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The Country That’s Madly in Love With AI
Who’s afraid of AI? Not South Korea.
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The Night Train of Life
We are all passengers on a night train, travelling the long journey of life. It is an endless journey stretching across tens of thousands of years. Each passenger on this train must eventually disembark. Some ride for fifty years, some for sixty or seventy, others for a full hundred, but when the train arrives at their station, each must get off. Outside the train, it is pitch dark. No one, not even the traveller himself, knows where they are going once they step off.
To get off the train of life means to step out into death. And no one knows what lies beyond it. Most people try hard to avoid getting off at their station. They plead, ‘How can I leave my family?’ They ask, ‘Where am I supposed to go in such utter darkness?’ But when the time comes, everyone must leave the night train. The train moves on without pause, indifferent to who has disembarked or what has become of them. Two people may choose to get off at the same time, but each must go off on their own separate path the moment they step off the train. Coexistence is allowed only on the train, within the boundaries of life. We are all riding this night train of life. In a hundred years, everyone on board now will have been replaced. Even in fifty years, half the faces we know will have stepped off into the darkness.
There was a man named A on this train. While on board, he worked tirelessly to earn money. With that money, he bought valuable possessions, ate good food and dressed in fine clothes. Time passed. He grew old and the time came for him to step off the train. But he didn’t want to. How could he leave behind the money he had scrimped and saved, so frugally that he couldn’t find a single bowl of rice to spare for a hungry stranger? How could he hand over all the treasures he had clutched so tightly, never letting go for a single moment? As he agonised, the train pulled into his station. It was time. A hugged his possessions one last time before being pulled off the train out into the darkness, where there was nothing but night. His family stayed behind and divided up his money, his belongings, his food. They said, ‘He was a generous father.’ But the passengers still on the train looked on in silence. One of them said quietly, ‘He loved his wealth so dearly. I can’t imagine how much it hurt that he couldn’t take it with him.’
There was another man on the train, named B. He had spent his life devoted to art. In his youth, he endured poverty and frequently went hungry. He never lived in luxury. He had only a few friends, with whom he shared warm companionship. But still, he managed to publish a few volumes of his works. He had little interest in money or material goods. In winter, he got by in a threadbare coat. In summer, sweat poured from his brow as he wrote. Eventually, his time came too. He said goodbye to his few friends, quietly remarking, ‘I wish I had left behind better work…’ And then he stepped off the train.
As the train moved on, the remaining passengers read his books. They said, ‘He lived a hard life, but gave us so much joy. We’re thankful to him.’
There was also a man called C. He spent nearly his whole life walking up and down the train. He sought out the sick to offer comfort and medicine. He visited those who were suffering and lent them a sympathetic ear. Sometimes he gave his own food to someone poorer than himself. Sometimes, without a word, he sat beside someone just to sit with them in their sorrow. His whole life was love and service. To everyone, he offered the same smile, the same kindness, the same compassion. It was as if he had boarded the train to serve the abandoned and forgotten. When his time came, he too stepped off the train. Many mourned his departure. ‘If only he could have stayed with us a little longer.’ One passenger said, ‘We should carry on his work and help those in need as he did.’
Which of these three people would we like to be? How should we live our lives?
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What Is MSG—and Is It Actually Bad for You?
The idea that MSG is uniquely harmful rests on a single letter and a lot of iffy science.
Some 15 to 20 years ago, MSG was nothing less than a nutritional bogeyman. When I was a kid, the word was spoken in hushed tones like a swear word or a sex term, invoked to strike fear into the hearts of people considering ordering Chinese takeout or microwaving a Cup Noodles for dinner. (Not-so-fun fact: Reported side effects like flushing, nausea, muscle aches, and chest pain were even collectively labeled “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” a nickname that’s since been condemned as racist. Now “MSG symptom complex” is more commonly used.) When a friend in college expressed skepticism that MSG was really all that bad for you, our other friends and I looked at him like he was wearing a tinfoil hat. Knowing that MSG was harmful, and avoiding it whenever possible, was a foundational tenet of our food education.
But in recent years, I’ve started to wonder if my skeptical friend was right. Despite the rampant fearmongering around MSG that dominated my childhood, modern science doesn’t really support the belief that it’s somehow worse than other food additives. Sure, it may cause digestive issues like bloating, gas, and stomach pain in significant amounts—but hey, too much of almost anything can do that (and yes, that’s even true of essentials like protein and fiber, FYI). Which dredges up a disturbing possibility: How did that “foundational tenet” catch on so hard—and could racial bias have played a role? To find out, I turned to experts to determine how MSG earned its bad reputation in the first place. Here’s everything you need to know about this controversial condiment.
What is MSG?
MSG—an abbreviation for monosodium glutamate—is a chemical compound that consists of sodium and L-glutamic acid, a nonessential amino acid that occurs naturally in foods like tomatoes, anchovies, mushrooms, and Parmesan cheese. “Even breast milk has MSG,” Soo-Yeun Lee, PhD, a professor and the director of Washington State University’s School of Food Science, tells SELF. While you can buy MSG on its own—as an “odorless white powder that can be sprinkled into your food like table salt,” according to Harvard Health—you’re more likely to eat it in the form of foods that were modified to contain it during the manufacturing process.
MSG’s history as a food additive stretches all the way back to the early 20th century. In 1908, a Japanese professor named Kikunae Ikeda discovered that glutamate was the source of the savory flavor of seaweed broth and filed a patent to start commercially producing it. Then, as now, MSG’s appeal stems from its flavor-enhancing capabilities. Specifically, it heightens umami, the “fifth basic taste.” “You could put a little bit of it [into your food] and still get a lot of savoriness and saltiness,” Dr. Lee says. Compared to sodium chloride (a.k.a. table salt), which has a more transient impact, “MSG has a prolonged sensation that's long-lasting and lingering.” When Dr. Lee’s students try MSG during demonstrations in class, she reports they are often reminded of ramen or chicken broth.
Today, MSG is manufactured through the fermentation of starch, sugar beets, sugar cane, or molasses, similar to the process that makes yogurt, vinegar, and wine. While it may be heavily associated with Chinese takeout in the public imagination, it can also be found in a wide range of other items, including mayonnaise, ketchup, barbecue sauce, salad dressing, packaged seasoning blends, frozen pizza, hot dogs, and lunch meats. “You can really add this to anything you like,” Jamie Alan, RPh, PharmD, PhD, an associate professor in the department of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University, tells SELF.
Why does MSG get such a bad rap?
Buckle in for a whole bunch of academic intrigue. Back in 1968, a person identifying as Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok penned a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine describing “a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant[.]” His symptoms, he wrote, included “numbness in the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness, and palpitation.”
The letter was an instant sensation, even though—as Dr. Lee points out—the claims weren’t scientifically based in any way because there was a sample size of one. Seizing on the author’s claims, news organizations like The New York Times published stories about the “strange syndrome.” “This idea then spiraled,” Dr. Alan says, fueling a widespread public impression that MSG was harmful and should be avoided whenever possible. (For what it’s worth, Dr Lee hypothesizes that overeating may be the actual cause of the issues the author attributed to MSG. “Chinese food’s usually so tasty that you tend to overconsume, and when you overconsume, all of those symptoms that are listed happen—nausea, indigestion, sweating, headache,” she says.)
But the story doesn’t end there. In 2024, a major twist emerged when a retired orthopedic surgeon and Colgate University trustee named Dr. Howard Steel contacted Colgate University professor Jennifer LeMesurier to make a shocking claim: He was the author of the letter. Goaded by a friend who had bet him $10 that he wasn’t smart enough to have an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steel said he had invented the sensationalistic “strange syndrome” and the persona of Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to win the wager, LeMesurier recounted in a 2025 episode of This American Life.
When reporters tried to corroborate Dr. Steel’s claims, however, holes started appearing, according to the This American Life episode. Chief among them: There actually was a real Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, and his biographical details seemed to match those provided in the letter, like his professional title, the name of his research institute, and the date of his move to the US.
While both Dr. Steel and Dr. Ho Man Kwok had died by the time the digging began in earnest, their surviving family members were able to shed some light on the situation. Dr. Ho Man Kwok’s children and former colleagues were adamant that Dr. Ho Man Kwok had in fact written the letter. Meanwhile, Dr. Steel’s daughter said her father was a lifelong prankster who loved pulling one over on people. With this testimony in mind, the reporters came to the conclusion that Dr. Ho Man Kwok was most likely the true author and Dr. Steel had taken credit for years as an elaborate practical joke.
Regardless of its true authorship, the letter has cast a long shadow. To this day, as my own experience shows, MSG remains widely demonized. “Unfortunately, when people hear misinformation—and I think it's prevalent nowadays too—they grab onto it and then don't let go, especially if it is as provocative as ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’ is,” Dr. Lee says. Besides the 1968 letter and its cultural impact, the negative associations stemming from the widespread use of MSG in ultraprocessed foods may have also played a role in the hate.
Is MSG worse than other food additives?
The short answer: no. Early studies on MSG “had several flaws,” and subsequent studies have found that MSG is “generally safe,” Dr. Alan says. In fact, “most of the scientific evidence through peer-reviewed human trials show no detrimental effect” of consuming MSG in normal amounts, Dr. Lee says.
In an attempt to arrive at a more definitive conclusion, the FDA commissioned the independent scientific body Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) to evaluate the safety of MSG in the 1990s. Published in The Journal of Nutrition in 1995, the final FASEB report determined that “there is no evidence linking current MSG food use to any serious, long-term medical problems in the general population,” as a later Journal of Nutrition article put it.
Reflecting this, MSG is labeled “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) by the FDA. Yes, “you can experience side effects like headache if you consume too much MSG, but this seems to be rare,” Dr. Alan says.
Ultimately, no compelling research has emerged to bear out the idea that MSG is inherently bad. Even the chemical makeup supports this verdict, according to Dr. Lee: Since both components of MSG, sodium (an essential mineral) and glutamate (an amino acid, which is a protein building block), are necessary for your body to function, “the hype about how it is not good for you isn’t totally grounded in science,” she says. "I do believe...it’s benign to eat based on typical consumption level.”
Dr. Alan suspects that prejudice played a significant role in the 1960s-onward backlash toward MSG (and, by extension, Chinese food). Yes, soy sauce may be high in MSG, but, Dr. Lee points out, parm is too—and Italian cuisine has hardly been subjected to the same degree of scrutiny and stigma. In Dr. Alan’s opinion, the hysteria “was driven in part through bad science and xenophobia,” she says. “In 2026, MSG is perfectly fine for the vast majority of people in moderation.”
Per the FASEB report, a small subgroup of otherwise healthy people (less than 1% of the population, according to Harvard Health) may be sensitive to MSG and more likely to experience side effects as a result. However, Dr. Lee emphasizes this is the case with many foods and ingredients: More people have trouble digesting dairy (around 36% of Americans) or peanuts (1% to 2% of Americans), for context. And even the existence of MSG sensitivity itself has been disputed, as the placebo effect is thought to come into play to some extent.
How much is safe to eat?
While the FDA doesn’t appear to have set a recommended MSG intake limit, the European Food Safety Authority revised nutrition standards in 2017 to recommend a maximum of 30 milligrams (mg) per kilogram of body weight per day. In case you need a reference point, that would shake out to around 2,700 mg (or almost three grams) of MSG for a 200-pound person, according to Dr. Alan. That “is quite a bit,” she says—so much so that it would actually be hard to hit that amount in the course of a normal 24 hours of eating. Per the FDA, an average adult’s daily added MSG intake hovers around 0.55 grams—significantly below that threshold. Take it from the EU Food Safety Platform: 30 milligrams per kilogram “is significantly more than you would normally consume on a regular basis.”
Meanwhile, the FASEB report identified some generally mild symptoms in “sensitive individuals” who consumed three grams of MSG or more without food. But this finding doesn’t have much bearing on general dietary health for obvious reasons: Not only are you unlikely to consume three grams of MSG in a day, as we detailed above (an average serving of an added-MSG food contains less than 0.5 grams of MSG, according to the FDA), but you’re also unlikely to raw-dog it.
In other words, routinely overloading on MSG (or feeling abnormally sick afterward) isn’t a viable concern for most people. Yes, “it could theoretically be done,” Dr. Alan says. Realistically, however? You’re not likely to run into that problem, freeing you up to eat lo mein and General Tso’s chicken without fear.
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https://psyche.co/ideas/sometimes-we-shouldnt-be-ashamed-of-public-shaming
When our self-respect, status and social identity are threatened, we ought to defend ourselves and shame our wrongdoers
Cases of public shaming often make us familiar with the victims. Take Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot. On 16 July 2025, the two attended a Coldplay concert. Byron was Cabot’s boss. Both were married but allegedly separated. As the evening went on and the drinks flowed, they became more familiar, eventually holding one another. Then, much to their own surprise, they appeared canoodling on the enormous Jumbotron in front of thousands of fans. They were shocked and immediately tried to disentangle themselves, Byron ducking for cover. Within days, a TikTok video of the incident racked up 100 million views. And then came the tsunami of abuse, especially for Cabot. At one point, she was receiving up to 500 calls per day. It was a classic, if exceptionally vivid, case of public shaming, and everyone became familiar with the targets.
But what about the people who participate in public humiliation? The people who post and repost information about the victims, who share memes about the event, who criticise or mock the victims? Often, those people are treated as ‘a faceless, nameless, avatar-masked mob’, as the journalist Kat Rosenfield put it. They are rabid, irrational and dangerously unaccountable for their actions. Even in cases where many agree that public shaming is justified, not much analysis is dedicated to the public shamers themselves. Instead, the focus is on the overall effects of the public shaming, and why those effects justify the shaming. For example, the #MeToo movement employed the calling-out and shaming of sexual harassers, and was widely supported. To that effect, many commentators have pointed out the overall value of the movement in changing how our society deals with sexual misconduct.
But it’s worth thinking about the individual actors behind many of these cases of public shaming. After all, public shaming is a group activity. And if you’ve had the misfortune to be in a group project, you know that each person performs differently, with different motivations, approaches and goals. Some people who participate in public shaming do so out of schadenfreude; they simply take joy in the suffering of others. Some participate for the sake of moral grandstanding or virtue-signalling. Some do so because they genuinely believe that a wrongdoing has been committed and should be punished. Some motivations are laudable, others less so. When we take a step back and make a moral assessment of a case of public shaming, we should think not only of the overall effects on the victim, but also of the individual instances of criticism that make up the whole.
In her book Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life (2018), the philosopher Krista Thomason introduces the concept of ‘moral self-defence’. In paradigmatic self-defence, you protect your physical self from an aggressor. But in moral self-defence, you protect your moral standing, which refers to the perceptions of your status in society. In an ideal world, all people would enjoy the same fundamental moral standing as free and equal members of society. Although people clearly differ in some aspects, such as their place in organisational hierarchies or in their capabilities, people should enjoy moral equality. Regardless of your fancy job title or your net worth, we should all benefit from the same set of fundamental rights. Everyone’s interests count for something. Unfortunately, our world is less than ideal, so there are people who refuse to acknowledge this moral equality and systems that fail to treat people as moral equals. In the most egregious cases, such as in institutionalised slavery, even a person’s standing as a human being is taken from them.
We don’t even need to look to the horrific excesses of human cruelty to see people undermine the moral standing of others. In principle, any intentional wrongdoing can express disregard for another person’s interests. If I step on your toe and refuse to apologise, I imply that I have the right to treat you disrespectfully. As the philosopher Pamela Hieronymi observes, wrongdoing suggests ‘that you can be treated in this way, and that such treatment is acceptable’. Most of us experience threats to our moral standing at some point in our lives. We’ve all encountered people who think themselves superior to others. Many work in environments that are undignified and degrading. And systemic injustices, like the failure to hold sexual misconduct accountable, subordinate the interests of entire groups of people.
The seriousness of having your toe stepped on may seem small, and hardly worth any sort of ‘self-defence’. But patterns of wrongdoing can have a cumulative effect. Systemic injustices, especially against specific social groups, have serious effects on the moral standing of members of those groups. They can cause and perpetuate perceptions of inferiority. When systemic injustices are unaddressed, people in society may come to believe – if they don’t already – that it is acceptable to treat the victims wrongly, and that the victims have a lower standing. Think of the culture of ‘victim blaming’ in cases of sexual assault. An even more pernicious possibility is that victims of injustice fail to recognise their own status as equals, or lose self-respect. Studies in social science and psychology have shown that victims of racial and gender discrimination often suffer from lower self-esteem, and sometimes blame themselves for the wrongs done to them.
Anger, resentment or revulsion get a bad rap, but they are important in maintaining our moral integrity
So our moral standing can be affected by the wrongs done to us, and therefore needs to be defended. This is where outrage comes in. The individual acts that contribute to public shaming – criticism, mockery, expressions of anger and disgust – can help defend our moral standing. These can remind others that wrongdoing is unacceptable. Moreover, some kinds of wrongdoing, like those related to systemic injustices, have a public audience. Thus, these kinds of wrongdoing can affect the moral standing of a group of people in the eyes of the wider moral community. This is why public shaming needs to be public. A defence against public acts of wrongdoing should similarly be carried out in the eyes of the wider community.
But the power of criticism goes beyond its effect on others. Underlying many instances of criticism are powerful moral emotions like anger, resentment or revulsion. These emotions get a bad rap, but they play important roles in maintaining our moral integrity. We feel these emotions – and the need to express them – when we know we deserve better. Anger, for instance, viscerally draws our attention to wrongdoing, telling us: ‘This is not OK.’ The philosopher Alison Jaggar writes that: ‘Only when we reflect on our initially puzzling irritability, revulsion, anger or fear may we bring to consciousness our “gut-level” awareness that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty, injustice or danger.’ It’s the pissed-off canary in the coal mine of our selves.
In psychology, researchers have studied the phenomenon of coping: the process of managing the psychological effects of stress and other challenges. Victims of systemic injustice can engage in ‘confrontational coping’: expressing outrage, anger, or opposition towards wrongdoers. Another option is ‘avoidance coping’: doing nothing or trying to forget. Some studies have found that confrontational coping helps victims overcome feelings of helplessness, creating positive emotions and, surprisingly, facilitating forgiveness. In contrast, avoidance coping in cases of racial injustice can worsen the psychological effects of discrimination.
Public shaming is a form of confrontational coping that can be particularly powerful because of its larger audience. When a person engages in public criticism or other expressions of anger, they affirm their own self-worth and give themselves a chance to be heard. In writing on the civil rights protests, Bernard Boxill observes that when a protestor ‘affirms that his condition is avoidable, he insists that what he protests is precisely the illegitimate, and hence avoidable, interference by others in the exercise of his rights.’ Similar results have been found in women who participated in the #MeToo movement online by criticising sexual harassers. Such active participation helped victims of sexual misconduct ‘find their voice and regain their power’, thus alleviating losses in self-esteem.
As a form of moral self-defence, public shaming is not just a nice metaphor. There are benefits to how we theorise about the morality of public shaming. Moral philosophers make a distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons for action. Agent-neutral reasons are ones that apply to every person, regardless of their own identity or interests. If you see a child drowning in a nearby pond and you can save them, you have an agent-neutral reason to act. Anyone who sees a child drowning should save the child if possible. But suppose this child is also your nephew. Now you also have an agent-relative reason to do something. Regardless of how spoilt he may be, the fact that this child is your nephew means you have all the more reason to save him.
When people support the use of public shaming, they often couch their support in agent-neutral terms. They point out that the wrongdoer deserved to be punished, that we need to deter people from wrongdoing, or that we need to stand up for marginalised communities. If this was all there was to it, victims of wrongdoing would have no more reason to engage in public shaming than the rest of us. But when we evaluate public shaming as a form of moral self-defence, we understand why victims of wrongdoing – particularly serious and systemic wrongdoing – may have a special interest in participating. If a person needs to engage in criticism to protect their sense of self-worth, it may not be enough for other people to do it for them. Frankly, there’s nothing quite like doing it yourself.
Each person is a free and equal member of the human community, and this standing is worth fighting for
A further benefit of thinking about public shaming as self-defence is that it gives us a rubric to determine when individuals are justified in participating in public shaming. Legal scholars and philosophers recognise that self-defence must meet at least three requirements: the existence of an unjust threat, proportionality, and necessity. Necessity refers to the best course of action overall (for example, killing an attacker may be necessary, if other methods of defending yourself could result in severe injury to yourself). We can plug these three requirements into how we should judge cases of public shaming. Thus, if you want to publicly berate your local barista for adding too much milk to your coffee, you should ask yourself three questions:
Is there an unjust threat to my standing in society or my self-respect?
Are the likely harms from public shaming proportionate to the threat to my moral standing?
Is public shaming my best course of action, given my aims and the likely harms?
Needless to say, a bad coffee will not pass this test. But other wrongs, like sexual assault, may very well do so.
To be sure, none of this is a blanket endorsement of public shaming, which can cause very serious harm to its victims. It also comes with costs for the wider community – it can cause mistrust, polarise groups, and create an unhealthy environment of vitriol and vindictiveness. And, as mentioned, there are plenty of self-serving, self-aggrandizing, morally objectionable reasons for why people participate in public shaming. Nevertheless, the concept of moral self-defence reminds us that our self-respect, our social identities, and our status in our communities are vital. Each person is a free and equal member of the human community, and this standing is worth fighting for. Cases of public shaming like the #MeToo movement are examples of how individuals can fight for their own standing. Just as we are entitled to impose harm on culpable aggressors in defending our physical bodies, we are also entitled to impose harm on culpable wrongdoers to defend our moral standing.
James Edgar Lim is a post-doctoral fellow in philosophy at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore.
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