This is my weblog. Yes, it means logs meant to be on the web. Yes, the word blog comes from weblog. Yes, I had no freaking clue that this was the case. And yes, I am writing all these just to fill up the space below which the logs can begin.
Don't criticize what you can't understand
Don't write what you do not — to at least a certain admissible level — understand. This reminds me of the line in Bob Dylan's song "don't criticize what you can't understand".
Ab initio cum recta abstractio
It is important to think from the ground up but you must be at the right ground.
Hence, ab initio cum recta abstractio. From the beginning with the correct abstraction.
On what engineering means
Zeeshan mentioned the meaning of the word "engineering" means "cleverness".
Cryptography and Physics
The philosophical exploration of cryptography from a physical perspective delves into fundamental questions about the nature of information, its robustness under physical laws, and the principles governing its secure communication and control (black hole information paradox, non-locality and nature of quantum information).
Need for?
Almost always we find works of science established on grounds of mathematical understanding (language formalisation?) and physical importance (pragmatic realism?). However, philosophy (understanding perspective?) is often left out. This often comes around to bite back. The main reason I believe this happens is because of lack of perspective leading to further lack of ideological basis or motivational push.
Richard Borcherds interview
Try counter-examples and try proving at the same time, for sure either one will work out.
Mathematics is discovered. How? If there were another civilization that we come across, we shall share the same mathematical ideas — even though representations and formalisms might be different. Now my question is that — does it mean humans can serve to be "universal conscious machine" because they can do math?
"There are some mathematicians whose work I could have never discovered for myself — no matter how harder or smarter I worked — Grothendieck is one of them."
Denis Nardin on how to do math research
I liked how he mentioned the same methodology for learning something as Siddharth had suggested me. Eat the main ideas, come back, chew on them and maybe come back again and chew on other stuff (... till you understand).
They also talked about how important active listening and asking stupid question are. Also, while reading a paper do not have the target of completing proper reading of it, rather look for and understand what you are interested in.
‘If’ from Rewards and Fairies
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
The poem nicely encapsulates my notion of virtue ethics. To be stable when none are, to be trustworthy when none are, to be hated but not giveaway to hating, to not be too proud or be grandoise, to be stoic about results yet be passionate about actions, to build things back up no matter how many times they are broken, to wager away everything on that what you feel righteous and to hold on to all these when despair glooms all.
My favourite public speech
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. (Abraham Lincoln)"
Found randomly
"The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature. (C.S. Lewis)"
Propaganda
Edward Bernays, often regarded as the father of modern public relations, explored the relationship between democracy and propaganda. He believed that in democratic societies, propaganda could be used to shape public opinion and influence behavior, effectively molding consent. Bernays emphasized the power of persuasion through targeted messaging and the manipulation of emotions, habits and opinions; suggesting that propaganda played a significant role in maintaining social order and managing public opinion.
Berney saw democracy not as a society where people govern themselves through a defusion of power but as a society that could be managed by few individual hands (invisible governors).
He believed most people were just too dumb or prone to violence to think for themselves except in the narrow confines of an election with extremely sparse options (say just two candidates like presidential election in the US). “Rest of the time people needed to be policed and nudged from the top down for life to remain decent”.
Diplomacy and Perception
- Identities matter to us more than actions. By turning actions into identities we can make people much more likely to engage in those desired actions.
- Speak with a great deal of confidence. Remove fillers.
- Be prophetic. Don’t ask me wtf that means.
Code
Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express.
A nice mantra to remember when you think of approaching any system design job be it in the manufacturing industry or be it in good old software engineering.
Now, on the subject of actual “code” or “programs or software”, code is used and read more than it is written. Zeeshan sent me a blog post regarding this.
biz > user > ops > maintainer > author
Whims and Selling
Always selling and marketing based on the whims of the public is a fast track to disaster for the public and often for the institution doing it too. However, certain individuals can get wealth and influence, a lot of it, by doing this.
Trust and Values
Without trust society cannot stand. It is neither just truth nor lies that a civilization is built upon. A civilization stands on trust be it fictional, fake or emperical truth.
To imagine an intermingling of trust and fiction is strange. Maybe fiction is essential for our minds to comprehend reality and work with it.
As to values and personal values, I trust in being virtuous. And my virtuosity assumes openness and honesty in all things important. I also find courage (and humor) to be one of the greatest of virtues. But it must not be empty and we should always try to gain the strength to back it up.
The venture to virtuous is never an one-off permanant state. We need to keep toiling for it. This lack of permanance isn't bleaksome but beautiful.
Superman’s superpower
Confidence (origin: confidere, meaning: have full trust) is based on intense trust on yourself, your abilities and your potential and maybe bring out the same from others. When you are really confident you learn to be courageous and to let go of the insatiable need to control things.
Backwards Law
“The more you try, the further away you are.” - The Backwards Law
For example, the more you try to float, the more you sink. In dating, the more you chase after someone, the more repulsed that person gets since they sense neediness. In business or poker, the stress of thinking of not having or losing money puts you in that poverty mindset of scarcity.
Rosch and Whorf's Hypothesis: an excerpt
Rosch's early studies were on color. She learned of the Berlin-Kay color research midway through her own research and found that their results meshed with her own work on Dani, a New Guinea language that has only two basic color categories: mili (dark-cool, including black, green, and blue) and mola (light-warm, including white, red, yellow).
Berlin and Kay had shown that focal colors had a special status within color categoraies-that of the best example of the category. Rosch found that Dani speakers, when asked for the best exampies of their two color categories, chose focal colors, for example, white, red, or yellow for mola with different speakers making different choices.
In a remarkable set of experiments, Rosch set out to show that primary color categories were psychologically real for speakers of Dani, even though they were not named. She set out to challenge one of Whorf's hypotheses, namely, that language determines one's conceptual system. If Whorf were right on this matter, the Dani's two words for colors would determine two and only two conceptual categories of colors.
Rosch reasoned that if it was language alone that determined color categorization, then the Dani should have equal difficulty learning new words for colors, no matter whether the color ranges had a primary color at the center or a nonprimary color.
She then went about studying how Dani speakers would learn new, made-up color terms. One group was taught arbitrary names for eight focal colors, and another group, arbitrary names for eight nonfocal colors (Rosch 1973). The names for focal colors were learned more easily. Dani speakers were also found (like English speakers) to be able to remember focal colors better than nonfocal colors (Heider 1972).
In an experiment in which speakers judged color similarity, the Dani were shown to represent colors in memory the same way English speakers do (Heider and Olivier 1972).
Story and its elements
A story is built with the following:
- Narration → moves the story → active voice, fuck adverbs and adjectives
- Description → show the perceptions → don’t tell
- Dialogue → brings characters to life → don’t overstate
Good Ideas and Comedy
They are related. Both are based on noticing anomalies (often quite randomly). Much of standup comedy is based on anomalies in daily life. Whereas good ideas, that work, originate from anomalies at the frontier of knowledge. I think there was Paul Graham blog on the same.
Where I differ from Nietzsche?
Must you give up on "good" to be "great"?
Our identities shouldn't outright contradict what it means to be human; the pursuit of beauty in building and understanding and the capacity for empathy.
On Vagabond
- Love the endeavour.
- Experience is not the same as awareness and awareness is not the same as meta-awareness.
- Preoccupied with a single leaf, you won't see the tree. Preoccupied with the tree, you will miss the forest.
- Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
New Amsterdam
"How can I help?" (Season 1 Episode 1)
"Why take the hard road? Better views." (Season 1 Episode 6)
Why play chess (mea editio)?
- Learning how 'to commit' and get comfortable with doing 'hard things'.
- Relying on spatial reasoning and memory more.
- Improving patience and concentration to be honest.
The Three-body Problem
"Should philosophy guide experiments or expeiment guide philosophy?" (Cixin Liu, 三体 or Three-body)
Thoughts on after graduation
Every kid sometime or the other looks up to the sky and wants to an astronaut. Once I was past that phase, I wanted to be a lot more things from sewage cleaner to footballer to professional gambler (and yes I have actually tried my hand at a few of them). In college, I am studying computer science and hence the most obvious option is to go into software engineering. I do not particularly like being a software engineer but neither does "just academia" suit me for I feel that it traditionally lacks adventure.
It's hard for me to be a good beaver or frog and dig deep or operate without a strong big picture. I find myself indulged in things that demand art and engineering just as much as rigor and research - maybe even a tad bit more. This is more of a reflection of my traits and frame than tools or skills.