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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

I'll be blunt. I understood your first line but I am completely lost with your second and third sentences. What kind of logic misusage? Mine? GPs? Who is supposed to sit down and exchange information? Me? GP? Cixin Liu? Exchange information with whom and to what end?

And are police being an "instrument" supposed to indicate that holding domestic relatives hostage is indeed a systematic policy rather than a circumstantial tactic particular to special cases, and is failing to understand that is a misuse of logic?

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I thought "every police is a piano" is clearly wrong, and based on that thought, I further refer to it as the misuse of deductive reasoning -- confusing subsets with supersets.

Take an example -- if we could agree on that -- it is well known that police will kill bad people when the bad people are doing really bad things -- with the precondition that the bad people must be alive to do really bad things, and to be killed. With the same faulty deduction rules, one could say that it is well known that police kill people whenever people are alive.

Sorry if that caused confusion.

> sit down and exchange information

For one.

I am a Chinese citizen. I know many people, including close friends, relatives, studying abroad. I am not aware of any cases that their relatives are held hostage by the government. I am aware that police go after bad people (of course, the definition of "bad people" may vary nation-wise, but please take a little break on that and assume it normal), even if the bad people are relative to one entity studying abroad.

For two, about Cixin Liu's case.

This is the part I genuinely don't understand -- why would he seek asylum outside China? Did he do anything illegal? This whole thread is about an English version of the postscript in his work. I have read both native and translated version, and can confirm that the same postscript is attached in both versions, and the translation is quite precise. And then people start to discuss about "seeking for help abroad", "HK protest" etc. -- do these people think the postscript is so offensive that the government will go after him?

I don't think the text is offensive by any means. I don't think the government will go after him.

If that's not the case, what are they talking about? Am I missing something?

For the first part, I understand now, and I think we are more or less on the same page. Although I think I come from a place of treating that commenter as expressing a valid concern, but making a generalization I wouldn't make. I think you're coming from a place of also disagreeing with that generalization, but using it to push back on the idea that there should be any concern of the kind addressed by the commenter. With that, I couldn't possibly disagree with you more.

As for the second part, there's a lot there. It's good that your personal anecdotes you don't know of anyone held captive, but I don't think that was the question, and again I feel like that's coming from a place of wanting to generally dispute that people should be concerned about the practice of holding relatives captive to punish dissent.

For the rest of it, this is exploring the possibility, illustrated through Cixin Liu in a hypothetical example, of what might happen if he ever hypothetically wanted to extricate himself from China. His international success brings with it questions relating to free expression in China, so I treat these conversations as not terribly surprising, and frankly quite necessary.

And again, I don't think there's a literal case that he wants to do this, but that wasn't the point, and your confusion there again seems like it's coming from a place of generally wanting to deny that there should be any concern with how China could conceivably take family members hostage to pressure expat dissidents. And again, I could not disagree with that more.

I see now it is no longer about the postscript.

It's like a high priority, non-maskable interrupt -- when such conditions are met (China signal pulled up to 3.3v), it is immediately no longer about the matter at hand, but the thought experiments, hypothetical stuff.

This is not good in a few ways, but I don't think you care about most of them.

But at least, I think, this will matter: If this is necessary and inevitable, then you, as a whole community, will have more difficulty, less efficiency in thinking about, or discussing anything about China.

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