Author Archives: Kevin L

Reference Anxiety

General Paper Comprehension forced us to discuss an extremely interesting issue on happiness and the problem? I kind of screwed the paper up because I ended up talking about equality instead. The comprehension passages were actually the ones that inspired me to write the article ‘Happiness Equation‘ here on my blog. The feeling of reading something during an exam when I read it for leisure a few months back felt terrible. It’s bad to be too widely-read. Anyway, after the paper, we were asked to discuss it and I came up with the following argument that’s really out of this world (or maybe it has been around but people are just not accepting it too well).

The entire idea of reference anxiety rest upon the notion that one’s happiness varies with the relative difference between the wealth of oneself and that of those whom he can perceive. Therefore, the manipulation of one’s perception of reality can make a whole lot of difference to the way he feels.

As the passages have pointed out, the ‘very increase in money – which creates the wealth so visible in today’s society’ triggers the very dissatisfaction we seek to eliminate in an attempt to make ourselves happier. Tackling this idea of reference anxiety on its own grounds, the acts altruism prescribed do have an immense impact on one’s happiness as it directly affects our perception of the world. To visit a nursing home, or help a friend’s child with homework and perhaps even listen to a friend venting frustration about his public sector job provides a huge opportunity for interaction with the relatively less privileged members of the society and in so doing, when one uses these people as reference, one’s perception of reality is radically altered. As we move towards serving communal goals of making our environment greener or conversing with elderly about their old-age ailments as a means of consoling them, we withdraw ourselves from the overt display of wealth elsewhere that has been making us unhappy. And that, makes us happier, or at least consoled of our status.

This is a real thing, a very real thing. and my thesis? “Reference anxiety causes an ‘upward spiral of discontent’ and superficial altruism is the remedy for this misery.” Everyone, sometimes we just gotta get real and admit we are at fault – sometimes we just need to acknowledge that the miserable life of our neighbours is giving us a good Saturday night joke to laugh about. We exist in the real world, there’s no need to be apologetic about it anyway – and more importantly, there’s nothing to be pessimistic about. If we cannot accept intolerance, or ignorance that arises from inability to recognize the limits to one’s abilities, it’s going to be tough.

Challenged

Challenged by Mib’s crappy definition of simplicity, I am forced to change my blog layout temporarily to reflect the nature of my arguments and the descriptors of the site used by it’s URL, which is kinda inaccurate in any sense.

By the way Mib, thePropagandaMachine was started in 2004, when we entered Secondary 3, and the time when erpz.net started. In 2002, if you still remember, we spent our days talking a whole lot of computer game crap with Yong Keob in class and wouldn’t have learn about designing websites yet. In 2003, we were doing the igroov.net with Wap so no chance for erpz.net to spring into existence. So to sum it up, erpz.net is not as old as you think.

Acceleration Problem

Talking about perspectives, I always take on multiple ones, so you can consider me as sitting on the fence, omnipresent when looking at the same object/issue/idea/dispute or perhaps as being a perfect observer but it appears that I have met my match. While I must claim capability in applying scientific principles of balance in nature with that of humanly interaction and social sciences, or using economic principles to explain behaviours, much robbing much of psychologist’s rice bowl but this time, I must seriously admit defeat. My sister, when flipping through her Physics Tutorial, was asked the question:

Is it possible for the speed of a body to decrease while the [magnitude of] acceleration increasing simultaneously?

In retrospect, the words in the parenthesis makes all the difference about how the question should be answered but the issue here is that my sister told me the answer is a ‘yes’, which is really counter-intuitive. Then she explained that you can be slowing down in speed because you are accelerating in the opposite direction. That was total ownage. Never have I expected that sort of perspective. It’s like running 2.4km, slowing down and getting scolded by the coach for slowing down halfway – what do you reply? “I am so not slowing down, in fact, I am accelerating, just in the opposite direction.” Would you take that for an answer if you were the coach? Sometimes, in fact often, we rely on our intuition more than logic because logic is often undermined by a play of words, setting certain premises down to misled people. In fact, some weird people actually dare to attempt to undermine my arguing ability by providing the following ‘riddle’:

一个告你哲学的问题：什么是人生（人参）？

Apparently, the words in parenthesis in the question reflects the actual question and despite the difference in pronunciation, it is too slight for us to detect naturally without close inspection. This would thus suggest that the question is out to trick people to give some really complicated answer when you could have just said ‘It’s Ginseng’. But yet that would not constitute an answer because of the premise being set down – that the question is supposed to be philosophical. As such, the answerer commits no mistake in producing any answer or even babbling constitutes an answer because the question itself is flawed – the answer that is expected of the question do not satisfy the premise that has been set down.

Going back to the physics question earlier, the answer is indeed ‘yes’ if we simply consider the ‘magnitude’ of acceleration because taking on ‘magnitude’ would mean a total disregard of the sign. This being true, we can say we are accelerating rapidly in magnitude if we go to a stop from a sprint. There’s absolutely nothing wrong logically with this statement, but it irritates people. And more importantly, it irritates people more than the Monty Hall Problem. Probability is a wonder, it never becomes truly integrated into our intuition because it doesn’t satisfy our day-to-day experience and the transfer of information makes the law of large number valid but makes large numbers seem small anyways. Therefore, the Monty Hall Problem would be one that confuses naturally, and is inherently, indisputably counter-intuitive. But this, is different, it is difficult to take on a perspective not expressed in the ordinary terms – though there’s often times when you have to accept extremist perspectives, they are not as disturbing as the one raised because this acceleration problem gives rise to other connotations of laziness and so on. It is hard for us to accept such a logical argument.

That being said, we do not rely on logic, and reason is just something that managed to become housed in our intuition enough for it to play out fully in the world. Reason, as far as we know, in the context of human being, is never consistent and I believe I have mentioned in previous articles/writings that double standards is a result of the idea appealing to the different sides (emotional or intuitive reason) of our brains. Logic is not relevant when it cannot be linked to our daily experience and applied to our lives. The scientific rhetoric, or to put it nicely, philosophy of exploration of natural inquiry, should cease to generate arguments of nature so abstract and devoid of reality.

Asymptotic

Perhaps some people are just naive, but they will claim that it’s just some crappy lines, so why bother. They just don’t get the idea of an asymptote, tending towards but never ever reaching. I saw this line somewhere:

Practice makes Perfect. Nobody is Perfect. So why Practice?

And I think it makes absolutely no sense; just because something that is meant to bring you to an aim that is impossible to attain doesn’t mean you give up on it. After all, there was the Babel Attempt, we don’t seek to truly reach the Heavens but to be nearer. Yes, no one can be perfect, not wholly, and not even in a single thing, but we can tend towards perfection. We have never fulfilled our moral responsibility to everything we have to, but at least we try as best as we can to do that – if we were to give up completely on this role, the world would sink into absolute chaos. It is thus, never pointless to do anything. Every single action can make a difference, no matter how insignificant it is – you can prove that mathematically for economic phenomena and the assumption cannot hold in a finite world.

In fact, let’s just treat every single goal as a function, I guess there’s a special name for this sort of function but I am not sure what it is, these functions that can never be expressed as quadratic, or cubic, or anything else – functions like ‘ln x’, ‘sin x’, ‘cos x’ or the exponential function. All these goals that we have are these functions, and I believe there’s infinite of these in the world, except we may not have discovered so many. All right, we have got goals, but because they cannot be expressed such that fitting the variable into it’s different power, they are ‘perfect goals’, never attainable. Still, we try to express them, with our best knowledge and best efforts, perhaps using the Maclaurin’s Expansion. Every single time when we differentiate the function, when we substitute x=0 into each of the differential equations, and attempting to form the Maclaurin approximation, we are going closer to the goal, tending towards it. We can get very close, but never perfectly hitting it – but that would be enough. That’s life.

In a world without absolutes, perfect stuff, or a ceiling for anything, we just have to accept that we slog our lives just to ‘tend towards’ certain goals. We can never truly attain them, and that’s why we never manage to define success, or an exact purpose in life. Some people hope for money, and others want fame – so naive people decide to question how much fame or money we need to ascertain that we have attained our goals in life, and fulfilled the purpose of life. Let’s propose a simpler way out, a solution that we have been using long ago but never truly acknowledge it’s presence – the notion of a tendency towards success, asymptotic approach to the goals. We live like that, and as we approach the end, the function may be a close fit, with only like 0.00000145242 units away from our goals but it’s great enough, that’s all and when we decide it’s time to let go, it will leave us, very much like an asymptotic graph tapering off, out of life to spare.

Isn’t that a wonderfully elegant model of life and its rat race/paper chase of our model world?

Asymptotic

Perhaps some people are just naive, but they will claim that it’s just some crappy lines, so why bother. They just don’t get the idea of an asymptote, tending towards but never ever reaching. I saw this line somewhere:

Practice makes Perfect. Nobody is Perfect. So why Practice?

And I think it makes absolutely no sense; just because something that is meant to bring you to an aim that is impossible to attain doesn’t mean you give up on it. After all, there was the Babel Attempt, we don’t seek to truly reach the Heavens but to be nearer. Yes, no one can be perfect, not wholly, and not even in a single thing, but we can tend towards perfection. We have never fulfilled our moral responsibility to everything we have to, but at least we try as best as we can to do that – if we were to give up completely on this role, the world would sink into absolute chaos. It is thus, never pointless to do anything. Every single action can make a difference, no matter how insignificant it is – you can prove that mathematically for economic phenomena and the assumption cannot hold in a finite world.

In fact, let’s just treat every single goal as a function, I guess there’s a special name for this sort of function but I am not sure what it is, these functions that can never be expressed as quadratic, or cubic, or anything else – functions like ‘ln x’, ‘sin x’, ‘cos x’ or the exponential function. All these goals that we have are these functions, and I believe there’s infinite of these in the world, except we may not have discovered so many. All right, we have got goals, but because they cannot be expressed such that fitting the variable into it’s different power, they are ‘perfect goals’, never attainable. Still, we try to express them, with our best knowledge and best efforts, perhaps using the Maclaurin’s Expansion. Every single time when we differentiate the function, when we substitute x=0 into each of the differential equations, and attempting to form the Maclaurin approximation, we are going closer to the goal, tending towards it. We can get very close, but never perfectly hitting it – but that would be enough. That’s life.

In a world without absolutes, perfect stuff, or a ceiling for anything, we just have to accept that we slog our lives just to ‘tend towards’ certain goals. We can never truly attain them, and that’s why we never manage to define success, or an exact purpose in life. Some people hope for money, and others want fame – so naive people decide to question how much fame or money we need to ascertain that we have attained our goals in life, and fulfilled the purpose of life. Let’s propose a simpler way out, a solution that we have been using long ago but never truly acknowledge it’s presence – the notion of a tendency towards success, asymptotic approach to the goals. We live like that, and as we approach the end, the function may be a close fit, with only like 0.00000145242 units away from our goals but it’s great enough, that’s all and when we decide it’s time to let go, it will leave us, very much like an asymptotic graph tapering off, out of life to spare.

Isn’t that a wonderfully elegant model of life and its rat race/paper chase of our model world?

Singapore's Escapes

Was a the bookstore and I was forced to simply browse at books without buying them because I already have about 4 books back at home that’s not completed. Worst, school work is piling up and I have absolutely no idea when I will even go back to the books. I hope to complete them before the June Holidays. Anyway, I saw this travel guide series published by some foreign press and so I picked up the one on Singapore. It was an orange book so I guess that’s partly the reason why I even bother to pick it up.

I looked through the chapters: 24-Hours, Hotels, Leisure, etc. The last chapter caught my eye: ‘Escapes’. I was wondering what kind of escapes in Singapore the guide would recommend – some resorts, or whatever exorbitant country clubs? I flipped the pages, looking through the photos of places I don’t seem to remember, Indoor Stadium, Botanic Gardens, and so on. These were the places I visited last time but it’s been a long time since I was there the last time and I am rather sure at this point of time, or any point of time, there’s some construction work at any single location/place that the guide recommends you to visit. In any case, I soon reached the chapter that previously caught my eye…

The first paragraph read (loosely presented from my poor memory): ‘Singapore’s great central location in South East Asia means that it’s convenient to move around to different places out of town…’ That didn’t seem a valid statement, as the part about ‘out of town’ deviates from the part about being central in South East Asia. I looked at the picture on the next page and found it unfamiliar. There’s this tinge of unfamiliarity about it, much like the feeling that you get when you watch foreign films, the yellowish or some other shades that sets it apart from the perfect-white-balance kind of photos of Singapore places. Well, some photos are artistic but it is this un-Singaporean feeling that makes it artistic in some sense. So my eyes reorientated slightly to read the captions beneath the photo on the page. It gave the name of some hotel, followed by a comma and then the words ‘Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’. I checked the cover again and it was still the same book, the title in front was still ‘Singapore’ and I looked back at the page my fingers was gripping. My visual senses weren’t conveying the wrong messages to me a moment ago. This is a Singapore travel guide and they are telling you that the escapes out of town is some hotel in Malaysia? Goodness.

Singapore, it appears, has no urban escapades after all.

Singapore’s Escapes

Was a the bookstore and I was forced to simply browse at books without buying them because I already have about 4 books back at home that’s not completed. Worst, school work is piling up and I have absolutely no idea when I will even go back to the books. I hope to complete them before the June Holidays. Anyway, I saw this travel guide series published by some foreign press and so I picked up the one on Singapore. It was an orange book so I guess that’s partly the reason why I even bother to pick it up.

I looked through the chapters: 24-Hours, Hotels, Leisure, etc. The last chapter caught my eye: ‘Escapes’. I was wondering what kind of escapes in Singapore the guide would recommend – some resorts, or whatever exorbitant country clubs? I flipped the pages, looking through the photos of places I don’t seem to remember, Indoor Stadium, Botanic Gardens, and so on. These were the places I visited last time but it’s been a long time since I was there the last time and I am rather sure at this point of time, or any point of time, there’s some construction work at any single location/place that the guide recommends you to visit. In any case, I soon reached the chapter that previously caught my eye…

The first paragraph read (loosely presented from my poor memory): ‘Singapore’s great central location in South East Asia means that it’s convenient to move around to different places out of town…’ That didn’t seem a valid statement, as the part about ‘out of town’ deviates from the part about being central in South East Asia. I looked at the picture on the next page and found it unfamiliar. There’s this tinge of unfamiliarity about it, much like the feeling that you get when you watch foreign films, the yellowish or some other shades that sets it apart from the perfect-white-balance kind of photos of Singapore places. Well, some photos are artistic but it is this un-Singaporean feeling that makes it artistic in some sense. So my eyes reorientated slightly to read the captions beneath the photo on the page. It gave the name of some hotel, followed by a comma and then the words ‘Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’. I checked the cover again and it was still the same book, the title in front was still ‘Singapore’ and I looked back at the page my fingers was gripping. My visual senses weren’t conveying the wrong messages to me a moment ago. This is a Singapore travel guide and they are telling you that the escapes out of town is some hotel in Malaysia? Goodness.

Singapore, it appears, has no urban escapades after all.

The Hardened Heart

Guard against the Hardening the Heart…

Unfortunately, in this harsh world of mankind, humanity seems out of place, seriously misplaced. Sometimes I ponder over how right it is to have a word which has it’s roots from ‘human’ to describe something that is really not that human nowadays. The hardening of our hearts is a phenomena that seriously need some tracing back to understand why it’s really so hard for humans to be humanly and for the terms mankind and humanity to converge.