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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that it's like this, but I automatically do not believe any scientific breakthroughs that come from China.

There has simply been too much fraud for me to believe anything they say.

http://www.sciencealert.com/80-of-the-data-in-chinese-clinic...

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There was a reddit AMA in 2011 where a guy went to China and got stem cell treatments for his paralysis[1] and could walk now. Nobody on Reddit believed him. They basically spent the whole AMA trying to tell him it didn't happen. Then America did it 2016 and everyone was like "The Future is here and we did it first!"[2]. No, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed, or maybe it's already happening somewhere in China.

1.https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k1hts/i_am_a_28yr_old...

2.https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2jvllq/a_cure_for_par...

Reminds me of the story of a young boxer from my gym. He eventually became very popular and gotten a World Kickboxing champion title. HE was very humble and trained at our gym all the time. There was this guy that challenged him few times over the span of his title and every time he endup KO the champion. So it was funny watching him being an undisputed champion on the TV, yet knowing he got beaten to KO few times by someone who hasn't been boxing professionally or did not make a career out of his box..

there's zero evidence in 1. that he 1) had paralysis 2) went to china 3) got stem cell treatment.

You seem to have some cardinality issues in your numbering there.

He was listing points in reference to link #1. Don't see an issue.

We do tend to diminish achievements from Asia historically. They discovered America first (the whole notion of "discovering" first a place where there already are people is absurd), they got printing first, they mastered gunpowder first... and yet most westerners will name Columbus, Gutenberg, and Europe.

They mastered basic rocketry even before Europe got proficient with gunpowder...

If you're basing the claim that they discovered America first on the book 1421 (which many people do) then you should know it's generally considered to be very poor quality historical research by most historians.

For what it's worth, I'm in France and it's common knowledge here that China invented gunpowder. I don't think I've ever heard someone saying Europe did.

But Europe was the first to do CANNONS on a large scale...

Oh, yeah. Now you're mentioning it, "China invented gunpowder" is often followed by "but they used it only for fireworks".

Polish here. We learn in schools that Chinese invented gunpowder - period. Few more things we learn about them and Arabs as well.

Apparently, back in the 19th century people credited Berthold Schwarz [0] with the inventiom of gunpowder. I remember reading Beyond Good and Evil and reading in the preface that "the Germans invented gunpowder" and being rather puzzled, but it turns out that that was considered a fact at the time.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if gunpowder was discovered independently in Europe, or at least partly so because nobody walked out of China with a recipe for it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Schwarz

It is pretty common in the US too...

The US is a big country, results vary wildly. Taking a straw poll of the office everyone replied "China" as the inventor.

>We do tend to diminish achievements from Asia historically

Except Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea. I think a healthy skepticism of China is warranted. Especially a People's Daily article. The newspaper that was a driving force during the Cultural Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Daily

The whole notion of "discovering" first a place where there already are people is not absurd.

You discover that this continent exist from your point of view. There were people already living there but they were totally ignorant of where they were living, in fact most of them were in Stone or bronze's age.

"they got printing first, they mastered gunpowder first" Nobody will tell you this ever(that they got printing first). They will tell you that printing in metal last hundreds of times more than printing in porcelain or wood, and making it possible was a significant contribution that changed the world. How much typography do you see done today in porcelain? I have seen wood printing in China as an an art form, but not as something serious.

Gunpower was mastered by Europe with the invention of gunpower without fumes of course, that is absolutely true. You should try yourself a weapon done with black gunpower to see the difference. It happened in Europe because of the scientific revolution that happened only in Europe because of the Gutenberg press among other things. Not just that but dynamite, TNT...

The reality is that Asia created achievements until XV century, but they remained stagnant for 4 or 5 centuries. This is not something that I say, it is something that any Chinese will tell you.

Do you automatically disbelieve everything coming out of Europe, the United States, or any other country that carries out scientific research or has a regulatory framework for medicine? If you don't believe in the ability of China to run a life and death regulatory agency without systemic fraud, what is your reason for trusting their journalists?

It took only a few minutes to track down the original source for this claim to an article by the Economic Information Daily [1]. I don't speak or read the language but Google Translate did a pretty good job: the CFDA (Chinese FDA equivalent) report was neither made public nor shown to the journalist and the article is based on "an anonymous source within the agency." Putting aside the reliability of the source, according to the article their definition of fraud includes omission of adverse reactions and other clinical data.

I'm sorry to break it to you but no other medical regulatory agency on earth is much better. There have been no conclusive studies on omission of data in clinical trials in the US or Europe so for all we know 100% of their trials fall under the definition of fraudulent used by the SFDA. This is a problem the FDA is painfully aware of because of their very public failures, like Rofecoxib (Vioxx), which were due to clinical data withheld by pharmaceutical companies. Regulations for mandatory reporting were only enacted by the FDA in 2008 and since then the system has been plagued by fraud driven by our top institutions [2].

Without access to that report and the raw data, the article is classic FUD. The same problems are systemic in agencies like the FDA which has nearly a century more experience regulating drugs than the CFDA.

[1] http://www.chinanews.com/m/sh/2016/09-09/7998783.shtml

[2] https://www.statnews.com/2015/12/13/clinical-trials-investig...

I do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba

That is an unfortunate place to be in. Generally the question is what is said vs what is not said which can often provide the extra color commentary about how surprising the breakthrough actually is.

So for example, they have a "file" photo rather than the current apparatus. One of the challenges everyone is working on is "apparatus erosion" in which containment causes parts of the assembly to become, well, more plasma.

Then there is energy output, not a lot of details about how much energy they were getting out vs how much they were putting in. Running for 60 seconds should make possible a number of fairly accurate measurements of their efficiency. This is important because it is "easy" to make non-net energy plasmas that last for a long time, it is "hard" to create a plasma that providing the necessary environment for fusion to occur. Here is a great description of "H mode" confinement : https://www.euro-fusion.org/glossary/h-mode-h-regime/ which discusses that it is suceptible to ELM's (or bursts of plasma out of the side that eat away at your tokamak :-)

As a result of what they do not say, and do not show, I think the term "breakthrough" is probably a bit over used here, more like "progress along the path of building a tokamak unit." And progress is good, you learn new things with each step.

In a few decades, when most of the new inventions will start coming from China, this attitude is going to be very difficult to maintain.

When.

It is quite possible that most of the new inventions will be coming from China, and also most of China's scientific production will be rubbish. China has been great with scaling up its scientific community, but the problem of establishing an academic culture of scientific honesty is harder.

I'm a bit confused by this comment. Are you implying that "an academic culture of scientific honesty" is something the non-Chinese world has but China doesn't?

I'll concede it's probably a matter of degree.

Especially on the front of medical trials, a recent Chinese government probe found 80% of data used was falsified [0]

[0] http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical-fakes-0927201...

Sounds like a better track record than Theranos to me.

You are demonstrating awareness of the point being made: if scientific fraud was as rampant here as it is in China, Theranos wouldn't even be remarkable and still unknown. But it is in fact rare enough to cause scandal.

If you want to keep that attitude and make non-contributory quips, go back to Reddit. It is not appreciated here.

Most of Big Pharma's medicines don't actually work.

As in, they don't work to cure the underlying condition. They work to treat the symptoms, and thereby require you to take the medicine fairly indefinitely if you want to by symptom free, side effects notwithstanding. Thereby extracting economic value from the generally unwell and ageing population and concentrating it in the hands of Big Pharma.

In that way I see most of medicine as being fraudulent.

Also, you're probably being down-voted for your last sentence, as it is, as you say not appreciated here.

If Big Pharma developed treatments-rather-than-cures as a deliberate strategy to milk recurring revenue, biotech startups could ignore those recurring treatments and take over the market with easier-or-equally-difficult-to-find one shot cures that doctors, patients, and insurance companies would all prefer. But it turns out that Biology is Hard and the indefinite treatments are still used because neither incumbents nor startups have been able to find drugs that are once-and-for-all cures for diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson's, etc. It's the same reason we don't have Mr. Fusion powering our cars instead of liquid hydrocarbons: not because the sinister oil cartels are suppressing technology, but because developing that sort of breakthrough is extremely hard.

And then you get to this convoluted certification and approval process that more or less guarantees that the startup is going to be dead before it starts selling anything.

It's pretty questionable actually...it will hopefully improve.

It's a bit like their economic reporting...too good to be tru ed.

Certainly, it's an issue throughout the West as well, to a degree. For that matter, my guess would be that the culture of honesty is improving in China while it worsens in, say, the U.S..

Quite a few Chinese with PhDs earned it from abroad (US, Europe). With the lack of resources in the US for students obtaining professorship, many of them are going back to China with lucrative offers. They will bring back whatever they learned in the US - and if they saw scientific integrity in the labs here, then they will transform it in China.

In parallel, like how China has been cracking down on political corruption because it doesn't benefit the people, I imagine/hope they do the same for academic dishonesty.

True. We need to see China creating something that is not a copy first.

That's what they said about Japan in the 50s.

And the US in the early 1800s.

Schuyler Towne has an amazing discussion of this, how Europeans routinely were laughing at American inventions... until they suddenly very much weren't.

It's in this talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqjacHSTd48&list=UUBDpLXSbLH...

I'd link directly to the relevant five minutes but it's hard to justify doing that sort of harm, depriving you of the other great 45 minutes there.

(Ok, let's say it's 34ish to 41ish. Still, that entire thing is probably better than the other way you were going to spend some 50 minute block today.)

It's also the origin of "Made in Germany" which initially was supposed to warn British consumers against the simple copies from Germany...alas it has turned into more of a seal of quality later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany

You should google the history of the phrase "Made in Germany" (I'm German by the way)

Quote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany):

> The label was originally introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887,[1] to mark foreign produce more obviously, as foreign manufactures had been falsely marking inferior goods with the marks of renowned British manufacturing companies and importing them into the United Kingdom. Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry (Merchandise Marks Act - Oxford University Press).[2]

I like to look at the discussion of wikipedia article. Note that the reference "[2]" is not pointing to oxford university press but rather to a spiegel article.

The actual act can be found here [1].

"With regard to direct false indications of origin the matter is simple enough. If knives are imported marked Sheffield when they have been manufactured in Germany, it will be evident that a fraud has been committed."

"But in the case of indirect indications of origin the matter is not so simple. The use of the English language in descriptive expressions such as "superfine make" on a label applied to goods coming from a foreign-speaking country is undoubtedly, under the ACt a false indication of manufacture"

"In addition to these indications of British manufacture, there are many other wordsused on goods in other languages which might be false or not according to the country from which they are imported. Such words, for instance, as "Mode de Paris,""

In other words, the focus of that act was not things that have been intentionally mislabeled, but rather the junk that people nowadays consider hip combined with the fact that people probably knew even less foreign languages back then than they do now. But anyway I guess it's a matter of opinion whether you take an interpretation of the original text or someones understanding of the understanding of someones thesis.

[1] https://archive.org/stream/merchandisemark00payngoog#page/n2...

I don't really know what your point is because I don't understand the language discussion.

In any case, there is no doubt that Germany copied major parts of the industrial revolution from Britain. Or do you think they (we) developed all the same things just a bit later independently, by chance?

The point is that all people copy, in response to a specific comment about China. Yeah... and after reading your comment three more times I still don't understand what point you are trying to make? I think you are trying to say something about the intent of why "Made in Germany" was introduced, but I don't see anything about that in the linked page, just some obscure discussion about language but no larger context. It seems to me the linked page is about some obscure details.

The track record of research results will define China's reputation.

I would say producing and designing interesting things that work at half the price of the rest of the world might have a better correlation with China's reputation.

Perhaps, but catching up is easier than surpassing. We've seen the same with Japan where trajectories were set to overtake the West two decades ago (on science, economy, etc), but when they reached parity the progress slowed down considerably.

The difference is that China has made epic investments in education and training, while the US, the UK, and some other Western countries have worked hard to make education and training more expensive and less accessible.

There's also been a hollowing out of independent inquiry in Western academia, and its replacement by a for-profit-only paper production sweatshop, with universities becoming corporations that have no respect for their employees and only care about short term profitability.

I think we're probably somewhere close to parity now. Both systems are broken in their different ways, but the bottom line for investors is that the Chinese system has a lot more potential to grow than the system in the US.

Trump is likely to make things worse rather than better. I suspect he literally doesn't understand what scientific and technological research is, never mind appreciate why it needs to be supported.

Interestingly, the only western power actually still doing something is Germany, which just started a program to invest another 200 billion EUR into education over the next few years.

We might see a return of Germany surpassing the US in science output again.

That number sounds a bit large to me (2500€ per capita is a lot!). Do you have some more information? Can't find any mention of such a programme. https://www.bmbf.de/de/der-haushalt-des-bundesministeriums-f...

That program was being discussed as part of the reinvestments over the next 10 years, funded by the tax surplus.

The idea was to spread it to about 20 billion a year, and a similar amount being spent on infrastructure, which would roughly match the 48 billion EUR tax surplus.

It was supposed to be voted on earlier, but I’m not sure what’s being discussed right now, it’s all still unclear.

I do know that some states have already started investing into education, under the assumption they’d get the money back through that.

To be fair, fraud in Western research is prevalent as well.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-cancer-idUSBRE82R1...

Utah had cold fusion, anyone remember that? Fusion research is tricky to evaluate (and false positive results are common).

A default position of skepticism works in both cases.

Sure, we have to be careful about these things. Replication is key, which is where the Utah results fell down quickly.

Not sure why I'm getting down votes on parent, but there it is.

I suspect it's your unequivocal use of the word "had". All we know for sure that they had was one unreplicatable experiment which has since been shown to be deeply flawed in both execution and observation.

It was a big scandal at the time (late 80s), and a cautionary tale shared quickly with us Utah phd students. Cold fusion is (or was) synonymous with research break throughs promoted too early that are later found to be BS.

People downvote the smallest things. I've found it's not as much of an obstacle to continuing the thread as you might think; certainly compared to, say, any moderately popular subreddit.

You have to admit a bubble imploding and heating up to nearly 20,000C is pretty amazing even if it isn't fusion.

Sure, I will be more excited when it is independently replicated as any science of this type should no matter where it comes from.

It was replicated. It just was found to be an interesting result of cavitation, not fusion.

I wasn't aware of that. Their companies have the same problem with financial reporting when they're listed on U.S. exchanges. By default, you're supposed to be (extra) skeptical.

https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2011/2011-123.htm

There's significant differences between journals of medicine (and traditional chinese medicine) and journals of physics.

Just like there's a significant difference between psychology journals and physics journals.

It is hard to fault people in that area of the world for turning to folk medicine with fraud rates that high. It is probably just as effective.

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