中国人喜欢天才，喜欢将个人成功归结于偶然的，基因性的突变，或是天时地利人和导致的异状。芸芸众生是正常情况，而做出一些成绩的人往往在人们眼中是高不可攀的超人。

这在中英互联网的论坛中就可以看出。有时，我会搜索一些学者在中文网站的材料，来看看学者的中文名字，以及自己是否以前就通过翻译作品了解过此人。通常，中文语境中的这些学者或知名人物，在人们口中，在百科全书中，都被写成奇人：天才中的天才，神童，非凡。仲永才是大家膜拜的对象，这似乎是一种对神的追求，而因为没有公认的神，因此大家在人中狩猎神的影子。

这样一来，一旦某人被贴上了超人类的标签，ta就很容易借力真的成为超人。当然，这在每个文化中都多少有所显现，但中国人对神人的推举还是更为明显。既然神人已现，那众生的能力就体现在是否能辨别出神人，为了证明自己的识人功夫，众人又更乐意将自己选中的神人吹捧得更高一等。这倒和赛马有异曲同工之趣。

自然，人天赋有别，总有人在某一处做得特别好，这是正常情况。而一旦将这归功于天才，天选，那就将众生和天才中间隔了一堵墙，这也方便地成为划分群体的方法。有的人天生不同，所以他们能做某事。这对于激发一种长久的、非激情所推动的、寻常的创造力有阻碍的作用。成绩总归不是靠一时兴起能做成的，压抑中的爆发不是长久的创造之力。每个人都应当有一种自知，即自己有某种天赋，而自己的努力，前半生是将它发现出来，后半生是使用它，驾驭它，完成自己被赋予的工作。

也有很多情况是，某人的天赋与ta希望从事的事业有别。这样的情况下，此人也许在自己愿做的领域无法达到擅长领域那样的成绩，但长远来看，不论是成就还是个人幸福，都远大于短期让其做擅长但不热爱的事来得好。不仅好，而且善，这是对人的仁慈。

A good thing of studying at the university is that you enter into a universe of terminologies and structures, which are transferable from discipline to discipline, and gradually you can take advantage of the existing materials in your brain and get into unknown fields with less pain. 

Studying outside of this structure is certainly doable, but then all your knowledge structures would be based on personal expressions, then it would be harder to transfer the skills and knowledge. But transferability is always naturally ongoing, and that is why a lot of very old wise people would tell you a story of them doing something completely random when they were young and they’d use that wisdom for every other aspects of their lives. 

I definitely find it a lot easier to do inter-disciplinary study at the university than in workplace, in the street or in socializing. Because outside of the institution, all wisdoms and knowledge are expressed in their own ways, so the merging process can only happen in brain in a more abstract manner. Sometimes you know that you are employing your skills from another field to benefit your action in another, but you cannot make it clear what that is exactly.

The thing that is the most transferable in my humble opinion is music, and I learned more from it about stuff I study in academia than anything else. Any music, rock, classic, popular, rap, techno. It teaches me patterns, and the responsibility of academics is to find patterns, or assume patterns and prove them right or wrong. Music teaches me both science and humanities. It also teaches me to acknowledge my humbleness and at the same time take advantage of my limited cognitive ability. 

Academia is a process of baptizing phenomenons and giving them names. Names are keys to dictionaries: they evoke something much larger than a simple word, so that you store and converse in a more concise manner. After baptizing, they are dictated into existence, they are cognitively created, and now they have a nature, which is the nature of how we understand it. 

This is a process of mapping the world with language. Once that happens, you can play around with the language and make magical things happen. 

I am often amazed at how the simple questions of a subject are far more difficult to answer than the complex ones. By simpler ones I mean the ones that a layman would ask to a professional. This is true for most of the disciplines in which I’ve worked, and true for most of the areas in which I have interest. 

The only way to proceed when one cannot answer the simple questions is to dive in and manage to conquer the detailed and concrete ones. For literature, when one cannot understand the meaning of stories or the aesthetics of language, they go ahead and read them, analysing the rhythmic patterns, the symbolic purposes and story structures. From here one can more confidently look back to the initial questions and try again to answer them. If it still doesn’t work, one then has to keep digging in and come back after a while in the same manner. 

Mathematics too. It is very hard to answer questions such as why it is legit to put numerical problems in geometrical forms, what is the difference between 0 and 1, or why prime numbers behave like this. But what we can do is to manipulate our mathematical tools and play the numbers or the shapes around. We can even use the solutions of these questions for practical applications. The juniors try to answer the complex questions, with ornate details and meticulous calculations. The seniors can sit down and think about the simpler ones, and wait for the time to come when they have an inspiration to approach them. 

From this perspective mathematics sound a lot like what the epic poets do: summoning the muse in order to approach the unapproachable, and give credits to some existance larger than themselves that mobilizes the poets’ hands to embody a field of knowledge. 

That is also why I find sufficient reasons to toil when I don’t have a clue for what is going on in the big picture. I used to analyse pedantically every words with their etymology, phonetics and so on. That was something that I could do. The bigger and simpler questions can then be approached when one grasps the shape and mechanisms of building blocks and see exactly how a microcosm works. 

When even the details cannot be understood, most pedagogy would train kids with rote memories and skills, and that is also the only thing left that can be done. All in all, that which is within one’s capability is worth doing. And it is worth putting time and effort no matter how trivial that seems to be. 

All experts in a subject needs an intuition to be extrordinary, instead of being just skilled technicians. This discussion has some more relevance today as artificial intelligence is threatening to invade the cognitive arena. It’s certainly true that a collation of information is powerful, but I doubt that intuition is possible for machines. 

Mathematics is something about which I find intuition to be fundamentally important. Without intuition, mathematics is the work of a drudge, something that is achieveable with automatic force. I don’t mean the boring part of the work is not important, on the contrary, the heavy-lifting labour is what separates a mathematician from a math amateur, but intuition is what separates a math genius from a math practitioner. 

Humanities study needs intuition as well, which sounds like common sense. But intuition here needs more careful handling, because it can be abused due to its high accessibility. Take literature for example, the essence of poetic work is to influence people by creating emotional fluctuation, which can lead to an excess of intuition for readers and researchers. The job of a professional is to differentiate intuitions and discard most of them. Of course, for mathematics and science, this is also true, but as humanities seem to have a low threshold to let intuition happen, professionals in this field ought to be more careful in choosing the correct intuition to wield. 

Or I should more accurately state it as: what matters is the good intuitions. Crudely speaking, bad ones are either true or false, and the true but bad ones are trivial, which wastes our precious time that can be spent with better stuff like idling.   

If a piece of music is composed with an emotional scheme, then the playing should be more strictly controlled. For this kind of music, I prefer the ones with passion to the ones with sorrow, which has something to do with my personality. In any case, I like expressions that are honest and controlled. If it is not controllable, then it is embarrasing to express it out loud with forms like music or poetry. I do get emotional with language sometimes, but I try not to read or use them afterwards. I might do it as a chore to clean up my cognitive space. They are more functional than aesthetic. 

Language surely can be a downpour of emotions, but that is bad taste. The Romantists advocate it, but they themselves are decently controlled with their own works. They are trained to a point where their utmost uncontrolled state is still controlled to a high standard. 

I enjoy listening to music composed with a strong musical regularity, though I also listen to wild compositions, but they have to be played by someone tethered by a rope. Their task is to realize something that has a tendency to chaos, but they regulate it with their enshrined force of restraint. 

You cannot simply go wild with art. That is just insanity. Poetry recently has a fashion to go haywire, which is very unfortunate. 

I don’t even think that is a high-brow aesthetic standard, as some might argue. If you go have a lunch in a humble household, you will almost certainly hear the most down-to-earth conversations and eat with the most honest utensils, which have their solemn beauty. On the contrary, I  find a lot of art created for the wealthier class going towards flamboyance or hollow, or both. 

But when art is created for a much higher purpose, for example, theology, then the hubris is oftentimes much reduced. Although it can be still be played with an individualistic manner and fail the intention of the composer.

Unfortunate event alone is not tragedy. Tragedy is the understanding that tragic events are exactly the same ones that consists of what people might call hope. If tragedy is eliminated, then hope goes away too. The deep sadness exists not in melancholy phrases, but everywhere else. It nurtures hearts, makes people laugh and dance. It is the crucial nutrition. 

There is tragedy in vivacity. But there isn’t tragedy in grandiloquence and sentimentality. If any, there hides a lesser form of comedy, something like a farce, forcing you to laugh, like a tyrant. 

As a friend pointed out in my other article on the Swiss depression, the Swiss education system is not designed to nurture academia solely, which I might have implied there. That is a valuable suggestion to me, and he was correct, although that wasn’t what I meant, I wrote it insufficiently that there was indeed this implicature. But instead of editing it to make it clearer, I think that topic deserves another article on the specific subtopic of morality and legislation.

What I wanted to say then, instead of the problem of education, is actually the situation where a society sets the bar of morality too high as if it were legislation. This is something that I used to think would be good to the human soul: when the bare-minimum legislation is guaranteed, a higher collective morality is a sign of a progressive (a modifier that I used to think was positive, now neutral, if not frowned upon) and better society, because then the morality is motivated by a sense of voluntary integrety. I still think highly about morality, but only when it is followed voluntarily on the microcosmic scale. If people actually think of morality as if it were set in stone, then the de facto effect is that the moral rules are kept with the same standard of legislation, and it can backfire – people can be depressed when they don’t achieve the high moral standard as what the society expects.

The problem is not morality, but the scale of its rigidity. A trite but sufficient metapher is eating fruit – a good amount of it is good for heath, but way too much or way too prescriptive would cause other problems. The question to be asked is then: how much is good enough?

A higher moral standard can also trigger a high standard on mannerism, and thus hinder social interaction, because socializing causes awkwardness, faux pas, and slips of the tongue. A dynamic socializing process is to socialize, err, and reflect. But if the standard is high enough, then quitting the process once for all is the safest bet.

Again, my opinion on Switzerland doesn’t mean I don’t approve of this society. On the contrary, I repect it very much. But I see there are some problems in the society that are causing it harm, namely the mental well-being issue that isn’t caused by material scarcity, and thus cannot be solved by material abundance.

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the angels are “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” and this is what I think a society should tolerant. Above the bar of legislation, everybody has the freedom to fall, albeit the choice of not falling is what makes people grow.

On the other extreme, if the morality is not only considered legislation, but also made as legislation, then it produces a corrupted society, which has many examples in the history worldwide.

I am very happy to have talked to a friend yesterday who brought up to me the “chà bù duō (CBD)” concept in Chinese. This is something I often think about as well. Though most of the time the word being mentioned is used to make fun of the Chinese nonchalance with a negative tone, this is one of the central concepts that make up of the Chinese spirit. It is one of the mental instruments that the Chinese use in either good or bad ways. 

If you think about CBD, it shares some meanings with the Taoist philosophy of qí wù (齐物), the equality of things. Zhuangzi advocates the identicalness of all being, either material or spiritual. Much like the monism in western philosophy, but with a big difference that Zhuangzi doesn’t establish a hierarchy among beings despite that they are identical in nature, but promotes the essential equality on all fronts. This by no way means equality in a social distribution manner (social status, wealth – the superficial equality), but epistemologically. This means, for example, a corrupted environment can be identical to a paradisal one from a Taoist perspective, so that a Taoist is able to live in it without being currupted, and takes action in it. (Many interpretations believe Zhuangzi doesn’t promote action-taking, as in “wú wéi”, but I take on the school of thought that argues wú wéi doesn’t avoid action.)

Zhuangzi believes a truely free spirit is xiāo yáo – which doesn’t have a counterpart in English. It is a status of being, living with the disturbance of life but happy and carefree at the same time. As opposed to the buddhist carefree, which is achieved by reclusion and meditaion, xiāo yáo encourage the spirits to face the complexity of the social reality and take action, but remaining a wholesome mind at the same time. A person who achieves xiāo yáo can then live and act in any environment with a noble heart that is incorruptable. 

But Taoism is also an ‘academic’ philosphy, which means its multilayered meaning is only taught at institutions, grabbed by even fewer who are interested in this school of thought and make their efforts. The classical written system is historically removed from the common people, leaving them unable to read with the knowledge of spoken language. The written system is not only ideographic, but also with different syntax and lexicon from the spoken one, which means one cannot understand classical texts at all without a formal education. But after the emergence of Taoist religion based on the philosophy, many of its concepts start to spread out of the elite circle and be adopted into the common spoken language but with lesser meanings. 

Here I don’t mean CBD comes from Taoism, because I am in no way an expert in Chinese linguistics nor philosophy, nor have I done my research with historical evidence. But as a Chinese, the concept of qí wù, which I learned from school as a classical concept, and CBD, which is a prevalent mentality among the daily Chinese conversations, bear a lot of similarity. It is also possible that these two concepts cement each other bottem-up and top-down. 

The common usage of CBD in daily Chinese has nothing ontological but almost always about practicality. The Chinese society, through out its history, has almost always been an authoritarian one with clear social hierarchy and structures. With a huge population, the typical pyramid shape of classes, and the argrarian economy, a large part of the society consists of common people with predictable income and career paths (this doesn not mean stablility in any sense, but they are mostly aware of what at best they can receive and achieve; it is not strict immobility either, but upward mobility through imperial exams is extremely chancy compared to the population). It means they have to be ecnomical with their resources and use them with priorities in mind. CBD is often used in situations where the events in discussion are not important enough in their priority list, such as the color of their wall, which is the example that my friend shared with me. White and pink can be CBD, because the family might have more problems on their plate, and too little time and resources to spend. 

But CBD can also be about situations that seem very important to most people. The difference of life and death can also be said to be CBD, and in this case it is much more similar to qí wù in Taoism. The typical Chinese would take death as factual, and the emotion around it is more considered bēi (悲) than sadness. bēi is sadness in a much less performative manner but considered a human status that is throughout their course of lives. I often discuss death with my aging grandpa, who was not educated in his youth due to the revolutions. He would frequently tell me life and death are CBD. 

Admittedly, CBD is also abused in many professional settings. With the rapid modernisation of the Chinese society, a lot of work require accuracy instead of flexibility. CBD could also be used as excuses for subpar performance, which is one of the reasons for CBD’s bad reputation. 

I often think about why human suffer. I understand it concerning disasters: flood, famine, oppression, earthquake, born-disabilities. But in Switzerland I used to have no clue. I see suffering at a disproportionate level over social wealth and stability. People are taken care of by a well-designed society; they have rights and opportunities; there are high-quality materials for almost every hobby known in civilization. It seems to not make sense. Till this moment, I still don’t fully understand, but I have some thoughts.

John Adam once said that the purpose of their generation studying politics is for the next one flourish in art, science and truth*, though I probably paraphrased it considerably badly. From what I observed, Switzerland is indeed a place that has realized those visions. The education system is meticulously orchastrated to facilitate all kinds of talents and dreams. It’s not an exaggeration here that no matter what a kid wants to become, there is an established path to achieve that. There aren’t too many political complexities to disturb their minds, and when there are, there are also outlets for the grievances.

At this point, I’ve already unfolded one of my hypotheses: as a counter reality to what that famous person said in the beginning of this paragraph, the young in Switzerland is left only with the possibility of pursuing art, science and truth. But the problem is, not everybody is talented in this way. Just to be clear, firstly, I don’t mean metaphysics, science, and art are higher than other human pursuits; and secondly, I don’t think a world overloaded with pursuits is a good society. What I think is, however, in a complex society, there are positions for all forces, and this condition somehow is better for individual mental health. Imagine in a well-fledge film, there are many different ideologies, and some are inexcusably evil, but there are counter forces that hold the balance. Those dark sides are not some abstract mysterious force from the universe, they are just misplaced human pursuits. The bottom line in this kind of society is the law, which guarantees that these pursuits don’t cause disasters. Above that, the chaos is to some extent tolerated. This kind of society is dynamic, because there are frequent side-flipping, and that is also tolerated. But in a highly conditioned society, there are far higher constraints above the law that regulates human behavior, and those that fail to meet the bar gets dismissed easily. In other words, human pursuits are judged with a high standard, and human traits as well. This is not to say there are punishment for these subpar pursuits and traits, but they are commonly regarded as not good enough. In contrast, in a complex society, as long as the bare minimum is met, there isn’t a lot of competition in behaving and living in a perfect manner.

Besides, people here don’t have a lot to fight for compared to the rest of the world. Of course, there are universal ones like environmental causes, but that aside. Bad news for this good news is people here watch the world burn but can not do much about it. Imagine living in an enclave of a warring state, the fear is the horror. When people here industriously recycle every piece of aluminum on a yoghurt package, the rest of the world is mass producing consumer products which are only turned into garbadge weeks after purchase. Or even worse, weapons. Of course, people can still do something here, for example, keep reducing the already tiny amount of unrecyclable garbage, but the hulk is outside of the room. This fear is unsolvable.

Another hypothesis is individual dormancy caused by how well-established the society is. In a complex society, one has to actively seek uncommon resources and alternative methods to get thing done; while here getting things done is a process of following formalities. The latter gradually moulds a passive psychology, since the essence of getting things done is in waiting instead of acting. I myself have noticed a significant change in my action-taking style ever since I moved here. As every minutiae is already thought of and prescribed a solution from an authority, I became a lot more passive both physically and mentally. It caused a lot of disturbance at first, so I channelled almost all my energy into academia, which seems to be the only realm for active problem-solving.

All things said, I still believe this is a good society. But I don’t see it as a perfect society, like what most mantra says. The thing is, one has to realize that even a good society is not good for everyone. It is good if one wants to channel their energy into pensive pursuits, which needs concerntration more than anything else. But if one has other talents that don’t fit into this society, they don’t need to persuade themselves into believing that it must be their fault, which does no good to their already self-doubting mental state. Besides that, one often feel guilty being born into a good society as if they owe something to people who are not lucky enough. It is an angelic mindset, but not necessary. Good people’s guilt don’t do anyone any good. Kindness is out of kindness. Offering doesn’t need to be driven by a delusional guilt, and human suffering, no matter their material condition, is all painful.

*I did some quick research on John Adam’s exact quote, and it goes: I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

I’ve been playing around with AI in academia for a while, and there are bunch of things that I think it can do and bunch of things it sucks.

• It spits good terminologies. Sometimes we don’t know how to dive into a topic because we don’t know there are vocabularies that describe the phenomenon or pattern, with which we can easily search and learn, and AI is handy in collating all those fancy terms that you wouldn’t easily know. Taking from here, one can find peer-reviewed resources to dig deeper.
• Caveat: not reliable for direct answers. I used it to answer my questions every now and then, and its answers even contradict themselves. Silver lining is that when reading them carefully, the incorrectness is obvious, but it can be time-consuming so not worth it.
• It can collate college course schedules for one to know in what sequence to learn a subject. Self-study sometimes get tricky when one follows a flexible schedule and at some point they cannot go forward because there are something they don’t know which is not a google-click away. Thus using college schedules is an easy method. Most colleges have their course schedules open for public so AI can rarely make huge mistakes. Even it make mistakes it’s not a big deal.
• Caveat: from here it’s better to seek for other resources (e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare etc).
• It gives good sentence parsing. For philosophical, mathematical texts, or generally any texts that are peer-reviewed and is meant to be understood (which excludes anything poetic), I use AI to help me parse them whenever I don’t understand. For a language model I guess that’s what it was meant to do at the first place.
• Caveat: It mansplains. But good thing is one can shut it up anytime they feel like.

I read a piece of news this morning, and it struck me as a bit surprising and confusing at first glance, so I tried to see it in topology to see whether there’s any ways to interprete it better.

The news went like this: some school teachers shared grievances over irrelevant responsibilities attached to their performance evaluation, which concerns new governmental incentives that applies to general citizens. In order to propogate the nudges, school teachers were ordered to encourage the students to ask their parents to adapt to them, and if it failed, the teachers would get public reprimand in school. Both the teachers and the parents complaint about it, and it triggered much criticism from the public as well. 

I draw a simple graph to represent this structure: 

In the graph we can see that there are several players in the interaction: government, school, teachers, students and parents, the edges represents some kind of connection, least of all, they know each other, but most possibly much more complicated.

For civil responsibilities, we can transform the graph into a digraph with arrows representing responsibility-taking direction. Each player in the field takes their own responsibilities, i.e., are reflexive, and at the same time there is a partial order existing among government, school, teacher and students.

These arrows can also be interpreted as “who directly imposes influences on the other’s decision-making.” Here, I am only taking consideration of obligations, not implicit influences like propoganda and rhetoric. And these decision-makings are all under the condition that their behaviors are legal, i.e., not breaching any rules that are forbidden by law.

We can see that in this power hierarchy, there isn’t a path from govenment to parents. The nudges can only influence the parents through softer methods to persuade them to make their own decisions, either by stimuli or rhetoric.

But at the same time, there are other layers of these same modes, as a multiplex network.

This layer represents a subtler relation among the multiple members. This is the human psyche that strive to get into someone else’s good books, for the benefit of future gain, either of political benefits, career growth, educational resouces, emotional bonding, etc. One could also say there are arrows too from teachers to students and teachers to parents, making them reciprocal relations, but the desires this way are not as strong as the other way around, so I omitted them for simplification purpose.

We can see that in this representation, there are two paths from parents to the government. The one who wants favor is in a less powerful position and the ones pointed to more powerful ones. Thus there emerges an established power system with the inversion of the arrows.

Here the hierarchy is established. And now the decision-making is no longer based upon a responsibility system but an inversive struture of favor-seeking. In other words, this favor-seeking human psyche is taken advantage of for executive purpose.

There are also two components that worth ponder about in this graph, namingly the one bounded by bureaucratical obligation (gov, school, teachers) and the one by moral, legal and emotional obligation (teachers, students, parents). The former one is an executive path and the latter one is not much so, and there could also be interesting findings. But I ran out of time, so I guess that’s it for now.