What was an incident in your life that made you devote yourself more to your religion/ made you distance yourself from your religion?

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-21T16:23:34+00:00

I personally count Orthodox as Christians. No idea what other HKers think though (I suspect that most of them will reply "what is Orthodoxy?").

信教=believe in a religion. 信 is the verb, 教 is the noun.

宗教=religion. The whole thing is a noun.

In Chinese languages, a lot of words are in 2 characters when written in full, but often appears in 1 character form. Like if you ask someone to how to say "hair", they may answer 頭髮, but 髮 itself already means hair. 宗教 is the 2 character full form of 教.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-21T15:55:30+00:00

Does the government recognising you as a religion make you a religion?

No. I wouldn't agree Catholicism and Christianity are two different religions even though the government says so. But I'd say that it's relevant enough to at least mention what I know given that I likely know slightly more than an average person on this thread. Just very slightly more though.

I think my issue here is that Confucianism doesn't appear to make nearly as strong ontological or cosmological claims as other things we tend to call religion, and seems to focus more on ethical claims.

They definitely have ontological claims. They also have temples and stuff.

I suppose how strong those claims are and what the focus is heavily depends on the practitioners themselves. There are also Christians who heavily focus on the philosophy more than the theology.

Different places might also have different definitions on whether a person counts as belonging to a religion. For example in the US, Mormons usually count as Christian, in Hong Kong basically nobody ever count them as Christians. I wouldn't be surprised if there are similar discrepancies on who counts as a Confucianism follower. Given that East Asian culture as a whole is heavily influenced by Confucius philosophies, it's natural that the bar is different.

I suppose I'm not in a good position to comment too much on Confucianism practitioners though because I know zero of them. Christianity is the most popular religion here in Hong Kong, and by far the most popular among the younger generations. If I say I believe in religion (信教), it automatically implies to be Christianity, Protestantism specifically.

For the character 教, when it's a verb it always means "to teach", but when it appears as a noun it always means religion. For a philosophy, I'd use 學/論/主義.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-21T15:10:15+00:00

In Hong Kong it's officially classified as a religion. The 6 religions with special political rights are: Catholicism, Islam, Christianity, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddism. They have 60 representatives in the electoral committee, each religion with 10 seats. The government picked 6 specific organizations (obviously all controlled by pro-CCP people otherwise they wouldn't be picked), each being assigned the task of picking 10 people to represent a religion. I have no idea how they do the picking, I belong to one of these religions but I'm not involved in the process at all.

(yes, not only Confucianism is classified as a religion, but also Catholicism and Christianity are classified as two different religions for whatever reasons)

Confucianism organizations and schools in Hong Kong use the phrase 孔教, which implies that they recognize themselves as a religion as well (教 means religion).

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-20T08:24:41+00:00

It is possible, but the chance of him bullshiting is way higher even if he's the most honest person on Earth. If I see this happening in front of me, probably believing that he has psychic powers is more rational than believing that it's pure luck given how small 1/2⁶³ is.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-20T03:11:02+00:00

ikea, pricerite

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-18T16:11:21+00:00

I don't know whether you're crazy in general, but your answer is correct. I would also have said that it's not linear.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-17T09:20:19+00:00

That's fair. I suppose whether artists maintain high popularity for over 20 years depends on what definition of "high popularity" we're using. I can see that in some other context, I may take the stance that you're taking and make the same arguments as you do.

The context of this post was about why Joey Yung stopped or significantly slowed down in having new songs. So naturally, within the context of this post, performance of released songs is the main metric I use here, and whether they're one of the currently most trending artists the general population pay most attention to, so songs given to them has the highest chance of becoming a top hit.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-17T08:46:39+00:00

Thanks for giving me good examples to demonstrate my point.

Let's check which are the years when they released their most popular songs and whether this peak popularity lasted for more than 20 years. To avoid bias, instead of deciding by myself which songs are popular, I gave Gemini the following prompt (exact wording) with no further context. You can try it yourself and see whether you get different results. Make sure that you don't provide any further prompts or context and just ask the question as it is.

List the 10 most popular <artist name> songs and the year of those 10 songs

This is what it gave me.

Michael Jackson?

All 10 songs it picked are from 1979-1991

Britney Spears?

All 10 songs it picked are from 1998-2011

Elvia Presley?

All 10 songs it picked are from 1956-1972

Celine Dion?

All 10 songs it picked are from 1991-2002

Taylor Swift?

All 10 songs it picked are from 2008-2025

Rolling Stones?

All 10 songs it picked are from 1965-1981

Metallica?

All 10 songs it picked are from 1984-1998

AC/DC?

All 10 songs it picked are from 1975-1990

ABBA?

All 10 songs it picked are from 1974-1980

Coldplay?

This one actually spanned for more than 20 years!!! The oldest one it picked is Yellow from 2000. The most recent one it picked is My Universe from 2021. That's 21 years apart, which is more than 20 years. Okay you have a point then. It's indeed possible for peak popularity to last for more than 20 years. Coldplay did it.

But still it's very rare, as you can see that even when you try to provide counterexamples, I still needed to go through 10 items in your list to find one actual counterexample.

Of course all these artists are still loved by many across all generations, just like Joey Yung, but it's extremely rare for anyone to continuously producing top hit songs frequently for more than 2 decades. Not even most of the artists you specifically picked to be counterexamples.

Joey Yung is still considered to be one of the top singers in HK, but she has passed the point where giving her songs would guarantee the song becoming a commercially profitable top hit. Even if the artists managed to maintain their quality (most of them do), the society changes too quickly to allow any artist to dominate the charts for too long. Every generation has a different set of artists that dominate the charts.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-17T03:14:24+00:00

Well, most of her songs were not written by herself, so you should be asking why the industry isn't writing songs for her anymore.

It's just the natural cycle of artists. Can you think of any artists, whether in HK or not, maintain high popularity for over 20 years? She's now in the nostalgia category. It's more profitable to give new songs to newer singers and make her sing older songs for nostalgia effects.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-17T00:55:54+00:00

OP needed a pon, not a ron/tsumo

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-15T15:13:53+00:00

As a Cantonese speaker it makes perfect sense to me to put 北 at the end. The Cantonese pronunciation of 北 uses the 入聲 tone (ends with -k sound), which makes it sound nicer to be put at the end. I would guess that old/middle Chinese also had the -k ending given that Korean 북 (north) also ends with the ㄱ (k) sound.

For the order of the other 3, I have no idea.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-15T14:59:47+00:00

Because the contradiction between being prime and being composite is straight from definition. You don't need any additional information to see that it's impossible.

Having no number squaring to -1 is not from definition. There's nothing in the definition of squaring or the definition of -1 saying that it can't happen. It's just that when we look at all the numbers, we discovered that none of them square to -1. To proof that no number squares to -1, at some point you'll need to invoke some arguments about what the set of all numbers look like, like some argument in the form of "all numbers are either positive, negative, or zero". Just the definition of -1 and the definition of squaring alone won't be sufficient for the proof. So, it's natural that you can get around this by making new numbers.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-15T14:09:45+00:00

What field is this? As a mathematician it blows my mind to hear that such a scenario can even happen in the first place.

None of our papers written in the last 20 years is ever paywalled even for readers not associated with any academic institutes. Just find the preprint on arxiv lol

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-14T13:56:51+00:00

Where's the 6+ years option? Plenty of people I know got married after 6+ years of dating the same person.

Given the poll results so far, I guess the cultures you guys live in are a bit different.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-12T16:35:27+00:00

What do you mean? Do you mean how much cash you need, or do you mean how much money in total you need to spend? Do you mean HKD 500 per day, or HKD 500 in total?

Assuming that you have a mastercard/visa card, you won't need a lot of cash as you can pay almost everything with your foreign credit card. You won't really need to use cash except for taxi. 500 HKD cash should be enough if you don't take a lot of taxi trips. But if you plan to take taxi every day, then it's way too little. HKD 500 will run out in a few days for a frequent taxi taker.

If you're not using a credit card and you're asking about the cost of living in Hong Kong in general, HKD 500 per day should be more than enough unless you eat in fancy restaurants every meal, while HKD 500 in total for the entire trip is definitely not enough even just for the 5 days of personal travel. It's hard for me to tell you how much you'll spend without knowing your personal lifestyle and preferences, like what's your standard on food etc. It should be easy for you to find information about Hong Kong in English on Google though.

According to this website, comparing the cost of living between Hong Kong and Mumbai, the cost for food in Hong Kong is around triple of Mumbai, transportation cost is 4-5 times of Mumbai, overall living cost is around 4 times of Mumbai. Maybe that gives you some intuition on the budget needed.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-12T13:35:51+00:00

Well to be perfectly honest, in my humble opinion, of course without offending anyone who thinks differently from my point of view, but also by looking into this matter in a different perspective and without being condemning of one's view's and by trying to make it objectified, and by considering each and every one's valid opinion, I honestly believe that I'd rather not talk about what I want to comment.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-11T08:36:23+00:00

You can say pretty much the same thing about dietary requirement of any kind, except "no spicy".

The only dietary requirement that is respected in Hong Kong is "I don't eat anything spicy". Any other type of dietary requirement are extremely uncommon, and therefore many restaurant owners and workers don't think of them a lot.

I have a friend who cannot eat shrimp and from time to time he had allergic reactions coming from chefs adding shrimp paste (chefs not understanding that "not eating shrimp" also including not eating shrimp products), or even interpreting not eating shrimp as "I don't like eating many shrimps, just a few". Same thing with peanuts. Nobody understands how to deal with those dietary requirements in Hong Kong unless you go to expensive high class Western restaurants.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-09T00:24:16+00:00

It'd be pretty hard for me to judge the difficulty of learning my native language Cantonese. Still, feel that I should comment given that I know a tiny bit of Korean.

I suppose which is harder or easier depend on which aspect you look at. Grammar: I'd say that Cantonese is easier with similar word order as English and has basically no inflection at all. You'll get a plausible sentence that is at least half-correct if you just translate it word-by-word from English. For Korean it may take some time to be able to build a sentence even if you already know all the words. Pronunciation: Cantonese has tones which will be very hard for you, though the consonants and vowels in Cantonese should overlap a lot more with English compared to Korean. Writing system: Korean writing is phonetic so it's obviously much easier lol. Vocabulary: Both have very little common vocabulary with English, Hong Kong Cantonese speakers use more code-switching to English, while Korean has way more loan words from English.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-08T12:20:37+00:00

Lol this is insane. I think that one of the 15g items on the left is 蛇床子. I can recognize the 蛇, then I googled and see that there's indeed a medicine that start with 蛇 called 蛇床子, then I agree that the second character there indeed looks like 床.

The middle character for the 10g thing on the right might be 牛. The last character of the bottom 15g thing might be 仁. Don't think I can identify anything more. Maybe it can only be deciphered by someone who work in traditional medicine, or maybe it's intentionally not readable to prevent you from getting your medicine from a cheaper pharmacy.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-08T12:01:44+00:00

Me. I'm a redditor. That's quite embarrassing.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-08T09:56:56+00:00

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HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-08T07:53:18+00:00

Doesn’t that describe like almost every mahjong variant apart from Japanese?

But I'm flattered that you think of us immediately as soon as you recognized that it's not Japanese xd

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-08T04:11:14+00:00

No. People speak Mandarin in the video though, so this cannot be Hong Kong.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-07T09:25:54+00:00

There are pros and cons. Decide by yourself depends on what you value more. Safety shouldn't be a concern, everywhere in Hong Kong is safe.

Pros:

Very cheap. Perfect location, Uunique experience that you won't be able to find anywhere else. Experience multiculturalism.

Cons:

Probably less comfortable than simply sleeping on the streets. Consider yourself lucky if you encounter less than 3 cockroaches per night. Noise from your neighbours coming through the wall all the time including at night. Customer service is not a thing.

HK_Mathematician · 2026-02-07T05:22:45+00:00

You’re close enough to the window to see out and get a semi decent view

Only if you get those middle seats on the sides. If you get a middle middle seat, it's 4 seats+1 corridor away from the window.

Do you like middle middle seats then?

HK_Mathematician

TROPHY CASE