I have studied the world’s religions much more thoroughly than the average religious believer, and probably more than many devout ones. There are, of course, religious clergy and academic specialists who have much more in-depth knowledge of a specific religion, or some particular aspect of religion in general, than I do. But I think that I have as broad a knowledge of world religions as almost anyone. I’ve studied the scriptures and foundational texts of the major world religions (and many minor ones), and read authors ranging from popular apologists to the philosophically inclined from each of them, from every period since the foundation of the religion until now. In addition, I’ve also undertaken a pretty thorough study of history, so I have a sense of how religions have developed and interacted with one another that most believers do not have.

Religious believers will sometimes tell me that, if I only studied their scriptures more, or read certain books or talked to certain scholars, I would find that the evidence supports their religion. I do not doubt their sincerity in their belief that the evidence, when (mis)interpreted in a favourable way, can be made compatible with their perception of reality, or that there are people who have constructed elaborate and detailed arguments supposedly demonstrating the truth of their religion (since I’ve read many of the books myself). But this is exactly like presenting a person who has flown around the world in an airplane with precise measurements showing that some small patch of land is flat, and expecting him or her to stop knowing that the Earth is roughly spherical in shape.

There are, say, some Christian preachers who are very talented at connecting events in the real world (or in earlier parts of the Bible) to Biblical prophecies, or Muslim theologians who are quite adept at arguing that a creator God must have certain essential attributes. The most that Christians and Muslims can say about the arguments of these respective groups is that they are compatible with their religion, not that they demonstrate their veracity. Predictions about the future made in the Bible which have apparently come true can be explained by means other than an omniscient God (such as that people are simply reading an unintended meaning back into the text). Similarly, Islamic theology, however extensive, might simply be about a being that does not exist in the real world. The point is that an expert in a specific geographic feature of one country or region is not in a better position to judge the shape of the Earth than a layperson who has travelled throughout the world.

It is in this context that I wish to say a few words about expertise, whether it be religious expertise or secular or scientific expertise put to the service of religion. As someone trained in science and in logic, the alleged expertise of a person by itself means nothing to me, nor should it mean anything to anyone else. In the final analysis, what matters is whether or not a person who makes an argument can back it up with evidence or reason. Whenever a religious believer has recommended an “expert” to me who is supposedly able to show that his or her religion is true, I have inevitably discovered one of two things. Either the believer does not actually understand what the expert really said or wrote, or the so-called expert is simply wrong; and quite often, both of these situations apply.

The one academic field where the clash between religion and academia has received the most attention is of course biology, with creationist rejection of the theory of evolution. But it is by no means the only one. The study of history, for example, has cast doubt on many of the stories told and believed in by Jews, Christians, and Muslims about the past, and the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of their religions. Now there are certainly historians who are also religious believers who can show how the evidence can be interpreted in a way that may not be incompatible with the evidence. Characters and episodes from the Bible can indeed be mostly matched to people and events from history. (This is true to a much lesser degree for the Qur’an, but it is also not a narrative like the Bible. The corresponding Islamic literature would be the collections of aḥādīth.)

However, the fact that the Bible refers to real world events no more proves its veracity than the existence of Baker St. proves that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, nor does it lead to the conclusion that the miracles recorded therein are also real. It is clear to anyone who has studied the actual history of Israel that many of the Biblical stories involving David and Solomon, for example, must be exaggerations and myths, no different than other ancient nations have told about their highly-regarded kings. Ironically, the relative historical unimportance of these kings meant that the authors of the Bible were able to get away with this exaggeration.

In comparison, consider the Duke of Zhou, who shaped much of subsequent Chinese culture, is roughly their contemporary, and who, like David, has many poems in a culturally influential book of poetry attributed to him. It was he who first wrote about the concept of the Mandate of Heaven (that is, the Chinese ruler’s right to govern is granted by Heaven, i.e., God, and can be revoked if the ruler is incompetent or unjust). No one ever argues that just because many aspects of the Chinese historical records about the Zhou dynasty have been subsequently confirmed by archeology, that we should therefore believe in the Mandate of Heaven, or accept as true the parts which are clearly mythological or simply reflect the religious beliefs of their composers. The Chinese historical records are attested by better evidence than the Bible, if for no reason other than the fact that the rulers of China governed far more people and a much larger geographic area than than did the rulers of Israel, but this tells us nothing about whether the religious beliefs of its composers are true (e.g., if the Chinese emperors had any actual connections to Heaven).

(Updated 2010-11-08: continued in part 17 here.)

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 18
2. The geographic and temporal spread argument, part 11
3. The geographic and temporal spread argument for religion as a human creation, part 1

Because most people aren’t going to read my rather long autobiography, I have distilled what I want to say on the misconceptions held by traditional Chinese parents about education and schooling into a few important points which I will discuss below. This way, any student caught in the situation that I was in can print this out and use it to tell their parents that they are on the path to destroying his or her academic career.

There may be any number of reasons why traditional Chinese parents have these erroneous beliefs. China has historically had to manage a huge population, and thus the educational goals of traditional Chinese culture focus on stability and hierarchy, emphasise standardised testing, and discourage individual creativity — in other words, traditional Chinese culture is diametrically opposed to the values required to become a successful scientist. Also, immigrants who were educated elsewhere may falsely assume that their children’s experiences in school will be similar to their own.

I do not claim that these misconceptions, or the actions inspired in parents by them, are necessarily always harmful. In fact, children of parents who hold them may do quite well in high school, and possibly even in the first years of university. This seems to be supported by anecdotal evidence and by the popular stereotype of Chinese students as hard workers with good grades.

However, the pressures and restrictions imposed on their children by parents who hold these misconceptions are most certainly crippling disadvantages for any student wishing to enter graduate school in science, which is my concern. But what is far more damaging than any particular erroneous belief is the authoritarian attitude that parents simply cannot be wrong merely by virtue of their being parents. If parents are willing to abandon their erroneous beliefs when they are shown not to correspond to reality, the damage inflicted on their children will be minimal. Otherwise, they may end up doing enormous damage to their children’s careers.

The points below apply not just to traditional Chinese parents, but to authoritarian parents from any cultural background. But I am of course writing from my own personal experience, although I suspect that these experiences are shared by a large number of people who may not want to draw public attention to the deficiencies of their parents.

1. The way to succeed in school is to “study”, and to “study” means only to read text books assigned by the school and to repeatedly do the drill exercises found therein.

Wrong. While such a strategy may result in good grades in elementary or high school, the only skill it can develop is the ability to follow instructions well whether they are understood or not (which may in fact be a very useful skill in certain jobs or situations). It will leave undeveloped the far more critical skill of thinking for oneself.

In the upper years of university and in graduate school, it will no longer be advantageous to mindlessly follow instructions, leaving students who have depended upon their ability to do so for their high grades unable to remain on parity with students who have been encouraged to learn how to study for themselves all along.

I have witnessed this firsthand among my high school and undergraduate classmates who behaved exactly like how my parents want me to behave. Fortunately for me, I did not obey my parents.

2. Anything not on the school curriculum is a “waste of time”.

Wrong. I learned almost everything that I would need for graduate school outside of the classroom. I would even go so far as to say that I would have been much better prepared for graduate school if I hadn’t been forced by my parents to waste so much time on school work that I didn’t need to do.

Granted, a part of the reason that sticking to the school curriculum was such a waste of time for me was that my parents had coerced me into an undergraduate program other than the one I wanted to enter (see point #5 below). I therefore had no choice but to take courses I had neither any interest in nor any use for, while pursuing my actual interests outside of my official courses.

However, even if a student is in the undergraduate program of his or her choice, discouraging him or her from going outside of the curriculum is still a bad idea. For one thing, the contents of the curriculum may have been decided by political or economic factors such as sources of funding or the whimsical preferences and tastes of the curriculum designers, and may therefore have very little to do with the needs of any particular student. Furthermore, the nature of the curriculum design process is such that there is an inherent lag, and the curriculum will always be far behind the cutting edge in any field, and especially those in which progress is rapid.

For example, my high school computer science classes did not cover computational complexity, even though it was an established topic in the undergraduate computer science curriculum at the university level. Group theory was covered neither in any of my high school algebra classes nor in any of my undergraduate classes in engineering, even though knowledge of it is assumed by many of the courses I took in graduate school. And while I was an undergraduate, there were no courses in quantum computing, which were subsequently introduced into the curriculum after I had already started graduate school. At each stage, my parents criticised or punished me for studying topics “not on the school curriculum”, but these turned out to be exactly the topics I would need to know for my graduate studies.

Any parents who punish their children for studying topics outside of the school curriculum will most certainly damage their academic careers far more than can be made up for by any additional time they may have gained to study topics that happen to be on it.

3. Social connections are not important. The best students are socially isolated and study alone. The way to succeed in school is by sticking to others of the same ethnic background.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Being socially well-connected is very important for academic success. My personal experience as well as observations of others tell me that the best students and academics are those who have a large social network to whom they can turn whenever they need help.

When I was young, my parents continually lied to other people about how much time I spent “studying” (see point #1 above), by which they meant alone. (I could never understand their motivation for this lie. If their purpose was to impress other people, wouldn’t it have been much more impressive to exaggerate in the other direction, and tell them that I had the highest marks in the school despite not studying at all? Now that would’ve been impressive.) Having their parents lie about how much time they spent “studying” is a common experience among my relatives, friends, and acquaintances of Chinese background. There is enormous pressure to “study” alone and to dissociate from others except for those who have comparable or higher marks. The natural consequence of this, of course, is that the students with the highest marks are pressured not to have any friends whatsoever.

Again, this may result in good grades in high school and in the early years of university. But there are certain skills which can be learned or honed only through interacting with others, and by the upper years of university or graduate school the difference will become very obvious.

And finally, even if traditional Chinese parents allow their children to socialise, they nevertheless pressure them to limit their social interactions to those who share their ethnic or national background. My parents continually attacked anyone I associated with who wasn’t of Chinese background (the only exception was an undergraduate classmate who is Indian, because he had higher marks than me). Once I started graduate school, they kept suggesting that I work with professors of Chinese background and that I spend more time with Chinese graduate students, as if other people didn’t exist. My mother became obsessed with criticising me for having Iranian colleagues.

My parents’ behaviour was extremely damaging to my career because I passed up many opportunities to collaborate with people whom I knew my parents would criticise me for working with. A person who restricts the pool of his or her collaborators based on ethnic or national background will never be as successful as a person who operates without any such restriction. The reason basically boils down to the standard economic argument against racism (or any form of discrimination based on attributes other than those directly relevant to the situation).

I don’t deny that it is possible to obtain a graduate degree, and even a Ph.D., while limiting one’s interactions mostly to others of the same ethnic background. Apparently many people do. I’ve met several people who have graduated with Ph.D. degrees from Canadian universities and yet are barely able to speak English (or French). But these people are not anywhere near the top of their fields, and usually leave academia as soon as they graduate.

4. Extracurricular activities are a distraction from school (except for music lessons).

Wrong. Extracurricular activities are very important for practising and reinforcing skills taught in the classroom, as well as for learning skills not taught in the classroom altogether. Furthermore, extracurricular activities are a way of meeting people who share one’s interests whom one would not otherwise meet (see point #3 above).

And honestly, what’s up with Chinese parents’ fetish for music lessons?

5. It’s important to have a prestigious degree.

Wrong. It’s far more important to work on what one believes to be significant and relevant. The degrees and honours will come naturally later.

At the end of high school, I wanted to prepare myself for studying quantum computing by enrolling in a general science program in university and choosing my own courses. My father thought that this was not “prestigious” enough and coerced me into entering an elite engineering program instead. He insisted that after I graduated I would be “qualified” to do anything I want.

I did not return to quantum computing until my Ph.D. Some of the most important discoveries in the field were made in the meantime. I would most certainly have been in a much better position in terms of my research if I had started right away when I entered university (or even in high school), instead of waiting until I had earned “prestigious” degrees which “qualified” me to do research in the field.

When I was an undergraduate, I turned my attention to information processing and retrieval in languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, because I expected the Muslim world to become much more prominent in global politics after the fall of the USSR. I also studied the Islamic religion and the history and languages of several countries in the Muslim world. My parents continually criticised me for doing this since these subjects had nothing to do with the degree for which I was studying. However, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, people turned to me for my expertise, despite the fact that I had no degrees in the relevant areas. (I would later earn a Master’s degree in computer science for information retrieval, but for bioinformatics rather than languages written in the Perso-Arabic script.)

The obsession with earning degrees puts the cart before the horse. There are many people with prestigious degrees who end up not accomplishing very much. Conversely, a person who is accomplished will be recognised whether or not he or she has a degree to symbolise his or her accomplishments.

6. I know better than my child what is in his or her best interest.

Wrong. Your child has far more time than you do to think about his or her future. If he or she is adamant about what he or she needs to do to succeed in school, then he or she is most certainly right.

If your child is or has been in the gifted program, he or she is very likely to know much more about the education of children than you do. This is because the school often sends home literature on gifted children which you’re too busy to read or to pay much attention to, but which your child has devoured voraciously for lack of better things to do. Anything you do will then be compared to what the latest research in developmental psychology says a good parent ought to have done in the same situation.

It is well-known that authoritarian parenting is damaging to children and that children should never be discouraged from pursuing their interests. And yet traditional Chinese parents adhere to an authoritarian style of parenting that discourages their children from (or even punishes them for) studying anything outside of the school curriculum. This needs to stop, and children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. Education vs. schooling
2. Most advice given to people with abusive parents is wrong
3. Revenge as a Motivation for Abusive Parents

I should perhaps go back a little and explain why the demographics of my graduate school labmates was noteworthy. Throughout my undergraduate years in Engineering Science, my father had been harassing me about my supposed inability to compete with students from mainland China. This was, of course, complete nonsense. I don’t recall many students from a mainland Chinese background who didn’t drop out by second year. The majority of them had formed a clique, and worked and socialised only with each other. As soon as a few of them started dropping out, most of them dropped out because they no longer had their support group. The only ones who made it past second year were those who did not restrict their coalitions to classmates from a similar background — in other words, those who adapted to become more like their Canadian and Westernised classmates. I had only one classmate of Chinese descent who had comparably high marks, and he was fairly Westernised (and I think he might have been born in Canada or the United States).

In any case, my father held what he imagined to be the typical student from mainland China to be the epitome of the university student: someone who had no goals aside from maximising his grade point average and spent all his time on only that and nothing else. Never mind the fact that I could clearly see for myself that those of my classmates who actually had his kind of mentality were all struggling to even pass, and failing — he insisted that I should behave more like them. Furthermore, he declared that, while I did not believe him now, I would soon find out in graduate school how right he was.

I had actually thought a lot about the demographics of my future colleagues while I was in high school, but at that time I had wanted to study what would now be called quantum computing, and had no intention of entering into engineering. I believed that my future colleagues would be mostly white, largely secular, and with a somewhat disproportionately high number coming from Jewish backgrounds — these were the typical demographics in many cutting-edge fields of science. On the other hand, those of Chinese descent would be underrepresented, especially in comparison with their general overrepresentation in more established areas of science and engineering. The reason for this is the Chinese cultural preference for staying away from anything deemed novel or risky, and sticking with things which are seen to be traditional or safe. My father was the perfect exemplar of this attitude. He refused to accept the rationale I offered for my interest in theoretical physics, namely that there is a deep connection between quantum mechanics and computer science which was largely unexplored, on the grounds that he “had never heard anyone say that”. (The implication that I was not anyone did not go unnoticed, either.) Clearly, if I wanted to do cutting-edge scientific research in certain areas, very few of my colleagues would be from a Chinese background, except for those who were highly Westernised. And yet my parents kept pressuring me to restrict my social circle to those of Chinese background only.

I could see for myself, both in high school and as an undergraduate in university, that every single one of my classmates who behaved according to my parents’ ideal did very poorly in school. I had no reason to believe that it would be any different in graduate school, whether it was in computer science or in engineering.

The top students in Engineering Science in my year came from a variety of backgrounds, but those of Chinese descent were underrepresented, while Iranians and Jews were overrepresented. In fact, the two students with the highest averages were a pair of Iranian guys who were cousins. The highest average in the class that was two years ahead of mine also belonged to an Iranian. This overrepresentation of Iranians among the best students in one of the top engineering programs in the West did not surprise me; it reminded me of the preponderance of German-American physicists during World War II, or of Russian-American scientists and mathematicians during the Cold War.

As I have written about previously, I chose to focus on control systems because this allowed me to study several subjects that I wanted to learn more about in a context that was acceptable to my parents. The demographics of my graduate school labmates was a bonus, because it meant that I could also learn Persian within the same environment. My Master’s thesis was based on previous work carried out by an Iranian former member of the lab, and I received a lot of help on my research from my Iranian labmates. Incidentally, my supervisor, Dr. Raymond Kwong, has a similar background to my parents. I had thought that, because of this, they would not criticise him — but they did anyway.

I had been studying information retrieval in languages written using variants of the Arabic script on my own, but my focus had moved away from Urdu because I was no longer in touch with Mrs. Mallo. Because of my labmates, I redirected my focus towards Persian. As I have mentioned previously, I added a section on the Persian language to my web site, but took it down just before the 9/11 terrorist attacks at my father’s insistence.

Despite the fact that my web site was unavailable, I continued to receive e-mails about some of the projects on it. Apparently, it continued to show up as one of the top results on text processing in the Perso-Arabic script in several search engines, and naturally there was now a lot of interest in this topic. After I restored the site (but without the non-English sections), I put up a page on processing various languages in LaTeX because it was one of my most popular requests.

Many people remarked to me at the time how marketable my skills had become, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I was told that I would be the perfect candidate for many career paths and job openings which had suddenly become available. It reminded me of what people said to me in high school about my suitability for studying the physics of computation. But I had no formal qualifications in information retrieval or Islamic studies, though I did have some attributes which people with only book learning did not have: I had first-hand experience of fasting through Ramadan, and I had spent the past four years counselling students from Muslim backgrounds who were trying to reconcile their inherited beliefs with what they learned in university. Furthermore, my background was neither European nor Middle Eastern, and I was not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. The fact that the historical conflict between Christianity and Islam and the current turmoil in the Muslim world were “none of [my] business” was seen by everyone as something that worked in my favour.

I knew that there would only be a small window of time to take advantage of the opportunities which had become available to me. Others would soon act to fill the niches which had been opened, but I had a head start. Furthermore, I was studying Persian, rather than the too-obvious Arabic, which would buy me some time. After 9/11, I predicted that Iraq would fall and that Iran’s regional status, which had been kept in check by its archnemesis, would be elevated as a result, and that therefore knowledge of the Persian language would be in demand in a few years — a prediction that turned out to be correct. However, my actions were also constrained by the crippling restriction that whatever I did, it would have to be a part of “school”. Furthermore, I was in the middle of my degree, and I wanted to finish it first. But I planned my switch into computer science — which I had wanted to study in university in the first place — around my skills in information retrieval in Persian.

In graduate school, I started becoming a social hub again. Besides hanging out with Iranians while they spoke Persian to each other, I also went to see Bollywood movies in Little India with labmates and friends from South Asia. I had actually started watching Bollywood movies in high school to learn Urdu, and since I had studied Sanskrit (and hence Devanagiri) in university, it meant that I could also read Hindi. (If the previous sentence was confusing to you, see here.) My interest in Sanskrit was shared by Dr. W. Murray Wonham, Professor Emeritus, who remained quite active in the lab in spite of his official retirement.

I socialised with everyone without regard for cultural or linguistic barriers. Many graduate students seemed to socialise mostly with those from their own cultural backgrounds, not necessarily out of any prejudice towards anyone else, but mainly out of convenience and laziness. But because I wasn’t inhibited by either of these factors, I knew a lot of people and a lot of people knew me. I had an international reputation: whenever there was a visitor from Iran or India, I was someone they “had to meet”.

Now, one might argue that being able to recite Persian poetry and knowing a bit of Bollywood trivia are the wrong reasons for being famous in graduate school — but this didn’t matter. (For all I know, maybe Richard Feynman became such a famous physicist because he played the bongo drums.) The point is that I had opportunities to meet and potentially work with people which I never would have had if I had obeyed my parents and acted like a student from mainland China. The only reason that I didn’t take advantage of those opportunities was because I knew that my parents would simultaneously criticise me for associating with my colleagues while taking credit for any work I did with them. I suppose that this was a form of self-sabotage, and this kind of thing would become increasingly common throughout my career. (Having a harsh inner critic and acting in a self-injurious manner are traits common to people with abusive parents.) Meanwhile, my labmates who actually came from mainland China would express to me that they wished they were more social and had more connections, but lacked the proficiency in English and the confidence to make themselves noticed.

My busy social life in graduate school did not escape the notice of my parents, who once again began to attack me for being too popular. Considering that they had been attacking me throughout my undergraduate years for socialising primarily not with my classmates but rather with people who had nothing to do with my schooling, one would think that they would be happy that my social and academic lives had become re-integrated in graduate school.

I have been extraordinarily lucky in my life in that I kept encountering people who, for whatever reason, decided that I was extremely talented and volunteered to do whatever they could to help me make the most of my abilities. In the long term, I think that my parents’ continual efforts to separate me from these people have been far more damaging to my scientific career than their depriving me of any specific career opportunity. In elementary and high school, they always criticised my teachers, my friends, and my friends’ parents who supported and praised my interests, while demanding that I behaved like my Chinese classmates who had submissively allowed their imaginations to be suppressed and destroyed by their own parents. They accused Dr. Percy of diverting my attention to astrophysics which had “nothing to do with” computer science, when in fact he gave me an enormous head start with my scientific research. They continually blamed Mrs. Mallo for distracting me, when she was the one who enabled me to continue my studies after they had made it impossible to do any work around them. When I entered university, it was my affiliation with people who shared my interest in religion that allowed me to acquire the skills I would later need in graduate school, but my parents insisted that they were wasting my time. And in graduate school in engineering, it would be my Iranian friends who prepared me for my return to computer science by teaching me Persian. Ironically, it was my parents who had put me into an environment with so many Iranians to begin with when they forced me into an engineering program, but this didn’t stop them from criticising me for making the best use of this fact.

When I completed my Master’s degree, both Dr. Kwong and Dr. Wonham asked me to stay for the Ph.D. program. I felt very guilty about turning down the offer, but I had never intended to be an engineer in the first place, and I wanted to return to computer science as soon as possible. My parents had insisted that I obtained a postgraduate degree in engineering, and I had hoped that they would leave me alone to pursue my own interests once I had earned one — but I guess I knew that this would not be the case. My decision to leave was made easier by the fact that my father had started to really dislike my supervisor for no discernible reason (but my guess would be jealousy), and began to insult him and criticise my association with him. I knew that even if I had wanted to pursue a Ph.D. degree in engineering, there was no way I could do so while sustaining a continuous barrage of insults against my supervisor by my father. But I disappointed a lot of people by leaving engineering.

I searched for a way to switch into computer science and to do research into both information retrieval and quantum information theory. My parents had always accused me of being distracted and of dividing my attention, but this was my defense mechanism against being prevented by them from studying what I wanted to study. I knew that, at any moment and for no reason whatsoever, they could put an end to my research by forbidding me from continuing, and if I refused, then by continually criticising and threatening me until I was no longer able to continue. They had done this to me in high school, and I had compensated for my inability to continue studying theoretical computer science and physics by turning my attention to informational retrieval and religious studies. Every time my parents prevented me from being able to focus my attention on one subject, I would turn to another. This was how I survived their continual attempts to destroy my scientific career.

Incredibly, one university was a leader in both information retrieval and quantum information theory, and it was in Canada to boot: the University of Waterloo. Even more incredibly, the city of Waterloo was also home to two research institutes devoted to the topics that I cared most about. The first, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), was established by Mike Lazaridis, the founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM), to be a world class research facility devoted to theoretical physics. It fit the description of “a building full of astrophysicists” that I had predicted to my father I would one day be studying computer science in. The second, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), was founded by Jim Balsillie, the other co-CEO of RIM, to be a think tank on issues of international relations. (In fact, after the Perimeter Institute moved to its new location in late 2004, the two institutes were located just across the street from one another.)

I felt that it was an incredible stroke of good fortune that everything I wanted to study happened to converge in one place. Therefore, I came to Waterloo.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 2: my high school predictions about the future
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science