That is if you believe biological general intelligence is the end goal of evolution, which I believe is highly unlikely.
Intelligence is simply a special side-product of evolution, there is nothing general about general intelligence. Many organisms can thrive without it.
There is also a non-negligible chance that all organisms would die out before reaching intelligence. We are fortunate to live in a world that produced us.
That's a bit besides OP's point though, which is about vacuous claims. Humans are the existence proof that there is some sequence of circumstances where evolution reaches GI. There's an analogous sequence of circumstances in the RL case, which happens to be the hard part.
Not OP, but yeah, evolution doesn’t have goals in the same sense that people do, just like gravity doesn’t “want” to pull things, it just kind of “is”, and simply acts as reality permits based on prior and current conditions. That’s reasonable to say.
Convergent evolution exists for at least some adaptations though, like the eye. It’s not unreasonable to think that there may be some sort of equivalent convergence which creates a high general intelligence adaptation given enough time, at least for social creatures.
I think it’s pretty much impossible to know whether intelligence is a convergent adaptation without some kind of perfect simulation of evolution over billions of years. You’d have to tweak starting conditions and see if you kept getting smart creatures.
This assumes a multiverse which is interesting, because it leaves open the possibility that we are in one of the infinite universes(pl) that does have intelligence as its goal. :)
My suggestion is that you shouldn't bother. The Chinese people would not believe the Western media narrative on Xinjiang (XJ), which also doesn't really have credible sources if look deeper into their "facts" [0]. And it is increasingly clear that the XJ narrative is a US-backed propaganda rather than factual reporting [1]. Most of us would consider the western people being brainwashed into believing whatever the media puts out about XJ, just as much as the English speaking westerners think about us. Please ponder about this: can I, as a Chinese, easily change your media-fed opinion on XJ? Yet I am trying my best here (because I procrastinate).
The video shown by the BBC about the official visit to the vocational training center implants a subliminal message of "bad things are happening here" with eerie BGM and horror-movie-like filter. Your system 1, i.e. your fast, instinctive and emotional mind [2] would also be tricked by that too. Regardless of what's happening there, do you really think this is the way of objective, bias-free reporting?
Personally, I do not like the way they train these people. Westerners would never understand this culturally. But when compared to the war effort instigated by the US against Islamic nations, vocational training is IMHO a much better alternative against terrorism. XJ used to have a terrorism problem, and it's now much safer.
I would suggest you guys to travel in XJ after opening up, if possible, it is an incredible place to visit. If not then there are plenty of local people on youtube vlogging their daily lifes.
People here need to be able to express their views and respect each other, even across broad national/ethnic/ideological gaps. Someone disagreeing with you about China is not evidence that they're a communist agent or anything of that nature, and it's poisonous, degrading, and frankly dumb to make posts to that effect.
Rather, what's going on is that this community is large, diverse, and full of people with different backgrounds. We need to hear each other, not abuse each other.
If you'd like more explanation, I've written about this extensively:
No, this is not because I'm secretly a communist. It's because you can't attack others like this on HN. For plenty of past explanation see these links:
Well I'm Chinese and have positive personal experiences in China, so I'm pro-China.
If you're going to base your questions on the premises that I do not agree with, and do not give your reasonings, then there is no way to engage in productive conversation.
Tip: you don't have to be pro-CCP to realize that (mainstream) Western reporting on China is frequently very focused on a handful of stories and discards a lot of information that doesn't fit.
Because the news of the journalist got beaten up by the protesters went viral. There were more than 4 billion views on the related searches [1].
I will refrain from commenting on politics (don't have the time to contribute) but must say that I found both sides are incredibly biased against each other.
Re. [1,2] see [4], but I wouldn't expect it to convince you.
Re. [3] I fail to see how an apology is an acceptable excuse for the protesters' behaviour, regardless of their cause.
The protesters apologizing are presumably not the same whose behavior they're apologizing for. It just shows that the protest movement is not homogeneous and does not as a whole support indiscriminate violence.
It is puzzling to me why foreigners would actually believe that we are somehow inflicted by the "social credit score" and worry about being sent to a "re-education camp" for simply circumventing the censorship.
I work in a research institute that is government-sponsored, and I can assure you that our work relies on having access to censored foreign sites (Google, Google Scholar, etc.), and there isn't an official way to do so and we all use third-party or self-hosted VPNs.
All my friends and families always discuss incidents in the past history of PRC freely, and never have to worry about being surveilled. It has recently bothered me that the western media often see the issues in colored lenses, have strong beliefs in anti-China sentiments and yet provide no direct evidence relating to the claimed atrocities commited by the government. I tried very hard to find actual direct evidence and to justify their claims (e.g. [1]) but discovered none. The lack of evidence make those hard to believe and would urge you to take those with a substantial grain of salt, and not everything is abysmal in China.
Conflict of interest: I am a Chinese and I studied in the UK for 8 years.
As a westerner outside China I'm not under the impression that the CPC cares much about your private or semi-private conversations with your friends and family, unlike notably the Stasi or early Soviet censorship.
But I bet you'd be running a very different mental calculus before saying some of those things you'd say in closed circles on your widely-read blog under your own name.
That's the thrust of what the GP is talking about, which I think you're taking a very selective view of in thinking that by "chilling effect" they're talking about Stasi-like censorship. Even if can get away with certain speech 99.9% of the time in a totalitarian regime just having to worry about the 0.01% has a huge chilling effect.
> provide no direct evidence relating to the claimed atrocities commited by the government. I tried very hard to find actual direct evidence and to justify their claims ... but discovered none
I'm genuinely curious about this. There are witness accounts of forced organ harvesting, and it's not too long ago that the government announced that it stopped the practice[1], implying that it was happening at least up until that point, and the rumors were correct.
There's no way for external parties to verify that forced organ harvesting has ended as promised. When a government does not invite external observers to verify such an important matter, shouldn't anyone's gut feeling go on red alert? Has there ever been a case when a lack of gov't transparency wasn't a bad sign? Is it cultural bias on my end to assume the worst-case scenario?
So by forcing the use of illegal vpns, you can always be arrested. Or fired for not doing your job.
It's not that everything is terrible in China, it's that the Chinese government is an oppressive regime with severe totalitarian bent. Those oppressive regimes which least interfere in the everyday are the most likely to continue existing - we've known this since ancient times.
But censorship, ethnic camps, totalitarian power and mass surveillance do a reppressive regime make.
There are a few cases when it comes to arrests of VPN service owners, but zero incidents that I know of of VPN user being arrested. This is simply because the former breaks the law and the latter doesn't.
Censorship is no secret, totalitarian power is hard to define, but ethnic camps and mass surveillance may or may not exist depending on the existance of direct evidence.
Edit: Evidence is universal, and I suppose we can all agree that it is not dependent on me.
There is no country I am aware of, including China, which denies the existence of the camps. China contends that they are voluntary "educational centers" that just happen to only contain Muslim Chinese who aren't allowed to leave and spend their days singing praises to Jinping.
I'm sure you've seen the infamous "tank man" picture, which provides direct evidence that the PRC rolled tanks into Tiananmen Square. The above picture isn't as iconic, but it shows what the PRC did with those tanks: they crushed and killed anyone in their path.
If this is indicative of the depth of your knowledge about government atrocities, I suggest you stop. Worse would be to talk about reeducation camps, or organ harvesting. It's meme-like at this point and has no bearing on reality.
Things that actually happened: rural protests, corruption, razing houses by eminent domain, medical malpractice, even some obscure musician being blacklisted, things that can happen everywhere but happen with "Chinese characteristics" in a more volatile way because of the lack of rule of law and due process, often ending with violence or curtailment of basic rights. But these are not as trendy and nobody really gives a shit about how Chinese people live, people just want to feel morally superior.
Extreme Islamic is a difficult problem to deal with globally. Look at Israel, they are taking extreme measure too.
Historically, this extreme ideology comes from Western culture. Both Christian and Islamic are exclusive religions. Drives each other nuts for thousand years.
US played a very bad role in modern days and caused the situation out of control. Iraq war and other mediterranean wars, all of them are unethical anti-human-rights wars. They have destroyed so many families. That's why nobody in the world believe US's so called human rights propaganda even though there are some America truly care.
Chinese don't believe that US is able to solve their own extreme Islamic problem. They invented their own method. They believe that the fundamental reason for the extreme behavior is because they are excluded from the society and the economy. They want to reeducate them to get them involved. However, the approach is a bit harsh. Not quite sure whether they will succeed.
Frankly speaking, getting everyone involved in the society is the key for US as well. Rich people don't pay tax, don't participate in the economy, and don't care about poor guys. They have their robots. More and more poor people have left the economy completely for years. The middle class is vanishing quickly. The extreme behaviors are emerging fast these days.
Before we point our fingers at other people, we really should figure out our own issues.
The American government being wrong does not make the Chinese government right. There's actually enormous pressure on Washington, both internationally and internally, to stop these human rights violating conflicts that only serve to further inflame sectarian violence. Right now, as some call for war with Iran, there are other voices calling for peace.
This is not a competition for which country's government is more right, rather it is an effort to promote global peace, prosperity and human rights. Rather than zero-sum thinking, people of conscience seek to lift all boats.
If you look you'll always find others doing wrong. You can look historically and find for most countries some rather big wrongs.
But the question is what is happening right now. The Chinese government has rather successfully made two ethnic groups minorities in their own homelands through an intense government-stimulated migration of Han Chinese to in particular Tibet and Xinjiang. Both used to be own states that were brought into China in the creation of the PRC. What you see in Tibet and Xinjiang is a direct result of that policy of forced integration/ethnic takeover.
Israel is a perfect comparison because the Israel conflict similarly stems from the creation of Israel itself: a country was declared by the colonial power (UK) of the Palestine territory due to a 2000-year old claim of that being the Jewish homeland. This was done without any care or concern for what the current citizens of those territories wanted. And those left in the territories are massively disadvantaged in all aspects of life. That is the source of the Israel-Palestine conflict and Israel's conflict with most Muslim neighbors. And the Uighur conflict similarly stems from the annexation of those territories - with different cultural and ethnic groups - by the PRC. The religious expression of this conflict is a symptom, not the cause.
Think of Chinese resistance against the brutal Japanese occupiers. Your people, from our perspective today, were fighting heroically against an outside enemy that wanted to assimilate them and steal the territory and resources. That's how Tibetans and Uighurs see the takeover of Han-Chinese and the PRC.
There are memes that everybody hears or passes around without any critical processing, like "in China they eat dogs" or "in Alabama they marry their siblings". Is it correct or incorrect? Is it not happening? You can ask yourself the same questions. When I say it has no bearing on reality, I don't mean that it has no reality, I mean that it has no bearing on reality.
That's very shocking to hear, but I'm not entirely surprised to hear that you doubt these events. The combination of censorship and propaganda is very effective. I try to keep an unbiased perspective and I am very aware of how the hidden motives of governments and media organizations can skew the news, even in the freest of countries.
My broader point though is that you won't change your mind because your livelihood and freedom depends on you denying or ignoring the actions of your government. So just like in the VPN experiment, we can remove the wall, but you will not leave the prison. I feel sorry for you, individually and personally, though it's probably for the best that you're not interested in questioning these things too closely.
I think the other posters all provide clear evidence of the issues raised. I'm wondering if you had a look and changed it at least started to doubt your current views? If not, what would convince you?
More importantly, you seem to be quite educated and tech literate, and use ok f vpn is natural for you. What % of the population would you think is able to access vpns and outside media and sites?
I believe the fear and anti-China sentiments stemmed from the the past history of the regime in China. It's okay to bear the "outsider" concept that as long as you are not doing something wrong then the gov won't do anything to you. However, please do keep in mind that if you are not voicing out for the others that are suppressed, then no one would voice out for you when you are the target of suppression. Assuming you had some sort of higher education, it's hard to gauge when will your interest conflicts with the central government's. The fact that people around the world are resisting and pressuring such regime is because the fear that it would spread its influence globally. I personally don't think the issue relates to the people itself, but I would not trust the central government at all. (Tienanmen square, "re-education camps", Surveillance, Censorship, Persecution of political dissidents)
Your link [1] goes to an exhaustively researched and documented conclusion that China is participating in "widespread or systematic" state-sponsored forced organ transplants, torture, and extermination, targeted specifically against Uyghurs and Falun Gong, "beyond any reasonable doubt."
What were you trying to accomplish by posting that? Did you skim the first couple of pages outlining the claims, get bored, and assume their conclusions would match your beliefs? Or did you hope that no one would bother to read enough of the bloody dense thing to figure out what it actually said?
Either way, you're lying when you say you "tried very hard to find actual direct evidence but discovered none."
The report summarizes eyewitness testimonials given in front of the tribunal; I'm not sure what other evidence you expected.
FWIW in 2009 China Daily, which as you may know is a party-owned newspaper, published an article on the practice of taking transplants from prisoners. Unfortunately the original article was not archived, but it appears in this listing of headlines: http://web.archive.org/web/20090828122112/http://www.chinada...
Now maybe what you're actually sceptical about is whether Falun Gong practitioners wre specifically targeting. I don't believe they were, it's just that there were a lot of them, so when membership was prohibited, a lot were sentenced to death and consequently had their organs harvested. They also had enough members abroad to complain loudly about it and get people to actually care, in contrast to most other human rights violations.
Intelligence is simply a special side-product of evolution, there is nothing general about general intelligence. Many organisms can thrive without it.
There is also a non-negligible chance that all organisms would die out before reaching intelligence. We are fortunate to live in a world that produced us.