We all know the difficulties that Harvard has been going through, and I thought that it would be fun to showcase an actual Harvard perspective, so I’m sharing this free article from the New York Times to all of you written by Steven Pinker, from my own subscription. 

It is well worth reading, and I hope you will enjoy it if you choose to read it! 

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/opinion/harvard-university-trump-administration.html?rsrc=ss&unlocked_article_code=1.KE8.FQW2.LxEovGin6Ef6&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Pinker is a disarming man.

If you read his articles, they are quirky yet intellectually engaging. The man stuffs so many different facts into a single paragraph that it often makes me wonder how or whether he just has access to all of the ideas he does, articulating within a single hand wave expressions and fires of the most deeply interconnected set of neurons I may have ever witnessed on the planet. 

Well, at least that’s what I feel having read Pinker for quite a number of years now – And not knowing that he was the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University Well, that’s just a lack of attention to detail on my part, but it’s an interesting reality Sometimes people may have done or know far more than you might even think, perceive, or understand And sometimes these surprises can be rather fascinating. 

Read the essay and it will give you a picture of what I understand about elite universities in the US at this point – Not exactly woke madrasas or the very headquarters of the CCP as President Trump seems to suggest, but instead as something rather different, definitely vibrant albeit with its flaws, where strident opinions are often shared, becoming the very voice of a generation through nothing more than the saliency bias and social media even amid an admitted climate where certain ideas are put to rest not because they are bad ones, but instead because of certain unspoken rules and norms within the anomalous “them” and in Harvard in particular as an institution.

I should say that I studied in the U.S. as well, and at what some might call an elite school – there are certain archaic rankings and celebrations of Mental Gymnastic Olympics that assert that we are institutions of the same tier.

As we see from the IPEDS Peer Institution Ranking (shown as a little association network originally taken from the Chronicle of Higher Education – “Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?” – https://www.chronicle.com/article/who-does-your-college-think-its-peers-are#id=166027), some of these celebrations can be extremely convincing in asserting that we are the same, we are equal, we are amazing!!

But we are not.

They were founded in 1636 by the Massachusetts General Court to train Puritan clergy on land chosen because it was closest to God, aka because the minister Thomas Shepard lived nearby (lol), but we cannot say anything – We came in 1892 on the literal swamp that is Hyde Park today. 

They have an endowment of $53.2 billion, the largest of any university in the world. We are paupers at $10.1 billion. 

They have 162 Nobel Prize winners who freely flock onto campus like pigeons drawn to power, prestige, and endowment returns. We have 101—many of whom are in economics, a field Harvard still half-considers social alchemy even as we drag bruised bodies away on the wreck of neoliberalism.

They have 8 Presidents of the United States, from John Adams to John F. Kennedy—an entire Mount Rushmore of legacy admits, Lee Hsien Loongs, Tharman Shanmugaratnams, and Lawrence Wongs – and then there is Obama who, depending on what you believe, either outweighs all of them cumulatively or basically plunges us into negative territory – oh, and what made you think he was Chicago when he was born there by accident, worked there by choice, and learned from Harvard Law School?

Historically, financially, academically, and politically, we are not the same. Beyond question and on every measure, it is Harvard that stands as the sociological definition of excellence, most easily understood and articulated in our modern society and across the generations.

Now, some may say, rightfully or wrongfully, that the shield of truth and veritas has broken into a million pieces, and become melded together into a modern-day Frankenstein- pastiche parody of its former self. I am sure that that would be entertaining and easy bait for all of us peons who were not smart or worldly enough to either apply or get in, but I would not want to be like the fox that reached for the grapes, could not get them, and concluded that they were sour. 

Rather I take a different tack – It is valid, fair, and correct to take the elite to account to make them reassess their standards once upon a sociological turn – And sometimes, pain and a severing break from the past is what is necessary to create that change. Will that change kill the goose that laid the golden eggs? Perhaps. 

…But does it matter if that goose was actually involved in an advanced counterfeiting scandal? 

Well, I suppose you never know with these Harvard-educated geese. 🪿

Jokes aside, evaluating things requires nuance. To or paraphrase recently deposed PKR Deputy President Rafizi Ramli, things are not totally white or black. Sometimes, when you see things that are black, you might want to blacken them. Black black black? We whiten everything and kerat, kerat, kerat – but occasionally, there is no need for that. 

…But occasionally, might that need exist? 

To determine when it is appropriate and when it is not. In the fullest of all consideration, and with an eye to the future, we must look upon the matter with wide and broad eyes before we decide. 

Yet here it seems that the Rubicon has already been crossed, Charon has already rowed across the lake, and the Torii gate has been well and bypassed – and now, the pain is certain and the wound is real. 

But what kind of recovery will it be? 

Will it be the sort that grows a muscle? Or kills the patient and the goose and makes the billions of eggs that were indistinguishable between gilt and gold into a single omelet in the flavor of scorched earth? 

We shall see!

Victor Tan,
May 27th, 2025.

PS: Yes, that is a phoenix and a goose. Thank AI for the broken logos. You are welcome. 😊

Some of you who follow me on YouTube know that I’ve been conducting some coverage of the PKR Deputy President elections featuring former deputy President Rafizi Ramli, and incoming deputy President Nurul Izzah.

Sometimes it’s good to take a moment to think about the events that have happened over the course of the past, to understand things a little deeper, so I decided to do an analysis of the election results, which I’m sure many Malaysians were following.

It is my first time doing this, and I will share my thought process along the way.

When I look at the vote totals and also who got how many votes, I realize that we have been told earlier that there were about 32,030 people who were eligible to vote.

Yet, at the same time, when we added together the votes cast for Rafizi and also Nurul Izzah, the total was only 13,669. This was a 42.7% turnout.

Now, this was significantly better compared to previous PKR elections during which the turnouts ranged from about 10–15%.

But thinking about that made me realize something important:

Firstly, Nurul Izzah only has about 30% of the vote and she does not have a strong mandate.

Second of all, this system made it so that what we see seems to be a highly improbable result.

Now, some of you may know that PKR recently moved over to a delegate system.

The way that it works is that there are 220 divisions of PKR and they all select a certain number of delegates to end up making up the total pool of people who are eligible to vote.

In other words, this is not a random sample – This is not the general population.

Indeed, if it were, and we were dealing with just your average everyday social media poll, it is almost a foregone conclusion that Rafizi would have won. Don’t believe me? Look at any poll.

I even did one here a while ago with 1200 votes, which you can see here – http://youtube.com/post/Ugkxq5t-Nqjdp…

It’s not a huge poll, but you can also look at larger ones from people like Halim Romli or otherwise – they show the same result.

Yet, Rafizi did not win.

Of course, social media doesn’t reflect reality. Look at all you silly people reading this – you’re not a part of reality and figments of the imagination and NO poll conducted on social media could POSSIBLY reflect reality, kan kan?

Jokes aside, pause your mental gymnastics: it gets a little stranger than that.

Recall that PKR elections take place in two stages, beginning with divisional, and the winners of divisional elections get to select the voters for the deputy president elections. Each division leader (there are multiple in a division) then selects the people who make up the eligible delegate pool; repeated enough times, we end up with the total pool of 32,030 eligible voters.

So, the people who were selected to vote in this case were likely selected because perhaps they had views that aligned with the delegation leader/division leader.

Perhaps that’s not the case, but it could be reasonably construed that if such people were actually chosen, then on account of the way that the delegate system was designed, that at the very least they would cast votes.

Yet somehow or another, we see that the converse is quite true.

From the total split of online and in-person votes, we can see that there were 9,029 physical votes.

Given that there were only 13,669 votes in total and only online and in person votes were possible, this logically means that the total number of online votes cast was 13,669 – 9,029 = 4,640.

At the same time, we also know that the very fact of physical voting and showing up to the premises should mean that everyone who showed up in person cast a physical vote (unless they showed up for no reason and none of them voted? LOL), which means that if we apply the principle of complementarity, the entire remainder of votes eligible to be cast were from the total pool of online-eligible delegates – 32,030 – 9,029 = 23001 such votes were possible.

However, it looks like only a very small proportion of these voters actually made the choice to vote – When we calculate the total number of online votes divided by the total number of online-eligible votes, the percentage that we get is (4640/23001)*100% = 20.2%.

Now I find that extremely interesting.

All these people who were selected specifically so that they could take part in the election and could vote basically did not vote—even though they could have very easily signed in to the portal, put in their login details, and then cast their votes from the comfort of their homes.

…Weren’t they selected by leaders to do exactly that to determine the entire future of the party???

Now what does this say?

There could be a few things.

The first is that, well, perhaps all these people are just not online savvy and were unable to carry out the vote, or just missed the voting deadline.

Now this is possible, but it seems to point to a major gap.

Did the party not instruct its delegates on how to vote?

Did they forget to vote and forget the date?

That doesn’t reflect particularly well on the party, because it shows incompetence and poor organizational architecture.

But that’s just a couple of boring possibilities of several.

Here’s the next possibility.

What if people basically just decided not to vote because they didn’t care, really?

In that case, then it seems that the party was not really responsible in enforcing discipline or getting people to cast their votes. But then that too is just one interpretation of many possible interpretations.

Now here’s the last and unfortunate set of possibilities.

What if people decided not to vote because they felt that the result was already preordained, or that even if they voted, they would not make a difference, or they abstained because they felt that there was something seriously wrong with this process? Is it also entirely out of the realm of speculation to imagine that perhaps there could be a scenario whereby members have their votes not be anonymous, and their identities could be revealed to the party leadership, thereby causing them to choose not to vote in the first place for fear of voting against the party line and losing all their chances of being promoted in the party hierarchy…?

Well, that’s an unpleasant thought.

Here are my main questions:

Q1. If these people were delegated, meaning specifically chosen to vote in the election and equipped with that privilege, then why is it that the overall voter turnout was so low?

Did they not care about the vote? Were they unable to vote? Did they choose not to vote for certain reasons of which we are not aware?

How were these ‘delegates’ chosen?

Q2. Why was the online voter turnout so low?

What does it say about a party’s future-readiness when 80% of its online-eligible delegates don’t even log in?

Q3. Considering that the delegated voter turnout was so low, is the election result truly a reflection of what the party actually wants?

Or is it really just a manufactured consensus brought about whereby the deputy president of the party received her presidency when she, at the end of the day, was voted in by barely 30% of the total eligible delegate base?

Q4: If everything has gone above the board and people have voted in larger proportions, then would the election result have been different?

Q5: Did party leaders have access to information about who cast what vote, and would that have given voters an incentive to toe the party line… Or else?

The Malaysian people may never really know the answer to this set of questions, but I think that they are relevant to put out there in the first place. It is interesting that this entire process is so opaque, yet somehow or another, we are sold a vision of profound democracy, reform, and a change to the old way of doing things in lieu of a new guard.

Should PKR really retain the election result given these questions that are at hand here, with no concept of a quorum, missing voters, and multiple open questions about what happened and why nobody is saying anything about it?

Oh yes, and I’m aware that this post is currently being shared to a few places – I am honored! Please feel free to share further if you find the questions it raises insightful.

Also, if you’d like, consider watching the context for my analysis here: