AiriZel: Thoughts

-Sebastian

So I’ll be required to blog for a few class blogs this semester on a variety of subjects. I’ve decided to replicate said posts in this blog so I can have a general idea of what I’m writing about and when. This is the first of the series and in this particular case in response to Barry Schwartz modest proposal to make college admissions random.

So just a sidenote. The view expressed in this blog post series does not necessarily reflect my own. At times, I will take the devil’s advocate point of view to enhance my own thought process (something I’ve done many times in debate).

Also, I tend to be pretty introspective, which may explain why writing out my thoughts can actually change my beliefs on the topic manner.

So without further to do, this is my blog post titled:

Good Enough? Not Quite.

Oh the good ol’ modest proposal…

In explaining his essay as a “modest proposal,” Barry Schwartz pays tribute to Jonathan Swift as he compares Swift’s proposal to eat babies to how colleges admit students.

To be fair, there are a lot of similarities between college admissions and the consumption of babies. For one, they’re both messy affairs that upset parents. Two, they’re both solutions to their respective “overpopulation” problems; Switching to a random lottery would supposedly solve the “overpopulation” of overly competitive students gaming the system and eating babies would solve population problems in general.

However, I believe there is a fundamental problem with the premise of the lottery itself. First, there is Schwartz’s insinuation that intense competition should be accepted as inherently bad (citing a slippery slope decrease in academic vitality and what not). However, as seen by the thriving cultures on universities such as Yale (a university that has experienced decreases in admissions and increased competition for the better part of two decades), this so-called “intense competition” manifests itself as a proactive student body driven to succeed at their craft. Competitive ambition and blood-seeking competition are often confused. In a sense, being driven is itself a minimum standard for a person needs to succeed in college and in life. So is it not that the fact that people subjected themselves to such competition makes them that much more suitable to thrive in college (or at the very least prevent the degradation of academia).

Second, his solution doesn’t solve any problem. Although the main benefit of a lottery would be to stop gaming, the “gaming of the system” will always exist. Any set of rules has a metagame, a game beyond the rule set, that can and will be accessed for individuals who seek to maximize their efforts. By switching to a lottery, you’d replace overachieving metagamers with “minimum effort for maximum results” metagamers. Not exactly a pleasant change at all. This is a fundamental part of how people work and as a result, should not be considered as a valid reason to implement a lottery.

Lastly, simply taking a lottery would work if we could quantitatively assess individuals for their intelligence, motivation, and potential. Such a measure does not exist in the least, which is why the universities currently employ staffs of admission officers to discern these traits. A lottery assuming individuals at a certain will be “good enough” without a perfect assessment is to disregard the holistic view of an individual and his or her ability to contribute to the university.

-Sebastian Park

-Sebastian Park

PS. Oh yeah, Freshman Screw was fun. I have a draft of what my thoughts were before and after screw on file on this blog, but who knows when I’ll get around to actually cleaning that up.

Apologies for a downed blog for a few days (eh, give or take 5), VlexoFree changed over the host and for some reason there was a DNS error with godaddy (I thought I had saved my changes to the DNS server, but it wasn’t recorded and what not..).

I’m in my Intro to Psych lecture right now.

-Sebastian

I told myself that I’d keep a blog starting this past year with all my thoughts. And well, I’ve done it! And although this post was originally supposed to have been posted a week ago, Strep throat and New Years activities disagreed with that time table.

So here are some statistics. I have 88 posted blog posts with 15 additional blog posts saved on an external from South Kore (they’ll be posted eventually). This blog is now over a year old.

Things that have happened since I started this blog:

Obama became president, I graduated high school, I got into Yale College, I went to Korea, I started playing poker, the PureMTGO Freed from the Real podcast was started (and is still going strong), Haruhi season 2 started and ended (I’m currently on episode 12. Started yesterday haha), I moved my reachable address to Yale, Facebook had privacy issues, Twitter still has no business model (and may never), with Avatar, the 3D medium of watching movies has become more readily accepted, and I turned 18.

These are a variety of things that happened and honestly, there are more things that happened than that even. Anthony Platon got a girlfriend for example. I severed ties with some of my high school friends (tis the college process I suppose). Taylor Swift became really big. So much happened this past year and more the past decade.

So now, what’s on my mind going forward? Well, I’ve been watching hours of Haruhi on the plane back to Yale so my one resolution is to for as much as possible follow this:

“Feelings of love are just a temporary lapse in judgment. Like a kind of mental illness.”

That’s forefront in my mind right now. I feel like my search for happiness and love is getting in the way of progress. So enough of that. Back to the hard rigor of life.

Not sure if there’s anything else really. One change I’d like to announce is that my hosting has changed from Vlexo to VlexoFree. These guys have always been amazing to me and continue to be.

I’d really like to send a New Years thanks to my good friend Erik Friborg. Without him, the Freed from the Real podcast would not be in existence right now. I’m really glad that he agreed to do the podcast with me because as a result I not only saw the creation of a podcast, I also gained an invaluable friend in him.

Also shoutouts to AJ (the necessary British character), Mike Janssen (thanks for all the technical help and filling in time to time. Also congrats on your marriage man), and Joshua Claytor (who despite having yet been on the podcast, continues to give his full support).

I’ll have a thank you post soon (I think).

Happy New Year

-Sebastian

Here’s a funny image to enjoy Christmas.

-Sebastian

and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for my mouse.

My stay at home was joyous as it was fun,

It’s very interesting to be back in LA after all the things I’ve done.

-Sebastian

Finals are done.

I’m in LA.

That is all.

-Sebastian

Studying for an Microeconomics final. Hopefully it’ll go well. What’s more to say.

For anyone who reads this and is in SoCal, I’ll be at the PTQ San Diego event on the 19th of December at Costa Mesa. My only real life PTQ this season, hopefully I’ll only need to that one that qualify for PT San Diego (at which point, you’ll see me coming back to LA to participate next year)./

Lastly, today a few of my friends and I had our first really legitimate idea for an entrepreneurial venture. I’mma roll it out as it comes along, but this is the first one I’ve had in college that I feel will work very well. Hopefully the first success of many.

Back in LA the 15th.

-Sebastian

So Google Chrome’s apparent securities holes were well… apparent.

Yesterday, an accidental ad click led to a Google Chrome exploit that installed Antivirus Live, a rogue spyware (I’d even go as far as to say virus) onto my computer. After attempting to quarantine it myself in safemode, I failed (being unable to completely kill it before it propagated itself the next start up).  Luckily, my Thinkpad T400 comes with a built in factory reset button (useful if I ever decide to sell this extremely awesome machine). After using the included software to retrieve some files (namely about 300 MBs of photos recently updated. Being somewhat paranoid, all my files are backed up in 4 places. Using Dropbox, there’s a copy of all my notes and assignments and other important files on my netbook, the dropbox server, and the laptop. The 4th place is an external harddrive that I keep files on as well. ).

What have I learned? Well a few things.

• Being paranoid has its benefits. I didn’t have any hesitation giving up (saving myself hours of headache) and resetting my system to its factory functionality. In whole, the entire recovery process has taken 4 hours (and a lot of that was making sure I got the 300MBs of photos onto an external without corruption)
• Dropbox again proves itself to be amazing. All my magic decks, assignments, notes, and important information just simply stayed safe. Installed dropbox on the fresh install and boom, it starts to put those files back on here.
• Google Chrome’s amazing speed has its consequences. It really does have some security issues.
• Firefox again claims itself as my default browser. It also helped that because I had backed up my google chrome bookmarks on firefox, I could just sync those back in.
• I’m not running any of my customized desktop interface applications (rainlendar included). This makes me sad, but I just don’t have to time and energy to reconfigure everything to my own need. Maybe I should have backed up these files too (but given that I edited my desktop over a period of 3 months, I really lost about 2 months of customization).

Anyway, a few funny last notes. Yale’s Freshman Holiday Dinner was overhyped, yet enjoyable. It’s definitely an interesting thing to see a 20 foot long piece of bread and lobsters thrown into the crowd. The ice sculpture thing was awesome as well.

Well that’s all folks. I have an econ final next monday and then I head back to LA the following Tuesday

-Sebastian

EDIT: Edited for a reason. heh.

I was going through my (now expansive) magic online collection and noticed just how much more meaning the cards from old have to me. And by old I mean Ravnica. That’s when I started getting into competitive magic. That’s when I had no money and no way to generate cards. So as a result, I strictly played constructed back then. For the past 4 sets, I’ve been playing strictly limited. This goes back to my return to magic after my 4 month departure. I’m now positioned to be playing all of those constructed matches (namely standard, but also Zendikar block, extended, and to a far lesser degree Classic) that I want to. I definitely feel a disconnect with M10, most of Alara and Eventide as I just didn’t play constructed when those sets were in play. Now hopefully, with my constructed mind back in full gear, I’ll be good to go.

Got a deck? Send it to me!

-Sebastian