I first picked up Dostoevsky in summer of 2008. Though I had vaguely read about him somewhere, what really made me purchase the books was the fact that the books were pretty cheap. 120 bucks for a 400-500 pages book. I picked up both Crime and Punishment and The Idiot. Little did I know the masterpieces they were. Crime and Punishment was a book which made me marvel the depth of understanding an author can have about the human psyche. I just didn't think that it was possible to write in such depth about one thinks.

I was aching to read The Brothers Karamazov(TBK) for a long time. Many forums suggested that it is the most evolved work by Dostoevsky. Though it is a 1000 page tome, and committing to it was a big hurdle. Finally, I got around to finishing it this month, and man did it blow my mind! Though I still like Crime and Punishment more, TBK will easily be the in the top 5 books I have ever read.

Here are my notes from the book:

1. The thirst for life

Some driveling consumptive moralists—and poets especially—often call that thirst for life base. It's a feature of the Karamazovs, it's true, that thirst for life regardless of everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base? The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one's heart prizes them.

One of the key questions in the book is - Is life worth living? There are many aspects of life which give you so much pain and one often thinks whats the point of all this. Dostoevsky accepts all the ill wills of life and still finds beauty in this life which makes it worth living. The Karamazov brothers have different views of life, but all of them still have a great thirst for life, the need to live it to the fullest.

2. To love life before logic

“I think every one should love life above everything in the world.”

“Love life more than the meaning of it?”

“Certainly, love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it's only then one will understand the meaning of it. I have thought so a long time.”

Many of us try to find meaning in Life. Viktor Frankl in his famous book Man's Search for Meaning says that "meaning" is the most important thing in life and empowers one to go through any hardship. Though here Dostoevsky implores that life should be loved without any logic. There is no logic needed to love life. Life should be loved in itself.

1. Intractability of God

if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world?

Dostoevsky questions how is it possible to "understand" good if the sense organs and the mind through which we try to make sense of the world are so limited. We know that there are many things which we can't understand because of the physical design we have. The way human eyes see the world is very different from how a bee with its compound eyes sees the world. Bats perceive the world only through sound waves.

Our brain is also limited and designed to understand and perceive the world in a particular way. With all these limitations, is it fair to ask questions about God? God by definition is something outside the system we exist in and trying to understand Him using tools within the system is definitely questionable.

4. Loving others

“I could never understand how one can love one's neighbors. It's just one's neighbors, to my mind, that one can't love, though one might love those at a distance.

For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”

This is an idea which Dostoevsky also talks about in his book The Idiot. Loving the idea of humanity and human beings in their totality is easy, but when it comes to loving a particular person its lot harder. You see the faults in them. The physical imperfections. The faults in their character. Its no longer an idea, but a concrete reality and what you have in reality may be very different than the idea of a person you have in mind.

the face of a man often hinders many people not practiced in love, from loving him. But yet there's a great deal of love in mankind, and almost Christ-like love.

Though a Christ-like love is still possible, and that is what we should try to strive for. This is advocated by his character Alyosha, who is his mouthpiece for his idea of benevolent love, which Dostoevsky belives is possible.

5. Solitariness and the importance of others

For every one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realization he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them.

For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort

Though the novel is written in the 1800s, it's interesting to see that individualism was still on the rise then as it is now. People are getting more and more self-centered. Though this gives them a new freedom in terms of what they can do as an individual, they lose the feeling of belonging to a society and the solidarity that comes along with it.

Aristotle has written in Politics,

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”

Human beings reinvigorate in the company of others. The phenomena of Individualism is getting more and more pronounced as people get increasingly reliant on social media for interacting with each other rather than personal connections. This creates a hole in the individual as he constantly searches for something he belongs to. Our social relationships give us a sense of who we are and add meaning to our life. The rise in individualism is taking that away from us.

6. One can't judge one's fellow men

Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of any one. For no one can judge a criminal, until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime.

If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach

The crime committed by others is also because of the way he was treated by the society or the environment in which he grew up. Thus, the society in general and we as being part of it are also responsible for his crime.

Why was the society not able to give him such an environment which enabled him to grow into a loving person? So before judging others, we must also understand that we are also part of the reason why they are so.

7. Habit

It's because people are not used to it. Everything is habit with men, everything, even in matters of nationhood and politics. Habit is the principal driving force.

Man is a creature of habit. Even in politics and nationhood, we are driven by habit. That is why different nations have different political discourses and people are OK with it, though it would seem ridiculous for people of other nations.

For example, China since becoming the People's Republic of China is dominated by a single party rule and people respect the party members there. Indian people, on the other hand, detest too much power in one political party and we see different parties forming the government in consecutive elections, partly driven by the anti-incumbency factor.

8. God and Ethics

‘But what will become of men then?’ I asked him, ‘without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?’ ‘Didn't you know?’ he said laughing, ‘a clever man can do what he likes,’ he said.

This is one of the key ideas in Crime and Punishment also. If there is really no God, then all things are lawful. The protagonist in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov uses this line of thought to justify the murder of an old lady for money and it seems perfectly fine.

Is God invented to enforce morality? If there is no God, then will human beings kill each other and end the human race. Is God necessary for the preservation of the species?

9. God as Hope

What should I be underground there without God? Rakitin's laughing! If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground. One cannot exist in prison without God; it's even more impossible than out of prison.

When Mitya, one of the three Karamazov Brothers, thinks about the idea of there being no God, he just revolts at it. How can a man spend time in prison without God? And even outside of the prison, it is not possible to live without God. God is the ultimate source of hope. A hope that even though this world is cruel, the all-merciful God is watching him and all of this will be compensated for in "the next world".

10. Does God or Satan exist?

Je pense, donc je suis, I know that for a fact; all the rest, all these worlds, God and even Satan—all that is not proved, to my mind. Does all that exist of itself, or is it only an emanation of myself, a logical development of my ego which alone has existed for ever

In this conversation with Devil, Devil says that he is not sure if God or Satan exists. Maybe it is just a development of his ego, something which the brain has created for its own need.

Its a book with many gems. The way the characters are developed and the philosophical quandaries they go through will break you apart before tying up again.

If you are planning to give this book a try, go for the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. I hear it is the best.

Recently I have been attending a few conferences and meetups focusing on blockchain and its application. While its good that this technology is getting attention in India, I really believe that we need to do a better job at understanding this technology. Many times I come across propositions which intend to apply blockchain to something which doesn't really need blockchain. While part of this may be fuelled by the recent ICO craze, but mostly its lack of effort on our part to get into the depth and really understand what this technology entails.

Blockchain on the face of it is needed to prevent the problem of double spending in a trustless environment. Only when there are multiple parties involved and there is a problem of trust between them, does applying blockchain based solutions help.

Some points to keep in mind before applying blockchain to any system:

1. Blockchain is not needed for "immutability"

The use of blockchain as an immutable ledger is so well advertised that people think that just the use case of creating an immutable database is enough to justify using a blockchain.

But "immutability" is a nuanced concept which we will see below.

Designing atabases which are immutable by design is an age old concept. More commonly known as append-only databases, there have been many attempts to create such databases. Google's Big Query, RethinkDB and CouchDB created databases which were append only by design but they had to allow for garbage collection/updation as such databases blowup in size quickly. Datomic is an existing database which is append only by design. This allows for auditing how and where changes were made.

Here is a good discussion on immutable databases and a discussion on where such databases can be used.

The thing to keep in mind is that these append-only databases are not immutable if the admin can be an attack vector. As these databases are at the end of the day stored in hard drive of a central server, it can always be edited.

Content addressable datastores like IPFS can be used securely store data as in that case a file is addressed by a unique hash. If the data stored in the file is changed in any way, then it will no longer have the same hash. The only issue is that these hashes need to be stored in a secure way in a database and this introduces a vulnerability.

If you use blockchain, it gives you protection from the admin being an attack vector, as there is no single copy of the database which can be edited. The database is present in distributed nodes and the truth is determined by the consensus mechanism like Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, etc. and not based on what is written in a single node.

Thus, "immutability" is not a singleton concept but a spectrum. Depending upon what your attack models are and the level of data protection and trustlessness you need, there can be different solutions which serve the purpose, and are more efficient.

2. Its very hard to make blockchain work with the "Wet World"

Wet world here is referring to the physical/offline world. Things which are not digital are tough to be represented on blockchain in a non-repudiable manner. Blockchain operates in the world of bits, while the physical world is made of atoms.

Blockchain doesn't know about what is happening in the world. For example, there is no information on the blockchain if a particular team won a game or not. For this information to be available to the blockchain, there needs to be a service which pushes this data on the blockchain. Such services are called Oracles. Having trustworthy Oracles which pushes correct data on the blockchain is a non-trivial problem. According to Nick Szabo, trusted third parties are security loopholes.

Tracking items in supply chain on blockchain also faces this bottleneck. Since, the items which are transported in a suppychain are physical/"wet" accurately identifying them on blockchain is challenging. Generally such items are tagged with digital ID like RFID, barcode, etc. But it is easy to tamper with such digital IDs externally applied on an object. Unless the object itself has a digital signature (like diamond fingerprint, explained in more detail below), any external ID which is applied on an object can be tampered with or copied.

In a use case which we recently built, we wanted to track a crate of mangoes across different part of supply chain. We can do this by attaching a bar code to each crate, and tracking that barcode in blockchain. The problem is that, this barcode can easily be copied and attached to another crate. If there are no other checks and balances, this system will fail given that participants have enough incentive to fool the system.

There are some projects like Slock.it which use locks on physical objects e.g bicycle to make them operable using smart contracts. Though how secure these locks are which can be operated digitally is an area of examination. If there is enough incentive, can't that lock itself be removed? Then there will be no way to track these assets on blockchain.

On the other hand, in cases where the object itself has a digital fingerprint, this problem doesn't exist. For example, in case of diamond, shining a laser light on it in a particular way produces a diffraction pattern which is unique signature of a diamond. This unique pattern can be hashed and tracked on blockchain.

Diamond Refraction Pattern

3.You don't need blockchain for tokenization

Recently I met a gentleman who was suggesting how blockchain will change the face of small businesses in India. Now, a Pizza shop can issue a Pizza Token(PT) and ask to be paid in them. His regular customers can buy the tokens and pay him in PT whenever they order pizza from him.

On the face of it, it sounds like a genuine use case. But when we dig deeper, it soon becomes clear that there is no need of a blockchain here. Even today Ola issues Ola money which is nothing but a token which can be used only in Ola platform. The company running the service (Ola) can issue tokens for fiat, which can be redeemed by token holders in the platform. In the process, some discount is given to users for using Ola Money.

Since, we are trusting the service provider, there is no need of blockchain here. This of course leads to issues where the service provider can arbitrarily change the number of tokens needed for a service, or there being no external market for Ola money tokens (at least no formal markets)

Of course, one advantage of tokens is that you can realise your revenue before actually providing the service - but since there is no external market for such tokens, there is no speculation and trading activity which happens in case of crypto tokens.

4. In many cases, centralised services work just fine

You don't need decentralization for everything. If you trust a service provider, there is no need for decentralization. Only when there are multiple parties involved, who don't trust each other, there can be a case of decentralised applications.

Decentralised networks also have their own problems. Decentralised networks are more resilient as they don't have a single point of failure. But they suffer from effects like Braess's Paradox Braess's paradox demonstrates how adding a new high-speed road in a road network can lead to more congestion, than without the new road. So, in some cases a central planning, which has view of the complete system, may make more sense than decentralised systems which don't have any global optimization function.

Scientists have also shown how decentralised power grids can also suffer from similar problems.

5. Centralised services will always have better speed and efficiency

If speed and efficiency are your main concern, blockchain based solutions may not be the ideal choice.

Visa averages around 2,000 tps, with a peak capacity of perhaps 50,000 tps Google currently processes 65,000 queries per second. By design, it is very difficult to achieve such rates for distributed networks

On the other hand, Bitcoin is limited to 3-7 transactions per second and Ethereum to 7-15 tx per second.

Here's a graph of transactions taking place in the Ethereum network

So, around 700K transation are made on Ethereum everyday, which comes down to 8.1 transactions per second. At its peak, Ethereum network had processed ~1.3 mn tx per day, which is around 15 tx per second

Although there are efforts to scale these system for processing more number of transactions, they will never achieve the speed of centralised systems.

Ethereum is focussing on sharding to achieve high TPS while Lightning Network is bitcoins bet to scale the number of transactions processed by creating off chain channels.

Proof of stake protocols can achieve higher number of transactions per second as they don't involve miners but only validators. Ethereum's POS protocol Casper for example will have an expected time of 4s per block in starting.

If we assume that number of tx per block is same as current, which is 150 tx/block, then the throughput with casper would be 37.5 tx per second. This is much better than current state, but still leaves much to be desired.

Since, by design any blockchain based system would involve coordination cost between different nodes, which need to be sure that only authentic transactions are being processed by the network, they would be slower than a single server processing all the transactions. The benefit such network though provides is that of trust between nodes, which is absent in a centralised system.

Only in those systems where the benefits due to increase in trust outweighs the loss in speed and efficiency, do blockchain makes sense.

Thanks Nilesh for reviewing the initial draft of this post.

This question was inspired by my reading of Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. The book talks about the story of an English butler in the 1930s. One of the key questions which he ponders about is "What makes a great butler?" Though the question seems to be quiet limited in the scope as he puts it, but his analysis takes subtle forms which I think could apply to any profession.

It made me think, what makes a great entrepreneur or a great technologist? Since these are the two field of endeavours which I most closely associate myself with. Prima facie, the question is non-trivial.

Is it the degree of success you have had? But success is also a function of luck, which at best is a random variable.

Is it the amount of monetary success or how rich you are? But again, money is just one metric. Many of the world's greatest thinkers and influencers weren't rich but were great in their own right.

So, what really constitutes greatness?

The way Mr Stevens, the protagonist in the aforementioned book, defines greatness for a butler is:

1.Having dignity

2.Being associated with a "distinguished" household

The sense in which he uses dignity is very close to the sense in which Rudyard Kipling talks about facing triumph and disaster. To quote

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

Essentially maintaining one's equanimity in both adverse and favorable situations.

Being associated with a "distinguished" household is more nuanced. Mr Stevens talks about helping the noblemen to whose house he serves address the problems facing humanity. He derives satisfaction from the fact that his service is in a way helping his lordship, his employer to address the current problems facing the world or leading to its development.

That's a great way of looking at it. How is your work helping solve the biggest problems facing mankind or developing it? As a technologist/entreprenuer, we must judge our ventures on this rubric. Otherwise, whats the point of it all?

I recently had the fortune of attending a public lecture organised by ICTS in which Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne was talking about his efforts to detect Gravitational waves. Gravitational waves, for the uninitiated are waves in the fabric of space time which emerge when objects with high mass accelerate towards each other. Generally this are observed when Black Holes are formed or neutron stars collide, and give us a sense of what happens when matter is present in high densities - where the fabric of spacetime is very different from how we experience it.

LIGO Observatory in Hanford, Washington

What particularly struck me in his talk was that, he started his quest to detect Gravitational waves in 1970s and his group was able to detect them finally in 2015. Such a long focus on working towards a particular goal. I wonder if we in the current generation can focus on something for so long - with the modern ethos of "Break things and fail fast"

But detecting gravitational waves and analysing the information they convey is really a momentous endeavour. It helps us answer the most profound of all questions - "What does this all mean?"

How matter and time behaved in the first 10-22 seconds of the Big Bang can help us understand things about our universe which are unknown to us till now.

So the real question is - What are we working on which helps solve the human quest of our time? I think that is the key question. And that is the closest proximate for ascertaining greatness I can come to.

This question came to my mind listening to this interview by Chamath. He mentions that there are maybe 150 or 200 people who actually control the world. They may not be the people who we hear about in the news, but folks who pull the string to decide what comes in the news. And, unlike what you are probably suspecting, it's not the tech entrepreneurs.

So who really are they?

If you think about it, consumerism and capitalism are two major themes of our times. Communism which came as an alternative in the early 1900s is now mostly a spent force with most of the communist countries in ruins now. Most notable among them is Russia which is only a shadow of its glory days in the Cold War era. China has actively embraced capitalism and is one of the best examples of State Capitalism - a capitalist economy with strong control by the state. This can be easily seen from how tightly the big 3s of China (Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu) tow the government line.

So, with the capitalist system being the dominant ethos of our times, the power is really derived from the basis of the capitalist system, MONEY.

Who really controls the money? For the uninitiated, money is supposed to be a metric of value created by a society or person, but it really has taken a form of its own and is now the primary source of power.

US can't do anything against China because China practically owns the US by being the major buyers of US sovereign bonds. China is the manufacturing base of the world, so governments think twice before messing up with China.

But I digress. Who really controls the source of power? The money. You see, money is just a myth which a society agrees to believe. It is one of those Noah Harari's intersubjective ideas, which hold value because people believe in it.

Entrepreneurs don't really have the power. because the budding entrepreneurs are like laborers employed by Investors who deploy their capital to support ideas which they think can bring the maximum returns. Otherwise, why would there be so many bike rental/sharing startups which are being valued as unicorns (having a market valuation of more than 1 bn USD)

Firms like Softbank make bets which control the entire industry. For example, they have invested in every major cab haling company in the world. They are now the biggest investors in Uber, in India based Ola and Southeast Asia's Grab. So, they are not betting on a particular company, they are buying the index. They know that app-enabled cab hailing is an idea which is here to stay and so they are buying every effing big company in that market. They can afford this because they have a 100 bn USD fund. So you can say, the goal of all entrepreneurs now is to get invested by Softbank. Softbank now decides what entrepreneurs work on. So, does Softbank wield the ultimate power?

No. That would be an error in assumption. Softbank itself is funded by Saudi Sovereign fund which owes most of its money to petrol export. So, this is basically an effort to convert old money (Petro Dollars) into new money, one coming from tech. So, in a way, Saudi government calls the ultimate shot on what should the world work on - just because they have excess money from the export of petrol.

You may think that governments control the world. Well, this may in some respects be true. The magnitude of surveillance that the Chinese government imposes is straight out of the pages of an Orwellian novel. The Indian government also, with a continued effort to link every aspect of your life with an Aadhar number, is well on its way to achieve the same. That too when Aadhar is full of security loopholes. You are required to link your PAN ( income tax id), Bank Account and any investment account with Aadhar. Even your mobile number, you should link with Aadhar. I am really not sure, what's the purpose of all this - apart from having a strict account of what you do. Big Brother is watching you! Man, how can George Orwell be so prescient?

But again, power doesn't belong to amorphous groups of people like Government or bodies like Politburo in China. It's individuals who seek power. Nietzche, I think, understood this most accurately when he published the Will to Power. The Will to Power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans – achievement, ambition, and the striving to reach the highest possible position in life.

Well, there are few competing philosophies of life. Desire for meaning, Desire for happiness. But I think Nietzsche has really distilled it to its core. The first stage is a desire for happiness. The absence of pain and agony from one's life. But one soon realizes that long-term happiness only comes from having a meaning in one's life. Something meaningful which one can pursue throughout one's life. Something which outlasts oneself. Something which defies mortality.

But what if you reach that stage where you have something meaningful to work for. Something which apparently has an inherent meaning. You soon realize that the world simply doesn't care. There is nothing which has inherent meaning to it. The meaning you find is the meaning you assign to it. So, if there is nothing with inherent meaning - YOU decide what has meaning.

This is the origin of Will to Power. Since nothing has meaning, you want to enforce your worldview. If there has to be any dominant worldview out there, why not yours. So, to impose your worldview on the largest number of people you develop a Will to Power. It's surprising, how Nietzsche cuts through all the layers and hits straight to the point.

Chamath mentions this briefly in his interview that the people who actually control the world don't really care about your worldview. They have a worldview and they want to impose it on everyone. The Will to Power. And since in a capitalist society, power is controlled by people who have the money or those who control it, it's their worldview which gets imposed.

You might think that the major religions of the world really do have power. Afterall, doesn't the Papacy control the western world?

Not so much anymore. They used to call the shots when the world was controlled by Aristocrats and Kings who derived their power to rule from the divine rights given to them. This was often sanctified by the prevalent religion of the time, and hence the power ascribed to the Papacy. That holds water no more. Governments are run by people who are elected or at least want to give the impression, that they are democratically elected. Only China is the place, which despite not being a democracy, has been able to make so much apparent progress - without any revolutions and protests.

India, on the other hand, was never controlled by a religion. Hinduism in itself is too decentralized a religion to wield any power. It allows all sects to exist, all views to thrive. This may be the reason for its apparent lack of power. There is no seat like that of a Pope or Imam who controls all Hindus. It is too decentralized. This also ensures its longevity as the more embracing a religion is, the more long lasting it would be.

So who really controls the world?

We saw that it's not the religion. It's the centers who control money flow. Governments, Corporates, Individuals.

Chamath mentions in his talk about the Koch Brothers.According to Forbes Magazine, the Koch brothers are now worth $80 billion. They have amassed immense power not only from their wealth but also from the connections they have developed and loyalties they have bought. They invest heavily in the US political process and swing the dialog in the domain which they are comfortable with.

So who really controls the world? I will hazard a guess here.

1. The Capitalists in the US (not the politicians)
2. The Standing committee of the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping
3. The petrodollar owners like the King of the Saudi and whoever controls their sovereign funds
4. Numerous other capitalists who move the pawns and set the game according to their liking in the capitalist system of ours

How long this capitalist system will last is anybody's guess. After all the feudal system in Europe was just prevalent some 200 yrs back, where all the power was controlled by the aristocracy. Will this capitalist system be more long lasting? I don't really have an opinion here. The one good thing about this system is that at least it gives the impression that anybody can rise in this system if he has the brains and guts to make enough money. If one has enough money, they have a seat in the table and can impose their worldview.

As Chamath says, "Take the money" and then you can impose your worldview. After all, WHY NOT?

I recently finished reading Anathem and what a great read it was! Though filled with occasional meanderings by Stephenson, it covered topics which I didn't think fell under the preview of science fiction. Below are some of the points which I found to be interesting.

Spoiler alert! If you intend to read Anathem someday, stop here. The next section is full of spoilers.

1. Long Term Thinking

Anathem sets up a mathic world which is devoid of contact from external world for 1, 10, 100 and 1000 years. The 100 and 1000 year maths seemed to have wisdom and knowledge which is much deeper than 1 and 10 year maths.

One issue which I began thinking was - how do you build something for the long term? Religions last for a long time. Christianity is around 2000 years old. Hinduism or the set of beliefs which comprise Hinduism is around 4000 years old. Companies or corporations are fairly short lived - Google is only ~ 20 yrs old. Long lasting companies like GE are around 125 years and have already faded in glory IMO (though "company" as an idea is still very new - 1700s I think) While christianity and Hinduism are still very relevant. What are the properties of such orgs like religion which make them much longer lasting than businesses? Is it just that they solve much bigger problems (like meaning of life, purpose of existence) than companies which are primarily built on profit motive?

1. Being an "Enthusiast"

Came across this definition of Enthusiast. Made me wonder if this is what people mean when they write "Startup Enthusiast", "Blockchain Enthusiast" in their linked profile. Surprisingly I have never come across anyone claiming to be "Math Enthusiast"

1. The need for a story

Here, Stephenson talks about how the industrialization/corporatization has taken away the story from the life of an individual and made him nothing more than a clog in the wheel. If we look into history, this is a fairly recent phenomenon. Before the conception of modern corporations and assembly, people used to earn their living as artisans, farmers or traders. An artisan has much more connection to their work than an industrial worker working in a modern corporation.

This is also the reason why relgion and sports become very important. They provide humans with a story to live by, rather than just being an insignificant speck in the grand universe.

1. Quantum Mind

In the book, Neal Stephenson talks about a Thousander (one who remains secluded in his math for 1000 years) who has acquired the capability to participate in many Narratives simultaneously. This is similar to the idea of Many worlds interpretation in quantum mechanics.

He also points to the idea of Quantum Mind which suggests that the emergence of consciousness in brain cannot be explained by classical mechanical theories and there must be some quantum phenomena happening in brain which gives rise to consciousness.

1. Emergence

This idea is broadly related to the idea of quantum mind but also points to how one can train one's mind through disciplined thinking. Though the benefit of this may not be apparent immediately, the training enables one to perform when the time arrives.

As Robert Pirsig points to in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

Well, there are many more points which I want to talk about - but these are the top 5 big ones. May be I will do a second post talking about some more insights.

I recently came across Robert Sapolsky's lecture on Human Behavioral Biology. Here is the complete series available on Youtube.

One of things which struck me was how results derived from Game Theory have been observed in nature among living organisms. One of the famous results in game theory is about Evolution of Cooperation by Axelrod. The same effects were observed in populations of organisms in natural settings.

The lecture series is filled with many gems like these. If you have interest in understanding origins of human behavior, do check out this lecture series.

This post has been waiting in my edit box for quite a long time, so need to get it out!

Ok. Most of the current world thought places lot of emphasis on rational thinking and logic. Most successful people attribute their success to rational thinking. This kind of thinking is embodied by Greek god Apollo, who is considered the God of Knowledge, rational thinking and order.

Dionysus on the other hand is the god of irrationality and chaos, appealing to emotions and instincts

Nietzsche introduces the concept of Apollonian and Dionysian in his book the Birth of Tragedy. Apollonian is the rational part of man's nature which gives him individuality and rational thought. Dionysian on the other hand is the chaotic part of man's nature. Drunkenness and madness is Dionysian as it makes man forget his individual character and submerges into a greater whole. Any form of enthusiasm or ecstasy is Dionysian. Music is the most Dionysian of all arts as it makes you forget about your individuality and takes you into another realm.

According to Carl Jung, Dionysian represents the Unconscious and part of the lymbic brain which is beyond conscious thought. This part of the brain is considered much more primitive than the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for rational thinking.

This made me begin thinking if rationality is really that supreme a quality to strive for? Why is the current world narrative so much focussed on being rational? What are we losing by ignoring the Dionysian aspect of our nature? It makes us more individualistic rather than part of a whole.

I remember reading an account by Tony Hseih, founder of Zappos of how being part of rave music culture made him feel being part of a much bigger "thing". It was sort of a spiritual experience for him.

Does being too rational prevent us from such experiences? After all chaos was the origin of life.

I have been reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem the last few days. The story is set in an alternate world which has a mathic system where intellectuals (or people of mind) stay in maths secluded from the normal world. The mathic world (which has meaning very similar to hindi word मठ ) comprises of 4 sections. People are Unarian system interact with the outside world once every year. People who are Decenarian interact with the outside world and other sections only once a decade. Similarly people who are Centenarian and Millenarian interact with the outside world and other sections once every 100 and 1000 years respectively.

The research or insights obtained by Centernarian is thus available to other math sections only once in 100 years. For Millenarians, their research comes to light to others only once in 1000 years. Thus the design of the system is such that people in the more secluded maths (100 and 1000 years) focus on problems which are important enough to stand the test of time and stay relevant. So, Centernarians work on much more fundamental problems than Decenarian. Similarly, Millenarians take this to another level and work on ideas and problem which ideal should stay relevant for 1000 years, when they are brought forth for the rest of the world.

This is a very interesting way of thinking. More so when we are becoming mush shorter term thinkers. A good question to ask ourselves is, what we are working on today that would stay relevant for 100 years? For 1000 years? This question makes one think about aspects which we don't generally focus on when working on projects.

Jeff Bezos is one of the proponents of long term thinking. He has commissioned a project for building a clock which would give correct time for 10000 years. It is very interesting to go through the aspects they have to consider when thinking about designing such a clock. From rusting of parts to being able to withstand natural calamities. All such details are being considered at the design stage itself.

A key question to ask ourselves is: what are we working on today which will stand the test of time? Which will stay relevant for 100 years? For 10000 years?

Crypto world is booming and at the core of this is the consensus mechanism introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto called Proof-of-Work. Bitcoin is based on proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

The basic idea of proof-of-work is that the miners who mine Bitcoins and validate transactions can't just do this without any cost. They have to prove that they have solved some difficult crypto problems (finding SHA-256 hashes with specified number of leading zeros). Since the miners have to expend computing power in solving these crypto problems, they can't just add arbitrary transactions in the blocks they mine. The bitcoin consensus mechanism is designed in such a way that it is in miners' best interest to follow the longest chain and only validate correct transactions.

While the above description may sound like a lot of jargon, the underlying idea is pretty neat. It says that one can't be trusted for what one says, it has to be backed up by some work one has done to achieve it. In the case of bitcoin mining, it is the cost of electricity consumed in solving the crypto puzzles which lends credence to the miner. In developer parlance

Talk is cheap, show me the code.

What is the one thing which is dear in our lives? No, it is not money. Money can be earned by different mechanisms, but what can't be earned back once spent is Time

So, how can we trust what someone is saying? Ask them to show proof of what they have done about it. Have they spent any time of their life doing/working towards what they are saying. This can act as good way to filter a lot of noise.

A practical application can be found in the area of hiring. Many candidates claim that they are very interested in a company or a particular field, say marketing. The best way to test it is to come up with practical ways for them to work on it. If a company is looking for product managers, ask the candidates to do a small project for them working on an open problem which the company is facing. This would act as a good proof-of-work test. If the candidate actually spends time on it, then he is really interested in the job, otherwise not.

This approach is followed in many open source projects. Open source projects don't need you to pass an interview to start contributing in the project. You can just start contributing, and if your contribution is found valuable - then your code pull request is merged in the main branch - otherwise not. Your work is the best signal of your interest, not how eloquently you say so.

Nick Szabo has a great article on how social scalability can be achieved in a trustless environment using proof-of-work. Devising unique ways to eke out true incentives and alignments might as well be one of the biggest contribution of blockchain technology.

Today I was listening to this interview of Ariana Huffington by Tim Ferris. She was talking about the concept of Imperturbabilty which I found to be fascinating. By the way, if you haven't checked out podcasts by Tim Ferris, you must check the out. He interviews some world class people in great detail.

Anyways, so the idea of imperturbability is to be in a state where you are not easily perturbed or disturbed. This is essentially the Stoic mindset of taking things in their stride. Not getting too agitated by failure or get too complacent by success.

The word was used by Marcus Auerelius in his classic book, Meditations which is a great glimpse into the Stoic thought process. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who led several wars, conquered states and go through plague epidemics in his kingdom. But in all these, he maintained a Stoic way, a state of imperturbability.

The idea is not to never get disturbed, but to be in a stable equilibrium where you get back to your centred-state even after getting agitated. Its essentially the idea of stable equilibrium in physics, where a body gets back to its original state even after it has been moved from its state of equilibrium

So, in a stable equilibrium, even if you are perturbed by anger or some external stimuli, you get back to the equilibrium state - the state of stable equilibrium.

How do we reach that state? The state of centred equilibrium? Need to explore that further.