This is a speech given a few years back by the mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, at the National University of Taiwan. It was a very nice speech, if you leave aside the political background of the speaker. Ko Wen-je, known as Ko P. to his friends and to the media (where the P. stands for "Professor"), is a self-confessed aspie, who also really has a moderately-severe college-age autistic child. In short, he is one of us. Ko P. was a political outsider (he was a surgeon doctor and a professor, prior to becoming the major of Taipei), but won the seat of mayor of Taipei in a landslide in 2014. At the time of the election, he was still extremely unskillful in talking to the media, but that has improved quite a bit since then.
What's the point of this video? There are a few points:
(1) The point it, he is a counter-example to the myth that social skills are essential to a person's professional career, even in politics. He was able to acquire and refine his social skills on the job.
(2) Language of today's intellectuals: he is a surgeon, but he views and analyzes the world by drawing analogies from medicine, math, physics, chemistry and even religion (buddhism). Sure, this talk was aimed at college students at a top university, hence not easily understandable unless you have a strong science education background. But this is the fact: in today's intellectual world, there is a universal language, and that's the language of science. He is a surgeon, but he uses the very same language I use.
Early last year, I bumped into this video in YouTube. "That was a nice speech," I told myself. It was a pitty that there was no CC (closed caption) subtitle in English. It was no doubt a difficult speech to translate: it had tons of technical terms from many different fields and also some vulgar, language-specific jokes. Frankly, not too many people in the world are able do the translation for this speech, in my opinion. Knowing that Ko P. was on the spectrum and had an autistic child, I kind of viewed it as a favor to a fellow aspie. So I contacted the YouTube administrator of NTU (National Taiwan University), and volunteered to translate the speech. It took me a few weekends to do the translation, re-synch it to the video, and generate the .srt file. I sent back the translation. But after one month, three months, half a year, I did not see the English subtitle uploaded to the video. I told myself, oh well, perhaps politicians don't like their vulgar jokes translated, for the whole world to see. It was only a few days ago that I checked again. To my surprise, the English caption was there now.
It's a good speech. It gives you a few tips on how to tackle and solve problems in life, and how to look at life in general.
08 Apr 2017, 7:46 am
