Our Brave New World

Increasingly, I ask myself (and one or two close friends) the question – would you rather live in 1984, a totalitarian society of mass surveillance and repressive regiments or Brave New World, a “negative utopia” (as the author put it) of corporate tyranny that uses behavioral conditioning alongside other scientific advancements to enslave its people […]

Immigrants

In 2018, 15% of H-1B visas were denied, as opposed to the 7% in 2017, 6% in 2016 and 4% in 2015. Many among those denied H-1B visas are Asian immigrants like my own father who immigrated to the US on a full scholarship as a hardware engineer and worked his way up the semiconductor […]

Why I think people I know ignore me

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” – Friedrich Nietzsche On the vibrant, sprawling campus of Stanford, everyone seems to be on some teetering center of mass between academics, social events, and sleep, so it’s understandable that some social cues […]

The Source of Conflict

I don’t think conflict occurs because (groups of) people have different standards. Conflict occurs because of the illusion that those of different standards can work together. It is this illusion that leads to the buildup of grievances collected from compromise – and for two sides of different value systems, every compromise is a negative-sum game. […]

Unhappiness

The wisdom you’re about to read comes from the mind of a person who has suffered the cumulative trauma of an average’s person life many times over, and who has the mental age of a death bed patient. *cough* If every human action is driven at the core by emotion, and all emotions are determined […]

Hong Kong

Attack on Titan is my favorite anime of all time. In it, humanity is caged in walls and their survival constantly threatened by incoming Titans who try to eat humans alive. The anime is notoriously good for its unforgiving brutality, plot twists but ultimately its characters, who touched many of the owners of its 100 […]

Chess

Recently I’ve become an enthusiast of chess. It was summer 2019 and my internship hours were slowly eating up my right brain. Famous scientists and philosophers have echoed that creativity comes in bursts, and I was living right across my company, so I decided to extend my daily working hours by interspersing intellectual diversions throughout. […]