(Part 2) Top products from r/singapore

I see most things have been mentioned already. Project euler is good if you don't have a project in mind (and if you like math). The pragmatic programmer is also a great book to read after you have some beginner knowledge.

> no scrimping to pay for education

The best teacher for your kids is yourself (along with the husband, of course). It's more important to instill a sense of curiosity and wonder of the world than sending them to expensive tuitions and 'elite' schools, where many teachers actually don't know what they're talking about either. Basically, if you want the children to be smart, you have to be a role model of smartness yourself, instead of offloading that burden to the school. I'd argue that excessive homeworks and school assignments are actually harmful to the children's intellectual development.

Thanks for posting this. I've been so desensitised by the waves of TED-worthy solutionism way of thinking. Locally, the Yale-NUS kids are especially notorious for such ideas because THIS is the way they gain prestige among their circles. Doesn't matter if the ideas actually work, just need that notch on their CV and they're ready to ride it all the way to an upper management level in McKinsey.

Unfortunately, this will be the norm among the upper-middle and upper classes for a long time to come. Here are some books for those interested to learn more.

Winners Take All

To Solve Everything, Click Here

Geek Heresy

Not to say that people shouldn't strive for social change, etc. But real change requires real grind and understanding. The people doing so aren't usually in the media limelight either.

to summarize, it will depend on three points: [1] your race (or the one you pass as) relative to [2] its history in the place you go to, as well as [3] the purpose of your visit.

[warning: a lot of generalization] for example, as a Chinese person in the US would be viewed as a model minority in most spaces (especially employment) and would not face disproportionately higher incarceration rates as your black or latinx peers. To assimilate into the local lifestyle and culture can help you blend in, but it definitely won't completely prevent incidents of name-calling, racial aggression, etc.

On the other hand, if you went to Indonesia for job opportunities, despite still being Chinese, you are probably more likely to be met with hostility and discrimination, because the impressions Indonesians have on their local Chinese populations is different to what Americans have on theirs. HOWEVER if you make it clear that you are there as a tourist (and not a threat to their employment opportunities) the reaction might differ.

Of course, all of these are generalizations to be taken with a grain of salt; they are simply there to illustrate how there can be differences in how you are treated based on the abovementioned factors. I'm here not to help you predict what you, in your context, will face in the country you would be visiting/residing in, instead I am here to introduce to you factors that you have to consider and apply to your particular situation.

Here are more examples to further illustrate how history can further complicate how you can be treated based on race:

• We as Singaporeans view white people as almost homogenous, but there very much is racism within whiteness.
  
  

1. Aryans in Nazi Germany discriminating (and lots of murdering) against Jewish people, despite both being essentially white to us.
   
2. Put an Irish person in White America and there's a history of how they went from being discriminated against to being largely incorporated into whiteness.
   
3. Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins are treated as just Slavs in their diaspora, but put them in the Yugoslavian region and suddenly the identity divides and they discriminate each other based on their national identities despite speaking mutually intelligible Serbo-Croatian languages and sharing overlaps in culture & history.
   
   

• Sikhs in India have a history (of brutal tension) with Muslims, but put them in the US and they will in most instances actually pass off as Muslim and will frequently be the target of Islamophobia.
  
  The answer to such a broad question is truly more complicated than what the analogies in the comments section can give. The solutions to helping cope with or reducing the incidents of racism in such circumstances will also differ, and you might have to look beyond the advice of "just assimilate and you will be fine".
  
  Do your research!

OP isn't looking for neutral, he's looking for insights into how Singapore came to be. My recommendation: Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World. Not a book written by LKY, but a collection of his thoughts.

https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959

Time to gift them this book during their birthdays

How anyone read Singapore: Unlikely Power, and if so, is it any good? I'm trying to find a decent general history book and this one seems to be getting attention.

<== has a BA in International Relations

If you really want to get into International Relations, the LKY School of Public Policy isn't very highly-regarded in the field. NTU's RSIS is far more respectable. Main reason is: Kishore Mahbubani of LKYSPP is a prolific huckster who spouts a lot of BS in order to drive sales of his own books.

And then there's the issue of your reason for wanting to pursue this Masters. You need to ask yourself on what you really want to get out of it, because admissions committees are going to pay a lot of attention to your reason for making them bother to read your application in the first place.

There's also the problem where you don't seem to know a lot about IR. If you don't, this beginner's guide is very effective at covering what undergrads usually go through in a semester-long Intro to IR course.

For more detailed reading, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics presents one of the dominant theories of International Relations and according to my very biased opinion, the one which represents what our global order moving towards in the next couple years.

Read those two at the very bare minimum, then you should have a fair idea if you're keen on this path. If reading those two makes you bored, then forget it, because you'll be reading a lot of this kind of material.

I'm using quite a few in hard copy:

Outline of French Grammar and PDF.

The Alter Ego textbook, which I picked up when I was taking classes. Not incredibly important, but it was nice to have some structure. Lessons are scenario based (Family, festivals, seasons etc) and try and introduce a bit of French culture.

An older version of this verb conjugation book. It's a convenient way to learn and look up new verbs. Conjugating verbs in French sucks, this made it suck less.

And a French-English dictionary from Collins.

Keep in mind that I was taking classes, so many of these were supplementary. Didn't need to do the heavy lifting by myself.

---

If you really want to do it by yourself, you could start by looking at these, which are online course things structured for beginners.

http://www.frenchbyfrench.com/index.php

http://www.laits.utexas.edu/fi/home

http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tex/gr/

I probably should've linked these in my first post.

https://www.amazon.com/Family-Book-Todd-Parr/dp/0316070408

Should be compulsory reading for whoever makes these calls.

My BookDepository order has arrived! Been hyped to read this book about tea since I drunkenly made the order two weeks ago!

He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.

This is a refreshingly honest and mature response to criticism.

Instead of deflecting the criticism or using personal attacks, she questions the framing of the debate and acknowledges the causes as systemic and institutional.

As an obnoxious expat myself, I've witnessed the way behaviours (both good and bad) are institutionalised in every culture. And in Singapore it's crystalised around a culture of empty material consumption. Eat, shop, work, express yourself only through consumer choices. Singapore took this false image of progress and amplified it. It's little surprise that this culture does not make people happy in the long term.

See: The globalization of addiction.

Sure, here is how a company / university / school / nation can be more diverse and more meritocratic:

• Recognise unconscious biases that you have against under-represented and make sure they don't play a role in performance reviews, results, promotions, etc. This way, meritocracy will work properly as people will get the results they deserve. It has been shown time and time again that under-represented groups perform worse even when they're equally capable.
  
• Understand that that underrepresented groups may have problems at home (lack of money, abuse, etc) that affect their performance. If a teacher / manager is trained to recognise this and has resources available to act on it, they can help equalise the troubles an individual from an under-represented group might be facing.
  
• Spend more time looking for people from under-represented groups. They often don't have the channels to apply / reach out or the coaching along the lines of what to say and how to say it in an interview to make it to the level where they are accessed for their competence. E.g. a rich ang moh dad will teach his child how to make a killer resume and connect the child to his business colleagues, a poor Malay dad might not be able to. You need to provide more support to the malay kid. You cannot just say "too bad lor... Singapore is meritocratic. You figure out your resume yourself. You don't know how to make resume then you cannot join our uni. Singapore will provide equal training to Chinese and Malay. After that it's up to you."
  
  You know what is not on this list (which is what you seem to believe diversity is about):
  
  
• Filling up quotas with incompetent members of the under-represented groups. That is stupid. No successful company with a serious diversity program does that. No good HR department debates over it. This is not the 90s wall street.
  
  And you sound like a logical guy. Here is some logic to prove that this is not a zero-sum game:
  
  
• 1 position available in NUS Med School program. 2 candidates:
  
• Malay kid with meritocracy heuristic score "A"
  
• Chinese kid with meritocracy heuristic score "A"
  
• Hire Malay kid.
  
• Did meritocracy drop? Nope.
  
• Did diversity go up? Yes.
  
• Is this a zero-sum game? Nope.
  
• Is it unfair? Yes, to the Chinese kid it is. But it is not a zero-sum game.
  
  Btw, I'm not making this shit up. This is implemented in companies (the new age financial industry is actually pretty good at diversity—better than the tech companies that are slowly getting there). And this actually works.
  
  If you are actually interested in learning more instead of shitting on diversity + equating it to racism/poor-quota-policies, you may check out: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345528433/. There is no point in me regurgitating stuff that is readily available.

To add to u/nusgawker re: South China Sea, look up Bill Hayton's book The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia

https://www.amazon.com/South-China-Sea-Struggle-Power/dp/0300186835

The public libraries should have some copies available.

> I studied engineering where you assume the worst and plan accordingly to make sure that never happens. As it is said about making products idiot-proof, the world is always making a better idiot. If you assume the worst and have plans to contain it or make sure it never happens, chances are it won't screw up too badly, while if you just hope for the best, you are just asking for something to go wrong.

Why are the only options assuming the worst and hoping for the best? This is a false dichotomy.

> If a doctor screws up, a patient can die. If an engineer screws up, a lot of people can die. If a the state enforces a certain education system and screws up, a whole generation, and maybe the next few as well, can be screwed up mentally. If you do not take that into account as a possibility and account for it accordingly then I got nothing else to say.

But that's kind of the point here: we don't, based on that fear, ban the doctor from performing surgeries or forbid the engineer to build high-rise structures. Risk is to be managed with proper oversight, not invoked to clamp down on all possibility of failure in a paranoia of fear.

In the context of education, this comes in the form of curriculum planning, lesson observations and review, and feedback from parents (or even students directly). Sure, one could build in a more oppressive system of oversight if there is a legitimate fear of radicalisation or even a more prosaic clash of values (as is the case in terms of sexuality or religious education, for example), but by and large a lack of trust in teachers is not a particularly good sign for an education system.

> I did the IB program in Australia and in it we had Theory of Knowledge which is basically philosophy. At year 11/12 which is about the equivalent of our JC, my experience with it is that most of my classmates were not interested in it and basically everyone bullshitted their way through it. At the end of the IB program I can say pretty confidently that most of them can throw out counter arguments based on nitpicking of the type of arguments that are used but are barely able to come up with their own arguments and reasoning. It might be different in the IB in Singapore, but I doubt its any better thanks to our tendency for rote learning. Of course there would be the exceptions, but as a whole most of us did not benefit from it.

That's fair enough, but one of the problems with ToK (or KI at the 'A'-levels for Singapore) is the immediate pressure of producing results in a high-stakes grading system. Part of the argument for introducing philosophy at lower levels is that there isn't this pressure to produce tangible results, and allows for a slower, more considered approach to critical thinking and philosophical reflection.

> As I've said earlier, at the very most, philosophy should be only taught when the students are older and are more discerning, and I gave the range of upper sec (sec 4 maybe) to JC level, and I'd personally prefer it to be in the JC level. What age range would you then propose? From my experience most kids at that age or younger have no appetite for philosophy and thus they will probably either drown it out and focus on other subjects/hobbies or they will learn it by rote. Either way, they as a whole would not benefit much from it. Too early and the chance of screwing up their minds is there while not being effective, while if done so at a later age, the students might be able to better understand and discern for themselves. The basics of questioning, reasoning and understanding can be taught without having philosophy classes/materials, so there is no need to specifically 'teach philosophy' to young kids.

First off, I would reiterate that I agree that philosophy is in no way necessary for teaching critical thinking and indeed should be inherent in the teaching of every subject; my contention with your argument is that you exaggerate the risk of teaching it while quite uncharitably dismissing its benefits without even really bothering to address just what those benefits could be.

More substantially, much thinking about philosophy's pedagogical role, especially at younger ages (i.e. grade/primary school), is that critical-thinking skills are less important than critical-thinking dispositions. Some of the problems you point to, such as a lack of interest and sincerity in the arguments offered, are arguably a problem of prioritising skills (or even content) over dispositions.

Such dispositions or habits of mind include:

• Active listening;
  
• Addressing ideas instead of people;
  
• Open-mindedness;
  
• Intellectual honesty.
  
  Note that because this is about inculcating intellectual virtues or values (rather than any particular philosophical content), limiting this to older students on the grounds of them being more discerning actually doesn't make that much sense; if anything, the idea is to put in place structures that makes them more discerning.
  
  To put it another way: the premise here is that the 'philosophising' element is already inherent in younger children with their tendency to ask why. Philosophy programmes for younger children thus emphasises putting in place structures of thinking (usually through the use of questioning and ground rules for discussion) to guide that natural curiosity into a more disciplined, reflective practice. Note that this means that focusing on substantial philosophical ideas as content is often a secondary concern; rather, they are used because they are seen as conducive to producing a reflective response.
  
  To further add on to the point, examples of more bite-sized philosophy as triggers for discussion include texts like Baggini's and Lipman's. The latter is a direct inspiration for the movement known as Philosophy for Children (P4C), which actually has an in-depth entry in the SEP addressing in much greater depth some of the issues you have raised.

You are a chauvinist because you are a majoritarian. You should try picking up a book on identity politics someday.

It is chauvinists like you with your notions of cultural relativism who come up with nonsense like "Asian values" to justify and legitimize ugly sections of modern Asian society. It is because of that same cultural relativism which Singaporean professors of International Relations obsess over that I refused to attend local universities for that field of study: it's smoke and mirrors aimed at justifying bullshit and they know it.

Once again, you weep openly and cry about "other possibilities" when you offer none, and are incapable of justifying and/or defending your chauvinism.

If you can't even cogently justify what you argue for and bleat about "getting off my high horse", you shouldn't be arguing in the first place. I'm riding on my goddamn horse because I've earned the γνῶσις to do so. I'm tired of the notion that knowledgeable people must debase themselves before the mob and accept their ignorance and vitriol for being as valid as their own knowledge. This postmodernist bullshit is the cause for the rise in creationism, the organic and anti-GMO food fetish and anti-vaccination. That same postmodernism is making you feel entitled to complain when you have subconsciously realized that you are wrong, and yet persist in convincing yourself that your chauvinism is valid.

>inner city Baltimore areas where drugs have absolutely devastated entire neighborhoods.

I think you have it the wrong way around. Drug use and drug trades in poor areas are a symptom of economic devastation, not the cause. Although it does make it harder to pull a population out of poverty once a drug trade takes hold.

Bruce Alexander thoroughly covers this in his book (http://www.amazon.com/The-Globalization-Addiction-Poverty-Spirit/dp/0199588716)

My view on weed is that while it's not good for you, it's not so bad that it's worth criminal penalties and the amount of effort of law enforcement and the court systems. You said yourself that you tried it before...do you think you should have gone to jail for doing so? Obviously all that effort that goes into law enforcement isn't working if you managed to try it when it was illegal.

As a European also myself, I'm waiting to see how long it would take before another European was to call you out on your nonsense, but it seems that's not going to happen.

For those who want a bit of context, the views held by /u/bjarkebjarke represent the nationalist segment of Europeans, in a continent where literal Neo-Nazi groups like Jobbik and Golden Dawn (before they got arrested) - whose active role is to march in groups and physically attack minority individual citizens who are simply living their daily life - are prevalent.

To give context, PEGIDA is one of these groups, stemming from a part of Germany known for its Neo-Nazi population, and found containing a large number of Neo-Nazis and football hooligans. This explains why the counter-demonstrators outnumbered the demonstrators - because no rationally-minded person wants violent groups legally condoned to attack people on the streets and create division.

This situation in Europe is exactly why Singapore, with its lack of violent mobs roaming the streets and stupid people preaching hate being given a voice, is a better country at the moment than European countries to reside in.

As for the anti-Muslim claims, almost all of which are false and/or misleading, have a vast amount of reputable academic literature - such as this - opposing such nonsense claims.