You missed the point. I made an analogy, you missed the point about the analogy.
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It seems that you're interpreting the oil analogy as a reference to belief, or culture more generally.
But I said right there at the top, it's not about the contents, it's about how a western audience could potentially react to the way a selection of commented quotes of an ancient chinese thinker is presented.
The cultural facts you mentioned are relevant culturally but irrelevant both to the blogpost and my critique of it. They are related, and share similar words and concepts, and it is even nuanced, but talks about another subject.
While your subject is related to cultural identity, mine is about charlatanism. I don't think the blogpost is trying to appropriate chinese culture, in the same way HĂ€agen-Dazs is not trying to undermine the scandinavians. However, in both cases, we have a case of deception. The deception is not against a culture, but against a possible victim that does not know the target culture.
I'm not talking about migration, I'm not talking about culture appropriation, I'm not judging nations or cultures by value. I understand this is difficult for most audiences to grasp, and I'm not saying you don't understand it.
Think of a cloud of different subjects related to culture. Matters of identity, belief, appropriation, all share a similar group (talk about culture, mainly).
My critique is more closely related to another group of ideas (critical thinking, avoiding cult-behavior, manipulation of perception, cold reading).
It is true that these both clouds of subjects intersect, but briefly. Some people say religion or certain cultures are manipulative, and they also describes themselves as skeptics.
Through that intersection, you could have derived a reply that confuses a lot of audiences, and it would appease to these kinds of religious skeptics (militant atheism), moving the discussion towards a more easy to navigate terrain (it's easy to point out the mistakes of militant atheists, and hard to spot the difference between a secular-type and an atheist-type). Again, not that you don't know (on the contrary, you demonstrate quite an ablity to select subjects).
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Your reply (possibly accidentaly?) hits a combination of notes around the subject that is curious. It doesn't pass scrutiny.
For example, if it was part of a larger corpus of text on culture, both of our comments should have been left out (mine for not being about culture, yours for being a continuation of mine. you broke the chain, man).
In another example, my comment would be perhaps be in a larger corpus about secular though, but your reply woundn't (from there, you started talking about culture as the main subject. breaking the chain again, man).
Makes sense?
I don't take cultural appropriation seriously at all if the victim is China (or Japan or India.) A friend of mine visited China one Christmas season and saw a Santa Claus figure crucified at the the top of a tree. If they can mangle our culture that bad we can do what we like.
As for Charlatanism I'm just going to invoke Nietzsche insofar as "the will to appearance, illusion, deception, becoming and change (to objective deception) is here taken to be more profound, more primordial, more metaphysical than the will to truth, reality and being"
Today I'm inclined to ask "how many neurotypicals can dance on the head of a pin?" and I'm seriously concerend with the "ahistorical turn" insofar as a lot of people don't want to think about the 1990s or the 1970s never mind the 1910s.
If we're going to deceive ourselves we might as well draw from the largest cultural library and have some diversity in our misconceptions. A year ago I read all the Poul Anderson books that I skipped (read Heinlein, Pohl, Smith, Niven, Asmiov, ...) and really appreciated that all of his aliens were religious, the kind of "people" who wouldn't let you use circular wheels (holy!) and even if you used
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuleaux_triangle
you'd get spoken to very harshly by your superiors in the Polesotechnic League. Here on Earth though faith healing and exorcism have been first and second line treatments for many conditions as described in
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-97489-000
and if a person who had an intractable problem found Milton Erickson and had a strange conversation and then forgot they had a problem or if a person speaking in the name of a fox [1] pronounces in front of a crowd (containing the thief) that a stolen object will be found in a certain place and gives the thief an easy out... what's wrong with that? Is it any worse than people believing false statements such as "Paroxetine corrects a chemical imbalance?"
[1] who perhaps became something more than vulpine by practicing Daoist cultivation
Coprolalia (either voluntarily, by satire, or as a suggested mechanism) is an appropriate response to both my exxagerated analysis (I did provide a quick summary in the beginning though) and _also_ in tone with the idea of charlatanism (in the sense of molding rethoric).
Mine stands without the extras though.
gsf_emergency_2
07/09/2025
Not to disappoint you bro, skepticism of your sort still sounds like shallow-but-dressed-up anti-intellectualism. Like asking clearly educated folk to eat shit in the fanciest way you can muster. Neither interesting, nor productive.
Unless you are European literary critic or something, then the interesting bit is why you are on HN
I could box with him all day always stepping to the side with questions like "Do I blame Carlos Castenada or do I blame the people who believed in him?" but to get back to the origin:
Confucius is utterly devoid of "woo" (ć·«) and is much closer to Aristotle and company than he is to Mary Baker Eddy. Likewise, there's a big Chinese literature in psychology where you'll find things that I believe are true on any level (sadness suppresses anger: try reading names at the war memorial when you are angry but can't be) that are hard to find or absent in Western literature.
gsf_emergency_2
07/09/2025
>sadness suppresses anger
The Chinese v. of that really requires a link! It's nearly a chengyu but I don't know if Douyin is surfacing truly new ones these days
Problem with most things-- help us GPT-- you have to dig through a alot of chaff to get to the wheat
Another aspect of the curiosity vs agency tradeoff..?
I have a question: how did you guys expected me to react?
gsf_emergency_2
07/10/2025
Not in a good (curious, friendly) way :)
To be fair, I think you have a point about people latching on to eastern "woo" but that (your stance) comes across as victim-blaming (=not as heroic OR as fresh as you might imagine it to be)..
Not sure you intended such a interpretation, but I suspect you might also blame us for that :)
I haven't seen any interesting solutions to the uh "skepticism vs openness" dilemma, you haven't pointed to any either, but maybe trying to understand what the relative value of different approaches are may help
By different "approaches" I mean, in the current context, fresh ways of distilling the non-wooness in non-western uh data
I see, the problem was in assuming that I want to present myself as an original thinker.
I'll keep my longstanding tradition of explaining exactly how I work: I have no interest in competing for an audience of hot takes on things. _Skepticism is old_, I dusted it from an old shelf. Of course it's not fresh.
So, I can attribute all the harshness that came across from me to your provokations. That's very generous. I didn't needed it though, and I don't accept gifts from strangers.
You're clearly confused. Doing these rethoric stunts is not something to be proud of.
Why should I be disappointed? I just made a charlatan do a bozo stunt to try to get out of a corner.