Category Archives: Thoughtful

Thoughtful

Do you trust the police? (my response to Patel)

 

patel
http://www.gofundme.com/m757pw

The tragic story of Sureshbhai Patel‘s arrest and serious injury (partial paralysis) 1.5 weeks ago (on Feb 6th, 2014) resonates strongly with me for a few reasons, despite the fact that I am not Indian.

I am not here to discuss police brutality or white privilege or any of another alienating terms that people “know their opinion on.” I am here to discuss my personal feelings and experiences.

Here is the dashcam video of Patel’s arrest and injury, should you wish to judge for yourself.

fifty-seven

 

Patel is 57, around the age of my parents. I love my parents a lot. Although 60 years old seemed crazy old to me a few years ago (when I was a teenager), my parents are in good health and kick my butt in getting stuff done, including physical chores.

grandparents leaning in

 

I am friends with a Chinese couple (the husband works in biotech and the wife is a Harvard grad student) in my area. They recently had a baby, and their parents flew in from China to help take care of the baby. (I’m not sure if this is a thing in European cultures? but I think it is common in Chinese cultures for the grandparents to take care of the children while the parents works. See here and here). So immigrants bring this cultural mindset with them.

(By contrast, I’m an ABC, in other words I was born and grew up in the US, and find the thought of my parents taking care of my baby to be weird and unrealistic… Actually, I’ve instilled in myself a deep suspicion of babies, so the words “my baby” :s eww).

Like Patel,  my friends’ parents speak almost no English, but are by no means stupid. They (the grandparents) constantly invite me over for dinner and cook delicious foodstuffs for me, oh man, now I’m hungry. Sadly I can’t find any pictures of the food they cooked right now (possibly I don’t have any pictures). They always send me home with tupperwares of leftovers too. As a result, I’m quite fond of them, even if making conversation is a bit of a struggle due to language, cultural, and generational differences.

English as a Second Language

I’ve known from a friend’s experiences that simply not knowing English or not understanding it well enough / fast enough can get you arrested, even if you’ve spent decades in the US, worked your way up from being a dirt-poor immigrant, and now contribute to the US economy, pay your taxes, and are generally an upstanding citizen.

To get your record cleaned of an arrest when you did nothing wrong is still an easy few thousand dollars in lawyer’s fees. They did not benefit from police cams; they swept their arrest under the rug out of shame. Shame for what? Not being born in the US? Years later, it’s just something to be bitter about and not ever bring up again after dealing with it.

As a result, since a young age I’ve been open to the idea that our justice and policing system is not perfect.

Do I trust the police?  Unfortunately, instinctively I do not.

due to my aforementioned experiences.

I temper my gut feelings with the knowledge that I should look more into the research behind whether police are trust-worthy, since my personal experiences will only ever constitute a part of the whole picture.

global comparison

For instance, having visited other countries, I am able to get some prospective and understand that the US is pretty high up there in terms of standards of governance. In 2008, the US ranked in the 90-100th percentile in terms of perceived corruption:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Governance_Indicators
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Governance_Indicators

Or from the world bank in 2013, with links to the methodology:

http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#reports
Interactive version: http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#reports

Personally, I’ve visited several other countries where, in broad daylight, police officers will deliberately lead you (tourist in car = people with money) astray or ambush you, waste your time and make you sweat, and then threaten you with a ticket unless you realize what is going on and pay them a bribe.

However,

None of these facts excuse us from working together to build more just and trustworthy social systems. Our rule of law in the US maybe be good, on average, compared to the rest of the world. But you or I could easily be caught in one of the “outlier events” and lose thousands of dollars, our mobility, or our life. Averages are small comfort then.

Thanks for listening.

Thoughtful

i am a meat reducer (some musings on not-vegetarianism)

1 Comment

(no, meat-reducer is not actually a thing)

Over the last year, I’ve been toying with reducing my meat intake. Here are the causes and the successive iterations I went through.

chickenstareoff

i won’t spend money on meat, but i will eat meat going to waste

The initial deciding factor was founding a company with one other person who didn’t eat much meat. I didn’t like meat that much anyway (too many dry chicken breasts I’d shoved down to avoid food waste), so when buying company rations it was easier to stockpile food we would both eat (ramen, frozen cheese pizza, frozen bean burritos, cake mix cake, cheetos… I had such a terrible diet. YET SO GREAT).

His general philosophy was to avoid spending money on meat while still prioritizing not wasting food. This seemed agreeable to me, since I dislike food waste more than I dislike killing animals by a wide margin. Fish were deemed okay to make a complete diet easier, and so company celebrations were at sushi restaurants (dubious from an ecological standpoint, honestly, since over-fishing is a big problem).

The other major point was to not take a stand, to got the opposite direction of evangelist vegans or vegetarians who believe they have the higher moral ground.

first dilemma

Chicken instant noodles uses chicken stock. But I dislike shrimp instant noodles. Is paying for chicken instant noodles okay?

I decided it was, because most places don’t stock vegetarian instant noodles.

second dilemma

I hosted a boatwarming  bbq party. Was it okay to buy meat burgers and hotdogs for my friends who no doubt would expect it to be there and might find eating veggie burgers weird and unfulfilling?

I decided it was, although I’ll probably try to avoid the situation in the future.

Apparently, in mixed-diet household house parties, the vegan person might supply the vegan food and the omnivores buys the meat for everyone else.

third dilemma

When treating someone to lunch or dinner, is it okay to pay for their meat selections? We took our interns out to lunch several times.

I decided it was okay.

what options are there: few!

It was fun to go to restaurants and see what the vegetarian options were. They’re often not great. For instance, dim sum, that favorite of my group of friends. Good luck filling yourself up on anything vegetarian at dim sum. Crispy taro thing? Filled with meat inside. Long noodles? Secretly has shrimp embedded inside.

it’s hard to remember at first

I would catch myself ordering my go-to dishes at restaurants and then go “Derp.”

leather and down

Then the question comes up. What about spending money on animal products? Leather work boots are comfy and weatherproof. Down jackets are nice and warm. I decided spending money on these was okay.

it’s hard to not eat meat even when i’m not buying it

1) There’s a lot of free food around MIT, usually not-vegetarian

2) When I visit my parents or when they visit me, they cook me large quantities of meat (maybe I will make an exception and declare to them I am a meat reducer next time…)

It’s hard to explain your dietary preferences or avoid talking about them when you make them arse complicated

I had to declare my food preferences for ordering company lunch. (My company, <15 people, is a mix of vegan, vegetarian, and omnivore). My first week at work, my parents had cooked me a large batch of meat, so I ate it every day. Additionally, there’s a decent amount leftover from company lunch and I try to divert everything from the trash, including the meat dishes.

I wasn’t sure how to explain that I’m sort-of vegetarian except where chicken noodles and food going to waste are concerned, since really, if you’re sort-of vegetarian, you’re not actually vegetarian.

what about deer killed by bow and arrow from a friend of a friend

I’m not joking, this actually came up. I decided that it was okay to eat this meat, since it was definitely not factory-farmed.

why?

enh, why not. A lot of my friends are into it, I don’t actually like meat that much, and factory farming is definitively terrible.

also it’s delicious

i really want an eggplant parmesan sandwich. SO DELICIOUSSS. and hummus and raisin bread. and saag paneer. mmm. quinoa, onions, and sweet potatoes. sweet potato pizza. nachos and cheese. microwaved frozen vegetarian dumplings.

these are all super-simple college cooking foods.

currently

At work, I sit halfway between the vegetarians and the omnivores and pick exclusively from the vegetarian side if I can reach it, but if there’s leftovers I’ll eat them meat and all.

I never buy meat at the grocery store nor at restaurants. If I’m treating someone, I’ll pay for their meat selection. If it’s free food, I’ll avoid eating meat unless I’m really hungry, since usually someone else will get around to eating it.

Currently, I am a meat-reducer.

 

Gender, Thoughtful

poll: diversity in STEM: why do you give a ****, or why not (informal MIT survey)

HI INTERNET

poll

recently I was feeling grumpy so as usual I expressed my grumpiness by collecting data about the topic from my friends.

(Here is one poignant article that really articulates some of the current issues about diversity in STEM:

https://medium.com/thelist/the-other-side-of-diversity-1bb3de2f053e

I was surprised by how much I identified with this).

The written responses I compiled and sorted alphabetically (to remove ordering information), and are now displayed on this site:

http://mit.obio.me/ (created by Ned Burnell — it’s open-source, source on github ^^)

Screenshot from 2014-12-13 19:30:12

Anyway, I keep meaning to mine the data sometime to pull out some statistically insignificant yet interesting conclusions (I don’t know how to science, sadly).

The basic question I am curious about is

do the people who are most likely to be in power in the future (standins: grades and income, gender and race) care the least about diversity (standins: talk to people about it, rate it important, read about it, think about it).

(see appendix for more thoughts)

Mostly, it’s a little irritating sometimes to always be talking to the same people about these topics, and I am uncertain about what the cause for that is. Do people feel uncomfortable talking about these issues, do they not care, or what?

Another interesting anecdote is that a lot of my female friends don’t care about this problem.

Happily, what I learned from getting over 120 responses to the survey in 24 hours (from just three or four mailing lists: pika, EC, MITERS-keyholders, and some friends) is that a lot of people do care about this topic. 

IAP

I decided to run an IAP class — hopefully some people will sign up for it.

http://student.mit.edu/searchiap/iap-9289af8f4a299dfd014a2d29af2200ff.html

Diversity in STEM: How racist and sexist are we, and why should we care?

This workshop aims to be a fun, productive, and provocative introduction to issues of diversity in STEM. We’ll start out with a no-holds-barred discussion about what we personally think about diversity in STEM (is it worth it? do we need it? should we care? why or why not?), examine where our beliefs come from (share personal experiences), and then review the scientific literature on this subject. From there, we will begin work on concrete project(s) to showcase diversity at MIT, as well as compile a report to MIT’s Institute Community and Equity Officer. On the final day, we’ll present our projects to each other, so make them fun and interesting!

The goal is not to push an agenda; the goal is to relate to and engage with each other, even if we have very different beliefs, as human beings who developed our beliefs though our experiences.

Possible projects:

* Cookies that visually display the statistics about diversity at MIT (statistical food)

* Short film about people’s experiences at MIT, about diverse people at MIT, or about what MIT people think about diversity

* Compelling website displaying a collection of quotes from the MIT community or results of polling MIT

* Game explaining recent scientific research into this topic

STEM

 

Other Internet

three other interesting data visualization projects that I thought were well-done

The latter I thought was better done than the first, in the sense that it provided a guided walkthrough of how to explore the data and what interesting conclusions we might draw from it instead of just dumping it in front of the user. See this article (Tell, Don’t Show) for some interesting thoughts on this.

appendix

other hypotheses to look at in the diversity form data:

  • gender, race, and income, controlling for age
    “Do white males get paid more”
  • grades and income, controlling for age and major
    “Do people who do well academically get paid more”
  • age and importance of diversity
    “As people enter the workforce, do they care more about diversity”
  • gender, race, and importance of diversity
    “Do white males care less about diversity”
  • gender, race, and grades
    “Do white males do better in school”
  • grades and importance of diversity
    “Do people who care about diversity do more poorly in school”
  • gender, race, comfortable
    “Do white males feel uncomfortable talking about diversity” and that’s why it’s hard to engage them in dialogue, or do they just not care about it
  • gender, race, talk to in person or online
    “Are there systematic biases in who is talking online or offline about diversity” as opposed to just reading about it (engaging in dialogue)

income, importance of diversity
“Do the people who get paid more care less about diversity”