Law and Order in Singapore

 

The growing use of and subsequent pushback against Flock cameras is something I'm following with great interest. As technology improves in quality and pervasity, you'll likely see even more invasive and prevalent use for purposes of public safety, so this debate will only increase in intensity.

Hopefully it is readily apparent that there are pros and cons to Flock and other technologies that efficiently and seamlessly capture information out in the public. On the one hand, such devices can greatly aid public safety through deterrence on the front end and investigation on the back end. On the other hand, over-surveillance by the state comes with it the specter of government overreach, inequitable deployment, and loss of privacy.

Although I was only in Singapore for less than two weeks, it was pretty clear that their public sector is even more invested in this sort of approach to keeping everyone safe: cameras everywhere, a prominent police presence, swift enforcement of all laws in the public space. And, at least among those people I spoke to, including my own daughter who spent six months navigating a brand-new big city on her own as a single woman, the trade-off between intrusion on privacy and greater sense of safety was, at least in its current form, more than acceptable. (Off topic, one cab driver even reminded me that physical punishment is still a thing in Singapore, and that as a father of young daughters he wholeheartedly approves of it as a stark deterrent against violent crimes).

My own knee-jerk reaction to amazing new technology is neither to want to give it free rein nor to immediately pronounce it as something evil that must be stuffed back into a sack. My preference is to push towards progress, but with an eye to what controls can be put in place to avoid abuses. Perhaps that is naive. If it is impossible to keep a dangerous thing from getting into the wrong hands and being used for ill, then we should not try to reason with ourselves that we can. But nor do I like intentionally under-using or discarding new technological functions, or dismissing or vilifying those who will benefit from their use. This is a topic worth keeping an eye on for so many reasons.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Speaking of Atlantic City: Recollections and Memories," by Janet Robinson Bodoff and Leesa Toscano.

At seven years old, the most glamorous thing I ever saw was Miss America contestants riding down the boardwalk dressed in sparkly outfits on the back of shiny new cars. As if that was not exciting enough, the cars were interspersed with floats covered by tons of beautiful flowers, glitter and streamers. I can s till recall the scent of those floats festooned with what seemed like a million blooms. Mingled with the ocean breeze, it was pure perfume. Oh, how I wanted one of those flowers.

My first visit to the parade was magical, and returning to the parade is still as exciting to this grownup. When I was seven, my mom brought my little brother and me to the parade, as her mom had brought her. Like so many other little girls, we dreamed of fancy dresses, tiaras, and unattainable beauty. We were not the first. Generations of little girls had the same dreams.

For those who could not afford a hotel stay, a day trip to the shore was a family treat. To save money, day-trippers brought their lunch to the beach in shoe boxes and forevermore became known as shoobies to the locals.

On the Folly of Rewarding "A" While Hoping for "B"

 

Leaving the comforts of suburban San Jose on the West Coast to attend college at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on the East Coast commenced a phase of life in which the life lessons came fast and furious. I was forced to manage my money and do my own laundry and figure out my weekly schedule. I constantly took in new observations and new lessons about how things work on the streets of West Philadelphia. And I discovered that much of what I learned in high school history class was a sanitized account of a far more earthy and nuanced historical record. When I graduated four years later I was still pretty naive, but I grew so much during that time period because of all the ways I was stretched and challenged during that time.

One of those in-classroom thunderbolts from the sky was the seminal management paper, "On the Folly of Rewarding 'A' While Hoping for 'B.'" Its author, Steven Kerr, cited example after example of claiming to want one thing while actually rewarding a completely different thing. What really blew my mind was that this principle could be found in so many places and was so prevalent. In sports, we all say teamwork and unselfishness is paramount, and yet at the professional level chasing individual accomplishment is what nets the most compensation and attention. In business, we want leaders who think about the long term and about society writ large, but stock prices and executive compensation are based on quarterly performance.

Politics is where this dissonance is most pronounced and problematic. For example, at a federal level, politicians are compelled to invest in fundraising and base-building in order to stay in office, rather than using their office to achieve the greatest public good. 

At a local level, the incentive misalignments are even more pernicious. We wish for our electeds to be public servants, stewarding public resources for the enrichment of a location and its constituents. Almost all who seek office have this positive impulse in them at some level. But staying in office involves securing a sufficient proportion of votes within your jurisdiction. If given a choice of holding your office in a way that allows your constituents to flourish and therefore increase the amount of social mobility they have, including a higher likelihood that they will move to a better neighborhood, and performing in such a way that your constituents stay immobile and loyal, most people would consider the former to be more noble but the system rewards the latter. 

I will leave to you to think about whether and where the folly of rewarding "A" while hoping for "B" occurs in your life. For me, it was a wake-up call that, in just about every facet of life, people respond to incentives, and all too often those incentives are misaligned with how we would actually want people to behave. So what are we to do about this?

Contrarian Viewpoint: The Demise of Higher Education is Greatly Exaggerated (Although Many Institutions Will Fold Along the Way)

 

I see this opinion a lot among my friends and online, which is that universities are archaic and will die out in number and relevance. To be sure, the sector faces some major tumult: demographic bust (i.e. far fewer 18-22 year olds), so many other ways to gain knowledge and forge networks, rising tuitions combined with greater uncertainty as to whether paying those tuitions will guarantee you a job after, and (at least for now) a president and base of supporters that is ambivalent if not antagonistic about the most prestigious among such institutions.

Here's the thing about humanity in a liberal economy and democratic government: tumult plus demand equals innovation, which leads to survival, adaption, and thriving. Many institutions will not make it, nor should they if they fail to add value to their students, stakeholders, communities, and society. But many other institutions will recognize the market opportunity and boldly adjust their offerings, space, and very ethos to seize it.

The thing is, and perhaps this is wishful thinking on my part rather than a prediction of how the future will actually play out, a university campus is the ideal setting for the kind of activity that humans need to flourish and dare I say survive as a species. No matter how digital our interface becomes and how good AI is at replacing much of our doing and thinking, three important things happen when really bright and really different people come together in a setting in which acceptance is the norm and growth is the goal:

1. We come to learn about and more deeply accept those who are different from us, so that we are better people and more informed advocates when our new colleagues are faced with hate

2. Cultural expressions flourish, both that which comes from our home culture and that which is created amongst us as its own new culture reflecting contemporary values and desires

3. Scientific advancement and business innovation occur when people from different disciplines and walks of life explore the edges of their knowledge and emerge with new insights

My hypothesis is that humanity is hungry for all three of these outcomes. If college campuses are where they happen, they will continue to attract producers, consumers, and investors until the end of time. It may look very different than today in physical layout and business model. There may be many seemingly unassailable institutions that totter and then crumble. And so every institution must be vigilant, entrepreneurial, and lucky. I predict that those that make it will continue to be just as if not more culturally impactful as now.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Thus Spake Zarathustra," by Friedrich Nietzsche.

“And what doeth the saint in the forest?” asked Zarathustra.

The saint answered: “I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise God.

With singing, weeping, laughing, and mumbling do I praise the God who is my God. But what dost thou bring us as a gift?”

When Zarathustra had heard these words, he bowed to the saint and said: “What should I have to give thee! Let me rather hurry hence lest I take aught away from thee!”—And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing like schoolboys.

When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!”

And all the people exulted and smacked their lips. Zarathustra, however, turned sad, and said to his heart:

"They understand me not: I am not the mouth for these ears."

Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money—these impotent ones!

See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.

Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness—as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne.—and ofttimes also the throne on filth.

Before my highest mountain do I stand, and before my longest wandering: therefore must I first go deeper down than I ever ascended:

—Deeper down into pain than I ever ascended, even into its darkest flood! So willeth my fate. Well! I am ready.

Whence come the highest mountains? so did I once ask. Then did I learn that they come out of the sea.

That testimony is inscribed on their stones, and on the walls of their summits. Out of the deepest must the highest come to its height.—

News Flash: Social Media is Not Real Life

 

In Christian circles, they say it's easy to remember the people that influenced you and hard to remember the sermons that did the same. One talk I do recall was some 30 years ago, where the speaker warned us about excessive TV watching, mainly because the passivity of consuming content that way was dangerous to our actively processing information. Meaning that TV was bad not because the content was trash (although certainly a lot of shows are in fact garbage from a moral standpoint), but that even wholesome content rendered our brains like couch potatoes, being told when to be scared and when to be happy, what was good and evil, and above all what products to buy that would make our lives better.

Almost as a throwaway line, incidental to his point, but I have remembered it to this day so clearly it lodged in at least one audience member's mind, he observed that at any rate what you see on TV isn't real life, in at least three ways. One is that shows, as entertainment, are mindful of taking their audience on a narrative arc in the span of a single episode, whereas the pacing of real life isn't as fast, ordered, or predictable, so we can struggle with knowing where we are in the stories that make up our own lives without similar prompting. Two is that TV shows emphasize the most exciting parts of a life or community or story, whereas in real life most of our life is boring things like sleeping and paying bills and running errands, so our own lives can feel slow and boring compared to what we see on the small screen. Three is that the people featured on TV shows are among the most beautiful, fit, and well-dressed in our society, making us feel ugly and raggedy in comparison.

Social media in 2026 is a far more advanced and pernicious version of this point. A 22-minute sitcom episode has given way to a 10-second video, packed with excitement and drama and featuring some of the most beautiful people you will never meet in real life made up to the nth. Perhaps it is obvious that social media is an extremely unrealistic mirror of the real world, but given how much of it we consume and how engrossed we get into it, it can conjure similar feelings of unfulfillment, poor self-image, and covetousness. Like TV or perhaps more so, we are not forced into this content but rather choose into it, either directly or through the algorithm feeding us what we've made clear we will like based on other things we've consumed. And so we are looking to be entertained, brought along for a fun ride and enjoying gawking at the beauty and glamour and riches showcased in the process. We can't help but find ourselves wishing what we see on social media to be our real life, and feeling smaller and less important when we realize it isn't.

Perhaps you consider I am exaggerating this. When we play violent video games or watch professional sports or lose ourselves in a trashy soap opera, we are not playing out some deep desire to shoot people or dunk a basketball or engage in marital drama. I hope you're right. Because I worry that we are being self-destructive by consuming clip after clip of beauty tips from impossible beautiful people, or extravagant parties and mansions and vehicles, or effortless success in business and arts, and think social media is the real life we want for our lives. It's a formula for self-loathing and self-destruction, which I don't want for myself or my loved ones.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "A Clockwork Orange," by Anthony Burgess.

The day was very different from the night. The night belonged to me and my droogs and all the rest of the nadsats, and the starry bourgeois lurked indoors drinking in the gloopy worldcasts, but  the day was for the starry ones, and there always seemed to be more rozzes or millicents about during the day, too.

"Hear hear," said somebody.

There was a lot of govoreeting and arguing then and I just stood there, brothers, like completely ignored by all these ignorant bratchnies, so I creeched out:

"Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog?" And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: "Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?" I didn't know what made me use those slovos, brothers, which just came like without asking into my gulliver.

"And what do I get out of this? Do I get cured of the way I am? Do I find myself able to slooshy the old Choral Symphony without being sick once more? Can I live like a normal jeezny again? What, sir, happens to me?"

He looked at me, brothers, as if he hadn't thought of that before and, anyway, it didn't matter compared with Liberty and all that cal, and he had a look of surprise at me saying what I said, as though I was being like selfish in wanting something for myself.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Dracula," by Bram Stoker.

When I asked him if he knew Count Dracula, and could tell me anything of his castle, both he and his wife crossed themselves, and, saying that they knew nothing at all, simply refused to speak further. It was so near the time of starting that I had no time to ask anyone else, for it was all very mysterious and not by any means comforting.

I stood beside Van Helsing, and said: --

"Ah, well, poor girl, there is peace for her at least. It is the end!"

He turned to me, and said with grave solemnity: --

"Not so! alas! not so. It is only the beginning!"

When I asked him what he meant, he only shook his head and answered: --

"We can do nothing as yet. Wait and see."

When Lucy, I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape, saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares, then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy's eyes in form and colour, but Lucy's eyes unclean and full of hell fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew. At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing. Had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight. As she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile. Oh, God, how it made me shudder to see it! With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur. When she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile he fell back and hid his face in his hands.

She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said, "Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!"

There was something diabolically sweet in her tones, something of the tinkling of glass when struck, which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another.

As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell, moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them, when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix. She recoiled from it, and, with a suddenly distorted face, full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter the tomb.

When within a foot or two of the door, however, she stopped, as if arrested by some irresistible force. Then she turned, and her face was shown in the clear burst of moonlight and by the lamp, which had now no quiver from Van Helsing's nerves. Never did I see such baffled malice on a face, and never, I trust, shall such ever be seen again by mortal eyes. The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of flesh were the coils of Medusa's snakes, and the lovely, blood-stained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greeks and Japanese. If ever a face meant death, if looks could kill, we saw it at that moment.

We ran over and saw him spring unhurt from the ground. He, rushing up the steps, crossed the flagged yard, and pushed open the stable door. There he turned and spoke to us.

"You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!"

With a contemptuous sneer, he passed quickly through the door, and we heard the rusty bolt creak as he fastened it behind him. A door beyond opened and shut.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Candide and Other Stories," by Voltaire.

(Candide)

"So Pangloss deceived me cruelly when he told me that all was well with the world."

(Candide)

"You see," Candide said to Martin, "Crime is sometimes punished. That scoundrel of a Dutch skipper got the fate he deserved."

"Yes," said Martin," but did the passengers on his ship have to perish also? God punished the rogue: the devil drowned the rest."

(Candide)

"Do you think," said Candide, "that men have always massacred each other the way they do now? That they've always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands? That they've always been feeble, fickle, envious, gluttonous, drunken, avaricious, ambitious, bloodthirsty, slanderous, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and stupid?"

"Do you think," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they find them"

"Yes, no doubt," said Candide. 

"Well, then," said Martin, "if hawks have always had the same character, why do you expect men to have changed theirs?"

(The Ingenu)

He read some histories: they depressed him. The world seemed too full of villainy and human misery. For indeed history is but a tableau of every crime and catastrophe. On such a large stage the vast majority of innocent, peaceable human beings continually fade into the background. The leading characters are invariably depraved men of ambition. It is as if history only succeeds if it is like tragedy, which palls if it is not enlivened by passion and foul deeds and great disasters

(The Ingenu)

The Ingenu was making rapid progress in his studies, particularly in the study of man. The reason for this rapid intellectual progress lay as much in his education as a savage as in the natural cast of his personality. For, having learnt nothing all in his childhood, he had not acquired any prejudices. His thinking, not having been warped by error, remained as straight as ever. He saw things as they are, whereas the ideas with which we are imbued during childhood make us see things our whole lives through as they are not.

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Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson."

I took my Power in my Hand—

And went against the World—

’Twas not so much as David—had—

But I—was twice as bold—

I aimed by Pebble—but Myself

Was all the one that fell—

Was it Goliath—was too large—

Or was myself—too small?

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Handmaid's Tale," by Margaret Atwood.

I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.