Inno-Tech Expo in Wan Chai

The Inno-Tech expo in Wan Chai is just one more aptly timed propaganda campaign.

How can you tell? It's sponsored by Our-HK-Foundation.

So what is it saying?

In the hall, HK is right in the center, but that's it. The HK booths are small, consisting of each of the main universities in HK. All around it are the cutting edge tech from China.

It's obvious what that means. HK is not exceptional, you're just part of our grand plan, along with our drones, YJ-8 transport planes, submarines, security bureau helicopters, autonomous watercraft, VR education, quantum satellites, supercomputers... "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated!"

Your move, HK.

Dream List: Nature Edition

Dream list.

1. Achieve technical dive qualifications and dive to the bottom of the Blue Hole.

2. Do a 6000m+

3. Hike in Nepal. Annapurna circuit, Everest Base Camp.

4. Backpack Europe on a reasonable budget (above coach-surfing)

5. Road trip the Americas.

6. Cruise around the world all at once.

7. Bike one round around Taiwan.

8. Do the Via Ferrata around Mount Kinabalu.

... Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mount Hua, Mount Pinatubo. (Anything but Victoria Peak makes me extremely happy)

9. Go to Space.

10. Do the above alone

11. Find a big group of friends to do that with me.

12. Bonus: Find a virtuous female to do the above with me.

Word of the Day: hubbub

A loud, confused noise, as of many voices.

I really dislike the hubbub of crowded dimsum restaurants on sunday afternoons. 

Thought of the Night: Competing Ideas

Our lives are arguments in a sea of competing ideas. 

Our choices are the words with which we write our thesis.

If you choose to work hard and achieve, you are making the argument that life is best spent working and that the goal of life is to achieve.

If you slack off and do the minimum required, and spend your time fulfilling your deepest desires, you make the case for spending whatever time it takes to fullfill one's desires.

Me writing this post is an argument that there is a human need for life to be record, acknowledged.

What do you stand for?

Waltzes

Once, I listened to some waltzes while working on some code.

And then I realised what the best waltzes were making a statement for.

The best waltzes are making statements about how a wonderful life has regularity in it. The fact that it is played by orchestra is a statement about how everyone has their role to play in the big picture, that it's about how well you play the role.

It is a very classical, mechanistic view of society working like clockwork.

In a world full of chaos and unintended consequences, waltzes are an invitation to suspended disbelief, to believe in a deterministic universe as people once did.

Want vs Demand

Do you want it or do you demand it?

Demand is to both want and willing to pay the cost for it.
I find that we generally want more than we are willing to pay for.

Most people want to be millionaires, if not billionaires, but far fewer demand it.

Ideas are commodities. Execution is not.

Ideas are commodities. Execution is not. 

Always bet on the jockey and not on the horse.

Always be the jockey and not the horse.

Ideas are useless unless executed properly.

Zizek!

Disclaimer: I generally dislike leftists, but here I can sympathize.

There is a problem with this perspective. Why do you want to be interesting instead of happy? Isn't the end goal still to be happy?

Does that make you feel happier, than if you just aimed to be happy?

I have felt the exact same thing. I have felt somewhat insecure about being happy because of this feeling that all happiness is fleeting, and so being interesting was the safer, more long-term choice to lasting happiness. 

I now recognize that happiness will always be fleeting and that it's not a reason not to be happy. And I do still see that being interesting gives a kind of satisfaction and meaning that leads to greater happiness.

Objectivism and Machiavellianism

Objectivism is for idealists. Machiavellianism is for realists.

And both are sides to the same shape that is social reality.

Buggy Blogger

Blogger has a rather obvious bug. Clicking update often double-posts, or creates a draft post and updates the current one.

Perhaps Google/Alphabet don't bother putting much resources into this, and we should move to something else soon, like wordpress.

Questions for thought

So I got this email a while back from SIS, asking the following three questions.

·         What would you like to say to SIS(HK) for its 25^th birthday?

First of all, I had no idea SIS is just about my age. Congratulations for living that long. And me for growing up to see you. 

Anyway, thank you for what you helped shape me, for better or worse. 

·         How has SIS(HK) nurtured you or brought you to where you are today?

Back then, I was choosing between three schools. I didn't know the difference really, but the local schools were really scary. The rooms were grey and boring, the kids looked kind of mean. And they didn't have a pool!

But who knew, SIS would be just as scary. Back then, we had this Head of Discipline who'd dish out punishments. Like when I was late one morning, and everyone on time were in the gymnasium. And so someone told me to go line up behind the stairs. I felt lonely and the worst part was when students came out and stared at us. It wasn't so much shame, but feelings of abandonment.

This sort of programming haunted me for the next decade or so, when I realised I should go to therapy for. Perhaps it was earlier relevant experiences. And even after long discussions about this, I find that effects still linger. Today, I still choose to work for companies that are flexible in their working and lunch hours.

Having gone through that, I would not have it any other way. I believe it inspired me to ever greater depths of self-knowledge. If anyone ever writes a biography about me, the early impact of Eugene's time at SIS cannot be overstated.

·         What are your aspirations for SIS(HK) in the near future?

I aspire to move out of HK in my twenties.

I aspire to save most of my money and retire early.

I aspire to do a nightwalk or dayhike everyday. I hear the bosses of my company bike up to the peak every morning at 5. I don't feel comfortable biking on the road, so I hike.

I aspire to own a car and maybe drive myself around someday.

I aspire to never get out of therapy. I used to think of therapy as being for sick people. No, not at all. I get counselling and therapy to advance my self-understanding.

To be continued...

What do you think?

Answer Below!

Quote of the Day

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month. 
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

I make at least a dozen of errors (that I catch on my own) a day. 
Software engineering is a humble profession.

Slavoy Zizek, Psychoanalysis

Things which also contain the counter-thing.

Wars for Peace
"For your own good"
Chocolate laxatives. Chocolate leads to constipation, laxative leads to bowel movements.
Decaffeinated Coffee.

-

It used to be that we feel guilt if we enjoy too much.
Today, we feel guilty if we cannot enjoy things. 

Much of modern therapy has been focused on this, to the point where I feel the need to ask "Why??". So this really turns it around its head.

"Psychoanalysis allows you not to enjoy, to open a space where you have the freedom to enjoy or not."

And I believe this is indeed a paradigm shift, for psychoanalysis at least.

Thought of the Day: Social Science

It is common for social sciences, economics academia to be the reality generator of the political elite.

Example

Keynesian economics.

Why?

Keynesian economics provides the intellectual justification for economists, statisticians, technocrats, bureaucrats, and policy wonks in their exalted positions as “fine tuners” of economies the world over. 

Keynesian economics is a dominant view because it is of high political value. 

And political value often has nothing to do with truth and long-term well-being of the economy.