...I'm no genius

I was a big fan of the NBA legendary player Michael Jordan when I was in middle school. I wished I were as gifted as him in basketball, least to say my height or body shape. After all, I am not, and never will be.

Some time ago last October when I was on the way to mainland China, to where my grandparents were born, on the coach I was reading David Shenk's The genius in all of us : why everything you've been told about genetics, talent, and IQ is wrong (New York : Doubleday, 2010).

Intelligence is a process, not a thing. Everyone is born with differences, and some with unique advantages for certain tasks. No one, however, is genetically designed into greatness. Talents are the result of a slow, invisible accretion of skills developed from the moment of conception. We have far more control over our genes - and far less control over our environment - than we think.

1. Despite appearances to the contrary, racial and ethnic groups are not genetically discrete; and
2. Gene don't directly cause traits; they only influence the system. (p. 86-7)

So, how to be a genius? Find your motivation, be your own toughest critic, beware the dark side, identify your limitations - and then ignore them, delay gratification and resist contentedness, have heroes,  and find a mentor.

Free?

I often go out of the track and tend to be directed to read some out-of-the-field books at some point while surfing the internet or browsing scholarly works. Fortunately, most of them are interesting and stimulating. Recently I finished two of these.

The first book is Chris Anderson's Free : the future of a radical price (New York: Hyperion, 2009).

"Like it or not," Anderson says "we all live in the Google economy these days in at least some of our life." (p. 183) Free drives out professionals in favour of amateurs. Free tends to level the playing field between professionals and amateurs. (p. 234-5)

It forced me to reconsider the distinction between professionals and amateurs, and read Andrew Keen's The cult of the amateur : how today's internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2007).

In the Web 2.0 revolution, instead of a dictatorship of experts, he claims, we'll have a dictatorship of idiots.

For better or worse, everyone is simultaneously broadcasting themselves on YouTube and/or Facebook; but nobody is listening.

The Web 2.0 revolution is, as Keens argues, the great seduction. We are being deduced by the empty promise of the "democratized" media. The revolution peddles the promise of bringing more truth to more people - more depth of information, more global perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate observers. But this is all a smokescreem.

It is, in fact, delivering superficial observations rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgement. The real consequence of the great seduction is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information.

stock clearing

From last December (2010):


Since I have come back from Scotland I have been overwhelmed by an avalanche of new classes to teach and piles of untouched lonesome journal articles resting on desk and top of the bookshelves and awaiting me to read and extract after I returned.

It might not be exaggerated to say that with the help of my supportive colleagues and seniors I championed one and a half new courses. Journal articles printed before, some long before, I left are yet to be read. The first semester is coming to an end and boxes of students' paper have been cleaned (though another patch of examination papers are yet to come next week), it is high time to bring them back to life again, and vacant the desk and bookshelves for other latest works to come.

One of the journals that I browsed intensively was New Literary History, which I found very stimulating and illuminating. I skimmed some of them just today.

Sanjay Krishnan's "The place of India in Postcolonial Studies: Chatterjee, Chakrabarty, Spivak," New Literary History, Vol. 40, 2009, pp. 265-280. Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. "Anticolonial though refers to forms of ideology critique that expose as false the colonizer's claim that colonial values are properly enlightened or universal. Postcolonial though is a reflection on the categories and reflexes through which anticolonial resistance takes place. Postcolonial thought asserts that anticolonial resistance tacitly reproduces the culture and values of imperialism." (p. 265) "anticolonial thought is the ideology critique of colonialism, whereas postcolonial thought signals a critique of the anticolonial conformism to the culture of imperialism. Postcolonial though therefore scrutinizes the dominant rules of representation set in motion by knowledge production in academia and beyond." (p. 266)

R. S. Khare's "Changing India-West Cultural Dialectics," New Literary History, Vol. 37, 2007, pp. 223-245. Louis Dumont, Wilhelm Halbfass, Octavio Paz, and Amartya Sen, whose The Argumentative Indian (London: Allen Lane, 2005) has been on my to-read list.