Mochaspot

A Rational Christianity

2012-11-23T12:25:00.001+08:00

This was an essay I wrote for a class I took this semester. Posted here for posterity.

Case Study: Is It Possible To Reconcile Faith and Rationality?

I am a Christian, and that makes me weird.

My circle of friends consists primarily of rationalists. I am the only one amongst them who believes in any sort of God, and amongst them I am also the only one who is religious. Religion is not particularly fashionable amongst rational people.

If I claim to be a rational person (which is how I found myself
with this group of friends in the first place), then how am I to justify my
belief in the God of my religion?

This essay attempts to use some of the tools taught over the course of this semester, in GEM1902G, to answer this question.

Proof and God

Let's tackle the first problem with any rational approach to theism: i.e. the fact that — despite the best attempts of many of my fellow Christians — the existence of God is not a falsifiable hypothesis. Since God is supposed to exist outside of nature (and its trappings of space and time), one cannot prove the existence or non-existence of God using methods known to science.

That is not to say that there haven't been such attempts. Historically, Christians have deployed all sorts of arguments for the existence of God. Take creation, for example. Christians have argued for centuries that the complexity of life justifies the existence of an intelligent designer. This was all well and good until Darwin came along and demonstrated that the explanation for this complexity was a lot simpler: that evolution, as a biological mechanism, enabled life to evolve incrementally towards what the biologist Richard Dawkins calls 'adaptive perfection'^[1]. Dawkins and his ilk thus argue that Christians have no claim to the idea that God exists.

But there is a problem with this train of thought. It is not true that the complexity of life justifies the existence of God, as the Christians have argued. Conversely, the existence of evolution does not, as Dawkins would argue, preclude the existence of God. It strikes me that the debate surrounding evolution is only strong enough to deal with the mechanics of creation, not on the presence of creation itself.

What do I mean by this? Well, if science says that evolution was the mechanism with which we came to be, who, then, can stop us from arguing that God used evolution to create life? And if science says that the universe was created via the Big Bang, then what is to stop the Christians from saying that God created the universe via that exact phenomenon?

Science is silent on things that exist outside of nature. It is muted when dealing with non-observable, non-falsifiable hypotheses. Because the existence of God is not falsifiable, science is of no help to us here. It cannot say anything strong on the existence of God.

God and Correspondence

The correspondence theory of truth is thus of limited value when it comes to God. Even if we do attribute certain phenomena to him, we can never really know for sure.

This attribution problem plagues all the other arguments that may fall into the correspondence theory of truth. For instance, some theists argue that our sense of right and wrong comes from God. (This is known as the moral argument for God.) This, too, is subject to the attribution problem — even if a scientific explanation is found for our moral senses (and there is good reason to believe that one will eventually be found — see recent advances in evolutionary psychology), theists may still attribute this mechanism to God.

This problem of attribution is applicable to any discovery in science. So we're left with where we began: if attribution is a problem, how else might we be able to reason about God?

God and Coherence

The coherence theory of truth gives us a possible alternative: we might reason about God by treating the belief in God as an axiom. When seen in this light, it becomes possible for us to build an internally-consistent system of beliefs that include the existence of God.

A friend of mine, an agnostic, told me that she grew to understand her religious friends as people who started with a different set of base beliefs. This finally gave her the ability to understand where they were coming from (and, though this was left unsaid, in turn saved them from being seen by her as completely irrational creatures).

Perhaps this is a good rationalist justification for God. If science is silent on God, then one way of reconciling God with reason is to say that you simply choose to believe in Him. After accepting the axiom of God into your system of rationality, you may then proceed to weed out beliefs that are inconsistent with both belief in God and belief in Science. This makes things simpler for the thinking Christian.

God and Consensus

If enough people believed in these axioms, we might perhaps reach a consensus that God exists, and that it is not an intellectual 'crime' to believe in His existence.

I, am, of course, being glib. Consensus is a very shallow way of validating the belief in God — just because everyone believes in something does not necessarily mean that the thing is true.

But the consensus theory of truth leads us to an interesting idea: if people all across the world, for most of history have agreed to cling to God, then perhaps we should not discount it so quickly in pursuit of pure rationality.

There are two ways of looking at the prevalence of religion: the first is that men are largely irrational creatures. This is — unkind as it is — probably true. The second way of looking at this is to conclude that there must be something to religiousity that appeals to basic human nature.

There is some evidence to support this claim. Anthropologist Richard Sosis, for instance, examined the history of 200 communes in the United States in the 19th century^[2] and found that just 6 percent of secular communes were still functioning 20 years after their funding, as opposed to 39 percent of the religious communes.

The difference? Religious communes could demand more sacrifice from its members. The number of sacrifices demanded, such as giving up alcohol, or fasting, or cutting ties from outsiders, was linearly correlated with how long the communes lasted. But for secular communes, Sosis found that there was no relationship between sacrifice and longevity. Most of them failed within eight years.

Sosis then argued that the rituals and laws necessary for the health of a group work best when they are sacratized. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, especially if this sacredness binds people together. But secular settings fail to mask the arbitrariness of social conventions, making it harder for the group to cohere.

Interestingly enough, anthropologists Scott Atran and Joe Henrich showed in a 2010 paper^[3] that the development of religion has been driven largely by competition amongst groups. They argued that groups that managed to put their gods to good use had an advantage over groups that didn't, and the groups that didn't soon began to adapt these religious ideas for their own use.

This is in line with Sosis's findings. If gods help groups outcompete other groups, then it makes sense for competing groups to adapt these ideas
for the benefit of their own group. Gods can be helpful as a form of social glue.

The idea that consensus on a religion is beneficial for the group is not without merit.

God and Pragmatism

But if there is a rational argument for God at the group level, then what of the individual? Perhaps the most rational, personal argument for God is that of pragmatism: it benefits me, therefore it is good enough for me that God is real.

Religion does have its benefits, after all. For all the claimed injustices and horrors that intellectuals have attributed to religion, religion on a personal level is a pretty useful thing to have.

Christianity, for instance, has provided me with a clear moral code. It has also provided me with a social support system — that at its best is tolerant, and kind, and accepting (although it is very often not). Most importantly, however, Christianity gives me a mental framework with which to make sense of the world. It compels me to forgive those who have done nasty things to me, because of the belief that I am no better a person, at my core, than those who have wronged me. (The Christian terminology for this being 'everyone is a sinner, but God loves you anyway').

If Christianity makes it easier for me to be a better person, who can fault me for my belief in it?

The problem with rationality

There is one problem with this entire essay, though.

In his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks of a study he conducted in 1993^[4], where he examined the moral judgments that people make when exposed to a series of moral conundrums.

A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it okay for them to make love?

Under interrogation, most subjects in the experiment agree that these things are wrong. But, with no demonstrable harm in these situations, they found it difficult to explain why.

Haidt argues that this difficulty did not stem from a lack of reasoning. He argues that people do reason. But like psychologist Daniel Kahneman^[5], Haidt argues that human reason works like a 'press secretary': justifying our acts and snap judgments to others. (He calls this 'post-hoc rationalizations'). In the example of the incest question, for instance, subjects relentlessly marshal arguments against the act, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes their arguments, simply because they believe it to be wrong.

Haidt then explains this phenomenon in terms of evolution. Reason, he posits, evolved to help us exert influence over others, not to help us find truth. Or, as he puts it eloquently, 'reason evolved to help us spin, not learn'. People make judgments first, then come up with rational arguments to support their views.

Similarly, this entire essay can be seen as my attempt to do a post-hoc rationalization of my belief in Christianity. I believe Christianity to be true, and I believe, as a rational person, that there are rational reasons for thinking so. Naturally, I attempt to justify my beliefs.

Perhaps, then, the logical conclusion here is to say that reason is not the perfect ideal that my friends and I make it out to be. In this cynical view, what GEM1902G has provided me is simply a set of tools that — if I am so willing — I may employ to justify myself.

I have shown here the existence of a rational, truth-based argument for God. But I have also, you might say, engaged in an indulgent post-hoc rationalization of my Christianess.

I am slightly troubled by this. But as I have (rather competently) demonstrated rational reasons for believing in God, I think my irrational use of rationality can be set aside for the purpose of this essay, to be picked up on and brooded upon at a latter date. I am, after all, only human.

References

[1] - Time: God vs Science
[2] - Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211-239.
[3] - Atran, S., & Henrich, J. (2010). The evolution of religion: How cognitive by-products, adaptive learning heuristics, ritual displays, and group competition generate deep commitments to prosocial religions. Biological Theory, 5(1), 18-30.
[4] - Haidt, J., Koller, S. H., & Dias, M. G. (1993). Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 613.
[5] - Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Singapore

2012-04-03T14:24:00.001+08:00

Watch this and you'll see the Singapore that most tourists see. It is beautiful and clean, and every bit as dynamic and crowded and colourful as this video makes it out to be.

But there are also other Singapores. The Singapore that the typical NUS student sees consists primarily of the NUS campus, followed by a depressing number of study rooms and computer labs and student lounges and (occasional) rooftop barbecues.

The Singapore that the typical Singaporean sees is very different from the rich places you see in the video above - their Singapore consists of HDB flats and void deck events like the occasional marriage, and old men playing chinese chess on stone benches. (Void decks are the empty spaces underneath HDP flats, designed to be community gathering points by the Government). This Singapore, is, I think, more realistic.

And there's also a dark Singapore, consisting of night clubs and KTV pubs and Thai bars, which my friends tell me range a spectrum of raciness. The old fashioned Chinese KTV pubs have older women singing and sitting with men, the younger Thai bars are covered in mist to hide vice (and other, erm, activities).

Singapore is beautiful, but only if you can afford it.

Perspective

2012-02-12T17:40:00.001+08:00

Here's an interesting thought experiment:

If you're human, like I am, you will work to improve your lot in life. Mostly this means that you will toil for success, some recognition, and for the ability to look yourself in the mirror every day and say that you're doing something of meaning. (This is sometimes — but not always — tied to your net worth - the society around you will unconsciously judge you based on how rich you are, even if it's not explicitly stated).

So say that you've spent the first few years of your working life going at it. You leverage your university education, hunt down opportunities, fight for promotions and then — after 10 years of hard work, get to a cushy middle management position.

You're not rich or successful, mind, but you're not that far off from it. Give yourself another 10 years and it's almost certain that you'll be at the top of your firm.

We know how a young, single, working professional looks like. Say you live a comfortable life: you have a nicely furnished apartment, a fiancé, and nice things to show off to your friends. At family gatherings your aunts ask how you're doing and you tell them and they chalk you up as one of the family's successes. Your parents are proud of you.

All is well. You keep working hard because you want to 'succeed in life'.

One afternoon, right after a very ordinary lunch break, a shadow passes over your desk. You look out of your office windows, and then you look up — you see the underbelly of a vast spaceship.

As you watch, the ship moves to the industrial area of your city, and then a beam of light lances down towards the ground.

You fly off your feet and hit the office wall in the resulting concussive roar.

In the next few years the human economy collapses as Earth goes to war; your firm cannot find any business as it makes no sense to do so. You are fired.

So here's the question: in such a scenario, does ambition matter? You have spent a good 30 years of your life getting a good education to get a good job to be able to show your aunts that you've Gotten Somewhere In Life.

And one alien attack takes it all away from you.

***

This is a rather contrived example, of course, but it's also a reminder that what we consider a normal life (i.e.: good school -> good university -> good job -> kids -> success) is not in any way ordinary.

After all, while an alien attack is unlikely, a global depression is not. Yuppies in the 1930s never saw it coming. Nor did they expect a World War. (Incidentally, it strikes me that growing up in the 1920s must have been a bloody interesting time.)

So what point am I making here? That's simple: don't take things for granted, even as you work your ass off. Life is too random and too weird to assume you have a God-given right to chase success.

(Oh, and, erm: keep an eye on the skies - you never know when a mothership will land and destroy everything you've worked for.)

A Lonely Chinese New Year

2012-01-23T21:42:00.001+08:00

I'm having a lonely little Chinese New Year in Singapore - where the only highlight was an awesome dinner with cousins Aaron and Karen and their family.

A couple of quick, loosely connected thoughts: productivity is at an all-time high again, in proportion to the loneliness. This is one of those times where I'm absurdly thankful I'm not on Facebook; my friends tell me that it's depressing to see all their friends celebrating Chinese New Year back home. Sometimes ignorance really can be bliss.

I had a fascinating conversation a few days ago with Dr Connor Graham, the House Fellow for my floor. I was into my 5th glass of wine by that point (a dry white, a medium white, two glasses of Shiraz, and two flutes of sparkling wine), and was slightly wobbly, and so more prone to talk to Random Professors about Life, the Universe and Everything. In this case, what I found interesting was how his wife (who's from China) came to Singapore and discovered so many Chinese festivals that the mainland Chinese never celebrate, due in part to the PRC government's crackdown on culture over the past 50 years.

It's rather amazing to think that Chinese culture is preserved in immigrant communities such as in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, perhaps to a larger degree, than it ever was in Mainland China.

And so anyway, I'm going to leave you with that thought, as I go back to do my Operating Systems homework. Till we meet again, Gong Xi Fa Cai!

The Most Productive Month Of My Life

2012-01-15T18:26:00.001+08:00

I can't believe how productive I was in December:

I build the Unofficial CORS API, a programmer's interface to get data from NUS's course catalog. [4 days]
I built Treehouse - a project dashboard and community news site, again for NUS Hackers. [6 days]
I redesigned the NUS Hackers site, and got speakers from Google and RIM to sponsor and speak at our events. [7 hours]
I wrote a 4000 word essay for an O'Reilly book on publishing, due to be published in the middle of 2012. [4 days]
I wrote an article for NUS's The Ridge, on NUS Hackers. [2 hours]
Finished reading 5 books, including the entire Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series. [God knows how long - but I loved every second of it.]

Part of the reason for this productivity, I think, was because most of my friends were either busy or away from Kuching. Ida and Sam were in London; Paul was preparing for his internship in Intel Penang, Garrick was too busy working on his Sugar Bun restaurant.

I spent most days at home, programming and thinking and reading and writing, and I will admit that I felt a little lonely when my sisters went out more than I did.

But: I'm amazed at all the work I've done, and I wonder if a little loneliness is good for all of us.

Happy Birthday

2011-12-14T23:44:00.001+08:00

Today is my birthday. In celebration, I opened a bottle of wine by myself for the first time. I took the bottle out to the garden, and — having sufficiently restrained the dog — proceeded to google 'how to use corkscrew'.

Google told me to insert the worm into the centre of the cork. I did so. As I did so, I entertained vivid images of the wine bottle exploding underneath the neck, sending flying glass shrapnel into my nether-regions, shredding my balls, rendering me impotent for the rest of my life.

I kept screwing the worm into the cork. It was dark and my sister was feeding the dog. She has carefully kept a pillar between herself and me, in the off chance the bottle explodes.

Opening a bottle was scary.

I have never opened a bottle of wine on my own because my friends have had more experience that I have, and they have always been around to open bottles for me. My sister and I are suitably impressed by all who are brave enough to open wine bottles. When I was little, my dad opened a wine bottle at my grandfather's house. The cork shot out of the bottle and hit a fluorescent light bulb directly above my grandfather, which exploded and showered glass over the dinner table. My grandfather had to be taken to the hospital, where he had to have stitches in his head.

I was little then, and down with a fever, so I wasn't in the dining room with the rest of the family. All I remember was a sound like a gunshot and a crash of glass. And shouting. Lots of shouting. It left quite an impression.

I finished screwing the worm in, and started to pull the cork out. I entertained vivid images of the cork shooting out of the bottle, ricocheting off the car porch, and killing my dog.

The cork came out after more reverse screwing. I breathed a sigh of relief. My sister laughed at me (she was at a safe distance, holding a flashlight) and I noticed for the first time that I was sweating.

I took the wine into the kitchen and proceeded to drink a lot of it.

I am now 22. I must admit that I feel suitably accomplished.

Next year, I hope to open two bottles of wine. Hurrah!

Problems I'm Interested In

2011-12-07T10:35:00.001+08:00

I'm supposed to put this up on my personal site, but till I get Hyde set up and deployed I'm posting a list of problems I'm interested in (or thinking about) here.

The networked book. The recent industry-wide shift to ebooks is really no different from its physical analogue: you go to a store, you buy a book, you read the book. End of story. The networked book posits a radical idea: what happens if we could have a canonical representation of each book on the web?

Well, you can do cool things with that, of course. The obvious benefits are quick to present themselves: books in browsers means books are readable in the widest spectrum of devices possible (think: phones, OLPCs for kids in poor countries); you can aggregate reader-created comments and annotations into a central version of the book; you can link to specific paragraphs or sentences when referencing works on the web.

But the other benefits are not as clear - for instance, books can be updated if they're on the web. We can build versioning systems for books, and push versions down to ebooks as corrections are made available. Networked books can also be edited, and reading communities may (will?) spring up around them.

But also, the long-standing question: how do we get there?

Social software for small groups. The forum has proven — over the last couple of years — to be detrimental to the building and maintenance of healthy digital communities. Large social sites like Quora, Stack Overflow, Hacker News and Reddit have shown us that large online groups need tools to save themselves from themselves (and even smaller communities do better with self-enforcing controls built into the software). How would social software (e.g. a forum) would look like with these elements adapted for the small, digital community? The challenge is likely three-fold: a) how to promote good behaviour in online communities b) how to apply elements of gamification in the best possible way for maximum community engagement and c) the market problem - how to disrupt and replace existing bulletin board solutions.

Marginalia of the future. NISO (the National Information Standards Organization) has just started an effort to create a universal annotation format. There are multiple interesting challenges to this: i) how do you map annotations to specific paragraphs, given the fluidity of the text in most ebook readers ii) how would such a format be implemented, in order to be as cross-platform as is feasibly possible? (And what of PDFs? Scanned PDFs almost certainly cannot be annotated, as there's no text to latch on to.)

Note: there may be a good algorithmic approach to the first problem - e.g. using the Levenshtein distance to compare hashes of paragraphs, and this seems to be largely a reader implementation problem.

Open textbooks. The textbook industry is one of the worst industries to have blighted education for the past two decades (I'm not kidding about this, Feynmann has complained about it in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann!, but the reality today is much worse).

I suspect that it's possible to disrupt this industry: provide free software for professors to write their textbooks in, on the agreement that so long as they keep a version of their textbook free and open (perhaps under the Creative Commons license), which we can then print and deploy to kids in poor nations.

Two quick things: 1) such initiatives already exist, such as in the state of California; but the software largely sucks; 2) Room for Reading seems like a good partner here, my friend Callie Miller is a big believer in what they're doing.

Can there be a better Wikipedia? Idle thinking; but I'd like to know if it's possible to build a better Wikipedia from both the software and the community perspective. The case for better software quickly presents itself: Mediawiki is rather obtuse to learn and to use (and is of course rather old). Also, are there better processes for topic review and deletion? I'm not so sure about that - the processes that exist today sprung up organically, and may very well be the best way to police Wikipedia.

A solution for the filter bubble problem. Eli Pariser has talked about this in his TED talk (see below); my question: is it possible to headfake a site — perhaps a news site, like Reddit — to solve the filter problem by purposefully throwing users up against people of different and opposing viewpoints? Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures has suggested an opposite view reader, which sounds like an incredibly cool site to build.

Concurrent programming. I've not thought much about this problem, nor have I looked very deeply into it (will probably have to start reading papers, should I want to experiment in the field). But everyone in Computer Science knows that concurrent programming is the challenge in Programming Languages, at least for the next few decades. Liskov suggests that we need a new model of thinking about concurrent programming, the same way that Google's map-reduce approach turned out to be the right way to think about distributed computing. What might this mental model be?

My Dog Has A Mid Life Crisis, And Other Things

2011-12-05T23:41:00.001+08:00

The problem with Kuching houses are that they're so much bigger than Singaporean ones. I felt every square foot of this truth — and I know the square feet well! — because 30 minutes after getting back from the airport I found myself vacuuming the entire bottom floor of my house, like any good little Kuching boy would.

My sister played Blackbird on the guitar right before I wrote this post. It's raining, but it still feels oddly hot in my room.

My bedsheets are pink. The floor is wood underfoot and slightly warm. I have a high-quality secondary monitor again.

I'm reminded of a sentence written by Meng Wong (who's a Singaporean VC, and a mentor):

Being human is funny strange. You begin. Then you go away from where you began. You hold hands for a while. Then you let go. When you go back to where you began, it all looks different but still smells the same.

It's true. With the possible exception of the front of the house (which smells of dead rat, believe it or not - some rodent went and killed himself in the ceiling) the rest of Kuching feels the same sort of different that you get for being away for awhile. There's a cooler in the dining room, where before there was a standing fan. And a cute little robot brush is hanging from the kitchen sink. But for all the changes, it all still smells the same.

(Note: my sister did some calculations earlier tonight and we found out that my dog is 49 years old in dog years — just 2 years younger than my dad. She's still as smelly as ever, though. Dad's asked me to bathe her tomorrow.)

All this to say: I'm back home, folks. I'll spend most of this break with family and programming, but if you want me for debate or you want me to teach you programming or you're a friend and you have a computer problem ... (which are all the things my friends find me for, by the way, bless them) ... you know where to find me.

It's good to be back.

Honey To Bees

2011-11-19T14:57:00.001+08:00

In case you missed it, O'Reilly Media recorded the entirety of the conference and uploaded it to Youtube. This is my talk.

Paradox

2011-11-09T22:28:00.001+08:00

This morning I had a Skype call with the founders of Hyperink, a publishing startup based in San Francisco. They recently raised $1.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator and SV Angel, making them at least 4 million in valuation.

We met — as many in the valley do — via a mutual friend. I had helped a guy named Derrick Kho set up an internship program called Startup Roots earlier this year, when he contacted the NUS Hackers for publicity and introductions to good student programmers. When I went to the valley I stayed with a bunch of NUS students, one of which turned out to be his girlfriend.

"Have you heard of Hyperink?" he asked on my first night there, propped up in the cold on the doorstep outside.

I had, but I didn't really knew what they did. Derrick told me. "Maybe I can set up an email introduction — I think you guys should really meet."

We did, and I spent Saturday morning talking to Kevin, one of the co-founders, and then programming at the Hyperink offices.

When I got back to Singapore, Kevin set up a Skype call because (it turned out) they wanted my advice on setting up a digital publishing workflow. (By chance, I'd spent most of my time at Pandamian doing something similar). I obliged by pointing them to half-a-dozen tools, including an EPUB generator I adapted for Pandamian and then maintained, as free and open source software. In exchange, they were willing to give us access to their authors to test out a marketing tool we were planning to build.

"Thanks for your help," said Matt, the other co-founder, shortly before we concluded. "When Kevin first told me about you, he said 'holy shit I met this guy and he knows so much about ebooks.' And that turned out to be totally true, and then some!"

I felt pleased at that, but then the Skype call ended and I was faced with an incomplete assignment, and I felt bad again.

Here's my problem: I find it hard to reconcile my status as a student with my status as an ebook 'person'.

I am a terrible student: right now I'm doing level 2 modules in NUS when I'm third year, and my classmates look at me a little funny when I tell them, slightly embarrassed, what mods I'm currently studying for. Sometimes I change the subject, because I don't want to see the looks on their faces when they find out.

On the other hand, they're not sure how to react when I tell them what I do on the side. I also don't tell many of them about my extra-curricular activities.

I'm not sure how to judge my self-worth. My pride at my ebook work (and my obsession with some of the problems in the field) are mostly buried under my insecurities as a student. I'm not disciplined in studying, I get distracted, I fail subjects. I'm at least half a year behind on my peers, and I'm likely to repeat a semester, delaying graduation for half a year.

And on the side, I'm giving advice (and code) to a million-dollar company.

How do I reconcile this? I know I should feel proud, but right now I'm struggling with constructing a processor out of logic gates, and doing badly at it. I suppose there's only so many Cs and Ds one can take before thinking badly of oneself (okay, I know I'm not an idiot, but there's psychological wear and tear, just try it for a year or two).

(And, yes, some people would say this immunization to failure is necessary for an entrepreneur).

I suppose my insecurities about my academics has tempered with my obsession (and pride) with doing good work in digital publishing. Maybe that's a good thing.

Maybe not.

On the bright side, at least I know if I fail I can always get a job as an ebook consultant.

Haha, now wouldn't that be a laugh?

Towers

2011-11-01T03:22:00.001+08:00

I'm sitting in the plane, back from Incheon, Korea (it was a one hour transit on the way back from San Francisco) and I'm thinking of her.

I miss her.

I don't miss her all day, every day. It depends on the environment. Right now the plane's quiet and sleepy and the blanket drawn up around me's comfortable, so I want her in a seat besides me. In San Francisco I didn't want her there - it didn't feel safe, especially when I was making my way back at night. (My friends say they'd heard gunshots one night out in SF, and got so bloody scared they drove back home to Mountain View and didn't return for a few weeks.)

American cities are strange. San Francisco is ugly and large, and while I got rather good at navigating the city, I never understood the way the poor, homeless people could coexist next to the yuppies walking down the street. I got out at the Civic Centre BART station, and stood there, mouth agape, at one of the most beautiful parks I'd ever seen in SF. I was about to take out a camera when a well-dressed old woman saw my open mouth and asked if I needed help — she gave me directions and then warned me to 'watch my wallet'.

On Saturday, after a meeting with another publishing startup in the city, I took a CalTrain down to Mountain View. Angad picked me up in a VW convertible.

Mountain View is beautiful. It's nearer to winter now, and so there are wild splashes of pink and reds in the underbrush. The streets are clean. The shops look sleepy and small, and Castro Street is chockful of quaint food shops (all healthy, in typical Californian fashion).

Angad took the roof down and we drove to Palo Alto, where Stanford is. The whole area leading out of SF is beautiful. It was then, driving in the cool ocean breeze, with the roof down and music blaring, did I wish that I could bring her down with me to see what I saw.

I'm sure London is as beautiful as California is. One day, we'd go together to explore the whole city. But we explore everything, anyway. It's only a matter of time.

Steve

2011-10-07T13:36:00.001+08:00

I was very sad when I heard of Steve's death. It was the first thing I woke up to, thanks to BBM:

Sam: OMG STEVE JOBS IS DEAD

Followed by, a few seconds later:

Idasu: Steve Jobs is dead?!

(Ida then drew a fantastic cartoon of my (real!) reaction to Steve's death on her blog, you should go read it).

But in the hours after his death I couldn't help but think back to Steve's commencement address, in the summer of 2005:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I choked a little when I read that.

The most important lesson I've learnt, I think, from Steve's life (and really, from Barbara Liskov's talk, or Brewster Kahle's life, or any great person's life) is the importance of doing great work.

You and I will only be remembered for what we leave behind. Liskov will leave behind her the creation of Object Oriented Programming. Kahle will leave behind him a digital archive of humanity. Jobs will leave behind too many things to count.

It is true that we will all leave something behind — for most of us, it would be the effect we have had on our families and friends. But as youngsters, it would do to remind ourselves: if we are to be ambitious, we have to create value for more than the people around us.

We have to do great work. Everything else follows.

This begs the uncomfortable question: what are you working on today that is great work? Getting good grades is — economically speaking — a null value. Nobody says "he was a great man, he got straight As in all his exams." It is a means to an end — the end being a place from which you may do great work (medical doctors, here, come to mind).

Turing Award winner Richard Hamming used to go around the University cafeteria and hound the other scientists: "What are the most important problems in your field?" and "Why aren't you working on them?". After a few weeks, Richard Hamming was banned from eating with most of the other scientists.

(The few who did listen did rise in stature in the scientific community).

But asking this question helps, I think, in other areas. Even in smaller spheres there is opportunity to do great work. You can start clubs, or revamp existing ones (to make them more valuable for the existing members). You can volunteer at NGOs, and then think hard about ways to make that work more efficient.

We are remembered by how much value we have created for those around us. Steve created whole industries around his work. I am writing this on a Macbook, and I work in a field he helped pioneered. He will be remembered for a long time.

Go with grace, Steve. May you rest in peace.

Decision Trees

2011-10-05T21:22:00.001+08:00

There is some justice in life.

How did you win that? It's so good that you know what you want to do. Wah, what you're doing is so interesting! How you so keng arr?! That's pretty cool. How come you so lucky?

Sometimes I walk down from Tembusu college and see people playing frisbee on the commons. There's a lot of shouting. It seems like a lot of fun.

And sometimes I read blogs from people of my age group, where the bloggers go out with friends, take pictures with each other in restaurants and on beaches and in cars. They go to church; they thank God for saving them from the latest weekly catastrophe.

That could be me, I think to myself.

Then I return to my work. On a given day I deal with at least 15 emails from 5 different people, minimum (still manageable due to the filters I have in place in Gmail). I code; I write, I do homework for school. Then, when it's late at night, I open a different set of editors and write code for external projects (Pandamian, NUS Hackers, contract work to finance my trip to San Francisco).

I wonder how things might've been had I had chosen the easy path - to study and go out with friends. Like how everyone else is doing it. This blog might get updated more often. I might attend big campus parties.

But I didn't. And so I don't.

In exchange, I am head of NUS Hackers. I'm invited back to San Francisco, for Books in Browsers 2011. I am a member of the private Reading20 mailing list. But I don't go out with friends much. And I don't party at all.

Today, my school gave me 600 dollars to fly to San Francsico.

"You're so lucky!" my friend tells me.

I am not lucky. Life just gives as good as it gets. It is — occasionally — fair.

Some Quick Lessons From Barbara Liskov's Talk

2011-10-03T13:03:00.001+08:00

I don't have much time to write this, but I think I should get everything down before I forget it.

I attended a talk by Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov last Thursday. The Turing Award is Computer Science's equivalent of a Nobel Prize. She won it because she invented Object Oriented Programming (gross oversimplification, but I'm just writing to provide some context).

A number of things struck me about her talk. The first was that she said that ideas had their time — not a new observation, but one worth remembering (see this Gladwell essay on just that). She discovered OOP because i) it seemed like its time had come — she could see hints of the idea in all the papers of the time. And that ii) she thought really, really hard about the problem.

The next thing to strike me was how important Programming Languages research is. Her view of the current languages in vogue (Python, for instance) was that "you can see the attraction, but it does so many things wrong" and that "it's sad that the academic community dropped the ball on creating a language ... (that meets the requirements of) industry. The kind of language that's easy enough to teach programming to a student, but also good for industry. Instead we've been so hung up on the theoretical bits. So we've had languages created by people outside the field, and they get so many things wrong."

Which is an interesting observation - and pretty true, no? Ruby was created by Matz; and Python by Guido, and they weren't doing PL work at the time. Nor, for that matter, was Ritchie, who did the bulk of the work on C.

And lastly, I'm struck by how Programming Methodology is really a study on human thinking. Before Liskov invented OOP, programming languages were flying spaghetti spitballs. What OOP did was to introduce a level of abstraction that made it easier to think about programs (and more importantly — made it easier to reason about correctness).

I had never considered this. I'd always wondered at research done in the field of programming languages - weren't languages these dinky little things you used on a daily basis? What discoveries could possibly be made in the field?!

But of course that view was wrong. There are good ways of doing PLs, and also bad ways. Liskov said that we haven't yet found the right kind of abstractions for concurrent programming (and I asked her about Go, which proposes to create an abstraction for exactly that, but she professed to have not heard of it. Sigh. I wished she did; her opinion would undoubtedly be very interesting!). She also argued that we didn't yet know the right way to think about massively distributed computing systems, though Google's MapReduce algorithm was a big step in the right direction.

At any rate, that is what I've learnt, and I'd do well to remember some of it.

Honesty

2011-09-22T21:03:00.001+08:00

I think the biggest lesson I've taken away from 2011 has been that of honesty. Self-honesty, that is - the kind of honesty that happens when you look yourself in the mirror.

Most of this year has been terrible. Not absolutely terrible, as in the kind of terrible you'd expect going through a concentration camp, say, but terrible enough to look back and know that I've made a mess of things, and that I'm now standing in a roomful of broken glass. The only way forward is to sweep it all up and throw it away, and fill the room (again) with crystal statues and polished mirrors and ice-glazed pieces. It's hard work, and I'm still sweeping.

I have learnt this year that I have exactly the kind of personality-type that's good at deluding him/herself. I shy away from brutal honesty. Not doing well in math? Don't worry, I tell myself, you can always catch up later. Co-founder not contributing code? Don't worry, I say, he's busy now, maybe he'll do so in the near future. Relationship not going well? Don't worry, I'm busy, I can always make it up to her later.

Except that I can't. You can't reverse things like ignoring your girlfriend and ignoring your math (and, no, I'm not comparing the two; though if I were the former would trump the latter in both joy and complexity). But these are things that I've lost last semester, that I'm now trying to win back.

Life is comfortable when you don't have to face up to the hard truths of your life. And I'm sure that we all can be very good at self-delusion — the couple in a relationship that's going nowhere; the person who's self-deluded about his or her body weight; the girl who can't sing but wants to be a superstar.

The truth is often called brutal for a reason. Facing up to it forces one to be a little uncomfortable with oneself, at least for a little while. But I'm beginning to see that such discomfort is necessary to grow in life, and running away from hard truths isn't going to get me anywhere.

(There is a caveat, of course - too much discomfort and you go into panic mode, which then spirals into a destructive cycle of self-loathing, and so I suppose there's an upper limit on all this introspection).

At any rate: no more self-delusion. It's time for some proper life.

Stress and Happiness

2011-09-21T00:28:00.001+08:00

Sam:
What's going on these days?

Me:
Hrmm?
Some stress over going to SF
Lots of stress over Pandamian
Lots of stress over academics
Some stress adapting to girlfriend in uk
That's about it. :)

Sam:
Lol what about happiness?
Why all stress only
And when is SF?

Me:
End of October
You don't get it - to a person loving what he does, stress is happiness :)
There can be no joy without pain! No elation without victory hard won! No love without effort! :)

Sam:
Lol you sound like Nietzsche

That's pretty much everything in a nutshell. For the moment, at least. Now back to work.

Sometimes, A Little Worrying

2011-08-11T14:27:00.001+08:00

So there's Linear Algebra coming up this semester, and a couple of friends have told me that it's impossibly hard. Harder than MA1521 (Calculus). I'm starting to be a little worried. One of my friends got an A- for it. Another, who does consistent work, got C+.

"How'd you do it?" I asked.

"Being consistent is not enough. It's just not enough." says the latter friend.

"Oh, urm, do everything." Says the former. "All the tutorials, and all the questions in the tutorials. And if you don't understand, just redo the questions."

So, in theory the strategy for doing math is simple: keep doing consistent work, and keep practicing. But knowing something and being able to execute it are two different things. I'm able to consistently execute practice-heavy modules if I like it (e.g.: programming). But I have a history of being bad at Math. Math's my Kryptonite.

I'll have to figure out what's the difference between the two. And why I seem to shy away from anything that requires math (e.g.: physics). This is largely internal; local to the way I think, and no amount of advice by well-meaning people would help until I do.

The first Linear Algebra lecture starts in one and a half hours. Eigenvectors, here I come.

If God Did Not Exist, It Would Be Necessary To Invent Him

2011-08-01T02:34:00.002+08:00

I bring two pieces of good news (and one slightly sad rant, to do with the title of the post today, but that'll be in a bit).

First, the Thomians won the Thomian-Marian debate tournament this year, the first time they've done so in 8 years. (I should add that I added to this record: we lost the Marian-Thomian debate in 2005 because I — erm — got carried away by the crowd and did a horrible job as third). The motion this year: THW revoke the quota for women in executive jobs.

It was good because they did well, running a competent opposition case and clashing with the Marians at all points of the debate, as opposed to them winning on the grounds of being the 'slightly-less-lousy' team. Plus: we had a good time watching the match, and — I think this was true for Paul and Sam and Kevin as it was for me — we went home rather happy with the results. They were all pretty promising.

In other news, Ida, Kevin and I were treated to lunch by the Greenian squirrels earlier today. They carted us off to Hartz Chicken, after which Kevin invited us over to Swinburne to debate BP style.

(The Greenians were all very excited about this).

A note about the young Greenians: I have never before met a team of hyperactive debators so awesome and so driven. They're eager to learn, never down and out, not too serious, and are getting bloody good at debate. Granted, they've got a bit more to go before being absolutely great, but I'm willing to bet that they'll be a team worth watching in a couple of years.

Now on to the sad, serious bit: the BP style motion we debated on was THBT If God Did Not Exist, It Would Be Necessary To Invent Him. I was first speaker for the closing Opp.

Paul opened the debate by defining God as a principle, or 'anything we devote ourselves to, be it an obsession, a deity, a stance or a philosophy'. This was an odd sort of setup, bordering on a squirrel, but he thought it an interesting enough case to run.

Fortunately for us he then spent the last half of his speech on argumentation: that a moral landscape requires a God to function, without which moral systems would fall apart — this was an old Christian argument, one the atheists have long had responses for, and it was something Opp could grab on to and harp about.

Which was what happened next: Kevin opened the opp bench by misrepresenting Paul's case-set, and then he re-set it in a more conventional place: God is God, and if tomorrow we were to find out that He was a lie, then it would not be necessary to invent Him, for there are systems of morality out there that do not depend on God's existence to work. Kevin's main argument was that people can only believe in something that's proven to be real. Therefore, creating a religion around a fiction is no good for both the believer and the morality imposed by that system.

I extended Opening Opp's case by arguing that we are already living a Godless society. So what's the big deal if God were to die tomorrow?

We will go home today and drive back to our Godless lives; we watch and read a Godless media, we are governed by a Godless government, and we study — or at least our kids have — a Godless education. Let's face it, ladies and gentlemen: if God were to be proven fake tomorrow, society probably wouldn't even bat an eyelid - we're already living as if God did not exist.

It broke my heart a little when I said that. Mostly because I realized that it was true.

I can't decide if there's any way to reconcile that with a God-centric society. History has shown us that whenever God and Government are mixed, bad things happen. No matter how good God is supposed to be, man will screw up; so the saying goes: from the crooked timber of man no straight thing was ever made.

And this has been happening for a very long time. It used to be that God was the center of society. Religion played a huge role in just about everything - government, wars, schools of thought. And then it failed. Fast forward a couple decades - mankind turned its faith to the philosophies of government. There was, for a time, a huge amount of belief in democracy and communism, and socialism, and so on so forth. People fought wars over such things. But we all know how that turned out - we were let down, yet again, with the fall of the Second World.

Today, we live in what academics call a Postmodern world. There is nothing at the centre of society. Relativism rules the day: you can be of one religion and I of another, and it's perfectly alright because your religion governs your values, and mine governs mine. Everything is relative, nothing is absolutely true. And so the value systems that we regard highly today aren't particularly beholden to any one morality.

This was a highly simplified summary of the development of the Postmodern world, but again I spoke with an internal voice screaming away at me. I think it's an incredibly odd thing to be a staunch Christian and to argue for the development of a Godless society. It's sad because it's against all I believe in, and it's sad because it's true.

How does this link to the motion? Well, if God were to die tomorrow, we would not need to invent him. We already live without Him. And despite side Government's case that morality will crumble without a divine base, we know this to be fake: today, we live without God, and we have not descended into anarchy.

(...) What keeps mankind from descending into chaos? For starters, we already have systems of morality that do not require God to exist. But — and we know this, do we not? Society is kept from anarchy because we believe in secular ideas of wrong and right: ideas of human rights, and the social contract, and the harm principle, and the principles of truth and justice. Our government has long enforced right and wrong without the authority of God, and we can very well survive the loss of a deity. After all, we no longer hear a politician justifying a case with the Bible as his reasoning. We hear him arguing from principles of justice, or equality, or rights. This wasn't true a hundred years ago — a hundred years ago we would have heard theological arguments — but today, never.

And so, I wonder now: what if it's impossible to have a God-fearing, God-loving society? The right-wing Christian nuts in the GOP, for instance, have shown us how idiotic such an approach might morph into — instead of sharing in the grace of God, they mandate such laws as the right to deny service to a homosexual in the state of Texas, the right to teach creationism (and ignore scientific evidence w/r/t evolution) in Louisiana, and they reject global warming simply because 'the Bible doesn't say so.'

It's often a common refrain in churches to talk of 'revival'. "Let's bring revival across the land!", they cry. But what if that's not possible, due to the lessons we have learned that led to the separation of church and state?

I'm no longer sure I would support a theocracy, even one supported by a coalition of churches. But now that I'm writing this, I think that there could be something in having a Godly government. Like the founding fathers, who believed in the separation of Church and State and yet created their government on the bedrock of Godly principles. Maybe that would work. I don't know.

What I do know is this: if God did not exist, it would certainly not be necessary to invent him. Society already lives without him - it is possible to go through your entire week with no connection with God beyond the compulsory Sunday service. We live in a Godless world, and it would be a lie to say it isn't so.

Good Debaters

2011-06-22T02:38:00.001+08:00

I've been thinking about training debaters for about four years now. It's not much, but it's been a very interesting, if at times frustrating, experience. Today I think I've found the answer to a question that has bugged me for the longest time: how do you create a good debater?

I started my coaching stint in 2008, thinking that perhaps the fastest route to scoring debate wins was to teach my kids case creation. This was a bias with how I worked, as a debater: I preferred using clever cases to win debates (sometimes to my own detriment).

But this didn't work out the way I planned. Good case creation requires a degree of creativity, and I was not equipped to teach creativity. A whole bunch of debaters got bored and walked out on me. I was distraught. Unprepared, the Thomians bombed the 2008 Swinburne Debate Championships.

In 2009, Paul and I thought that perhaps if we taught the basics of debate everything else would take care of itself. It was a pretty naive belief, in retrospect. We sat down and designed a basic syllabus for high school debate as we knew it, in Kuching (including, of course, what we thought about certain city-specific debate idiosyncrasies). This took us about a year to get right.

It was at the end of that year that we realized that this simply wasn't enough. As a result of our work, the Thomians became pretty good with the basics of debate. This is still true today (and will likely be true for the next few years, so long as they stick to the debate letters) But, as any experienced debater might tell you, mastery of the basics has very little to do with winning tournaments. Truth be told, the Thomians had a pretty bad run that year.

But — and it behooves me to say this: in 2010 Saravana, one of our juniors, got to be a really good debater, as president of the Thomian debate team. And he did it with no help from us at all. Aha! We thought. Perhaps the secret to becoming a good debater was to teach juniors! Because if you taught other people, the logic went, you'd be so motivated to keep ahead of them that you'd become good in the process.

So we tried that this year. Or at least, we put an experiment to test: there was a new batch of juniors who had to teach the next generation of debaters. Would they become good, too?

The answer: no, they didn't, not really. They were good, good enough to give most teams a fair fight, but they weren't good enough to be in the teams that entered the breakout rounds. Oddly, they didn't get as good as Saravana did.

So that wasn't it. And at this point we were at a loss. What could it be, possibly? I was frustrated beyond belief at this stage. I didn't get it. How could this be?

My frustration was, I must admit, made worse by the fact that we had no idea how we got good. Or, worse, how we got good in the absence of proper debate training. My juniors have, on average, three times as many debates in a single year in 2009 than I did in my entire high-school debating career. And yet I was still better than them. How could this even happen?

When Paul first entered Swinburne debating, he was considered a 'prodigy'. He was a high school debater who was at least the best of his batch, and good enough (and promising enough) to be part of the club's roster. It was only a few months later that Swinburne sent him to the World Championships.

A year or so later, Paul invited me to train with his Swinburne mates. I was rusty, and somewhat bad, but I could at least hold my own against them. This surprised me. I wasn't as bad as I had imagined.

Immediately, a couple of elements presented themselves as possible factors:

Debate demands maturity. I was older, and therefore better read, and therefore I was better than my juniors.
I had more 'experience'
The Thomians aren't intelligent. Other schools had bigger, cleverer pools to choose from
The Thomians are all male. Only debate teams with females on them had a chance of becoming great
Good debators need good general knowledge. The Thomians had lousy general knowledge.

One by one, over the past four years, Paul and I began to test these possibilities.

A few were quickly proven to be false. 2) was wrong, because in 2009 I simply did not have as much 'experience' as my juniors did, on a debate-for-debate basis. Yet I still thrashed them. 4) was wrong, because at the highest levels of debate, teams are heavily weighted to male debaters. 5) was also false — other teams had equally bad (or perhaps slightly better) general knowledge, yet performed disproportionately better as compared to the Thomians.

So that left 1) maturity, and 3) intelligence.

1) is likely a factor. I've not had the time to devise a test for this, but generally speaking, you need a baseline level of maturity to be a good debater. This we take as common knowledge.

But there is a problem here. In the Junior category in Swinburne, teams compete with more or less the same levels of maturity. And from anecdotal evidence, maturity usually is constant, to a degree that does not explain disproportionate differences in ability. Yet these other teams (like Hui Mei, Malachi and Melanie of Green Road, winners of 2011's Junior Category) have something that I don't see in my Thomians.

Factor 3), intelligence, is harder to argue against. Paul and I sometimes bring it up in the guise of 'talent'. We would say: perhaps our ability is something we both had, and that we can only hope to see in our juniors. I hated this idea — if it were true, it would be crushing: I would have to accept that excellence in debate was nothing more than a series of flukes, determined by the quality of talent that just so happened to join the debate club in a particular year.

"But no!" Paul said, earlier today. "That's not true! When Stephen Obed first joined SDC, he completely sucked! He stuttered, he couldn't speak properly, he had no analysis, he had nothing!"

Stephen Obed is one of the best Swinburne debaters I have ever seen.

He got good by hounding adjudicators. He spent hours arguing with seniors, sometimes to 1am in the morning, in bars after debate meetings. His neighbours thought he was slightly mad, because he rehearsed whole speeches on his balcony, at night, speaking to himself (and rather loudly, at that).

"He's obsessed." I said to Paul, my eyes growing wide. "We're obsessed!"

In high school, I spent days practicing arguments: testing speeches against myself, out loud, while watering the plants or cutting the grass or doing laundry. Paul would obsess over debates long after the fact, thinking through every second, wondering if he could tweak certain bits to favour his team. Saravana went insane teaching debate to his juniors; he also spent hours at night reliving debates he lost.

"Every debater I know to be good," Paul said, slowly, "Obsessed about getting better."

It was obsession. That was the secret sauce. Not everyone had it.

Now of course it's true that debaters have to be matured enough, intelligent enough, experienced enough, and knowledgable enough to be truly good. And it's also true that forcing debators to teach their juniors will make them better, just as it did Saravana and me. And it's also true that getting debaters to adjudicate will accelerate their growth, just as it did Ida and Julie. But I realize now that I had it all backwards: it was not enough to teach debaters to be matured, smart, experienced and knowledgable; nor was it enough to execute a million and one coaching tricks — all this was useless if they weren't obsessed.

A normal debater would be depressed about a debate he/she lost, and get on with his or her life. An obsessed debater would spend the next six months thinking up rebuttals to arguments his opponents made. I still do — in fact just last month I thought of a brilliant case set-up to use in a semi-final debate I had lost over a year ago.

But I think there's another element to this that I had not previously realized: Swinburne, Green Road and Lodge have largely been built around loose, autonomous teams. Teams were free to pursue their own strategies, as they saw fit. St Thomas's keeps its debaters without teams for a good part of the year; most of our organization is at the club-level, not the team-level. By this I mean debaters often have more allegiance to the club than to their own individual teams.

Paul and I became obsessed because we had each other; we would grab a small nook after every debate to analyze what we could have done differently, regardless of the outcome. We egged each other, and got better in the process. Likewise, debaters in teams will tend to get better the same way. Perhaps that is one way we can organize to encourage obsession.

By and large, however, this discovery has made me very happy. It is not my fault that my Thomians have performed badly. It is the result of a trait, one that appears in debaters individually. Getting better is thus no longer a function of training more extensively — it is now a function of finding obsessed individuals, putting them in teams, and then letting them take their training into their own hands.

A Library Is Many Things

2011-06-10T17:36:00.001+08:00

I've been doing two things in Kuching since I came back: programming and friends. (Well friends here include family, and of course the lion share's of time is with Ida /wink).

What I haven't been doing is writing: any and all writing I've done since I've been back has been constrained to emails and the occasional Pandamian feature release. And so I kinda-sorta miss writing. Which explains why I'm taking some time to write this short missive.

I am constantly surprised by the sheer number of books in my bedroom. I came back from Singapore and my first reaction was 'God it's so big!', followed by a rummaging of the huge number of books I've stacked up over the years.

I'm now in the middle of three books, and two ebooks, and they make me absurdly happy. I read them when I'm sick of programming.

I think I've forgotten how nice it is to buy and keep books without care for space — in Singapore I never have enough storage space, and so I only keep five that are dear to me:

The New Turing Omnibus
The Bible
What's So Amazing About Grace?
Osotogari
The Mythical Man Month

Here I have dozens. And all kinds of exercise books and diaries and old scrapbooks from my time at St Thomas's. Some of them are ridiculous: e.g. my diary circa 2006, page 170: 'Draw bio (the one you forgot last wk), Kimia 4.2 Eksperimen pg 191, Do Math 10.2b!'

And this is how — at night, when I'm lying on my bed with only the street-lights from outside to illuminate their spines — that I know I am home.

Personal Update

2011-04-30T18:52:00.003+08:00

Public service announcement! Tadaaa, this is Ida:

Ida is my girlfriend.

(This is my mum. Don't worry, mum, Ida is nice!)

I like Ida very much. We see here how she demonstrates the relative shortness of a Lamborghini.

Ida makes me very happy. :3

Ida is in Kuching at the moment, while I am at Singapore. She is going to London in September.

I no like LDRs. But there is one good thing about them.

Arrivals are made more awesome by waiting the distance. I am excited to go back to Kuching to be with Ida! I miss her so. <3

Minor Update

2011-04-29T00:43:00.001+08:00

So here's a quick update: I have three more exams to go: Narrative, Chemistry and Software Engineering. All due next week.

I've probably failed my calculus exam a second time in a row, this time due to a combination of idiocy, gastritis (or whatever it is; Zakil tells me that it's an odd combination of symptoms that he can't place) and math phobia.

The summer holidays are up soon, which I think of as an excellent opportunity to spend time with loved ones, learn new things (Tornado webservers, anyone?), and work on Pandamian.

Speaking of which, Pandamian's a top five regional finalist for Meltwater's Movers and Shapers competition. The team's flying to Hong Kong on the 17th of May; I'll be missing out on that trip because I'll be back in Kuching on the 15th. But I intend to put in a full week of co-development before coming back.

Will be speaking for a little bit at the Singapore Startup Weekend this Saturday; Meng was really kind when he invited me over to share my experience with Pandamian. Am looking forward to an hour amongst startup-ish people, a free lunch, and then back to studying I go.

Sometimes

2011-04-19T15:21:00.001+08:00

"Have you been to the library recently?" I ask Yipeng and Shawn. We are studying at the COM1 basement, books and papers strewn across the tabletops.

"Uhh. No." says Yipeng. "The last time I went to the library was last semester."

"They had this sign at the main entrance."

A pause.

"Sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice, coming to a Singaporean university."

Yipeng looks up from his papers, looking stressed. "Yes, sometimes I wonder that too."

Things I Like About Computer Science

2011-04-09T20:12:00.011+08:00

I bumped into my Form 6 Physics teacher Pn Loh late last year, while at St Thomas's to teach debate. She looked harried, but smiled and stopped for quick chat.

"Oh hello!" she said, "What are you doing now?"

"Err ... holiday," I replied. "Here to teach debate for the afternoon."

"Oh, no, I mean what are you studying?"

"Computer science. NUS."

Pn Loh's eyes popped. "Wahh!!" she exclaimed. "How did you get in ahh?!"

"I also dunno." I say, but amused. We talk a bit more, and then she went off. But not before turning and saying: "Oh you know, maybe you should come back and talk to some of our Form 6 student here. They don't really know — I don't think many people here know — this computer computer thing."

Well I do know a thing or two about this computer computer thing. Here are a couple of things I like about it:

1. The Newtons Are Still Alive
There's this thing in Computer Science called object-oriented programming. The person who sort-of invented it (or most of its current ideas, and in particular modularization) is a woman called Barbara Liskov, winner of the 2008 Turing Award. She was my professor's PhD supervisor at MIT.

Computer science is such a young field that most of its legends are still around, teaching in the faculties of the various universities worldwide (though most of them, admittedly, are in the US). This youth means two things:

1) Big chunks of what you'll learn in computer science is wrong. You know this, your professors know this, but it's still slightly exciting to think that so much about compsci are still things that are horrendously broken, and in need of a fix.

2) You are still able to talk to the legends. Physicists can't talk to Newton or Einstein, but if you're in computer science it's still possible to find the equivalents, learn from them, and take them out to lunch.

(While I was at the Internet Archive I bumped into Ted Nelson, the inventor of Hypertext. I was showing his wife the Archive's new Javascript-based ebook reader, when he came wandering over. His wife introduced us. "Hi, I'm Ted. I did Xanadu. I invented Hypertext. You know — HTML?" He was eating sushi.)

2. Nobody Really Knows What You're Doing
This is slightly frustrating, but also slightly funny. A famous introductory lecture at MIT describes Computer Science as such: "Computer science has nothing to do with computers. And it's not really a science."

To your friends and relatives, being in compsci means that you're the guy they turn to when they have a problem with their computers. I use a Mac, and often have no idea as to how to best fix their Windows machine. (Most compsci majors use Unix systems, by the way. That means Linux or Mac. Rarely Windows).

The simplest way I can describe computer science to a non-techie friend is to say that compsci's a lot like add math. In primary school, we weren't allowed to use calculators to do our math. In secondary school, we were — but the math problems became so difficult that using calculators didn't help us as much. Computers are the most powerful calculators of all. Like add math, we're more interested in the potential problems we can solve with them than with the calculator itself.

(An apt analogy is that calling computer science "computer science" is a little like calling biology "microscope science". Like many biologists, we can't really help you if you've got a problem with your microscope.)

3) Has Created The Most Number of Billionaires Under 30
During the railroad revolution a disproportionately large number of people who became rich were in the railroad industry (or in other complementary industries such as steel; see: Andrew Carnegie). The same thing is happening in the digital industry today: the people who are creating the most value in the world are the ones either working on or with the Internet.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Kevin Kelly, in his 1999 book New Rules For The New Economy, points out that the Internet is essentially a communications accelerator. This is important because communication isn't just one part of the economy; communication is the economy. In simple terms, anything that accelerates communication accelerates the economy (or at least disrupts the power structures within it). And this has proven to be true: almost every industry that has come into contact with the Internet has been irrevocably changed, often with chaotic, ugly results.

Newspapers are struggling to make money. Music labels are going to hell, and blaming digital piracy for the disruption of their business models (they're wrong, but this isn't immediately clear if you haven't been thinking about the problem for a long-enough amount of time). Publishing, which I work in, is being slowly disrupted by the coming ebook revolution, which prices ebooks at less than 20% of the current retail price.

This chaos presents an unparalleled opportunity for anyone with the guts and the brains to build the (digital) economic structures of the future. It's not going to happen immediately — I started writing and thinking about the digital book-future four years ago, and much of it has yet to happen — but if you're daring enough, and smart enough, you can very well shape the fabric of the future. (And get rich in the process; but that's secondary to making the world a better place, isn't it?)

4) Has The Largest Potential For Empowering Social Change
Exhibit A: in the aftermath of the 2008 Kenyan elections, blogger Ory Okolloh put a call out to her readers: “Guys looking to do something: Any techies out there willing to do a mash up of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?” The NYTimes reports:

A few days later, Kenyans had a Web site that allowed people to text or e-mail reports and see them plotted on a Google map of the country. It became useful not only for rapid intervention, but — as the name suggests — to document the deaths, injuries and destruction when virtually all other media were blacked out.

The software they built is now an open source project called Usahidi. It's been used in just about every disaster since: two hours after the Haiti earthquakes, Usahidi set up a Haiti site and got a Usahidi compsci student at Tuft's University to organize a group of 300 volunteers. Radio stations in Haiti then got listeners to text in reports, which thousands of US-based volunteers then translated and aggregated to the maps on the Usahidi site. Any report requiring immediate action (from a trapped person, for example) was forwarded to the closest rescue team, again through Usahidi software.

Usahidi has been used to catalog and report election fraud in Mexico, report damage caused by the Gulf spill, and organize efforts around medicine shortages in Uganda. Something to think about: why haven't we used Usahidi to catalog and organize election efforts in Malaysia?

Accelerated, accessible communication changes just about everything it comes into contact with. Recent revolutions were powered by Facebook and Twitter (in Egypt, organizers got tips from Tunisian revolutionaries through Facebook as to how to resist tear gas). And the enablers of this change will very much be the builders of the digital world: the computer scientists, the engineers, and the programmers working on the technology to connect people in new and often surprisingly novel ways. Some of them are working in Google and Facebook, but many more in universities and startups around the world.

But what does communication have to do with computer science? There are a couple of things. For instance, as the web has become more 'real-time', so the technologies written to support it have to adapt to the speed of transfer. Facebook's feed, for instance, is updated so frequently it has to use a non-relational database system called Cassandra. NoSQL datastores are fairly new in computer science, and it's not entirely certain how they'd do in most production environments. (There are many more other challenges, but I'll not go into detail here)

The point is: I am a computer science student in an era where so many things are being thrown into chaos by a digital shift. It's exciting, it's young and it's scary, but it's also what I like most about my field.

The Death Of Advice

2011-04-08T18:12:00.001+08:00

Two years ago, if you'd asked me advice on what to do after college, or how to succeed in life, I'd have given you a set of straight answers I believed to be true. "Find your passion." I'd say. "Study what you love in Uni." "Learn to take the initiative." "Work hard."

All of them obvious things we've been told, as kids, at one point in time or another. But the funny thing is that — with experience — I'm now no longer as certain as I was back then. A couple of juniors asked me a year back, during the summer holidays: "What do you think I should do in university?" And my answer was "It depends ..." with a guilty shrug appended at the end.

Consider the four bits of advice I've listed above:

"Find your passion." sounds simple enough — if you do what you're passionate about, you'll be good at it, and you'll be set for the rest of your life. Right? No, not really. The problem with this is that it's really hard to find out what you're a) good at and b) passionate about plus c) it being a field that's lucrative enough for you to live your life the way you want to (notice that I said enough — how much you live by is really up to you). Whether you find all three is a matter of randomness. If you're lucky you'd discover what you love to do at a relatively early age. Or you may take 40 years. Or you give up on one of the three. There's no good way to tell.

(Worse, history is littered by people who found their passion early and failed miserably.)

"Study what you love in Uni", too, sounds nice, until you realize that many of the same objections that applied to the first nugget apply to this bit of 'wisdom' too. I love what I'm studying in University — but how I stumbled into my field is more luck than anything else. And so what do you tell the hundreds of students who aren't studying what they love? To shove off? That's not true, now, is it? There are hundreds of people who leveraged a course they hated and changed to happy careers later in their lives. Whether you hate what you're studying in University doesn't seem to matter — unless you want it to.

"Learn to take the initiative." used to be a general principle you'd assume to some degree of certainty would lead to success. But the world doesn't like certainty. I can think of a half dozen people who never took the initiative and yet have had awesome things happen to them; they were at the right place at the right time. Others do so but aren't rewarded with much worldly success. So initiative and drive aren't guaranteed metrics of success, either.

"Work hard" is a lie. You don't necessarily have to work hard to succeed. This is because there are different kinds of work, and therefore different kinds of returns. A builder hammering nails into the wooden structure of a house earns as much money as he hammers nails; a computer programmer writes software once and lives off its revenues for ten years afterwards.

I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that: for every bit of advice that someone gives you, there is always a counter-example to disprove the rule. Work hard ... except when you don't need to. Find your passion ... except for when you become successful on something you hate. Study something you love, except when studying a field you dislike leads you to an opportunity you've never dreamed of.

My mind clogs up with edge cases when someone asks me for advice, today. I realize now that there are no simple rules in life. The only one that's served me well isn't really advice — and so I hesitate to give it to other people:

Make the best out of what you're given.

Or, put another way: always choose the local maxima.

What I mean by this is that, when at a crossroads — don't think too far ahead. Just pick what gives you more opportunities. For instance, when faced with a choice to study Economics or Math in university, pick Math, because Math gives you more opportunities (you can study Economics at graduate level with a Math degree, but not vice versa). When faced with the spectre of Matriculation vs Form 6, pick Form 6. When faced with the opportunity to go to San Francisco to speak to a private gathering of influential technologists or stay in Singapore and study for exams ... choose to fight for San Francisco.

'Choose the local maxima' isn't exactly life advice, because you're making things up as you go along.

Much of my life (so far) has been like this, I think. I started debating because I thought it would be useful to be persuasive. I then thought to put those argumentative skills to use when I started writing a blog on digital fiction, because I thought it was an interesting, unexplored field. This blog then led me to think about some unsolvable problems in digital publishing, and act on them in 2008, with the creation of the Web Fiction Guide. My frustration at my inability to program led me to choose Computer Science for university, a field which I now love. My work with Novelr got me into NUS despite my bad grades. Novelr's community — now 600-700 strong, led me to create a company to solve some of the more annoying problems I'd been struggling with for the good part of four years. The creation of that company (and the clarity of ideas behind it) led me to an invitation to a private gathering of ebook technologists in San Francisco. I am now committed to solving some intractably difficult problems in publishing — problems that very well may take 30, 40 years of my life to see through. In short: I know what I want to do for the future. And it's all luck. That, and following the local maxima.

Of course, I'm not saying that my life if guaranteed to turn out well. Life is random, after all. But the principle still applies: if you fail an exam, or flunk college, or drop out, or find yourself in a bad place, choosing the local maxima is almost always the best thing to do. There is, after all, this saying about life and lemons ...

I'm tired now, and chronically sleep-deprived, and am writing this only to relax after a solid 24 hours of assignment hell. I'm not even sure if I make sense. But I do think this is true, and I hope you've found it interesting. Thanks for reading.

(Note: I'm Christian, and so what I really mean by 'luck' is God's grace, and what I mean by success I mean worldly success — something that isn't as important to a Christian as fellowship with God. But if you're secular, or from another religion, ignore this. Just understand that I'm actually thinking about different things.)