How I became a philosopher of education / generalist in Malaysia

My granddad and dad were both A students of a sort ... so I didn't have much choice of focus up to the age of 17. I had already deprioritised formal education by that point, but I had been prepping for college scholarship from the age of 9.

So, I finished the process, lucked out, and got into my uncle's alma mater, presumably as a sort of legacy hire. You hope the world out there is nicer than the one you grew up in. It was something like a MYR 500k scholarship, so it was fun, a good standard of living.

But at that age of 18 I decided to be a B+ student, because I wasn't impressed by the A students or the people who were teaching people them that way. This changed my life path significantly, making me what I am today.

At the time, I figured it would still be possible to maximise learning by focusing on the less-graded aspects of academic life, which would not have been possible if I focused on As (I don't consider myself super smart, and there is always only so much time for things).

But then I took interest in the fact, that the entire billion MYR school around me, wasn't actually focused on learning as a matter of organising the history of all knowledge, but rather on producing marketable class stratification to satisfy the "notion of education" held in esteem by industry. 

I studied this keenly in my second year at college, then decided to drop out and save the college the second half of my scholarship. A dean told me that the institution preferred we finish, so I figured I'd just sit the "job" out, till the end. One of the more interesting things I got to do, was represent the student government on a faculty committee, which redesigned the general education requirements.

Along the way, I somehow found time to luck out into another development : I had been trying for a few years, to see if I could map all of my conscious experiences to quantifiable data structures ... and somehow I managed to figure it out. It was a paradigm shift, which made me think I should just dwell on it for twenty years, as a matter of testing.

At 22, I finally got my degree, avoided setting it on fire on stage ( my mom had said she would kill herself ), and returned home to Malaysia where I began the next leg of my study plan : commerce, technology, politics, and trying to understand how Malaysia works.

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Postscript : Two people asked if there is a part 2. I have recorded most of my journals online for two decades. But summary stories typically read better when there is a lens with humanistic appeal. Currently I don't believe I have one. If I were to retell stories for the sake of telling them, the last two decades would mainly be a story of things a bored kid did in Malaysia which confirmed that mostly, life is boring. 

Q: "why don't Malaysians call out racists?"

q: Threads user foojeremiah

a:

1/

Malaysia is a constitutional ethnocracy - racism is official, and formal. And it comes from a historical strategy for managing xenophobia. This is not meant to be offensive language, as it is mere structural fact.

The aversion to (i) non-Malay culture changing the definition of Malay culture, and the aversion to (ii) non-Malay powers gaining power over Malay powers, was at the root of the Malayan constitution ( simply grandfathered into Malaysia's ).

Such annotation does not please everyone.

2/

1. Being hurt by words describing facts, becomes a matter of language preference. Other "polite" words may be used to describe the same facts. These linguistic devices are already studied in culture and society.

2. If Malaysians don't acknowledge its legal, structural facts, we will just spend more time arguing instead of focusing on GDP. We must "own" our racism and xenophobia. Or we must come up with new language that embellishes imperial structures without hiding what they are.

3/

3a. This completely introduces contemporary Malaysian values : on aggregate we are less interested in material developments, as we are also interested in language, customs, supernatural entities, and the influence of supernatural entities, upon public norms and ethics in general.

3b. We also take pride in being polite. ( The pros and cons of which are the subject of an entire note I made about cancer. )

4/

4. Back to the original question : Malaysians, for all their linguistic agility are very poor technicians. As a result, flowery language often causes arguments about what flowers mean, and sometimes people think a flower is a weapon, while others think the same flower is a living organism which embodies an etheral value or a national value.

5. Flower fights will proceed. As in pillow fights.

6. And so will flowerfighting. As in firefighting.

the next malaysian mythology

Hsu Chuang Khoo did an interview with Shahril Hamdan that indicated, this chap is future prime minister material. :) The key talking point was the absence of a unifying political mythology. On "unifying values" - it can't be 

• (a) religion 
• (b) race 
• (c) economic class; 

so my view has been, it should be 

• (d) legalistic ... it has to come back to a focus on civics, based on an understanding how how the law works, introduced to children from primary school, and put into practical gamification until they are 15, like running a mock country; afterwhich the education system should allow the "trained cititzen" to turn their focus to industrial specialisation.

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• (e) food : nope, see (a)
• (f) STEM : nope, Malaysia is where STEM goes to die ... you can't fix this before the national unity problem
• (g) art and design : nope, see (a, f) ... maybe ... change my mind?
• (h) commerce, entrepreneurship, business : nope, see (b) but you can save it if you fix (d)

amok

Barah di jiwa Malaysia adalah sikap senang menjadi marah. Penyakit ini komorbid dengan tabiat kita untuk cepat menyimpan marah. Sekaligus, kemarahan yang senang tercetus lagi cepat disimpan, lama-lama menjadi letupan. 

Pemahaman ini memang bermasalah. Ia bercanggah dengan alhuiat budaya kita sebagai tokoh simpan marah. Kalau tiada kemarahan, seorang pemuda tidak dapat menerokai pengembaraan peribadinya untuk sampai pada upacara peralihan menjadi dewasa. Jadi, dari kecil, kita cari marah, dapat marah, kuat simpan marah. 

Pemimpin pernah kata, ini semua kerja orang gila. Orang gila biasanya tidak menganggap dirinya gila. Sebaliknya, dianggapnya semua orang lain yang sudah lari dari penepatan.

Mari saya menggagaskan satu lagi pemahaman yang bermasalah : semua nilai moral adalah ciptaan. Setiap benda yang tercipta, mempunyai perekaannya tersendiri, sama ada perekaan itu bijak atau cuai, tepat atau lari dari tujan benda itu. Antara pereka, pernah ada orang kata, ada tuhan, ada syaitan, ada jin, ada manusia, dan sebagainya.

Jadi cadangan saya ringkas : kau fikirkan saja, siapa pereka nilai moral, dan adakah perekaan itu bijak. Kau ingat bagi tujuan apa anda boleh jadi marah? Manakala apa tujuan anda cepat simpan marah?

Dijangkakan ada orang akan jawab dengan marah.

metaphysics of the social sciences

Animals are driven by carrots or sticks. Humans are animals. So we understand human careers by understanding the carrots or sticks that drive them.

Some animals believe that their carrot is unlike all other carrots. Or that their sticks are unlike all other sticks. Unless a method of judgement can be agreed upon, the exploration of methods to prove the veracity of such claims is futile.

Politics is the study of carrots and sticks. When economics concerns itself with only numerical analyses, we see it and politics as different. When economics concerns itself with behavioural structure, then behavioural economics and computational political science are exactly the same thing. History, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and critical theory are different from this only in terms of having a focus on meriology and naming - ontological concerns, which once subject to quantification come back ... only to mere behavioural economics.

The reduction from these to the natural sciences is well-known and trivial to explain.