Year: 2022

Excerpt from a Reading Group on The Human Condition: The Boundary Between the Public and the Private, the Distinction Between Property and Wealth, and the Meaning of DAO

Culture & Public Commentary2022.11.13
Excerpt from a Reading Group on The Human Condition: The Boundary Between the Public and the Private, the Distinction Between Property and Wealth, and the Meaning of DAO
Note: Huawendao holds a weekly reading group on Arendt’s The Human Condition, reading and discussing the Chinese translation of The Human Condition paragraph by paragraph on site. This video and text excerpt come from one such passage, and the discussion is closely related to the aims of DAO. The video production and text arrangement were completed by Jiang Gungun, with 『華』 doing the polishing. The quotations below are selected from the original text of The Human Condition; the main text consists of explanation and discussion. The explainer is 『華』. Because many cuts were made in the整理, most of the on-site discussion was not recorded. Chapter 2 The Public and the…
media Web3 blockchain public sphere
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2022年11月13日
Huawendao Offline AMA, First Session: White Paper Presentation

Chinese Civilization & the Way of Chinese2022.11.13
Huawendao Offline AMA, First Session: White Paper Presentation
The first offline presentation event of “Huawendao” was held on September 23, 2022, at Meta Space in Wudaokou. What follows is a written transcript. First Half: Reading and Discussing the White Paper “Hua”: I’m one of the three initiators of Huawendao, I’m “Hua,” and today I’ll be reading through and explaining our white paper section by section. If anyone has any questions in the middle, please feel free to raise them at any time. What I’m talking about today is already the second version of our white paper. The first version was actually longer, with more than ten thousand characters, but after many people read it, they all said it…
technology China freedom Web3
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2022年11月13日
Huawendao White Paper, Version 2.1.1

Chinese Civilization & the Way of Chinese2022.09.30
Huawendao White Paper, Version 2.1.1
In the past two days, an article lamenting Chinese Web3 entrepreneurs went viral far beyond its usual reach, which prompted me to publish ahead of schedule the DAO I have been gradually preparing to build. The popularity of that article shows that the need among Chinese entrepreneurs for recognition is still very widespread. So in fact, it is not hard to build a Chinese help Chinese community; what is hard is to genuinely carry forward the positive elements of Chinese culture, rather than understanding what “Chinese” means in a negative, oppositional sense (non-white, non-Western, non-English, and so on). Why is the Jewish community so strong? The key is still that…
technology China freedom Web3
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2022年9月30日
Confronting “Complexity” — A Review of Big Science

History of Science & Scholarship2022.09.16
Confronting “Complexity” — A Review of Big Science
This article was published in China Science Daily (2022-09-16, Section 3, Books), with the title changed to “Confronting the ‘Complex’ Head-On — A Compound of Science, Capital, and Politics in the Age of Big Science, Scientists Can No Longer ‘Cultivate Themselves Alone’” When we speak of America’s research environment or science policy, the first thing that usually comes to mind is Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier, a report Bush submitted to then-President Roosevelt in 1945. The report emphasized the importance of basic research, arguing that the government should provide funding support for basic scientific research, but must also respect scientists’ independence and autonomy. Bush’s report was indeed far-reaching in…
book reading science freedom book review
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2022年9月16日
Augmented Reality or Augmented Rationality? The Multiple Ideals of Communication Technology

Culture & Public Commentary2022.08.11
Augmented Reality or Augmented Rationality? The Multiple Ideals of Communication Technology
This article was published in Science News (2022-08-10, p. 4, General, under the title “Augmented Reality Does Not Necessarily Mean Augmented Rationality”), while the title in the WeChat public-account version was changed again to “Holographic Teleportation, Human-Machine Symbiosis? Communication Technology: There Is No Best, Nor Can One Speak of Better.” Recently, students at Western University used Microsoft’s Hololens to achieve the world’s first “international holographic teleportation.” In the press release issued by Western University, the opening lines already mention the science-fiction scenes of Star Wars and Star Trek, where people far away on another planet can also attend a meeting in the form of holographic images. But this news item…
technology culture reason VR
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2022年8月11日
NFT-ifying Behavioral Histories: The Return of Value to Meaning

Culture & Public Commentary2022.08.02
NFT-ifying Behavioral Histories: The Return of Value to Meaning
I had a sudden awakening around the end of last year and the beginning of this year, and embraced new concepts like the metaverse, NFT, and Web3. But there is still one new concept about which I have always been somewhat reserved: DAO. DAO stands for “decentralized autonomous organization.” In fact, it is also an old concept. I remember that when I first got into Bitcoin, Babite seemed to be planning to do DAO (or something similar), and I also witnessed the The DAO incident that later led to the Ethereum fork. My view has actually remained fairly consistent: I think DAO is a good concept, but the ways it…
China freedom history Web3
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2022年8月2日
Will Digital Musk and Digital Musk Become Friends?

AI & Scholarship2022.07.24
Will Digital Musk and Digital Musk Become Friends?
Published in China Business News, 2022-07-24 Recently, Musk said “已经做过了” (“I’ve already done it”) in a remark that sparked attention and heated discussion. The question he was replying to was: “If you could upload your brain to the cloud and talk to your virtual version, would you become friends?” Musk was most likely joking, but not long ago Google did in fact have a programmer who, after talking with an AI, concluded that the AI had awakened self-awareness and tried to fight for rights for his “AI friend.” For now, consciousness uploading or AI awakening probably has not yet happened, but we can indeed begin with a thought experiment: what…
technology commentary AI self
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2022年7月24日
“Selected Readings in Original Works of Philosophy of Technology” Course Summary for 2022

Teaching & Courses2022.07.12
“Selected Readings in Original Works of Philosophy of Technology” Course Summary for 2022
The courses I teach are mainly undergraduate general-education courses, and among graduate courses, this reading course is basically the only one I still have now. This is the second run of this course that I’ve taught. I don’t seem to have written a summary after the first run either, probably because there was no exam component then, so there was nothing to comment on. As for the course content, it was just reading, so there wasn’t much to summarize anyway. But in this run I added an exam component, so it became necessary to write a set of comments. This course itself is taught in a fairly lazy way: I…
philosophy course Heidegger Introduction to Philosophy of Technology
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2022年7月12日
Becoming Citizens Capable of Debate—Commencement Address for the 2022 Department of History of Science Graduation Ceremony

History of Science & Scholarship2022.06.27
Becoming Citizens Capable of Debate—Commencement Address for the 2022 Department of History of Science Graduation Ceremony
I am very honored to speak today on behalf of the teachers of the undergraduate minor in history of science. Building the undergraduate major has always been a priority for us in the Department of History of Science at Tsinghua University. In China as a whole, we were also the first department of history of science to enroll undergraduates. At present we are training a minor; in the future we will also train a major. So, why should undergraduates study history of science? Of course, one purpose is to train future scholars of history of science and strengthen the pool of applicants for our graduate program. But many undergraduate students…
history of science scholarship philosophy of science knowledge
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2022年6月27日
In Memory of Master Xianglong

Life & Notes2022.06.09
In Memory of Master Xianglong
Teacher Zhang Xianglong passed away yesterday… I was fortunate, as an undergraduate, to sit in on his introductory philosophy course, and later I also had quite a bit of academic and personal contact with him. I always got used to calling him Master Xianglong, because he was the first person who made me feel what the bearing of a master was really like: truly bringing together Chinese, Western, and Indian thought, and making one feel the profundity and richness of thought. Although Master Xianglong’s thought leaned toward antiquity, his horizon was broad and he kept up with the cutting edge. He insisted on reading the latest technology magazines, and when…
philosophy everyday life China Confucianism
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2022年6月9日