A Revolutionary Discovery in China | Hacker News Reader

A Revolutionary Discovery in China

nybooks.com

88 pointslermontov33 comments

The revolutionary discovery is some ancient manuscripts. These manuscripts show that early Chinese philosophers may have argued that rulers should abdicate the throne in favor of the the one with most merit. Rulers should not pass the title to their children.

I tend to read comments, and not articles - as a result, sometimes I wish that HN had a special `TLDR` subsection, directly below a posting, that used vote-based mechanics for the selection of a post like this.

Kudos to you for such a concise summary :thumbsup:

same here, same here

Part of the problem is that the title of this article (and many others these days) is pure clickbait. :/

The NY Review of Books is still primarily designed as a print publication. The title here shows up on their table of contents page, so you might better describe it as “flipbait”. Notice that on the NYRB ToC page, the title of the book under review – Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts – is also printed, giving additional context to the review.

There’s nothing especially “these days” about magazine essay titles with puns in them. Catching a reader’s eye and enticing him to start reading is the title’s primary purpose. This isn’t a newspaper story, where the reader might be trying to get a clear idea of the day’s main events just by skimming the headlines.

Same, especially when titles are so cryptic (linkbaity?).

I normally really cringe when I see "TLDR" and "ELI5" all over the comments of every post in places like reddit (where the original piece is thoughtful and well worth a full read), but I am starting to appreciate its role when content has such click-bait titles.

Terrible. The TLDR given by OP completely misses the point of the article. The scrolls aren't a revolutionary discovery because of what they contain, but because of what implications can be drawn as a result (which you'll have to read the article).

If people wouldn't link to garbage there wouldn't be a need for TL;DR because a high quality news article is already minimized and compact. This is a cultural problem on HN, since a year or so we've seen a massive increase in "bla bla" articles reaching the top (at least it feels that way).

The article is a good read. I like the triple word play in the last sentence, "For them, he held a key to the present: the past."

They also show a common culture among the Chinese territories prior to the Qin's unification.

First, the term "common culture" is relative. In here they are talking about intellectual ideas. There always existed seductive ideas spreading among the (somewhat free) class of intellectuals but these shared flows of ideas were not necessarily representative for neither the (territorially divided) masses of people living somewhere on lower levels of the social ladder nor for the class of rulers above them (which were clearly territorially distinct before unification). The said scholars were in a privileged position of affording to maintain relations with outsiders without much hurdles. The underlings were too poor or too mediocre to want such things, the political lords above them were bound by loyalties and other obligations which made interacting with equals outside their political sphere difficult and suspicious. So this "common culture" may not be more common than say, revolutionary/socialist ideas shared between small groups of intellectuals across the Europe in the eighteen-nineteen centuries. Actually, "not necessarily representative" is too mildly put considering the heavy censoring that casted them into oblivion afterwards!

Second, this is a batch of documents extracted from one place. It's safe to assume that all they reflect is the views of whoever gathered them. It's the confirmation bias, you know?

> Second, this is a batch of documents extracted from one place. It's safe to assume that all they reflect is the views of whoever gathered them. It's the confirmation bias, you know?

The point though is that some of these documents went a very long way to find their burial in the south. Yeah, a sample size of 1 isn't very much to go on (maybe these documents were kept because they were prized possessions of 'foreign' lands?), but it does show in the very least a deep cultural contact between disparate kingdoms in the pre-China age.

"but it does show in the very least a deep cultural contact between disparate kingdoms in the pre-China age."

Cultural contact - yes, deep - not so convinced. If the said territories would indeed have been in a deep cultural tie they wouldn't had to be united by war. Look at the Romanian unifications:

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

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

So people with cultural ties never go to war?

Seems very reasonable. The Roman Empire also had their longest streak of "Good Emperors" when the Emperors were all childless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerva%E2%80%93Antonine_dynasty

These are more than just some ancient manuscripts. These are scripts that somehow survived the most comprehensive cultural and intellectual cleansing in known history. The Qin emperor purged China of ideas he found distasteful and for over 2 thousand years, those ideas have remained purged. These manuscripts partially change that.

Yeah, that's how it's done in China. This is pretty much a testimony from as early as the written word itself!

Thanks that was a good summary :-)

Relevant wikipedia articles:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guodian_Chu_Slips

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Allan

"Then he outlined some of the new texts soon to be released: a chart for multiplying and dividing complex numbers"

I'm assuming that this a journalist using the word "complex" in a vaguer sense than a mathematician would. But that would be a pretty stunning thing to find on 2500 year-old strips of bamboo.

It's decimal multiplication table. More details in this nature article: http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-times-table-hidden-in-chi...

further illustrated here in Chinese:

http://www.wikiwand.com/zh-mo/%E7%AE%97%E8%A1%A8_%28%E6%B8%8...

That's really interesting to see how table lookup using bamboo strips!

Yeah, he probably should have said "complicated" instead. The journalist either for some reason lacks knowledge about complex numbers or studied math in other language and missed the other meanings that he inadvertently touched.

http://users.math.yale.edu/public_html/People/frame/Fractals...

Oh wow, that really had me going for a while.

The Mohists seem very appropriate to HN:

"The Mohists, egalitarian rationalists whose social base seems to have been urban artisans, not only were philosophically opposed to war and militarism, but organized battalions of military engineers who would actively discourage conflicts by volunteering to fight in any war against the side of the aggressor."

— David Graeber, "Debt"

(Well, an alternate-universe HN where participants commonly considered "social justice warrior" as an ancient tradition to aspire to, rather than a pejorative.)

The JavaScript on this page absolutely destroyed my browser for close to a minute. Content creators take note - this is why many people choose to block unnecessary JavaScript and/or ads.

I don't they give a damn, but... this only encourages me about a business idea I thought about a while ago - a subscription-based service to pre-render JavaScript-laden content!

He mentioned the discovering professor doing the presentation avoided making grand conclusion. I think the presenter not making preconceived conclusion is just basic academic discipline and is a good thing. His job is to decipher the text and present them as raw as possible to the others. The debate, conclusion, and implication should be drawn by the others.

Large amount of texts written 2500 years ago is quite impressive, considering they were written on bamboo strips. It proves that most of the old texts we see today were actually written down instead of passing down orally. I can't imagine how they transported their "text books" then. I feel our paper books are too weighty.

Chinese characters allow to "compress" information, at least compared to alphabetic writing systems. That made them relatively transportable.

A good example of how a library might look like at that time can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3cnH5-nMbM Those rolls of slips around characters are books.

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