Our Brave New World

Increasingly, I ask myself (and one or two close friends) the question – would you rather live in 1984, a totalitarian society of mass surveillance and repressive regiments or Brave New World, a “negative utopia” (as the author put it) of corporate tyranny that uses behavioral conditioning alongside other scientific advancements to enslave its people […]

Why I think people I know ignore me

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” – Friedrich Nietzsche On the vibrant, sprawling campus of Stanford, everyone seems to be on some teetering center of mass between academics, social events, and sleep, so it’s understandable that some social cues […]

Unhappiness

The wisdom you’re about to read comes from the mind of a person who has suffered the cumulative trauma of an average’s person life many times over, and who has the mental age of a death bed patient. *cough* If every human action is driven at the core by emotion, and all emotions are determined […]

Chess

Recently I’ve become an enthusiast of chess. It was summer 2019 and my internship hours were slowly eating up my right brain. Famous scientists and philosophers have echoed that creativity comes in bursts, and I was living right across my company, so I decided to extend my daily working hours by interspersing intellectual diversions throughout. […]

Sugar

I just had my first boba tea in recent memory. I asked for no sugar, yet it was sweet af. I thought, the sugar in my sip does nothing more than make me take the next sip. It has no nutrients other than unnecessary calories, yet the very fact one sip makes you take the […]

Google wants to patent basic math

I still have a hard time believing this. My view on Google had a near 180 degree shift this morning, after coming across an unpopular tweet calling out Google for trying to patent batch normalization. Batch normalization is a stupidly simple but effective technique to standardized your data being fed through a neural network by […]

How a traumatizing relationship led me to Andrew Yang

Just recently, I finally came out of PTSD over the traumatizing end of a relationship with a sociopath. To summarize my PTSD tenure: I was suicidal for a month, had severe heart palpitations (almost took an MRI), high blood pressure, migraines, not to mention rebuilt my entire worldview from scratch, Descartes style. Looking back to before […]

Effects of Automation

AI will create winners and losers, and it won’t be fair. The middle class will give out first (those are the jobs AI will automate out first), polarizing wealth inequality and leaving most people tending to lower-class jobs like animal carers, baristas, and babysitters. If you believe in some definition of utilitarianism, you believe there’ll […]

When one reaches the end of morality

What is morality? Does it even exist? This lies at the heart of the compatibilism debate – whether the future is determined already, and if that affects morality. Compatibilists believe morality exists in a determined world. Among them, some go further and argue we need a determined world to have morality. Incompatibilists believe morality doesn’t exist […]

Compatible Moral Asymmetry

At the center of the free will debate lies two paradoxical claims: We require free actions from the (deterministic) causal chain to be morally responsible. We require the causal chain to be effective for moral responsibility on our actions. (This is the final paper for PHIL75W, my favorite class ever). Supposing the first is not […]