討論會行事曆

January 2022
【1/14 (五) 7:30pm SE Asia HSR】

SE Asia HSR

A few months ago, someone I follow on social media posted about Laos (寮國) taking delivery of their first HSR train. My jaw hit the floor, because I had never in my life considered the possibility of HSR in SE Asia. But also Laos???? 

So I began to dive into this rabbit hole, and discovered there’s actually several plans for HSR systems in SE Asia. Of course there’s China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI or B&R, 一帶一路), but there’s also a plan put forward by ASEAN (東盟), of which China is also a member. There’s proposals to connect all of Asia with HSR, and there’s rumblings about connecting India, too. 

Thailand’s been doing extensive work on their infrastructure, rail, HSR and ports. And then there’s some interesting things going on with Malaysia and Singapore, who apparently made a deal, exchanged money, called off the deal, returned the money, and then one year later are discussing the deal again

Back to the Old Normal?

As the covid-19 restriction policy has been loosened a bit, it feels like we could soon be back to "normal" life. But are we ready to welcome back our "old normal"? 

There has been a bunch of discussions about anxiety around going back to normal: 

。Some people expressed their anxiety towards re-attending social events after months of life without social interaction. 

。Some people worried that their work-life balance would be interrupted and that their quality of life would be crushed as they go back to a 9 to 5 office life. 

For me personally, I feel like we have taken a big rest and should be prepared for another phase of life, which is as usual fast-paced, productivity-oriented and success-driven. And this time it will definitely become tougher. 

 

Let's read this month's article: We shouldn’t go back to “normal.” Normal wasn’t good enough.

But there’s a second category of worry here. And this one, arguably, might be worth cultivating: the worry about returning to a global normal we’d rather not come back to. The pandemic broke open public discourse around issues that were either typically sidestepped — mental health struggles, for instance — or accepted with little resistance, like the rigidity of the modern workday. Will returning to normal life mean sweeping these hard conversations back under the rug?

As University of San Diego student Lily Yates told me, “I think people’s increased willingness to intentionally care more for their mental health during the pandemic reveals the problem of just how taboo it is during ‘normal’ times. We shouldn’t need to cite a global pandemic to take extra time for ourselves and set necessary boundaries at work and school. The idea that everyone is ‘okay’ at all times — and that we should pretend we are if we’re not — has been shattered, and it should stay that way.” 

John Berger About the Naked and the Nude

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. In John Berger's Ways of seeing, he argues that a woman’s social presence is very different from that of a man. Men treat women as objects. Men survey women, and how a woman presents herself determine how she will be treated.

In European oil painting, nude is an ever-recurring subject that particularly manifests how women have been seen as a sight. In today’s discussion, we will take a closer look at some of these paintings and discuss how certain ways of seeing construct women's sense of themselves and the world.

1.

Crème de la crème: the essence of life

 "In French, they have an expression: crème de la crème. ... The cream of the cream. It means the best of the best. The most important essence of life—that’s the crème de la crème. Get it? The rest is just boring and worthless." -- First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami 

Crème de la crème is quoted from Haruki Murakami's short novel First Person Singular. The full story drags one into Murakami's typically weird weird (in a good sense) world: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/cream

 

However, today we are not going to talk about the story. We will be delving into the topic of the essence of life, that is, or as Murakami called it, the crème de la crème.

 

Here is an overview of today's discussion:

1. What would you say is the essence of life or 'the cream of the cream'? 
2. Is it the 'cream of the cream' really the thing that makes our life good? 
3. What constitutes a good life? What are the elements? 
4. How does one approach creating a good life? Does it take time to learn? How do you learn it and where do you learn from? 

 

Rethinking Our Identity

Today's Guide

✨Be prepared to jump out of boiling water 

You probably have heard of this story. If you put a frog in lukewarm water and slowly heat it up, it won’t survive. The situation is changing but the frog lacks the ability to rethink it. A warm bath then becomes a death trap. 

Are we smarter than frogs? Are we able to sense these slow-boiling pots and get out of them? Probably not, if we are reluctant to rethink, as Grant suggested. 

So what to rethink exactly? 

You can rethink your career, your habits, your relationships and your identities. Plan for rethinking as if you are going to the doctor for an annual checkup. Nothing goes wrong normally, and you can keep working on whatever you’re up to. 

✨An identity checkup 

In today’s discussion, we will focus on rethinking of identity. Let’s watch the video again starting from 5:00. 

His story is relatable, isn’t it? You might have a similar version. There are some roles we desperately want to fit into, and yet we struggle a lot seeing ourselves in these roles. A fancy psychological term “identity foreclosure” was introduced here. Identity foreclosure refers to a situation when you settle too early on a sense of who you are and close your mind to alternatives selves.  It happens when you reject asking yourself with the thought, “If I am not a _______, who am I?“ The blank for Grant is 'diver'. But you can turn this question into an actual inquiry:

“If I am not a _______, who am I?“ (share)

✨Know your values 

But how? Grant’s method is simple but inspiring. He started by asking himself, what are my values? For him, his values were to grow, excel and contribute. 

Okay, so here let us take some seconds to think about a question: What are my values? 

Discerning where his values lie, Grant realized that he needn’t be a professional diver to grow, excel and contribute. Diving is a passion, not the purpose. By identifying his values, he opened his mind to new possible identities. Freeing himself from an old identity, he got time to dig into something else. Later on he became a psychologist, a professor and a amateur magician, where he grows, excels and contributes. 

Some questions to consider: Is your path leading you to these values? Does your current position help cultivate your prospects? Are you settling for a relationship that fails to comply with what you cherish the most?

The Pleasure of Ownership

Today, we are going to see how much pleasure we get from owning things. 

First, share an item and its story.  It can be a light bulb, a fan, a desk, a laptop, an oven, a CD player, a bicycle, a rice cooker, a pair of shoes, a coat, or anything, really. 

Second, recall where and when you got this item and assess its qualities.

And finally, evaluate how much pleasure you get from owning this product.  

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Here is the format: 

1. Item (Take a Picture)

2. How long

3. Special qualities

4. Reflection
    1) Please evaluate your pleasure in owning it
        How often do you use this item? Do you take special care of it? How? How often?
        If it wears out, what will you feel? 
        Are you likely to purchase it again? 
    2) Share your habits or rules of purchasing

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Rethink under the Pandemic: Who are meritocratic "winners" and "losers" and how are they created?

Watch this video →Michael Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit

Meritocracy deepens the conflict and divide between "winners" and "losers". According to Sandel, we have to rethink three aspects of our civic life: The role of college, the dignity of work and the meaning of success.

Here's some questions we'll discuss:
1. The dignity of work: "What you learn makes what you earn." "The money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good." Do you agree or disagree?

2. The meaning of success: How is success defined in a meritocracy? Do we live in a meritocracy? What is a better system? What's the meaning of success to you?

3. What is the heart of Meritocratic Ideal?

4. What does Sandel mean by "The hubris of merit"?

5. According to Sandel, meritocracy is corrosive to the common good. What common good may it be? How have definitions of 'common good' possibly changed during the Pandemic?

6. The role of college: Nearly two-third of Americans don't have a four-year college degree. Is a four-year college degree necessary? What is the role of university? What's the problem of creating an economy that makes a university diploma a necessary condition of dignified work and a decent life?

7. Why do you think Michael Sandel calls it "the tyranny of merit"? Why 'tyranny'?

The Moral Dilemma for Self-driving cars: Who should be protected?

Driverless cars are rapidly growing in popularity around the world. Have you ever thought of having one? And before you purchase, have you ever wondered who this self-drving car will preferentially protect in a car accident: its passengers or pedestrians?

Moral Machine is a moral test designed by MIT Media Lab to gather human perspective on scenarios that self-driving cars will encounter. Go ahead and do it. As you play, make a note of your feelings. Are you uncomfortable? Are you satisfied? Are you convinced? Or are you confused? It will be useful in our discussion this week.

Why are we free yet unhappy?

Our material today was excerpted from Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm.

Warm up:
Today we're going to talk about freedom.

• Three words to describe freedom
• When was the last time you felt like you were free?
• Do you think you are free now? How about compared to your younger self?
• Do you think a child has more freedom?
• Do you feel like you have more freedom living in Taiwan rather than somewhere else?

Our Malady

In Our Malady, historian Timothy Snyder shares his personal experience of struggling to navigate America’s healthcare system during a serious illness, providing shocking insights into racial and income inequality that continue to plague Americans. Below are extensive exerpts from the interview, I don't expect we'll be able to discuss all of them, but hopefully most!

Congressional Inquiry into Health Insurance

Rep. Katie Porter: What I'd like to do now, Mr. Bradway, is I'd like for you to please explain to the American public why you and four other executives deserve to pay yourselves tens of million dollars each year. I've got an empty whiteboard ready to take down your justifications.
Amgen CEO Robert Bradway: I recognize that that's a considerable sum of money. I would, of course, point out that I don't have any direct input to my compensation: that's derived by the board, and it’s the board to a vote of the shareholders who overwhelmingly supported the compensation package for me and the other main executive officers–
Rep. Katie Porter: Reclaiming my time, sir. Do you not know why you're getting hundreds of millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars a year? What is the justification? I'd like to show the American people.
Amgen CEO Robert Bradway: Our compensation is consistent with competitive positions at other companies-
Rep. Katie Porter: Mr. Bradway, reclaiming my time. “The other guy gets paid too much too” isn't a justification. I'd like to hear what you do to deserve $124 million in salary–you and your top five executives–over a three year period?
Amgen CEO Robert Bradway: Well, more than 90%- Speaker: Gentlelady’s time has expired. The gentleman may respond to her question.
Amgen CEO Robert Bradway: More than 90% of my compensation is based on performance measures that include how our shares perform relative to the market, and our compensation program is aligned with that of our owners, our share owners. So, a large part of my compensation reflects the fact that we've been creating value for our share owners by advancing innovative medicines like those that we have on the marketplace today.
Rep. Katie Porter: I wish you would focus on creating value for sick patients, Mr. Bradway, not just your shareholders. I yield back.

Pain
Tim Snyder: The bit of book that you're talking about, I'm starting from my own problems with pain, basically. By a problem with pain, I don't mean that I have a lot of physical pain. That's true. But, what I meant is my inability to talk about it.

In the story of my illness, a lot of things go wrong and a lot of them weren’t the fault of individual doctors or nurses. I think generally, they were the fault of a system which makes it impossible for doctors and nurses to work, and maybe we'll go into some of those details and some of that structure. But some of the problem was that repeatedly, I was unable to tell people that I hurt a lot.

Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

I want to talk about these two images, and what they might mean to you:

AOC

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of the U.S. House of Representatives, experienced sexist microagression from one of her colleagues (described in the article below). She was originally going to blow it off, because, like all women, she's experienced this so often that it hardly seems worth the effort to deal with it. However, when the man who attacked her decided to do a half-assed non-apology on the floor of the House, she decided to address it. This video captures her entire speech. 

Because her name is really long, everyone abbreviates it to AOC, and this is how she's most often referred to on social media.

 

Following the Rules

Rules and Rule Breaking
We're going to look at how nations and individuals think about rules both in moments of crisis and in everyday interactions. Cultural attitudes about rule following and rule breaking shape our lives in all kinds of ways, from the tidiness of our homes to our political preferences to our approach to stopping the spread of a pandemic.

Rules for:
Crossing the street
Dress codes
Littering/chewing gum
Wearing Shoes in Banks/Stores/Public places
Being on time for a meeting (In Brazil, when they want people to show up at the actual listed time, they say it's on 'British Time'.)
Cleaning up the stadium after a sports match

Two Types of people?
VEDANTAM: We are so familiar with these differences between groups that we have movies and television shows that are built around these themes. These differences also show up in our domestic lives and in workplaces.

GELFAND: You can think about how strict or permissive we are from many different perspectives - from national perspective, from organizations, even our own households. In the book, I talk about how we all have our own preference for the kind of Muppet we want to be. Some people are order Muppets.
...
They really like rules. They manage their impulses. And they really like a lot of order and structure. And then on the flip side, some people are chaos Muppets.
...
They tend to not really notice rules. They are more risk taking and impulsive. And they're more tolerant of ambiguity.

It causes a lot of conflict between people. Think about parents who are trying to raise kids, and they have different ideas in terms of how strict they should be or finances. Or even how you load the dishwasher, I found in my household, can get you a little flak. So I think it's important to really look at this as a aspect of culture that affects us all the time, from our nations to our households.

The Labor Theory of Property, or, What Exactly is Intellectual Property?

The excerpts below are all from this article: Terra Nullius

The Labor Theory of Property
In 1660, John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government, where he set out to resolve the seeming conflict between individual property rights (which he valorized) and the Bible (ditto), which set out the principle that God had created the Earth and its bounty for all of humanity. How could a Christian claim to own something personally when God had intended for everyone to share in His creation?

Locke’s answer was the “labor theory of property”: private property is the result of a human taking an unclaimed piece of the common property of humanity and mixing it with their labor (each human owns their body and thus the labor of that body), creating a property cocktail: one part unimproved nature, one part human sweat of the brow, mix well and serve in perpetuity.

'Aloha Poke'
More than a thousand years before John Locke was born, the people of the island of Kahiki coined the term “Aloha,” which is present in all the languages of the region today: it’s an untranslatable word that conveys a beautiful, complex blend of emotions and sentiments, so iconic that adherence to the “Aloha Spirit” has been Hawaiian state law since 1986.

In the 1970s (300 years after the publication of Two Treatises of Government) Hawaiian chefs expressed their aloha spirit in a dish called “poke,” a delicious mix of raw fish, served with seaweed, rice or greens, roasted and ground kukui nut meat, and other variations. In 2012, this dish spread to the mainland and mutated further, acquiring many new and delicious variants.

In 2016 (centuries after “aloha” and Locke, decades after “poke”) Zach Friedlander founded a restaurant called “Aloha Poke” in Chicago, and in the summer of 2018 Friedlander’s successor, Chris Birkinshaw, retained the law firm of Olson and Cepuritis Ltd to threaten Hawaiian chefs operating poke restaurants, insisting that they remove “aloha” from their business names. Eventually, the furor prompted Aloha Poke to issue a half-assed, self-pitying apology and to back off a little from its threats.

Friedlander defended the company’s actions and dismissed criticism as a “witch hunt” and “fake news”. [In their response] you can see the specter of John Locke haunting every word. Friedlander, his staff, and his investors put real work into making a midwestern chain of poke restaurants identified with the name “Aloha Poke.” These unimproved words had been around forever and no one else was building a national empire with them: by getting to the idea first and mixing their labor with it, they had transformed the bounty of nature into private property. This odious specter haunts much of the world today, and it has plenty of company, for this conception of property rights has sent millions to their graves.

The Eight Stages of Development

8 Stages of Development by Erik Erikson

Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development
Erikson maintained that personality develops in a predetermined order through eight stages of psychosocial development, from infancy to adulthood. During each stage, the person experiences a psychosocial crisis which could have a positive or negative outcome for personality development. These crises are of a psychosocial nature because they involve psychological needs of the individual (i.e., psycho) confronting society (i.e., social). According to the theory, successful completion of each stage results in a healthy personality and the acquisition of basic virtues. Basic virtues are characteristic strengths which the ego can use to resolve subsequent crises. Failure to successfully complete a stage can result in a reduced ability to complete further stages and therefore a more unhealthy personality and sense of self. The good neews is, these stages can still be resolved successfully at a later time.

Stage Psychosocial Crisis Basic Virtue Age
1. Trust vs. Mistrust Hope 0 - 1½
2. Autonomy vs. Shame Will 1½ - 3
3. Initiative vs. Guilt Purpose 3 - 5
4. Industry vs. Inferiourity Competency 5 - 12
5. Identity vs. Role Confusion Fidelity 12 - 18
6. Intimacy vs. Isolation Love 18 - 40
7. Generativity vs. Stagnation Care 40 - 65
8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair Wisdom 65+

Extending Maslow's Hierarchy

This article is a review of a book called The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity by Eugene McCarraher. There’s some interesting concepts brought forward on this piece we could reflect on in terms of our current globally imposed economic and social structure.
First, here are some excerpts from the article.

A stable material and social infrastructure gives us the time and space to thrive as individuals
In 1943 the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed his famous hierarchy of needs. The banal premise is that some needs are prior to others. We need food and shelter, for instance, before we can seek friendship and love. And only once we’ve attained those can we attain the summit of the pyramid: the Shangri-La of “self-actualization,” defined as doing what one “is fitted for” and becoming “more and more what one is.” This vision of human flourishing has become ubiquitous in the decades since Maslow’s paper. A regular feature of school curricula and self-help guides, it has filtered into our everyday understanding of the meaningful life: one in which a stable material and social infrastructure gives us the time and space to thrive as individuals.

Raising Responsible Kids

Let's talk about this quote (p. 3-5) from Positive Discipline: The Classic Guide to Helping Children Develop Self-Discipline, Responsibility, Cooperation, and Problem-Solving Skills.

This book is 25 years old, and so lots of its content has already been incorporated into teaching and parenting practice. Nevertheless, the pages quoted below intersect nicely with a question I've been asking myself lately, which is: how do the radical changes society has been through in the last 20-30 years affect how we raise our children? Regardless of in the US or Taiwan, the teachers parents I know struggle with how much freedom to give kids, how much guidance, and where and what kind of limits to impose. This passage gives an interesting insight into the cultural source of some of our challenges.


Why don't today's children develop the same kinds of responsibility and motivation that seemed more prevalent in children many years ago?
There are many possible explanations, such as broken homes, too much television, video games, and working mothers.  These factors are so common in our society today that the situation would seem rather hopeless if they really explained our current challenges with children (And we all know of many single and working parents who are doing a great job raising their children because they use effective parenting skills.) Rudolf Dreikurs had another theory. 

There are many major changes that have taken place in society over the past few years that more directly explain the differences in children today.  The outlook is very encouraging because, with awareness and desire, we can compensate for these changes and in doing so can also eliminate some of the problems that many think are caused by broken homes, too much television and working mothers.

Equality not dominance/submissiveness
The first major change is that adults no longer give children an example or model of submissiveness and obedience.  Adults forget that they no longer act the way they used to in the 'good old days'. Remember when Mom obediently did whatever Dad said, or at least gave the impression she did, because it was the culturally acceptable thing to do?  In the good old days few people questioned the idea that Dad's decisions were final.
Because of the human rights movement, this is no longer true.  Rudolf Dreikurs pointed out. "When Dad lost control of Mom, they both lost control of the children." All this means is that Mom quit giving the children a model of submissiveness.  This is progress. Many things about the 'good old days' were not so good.

Is it possible to live without the Big Five?

The 5 big tech companies have a big impact on our society, but how difficult it is to avoid them? The author of these articles tries to cut each of the tech companies out of her life, one each week, and then the last week, she tries to cut all of them out. She encounters hilarious and also thought-provoking obstacles each time.
The story is worth reading in full, but below I’ve pulled out some of the more interesting facts and conclusions, for us to discuss.


Amazon:
Amazon reportedly controls 50 percent of online commerce, which means half of all purchases made online in America, which is obscene.
Amazon is not just an online store—that’s not even the hardest thing to cut out of my life. Its global empire also includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the vast server network that provides the backbone for much of the internet, as well as Twitch.tv, the broadcasting behemoth that is the backbone of the online gaming industry, and Whole Foods, the organic backbone of the yuppie diet.
AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.

CDNs obscure AWSs
Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block.
With the VPN up and running, I start to wonder why so many sites still work. Airbnb, for example, is a famed user of AWS, but I can search for a Thanksgiving vacation home there. I email Airbnb to ask if it still uses AWS for hosting, and a spokesperson confirms the company does. (I also could have confirmed it with this cool tool, which tells you about the digital provenance of a website.)
That’s how Dhruv and I discover a major flaw in our blocking technique. It turns out many sites, in addition to using a company like AWS to host their digital content, employ a secondary service called a content delivery network, or CDN, to load web pages faster.
If a website uses AWS in combination with a non-Amazon CDN, my blocker sees the IP address used by the CDN and lets that AWS-hosted content slip through. When I check with Gizmodo Media Group’s tech team, I discover that our own sites are hosted by AWS and use Fastly as a CDN. Just like Airbnb, Gizmodo is sneaking past my blocker.

Bad News

We're going to play a game where we create fake news, and talk about it as we play.

Bad News

An article from the University of Cambridge about this game: Fake news ‘vaccine’ works: ‘pre-bunk’ game reduces susceptibility to disinformation

“We wanted to see if we could pre-emptively debunk, or ‘pre-bunk’, fake news by exposing people to a weak dose of the methods used to create and spread disinformation, so they have a better understanding of how they might be deceived.

“This is a version of what psychologists call ‘inoculation theory’, with our game working like a psychological vaccination.”

The study, published today in the journal Palgrave Communications, showed the perceived reliability of fake news before playing the game had reduced by an average of 21% after completing it. Yet the game made no difference to how users ranked real news.

“We find that just fifteen minutes of gameplay has a moderate effect, but a practically meaningful one when scaled across thousands of people worldwide, if we think in terms of building societal resistance to fake news,” said van der Linden.