Category Archives: Issues & Ideas

Is the syllabus a document that draws up a schedule of what students should learn, what teachers must teach, or one that dictates what examiners can test?

It is all, my friend, Syd Suyadi, who hopes to be an educator says, quite very some time ago. This friend of mine was once a hopeful person, extremely optimistic about his future, the future of the future generations and that of mankind. His optimism counts on 2 particular factors: 1) He believes his involvement in education in future would allow him to effect change that eliminates flaws that are currently still with the system; 2) He believes that the products of education have served the society well and would continue to serve even better with his fine-tuning of the system. He soon became disappointed and no longer motivated, though not to the state of disillusionment. It was a sad sight to see young people getting depressed this way, though it was a noble and good kind of depression.

But why? Why did he become this way? It was because of 2 particular developments in his perception of the world and naive notion of change. Firstly, he started having doubts about his ability to effect change in future and in fact, he begin suspecting that the education system doesn’t even have the capacity to accept that sort of change he was expecting to effect. These doubts, again, arise because of 2 developments in the education scene in Singapore. Firstly, we had a change in education policy that involved a concoction of lots of different programmes that are in highly experimental status – all of which proved rather disappointing from the view of the students. Second, the education system was becoming extremely elitist from my friend’s view – one of a premier institution in the country. The two developments proved that my friend’s chance of survival in the system is not very large and also that changes in the system is sometimes, rather harmful.

Secondly, Syd’s ambitions are continually undermined by his own inability to meet his own expectations in his academic career. That is not to discount his ability in possibly benefiting the system but for him, people’s perception of his abilities is tied strongly to his academic and portfolio achievements. Worst, he came to hate the type of people he first seek to nurture. Elites, he calls them, crowds out opportunities. He criticizes the system’s poor measures of ability and frequent blunders in identifying talents (including their high myopia that resulted in not identifying Syd Suyadi himself).

Shame on the Great Equalizer – for you eventually destroy those who trust you the most!

Dunjie, a one of the more prolific thinkers of weird ideas that I have as a friend asked me;

Is it possible to create a filter that traps the small things while letting the big things pass through? Or a hole that is a size that allows big particles to pass through without the small ones doing the same?

What he has just asked, is not at all a Physics inquiry or stuff dealing with scientific possibility but one that questions logical premises. I explained that it is not possible unless you redefine big and small. For all I know, ‘small’ is a size that can be considered the sub-set of ‘big’ so unless the definition goes the other way round, whatever proposed can never be possible. We all know that if you have a hole big enough for something big to enter, anything smaller than this big thing will be able to pass through so it is valid to say that logically, the ‘small’ is within the premise of the ‘big’. While it is nice to think you can circumvent many humanly impossible task with science, it is never possible to undermine logic.

The same, therefore, applies to formulation of arguments. The definition in the line of arguments must all be consistent or you will get statements like “Nobody is Perfect. I am Nobody. Therefore, I am Perfect”. Or that, “Nothing is better than A1. F9 is better than Nothing. So F9 is better than A1.” In both cases, the ‘Nobody’ and ‘Nothing’ bears different definitions or meanings in the first and the second statements so they cannot be equated or used as the link for the concluding statements. Logic have to be obeyed and we should identify the premise to provide ourselves the context where we can draw upon the most appropriate answer.

I would proclaim that I have been an existentialist. But in fact, I may not be – not in the Sarte way, not in the Camus way or the Nietzsche way. So maybe I am just an existentialist in the Vib kind of way. Essentially, I make use of their arguments, their notions of reality and tools to argue my advice and ideas on life. But the recent studies on climate change and global warming started changing my ideas about cycles and the meaningless-ness of life itself and other natural processes. This discourse would concentrate on tackling Camus’ ideas of Absurdism more than other things and would eventually present something that would sound deterministic. I hope I don’t sound that I have betrayed existentialism because I still feel strongly about one’s ability to change his circumstances and the need to define oneself – but I also believe this ability is part of the entire general direction everything is heading towards anyway.

Scientist studying climate change always looked at the past for patterns of our weather conditions and attempt to use them to predict the future. And all these relies on this fundamental assumption that whatever happens at present and in the future, is governed by exactly the same laws and affected by the same variables as in the past – something that has to be reconsidered given our magnitude of rapid changes. This infectious intuition that things goes in cycles arise not only in Geography (Climate, Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Weathering) but also other social sciences such as Economics (Trade Cycles), Sociology (Societies) and more importantly, Philosophy dealing with existence and sentience. In the aspect of philosophy, Absurdist ideas draws upon most of its conclusions of the meaningless-ness of life from illustration of how everything runs in cycles.

My concern here is that cycles that we speak of, are not full circles and we are never on the same path as the past. It is all a spiral that tends to somewhere. We may well be on a contracted spring, with cycles in that we are going round and round so we find things familiar but we are effectively progressing up the spring. That’s to say that all that we have been through is not wasted. Things proceeds with meaning, or at least a macro purpose such that everything that may seem meaningless would converge to something meaningful. Thus, all the climate changes, plunging into Ice Ages can well be processes that drives the entire climate system into maturity, into more stable weather systems. The same applies for Absurdism – every cycle brings us closer to the end. And to answer to Beckett, I think Vladimir and Estragon will meet Godot one day because the time dimension still exists, which is to say that the similar stuff that goes on signifies there’s some end.

Trade cycles as well. There are ups and downs but I guess we can safely assume that economists have been clever enough to identify that we are heading towards upward spiraling purchasing power and ability to satisfy our needs. In this intellectual discourse then, we would still say Economics have been heading in the right direction of analysis at least. All the other disciplines are simply too pessimistic.

We do go through cycles, but it’s a spiral to maturity.

Like last year, I devoted to what hopes to be one out of infinity units of my life on playing the lamest computer-simulated business game ever. Well, you can say this is just a dumb rant on going to lose in the game (the game is ending in about 1.5 hours and my team is still far behind), but I’ll surface extremely valid points that will demonstrate how the game cannot reflect anyone’s business ability. More importantly, the entire spirit of business is lost as we look at the varying commitments of players to the game. Our team is one of the slackiest and un-serious so that’s perhaps why we have such problem. In any case, I still have the urge to flame the organizers.

The idea of using computer simulation for business is a great idea – we simulate economic models, theoretical physics model and environmental models and they are all helpful when they allow us to see things in the real world. The problem with any simulation, is then that they are far-fetched from anything that’s real – then it cease to be a simulation but simply an imagination. The whole idea of attempting to predict the real world is the fundamental basis for having simulations in the first place. A business simulation, is thus highly flawed in a few aspects: (1) Uncertainty, (2) Timing and (3) Strategic.

A business simulation is unable to bring in uncertainty into the game properly. It is 2-dimensional but no elements from the 3rd dimension are entering this plane. Typical things like ill rumours, reputation index, strategic moves and tactics involving the temporal dimension is not allowed, reducing uncertainty only to mere fluctuation in prices that can be predicted quite precisely based on understanding of all rival teams (and in our case, the understanding of their level of devotion and amount of temporal devotion available). Of course, I can easily explain where I failed at – time; I didn’t have time sitting by the computer, hecking my tutorials and lectures, pretending to go to the toilet (but end up in the computer lab adjusting parameters), or even attempting to plot a demand curve by adjusting prices and looking at the consumer index that is given by the system.

The second point, with regards to timing in business, the simulation is such that things get problematic when transactions peak. The sounds more like some speculative stock market than a business arena. Worst, the timing is serious distorted by time lags. The movements in the demand market lags behind the dynamics of the input market, making it unrealistic for any players who does anything at all between each hours. To make the explanation clearer, I shall describe the game: you face a dynamic price system with regards to inputs where raw material prices fluctuates based on the demand for them but your demand is not so quick-changing, you only know whether your products are sold at hourly intervals. The general strategy: Rush to the computer at the exact hour when your products are bought, stock up raw materials to maintain supply before others does (so that you enjoy the assumed lowest prices) and then adjust any parameters as desired, and then get back to your life. Very realistic huh?

Finally, with regards to strategies. The simulation reduced your strategy options drastically compared to the real world but that’s fine; problem is parameters such as advertising should not be allowed because it sends out the wrong information that the more money you put into advertising, the more you can differentiate your demand. Simple economics and perhaps some common sense would suffice to tell you that’s not true at all. The game is strategically flawed in the sense that there are fixed strategy that works, and although there’s a threshold for the number of players who are allowed to play the strategy before it collapses, the way the demand manifest is such that all players faces similar market conditions and thus strategies to be played out are expected to be similar – leading to faster collapse of workable strategy (assuming they are worked out quickly by players). The information asymmetry in the market is not well-simulated (all players are given the same market report, meaning that players do not attempt to gain more information if they are willing to buy it) as well, further reducing the strategical realism.

Well, let’s just forget about it anyway. It’s time to get a life, geeks out there still fiddling with your company parameters!

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.