Spesial: Undangan Untuk Merampok ATM

H ari ini saya mendapat link tentang perusahaan yang menjual produk berupa kartu ATM yang bisa dipakai untuk mengambil uang dari berbagai macam ATM bank.

Dengan kata lain, orang-orang di balik perusahaan ini, yang beralamat http://www.way4rich.cjb.net/, dengan penuh kesengajaan, kesadaran, perencanaan dan persiapan, melalui produk yang mereka tawarkan, mengajak para pengunjung situs mereka untuk merampok uang para penabung di berbagai ATM.

Www.way4rich.cjb.net telah mengiklankan dan menawarkan diri sebagai dalang terhadap berbagai potensi kriminalitas di masa depan.

Beginikah caranya mencari kekayaan? Beginikah hasil jerih payah pendidikan bertahun-tahun—mengajak/memfasilitasi orang lain untuk menjarah sesuatu yang bukan haknya?

Imbauan saya: semoga orang-orang di balik bisnis ini segera menyadari kekeliruan mereka. Semoga mereka ”merasakan” betapa seriusnya sebenarnya suasi kejahatan ini dilihat melalui perspektif kemanusiaan, hukum, moralitas, dan etika. Dari sudut pandang ekonomi, potensi keuntungan yang mereka pertaruhkan tidak berarti jika dibandingkan dengan sesuatu yang non-uang yang mereka tawarkan sekaligus pertaruhkan, baik kepada orang lain maupun kepada diri mereka sendiri.

Harapan saya, semoga link di atas segera dimatikan dan perusahaan virtual tersebut mematikan eksistensinya.

Still label your kid “Smart”?

I have believed that my daughter is a “genius.” Until this very day, I actually have kept telling her she is a super smart girl. Let me give some examples: she started reading fluently just a few days after her 4th birthday (I myself started it at 6.5). One day she asked me a question: “If nobody has met God, how could I know that my teachers teach me what God means?”

Today I found an interesting blog post from Marginal Revolution. As an expression of appreciation to it, below is my quote:

"...a growing body of research-and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system-strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of "smart" does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it."

“ It turns out you should praise them for their effort, not their intelligence. If you praise kids for their intelligence, they tend to avoid tasks they fear they will fail at. ...”

My daughter is 7; well, I hope it’s not too late.

On Free Will

Enda Nasution’s recent article on free will has been a good chance to (re-) think about the unique phenomenon. After reading it, its comments, and the referred-to article in the New York Times, I felt the need to attempt to emphasize its validity. The articles and most comments that followed, if not undermining the validity of free will, reflect varying degrees of our dubiousness or confusions about it.

On the face of stuff like it, what do we posses to understand with? Two distinct sets of tools: scientific and religious reasonings. I will concern myself only with the first here; while it must intrigue to engage the issue using the second set, I will reserve it for further discussions, whose chances I am sure are great to come by. I’d like to point out that even in the scientific realm, there are huge problems, which directly and not directly relate with free will--the subject of our discussion today.

Firstly, there are huge problems buried deep in oblivion due to our daily chores regarding the mantle of science, or to be more accurate, the spectacles of science. One of the major problems relates the difference between scientism and science. Most of the time, we mistake the two. Science is, after all, scientia; correct knowledge. What we think of “science” mostly replicates what people hold on natural sciences. Most social scientists use the methodology of physical or natural sciences to try to understand social phenomena. This is not only lamentable, but seriously erroneous. Furthermore, the fact that most scientists use this does not mean it is correct; nor the only way to look at science.

There is another form of science, another way of looking at things, which perhaps can bring us closer to truth. We may disagree with this; but if we dismiss it entirely, aren’t we crediting too much to the “science” that most of us see it?

Take, for instance, praxeology—or the science of human actions. It has been believed by a few proponents to be a better approach to studying beings with will, and which derives its axioms based on logical deductivism.

It is introspective to know that natural forces, trees, animals do not have will. Only we, human beings, have will. That we make choices, cannot be disproved. The fact that some cannot make choices due to external factors, it is of different nature. All of our choices have consequences; and the fact that some consequences may affect, necessitate or proscribe our next round or capacity of choice making, even to the point of debilitating it, does not contradict or totally nullify our freedom to choose.

Such examples as those one’s inability to quit smoking only reflects one’s preference over certain choices. Even Einstein’s words that Enda quoted in his post is not about will per se; it’s about power. The fact that I cannot fly from home to office does not invalidate my free will. Of course, I cannot will what I cannot do. We cannot confuse will with power, precisely because we are free to choose to the limits determined by our condition as humans.

Like everything else mundane that we know of the world, we have our certain definite and definable nature.

Of Flood, Economy and State

My sympathies to the flood victims are nothing to be posted here.

I just want to contend here, despite the seemingly counter-logical statement, that the disastrous floods in Jakarta and surroundings have had only little to do with the natural downpours, but our inability to cope with them. What could be said about this recurring man-made disaster?

It has but shown the failure of the state. The floods that still inundate the capital city Jakarta and elsewhere in many other parts of the country have seen the central and local governments at the mercy of their generous, self-providing people, while most of these people, in fact, themselves are at the mercy of nature. While the people should stop to rethink of their relationship with nature—especially with water as our focal point of crisis in future , the government should long ago have stopped thinking that they know what’s best for the people; that they self-claim themselves as the main “development agent.”

And one of Kompas’ recent editorials was entitled: Banjir Mengganggu Ekonomi, or Floods Disturb the Economy. Something rather amiss—or somewhat inapt, here, which perhaps not many people took notice. Corollary to it is a thought that views economy as of ultimate importance. Such a view is derived from the long believed notion that most people falsely cling to that compares a nation’s economy as that of something organic, likened to the lives of plants, trees, or animals. This is a serious fallacy. Plants, trees, animals live neither with neither will nor plan, unlike us human beings. Talking about a nation’s economy is talking about actions and activities of millions or billions of its people who have both will and plans for the sake of embetterment of personal states or well being. If the wellbeing of most persons in a city is being seriously disturbed, a talk about the region’s economy would be, I'd say, insensitively foolish...