scientism comments on Link: If you don't already read Bad Science - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Manfred 25 May 2011 10:28PM

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Comment author: gwern 26 May 2011 05:20:00PM 6 points [-]

I've been seeing this meme a lot lately, that the PRC leadership are engineers. It seems to be used in an implicit sense of 'they are practically scientists, and will be cool & rational & open to broader application of the scientific method (whatever their other failings), and we can generally expect rational actions of them'.

This bothers me.

  1. There's the obvious point that even if they are rational actors, they may share few of our values and their rationality be a bad thing from our point of view; it's a common interpretation of the Party that it is ruthless, murderous, and determined to keep China intact and under its control (and there are racial undertones here of Han supremacy).
  2. It's not clear at all that engineering is associated with the better parts of the scientific tradition and with rationality in general, given the connection between engineers and terrorism (and creationism is mentioned).
Comment author: scientism 27 May 2011 10:08:25PM 3 points [-]

I would seek out information on what the PRC leadership actually thinks and does. What you find in the media is extremely misleading when it comes to the modern Chinese Communist Party (contrary to popular belief it has undergone considerable political reform as well as economic reform). Indeed, the PRC actually does already roll out policy in an experimental way before making it widespread. I recommend reading Mark Leonard's What Does China Think? for a short, popular introduction. David Shambaugh's China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation is a scholarly account that gives an idea of what's going on in China's many think tanks.

Note: I'm not condoning the Chinese Communist Party's actions or recommending their political system. It's just one area where I've done some research and discovered the truth is very, very far from what's ordinarily presented. The PRC leadership have, as far as I can tell, at least been trying to build a meritocratic political system in which there are no general elections but a great deal of experimentation in ways to elicit and respond to feedback from the citizenship. Whether they've succeeded or not is another matter. At the very least they've managed to create a system where power is exchanged peacefully and the leadership has a relatively high level of education.

Comment author: gwern 06 June 2011 10:19:48PM *  0 points [-]

David Shambaugh's China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation is a scholarly account that gives an idea of what's going on in China's many think tanks.

One of the things that seems to be emphasized in what I've read is how difficult it is for Westerners to understand what is going on inside the Party, but the reviews of that sound interesting (especially the talk http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/events/2008/0415_china/20080415_china.pdf ), so I'll put it on my list.

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