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Victor Tan

Victor Tan is incredibly excited about AI technology and its potential to transform the world. He is the creator of Transform Your Creative Writing With ChatGPT on Udemy and the author of The Little Robot That Could Paint, an AI-generated children’s book that introduces children to artificial intelligence that will release on March 14th, 2023. He is deeply passionate about education, and In his coaching and tutoring business Ascendant Academy, he teaches students not only how to sell themselves to top institutions, how to write effectively and conceptualize ideas with AI, believing deeply that AI is not here to replace us, but instead to help us to level up as a species as we conceptualize and create the most powerful tools that the world has known since the dawn of humanity. When he isn’t spending time writing, creating online courses, and creating the occasional video about ergonomic chairs and curious uses of ChatGPT on his YouTube channel, he’s probably  spending time coaching students to enter top universities in the US and UK, creating new Apple Homekit smart home automations, and playing an already unreasonably large yet still growing collection of musical instruments.

The author has 109 posts

No, ChatGPT is NOT making you stupid.

Sepupus, the internet has been abuzz of late because of a new MIT study called “Your Brain on ChatGPT”.

All around on Reddit and the internet, people are starting to form wild conclusions, read patterns in the stars, decide unilaterally or with the agreement of some people out there and everywhere, that somehow now people are being made stupid and MIT researchers have said that it is so and therefore it must be true.

I find it interesting and fascinating.

Now, in what way is this related to economics if at all?

Well, artificial intelligence is a very important part of our economy and it will continue to be important for the foreseeable future, as it shapes and reshapes the economy and how we treat human capital in ways that are intuitive and sometimes unintuitive, in ways more subtle and interesting than the standard narrative of robots replacing human beings may suggest.

It’s interesting to think about it and how it’s going to affect the way that we can live and work in this world which is ever-changing and continually evolving. With that in mind, here’s my perspective.

I do not generally think that ChatGPT is making us stupid.

I read the MIT study earlier, and I broadly understand the way that it is constructed.

You can have a look at it here.

Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

Basically, what they did was that they asked participants to write SAT-style essays across three sessions chosen from a range of choices in three different groups:

1. One purely using their brains

2. One using Google

3. One using ChatGPT

Then, they had some participants come back for a fourth session where they swapped people from one group to another — 18 people did this in total.

Now this is what ChatGPT says, in summarizing what happened:

(AI generated – also, as a full disclosure, I do use AI-generated content on this website once in a while; consider this a disclosure that you may see AI generated content here once in a while, although I affirm that I will curate it to ensure that it is high quality and it is accurate and matches experience. I hope you won’t mind as what matters more I think is the specific choice of what to show to you rather than the question of whether the content is generated by AI or if it is not!)

What the Study Did

The researchers wanted to understand how using ChatGPT-like tools (called LLMs, or large language models) affects your brain and your essay writing.

They divided participants into three groups:

  1. LLM group — people who used ChatGPT to help write their essays.
  2. Search Engine group — people who could use Google to help them.
  3. Brain-only group — people who weren’t allowed to use any tools; they just used their brains.

Each person wrote three essays under their assigned condition.

In Session 4, they mixed things up:

  • People who had used ChatGPT before were asked to now write essays without it (LLM-to-Brain).
  • People who had never used ChatGPT were now allowed to (Brain-to-LLM).

Only 18 participants completed this fourth session.

What They Measured

They used several ways to assess the participants’ thinking and writing:

  • EEG (electroencephalography): This measures electrical activity in the brain. They looked at brainwaves to see how engaged or active the brain was.
  • Essay analysis: They checked the essays using Natural Language Processing (NLP), human teachers, and anAI-based scoring system.
  • They also looked at how similar or different the essays were (in terms of topics, words used, named entities, etc.).
  • Self-reports: They asked participants how much they “owned” or felt connected to their writing.

What They Found

🧠 Brain Activity:

  • Brain-only group had the strongest and most widely connected brain activity. Their brains were working hard and across many areas.
  • Search Engine group had moderate brain engagement.
  • LLM users had the least brain activity and the weakest connectivity — indicating low mental effort.
  • When LLM users switched to Brain-only, their brain activity stayed low. It was as if their minds were still in “autopilot” mode — under-engaged.
  • When Brain-only users switched to LLM, they had high activity in memory and visual/spatial reasoning areas — kind of like how Google users behaved.

📄 Essay Quality and Similarity:

  • Essays from each group became more similar within their group — especially in wording and topics. LLM users’ essays were more homogeneous.
  • LLM users had the lowest sense of ownership of their essays and often couldn’t remember or quote what they had written.
  • Brain-only users had the highest sense of ownership and memory of their writing.

⏳ Long-Term Effects:

  • Over 4 months, the people who used LLMs consistently:
  • Had weaker brain engagement
  • Wrote more similar, less original essays
  • Felt less connected to their work
  • This suggests that relying too much on ChatGPT may make people less mentally engaged and less able to learn deeply.

Bottom Line (I disagree with this)

  • LLMs like ChatGPT make writing easier, but they might also reduce mental effort and learning.
  • This has serious long-term implications for education, especially if students use LLMs without actively thinking.
  • The study doesn’t outright say ChatGPT makes you stupid, but it shows that heavy dependence on AI tools may hinder cognitive growth and originality over time.

Alright, no more AI.

I disagree with the interpretation, and I’ll tell you why.

It seems simple and intuitive to conclude that ChatGPT is making people stupid because of the lowered brain activation in the people who use LLMs over the period of several months.

However, in my mind, there are several problems with that, and it is good that the authors of the study acknowledged limitations and also the need for people to conduct more extensive studies, even as they note that there was no choice of LLMs, the participants were all recruited from nearby universities and were not a diverse sample, and the task in itself was a narrow one.

Firstly, as the researchers admitted, this task was specifically related to essay generation with a limited set of topics.

Secondly, the observed drop in brain connectivity cannot be meaningfully and purely attributed to a decline in cognitive performance but can also be attributed to a reduced engagement in the tasks.

For instance, people who used ChatGPT may not have been so absorbed with their first, second, and third essays and therefore when they came to the final task, they may have just come in with no strong feelings whatsoever.

This can be interpreted as a decline in cognitive performance, but should it be interpreted as such?

The researchers do not tell us, and it is probably something that they did not really look into in the context of this study.

Let’s also now consider another broader point about intelligence at large, now in a Sepupunomics context.

While working memory and brain connectivity might be taken as indicators of intelligence, it is unclear that they are the sole indicators of intelligence — That lack of connectivity or engagement indicates a lack of intelligence.

In fact, what we consider ‘intelligent’ now has changed drastically relative to what we used to understand as intelligent, and given the fluid nature of intelligence throughout the course of history, we have no reason to suppose that the future should be static or unchanging — or that connectivity or engagement in this context indicates the presence or absence of intelligence in a person.

Intelligence in every era has always been defined relative to outcomes that we consider to be valuable or worthwhile; as Naval Ravikant has observed, and I paraphrase, the intelligent man or woman is the one who gets what they want out of life.

In every generation, social and economic conditions have changed, and human beings and our brains have adapted and evolved in relation to those social, economic, and material conditions.

Accordingly, the jobs and the tasks that we now consider valuable have also vastly changed compared to the past – what is valuable human capital, or…

Human capital: the value employees bring to a company that translates to productivity or profitability, and more loosely, the value that human beings bring into an organization (whether a company, a nation-state, or the world) that translates into benefit to the world.

Automated autogates have replaced the toll booth operators that used to sit there lazily one after another, and the ATM has made it so we speak to bank tellers only when there are special circumstances that we cannot deal with; the job that we call a farmer now varies across countries and civilizations and can still in fact mean the small holder carrying a hole and wearing galoshes, or it can mean the grand scale tractor fleet operator running cloud seeding of operations with artificial intelligence.

For many reasons that include these changes in technology, the jobs of our era have changed, the demands of employers have changed in relation to what they need because of how different skills are now required in this era, and what we call or consider valuable human capital has changed – This is not theoretical. It is already happening and it has happened for years, and will continue to happen in the years to come.

Coincidentally, I was speaking with some students earlier and telling them about how nowadays it has become normal and uncontroversial that people no longer remember phone numbers anymore… But that’s not a bad thing, and neither does it indicate that people have become stupid because now they cannot remember phone numbers.

Rather, it hearkens to the fact that now, what is called cognitive offloading is a possibility – because technology now permits it, we can use phones as external cognitive storage for us, thereby freeing us from dedicating those cognitive resources towards memory. In our modern social context, it would be the person who cannot operate a phone who would likely be considered “stupid”, not the person who cannot remember a phone number but can retrieve it from their device.

The same thing has happened with directions — These no longer preoccupy so many of us because Google Maps has now replaced the need for us to consult physical maps and then discover how to go to certain places, even though that isn’t universally doable and won’t always work with all locations.

My Assessment:

Given the limited nature of the task, the possible alternate interpretations of the data, and the fact that intelligence can certainly be defined in other ways, I cannot conclude that there is a causal impact between usage of ChatGPT and a drop of intelligence or increase in stupidity.

In lieu of that, and in critiquing the study, I would say that ChatGPT allows us to participate in the world in new and different ways, which some might argue is reflective of heightened intelligence and that was not accounted for by the study.

Note for example that the study task is something that very much does not represent best use of ChatGPT — merely using ChatGPT in order to generate essays and then copying and pasting the contents in order to create a Frankenstein creation that the creator, so to speak, had no knowledge of and only was able to appreciate on a surface level.

We are perhaps aware that we should not ask camels to climb trees, fish to fly in the skies, or birds to swim across the English Channel.

That would be absurd and it would be entirely illogical.

It is fun to visualize, though!

In the same way, I think it is silly to suppose that we should evaluate people’s brain waves on ChatGPT and then come up with easy conclusions about whether they have become smarter or dumber when in the very first place, using ChatGPT in that particular situation was analogous to all of the somewhat colourful examples I had provided earlier.

With ChatGPT, people have the ability to explore a very wide range of topics very quickly.

They have the ability to confirm their assumptions, assess their own thinking, ask questions that people would never ask under normal circumstances, and then figure out whether they were correct or if they were wrong and obtain directions for future research.

This cycle of confirmation and disconfirmation, research, understanding, analysis, and synthesis is extremely quick — but none of those things or the ways that they may relate to ‘intelligence’ of the new era is really tested under the condition of being asked to choose a single essay and write it, and none of this is accounted for under the conditions that the researchers placed the participants.

As acknowledged by the researchers, the results that we saw were highly context-dependent — If intelligence is, as Mr. Ravikant said, getting what you want out of life, it seems almost a little silly to imagine that a study involving writing an essay would generalize to the entirety of life and the vast array of situations outside of ChatGPT that a person could ostensibly use it for.

We as laypeople may come up with a hundred misconceptions of what the results may show or what they may show or may not show, and it is entirely a person’s right to talk about what happened to their mother/father/sister/brother/irresponsible child/precautious baby using ChatGPT or anything else they like…

But the capital-T Truth remains out there and definitely should be a subject of investigation for the future.

Conclusion:

We cannot unambiguously conclude that.ChatGPT inherently makes you stupid or make you smart — Certainly not from the study. The authors affirm this as well, and the truth, as it turns out, remains a matter of opinion.

Here is mine.

I would not guess that that capital T truth is that with respect to how our society defines or will redefine intelligence at a later state, in consideration of the ocean change that AI is bringing to our world, that people who are using ChatGPT are becoming more stupid; after all, (and this is AI) Malaysia’s MyDIGITAL blueprint and Singapore’s AI governance frameworks both acknowledge that productivity in the 21st century isn’t just about raw mental horsepower — it’s about tool fluency, adaptability, and strategic attention.

Like any other tool, ChatGPT can make you stupid or it can make you smart, depending on how you choose to use it — Calculators can certainly make you dumb if you repeatedly bash them against your head and end up rewiring your brain the wrong way. I suppose, although that’s not really something that people use calculators for, even when we relied upon them. Perhaps we made up for what we lost in arithmetic skills with a greater and vaster exposure to problems that we would never have encountered.

This doesn’t exclude higher levels of talent from emerging within the system as outliers that stand beyond the calculator, the pen, the paper, and certainly ChatGPT – And it also doesn’t exclude the possibility that because of AI and the way that all of us are using it and living through it in this era, that even the paradigm of what we consider worthwhile to teach and to learn both in economics and in life will change along the way.

On my part, I am pretty confident that I have become smarter than I otherwise would have been now as a result of ChatGPT. Relative to what I would have been in an alternate universe where it had not come into existence.

Of course, there is no way to construct a counter-factual or to disconfirm that. But I suppose in the long run and on the balance of things, time will tell — If using this technology continues to help me to get what I want out of life and everything good along the way in ways that continue to affirm my sense that this technology is game-changing, cognitively altering, and a complete break in the way that we used to do things., then I suppose that I will not have been entirely wrong in my assessment.

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next one!

V.

Harvard Derangement Syndrome

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. 😊

Royal Society Interview

Very honored to have the chance to interview the very first Malaysian scientist to join Britain’s Royal Society soon.

Looking forward to meeting you soon, Ms. Ravigadevi!

What questions should I ask and what are you curious about?

Let me know down in the comments!

PKR Deputy Presidency Election Results Analysis

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:

SHOCKING NEWS FROM HARVARD

Sepupus, it’s not every day that I am genuinely shocked by a piece of news. 

It’s also not every day that I feel compelled to use an O.O react on Instagram. 

Today’s news gave me both opportunities in a double-whammy perfect storm. 

The Trump administration will be revoking Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. 

You might think that this is a simple matter that affects just one generation of students, as Singapore’s Calvin Cheng hinted, but no, that’s not the case. It affects multiple generations of students, and not just the ones who are going over to Harvard, but also the ones who are currently there.

  1. Students who are currently enrolled at Harvard on student visas are being forced to transfer to other institutions or face visa termination. Even if they’re one semester from graduation, their legal status is now in jeopardy.
  2. Students who were recently accepted and expected to enroll in Fall 2025 will not be issued student visas through Harvard. Even if they have flights booked or housing arranged, they cannot enter the U.S.
  3. Students who are set to graduate this May might seem safe—but only conditionally. Those planning to stay in the U.S. under OPT (Optional Practical Training) could be blocked if their application depends on Harvard’s now-revoked SEVP certification.
  4. The SEVP termination means Harvard can’t issue I-20 or DS-2019 forms, which are essential for F-1 and J-1 visa processes. So even paperwork in progress may be frozen or voided.
  5. The revocation applies beginning in the 2025–2026 academic year, but its effects start immediately, especially for visa maintenance, transfers, and immigration compliance.
  6. The rationale given involves accusations of antisemitism and Chinese Communist Party coordination, but regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the reasons, the collateral damage is enormous.
  7. Harvard has pledged legal action and called the move “unlawful,” but unless it’s reversed fast, thousands of international students—past, present, and future—are caught in a geopolitical trap.
    Depending on how you view the matter of academic freedom, this is…

Well, I know you all better than you think. 

Most of you would probably immediately declare that this is unconscionable, an attack against freedom, a fight against the good of the world and the darkest evil – unstoppable sword, immovable shield, justice and destruction – the very recounting of the Bhagavad Gita itself by Robert J Oppenheimer (Harvard University 4.0 Summa Cum Laude I believe) himself when he said:

At the time that Oppenheimer had recounted these ominous words, nobody had died and it all seemed like a test that would merely remain a test.

Nothing really would happen, would it?

The United States wouldn’t dare use the atom bomb, would it?

Yet, on August 6, Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima, 80,000 people died.

On August 9, Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki, 40,000 people died.

Including long-term effects from radiation and injuries, the total death toll was estimated to be over 200,000.

What happened with Harvard may very well be one of those proclamations, except in slightly less poetic language, but with no less damage, including to many personal friends and acquaintances from Malaysia and beyond. 

Now, I know what some of you might say: FAFO. 

F*** Around and Find Out.

But I think it also illustrates a very interesting principle. 

Freedoms can conflict – Or, as Joseph Stiglitz has noted, Isaiah Berlin had originated, and Anwar Ibrahim had misattributed at the Khazanah Megatrends Forum in 2024 (yes, I paid attention to your speech. I know exactly what you misquoted and when you misquoted it. It’s good that people pay attention sometimes isn’t it, Dato’ Seri?)

“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

You may agree or disagree with what is happening here, but really what is the most likely predictor of whether you would agree or not is not necessarily the reasoning that would be brought to bear in this decision, but instead the socio-cultural, religious, or ideological alignment with which you connect. 

There is such a thing, of course, as freedom to speak.

But at the same time, there is such a thing as a freedom to not be harmed and to enjoy a peaceful and safe environment. 

Now, to whom should we grant infinite blanket freedom to pursue their right?

For whom should society fight?

Should there be an arbiter to determine it?

Or should the two groups participate in a complete contestation, where in the inevitability of time, the clearest principle shall emerge as it has for the hundreds of generations that have come past. 

The strong shall live, and the weak shall die.

I leave it to you to determine what strength should consist of.

“But wait!!! These things should not contradict!!!” say our woker class. 

How fitting. It is after all only in the wokest yet ablest minds that sufficient room for mental gymnastics exists to transform these things into an amalgam of perfect compatibility. 

Perhaps literature will result! 

Something like Wael Hallaq’s Impossible State.

Something like a full on thesis on statehood, self determination, and society. 

Well, let a million theologically irrelevant flowers bloom. 

It is in those woke minds that the most narratives about one-sided injustice will be born, as will a hundred and maybe even a thousand statuses about how, allegedly, it didn’t start on October the 7th, even though, in a very real and practical sense, these people will deny aspects of the narrative that were not convenient to them in order to join the solidarity party and prune the stories that they considered unworthy or unfitting while looking in the mirror and telling themselves they were on the side of justice. 

How adorable. 

Well, I’m sure that if you own a superior mind to mine, you won’t be affected as you can see both sides and know well enough not to engage in a pointless(?) discussion. 

Let’s be clear that the situation in Gaza is not conscionable, and it’s not something that people should accept, but what we see here is insane. 

It is expansive, it is sweeping – it is on a whole new level. 

To all of you who are affected by this and what the Trump Administration calls the “Big Beautiful Bill”, I am in no doubt that this will be a transitional or generational break for you. If the status quo holds, it is certain that things will change. 

As I observed, many of you you are much smarter than me, both in the Naval Ravikant get-what-you-want-out-of-reality way and academically I am sure, and I am sure that you can adapt, but my condolences. 
It is genuinely sad, it is genuinely unfortunate, and if this plays out in the way that the status quo suggests, it will be deeply deleterious to the lives of people I personally know, including many of the people I’ve talked to on this channel. 

I mean this genuinely when I say that I am sure that you will adapt to something better, even if on the surface of things it appears that the sky and the world have just collapsed, and I hope all of you members of the audience will keep them in your prayers. 

V. 

Inevitable Hash Brown

In the journey of life, change is inevitable and I say that unironically.

Why “unironically”?

Because people have repeated “change is inevitable” to high heaven and it often comes off like a word hash brown, fresh off the shelf of a cooling rack; toasty, delicious, yet ultimately unhealthy, factually fast food language.

Yet so as the hash brown is delicious, so is the language of ‘change is inevitable’, only to be appreciated if it is savored properly.

If it seems a little strange to you that I’m writing about hash browns and change, know that it is for me too, but it is one of those changes I see from 2025 – the sort that involves taking on random streams of thought and fashioning them into the rivulets that add into a current that move forward, summing into a flow.

I do wonder a little bit about whether there’s a consistent pattern though.

I find that I’ve become a bit more thoughtful about things like these – that I have a higher discernment for what constitutes quality thoughts, while at the same time holding the small blessing of being able to evaluate things in light of a larger goal of social change and transformation through the development of content, ideas, and otherwise.

It sometimes feels like I am in the middle of a grand dialectic with the world, one where I stand in the marginal territories of an evanescent frontier, fighting against a world that I do not want to come to pass, aiming to reshape it to my will.

I think about so many things.

Biology, willpower, society. Mind, hand, money. Power, politics, philosophy.

Birth, life, age, death; competition, progress, history; nation, spirituality, world; destiny, history, legacy.

It seems to me that these words now come out easily from me, not from the outer rim of the deeper examined mind, but instead from the surface – not from a deepened reading, but instead from the unironic expression of my outwardly expressed thoughts.

On observing myself and the pattern of these thoughts, it seems a little strange to me.

Is it really normal that such things would come out just on a casual reading of things?

Sometimes, it seems silly that all these thoughts should reverberate inside the mind of a single person, and sillier to contemplate and realize that it is a mind that may not be richer than that of any single other person I’ve seen in my life even if they were less articulate, less able to express what proceeds from the edge of the tongue, yet one that may not be less rich than that of the someone with the higher-resolution pen there to inscribe in quantum spectrality truth in construction a reality filtered through prisms grander than I dare imagine.

We live in a grand world, a pool filled with many incredible people.

I suppose it is not too much to ask to make a small mark in that world, yes?

Influencer

In Mensa events, one annoying character (generally ok person but annoying with an emphasis on the G) sometimes comes up to me and starts talking about my ‘influencer’ career and how I’m ‘influencing’ people in a presumptuous fashion, acting as if suddenly he is the be all and end all of ‘influence’.

Well, he is not and he is lovably mediocre as far as I know so I’m not too concerned about that, but I think it’s certainly an interesting concept to explore.

The concept of an ‘influencer’ is so interesting.

In purely technical terms, an influencer influences, and the derivational morphology is inescapable; to be an influencer, you must surely influence.

But the question naturally arises:

What kind of influence do we mean here?

After all, there are so many kinds, which the world almost invariably collapses into a few different and well defined stereotypes.

The comedic genius who specializes in fun, short, but stupid skits? The dancing girl thirst trap using every single part of her body to try to get you to click the ‘follow’ button and oh by the way buy some lipstick with a 10% discount code and 15% commission? The travel blogger cum exercise guru here to teach you the vastness of Borobudur on a diet of tempeh and budu budu?

There are so many kinds out there, all valid and all cool in their own way – the internet is a wonderful place with lots of incredible and talented people, after all, here to persuade you and to make their fortunes in ways inconceivable at the dawn of humanity and even now to members of an older generation who cannot deal with that idea in any way except to infantilize or look down upon it.

To be fair, it is not entirely the older generation’s fault that they think that way, because many such people do not succeed in their journeys and only a few people do rise to the top of a steaming pile of broken bodies.

Yet it is the older generation that is all too often sharing what I say, think, and do with their families, friends, and everyone else; it is infinitely more likely that a person of the older generation would know of me than a younger person, and to such a degree that even I cannot fully appreciate or control it, as my name ratchets unpredictably from WhatsApp group to WhatsApp group throughout this country. Will it ratchet overseas? Who knows – but I’ll look forward to shaping that outcome.

As one of the people who may rise in that way though (although naturally, it could go sideways), what I think is this:

It is a privilege to be able to rise, and to be able to influence thinking in different ways, and I should like to use that influence for what we might call good, and not evil – to speak for discourse and ongoing conversation – to shape our culture so that it becomes not only socially acceptable to think logically, but also socially unacceptable to be caught up in old lies that do not serve us.

However, it is not for a person to judge his own legacy – I’m sure that you are all intelligent people who can make your own conclusions, and you can talk as you wish. That is all part of the game, one in which I will make my own moves.

I didn’t misuse the word ‘game’, by the way. It’ll be a fun time – look forward to it!

“Nice Guy”

Many people in this world consider themselves what we call ‘nice guys’.

I do not.

I may have tried to convey myself as a nice guy at an earlier point, to act as if I happen to be a nice guy, to think about ‘what other people think’ to the point of neurosis…

But I would not really consider myself a nice guy.

What this DOESN’T mean is that I go around attacking people needlessly or getting into fights I don’t need to get into, fight against my actual interests – rage against the machine like a two bit two hundred kilogram behemoth of a manchild on a warpath to destroy the known and seen universe.

But what this DOES mean, is that I will express what I think without fear, without favor, without the sense that “OOPS SOMEONE’S OUT TO GET ME” because if I see a dude who needs to get scolded, I am going to scold that dude, think about how to more efficiently scold the dude, and even think about how I’m going to use people to further my own goals.

If that sounds bad, it probably is – but that’s just another aspect of me – I have certain goals in this universe that can only be attained through changing the ways that people think, believe, and ideate in this world on small and large scales…

Which means I cannot ever avoid conflict.

…But that’s just as well though?

Conflict is how stories move forward.

Conflict is how main characters turn from unknown troglodytes in the gonadic expression of a whelp into world changers, the hero in the demon king story.

If a nice guy ceases to be a nice guy the moment he goes out there and starts fighting with people, then it is clear:

I am most certainly not one of those ‘nice guys’.

I will not step around your ego, your feelings, your thoughts.

Though I do not choose to needlessly hurt you, I will not tell you beautiful lies to make you feel ‘comfortable’ merely because it is easier to avoid your ire.

I do not crave conflict, but if it is a means to an end, then I will bathe in it, exult in it, and become good at it to the extent that it is necessary to achieve the wider goal.

What is that?

That’s a story for another day.