Step Out

Hello again after a pretty busy weekend. As I have mentioned before, my weekends have been pretty eventful this summer and this weekend was no different. On Friday, I had dinner with Noor and Olga at Casa Lupe, which is an apparently popular name for a Mexican restaurants since there seems to be four restaurants in the south bay with that same name that do not appear to be a chain. After dinner, I went to Josh and Shannon's house warming party. Nick and I carpooled up but alas, we forgot Shannon's number so we were stuck outside the door because we didn't know the code to get in plus Josh/Shannon aren't listed in the directory. So we called almost everyone we knew at the party but nobody picked up. Finally, Paul picked up and we were able to get in. Josh and Shannon's is really cool and mimialistically stylish. Josh had some newspaper articles mounted about him on the wall. Unfortunately, I cannot do the same for me because I think the only time I made the newspaper was the school newspaper back in high school. If I do get mentioned in the newspaper again, I will make sure to frame and mount on my wall. Except I will blow up the article to about 50 times the size to a huge mosaic as a tribute to myself. I guess I will have to settle for the Oasis and X-Files posters I plan to hang on my walls. First off, some of you may think that is very collegish (which is not the style I am going for). First off, this is a vintage X-Files poster. I got it 12 years ago when the X-Files was the hottest TV show on the air. So I kept it all these years (the past two in storage at Jinah's place). The Oasis poster I bought off eBay. Oasis is still very popular in the UK because I got outbid for an early Oasis poster so I had to settle for the album poster from their latest album. Fear not, I am currently bidding on additional posters to make up for it. Second of all, I bought really nice wood frames (not poster frames) for my vintage posters. So they are gonna look kickass in my place.

On Saturday, I went to Cyrus's BBq. I thought I would show up fashionably late but it turns out all the other guests were even more fashionably late than I. As a consequence I had to let everyone in when they arrived. But the food was really good and I had a fun time. We capped off the evening by going to Golfland to supposedly play golf but we spent so much time in the arcade that we didn't get around to playing golf. DJ proved my theory that all asian girls are good at puzzle fighter by systematically destroying all opponents (including me) until Cyrus (in a fit of revenge) finally beat her. She claims it was the first time she ever played. On Sunday, I went to a birthday BBQ for Zahra, who was in town to head off to burning man. It was also a semi-unoffical SI reunion because a great many ex-Siers were there, including Cari, who would no doubt leave a comment if I did not mention she was there. After the BBQ, Noor, Olga, and I went to Half Moon Bay for dinner at the Half Moon Bay Brewery. They have some good beer called Maverick's there. During dinner, I thought about saying, "That's right, I am dangerous" or "I have a need...a need for speed!" or many other quotable Tom Cruise/Maverick lines from Top Gun but a rare bout of good taste prevented me. Kudos to Noor for driving because the drive back was dark, foggy, forresty, mountainy, and curvy - which are prime I Know What You Did Last Summer type horror movie conditions.

I do have some sad news to report. I gave up my beloved Motorola V60 cell phone today. That phone gave me many good years and quite honestly, I kept on using it far past the time I should have put it out to pasture. I don't know of anybody else who still uses a phone with a non-color screen. But me and that phone had some good memories and good conversations. Plus that phone (in its day) was like the Lexus of phones. I was used by Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs, it also showed up in Fastlane and in Arrested Development. So I had it for about 3 years until this past weekend when the antenna finally broke off, which definitely affected its range and voice quality. So I upgraded, to yes, you guessed it, a razor. I was initally against getting the razor but the phone I really wanted required an additional 20 bucks a month for the data plan. I got my first cellphone as a birthday present in the spring of 2000. I was the second one of my friends to actually have one (which led to them calling me up almost non-stop thus eating up my anytime minutes when they were super mega expensive). In the six years since, I have had three phones (including my first one). Most people run through three phones in a year or two. Everytime I have had to upgrade, it is because I literally used the phone into the ground. Like it barely worked. For example, my first phone I traded in when it got the point where if I didn't charge after 8 hours it died and the reception was so bad, it acted more like a pager where i got voicemail notifications which I could then reply back with on the phone. So goodbye v60 you served me well, just like my previous phones.

I am going to reserve the rest of this super long entry to discuss a talk I attended last week by Phil Tetock. He came to Google to discuss the errors experts make in political and economic judgements. His basic point is that experts in those fields (who make their livings off being "pundits" are just about as accurate as non-expert people. The only difference is that these experts who are wrong a lot and supposedly are paid to be right never really face any consequences for being wrong. They just make up excuses to justify their wrong judgement such as "I was almost right" or "I made a mistake but it was a good mistake." Both excuses have a sophomoric logic more related to a high school freshman who makes up an excuse on why he was late than a supposed pundit. It is an interesting subject but also very common sense plus annoying when you think about our current political situation. Here you have all these pundits (the O'Reilly's, Limbaugh's, Scarbourough's, George Will's) being paid to give their "expert" opinion on stuff they have ZERO background in. Basically, there are paid bullshitters, which sounds like a cush job but practically, makes them some of the most useless people in the world. I don't give a shit what some political science grad from the 70's / loudmouth has to say about Lebanon when they probably couldn't point it out on a map. Tetlock divides the experts in his book into hedgehogs who believe in a grand scheme/idea that explains everything versus foxes, who reject such large notions and believe that many factors come together in a complicated manner to produce outcomes. Not surprisingly hedgehogs are the ones who are the worst performers at accurately predicting things. They also make lousy debaters. I am much more a fox than a hedgehog. But I have ran into more than my share of hedgehogs in the past. Here is just a sample:

1. I ran into a hedgehog type person who believed that the single most destructive force in the world today that is at the root of all crime, corruption, war, AIDs, and conflict are people with "loose morals" or people who are not fundamentalist Christians. He honestly and truly belived that if we all read the Bible than all these problems would be solved.

2. Yet another hedgehog argued that atheists were responsible for the holocaust, communism, and all of history's evils since we apparently have no moral code since we don't follow the Bible, which apparently he never considered the fact that many many people (the majority of people in fact) have moral codes and don't read the Bible. He said that if we got rid of all the atheists than we would wipe out evil in the world. Let's just say I doubt anybody would seriously trust anything he predicted.

3. Yet another hedgehog said that Jews are responsible for racism against Asians (and no this hedgehog is not Mel Gibson). This hedgehog's line of argument is that since there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, and Hollywood makes stereotypical depictions of Asians, than Jews must hate Asians. Which makes just as much sense as I ate a lot of pizza in 2005, and the Chicago White Sox won the World Series in 2005, so then my pizza eating must have been the reason why the Chicago White Sox won the World Series.

4. This is the most common type hedgehog I have run into. The people who justify their judgements about a entire group of people, vast social policy, or complicated issue on their own singular, personal experience. For example, a hedgehog said that the reason why healthcare is expensive is because almost everybody in boarding hospitials are faking being sick because his mom worked as a nurse and that was her experience in her hospitial. I don't think he ever realized that perhaps the patients in the other 99.9% of hospitals were not faking and actually had some ailment of some sort. This same hedgehog also said the reason why the airline industry is doing some terribly is because they don't fill their flights because on a lot of flights he takes, they are not full. Obviously that means the other tens of thousands of flights that day were not full either. I try not to do this even though it is easy to fall into. For instance, I graduated from undergrad with honors by taking a full load and working 30, sometimes 40 hours a week. Doesn't mean I think everyone else can do it and I sure as hell don't recommend it. Alas, why can't more people be more of a fox (look-wise also) like me.

So you can see hedgehogs are annoying people who don't know what their talking about, which probably makes up a huge amount of the blogosphere. But it is getting late so I will say so long for now. Happy Labor Day everyone. Until next time, peace.