{"id":566,"date":"2014-05-06T21:48:59","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T13:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tembusu.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/?p=566"},"modified":"2025-09-25T16:44:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T08:44:40","slug":"of-proofs-and-truths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/2014\/05\/of-proofs-and-truths\/","title":{"rendered":"Of proofs and truths"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tembusu senior and soon-to-be-graduate Cedric Chin wrote about Tembusu Junior Seminar\u00a0\u2018Proof: What\u2019s truth got to do with it?\u2019\u00a0on his blog,\u00a0metacog<\/a>. The post received several hundred likes and shares over one day. Treehouse decided to ask him some questions about his post. Do read the original post here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1) What compelled you to write this piece?<\/strong>
\nProf Tay\u2019s class was really the most important class I\u2019ve taken in NUS. I\u2019m not sure if I managed to communicate it clearly in the essay, but I\u2019m a lot more rigorous in my thinking now, which led to doing well in other things: it shaped how I ran the NUS Hackers, and how I performed in my internships in the subsequent summers.<\/p>\n

It was also hard to communicate to freshmen how powerful the class was, for me, and why they should consider taking it. So I thought I\u2019d write an explanatory essay instead.<\/p>\n

2) What is the most interesting thing that people are saying about it?<\/strong>
\nA friend said that he thought there should be more GEMs like Proof in NUS: that is, modules that focused on ‘becoming better humans’, as opposed to \u2018learning more stuff\u2019.<\/p>\n

3) Is it true that you used to lack appreciation for arts and humanities subjects before coming to Tembusu?<\/strong>
\nOh yeah. Someone told me a few weeks back, at one of the farewell dinner things us Tembusu alumni-to-be were doing – that I was a lot more annoying in my first year here. I used to make fun of sociology and Derrida incessantly at dinner. Actually I still make fun of Derrida.<\/p>\n

4) Do you recall an instance where you stopped yourself midsentence because you were reevaluating your own assumptions?<\/strong>
\nI was arguing that we needed to charge a token sum for an event or we\u2019d have an incredibly high drop-out rate for registrations. I stopped myself mid-argument because I realise my assumptions might have changed – I was basing this off experience on events that we ran two years ago, that were also slightly different. I then decided we needed to test the assumption instead.<\/p>\n

5) In a hypothetical scenario where your girlfriend may be cheating on you, which of the four theories of truth would you prefer to adopt: correspondence, coherence, consensus, or pragmatic?<\/strong>
\nCorrespondence and coherence, probably. Correspondence (do the facts confirm the hypothesis that she\u2019s cheating on me?) and correspondence (does this behaviour match up to what I know of her behaviour in the past?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A short interview with Cedric Chin about his viral blog post on Professor Tay’s Junior Seminar, \u2018Proof: What\u2019s truth got to do with it?\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":573,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","publication_type-interview","theme-college-affairs","scope-tembusu"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":574,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions\/574"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tembusu3.nus.edu.sg\/treehouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}