Effects of culture on knowledge production

Consider this: How do we come about to invent a new dish, such as Singapore's 'national food' Chicken Rice?

I assume there has been a long history of cooking meat inside boiling water, or what we called 水煮. So people have knowledge of how to get the tender chicken out of boiling water. It is easy to get hard chicken meat out of it. I saw some chicken rice stall hanging and drying raw chicken at the back of the food center. Therefore, the knowledge on process the chicken before boiling has to be in place.

Then, was the way to cook rice with chicken fragrance. I assumed during the processing of chicken, some of the oil or parts were treated to produce thick soup, which was mixed with the rice for cooking. Reuse of excess food is an important chinese culture of thrift and also key to a lot of Chinese cuisine. These two knowledge probably can fused into a new process in cooking rice. Perhaps before that, Singaporeans had toyed with different soup that can be used to cook with rice, thus strengthening the knowledge on the ability of rice to mix with different ingredients.

Also, chicken rice cannot be too good without the availability of sesame oil, soy sauce, and thick soy sauce. The last is about the most important. It wasn't too salty and a bit sweet. It is something which I cannot find easily outside Singapore.

Someone intelligent, within that particular environment and have access to people knowing each of these specific knowledge, may at one point mix and invent Chicken Rice, a food that drove many businesses in Singapore today, even sold in top hotels and restaurants. However, it would be hard for soy sauce makers, rice makers, or soup makers to know that their knowledge is key to the invention of something greater. Each of them is a piece of the great infrastructure that allows innovation to happen.

This long winded and semi fictitious case I wrote is to argue for the important of social infrastructure, including key knowledge, social network, and people who can bring these together.

I sense that many of the new economies who are trying to bring in knowledge production can easily replicate key knowledge, which are skills, text books, and people. However, networking them productively is not as easy. Ideas cannot get synthesize due to intellectual property, traditional decision making structure, trust, lack of short term profit, or shortsightedness and lack of beliefs in collaboration. I think that a culture can establish the smoothest social networking protocol that enables the fastest knowledge exchange between trustworthy people will come out winning in every innovation contest.

A news released by fairly reputation Chinese news site 17173 include a bitorrent link to the 'patch.'

Rumors of impending release of TBC 3.05 continues in the CWDG chatroom. A news released by fairly reputation Chinese news site 17173 include a bitorrent link to the 'patch.' http://download.17173.com/121/11/54340/

Very soon after, about 2 hours since I saw the discussion in the chatroom, someone posted an official notice by the9 staffs, saying:

0. 切勿轻信和乱下网上流传的一些3.0补丁文件
目前在网上流传的一些3.0补丁安装文件很可能是不安全有木马的，所以在官方正式放出3.0补丁前，希望大家可以安心的等待，以确保自己帐户的安全。
官方公告..

asking players not to download patch from external sites, in case of trojans. Before the official release, that everyone should wait for their own account's safety.

Orderly is where the activity is

I have been tackling a difficult problem lately, one of cross-cultural differences. The problem is - when you look at individuals within a culture, say china, you will often find outcroppings, deviants. When you seek history to explain behaviors, you can also encounter contradictory events.

The problem is every human is highly malleable, provided you are patient with him. So apart from history, many other things, such as character, affluence, friends, jobs, personal events, shaped a person's behavior. While we can observe that Chinese are more alike to each other than to Americans, there are a lot of individual variability. Accounting for the similarity is difficult, and finding something useful out of this account is even more difficult.

However, if we narrow the scope to local activity, for instance, the behaviors of Chinese inside the chatroom of an online game, we start seeing more similarity between the subjects. Their shared environment and motivation shaped their behaviors to be more similar than outsider.

The point is anthropology is useful in spotting repeated patterns (similarities), but when subjects are very different, it is hard to tell a good story. When the scope expanded, we need support from quantitative analysis to objectify the observation. They are tools that help us ascend to the macro.