culture – sardonick

Random Thoughts on Taiwan

mote — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 10:43:04 +0000

Wrapping up my trip in Taiwan, I’m struck by a thousand random thoughts…

Taiwanese fashion iterates more quickly than the United States! At a breakneck pace — and even me, fashion-challenged as I am, can see this. Before, I thought it was the result of less expensive clothes that can be bought for less and wear out more quickly. Now I am not sure… are they closer to the source/origin of new trends?

Taiwanese architecture also iterates more quickly. There’s more adventurism in building design here (with the associated successes and mistakes that you’d expect!). Maybe there’s some other cultural aesthetics (desire for quick change?) at play here.

my fingernails grow 2x faster here; cause unknown.

Taiwanese is a dying language, sadly (it has a warmth and down-to-earthness that mandarin lacks). even as far down south as taichung, kids listen to their parents talk to them in Taiwanese, and then answer back in Mandarin. In the office, no one spoke Taiwanese to one another. While there is some cultural preservation backlash (early into my visit, I attended a play that was intentionally set in Taiwanese), but I’m afraid it isn’t enough.

my mind staggers at Taiwanese economics. For lunch one day I had a $20NT ($0.8 USD) fatty-pork-with-sauce-atop-rice. followed by a $150 ($5) coffee. That’s a greater-than 6x ratio. Imagining a typical cheap $5 lunch in the US, can I imagine following it with a $30 cup of coffee?

There are other interesting economic forces at play. Service fees are substantially cheaper compared to the US. As are locally manufactured goods and foods. Gasoline is about 2x as expensive, I think. Luxury goods are about the same price as in the States (but this is absolute price… relative currency strengths make them about 3x as expensive). How does this all shape society?

There are far too many binglang (a carcinogenic nut chewed by the working class) trees here for local consumption. I see way more groves than could be consumed. Do they, then, export? To where?

While job types are divided largely along race lines in the US, I see them more divided along age lines here. “The old man the machines”. The old are the ones who work in the factories, in construction, etc. The young are in the cleaner, air-conditioned stores. I don’t know which injustice/imbalance (tw or us) makes me more sad =(.

Public vs private: On one hand, Taiwanese keep their private lives very private. On the other hand, they literally air their laundy where everywhere can see it. The public turns an obligatory blind eye. Is this necessary to being short on space, or are there different sets of aesthetics and decency here?

Android phones are very common here! On the street, and in commercials.

City governments could easily use mechanical turk / crowdsourcing to translate signs and notices. Wonder if they are agile enough to do this? (America’s governments would not be).

My favorite game on the street: distinguish the european foreigner from the american foreigner. Or, distinguish the ABC from the local Taiwanese. It’s interesting. There are subtle differences in clothing, mannerisms, that most of the time the conscious mind doesn’t catch but the unconscious mind can pick up on.

Tainan restaurant traffic is shaped by information cascades

Taiwan vs American Culture: Public vs Private

mote — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 01:20:10 +0000

Taiwanese and American cultures have different divisions between the trichotomy of public vs private vs intimate life. Taiwan culture seems to strictly divide public life and private life, with much more relaxed boundaries between private and intimate life. American culture, in contrast, has a more relaxed division between public and private life, while maintaining a very tangible boundary between private and intimate life. It’s most easy to elaborate on this architecturally:

Public vs Private: Fences: The archetypal American fence is the white picket fence. More symbolic than practical, it’s waist-high, non-imposing and it doesn’t do much to impede visibility of the interior for outsiders. The typical Taiwanese fence is a bit more imposing: seven feet high, cement, 6 inches thick, and (as if that wasn’t enough!) shards of broken glass embedded into the top to deter burglars. (And, no, this isn’t motivated by higher crime rates, though that was my first guess, too).

Private vs Intimate: Home layout. The typical American home has a bunch of bedrooms, separate from one another. When I was growing up, lots of kids would even close/lock their bedroom doors, to get that extra bit of privacy. The traditional Taiwanese home (not the modern flats, but rather the ones out in the countryside from 50 years ago) has bedrooms all connected. The master bedroom is in the very back, and to get through it, one has to walk through all the other bedrooms in series.

So, knowing this, what are the repercussions of public vs private vs intimate on use of the internet, social networks, and social software in general? Do we need to design for different cultures differently, especially in forums where people interact?

[some thoughts after spending a few weeks in Taiwan over the holidays, partially inspired by seeing a local Taiwanese parody of an American white picket fence, that reached less than knee-high]

I can has consciousness?

mote — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 06:50:11 +0000

Conversations at work recently have turned again and again to consciousness and self-awareness (what, you thought “Android” was just a phone? ;) ). Now, I’m not going to belabor the point with discussions of artificial intelligence and yet another amateur’s resummarization of Searle’s Chinese Room[1]. Instead, I’ve been thinking about self-awareness in groups of humans.

A bullet-point braindump:

As background, remember that short story in Godel Escher Bach, where the ant-eater communicated with the colony of ants (not the ants themselves, but the colony), and ate certain individual ants as a way to shape the colony into something that’s more intelligently connected?
It’s a cliche’d remark that groups of humans begin to resemble organisms in their own right. Corporations seek after the good of the corporation rather than the good of any of its individuals. Cultures grow, intermingle, reproduce spawning new cultures. OK, so these macro-groups of humans are animals, that’s for sure. But are they self-aware Conscious? Would we recognize it if they were?
It’s interesting when a group of people who’ve been meeting for a while realize that they are in fact behaving as a group, and in turn have a group identity. Is this awareness of group identity the same as self-awareness in the group? (answer: I don’t think so, this is something different).
To extend the brain metaphor, imagine humans to be the neurons in a larger collective brain. Urgh, the speed of signal transition along axon-dendrite gap is horribly slow. What effect does this slowness have? Also, humans are damn intelligent signal processors compared to neurons. What effect would our individual intelligences have on the larger structure?
Would such a self-aware “organism” think thoughts that are entirely separate and entirely transcendent above the thoughts of its constituents?
Scale? Seems to be the general belief that intelligence is the emergent result of massive amounts of highly, highly interconnected neurons. How many people do you need in a group before it can be considered an organism? A self-aware organism? Is the interconnectedness of humans even on a large enough order of magnitude to support a functionally processing organism? What are such an organism’s inputs, outputs? Would human sub-organizations specialize into computational functional tools, similar to how neurons in the brain are specialized into groups like the PFC, the amygdala, etc?
I imagine an extraterrestrial coming to the earth, and conversing with society as opposed to individuals. That would be an interesting story. But not the kind of sci-fi that would entertain a puny human mind, though, that’s for sure.

Hmm, I’ll have to think more about this… so many premature thoughts… And most of them the result of only 4 hours of sleep for the last couple days. My apologies, dear anonymous reader, for the unpolished words, the undeveloped concepts, the flaws. “Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness.”

[1] (In any case, I love Ben Goertzel‘s take on the situation, which, to paraphrase: “When the time comes, and you’re actually arguing with the computer whether it is self-aware or not, then the point is already moot, isn’t it?”)