita level, after the Yuan (14th century or so), which would at least partially explain why there was lower demand for further improvements in mining.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
men claim to be straight, but constantly joke about fucking femboys, twinks, and trannies
What really?
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
The worst thing was that I was on vacation at the time and couldn't just get someone to prescribe some pred for me on the sly!
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
No, I agree with this; but I think that some European states in the early modern period — France under Louis XIV? — had enough pure state capacity to develop the ability to support free trade, and it still took a little while for ideas about free trade to get expressed. Conversely in China, early Ming China most likely had the state capacity to support free trade, but pointedly decided not to. (Chinese state capacity withered away dramatically over the Ming-Qing period anyway; I am happy to be corrected about the European record.)
I suppose what I mean is that a modern state is necessary but insufficient.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Amongst my close friends in undergrad, there used to be a guy who had a ~150 IQ (he was the only member of the group who had it measured "properly" by a professional - he had a psychologist friend and he agreed to be one of the test subjects for something), and he was noticeably duller than the rest of us in [hard STEM subject we all studied] - this was evidenced objectively in exam results (and he worked to try get good results) I'm not sure if he is just one of those unfortunate people on the vertex of the functionality/IQ ellipse, or if it really was just a "culture" issue (maybe he was just overloaded with extra-curriculars, he had test-anxiety, etc - normally I'd discount those explanations as cope - but then... 150 IQ!)
It could possibly be a test with a different SD score, though I'm not sure why that would be the case since I think? most Western tests are calibrated to be SD15 or SD16. I recall hearing about a K-pop star with an IQ of 148 and then finding out [that it was 148 on a different scale (with an SD of 24), as was the standard in Korean school testing at the time (?)
150 would be gifted but not that exceptional in that case.
Oh yes, this is true! (I recall alluding to this difference in a reply I made regarding DeepSeek being uncannily good at classical Chinese poetry -- it's able to identify words that rhymed back in the day, but not in standard Mandarin.) Even in Middle Chinese these often wouldn't be exactly the same, so it would really mostly be a guide rather than an absolute. Nonetheless, they often sound similar enough that it's significantly less effort than if it were completely random, in the same way that Middle English sote is different but kind of similar to sweet (and not at all to mistletoe) in sound.
The way simplification really broke things is by removing many phonetic guides completely, like 廣 to 广. I happen to be more of a fan of the simplification done in 新字体 shinjitai, but even it kind of breaks things sometimes -- 廣 is now 広, for example, which has a misleading phonetic component. (Of course, it matters less in the Japanese case, as 広い is hiroi, and many compound words use ひろ hiro native pronunciation rather than こう kou borrowed (from China) pronunciation.)
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.
Before the 20th century the vast bulk of the Chinese population was illiterate. And those that were literate were plugged into the imperial system of governance, which required the use of hanzi. There were some exceptions where ethnic minorities came up with their own syllabic scripts, but this happened mainly on the Yun-Gui plateau as far as I know, which I personally don't even consider China proper.
I’ve seen estimates that Song-to-Ming literacy was surprisingly high (but downtrending), up to 20-30%. It is interesting to note Choe Bu’s memoirs of when he was shipwrecked and his travels through China while getting back to Korea, where he gains the impression that literacy was quite common in the south, or at least around the Jiangnan area (but rare in the north).
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
The one time I (was confirmed to have) got it I was pretty miserable with a few days of quite painful laryngitis that made swallowing difficult. It kinda sucked, wouldn't recommend
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 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
1mo ago
What’s the cultural distance between Spain and Latin America compared to the USA (I assume this is where you are)? I speak both Japanese and Chinese but not Spanish (and have only ever visited the United States), so I may have a skewed view, but it seems like the cultural distance between the States and the East Asian countries is larger than the States and Spain or Latin America.
It might be worth learning the East Asian languages if you want to expose your child to a significantly different culture as part of a broad liberal-arts-ish education.
I know I used to entertain learning other languages to read their literature. Who knows, I might try to pick up another language even this late in life!
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
finding racism in ham sandwiches
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I tend to think of it this way -- a Timmy is drawn to cool stuff represented by the playing of the game (whether it be through roleplaying, through big fat numbers, the social aspect of the game, etc.), while a Johnny is drawn to cool interactions created by the game mechanics, up to and including bizarre 5 card combos relying on arcane rules minutiae that doesn't work out 9/10 of the time but that one time it works it looks really impressive...
A Timmy would be happy winning conventionally but in a "cool" way (think more "would look cool on a movie screen" rather than "would impress other players"), while a Johnny is more interested in doing unconventional stuff.
On the other hand Spikes just want to win at all costs within the rules of the game -- and if the most effective deck is utterly braindead and uninteresting otherwise, so be it.
In an RPG you could maybe translate it thus:
- Timmies would try to spec their character to feel the most badass
- Johnnies would be more interested in weird builds or challenge runs
- Spikes would minmax the shit out of the game (though TBH I think in a solo context even Spike-y people tend to loosen up a bit)
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
But what about their early morning puff while they’re still in their onesies?
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I don't even know how to respond to this. Did I not explain further literally in the same sentence?
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
My partner runs circles around me in Mario Kart, and probably has spent more time playing games in the last couple years than I have. She's sunk in probably >20x the time I have in BG3, last I checked, and is enough of a gamer that she started talking mad shit about my brother's unoptimised strats while he and I were playing co-op (note: my first run, 0 familiarity with any mechanics) despite him having completed a couple runs already -- though he's more of a Timmy while she's more of a Spike.
She also used to beat me in WC3 more than 50% of the time when that was relevant. (I did kind of self gimp myself by being interested in relatively high execution strategies that I couldn't perform, and she would just huntress rush me to death)
She is quite competitive and plays to win, though, so now she doesn't play competitive games because she doesn't feel like she could compete at a satisfactory level anymore without putting in enough effort that it would derail other commitments. I can't really disagree -- I've stopped for largely the same reason (though I loosely still play a bit of MTG).
n=1, but they do exist.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
Sure, that makes me more likely to accept that there is a large difference between men and women wrt second languages in practice.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
He decided to get married before having kids, his wife converted to Judaism, they're raising their kids in his family faith/ethnic tradition, and whatever arrangements on the side they have
Does this even work? I thought Judaism was transmitted(?) through the maternal line.
Bad dragons?
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