Do you have anything better than an appeal to tradition to justify your viewpoint, perhaps a book or study that comprehensively justifies TCM without falling into the basic traps of failed statistical reasoning?
Perhaps the missing point is that the TCM approach to illness or health is dramatically different from Western medicine.
Surgery or modern medicine (injection, pills) focuses on one particular manifestation of illness and targets a particular illness.
On the other hand, TCM is not targeting a particular illness, but rather, it sees illness as the symptom of something deeper going off track in the body. Hence it tries to regulate and balance the body so that it can correct itself, without too much intervention.
It's not something that you can quantitatively study easily and get concrete results, as it is more long-term and therapeutic rather than short-term result driven.
The point is, the parts of traditional medicine that work are adopted by modern medicine. Meaning, although they're still part of traditional medicine, they're no longer distinctive of traditional medicine. Traditional medicine is distinct from modern medicine only by virtue of the parts that don't work.
This is what is meant by the "traditional medicine that works is called medicine" soundbite. The soundbite on its own condenses the argument very imperfectly, and people should be wary of using it.
Please educate yourself with the term TCM (traditional Chinese medicine, 中药) before making such condescending comments. It's a very specific branch of medicine, not related to the generic English term "traditional medicine".
Your argument, to a Chinese person, is equivalent to "JavaScript is old because Java is old." It makes no sense at all.
Edit: It's also worth noting that in Chinese, TCM is simply 中医, which literally means Chinese medicine. I'm not sure who decided to add the "traditional" in front, but it's not actually how it's called in China.
> Traditional medicine is distinct from modern medicine only by virtue of the parts that don't work.
If you say it this way, then maybe we should stop using the term TCM and just call it its original name "Chinese medicine" so we can both be happy.
I know this is hugely unpopular, but...that sounds like a problem that communism was initially designed for, where productivity is so high that people can just take what they need.
I have been thinking about the issue of "saving the planet", which is similar to "saving the endangered spices from extinctions".
Ultimately I think humans are just selfish by nature and they only do things to ensure the continuation of humans as a spices. Everything else is sugar-coating it. So really, there is no morality to be discussed, it is just natural instinct.
Humans are much more selfish than that. Almost nobody cares about the species. They care about themselves, their family, maybe their neighborhood, and if you’re really lucky they might care about their country.
> They care about themselves, their family, maybe their neighborhood, and if you’re really lucky they might care about their country.
Most of that is social construct.
Our biological imperative is too simple for most people to fathom-- if you concern yourself only with the welfare of yourself and your family, you're doing your part for the species by expanding it with viable offspring.
If ensuring the survival of you and yours means paying tribute to the local warlord or toeing a party line, then concern for the neighborhood or country will follow.
But make no mistake, it's not in your interests for the species to thrive. It's in your interests for your own offspring to thrive. Nature can't maintain its balance if the sick and infertile reproduce and the boundless demand for limited resources result in us driving everything else to extinction until we all run around sticking punji knives in each others' guts for lack of food anyway.
Does any other animal species care about things other than themselves? Natural selection would weed out individuals who were too altruistic, if you're looking for something to blame you're going to have to blame thousands of years of evolution selecting for the cruelest and greediest organisms
I read your link, and my biggest disagreement with it is that it (a) basically uses a very flimsy strawman argument that mischaracterizes the other side and (b) its conclusion is baffling and illogical.
Of course the reason we should fight global warming is that it will have huge deleterious effects on humans that are avoidable. Yes, I agree, "the planet" will continue with or without us, but most people would prefer the "with us" option.
Finally, you end with "All we are doing is making the earth more suitable for humans to live, that’s it." What?? Tell that to the billions of people that live along the coast, or say anyone that lives in Bangladesh.
> Finally, you end with "All we are doing is making the earth more suitable for humans to live, that’s it." What?? Tell that to the billions of people that live along the coast, or say anyone that lives in Bangladesh.
I think you misunderstood the meaning of that sentence. I mean "the effort to counter global warming" is to make the earth more suitable for humans to live, not the lack of effort.
Work or hobby, you can only choose one for each type of activity.
You need to decide if you want to do programming as work, or hobby.
If you decide to do programming as work, go find another hobby that keeps you interested and treat programming solely as revenue source and don't devote too much into it.
Otherwise, you get to enjoy programming a hobby, and you need to find a source of income. This can be from the hobby, but it kills the fun of it.
- Some people have spent considerable time and effort writing an entire long wiki page for "Criticism of Confucius Institutes".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Confucius_Institu...
- The "Reception and controversies" section of main wiki page for Confucius Institute is considered not neutral.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute#Reception_...