我似乎总在更加悲伤。我不愤怒了，我很少生气。我能理解周围发生的大部分事情，包括我自己曾经百思不得其解的部分。我无法愤怒了。我知道了自己的有限性，我也知道了别人的有限性，我知道了时空的有限性，我知道了自己的位置，所以我变得悲伤。

这些很难再去讲，毕竟悲伤是很无聊的。愤怒很有传播性，也很有娱乐性，是交朋友的催化剂。我在想，两个在同一场景一起愤怒的人，但凡他们那时有连接的渠道，他们一定会交个朋友，这是人之常情。

悲伤就不一样了，它那么的个人，那么的温柔，像一块医用棉布，包裹在我的身体外延，它保护者我的感官，让我不再有痛感，也让我不再狂热地爱上什么理智不允许的东西。它是说不出来的，因为不好听。聊悲伤的人让人感到遗憾，感到怜悯。谁也不想做被怜悯之人，除非情况必须这样不可。但凡不成为怜悯的对象，那就不要这样，不然谁的心里都不好受。

我的衣服也变成了很软的材料，配合着我的悲伤。我不再去穿那些硬挺的酷酷的夹克了，也不穿那些沉重的带有淡淡膻味的皮衣了，我穿羊绒、粘纤，我穿极细的棉料，我穿软塌塌掉在我身上的毛衫，它延长出的软毛蹭着我的肚子，让我感到那么的舒服，那么的悲凉。

我学了很多的东西，越学就越悲伤。学习多美好啊，让人充满了神性，求知多高尚啊。我在高尚使命的阴影下悄悄地悲伤，希望有一根极细的针能穿透这棉布，刺痛我的身上，让我流出血来，让我哭出来，让我喊叫，让我去玩了命地跑，让我自负地站在山顶认为自己如此伟大。我希望这样，但我已经没有这样的能力了。

我是一个很爱干净但是可以包容一定混乱的人。上帝讲，干净就在神圣的旁边，这话我是认同的。一个不干净的厕所于我就像犯了重罪，所以在公厕如果看到有人没有打扫干净，我也会全部整理干净再用。但混乱就不一样。

我在完全规整的空间是没有任何能力的。不只是创造的能力，也没有了活着的能力。我没办法说服自己起床去煎一只鸡蛋，我没有了做一个人的能力。我只想静止在那个完全规矩的空间，甚至不如死了才好，这样一切都更规矩了。我做不到活在全是规矩的环境里，这是我用了很多经验才意识到的事情。

我试过把书籍按照类别整理出来，分门别类，我就再也不想去读那些书了。分类已经耗尽了我对它们所有的耐心。反而如果随意将各种书散落在家里的不同地方，我会逐渐，像一只搬运米粒的蚂蚁一样，慢慢把它们读完。

我常因为持续受教育而感到自己似乎获得了更多的理性，但也常常在四望生活环境时明白，自己只不过是那个无法舍却本能的，喜欢一些混乱的，喜欢制造混乱的，喜欢散发混乱的人和事件的，常常为不混乱而懊恼的青年。档案柜是我最害怕的地方，看到它，我以为我已经死了。

这几天要在学校的系统选课，又要来计算一次各种学分。按理来说，受到了这么多年的教育，理应对行政事务十分熟练才对，可我依旧在做这些事的时候感到十分痛苦。我想，这也是一种被惯坏的表现吧。

聪明的学生可以更有效率地安排自己的生活，但这效率二字不论何时都让我恐惧，反而不想做事。比方看到学校课程模块的要求，一旦想到我可以更有效率地念完学位，压根连学都不想继续了。我遇到过很多聪明的人，聪明的行事风格，聪明的生活理念，全部都让我感到疲劳。似乎聪明二字已经成为了人类文明至高无上的伟业，但凡有节省时间或金钱的事而不为就成了蠢货。一切的行为都又了更加开化的做法，人想着法子要证明自己虽然曾是猴子，但是不会总是猴子。这比认为自己一直是猴子还要滑稽，我都不免要为此感到伤心。

计算机专业的课程是效率生意的推手，我们学习各种算法，将数学无底线地庸俗化，更好的算法就变成了证明聪明的脑袋的物证。让计算机更快地做事，人就获得了永垂不朽的纪念碑。转头想想，这些事真的要做吗？

全球的文明概念都由西方定义，其他民族的文明都成了奇花异草，可以拿来给西方的凯旋门装饰门面。人若想在这样的大潮中保留人的味道，就立刻成了耽误效率的傻瓜。人工智能的壮举让大家又一次欢呼着笑了出来，幸福就在眼前。而笨拙的我，还在为计算学分而烦恼。

I’m going back to China for the Chinese new year tomorrow and it feels very surreal. I don’t really know if I am happy to be in Switzerland, because I oftentimes find myself having opposite opinions on it within the time span of a few days. This is a completely new perspective to me because I usually have a firm opinion on my living environment as soon as I stay there for more than a week. But Switzerland is different. 

I guess it has something to do with two directly different parts of my personality. I am a complete nerd when it comes to hobbies. I dig deep. Switzerland is a heaven for that. The subjects I am studying are all my personal hobbies, which creates a little world for me, and it doesn’t even require me to set foot out of my little room of like 25 square meters. Yes, speaking of that, I am living very cheap, which I don’t care, on the contrary, I enjoy it, because when I immerse into my hobbies, space stops to make sense to me. My mental space expands infinitely, and my physical space stops to exist. I often feel like a brain functioning transcendentally when I study my beloved subjects. It is very organismatic, and yes, I just created that word. 

But I love people, that I can not change either. I don’t like myself when I spent time with myself for too long that I don’t even make efforts to interact with people in real life. I believe in connection, and that is something I think is more important than intelligence. To be fair, I don’t even study for intelligence, I know I am smart enough to learn what I like as much as possible, and that’s enough. I don’t need knowledge to improve my intelligence. I study for fun, and I don’t think there is any meaningful outcome in the pursuit of intellegence either. We are creatures who don’t even know what made us what we are, so there is no point in proving oneself. If I prove myself to be better, I am just proving some contingence to be better, and that is not my merit. Love however, is a whole different topic. I believe that human relation and love is always a nobler pursuit. But when I get too deep in study and research, I sometimes forget about it, because research is just too much fun. Sometimes when I raise my head in the library after 10 hours of reading and enjoying myself, I realize I have detached myself from a world that is genuinely worth being in. I’ve reduced the importance of physical space to nothing. I don’t like myself being like that. 

So there’s this dilemma. I like Switzerland for that it provides me an envoronment that I can really have fun with my hobbies without interruption. But I don’t like if for creating for me an ultra comfortable and self-sufficient environment that I don’t have a lot of motivation to meet people anymore when I am already having great fun. 

And I don’t like myself being contradictory either. This is probably my own problem, because making sense of one’s life is just another futile human endeavor. But I feel good when I am consistent. And when I feel good, I bring more love to others. When I feel like an absurd random person without a narrative, I feel very pathetic, and I try not to interact too much with others because my confusion might be an inconvenience. 

Yeh, I am totally ranting. Today I am finishing off some of the administrative tasks and buying gifts and planning for tomorrow’s flight, suddenly I don’t wanna go. I wanna just stay in my woman’s cave and continue doing what I have been doing. It’s just so aluring. At around 4 pm I really hoped my flight gets postponed or even cancelled. But before today I had been really excited about the trip, because I didn’t want to be a solitary person living off of her hobbies only. And now, at night, I am not even sure which one I want more anymore. 

Life in China is really different. It is very secular and practical. People don’t get caught up too deeply in thoughts, except those who decide to be hermits. The Chinese wisdom is action. Knowledge is only considered noble when the person acts accordingly, otherwise people would laught at them for either being hypocrites or cowards. So I am always forced by myself to act back home. I want to be a brave woman. I want to do. I want to practice what I’ve learned. I want to act. I want to do whatever small to contribute to something that I believe is good to some extent. 

But the Swiss philosophy is different. Thoughts only can be considered worth pursuing. This is so seductive to me. God knows how comfortable I am when I sit in my armchair and start reading and thinking. My body even feels like a burden at this circumstance. 

I still don’t know which I like better, or if I even need to find a better path to decide on. What I do know is that this contradiction is valuable. If I haven’t had any big contradictions in my life, then I am one of those lucky brats who deserves to be put in front of a difficult situation. 

In two hours, I will finish packing my stuff, and start sleeping. Tomorrow, I will take on a plane, and a month later, I will come back. I have enough time to think about this contradiction, and I have enough time to live my life and dismiss this problem. After all, not all problems are worth solving, and this might be one of them.  

I’m thinking about causality a lot recently. What triggers it is I realized I haven’t got a lot going on that can cause something in my life. It’s very predictable. Everyday I go to the university, continue doing something I left with the day before and that’s it. This is a closed society, here, the city I am living in. I am not used to it at all, still, after one and a half years of trying. I try to like it, and in fact, I do for the most part. But this kind of like is by default, because there isn’t a forseen alternative. I have the opportunity to use my time on something I like and am good at. I don’t need to deal with too many social interactions. But on the other hand, unpredicability is the poetic side of life. I gave that up and part of me is yearning for it.

I was trained by the metropolis to let loose. To focus on what I can control and let chance take over those I can’t. It was a beautiful philosophy of life, with the delicate balance between me and not me. From one point there can be ten weighted edges, and although my personality leads me to choose the one of my preference, the environment could push me to picking one from the other nine. Some different decisions, albeit small, like the choice of dinner, could lead to life changes; and some albeit big, like choosing education, can look trivial when time goes by. One cannot estimate the capacity of causality among choices, and that is the art of metropolis life.

Thus I am extremely adroit at making small decisions. I’ve trained myself to adopting a decision-making procedure that is both practical and efficacious. And when the decision is proven to be bad, I don’t cling too much to it. At the end of the day, I can always say that I’ve immersed into life.

But here I’ve taken on a whole different strategy. There aren’t a lot of decisions to make, and if there are any, they are mostly not triggers of anything unexpected. There are conventions on everything, based on what the predicability is high on all fronts.

A direct consequence of this kind of society is that people can feel trapped. Although we don’t know if we have free will, but the appearance of free will is not easily felt in this society. We don’t feel we are free by following convensions. We feel free by coming up with our strategies for unique situations. Admittedly, it is very rare for any situation to be unique, which is, not experienced by anyone else in the entire history, but that doesn’t make following other’s coping mechanism a better idea for everyone. In fact, solving problems independently is one of the strongest sources of pleasure, and it makes one mentally and phisically robust.

Thus spoke me. Sometimes I get this subtle feeling of floating above this society instead of being in it. More often, I have a stronger feeling of being an actor to play out my pre-destined role. This is what feels like in this kind of environment. When events have high predicability, one can easily jump out of their position and think what actually is going on here. A streamlined life. A 9-5 actress. Mostly I can go forward with an automatic force, or inertia. The friction is so small that the initial force can make one go strong for quite a while. During this time, life is on auto-pilot. It gives me a lot of time and energy to go metaphysical.

If metropolitan life is art, then small city life is for drudges. Incidentally, I admire a lot of nobel drudges. Even more so than artists.

The university is a very simple place. I never realized it even in my bachelor’s program back home. People discuss what is it, why is it and how it should be theoretically, and don’t worry too much about the practicality of these theories. They are not supposed to be practical. That’s the point. The world outside of the academia is where these theories get to be practiced, and they are always compromised, so the art of practicality is how to compromise, and what to compromise. 

People rarely judge compromises in the executive world. They judge mostly what that execution achieves, either as regards to influence or competitiveness. They don’t really do value judgement on each procedures, but the final result is still under evaluation of such. The academia is another situation: people are careful to make good and right decisions on each process, but the final output is not very much judged whether they are significant or not. 

I prefer the second one, of course. But I have to admit that I oftentimes find myself using some philosophies I learned from the world of execution, because I don’t want to end up building a triviality. I learned so much from it, but the academia is the place to teach me the principles of compromise. I have some hunch about it, but now I can understand it in a more rigorous way. 

Some compromises are better than others. And without compromise, one cannot really achieve anything, not even a theoretical endeavour. To craft a theory is also an execution, and it needs everything one needs for casting an iron ax. The most important features of an ax to an axe-wielder is often the handle and and the kind of force it applies to its objects, and for a theory too. But an ironsmith needs to execute all the details with equal attention to make possible the user face and the function. For a theorist, they need to do all the heavy-lifting work too, proving, testing, reviewing, in order to produce some short and elegant concepts that are tenable or even useful. 

Retreating to academia (not the best verb, but I often feel this way) makes a bit more hesitant in doing things. I started this habit of hoping to craft it closer to perfection and the consequence is that I expand myself too much and cannot easily finish any project. Expansion is easier than the execution of one section, because the details are not exciting and sometimes frustrating. But expansion is necessary, too. Without it, the execution of one section could be unstable because it overlooks its position in the big picture. 

One can only study one or two subjects at the same time in college, but with internet, anyone can approach any subject they are interested in without much hussle.

A standard way of looking at a subject is top-down: knowing its nature, its structure and then diving into details. Stanford philosophical encyclopedia is a nice resource to start for a wide range of subjects. Philosophers are responsible for answering a lot of fundamental questions, which never should have a definite anser. A question with an answer is just a piece of information. Knowledge is a jungle, our understanding of which is limited to the length we’ve gone through so far.

For dealing with details, AI can be handy. It can generate the standard learning process of a subject from top universities, and following that there are online playlists that deal with these sub-branches. If one really wish to dig into a field, a rigorous study is necessary, otherwise there could be patches that are left out if roaming within it without a method.

But roaming is fun. I roam all the time. The rule of thumb is that one should always be immersed in learning. If the systematical way fails to grab one’s attention, then it is better to leave it for a while, roam in the field, get some fun, and then come back. Forcing oneself to pay attention is miserable. We have suffered enough in life, and really should reduce pain whenever we can.

Problem-solving is essential, and should be done with quality instead of quantity. Wrong answers are treasures, from which one learns the most. If the answers are mostly correct, then it is only a waste of time. Mostly wrong answers are just due to different understandings of a concept from the official one. Understanding a concept in the same way as others is important in that people can only discuss the subject when they have a collection of vocabularies that defines the same meaning. Otherwise it is just one man’s game.

And if one hopes to learn something in order to do something, then it is quintessential to just do it. Think about it, try to do it. And if there is any problem, come back to online resources and look it up. After doing it a little bit, then use the time that’s spared for a systematic learning, so as to do it better. There is a hypothesis of vicious regress concerning know-how: if one needs pre-knowledge in any action, given that grabing the knowledge is also an action, there would be an infinite process before actually taking the action one wants to act at the first place. So just do it.

Today I am thinking about problem-solving and how to generally look at a problem.

All mathematical fomulas were written down at some point in history by some people who wanted to solve a problem but lacks a way of thinking about it. Formulas gives out relations among expressions for us to think about problems within their contexts, so that we can reduce the problem and eventually generate an answer to it if lucky enough. Problems can be solved with certainty or probability. There are many standard methods to solve it, exhaustion for example, is one. Looking at all the possibilities and find the right answer. Or one can employ their human intuition to try out the ones that look most likely to be true, so as to reduce the time invested in the process. If for a certain kind of problem there is a codified flow of trying out possible answers, then it can be programmed into computer to try them out for us as algorithms. It can reduce our mannual work, but without that intuition, some flows can be extremely time and energy consuming.

Mathematical problems are extremely elegant, in that it lacks any complexity we have to deal with in daily life about an ordinary issue. We deal with problems all day long, and our pattern-finding can be absurdly wrong, because there are so many factors involved in any issue that we cannot know for sure whether the factors we observe are contributers. Mathematics is not something like that. It is a self-sufficient world where all the factors are in it. The initial factors are very simple, like throwing in a couple of basic lego blocks in different shapes, which can be replicated infinitely. With different amount of those blocks people can build complex relations that solve their own problem and facilitate others’ discovery. Coming up with problems and solutions are both creative processes, and both require an insight into the nature of the problems, tools at hand and other resources that can be manipulated into a more handy and specialized tool. Sometimes, however, we have to take a step back and look at our tools with its compartments, and think whether we need to wield such a contraption for this kind of problem. Sometimes the instrument is too much for our problem, and we need to reduce our tool first.

In any case, I think one should stay pleasant during any problem-solving. Intuition is only at work when one’s brain is active and full of cuiriosity and whimsy. Generally, I come up with more solutions after a good laugh. And laughing also gives me a good appetite.

今天看了一下学术的划分。

我以前没有意识到的是数学及计算机科学是单独的一类，也就是划做形式科学。另外，我很意外的是实用学科就直接被分类为“职业”，有点戳着脊梁骨骂人的感觉。

另外，地理是被放在社会科学的，我以前也没有想过，当然，它同时也属于自然科学。在关于物权和知识产权的课中教授曾提过领域算作社会的一部分，也就是说，社会的基本组成部分不仅包括人、动物这些生命体，也包括这些生命体所占有的地理区域。但将地理看作如此重要的社会概念，甚至被放在社会学科的框架中，还是超过我的预料。

从分类能看到，目前大学的教育体系大体关注在求真（科学）、求善美（人文）以及职业训练。

我是一个很不喜欢争执的人，所以一直很希望有一种人际关系的模式让我能避免冲突，因为我意识到争论的“赢”并不是让我很快乐的事。我更喜欢确定性的真相，也许就是因为这个，我感受到在数学当中极大的快乐。

很多的争论到最后都会变成技巧的竞赛，因为语言总是有漏洞的，如果某个人擅长捉虫，那从漏洞中攻击对手就可以了，最后常常没有什么关乎真相的结论。因为人被丢在这样一个杂乱的世界，所以总想从中找出规律，有的人看到了A形态的规律，有的人看到了B形态，但也许另一个人站在上空鸟瞰，会发现A和B都是局限在极小一处的细枝末节。争执这样的规律让我觉得疲惫，既没有获得交流的乐趣，也没有感到友谊的乐趣，也没有获得什么知识。刻板印象就是这样一种规律。即使我经常避免这样的争论，但在异国，也会遇到被人提到这样的刻板印象，我时常没什么想说的，因为如果一个人看到了A形态的规律，就说明ta：1）站在可以看到A的视角；2）对存在A规律的问题有兴趣；3）对发现A规律感到比较愉快，对ta的情绪有帮助。而我对这三项都既不适用，也不太有兴趣，所以一般就不去讨论了。但我绝不认为所有人都应当这样，相反，我很尊重愿意用时间和精力去辩论这样规律的人，正因为他们的存在，才给了我脱身而去做别的事情的机会。但实际上，刻板印象常包含一定程度的真相，不然这样的印象不会持续这样的久。同时，这也是一种坏品味，很多这样规律的出现都是由于某人看到了这样的规律，由其他看到此规律的人印证后，传播到没有见到此规律的人中间。最后的这批人不仅没有见过这个规律，也没有见过产生这规律的事件和现象，所以长时间持有这样的认知是有点难为情的。

数学的规律很单纯，比物理的世界还要单纯。它讨论抽象的数字、形状，而一旦这种规律被人运算出来，它的真属性是普遍的，这时运算出来的人，和绞尽脑汁也想不出来的人，以及围观这些人去运算的看客，都会体会到无限的愉快。这些抽象的规律，可以有应用上的价值，也有审美的价值。它的美有无限的阐释空间，因为它全无内容，只有形式，因此人可以有无数欣赏的方式，或是欣赏这形式，或是将喜欢的内容填充进这些形式中——其中一个经典的例子就是西方的古典音乐，将物质振动的频率加在了形式当中。

世界杂乱多变，文学让我感受到混乱中蕴含的动力；数学则给我提供一个撤退的小屋，确定，完美，无限，充满想象空间。