Academia vs Others

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. 

A Practical Procedure of Studying a Subject

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.

Mathematical Problems

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.

Brute Force

Dad’s childhood house has just been decided to be demolished. These kinds of decisions are always acted upon the objects they found interesting, upon the people who seem to possess these objects. 

I don’t remember much about this house. My mom was born in the city, and she married my dad, a village guy. Dad doesn’t look village though. He has the appearance of a lady’s man. I once asked him, were you popular among the girls at your school? He went, I wouldn’t say otherwise. 

Mom didn’t like villages. It was backwards. It still is. When mom and dad took me to dad’s house for the New Year’s celebration, she was asked to sit with all the other women and children at a table with half the height of a proper one. Women could not eat with the same status as men. She decided not to go there again. And she kept her words. So I didn’t really go either. 

Thus I cannot say much about it. I have some vague memories about an unappealing toilet that was just a deep hole into the ground. I had to walk pass a dog that looked like he didn’t enjoy strangers releasing themselves in the toilet of his house. I had to be accompanied by someone from the family everytime I had to pee or take a shit just for this reason. They would wait for me, not really outside, because we both were. The toilet had a roof, so it provided some shelter for pee-takers during rain and snow, but if it was windy, it wouldn’t have more functionalities to offer. 

During the few times that I was actually there, I remembered being chilly almost all the time. Radiators were non-existent in the villages, and people generally burn coals to endure the winter. Coldness could lure people into making silly decisions, like shutting their windows and doors during the night while buring coal. Dad was nearly killed once, being very warm with the coal buring all night, absolutely no draught sneaking inside from any cracks of the windows. 

The house was made of wood and brick. The wooden roof smelled moldy, probably due to ventilation problem. It had a Chinese structure, which means all the rooms in one household connected into a circle, and the doors all face towards the center of it. The central area bounded by the roomss were a garden. The main gate faces the main room, indicating the highest status of the people living in it, usually by the exclusive standard of old age. 

Dad’s house was a little different in that there wasn’t a main room in that area, so grandparents lived in the one on the right side. I guess rightness is still higher than leftness, but this is just my conjecture. Their room was symmetrical. Walking inside, there was a table with the shape of a cube, and on each side there were two chairs roughly with the shape of two cubes stacking on tope of each other. The two chairs faced towards the door. Grandparents were supposed to sit on the two chairs facing outwards to talk to their inferiors. Pictures were hung on the walls, with symmetrical constellations. There probably were some ones capturing the reminiscence of the cultural revolution, but that I don’t really recall. The two sides of the table-chair centrality were communal areas and grandparents’ bed respectively. This table was that proper dining table at which only men can eat. 

I cannot say everything about it. I cannot even describe it from the perspective of an insider. Whenever thinking about the condo of my grandparents from my mom’s side, I attach it with a personal connection, as if thinking about a body part of mine. It is my extention. But dad’s house has always been far from me. I was a sporadic visitor. Looking at their lifestyle with curiosity and dazzlling. 

Dad’s parents passed some years ago. He’d always had a strong connection with them, but especially after he parted with mom, since he didn’t have more family members other than his parents and me. Mom’s parents love him, too, but he had to keep an arm’s length. Dad used to be a painter, and I used to hang a lot of his paintings in my room. When they parted, mom packed dad’s things and put them outside of our condo. He didn’t come to pick them up. Mom didn’t take them back, either. 

Dad texted me some days ago, saying he was going to travel back to the village for some demolition process. He stopped visiting it regularly after his parents passed away. 

He doesn’t have much belongs due to the fact they were left outside of the condo in which we used to live together. I remember going back to that condo once after mom had sold it, and took a look at the area where dad’s belonging’s used to be. It was occupied by something else. 

The vicinity of his house was planned for some reconstruction project. The village used to be a historical town, and it was decided the original architecture should be rebuilt in order to remember this fact.

Antiques demolished for a reconstruction of official antiques. 

In a court, a judge would declare a statement false without material evidence. In a scientific world, my memory is this kind of narrative. All the materials are easily demolished by invincible force. Only the mind, along with the memories, keeps archive, retains history, celebrates love and courage. I trust it and cherishes it. With my pen, I materialize them, until it is proven false due to the lack of evidence. 

On Philosophy: Existance, Event, Object

This is something that I decided to try out. Everyday I am bothered by having to attend some courses that teach me nothing new when I leave the class. So I decided to do a summary everyday to reflect on what I learned during the day that’s actually new and worthy to learn. And they are the moments when I laugh a bit with epiphany.

1) Philosophers argue over how to reduce existence to a basic element in reality, like whether it can be treated as a property, and if so, what is its position in the hierarchy of all the properties that an object has.

2) There is a debate over what counts as property. Basically one school believes that there are plenty of properties (countably infinite) out there, and each sentence with a predicate assigns properties, without the need to consider the predicates’ significance, and they have an “abundance conception of properties.” Another one believes that properties are not that many! We gotta be economical in deciding whether something is a property, i.e., only those who truly categories a bunch of objects with their intrinsic features count. They have a sparse conception of properties.

3) Perdurantism vs endurantism. The former believes objects are 4-dimentional and each temporal picture of the 3-d object is a part in the objects entire existance. While the latter agrees to disagree. They believe objects are wholly present at all temporal points. Their objects are 3-d and don’t take time into consideration.

4) Derived from this, there is a perdurantist view on what an event is: they think event occurs if objects’ properties change over a period of time.

5) And based from this, there are a bunch of interesting quotes from both schools over event vs object. For example, Katherine Halway says, change is “the possession of different properties by different temporal parts of an object,” which links event to change, and, which links this concept to calculus in mathematics. For example, we can calculate an event’s intensity based on its first derivative.

6) Necessity vs contingency. These are properties of objects or events. Necessity means the existance/occurance is guaranteed and independently true of all circumstance; contingency means that is not guaranteed, caused and possible to be false.

7) Alright! So is there really a difference between objects and events? Can one merely treat them as the same entitiy? Yes! But first let’s look at the differences.

Verb Spacial Boundary Temporal Boundary location Movablility Persistence
Object Exist Crisp Vague Located at a space Yes Endurance
Event Occur Vague Crisp Co-location is possible No Perdurance

But they are treated as the same by some schools, because these two entities’s properties that are not under the same field are not diametrically apart from each other, but are comparative. They can overlap too. According to Nelson Goodman, an object is just a monotonous event and an event an unstable object (not the exact words). And Alfred North Whitehead also has a nice quote: endurance is the property of finding its pattern reproduced in the temporal parts of the total event.

Philosophy & Maths

This is something that I decided to try out. Everyday I am bothered by having to attend some courses that teach me nothing new when I leave the class. So I decided to do a summary everyday to reflect on what I learned during the day that’s actually new and worthy to learn. And they are the moments when I laugh a bit with epiphany.

1) There are a bunch of properties that are hereditory along the lines of graphs and their minors. And for some hereditory properties there are a bunch of simple forbidden minors. Some smart people namely Neil Robertson and Paul D. Seymour proved that we can know whether complex graphs have certain hereditory properties by testing whether they have these properties’ fobidden minors. If they don’t, guess what, they have those properties, and it’s also true the other way around.

2) Arguments are structures, composed with premises and conclusions. Premises are propositions in favor of that conclusion. There can be some variations of the concretness of that logical structure: P guarantess the truthness of C, or P makes C closer to truth; P implies C; or P just makes C more convincing.

3) An entity have multiple properties and they are not equally weighted. The dominant one might give name to the entity like how drunkard gets the name from their drunkness. These properties are predicated of the entities and thus predication is that act of judgement. As opposed to properties that are universal, tropes are the “properties” that are particular. Also, predicate is also the linguistic term for the chunk except the subject, which makes sense since that chunk is right now assigning a property to an entity!

4) Those most heavily weighted properties are one way of determining the nature of the entity to which they are clinging, in other words, without those properties, the entity is not that thing anymore! Another way of deciding the nature of that entity is its cause. I’m kinda surprised that the materialistically smallest component is generally not considered the entity’s nature at all.

5) Oh right. Apart from the property thingies, an entities can also have accidents, which don’t really hold sway over the entity in question.

6) And what is nature? It’s how things go without intervention, whether that’s human, divine, doesn’t matter. And natural science is the study of how they go. It does’t really care about what exactly is nature though. It just takes a grand concept and study the laws that govern that big, big picture.

7) And Aristotle said something quite fun. He says there is no truth unless a property is predicated of something.

学术

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。

Graph Theory Application on a Piece of News

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: 

graph 1
Basic nodes and edges

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.

1. Digraphs with the arrows visualizing responsibility direction

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.

2. Arrows representing “who wants who’s favor”

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.

3. The inversion of graph 2

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.

数学

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。

Autumn Nakedness

I saw two naked people through the windows. 

It was early November, but the river bank of the city was still a good track for lazy runners who don’t know exactly in what manner their night run is going to maximize the benifits to their souls. I was among one of them who took this opportunity to satisfy my daily demand of self-achievement, and along with the water ran I. 

To science illiterates, the flow of water is a contingent fact. I have never realized river eventually goes to a container until one day, when the sun was clear, I could see very far. The container for Rhine has a long way to go, but every drop of water goes with the flow, and neither of them feel they are the reason for the power of the vehicle. All of them thought they were merely passengers. How wrong can one be, when everyone else is wrong at the same time? It must’ve felt secure to be wrong. But at the same time, it depends on whether being right at the circumstance is polite. 

Imagine I were a drop of water in an overly developed society, I would’ve been very careful for my epiphanies. Would people think I am barbarious if I take a rest on a stone and think for a while, without making eye contacts to every acquaintance? Would I be abandoned by modernity? I cannot imagine the horror. If I could choose, I would’ve rather been a bridge at such a place. Immobility goes hand in hand with civilization. And bridges can still smirk under the guise of their stony faces.

Until I saw two naked people in the light of their spacious condo. The lights were very dim, if I recall correctly, because their bodies were breathtaking, bathed in that raspy color. But they nonetheless stood out perfectly, because their neighbors either put down the shutter or didn’t switch on the lights at all. Night time is supposed to be reserved for reflection for successful people with torching humility. The more they spend time with themselves, the more they look like innocuous people who happen to be elites. They wish they were less smart, but their hands are tied. 

The naked people were naked gratuitously. They window looked at the river bank, and eyesights went both ways. There was an undirected edge between the window and my spot, which had been a graph structure I had just learned from mathmatics that afternoon. The nakedness was thrown onto me, because I didn’t even try to peak through any barriers. There were none. I looked up and they were just there, like two angels exchange banters, and they didn’t bother to take on the wings on the tenderhooks. Too much dust, they thought. They’d flown to Japan once, and had learned their etiquette. 

They stood face to face, but with a farely long distance. They showed themselves from two windows, and as it was a big condo, they were unnaturally away from each other. The windows were large too, allowing for a good fat surface to receive my eye contact. From afar, I could still recognize they were a woman and a man, and their bodies were angelic. The man was at the east and the woman west, and I knew it because she was at the upper flow of the river. Her breasts were bulbous, dropping downwards due to the same reason water falling down the east. They were talking, but their manners looked like they were right next to each other, which I imagined was the benefit of the reverberation of the empty room. 

The man was painting the woman, but that I had to infer from his movement below the window sill. His arms made a commuting movement without a steady rhythm, which led me into guessing that it was a drawing process. He looked up very often to exchange words with the woman, and she wore an serene facial expression with sporatic laughters. I didn’t understand why he was naked too. And since his body was as perfect as hers, and if he had to be naked, why didn’t she paint him at the same time? It would’ve been a more economical allocation of the beauty resource. 

It was not necessary that they let us see, but I appreciated it. The water, I assume, appreciated it too. Each drop of the river had a time range of flowing through the eyesight of those two windows, and I bet they’d look back when time and space had passed. The two bodies were among the most well-built ones I had ever had the chance to stare. I hoped they let the curtain open only because they were proud. I hoped they thought they were Roman Gods. I hoped they fell in love with the image of themselves like Narcissus. They deserved that. And the fact that they let me see made me respect them in a holy way. 

Or they could be angels, like my previous hypothesis. They let me see as a way of revering their designer, and he painted her because they wanted to analyse the craft. 

Were there some drops of water, stopped on a piece of stone below the window, and rested there, for some entertainment? Did they refuse to change the formality of pronouns when they asked their neighbors to pass them onto the shore? Have they decided to ditch the civilized politeness in exchange for a heroic action which, rumor has it, did harm to one’s soul? 

I stood by and watched, until I left.