Republic of Letters

This is a message in the river of time to connect with like-minded individuals, who in the history might be referred as intellectuals in communities known as, for example, Republic of Letters in the era of Enlightenment.

这是时间河流中来与志同道合个体连接的一条短讯。这些个体在历史上的启蒙时 代可能被称为Republic of Letters团体中的知识分子。

To appreciate what I mean by intellectuals, we might need to discuss what does “cultured” mean. Individuals and societies live in life cycles of different timescales: individual lives in the timescale of years, while societies change at a timescale a magnitude longer (i.e., decades). As a consequence, the works of intellectuals typically have a cycle measured in decades. To give some famous examples,

为了理解我所说的知识分子，我们可能需要讨论“文化”是什么意思。个体和社会 存在在不同时间尺度的生命周期中：个体的生命周期是以年为单位的，而社会的 变化则以数量级更长的时间尺度（即几十年）来衡量。因此，知识分子的作品生 命周期通常是几十年。举一些著名的例子，

• Einstein’s the special theory of relativity was only recognized after a decade later, at a time when experimentally, eclipse was found to indeed bend light;
• Elon Musk’s SpaceX only had its first contract (with NASA) after ten years since it was founded;
• it took almost a decade for J. K. Rowling to write the first book of the Harry Potter series, and got a publisher that was willing to publish it;

• Ilya Sutskever explored ideas at OpenAI which had zero profit for about 8 years before ChatGPT was born.

• 爱因斯坦的相对论在十年后实验证明日食确实会弯曲光线才被认可；
• 马斯克的SpaceX也是成立十年后才与NASA签署了第一份合同；
• J.K.罗琳花了将近十年的时间完成哈利·波特系列的第一本书，找到愿意出版的出版商；
• Ilya Sutskever在OpenAI探索了8年之久想法，在此期间OpenAI毫无利润，直 到ChatGPT诞生。

Those are successful stories, and many intellectuals only got their works recognized after they past away. Yet, those works are cultural artifacts that are the foundation of civilizations, and they have rather slow pace to be made, propagated and received.

这些都是成功的故事，许多知识分子在去世后作品才得到认可。然而这些作品是 文明的基石，它们被制作、被传播和被接受的过程都相当缓慢。

Therefore, the career (in modern terminology), or life stages of intellectuals need to blend in the life cycle of the society, and thus they live lives that are sometimes markedly different from the dominant mode of life styles in a civilization (e.g., typically aspired middle class life in our times).

因此，知识分子的职业生涯（用现代术语来说），或者说他们的生命周期需要融 入社会的生命周期。由此原因他们的生活有时与文明中的主流生活方式明显不同 （例如，我们这个时代通常渴望的中产阶级生活）。

Each era has its own theme, and each needs its own generation of intellectuals to break through the old, and build up the new. This page is written to serve as a beacon to attract intellectuals who try to find the pulse of and to flow within our current era. Feel free and be welcomed to connect with me.

每个时代都有自己的主题，每个时代都需要自己的一代知识分子来承上启下，除 旧迎新。本页的撰写旨在作为一个灯塔，来吸引那些试图找到时代脉搏并在我们 当前时代中行舟的知识分子。欢迎随时与我链接。

Perhaps an easy place to start is books and movies. I maintain the my book list at Goodreads, with an outdated version at Douban—this site also includes movies and animation. I also have a record of songs and music listened at Netease Music. It is a good idea to connect from there.

也许一个容易开始的地方是书籍和电影。我在 Goodreads上 维护我的书单，同时在豆 瓣上也有一 个过时的版本——这个站点还包括电影和动画。我还记录了在网易云音 乐上听的歌曲和音乐。

For more in-depth interaction, I have written some essays, and in the following, I would like to point to two of them that try to capture the two basic tenets of our times: the first is perhaps about a theme that is everlasting, or in another word, classic; and the second is unique to our times, and is marvelously and shockingly novel.

对于更深入的互动，我写了一些文章，其中两篇尝试刻画我们这个时代的两个基 本支柱：第一篇是关于一个人类永恒的主题，或者换句话说，是经典的；第二篇 是我们这个时代独特的，是令人惊讶和新奇的思想和技术的革命。

The classic is an everlasting theme of humanity, which I expand in the article 人类计划. And the modern is the revolution in ideas, and technology at the scale of the first Renaissance and the first Industrial Revolution, respectively, which I expand in Era of Planeterization: Managing Complexity with Intelligence.

经典的这一篇是人类的永恒主题，题为《人类计 划》。而现代的这一篇则是我们世代在第 一次文艺复兴和第一次工业革命的意义上的思想和技术革命，题为《星球化时 代：用智能管理复杂性》。