December 19

A fictional dinner

In the play Top Girls, the main character Marlene invites historical or fictional characters to a dinner party, in which they all share their life story as being an extraordinary female in a male-dominated society.  To better understand the author’s intention in Act One of this play, I’m going to write about if I am to invite people to a dinner party, who will I choose?

Su Shi
Princess Wencheng
 Oda Nobunaga
 He was born on 8 January 1037, died on 24 August 1101. Chinese calligrapher, gastronome, painter, pharmacologist, poet, politician, and writer of the Song dynasty. His journey of being a government official has many ups and downs, remain unmoved either by gain or loss. He managed many different cities all around China, including my city Hangzhou. We have an embankment built by him, named after him.  His poets are very famous forever. They are in textbooks and they are actually wonderful.  Princess Wencheng, surnamed Li, was a member of a minor branch of the royal clan of the Chinese Tang dynasty. In 641, she was granted by Emperor Taizong of Tang to King Songtsän Gampo of Tibet for marriage at the age of 15, an involuntary actor of the emperor’s Heqin policy. She is popularly known and well respected in Tibet. She enhanced cultural and technological exchange between Tang and Tibet(seeds, crafts). Details about her life are a mystery. Oda Nobunaga was a feudal lord of Japan who ruled in the late 16th century. He succeeded his father and assumed total power by eliminating all opposition against him, including his own uncle and brother. He was an expert in battling. He built up alliances, warrior class system, free market, infrastructures, turned over the economy from agricultural to manufacturing base, value land by production. Though he may be remembered for his brutality, he is credited with unifying a large portion of Japan and changing the history of the island nation forever.

 

  • They Lived an interesting life, not boring or conventional.
  • Very capable
  • Somewhat mystery therefore intriguring
  • They lived the best out of their lives and also work hard for other people’s life.
  • have major contributions to society.
  • I like their attitude towards life. I like what they have done.
  • They have distinctive characteristics.

 

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December 10

Expected value = odds of gain x value of gain

Notes：

Why we make bad decisions

Expected value = odds of gain x value of gain

Why can’t estimate precisely:

  • If something comes to your mind first, you will think that it’s more likely.
  • Compare to the odds that other people get. You are less likely to do it if others are more likely to succeed, even if the odds to you is the same.
  • Compare to the past instead of compare to possibilities.
  • Comparison changes the value of things. But the comparison we make is different base on the current situation.
  • More>less; sooner>later.
  • Get to the future, change your mind.

The surprisingly logical mind of babies

  • Generalization
  • Causal reasoning
  • Baby experiments
  • Randomly sampled or cherry-picked
  • Rich information from sparse data

 

Describe a time when you made a bad decision because you made one of the errors that Dan Gilbert discussed.

I decided to play games when I actually had to study. This is an error of time changing the expected value. The pleasure of playing games is “now”, and the bad consequences of not doing homework is “later”. Therefore, at the moment I value playing games over doing homework. Of cause I regret the decision later on when the pleasure of playing games becomes the past and the consequences of not doing homework become the present.

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December 3

Paper 1 Reflection

What is challenging:

  • restricted time. I only wrote 2 body paragraphs, but I planned to write 3.
  • Trying to understand the underlining meaning of the text. Because I have very limited knowledge for the context.
  • Structure of my ideas. I kind of just write what I thought, but then I realize that I sometimes repeat or I would struggle to find conjunction or connecting sentence.

What is easy:

  • Find meaningful ideas to write about.

How to improve:

  • Record time when doing my homework.
  • take simple notes on the US and Europe history. Or watch some old movies.
  • Just practice.
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December 2

Political cartoon – Liza Donnelly

  • In what ways do political cartoons offer multiple perspectives on the ways in which gender roles and identities are socially and politically constructed?

In some male’s perspective, when women wear a short skirt or wear red lipstick, it’s an implicit sex invitation. Some criminals will use these to defend themselves for raping, to say that somehow it’s the victim’s own fault. The society is male-dominated, therefore, the “justice” is on the male’s side, these claims become somehow valid in the society. Women, on the other side, do not have the power to restrict men. So when they want to lower their risk or getting raped, they can only do it by restricting themselves, without realizing that it’s not actually their fault.

  • How, and to what extent, can humor used to convey truth?

Truth is always too heavy, people would not like to think about it. Humor can make truth lighter, provide a common group for people to share their thinking without getting hostile or defensive. Humor also helps an idea to reach a wide range of public and mix it into everyday life.

  • Can anything be understood without an understanding of the historical or political context?

No. Probably would misunderstand or just don’t get it. So unfair. Why are most of our study material so western centered?

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December 1

TOK Arts Concept, Sculpture Award

After presenting this to the class:

  • What would you change in your own award, and why?

Another group separate people by age group and access them separately, I think that’s a good idea. Also, our group focus on the intention of the artist, but in the class discussion, I realize that the value of an artwork is actually more dependent on the audience world. An artist might unintentionally create something that deeply connects to the audience and might changes people for the better. So intention should not be an important criterion.

  • What did you realize about others’ awards? Questions you might raise?

So the main “unsolve” questions that repeatedly come up in our discussion are:

How to measure emotion? A lot of us said that good art is able to raise emotion among many people. I believe in oneself, it’s easy to know how strong is one’s emotion, it’s just hard to accurately describe it to others——except using art. So that’s kind of a dead loop.

How to ensure that the judges are unbias? Who should be qualified as an expert? Or if we are getting public voting, which platform? In extension to the public voting, are popular art equal to good art? All these questions finally come together back to the very beginning: What is good art?

But then I wonder if no one knows what is good art, then how does arts award in real life survive? Maybe good art doesn’t have to be “good” universally, or “good” objectively. If I think it’s valuable to me, then it’s valuable to me. Even if it’s meaningless to others, it’s still valuable to me. So art awards are not actually trying to decide what’s good, they are more like the recommendation list on your music app.

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