June 2020 Release Notes [UFO]
Fermat's Last Theorem, Essay Writing and the return of La Liga and Serie A.
We’re officially halfway through the most momentous year of our lifetimes. I have no intention of making this a full blown substandard mid-year review. I recently found someone on Twitter muse that historians in the future will be asked what month of 2020 they specialized in. As far as I’m concerned, I just want Dan Carlin to live another 50 years and release the twelve part podcast series once every six months. Speaking of which, he put out Supernova in the East IV.
In the everlasting spirit of keeping things bland on the blog, let’s talk about LinkedIn. Not for the first time, I had an acquaintance ask if I could form a connection on that abomination of a site. I explained how I was told so many times to create an account that I decided it wasn’t worth it. For what it’s worth, that’s a good way to make decisions. It is obvious that nothing happens on LinkedIn. From first principles, we can say that the only people who benefit off of LinkedIn are the exceptional candidates who are so top-right that they show up in searches and make everyone else feel bad. The rest are just entries into the database. And the irony is that the top candidates are smart enough to not have to rely on anything but their brains. Why do so many Indian students flock to LinkedIn though? Is it like setting a trap and just hoping for that interview offer to jump into our inboxes? Or do we just keep it around in case we need another job? The most honest answer given to me when I asked a friend was that having an account makes it easier to stalk other people on LinkedIn. At least that’s a noble cause.
If LinkedIn was actually a site that let each of us put out our individual talents and communicate our values to the entire world, it would still be superfluous in that personal websites and blogs do the same thing while letting people be creative about their pursuits. Whereas in the current scenario, we’re all just data-points next to other tiny people, clamouring for attention by uploading our Coursera certification or the latest internship. The incentive is to show off, not to exhibit what we learnt. A certificate means nothing if the candidate has gotten it by copying code off of GitHub and an internship means nothing if the concerned person has spent a couple months doing something that created no value to anyone. It just doesn’t matter, so close your account and find platforms where people get to know you as something more than the number of connections you have (if that’s what is important on LinkedIn).
Essays!
What should an essay be? It should primarily be useful. It should also be correct but not by making it vague. For example, A is to the left of E is less accurate than A is four places to the left of E. Paul Graham writes that precision and correctness are opposing forces but I am not sure what he means by that. Maybe another reader will have better results. An essay should tell people things they don’t know not by surprising them with information but by putting into words things, they only knew beneath their conscious thoughts. Of course, all of the above statements are a matter of degree.
The four critical metrics we need to keep in mind are novelty, correctness, importance, and strength.
If you write a terrible sentence, don’t feel apprehensive while striking it out. Often, we might have to abandon four to five large paragraphs and sometimes entire pieces. We can ensure that we write excellent essays by just throwing out the bad ones and progressively better at it.
As for my strategy, I write my initial draft very fast. It is filled with verbatim, and the principal idea is to get out the thoughts. I believe that it is essential not to keep track of all the revisions that we make. Some sentences just feel right at the moment, and some don’t sit well even after a hundred iterations. Some paragraphs are written in a somewhat bloated and repetitive way, while some are just not true. Even the process of striking them out is somewhat painful because it could be that I’m trying to get a significant point across, but I’m not able to.I catch these odd paragraphs every time I go through the entire essay. The piece is not considered complete until I’m absolutely sure there aren’t such stray lines anywhere.
Again, the critical point is to not settle until you’ve found the right word, the correct sentence, the perfect paragraph.
Time is never the issue unless you’re an English major or a journalist as Paul Graham writes. I’ve written hundreds of both tiny essays and long opinions that haven’t seen the outsides of my notebooks. It doesn’t matter how long we take to finish a blog post as long as we stick to maximizing the metrics mentioned above. After all this, mistakes sometimes still get through and if you or other people pick it up, just correct it with a gracious footnote!
If you are screwing up and people don’t say anything, it means they don’t care anymore
~ Dr Randy Pausch
For maximizing importance, we just stick to writing about things that are important to us. The people who read our essays are not very much unlike us (unless you’re Paul Graham/Scott Alexander.) Importance = number of people who think something is important $\times$ how much they believe it is important.
It’s almost the same for novelty, things that surprise us will surprise people like us (who have similar expertise in the fields we write.) A subtle tug of war ensues wherein we have to be humble enough to acknowledge that we didn’t know it before and also confident enough in that area to navigate the reader through the intricacies of the novel idea.
The final metric mostly boils down to how well we’ve thought about what we wanted to write. The presentation can either happen blandly, or it can be refined to the most exceptional detail. Both approaches have their own merits and demerits. (I hope you could tell which method I used for this.)
Strength also comes from writing things simply. I used to be a big proponent of sophisticated writing with every mundane word replaced by one from a thesaurus. I sure learnt a lot of new words, but my readers never shared the same enthusiasm. Keeping things simple not only helps the readers but also makes it easier for us to find mistakes. I’d like to elaborate on how programming reinforced this idea. A single line of code with a few nested ternary operators is brilliant but splitting it into five or six lines would only make it easier to debug + easier for others to read
I get that the discussion of how to find new things is a valid one and it isn’t something that has to do with writing. Nevertheless, I’ll provide my two cents worth. To discover new ideas, we need to work on projects that are good and non-obvious. Non-obvious ideas are usually found in the shadows of misconceptions (mistaken assumptions) that people don’t question often. We all make assumptions about systems but don’t pause to consider how valid the assumption could be. I don’t want to lobby for vague conspiracy theories but every well-accepted misconception has a dead zone of unexplored ideas.
Writing strongly is, in my not-so-humble opinion, an art. To be short with someone is to more or less be rude to them. Putting phrases like “I think” and “Perhaps” in front of sentences makes our idea look weak even though we do it for making it understandable that we’re just airing our thoughts. I used to think that correctness was enough to ensure that my essays were attack-proof, but I’ve slowly learnt that it only makes it valid attack-proof. In fact, people rarely disagree with what we write, they make up something we said and disagree with that. For example, stating an idea strongly only requires someone to exaggerate our point slightly and make it completely false, and you can guess the other end of the spectrum.
The only place where we should mention that there could be misinterpretations are in cases where a well-intentioned and reasonably smart person might do. Correct for honest readers, don’t engage with the trolls.
Step one is to practice. And when at level one, the only number of readers we need to be concerned is one (you). Write something that you’d wanna read. And step two is that we don’t have to put every single thought on the internet. Aspiring so-called writers write once in six months and put it up on the Web for fake internet points. No value created. It’s not that there is a lot left to write about, there is a lot left to discover.
Raja Yoga by Vivekananda: Preface Notes
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It is not the sign of a candid and scientific mind to throw overboard anything without proper investigation.
- There are some inexplicable extraordinary mental phenomena that occur from time to time.
- “Surface scientists” ignore them.
- Ignorant people think some divine being has something to do with them.
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For thousands of years such phenomena have been investigated, studied, and generalised, the whole ground of the religious faculties of man has been analysed, and the practical result is the science of Raja Yoga.
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It declares to mankind that each being is only a conduit for the infinite ocean of knowledge and power that lies behind.
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The supply of tremendous potential comes from a desire, a want, a prayer (which are infinite) and not some divine being.
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The idea of supernatural beings may rouse to a certain extent the power of action in man, but it also brings spiritual decay. It brings dependence; it brings fear; it brings superstition.
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All the orthodox systems of Indian philosophy have one goal in view, the liberation of the soul through perfection. The method is by Yoga.
- All such are especially and earnestly reminded that, with few exceptions, Yoga can only be safely learned by direct contact with a teacher.
Random Thoughts
The Astounding Physics of N95 Masks
https://m.xkcd.com/1755 and https://m.xkcd.com/2324 are hilarious!
Basketball’s most overlooked skill: Moving without the ball
The One and Only [[Maryam Mirzakhani]]