后记
Postscript: Planting flowers intentionally yields no blooms, while planting willows casually brings shade
This minor theory of Fdamage is truly a product of sheer coincidence. My AI assistant and I started out by complaining about those silly writers who either make "groundless criticisms" or heap "lavish praise," hyping up the "China Model" and the "China collapse theory." Some of them are financial journalists, while others are so-called economists. In my view, they lack depth in their perspective; they always fixate on their own tiny, limited plot of land, forgetting that a flood washes away the dikes because of a massive surge in glacial meltwater far beyond their little horizon.
Things without depth have no explanatory power.
And theories that possess explanatory power are usually not only deep but also simple—as the saying goes, simple but not simplistic.
Later, I saw foreign financial journalists hyping up that perennial topic: the undervaluation of the RMB. So I thought, let's see what the "should-be exchange rate" of the RMB actually is.
Also, how much has real estate—China's former pillar industry—actually fallen?
If we do not accept the current market data wholesale, we must have some calculation tools and algorithms to estimate data that we deem more reliable.
So this is the original origin of Fdamage. In the booklet, I also wrote about how I eventually developed it into a simple function.
However, writing this postscript now, I feel this function is still too simple. But since my math is poor—and I haven’t done well in math since junior high school—I have no intention of constructing a sophisticated mathematical model for Fdamage. I will just shamelessly follow Steven N. S. Cheung's lead, focusing solely on explanatory work and steering clear of econometrics. Of course, I hope there will be students who are good at mathematics, biology, and bioinformatics who can help me refine this function in the future.
By the way, speaking of the word "function" (函数), I once complained to my AI assistant: why on earth was "function" translated as "函数" (han-shu) in Chinese! It clearly means "function/utility" (功能)! Now, whenever I talk to AI about programming, I still have to say, "Write a function (函数) for me in Python, and its functionality (功能) should be like this..." It is really quite frustrating. Of course, the translation that makes me cringe even more is "robustness" translated as "鲁棒性" (lu-bang-xing)! This is the ultimate masterpiece of translations that are neither faithful, nor expressive, nor elegant!
I recall that my math was always poor. It wasn't until a few years after graduating from college, probably around 2006, when I met a master's student in mathematics from South China University of Technology on a train. He was a fellow townsman from my graduating class. I told him that I had never been good at math, and asked him, "Fellow townsman, what are the most critical concepts in advanced mathematics that can connect the entire subject?" Because I believe that the core, underlying theories and key concepts of any discipline are just one or two, but I was terrified just looking at those calculus textbooks, so I couldn't find them. He counted on his fingers and said, "Actually, advanced math is very simple!" (We all know the humblebragging of top students all too well.) "Crucially, you only need to master functions and limits." At that moment, it suddenly dawned on me: functions and limits.
functions and limits.
So when I do some thinking, I deconstruct the problems I want to explain.
Everything, every single problem, I believe can be deconstructed all the way back to the Big Bang if we apply the thinking of limits. Recently, Penrose proposed that the Big Bang is the end point of a previous expanding universe—a viewpoint I think I saw someone mention many years ago.
As for functions, they represent the interactions of various factors and their outcomes.
Therefore, when I separated Fdamage from being a supplementary factor of the theory of interest and turned it into an extended theory of interest, I began to wonder what more universal theory I should use to explain it. After all, using human behavior to define interest in the theory of interest is already extremely ingenious. So, we build our theory using the more fundamental concept of "intraspecific structure."
In fact, I don't think this is a particularly "exquisite" or "brilliant" theory. However, as long as it is partially useful, makes sense at certain levels, and can explain some economic and social phenomena, that is enough.
Writing to this point reminds me of the theory I coined in 2015, Seeking Deep Understanding Without Reading. There are three main reasons: first, thinking and reasoning through things by oneself exercises the brain; second, when reading, if a book is of low quality, it is verbose, while if it is of high quality, finding that they have already come up with the clever ideas you thought of is a pity; the most important point is that, with human development to this day, there are simply too many books—there is absolutely no summit to the mountain of books, even though it has many paths.
So, writing this booklet has already been quite verbose, and I feel truly sorry for wasting everyone's time in reading it.
As for the many concepts, theories, and logics involved, I don't think they are very difficult. Especially today, when AI tools based on Large Language Models have mastered the vast majority of human knowledge in the public domain, there is no need to list conceptual things in an introductory booklet like this.
However, my next step is indeed to command AI tools to "refine" it in terms of presentation, discourse, logic, conceptual introduction, and readability—but that is not a task for today.
Today's task is to finish this postscript and then complete the rapid publication of ADP as soon as possible.
So be it.
If there is anything left unsaid, I will gradually apply patches and update versions in the future.
Wang Jueju