Seth's Blog

Person A to Person B: “See that piece of shit? If you eat it I’ll give you 100 million yuan.”

Person B eats the shit.

But Person A doesn’t want to give him 100 million yuan.  He says to Person B: “How about I eat shit too? Then we’ll be even.”

Person B agrees.

Person A eats some shit. “Now we’re even,” he says.

They have just increased GDP by 200 million yuan.

A few weeks ago I got a treadmill for my Beijing apartment. Two days ago I was walking on it (I try to walk 1 hr/day) while watching Leverage to make the activity more palatable. But Leverage bored me. It was too simple. So I took out some Chinese flashcards (character on one side, English and pinyin on the other) and started studying them. I was astonished how pleasant it was. An hour of walking and studying went by . . . uh, in a flash. In my entire life I have never had such a pleasant hour studying. The next day it happened again! The experience appears infinitely repeatable. I’ve previously mentioned the man who memorized Paradise Lost while walking on a treadmill.

I’ve noticed before that treadmill walking (by itself boring) and Chinese-character learning (by itself boring) become pleasant when combined. So why was I astonished? Because the increase in enjoyment was larger. The whole activity was really pleasant, like drinking water when thirsty. When an hour was up, I could have kept going. I wanted to do it again. When I noticed it earlier, I was using Anki to learn Chinese characters. Now I am using flashcards in blocks of ten (study 10 until learned, get a new set of 10, study them until learned . . . ). The flashcards provide much more sense of accomplishment and completion, which I thinks makes the activity more pleasant.

My progress with Chinese characters has been so slow that during the latest attempt (putting them on my wall) I didn’t even try to learn both the pinyin and the meaning at the same time; I had retreated to just trying to learn the meaning. That was hard enough. I have had about 100 character cards on the walls of my apartment for a month but I’ve only learned the meaning of about half of them. No pinyin at all. In contrast, in two one-hour treadmill sessions I’ve gotten through 60 cards  . . . including pinyin. For me, learning pinyin is much harder than learning meaning.

It’s like drinking water when you’re thirsty versus when you’re not thirsty. The walking turns a kind of switch that makes it pleasant to learn dry knowledge, just as lack of water creates thirst. Not only did studying dry materials become much more pleasant I suspect I also became more efficient — more retentive. I was surprised how fast I managed to reach a criterion of zero mistakes.

I had previously studied flashcards while walking around Tsinghua. This did not produce an oh-my-god experience. I can think of three reasons why the effect is now much stronger: 1. Ordinary walking is distracting. You have to watch where you’re going, there are other people, cars, trees, and so on. Distraction reduces learning. If the distractions are boring — and they usually are –  the experience becomes less pleasant. 2. Ordinary walking provides more information than treadmill walking (which provides no information at all — you’re staring at a wall). The non-flashcard info reduces desire to learn what’s on the flashcards. 3. On these Tsinghua walks I had about 100 flashcards which I cycled through. Using sets of 10, as I said, provides more sense of accomplishment. I’ve also had about 20 Chinese-speaking lessons while walking around. The walking made the lessons more pleasant, yes, but it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as the treadmill/flashcard combination. And because lessons with a tutor are intrinsically more enjoyable than studying flashcards, the increase in enjoyment was less dramatic.

As I said earlier I think there’s an evolutionary reason for this effect: The thirst for knowledge (= novelty) created by walking pushed us to explore and learn about our surroundings. One interesting feature of my discovery about treadmill and flashcards is that it may take better advantage of this mechanism than did ordinary Stone-Age life — better in the sense that more pleasure/minute can be derived. In the Stone Age, novelty, new dry knowledge, was hard to come by. You could only walk so fast. After a while, it was hard to walk far enough away to be in a new place. Whereas I can easily switch from flashcards I’ve learned to new ones. An example of a supranormal stimulus.

A Chinese friend of mine thought I had removed this post.

A few years ago the Chinese people invented a new noun: guan er dai (官二代), meaning the children of government officials. There was already fu er dai, meaning the children of rich people.

The reason for the new term is that guan er dai act badly. A few weeks ago at Hebei University, a guan er dai, driving a car on campus, hit and killed a girl. Angry bystanders gathered around the car. “My father is Li Gang!” shouted the guan er dai. Li Gang is a mid-level police official. Not especially powerful, but powerful enough. Hubei University covered up the incident.

Government officials have always been very powerful, said the friend who told me this. But only recently have people become aware of this. This is why guan er dai is a new term.

A few years ago a Tsinghua sociology professor and a graduate student wrote a book about the hierarchy within Chinese society. Government officials on top, below them business people, and so on. Perhaps farmers at the bottom. The government did not allow this book to be published — “we are not on top of society, we are the servants!” said a government official. All that work, down the drain.

More The reckless driver was sentenced to three years in prison. The New York Times has a long article about this.

In Chinese supermarkets now and then you see a large and a small version of something taped together — for the price of the large version! For example, a quart of milk and a pint of milk taped together, sold at the price of one quart. Wow, you think, for the same price I get 50% more.
Today I looked closely at one of these deals. The milk was several days older than the rest of the milk for sale. I realized it was the Chinese equivalent of putting a day-old sticker on something and selling it at half-price. Day-old stickers have negative connotations (“stale”) but the taped packages have positive ones (“your lucky day”).

Chinese students say GRE stands for God Read English. The reading passages in GRE prep books are so difficult only God could read them.

More Maybe God will comment on your blog, said a Chinese friend. “I haven’t passed the GRE.”

A Chinese physicist recently resigned from his job (pure research) at a Beijing research institute. His salary was too low. The base salary is something like $200/month, with something like $1200 for each paper you publish. He explained his decision in a letter to his bosses, which he posted on the Internet. From Google Translate:

Dear leaders:

Hello!

August 2006, I single-handedly carried the mat, one hand holding the quilt to the school to report to work. Slept on the floor in the office 3 nights later, Frank and others XX XXX Street, shares a house, 800 yuan per month. Themselves feel better. However, when my wife came to see me when to Shanghai, but a cry. She did not expect this to write beautiful prose, in English is superb, the monthly salary of ten years ago, men who have three thousand dollars so come down: the room to work without a decent table, there is no place to sit, could only sit bed; office also can take place without her. Yes, until now, my office is a chair, a common HP laser printer or the wife gave me a birthday present. His wife’s insistence, in March 2007, after six months sharing with others, I moved to Village X XX X, X round room (Reference: College on XXXX XXX), monthly rent of 1,600 yuan.

(more…)

I have 80 Chinese characters (flashcards for children) taped to a wall of my Beijing apartment. I add about five per day. I wrote about this earlier, before starting. So far it’s working. With almost no effort, no discipline, I know what almost all of them mean. I test myself a little whenever I’m in that room. This is a vast improvement over several previous attempts to learn the characters, such as studying flashcards the usual way or using Anki, a flashcard program.

I ruefully realize this is an application of something I thought of many years ago: the forces we can turn on and off are much weaker than pre-existing forces we can only take advantage of. Burning coal is a force we can turn on and off. Solar power is a pre-existing force we can take advantage of (and which almost everyone in Beijing uses to dry clothes). The sun shines no matter what we do. Deliberate studying we can turn on and off. We can study or not. In contrast, I am inevitably going to be in that room. Taping characters to the wall takes advantage of that.

I asked an American friend who’s been in China for a year how the year had changed her. She told a story:

I was in a restaurant in Inner Mongolia. This guy was going around smashing things, throwing glasses. He was drunk. I was shocked. I expected a strong reaction: Get out of my restaurant! That’s not what happened. There was no strong reaction. The guy finally left and the staff cleaned up the mess he made. I’ve learned not to react strongly to unusual behavior.

I love this story. That travel changes your assumptions is hardly a new idea but this says it vividly and briefly.

I asked several Tsinghua students what they thought about Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident, winning the Nobel Peace Prize. There was a wide range of answers:

1. “It’s a sensitive subject,” said one student. And said no more.

2. “The Nobel Prize always seems to involve China,” said another student. Maybe she meant the Peace Prize in 1989 to the Dalai Lama and the more recent Literature prize to Gao Xingjian, but I’m not sure. Politely changing the subject.

3. “I don’t know much about what he stands for,” said another student (a freshman).

4. “Now is not the right time for his ideas. They would interfere with economic progress,” said a student who is a member of the Communist Party.

5. “Many people say because the European economy is bad, they gave the prize to someone who will never collect the money [because he's imprisoned],” said another student. She added that receiving the prize will be bad for Liu. Because it was “a great shame for China” (meaning the government), they will increase his prison sentence.