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Chinese archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road
- mensetmanusman 2y agoIf your goal in research is to p-hack your way to a conclusion, you will always succeed.
- wheelerwj 2y agoP-hack?
- mensetmanusman 2y agohttps://statisticsbyjim.com/hypothesis-testing/p-hacking/ https://statisticsbyjim.com/hypothesis-testing/p-hacking/
- opinion-is-bad 2y agoIn statistics, the p-value is shorthand for “how unlikely was this result.” Smaller p-values indicate less likely results, which in turn creates evidence of a relationship between variables. Many naive approaches to statically analysis place an almost magical value on the 5% threshold, but that’s not actually a rare event if you run dozens of tests. P-hacking generally refers to running tests and discarding the values that do not support what you want to be true. It’s a big problem in academia.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- j7ake 2y agoTechnically it’s how unlikely of an event under a null model. The null model is key: if you are mischievous, you can just define a seemingly benign but incorrect null model and generate extreme p values without discarding: all values will be significant!
- em500 2y agohttps://xkcd.com/882 https://xkcd.com/882
- skybrian 2y agoI’m wondering how often p-values are even used in papers about archeological digs? It seems like historical arguments are often made without doing statistics at all?
- llamaimperative 2y agoI don't think they're talking about literal p-values, but the more general practice of defining your question in terms of the desired result.
- skybrian 2y agoYes, but I’m annoyed with the low-effort use of science-based metaphor, and taking it more seriously leaves an opening for someone who actually knows something to elaborate.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- faragon 2y agohttps://archive.is/PJ18y https://archive.is/PJ18y
- wtcactus 2y ago[flagged]
- meiraleal 2y ago[flagged]
- transcriptase 2y agoIn the world of plant genomics there’s a somewhat interesting trend where teams of Chinese researchers eventually, owing to newly collected specimens in China unavailable to other groups, conclude that that whatever their group works on just so happens to have originated from China.
- coldtea 2y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Roman Empire, at its time, meant nothing to those parts of the world, no influence, economic, cultural, or otherwise Rome, China and the North Indian kingdoms traded. > They had their own empires, and often far greater development and refinement This is as silly as claiming Rome was the centre of the world.
- coldtea 2y ago>Rome, China and the North Indian kingdoms traded Yes, well established. But in limited amounts, and without much knowledge in either side about the other, not much influence, cultural, social, economic, military, and such. Which is way Marco Polo's journey, which happened close to a full millenium later after the final centuries of the Roman Empire, is still a landmark of the civilizational meeting between Europe and China. >This is as silly as claiming Rome was the centre of the world Not anywhere near as silly. For most of history, millenia before and after the Roman empire (until about the later modern era), China is considered by economists and historians to have been the top global economy. And that's not due to population (in fact, it was smaller than the Roman Empire population wise, even about half), but with impressive organization, culture, and infrastructure.
- mannyv 2y agoThe CPP repudiated Old China back in the day. Now they want to embrace Old China because it gives the CPP legitimacy. So the world turns.
- zzzbra 2y agoCCP*
- pessimizer 2y agoCPC
- ginko 2y agoPCP
- meiraleal 2y agoIt makes sense because Old China was guilty of putting them in that situation. Even Older China was the richest country in the world for many centuries tho.
- quattrofan 2y ago[dead]
- gumby 2y agoScouring trade route history is a two-edged sword: which way did influence run? I’m sure ideological archeology can solve that though. That path also has a lot of history.
- cs702 2y ago> ideological archeology A short, memorable, oxymoronic, and yet accurate description of these efforts. I like the term so much that I'm going to start using "ideological [scientific field]" to refer to similar pseudo-scientific efforts in other fields.
- coldtea 2y ago>which way did influence run? Usually the way of the site of higher riches and more advanced technically, organizationally, etc, to the less one?
- mistrial9 2y agoimagine a way of the sword and a way of the cloth. The cloth ways prosper while the sword ways train to fight. The sword way group then kills or threatens to kill the cloth way group, demanding payment. So it begins. Later, roving hordes on horseback arrive without warning from far away, and simply take everything, breaking any balance. The horse masters are the new rulers. Later, the horse masters lose. etc
- SiempreViernes 2y agoYou leave out the bit where the sword way freeze to death because they have no technology to deal with the harsh weather (which obviously is present because there's a need for cloth in the first place).
- Spivak 2y agoThe West really isn't winning this one if that's your standard. The Mongol empire which amassed all the wealth, technology and military prowess of China during their expansion destroyed the Arabic world (arguably the most advanced civilization at the time), Russia, and the West they encountered like a bulldozer through wet cardboard. And did so with armies 1/3-1/5 the size of their opponents. We don't really acknowledge in history class just how lucky the west got with Temüjin dying and stopping the expansion that was literally right at our door. Edit: The sibling comment is grossly misleading, the west barely won against a scouting battalion that we had time to prepare for that was frozen and starving because the greatest wingman in history tricked the army into taking the long dangerous way through the mountains and sent us a heads-up. The Mongol army wasn't primitive, it's that their purposeful strategy (and what made them so dangerous so far from home) required they plunder food and supplies regularly along the way. It made it so they didn't need huge supply lines and could outmaneuver armies that did.
- skybrian 2y agoYes, sometimes research is funded due to political motivations. The researchers could discover and publish interesting historical facts anyway. Hopefully they will still be able to do good work? It’s good that someone funds it, even if their motives aren’t pure. It’s unlikely that this is really going to move the needle as far as rivalry between China and other countries goes; it’s more of a side effect of that rivalry, like national museums, the Olympics, and moon landings.
- SubiculumCode 2y agoThe myth of China being China for millenia is such a propagandist rewrite of history in that region; I hate to see NYT headlines fall for it.
- SubiculumCode 2y agohttps://www.camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/ https://www.camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/
- nsonha 2y agoit's an excerpt from a book, that presumably has a lot of things to say about China. Why focus on that to elevate some petty point that China does not have 5000 years of history. So what? it still has millennia, counting only written history. It's a bit tiring to see the average tech guy on HN demonstrate their critical thinking about everything China. Being able to write some code and read your own country's propaganda does not mean you're well equipped to talk about other countries.
- SubiculumCode 2y agoIt would be akin to Italy claiming that they are Romans...sure Romans lived there, but there is a whole lot of history between then and modern day state that would make this claim at best tenuous.
- card_zero 2y agoMussolini was fond of making that claim. Wikipedia says "the entire Mediterranean was redefined to make it appear a unified region that had belonged to Italy from the times of the ancient Roman province of Italia, and was claimed as Italy's exclusive sphere of influence."
- meiraleal 2y agoEvery place has millenias of history. The countries in the American continent start to count from when they were invaded by Europeans, that's their (our) loss.
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- amriksohata 2y agoThe british re-wrote history from the east, revisionism is part of any major empire, China is just doing it back
- ramblenode 2y agoUnlike many commenters here, I actually read the article, and this quote seems to be the basis for the tenuous link between archeaology and geopolitics suggested by the title: > The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor. “Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said. Kind of an interesting story if you can look past the attempt by WSJ to shoehorn in a geopolitcal angle. > Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument. "We're just asking questions", etc.
- Leary 2y agoExactly, the Yuezhi is about as Chinese as the Japanese are, both first entering into the historical records in official Chinese dynastic history during the Han Dynasty.
- beloch 2y agoArchaeology does not take place in a vacuum. It has always been a product of political human beings. Archaeologists are keenly aware of this. Mussolini excavated Pompeii with bulldozers to reveal the past greatness of Italy on a schedule compatible with his ambitions. British archaeologists conducted digs around the globe through the lens of empire. Natives in the Americas, to this day, hesitate to trust archaeologists because they have, far too often, ignored the culture and concerns of descendants while digging up their ancestors. Most archaeologists strive to tell the truth, but truth is often a matter of perspective. It's not being anti-Chinese to observe that China is currently an expansionist totalitarian state, and that Chinese archaeologists will be under pressure to support a state-approved narrative. Their research should be viewed with their cultural context firmly in mind.
- nuc1e0n 2y agoYep. They also did partial reconstuction work of the great wall in modern times and passed it off as ancient. Similarly, Stonehenge in the UK was also partially reconstructed in the 20th century. Sensoji temple in Tokyo was also rebuilt to its original design in the 1950s. The giant stone Buddhas of Afganistan could do with reconstructing IMHO as well.
- feedforward 2y agoYou see this in cross-Atlantic history education too. In US and European history, everything seems to flow out of Europe, or at least the Mediterranean. Menes becomes king of Egypt around 3150 BC. Then we fastforward to Honer and the Olympic games in 7th century Greece. Then there are the Punic wars and Rome wins the Battle of Cornith in 146 BC. Then the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and so on. With some things like the revolts in Judaea against Rome as a kind of dialectic counter-narrative. If we look at what was happening in India, in Mali, in Japan and China, in Tenochtitlan or Caracol or Cusco, we see a different history happening. From the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683, to the end of World War II, Europe and the US did dominate the world. That has been fading, and the narrative is facing too.
- ahazred8ta 2y agoThere was a cartoon of a high school history teacher asking "So how should we cover this - dialectical materialism, or Kings and Battles?"
- 77pt77 2y agoThe next step is to start taking "1421: The Year China Discovered the World" seriously. Vide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies
- slater 2y agoI read that book when it came out. Really liked it, but, from that link: "The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous ... Examination of the book's central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance." Whelp!
- 77pt77 2y agoIf that were true, when the Portuguese and Spaniards got to tne new world 90% of the people would have died recently of disease. Those chinese ships were small floating cities and disease would have spread throughout the continent.
- tm-guimaraes 2y agoThat did happen to the big Central American civilizations. Killing by a mix of inter conflicts and mass desease
- dredmorbius 2y agoIf I'm interpreting parent correctly, they're arguing that had the Chinese recently visited the Americas, the Portuguese and Spanish would have encountered native populations which were already decimated by disease. As this isn't the case, the epidemiological argument against shortly prior Chinese encounters with American populations is strong. That post Portuguese/Spanish contact native American populations were annihilated by disease is now well established fact. That again argues against earlier Chinese contact.
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- nuc1e0n 2y agoTravellers from Asia journeyed to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom of Ghandara (whose name is a corruption of Alexandria) and took Buddhism back with them to the east. This is fictionalised in the story 'Journey to the West'. Nippon TV in Japan did a cool TV series adaption of this story that was dubbed into English and shown on kids TV in the UK as 'Monkey', which was quite popular back in the day. If you spend enough time wandering around the British Museum you learn all this stuff.
- Keysh 2y agoGandhara (not "Ghandara") is mentioned in the Behistun inscription of the Persian emperor Darius, from about two hundred years before Alexander, so it's clearly not "a corruption of Alexandria".
- nuc1e0n 2y agoOh really? Maybe that's wrong then. Is the name a transcription or a translation? What script were the records written in originally? Names can be retroactively applied, especially in translation. Looks like I've got some reading to do. Edit: Maybe I got confused between different folk etymologies for the name of the city of Kandahar.
- profsummergig 2y agoFrom what I understand (and I could be wrong), Kandahar is the modern name of Gandhara.
- nuc1e0n 2y agoThat's what I thought as well, but clearly there's more debate there to be had than I realised. Was the city not founded by one of Alexander's generals or was it? Or ever called something like Iskanderha? I don't know.
- Keysh 2y agoKandahar is a city; Gandhara was a kingdom. (But, yes, there is a theory that the name ["Kandahar"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar) derives from Gandhara, as opposed to deriving from "Alexander" -- though it seems generally agreed that there was a city -- [Alexandria of Arachosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Arachosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Arachosia) named after him built on that spot.)
- pjmorris 2y agoFTA: “We are studying the past to understand and shape the present and future,” said Wang. I was of the persuasion that "History is written to say it wasn't our fault" - Sam Phillips, but it may play a more active role than that. I recently read and enjoyed 'The Silk Roads', Frankopan, which, to oversimplify, takes as its thesis the idea that "...for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun." I was persuaded that he has a point. I'm currently reading 'The New China Playbook', Jin, together with an ideologically-varying friend as a way to base our discussions more on knowledge than opinion. So I'm particularly interested in what others have found helpful in understanding China's past and present. Any recommendations?