Tamseel's Weblog

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  • I should write something

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

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

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

    ——

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

    ——

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

    ——

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

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

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

    —-

    I think what a person should do is this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Meaningful Help

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

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

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

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

  • Writing raw vs processed thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Certain about means, uncertain about end, and vice versa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Index Investing in a Nutshell

     So, finally, I have been able to come up with a single answer to the answer I spent a long time on (probably more than was necessary).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The basic criteria is:

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

    1. Diversification

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

    https://sarmaaya.pk/indexes/MII30
    https://sarmaaya.pk/indexes/NBPPGI
    https://sarmaaya.pk/indexes/NITPGI

    2. Methodology

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

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

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

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

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

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

    3. Total Expense Ratio (TER)

    The declared management fees are:

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

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

     Management FeesTER (YTD) including levy
    MIIETF0.5%1.07%
    NBPGETF      WEBSITE DOWN      
    NITGETF0.4%1.18%

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

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

    But you know what’s the ideal situation. Ideal situation is to buy an index that is actually an index of one index from different countries of the world. An index of indices would be the ideal diversification. But for now, I don’t want to get into the hassle of how to buy foreign ETFs reliably (because investing is meant to be where you save your savings and thus, your funds would be at the place for who knows 5, 10, 15 years) and I haven’t found out a reliable way yet (which also doesn’t cost a large amount of fees).

    I had thought about I would end with some basic things such as, the purpose of such investing is not to complement or replace your income, it is to preserve savings along with accumulating some wealth. Young people should realize that the highest ROI is on human capital. I know some young guys who waste a lot of time on this stuff trying to make income from there, without realizing how greater return they could have earned if they had invested same amount of time on themselves. This is something you are supposed to think about only once to devise your strategy, and then just run on that strategy for the next 20 years on auto pilot, and think about things that matter more.

  • Notes on Pakistan’s Nuclear Program

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

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

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

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

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

  • AI & Sentience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Fixing Education – 1am thoughts

    Hey guys,

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

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

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

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

    TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:20 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

    TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:24 am

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

    FA — 27/04/2025 1:27 am

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

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

    🙌

    TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:28 am

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

    FA — 27/04/2025 1:29 am

    I’m a fan of yours from LinkedIn 🙋‍♂️

    TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:30 am

    Oh wait, am I that popular?

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

    TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:30 am

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

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

    FA — 27/04/2025 1:44 am

    I am definitely familiar with Talha bhai. 💯

    That’s actually a super interesting take.

    FA — 27/04/2025 1:52 am

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

    This should solve the “credential problem”. 

  • On human behavior and beliefs

    There’s a pattern that I have noticed so many times, that if someone asks me what’s the most fundamental thing I have figured out myself, I would tell this.

    Most of human behavior is stuck in re-enforcement cycle. People model human behavior based on their observation and then build systems based on those models, and those systems end up influencing how humans behave, without the initial observers realizing that the behavior they observed initially was itself influenced by the previous systems (or environment) those people were living in. A lot of man-made systems work not because they were based upon models of human behavior that were fundamentally true, rather because these systems can shape human behavior to fit accordingly. These systems are self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words, if people have a collective belief about human behavior, that belief will become true, because everyone would behave as if it was true, in result prompting people to behave that way even if they originally wouldn’t.

    I first noticed this phenomenon while studying economics where it was assumed that work is a “bad” — something that people dislike in itself but do so because it earns them something (income in this case) that they like by a greater degree. This assumption was irritating for me because the kind of people I admired were all those who loved their work, and so I objected on this assumption. I was told that there are certainly exceptions but this is what explains the behavior of most people. They were right about that, but what they got wrong was that they built whole economic theories on this assumption without ever questioning whether work is fundamentally a “bad” or whether most people do a primary work that they dislike because it’s the system-default and they never put much thoughts or efforts into finding an alternative 1. This belief probably wouldn’t have caused any problem if only a few individuals believed it, but when everybody believes that work is a necessary evil for earning bread, you see rise of what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs — meaningless jobs that only support other meaningless jobs where people are doing useless busywork thinking they are doing real work.

    But it was soon enough that I started noticing this pattern at other places. Money is just whatever people believe will be accepted as a medium of exchange. In financial markets, an asset will become “valuable” if a lot of people believe it is valuable. If people expect inflation to happen, it will happen.

    Beyond economics, consider how we raise our children. Most people believe children are dumb. Even if people don’t say it out loud, they treat them this way, including their own parents 2. Schools are designed on the same premise that children are stupid and very slow-progressing. Unsurprisingly, a lot of children do end up being stupid and slow-progressing, because that’s how schools handle them. Now, I am presenting this phenomenon it in the right order, otherwise someone’s first observation would be that children are stupid and slow-progressing, and then will see schools designed on the same premise and will be satisfied that schools are well-designed for society’s needs 3.

    A rather unexpected case of this phenomenon was something I realized relatively recently while watching an Adam Curtis documentary. The reason sexuality more influentially shapes people’s lives in US than in countries like Pakistan is because Edward Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud — had employed Freud’s sexuality-centered psychology theories in shaping public perception in US on a massive level during his work for big corporations and the government. Freud is a leading figure in psychology probably not because his theories were fundamentally true but because some people in power believed they were true and built systems based on his theories that influenced human behavior, thus turning them true as a consequence.

    Coming back to the main idea of how these systems and beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies. I was talking about this phenomenon in the parenting context with someone when this idea connected with another thought that I was thinking independently but was related to the same idea.

    This self-fulfilling pattern not only applies to beliefs of groups of people in authority 4, but also to beliefs one individually holds.

    A lot of beliefs are such that they would be true if you believe them to be true and would be false if you believe them to be false. A simple example is that if you think a university degree is important for good livelihood, university degree will most likely end up being important for your livelihood because you won’t spend time doing things that could improve your livelihood more than your university degree. Same case applies if you replace university degree with skills, connections, or your zodiac sign.

    Another example is one’s perception of being blessed or miserable. If someone thinks their life is miserable, it is miserable regardless of how good it is by objective measures, because one’s standards of living don’t matter if one doesn’t feel content with their life. Blessedness is only real if perceived.

    Similarly, people who think that they could become exponentially better in something if they put in the required time and effort, are the only ones who actually end being seriously good in that thing 5 because others never risk investing that much time and effort 6.

    Now, the apparent conclusion from noticing this pattern might be that perception and beliefs are all that matter, and we should thus shift all our focus on shaping these beliefs.

    But this is incomplete thinking. Focusing on just beliefs works only if there is no fundamental truth about reality. And if there is no fundamental truth about reality, why do financial bubbles burst, and markets take correction? Why do societies fall after their glorious rise? Why do homeschooled kids outperform schooled kids? Why do some people get to spend most of their lives doing what they love while others spend most of their lives doing what they hate? Why do people who believe true understanding of things is better than hacking for exams end up feeling better about what they do in lives and vice versa for those who think otherwise?

    The simple answer is that there exists a fundamental truth, but it will benefit you only if you believe it to be true. On the other hand, if you believe what’s not fundamentally true, you might still feel that your beliefs are true without ever realizing you could have done so better if only you believed in what was fundamentally true.

    1. It might be that at a certain point in history that for most people, there were no alternatives to working in agriculture or similar occupations even if they disliked it because technology wasn’t advanced enough and reaching production levels necessary for survival needed putting in a lot more amount of work in certain areas regardless of whether people liked them or not. But with technological progress, this certainly ceased to be the case, but the default systems persisted and people continued to believe that working on things they don’t find interesting is necessary for survival. ↩︎
    2. I theorize that the reason kids continue doing baby-ish activities these days is because parents like the baby version of their children and thus do not train their kids to act mature and take responsibility for things — but this is probably a discussion for another essay. ↩︎
    3. Fourteen-year old Aaron Swartz had figured out the absurdity of how children were treated and you could feel his resentment in his essay explaining it. ↩︎
    4. For most part of history, these group of people were those who held power, because they directed the flow of information. But with tools of mass spread of information, this can now be individuals with otherwise no power who somehow happen to gain mimetic virality. ↩︎
    5. Visa’s examples of serious people are also an example of this. ↩︎
    6. An exception for this is when individuals are so absorbed in that thing that they don’t even bother thinking about how good they can be at it or the consequences of them failing to be good at it. They simply don’t care about the secondary things at all. ↩︎

  • Thoughts on Parenting

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

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

    I just watched it now.

    I am not well-informed about the topic to form any opinion for now about if it’s good, neutral or bad for babies to watch this.

    But in a broader context, my point is this:

    These kinds of videos that are made around educational context (language in this case) get wrong about learning just as what Duolingo gets wrong. It’s kind of like baby version of Duolingo.

    Duolingo’s philosophy is that social media use different tactics to addict people to consume slop there, but we could use the same tactics to addict people to learn things. There hasn’t been any consensus, but I think there’s a lot of people who disagree with this philosophy including me. It’s same as how some ideological groups claim to “liberate” people’s thinking, but what they do is to get people out of one dogma, but put them in another dogma. True liberation is to make people think for themselves. Similarly, true education would make people safe from unhealthy habits and addictions, not use same techniques to make them “learn” things.

    In the video, you could see that words were matching with the visuals which is good, but what is bad is that babies also understand what’s happening, and what’s happening is that a bus is going somewhere and people in bus are doing weird actions while singing a rhyme. The situation was based on reality, but with an artificial/fake context.

    This should not make you think I am against purely imagined worlds. Doraemon is something I have watched a lot, like too much in my childhood. A lot of things were imaginary, but there was some real context around it. Cat robots don’t exist in real, but friends do help each other. What I mean by context is the story — what is actually happening. And this is what babies and kids naturally pay attention and what they should pay attention to. While, the learning would happen automatically. For this reason, I think Doraemon is an excellent cartoon for kids, because the un-intentional learning in it is way huge.

    Now, this was a bit tangent because Doraemon isn’t for babies, and you’d agree that Doraemon is suitable for kids older than babies. But check out this cartoon that I used to watch when I was a kid (not a baby, or I wouldn’t remember 😂) : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJuI8TslmruBKI-b0R3InlY7gW17b-U_J

    Now this world is purely imaginary, but the context is real.

    Also, if you watch this cartoon, you will realize how slow it is, which I think is very important thing. The main issue with YouTube kids video is that kids won’t want to stop watching these videos, because they get kind of addicted to them, which is because how fast-paced overly-colorful these videos are which hyper-activates kids’ brain in a wrong way. I don’t remember exactly where, but it was maybe a DW Documentary where they showed that experiments were done with rats who were shown constantly blinking colorful lights on a monitor, and they noticed observable anxiety or hyper-activity in these rats. This thing might not be as harmful for adults, but for children’s brains, this is very bad.

    But apart from that, I also don’t buy the assumption that kids can’t understand adult stuff. Maybe try showing space videos to your nephew and he might not get as bored (getting bored is also a good thing btw, that is when all creativity happens), or he might not dislike them. Now, I don’t mean to suggest an extreme view of this (any extreme is bad), but the reason I’m insisting on this is because there in a complete consensus on the opposite extreme that kids are dumb by default and thus, they should only do childish stuff.

    This is a point that Aaron Swartz hated when he was kid. He used to do interesting real stuff from very young age and hated it when his environment assumed that kids are dumb by default (See this essay he wrote when he was 14: https://web.archive.org/web/20020819014933/http://www.aaronsw.com/school/2001/01/21/ . He had similar thoughts when he was even younger). Henrik Karlsson makes same point in his Apprenticeship Online essay. Actually, this is also what my mother used to believe and thus she did not treated us like kids the way people usually do.

    People would look at kids and babies, and notice the childish stuff and how dumb they are and think that children are supposed to be like this, but they fail to notice that precisely because they think this, they themselves create such an environment which actually makes them childish and dumb.

    Tangent thought, but this is a pattern I have noticed so many times, that if someone what’s the most fundamental truth I have figured out in life that other people don’t get, it’s this. Most of human behavior is stuck in re-inforcement cycle. We see people, we notice they act in a certain way, and create models and systems according to that way, without realizing that people act that way because the previous systems or environments encouraged that kind of behavior. These systems are self-fulfilling prophecies. If on mass level, people have an assumption about human behavior, that assumption will become true, because everyone would be behave as if it was true, actually prompting people to become that way even if they originally wouldn’t.