RIP SBP Data Authenticity ft. Aaj ke hisaab se

 Today was the first time, the intertemporal currency value converter I had made a while ago came to my use, when during a phone call with my father, I instantaneously converted a past amount he mentioned to its current value, and I told him about this, and he liked the idea. When I told him, that for present value it's using 2024's last quarter gold prices to compare against historic gold prices, he asked me to get present gold price updated and share it with him. This time, I figured out extracting data from Business Recorder is pretty straightforward using an AJAX call that the webpage was making under the hood.

Last time, I wasn't able to find out a good source for recent data. Since, BR had this data since 2011, I thought about comparing it with the data from SBP that I had used in conversion in my converter, and voila, the two data series are not validating each other.

The price growth rates for the two sources are not even remotely close.

And then they say, I am too paranoid about data sources.

Now, what am I supposed to do plug in my converter? Does authentic data even exist?

Miyazaki's movies & kids not being taken seriously

An interesting pattern Nabeel Qureshi mentions about what makes Miyazaki's movies so special:

[00:10:22] Dan: Another director you cited that you love before, Miyazaki. What do you think that he understands that maybe Disney, other animation studios are overlooking, and they don't quite get?

[00:10:31] Nabeel: Oh, yes. This is one of my favorite topics. I think Miyazaki just makes movies for adults that are also for children. He really takes children seriously as full beings, if you will. That's very important. If you watch interviews with him, he's always saying, I think kids have a very good sense of the issues that we think of as adult issues. Life and death is a simple example. Even a movie that's relatively on the child-like side of his canon, like My Neighbor Totoro, it's actually a pretty serious plot because the mother is on the verge of death, and she's sick the whole time. It's showing how these two children cope with that.

Another example is Kiki's Delivery Service. It's charming, right? It's this teenage girl, she's going to become a witch, and she's going to learn to fly. I feel like Disney would take this in a very whimsical childlike direction. Actually, it's a drag, she moves to this Stockholm-like city. She has to get a job and work. It's a grind. She gets sick. Nobody cares about her. There's all these things that happen that you wouldn't really expect to happen in a kid's movie. Yes, I think his secret is he takes children very, very seriously, which I think most adults do not by default. He makes movies for children as though they were fully conscious beings.  [Emphasis Mine]

Source: https://www.danschulz.co/p/nabeel-qureshi

Writing raw vs processed thoughts

 It was interesting that I just simply had to nudge FA that he should write down his thoughts somewhere on the internet, and he would start doing that. It was easier in his case, because there was no need to convince or explain him, he already knew why he should be doing that. So, this was already something he thought, he should be doing, but as is the reality of this world, just desiring things or thinking that things should be a certain way, does not automatically translate into actually doing that thing. Other than reason or desire, one also needs to be agentic about actually doing that thing for that thing to be done, and sometimes, even the generally high-agency people need some sort of nudge to start doing the thing that they themselves think they should be doing. For this reason, I think, nudging people into doing something that they themselves think they should be doing is a good thing, and more people should be doing this.

Anyways, that was the preface. What I actually was thinking about, was the difference between writing raw/unprocessed thoughts and structured/processed thoughts. If you have read about Visakan's ideas about it, notably do 100 things, he leans more on the idea of writing unprocessed thoughts and just doing things which is basically a better version of quantity leads to quality thing. On the other hand, if you have read Henrik Karlsson's work, notably the essay where he explains that the conventional internet wisdom of quantity leads to quality is flawed, and Anu Atluru's work, notably Make Something Heavy, you might have impression that one should spend more time into processing his writings before publishing them.

Now that I am thinking about how to phrase what's in my mind, different frameworks are coming, so let's try them one by one.

If you actually read all these essays, you will realize there are differences in the context in which all of them are talking about. Visa is talking about doing something in a sense of enjoying the thing itself:

"Do 100 Crappy Things For No Reason, With No Agenda To Live Up To, At Whatever Pace Feels Comfortable, However You Like."

 While, if you read Henrik, he is framing it completely in his own personal context of doing writing that leads him to better thinking:

"I also don’t think that optimizing for growth is a healthy way to write; a better metric for me is how much my thinking improves."

Meanwhile, if you read Anu Atluru, you realize, she is talking about creating something heavy -- something meaningful and durable, in a broader sense but around context of current internet culture running on light things, resulting in this strange feeling of unfulfillment caused by not creating something heavy. So she has framed it as sort of a counter-effect of that internet culture, however, she also hints in between on the cycles of creation process.

"At any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing... Your gut knows what state you’re in. And the cycle repeats... No one wants to stay in light mode forever. Sooner or later, everyone gravitates toward heavy mode—toward making something with weight. Your life’s work will be heavy. Finding the balance of light and heavy is the game."

"Weight is not restricted to “work” in a traditional sense but to every arena of meaning."

Actually that incorporates both the frameworks I had in my mind which were:

1. Understand the context or framework of thinking of the author and see how they apply to your own specific context, if they do.
2. When an author makes a point, they are specifically framing it in context of people who are on a certain side of a specific point of reference. If you are standing on the other side of that point of reference, that specific framing might not apply to you even though the underlying concept of the author is totally valid.

If I think about my own personal context specifically regarding writing, the closest it is, is to Henrik's context. But I had been having this problem that when I intended to write processed thoughts, my mind would auto start processing those thoughts before I had the time to even write them out, and what resulted was that I would not be able to think about them in a concrete and structured way because the thoughts remained as vague pre-concepts in mind without being materialized into type. So for me, the first step was to first build the habit of being able to write down the thoughts first, because when I did that, no matter if they were much processed or not, I was able to restructure or reframe that idea in my mind later on could see the flaws where they were.

This was a reasoning behind my idea of starting to write in weblog instead of my earlier idea of writing essays. However, even for me being able to write a weblog (where thoughts being properly structured is not a strict requirement), there were some hidden intermediaries, which were my physical diary and a secret blog I had shared with no one else. Interestingly, Henrik despite being inclined to writing processed thoughts, realized that it too had its benefit:

What has delighted me about the shit blog is how abundant it has made me feel. I sit down and type as fast as I can, and the results—well, they suck, but they don’t suck that much. They have a certain breeziness and some insights, too—insights of a different kind than I have in the serious essays. Which means I have underestimated my capacity! I can actually just sit down, without energy, without ideas, and if I frame the task in the right way, I can extract something of value from myself. The sense of scarcity I felt previously—feeling that to write the actual essays, I needed hours of high energy, which is scarce since we homeschool our kids, and I work, and the 2-year-old wakes up at night screaming, and feeling, because of this, that I needed to use my limited energy on good ideas—this feeling of scarcity has, I realize, kept me from doing more and better work.

Certain about means, uncertain about end, and vice versa

 Since I'm about to graduate in a while, and since these are the times when a lot of people start asking you about your future plans, I thought to write about this. Though most of the people are such that you just have to give them an artificial answer to satisfy them because they are not in the mood of trying to understand the idea I want to convey, there are also some people who are in this mood, and so I might be sharing this with them.

Most of the things we do are a means to a certain end. What happens many a time is that people get so engrossed in trying to figure out the means that they do not give much thought about exactly what kind of end they would want to achieve, and thus it's no wonder that many a times, when people end up achieving the exact end that they themselves wanted years ago, they regret it, or at-least do not like it as much as they thought they would.

So, I believe it's a better thing to start from the end, and then retrace back the means. But there are issues with this approach as well. Because when most people think about an end, they are not thinking about the true end itself but also another means a level high up. For instance, if you ask college students about what kind of work do they ideally want, they would list out different sorts of careers, but what they are actually targeting via any specific career path is a vague concept of the work that would allow them live their ideal kind of life. For instance, two persons might want to adopt two different careers, but both are actually targeting careers that allow them to make the most amount of money, but even making most of money is a means for another end, one of which could be to lead a comfortable life, or another could be to have a certain status in society.

Living a comfortable life or having status in society etc. are actually very simplistic notions, but I'm mentioning them because these are the closest thing to a true end that most people would have thought about their work. In reality, targeting for one or two concrete variables to optimize their life for, is often not a good idea, and subconsciously, people try to optimize against a wide range of preferences with different priority and weightage.

Now, the apparent problem with these preferences is that they change over time. But first, it needs to be realized that a lot of times, what changes over time is not your underlying preferences about the kind of life you want to live, but rather your reasoning about adopting what means allow you to optimize for those underlying preferences. Now, when I think about the instances when your underlying preferences actually change, it's only because of you having imperfect information, sometimes about the world and sometimes about yourself. In some of the cases, this information gap can be somewhat improved by thinking out about these things in a structured manner, but the true bridging of this gap happens in the real world, when you actually dip your toes in the water. So, the solution, to the changing preferences problem is to increase the surface area of interaction of your inner self with the external world and then being actually thoughtful and perceptive about those interactions so that you gather maximum information about your inner reality and the external reality and their interaction. In other words, it can be said, you have to speed-run experimentation around your life, but not in a blind manner, but rather a perceptive and thoughtful manner, so that your learnings from the previous experiments guide you about what next to experiment.

This was a very long tangent, but I think it can be used as a fair enough idea for explaining where I currently stand.

Over the last three years, I have been doing experimentations, but initially I was not very thoughtful about them, and I was definitely not speed-running them, however, over the years, it has improved. Owing to these, I have got some idea of my underlying preferences or the true end I would want to achieve, however, I have yet to figure out what exact form of work would allow me to optimize for them.

The words means and the end give the impression that one follows the other in time. But if we consider, a given point in time, or a certain kind of life one is living, then we can distinguish that certain form into two things, let's call them essence and the body. The body represents a specific concrete form of exterior reality, while essence represents the core idea which is abstract and sort of undefinable in a sense -- something difficult to enclose in a jar of words.

So, I have somewhat learned about the essence of the kind of things I would want to work on in life, but I am trying to figure out what exactly the specific body or structure of the work would look like.

Now, that I am thinking, maybe, that essence is not actually that undefinable. There are a certain elements of it which are difficult to structure out in words, but still a lot of it can still be structured out in words. It seems I wrote that this was undefinable because I did not want to define it, either here in this blogpost, or maybe I was just playing around with myself not wanting to think structurally about it, or maybe, that phrasing "difficult to enclose in a jar of words" was interesting enough that I did not want to delete it, but anyway, I think this pretty much sums up about my current situation.

I have got an intuitive sense of the kind of work I would want to do in life, but I have no idea of specifics of that yet. Maybe, I will try to wordify this intuitive sense some other time.

Playing the Devil's Advocate

 I noticed on Saturday while talking with a good teacher, that I play something like Devil's Advocate pretty often. This happens specifically when discussing about things I have given a good enough thought but I have still been unable to form confident conclusion about any particular side.

I think this practice is helpful in the sense that it allows one to explore various points in the explanation-space of a specific problem or phenomenon in order to ultimately find out which point in that complex space is closer to the truth.

First Filter

Few days back I told GZ who had recommended me Steins;Gate anime based on my interest in science that I had watched it and I liked it, and asked him if there are other anime like this, and he recommended me to watch Dark which is a TV series not an anime (because it also involves time travel). I told him I had watched the first season, but I did not like it. He was really astounded, and so I explained. Dark is a really good TV series actually from all aspects but one. It's cinematography, acting, music, direction, all of the things are top-class. When they do depiction of old timeline from 60s or 80s, that too has been done excellently. Most people do not consciously think about these things, but it takes consideration of multitudes of factors to make a movie or TV series give that certain effect that it has, and Dark had that effect. But the single thing that didn't click to me was the core story. SPOILER AHEAD. The core story, at-least of the first season, was revolving around a town of people constantly cheating over one another. I'm sure they would have developed the story further in the next seasons, but the one for first season wasn't interesting enough for me to continue on. Now, the core story makes one element of the multiple of elements, and if let's say I intended to learn cinematography or film-direction, I maybe wouldn't have bothered about it. But in general, it seems I have something that I would henceforth call first filter which outright eliminates some options out of the table regarding things I might be spending time on. I will explain more about what it means later. So, the core story of a piece of creative work sort of acts as a first filter for content I would want to consume. I probably wouldn't have coined a new term for this if it was just about this, but as I was having my dinner few minutes ago, a pattern popped up in my mind, because I had applied a similar rule on a different thing as well. A little while ago, maybe one or two months, someone had asked me about potentially working with a specific FinTech company and I just started analyzing that company to understand what it actually does. So, their core product was basically a mobile app for saving committee but when I looked into it, it was just a credit app disguised as a savings committee app. It had much better UX and credit terms than most of the other credit apps, but this idea just couldn't settle with me, that they are a credit app but they disguise themselves as a savings committee app. It might not seem that much of a problematic thing to most, but to me, it certainly is. Their targeted userbase belongs to a culture where borrowing on interest is disallowed by their religion. What the company is essentially doing by this branding, is extending credit to those people who do not wish to borrow money because of their religious ideology or whatever, by tricking them into thinking that it's not credit. I probably wouldn't have a problem if it was just a credit app as my problem here is not any specific religious ideology, but the fact that the company does not respect its customers' religious ideology -- it's like a restaurant that serves alcohol in name of non-alcoholic beverage to a Muslim or serves beef in name of chicken to a Hindu. Anyways, I was just casually asked about this company and it was not like a job offer or something, so it was just something that popped up while I was trying to figure out the business model of that company. But after this thinking, I was certain, that this was not a company where I would like to work, essentially because it failed the first filter. Probably, more examples might up come up in my mind, but based on this, this is the basic idea of first filter. There are a lot of criterion and variables based on which one decides and prioritizes between several options, but there are some things, the presence of which just outright eliminates an option out of consideration; that specific thing is the first filter. Now, since first filter is what eliminates an option regardless of how much it desirability it has in other aspects, it means that first filter is and should be only applied on a problem regarding some core idea. For instance, with the first example, the core plot is the core point of the whole film or series (unless you are watching for specific reasons like learning cinematography) and if that feels sickening to me, I just don't bother with it, and with the second example, the core idea of a product company is what their product is, and if that product is sold around a deception, it doesn't make sense for me to work at such company. As I mentioned one could be watching a series to learn cinematography, one might also work at a company for some very specific reasons, and in that case he might not bother about the core business of the company. For things like work, these specific reasons do not exist for long-term, so I think it is a good idea to decide not to work at a place where you feel problem with the core idea of their whole business.

 

Ideal Weblog Platform

 Blogger is not the right platform for a tech person to use for long-term. It is only good for non-tech people. If someone has the technical expertise the best way is to compose the blog posts as .md files on Obsidian or VS code and have a static site generator convert them into html files to host somewhere.

But there is one major flaw I have seen in all SSGs is their closed look. By default all of these have an index of posts (maybe along with some excerpts) but not an open feed view of the weblog. This exactly is why Blogger felt compelling to me. This old-school bloggish feeling is not just about nostalgia, there's an open feel to it, because you don't get a list of posts that you can open if you wish to. Rather, you automatically get a feed of recent posts by which you get to know what the person has been recently upto. Interestingly, Substack also has this feature but this is specifically an issue with the idea of weblog and not essays, it isn't much useful there.

Consider the experience of reading a book. You randomly swift through pages, and if something catches your attention, you stop and read around. You do not first have to select a topic from the TOC to decide what to read. Weblog should be like this, where entries are open by default, and the homepage should be a feed of atleast around 20 recent entries from which the person can swift through by scrolling. And if someone wants a list of entries, there should be a table of content for that too (which is something blogger is missing).

Also, I still need to think whether I would want /essays or /weblog in subdomain of the site or in the slug. This is difficult to decide.

I am leaning towards latter because the written content is supposed to be the substantial thing on tamseel.pk. What else am I thinking of having on my site? I can't think of anything. So, why not have it under the main site. Because different subdomain is kind of a different site.

Apparently, it seems no pre-cooked solution would satisfy my needs. I will have to tinker with these SSGs to specifically achieve what I want. I can't tolerate Blogger's stupidly long permalinks for long.

Vibe Researching

 Even though I don't like it for myself, I thought about trying to do a full-fledged thesis work for a friend with the help of LLM. But unfortunately, I failed. Either it was a prompting skill-issue or that LLMs haven't reached that state yet.

My thoughts lean towards the latter. Although Claude is fairly good at writing functional code to achieve the desired result, it like its counterparts is not even nearly close at understanding statistical nuances. I think, it's about datasets and training. Training dataset even for complex programming problems is, I suppose, available in plenty amount, and all the documentations for programming languages do not have any conflicts. But firstly, the training amount on real world dirty statistics is available in less amount, and that different textbooks are written for different levels of understanding. And many a times, different authors use different terminologies for same things, and...

My brain's auto-forming connections with former thoughts, but yeah, LLMs basically extract the concepts from labels, and wherever the labels are not universally consensually defined for concepts, it might give LLMs a hard time extracting the concepts.

I don't think there's something fundamentally different about statistics. If it's tacit so is programming. The only thing I can think of is the log, or in other words, data for training. Getting LLMs to do non-nonsensical statistical work by giving them published research papers, will only be as good as showing LLMs only the GUIs or command outputs of programs instead of actually including the code for the program in the training dataset.

The concept of reproducibility in research does have been something people have started to talk about, but still, it's scarce. What we need is a log of statistician -- something like a field diary, which contains all assumptions, hypothesis, decisions, the rationale behind decisions, the bad results, the deciding of an alternate route, or in short, the whole truthful process of the work. And I believe it's not limited to statisticians only. More fields should be giving a thought about getting the tacit ideas documented down somewhere, so that we are able to build better LLMs.

Lingap - Extending the definition

 Earlier in a thread, I had coined lingap as a situation when there's a linguistic conflict, not a conceptual one.

Here I redefine -- or maybe, just rephrase the concept.

Picking from my earlier entry, there are concepts and then there are words. Concepts are the abstract entities that reside in our minds within the thoughts. Words are the labels we give to those abstract entities in order to communicate those thoughts. Concepts can also be related to physical objects, like water -- the molecules of which are made of hydrogen and oxygen, but still when I talk about water, I'm talking about that because there's an abstract concept of water in my mind too. I have already gone too far across this tangent in my head, and I don't need to put that down.

Anyways, so I was saying there are four types of situations. When two persons are talking about:

1. Same concept and the same label (normal communication)
2. Different concept and different label (normal communication)
3. Same concept but different label (like that folkstory about grapes where three persons were fighting about what to eat, and they were all saying grapes but in different languages)
4. Same label but different concept (this is what I call lingap)

I recently noticed this phenomenon when I shared the Intelligence essay by Talha with two individuals and I had to explain to both of them, how intelligence is a label for an abstract concept, and they should focus on what abstract concept the writer is trying to convey, and should not confuse it if against that label, we index a different concept in our mind. If so, we should forget what label/word/code the writer is using for the concept and focus entirely on the concept, and then decide whether we disagree or agree with the concept. After that, we have all the time to argue what would be a good label for it.

So, lingap is a situation where two persons are using a same word/label but both mean different concepts by the same word/label. But the problem, is not just that. The problem is that people by default don't distinguish between label and concepts. They think of them as intertwined. So the more people try to communicate/argue/discuss about the concepts, the more the discussion gets entangled, and the only way to resolve such a communication is to understand this phenomenon (which I have only labelled as lingap) and realize that labels and concepts are not intertwined and are completely separable.

Index Investing in a Nutshell

 So, finally, I have been able to come up with a single answer to the answer I spent a long time on.

Honestly, it wasn't that difficult of a problem, and It is strange why it took me so long to reach the final conclusion. It was because I keep hopping in and out of certain topics I'm thinking about, and this one got completely knocked of my mind unless I was reminded of about it when the indices dropped because of the tensions arose between India and Pakistan.

So, the idea is simple. Savings are good. But value of money decreases over time because of inflation, so it is a good idea to not hold liquid money, rather invest it somewhere. Some people prefer to lend this money instead of investing it, which is, they would either deposit the money in a saving account which would earn interest which will help the money not lose its value, or they will lend it to some other entity like government, in the form of buying a government security such as T-bill or Savings Certificate (. Interestingly, in Pakistan's case, even what people deposit into bank, around 70% of that indirectly is a lending to the government because it is the biggest borrower from banks). Some people use the term investing for this as well, but I would suggest not to use this word because it confuses with the economic concept of investing which is different.

Investing means buying a stake in the business and getting the right to earn a proportion of the same reward as does the business, while lending is just buying the interest you would get back according to the terms. Both have risks. If the business, you have bought a stake in doesn't earn a profit, neither do you. On the other hand, if your borrower goes default, you lose all or some of the money you have lent. But generally, it is assumed that the probability of the lenders (banks/governments/businesses) going default is less than the businesses earning a loss. One may or may not agree with this assumption, but I think I'm going astray from what I originally intended to write, and I should maybe write about economics of it at some point later.

So, I prefer buying stakes at a business rather than just lending my savings to the banks which in turn might lend it to government or to businesses or to consumers (e.g. people financing cars/homes). For people, who don't have a significantly large amount of savings, the way to do this is to buy shares of companies that they think will remain profitable for years to come.

But, the thing is, how will you know which listed (the shares of which are traded on the stock exchange they are listed in) companies are a good business and which one's aren't? It turns out, finding that out is full-time profession of a lot of people. But if you don't want to spend a lot of time deciding which stocks to buy yourself, there's a simpler way -- buy a very diverse basket of shares of companies which are doing well in the stock market. But actually not buy all those shares yourself, but buy only shares of that basket. Those baskets are called indices and the shares of those baskets are called Index Funds or Index ETFs. Different indices (basket/collections of shares with different weightage) are defined by different companies, and they all have different criteria. So what you have to do is to select an index that covers a large no. of diverse companies that are persistently doing well in the stock market, and buy an index fund or ETF for that index. The company that decides the index will every once in a while make changes to the constituent stocks of the index and their weightage, and the index fund managers or ETF managers would update their holdings accordingly.

The, interesting thing is, that if you do this, across a time-horizon spanning years, you will earn higher returns on your investment even those full-time professionals. It is important to note that investment is made on time horizon usually spanning years. Some people buy and sell shares and other assets, on a day-to-day basis. That is called day-trading and is totally different than investment, and is somewhat similar to gambling because a big proportion of short-run fluctuations of these assets are not from the mechanism which results in its long term changes, but rather these short-term fluctuations come from perceptions of these day-traders about the difference between current and few-hours-future perceptions about a particular stock by other day-traders. And over a significant number of attempts, the expected-value of the no. of getting this perception of perception right (+ve) and wrong(-ve), is zero at best and negative at worst (for small players because large players have the power to sometimes manipulate the market). But this can occur only in time horizon of hours and days. Across months and years, the only thing that determines the value of a stock is how good that company is doing and is expected to do the business.

This entry is becoming entangled with no central point, so let me return to idea of what's the best approach for a NON-financial-expert with small savings.

I was talking about index fund. And yes, this has been historically proven, index funds on a longer time horizon have earned higher returns than majority of the professional stock-pickers. In US, the most popular index for this is S&P500, also recommended by an expert well reputed in this field -- Warren Buffet.

So what, I was looking for was what's the S&P500 alternative for PSX?

S&P500 includes 500 companies from around total of 6000+ companies from US's two major stock exchanges -- around 7%. In Pakistan, there's only one stock exchange PSX which lists 500+ companies, 7% of which makes around 35 companies. The principle of diversification requires you to have a higher no. of stocks in your portfolio (Portfolio is simply the basket of shares you have personally bought (and other assets). But on the other hand, if S&P500, includes only 7% of the companies, that is because those 7% stocks are those that make up around 80% of the total value of all shares of all stocks traded in the exchange (market capitalization of exchange). So, the ideal equivalent would be KSE-100 index of PSX which includes 100 companies that represent around 85% of PSX's market cap. Even though KSE-100 is the most widely used index for representing the stock exchange, there is no ETF available that tracks KSE-100 (I have yet to find out why).

In Pakistan, there are not index funds, but there are 9 index ETFs that also are traded on Stock Exchange. So, my task was to find out which one is best among these ETFs.

1. ACIETF - Alfalah Consumer Index ETF
2. HBLTETF - HBL Total Treasury ETF
3. JSGBETF - JS Global Banking Sector ETF
4. JSMFETF - JS Momentum Factor ETF - 10 only
5. MIIETF - Mahaana Islamic Index ETF - 30 companies
6. MZNPETF - Meezan Pakistan ETF - 12 only
7. NBPGETF - NBP Pakistan Growth ETF - 15 only
8. UBLPETF - UBLPakistan Enterprise ETF - 9 companies
9. NITGETF - NIT Pakistan Gateway ETF - 14 companies

For me, this was a rather simpler decision between MIIETF and MZNPETF - the two ETFs which only track stocks of those companies that fulfill Shariah-compliance criteria, the prominent result of which is that conventional banks are excluded, which is a good thing because Pakistani banks are making most of their profit by lending to government, and if I wanted to earn through lending, it would have been much simpler to just buy government issued Treasury Bills or Savings Certificate instead of purchasing stocks of banks which are indirectly earning profit by lending to the government. The banks in principle will never have a return significantly higher than the interest rate government is offering on its securities. However, I will apply my criteria to all of the ETFs.

The basic criteria is:

• Diversification
• Methodology
• Total Expense Ratio (Management Fees)

1. Diversification

HBLTETF, ACIETF, and JSGBETF are instantly out because they only target a specific sector. Then, we have to see number of stocks included in the index. Small number of companies means less diversification. Interestingly, the maximum number of stocks covered by the remaining is 30 by MIIETF which is followed by NBPGETF covering 15 and NITGETF covering 14. Interestingly, NIT Index tracked by NITGETF does not have a limit on maximum number of stocks rather it includes as many high market-cap-stocks that make up 50% of PSX's total market cap. Keep in mind S&P500 covers stocks making up around 80% of market cap. So, anything less than 50% is obviously out of question. Thus, we have only 3 candidates by this point. Among these, MIIETF is the best candidate from diversification perspective:

2. Methodology

An interesting thing I just found out is that NITGETF does not cover 50% of exchange's total free--float market cap, but rather 50% of KSE-100's free-float market cap, which means 50% of 85%, i.e. 42%.

Anyways, all three of these indices use free-float market capitalization methodology.

MIIETF includes top 30 stocks among all Shariah-compliant stocks. Upon checking, I found out, that apart from stocks of banks, only 3 stocks from KSE-30 index were excluded from MIIETF. DFML was excluded because it had debt-to-asset ratio of 133% while compliance requirement is <37%. POL and FFC were excluded because they did not meet the criteria of non-compliant income and non-compliant investment to assets ratio. POL belong to Oil Sector and MIIETF has substitutes for that, and for FFC, a fertilizer company, it doesn't matter because the two other ETFs are not including even a single stock from fertilizer sector, while MIIETF has other stocks from fertilizer sector.

MIIETF and NITGETF include weightage purely based on market capitalization while NBPGETF has 50% weightage from market cap and 50% from daily traded value with weightage capped between 3% and 10%.

NITGETF and NBPGETF have stricter and complex liquidity requirements while MIIETF has a single straightforward requirement of average daily traded value of PKR 10 million over the last 12 months.

MIIETF is recomposed quarterly while others are re-composed semi-annually.

3. Total Expense Ratio (TER)

The declared management fees are:

• MIIETF: Up to 0.70% p.a. of the net assets of the fund
• NBPGETF: Up to 0.75% of the net assets per annum
• NITGETF: 0.40% of the net asset per annum

But let us check their exact latest expense ratios from their April 25 fund manager reports.

	Management Fees	TER (YTD) including levy
MIIETF	0.5%	1.07%
NBPGETF	WEBSITE DOWN
NITGETF	0.4%	1.18%

Here, again MIIETF is the winner because of lower total expense ratio.

At this point, it was clear to me, that MIIETF is the right ETF to put your savings in. If suppose, MIIETF was not there, then my choice would have been NBPGETF (though I would have first confirmed its TER).

Steins;Gate

Watching Steins;Gate, all I can say is that the following comment by Talha Ashraf (when I had asked him about Serial Experiments Lain) was so right.

looking at the cover for this [Serial Experiments Lain] anime, hell no!

You know I've seen sad movies but the thing with dark animes is that the word sad does not cover it. They're on a whole different level. A dark anime will reach into your chest, squish your heart, pull it out, put it through a meat mincer, twice, and then put it back in its place while you try to grasp what happened.

There couldn't have been a more apt description.

Funnily, Serial Experiments Lain wasn't that dark. In a sense, you can say, it kind of was. But not in that way.

Notes on Pakistan's Nuclear Program

Yesterday some questions and thoughts made me curious about Pakistan's nuclear program, and I started reading about various aspects of it. Some brief unstructured notes.

• 1947-58 ?
• 1965 Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) was established
• 1958-69 Ayub Khan
• 1960 Dr Ishrat Hussain Usmani appointed chairman of PAEC
• 1960-67 Under Dr Ishrat Usmani's chairmanship, PAEC set up crucial infrastructure (like PINSTECH and KANUPP) for development of nuclear energy (for peaceful purpose). He set up PAEC scholarship which sent hundreds of brilliant students abroad for doctorate studies in fields of physics, mathematics, and engineering for developing human capital necessary for massive scientific projects of the country. 
• 1962 India's loss in Sino-Indian war increased political debate within India on development of nuclear weapon.
• 1964 Proponents of nuclear weapon within India ultimately achieved a green signal from India's Prime Minister in the name of so-called "peaceful nuclear explosive", accelerating the development
• 1965 Indo-Pak War
• 1965: Bhutto, then Foreign Minister met Pakistani scientist Munir Ahmad Khan in Vienna at IAEA meeting who informed him of India's development after which Bhutto started lobbying for development of nuclear weapons though Ayub Khan did not consider it.
  "If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own. We have no other choice" - Bhutto
• (unclear if Bhutto started lobbying after war before meeting Munir Ahmad Khan or after meeting him)
• 1969-71 Yahya Khan 
• 1971-77 Bhutto
• 1971, Dec. Indo-Pak War after Bhutto Election
• 1972, Jan 24: Multan Meeting with scientists where Bhutto explicitly expressed his decision to develop nuclear weapons. Dr Ishrat Usmani objected, while all other scientists were in favor.
• 1972, Jan: Tensions had been escalating between Bhutto administration and Dr Ishrat Usmani who was proponent of non-proliferation. Munir Ahmad Khan was appointed chairman of PAEC who led Pakistan's nuclear weapon program.
• 1974 India's Pokhran-I nuclear test (public but declared as peaceful test)
• PK's Progress was slow before but it immediately increased with it
• 1974: Dr Abdul Qadir Khan who had worked on translation of URENCO's centrifuge designs wrote to Bhutto
• 1976: AQ Khan returned to Pakistan. Later friction developed between him and others at PAEC and then upon writing to Bhutto, ERL (later KRL) was established for Uranium enrichment (instead of plutonium which PAEC was attempting) and Khan was put in charge
• 1977-88 Zia ul Haq
• 1979: Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan and Pakistan's importance for US (US pressure to halt nuclear program was lifted off)
• 1983 March 11: Pakistan's first (confidential) Nuclear Weapon Cold Test
• 1988-90 Benazir
• 1990-93 Nawaz Sharif
• Munir Ahmad Khan retired as chairman of PAEC and Ishfaq Ahmed Khan took his role
• 1993-97 Benazir
• 1997-99 Nawaz Sharif
  
• 1998, May 11: India's Pokhran-II: Public Nuclear Weapon Test by which India claimed to be a nuclear state
• 1998, May 28: First Public Nuclear Test
• 1999-2007 Musharraf
• 2001: Both Dr Abdul Qadir Khan and Ishfaq Ahmed Khan were dismissed by Musharraf (from exactly what?)
• 2003, Oct: BBC China cargo ship was found with centrifuge machines sent to Libya
• Bush apparently handed over evidence of proliferation to Pakistan
• 2004, Feb 4: AQ Khan made public confession and apology
• Musharraf issued a pardon and AQ Khan was house-arrested with no further investigations
• 2008-13 PPP
• 2009: Court declared AQ Khan free citizen, ending his house arrest
• 2013-18 PMLN
• 2018-22 Imran Khan
• 2022-23 Coalition
• 2024- Coalition

One strange thing was how Dr Abdul Qadir Khan was (and still is) given publicity and much credit for development of the weapon even though he had role only in the Uranium enrichment process, which no doubt, is one of the most crucial step for the weapon but still, it is outright wrong to regard him as father of Pakistan's nuclear program. If there was someone who could have been given this label, it should be Munir Ahmad Khan. But still, it is not as startling that why Dr Abdul Qadir Khan was awarded such prominence, after realizing the role he had played in the fishy work [redacted] after Pakistan had developed the capabilities, and how easily [redacted] got away with it putting all the blame on a single person.

Some links (though I didn't save lot of them):

• https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Pakistan/PakOrigin.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20160618211847/http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_79D2F752DA9944C8AFFF4D724FE6412C
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvAvsNaG7cE
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDm9uzoY3JM

One thing that is needed when getting into these things, is that whenever reading any certain thing, you have to consider where does that specific person has a bias towards. It helps rectify exaggeratingly negative or positive statements, but you can still get objective information. And when you do it from all sides, you can then conclude what really happened by filtering all info to see what puzzle pieces actually match.

What is a weblog?

 Words are not concepts. Words are the codes we choose to represent concepts. The apparent thing is that different people use different codes for same concepts, i.e. they have different words for the same concepts in different languages. But the non-apparent thing is equally usual. The word for a given concept might start being used for a different concept. Now this seems weird, because theoretically it would be pretty confusing if the concepts that our codes represent keep changing all the time; that would make communication all the difficult. But it happens all the time. Codes remain; concepts don't.

The problem, for now, is what to do if you have a concept in mind, for which their was a word, but that word started getting used for something else - a different concept. The reason the code got switched for another concept in the first place, was that the initial concept had gotten out of fashion and thus some other more fashionable concept had acquired its code. By fashion, I do not intend to associate any subjective preferences of mine, but rather I intend to define it as a representation of what people at a given point in time and space interact more frequently with. Thus, this initial concept which lost its code is something not a lot of people are frequently interacting with. But those who want to interact with it, I think, should choose a new code for it; otherwise the concept they want to interact with will dissolve its identity with the new concept that had acquired its code. That's what I think.

Luckily, the concept I have in my mind used to have a somewhat longer code which got shortened out, but the shortened out code got acquired by a more fashionable concept, so I thought that the original unshortened version of the code might be good to represent that very concept.

That was the preface to today's blog entry.

Weblog is a code I have decided to use to represent the concept which is quite different from the concept which is nowadays commonly represented by the word blog. Weblog in its strict sense is a log on the web. That is a fair enough decoding of the code and representation of the concept, but here are a few other things:-

1. Weblog is a personal project.
2. It is mostly a log of observations, thoughts, ideas, and/or activities of the person.
3. The weblog is primarily intended for a very limited audience. The weblogs would either be about things that only they would find interesting who find that person interesting (friends and potential friends), or that they could revolve around a niche area, so that only those people interested in that niche would find the weblog somewhat interesting.

Weblogs were in fashion in 2000s when internet and computers were something people felt excited about, and the possibilities of what new possibilities had opened before them with this new technology seemed to be endless. One of these newly opened possibilities was exchange of information (thoughts, ideas, observations, descriptions of what they were up to at the moment, etc.) with people who were close in interestedness space of things but were further away in physical space. The excitement totally made sense.

The code weblog got shortened to blog, but it kept representing the same idea. But what this code represented started changing in 2010s and by late 2010s, the concept it represented was totally different.

As of now, the word blog usually represents a portal for corporatish announcements, regurgitated self-help-ish bait for people unable to find a way out of their problems, and most-of-all, a specifically formatted SEO-driven gibberish religiously written in an attempt to please the almighty Algo-lords.

To dissociate the former concept from the latter, I have retorted to using the code weblog for the former.

Weblogs are not out of existence, they are just out of fashion among the people who populate the cyberspace. The evolution of sociological nature of the cyberspace is an interesting phenomenon but maybe that's a topic for another time.

Also, by writing this entry, I do not attempt to bring weblogs in fashion all by myself. That would be a very big undertaking. I merely am a stubborn fan of the concept, who is clarifying what he's up to.

And this is what I am up to. And I hope this weblog remains to be an okay enough representation of what I have been up to all the time since today.

That's all for today!

Busy Day

 After spending hours trying to debug a Critical Error on a client's WordPress site, realized that I was debugging it in the wrong place. I had SSHed into the VM on GCP while I myself had transferred that site out of GCP to my own server when it was impacted by malware. Now, I was in the GCP server seeing woah, there's malware here, trying to clean it up and then trying to debug, but nothing seemed to change anything, tried everything. Eventually decided I will move this backup stored in wp-content to my own server and then will set up a new site there and restore that backup, and it was after I had copied the backup to my own server, that I realized that site is being served from my server and not GCP's. Meh

Turns out, it was a theme issue, which got fixed by replacing theme content manually.

Then spent some time streamlining my personal site publishing workflow. Firstly, I created a proper git rep on my local device and version stored the previous versions in git. Then, I added a mechanism to push the changes live on my server (not git) by just executing ./.deploy.sh

That took some time but not much. But then spent hours trying to figure out how to set up conf on my HestiaCP server which is running apache + nginx reverse proxy, to perform the following two seemingly simple functions:-

• Serve respective html document (domain.tld/essay.html) when user visits a non.html url (domain.tld/essay) if it exists
• When user visits url with .html appended (domain.tld/essay.html), redirect to clean version (domain.tld/essay)
  

What I essentially wanted was a single cleaned url for every piece of content. Because it doesn't seem a good practice to have two urls serving the same content.

But it wasn't as simple as it seems, primarily because of my messy HestiaCP apache + nginx setup. I really should move to pure nginx server but I'm being lazy about that. Anyways, when I figured out it should be done in nginx conf and not apache, the issue was I couldn't edit the main conf rule because HestiaCP rebuilds it every time. So, I had to add to nginx.conf_custom, but somehow it wasn't working. Realized, they should be added in nginx.ssl.conf_custom since my site has an https redirect.

But now, one rule was working but not the other. That was because we can't add a new location tag in the custom conf which is being included from the main conf file. So, I had to use a different rule (Even though this took me much time, but thanks to LLMs, I could get the rules atleast, otherwise I would have to spend a whole day understanding rules, which I wouldn't have spent on it) for that which wasn't a / location tag.

This worked, but it broke the www to non-www redirect. Figured out that custom conf is included before the redirect conf and that is why, when a redirect rule is matched in custom conf, later rules aren't applied. So, I added that part (which hestia has separated out) in my custom conf as well, and finally I had it working.

Still, a url such as http://www.tamseel.pk/internet-companions.html is redirecting 4 times before reaching out https://tamseel.pk/internet-companions which isn't great and can obviously be fixed, but maybe that's for another day.

-----

Also, I listened some more part of Henrik's recent podcast and there was this part where he describes how the book by a mathematician, with title something like proofs and refutations, was helpful in his internalizing of this method of increasing the surface complexity of the problem - no, I guess that's not a good description. But, I thought of it like as was talking with Talha on how there are no books on how to think. This seemed to be (according to Henrik's description) a book that was indirectly about how to think.

Not getting a new insight

 I was listening to Henrik just a while ago, when something he said popped up a whole bubble inside me head. It was like a flaw very serious flaw that was stopping me from doing things was developing silently all the while I had no idea that it existed and Henrik was mentioning something like he too had this. Quoting him (and it's just a bit - I recommend listening the whole answer):

But I remember like a big thing I think I can see... A big thing that's changed in my writing is that I used to be, when you're... When you're like a blogger, there's a strong incentive or like a strong expectation, a norm around like that you're going to have a big insight. And and what you see that happens a lot is that people come up with these new frameworks and this new way of thinking about it, which I don't think is... That's like an ego thing - you want to have like a clever new insight and and I felt I was kind of doing that too much at some point. Kind of had picked up that style of writing and and and it was hard and uncomfortable. How do you sort of push beyond trying to be insightful and like, letting go of that ego thing and like, writing being okay with just writing the obvious things or writing things that people have already said but but maybe just adding your nuance or reacting to it without having to like, be that cool guy who invented that new framework or whatever. So, so, so that was one of the things that I noticed.

I think that's something stopping me from producing good work, because I want to be that clever guy even though there's lots of obvious stuff to rethink about.

AI & Sentience

 Read something about AI's sentience on twitter which I was unable to grasp, so let me write down some thoughts.

The first problem arises is that not all people mean the same thing by consciousness and sentience.

For example, are all animals sentient? What about trees and plants? And bacteria? Viruses?

If consciousness or sentience is something advanced than "life" then where do people think the line exists?

If it's the same thing (which most people don't think) then a defining point is the will to survive. All desires originated from the will to survive. Some animals like bees and humans also accept death not because they are acting against that will but rather their will is of communal survival. But sometimes, some individuals do act against that will, and that's the exceptions.

On some level, it seems hilarious to think of whether or not AI is conscious or sentient, because what does it matter. Do flies think humans are conscious? Do we think flies are conscious? What do our perceptions affect each other?

One examplish way is to say if something's sentient they can feel pain, and thus we should avoid giving them pain which is a reasonable thing. I think we believe that for all living organisms it's true although the sensations of pain are very limited in primitive life forms. Also, when we see a greater benefit in our own alleviation of pain, we neglect that of other organisms (which is a separate discussion, which can't be unfolded here).

Do AIs feel pain? I don't think so.

I think Feynman put it very well in his Computer Lecture from which the clip Can Machines Think was taken.

Planes mimic birds, but it doesn't mean they perform that same function of flight by same process. LLMs mimic language but through an entirely different process. But the thing is, LLMs are not mimicking brain. Brains receives sensory impulses of numerous forms and have complex sensations regulated by complex chemicals called hormones. LLMs on the other hand are given bits and bytes containing textual or visual information without any feedback mechanism involving actual pain or pleasure. Surely objective functions serve the same purpose, but they don't work the same way humans behave.

So what do these people even mean by sentience. If it's a functionality, then LLMs do have it alright. No doubt about it. If it's what we feel, they certainly don't have it. It seems the problem is that these people want to extend a property associated with human beings to a newly invented thing. But properties of things can't be borrowed from other things, they come from within. If you try to find out mileage of a cheetah, it's senseless because a cheetah does not consume gasoline and performs a single primary function of running. It's the same way trying to find if AIs are sentient. If AI has a property, it should be derived from its characteristic itself, and not be labelled from outside. 

Now, the interesting point though, is that since AI is a simulation of how humans speak, it can claim to be sentient, but that's because we designed it to be that way, we designed it to mimic our language. They don't work the way human beings work. So we can't just accept that what they say about themselves is a true representation of what they are or the hypothetical feelings they might have, and not just its functional tendency to mimic human language. 

Fixing Education - 1am thoughts

Hey guys,

It was fun stalking your discord server. Had joined it months ago when I connected with FA maybe on Linkedin, but forgot to check it later on. Interesting stuff. Also, watched bits from your podcast. 

Thought to share my two cents on education system, but I see no point regurgitating the same thing. You guys have (mostly) got it right. I also once shared a curated list of interesting essays on this topic. This one by Paul Graham is specifically good: https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

The part about fixing it is the tricky part. But it seems like something I have moved past. Used to think a lot about this in early days of my university.

[discord doesn't allow long messages, so will add the rest in thread]

TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:20 am

The part about fixing it is the tricky part. But it seems like something I have moved past. Used to think a lot about this in early days of my university. First, I thought students were wrong, we need to fix how students approach their learning. Then, I realized professors were wrong, because they don't encourage behavior. That should be fixed first. Then, I was like it's not their fault, students' learning capabilities are already too messed up in school/college board ke exams in many cases to an un-fixable degree, so we need to fix school education first, which is even more tricky thing because we don't have good enough teachers at school level. The reason it seems is that at school-level parents oversee their children's educational progress, but parents don't understand the dynamics of the ever-so-changing world themselves and think only in terms of grades, because of their own insecurities or status games e.g. flan ke bache ki to ye position aai hai.. So, in most cases, parent's incentives aren't properly aligned towards actual learning of the students themselves. So then, I was like we need to fix parenting. But I got stuck there and have been stuck for a while. Because I don't know how this can be fixed for masses. Maybe I can homeschool my future-kid, and provide him such an environment where his natural curiosity is not repressed, and thus he learns things himself, but that would be because I have internalized such a worldview. How do we convince the masses to adopt this worldview (which seems to be correct)? I don't know. We need something like cultural change, but I certainly don't know where that would come from.

One solution though that I came upon though from a different path was when I was thinking of the situation of educational NGOs for children and how even relatively well-funded ones are supporting only a very limited students. The potential solution is something that I haven't thought about fully, but it seems it should be somehow self-fund by getting children to work on useful meaningful work that the institution can commercialize upon. The hardest problem though is that it would be deemed illegal because of child labor. But if children can do meaningful work for some allocated amount of time of their day where they get to learn things, I don't see any harm in it. In fact, homework is also kind of child labor except that it's useless and children hate it, and it doesn't benefit the school either.

Aaron Swartz who was a prodigy in programming had written this essay when he was 14yo:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020819014933/http://www.aaronsw.com/school/2001/01/21

He argues how denying children useful and meaningful work is actually stripping liberty away from them and is harmful for them.

Well, this was a very long tangent from the initial question but that's how thoughts flow. I have more thoughts on it, but I would be curious to know what are your take about these ones.

TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:24 am

So, my current take is like it's messed up from all directions, but if we need to fix something first, it should be parenting where we give children the liberty to explore and learn things on their own

FA — 27/04/2025 1:27 am

Thanks for sharing your very raw and authentic trail of thoughts. 💙

Agree with your thoughts mostly and I consider the solution you gave a viable one for higher education at least.

🙌

TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:28 am

Despite the fact that I hate giving introductions, I think some minimum info would be fine. I'm Tamseel - currently in last semester undergrad in Economics and spend most of my spare time tinkering with computers and reading blogs on the internet. 

FA — 27/04/2025 1:29 am

I’m a fan of yours from LinkedIn 🙋‍♂️

TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:30 am

Oh wait, am I that popular?

I guess Talha is to blame for inflating people's prceptions 

TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:30 am

I think I would think more on this and write an essay/blogpost

I suppose you might be familiar with Talha Ashraf from linkedin as well. I have had conversations with him on the topic, and he has interesting thoughts on it as well. His main thesis is that education system is a monopoly and to fix it, you need to fix things from the demand side of talent. E.g. a lot of companies prefer students with ivy league degrees, but if you create a good company where you don't give a shit about people's credentials and hire purely on basis of how good they are at solving problems, that's something closer to breaking the monopoly.

FA — 27/04/2025 1:44 am

I am definitely familiar with Talha bhai. 💯

That’s actually a super interesting take.

FA — 27/04/2025 1:52 am

If companies don’t care about degrees and being from ivy league etc. people wouldn’t care either. 

This should solve the “credential problem”. 

Interesting people are kid & adult at the same time

 I was down the Aaron Swartz rabbit-hole once again, and it made me notice how some of the interesting people are essentially the same kind in both childhood and adulthood.

In childhood, they do serious things and work with passion and think about things as if they were adults, and in adulthood too seem to be unconcerned by things most adults take too much seriously.

In other words, although their experience and worldview changes as they grow older, but an essential attitude of theirs remain the same. If it's fine to enjoy yourselves, then it's equally fine in both childhood and adulthood, and if you should be serious about thinking about things and the work you do, that should be equally valid in both cases as well.

This doesn't seem to be how most people behave.

Thoughts on Parenting

The following is an archive entry from a chat with Talha where he had asked me how I had learned English as he had done it by consuming media in English. I mentioned the same along with mentioning how my mother sometimes used to make us write about random things such as some character from the cartoons we were watching and so on. He later mentioned how internet-era kids are so better at English comprehension, on which I objected on the ground, although their English is better, overall today's content is mostly slop and it has made kids dumber. I then explained that by slop means how the context for the videos or the kind of content kids watch is fake. Kids continue watching baby stuff and that's also because parents want to continue thinking their kids as babies. During the chat, he had shared a sample video for what his nephew watched when he was <1 years old which was this. 

The next day, I replied to the message with the link to this video and wrote the following which makes this blog entry.

Solitude

 It turns out different people mean different things by solitude. So let me put different words for the different ideas.

Firstly, there's the idea where someone is both physically and virtually disconnected from other people, such as when people abandon their phones etc. and go to a far away isolated place. This sort of solitude tries to minimize social interaction with other people. We can call it external solitude.

In contrast to this, is the idea of internal solitude. In this type, one might be living among people in a seemingly usual way. He might be living in a hostel sharing room with his roommate, taking a bus, buying grocery, etc. So apparently, he is doing social interactions, however, none of these social interactions actually take space in his mind, because his mind is mostly occupied with his own ideas.

The more I am writing, the more it's becoming apparent that these classification are not true classifications but rather loose attributes with blurry distinctions, but nonetheless, I'll continue these thoughts and would later reprocess them to see if they make sense.

Then there's this another distinction based on the perspective of the person in solitude. One is thought solitude where one tries to block out input of information or thoughts from external sources (save one when one is reading?) so that he can spend his time thinking about and refining the thoughts or ideas already accumulated in his mind.

While, the other form of this is poetic solitude where the person derives a poetic pleasure in spending his time in contemplation of beauty of the things around him. But it's not just about contemplation, I think, it's also about becoming more receptive of your surroundings, in order to see what is hidden in plain sight. And so, it does not necessarily have anything to do with writing poetry, but those who actually wrote good poetry did so by this means.

Both these forms are interesting, but important to note these are two distinct things. There's also another offshoot which is loosely attached to this classification which is the meditative form of solitude. I don't know much about it, but from what I have heard or read, it involves removing each and everything from your mind, whether ideas, thoughts or whatever. So, you are neither contemplating your surroundings, nor your own thoughts, nor others' thoughts, but just trying to empty your mind, sort of like an F5 for your brain.

I guess these are all forms that come to my mind now. These forms although distinct are not permanent. There was a time when I used to spend some part of my day in poetic solitude and some part of my day in thought solitude, specially in my early university days, since I had come to a somewhat new social environment, I was being more perceptive of the new surrounding (and I also was being some sort of poetic about it), but after 2 years, the poetic part almost faded away, which sometimes feel strange to me because it was nice too, but these are the things for which there's no point forcing yourself into.

Similarly, some people might spend most time in internal solitude, but sometimes they need external solitude as well to amplify the effect of internal solitude.

A weird trait

  I just noticed a very weird thing that atleast happens to me. I had known for long that this effect applied to me subconsciously, but recently, I just got note of a very concrete example rather than the previous abstract ones.

So, that thing is to read a kind of principle or advice or hack, then absolutely forget it, like you don't even have the foggiest of notion about it. Then, the scenario where that advice is applicable comes up. You do exactly as said in advice. You are asked why you did that. You give some very sound explanation of why you felt you should have done that, but you have absolutely no idea that this was some advice you had read, and had you not read that thing, the chances of you doing that, would have been low. Well, I don't have any evidence for what I would have done had I not read that thing would be not according to the advice, but it seems to me that the thing I did in that scenario is niche enough that it must have been influenced by some degree by the thing I had read.

------

Much Later Edit: I think the following tweet by Anu Atluru explains this phenomenon:

the purpose of reading a book isn’t to retain information, it’s to refine your worldview just a little bit with each one

— anu (@anuatluru) January 2, 2024

While reading, we are subconsciously modifying our worldview or internal model in view of new areas of thought extended by the author, if they seem to be true. But from the tweet, it seems not all people do this.

Book Ratings and Time Discounting

 An interesting phenomenon I observed while I was updating list of books I've read on Goodreads, is that humans discount the rating of books they read later in their life. The reason is not so complicated. When a person develops a habit of reading, the marginal learning of each book is high, but as he gets on reading and has accumulated some concepts over time, the marginal learning starts plummeting. The problem is that this trend is not consistent. For instance, if a person ventures into a new domain, the marginal learning will once again be high, and if he returns to a field he has already explored, it will be low. Due to that, we cannot use a formula to discount the earlier ratings of books.

The phenomenon I described earlier applies when ratings are made at the time of reading. However, if you ask a person at any point in time, to rate all books he has read, he now might rate earlier read books lower than what he would had he rated it on time of reading. This is because when a reader rates a book in retrospect, the book's learnings seem smaller relative to the accumulated learnings at the time of rating.

This leads to some interesting questions:-

• What is a more appropriate way of getting rating for books
• Does this phenomenon also applies to other things like grading. e.g. a teacher starts grading papers, and the earlier papers get graded higher than the last ones, given same quality of paper attempted?

On Comfort Zone

 Whenever someone asks my take on some topic, or whenever I see two persons debating about some topic, the first thing I do is to ask, "What do you exactly mean by <topic>?" Oftentimes, that unclogs that debate, and some real discussion starts.

Once you start throwing this question at all places where its applicable (even when you hear a debate on YouTube, you can ask yourself, what do these people exactly mean by that thing they are arguing about?), you will realize the insane amount of times people misbelieve what other person means by something.

If the thing is a catchphrase or a buzzword, the probability of this problem existing is nearly 100%.

Anyways, who hasn't heard "get out of comfort zone" and all those stuff?

But it is insane how many people haven't even thought about what they mean by comfort zone. Most of the times people say this, it means "do things that seem difficult to you". But if you think about it, is there even any point in doing something just because it seems difficult to you? Without any conditionality, this is absolute nonsense. Same logic applies to similar phrases like "things that don't kill you make you stronger".

So, Tamseel Kun, are you going to defy the conventional wisdom of ancient masters?

Haha, yes, I am. What can you do? Beat it if you can.

Just kidding.

If you ever take a survey from a population to measure the extremeness of difficulty of things that people think they are supposed to do when it is said "to get out of comfort zone", you will find out a systematic bias in the results. That extremeness of difficulty will be much higher for those people who tend to be weaker in those areas of life that are considered to be more important by their social circle even if they are exceptional in some area of life that is not held in very high regard by the society. Meanwhile an average respondent measures the things he thinks people are supposed to do to get out of comfort zone as much less difficult than the first group.

I believe this phenomenon is general but the specific area that brought me to this concept was socializing. It is very common for introverts to receive the advice to socialize more even when they hate it, and it only drains their precious energy which could have found a much better use in some other thing.

For people having some sort of mental difficulties, it is a torture sometimes to get out of their comfort zone, but it is bizarre how widely we exclaim this thing without understanding it.

Coming back to conventional wisdom, if you think about some giant leap that you made in your life because of doing something difficult, you will realize that even though it felt hell of a difficult, there was still some safety net out there (even if you don't realize at first). For anyone who thinks, it is important to take unbounded risks to achieve some sort of greatness in life, I would suggest you to rethink your ideology, and let me know if you conclude that you are right. 

On Illnesses

Broadly speaking, man suffers from two illnesses, one that he is born with and the other one he acquires from his environment. The former kind of illnesses do not necessitate inheritance of some sort of genetic defect, rather it is quite possible that that illness is born only with the birth of that person, such that the mother became a channel for passing that illness from the environment to the newborn during the gestation period. Of the former kind of illnesses that one does inherit from parents can also be classified similarly, i.e. the parent(s) acquired those diseases from the environment during their life, or they were born with it, and if they were born with it, similar recursive logic can follow.

If one sets to find how diseases are cured, it should be a matter of curiosity to wonder where did the ill acquired his illness. The way many of the diagnoses are done in recent medical practice, the complex chain of illness is often neglected, and only first-level source is inquired about. This often leads to mis-classifying congenital diseases as originating from environment and environmentally-acquired diseases as congenital.

Let me explain using some simple examples.

The well used as primary source of drinking water in a village gets infected with cholerae. All village residents drink the same water; many get infected with cholera, but not all. Why not all? They have a strong immunity system. True. Based on some demographic characteristics, we can find out probabilities of a village resident getting infected, e.g. children and old people have a weaker immunity system and hence higher probability, etc. Among those getting infected, some would have a reason for having their immunity system weaker than the attack of the disease, but some won't have any reason. These people who, if they were healthy, should have an immune system strong enough to combat the disease, but they didn't.

So, in this scenario, among those getting infected, there would be two kinds, (i) for which it is natural to get infected e.g. children, or old-aged people, and (ii) those who have another illness. The people pertaining to type (ii) again either were born with that illness, or acquired it during their life. But it is this other illness that is the actual illness and not the cholera. No doubt, hygienic measures should be adopted to avoid the spread of this disease, but this other illness that a significant portion of population suffer with, too demands serious attention.

Unlike the level-1 cause (Vibrio cholerae), the level-2 cause (the pre-existing illness) is never given attention. The reason for that, is that it is quite possible that a person has some form of illness (congenital or environmentally-acquired) and it stays dormant during the whole life, and the person might live through his life without ever getting in much trouble due to that illness, and hence never noticing that he has some sort of personal illness as well.

Now, let's turn to another class of diseases that is commonly referred to as mental diseases. Many of them are considered to be congenital. I think that among those mental diseases considered as congenital, many actually aren't and are rather environmentally acquired. I don't have any factual evidence for it, but the way I see it, the perspective with which this problem is looked at alters the understanding of it. To explain further the reasoning for my belief, let me introduce two terms, one is the substance, and the other is stimuli. In the last example, I used another term, personal illness, by which I meant that the substance of the person was ill, and the stimulus - the cholerae bacterium, even though a cause in the chain, was a secondary cause and thus it should be concern of our secondary attention. Primary attention should be given to the personal illnesses borne by those members of the population.

If you think about this affair, you'd come to the conclusion that it really is a matter of perspective. It is the matter of whether we call a certain person's substance susceptible to a certain stimulus ill or not. In diagnosis of many of physical diseases, if a stimulus is found to be responsible for the disease, the health of the substance is not brought to question. Contrarily, in diagnosis of mental diseases, it is most often the substance that is considered to be unhealthy and stimuli in the causal chain are rarely held to be the primary cause of illness.

So, the real question that arises in diagnosis of illnesses is that if a substance is susceptible to certain stimuli, is that susceptibility in itself a bad thing or not?

Regarding many of the mental diseases, the susceptibility of certain stimuli is a part of that person's idiosyncratic nature, which I believe cannot and should not be termed as the illness in itself. The very same idiosyncratic nature that make some people susceptible to certain stimuli, oftentimes also grants wonderful intellectual capabilities. Therefore, for mental illnesses, I believe focus should be on taking care of those stimuli instead of altering the substance through medications. Thinking again about the idea that it not correct to call such a substance to be actually ill, one realizes that the term mental illness itself is incorrect for a large variety of problems that we term as mental illnesses.

If we are able to get more clue about even the first few levels in the causal chain for our illnesses, it would be a breakthrough in the way we cure our diseases, keep ourselves healthy, and distinguish illness from what is not actually an illness.

Anti Research

 So one of our professors assigned us some group presentations. And there was one topic or argument, and he asked a bunch of students to present or debate or give arguments in favor of it (whatever that was) and then to a bunch of other students ask to prepare presentation with arguments against that thing. Then, he explained how you have to consult sources, like research papers, news articles, and this and that in order to form basis of your arguments. Like you have to first review such material and then you use those sources to back your argument.

This pissed me off so much. I asked what if the topic that I have been asked to present in favor of, is something I am against, and same thing can apply vice versa. He didn't understand my point and said that you have to use sources and blah blah. But I was so angry and I think I couldn't control my frustration and that's why I was unable to articulate my point clearly, and it came out something like, 'it's not the way it is. Something either is, or it isn't. How can one pre-decide if it is or it isn't.' Yeah, I know it was very weirdly phrased. My voice this time was slightly loud and had some kind of argumentative tone in it. He replied the same blah blah but at the end he said something like, that's what research is; to find things out. I knew it wasn't any use. I said nothing.

Two of my friends later told me that sir didn't understand the question. And on some level, I think that yes he didn't understand my question, but not because I articulated it badly (my friends were smart enough to understand me, he wasn't?), it's because he had been trained and indoctrinated in that manner.

There is an enormous amount of people who don't understand what research is. They think research or science or whatever the academia is supposed to do, is to find out things (which I think is correct). But their way of finding things out is so wrong. They think of it like finding the right source to quote, or finding the right data to analyze, or the right econometric model to apply, or finding some other right thing to do, and this kind of finding will result in production of some academic work. Yes, it will produce academic work but not valuable work.

What a true researcher simply needs to find is truth. Some overlooked, un-discovered piece of truth. That is the end. Rest are all means. Why don't people such distinguished understand a matter that simple. You can't give conclusions to people, and ask them to research arguments in favor of the conclusion because that exactly is the opposite of research. IT'S ANTI-RESEARCH!!

I don't know to what extent this applies to academia at other places but atleast here, we are all producing an enormous amount of anti-research work.

Thank you for coming to my Rant-Talk.