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NYT: This is Your Life (and How You Tell It) describes a new focus on life stories as a source of information in the field of psychology. The connection between personal myths and identity is a strong one, and in fact the two may just as easily be seen as different angles on the same thing – to use “identity” over “life story” is to speak of state functions instead of a repeated path simulation. I think the state function approach requires more processing. After this article, I went to looked into a few books by the author mentioned, and got the library to order “The Stories We Live By“.

I have always been curious about identity, given that I am a Taiwanese who grew up in Singapore who later realized in America that I was rather much both. In my own inquiries, I have isolates certain important questions.

What makes something personal? I think this is quite perfectly answered via reference to personal myths – personal are the things that interfere with the important story, facts that (by the rules of storytelling) force a person to revise their personal myth.

I read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie a few years ago, and felt that the techniques described in the book were manipulative and hypocritical. Now I understand better what it is that they do – they are ways of hacking into the life stories of other people. If the life story is all there is, then changing the life story of another person IS changing their life, and the question of sincerity becomes irrelevant. A self-fulfilling prophecy is not a lie. I do not think this is sufficient grounds for exempting such hackery as manipulation, but it does lessen the charge somewhat.

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The pain started Tuesday and proceeded to ramp up at a slow constant rate. Finally on Thursday morning 3am it became intense enough to wake me from sleep. I decided something had to be done. The next day.

Thursday I went into MIT Medical to get it checked out, expecting, at best, to get some new-fangled antivirals. Well, after some prodding they suspected appendicitis and scheduled a CAT scan at MGH. The CAT required imaging fluid be ingested, and boy does that stuff taste bad! It had been diluted 60mL in 500mL of sweet apple juice, and still tasted bitter enough to almost induce vomitting. After drinking all that, I was to MGH via ambulance. Found out that the MIT ambulance was operated by undergrads – they were the most awkward ones to interact with during the whole process, being some almost my age and fairly attractive.

Arrived at MGH, worried that my long stay on earth as an alien observer was finally at at end. After all, HQ could scarcely allow me to remain here after I had been exposed by the scanner right? Well, unfortunately that did not happen. Instead, turned out I had appendicitis. Had to go through some paperwork to put me through the ER, and had the operation done Thursday night. Am now (Saturday) sitting at home recovering from three small Laparoscopic punctures in my abdomen.

A big thanks to all the people who visited me during my brief hospital stay – Hui (who’s helped a LOT), Troy (bossman) , Qin, xg, Emma, Sandy, Amelia. And my roommate Marc, for getting me waterproof tape.

Last weekend I was obesessed with panoramas. Using hugin, autopano and enblend, I created the first panoramas I’ve ever created, and boy did I impress myself. The one below is of Garden in The Woods, a cute little, well, garden in the middle of the woods in Framingham. Some friends of mine had decided to drive there on Sunday, and I tagged along. The rest of the photos can be found in the gallery.

I attended my first MITSFS meeting today. I had arrived at 5:30p sharp, and the meeting had not started yet. My first action on entering the room was to slump onto the closest chair. That felt overly conspicuous after about five minutes, which prompted me to walk over to the circulation book and pick out an Asimov novel. I picked “Nemesis”. I then sat there reading until the meeting began. It is a jovial organization that seems to operate really smoothly. This is more than I can say for most of the other organizations I have seen. Anyways, I stayed quiet and observed, and voted on only one issue, on whether the society was to announce that the space banana over Texas was to be split.

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Earlier this week, we heard Rebiya Kadeer of East Turkistan / Xinjiang speak. The PRC students at MIT had sent out a protest call on their mailing list, and that was how I was summoned to the event. Not in support of the PRCs, but to see what type of discourse they had become capable of. I was suitably impressed by their ability to stick to the topic, given that this was the same group whom last year had become offended at the teaching material of a class on wartime Japanese propaganda. The talk itself was supported by the local Amnesty International (good) and the Muslim students society (less good). It really made me think about the amazing levels of journalistic reputation that watchdog organizations like Amnesty International depend on. I mean, how do you know you can trust Amnesty International to tell the truth? Who watches the watchers? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not that kind of cynic. It’s just an interesting question.

In other news, it worries me that learning from people with different viewpoints is so difficult. The specific ones I am thinking about are really violent in their modes of persuasion and invoke all manners of unproven authority at the slightest provocation. They are also quick to issue absolute statements, constantly reasserting whatever authority they choose as the sole source of knowledge, issuing ultamatums at every turn. This is shallow discourse, distasteful shallow arrogant noisemaking. I feel the joys of intellectual discourse being drained from me everytime I talk to brutes like this. How they mistake data for knowledge, and rote memorization for thought!

Yes I do want to talk to people significantly different from myself, but clearly I have overreached the optimal distance here. So just how much variety can I take? I think one thing is for sure, that there must be a shared interest in philosophy. In my book, this amounts to an interest in exploring hierarchies of fundamentality in one’s concepts about the world, and more likely than not two people both reaching for the depths would tend to reach the same few places. The hope is that having such places to start from would greatly lessen the conversational burden of being mortally different.

Ah, the strange dreams that keep me going.

]]> http://www.thechiao.com/wordpress/2006/12/13/53/feed/ 0 http://www.thechiao.com/wordpress/2006/10/15/motifs-in-science/ http://www.thechiao.com/wordpress/2006/10/15/motifs-in-science/#comments Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:42:36 +0000 Chiao http://zeno.unixboxen.net/wordpress/2006/10/15/motifs-in-science/ I am planning a course for MIT’s IAP period next year. The course will be about patterns that keep coming up over and over again in the physical sciences.

The ideas that I have come up with so far will be on a page of the same name on this blog.

Update: Have given up on the course, think that a website would be a better use of time. 

That’s a dialect of LISP, for those of you who don’t know. Not that you would know what LISP was. I’m not even sure I do.

Anyways, it is a new year, and have been very excited meeting all the young people coming in. I’ve said this before, I think – I find their enthusiasm infectious.

On account of all this infectious enthusiasm, I shall pull an all-nighter and get some things done tonight!

One other thing I have been thinking about for a while now. Learning Ocaml. It’s a programming language. It’s a programming language very different from the others that I currently know. That is a fact. What keeps this item on the list though, is speculation that Ocaml would be a very powerful development for my programming if I get around to learning it. You see, it is a language which is advertised as being very “expressive”. What that means is that, for a given program, Ocaml purports to allow the programmer to be much more succint in his code. What greater virtue is there in coding, after all, than the compact expression of abstract ideas? Well, the quality of expressiveness promises that, and that promise is one I believe.

Other than Ocaml, another expressive language is Common Lisp. Out of all the high level, expressive, functional (well, CL isn’t exactly functional, but whatever) languages, Ocaml produces the fastest binaries, and that’s why I plan to learn it first.

Plan to. ;)

It turned out to be St. Matthew Passion. Prior to finding out the name of the piece, all I knew about Bach was that Stephen Hawking listened to lots of it during one long depression spell. I was expecting an instrumental piece in a minor key – I wasn’t prepared for something that heavy and wordy. I don’t know if it was remembered images from the movie coming through, the mental strain of reading German in dim light and mapping it to the English in the next column, or just the warm air and the slightly soggy shoes from the drizzle, but reality sure took on a strangely high resolution during those three hours. It lasted forever.