Reflection

 End of the year is always a good time to reflect. I love reflecting and end up feeling I do it as a sort of shallow intellectual activity rather than taking action. 

So here goes plan for the next year. Simple 

More of 

Reading, thinking, exercising, writing, working, ink pens, kindle, spending time being present, being a better friend, yoga, running, keeping track of money

Less of 

Phone time, scrolling, reading useless stuff, sugar, ghosting (work), not calling out non performance,anger, empty swiggying, spending 

And to take what comes my way in 2022 with better attitude. 

Conversation

 As a way of solitude and deep thinking. 

I remember reading an article long back about how facebook and other instant messaging media deprive us of real conversations and deep friendships. This was before "The Shallows" and before it was fashionable to deride social media. The article spoke about how important it is for us to cultivate solitude to better understand ourselves. Counterintuitively the article also suggested that conversation with a friend can also give you the same kind of understanding and richness, as solitude does. 

I could relate to it, since I have/had a couple of friends with whom those kind of conversations happen. With almost any good friend, conversations leave you feeling wholesome but with some people, conversations lead me to understand things about myself that I may not have been fully aware of. It is rarely anything groundbreaking, more like having a fuzzy idea snap into focus, or something hazy from the background coming to the forefront of my conscious. 

It is very rare for these to happen in group settings, on video calls etc, though I remain hopeful that we will soon develop tools that enable almost an in-person feel even through tech. 

Understanding the other

 Its really easy to bunch a group of people who disagree with you and label them as idiots. Thats what most of us do. Its far more difficult to understand why they have reached this stance. Maybe they dont have the in-depth knowledge of the subject as you do, maybe they have had an experience that has let them to believe that the un-truth is the truth. In a lot of cases it may also be that the information diet they consume presents a different world view than the one you consume. 

Mainstream media and liberals sometimes take a condescending view of trump supporters as racists and idiots. Partly from a desire to be contrarian and partly from curiosity I try to figure out why Trump supporters /anti vaxxers are the way they are. Surely they arent a group of low IQ individuals, surely the spread of good people and bad, super smart and super not-smart people is the same in that cohort as any other large group you take. What then leads an average person to be so rabidly anti-vaxx? Its personal experience or what they have heard growing up( that they havent found enough evidence against, to invalidate). 

I got a small insight into that recently. Anti-vaxxers strictly believe that pharmaceutical industry is out to get everyone. While that seems like standard anti-capitalist, I have always wondered where this mistrust stemmed from. And why just this industry? Surely every indsustry is out to get everyone? 

While reading Empire of Pain- the history of the most abused prescription Oxycontin, I got a vague understanding of why this perception might have built up. One of the most succesful pain-relievers, it ended up being the most abused drugs because it developed a dependence even with low doses/low frequency of usage. And the company continued to advertise and push the product even as evidence was mounting against it. Thousands of normal people with minor injuries who were prescribed a simple pain killer ended up addicts.

The company specifically targeted suburbs in certain areas where family physicians were common, where people tended to trust doctors and would not question them. This I suppose ties in nicely with the traditional Republican states, which tended to have more veterans, ( and thus more injuries,disabilities and pain) and were target areas for the company. 

In a small city, when anyone dies abnormally everyone feels it, as if it were one of their own. Oxycontin abuse deaths would have reached a level where everyone knows someone who lost their lives to addiction. The fact that the company exhibited no regret and continued promoting the products, is enough for everyone to decide that Big Pharma just does not care. A mistrust in one company extends to the entire pharmaceutical industry and the fear manifests itself as a general mistrust of everything they do. 

Of course, people with other agenda feed them misinformation that they beleive because it aligns with their world view, but the basic reason for this mistrust is not stupidity but simply that it is a different world for them than it is for us.

The urge to consume and the resistance to create

 Its no new topic- Its perhaps my favourite and least favorite thing to write about- I carry it like a disease I despise, yet have lived with it for so long that its become a part of my identity. Its the online content consumption. 

And its deadlier cousin- consuming content about overdose of content consumption, how you can reduce your content consumption etc. Its a real spiral I tell you. 

Anyhow as a part of my resolution to become more mindful I ahve strated to notice my urges to consume stuff. I cant seem to be in a room by myself. I feel like I am wasting time if I am not listening to some podcast. However this thought doesnt seem to come when I am cruising down some useless rabbithole middle of teh day. The worst bit is that not doing something useful feels guilty when it doesnt have to, and doesnt when I absolutely should be feeling guilty. 

Detox is what everyone suggests but I want a way to integrate this in my life without having to resort to extremes. I have realised I dont do any activity without being distracted. Even in the middle of this post, I took a break to send something to a colleague ( that I was supposed to send yesterday, btw). 

Forgetfulness, followed by feeling ashamed. Its crippling. 

Post death

 Uploading your brain to a system and becoming immortal digitally has been an endless fascination of mine. Ken Liu, Neal Stephenson have touched on these and  I have consumed those with great interest. My personal stance on this always was that I dont want that for myself. I want to live in my physical body and then disappear. 

I had not considered what is the fate I would prefer for my friends. 

I was reflecting that for a few of my closest friends - I have spent more time with them digitally than I have in person. They live in different countries and we barely meet once a few years. But even if we dont meet at all, the quality of our friendship hasnt come down- perhaps due to the strong foundation of knowing each other fully well or that we are used to living a lot more of our life digitally that this has become a part of life. 

Should one of them be faced with an early death, would I not love for them to live in a system, so that our friendship can continue? Am purely talking from my perspective- not theirs. To me I think it wont make any difference- we hardly see face to face, an emoji is enough for me to figure out what they are feeling, and most importantly I would love a world where they exist, than one they dont. 

But then there would surely be overpopulation- my solution to that is the digital one too expires at an agreeable age- Say 80/75 or whatever. This is only a solution for early/natural deaths.

Its not you Murphy, its me

 Somedays everything goes wrong. And its not some stroke of ill luck or a hilarious montage of things going wrong in impossible ways. Its more like a heavy burden that slowly keeps growing in weight and pushing you down. Yesterday was one of those days. It felt like I can do nothing right. I seem to have the anti-midas touch. Every potentially golden thing I touch, i burn to ashes. 

I pushed through it, not really recovering, but just surviving. Today that feels a bit distant. I am still the same underacheiver, but I feel like I can do maybe a bit more today. Today is a new day and my failures of yesterday wont matter. 

I dont know if they wont, I just hope they dont. 

I have to find focus else nothing will happen. I have to build in productive slack to recover, recharge and get insights. Not timewaste slackery thats useless. 

Trapped priors

 A very interesting article by Slatestar codex about LSD bringing back lost sense of smell due to CoVID and the possible explanations for it. While that is quite interesting in itself, what stayed with me was the concept of a trapped prior/a prior state which leads to all sorts of problems. Like you get sea sick because you are not used to it, but the sea sickness stays even after you have got on land. Chronic pain is supposed to be similar- you have been in a state of pain for so long that even after the original reason for the pain has healed, your brain is still receiving pain signals because your nerves are expecting it to be there anyway.  Its fascinating. 

This can surely be extrapolated into the non-physical bits of life too. Say you have worked in a place that you consider uncreative, full of politics and not your type and you get on a certain lazy routine of coasting along helped by caffeine and funny websites. You get a job in a different place with different people but you cant seem to get out of your funk. Or in many cases a boss may have been a certain way- lets say he gets the feedback and changes his style . But you continue to act as if he was the old asshole. 

The phrase trapped prior is beautiful because its just so appropriate. Full disclaimer- I havent read the article on trapped prior yet so am not sure if he means only this as trapped priors. 

Is knowing you are in a trapped prior enough to get you out of one? The brain is way too complex for such simplistic answers 

No phone spaces

In my never ending quest for de-addiction from phone  I thought of implementing a simple thing during the day. Three times during the workday, once before and once after, I will spend some time away from my phone, just thinking. Maybe I am thinking about work, maybe I am not, but I will get those pockets of spaces just to get a sense of the day passing by. Am not fixing a time to it, but yeah it mostly happens when I have a call in say 15 minutes, and I am unable to focus on my current task. Or I have just finished a long call and I am trying to process it. 

I feel like I have a lot of ideas, I just never let them come to the surface because of the algae/lotus leaves of Social media. Who knows what riches lie underneath? These spaces are a chance for me to glimpse through the thick layer on top - maybe I will see flashes of brilliance or maybe it will be dark and terrifying. 

I also wanted to have spaces as in physical spaces that are no phone, but thats proving a lot harder. 

post mid life

 I was thinking the other day that I may have lived half my life. I dont know where the days went, my life slowly changed and was suddenly nothing like what it was 5 years back. 

I have heard that this is how you feel when you are 65, so what is teh way to stop it? Do new things? Have new experiences? Be mindful of whatever experiences you are having anyway? Stopping to note the passage of time? Accumulating great memories? Reliving those memories to ensure they dont disappear? 

Ken Liu makes me think

 All his short stories have something that make me want to stop reading the short story and just think about it. 

The most recent one was where society reaches a level where we buy armors from trolls. So AI helps you not see trolls and their vicious judgements you buy software that prevents you from seeing them. Because you cannot stop trolls, platforms cannot manage this censorship business, the smartest way seems to be to shield yourself from it. 

Ofcourse trolls then figure out a way to break the armor and then its just a full fledged evolutionary arms race. But the idea that instead of trying to figure out a way to make the trolls stop, we need to figure out a way to not see them, made me think. Maybe its really basic, but tahts pretty muhc how humankind has dealt with everything? 

Bad weather? Build homes and protect yourself. Thorny paths? Wear a shoe. Going by that logic this does seem to be the future.

Copy-paste orr

 A lot of Indian innovations end up like this- take something thats uber succesful in the US. Find a cultural context tweak that makes it relevant for India, launch. 

I was listening to the first episode of something that aims to be the indian version of the tim ferriss show, we have seen enough and more products that bring an indianised us product and we call the founders, the creators innovative, succesful etc. 

If you are one of those who are scornful about it, about the fact that its  not real innovation, just some maintenance, the question then remains- why didnt you do it? or anyone else before this person? 

Maybe it needs a certain knowledge in a particular field or a network with enough well connected people to spread the idea forward or maybe it just seems far fetched for India until someone proves otherwise. 

So even if its copy and paste is all thats being done, its worth appreciating. 

Strange fears

 I write a lot on my notebooks - call it whatever you want journaling, venting, taking notes, morning pages.. I dont typically go back and read them but I have stumbled upon various entries randomly and found myself reading them. 

A lot of times I feel some amount of fondness and admiration for the past me who has written something interesting. But a lot of other times I am embarassed-what was past me thinking? One of my weird fears is that someone will read it after I am dead and think " wow she certainly had the same problems over so many years". My problems have a theme- Too much time spent on phone, didnt do what I was planning to do the previous day, not sure where I want to be in life etc. They can look insightful if you read just one of the entries, but man I have wasted a lot of ink on the same problems. With almost zero resolutions. 

I suppose I could burn my journals and resolve these problems, rather than trying to solve the problems 

A series of easy steps

 Motivational speakers and similar trainers online try to tell you to start things easy. Want to become a copywriter? Just copy some great works - your brain will start thinking in the same direction. Want to start an exercise habit? Just walk for 10 minutes once. They make it seem like once you do an easy thing, you can pile up another easy thing on it, and  this combined  thing remains easy for you. 

It may not be entirely true. 

If it was just piling up one easy thing on another, everyone would be doing it. The fact is that in any path that is rewarding, you may start easy but at some point you ahve to do the difficult bits. Starting easy is only for you to get the initial motivation, maybe see some early results so you stay excited even for the difficult bits. 

Motivational speakers may know it, but they never tell us. 

The medium is the message

I think the medium modifies the message- this is true even for people. Take for example politicians- when a leader makes a racist or a discriminatory statement even in a personal capacity, it is taken by followers as a command that they should act upon. In the case of India, the message is modified. haha. 

But its true across all levels. If a CEO believes in coming in early and keeping his office uncluttered and he speaks about it occasionally, even if he didnt mean it as a direct order, it is taken as one. A breakthrough idea in an obscure blog will be viewed with more skepticism than a breakthrough idea in a peer reviewed magazine. 

The message is actually the message + a bit of the medium 

Troublesome Sitcom portrayals

They show them eating pizza and cookies all the time and never gaining weight. They dont show any exercise routine or anything yet they all have brilliant figures. I understand that they cant be fully realistic but they cant all be opening bottles of wine all the time, baking brownies and having icecreams. It just is unrealistic. 

Also this whole dealing with breakups with icecream, dealing with sadness with chocolate has come to India from watching US sitcoms. Sugar should be a celebration not something to fill the absence of joy. Its a cherry on the cake, if you dont have cake you cant make one with cherries. Inappropriate cake analogy, but what to do.

In their heads

 I would love to get into somebody's head to understand how they think, what goes in their minds as they hear something or their thought process as they make a decision. 

If I get into their head as myself I wont get a 100% understanding of what its like to be them. If I somehow manage to become them 100%, I wont get an understanding, because I have become them. 

So we are doomed to live with incomplete understanding and the consequent befuddlement as others choose something that makes zero sense to us. So our inability to understand someone is usually not a lack of  communication or misunderstanding. A close analogy I can think of is lets say you are describing furniture in a house- however accurately you describe the furniture, if you and I are imagining different empty houses to put them in, our end results will be that different.

So we should cut ourselves some slack for the inevitable miscommunication that happens.

Worst analogy

Weight loss journey is like a maze. You think you are going forward you may be completely going backward. You think the end is near, but you are so far off its not funny. 

What matters is that everyone eventually exits the maze. Whether you give up and exit the same way you came or you bluster your way to the end, you are not stuck in the maze forever. 
So the only thing to do is to have faith that you will exit.

Complexity

 Given how complicated everything is and how inefficient the people who are running it, its a big surprise that we havent collapsed under the weight of our own incompetence. 

How do airplanes fly everyday in a country like India where everything gets delayed, no supplier keeps their promises, everyone is prone to some bribing, most of us are skimping on work and doing the just the bare minimum to coast along. 

Not denying there are some sincere people who do every job as if it was the most critical one on earth but a majority of people coast.  

Then why is everything not collapsing? is it that the systems are so strong that they have mechanisms to catch failure? Is it that the weakest links/ most critical ones are heavily monitored? Or is it that since the systems are so pliable, we usually get our way and the real impact of this complicated inefficient system is felt by someone who has no power over it? 

Short term

 Everyone here is gasping for Oxgen and as a response the affluent Indians world over donated.  Startups in India bought so many oxygen cylinders, NRIs donated to non profits buying oxygen cylinders, and students gathered to buy oxygen cylinders. 

At the end of the wave, whats going to happen to these oxygen cylinders? Will they be redeployed into hospitals? Will they be given to ambulances? Those of us who bought them just to be safe- are we going to let them languish in our store rooms to be thrown away in the next few years? 

It feels like everyone buying oxygen isnt a very smart idea longterm. But how could the donations have been used to improve the foundation on India's healthcare? Do those cylinders in some way make our healthcare system a little more reliable? I know its easy to pontificate on it after the fact, and the need then was oxygen. So people were right in overbuying those. 

Who should ahve guided non profits on whats the right thing to do? 

The amount of waste

 Throwing our own garbage has brought to my attention how much waste we generate as a household. We order too much on Amazon, order more than we should from Swiggy than can be healthy for us and in general have too much stuff. 

For a minimalist-aspirant like me, that sucks. 

I gave up my minimalist home expectation after seeing how much my husband loves stuff. And for those who are going to say " Stuff doesnt make you happy" really havent seen him after he has received a well-designed product. And I think his happiness from good products far exceeds many people's happiness from experiences. He hits all the marks of anticipation, during use and post-purchase. So it doesnt bother me. 

This brings me to an interesting digression- Does stuff really not make you happy? The answer isnt straightforward. Stuff or experience can make you happy if you like it for what it is. The general understanding about stuff usually was that you bought things to impress others/ raise your status but experiences were for yourself. That statement isnt true in the age of social media, so maybe in this decade we shouldnt rattle " experiences make you happy, stuff doesnt"  as if it is the gospel. 

Anyhow, the flipside of stuff is that it comes in packaging. So much packaging. Sigh. 

The world post covid

 Assuming there is a post covid that is. 

Which looks difficult from where we are. Would it become like a common cold? Or would it be like smallpox before it was eradicated? 

A constant threat, taking away your loved ones. 

I had always believed that the end of mankind will be from viruses. The same way we have made so many species extinct because they couldnt evolve fast enough compared to our destruction of their habitat. So scientifically it makes sense that our extinction from a virus will follow the same pattern. Abundant population, the virus mercilessly keeps killing, until the population becomes too less for the virus to happily propogate. Then it may do some half assed measures to save humankind? But in the end will watch in horror as the last of the once-abundant species dies. 

I also head a contrary belief in my head that when the end comes it will be swift. Apocalypse, asteroid hits that kind of thing. I hadnt imagined a slow drawn out match where we are losing a few at a time. Its certainly far more painful and far more likely. 

I guess its the same concept with an individual's death too. Mostly slow and drawn out until it is over one day. Its in a few cases that its swift/instant. 

Wow not where I expected this post to go but here we are. The end. Slow, drawn out and unsatisfying.

Even if no one reads it..

 Ill still blog everyday, says Seth Godin, someone who has millions of readers on his blog. 

I have followed his blog sometime back, and for some reason got annoyed with it and unsubscribed. But the idea of writing something short everyday, that has stuck. 

Today's short post is on Observation. 

Almost everything interesting comes from observing. Artists pick out something that stands out from a scenery, stand up comedians tell us what we already know, but they observe and pick it apart in a way that makes it funny. Companies can observe what people say about them in their emails and reviews and learn a lot, spouses can observe their partners reactions and figure out something is wrong. There is nothing original anymore but the same old thing can be packaged in an interesting way, and your perspective is the packaging that makes it interesting. 

While we lament the loss of thinking time in our life, we should also include its close friend observation, which has always been in the background and seems to have disappeared quietly, in the age of distraction and information consumption. 

Some things about Bad Blood

 I just finished Bad Blood by John Carreyrou and liked it more than I expected to. It read like a fast paced fiction and kept my interest sustained, even when I knew the Theranos story broadly. Here are my thoughts on it 

1. "When you strike at the king, you must kill him" is a quote he uses early in the book.  He follows his own advice thoroughly and ensures that he nails Theranos completely, consistently doing follow up stories to ensure Theranos is completely cornered. He gained enough fame and attention with the first couple of articles but his real work is in his final few articles on FDA, CMS etc. He knew Elizabeth enough to know that she will come back, even if there is an iota of opportunity and will ensure he is killed ( metaphorically)
2. I think its unfair to call Elizabeth a fraud. For one I think she is a fantastic sales and marketing person and thats a skill ( one that a lot of con-men have, admittedly) but its no joke to convince enough people with experience and intelligence. All of them believed in her vision and her ability to achieve it and I think she would have made a fantastic PR person/Sales head for a company that was actually doing what Theranos pretended to do. 
3. Fake it till you make it, is touted in irrelevant contexts.  It works only in mental challenges- like when you are shy, you act like a confident person. If you have forgotten to bring homework to school, no amount of faking will bring the homework to you. Theranos was sort of midway- they were working on some tech and she was hoping it will be working, and she ended up promising the moon. 
4. Out of a lakh test results Theranos had conducted with Walgreens, 10 patients sued which doesnt seem like a terrible number. I feel like hospitals would have a similar ( or slightly lesser number of ) suings, for negligence etc. Not sure if Theranos jugaad worked or if the doctors disregarded the test results and ordered new ones. 
5. In any other industry, she wouldnt have been called out as a fraud. Healthcare is heavily regulated and her not following the processes ( which was hailed as revolutionary when Uber went against regulators) led her into deep trouble. Obviously she also gained the fame she did because she promised things in healthcare, but I think had she chosen a less- regulated industry and made huuuge promises about the moon, only to give you the terrace, she would have not been crucified. 
6. Case in point for Point 4- Elon Musk. He promises Mars rockets and gives us Tesla , something that Mahindra and Bajaj do in India. But he chose his industry well, and is not facing the consequences of slow technological advance because there is no ethics issue as was in the case of Theranos. 
7. I now have a grudging respect for Silicon valley venture capital firms for not investing in Theranos. Could have been that its not their area of expertise for a lot of them but those that she did speak to didnt invest in her because she refused to share the tech with them, had no peer-reviewed papers for the tech ( because it was a trade secret) and this clearly wouldnt have passed muster with their due diligence team. 
8. She managed a good con by playing everyone around like a fiddle, and in a twisted way I find that a victory for feminism. ** A bunch of white, experienced old men were so convinced by her "vision" and one of them chose her side against his own grandson. He was unconvinced even when Elizabeth displayed clear signs of ethics breach by sending  documents they hadnt agreed on when she had expressly said she wouldnt etc. 
9. Apparently the board had agreed on a motion where Elizabeth would have 99.7% of the voting rights. Its laughable and to illustrate it, I burst out laughing when I heard it. ( I read the audiobook).  She had the biggest law firm representing Theranos, and how were they paid? In Theranos shares! While the ex-employees who were sued by Theranos had to find the huge legal fees from their own savings, Theranos  literally had to spend nothing and could hound the terrified employyees into doing their bidding. And the head of the law firm was on the board. And unsurprisingly he was 74. She really had something with the 65+ crowd. 
10. Rupert Murdoch ( 84, in case you are wondering) was the largest investor with about 100+ million invested in Theranos, a few months before the WSJ broke out the story. Murdoch owns the parent company of the WSJ and Elizabeth tried her best to get him to interfere and stop the story from going out. But Murdoch refused to interfere and said he trusts the editors to handle the matter fairly. (The story broke and as a consequence his share values came down to zero. And what did he do? He sold the shares back to Theranos for 1$ , and now could use the money lost in order to save on his taxes ! Guess its reallly tough to lose when you are that rich! ) But my point with Point 9 is that its quite impressive that he chose not to interfere when he had a large stake. 
11. Sunny Balwani was such a **** and apparently he " recruited a bunch of ingratiating Indians who wouldnt refute anything he said out of fear and a desire to advance".  Sounds all too familiar. 
12. I wonder what Elizabeth will do going forward. I half- expect her to come back after 15 or 20 years so with some other innovation, maybe not in healthcare. But she is too ambitious and intelligent to just end her legacy with this.

** I dont mean to say that she fooled all men- there were enough men suspicious of her( Hunter from Walgreens, the copywriters from Chiat Day etc) but its interesting for me to note that there were almost no women under her spell. I think our bullshit filter is stronger for our own gender.  I have seen this in college as well - guys are able to spot fake guys quicker than girls can. 

The way I read books

Self-criticism is perhaps my most enduring hobby. If there is one thing thats exempt from my self-criticism, its my reading habit. I love books and reading and I read a lot of them.  I am not sure if I recall everything or (sometimes if i can recall anything) from books I have read, but there is not an iota of doubt that books have made me who I am. 

Like everyone else I have phases when I cant read more than one page, when I am too distracted to absorb what I am reading etc. Despite these, I manage to read a lot. Here is how. 

1. At any point, I read what I feel like. This means that I go through my Kindle library and pick whatever I am in the mood for.  This also means that I have way too many books in progress. Sometimes the books get to the stage where they draw you in, and I finish the rest of the book in the next couple of days. 

2. I read different things at different times. Mornings I can handle heavier deeper books, if I read in the afternoon its mostly lighter essays. Unless some non-fiction book is really interesting, I read fiction in the nights. 

3. I typically read fiction when I have long stretches of time such as a free weekend or a vacation. Fiction requires you to enter a different world,  and thats easier when your world doesnt demand much from you. 

4. I listen to audiobooks to fall asleep and when I take a walk. A lot of times I re-listen to audiobooks. 

5. I re-read books I loved. I always get a lot more in the re-reading than I do in my first time. I am also able to finish the book faster. I skip bits that I dont love and go deeper into the bits I do. 

6. I spend quite a bit of time picking books. Reddit's "suggestmeabook", Amazon's recommended books, Guardian book recos are all my sources. Everytime I come across something interesting I download the sample. In bits of time I read the samples to get a flavour of whether I will like the book or not. 

7. I dont worry much about the count of books read. The metric I use is the time I spend reading. And since I dont spend even one minute reading stuff I dont like/enjoy, it works out great. 

8. There are times when I dont read anything serious- I can go for weeks reading fluff after fluff. I dont worry that I am reading only light books ( like Liane Moriarty) I know its a phase and that I will get back to other "serious" books. 

9. I am currently going through an Alaska, Hawaii phase. I have a bunch of books set in Alaska and Hawaii that I have downloaded samples of, some of which I have bought. 

10. I have tons of unread, barely started, half-read books in my library. If I dont like a book I delete it from my list. Some books I will get back to and finish at a much later point in time and some books I havent yet gone back but I may eventually.  So every book thats on my Kindle is a book I like at some level. 

11. I read way too many of " how to focus" " how to manage your time better" kind of books than can possibly be good for me. 

10 Things about Artificial Intelligence

Rereading the Shallows made me think a bit deeper about Artificial Intelligence and I realised I have way too many questions and doubts about AI. 

1. When we say we are trying to create an AI future, are we replicating one human or are we replicating the whole of humanity? If its the latter it means we have to have diverse enough AIs to be able to duplicate the diversity of thought and character present in humans. 

2. AI with a definite purpose, will soon become better than humans at that purpose- For ex identifying a certain component or even AI to build a house , I think they will overtake humans in those abilities fairly soon. But AIs that can become humans, I dont think thats anywhere near, in our future

3. Most of human experience is wondering about what others think.  Its about insecurity, anxiety, greed, hope, happiness, stress and sleep deprivation. Even if AI can reasonably simulate some of it, I am doubtful of its abilities to do all. We can program a machine to be hungry for information but can it ever feel wonder or curiosity? 

4. Douglas Adams was a genius when he created Marvin the depressed whiny robot- Thats the ultimate achievement of AI . 

5. Other things that one would need to program is our dynamics with other humans that creates the fabric of our experience. AI will need to have that which means we will have machines that are jealous of one another therefore dont reveal everything, machines that act as if they hate the other one when they are actually in love. 

6. When we eventually do simulate things in point 5, the AI will not be optimised for efficiency, it will be optimised to be human ie irrational & inefficient- so, why would we even need that AI? We can just make more humans the way we are currently. 

7. Downloading your thoughts on to a computer and living forever in a brain is one of the most loathsome ideas for me. I hope I die before those technologies come to pass. 

8. When I was thinking about AI, I realised that AI will be able to have the exact same sensory inputs and experiences as humans. Humans choose to perceive only a few of those- For ex in my visual field I see a lot of things but I focus on the bee flying around the bird. Similarly while I do experience the sense of my feet on the ground, I am not aware of it always. The AI will have to always have a system that is filtering what to perceive and what to ignore. Aside from the fact it is complicated by us sometimes choosing to focus on something random for no reason, or choosing to be aware of it when we read about it, it also means that the AI has to have a mind ,that makes these decisions and is  influenced a certain bit by the sensory inputs too. 

9. Our mind is an emergent property of the way our body is wired. So I dont know how we can design an AI mind that functions exactly the way an emergent mind would. 

10. Of course I am completely unaware of the actual progress  happening in this field and its possible that a lot of these issues I am atalking about are resolved. Looking at the quality of chatbots and other AI applications though, am kind of sure its not. 

10 non-cynical things

Whenever I am stuck for things to write, I think of things I sneer at. Things that I feel others are doing wrong or are not seeing that I, in my supreme wisdom and clarity, am able to see. And then the words flow. For this post, I am trying to write about the quotidian and the wondrous and see if I can drum up 10. 

1. Nature isnt just transformative experiences and polar bears. Its also the aggressive cancer that sneaks up on your liver, its the rodent that invades your kitchen, its the  bug that you ingest, that drains you so much that you need to crawl to the loo. ( Inspired by Kathleen Jamie- Sightlines) 

2. Whenever we see a video or hear an audio of ourselves we are so appalled- I thought I moved faster than that on the court, I didnt realise how fat I was, Is that really how I sound, etc etc. Then why is introspection so hyped? Surely we dont know anything about ourselves? Isnt it better to ask people who are observing us?

3. Most statements made are not fully true. By which I dont mean they are lies, but that they dont apply all the time, to everyone, across all situations. For ex in point 2- obviously some people benefit by introspection, some problems may be solved by introspection- thats not the point. The point is asking other people ( friends , family etc) in a purposeful way. 

4. Have recently been fascinated by navigation without technology- the way people earlier used to navigate by stars, by birds, by natural landmarks- not that I need to go anywhere anyway. Or that I will be able to follow a star and reach the office or my friends house. But only in my current house have I noticed that the place of the sun set varies with the seasons and the stars move around the sky quicker than I had imagined. When we move to a new place we quickly learn the landscape, where is the nearest grocery store, the hospital and we orient ourselves in the new place fully.  The sky and the stars which are with us always, we barely have any clue of. But I can hear you saying we need the grocery store and the hospital , we dont need the stars. 

5. I hate cats. I respect them a lot though, because it feels like they understand that I hate them. They make angry eye contact before slinking away. They are graceful and regal, but somehow I dont like them at all. Not even kittens. 

6. A small streak of unhappy can color your otherwise happy day, but a small streak of happy rarely brightens up an otherwise harried day. Does 2 mins of mindfulness counter the rest of the stressed, distracted state? 

7. What do birds do all day? Just chill? We have a few birds that diligently wake up from their spots in our Eucalyptus tree and come back around 5:30-6. Curious where they go and what their day job involves. 

8. Am so jealous of people living in Britain, Ireland, Scotland etc- anyone who is not living in cities. They have access to so much wilderness, so much trails and woods to get lost in. Those of us in cities especially some of us unfortunate enough to be living in dusty Indian cities can only sigh in longing. 

9. As someone who is by herself a lot of the time, I didnt think reading horror would be a big deal. When I have lived by myself in the past, I have watched horror movies and not had a problem sleeping alone. The Haunting of Hill house was a slightly different matter. I began to wonder if the house I am currently in is evil and the general sounds and silences outside took on a rather sinister aura. But am glad that it didnt interfere in my sleep. 

10. I cant stand Anne Helen Petersen's whining. I read an article called "Should we be working during a coup" and I found it to be the most whiny,  entitled post ever. She seems to believe that no one except millenials has any problems in life and all millenial problems involve over working. This post in particular spoke about how a lot of people were forced to continue working on the day of the Capitol protests even though they felt anxious and distracted. She also tells that a lot of the bosses asked people to take it light on that day, so I am not sure what exactly her problem is. People exercised, people fed their kids and made meals and had them on that day, so why would you not be expected to work? All over the world when there are things happening politically in the country, that work day is colored by that. But everyone knows that and adjusts their expectations accordingly. AHP instead writes a whiny essay. 

Point 10 is cynical, but it was something gnawing on me so I had to get it out. 

10 Random Things

 1) Looking at the horrid unkempt mess our lawn has become, I wonder how the original forests even had a chance to flourish. How is the Amazon forest not just a jumble of weeds? Every single useful plant in our lawn has either been eaten by aphids, overtaken by weeds or dried out ( the last one is my fault :D) 

2) For all the discussion and encouragement about getting out of your comfort zone, I realised what a comfort zone slut I am. I didnt move from my comfortable sofa even when the sun was shining bright (the spot was much cosier in the winter, the summer sun is obviously not as gentle)  and ended up with a headache. I felt the headache coming on, yet didnt move. 

3) My time and attention are being pulled apart in a 100 directions from external requirements but the biggest enemy of my concentration is still my own mind. Am so appalled at my phone stats- I would rather reveal my weight before revealing the number of hours I spent on my phone or the number of times I clicked on apps 

4) Spending time in nature is the only time the hedonic treadmill fails. I can never get used to it.

5) The only forward that I have ever received that has been helpful is a one-liner from my friend - Procrastination doesnt make it go away. Doing it makes it go away. So simple, yet sooo powerful. 

6)Its Feb 2021 already. Surprised at how far I have come, without having achieved anything. 

7) I should be experiencing a strong mid-life crisis, but maybe I am too distracted to have one. 

8) Digital detox one day wont work- Its like eating healthy one day while bingeing on junk the other 6 days. 

9) I dont know if its the nature of my job, or its what I have become but I dont remember the last time I thought hard and came up with a solution. Everything has mostly been superficial problem solving ( picking one from a list of possible solutions) or  firefighting. 

10) Most books that are about A year I spent living in rural France, or how I moved out of Silicon valley to start a yoga retreat in Brazil have something inherently deceptive. The authors make it seem like they did all of this and then decided the experience was valuable enough for them to write a book about it. The fact however is that its clear from the book that they were preparing to write the book all along. How else do you remember how exactly you felt standing at the SFO airport? Or your description of your co-passengers?  Its absolutely OK to have been taking notes that you one day hope becomes a book, so why cant you just say that upfront? You may ask how it matters- But when you note down feelings for a journal its more real than when you note down feelings for a possible future book. You are in some sense performing it for an audience. 

11) My rant in previous point does not by any means make any of these books less enjoyable.