Ponder upon

Debating is a high level word-playing game, to manipulate your logical flows of thoughts.

Today, I have witnessed how fragile or valid an argument can be, and how interesting a question can be answered.

For instance, the engineering debate today at SAF building, there is a question which says something like this, :"Imperial students are inadequately prepared for high impact work".

Two panelists gave their arguments, but one defined high impact work as the financial stuff, the political influence and the economic regulation, whereas the other said that high impact work can also be something that 'bring an impact to the human beings'-such as being innovative in technology, bridging the gaps between different strata in a society.

In technical term, this is called 'mutually exclusive'. So, if both arguments do not cross-over, how are we going to debate?

However, I would like to give credit to this person who actually approaches this question from a different perspective.

"We shouldn't ask the students to give comments on this, since most of the students, if not all, choose engineering because they believe it such from the very beginning. It contains 'selection bias'. We ought to see this from a more general sense, that whether people who would like to do high impact work, will choose to study engineering in Imperial?"

Sometimes, it's not about the answer that matters. It's the approach and the perspective.

It has been quite a while since I have come across such interesting thought-provoking session. Probably that's the main reason why I keep a blog, why I choose Politics as my humanities option, and why I used to attend talks back in Malaysia.

To think out of the box, you have to be out of the box. You dont draw a square or a circle to limit yourself, if you want wild imaginations.

After this debate, I actually did some self-reflections on where do I want to go in life. I have always been keeping a dream, that is to use technology to influence the world, like how KS Pua did, a brilliant Sekinchan guy who invented the USB flash drive.

Can dream and reality be together for once in my life?