Dear students, relatives and friends who have come from afar, distinguished colleagues and friends,
Today is a special day, the first time in three years that we are holding a truly complete in-person graduation ceremony. 1,279 graduates of various programs of Peking University Guanghua Class of 2023, including students from the "Future Leaders" International Undergraduate Program, Global MBA, and Guanghua-Kellogg EMBA Program from all over the world, gathered in the Centennial Lecture Hall to celebrate their achievements in this beautiful and inspiring place on a special day. First of all, on behalf of Guanghua School of Management, please allow me to express my sincerest and warmest congratulations to the new graduates of the 2023 class. At the same time, I hope you will send applause to your families, friends, classmates, teachers... Thank you to the people who have accompanied you, supported you and encouraged you along the way, and invited them to share the excitement and joy of graduation.
Graduation means a temporary separation. "What will become tomorrow? will turn into a bouquet of flowers, a shooting star, a wish; Will it become a vow, a blessing," a fairy tale with a sad ending, a piece of music that is breathtakingly beautiful? The writer Hermann Hesse once said meaningfully, "Tomorrow will be the first day of the rest of your life." ”
As you begin the next chapter of your life, there will be a new life that will welcome you, with an air of joy, seduction, and abundance, and may often be intertwined with anxiety, sadness, and unexpected trials. We are at a disturbing moment in history: the old order and rules are gradually disintegrating, and the laws and laws that we know and are comfortable with are failing; Uneven development, unequal distribution of income and wealth, solidification of social classes, and other persistent diseases that hinder the evolution of human civilization have not been significantly improved, while grand narratives with unclear or even dubious intentions such as de-globalization or re-globalization cannot hide the fact that the world we live in is falling into chaos and even chaos brought about by imbalance and reconstruction; People with ulterior motives have a serious "nonsense" that has been accelerated and amplified by the Internet to breed the soil of systematic rumor-mongering, maliciously spread false misinformation that constantly infringes on the public's cognition, people often fail to form a consensus in the face of important empirical facts, making the originally rational argument become emotional catharsis or even deliberately created antagonism, a crisis of public trust in value rationality is emerging and beginning to spread; Science as instrumental reason is soaring, information, knowledge and answers to all kinds of "questions" are almost at their fingertips, and people are slowly falling in love with the convenience and comfort of giving up their ability to think – but systematic and comprehensive thinking is a moral responsibility that we must shoulder in this important period of history...
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows – Bob Dylon." In the face of a completely unpredictable future, as weak individuals, we can easily feel the impact and envelopment of the tide of the times and the drastic changes in the surrounding environment. At this historical moment full of crises and challenges, we should emphasize the value of university education and the changes it has brought to everyone more than ever: our education aims to cultivate a scientific and rational thinking mode and a framework system for analyzing problems, giving you the ability to "define the good", the will to "build the good" and the courage to act resolutely and decisively, and set the direction for the growth of life. I believe our education has shaped you today, and it will continue to nourish your future growth – growing in meaningful ways has always been the best way for us to cope with the twists of the times and heal this far from perfect world.
The departure is imminent, and unknown life rushes in. I would like to wish everyone all good sailing and a happy life, as described in Gulong's novel, "ride the fastest horse, climb the highest mountain, eat the spiciest dish, drink the strongest wine, play with the sharpest knife...". However, I have to say that your future cannot be smooth, and the loneliness, exhaustion and even frustration of those struggles will always accompany you. For a long time to come, you will often wonder, how can you live a life with more than a million possibilities?
The formation of unique ideas and intellects is a permanent mystery. Now the unlimited AI large-parameter model ChatGPT has more than 100 billion parameters, investing huge computing power to learn massive data, and the formation is only a description of the current recent; Even if hundreds of billions of parameters are constantly adjusted to iterate repeatedly, can this large-parameter model perceive the temperature of human nature, learn the nobility of being born as a human being, and acquire the "ability to define beauty" through continuous evolution, thereby guiding you through a life full of value and meaning?
We don't need to repeatedly adjust hundreds of billions of parameters to get a big model that guides life, but we need to return to common sense, to those simple laws that penetrate time and cross mountains and seas. If we follow the discounted cash flow model (The DCF model) that you learned in the most basic courses of finance, we can build a model that understands the value and meaning of life as the sum of the net present value of all the value a person will create in the future. In this small-parameter model, the size of the discount rate is a very critical factor or parameter that determines the value: the smaller the discount rate, the more we care about the future, the more we are willing to make greater efforts and higher prices in the present, and embrace the uncertain future with greater courage, so the greater the value and meaning of a person's life; The larger the discount rate, the more we care about immediate or short-term interests, and the more likely our lives are to be filled with calculations and exchanges, and not stand up to the scrutiny of the future. Based on this small-parameter model of life value, I give you a suggestion: lower the discount rate you use to discount future value.
Lowering the value of the discount rate parameter means changing the appetite for risk, believing that the future is good and being firmly optimistic about the future. Different risk appetites determine different attitudes in life, and the future you are the result of your choices now. The more noisy the times and the more twists and turns the years, the more precious confidence in the long-term future. Pessimism about the Chinese economy is pervasive: the investment cycle in real estate and big infrastructure is coming to an end; The demographic and labor dividends are fading away; With the end of China's industrialization process, the growth rate of total factor productivity, which drives sustained economic growth, has begun to decline. The traditional economic growth momentum has faded, and the new growth engine is not yet in place... However, as Bill Gates famously said, "People tend to overestimate the changes in the next one or two years and grossly underestimate the changes that are likely to occur in the next decade." In fact, the structural forces underpinning China's long-term stable economic growth are emerging: while we have completed great industrialization, the rapid development of AI and big data, as well as the rich industrial ecology that China has developed, have brought the possibility of "re-industrialization" - that is, any industry can do it again through digital transformation. "Reindustrialization" will bring about the huge possibility of increasing the growth rate of total factor productivity and maintaining sustained economic growth. According to our estimates, promoting the realization of carbon neutrality in the next 30 years will require nearly 3 trillion yuan of investment, equivalent to 8-9% of GDP per year, which will be enough to fill the gap left by the decline in traditional investment and support the continued high growth rate of total factor productivity... By treating short-term difficulties as the norm and extrapolating them excessively, you will lose the opportunity to create a new possibility in history – the pessimist is doomed to the future.
Choosing a lower discount rate means that you are willing to be a long-term believer, believing that life is not a 100-meter race, but a difficult marathon. There are too many people in our era who are obsessed with short-term fame and fortune, unscrupulous in order to achieve the end, willing to replace the present wealth with the future, and empty their souls for short-term interests; Too many people in our time at the same time do not hear or pretend not to hear the call of distant mountains, and are always reluctant to step out of their comfort zone in the present, no matter how absurd it may be. They always choose the safest, most moderate path to proceed, and as Bob Dylan sings, "She never stumbles, she's got no place to fall." True long-termists are willing to delay gratification, they have both realist concerns and idealistic glows; They believe that everything, even the most heart-wrenching pain, the long road of solitude in the long dark night, the despair of standing on the edge of the cliff with chewing glass in their mouths, is a gift of life, a gift to help them grow; They believe in the power of long-term perseverance, believing that "you cannot leave this world to the people you despise"; In the highlight moments, they can be the brightest star in The Lord of the Rings, the light of Earendil, and in the darkest moments of life, they carefully take care of the wild horse inside and patiently find a grassland for it to gallop...
Lowering the discount rate also means placing the growth of your mind and intellect in a longer period of time and in a broader space, which will improve the pattern and height of your cognition. We must deeply realize that different value orientations inevitably enter every link of people's thinking and intellectual formation process. Our knowledge of the world, our habitual acceptance of "insight," including the scientific knowledge that we have labeled "truth" are temporary and relative—limited by the value propositions of the proponents of those theories or ideas. By placing the formation of ideas and the growth of intellect in a broader space and time, we will thoroughly understand the fact that "over time, new truths from different directions will continue to be revealed." Understanding this fact, we can consciously avoid easily falling into ideological paranoia and completely rejecting undesirable views or perceptions; Understanding this fact, we are better able to learn to engage with people who think differently from you, to put each other's different perspectives or opinions to the test, and to be ready to change our own ideas. The unwillingness to listen to different voices and insisting on defending one's own self-justice in knowledge and opinions are the biggest traps that people set for themselves in the process of ideological formation and intellectual growth.
For the Class of 2023, a completely unpredictable future is upon us. I hope that you can lower the discount rate used to discount future values, and be a long-term person, a sunny person, a good person, without complaining or explaining. True strength is not in what can be conquered, but in what can be withheld; In this world, although there are no dreams that are destined to come true, there should be the best efforts to make for the dreams. Remember, the key to the future is in the sun.
Congratulations again! Happy graduation!
July 2, 2023 at No. 5 Summer Palace Road, Haidian District, Beijing