Accoutability

Man, not procratinating is hard. I guess that’s why it’s a habit.

I do feel myself improving–I struggle briefly with procrastinating (sometimes for pretty long), but I’m able to push myself to start working a little sooner than I used to be able to. Before, unless I absolutely needed to do something, it’d be impossible to push myself to start. I really wanna keep improving though–this is the first time when I’ve acknowledged how painful it is to break my procrastination habit.

Productive Thought

Yesterday’s post set the base logic for why diversity is so important–breadth of knowledge is incredibly important, but, in a purely merit-based system, depth is almost always overvalued relative to breadth. Couple this with the fact that cultural/historic oppression has made it so that many perspectives are underrepresented in society, and this entire situataion is extremely tragic no matter what angle you look at it from. Society as a whole loses, let alone the underrepresented groups (this is very similar to altruistic game theory).

This argument is not one I realized until very recently–it is so hard to realize the value of perspective when you grow up your whole life surrounded by a lack of such. It’s like expecting a child who’s spent his/her whole life on a farm to know what a city is like after simply reading a book about cities. Humans are very good at learning from experience, but we inherently suck at extrapolating to new perspectives. I’m not excusing my previous lack of support for affirmative action, but I think it’s important to analyze why I and many others thought that way. Simply calling everyone a racist/sexist (which I don’t believe I am) without peeling back the reasons why people hold the views that they do almost guarantees that change will not result. Of course, easier said than done (and some people are actually racist, in which case some name-calling is not recommended but reasonble).

I’ve decided that I’m going to share my perspective, piece by piece over time in hopes that people will finally start to understand the Asian male perspective on affirmative action. This is incredibly scary for me, as is sharing any perspective on a morally controversial topic. And for this, it is terrifying to share my perspective especially when most of society believes that you are automatically in the moral wrong. Most pro-AA individuals believe, if you’re not for affirmative action policies, you must be (in some sense) against equality.

Obviously, I believe this to be untrue. I think there’s a very logical, reasonable perspective in disagreeing with the current implementation of AA without being against AA itself. In fact, I believe forcing controversial issues to become polarized sides is literally the worst thing we can do in terms of remedying such issues. If we consider an arbitrary complex problem, the most important thing to do is to analyze every possible piece of information and not discard/simplify the majority of information that we do have. Polarizing such a problem eliminates all the complexities and details that must be considered in order to solve such a problem (imagine the detail lost when turning a colorful picture into only one shade of black and one shade of white).

And in the case of affirmative action, many individuals such as myself have found it easy just to group with the pro-affirmative action side–despite all the problems that we internally believe to exist with affirmative action’s current implementation. We push these thoughts all the way down because we slowly convince ourselves that any anti-affirmative action sentiments are intrusive thoughts indicative of internalized racism. I can’t recall the number of times I’ve been automatically labelled as a racist and treated as such for pointing out what I perceived as faults within AA implementations.

The issue is independent of whether I’m right or wrong–I know I’ve been blatantly incorrect before, and in other times, my correctness could be argued either way. The issue, however, lies in the fact that by polarizing the conversation, we stifle any possible areas of improvement that lie in the middle ground. After all, again, if we’re trying to grow as a society, it’s important to listen to all involved parts. But currently, we cut out the breadth of perspectives in this conversation by reducing it to two very polar sides–ironic if you consider my original comment.

In my posts, I’m going to make a lot of mistakes in my thinking, and I really want to converse with you if you disagree with my thoughts and grow in my perspective. But I’m still going to post my perspectives, because I’m afraid that if I don’t, nobody has and nobody will. I’m tired of my perspective being disregarded and shit on because of my gender and color of my skin, and hopefully my perspective, as small as a drop it’ll be in the grand ocean of this conversation, will spark more good than bad. And if I’m correct in thinking that many people share my perspectives but are just too scared to present them, I hope hope hope that more middle-ground perspectives will come out and help fix previously unconsidered societal issues.