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This term was the first time in my life that I felt challenged. As hard as it tried, it didn't stop me. Thus, I now feel unstoppable. That is good for my confidence and for causing me to take risks in helping the world, and it is bad for moderating myself and getting sleep.
I did a lot of computery things. I started the year with a two week seminar with my advisor on Great Ideas in Computer Science. It set the stage for the awesomeness of the term. CS221 was the reason my term was hard. I had my first all nighter working on CS221. Then I had my second all nighter working on CS221. It taught me a lot, and it gave me confidence about my CS and study skills. In turn, I taught a computer how to see. Unfortunately, it never got very confident. In CS107, a computer systems class that's taught in assembly and C, I learned that 1000000000! = 0, and I got famous. I'm not sure whether my fame was national or international, but it certainly extended beyond the Stanford bubble, and it all happened because of my common decency. In CS103, I learned about complexity. I already knew a lot of it because it wasn't a very complicated subject.
My CS work wasn't limited to the curriculum. I did some work for the student government technology team. I made one website that was extremely popular and one that has never been updated and probably has never been viewed either. I was, and still am, planning a Hackathon, which connects computer science students with nonprofits for a 24 hour coding marathon.
My CS interests have evolved. I was inspired by a video of a talk that was InSTEDD's conceptual birth. Now, I'm thinking about biocomputation and getting an MD/PhD so that I can use CS to wipe malaria off the globe.
My CS future is looking bright. I didn't fail any of my technical interviews. As a result, I got accepted as a section leader (like a TA-lite) for the introductory CS classes at Stanford, which will start in winter term and will be awesome. I have an internship offer at Google and at InSTEDD, and I'm not sure which I'll take. Google's interviews were also surprisingly easy.
I didn't neglect the non-CS part of me, though I may have killed off a large part of it. In my Feminist Studies class, I learned about the prevalence of patriarchy and relationship abuse. For instance, the original "rule of thumb" is that a husband can beat his wife with a rod that's no thicker than his thumb. In my history class, I learned that slavery is the rule, not the exception, in global human history. In Urban Studies 131, I got lectures from different social entrepreneurs every week. Their organizations are amazing, but most of the focus was on their stories and their character as individuals. The common theme seemed to be that I, too, can buy a one way ticket to Nicaragua.
The extracurriculars have been fairly good, too. Coaching the debaters at Palo Alto HS has been very rewarding, and I'll be the head policy coach next year. Also, I'm the cochair of Stanford's Queer / Straight Alliance. The events that we plan are good, but the work is mostly logistical, which I don't like that much, so it isn't intrinsically rewarding like Computer Science is. As a result of the work I do for QSA (and as a debate coach and for the student government and for Hackathon), I'm being recognized for an award from Stanford's Haas Center for Public Service. Debating for Stanford hasn't been the most rewarding, but I managed to keep the program alive, which was my goal.
The academic events on campus have been awesome. I got a picture with Noam Chomsky. He is a genius. I saw the founder of Kiva twice. She was better the first time. I didn't see any big name politicians (as noted in previous letters, they tend to give boring and contentless talks). Instead, I saw Fred Hampton Jr. Some queer authors also had book readings and talks that made me think about philosophy and identity.
As far as life goes, I haven't had enough time to be as social as I would like, but I did manage to bake lots of cookies. I also discovered what it's like to live in a college dorm room that has no closet or dresser: spotless and organized. I saw two rappers that I listen to: Zion I and Immortal Technique. Immortal Technique gave a lecture rather than a concert, though. I spent Thanksgiving with my roommate from last year. I was the only vegetarian, but they took good care of me. There were even some people as crazy as me politically! It also got me started reflecting on nationalist and religious identities, which continued over Christmas break. While I met the stereotypical college student on the train ride back home, I met the stereotype of college students writing bad checks. Whoops. To my horror, I also discovered that, having used almost 6GB of email storage space, I am running out of space.
Yes, this is my longest letter yet. This time, though, it has enough pictures to tide you through the rants and philosophizing. Also, the content isn't really that long. If you deleted all of the content, there would still be 9 pages of headings and subheadings and 4 pages of pictures.
Next term, because of the thoughts of pre-med and biocomputation, I'm section leading, taking an algorithms class, and taking lots of bio and chem.
This term was very busy. And that's by my standards. This term was the first time that I really felt like I worked hard. And it felt good. Each time, when given the opportunity, I try to push my limits because there is so much to do and so little time. And this term I found out that I have very few limits, and when I am at my limits I am satisfied.
Aside from that, spending 3 months at my limits taught me a lot. It taught me how much I can do. It taught me about how I work. It taught me more about what I value and what I don't.
Thursdays were my busiest day.
930-1045: CS221
1235-205: History class
(grab food)
215-305: History section
315-445: Feminist Studies class
5-6: prep for debate coaching
6-630: dinner
Bike to Palo Alto HS
7-9+: debate coaching
Thus, there are 14 hours in that day between sleep, waking up, breakfast, homework, answering my tons of emails, and everything else. Or, put another way, if I did the minimum possible on Thursday, fulfilling only my daily commitments and none of my weekly commitments, I would have a 10 hour day.
In a given week, if I subtract off all time that I'm in a weekly meeting, class, sleeping, eating, or doing a weekly coop chore, I have about 60 hours remaining. That time has to fit all of the speaker events that I go to, all of the debate tournaments that I attend (meaning 4/10 weeks, I lost all of my weekend), most of my other extracurricular activities, all of my philosophical musings, keeping my room in order, shopping, answering emails, doing my non-weekly coop chores, and all of my homework. That last note is particularly significant because one unit of credit is supposed to be 3 hours of work, one of which is taken up attending lecture, which would equate to about 40 hours of homework, and CS221 probably took more time than most 4 unit classes.
In other words, I found out that my limit is not a question of my determination or intelligence but rather a question of how many hours there are in a week.
The overall theme: taking care of myself became both harder and more important.
I noticed that whenever I was very busy last year, the first (unimportant) thing to go was shaving every day. Nothing bad would happen and noone would complain if I didn't shave for a few days. However, at the outset of this quarter, I realized that I would not be able to handle the workload without unbridled determination, and that goes hand in hand with an extremely positive self image and sense of purpose. In other words, if I tried to get by this quarter, I would fail; I was only able to get by by forcing myself to not only succeed, but to triumph.
So even though I was much more time pressured than at any time in my past, I made sure to do the unimportant things so that I could tell myself that I was thriving. So I was clean shaven this quarter.
I also realized that, in order to take care of myself, some things have to happen. Like eating and sleeping. If I am so tired that I sleep through part of a lecture, then it will take more work to figure out what I missed. If I can't concentrate because I'm hungry, then I won't be productive. Because my schedule everyday is so packed, this means, in practice, that there are very few times that I have in my week where I can go to a speaker event unless it provides food. I have to eat every day, so if an event is at a meal time and provides food, I can often go.
Even at a lower level, my body sends me stronger signals when I'm working at the limit. It takes a lot of energy to produce heat, and when I'm tired and low on energy, my body really appreciates warmth.
Location matters. Terra is a 10 minute bike ride away from most relevant places on campus (ie, the Computer Science building, Gates, which is at the northwest corner of campus. I'm on the southeast corner). That means that if I have an hour between classes, eating lunch at home means I have 40 minutes to make and eat lunch. Thus, I accepted that, even though I'm against eating out because it's wasteful of both money and resources, I would sometimes eat at some of the eateries on campus rather than going back to my dorm for lunch every day because my time is so much more valuable to me.
As anticonsumerist as I was before this quarter, working at the limit made me realize just how meaningless money is at this point in my life.
The flip side of that is that I realized what makes my time valuable and what I like doing.
First, even though I don't really enjoy cooking or cleaning, I consider doing those things in a coop setting immensely valuable. Some forms of work are less creatively fulfilling than others. An efficient division of labor does not mean relegating those alienating chores to a less privileged caste of people. It means that we need a system that encourages every member of the community to take responsibility for themselves and their community. I try to optimize my days to save 20 minutes because I think of everything that I do with my time as extremely valuable. I can't imagine how horrible it would be to have to sacrifice 8 hours of my day cleaning up the messes of, primarily, rich white kids. I think that they deserve the same chance at having meaningful, creative work that I do. That realization would also make me feel alienated if I weren't living in a coop. We make a lot of work that we put off on other people without a thought. That's why working with the people who work for you is so important. It is very different to make a mess when you know that your friend will have to clean it up the next morning. And I realize now how big it is that my RA last year knew the janitorial staff. In Marxist terms, the counterpart to the alienation of labor as a result of capitalist overspecialization is a lack of individual accountability. In simpler terms, I think that it's important to know the person who picks up your trash if you don't deal with it yourself from start to finish.
In general, I also value hard work. One of the things that I least liked about myself in previous terms was the amount of time that I would spend doing nothing productive. Just procrastinating, playing video games, watching TV, etc. This term, because I was forced to give up the unimportant stuff, I had to give up procrastinating, and I felt very good about myself because it meant that I was focusing on things that were meaningful.
Second, I solidified the idea that I don't really like the 3 Rs (Reading, .Riting, and .Rithmatic). Obviously, as a computer science major who writes verbose letters and reads a lot, that needs some qualification.
I don't like the kind of writing that is commonly valued in academia (though my perception of academic essays could be off).
The type of literary analysis that is meaningful to me is the type that you see in these letters. Analyzing semantics doesn't improve my values. I can't think of any instance where I gained anything from writing a lit paper that I didn't gain from simply reading the piece of literature and thinking about it or discussing it (which I do think is valuable). With some essays, I've uncovered some novel ideas, but the biggest ideas have just come from reading. The act of writing a lit paper also feels alienating because I think of writing as something that should be intrinsically productive. That is, when I write something, whether it is a letter or a speech, I write it for the people who will read it, think about it, and talk about it. I write for my community. I write for social change. Writing something that doesn't teach me a lot, will not likely forge a bond between me and the reader, will not likely be read by more than one person, and will not likely inspire social change is not something that I ever want to do.
The same holds true for the social sciences. The type of social scientific analysis that is meaningful to me is the type that is the result of months of research. In dissertations (and real books), people spend thousands of hours uncovering insight and then compress it into a comparatively few pages. In most undergraduate social science papers, they are so short that it would be extremely difficult to say anything that hasn't been said before, and because there is little expectation of original research (because that would take months and money to do well), it is very rare for anyone to say anything that one of their sources didn't already express more eloquently. Someone would probably learn more about my philosophy by reading some of Peter Singer's analysis on utilitarianism and Camus' "The Plague" than by reading anything that I write, and someone would probably learn more about my politics by reading something by Howard Zinn, Istvan Meszaros, or Noam Chomsky (I can't think of, off the top of my head, any political issue about which I disagree with Chomsky).
That's one reason that I write these journal entries / letters and why I like classes that assign journal entries rather than traditional papers. In my Theory of Knowledge class that I took in my senior year at South Eugene International High School, I always wrote substantially more than was required in my journal entries because it was an opportunity for meaningful self reflection and reflection about the world in whatever way I found most meaningful. Even when the entries are required, I take them seriously rather than BSing them. And the same was mostly true of the journal entries in the feminist studies class that I took this year. These journal entries not only function as a means for reflection on times when I am far too busy to engage in reflection, but they also (hopefully) maintain some level of community between me and you, even though I may not talk with you in person as much as I should. My hope when I started to write these journal entries was that they would start up a conversation between us.
My Theory of Knowledge class also assigned a more traditional essay, but because it prioritized the same sort of reflection, I got a lot out of it (and I also wrote substantially more than the maximum essay length. with the teacher's permission, of course). Rather than basing the essay around a literary or philosophical work, the prompt was on a philosophical idea, and the essay was a chance to explore that idea. Because I don't think that many undergraduate lit or social science papers will be published in a medium such that they directly better the world, that form of reflection is all that matters in a paper. And I don't think that the lit essays in academia allow for that open reflection. There is an academic voice. That voice, for some reason, doesn't like contractions. That voice doesn't like the first person even though very little of what the writer asserts is true to avoid saying "I believe" or "I feel" is actually objectively true, and personal experience is extremely important. That voice doesn't like the second person even though what the reader gains from a literary essay is one of only two things that is important about that essay (the other being what the writer gains). That voice traditionally will not allow people to speak in languages other than English or about their favorite song, even though escribiendo en el sujecto de musica might be the best way to develop a philosophical idea. I have had many 5-minute songs exert a substantial influence on me; I have had very few 300 page books exert a similar influence (though, often, their influence is greater).
In other words, I don't like writing for class because I have seen just how powerful writing can be, and when I am using all of my time doing something that I consider valuable, writing for class seems like a waste.
Reading is more hit-or-miss. There are a lot of books that I really like. I like reading the news. I like reading papers that I think are relevant. And even if I don't like a particular book, I can appreciate reading it as a form of creating common experience that allows for discussion -- that's one of the things that I really liked about SLE last year.
I dislike reading when it seems like the teacher just threw the reading in because they could. Particularly, when the reading is assigned for the sake of content and that same content is discussed in lecture, I am unlikely to find it valuable. Thus, I rarely do the textbook reading in my computer science classes unless it covers material that wasn't covered in lecture at all. Social sciences are much more variable in how well they deal with the reading. In general, I find material that was specifically tailored for me, like lecture notes or handouts or a lecture itself, is more educational.
That's another critique that I have of some readings: there seems to be a tendency to prefer readings that are older over readings that are more directly pertinent to my life. I would much rather read Rawls than Plato or even Locke or Rousseau. What's interesting is that many of my teachers, when asked to justify these choices, don't provide a logically complete justification. They say that Plato is good or educational or pertinent to my life. However, they are silent on the only question that matters -- not cost, but opportunity cost. There are millions of valuable uses of my time. In order to justify reading Plato, I need to know why Plato is more valuable than any other writer. Because Plato is valuable, but most political science and philosophical texts from the past century or two contain all of the valuable parts of Plato, weed out the useless parts, speak in common English so that I don't have to spend time translating and can dedicate all of my time to thinking about the issues, and present new ideas that pertain to problems that didn't even exist in Plato's time.
As far as I'm concerned, the numbers can crunch themselves.
What I like about computer science is that it isn't just about numbers. It's about critical thinking and problem solving using a particularly powerful tool. The nature of each problem varies, as will the nature of each solution. Some problems don't need much forethought and really just need any solution, no matter how inelegant. Some problems need a systematic view of every small component. Often, a combination is best: make something quick, and then analyze it to see which part is slowing you down the most.
What is significant, though, is that it is applied. It isn't just about any abstraction. It's actually about solving problems, and it teaches me a method for solving problems that I wouldn't be able to learn easily on my own. That's the difference between programming and computer science. Computer science is the way of thinking that allows a person to solve problems using computers regardless of what particular programming language they use or what problem they try to solve. Programming is the mechanics of the language. It's like the difference between literacy and authorship. Being literate helps with being an author, but very little of authorship is about putting words on paper -- it's much more about telling the story. Most of the breakthroughs in computer science don't have to do with any particular piece of code. They're much more about elegant solutions to unsolved problems.
If there was a social science major that had similar applied problem solving, I would likely be that major (or maybe a double major. Because CS is really awesome). However, because Stanford doesn't have a department of social movement organizing and because most of the applied classes outside of the School of Engineering are in the professional schools (law, business, education, medicine) or in extracurriculars, I wouldn't want to take an entire major's worth of non-engineering classes. When I see applied classes, like the Urban Studies 130 series on social entrepreneurship or the class on peer counseling that I took last spring or the class on relationship abuse prevention that I took this term, I take them and they are valuable regardless of their department. However, computer science is the only department that I have thus far explored where all of the classes are that valuable.
After this term, I feel indomitable. I got As in all of my classes, I learned a lot, I did what I planned to do in my extracurriculars (though I probably didn't spend enough time on the ASSU tech team), I succeeded in every tech interview that I did, I almost averaged 8 hours of sleep per night, I made some new friends, and I saw my old friends. I think that, with a small deal of caution, I will be able to take any challenge that I put myself to.
At the beginning of September, I was a part of a program called Sophomore College. Sophomore College is two weeks of one class at the start of sophomore year. You apply to one of several programs. There are small class sizes, and there are lots of cool activities.
My sophomore college was CS10SC -- Great Ideas in Computer Science. The professor was Mehran Sahami, my advisor. It was an awesome experience. We learned about great ideas in the history of computing, we learned about contemporary computing with tours to Facebook and Google (and with Mehran's knowledge as a CS professor and Research Scientist at Google). Because it was a small class and we were all in the same dorm, I got to know my fellow SoCo'ers well. It was extremely fun and interesting.
At the same time, I started up with my extracurriculars, notably coaching debate. Because I had more free time during SoCo than during the rest of the term, I was able to put in a lot more work. That free time also meant that I was able to read a book cover to cover. Wow! And I got some good one-on-one time with Mehran, which is nice because both of us are very busy during the quarter.
I also got on my bike for the first time in three months. The sun damaged the grips, and there were spider webs all over it, but everything worked fine, and after a few months, the spiders subsided to a reasonable level.
All in all, it was an excellent introduction to a hard quarter.
The course itself was like a more-interesting, 2-week version of CS103. What made it more interesting was that we would only take one or two days for each topic, and those days would cover the same material that we would spend a week or two on in CS103. Mehran also managed to fit in lots of interesting historical tidbits about each topic, in addition to covering some topics not covered in CS103 like AI, Google's PageRank, Social Networks (in fact, one of my Google interview questions involved an algorithm that Mehran covered in the lecture on social networks), encryption, and Open Source Software. The fact that Mehran is Mehran also made the course pretty awesome.
The course itself wasn't too hard. There were two problem sets that were each around an hour long. There was also a final project where we chose our own subject matter. I implemented a primitive version of RSA encryption (RSA is the reason that the internet is secure and that typing in your credit card number doesn't immediately mean someone else has access to your credit card).
While the course wasn't hard, it did make CS103 very easy in the fall.
The main thing that made the course so interesting, though, was all of the events that we did.
We toured Google. It was really awesome. There was a lecture on distributed databases (the takeaway: Paxos, Paxos with Cruft, or Broken. Paxos is a protocol for keeping multiple databases in sync with each other). We ate lunch in one of the Google cafeterias (it really is that good). We walked around and saw the campus. We looked around at some of the random projects that Google employees have done in their 20% time (Google employees get 20% of their time to work on the project of their choice). The Google campus had a feel similar to the one that I got when first setting foot on Stanford's campus. I would not mind interning there at all (I started talking with Mehran about the possibility of interning at Google soon after the tour).
We toured Facebook. They had a much smaller / newer feel than Google. The CEO and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, gave us a talk and some stuff with "Facebook" plastered all over it. It was interesting to get a talk from a CEO that's 6 years older than me and that only started wearing a tie when the economy crashed. His talk was a lot about the culture of the company. Because it's a web based company that's very new, each employee has a lot of influence (there are only about 250 software engineers, and there are about 250 million users), and there is a lot of rapid development. Another interesting thing that I noticed was that a lot of the people in my Sophomore College seemed more excited with the possibility of interning at Facebook than at Google.
We visited Stanford's AI lab. The person who would teach my AI class in the fall, Andrew Ng, gave us the tour. We saw all of the cool stuff that they did, like teaching a robot dog to walk over rough terrain (it's really hard to teach a robot to use legs rather than wheels), teaching a model helicopter to do crazy tricks like fly upside down, and working to create general-purpose robot modules (ie, a speech recognition module, an object recognition module, a module to open doors) that could be plugged in to any robot. It was interesting, but less interesting than the other tours.
We got a lecture from Google's head of Open Source, Chris DiBona. I think that a lot of the other people in the Sophomore College didn't get a lot out of the lecture because DiBona seemed to assume a certain level of knowledge about Open Source culture rather than assuming nothing. However, the level of knowledge that he assumed was almost exactly my level of knowledge (that of someone who read Slashdot, a nerdy news source, for a while), so I loved the talk. It covered the basics of Open Source -- what an open source license is, different open source software -- but it was mostly about the history and culture of open source. Thus, there were lots of funny, personal stories about the big players that I had only read about.
We went to the Computer History Museum (in Mountainview, I think). They had a lot of really old computers like the Babbage Machine. It worked with a crank, and it could do arithmetic! There were lots of punch card computers, and there was a chunk of each of the the first few electric computer (one of the room-big computers) that were used in big military tasks. There were also a bunch of computers that were about as old as I was, and some that are half my age. Mehran saw the first computer that he ever programmed on (I'm typing on the first computer that I ever seriously programmed on!). There was also an AI room that had some history-related plaques (ie, Deep Blue). It was pretty cool.
We went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It wasn't really computer related, but it was certainly an experience. First of all, we went there and back completely on public transportation, which meant Stanford-> Stanford's Free Bus, the Marguerite-> Caltrain-> San Francisco Bus-> Exploratorium. We spent substantially more time going to and from the Exploratorium than we did in the Exploratorium. My hunch is that much of the problem was scheduling -- we spent a lot of that time waiting, and I bet it could have been avoided. It all turned out well, though. The Exploratorium itself had a lot of cool exhibits. A lot of them showed similar things about how stuff works that I had seen at other science museums. The exhibits were done in a very fun and interactive way.
Some of the social events included watching the movie Sneakers (which is a non-technologically-accurate story about people who find a device that breaks NP completeness) and eating a dinner at Mehran's house. There was also general socializing, which included Mafia, Cranium, and watching the movie Dr. Horrible.
Because the school year hadn't started yet, Mehran didn't have quite as many people swarming his office hours. We chatted about classes in the upcoming quarter. I had already been planning on taking CS103, CS107, FEMST138, URBANST131, and one other non-CS class, but that still left some room in my schedule. Mehran mentioned that CS221 would be possible even though I hadn't really taken the prerequisites, which sealed my fate for the quarter.
We also talked about CS, my plans for next summer, and life in general.
One night, sitting in my SoCo dorm room, I came across Dr. Larry Brilliant's TED talks (TED is a conference that gets together a lot of cool people and has them give speeches, which are videotaped and freely available at ted.com). I don't remember how I came across them -- maybe I was watching Majora Carter's TED talk (Very good. http://www.ted.com/talks/majora_carter_s_tale_of_urban_renewal.html), or maybe I was just thinking about when Dr. Larry Brilliant spoke at the Stanford Service Summit last spring and doing a search.
The first TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_wants_to_stop_pandemics.html) was the founding talk of InSTEDD. Dr. Brilliant talked about seeing the last case of killer small pox in the world and his hope that we would be able to end other diseases through early detection and early response. His opening: "I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I got to see the last case of killer small pox in the world. There's nothing that makes you feel more the blessing and the honor of working in a program like that than to know that something that horrible no longer exists." Small pox killed more people in the 20th century than all of the wars in history, and it is eradicated. The global movement to eradicate it was astounding. Dr. Brilliant: "Al Gore said that the most photographed and printed image in the world was that of the earth, but this photograph [of a child with small pox lesions], as of 1974, was the most widely printed because we printed two billion copies and we took them hand to hand, door to door, to show people and ask them." He talked about how technology, GPHIN, had prevented SARS from being an epidemic. That planted the seed: using technology to eradicate a disease would be a very cool thing to do.
I talked with Mehran about what career opportunities there were for a computer scientist interesting in saving the world. One of the problems that I have been thinking about since deciding to go into CS is thinking about how I can use it to do good. Computers are very good at solving any problems of information. The issue is that, particularly with the problems affecting the worst off people in the world, we already know what needs to be done. People need food, water, and medicine distributed to them. People need capital so that they can work. People need schools built.
There are some informational challenges: what's the most efficient way to go about distribution? How can people with only a $20 cell phone query Google? If an aid worker needs to communicate with a semi-illiterate person using only a $20 cell phone and voice is out, how can they use text messages? How can we make aid workers as efficient as possible? If I could find an organization that were tackling these kinds of problems and hiring (like InSTEDD), that would be perfect, but since a lot of these problems are smaller and more disparate projects, it can be hard to get institutional support for them, and because the work is very specialized (you need to know computer science and be interested in global public health), there aren't as many nonprofits working specifically on those problems.
In the vein of "we don't need some insightful person to do something new; we just need people to do the work that we know needs to be done," I've been asking lots of people what they think the intersection of CS and social change is. Some common trends that I've noticed: everyone needs a website, and social media in general can help with advertising; most nonprofits need database work as they get bigger; and there are a few more-specialized nonprofits that were founded to use technology to address a specific problem. The work for the former two trends would be less interesting but available; the work for the last trend would require a lot of work in the field to figure out a problem and solution before doing any computer work.
When I mentioned public health to Mehran, though, he brought up that diseases are informational problems. Modeling the spread can help contain a disease. And, for the physiologically inclined, we can use computers to hack into diseases, determine exactly what they do, and design the drug that will undo that. Every half-century or so in recent history, humankind makes one or two big breakthroughs that advances our understanding of the world. Newtonian physics in the 17th and 18th century, electromagnetism in the early 19th century, biology, genetics, and medicine in the late 19th century, quantum physics and chemistry in the early 20th century, and information processing with computers in the late 20th century (though I might be a little bit off on any of these dates). A lot of people think that the first half of the 21st century will be known for computational biology -- using computers to understand and interact with biological beings. And it so happens that Stanford's CS department was reformed just last year to allow for specialization in certain tracks, and one of the tracks is biocomputation.
Another comment that Mehran made was that to truly advance the state of the art in biocomputation, you will probably need an MD / PhD. You need an extremely deep understanding of how the human body works and interacts with its environment and an extremely deep understanding of computers. As a result, I am now planning on fulfilling pre-med requirements at the same time as being a CS major. It shouldn't be too hard -- for the next three terms, I'll be taking a bunch of biology and chemistry classes (most people take chem their frosh year so that they can take bio their sophomore year because chem is a prerequisite for bio. I never really understood the concept of prerequisites anyways.), and I'll have to study physics on my own because I won't have taken the entirety of the physics series before taking my MCATs, but the workload will be very minimal after fall term of my junior year -- I will have taken most my general education requirements, most of my CS requirements, and most of my premed requirements by then, even though I'm only getting started now. There will still be a class or two each term that I have to take, but I think that more than half of my units each term are free for me to take whatever classes seem most interesting to me. I don't know what all of Stanford's premeds are so stressed out about.
While I still say that my career goal is to save the world, I can also say that I don't intend to die in a world where malaria exists. I will likely fail in that intention, but I won't stop working until I have succeeded.
Apparently, Palo Alto HS starts obscenely early. Thus, they were ready for debate practices to start up as soon as I arrived in California. Because Ben Picozzi, the other policy debate coach, wasn't on campus yet, this meant that there was a lot more independent work for me to do in preparing for, attending, and running practices.
I discovered that, like most things, you get out of debate coaching what you put into it. Because I was in charge for the time being, there was a lot more responsibility, but I felt a deeper connection with the debaters and I got more job satisfaction.
It'll be fun next year when I'm head policy coach.
Because SoCo was less time consuming than fall term, I actually had time to read a Book. I read "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedarsis. It came highly recommended to me by my high school lit teacher after she read my comments on humor in the Spring 2009 Verbose Letter. Because it was a library book (from the Law Library, in fact), I didn't mark it up, so my reflections on it may be less extensive than my reflections on "The Plague."
The book was lighter than I had read in a while. It's a collection of short stories about Sedarsis' life and is, in many ways, an examination of our postmodern culture and the assumptions that we bring to everyday situations. He actually had a lot about his personal experiences with postmodern art. There was also a good deal about homophobia, classism, and nationalism.
I didn't gain new revelations, but it was definitely a good read.
On 11/15, we had a SoCo reunion. Our class had an even boy-girl ratio, but all of the girls and none of the boys aside from me showed up to the reunion. I wonder why? The girls also seem to be surpassing the boys in terms of general success (ie, internships and accolades). Score one for equality! Particularly important in a field as gender-biased as Computer Science.
CS221 (along with all of the sheer amount of classes and extracurriculars) is what made this term hard.
I learned a lot about working with a group and developing a large project. In terms of AI content, the course material:
We started out with a basic search for a solution. Most AI problems could be phrased as a search problem. The only issue is that basic searches are extremely time consuming which makes them impractical to use in all but the most basic problems. In searches, we learned about a generic search algorithm (maintain a queue; add connected nodes to the queue when you 'expand' a node, which removes that node from the queue; when you expand a node, you check to see if it's the a goal node, in which case you can return with that node immediately. The only difference with different searches is what type of queue it is: first in first out --> breadth first search; last in first out --> depth first search; and cost-based searches or heuristic based searches like A* will use a priority queue), A* search, a search that uses a divide-and-conquer heuristic, and greedy hill climbing and optimization search.
We spent a little bit of time on applying search to solving constraint satisfaction problems and phrasing slightly more complicated problems in CSP terms (ie, is there a way to color a given map so that no two adjacent countries have the same color if you only have 4 colors to work with?). Specifically, we learned about consistency checking, forward propagation, and arc consistency / constraint propagation, in addition to the heuristics of choosing the most constrained variable or the least constraining value.
The next part of the class was about 'supervised machine learning.' With supervised learning algorithms, you know the correct answers, you let the machine make a guess, and you tell the machine how wrong it was. Then, it changes the way that it makes its guesses based on if it was wrong or not. This works well if you know exactly how the machine should have guessed in a number of cases and you want it to be able to use those cases to predict future cases. Specifically, we learned about linear and logistic regression using a gradient descent algorithm, and basic, bagged, and boosted decision trees.
We then moved on to reinforcement learning. This is good when you don't know the correct answer to a given problem, but you know what you want the answer to be. Ie, in a chess game, you don't know what move is most strategic on move 34, but you know that you want to win, and you might be able to tell the machine how far away it is from winning on any given move (ie, how many pieces it has left versus how many pieces the opponent has). We spent a lot of time on learning the Markov Decision Process.
That brought us about halfway through the term. In the last half, we spent more time on specific problems in AI and on more advanced models. Since we already know the basics of each model, this meant that the emphasis was more on learning a new algorithm to solve a task more efficiently rather than having to learn about what the task even is. Some of the areas that we talked about were computer vision and optical recognition, medical diagnosis, and natural language processing. Some of the new models we learned about were Bayesian networks, Hidden Markov Models, and Particle Filters.
Interspersed throughout the course were cool tidbits of things that AI has done. For instance, Stanford taught a helicopter to fly upside down, taught a car to do tricks like turn around really quickly, drive sideways, drive on ice, and drive long distances without any human input, and taught a machine to classify objects and respond to voice commands. AI can do some pretty cool stuff. And InSTEDD was founded on using AI to do natural language processing and infer disease outbreaks (now they do lots of other cool things too).
Starting out, all of the material was very basic. It was all a review of things that I learned about search in CS106B or about probability in CS109. As a result, the first problem set hit hard. It may have been an all-nighter between coding and proofs (there were only four assignments, plus the final assignment, in the term, but each assignment had both a coding portion and a more mathy portion) -- I don't actually remember. The reason that it was so difficult is because, rather than testing the basics like most classes do, they assume that you understand the basics and extract the most difficult parts of the reading and lecture and come up with a conceptually difficult problem. They pulled it off masterfully, though. They did a tremendous amount of the work for us on the coding portions, which meant that if we understood everything we had to do (ie, if we understood the material), it would be a simple task to add in what we needed to do. It was the same way with the problem set portion. The problems were really hard to understand, but once we understood them, the entire problem set was only a few pages. Also, because the class was so geared towards applied AI techniques, it was extremely evident that each coding assignment and problem set was only a few steps removed from an actual AI project that is either an unsolved problem or a problem that was only solved a few years ago, so there was never a question of why we were doing the work that we were doing. Everything was meaningful.
In comparison to my other classes: I was also very satisfied with the assignments in CS107. CS107 was a programming class, which meant that it was applied rather than theoretical ("can do you this?" versus "do you know this?"), and in those classes, you don't really learn the material until you have programmed it. Because CS221 was more theoretical, they couldn't quite make it so that you would learn about a type of machine learning or search space by doing, but the way they laid out their assignments was a very concise way of testing conceptual understanding. The assignments in CS103, a very theoretical class, I was less satisfied with. I guess since it's the introductory theoretical CS class, they have to teach the mechanics of doing proofs and such, but because I had already picked up most of that before, I felt like I had to do a lot of work on the assignments even after I understood all of the material.
Later on in the term, the assignments weren't quite so torturous. They were still very hard, but I guess we adapted to them or learned about working harder. I think that a large part of it was that we got better at group work. In CS221, all of the assignments were group-based. You could program with 2 other people, and you could discuss how you would solve the problems on the problem set with anyone as long as you wrote it up on your own. With the first few assignments, my group was spending a lot of time talking about the problem set portion; on the later assignments, we did the problem sets on our own and just conferred with each other when we had a problem (ie, that the class assumed knowledge of multivariable calculus, which I didn't know, so Brennan taught me multivariable calculus in 10 minutes for the problem set that utilized it) or to check our answers, which ended up going quite a bit faster. We also got better about distributing work and thought as a group. Or perhaps the assignments were just as torturous towards the end, but because we had completed the earlier ones, we knew that it could be done, so it wasn't a desperate race to finish. Rather, it was a steady progression of work towards a goal. That goal may not come until 4 or 7am, but it will come. I also realized the extent to which group work on difficult projects lends itself to all nighters. With individual work, you can work an hour during lunch, an hour between classes, an hour at 3am, and keep on like that until finished. Because finding a time when three busy students can meet to work on a project is hard, often not beginning until 10pm, it is much harder to break up the assignment into multiple work sessions.
Also, there were a ton of 'late days' (in the CS department, classes give out 'late days,' which are basically pre-approved extensions. Most classes will have between 2 and 4 late days. CS221 had 7.) Thus, if we needed more time on an assignment, it didn't feel like wasting a precious resource to turn it in late. In other words, our all nighters were the result of having other projects that we needed to do the next day and the day after that, not the result of any cruelty on the part of CS221.
Because the CS221 assignments were all conceptually difficult, I went into my other classes with a good deal of arrogance. Yes, people say that CS107 is a hard class, but it is by no means CS221, and I'm doing fine in CS221, so CS107 is easy. And that arrogance served me well. It is the same way of thinking that I got from doing debate. Yes, people say that an IB class or that taking an AP test without taking the class, or that taking a full class schedule and a full extracurricular schedule is hard, but it is by no means as hard as debate, so all of that is easy. Once I have climbed a high mountain, all lower mountains become mere hills. CS221 was hard, but it helped me with everything else that I did by giving me a more arrogant attitude.
It was arrogance, not rational confidence. Confidence is entering territory that has been explored. Arrogance is treated unexplored territory as if it had been explored. My term was hard, and there wasn't much wiggle room. If I had gotten a bad sickness, it would have been hard to make the time to recover. Rushing, headstrong, into the hard terms seems to have worked out so far, though.
Arrogance helps in some situations. It gives me all of the benefits of self-confidence even when I shouldn't be so confident. That means that I take risks and that I realize that, with stupid rules, the people who make them are often willing to relax them. I would not be as successful as I have been with only rational self-confidence.
However, arrogance is arrogance, a vice rather than a virtue. Being arrogant with my course load turned out well, but humility would probably have been better in my classes. In CS221, I was humble. It was the first class that I had taken that was really hard. Thus, I was fine when I missed a few points. In CS107, I was arrogant, so when I missed some points, I sent out grade-grubbing emails even though I was doing fine in the course and I could see why they would have given me the grade that I got.
The problem is that I haven't found a suitable substitute for arrogance. When I think of problems as hard, they are much harder to solve. I have had a series of technical interviews. The first few were the section leading interviews in the past. The last few have been the section leading interviews this term and internship interviews this term. In the past, I was asked questions that I knew, but I was nervous, and I choked. This term, I felt good about myself, and the arrogance overshadowed the nervousness, and I succeeded.
I guess you need to make a choice when living in a world with imperfect information.
CS221 also had a midterm. The midterm was on week 8/10. I guess they made the midterm so late because they had a final project rather than a final test, so they wanted to test as much as they could. The midterm was fairly similar to the homework problems -- conceptually hard, but not too bad if you knew the material very well. I didn't do too well on the practice midterm, but I studied a lot and made a good notes sheet, and I did well on the midterm itself.
The midterm was out of 140. The median was in the 80s. I was in the 100s. Because of the humility that I discussed in the previous section, I can accept that I was imperfect. However, this is telling of the mental difference between arrogance and humility: with arrogance, my initial reaction, in the gray area, is to blame others; with humility, my initial reaction, in the gray area, is to blame myself. I still strive to be better, so I am frustrated with myself that there was a problem that I did very poorly on. Arrogance can act as a shield, preventing me from beating myself up.
I do try to be humble when comparing myself with others. The only virtues that I publicly ascribe to myself are that I care about helping people and that I work hard because those virtues are accessible to everyone around me and are much less the result of the luck of birth than things like 'intelligence' or 'skill' (see Camus' discussion of heroes in "The Plague" for more on this point). Thus, I find it very awkward when someone else ascribes the virtue of intelligence to me when they work just as hard as I do. I guess it forces me to think about how lucky I am and how there's nothing that makes me deserve the success that I get. So I was embarrassed when a friend saw my midterm and said that I was a better coder than him.
The class was based around a group project. We worked on computer vision -- going through a video and classifying the objects in it as one of several types. I worked with the same two friends that were in my group for the assignments.
It was hard. Apparently, sight is complicated. One of the challenges we faced with this that we didn't face as much on the assignments was that everything took a long time. That is, in order to test how good our design was, we would have to let the machine train for a long time and then take 10 minutes to let it classify a video, and then we would find out how well we did. Some of my CS107 skills came in handy for this (at the end, 8 hours only got my neural network 1/3 of the way done training. Thankfully, I was running it inside of GDB, so I stopped it and saved it in the middle of training.).
Mostly, what I learned from the project was an appreciation of the difficulties of coordinating with a group to work on a big, experimental project. A lot of the projects that I had done in the past had a definite solution. With computer vision, it's an unsolved problem. Thus, it was just about trying new things and seeing what helped and what didn't. In other words, the projects that I had done in the past were just about programming; in this class, I was actually working on advancing the state of the art of computer science. It wasn't about the code; it was about the writeup at the end where we evaluated our trials and errors.
CS107 was my fun class this term. It wasn't too much work (compared to CS221. More work than my other classes). The teacher, Julie Zelenski, was awesome. There were a lot of cool ideas. I got famous.
The fame came from posting my notes. I take my notes on laptop, and the CS107 class website (https://courseware.stanford.edu/info/course/CS107 - publicly accessible) had a wiki, so I posted my notes to the wiki each day. While noone else in the class posted anything to the wiki (and I have no idea why), it seemed like everyone read my notes at some point in time. A few people actually thanked me for posting them.
Even more cool, though, was that right before finals week someone who wasn't even at Stanford sent me an email. He had been keeping up with my notes, and he hoped to do some of the assignments, and he asked me to post those too (the starter code that Julie posted for the assignments was all on servers that you needed to be a Stanford student to access). I asked Julie, and she said that she would be fine with me posting the assignments, and that she just hadn't taken the time to compile them all together. I got them all together, the non-student thanked me, and Julie told me to come back to CS107 as a TA.
The class itself was an introduction to computer systems. The other CS classes that I had taken so far operated at a much higher level than CS107. In CS107, we worked in C (which is more or less one level higher than assembly) and in assembly (which is more or less one level higher than binary), so the emphasis was on getting to know what happens behind the scenes when you write a program. The idea is that knowing more about how things work will a) let you build programs that work on a very low level, and b) make you write better (faster, less buggy) higher level programs because you will know why it does what it does.
I really liked the material. Even before I started programming, I knew that I would be the type of person who appreciates having the amount of control that lower level programming gives you -- the ability to use exactly what you need and no more. I also can't feel like I understand something until I can derive it (ie, in math, being able to read through a proof and know that something is true will let me accept it, but I won't understand it until I can do the proof myself), so doing lower level programming means that I now feel comfortable with the higher level programming languages; the higher level languages (like C++, Java, and Python) often are direct derivations from C.
There was also the material that was just plain fun. Knowing C means knowing (almost) everything about C (unlike a lot of other languages, C is fairly small. The language itself has only what is necessary and not much more. Thus, with C, it is actually possible to know nearly everything about it). Because C was created with this in mind, it is up to the C programmer to know what they can do that will cause problems. Because C was made to be fast, it doesn't have a lot of error checking built in, so there are a lot of things that you can do that will cause problems, and a lot of the class was spent teaching us about these problems. For instance, did you know that the factorial (the factorial of a number is that number multiplied by all of the numbers less than it. Ie, 4! = 4*3*2*1) of 1000000 is 0? The reason this happens is that, unless you take special precautions (which make your program run more slowly), integers (numbers) have a certain max size. On a 32-bit computer (most computers today), that max is 2^32 - 1 (or 2^31 - 1 if you allow for negative numbers), which is a little over 4 billion. If you add one to that max number, it .wraps around' -- it goes either to the negative value of that max number or to 0. When you compute a factorial, you basically just keep multiplying big numbers, and multiplication works the same as addition with regard to wraparound. Thus, eventually, you might have a number that wraps around to exactly 0. At that point, that factorial and every factorial bigger than it will equal 0 because, if one number wrapped around to 0, 0 multiplied by any other number will be 0. There was something weird like that in practically every class.
One of the things that surprised me was how intuitive everything was. Even without knowing much about C, I felt like I could sort of understand it. All of the decisions made about how the language would work felt like they were the same decisions that I would have made if I were designing the language. Last Spring when I was taking the test to be a section leader in the introductory CS classes, there were a lot of questions about how C worked, and even though I had never programmed in C at that point, most of my guesses were correct. Taking CS107 was very good because it made me comfortable with C, but it felt much more like solidifying my intuitions than like changing my thought processes.
I think that part of what made the class work so well was the integration between class and lab. In CS107, there were only 2 lectures per week, but there was also a two hour lab every week. In lecture, we would learn about some C concepts. In lab, we would use those concepts to break some programs in interesting ways and otherwise dig around the guts of programs (and do other less interesting stuff).
Because of a CS221 all nighter on a Tuesday night, there was one lab where the only sleep I got was between 10am and noon that day, and I got very little out of that lab. That also happened to be our first lab on assembly, which was right before the midterm. On the midterm, I missed a total of 10 points. 8 points were on the assembly question. So a lot of the understanding in class happens during lab.
There was also a lab that I completely slept through (the very last one), but thankfully, my TA was also teaching another lab later on that day, so I just stopped by then. I did miss out on her home-made, organic scones, though.
The lectures were good too. Julie (in addition to going through Stanford and being in SLE, the humanities program that I was in last year) worked at NeXT, a company that Apple absorbed (which happened to change the direction of Apple) and has lots of war stories about low level programming. For instance, once someone, whenever they would allocate fewer than 16 bytes of memory, would get an error, so they made a new function, malloc16, to allocate more memory than necessary. It turns out that they used the memory for one thing (ie, they allocated 7 bytes of memory for a 7 byte thing), then tried to shove another thing in the same piece of memory. That doesn't work very well. Another time, someone had one function to get a person's name and another function to access that person's name, but the first function never told the second function where the name was stored (for programmers: the first function stored the character array that held the name on the stack rather than on the heap. The second function declared a character array of the same size but never initialized any of the data within it. It worked because the character array was big enough that there was buffer room so that none of the data was overwritten, and the garbage data that was in the character array in the second function just happened to be the correct garbage). Because the stars aligned, everything worked even though it was incredibly buggy. Then, they tried using those functions on another computer architecture and everything pretty much exploded until they realized the error of their ways.
I should note, however, that I still don't feel completely comfortable with computers. Once I get something as high level as binary, I'm completely fine, but as far as I'm concerned, the hardware level still works by magic. In CS107, we did talk about the hardware a little bit, but only insofar as it concerned writing fast C code. That is, we learned about how to write programs that can use multiple processors, that can use superscalar processors (processors that can do multiple things at once -- most processors now), and that can avoid accessing the network or harddrive or RAM (because they're all slow compared to the processor cache), but we didn't learn about how each of those works. To learn that, I need to take the introductory electrical engineering class. Then, the only remaining question will be how quantum physics works, and I think that I can accept an incomplete understanding of that.
CS103 is intended to get CS majors good at math as it relates to computer science. Some of the material in the class was moderately interesting, but because of previous math experience, Sophomore College (which taught most of the concepts that CS103 taught), and being fairly good with math in general, the class was too easy, and as a result the assignments felt like busywork. The proofs that we were assigned didn't feel difficult, but just time consuming.
In the first half of the term, we covered some general math:
First order logic, proofs and proof strategies (induction, contradiction, contrapositive, cases, resolution), sets (set operations, power sets, infinite sets, countability), stuff related to sets (sequences, posets and the Hasse relationship, graphs, set mapping, functions).
In the second half, we transitioned to topics more related to computing:
Different models of computation (regular expressions / finite automata, context free languages, Turing Machines), computability (algorithms, recognizability, decidability), and complexity (P, NP, NP Completeness).
The course also felt a little bit crunched at the end. I feel like we could have spent more time on computability and complexity, which are the two concepts that most directly relate to programming, and spent less time on the earlier material, which is probably a little bit easier to learn and could be done in less time.
The class wasn't too bad. Partially, it's just that CS221 had much harder and simpler math problems (that is, they are conceptually hard to understand, but once you understand them, writing out a solution only takes a few lines) which made me feel like I was doing more work and getting more reward from CS221, so CS103 paled in comparison.
FEMST138 was a very good class. The teacher, Nicole Baran, works at the Center for Relationship Abuse Awareness, so she had a lot of practical knowledge about the subject.
The most significant thing that I learned in the class was just how culturally entrenched patriarchy is. So many thing that we think of as completely neutral were either originally used to oppress women or still oppress women to this day. Even going to our language. How many people say "rule of thumb" without knowing its origin? It turns out, the "rule of thumb" is that a husband can beat his wife as long as the rod he uses to beat her with is no thicker than his thumb.
The more direct way that our language actually reinforces patriarchy is with victim blaming. Often, when a woman is a victim of abuse, the questions will blame her for the abuse rather than blaming the perpetrator. This is often overt: "she likes abusive men" or "she looks for abusive men," "she was wearing something promiscuous," "she had alcohol that night," "she came on to him," or "she provoked him." A lot of the time, people blame victims even while trying to help them: "if only she had taken that self defense class" or "I told her she shouldn't wear that skimpy outfit."
As a result of this victim blaming, victims of relationship abuse are harmed by the society and legal system in addition to by their abuser. When a woman comes out as a victim of relationship abuse, people ask her why she's putting the abuser through such a hardship. In fact, there's such a social stigma attached with being a victim that the false reports of rape are lower than the false reports of most other crimes (even though there is a myth that women always cry rape). When a woman tries to get help from the legal system, she is often denied. In fact, men who abuse women are punished far less than women who fight back against their abusers. The movie "Defending Our Lives" tells the stories of several women who repeatedly went to the police after being beaten only to be turned away. Then, when the man tried to kill the woman and she killed him in self defense, she got a life sentence.
Another harmful myth is the myth of mutual abuse -- the myth that women abuse men just as much as men abuse women. What's interesting is just how flawed the science is that comes to this conclusion. In the scenario where a man chokes a woman and the woman tries to scratch him so that he doesn't die, the Conflict Tactics Scale (the methodology used to get these bad statistics) gives one count of violence to the man and two counts of violence to the woman. Apparently, scratching someone in self defense is twice as violent as trying to kill your wife or girlfriend because scratching leaves a mark where choking doesn't. In fact, 91% of the victims of sexual assault are female and 99% of the perpetrators are male.
The myth of mutual abuse is particularly horrible when children are involved. Men get custody of the kids just as often as women even when the man and woman are separated because the man was beating the woman (and, often, the child as well).
One thing that I liked a lot about the class is that Nicole didn't like exclusionary philosophies. As a result, a lot of the class talked about relationship abuse in same sex relationships, transnational perspectives on abuse and the unique challenges that immigrants can face, abuse in different age groups and ability statuses, abuse and socioeconomic status, and abuse in communities of color. This made the class inclusive, which strengthened the overall message, and it demonstrated the prevalence and importance of addressing domestic violence because it spans across so many lines of identity.
The structure of the class also worked very well. There were readings for each class (I didn't do all of them, but I liked what I read). Each class was structured as a lecture (except for a few special ones towards the end that were more about us students giving presentations and one or two others where we watched movies about relationship abuse), but the lectures were very engaging, and I always asked a few questions. My one criticism of Nicole's lecturing is that the powerpoint slides that she uses are from presentations that she gives to other communities (because she works 70 hour weeks trying to educate people all around the bay area about relationship abuse) rather than being tailored specifically for the class. As a lecturer, though, Nicole makes up for it because she doesn't rely on her slides; she actually knows how to lecture (which is hard!), and her material is always very interesting. Also, the assignments are structured as journal entries rather than papers, which, as discussed in "Time is Valuable: Writing Isn't," works very well for me.
There were also weekly discussion sections that were fairly good. In one section, one of the other folks said something like: "I believe in fluid gender, but I also realize that abuse is a gendered issue. How do I resolve that?". I responded "a belief in fluid gender doesn't preclude gender analysis. It is perfectly consistent to believe both that people should be free to identify however they want to and to analyze the socialization of gender: there are people who do identify with less fluid notions of gender and images that are prescribed by the media. You don't have to believe in static gender to see that traditional ideas of masculinity can be harmful. Or, for that matter, to see that higher levels of testosterone can be harmful."
After section, Nicole said that I should intern at the Center for Relationship Abuse Awareness. *sigh*. Yet another thing that must be done to save the world.
I liked a lot of things about this class, but for some reason, I didn't like the class as a whole.
I think that the class should have been taught as a seminar. It had few enough people to allow for discussion.
I also think that the class should have moved faster. The professor spent a lot of time at the beginning of each class reviewing previous classes, and the teacher progressed fairly slowly with material in general, so it was hard to pay attention. I voiced this point -- that you can lose people if you go too slow -- in a previous letter, though.
The material itself was interesting, though. It had some cultural elements similar to FEMST138. For instance, the term "grandfathered in," which refers to a legal exception made for people who the law didn't apply to when it came into effect, originated to keep blacks from voting after emancipation. It was illegal to prevent blacks from voting on face, but racists could make laws about education, literacy, or poll taxes as requirements for voting, with the exception that if a person's grandfather could vote, then these requirements didn't apply. That is, illiterate whites could vote because their grandfathers could vote, so they were "grandfathered in," but illiterate blacks could not.
Another thing that I got out of the class was the extent to which we are counterhistorical when it comes to race. We like to think of the civil war as a war where two sides, each noble, fought valiantly. Thus, there are civil war reenactments, and we refer to some sporting events as "civil war" events. We don't do the same with any other wars. We don't have Vietnam reenactments, "Gulf War" games, or think of the Holocaust as a war where two noble sides fought each other.
We don't like to confront our past of slavery (the US has had slaves for more years than it hasn't), so we say that the civil war was about economics instead. Yes, economics was important, but the civil war was about slavery. The only reason that slavery hadn't broken the US before was because everyone avoided talking about it. Each time that politicians were forced to talk about slavery, it almost caused an irresolvable conflict. Southerners threatened to secede over the issue of Missouri, and they might have but for the Missouri Compromise. There weren't quite so many threats of secession over tariffs.
There were plenty of other similarly interesting tidbits.
In URBANST131, there was a different social entrepreneur who came in each week to talk about their history, how they got involved in social entrepreneurship, and their social impact. There was a large part of each lecture allocated for question and answer. I really liked the course. Some of the people had done amazing things. Everyone had different advice on how to run a successful social venture, but at the very least I learned that there isn't just one right way to be a social entrepreneur.
The one advice that seemed consistent across each of the entrepreneurs was that a project should come out of seeing the need, not out of what you think the need is. Most of the projects originated from some form of international travel and seeing the poverty that they wanted to address firsthand.
Priya talked about her international travels. She saw that women often want to live in small villages rather than moving to big cities. This prevents them from easily selling their goods, but they could still be productive, and this is important because when a woman earns 4 dollars per day, it has a greater impact on the community as a whole than any other allocation of resources.
The one missing piece was a distribution model. Thus, she brings their goods to the US so that conscious consumers here can have their money directly benefiting people in need and so that they can get better goods than the stuff that's made in sweatshops.
You can buy these goods from the World of Good. They partnered with ebay, so you can use the same search and purchase tools that you're familiar with. Just search for "world of good" and it should be the first hit. Check them out!
Big Tent provides group tools for nonprofits.
Kickstart makes cheap hip-operated pumps so that poor people can irrigate their land, which increases their income by a lot.
I was interested by this speaker. He is obviously doing something good by helping people move out of poverty, but he has a weird justification. When he was talking about what made him want to start Kickstart, he gave a bunch of poverty statistics. 45% of people in Sub Saharan Africa live on less than a dollar a day; 40% are malnourished; with failed states and global warming, they're getting even poorer. However, because his pumps are moderately costly, the average person that buys one of his pumps makes $400-2000 per year.
He was very composed when answering everyone else's questions, but I seemed to hit a nerve when I asked him about this disparity. At first, he disparaged the statistics that he used earlier, saying that the numbers that the World Bank used to get them might be slightly off, but eventually he even admitted that he isn't helping the poorest people that he was bringing up statistics about.
I also found it interesting how I could see how the common critique of utilitarianism -- that the means, in addition to the ends, matter -- applied to him. I try to see how both the means and the ends are significant (in other words, in my version of utilitarianism, the means and ends are both effects of a policy, so we have to take both into account.). He had recently moved the production of his pumps from Kenya (where he sold the pumps) to China in order to make the pumps cheaper. It is true that this would let him sell more pumps to needy people, but his justification for this was that the plants in Kenya cost more to operate because, in Kenya, there is a higher turnover of people in his factories because when people get job skills from working in the factories, they can get better jobs.
In other words, the production costs in Kenya were higher because in Kenya he was helping the workers who made his hip pumps in addition to the people who received his hip pumps, whereas in China, people tended to stay in the sweatshops that created his hip pumps.
Hearing the justification for sweatshop labor from such a good person was sickening.
The Benetech speaker started out making open source software for international journalists and human rights organizations to use. Then, he started working on helping blind people read books. I think that he started out with text recognition and text to speech software.
The issue is that a computer can only read a book to someone if it sees the book as text. If it sees the book as an image, it won't know what to do with it. Thus, if a blind person buys a book, they would need to scan it in, change the images to text, and then have the software read it. Thus, he created a platform for blind people to share the books that they scanned in.
His talk made me even more frustrated with the current state of intellectual property rights. When he was working on his software for blind people, he found that there was a legal exemption to copyright law for the sake of format conversion for people with disabilities (what he was doing). His lawyer told him to ask publishers anyways. Their response: "You're the first person who has told us in advance that they were going to steal from us." He was eventually able to convince them since the law was on his side despite draconian copyright measures, since they had a legal obligation to provide electronic editions of their books for blind students (thus, Benetech would either save publishers money or prevent publishers from operating illegally), but that still provided heavy restrictions on textbooks and anything international. It wasn't until he got support from the federal government that he got any further.
His suggestion for convincing people to have less of a chokehold on their intellectual property:
"You have already made the economic decision NOT to do this social enterprise because it isn't profitable enough. We have a market that you have confirmed you are not interested in. Our idea will not hurt you -- we'll prevent it from seeping into your market. This will make you look great. Your employees will love that your product is serving a social need."
I was also surprised at how efficient they were. It costs him $50-100 to get a book ready for blind students because of automation and his peer to peer model. It costs his competitors $2000-8000. I would say that a 40-80x difference is pretty good.
TransFair USA is the main organization that does fair trade certification in the US. Seeing the person who started fair trade made me feel star-struck. Seeing Paul Rice in the flesh made it seem much more possible to do something as cool as create fair trade.
He got started by traveling to Nicaragua and realizing that conscious consumers in Europe (and then the US) would spend slightly more to buy fair trade coffee and that he could save money by cutting out the middle person. This meant that local farmers got $1 per pound of coffee ($1.26 before shipping and such) rather than $0.10 per pound. With the surplus money, he helped to build schools and bring public utilities like clean water to the farmers' villages.
One of Rice's points was that people want to help others, but they just don't have time. If an entrepreneur makes it easy -- makes it a purchase at a store that an individual already shops at and have a certification label -- people tend to be conscious consumers. It isn't just the Whole Foods crowd. Even people who shop at Dunkin Donuts, Walmart, and for Dole bananas like to buy fair trade products.
Rice said that his need for computer science folks was for database migration.
Rice's final words of encouragement: "You too can buy a one-way ticket to Nicaragua."
Four different organizations that started at Stanford came to talk. This talk seemed a little bit rushed and abbreviated. The organizations seemed cool, but I don't feel like I got to know a lot about the people's stories.
One organization made low cost ventilators.
SEE College Prep helps low income students and minorities study for the SATs.
DripTech, made a gravity-based irrigation system. It was part of a Stanford Grad School class called Design for Extreme Affordability. I have heard so many awesome things come out of that class. I am highly considering taking it once I'm a grad student.
ReMotion makes high quality prosthetic limbs that cost $20 rather than $5,000-50,000. Because these limbs allow for mobility to a much greater extent than the other prosthetics that poor people had access to, it allows them to work and to feel empowered.
David Green was quite a character. He makes low cost medical supplies so that people in the third world can get quality healthcare. He started out with intraocular lenses to cure blindness (mostly from cataracts), but since then, he has branched out.
He had a lot of interesting advice for running a social venture. He used a tiered pricing model. There are a bunch of different models (1/3 free, 1/3 below cost, 1/3 above cost; 80%/20%), but the key part of his model is to make the per-unit cost equal to the average monthly income of the bottom 60% of the population. He found that people can spend their average monthly income to get their sight back.
One bit of insight is that tiered pricing works even when it's voluntary. That is, people choose how much they pay, but people tend to segregate themselves by income. The rich people don't want to sit next to the poor people when waiting in line, so they choose to pay more.
Another bit of insight is that more free customers leads to more paying customers. He has no idea why, though he theorizes that it might be the word of mouth.
He also put healthcare into perspective. International healthcare systems, when they are denied resources, are substantially more efficient than the healthcare that I'm used to. Surgeons in the US who work on blindness average about 150 operations per year. In India, they average 2,000 per year. Green's organization now restores sight to 300,000 people per year.
The main thing that I got from his talk is how sick the US medical research industry is. Most of the products that he makes are between 10 and 100 times cheaper than his competitors (his intraocular lenses cost $1 to make. His competitors used to charge $150 before he entered the market), and he is convinced that the cost of production is similar. He is convinced that most of the medical research companies are lying when they talk about billions of dollars of research and development -- he spent less than $300,000 on research, and he has talked with a bunch of industry researchers who are sick of the industry who agree with him. He also recommended checking out Marsha Angel, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, for more on this subject.
The main reason that these organizations won't provide affordable medical supplies to the third world is because that would make it evident that they have such a massive price markup, so consumers in the first world would demand lower prices. Green's idea that this is the root cause comes from some organizations where he's on the board: they have technology that costs pennies to produce, but they aren't marketing it because they need to figure out how to justify making it cost hundreds of dollars.
Another criticism he has is that the government should open up intellectual property. The NIH gives Stanford $500,000,000 for medical research. The law says that any organization that gets funding from the NIH can charge royalties, but that the government can also "march in" to ensure affordability and access in pricing. But the government never marches in, so consumers are paying twice for that intellectual property: once in tax dollars to fund the research, and again to buy the fruits of that research.
His last main criticism is that medical research companies use their clout to suppress research to ensure their profits. Merck threatened to remove their funding from any organization that published research showing that Vioxx increased the rates of heart attacks. Green argues that, as a result, conservative estimates are that are that Viox killed 68,000 people.
In short, Green made me mad.
Victoria Hale worked with One World Health and Medicine360. They take on medical issues that aren't profitable but are necessary, like working on Diarrhea and Visceral Leishmaniasis.
She had a good story about how even small nonprofits can cure diseases. Most of the big lessons were ones that I had gotten from past speakers, though.
This was my favorite lecture. The people on the panel had recently won some award for being awesome, and then they got to talk to us about how awesome they each were.
From the non-tech orgs: it seems like the need for CS folks is:
-databases
-gathering information
-representing information
-media stuff (social networks, website, ads)
There were also two tech orgs. Ken Banks from Frontline SMS and Bright Simons from M Pedigree. Their message seemed to be: make sure you know what the needs are and what tech is available. Then, there will still probably be some problems that CS can solve as long as you don't think of CS as a panacea and you stay conscious of the problem. Ken Banks in particular suggested to spend a few years just working in the field that I'm interested in (ie, public health, sustainable development) and get with the communities that are affected to figure out what needs to be done.
The organizations themselves:
Madhu Sridhar from Akashya Patra feeds 1 million Indian kids on $14 PER YEAR. They make everything as efficient as possible. They started with one kitchen and just figured out how to scale. They use public private partnerships such that a lot of support comes from the government, but they are still a private entity.
Dr. Joseph Adelegan - Cows to Kilowatts. Turns Nigerian biomass (from slaughterhouses) into methane energy. Very green, and it serves so many different communities.
Lilly Wolfensberger from a Mexican organization (I didn't quite catch the name -- Cubitza? Huitzi?) talked about how she provided education and tools for sustainable development.
Ken Banks ([email protected]) from Frontline SMS had a very different perspective. He worked in IT for years. He went to Africa and worked in education and biodiversity for years. Then, towards the end, he realized that NGOs had problems with coordination, and that everyone was getting cellphones. Then, he spent 5 weeks, coded Frontline SMS, open sourced it, spent 2 years persistently making calls, emails, tweets, Facebook posts, and every other form of free advertisement, and he eventually got some organizations to start using his software. Now, lots of organizations are spreading the word and developing their own versions of his software. He still hasn't figured out how to make money off of it, even though he has thousands of users and has been working for 5 years. His suggestion was to not try to solve something that you don't understand (ie, development economics or global warming. unless you understand those things), but rather to solve something that you do understand (ie, using phones to communicate via SMS) and make the technology easy to use and general purpose enough that other orgs can use it to solve the problems that they know about.
Bright Simons had another tech project. He is with M Pedigree, which uses mobile phones to validate pharmaceuticals in Africa. The problem that he saw: right now, if you buy a pharmaceutical in some places in Africa, you have a 1/3 chance that it will be bad (mispackaged, expired, forgery.), which could kill you. He worked with pharmaceutical sellers and mobile phone organizations and made a system such that each pharmaceutical has a scratch-off part on the packaging that contains some code. You text that code to some central pharma phone number and it will look up in its database if that is a legitimate medication or not, and it will reply within 1 second with the answer. Simons stressed how he was able to insert himself into the market: each organization benefited from his entry. The pharmaceutical companies had financial losses because forgeries were getting sold and they were getting sued because forgeries were using their packaging and killing patients. Mobile phone companies benefit because they can sell more data. Governments benefit because they increase faith in the medical establishment so they have fewer public health threats. And people benefit because they don't die from fake meds.
Dipike Matthias from PATH, a global health nonprofit based in Seattle, talked about Ultra Rice, a project to fortify rice with micronutrients (like iron because anemia is the biggest micronutrient deficiency, affecting almost 2 billion people in the developing world). She stressed the importance of supporting local channels (ie, local rice farmers), data collection, and getting policy support. When I asked her about what she thought global public health initiatives needed more of, she said she saw a dichotomy: there are specialists and generalists. The specialists (ie, CS people, medical specialists) can focus on their issue, and the generalists (ie, people with experience in law or business) have to deal with a bunch of other random stressful issues, but they might be more important. Dipike started out as a CS / Electrical Engineering undergraduate, but she realized she liked being a generalist better, so she went to business school, got some experience in the private sector, and went on to PATH. She did give me the contact info of a group in PATH that's doing public health informatics work that might have use for an intern.
The last panelist was Allen Wilcox from Village Reach. He improves healthcare distribution networks using databases and trucks to serve areas that might otherwise lack medical supplies or information. He focused a lot on the business model. He started out with charitable funding, found out that there was interest in buying some of the products that he made (ie, using propane gas rather than charcoal for electrical generation), so he uses a tiered pricing system, and he became (will soon become?) self sufficient. The tiered pricing model seems to be a very common theme for social entrepreneurs.
The founder of MusicCorps was our final speaker. MusicCorps is a part of AmeriCorps, and it tries to use music as a means to other forms of service (ie, using music to catalyze political participation) and using music as an end in itself by expanding music education because music helps students succeed. This is especially true for at risk youth, and it is much more true of music than things like sports.
One interesting thing: when he was showing all of the studies about how awesome music was, he mentioned that the Mozart Effect study was false. It was funded by a Mozart organization, and no other organization has been able to reproduce it. Music is good, but Mozart isn't uniquely good.
On 9/17, there was a law school talk for Constitution Day.
One interesting thing that I heard is that justices often avoid the constitutional question and just rule on statutory claims in order to practice judicial restraint. That is, the branch whose job it is to interpret the constitution tries to not interpret the constitution because they're afraid of being controversial.
The constitution was established to be conservative (meaning resisting change) because conservatism leads to stability, which is good I the case of basic rights, but I guess I still haven't resolved the constitutional question for myself because it is opposed to democracy. That is, constitutions are very hard to change even if people democratically agree that they want to change it, which is particularly problematic given the way that some parts of the constitution have been interpreted (notably, how the 14th amendment is used to give corporations immunities against good regulations and to rule against affirmative action measures like in Concerned Parents v Seattle School District). But, given the current state of the world, I would probably rather a society with a constitution to one without.
On 9/18, there was a Haas Center retreat for all student-service leaders. I was there for both QSA and Hackathon. There wasn't a ton of work that got done, but I met some cool people. One person was with I AM, Initiative Against Malaria, which I didn't know existed.
On 9/19, there was a meeting for all sophomore-premeds to make sure everyone is on track. Since most of the people there had been at it for a year longer than me and since I was, more or less, on track, it eased some stress.
Later on 9/19, there was both a student government open house and a Haas Center open house. I did some good recruiting at each event.
On 9/20, there was an event for all of the sophomores. Basically, the sophomore class presidents and Dean Julie (who is the awesome dean of frosh) spoke. Nothing too inspirational. They also handed out Class of 2012 glasses. Go Stanford?
On 10/4, Noam Chomsky spoke at a Stanford Says No To War rally as a pit stop on his way to speak at Gunn HS, where the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center was holding a very large Chomsky event.
At Stanford, he was asked to speak about Condoleezza Rice's position at Stanford. He went against the grain of most of the other speakers. His argument was that, while Rice should probably be held accountable as a war criminal, Stanford and any university should strive to be apolitical and be solely about the dissemination of knowledge. In other words, he thinks that Stanford should be able to hire a war criminal (as long as she isn't penalized by the United States as a whole), a terrorist, or anyone else who had done questionable things in the past as long as, in their tenure at the university, they don't do anything that goes against the values of the university.
I also got a picture of myself standing near Chomsky when he was walking over to the car to go over to Gunn. There were too many hoards of people to actually talk with him, but it's the proximity that counts, right?
At Gunn, he had a much longer talk on broader themes. Hearing him talk was amazing. I think I learned something new and astounding in every sentence. Chomsky must have a photographic memory because he was quoting 20 year old news articles and even older US government declassified documents without looking at any notes. In the question and answer period, he got questions by activists about the specific programs that they had been working on for years, and it was clear that Chomsky knew much more about those programs than them. Before this talk, I knew that he was smart and that I agreed with his philosophy and politics, but now I can really see why he is the most cited and accoladed intellectual of our time. He is a genius.
He made me feel nervous about going into CS rather than trying to change US institutions to be more just. At least with CS, I'll be able to go into anything I want to in the future. He made me feel like democracy (and educating and activating the populace and limiting corporate control) were very essential for a just society. Chomsky also made me think about how important the US is, and how change from within and being critical of US institutions is important.
He made me feel hopeful about the future because of movements in Latin America (first time in 500 years they have thrown off European control), protest of Iraq before the war started, and the first coup in Latin America (the one in Honduras) that the CIA wasn't responsible for and that the US didn't officially endorse.
He made me feel more critical about Obama. The financial folks that caused the economic crisis are scoring record profits because Too Big to Fail is an insurance policy for the rich paid for by the poor. The healthcare proposal will help insurance companies by guaranteeing more customers without providing a public option that will be more efficient. Despite rhetoric, Obama didn't push through anything substantive at Copenhagen. Obama wasn't critical of Saudia Arabia or Egypt for being dictatorships without respect for human rights when he talked in Kairo. Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan. Yes, he's better than neoconservative, first-term Bush, but he's fairly similar to a slightly more sane / moderate second-term Bush. Yet because we narrow the political spectrum so much, we think of him as an extremely liberal politician rather than a centrist.
On 10/12, Google gave a tech talk on Google Chrome (their web browser that's incredibly fast, secure, and stable). I had a class right before, so I came in a little bit late.
I missed the body of the talk, but they were fairly interesting in the question and answer period. They talked about the design philosophy of prioritizing content over chrome (the part of your web browser that isn't content), designing for efficiency, and reducing options. That's the one part that I disagree with. The person designing Chrome previously worked on Netscape, which apparently had pages and pages of customizable options but bad defaults. He saw this and decided that, to force themselves not to rely on user customization as a crutch, they would remove most customization and just get the correct defaults. While Google Chrome does have the correct defaults, I still like my customization.
Later on 10/12, one of the Sophomore Class Presidents' events was a Sophomore Symposium on Poverty. There were a bunch of different perspectives.
The headliner was the founder of Kiva. She talked about meeting Mohammad Yunus, going to Africa, connecting with entrepreneurs who couldn't afford basic economic capital because of predatory lending, and wanting to help them out.
She said that she was able to succeed because she started small and specific, so she knew who she was helping and exactly what they needed.
She said that it was bad to be in a donor/recipient dichotomy. She told the story of going on a tour with some donors of some place in Africa that had some recipients of donations. One of the donors went into a sewing circle and said "Hello, I'm the person who gave you the money to get started sewing!" The recipient replied, "It's nice to meet you. I'm the person who paid you back."
The Kiva founder's main philosophy was to build connections between people. If she received an offer from a large corporation to make a donation to Kiva, she would tell them to, instead, have their workers each make small donations so that they would be able to each have an idea of where their money was going and who they would be working with.
There was a social psychology professor who talked about making people care about poverty.
There was a sociology professor who talked a lot about gender issues in poverty. The people most affected by poverty are overwhelmingly women and children. Women lack maternal or child care. This also means that they can't get jobs or educations after having kids.
Rob Reich,my professor in Justice at Home and Abroad last fall, was also a panelist. Taking the political philosophic perspective, he advanced Peter Singer's argument about the obligation of people to donate to end poverty. One of the specific justificatiotns that he used was that money doesn't linearly correlate with happiness. That is, someone who makes $4 per day will be much happier than someone who makes $0.50 per day, and someone who makes $100 per day will only be a little bit more happy than the $4 person.
There was a professor of literature. He was kind of funny (but not in a good way). He actually said "Literature needs poverty: the subject matter." Oh, the corrupting influence of postmodernism. He also said that literature can help us understand the complex nature of poverty. Interestingly enough, he seemed to talk more about what literature could do than actually sharing any literary insight. I think that I got more insight into the complexity of the issue from the other panelists. That was one of the good things about SLE, my humanities program last year: it wasn't just idly postmodern. We actually looked at the issues and got lectures by other people who could help us understand the issues, both from within literary fields and from without.
The econ professor was similarly funny. He was dogmatically opposed to taxes and for free trade agreements, the World Bank, and the IMF. I think that his problem is that he assumed that everyone else was as abstracted away from material reality as the lit professor. While the other panelists were critiquing the economic status quo by providing reasons as to why it materially harms the poor, the econ professor argued that the economic status quo was good because materially helping the poor is good. He never responded to the substance of any of the other panelists.
The star of the show was the director of Stanford department of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Gary Segura.
He talked about how the hypocritical economic policies were responsible for poverty. For instance, giving social services to the poor is considered a handout which will decrease self sufficiency and lead to laziness, so it's bad, but giving billions of dollars with no accountability to banks that exploited poor people is considered necessary to keep those same banks in power, so in that instance socialism is considered a good thing. In other words, the rich subsidizing the poor through their taxes is bad, but the poor subsidizing the rich through their taxes is good. The way that free trade policies are written is also troubling. They are not truly free policies because they only allow for the mobility of goods and services, not of people, across borders. This means that a Mexican worker cannot go to the US to buy the very pair of jeans that they produced. We have rhetoric of equal trade relations, but some are more equal than others.
He also talked about racial divisions support poverty. In the widest sense, there is a global north/south divide where the whiter nations tend to be richer and tend to exploit the poorer nations. He kept this issue concretely connected to material reality: the US has 5% of the world's population and uses 25% of the world's resources, so it is inherently materially exploitative regardless of what ideological picture people ascribe to the US. Even within the US, race supports poverty because racist justifications keep whites from supporting antipoverty programs. Poor whites support antipoverty programs until those programs are described as helping both white and black people. Race keeps poor people divided.
10/31/2009, Scott Fried gave a talk. Jewish Queers put on the event, and I helped sponsor it through Queer Straight Alliance, so I felt partially obligated to see the talk. It was very good. He was good as a speaker, and he had some motivational stories and interesting insight.
He opened with one of the central themes of his talk: desire. It was also on the first page of a book that he wrote. Everyone is waiting for something. Everyone wants something. Most of the rest of his talk was some variant of psychoanalytic theories of desire: acknowledge and accept desire or it will dominate you; acknowledge and accept your death drive or it will dominate you; acknowledge the lack or you will be self destructive. There were a few other assorted gems also.
As a 20-some year old college graduate, Scott's persona was perfect. He was a 3.9 NYU Classics major. But there was something missing ("the lack"). He had made connections with other people, but had not borne his sole or told his pure unadulterated truth. He did not identify with his persona because the only part of his self that was featured in his persona was the part of him that aimed at effortless perfection -- perfection without showing vulnerability to anyone else. Part of this meant that he was closeted: the society regarded a part of him as deviant, and he did not live in a time when it was safe or acceptable for him to say that.
Because his persona was not complete, he disidentified with it. A part of him wanted to destroy the idea that he was perfect, so he had a relationship with another man that was self-destructive ("the death drive") and unsafe ("unsafe" meaning not just unprotected, but also unequal power relations. Abusive.). To be clear, he did not outwardly destroy his persona; as he said, he went out of his own closet and into the other man's closet.
He didn't want the relationship. But he did. One idea that he kept going back to: "EVERY WEAPON WORKS." People are self destructive because it works. There is something missing (not just from the deviants. THERE IS SOMETHING MISSING), and every weapon, whether it is an eating disorder, or cutting yourself, or having an abusive partner, works. Every weapon fills the void. Until the next day when it doesn't. Or until it kills you. That's why the preachy strategies to .fixing' people with mental problems don't work: the preacher is saying to get rid of a weapon that works without proposing an alternative. Everyone is waiting for that thing that they desire, and there is nothing else beside that desire, so of course they won't give up something that fulfills that desire for a few minutes, that creates connection or control, that makes one part of the world seem less empty.
Much of the rest of his talk was giving some solutions to this -- both as an individual trying to fill the lack and as an individual who can help fill the lack within others. As an external agent: people want connection, which means that people want your truth (your whole, unadulterated, self-destructive, vulnerable truth), and people want empathy (unconditional acceptance, understanding, acknowledgement, compassion). As an individual: recognize that you are enough, and dance with the void.
I fundamentally agree with all of the overarching narratives within Fried's talk. Everything is about desire; there is nothing else. I made this realization as a result of reading Brian Massumi's "A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari" (along with Deleuze and Guattari's "Capitalism and Schizophrenia"). The actual books are hard to read postmodern philosophy, but if you ignore 90% of what they say, there are a lot of things that actually make sense.
People do things for a reason. The idea of an autonomous self is an illusion that hampers our understanding of how we are made. You don't have to be propagandad to be built; everyone is built by every stimulus that they see. For a social scientific take on this, see Gladwell's "Outliers" for a few ways that the luck of your birth determines just about every part of your life. Even if an individual is not consciously aware of why they do what they do or why they feel what they feel, there is a reason for those actions, feelings, and thoughts. Some of it is genetic, some of it is media, some of it is family, some of it is community -- there are lots of stimuli, but every part of an individual is the result of some set of stimuli. Let's get back to desire, though.
Once we get rid of "because I chose it!!!" as the convenient and vacuous answer for why we act, desire quickly becomes its replacement. Some form of decision calculus happens subconsciously, and we act on the result of that calculus without exception. That is not a figurative "without exception": I am saying that there is no action that any individual takes that that individual does not want to take. The common argument against this is based off of a conflation of desire with conscious desire. Even though a conscious desire may be "I want to quit smoking because tobacco farming it is one of the leading causes of deforestation, global warming, and child labor" (in case you were wondering, it is. On both accounts. Smoking isn't just bad for the smoker.) if the unconscious / neurochemical desire of nicotine is stronger (and it very often is. It is hard to beat a desire rooted directly in neurochemistry with a conscious desire which is several levels of abstraction away from neurochemistry.), then you desire to smoke because the decision calculus weighs the desire against the un-desire.
So yes, we are all waiting for something. Every Buddhist, enlightened or otherwise, is bound by desire because every action and every inaction comes from weighing desire. We are all machines, and comparative desire is the system by which we operate. Smoking, the death drive, the lack, the holocaust, the kid who acts out in class, the martyr, the ascetic, and everything else are all rooted in desire. I can understand why the smoker smokes and why the killer kills because it's the same reason that I am not vegan and that I procrastinate and that I play video games: there is some part of my brain that says that eating eggs and cheese is more important than the suffering of the cows and chickens in factory farms, and I am invariably bound to act on my desire.
As a side note, this is my response to "how do you live if you don't believe in free will?" The question of free will is the question of how a choice (every choice) is made. I believe that a decision calculus, the neurochemical encoding of an "ethic" or "system of morality," makes every decision. Because that ethic involves subconscious elements, it rarely coincides with the ethics of philosophers. When I say that "I chose to do X," I mean that my ethic decided that X was the most desirable option to take. I don't believe in my ethic because I .chose' to believe in it: I believe in my ethic because the previous version of my ethic chose to make a small modification to itself when presented with external stimuli -- a book, a speech, a kind person -- going back to the very first ethic present at birth. This might mean that there are no true choices because every choice that my ethic makes is the only choice that it can make.
That doesn't mean that I am a nihilist. My ethic says that helping people is good, so it causes me to do things that will help other people or that will change other peoples' ethics to align more closely with helping people. As long as your ethic believes in the good or self improvement, whatever that belief is, it is possible to improve yourself. Think of it like the law. The legal system is an ethic for the body politic of the state. It has no free will -- it is entirely determined by external stimuli. That doesn't mean that the state cannot change. People argue that free will is a necessary thought construct even if determinism is correct because they haven't thought of a way to be engaged without an illusion of control.
I am engaged with myself in the same way that I am engaged with politics. I have a set of beliefs, and I act to affirm those beliefs. It may be true that I cannot make any decision other than the one that I did (if the same election with the same voters and the same media happened twice, it would come out the same both times), but there is still a good outcome and a bad outcome (by some ethic). My ethic believes that it should aim for the Good, so when it is processing a decision of whether or not to do good, it comes back with an emphatic "yes!" It may be true that that decision is inevitable, but it is also true that that decision could not have occurred if the ethic was apathetic. In other words, my ethic believes that engagement is necessary, so I am engaged. I desire engagement, therefore I am engaged.
The question of inevitability does not factor into the question of my ethic. There is still a good and a bad; there is still a path that ought to be chosen and a path that ought not to be chosen. In other words, the answer (specifically, Camus' answer) to the existential question is the same as the answer to the question of free will. Yes, death is inevitable, but the response must be to affirm life. Yes, Sisyphus' rock will inevitably tumble, but his response must be to happily affirm that duty. Yes, the world is cold, but an ethic does not have to be, so the response must be to affirm human warmth. Apathy would interfere with that ethic, so an ethic must reject it. Inevitability is just not an important part of the equation.
That also extends to society as a whole. No, it does not make sense to punish someone because they made a "free choice" that is at odds with society, because that choice was unavoidable given the external stimuli. However, when society changes its ethic, it can change the ethic of individuals. One part of an individual's decision calculus might be "will this come back to bite me?" so some element of retributive justice is justifiable (though probably not in the extent that retributive justice is used as a justification for the prison industrial complex). However, that individual's decision to commit a crime was certainly also motivated by other stimuli like the media, education, and socioeconomic class, so each of those are just as relevant as prisons in the question of justice.
My other response to the question of free will is that I don't understand how it is conceptually possible to believe in free will at the same time as you believe that people aren't completely rational. If you believe that the subconscious, neurochemistry, or any external stimulus has ever effected a decision, then you don't believe in free will. Because I think that at least some of the staggering amount of statistics that have originated from the social sciences are accurate (for instance, that people who are poor are more likely to steal -- in other words, that they don't have a free choice in whether or not to steal -- or that straight white men are more likely to succeed in America -- in other words, that queer women of color don't have free choices in education and employment), I do not understand what someone means when they say that they believe in "free will." And no, quantum randomness doesn't imply free will. It implies randomness.
Thus, I agree with most of Fried's basic statements about desire. People are bound by desire, regardless of whether that desire is productive or destructive. Someone else asserting that a destructive desire is bad does not get to the root of the ethic that causes that destructiveness to be desirable, whether that is the desire for human connection or for breaking down a perfect persona or for empathy or for something entirely different. If a person keeps going back to destruction, it is because their ethic has decided that that destructive weapon works.
His solutions, connection and empathy, are also things that I agree with. In my Spring 2009 peer counseling class, that was consistently emphasized. I got the same theme in "How to Talk so Kids can Learn" by Faber and Mazlish (great book on working with kids). Feeling alone and in need of connection and understanding underpins many desires, so addressing that root cause can help with many surface effects such as self destructiveness.
The game "Planescape: Torment" also goes over similar themes. The protagonist is an immortal who loses his memory when he dies and who has done horrible things in his past lives. He is missing a part of himself (his mortality), and other tormented souls are drawn to him for that reason. They all desire something -- knowledge of your past, penance for past injustices, a true system of belief, love, compassion, logic, justice -- and that desire is killing them and dominating their lives. Banding together, recognizing those desires, and confronting them are necessary to bring them back into control of their lives.
I am not enough and never will be. No one with big dreams ever is.
Scott Fried thinks that people should say that they are enough as an issue of mental health and self esteem. But I choose to not be complicit with a status quo that includes suffering, and I will never be able to solve it all, so I will never be enough.
I am not discouraged by that fact because my relationship to the world does not depend on my being enough. It's just like with desire and free will: the relevant question is not whether or not I will end all suffering, but rather whether or not I will do what must be done.
I see this as tied to Fried's idea of the perfect persona. It is an idea that I very much identify with. My persona is a better person than I am. My persona works harder than I do, and my persona probably works for more important causes.
However, rather than trying to destroy my persona as a false image, I try to live up to it as an image that could be. Rather than saying, "I am hypocritical, so I should lower my ethical expectations to that level of inadequacy," I say, "I did not live up to my own expectations today. Tomorrow, I'll try harder."
And it works. I am not enough, and I am not content with anything less than what must be done, so I try harder, and I get a little bit closer to the goal. For instance, debate gave me the thought, "for any value of X, debate is harder than X, therefore I can do X," so I am not content with going easy on myself academically. The result is that I have never given myself anything other than a full class schedule, and I always go to any events on campus that interest me. By not accepting, ethically, anything other than an infinite obligation to the other, I have managed to continually move towards using less fossil fuels, eating less food that harms animals, the environment, and third world farmers, being more philanthropic, and orienting my academic, career, and extracurricular interests towards the public good.
No, I cannot live up to my persona. No, I am not enough. But that gap between person and persona is not a reason to be less idealistic, and that gap will become less prevalent on each successive day.
Scott Fried told a story about how his synagogue was across the street from the clinic where he was diagnosed with HIV. One day, the synagogue decided to dance on the yard in front of the clinic (it was apparently a nice yard, and it wasn't evident that it was in front of a clinic; it was just a yard). Fried never wanted to go back to that clinic, but he decided not to let his past dominate him, so he danced on the spot where he was diagnosed. And it was good.
While I do agree with the sentiment of not letting your past dominate you, I don't completely understand the idea of dancing with the emptiness, so I'm not sure if I can endorse that idea either literally or metaphorically.
Sometimes, moving on from something and dancing with it means accepting it. And if that something is a true injustice, then acceptance might get in the way of a categorical rejection of that something. I'm not sure that you can dance with something at the same time as saying that that thing should be eradicated from the world so that no one at any point in the future should have to witness it or its vestiges. That's why I find the story of Dr. Larry Brilliant (see http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_wants_to_stop_pandemics.html or http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_makes_the_case_for_optimism.html) so compelling. He saw small pox. He did not move on. He fought it, and he saw the last case in human history of killer small pox. He did not dance with the emptiness; he eliminated it so that no one else would ever have to face it.
I'm not completely sure that this is a critique of Fried, though, since Fried was talking more about individual emptiness.
There was also some basic stuff. "What are the mucous membranes through which you can get HIV in order of dangerousness?" "What are the 4 bodily fluids that can transmit HIV?" "Yes, people with HIV are dehumanized, and it's getting better, but it's still bad." He didn't really emphasize that in his talk, though.
He also said that there were too many loud voices on cable TV distracting us from issues that are really important. He didn't discuss it at length, but if you ever go without TV for a while, you will see just how loud and abrasive commercials and US news networks are.
On 11/7, there was a conference on biomedical computation. I couldn't go to the whole thing because I had a social movement organizing conference (Camp Wellstone) on the same day. There were some talks about specific grad student projects that I didn't completely understand. The keynote was very accessible, though. It was about how there is a lot of medical data now, and a lot of it is even openly accessible, but the data is 'siloed.' There isn't a standard format for publishing research results. There isn't a journal for publishing failed studies. There isn't much data mining or data integration to get all of the data in one place.
Two days later, there was a talk on computational biology. It was way over my head both algorithmically and biochemically. I think I managed to absorb some information from it, though. I also got an impression of how cool Stanford's BioX program is. The speaker said something along the lines of "The data that I'm presenting now is really just experimental. I used 1000 processors for about 8 hours to get this data . to be really rigorous, I would have let it run for at least a day." Wow.
Later on 11/7, there was Camp Wellstone, another event that QSA helped sponsor. Camp Wellstone was named after a politician (I can't remember if it was the House or Senate) who was very progressive (he speaks a lot like Dennis Kucinich, both in content and style. The claps he gets when speaking to Labor organizations is also similar). Camp Wellstone aims to train the next generation of progressive leaders.
A lot of their advice was stuff that I had already thought about, but the conference was very practical. They had some good advice, and they also gave me a copy of the Wellstone Movement Organizing Handbook. I haven't had the chance to read it all, but it looks good.
On 11/10, Fred Hampton Jr spoke on campus. He came a bit late, so I had to leave for debate in the middle, but the talk was fairly good. He believed in a few conspiracy theories that I don't really buy (ie, that the US government created AIDS to try to exterminate gays and blacks), but I gathered those from his side comments; the content of his speech was fairly easy to agree with. Most of the things he talked about are, by now, easily verifiable with declassified government documents or court records. For instance, that Fred Hampton was put in jail for giving out $70 of ice cream to kids, that the government was actively acting against the Black Panthers because they were giving out free healthcare (the rhetoric in that document was obscene), and that the Black Panthers presided over a record low in black on black crime.
On 11/16, there was a lunch at the Law School about voting reform. One of the big flaws that the speaker sees is that, while individuals, directly (25%) or indirectly (75%; through banks and brokers and funds and such) own the stock in public corporations, usually only the massive shareholders actually vote their shares to change the management of the corporation. This means that public corporations tend to be operated very conservatively (by conservative, I mean against change, not right wing), with brokers and large corporations tending to vote for the status quo directors. This means that a lot of publicly traded firms do things that the majority of their stockholders would think of as unethical, simply because the people that have a stake in that corporation aren't voting.
It is getting better. Now you can look up the voting histories of organizations, and because a lot of organizations are disclosing their votes in advance, you can find an organization that you agree with and vote like them. The speaker thinks that the next step that needs to happen is to allow for a person to simply say "vote my shares the same way as X organization recommends." Just like vote-by-mail increases voter turnout by making voting easier, this reform would likely increase participation in the democratic management of publicly traded corporations.
If you're interested in doing some research for how you vote your shares, proxydemocracy.org, moxyvote.com, and transparentdemocracy.org provide information.
The speaker concluded his talk with a discussion of voter funded media. In any voting community, whether that is a corporation, a city, or a nation, voters need insight about the issues. It is a public good. That is the reason that we have a public education system in America. The same logic justifies a public media. Everyone agrees that there is a media bias (the only question is what you think the bias is towards). Going back to the days of yellow journalism, it's very easy to see the inaccuracies that make it into our media when they are run as for-profit organizations. Looking at Fox News today, it's easy to see how Rupert Murdoch's advertising deals matter more than journalistic integrity in the news that News Corp allows to be disseminated (see the documentary "Outfoxed" for some more information).
The speaker's proposed solution was voter-funded media. He would not want the media to be government controlled, because then it could potentially turn into a propaganda arm (though BBC doesn't appear to be too propagandic, so the potentially isn't a certainty. Even media outlets that were explicitly established as propaganda arms like Voice of America have news that's much better than Fox). Thus, voters choose which media (blogs, radios, journalists, papers, ...) would get the funds and how much each would get. This system has had a lot of success in municipal politics, but it obviously hasn't been tried for the US as a whole.
Seems like a good idea to me. That's the philosophy behind a working representative republic, right?
Later on 11/16, S Bear Bergman, a trans author, came to speak. Bear read some excerpts from his newest book, "The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You." Ze ("ze" is a gender neutral pronoun. It's like "he" or "she," but it doesn't try to push Bear into a gender binary that ze doesn't agree with) talked about a plane ride when someone didn't want to sit next to him. Ze originally thought that it was an issue of weight (Bear is big), but the person actually identified Bear as queer, prompting Bear to write his new book about queer identity.
Bear also talked about trans pride. Bear sees the current phase of discourse about trans issues as negative: right now, the two main narratives are the deceitful trans person and the pitiable trans person. Bear's argument was that no social movement in the past succeeded by emphasizing the hardships of an identity. They succeeded by emphasizing what makes that identity special (ie, "Black is Beautiful"). Thus, ze embraced difference and gave a narrative of the proud trans person.
Trans people have kind, individualist, and relentless self identities. They know that the binaries that the external society imposes don't work, so they have to forge their own identity. Unlike many other people, they have to think about every aspect of their identity (how do I wear my scarf? How do I walk? Who do I think I am?).
Trans people have a community with communication and with a redistribution of power. They go against the cultural norm of trying to climb up the ladder and then pull the ladder up after. The community actively works to help others going through the same barriers that they faced, and they actively work to remove the barriers entirely.
On 11/17, three big philanthropy people spoke. I heard the same story from the founder of Kiva that I heard from her previously (I think this time, since she was speaking to a group of old philanthropists rather than a group of sophomores, she made the speech more boring), and I heard contentless stories from an Arillaga (she's the daughter of two people that have a lot of buildings at Stanford named after them) and from someone who runs a philanthropic organization that, if I recall correctly, helped Arillaga get started.
The moral of the story: look at how cool, not how big, someone's name is to predict the quality of their speeches.
Also on 11/17 was a Google product demo. I was originally going to go to an event that was put on in partnership with a nonprofit that's using solar power to ensure that mothers don't have to give birth without electricity in the developing world, but one of my friends dragged me to the Google event instead. Both events were happening in the same building at the same time, so it was an easy switch.
The Google event wasn't very interesting. It was intended more as a marketing event for people who don't use Google products than as a technical demo for people who already know about Google. Thus, the presenters were Stanford students who had been marketing interns with Google the previous summer. They showed some interesting youtube videos about Google products (ie, one that used Google Spreadsheets to make an image of a snowflake. it was really cool), but I think that I knew more about Google than either of them.
The one upside to the Google event was that I got a Google water bottle. This was very nice because I lost my stainless steel water bottle in the Bronx at a debate tournament that Palo Alto HS went to, and I had just been using a cheap plastic water bottle (the kind that leeches estrogen into the water when it's exposed to sunlight and that takes 1/4 bottle of oil to produce and ship) in the interim period.
They also gave out invitations to Google Wave and Google Voice, but I already had an invite for both of those.
On 11/19, Russ Altman, MD / PhD, gave a talk about the bioengineering major that's being created. I'm fairly set on being a CS major, but it sounds really cool. They have applied, scientific, physiological classes. In one of their labs, students will dissect hearts and learn the math behind it. Dr. Altman says that after the bioengineering classes, med school will be easy.
One of the reasons for the bioengineering major is that biology is the scientific major for people who don't like math, but math is important for biology. Thus, bioengineering strives to apply the same scientific rigor and quantitative analysis to biology as, for instance, the physics major applies to physical questions.
I'm the co-chair and financial manager for Queer Straight Alliance.
A lot of it has been logistical work. Being the financial manager means that I had to attend a banking workshop and that I have to reimburse people whenever they spend money. I'm also the person that other groups ask when they need external sponsorship. In my role as the co-chair, it's doing event planning, which seems to mostly revolve around advertising, getting food, and reserving a space.
I started out a little rough -- I tried, unsuccessfully, to plan an event with Equality 2010. Our main events of the quarter went well, though.
We planned a Sweetspot on October 10. Our 'spots' are social events for LGBTQ and allied people. The Sweetspot is geared towards lesbians because lesbians are often overlooked in LGBTQ communities, where most events end up being oriented around gay men even if they aren't explicitly exclusive. A lot of people appreciated the event.
The second week in November we had our Ally Week with the goal of getting more people around campus to identify as allies. We put up a lot of chalk and fliers around campus that included testimonials of allies describing why they identify as allies. We had an ally themed Q-Spot. We had a rehashing of our Equality 2010 event, and this time a few more people showed up. We also brought Ron Holt, a physician, to campus to give his "Biology as Destiny" talk about the science behind how being LGBTQ is not a choice. It brought a lot of new people, so I guess the ally focus worked. He also posted a group picture on his website (http://www.audacityofpride.com/audacity_of_pride/Stanford_QSA.html or see http://picasaweb.google.com/meviin/VerboseLetter201001#5464275975244854386).
I'm the Deputy Chair of Technology in the ASSU Executive Cabinet. I have been a lot more active with the ASSU tech team this year than when I was an executive fellow last year. Because of my experience with the ASSU site last year, though, I was already familiar with the internal workings of the ASSU website, so I was put in charge of doing web projects, which means I'm acting as a lot more of a generalist than the other people on the tech team.
Some of the projects that other team members have been working on include an online room reservation system for the student union (the system currently in place consists of a piece of paper posted on doors) and an integrated student homepage called Life@Stanford with widget functionality similar to iGoogle.
First, I have made general improvements to the website, adding functionality that didn't exist before. For instance, we use Joomla, a content management system, to simplify running the website, and we use a Joomla plugin that lets you put multiple .tabs' on one page -- basically, to have multiple pages in one page. However, that plugin didn't have any linking capabilities. I went into the code for the existing plugin and made it so that you can link to a specific tab just like you would link to a specific page.
Second, I have added lots of websites. I made a Student Jobs website, a guide on using the Career Development Center's database, which quickly became one of the most popular ASSU sites. I also made sites for a Table Loan Program, the Executive Committee Meeting Minutes, each of the Class Presidents, and the ASSU Marketing Team, and I made blogs for ASSU Town Halls and for Press Releases. Thanks to our content management system, this was a fairly easy process.
Third, I helped others use technology. The ASSU helps some companion organizations maintain their websites. For instance, I helped the Legal Counseling Office, which provides legal services for students, update their website. I helped out The Axe and Palm, an on-campus eatery, with their site also. For the ASSU executive cabinet, I also make presentations about technology use that can make them the most effective. There are a ton of really useful Stanford services that a lot of people just don't know about. Ie, StanfordWho lets you look up the @stanford.edu email address of any person, StanfordWhat gives you your networking information, StanfordYou lets you change your privacy and email options, and the list goes on. I also showed them how to use the meeting tools Doodle and When2meet and the collaborative tools available in Google Docs.
Most awesomely, I got the chance to work with our executive fellows. On 10/29, I got up at 5 or 6 AM to participate in a Stanford tradition known as Roll-outs (they were originally scheduled for 10/28, the morning after I had a big CS221 turn in, but they were rescheduled because 10/28 didn't work out for many people. I think that means that I got a nonzero amount of sleep that night, which is good). I, along with the other members of the executive cabinet, went around to the dorms of all of the people who got accepted as executive fellows -- basically, frosh who are interested in working with us -- and banged on their doors to wake them (and everyone else in the dorm, probably) up. The tech team has three executive fellows, and I have the pleasure to work with an incredibly enthusiastic fellow. He's very independent, works fast, and is generally awesome. He's already done Twitter/Facebook integration for the ASSU site and has added an ISBN lookup tool for the Stanford Book Exchange.
Less pleasantly, our website was recently damaged by the ASSU Senate webmaster. He destroyed our homepage. We had to quickly revert the changes and reduce their access privileges. That is one deficiency that I have noticed in Joomla: their access privileges are very blunt. You can't give a particular user access to a specific section of the website. You can only choose between administrator, editor, and writer (with a few other similar options).
I'm a project director for Dance Marathon Hackathon. Dance Marathon is a 24 hour dance fundraiser for AIDS. In the same 24 hours when dancers are dancing, hackers are programming for nonprofits. I have been working with nonprofits to get the projects and also making sure that we have hackers to work on those projects.
We have a fairly close relationship with Dance Marathon. We have meetings with the DM directors; we went to the DM all staff retreat on October 4; we helped DM stuff packets for the dancers on November 8; we go to the DM staff meetings. The Hackathon staff has varying levels of commitment to DM. I haven't made it to all of the DM events (the staff meeting is at the same time as QSA meetings), but I have still been to more than some of the other Hackathon people. As a result, some people have had a slightly combative attitude with DM about the extent to which DM and Hackathon would be integrated (ie, shared events, shared registration fees, maintaining a focus on international public health with all of the projects that we make).
I think another problem with the organizational structure of Hackathon is that we didn't really have a clear division of labor. There isn't one person who's in charge and handing out assignments, and a lot of people have been lax with their assignments.
Some of the projects that we have:
For Grameen America, the American branch of a Bangladesh-based microfinance organization, we will make an iPhone application to try to make people more likely to donate.
For Open Medical Records System, we might help them with data export or user/admin chat.
For InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), we will create symbolic logic for basic cell phones so that semi-illiterate people can communicate with nonprofits (or in general) over text messages using symbols.
The Hackathon will be Feb 6-7, which is right in the middle of the Stanford HS debate tournament. That will be one stressful weekend, but everything should turn out fairly well.
Palo Alto engages in both national circuit debate, which is more technical and based on logic and research, and local CFL debate, which is more persuasive based.
There have been a few CFL tournaments interspersed throughout the term, but I'm not really needed at those. Mostly, those tournaments are won and lost based on persuasive skills, and any strategy that I would help my debaters with before the round wouldn't really tip the scales.
I went with my debaters to some of their earlier national circuit tournaments. On the weekend of 9/25, I went with them to the St Francis tournament. It was my first experience being an intensive tournament coach. At previous tournaments, I was more in a hand-holding role (which is all you can really do for new debaters) or a no-time role (which is all you can really do when you have a bunch of debaters for every coach). At St Francis, I got to spend most of my time prepping out one team, so I could directly see my impact on their success and education. They were able to put my advice into practice very effectively. Working with large groups is necessary, but working with small groups is incredibly rewarding. Also, one of my teams got second place. I was impressed.
On the weekend of 10/15, I went to the Bronx tournament. Nick Coburn Palo, a successful former coach at College Prep School, came with us to help out with the coaching since we had three varsity teams competing and I was committed to judge in every round. Seeing an experienced coach in action was very helpful. One thing that comes with debate experience is that he was better than me strategically. He had debated and coached for more topics, so he knew about a lot more arguments, so he knew about arguments that we should be making and arguments that we should be prepared to answer that I hadn't thought about. Also, he knew how to run a team meeting -- making sure to keep it going, making sure that everyone knew their assignments, making sure that everyone would get some sleep. I also got to chat with NCP about some of his stories and about the PhD program that he's in right now. One of our teams made it to the double octafinals. Considering the size of the tournament, I was very proud of them.
The remaining tournaments in the year were USC, Alta, and SCU, but Ben Picozzi, this year's head policy coach, took the kids to those tournaments. I don't remember exactly how far they got at each tournament, but I think that they made it to elimination rounds at USC and Alta (both big tournaments), and they were one of the top teams at SCU.
See some pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/meviin/PalyDebate2009101517Bronx#
Along with the tournament aspect, I'm learning a lot about running debate meetings. Because there are so many people, it's hard to manage the classroom. Debate is an activity where we encourage people to speak up and where we want it to be fun -- after all, it is an extracurricular -- but that also makes it difficult to keep them focused.
I started reading "How to Talk so Kids Can Learn" (based on the advice of my high school lit teacher) to try to improve my teaching skills. It has a lot of helpful advice like using nonverbal reminders (ie, snapping your fingers and pointing). Another thing is that the book applies similar empathic / feeling techniques that I learned in my peer counseling class specifically to teaching, so I already have some practice with its methods. I'll give a longer review once I finish it.
I'm also learning to integrate different types of teaching into each practice. A practice debate takes longer than a full meeting, but otherwise, I can aim for a meeting to be part skills-lecture, part concepts-lecture, and part drills.
In Winter term, I'll be taking them to the Golden Desert tournament in Nevada, then there will be the Stanford and Berkeley tournaments right after one another, and then we'll be preparing for state and nationals and recruiting some more novices for next year.
And next year I'll be the head policy coach.
I haven't been getting much out of debating. For me, meaningful debate means engaging the policy aspects of debate, and I don't have enough time to do the research necessary to do policy debate the right way. Thus, I have been a very critical, research-lite debater this year. It isn't satisfying, and I don't learn a ton of things between debate rounds.
I get a lot more out of coaching Palo Alto. The team is big enough and dedicated enough that we engage the topic, so I learn about the high school topic, and teaching high school kids about politics, philosophy, and advocacy is more important than the education that I would get from even a rigorous take at college policy debate.
At the Diablo Valley College tournament on 10/23, I got 10th speaker and was a semifinalist. On the CSU Northridge tournament on 11/20, we won 3 and lost 3.
One eventful thing at the CSUN tournament: I saw a sign that made fun of "that's so gay," and I managed to get a picture of it. It made me laugh. It's blurry because there were about 5 seconds between me originally noticing the sign and our car making its turn. Luckily, I'm quick with a camera.
Because of all of the different public service activities that I do, the Haas Center for Public Service is going to be recognizing me. I think that entails putting my picture up in the Haas Center and on the front page of their website. They said that they're going to take my picture in January. They also had me answer some questions that they'll put up along with my picture:
Activities you participate in:
I'm the Co-Chair of Queer/Straight Alliance. In QSA, we help make Stanford a safe and open space for LGBTQ people by planning events so that LGBTQ people can have a greater sense of community and by raising awareness about LGBTQ issues to the greater community.
I coach the policy debate team at Palo Alto High School. Debating in high school was one of the most influential experiences in orienting my philosophy and politics toward service, and I try to make sure that other high school students have this same opportunity.
While my introduction to service at Stanford was not through technology, I am very interested in Computer Science, and I think that service is for everybody.
Part of my person stake in this belief is working with the student government -- I'm a deputy chair of technology for the ASSU. I develop student services such as studentjobs.stanford.edu and assu.stanford.edu/townhall, in addition to maintaining the website on the backend.
Because I want to spread public service to other CS students, I'm a director for Dance Marathon Hackathon. During the same 24 hours when DM dancers are dancing, our hackers program for nonprofits. While it often seems like CS students don't have the opportunity to work for the social good, Hackathon shows students just how useful CS is in saving the world. Because hackers make a complete product in 24 hours, they can see the direct and immediate impact that their work has.
Why is the Haas Center important to you?
When a student comes to Stanford, they are used to being the best. Thus, the first instinct of an entrepreneurial Stanford student, when they see a problem, is to forge out on their own through the cold, lonely world of big business so that they can start their own organization.
The Haas Center is important because service shouldn't work that way. It isn't about being the best; it's about helping people. The best way to help people is usually not alone. An interested community of public servants can accomplish what one individual cannot.
Working with existing organizations allows for work to have the maximum social impact: as a programmer, I would not write 1000 lines of code when I could leverage someone else's work with 2 lines. Similarly, as a public servant, I would not spend months developing new organizational infrastructure when I could leverage an existing organization and improve upon their foundation.
Also, public service is hard, but it need not be cold. By creating a community of people interested in public service, the Haas Center ensures that service takes place in a framework that is fulfilling to all those involved. That way, we can continue to do what must be done.
Why do you choose action over apathy?
I don't see myself as doing anything extraordinary. Injustice exists. Being a Stanford student makes me incredibly privileged, and with that privilege comes the responsibility to act against injustice. It isn't heroism or sainthood. It's just doing the minimum to be a decent human being. I choose action because I think that humanity is worth fighting for.
I live in Terra, a co-op on campus. It's been a fairly interesting experience.
It started off well. I arrived partway through Sophomore College, right before my birthday. Because fall term hadn't started yet, the only people around were the people on dorm staff (the RAs, kitchen managers, etc). Thus, even though I wasn't expecting anything for my birthday, they all barged into my room and gave me a delicious cupcake with a candle in it and sung me happy birthday. It made my day.
Living in a co-op itself means that we do our own cooking and cleaning rather than paying other people to clean up our messes. There are about 50 people in total that live in Terra, and each of us has a weekly kitchen job and several once-per-quarter jobs. The kitchen job is either setting up for the dinner cook crew, cooking dinner, cleaning up after dinner, or baking a midnight snack. I was one of the lucky few bakes, and I made some form of cookie or bread on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. It was fairly time consuming, but it was a good experience. The once-per-quarter jobs are cleaning up after the Friday happy hour, cleaning a bathroom, and doing an intensive clean of the kitchen. Those are each moderately annoying, but they're each only one or two hours every three months, so I'm not complaining.
Each cook crew consists of four or five people, and there will be a head-cook for each dinner (so each person is head-cook about twice per term). The head cook designs the menu. Thus, there's a different dinner every night. That's a lot nicer than living in a dorm where there's more or less the same menu every week (ie, there are 7 different menus that they cycle through) and there are a lot of things that stay the same every day (ie, the rice dish). I was satisfied with my food when I lived in FloMo, but it's definitely nice having a different dinner every night, especially because each dinner exposes me to a cultural food that I might not have tried before.
Also, because we manage our own kitchen, we have an open kitchen. That means that if I want to grab leftovers or make myself something to eat at 4am when I have two of my friends over working on a computer science project, I can. This has been amazing.
The one thing that I don't like very much about Terra is the frat-like atmosphere. Because we are a co-op and clean up after ourselves, we are very clean (unlike many frats where you see piles of week-old plates lying in the hallways), but we are just as partyish as any frat. In my dorm last year, there were fun and social events. In Terra, most of the dorm events revolve around alcohol and loud music, and people don't tend to have very deep / meaningful / insightful conversations with those two factors.
As a result of this atmosphere, there are a few people who are very outspoken about their regressive values. For instance, early on, there was discussion of having one vegetarian meal a week because of the environmental impact of meat eating. A few days after, someone sent out an email: "We, the cook crew, are upset with this; we thought the decision to institute a vegetarian Famine Dinner would be discussed with the house further before being implemented. KMs, [kitchen managers] why are you ignoring your residents?" As it so happens, there was meat in two of the dishes that they made that night (and that meat was on the menu that they were cooking, and the cook crew knew about it). I guess any dinner without 10lbs of meat in it is a vegetarian famine. At another dinner, a Filipino person was head cook, and they made Filipino food. Someone complained about only having "ethnic" food for dinner. As a result, another resident sent out an email about white privilege and how we should celebrate it when someone makes food from their culture rather than demonizing that culture. The person who sent out the Vegetarian Famine Dinner email then sent out an email all but denying the existence of white privilege. In the flame war that ensued, I learned that my long, verbose, thought-out style of responses is not appropriate for email flame-wars. Short + Sweet = Good.
In Terra, everyone has a two room double. That means that there are two rooms between two people, so each person gets their own room. However, the rooms aren't quite identical. There is a room with a door to the hallway and there is a room with only a door to the other room -- an .outside' and an .inside' room. The inside rooms are general considered to be nicer because you won't have your roommate going through your room to get to their room at all hours of the day, so there's more privacy. Because I arrived during Sophomore College, I pretty much had my choice of the rooms, so I let my roommate have the inside room (because I'm a nice guy).
Little did I know that, in addition to the privacy benefits, the inner room is also the only room with closets or dressers. My room has empty space where the closets and dressers are in my roommate's room. Because I didn't want to impose on his room, I decided to figure out how to manage without closets or a dresser.
The solution was to be organized. When I have space, there is room to be disorganized. Just like how, this term there was no time therefore I didn't procrastinate, in my room there was no space so I wasn't disorganized.
My clothes were filed neatly in tubs. My papers were all filed in expandos. My technology stuff was all in my drawers. The inside of my desk held scratch paper. There were pens scattered everywhere because no matter when a thought comes up, there should be a pen handy to write it down.
I would occasionally leave in-use papers on my desk rather than in an expando, but the overall look of my room didn't diverge much from the scheme that I designed when I moved in. For the first time, I managed to stay organized. See http://picasaweb.google.com/meviin/VerboseLetter201001# for some pictures of my room.
The one annoying thing about my room: I don't get very good cell phone reception anywhere in my room. I actually missed one of my phone interview calls with Palantir because my phone didn't ring when they called. Thankfully, Google Voice notified me that I got a call, so I was quickly able to rectify the situation. The internet works just fine.
On 9/21, the same day that class started, I saw one single flier advertising a Zion I concert that same day. The fliers must have gone up on 9/21 because I hadn't seen it before. There were no email announcements sent out. It must have been the least-advertised Stanford event ever, but it still attracted tons of people. I guess what advertising they did worked.
Zion I was touring for their new album, The Takeover. I had seen Zion I in Eugene a few years earlier, but I hadn't listened to much of their music before going to that concert. I appreciated this concert much more.
I got a copy of the album. It's pretty good. I also got a picture.
Immortal Technique, a hip hop artist that I've listened to for a while, came to campus on 11/6 to give a lecture (not a concert -- Technique is more like an intellectual with musical talent than someone who just sings to make money).
After hearing him speak, I respect him a lot more. He's like a young person-of-color Noam Chomsky. He has a very good politic, he is learning from his past (ie, when confronted, he said that he made a conscious effort not to say .fag' on his new album), he says that he preaches nonviolence in general, though he recognizes that sometimes violence is the only thing that will make people listen, and he doesn't exclude any particular style / purpose of revolution: he think that a doctor or a lawyer can be just as good as a hip hop artist if they keep their values in mind and don't compromise on them.
He has a very good grasp of history. He thinks that knowing the history of a people is important, and he analyzes language. Ie, "the coast is clear" from the Spanish reconquista (or was it from the conquista?) -- "there are no moors on the coast" "the coast is WHITE."
He still has some refinement to go if he does want to be a Chomsky figure -- he isn't reserved about swearing, for instance -- but I could see him being just like any other intellectual who cares about real issues if he ever wanted to.
Right before Thanksgiving break, someone hacked into some of Stanford's Linux servers and put a keylogger on them. Because those are the computers that most of the Computer Science people (include me) program on remotely, there was quite a bit of wreckage as a result of that hacking.
First, everyone who used them was recommended to change their Stanford password -- there's one login and password (for each student) that's used for all Stanford things, including email, viewing grades, looking at course materials, and just about everything else. After I did so, there were a few people that weren't getting my emails. It was weird because most people were getting my emails.
At first, I thought the problem was a direct result of the hackage. I had recently transitioned from mainly using my @stanford.edu email address to mainly using my @cs.stanford.edu address (the @cs email is managed by the CS department and has always been a permanent email address, whereas the @stanford email address used to only last until you graduated. Using an @cs email address also helps me advertise that computer science people do public service), and the @cs addresses are maintained on separate servers from the @stanford emails, so I thought that the same computers that were hacked held the @cs addresses. Apparently, the @cs email servers are managed by the CS department and are separate from the machines that were hacked. Thus, all of the emails that I was sending from my @cs account was getting through fine.
It turns out, I use gmail to manage all of my emails, and gmail doesn't notify you when an email that is sent through someone else's servers doesn't authenticate properly. That is, gmail recently added a feature so that I could send an email from my @stanford or my @cs account and have it show up exactly as if I had logged in to webmail.stanford.edu and sent an email from there -- previously, gmail would just change the "reply to" address, which would basically make my email show up as partly from gmail and partly from Stanford. In order to make my email show up as 100% from Stanford,
There was a notice that the Stanford CS mail
Those computers were able to be hacked into despite them being used mainly by CS people because CS didn't have administrative powers over those computers. They were all managed by Stanford's IT people.
Nick Isaacs, my roommate last year, invited me to spend Thanksgiving with him. It was good. His family made some vegetarian food specially for me. The meal as a whole was very good. There were some brown-sugar-baked yams (they may have been my favorite part of the dinner), mashed potatoes, vegetarian stuffing, turnovers (Nick's specialty! Probably the last time I had turnovers was with Mom), home-made pumpkin ice cream (it was a bit rough, but it was good), lots of other different deserts (I set the stage by taking a small slice of each rather than only trying half of them). It was excellent.
I had a good conversation with Nick's aunt, Jeanie, who lives in Fiji. We violated the first rule of polite conversation and talked about politics. We talked about some of the differences between Fiji and the US regarding gender and race politics. She was interested to hear that I saw Noam Chomsky in the flesh -- she had seen Howard Zinn (I think it was Zinn) in her college days. She was a very interesting person.
Nick's family in general is very friendly.
I bounced the first two checks that I ever wrote. My bank account separates my money into saving and checking accounts. When I went to get my checks, I asked the person if I could get them tied to my savings account, and I thought they said that they could, but apparently not.
For the first check, there was a $25 overdraft fee, but they still let the check go through. I guess that's their embarrassment-protection service. However, they don't automatically send out emails when there's an overdraft, and I didn't check my account very much in the month of November, so I didn't discover either of the overdrafts until looking at my statement at the beginning of December. They didn't let the second check go through, and they still charged the fee. Since it was my fault, I'm not too mad at them. They put the second check through after I transferred money into my checking account. And there are no lasting penalties, for which I'm glad.
You live, you learn.
The music that I listened to a lot this term includes:
Classical Baroque Music - it's good to study / work to.
K'Naan, a Somali rapper who talks a lot about what it's like to live in a failed state
Lupe Fiasco, who has a lot of political rap.
Sweatshop Union (as discussed in my previous letter)
The new Zion I album
The new Blue Scholars album
The new Immortal Technique album.
The new Smash Mouth album
"Talisman" by Air. I discovered the rain in the background, and being in California for a while made me miss the sound of rain.
"If You can Dream It" by Athens Boys Choir, a trans spoken-word artist. Part of the song is:
See I,
Never underestimate the power of a woman.
A sacred feminine . not man-hating, just trying to get
Even, just trying to get
Some control over those controllers because
We just can't c-o-n-t-roll with it anymore.
Angela Davis to suffrage.
Gloria Steinem to Frances Perkins,
Sharlie Hunter to Rosa Parks,
Alice Walker and bell hooks
And all those women you may have heard of
Called witches and bitches,
Whores and sinners because,
Like Dan Brown said, history is
Always written by the winners.
So, what will the future textbooks say?
That the revolution was built this way:
A twine into thick rope; a braid made by feminists and
Trans-activists, visionaries and radical faeries,
Antiracists and hackers,
Grown men and distracters,
Whistle blowers, door openers,
My grandma, my mom, and me.
Circumstance? Naw.
Come lay with me. Come
walk beside me in camaraderie
Because, like MLK, I got a dream in me, and
You got a dream in you. I
know you do.
<some other clip>
Now, if you can dream it, you can have it
If you can see it, you can get it
If you can reach for it, you can touch it
See, you just got to believe to get it
I like the song because of the message that we can overcome as long as we believe in the movement. History is written by the winners, so the question is how the history books will describe the movement, because the movement will succeed. It is nice to listen to when worrying about all of the harms that exist in the world.
I discovered near the beginning of the term that my email is filling up.
I can't stop it.
It's horrible.
Before the advent of Gmail, I had 4 MB of email storage, and I was happy to have it. I would save any email that I wanted to keep and delete any other email. My inbox was slim. When Gmail offered 1GB of free space on April 1, people thought it was an April Fools Joke. It changed the game. Deleting became unnecessary, which means that I can archive my email and use Google's powerful search technology to find any email that I have ever received without any difficulty. And people could now send rich emails with embedded pictures, videos, and programs without any difficulty.
When Gmail offered 2GB and continued to increase their storage limits (now it's somewhere between 7 and 8 GB for free), I never thought that I would run out of space. But at the beginning of this term, I realized that my storage was in the mid 60% used range and it was noticeably rising every few days. Now, after one term, my storage is at 77% used.
I tried deleting emails that I would never look at or search for again (ie, email lists that I didn't really read), and I tried unsubscribing from a few of my email lists, but on a school day, I probably get about 50 emails, and thinking about removing myself from email lists that I read (cutting myself off from vital information), thinking about whether I want to delete or archive every email (taking tons of time), and deleting all read emails (cutting my later self off from information that I might want to search for -- I search for old emails a lot) are all horrible solutions.
I have accepted that paying a yearly fee for Gmail storage will soon become inevitable.
I haven't spent as much time with my friends as I should have. Sorry.
I did get to know the people that I worked on CS projects with, Brennan Saeta, Emin Topolovic, and Zahan Malkani (who were in my dorm last year), more.
It was also nice that I was in the same classes as some people from my Sophomore College. Since CS classes are so big, though, I only really interacted with Anna Shtengelova, who was in my CS107 lab.
Nick (my roommate from last year), Emin, and Ted were all in my Feminist Studies class, which gave us a chance to interact.
I got to know David and Thomas, who live two doors down, a little bit better.
I continued to go to Mehran's office hours. They seemed a little bit busier this term than they were in the past. I also had more technical questions (ie, implementing neural networks for the CS221 final project) and career questions (ie, internships) than I did in the past.
I spent a little bit of time with some of my other friends, former teachers, and advisors, but not as much as I would have liked to.
I didn't stash myself in the luggage compartment by the outlet. It was really sticky.
Instead, I sat in the sightseeing car. I sat next to someone who, ironically, is
Because I was working in the sightseeing car late into the night, someone sat down next to my sleeping seat, and I didn't want to wake them up to get to my seat, so I slept in the sightseeing car. It was surprising -- there were a ton of people sleeping outside of their seats tonight. Usually, I see at most 1 person sleeping outside of their seat. Tonight, there were 3 or 4 people sleeping in the arcade car and 5 or 10 people sleeping in the sightseeing car. A few were sleeping in seats, but most were just sleeping face down on the ground.
I slept at one of the tables. It wasn't very comfortable. Ah well.
When I woke up, I found a new seat in the sightseeing car, and there were some new people around me. One just arrived in America from France. She was a Buddhist who has a life-skills-help organization in Seattle. There was also a father with two sons. The family talked a lot with the woman, but I think that I learned more about them than her.
The family lives in Salem. The father does maintenance work at a national park. The family is very Christian, and, as a result, the family homeschools their kids. The were going home after taking a month-long trip to learn more about the country. They saw some relatives (one of whom was Regan's neighbor when Regan was a kid), the Smithsonian, and a few other things. Interestingly enough, while all of the men in the family went on the trip, the wife and 3 daughters didn't go. Because I was just a bystander in the conversation and don't know the full context, I won't say that that's evidence of the patriarchal nature of conservative very-religious family structures, but it certainly is interesting.
The younger son (probably aged between 8 and 11) asked the Buddhist if she believed in Darwin's THEORY of Evolution because he believed in creationism (I think that evolution is fairly well established in contemporary experiments even if you believe that humans are different and that god created all of the original species, but oh well). Later, he talked about the Second Coming and spiritual ascension and damnation.
It saddened me to see such strong indoctrination in someone so young.
The older son (14 years old) was very bright. The father would keep quizzing him on things that they had learned on their trip and on other random trivia, and the son was encyclopedic.
It saddened me that the son's education will be fundamentally limited. I know that at least one of his older sisters is going to college, but the family culture wasn't one that strongly valued education. It is extremely difficult to get a good education when you grow up in a culture that doesn't strongly value education. That, I think, is one of the large differences between the educations that different kids get. With me, every person in my family has received higher education, every school that I have went to has highly valued education, and all but one person in my high school IHS class went to some form of college. As a result, I grew into the type of person who takes 20 units every term at Stanford and gets straight A's while maintaining a conviction that saving the world, not academics or career success, is the most important thing. That would not have happened absent a supportive family and community, so I can see myself in the 14 year old kid. This is particularly problematic when the father is critical of college (and cities, it seems) because he sees it as changing people's values against that of the values of the majority (interesting, since, increasingly, higher education is becoming the norm rather than the exception and people are moving from rural areas to cities).
In addition to the cultural limitations, there are structural limitations. It's hard to teach something that you don't use on a daily basis, and it's even harder when you're trying to tutor several students. That is, when a 9 year old and a 14 year old are getting the same math lessons from someone who doesn't do much with higher level math, I don't expect them to get an in depth knowledge of math deeper than algebra, and without that (and without labs), I don't expect them to get a very deep knowledge of science. Also, given the conversations that I heard, I don't expect them to learn much about social studies other than nationalist American civics (ie, they won't learn cosmopolitanism or A People's History of the United States), and I don't expect them to read much other than traditional religious or nationalist texts. I haven't seen how their homeschooling works, but if my hunches are true, then the kids will go into college with a deeper version of the knowledge that I knew in middle school. So the 14 year old will be encyclopedic about civics, but won't know much about calculus, chemistry, cosmopolitanism, or Camus.
Then again, they would likely be as saddened for my sake that I live a life without a personal relationship to Jesus as I was saddened for their sake that they live a life without scientific rationalism.
I think that I met the stereotypical college student. It's interesting that I'm just now meeting him since I've lived in a college town my whole life and am now a college student.
Just before the conversation between the family and the Buddhist started, someone sat next to me. We eavesdropped on their conversation while having our own conversation.
He got his bachelor's degree in studio art at a school in California (his home state). Now, since he realized that there isn't a lot of money in studio art, he's going for a degree in architecture at the University of Oregon. He converted to Buddhism (I recognized that he was Buddhist because he has a tattoo of the unending knot on his arm. He was impressed that I recognized its. Apparently, most people think it's a Nordic geometric design or something) for self-help / inner-peace reasons. He traveled (western) Europe a while back. He appreciated that houses in Eugene advertised "4-20 friendly."
The exception to the stereotype is that he's smart and responsible (for himself, at least). He is supporting himself rather than going into debt. That's part of the reason he's going to UO rather than staying in California (the other reason was that he didn't like the UC Berkeley culture / architecture program. Their architecture program likes gentrification and putting poor people into ghettos without public transportation, public works like parks, or commerce, and concentrating all of the wealth near rich neighborhoods) -- California housing prices are too expensive. He's also getting himself established, with a job, in Eugene before starting back with school. And he gets on the case of his roommates when they're slobs; he didn't like frat culture. At his previous job, he got a quick promotion because he was very efficient.
Like the stereotypical college student, he is ivory tower / individualist, and he doesn't extend his individual responsibility to his community at large. Thus, when he found that, in the job he was promoted into, he could get a full day of work done by noon (because he was efficient), he shared his efficiency tips with his coworkers, and he goofs off every day. The boss is incompetent, so they don't know that he and his coworkers goof off for half the day.
We had some interesting conversations. He hadn't ever been to Eugene before, so I told him about Eugene and UO. He asked some questions about college / Stanford. More interesting than the conversation itself is that it was very natural despite this being a stranger that I had just met and would likely never see again. He was so strongly a part of American college culture that even without knowing him, our conversation was as if we were picking up where we left off.
The only subject that was particularly interesting was religion. He is Buddhist, but he didn't seem very strongly attached toBuddhism. He asked about my religious identity, and I said that I was culturally Jewish but that I was epistemologically a scientific rationalist (epistemology = theory of knowledge. It answers the question of how we know what we know and how we get closer to truth. A Jewish/Christian/Islamic epistemology might be gaining understanding through Talmudic/Biblical/Quaranic study to understand God's word. A Buddhist epistemology might involve meditation to try to see the world as it truly as rather than as our senses, illusorily, report. A scientific epistemology uses the scientific method to test theories about the world). He said that was the way to go. I guess the western self-help culture (the culture stereotypically ascribed to hippies and college students) really only cares about self-help and is silent on larger questions of moral commitments and Truth, leaving those up to other philosophies (like science or evangelical religions) to decide. It seems like the only part of Buddhism that he believed in was meditation -- and that only for the sake of relaxation, not for the sake of nirvana / achieving Truth.
Does that make it religion without religion? I understand how someone can be atheist / agnostic and use non-religious beliefs to settle their questions of Truth, Ethics, Being, and anything else that religion usually answers. I can also understand how someone can conservatively believe in a religion. God told us the truth; the world is a few thousand years old; if you're gay or use a condom, you go to hell (in the example of conservative Christianity). I try, but I don't understand anything inbetween.
Religions were created as systems to guide life. Without one part of that system, the whole thing pretty much crumbles. If you believe that God speaks the literal truth, then you should be prepared to deny your senses and rationality and say that the earth is the center of the universe and that it was created a few thousand years ago. If you believe in Buddhism, you should be prepared to die, because this life is nothing other than suffering and you seek the cessation of this life. If you don't believe that God speaks the literal truth, then why would you believe in any of the epistemological claims that that God makes?
The moderates will argue that science can answer epistemological questions and that religion has little merit in discerning the Truth when confronted with science (that is, they believe that the earth is several billion years old rather than several thousand years old) but that it is useful in answering other questions -- ie, questions of Ethics (is being Gay a sin? Is it OK to own slaves as long as we set them free every 50 years at the Jubilee?) and Being (what is an agent in possession of free will? What happens after we die?). The problem with this is that most people don't believe that God speaks the moral Truth. If you believe that God speaks the moral truth, then you think that the violent revenge throughout the Old Testament is good, that the patriarchy and slavery within the bible is good, you follow the 10 commandments (so saying "God damn" or "lord," desiring, and not celebrating Shabbat are all sins), you follow all 618 (or was it 613?) dietary restrictions outlined in the Old Testament, and you believe in tons of other things that most people don't believe in. Because if God said it, then it is an absolute moral truth. If you don't believe that God speaks the Absolute Moral Truth or don't believe that the Bible is the revealed Word of God, then you would look at the Bible no differently than you would look at Fight Club or Camus or Plato -- certainly insightful literature, but probably behind on the times and certainly not absolute. But many moderates seem to think of the Bible as a special book, as, somehow, more than just a good book and less than Revealed Truth. A more important part of identity than culture, but not the only important part of identity. And that is something that I don't understand.
Even though, in practice, I agree with the moderates because their philosophies typically involve a good deal of religious tolerance and because they don't disagree with science, I remain puzzled by their philosophy. That's a problem for me because the moderates probably outnumber the religious conservatives and the scientific rationalists combined, so it is an important philosophy and culture to understand.
If you disagree with me, which I imagine you do if you aren't atheist, send me an email and tell me why. I want to understand.
As usual, I wrote this letter on the train.
It's weird. People are always shocked when I say that I ride the rain rather than a plane. The train is half the cost and half the pollution. The train doesn't prohibit me from using my cell phone or laptop. The train doesn't expose me to radiation (planes, because they are higher up than the ground, provide less atmospheric filtration from cosmic radiation). The train lets me bring water and any other gels or liquids that I desire. The train doesn't shout out messages about how we have a bright fluorescent crimson terror alert such that I should be paranoid about all of my stuff and about the people surrounding me. The train has electrical outlets. I don't have to arrive at the train station two hours early. I don't have to take off my shoes and jacket to board the train. I'm not cramped on the train. I don't ever get a headache because my ears didn't pop when riding the train. I don't have to buy my ticket weeks in advance to get a good price. I can check 3 pieces of luggage and carry on two pieces of luggage (plus my backpack and laptop bag) without paying anything extra, whereas most planes now charge for the first bag. In short, the train is the people's transportation and an example of how government-owned industries work and help people, and the airline industry is an example of failed security politics, failed capitalist decentralization, and the allure of high technology even when it isn't really better.
Several caveats:
I dislike that Amtrak doesn't let you check in any luggage stored in plastic containers. All of my worldly possessions fit in several Rubbermaid tubs, which means I need to carry them on if I want to travel with them. If I really need to check a tub, I just put it in a massive duffle bag, though.
Airlines have some conveniences that trains lack. There are a few airports that have free wifi, whereas most train stations don't. And, thanks to Google, most major airports have free wifi this November ~ January.
I realize that some airlines are better than others. Like Southwest. Most of my criticisms still apply, though.
I also realize that trains can't go over oceans very effectively.
I do appreciate the peanuts that the airlines give me (though friends with peanut allergies make me realize that giving out peanuts to everyone and filling the air with nuttiness can make some people feel sick, so that's probably another reason why airlines are bad).
When writing this, I realized how long it was. What made me realize: after I had made the outline of the letter (ie, putting all of the major events and headings in), before I had written anything substantive, it was 6 pages.
Most of my time over the break was spent relaxing. My first night home, I got about 14 hours of sleep. I probably averaged 10 hours per night over the break. I spent some time with family. I stopped by South Eugene HS to see some of my old teachers, though I missed a bunch of them. If only IHS was every day rather than every other day. I also met up with some friends, spent a lot of time writing this, and played some computer games.
This was the first time that my sleep schedule had really been altered since high school. Normally, my sleep schedule adapts completely to my circumstances. Due to my term, though, I had a hard time getting to sleep before 4am.
As I have gotten more and more anti-consumerist, I have had a harder and harder time answering the question of what I want for Chanukah / my birthday / other consumerist holidays. I've given it some thought, and here's what I came up with as a list of things that I appreciate or could actually use, ranked, more or less, from most desired to least desired. This isn't my hint that you should be getting me anything (after all, Chanukah has already passed), but is rather a reflection on my own values by examining my consumer values.
A large part of my valuing these things as gifts is that they are quality gifts. In the past, I have gotten video games that I immensely wanted beforehand, and after 30 hours of playing them, they sit in a closet. With the first two categories of gifts, the interpersonal connection that they would create is much greater than anything that comes in a box. With the other categories on my list, they are things that I would use for years, not hours. If I received a watch, I would continue to wear it on my wrist and look at it many times a day until it broke. When my dad got me a Made in America laptop back, it felt very good because I knew that I would be feeling just how comfortable (and padded!) it was for years, and I'm sure that my back will be thanking him even farther off into the future. It is the kind of gift that, because it is useful rather than just a gift for the sake of giving, is meaningful.
A lot of times people try to change the meaning of something. Sometimes this is a deliberate, political act. For instance, LGBTQ people reclaimed the word "Queer," and it no longer has an exclusively negative meaning. One of the things that I was exposed to in my class on the history of slavery was the extent to which this can happen substructurally, even absent a large social movement. In the class, this was in the context of the civil war: today, many historians and history teachers say that the civil war wasn't about slavery even though it really was because there is a vested political interest in painting the civil war in that way (see the section on History 51 for a more in depth discussion). I think that a similar phenomenon occurs with our holidays.
Take the example of Thanksgiving. The holiday of Thanksgiving was created to commemorate the .gift' that the Native Americans gave to the European settlers when the Europeans were practically committing genocide under the mantle of Manifest Destiny. When I mentioned this in a discussion in my dorm, someone replied defensively that Thanksgiving was not about that event, but about family. It seems strange when put so overtly -- that the holiday that we celebrate today bears no similarity to its symbolic predecessor -- but that is the norm. People don't typically have any historic memory of the meaning of Thanksgiving when celebrating Thanksgiving. Today, the holiday is about overeating, family, and abstractly giving thanks.
It might just be the historian in me, but I think that there is something very wrong with that.
First, as much as we would like to deny it, holidays retain their original symbolic significance. Thanksgiving is about family for the majority because that's what it was always about. American culture has never recognized the injustice committed in its foundation, so for the popular American culture, Thanksgiving is a safe place. To the descendent of someone who was killed in the biological warfare that the settlers waged with smallpox blankets, I would imagine that seeing your community celebrate would be alienating.
Second, historic monuments such as holidays provide an opportunity for historic reflection, and that is lost today. In high school, my lit teacher gave us a handout on Thanksgiving from Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" about some of the brutal realities that we celebrate on Thanksgiving. He used the holiday to teach me. If we ascribe all holidays an apolitical meaning, we lose these learning opportunities.
And they are lost! We don't think about the labor movement (anyone like the weekend? How about not having sweatshop conditions in the US?) on labor day, our own relationship to global warming on earth day, or contemporary race relations on MLK day. It's tragic.
Third, the question of opportunity cost: if you want a holiday about family, why call it Thanksgiving? Even if we don't want to create a new holiday, why not have those family celebrations on Mothers Day? When opportunity cost comes into the equation, it quickly becomes evident that the holiday isn't just about family even if that is a large part. When given the choice of on which weekend we have our family celebrations, we choose Thanksgiving.
This discussion is particularly relevant in the winter holiday season. People argue that Christmas is not a religious holiday with similar reasoning as arguing that Thanksgiving is not about the creation of the United States on bloody soil; it's about family and consumerism. Indeed, it is a national holiday in the US despite the separation of church and state.
Like in the case of Thanksgiving, it only seems this way to the people in the dominant culture. All of the Jews with whom I have talked about Christmas have said that Christmas time is alienating for them. Christmas is a celebration of a culture that we are not a part of. Even if we hear "Santa," it sounds a lot like "St. Nick" to us. The case of Kwanzaa makes this particularly evident. Kwanzaa is not a millennia-old holiday. It was created in America because many African Americans felt alienated by Christmas.
It's also important to separate the cultural significance from the religious significance. Christmas is not a religiously-Christian holiday. Jesus was born in the spring, not on December 25. Jesus would probably hate the consumerism of American Christmas if he were alive today. Aside from the Nativity, most of our Christmas celebrations are not explicitly religious. However, the entirety of Christmas is culturally Christian, and this has been true since its inception. Christmas was created so that pagan converts could celebrate something from within the Christian culture at the same time as the winter solstice festivals. Christmas was created to proliferate the Christian culture.
That's why it's problematic to take away the historic significance of the holiday. People have a vested interest in making the holiday seem apolitical or areligious, but it remains a significant part of Christianity. That's why I don't think of it as Holiday break or Winter break. It's Christmas break. The only thing that different Christmas breaks have in common is that there is no school on Christmas. There is no accommodation towards Chanukah or other celebrations. It is because Christmas break is not Winter break that different schools start and end at different times: schools on the quarter system want to have one quarter before Christmas and schools on the semester system want to have one semester before Christmas. If it were truly a Winter break, the breaks could occur at different times.
So yes, American Christmas is about consumerism and family and having a few days off and winter, but it is also about Christianity.
On a side note, the same idea applies to dates. Scientists often will say BCE ("Before Common Era") or CE rather than BC or AD. However, the year isn't 2009 in the Common Era. It's 2009 in the Christian era. Calling the Christian era the Common era is an attempt to separate our system of dates from its political significance.
There were a bunch of career-oriented events for Computer Science majors. Most of them took place at times when I was either just getting out of a class or just heading to another class, so I only caught half of most of the events, but they were very helpful.
There was a resume workshop, a career fair workshop (the week before the CS career fair), a recruiting orientation, and a career panel. All of them were before the second full week of October.
The resume workshop had the most practical advice. I also looked over the Career Center's handout on resume advice. A few takeaways: have a purpose at the top ("Summer Internship in Software Engineering"), have a summary of qualifications below that, include the effect that you had rather than just what you did (don't just say "programming a platform for paperless debate," also include "saving debaters hundreds of dollars on airfare for evidence." This was big. After doing this for every bullet point that I had on my resume, it was so much more powerful), don't put "references available on request" at the bottom, and, by looking at some example resumes, I was able to make mine look a lot nicer.
I got less out of the career fair workshop. Mostly, they recommended that I not dress casually, that I get a professional-looking nametag rather than using one of the "Hi, my name is ____" nametags provided, and not to wear a backpack or laptop bag when talking with the recruiters. The one practical piece of advice is to have cover letters ready that are specific to each organization.
When I went to a career fair, I didn't really follow their advice. I wore the same thing that I always did (though that does include a collared shirt), didn't buy a fancy name tag, and wore my laptop bag. I was also fairly selective, though. I didn't want to intern with a company that I didn't see as benefiting the social good. That automatically ruled out the financial and military recruiters, along with the neutral high-tech players like Microsoft and Amazon. The only organizations at the career fair that I considered interning at were Palantir (they do big data analysis, a lot for the government, and they have done some cool things in the past like analyze the Ossetia incident (that big Russia / Georgia conflict a while back), Hara (they do environmental work. No software engineering internships as of yet, though), and Google.
The recruiting orientation was basically just information about how the CS department recruiting works. It was nice to get the dates of all of the tech talks going on and all of the deadlines to apply for jobs and internships, but it felt like the type of event that could have been replaced by a short webpage.
The career panel was fairly fun. I dragged a friend there right after FEMST138. Mehran stopped by because there were a bunch of old students (the CS section leading program is a hotbed for successful CS people) and people that he worked with there. I came because someone from Google was there, but there were representatives from a bunch of other companies there, and they talked about the different company cultures of small startups versus big, establish organizations. It was interesting having both sides there. They seemed to contradict whatever the other side said, but it was all very polite. A few things that I think I managed to extract: startups will probably have more hours, less-clearly-defined roles, and a frantic rush to get things done as opposed to established companies, and web based companies will be pushing a lot of small iterations, so it's a more consistent amount of work than desktop based companies which will get more and more frantic as the release deadline approaches.
Early on, the debate coach at Whitman, offered to hire me to make a tabulation program. I ended up being unable to do it, mostly because of time constraints. Also, while I want to do tech projects for the debate community, the philosophy behind his tab program wasn't the same as my philosophy. He was avoiding making a tab program with a lot of customization. I would want to make mine completely customizable. Also, the one that I would develop for him was programmed in Visual Basic, a programming language that I have learned that I hate.
After the career fair, Palantir selected me to go through their interview process. It was my first tech interview aside from my CS198 interviews. Also, Palantir apparently has hard interview questions, so it was good for future interviews. I spent a lot of time studying for the interviews, including looking at interview questions that they had given in the past and looking at section problems from CS106B -- apparently, most of Palantir used to go to Stanford, and many of them used to section lead for CS106B.
The interviews weren't too hard. They started out with some weeder questions -- tell me about these data types, prove that you know what recursion is, prove that you are familiar enough with Linux to use Grep rather than spending hours remaking the wheel -- and then they moved on to an algorithmic complexity question where I found the most efficient algorithm for solving a particular case of subset-sum (and then coded it up).
Palantir apparently pays their interns as full employees, and they tackle interesting problems, but I'm not sure that I would feel fulfilled working for them. I think that, right now, I would feel better working for some nonprofit or doing research in biocomputation rather than at Palantir. They might be working for the social good, but they aren't able to disclose all of the details of their projects (they do some security stuff for the government), and I'm not comfortable working with them unless I could strongly convince myself that they would be for the social good.
There's another debater that has been at the same tournaments as me that is in CS, and he came across a similar difficulty as I did. He has a similar philosophy to me, but he is working for a defense contractor because he doesn't see there as being many opportunities for engineers to work for the social good. His only hope was that he would be able to change the industry from within the belly of the beast. For me, I'm not in CS because I see that as my one calling. I could just as easily see myself in any other industry. I'm in CS because it teaches me something new and useful that I would have a hard time learning on my own much more so than non-applied social science classes. Thus, CS wasn't the most effective way for me to to be a public servant, I would choose something other than CS. The luck of being versatile.
CS198 is a program where undergrads section lead (hold a once-per-week problem section with 7-13 people that supplements the three large lectures each week) in the introductory CS classes. I had applied to CS198 twice before, but I didn't quite make the cut. The second time, they said that my teaching was good, but that they prefer people who had taken CS107.
This time, it came very naturally. Even my first practice-section that I did before the actual interview went fairly smoothly. I think that the biggest difference within the interview, though, was the arrogance that I discussed when talking about CS221. My arrogance was greater than my nervousness, so I acted confident, so I didn't freeze during the interview.
This time, I got the position. I'll be section leading in Winter. I was really excited.
Since hearing back from them, there have been a few social events for section leaders. During the last week of school before finals, there was a barbeque and a dinner. I met some cool people. One of them worked on Starcraft 2 as an intern. I was impressed. A few of the people in my Sophomore College will be section leaders also.
When I had a chat with Mehran about the upcoming quarter, he cautioned me against taking CS198 for the first time in a quarter where I take 21 units. Everyone who takes CS198 says that it's more work than the originally thought it would be. He didn't want me to get burned out on CS198 or to work myself to exhaustion. He did give me his graces, though.
I think that Google is oriented towards the social good because the goal of making the world's information organized and useful is oriented towards the social good, and I think they are following their mission fairly well. Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State, has a series of YouTube videos about how technology is changing our culture, and his insight shaped my thoughts about Google.
They provide information to people who wouldn't otherwise have access to it. Google Books (well, the idea of it. Thanks to publishers and copyrights, this goal has not been met) would provide the biggest library of books to every individual for free. YouTube has changed the way people talk and, as we have seen with the recent elections in the US and in Iran, it is a platform for political and journalistic activism. The allow for collaboration across borders. They support Open Source Software. And those are Google's for-profit projects.
Google.org also does lots of amazing work. They use Google Earth to visualize environmental destruction, they use Google Search Trends to predict flu outbreaks, and they support organizations that are working for the social good.
In other words, I wouldn't feel bad about working there for a summer.
My Google interviews weren't until winter break. I did study hard for them, but after my other tech interviews, these were fairly easy.
A few days later, they said that I had done well on my interviews and that they would be looking for a mentor for me to intern under who is working on a project that matches my interests. Needless to say, I was happy to happy to get the good news.
Less than a day after I learned that I passed the Google interview, InSTEDD, an organization that I contacted for Hackathon, told me that they were looking for interns.
I was giddy. I had always said, "the only organization that I would even consider working at rather than Google would be InSTEDD, but they don't even have internship opportunities" (I think that they have actually had interns in the past, but the person that I talked to earlier wasn't aware of that). The reason that InSTEDD rivals Google is because they do such amazing work. The inspiring video that I discussed in "CS and Social Change: Dr. Larry Brilliant, Biocomputation, MD/PhD" was the same one where Dr. Larry Brilliant conceived of InSTEDD. He envisioned InSTEDD as a global force for early detection and early response to diseases. Today, InSTEDD also fights diseases and disasters (InSTEDD originally stood for International System for Total Early Disease Detection and was a play on TED, the name of the conference where Dr. Brilliant gave his talk, and on EDD, Early Disease Detection. Today, it stands for Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters). Now, they have several technologies, including GeoChat, which automatically helps nonprofits coordinate their aid by mapping disparate sources of information, Riff, which uses machine learning to detect disease outbreaks before they become pandemics, and several other technologies.
Many of the challenges that they deal with involve technological limitations. For instance, one of the projects that they suggested for Hackathon was one piece of solving the problem of how a nonprofit can communicate with someone who has just been affected by a disaster, who is semi-illiterate, and who only has access to a $20 cell phone where the voice communication has been taken out by the disaster.
Now, I'm in the process of deciding between Google and InSTEDD.
In Google's favor is everything aside from the project. Google has speakers on their campus, and I love seeing amazing speakers. Google, in general, is the same kind of big atmosphere that I like. People probably look highly on Google interns, and I would imagine that being an intern would help with getting a job at Google in the future if I wanted. Google has good pay, whereas InSTEDD probably wouldn't pay at all (though they would pay for airfare if I were to work in one of their international labs). Google also probably has more intern-events planned. The perks are probably better too -- I would certainly eat better than I have at any other point in my life.
InSTEDD, on the other hand, has amazing projects to work on. They're the type of place that I could see myself working at for decades. Also, since I (embarrassingly) haven't been overseas but value knowledge of cultures other than my own, working internationally would be a good opportunity: one of their main research labs in in Cambodia.
Right now, I am leaning towards InSTEDD, but Google hasn't even lined up a project for me yet, so they might have something similarly amazing to InSTEDD. Also, because Google and InSTEDD have a good relationship with each other (I originally thought that InSTEDD was founded in Google.org, but apparently they have just been funded by Google.org, but have always been independent), I'm hoping that it will be possible to do a combined Google/InSTEDD internship (the InSTEDD person that I had been talking with also suggested I look into this).
Being a premed cs major who didn't take many classes for either in frosh year is easy! But it does require planning.
Premeds need to be comfortable with biology, chemistry, and physics before the end of junior year for the sake of the MCATs. They also need to take a year of biology with lab, a year of physics with lab, a year of organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry, each with lab, and some math, some English, and some social sciences.
Based on the amount of stress that being premed generates, I was surprised that the requirements were so reasonable. Because I think that having a basic understanding the world is important, I had planned on taking all of those classes anyways. The only possible exception would be the labs and two years of chemistry rather than one.
I won't have much freedom to take electives in the next three terms because I need to take both biology and chemistry, with labs, and most people started that in their frosh year. I'll also need to study independently for the physics portion of my MCATs because I'll be taking the three physics courses between winter term of Junior year and fall term of Senior year, but I'll have to take my MCATs at the end of Junior year. However, after fall term of my Junior year, it's mostly clear sailing. There are still classes that I'll have to take, but I'll have a lot of freedom to shape my schedule and take electives like I've been doing for the past few terms.
The one thing that I wanted to do that I probably won't fit in is participating in Stanford in Washington, since it doesn't have a lot of classes for either CS or premed.
I heard an argument years ago that it is impossible to have good without evil, and that frustrated me. I thought about it again, and my two responses are:
1) Qualitative versus Quantitative. Even when we don't have qualitative differences between good and evil, we can still have quantitative measures of good. Even if feeling full wasn't opposed to feeling starved, an individual can still say that they feel slightly full or incredibly full. In the context of good and evil, if you get rid of the Hitlers of the world, you would still have plenty of people who are only slightly good and others who are completely altruistic.
2) Material versus Semantic. I don't care whether or not good is labeled as such. I would prefer a world without children starving to a world where some people are lauded as "good" because they try to stop starvation. Put another way, it might be true that you can't have feminists ("good") without sexism and patriarchy ("evil"), but I would still prefer a world where men and women were treated as equals.
It's funny that I'm a computer scientist who is low tech. I take the train, I don't have a smartphone and I only really use voice and calendar on my current phone, I am against 'social' media like Facebook and Twitter because I feel like they're antisocial, my laptop is a few years old, and I don't have an MP3 player.
I guess I have a high threshold for what makes a piece of technology important. High tech is sometimes better than low tech alternatives, but it often isn't, especially when the topic is something as important as helping people in the third world where, often, the only technology available is a $20 cell phone.
Most technologies are useful, but not fundamentally important. Yes, I could buy plenty of thneeds, but it wouldn't make me a better person or change how I interact with the world.
I do think that many technologies have the potential for changing human interactions. Something like Facebook could become a genuinely social network. Communication technologies in particular have a lot of potential. Cell phones allow us to do things that we couldn't do with land lines. For many people, they're a tool for safety. For some parents, they create a feeling that their children are secure. For groups, it makes meeting easier. For people in the third world, it makes computing possible.
For some other ways that technologies can change the ways that humans interact, see Professor Michael Wesch's YouTube videos. He does some very cool things.
Now that I'm starting to understand what some of the big words in philosophy mean, I wanted to think about what some 'standard' philosophies or some of my unthought philosophies are. Feel free to correct me if I got any of the terms wrong.
I have known for a while that my ethic (and, at a basic level, most people's ethic) is utilitarianism, though I accept philosophies such as Camus' as heuristics for ethical action when we can't dedicate the resources to determining the perfect utilitarian action.
Because my epistemology does not situate some external agent as dictating the True ethic, I think that ethics is the most important philosophy (I still need to read more Levinas, though) because most other philosophical questions wouldn't effect the most important ethics. That is, disagreements on action may occur at the superficial level, but most people agree that things like genocide and starving kids are bad. If a different reasonable ontology would not change that basic ethical statement, then working to give a material answer to that ethical statement is more important than bickering about other philosophies. That is, I will probably not live to see the day when the uncontroversial evils (like starving children) cease to exist. If my ethic dictates that it is more important to prevent children from starving than to do most other things, then my other philosophies would not change my actions. If they don't change my actions, then they have no ethical significance (because ethics is the philosophy of action), so there is no ethical reason for me to pursue the study of other philosophies once I have answered a few basic philosophical questions.
My epistemology is scientific rationalism -- empiricism. I believe something because I can observe it. A theory is true if we can create a test that would demonstrate its truth.
This has certain limitations. There are some things, notably basic philosophical and logical questions, that cannot be answered with empirical evidence. Generally, though, if we keep these simple, logic can take us the rest of the way. That way, we only need to assume basic stuff (ie, people should be treated with equal moral consideration / there are some human rights, consequences matter, p and NOT p cannot both be true at the same time, some basic set theory), and we can derive the rest.
I haven't given a great deal of thought to the importance of ontology. Ontology is the study of being. What is a thing? What makes that thing a thing? How do different things relate to each other?
I haven't given much thought to it because most of the questions that tend to be ontological are, for me, matters of convenience rather than matters of philosophical importance -- an ontology can make organization much more or less efficient (ie, 1996-Yahoo!'s categories versus Google's PageRank as two competing ontologies), but that's something that we can study, not something that we need to ponder.
Since my ethic says that causing suffering to beings that can perceive suffering is bad, I don't really care how much humanness I, another person, or a non-human animal has; we still shouldn't treat them poorly. The only remaining question is what suffering is or what can perceive suffering, but my epistemology can answer that: make a test, and study it. Asking people how happy they are or hooking up a machine to their brain seems like a much more rigorous way to understand how to treat a being than philosophy, as long as we accept the basic ethical and epistemological statements above.
One part of my philosophy that might be considered ontological is that I am a humanist. I think of this as part of my ethics rather than my ontology, though. It means that I think that anything that we consider human deserves to be treated with equal moral consideration, though I am also slightly anti-anthropocentric, meaning I think that non-human animals deserve some of those rights too. Another possibly-ontological thought is that I am a materialist and determinist, meaning I think that we should not try to look outside of the universe for answers, being, or essence. Things like consciousness, if they exist, are within this universe. The one exception is the rules that govern the universe itself, namely the fundamental physical forces. Except insofar as they concern ethics, I'm not sure why these thoughts matter, and except insofar as they can be discerned with scientific rationalism, I'm not sure how these thoughts can be true (or false) in any meaningful way.
If I misunderstood ontology, or if you have a reason why it is important, I would love to hear.
The last school of thought that I'll bring up is the least philosophical: methodology. Methodology is concerned with creating sets of principles that help uphold the other parts of philosophy. For instance, in a scientific study, one important methodological idea is to have a control group so that the scientist can isolate one thing to study. The scientific method is the methodology that supports scientific rationalism.
For questions of ethics rather than truth, a significant part of my methodology is pragmatic, comparative policy analysis. In other words, I don't discern good action by looking at one course of action and seeing how good it is. I look at many courses of action (including doing nothing) and see which one is the best, regardless of how good any given action is. It is about opportunity cost, not direct cost.
In SLE last year, when we were reading Marx and Mandeville, we had economists speak to us. They talked about the consumer revolution and gave the argument that even if sweatshops have horrible working conditions, they are still good because people are choosing to work there rather than being farmers.
Something that Dr. Larry Brilliant said in his second TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_makes_the_case_for_optimism.html) gave me a response to this argument. What the big cities do doesn't happen in isolation. The industrialization that those economists talked about happened as the result of environmental devastation (ie, deforestation and pollution that led to acid rain in England). Without a good environment, people can't farm very well. Thus, they must move to cities. It isn't that the opportunities in cities are so great and that people want to work in sweatshops. It's that creating those sweatshops destroyed the existing opportunities. In Dr. Brilliant's words (regarding global warming): "We eat as if we were 20 billion. And we consume so much that, again, a rise of 6.5 billion to 9.5 billion in our grandchildren's lifetime will disproportionately hurt the poorest and the most vulnerable. That's why they migrate to cities. That's why in June of this year [07], we passed 51% of us living in cities and bustees and slums and shanty towns. The rural areas are no longer producing as much as they did. The green revolution never reached Africa. And with desertification, sand storms, the Gobi Desert, the agadan, we are finding increasing difficulty of a hectare to produce as many calories as it did even 15 years ago."
This is particularly true in the case of modern day sweatshops. The Maquiladoras in Mexico exist because of a series of free trade policies between the US and Mexico. Those policies led to a declining GDP in Mexico for years after the policies were enacted. What happened was that, because of the free trade, US corporations came in and used their money to establish sweatshops in Mexico, displacing local, more-humane, factories. Yes, people work at the sweatshops, but it isn't because the sweatshops are good. It's because they pollute the land and displace other jobs.
Next term, I'll be taking:
CS198: section leading the introductory CS classes
CS161: algorithms
BIO42: cell biology and animal physiology
BIO44x: lab
CHEM33: organic chemistry (structure and reactivity)
I'm taking so much bio and chem because of my thoughts about potentially being premed / biocomputation and because I didn't take any bio or chem my frosh year. They should also be interesting.
In total, that's 21 units. Since 21 is over the max, I had to fill out paperwork to sign up for this schedule. This was what prompted Mehran to caution me against taking CS198 in an overload quarter (see CS198 - Section Leading). Kirsti, my academic director, also cautioned me against taking so many classes -- this past quarter, I didn't follow the limits that I set for myself when talking with Kirsti. They both signed off on the paperwork, though, and now I am all signed up.
After the end of the term, Kirsti checked on my grades to make sure that her signing off didn't condemn me to a horrible fate. When she saw that I got all As, she said that she was impressed and proud to know me. It was a different awkward-feeling from people seeing my CS221 Midterm, but it was still awkward.
The current head policy coach, Ben Picozzi, is graduating this year, so I'll be the head policy coach at Palo Alto HS next year. Which will increase the amount of time that I spend coaching debate.
I'll probably have to stop debating for Stanford (there are a few other people debating now, so policy debate won't die as a result of my not debating), and I might not stay with the ASSU tech team.