The (yet) Unsolved Problem - Part 2

 In my previous post, I have provided a much more broader but related context for what I will be discussing here.

In some conversations I had with some friends, the conversation naturally gravitated from the thinking-problem in the masses to the academia to the children and then to parenting. We observe the children in our surroundings, and the way they are being brought up, and we consider it to be very much problematic. There is this one extreme where children's brains are being lobotomized by them being given unsupervised access to mobile phones at a very young age. The parents of such children had not had these technologies when they were young, and so they do not have any mental framework or policy to be able to supervise their children. But then there's an even bigger problem that is only going to be exacerbated in the near future. The generation of people that are having their first newborns at this time, or will have their first newborns in next 5-10 years is the generation of people who themselves have an extremely unhealthy relationship with technology. Children are excellent learners, and the behaviors they are going to learn from their parents will be extremely problematic. This situation is extremely depressing.

My roommate has a very troubled relationship with teachers at his academic institute, and in one such a rant, he commented that if only the Principal would take one suggestion from him, it would make his life easier. He would suggest that, they should check teachers' social media profiles for signs of mental maturity before hiring them. I asked him how on earth will then this normie institute find teachers that pass the criteria?

This is the social environment in which our children will be born, where parents and teachers (to whom parents have started entrusting their children at a younger and younger age) are not mentally well capacitated to provide children an environment that allows them to develop a thinking capability. 

All of this might sound dull and gloomy, but the situation does not warrant pessimism. I believe children have extraordinary capabilities beyond our imagination. Have you ever tried learning a new language? You probably haven't, but if you know about the process, it's not an easy one. But look at children, they learn a completely new language without any guided or structured process within span of a few years, and that too effortlessly. This is crazy if you think about it. You just have to put them in the relevant environment and they learn insane things. (These children then grow up and become human beings who solve complicated problems and build unimaginable stuff.)

But as I mentioned, creating such an environment for our children is not going to happen by itself. It will require a conscious and sustained effort on our part. That is why I have read and thought (and argued with my mother) a great deal about homeschooling and parenting.

However, there's one point where all my previous frameworks of thinking break down. And I had to accept this when my friends asked me about the same point, that I haven't been able to figure out a solution for that part (yet). The problem is this. You can think and conjecture all day about what kind of environment children should have, but there is a crucial detail you are omitting from the scene, and that is that a child has two parents. If your partner does not have a shared understanding of this whole problem, and is not aligned with you in these principles guiding your child's upbringing, this is simply not going to work. Period.

So, the sub-problem that is unsolved yet is this: How do you find a life partner who aligns with your goals and is similarly committed in achieving those goals together?

The fact that my framework of thinking breaks down at this sub-problem means that it needs serious thinking. And when I think about this, then I do think a part of problem is that we (or at-least I) shy away from thinking or discussing this problem. So, the purpose of writing all this, is to stop sweeping certain crucial details of this problem under the rug, and confront them.

For a person to be the right life partner for you, they must align with you in the broader principles of how you are going to live your life. These broader principles are linked with the context I discussed in first post. One aspect of it is about what kind of things would we be spending most of our lives doing, and second is what kind of environment will we be giving to our children in which they will spend the transformative years of their lives. If two persons, do not align in both of these aspects, then I don't see any point in the marriage or relationship of such persons.

So, how do you find a person who aligns with you in these aspects?

I don't know. So, let me look at how it's being done in my environment.

In my environment, I see two different cultures which have a separate mechanism for how people choose their life partners. One is the culture to which I belong. This culture's mechanism is more traditionally rooted where matches are made or suggested by the greater kin and relies on the kin's perception of the two individuals but even more than that, their perception of the two individuals' parents, because a fruit inherits the characteristics of the same tree. If the two families find themselves compatible or aligned in their values and socio-cultural aspects, the match is made.

The second culture's mechanism is relatively a new one, where an individual's kin or even parents have effectively no role in such a decision. While the first culture discourages pre-marital relationship between two opposite gendered persons, the second culture freely allows it. In fact, since there is effectively no role of the kin, the pre-marital relationship is exactly the mechanism through which people are supposed to find the person they are willing to spend the rest of their lives with. Marriage is a commitment between two individuals for spending the rest of their lives together. In this mechanism, there is a pre-marital process called dating. During dating, the two individuals live together and kind of simulate the post-commitment life, to try to see if that will end up well, before actually making that life-long commitment.

This is a very rough sketch of the mate-matching mechanisms I see in the two cultures.

I have described these two mechanisms, because they are distinct in their methodology and the people I get to observe and know about, follow either of these mechanism, and it would not be logical that while observing the situation of their relationships, we do not keep in consideration that mechanism.

So, when I observe the current situation of relationships in the people from both the cultures, the situation is pretty bad at both places. However, the nature of relationship problems is different in the two cultures.

Let's consider the second culture first. In the second culture, individuals are exposed to this process of dating in their teenage or early-20s, when they are very young, and their worldview isn't properly developed yet. However, their bodies have sexually matured, and hormones have started kicking in. So, when these young individuals will start talking to opposite-gender individuals, they will naturally gravitate towards them due to the purely natural biological attraction toward opposite sex, even if there is no deeper principle aligned between the two of them. So there will be inevitable failures in relationships in early years because their process is not a process for finding a life partner but a process for finding a sexual partner.

This was the general-population problem. But then there are people within this culture who are serious about things they want to do in their lives and serious about finding a life-partner with whom to live their lives. This culture's mechanism causes problems for them in two ways. The major problem with this mechanism is because it has made relationships too much fungible. It is relevant to note that this second culture's mechanism had emerged as a reaction to mechanism of the first culture. In the first culture, relationships were too rigid; incompatible people felt compelled to continue their relationship further than they ought to, and thus suffered. So, this second culture first encouraged divorce and ending of long-term relationships, and then in continuance of making relationships more flexible went as far as discouraging the initial long-term commitment in the first place, by abolishing the tradition of marriage. So, the lines between short term experimentation part called dating and the long-term commitment part got blurred. As I defined earlier, the dating phase is an experimentation phase where you kind of simulate the post-commitment life before making that commitment. So, it is a fake simulation, because due to the idiosyncrasies of each individual, there is a certain minimum level of compromise or tradeoff you will have to do to be able to live together, but you will not be willing to make that tradeoff, if you are not committed about it for the long-term. So what happens is that on every hiccup in the pre-commitment experimentation phase, you either (i) consider moving on to a different relationship, or (ii) when you have done that enough, you become defensive and start doing things to ensure that the other person does not move on to a next relationship, and thus you start compromising a bit too much and that is also a problematic because it might take the relationship to the commitment phase, but then you will stop compromising too much and the other person will have a rightful objection to that, and things will start going downhill. All this happens because without commitment, the simulation is fake. A true simulation pre-commitment is simply not possible. So, this is the problem in this culture. How are you going to be able to build relationships that are based on broader life principles and not natural biological attraction owing to the hormones, and how are you going to find a life-partner when no one is willing to commit to a longer term relationship without a short-term fake simulation phase that does not in fact tell you about your compatibility with another person?

Now, let's discuss the first culture, where although an individual might make the final decision regarding choice of his partner, he himself would not be the one looking out for potential-partners to decide about, rather his extended family or kin would be doing this task for him. The primary problem with this mechanism, specially in this age, is that individuals have become more differentiated but with that many levels of hierarchy involved in finding the potential partners, the actual preferences or values of the two individuals get completely abstracted away. And for individuals who are supposed to make the final decision, there simply is not enough information to be able to judge whether the other person believes in same kind of principles as they do. It's just a blind guess. But since the problem of complete abstracting out of individual values started getting felt, the culture (or some subcultures) allowed flexibility in the mechanism. That is the individuals are now allowed to talk and discuss with each other, before making the final decision. This flexibility is limited, but still I think you can get to know a lot about other person's worldview by having a few conversations with them. But the problem is that this flexibility only solves part of the problem not the entire problem. The flexibility only allows you to filter out incompatible partners, but it still not solves the problem of how the kin is supposed to suggest potential-partners that are actually compatible, given that the kin does not understand the true goals or values of the individual. Maybe, if you are lucky, one of your parents might understand your preferences or values, but the sample of potential partners that your parents will directly know of is too small, and if they take suggestions from kin, then those suggestions would be not guided in any way by your individual preferences or values.

Another problem with the first culture and its mechanism is its traditionally rooted association with patriarchy. Apparently, the strictness and rigidity regarding the lives of females has loosened a lot on surface level. But the actual autonomy females living in this culture have with their lives is still low. The first part of their lives is governed or influenced by their fathers, and the second part by their husbands. Traditionally, females were married at a younger age and thus when they were married, they would be more adaptable to the ways of their husbands. Now, when marriage age is relatively later, the lives of females get well adjusted to their father's way of living which makes re-adjustment to their husbands' way of living much difficult. But either way, females do not have any kind of autonomy in their lives. This is a big problem. Because as I discussed in my previous post, there are already too many of a forces forcing a person to switch off their minds and follow the bureaucracy. Now, those few females who have somehow still developed the ability to think by themselves are very negatively impacted by this lack of autonomy. What lack of autonomy does is that it makes one's mind reach this conclusion logically that there a lot of (fixable) problems that can't be fixed, because the lack of autonomy disables them to even consider a big portion of the solution space. So even in areas of life where they do have some level of autonomy, they do not use it as much as they can, and that is a problem.

So, that is where I find myself currently in. This is the culture I find myself living in. And the one discussed before it is the only other culture I see or know of. And there are problems existing in both of these.

So, the problem at hand that I haven't figured out the answer of is this. Given the context of the graver problems I described in first post, there are certain broader principles I have developed (of course they are coarse and less developed now, and might go through some changes in details, but at a broader level I don't think they are going to change) that are important to me, so how do I find a life partner who aligns with these principles and is willing to put in the conscious effort to live by these principles, specifically given the context of the cultural environment I find myself in. 

The problem is already complicated enough, but there's another element that I think is of crucial importance in this problem, that is one's religious belief system. Most people subscribe to religious belief system they inherit from their parents by default. They not merely inherit the name of the religion/sect or the loosely-defined belief system, but also the degree of its influence, i.e., in which affairs of life does that belief system influence the actual practices or actions of a person (and to what extent) and in which affairs it doesn't. For the values and goals of two individuals to align enough to be good life partners, it is important that both the set of beliefs (or lack thereof) and the degree of their influence must also align. For instance if A is agnostic, and B subscribes to belief-system X only in practices of social traditions like marriage ceremony and funeral and not much else, then in belief-space they are close to each other. But if say, C belongs to belief-system X and is influenced by it to the extent the kind of work he'll do will be influenced by it, while D only follows belief-system X in social traditions, then they are further apart in the belief-space than A and B even though both of them apparently follow they same belief-system.

Currently, I'm in the phase of life where one starts to question and re-define the belief system he inherits by default, and I believe figuring out this part is going to take a while, but whatever the final redefinition is, it might add another level of complication to the already complicated problem. Because, if you plan to have children, it will be cause severe conflicts in their upbringing if both the parents do not lie close in the belief-space.

So, the final form of problem is this:

How do you find a life partner who:

• aligns with you in your broader principles of how you are supposed to live your lives
• aligns with you in your vision of the kind of environment you would like for your children to have and is willing to put the conscious and sustained effort in providing them such
• is autonomous and believes in these principles independently, and not merely because their life-partner believes in them
• thinks for themselves, so that both of you help each other get unstuck in hard problems of life
• lies close to you in belief-space (regarding belief-set and its degree of influence)

This is the unsolved part. I notice I had titled this piece as The (yet) Unsolvable Problem, which is funny because I should have used Unsolved instead of Unsolvable.

So, this is the yet unsolved part.

The (yet) Unsolvable Problem - Part 1

 I have just come from a long conversation with two university friends. On Thursday, I also had a very long conversation with another like-minded person. All of us are males in our 20s. And there was one direction in which both conversations flowed towards naturally.

When we look at our environment, we see things being operated at bureaucracy mode, i.e. keep the thing running, quality of output is not a concern. Our academia is running at bureaucracy mode. Our corporations are running at bureaucracy mode. Our government is running at bureaucracy mode. This mode of keeping the things running as they are, requires that affairs be operated by people who are submissive to the existing processes and resistant to new ideas, i.e. people who switch off their brain. Academia is exactly producing such people, and is very good at this job.

The result of this situation is that we live among people who have long switched off their brain, or at-least the part of brain that thinks new thoughts. The society may apparently continue to function this way, but not for long. Because the most dangerous effect of it is that people who do not think have no principles to stand by. Whenever they'll have a hard decision to make, they will take out their moral compass, look at it, and act upon it, without ever realizing that it's being influenced by the dominant magnetic field of their bureaucracy. The days of such a society are numbered.

The realization of this situation is very depressing. But this is what we see when we look around us. Naturally, a thinking person thinks of academia as the part where the process starts and so he thinks of attacking it first. But he realizes that among this chain of academia, corporation, and governments, academia is the longest surviving institution. Although government bureaucratic structures stays same, at-least the political process on the surface level keeps changing names with the electoral process. Some new corporations do emerge, and some do die out. But, academia, if you think about it, is the longest-held monopoly on a system. How do universities or educational systems die out? They just don't. And it's not because they adapt with the changing world so rapidly and so well that they never die, but it's because by design their simply is no mechanism for them to die. Or at-least we don't have a mechanism to declare them dead and build something new.

So attacking academia seems futile. It can't be changed.

So next comes corporations. The way you fight with corporations is by competing with them in business with a different mode of operation, an example of which is startups. This smaller, faster, and innovation-based mode of business operation will be able to outcompete corporations in all areas where free market exists. Now, there are two bottlenecks in spread of this newer business model, I don't know which one is narrower, but eventually one will become a problem when the other is fixed.

Digital space by nature was a new area less governed by governments, and that is why startups have naturally sprung up there and flourished. But in physical space, government bureaucracy is still halting the flourishing of startups. In competing against the governmental friction, startups either burn out and fail, or if they do survive, they do so by eventually picking up the same weapons, and becoming a corporation. For innovation-based businesses to win in physical space, government bureaucracy must be fought and defeated.

The second bottleneck in prevalence of this newer business model is that given this academic system that enables sucking away of smart people by corporations and government bureaucracy, where will the smart people to start start-ups come from?

And maybe this is also linked to the problem of fighting government. How can it be changed if the masses of people and government are aligned in this principle of only keeping things running without doing anything new? We need people who do not believe in this principle and thus don't want to be governed by a government who believes in this principle. Who will be these people?

My answer is: our children.

If thousands of years of evolution and survival of fittest, has given rise to human beings who have conquered the skies, moved mountains, and built thinking-machines, it is not an unsafe bet to claim that people who welcome change have higher odds of surviving than people who don't. The way things survive is by evolving, not remaining static. So if my chain of reasoning is not flawed, we have to remain steadfast on our path, and create small pockets of environments where our children develop the same principles of nature, and the future is in safe hands.

I also believe in human will and autonomy, and I do believe a lot of people raised in the change-resisting institutions will also develop their own thinking and start challenging that mode of operation, but still, that is something we can't fully rely on, unless we also think of producing a progeny that lives by principles of nature i.e. of change.

But, our children won't develop these principles by default in the currently existing environment created by bureaucracies. It will take a conscious and sustained effort on our part to create small pockets of environments that allows our children to develop the strength to withstand the downsliding and to overcome the inertia.

Technology is an amplifying media. All things decay in stasis. Brain rotting through huge consumption of addictive content is simply an amplified or sped up version of natural rotting of a static mind. Similar technology also amplifies the learning process of a young mind by accelerating the process of their natural explorations.

A car can be harmful in two ways. 1) it is standing on a steep hill by default, and it starts moving downhill if you don't take any action. 2) the car is on a level road but if you wildly keep accelerating, it goes out of control and causes an accident.

This is the technology our children will gain access to when they are born, and they would have to be taught how to drive it safely, and then we'll have to let them explore. I'm not just talking about cars. I'm talking about technology.

So, we have established technology is not our enemy. Our enemy is defaults. Our children find themselves in a car which is sliding downhill, and the children have no idea the danger they are in. Academia is not going to solve it. Corporations are not going to solve it. Governments are not going to solve it.

But this is not an unsolvable problem. It just requires conscious sustained effort on our part.

So, summarizing my chain of thought, without people who can think for themselves, we will never have people who can stand by their principles, and a society where people don't stand by their principles will inevitably be led to conflicts and disharmony, and such a society won't survive for long. There are three forms of bureaucracies, that are leading production of people who can't think for themselves : 1) Academia, 2) Corporations, 3) Governments. All these three forms of bureaucracies, by their design, resist change and innovation. The way to fight with them is to 1) create or work in smaller and innovation-friendly modes of businesses such as startups that outcompete corporations, and 2) take learning of our children in our own hands instead of academia, and give them an environment that allows them to develop their own thinking and follow their natural curiosities, so that we produce a progeny that can think for their own, and thus by mechanism of natural selection, allow prevalence of people who will build better systems for learning and keeping societal order than the ones we have now.

[That is where my chain of thought has went to, uptill now. The first part about choosing modes of creating economic value other than corporations is something I hadn't thought of in this framework before I started writing this. So, I have yet to contemplate further on that part. The reason I had started writing this was because in the second part of solution, I had gotten stuck at a point, the explanation of which I will do in a separate piece, as the preface or description of the context has grown larger than I had expected, and this preface is I believe a more important piece, and the problem I had in my mind was only a specific sub-problem within the context, so it should be described separately. I will link the next post here.]

In praise of... [*checks notes*]... emails

 I like email as a medium of communicating with friends. That is because, it has two desirable properties:-

1. Email encourages long form text. Text message is a good medium for fast conversation, but in short form, you can rarely convey a full chunk of thought. So, emails are good for that.
2. Email encourages a more thoughtful reply rather than instant reply, which for me is a very important thing. As a friend used to say:-

Late replies over dry replies anyday.

In a sense, I use emails as a substitute of letters. Earlier, I used to think it was nostalgia, but I realized it has actually lot of functional value.

The problem is, I am an outlier in using emails in this way. So when people think of emails, all they recall is boring formal corporate/legal/OTP kind of stuff. So, it is understandable why they think of it that way.

But there's a simple solution to this.

Have an email address that you use for nothing else but talking to your friends. Believe me, when you will open that inbox, you will never feel like how you use to feel now.

A blog post in which I info dump my friends on why they should also write a blog

 I will send this blog post to a few friends of mine. I might scare them away from writing a blog, but my challenge here is to not let that happen.

So firstly, instead of pointing you my very badly articulated blog post of mine that explains why my blog is called a weblog, I give you a tldr.

When I tell you to write a blog, I don't want you to tell you to write the kind of blogs people write these days. I want you to write the kind of personal blogs that people used to write a decade or two earlier, and back then it was called weblog (which later got later shortened to blog) meaning a log on the web. Very few people write that kinds of blogs these days, but as they say:

0.01% of people is a lot of people

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) February 12, 2021

I was about to go to a tangent, but let me come back. So... as I note in my badly articulated blog post, this is what a weblog is:-

• Weblog is a personal project.
• It is mostly a log of observations, thoughts, ideas, and/or activities of the person.
• The weblog is primarily intended for a very limited audience [or you should entirely ignore who's going to read it and that would be a very reasonable thing].

          ~ Tamseel in a very condescending tone

This is a very meh definition. So you should probably not delve very much on that.

However, I will point you to read something from some essays by Henrik Karlsson (whom you might have heard a many times from me).

He has this essay/blogpost titled "Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog" which is a simple bullet list of points. Interestingly, the most interesting point is at the end:-

In real life, you can’t go on and on about your obsessions; you have to tame yourself to not ruin the day for others. This is a good thing. Otherwise, we’d be ripping each other's arms off like chimpanzees. But a blog is a tiny internet house where you decide the norms. And since there are already countless places where you can't be yourself, there is no need to build another one of those. The law of the land is that everything you think is funny is funny. Those who find the texture of your mind boring or offensive can close the tab, no need to worry about them. It is good for the soul to have a place where being just the way you are is normal. And it is a service to others, too. You'll be surprised how many people are laughably similar to you and who wish there was a place where they felt normal. You can build that.

In another point:

Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution, write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.

Also:-

Your contradictions are an asset. You’re a lover of classical English architecture and you’re also a dirty little punk—expressing both at the same time is more interesting than sharing just cute pictures of English gardens or just wild trashy stuff. The more you incorporate everything that you love and that comes easily for you, your interests, your sense of humor, your grammatical tics, etc, the more your style emerges.

~ Henrik Karlsson

He also has another interesting and rather longer essay titled "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox" which you can read sometime else because reading it now can possibly overwhelm you which is against our purpose [or maybe you can also read now; the point is, follow whatever trails that seem interesting]. But I'll leave an excerpt.

People feeling alone in their interests has always been true to a certain extent, but the internet has made it much worse. The excess of information allows you to travel down your path of interest with mad velocity. On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling. And the further you fall, the less likely it is that anyone you’ve ever met is falling where you are. This will make you immensely sad. You will visit your parents, and when they ask you about your life you will have two choices. You can either be incomprehensible and see them grow concerned about things you are excited about, or you can talk about surface-level things and cry a little when you are alone at night.

The reason I’m spelling out this dynamic is twofold. First, you can get out of this mess if you want to. You do that by writing online (or publishing cool pieces of software, or videos, or whatever makes you tickle—as long as you work in public). Second, if you want to get out of the mess the key lies exactly in understanding that you are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.

This essay resonated with me a lot, and since the time I read that, I think have gotten out of that mess. 

I just now went away started re-reading some of interesting Henrik essays. I want to point out some of them here, but I won't because I might write a separate post where I share some of the most interesting essays of him. And the reason I'm telling you this here is because if I don't write that I'd like you to nudge me to do so. The way you can nudge me is by writing to me, and that is what I'll discuss in my next post.

 Anyways, back to writing a blog. If, by any chance, you have actually decided to give it a go, I'll help you with the undecidedness about where exactly to write. For now, you have only two options:-

• Choose the simpler path, and make a blog using the same platform I use for my blog at the time i.e. Blogger.
• Go be nerdy about all kinds of blogging platforms, and list down all their pros and cons and then eventually reach the same conclusion as mine. Hehe. Bye!

Being able to spin up a room of your own with a few clicks is one of the great advantages we have over previous generations. Make use of it. ~Henrik

A cultural change in science

 There's something that changed among the culture of the scientists and technologists from 50 years ago to now. And the change is very drastic.

The scientists I have seen/read from that time are mainly Carl Sagan and Feynman. But I don't think it's limited to them only. You pick up that time's media regarding science and you will feel a certain sense of wonder and curiosity and excitement about the great mysteries of the universe that we have started to uncover. The scientists of that time were telling how these were just baby steps that we have started taking, and there was a certain thrill about how great it would be in the future. And this isn't about science in particular, it's also about technology, or to be more exact, the collective effort of discovery and innovation. This great sense of wonder and excitement and onlooking towards the future greatly heightened the imaginations of the people of that time. These elevated imaginations can be sensed in the media of that time including both fictional and non fictional works. People seemed to believe that anything and everything was possible in future.

However today, the people including the scientists and innovators do not seem to believe that. Today, it seems there is a central vision of the future in the collective conscious of the people. And people really don't think anything drastically out of that vision is going to happen. There is a certain sense of confidence that is near-reaching arrogance. Scientists no longer seem to consider themselves as babies taking their first steps on the shore, rather they believe that most of the science is a settled affair, and anyone contradicting to them is mentally incapacitated. Same is the case for innovators and technologists. The space for healthy disagreement has greatly collapsed while unhealthy/violent disagreement is thriving. 

I don't know if the culture of the innovators trickle down to the masses, or if the innovators seem to carry with them the culture of masses to their fields, but whatever it is, I believe at all times the collective culture has been similar among the innovators and the masses. Many thinkers seem to disagree with this as they create a virtual dichotomy between the culture of innovators and that of the masses with the painting of innovators being explorers and breaking the conformity of the masses and so on, while masses being influenced like a herd. I think there obviously will be differences between these two groups at any time, but the collective sense of outlook of future among both will essentially same. The reason for that is that the influences of both of these groups on each other are inseparable. Let's move back 50 years and consider what was happening in the lives of the masses. They heard that there is new machine that is now springing up among people who can afford it, in which you say something and someone thousands of miles away listens to your voice exactly as it sounds at the same moment, and then you can also hear the other person back when they say something in their machine; so one can literally have a verbal conversation thousands of miles away synchronously. The machine became more widespread, and soon enough the masses had it too. Telephone, Radio, Television, and later Computers. I think we don't appreciate how much of a difference they had brought into the lives of the masses. So, it is entirely imaginable why the imaginations of even the masses were so much elevated and why to them, everything was possible in future.

Surely, we continued to progress in the last two decades, but certain elements diminished: the imagination, exploration, and experimentation. Just the other day, I saw a tweet with some different shapes and form factors of mobile phones in early 2000s (Edit: it was this one), but if you look at the technology of that time, you will realize how crazy the designers were being with the designs of these things, and I mean crazy in a good way. Today, essentially all mobile phones look the same. There have been many shifts in the design culture, I don't say they were in right direction or wrong direction, but the weird thing was that at each shift almost everyone followed the exact shift at the same time. Compared to a few decades ago, the experimentation with completely new and different designs is almost zero. Because technologists and scientists have the collective idea that things are now settling in. The same thing is downstream in the masses as well.

The LLM breakthrough due to the transformer architecture was like the decades of imagination finally culminating in reality. But when it rolled out to the masses, what did they do with it? Nothing. Nothing interesting. I'm not denying how great an achievement it was and how some innovators are greatly leveraging (wait, I shouldn't use that word) it. But I'm talking about the masses specifically who are mostly using it to write letters, reports, linkedin posts, assignments, etc. or are chatting with it like a gf/bf greatly enchanted by its sycophantic behavior.

So what's my point by saying all of this?

There has always been nostalgia of the past among people, and I don't deny myself having it. But the nostalgia does not have any functional value of it at all, if we do not take this chance to objectively study observe the past and try to observe the patterns of change along with their reasons. There is a structure to which all changes happen and I think these changes are worth further exploration. The first step is acknowledgement of change, and that is what I am doing here. My initial thought is that it is going to take a few more decades for this culture to revert back, but I think it's too early to say anything, and there is certainly more to uncover from this pattern.

I just recalled something and then I checked out. Feynman has this interesting lecture called "The Unscientific Age", in which he points out how some things are needlessly unscientific in the society and how people by changing their attitude towards it can greatly benefit themselves. It is interesting because some problems he had pointed out in general society have today seeped into the innovators. I'll end this by copying a few passages from there.

The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions—that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions—then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that. And I think that I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific. It has to do with politics. Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, "What are you going to do about the farm question?" And he knows right away— bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. "What are you going to do about the farm problem?" "Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use—not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them," etc., etc., etc. 

Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. Its never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around. And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept. It is a mechanical fact; it is impossible. The result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises. And the result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth. It's all generated from the very beginning (maybe—this is a simple analysis). Its all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer. 

Now we try another item that comes in the sciences—I give only one or two illustrations of each of the general ideas—and that is how to deal with uncertainty. There have been a lot of jokes made about ideas of uncertainty. I would like to remind you that you can be pretty sure of things even though you are uncertain, that you don't have to be so in-themiddle, in fact not at all in-the-middle. People say to me, "Well, how can you teach your children what is right and wrong if you don't know?" Because I'm pretty sure of what's right and wrong. I'm not absolutely sure; some experiences may change my mind. But I know what I would expect to teach them. But, of course, a child won't learn what you teach him. 

I would like to mention a somewhat technical idea, but it's the way, you see, we have to understand how to handle uncertainty. How does something move from being almost certainly false to being almost certainly true? How does experience change? How do you handle the changes of your certainty with experience? And it's rather complicated, technically, but I'll give a rather simple, idealized example. 

You have, we suppose, two theories about the way something is going to happen, which I will call "Theory A" and "Theory B." Now it gets complicated. Theory A and Theory B. Before you make any observations, for some reason or other, tha t is, your past experiences and other observations and intuition and so on, suppose that you are very much more certain of Theory A than of Theory B—much more sure. But suppose that the thing that you are going to observe is a test. According to Theory A, nothing should happen. According to Theory B, it should turn blue. Well, you make the observation, and it turns sort of a greenish. Then you look at Theory A, and you say, "It's very unlikely," and you turn to Theory B, and you say, "Well, it should have turned sort of blue, but it wasn't impossible that it should turn sort of greenish color." So the result of this observation, then, is that Theory A is getting weaker, and Theory B is getting stronger. And if you continue to make more tests, then the odds on Theory B increase. Incidentally, it is not right to simply repeat the same test over and over and over and over, no matter how many times you look and it still looks greenish, you haven't made up your mind yet. But if you find a whole lot of other things that distinguish Theory A from Theory B that are different, then by accumulating a large number of these, the odds on Theory B increase. 

Example. I'm in Las Vegas, suppose. And I meet a mind reader, or, let's say, a man who claims not to be a mind reader, but more technically speaking to have the ability of telekinesis, which means that he can influence the way things behave by pure thought. This fellow comes to me, and he says, "I will demonstrate this to you. We will stand at the roulette wheel and I will tell you ahead of time whether it is going to be black or red on every shot." 

I believe, say, before I begin, it doesn't make any difference what number you choose for this. I happen to be prejudiced against mind readers from experience in nature, in physics. I don't see, if I believe that man is made out of atoms and if I know all of the—most of the-ways atoms interact with each other, any direct way in which the machinations in the mind can affect the ball. So from other experience and general knowledge, I have a strong prejudice against mind readers. Million to one. 

Now we begin. The mind reader says it's going to be black. It's black. The mind reader says it's going to be red. It's red. Do I believe in mind readers? No. It could happen. The mind reader says it's going to be black. It's black. The mind reader says it's going to be red. It's red. Sweat. I'm about to learn something. This continues, let us suppose, for ten times. Now it's possible by chance that that happened ten times, but the odds are a thousand to one against it. Therefore, I now have to conclude that the odds that a mind reader is really doing it are a thousand to one that he's not a mind reader still, but it was a million to one before. But if I get ten more, you see, he'll convince me. Not quite. One must always allow for alternative theories. There is another theory that I should have mentioned before. As we went up to the roulette table, I must have thought in my mind of the possibility that there is collusion between the so-called mind reader and the people at the table. That's possible. Although this fellow doesn't look like he's got any contact with the Flamingo Club, so I suspect that the odds are a hundred to one against that. However, after he has run ten times favorable, since I was so prejudiced against mind reading, I conclude it's collusion. Ten to one. That it's collusion rather than accident, I mean, is ten to one, but rather more likely collusion than not is still 10,000 to one. How is he ever going to prove he's a mind reader to me if I still have this terrible prejudice and now I claim it's collusion? Well, we can make another test. We can go to another club. 

We can make other tests. I can buy dice. And we can sit in a room and try it. We can keep on going and get rid of all the alternative theories. It will not do any good for that mind reader to stand in front of that particular roulette table ad infinitum. He can predict the result, but I only conclude it is collusion. 

But he still has an opportunity to prove he's a mind reader by doing other things. Now suppose that we go to another club, and it works, and another one and it works. I buy dice and it works. I take him home and I build a roulette wheel; it works. What do I conclude? I conclude he is a mind reader. And that's the way, but not certainty, of course. I have certain odds. After all these experiences I conclude he really was a mind reader, with some odds. And now, as new experiences grow, I may discover that there's a way of blowing through the corner of your mouth unseen, and so on. And when I discover that, the odds shift again, and the uncertainties always remain. But for a long time it is possible to conclude, by a number of tests, that mind reading really exists. If it does, I get extremely excited, because I didn't expect it before. I learned something that I did not know, and as a physicist would love to investigate it as a phenomenon of nature. Does it depend upon how far he is from the ball? What about if you put sheets of glass or paper or other materials in between? That's the way all of these things have been worked out, what magnetism is, what electricity is. And what mind reading is would also be analyzable by doing enough experiments. 

Anyway, there is an example of how to deal with uncertainty and how to look at something scientifically. To be prejudiced against mind reading a million to one does not mean that you can never be convinced that a man is a mind reader. The only way that you can never be convinced that a man is a mind reader is one of two things: If you are limited to a finite number of experiments, and he won't let you do any more, or if you are infinitely prejudiced at the beginning that it's absolutely impossible.

Thinking Session #2

NOTE: THIS IS AN UNFINISHED DRAFT NOT WRITTEN FOR EXTERNAL READERS.

 Few days back I wrote something.

A main point was something like:

You should have extreme opinions about things that matter, but not about things that do not matter.

When I mentioned things that matter, I obviously meant things that had a chance to matter, not necessarily we are sure that they will matter. However, I had defined things that matter rather poorly. In example, I described how principles of practical guidance are what you should have extreme takes about.

This time, I try to figure out what's the right way to formulate this, as my previous formulation was quite wrong.

[To add: many things that didn't seem to matter at first but people continued being interested in them later turned out to matter very much e.g. discoveries in maths and physics]

So, last night, I was thinking about this on my bed, and I figured something out and I jolted them down on my phone:

You have to have hard opinions about principles of practical guidance, but not hard beliefs about how the world works, or about the underlying nature/mechanism of reality.

The latter is more susceptible to bias. People either gravitate totally towards their point of initial standing [belief they started out with], or an extreme opposite to their point of initial standing because it does not work out all things fully, and the opposite extreme explains/ copes those things right that your initial standpoint got wrong, but not because this new extreme is right, but because you were on the verge on falling right side of the bridge and it told you to lean left, but if you start holding it in similar extreme position, you are at risk at falling on the left side of bridge

Why there is a bridge you may ask? Why there is no extreme correct take?

Yes, there might be some extreme or near extreme correct takes, such as you should not harm other people, or try to make the world a better place.

But as I mentioned, these are about principles of practical or functional value that tell you how you ought to live your life.

But if you have extreme takes about how the world works, then I would say you have closed doors on yourself for any new discovery, and you are very very likely to miss the bigger picture

 

 I pondered again about the matter today, and something still doesn't seem quite right. I think I was correct about the latter part, that we should not have any extreme takes about what precisely the nature of reality is. The reason is that our discovery or understanding of our universe is quite in its infancy. We surely have progressed forth a quite and uncovered great many mysteries of the universe, but the proportion of that to the mysteries we haven't uncovered is extremely minute. To settle on our old frameworks is stagnancy and death of further inquiry. And I think this also makes it clear that I am only against hard settling of beliefs about things that we haven't properly uncovered yet. I do not mean that we should still doubt matters that have been proven through extensive evidence over time, such as that we should clean our hands before meals. As human, we have an innate tendency to speculate and theorize and that has set forth us to uncover many a things, and thus we should take actual actions that enable us to test them. Needless doubt will only incapacitate us from actually testing out. So, my point is that we must not treat these theories as settled or hard truths.

But, what I didn't get quite right was when I said we should have hard opinions about principles of practical guidance. I think this formulation can be misleading for someone who does not understand the matter I present henceforth.

There are in reality very few hard principles, that remain as hard truths one should cling to no matter what. Few I could count were integrity, honesty, justice, truth. There might be a handful of others I can't seem to remember now. Although I think these should stand at the root of our actions, I don't think these are the actual drivers of our rightful actions. What I think can be an actual driver of rightful action is the following statement/principle/whatever:

One should use his natural abilities to do the thing that is most appropriate in a given situation.

This principle is important to understand because what is right in a given situation is not right in some other situation. If we cling to rules like, do not harm others, be persistent, etc., we very soon will have to start introducing exceptions and edge cases. Actually edge cases isn't that right word because these exceptions will be much more common than edge cases. Take the point about not harming others, for example. When a surgeon cuts through a patient's body, he is actually inflicting a great deal of harm, but it is still appropriate because the harm is less than the expected alleviation of some other harm to the same person. Similarly, if society punishes a criminal, the harm inflicted upon the criminal is justified on the basis of harm alleviated from other members of society.

Take example of another saying, that we should be loving and caring for people around us. I think this also isn't a good principle to always adhere to. Why? I see many children do not get most out of their innate capabilities because their parents are too loving and caring of them, and this tendency of parents barrs those children from any kind of struggle including the struggle that comes inherent with doing anything meaningful in life. We as a society have been so much traumatized by purposeless struggle that most of us can't imagine a purposeful or meaningful kind of struggle.

Anyways, coming back to the point, in most of our everyday actions, we should not be following some hard and fast rules, but rather asking ourselves, what is the most appropriate thing to do here. We should be thoughtful of our actions, which means we should be trying to figure out the consequences of our actions, including higher-order effects. The problem with higher-order effects is that the higher order, you think about, your certainty about it reduces, so you have to discount that higher order effect due to higher uncertainty.

There is a group of people among rationalists who take this even further, and claim that we should not just be vaguely thinking about these higher order effects, but rather we should mathematically estimate these thing to find out what maximizes a certain objective function which they call us welfare. I think they are right about convincing people to contemplate about whether their actions actually achieved the results they intended to or not, and this was a good thing given that even a lot of seemingly well-intentioned [how do you know?] actions are ineffective. However, I think the mathematical framework they have developed for this contemplation is quite useless. One reason for this is that whatever final objective function they aim to maximize through their mathematical excise is something by nature unquantifiable. The attempts to quantify it nonetheless leads to ridiculous results like shrimpmaxxing. This is why we should keep mathematical models for well defined objective functions like no. of runs in a baseball game, and we might get some useful results from it. Second reason, for this is that we greatly underestimate human mind's capabilities to think about higher-order effects. I don't know what's the proper term for it, but I think this is what people mean when they say intuition. People who are observant of various changes in a given system, and think about it, and then tinker with the system to bring about some other changes and then observant of the whole system, and they do this whole thing for a great deal of time, develop this thing called intuition about that system, and their minds are then capable of accurately estimating higher order effects of a new set of changes in the system. When instead we shift towards mathematical models which can't properly incorporate all changes in a system (probably because some are not properly quantifiable, and as someone who has worked with demographic and survey data, I can assure you that in a complex system, even the quantifiable elements are very hard to get accurate observations of), we are just throwing a lot of useful but either unquantifiable, or not accurately observable information into trash can. I think a great abuse of mathematics in this age is that we have started seeing it as a tool to delegate our thinking to, instead of seeing it as tool to enhance it.

So coming back to the point that we should be thoughtful of our actions, and ask ourselves what is the appropriate thing to do given this situation. But this can also be rephrased to what is the right thing to do given this situation. While the appropriateness covers the part that how the correct course of action is different for different situation, but still given the situation, there is a judgement call, a matter of values. Thoughtfulness tells you about the higher order effects of different courses of action, but then considering the right course of action and actually doing it, requires you to be well-intentioned. [For now, I'm not sure about how to address this part].

These were a few things that remained when I was cutting down principles for things that are appropriate in one situation but not in some other: integrity, honesty, justice, truth, which makes me curious what makes them truly hard-and-fast. I don't think integrity can be compromised in any situation. One who dies fighting to maintain it dies a very honorable death. Similarly, I can't think of any reasonable excuse to be not honest. I do think it is appropriate to hide some true facts in some extreme cases, but it is a different thing to lie or be explicitly dishonest about something. Justice is also something very important because it actually guides a lot of appropriateness. A great deal of apparently good actions are nullified because they violate justice. For instance, a person who shows generosity to his relatives and acquaintances, but this depraves him to give essential necessities to his own family commits injustice to his own family. Similarly, if one starts doing charity work during his working hours, he is being unjust to his employer. So, I don't think there is any situation in which being unjust could be the right thing. About truth, well, I can't think of why someone would want to deviate from truth for even a single moment of his life. This is something so problematic in my framework of understanding that my mind just can't comprehend what could lead someone to believe it. If you are such a person, please let me know.

So, these were a few un-compromisable principles that came to my mind, and I think there might be a few more, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of them. In fact, there are great overlapping elements to integrity, honesty, and truth.

 

I should write something

 It's been a while since I wrote something, and things are being a bit dull and unproductive lately. But I prefer not to write about that.

I was scrolling through twitter a few days back (and I must admit I've been scrolling it too much lately) and I was like tired, like why are they all fighting over petty things. And the fights had the kind of arguments you would see in fights of 7 year old kids. It was weird and strange, and I'm thinking about deactivating my twitter too after my linkedin.

But anyways, I checked out WhatsApp statuses today morning, and realized its independence day. The updates were not unexpected. There was one video clip with title like how this independence day hits different because of the last Pak-India conflict, and it contained videos of military fighter jets, etc. Some other templatish posts. Then a few lads cursing the country and mocking how we are celebrating independence in slavery, etc.

------

Strangely, my response on all such things have been turned off in head. I watch/hear this stuff and I only get tired. Reality is complex. Our minds have an innate tendency to oversimplify things so that they can fit in in our framework of reality. It takes some sort of mental energy to go against this tendency and ask yourself, wait a minute; is there a detail I'm missing? but when we ask this question, and try to find out answers, we almost always find out there is some subtlety, some nuance, some detail that we are missing, and that expands our framework of reality, or in other terms, our worldview. People who ask this more and more, get their worldview expand in complexity and detail. When they see any oversimplified notion, they want to point out, hey, I see you have a point here, but there is some other detail you're missing. I'm not with or against your view, but I want you to notice, that whatever your view is, it is flawed or incomplete if you do not incorporate this element into the perspective as well. They do point out early on but soon realize how pointless it is.

------

But to scratch the itch, they want to say something nonetheless, so they write blogposts no one reads.

------

We owe a great deal of human progress and innovation to a small proportion of individuals who had very extreme and contrarian takes, about things that mattered. I think a disease in our society is that we have extreme takes about all the things that don't matter, and none about the things that matter.

Live in a city, talk to people (or just open up a social media feed that hasn't been personalized in favor of your own views), and you will find out there is a ridiculously high amount of matters of public debate, about which people have opinions -- and very extreme opinions. But ask them if they have a principle of practical value -- something that they have vowed themselves to follow under all circumstances, and most of them would have none.

To give an example, a principle of practical value could be something as simple as I will never litter in public, not even a tissue paper. This is a rather simple principle, but you see it has practical value. The world is marginally a better place because you decided to walk a few yards and throw the wrapper in the trash can. But if you have an opinion about most of matters of public debate, the chances are that your having any opinion about that is definitely not going to have any practical value for anyone, or probably, the expected outcome is net negative, because you might increase the amount of argument or conflicts among people, or at-least waste your time if nothing else.

----

I think what a person should do is this.

1. Upon a matter of public debate, ask yourself does this issue matter?

"Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction." -pg

2. If yes, ask yourself, what is x's take and what is y's take and what are they both missing? This will expand your worldview to hold more nuance.

3. When you've understand the nuances of the issue, work out a theory of change for the issue.

"People want to make the world a better place. But how? [X] says I can change the direction of the country by voting for him. [Y] says I can solve the climate crisis with a letter to the editor. [Z] says I can stop George W. Bush by signing their petition. Perhaps, but these requests ring hollow. How is writing a letter to my local paper going to stop the polar ice caps from melting?

Most groups have a couple steps at the end (switch to alternative energy, stopping carbon from being emitted, preventing global warming) and a couple steps at the beginning (write your congressman and send a letter to the paper) but in between they seem to expect that some kind of miracle will happen. They’re missing the concrete steps in between, the actual way we get from here to there.

In the nonprofit world, such a plan is called a Theory of Change. And the reason they’re so rare is because they’re dreadfully hard to come by. The world has no shortage of big problems, but it’s hard to think of ways we might realistically solve them. Instead, the same few things — vote, preach, march — get trotted out again and again."

4. By now, you will either realize that (a) the problem is solvable but you don't care about it enough to spend the effort required to solve it, or (b) in the given circumstances, the problem is not solvable in its entirety and you can only solve a portion of it, and then again, you may or may not care enough about it to actually spend time and energy solving it, or (c) the problem is entirely solvable and you do care about it enough that justifies the amount of the effort required by it (mostly, its not because you care about that thing too much but because the effort it takes is not too much).

If the thing got knocked out in the questions, congrats, you've saved yourself (and probably others) a lot of time, and if turns out not to, well, maybe you should get working.

Meaningful Help

 I was wondering about how regarding certain things that are my area of expertise (relative to general public, not expertise in absolute terms), I would have loved to help other people if they required that specific kind of help, but the thing I had in mind was very specific, and people generally aren't interested in such kind of things, and the few who might be, might not think about asking someone's help regarding it. This made me think about the human nature. People who are expert in certain areas can do things related to it with very little effort compared to other people, and generally, they love to help other people with those things (specially if they are niche things). The emotional pleasure that humans derive from providing such help is sometimes so great, that it won't be wrong to say that the person who is asking for help is actually doing favor to the one whom they are asking from.

But this made me wonder how this is not the case with all kinds of help. I myself has been asked for help with some sorts of things and I have hated it, and this is true for other people I have observed as well. The very same people like providing certain kind of help and dislike providing some other kinds of help. What's the distinguishing factor? There are multiple, like how close that other person is to you, how much you enjoy that specific kind of thing, how effortless is the task. But these things, I suppose, are secondary.

The primary factor, I believe, is one's perception of how meaningful will be their help to the other person. This can overshadow all other factors. If, suppose, someone likes making apps and a friend tells him they have an idea for an app, and asks him to help them develop it, he might not enjoy helping his friend if he thinks the idea doesn't make any sense. On the other hand, the same person might see a stranger on road with a flat tire who asks him for help with something, and he might feel good being able to help that stranger even though he is not a mechanic and he doesn't know the person needing help but because he thinks that help might actually make a difference to a person having a rough day. An edge case where this might not be applicable is if the person being asked for help is suppose, a teacher who might miss a class, but his not offering help would be because to him, providing that meaningful help might prevent him from doing some other meaningful work that he is obliged to do.

Not all people follow the same pattern, but I think it is a good enough approximation for people with a sound moral compass. So, what can we deduce from this? Firstly, one's perception of meaningfulness of the help they are offering might influence how they feel about it. This means that if you truly care about something and the task really means something for you (which doesn't necessarily means it should be something grand), you shouldn't hesitate about asking someone for help as they might actually feel good being able to help you. Secondly, we as humans are biased about helping others based on our perception. Our assumption about how meaningful or impactful our help is for the person might be flawed, so we should try to gain more clarity about this in whatever way appropriate (sometimes explicitly asking the other person works, sometimes you might need to choose another path). Lastly, I observe this strange phenomenon of meaningless work. It certainly is a strange fact how one's mere perception about the impact of their work can make them feel about their work. Thus, it is no wonder how some people absolutely love their work and others loathe it. If only people who loathe their work could know how they would feel doing something more meaningful to them, they might not stay long where they are.

On Arbitrariness of Labels

 There's something fundamentally wrong with classifications/categories/genres or as you can call them generally, labels. What's wrong about them is two-fold. People's inability to understand the arbitrariness of the process of putting things into different buckets to the extent that they don't like things which aren't too easy to put into a bucket, and also people who create things that are too easy to put in a bucket. Labels (classification / genres / categorization) rarely do justice with a good work.

I wanted to specify it down, but I am unable too. Every good creative work (book/movie/game/whatever) has such of its identity derived from its unique idiosyncracy that it feels wrong to use the regular labels with them.

But the strange thing about this is that labels are useful. They serve a useful function to make a lot of information manageable, which makes me realize that the problem arises when people start giving labels more importance than what they hold, and that probably happens because most of mass content has too little of an identity of its own that defining them with labels become the norm.

RIP SBP Data Authenticity ft. Aaj ke hisaab se

Edit: I later found out the mistake was my own. Details in end.

-------------

 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?

-------

Edit 14/07/25: So, I found out the data from both sources is actually consistent. The issue was how I was grouping it. The SBP Handbook explicitly mentioned the years were fiscal years. But when grouping BR data to get annual average, I had grouped by annual year instead of fiscal year. When I grouped BR data by fiscal year, it was pretty much the same.

PS. None of this matters because I think my decision to use gold prices as deflator was pretty stupid one, because gold prices have increased much more sharply then overall prices, probably because demand for gold was not much high pre-2000 but it increased sharply in the next 2 decades; that's my hypothesis. But anyways, I have found old CPI data for Pakistan, and will plug it when I find time.

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.