Today’s WITI had confirmed my long-time suspicion on the relations of numbers, expectations, and behaviour, to be true. It talks about Goodhart’s Law, named after a British economist, which posits that, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, according to WITI, as soon as you set some metrics into […]
Category: Psychology and Philosophy
Panic! in the supermarket aisle
Niki de Saint Phalle, Photo de la Hon repeinte, 1979 One of my first corona vivid dreams involved finding myself in a crowded supermarket where almost no one wore masks and none had regards for the practice of social distancing. In the dream, I realised I had been asking myself, “This felt like a dream. Or […]
The tools at our disposal
Last few weeks, it was reported that Malaysian authorities had turned away a boat carrying about 200 Rohingyan refugees, including women and children that was said to enter the country ‘illegally’. The justification provided was that the country was in the midst of battling Covid-19, and by letting in foreigners, which includes these asylum seekers, […]
Happy I didn’t sneeze
(This is only a series of things that happened and what I have observed and read since the last time I wrote. No further commentary and analysis.) A dear friend passed away peacefully in his sleep today. It’s my parents’ 39th anniversary today. Yesterday, literary critic, teacher, poet, and scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American […]
Hope as a moral duty
(Some background on this post: This was written with Lou Sullivan’s prompt from Suleika Jaouad’s The Isolation Journals newsletter in mind. Every day, Suleika sends a daily journaling prompt from her favourite writers, artists, and musicians to your inbox, and it is up to you to create something wonderful out of them. Lou, who according […]
On online mourning
The secret history of facial recognition. Lately I have been thinking about the way we mourn online. Two weeks ago, I, and perhaps others in the same hemisphere, woke up to the news of the death of Kobe Bryant. I found out through Twitter. To be honest, I could no longer recall a day where […]
Proofs are cruel
I’m onto my draft thesis corrections now, and if there are sentiments that ring true at this point of time, it comes from Zadie Smith from her book of essays, Changing My Mind, where she talks about receiving proofs: Proofs are so cruel! Breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring […]
On novelty, and burnout should make us angry
A few months ago a friend came to visit and we talked about projects we could venture into, if we had all the right resources: financial, skills, time, etc. (of which I think skills would be no problem, the other two, on the other hand, would pose some slight problems). She mentioned about an entrepreneur […]
What, at this moment, are you meant to know?
It actually felt good to just, write, in reference to the previous post. I was worried and had been stress-dreaming — you know those kind of dreams you get when you are stressed, which usually involves sitting for secondary school exams for subjects you no longer had any proficiency of in waking life (Additional Maths! […]
Questions to ask
I have written 2,567 words for my final chapter today, of which I expect to be concluded by next Tuesday. For the thesis, I have written close to 52,000 words. I thought about the time a few months ago when I was lamenting about how I was going to write 60,000 words for the thesis. […]
