On Writing

Hey guys/gals,

So I've been enjoying my foray back into the social online world. This blog is fun but I feel like it should be only be used to update on my personal matters and outlooks. It's great being emo every once in a while and all, but that becomes rather a drag when it's all your sharing with your friends. I enjoy witty commentary much more. =P

I've noticed that Lisa uses her platform to share her reads. I feel like that's a great tool for social media given how much I read in a given day. I've gotten back onto twitter but I feel like it's not a good platform for me to do so - the format feels very FB-notes-ish...in that your audience is often involuntary reads, whereas I prefer people who are interested in what I share to come to me rather than the other way around. (Note that I've had the bad experience of instigating a shitstorm over yearbook nominations back at Mac? Yeah, learnt my lesson from that)

I've been using Evernote and Reader (sadly, the two services do not cross-sync) extensively for my own intellectual reading, and to my delight I've (re)discovered that GReader also has a sharing service. So I'm moving to the GReader platform instead. You can get my feed on what I consider to be interesting reads here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/wang.steven1

It's a mishmash of things - Politics, business, science, culture, quirky ideas. If that's not your cup of tea it's cool, but I thought I'd advertise it here first.

I've also contemplated heavily about writing non-emo stuff, again, along the same lines posted above, but more heavily on my current passion, finance. (Yes, filthy capitalist I am.) I've got another blog set up (with nothing on it), and I'm gearing up for starting to write. I don't know how much intellect I can distill though given the competition out there, but hey, maybe it'll be good for personal growth and job prospects later? We'll see...now, all I've got to do is find the time to actually write...

In other news, I've got two other long-ass articles that are 80% complete but because I was sick over the weekend from withdrawal symptoms (*cough Amsterdam cough*) I've yet to finish it. It's coming soon enough!

Fucking dreams

I can maybe blame it on the withdrawal from Amsterdam coffee, but ionno....damn the dreams this past week has been extremely fucked up.

....I need a sedative.

Dreams

I just dreamt a zombie apocalypse. Oh, but I turned into a zombie in the last moment. They were very fast zombies. Baby zombies too.

And, I also think I'm falling for someone I know.

So much for lucid.

update: I might be retracting that last statement, due to the more recent post on dreams this past week.

Unknowledge

Alright, I got sidetracked by the Ayn Rand article. Now to finish off this post I've been working on for the past week.

Lisa's post on the "common sense" view of life was fascinating. It's because it connected with some of my thoughts that I didn't know/forgot I shared. I will try to make this post more proactive in nature, instead of going ballistic Socratic-questioning apeshit on Lisa. Hehe, here we go.

Faith is a funny thing these days. With all the politicization, religiciousization, and connotization (nope, none of those are real words), everybody keeps talking about it as watercooler talk (or internet rant talk), but I have a feeling 95% of them don't have a fuck's clue what they are talking about. Here's the story of my journey to define faith. (And unlike most of my shit stories, this one has an actual result)

I grew up, as you might know, in a secularist upbringing. For most of my prime (hah) I did what any secularist kid would do: I was apathetic towards religion. Didn't know too much about it, was never actively taught it, was never pushed into Catholic school (cuz my mother didn't know at the time how crappy public school was), and, most importantly, mostly didn't care. I read a lot about Greek mythology in grade 5, but that was because it was hilariously naughty: incest, family dysfunction, polygamy, tyranny, melodrama, lust, and all the good stuff in between. Damn, I love greeks. The King James New Testament I got handed for free from Gideon? Read the first few passages, put it away, never cared for it. I have a feeling that's what most Christians did anyway.

What was the turning point? I think my unique situation is that I discovered 'religion' seriously not after some personally traumatic event, but rather an external one. I speak, of course, of 9/11.

In the aftermath, there was a huge backlash against religious fundamentalism (oh who am I kidding, Islamic fundamentalism). But the general trend was going more and more secularist in my society. Amid the abortion debates, the stem cell debates, the climate change debates, the evolution debates, I came out with one conclusion about faith:

Faith is about belief. Specifically, the irrational belief in the unsubstantiated.

This definition is not too far off from urbandictionary's, and it remained a very reliable definition for me and my thinking process for many of my high school years. The debates then, became a very simple dichotomy between the irrational and rational. To me, that is one that is fundamentally fractured and can never engaged on an intellectual basis.

At the end of high school something transformative overtook my mind. I became deeply dissatisfied with the conclusions that I formed. After reading militant works such as The God Delusion, I felt that I was missing a key link about faith: my point-of-view, I realized, was warped by a sense of elitism and better-than-thou attitude. In the end, rational reasoning became something like fitting a square in a round pole. I felt a need to connect with the visceral as opposed to the theoretical. I knew I was wrong, but I didn't know what I could replace that void with, because I was still relatively anti-religion/establishment. So I settled for agnosticism.

Agnosticism, I believe, is defined the total lack of belief. My dad once asked me whether I believed in Christianity. I replied, "It's not that I don't believe in the concept of religion, I don't believe in the concept of believing." That may sound like a lot of word-twisting to you, but to me the word 'believe' is tainted with the connotation of something being irrational. And that is a definition we need to escape: faith is not about being rational or irrational; it lies outside the realm. Faith and science, in the wise words of Gould, are separate magisteria that encompasses different, orthogonal, but equally important aspects of our lives.

I've come across in the past a great symposium of faith-based articles: NPR's "This I believe". Two articles here and here then firmly settled my thoughts on my relation to faith today. I realized why I could not come up with a replacement to my void in knowledge those past years: there were none.

Faith, I believe, is not about believing. It is not necessarily about gods, or God, or the supernatural. It is much more profound than that. It is not about studying sacred tomes for their wisdom and knowledge. In fact, I think it's the opposite: faith is the study of unknowledge. It is appreciation of everything outside our knowledge, our world, even our very capacity at conceptualization. Unknowledge, by definition, the "anti-matter" to our very existence. And I believe it is something so beautiful it is by definition impossible to conceptualize.

Faith is about engaging in those brief moments when all else fails. It is those tiny microseconds when you feel your very self wrenches from its seat by an unseen energy. Some ancient people consider an orgasm a divine interaction with the heavenly. Others report events such as flashbacks just before someone dies. I myself have these moments when I listen to my music. Is this just your body chemicals tripping with you? Is it a divine energy transmitted through euphoria and sweeping tragedy? Is it something else, connected to another reality altogether?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but I think that's just the way it's supposed to be. Unknowledge, and faith, isn't something we should know or investigate about. It is, at the very core, something to feel. Something visceral.

And that, I believe, is the missing piece: the one I've been missing all along.

P.S. Consider me an old-school pluralist/Carl-Saganist/Gouldist, I guess.

Ayn Rand and Values

I'm gonna spell it out right off the top: I am heavily prejudiced against Ayn Rand.

If I had to get out all my bad preconceptions of her in one cheap shot, here it is:

"She is a massive cunt who made this bullshit elitist philosophy because she's too much of a whiny, pampered control freak (aka complete bitch) to cope with her childhood 'loss of status' from the middle class. Oh my god, what a tragedy. The bullshit philosophy became a bland, suck-your-cock piece of work that both justified and fed into her mania for the rest of her life. Probably the only thing going for her books is the ridiculous amount of sex. Ugh. Unquote.

...ok, now that the hugely unjustified rant is off my chest, let's talk a bit more nuance.

Now I hate convictions of the reactive rather than the proactive nature, which is part of the reason why I dislike her. However, this makes this post rather ironic given Lisa's recent post, and the fact that I am one of those soulless capitalists doesn't reduce the iron level by much.

Yes, I respect the woman for transforming the philosophical outlook for generations to come. Given the recent interview on Ayn Rand's influence on the daily show, (I don't have the link Canadians can access, but I'm sure you guys can find it) I would say we will probably be soon hitting a resurgence in Objectivism, due to the centre-left president sitting in the White House. I am not going to argue for or against the literal tenets of Objectivism (or the contents of the book), but rather link it up with several other pertinent/dormant themes that occasionally popped up. I might be referring to several of Lisa's posts for content. If you're positions were misstated/misinterpreted, I apologize in advance.

According to our trustworthy wikipedia, Objectivism is:

1. Reality exists independent of consciousness, and individual persons are in direct contact with this reality through sensory perception
2. Human beings can gain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive and deductive logic
3. Proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or rational self-interest
4. The only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure laissez faire capitalisms
5. the role of art in human life is to transform man's widest metaphysical ideas, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that he can comprehend and to which he can respond emotionally

I will talk about 3 and some of 4 here. Some of us interprets these points as a semantical justification for being selfish: after all, isn't the whole point of being altruistic making yourself feel good? Being selfless, in the end, was a reconfirmation of the essence of self, with the individuals closest to you getting the most favours. I don't think I need any more proof as you can all look up yourselves the pyschology studies of the white girl from your hometown compared to millions of starving African children. Some collective consciousness we're tapped into.

Let's suppose this is a valid point. But we've also debated extensively on the role of finance in creating value. Specifically, societal value. What does this have to do with anything? Well, exactly. there is no link even though there should be one. So:

Is creating societal value inherent in the creation of a moral, Objectivist life? Are they distinct and separate domains? And what happens when the a moral, Objectivist life is fully intended to destroy societal value?

Let's avoid the sentimental art rhetoric (#5) for now. I realize that perhaps all objectivist lives, followed properly, is a full artistic expression of that individual's unique awesomeness, but I'm aiming for something a bit more concrete. Consider your average Mongolian raider centuries ago. I firmly believe there is nothing more self-interest oriented than raiding, pillaging, and raping. Satisfies all your needs! Does this expression of manliness and exertion counteract with the thousands of villages and civilization destroyed in the process? Is this a net gain or a net loss for society?

In reverse, and something more recent, being a teacher is extremely strange to me. I've come across this little tidbit on the US News, as well as this. Sure, the potential to breed a future generation of awesome people does sound pretty net-gain to me, but where is the self-interest? Isn't the connection with education bureaucracy a direct edge into collectivist expression (and not even the good type)? Forget about pay, I don't see any sort of personal, self-interest benefit, when you are a teacher. Unless, well, unless you're one of those pedo teachers. Then kudos to you.

What about finance? Let's say I concede defeat on the earlier debates. That finance creates no societal value whatsoever. Financiers, then, are basically modern day barbarians: raid, pillage, rape. Of course, they don't do it excessively (most of the time), otherwise it harms the very system of they are mooching off of. (Now, I can hear a counter-argument in point 4 for respecting the other side's individual rights, but I contend that their rights don't extend to the right to not be legally/legitimately economically squeezed) Probably net loss to society? But naybe they offer indirect benefits? That is, they offer a major history lesson to crucial moments in our civilization? Would the world be a better place if these relatively able people were forced to research cancer cure instead? Would it be a more moral place?

Phrasing the earlier questions conversely: Is creating societal value even necessary in an Objectivist world? Is creating societal value even necessary in this world? Is this a moral obligation?

If I had to condense all this bullshit into one question, it would be this: given some of us had Objectivist influences, why have those specific individuals resented activities that don't create net society gain (howeverly crude that might've been measured?), and instead opt for an activity such as teaching, that did not fully extend her philosophical reasoning into a fully-fledged art form? Is there some self-interest I'm missing?

To me, this is not an issue of provoking the extremes unrelated philosophies. This is a fundamental inconsistency. And inconsistency itches me.

end of entry

P.S. Feel free to reply in your own blogs if comments do not provide enough space. I did. =P

update: thanks for answering my questions! i hope i wasn't being too much of an asshole; to conclude, i'd like to share a nice little tidbit I came across this summer on Ayn Rand

Wasted

Ok, I was apprehensive in writing this post because some of you might find it questionable/mildly offensive.

..but then I realized that I'm writing this blog for my sake, not yours. So screw it. =)

I was recently reminiscing some moments back in MSc with William. And I realized how much of the good times I forgotten now that I've moved on to this next stage. I even forgot which event I was in, which is quite shocking because I realized those were one of the best moments of my high school career, especially the Tea-making event (kudos to you, Lisa) This is a real shame, because I think there's a lot of value in reconnecting with my mental processes and worldviews during that time.

Thinking about MSc reconnected me to one of my thought themes (memes? lol) though, deep within the back of my head. I'm gonna jot it down here before Alzheimer's gets to me again.

In high school I saw a lot of talent. Maybe it was because I was hyper-competitive and a little bit nervous about how I would fare among you guys. This was a lot prevalent in the first two years, when I was still acclimating to the Mac gang, and MSc wasn't created yet. I remember at the end of grade 9, even before I was inspired during Onizuka's class (remember the student composition? lol) , I compiled list of students I thought were on par, or threatened me (in that overachieving way. I didn't know the actual word then).

Completely absurd, but true. I don't think I meant to use it in some Machiavellian way, but maybe I subconsciously did. In the sense that I wanted to be "alert" for the competition.

All of you, suffice to say, were on that list. (Save for Lillz, lol)

Thankfully, I never went back to it except maybe to modify the list after grade 10 (I vividly remember kicking Nadim off because I thought he was too self-obsessed with his own masculinity, image, and the need to be cool to truly "excel" and be competitive. I also remember kickstarting a secret dream for Harvard specifically during grade 9, while I was volunteering for my old middle school. Make what you will from that.

But the last topic was irrelevant. I think I was in general very interested in "talent" in the very generic sense of the word. I felt like I had a very intuitive feel for it, because I don't really go by the old standards of IQ, academics, etc, etc. There were a lot of times where I would talk to someone really accomplished and at the back of my head I would be thinking: "This bitch is a dumbass and probably can never amount to anything truly great." Or the other way around. People, I think, always judge in one way or another, but I did find myself with an interesting internal mechanism that I try to control consciously in as fair way as possible, instead of letting it control me into prejudice and whatnot.

Grade 11 and 12 came around and a new thought emerged: wasted talent. I've been mac'ers a bit longer now but some things didn't play out the way I'd hope them to be. Maybe it was my ego, but I now concluded that something critical was missing, that something unfortunate had caused a difference in what I think people should be progressing towards and what actually happens.

Off the top of my head, here are the people I thought who were wasting their talents by the end of graduation. Please don't be offended by my pretentious but sincere conclusions back in grade 12. They were from simpler times. I might still be standing by some of my earlier conclusions, but, again, I realize how specious trusting my gut intuition is. Hopefully you will take that into account when you express your outrage.

- Fred Ting

- Abel Sy

- Mayur Khatri

- Jimmy Li

I could name some others but they are people I know less well which means I stand by my judgement even less. I'd be happy to somewhat debate the merits of my judgement in the comments, but I have to go out now, Monday's a prime night for drinking and partying.

P.S. I felt like including a tangentially related music video, since I am going out =P Enjoy!

Narrating My Life

I won't lie: I am completely intimidated Lisa's output over the past few months.

Not only the quality of the content surprising insightful, but I felt that the pure quantity of it simply speaks volumes to where she is intellectually heading towards as opposed to the rest of us.

I have also spent this summer and these few months taking what I can in. I've been reading massively online. Business. Politics. Philosophy. Life. Mostly in rapid succession. I've been recording notes. However, when I saw what Lisa has been doing, I realized that a huge part of the picture was missing - I was swallowing knowledge wholesale without taking the time to digest it fully.

Hence, esoteric bullshit will resume on this blog. Not for your sake, sorry, but for mine. Narrating my thought, however rough, might put everything into a bit more context, provoke challenges -cough-, and allow some 'growth' to occur.

Well, on the topic of resuming the rough draft of my lifethoughts, I've been thinking about the act of narration itself lately. I've taken a fascination on this concept over the past few year and recently rekindled it when I saw this TED video about the danger of the single story. It's very heartwarming in your usual ways - say no against prejudice, discrimination, blah blah blah.

But narration - it's prevalent everywhere. We are the the masters of the universe as we have deluded ourselves into thinking. Nietzsche understood that - that's why, in my interpretation, he considers the final man one who conquers himself. The ultimate machine in reflexive conquer. The biological singularity.

But I digress. What we have right now is imperfection, formally called heuristics in neuroscience, sociolinguistics, etc. The computing power of our brains, no matter how much greater than that of silicon, is still finite. And because our very reality is defined by the our conceptual visualization of it in synpatic space, knowledge becomes an issue of resource (synaptic connections) allocation, rather than truth. The woman from Africa will have a very different worldview, thinking process, everything, from me. A certain percentage of her mind will simply be focused on perceiving the world through her eyes, processing it through her experiences. This is happening in real time. I can never encompass the processing capacity of both me and her.

So what often devolves into simple denunciation of 'racism' and 'stereotypes' is actually a fundamental impairment on us human beings, which irks me often times. If I judge most Indians to be 'smelly' I am being intellectually and morally 'indefensible', yet when I tell a little kid that he should avoid strangers offering candy (because they might be child molesters), I am being a 'reasonable parent', when I have 1) partaken in the very same act of encompassing judgement, and 2) encouraged our children to partake in the very same process of short-circuit judgements. It's no wonder society is so morally confused throughout history (there I go again, haha. Oh by the way, I apologize, Mayur, for using Indians as an example, it's just something racist I thought out of the top of my head).

The world is infinitely complex beyond us; our simple minds cannot handle neither the volume nor the variety of relationships that exists. I understand and accept this fact as part of my thinking. What I'm interested though, is the margins in which this occurs. This is true especially of the causal relationship that happens so ubiquitously in society. It seems to be the universal information condenser: in history, in journalism, in our daily dialogue with people.

"The Dow drops 124 points today on news of Hu Jintao's warning towards USD status as reserve currency."

"Superior naval power and the flourishing of arts allowed the Western powers to expand colonialism, expand Western culture, and firmly establish themselves as the dominant power entering the 20th century."

"I am where I am today because..."

Human nature dictates this process. From basic chaotic information our synapses construct causal relationships, 1 by 1. Heuristics allow us to construct these very quickly and intuitively at the cost of sometimes being wrong and often misleading. We use causal relationships, line them up one by one, and construct a narrative. It is like a string with beads on them. Rows and rows lined up.

Personal narratives then coagulate and turn into collective narratives. Stories, myths, tales of heroism, parables against corruption, greed; we've got it all. Journalism turns into history books. You can acknowledge the absurdity of it, but you can never deny it. I look at the myths of Greek lore, Chinese lore, Indian lore, and compared to the stories now. The story currently unfolding in the United States. Barack Obama. Climate change. Wall Street greed. And I can't help but wonder, in a thousand years, would humans look at our quaint stories with the same bemusement we look at the Greek tales? And on that note, do we really think Greek society can be characterized by the stories that were passed down? Can the people a millennium from now grasp the complexities of today's society when we ourselves are so naive when it comes to conceptually ourselves 1 millennium prior?

Why am I rambling all this bullshit? Obviously, there's a selfish motive: I am morbidly fascinated with my own narrative. No, I'm not so egotistical to think that I will somehow make a mark on the grand history of mankind (but a boy can dream, can't he?) But narratives collect in other meaningful ways. What will my family say/think about me after I die? What kind of person will I be? What things will I have done that would be significant? What kind of thoughts would they think I would be having? How would that be different from what I actually perceived and thought? And even something less long-term. What is my high school narrative? What is my university narrative? How will my classmates view me after these years?

It shocked me because I found out that my high school narrative, according to average-acquaintances (eg. Lina), is one of a snob. A person who thought he was better than everyone else, is unrepentant, and did everything to prove it (by going to Queen's). Amusing, because I myself thought that I was always the one with the least self-esteem.

But no matter, because what the collective narrative is, eventually, is going to be the collective truth (wikiality). Which is a bit frightening for me. Why? Because with all narratives, there is sometimes a hero, but there is always a villain.

I'm afraid I am eventually going to be the villain of the story.

It might be an irrational fear, or it might seem so because you haven't experienced my life as I've experienced it, but it's a fear nonetheless. It's funny how in media, the main protagonists sometimes break the 4th wall. But we never see the antagonist breaking the 4th wall. Maybe their existential terror will be too overbearing for the audience to conceptualize.

What does Bernie Madoff think of himself when he thinks about his role within history? What will Lex Luthor think after he realizes that he is the villain of the story? What does Darth Vader think when he watches his life through Star Wars? What does Hitler think after he realizes he is the villain of the story? What does Satan think when he reads the Bible story of his destiny? Granted, villains might be too deluded of self-grandeur to process that thought. But what if the villain of the story is merely a mortal? A rational, thoughtful little boy? What do people do after they realize that no matter what they do, their life will be deconstructed the role of the villain? Through choice, fate, unintended consequences, whatever. That moment of self-realization when it dawns upon you...

I don't know.

end of post

Note: I want to connect this TED video to your Office post, Lisa. It's relevant, but I haven't fully formulated my thoughts yet. Something about what defines value. In life, in society, etc.