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It will be interesting if a lot of research gets published in Chinese journals and not the West. If this happens I wonder if Western researchers will get their

It will be interesting if a lot of research gets published in Chinese journals and not the West. If this happens I wonder if Western researchers will get their information from Chinese journals or lag a bit behind Chinese researchers on the answers to these questions.

worik 3y ago
Mēh! Let the Chinese authorities burden themselves with questions of DNA markers and ethnic groups Eugenics has not done anyone any good, and when used as a means of controlling populations it goes to very dark places If the whole stack is not kept ethical, it is not ethical at all. If not ethical then it tends to evil
- aydyn 3y ago
  > If the whole stack is not kept ethical, it is not ethical at all. This is such a naive, borderline illiterate take. How much of modern human biological knowledge is built upon a foundation of unethical practices?
  - kibwen 3y ago
    From a practical (rather than moral) perspective, the reason that scientific ethics are a thing in the first place is so that the public does not sour on scientific endeavors and view them as illegitimate. If you eschew ethics, then, like Dr. Frankenstein, eventually you will have the public beating down your door with torches and pitchforks, regardless of the results you achieve. Which is to say, if you care about advancing science in the long term rather than merely in the short term, you must care about ethics. Accusing others of naivete here is a bad look.
    - aydyn 3y ago
      From a practical perspective, nobody cares unless it affects them. Ethics? AI research today is plainly not ethical, yet its full steam ahead. Whats a bad look is some idealized notion that everything can be perfect and ethical and there are no gray areas. That is plainly magical thinking.
    - hnfong 3y ago
      From a practical (rather than moral) perspective, as long as the research is approved by the government and the government is authoritarian, there won't be any public beating down your door with torches and pitchforks.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Are writing this comment from a phone made with no unethical issues? Cause I don't know any.
  - cocacola1 3y ago
    No evil is preferable, but a little evil is acceptable. A lot of evil, however, is not (unless compared to pure evil, I suppose).
    - yogorenapan 3y ago
      How are you measuring “evil”?
      - cocacola1 3y ago
        By the tried and true methods of “I know it when I see it” and the smell test.
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      So the whole chain must be ethical, but children labor to make your phone is a little evil that is not counting. Absolute statement, then relativism. I'm convinced.
      - cocacola1 3y ago
        Rather, a recognition of the current state of affairs. And not just my phone; my clothes, some chocolate I had recently, and probably most things I own. The overseer is more evil, but we’re all a little evil (or a lot?), though I doubt we’re all about to go off grid and be self sufficient, weaving our own clothes, building our own shelter, foraging our food, etc.
        BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        We can apply this argument to the original scientific frauds. At this point I have no idea what your opinion is.
- xdennis 3y ago
  > Eugenics has not done anyone any good It's reduced genetic defects in the population. For example in many countries you can abort babies with Down syndrome up to the time of birth.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
If you’re willing to cut ethical corners in one dimension there’s no reason to believe you won’t in other dimensions. Doing rigorous research with honesty, transparency, and ethically is interrelated. That’s why being a reputable journal is so important - presumably the standards are high and the research is more reliable, and citing it is more credible. While not consistently true or universally true, it’s at least true the less reputable journals are known to be … less reputable. So, yes, you could republish in less reputable journals, but other researchers will assume a low quality result intermixed with fraud, unethical practice, and lack of transparency. Fair or not Chinese journals don’t have a reputation for quality like mainstream journals, even among Chinese researchers. Finally a Chinese language journal has almost no readership outside of China, further diminishing the impact of your research. Even citing the research in an international journal would be problematic.
- npunt 3y ago
  Agree, unethical research also makes replication harder thus any results are more suspect.
- quotemstr 3y ago
  "Ethics" isn't one thing. One can be committed personally to honesty and scientific rigor yet opposed to curiosity-killing IRB culture that purports to think that a questionnaire somehow might rise to the level of atrocity but not for IRB review.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    An ethical code and standard however is. Cutting corners in following the rules in one area for convenience is indicative of not following rules that inconvenience you. It’s not relevant if you agree with the morality of the ethics, which are rules and are singular and expressed as a standard. If you can’t comply, you can’t be assumed you follow the other rules as well.
    - quotemstr 3y ago
      https://www.simplypsychology.org/kohlberg.html#Level-3-%E2%80%93-Postconventional-Morality https://www.simplypsychology.org/kohlberg.html#Level-3-%E2%8...
COGlory 3y ago
No. No one trusts Chinese research to be: A) accurate B) reproducible Even in Western journals it's frequently suspect.
dekhn 3y ago
In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was a lot of world-class science going on in England and Germany and most of it didn't get translated, which led to both countries being somewhat behind the advances of the other. The Dutch and Danish played a big role in mediating between those two countries, which were in intense competition at that point. I've long assumed that if China continues to invest in its research culture, eventually (probably even now) there is research being published in Chinese (I assume that means Mandarin, but I am not knowledgeable on specifics) that would be extremely valuable. Areas like material sciences, optics, EE, MEMS, etc. But I think since the US has so much cultural exchange with China, and so many Chinese-speaking residents, that probably any really important stuff will get translated.
- zelse 3y ago
  Re: Publishing in Mandarin, just in case you're curious: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Wu, etc are spoken languages (or dialects, or varieties), but the writing system is common to all of them, albeit in two major forms -- Simplified and Traditional. If I write 恭喜发财, a Mandarin speaker will read that aloud as gongxi facai, a Cantonese speaker as gung hei faat coi, and a Hokkien speaker as kiong-hi hoat-chai, though I left off tone markings even though they're important. In that sense, unless something's romanized, written materials are pretty much just written in 'Chinese', and not any particular variety. Learning Chinese is funny that way: the spoken language has very simple, regular grammar, but then you also need to learn how to read, write, and pronounce ~3,000 characters to read a newspaper, with a well-educated reader in the language typically recognizing between 8 and 15 thousand characters of the 80,000-100,000 or so that have ever existed (including obscure characters, obsolete characters, regional characters, and variant characters). It's similar to how if you show a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German and a Pole '456', they'll all know the meaning even if the Englishman thinks "four-hundred fifty-six", and the Frenchman thinks quatre cent cinquante-six.
  - hnfong 3y ago
    This is mostly true, but not exactly. Most Chinese speakers can understand (written) Mandarin, but all the spoken languages can be written in theory. Mandarin was just the first one to have been popularly written and it was the official dialect, so it became the de-facto standard (before it became de jure). People in Hong Kong for example have been writing Cantonese for decades, albeit more often recently than before. But if you looked you'd find published works written in Cantonese 100+ years ago. That said, if you only knew Mandarin it will probably only take you a couple days to get the hang of reading Cantonese since it's not that different when written.

worik 3y ago

Mēh! Let the Chinese authorities burden themselves with questions of DNA markers and ethnic groups Eugenics has not done anyone any good, and when used as a means of controlling populations it goes to very dark places If the whole stack is not kept ethical, it is not ethical at all. If not ethical then it tends to evil

aydyn 3y ago
> If the whole stack is not kept ethical, it is not ethical at all. This is such a naive, borderline illiterate take. How much of modern human biological knowledge is built upon a foundation of unethical practices?
- kibwen 3y ago
  From a practical (rather than moral) perspective, the reason that scientific ethics are a thing in the first place is so that the public does not sour on scientific endeavors and view them as illegitimate. If you eschew ethics, then, like Dr. Frankenstein, eventually you will have the public beating down your door with torches and pitchforks, regardless of the results you achieve. Which is to say, if you care about advancing science in the long term rather than merely in the short term, you must care about ethics. Accusing others of naivete here is a bad look.
  - aydyn 3y ago
    From a practical perspective, nobody cares unless it affects them. Ethics? AI research today is plainly not ethical, yet its full steam ahead. Whats a bad look is some idealized notion that everything can be perfect and ethical and there are no gray areas. That is plainly magical thinking.
  - hnfong 3y ago
    From a practical (rather than moral) perspective, as long as the research is approved by the government and the government is authoritarian, there won't be any public beating down your door with torches and pitchforks.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Are writing this comment from a phone made with no unethical issues? Cause I don't know any.
- cocacola1 3y ago
  No evil is preferable, but a little evil is acceptable. A lot of evil, however, is not (unless compared to pure evil, I suppose).
  - yogorenapan 3y ago
    How are you measuring “evil”?
    - cocacola1 3y ago
      By the tried and true methods of “I know it when I see it” and the smell test.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    So the whole chain must be ethical, but children labor to make your phone is a little evil that is not counting. Absolute statement, then relativism. I'm convinced.
    - cocacola1 3y ago
      Rather, a recognition of the current state of affairs. And not just my phone; my clothes, some chocolate I had recently, and probably most things I own. The overseer is more evil, but we’re all a little evil (or a lot?), though I doubt we’re all about to go off grid and be self sufficient, weaving our own clothes, building our own shelter, foraging our food, etc.
      - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        We can apply this argument to the original scientific frauds. At this point I have no idea what your opinion is.
xdennis 3y ago
> Eugenics has not done anyone any good It's reduced genetic defects in the population. For example in many countries you can abort babies with Down syndrome up to the time of birth.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

If you’re willing to cut ethical corners in one dimension there’s no reason to believe you won’t in other dimensions. Doing rigorous research with honesty, transparency, and ethically is interrelated. That’s why being a reputable journal is so important - presumably the standards are high and the research is more reliable, and citing it is more credible. While not consistently true or universally true, it’s at least true the less reputable journals are known to be … less reputable. So, yes, you could republish in less reputable journals, but other researchers will assume a low quality result intermixed with fraud, unethical practice, and lack of transparency. Fair or not Chinese journals don’t have a reputation for quality like mainstream journals, even among Chinese researchers. Finally a Chinese language journal has almost no readership outside of China, further diminishing the impact of your research. Even citing the research in an international journal would be problematic.

npunt 3y ago
Agree, unethical research also makes replication harder thus any results are more suspect.
quotemstr 3y ago
"Ethics" isn't one thing. One can be committed personally to honesty and scientific rigor yet opposed to curiosity-killing IRB culture that purports to think that a questionnaire somehow might rise to the level of atrocity but not for IRB review.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  An ethical code and standard however is. Cutting corners in following the rules in one area for convenience is indicative of not following rules that inconvenience you. It’s not relevant if you agree with the morality of the ethics, which are rules and are singular and expressed as a standard. If you can’t comply, you can’t be assumed you follow the other rules as well.
  - quotemstr 3y ago
    https://www.simplypsychology.org/kohlberg.html#Level-3-%E2%80%93-Postconventional-Morality https://www.simplypsychology.org/kohlberg.html#Level-3-%E2%8...

COGlory 3y ago

No. No one trusts Chinese research to be: A) accurate B) reproducible Even in Western journals it's frequently suspect.

dekhn 3y ago

In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was a lot of world-class science going on in England and Germany and most of it didn't get translated, which led to both countries being somewhat behind the advances of the other. The Dutch and Danish played a big role in mediating between those two countries, which were in intense competition at that point. I've long assumed that if China continues to invest in its research culture, eventually (probably even now) there is research being published in Chinese (I assume that means Mandarin, but I am not knowledgeable on specifics) that would be extremely valuable. Areas like material sciences, optics, EE, MEMS, etc. But I think since the US has so much cultural exchange with China, and so many Chinese-speaking residents, that probably any really important stuff will get translated.

zelse 3y ago
Re: Publishing in Mandarin, just in case you're curious: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Wu, etc are spoken languages (or dialects, or varieties), but the writing system is common to all of them, albeit in two major forms -- Simplified and Traditional. If I write 恭喜发财, a Mandarin speaker will read that aloud as gongxi facai, a Cantonese speaker as gung hei faat coi, and a Hokkien speaker as kiong-hi hoat-chai, though I left off tone markings even though they're important. In that sense, unless something's romanized, written materials are pretty much just written in 'Chinese', and not any particular variety. Learning Chinese is funny that way: the spoken language has very simple, regular grammar, but then you also need to learn how to read, write, and pronounce ~3,000 characters to read a newspaper, with a well-educated reader in the language typically recognizing between 8 and 15 thousand characters of the 80,000-100,000 or so that have ever existed (including obscure characters, obsolete characters, regional characters, and variant characters). It's similar to how if you show a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German and a Pole '456', they'll all know the meaning even if the Englishman thinks "four-hundred fifty-six", and the Frenchman thinks quatre cent cinquante-six.
- hnfong 3y ago
  This is mostly true, but not exactly. Most Chinese speakers can understand (written) Mandarin, but all the spoken languages can be written in theory. Mandarin was just the first one to have been popularly written and it was the official dialect, so it became the de-facto standard (before it became de jure). People in Hong Kong for example have been writing Cantonese for decades, albeit more often recently than before. But if you looked you'd find published works written in Cantonese 100+ years ago. That said, if you only knew Mandarin it will probably only take you a couple days to get the hang of reading Cantonese since it's not that different when written.