The rain splattered in vain on the glass, insignificant and ignored – my eyes following well-crafted sentences, my mind filled with images of Trantor and thoughts of interstellar politics.
Lost in another world while hurtling home on the bus in rainy weather… it makes me feel really smug.
Just started watching The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi thanks to a recommendation from Hui. This anime is having the same effect on me as FireFly. It’s making me feel really really happy watching it. Such an odd thing.
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There are TV shows that put normal people in extraordinary situations, where the viewer relates to the protagonist by thinking “Yeah I may feel and appear mediocre, but I’ll bet I could kick ass if the time came.”
The special thing about Haruhi is that she is an extraordinary person in a normal setting. She truly believes she is extraordinary, and wears it on her sleeve from day one, never condescending to any standard of normality. I find that inspiring.
Of course, Haruhi is aided by the fact that her extraordinarity just happens to be the truth. There are no if’s and but’s to her position in the center of her world. The story isn’t meta-religious dogma requiring the protagonist to go through various trials and tribulations to earn some overvalued prize. Her greatest/only enemy is boredom plain and simple, and since the only enemy of an anime series is also boredom, this is a perfect alignment.
To me there is one important difference between powerful ideas and ideas that are merely correct. Powerful ideas are transferrable. Powerful ideas are usually also correct to a certain degree, but the mindless pursuit of pedantic correctness can often be counterproductive.
Great ideas are great because of their influence on other ideas, and as such are necessarily powerful. In fact, I believe that many great ideas do not even have correct first incarnations. The fact that they are powerful allows the thinker to patch up superficial inconsistencies or realize that another important problem had in fact been solved. I believe great novelty and robustness often exists outside of details.
It is good to have a nose for powerful ideas. I have seen plenty of the opposite: correct solutions that require so much tedious, error-prone, slow, detailed work that they do not empower the reader at all. Worse still, there are those who are oblivious to this kind of failure, and who continue to pour effort into repetitive drudgerous tasks. These tasks are done only once, but are classified as repetitive in my mind because in doing them one does not learn how to do them any faster.
Of course, in completing the same task two people could learn really different lessons, what’s repetitive to one may not be repetitive to another.
“We’re not going to allow foreign correspondents or foreign journalists or anybody else to tell us what to do,” he said. “There are very few things that I do not know about Singapore politics, and there are very few things that you can tell me, or any foreign correspondent can tell me, about Singapore.”
I don’t believe that there is anything intrinsically wrong with arrogance. It’s just that most arrogance is a kind of ignorance.
I can trust that I know myself, at least, better than anyone else does. From this sovereignty flows firm convictions about improvement and happiness, about the manifest desires and ambitions that power my core, and how they instantiate and tie together the actionable principles on the surface. I am whole, and I must accept that. I cannot learn in part, I know only complete assimilation. I do not condone indefinite quarantine – every datum eventually gets discarded or reaches core. This is the sincerity of my thought, the monolithicity of my relativism, the justice of my ways.
Do you ever get the feeling that the company was friendly and all, but seriously causing you brain rot?
The writer talks about how graduate school is not a decision to be taken lightly. The part I really like is here:
Academia, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, is a total culture. It colonizes most aspects of your life. You are never not an academic–the little mental tape recorder is on all the time, or it had better be if you want to be good at this life. Anything is grist for my mill as a teacher and a scholar, and that is as it should be. Graduate school is, if anything, even more totalizing than this. It gets into your pores.
I guess it really isn’t that bad in the sciences. I have met dedicated students, but not too many people who connect what they learn to the world around obsessively, which I tend to do sometimes. I think graduate school just isn’t that total for most students in science, although for what reason I am not quite sure. Maybe it has to do with the fact that you can get a normal job with a science degree, or maybe it is because science is so well funded that there is a wider range of motivations among its practitioners.
This story from the Washington Times gives an account of the short history of wikipedia in China. What it tells me is that with the right technology, China is capable of change from within. I think that is a very nice message. Given the current popularity of forums and Instant Messaging in China and how hard they are to control, I think coming up with software to replicate the Wikipedia effect without having to cross the Great Firewall is possible. It might even involve those Trust Metrics I’m so excited about at the moment.