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标签：book review

The Street Is Not a Tourist Attraction—Afterword to I, My Singapore, My Street, My Walks

Life & Notes2025.11.19
The Street Is Not a Tourist Attraction—Afterword to I, My Singapore, My Street, My Walks
Thanks to the introduction by Unfinished Bookstore and the invitation from Teacher Ye Xiaozhong, I wrote a postscript for this reissued local Singapore book. 《My Singapore, My Street, My Walk》 Chen Zhirui, Ye Xiaozhong, Zhou Decheng / 𨑨迌 Publishing, ISBN: 9789819444915 This book brought together many literati and writers living in Singapore, inviting them to depict, from their personal perspectives, various streets or places in Singapore. The styles are diverse: essays, poems, as well as textual research and arguments. Like the city of Singapore itself, this anthology is multiple and mixed, each beauty prized in its own way. Although there are many differences in form and style, these pieces still…
culture book reading book review sociology
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2025年11月19日
The Linguistics of the Life Sciences: From Mechanical Analogies to Teleological Analogies—Preface to the Recommended Chinese Translation of The Book of Life

History of Science & Scholarship2025.08.03
The Linguistics of the Life Sciences: From Mechanical Analogies to Teleological Analogies—Preface to the Recommended Chinese Translation of The Book of Life
Philip Ball: *The Book of Life*, translated by Wang Qiaoqi, CITIC Publishing Group, 2025 I was honored to write the recommendation preface for this book. I actually did not read the main text very closely; I mainly wrote from the general perspective of philosophy of science. What I’m posting here is my original draft; the published version may have been revised to some extent. Science and Analogy The genome is the “blueprint” of life, the “instruction manual” of life, and life science deciphers the “code” of life through genetic technology… These are all familiar formulas to us. But Philip Ball’s *The Book of Life* is precisely a critique of these…
philosophy book reading science philosophy of science
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2025年8月3日
In the Digital Age, How Do We Win the “Battle to Defend Childhood”

AI & Scholarship2025.06.01
In the Digital Age, How Do We Win the “Battle to Defend Childhood”
Published in China Science Daily (2025-05-30, p. 4, Culture). The original draft title was “How to Protect Childhood in the Digital Age”; this is a reprint of the published version. International Children’s Day on June 1 is approaching. The holiday was initiated by the Soviet Union, originally to commemorate the children persecuted in the Lidice massacre of June 1942; later it became “International Day for the Protection of Children,” aimed at protecting children’s rights to survival, health care, and education, and at opposing the hiring of child labor. As for the right to survival and the right to health care, adults ought to have those too. What is truly special…
culture book reading media education
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2025年6月1日
Memory Replacing Computation—A Review of Stiegler’s Technics and Time

Phenomenology & Heidegger2024.02.02
Memory Replacing Computation—A Review of Stiegler’s Technics and Time
This article was published in Science and Technology Daily (2024-02-02, p. 3, Book Reviews), and retitled “Memory Is More Important Than Function; Richness Is More Important Than Efficiency” Bernard Stiegler was one of the most important philosophers of technology from the late twentieth century to the early twenty-first; in my view, one could even dispense with both “technology” and “one of.” His magnum opus is the three-volume Technics and Time, which has long been translated into Chinese, and Yilin Press has recently published a collected edition. The collected edition improves upon the old translation, especially by resolving inconsistent renderings of individual terms and by providing a unified index, making it…
philosophy technology book reading history of technology
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2024年2月2日
Cultivating a Cultural Atmosphere That Pursues Novelty and Interest — A Review of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

AI & the Future of Technology2023.11.16
Cultivating a Cultural Atmosphere That Pursues Novelty and Interest — A Review of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
This article was published in China Economic Times (Yujian Sixiang, September 18, 2023) Recently, two scientists from OpenAI published a book called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, attempting to argue that great technological innovations are often not the result of prior planning. In fact, Chinese tradition also has similar wisdom. For example, Daoism says, “do nothing, and yet nothing will remain undone”; Buddhism speaks of “no attachment, no form”; and there is the common saying, “If you set your heart on planting flowers, the flowers may not bloom; but if you casually stick a willow branch in the ground, it may grow into shade.” All of these mean something similar….
technology China history of science book reading
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2023年11月16日
Review of Radical Markets: Also on Why the Crypto Movement Should Be Radical

Culture & Public Commentary2023.06.10
Review of Radical Markets: Also on Why the Crypto Movement Should Be Radical
This piece, along with the earlier The Liberation of People in the Digital Age, was written as copy for PTADAO. The final text was excerpted to form A One-Page Clear White; if you’re interested, you can go take a look there. Here I’m posting the original version of the book review. Lately I’ve joined some Web3 chat groups and occasionally put out a few views. For example, a few days ago I was discussing the significance of stablecoins with someone, and I said that cryptocurrency was from the very beginning meant to upend the old system of central banks and fiat money. If the entire blockchain market turns around and…
book reading freedom Web3 Bitcoin
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2023年6月10日
How Is a History of Technological Thought Possible? — Mumford’s Historiographical Method as Seen in Technics and Civilization

History of Science & Scholarship2023.06.06
How Is a History of Technological Thought Possible? — Mumford’s Historiographical Method as Seen in Technics and Civilization
Published in Journal of Guangxi Minzu University, 2023, v.29;No.107(01) 46-52 Abstract: Mumford was a pioneer in the discipline of history of technology, and his representative work Technics and Civilization has profound significance as an inspiration for historiographical method. His historiographical method can be developed as a “history of technical thought,” which, like the “history of scientific thought,” aims to sort out the “inner logic” of technological development, that is, a certain thread at the level of thought or spirit. A history of technical thought requires the introduction of the following four features: first, spirituality (no longer regarding technology merely as neutral material artifacts, but revealing the spiritual connotations of technology);…
book reading history of technology book review paper
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2023年6月6日
Treating People as People: An Introduction to Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings

AI & Scholarship2023.05.05
Treating People as People: An Introduction to Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings
This is the introductory reading I prepared for the Mediasphere Alliance. The transcript was roughly organized by Feng Guangneng and then polished by me, though I tried to preserve the conversational style as much as possible. It has already been posted on the Mediasphere Alliance WeChat public account; here I am reposting the original draft. 1.1 Opening Wu Jingwei: Hello to all our friends online, and to all the book lovers who have long followed the Mediasphere Alliance reading group! Today we are very honored to have Teacher Hu Yilin from our Department of History of Science join us to lead us through Wiener’s very important classic, The Human Use…
history of science book reading history of technology book review
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2023年5月5日
Introduction to “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile”

AI & Scholarship2023.04.29
Introduction to “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile”
This article was published in issue 87 of Xinrui Weekly (it came out last year, but I forgot to repost it), under the title A “Failed” Social Experiment in Cybernetics—A Review of The Cybernetic Revolutionaries. It was slightly abridged at the time of publication (mainly the parts about involution were cut); here is the original text. Allende was elected president of Chile by a large margin in 1970. After taking office, he immediately launched a series of socialist reforms, including banning foreign enterprises, striking at landlords, and establishing a state-owned economy, among other measures. During this period, in order to effectively manage the nationalized economic system, Allende invited the British…
China book reading history of technology politics
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2023年4月29日
The Structure of the Historiographical Revolution — An Introduction to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

History of Science & Scholarship2023.03.01
The Structure of the Historiographical Revolution — An Introduction to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
I’ve recorded another introductory lecture for Chaoxing. The video course should already have been published on Chaoxing, and here I am posting the verbatim script I prepared when recording the program. I Hello everyone, I’m Hu Yilin, a teacher in the Department of History of Science at Tsinghua University. Today I’m giving you an introductory guide to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. II This book’s influence is enormous. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way: “Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century (perhaps the most influential). His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of…
history of science book reading science philosophy of science
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2023年3月1日