Humanities Harrovian - Issue Two

Issue Two Cognitive Biases- Are We Making Fair and Just Choices The Cape Town Water Crisis The Educational Divide The Problem with "Equality"

Humanities Harrovian

Contents............................................................................................................ 1 About us............................................................................................................ 3 Existential Crises: What is the Meaning of Life?.......................................... 5 Lara McWilliam, Year 12, Keller House

Cognitive biases: are we making fair and just choices?............................ 12 Helen Ng, Year 11, Gelhorn House

The Cape Town Water Crisis- A Warning to the World............................... 20 Stella Liu, Year 12, Keller House

How Has Art Adapted Amidst Covid?.......................................................... 22 Alysha Wong, Year 13, Keller House

Are our laws keeping pace with the new digital age?................................ 25 Lola Waczkow, Year 11, Anderson House

Home, Nostalgia, and The Odyssey............................................................. 31 Warren Zhu, Year 13, Churchill House

The Change America Needed........................................................................ 35 Dora Gan, Year 11, Wu House

The Educational Divide.................................................................................. 38 Sophie Ho, Year 13, Wu House

Should A Wise Person Fear Death?............................................................. 41 Warren Zhu, Year 13, Churchill House

The Crisis of 2020........................................................................................... 45 Jolie Chan, Year 12, Wu House

The Problem of "Equality"............................................................................. 47 Joshua Yen, Year 13, Shaftesbury House

What is the truth? A manual to Rhetorical Analysis................................... 50 Hansen Wen, Year 10, Peel House

1 | Contents

Contents | 2

About Us At the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year, two friends with the same passion for interdisciplinary learning and exploration in the Humanities came together, crafting an initial pitch for a school-wide academic publication.

Very soon, this nascent form of an idea gained traction and the team expanded to include several other student authors, illustrators and editors who now serve as the foundation of the Humanities Harrovian magazine.

We are a student-led project, seeking to give our peers the opportunity to broaden their horizons by extending their intellectual curiosity beyond the curriculum. We hope the Humanities Harrovian will become a platform on which interested and capable students can express their views on subjects ranging from contemporary issues to obscure historical events.

3 | About us

"Creating the Humanities Harrovian from the ground-up has been an amazing and enriching opportunity for me and my peers. We are so proud of what we have accomplished and truly hope that this publication can inspire everyone to communicate their passions for the Humanities outside of the classroom."

-Sally Wang, Founder

"Writing about a topic that interests me beyond the classroom has been such a great opportunity. It's an amazing chance to do some independent learning and get to argue my point of view."

-Sophie Putman, Founder

"As an art student, I have always acknowledged the fact it is hard to seek out opportunities to contribute to the school through art. As such I am incredibly lucky to have found a group of peers that is so supportive of its member's passions. The formation of the Humanities Harrovian not only creates more opportunities for humanities enthusiasts but also opens a new pathway for artists to share their talents with the Harrow community."

-Kayan, Art Director

"A publication like this only comes to fruition because of an enormous amount of work behind the scenes. The Humanities Harrovian team has combined academic curiosity with dedication and teamwork to produce a document that is astonishing in its maturity and professionalism. Enthusiasm and intentions are easy; seeing them through are the hard part. This team's vision has materialised into something quite unique and will be enjoyed by the Harrow HK community now, and for years to come."

-Miss A King, Academic Supervisor

About us | 4

5 | About us

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Taken from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, these words describe one of the greatest crises that has dominated much of society over the past two centuries: the search for the meaning of life - existentialism.

Existentialism can be defined as a philosophical theory that emphasises the individual’s responsibility to determine their own meaning by asserting free will.

It would be impossible to discuss this philosophy without mentioning the four major thinkers who have had such a strong influence on it: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. It was the core ideas of these philosophers that influenced what we now know as existential crises.

An existential crisis is defined as a series of moments when a person questions the purpose or value of his or her life and hopes to find meaning by contemplating the mystery of their existence. One can trace the roots of the existentialist movement to the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the “father of existentialism”.

Pre-Kierkegaard society was ruled under Hegelian theology after the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who stated that one could only find meaning when becoming part of a larger world purpose. However, Kierkegaard found greater importance in the individual’s responsibility to create our own lives, and therefore believed the subjective aspects of human life were the most important. He thought that Hegel’s ideas diminished the individual's responsibility for his own life and purpose.

Moreover, Kierkegaard thought these ideas had religious implications. Being a Christian, he believed that what mattered most was the personal and direct relationship between the individual soul and God. However, he believed this was not to be done through the dogmatic ways of the Protestant Church.

Kierkegaard found that Protestant practices, such as attending church and reciting prayers, were completely antithetical to how true Christians should live. He found organised religion apathetic and unfulfilling; instead, he placed importance on people taking a “leap of faith” in their belief in God, even if there is no proof of his existence.

Many people find themselves in agreement with Kierkegaard up to but not including his conception of God. The varying beliefs around Kierkegaard’s ideas are what instigated the development of two schools of thought about existentialism: Christian existentialism and humanist existentialism. What made Kierkegaard the ‘father of existentialism’ were his beliefs about the latter. His insistence on the importance of our choices as well as the search for meaning provided a framework for later existential thinkers, including German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

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7 | Existentialism

Joy Chen, Year 11, Gelhorn House

Existentialism | 8

Nietzsche swiftly became influential in the world of philosophy in the late 1800s as he found himself in disagreement with many Christian beliefs. In regards to the meaning of life, Christanity as a whole says that nothing is more important than what is to come in the afterlife: whether you are to spend eternity in heaven or hell. As such, many Christians believe that we should give up what seems important in this life and instead focus on achieving the ultimate goal of reaching heaven by following Christian principles.

Nietzsche found these beliefs to be limiting and destructive, asserting that they must be transcended because, in placing such a large focus on the ultimate goal in the afterlife, Christianity requires us to deny the commitments of daily life, which is the opposite of how he thinks life should be led.

Hence, in one of his key works, The Gay Science, Nietzsche declared that “God is dead”. Yet, despite it being one of the most famous statements in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche did not see it in entirely a positive light. Without God, the fundamental values of European faith would be jeopardized. To Nietzsche, damage to this philosophical system could lead to feelings of depression and meaninglessness in other words, nihilism. Nietzsche argued that in the face of nihilism, man must strive to be uber, to rise above the herd and create values for himself; in his own words, man must “become God to appear worthy of the death of God.” In turn, this can often lead one down the path of nihilism. Not to be confused with existentialism, nihilism is the belief that not only is there no intrinsic meaning in life, but there is no point in attempting to construct our own as a substitute. Being organisms that innately crave meaning and purpose in life, nihilism is an idea that has the propensity to wreak havoc across any belief system and drive one to lead a life consumed with apathetic meaninglessness. A person following this kind of attitude to life was labeled by Nietzsche as the “last man”, who would be one response to the problem of finding meaning, Nietzsche predicted.

Regardless of their crucial impact on the philosophy of existentialism, neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche developed their insights in a systematic way. Their ideas were further developed and brought into fruition via their twentieth-century successors, who tried to provide a path to meaning without a need for the divine or the transcendent. None of these successors were more notable than Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert

9 | Existentialism

Camus who struggled with themes including dread, alienation, and the absurd, which made them the leading voices of atheistic existentialism in the twentieth century.

The former summed up his philosophies in the statement “man’s existence precedes essence.”

Fundamentally, what Sartre argues for here is that humans were not created for any specific purpose.

Rather, we simply find ourselves in existence, and therefore each person must create his own essence and find his own meaning. Sartre argued that this gave humans a great deal of freedom with which one is unable to place blame on God nor his environment for how their life unfolds. To describe someone who seeks to deny this freedom by living as a product of their environment, Sartre used the term bad faith.

Only when you take responsibility for the meaning of your life and self-consciously choose your future can you lead an authentic life, which, to Sartre, is humanity’s ultimate and only goal.

Despite him not following any religious authority, Sartre strongly advocated that existential anxiety can be settled by freely choosing what kind of person we want to be. There might not be a god to guarantee our meaning, but to Sartre that did not matter, as we are free to make our own. Where some may feel weakened by such existential contemplation, Sartre thought that it was the despair of it that can pave the way to new meanings in life; as he summarised: “life begins on the other side of despair.”

Similar ideas were proposed by Albert Camus, a French philosophical novelist who Sartre would make the acquaintance of in June 1943. Camus was a great believer in absurdism. He outlined the “absurd” as the futility in searching for meaning in an incomprehensible universe that has neither God nor meaning. Notably, Camus recognised the similarities between man, who spends every day repeating the same futile tasks, and Sisyphus, a figure from Greek mythology who was condemned to push a rock up a mountain forever, only to roll back down before he could get to its summit. As Sisyphus repeated his laborious and futile task, Camus identified him as a metaphor for humanity’s meaninglessness. It was this futility which Camus labeled the human condition, a fate we are all doomed to from the moment we are introduced to this world.

On a contrastingly encouraging note, Camus advised us not to avoid the human condition; instead, we

Existential Crises: What is the Meaning of Life? | 6

must embrace the absurd. Camus argued that it is our responsibility to persist in the face of absurdity for this is all there is, as he summarised: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

However, when one goes through the intense process of contemplating the meaning of life, they may not always succeed in finding meaning. Hence, one typically comes out with one of the two feelings: trepidation or liberation.

Many philosophical writers have viewed the idea of an existential crisis as potentially dangerous to the overall mental well-being of society and an instigator of trepidation worldwide. Some argue that if an individual is weak, they may fall victim to despair and, as such, lead an inauthentic life. This issue displays itself prominently in the world of present-day mental health, as modern psychologists continue the exploration of existentialism and how it drives many to “existential crisis depression” and “existential crisis anxiety”. Although there are many factors that can cause mental health issues, it is argued by behavioral scientist Clay Rutledge that the current trend of increasing depression and anxiety in the U.S. isn’t just due to a lack of sufficient services to aid the issue. Instead, he says we’re facing a modern “crisis of the meaningless.” In an article from the Dallas News in 2018, he explains that “in order to keep existential anxiety at bay, we must find and maintain perceptions of our lives as meaningful. It is when people are not able to maintain meaning that they are most psychologically vulnerable.”

However, this does not need to be the case.

For Nietzsche, the most essential aspect of undergoing an existential crisis is overcoming it as the exact opposite of the last man: the “übermensch” (or over man, in English). The übermensch was a term coined by Nietzsche to describe one who views the apparent meaninglessness of life as an opportunity to take responsibility for meaning. The übermensch embodies a form of existence advanced from that of the nineteenth century’s last man.

Nietzsche believed that life is fulfilling on its own terms and is worth living for its own sake; hence, we all should aim to become an overman.

In a similarly uplifting manner, Kierkegaard wrote “whoever has learnt to be anxious in the right way, has learnt the ultimate.” To take this literally,

Kierkegaard found existential anxiety to be a necessary requirement on the journey of selfunderstanding; we have to transform our trepidation into meaning.

Not only have existential crises been examined in philosophy, but they have been discussed in the field of science too. Scientists like the late Stephen Hawking argue that we have no soul nor inherent meaning. Rather, we are just small specks on an insignificant planet in a neverending universe; we exist simply because we exist. Many argue that our existence matters simply and only because we appreciate its meaning. Thus, we can act purposefully even if we are not part of any grand cosmic plan, as we are able to separate the determined individual’s purpose from the universe’s seeming lack thereof.

However, such a task has become increasingly difficult as society has entered what has become the third wave of existentialism: neuroexistentialism.

Existentialism can be divided into three waves. The first wave, largely defined by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, occurred in response to growing anxiety in the society where God and religion could no longer guarantee the security of ethical systems. This wave was particularly strong after the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” which proposed the existence of all organisms could be explained via scientific theory, rather than divine creation, causing waves of doubt among religious communities in regards to whether or not God exists.

The second wave was later born in response to the horrors of the second world war, and was greatly influenced by Sartre and Camus. After the genocide of six million European Jews, people became less able to rely on the good nature of humanity to uphold moral values. Hence people began to shift their faith to science and abandon any belief in an ordered world.

The third wave has been occurring over the past halfcentury, as advancements in neuroscience have made known that humans are simply animals and that is all our existence is. The more neuroscience advances, the better an understanding we gain of the chemical processes that cause our behaviour.

Theoretically, if scientists become able to make complete chemical images of the brain, every action

Existentialism | 10

a person does could be predicted. This brings into question the existence of free will. For example, I might think I’m choosing to write these words, but it could be just the result of neuron interactions in my brain from minutes ago that led me to be writing this now. Because of this, my free will is inherently put at stake. Not only does neuroscience question the concept of free will, but it also discredits the idea that humans each have a soul. Scientists have begun to prove that there is no such thing as non-physical consciousness. If true, the death of the physical body is truly the be-all and end-all of existence. Such neurological discoveries have removed many of the final remnants of the belief that humans are in any manner uniquely meaningful, leading many into a modern-day crisis of existential dread.

So where does all this leave us? How can we take the findings of neuroscience in parallel with our concern over finding meaning, to remain determined in life?

It’s safe to say that as society has fallen into the coronavirus pandemic, our experience of a monotonous and repetitive everyday life like that of Sisyphus has enabled us all to experience the contemplation of life like never before. It is up to us, as individuals, to decide whether we are up to the task of finding meaning. Perhaps it is the ideas of Nietzsche that resonate with you, perhaps you identify with Camus’ insights on embracing the absurd, or maybe you find your meaning through religion. No matter how you are changed by an existential crisis, knowing where you stand on the matter is vital to self-understanding. When navigated well, an existential crisis can have the deepest and most transformative effect on an individual, that of truly maturing, accepting oneself, and creating a more meaningful life, in a world where there simply might not be any.

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: are we making fair and just choices

Introduction

Figure 2. Source: Encyclopædia Britannica, “Ptolemaic system”

Decision making is intuitive. Whether we know it or not, we are making decisions every day: some are trivial, some are life-changing, some are rational and some are just a little too personal to handle. For example, as you step out of your house in the morning, are you going to take the cheaper MTR or the more expensive but faster taxi? What subjects are you going to pursue for your GCSEs, A Levels and higher education? How much money are you going to invest in Tesla? In the 2024 UK and US elections, who are you going to support?

In most of these situations, in order to make fair and rational decisions, it makes sense to eliminate as many of our intrinsic faults in our rationale, cognitive biases, as possible.

Cognitive biases first came by as a quicker means of processing information, but over time they have proven to hinder our ability to make the best objective decisions. Our brains are astoundingly complex and, in turn, have lots of biases to help us process information. For instance, the below infographic shows all 188 currently known cognitive biases, more than realistically possible to cover in detail in this short essay.1

This article will cover 4 different cognitive biases and explain their implications on our daily lives in the hope of furthering our understanding of how our brain works and how we can best use it to our advantage.

Confirmation Bias The confirmation bias is one of the most frequently employed cognitive biases.2 We tend to believe information that supports our pre-existing beliefs, and ignore those that do not. Sometimes, even when we are given neutral information, we interpret it in a way that favours what we already know. We store this information in our brains because it is easier to remember - an effect called “selective recall”.

Why do we have confirmation bias?

We like to make sense of the information we have - the quicker the better. In order to do this, our brains have learnt to interpret information by linking it to the knowledge that we already

Cognitive Biases | 12 Figure 1. Source: www.designhacks.co, “Cognitive biases codex print”

Cherry Liu, Year 11, Keller House 13 | Cognitive Biases

Cognitive Biases | 14

Albeit seemingly counterproductive, this shortcut allowed our ancestors to make spontaneous decisions when faced with predators in a life-anddeath situation and carries on today as we continue to make quick modern-day decisions based on our age-old survival instincts.

of the group. As a way of seeking social validation, a member may conform to the belief held by the majority of their group even if there is an ideological conflict. As a result, people end up with quick but often mediocre solutions to problems, risking complacency and a lack of creativity and efficiency.

Confirmation bias in real life

Groupthink tends to occur when group members’ backgrounds are very similar, or when a powerful or charismatic leader is in charge - or even when the group is under stress.3 If mindfully used, groupthink can be a psychological trick up your sleeve to speed up a long-winded meeting; but at the same time, it is important to keep in mind that this is also the same mechanism behind many social problems, such as peer pressuring and stereotyping.

Confirmation bias seeps into many different corners of our lives, but it is especially significant in the scientific experimental research field as it is very easy to fall into the trap of interpreting data in a biased way to support pre-existing beliefs. If this happens, it becomes difficult for scientists to then come up with conclusions that best support the evidence collected because they are held back by the less accurate beliefs as a result of the confirmation bias.

One famous anecdote to illustrate this would be the discovery of heliocentrism. Since Ptolemy’s model of the universe from the 2nd century AD, a geocentric understanding of the universe has been left unchallenged for almost 2,000 years. It was not until 1543 that Copernicus published his heliocentric model of the universe in order to explain various astronomical observations that it was first debated.

However, long before Copernicus, back in 3rd century AD, Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos had already proposed the idea of heliocentrism. At the time, his ideas were not widely accepted because society was under the influence of the Aristotelian view on the universe. In this case, scientific progress was held back due to the reluctance to accept new ideas. In more psychological terms, scientists and the general public were constricted within their “confirmatory thought” (i.e. thoughts that only consider things from one perspective) and did not consider solving problems with “exploratory thought” (i.e. taking on multiple perspectives).

Therefore in today’s world, when conducting experimental research, it is essential for researchers to evaluate if the conclusions reached or the hypotheses tested are intrinsically biased, and most importantly, to remember that a fair investigation inquiry should never be taken for granted.

Optimism Bias As you are reading this now, what do you think are the chances of you getting a de-merit this school year?

We tend to overestimate the probabilities of positive events and underestimate the probabilities of negative events. This is defined as the optimism bias, also known as the “illusion of invulnerability”. We believe that we will perform better than the average, live longer than the average, and be richer than the average—all of which are impossible by definition.

80% of us have the optimism bias, and interestingly, we tend to be more optimistic about ourselves and people we are close to; in contrast, we are more pessimistic about things that are not personal and out of reach. This is known as private optimism.4 Why do we have optimism bias?

We like to feel that our decisions are always right, because this can lead to positive feelings like selfenhancement (feeling good about yourself), selfpresentation (making yourself seem respectable) and perceived control. As a result, we unconsciously convince ourselves that fate works towards our favour, leading to the tendency to expect events that are beneficial to us, even if it may be quite far from reality.

Optimism bias in real life

Another powerful consequence of confirmation bias is a phenomenon called “groupthink”, which is when a group of people come to make the same biased decision because they want to maintain the harmony

15 | Cognitive Biases

The optimism bias, as you might have already noticed, prevents us from perceiving reality objectively, which can lead to bad decisions. If you

are like me who had persistently overestimated my muscle endurance during PE lessons, you would know the pain of choosing to do 10 burpees every minute, on the minute. Another person influenced by this type of bias might think that they will never encounter a car accident and hence never wear seatbelts, when in fact, the statistics for car accidents in Hong Kong state that out of 900,000 cars, around 1,300 accidents happen per month, making it a 0.14% chance for your car to get into a road accident … each month.

If you’re lucky, you might just get by with a fine, but the optimism bias quite smoothly transitions into complacency or arrogance; it is potent enough to lead to devastating results. Taking another example, the fire protection architect for Notre-Dame “assumed” that the ancient oaks of the structure would burn slowly, giving ample time for rescue. “Oak that old can’t burn like a match. It’s absolutely incomprehensible,” he said. The result? The spire and roof of the cathedral—a staple landmark of Paris - were burnt down and can no longer be restored to its original form, not to mention that 1 billion euros were raised to rebuild the cathedral (notably, 80 million of which have been used for reparations so far).

Figure 3. Source: www.td.gov.hk/ “Trend of Monthly Total Road Traffic Accidents”

However, this is not to say that the optimism bias does not bring us any benefits. Remember the saying “if you believe, good things will happen in life”? As generic or cheesy as this sounds, it can actually act as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or as Generation Z like to call it, the law of attraction. By believing good things will happen, they will become more likely. As a result of optimism bias, one may become more motivated in the goals they want to achieve and gain “better self esteem, lower stress levels and better overall well-being”.5 Notably, this positive manifestation is more prominent in health: people who are optimistic about their longevity tend to exercise more regularly, eat more mindfully and conduct healthier habits, thus maintaining better health.

Interestingly, although shared by most people, optimism does not spread uniformly amongst our

Figure 4. Source: NBC News. “Notre Dame Fire: What was damaged”

population. A comparative study carried out in 2003 found that “European Americans held an optimistic bias in the prediction of positive and negative events, whereas Japanese held a pessimistic bias for negative events... due to the self-enhancement in Western individualism and self-criticism in Eastern collectivism that is prominent in the respective cultures”.6 Is there also a link between cultural upbringing and optimism bias? As we gain more understanding of our brain and its processes, perhaps we can find the answer one day.

Pessimism Bias The word “pessimism” came from the latin word pessimus, meaning “the worst”. In the psychological context, pessimism bias is the tendency to overestimate the probability of negative events and underestimate those of Cognitive Biases | 16

Figure 5. Source: unearthedcomics.com. “Optimism and pessimism”

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positive events. Compared to its twin optimism bias, pessimism bias is more subtle, hence harder to define and research, because it ranges from just a “half glass empty” world-view to an unrealistically negative outlook towards the future—the latter of which is associated with heavy depression symptoms.

Why do we have pessimism bias?

The honest answer is, we simply do not know. Pessimism bias greatly varies from person to person, from culture to culture, from context to context. Neurology research suggests that the neural pathway responsible for pessimism is also used to mitigate optimism bias (optimism and pessimism bias coexist!), and that irregularities in this pathway are associated with depression: does it cause depression or vice versa? Not much is known about the specific mechanisms within our brain, which makes it all the more mysterious and fascinating.

Pessimism bias in real life The pessimism bias can subconsciously make us perceive the future negatively. For example, if someone felt very anxious before a musical performance, they could feel varying levels of physical discomfort hours before going on stage: their hands and legs may start shaking as they try to navigate through notes of the piece (confirmed by my own experiences!). This is the “stage fright” that many performers experience at some point in their careers. On a bigger scale, widespread pessimism can change public opinions on subjects, ranging from housing prices to climate change to the next election of a government body. An interesting article from the Decision Lab illustrates how we display pessimism bias from the information overload from the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to desensitization and potential emotional fatigue.7 On the other hand, pessimism is also what keeps us grounded, giving us more realistic insights about the world. As humans, we all have some internalized optimism bias—we like to believe that the universe works in our favour. However, having some pessimism bias can help us rethink important decisions by asking “Can I really do this?” or “Should I first consider the risks of this decision?”.

Sometimes, having some pessimism bias will help us tone down our overconfidence. The above example is a way of putting ‘positive pessimism’ into action—that is, channeling pessimism into actions that change for the better. By doing so, the degree to which someone experiences negative biases may be reduced, making them feel better.

Lastly, please also be aware that chronic and/or overwhelming pessimism could be associated with depression or other mental health issues. It is best, and perfectly normal, to seek professional help from psychiatrists, doctors, psychologists, counsellors and more.

More links are available in the bibliography of this article.

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Blind spot bias Did you make it through this article thinking “none of this applies to me, I live my life completely rationally”?

Well then, welcome to blind spot bias - “the failure to recognise one’s own cognitive biases”.8 It’s almost like being able to distinguish the smell of your friend’s house, but never really knowing the smell of your own home. We often see the faults in other people but cannot recognise our own, this leads to smugness and arrogance when we believe that our opinions are superior to others’.

Why do we have blind spot bias?

Although we tend to be capable of spotting other people’s downfalls in decision making, it is more difficult to recognise our own biases because we are so accustomed to our logical patterns: in other words, our mindset is that “everyone is more biased than me”. This is also why we tend to feel closer to people who display the same work patterns as us.

Blind spot bias in real life The blind spot bias is one of the biggest culprits in the failure to realise our background and privileges because we don’t recognise the innate flaws that we possess. To demonstrate this, you, who are reading this as a student in Harrow, are exposed to young people with similar financial capabilities, friends who live in Hong Kong and speak English fluently. You are students who are receiving high levels of education and you are people who are loved by their peers, teachers and communities. There are so many things that we share in common that sometimes we forget that there are people outside of our social comfort zone, our bubble, who may think very differently from us. As a result, we are often oblivious to - or worse, dismissive - of their opinions, their stories and sufferings. So, to avoid becoming ignorant, pose questions like these to yourself: “Have I considered this subject after putting myself in other people’s perspectives?”

“Are there any things in my daily life that I take for granted?”

“How would other people react to my decision?”

“Would anyone feel uncomfortable about anything I say/do?”

19 | Cognitive Biases

Lastly and most importantly, remember that bias exists in all parts of our cognitive processes. It is important that we always keep an open mind and remember that other people’s opinions are just as important - not least because they are formed from cognitive processes just as complex as ours.

Conclusion Decision making abilities are learnt and not innate.

Although we still have a long way to go from being completely impartial, simply learning about our cognitive biases is already one of the most effective ways to eliminate them. These four cognitive biases should give you some insight into how our minds work, and given that there are 184 more, this is just the tip of the iceberg of our brain's wonderful complexities. After learning about these cognitive biases, we can become more aware of our shortcomings and gain a greater understanding of other people’s opinions which will ultimately help us to learn from each other. In today’s environment, a place where empathy and understanding have become scarce resources, I hope that we can start to make more informed, well-thought through and empathetic decisions moving forwards.

Stella Liu, Year 12, Keller House Imagine your city nearly completely ran out of water and the little water that was left went to the most important public facilities and communal taps. You had to line-up for a daily pre-approved 25 litres of water, per person. That was what residents of Cape Town had to endure during their countdown to ‘Day Zero’ in 2018.

‘Day Zero’ means the implementation of Level 7 water restrictions when municipal water supplies would be switched off and residents would have to queue for their daily ration of water. These restrictions made Cape Town the first major city in the world to run out of water. However, the legislative capital of South Africa has always been renowned for its pristine coastline and multi-million dollar beach front properties. So how has water become a scarce resource in a city defined by its waterfront features?

Cape Town's most prominent feature is its Table Mountain which traps the warm onshore wind coming from ocean waters creating rainfall that flows through rivers and fills underground aquifers. It is an oasis surrounded by desert and its comfortable, arid climate. This has attracted many tourists as well as rural to urban migrants in search of a better life, in hopes of finding a job in one of the many resorts or wealthier households. Cape Town’s population increased by 80% from 1995 to 2018, but, like all cities facing rapid urbanization and migration, inequality became prevalent. According to the UN Human Development Index, South Africa has the highest degree of income inequality in the world.

Many shantytowns in and around Cape Town are suffering through years of water shortages, unreliable access to clean water, and long communal distribution lines. Meanwhile, the majority of white middle and upper classes, who rarely consider using water sparingly, have been installing private water tanks in their homes.

The government also made a common, yet false, assumption: the future rainfall patterns would resemble the past, or at least not change too quickly.

However, due to climate change, Cape Town’s water supplies nearly vanished. Six years ago, the city’s six dams were full, but three years of drought resulted in a rapid deterioration of water security. In 2016, the city saw just under 9 inches of rainfall and in 2017

just 6 inches were recorded. This was in stark contrast to the average of 22.2 inches in the rest of South Africa. NASA data states that the reservoirs currently stand at 26% capacity with the largest reservoir (Theewaterskloof) in the worst shape.

The city was already at risk of drought and the government failed to provide solutions to mitigate future problems leading them to a position beyond return. The government failed to act sooner because, unlike the national government, it is not run by the African National Congress. Instead it is run by the Democratic Alliance. The national government rejected the Western Cape Provincial Government's application to declare the drought a “national disaster” in 2015 -a necessary step in order to get funding for local drought preparation. And even though the national government eventually accepted the disaster application for a few municipalities, their application for a city-wide disaster status in early 2017 was rejected by The National Department of Water Affairs, stating that: “Although the water situation is concerning, it is not yet at crisis level.”

This further slowed the action taken to prevent the growing crisis.

In early 2018, the crisis was in full swing. For months there had been volunteer water restrictions but more than half of residents ignored them. In an effort to rectify this, the city enforced tougher restrictions in January asking residents to consume just 50 liters of water per day.

Moreover, the essential Theewaterskloof reservoir was down to 10% of its capacity and the last 9% of the water was unusable because of the high mix of sand. Additionally, the city's mayor, Patricia de Lille, announced that ‘Day Zero’ was projected to take place on 22 April, but later changed this to 12 April. The water usage declined significantly under the new restrictions, both personal usage and agricultural, which allowed the city to move ‘Day Zero’ back even more. On the 28th of June it was postponed indefinitely.

Due to the collective efforts of the residents and the government Cape Town was able to escape the catastrophe that awaited them at the other side of ‘Day Zero’. The government instructed people to limit their daily water use per person to 50 litres a day which is still reinforced with signs all around town

The Cape Town Water Crisis| 20

reminding people to conserve water. Along with that, the city also prepped 200 emergency water stations outside groceries and other gathering spots, each having to serve almost 20,000 residents. An addition to new desalination plants, new water wells and a plant that would reuse dirty water was built. Many middle class residents have learnt to conserve rainwater and remove their carefully curated lawns and gardens.

Residents would often say “if it's yellow, let it mellow” as a motto for water conservation in homes where they would also use grey water to flush toilets (these practises have been the norm in nearby shantytowns). Some speedy Capetonians turned the crisis into businesses with online offers to “deliver” water whilst others began selling and installing rainwater collection systems. Nevertheless, some measures that were set out have proven to be controversial. In townships, authorities have cracked down on informal car washes, handing out fines that reach as much as £300 (equivalent to one month's salary). Though some measures were considered as extreme, all efforts helped make the dawn of “day one” less probable.

Even though Cape Town was able to avoid the invoking of level 7 water rescristions, the possibility of more major cities running out of water is becoming increasingly probable. The UN said that by 2050, 5 billion people could be facing water shortages. Many other major areas including Mexico City, Melbourne, Jakarta and large parts of California are facing similar problems that might lead them to their own “Day Zero”. One might ask, how could these places possibly be facing a water crisis? Aren’t they surrounded by water? Since the earth’s surface is 71% covered by water, we assume that the supply is essentially unlimited. But in fact, only 1% of all the water on earth is drinkable and only 8% of that is used for personal use and the other 92% are used for industry and agriculture. Furthermore, a high percentage of that goes to alfalfa farming which is eaten by cows for consumption. Poor management by governments, geographical ‘bad luck’ and climate change might lead to an essential part of our lives becoming a rare commodity.

Everyday on average, a person uses around 350 litres of water. We open these taps so mindlessly, never wondering where all the water comes from. So next time you turn your tap on, think about what you would do if it ran dry because the arrival of your city’s “Day Zero'' could be sooner than you think...

https://www.circleofblue.org/cape-town/

21 | The Cape Town Water Crisis

How Has Art Adapted Amidst Covid?

Alysha Wong, Year 13, Keller House

Art is an integral part of society, acting as a means of global communication, a record of human history and a device that elicits important conversations necessary in creating a utopia.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, artists and museum curators have needed to reevaluate their previous procedures of displaying artwork.

What once was suspended on the cream walls and framed by gold in Tate Britain is now a photograph with its potential to evoke, to comfort, to disturb restricted by 2dimensional screens.

Undoubtedly, this has taken a toll on both ends: the artist and the viewer. However, it may be far too reductive just to look at the confining limits of online exhibitions; it is equally important to reflect on the possibilities of displaying art in online environments.

Despite being seen as a hassle or a missed chance of remuneration, other institutions have capitalized on this shift, taking steps to advance engagement levels with their viewers. It is helpful to note that online exhibitions are not limited to the museum’s website. Some museums have chosen to release interactive material on social media platforms. This approach has overt benefits to institutions: by tracking online viewers’ activity (eg. the number of visits and duration spent on

each artwork), quantitative data is easily generated which enables these institutions to understand and analyse their museum ethnography.

The democratising potential of art on social media platforms is among the most gratifying pros to the approach; art now has the utmost potential to reach the masses, perhaps including once marginalised audiences. This also poses a solution to the gentrification of art, removing it from its bourgeois, conservative roots into a new point in time where nongrammatic expression, rather than privilege and indulgence, serves as the nexus of art. For instance, the V&A museum in London is home to the world’s oldest dated carpet: the Ardabil Carpet. Having survived an earthquake in the shrine of Shaykh Safi al-Din and multiple transactions from Iran to Manchester. It is currently stored in the V&A where it was previously lit up for display during a brief window of 10 minutes every 1.5 hours to preserve its rich colours and complex textures. The incorporation of the carpet in the museum’s online collection, owing to the pandemic, instantiates more sanguine aspects of displaying artwork online. A recent survey by the Pew’s Research Centre’s Internet & American Life Project further demonstrates this cause and effect, where 92% agree with the statement “the internet has

increased engagement in the arts by providing a public platform.” If an online collection has more reach than its physical form, whilst being able to keep the artefacts in perfect condition, are we witnessing the beginning of a new era of art-displaying, where we find more and more artwork exhibited online?

Nevertheless, the viewer experience of art online is incomparable with that of art in a physical exhibition, where one would immerse themselves not only in the work behind the frames or glass panels, but momentarily into the depths of human history and culture. When finely-glazed porcelain plates or 6-foot-tall sculptures are photographed and presented on computer screens, they lose their impact. Instead of pausing, contemplating and allowing ourselves to be engrossed in the artwork, we tend to scroll, click, and swipe quicker online. As technology develops, we are increasingly accustomed to instant gratification. In a 2004 study by Stephen M. Nowlis on the Effect of a Delay Between Choice and Consumption on Consumption Enjoyment, he observed that when people are waiting for something they like, their delay in gratification increases their subjective enjoyment. Similarly, it can be argued that the speed and frequency of pop-up ads in which the Internet endorses harms the

How Has Art Adapted Amidst Covid | 22

23 | How Has Art Adapted Amidst Covid

Reika Oh, Year 12, Gelhorn House

viewer experience of online art.

This prompts the questions: is art more spontaneous or are its effects comparable to that of a slow-burn film: a methodical, hypnotic experience that leaves the viewer lingering with afterthought? If a technologydriven future is promised, and displaying art online becomes the default, what would we expect of art in the future?

Taking the Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco as a case study to demonstrate the link between social media and art, we can gain a better sense of how art is being consumed in the 21st century.

The museum is one of the many pop-up “selfie museums” that have gained extreme popularity, with 40-dollar tickets selling out months in advance. The shift in the definition of “museum”, from a building where collections of valuable artefacts are made accessible to the public, to large ball pits with colourful walls and mirrors begs the question: how does social media change the art we consume and create?

Naturally, traditional museums are adding more elements that these “selfie museums” have, in hopes of attracting more visitor interactivity. In the last 5 years, museums have changed from banning photography to encouraging it. The Renwick Gallery put up “Photography Encouraged” signs in 2015, drawing more visitors in 6 weeks than in the previous year. It is undeniable that this new approach to viewing art has attracted a new crowd of visitors who may not fit into the target market. Banksy, one of the first artists who rose to fame after going ‘viral’ on social media, did not aim to attract the stereotypical investors of art:

older appreciators who are willing to pay fortunes for a symbol of status to flaunt.

Instead, counterculture groups resonated heavily with his message. It’s very likely that Banksy’s story would have been completely different if it happened even a decade earlier, without social media being a ubiquitous influence in our lives.

Nevertheless, with this level of social media sharing comes a lack of quality control. When colourful, simple, large-scale installations fill the space of the many museums, less and less of its resources will fund more subtle, complex, detail-oriented artwork. It is impossible to ignore the fact that the latter are all traits desired by art critics. Whilst we can appreciate the motifs and simplicity of these artworks, we must start to question their appeal when they lack vital qualities and cease to bring anything new to the table. To narrow this down further, we can look at Instagram as an example of the problematic aspects of sharing art by analysing their infamous algorithm in relation to trends. The way it personalises feeds with media perceived to be of interest or popular is reductionistic of human behaviour and can even be counterproductive to art appreciation. Our tastes for art should not be homogenised into a formula that feeds us back to similar posts; rather, it should be expanded and experimented with. This can be done through reading a diverse range of critics, articles, and magazines, or simply through avoiding art on Instagram’s explore page. When formulas decide what shows up on most viewers’ screens, there are dangerous implications.

Evidently, the outbreak of COVID has brought huge repercussions for artists and art consumers.

This period of irregularity sparks conversations about the future of art as we advance into a technology-driven future.

Whether the rebound is one that expands the demographics of art and pushes the limits of immersivity, or one that transforms the pre-existing notions of “good art”, bringing us new qualities that we judge artwork by, we can only guarantee that like everything else, art is ever-changing.

How Has Art Adapted Amidst Covid | 24

Lola Waczkow, Year 11, Anderson House Introduction Over the centuries technology has evolved. Innovation dates back 2 million years ago, from the first inventions of tools made from stone, ranging to the Ancient Greeks of the invention of mathematics, along with the Romans’ underfloor heating systems, to the first steam train being invented and, to the first antibiotic, penicillin. Technology can be seen in many different forms and it is how we as humans have adapted to our surroundings and the reason for which we have revolutionized.

Technology has developed over time as we have developed and it has changed the way we think.

Innovation has been the major reason for the advancement of humanity, especially in the medical and mechanical industry and it has always been beneficial for society. Technology has always been seen as something good for humanity. However, over the past couple of years technology has developed rapidly to lead to a new digital revolution known as the information age.

The information age has led to mechanisation, and therefore the increase of demand in the tertiary and quaternary industry, stated in the Clark-Fisher model, due to the lack of use of human labour in these industries from the advancement of machinery. But most importantly, the information age has led to the construction of technological devices, online companies and social media.

These platforms have introduced new concepts; ones that the human race has never dealt with or seen before. Therefore it is the laws duties to make sure these concepts are being regulated strictly and ethically enough.

Ethical Usage of Companies Online, e-commerce companies have been a major problem for the law to keep pace with due to its rapid and ever-changing new concepts. Multi-million dollar companies expand rapidly and as they do so, laws need to be created or changed in order to compensate for this growth. As a result, these online and ecommerce companies can be hard to regulate. The upcoming constant new changes that occur so often, make laws often irrelevant and legislation needs to be made rapidly to respond to and contain changes. A source from the BBC states that Amazon, an e-commerce giant, “only paid £293 million in tax in the UK while its sales surged 26% to £13.73 billion”. This, therefore, represents how little these online companies, from the large profits being made, give back to the government compared to what they extract and make a profit off of in society. This is largely due to the weak legislation that allows multimillion dollar companies to pay 0% of federal tax. In addition to this, online companies that are founded online are furthermore hard to regulate as to who and

25 | Are Our Laws Keeping Pace With The Digital Age

where they are held accountable for, for example, which country to whom they owe tax. So how do you regulate these companies?

Internet companies should have clear transparency about who their customers are; for example, what are the controls to make sure you do not invest in illegal or terrorist financing. Furthermore, online companies should invest in society more to make the balance fairer between what these companies extract and give back to society, especially in tax rates in which the law should promote.

A key issue here is also in data privacy and data security. The selling of data between companies, specifically customer data, is still permitted. However, it is only allowed if the customers have been informed but customers usually do not realise they are agreeing to such terms as the consent forms are incredibly long and most only read the terms and conditions briefly, if at all, so this subject is very easily missed. Therefore, customers are providing consent to the selling of their data without them being aware. Companies store and keep personal user data to personalize and tailor experiences in order to target specific individuals to keep them attentive and in turn increase the addiction and time consumed on these platforms regardless if this addiction is healthy or not for the user. The company in turn makes

a profit from the increased time consumed by the user from advertisements. However, this can be quite dangerous for users, as their data is being sold without the awareness of where their data is going and the fact that it is even being sold. Users cannot determine the market value of their own data and that their data is being shared and sold multiple times. The user has no control over their data and private details and in turn, their data is being used against them to target a customer's weaknesses. For example, if a user has a gambling problem, if the data being sold involves their gambling addiction, then that user would be targeted by gambling apps and games, especially advertisements for these gambling companies. This is unethical as companies use users’ data to target the users’ potential compulsions that make them more prone to addiction.

Effectively, online companies use data to target a user's weakness.

Data security is a major issue.

Adobe had experienced the largest ever data breach of 152 million records. The idea of sustainability plays a key concept in whether the data that is shared is being used ethically or for the sole purposes of a company and its success of making the user in turn more addicted. To prevent unethical uses, there should be stronger, more relevant legislation to make sure the user is aware they have provided consent for the selling of their data. This could be done by providing a specific consent form just on the usage of data.

Furthermore, better legislation should be applied to monitor the usage of data better and that it cannot be used to apply personal

experience to a user. Laws are crucial to ensure that data is being used ethically and the user is aware of where and how their data is being shared. In turn, laws should be made more relevant to support the new issues in data security as many regulations are in fact older than the online technology businesses it regulates. A customer should feel secure and have the right to know what happens to their data and how it is being used, to ensure security. Ideally, customer data should not be stored at all.

This is key in terms of data privacy and security before further advancing forward into technology.

Addiction Many of us spend a lot of our time online. The average person spends up to 3 hours and 15minutes a day on their phone.

That’s 1186 hours and 15 minutes a year which is 49 full days each year and 3558.75 days in an average lifetime just being spent looking at a tiny square screen. Now, if you told this information to someone, they most likely wouldn't believe you.

Why is this? Well, it's the art of technology. The digital era is unlike any era because it does not trigger the user's awareness.

As a result, we often do not realise how much time we consume on our phones because it does not trigger the user’s awareness. Instead, it uses our psychology against us to make us more and more addicted. This addiction is what provides a source of profit for the technology companies, specifically social media companies, through advertisement. The longer you spend on your phone the more advertisements are able to be

advertised and the more money online companies can make. So as long as these companies are making money this addiction will not stop. This is because this addiction has already been leashed into the world and it is so very hard to control. Even technology companies who solely had good purposes for technology could not control the addiction that came with it. If companies who are the source of technology are not in control, the same goes for the government.

Therefore it is up to the law to rouse down the troubles of technology. If 3558.75 days per lifetime is the average person’s amount of time spent on devices, what is the amount of time a highly addictive person spends online? Although consuming a certain amount of time on technology is perfectly fine, it comes to a certain point where spending too much time on your phone per day can actually be damaging for your health. Mobile phones are not conducive to an active lifestyle and they can lead to poor heart health. Devices are a major cause of sleep deprivation and can lead to physical illness, memory loss and impact on learning skills. Not only do mobile phones contribute to bad physical health it also leads to a negative impact on mental health. Many people choose to use their phone to avoid negative emotions or to suppress downcast emotions. Devices are a major cause for the increase of stress and loneliness as interacting through cyberspace and not interacting in real life can cause depression and loneliness especially when withdrawing from technology. Research from MIT discovered that students who were asked to give up their

Are Our Laws Keeping Pace With The Digital Age | 26

phone for 24 hours had anxiety and confusion without their phone. This proves just how reliant we have become as humans on these devices, too dependent. In addition to this, devices can be a huge distraction, especially for students or people at work, 67% of teachers have seen students that are distracted by their phone.

A study from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that many young people suffer from withdrawal symptoms; for example, increased blood pressure and heart rate, and can become very irritable and put at unease when separated from their phones. Many people cannot resist the impulse to use their phone. 47% of people have tried to limit their phone use however 30% have succeeded. It is addicting. And the worst part is that most times we pick up our phones we are unaware that we even picked them up in the first place. Unaware of the addiction our phones are causing us. Like an addiction, smartphones lead to unhealthy habits. The google definition of addiction is “the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance or activity”.

So why are there laws and consequences over drug addiction, alcohol addiction, cigarette addiction and gambling addiction but no laws for technological device addiction if this addiction to a device fits perfectly well into the definition of addiction? Furthermore, all these addictions appear in a book used by psychologists called the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders apart from smartphone addiction that does not appear even though it contributes to severe mental health issues.It comes to a certain point to ask how ethical

and natural this is for society?

How will it change in the next decades? The problem is if it will not. It is therefore up to the law and legislation to regulate unhealthy addictions for the betterment of human health both physically and mentally. For instance, the law could create legislation for these online companies of the restrictions of what is being sent to you, ideally less targeted and personalized information that is being tailored to target specific groups of people in order to ‘hook them on’.

This in turn would make device usage less addictive.

Furthermore, legislation should also be put in place for a maximum amount of time a person could spend on their phone if not needed for work purposes if they are addicted and spending a very significant amount of time affecting their lifestyle that is regarded as unhealthy.

Using addiction to an online app’s advantage. Lots of apps have been making the majority of their money off not only advertisements but off users buying in-game bundles in a non entirely ethical manner. Many users are addicted to these apps, specifically gaming apps, where people spend a vast majority of their time and money on these virtual apps or games which these apps make money off. In a recent survey, the average American spends $205.15 in gaming. The app developers use physiologists to personalise and target specific people to increase the addictive nature of these apps, for example using personalized experience. For instance, there is a millionaires club on certain game apps where only players who have spent $1million can join. This proves

27 | Are Our Laws Keeping Pace With The Digital Age

the vast amount spent on these apps and the addiction tools used by game developers to encourage and promote users to spend money. In turn, many users in the game are prone to buying the in-app bundles which are normally quite expensive. A proportion of app revenues should be taxed according to each country that app users are based in. Overall, legislation should be put in place that a proportion of tax revenues should be spent towards gaming addiction programmes.

Artificial Intelligence - AI A newly developed characteristic of intelligence machinery that imitates human intelligence into working and thinking like human beings. It has been found useful in many advancements in the medical field, helping healthcare workers to understand the day to day patterns and understand the needs of the people they care for better. AI also oversees any similarities in patients' conditions as well as any anomalies to provide predictive analysis and identify patients most at risk of developing a condition which helps prioritise patients and also improves preparation and insight of a potential condition. AI also uses pattern recognition to oversee what type of factors make a condition worse from a stored group of data. Robots have been used in the medical industry for over 30 years and can range from being a laboratory robot to a surgical robot performing highly complex tasks, like aiding a human surgeon or performing a surgery themselves. This can range from performing a gallbladder removal surgery to coronary artery bypass to hip replacement and kidney transplant. AI is a very powerful tool and with the development of

AI, a high majority of tasks in the medical industry can be performed by these robots.

However, with the many benefits that come with AI, also comes many risks where law is needed to control and overlook. Thinking into the future. When AI becomes more advanced and machinery starts replacing human labour in the medical field to perform surgeries independently, a set of rules and regulations would be needed to be enforced for people to abide and use this machinery ethically and responsibly. For example, machinery would need health and safety regulations and would need to be tested several times until used in the public to make sure machinery does not malfunction. Laws would also need to be enforced to make sure this machinery is used by professionals in order to make sure that it is being used by the right people and on the right patients.

AI has also been the foundation for autonomous operation and development for autonomous vehicles and the emergence of the possibility of lethal autonomous weapons systems about the concerns of the ethicality of AI and potential malicious use.

Restrictions crucially need to be put in place on the use of lethal autonomous weapons with only Belgium pacing legal legislation to prevent the use or development of LAWS. Many autonomous vehicles have been allowed on the road however governments are in the critical and rapid urge of changing their traffic laws and other vehicle-relevant laws to make sure there are laws relevant and apply to the purposes of these autonomous vehicles on the road to make these vehicles ethical. This is

critical because there are many risks and deadly consequences following autonomous vehicles on the basis that these selfdriving cars are different to normal, manually driven cars and therefore laws need to be updated in order to be relevant to these new self-driving cars as they are operated much more differently from manually controlled vehicles.

Although AI has its benefits, social media companies have begun using AI to their advantage in a somewhat malicious manner.

Many companies have been experimenting and using AI to enhance personalized experience which in turn is dangerous for the user as it targets their weaknesses where learning what they are more prone to be attracted to and consume more of which leads to them spending more time on technological devices. This is not ethical or beneficial for the user and laws should be created to regulate the use of AI on users.

The basis of AI is fueled by data.

Facial recognition cameras and computer vision are being used wherever you go, and in turn limits a person's democracy and liberty as citizens have not agreed for their face to be observed and tracked by a person behind a screen. The real issue here is privacy and how AI is being used and who it is being used for and for what purpose.

Stronger laws need to be enforced to protect our data privacy to regulate our data and the use of AI to make it isn't being used for unethical purposes and supports privacy law and rights.

Generally, the issue here is that

laws for AI can be hard to put into place as it is a newly developed concept and most governments are adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach towards AI regulations.

Therefore not many regulations, if any, have been put into place for different areas of AI sectors, for example, there is no regulation on malicious AI with no discussion about the matter either. However, these laws need to be rapidly put into place to make sure AI is being used ethically and efficiently and remains a good purpose. Laws need to be put into place to prevent malicious AI from being used, protect data privacy, reduce the risks of autonomous vehicles and prevent the wrong use of autonomous weapons in order to make sure that AI is used ethically. These laws need to be implemented soon and rapidly in order to prevent any malicious events from occurring.

In addition, discussions about putting laws around ethical and responsible use of AI in place need to begin. Regulations and laws need to be put into place, pertaining to the use of, creation or interaction with AI systems.

Supervision There have been many social media accounts online that do not use technology ethically and in turn, are hard to be identified.

Ideally, all online accounts should be identified and regularly supervised and all should be regulated and overlooked before they are officially put online for other people to view to make sure no inappropriate material is being used. If so, the company responsible for holding these online accounts, for example, Instagram, should immediately recognize inappropriate material and take the account down.

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Hebe Cheuk, Year 13, Wu House 29 | Are Our Laws Keeping Pace With The Digital Age

There should be stricter laws for online and social media companies that are responsible for hosting these accounts. Additionally, laws on how and what websites are allowed to be put onto the internet should be stricter and the proof that the online company is legitimate should be more secure to make sure it does not support illicit activities and hence websites and online communication and e-commerce businesses should be based on just how laws are like for businesses in real life. Online companies should be more responsible for what accounts are being put onto their apps. There should be stronger laws on regulating activity better to make sure online technology is being used ethically. Overall, ideally, there should be some sort of online police in the form of AI to navigate and supervise the uses of online activity recognized by the law.

Summary In conclusion, the main idea behind technology is social responsibility and the way it is used ethically. In order for technology to be used ethically, relevant laws have to be implemented to govern and regulate technology. The overall trend of all the areas discussed is that stricter and new legislation needs to be implemented in order to govern online companies, AI ,and addiction due to the fact that many laws are not relevant to the technological era we are in today. However, many governments have adopted a ‘wait and see’ approach to laws and regulations, especially with AI, according to Forbes. Technology can be hard to govern and regulate as new concepts are made that have never been seen before. Therefore it is hard to predict just how this technology will be used and hence the current laws that apply to technology are not relevant and not regularly updated enough to keep pace with the information age. This means that technology potentially is still being used for unethical purposes. When technology is used, it should be used in a way that is not only ethical and beneficial for the company but for the user and society.

For example, the use of personalized experience targets a user’s weaknesses in order to make them more addicted. This, therefore, does not seem like the most beneficial, moral and fair use of technology, however, the laws and regulations allow this to occur. In my opinion, although it is hard to keep pace with technology, I believe laws and legislations should be made more relevant and updated more frequently to prohibit the unethical use of technology. The information age expands rapidly, therefore laws have to be updated or changed rapidly too. In conclusion, there is a crisis in the information age and therefore change and justification must be made through the law.

Contents | 2Are Our Laws Keeping Pace With The Digital Age | 30

Home, Nostalgia, and The Odyssey Warren Zhu, Year 13, Churchill House

Few men can keep alive through a big serf to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind: and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband, her white arms round him pressed as though forever —The Odyssey

31 | Home, Nostalgia and The Odyssey

Rachel Li, Year 13, Wu House

The Odyssey is about Odysseus’ journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War—a 10-year journey after 10 years of war. In the decade Odysseus survives and endures (though all of his crewmates travelling with him have perished) the anger of Poseidon, Calypso’s imprisonment, the offerings of the Lotus Eaters, the fury of the Cyclops, the temptation of the Sirens, the sweet embrace of Circe, the desire for the Cattle of the Sun, only to arrive back home with irreverent suitors courting his wife whilst wasting away his estate. With the help of Athena and his son Telemachus (much matured after his own journey to search for his father), Odyssey disguises himself as an old beggar and kills all the suitors, reuniting, at last, with his family.

The late Roger Scruton said that in the centre of The Odyssey is nostalgia. Nostalgia is a combination of the Greek nostos, the returning to home, and algos, pain. The locus of nostalgia has always been ‘home’; this can be discerned through the aforementioned Greek word nostos—the coming back home. Home need not be a physical location—like Ithaca that Odyssey tried so hard to sail back to—but it has to be the place where ‘the past’ dwells. There is a sense of familiarity and a Heideggerian knowing-your-wayaround at home, but also the sense of naturally being an element within it. And nostalgia is just that desire to find or to return (though every re-turn is always a re-discovery), to a place in the universe that belongs to oneself and to which oneself belongs. Nostalgia is Dasein (as Heidegger would say) in its quest of finding itself because Dasein “is its past, whether explicitly or not”, and it, Dasein, is that being with “historicality… [as a] determining characteristic” .

Nostalgia is the longing to re-join with that part of 1

oneself—lying, now, forlorn in the past—that one loses to the steady, unrelenting flow of time.

Nostalgia manifests itself as a wish to return to a time where everything was right and (thank God!) people were not so decadent. Either for the paradise that was so unwittingly lost—that’s the Christian narrative of innocence, or a glorious time with glorious people before mankind was tainted by society—that’s Rousseau’s story of the noble savage or a glorious era that once was and is now long gone—that’s the Roman story of the senate and the founding of the empire. At the very least, nostalgia, for each individual, is that yearning for one’s past, which, though its misgivings, is painfully wonderful, for lying in the middle of all that loveliness is a ‘sweet unrest’ 2 —a pain that we are most powerless to quench because we are timely beings thrown into a rectilinear stream who have, as our direction, a constant moving forward. (As Kant says, we are creatures who intuit time and create this stream in which we swim, sometimes effortlessly, sometimes less so.)

Nostalgia, in this sense, is a paradoxical enterprise, 3 for it is the search for a past, or, at the least, the salvaging of what remnant of it we can find in the future. For the past is always past, and no longing, after the past has passed, can make it less so.

In this sense, Odyssey has its modern counterpart in In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s masterly effort to regain the past—with all that was dear and wonderful and sad and painful there, dwelling deep in the unconscious, only to be activated by a chance detail (the so-called Proustian moment) that has not lost any of its potency precisely because it has not been recalled. In Search of Lost Time, however, draws out

1. P41 english, P20 german.

2. Taken from Keats’ Bright Stars…

3. Critique of Pure Reason, A 26

Home, Nostalgia and The Odyssey | 32

another aspect of nostalgia: whatever one is salvaging is not necessarily lost to the world, but, instead, lost in oneself. This returning home is never the discovery of anything new, but the reawakening of whatever was forgotten and neglected. The quest back home, spurred by nostalgia, is always a quest in self-understanding.

Nostalgia, whenever and wherever it manifests, is the pointing-toward some neglected part of oneself.

To develop on this point, allow me to give a synopsis of Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger called the being of each person Dasein . And Dasein is Dasein, 4 in virtue of the fact that it has an understanding of its being. This understanding of itself is mostly unmental (and this is the long-held distinction of man as the thinking thing that Heidegger was trying to rebel against) , and is manifested in doing, as know-how, acquired5by being in a culture with multifarious social practices and being in relation with people. This is similar to a point made by Wittgenstein in On Certainty, about how for most of the time we don’t think about what we do, but just do it out of habit.

What this has to do with nostalgia, is that the going back home to the culture—the place, the environment, the kind of people, the way of life—that had been instrumental in determining one’s outlook as well as one’s sense of identity—who one is, what one does, what one likes, what one wishes to achieve in life, what it means to be oneself—aids Dasein in its understanding of itself. Thinking along this line, nostalgia, perhaps, is not as tragic and futile as I have made it seem in the paragraphs above. At its most authentic (and Odysseus’ journey back home— in contrast with all the other shipmates who have all lost themselves on the way—would be the epitome of this authentic nostalgia), nostalgia can be constructive. Constructive, here, used, in the sense that nostalgia is not a completely hopeless affair, but its effect is less like construction, but archaeology: a bringing to the light of consciousness all that one understands but does not know. This nostalgiaguided ontical-archaeology is important because it is only to the extent that we bring our past, our history,

our being to bear can we be autonomous. For the past is always driving us forward (as Faulkner says “the past is never dead, it is not even past”), 6 more so if it lies hidden from us, and it is only in understanding ourselves that we are in control of ourselves. Heidegger says, slightly after the passage that I quoted above: “Only because it [an era] is ‘historical’ can an era be unhistoriological.” 7 8 This character of nostalgia, that it does not trap oneself into history, but liberates (to the extent that one is able to be liberated) oneself from the future, is perhaps the reason why in the Greek tradition, following The Odyssey, the returning home (nostos— homecoming) is always heroic. The hero is the person who leaves home (The Iliad) and returns again. Both journeys require courage—the one away and the one back—and perhaps more so for the journey back home (or else why would all of the sailors who accompanied Odysseus to Troy not have survived in this journey back?). This, I speculate, is because the past is a much more painful place than the future (though the future has its own set of concerns).

Allow me to develop my point using Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX, where the pain of the past is articulated marvelously: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste: Lying in the past are ‘old woes’: unhappiness, pain, and grievances that do not simply disappear when one ceases to experience them, but instead lies still, dormant in one’s memory. The journey back is a voyage through all that has once beaten one down: it is sorting through the unconscious, releasing what is repressed within, confronting those terrible and demonic parts of oneself, and coming to terms with them. The past is first painful because it brings to

4. For Heidegger there is a difference between Dasein, as an ontological status (a kind of being), and human, as in the DNA and the number of chromosomes and what else biology would call human. There is an interesting section in Being and Time, called, specifically, “How the analytic of Dasein is to be distinguished from anthropology, psychology, and biology” 5. Interestingly—and this really helps to give one a sense of the Early Heidegger—Heidegger explained logos, not as ‘reason’, or ‘logic’, as one would normally translate it (and this is how Aristotle’s famous “λόγον ἔχον” is translated, as the ‘animal rationale’), but ‘speech’, as in discourse and communication with fellow human beings. In one of his lectures, he said that we can best understand what logos meant to the Greeks by comparing it with reading the newspaper (take into consideration that it was in the 1920s, so newspaper played a much more important role in the society), as in, engaging in civil life and caring about the polity.

6. The interested reader can read the preface to Between Past and Future, with a discussion on one of Kafka’s vignettes, of a Human stuck between two persons, one pushing him forward from behind (the past), and another pushing him, from the front, backwards (the future). The striking thing is that it is the past that drives us forward, and the future that forces us back.

7. English 42, German 20 8. Freud, in some sense too, pointed at the enslaving effect of the past in his discovery of the unconscious, and Jung, even more radically, raised the past to a new height in his postulation of a Collective Unconscious.

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realization the essential tragedy in human striving— that most of what we seek we do not get. And this pain is doubly felt when we realize that, since nothing human is infallible, we have not made the best use of the past (“wail my dear time’s waste”).

Characteristic of the past is that, as I’ve mentioned before, it is past, and can never be summoned back: For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight; Although, for Shakespeare, not all is lost. There lies salvation in friendship: But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.

Note, however, that to end his sorrow, the speaker need not physically see the ‘friend’, but only ‘think on’ him. Isn’t this, then, the sweet part of nostalgia—the element of nostos, the envisioning of being back home with one’s friends and families and all that one loves that sustains spirit and life—as the natural counterpart to algos, the pain in never being able to re-experience the past?

It is perhaps worth noting, related to this, that the past, throughout history, has constantly been viewed as a burden (as Nietzsche called it in his thought experiment called “the eternal recurrence”), for it is the thing that one cannot change but is nevertheless attached to oneself forever. There have been many attempts to erase the past, in Communist China, in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany—what this does is that it makes us stranger to ourselves. George Santayana said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. We need not accept his proposition in full to understand his point: Along with the loss of the past is the loss in our ability to judge.

process, because to return to one’s past is to shoulder responsibility for all one had done, since, as mortals, we make mistakes, and this acknowledging, accepting, and taking responsibility of our mistakes is a process unbearable-beyond-belief—especially so, looking back far from the future, with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that I could have made a better choice, that if only I….

To relate back to The Odyssey: To return to the past is to take care of those ‘who’ whom one bears the duty to care—the suitors crowding around Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, and Odysseus’ father, Laertes, terribly sick because of Odysseus—since it is in the past, not the present or the future, where duty and obligation lies.

To end, I want to point you to another part of the heroism in nostalgia, that is, the willingness to put one’s imagination—what one imagines the home to be like, how wonderful it is—against reality. This rises out of the fact that it is not ‘I’, but remembrance, who remembers, in that much of the imaginings and remembrance of the past is faulty, rising out of the urge, the innate human need, for remembrance—and this is the myth of the Golden Age, for we tend, in our need to remember and to have an anchor that we can always strive back on, romanticize it. A famous Chinese poem ends: (the closer to home, the more reluctant I proceed, I see him who came from home, but I dare not ask how it is), which articulates the exact fear that is actualized in Odysseus’ confrontation with the suitors surrounding his wife, Penelope. When Athena reveals to Odysseus what dangers lie in his house, Odysseus thanks her: “God help me!” the man of intrigue [Odysseus] broke out: “Clearly I might have died the same ignoble death as Agamemnon , bled white in my own house too, if you had never revealed this to me now, 9

It is also the case that the past, if unresolved, can lead to present conflicts. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an example of that. What this demonstrates, again, is the value in returning and straightening whatever crooked thing lies dormant in the past through returning home. Though valuable and necessary, however, this returning is not an easy

9. Agamemnon was murdered by his wife, Clemenaestra, right after coming back home. Though, he, in some sense, deserved it, as he sacrificed his young daughter to the gods in order for the wind to be in his favor.

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The Change America Needed Dora Gan, Year 11, Wu House

Often referred to as the “Second American Revolution,” the Civil War was a turning point in the United States’ history. Its aftermath revealed systemic political, social and economic problems in the antebellum period, many of which failed to be resolved during Reconstruction due, in large measure, to disagreements between President Andrew Johnson and Congress.

In 1820, the Missouri Compromise split the nation along the latitude of 36° 30', with slavery permitted in the south and prohibited in the north[1]. The Northern economy focused on manufacturing and industry, while the Southern economy was based on farming cotton and tobacco, dependent on the labour provided by black slaves[2]. However, as Senator William Seward of New York told his colleagues in 1858, the collision of interests between North and South was not “the work of interested or fanatical agitators”, but rather “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will sooner or later, become entirely a slaveholding nation or entirely a free-labour nation.”[3] The Republican Party was formed in 1854: a party based on the principle of opposing the extension of slavery to the western states as they joined the nation, with an ideology defined by competitive, egalitarian, free-labour capitalism[4][5][6]. When Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, seven southern states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) concluded that their legislatures and economy were in peril, leading them to secede from the Union and establish the Confederate States of America at Montgomery, Alabama on February 1861 with Jefferson Davis as president[7]. With the first shot fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 by the Confederates, the fires of the Civil War were ignited and would continue to burn well beyond the war’s conclusion[8].

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The war was essentially a stalemate for the first three years, even though the North had an advantage in terms of armaments, manpower and finance. Lincoln changed commanders six times; it was not until he appointed Ulysses Grant as Lieutenant General in the spring of 1864 that the North seized the upper hand.

Finally, on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, ending four years of brutal warfare that resulted in over 600,000 casualties.

If the American Revolution created the United States, the Civil War determined what type of nation it would remain. With the assassination of Lincoln on April 14, 1865, a stunned Vice President Andrew Johnson, known to many as the “dead dog of the White House,” stepped into the Oval Office and inherited the task of reuniting the North and the South[9][10].

History would judge that he was ill-prepared to address the chaos and confusion of Reconstruction (1865 -1877)—much of which he would create in the first place.

Lincoln’s original blueprint for Reconstruction took form in the Ten-Percent Plan of 1863: if 10% of a southern state’s voters swore an Oath of Allegiance to the Union, that state would be readmitted with its Confederate generals receiving a full pardon[11]. A new state government and restructured state constitution would be put in place, officially accepting the abolition of slavery[12].

However, Johnson, a Tennessee Unionist and previously a slave owner, was more lenient towards the South with his plan, which included dispensing thousands of pardons to former Confederates[13]. He called for a loyalty oath less stringent than Lincoln’s and as long as Southern state governments abolished slavery, repudiated secession and abrogated the Confederate debt, they would be free to manage their affairs[14]. The Southern states also had to uphold the new Amendments to the Constitution: 13th (1865) that “neither slavery nor

involuntary servitude… shall exist within the United States”; the 14th (1868) that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges ... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”; and the 15th (1870) that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” [15] The Southern states conceded begrudgingly. Thus, operating on what was later known as the “separate but equal” doctrine, the Southern states established Black Codes and Jim Crow laws as early as 1865, just as the 13th Amendment was enacted. These Codes and laws enforced de jure segregation (segregation by law), which ensured white supremacy and an ongoing labour supply for their recovering, agricultural-based economies.

These laws not only defined everyday social protocols, with black people and white people using separate waiting rooms and ticket windows for trains in Alabama or different hospital entrances in Mississippi, but also sought to restrict jury selection and voting rights, undermining the 14th and 15th Amendments[16]. Black people were not allowed to serve on a jury and thus, many all-white juries sentenced Blacks, most of whom were either innocent or had committed a lesser offence, to harsh sentences. Although the Southern states could not legally prevent Blacks from exercising their right to vote, they introduced laws to limit those who could.

For example, property tests were codified so only property owners could vote, and people who were property-less or illiterate (which was the case with most Blacks) were only allowed to vote if their grandfather had voted before as specified in the “Grandfather Clause.”[17] Accordingly, many Blacks were automatically disenfranchised.

In an attempt to help the 4 million former slaves integrate into society and thus unite the country, Lincoln supported the founding of the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865 and authorised its operation for one year[18]. The Bureau aimed to provide food, housing, and medical care for black people and poor white southerners: it would go on to feed millions of

people, build hospitals, provide medical aid, and negotiate labour contracts for black people before being disbanded in 1872[19]. However, the Bureau’s greatest achievements would be in education: building more than 1,000 black schools and being instrumental in the chartering of Atlanta University and Fisk University in the South. The Bureau intended to play a significant role in helping the country protect its newest citizens; predictably, it was met with significant resistance. First, it was underfunded and understaffed, with only 900 agents at its peak. Also, its representatives were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group that terrorised and lynched Blacks (and some white Republicans) with impunity[19]. However, the Bureau met its greatest resistance from President Johnson, who vetoed its continuation in February 1866. He argued that the Bureau interfered with states’ rights and would financially burden the federal government.

His veto angered the radical Republicans in Congress - Republicans who held the South morally culpable for the war and wanted to punish them for it.

A hostile tone had been set for the rest of his term as the Radicals believed he was being too lenient with the Southern states and had violated the terms of his office, leading to many future disagreements.

Economically, it was estimated that freeing the slaves resulted in a loss of almost $2 billion for Southern planters[20]. Lincoln had famously remarked that each freed slave would receive “forty acres and a mule” but Johnson reversed that order, returning all land to Confederate owners[21]. To secure a steady labour supply to work the cotton and tobacco crops, sharecropping was introduced in the South: former Black slaves agreed to work the land in return for a fraction of the crop they delivered. The Bureau was forced to oversee these sharecropping arrangements which were, by definition and intent, oppressive[22].

Regarding these post-war problems of Reconstruction, President Johnson said little, changed less and opposed more, as he was constantly vetoing bills initiated by the Radical Republicans. Lincoln’s stated objectives for going to war were to abolish slavery and to unite the country, but Johnson had been unable or unwilling to effectively follow this up. He had originally vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, which struck at the unfair Black Codes, vetoed the continuation of the Freedmen’s Bureau and opposed the 14th and 15th

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Amendments. In doing so, he exercised his right to veto bills passed by Congress; however, once Congress overrode his vetoes, he failed to enforce laws Congress passed per his duty.

Even if Johnson opposed the Amendments, the Constitution still needed to be the basis of American democracy. As President of the United States, he had to uphold the basic values and rules set by the founding fathers. In not doing so, he faced the full wrath of Congress, which eventually led to his impeachment.

In the words of Representative William Kelley of Pennsylvania, “the bloody and untilled fields of the ten unreconstructed States, the unsheeted ghosts of the two thousand murdered negroes in Texas, cry...for the punishment of Andrew Johnson.”[23] Johnson was eventually impeached in 1868 when he dismissed Edwin Stanton from the post of Secretary of War when Congress was not in session, violating the Tenure of Office Act passed in 1867. The ensuing trial in the Senate did not produce the 2/3 majority necessary to convict Johnson; it failed by one vote, 35-19.

Politically, not only did Johnson fail to undermine the Black Codes, he gave Southern states the freedom to implement them instead; socially, he vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau even though it succeeded in helping those in need with the little resources it possessed; economically, he reversed Lincoln’s plan of forty acres and a mule. He might have chosen to encourage the Southern states to welcome and accept the Amendments; instead, he opposed them and sought control of Congress through lobbying representatives to support his decisions and vetoes.

With his “Swing Around the Circle'' speeches for the Congressional elections of 1866, he attempted to win over moderate Republicans by saying “Congress, factious, domineering, tyrannical Congress has undertaken to poison the minds of the American people, and create a feeling against me in consequence of the manner in which I have distributed the public patronage.”[24] In belittling Congress, he encouraged Southerners to resist the Amendments and other post-Civil War legislation. As a result, the Republicans increased their majorities in Congress and instituted legislation without Johnson’s support. Although the country was once again reunited in theory, the North and the South remained

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bitterly divided in practice. In essence, although Abraham Lincoln had won the war, Andrew Johnson had lost the peace.

The Civil War was pivotal in the nation’s bid to reinforce democracy and a sense of union.

Reconstruction was meant to be a way of redirecting that democracy, and might have done so and provided a time of healing and national reconciliation had President Johnson and Congress not been at such odds. Nearly 150 years after the Civil War and Reconstruction, its fallout can still be felt by average Americans on a daily basis. Americans still seek to come to terms with the ongoing implications of a nation divided, de facto segregation would continue well into the 20th and 21st centuries, the Ku Klux Klan would create an ideological foundation leading to the emergence of white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys and securing equal justice at the state level and in the courtroom still risks being undermined by racial prejudice.

Johnson had failed to carry forward Lincoln’s vision and that of the Founding Fathers and failed to give the country the change it needed. Nevertheless, perhaps in current times, where the schism between the two political parties is significant and troubling, the lessons from the failures of Reconstruction will be ones worth revisiting and learning from for the United States to reach national unity.

The Educational Divide Sophie Ho, Year 13, Wu House

Underneath the surface of a glamorised world, singing the benefits of globalisation and interconnectedness, lie preexisting inequalities entrenched in a society we no longer recognise.

Propelled by political forces who seem to focus solely on financial gain, communities have been left with no choice but to succumb to the uncertainties of daily life, treading precariously on fragile ground.

We have been rendered impotent against the risks of interdependence; as we wade through the inconstancy of COVID-19, more and more problems are brought to light.

Although COVID-19 has devastated the world in innumerable aspects, we must draw our attention towards the most extensive disruption of education of all time. Something that we have often taken for granted, simply glanced over as an institution, has been uprooted and tossed into an unrecognisable system of chaos. The impact of the pandemic on education systems has completely transcended geographical boundaries, affecting 1.6 billion students spanning 190 countries from all corners of the Earth.

Disparities, once hidden from the eye, have been unveiled and further exacerbated by learning losses, particularly in low-income or rural areas for the most vulnerable learners. Decades of progress have been reversed, especially for girls, an already vulnerable stakeholder in the past. Many are now more vulnerable to domestic violence and child marriage, whilst some are ultimately forced to drop out of school. The socio-economic resilience of refugees and forcibly displaced children have also been eroded by deprivation, reflected in their inability to access support services, including free school meals.

Altogether, this has resulted in a lost generation of approximately 23.8 million additional children who may not have access to education next year.

Figure 2 shows how the ability to respond to school closures varies according to the level of development: in the second quarter of 2020, while only 20% of children in primary education had been out of school in countries with very high human development, this number reached 86% in countries with low human development. Areas, such as the Sahel in Northern Africa, with unstable education systems due to climatic hazards and insecurity have been made worse through nationwide school closures. Students living in other places which lack basic infrastructure and electricity or contain low levels of digital literacy across the population are unable to gain connectivity to the Internet, let alone have the hardware needed for distance learning.

Therefore, an educational divide can be identified between countries of different economic development. Korea, a developed high-income country, transitioned successfully to virtual learning in just a few weeks after COVID-19 hit. This was aided

by KMOOCs and a digitalised curriculum that was implemented from years before, along with collaborative efforts between large corporations and the education sector. Volunteer committees of teachers have also helped coordinate central offices

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Se Lyn Lim, Year 13, Wu House

and train local teachers in online teaching platforms, along with the provision of free technology for families in need.

On the contrary, South Africa, recognised as the most unequal country in the world, suffered significantly from its bimodal education system. Children in the top 200 schools received a greater amount of distinctions in mathematics than children in the next 6,600 schools combined. While a small number of privileged children had access to some of the best education in the world, the rest faced an ailing system constrained by neverending cycles of poverty and inequity. As more privileged schools used digital resources to aid remote learning, the poorest schools had no choice but to take an absolute hiatus from formal learning, considering only 10.5% of South Africans had access to the Internet. The government had not even fulfilled standards for basic infrastructure; 3100 schools still had pit latrines at a learner to toilet ratio of 30:1, compromising not only each student’s education but also their health, privacy, and dignity.

marginalised groups, provide funding for the basic needs of deprived communities, and offer more support for the education sector; policymakers have to review existing policies and strive for better reform to mitigate future risks; national ministries should aim to change the correctional high-stakes accountability system, allowing greater flexibility in events of difficulty. Above all, support has to be provided for the most important education actors at the local level: our learners, teachers, and school staff. These people have all played a vital role in responding to COVID19, from analysing health risks, adapting the curriculum and taking on additional responsibilities.

Therefore, to truly enhance the resilience of education systems, we must promote communication across all stakeholders and education actors to ensure effective implementation and assist the needs of learners across the world.

There is no better time for the reformation of education - we must act now.

The digital divide must be bridged to provide reliable and affordable Internet access for those who are cut off from the benefits of technology. Short-term solutions consist of the provision of take-home technologies, as well as the establishment of community centres. Alternatives must be assessed for those with disabilities who face barriers concerning access to equipment, such as implementing audio narration or sign language videos. Those who lack digital skills need to be provided with sufficient tools to adapt to the new modes of instruction; this could be done through a mixed approach of print materials or educational television.

Contrary to popular belief, universal access to the Internet is not a panacea. To reach the core of the problem, we must strengthen the resilience of education systems as a whole, with a holistic approach focusing on inclusion for all learners. We must make it a priority to ensure fair and equal access to quality education regardless of socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, or disability.

However, this requires the fostering of stronger connections to engage stakeholders in education systems, encouraging both international and national cooperation at all levels. Everyone has to play their part: governments need to address vulnerabilities of

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Should A Wise Person Fear Death?

Warren Zhu, Year 13, Churchill House

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.

—Dylan Thomas Introductory Remarks

us…”, and the wise person would not fear death.

Should a wise person fear death? This question first came to me as I was reading Epicurus, the great Greek champion of happiness. It is a question of extreme relevance, but one so broad that any attempt at answering the question would, by its nature, be incomprehensive. Nonetheless, I will, in this essay, take on the quixotic task, with the caution that it is by no means conclusive.

Plato, in the Phaedo, provides another argument: If the duality between the transient and material body, and the immaterial and immortal soul is true as Plato believes it to be,wise ones would not fear death, since the soul shall not perish along with the dead of the body. The wise, instead, would even look forward to it, as it untethers them from their body—with its tedious biological processes—into the realm of pure thought, the only realm that matters to the wise.

I will first examine Epicurus’ argument along with Plato’s, who held a very similar view, and point out why I believe the two arguments are inadequate. I will then examine the larger question of: “should a wise person fear death?”, taking Dostoevsky, Seneca, Heidegger, and Nietzsche’s arguments, each of which argue for a realm of life in which that ‘death’ has ‘no dominion’ over, and therefore, should not be feared by the wise.

It would, however, be prudent to first clarify what the word ‘wise’ is before setting out to answer the question: Wisdom is not intelligence—the ability to solve mathematical problems or understand abstract notions; nor is it knowledge—the storage of facts and theories. Wisdom, as discussed in this essay, is a clarity in one’s understanding of life and death. The wise person, it follows, is the one with the most reasonable attitude towards life and death.

The Arguments Epicurus’ argument goes as follows: we fear death only because we believe it is bad in some way.

However, death cannot be bad for anyone since "when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist…”. Death, to the living human being, is nothing, because they will never cross paths. Therefore, “Death…is nothing to

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There is, however, a successful objection to both Socrates and Epicurus, presented in Hamlet’s famous Soliloquy. Hamlet says: To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; The flaw in both Epicurus’ and Socrates’ arguments is that they are both assuming what the experience of death is like—in Epicurus’ case, nothingness; in Socrates’ case, bliss in pure thought—and this move is unjustified, because the “dreams” that “may come”, could be ones that “give us pause”. This, although does not fully discredit Epicurus and Socrates’ arguments, shows that they are much less robust than they claim to be.

Not all is lost, however, for one can find a different kind of argument that dispels the fear of death but does not presuppose any post-death experience. For these, we can look to Dostoevsky, Seneca, Heidegger, and Nietzsche.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky gives an

irrationalist argument for the groundlessness of the fear of death—that in genuine love immortality would be self-evidently felt. To try to explain this account in the form of an argument, would be that by subordinating our self-interests to another entity through love, something much more enduring than that fleeting moment of the consciousness of the self between two ‘eternities of darkness’ that we call life.

Therefore, the wise person, whose wisdom consists in his love and understanding, should not fear death, for death has no ‘dominion’ over love.

Dostoevsky’s argument is much more difficult to refute, mainly because it relies on an experience of intense love. It may be said, however, that it is much too reliant on emotion, rather than reason, which, the wise person, in its relentless questioning, would not accept.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic, however, provides an argument that relies not on emotion, but rationality.

To Seneca, as with the Stoics before him, fear, just like all other emotions, rises out of confusion. Firstly, only things that are invariably bad should be feared; since death is not always negative to the person who suffers it—to a slave who has lost all of his freedom, for example—the fear of death is completely irrational. Secondly, the emotion of fear, even as a response to what is unequivocally bad, is still counterproductive and irrational, for, to the stoics, all emotions rise out of irrationality. Third—and Seneca argues passionately on this point—only the person who is not afraid of death can be considered truly free, for the choice to die when the circumstance warrants it is no less a freedom than any other action.

Seneca says: “just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage… so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life.”, and this is no different for the wise person, being the paragon of virtuous understanding and the freest person.

Thus, for the rational, wise person, death shall have no ‘dominion’.

Seneca’s argument, in some sense, refutes Dostoevsky’s, insofar as it is predicated on a refutation of the validity of emotion. But it refutes Dostoevsky’s argument in such a way that the refutation supports his conclusion. In this, the case for a positive answer to the question that we are currently investigating is strengthened. The combination of Seneca and Dostoevsky’s arguments is similar to Bertrand Russel’s famous argument against Naïve realism (Russel’s argument being that

since Physics presupposes Naïve realism, and Physics shows that Naïve realism is wrong, Naïve realism, whether Physics is right or wrong, is wrong).

Building upon the previous conclusion, there are two different kinds of arguments from Heidegger and Nietzsche that I wish to discuss, which would strengthen the case that a wise person should not fear death.

Heidegger agrees with Seneca that fear rises out of confusion. To him, fear and anxiety are two sides of the same coin. Fear arises out of inauthenticity, of Dasein (i.e., the mode of being that humans—or, as he likes to call it, mortals—hold) not realizing its own potentialities-of-Being. In contrast, anxiety is characteristic of the authentic mode of Being (authentic mode of Being being something analogous, though not completely the same as, being-wise). In authenticity there is nothing to fear— there is even no Dasein to be anxious, for only “anxiety is anxious”. In fact, in his analysis of Dasein’s temporality, Heidegger asserts that it is death that provides Dasein’s everyday activities with meaning, just as for Aristotle it is the telos that give every object its purpose. In this sense, death is something to be affirmed.

To Heidegger, the question is not so much answered, but dissolved. His is less of an argument but a description of a phenomenon that, once he directs one to see it with him, removes the sense of the question. For the wise person, who here could perhaps be defined as the anticipatorily resolute (his jargon for the conditions of authenticity) Dasein that lives in authenticity, would never experience fear.

Therefore Death has no ‘dominion’ over the authentic, wise person.

Nietzsche argues in a similar fashion as Heidegger, although, instead of pointing one to a phenomenon, the wise person is defined by him, amongst many other attributes, as the one who would not fear death.

His concept of amor fati (love of fate)—the ideal for the truly great and wise man (the Übermensch/Superman/Overman)—requires one to love every moment, no matter good or bad, of one’s life, including death. The wise person affirms death as he affirms everything else that comes at him as an inescapable part of fate. Whatever ‘dominion’ death shall have; it will not dominate the noble, Aristocratic (in the typically Nietzschean fashion) love of fate that the wise person possesses in virtue of his wisdom.

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Joy Chen, Year 11, Gelhorn House 43 | Should A Wise Person Fear Death?

Conclusion I agree with Epicurus in his statement, that a wise person does not fear death, although I do not agree with his argument—for it overlooks an aspect of death: its murky uncertainty. For the same reason, Socrates’ argument does not convince me.

However, the pair of arguments of Dostoevsky and Seneca, which contradict each other and at the same time prove the same thing, have great validity. So do Heidegger and Nietzsche’s position, since both of their arguments cannot be refuted logically, but only believed or not believed: Heidegger pointing one to the mode of Being of the wise person in which the fear of death is dissolved, and Nietzsche defining the wise person in such a way that it cannot fear death. These are my grounds for agreeing with Epicurus’s conclusion (that the wise person should not fear death), in that there are spheres of life (love, in rationality, in authenticity, or in amor fati) that death has no dominion over.

Of how much relevance, however, does this brief survey and tentative conclusion bear? I’m afraid, perhaps not much; I fear that the wise person is perhaps only an ideal, something that exists up there in the world of forms and ideas, something that lies in the colorful world outside of the cave that we, the fugitives of darkness, can never divine. The truly wise person may be able to dispel the existential fear, but we ordinary mortals would still succumb to the dread despite the strength of all arguments.

However, at the same time, I also want to contest that the setting up of such an ideal—the wise person—to strive for, is, still, of some value. For we are, in some sense, story-telling animals, animals who struggle to understand where we are, who we are, and just as importantly, where we should be. The destination may not be reachable (as in the case of the wise person), but we would, nevertheless, benefit in this quixotic (Sisyphean?) quest.

Should A Wise Person Fear Death? | 44

The Problem of "Equality"

Joshua Yen, Year 13, Shaftesbury House

Abstract: In the last issue of the Humanities Harrovian, I provided a powerful deductive case that proved that a belief in the equality of opportunity and equal rights requires the existence of a personal, creator God. The goal of this article is different from my usual style of arguing for a certain conclusion, rather, I want to invoke thought and prompt you to question your ideas about equality. As a result, I will not argue against any specific part of equality. Instead, I will attack the most general notion of equality, the idea that everyone should be made equal. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate that we should not jump to the conclusion that equality is always a good thing—we must keep each of these cases at arm’s length and approach each claim for equality in a case by case manner.

Forms of Equality: In the past, I have often heard the term “equality” used in a very loose and broad sense. A lot of people argue for equality as something that everyone should strive towards, without even asking themselves what equality actually means.

The first part of my dialectic is to demonstrate that there are more forms of equality than one may think.

Instead of merely arguing for or against equality, I just want you to think deeply about your starting point.

To demonstrate this, let me turn to a very common example—equal pay. In the current discourse, the idea of equal pay is often raised, be it about racial or gender pay gaps. Popular culture likes to look at the average gap between two groups and immediately suggest the existence of inequality. However, I’m afraid that this is an oversimplification of the facts.

One must further ask themselves—is this disparity due to innate discrimination within the system, or is it a result of other means?

What do I mean by this?

Imagine a world where everyone has equal

47 | The Problem of "Equality"

opportunity, but in this world, all Asian men get paid less than any other group. Is this world possible? If the answer is yes, then we can see that arguing from a certain aspect of inequality, pay gap in this instance, to inequality is justified—there is a more nuanced structure underlying the nature of equality that must not be overlooked.

So what is this structure made of?

In the case of the pay gap, I feel that there is an important distinction between the equality of opportunity and the equality of outcome. The former argues that everyone should be given an equal chance to succeed. The latter, on the other hand, argues that everyone should be given an equal conclusion. In each case, there may exist more forms of equality; however, I think that these two are sufficient as a basis for my discussion.

Problems of Equality Simpliciter: Upon understanding that there are two important forms of equality, let us discuss the first part a bit more, the idea of equality of outcome. In my opinion, this can be broken down to an even greater degree.

To illustrate this differentiation, imagine two worlds, one in which everyone is rewarded equally given they produce the same outcome, and another one in which everyone is rewarded equally for the sake of equality. I will rename the first as equality of reward and the second as equality simpliciter. While I feel the first is an honourable pursuit that is indeed tied to the concepts of equality of opportunity, I feel the second is faced with insuperable problems.

What are these problems?

According to Nietzsche, there are only two ways to gain this sense of equality, “[by drawing] all others down to one’s level… or by [drawing] oneself up with everyone else.” (Aphorisms on Love and Hate 34-35) I think this is undeniable. To make everyone equal in the broadest sense, there has to be either great destruction (making everyone as ruined as the weak)

or a great construction (to make everyone rich).

While the latter sounds desirable and is indeed what a lot of socialists and communists dream of, in reality, this option is impossible. Just appreciate, for a moment, how impossible it would be to have a society where everyone is as rich as Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. An economy cannot afford to have 7 billion billionaires in the world; the existence of the economy can only be developed and sustained with supply, demand and a hierarchy. If everyone was as prosperous as Bill Gates, there would be a great sense of inflation and money would lose its value.

Now I am no economist, but I believe that these conclusions are undeniable and undesirable.

Hence, it seems that the only way in which we can achieve equality simpliciter is to bring everyone down via a great destruction. However, this is undesirable as well. Of course, it would sound good for the poor and the weak, who out of their ressentiment, (the idea that the weak are jealous of the strong and this jealousy turns to hatred) want to gain power by reducing the great to nothing. Unfortunately, this would be greatly unfair to the rich, who have worked hard to be there, and would also be a great act of theft. To steal the property of the rich to force them into poverty would be an act worthy of the greatest demagogue totalitarian states of the 20th century.

This form of destruction was embodied by Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany (this was socialist as well) and Communist China, who in the name of the poor, took advantage of this feeling of ressentiment and established themselves as the party of equality. In each of these situations, there was violence and a lack of freedom, which is to be expected given the goal.

Wherever there is freedom, there is an opportunity to improve; there is an opportunity to rise above those who are unwilling to work as hard. From this we can come to a simple conclusion and truth: 1 whenever there is freedom, there is inequality.

From this analysis of this form of socialism and equality as a whole, it is clear that there are significant problems of equality simpliciter and we should turn to a more modest and more reasonable form of equality.

Why Equality of Opportunity: This more modest form of equality is the equality of opportunity. This is the form of equality that I think we

should all start off with. To illustrate why this is the case and also what it is, I would like to provide a few examples of it. By doing so, I think that its utility and importance would be quite self-evident and that it would be clear why this works hand in hand with a meritocracy, which is important for the developments of any society. Here I would provide three examples of equality of opportunity: work, education and speech.

Equality of Opportunity in Work: Under the equality of opportunity, companies are obliged to open their doors to people of all gender, racial and socio-economic backgrounds, providing an equal judgement of all candidates dependent on their competency. The idea of competency is of utmost importance in this form of equality.

Unlike some proposals that suggest we must accept more of the minority groups to ensure equal representation in the workplace, under this view, as long as the most competent people receive the job, then equality would be achieved. For example, if a company had a group of a hundred applicants, half being African Americans and the other half being white Caucasians, the company would not be discriminating or acting unfairly if they accepted 100 Africans or 100 Caucasians as long as those who took the job, were, at the time, most apropos and suitable.

Equality of Opportunity in Education: Equal opportunity in education follows the same stance as equality in work. Instead of enforcing any “quotas” based on race, gender or other divisions, all choices must be made on virtue and merit. The students / applicants who work the hardest and are most sharp should gain the position, whereas those who are less efficient do not deserve their positions and hence should not acquire these coveted opportunities.

Equality of Opportunity in Speech: One of the biggest problems of late has been the ever-increasing idea of cancel culture, where one group with privilege and power uses its power to crush the ideas of contrary beliefs of the minority. (Of course, a lot of people like to claim that they are cancelling people to represent the minority, but such reasoning is absurd, as any group with the power to cancel someone must at least be in the majority.) The equality of opportunity in speech is integral in

1. For example, the Great Leap Forward, purging of intellectuals, Hundred Flowers Campaign, Concentration Camps and Gulags etc.

The Problem of "Equality" | 48

upholding academic discourse and the development of society, as without the freedom to put forward new ideas, one is caught in the past and is restrained from making progress or contributions to further the development of society. Hence, equality of opportunity in speech is also of utmost importance.

Conclusions on the Equality of Opportunity: As you can see, equality of opportunity is heavily dependent on a meritocratic society. In this situation, those who are willing to put in the effort and are best at their jobs can improve and benefit, whereas those who are unable to carry out their jobs should not be rewarded.

General conclusions and closing thoughts: This article is not as long as most of my other pieces; however, I think that it is sufficient to serve its purpose. Rather than arguing for a certain conclusion, I have developed a few hypotheses which would hopefully lead you to question your prejudices and develop your worldview and beliefs.

Equality is an important goal when used rightly, but when misused or misunderstood, can lead to unimaginable consequences like the purges of the Soviet Union or the oppression of the Jews and other dreadful acts which were done under the guise of “equality simpliciter” (via destruction). So, to wrap off, I would like to leave you with a word of advice: be careful!

49 | The Problem of "Equality"

What Is the Truth? A Guide to Rhetorical Analysis

Hanson Wen, Year 10, Peel House

Is There a ‘Real World’?

Humans are curious animals who seek the truth. Our nature has pushed us to develop science, religion, literature, and other fields of study. But at times our curiosity fails to identify inaccuracies and discern what is real. Without recognising what is real, we may rely on unfounded information in our everyday decision making. Sometimes, world leaders make this mistake too.

For example, Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, frequently relied on astrology in his decision making.

Before exploring the importance of seeking the truth, we must first define it. I believe that, in reality, we can never find the so-called truth. Are we even sure this is the real world? For all we know, we could be living in the Matrix, or in an illusion broadcasted into our brains by an evil scientist. There are infinite possibilities of ‘real worlds’ that we could be in.

There is no definitive way of knowing the truth about something, as there is no definitive starting point: we do not know what is real. What we do

know is how to reach conclusions from observations, though these still may not be the full truth.

Imagine this: A Goldfish Scientist is in your room watching you bounce a ball. You wake up every morning at 6:00 and bounce a ball for 30 minutes. The Goldfish Scientist observes this phenomenon for 3 months and concludes that this is yet another natural law, like how the earth rotates around the sun, that you will wake up every day at 6:00 and bounce a ball for 30 minutes.

He also discovers that depending on where he positions himself in the goldfish bowl, the movement of your ball changes. We know this is because of light refraction in the water, but the Goldfish Scientist does not. He therefore formulates a highly complex equation of ball movement and believes this is the truth, and that all movement beyond the bowl follows this equation. Now, suppose one day you did not wake up as usual. This would break the foundations of truth for this goldfish, and as a result, the entire system of science that he built around his daily observations would have to be reconstructed.

The Goldfish Scientist represents

how we humans observe the world around us and make conclusions from them. We think that what we observe and the equations we formulate are the ‘truth’, but there are infinite possibilities. We could be in a computer simulation, where a small malfunction could break all the fundamentals of physics that we know of. We only say that our world is physical because all our gathered evidence points to it, but that does not negate the possibility of us being in a simulation. The ‘truth’ (or theory) that we believe in is merely a truth which has a better explanation and stronger supporting evidence than all of the other theories: The heliocentric theory has a better explanation of the orbits of the planets we observe than the geocentric theory; Einstein's relativity theory has a better explanation of the ether theory and why we cannot find ether, because it doesn't exist; the modern medical system has a better explanation of the body than humorism and the Chinese medical theory of yin-yang. In theory, however, any of these theories can be disproved and replaced if we discover better ones.

What is the Truth | 50

How to Find the Truth

What Could Possibly Be True?

Our method of seeking the truth is through the use of logic, evidence, and deduction. There is no proof of any sort for the statement: “logic and proof could lead us to the truth”; This statement is just how we think naturally. We think that: “if there is only 1 Bob in this world, and Bob is right here in front of me, then he could not possibly be in Paris right now drinking a cup of tea, because ‘there is only 1 Bob in the world’. Having said that, logic and proof have not failed us yet, and everything we’ve observed has followed the 3 basic principles of logic:

The 3 levels of impossibility are methods that we can use to create a first perception of a statement or object and analyse the possibility of it being true.

1. The law of identity: you are you, a = a

The next level, physical impossibility, is the violation of physical potentiality.

The described phenomena which contradict the rules of physics today. Telepathy is an example: the idea that you can transfer energy from one mind to another mind in an instant must be impossible because it violates the principle of the conservation of energy.

2. The law of non-contradiction: you cannot be a man and not a man at the same time and in the same space, a ≠ -a 3. The law of the excluded middle: two contradicting statements cannot both be true.

You can either move forward or back. You cannot move forward and backward.

Anything violating these rules cease to exist, unless this logic is incorrect, which it could be. In quantum mechanics, a particle can, in the same space, simultaneously exist and not exist, which seems to violate the law of non-contradiction (Schrödinger's cat thought experiment). Although I am not an expert in quantum mechanics, I will still try to give an answer.

Maths is based on the rules of logic, and since quantum mechanics is derived from mathematical provings, it follows that quantum mechanics is also based on logic.

51 | What is the Truth

1. Logical impossibility 2. Physical impossibility 3. Technological impossibility The first level, logical impossibility, refers to contradictions which violate the rules of logic and therefore cannot be true. Statements like “a married single person”, “a round square”, and “blue is not a colour” cannot be true.

Finally, technological impossibility describes things or events that cannot be true because they are beyond the technological abilities of humans.

For example, we can't make a spaceship that flies at near the speed of light because we don’t have the technology for that.

Now, let’s use this to assess the statement “Cows can jump to the moon”. Firstly, does it violate any of the logical rules? Quite obviously, no. Secondly, is it physically impossible for the cow to jump to the moon? Well, the muscles, tendons and energy of the cow itself would not physically allow this to happen,

so it is physically impossible. In other words, things only seem impossible because they violate one of the three possibilities.

What Is True?

Reasoning, as opposed to impossibilities, is a way to find the truth in all conditions because it strictly follows the rules of logic.

There are 2 types of reasoning: inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning.

1. Deductive reasoning An effective way to conduct deductive reasoning is syllogism.

A syllogism is composed of one major premise, one minor premise and one logical conclusion from the premises. A typical example would be: Major premise: All Human beings are mortal Minor premise: Socrates is a Human being Logical conclusion: Socrates is Mortal If the premises are true and the reasoning has no fallacies, then the conclusion will ultimately also be true.

However, we also need to be able to identify deductive fallacies: A. Affirmative conclusion from a negative premise: If John is a single man, then John must be male.

John is not single.

John is not a man.

In this example, all premises are true, but the conclusion is not true, as there is no premise

saying John not being single means John is not a man.

B. Affirming the consequent: If Chicago is the capital city of Illinois, then Chicago is a city in Illinois.

Chicago is a city in Illinois.

Chicago is the capital city of Illinois.

In this example, Chicago being a city in Illinois does not mean it is the capital city of Illinois.

Another example of a deductive fallacy is similar to the structures above, but with the terms swapped. For the John example, we could swap the terms and say: If chickens can lay eggs, then they are useful to humans.

Chicken can't lay eggs.

So they are not useful to humans.

In this example, this reasoning does not stand because chickens are useful to humans in other ways, such as providing meat for consumption.

What I just mentioned are fallacies specific to deductive reasoning, but in general there are a lot more.

Here is a reference image to help you remember all the fallacies.

2. Inductive Reasoning Inductive reasoning is sorting statements or objects based on their properties and making predictions based on those properties and groupings.

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/rhetological-fallacies/

What is the Truth | 52

There are 3 major types ways of inductive reasoning: Enumeration induction Analogy induction Hypothetical induction 1. Enumeration induction: Examples: Through observation of a portion x of the members of group a, y% of the observed group has the attribute P, so y% of group a has the attribute P. Through observation, 15/30 of the members from the competing company that came to the meeting are Christian, so the rest of the company is also 50% Christian.

The vast majority of the food at Joe’s is bad, so the rest of the food at Joe’s is also bad.

2. Analogy Induction

Hypothesis H explains P. No other Hypothesis can explain P as well as H. So H is likely to be true.

Watson is a doctor who is wounded, tanned and seems depressed.

My hypothesis is that he is a medic who just came back from the front lines of Afghanistan, which could explain why he is like this.

I cannot think of any other reason that explains Watson’s appearance and behaviour as well as this.

Therefore, Watson is likely to be a medic who has just come back from the Afghanistan front lines.

These inductions cannot reveal the absolute truth, but they can tell you what is likely to be the truth. It is important to note that they can only give a plausible conclusion, so we must be careful when encountering such reasoning.

Examples: Premise: Object A has attributes E F G, and also H Premise: Object B has attributes EFG Conclusion: So object B is likely to have attributes H Premise: Earth has land, water, air and also life Premise: Mars has land, water and air Conclusion: Mars is likely to have life 3. Hypothetical Induction Examples: Observation P is made.

53 | What is the Truth

Extrasensory (ESPs):

Perception

Extrasensory perception, or ESP, is a controversial topic.

Earlier generations often subscribe to the belief in phenomenons like this more. It is very interesting to talk about this topic using the tools we’ve just learned.

ESP is defined as “claimed reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. It is said that it includes abilities such as intuition, telepathy, psychometry, clairvoyance, and their trans-

temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.”

While ESPs are logically possible, they are physically impossible because telepathy breaks the principle of energy conservation, as it involves transfer of energy at an instant.

In order for the brain to receive information, it has to receive energy, because information must be in the form of energy.

But modern medical analysis demonstrates that there are no mechanisms for receiving energy beyond the physical processes of blood transfer and neural signals.

We therefore have good reason to question ESP because it goes against our knowledge of the natural world, not to mention the fact that ESP itself also does not have substantial supportive evidence.

To conclude, we cannot find the absolute truth itself, because there is no tangible starting point.

We also don’t know for certain if we can trust the tools we use today, such as maths and logic, to find the truth, though they have not failed us yet. And we don’t know if the scientific conclusions we have reached today are real or just illusions. We also introduced the use of logical reasoning to analyse statements and identify fallacies, an important process that can help us navigate and avoid deceptions fed to us in the modern world, such as through digital media.

After reading this article, I hope you’ve learned that the world is not black and white, that there may not be an absolute truth at all, and to always have a critical mindset.

Existential Crises: What is the Meaning of Life?

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Cognitive biases: are we making fair and just choices?

Helen Ng, Year 11, Gellhorn House Desjardins, Jeff. "Every Single Cognitive Bias In One Infographic". Visual Capitalist, 2021, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/every-single-cognitive-bias/.

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Sharot, Tali. “The optimism bias”. TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, February 2012, https://www.ted.com/talks/tali_sharot_the_optimism_bias?language=en Cherry, Kendra. “Understanding the Optimism Bias, AKA the Illusion of Invulnerability”.Very Well Mind, May 2010, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-optimism-bias-2795031 Chang, Edward C., and Kiyoshi Asakawa. "Cultural Variations On Optimistic And Pessimistic Bias For Self Versus A Sibling: Is There Evidence For Self-Enhancement In The West And For Self-Criticism In The East When The Referent Group Is Specified?".

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Are our laws keeping pace with the new digital age?

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How Has Art Adapted Amidst Covid?

Alysha Wong, Year 13, Keller House Editorial, Artsy, and Sonia Xie. “In the Midst of COVID-19, Chinese Galleries Adapt and Persevere.” Artsy, 17 Mar. 2020, www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-midst-covid-19-chinese-galleries-adapt-persevere.

Grincheva, Natalia. “Researching Online Museums: Digital Methods to Study Virtual Visitors.” Research Methods for the Digital Humanities, 2018, pp. 103–128., doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96713-4_7.

“Is the Future of Museums Online and What Might a Virtual Museum Look like?” MuseumNext, 17 Oct. 2020, www.museumnext.com/article/is-the-future-of-museums-online/.

Moss, Isaac. “Is Instagram Changing Our Fundamental Relationship to Art?” Sleek Magazine, Nov. 2018, www.sleekmag.com/article/instagram-art/.

Schwab, Katharine. “Art for Instagram's Sake.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 14 Mar. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/instagram-art-wonder-renwick-rain-room/463173/.

“V&A · The Ardabil Carpet.” Victoria and Albert Museum, www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-ardabil-carpet.

Voxdotcom, director. How "Instagram Traps" Are Changing Art Museums. YouTube, YouTube, 19 Sept. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_r-dP22Ps&ab_channel=Vox. Nowlis, Stephen M., et al. “The Effect of a Delay between Choice and Consumption on Consumption Enjoyment.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 31, no. 3, 2004, pp. 502–510. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/425085.

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Should A Wise Person Fear Death?

Warren Zhu, Year 13, Churchill House Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Modern Library, 1950.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Books, 1994.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by David Mcduff, Penguin Books Ltd, 2003.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The House of the Dead. Translated by Constance Garnett, Dover Publications Inc., 2004.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by David Mcduff, Penguin Books Ltd, 2004.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons. Edited by Ronald Meyer. Translated by Robert A. Maguire, Penguin , 2011.

Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus.” In The Epicurus Reader: selected writings and testimonia translated and edited, with notes, by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson; introduction by D.S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis : Hackett, c1994, 125.

Scanlan, James P. "Dostoevsky's Arguments for Immortality." The Russian Review 59, no. 1 (2000): 1-20. Accessed March 4, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2679619.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, 1974.

Nietzsche , Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for Everyone and No One. Translated by Graham Parkes, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: (World Classics, Unabridged). ALPHA EDITIONS, 2016.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-In-The-World : A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mit Press, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. United States, Stellar Books, 1962.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and Robin Campbell. Letters from a Stoic ... Selected and Translated with an Introduction by Robin Campbell. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974.

Plato, and Christopher Rowe. Phaedo. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet : Prince of Denmark. Sweden, Wisehouse Classics, 2017.

Thomas, Dylan, and John Goodby. The Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York, New Directions, 2017.

The Cape Town Water Crisis Stella Liu, Year 12, Keller House Baker, Aryn. “Cape Town's Water Crisis Day Zero: The Day the Taps Run Dry.” Time, Time, 15 Jan. 2018, time.com/5103259/cape-town-water-crisis/.

Davies, Matthew, director. What Happened to Cape Town's 'Day Zero'? BBC News, BBC, 2018, www.bbc.com/news/av/business-44170561.

“First City To Run Out Of Water? - The Cape Town Water Crisis | AJ+.” YouTube, YouTube, 1 May 2018, www.youtube.com/watch? v=hg6cwdc19Rw. Heggie, Jon. “Day Zero: Where next?” Science, National Geographic, 10 Feb. 2021, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/partner-content-south-africa-danger-of-running-out-of-water.

Leahy, Stephen. “The World's Water Crisis Explained on World Water Day.” Science, National Geographic, 10 Feb. 2021, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/world-water-day-water-crisis-explained.

Mahr, Krista. “How Cape Town Was Saved from Running out of Water.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 4 May 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/04/back-from-the-brink-how-cape-town-cracked-its-water-crisis.

Mlaba, Khanyi. “How Cape Town Went From Water Crisis to Overflowing Dams in Just 2 Years.” Global Citizen, 2020, www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/cape-town-water-crisis-day-zero-overflowing-dams/.

Poon, Linda. “The Future of the City Is Thirsty.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 2019, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/201908-14/the-urban-water-crisis-may-be-worse-than-it-looks.

TestTubeNetwork, director. Why Is Cape Town Running Out Of Water? | NowThis World. YouTube, YouTube, 25 Feb. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SViZEtsoHyA. Torrent Tucker, Danielle. “Cape Town's 'Day Zero' Drought a Sign of Things to Come.” Stanford News, 8 Nov. 2020, news.stanford.edu/2020/11/09/cape-towns-day-zero-drought-sign-things-come/.

Walton, Brett. “The Next Urban Water Crisis? Inadequate Data Clouds the Forecast.” Circle of Blue, Brett Walton Https://Www.circleofblue.org/Wp-Content/Uploads/2018/06/Circle-of-Blue-Water-Speaks-600x139.Png, 21 Nov. 2019, www.circleofblue.org/2019/wef/the-next-urban-water-crisis-inadequate-data-clouds-the-forecast/.

Welch, Craig. “Why Cape Town Is Running Out of Water, and the Cities That Are Next.” Science, National Geographic, 10 Feb. 2021, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/cape-town-running-out-of-water-drought-taps-shutoff-other-cities.

The Educational Divide Sophie Ho, Year 13, Wu House O'Regan, John, director. How Is the Pandemic Reshaping the Education Debate? Part 1: East Asia, South East Asia, Australasia. YouTube, UCL Institute of Education, 15 Dec. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch? v=JdVlMEZwBZM&list=PLciXpf358xeAhxGA6swp_Kuw9wd8MUzdE&index=2&ab_channel=UCLInstituteofEducation%28IOE%29.

O'Regan, John, director. How Is the Pandemic Reshaping the Education Debate? Part 2: the Americas and South Africa. UCL Institute of Education, YouTube, 18 Dec. 2020, www.youtube.com/watchv=ZOP0xMdPC9Y&ab_channel=UCLInstituteof Education%28IOE%29.

“South Africa's Broken and Unequal Education Laid Bare.” Amnesty International, 11 Feb. 2020, 17:13 UTC, www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/02/south-africa-broken-and-unequal-education-perpetuating-poverty-andinequality/#:~:text=The%20South%20African%20education%20system,published%20by%20Amnesty%20International%20today.

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“Urgent, Effective Action Required to Quell the Impact of COVID-19 on Education Worldwide.” World Bank, 22 Jan. 2012, www.worldbank.org/en/news/immersive-story/2021/01/22/urgent-effective-action-required-to-quell-the-impact-of-covid-19-oneducation-worldwide.

The Change America Needed Dora Gan, Year 11, Wu House 1. McPherson, James M. “Out of War, a New Nation,” National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/spring/newnation.html. Accessed 12 February 2021.

2. History.com editors. “Civil War.” History, https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/american-civil-war-history. Accessed 12 February 2021.

3. Ransom, Roger. “Causes, Costs and Consequences: The Economics of the American Civil War.” Essential Civil War Curriculum, https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/the-economics-of-the-civil-war.html. Accessed 12 February 2021.

4. History.com Editors. “Republican Party Founded.” This day in History. Accessed 12 February 2021.

5. History.com editors. “Civil War.” History, https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/american-civil-war-history. Accessed 12 February 2021.

6. Ransom, Roger. “Causes, Costs and Consequences: The Economics of the American Civil War.” Essential Civil War Curriculum, https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/the-economics-of-the-civil-war.html. Accessed 12 February 2021.

7. Freeman, Joanne. “Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints.” Library of Congress. Accessed 12 February 2021.

8. Beardsley, Frank, and Kelly Jean Kelly. “First Shots of the Civil War Fired at Fort Sumter.” Learning English, https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/first-shot-civil-war-fortsumter/2441338.html#:~:text=Just%20before%20sunrise%20on%20April,to%20answer%20the%20Confederate%20attack.

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9. History.com Editors. “Abraham Lincoln's assassination.” History.com, https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/abrahamlincoln-assassination. Accessed 12 February 2021.

10. Bailey, Thomas and Kennedy, David: The American Pageant: A History of the Republic (6th Edition). D.C. Heath and Company, Lexington, Massachusetts, 1979.

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12. Bailey, Thomas and Kennedy, David: The American Pageant: A History of the Republic (6th Edition). D.C. Heath and Company, Lexington, Massachusetts, 1979.

13. Varon, Elizabeth R. “ANDREW JOHNSON: DOMESTIC AFFAIRS.” Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/president/johnson/domestic-affairs. Accessed 12 February 2021.

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16. “Examples of Jim Crow Laws - Oct. 1960 - Civil Rights.” Ferris State University, https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/links/misclink/examples.htm. Accessed 12 February 2021.

17. Brooker, Russell. “Voting Rights For Blacks And Poor Whites In The Jim Crow South.” America's Black Holocaust Museum, https://www.abhmuseum.org/voting-rights-for-blacks-and-poor-whites-in-the-jim-crow-south/. Accessed 12 February 2021.

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20. Ransom, Roger. “Causes, Costs and Consequences: The Economics of the American Civil War.” Essential Civil War Curriculum, https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/the-economics-of-the-civil-war.html. Accessed 12 February 2021.

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57 | Works Cited

The Problem of “Equality” Joshua Yen, Year 13, Shaftesbury House Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Modern Library, 1950.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Books, 1994.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons. Edited by Ronald Meyer. Translated by Robert A. Maguire, Penguin , 2011.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. The Merlin Press, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Aphorisms on Love and Hate. Translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Penguin Books, 1878.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: (World Classics, Unabridged). ALPHA EDITIONS, 2016.

What Is The Truth? A Guide to Rhetorical Analysis Hansen Wen, Year 10, Peel House 1. Schick, Theodore, and Lewis Vaughn. How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age. McGraw-Hill Education, 2020.

2. McCandless, David. “Rhetological Fallacies.” Information Is Beautiful, 2012, informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/rhetologicalfallacies/.

Further Reading 1. Bem, Darly. “APA PsycNet.” American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association, doi.apa.org/doiLanding? doi=10.1037%2Fa0021524.

2. R, Dr., et al. “Why the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Should Retract Article DOI: 10.1037/a0021524 ‘Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect’ by Daryl J. Bem.” Index, 1 Jan. 2020, replicationindex.com/2018/01/05/bem-retraction/.

3. Schick, Theodore, et al. How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age. Langara College, 2020.

1. This paper outlines some of the experiments on ESP, about predicting the futures and others. It's very interesting.

2. This source contains rigorous analysis on the aforementioned paper 3. This was the book that inspired me to think about the world in a skeptical way. I recommend it to everyone The Crisis of 2020 Jolie Chan, Year 12, Wu House Calma, Justine. “What You Need to Know about the Australia Bushfires.” The Verge, 13 Feb. 2020, www.theverge.com/2020/1/3/21048891/australia-wildfires-koalas-climate-change-bushfires-deaths-animals-damage.

Ramsay, Susan. “Coronavirus: A Timeline of the Outbreak Related to the Deadly Sars - March 2020.” Youngpost, 5 Oct. 2020, www.scmp.com/yp/discover/news/global/article/3104241/coronavirus-timeline-outbreak-related-deadly-sars-march.

Kirby, Jenny. “‘Black Lives Matter’ Has Become a Global Rallying Cry against Racism and Police Brutality.” Vox, 12 June 2020, www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21285244/black-lives-matter-global-protests-george-floyd-uk-belgium.

“Beirut Explosion: What We Know so Far.” BBC, 11 Aug. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53668493.

Stelloh, Tim. “California Exceeds 4 Million Acres Burned by Wildfires in 2020.” Nbcnews, 5 Oct. 2020, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-exceeds-4-million-acres-burned-wildfires-2020-n1242078.

Works Cited | 59

Authorship Lara McWilliam Helen Ng Hanson Wen Warren Zhu Lola Waczkow Jolie Chan Alysha Wong Stella Liu Dora Gan Sophie Ho Warren Zhu Arts and illustration Kayan Tam Hebe Cheuk Rachel Li Se Lyn Lim Reika Oh Joy Chen Cherry Liu

Academic Supervisor Miss A. King HH Team Sally Wang Sophie Putman Amber Liu Jolie Chan Stella Liu Cindy Zhang Josh Tang Rhea Kundamal Jarra Sisowath Jett Li Josh Yen

Formatting Jolie Chan Megan Siu Editing Jolie Chan Jessica Keady Catrina Kean Annie Kim Ella Hirmasto Sophie Ho Valerie Ho Jett Li Amber Liu Jarra Sisowath Joshua Tang Lola Waczkow Sally Wang Janice Wong Joshua Yen Audrey Yuen Cindy Zhang

Humanities Harrovian 59 | Credits