A Bundle of Thoughts

What kind of world do I want me / my kids to live in?

Peace, no war [assumes stable world population]

Everyone has a voice which is heard and can make reasonable contribution to their community. ie. distributed governance at local level.

Meaningful work for everyone. Rewards are internalized for work (i.e. ideally no work whose value is inflated primarily due to rent or inefficiencies)

Meaningful communities. Communities may not be 'local' geographically, but it will be possible for everyone to feel 'plugged in'.

All of the above includes the 4 million globally who do not yet have access to the developed words's goods and services. It may not necessarily mean expanding all the developed world's goods and services to them.

I don't necessarily believe with my below formulations. I just want to formulate them first!

On power and externalities in networks

Observations - the world (of people) is a network with two valuations roughly. One can be thought of as 'internal value'/'inherent value' and is endowed by our community. The other is economic value roughly related to Shapley value (how important we are in production). Issues arise when those two values are not synced up. Power somewhat distorts this but power is necessary because of inefficiencies (bounded rationality, limited information, impossibility of syncing groups with different interests via Arrow impossibility etc etc). Most optimal use of power is in maintenance of a system that is roughly incentive-compatible.

Externalities are a big issue in networks. One simple example: We have to think about how social networks create dissatisfaction (like media showing me what all my friends are doing / norms forcing me to compare - gets worse in big cities). These externalities should be trimmed as possible. In the long term, most humans in societies adjust. But probably short-term incentive compatibility is necessary for peace. Markets smooth incentive compatibility, but only among market-exchangeable things. Interesting approaches to these issues: Blockchain expands the space of market-exchangeable things, great. For other things, we need other things to do compatibility. AI tries to do a top-town approach to this, predict your incentives, design compatibility.

On the transition to AI

Humans can't think as a whole yet so we think in terms of national/sub-national/super-national societies. Very important in these changing times for these societies to think about the world they're creating. New technologies create (usually) large benefits but also huge externalities. Old assumptions- especially the market assumption - that societies are a closed system that adjusts on its own to new externalities, and that markets can help can adjust society to any shock in an effective and desirable way - may not hold up. When AI drops into society, will markets take care of the mess and inequality that follows? [I think prob no, because AI is something that is at the same time so desirable - makes everyone who it serves richer basically - but at the same time inaugurates a new system of power and order in the world. Everyone wants the services, the consequences are just accepted as a matter of course. The consequences play out in the long run though, far after everyone has already gotten used to the comfortable benefits that AI brought.]

Our lifetimes are without a doubt to be lived in the 'transition period'. There will be parts of the world that do not see the changes from robots and algorithms 50, maybe even 100 years down the line. Many people in our generation will find it hard to transition to a 'robot-native' way of life. The point is to build societies and intersociety mechanisms to ensure that these people also get a secure place in the world, possibly at the cost of a loss of efficiency still within acceptable bounds.

On the difference between humans and machines

Theres a fear that AI will cause us to lose our sense of humanity. I think there's little to fear in that in the short term.

Much of human activity is the setting of ends/goals and performing them. Much of 'human' thinking is the ability break a big system/goal down modularly, which is why human beings are so successful. The 'big picture' is where something more 'essentially human' (weakly defined) is, the bottom layer "modules" can all be automated. Because of limited bandwidth (constrained rationality) this is usually the only way we operate. As an example of an automatable module - for example, running a financial trading system (have the system statistically learn the logic/intuition that traders use when executing a trade). There is a caveat that the module is replicable - that is, enough people are engaged in it, or it is engaged in enough repetitive times to produce sufficient data to train a model - to be automated. This wave of AI (lasting until ~2035? ~2040?) is about being able to automate all the replicable modules.

Certainly many believe those things I called 'essentially human' are also automatable (strong AI), and many of them will be automated with further discovery. I use the word 'essentially' here not in a metaphysical sense but just meaning not automatable yet.  Given these changes in society we need to employing more people to be working on the 'essentially human' aspect. (See [1]) I also mean this: humanity is a network bound to human beings. A robot cannot, unless acting as a delegate, produce human goals/ends. Maybe one day the system will be good enough to produce its own (open-ended) goals, but those will essentially be robotic goals and not human goals. Whether one is more powerful or better than the other is not the issue, the issue is that, standing by itself, they do not constitute "goals" that make sense to humans. AI cannot replace humans in goal-setting yet. Goal setting isn't just about crunching the optimal way to do X. Maybe one day we'll talk about bringing robots into the wider network of "sentient beings" but that day (strong AI) hasn't come yet and is at least tens of years down the line. With so many changes in society so rapidly, it makes sense to plan one step at a time.

An interesting corollary: Human goals are not ‘human goals’. All goals are someone’s goals, some particular human’s goals. Importantly for this discussion, when we design AI for example, many suppose we’re designing for humanity as a whole. But maybe not everyone can benefit from this AI. Maybe you have to be really intelligent or something. 

Some ideas about what can be done in the world system:

A view of capital as applied to bots:

The capital-ownership system is not prepared for this change in society. It seems to me that the current system of capital-ownership grew up in an age that was still rather diffuse - i.e. expansion was possible for each person, your actions didn't produce so many negative externalities on the rest of society. Big capital-owners obviously did, and they were periodically cracked down on, however, they were still tolerated as they also led the society's possibility for expansion (they are a society's main arm of expansion to other lands and other societies or other economic frontiers). The theme here is expansion. Everyone's happy as long as they have a chance to expand.

Capital-ownership is basically capital dictatorship. Whoever owns X piece of capital gets monopolistic say (dictatorship) over how it is used. If technology represents the future (shares in future production etc), whoever owns technology owns the future. A controlling stake in future production (and society's future) is way too large a compensation for the development of a new technology on the scale of AI systems. Robots are basically self-reinforcing super returns on capital. Their owners will be our new kings and kingmakers.

A view of data:

Central to these issues are data ownership and right to process data. Tech firms who created these technologies should get adequate economic rewards but should not gain political power. However we have many cases in history where entities have grabbed power by promising benefits to the masses. We need enlightened leadership that stays in touch with the (technological) times, while being not beholden to their creators.

If it's just not possible to do mass-scale AI development without heavy-scale intrusions in privacy, deep and specific rules for acceptable data use should be delimited and enforced.

A society needs to decide on a data security tolerance, a place on the line between absolute privacy and absolute data collection free-for-all. The issue is that this is directly related to a society's competitiveness through mechanisms such as 1) the ease of training neural network models 2) the ease of bringing data services to market, so societies have incentives to keep privacy low.

Possibilities amongst others:

Data as a public resource whose use is taxed.

Data as intrinsic to the private individual so its use is limited without explicit consent.

Data belongs to the data collector

The ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an, which was capital for a good thousand years, is obviously an old city with old roots, but still feels very new. In some respects this is unavoidable. Xi'an never regained its imperial splendor after the capital moved away in 904 CE, and gradually became a small, local city. My father as well as both my maternal grandparents both went to university in Xi'an, and they recalled to me their experiences of the city fifty and twenty-five years ago, when it was still a sleepy little town, walled in by the majestic but small city walls which still stand today, a small place with little alleyways. They told me their stories of having to go to town from their university, which, though it is surrounded by skyscrapers today, was then really in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by acres and acres of fields without sight. The Xi'an population grew over ten times since those days, and Xi'an is trying to regain its place as an international metropolis and the glorious city of China's past. It's quite surprising that it was only recently, only twenty years ago, that Xi'an recovered the size it had a thousand years ago. Of course, during that time it was the capital of celestial empire, and almost certainly the largest metropolis on earth.

And so with these dramatic polarities, Xi'an is a place of contradictions. It's new establishments are very new, some of its old sites are crumbling. It is a city which sells it's "old" characteristics, despite being 90% almost completely built in the past forty years. It is a place that has retained so many pieces of old China, an old China even older than the old China in many cities - which are from the Ming dynasty in the 1300s, whereas Xi'an is from the 600s - and yet has also much of its oldness to time. Xi'an's identity is tied up to its status as the historical capital of China - the capital of the first Qin Emperor as well as the capital of the great Han and Tang dynasties, yet those dynasties are long gone and only fragments remain in museums. Xi'an is a different historical experience - it's an experience of archeology almost - because so many bits and pieces of Xi'an's regal past are broken and scattered in different museums. What is passed on to the area as 'local Xi'an culture' is quite different from the great imperial cultures that one goes to Xi'an to see.

With this in mind, Xi'an is absolutely a sight to behold. Yes, the city has moved on from its past, but there are enough bits of the past there to appreciate for many, many days. So here are some of the awesome places:

I had a moment that sent me chills at the Emperor Qin's mausoleum and the Terra-cotta Warriors. His burial mound is an actual pyramid - it's a one kilometer wide mountain that took us about twenty minutes to drive around - a mound for the memorial of one man, a man who literally created, who invented the concept of China as we know it. I think there must be very few places like this in all the world. He, of course, is China's Caesar and Augustus; many of the ideas out of his mind - the methods of governance that he chose and the written characters that he standardized - are still used by myself and others personally every day of our lives.

Close to the Emperor Qin's mausoleum (but still a bit of ways outside of the city) is the Huaqing Palace. I went there and found the place where Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese nationalists got kidnapped during WWII. He was attempting to root out the Chinese communists in a final offensive as the Japanese started attacking. Two of his generals who he sent on this final mission didn't agree with him, and kidnapped him and forced him to cooperate with the Communists. If this Xi'an Incident didn't happen, it's possible mainland China would still be ruled by the KMT (Nationalist Party) today, a strange thought. I went to take a look.

The city wall is gorgeous, and you can take a bike ride along it. It takes an hour and a half and is a lot of jovial fun. The city has grown beyond that wall, so along the wall you can see the contrast between new and glitzy Xian (outside of the wall) and old and regal Xi'an (within the wall). Biking along the city wall with the Yenching Academy crew was definitely one of the most memorable moments of this past year.

The Great Goose Pagoda is one of the oldest Chinese pagodas still standing, and was built to store the sutras that Xuanzhang, the famed monk immortalized in the Journey to the West. Since so many Buddhist lineages in China trace themselves back to Xuanzhang and the scriptures he translated from India, this is another place to see history immortalized. The pagoda itself is gorgeous, although the site around it has been a bit touristified.

The Daming Palace is the old grand palace of the Tang dynasty. Nothing remains except for empty land which is not a protected historical site, with various districts hosting archeological digs. The site is huge and a pleasant bike ride (almost as big as Stanford campus I would say), and on my trip there I bumped into the site of the building where China's most famous poet Li Bai used to live and write poetry.

Google Translation of this original piece by Ed Sander.

Recently it was again that far. After a broadcast of Tegenlicht, which could be quite a bit marked, the discussion about China's social credit system flared up again. Especially opponents of the 'sleep law' that a few weeks later in a referendum could vote for, it used as an example of 'such a society', and therefore the drag law, which we really do not want in the Netherlands.

All this is accompanied by a number of persistent misunderstandings that have been circulating for four years on the internet and in the media in general. I want to try again in this article to get rid of these misunderstandings. I also want to make an effort to cultivate more understanding for the situation in China. When assessing China's credit systems - spoiler: there are several! - we make a big mistake by looking at it through western glasses and from the context of our society. But China is not the Netherlands ...

Please note: in this article I try not to criticize or defend the social credit system. I am only trying to remove the stubborn misunderstandings and make the necessary nuances.

Misunderstanding 1: There is one credit system

The biggest misunderstanding is that there is one system. This also leads to different conclusions that are not correct in practice. Simply put, there are two groups of systems. To emphasize the difference, I personally prefer to refer to a commercial credit system and social management system .

Commercial credit system: Due in part to the lack of a good creditworthiness system as we know it in the form of a BKR and thus credit to consumers, the Chinese government has given approval to a number of private companies for the development of their own creditworthiness systems. The best known of these is Sesame Credit from Ant Financial, a sister company of Alibaba. To calculate a credit score, Sesame Credit primarily uses transaction data on various Ant Financial and Alibaba platforms, such as Tmall, Taobao and Alipay. With a high score, a consumer gets access to certain services, such as test drives with cars, not having to pay a deposit in hotels, etc. Because financial capacity is an important aspect when looking for a partner, Sesame Credit is also integrated into various dating sites, so that users can see the scores of their potential partner. Also read the extensive article about Sesame Credit that I wrote several years ago for more details.

Social management system: The Chinese government wants to introduce a system in 2020 to assess and manage the social behavior of the citizens. With good behavior one is rewarded and penalized for bad behavior. The question is whether the term is technically feasible in view of the large amounts of data and complexity of linking different databases. Even within the social management system there is currently no single system, but there are experiments in 40 different regions with different local systems. Central there are, however, various 'black lists', for example of persons who have been sentenced to pay fines but who do not pay, or tourists who seriously misbehave during flights or abroad. Such persons can then be limited in their liberties. For example, misbehaving tourists can not go on holiday abroad for a number of years. People who do not pay fines imposed by the court can not use first-class train or luxury hotels; after all, if you can pay that you can also simply pay your fines. I also wrote an article about this system in the past.

An important difference between the two categories is that the social management system rewards and punishes, the Sesame Credit system rewards only at high scores. A system like this mainly shows how powerful you are, while the social management system tries to steer government officials and bodies, businesses and the citizen into moral and ethical behavior.

This video of Extra Credits from 2015, which is regularly referred to, is one of the culprits for the confusion and is full of factual inaccuracies and wild assumptions. Many people will watch the video, but will not read the comments under the video, in which the creator admits that there is a lot of discussion about the operation of the system and he actually is not sure how it works. The assumption in the beginning of the video that arch-rivals Alibaba and Tencent would have set up a credit system together would have had to ring alarm bells for everyone with a little knowledge of the Chinese internet market ...

Misunderstanding 2: Alibaba shares its data with the government for the credit system

As indicated, there is therefore not one system and the two categories are not (yet) connected to each other. Chinese internet companies are obliged to supply data to the government if they ask for it, but there is no evidence that Alibaba shares all its data on a large scale. It is possible that the government requests the transactions of specific persons (suspicious of terrorism, activism etc.) from Alibaba, or that the buyers or sellers of a certain article are requested. Consider, for example, counterfeit goods found on the market place Taobao. But as far as is known, automatic sharing of large amounts of data is not known.

Although the government is therefore not likely to extract large amounts of data from Alibaba's platforms on a structural basis (and Alibaba also denies this rumor), it is true that Sesame Credit uses the black lists with people who do not pay their legal fines. The government provides this data to Ant Financial, which thereby reduces the Sesame Credit scores.

It is also the intention that various government bodies mutually share data with each other. Bad behavior in one sector can then lead to punishment in various other sectors. Do you not pay your court-ordered compensation? Then you are not allowed to travel first class. That may sound strange to us because it can concern two non-related issues, but in China, where the government plays the role of 'parent' culturally, it is comparable to our own upbringing: do you not eat your vegetables properly? Then no television tonight!

Incidentally, it is true that the government can not set up a national social management system on its own and that it requires the specialist assistance of experts. These experts must be sought among the large internet companies, some of which have already set up similar credit systems like Sesame Credit. In 2015, Ant Financial indicated in a press release that it wanted to help build a national social management system and Baidu was also called in to help the technical implementation by the government.

Misunderstanding 3: The social credit system is a point system

Alibaba's Sesame Credit is a points system where a certain score is achieved and a user even gets suggestions to improve that score, eg by buying more on Alibaba platforms or by filling in the personal profile better. But contrary to the persistent reports that every citizen in China gets a score from the government, the social management system is not a system that is based on scores and getting bonus and penalty points.

Most current local experiments with social management systems consist of blacklists rather than scoring systems. There is also experimenting with 'naming and shaming' in which people who misbehave in a modern technological way are nailed to the pillory. There is an experiment where you get to hear a special transition tone and message when you call someone who refuses to pay his fines.There is also an experiment in which pedestrians who regularly walk through red light are identified by face recognition and appear on a publication board with name and name or have to collect a number of likes on their social media for a report of their offense.Incidentally, there has been a testing system in China for years, where restaurants in some regions are obliged to prominently display the result of a hygiene test in their case. A good result is accompanied by a green happy emoticon, a moderate result with a neutral yellow emoticon and a bad result with a sad red emoticon.

According to Foreign Policy , in Rongcheng, in the province of Shandong, experiments are currently being conducted with a point system. For the time being it is no more than that: one of more than 40 local experiments, with no indication that it will be rolled out to the national system of 2020. On the contrary, there is in China in the city of Suining, in the province of Jiangsu in the beginning of this decade Even a test was done with a method whereby the citizen was assigned an actual score, penalty points for violations and bonus points for the behavior of a model citizen.On the basis of the score, citizens were classified in category A, B, C and D, with A-citizens having the most privileges and, for example, becoming members of the Communist Party.However, this experiment was halted after criticism from citizens and state media about the subjectivity of the system. The central bank also did not renew the formal authorization of Sesame Credit to act as a leading creditworthiness system in 2017, partly because the system collected a lot of data and there was a 'conflict of interest' because of the link to purchases from Alibaba.

In summary, there is currently no central point system and it is unlikely that it will happen due to the technical complexity and previous negative experiences. The conviction that the social management system gives every citizen a code is probably due to confusion with Sesame Credit and the fact that an ID number, no score, will be used for natural and legal persons to link data from different sources.

Misunderstanding 4: China's credit system is like the episode Nosedive in Black Mirror

In Black Mirror's episode Nosedive, people judge each other by giving points. The average score of a citizen is therefore adjusted on the spot and the service provided by the government and companies that the citizen can use changes according to the score. People with a low score automatically have a stigma and the whole system is strongly influenced by personal emotions. If someone has stepped out of bed with the wrong leg, you can better stay away from him or her, so it is proposed in the relevant episode.

As you will understand now, the social management system does not work in this way. Sesame Credit may seem more like a Nosedive due to the point system, but Sesame Credit is basically based on buying behavior and does not differ so much from certain loyalty programs that offer customers privileges. You are not actually penalized in Sesame Credit but are rewarded (mainly based on purchases from Alibaba). Just like you can board earlier and be allowed to sit in the business lounge with enough frequent flyer points.

It is true that Alibaba once let it slip that having friends with a high score can also be positive for yourself. Let that be the reason why the protagonist in Nosedive , Lacie Pound, does so much effort to visit a wedding. But even simply comparing Sesame Credit with Black Mirror is too short a turn.

And okay, I honestly admit that I sometimes let myself be tempted into that comparison. At the request of a client I had also included a small reference to Nosedive in a presentation on digital innovation in China. Something that I regret afterwards because I myself have also contributed to the maintenance of the misunderstandings.

But some go much further in the equation. What is shocking is the NOS report in which it is not only stated that every citizen gets a score and in which the comparison with Nosedive is revived, but which is also full of other untruths such as that you would get penalty points if you were the dumpling seller or fellow passengers does not treat the bus properly. That is more than making a direct comparison with Black Mirror, which is the presentation of fiction as a fact and makes me suspect that the media sometimes rather present a juicy story than telling the reader the truth.

Instead of comparing the Chinese social management system with Nosedive , we'd better ask ourselves if that whole Black Mirror episode is not based on the social pressure to 'like' everyone and everything on Facebook, because otherwise people do not like us either. more 'like'.

Misunderstanding 5: This must be terrible for the Chinese citizen

Probably only people who have lived in China for a longer period of time or have good friends or family members understand that a large part of the population actually welcomes the social management system. In recent decades, the economy of China has grown enormously and society has changed a lot. From a central planning economy with little financial incentive for entrepreneurship, China is now a place where there are many more liberties to start your own business. At the same time, China is in what some call a 'moral vacuum'. There is no strong ethical framework for what is good and bad.

You may see plenty of people in Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian temples, but that is often very opportunistic behavior; raising three incense sticks and making a wish. Ask the average Chinese what the teachings of the Buddha exactly means and there will be - just like in other Asian countries - few who can tell you that. Applying a religion or philosophy does not mean that you follow the corresponding moral framework. In China you see the biggest thugs in the business world often wearing Buddhist bracelets.

Everyone wants to get a share of the exploding economy. And in the absence of a moral framework that does not always happen in an equally honest way. In the years that I lived in China, there was a scandal about food safety almost every week, with manufacturers knowingly selling life-threatening products. The melamine scandal from 2008 is probably the best-known example. But there are also several examples of schools that have promised valuable diplomas and run off with the money, brides for lonely single farmers who take their savings with them, people who sell a certain product but then deliver something of a much lesser quality. Employers who do not pay their staff, doctors who prescribe unnecessary medical treatments, web shops with counterfeit goods and fake reviews and 'Black PR' agencies that spread harmful rumors (see China Talk 1 ). All in all, a large part of Chinese society unfortunately hangs from lies and deceit.And almost everyone in society regularly suffers from this.

In practice, this means that a Chinese will, in principle, distrust foreigners. The willingness to donate to charities and volunteer work, for example, is also very low, even if one can easily afford it. People simply do not have the confidence that their money or help ends up well. Within the network of guanxi , friends, family and acquaintances and their friends, family and acquaintances one is still willing to trust another, but if there is no one who can guarantee a stranger, the threshold for doing business will be high . This is also one of the reasons that online reviews of products, travel destinations, restaurants, etc. are so important in China. By definition, we assume poor quality until the contrary is proven.

A good example of the total paranoia that prevails in China was when my Chinese brother-in-law got a daughter. We bought a buggy for him and his wife and although the reputable brand that they wanted to have was for sale on Chinese platforms, and still on platforms like JD.com and Tmall that have fewer problems with counterfeit goods than for example Alibaba's Taobao, both my wife and her brother insisted that we buy this buggy in the Netherlands. That we eventually had to pay 60 euro shipping extra and my brother-in-law might have to pay import duties it was acceptable to them to minimize the - in my opinion very small - risk of delivery of counterfeit products. The run on Dutch milk powder also originates in the same paranoia; Although the same Dutch products are just for sale in China, they prefer to be taken off the shelf at a Dutch chemist.And not entirely unjustified; there were regular reports in China about local tampering with imported foreign milk powder.

In itself, the current situation in China is not so different from the periods full of scam and malicious things that Europe and America (think of the Wild West) have also gone through. In a society where people do not trust each other by definition, where regulations are often only seen as a suggestion and enforcement of those rules leaves something to be desired and where the possibility of equality in the judiciary is often limited (especially if you government would like to sue) is a social management system by a large part of the population not seen as a threat but as a solution. It will help them to determine who is and is not reliable. I am also convinced that the main objective of the government in implementing the social management system is to improve Chinese society, which is confirmed by the overview below from a recent Mercator Institute report setting out the objectives of the social management system are summarized.

Despite all misunderstandings, the media has obviously understood one thing: the system will also be used to keep citizens in line. The government is given even more power to control the behavior of the citizen and to shape the citizen into her ideal image. Citizens are blacklisted after a court ruling, but the fact that the state and the legal system are not separate gives the government the exclusive right to define what is good and bad. And for certain well-meaning people who also try to improve Chinese society, this can sometimes turn out wrong, with or without a points system.

Want to know more about Sesame Credit and China's social management system? These are the most reliable sources for me:

Jeremy Daum's article on the actual meaning of the social credit system.

Rogier Creemers in the VPRO podcast Futureshock .

Simina Mistreanu's nuanced article, Life Inside China's Social Credit Laboratory , in Foreign Policy .

Samantha Hoffman 's analysis of the Leninist origin of social management.

Zheping Huang's excellent explanation of Sesame Credit.

Not everything Wired has published about the credit systems is worth it, but Mara Hvistendahl's article is highly recommended.

“You can take the person off the island, but you can never take the island out of the person." It's always hard to describe what Hawaii means to me, and I've tried many times to formulate it. Indeed, as more and more places become home to me, Hawaii is no longer the my only place of residence that has left a deep impression on me. But, though my residence may be elsewhere, I still reflect on the values that I have taken from Hawaii that have become deeply relevant guideposts in the wider world outside of Hawaii. I thank these islands for them.

The Sublime / Awe / Nature

One of the most important feelings to me is a sense of the sublime, of awe. I see it when thinking about mathematics, or when enjoying good (usually abstract) art or a good symphony. And I see it in nature- in ragged landscapes, in waves crashing in the ocean. Hawaii's awesome natural scenery does much to channel this feeling. I have gained from Hawaii a deep appreciation for nature and its preciousness. Hawaii is an Endangered Species Capital of the World and we have so many unique lifeforms found nowhere else. In school we were taught that nature is a living, breathing part of the world just like us; we grow up alongside her and also depend on her for sustenance. I grew up feeling very connected to the awe-inspiring power and beauty of the natural world, and aware that she needed to be carefully treated and tended for. In the future, Hawaii has made me desire a lifestyle where I can always incorporate an appreciation for nature into my life- ideally often going on hikes, camps, and maybe even regular trips to the Alaskan wilderness, or the Amazon! (I watched too many nature shows when I was a kid.)

The importance of history and a sense of place.

Hawaii is a place with a strong sense of place. I've seen a definition for 'sense of place' that defines it "the set of meanings that a people give to a place". Hawaii has a lot of meaning embedded into a very small space. Largely that is because of its history - its history as a site of deeply rooted native culture, its history as a land of many cultures who have had to navigate living together in one place. Every neighborhood has a unique identity, unique stories. These identities come about because of historical events, and they burn a sense of specialness into every district. Hawaii is thus a very special place, but then again, other places in the world are also very special places - if we are aware of the stories and histories behind them. Hawaii has taught me to be interested in urban history and area history, and to really enjoy visiting historical sites in general, as well as understanding the narratives behind places. I enjoy most places with a lot of history, where I can be constantly learning about the stories behind a place. Of course, historical memory is by no means a permanent thing - it passes with the passing of generations, with the importation of new memories, or can be erased when important monuments or sites are removed or forgotten. In many ways historical memory in Hawaii is being eroded as well. I think that we should try to preserve historical memory and as much as possible tell the narratives of what's around us to our children and grandchildren.

The importance of narratives.

And the same goes for other kinds of narratives. We all have different narratives. Hawaii is a place with many narratives. We have no majority ethnicity; we have significant numbers of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Native Hawaiians, Whites, Blacks, Latinos, Micronesians, other Polynesians, Southeast Asians, etc. Every has a different narrative; everyone has a different background. Diversity of narratives, diversity of identity is the norm; In many ways, Hawaii is a microcosm of the world. In the world today, our neighbor might not be someone just like us. In a multicultural world, we have to understand and appreciate the importance of different narratives. Many people have many multiple layers of mixed narrative/identity. If you ask some of my friends their ethnicity, they will say, "I'm Portugese-Japanese-Chinese-Russian-Italian"; very mixed-race families are very common. But that's just a facet of the idea that we see each other as other people on this planet, and not primarily in terms of race. In that context, it's not strange that I grew up without really knowing what races were, and without needing to; I was sixteen or seventeen before I learned that Dela cruz was a Latino last name or that Han was a Korean last name or that Kawasaki was a Japanese last name. I never needed to know this, and it was irrelevant to my interacting with these people. Before that, names were just names and that was that. What mattered was the stories of the individual, not any labels we put on people, because all labels were useless. Similarly in our world, there is such a plurality of narratives, and all of the different ways we tell our stories as individuals and groups matter. Hawaii encourages us to celebrate diversity, to celebrate narratives, and to refuse to put labels on people.

Community / Mutual Cooperation -

We only have one world, and Hawaii is a microcosm of that. In Hawaii, we're pretty aware that we’re all on an island so we better take care of each other no matter what our differences are, because we either go up together or we go down together. It's basically the same in our world, except that we don't really realize it at times. I believe in our common humanity. I believe that we need to work together globally, and to think through issues as part of one community called Earth, and also that everyone should have an equal shot at contributing to this community, no matter where he or she grew up. I believe we're not all that different after all, wherever on the earth we grow up in, and we need to work together for the sake of this delicate island earth we live on. I believe that for many problems, the world is already too small for the idea of 'countries'. We should try seek our common humanity and cooperate across borders as much as we can.

Warmth and family feeling

Hawaii is a diverse community. But not just community in the abstract, but one that gives a feeling of belonging, and of family. People-to-people interactions feel a lot more open in Hawaii; People take care of each other like part of a big extended family, and interacting with people feels warm. The feeling of being connected to a community is very important to me; I believe the richness of one's life lies in the quality of ones' relationships, and that is definitely something that Hawaii has taught me and fostered in me. This is definitely one of the most important values of my life. I hope to help create that feeling of warmth and belonging in whatever communities I am able to be a part of in the future.

A gateway between the East and the West

Finally, Hawaii is a gateway between the East and the West. With 52% of our population with ethnic heritage from somewhere in Asia, we are a strong world center for the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures. We have hundreds of institutions, temples, churches, clubs, associations associated with the Japanese, Chinese and Korean populations in Hawaii, and those populations have kept their cultures strong. We have a large number of native Japanese speakers, and we have arguably one of the best Asian studies programs in any university in America (Certainly the best program in Asian philosophies and religions). Sun Yet-Sen, the founder of Modern China, grew up in Hawaii and was associated with many institutions which still stand here; several other national leaders of the past 100 years in Asia have deep associations with Hawaii. Hawaii is an important strategic site in the Asia-Pacific region with Pearl Harbor, harbors the influential East-West Center, a think tank which focuses on Asia studies, and have produced countless scholars on Eastern and Western relations, comparative history, comparative politics, or comparative thought. Hawaii was an ideal place for me to develop my interest in bridging and connecting cultures in Asia as well as in North America, in thinking and acting biculturally, in seeing how someone can hold multiple cultural identities in one place. The relationship between East and West, most particularly between the US and China, will be probably the most important relationship in the world in the upcoming century. Hawaii is in a great position think about that and so much more. Only from a multicultural perspective (in this case it's the East-Asian/Western perspective, but doesn't have to be limited to that) can we best process the issues facing the world dominated by a newly prosperous Asia and the United States.

Conclusion

I lie near my grandma and my grandpa’s warm bodies, in the dark still silence. Their warmth envelops me and takes me back to a past that I never knew.

There are many things that I don’t know about this country; the more I uncover, the more makes sense.

Today, I took a ride through the countryside, to my cousin’s driving school where she will sit for her driver’s license test tomorrow. As we drove past trees and fields, run-down shacks and villages, images flashed before me of an old China, the China I hear about in my grandparents’ stories and in textbooks. It was a China in which there were no paved roads, only dirt paths, no cars, only farmers in thatchy straw shoes and the occasional bull, no two-story buildings, only tiny mud shacks, roofed with straw, or, if they were lucky, tiles. The average life expectancy was thirty-five, the average years of education, zero. The average passtime was... well, passtimes didn’t exist, and you were lucky if you could have a full stomach every day. You were lucky if you could eat rice every day; normally rice was rationed my mixing it with cheaper grains or sweet potatoes to make gruel. 

Only in classes in these past few weeks did I come to understand some of the labels that would come to define my grandparents and my parents’ lives in how they got from those years to these years.

“Middle Farmer”. My family owned about 1 acre of land in Jiangsu, which prevented them from being in the class of “rich farmer” from whom land was confiscated in the early Communist days, and prevented them from being in the class of “poor farmer” which benefitted the most from the Communist Revolution. In the first days, Communism brought no material change to my household.

“Socialism”. Chairman Mao advocated a type of socialism that wasn’t accepted by everyone in the party. You had to have a big capitalist class, Marx argued, to build socialism. Mao truly believed that socialism could be achieved quickly and directly. He collectivized all the land and nationalized all the work before there was too much capitalism, believing that it would fast track China to a socialist society. I’m not sure if my family ever were “true believers” of this brand of socialism. I think they, like many, felt that collective ownership was largely an inconvenience but there wasn’t much that could be done about it.

“What is socialism?” I asked one of my relatives once, a party member. “I don’t know.” They replied.

“Reform and Opening Up”. One of my relatives’ household was one of the first in their village to buy a television. When they would watch it, those earliest ‘70-80s Hong-Kong dramas, the neighbors would hear of it and crowd into the room. Eventually, my relative’s father moved the television outside so everyone can have a look, and even bought a generator as the power would often go out. But after all the guests left, they would bring the TV back in and try to sneak in some TV time by themselves - and would invariably find neighbors coming and peeping through the windows!

Such were the times which brought this household to today. 

A bit rambly but nice to get all my thoughts down.

Shanghai is a great place. That's the first impression I want to put out there, partly because of my own and everyone else's poor impressions of all the bad things coming out of China that the media has furnished us with. Sure, those things like lack of press freedoms and political accountability are real problems, but all in all they don't really capture the totality of everyday life here. I can't speak for the rest of China, but Shanghai a developed city and not a developing one. It's clean, efficient, and sparkling; its inhabitants are very proud of it. I feel like Western media rarely paints a more complete picture of China – they often focus in on a specific story, often negative, in a very narrow scope. That's needed but often times leaves one without a bigger picture.

Unlike what I expected in a big city (I think New York), most people I have met are actually surprisingly nice (multiple people have helped me when I accidentally dropped my umbrella out of my backpack side pouch, or have been very courteous with directions). They are also hardworking (my coworkers often work overtime, lots of people coming back on the subway at every hour), and not in any way brainwashed. You can talk to most people about politics, and most people have opinions, some positive, some apathetic, some resigned. But independent thought is alive and well I feel. It might just be me, but I also get a kind of warm and inviting community feeling of Shanghai- I've been helped out so many times in so many ways by strangers; I have a feeling that people don't have a "mind your own business" attitude, and do take care of those around them. So all in all, I quite like Shanghai!

One weird thing is that I walk around sometimes and I'm still surprised when I realize: "Oh hey, everyone here is Chinese" xD. I know, I'm in arguably the largest agglomeration of Chinese people in the world, but I'm still kinda used to being a minority, or at least seeing different races around. So when everyone becomes Chinese, and the fact that people are Chinese ceases to matter, everyone is just "human." Then you notice a lot of different kinds of humans in the mix. For example, in terms of the young people you have the very western fashions going around now, as well as people who dress simpler (with guys, the "short Asian haircut"). You have the people going for Korean styles although I must admit it's not as common as I was expecting, you also have the otaku types, and a lot of others. There's a lot of difference and diversity there.

I think this feeds into something that I've been experiencing very strongly recently, that China is not a homogenous, monolithic whole. There is so much difference in-between. China is a nation built on many regions, and many subcultures, and those subcultures are still really important. Most people in Shanghai still speak Shanghainese, and I can't understand them because it's a totally different language. A lot of my coworkers switch between 'regional mode' (speaking in dialect) to 'national mode' (speaking Mandarin) many times in a conversation, and definitely depending on who they're talking to (they wouldn't speak Shanghainese to a non Shanghainese speaker). If you go out a few hundred miles, the entire culture would change into something different. I really appreciate the difference, the subcultures, and I feel like they're the keys to a richer understanding of China.

As for me, I think this is a really cool time in my life, one that I'm quite thankful for. For one, I get to explore for the first time two other parts of my identity, which has been very interesting. In America we deal with issues of being Chinese- or Asian- American; here I'm learning what it means to be American-Chinese. It means having customs and assumptions that are somewhat different form what people would assume you to have; it means not being able to speak Mandarin as well as you want sometimes. The other part that I get to explore is what it means to be a Jiangsu-er (Jiangsu being the name of the province I'm from; Shanghai is part of its macroregion and used to be a part of it). This goes in line with what I said above about 'regional difference'. Our province is packed with cultural sites and cities, as well as known for its abundance of waterways. We have a lot of things to be proud of and that's fun to learn about!

Finally, I'm glad to have this chance to hang out with family. I've never really had the chance to hang out too much with my extended family, and I'm happy to get that chance now. Its made me really glad to be able to see my grandparents, aunties, uncles, and cousins, and step into their lives, and to maybe stay for a little longer this time. Honestly, I always thought that if I had stayed in China (I moved out when I was 4), my life would turn out probably something similar to my cousins. As it was 10 years ago, I thought that would have been quite different from my life in America partly due to lack of many technological amenities. Ten years ago, there was much fewer high-speed rail lines, much fewer subway lines in the big cities, no instant communication through WeChat (to speak nothing of bike-shares and mobile payments, which arguably make life in China quite more convenient than in the US). China now is much, much more developed, in a span of 10 years, and I don't think my life now would have been that different after all. One motivation for me to come back to China was to hang out with them, and now I feel like the distance is closer and communication easier than it has ever been.

It's been a wild week, this past first week of work. I realize that part of the excitement of the past week is that it's the beginning of the first time that I've actually ever lived in a big city, which is something I've wanted to do all my life.

I think I shared with a lot of people a snapshot of my daily routine here - it's basically this: I get up at 7am and eat breakfast, and leave the house at 8. It's a 15 min walk to the metro station, and then I get on the metro line one for 30 mins. It is crowded like sardines for the first half of the way, it lightens up after a few stops in the metro. It's then another 10 minutes from the metro station to my office, a 55 min commute in all. I get to the office at 9 and then start work. I'm working on helping update their Apache Kafka/HBase/Spark based data platform. Work goes until 12; there's a lunch break until 1:30, and then work until 6. Afterwards I normally hang out in the city for a couple of hours and get back around 10, and then wash up and sleep.

I've been spending my metro time watching shows and movies (Streamed all parts 1,2 and 3 of Terrace House Aloha State and recently saw Duckweed and Beijing Meets Seattle 2: Book of Love, a few Chinese movies), and since I spend two hours each way commuting every day; I can get through a whole film in a day :P. That's been fun and helping me with my Chinese.

The past week has been a fun, exciting blur. Bryan Cheong and I travelled to Nanjing (my hometown), Suzhou, and Hangzhou, there gorgeous and historically important cities near Shanghai. We saw a lot of famous sites, enjoyed a lot of beautiful natural scenery, and ate a lot of good food. I’ve also started settling into life in Shanghai, and sort of know my way around my neighborhood. The weather here has felt very hot because of the humidity (low 80 high 90 and 80% humidity). You go outside and immediately start sweating. It takes a little getting used to and I’m not sure I’m used to it yet. Yesterday, we got the wifi in my room set up and today I start work. 

So I have 45 mins at the gate at the airport and want to take some of the time to share with you guys how I'm feeling about the whole thing.

China! It's imminent! I have all these things I want to do, and I feel resigned that I probably won’t come back from China having checked off all the checkboxes in my mind because basically there's must too many checkboxes. My most important goal for China right now is figuring out with more clarity my heritage and narrative by connecting with my extended family. This I think I'm sure to do and look forward to! Some other side goals are, to get better at Chinese (hopefully to be able to hold technical conversations which I can't yet do), to get better at data science programming (through summer job coding in Shanghai), to get experience writing a thesis to see if I want to do a PhD in Econ which I would be apply for the year afterwards (hopefully).

Honestly, I'm feeling pretty damn nervous. I will be quite far from my friends, the communities I was a part of up in NorCal, as well as my homies in Hawaii and my family. As someone who really needs people close to him close by, I'm worried I won't handle the transition/being in China for a whole year as well as I should. If theres anything I would ask to keep in your prayers and thoughts it would be this ;), and I'm also asking you guys to please check in often! :) I would love to hear from all of you as I'm sure it would help me to feel you guys close at hand and would make me very happy and less anxious, and would truly be a blessing to see what my communities back in America are up to.

One of the things I hope to be doing next year is being able to focus on just one thing at a time. In college I’ve definitely spread myself a bit thin, engaging in all my interests of Computer Science, Economics, East Asian Studies, and a bit of Philosophy/Religion. I had in my mind that I wanted to be an academic - a vaguely data-oriented social scientist- so I figured it’d be best to learn as much as I can in every field while still in college. But honestly, I've become somewhat burned out about it all. Im glad to still be challenged but to do also be able to do just one thing at a time instead of everything at once next year. So, data science in the summer, probably Econ dissertation for the rest of the year.

I think that some of the problems outside of my specialization that I had been interested in are still hugely important to me, and I'm excited to explore them - for example: the synthesis between various Eastern and Western historical traditions, interpretation of ‘Western’ traditions like Christianity or Western philosophy in Eastern contexts, and ways to think about things like justice drawing on both systems - these questions are still hugely important. In coming to college I thought, idealistically, that I wanted to develop myself to be able to be a bridge between the East and the West. This ideal is still very much in play next year. However feasible I find this goal, I'll be looking for ways to connect the various people and ideas I meet in China with what I know from America.

If that ever pans out, though. For now, I'm just focused on recuperating from the school year. I don't think I'm ready to think about all that now. For now, I'm kinda just taking this as one long, long grad trip. I worked hard so far and think I earned some respite! Some traveling (with the one and only Bryan Cheong) and hopefully a lot of good food and exploring the city to come!

Off to Shanghai!

(By the way, add me on WeChat: "textangel" to get ahold of me the fastest, although I still will respond to Facebook messenger with a slight delay.)

I write this (short, and, since I just tried to write down what I could before I got tired and needed to sleep, necessarily incomplete) post to come to terms with an obvious fact. I am graduating. Graduating from Stanford University, billed by many as one of the best universities in the world, and for me, a place where I have struggled and loved and strived and fell and was bored and excited. Coming to college was always something of a dream, because academically-minded me had always wanted a place where like minded people would go after hard problems together. Though I certainly found that, I discovered a lot more that I wasn't at first ready for. I discovered various interactions between by various identities (Asian American, Christian, Chinese, Nerdy, etc); I discovered how hard it was for me to make friends at first, and how people have helped me get around that. For someone who remembers his worldview limited to life on a small island, I discovered the world.

I certainly have my experience palette stretched plenty here - some things I will always remember - long problem set parties with my friend Bryan over a class designed to be very, very rough. Going to Great America summer of sophomore year with some friends I was living with; those same friends who first taught me family and community by letting me stay when I needed a place to stay for a couple of weeks. That day when Obama was on campus and I waited 5 hours to go see him. Great talks with my freshman InterVarsity small group leader. Visiting my friends on the East Coast, going to Japan. Meeting two Econ Nobel Laureates in one week and getting two signed books. Starting an a cappella group, visiting friends in SF. 

And yet, as I reflect, there are still a lot of things that I'm working on.

爱 ai, love

I think I'm still discovering to what extent I am a person who loves and is loved by others. Stanford taught me a lot about that. Love, for me, is a state of being whole, of feeling fully human, and in community, a feeling that one feels of family. Through highs and lows, both busy and relaxed times, I found that I remember most those times when I have felt well-situated in the love of others, and love for myself.

The Long Game

I always tell myself that I'm playing the long game in life. In other words, to make really long-term ideas of where I want to be and to act accordingly. I'm still learning to pare down from thinking about long-term too much - if there's one thing I've learned in school and still am learning, its how to put everything down and live a little more.

The formation of an identity

It's said that modern life, especially post 1950s, has been focused on this concept of making yourself, of forming your own identity, of breaking with established norms, of authenticity. One of my big projects in college was to tie together the many strands of my identity - Chinese, Hawaii boy, Christian, American, Mathematician, Human. Sure, I think I've been able to do a lot on that front - traveling around Asia helped me to understand my Asian Background more, and classes here have got me thinking about many of these other identities. (It is, by the way, a commonly stated frustration of minorities, that I quote because I've felt it, that we have to navigate conflicting identities and choose how to identify in a culture whose default is not us). But at the same time, I wish I could have not worried about identity issues so much, because it is time consuming and difficult to think through these things. I sometimes wish I could have just gone by established norms and lived a comfortable life. But alas, that was not to be in college! I think it was necessary at this stage to help me see where I fit in the world. Hopefully this will be a change post-college!

Fears

To my friends in China, and those in the States, I sometimes feel like I want to explain what it is about growing up in Hawaii that leads me to keep talking about it. Yes, the beaches are nice, and yes, there's a lot of fun outdoors places to explore, but I'm always brought back, time and again, to the feeling of community.

To explain this, I'll wanted to try to write a little something about this: Growing up in Hawaii, one is surrounded by reminders of what I might call some "Hawaiian core values." They are words- usual collections have 10 or 12 of them - that attempt to capture something about what many of us who grow up in Hawaii care about as a community. I wish to list the definitions that I found of some of them today. They, of course, generalize, for it is probably impossible to capture values amongst an enormous diverse group of people. And as generalizing slogans, they fail to capture the nuance of many of our communities. They are more ideals than reality, yet, by and large, to the extend that these are practiced they capture some of that communal essence which makes Hawai'i special.

Aloha means love. "The unconditional extension of trust and friendship to include strangers. Taking responsibility for those to whom aloha is extended insuring their safety, well-being, and peace of mind. Also extended to places and the physical environment implying stewardship obligations as an expression of caring for the condition of such places.”

"Kokua is the act of being helpful. To provide relief by assisting others. To lend support whereby one assumes the same sense of responsibility as the receiver of the assistance toward completing a task or activity."

"Kuleana to view responsibility as a privilege and honor. To accept responsibility as a duty, not in pursuit of reward, but because it is the right thing to do."

"Laulima is the condition of cooperation that causes everyone to work together toward a common goal. It is about many hands working together without attention to rank or position so that one person’s success is everyone’s success."

I've read many who have sought to explain or characterize the charm of local Hawaiian culture, and for me, I think it comes, again, in the feeling of community there. In Hawaii, there is the implicit understanding that all of us on the islands, strangers or friends, are one community, and we ought to help each other out. Most of these core values are about community togetherness, and people try to live these core values out. Some say it feels like one big family - and I agree! We call every older adult "auntie" or "uncle", and there’s truly a sense in which we mean it as such. The warmth of Hawaiian community gatherings is very easily felt. Obviously this is idealized - we are not a perfect society, no, far from it - and we are not an undivided society either - but the wealth of warmth and love I received from my communities in Hawaii are certainly incredibly meaningful and cannot be forgotten.

Ginkakuji, Kyoto

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of my favorite things in the world are Asian landscape gardens - particularly Chinese and Japanese ones. I actually wrote my required freshman research paper in college on the aesthetics of landscape gardens, where I learned about the ideals they try to capture of humanity in harmony with nature. The garden is, after all, a human environment and a created thing, and yet it is to be designed in imitation of nature; all human spaces in the garden must fit into the natural landscape. From this we get a sense of harmony, humanity in its rightful place as natural beings, humans in their highest state appreciators and enjoyers of nature.

I go to China because I hope to taste something of that other world, though it is my word. China - I am a person defined by it, too Chinese, despite growing up in America, too defined by my heritage and the stories of my family and my ancestors and those spirits which walk with me today, that thing called history.

Computer languages are without a doubt merely an expression of the times, a current way of thinking which changes every rapidly. I am drawn to the essential, the unchanging, those sacred truths of the world which do not change.