There’s this problem with repeating a certain reference work (even with word-by-word translation) on repeat in attempt to learn language. That is, your brain start memorizing whole sentences and their meanings instead of forming individual word by word associations. Even though, one might be able to fully understand the readings on which the language learner has done his exercise, he might not be able to extrapolate that learning, even to another passage that uses the very same vocabulary. Language learner should thus be wary of this illusion and constantly stream himself newer stuff (even though containing same level vocabulary).

A chair is an enclosing structure. A low-height table with which you are supposed to sit on ground is better than an elevated table and a chair, because on ground, your body is not enclosed in a structure and hence enjoys greater deal of flexibility while moving around.

Example of a good work setup

I just read this:
https://talhaashraf.com/show

This principle is applicable and also useful when you are asking someone a question. You can show them your thinking process that leads to the question. This gives them the relevant context for why you are asking the question, how’s that relevant for you, what parts you’ve been able to figure out and what parts you got stuck at, what you’ve got right and you haven’t, and so on.

If you don’t give your thinking to the person you’re asking a question from, you are basically delegating the task of extracting the relevant context around the question to them, which is not only too much of an ask (and hence rude), but also very inefficient and slow.

There’s exception to this principle though. You don’t need to do this when you are asking someone questions to learn more about them (instead of asking question about a specific matter or a problem). In this case, you should rather try to make your thinking less visible. Because people often subconsciously adapt their responses according to their perceptions of the inquirer’s desired response. And even if their responses are not modified and representative of their true self, they will still be restrictive to narrow specifics. When you want to learn about someone, you should rather question them in a way that allows them to be more explorative about themselves so that its beneficial for both of you.

There have been times when I was working on some problem and I was shrugging of a certain part of the problem saying I don’t have time to fix that and then proceeded with some workaround for that instance, and the problem re-occurred in a different instance and I did the same again, and it repeated quite a few times. And then, when I eventually figured out the mechanics of the thing, I was like it wasn’t that difficult actually, I should have learnt it earlier.

But there’s an underlying logic for this avoiding figuring-out-problem-from-first-principles behavior. The brain does this to avoid spending cognitive energy on very second problem you see, but only on problems that are recurring. However, the problem here, is that the internal tally for how frequently recurring a problem to figure it out should not be 10 or something; 2 is just a fine enough number, and if you’re really lazy, then 3.

If you want a convenient way to get and read all new things I post on this site, you can use an RSS reader. The URL of this site’s RSS feed is:

https://weblog.tamseel.pk/rss

These days almost all sites use email newsletter as a means of staying in touch with users. But RSS works on an inverse philosophy. The site shouldn’t keep user in touch. Rather, the user should stay in touch with the site.

Email Newsletters are a push mechanism where you give every site your email address and they send in updates any time they want in your inbox. This is the push mechanism.

RSS is a pull mechanism. Here, I give you my RSS feed url. And you can add this feed to an RSS reading app and your app will fetch new items from the feed periodically, that you can read any time from that app.

The RSS approach was more popular in old times. But the shift happened as the competition for users’ limited attention started becoming fierce. In the pull mechanism, it is up to user whether to open their RSS app or not, and whether they want to get on notifications or not, and all sorts of options like that. The intention lies upon the reader.

With emails, the email lands in your inbox whether at that time your intention to read is or isn’t. For me, often times, I get a newsletter, I don’t want to read it right away, so I swipe the notification away, and I forget, and since more stuff keep coming in, the old newsletters are pushed downwards and remain unread in the inbox. So, I thought of making a new email address just for newsletter, but boy, the number of email addresses I have is already too high. I should stop workarounds and look for proper solution and the proper solution is very old and simple, i.e. RSS. That gives me full control over what I receive, how frequently I receive it, and how I am notified of it. Of course, you can unsubscribe to email newsletters as well, and tinker with your email settings, but come on, go look at your inbox. I can’t stand having that kind of inbox. At the moment, I don’t have enough actual data to tell how the experience of shifting to RSS has been, but I will write about once I have.

Now, I know, some people might not have any problem with instant updates at any time, well they can set up their RSS reader app, to check for updates more frequently and set up notifications for it.

If you want to read a better version of this posts, and a list of some rss reading apps (I haven’t tried them yet), read this:

https://ncase.me/rss

I have seen it happen many times, and I myself have even been on the receiving end. A possible reason is that when a person is confused and you tell them, hey, X has said something good about just this kind of problem is kinda redundant and useless. If you have internalized learned wisdom well, you probably would be very well able to speak it out directly (because you had actually applied it and seen it work, (or if something not experimentable, you’d have followed a thought experiment and reached the same conclusion independently)).

This is useful to know when you’re helping other people solve their problems, because I have this instinct to point people to original source where I read/heard the concept, and it is useful in some cases, but in most cases it isn’t. Or I should say, pointing to original source is useful at the end of conversation or after the idea has made sense to the other person not before it.

I unblocked x today to export my tweets (so that I can import them here), but I wasted next half my hour scrolling through it. Earlier, when I had blocked it I had written something like “it is ironic because the content on my x feed is actually interesting”. But now, I feel like, even though the content might be interesting in itself, but for me specifically, it unarguably was having an adverse effect at least the way I was consuming it.

I have been using the word “interesting” as a catch-all for all things good or things that I think are worth pursuing further. But, it isn’t a good idea to keep pursuing things which are interesting in themselves, but have a net negative effect on you.

The primary problem with our (university) students is that they don’t want to think what reality is, they want to be told what reality is. Unless a disposition towards thinking is sustained and not killed until a student reaches higher education, the profession of professors is cursed for thinking people.

Unless I engage in serious thinking and serious reading, I cannot do serious writing, and thus, I should refrain from writing (or at least serious writing) at times when I’m not doing serious thinking.

 I like email as a medium of communicating with friends (and strangers on the internet). 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 actually has a 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 their inbox littered with boring 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.

Create a separate 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the preface to today’s blog entry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s all for today!

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, although their experience and worldview changes as they grow older, but an essential attitude of theirs remain the same. There’s some lightness in children that doesn’t necessarily need to go away as you become an adult. On the other hand children too can do serious work and think about important things. It’s not an adult chore to do but a very essential human experience that doesn’t need to be delayed unnecessarily.

This isn’t how most people think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——

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

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

— anu (@anuatluru) January 2, 2024

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

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

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

This leads to some interesting questions:-

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