Count me as one of those who regards the question as dubious. At various points in this essay, the thing that was to be invented becomes “*modern* science” or “scientific *method*”. China always had plenty of people who wanted to know the truth, who devised systematic models of the world, and who managed to discover things. Out of human civilizations, Europe certainly hit the scientific jackpot, in the sense that numerous developments came tumbling out of Pandora’s box together. But the spirit of inquiry had already existed in many times and places.
Also, I would like to see an investigation like this, directed at answering the question: Why didn’t Less Wrong (or MIRI) invent deep learning?
I made the deliberate and explicit choice near the beginning of this project to focus on the scientific method since that’s precisely where the clear differences lie.
A few terms worth disentangling: empiricism is the notion that you should look at the world to learn about it, and that’s a very old idea even when not widely adopted. I wouldn’t equate science with empiricism for this question. Science can either refer to a body of knowledge or the method used by which that knowledge is generated. Though they’re tightly connected, I’ve interpreted this question is primarily about “why wasn’t the scientific method invented in China?”
Count me as one of those who regards the question as dubious. At various points in this essay, the thing that was to be invented becomes “*modern* science” or “scientific *method*”. China always had plenty of people who wanted to know the truth, who devised systematic models of the world, and who managed to discover things. Out of human civilizations, Europe certainly hit the scientific jackpot, in the sense that numerous developments came tumbling out of Pandora’s box together. But the spirit of inquiry had already existed in many times and places.
Also, I would like to see an investigation like this, directed at answering the question: Why didn’t Less Wrong (or MIRI) invent deep learning?
I made the deliberate and explicit choice near the beginning of this project to focus on the scientific method since that’s precisely where the clear differences lie.