'Global Science is Splintering Into Two - And This is Becoming a Problem' 168
The United States and China are pursuing parallel scientific tracks. To solve crises on multiple fronts, the two roads need to become one, Nature's editorial board wrote Wednesday. From the post: It's no secret that research collaborations between China and the United States -- among other Western countries -- are on a downward trajectory. Early indicators of a possible downturn have been confirmed by more sources. A report from Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, published in August, for instance, stated that the number of research articles co-authored by scientists in the two countries had fallen in 2021, the first annual drop since 1993. Meanwhile, data from Nature Index show that China-based scientists' propensity to collaborate internationally has been waning, when looking at the authorship of papers in the Index's natural-science journals.
Nature reported last month that China's decoupling from the countries loosely described as the West mirrors its strengthening of science links with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. There are many good reasons for China to be boosting science in LMICs, which could sorely do with greater research funding and capacity building. But this is also creating parallel scientific systems -- one centred on North America and Europe, and the other on China. The biggest challenges faced by humanity, from combating climate change to ending poverty, are embodied in a globally agreed set of targets, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Approaching them without shared knowledge can only slow down progress by creating competing systems for advancing and implementing solutions. It's a scenario that the research community must be more aware of and work to avoid. Nature Index offers some reasons as to why collaboration between China and the West is declining. Travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic took their toll, limiting collaborations and barring new ones from being forged. Geopolitical tensions have led many Western governments to restrict their research partnerships with China, on national-security grounds, and vice versa.
Nature reported last month that China's decoupling from the countries loosely described as the West mirrors its strengthening of science links with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. There are many good reasons for China to be boosting science in LMICs, which could sorely do with greater research funding and capacity building. But this is also creating parallel scientific systems -- one centred on North America and Europe, and the other on China. The biggest challenges faced by humanity, from combating climate change to ending poverty, are embodied in a globally agreed set of targets, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Approaching them without shared knowledge can only slow down progress by creating competing systems for advancing and implementing solutions. It's a scenario that the research community must be more aware of and work to avoid. Nature Index offers some reasons as to why collaboration between China and the West is declining. Travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic took their toll, limiting collaborations and barring new ones from being forged. Geopolitical tensions have led many Western governments to restrict their research partnerships with China, on national-security grounds, and vice versa.
China wins (Score:5, Insightful)
All Chinese scientists read English well enough to understand scientific papers. Essentially no non-Chinese scientists read Chinese well enough to understand scientific papers.
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There are plenty of people in the West who are capable of translating from Chinese to English... even very technical material.
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Plenty may be overly hopeful. Basically every Chinese person is taught English now. At best,1% of English speakers speak Chinese.
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At best,1% of English speakers speak Chinese.
Probably off by at least one order of magnitude.
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You think a minimum of 10% of English speakers (who aren't Chinese) also speak Chinese?
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Maybe he meant .1% of English speakers know Chinese
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That I wouldn't argue. 1% was likely being generous.
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I've travelled to China to work with Huawei as a representative of a western scientific HPC project recently and no matter where I went, the people were friendly and welcoming. The Chinese are generally very positive towards... pretty much everyone. This is almost certainly because the can choose what to consume of western media, and of course most western political media regar
Re:China wins (Score:5, Informative)
Essentially no non-Chinese scientists read Chinese well enough to understand scientific papers.
Do you really think translating Chinese scientific papers into English is a barrier in 2023? There are plenty of times where want to visit a website in another language, and it is never a barrier. My browser even asks if I want to translate it automatically. I've never had trouble understanding the core message of the text even if the translation isn't perfect grammatically.
Re:China wins (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to put TOO fine a point on it.
YES!
Literal translation of Chinese into English leaves you with a garbled mess.
Can Chinese speakers convert that? Sure!
Can most English speakers do it?
NOPE!
Re:China wins (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is the first translation of a research paper I found online in Chinese, and it sounds pretty good when run through Google Translate. Perhaps a big wordy but perfectly understandable.
Research summary
Generally speaking, restrictions imposed on outgoing government personnel can be divided into two categories: restrictions on political activities and commercial activities carried out by outgoing government personnel. These restrictions are intended to ensure that government personnel adhere to certain standards of conduct in order to maintain public confidence in the government and preserve the government's integrity.
Restrictions imposed on outgoing heads of government
Neither France nor the United States has written rules governing the activities of outgoing heads of government. However, in both countries, media criticism, unfriendly public reaction and practices appear to have had the effect of deterring outgoing heads of government from engaging in dishonest behavior.
The British Ministerial Code stipulates that if the head of government intends to accept an appointment with any organization within two years after leaving office, he must seek advice from the Business Appointments Advisory Committee. Outgoing heads of government in the UK generally act in accordance with the Ministerial Code.
In California and Ontario, restrictions on outgoing heads of government are based on statute. These restrictions govern the business dealings between the outgoing head of government and the government, as well as the outgoing head of government's future employment.
[...]
Re: China wins (Score:2)
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Technical documents tend to translate reasonably well now, but there are still issues. Many papers are published as PDFs, and translation apps have trouble fitting English into the same space as the original Chinese.
Another issue is discoverability. It seems like for some reason search engines don't like machine translated text. Maybe they see it as auto-generated, or maybe a lot of SEO spammers bulk translate stuff for their websites.
Re:China wins (Score:5, Interesting)
English is the universal language of science. Even the top Chinese scientific journals are in English: https://english.cas.cn/pu/ [english.cas.cn]
Re:China wins (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't expect this to remain true. A century ago German was the language of Chemistry.
OTOH, automated translations are now or are becoming good enough that this is no longer a real barrier. And I often think that perhaps a paper would be better if translated into English from whatever it was written in. (Ostensibly English, but unreadable.) Note that this does not imply that the author is not a native speaker of English, just that they are really poor at writing.
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Don't expect this to remain true. A century ago German was the language of Chemistry.
OTOH, automated translations are now or are becoming good enough that this is no longer a real barrier. And I often think that perhaps a paper would be better if translated into English from whatever it was written in. (Ostensibly English, but unreadable.) Note that this does not imply that the author is not a native speaker of English, just that they are really poor at writing.
All top conferences and papers will continue to be in English during our lifetimes. The reason is that the review process is global and depends on a lingua franca, which is English. Some countries, like France, have tried to muscle in on the English dominance, but they have failed miserably.
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Re: China wins (Score:2)
Things change for reasons, not just because.
Some other nation would have to become dominant for that.
As long as we have the biggest stick that's not going to happen.
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I wouldn't assume that America doesn't destroy itself in our lifetimes, at least in terms of international influence.
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I wouldn't assume that America doesn't destroy itself in our lifetimes, at least in terms of international influence.
Our international influence is due primarily to our projection of military power. So unless Tuberville successfully destroys our military leadership that's not likely any time soon.
Re: China wins (Score:2)
The military power could largely fall apart in a few years if the world stops believing in the long term viability of the US dollar. The debt curve is not in your favor.
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The military power could largely fall apart in a few years if the world stops believing in the long term viability of the US dollar. The debt curve is not in your favor.
So what do you think they're going to switch to? The Yuan? The Euro? Bitcoin?
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So what do you think they're going to switch to? The Yuan? The Euro? Bitcoin?
Barter and complex exchanges with a global depression beyond what we've seen in the past. It's not a desirable option, but it's a path we can definitely go down.
A decade after that kind of upheaval it's unlikely the US would come out on top. It would depend a lot on if the US managed to keep its domestic markets intact during a serious depression.
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Machine translations will be usable for science, engineering, and medicine within our lifetimes.
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"lingua franca" is French for French language...
Actually, lingua franca is apparently derived from a Mediterranean pidgin language called Sabir. The word "lingua" is more Italian, and "franca" is derived from greek/arabic/italian roots. At least, according to Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Thought you may want to know. Just so you don't think it's French any more.
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"lingua franca" is French for French language...
Actually, lingua franca is apparently derived from a Mediterranean pidgin language called Sabir. The word "lingua" is more Italian, and "franca" is derived from greek/arabic/italian roots. At least, according to Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Thought you may want to know. Just so you don't think it's French any more.
Thank you. That was fun and informative.
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"lingua franca" is French for French language...
Well, no. It is Latin for "free language", which holds the record with well over 1500 years of usage, far more than French or English, or German.
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WHICH scientific community? The point here is that the community is bifurcating. I assume that there are already a large number of publications in Chinese that I never hear about. (Actually, that's true even in English. Mechanical Engineers miss a lot of work in organic chemistry, e.g.)
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Im my day, we used German for scientific papers, and we liked it! Kids these days...
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Wins what? Damn sure not science. (Score:2)
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Most of the "fraudulent science" papers I hear about are from western sources. I blame "publish or perish". There are some really high profile ones from elsewhere, but not the majority of the ones I hear about. (And I'm not a real scholar...I merely follow things I find interesting.)
Don't be guided too much by what headlines say. They are ALL designed to manipulate you. (Some are accurate.)
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As a grad student in the 90s, I was b both amazed and horrified by the Chinese students.
It appeared that their four years of "college" was really just training in memorization and test taking.
They had this bizarre ability to do well on tests while having pretty much zero comprehension of the material, coupled with no ability to apply it or manipulate it, let alone explain it.
And were in big trouble when a professor created an entirely new question on a test, rather than one that could be ground out from the
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And yet Chinese companies are innovating at astounding pace. It can't be IP theft because it doesn't exist anywhere else. Everything from methane rockets to wireless communications to AI.
We really need to stop with the "don't worry, Chinese people are terrible at everything and will never catch up with us" line, because it's screwing us. We need to take them seriously and compete.
Just today I was reading about Loonsong's latest CPU, which is on a par with current gen Intel ones for efficiency, only a little
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Re:Wins what? Damn sure not science. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second of all, America is a place where the "heterodox view" can be expressed without threat of your entire family being taken and disappeared into some desert labor camp for saying something against the official line.
Thirdly...man, I don't even know why I'm bothering arguing at this point. We are literally the home field of science. Nobody else is even close.
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Still is, overwhelmingly and almost uniquely. In fact, many of our problems stem from taking that too far into knee-jerk dialectic where none is called for.
We don't have political prisoners, period. That kind of statement is kind of absurd false equivalency that always comes from the mouths of authoritarian apologists.
There's no parallel between in
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If you actually believed those were compelling examples, you would have explained them instead of just namedropping. You're playing the same old innuendo propaganda games. Like if someone accused you of being a serial killer, you deny it, and I just say "Oh yeah? What about Patricia Marx and Cynthia Stephens? What about all those coeds who disappeared in 2015?" You've said nothing at all.
Decrying
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What are you, a standup comedian? Is this your bit where you talk about shopping at an "uncertainty store," where all the products are guaranteed?
No, things don't usually seem like their opposites to me. I'm content to speak English rather than Newspeak. But then I wasn't raised in a glorified slave camp of a country that still puts history's 3rd worst monster on its
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you are such an idiot. none of what you said has anything to do with science
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We're on Earth. Slashdot is just a website. The only karma that matters is how well your words and actions are accountable to truth. Organizations like Fox are explicitly propagandistic and unaccountable to reality.
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One is a right-wing corporate propaganda outfit that openly expresses its true nature, and the other two are right-wing corporate propaganda outfits that clumsily pander to demographics they neither agree with nor understand under the theory of "infotainment media."
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At a company like Fox, the agenda of the presenters perfectly coincides with the business agenda, while at "liberal-flavored media" like CNN the product is meant as a kind of feint or dodge by executives with the exact same business agenda as their Fox colleagues.
People are seriously deluded about the politics of media. I roll my eyes every time someon
Re: Wins what? Damn sure not science. (Score:2)
"Most of the "fraudulent science" papers I hear about are from western sources."
Stop getting your news from China.
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Most of ALL the scientific papers I hear about are from western sources. Including fraudulent. (Look into Stanford for a very recent example.)
Since most of the papers I hear about are from western sources, it's not surprising that most of the fraudulent ones are also. But if I just paid attention to the headlines I think the proportions might be different.
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LOL, we don't need to read Chinese. We'll build AIs that will do it for us.
Re: China wins (Score:2)
Most are not- they fabricate evidence and propose false theories, all in the name of academic output. Socialist and totalitarian societies do not encourage truth seeking.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that China is an authoritarian dictatorship that has a strong desire, if not an actual goal, to undermine liberal Western democracies, overturn the rule of law, and reshape international relations the way it wants them. Same goes for Russia, Iran and North Korea, but I think only China has a realistic chance of succeeding.
While it's regrettable if science suffers, in the long run I think we need to realize that China's goals are antithetical to liberal democracies' goals and act accordingly.
I think Iran & NK (Score:2)
NK is so desperately poor they are a non issue. Folks don't really understand just how much we bombed them because we used shells instead of bombs dropped from planes. It's 70 years later and the country is still shell shocked. We quite literally bombed them back to the stone age.
As for Russia, their dictator lost his marbles. Age related cognitive decline can c
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Iran is run by a theocracy whose goal is to preserve itself (hence the well-equipped and well-trained Republican Guard). The Iranian government is willing to do almost anything to damage other countries it sees as threats, just so long as it doesn't lead to actual war, which they don't want.
Agree with your assessment of NK and Russia, though I don't agree you can break down dictatorships by being nice to them. Is there ever an instance where that has worked?
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though I don't agree you can break down dictatorships by being nice to them. Is there ever an instance where that has worked?
Franco comes to mind. Helps when they're not expansionist, and still had to wait for him to die, but at least the successor he appointed used his absolute power to call a Constitutional Convention and gave up his power once the people decided on their democracy.
Likely some in Central/South America too.
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I believe Japan's dictatorship was ended by a couple of atomic bombs.
Post-war, of course it made sense to help Japan. But a democratic Japan could not have happened IMO, or at least not quickly, without the destruction of the autocratic regime first.
Modernization is the key (along with secularization that inevitably follows). That leads to education which leads to critical thinking. Right wing authoritarian govts can't survive that.
It'd be nice if that were happening in the US... secularization, educat
Re: I should add (Score:2)
Without condition? You mean like requiring them to accept our base or limiting their military?
Re:I think Iran & NK (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's more complicated than that. The North Korean regime actually needs* the US.
Iran is a very interesting country. It is not a small country -- it has a larger population than Germany or Turkey. It is resource rich, and aside from things like oil and uranium it's greatest resource is people. It has an enormous higher education system that produces a large number of college graduates. It graduates more engineers than Japan or Korea, for example.
So while it's tempting to boil Iran down to a personified country, or to "the mullahs" as if they were somehow uniform in thinking, it's a crazy complicated country with multiple factions vying for power. Sure there's the Supreme Leader, who has the Revolutionary Guards who are answerable only to him, but because he *needs* them to exercise power over everyone else he's got a bit of a Praetorian Guard problem with them. They're the most batshit crazy religious radicals in the country, far worse than the mullahs, even the Supreme Leader himself.
So while it may have looked like Iran was "coming out of its shell" from the outside, what was happening was that certain pragmatic factions were gaining a bit of traction, then the relgious radicals asserted themselves. US actions were perhaps useful to those radicals, but it's likely they'd have done it anyhow.
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Yes, that. The overthrow of Mosaddegh was a terrible thing. I have several Iranian friends; they all hate the current Iranian regime and are all very bitter about what happened to Mosaddegh.
Western powers are not perfect by any means. But as I said before, I'd rather live under their systems than the current Chinese, Russian, Iranian or North Korean systems.
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just want to be left the fuck alone. Iran in particular was gradually coming out of it's shell and modernizing until we ****ed it up. Again.
NK is so desperately poor they are a non issue. [...]
As for Russia, their dictator lost his marbles. [...]
North Korea (i.e., the leadership) just wants to remain in power. However, to do that, they need international money, and so they impact the rest of the world through arms sales, online crime, etc. Oh, and they like lobbing missiles around South Korea.
Iran doesn't want to be left alone. They are smaller than China, but they also believe that they deserve a more prominent position in the global (or at least local) geopolitical hierarchy. That's why they actively try to directly and indirectly influence w
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the US and its lackeys in NATO wanted to overthrow Putin by destabilizing Russia by creating a threat in its front yard
What is this "threat" of which you speak? The demonstration that a country like Ukraine could move out of the Soviet era and hold free and fair elections? I can see why Putin would be afraid of that, as an authoritarian dictator.
Iran's theocracy wants to give us all 'peace' (Score:2)
as defined by Islam:
Ayatollah Khomeni argued:
'Islam’s jihad is a struggle against idolatry, sexual deviation, plunder, repression, and cruelty. The war waged by [non-Islamic] conquerors, however, aims at promoting lust and animal pleasures. They care not if whole countries are wiped out and many families left homeless. But those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlastin
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I think it's important to note and remember that even "before" the current war in Ukraine, Russia also invaded Georgia, Ukraine once before and were already occupying stolen land before the current war, and sent in their troops to slaughter the locals in Chechnya multiple times. And that's just quickly off the top of my head and only including their actions as Russians and not Soviets.
Their current war may make then extra-double-super-loathesome. But let's not pretend that Russia was a nation of Care Bear
Re: I think Iran & NK (Score:2)
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They don't want to overturn the "rule of law" necessarily, they want to implement the rule of law the way they see it.
There's nothing unique about that, even our good buddies in Continental Europe have a different take on that than English common law countries.
Russia seems fairly adapt at citing U.S. international precedent (I.E. The Bush Doctrine) when it suits them.
I'm not disagreeing that Chinese dominance in the international stage would be different for the U.S. Just suggesting that the minute details
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What you say about China is also true of the US (except that it's less authoritarian, and a near-oligarchy rather than a dictatorship) in mirror image.
The US is approximately a representative democracy at the local level, and probably at some state levels. Not at the national level. And it wasn't intended to be. The founding fathers had a great distrust of democracy, even though it was popular, so they tried to create a republic where the elite would rule. They were pretty successful, even though it isn
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Of all of the countries capable of being a super-power, which right now is the USA and China, and maaaaaybe Russia... I think I'd pick the USA, despite all of its flaws.
The "USA is not a democracy" trope is a dumb talking point. It's not reality [represent.us].
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Of the countries that I know, I generally prefer the US. Since my father was in the military, I've stayed in a couple of other countries for a period of years. Let me guarantee to you that if you're getting your ideas from the news, you're forming a false image of what the country is like.
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Who wants to undermine Western democracies ? (Score:2)
Special counsel obtained search warrant for Donald Trump’s Twitter account [politico.com]
Trump Could Have Unleashed Violence If He Knew About Search Warrant For His [forbes.com]
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China would absolutely have done all of those things back in the day if it had had the capabilities and felt it was in its interests.
Yes, the history of US meddling in international affairs is checkered at best. It did all of those rotten things, but it also rescued Europe and Japan from the ashes of WWII and was instrumental in the creation of the UN.
"I can see Russia from my Lab!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually this will probably be a good thing for many scientific advances as competing empires try to outspend each other looking for preemptive technology.
Parallel construction with local variations will become a live experimental environment where we can watch different implementations of punctuated innovations followed by a couple decades of mutually converging toward the best implementation after the cat's out of the bag.
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Competition leads to better outcomes.
Right now we have a repeatability, and an outright falsification, problem in science. If you have two different large countries pursuing economic advantages, then these will be harshly punished and be reduced to irrelevancy by those granting the funds.
A monolithic apparatus will only make the problem worse.
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"Competition leads to better outcomes." is a religion. tons of actual science shows where this universal statement fails. competition sometimes helps. sometimes it does not. For problem solving and creative thinking it does not help. On a larger organizational scale, it can decide where to focus resources and that can do some good... although it can easily waste at least 1/3 of funding in marketing and as much in other bloat just to compete to fund less than 1/3 of funding put to actual research...
We need
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...We need is government funded verification...
I'm gonna stop you there; we aren't going to agree. Even if you like our current iteration of "government", the next probably won't be to your liking, and they will custom order whatever 'science' they want to fit their agenda.
Competition may not be the perfect solution, but it's certainly the least bad off all the options.
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Bureaucracies being slow to change is a feature not a bug.
A democratically run government is as competent as the voters. Yes, that means it is YOUR fault when it doesn't work because you vote in orange morons; or you are so corrupt that a tax break or imposing your religious opinion about childbirth buys your vote. At least there are some professionals involved but thinking that your vote-by-money free market is going to solve everything by direct democracy is fool hardy... especially when the votes are co
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...none of that has anything to do with the corruption I mentioned. Stop being tribal; the letter after the name has little bearing on the level of corruption.
Rely on the government at your own peril.
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This is probably ok for tech development in specific directions, but totally inadequate for tackling complex sociotechnical chalenges. I mean, we won't find a sound path to solve climate change by trying to out-compete the other major players. Does anyone really believe we can reach any emissions goal without China?
We need a different kind of arrangement... I know it might seem idealistic on paper, but it can't get more pragmatic than this: either we do it or we (all countries) will suffer.
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In China, fraud is synonymous with success. (Score:3)
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Hey, their attempt to turn shit into butter is already at 50% success!
Spread is on par. Taste still slightly off.
Seems like a good thing (Score:3)
This worked to the world's great benefit during the Cold War. Seems like a good thing to have two separate investigation tracks.
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It is, after all, science. If both sides don't come up with the same answers, at least one of them is doing it wrong.
And independent verification of someone else's work is a key element.
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I disagree on the diversity of science, and really just about the lack of cooperation on everything else as well. Humanity needs to work together. A little friendly competition is one thing, but threatening war and isolationism is n
Re: Seems like a good thing (Score:2)
The Russians had the first satellite, for one.
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But I agree, the cold war did certainly motivate humanity towards space travel. Point taken.
Why is this a problem? (Score:2)
When you have two independent systems they can avoid making the same mistakes. I'm quite glad to have multiple windowing managers to choose between. These days I prefer mate, but there were periods when I usually preferred KDE or gnome.
China's 'decoupling' (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, it might have to do with the West's (apparently) slow realization that China has been aggressively doing as much espionage as research, and providing literally nothing in return - not even maybe a "hey we have a nasty disease coming, just warnin' ya!" headsup.
Fuck China.
It's a totalitarian state bent on hegemony at least in East Asia.
I am well aware that the US and other western countries have bad enough track records when it comes to Human Rights, surveillance, and bullshit government shenanigans...but this is orders of magnitude than the level of omnipresent despotism we'd get if China was in charge.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
It's only a problem if... (Score:2)
... you ignore the fact that the underpinnings of modern science evolved during a period where scientific work was almost exclusively a local activity. This is somebody's perceived gap between what they think is the ideal situation, and the world as it is. It's not really a problem.
Science is Splintering is a problem for Journals (Score:3)
'Global Science is Splintering Into Two - And This is Becoming a Problem'... for Nature.
More competition in reporting options is bad for business.
Competition (Score:2)
From TFA:
Approaching them without shared knowledge can only slow down progress by creating competing systems for advancing and implementing solutions.
Competing systems is a sure way to expose what works and what doesn't.
You know they're selling you something when.... (Score:2)
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Science is non-binary (Score:2)
This is why translation journals were a thing (Score:2)
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Interesting phrase you used - "live and death"
I am reading light crime novels based on court investigation described in Chinese literature. In one of the stories the judge needs to investigate the "Examination building" in Canton - a building with a number of small cells where the candidate is locked in the morning with food, paper, ink and the exam questions. In the evening the results are collected.
The interesting thing was that the citizens were afraid to visit the building, because so many people kill t