Day 10 (15/5) - Stanford
On the BART, Jabir and I were having a discussion on the utility of taxonomy and categorisation, as opposed to embracing the fragmentation of knowledge beyond palpable categories. I was accused of being simplistic, but this was ridiculous really, since cognition is categorization: "The essence of memory organization is classification, relating new experiences to the old." - William Estes; just because we recognise that we live in and interact with the world using categories does not mean that we ignore the subtleties of particular instances. This caused a woman to laugh because, really, philosophy (and epistemology in particular) is not something you discuss in polite company.
In the morning we had a talk at APARC and the afternoon was free.
We took a zero emissions fuel cell bus to the transit center; an interesting thing about many US buses is that they are kneeling - the front of the bus can be lowered to make it easier for people to get on, or wheelchair users to wheel themselves up the ramp.
Unfortunately no girls chose to do a paper on shopping and multiculturalism. Then they could've gone shopping to do 'research'. Though one is doing the touristification of Chinatown.
The US officially has a melting pot policy (homogeneity), but people are very enthusiastic about their heritage and identity. They know where their grandparents are from; Asian-Americans say they want to visit their hometown in China to find their roots. Meanwhile in Singapore we officially have a salad bowl policy (heterogeneity) with CMIO (with PAP as the sauce), but people are blase about their roots, not wanting or liking to talk about their heritage and not knowing where their grandparents were from.
For lunch someone allergic to beef ate a 100% beef hot dog. Luckily she brought her creams and pills.
After lunch, I went for Political Economics (the use of mathematical models to examine politics). The blasted room was so hard to find I walked in 15 minutes late, with Jabir and Guanzheng (who wanted to see what Applied Maths was like) falling out before I found it. The lecture/seminar was 1 hr 50 mins without a break - quite xiong.
The students had read a paper before class and were discussing it semi-enthusiastically. They had no lecture notes (just some paragraphs of discussion blurbs) and the structure of the class was less obvious than I expected.
There were some interesting bits. The poor were modelled as imposing costs on the elite by revolting, and democracy was modelled as a promise of future redistribution (it was claimed that Singapore was a stable autocracy because inequality was low and so there was no benefit from revolution. Wth). Political dynamics were modelled as a game between the rich and the poor about tax rates and the threat revolution, and the conditions for revolution were also modelled. In earlier weeks, there'd been size of government models, public goods and preferred tax rates.
Cute models aside, the maths was just used to come up with fancy expressions where the symbols had no real meaning or relevance to reality and we learnt nothing new we didn't already know before starting the mathematical footwork. What a sham of a discipline.
Indeed, there was extension discussion of the realism of the model, its assumptions and its interaction with reality; one student objected, saying that using rational theory to explain the actions of irrational agents was flawed, and we should use sociological theories instead. It was also said that what should be modelled was not decisions but 'pseudo-evolutionary' models should be used. It was also pointed out that the coordination was suspect - the elites might but the poor were too numerous to coordinate revolution. One girl pointed out that no one sits around calculating probabilities in their heads. I think economics doesn't even explain economics that well, let alone real life.
Later a Singaporean student told me that this was an atypical lesson (weird modelling) of an atypical class. Going through the paper and discussing it was not normal - usually it was more like a lecture, where they'd go through models without papers. Usually the class was more interesting. I replied that it was already more interesting than NUS, hurr hurr.
Stanford has a social dance class carrying 1 credit.
India is a good counterexample to the theory that most people cannot speak more than one language very fluently.
I was feeling masochistic and needed to work my brain cells to burn the basket of cheese fries I had in addition to my other food at lunch (they were weird - a very mild, almost tasteless cheese was melted over them), so I went for a graduate class in 'Multiperson Decision Theory'.
That day, there was a presentation on 'A continuous-time version of the principal-agent problem' (the instructor called it one of the best papers he'd ever seen, but it was rejected by Econometrica). I was doing okay until 'argmax' appeared. Then 'HJB equation', boundary conditions and Ito's Formula overwhelmed me and very soon I felt like gouging out my eyeballs. The presentation was almost all maths, and had very little economics - clear proof that the more economics you learn, the less economics you know; they called some models intractable - I don't want to look at those.
There were 12 students in the class. 11 were guys, and the sole girl looked quite nerdy.
Running out as soon as was polite (when the Q&A started), I decided I needed to walk off my migraine so I walked to Stanford Shopping Center (I considered the hotel but decided it too far). My psyche had been so damaged that loud hysterical laughs were coming from me at irregular intervals for a while after I left.
Palm Drive
Entrance - perhaps the most pretentious part of Stanford
Wth rules for the Shopping Center
The shops were quite expensive, but Stanford kids are rich, so it's okay.
There was a grocer selling exotic fruit like strawberry papaya and cherimoya.
Some Asian noodle joint had a vegetarian option called 'Buddha's Bliss', and a fusion dish called 'Cultural Harmony'.
I walked to the 22 bus stop (there was a free Stanford shuttle down the El Camino Real but it had a confusing route [Guan Zheng and I got on at the wrong stop during the night we watched the movie and had to get off at the transit center and take the public bus] and came only every half hour), but just missed the bus. The next one was taking forever to come, seemingly in violation of the schedule, so I walked in the direction of the next bus stop, hoping it had a seat. Naturally, a bus came when I was too far to run to either the new or old bus stops. When the bus finally came, I realised that not only were the raspberries I'd bought partially squashed by their own weight, I was at the wrong stop - I was on the stretch where the bus came only ever half hour, as opposed to the stretch where it came every 12 minutes. Gah.
Everyone had gone to dinner already, so I ta pao-ed so-called Hawaiian food. Grilled spam musubi (like sushi) sounded disgusting so I went for a seafood set with chicken. I noticed that they'd won a Hawaiian award in 2003 and 2004 (there was also an award for best Chinese food - wth). 2005 onwards was curiously missing and the quality of the food showed why - suffice to say that the 'BBQ chicken' was grilled.
Quotes:
preceed'duh'nce (precedence)
I'm not dying for men. [Student 2: You're dying for a lot of things you will not say.] Yah, like sex. [Student 2: It came from your own mouth] (mention)