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Comment by Sangermaine | Hacker News Reader

>It's fun to heap criticism on China's research. There's too many fraudulent results, as a culture they don't value out of the box thinking, ect. That kind of thinking hurts us, not China.

You'll have to explain how being critical of fraudulent results "hurts us, not China", unless you're implying the criticism isn't valid, but from what I've read it's a very real concern in research coming from China.

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I'd say the same way any criticism hurts the party believing it, not the one it's directed at. It increases your confidence in yourself without any corresponding increase in you real performance. In this case, public perception of superiority might lead to the US keeping its drug trials slow and expensive, reducing the amount of medical technology invented there compared to China.

>I'd say the same way any criticism hurts the party believing it, not the one it's directed at.

That doesn't make any sense. If the criticism is accurate, then it hurts the criticized party because it's true, whether or not they accept the criticism.

> It increases your confidence in yourself without any corresponding increase in you real performance

You don't need to increase your performance if the other side is lying about how well it's doing and you know it. Your confidence in yourself is well-founded in this situation.

>In this case, public perception of superiority might lead to the US keeping its drug trials slow and expensive, reducing the amount of medical technology invented there compared to China.

If China is actually producing a significant amount of fraudulent research, then their development will be hindered by their own fraud, which is the point. If their technological development is premised on fraudulent research, it won't advance.

You seem to think this is just a matter of opinion that can be freely ignored. You seem to have a completely backwards understanding of the concept of criticism.

It's true whether or not anybody says it. If nobody criticized China, all those problem would still be there. Except people in the US wouldn't be so confident of their superiority. I think that would get them worried into action, like they got worried into the space race by Sputnik as the article mentioned.

It is a matter of opinion - public opinion - which is what ultimately drives how the FDA works. If the US public is clamoring for them to get their ass into gear, eventually they will.

Meta: Your point (on criticism or underestimating) is extremely good as general rule for many cases.

I believe his point is that although it is useful to analyze someone to see what they're doing wrong (so that you don't repeat the same mistake), it would be more useful to study what they are doing right so that you can apply those lessons to your situation. The former is quite easy to do and runs the risk of lulling one into complacency and a false sense of security, while the latter exercises your brain and demands greater effort and a more impartial assessment of the situation.

http://www.aaronkharris.com/presumption-of-stupitidy https://sivers.org/ss

In the grandparent commenter's case, he is saying that everyone is focusing on the negatives of Chinese research when there are some useful lessons regarding regulation that could possibly be ported to the US.

The problem is you literally cannot trust anything positive that comes out of China. This isn't jingoism, western countries have their own issues, but China is a country set up only for rewarding positive results and severely punishing negative or even neutral results. Having worked from China in numerous jobs, a good chunk of the useful information they have is a liability as it's most likely stolen from elsewhere. To be clear this has absolutely nothing to do with the individual person, but with the risk/reward structure that exists in mainland China.

I'm not interested in arguing about OP's explicit wording, but the implication is that people are too complacent about "our" lead. It can only hurt you to underestimate your opponent

I think the point is that we’re focusing on the bad parts, and overlooking the actual legit research part of China.

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