标签：choice

How Can Ethics in the Technological Age Welcome the Future? [Fourth Commentary]

Culture & Public Commentary2018.12.09
How Can Ethics in the Technological Age Welcome the Future? [Fourth Commentary]
This one was also published on Jiemian (for reprints, please contact Jiemian), but it was not a commissioned piece. I wrote it casually and sent it to them. The feedback was that the quality was worse than the previous two, which may have had something to do with the rather rambling way I wrote this one, or perhaps with the fact that the issues this article faced were more tangled and its viewpoint correspondingly more moderate. Still, they did publish it, but with very extensive changes: the title was altered (Can Technological Progress Really Tailor Human Value Preferences?), and the He Jiankui theme was also removed (don’t ask why; just…
technology commentary tradition value
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2018年12月9日
The Inevitable Path to Decentralization—A Few Thoughts on Bitcoin Hard Forks, and, by the Way, on Central Bank Digital Currency

Web3 & Bitcoin2016.01.21
The Inevitable Path to Decentralization—A Few Thoughts on Bitcoin Hard Forks, and, by the Way, on Central Bank Digital Currency
Bitcoin is facing the situation that the 1M block size limit is about to become insufficient; a major upgrade is needed. But how should it be upgraded? Different people propose different schemes. If a backward-incompatible scheme is rolled out without reaching consensus, then some people choose the new scheme while others do not update or choose yet another scheme, and the result is what is called a “hard fork.” There was XT a while ago, and more recently there was classic, but in the end a hard fork seems to have been avoided. Many people were probably relieved, but I, for one, feel a certain regret. In my view, a…
freedom Web3 Bitcoin blockchain
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2016年1月21日
Settling Accounts After the Fall and Talking About Shoes

Life & Notes2013.03.27
Settling Accounts After the Fall and Talking About Shoes
A few days ago I reposted and mocked Xi’s “shoe theory” on Weibo, and my dad got unsettled. He immediately called to warn me to be careful with what I said, so as to avoid settling accounts after the autumn harvest. Generally speaking, it is rather awkward when the blogs and Weibo accounts of people born in the 1980s and 1990s come under the gaze of their parents, and I am no exception. Although my writing is addressed to anyone, and even if it is watched by parents and relatives it will not place any real pressure on me, it would be a lie to say that it causes no…
China freedom history Aristotle
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2013年3月27日
Equality or Freedom: On the Question of Attending School Outside One’s Hometown

Culture & Public Commentary2012.12.17
Equality or Freedom: On the Question of Attending School Outside One’s Hometown
Recently, the case of the non-Shanghai girl Zhan Haiter has drawn a lot of attention, especially because it happened in Shanghai, so I can’t help but offer a few comments as well. Of course, I support Zhan Haiter’s struggle, and I support every citizen’s open expression of his or her demands; but as for the content of those demands, I do not support it. This matter involves too many questions, all tangled together, making an already complicated issue even more complicated. So first we need to break down the questions involved. There are two big issues: one is education, the other is regionality. It should be noted that the problem…
culture China freedom commentary
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2012年12月17日
Satisfaction and Choice—Reading Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants

AI & the Future of Technology2012.04.24
Satisfaction and Choice—Reading Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants
I recently read this book: Kevin Kelly: 《What Technology Wants》, and what especially caught my attention throughout the book was the discussion of the Amish. The original title plainly says Technology, yet the Chinese translation from CITIC Press has actually turned most of the instances of Technology into “科技” (“science and technology”)—utterly baffling. As a product of this “brand” called CITIC Press, notes, indexes, and so on are of course uniformly absent; the fact that an “Acknowledgments” section was preserved is already extraordinarily rare. In itself, this book, though not especially profound academically, is still a very good popular introduction to philosophy of technology, somewhere between the academic and the…
book reading technology notes freedom
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2012年4月24日
From Technical Code to Virtue Ethics: Table or Div? — Starting from the Ministry of Railways Ticketing Website

AI & the Future of Technology2012.01.05
From Technical Code to Virtue Ethics: Table or Div? — Starting from the Ministry of Railways Ticketing Website
The Ministry of Railways has finally rolled out an online ticketing system, and that alone is worth encouraging. Of course, it is debatable whether moving the advance-sale period for online tickets up by two days is a good idea; for migrant workers and other vulnerable groups who lack access to the internet, this is not very fair. I have already booked train tickets on this website three times (the first two times were round trips to the Winter Solstice conference), and each time I ran into one problem or another. Even when the Winter Solstice conference was still very much in the off-season for train tickets, I still encountered network…
China technology media commentary
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2012年1月5日
On “Fate”

Life & Notes2009.03.25
On “Fate”
As I mentioned earlier, I feel as though I am being teased kindly by “fate,” and I may have used similar rhetoric in earlier essays as well. Well, this is similar to my saying things like “the ghost of Kant is poking me from behind” — it is simply a metaphorical way of expressing a “feeling,” and does not mean that I believe in “fate”; nor, of course, does it mean that I do not believe in fate. For an ill-defined concept, making an yes/no judgment about it is always pretty meaningless. First of all, I would like to declare that, with regard to the transcendental world of deities, I…
philosophy autobiography consciousness choice
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2009年3月25日
[Archive] Keke Forum Lecture 60: “Collapse”…

History of Science & Scholarship2008.11.21
[Archive] Keke Forum Lecture 60: “Collapse”…
Peking University Forum on History of Science and Philosophy of Science, Lecture 60 Time: Friday, November 21, 2008, 3:00–5:00 p.m. Place: Meeting Room, 1st Floor, Department of Philosophy, Peking University (Four Court) Speakers: Jiang Xiaoyuan (Professor, Department of History of Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Liu Bing (Professor, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University) Topic: After *Collapse*: Reflections on the Anxiety of Human Civilization http://hps.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=828&keyword= It’s been a long time since I last wrote a comment after a KeKe Forum lecture. Partly because I didn’t attend some of them, partly because I was lazy, partly because I felt there was nothing much to write, and on top of that the forum…
philosophy book reading notes history of science
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2008年11月21日
First Assignment for the Special Topic on Ethical Questions of Life and Death: On Train-Hitting-Person Cases and DDE

Philosophy & Thought2007.03.19
First Assignment for the Special Topic on Ethical Questions of Life and Death: On Train-Hitting-Person Cases and DDE
First Assignment for the Bioethics Special Topic: On the Train Running People Over and DDE DDE（Doctrine of Double Effect, the doctrine of double effect）： When some actions inevitably bring about double consequences, namely one intended good result and another foreseeable bad result, the doctrine of double effect holds that such actions are good (that is, necessary under natural law) if and only if all of the following conditions are met at the same time: 1） The action must not be immoral 2） The bad consequence must not be the means to the good consequence 3） The intention of the action must be directed only toward the good consequence, although the accompanying…
philosophy Christianity virtue choice
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2007年3月19日
Some Interesting Problems, II: To Change or Not to Change?

History of Science & Scholarship2006.08.13
Some Interesting Problems, II: To Change or Not to Change?
Change or not change? This isn’t a logic puzzle in the strict sense, but it is still a very interesting strategy problem. It suddenly occurred to me: It goes something like this: you are taking part in a game show such as “Lucky 53,” and, fortunately, you win a prize. The host takes you to three boxes and tells you that one of them contains the grand prize—say, a luxury villa—while the other two contain only consolation prizes—say, a jar of doubanjiang. You may choose any one box at will. You choose a box, say Box No. 1. At this point the host opens, say, Box No. 3, and lets…
book reading notes mathematics choice
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2006年8月13日