Reading an article in the WSJ about the lawsuit against Harvard regarding discrimination against Chinese students. One thought comes to mind, this likability score they use as part of the judgement for admission is admittedly and objectively existent sentiment that affects success and future donation to the school.

Chinese people have things that are extremely not likable. Trust me, I would know, being one and living among them. Not any more so than other races, but one can definitely see the problem. And I’ll abbreviate here and all Chinese-like Asian cultures I’ll just abbreviate and call everyone Chinese for this post.

I mean com’on let’s start with their starchy ricy food tradition, one can’t possibly do well and have the longevity to pay back the school on a diet like that! For a person on a modern diet, being offered a Chinese meal is practically an affront to one’s dignity and sanity. I cannot imagine Harvard ever wanting to recruit Chinese people or people who eat like that. Look at the Indians, they eat long grain rice that doesn’t give you diabetes and slow-burns longer.

Chinese vanity for humbleness is incredibly destructive. Why be humble? why sandbag? when the competition is so fierce, why spend any brain-energy on holding back? No body really knows how strong everyone are because of this extra layer of defense. This age-old tradition is unlikely to go away, and contributes little to the endowment or prestige of an institution.

Chineese problem solving, if one were to sample from the entire US Chinese population, suffered from Communist indoctrination. Really, the things you don’t like are not all traditionally Chinese, a lot of it is modern imported thoughts from Marx, Lenin, Engels, and many others… Chinese people have this social expectation that other people behave well. The Chinese governments have arms–may, tentacles–that can exert power to enforce a certain level social nicety. I remember the indoctrination by all authority figures that one should yield to elderly when taking seats on busses, one should not spit, not be greedy or lazy, one should be honest, and be loyal to the country which will provide you with a nice society to live in. (And maybe some other managed aspects of life that I did not personally experience like conditions of marriage, pregnancy+abortions, and death…)

The same is accomplished in our developed world by non-profits through advocacy, and through operational culture, which, in this case, seems encoded in the admission process of Harvard and similar schools. There is no explicit funded authority whose job it is to make the world a nice place to live. This difference in expectation of others and the government, the entitlement to reciprocation equaling to one’s own regulated participation in society, is clearly a political perspective shared by many Chinese people–the unconscious bias of Chinese. The Chinese demands a society that wants everyone to be nice if they themselves are nice.

There is no authority, except the admission authority in the universe of Universities, they are funded and empowered to choose the members of their prestigious society. Perhaps they fear what would happen to these delusional people when they find out that the world really doesn’t work that way. Society wants what it wants, not what you do or what you want. In some sense, this bias against inclusion of Chinese students is kindest choice, for everyone.

To me, the ideal outcome is this lawsuit is the establishment of unfair discrimination, but with no punishment for these institutions. All we want is to improve life for future generations and we, realistically, expect no greatness for the generation that did and still do that.

I realize, perhaps this last idea is too Chinese. Why the fuck would we seek no damages if the school discriminated? Have I caught a bug in my brain? This pessimism I feel for the possibility of progress in the society is troubling and definitely Unamerican, imho, but is it Chinese to seek no reparation?

In the meantime, though, while American Chinese figure out these things from within, perhaps we should have our separate peace? Let sleeping dogs lie. And if the institution decides to fake it until betterment is made to happen, that would be fine with me.

Just skimmed a public draft of the last chapter of Machine Learning Yearning book by Andrew Ng. I know a lot of people out there might be joking that it’s more like Machine Learning Yawning. But in reality, the execution of these seemingly simple ideas is probably incredibly difficult.

Consider the last time you put a multistage Machine Learning system into production where the output of one stage is the input of the next stage. Deciding to even try this is a monumentally difficult task. The data gathering, the training and verifications, the analysis required is so vast in it’s requirement, that most organization do not attempt it.

Luckily though, people are largely imperfect machines. This means we are usually equipped with ability to work around error prone components. One approach is discussion of a topic. The book’s accompanying discussion forum at deeplearning.ai seems like an effort to help everyone wrap our minds around this thing.

Cant wait to read more about it!

In Crazy Rich Asians, according to an article from Android News (the independent)…but it could still be a good exhibition of Chinese Central Kingdom mentality. It is inconceivable(to the author and viewers) that a non-Chinese women could possibly be attractive in all the Chinese ways… It’s not necessarily that Asian men doesn’t want or can’t “get” Scarlett Johansson, again using TFA’s example, it’s just that it’s out of the imagination for the moment, let’s say it with modern American modesty, due to “lack of cultural fit” (with said Chinese plot)

I think something may be lost from thought to text here…
And honestly, I really do wonder if that mental framing can shift, even to enjoy fictional situations.

I myself found myself sneering at the opening scene–that would never show well in London… No English man would ever believe that, preposterous! NATO would sooner bomb Singapore than to let that insult take place…

Sigh.. I’m so confused. What century is it. How do westerners really feel about the western power mid-Trump-administration? We kind of know how hillbillies and rednecks oughta feel, but do we really still feel that way? Do we want to feel that way?

Perhaps there is positive in all of this. It is a defining moment for the west as it is for the east. Let’s hope everyone come out on top of the heap that is earth.

((and okay, fine laugh at Chinese twigs having a mind for culture, hahaha))

So why is omniscient government unattractive?

Suppose, completely hypothetically speaking, in 2018, when the US declared trade war with China ostensibly sacrafices it’s agriculture exports while demanding better fair trade with China in tech, that it did so because secretly it knew, from it’s weather forecast or from secret police monitoring of farm lands, have discovered that American farmers will under produce this year and isn’t years to come. Do you think that’s a brilliant move? You do huh?

Now, let’s think of their omniscience reading your email. I’ve been blasted with news about IRS monitoring private emails to find out tax cheaters who erroneously pays IRS less than they should. One wonders, not knowing the reality, whether the IRS ever gives money back due to discoveries of errors the other way as they read our emails?

In the case of contest between nations, one proudly declares national interest as the ultimate. However the same technologies are applied to constituents, it seems unfair to citizens. How can it be? (And this is merely a mathematical possibility in a hypothetical situation) suppose farmers are subsidized by the number of acres they farm a protected crop, say some kinds of beans. For every acre-month they put towards farming the beans they get $1 to farm beans instead of something else… say day trading stocks by light of sun and hosting raves on their vast lands by the shadows of moonlight. Suddenly, there was an unusual pattern of climate change that caused the production of beans to fall from 10 beans per acre-month to 1 bean per acre month. Now, the government detects this change, and can see that the crops are not yielding well from secret police satellite pictures of farms. So, the deep-government estimates the fall of production and is able to preemptively provoke global farming tariffs. Doing so causes the price of farm produce to increase worldwide. Because the price domestic farmer can is sell their goods at is higher, the incentives to stay farmers can now be lowered to something less than the $1 needed to attract them from other activities.

So, the government gets paid tariff by foreign sellers, and then has to pay farmers less to stay farmers… seems like a net gain for the federal government. Who’s pay went into making this happen? It’ll have to be any consumer of farmed goods.

If the government did not respond to the knowledge of a decrease in production, foreign farm produce would have made up for the loss of American production (no price change in corn and apple and orange juice) but American government will have to pay more incentive to farmers to stay farmers because although they could not supply the demand, the lack of domestic supply does not affect domestic demand or price of farm produces. So farming businesses basically has a real bad year, and government subsidies has to pay for that.

What prevents this complicated hypothetical event from happening? Would it be unjust or unfair? Would it be wrong? IDK, and perhaps I have no better solution, but it is nice to understand the mechanics of these money matter.

Also, the Trump administration is down playing effect of climate change… One wonders if this is a national security matter in which the environment is so severely damaged that crops yields have become intolerably low. Perhaps this tariff to cause retaliatory tariff did just what they wanted: it hides the drop in crop production in USA to all foreign observers who don’t have secret police satellites. And certainly it hides it from the general public who have no access to our governments omniscience. Perhaps the end is near? Is there a point in discussing fairness and equality and rights and the American way if our planet is already gone and we face extinction?

This horid nightmarish lucid imagining is kind of inspired by my backyard crops of fruit and vegetables: they are doing horrendously this year–despite daily watering and generous fertilization, they yield almost nothing. And of course, there is a real trade war between US and the rest of the world… And subsequent declaration of new subsidies to combat the loss of farming income.