Chris's Blog for LC

The field of micro-finance was unexpectedly new and interesting to me. When I was reading Half The Sky, the word micro-finance stood out to my eyes even though I had no idea about what it is like. As I kept researching into this topic, I felt that its humanistic aspect of focusing on every woman’s dignity was striking. I had been dreaming of working as an investor for infrastructure development at World Bank or UN-related development banks , but to me, micro-finance is actually as intriguing as this work. Therefore, the interview with Ms. Soledad Gompf was eye-opening, which might have affected my view on future work as well. As a whole, this week’s experiences were filled with something new, and I’m pretty sure that I definitely want to pursue this interest even after LC.

Since several studies have proven that achievement gap in education is solely related to children’s background, at first, it seemed to me that addressing both socio-economic disparity and individualization of education are crucial to solving this issue. However, I noticed that the first option might be chicken-and-egg issue because we learned that the best way to close social and economic inequality should be education. If we have to solve the social and economic inequality in order to provide ideal education, this will result it an endless cycle. Therefore, I would suggest focusing on providing a variety of educational opportunities in accordance with each student’s background. In this way, students with relatively poor educational background will also be able to receive education that is not too advanced for them and improve their academic skills step by step.

As far as I understood from the books, just war has three characteristics. First, in theory, war can be justified when self-defense is needed against unjust enemies. Second, war can be justifies when conducted in a just way. These two are traditional components of just war, and they can be rephrased into “why” and “how” nations engage in war. In addition to these two, focus on post-war efforts is also arising. Therefore, justification of war, process of war, and post-war efforts are often considered when discussing just war theory.

• “Education” and “Empowerment” are mentioned as the key to improving women’s social status. How are these related, and how can they resolve the situation?

First, empowerment can be defined as an authority or power given to someone to do something. This way, education can be regarded as a type of empowerment because education can provide various perspectives, knowledge, thinking skills, moral, so on and so forth, all of which are necessary for women to stand up for themselves. Education is of course essential for men and other genders as well, since they are more likely to get the ideas of integrity and moral. Although it spends an unimaginable time and energy to change the whole culture of community through education, this is the most effective way in a long term.

I’m against the idea that voluntary prostitution should be legalized because of a simple reason: it is very difficult to distinguish whether a person is voluntary prostitute or not. Furthermore, it is also possible that one change what they say about their will in a moment. Hence, even involuntary prostitution could be justified by law.

Some may say that they can write a contract to ensure the prostitutes’ willingness, but there are almost countless ways to avoid that. In other words, this statement is same as saying “You can force someone to be a prostitute as long as you have a contract.” For example, one can just threaten a girl to write a contract, or a girl might not know what it means to be a prostitute. There is no means to accurately check one’s willingness.

Therefore, I think legalizing “voluntary” prostitution might just justify or even promote forced and involuntary prostitution. From the perspective of humanity, outlawing prostitution should be the only way to defend people’s (often girls’) human rights.

Even though some are revealing the significance of WMDs, like O’neil, I basically think the situation will keep going even in the future. First, it seems that now is still in the process that WMDs are becoming known among people as we can see from O’neil’s book. Therefore, this process of recognition will continue in my opinion in the near future. However, the process will not be completely done because always caring about WMDs will tire people and some people will just abandon the option to be careful about WMDs. They will just live an ordinary life, avoiding cognitive load. Therefore, I suppose the people in the future will be divided into two groups: those who are cognizant of WMDs and those who are not. The first group might be able to defend themselves or even take advantage of that status quo. The other group will keep being ignorant, no matter how others advocate not to.

Also, I think WMDs will not be eradicated unless we completely eliminate discriminatory ideas against anything. Since the characteristics of WMDs include “damage,” WMDs seem to be solely related to the human nature surrounding discrimination. As long as discriminatory consciousness exists in people’s minds, WMDs will continue to be weaponized (because it can harm people). Hence, combatting WMDs is similar to combatting discrimination.

How to eliminate discrimination might be one of the toughest questions we can think of. However, I personally believe that trying to relate ourselves to others as the same humans must be key to answering this question. This way, we will be able to feel others’ pains regardless of who they are. The practical means should be dialog and education: dialogs can change the consciousness of the people in our generation, and education can change that of the people in the following generations. In conclusion, I think WMDs will keep suffering people unless we eradicate discrimination by means of dialog and education.

Topics I’m interested in

• Mathematics surrounding nuclear weapons
• Education in slum

Although I do not have any idea on specific how-tos for the topics above, I just want to delve into them.

I actually was the one who asked this question on another student’s thread, but I’m not really sure about a solution. The fundamental requirements should be the opposite of the three characteristics of WMD, which are 1) transparency, 2) fairness, and 3) unscalability.

1. Transparency can help a model not become a WMD because those who make models less likely manipulate the process in favor of certain people.
2. The damaging trait of WMD is what makes WMD weaponized, so ensuring the fairness of a process not to damage anyone could make it more ethical.
3. If a model is scalable to a huge population, this might mean the model is excessively standardizing people’s patterns. Rather, personalizing a model as much as possible would be more acceptable to everyone, without leaving anyone out.

Furthermore, keeping a model updated is likely effective, since the model can be in the most suitable form according to the feedback it receives. In order to make it sure, getting a model comprehensible also seems crucial because it can enable a tremendous population to assess models and give feedback from various perspectives.

Thoughts on class

Overall, I really like the class, since it require me to reflect on complicated issues and ideas, which I believe is spurring and improving my intelligence. I feel our class is more like “Mathematics and Social Justice” rather than “Mathematics for social justice” because we’ve been focusing on the relation between mathematics and social justice. Hence, although the class might be like that as it goes, I may want more portion of real-world math. Thank you for reading!

What is a model?

• “A model, after all, is nothing more than an abstract representation of some process, be it a baseball game, an oil company’s supply chain, a foreign government’s actions, or a movie theater’s attendance” (O’neil, 2016, p. 18).
• “No model can include all of the real world’s complexity or the nuance of human communication” (O’neil, 2016, p. 20).
• “Models are opinions embedded in mathematics” (O’neil, 2016, p. 21)

From the quotes from Weapons of Math destructions above, a model seems to be defined as a simplified flaw of actions or phenomenon, which involves incomplete and subjective variables.

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What are Weapons of Math Destructions?

• “I came up with a name for these harmful kinds of models: Weapons of Math Destruction, or WMDs for short” (O’neil, 2016, p. 3).
• “So to sum up, these are the three elements of a WMD: Opacity, Scale, and Damage” (O’neil, 2016, p. 31).

Interpreting the quotes above and taking several portions from the book into consideration, WMDs seem like models that meet the qualifications as follows:

1. the model is opaque
2. the model is unfair and harmful to someone
3. the model is scalable to a bigger population

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Criteria for liberal arts college rankings

• Number of students who’ve got Phd after graduation
• Career support & alumni’s careers
• Financial aids
• Quality of professors
• Satisfaction rates of students
• Number and quality of researches and publications
• Faculty resources

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References

ONeil, C. (2017). Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Great Britain: Penguin Books.