Julian @ Empedocles

Looking from the outside

November 20, 2008 · No Comments

This is just great. My quote of the day:

The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition. It’s not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive.

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Aidoru?

November 14, 2008 · No Comments

Although Japan is a bit too far North for me and I never really got into otaku, I have liked Aya Ueto since seeing her in Azumi. Maybe I should peruse her more recent offerings? With Hong Kong, Korean, and Taiwanese pop culture spreading all over Asia, Japan’s is only one of the options now.

And since Tata Young succeeded, sort of, in Bollywood (with Dhoom-dhoom), I’m wondering if Indonesian (perhaps dangdut-inspired) or Malaysian fare could at some point become Asian pop culture phenomena? Or are they too ‘Malay’ to gain traction with the Chinese-rooted Asian cultures?

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Places revisited

November 14, 2008 · No Comments

Last time I was in Jakarta, it rained and rained and rained. The same in Bali, to the extent where I only had a half a day I could spent at the beach and drowned the misery the rest of the time in various liquids at the restaurants lining Seminyak’s main street.

And this time in Jakarta it rained some more. So much for new beginnings. But I am not the only one to have this feeling it seems. Paul Theroux’s new book revisits some of his own grounds. I have not read it yet but it seems to intersect with many of my own treading grounds; and he seems particularly unkind to Singapore.

I’m a reader of travel books, yet I am still miffed as to the interest people have in this particular genre!

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Right here, right now

November 1, 2008 · No Comments

In another example of synchronicity, Asia News Network features the hotel I stayed in Jakarta just days ago. Seems their Halloween was hopping.

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Unconventional wisdom

November 1, 2008 · No Comments

Dan Ariely has more interesting things to say. Once again, this is serious academic research performed by people from Harvard Business School and MIT. It’s the type of stuff that I always somehow knew or felt instinctively, but the social pressure was to dismiss it as inappropriate.

- people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, but in fact acquiring more information about others leads to less liking. In the process of learning, dissimilarities are discovered and this leads to disliking. Of course, I mentioned just a few posts ago how sitting with someone you harbor a crush for makes that crush just go away. This is why strangers in the night/on the bus/on the plane are always attractive. Forcing individuals to interact with strongly disliked others does increase liking (regression to the mean), yet in real life such situations are avoided and a potential for defusing disliking is lost;

- at first acquaintance, individuals read into others what they wish;

- decisions are difficult because outcomes are uncertain (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; these psychologists got the Nobel prize in economics for their insight into decision making, so this is not voodoo NLP ’science’);

- the excitement of anticipating a first encounter can heighten positive expectations;

- similarity to the self (from shared traits and values to trivial things like shared birthdays) his highly diagnostic of liking;

- in absence of information, people assume similarity with others, hence propensity to liking; however, initial evidence of dissimilarity causes subsequent information to be further evidence of dissimilarity and thus cause disliking;

(maybe this is the man without qualities? I should read Robert Musil perhaps).

- this bears repeating: the increase in knowledge leads to decrease in liking. More so for women than for men;

- knowledge is different from exposure without learning: sitting in the same room with someone repeatedly will create a kind of kinship which will increase liking. But that is not acquiring information about that person;

- propinquity - how near people live to each other - predicts the emergence of friendships, but even more so the emergence of enmities;

- partners (romantic and otherwise) who play hard to get are desirable; individuals who demonstrate unconcealed romantic interest seem desperate and unappealing; romantic interest should be dyadic - targeted at one individual and eliciting the same response (it does somehow) - rather then being broadcast… and this broadcasting may be unfortunately unconscious;

- people have limited insight into their own behavior under drive-states (e.g. obsessions, alcohol). Hence self control should be proactive - don’t put yourself in that situation - rather than reactive, assuming you will handle the situation well. Decisions will be stigmatized as immoral behavior by people who would themselves make the same mistake in the same drive-state.

Heady, crucial insights. My takeaway: never put yourself in a situation where you are not at overwhelming advantage. The Chinese strategists knew this all along but somehow in the West the romantic view of the heroic struggle is more widely disseminated - with disastrous effects.

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Subway

October 28, 2008 · No Comments

This is the escalator to the future MRT station at Fusionopolis.

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Typical for Singapore. Yet, it reminds me of the Belmondo movie, That man from Rio. Where the scenes that this photo reminds me of were in fact happening in Brasilia. And all is a bit Giorgio de Chirico-esque. Welcome to my flow of consciousness.

One North Fusionopolis Building
One North Fusionopolis Building

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Saint Etienne

October 25, 2008 · No Comments

My favorite band in my favorite magazine talking about some of my favorite things: Saint Etienne [ in Monocle].

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Thailand (but not only) in crisis…

October 12, 2008 · No Comments

An interesting take on Thailand’s current crisis, from a Thai perspective. Some officialspeak but I believe it does represent non-gossipy commentary to the degree possible in Thailand’s current conditions.

It seems that no society is immune from crises. The US is bouncing from a crisis to another, and Europe has the current mess to deal with on top of its languishing, deeper issues. We should give Thailand a break, it will somehow fix its own problems too.

That being said, I am not sure what is the right attitude a (frequent) visitor to the country should have. Pretend nothing is happening? Isn’t that heartlessness? Get involved? Isn’t that noseying, that particularly unpleasant Western attitude that has less and less of a basis in reality now that the Western societies themselves are beginning to crack at the seams? In other words, can I sit at Sirocco in Bangkok and ignore the clashes I see 35 stories below, or should I do something about it? Asking a cab driver last year what he thought about Thaksin and Sondhi yielded a blank stare.

What to do?

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Behavioral economics teaches us that you cannot be all that you want to be

October 10, 2008 · No Comments

Economists, sometimes, have interesting things to say. Especially the new(-ish) breed of Behaviorists, such as Kahneman, Tversy, and now Dan Ariely. Discovering the later, I have had a feeling I have experienced only a few times in life so far; last time when I discovered Osho. Society works based on certain assumptions that everyone (publicly) holds as self-evident, but which to me never seemed so: “work hard and you will succeed”, “love your country, respect your elders”, “happiness is marriage and family” and so on. Okay I can’t quite get the right quote for some of these, but you get the idea.

Anyway, when some or all of these “self-evident” truths fail to materialize, one’s belief in the orderliness of the world starts to shatter; one starts to believe that something is undermining the way things should be; that life is unfair; that there is some secret knowledge that is the true knowledge which helps one attain whatever one wishes. Hence conspiracy theories, doomsday cults, gurus, seekers, and depressed people - all of which are more mainstream that we perhaps accept.

And then here comes Dan Ariely, in a long line of nonconformist thinkers. Among his pearls of wisdom:

- go to a party with an ugly friend (wingman) if you want to hook up: because beauty/valor is relative, not absolute, and you will shine by comparison;

- procrastination is a natural tendency;

- in a free society which encourages “living life to the full”, people will simply have a hard time making any decisions, for fear of missing out on the alternative.

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Ralph Fitch

October 9, 2008 · No Comments

…was the name of the first Englishman to arrive in mainland South-East Asia (in Chiang Mai, of all places) in the 1580’s. By then, the Portuguese were already firmly entrenched in the area, with major settlements scattered between Malacca and Ayutthaya. Whatever one’s opinion is about imperialism (although, at that time it was purely a commercial enterprise, with little regard for ideologies other than spreading Christianity), one has to respect that plucky little nation that managed to create an empire halfway across the globe. Even today reaching Bali or Phuket from Europe or the US takes an exhausting 20+ hours door to door; the heat, the smells, the crowds are overwhelming for the first time visitor. Yet these stout seafarers managed to build a successful commercial enterprise in spite of this, only relying on long, infrequent and thin supply lines.
I wonder if they ever tried this thing which surprised me on my first trip to South East Asia…
Kopi tiam in a bag
Kopi tiam in a bag

…coffee in a bag? 

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