Wawancara Bersama Dr. Bakri Musa (Bahagian 8)

March 11, 2013

http://suaris.wordpress.com

Wawancara Bersama Dr. Bakri Musa (Bahagian 8): Pendidikan untuk Malaysia

Suaris: Dr banyak menulis dan membentangkan kertas kerja mengenai pendidikan yang sebaiknya untuk Malaysia. Adakah dasar dan sistem hari ini mampu membawa orang Melayu mengharungi gelombang masa depan? Apakah yang perlu diperbaiki, diatasi atau diganti?

Dr Bakri: Ternyata dasar dan sistem pendidikan sekarang tidak mampu membawa anak-anak, khasnya anak Melayu, menghadapi masa depan. Rakyat tidak puas hati walaupun berkali-kali kerajaan buat kertas putih dan cetak biru (“blueprint”) untuk “mentransformasikan” sekolah dan universiti kita. Semuanya tidak berkesan. Di sini saya maksudkan aliran awam; pihak swasta cemerlang, tetapi tidak ramai penuntut Melayu di antaranya.

Tanda jelas pendidikan awam kita tidak mengagumkan ialah pertumbuhan cergas sekolah antarabangsa dan kolej serta universiti swasta. Di Alberta, Canada, sekolah dan universiti awam mereka handal. Oleh sebab itu saluran pendidikan swasta tidak laku. Begitu juga di Singapura. Pertumbuhan sekolah dan universiti swasta yang rancak di Malaysia bukan tanda sektor pendidikan kita beres dan subur, tetapi sebaliknya.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer menulis dalam novelnya Bumi Manusia, “seorang terpelajar harus sudah berbuat adil sejak dalam fikiran apalagi dalam perbuatan.” Itulah tujuan pelajaran, untuk mendidik rakyat yang adil. Pendidikan Islam bertujuan membina makhluk yang soleh. Istilah “soleh” saya ertikan “berguna atau memberi manfaat kepada masyarakat.” Rakyat yang adil dan soleh, itu tujuan pendidikan.

Bagi masyarakat berbagai kaum dan budaya seperti Malaysia, saya tambah atau beratkan satu lagi tujuan, iaitu meningkatkan persefahaman antara kaum supaya kita lebih berfikir sebagai satu dan tidak lagi terikat kepada prasangka kaum kita. Tanpa tujuan ini, kita mungkin menjadi saperti penduduk Northern Ireland, berpendidikan tinggi tetapi bermusuhan antara satu dengan lain. Di sana kaum Katholik dan Protestan tidak habis-habis bermusuhan.

Betul pada intinya seorang yang “adil dan soleh” tidak akan membuat demikian, jadi tujuan kedua ini mungkin berulang atau termasuk dalam kandungan “adil dan soleh.” Walaubagaimanapun kita mesti beratkan sudut ini.

Falsafah pendidikan mesti menyifatkan murid sebagai pisau untuk diasah atau tajamkan. Tetapi sekarang kita sifatkan mereka sebagai tong kosong yang mesti disumbat dengan fakta, maklumat, dan propoganda.

Fikirkan, di tangan pakar bedah, pisau tajam ialah alat memyembuh barah; di tangan ahli seni pahat, (untuk) mereka patung kayu yang indah. Sebaliknya, di tangan penyangak pisau menjadi senjata membunuh. Itu mustahaknya tujuan adil dan soleh dalam pendidikan.

Dengan tong yang diisi, apa yang mungkin kita dapatkan balik hanya apa yang telah disumbat. Itu sahaja! Itu pun bukan semuanya sebab banyak yang terlekat atau bocor keluar di bawah.

Munshi Abdullah menulis, di antara mereka yang berguru dan mereka yang meniru, jauh bezanya. Seorang yang berguru, dan berguru cemerlang, tidak terhad pencapaiannya. Mereka yang pandai meniru terhad hanya kepada menghafizkan apa yang diberi atau diajar. Itu sahaja, seumpama burung nuri.

Pendidikan tidak menjamin kita semua menjadi pemimpin, hanya mengajar pemimpin mana yang patut diikuti (education can’t make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow). Itu (yang disebut) Horace Mann, pendidik Amerika terkemuka. Dia menambah, tidak ada ciptaan insan yang lebih hebat lagi untuk menyamakan keadaan manusia (education … beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men ..)

Di dunia ini, yang paling bertuah atau beruntung ialah mereka yang fasih dalam dua (atau lebih) bahasa, dan satu daripadanya ialah Bahasa Inggeris (BI). Itu sebabnya Negara China, Jepun dan Korea Selatan berlumba mengajar penuntut mereka BI. Yang paling rugi atau lemah ialah mereka yang hanya tahu satu bahasa sahaja, dan bahasa itu lain daripada BI. (manakala berada) di tengah-tengah terletak mereka yang fasih hanya dalam BI. Mengapa BI dan bukan Mandarin atau Swahili yang penting dalam dunia sekarang saya tidak tahu. Sepatutnya Mandarin sebab bahasa itu yang paling ramai pengunanya. Pada satu masa dahulu, bahasa Latin. Mungkin pada masa depan dengan kehandalan kemajuan negara China, Mandarin akan menjadi bahasa pilihan.

Kebanyakan orang Melayu fasih hanya dalam satu bahasa sahaja, dan bahasa itu bukan BI. Kaum bukan Melayu di Malaysia fasih dalam dua atau tiga bahasa: BI, BM(Bahasa Malaysia) dan bahasa ibunda. Itu sebabnya mereka maju, dan bukan atas alasan keistemewaan budaya atau bangsa mereka. Cina yang fasih dengan Hakka atau Hokkien sahaja terhad ke pasar minggu dan gerai atau kedai. Dengan cara pendidikan yang bijak, murid Melayu pun boleh juga fasih dalam tiga bahasa, BI, BM, dan Bahasa Arab.

Mengikut kajian neuroscience, banyak tambahan keistimewaan otak kepada mereka yang fasih dalam berbagai bahasa, antaranya kebolehan berfikir “luar kotak” dan dari berbagai sudut. Itu sebabnya universiti terkemuka Amerika memestikan mahasiswa mereka fasih dalam dua bahasa.

Selain daripada bertujuan berkebolehan dua (atau tiga) bahasa, sistem pendidikan kita mestilah beralasan kukuh atas sains dan ilmu hisab, serta mengalakkan murid berfikir. Sains membolehkan kita memahami alam di sekitar serta di dalam (diri) kita. Sains ialah kajian “Quran Kedua” yang dimaksudkan oleh Hamka. Ilmu hisab pula, tanpa kemahiran dalam mata pelajaran itu, kita tidak boleh berfikir dengan tepat, hanya agak- agak sahaja. Dan tanpa berkebolehan berfikir sendiri, rakyat akan jadi Pak Turut dan senang dipengaruhi.

Had sekolah patut dipanjangkan selama 13 tahun untuk semua, dengan empat mata pelajaran asas – BI, BM, Sains, dan Ilmu Hisab – dimestikan setiap hari dan setiap tahun. Mata pelajaran lain dipilih oleh sekolah dan pelajar. Saya tidak kira apa bahasa pengantar, sama ada BM, Swahili, atau Mandarin. Di Amerika sekarang sudah jadi kebiasaan untuk semua bersekolah 15 tahun, prasekolah ke darjah 12 (13 tahun) dan dua tahun kolej.

Saya mencadangkan pada tahun 10 hingga 13 (sekolah tinggi) penuntut disalurkan kepada tiga jurusan –akademik (untuk bakal mahasiswa), biasa (untuk bakal askar, kerani dan jururawat), dan vokasional, untuk melatih pembuat perabut, juru mekanik, dan tukang jahit. Murid boleh menukar saluran hanya semasa Tahun 10 dan 11. Ini cara Jerman, tetapi di sana saluran itu dimulai lebih awal lagi, pada tahun lima.

Selain daripada itu saya (cadangkan supaya) tambahkan peruntukan kepada sekolah yang mempunyai (komposisi) murid yang mencerminkan masyarakat Malaysia. Saya tidak memaksa tiap- tiap sekolah mengambil beberapa peratus murid Melayu, Cina dan sebagainya, tetapi sekolah yang berjaya mendapat murid berbilang kaum akan dihadiahkan dengan meningkatkan peruntukan wang, guru dan kelebihan lain, tidak kira apa bahasa pengantarnya. Begitu juga, saya akan melebihkan peruntukan untuk sekolah di mana muridnya terkumpul daripada keluarga miskin, seperti di luar bandar.

Saya tidak hapuskan sekolah terhad kepada satu kaum. Jauh sekali! Hanya sekolah tersebut jangan harap mendapat bantuan satu sen pun dari kerajaan. Tentang agama, itu patut di ajar hanya sebagai satu mata pelajaran sahaja dan bukan memenuhi seluruh masa atau sukatan pelajaran. Sekolah agama mesti mengajar empat mata pelajaran asas yang saya sebutkan dahulu (BI, BM, Sains, dan Ilmu Hisab). Saya tidak kira apa bahasa pengantar sekolah agama, samada Arab, BM, Mandarin (seperti di Negara China), atau B.I (seperti di Amerika). Sekolah agama Kristian di Amerika ramai penuntut bukan Kristian termasuk Islam oleh sebab mutu akademiknya tinggi.

Kalau sekolah agama Malaysia tinggi tarafnya, mungkin ibu bapa bukan Islam akan menghantar anak mereka. Tengoklah dahulu, Tun Razak dan Hussein Onn hantar anak mereka ke sekolah “mission” (satu jenis sekolah agama) Kristian!

Kelemahan yang nyata di antara murid Melayu ialah kemorosotan taraf BI. Saya anak kampung, ibu bapa saya tidak tahu langsung BI, dan bahasa itu jarang digunakan di sekitar alam saya semasa kecil. Tambahan pula saya bersekolah semasa negeri dijajah. Tetapi saya fasih dalam BI. Sepatutnya sekarang kita sudah merdeka, pimpinan negeri dalam tangan Melayu, kemudahan untuk murid Melayu untuk belajar BI semestinya lebih senang bila dibandingkan dengan masa dulu. Tetapi sebaliknya yang berlaku!

Apa sebab? Masyarakat dan pemimpin kita tidak memberatkan hal itu. Mereka menyifatkan mengalakkan BI bermakna kita tidak “memartabatkan” atau cinta bahasa kita. Itu kesilapan terbesar.

Oleh sebab taraf BI di (kalangan) murid kampung sudah jauh merosot, saya cadangkan mengadakan “immersion schools” mengunakan hanya BI selama sekurang kurangnya lima tahun dari prasekolah hingga ke darjah empat atau lima. Bahasa lain termasuk BM tidak diajar. Oleh sebab BM digunakan di sekitar luar sekolah dan di rumah, tidak mungkin murid akan lupa bertutur dalam itu.

Saya mensyaratkan satu sahaja. Iaitu murid dihadkan kepada mereka yang bahasa ibunda ialah BM, bahasa itu biasa digunakan di rumah serta sekitar, atau murid itu sudah fasih bertutur dalam BM.

Kalau seorang murid Cina sudah pandai bertutur dalam BM (seperti Cina Baba misalnya) mereka boleh masuk sekolah “English immersion.” Kita mesti mengadakan Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan (Inggeris), di mana bahasa penghantar ialah BI, di kawasan kampung Melayu.

Satu cara lagi untuk meninggikan taraf BI antara murid Melayu ialah dengan menubuhkan Sekolah Agama yang menggunakan BI sebagai bahasa pengantar, seperti di Amerika. Sudah tentunya murid di sekolah itu akan fasih dalam BI, BM dan Bahasa Arab!

Itu dengan ringkasnya cadangan saya untuk membaiki, mengatasi atau mengganti sistem pendidikan kita. Saya kembangkan dengan lebih mendalam lagi melalui buku saya, An Education System Worthy of Malaysia (2003).

Untuk menutup (wawancara ini), saya bentangkan tiga unsur asas. Pertama, ibu bapa sahaja yang tahu apa yang baik untuk anak mereka. Maknanya, kita tidak boleh paksa ibu bapa menghantar anak mereka ke sekolah ini atau itu. Pilihan itu semestinya terletak di tangan ibu bapa, dan hanya kepada mereka dan bukan pemimpin politik atau pegawai pendidikan.

Kedua, mengikut kebijakan bekas Canselor German Willy Brandt, hanya satu sahaja bahasa rasmi di dunia ini, iaitu bahasa pelanggan kita. Kata Brandt, kalau saya ingin menjual, saya mesti menggunakan bahasa bakal pembeli.

Kalau saya membeli dari kau, kau mesti gunakan bahasa saya (Jerman)! Kalau kita ingin menjual lebih banyak lagi getah dan kelapa sawit kepada negara China dan Amerika, kita patut belajar bahasa mereka!

Ketiga, dan pandangan ini khas untuk orang Melayu sahaja, kita mesti ingat atas perbezaannya penting antara memajukan Bahasa Melayu dan memarakan Bangsa Melayu. BM boleh maju tetapi itu tidak bermakna Bangsa Melayu akan turut bersama. Tetapi kalau Bangsa Melayu maju, semestinya bahasa kita akan turut bersama.

Lebih penting ialah sebaliknya, iaitu jika Bangsa Melayu bangsat, tidak ramai yang ingin belajar BM. Itu termasuk orang Melayu sendiri. Lima puluh tahun dahulu negara China bangsat; tidak ramai berminat belajar Mandarin. Sekarang Negara China sudah maju, Mandarin ialah bahasa kedua yang sangat diminati oleh pelajar Amerika.

A Tribute to Sir Patrick Moore

December 17, 2012

by Professor Martin Barstow, University of Leicester (December 11, 2012)

Growing up a the time of the Moon Landings, like many others I was inspired to become a scientist by Patrick through his coverage of Apollo and his appearances on Sky at Night. He already had a strong connection with the University when I joined the Physics and Astronomy Department and it was a thrill to meet him in person for the first time.

His support for our work has been tremendous over the years and he became a patron of our efforts to create the National Space Centre here in the Leicester (the planetarium is now named after him).

I was delighted when he was awarded the Distinguished Honorary Fellowship of the University in recognition of 50 years of Sky at Night together with his association with the University and was privileged to act as his host for the day. The weather was terrible, but Patrick insisted we walk to the De Montfort Hall. It was slow progress, as everyone we passed stopped to say hello and he took time for a personal word with all.

I always had an ambition to appear on Sky at Night as a young astronomer and, in recent years have had the good fortune to be involved in a number of programmes. Becoming part of Sky at Night is like joining an extended family, with Patrick being the glue that held it all together. He was one of nature’s gentlemen with time for everyone. His hospitality was generous and trips to his home at Selsey became events for my whole family.

When my daughter, Jo, was about to start a PhD working on Venus, Patrick remarked, “I wrote a book on that”. Several days later a copy of the book appeared with a personal message inscribed on the title page. My musician son, Nick, was allowed to try out the famous xylophone and caused some consternation for the BBC film crew when Patrick insisted on delaying a recording while he “dug out” some music for him.

We last saw Patrick in person at a wonderful evening in Selsey celebrating the 55 year anniversary of Sky at Night earlier this year. Many of the Sky at Night family were there and we closed the evening with a truly terrible, but enjoyable (to us at least), karaoke rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. I am not sure what Brian May (another great friend of Patrick’s) would have thought of that.

I have many fond memories of Patrick that I will aways treasure. He was a great man and a great friend. I will miss him tremendously, but he will be missed by millions more.

Professor Martin Barstow, Head of the College of Science and Engineering

Anwar: A Visionary Leader?

September 25, 2012

by Terence Netto

COMMENT Is Anwar Ibrahim an irresponsible rider of the zeitgeist, or is he a leader who has a feel for the law of unintended consequences and has manned himself nobly to face the formidable challenges of the path of bold reform he elected upon 14 years ago that is now poised for execution?

In other words, is he an opportunist thumping the tub with minimal concern for consequences, or is he a visionary leader with a matchless ability to convey high flown speculation in the accents of the street, a place now reverberating with the democratic spirit of the times leveraging on which would afford him the spotlight-grabbing presence of a global leader?

In sum, is he charlatan or statesman?To be sure, the double-sidedness of this question that dogs Anwar has been the common lot of many a pivotal politician in eras past, with allies and adversaries, contemporaries and successors, journalists and historians, puzzled by what they see as enigmatic, contradictory, and even, hypocritical, strains to their character.

Today, by accepting the invitation to be the fifth speaker in the series called Royal Selangor Club Presidential Luncheon Talks, Anwar has chosen to saunter into a situation where he may well be subjected to sharp and unceremonious questioning from a sellout crowd on the penumbras to his political personality.

The 350 seats to the luncheon were taken up within three days of the posters publicising the event going up at the prestigious club. In contrast, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, the first invitee to the series that begun last January, had 184 takers; Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, the second invitee, had 148 takers; Musa Hitam, the third speaker, had 190; and Lim Guan Eng, the fifth, drew 275 diners.

Lim’s draw was the most creditable of the series until Anwar’s because dining rates for his talk were raised from RM50 for club members and RM70 for guests to RM80 and RM100 respectively – a marked increase that, apparently, did not have a diminishing effect on attendance.

The raised rates have been retained for Anwar’s talk which at its draw of 350 diners is a smash because he had asked for a September 6 date, but was told by the club that they needed more time to publicise the event.

In the event, the club did not need the extra time to herald the talk. It could have been held at Anwar’s request early date. Seats were sold out within 72 hours of the posters going up – and that was in the first week of September.

Tough questions expected

However, a brimming house is no guarantee of likeability for what the speaker is going to say and there could be a number of pesky questioners eager to have a go at Anwar who ought not to avail himself of the protection the talk’s moderator offered Najib when he faced a question about his willingness to accept the results of the 13th general election.

The moderator interposed in the question-and-answer session to absolve Najib of the need to reply although the question was perfectly in order because it was on a subject that speaker had threaded in his postprandial remarks.

The protocol on these occasions is that invited speakers should not be asked questions on matters they had not raised in their speech.Of course, nobody would expect Anwar to affect the Dr Mahathir Mohamad stance that the latter made famous at the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Lingam video controversy in January 2008.

That General Custer-like stand saw Mahathir claim that he was prepared to answer any questions within or outside the terms of reference of the inquiry, a typically pre-emptive position taken by the former prime minister to rock circling detractors back on their heels.

But that bombast fell flat when Mahathir trotted out the excuse of a not sufficiently retentive memory at the inquiry when he was pegged on lacunae in his conduct and that of his aides.

Anwar, an exponent of transparency and accountability in government, cannot rely on comparable subterfuge for his salvation before an audience that is likely to temper admiration with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The reference here to Mahathir is not without relevance, for it was at the Royal Selangor Club where Mahathir was first introduced to Anwar in 1971. It remains to be seen if Anwar would make that first encounter the subject of his talk today; it is a fit subject for dilation.

First impressions can be deceptive or they can be spot-on for a lifetime. By dwelling at length on his first impressions on Mahathir, Anwar can show what has learned over four intervening decades on the nature of fleeting and immediate impressions.

That way he would tell a lot on the moral thrust and empirical substance of his perceptual and analytical ability, which is important because Anwar would, if it comes to that, be Malaysia’s first PM of an avowedly intellectual bent.

On Perception, Human Mind and Decision Making

September 17, 2012

by Khairie Hisyam Aliman@http://www.themalaysianinsider.com

One particularly memorable class I had in university was when a professor talked about marble stones and the metamorphic processes that create them, ending with an short account of when he was in Mecca.

As he laid eyes on the marble flooring near the Kaabah, his mind immediately analysed its properties and before he realised it he had a good idea of its parent rock’s geological qualities and history.

At the time, I was awestruck by the professor’s geological expertise and how it provides an additional lens through which he perceives the world, picking out details that another person could never guess at. Years later I find myself almost understanding what that might feel like — albeit with words and language instead of rocks.

Previously I wrote about sub-editors and how the nature of the work imparts lifelong habits, even after moving on to other jobs. While that is somewhat different from my professor’s knowledge and experience flavouring his perception of his surroundings, I feel both boils down to the same basic thing: our work defines a significant part of who we are. The knowledge and skills that we learn, acquire and master, once hardwired into our brain, inevitably influence how we interact with our world.

Inevitably, these bits and pieces that we keep adding to our great archive as we go through life will shape us as individuals. As we learn new things and discover, the way we perceive things around us evolves to reflect what we know and understand.

When I was in my teens transitioning from comic books to more text-heavy volumes by Raymond E. Feist and Terry Brooks, my perception of the books was rather simple. Both writers tell different stories, and that was all I saw. At the back of my mind I was vaguely aware of another aspect differentiating the authors that I could not seem to vocalise, like a forgotten word at the tip of your tongue that just won’t come out.

It was only when I learned to write professionally and grew aware of the concept of “writing style” that I realised — like a light switched on in a pitch-black room — that the authors structure their sentences differently, finally seeing the nuances that mark their respective voices.

From that point on I began paying attention to how different writers arrange their words, how different it is from how I would write it and what makes their personality shine through the dry ink on paper. Learning that one concept as a writer added an extra lens through which I read, and whenever I read I look through it without conscious effort.

I imagine it is the same with everyone, whatever you do for a living. What we know colours our perspective and, eventually, after accumulating enough knowledge or skill in something, that colouring stays permanently.

Our brain processes what we see and hear and touch based on what it knows, and the more we know in one field of expertise, the more it will be inclined to access that area of its archives first to give definition to what we perceive. It is the reason why an architect will look at a house and immediately ponder its design, whereas a realtor might see the same house and weigh its location and value.

Sometimes it makes me wonder: are those around me seeing things I do not? Perhaps they do. And perhaps I see little things that they miss, too. The thought of something I see clearly still holding mysteries that are in plain view to someone else fascinates me as much as it humbles me.

My professor sees the world through the eyes of a geologist. Whose eyes might you be looking through?

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.

_____________________________

The Science of Irrationality

A Nobelist explains our fondness for not thinking

by Jonah Lehrer

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: “A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs 10 cents. This answer is both incredibly obvious and utterly wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and $1.05 for the bat.) What’s most impressive is that education doesn’t really help; more than 50% of students at Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology routinely give the incorrect answer.

Daniel Kahneman (left), a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this for more than five decades. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way that we think about thinking.

While philosophers, economists and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents, Mr. Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on mental short cuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. The short cuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether.

Although Mr. Kahneman is now widely recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, his research was dismissed for years. Mr. Kahneman recounts how one eminent American philosopher, after hearing about the work, quickly turned away, saying, “I am not interested in the psychology of stupidity.”

But the philosopher missed the point. The biases and blind-spots identified by Messrs. Kahneman and Tversky aren’t symptoms of stupidity. They’re an essential part of our humanity, the inescapable byproducts of a brain that evolution engineered over millions of years.

In Mr. Kahneman’s important new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” his first work for a popular audience, he outlines the implications of this new model of cognition. What are the most important mental errors that we all make? And can they be overcome?

Consider the overconfidence bias, which drives many of our mistakes in decision-making. The best demonstration of the bias comes from the world of investing. Although many fund managers charge high fees to oversee stock portfolios, they routinely fail a basic test of skill: persistent achievement.

As Mr. Kahneman notes, the year-to-year correlation between the performance of the vast majority of funds is barely above zero, which suggests that most successful managers are banking on luck, not talent.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. The stock market is a case study in randomness, a system so complex that it’s impossible to predict. Nevertheless, professional investors routinely believe that they can see what others can’t. The end result is that they make far too many trades, with costly consequences.

And it’s not just investors who suffer from this mental flaw. The typical entrepreneur believes that he or she has a 60% chance of success, though less than 35% of small businesses survive more than five years. Meanwhile, CEOs who hold more company stock—taken here as a sign of self-confidence—also tend to make more irresponsible decisions, overpaying for acquisitions and engaging in misguided mergers.

Even consumers are hurt by this bias. A recent survey of American homeowners found that they expected, on average, to spend about $18,500 on remodelling their kitchens. The actual average cost? Nearly $39,000.

We like to see ourselves as a Promethean species, uniquely endowed with the gift of reason. But Mr. Kahneman’s simple experiments reveal a very different mind, stuffed full of habits that, in most situations, lead us astray. Though overconfidence may encourage us to take necessary risks—Mr. Kahneman calls it the “engine of capitalism”—it’s generally a dangerous (and expensive) illusion.

What’s even more upsetting is that these habits are virtually impossible to fix. As Mr. Kahneman himself admits, “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.”

Even when we know why we stumble, we still find a way to fall. WSJ: Jonah Lehrer

Uniting Religion and Reason

July 25, 2012

by  Dr Mohd Farid M Shahran, Senior Fellow, IKIM@www.thestar.com.my

It is hardly possible for a civilisation to survive without being appreciative to rational inquiries and intellectual pursuits. For civilisation is nothing but the refinement of human life through rational investigation and experience.

THE incident of a couple attacking a Policeman with a sword in front of the Prime Minister’s Department was a front cover story recently. The man, who was shot and later on died, also claimed himself to be the Imam Mahdi.

While the real cause of the incident is still under investigation, immediate reaction was one of bewilderment for such an irrational act. Since the motive is seemingly religious, the deeper question is, could religion teach us to do such a thing?

To be religious is quite often thought to be anti-reason and dismissive of rational inquiries.The basic premise is two-fold. First, since religion is based on submission to the absolute will of God, less room is available for thinking and rational justification, and secondly, it is based on divine injunction which is beyond fault, hence, no rational explanation is needed.

The logical implication of this thinking is that what comes from religion will form its own truth, while what comes from reason will form another. Both of these are irreconcilable and contradictory. Ultimately, this thinking will lead to the situation where every endeavour, which is based on rational inquiry like science and philosophy, is contradictory to religion.

This is based on a few observations: First, Islam has proven itself to be a great civilisation for a long time. It is hardly possible to think of a civilisation that can survive, without being appreciative to rational inquiries and intellectual pursuits.

For civilisation is nothing but the refinement of every aspect of human life through rational investigation and human experience within any framework of a worldview.

In the case of Islam, although the development of its civilisation was inspired by the spirit of revelation and progressed within the framework of religious worldview with tawhid as the central theme, the gradual unfolding of its various civilisational aspects in history took place through diverse intellectual inquiries.

This is reflected in countless great intellectual works of Muslim scholars throughout the Golden Age of Islam. In addition, science and philosophy flourished in the Muslim world while translations by Muslim scholars of great works from the zenith of reason at that time, the Greek civilisation, were very much active.

Secondly, the Quran as the source of Islam is far from anti-reason.Replete with verses challenging human beings to use their reason, the Quran quite often ends some of its verses with phrases like “will you not use your reason?” and “so that you might use your reason” which are mainly directed at those who are inconsistent in their thinking and actions.

In the same spirit, the Quran does not ever portray people who are reasonable and contemplative as bad and vile. On the contrary, they are described as those who are on the right path and are close to God.

They are the ones who posses true insight (ulu al-absar), true heart (ulu al-bab), true intelligence (ulu al-nuha), all referring to different aspects of reason (‘aql).

One of the verses pronounces that those who reflect on the creation of heavens and earth will eventually come to the conclusion that such creations are neither made in vain nor without purpose, but rather are signs to higher divine meanings (Quran 3:191).

As a matter of fact, this verse has become one of the motivating factors in the development of science in Islam.

In a few instances in the Quran, God challenges those who do not want to accept the teachings of the Prophet and the truth of religion to provide their burhan to prove themselves right.

The term burhan, which later became a terminology in Islamic philosophy, refers to the demonstrative proof that is the highest level of rational proof based on self-evident premises.

Thirdly, some rational principles play important roles even in the understanding of revelations as explained by Muslim theologians.For example, before every Quranic verse can be fully understood, it must be qualified rationally for its metaphorical level, if it is specific or general, or if it comes in contradiction with other verses in terms of meaning.

Such are the rational principles which are the prerequisites in understanding revelation.

Following this, another important rational method developed in the study of the Quran, which is the allegorical interpretation in regard to the verses which seem contradictory in meaning.

Such a method derived from the premise that the Quran must be consistent and self contradictions should not arise. In other words, those who read the Quran must be reasonably sound so as to understand that some verses are not in contradiction with others.

Fourthly, in Islam both reason and religion are innate to human beings. Being an essential characteristic, every human being is endowed with reason, and for that matter, the human being is defined by philosophers as a thinking living being (al-hayawan al-natiq). The great Muslim thinker, al-Ghazali, defines reason as a natural disposition in man that differentiates him from other living beings.

As to religion, which in Islam is reflected in the concept of conscious and willing submission to one God (aslama) and true worship (ibadah), they are already inherent characteristics of every child who, according to a saying of the Prophet, is born into this world pure and sinless, hence has already submitted itself to God.

In fact, another Quranic verse reiterates that even all of the children of Adam have submitted themselves to God through their covenant with Him before coming to this world (Quran 7:172).

It is therefore hardly conceivable that both religion and reason, which are innate, can be contradictory in nature.

Public Security is a Worrying State, says Ex-IGP

July 13, 2012

Former IGP says Public Security is at a “Worrying State”

by Amin Iskandar@http://www.themalaysianinsider.com

Former IGP Tan Sri Musa Hassan has accused the authorities of hiding facts from the public over the country’s crime rate, claiming that public security has now reached a “worrying stage”.

In an interview with The Malaysian Insider, Musa told the government that there was no need to mask crime figures, pointing out that if crime was not on the rise, top-ranking officials and ministers would not need to hire bodyguards.

“The public needs to know the truth, there is no need to hide when it comes to crime. When I was the IGP, I always spoke about rising crime,” he pointed out in the interview yesterday.Musa, who has served in the Royal Malaysian Police for over four decades, was the country’s IGP for four years from 2006 before he was succeeded by Tan Sri Ismail Omar on September 13, 2010.

Despite the recent spate of assaults, robberies and kidnappings, the Police, government efficiency unit Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) and the Home Ministry have held on to statistics showing that the country’s crime rate has dipped considerably since initiatives under the Government Transformation Programme (GTP) were put in place two years ago.

PEMANDU’s “Reduce Crime NKRA” unit held a media briefing yesterday to allay public fears on the issue and released fresh statistics showing that the rate dropped again in the first five months of the year by 10.1 per cent.

It had previously released figures to show that index crime had dropped by 11.1 per cent from 2010 to last year while street crime dipped 39.7 per cent in the same period.

The agency even appealed to the media for assistance to help correct the public’s perception of crime, urging for more “balanced reporting”.But Musa appeared to dismiss the figures and suggested instead that the government appoint a third party to conduct an independent review of the country’s crime rate and produce its own statistics. “During my time, I asked Universiti Sains Malaysia to prepare crime statistics,” he said.

At yesterday’s PEMANDU briefing, unit director Eugene Teh cited several surveys conductedby foreign pollsters, which he said further supports the agency’s crime statistics. Among others, Teh pointed to the latest Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) survey which showed that public fear of crime in Malaysia dropped 3.9 per cent from 58.5 per cent in December 2009 to 54.6 per cent in May this year.Musa suggested improvements in police operations as one of the measures to help reduce crime, saying the force could change its crime prevention methods to “intelligence procurement”.

“We need to get intel information first. If the information is good in terms of its procurement, and we work closely with foreign enforcers, then we would be able to ascertain the background of a person much earlier to monitor them.

“It is the same within our country… we need to monitor local gangsters and criminals,” he said.

The experienced former top cop added that a similar trend in rising crime was currently being felt in countries across the globe due to the economic crisis in Europe.

“Globalisation makes it hard for a country to prevent crime; it causes many foreigners, whose backgrounds we do not know, to enter our country… especially those from Nigeria. These are some of the reasons behind the rise in the crime rate here,” he said.

Despite the repeated assurances and statistics from the authorities, Malaysians, especially women, appear to be unconvinced and have grown more insecure when out on the streets.

Even the country’s expatriate community has weighed in on the issue and said they were increasingly fearful for their safety here, especially after the kidnapping of 12-year-old Dutch schoolboy Nayati Moodliar, who was snatched while walking to school earlier this year, hit global headlines.

In the latest high-profile crime to be reported, the mother of a Penang federal lawmaker was robbed at knife point in a pre-dawn home invasion in George Town.

Other cases which made headlines in recent weeks include an ATM robbery at a hypermarket that saw about RM1.2 million carted away, a carjacking and kidnapping of a Singaporean family in Johor and a Malacca clerk who died after she fell off her motorbike after being attacked by two men.

Following the string of ATM robberies, banks are also now mulling moving their ATMs located in malls, supermarkets, petrol and rail stations to alternative locations.

Let the Revolution in College Education Begin

May 16, 2012

NY Times: Come The Revolution (05-15-12)

by Thomas L. Friedman

Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school.

“I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.”

Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. The costs of getting a college degree have been rising faster than those of health care, so the need to provide low-cost, quality higher education is more acute than ever.

At the same time, in a knowledge economy, getting a higher-education degree is more vital than ever. And thanks to the spread of high-speed wireless technology, high-speed Internet, smartphones, Facebook, the cloud and tablet computers, the world has gone from connected to hyperconnected in just seven years. Finally, a generation that has grown up on these technologies is increasingly comfortable learning and interacting with professors through online platforms.

The combination of all these factors gave birth to Coursera.org, which launched on April 18, with the backing of Silicon Valley venture funds, as my colleague John Markoff first reported.

Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a fee for years. And schools like M.I.T. and Stanford have been offering lectures for free online. Coursera is the next step: building an interactive platform that will allow the best schools in the world to not only offer a wide range of free course lectures online, but also a system of testing, grading, student-to-student help and awarding certificates of completion of a course for under $100. (Sounds like a good deal. Tuition at the real-life Stanford is over $40,000 a year.) Coursera is starting with 40 courses online — from computing to the humanities — offered by professors from Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania.

“The universities produce and own the content, and we are the platform that hosts and streams it,” explained Daphne Koller, a Stanford computer science professor who founded Coursera with Ng after seeing tens of thousands of students following their free Stanford lectures online. “We will also be working with employers to connect students — only with their consent — with job opportunities that are appropriate to their newly acquired skills.

So, for instance, a biomedical company looking for someone with programming and computational biology skills might ask us for students who did well in our courses on cloud computing and genomics. It is great for employers and employees — and it enables someone with a less traditional education to get the credentials to open up these opportunities.”

M.I.T., Harvard and private companies, like Udacity, are creating similar platforms. In five years this will be a huge industry. While the lectures are in English, students have been forming study groups in their own countries to help one another. The biggest enrollments are from the United States, Britain, Russia, India and Brazil. “One Iranian student e-mailed to say he found a way to download the class videos and was burning them onto CDs and circulating them,” Ng said last Thursday. “We just broke a million enrollments.”

To make learning easier, Coursera chops up its lectures into short segments and offers online quizzes, which can be auto-graded, to cover each new idea. It operates on the honor system but is building tools to reduce cheating.

In each course, students post questions in an online forum for all to see and then vote questions and answers up and down. “So the most helpful questions bubble to the top and the bad ones get voted down,” Ng said. “With 100,000 students, you can log every single question. It is a huge data mine.” Also, if a student has a question about that day’s lecture and it’s morning in Cairo but 3 a.m. at Stanford, no problem. “There is always someone up somewhere to answer your question” after you post it, he said. The median response time is 22 minutes.

These top-quality learning platforms could enable budget-strained community colleges in America to “flip” their classrooms. That is, download the world’s best lecturers on any subject and let their own professors concentrate on working face-to-face with students. Says Koller: “It will allow people who lack access to world-class learning — because of financial, geographic or time constraints — to have an opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families.”

When you consider how many problems around the world are attributable to the lack of education, that is very good news. Let the revolution begin.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 16, 2012, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Come the Revolution.

Eusociality? A Review of Edward O Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth

May 12, 2012

New York Times Sunday Book Review

The Original Colonists
‘The Social Conquest of Earth,’ by Edward O. Wilson

by Paul Bloom (05-11-12)

This is not a humble book. Edward O. Wilson wants to answer the questions Paul Gauguin used as the title of one of his most famous paintings: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” At the start, Wilson notes that religion is no help at all — “myth making could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity” — and contemporary philosophy is also irrelevant, having “long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence.”

The proper approach to answering these deep questions is the application of the methods of science, including archaeology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Also, we should study insects.

Insects? Wilson (right), now 82 and an emeritus professor in the department of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard, has long been a leading scholar on ants, having won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes for the 1990 book on the topic that he wrote with Bert Hölldobler. But he is better known for his work on humans.

His “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,” a landmark attempt to use evolutionary theory to explain human behavior, was published in 1975. Those were strange times, and Wilson was smeared as a racist and fascist, attacked by some of his Harvard colleagues and doused with water at the podium of a major scientific conference. But Wilson’s days as a pariah are long over.

An evolutionary approach to psychology is now mainstream, and Wilson is broadly respected for his scientific accomplishments, his environmental activism, and the scope and productivity of his work, which includes an autobiography and a best-selling novel, ­“Anthill.”

In “The Social Conquest of Earth,” he explores the strange kinship between humans and some insects. Wilson calculates that one can stack up log-style all humans alive today into a cube that’s about a mile on each side, easily hidden in the Grand Canyon. And all the ants on earth would fit into a cube of similar size.

More important, humans and certain insects are the planet’s ­“eusocial” species — the only species that form communities that contain multiple generations and where, as part of a division of labor, community members sometimes perform altruistic acts for the benefit of others.

Wilson’s examples of insect eusociality are dazzling. The army ants of Africa march in columns of up to a million or more, devouring small animals that get in their way. Weaver ants “form chains of their own bodies in order to pull leaves and twigs together to create the walls of shelters. Others weave silk drawn from the spinnerets of their larvae to hold the walls in place.” Leafcutter ants “cut fragments from leaves, flowers and twigs, carry them to their nests and chew the material into a mulch, which they fertilize with their own feces. On this rich material, they grow their principal food, a fungus belonging to a species found nowhere else in nature. Their gardening is organized as an assembly line, with the material passed from one specialized caste to the next.”

There are obvious parallels with human practices like war and agriculture, but Wilson is also sensitive to the differ­ences. The social insects evolved more than 100 million years ago; their accomplishments come from “small brains and pure instinct”; and their lengthy evolution has led them to become vital elements of the biosphere.

In contrast, Homo sapiens evolved quite recently; we have language and culture; and the consequences of our relatively sudden domination have been mixed, to put it mildly: “The rest of the living world could not coevolve fast enough to accommodate the onslaught of a spectacular conqueror that seemed to come from nowhere, and it began to crumble from the pressure.”

This book offers a detailed reconstruction of what we know about the evolutionary histories of these two very different conquerors. Wilson’s careful and clear analysis reminds us that scientific accounts of our origins aren’t just more accurate than religious stories; they are also a lot more interesting.

But Wilson also makes some radical claims about the origins of our eusocial natures. For ants, he argues that workers are “robotic extensions of the mother’s genome,” so their eusociality is explained through the standard process of natural selection, in which single colonies are akin to single animals. But this won’t work for us; unlike insects, all humans compete for reproductive resources. So how did we get to be such social animals?

One solution is kin selection, as developed by William Hamilton and extended by Richard Dawkins in his discussion of “the selfish gene.” The idea is that from the perspective of the gene there is no hard-and-fast difference between an animal’s interest and the interest of its kin, and hence a gene that guides an animal to help its relatives could spread through the population even if this helping was costly to the animal itself.

The story, most likely apocryphal, goes that the biologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked if he would give his life to save his drowning brother, and he responded that he wouldn’t, but he would happily do it for two brothers or eight cousins. That’s the logic of kin selection.

Wilson was once a proponent of this view, but in a 2010 article in Nature, written with his Harvard colleagues Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, he argued against it — for insects and for humans. Their attack was controversial, to say the least, and there were outraged responses in a later issue of that journal, including one with 137 authors.

These critics charged that Wilson and his colleagues were ignoring the considerable explanatory accomplishments of kin selection theory and, from a theoretical standpoint, were mistaken in drawing a sharp distinction between kin selection (which they reject) and “standard natural selection theory” (which they accept).

Wilson’s favored alternative theory for the evolution of eusociality is group selection. The notion is that a gene for helping behavior can thrive even if it’s disadvantageous for the individual — so long as it gives the individual’s group an advantage over other groups. Darwin provided a nice example of this, imagining two tribes in conflict and noting that “if . . . the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other.”

Now, group selection has long been controversial; many scholars believe that while it is possible in principle, it is far weaker than standard within-group selection. Wilson himself says that eu­sociality is rare precisely because “group selection must be exceptionally powerful to relax the grip of individual selection.” But it might play some role in human evolution. The economist Samuel Bowles, for instance, has persuasively argued that the propensity to give one’s life in battle — the ultimate example of eusociality — might emerge because of the powerful advantage this gives to a warring community.

Wilson’s own theory is far too extreme, though. He adopts a Manichaean view of evolution, in which group selection is responsible for all of our virtues (“honor, virtue and duty”), while individual selection produces nothing but sin (“selfishness, cowardice and hypocrisy”). But it’s long been known that unrelated individuals can benefit from repeated cooperation with one another, so long as there are mechanisms in place to encourage reciprocity and punish betrayal.

There is now evidence — from computational modeling, observations of real-world human interactions and laboratory studies — showing that our altruistic and eusocial choices are sensitive to past interactions with individuals and that we are inclined to reward cooperators and punish cheats and free-riders. This evidence suggests that group conflict is not the sole force that has shaped human eusociality. Wilson must be familiar with this research, but doesn’t acknowledge how it complicates his account.

Sandwiched between his discussion of evolution and a concluding statement called “A New Enlightenment” is a series of chapters on language, culture, morality, religion and art. This section is intended to answer the “What are we?” question, but it is disappointing. Each chapter is only about a dozen pages and mainly summarizes the proposals of other scholars. While Wilson is never boring, there are few new insights here. The feeling you get recalls a remark once made by Roger Ebert about an artsy horror movie: there is foreboding and there is after boding, but no actual boding.

Wilson ends his chapter on morality with some ideas as to how evolutionary theory can inform our moral understanding. He argues that the papal ban on artificial contraception is based on a misunderstanding of evolution. Sex didn’t evolve just for reproduction; rather, “continuous and frequent intercourse . . . is genetically adaptive: it ensures that the woman and her child have help from the father.” Similarly, the condemnation of homosexuality is unreasonable because homosexuality is also likely to be a biological adaptation: “Homosexuality may give advantages to the group by special talents, unusual qualities of personality, and the specialized roles and professions it generates.”

Well, maybe, but Wilson never explains why these evolutionary hypotheses should influence our moral judgments. Suppose it turns out that he is mistaken and sex did evolve solely for reproduction. Would this show that non-procreative sex acts really are sins? Hardly.

Wilson goes on to claim that there are some ethical precepts that “all will agree should be opposed everywhere without exception,” and his list includes slavery and genocide. But actually the wrongness of these acts is a relatively recent discovery (the Bible, for instance, approves of both of them). And from the group selection view Wilson himself favors, an appetite for genocide — the destruction of one group by another — can be seen as the ultimate biological good. Our understanding that genocide is a monstrous act illustrates the limits of evolutionary theory as a grounding for morality.

I agree with Wilson that evolutionary theory has some relevance to how we should live our lives. But the connections are subtle, and here, at least, Wilson is too quick to dismiss philosophy and allied disciplines when it comes to answering the questions that matter the most.

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale and the author of “How Pleasure Works.” He is writing a book about the development of morality.

A version of this review appeared in print on May 13, 2012, on page BR30 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Original Colonists.

Academic Space in the Fifth Estate

March 28, 2012

by M. Sidek Hassan (03-24-12)@http://www.thestar.com.my

Universities and academics must take advantage of this new and exciting challenge and opportunity to prove their intellectual prowess.

MY objective today is to fire a conversation, a debate even, on the role of academia in influencing opinion, shaping thinking, growing minds. And if the social media is increasingly popular and impacting the lives of our young, is there a place for academia in this space? And if there is that space, can it be considered the Fifth Estate?

Let’s take a step back and appreciate the First, Second, Third and Fourth Estates. There is general acceptance as to these four estates, namely the clergy, First Estate, the nobility, Second Estate, the proletariat, Third Estate, and the print media, Fourth Estate.

Voicing out: Are members of the academia a part of the Fifth Estate? Yes, if one agrees that their role goes beyond providing checks and balances. Yes, if their role involves shaping thought and character.

But whatever the definition, the point to note is that this was a system of classifying the political reality of the time, well before democracy existed as a fundamental system of political belief.

Recall the French Revolution, the uprising of the oppressed, which gave rise eventually to the Fourth Estate which is largely a response to the need to provide checks and balance to the other three estates.

This Fourth Estate, the print media, has today evolved into the mainstream media. It was first conceived as the people’s conscience, giving voice to the marginalised.

Whereas in years past the print media provided the outlet for the masses, today, people, especially the young, find empowerment in Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other forms of social media. So is this the Fifth Estate?

There is no one definition for the Fifth Estate. However, there is growing consensus that the alternative media, the folks who blog and are on Facebook and Twitter comprise the Fifth Estate.

Is our PM then part of the Fifth Estate? He has Facebook and he tweets. Many of us do that too. Can civil servants be part of the Fifth Estate?

The Fifth Estate’s role is essentially to provide another avenue for the voices to be heard, to provide another point of view. It is not so much about the “social media” per se but about the fact that people are using and accessing this medium to be heard and to hear others’ views.

They want to be able to tell you things that the Fourth Estate supposedly won’t report and share information they claim they cannot push through there.

Inevitably, the active participants in the digital media are the young, your Generation Y folks, and perhaps those who claim to have become disillusioned with the other Estates.

Social media and the digital network have the ability to catalyse another revolution of sorts, one that has gone down in the idiom as the Arab Spring. This is the power of the digital revolution, pun intended!

This Fifth Estate is driven by technology. They have the power to influence, to shape how people think, how they learn and how they glean knowledge, just with their key strokes. However, the digital network can wield as much good as harm.

So, where does this leave the academia? Can we regard academia as the Fifth Estate? Or are members of the academia a part of the Fifth Estate?

Yes, they are part of the Fifth Estate if one agrees that their role goes beyond providing checks and balances. Yes, if their role involves shaping thought and character. And, focusing on the greater good.

The following prerequisites for the academic fraternity to claim a Fifth Estate status:

•  YOU must believe that yours is a noble profession and that you are in it out of conviction and choice. You must be an academic because you have the skills, knowledge and expertise. You are in this field because you are convinced that you can make a difference in the lives of the people you teach; that you want to be involved. Make yours the profession of choice!

• YOU must believe that yours is a profession of immense power and influence. You have the power to shape minds, thought and character. You believe that education shapes and empowers the human intellect and spirit.

Yes, yours is the challenge of meeting differing expectations. One group demands that universities and institutions of higher learning produce graduates who are work-place ready.

Then, there is the other group that feels the university is the place for exploring new knowledge, for research and experiments in ideas and thoughts.A university education is distinct from a vocational or technical institution. It serves to provide students with broader education, that you teach them to think – think critically, think strategically. Get this right, and employability will follow.

Universities are not just places where someone goes for a degree and also are more than just places where people engaged in “research”.

So, to be a force in the Fifth Estate, Malaysian universities must reclaim their intellectual leadership. Use your expertise, and influence the discourse in whichever or whatever sphere.

The Fifth Estate presents you with new and exciting challenge and opportunity to prove your intellectual prowess.

• YOU must believe that in the course of your work, you can give voice to the marginalised. In this space, you re-assert that all-important relationship between the university and society. Your research should guide the conversations on topics concerning society and the minorities with no one to speak for them.

More important than that, is your ability to propose solutions, credible solutions because they would be borne out of your research and experience.

The message is that your work contributes to the larger good. Use the technology available to you to convince, influence and expand your reach.

You must use your expertise to differentiate yourself from the citizen journalists in the blogosphere. Many bloggers advocate the same things we dislike in the Fourth Estate. They are often biased and tend to take extreme positions, regardless of the facts.

Academics on the other hand are accused of being detached from the real world; that you live in your ivory tower. While the bloggers are said to politicise issues, academics are accused of being theoretical.

The academic fraternity’s strength is in the ability to report based on research. You have the training to enable you to be objective and the intellectual tools to scan the environment, and provide different perspectives so essential for making informed decisions.

More importantly, you have the ability to impart that expertise to your charges and start a virtuous cycle of intellectual discourse that contributes ideas for society’s betterment.

• FOCUS on the people, not on the technology. This is what sets you apart from the other folks who claim the Fifth Estate. For them, it is Facebook, Twitter and their blogs.

More often than not, these netizens just want to get their point of view out there without much thought about the consequences or impact on others’ lives.

But you have the advantage of knowing how to build relationships. You are trained to analyse, to teach, to communicate. This is about extending your reach beyond your classroom.

Yes, there is a place for academia in the Fifth Estate. However, I want to push the unconventional point that the Fifth Estate does not belong exclusively to any particular group.It includes anyone who can listen and give space to the otherwise, marginalised. Such that even Government and government officials can be part of it!

For in the final analysis, what the Fifth Estate has to do is to influence people and for the right reasons; in what is right, what is true and what is good. For is it not said somewhere that the voice of the people is the voice of God!

This lecture was delivered by Tan Sri Mohd Sidek Hassan, Chief Secretary to the Government, at the Chief Secretary Annual Lecture Series organised by the Razak School of Government, on Tuesday, 20th March 2012.

Universities are about advancing science, research and knowledge

March 2, 2012

http://www.nst.com.my

by Dato’ Dr Ibrahim Ahmad Bajunid

ALMOST everywhere, universities are in the race for numbers and quality. There are many institutions called or given the status of universities which are really not universities in substance, spirit or tradition. To be truly a university requires more than official recognition and compliance to regulatory requirements.

A university is an idea, a state of mind, a supreme intellectual existence, a capacity to understand, a consuming passion for some calling, some mission for humanity.

A university does not happily imitate mainstream policies and practices, oblivious of the realities at the margins. A true university has the mission of the abolition of ignorance and the assumption of knowledge, the creation of luminosity of knowledge, the ascendance of the civilised.

Universities are about intellectual character, caring, compassion and enduring imagination. Universities are not just about conformance and mainstreaming.  Universities are really about being at the margins. The margins, metaphorically, are the frontiers, the zones of overlaps between the rivers and seas, the deserts and the verdant lands, the horizons when the lands and seas seem to meet the skies.

Universities are not about comfort and complacency but are about the challenge, the untried and unknown, the unfamiliar and the not understood.  But how do Malaysian public and private university communities see themselves? Universities are institutions where professors and students, learners all, have the passion for truth, knowledge seeking, justice and to educate learners and improve society.

In universities, there is the collective sense of awareness and consciousness of Eric Hoffer’s insight that in times of drastic changes, it is the learners who inherit the future.  The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world which no longer exists. Do universities recognise that these are times of drastic changes? Are passions for creative, constructive imagination unleashed and is there preparedness for drastic changes in the future or is academic complacency the cultural norm?

Excellence and continuous betterment are not just about imitating the so called “best practices” but are about balancing the best of mature knowledge considered correct, and the excitement of learning from errors, and charting out new territories — terra incognito — the unknown territories of mind,  matter and energy.

Great universities with great teachers and knowledge leaders do the following:

• THEY are on the eternal quest for truth.

•  THEY go beyond teaching for survival to teaching for wisdom and balance, dialogically and dialectically.

•  THEY reflect the genuine passions of scholars and are not about pretensions of scholarship.

•  THEY serve humanity beyond their parochial existence.

•  THEY teach and conduct research at and across the margins.

•  THEY foster understanding of teaching for happiness as wealth.

•  THEY cultivate multiple intelligences, not just disciplinary modes of thinking, teaching and learning.

•  THEY grow paradigm pioneers.

•  THEY create life-changing learning and living experiences for students and staff.

•  THEY are the guardians of high culture and celebrate exquisiteness of life’s/human refinements.

•  THEY foster the development of imagination to confront the challenges of the times.

THEIR knowledge becomes the basis and principles of moral authority of their society, the conscience of their civilisation and of mankind.

The easy part of managing and leading a university is about numbers and material indicators. The climate, ethos, conscience and moral authority and character of a university would be the harder challenges of the meaning-making of universities.

The excellence and real impact of any university is really what they do at the margins, at the leading edge. When universities  become all too familiar and alike, teaching more of the same that schools teach, then these institutions are extensions of high schools.

When universities are institutions of indoctrination demanding conformity from all, staff and students and administrators, then these are group-think training camps and not universities.

When universities merely respond to the needs and demands of employers for robotic beings, then the institutions are not universities but are production plants.

When universities merely deliver the knowledge defined as final by professional bodies, professional inertia and academic malaise set in. A university inherits the received wisdom of the past but must in turn create its own definitions of the present, contribute to and map out its own new terrains and universes.

In the context of the rapid expansion of different models of universities and the policies of democratisation of higher education, are Malaysian universities developing cultures of mainstream compliance or meeting challenges at the verdant margins?

Darwin, Humanism and Science–A.C.Grayling

January 27, 2012

I have posted a number of Prof. A.C. Grayling’s articles on the blog in the past. He is my favorite Philosopher of our generation. In keeping with that, I thought it would be a good idea if we listen to his lecture on Darwin, Humanism and Science. Below is some background that may be useful for us to understand his speech:

http://ottawa.humanists.net/lifewithoutgod/humanism.php

A.C. Grayling explores the idea of Humanism informed by Science

Humanism is a positive view of life that roots itself in the natural world and celebrates freedom, cooperation, understanding, creativity and compassion. It is a philosophy that allows people to affirm that they are responsible, ethical members of society, and justify it in a way that is compatible with modern science.

Most Humanists reject supernatural explanations for everything, including the most puzzling and seemingly unexplainable phenomena. We don’t, however, dismiss that some things that have traditionally been in the realm of theology deserve an explanation. Some of these important things include: The origins of the universe, ethics and morality, consciousness, emotion, and purpose. The project that is Humanism is to assemble natural explanations for all of these things into a view of the world that is logical, defensible, and most importantly: awe inspiring.

Doubt, Critical Thinking and the Scientific Method

“Take no one’s word for it”

One of the most core values of modern day Humanism is that it advocates the use of critical thinking and the scientific method in every aspect of a person’s life. Doubt is a feeling that is cherished by a Humanist because it has proven to be the great engine of innovation and progress.

Many say that one of the most important discoveries ever made by humanity was the scientific method. Since it has been adopted, the human species has been lifted out of millenia of dark ages and stagnation, and into a brand new world of understanding and discovery.

The scientific method is a self correcting process used for uncovering the nature of our world. Humanists believe that we are far from understanding the anything in it’s entirety, and only by subjecting all of our ideas to deep scrutiny and experiment will we ever get any closer. To a Humanist, nothing is beyond scrutiny and inquiry, not even the principles of Humanism! The fact that we are always open to being wrong, or not quite right is what allows us to move forward and grow.

Freedom, Cooperation, and Responsibility

“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”

Take a moment, and try to imagine your life as a hermit with absolutely no interaction with other human beings on a day to day basis. Think of everything that you would be responsible for, and think of how barren a life in isolation would be emotionally. It is a dark thought, but on the bright side, it would be next to impossible to realize in our modern day world.

There are billions of humans on this planet, and millenia ago we had the collective realization that it would be much better for everyone if we organized ourselves and cooperated in societies. Today we have no choice but to play a contributory role in this massive human adventure. Humanists not only accept this fact but realize that respecting our roles as members of society is crucial in maintaining and bettering it.

Unfortunately we have not yet been able to level the playing field for everyone born into this world, and to do so is a mammoth yet extremely admirable goal to which we strive. Humanists value systems of organization and government that encourage peace, freedom, prosperity, diversity, and sustainability.

And how about Richard Dawkins? He lectures on Charles Dawin and Evolution at The Humanist Society of the United Kingdom:

Singapore: Becoming Asia’s Hub for Talent

December 17, 2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

The Singapore Government’s intent is to become the hub for talent in Asia. This means it wants to attract the brightest and best people to work there. This may sound like a lofty aim but it is backed up with long-term planning and clear policies.

by Octavius Black (12-04-110

In the ballroom of the Raffles Hotel, Singapore’s Minister for Trade and Industry, Lim Hng Kiang (left), finishes his speech to commemorate the signing of a trade agreement between his country and the UK.

There is healthy applause. The mood is upbeat after his sunny version of what the glorious relationship between our two countries could grow into. Vince Cable takes to the stage to respond.

“When I studied economics at Cambridge in the 1960s”, he begins, and so marks the contrast between one nation looking steadfastly forward with masterful strategic intent and steely determination, and the other, all too often, revelling in nostalgia.

There is an old saying: “It matters not where a man is standing but which way he is facing.” Singapore may have a population smaller than London but after a packed week of 33 meetings, I am left in no doubt both which way it is facing and quite how serious it is about getting there.

The Singapore government’s intent is to become the hub for talent in Asia. This means it wants to attract the brightest and best people to work there. This may sound like a lofty aim but it is backed up with long-term planning and clear policies.

An executive from BP tells me that when he secured his work permit, he was delicately told that while it was officially to work for his esteemed employer, they would happily extend it for five years if he chose to stay and work for anyone else. A senior vice- president at Deutsche Bank was, I’m told, called up by a caring civil servant when, after a tour of duty, he decided to return West. The bureaucrat reminded him exactly how much tax he had paid, thanked him for his contribution and explained that if the banker did decide to stay on a little longer, they would greatly reduce any future tax take.

These may sound like cunning tactics. Indeed, they are. But they are part of a much grander strategy.

I went to visit Chee Wei Kwan(right), who heads up the Human Capital Leadership Institute (HCLI). The HCLI is seed funded by the government to provide intellectual leadership on how to build leadership and manage talent (meaning employees) in Asia. It conducts pan-Asian research on what makes people tick (at work) as well as programmes that bring in worldwide leaders from business, government and academia.

Perhaps most impressive of all is its fledgling alternative to the Harvard Business Review, HQ Asia. The topics range from a Confucian view on talent development to how Asian leaders can make more impact in Western head offices. The first edition went to 4,000 people; the second edition to a cool 11,000 (they had to do a reprint).

I’m even more surprised when I visit Zee Yoong Kang(left), CEO of the learning hub at NTUC, the Singaporean equivalent of the TUC. He tells me the days of collective bargaining are over. Instead, the unions’ focus is to work with the government to build skills that make Singaporeans even more employable; the more they do this the more powerful their lobbying of government and so the more funds they receive. At the moment, the focus is on building the management skills of people in organisations with fewer than 300 employees. The government has lots of money to invest in this area, he assures me.

It’s not just small businesses. Unilever is investing €40m in a vast new corporate university in Singapore. All their leadership development from across the world will be done in just two locations: London and Singapore. The ratio between the two is 40:60. Get the drift? Unilever does. With 3,000 chemistry grads a year in the UK (1,000 of whom are from overseas and so likely to return home) and more than 30,000 a year in China, it’s clear to them where the next generation of soap powder is likely to be invented. They have set up a research and development Centre in China which means, in a few years, the Singapore campus is going to grow even more.

My week in Singapore tells me four things: first, when a government shows clear, long-term strategic intent it can be formidable. The unions are hand in glove with an unequivocally capitalist government and civil servants neatly put their politicians’ policy into delightfully practical action.

Second, that a government that chooses the attraction of top talent as one of its core planks for growth gives a clear message to businesses that don’t.

Third, the nexus of smart people is moving East. This is partly because Asians who go to university in the West are returning home and partly because more smart Westerners are heading East (there are over 30,000 Brits in Singapore). Mainly though, it will be from the colossal investment in learning that Asians are making for themselves.

And my last lesson. My business, Mind Gym, needs to open there fast. This shouldn’t be difficult: as the civil servant told us only half joking, “if it takes you more than two hours to set up your company here, you’re doing something wrong”.

Octavius Black is CEO of Mind Gym. http://www.themindgym.com

Two Brains Running: One Fast and One Slow

November 27, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com

SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

Two Brains Running

By JIM HOLT
Published: November 25, 2011

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in economic science. What made this unusual — indeed, unique in the history of the prize — is that Kahneman is a psychologist. Specifically, he is one-half of a pair of psychologists who, beginning in the early 1970s, set out to dismantle an entity long dear to economic theorists: that arch-rational decision maker known as Homo economicus. The other half of the dismantling duo, Amos Tversky, died in 1996 at the age of 59. Had Tversky lived, he would certainly have shared the Nobel with Kahneman, his longtime collaborator and dear friend.

Human irrationality is Kahneman’s great theme. There are essentially three phases to his career. In the first, he and Tversky did a series of ingenious experiments that revealed twenty or so “cognitive biases” — unconscious errors of reasoning that distort our judgment of the world. Typical of these is the “anchoring effect”: our tendency to be influenced by irrelevant numbers that we happen to be exposed to. (In one experiment, for instance, experienced German judges were inclined to give a shoplifter a longer sentence if they had just rolled a pair of dice loaded to give a high number.)

In the second phase, Kahneman and Tversky showed that people making decisions under uncertain conditions do not behave in the way that economic models have traditionally assumed; they do not “maximize utility.” The two then developed an alternative account of decision making, one more faithful to human psychology, which they called “prospect theory.” (It was for this achievement that Kahneman was awarded the Nobel.) In the third phase of his career, mainly after the death of Tversky, Kahneman has delved into “hedonic psychology”: the science of happiness, its nature and its causes. His findings in this area have proved disquieting — and not just because one of the key experiments involved a deliberately prolonged colonoscopy.

“Thinking, Fast and Slow” spans all three of these phases. It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching, especially when Kahneman is recounting his collaboration with Tversky. (“The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”). So impressive is its vision of flawed human reason that the New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and Tversky’s work “will be remembered hundreds of years from now,” and that it is “a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.” They are, Brooks said, “like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.”

Now, this worries me a bit. A leitmotif of this book is overconfidence. All of us, and especially experts, are prone to an exaggerated sense of how well we understand the world — so Kahneman reminds us. Surely, he himself is alert to the perils of overconfidence. Despite all the cognitive biases, fallacies and illusions that he and Tversky (along with other researchers) purport to have discovered in the last few decades, he fights shy of the bold claim that humans are fundamentally irrational.

Or does he? “Most of us are healthy most of the time, and most of our judgments and actions are appropriate most of the time,” Kahneman writes in his introduction. Yet, just a few pages later, he observes that the work he did with Tversky “challenged” the idea, orthodox among social scientists in the 1970s, that “people are generally rational.” The two psychologists discovered “systematic errors in the thinking of normal people”: errors arising not from the corrupting effects of emotion, but built into our evolved cognitive machinery. Although Kahneman draws only modest policy implications (e.g., contracts should be stated in clearer language), others — perhaps overconfidently? — go much further. Brooks, for example, has argued that Kahneman and Tversky’s work illustrates “the limits of social policy”; in particular, the folly of government action to fight joblessness and turn the economy around.

Such sweeping conclusions, even if they are not endorsed by the author, make me frown. And frowning — as one learns on Page 152 of this book — activates the skeptic within us: what Kahneman calls “System 2.” Just putting on a frown, experiments show, works to reduce overconfidence; it causes us to be more analytical, more vigilant in our thinking; to question stories that we would otherwise unreflectively accept as true because they are facile and coherent. And that is why I frowningly gave this extraordinarily interesting book the most skeptical reading I could.

System 2, in Kahneman’s scheme, is our slow, deliberate, analytical and consciously effortful mode of reasoning about the world. System 1, by contrast, is our fast, automatic, intuitive and largely unconscious mode. It is System 1 that detects hostility in a voice and effortlessly completes the phrase “bread and. . . . ” It is System 2 that swings into action when we have to fill out a tax form or park a car in a narrow space. (As Kahneman and others have found, there is an easy way to tell how engaged a person’s System 2 is during a task: just look into his or her eyes and note how dilated the pupils are.)

More generally, System 1 uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices. System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes. So System 2 would seem to be the boss, right? In principle, yes. But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily. (The vogue term for this is “ego depletion.”) Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds to it. “Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is,” Kahneman writes, “the automatic System 1 is the hero of this book.” System 2 is especially quiescent, it seems, when your mood is a happy one.

t this point, the skeptical reader might wonder how seriously to take all this talk of System 1 and System 2. Are they actually a pair of little agents in our head, each with its distinctive personality? Not really, says Kahneman. Rather, they are “useful fictions” — useful because they help explain the quirks of the human mind.

To see how, consider what Kahneman calls the “best-known and most controversial” of the experiments he and Tversky did together: “the Linda problem.” Participants in the experiment were told about an imaginary young woman named Linda, who is single, outspoken and very bright, and who, as a student, was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. The participants were then asked which was more probable: (1) Linda is a bank teller. Or (2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. The overwhelming response was that (2) was more probable; in other words, that given the background information furnished, “feminist bank teller” was more likely than “bank teller.” This is, of course, a blatant violation of the laws of probability. (Every feminist bank teller is a bank teller; adding a detail can only lower the probability.) Yet even among students in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, who had extensive training in probability, 85 percent flunked the Linda problem. One student, informed that she had committed an elementary logical blunder, responded, “I thought you just asked for my opinion.”

What has gone wrong here? An easy question (how coherent is the narrative?) is substituted for a more difficult one (how probable is it?). And this, according to Kahneman, is the source of many of the biases that infect our thinking. System 1 jumps to an intuitive conclusion based on a “heuristic” — an easy but imperfect way of answering hard questions — and System 2 lazily endorses this heuristic answer without bothering to scrutinize whether it is logical.

Kahneman describes dozens of such experimentally demonstrated breakdowns in rationality — “base-rate neglect,” “availability cascade,” “the illusion of validity” and so on. The cumulative effect is to make the reader despair for human reason.

Are we really so hopeless? Think again of the Linda problem. Even the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was troubled by it. As an expert in probability he knew the right answer, yet he wrote that “a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down, shouting at me — ‘But she can’t just be a bank teller; read the description.’ ” It was Gould’s System 1, Kahneman assures us, that kept shouting the wrong answer at him. But perhaps something more subtle is going on. Our everyday conversation takes place against a rich background of unstated expectations — what linguists call “implicatures.” Such implicatures can seep into psychological experiments. Given the expectations that facilitate our conversation, it may have been quite reasonable for the participants in the experiment to take “Linda is a bank clerk” to imply that she was not in addition a feminist. If so, their answers weren’t really fallacious.

This might seem a minor point. But it applies to several of the biases that Kahneman and Tversky, along with other investigators, purport to have discovered in formal experiments. In more natural settings — when we are detecting cheaters rather than solving logic puzzles; when we are reasoning about things rather than symbols; when we are assessing raw numbers rather than percentages — people are far less likely to make the same errors. So, at least, much subsequent research suggests. Maybe we are not so irrational after all.

Some cognitive biases, of course, are flagrantly exhibited even in the most natural of settings. Take what Kahneman calls the “planning fallacy”: our tendency to overestimate benefits and underestimate costs, and hence foolishly to take on risky projects. In 2002, Americans remodeling their kitchens, for example, expected the job to cost $18,658 on average, but they ended up paying $38,769.

The planning fallacy is “only one of the manifestations of a pervasive optimistic bias,” Kahneman writes, which “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases.” Now, in one sense, a bias toward optimism is obviously bad, since it generates false beliefs — like the belief that we are in control, and not the playthings of luck. But without this “illusion of control,” would we even be able to get out of bed in the morning?

Optimists are more psychologically resilient, have stronger immune systems, and live longer on average than their more reality-based counterparts. Moreover, as Kahneman notes, exaggerated optimism serves to protect both individuals and organizations from the paralyzing effects of another bias, “loss aversion”: our tendency to fear losses more than we value gains. It was exaggerated optimism that John Maynard Keynes had in mind when he talked of the “animal spirits” that drive capitalism.

Even if we could rid ourselves of the biases and illusions identified in this book — and Kahneman, citing his own lack of progress in overcoming them, doubts that we can — it is by no means clear that this would make our lives go better. And that raises a fundamental question: What is the point of rationality? We are, after all, Darwinian survivors. Our everyday reasoning abilities have evolved to cope efficiently with a complex and dynamic environment. They are thus likely to be adaptive in this environment, even if they can be tripped up in the psychologist’s somewhat artificial experiments. Where do the norms of rationality come from, if they are not an idealization of the way humans actually reason in their ordinary lives? As a species, we can no more be pervasively biased in our judgments than we can be pervasively ungrammatical in our use of language — or so critics of research like Kahneman and Tversky’s contend.

Kahneman never grapples philosophically with the nature of rationality. He does, however, supply a fascinating account of what might be taken to be its goal: happiness. What does it mean to be happy? When Kahneman first took up this question, in the mid 1990s, most happiness research relied on asking people how satisfied they were with their life on the whole. But such retrospective assessments depend on memory, which is notoriously unreliable.

What if, instead, a person’s actual experience of pleasure or pain could be sampled from moment to moment, and then summed up over time? Kahneman calls this “experienced” well-being, as opposed to the “remembered” well-being that researchers had relied upon. And he found that these two measures of happiness diverge in surprising ways. What makes the “experiencing self” happy is not the same as what makes the “remembering self” happy. In particular, the remembering self does not care about duration — how long a pleasant or unpleasant experience lasts. Rather, it retrospectively rates an experience by the peak level of pain or pleasure in the course of the experience, and by the way the experience ends.

These two quirks of remembered happiness — “duration neglect” and the “peak-end rule” — were strikingly illustrated in one of Kahneman’s more harrowing experiments. Two groups of patients were to undergo painful colonoscopies. The patients in Group A got the normal procedure. So did the patients in Group B, except — without their being told — a few extra minutes of mild discomfort were added after the end of the examination. Which group suffered more? Well, Group B endured all the pain that Group A did, and then some. But since the prolonging of Group B’s colonoscopies meant that the procedure ended less painfully, the patients in this group retrospectively minded it less. (In an earlier research paper though not in this book, Kahneman suggested that the extra discomfort Group B was subjected to in the experiment might be ethically justified if it increased their willingness to come back for a follow-up!)

As with colonoscopies, so too with life. It is the remembering self that calls the shots, not the experiencing self. Kahneman cites research showing, for example, that a college student’s decision whether or not to repeat a spring-break vacation is determined by the peak-end rule applied to the previous vacation, not by how fun (or miserable) it actually was moment by moment. The remembering self exercises a sort of “tyranny” over the voiceless experiencing self. “Odd as it may seem,” Kahneman writes, “I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”

Kahneman’s conclusion, radical as it sounds, may not go far enough. There may be no experiencing self at all. Brain-scanning experiments by Rafael Malach and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, for instance, have shown that when subjects are absorbed in an experience, like watching the “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” the parts of the brain associated with self-consciousness are not merely quiet, they’re actually shut down (“inhibited”) by the rest of the brain. The self seems simply to disappear. Then who exactly is enjoying the film? And why should such egoless pleasures enter into the decision calculus of the remembering self?

Clearly, much remains to be done in hedonic psychology. But Kahneman’s conceptual innovations have laid the foundation for many of the empirical findings he reports in this book: that while French mothers spend less time with their children than American mothers, they enjoy it more; that headaches are hedonically harder on the poor; that women who live alone seem to enjoy the same level of well-being as women who live with a mate; and that a household income of about $75,000 in high-cost areas of the country is sufficient to maximize happiness. Policy makers interested in lowering the misery index of society will find much to ponder here.

By the time I got to the end of “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” my skeptical frown had long since given way to a grin of intellectual satisfaction. Appraising the book by the peak-end rule, I overconfidently urge everyone to buy and read it. But for those who are merely interested in Kahneman’s takeaway on the Malcolm Gladwell question it is this: If you’ve had 10,000 hours of training in a predictable, rapid-feedback environment — chess, firefighting, anesthesiology — then blink. In all other cases, think.

Jim Holt’s new book, “Why Does the World Exist?,” will be published next spring.

A version of this review appeared in print on November 27, 2011, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Two Brains

Protect Malaysia from Red Earth Radioactive Waste

October 4, 2011

http://hawkeyejack.blogspot.com/

by Hawkeye

A coalition of environmental activists, including Clement Chin (right) and electoral reform group Bersih, have banded together to advocate for sustainable development. They are organising a rally in Kuantan, set for Saturday (October 9).

Perhimpunan Hijau 109 or the Green Assembly, is led by a local activist group protesting against the Lynas rare earth refinery in Gebeng, not far from Kuantan.

The national steering committee of the event, which is made up of 10 NGOs, expects some 10,000 people to turn up, what with the promised attendance of popular Bersih chief Ambiga Sreenevasan.

Speaking to reporters in the Parliament lobby today, the committee’s representative, Bang Seet Ping, said the event aims to encourage the people to take responsibility for their future.

“I am just an ordinary person. I want to protect my home, my community and my children. There are many others who share my sentiments and aspirations, who want a better future for their children,” said Bang, a mother of two.

“Many of our lawmakers are not environmentally literate. I hope they hear us loud and clear. Environmental issues must be a key issue that voters take into consideration in the next general election,” Bang (left with Hishamuddin Rais) said.

The event will kick off with the rising of the sun at Pantai Balok. An endorsement of the Earth Charter – a declaration of fundamental ethical principles for sustainable development – will be made.

The objective of the event, said Bang, is to propel “a change in our way of life, change in how society works, how decisions are made, and how businesses are conducted”.

Also lending their support to the Green Assembly, are the residents of Kampung Bukit Koman in Raub, who are fighting to stop a nearby gold mining operation that is said to be linked to cyanide poisoning.

Posted by Hawkeye at 7:26 PM

How We Became the Center of the Universe

August 16, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/

NY TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe

By David Albert
Published: August 12, 2011

David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything: art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it anything like the attention it deserves, in the small space allotted here, is out of the question. But I will do what I can.

It hardly seems worth saying (to begin with) that the chutzpah of this guy is almost beyond belief, and that any book with these sorts of ambitions is necessarily, in some overall sense, a failure, or a fraud, or a joke, or madness. But Deutsch (who is famous, among other reasons, for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum computation) is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to spend time in his head.

He writes as if what he is giving us amounts to a tight, grand, cumulative system of ideas — something of almost mathematical rigor — but the reader will do much better to approach this book with the assurance that nothing like that actually turns out to be the case. I like to think of it as more akin to great, wide, learned, meandering conversation — something that belongs to the genre of, say, Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” — never dull, often startling and fantastic and beautiful, often at odds with itself, sometimes distasteful, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes (even, maybe, secondarily) true.

The thought to which Deutsch (right)’s conversation most often returns is that the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, or something like it, may turn out to have been the pivotal event not merely of the history of the West, or of human beings, or of the earth, but (literally, physically) of the universe as a whole.

Here’s the sort of thing he has in mind: The topographical shape and the material constitution of the upper surface of the island of Manhattan, as it exists today, is much less a matter of geology than it is of economics and politics and human psychology. The effects of geological forces were trumped (you might say) by other forces — forces that proved themselves, in the fullness of time, physically stronger.

Deutsch thinks the same thing must in the long run be true of the universe as a whole. Stuff like gravitation and dark energy are the sorts of things that determine the shape of the cosmos only in its earliest, and most parochial, and least interesting stages. The rest is going to be a matter of our own intentional doing, or at any rate it’s going to be a matter of the intentional doings of what Deutsch calls “people,” by which he means not only human beings, and not all human beings, but whatever creatures, from whatever planets, in whatever circumstances, may have managed to absorb the lessons of the Scientific Revolution.

There is a famous collection of arguments from the pioneering days of computer science to the effect that any device able to carry out every one of the entries on a certain relatively short list of elementary logical operations could, in some finite number of steps, calculate the value of any mathematical function that is calculable at all. Devices like that are called “universal computers.” And what interests Deutsch about these arguments is that they imply that there is a certain definite point, a certain definite moment, in the course of acquiring the capacity to perform more and more of the operations on that list, when such a machine will abruptly become as good a calculator as anything, in principle, can be.

Deutsch thinks that such “jumps to universality” must occur not only in the capacity to calculate things, but also in the capacity to understand things, and in the closely related capacity to make things happen. And he thinks that it was precisely such a threshold that was crossed with the invention of the scientific method.

There were plenty of things we humans could do, of course, prior to the invention of that method: agriculture, or the domestication of animals, or the design of sundials, or the construction of pyramids. But all of a sudden, with the introduction of that particular habit of concocting and evaluating new hypotheses, there was a sense in which we could do anything. The capacities of a community that has mastered that method to survive, and to learn, and to remake the world according to its inclinations, are (in the long run) literally, mathematically, infinite.

And Deutsch is convinced that the tendency of the world to give rise to such communities, more than, say, the force of gravitation, or the second law of thermodynamics, or even the phenomenon of death, is what ultimately gives the world its shape, and what constitutes the genuine essence of nature. “In all cases,” he writes, “the class of transformations that could happen spontaneously — in the absence of knowledge — is negligibly small compared with the class that could be effected artificially by intelligent beings who wanted those transformations to happen. So the explanations of almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would be applied to bring those phenomena about.”

And there is a beautiful and almost mystical irony in all this: that it was precisely by means of the Scientific Revolution, it was precisely by means of accepting that we are not the center of the universe, that we became the center of the universe.

This is all definitely incredibly cool. But I have no idea how one might go about investigating whether it is true or false. It seems more to the point to think of it as something emotive — as the expression of a mood. An incredibly cool mood. A mood that (maybe) no human being could ever have been in before right now. A mood informed by profound and imaginative reflection on the best and most advanced science we have. But not exactly, not even remotely, a live scientific hypothesis.

Anyway, it’s that mood, or conceit, or whatever it is, that gives “The Beginning of Infinity” its name. But a lot of the meat of this book is in its digressions. And of those (alas) I can only, hastily, randomly, mention a few.

Deutsch is interested in neo-­Darwinian accounts of the evolution of culture. Such accounts treat cultural items — languages, religions, values, ideas, traditions — in much the way that Darwinian theories of biological evolution treat genes. They are called “memes,” and are treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.

He also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies for meme-­replication, one he calls “rational” and the other he calls “anti-rational.” Rational memes — the sort that Deutsch imagines will replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies — are simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or more rewarding because they tell us something useful about how the world actually works.

Irrational memes — which are more interesting, and more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the essential character of pre-­Enlightenment societies — reproduce themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent new ideas. And one particular subcategory of memes — about which Deutsch has very clever things to say — succeeds precisely by pretending not to tell the truth. So, for example: “Children who asked why they were required to enact onerous behaviors that did not seem functional would be told ‘because I say so,’ and in due course they would give their children the same reply to the same question, never realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true even though its holders do not believe it.)”

Another chapter is devoted entirely to the evolution of creativity. At first glance, the ability to come up with new and better ways of doing things would appear to confer an obvious survival advantage. But if that’s how it worked — or so Deutsch argues — then the archaeological record ought to contain evidence of the accumulation of such better ways of doing things that are contemporaneous with the time when the human brain was actually in the process of evolving. And it doesn’t, which would seem to amount to a puzzle.

Deutsch has a cute proposal for solving it. The thought is that the business of merely passing on complicated memes, without any thought of innovation, requires considerable creativity on the part of their recipients. Learning a language, for instance, is a matter of inferring, from a small number of examples, a collection of general rules, each with a potentially infinite number of applications, governing the uses of the words involved. In Deutsch’s view, the work of keeping such complex memes in place, from generation to generation, is no less a creative business than the work of improving them.

This, as I said, is cute, and typical of the dexterity of Deutsch’s mind, but it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. Wouldn’t it be a reproductive advantage to have a heritable capacity to think on your feet, and outside the box, in a sticky situation, whether or not any particular thought you have ends up getting preserved, and passed down to your children, and enshrined in the practice of a whole society? And isn’t it possible that creativity was never selected for at all, but arose as a byproduct of the selection of something else?

As to the business of learning a language — well, gosh, haven’t linguists been thinking about these sorts of questions very hard, and very systematically, and along very different lines, for decades now? If Deutsch has reasons for thinking that all of that is somehow on the wrong track, he ought to tell us what those reasons are. As it is, none of that gets so much as a mention in his book.

And there are, in some places, explicit and outrageous falsehoods. Deutsch insists again and again, for example, that the only explanation we have for the observed behaviors of subatomic particles is a famous idea of Hugh Everett’s to the effect that the universe of our experience is one of an infinite and endlessly branching collection of similar universes — and that what resistance there is to this idea is attributable to the influence of this or that fancy, misguided philosophical critique of good, solid, old-­fashioned realistic attitudes toward what scientific theories have to tell us about the world. This is simply, wildly, wrong.

Most of the good, solid, old-fashioned scientific realists who take an interest in questions of the foundations of physics — like me, for example — are deeply skeptical of Everett’s picture. And that’s because there are good reasons to be worried that Everett’s picture cannot, in fact, explain those behaviors at all — and because there are other, much more reasonable-­looking proposals on the table, that apparently can.

Deutsch’s enthusiasm for the scientific and technological transformation of the totality of existence naturally brings with it a radical impatience with the pieties of environmentalism, and cultural relativism, and even procedural democracy — and this is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes creepy. He attacks these pieties, with spectacular clarity and intelligence, as small-­minded and cowardly and boring.

The metaphor of the earth as a spaceship or life-­support system, he writes, “is quite perverse. . . . To the extent that we are on a ‘spaceship,’ we have never merely been its passengers, nor (as is often said) its stewards, nor even its maintenance crew: we are its designers and builders. Before the designs created by humans, it was not a vehicle, but only a heap of dangerous raw materials.” But it’s hard to get to the end of this book without feeling that Deutsch is too little moved by actual contemporary human suffering. What moves him is the grand Darwinian competition among ideas. What he adores, what he is convinced contains the salvation of the world, is, in every sense of the word, The Market.

And there are moments when you just can’t imagine what the deal is with this guy. Deutsch — notwithstanding his open and anti-authoritarian and altogether admirable ideology of inquiry — is positively bubbling over with inviolable principles: that everything is explicable, that materialist interpretations of history are morally wrong, that “the only uniquely significant thing about humans . . . is our ability to create new explanations,” and on and on. And if the reader turns to Pages 64 and 65, she will find illustrations depicting two of them, literally, carved in stone. I swear.

Never mind. He is exactly who he is, and he is well worth getting to know, and we are very lucky indeed to have him.

David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience.”

Book Review: Perplexities of Consciousness

July 31, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com

SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW- New York Times

Know Thyself: Easier Said Than Done
(Saya Mudah Lupa/Saya Tak Nampak)

by Nicholas Humphrey
Published: July 29, 2011

A few days before a review of my latest book appeared in these pages, I wrote to my editor, saying I had seen an advance copy and how much I liked the color illustration of the yellow moon. He replied that I must be mistaken, since the Book Review doesn’t use color. The next weekend he wrote to say he couldn’t think what had come over him — he reads the Book Review every week, and had somehow not noticed the color. Odd. And yet these lapses can happen to the best of us. Ask yourself what the Roman number four on the face of the church clock looks like. Most people will answer it looks like IV, but almost certainly the truth is it looks like IIII.

Why are we so bad at knowing — in this case remembering — what passes through our own minds? The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, in “Perplexities of Consciousness,” contends that our minds, rather than being open-access, are largely hidden territory. Despite what we believe about our powers of introspection, the reality is that we know awfully little about what our conscious experience amounts to. Even when reporting current experience, we make divergent, confused and even contradictory claims about what it’s like to be on the inside.

Consider binocular double vision, for example. Hold your index finger a foot in front of your nose, and look to the horizon. Some will say they see two “ghostly” fingers, but others will be sure they see just one. Note that people don’t disagree about the external facts — none of us think there’s really more than one finger out there — rather, we disagree at a level one step back: our private sensory experiences. And Schwitzgebel finds further examples across the range of mental life. “Is joy sometimes in the head, sometimes more visceral, sometimes a thrill, and sometimes an expansiveness, or, instead, does joy have a single, consistent core — a distinctive, identifiable, unique experiential character?” We can’t give a straight answer. “What exactly is my sensory experience as I stare at a penny?” Even in such a simple case, we can’t agree.

Now, you might suppose that a likely explanation for these disagreements is that different individuals have differently constituted brains, so they are not having the same experience to begin with. Indeed it has been discovered recently that some humans have three times as much brain cortex assigned to receiving information from the eyes as others do. And this must surely be influencing the quality of their experience somehow. Yet Schwitzgebel (right) argues that brain differences, even if they exist, are probably beside the point. For there is plenty of evidence that people will give different interpretations of the very same events inside their heads.

He begins with the curious case of color in dreams. When people today are asked whether they regularly dream in color, most say they do. But it was not always so. Back in the 1950s most said they dreamed in black and white. Presumably it can hardly be true that our grandparents had different brains that systematically left out the color we put in today. So this must be a matter of interpretation. Yet why such freedom about assigning color? Well, try this for an answer. Suppose that, not knowing quite what dreams are like, we tend to assume they must be like photographs or movies — pictures in the head. Then, when asked whether we dream in color we reach for the most readily available pictorial analogy. Understandably, 60 years ago this might have been black-and-white movies, while for most of us today it is the color version. But, here’s the thing: Neither analogy is necessarily the “right” one. Dreams don’t have to be pictures of any kind at all. They could be simply thoughts — and thoughts, even thoughts about color, are neither colored nor non-colored in themselves.

This explanation is of a piece with Schwitzgebel’s general line. We are fantasists about our own mental experiences because we have little other choice. When we are probed by questions beyond our introspective competence, we have to make the answers up as best we can. Schwitz­gebel’s message is very much in keeping with much writing in contemporary psychology that aims to knock us from our pedestals of Delphic self-assurance: to prove that we are, as Timothy Wilson says, “strangers to ourselves.”

This could all be true. We often do have trouble telling what’s going on inside our minds. But still I can’t say this is always because of feeble introspection. I suspect the real problem may be not that we know too little about our mental states but that we know too much. We are asked to say “what it’s like” — to dream, to imagine, to feel — as if there ought to be a simple answer: colored or not, single or double, in the head or in the heart. But, when it comes to it, the rich totality of our experience will not fit the Procrustean bed that philosophy, and everyday discourse also, tries to impose on it.

In the 1780s, Thomas Reid, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, chided his colleagues on just this score: for not appreciating the complex multilayered character of sensory experience. Reid argued that there are always two parallel threads to our experience: “The external senses have a double province; to make us feel, and to make us perceive.” Sensation is how we represent sensory stimuli at the surface of our bodies — the mental representation of “what’s happening to me”; perception, by contrast, is how we represent the outside world, “what’s happening out there.” And these two processes have dissimilar characteristics: sensation is raw and immediate, perception more categorical and slow.

Question, then (it’s one of Schwitzgebel’s examples): When the lights go up on a complex scene, do we immediately “see” the whole scene? The answer can only be yes, and no. At the level of visual sensation, yes, it’s all there, every part of the field, every stitch of the tapestry, seems to be filled in at once. But at the level of perception, no, our picture of what’s out there in the world gets built up over seconds. “What exactly is my experience?” If exactly means simply, this question is one to which there’s no good answer.

Reid complained that the habit of confounding sensation and perception “has been the occasion of most of the errors and false theories of philosophers with regard to the senses.” While Schwitz­gebel fails to pick up on the sensation-perception distinction where he should do, I’d say there is one consequence of it that could play right into his hands. For, remarkably enough, research has shown we don’t actually need sensation to perceive. There is a clinical syndrome known as “blindsight,” resulting from brain damage, where the subject — to his own astonishment — finds he can “see” the properties of things he’s looking at, even though all visual sensation has been lost. He may indeed be able to guess what color an object is, without, as it were, seeing the color in color. Could the existence of blindsight help resolve the paradox of the color — or lack of it — in dreams? Do we indeed “see blindly” in dreams? I think we may. We dream of Joseph, and weave him an amazing technicolor coat; yet, like the emperor, he is really wearing nothing but ideas.

Nicholas Humphrey is school professor emeritus of psychology at the London School of Economics. His most recent book is “Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness.”

UNIK’s Technical Advisor resigns

June 10, 2011

By Lee Wei Lian@http://www.themalaysianinsider.com

UNIK, the Prime Minister’s initiative tasked with restructuring the country’s public innovation ecosystem has hit a setback with the resignation of its technical advisor Dr. N Danaraj who was in charge of putting together the National Innovation Policy (NIP).

His resignation earlier this week could come as a blow to UNIK due to the loss of experience as Danaraj has a masters degree in public administration from Harvard, a doctorate from Oxford and was also technical advisor to the National Economic Advisory Council (NEAC), a senior fellow at Khazanah Nasional, and a research fellow at the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research.

His departure, which sources say was due to various disagreements with UNIK CEO Dr Kamaljit Singh over the NIP, comes as several innovation agencies have been privately expressing concern over the UNIK’s chief’s leadership style.

The innovation agencies are understood to be frustrated that their issues over proposed changes to the way federal grants are disbursed have not been adequately addressed and their growing resentment over the uncertainty could hamper UNIK’s efforts to implement initiatives.

Their unhappiness came to a head when they learnt that Kamaljit had proposed a freeze on funding by innovation agencies by July at the Economic Council (EC) meeting earlier this month without consulting them.

Sources say that a decision on the proposed freeze was postponed following objections from several other members of the  EC, which is chaired by the Prime Minister.

Kamaljit is understood to be in favour of implementing a competitive bidding system where both government agencies and ministries that disburse technology related grants such as Biotech Corp, the Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation (Mosti) and the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) bid against each other for the funds which will be put in a common pool, but agencies say it is unfair for agencies under the ministry to bid against the ministry itself.

One industry veteran familiar with the situation said that while some people might appear to “play ball” with Kamaljit because they believe he has the Prime Minister’s ear, the opposition might get more serious if he doesn’t get buy-in from the agencies.

“If you push things through without getting agreement, do you think the agencies will help you?” said the industry veteran. One industry player said UNIK is a good initiative but the main issue is lack of clarity from the top and claimed that the affected parties were being asked to trust Kamaljit without knowing all the details.

“Nobody’s afraid of competition,” said the industry player when asked about competitive bidding. “If we don’t perform, shut us down.”

“But you can’t put parents and children in the same basket and ask them to compete (for grant money budget), that’s not market forces,” he added referring to the concept of agencies competing against their parent ministries.

Some industry observers say however that Kamaljit may be trying to push things through because he feels that things will not get done otherwise.

“UNIK has an ambitious agenda and when you are short of time, you may be forced to step on the toes of those more used to a drawn out consultative process,” said one observer. “That’s why Unik is under the prime minister’s department.”

When contacted, Danaraj confirmed the resignation but declined to comment further.Kamaljit also declined to comment for the story when contacted.

UNIK, which stands for Unit Inovasi Khas or Special Innovations Unit, was established by Datuk Seri Najib Razak to develop and implement strategies to stimulate and support innovation in Malaysia.

Its website states that it is a special-purpose body designed to focus on two core priorities – improving Malaysia’s innovation eco-system and directly cultivating innovation.

Over a period of 18 months, UNIK in its current form, will focus on developing policy in support of an improved innovation eco-system while a statutory body called Agensi Inovasi Malaysia (AIM) will be set up to take over implementation and policy reform. Leading global strategy consultants, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) were also engaged by UNIK late last year to study the efficiency of funds disbursement in the public sector.

The three key recommendations from the study, which leveraged best practice from Singapore, US and Korea, were for Malaysia to focus funding in strategic sectors where it has comparative advantage, to introduce a performance management system that allows standardised performance comparison on outcomes across funds, and for more comprehensive linkages within the innovation ecosystem — research, entrepreneurs, investors and the private sector.