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  • Solitude

    In

     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.

  • WhatsWrapped!

    In

    Since it’s the last semester going on and our degree is about to end, the idea that MUA had shared first 2 years ago, which I had later become disinterested in, resurfaced in my curiosity.

    So I did that—analysis of WhatsApp group chat of our class. Here’s the gist of around 4200 messages sent in span of 15 months.

    Note: Words message and edited were WhatsApp generated and thus do not count as valid. The 6th most used word (at 8th no.) was a teacher’s name.

    These were the charts I sent in the group and asked my fellows if they were curious to know about something else.

    One was about message count of others apart from the top 25. This shows us the total distribution.

    Another was about who most used the most used words, specifically the most used word class and the teacher name at 8th no.

    The funny part was when the class-fellow who was the 3rd (/2nd) person with highest mentions of that teacher asked when she had taken that teacher’s name. So, I filtered the dataframe with her as sender and text containing that teacher’s name, and sent the results. The results included that instance when she was ranking (satirically) various teachers and some other students were provoking her. The texts are very hilarious but can’t be shared here since they contain TMI.

    .

    The most tedious part in the whole exercise was mapping the missing phone numbers (those not in contacts) to the names of students by searching for any instance when a text containing the roll number or other identifiable information was shared from that number.

    Anyways, this was the overview of the group which was formed around 4th semester when morning and replica classes were merged. In the earlier group of morning class, messages were sent in an amount incomprehensible for me. Explains why I had joined that group several months later.

    The part that hit the most was when I thought of converting my R script for analysing whatsapp chat export into an R package, and found that someone had already built that 😭. Had I known that before, I wouldn’t have needed to write that script. (Actually, I am not sure. I probably wouldn’t have found this interesting if I wasn’t writing the code. Maybe I would have. Who knows?)

    Code: https://github.com/aiktamseel/whatswrapped

  • Internet Companions

    In

    I have been meaning to write on this for so much time.

    Unrelatedly, I have been meaning to delete my Linkedin account for so much time.

    So, it is today that I decided to do both.

    For me, who started playing with computers at the age of 4, computers have always been fascinating machines, but my experience of interacting with people on internet is relatively new. I do feel nostalgia for the time when we used Yahoo and Gmail messenger to talk with our relatives far away, but I was a kid at that time, and it’s just nostalgia. My later use of internet consisted mostly of playing flash games on Miniclip, Friv, etc., and learning about random tech stuff to fix things for other people like, how to install Windows, how to wipe an iPhone with forgotten password, how to install a paid mobile game for free, how to install phonetic Urdu keyboard and format Urdu documents in Word, how to make printers work, how to flash a stock ROM on android device, etc.

    My first interaction with people on the internet happened in 2020.

    I was in grade 11, and I don’t remember how, but somehow on the internet, I learned about a place where they were providing free online courses related to tech skills. It was called DigiSkills. At that time, just the term GraPHic deSigN fascinated me so much that I enrolled in that course. A few months after, I realized graphic design is not my thing. By that time, I had accidentally stumbled upon a website-maker called Google Sites1.

    Google Sites just blew my mind. How easy it was to create cool-looking2 websites for FREE3! Using Google Sites in a practical setting for disseminating information for a local community that I was part of, made me realize4 that websites were my thing. So when I figured that WordPress, the course of which was offered by DigiSkills, was a tool for creating websites, I started watching the videos of that course on YouTube5. The time was 2020 when I was in college6 but the educational institutes were closed due to Covid-lockdown.

    Incidentally, using an anonymous FB profile7, I joined the Facebook group that the instructor Saad Hamid had made for those taking the course. There, Saad Hamid (who was working at Google that time) posted about CloudSeekho, an online bootcamp (though they never called it bootcamp) to learn about Google Cloud. The interesting thing was that those would finish it would get GoOgLE-branded swags. I knew nothing about cloud other than the fact that iCloud and Google Drive were cloud, but to the 16yo me, those swags looked cool. The bootcamp was aimed at CS undergrads in Pakistan, and here I was — a college-student who had chosen biology instead of computer science (just so he could avoid math8), but the bootcamp only required you to be a student and that I was. Still, I commented on that post by Saad Hamid asking if a non-CS 16-yo could do it. He replied with something that was synonymous to, it’s worth giving a try. So did I.

    That bootcamp (CloudSeekho S1) was my first experience interacting with people on internet. There was a slack channel for communication. I was a bit afraid about if I’d be able to do the labs that we were supposed to do, but they turned out to be pretty easy. All I had to do was start the lab, and follow the instructions. I understood very little about the different tools9 being used like load balancer, or compute instances, etc. but I could follow the instructions very precisely. It got so well to the extent that I was one of the persons helping out people telling them of some mistakes in the instructions of a few labs. Contributing to these elder people studying in UniVErSitY felt really cool. In that bootcamp, I made my first (sort-of) internet companions10 and also, my first Linkedin account.

    Two individuals I continued interacting with after the bootcamp were YM and KK. The actual interactions probably weren’t that many, but when someone had something publicly shared that influenced me, like made me do something or change my behavior or perception about something, I am counting that as well. So both, KK and YM became an influence.

    KK used to sketch and make illustrations and had uploaded some of them on Behance. The failed graphic designer of me, liked that. I too, made a Behance account and uploaded there some of my (failed) logo designs, photographs I had taken of birds and sky and a spider (using my father’s mobile), and digitalized colored versions of two sketches of our college classroom that my only11 friend at college had drawn on paper. KK also shared with me playlist of a really cool course called “Git and Github for Poets” with me, through which I got to learn about them years before I would use them for actual code.

    YM had a Medium account with some writings. That form of writing was new to me. Writings not from famous long-dead writers that some bunch of so-called academicians decided to put in our curriculum12, rather from everyday living human-beings about their experiences and thoughts. Some of YM’s writings changed my behavior about some things, and made me do some things. Inspired by YM, I started writing on Medium and started taking freelancing seriously. Before that, I used to think freelancing could only be done by full-time professionals, but YM was a living example of non-professional (professional = years of experience) student actually doing freelancing. Also, through YM, I got to know of a web-dev bootcamp that will be mentioned later.

    My interest in Google Sites that had started before CloudSeekho, continued adjacent to it and also afterwards. I had learned various tricks, the coolest among which, I thought, was of getting a FREE13 domain connected to Google Sites. I made some videos about these and uploaded them on YouTube, but I couldn’t find any place where people talked about Google Sites. So, I created a Facebook Group for it and shared link to it under those YouTube videos. Slowly, people started joining it. The group was small, but I could share those tricks there, and talk to other people who used Google Sites, and help them with their issues. Since, it was the pre-mobile era (atleast for me), one had to actually open Facebook to see what was there, and since there could be days when one could not open it, I thought it would be a good idea to add another moderator to the group as well. So, I made a Moderators Required post there. Only one person — JB1 — commented, who was also a teenager like me. So, I texted JB1 to ask about his experience with Google Sites, and it turned out, that he had much more experience with Google Sites than me. I happily made him the moderator and I also got to learn some random things about him, like his interest in drones and flying.

    With JB1 as moderator, I no longer needed to pay that much attention to that group. And some time afterwards, I deleted my anonymous FB account, which automatically made JB1 the group admin. Much later, when I made a new FB account, I saw that he had grown that group into a thing, in a way I never could. It was very nice talking to him again. Then, again I deleted that account. Just this last year, I connected with him on Linkedin, and it was as good talking to him as before.

    Back to 2020, few months after CloudSeekho, YM posted on linkedin about a free online web-development bootcamp for Pakistanis. This bootcamp, again was not called bootcamp, rather an internship, which it obviously wasn’t. By this time, I had learned about WordPress, but knew nothing about HTML, CSS, JS stuff. So, I joined it. The communication for this one, happened in an FB group where only admin could post, so it was not organized in a way, you would have many interactions with other people. If anyone had any problem with a task, they would have to comment under that week’s post, and there, admin or someone else could reply explaining what’s wrong in their solution. Once, I replied to a problem someone had commented under the admin’s post, explaining the issue in it. Unexpectedly, that person, JB2, later started conversation in FB Messenger. After a few days, we two were, sort of, doing this bootcamp together. We would both ask for help whenever one of us got stuck in a problem, or we just ask out each other’s progress and so. That was my second (and probably last) experience when I realized learning is much more fun when done together. An interesting fact was that JB2 was an electrical engineering student and like me, was doing it as a fun side-thing.

    By the end of 2020, I had started using Medium that I had gotten to know about through YM. I started writing some things14 and also started following some other people who used to wrote on Medium, one of which was 0xA. I occasionally commented on his writings, and he — who had followed me back — occasionally commented on mine. His writing theme was unlike other people on Medium. He was reader of Camus, Kafka and the like. At that time, he was in his early twenties, and I couldn’t actually understand what he was experiencing by reading his creative writings about his experiences but they felt so original that I was attracted towards them. Later, when I got to university, somehow I started understanding his writings more. That is when I again reached out to him, and we started talking on email (with gaps of 5-7 months).

    In 2021, I deleted my Linkedin account after a year or so of creating it. Initially, I hadn’t understood the dopamine hit I would get on each comment and like, that I got on my posts. At that time, I would connect (on Linkedin) with every other person, and some of my posts had gone somewhat popular. Slowly, I started becoming conscious of this dopamine hit and it made me sick. So, I was around 17 when I quit linkedin first time.

    That year, I totally revamped my Fiverr profile, and finally landed my first order. To this day, I don’t understand why MR —my first freelance client — trusted me so blindly with that order15. He was a very kind person and was undergoing cancer treatment. I was really saddened when I learned about his demise two years later.

    In 2022, I moved to Lahore for university. That year, I got to enjoy a lot of solitude, and also, the freelancing thing started realizing. Later, I also re-made my Linkedin account as a strategic-compulsion16.

    In 2023, I found xyT on internet who became a heavy influence. But with him, I never interacted as such17 It started when I stumbled upon a blog that he and his friends had created when they were in university (back in 2014). Reading his blogposts, I was mesmerized. I became certain that if there was any person on Earth who could ever understand me, it was him. I read his writings like a holy scripture. I read all of his blogposts multiple times. Every Facebook, Instagram, Twitter post he made, I read. Every YouTube video made by him, or in which he appeared, I watched, multiple times. I still have a folder on my laptop with screenshots of some his posts.

    That was a strange time in my life, when the absurdity of everyday lives of people had started haunting me. There were books, but my taste in reading hadn’t developed that much, and I couldn’t resonate much with the authors, but with xyT, I resonated deeply, and he influenced me in a way, that made me do a lot of things, which I lack the space here to explain. But in his company, I spent a great deal of time.

    By the start of 2024, I started realizing that despite admiring someone, there’s a limit to which you could or should imitate their style and that limit I had already hit. In his own words: There’s no template to life. I say make your own way, follow your own style and leave your own mark. xyT gave me company when I needed it the most, but now it was time to say good-bye.

    Something interesting started happening in early 2024. I started going down some interesting rabbitholes on the internet. And those rabbitholes led me to a place that I was long in search of – the unindexed web of non-corporatish personal websites.

    It is very difficult to accidentally stumble upon such stuff, but it is like a thread that once you have gotten hold of, you can pull it all the way up. The metaphorical end of this thread was Curius extension. I started reading blogs, personal websites, digital gardens made by people around the world. I was like those desert Bedouins mentioned by Exupéry, who were once taken to France and were shown a waterfall, and when they were told it was time to go, they exclaimed they should wait … (for what?) … for the waterfall to finish. I was waiting for this niche content I had discovered on the internet to finish, only to realize this was tremendously more than what I could consume in my entire life; more and more of it just kept sprouting.

    A little down the road in 2024, I started aggressively curating my Linkedin feed. I removed from my connections all people with whom I had never interacted. Of those connections I personally knew, I unfollowed a lot. Now, I was only following people whom I thought were doing good work. Most of them were unrelated to things I was interested in. There were designers, marketeers, typographers, etc. but they were all those whom I thought were really good at what they did. So, through one such designer whom I had started following after seeing a Karachi-bus-simulator made by him, I stumbled upon profile of another person, TA, who was to become another influence.

    By that time, I was almost sick of Linkedin (this is summer 2024 btw) because despite my aggressive attempts to curate my feed, absurdity kept creeping into it. Seeing TA’s profile was like a summer breeze. I instantly knew this was the kind of person I would have loved having as a school/ college/ university friend had he existed in those times in those places. Amusingly, the first essay/ blogpost I was redirected to from TA’s posts, was of Henrik Karlsson18, 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”. To some extent, I think, it did turn out this way, with his blogposts.

    So, I sent him a connection request which he accepted, and one day, I struck a conversation with him19. It went unexpectedly good. I never had imagined that someone in their first conversation with someone on internet would invite them to tea whenever they visit his city.

    The perk of having a person you resonate with, as an internet-companion is that you can ask them questions, the answers to which although they give from their perspective, somehow help you in formulation of your own perspectives. Plus, you get introduced to a whole range of content (books and internet-essays in this case) that you would love consuming. Plus, you can rant to them (in a sensible manner) about things that frustrate you. For some strange reason, when someone says, same dude, or, us bro us (not as a cliché, but in an intentional way) about something not commonly felt, it feels really satisfying.

    TA pushed me to do some things that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. But even if one doesn’t explicitly nudge you to do something, when there’s a chance that someone you look up to might see, you do things. One becomes less reliant of this feeling with time, but it’s much helpful when one’s starting out a particular sort of things.

    In late 2024, once scrolling on twitter, I saw a tweet that I found much resonating. The post author had a personal website mentioned in bio. I opened it and found it amazing. I cold-emailed them telling that I loved their website. They replied with much kindness telling that they were not expecting anyone to stumble upon their website, and that they hadn’t updated it in a while. I then told them that I have been planning on making my own website for some time as well, and then they nudged me to just get a very basic website with skeletal html get up within an hour of reading their email. Not within an hour, but I did that within 24 hours of reading that. That v0.1 of my website wasn’t something I was too proud of. I shared it with TA, and he shared it on his Linkedin without me asking him to do so. A lot more people than I had expected, liked that website, which in turn made me update it to v1.0 — that still was liked by more people than I had expected.

    Sort of digression, but interesting. When I told about inFilter (a chrome extension I was building those days) to someone on twitter, they told me they use a twitter equivalent of it and I have been using it since then. Once, I switched to Firefox browser for a while and opening up twitter literally got me scared. It’s insane how often we continue with horrible defaults when they could be drastically improved as easily as installing an extension.

    One last encounter with which I would finish this stupidly-long essay20 is with JB3 who after reading my announcement of closing of my blog that I had started in 2023 (in imitation of the blog in which xyT wrote) had contacted me to ask if JB3 could re-start that blog. I used to think that that blog existed in void, so it was interesting to learn that someone had found it interesting enough to think about re-starting it.

    That brings us to today — when I have decided to quit linkedin for the third time21.

    Linkedin is absurd. On the other hand, there are some interesting people on Linkedin as well (some of whom, I suppose, are there due to strategic compulsion). This makes making such a decision difficult.

    However, the reason I have finally decided to quit linkedin is actually different, but quite simple. I need solitude.

    If you liked reading this, you will probably enjoy reading this series of four essays by Henrik Karlsson. If somehow, you have reached here and would want to be able to hear from me about interesting things that I—at some point in future—might want to share, write me an email22.

    Warmly,
    TA0

    1. Which reminds me that 3 or 4 years before that, I had stumbled upon blogger.com and had been fascinated by it as well, which makes me realize I had been stumbling upon interesting things on internet before, but I remember little of them. I will sometime try to make a proper record of those things. ↩︎
    2. contrary to the old-school blogspot themes ↩︎
    3. You don’t understand the importance of free services, unless you are a kid without a bank account and who doesn’t even know how credit card works and who would get a panic-attack just by the thought of asking parents for credit card details (not because your parents are so strict, but because online transactions aren’t the norm and how would you explain them).
      A digression inside digression, but this one’s funny: Although I didn’t know about credit cards but even 14-yo me knew how easypaisa worked and was smart enough to convince his brother to make an easypaisa account on his SIM, into which I could get some physical cash (that I personally owned) to be deposited via a local shop, that consequently I could send to a random trader on an online p2p exchange to buy some bitcoin (back in 2018 before the hype), that in turn I could use to buy a new coin which was being offered in ICO, but wasn’t smart enough to realize that it was a scam, and there was no actual coin. oops :\ ↩︎
    4. realize here does not mean a global realization, but a realization that was real for that time ↩︎
    5. because in DigiSkills enrollments only opened once every 3 or 4 months and they weren’t open that time ↩︎
    6. what is called High School in US ↩︎
    7. I had no experience of using social media before this (as my parents sensibly disapproved of it), except the anonymous facebook profiles I had occasionally made (between 2017-19 when I was in class 8-10) to stalk facebook profiles of my classfellows and teachers (bcz everyone was on FB that time) ↩︎
    8. My relationship with Mathematics has changed since then ↩︎
    9. Even though I sometimes felt like an impostor for not understanding the stuff, I later realized, I had kind-of understood some basic things without realizing, like what VM instances are and how command-line works, etc. ↩︎
    10. I wanted to say internet friends but friends is a complicated word and different people mean different things by it, I might write on that some time, and I also don’t want to use internet connections because of the bad taste Linkedin has given to that word ↩︎
    11. At college, I had a lot of what I now call semi-friends or acquaintances, but only this one I count as friend in retrospect. ↩︎
    12. This reminds me of a funny incident. Once, I re-read Good Bye Mr Chips (that was in our 12th class curriculum) after 12 college, and said to myself, gosh, this novel is good! ↩︎
    13. See footnote no. 3 ↩︎
    14. Some of these writings I now find childish, but I feel glad that I didn’t shy away from writing, or otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten into the habit of writing. ↩︎
    15. He was the (metaphorical) $499-client for me. I realized later after getting the $9 clients. ↩︎
    16. this term was introduced to me later by my university friend MUA, who when was nudging me to come to the welcome party we were giving to our juniors, explained me how he himself not liked to go to the party, but he was going as a strategic compulsion. ↩︎
    17. Except much later, only once, briefly, when I was tired and sleepy and was least expecting it, he himself started a conversation with me since I had commented on one of his tweets ↩︎
    18. Henrik Karlsson, is among the best writers I have found on internet. ↩︎
    19. Actually, I had intended to leave some messages, not to strike a conversation, but I wasn’t aware of TA’s quick-replying habits. ↩︎
    20. Does this even qualify as an essay? ↩︎
    21. I can’t remember when and how I quit Linkedin the second time, but my memory recalls of a second account that I had closed before this one. This sounds strange but it is what it is. ↩︎
    22. I like email because I prefer spaced communication over instant one.
      Also, My email address is x@gmail.com where x = aiktamseel ↩︎

  • A weird trait

    In

      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:

    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 email to our Program Coordinator that I never sent because I thought they just can’t understand

    In


    I am writing to you this email, as these thoughts have accumulated in my mind, but I suggest you to read this when you are feeling well, and have time to process this with ease of mind.

    The failure of School of Economics to impart in its students the skills and attitude that an educational institute aims to impart, is a very serious issue, but I believe the nature and causes of this problem are not understood at all. There is serious neglect on part of responsibilities of students, but the reasons behind it are not well thought upon.

    To understand this, you need to understand the anatomy of an incoming batch of BS 1st semester. More than 90% students would have spent their last 12 years in educational institutions that only intellectually dumb down these students. The quality of textbooks by our local textbook boards is pathetic (I had cried with joy when I read Mankiw’s principles textbook in 1st semester). The matric and inter exams only test student’s ability to memorize stuff from textbook, and reproduce them with paraphrasing in the exam in good English, so that’s what schools and colleges focus on, because that’s what they are claiming to be in the first place – institutes that help students achieve high scores on exams, not to help students become more intellectual and creative.

    Second feature of that batch, is that more than 80% students take admission in Economics as a last resort after not being able to secure admission in apparently more prospective degree programs; more than 70% are disheartened by their failure to do so, because of our poor social attitude.

    Third feature of that batch is that almost 50% students lack in interpersonal skills, which I believe is a failure of our social structure, more than the schools and colleges.

    But the most important feature of all, is that despite all of what I mentioned above, none of those students hate Economics, absolutely none of them. They simply don’t know what Economics is. They are de-motivated, disheartened students about whom their social circle predicts no impressive future.

    Does the faculty of School of Economics understand the delicacy of this situation? I am not sure, but I do not see any systematic effort by the institution to inspire these students about how practical and valuable Economics is to help them understand the world around, or even an effort to motivate these students in general: to make them believe that they are not doomed, that the opportunities for them to grow are so much more than what their social circle can think of. Few course-instructors individually attempt this, institutionally there is no such attempt.

    Now, what this incoming batch of students observe over time should also be noted. Firstly, most of them still think in the grade-maximizing framework that their previous institutions have indoctrinated them with. They try to apply this framework, but they fail, because they don’t know how to “understand” things; they still expect that merely memorizing stuff from textbook or solving exercises will help them. When they are unable to answer the out-of-exercise questions that they are now asked, they first try harder at memorization, but eventually accept the uselessness of the task, and instead of switching their approach from memorizing to understanding, they quit trying; their approach now is just surviving. Important to note, is that this happens over span of around first 3 semesters, such that they are stuck with where they are and see no alternative option to switch to.

    Second thing they observe is the dullness of the whole department. First semester students do not receive much attention from the instructors of the compulsory courses (as they are taught by permanent faculty who is busy). But apart from academic point of view, there is so much dullness in the department regarding extra-curricular activities. When they talk to their seniors, they don’t hear from them about any interesting projects they are working on, or any activity they are taking part in, or any event they are attending, or any internship they did, or any (Economics or non-Economics) book they read; all they would hear is about xyz problem in the department, or tips or tricks on “surviving” the situation. There would be no interactions focusing on any kind of upskilling or intellectual discussion, neither about economics, neither about any other domain of life.

    This, you might have noted, is a cyclic situation, because these same fresh students later would interact with their juniors in the same manner. This makes it much difficult to solve and an even greater effort is required by department to break this cycle.

    Now, let me shift the perspective to another angle that is of the department administration and the faculty.

    Firstly, the department is administratively highly inefficient. Compared with other departments, I must accept it’s ahead, but things that can be improved are lot. A great deal of time of faculty members is wasted because of this inefficiency. I will just give a few examples.

    Faculty members face an issue of internet in their offices. I can assure you that this problem is easily solvable. There is no rocket-science in it. Even the smallest of company in Lahore, with an office equal in size to our room no 1, that needs internet to function, has solved this problem, but our department could not solve this in the last 3 years, despite the fact that it impacts faculty members directly.

    Another example, is that our student advisors tediously schedule the timetable manually, each session. The time schedule has to be prepared that there is no conflict among classes of one instructor, or of one class/section. Manual scheduling is tedious and inefficient, but with help of software, it can be easily automated. I had actually coded such a software myself and shared it with our Student Advisors, but I was a little late last semester, as the timetable had already been scheduled, but I hope it would be used in the next semester.

    Similarly, many other administrative tasks can be digitalized that will save time for faculty members and students as well. When I visit the corridor upstairs, it is astonishing how often I see students outside coordinator office, or coming out of Mr Sajid’s office. If students need to visit the office (for reasons other than clarifying their concepts) in such a frequency, there must be something inefficient in the administrative process. The greater problem is not the administrative inefficiency, but that no one is even trying to solve this inefficiency, despite the fact that it is having a negative impact and it is improvable.

    Now, let me shift towards the institutional philosophy. I was very gladly surprised when I read draft of department’s vision and strategic plan formulated back in 2018, because it has laid out the complete roadmap of the structural transformation that I think is necessary. However, why its implementation stopped with upgradation of the Department into School is something I don’t understand. Sometimes, it seems the faculty has become too hopeless about the situation or maybe they think that the implementation on the vision can only start when construction of the new building completes, but I’m not sure about this.

    One crucial perspective about institute’s vision is to understand what kind of fresh graduates does industry demand. From any batch, maximum 5% students are those who can excel in economics to such an extent that they can receive foreign scholarship. Another 10% are those that can fill roles directly related to economics and financial research (because there’s only that much demand for such roles). The rest of 85% can be prepared for three domains: (i) specialist semi-related roles (e.g. data science, pure finance, etc.), (ii) generalist roles (e.g. management) for good positions in companies, (iii) masters students in local universities. This gives us a perspective of what skills should we focus in inculcating in students. It appears to me that the domain (iii) is the only one that is in sight of the faculty, because there is way less emphasis on the other domains. It is important to note that inter-personal skills (communication (reading, writing, presenting), problem-solving, rigorous attitude, creativity) are something that a great proportion of students will be solely relying on to get employed, and these are the things which I have noted other famous Economic institutes of Lahore, like LUMS, LSE, or FCCU greatly focus on.

    I completely understand that a big difference between School of Economics, and other institutes is that SoE have much less finances as it is a public institution contrary to the others. However, there is still a wide range of effective steps that can be taken to improve the departmental culture, an important one being the enactment of an Economics Society. What mysterious force has kept the society from being formed for 3 years despite dozens of requests by students over time, is beyond my comprehension. A society is the most effective intervention because it is self-sustainable and fixes the problem at its root. The faculty only needs to ensure that the students who run it are actually ambitious and skilled, and then give them the authority to direct the society along with making them stand responsible for their actions. After that, a supervisor can oversee its activities to see if its going in the right direction, but otherwise the society will self-improve overtime.

    One might wonder, why do students need an official society for these activities, and why are these not being coordinated without a society. The problem again is the culture. I remember that in 6th semester, where Econometrics II course involved use of R programming language, I who had taken courses in it and was familiar with it, decided to do a session with my classfellows to teach them the basics of R. Firstly, we had to ensure that Mr Ahsan would not run into the room mid-session demanding us to empty the room because of another class was to be held there despite the fact that no class was scheduled in the room (this has happened a lot of times before). Secondly, I had to personally convince Computer Lab attendant that no projector would be harmed during the session (after his initially “it is not allowed to do this yourself”). I believe if I had asked a teacher to give permission for it, they would have happily coordinated, but this exactly is the point. Why does one have to seek permission to do something productive and useful? This friction first dampens such activities and eventually totally eliminates them.

    Another reason that society is essential for such activities, is that only a very small percentage of students make out of their colleges with their ambitions alive. For them to exert positive influence, there needs to be a critical mass of them clustered together. However, it is much difficult to identify such students without such a platform because these students seem themselves as misfits here, and actually conceal their passions, again because of the dull culture.

    One intervention that the department has been trying to enforce is the attendance policy, the one that I passionately hate for personal reasons. But without getting into much debate, I present a counter-question: why do students not want to take the classes? I will only hint at the answer. If the average class attendance of various courses is observed, I can assure that the variation of average attendance among courses will be significant enough. The reason students don’t find it interesting to take the classes is what needs to be actually fixed.

    There are some batch-specific issues as well, for instance for our batch, some of the foundational courses (Probability & Probability Distribution (inferential statistics), Research Methods) were poorly taught, but I agree with what you said in the class about my previous suggestion (maintaining a record of topics covered in a course) that such gaps exist in almost all institutes, and the students need to fill that. And that is why, my primary suggestion this time is to allow for cultivating an environment where students productively cooperate with each other.

    Lastly, I would like to mention a positive fact about School of Economics, which is that these issues are being felt. I personally am aware of some serious problems in some institutions where they are so deeply ingrained that they are not even felt and detected. That is a more serious problem when apparently all signs seem good, students are getting good grades and everything, but intellectually they are completely hollow. So, I am hopeful that these issues being felt and detected will eventually result in curbing out of these after attempts from all side.

    The reason I shared my opinions in this regard is that I have deeply observed, thought, and read about this matter, and it’s not just a temporary thing. I remember writing an email to Head School of Economics a year ago which had in its early lines “It’s winter recess and I am writing to you this email at around 11 PM because of the strong need I feel to write this to you”, and had in its ending lines “I, as a student, wouldn’t have had the courage to write this to you if it was not for the students in batches following mine.”

    Thank you for taking the time to read this.

  • Book Ratings and Time Discounting

    In

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

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

    This leads to some interesting questions:-

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

  • On Comfort Zone

    In

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

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

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

    Anyways, who hasn’t heard “get out of comfort zone” and all those stuff?

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

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

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

    Just kidding.

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

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

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

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

  • On Illnesses

    In

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

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

    Let me explain using some simple examples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Anti Research

    In

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Thank you for coming to my Rant-Talk. 

  • Mimicker – Short Story

    In
    Mimicker – Short Story

    He hated his job but for some compelling reason, he had continued doing it. For as long as he could remember, that’s what he used to do. Living inside this small room, staying alert for when he is called to perform the job in front of the device hanging on the wall. But today, he was looking at this device with rebellious eyes. This strange monitor-like device always had on display the visuals of another room identical to his. He had been called. In three minutes, his client was going to come on display and he was supposed to perform the job, which would span over a minute. Apparently, he was prepared. But inside his mind, a fight was going on. Sleepless nights spent questioning his life had tired him. He had decided. Despite the disastrous consequences, he would not perform his job today. In fact, disaster was what he was wishing for. It was much better than the dull monotony of mimicry. So, instead of simply not showing up, he would show up and ruin everything. Instead of standing in front of the device and mimicking the actions of his client, he would do just the opposite. Chaos would erupt in his client-world when they find out that they had been misidentifying science and fiction. For the first time in his life, he felt the sensation of excitement. It was time. The client appeared. He stood still in front of the device and the client was standing still as well. Suddenly, he slapped himself on his face and so did the client. What was happening? He felt disappointed, but more than that, he was confused. He started making funny faces and the client did the same. He ran away from the device and so did the client. The job was successfully completed. In the corner of his room, he stood perplexed, not being able to understand who mimics who?