[infoseek12]

It will be interesting if a lot of research gets published in Chinese journals and not the West. If this happens I wonder if Western researchers will get their information from Chinese journals or lag a bit behind Chinese researchers on the answers to these questions.

[fnordpiglet]

If you’re willing to cut ethical corners in one dimension there’s no reason to believe you won’t in other dimensions. Doing rigorous research with honesty, transparency, and ethically is interrelated. That’s why being a reputable journal is so important - presumably the standards are high and the research is more reliable, and citing it is more credible. While not consistently true or universally true, it’s at least true the less reputable journals are known to be … less reputable. So, yes, you could republish in less reputable journals, but other researchers will assume a low quality result intermixed with fraud, unethical practice, and lack of transparency. Fair or not Chinese journals don’t have a reputation for quality like mainstream journals, even among Chinese researchers. Finally a Chinese language journal has almost no readership outside of China, further diminishing the impact of your research. Even citing the research in an international journal would be problematic.

[roenxi]

> If you’re willing to cut ethical corners in one dimension there’s no reason to believe you won’t in other dimensions.

There is reason to believe. People have different ethical standards and some standards are more conducive to getting honest useful results. In this case I think free and informed consent is important. But the ethical framework our medical system works to is counterproductive and destructive; so there is reason to believe that the ethical option is to ignore the official rules on ethics under some circumstances. I personally am of the opinion that the single biggest threat to my health and wellbeing is the West's culture of forcing everyone to conform to the highest possible safety standard and paying no attention to the cost-benefit of that. As I measure it, our absurd standards appear to be crippling (with respect to some hypothetical entity that had more reasonable standards) the west's:

* Manufacturing capabilties.

* Energy security.

* Medical research.

So while someone with different ethical standards might also cut corners on the quality of the reporting I find it extremely easy to believe that someone with different standards might just produce better research. We don't all have the same ethical frame.

[npunt]

Agree, unethical research also makes replication harder thus any results are more suspect.

[quotemstr]

"Ethics" isn't one thing. One can be committed personally to honesty and scientific rigor yet opposed to curiosity-killing IRB culture that purports to think that a questionnaire somehow might rise to the level of atrocity but not for IRB review.

[BlueTemplar]

How readily does reputation change with scandals ? Because we seem to be in the middle of a pretty big one, where the functioning of the whole system is in question.

Starting with a milder example :

https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-how-to-be-...

Followed by a more... radioactive one :

https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-sausage-factory-of-p...

BTW for this last one, HN seems to be outright blocking submissions, with the dreaded (and in this case disingenuous) "you are posting too fast" error. Now I'm willing to leave some benefit of the doubt that this is done in order to minimize flamewars, but it does still leave a bad taste...

But to conclude, some wise (??) words :

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...

(The links to Paul Graham's and Scott Aaronson's takes are also worth reading.)

[dekhn]

In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was a lot of world-class science going on in England and Germany and most of it didn't get translated, which led to both countries being somewhat behind the advances of the other. The Dutch and Danish played a big role in mediating between those two countries, which were in intense competition at that point.

I've long assumed that if China continues to invest in its research culture, eventually (probably even now) there is research being published in Chinese (I assume that means Mandarin, but I am not knowledgeable on specifics) that would be extremely valuable. Areas like material sciences, optics, EE, MEMS, etc.

But I think since the US has so much cultural exchange with China, and so many Chinese-speaking residents, that probably any really important stuff will get translated.

[zelse]

Re: Publishing in Mandarin, just in case you're curious:

Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Wu, etc are spoken languages (or dialects, or varieties), but the writing system is common to all of them, albeit in two major forms -- Simplified and Traditional. If I write 恭喜发财, a Mandarin speaker will read that aloud as gongxi facai, a Cantonese speaker as gung hei faat coi, and a Hokkien speaker as kiong-hi hoat-chai, though I left off tone markings even though they're important. In that sense, unless something's romanized, written materials are pretty much just written in 'Chinese', and not any particular variety.

Learning Chinese is funny that way: the spoken language has very simple, regular grammar, but then you also need to learn how to read, write, and pronounce ~3,000 characters to read a newspaper, with a well-educated reader in the language typically recognizing between 8 and 15 thousand characters of the 80,000-100,000 or so that have ever existed (including obscure characters, obsolete characters, regional characters, and variant characters).

It's similar to how if you show a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German and a Pole '456', they'll all know the meaning even if the Englishman thinks "four-hundred fifty-six", and the Frenchman thinks quatre cent cinquante-six.

[worik]

Mēh!

Let the Chinese authorities burden themselves with questions of DNA markers and ethnic groups

Eugenics has not done anyone any good, and when used as a means of controlling populations it goes to very dark places

If the whole stack is not kept ethical, it is not ethical at all. If not ethical then it tends to evil

[aydyn]

> If the whole stack is not kept ethical, it is not ethical at all.

This is such a naive, borderline illiterate take. How much of modern human biological knowledge is built upon a foundation of unethical practices?

[xdennis]

> Eugenics has not done anyone any good

It's reduced genetic defects in the population. For example in many countries you can abort babies with Down syndrome up to the time of birth.

[BiteCode_dev]

Are writing this comment from a phone made with no unethical issues?

Cause I don't know any.

[COGlory]

No. No one trusts Chinese research to be:

A) accurate B) reproducible

Even in Western journals it's frequently suspect.