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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

 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.

 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.