29 Apr 2022
facebook
·
social-media
Everyone agrees that Facebook makes them feel worse. It accelerates the “Fear Of Missing Out”
anxiety that is quite strong even when you don’t know exactly what your peers are doing on a
Friday evening. But people continue to flock to Facebook. Yes, Facebook is losing teen users,
but this is not a precipitous drop. In any case, these teenagers are going to other platforms which
are arguably worse than Facebook for reasons that I will outline in this post. What is so
interesting on Facebook? Why does it exist? What is it for? These are incredibly complex questions.
I will leave that hardest-of-all tasks to the technology philosophers. Instead, I will focus on the
one thing that became clear to me after a recent conversation: The existence of Facebook is an
anomaly. Facebook’s target user base will never need to use Facebook: Facebook is meant to “connect
people.” Their belief is that if you know what is on your friends’ mind, then you are connected to
them. The better you know someone, the more connected you are to them. The more you will be able to
appreciate the posts they make, both personal and political. But the better you know someone, the
less you need a tool such as Facebook to keep that relationship alive and healthy. So, you don’t
need Facebook to connect with the people whom you are closest with in the world. So, …,
what gives? Why are you on a platform where you are connecting with a bunch of people whom you know
only vaguely and care about at the superficial level? I have some thoughts about this dichotomy.
Read More
28 Feb 2022
monthly
·
reading
·
series
The month of February is before the end of the financial year and the month that many governments
release their budgets for the next financial year. They also talk (at length) about the policies
that they are going to implement. To commemorate this annual exercise in long-term decision making,
this month’s list of recommendations is about politics and government policy. We see examples of
government policy gone wrong and those that worked out well. There is an interesting new theory
about conservatism and the feeling of disgust (not just at liberal ideas, but a more generic
form of disgust.) And there is an article about degrowth from Vox, which has been making the rounds
periodically since 2019. It is worth looking back on this article periodically to understand how
futile unilateral action can prove to be.
Read More
13 Feb 2022
artificial-intelligence
·
book-review
·
capitalism
·
sci-fi
Ted Chiang is a path breaking philosopher and fiction writer. I started saying that after reading
his short story “Story of Your Life.” His second book, “Exhalation”, is a collection of short
stories from 2019. It covers an even wider range of topics than his first collection. Chiang has the
ability to zoom out of the present moment and write about human nature without providing solutions
or trying to pose arguments about complex questions; instead, his writing makes the reader think
about what they would do in that situation, and that is the primary method he uses to engage the
reader in a discussion. This ability to inhabit someone else’ life for a period of time is the
reason I read fiction, and the characters in this collection are put in situations where you want
to be riddled by the dilemmas and struggles that they are facing. The striking aspect of Chiang’s
short stories is the amount of time that one remembers their premise and key questions for. The key
questions in a handful of his short stories have remained with me despite having last read them 3
years ago.
Read More
11 Feb 2022
beatles
·
music
I found out about the Beatles documentary from a podcast episode. The host was talking about a clip
showing the Beatles legend, Paul McCartney, composing the song “Get Back.” The stunning part of this
video was that he had started from nothing. He was idly strumming chords on his guitar, early in the
morning. Ringo Starr and George Harrison were sitting across from him; they appeared disheveled,
tired, and sleepy. The final Beatle, John Lennon, was nowhere to be seen. I watched this video a few
times; hoping to get a glimpse of something around McCartney which gave him the inspiration to come
up with the melody. I wonder if other viewers were watching the video looking for a similar kind of
revelation. But there was nothing. McCartney had created the song out of nothing; like a vaguely
remembered dream converted into a beautiful melody. I learned more about what the documentary was
and where the footage had come from. (Admittedly, I went through this information gathering process
in a frenzy.) This past week, some theater chains in Japan capitalized on the mania of Beatles fans
by airing a 1-hour special, The Rooftop Concert, for a limited period of time. I watched the
special, and here are some thoughts about my experience.
Read More
31 Jan 2022
monthly
·
reading
·
series
For the first recommendations post of the year, I have picked out some of the best New Yorker
stories that I read as I worked through my issue backlog from early 2020. I have given up on reading
the New Yorker at the pace at which it is published. However, the articles that are included in each
issue are rarely “current affairs” related and can basically be read and re-read years into the
future. Lately, the role played by magazines in our reading diets has become clearer to me: They are
published at a much faster pace than great fiction or non-fiction; while they are written by the
very same people who will eventually produce those great works; so magazine pieces offer us a window
into upcoming great work. (I think.) So, this month I have a mix of dealing with grief, bad
governance as seen through the eyes of an official, compared with the impact of bad policy as seen
through the eyes of a journalist, the “mad science”-y feel of triggering avalanches intentionally to
avoid larger avalanches, and a disturbing article about the effects of late-stage capitalism on
workers.
Read More
29 Jan 2022
covid19
·
skype
·
video-calls
Video calls are ubiquitous. Skype and its modern counterparts were the go-to tool for connecting
people who were not in the same physical space. In the era when travel was possible, convenient, and
exciting, these tools were stopgap solutions; to be employed until the time that you could
refill your “physical presence” account balance with people. Then, COVID19. Everyone was stuck at
home. Travel became impossible. Video calls became the only way to meet some people. At work, the
number of people that I interact with on a daily basis whom I have never met in real life has gone
up from 0 in March 2020 to 5 this past week. I don’t think my experience is an outlier. The
necessity of using this tool could not be escaped; neither could the feeling of tiredness that would
always follow its use. What is the source of this tiredness?
Read More
16 Jan 2022
emotions
·
social-media
When Facebook came on the scene, the most attractive features on the platform for me were photo
albums and life events. These two features in combination gave the user the ability to build a
timeline of their life. Every trip that you go on, place that you visit, and dinner that you eat
can be documented for the present and archived for the future. The photos and events were arranged
as milestones that the user chose to retain when they told their story. The digitized nature of
this data enabled the creation of works that were out of reach for the ordinary scrapbooker or the
amateur video editor: The personalized Facebook “Lookback” videos, which were generated for
Facebook’s 10th anniversary, were the biggest “proof-of-concept” of a world which was digitizing at
a fast pace. I feel that Facebook was at “peak utility” back then. Nostalgia was the currency that
the platform traded in effortlessly. Product managers at Facebook intuitively understood the value
that they were creating in their users’ lives. Looking at the Lookback video is not like looking
back at photo albums from a decade ago because in the latter experience there is no
curation. However, Facebook’s usage is on the decline. Platforms that focus on creating Anxiety in
their users’ minds are on the rise. Did something fundamental change?
Read More
31 Dec 2021
monthly
·
reading
·
series
There is no specific theme for this month’s recommendation list. It is an assortment of the articles
I read over the past year which had one thing in common: I wanted more people to read them and
decide what they thought about the underlying institutions and people that these articles
described. So, we have two articles about the tennis world: one about an athlete within the world
and another about the incentive structure of the sport; one article about a non-contrarian CEO with
some interesting ideas about running companies that he does not divulge, and another one about a
politician with new realizations that helped him confirm 3 nominees to the US Supreme Court even
though the confirmation of a single Supreme Court nominee was hailed as a big achievement just a few
years ago on the TV Show, West Wing.
Read More
26 Dec 2021
book-review
·
complex
·
philosophy
Descartes has a gift for reasoning that I will not attempt to summarize in the few paragraphs of
this review. Descartes’ essay is worth reading if you have ever wondered about the philosophy behind
his saying “I think, therefore I am.” It is worth reading if you have a few hours to yourself and
you want to think. It is challenging, and some of the philosophy went over my head. Despite that,
I got a basic understanding of what he was trying to do. He attempts to reason from scratch to prove
the existence of the “soul” and of “God,” for he believes that if he is able to prove their
existence, then even the most irreligious person would follow his reasoning and become religious. I
was not completely convinced by his logic in this regard, with regard to his proof of God’s
existence. But I was convinced about the reasoning behind his quote connecting doubting, thinking
and existence. In this review, I have explained both Descartes’ lines of reasoning and the
doubts that arose within me when I followed these lines “without prejudice”.
Read More
19 Dec 2021
economy
·
finance
·
india
The National Monetisation Pipeline was a policy announced by the BJP government in India in
August 2021. This policy was not widely covered in any of the national newspapers, and there were no
policy analyses that went deeper than the headline numbers highlighted by the government. While some
articles started coming out in September with more details about the government’s expectations, I
couldn’t find any criticism of the government’s approach. A tired comparison to Australia’s asset
monetisation plan was everywhere, but this did nothing but scratch the surface. (The same comparison
was repeated in multiple publications including The Print and India Today.) This post is a summary
of my understanding of the policy after reading some detailed coverage in the September 27, 2021
issue of the India Today magazine.
Read More