Something interesting today.
Have you noticed a phenomenon? Whether it is the Hongmeng system in 2021 or Wenxin Yiyan in 2023. Every time Chinese science and technology has a major, original, and innovative innovation that can attract public attention, it seems that there will be a kind of speech: this thing, a casing.
What is the reason for this phenomenon?
The friend here said, is there any reason for this? I casually post my meal online. One said it was too expensive, one said it was too cheap, one said it was too nutritious, and the other said it was too nutritious to get sick sooner or later. Isn't it the norm on the Internet? What is there to discuss?
Not necessarily. Such a uniform shell theory is actually interesting. In particular, every time the shell theory is just released, it always seems to be well-founded and well-founded. Although it will soon follow the deepening of users' understanding and the increase of positive feedback, the shell theory will gradually dissipate. However, the troubles it causes to enterprises and scientific researchers are real, and it often evolves into the embarrassing situation of being boring and not responding to being said to be guilty. There are always a small number of people who still cling to the shell theory after many years, no matter how many times it has been falsified, they still take it as the truth.
Therefore, the reason behind the shell theory is worth digging a little bit. This is actually a standard question of the history of mentality. The so-called history of mentality is one of the representative theories of the third generation of the French Annals School in the early 20th century. : The Religion of Rabelais, which uses the concept of mentality to discuss important topics such as atheism and scientific evolution.
Talk about shelling in advance, and every time you throw out shelling theory, you can gain fans. The key is that some people naturally have the mentality to accept this statement. Then we might as well try to talk about this topic from the perspective of mentality history.
According to the usual practice, an anti-bar declaration is issued. First of all, we don't need to look at this issue with conspiracy theories, such as quarrels between friends and businessmen, foreign incitement, etc. It is a particularly simple, rude and boring approach to attribute the problem to conspiracy theories indefinitely. Rational communication begins with abandoning conspiracy theories.
Second, I'm not saying that casings don't exist at all. In fact, we can see that many companies are using the information gap to make money for shelling, and they don't even shy away from this. We are just talking about the behavior of putting autonomous technology under the cover of a big hat at every turn.
OK, the bar is over. Let's see who is trying to publish shell theory.
fake expert
Mr. Liu Baorui, the king of stand-ups, has a section of "Fake Experts", which tells the story of Jia Xingjia and Manbu Bubu who opened a store in partnership. Jia Xingjia fooled Uncle Man in all kinds of ways, and in the end they almost sold the two of them.
In the process of disseminating shell theory, it is generally such a combination. It is often a "senior practitioner" in the technology industry at the beginning, expressing some opinions on Zhihu, Tieba and other platforms, with theories, codes, and industry insiders pointing out that a certain technology is actually a cover, plus Yunshan Wumao said a few words about the interests, and he couldn't point it out. He understood everything, and then he was regarded as a standard by many netizens. Once you quarrel with someone, you will move out this link, saying "Is it a shell, I suggest you to learn about XXX first" or "You said it is not a shell, how do you explain this?"
Here is a question: Is the senior person who first expressed his opinion really authoritative?
The friend here said again, people have been working in this field for more than ten years, can they still not be authoritative? In fact, it is not necessarily true.
We have interviewed a lot of technology practitioners, and there are two things we deeply feel about this industry: one is that the industry is changing rapidly, and the other is that the division of labor is very fine.
A software engineer may use only one language, or just make one kind of program, which will not change for many years. Some practitioners will look at trends and changes, but there are also many people who are very conservative about their own one-third of an acre of land, very sensitive to changes, and even have a certain sense of crisis.
This reminds me of one thing. In a city in the west, a leader once investigated the situation of cars yielding to pedestrians. A taxi driver said: "How can a car let people go? I have been driving for many years and have never heard of a car letting people go." As a result, a decree came down, demerit points and fines for pedestrians, decades old drivers immediately Changed the habit.
This happens to us ourselves. Once in a seminar, we interviewed a certain law professor, what do you think of the combination of AI and law? He said categorically: "AI cannot be combined with the law. This thing is useless." As a result, in December 2022, the Supreme People's Court issued the "Opinions on Regulating and Strengthening the Judicial Application of Artificial Intelligence".
In the same way, a software engineer who has been working in Java for many years and has been developing Android applications probably neither understands Harmony, nor is he willing to understand what Harmony is. He not only thinks that Hongmeng is a shell, but he thinks that all new operating systems must be shells.
On the other hand, the so-called industry insiders may not actually be so "in the industry". The division of labor in digital technology is very detailed, and many tasks are very difficult. For example, training a database engineer often takes ten or even twenty years. It is difficult for him to have the energy to understand other software other than the database, let alone hardware, AI algorithms, and security issues.
Therefore, the so-called industry insiders who comment on new technologies may not have technical understanding and work scope in the area they comment on. They just comment on this, which can show their sense of superiority, and it is difficult for most people to judge his expertise. What exactly is the scope.
It's like in a school, asking the physical education teacher what is the teaching goal of the Chinese group for the next semester? Chinese teachers and students must be confused. But when it comes to shelling or not, we often fall into a similar misunderstanding of thinking.
It is important to be an expert, but we must also be alert to the misreading and misjudgment caused by the filter of the expert.
don't understand
If you have Jia Xingjia, you must have full understanding. The two are the relationship between the tour guide and the group tourists, and both are indispensable. In fact, the stand-up comedy has already told us that if you don’t understand Man, it’s not that you don’t understand completely, but that you have to pretend to understand if you don’t understand, and you have to do things that you can only do if you don’t understand, so you are confused by Jia Xingjia.
Friends who are easily confused by the theory of shelling actually have this problem: they don’t care about technology at all, and they definitely don’t care what shelling is. And those who really understand digitization and the operating logic of the software industry will certainly not fall into such boring arguments. So who is left in the middle? The rest is to have a little understanding of technology, but more of this understanding comes from mobile phones and computers, so it is easy to rigidly align concepts such as parallel imports and refurbishment into the basic software.
The mentality that works behind this is that we often have a kind of "enemy against the strong" when we face technological innovation and technology companies. Everyone likes to see that things that are high-end are actually vulnerable, and people like to see things that are vigorously promoted are actually worthless. This kind of "debunking" mentality can bring pleasure very directly and cheaply. Its operating psychology is somewhat similar to belittling luxury consumption and debunking the trap of consumerism.
But the problem is that technology products, especially basic software, are not luxury goods and do not have the user segmentation brought about by consumption power. They will soon be tested by more users and usher in more authoritative certification. At this time, the slander of the shelling theory will be self-defeating, which is why many shelling theories will disappear by themselves.
Of course, Qiu Qiang's mentality exists in various fields, and there is nothing new about it. But in the field of science and technology, this mentality is often based on a cognitive blind spot, that is, a lack of understanding of the logic and value of open source.
Indeed, open source is confusing. Giving something you make to others for free is naturally counter-intuitive. Open source software is indeed not born like this, but a choice of desperation. As early as the 1980s, the European and American software industries discovered that if each company re-creates a set of software, the final result is that everyone will die together, because with more and more software, the system architecture becomes more and more complicated. The cost of a set of software will continue to increase. In order to cope with this software crisis for all mankind, the basic software open source has been formed, that is, the latecomers innovate on the basis of the previous open source software, and then open source the operation plan. This solution avoids countless times of reinventing the wheel, and makes software affordable for everyone and every enterprise.
In fact, this logic is easy to understand. If every family is allowed to invent electric lights once, the whole world is estimated to be in darkness until now. But when Chinese software is also innovating on the basis of open source, open source again, and carry out this universally applicable action, someone will jump out and say: You are a shell!
It’s true to say so, but human beings have been shelling for decades, and it’s just like Russian nesting dolls that are constantly shelling. Linux is created from Unix, and Android is created from Linux, which makes the third The Second Industrial Revolution was on its way to success.
Conversely, if a basic software, especially an operating system, is not compatible with previously widely used open source projects, it is really a waste of people. It’s like the cement label was invented abroad. If we suddenly announced that it is not compatible with it, and we have to build one ourselves, then the cement plant, civil engineers, and construction units will all be confused. What should we do when the previously built building is inspected and accepted? What to do with the materials already bought on the construction site? What about the equipment in the cement plant?
But once it comes to the issue of Hongmeng being compatible with Android, many people can't respond, or are unwilling to respond.
After all, one side is to understand the concept of open source and the operating logic of the software industry. There is a little bit of a threshold. When you find that someone uses open source code, you will expose it like you have obtained a magic sword. This thing is very easy, there is no threshold at all, and you can also get the psychological satisfaction brought by pretending to understand.
Xing Ziji
Here we may want to insert a character into the stand-up comic to enrich the whole script, so let's name the new character Xing Ziji.
Teacher Xing is not Qiu Qiang, or loves to pretend to understand, he is just in a hurry. He hopes that China's technology will soon become the world leader, and that the 2nm chip will be successfully developed in China tomorrow. Once he finds out that it is not so fast, his mentality will be different, and he will naturally attribute the reason to the enterprise. Then the case theory that happened to appear became a reason for them to explain that companies cannot do well in technology.
This mentality is very common and deserves to be understood and respected. I remember one time when we were on the high-speed rail, we chatted until we had just attended a Huawei event, and the elder brother next to me immediately came over to ask how Huawei's technology was doing. That kind of deep concern and sincerity of emotion is actually moving.
Especially friends who report this kind of mentality will often read various scientific and technological news and short videos, and can often see what kind of breakthroughs have been made by a certain college or a certain scientific research institute in our country, which has reached the leading position in the world, so naturally It will lead to the conclusion that "the country has made so many breakthroughs, but your company is still so backward".
This is over-anxiety, which confuses the division of labor between the different roles of production, learning, research, and government in technological innovation. A technological innovation in the field of academic research needs to complete prototyping, technical verification, engineering, productization on the enterprise side, and then go to the market. This process is very long. Hardware can last more than ten years, and the fastest software innovation can be transformed in one or two years.
A benign scientific research and innovation environment requires close cooperation and each performing its duties. Scientific research institutions are responsible for theoretical and scientific breakthroughs, large enterprises are responsible for technicalization and productization, and small enterprises are responsible for specific services and applications. There is no analogy between them. It is not advisable to use the basic scientific capabilities of enterprises to compare scientific research institutions, just like ranking by how much money scientific research institutions make.
To use another analogy, we often see science news saying that human beings are one step closer to immortality, but if you go to the hospital to buy medicine, you will definitely not be able to buy immortality medicine, nor is it that a medicine cannot cure all diseases and live forever. , it is useless.
China's science and technology is moving towards self-reliance and self-improvement, and it needs to be done step by step. That kind of story of overtaking on a curve and reaching the sky in one step is all used by marketing accounts and big fools to deceive people. It is better to watch it less, and it is better not to watch it.
On the whole, the cover-up theory is often rampant, but in the final analysis it is a dislocation of mentality and knowledge. Due to the lack of science popularization in the technology industry, many underlying technologies and basic industries are not discussed or shared, resulting in a lot of common sense knowledge that cannot be captured by the outside world.
Some fake experts took advantage of this information gap to cater to the strong-willed mentality of "opposing capital and big companies", as well as the urgent mentality of worrying about Chinese technology and wanting to achieve overtaking on corners, and finally let "everything is a shell" again and again Make waves.
In fact, there is no good way to get rid of this kind of problem. We can only persevere in science popularization and explain it over and over again. However, the dissemination of positive news is never as strong as negative news. No matter how you tell an industry story, it is not as good as a fairy tale. This is also a place where making technology content is quite frustrating.
I hope this field can be more understanding and less arbitrary; more objective and less extreme. I hope that one day, all of us can reach such a consensus: find another way to build buildings with chewing gum instead of cement, that is not innovation, but nonsense.
Gentlemen, if it is good for China, please go to a higher building.
