Suixuan

标签：elite

Rebuilding the Threshold—Web3 Is Indeed a Kind of Regression into “Enclosure and Self-Exaltation,” but That May Not Necessarily Be a Bad Thing

Culture & Public Commentary2022.01.30
Rebuilding the Threshold—Web3 Is Indeed a Kind of Regression into “Enclosure and Self-Exaltation,” but That May Not Necessarily Be a Bad Thing
Yesterday, the floor price of the Bored Ape NFT broke through 100 Ether (ETH), and now it is 106.9 (one Ether is currently worth more than 2,500 U.S. dollars), which means a single Bored Ape is worth roughly one to two million yuan. “Floor price” refers to the cheapest ape you can buy right now if you rush in and make the purchase immediately. Because every ape looks different, and the rarity of their various attributes also differs, many people choose to buy at a higher price point; for example, Justin Bieber today spent 500 ETH to buy one. The full name of Bored Ape is “Bored Ape Yacht Club”…
culture Web3 blockchain decentralization
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2022年1月30日
The “Two Cultures” Debate Is Long Outdated

Culture & Public Commentary2019.07.02
The “Two Cultures” Debate Is Long Outdated
Published in China Science Daily (2019-06-28, p. 5, Culture) In 1959, the British writer C. P. Snow proposed the thesis of the “two cultures” in a lecture, sparking intense debate. Even sixty years later, the topic is still with us, and seems not to have gone out of date. But I want to put forward a seemingly out-of-place claim: the two-cultures debate is already passé, and there is not much point in still fretting over the issue Snow raised. First, let us return to the context of the time and see just what split between what two cultures Snow was actually talking about. Nowadays, when many people talk about…
culture science sociology intellectuals
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2019年7月2日
On Elitism and Esoteric Truth

Culture & Public Commentary2012.10.18
On Elitism and Esoteric Truth
Today I went to sit in on the World Congress of Chinese Philosophers, took a look at some academic celebrities whose names I had only heard before, and was greatly disappointed. I’m too lazy to go again tomorrow. That Tang Yijie was unreliable I already knew; that Chen Lai was reliable I also already knew. But I didn’t know many of the other famous figures very well. After listening to one round today, basically the only one of any interest was Chen Lai; the others, such as Lin Yusheng, sounded academically fairly sound, but the reports themselves were a little dull. As for the much-vaunted Gan Yang and Liu Xiaofeng,…
philosophy China culture media
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2012年10月18日
The Left and Right, Chinese Style

Enlightenment & the Spirit of Freedom2012.05.15
The Left and Right, Chinese Style
Recently I’ve been mentioning the left and the right quite often, but always rather cautiously, always wanting to add a couple of lines: I don’t like taking sides, I only use labels because I have no choice, and so on. To keep on like that is not really a solution, so I might as well write an article and talk through my understanding of the so-called left and right. My first acquaintance with the concepts of left and right probably came in middle school political class, where the teacher explained that the left was progressive and reformist, while the right was backward and conservative. We children, brainwashed by China’s rote-learning…
China freedom tradition politics
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2012年5月15日
Why Post Grades?

History of Science & Scholarship2010.06.22
Why Post Grades?
The course in the history of science has always posted the grades for homework and the final exam online. When I took it back then, I checked my grades on Professor Wu’s personal homepage, whereas now they are usually posted on the BBS. Every time grades are posted, there is inevitably some questioning: by making classmates’ information public like this, what about their privacy and so on? Here I might as well explain the reasons for doing it. First of all, the very notion of “privacy” is strange. Why are grades a student’s privacy? I have only heard that the exam scores of primary and secondary school students cannot be…
scholarship education Peking University Wu Fei
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2010年6月22日
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon, 09-12-26

Life & Notes2009.12.26
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon, 09-12-26
Last week was all normal; there just wasn’t much of anybody and nothing much going on, so I won’t record it. Next week will also continue as usual. Today, Guawang brought along a classmate. Though there weren’t many people, the discussion was still quite lively. We talked about the relationship between elites and the masses—whether some new idea becomes widespread because the public blindly follows a small number of authorities? We also mentioned the “pleasure machine (brain in a vat),” the choice between love and chemical substances? purpose and meaning, scientism, paradigm shifts, sympathy, departmental divisions… I don’t remember the specifics for the moment; I’ll fill them in again in…
everyday life the masses scientism elite
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2009年12月26日
[Western] Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses —☆

Culture & Public Commentary2008.02.14
[Western] Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses —☆
[西]Ortega y Gasset: “The Revolt of the Masses,” translated by Liu Xunlian and Tong Dezhi, Jilin People’s Publishing House, October 2004, 16 yuan——☆ I read this book on the train while I was going home; thanks to a delay, I happened to finish it in one sitting. But the excerpts below were not entered into the computer until the last day before I returned to Beijing, which shows how completely I wasted my time at home. This is a wonderful book, so much so that I wanted to classify it as a “★” recommendation. After much hesitation, I lowered it by one grade, because I felt that the book’s mode…
book reading notes sociology the masses
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2008年2月14日