Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference? • Richard Carrier

…Understood as such, it is not surprising that China didn't develop it. Because "it" here means something fundamentally different from what China did do, which was merely excel above all at what all civilizations do, which is merely accumulate philosophical and craft knowledge that nevertheless remains scattered within a sea of errors, fantasies, and bad ideas all given the same weight. That only happens when you have no conception of how to tell the difference between those two things. And so really, the "secret sauce" is simply the remarkable, indeed clearly extraordinarily rare, discovery of how to tell the difference…

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/19104