Crimson opinion writer
Alexander Junxiang Chen
Latest Content
Identity Is Forever Fluid
Viewing other individual or cultural identities purely through the lens of one’s own is a recipe for epistemic disaster. Recognize that differences in how someone else views the nature or fluidity of a particular identity, though potentially unfamiliar to you, are nevertheless authentic and do not represent a license for mockery, derision, or mischaracterization.
Who Cares About Aesthetics?
Don’t worry too much about how your unique aesthetic tastes in art, music, clothing, or anything else are perceived by friends and family. If we are to discard any remaining notions about the dualism of body and mind and accept the preponderance of empirical evidence that the latter arises in some fashion from the former, then we must logically conclude that sensations such as aesthetic pleasure possess a fundamentally biological basis.
AI Is No Threat to Art
The proliferation of a new technology need not be viewed as an existential threat to the fine arts. Rather, it should be welcomed by artists as a new medium of personal expression that can help their natural ingenuity and originality shine further. The generative algorithms that have captured the public imagination rely fundamentally on building off of artistic motifs created by human agents.
The Interesting Thing About Interest
The very concept of interest is, at its core, largely synonymous with the nature and strength of the relationship between a lender and borrower. This explains why a rise in social complexity, at least initially, begets the emergence of the interest rate.
Open Spaces
For those more burdened than others by the drudgery of daily life, this escapist itch is predictably stronger. Even so, there certainly lies in all of us to some degree, a tiny Mephistophelian voice that, rather than tempt with material pleasures, goads us to gleefully abandon the present. To put it another way: How many of you have ever had the desire, however fleeting, to drop everything and take a two-week sojourn to St. Lucia?
We’ve Always Been Global
Global integration can be culled, and free trade can be suppressed, but if history is any guide, the world will never stop being global — and for the better.
Of Bitcoin and Barbarians
Among the many parallels that politicians and thinkers so often draw between the Roman world and ours, perhaps one that should be heeded with caution is the loss of public trust in the Roman “financial” system and the one that we live with today.
