- This election will attract more voters for two main reasons: (1) the country is more divided than ever after four years of Trump; (2) voting now has a lower opportunity cost than before mainly due to the pandemic: More people staying idle at home or working from home. Making a trip to voting stations or waiting in long lines to drop their ballots suddenly becomes attractive as it offers a good reason to get out of homes for doing something meaningful
- Demonstrations mingled with looting are unlikely to stop soon partly because many low income families are currently out of jobs with little savings in hand. Looting seems to be the fastest way to “solve” that problem, at least the one that makes intuitive sense
- Jared Kushner was not wrong in saying Black Americans must want to succeed for policies to make a difference. His problem is to single out the blacks, when in fact internal drive makes a significant different for every community, every ethnicity, every culture, every individual and every family. It applies to the first family as well: It must want to do the right things for the American people — not for its own interests — before anything else.
- Speaking of internal drives, sometimes it is the only thing that matters. However, adults are a lot harder to change than children when it comes to the baseline level of motivations. This is an issue of efficiency: We will end up spending $x to raise the motivation of an adult, but only $y for a child, $x > y$ all the time.
- Internal drives are like faiths: The best time to install a faith is when you are kids. I myself was a good example. Out of curiosity I studied the Bible and quickly familiarized myself with the stories, words and contents. Pretty soon I could talk intelligently during the Bible discussions and the church leader asked me to be a student pastor, explaining the Bible to other students when they had questions. Knowing Bible however made little difference for my faith. Deep down I was never convinced that the God really exists. An average American kid growing up from a very religious family is far more likely to have solid faith than I do. Today I can barely remember any Bible story at all.
- Americans are best at telling stories, while Chinese are best at making material changes. To convince yourself of the former, watch The Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix mini-series about an orphan chess genius named Beth Harmon. The character was portrayed so real that I had a very hard time to believe the whole story was fictional.
- China is the exact antithesis of the US: It has been clumsy in telling its own story of growth and for the most part, does not know how to make international voices through its ordinary citizens, not through the state mouthpieces. It seems the only way to know China well is through looking at a bunch of numbers: miles of high speed trains built; price dropped after China entered the production of some goods; miles of paved roads to the most remote places; or the acres of farmed fishes and shrimps. These things can only make headlines once in a while, and are interesting in general only to the business community
- The pandemic would have provided a good opportunity for the world to appreciate China more (like knowing how many face masks they can make on short notices, or making its vaccine available to other countries), except it turned out to be one of the worst moments for the country thanks to Trump administration. The lesson: Americans still hold the key to tell, to interpret and/or to translate stories of other countries, despite the significantly worsen reputations created by Trump. Honestly, the US has been dominating global voices for too long that no other nation or country group (e.g., EU) could easily step up efforts for a replacement
- Bearing a low resemblance between China and US can be a good thing: Parties sharing little similarities could learn more from each other than countries of high similarity. It is like you would learn little from your brother /sister because you grow up together, but more from a new family just moved in town. Unfortunately, what we see now is that the two countries have been turned off — rather than turned on — by their differences
- Why is it so hard for humans to get along with each other? One possibility is that the aliens who created us and sent us over to the earth had programmed us to be jealous with each other, to have brain washed us so we are leaning toward fighting more than cooperating with each other. Busy fighting has in turn dragged us of all down, making ours way behind their level of civilization and technologies.