nothing much happening today. firstly, i checked KM last night at 11+pm and i got shortlisted for NTU H3 contemporary physics! haha, feel quite happy, after quite a few days of worrying at least managed to get past the NJC barrier. but quite strange leh, only 4 ppl applied for contemporary as first choice (myself, shi kai, joshua ng and xiao lan). i always had the impression that contemporary would be more popular than semicon, but i guess i was wrong. well, on the bright side, there's a higher chance that the 4 of us will be able to get in tgt. haha, learning some new ultra-chim stuff is always better with friends around. compare this with josias: he got shortlisted into SMU game theory, but altogether there are 22 NJCians who got shortlisted, when there are only 200 slots for game theory for then entire country. bound to have a lot of ppl not making it in the end... well in any case, best of luck to josias, and also to jade (if i rmb correctly, jade also got shortlisted) :). another thing, very surprised to see that alyssa got shortlisted for NTU numbers and matrices (or was it something else? anw, it's one of the uni maths courses). i mean, not surprised that she got in lah (it would be freaking evil of me to post sth like that here), but surprised that she went to apply in the first place. alyssa has always been a rather under-the-radar sort of person in the class, and i didnt rly expect her to do anything outside of the school curriculum. well, i have to say im guilty of stereotyping here, so now im apologising (dunno if she even knows of this blog lol).
stereotyping... wat a horrible phenomenon it is, isnt it? with stereotyping, we have such evils as racism, sexism etc etc. of course, in these instances stereotyping is absolutely abhorred and condemned. and yet, in other scenarios, it's condoned and even encouraged. let's take a light-hearted example, the music that i like. it is very unfortunate that many of my friends have a negative stereotype of metal music, saying that it's loud and cacophonic and demonic and wadeva other weird gripe they can think of. of course, those are all sweeping statements. and yet everybody treats it as a joke (me included, no hard feelings there), and we all have a good laugh about it. isnt this a form of stereotyping as well? condemning all the hard work and effort put in by the various bands of this genre, is that really trivial compared to condemning all the efforts of a particular race or gender or some other minority group? and going a bit deeper, arent banded classes also a form of stereotyping? ur assuming that everyone in the class will do equally well with equal consistency just because they scored on a similar level before. in actual fact, there are bound to be ppl who fluked out and got into a higher band, as well as people who got unlucky and went into a lower band. in that case, couldnt the argument of stereotyping be applied to virtually any form prediction?
i hope u guys managed to see that the last few statements were actually a tongue-in-cheek look at the blurry boundary between probabilistic prediction and blatant stereotyping. nobody can predict the future with absolute certainty, so the best that we humble mortals can do is to take the data available to us and make guesses. of course, people tend to use more chim words like "prediction" or "hypothesis", but in actual fact they can all be called educated guesses. stereotyping, on the other hand, means making predictions of the nature of something (could be the moral character of a person of a particular race or the noisiness of a certain genre of music etc etc.) based on long-standing assumptions. in the case of "bad stereotyping", these assumptions are either drawn from insufficient data (he's XXX race and he's a thief, therefore all people of XXX race are thieves. notice how this person uses a sample audience of 1, which is pathetic) or from outdated data (quite a funny misconception i read about in the newspapers: many americans think that singapore is part of china. while hundreds of years ago, when international travel was limited to sailboats, the assumption that all chinese are from china might have been valid, in modern times it is no longer so). now, if the huge problem in this distinction is still unclear to you, let me ask this question: how do we know whether the data available to us is sufficient or contemporary enough with which to make an educated guess? this very vital distinction between a scientific prediction and a stereotype, is defined by very relative and subjective terms that nobody has ever bothered to clarify. wat can we say about all the scientific predictions that ever came about?
now, you might be thinking that all this is absurd, but there is a very good example, strongly grounded in science, which can demonstrate this. in the era of newtonian physics, people thought that everything was deterministic: that is to say, if the starting conditions for an event are identical, then the result will also be identical. for example, if you threw a ball at the same angle with the same weather conditions with the same strength, then the ball will fly with the same trajectory and land in the same place every single time. in actual fact though, scientists have never been able to get precisely the same result for anything, but they simply assumed that it was due to the fact that it is humanly impossible to exactly recreate the same situation. however, quantum mechanics now teaches us that there is no such thing as certainty, and we can only measure the probability of something happening before it actually happens, and that observation is the only way for anything to ever be certain. the long-standing belief that everything is deterministic has been shattered, because now we know that everything is actually probabilistic. it turned out that the assumptions on which we were making predictions were actually inadequate. looking back now at the difference between an educated guess and a stereotype, have we actually stereotyped every scientific prediction before that?
i think stereotyping is part of human nature. humans look out for patterns, so whenever they see two characteristics which seem like they're linked, the brain will draw the link automatically. i guess stereotyping is just what happens when the brain stumbles upon a particularly unreasonable link.
ok, i just went very VERY off-topic there. back to normal life. i think i lost my moe pre-u scholarship acceptance letter, which is a bit disappointing cos i wanted to hand that up tgt with my H3 application. if PW has taught me anything, it's that everything needs some form of substantiation, and there's no way the NTU ppl are gonna believe that i got the scholarship without some sort of proof. oh well, hopefully i'll be able to get in without that...
so i went to school for what, 5 min? urgh, total waste of my bus fare. why does the school like to set everything on days where i dont have to go to school? but anyway, i saw alyssa, brenda and yicen just coming out of school. apparently, they were having OP practice, and mr chew booked a classroom for them for 4 hours. BOOKED a classroom. he can do that? since when could students ask teachers to book rooms? why didnt chen shu hui say anything about that? a bit bummed out by that, i wished she told us abt it, then we wouldnt have to spend our past few OP practices scavenging for free rooms.
anyway, my mom's a primary school teacher and she needed to prepare an introduction to different genres of music for primary 1 and 2 students. i tried to convince her that progressive metalcore is a genre that deserves some mention, but for some reason she just doesnt want to play PTH in front of 7 and 8-year-olds. i wonder why...
well, OP is coming up soon for everyone, so good luck to everyone guys! :)
here's another SOAD song. it's got quite a weird title... I-E-A-I-A-I-O. love the super-heavy guitar, and the chanting part during the chorus is also quite interesting.
