China on Eigenform Articles

Learning the Language of Rain

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0800

Huawei’s Pangu LLM is a bit of an oddity. It’s one of the biggest models publicly available (200 billion parameters), and - according to its makers - can do almost anything. In practice, however, it does barely anything because no one is using it. Upon conducting a rigorous large-n enquiry (asking a few people I know in the industry whether they or anyone they know have used it) the results included blank stares at best and ridicule at worst. It is widely known, for example, that Pangu is under-trained for text generation (and we’ll get back to this intriguing fact later), and Ernie Bot (文心一言) is far better at producing Chinese texts.

Artificial Intelligences in the Guanzi and the Han Feizi

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0800

One of the fundamental differences between Confucian and Daoist thought lies in their differing visions of what it means to learn.

Of the two, the Confucian conception is closest to the standard 20th century perspective: for a Confucian learning involves studying and applying useful information. By reading, memorising and implementing the collected wisdom of humanity, one may benefit from others’ experience and thus achieve better outcomes than are possible when working alone. Ideally, this process will result in a certain comprehension of their reasoning, but even if it does not, the results will still be significantly better than would otherwise have been the case. Learning is thus a process of accretion: the more information a person acquires, the more likely he is to find a parallel capable of dealing with any given problem that may arise.

Fan Ju's Revenge

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0800

A while back, I wrote a Twitter thread suggesting that the author of “Speaking to the King in Zheng”, an anonymous chapter of the Stratagems of the Warring States, was Han Fei, the author of parts of the Han Feizi:

It seemed like an interesting possibility, so I asked a couple of developers from Lexikat (my company) to accept a brief side-gig writing some text analysis scripts for the purpose of investigating further. You can find the results here, which seem to confirm that the chapter is stylistically close to those Han Feizi chapters most likely to have been written by the historical Han Fei. We used relatively simple analysis techniques, but were later approached by an academic partner at Seoul National University to build a more sophisticated AI model to perform the same task. It turns out that our work was so good that it inspired other investigations on the same topic. In particular, this one, by Park Sunyoung, an SNU grad student, in the Journal of Humanities (Inmun Kwahak). We shall refrain from commenting on the background of this study, as certain questions have been raised by her colleagues regarding the origins and originality of her code and ideas, and the issue is currently sub judice.

Procedural Models of Political Order

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0800

The point of a model is not to replicate real-world phenomena; it is to identify which inputs are most important in producing a given output. The simplest functional model tells us what are the necessary and sufficient inputs to achieve the output we are interested in. This, in turn, tells us where we should focus our attention in real life — which input changes will have greatest effect on the output and which are peripheral.

“Someone spoke to the King in Zheng”: using high tech methods to solve an ancient Chinese mystery

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0800

This story begins with an ending.

The Han Feizi is a compendium of essays about the bloodthirsty politics of the Warring States era in China. It opens with the death of its author in approximately 233 BC.

In the first chapter, we meet Han Fei[1] — writer, tongue-in-cheek contrarian, freelance politician and perennial insider-outsider — as he is about to speak before the court of King Zheng of Qin. Zheng’s armies are on the verge of sweeping across China, which he will rule under the name of Qin Shihuang, and Fei’s essays have already caught his attention. This is the perfect moment to secure a position in the Qin government. However, Zheng is too smart to fall for the sort of bland flattery that could be deployed elsewhere to win a sinecure. Instead, Fei stands to speak and delivers a ruthlessly effective criticism of Qin’s failure to wipe out the other feudal states, including Han — to whose ruling family he himself belongs. In a speech that is unquestionably one of the high points in the history of human rhetoric, he argues that Qin’s prior hesitations in overrunning its neighbours were a false mercy, merely prolonging a conflict that could have been brought to an end at multiple points over the past century if Qin’s advisors had only been more intelligent or less compromised in their allegiances. Having long been a critic of the Han government, Fei finally throws his family and his state to the wolves, aligning himself once and for all with Qin.