If You Are the One

3 comments on Hacker News

1. NeutralSyneRyderNov 3, 2019

   >It seems (if Hollywood is to be believed) that in the US, people sometimes frown upon their partner having any friends of the opposite gender.

   I can't say I've got that impression from US movies, but watching the Chinese dating TV show "If You Are The One" (airs in primetime with subtitles in Australia), the women often ask the male candidates to give up all their female friendships as a condition of dating. (Occasionally the male contestants will make the same request.) Sometimes the women will allow female friendships if the male contestant agrees to regularly let them read/approve the phone messages they send to others. It's been an interesting show to watch from a cultural perspective.

2. PositivecrdbMar 11, 2016

   I think the rules for the sophons are not entirely clear, because he set them up as a plot device for a few of the things he needed (FTL, no more science, omniscience of the enemy) in order to create the special conditions that force humanity to defend itself by creative thinking and this is also why I didn't spend too long cross-referencing their viability. Nevertheless I vaguely remember them being some kind of giant PCB when unfolded in 2D with a fairly high level of abstraction and autonomy without being strong AI (and therefore a new civilisation). It's a given in the plot anyway that you don't want to create a higher civilisation, because of the DF... well, I'm not going to spoil it, but the Trisolarians have very good reason not to create real intelligence capable of resetting its goals.

   The translation is as good as it's going to get. The main issue is that Liu is from the PRC and spent most of his life there. It took me years in Asia to slowly realise how differently the Chinese think from Westerners (hell, Westerners themselves think very differently just across borders - compare the worldview of a Brit to that of a Nordic or a Frenchman). If you compare Strugatsky and Asimov, you also get this huge cultural difference that is untranslatable because of the large amount of metadata bagage that Russians would already have coming into Strugatsky's work after growing up in Russia.

   The book is "very Chinese", if that makes sense, which I think is what confuses people (and to me is a feature). A quick intro to what that means might be watching a few episodes of If You Are The One (非诚勿扰), a slightly crazy dating show that since the second season has had a government censor added to the panel to moderate the gold diggers; an Australian TV channel has started subtitling a bunch of episodes, although I unfortunately could never find the infamous season 1 ("I'd rather cry at the back of a BMW than smile on a bicycle"). You both get a sample of PRC normal citizen thinking and a taste of how the government is setting the tone culturally.

3. NegativeyiranshengMar 10, 2013

   As I Chinese living in the US, I always found this kind of news reports fascinating and inform me something new about Chinese society to me: strange and bizarre businesses/markets arising from some twisted cultural background, reflecting the confused mindset this new generation of of Chinese people.

   On a related note, matchmakers aren't certainly the only ones banking the profits exploiting the traditional and failing marriage/relationship mechanisms in the society. A few years ago, this seemingly dull reality TV show (If you are the one) on dating suddenly gained popularity and became a heated discussion, bringing to attention the confusion surrounding marriage and a wide range of social topics. You can just see in the show how China as a society failed to come up a coherent value system that could address love, relationship, marriage, wealth and pretty much anything meaningful.

   Related background on the show and its contents, which also covers the unsurprising step-in of censorship: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/world/asia/censors-pull-reins-as-china-tv-chasing-profit-gets-racy.html?pagewanted=all