I spent more than 5 years of my life living in Taiwan and among the many curious things that I've seen were daily scenes of the local population engaging in or with Chinese traditional medicine in one way or another. In parallel to this, for many years I've been thinking about how to more correctly think about the world so that I am not affected by my own bias, preconceptions, lack of information etc. to arrive to what a lot of philosophers have rightfully called 'truth' - which is basically another way of saying to understand what is really going on. Be it in the world of language studies, international relations, quantum mechanics or trying to more accurately understand the current state of society or predict future economic development.
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https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/thinking-ladder.html |
I've seen the video about 3 or 4 years ago and I've been always willing to go back to it and watch it again more carefully. A friend of mine was interested in the topic but doesn't speak Mandarin and since I wanted to take notes watching this video anyway, I made a summary in English for her which got so long that I decided to publish it on my blog.
Summary
In the video Luo Zhenyu first says, in general, that talking about Chinese traditional medicine is quite a sensitive thing in the Chinese culture and he's afraid that people will trash him. In a way, Chinese traditional medicine, he says, is almost like a religion to some. While when it comes to many other topics, Chinese can discuss and accept other opinions, when it comes to Chinese traditional medicine it very easily sparks arguments and sometimes even physical altercations and he says that it's very important to talk about why this is happening to understand something more important than the actual argument about whether Chinese traditional medicine works or not.