Ko Lectures
The Mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, gave a lecture at the National Taiwan University, using science to explain certain human behaviour and also gave some advice to the students. This was a few years back.
I sat through the entire 1.5hr webcast, feeling guilty that I actually invested more attention in this than any of the lectures back in university. If you are interested, you can refer below.
He touched on the truth table, probability, market structures, thermodynamics, and genetics, and shared some of his personal experiences. I like how he highlighted that humans like to take a chance at something when they jolly well know the outcome would most likely not turn out as expected, and that failure is the norm whereas success is an exception. Marked a few timecodes of some salient points:
26:24 Outliers of a distribution
45:38 Ko's take on death
47:35 Success and failure
1:19:20 Ko's take on fame and fortune
1:22:06 Mission of a doctor
He is someone I look up to. Apart from being smart, he is wise too. I do not follow Taiwan politics closely, but it is common to see politicians screaming and and talk with circular reasoning in council meetings. Many seem to have the warped mentality that logic and sense are proportionate to the volume of their voices. Ko has been doing well during his tenure, as seen from the many initiatives and projects he rolled out, the significant reduction of debt, and successes of events such as the Universiade 2017 and the control of the Covid-19 pandemic (case in point: Taipei started distributing masks via vending machines before Singapore). He's a pretty straightforward man, and may come across as snobbish. But oh well, he indeed has the bragging rights.
There was once he commented that Singapore is like a "canary inside a cage". One can guess what he was trying to insinuate. This remark angered many Singaporeans, expectedly. Some of his supporters leveraged on his statement and further weighed in. I thought there was no need for a rift between people over this. Ko does read Lee Kuan Yew's publications to gain governance insight, so maybe Singapore isn't all that bad. But then he never seemed to have said a word of praise to Singapore. Maybe his pride gets in the way, but well, isn't it understandable for humans to have flaws? Many tend to be extremists who fail to see the bigger picture and vehemently stand their own ground while being oblivious to inadequacies - blind supporters for short. Hence sometimes it is pretty amusing to see how people argue on the net. And that's also why they say you can never satisfy everyone altogether.
I sat through the entire 1.5hr webcast, feeling guilty that I actually invested more attention in this than any of the lectures back in university. If you are interested, you can refer below.
He touched on the truth table, probability, market structures, thermodynamics, and genetics, and shared some of his personal experiences. I like how he highlighted that humans like to take a chance at something when they jolly well know the outcome would most likely not turn out as expected, and that failure is the norm whereas success is an exception. Marked a few timecodes of some salient points:
26:24 Outliers of a distribution
45:38 Ko's take on death
47:35 Success and failure
1:19:20 Ko's take on fame and fortune
1:22:06 Mission of a doctor
He is someone I look up to. Apart from being smart, he is wise too. I do not follow Taiwan politics closely, but it is common to see politicians screaming and and talk with circular reasoning in council meetings. Many seem to have the warped mentality that logic and sense are proportionate to the volume of their voices. Ko has been doing well during his tenure, as seen from the many initiatives and projects he rolled out, the significant reduction of debt, and successes of events such as the Universiade 2017 and the control of the Covid-19 pandemic (case in point: Taipei started distributing masks via vending machines before Singapore). He's a pretty straightforward man, and may come across as snobbish. But oh well, he indeed has the bragging rights.
There was once he commented that Singapore is like a "canary inside a cage". One can guess what he was trying to insinuate. This remark angered many Singaporeans, expectedly. Some of his supporters leveraged on his statement and further weighed in. I thought there was no need for a rift between people over this. Ko does read Lee Kuan Yew's publications to gain governance insight, so maybe Singapore isn't all that bad. But then he never seemed to have said a word of praise to Singapore. Maybe his pride gets in the way, but well, isn't it understandable for humans to have flaws? Many tend to be extremists who fail to see the bigger picture and vehemently stand their own ground while being oblivious to inadequacies - blind supporters for short. Hence sometimes it is pretty amusing to see how people argue on the net. And that's also why they say you can never satisfy everyone altogether.
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