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2025: A Wheel of Life Assessment, Flip of Optimism, & General Long-Termism

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Traditionally, I wasn’t much of a New Year’s resolutions guy. Nor much of a “how has this year been” reflecting-type either. January 1st is an arbitrary date chosen to start a calendar year. One could just as well introspect about the past 365 days or initiate a resolution on, say, 29th Aug, and it shouldn’t make a difference. But, it does. And 31st Dec/1st Jan works great, at least in terms of neatly bookending events occurring in a given year. Last year, inspired by a practice that The Missus has been a regular with, I wrote a letter to my future self. You can write to yourself from here ( https://www.futureme.org/ ). It allows for different durations, or you can choose a custom date, and it’ll come to your inbox at the end of it. Consider. I also had second thoughts and some mild reservations about ‘publicly’ introspecting on the year that was, or the plans/hopes for the year that would be. Mostly because I am still finding my voice and am not sure if it is a good idea to write abou...
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Why Facts Don’t Persuade: Priors, Narratives, and Bayesian Thinking

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Most persuasion fails not for lack of facts but because the starting beliefs are different. As a result, the facts don’t move them as much as we think or hope they would. Persuasion is an important skill across domains. And despite all the changes the rise of AI will lead to, it will remain a vital skill to cultivate. Along with storytelling. Persuasion works across fields — sales, fundraising, motivating a team towards a given objective, or gathering people around a cause. Or posting an article about how Bayesian reasoning is a key reason why we fail at persuasion and talk past each other. Persuasion is not a standalone skill and requires supporting structures. Humour helps. Storytelling helps. The ability to discern facts and a certain level of critical thinking helps. But it’s all towards the same objective: persuading another human (or a set of humans) to adopt a certain view. It should be a simple matter of presenting a certain set of facts. That should be sufficient to persuade t...
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Boiling Frogs, Geographical Monopolies: On Delhi's Smog & Reasons for Optimism

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Too Long; Didn’t Read (TL;DR): The Air Quality issue hasn’t been solved in Delhi-NCR/North India for decade+. Politicians would care if it were a major electoral issue or a major ‘interest groups’ issue. Residents don’t have enough exit options (alternate cities to move to).  Optimism : More people aware of the fact that there’s a problem. People willing to pay. Money & people => possibility of and motivation for technological, political, or social solution.  Prediction : Delhi will halve its current PM2.5 particulate matter in 8 years. But, it requires for the issue to become a voter priority. Long; Do Read: Introduction For the past few years, starting in mid-October, a few things happen without fail in significant parts of North India (and especially Delhi): Delhi skyline changes to the yellow-orangish tint, often seen in Hollywood/Netflix movies when they are depicting Mexico countless (and much-needed!) think pieces around: cause of the dangerously high AQI (at tim...
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Nuclear Deterrence, Game Theory, and a non-Review Review (A House of Dynamite)

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The Man Who Saved The World Vasily Arkhipov. That’s a man often credited, without exaggeration, for saving the world. On 27th Oct 1962, at the peak of Cuban Missile Crisis and during the Cold War between US and USSR, the two nations came closest to a nuclear war, and were averted due to the actions of Arkhipov. Vasily Arkhipov was a senior officer in the Soviet nuclear submarines at the time. The year before, in July 1961, while he was onboard a Soviet (nuclear-powered and nuclear-equipped) submarine doing some tests near Greenland, it developed a major radiation leak. The radio communication broke down too, and the crew had to devise a solution at that time on their own. They did. At the cost of major radiation exposure to all 139 crew members, with 22 of them dying within 2 years. There’s definitely a thrilling movie, if not a Chernobyl like series, in there somewhere. On 27th Oct 1962, Arkhipov was in another nuclear submarine (B-59), hidden well below somewhere in the Caribbean. Me...
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Why Pre-2022 Content Will Become the New Pre-1945 Steel

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The nuclear age left radioactive traces in all modern steel. The LLM age is doing the same to digital content. Some analogies and lessons from that. Radioactive Signature on Steel From around 1945 onwards, in specialised niches and applications, there came up a need for specialised steel — steel that was made from before 1945. You see, after the nuclear tests and detonations, there exists a certain level of diffused background radiation in atmosphere. While these detonations happened in US and Japan, initially, followed by USSR and elsewhere, the radiation spread quickly and to somewhat uniform levels, throughout the world. The typical steel-making process uses atmospheric oxygen. And this background radiation in atmosphere leaks into the steel-making process. All steel made after 1945 has a certain level of radioactive traces (or its radioactive signature) slightly and measurably higher than for steel made before that cut-off. There are a set of highly sensitive, niche applications, w...
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Postcards from Vietnam

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Last week of August, I was fortunate to have travelled to Vietnam. I say fortunate because I loved every bit of it, and hope to be able to travel there again. We visited Ho Chi Minh City (also called Saigon or HCMC), Da Nang, and Hanoi — the three major cities across South, Central, and North Vietnam respectively. Each of those had a different flavour across the many dimensions — food, culture, traffic, road infrastructure, markets, coffee, among other things. Our trip was for about 8 days, and we definitely felt that was too short to fully soak in the things the country had on offer. But, it’s better to leave with an incomplete appetite and a desire to return, than otherwise. It was an excellent trip in absolute sense and in terms of value for money. History While Vietnam has had a continuous history of about 3000 years, in the modern era, it’s been a theatre of the different world powers. Under French colonial rule until World War II, control shifted to Japan after France fell to Naz...
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