If any sentence in the summary intrigues you, there are several additional paragraphs related to that sentence in the body of my letter, and the index will tell you where to look. Make sure you read the full version before commenting about me to someone else, though. Regardless of how much you end up reading, write back! I look forward to hearing from you.
Class: I liked my classes. I continued my humanities class, took a class on Statistics in Computer Science, took a class on social movements, and took a peer counseling class. The humanities class helped me refine some of my values (though the most significant part was my teacher’s recommendation of a Camus book that wasn’t on the syllabus, The Plague) and let me practice telling jokes (the secret is being awkward); the CS class was an interesting step back into the world of math and gambling; the social movements class was more about sociology than social movements; the peer counseling class taught me some very useful skills. I have been solidifying my relationships with my CS advisor, Mehran Sahami, and my unofficial advisor, Michael Rosenfeld. I have a 4.0 within my major (Computer Science), and have continued to get As (with one A-) in my other classes.
Activities: I started coaching middle/high schoolers debate, which has been very enjoyable and showed me that I like (and am moderately good at) teaching and that teaching has very little to do with the lesson plan and very much to do with crowd control. I became a project director for Dance Marathon Hackathon, an organization that gets computer science people to volunteer their time to program for nonprofits. I became a deputy chair of technology for the student government, and we’re doing some public service related projects. I’m also the cochair of the Queer Straight Alliance, and I hope to do a lot of activist stuff (the applied side of social movements) next year.
Speakers: Tons of amazing speakers. There were lots of big names (CEO of Microsoft, Supreme Court Justice Breyer, George Shultz) that had talks without any content. The highlights (in terms of content) for me: the developer of the videogames Civilization 4 and Spore (possibly the most pirated video game ever) talks about how he hates copyright and how to make video games that matter (in the intellectual and journalistic senses of the word “matter”); oodles of people who made technologies for the third world (ie, a $25 baby incubator) and for people in poverty in the US (ie, Majora Carter’s work with green technology in the Bronx) make me realize that Social Entrepreneurship might be the way that I use my skills to help people; the person who eradicated smallpox with the World Health Organization and someone from the Gates Foundation make me believe in the amazing potential that humans have for social good – we have eradicated a disease before, and we can do it (or something even more amazing) again.
Politics + Service: I ran for a senate seat in the student government and lost. It was close, I learned a lot, and I got involved with the campaign of the people who won in the executive race. I also made a youtube video, went shirtless for a day (it’s ok – there was body paint), and got hundreds of people to know my name. It’s like I’m a celebrity! I volunteered on a panel for people interested in going to college and as a tutor for some of the less advantaged youth in the Stanford community. The HAAS Center for Public Service taught me about event planning – that is, begging for money and being frugal. The Food Stamps Challenge had me eat on a food stamps budget for a day and made me internalize some of the reasons why welfare is a good and necessary service. The Day of Silence made me think about what it would be like to be denied my voice and about my role as an ally to LGBTQ people. I leaked the location of Condoleezza Rice to some protesters.
Life: I am the most likely to start a cult (I bet it’s my indomitable will) and second most likely to save the world (also my indomitable will), but I was only 4 votes away from being most romantic. LG broke my phone. I managed 19 hours of sleep one day before finals week. I might have had swine flu and almost choked on Tylenol. I am the victim of identity theft (and your data might be insecure too!). I watched someone rip up a painting in an art museum. My roommate and I talked (in our sleep). I spent my train ride to Eugene hiding in the luggage compartment.
Summer Plans: I’m going to read a bunch of books, write a program that tells postmodernists to rewrite their papers, watch pointless TV, and do my civic duty.
Future Plans: I’ll begin the school year with some Google programming. My residence will be the farthest place from the Computer Science building on campus. I picked my roommate for next year before meeting him. I got the most satisfying rejection letter ever, so I won’t be teaching in Stanford’s introductory Computer Science classes this Fall, but probably this Winter. And there are more classes to take than I could take even if I stayed at Stanford until someone else saved the world, but featuring prominently on that list are classes on social entrepreneurship, classes in the business/education/law schools, and a singing class.
I included numbers 1-4 after each heading. 1 = interesting stuff, but probably not very personal; 2 = interesting ideas that are very likely my beliefs; 3 = interesting and personal stuff; 4 = wow, that must be really important to me, value laden, and personal. Keep in mind that something with a 1 doesn’t mean that it was unimportant to me or that it will be uninteresting to read; the numbers indicate how personal my writing style in a particular section is.
The acronyms: SLE = Structured Liberal Education, my humanities course. SoCo = Sophomore College. CS = Computer Science. Soc = Sociology. ASSU = Associated Students of Stanford University – the student government.
CS109 – Statistics and Probability for Computer Science Majors
My Other (Unofficial) Advisor (3)
SLE – Structured Liberal Education (Humanities)
Soc22n – The Roots of Social Movements (3)
Soren Johnson: Remix, and How to Make Video Games Matter (2.5)
Stanford Service Summit Panels: Social Entrepreneurship and Using Technology for Social Change (1.5)
Food For Thought: Conference on International Development (2)
Majora Carter: The Connections between Environmentalism, Race, and Class (2.5)
Masculinity, Malaria Eradication, MEChA, Humanities + Homelessness (2)
Misc: Justice Breyer, Someone from the State Department, George Shultz (2.5)
Student Government Elections (3)
Admitted Students Weekend – House Host (1)
HAAS Center for Public Service Events (1)
Middle and High School Panels (1)
My Roommate + A Tangent on Ender’s Game (3)
Being a Computer Science Section Leader (1.6).
The Plague: Camus’ and My Philosophy (4)
The last two terms, I took programming classes. During spring term, I took a ‘theory’ class: it’s still about computer science, but the focus is not on how to program, but on learning the ideas that will lead to better programs later. This class was an introductory probability/statistics course that was focused on computer science, so while we would learn the same general probabilistic principles that they teach in other probability courses, we would also go over the applications to programming.
I had a good time in the course. The professor was Mehran Sahami, my computer science advisor. I took the class because he was teaching it. I knew, because of my experiences with him in my first programming course, that he is a very charismatic and intelligent lecturer, and probability and machine learning are some of his favorite subjects. If he wasn’t teaching it, I probably would have taken the next programming class, CS107 (I’ll be taking it this fall).
One reason I liked the course was that he just made it fun. After the midterm course evaluations, one of the complaints that he got was that people couldn’t see where he was pointing when he would point to one of his powerpoint slides. As a result of this, for the rest of the term he used a lightsaber that he was part of his Halloween costume one year when he worked at Google as a pointer. At times, it would spontaneously turn on with a bout of light and a “vwoom!” before he would turn it off again.
He also made the course material fun. Because probability as a science was developed because of casinos and the gambling industry, he would occasionally bring gambles (I like to think of them as applied probability) into the classroom. For instance, there’s the Monte Hall problem. There are three doors (in our case, envelopes). Behind one door is a prize; behind two doors is nothing. One person picks a door. Then, the game show host opens one of the door and reveals that nothing is behind it. Should the person playing the game switch? Yes (intuitively, because the game show host knows which door is the prize and cannot pick that door). So, Mehran has three envelopes (one of which has cash in it), picks a volunteer from the class, opens one of them, and asks if they want to switch. He actually repeated this during the admitted students weekend (all of the people who got accepted to Stanford can come before they decided where to go to college and sit in on classes, among other things), and the volunteer was a prospective frosh. After the frosh opened their envelope (and got $20), Mehran revealed to the class the secret: all of the envelopes besides the one he revealed had cash in them. The lesson? “Sometimes, we make our own probability.”
It was also nice to take another math class. I hadn’t taken a math class for a year, and even though CS109 was a computer science class, it was almost entirely math with computer science applications. It was a little bit hard because it was the most rigorous math class I have ever taken: even when I took linear algebra at the University of Oregon, the pace was nowhere near as fast as in CS109. As a result, I had to change the way I took notes (in previous math classes, there was time to do each example during the lecture, whereas this class had more than 100 people in it, so that would have been impossible, so I had to start taking notes on the general ideas rather than the particular examples), and I actually had to study my notes and the PDFs from the lectures after class. I didn’t fully adapt until halfway through the course, so I got an 80% on the midterm and didn’t fully learn the material from the first half, but once I changed my study habits, I was able to keep up, and because the second half of the course leveraged the material from the first half, I had a good grasp of everything by the end.
Utility: People have a sometimes-logical “utility function” that they use to make decisions. In other words, their values. For the sake of concreteness, let’s talk about money. Most people don’t value every dollar equally. In their utility functions, the value of money exponentially decays. That is, if you had a choice between a 100% chance of getting $1 million versus a 10% chance of getting $10 million, most people prefer the certain million, and they would still prefer the certain million to a 10% chance of $20 million because the added value of $19 million isn’t worth the risk. In other words, at high dollar amounts, people are risk adverse. At low amounts, though, many people are risk preferring. Many people are fine with a losing gamble if it’s only a few dollars because of the fun of gambling.
Breaking Vegas: As someone who has never read any “Get Rich Quick in Vegas!” books, I was interested to learn that there are certain algorithms that will actually result in you winning. For instance, bet red on roulette. Start out with one dollar. If you win, quit (or start over with one dollar). If you lose, double your bet. As long as there are only a few dummy slots on roulette (ie, in a casino, there are 18 red, 18 black, and 2 dummies. Or something), you can expect to have positive winnings. Of course, the next part of the lecture was entitled “Vegas Breaks You.” That algorithm relies on infinite credit, no maximum bet, and the casino not kicking you out.
In a general probability course, there is a type of problem that statisticians classify as a “coupon collecting” problem. For instance, imagine that there are 10 different types of coupons. How many coupons will you expect to collect in order to get at least one of every type? If you collect 30 coupons, what is the probability that you have one of every type? How does that probability change based on the number of types? What if you only care about getting half of the types?
In CS109, the professor briefly explained what “coupon collecting” was, and then he showed how it was related to computer science. One way that computers store data is in a “hash table.” In a hash table, you tell the computer to create a certain number of “buckets,” and you divide your data between those buckets. This is a fairly efficient way to store (some types of) data because the process by which data is allocated to a certain bucket is randomized using a “hash” function, so each bucket will end up with about as much data as every other bucket.
Analyzing a hash table is the same as analyzing a coupon collecting problem. Each hash table bucket is like a coupon type. It is inefficient if a hash table has a bunch of data in one bucket and no data in another bucket, so a computer scientist would want to compare the probability of having under or over utilized buckets based on the number of buckets – how does changing the number of coupon types affect the probability?
Because it was an introductory probability course, we had to do a basic overview of a bunch of topics (different types of probability distributions such as the normal distribution or the exponential distrubion, combinatorics, conditional probability, independence, joint probabilities, expected values, variance, confidence intervals, and different ways of predicting new data), so in much of the course, it seemed like each different lecture was starting anew with a different topic. Each topic would build on previous topics (what is a given probability distrubiton would turn into what is the expectation and variance of a given probability distribution, which would turn into a way to derive the expectation and variance of a given distribution), but it still felt a little atomistic.
Towards the end, however, the course took a greater programming focus, and the course really came together. The last unit was on machine learning, and we learned one way, for instance, of taking some emails and teaching a computer to classify them as spam or not spam (or taking risk factors and classify someone as having heart disease, or taking voting patterns and predict political party). Rather than just having computer related math problems, we actually made a program that would take in this data and learn. I guess I just learn best by doing, because after that unit, I felt like I had a really good grasp on how each of the topics related to each other.
Finals week was from Thursday, June 4 to Wednesday, June 10. I had one final before finals week, two finals on June 4, and this final on the very last slot for finals on June 10. In other words, I had about five days with nothing academic but studying for my CS109 final.
While I did participate in some end of year activities, I got a lot of studying in, and I ended up with an A in the final and an A in the course.
I’ve been continuing my relationship with Mehran outside of the classroom. Despite the hoards of people clamoring for his office hours, I have managed to secure a fairly consistent spot. He’s a pretty interesting person. Interestingly enough, he and my dad had one of the same summer jobs. Bonus points if you can guess!
Because his office hours are so busy, it’s also interesting to hear some of the other conversations. That is, Mehran has open office hours, so if two people want to talk at the same time, they’ll both be in the room at the same time asking questions. It has actually been kind of helpful: there are a fair number of grad students who come in to talk to Mehran, so I’ve been getting more of an idea of what Stanford’s graduate CS programs look like.
And, since Mehran is now an advisor and friend, there’s also the life advice. For instance, my SLE section leader recommended that I read The Plague after a term of literary discussions with me, and Mehran mentioned that The Plague was his favorite book for a long while when I asked him if he had any books to recommend. In other words, we work well together.
And to think – when I was coming in to Stanford, during New Student Orientation, I wasn’t even planning on taking a CS class!
I’ve also been maintaining a relationship with Michael Rosenfeld, the person who taught my sociology / identity class last term. His office hours are a little less competitive than Mehran’s.
One interesting thing is noticing the difference in topics that I talk about with Mehran versus with Michael. It seems like Mehran, my CS advisor, talks more about social issues with me, and Michael, my Soc advisor, talks more about CS issues with me. I do engage each of them with their respective subjects, but the interdisciplinary aspect continues to intrigue me. Partly, this is because they each had broad backgrounds. In the days before personal computers became powerful, anyone who wanted to do social science work with large data sets needed to know how to work with a Unix database server, and Mehran had done debate before he got involved with CS.
Michael also acts as more of a moderating force on me. Perhaps because he had me in a sociology class (so there was more of an opportunity for me to voice my radical views) rather than a CS class, Michael seems more ready to voice the “well, ‘Everything is Free’ might be a nice catch phrase when you’re rioting on the streets, but I’m not sure how viable it is for a real social movement” opinions (but… but… “everything is free” is a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, statement about the information age?). Since I deal so often with the radical opinions – through debate and many very-opinionated organization and people – it’s always good to hear sensible moderates.
The other interesting thing is the name. I’m still not quite used to calling Michael by his first name. It might be out of a habit of calling him either “Professor Rosenfeld” or “Hey You!” or it could be that Michael is my dad’s name.
Overall, I liked SLE a lot more this term than in previous terms. The readings were more contemporary, so I could relate to them, gain from them, and write meaningful papers, and I meshed well with Greg Watkins, my section leader this term. Because I’ve been so busy this quarter, I didn’t quite do 100% of the readings, but I made an effort to get through the ones that I found to be interesting. And I sort of got the gist of the rest.
A side note: if you read much of this, you’ll notice that literary analysis occupies half of the pages. This does not mean it has anything to do with the literary criticism that we do in lit class. In my mind, the sole purpose of the humanities is inspiration. It’s like Christianity: you can spend this life and the next bickering about theology, but its sole purpose is not theology but Grace. As much effort as Stanford puts into researching the theory, I care about nothing but the practice, and for the sake of saving the world, inspiration is much more important than research.
So, as fun as the essays were, most of the learning occurred when doing the readings or discussing them.
In the weekly SLE discussion sections, I learned how to tell a joke.
The driving force behind my push for more humor was my teaching experiences. Debate is a group that pushes its people to devote all of their free time to academic pursuits, so debate coaches need to instill a community among its members. Telling stories and jokes is one of the best ways to achieve that community. Humor is also effective in terms of tutoring and teaching in general because when someone is laughing, it activates the same part of their brain that needs to pay attention. In other words, jokes decrease daydreaming.
That’s not to say that I’m a class clown. I just have learned how to make some of my observations succinct and humorous. For instance, in our readings on feminism, we came to a question about marriage equality among genders. The idea was that the man is culturally expected to work and the woman is culturally expected to take care of the kid. This discourages women from getting an education or a career. Someone advocated an “it takes a village to raise a child” system. The section seemed very against that idea. “One of the most natural things is for a mother to raise her child bla bla universal bla bla I love my mother bla bla bla.” I interjected: “But what about me?” The section broke out laughing. I continued: “You’re so against a communal system because you say that it’s natural for mothers to raise their children, but you’re ignoring the question of men. If the connection that a parent has with their child is important, then why is it acceptable for a society to deny fathers that connection? It’s fine to disagree with the idea that a community should raise a child, but you’re disagreement with that idea is throwing out the basic idea of equality.” In other words, I warm them up then take them down.
As the length of this letter demonstrates, my brain still associates writing with formality rather than humor, so my writing is either motivational, overly-academic, or just wordy. While I know how to talk now, there’s still nothing interesting in my writing (in case you haven’t realized how true that statement was, that was a failed attempt at a joke).
I have realized how modular humor can be. Humor is mostly awkwardness + irony. That is, the world isn’t as you would assume, and you haven’t though enough about that particular irony to be comfortable with it, so you laugh to let off tension. One of the modules that I use: one person says X ironic thing; I reply “I know that X is always true for me” or some variant. I would give an example, but, out of context, it would suck out all of the humor that would ever enter whatever room you’re in. People say tons of things in conversation that are ironic, so all that’s left is awkwardness. And I’ve had years of practice at making conversations awkward.
I also am beginning to learn the limits. In the meeting for a Sophomore College class that I’ll be taking in September (see “Sophomore College” at the very end), I made two moderately funny jokes. Each of them succeeded in silencing the room. I think people need to learn that I am intelligent before they are able to laugh at my jokes. Otherwise, they just think I’m stupid.
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
Frankenstein, Shelley
Selections of romantic poetry
Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of History, Hegel
On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher
Selections from Marx
Pere Goriot, Balzac
The Descent of Man, Darwin
Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche
To the Lighthouse, Woolf
Selections from Freud
"The Waste Land", Eliot
Lenin's "The State and Revolution"
Selections from Beauvoir and Okin
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brecht
Survival in Auschwitz, Levi
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt
The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon
The Stranger, Camus
Season of Migration to the North, Salih
The quarter opened with Mill’s liberalism. Not liberalism as in the modern American left, but rather the idea that there is no objective way to determine the Truth, so individual freedom should be prioritized over the enforcement of hierarchical social structures (ie, religion or totalitarian states). Marx is typically cast as a critic of the limits of liberalism: in Marx’s industrial society, people had the ‘freedom’ to choose who to work for, but when a 14 hour per day sweatshop was the only industry in town, then all people were forced to choose that because people must eat, and that type of labor violates human nature by alienating the laborer because their work is not fulfilling or intellectually challenging.
In my first paper, I tried to reconcile these two theories by focusing on the justifications that Marx and Mill use for their societies. I argue that, at the core, both thinkers care most about creativity, and a society that cultivated creativity would be inbetween a communitarian and a liberal society. A totalitarian interpretation of Marx would fail to achieve individual creativity, but an individualist interpretation of Mill would isolate creators from one another, destroying the creative community. I use the metaphor of remix culture: just like academics cite others in their community, a strong community is essential to society, but it is still individual academics creating. Or, with music, some of the best music contains allusions to other artists, or, like DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (a remix of The Beatles’ White Album and Jay Z’s Black Album), by using the actual sounds from previous artists to create something new.
The first half of this term, like the previous two terms, was more about the history of western thought than thoughts directly relevant to me. That is, Nietzsche is certainly an interesting philosopher, but the majority of his philosophy is not anything that I would ever advocate. Similarly, Lenin was very insightful about the distributive harms of capitalism, and his revolution advanced Russia by leaps and bounds (doubling the average Russian life expectancy, among other things), but a violent revolution to overthrow the United States government is certainly not the correct tactic for the current historical moment.
Each of the readings after Lenin, though, spoke to me very strongly. The literature was very similar to the things that I read in my own free time. Beauvoir was one of the earlier feminist authors, so some of her ideas are problematic or overly individualistic, but most of her ideas are very useful. Okin, a more recent feminist author, took a very policy-oriented approach, and I would love to see any of the policies that we read about enacted. For instance, men and women aren’t paid equally for equal work. Since laws against employment discrimination haven’t worked yet (women are still paid between 70 and 80 cents on the dollar), we could also try things like dividing pay equally between partners. That is, if a man and woman are married, the man works, and the woman doesn’t, half of the weekly paycheck would go to the man and half to the woman. This would solve a number of important gender issues. Right now, if a woman wants divorce, she might be forced to stay married just for financial purposes, but splitting the paycheck would solve that. If the man gets all of the paycheck, then even though the average housewife works about 60 hours per week, the man will own the house and have control of the bank accounts. If the woman wants to divorce, she would have to get a job to support herself, find a place to live, probably find a way to take care of any children, and she will likely not have as much education as him; the man will have none of those disadvantages. Compound that with the low payment rate of alimony and child support, and you have a very compelling policy.
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is about her experiences at the post-holocaust trial of Eichmann, a Nazi who, more or less, helped in organizing (though not so much in executing) the holocaust. The book attacks the notion that evil is supernatural. Eichmann was not drastically anti-Semitic. Rather, evil is banal. Eichmann just took orders. He separated his personal morality from the morality of his job, so even if his actions as a Nazi were immoral, he didn’t take responsibility for them (particularly relevant in a society where people will pursue jobs that they consider immoral for money). He lacked critical thinking skills, so he was fine with simply taking orders. I particularly like Arendt’s conclusion. She argues that the trial hung Eichmann for the wrong reasons, but he still deserved death. She writes:
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.
Though I disagree with the death penalty, I like Arendt’s argument and philosophy overall because of my realizations that, as much as my philosophy disagrees with traditional values (since I believe, more or less, in utilitarianism, and values like ‘responsibility’ necessarily come second to preserving utility), I am fine with those values when they are taken seriously. In other words, I don’t care about ‘responsibility’ when it means that a poor person who steals food out of necessity is held ‘responsible’ for their crime and punished but a person who buys clothes made in a sweatshop assumes no responsibility for actively support sweatshop labor conditions. However, when someone actually believes in responsibility with zeal rather than solely when it is convenient, the result is good even if it isn’t perfect utilitarianism. I have come to similar realizations about ideals like Truth, Compassion / Sympathy, Duty, Hope, Community, Love, and Honor / Fidelity / Respect.
May 15, outside of SLE lecture time, Rashi Jackman, one of the section leaders in SLE (he was never one of my section leaders, but he has always been a cool person to talk with or listen to), gave a talk on genocide. His overall argument was that people need to realize their own individual responsibilities rather than assuming that the US government or the UN will take care of the situation. This could mean raising awareness about the issues for yourself and your community, or it could mean volunteering overseas.
One small disagreement that we have: Rashi focuses in on the personal connection that people have from volunteering, whereas I focus on the results, so I would be more likely to work and donate money to an organization like Oxfam because they will have a drastically more significant impact with my money than I would have with my time. Part of Rashi’s point, though, was for the mass scale. Not everyone knows or cares much about international issues, and Rashi’s idea is that if an individual expands their community a little bit (ie, volunteering in their local community), it will make it much more likely that they will expand their community a lot (ie, volunteering in the global community).
Fanon’s book is a psychoanalytic take on colonialism. Even more than the book itself, though, I liked the introduction to the book by Sartre. Partly, I like Sartre’s take on Fanon because, while Fanon focused more on colonialism, Sartre focused more on neocolonialism and the responsibility of everyday people living in industrialized nations in supporting neocolonialism. I would go more in depth, but I wouldn’t do Sartre justice.
Salih’s novel is about the problem of cultural imperialism versus cultural relativism. That is, in postcolonial society, the society is just now rebuilding its culture and recovering from a violent imposition of western culture. At the same time, why have sympathy for a culture moreso than a person? A culture cannot think or feel; it is just a construction. In that sense, impositions of western feminism or the knowledge of how to build a well are good: if a culture is harmful to women and if an individual believes that all people should be treated with equal respect, then that individual should disregard the culture and help the people.
The book didn’t bring me to any definite conclusions, but it did remind me of how good my high school education was. It took my Stanford course in western thought 3 terms and 60 books to get to one of the most relevant challenges of the 21st century. In my International High School program in high school, I spent four years hashing out every angle of that issue.
Each week in SLE, there are historical, related, or completely nonrelated lecturers that come in as a supplement to our literary lecturers. So, in our unit on the holocaust, we had a lecture on modern day genocides. Because contemporary genocides are one of the issues that I care a lot about, I already knew much of what the lecturer discussed, but there was also a very significant emotional element. He had us watch the movie “Shooting the Dogs” about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and it was one of the more emotionally evocative movies that I have seen on the subject.
There were also some other cool lectures. There was one on the history of electronic music by someone at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (they have the patent on the FM synthesizer. It is one of the most lucrative patents that Stanford has. And Stanford has a lot of patents). The Darwin lecturer was one of the former presidents of Stanford (and maybe the founder of the Human Biology department? I don’t remember). Estelle Freedman gave the lecture on modern feminism – she’s one of the best lecturers on campus, and she knows a lot about feminism. She teaches the Feminist Studies 101 every other year – I’m planning on taking it from her my Junior year. We also had a lecture from Soren Johnson, the developer of the video games Civilization 4 and Spore. He isn’t a professor, but it was still one of the best lectures that I’ve had. More discussion of the lecture will follow in the Speakers section.
My final was a 20 minute conversation with Rashi Jackman about modernity. Basically, there were some broad philosophical questions (Is modernism the era of the individual? Can you defend that the 20th century tells a history of progress? Is moral relativism, because it cannot condemn evil, or moral absolutism, because it leads to intolerance, worse?), and I was encouraged to answer them using any of the works from this quarter. It went by quickly, and I ended with an A.
Overall, Soc22 was interesting at times, but fairly basic. It went over the sociological study of social movements – basically, reaffirming intuition about social movements and using a lot of jargon to do so – and applied that to different social movements.
I came to the realization that undergraduate majors are divided in a very problematic way. On the hard sciences side, there is both theory/research and practice. You can go into math and learn about different algorithms or prove theorems, or you can go into computer science and create something using those algorithms. You can go into chemistry and research the properties of different elements and compounds, or you can go into chemical engineering and make medicine out of those chemicals.
Getting an undergraduate degree in the social sciences, though, there is only the research track. There is very little applied social sciences. That is, you can research social movements, politics, or the media, but there is no major for the applied side of those skills. To get training in advocacy, social movement organizing, social entrepreneurship, education, journalism, or other ways of applying the skills in the social sciences to help people, you have to go outside of undergraduate study. Like law school, business school, education school, volunteering, tutoring, or otherwise gaining experience with little previous training in the applied social science.
Maybe this means that, rather than trying to be a double major in computer science and a social science, I’ll just major in computer science and take classes from the law, business, and education schools. Or I could try out the history major.
The final was a 12 page paper about the social movement of my choice. I wrote about the Open Source Software / Open Culture movement (see Larry Lessig’s book “Remix Culture” if you’re interested in learning more about it). I ended up with an A-. Given that I had a moderate fever when writing my final. More on that later.
Speaking of applied classes in the school of education…
Ed193a is a class that trains students to be peer counselors at The Bridge, Stanford’s 24-hour, free, anonymous peer counseling service. I didn’t come in to it thinking that I would want to be a peer counselor. I actually just got an email, before picking my classes, entitled: “Ed193a – Be a Better RA, Friend, and Leader!” I thought that the class would teach me some good listening skills, and I knew a friend who had a positive experience in the class last term, so I decided to take it.
I got a lot out of it. Each week there was a lecture on some skills / best practices, there was a section where we would go more in depth on those skills and apply them, and there was a cocounsel where each person would have a practice-counsel with someone else taking the class.
Some parts in the class were a little bit intense (ie, our two weeks on suicide), but it was all useful.
The overall message is that the peer counselor is there to help the counselee figure out their own problems. To that effect, there are 8 commandments:
Be Here and Now – that way, the counselee can deal with the emotions that they have and move on rather than dwelling on the past.
Have Empathy
Put Feelings First – feelings are often at the core of an issue. Even if a person wants to just deal with a problem, dealing with the feelings will probably help them deal with that problem by getting them into a place where they can think clearly.
Don’t Interpret – if the counselee says something and you interpret that to mean something that it isn’t, then it can make the counselee feel very awkward, offended, or otherwise uncomfortable. And even if the counselee buys in to the interpretation, since peer counselors aren’t trained to interpret, they might be buying into something wrong, which could be harmful.
Don’t Take Personal Responsibility for Their Problems – the counselor’s health is important too.
Don’t Judge
Don’t Give Personal Advice – as a peer counselor, you’re trying to help the counselee get to their own conclusions. You aren’t trained to give good personal advice, and they’re more likely to actually listen if they come up with an idea on their own.
Don’t Ask “Why” – the word “why” can seem accusatory. Asking the same question using “what” or “how” will be more effective.
There’s also the guideline to ask open ended questions rather than closed ended questions. With an open ended question, the counselee can come up with their own feelings. With a closed ended questions, they might just answer “yes” or “no,” which wouldn’t help very much.
In a counsel, the counselor will also intersperse paraphrases throughout. These can help to make sure that the counselor isn’t getting the wrong impression and also because, if a counselee is overly emotional, they might not fully realize some of the things that they’re saying, and a paraphrase will let them hear it from someone else and process their own information.
The overall flow is to figure out the situation, identify, classify, and figure out ways to deal with each big feeling that the counselee is having, and then try to deal with the underlying problem.
Figuring out the situation and dealing with the underlying problem were fairly common sense (with the caveat of asking open ended questions and having them figure it out themselves rather than giving personal advice), though getting practice with it definitely made me improve. The main thing that I learned was dealing with feelings. Trying to grasp how a feeling is affecting a counselee, what other feelings are tied up in it, ways that they’ve dealt with the feeling in the past, etc.
The final was on May 29, a week before finals week. It was a counsel with a current peer counselor. They assumed a particular role, I counseled, and he told me how I did afterwards.
There were a few kinks – I asked some closed questions – but it went well overall. He said that I had an amazing ability to direct the conversation so that it’s productive at the same time as opening up space so that he always felt like he was moving somewhere on his own. When my section leader looked at the comments on the evaluation form from the counsel, he said that he had never seen the evaluator write that.
It felt good.
I’m still not sure whether or not I’ll do any peer counseling at the Bridge, but I might.
There aren’t very many debate tournaments in the spring term, so nothing much to report there. There were elections on the debate team, and I’m now the Captain of NDT-style debate (policy debate, as opposed to parliamentary debate) and the webmaster for the debate team.
I also started coaching debate at Palo Alto High School. This spring, I was primarily the novice coach (Palo Alto HS recruits 8th graders every spring to get them interested in debate and to get them some experience so that they can come in to high school as, more or less, varsity debaters), but next year, I think I’ll be coaching pretty much everyone. It made me realize a few things.
I like teaching: coming up with the lesson plan and lecturing or having them do activities comes easily to me, and it feels really good to see them learn.
Crowd control sucks: even with groups of 10-20 who are coming voluntarily to debate practice and who are very bright students, it is hard to keep order. I can see why good teachers are so rare. Any tips?
On May 17, I took them to their first tournament. They had only been to practices for a little over a month, and two teams of them got 3rd and 5th places. A bunch of them are also going to a summer debate camp. I have high expectations for next year.
Also at that tournament, a debater from another school called one of my debaters a bitch behind her back. Women are underrepresented in debate, and apparently debaters aren’t above sexism. After telling my debater that the other debater was sexist and it was an unacceptable thing for him to do, I tried to cheer her up. I told her that she was a strong debater, she beat the sexist debater when they debated each other, and unfortunately strong women get called names. It only reaffirms that they are strong women, though. At the debate meeting after the tournament, the director of debate at Palo Alto HS, Jennie Savage, made cupcakes for everyone for their first tournament, and she made a “bitchcake” (A cupcake with a gummy worm in the shape of a “B” on it) for the girl who was called a bitch. Jennie’s logic was the same as mine: you don’t get called a bitch unless you’re strong, so it deserves celebration. I can’t help but thinking of bitch magazine.
Even after their first tournament, I’m starting to feel a comradeship with them. It’s not the same as the community that I felt when I was a high school debater. It’s more like… I’m invested in them and want them to succeed. They’re my debaters!
Last year’s student body president, a few years ago, started Dance Marathon. It’s an annual 24 hour fundraiser for FACE AIDS / Partners in Health that was was started as a response to reading Paul Farmer’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains.
This year’s student body president, David Gobaud, now a CS grad student, saw that a lot of technical people are not involved in public service simply because most public service opportunities are advertised to social sciencey people. Gobaud founded Dance Marathon Hackathon, which has computer science people program for nonprofits for the 24 hours of Dance Marathon. For next year’s Hackthon, Gobaud passed along the reins, and I’ll be one of the project directors for it.
This past year, I was an executive fellow on the ASSU (Associated Students of Stanford University – Student Government) web team. Starting this spring, I became a deputy chair of technology.
Because of Gobaud’s CS experience and public service attitude, there are a lot of cool projects underway. There are some general student-life applications (ie, online room reservations for the student union), but, for instance, we’ll also be creating a service database where anyone can post their experiences with the many public service organizations on or near campus.
It’s nice to be in an organization that’s doing so much.
In May, last year’s QSA leadership approached me and recommended that I apply to be part of next year’s QSA leadership. I applied, and now I’m co-chair and financial manager.
In the past few years, it has mostly been a social organization. Last year, they organized the work on the No On Prop 8 campaign, but not a whole lot of other political action. There is a lot of potential in the organization, though, and I hope to make it a lot more political. One thing that we’ll want to do is organize an Ally Week to try to get more people to identify as allies to LGBTQ people.
We’ve also been working with the ASSU to try to get some institutional change. For instance, in RA training, there isn’t anything about LGBTQ issues, and I have heard of RAs who were openly homophobic. It’s nice to be on both the ASSU and QSA – I can see the direct institutional connection and feel like I can easily make my voice heard. Even though I just got involved with QSA, I have already helped represent them at the ASSU Policy Summit’s panel on the student government’s agenda for diversity and in meetings with David Gobaud about the executive agenda.
Soren Johnson was a SLE guest speaker on April 23. He’s the developer of the computer games Spore and Civilization 4. He was a double major in computer science and history at Stanford. The topic of his lecture was “Can Games Matter?” but he went over a bunch of different issues. This was one of the best lectures that I’ve had this year.
He talked about games as a unique medium because they are interactive and active, whereas watching a movie or reading a book is a static, non-participatory experience. Video games can adapt depending on how you play.
He talked about authorship and remix. When multiple people are creating content together, each leveraging off of what the other person created, who is the author? For instance, in the youtube video “The Mother of All Funk Chords,” a remix artist collected videos of people playing short snippets or notes and saying things and remixed each of those individual notes into an actual song. Who was the creator? The creation would have been impossible without the remix artist and it also would have been impossible without each of the original artists. Johnson argued that we have to move away from thinking of individuals creating and start recognizing that groups create things together. In Spore, the users generate most of the creative content, and Johnson just made the tools that the users used to create. Johnson thinks that everyone can and should be a creator, and that current copyrights are too restrictive, so they’re losing the battle, and the creators of intellectual property will have to adapt or lose out.
He talked about the creativity within remix and user generated content. User generated content allows for things that the industry cannot create. There is a mod of Civilization 4 (a mod uses the underlying framework of something else – in this case Civ 4 – to create something new. This mod had new rules, new technologies, and it was really a whole new game) that has 200,000 users. That couldn’t have been a game produced in the industry, though, because 200,000 is too few sales for a commercial game, because some of the content was too edgy to pass reviews, because there was a backstory that was too long for some users, etc. In other words, it was a fringe game, but it was still a good game.
He also talked about how users leveraging off of original content leads the original artists to new creativity. When people made a mod for Civ 4, the mod community had certain ideas that Johnson integrated into new versions of Civ 4.
The brunt of his lecture, though, was on how to make games matter. He introduced the topic by presenting a distinction between theme and mechanics. The theme of Mario games is plumbers saving a princess. The mechanics is timing. The theme of Age of Empires is historical warfare. The mechanics is resource management. The theme of Spore is evolution. The mechanics is creativity. Johnson argued that the important part of a game is not the theme, but the mechanics. So even though the theme of Spore is evolution, the game is about creativity.
However, the divergence between theme and mechanics or between theme and meaning is reducing the potential of games. When the theme matches the meaning, the game can be educational, teach a skill, or be used for research.
Regarding education, one example Johnson used was a gerrymandering game. The objective of the game was to try to divide up the district lines so that his political party had more seats than the other party. Even though Johnson knew about gerrymandering before he played the game, because games are a unique medium and are active, the experience of playing the game made him understand it much more and made him much angrier at the political system for allowing it.
Regarding skills, the best example would probably be in the military. With games like “America’s Army,” the US Military is teaching its soldiers and recruiting gamers to join by associating the army with fun and desensitizing gamers to violence. There are also flight simulators and plenty of other games used for industrial education.
Regarding research, Johnson’s honors thesis was a computer simulation of a certain period of history. It was a game where the theme matched the meaning and the player assumed a historical role.
While games can be about more than fun, Johnson sees it as tragic that the current games industry cannot adapt to that. That is, just as the mod to Civ 4 could not have come out of the industry, many of these educational games could not have come out of the game industry. When playing a game for fun, users expect certain things like fairness, but in many cases the topic of education is an unfair society. The game that Johnson wants is one that teaches or portrays the subject matter of Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book about geographic determinism. Such a game would be intrinsically unfair because a society that started out near a bunch of rivers and oceans and in a temperate zone would fare drastically better than a landlocked, tropical society. Such a game could only come out of academia or come as someone’s pet project.
In order to facilitate games that matter, our society needs to change what it thinks of games and of computer programming in general. We need to teach programming in school as a skill like writing. We need to foster a community of game developers that can leverage easily off of each other’s work by releasing software as open source so that dinner anyone else can easily make something new out of something old.
He stayed for, but I was called to go over to Palo Alto HS for debate – the person who usually coached on Thursdays didn’t come in, so the debaters were unattended. My roommate, also a fan, got Soren Johnson to sign some DVDs for me and him, though.
At the beginning of May, there was a SLE alumni mixer. There were some interesting people there. A bunch of tech people. The Google guy didn’t make it.
Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO gave a talk on May 6. Didn’t say much of interest.
Two people who were working on natural language at Google gave a talk on May 12. They talked about some of their experiences working with natural language at things like Google 411 and the benefits of an interdisciplinary education. Interesting, but not very memorable.
There are also some talks with a pre-professional focus. Lockheed Martin had a leadership workshop for engineers the next Saturday. There were a bunch of aero engineering grad students there. I guess Lockheed Martin is one of a short list of organizations you work for if you like making stuff fly. Let’s just say that my opinion of their talk doesn’t differ much from my opinions of their organization in general.
On May 22, Mendel Rosenblum (founder of VMware, a software virtualization company that, among other things, lets you run windows on a mac. Its main claim to fame is in servers, though, where it simplifies the process of managing each server) came to my dorm for a dinner. The dorm’s Resident Fellow, Greg Watkins (also my SLE section leader this term), got everything organized. It was a fairly chill atmosphere. No particular insights, but it was a nice chat.
The first weekend in April, Stanford had its service summit. The service summit was an idea from the student government to expose interested students to ways to get involved with service and to brainstorm plans for Stanford’s service vision for the next few years.
There were a bunch of cool panels, but there was only time for two. The first one I went to was on Social Entrepreneurship. Each of the people there had done amazing stuff, but one in particular took a class at Stanford’s grad school called “Extreme Affordability.” In the class, people from all of Stanford’s different grad schools (ie, business, engineering, product design…) get together to design a product that is designed to be extremely affordable so that people in the third world can benefit. Jane Chen took this class and founded Embrace (see http://embraceglobal.org/). Premature or low weight babies born in the first world might use incubators (to keep up their heat so that they stay healthy) that require electricity and cost up to $20,000. Chen made an incubator that sells for $25 and only requires hot water.
The panel also talked about the role that Stanford played. There is an important financial aspect because the business school has loan forgiveness. There are human resources because Stanford has so many engineers and people interested in getting things done rather than just researching and talking. There are professors and alumni. There’s also the Stanford name, which means that if you are aggressive or radical, people are more likely to take you seriously.
The other panel I went to was on technology and social change. Two lessons: 1) One Laptop Per Child is the wrong model. 85% of the world’s population is covered by cell towers. Leverage cell phone technologies like SMS (text messaging), or build applications to run on cell phones. 2) Interact with the people that you’re trying to help. That way, you’ll know how to adapt to their cultural context.
There were a few keynotes. The first was a former ASSU president (I think his last name was Westley?). He led the student movement against South African apartheid by getting Stanford to divest its funds from South Africa which led to other universities and, later on, financial institutions divesting their funds, which gave Mandela the support he needed.
Then there was a keynote with the dean of Stanford’s med school, Dr. Garcia, and the chief philanthropist at google.org, Dr. Brilliant. Dr. Brilliant led the World Health Organization campaign that eradicated smallpox. Brilliant’s vision for the future?
We need to eradicate polio. If we do that, the global community will start believing that it is possible to eradicate diseases, and then we’ll be able to work on malaria.
We need more public intellectuals: in the past, there were people that theorized about democracy, public service, and civic responsibility, but that is now missing.
We need people to go into social entrepreneurship rather than academia or venture capital.
We need to solve global warming. It exacerbates every other problem. All of the work that Mohammad Yunus (the microfinance guy) did would be destroyed if there was a one meter rise in world sea levels. It is reducing agricultural capabilities. This is forcing Africans to eat 700 million wild animals, which is leading to dozens of new diseases. As Dr. Brilliant says, “Forget what your sex ed teacher told you; eating something is the most intimate exchange of bodily fluids that exists.” Warming is decreasing the global supply of usable water, which is increasing conflict in the Middle East, worsening agriculture, and is leading tens of thousands of farmers to commit suicide.
We need a community to support us. These big social movements fail 8 out of 10 times, so we need a way to continue. Those two wins are important. When asked how Stanford could better facilitate this, he said, “First of all, change your speakers. Bring in fewer Nobel laureates and more people who live the life of the heart: inspirational people who have lived hard lives and done something good in the world.” Here here! He also suggested that the only things learning in the halls of learning are the halls, so it is necessary to go outside of the classroom to figure out how to save the world.
The next weekend was a “Food For Thought” conference. It was about international food politics. I came in with fairly high expectations because food politics is such an essential part of international development and ensuring a good quality of life to impoverished people, but the people who came were not good speakers, and they didn’t have any interesting takeaways.
While one of them was talking about why genetically modified food was the best thing since sliced bread, I checked out some of Vandana Shiva’s writings on how GMO crops have been a horrible thing for India. One of the reasons is that they’re not well adapted to the conditions of most Indian farmers. The studies that the Food For Thought speaker had conducted assume a lot of expensive farming equipment, fertilizer, water, and a different climate. When GMO crops are used by poor farmers, the yields are worse.
Another reason is that, with GMO crops, the DNA is proprietary. You more or less need to pay royalties to grow them. Because of this, corporations are trying to make their brand of seed wipe out all other seed types and then force farmers to pay them even more by secretly bundling in other DNA into the seed. For instance, there are seeds that will only grow for one planting cycle, so farmers will need to buy new seeds every time. There are seeds that need a proprietary fertilizer or pesticide to work. The desire of these companies to profit at the expense of both farmers and biodiversity is disgusting.
On April 21, for Earth Week, Majora Carter gave a talk. This was another one of those extremely awesome ones. It was mostly about Carter’s experiences, but she has done some very cool things. If you haven’t heard her speak before, check out a short video where she talks about some of her experiences at http://www.ted.com/talks/majora_carter_s_tale_of_urban_renewal.html. She’s an amazing speaker – if you have the opportunity, check out the video.
Her overall philosophy is that development is good, but it must operate under a triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) and bring the community to the table. The current decisions are made in a top-down way that ignores the interests of the people affected by those decisions and the environment. Carter wants to see more grassroots organizations.
The thing that’s so cool about Carter is that she works with the intersections between environmentalism, race, and class. She grew up in the Bronx, and she saw that people of color overwhelmingly lived in poor areas that have no parks or greenery and many sewage and waste treatment plants, and she does work to fix that. For instance, few people hang out outside because there is no greenery. Thus, there is crime because there are fewer witnesses. Adding some plants has encouraged people to stay outside and has decreased crime. The process of actually adding plants also created jobs.
She also started one of the country’s first Green Roof companies. They retain 75-90% of the stormwater that comes down on them – important because the Bronx has most of the city’s sewage treatment plants, and the sewage systems are inefficient in that they combine stormwater and sewage. Thus, keeping stormwater out of the sewers increases energy efficiency and decreases the impact of sewage treatment on the community. In addition, it combats the urban heat effect, creates jobs, creates food, is good insulation, cleans the air, and makes the roof last ten times longer.
Less than 25% of the South Bronx’s residents own cars, but most corporations only build parking spaces, not pedestrian or bike ways, so Carter built a greenway. More stormwater management. More jobs. More ways for people to get around the town.
At the end of April, C.J. Pascoe, the author of Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, gave a talk. I missed the actual talk, but she came to a dinner at Terra (a co-op where I’ll be living next year) that I attended. As such, I’m not 100% sure on the thesis of her book, but it seems interesting.
May 1, one of the high ups in the Gates Foundation came to talk about malaria. It was partly a technical talk – what is Malaria? How is it spread? How has it changed? How prevalent is it and in what areas? What technologies do we have that can stop it? – but it was also about the political effort needed to stop malaria. One of the biggest problems that he saw was that most efforts against malaria are purely reactionary. This means that, when malaria is killing thousands of people in a given state in a short timeframe, the state will invest in anti-malaria and anti-mosquito measures, but after those succeed and reduce cases to 1% of their peak levels, all political will (and funding) disappears, and malaria returns to its peak levels in a few years. We need global support and awareness to combat this. On the technical side, we also need new research because different strains of malaria and mosquitoes are increasingly becoming resistant to the measure that we’re using now.
The speaker was hopeful. Malaria has been eradicated from many countries where it was once endemic (such as the US), and there has increasingly been talk of malaria eradication when, even a few years ago, noone thought that was a realistic dream.
The next day was a MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán; Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, the main Chicano student anniversaries organization) conference. It was mainly organized as one of their annual alumni events, but this was also one of the of a very successful hunger strike that MEChA did years ago. MEChA is one of the organizations that I really need to get more involved with next year. They’re prominent on a short list of groups that is organizing students for civil rights and workers rights.
May 21, Debra Satz, director of the Center for Ethics in Society and the person who gave the SLE lectures on Locke and Marx, gave a lecture on her work with the Hope House. The Hope House is a center for homeless women, and Satz uses literature to give them a humanities education so that they can learn about themselves and get their lives back on track.
I never would have thought that something like Plato would actually teach someone life lessons. I guess I’m just one of those historically based persons rather than literarily based persons. Blame debate?
April 13, the law school brought Supreme Court Justice Breyer on campus. It was just a small gathering in one of the law school buildings; it wasn’t like when Justice Kennedy came and talked to several thousand people. That makes two Supreme Court Justices that I’ve seen.
I was unimpressed. Aside from the horrible acoustics, there wasn’t much content in his talk.
The next week, someone from the State Department came to talk. It was more of a “this is what to expect if you have a career in the State Department” than I was expecting. I do remember being struck by a conservativism in the organization that seemed to transcend any given administration, though, which disturbed me. Kind of the same thing that I talked about in the section on Hannah Arendt (“Radical Responsibility”): just like Eichmann was willing to kill for his job, the speaker said that she felt like it was her job to paint America’s actions in a positive light even when she thought those actions were immoral.
On May 11, George Shultz came to talk. The talk was on fidelity – to his family, his state, his morals. Shultz didn’t really answer any of the questions posed to him, though. The few philosophical observations that I had of him:
1) He doesn’t really care about cosmopolitanism. That is, he feels very little fidelity to the global community.
2) In any instance where he has a strong moral belief about something, fidelity to his own values comes before fidelity to his superiors in the state. That is, there were several instances where he stood up to Regan and Nixon.
3) In any instance where he doesn’t have a strong moral belief about something, he’s fine with fidelity to the state. This seems disturbing to me on the same Eichmann lines. It seems like cases where he doesn’t have a strong moral belief are the majority of cases (he gave one or two examples where he stood up for his values against the state, but I didn’t get the impression that he did it very often), so it seems like he was content being an automaton for the state – even when he disagreed with something (as long as it wasn’t one of very few hot button issues for him).
I think I’m beginning to discover what the archetypal politician is. It makes me think of the character Bernard from “I Heart Huckabees” who he keeps on telling the mayonnaise story to everyone. All of these politicians have a stock story – mostly meaningless – that they tell to no end.
When Colin Powell came to campus, he told a story about getting his son a car. In short, he takes his son to the car dealership, fakes getting a call from the president, leaves, comes back a few minutes later, and gets a good deal on the car. When Powell told it, though, there was some moral attached to it (the rich get richer? Wait, that doesn’t sound like something Powell would overtly say…), lots of jokes, and the telling took 4 or 5 minutes.
Shultz told stories too. In one of his stories, he was talking about getting Powell into his country club (or it may have been an equivalent elite(ist) institution). However, this story involved retelling the entirety of Powell’s car story with some context at the beginning and some garnish at the end (“You should admit Powell so that you can hear his car story” – imagine that in a dramatic tone after hearing the car story for 5 minutes).
In other words, this meaningless story is so important that they not only tell it, but others retell it and others discuss the telling of it.
I guess the moral of my story about politicians (the rich get richer?) is that it seems like the personality, not the values, is what politicians have in common. You may have noticed that when I write about speakers, I have the political speakers separated from the public service speakers, whereas when talking about my own life those two categories are not separate. That was my recognition about politicians: the institution of politics was created to provide a public service to the people, but the American political system has drifted away to become a cult of personality. It’s like what Dr. Brilliant’s said (see “Stanford Service Summit” keynote): America has lost its public intellectuals who theorize on democracy for all citizens to hear.
What will it take to redeem America’s politics?
The first week of Spring term was campaign week. I was running for ASSU (student government) Senate, and there was only a one week period in between when we were allowed to start campaigning and when voting takes place.
I actually decided to run not long before the start of the campaign. Shortly before the campaign, the Students of Color Coalition had a public meeting where they talked with all interested people about why they needed people in the ASSU. They talked about how the ASSU had done meaningful things for communities of color, and they also talked about how ASSUs that weren’t friendly to communities of color had done some very regressive things. I didn’t have a ton of time to get my campaign together, but they inspired me.
It was like a real election. That is, the difference was only in size, not in tactics. There were endorsements: I was endorsed by the Queer Coalition, Stanford Democrats, and Students for a Sustainable Stanford. There were speeches and handshaking: I spent almost every mealtime during campaign week talking to people at different dorms about why I was running (one of the executive slates even went so far as to kiss a baby). I was interviewed for the Stanford Daily (though the topic was on how last year’s ASSU presidents, Jonny and Fagan, inspired people this year to run on public service oriented platforms. Which is true in the sense that I would not be involved with student government whatsoever if Jonny and Fagan didn’t show me that Stanford’s student government had the potential to be a public service organization. The article, though, almost made it sound like I wasn’t interested in public service before Jonny and Fagan. Ah well.).
I made a youtube video – a low quality remix of “I’m On a Boat” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPtfNpGWYrA or search youtube for [Sam King I’m On a Boat] if you want to see my video) – with the help of Brennan Saeta, one of the computer oriented people in my dorm. It got a bunch of hits. Fairly good experience. It was also cool to do video editing for once, even though, as the quality would indicate, both the filming and the production for that video happened in less than two days.
I made tshirts with the help of my dad. I made the design, and he cut it out onto an emulsion and did the actual silkscreening. They turned out really well, and a bunch of people were wearing them during campaign week. A few have even continued. Who would have thought!
The last day of campaigning, I decided that tshirts weren’t enough advertising, so I got one of my artistically inclined friends to bodypaint me. I think that this was the best part of campaign week. With all of the stress of a week of talking to people, flyering, sending out emails, making calls, and getting endorsements, advertising myself shirtless for a day gave some much-needed relief. And it probably got some looks.
The election turned out moderately well. I got about 700 votes. In previous years, people won with about 500, but this year there were a lot more voters, so I was about 100 votes short. The executive slate, though, turned out the right way, and David Gobaud and Jay de la Torre won.
The most disturbing thing about the election was a ‘slate’ that rose up for the first time called “Students for a Better Stanford.” There are about 0 issues that all of the people in the coalition running for senate agree on (their publicity materials stuck to taglines like “protect your right to party” rather than addressing the issues that the campus and our community faces). They were nothing other than an advertising coalition. But it worked. Most of them got elected, even though the members of the slate were much more conservative in their views of Stanford (and in general) than the majority of people on the campus (because they didn’t agree on the issues, there were a few liberals, but most were conservative). Because they were a senate ‘slate’ and no senate ‘slate’ had ever existed before, the elections commission wasn’t applying any rules that it set up to ensure a fair campaign. For instance, it is against the rules to list the organizations that endorse you in the short statement that voters see when they look at the candidates’ names online. I wasn’t allowed to say that the Queer Coalition endorsed me, but I think that most of the Better Stanford folks listed that they were on that group. There were plenty of other rules that applied to them but didn’t explicitly say “senate ‘slates’ must do this” (the rules that applied referred to individuals and organizations endorsing individuals) because senate slates didn’t exist before, notably the limits on advertising. It really sickened me, though.
What this made me realize about politics:
1) People aren’t rational decisionmakers; name recognition is extremely significant. In my campaign, I wanted to be idealistic and pretend that this wasn’t the case. I made the campaign entirely issues based. Every email I sent out and every flyer I put up had my stances on the issues. Even my youtube video was mostly issues based – within the constraints of “I’m On a Boat.” And, in the end, I didn’t win, whereas the Students for a Better Stanford did – similar to the Powell/Shultz cult of personality in American politics as a whole that I talked about earlier.
2) I think that I could do some good things in politics, whether in the scope of Stanford or of other government entities.
3) Winning isn’t everything. I’m not in the senate, but I still got a seat in Gobaud’s executive, and I’m still doing some good work for Stanford.
4) The good folks can still win. Gobaud / de la Torre won in a landslide.
The last weekend of April was Admit Weekend. Basically, it was Stanford’s chance to impress all of the people go got accepted to Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard. I was a HoHo, a House Host, meaning I help out with the events that the admits do. The Head HoHo did most of the work, but admit weekend was still a good experience.
I tabled for debate at the activity fair. There seemed to be a lot of people interested in doing debate at Stanford. I have high hopes for the team next year.
There were a bunch of SLE events, too, and I got a chance to talk to some people who were interested in doing SLE. The diverse array of opinions was interesting. Yes, there were plenty of different majors, but there were a bunch of different opinions on SLE also. This was particularly evident when people asked about grading. There was the “grading is arbitrary” crowd and the “they watch you closer than you know” crowd. I, personally, belong to the former crowd: fall term, I deserved a B but got an A-; winter term, I deserved an A+ but got an A-; spring term, I deserved an A and got an A. I think the major gripe of the “grading is arbitrary” crowd is that many of them see people who don’t do the readings and put in less effort on their papers but get better grades than them. Or it could have something to do with the subjectivity of grades. Or it could have something to do with the lack of disclosure regarding grades – you know very little about what grade you’ll get until you are told your grade for the term. Ah well. It’s not like grades are the most important part of a Stanford education.
A few weeks later, I got an email from the library. Apparently, they found an admit weekend card that belonged to me. I wondered what it was for a while. Then I realized that it had nothing to do with this year’s admit weekend: it was from a year ago when I was at Stanford as an admit. I lost my meal card on a tour through the library and, a year later, someone stumbled upon it. I was amazed.
There were also a bunch of events through the HAAS Center for Public Service. On April 18-19, they had an Emerging leaders retreat. I didn’t get much out of it. It was at the beach, which was nice, but the only content at the retreat was a set of activities designed to make us think about what public service means to us. Since I had already given a lot of thought to that topic, it was pretty much just a day at the beach when I should have been writing an essay (I ended up really proud of the essay, though – it was the one on Marx, Mill, and Remix that I wrote for SLE and talked about in “Liberalism”).
The Wednesday after that retreat (also after the first draft of the essay was due), though, there was a workshop on event planning. There was tons of useful information – how to deal with big name speakers, how to not spend thousands of dollars on events (one tip: don’t schedule your meetings / talks during mealtimes. That way, you don’t have to feed the people who attend), who to talk to for reserving rooms and equipment, where to get equipment for free, rules and regulations… It was one of the most practical / useful workshops I attended all year.
May 1, there was also an event on grantwriting. Since a nonprofit will never fire its fundraiser, good career prospects. Probably not something that I would want to do fulltime, but it seems like a very interesting thing to do – you get exposure to the entirety of the organization / thing that you’re writing the grant proposal for, and it uses the same persuasion and research skills that I learned in debate.
Towards the end of the term, I also got involved in a tutoring program. The program is aimed at tutoring the children of Stanford staff (think custodial staff, not faculty), and this Spring was its pilot. It’ll be getting into full stride next year. It was a really good experience. Similar experiences to coaching debate, but it’s one on one and helps more than the people who are already the intellectual elite.
The first full week of May was the Food Stamps Challenge. Students Taking on Poverty planned the Food Stamps Challenge as a way to show people one (small) piece of what it’s like to be in poverty. The challenge was to eat as if on food stamps – meaning you had a $4 allowance for food – for a day. Some of the STOP members did it for longer than a day. I only did the one day. One thing is for sure, though: the money from food stamps isn’t enough to get a nutritionally balanced 2000 calorie diet.
The day before the challenge, they had a few speakers come in. Two of the people on a panel were involved in administering food stamps programs, and the third was a recent Stanford graduate and food stamps recipient. The Stanford grad said that he knew a lot of graduates from top colleges on food stamps in the current economy. It’s those types of things that make you realize that the image of welfare recipients as unproductive leeches on society is just right wing propaganda: the people who are the most eager to get into the work force and who are intellectually qualified can’t get jobs because our economic system doesn’t value stability, and welfare is there to make sure that the instability of our economic system doesn’t mean the death of our citizens.
Thursday of that week was Stanford’s Day of Silence (it doesn’t fall on the National Day of Silence because our Admitted Students Weekend is on that day). It wasn’t very well advertised this year. I guess that’s one of the things I’ll be in charge of next year with QSA – hope I can do better!
After the Day of Silence, I collected my thoughts and sent an email out. This Day of Silence got me to think about issues of voice and silencing. My philosophical revelations and my description of the event:
A few days ago, you may have noticed some people who weren’t talking.
They were participating in the Day of Silence. It is often mischaracterized, and on the day when it is in the public eye, the people who most strongly believe in it are not speaking, so I thought I’d take a moment to explain what it means to me. It is a way to learn about the importance of voice. Participating let me think about the importance that I place on communication, what it would mean to be denied the ability to communicate, and what my role, as an ally to LGBTQ people, is.
At its most basic level, the Day of Silence is an act of solidarity – silence is a visible signal of being an ally to LGBTQ people – but for me, the Day of Silence is more significant because it teaches its participants a lesson about the meaning of voice. Thinking about the Day of Silence in this way – that it is about communication and voice rather than just speaking – made me appreciate the Day of Silence much more this year than I did previously. At my high school, the Gay Straight Alliance passed out note pads to everyone who was participating. Participants weren’t speaking, but they still had a voice. I think that this obscures the spirit of the event.
I participated in the Food Stamps Challenge earlier this week, and the spirit of the Day of Silence is the same: just as the Food Stamps Challenge forces participants to think about issues of hunger by having them live a day on food stamps, the Day of Silence forces participants to think about issues of voice by having them live a day without one.
Communication is important to me: I am a debater, so I am used to my voice being one of my most powerful weapons. The Day of Silence is fundamentally about people who are denied that ability to communicate. People without a voice.
It made me realize that I am in constant communication. When I was silent, people wondered and asked. In this sense, I am in a position that the true victims of silencing are not in. My community gave me every possible opportunity to speak. My choice not to speak was voluntary.
With many LGBTQ people, silence is forced on them. There are policies codified in the law, such as the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, that force LGBTQ people to remain silent about their identities. There are social norms that force people to remain silent. Speaking out can mean loss of employment or physical harm. Even more insidious is the fear. Because heterosexism is ingrained into our culture, even spaces that are safe (spaces where people will not be discriminated against for expressing themselves) are not open because there is always a chance that the space isn’t safe. Even if the chance of discrimination is small, when that chance is always present, it is easy to fall into the habit of self-censorship.
Thinking about voice in these terms made me realize the connections with other groups. LGBTQ people are not the only people that have been silenced. I read Speak, a book about a rape survivor who was silenced, and the Day of Silence helped me make the connection. The same psychology of the character in Speak is present in other silenced groups. During the Day of Silence, that same psychology was present in me. At the lunch table, or with my roommate, or in just about any other situation, I wanted to talk, but there was a barrier. I bit my tongue, and I disengaged myself from my surroundings. In my class sections, my peers were commenting on the reading, and I wanted to voice my ideas, but all I could do was bite my tongue and disengage from academics.
That was the most significant thing that I learned: the immediate psychological effect of being denied self-expression. For me, speaking is an organic process. During the Day of Silence, I had to think through everything that I wanted to say and consciously silence myself. Rather than being an active participant in my life, I was an observer.
But the chance to observe did make me realize the importance of allies. Because I denied myself communication, when people asked me why I wasn’t speaking, I relied on my roommate to volunteer an explanation or, when he wasn’t there, I relied on a card that the LGBT center printed out. The general principle applies to allies in general: Some LGBTQ people (and, as I said earlier, other groups) are silenced, and they need allies and community organizations to speak for them. One role of an ally is to help those who cannot help themselves.
This means that not everyone participates in the Day of Silence, and not everyone should participate in it. A counselor (or an aid worker, or an advocate for rights, or a teacher, etc) should not be silent because their silence would harm others. That is why the Day of Silence originated as a student movement. It is a way for students to learn about the value that they and others place on communication, the people that can’t communicate, and the ways to help. In other words, I did not speak during the Day of Silence in order to realize why it is necessary for me and for other allies to speak out every day.
At the end of May, a group called Project Motivation sent out some emails asking for people to be panelists for middle schoolers who were interested in college. It was meaningful in a way similar to my tutoring. I got the chance to talk with kids who were enthusiastic about education even though they didn’t come from the most economically (or educationally) advantaged communities.
I was also on a high school panel the same day. The high school panel was done through the Stanford Admissions Office Diversity Outreach Program, though, so it was less about telling enthusiastic students to go to college and more about getting the intellectual elite (within minority communities) to go to Stanford rather than Harvard or Berkeley.
Condoleezza Rice is on campus now. Her first public appearance was at a dorm for dinner one day. The protests made national news. Since then, she has been hiding her appearances. Stanford in Government was having an end of year dinner with her as a guest, and I leaked the location to the protest groups. I didn’t personally organize anything (I had a prior commitment), but the protest groups got something together.
The president of Stanford in Government yelled at me (over email), describing protest as immature. I thought it was kind of funny. I replied that I believed in freedom of information rather than secret events, that I believe in freedom of speech (especially protest as political speech), and that my role models are people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King who changed the world through protest. If that’s what immature means, then America was founded as an immature country, and that’s good enough for me.
The one consistent social event (that is, the one thing that is both outside of my regular group of friends and weekly) was Computer Science Four Square at Four. Every Friday, 10 or 20 CS majors would wander out into the sunlight (we didn’t wander too far – it’s right outside of the CS building).
To answer some rumors: 1) yes we really are that nerdy. When we socialize in groups, our topics for conversation didn’t stray too far from algorithms. We did occasionally go into religious wars – Mozilla Firefox versus Google Chrome. 2) no, we aren’t, as a group, that un-athletic. It’s just me that’s frail and feeble. That is, many of the people who came to Four Square at Four are drastically better at four square than most of the jocks I know.
May 23 was Genderfuk, Stanford’s drag show. I didn’t spend much time on my outfit. I just wore my rainbow tie… in my pants’ fly. It was fairly small compared to the University of Oregon’s drag shows, but it was still a good time.
The next day was my dorm’s Boat Dance. Basically, we chartered a cruise boat to go to the edge of the bay and back. Interestingly enough, because Stanford seems to have lost the ability to be frugal, the charter bus (haven’t seen a yellow bus since I became a student at Stanford) cost about as much as the cruise. It was fun. Not any more fun than it would have been if we saved the time, money, and carbon and had a dorm dance on campus, though.
My campaign youtube video wasn’t the only humorous video. Some other people in my dorm made parodies of Brittany Spears’ “Womanizer” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rWp1rVmQ_8 or search for “Stanford Womanizer”) and the TV show “Friends” (not posted online at the moment). Very high production quality.
The last Friday of the term, we had a dorm banquet. Prior to that, there was some voting. It turns out that I’m most likely to start a cult. I’m also second most likely to save the world, second most likely to start the revolution (not that the last two, or possibly three, questions were that different from each other), third most likely to be an evil mastermind, and I’m so likely to make contact with aliens that one person wrote down “Sam King already has” in the voting period. I didn’t get voted Prettiest Eyes. One person did vote me for Most Romantic, though.
The first week of May, my phone broke. You may not be aware at this point, but I do a lot of things, and the calendar on my phone is how I keep track of them all. Being without a phone for a week was not fun, even though I rarely talk on the phone or send or receive text messages.
Because the break was a manufacturer’s electronics error, I didn’t have to pay for the replacement phone, but it was still a major pain to be without a phone, to transfer everything from my old phone to my new phone (especially since my old phone wasn’t working very well), and to talk with tech support to verify that I could get a new phone for free.
I was also sick during dead week and finals week. The Monday before finals, I woke up with a fairly severe fever. I went to my CS class and I ate, but that is all I did that entire day. I slept (or lay in bed without sleeping because my fever was keeping me awake) for 19 hours. I cancelled all of my other commitments. That was the only Monday I had to cancel the Palo Alto HS debate meeting.
Getting 19 hours of sleep helped, and I didn’t have to miss any other commitments. I didn’t do anything above the bare minimum, though. In other words, I missed the pre-law event on Tuesday, the LGBTQ lunch on Wednesday, the product design dinner on Thursday, and probably some other things.
It did mean that most of my final projects and final examinations weren’t in the best of health. My peer counseling written final was on Tuesday (the applied final was the previous week, though, so I took it in good health). My final project in my CS class was due on Wednesday, so I had to spend 10 hours on that between Tuesday night and Wednesday at 5am. Thursday was my SLE oral final, so I spent some time studying for that on Wednesday night. Friday was my social movements research paper, so the entirety of Thursday after my SLE final was spent on that. And I didn’t miss class, either.
Thankfully, though, my CS final, which is the one I was worried about, was on June 10, or roughly 220 hours after I first woke up sick. I was still congested, but I was in a clear state of mind at that point, and the 5 days in between my last non-CS-final activity and my CS final helped.
I’m not quite sure what the sickness was. Some people thought it might be Swine Flu – there were about 7 cases on campus around dead week. Right after news of swine flu came out, the president was talking about shutting down the campus and sending everyone home if there were any cases in the area. Then everyone realized that the swine flu was less harmful than the seasonal flu. Because of the swine flu possibility, though, my RA and roommate coerced me into going to Vaden, the campus’ free clinic. When I stopped by on the Tuesday (or maybe Wedensday?) after I got sick, they thought it might be strep (the test came back negative) and gave me some Tylenol and ibuprofen. I almost choked on the Tylenol since I have never learned how to swallow pills. The process of choking (and coughing) made my shoulder sore – this symptom persisted for the rest of my sickness, and it was much more severe than any symptom I had after Monday’s fever. Yet another plague of modern medicine! Or I should really learn how to swallow pills. I didn’t end up taking the rest of my doses of Tylenol or ibuprofen.
The Monday after I got back home, I got a voicemail from my bank / credit card. They said that there was some suspicious activity on my account and to call them back as soon as I got it. I checked out my account online, and there were two $150 purchases posted to my credit card account earlier that day. Needless to say, they weren’t me.
I gave them a call back. They cancelled my card, sent me a new one in the mail (apparently, they had my address wrong on file even though I had been getting mail from them properly. I had to call a different person later that day to get that straightened out), and told me that I wouldn’t have to pay any of the fraudulent charges. I would only have to fill out some fraud paperwork (it still needs to come in the mail. So does my card.).
The disturbing thing is that I pay a lot of attention to data security. I never lost my physical credit card. I have used the physical card for several purchases, but the only time that it left my sight for any amount of time was when I went to a restaurant once for someone’s birthday dinner. Online, I only deal with trusted websites (paypal, amazon, Amtrak), don’t have any viruses, and don’t let anyone else access any of my financial information. In other words, the only weak links were when I handed it to the waiter at the restaurant and the databases at Amtrak (which, I would wager, aren’t very secure. T Mobile had their databases, including all of their employee financial information, hacked. A bank in Germany had all of their information hacked. Companies don’t take network security seriously unless they are someone like Amazon or Google or Paypal.). Even my local network couldn’t have been compromised (there are attacks that would let people do fraudulent purchases if you ever log in to a website that has your sensitive information, like Amazon, over wifi. I never made a purchase at Target before, though, so that wasn’t the issue). In other words, it’s disturbing that the most secure of people are insecure because of the society around them.
It was cool, though, that my bank caught the fraudulent purchase less than a day after it happened. Go modern technology and computer science!
Since I lack artistic appreciation…
During campaign week, there was an urban dance show and there was a Battle of the Bands. Last year’s student government executive and some of their friends had their own band. The music was a little bit too screaming-hard-rock for my taste, but ah well.
The next weekend was Aida. The play itself was cheesy, but the acting was good.
The second weekend in May was a trip to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. It was a SLE trip because our second paper was comparing a painting to a literary work. The trip was moderately interesting even though I’m not an artsy person. The lecture at the start gave some interesting historical tidbits.
I wasn’t very interested in the static works (paintings), but there were some video exhibitions that I liked. There was an entire floor on one video person. He paints stuff, but he also does videos of himself painting, and the videos are very good. He does some cool stuff with turning the film backwards (in time). In one, he has a painting that, when he filmed it, he had finished and was ripping up and tearing down from the wall. With the backwardsness, though, he was building up the painting from pieces. There was another one where he painted something using various household objects (rag, tea kettle, something that splatters…) with black ink. Doing it backwards gave the effect of him taking the black ink off with a rag (and the ink going up into the tea kettle…). Seeing a rag move backwards in time to pick up paint was definitely worth seeing.
The next day was Bent, a play about the Nazi treatment of LGBTQ people during the holocaust. It was intense.
There was also an end of year comedy show that one of my friends helped organize. It was for a sketch comedy class that he was taking. It turned out very well. One of the highlights was a ghetto spelling bee. One of the contestants was “La-ka,” pronounced “la dash ka.” It took me embarrassingly long to get that joke. The words were funny too. One was a word pronounced like “omelette.” The word was “Immalet” as in “Immalet (I am going to let) you go.”
The Saturday before leaving, I finally saw the house of my roommate, Nick Isaacs. It was big. The folks were friendly. The garden was nice.
Nick has a really big book collection, too. On a related note, I discovered that recent printings of Ender’s Game have a new cover. It’s weird how much the new cover disturbs me. I had no attachment to the old cover, and it doesn’t affect me whatsoever when other books change their covers, but the no cover just seems so wrong.
To get even more sidetracked, Ender’s Game is a bestselling Sci Fi book for young adults by Orson Scott Card. It’s a really good read, but it has a bunch of really screwed up values if you read it critically. For instance, the essay “Creating the Innocent Killer” (http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm) argues (in 10 pages of eloquent language and highly relevant quotes) that, for Card, you’re morally innocent from committing murder as long as you cry about it afterwords. Basically, the book paints Ender, a murderer, as the victim, and it paints the people that Ender kills as perpetrators. My roommate, a member of Men Against Abuse Now, caused me think about the similarities that this has to blaming the woman for domestic abuse. Nick pointed out the regressive views that Card has regarding the role of the woman in a marriage in the sequels to Ender’s Game. Similarly disturbing is Card’s perception of the Middle East and Middle Eastern people in the Ender’s Shadow series. Card’s idea is pretty much that violence is endemic to the Middle East and that Middle Eastern people, with a regressive culture, will continue attacking the noble west until they are completely beaten into submission. Then there will be peace.
That could be connected to my perception of the cover. The old one was a dark war zone. The new one is an innocent little boy playing a game with someone else’s invention. There is something in his eyes, but it’s not critical thinking, responsibility, or taking matters into his own hands (yet more relevance of Eichmann in Jerusalem. See “Radical Responsibility”). Maybe that’s the dirty secret of the novel: Card gets so much credit from smart kids for telling a story about a smart kid, but, in truth, the story is about an emotionally abused pawn of some mass murderers. Ender is intelligent, but it’s just a glorified version of the same intelligence that drones use to follow orders.
Nick’s little brother came back with us for a night in the dorm. The dorm’s consensus was that Timmy was adorable. It was also interesting to see Nick’s brotherly instinct coming out. I think it’s inversely proportional with the age of the brother: Timmy is a few years younger than Ben, Nick’s other brother, and Nick’s relationship with Ben seems more like the relationship of two longtime friends than the relationship of one person who is out to protect and guide the development of the other. I guess it comes with age. “Turn around, turn around…”
Nick also let me store some of my junk with him. It was a major load off of my mind. And off of my hands.
I gave him my magic card collection. There were some old gems in there. It actually turned into a rather emotional moment. I suppose I should have surprised him with them in the car ride over to the train station (he drove me and my 5 bags/tubs away to the train station when I was leaving for Eugene) to maximize the stereotypical cheesy farewell moment. Ah well. I’m not big for stereotypical moments.
We did have a good talk on the ride over, though. We talked about each other’s sleeptalkings – Nick had said something sentimental in his sleep the night before. And I did computer coding in my sleep. Slightly less sentimental. We talked about how we’re only a short distance away from each other next year – both of us are on the east side of campus. We talked about our nonverbal communication. We each had our grunts/shrieks for homework and SLE essays in particular. We talked about singing – more Nick’s than mine. And we wished each other farewell.
We were good roommates.
Getting on the train was a bit of an ordeal.
Little did I know, in my attempts to pack everything into 5 pieces of luggage (Amtrak lets you check 3 and carry on 2), I packed one bag that was 15 lbs over the weight limit. The person behind the counter was mean (and not just because he enforced the rules; he also berated me. Repeatedly). I got about 5lbs of stuff moved from my overweight bag to some of my other bags and some of my carryons. In the end, I had to just take stuff out and carry loose clothing with me onto the train. When I texted my roommate, his response: “You must look like quite the vagrant.” Indeed.
I also slept during normal hours on this train ride. Normally, I read, watch videos, and do other things on my computer until the early morning and then sleep for a few hours. This time, I slept right after getting on the train, I woke up at about 6am (I didn’t feel very rested), and then I found an electrical outlet and finished my train ride.
Normally, the Coast Starlight trains have electrical outlets in their café. This one didn’t, though, so I had to hole myself up in a luggage compartment in the arcade car. Not the most ergonomic seat, but it wasn’t bad. I also met someone on the train ride. He had the same idea as me: find an outlet. He climbed into the luggage compartment directly under me. We didn’t see each other until we neared Eugene and I climbed out of mine. Apparently, he’s interested in computer science and will be applying to Stanford soon. Small world.
Looking out the window, I was very struck by the greenness going north. Even though Stanford has massive investments in landscaping and water such that its campus is much more lush than the surrounding area, it is still drastically greener in Oregon. Probably fresher air, too. Certainly better water.
Getting off the train, I forgot my luggage cart at the train station. Darn.
I’m not doing anything definite this summer, so I’ll have some time.
I have already read The Plague. It’s now my favorite book. I’ll probably reread it in a bit.
Other stuff on my reading list: the SLE books that I didn’t read as well as I should have, The Brother Karamazov, Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Road, Why David Sometimes Wins (which I can’t find a copy of anywhere in Eugene. ARGH. It’s about social movement organizing. It’s by the guy who came up with the slogan “Yes We Can”), Creating an End to Poverty (by Yunus, the microfinance guy), Freakenomics, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and A People’s History of the US. I also have about 30 other books on my list, but I doubt I’ll be able to get to any more than the ones I’ve already mentioned.
Since I’ll be on the student government’s tech team and I’m still relatively new to CS, there’s a lot I need to teach myself. Particularly web programming languages like PHP, Python, and Javascript.
I also have the idea for a programming project that would analyze how hard it is to read a given written work. It would go section by section so that it could tell you which sentences to rewrite. It might be overly ambitious, but it should be relatively simple to program once I figure out how to make it interface nicely with the internet. Obviously, it will take a lot of fine tuning. I’ll need to figure out a nice baseline for easy to read (likely, a news article from a prominent journalist) so that I can figure out what “hard” means, but once I get that done, it will be really cool.
If I do get around to doing it.
I haven’t had much time for video games while at Stanford (though I have, perhaps, spent more time than I should have on video games. Without them, I bet this could have been 10 pages longer!). That has changed now that I’ve gotten home.
I haven’t watched any TV at all at Stanford. The weirdest thing about watching TV again is how horrible and abrasive it is. Commercials are loud, pointless (unlike Google’s relevant and nonintrusive ads!), and interrupt my show. I’ve already seen it (in general). The shows themselves are mostly pointless rather than meaningful commentaries on world events. The exception is Current TV, also available for free at current.com, which has amazing, interesting, and poignant journalism and social critique.
Still, it’s on.
I might also do some writing, learn video or music editing, or do some fun software projects.
I have been 18 for less than a year, and I’ll be doing jury duty this July. While many people have been giving me tips on how to get out of it, I actually think that my civic duty is important.
What I discovered, actually, is the best way to get out of jury duty: make your county so crime-free that there are no trials on your jury duty date (that is, I didn’t actually do jury duty because there was no trial on my date). It isn’t quite as easy as it sounds, but it feels fairly rewarding.
I’ll also be learning how to drive. Probably should have happened two years ago, but better late than never.
Stanford has a program called Sophomore College. Fall term starts towards the end of September, and SoCo goes from the beginning of September until the start of fall term. In SoCo, you only take one class, and it meets every day of the week. To do a SoCo, you have to apply – each SoCo has enrollment capped at 16ish, and there are only 10 or 20 of them, so there are always more people who want to do a SoCo than spots available.
Mehran took over the CS SoCo, so I decided to apply for it. It seems like it will be very fun and educational. There are a bunch of things that the class has historically done than Mehran will be continuing – how do we know that some problems cannot be solved? How do our computer security systems work? What does it mean to describe a computer as “intelligent”? – but he’s also letting the people in the class drive a lot of the curriculum. And there will be some field trips since we’re already in Silicon Valley. And he managed to snag some of the Google Android developer phones, which I’m very excited about.
It’ll also be nice to see how Mehran teaches a class that doesn’t have its enrollment in triple digits.
When I wrote my application to Stanford, I said that I wanted to live in Columbae, the hippie vegetarian consensus-decision-making change-through-nonviolent-action co-op. When people were deciding on where to live for next year, though, I actually ended up in Terra, the orderly meat-eating non-consensus Queers-deserve-rights-at-all-costs co-op.
Many of the considerations that went into that decision turned out untrue. Originally, Nick Isaacs and I were going to be roommates again, and, while he claims he would have been fine living in Columbae, he would have been much happier in an environment where people cooked meat. As much as I am anti-hippie (for me, hippie connotes laid back / self-help culture, and I believe that real change needs action. In other words, I am anti-hippie because I am pro-green, pro-labor, and pro-equality), I still appreciate living in a hippie commune to an extent that many people would not. Also, a bunch of my friends (like Brennan, the person who helped my with my ASSU campaign video) were talking about Terra. Well, neither my roommate nor many people from my dorm will be living in Terra next year. There is a sizable contingent, though: my room and the next two rooms down the line (we already chose our rooms) are all people from my dorm.
That said, I’m still happy to live in Terra next year. First, I wanted to live in a co-op. I like the idea of us being self-sufficient, making our own food, cleaning after ourselves, etc. Everyone, especially affluent folks like me, should try it at least once in their lives. Even though not a lot of the people from my dorm will be living there, I do know a bunch of the people who’ll be living in Terra because Terra is the unofficial LGBTQ themed residence and I’m active in the Queer community. Also, Terra is where a lot of LGBTQ activism takes place, and I like being around activism.
The food’s good, too. And there’s an open kitchen, so I’ll be able to eat even when it’s not a meal time.
The location, while much farther from central campus than before (and it’s basically the farthest dorm from the CS building that exists on campus. ARGH.), is still pretty cool. It’s right next to Vaden, the free clinic. That probably means that I’ll be stopping by at the first signs of sickness rather than never (as was the case with my flu fall term) or after the worst part of my sickness has already passed (as was the case with my sickness in finals week of spring term). It’s near my roommate’s apartment-style place (it’s still a part of Stanford housing, but each group of people has thick walls separating them from everyone else). I’ll have to pass by the HAAS Center for Public Service to get to campus, which will hopefully incite me to be more active with HAAS events. And it isn’t too far.
The actual process for getting into a residence is called the Draw. Because there are 6,000 undergrads that all have conflicting desires on where to live, the Draw is a process where everyone ranks their preferences, then each person gets a lottery number, and each person gets into the highest ranked dorm that is still available when their number comes up.
Since it can be annoying to enter into the draw, some people also preassign. This means that you know where you’re living before the draw even begins. I preassigned into Terra. Because of changes in the rules regarding the draw, this might have actually not been the best idea. Basically, each student, in their 3 years going through the draw, gets one good draw number, one medium draw number, and one bad draw number, and apparently preassigning uses a medium draw number even though I could have gotten into Terra with a bad draw number. I’m not too worried, though.
You can draw (or preassign) with a roommate, but because of the aforementioned dropouts, I drew alone, and I didn’t figure out who would be my roommate until the meeting where everyone decides which room they’ll be living in. My roommate for next year, Allister, actually didn’t make it to that meeting, so I just met with a friend of his that he sent as a proxy.
When I met with him later, though, he seemed pretty cool. Maybe a little less singing in the room than with Nick, but we can work on that.
In the introductory CS classes at Stanford, the section leaders are undergraduates. I think that I would be a pretty good section leader, and I think that I would really like teaching. To be a section leader, you have to do an application, interview, and test. Mid May is the second time I did the first two parts and the first time I made it to the final round.
The application was expanded this time. They also asked some questions like “Explain backtracking recursion to your 10 year old cousin” and “Explain the benefits of decomposition to your friend who loves waterfowl biology.” It was fairly interesting to spend the time thinking up metaphors.
The interview was two parts: lecturing and debugging code. The interview went better in some ways and worse in some ways than last time.
The better: I had spent a lot more time working on my lecture skills, and it paid off. I sat down with David Gobaud after an ASSU meeting, and he had me practice and gave me some tips. I also practiced my lecture on some people in my dorm. The two big improvements in my lecture skills: I used more and better pictures on the whiteboard, and I started abstract before going into the actual computer code. The interviewers also asked some fake questions that I did a good job of answering.
The worse: for the first time since doing debate, I suffered from stage fright. They asked me a question about how long a given piece of code would take to execute, and I failed to calmly step back analyze it even though I knew how to solve the problem. I was on the right track, which they gave me credit for, but they had me move on with the interview before I was completely finished. Also, because I was out of practice programming (my only CS class this term was a math/theory class, not a programming class), I was out of practice debugging, and it showed. I fixed all of the problems with the buggy code before the time was up, but they gave me a few hints, and I should have been much faster overall.
Much to my surprise, I made it to the final round with the test. It was an online 100 minute test. I thought it was fairly fun. In my mind, the test was basically aimed at seeing how good we would be at grading our students’ code. In the test, they asked a lot of questions where it was something that I had never actually done before (and, with good programming practices, things that I should never do), but if I understood the internals of the programming language and the program that turns computer code into computer programs, I would know the correct answer. In other words, the test had me doing a lot of critical thinking. There were also some questions about things that I would get a lot more experience with in CS107, the introductory programming class that I haven’t yet taken.
I did fairly well on it. I got a few questions wrong, but my intuition was correct on most of them even though I hadn’t had any direct experience with a bunch of the questions.
In the end, I didn’t get one of the spots, but I did impress them. They said that my teaching was one of the best that they had seen, but they had found that people who had taken CS107 make better teachers, so they encouraged me to apply again after I take CS107. Not quite the answer I was looking for, but it was one of the most satisfying rejection letters that I’ve gotten. I’ll be taking CS107 in the Fall, and, hopefully, will be section leading in the Winter.
I won’t have to choose my classes for the Fall until a few weeks into Fall term, but I have given them some thought. I will be taking CS107, the next introductory programming class, and CS103, the CS math/theory class that I think they’re encouraging people to take before CS109 (the class I was in this term). Between those two, that’s 10 units.
Apart from that, no definite plans. I might take an intro voice (ie, singing) class. There are some Urban Studies classes that I want to take – the 130 series has some very highly recommended classes on social entrepreneurship. I might take a class or two from the law/business/education schools (probably not ready for med school, though). There are a bunch of interesting classes in the Feminist Studies and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity departments. I have also been telling myself continuously that I need to take more history classes – debate has given me the critical thinking skills to put the pieces together once I know the relevant historical facts, but I still don’t know all of the relevant historical facts.
Oh yeah, there are some introductory math/physics/chemistry classes that I was planning on taking my frosh year, too. What ever happened to those? I should probably take those at some point in time.
My favorite reading in SLE was Camus’ The Stranger. The protagonist, Meursault, is very similar to me in many ways. He has seen what the existentialists call “the absurd” – the idea that, unless you believe in religion or a substitute (like nationalism, fascism, capitalism, Marxism, etc), there is no way to say that there is any absolute Truth or value, and in the current historical moment, even if people claim to believe in those things, most are just going through the motions. In other words, “the absurd” is the idea that there is no absolute meaning to life. The universe is cold.
The key difference is that, while both Meursault and I have seen the absurd, Meursault, until the very end, acts like an emo nihilist whereas I act more like a Quaker with zeal. Meursault sees a cold universe and lives coldly. I see a cold universe and try to bring warmth to it. That is why Camus didn’t like being called an existentialist. He agrees with Sartre on the absurd – that is, that the universe is cold – but Camus puts the emphasis on the idea that people don’t need a warm universe to behave warm themselves. No absolute values doesn’t mean no values. In the SLE discussion section that we had after reading, that was more or less my take on the book. Meursault’s dispassionateness is his tragic flaw, and the answer is compassion. The section leader, Greg Watkins, recommended that I read Camus’ The Plague, a book that he wrote after The Stranger that more strongly develops those ideas of compassion.
June 19, I finished reading The Plague. If you’re interested in learning what my philosophy looks like, The Plague is the most eloquent elaboration of my philosophy that I have ever seen. It is easily my favorite book.
In The Plague, the town of Oran gets the Plague and is quarantined. The book is about the group of people who fight it.
There are many works that include a self referential element – writers writing about the role of art, the artist, and the masterpiece – but The Plague was the first book I have read where I felt the description of the artist was both honest and successful. Camus describes the artist as doing their tireless work and duty to simultaneously tell the dirty truth and leave the reader to have hope that their duty will be meaningful and that love and community are possible. The final page alone made me cry more than any book before ever has. It was beautiful and inspiring. It was honest. As I neared the end of the book, what I had already read was so revalationary that I doubted Camus’ ability to create a meaningful conclusion. But it was perfect.
The same values that I described in an artist were the important parts of the book. This is my favorite book because it provides such a compelling defense of those values that I don’t believe in but yet I zeal with (as I discussed in “Radical Responsibility”): Truth, Compassion / Sympathy, Duty, Hope, Community, Love, and Honor / Fidelity / Respect. Like Arendt, Camus sets a high bar for the everyday person. It is insufficient to simply do no harm. Every person has a natural duty to their community. Fulfilling that duty doesn’t make a person a saint; it just makes them human.
Most important, for me, was Camus’ discussion of Duty. Every person has a duty to do good, but then there is the problem of the absurd. There is no earthly reward for doing your duty. There is no heavenly reward for doing your duty. You will never be done with your duty; you will never win. But you still must do your duty. There are no objective values, so there can be no justification for this (any rigorous philosophy needs axioms just as much as it needs theorems). But you still must do your duty. Camus writes:
“It comes to this […] what interests me is learning how to become a saint.”
“But you don’t believe in God.”
“Exactly! Can one be a saint without God? – that’s the problem, in fact the only problem, I’m up against today.”
At that point, the rest of philosophy is secondary, for Duty is the only pragmatic or moral philosophy. “There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn’t waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done” (41). There is enough in the command “Do Good” to last a lifetime.
This duty must be unflinching. In the face of bureaucracy, doubt, or the name of Truth, a person must invoke duty. Nothing more, nothing less. When the doctors are discussing whether or not plague has broken out, Rieux declares that identifying it as plague or not is the wrong question. “You’re stating the problem wrongly. It’s not a question of the term I use; it’s a question of time […] It doesn’t matter to me […] how you phrase it. My point is that we should not act as if there were no likelihood that half the population would be wiped out; for then it would be” (50-51).
Regarding the tension between Duty and Truth: it is not so much that duty denies Truth, but rather a recognition that there are stories more important than the one regarded as Truth. Unflinchingly telling the story of your duty is the most important truth even if, in the face of someone else’s Truth, your truth is the simple declaration “In this respect they were wrong, and their views obviously called for revision” (23). There is no use for the so called Truths in which “something is held back” (12). Then, the ‘Truth’ is just an abstraction away from reality. Seeing death doesn’t show you the Truth without complete empathy and sympathy for the person in suffering: “they had never had to witness over so long a period the death-throes of an innocent child” (214). In other words, the truth in duty is more significant than all other truths because it recognizes the ugly parts of the world and leads to new understandings. “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture” (218).
In order to care for the living, duty must look forward rather than dwelling on past indiscretions (56). Duty knows no price (10), but it does know community (20). Duty even means abandoning humanity in order to truly serve others (68-9, 76-7), even though that abstracts the individual away from something precious. Most people do need human warmth (56) and love (8; 14; 18). Living in a world of tragedy, that is hard, but it just tells of the need for hope (37; 59-60, 74). Thus, at the same time as living dutifully, even if that must be without humanity, the guiding force has to be living with compassion, sympathy, and empathy (46).
This all comes together in what the narrator claims is the central theme of the book. The narrator “resolved to compile this chronicle” to do his duty in speaking in favor of the plague-stricken people and to give a memorial of the injustice, but also “to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in [people] than to despise” (308). That was the most beautiful part of the book. The narrator says the same thing within the first few pages, but I wasn’t yet ready to accept such simple words.
I wanted to believe in it then, but it was too important to take lightly. That statement is the most important claim in every anti-totalitarian philosophy. The problem with totalitarian regimes is the problem of evil. There have been plenty of good tyrants who brought infrastructure and industry to their citizens and who would have won the popular vote if there were an election. But sometimes evil happens, and then you have Nazi Germany. With anti-totalitarian politics, it’s the opposite. The problem of good: in a democracy, power is less centralized, but there is no authority to trust and noone authoritative enough to charismatically declare that we must all fight the good fight. No Crusades, but no Savior. There may be less evil, but is it worth the sacrifice if it means that there would be less good?
Essential to the question of duty is if that duty is enough. Without some kernel of good essential to human beings, duty would not be enough. But as long as human nature is something to believe in, then duty is enough. If there is that kernel of good, then every scientific discovery, every opportunity, and every trial is also good because I can trust in humanity to do the right thing. When I think about how to treat others, I don’t have to worry about whether they are a good person or not. I categorically believe in treating others with compassion because there is good in people, so even though I might end up helping a Hitler, on the whole I will be doing good.
That’s the problem with postmodern philosophy. It argues that there is no human nature. Without that nature, we can’t say that people are, on the whole, good. In that philosophy, nonviolence is not enough, and neither is common decency. Drastic and totalitarian action would be necessary to secure the good. Liberal Democracy would not be the end of history as Francis Fukuyama argued (“The End of History and the Last Man”; speaking of which, he’s coming to Stanford in 2010). Without someone to show that people are decent, there is no reason to trust in the Truth and hope that, given the facts, people will tend to vote the right way.
And that is what Camus does. The world isn’t perfect; there is pestilence; some people are evil. Those things will always be true. But nevertheless, there is more to admire than to despise, and that’s enough reason to fight the good fight